Welcome back to practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!

*sitcom audience cheers*

Thank you, thank you. Ok so far we've had a developer from hell and a CEO who shot to fame for being the first rectum to receive a passport and be given a job.

2 pretty strong entrants if you ask me. But its time to slow it down and make sure everyone gets a fair chance. Its not all just about the psychopaths and assholes, what about the general weirdo's and the stoners who just made life awkward?

So here we go, Most incompetent co-worker, candidate 3, "A".

"A" was a bit of an unusual developer, despite having a few years experience in his home country, he applied for an unpaid internship to come work with us ... probably should have rang alarm bells but hey we were all young and dumb back then.

I had to say I felt very bad for A, as he suffered from 2 very serious, and job crippling personal conditions / problems

- Email induced panic attacks
- Extreme multifaceted attachment disorder (also known in layman terms as "get the fuck away from me, and do your job" syndrome)

While he never openly discussed these conditions, it was clear from working with him, that he had gone undiagnosed for years. Every time an email would come in no matter how simple ... even the services team asking to confirm his staff ID, would send him into a panic causing him to drop everything he was doing and like a homing missile find me anywhere in the building and ask me what to do.

Actually "A" also suffered from a debilitating literacy issue too, leaving him completely unable to read our internal wiki's himself. Every week we had to follow a set of steps to upgrade something and every week to mask his issue, he'd ask me what to do instead ... no matter how many times I sat with him previously ... must have been truly embarrassing for him.

But "A"'s finest moment in the company, by far, was the day where out of the blue, at the top of his voice (as if wearing headphones ... without wearing headphones) he asked

"DO YOU KNOW ANYONE WHO SELLS POT?"

... why no, manager of the entire department standing behind you, I do not

... why no, tech lead talking to manager, I do not

... why hello 50% of my team staring at me ... no "A", I do not!

Needless to say all our team meetings were a little awkward for the next few weeks after that but hey who doesn't like being thought of as a stoner / drug dealer by their team mates huh?

Will A make it to the top of the list of most incompetent? Well he has some truly logic defining competition yet to be announced.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

I was 15 years old and the first year of high school. Everything was new to me and I was such a newbie. At that time I had 2-3 year of programming behind me at an institution where they taught competitive programming. And I knew something about computers. Not much but more than most of my school mates. At that time I wanted to become "super cool hacker".

So we had this very very thought teacher for history which was also our form master. She really knows how to explained everything about history and in an interesting way. But while she was teaching we also had to write down notes from her powerpoints that were on a projector. And occasionally she would wait for us to copy everything and then move on with her lecture. But sometimes she didn't. This was frustrating as hell. The whole class would complain about this because you couldn't take notes down normal, you had to do it at double speed.

But she got one weak spot. She was not very good with computers. Our school computers were locked in some kinda closet so that students didn't have physical access to a computer and were also password protected. So I came up with the plan to plant wireless mouse in her computer so that I could control her mouse. At that time it seemed like SUPER HACKER MASTER PLAN.

So I got an opportunity one time when she left the classroom and let closet where the computer was open. I quickly sneaked the USB of the wireless mouse in the computer and then go back to the seat.

So THE FUN began.

Firstly I would only go back in powerpoint so that all my schoolmates could write down notes including me. And it was hilarious to watch when she didn't know what is happening. So then I would move her mouse when she tried to close some window. I would just move it slightly so she wouldn't notice that somebody else is controlling mouse. And by missing X button just by slight she would click other things and other things would pop up and now she had to close this thing so it became a nightmare for her. And she would become angry at the mouse and start complaining how the computer doesn't work and that mouse doesn't obey her.

One time when she didn't pay attention to her computer and projector I went to paint program and drew a heart and wrote we love you (In Slovenian Imamo vas radi -> See the picture below) and one of my school mates has the picture of it. We were all giggling and she didn't know what is was for. And I managed to close everything before she even noticed.

So it got to the point where she couldn't hand it more so she called our school IT guy so that he would check her computer (2 or 3 weeks passed before she called IT guy). And he didn't find anything. He was really crappy IT guy in general. So one week passed by and I still had messed with her mouse. So she got a replacement computer. Who would guessed all the problems went away (because I didn't have another mouse like that). I guess when our IT guy took the computer to his room and really thoroughly check it he found my USB.

So he told her what was the problem she was so pissed off really I didn't see her pissed off so much in all my 4 years in high school. She demanded the apology from whom did it. And at that moment my mind went through all possible scenarios... And the most likely one was that I was going to be expelled... And I didn't have the balls to say that I did it and I was too afraid... Thanks to God nobody from my school mates didn't tell that it was me.

While she waited that somebody would come forward there was one moment when our looks met and at that moment both of us knew that I was the one that did it.

Next day the whole class wrote the apology letter and she accepted it. But for the rest of 4 years whenever was there a problem with the computer I had to fixed it and she didn't trust anybody not even our IT guy at school. It was our unwritten contract that I would repair her computer to pay off my sin that I did. And she once even trusted me with her personal laptop.

So to end this story I have really high respect for her because she is a great teacher and great persons that guide me through my teen years. And we stayed in contact.

So today I got fired.

Why?

The Ceo forgot they asked me to take care of some business while he was gone. They went on a trip to get thier butt inflated (quite litterally kim kardashian status) for two months.

Me, A general employee, not a captain, or a division manager.

Turns out I ran the company a lot more efficiently than they did, reducing our man power from 5 staff per task down to one per task.

Not only that increased client retention 78℅

Was let go for overstepping my company roles.

I think they we're just a bit jealous, or ego was too large.

Luckily, one of the division managers took me under one of their teams and is secretly keeping me on until I bust out of this joint.

So before I resign from my job tomorrow I thought I'd talk a little about a couple of things at work that I won't ever tell my boss in person but are generally some of the reasons I want to leave.

---------- warning long rant ----------

1. The CEO of the company finds out I only have my learner's and take the bus, goes on to belittle me about taking the bus.

(It may have been meant as a joke but I was offended, and we don't have any actual HR to complain to)

First off my real reason for not getting my restricted is mostly related to the fact public transportation does the job it needs to, I don't really complain unless the planning is fucked up (Adele concert rant lol) but typically I don't need a car. The other reason is because with a car I'd have to wait in traffic 1-2 hour each way. Also cars cost money which I don't have.

2. CEO buys himself and general manager brand new Range Rovers, you know those giant monstrosities box jeep looking things.

I hate this because I earn $31k, those things probably cost around $50 each (so typically 3 years worth of my wages).

When I had a talk about my contract at the 6 month mark, the general manager (my boss) said he wouldn't budge on my salary (yet they buy these jeeps)

3. I live way too far from work and because of it being Auckland and the current inflation for house prices, the rent prices have also increase, I wouldn't be able to get a house closer to home nor rent with minimum wage :(

4. Though it's not too necessary they mask that the app was made by me, whenever I see an email about the app to potential clients they refer to be as this app guy, and during their presentations they don't really include as part of the reason this app has been developed ( aside from my boss being the client, I came up with some interesting ideas to turn their paper form of the process they use into a digital one, I also did research for the specific topics, something I could have just asked for instead).

5. Old fashioned way of looking at so called "IT", they added fixing computers to my contract which I dread, especially since I'll be close to a deadline and then I get a call to fix someone's computer...

6. They don't seem to want to expand their "development team" to more than one person.

When I give my resignation I have to stay here for a month and I bet people will start to act differently around me, my likely my boss and the CEO. I think the other people that work will understand, given my situation.

I'm planning to for the last month to only do planning for the app they want me to work on, UML diagrams, use cases, Sprint planning (albiet, only developer here lol). Research on the third party libraries we need for the app and generally give the next guy the easiest path to getting the app done.

I want to do this because the Android and iOS app we're done via cowboy programming in a sense. (I don't have too much in terms of documentation and planning aside from a Microsoft planning website setup with to-do of which features are done for the iOS and paper Todo for the Android app.

Alright long rant over, I've got it all written down, glad I'll be leaving this place.

Senior development manager in my org posted a rant in slack about how all our issues with app development are from

“Constantly moving goalposts from version to version of Xcode”

It took me a few minutes to calm myself down and not reply. So I’ll vent here to myself as a form of therapy instead.

Reality Check:
- You frequently discuss the fact that you don’t like following any of apples standards or app development guidelines. Bit rich to say the goalposts are moving when you have your back to them.

- We have a custom everything (navigation stack handler, table view like control etc). There’s nothing in these that can’t be done with the native ones. All that wasted dev time is on you guys.

- Last week a guy held a session about all the memory leaks he found in these custom libraries/controls. Again, your teams don’t know the basic fundamentals of the language or programming in general really. Not sure how that’s apples fault.

- Your “great emphasis on unit testing” has gotten us 21% coverage on iOS and an Android team recently said to us “yeah looks like the tests won’t compile. Well we haven’t touched them in like a year. Just ignore them”. Stability of the app is definitely on you and the team.

- Having half the app in react-native and half in native (split between objective-c and swift) is making nobodies life easier.

- The company forces us to use a custom built CI/CD solution that regularly runs out of memory, reports false negatives and has no specific mobile features built in. Did apple force this on us too?

- Shut the fuck up

So I've been looking for a Linux sysadmin job for a while now. I get a lot of rejections daily and I don't mind that because they can give me feedback as for what I am doing wrong. But do you know what really FUCKING grinds my FUCKING gears?

BEING REJECTED BASED ON LEVEL OF EDUCATION/NOT HAVING CERTIFICATIONS FOR CERTAIN STUFF. Yes, I get that you can't blindly hire anyone and that you have to filter people out but at least LOOK AT THEIR FUCKING SKILLSET.

I did MBO level (the highest sub level though) as study which is considered to be the lowest education level in my country. lowest education level meaning that it's mostly focused on learning through doing things rather than just learning theory.

Why the actual FUCK is that, for some fucking reason, supposed to be a 'lower level' than HBO or Uni? (low to high in my country: MBO, HBO, Uni). Just because I learn better by doing shit instead of solely focusing on the theory and not doing much else does NOT FUCKING MEAN THAT I AM DUMBER OR LESS EDUCATED ON A SUBJECT.

So in the last couple of months, I've literally had rejections with reasons like
- 'Sorry but we require HBO level as people with this level can analyze stuff better in general which is required for this job.'. - Well then go fuck yourself. Just because I have a lower level of education doesn't FUCKING mean that I can't analyze shit at a 'lower level' than people who've done HBO.

- 'You don't seem to have a certificate for linux server management so it's a no go, sorry!' - Kindly go FUCK yourself. Give me a couple of barebones Debian servers and let me install a whole setup including load balancers, proxies if fucking neccesary, firewalls, web servers, FUCKING Samba servers, YOU FUCKING NAME IT. YES, I CAN DO THAT BUT SOLELY BECAUSE I DON'T HAVE THAT FUCKING CERTIFICATE APPEARANTLY MEANS THAT I AM TOO INCOMPETENT TO DO THAT?! Yes. I get that you have to filter shit but GUESS WHAT. IT'S RIGHT THERE IN MY FUCKING RESUME.

- 'Sorry but due to this role being related to cyber security, we can't hire anyone lower than HBO.' - OH SO YOUR LEVEL OF EDUCATION DEFINES HOW GOOD YOU ARE/CAN BE AT CYBER SECURITY RELATED STUFF? ARE YOU MOTHERFUCKING RETARDED? I HAVE BEEN DOING SHIT RELATED TO CYBER SECURITY SINCE I WAS 14-15 FUCKiNG YEARS OLD. I AM FAMILIAR WITH LOADS OF TOOLS/HACKING TECHNIQUES/PENTESTING/DEFENSIVE/OFFENSIVE SECURITY AND SO ON AND YOU ARE TELLING ME THAT I NEED A HIGHER LEVEL OF FUCKING EDUCATION?!?!? GO FUCKING FUCK YOURSELF.

And I can go on like this for a while. I wish some companies I come across would actually look at skills instead of (only) study levels and certifications. Those other companies can go FUCK THEMSELVES.

Some clients take this too literally, but in general I would agree! ☺️

©Instagram @alphaimplement

Sooooo me and the lead dev got placed in the wrong job classification at work.

Without sounding too mean, we are placed under the same descriptor and pay scale reserved for secretaries, janitors and the people that do maintenance at work(we work for a college as developers) whilst our cowormer who manages the cms got the correct classification.

The manager went apeshit because the guidelines state that:

Making software products
Administration of dbs
Server maintenance and troubleshooting
Security (network)

And a lot of shit is covered on the exemption list and it is things that we do by a wide fucking margin. The classification would technically prohibit us from developing software and the whole it dptmnt went apeshit over it since he(lead developer) refuses (rightfully so) to touch anything and do basically nothing other than generate reports.

Its a fun situation. While we both got a substantial raise in salary(go figure) we also got demoted at the same time.

There is a department in IT which deals with the databases for other major applications, their title is "programmers" yet for some reason me and the lead end up writing all the sql code that they ever need. They make waaaaay more money than me and the lead do, even in the correct classification.

Resolution: manager is working with the head of the department to correct this blasphemy WHILE asking for a higher pay than even the "programmers"

I love this woman. She has balls man. When the president of the school paraded around the office asking for an update on a high priority app she said that I am being gracious enough to work on it even though i am not supposed to. The fucking prick asked if i could speed it up to where she said that most of my work I do it on my off time, which by law is now something that I cannot do for the school and that she does not expect any of her devs to do jack shit unless shit gets fixed quick. With the correct pay.

Naturally, the president did not like such predicament and thus urged the HR department(which is globally hated now since they fucked up everyone's classification) to fix it.

Dunno if I will get above the pay that she requested. But seeing that royal ammount of LADY BALLS really means something to me. Which is why i would not trade that woman for a job at any of my dream workplaces.

Meanwhile, the level of stress placed my 12 years of service diabetic lead dev at the hospital. Fuck the hr department for real, fuck the vps of the school that fucked this up royally and fuck people in this city in general. I really care for my team, and the lead dev is one of my best friends and a good developer, this shit will not fucking go unnoticed and the HR department is now in low priority level for the software that we build for them

Still. I am amazed to have a manager that actually looks out for us instead of putting a nice face for the pricks that screwed us over.

I have been working since I was 16, went through the Army, am 27 now and it is the first time that I have seen such manager.

She can't read this, but she knows how much I appreciate her.

My company wants to start using Node.JS.

JavaScript.
They wanna use JavaScript.
For everything.

JAVASCRIPT.
FOR EVERYTHING.

Scene;

**Asshat enters break room after meeting**

**Asshat turns to Asshole**

Asshat: “Oh here in a year or two we’ll just be rewriting all of this is Node.JS.”

Asshole: “JavaScript. You’ll be rewriting it in JavaScript. And fucking WHY?”

Asshat: “It’s better”

Asshole: “It’s not really a general use language. Why wouldn’t you guys choose Python if you wanted to write EVERYTHING in a goddamn scripting language?”

Asshat: “Google uses Node.JS”

Asshole: “For back-end web development type stuff. I doubt their accounting systems are written in fucking JavaScript...”

Asshat: “Python is oooooold.”

Asshole (to himself): No you’re old, you stupid, ancient fuck.

**Asshole rolls his eyes and walks away**

**Asshat continues his ignorant chuckling**

End Scene;

Clearly years of fixed format RPG programming has killed too many of Asshat’s brain cells.

I JUST FINISHED MY FIRST NEURAL NETWORK!!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

I need to stop reading devRant posts on the train and in public in general. These rants be cracking me up too much. Most awkward when you try to explain to someone who cares to know what's so funny and you know they can't relate so you're just sitting like.....

In my opinion, business as usual.

1. Work from home if possible. Cars fuck up the environment and no one likes traffic jams, use transportation sparingly. Pandemic or not.

2. I never want to shake the filthy sweaty hands of untrusted peasants, I don't care if you're a CEO representing our biggest client. An acknowledging nod is sufficient.

3. Why the FUCK do I feel sneeze droplets raining down the escalator? I don't care WHAT you're infected with, just sneeze in your elbow. No, don't sneeze in your hand either you dimwitted mongrel, because too many people insist on ignoring rule 2.

4. The news just taught you how to wash your hands? You mean, you didn't learn that in elementary school?

5. Pandemic or not, if you're sick, fucking stay at home. Why do people suddenly need a "policy" for this? Wasn't this always the common sense rule? Employers who don't send sick workers home actively sabotage their own business, even when it's "just a mild flu".

6. Keep some distance from me in public whenever possible. Again, pandemic or not... It's called personal space.

7. I understand that wearing mouth masks is not culturally integrated in the west like it is in Japan, but maybe it should be. Not for egocentric self preservation when you're healthy, but out of politeness to the public when you're sick. They actually work much better for that purpose, and it decreases the chance I will break your neck when you violate point 3.

I'm not a total germaphobe. I'll gladly engage in a filthy orgy with a dozen friends... As long as they've showered, aren't coughing, and don't have snot running down their chins.

The general hygiene level of the population is so fucking awful.

Pandemic, or not, it doesn't matter.

I fucking hate Internet of Things, I think that it's a ridiculous idea to connect things, that work perfectly fine, to the internet.
The 'convenience' you get is minimalistic and most of the time non existent.
It is also often insanely insecure and expensive. The burdans it brings with it most of the time just outweigh the positive sides of it.

Now today happened something that made me hate it even more. Today was the First Lego Lego (Lego competition with ev3 robots, etc.) and one part of the tournament is to find a solution for a given problem. This year the general topic was hydro-dynamics and so the problem was how you can reduce water usage and 'save' water.

Our idea was to make reusable coffee cups and give them to the local coffee shops. One time use paper cups use take around 400ml water when produced) Basically you buy a cup once for 5 bucks and you get your coffee served in it. After drinking the coffee you return the cup to a local cafe and get a chip as pawn. When you buy your next coffee, you give them your chip and get it served in another reusable cup. The are at the moment already around 1000 cups going around the city.

Now this was our idea and we got ranked third. I am not too mad about our rank but what really drives me fucking mad is the team who ranked first.

Their idea was to make a pump (using an arduino) and a humidity sensor which you stick into a plant and the pump pumps water when the plant is too dry.
However (you probably guessed it already) they went a step further and connected it to the internet. They also made a web 'interface' for it so you can control the pump with your smartphone / computer / smartwatch / tv / whatever the fuck is connected to the internet nowadays 'thanks' to the iot 'revolution'.

So it is a pump that waters your plant when it is too dry BUT it is also connected to the internet.

WHY THE FUCK DOES THIS HAVE TO BE CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET.

"Oh look it is connected to the internet, wow awesome, oh it is also 'smart'. oh cooool. Nice I don't have to water my plants anymore"

A funny thing is that one of my friends built basically the same thing without connecting it to the internet. He built a small box with a pump and a humidity sensor that measures if the dirt is too dry and then waters the plant. It checks every few hours and the also is a small 16x2 LCD and a knob that you can turn to control how much water it should give the plant each time it waters it. He built it and I programmed it for him. Works perfectly fine and I don't see any reason why there should be any need to connect something like this to the internet.

Anyway we got ranked third, they first. I guess we should connect our coffee cups to the internet in some way ...

My code review nightmare part 3

Performed a review on/against a workplace 'nemesis'. I didn't follow the department standards document (cause I could care less about spacing, sorted usings, etc) and identified over 80 bugs, logic errors, n+1 patterns, memory leaks (yes, even in .net devs can cause em'), and general bad behavior (ex.'eating' exceptions that should be handled or at least logged)

Because 'Jeff' was considered a golden child (that's another long TL;DR), his boss and others took a major offense and demanded I justify my review, item by item.

About 2 hours into the meeting, our department mgr realized embarrassing Jeff any further wasn't doing anyone any good and decided to take matters into his own hands. Thinking 'well, its about time he did his job', I go back to my desk. About an hour later..
Mgr: "I need you in the conference room, RIGHT NOW!"
<oh crap>
Mgr: "I spoke to Jeff and I think I know what the problem is. Did you ever train him on any of the problems you identified in the review?"
Me: "Um, no. Why would I?"
Mgr: "Ha!..I was right. So lets agree the problems are partially your fault, OK?"
Me: "Finding the bugs in his code is somehow my fault?"
Mgr: "Yes! For example, the n+1 problem in using the WCF service, you never trained him on how to use the service. You wrote the service, correct?"
Me: "Yes, but it's not my job to teach him how to write C#. I documented the process and have examples in the document to avoid n+1. All he had to do was copy/paste."
Mgr: "But you never sat with Jeff and talked to him like a human being? You sit over there in your silo and are oblivious to the problems you cause. This ends today!"
Me: "What the...I have no idea what you are talking about. What in the world did Jeff tell you?"
Mgr: "He told me enough and I'm putting an end to it. I want a compressive training class developed on how to use your service. I'll give you a month to get your act together and properly train these developers."

3 days later, I submit the power-point presentation and accompanying docs. It was only one WCF with a handful of methods. Mgr approved the training, etc..etc. execute the 'training', and Jeff submits a code review a couple of weeks later. From over 80 issues to around 50. The poop hits the fan again.

Mgr: "What's your problem? When are you going to take your responsibility seriously?"
Me: "Its pretty clear I don't have the problem. All the review items were also verified by other devs. Its not me trying to be an asshole."
Mgr: "Enough with the excuses. If you think you can do a better job *you* make the code changes and submit them for Jeff for review. No More Excuses!"

Couple of days later, I make the changes, submit them for review, and Jeff really couldn't say too much other than "I don't see this as an improvement"

TL;DR, I had been tracking the errors generated by the site due to the bugs prior to my changes. After deployment, # of errors went from thousands per hour to maybe hundreds per day (that's another story) and the site saw significant performance increases, fewer customer complaints, etc..etc.

At a company event, the department VP hands out special recognition awards:

VP: "This award is especially well earned. Not only does this individual exemplify the company's focus on teamwork, he also went above and beyond the call of duty to serve our customers. Jeff, come on up and get this well deserved award."

Okay so this is going to be a rant.

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

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

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

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

I just can't understand what will lead an so called Software Company, that provides for my local government by the way, to use an cloud sever (AWS ec2 instance) like it were an bare metal machine.

They have it working, non-stop, for over 4 years or so. Just one instance. Running MySQL, PostgreSQL, Apache, PHP and an f* Tomcat server with no less than 10 HUGE apps deployed. I just can't believe this instance is still up.

By the way, they don't do backups, most of the data is on the ephemeral storage, they use just one private key for every dev, no CI, no testing. Deployment are nightmares using scp to upload the .war...

But still, they are running several several apps for things like registering citizen complaints that comes in by hot lines. The system is incredibly slow as they use just hibernate without query optimizations to lookup and search things (n+1 query problems).

They didn't even bother to get a proper domain. They use an IP address and expose the port for tomcat directly. No reverse proxy here! (No ssl too)

I've been out of this company for two years now, it was my first work as a developer, but they needed help for an app that I worked on during my time there. I was really surprised to see that everything still the same. Even the old private key that they emailed me (?!?!?!?!) back then still worked. All the passwords still the same too.

I have some good rants from the time I was there, and about the general level of the developers in my region. But I'll leave them for later!

Is it just me or this whole shit is crazy af?

So I'm on stack overflow trying to give back to the community that has helped me so much yanno.

So I see a question and decide to answer it but I'm on my mobile and trying to write a well formatted etc. answer is a bit tricky so instead I thought I would answer it as best I could on the phone so at least the OP would be going in the right direction and then when I got back to my computer, I would expand on the answer.

But before I had a chance (within 10 minutes of answering) some 200k+ rep dickhead decided it was his job to tell me how bad I was for not giving a proper answer and i have enough rep to comment and I should know better.

So I responded to him (my first mistake) and told him that my answer was intended to get him going and most likely he wouldn't need any more help but that I was going to update it when I got back to my computer.

Well he didn't like that and continued to berate me for my unbelievable behavior.

I then said that if he was that upset, then report me, or even better how about he actually answer the question instead of being a fuckwit to others that have tried.

I also said that I thought that SO and development in general was not about being given the answer but by finding it yourself and actually learning something and that sometimes you need to be pushed it the right direction to find the answer which is what I did here.

Well he disagreed with that too and downvoted my answer which by that point had been updated (like I said I would).

I just don't get it, what is wrong with these people and why has SO become such a toxic place?

I want to give back to the community and help others like people have done for me over the years, but then fuckheads like this just ruin it and make you not want to be a part of it anymore.

Then I come here to devRant and everyone is so nice to each other, you can see the respect.

It's enough. I have to quit my job.

December last year I've started working for a company doing finance. Since it was a serious-sounding field, I tought I'd be better off than with my previous employer. Which was kinda the family-agency where you can do pretty much anything you want without any real concequences, nor structures. I liked it, but the professionalism was missing.

Turns out, they do operate more professionally, but the intern mood and commitment is awful. They all pretty much bash on eachother. And the root cause of this and why it will stay like this is simply the Project Lead.

The plan was that I was positioned as glue between Design/UX and Backend to then make the best Frontend for the situation. Since that is somewhat new and has the most potential to get better. Beside, this is what the customer sees everyday.

After just two months, an retrospective and a hell lot of communication with co-workers, I've decided that there is no other way other than to leave.

I had a weekly productivity of 60h+ (work and private, sometimes up to 80h). I had no problems with that, I was happy to work, but since working in this company, my weekly productivity dropped to 25~30h. Not only can I not work for a whole proper work-week, this time still includes private projects. So in hindsight, I efficiently work less than 20h for my actual job.

The Product lead just wants feature on top of feature, our customers don't want to pay concepts, but also won't give us exact specifications on what they want.
Refactoring is forbidden since we get to many issues/bugs on a daily basis so we won't get time.
An re-design is forbidden because that would mean that all Screens have to be re-designed.
The product should be responsive, but none of the components feel finished on Desktop - don't talk about mobile, it doesn't exist.
The Designer next to me has to make 200+ Screens for Desktop and Mobile JUST so we can change the primary colors for an potential new customer, nothing more. Remember that we don't have responsiveness? Guess what, that should be purposely included on the Designs (and it looks awful).
I may hate PHP, but I can still work with it. But not here, this is worse then any ecommerce. I have to fix legacy backend code that has no test coverage. But I haven't touched php for 4 years, letalone wrote sql (I hate it). There should be no reason whatsoever to let me do this kind of work, as FRONTEND ARCHITECT.

After an (short) analysis of the Frontend, I conclude that it is required to be rewritten to 90%. There have been no performance checks for the Client/UI, therefor not only the components behave badly, but the whole system is slow as FUCK! Back in my days I wrote jQuery, but even that shit was faster than the architecuture of this React Multi-instance app. Nothing is shared, most of the AppState correlate to other instances.

The Backend. Oh boy. Not only do we use an shitty outated open-source project with tons of XSS possibillities as base, no we clone that shit and COPY OUR SOURCES ON TOP. But since these people also don't want to write SQL, they tought using Symfony as base on top of the base would be an good idea.
Generally speaking (and done right), this is true. but not then there will be no time and not properly checked. As I said I'm working on Legacy code. And the more I look into it, the more Bugs I find. Nothing too bad, but it's still a bad sign why the webservices are buggy in general. And therefor, the buggyness has to travel into the frontend.

And now the last goodies:
- Composer itself is commited to the repo (the fucking .phar!)
- Deployments never work and every release is done manually
- We commit an "_TRASH" folder
- There is an secret ongoing refactoring in the root of the Project called "_REFACTORING" (right, no branches)
- I cannot test locally, nor have just the Frontend locally connected to the Staging webservices
- I am required to upload my sources I write to an in-house server that get's shared with the other coworkers
- This is the only Linux server here and all of the permissions are fucked up
- We don't have versions, nor builds, we use the current Date as build number, but nothing simple to read, nonono. It's has to be an german Date, with only numbers and has always to end with "00"
- They take security "super serious" but disable the abillity to unlock your device with your fingerprint sensor ON PURPOSE

My brain hurts, maybe I'll post more on this shit fucking cuntfuck company. Sorry to be rude, but this triggers me sooo much!

Some devs like to write meaningless or too general commit messages.

Stop it. Get help.

Call 0800-GITGUDBOIII where real experts talk version control.

Story Time. Inspired by another rant.

Context: I'm In a coding camp years ago, it's the first day.

We're doing introductions (name, why you're here, etc). Always fun to do that....

The folks running the camp are excited to introduce a student who also at one point was a teacher for some sort of girl power coding organization. So this raises questions, why would someone who teaches be a student in this camp?? And even a bigger question is raised when this person introduces themselves for a long time, and as an aside puts down the girls she taught in this program they taught ... like who does that?

horribleLady does that ...

A few hours later horribleLady asks her 12th question of the day (we haven't even started talking about code). Before she asks her question actually says:

“I know, I’m going to be a problem.” -laugh-

🚨🚨🚨 ヽ ( ꒪д꒪ )ﾉ 🚨🚨🚨

Fast forward to group projects and she's this sort of emotional storm, tears, and a sort of angry shouting that isn't angry enough for some folks to say she's yelling at people ... but she is. Fortunately I'm not in the first group project with her, but because we're all working in the same room we all get to see the train-wreck unfold.

The moment she doesn't get something (all the time) everyone in her group has to STOP and figure out what they're going to do about it, then again STOP because she thinks someone is doing something different than what was planned. STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP.

In a way, everything had to go through her, she didn’t declare it that way, she didn't present herself as any sort of authority, she would just stop everyone the moment she thought anything was wrong, or she didn't understand it (all the time), and either inject herself or demand help from her team. Everyone around her had to be drawn into whatever problem she had. It was horrific to watch.

Private slack channels would light up like crazy with "OMG", "WTF", "I DON'T UNDERSTAND HER", "FUCK" and "SHE"S HOW OLD!?!?"

So finally it happens to me and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly (capable guy, nice dude, pretty sure he was high all the time).... we're teamed up to work with horribleLady. Thankfully for just one day. I accept this because I figure one day with her is enough penance to try to avoid any further contact later on.

My approach is straight stone face. I refuse to respond to her sulking, or sighing, or general emotional bait she throws out constantly. I saw other students unwittingly take her bait (they were trying to be helpful) only to have her crap all over them with her frustrations or whatever it is is going on.

Still we're teamed up with her her for the day so I'm going to be a good team member and I explain what guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I are doing / trying.... and so forth. But she's just too upset that she's even assigned to work with us, and tells me I'm just not doing it right, and her explanations about how we're not doing it right makes less than 0 sense. I ask her to show me what she means but she won't type anything on her keyboard, she'd just talk about how she’s thinking conceptually in circles and sulk about it rather than listen. I don't respond to any of her shit and say "I'm going to try this." and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I just keep working.

She would later call the instructor over and complain to him for a while and say: "These guys just get it, they're not helping me, I want to be assigned to another group." She doesn't get her way so she just moves to another table in front of us.

After that day I figured it was a great time to ask .... to NEVER be assigned to anything with her because "If I told her what I thought it would just get a lot worse." I got my way ;)

Other students weren't so lucky. Tears, sulking, her special way of yelling at people that somehow never got her in trouble (she should have been kicked out of the program) just kept going on. She refused to even present one group project she deemed not good enough despite the fact that she contributed nothing functional to the project that the TA's didn't write for her...

Amidst the stories she would tell to students was one of how she sued her totally sexist/racist/evil former employer. She never said what came of it, but that combined with her inability to do things reminded me of a rant I read on here.

I sometimes fear being hired someplace and walking in my first day to find I'm assigned to work with .... horribleLady. In this scenario she managed to get hired and they're too afraid to fire her so they assign the new guy to work with horribleLady...

I've no idea what happened to her after the camp.

(I rewrote this rant a few times because it kept circling back to a larger story about the coding camp I wrote about a few years ago, so if this seemed sort of broken up and wonky, yeah it was / is / yeah)

Got a call from Google!

Asked for two months to study: Discrete mathematics, Calculus, introductions to algorithms, design patterns, CTCI and linux/unix OS workings in general.

I know I'll be banging my head against the wall and I don't have my expectations too high. But regardless I feel like this is a good excuse to speed up my studies and push myself in the direction I want to go already. It'll be a win-win even if I don't land the position because I'll definitely gain a ton in the process of preparing.

I will be expose to all of this material (except for calculus because I've been learning it for a couple of months) for the first time so I know it'll be a challenge and I am looking forward to it.

If any of you have any tips on good study habits that'll be much appreciated; I currently like to read most of my material and supplement with videos/tutorials... Khan is great but they lack material on discrete mathematics unfortuantely. Thanks in advance!

Wish me luck (:

Just wrote a (PHP based) proxy which can cache resources being requested and serve them to clients.

The idea is that (I'm going to write a firefox add-on for it too, yes) you can install the add-on and any resource (js/CSS, general web resources which would be downloaded off of googleapi's etc) hosted with Google would be proxied through the server running the proxy, meaning that one wouldn't have to connect to the mass surveillance networks directly anymore as for static resources.

I think checksum verify stuff would still work as the proxy is literally a proxy, the content will be identical to the 'real' resource. (Not sure about this one, enlighten me if this isn't true)

Input appreciated!

I really like my little group for this one huge exam project we have. Everyone's nice, ambitious, takes the project seriously, responsible and communicates well. Additional bonus is we're all on the same skill level so everyone's learning and nobody is dragging a huge load alone. We've had no issues so far and despite being fairly early in the project we're making good progress all around. Is this what a stress-free experience feels like? Pretty happy with the project in general and I think our app idea is pretty cool too.

So my first job is also my current one. I am a computer science student and for my course we had to do a project for an actual client. The client was a consultancy company and after working my ass off, their software development partner decided to hire me and a classmate.

The company is pretty small (we are now with the 6 of us) and the general attitude is very nice. I've only been working there for a few weeks and I feel very welcome. The work isn't too hard (mainly web development with geographic features/data).
In rough lines the stack always consists of a Java Rest API and an Angular frontend that retrieved the data from the API.
So far I have learned a ton and I am really happy that I have this opportunity. Lunch is provided and we always eat together, we crack jokes, have fun, play games in the break. Coffee machine next to my desk. I'd love to work here all my life :d

Since I'm still in school I can't go to the office every day. Instead I am at the office every Monday and on other days I try to work from school or home.

Since everyone seems to be talking about getting places late, here's my not-so-significant story about my most recent interview.

So I was told that GPS probably wouldn't work. But the instructions that I got were not specific enough to guide me - something I learned only once I arrived in the general area that I was supposed to be in.

Ended up going one street too far and talking to the wrong front desk. They kindly gave me instructions to get to my destination.

These instructions were also wrong. They left out one step and viola, I'm at the gate of the sheriff dog training facility.

Turn 'er around and finally get on the correct road. My 20 minutes early turned into 10 minutes late, just like that.

They were understanding and I got the job.

Hello! A tiny update on the privacy site thingy. (linuxxx here yas).

I've finished the preview page (description of what will be on the site really) and slowly preparing for deployment.
In the mean time, since @ewpratten is very busy at the moment, I'm giving the frontend part a shot myself! Working on the general layout/presentation right now and I will show a preview as soon as I have anything solid enough to show :).

Also working on the custom CMS which is going well!

I am kind of hestitant to publish the preview page because I am not a frontender and I know that I'll get all criticism on here so please, please go easy on me! Also, just in general, if you find any kind of flaws in the web app or wherever, please report them to me! As for frontend, I won't fix anything because I've got bigger priorities (like creating the actual site itself xD) but general feedback would be appreciated :). And as I said, I'm a backender so don't judge me too hard on the frontend!

Alright now let's gather some courage to actually publish this thing 😅

Product manager: "Programmers are limitted to computer programs, that's why app developers can do mobile devices too!"

Me: "Programmers are not limited to computer programs, its a general skill"

Product Manager: "Then why App
Development is a career?"

Java's System.out.println because it's too effing long to write!
And in general, all of Java because you need an MB of code just for Hello World.

I'll use this topic to segue into a related (lonely) story befitting my mood these past weeks.

This is entire story going to sound egotistical, especially this next part, but it's really not. (At least I don't think so?)

As I'm almost entirely self-taught, having another dev giving me good advice would have been nice. I've only known / worked with a few people who were better devs than I, and rarely ever received good advice from them.

One of those better devs was my first computer science teacher. Looking back, he was pretty average, but he held us to high standards and gave good advice. The two that really stuck with me were: 1) "save every time you've done something you don't want to redo," and 2) "printf is your best debugging friend; add it everywhere there's something you want to watch." Probably the best and most helpful advice I've ever received 😊

I've seen other people here posting advice like "never hardcode" or "modularity keeps your code clean" -- I had to discover these pretty simple concepts entirely on my own. School (and later college) were filled with terrible teachers and worse students, and so were almost entirely useless for learning anything new.

The only decent dev I knew had brilliant ideas (genetic algorithms, sandboxing, ...) before they were widely used, but could rarely implement them well because he was generally an idiot. (Idiot sevant, I think? Definitely the idiot part.) I couldn't stand him. Completely bypassing a ridiculously long story, I helped him on a project to build his own OS from scratch; we made very impressive progress, even to this day. Custom bootloader, hardware interfacing, memory management, (semi) sandboxed processes, gui, example programs ...; we were in highschool. I'm still surprised and impressed with what we accomplished.

But besides him, almost every other dev I met was mediocre. Even outside of school, I went so many years without having another competent dev to work with. I went through various jobs helping other dev(s) on their projects (or rewriting them), learning new languages/frameworks almost every time: php, pascal, perl, zend, js, vb, rails, node, .... I learned new concepts occasionally (which was wonderful) but overall it was just tedious and never paid well because I was too young to be taken seriously (and female, further exacerbating it). On the bright side, it didn't dwindle my love for coding, and I usually spent my evenings playing with projects of my own.

The second dev (and one one of the best I've ever met) went by Novo. His approach to a game engine reminded me of General Relativity: Everything was modular, had a rich inheritance tree, and could receive user input at any point along said tree. A user could attach their view/control to any object. (Computer control methods could be attached in this way as well.) UI would obviously change depending on how the user could interact and the number of objects; admins could view/monitor any of these. Almost every object / class of object could talk to almost everything else. It was beautiful. I learned so much from his designs. (Honestly, I don't remember the code at all, and that saddens me.) There were other things, too, but that one amazed me the most.

I havent met anyone like him ever again.

Anyway, I don't know if I can really answer this week's question. I definitely received some good advice while initially learning, but past that it's all been through discovering things on my own.

It's been lonely. ☹

I don't think I could give the best advice on this since I don't follow all the best practices (lack of knowledge, mostly) but fuck it;

- learn how to use search engines. And no, not specifically Google because I don't want to drag kids into the use of mass surveillance networks and I neither want to promote them (even if they already use it).
- try not to give up too easily. This is one I'm still profiting from (I'm a stubborn motherfucker)
- start with open source technologies. Not just "because open source" but because open source, in general, gives one the ability to hack around and explore and learn more!
- Try to program securely and with privacy in mind (the less data you save, the less can be abused, compromised, leaked, etc)
- don't be afraid to ask questions
-enjoy it!

Fuck Apple and its review system

So, this started in december. We wanted to publsih an app, after years of development.

Submit to review, and passes on the first try. Well, what do you know. We are on manual release option, so we can release together with the android counterpart. Well yes, but someone notices that the app name is not what was aggreed (App Name instead of AppName). Okay, should be easy, submit the same app, just the name changed. If it passed once, it will pass again, right? HAH

Rejected, because the description, why we use the device’s camera is too general. Well... its the purpose of the app... but whatever, i read the guidelines, okay, its actually documented with exapmles. BUT THEN WHY THE FUCK COULDNT YOU SAY THAT ON THE FIRST UPLOAD?

Whatever, fix it, new version, accepted, ready to release just in time.

It doesindeed roll out,but of course, we notice that the app has a giant issue, but only on specific phones. None of our test phones had this problem, but those who have, essentially cannot use our program. Nasty as it is, the fix is really easy, done in 5 minutes. Upload it asap, literally nothing changed from user point of view, except now it doesnt crash on said devices. Meanwhile 1 star reviews are arriving from these users - of course with all the right. Apple should allow this patch quickly, right? HAH

THE REAL BULLSHIT COMES NOW

With only config files changed, the same binary uploaded we get rejected? What now? Lets read it. “Metadata rejected, no need to upload new binary”.... oh fine only the store page is wrong? Easy. Read the message, what went wrong. “Referencing third party content is nit permitted on the app store” meaning that no android test device should be shown. Fine, your rules. They even send a picutre of the offending element. BUT ITS NOT EVEN ON THE STORE. THATS A SCREENSHOT OF THE APP. HOW IS THAT METADATA? I ask about this, and i get a reply, from either a bot, or a person who cant speak or read english, and only pasted a sample answer, repeating the previous message. WTF. Fine, i guess you are dumb, but since they stop replying to our queries, do the only sensible thing, re-record the offending tutorial video that actually contained an android device. This is about 2 weeks, after the first try to apply a simple patch to a broken app. And still, how did it pass the review 2 times?

Whatever, reupload again, play the waiting game for a week, when the promised average wait time is 2 days, they hit us with a message, that they want to know what patent we use in our apps core functionality. WTF WHY NOW? It didnt bother you for a month, let it release ti production and now you delay a simple patch for this? We send them what they know. Aaaaand they reply: sorry we need more time to review your app. FUUUUUUCKKK YOUUU. You are reviewing a PATCH with close to zero functional change!!! Then, this shit goes on, every week we ask about an ETA, always asking for patience... at the end it took another 3 weeks... so december 15 to jan 21 in total...

FOR. A. SINGLE. FUCKING. PATCH

Bottom line is what is infurating, apple cares that there is an android device in the tutorial video, but they dont care that a significant percentage of our users simply cannot use the app.

Im done

This one's for all the SysAdmins out there.

About 4 years ago I was asked to take over a dental offices systems administration (~20 machines) after their previous guy had allowed their servers RAID 1 to fail and hadn't done any updates or general maintenance. (please take note this office is my parents dental office).

I since have been recovering from his poor configuration and setup by instating an active directory environment and installing up to date software as well as updating machines on the domain to Windows 10 since windows 7 is no longer supported. I have also been properly licensing everything.

My bosses (my parents) are annoyed with this because "it's more expensive" and "it's too complicated we don't know how to manage it" and I don't know how to explain to them that they aren't fucking systems admins. They asked why they could do it before and I tried to explain that now it's secure and things need to be rolled out on the network level. They had every user running full local admin on every workstation plus the server.

Some people don't fucking understand that just because it's simple doesn't make it a good fucking idea. And because it's cheap doesn't mean it will always be (just wait till Microsoft audits you).

Oh and they also don't understand fucking CAL licensing and refuse to pay for gsuite for all their staff who use it. Instead they just have two gsuite accounts and give everyone the fucking password.

I'm going to have an aneurysm

Structure: decades of programming in too many languages to enumerate. I lean functional, but only when the language doesn't fight it. No matter what I'm doing, my code is immutable in practice, if not paradigm.

Syntax: No one thing in particular. I code differently depending on the language.

When I start learning a language, I'll find the standard style checker and create a project where I write an example of every single rule.

The end result is generally a quick intro to the language and a bonus understanding of the hot sports opinion in said language. I call this an ocean boiler.

I lean heavily into autoformatting because I've worked on too many projects to care, and I have a general expectation that something which is important enough to make a code standard is important enough to be enforced in tooling. I'd rather spend my time solving problems that thinking about stylistics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TL;DR
I accidentally surpassed(?) my user permissions and closed some of my classmates browsers and locked up a terminal for me

In school we have 2 primary operating systems: Windows and Ubuntu. Windows is hell in general and but not as hell as the firefox installation on Ubuntu.

"Just loaded this page. Now wait half a minute so that I can render it"
"Woah, woah, woah. Slow there. You just made an input event. Give me those 5 seconds to compute what you just did"

Executing "top" or "htop" shows you a long list of firefox processes with a cpu usage of 99.9%, since the whole school shares that linux environment.

Anyway, one day it was way more servere than normally and I way forced to kill my firefox instances. So I pressed CTRL+ALT+T for that terminal, waited 5 minutes until it accepted input typed "killall firefox" with a delay of half a minute per character and smahed that enter key.

At this very point in time I could hear confusion from every corner of the room. "What happened to firefox?"

Around 30% of the opened browsers where abruptly stopped. I looked back to my screen noticed I was logged out. I couldn't login from that terminal for the rest of that day.

Our network admin, which happened to be there, since the server is just next door, said that this was just convenience, but the timing was too perfect so I heighly doubt that.

I felt like a real hackerman even if it was by accident :)

Working in the embedded systems industry for most of my life, I can tell you methodical testing by the software engineers is significantly lacking. Compared to the higher level language development with unit tests and etc, something i think the higher level abstracted industry actually hit out the of park successfully.

The culture around unit testing and testing in general is far superior in java and the rest.

Down here in embedded all too often I hear “well it worked on my setup... it worked at my desk”.. or Oh I forgot to test that part.. or I didn’t think that perticular value could get passed in... etc I’ve heard it all. Then I’ve also heard, you can’t do TTD or unit tests like high level on embedded... HORSESHIT!

You most definitely can! This book is a great book to prove a point or use as confirmation you are doing things correctly. My history with this book was I gonna as doing my own technique of unit testing based on my experience in the high level. Was it perfect no but I caught much more than if I hadn’t done the testing. THEN I found this book, and was like ohh cool I’m glad I’m on the right thought process because essentially what they were doing in the book is what I was doing just slightly less structured and missing a few things.

I’ve seen coworkers immediately think it’s impossible to utilize host testing .. wrong.

Come to find out most the of problems actually are related to lack of abstraction or for thought out into software system design by many lone wolf embedded developers.. either being alone, or not having to think about repercussions of writing direct register writes in application or creating 1500 line “main functions” because their perception is “main = application”. (Not everyone is like this) but it seems to be related to the EEs writing code ( they don’t know wha the CS knows) and CS writing over abstraction and won’t fit on Embedded... then you have CEs that either get both sides or don’t.. the ones to understand the low level need but also get high level concepts and pariadigms and adapt them to low level requirements BOOM those are the special folks.

ANYway..the book is great because it’s a great beginner book for those embedded folks who don’t understand what TDD is or Unit testing and think they can’t do it because they are embedded. So all they do is AdHoc testing on the fly no recording results no concluding data very quick spot check and done....

If your embedded software engineers say they can’t unit test or do TDD or anything other than AdHoc Testing...Throw the book at them and say you want the unit test results report by next week Friday and walk away.

Lol

I've been using microsoft dev stack for as long as i remember. Since I picked up C#/.NET in 2002 I haven't looked back. I got spoiled by things like type safety, generics, LINQ and its functional twist on C#, await/async, and Visual Studio, the best IDE one could ask for.

Over the past few years though, I've seen the rise of many competing open source stacks that get many things right, e.g. command line tooling, package management, CI, CD, containerization, and Linux friendliness. In general many of those frameworks are more Mac friendly than Windows. Microsoft started sobering up to this fact and started open sourcing its frameworks and tools, and generally being more Mac/Linux friendly, but I think that, first, it's a bit too late, and second, it's not mature yet; not even comparable to what you get on VS + Windows.

More recently I switched jobs and I'm mainly using Mac, Python, and some Java. I've also used node in a couple of small projects. My feeling: even though I may be resisting change, I genuinely feel that C# is a better designed language than Java, and I feel that static type languages are far superior to dynamic ones, especially on large projects with large number of developers. I get that dynamic languages gives you a productivity boost, and they make you feel liberated, but most of the time I feel that this productivity is lost when you have to compensate for type safety with more unit tests that would not be necessary in a static type language, also you tend to get subtle bugs that are only manifested at runtime.

So I'm really torn: enjoy world class development platform and language, but sacrifice large ecosystem of open source tools and practices that get the devops culture; or be content with less polished frameworks/languages but much larger community that gets how apps should be built, deployed, monitored, etc.

Damn you Microsoft for coming late to the open source party.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Css was developed by monkeys. I fucking hate how there is no organisation, laying out stuff requires too much work, there are billions of ways to do something. Aligning things in css actually has a web page dedicated to that, seriously, what the fuck????? I love doing backend and creating rest apis but for the love of god i cant stand css and front end in general🤦🤦🤦

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just so done.

For me, the worst co-worker is one who works by the principle of quantity over quality or a person who thinks quick and ugly fixes are a valid way to solve problems. Also: If there are unittest, don't fucking dare to change or remove them, just so your code runs without errors.

But in general, I just can't work with people who don't really think about what they are coding, people who just code straight ahead without making the simplest plan about how to solve something. Most of these people realize too late, that their approach was rather shitty, unreadable and unmaintainable.

I often see memes about "I forgot what I coded last [insert timespan here]". Though it is kind of normal, if it takes you too long to find out what you wrote, you should consider overthinking your coding approaches.

Just my 50 cents.

Damn I miss coding... 4 weeks of learning & exams is too long...

26 or so hours up now. And I've got a few stories to tell :) feel free to refresh your cup of coffee and take a seat.

Last few days I've been going into this odd place called intown.irl to get in touch with its inhabitants. An odd place I have to say. But in some cases quite rewarding, even got a MILF home with me and into bed at some point. Anyway...

3 days ago I think it is now? Thursday evening I took my laptop to this local bar where I had this issue about dihydrogen monoxide with one of the bartenders earlier (you'll find that rant on those keywords). Still wanted to visit it regardless though, as I met that first woman there earlier that approached me. Unfortunately I didn't see her there that day.

Some bald guy who was clearly drunk approached me. Many people were already giving curious looks at this laptop I brought to the bar. I finally tuned it up with the stickers from FOSDEM.. I'll put a picture of it in the comments. My theme was one of privacy (central), distributions and Google's open source initiative (which aligns with the keychain token I got from them as well). But of course.. that guy.. he thought that a pimped/riced laptop obviously meant that I was a hacker.

Guy went to the toilet.. went back.. and suddenly grabbed my laptop and turned it towards him. Boy was I never more smugly satisfied that those rubber pads on the bottom are quite resilient. Could've almost damaged my screen by trying to grab it like that. But it's a CCFL display.. so high voltage. If it were to become broken.. worth it. 😈

On it at the time was a terminal, pinging Google (had network issues at that bar, to the point where one of the - I think - staff members got up to me and offered the WiFi password and got to talk with me.. more on that later), and my usual Linux desktop along with the Arch anime wallpaper with the quote of Da Vinci.. simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Of course the guy saw the terminal.. and probably reaffirmed.. yep, that's a hacker. At least he wasn't too wrong about the general term.. but the hat.. most likely he was wrong on that one.

Guy left with this question.. "you are a hacker, aren't you."
I replied to him: "No sir. I'm not a hacker. I've got no idea what you're talking about."
Guy kept looking at me weirdly for the whole night to come.

Back to that companion guy though. Mac user, yada yada.. but he told me about his backup solution. Apparently - I shit you not - he has not only the photos on his local device, he's also frequently backing them up in Time Machine (which I was really curious about whether it uses mirroring or snapshots.. he couldn't tell, lmk if you do) but not only that.. he was storing another offsite backup in that very bar, in case his house went on fire.

Now that is a proper backup scheme!!! If only more people were like that.

Seriously though.. that bald guy who took my laptop just like that... I just let it slide for that one time, but I tend to treat my machines as an extension of my very self. I think that was a very uncalled for move. Asshole...

How would you have reacted to such a thing? And.. maybe that's why we technologists don't get outside too often? Fucking everything is hacking these days if it's not Knopkes and Blinkenlights… Not every shell is a h4xx0ring console for h3kk1ng de fasbuk…

tired of my tor browser not letting me do my job (still configuring settings, but it's taking too long and i'm getting tired of it), and chrome doesn't show my mouse pointer (which works everywhere else on my machine).

Time to go back to firefox. downloading nightly this time, though. thoughts on it? any default settings I should change for security or to make it better in general?

Two things before this all:
- I fucking love gitlab so far
- I miss the fuzzy searching from sublime text, as vsCode still can't do it properly..

I was fed up with all the shitty overbloated git deployment scripts, sync scripts, automatic backup solutions and hosted git servers out there, so now my own solution is:

- remote git cloned local files
- local files are synced via dropbox, to easily edit them on any device
- all changes and deleted files are saved up to 1 year on dropbox
- remote has gitlab running and webhooks setup
- the webhooks point to my node scripts, which then rebase the code to its dedicated dev server
- daily server backup with 7 days roll
- cold storage backup each 30 days

Sounds like overkill, but from my experience, you really can't have enough places that have a backup, especially coldstorage backups.

My goal in general though is to have everything on my computer backupped and ready to go asap, if something happens.

I wanted to just use a virtual machine for development stuff, but that wouldnt be able to run on my laptop, so I need a more general solution, where I sync all configs and all projects across. (and have some sort of basic list of tools needed, so I dont need to remember them)

Found for example something for vscode to sync its settings and plugins via any sort of git, will give it a try in near future too.

During my first year of working, I was offered to work part-time at another company. I actually took it to my supervisor and asked for his advice.

He began with a sigh, he knows that I like programming so much and wants the job because I wanna do more programmings. He gathered his thoughts and said calmly, "Look, I cannot stop you if you want to, but think about this, you already are doing programming for five days a week here. Take those extra times you have to develop other parts of yourself. Go learn public speaking or something" or something along that line.

I gave it a deep thought, took the advice, and rejected the offer. I eventually went on to commit myself on volunteering for the next two and a half years, and secured a promotion about a year from that conversation because my supervisor sees improvements in my communications with others and my soft skills in general (unlike programming, you can't volunteer in an organisation without speaking to people).

Sometimes we programmers only wanna code that we forget that what we're building are for humans and involves other humans. You wanna be the best at work? Try to grow on your horizontal axis, too.

//Random Mr. Robot thought//
So this picture and this quote in general has been in my mind quite recently. The first time I saw this scene it just passed through my mind as just a wierd quirk of elliot. But upon further thinking, I question that given Elliot is someone who specializes in network security in a sense. A part of which focuses on finding exploits in networks or even software in general( basically finding the worst in them). And the more I think about that,the more I come to realisation that just like most programmers mix together logic in their life in dealing with people, this scene stands out as an example of just that happening with Elliot and what perhaps, makes him such a good hacker. Perhaps we could all learn from this, or perhaps I'm just looking too much into this. Eh.

I've got a rant-type question:

Why would you EVER use Google Chrome?

There are a million browsers in the world, you could've used Firefox, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, Bad Wolf, Qute, st, Epiphany etc, but you chose to uss Google Chrome.

What would be the reason you would ever choose Google Chrome over any of the million browsers, out of which many of them get the job done much better than Chrome? Okay, I get it why you might use IE or Edge, cause you might be too lazy to install any other browser or you just want the performance benefits you get with Edge which totally, most definatelly, a very big plus point for Edge.

*"Chrome has a balanced-bloat out of all browsers"*
But how tf does that matter? That doesn't even help performance wise anyways.

I can't get over the fact that I have to see/hear about 'Chrome hogging RAM' EVERYWHERE. Like, why do you even care about the god damn browser? Why is it a standard over the million other browsers that exist? Why can't the general public be educated that browsers have choices (just like phones) and you don't have to spit crap over people who don't use Chrome.

It just drives me crazy of how many people hate Chrome, and still it's a 'default' browser.

I would quote Vivaldi (the company/browser):
'A browser should adapt to you, not the other way around.'

(Disclaimer: Rant of a former Firefox, qute, st, Opera, OperaGX, Edge, and ofcourse, Chrome user. Currently in deep love with Vivaldi.)

I'm done ranting. Have a nice day!

(My first post here, if I did something wrong, let me know! I'll make sure I don't do it again!)

I think I have been having too much fun in meetings.

We started one meeting:
Boss: Isn't today a great day?
<Boss looks at me>
Me: I will wait until the end of the meeting to decide.
Meeting takes place. Boss is upset about things in other areas that are not panning out properly. He is not happy by the end of the meeting.
<Boss looks at me>
Boss: You are right, today is not a great day.
<everyone laughs>

Another meeting:
Boss: How is everyone doing? Is everyone having great job satisfaction and challenging work? (Not exact words, but the general meaning of them.)
<Boss looks at me>
Me: I just rearrange text all day.
<Boss laughs>

I figure if he is laughing it is generally a positive experience. I am serious when he asks what I am doing in my work.

Is the general public getting stupider or am i getting smarter?? I love my cousin to bits but every time he speaks, i lose brain cells. I didn’t always think he was this dumb. I find a-lot of people are too dumb to interact with lately so i stay in my house, alone, typing code and laughing at Netflix. Am i the problem?

Good question, what wasn't bad about 2020?

As far as good things go.. well, COVID-19 actually. Back in February the lockdown began in Belgium, and while many people got bored out of their minds, I actually became a lot more productive. So many projects started back then, and I got a lot better at programming because of it. Now I can confidently write most bash stuff without ever looking anything up. And the code is maintainable, on account of putting everything into functions. You can literally navigate the code just by looking at it. On older code I always had issues with that.

I'm very glad that essential travel even back then wasn't really restricted. Because my bank is retarded about online banking, I have to go to the bank every so often to check my balance. At the time I tended to do that late in the evening, when nobody else was outside and I had the entire town to myself. That was one of the travels considered essential. So I kept doing it and made that my biweekly walk. I really enjoyed that. Gets your mind off things.

Bad things would be the utter stupidity that the general public had shown me during that pandemic. Burning down 5G antennas and not even getting the right ones, toilet paper, 5G death beams in street lamps?! They even sent death threats to telco workers over sensationalist bullshit from what IIRC was just a random Twitch streamer. Those people should just fucking kill themselves, choke yourselves in that pile of toilet paper you got yourself and then called yourself financially challenged. You braindead fucking retards!

Another dev-related thing is the normalization of SJW terminology. Now even "blind playthrough" gets your ass banned on Twitch. I saw a tweet about a Twitch employee (I think) proudly saying that they implemented it. Most upvoted comment on it was from a blind person, asking why they did this and not made the Twitch app more friendly to use for blind users. They too thought this was bullshit. Yet it still got added in, and more and more people are starting to think that "this is fine". Hell even that "this is necessary".

What annoys me the most is that this mostly comes from the US, where around that time they laid their knee on George Floyd, and didn't fix their legal system at all. As a European it baffles me since we have many immigrants here (the Drumpf even called Belgium a hellhole over it) and we just don't give a shit about whether or not they are "truly Belgian". We just let them live their daily lives like everyone else. Imagine just not giving a shit. Imagine not bothering them, not with racism, not with reverse racism, not with anything. Just let them do their thing and that's it. Yet despite Belgium being one of the most inclusive countries in the fucking world, I still got called a racist many times for asking.. why did you implement this? Why this, and not tackling the problem at its actual and pretty fucking obvious core?

So all in all I can only hope that 2021 will get a little bit better. But that's the same thing I said in 2019, and it didn't quite come true.

need advice on integrating .t3d file support in c++ engine
hey, been stuck trying to figure out how to get .t3d file support working in our custom game engine, which is all written in c++. it's turning out to be a lot trickier than expected and i'm kinda hitting a wall here. the documentation on .t3d itself is pretty much nonexistent and what's out there is either outdated or too vague to be of any real use. i've tried a few things based on general file parsing logic in c++ but keep running into issues with either reading the files correctly or integrating the data into the engine in a way that actually works. it feels like i'm missing something fundamental but can't pin down what it is. has anyone here gone through this process before or has any experience with .t3d files? i could really use some advice on how to approach this, or even just some resources that explain the format in detail. also, if there are any common pitfalls or things to watch out for when adding new file format support to a game engine, i'd appreciate the heads up. thanks in advance for any help, feeling pretty stuck and any guidance would be a huge help.

Regarding Article 13 (or 17 or wherever it moved to now)… Let's say that the UK politicians decide to be dicks and approve the law. After that, we need to get it engineered in, right? Let's talk a bit about how.. well, I'd maybe go over it. Been thinking about it a bit in the shower earlier, so.. yeah.

So, fancy image recognition or text recognition from articles scattered all over the internet, I think we can all agree.. that's infeasible. Even more so, during this lobby with GitHub and OpenForum Europe, guy from GitHub actually made a very valid point. Now for starters, copyright infringement isn't an issue on the platform GitHub that pretty much breathes collaboration. But in the case of I-Boot for example, that thing from Apple that got leaked earlier. If that would get preemptively blocked.. well there's no public source code for it to get compared against to begin with, right? So it's not just "scattered all over the internet, good luck crawling it", it's nowhere to be found *at all*.

So content filtering.. yeah. Nope, ain't gonna happen. Keep trying with that, EU politicians.

But let's say that I am a content creator who hates the cancer of joke/meme because more often than not it manifests itself as a clone of r/programmerhumor.. someone decides to freeboot my content. So I go out, look for it, find it. Facebook and the likes, make it easier to find it in the first place, you dicks. It's extremely hard to find your content there.

So Facebook implements a way to find that content a bit easier maybe. Me being the content creator finds it.. oh blimey! It can't be.. it's the king of freebooting on Facebook, SoFlo! Who would've thought?! So at that point.. I'd like to get it removed of course. Report it as copyright infringement? Of course. Again Facebook you dicks, don't make it so tedious to fill in that bloody report. And look into it quickly! The videos those SoFlo dicks post is only relevant in the first 48h or so. That's where they make the most money. So act more quickly.

So the report is filled, video's taken down.. what else? Maybe temporarily make them unable to post as a bit of a punishment so that they won't do it again? And put in a limit to the amount of reports they can receive. Finally, maybe reroute the revenue stream to the original content creator instead. That way stolen content suddenly becomes free exposure! Awesome!

*suddenly realizes that I've been talking about the YouTube copyright strike system all along*

… Well.. maybe something like that then? That shouldn't be too hard to implement, and on YouTube at least it seems to be quite effective. Just imagine SoFlo and the likes that are repeat offenders, every 3 posts they get their account and page shut down. Good luck growing an audience that way. And good luck making new accounts all the time to start with.. account verification technology is pretty good these days. Speaking of experience here, tried bypassing Facebook's signup hoops a fair bit and learned a bit about some of the things they have red flags on, hehe.

But yeah, something like that maybe for social media in general. And.. let's face it, the biggest one that would get hurt by something like this would be Facebook. And personally I think it's about time for that bastard company to get a couple of blows already.

What are your thoughts on this?

Actually I feel I am prety lucky about the relationship between my yamily and me being a dev. My dad is a developer as well (in fact, he was the one who taught me most of what I know today; not as in general coding, but good and bad programming practices, tips what to do next ...) and my mom just started learning Python.
So they know prety well what it means to be a dev and have quite realistic image of what to expect.
To be fair, I am still the one who usualy fixes broken printers and replugs unplugged ethernet cables. but that is because I enjoy doing that. I take it as a challenge for myself to figure out what/how/when went something wrong. Most of the times I try to figure that even without touching the broken things.
Anyway, getting off topic.
Alltogether I don't think that they have too unrealistic expectations, but if I had to chose one, it'd be my learning capabilities. I can't learn complete java in 2 days ...

My parents know I systematically google every question they ask me about computer in general. Hopefully one day they'll do it too.

So I have been a fly on the "wall" for last couple of months and never signed up, but now here I am!

Rant is about a serious topic - gender gap in tech industry!!
Couple of months ago Stackoverflow announced developer survey results! I was shocked by demographics results! It was disappointing to see biggest gender gap in general tech industry!
I believe tech industry can be the first one to have equal pay for women!

However.... (bad part)
I was going through my twitter feeds and saw this! Many of you have seen this tweet too.

(ohh!fuck I cant attach multiple images here, I should have created Medium post, fuck it!)

"They" continue, quoting from the tweet.
1)"....bias in society is reflected in AI"
2) "However, I do think it is our responsibility as designers/developers/users to be aware of this bias and do our best to correct it."

I want to rant about 2nd one. Some of you may not like it including grammar naziz!
As a developer/programmer I take 2nd one personally! I am currently at denial phase though!
And I have an OCD so gonna make points here!

1) Seriously tell me please, how the fuck you can write gender bias algorithm which can pass a big crazy amount of test suite?

2) Google has done many things for last decade to overcome gender gap related issues. I have met some of the nicest people from Google, and this is really hard for me to believe that google AI or that team has anything to do with the results!

3) Someone suggests use "they" in google translated result, can you fucking imagine how wrong that would be??? If I am developer working on that algo or even in that team and I see this ticket in jira with highest priority where it says, "make all translated results gender neutral using only they" - I would fucking like to die and may be in my next life ask me to do that, when I am a toddler!

4) I am an advocate for equal pay, equal rights and equal opportunities for everyone to "minify" this gender gap in tech, but showing google translate results of a gender natural language to make a point is wrong, it is simply undermining the efforts of something really helpful thing.

5) Moving on to the core point - What can be done to lower down the gender gap? I have seen amazing women who can code/manage far far far better than what I ever could imagine, and they are at really good place and deserve to be there. Are they doing enough to inspire other women to join tech industry?
Collective efforts are very much required. And need to keep in consideration that tech industry is highly competitive roles are also changing rapidly.

6) Many big companies have women at higher positions(CEO, CFO,....) what are their efforts to bring more women in tech industry?
(Some of you may not like this, as this is implying that it isn't only men's job. )

7) Going slightly political here, everyday we see really disappointing news related to women and their rights and health, I strongly believe women don't have to ask for or even have to mention about "equal rights" about anything. Everyone is equal!!!
This is 2017 and still fucked up!

Thats all for today! Heading for breakfast!

This is just a bunch of things I needed to get out that I’ve been holding in for a while now.

Recently I’ve found myself In this state where I feel so depressed, lazy, and just pressured to program in general. I feel like it comes from me dismissing my abilities a lot of the time and I get demotivated to do stuff but at the same time when I do sit down and code I get distracted so easily, I can get work done but I just feel like I’m everywhere.

I want to apply for positions but I’m in this duality where I both feel like I can or can’t do it, I feel like wherever I apply to will not be accepting to people that don’t have a big degree or a ton of work experience and that I’ll get fucked on it. I’m fucking anxious that if I do get a job they will be like “hey fucking do X” and I will have no fucking clue how to even do X, and I’ve had people tell me that they know for a fact I can do it but I still fucking can’t believe it because I just completely doubt myself because I have failed at things like learning certain frameworks or failing to make the things I want and having to turn to simpler projects first because I’m too overwhelmed by the scale and I didn’t do any thinking about it before hand.

I don’t know if I’m making sense at all, I always write out rants like this and I always just erase them because I fucking hate whining like this but I need to let it out before I go more crazy I’ve been holding so much in for a long time now and it’s not been good.

I just over all feel terrible, anxious, and unproductive and I want it to stop.

Alright. This is going to be long and incoherent, so buckle up. This is how I lost my motivation to program or to do anything really.

Japan is apparently experiencing a shortage of skilled IT workers. They are conducting standardized IT skill tests in 7 Asian countries including mine. Very few people apply and fewer actually pass the exam. There are exams of different levels that gives you better roles in the IT industry as you pass them. For example, the level 2 or IT Fundamental Engineering Exam makes you an IT worker, level 3 = capable of working on your own...so on.
I passed level 1 and came in 3rd in my country (there were only 78 examinees lol). Level 2 had 2 parts. The theoretical mcq type exam in the morning and the programming mcq in the afternoon. They questions describe a scenario/problem, gives you code that solves it with some parts blanked out.

I passed the morning exam and not the afternoon. As a programmer I thought I'd be good at the afternoon exam as it involves actual code. Anyway, they give you 2 more chances to pass the afternoon exam, failing that, you'll have to take both of them the next time. Someone who has passed 1 part is called a half-passer and I was one.

A local company funded by both JICA and my government does the selection and training for the Japanese companies. To get in you have to pass a written exam(write code/pseudocode on paper) and pass the final interview in which there are 2 parts - technical interview and general interview.

I went as far as the interview. Didn't do too good in the technical interview. They asked me how would I find the lightest ball from 8 identical balls using a balance only twice. You guys probably already know the solution. I don't have much theoritical knowledge. I know how to write code and solve problems but don't know formal name of the problem or the algorithm.

On to the next interview. I see 2 Japanese interviewers and immediately blurt out konichiwa! The find it funny. Asked me about my education. Say they are very impressed that self taught and working. The local HR guy is not impressed. Asks me why I left university and why never tried again. Goes on about how the dean is his friend and universites are cheap. foryou.jpg

The real part. So they tell me that Japanese companies pay 250000/month, I will have to pay 60% income tax, pay for my own accommodation, food, transportation cost etc. Hella sweet deal. Living in Japan! But I couldn't get in because the visa is only given to engineers. Btw I'm not looking to invade Japan spread my shitskin seed and white genocide the japs. Just wanted to live in another country for a while and learn stuff from them.

I'll admit I am a little salty and probably will remain salty forever. But this made me lose all interest in programming. It's like I don't belong. A dropout like me should be doing something lowly. Maybe I should sell drugs or be a pimp or something.

But sometimes I get this short lived urge to make something brilliant and show them that people like me are capable of doing good things. Fuck, do I have daddy issues?

Subaru's Symmetrical AWD is the best thing in the world at the moment. Also, warning: !dev

Tl;dr: I'm getting another RPi3 thanks to awesome engineering.

Got a couple of inches of light snow here, and on my way home I came across a GMC Sierra dually stuck at the bottom of a moderately sized ditch. Naturally, I stopped by in my Forester and offered to tow it out.

With my 20ft tow rope stretched to its full length I was barely touching the road. He signalled that he was ready, and I gunned it. Slowly but surely the truck crawled out of the 6ft deep trench. She crested the hill with much applause (from me and the driver of the truck). As a thanks, he gave me $30.

Looks like I'm gonna get a new Raspberry Pi to play with. I think I'll turn this one into a countertop MAME arcade machine.

And for those of you wondering why I'm praising Symmetrical AWD as opposed to AWD in general, here's a quick lesson in drivetrains:
Most all wheel drive cars power the front wheels most of the time. This saves on fuel economy. The thing is, power is only transmitted to the rear wheels when the front wheels start to lose traction. At that point you're already screwed; only two wheels at any one time are putting useful power to the road.
Symmetrical AWD systems, like you'll find in all Subarus and most performance cars, distribute the vehicle's torque eaqually front-rear at all times. So instead of waiting until the front wheels start slipping, all of the wheels are powered right off the bat.

To make this more devvy: grrrr php, vim is best, I configured the tab key to enter four spaces, js has too many damn frameworks and they're still being pumped out faster than rabbits in a bunny farm.

I like js and node in general.
But there's this thing I hate about NodeJs...

The blogs. The goddamn blogs.

Every goddamn blog post. Is code. Dozens of lines of code.

Oh, so you want X feature? Just copy paste this shit.

I swear to god, blog posts are the source versioning system to these people.

What they should instead is
a) Create a package.
b) Add tests to it.
c) Present the package to the reader with some minimal code.

But I'm a getting a huge impression that node blog writers want you to copy the code in their post, paste it in your project, and be happy with it.

Now, I'm not assuming that every person posting in medium.com is a software engineer (and by engineer I mean an engineer, not some fuckwad who begs for github stars on dev communities).

The problem to me is that they fucking SATURATE the goddamn search results.

The same goes for finding an npm package for your need, because there are so many low quality packages it's saturated too, you have too plow this stinking pile of projects that have very low quality,
and there's not a really good npm finder out there. Half of them are dead, some look and load like shit, and npm search has a low barrier for good code.

Me on rails, OTOH "ok, I need this thing", I google that and I swear to [-∞,+∞] I find GOOD packages, well designed, no cookie cutter bullshit, no obscure marketing shit on the README.md, it is very clear what this shit does, and the api is designed for HUMANS.
and it actually takes very little time to know if there's no such package.

I don't have to read dozens of fucking my-fuck-blog.io (jesus christ, the io domain has become such a fucking joke, it got fucking abused to death, there are some cool sites out there using it, but my god, James H. Marketing likes to just absorb everything he can, and the internet was not going to be a fucking exception)

does all of this make sense?

(in 2008)
my boss in my first job. in general every time when he randomly burst into office. one specific time when he burst i to office and INSISTED that we've got to go to a parking lot to see something.

that something was a remote-controlled helicopter he just bought. (this was before the age of drones).

oh, and he was a chain smoker, always had a cigarette behind his ear (wat), and was dragging me out to have a smoke (i was the only other programmer smoker, but not as heavy as him) every 10-15 minutes under the implied pretense of needing to discuss something about the code, and frowned heavily when i refused (because i was actually in the middle of actual work), because he took it as me refusing to have a work meeting with him.

no, we almost never talked about anything work-related, while on that smoke "work meeting".

also, my boss' boss in my first job, when she entered the office asking "we need a clickable map of our country where clicking each region brings you to a search page with filter set to results from that region. how would we do that?"

i answered "html imagemap linking to the right search url for each region, or embedded flash doing the same, if you want the region buttons to be animated", and turned back to my work.

upon which she proceeded to talk about it with the second programmer, both pretending they're solving some aspects that my answer didn't already solve, INSISTING that i stop doing "whatever nonsense you're doing" and pretend that i'm paying attention as if anything they said was in any way relevant or important. i kept returning to my work because i was solving an annoying bug and their talk was empty and useless.

this second incident was then cited as one of the reasons i was let go, because "he ignores important conversations with his superiors about upcoming tasks"

in general, my first job was a shitshow where nobody had any time or energy to do actual work because they all expended all of it to PRETEND for their superiors that they're working, since the superiors had no clue how it looks when we actually do our actual jobs.

(one month after i was let go (because, in my boss' words, yes, the one with the helicopter, "the IT productivity is very low and I have to hold someone responsible") , the second programmer was let go as well, and one month after that, our boss (head of IT) was let go too. to this day I keep being fascinated how did the company manage to survive long enough for me to even be there, let alone how it STILL manages to survive. i guess being part of a nation-wide conglomerate is very effective in covering your company's losses and uselessness)

(I'll give some context before the rant: I'm part if the IT department of a manufacturing company (actually I'm 1/2 of the department), and all the applications (old an new - except the ones used on production line) used in the company are my responsibility, that including most of databases too... Also, English isn't my native language so there will be some words or phrases that I'll probably write wrong... Sorry for that, if there are any corrections, I'll be glad to hear them)

So...

There will be an implementation of new "control point" on the "shipping department" which consists on a electromechanical equipment controlled by a PLC. And despite the original concept was a collaboration between 2 departments (we, IT, and Production Control), I was never taken in consideration about anything of the project... To be fair, I forget about its existence until two weeks ago.

So, a few days I learned that there are a huge delay regarding the original deadline (mainly because the supplier was delayed with the delivery of their system), and since two weeks (less, actually, because some holydays in between) I'm learning how to integrate that "P.o.S" into an existing application on a PC using a serial communication (not the main problem, as I've done that before... With another brand of PLC's) while avoiding buying any additional software (to get the communication done and in a easy way) and that sort of things... But discovering in the process that it will be necessary to acquire such additional SW in order to finish the job ASAP.

When suddenly I get the "news" that it's almost all my duty (and responsibility) to meet the original deadline, because it doesn't matter how the other departments screw all the schedule, it's the job of IT to get the shit done in time... And what is worst: they didn't said that in such straight manner, no, the implied it while making a quick test with the general manager.

I mean, WTF? Besides doing a "respectable" number of "user support" activities in a dialy basis, I also need to manage the activities of other departments? And also fix their screw ups on a schedule that I just learned days before?

And also there is a coworker (one of whom screwed up) that, almost every time she see me, is asking "how much until you'll finish?"

As I read on a meme years ago: "please, give patience, because if you give strength, I'll need bail money too..."

Damn... I don't know of the benefits of this work are worth all this nonsense

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

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

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

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

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

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

You are a great person.
Do not forget that.

There is this general idea that people have that when programmers are able to run their code in their first attempt, without any error, they think of ourselves as geniuses. But i think that is the case only when you are starting to code. If a programmer with enough experience runs his/her code in their first attempt without any issues, he/she just says their thanks and moves on, because they know that the code can sense cockiness and if they get too carried away now they'll have to pay the price in future.

Biggest teamwork fail? This is the general way we do business where I work right now:
My boss didn’t want to be the kind who hovers, always micromanaging. He also hates the idea of taking programmers away from their work for meetings. Sounds great, right? This has resulted in:

• All non-lead devs being excluded from all meetings other than scrum (including sprint planning and review meetings). Nobody ever knows what the hell is going on. They don’t think we “need to know.” This means most of our day is spent trying to figure out what needs to be done, rather than getting anything done.

• Our remote boss making dozens of important decisions about our platform, never telling us, and blaming us for not forcing our lead to be more communicative.

• Pull requests staying open for weeks, sometimes months, because nobody has definitively decided what version we’re actually supposed to be working on. This means our base branch could be any of them, and it means PRs that have been opened too long need to be closed, updated, and re-opened on the false promise of someone actually looking at it.

Just ranting here... but I think our biggest teamwork fail is happening right now, with all of those things ^

*sighs heavily, utters a few profanities, starts updating resume*

This one is on me. I thought I had vetted this place well and asked the right probing questions during the interview, the core product is very cool but the company is too functionally immature.

it feels like Im in a relationship with someone who is really nice, very attractive and clearly very book-smart but has absolutely zero emotional intelligence and even less of a clue in general about what they actually want and need from the relationship. And to that I say:

“…yeah nah.”

During Summer I'm tired because it's too hot.

Now it's getting cold, it's getting harder to get out of bed...

And the heater makes me tired too...

Plus there's the not going out or, moving as much... Which may also be due to being tired.

And well in general, I seem to not feel like doing anything lately... Because I'm tired....

Seems like my routine is consolidating to: sleep, eat, work...

And if I had a choice it would just be sleep...

I need to get out of bed now so can eat and go work..... But I don't wanna.....

Is it just me? Any tips to break the cycle?

So, by a cruel twist of fate I ended up on the front line of tech support for the app we've built. It's aimed at non-IT professionals, in general people who are not expected to know too much about computers but who should have at least two neurons to bash together in their pretty little heads.

No.

It really makes me drop my faith in humanity considerably. Clicking a confirmation link is too much. Filtering an excel sheet is too hard, despite it being their technically main work tool. Tickets are basically "shit's broken go fix". What is broken? How to reproduce it? Why do you expect the person on the other side of the screen to be a fucking diviner? I recently ran all out of dove guts to search for the answers of your questions.

So yesterday I discussed how I am using speech to text to do approximately 50% of my rants. I am now doing a growing percentage of my outlook emails by voice as the human-computer voice interaction is pleasing and very natural. I have even named my iPhone 'little jumpshot' today.

Today I experimented with text to speech so that my rants are automatically read back to me before I send them. Some decent results.

In settings - general - accessibility you will find voice over (not recommended - be careful). Below that is Speech - speak selection or speak screen options.

Speak selection allows you to highlight text to be spoken. Too much human interaction for my purposes of walking hopefully not tripping be looking down. Using up my nine lives 😐

Below voiceover is - Speak screen - which allows you to pull down the screen with two fingers to speak what is on the screen. This will read the rant or of there are multiple rants on the screen it will read those as well.

It works but it will take a bit of getting used to. It also requires a few clicks here and there.

My goal is to interact with devRant fluidly 100% by voice. Just talking to 'little jumpshot' and him creating and posting all of my rants and reading all the other rants developers post.

For a few days experimenting I am satisfied with the progress but there is a long way to go.

Hopefully, in the end, this may help some people. Any ideas are very welcome.

1. Fix climate change and the environment in general
2. End corporate coercion and social inequality
3. Cure all mental illnesses

Is that too much to ask for?

So at the beginning of the year I took a new job at a large, stable company. Leaving a failing startup, toxic leadership, and an absolutely stellar development team in the process. Given what's happened in the world since then, I'm overall pretty happy with the decision to have some more stability for me and my family.

That being said, I'm super bummed out (and weirdly burned out) now because I feel like I'm becoming a worse engineer.

I've worked for large organizations before (single digit thousands of employees), but never have I experienced a personification of enterprise memes like this. Leadership too out of touch, lots of bullshit work just to make worthless reports look good, horrific legacy codebases and infrastructure, you name it.

My biggest problem are the expectations are shockingly low. I went from a hyper demanding work environment where the fate of the entire company seemed to hang in the balance each and every week, to an environment where we literally invent arbitrary, bullshit deadlines and requirements so we have something to feel some stress about. And even still, most of the deadlines are laughably far away. The pace of work that's not only accepted, but praised is so slow that I find myself procrastinating more and more. I spend so little time doing any work, and even less time doing things that would pass as "interesting", that I feel like the engineering and problem solving part of my brain is starting to rot.

To make matters worse, the culture is weirdly confrontational despite the pace being so slow. The people here are _incredibly_ pedantic and will launch into 15 minute arguments over the tiniest incorrect details in a story title. Interrupting someone just so you can say what they were going to say is a daily trial. And most ridiculous of all, _repeating_ word for word what someone _just_ finished saying like it was your thought and you didn't even hear them. I don't even know what the motivation for this could be because it makes them look like total clowns.

I've tried to bring up some of the things I find ridiculous, but most everyone has just accepted them at this point and there's virtually no effort to try and make things better. I only get stupid non-answers like "obviously you've never worked at a large enterprise before". Yes I have. Twice. We didn't partake in half the bullshit that happens here.

Honestly this was all just a passing frustration for the first month or two, but 7 months in I'm starting to see myself become complacent. My current output would be absolutely _shameful_ to myself from a year ago, and even my personality has started to shift to the point that I just go with the flow and don't challenge anything.

I've stopped keeping up with tech trends. I've stopped experimenting with new things. I've tried to do more work on personal projects, but the burnout is starting to affect my life outside of work. In general I've just completely stopped trying, and I absolutely fucking hate it.

I also feel like a total tool for complaining about having a cushy, stable job where I barely have to do anything given the current world climate. But I'm more miserable now than I think I've every been in my career. Has anyone else experienced this and found ways to combat it? How do you get your motivation back once it's lost and there isn't even any pressure to regain it?

I totally blame myself for becoming part of this joke. That's totally on me for not continuing to push myself, but I never realized how much of my "drive" from the last job was coming from the high stakes we were operating under. I really just want to get back to being proud of my work and pushing to be better.

Anyway, sorry for the lengthy post. This turned out to be a weirder rant/self-roast than I intended. But I'm hoping this will be the first step to kicking my own ass back into shape.

So today I'm going to join Reddit
Tell me subreddits where I can learn more and at the same time it doesn't go too much above my head

Interests in which I'd like to invest time:
Machine learning
Statistics
Distributed systems
Or general computer science research

Suggest me

If you wanna think that I'm a bad programmer, that's ok, but I can't put up anymore with Xcode.

Jesus Christ. An entire afternoon spent trying to make an array with two dimensions. I tried every fucking way I found in SO, in the apple site and in every another site that I found in my way.

First: For every example for Swift 3 there's another 10 for Swift <3.

Second: Mutable arrays, as I'm noticing, aren't a thing anymore, so, to declaring array size we go! Except it's impossible to. Tried 3 different ways. Not a single one worked.

Third: Actually, one of the 3 tries worked, for int arrays, and for some obscure reason it won't work for strings, as declaring the array as [String] is too general for swift, I mean, I completely agree with it, a [String] array could contain anything right???? FUCK NO. IT CONTAINS STRINGS YOU FUCKER!!!!

I swear, if the equipment was mine and not from the office, I would have thrown that piece of shit which disconnects from the fucking computer every 30 seconds that apple calls keyboard out of the window already.

Why the fuck do I need to develop for iOS in swift/xcode?? There's so many cross platform alternatives out there, good ones in fact, but no, we must build the applications natively or else the phone will catch on fire according to my boss.

I kinda liked Apple until now.
From now on? Fuck Apple.

Great googly moogly is Kotlin an ugly language.

If you are just starting out with Android or Java development in general, I highly recommend sticking with Java and avoid Kotlin like the plague. It feels like a meme language that was taken a little too seriously.

Full of little flowery nonsense that aims to make the language more human, but only serves to make it look like a child designed it.

I absolutely hate when a language doesn't require type declarations.

The "it" keyword rankles my underwear beyond belief.

Trying to build a dictionary/hashmap/hash felt like I was writing out an essay for school. In other languages it's straightforward and makes sense. Even PHP makes more sense.

I am obviously missing something here, because there is no way something so common and done the same way across different languages has such a wildly different approach in Kotlin.

I have as much experience with Java as I do Kotlin but it immediately makes more sense as a language and doesn't have all this flowery nonsense. It is verbose, which means I don't have to decipher what the code is actually doing when I read it.

I'm familiar with the enterprise Java meme, but I'm not writing enterprise Java, and that's not my style anyway so it doesn't affect me. But even so, that would be a million times easier to handle that Kotlin.

How the Common Lisp Community will eventually die soon:

Clojure is the only main Lisp dialect having some sort of heavy presence in today's modern development world. Yes, I am aware of other(if not all) environments in which Lisp or a dialect of it is being used for multiple things, CADLisp, Guile Scheme, Racket, etc etc whatever. I know.

Not only is Clojure present in the JVM(I give 0 fucks about whether you like it or not also) but also has compilation targets for Javascript via Clojurescript. This means that i can effectively target backend server operations, damn near everything inside of the JVM and also the browser.
Yet, there is no real point in using Lisp or Clojure other than for pure academic endeavours, for which it is not even a pure functional programming language, you would be better served learning something else if you want true functional purity. But also because examples for one of the major areas in software development, mainly web, are really lacking, like, lacking bad, as in, so bad most examples are few in between and there is no interest in making it target complete beginners or anything of the like.

But my biggest fucking gripe with Lisp as a whole, specifically Common Lisp, is how monstrously outdated the documentation you can find available for it is.

Say for example, aesthetics, these play a large role, a developer(web mostly) used to the attention to detail placed by the Rails community, the Laravel community, django, etc etc would find on documentation that came straight from the 90s. There is no passion for design, no attention to detail, it makes it look hacky and abandoned. Everything in Lisp looks so severely abandoned for which the most abundant pool of resources are not even made present on a fully general purpose language constrained as a scripting environment for a text editor: Emacs with Emacs Lisp which I reckon is about the most used Lisp dialect in the planet, even more so than Clojure or Common Lisp.

I just want the language to be made popular again y'know? To have a killer app or framework for it much like there is Rails for Ruby, Phoenix for Elixir, etc etc. But unless I get some serious hacking done to bring about the level of maturity of those frameworks(which I won't nor I believe I can) then it will always remain a niche language with funny syntax.

To be honest I am phasing away my use of Clojure in place of Pharo. I just hate seeing how much the Lisp community does in an effort to keep shit as obscure and far away from the reach of new developers as possible. I also DESPISE reading other Lisp developer's code. Far too fucking dense and clever for anyone other than the original developer to read and add to. The idea that Lisp allows for read only code is far too real man.

Lisp has been DED for a while, and the zombies that remain will soon disappear because the community was too busy playing circle jerks for anything real to be done with it. Even as the original language of AI it has been severely outshined by the likes of Python, R and Scala, shit, even Javascript has more presence in AI than Lisp does now a days.

To finish my photography portfolio website and get it online. I've been putting this off for YEARS. Just started again (and from scratch) and I've been making some progress for the last couple of days. I don't want to even look at that old project I scrapped, or maybe I will once I finish (read: publish) this one.

My problem before was that I was always looking at the big picture and was trying to figure everything out in one go.

In contrast with that, I now figured out a relatively simple and straightforward way to start off with no back end at all and just use static resources instead (with some logic to parse them every time I "upload" new stuff), which should be fine even in the long run if I end up being too lazy and/or busy to do the back end. In general, I now try to tackle small tasks one by one (even if I don't always write them down and/or track them) and realise that it's better to be done (even not in the best way I imagine it) than to not be done at all. It's as if I learn how to do stuff properly for the first time. Oh, well...

Random thoughts that I need to put somewhere. that I’ve been holding in and have to get out.

I feel like I’m more welcomed and wanted here than in real life. My friends don’t really think about me when making plans anymore, no one really thinks of me in general.

In school I was the awkward kid that was nice to everyone and I’m not taking the whole graduation well. I miss high-school and my vocational school, I miss my friends and I’ve just felt like things ended too soon and I just kinda feel alone

I wish I could just sit down and program and not procrastinate the only time I seem to be able to get stuff done is when I force myself. I feel like I’m such a shitty developer for not fighting it better. I need to be better.

I’ve not had a good few weeks. Since I’m taken a semester off from college no one in my family besides me is able to stay with a family member that’s in the hospital. I volunteered because I care for them deeply and want to help them. but it takes a huge toll on me since I have to be the one that listens to the doctors tells the rest of my family what’s happening. While Im kinda freaking out because I’m scared and nervous and NOT READY and I’ve had to stay a week there and I’ve been having to stay on and off and I haven’t really told anyone how I really am feeling about it all because I don’t like to be vulnerable in front of people and it’s been really hard and taking a toll and not helping the procrastination.

Girlfriend, and maybe relationship in general. Too much stress x)

I hate when one of my cw starts to flood the chat, especially the #general. It goes like:

CW: hey
CW: anyone have a pendrive
CW: ?

Me: I have one (and tells him where he can find on my desk)
Another CW: I have one too

CW: thanks, I'll get the one from <Another CW>
CW: hahahahahaha

You don't need to write a whole thesis in a single message, but at least you should guarantee that each message have some meaningful information, not just "hey", "?" and "hahaha"

Slack is not MSN.

Who should and when it would be a good time to tell him this is a waste of attention?

Every general meeting with a CEO who has never tried the freaking product or prototype and has zero technical knowledge.

As well, just about two out of three meetings with a HR person.

I've had meetings with a CTO too where it legit could be a boring handbook or email used for inducing sleep at night.

so i am on notice period and suddenly my manager has realised that there are a lot of tasks that i have to pickup. well fuck this guy.

i was initially dumb enough to think that i leaving is a bad thing,and i should be doing everything to make the transition easier. the task was also interesting enough , as we were trying to add a new and complex feature and i was the main dev there.

so i started at full pace. i would work on my tasks for hours , even missing on my personal projects. but since last week he would keep adding new tickets in my jira boards every few days , followed by a quick huddle telling how this is a very small and high priority ticlet and i should look at that first.

and me being me, i would not only just finish those small tickets in time, but have a progress on my major feature, as well as answer doubts of other team mates and attend meetings.

--------

i always forget how hypnotising this work culture usually get. the above scenario that i explained? i have no problem with that in a general day. i love to work, solve problems and help others. but these are no normal days, this is my fuckin notice period.

And i am here coz of a reason. if they rely on me so much, why did they forced me to relocate when i just can't? why don't they gove me a lucrative salary + worthy relocation benefits ? fuck them. i even have to serve for a fucking 60 days coz they are not willing to reduce my notice period .

fake promises everytime.
"you don't worry about different office mentioned in your offer letter. we will always keep the environment remote" ~ lie

"even if we go wfo, our company will open an office in your city too, your city is the capital and we had an office there before" ~ lie

"your notice period will get reduced, dont worry about the 60 days" - another fucking lie

______

notice period experts, i need some devil advice to not get exploited by a lier corp. how to utilise my notice period and what should he the excuses to not attend any nloody meetings?

I've been working on the ecommerce website from hell for over a year now. I should have heard the alarm bells when the studio who were running the project took a month to pay my deposit but still expected me to start working, but I explained that I wouldn't start without some form of security and they were cool with it, so I carried on.

It started off as a simple build with simple products, no product variations etc and a few links on the designs which appeared to lead to external links, and checkout and cart pages were nowhere to be seen. It wasn't a big money job so I just build them in as plain and straightforward as I could, in line with how the rest of the site looked. They then changed their mind about how they wanted these to look, and added loads of functionality to the site throughout the build, so by the end of the line, the scope of work had completely changed. I also had loads of disagreements in terms of design and useability, as their designs straight-up weren't going to function otherwise, plus every round of changes meant that I had to prolong the job further and fit it around work for other clients.

Fastforward a few more months and I get sent a really angry email with some of the client's complaints, including one that raised an issue with the user journey, and the finger of blame was pointed at me. The user journey had been a part of the designs from the start, and this was never raised as an issue for A WHOLE YEAR. They then said that it had to go live on Monday (three days after they sent email with these huge new structural changes). I told them I could no longer work on the project but was happy to waive the rest of my fee (3/4 of the total fee, when I had essentially completed the site, minus 2 minor bugs), so they could find another developer in the limited time they had. At first they refused to hire another developer, claiming that it would be too expensive, which made no sense, as for a few minor fixes and out of scope additions he could get paid a wage that would have otherwise paid for the majority of the work I had done on the site. I stood my ground and finally they found someone, so I sent over all of the files and database to their new developer and asked him to give me a heads up when I could remove the staging site from my server. The next day, I received an email from the studio asking me to fix some bugs the developer was requesting I fix so he could carry on with the site. They were basically asking me to work more, for free, to enable him to walk off with the majority of the money and do less work. They also forwarded a suuuuuper shitty, condescending email from him, listing all the things he thought was wrong with the site (he even listed 'no favicon' although they'd never supplied a graphic for this). He also wrote a paragraph at the bottom EXPLAINING MY JOB TO ME and telling me:

I get the feeling you like to write Javascript, while being one of the easiest languages to learn, it can also be one of the hardest to master. While I applaud you for writing Vanilla JS, it looks like you have a general problem with structuring your application.

Not sure if I'm being oversensitive here but it felt so patronising, and i couldn't even go for an angry walk to get it out my system because of social distancing lol.

Let a girl quarantine in peace!!!!!!

Seriously wtf? I wanted to play a new game. So I found Elden Ring on sale. But the first 30 minutes in the game is video/cutscenes so far. How can that reasonably be considered game play if it counts against the 2 hours of trial period? I don't play Skyrim in 3rd person, but I like that I can switch in and out to look at things.

I didn't like the feel of the combat system and I didn't like that it locked the 3rd person view. I hate playing in 3rd person as it is nearly always janky. How can that game be that popular with no option for 1st person?

I must be getting old. If a game doesn't feel the way I like, I bail on it. It has been this way with the last 3 or 4 Steam games I tried. Is it me, or has gaming in general gone to shit? I want an RPG with simple open world aspects, a non locked storyline that you can do if you want, maybe a vast generated world, and the ability to build things. I like FFX, but it takes a while to unlock "do what you want mode". It has party/character development, but no building.

I feel like the 2 hour trial period is too short. Not enough time to give the game a chance. I would have stuck it out if it gave me more time. I bailed because of janky 3rd person. Not enough time to get used to it imo.

I would rather play older titles I can trust to be fixable than new games. I am seeing people who play Skyrim come back to playing Skyrim after trying Starfield for a month. That is not a good sing for Starfield.

Maybe I just know what I want and have no time to be fucking around with new takes on game play. It is funny. I have 3 or 4 games I bought on sale from Steam that I have never played. Or played very little. I played Wild Hunt for like an hour and never played again. I didn't refund that one because I will get around to it, but I don't know when.

I need to get this out there because you guys and gals are honestly the only people I can vent this to.

I’m working on a program for fun that’ll transfer files over sockets. Nothing too special. But this project is just boring me. I’m not getting any motivation even when I’m getting started. Which didn’t happen last project.

I have a general idea how I’m going to do it but I just can’t sit down and do it because I start overthinking about everything. Like how am I going to do this or that. How am I going to handle feature a, feature b, etc. And I’m just getting a headache and I’m not writing code and I’m JUST FUCKING STARING LIKE AN IDIOT. I don’t even know why it’s not inspiring me because I’ve always wanted to program a file transferring application of some kind and I still do.

I keep doing a bunch of small patches when I work on it and they work and improve it but I am hard on myself because it’s not one big feature or I didn’t work on it for hours. I’m always so fucking hard on myself fuck.

I want to do so much other stuff but I just wanna tough it on through and finish but it’s so uninspired because I don’t even feel like what the final product will feel like others. Like any service that involves transferring files I feel like they don’t function like how I’m thinking they do like I’m trying to make this function.

I feel like everything I’m making is just subpar and not good and I’m trying and I’m trying to improve but I feel like I’m not getting anywhere. And I want to learn a lot of stuff I have shit planned but I can’t get to it because I have to go through uninspired bullshit hell.

Idk

If you're working on close to hardware things, make sure you run static analysis, and manually inspect the output of your compiler if you feel something's off - it may be doing something totally different from what you expect, because of optimization and what not. Also, optimizations don't always trigger as expected. Also, sometimes abstractions can cost a fair amount too (C++ std::string c/dtor, for example, dtors in general), more than you'd expect, and in those cases you might want to re-examine your need for them.

Having said all that, also know how to get the compiler to work for you, hand-optimization at the assembly level isn't usually ideal. I've often been surprised by just how well compilers figure out ways to speed up / compactify code, especially when given hints, and it's way better than having a blob of assembly that's totally unmaintainable.

Learnt this from programming MCUs and stuff for hobby/college team/venture, and from messing around with the Haskell compiler and LLVM optimization passes.

!dev

Sorry if this is a bad read, pretty new to devRant and writing in general.

I can't help but think and think of how much I fucked up my opportunities to completely change my life/financial status a couple of times. Damn.

A few years back (it was 2009, I think) I was playing Diablo II online, helped some random guy get through the hard levels. Normally, in such situation the lower lvl player allowed the higher level guy to grab the valuable boss loot; however this time the guy except sharing the loot with me asked me if I want his spare 2000 bitcoin. I asked if it's of any value, he said "not really".

I said I'd contact him later, when I figure out how this thing works and how to setup a wallet.

Guess what, I was too lazy and forgot about this thing completely. Then we lost contact.

In 2010, I made a comeback to bitcoin, but instead of buying it, I downloaded the bitcoin client, the blockchain (it was 800 mb in size, I remember) and have been contributing by running it on my PC for like a year.

Finally decided to get it ~3 years ago. Bought 2.5 BTC for 400$.

Was holding it, until I fell for the "free OmniseGO" scam and somebody stole them off me.

All of these can't get out of my head.
I visit coinmarketcap literally every hour to see how much I could have now. My girlfriend, friends, family, all fail to cheer me up. I still made a pretty good deal buying 5.5 ETH for 45$ and thats like 2500$ soon, its nice but this much I can make by coding

Shit, what do I do to stop being stressed except for seeing a psychologist.

May my failure make you smile today

Prequel to my previous post:

I received an offer from a startup that did not meet the originally advertised salary range. In every other aspect this place seemed like where I'd enjoy working the most and each previous interaction made a very good impression on me. So needless to say this was quite a shock.

They immediately apologised and explained the situation. They only now started to expand to and hire from my location (which can be verified) and I would be the very first person from this location (seems true too but I could only really verify this after joining). They explained the salary range I had seen was for their main hub location (accurate too) and said that the recruiter who posted the ad did not adjust it to mine. I asked why tf they didn't notify me of this earlier and they said they are super busy with everything, are new to location based salaries and normally don't check the recruiters posts as it should be her work.

Now, even if this is totally true, it was an awful sudden shock and felt a bit like a scam - totally contradicting my previous impressions.

Here are a couple of other points that I'll just sum to save time:
- before seeing the job ad I had a *reasonable* salary expectation even lower than their actual offering
- on the ad, the bottom end of their salary range far exceeded my reasonable exp.
- the relative level of my position would be even higher up the range that I have seen realised would be top 5%
- having had seen the ad, I started to have an *ideal* expectation being the bottom of the range
- in first interview I told them my exp. is the bottom end of their range +- a bit
- I told this to a dev guy who has no fucking idea about this stuff and I don't blame him but he noted this down to higher management
- generally I have not been very precise of my expectation as previously I only had lower class dev jobs, this would be the first decent.
- Hence I have seen an enormously high variation in salaries offered to me so this advertised range whilst high seemed possible

Now, with all this in mind I posted here a question about what some of you would do in my position.

I received the following group of responses:

- it's a scam, bad place, run
- it's an intentional (common) trick
- people make mistakes like this esp. startups so find out if this is intentional or not
- just decide if their current offering is reasonable for the position and location, ignore the rest
- just decide if the amount is enough
- location based salaries are retarded, don't work there (I kinda agree and also don't)
- if they can afford the higher pay in another place they should have no prob. meeting the range
- it's more important that you'd enjoy it there if the pay is sufficient for general needs
- company culture is generally more important these days
- fuck recruiters and hr people (amen to that btw)

Here is what I did:

Regardless of whether I believe them or not I hyperfocused on the potential scam/trick aspect.
I told them that every other interaction with them was positive and would love to join them but this was a really bad impression and feels like they are playing with me. I made up some bullshit previous examples of companies trying the same trick on me (which obv. never happened).

Then I said that I think to resolve this they should invite me to their main office for a day (all interviews had been online) and if after that they are still not ok to offer me at least the bottom of the adv. range then we can part ways. Otherwise this should ensure both of us that we are a good match, etc.

They seemed to love the idea and said that I should go there for x till y (3 days) and if we don't hate each other by the end I'll get the amount at the bottom of the range and they apologised again about it looking like a scam, etc.

So thanks a bunch again to those of you who provided valuable input.

(Ok, I love js in general (specially with es6), but here's something I hate about the "ecosystem". Dont take this too srsly also)

Holy fucking gagged shit, these project readmes that start out for too long about the project objective instead of stating the actual thing/s the software does.

WHAT DOES IT FUCKING DO!?
STOP BEING FUCKING FANCY ABOUT YOUR PROJECT.

Jesus christ, people jacking off about their awesome tool and how it will make everyone happy. No one cares.

"shitsmoke.js is a framework that focuses on delivering truly reliable data with static checking enabled on deployment."

WHAT THE SHIT DOES THAT MEAN?

Gimme a bullet point with the goddamn features (not the fucking BENEFITS) and I'm done.

These are like layers of marketing bullshit texts you have get through, getting more technical as you go on.

But sometimes they never do a technical summary, THEY GO STRAIGHT INTO THE GODDAMN API. And the API docs belong to a docs site, there is github.io and packages that take care of that.

You're like a goddamn linguistic detective, trying to disect the meaning of these words to understand if some package is what you're looking for.

And I don't wanna visit another website to understand what it does either!

Question time:
What's the general opinion around here on Authy for 2FA?

I've been down the road of phone wipes and phone swaps before that blow out the Google Auth codes which is nothing but a royal pain in the ass to get access back to all the accounts setup.

Authy having encrypted backups gives me some level of belief they can do what I want them to do, but I figured I would ask around before transferring over since... well that's a pain in the ass too 😂

So we started a new Unity video game project for mobile in June 2021. Hooray!

Being a mobile project, one of the earliest things we think about is scaling the interface across all sorts of device screen resolutions and aspect ratios, right? Well, to preemptively solve this problem early on, I decided to letterbox the game view - just choose one aspect ratio for the game and pad black bars to the sides of the screen. Simple, solves the game's world space problem without trying too hard, and it automatically adapts to Android's split-screen mode.

I showed the early builds to management as well as game design team and they gave me some general nods. Sounds like green light ahead. I spent the next few months building the game logic and scale the UI around a consistent letterboxed game view. If you had experience scaling Unity UI to a letterboxed area, you should already knew that it takes a whole paradigm of its own that's kinda hard to break out of, but the fact that it stays consistent across all screen aspect ratios is so worth it. Regardless, the biggeer benefit of letterboxing is simpler world space setup. You don't worry about whether this particular area will be overflowed horizontally or vertically in a particular device or not. You have a 9:16 window to view the world through, nothing needs to move at runtime and that's about it.

Fast-forward to early September 2021 and 40+ builds later, the GD started having concern that the playing area is not filling up his phone screen and that the letterboxes are bothering him. He wants to get rid of the letterboxes and wants the game world as well as UI to fill up his screen.

Yes. After 40+ builds, for all of which the letterbox was present, nobody in the project raised a concern about the letterbox. It's only NOW that they all of the sudden side with the GD and demand the removal of the letterbox. I feel like almost half of my effort on this game has been wasted. These clueless guys didn't spend one second looking at the early builds thinking of the possibility that the black bars at the top and bottom of their phone screens (which I repeat: has been around since the very first build) is gonna bother them? Somebody must be playing a cruel joke at this company. They had all the chances to bring this up as a potential issue and TODAY is the first time I hear of it.

See, designers. You waste our time and your time by doing this kind of thing. Please raise your issues early. Complain to us ASAP. If you wait for so long before raising an issue that has been in-your-face the whole time, I can't fault any developer for assuming you're trying to play a long prank. I can tell designers right now: it's not funny.

alright so I've been at my new job for 3 days now. I got a complain that I was talking too much or was just in general to noisy.

I'm sure alot of other developers do this but when I am programming I talk myself through steps. I understand that this is an office environment and I need to keep quiet. But what I don't like is that other full time employees are being hypocritical.

One other worker had a 40 minute conversation, that I'm sure the entire office could hear, about the card game bridges.
Another was full on yelling at a team of devs over the phone about how they should get the entire team to work on a bug that he had found.

I just don't get it.

Been looking for a new job for 2+ years and have failed at every opportunity. Numerous white board interviews, code challenges, hours upon hours wasted. Just can't seem to make the next move. I believe I have my soft skills down because I am able talk and do meetups just fine but either I'm too junior or something else is going on.

What started all of this was my latest rejection that I thought I had in the bag. Sailed through all their questions, did a live code thing, all of that being for 3+ hours. As it's called a final interview with them. Not to mention they're a startup, figured their standards might even be a bit lower than normal since they're needing people. Yet, still got rejected.

This sort of stuff, I'm seriously considering just leaving tech in general and probably just go do a outside job. With supposedly everything going for me like working in a hot job market, in a growing tech town, experience, and doing extra coding on my own time to beef up my portfolio. Doesn't matter. Still continious rejection. Lol in fact how I even got my current job was through completely unconventional means and based on that, I think it's done me more harm than good, which is why I'm trying to leave my current job and go into a place where I can be a better developer.

As of now, back to the grind of trying to find something.

When I hit the endpoint from Postman it works. When I hit the endpoint from my application that pushes data to the endpoint it doesn't work, returning a 404 status code. I KNOW the endpoint is there and operational and that both Postman and my application have the same endpoint configured, letter for letter.

So lost. So confused. What the hell is going on.

I decide to install Fiddler to monitor the traffic to see if I can see anything helpful.

I initiate the request again from the application and immediately see that the request size is huge. BAM. It immediately hits me, the payload to the endpoint is too big and the server is "rejecting" it with a 404. I post a smaller request with the application and it works fine.

Yay, saved by Fiddler.

Why does the endpoint default to 404 in such scenarios. The definition of 404: "the client was able to communicate with a given server, but the server could not find what was requested"

In my case, the 404 returned was a red herring. I understand that the substatus code gives more information on why the 404 was returned, in my case the request size being too big, but 404 in general feels like the wrong status code to return because the endpoint IS there. It made me troubleshoot the wrong thing.

Thanks, IIS.

Yet another day at my company, Im rewriting some old code for client (rewriting old, php 4 system for vindications managment) and you know the moment when you are focused and someone comes to you to absolutely ruin your focus. Fine, whatever. Oh, for fuck sake. Again dev is doing as support becouse one moron with second can't login into zimbra admin panel and add fucking mailbox. I show them exacly how they login, remind them they are admins too, slowly show them, so you click "manage" than you click that gear icon and than you click "new", fill in email address and password. As simple as 1-2-3. Okay, fuck it, time to go for a cig. I just finish up few lines and stand, grab my vape and start walking towards door. In door I find my buddy with 2 random people. He told me that they are interns and that I should show them some basics and stuff around that. Oh god, fuck my life. If anything, Im definitely very bad teacher, mainly becouse I often have problems with saying what I mean in the way that somebody actually understans and knows what I am trying to say. Whatever. Fuck it all. I grab two of our old laptops that nobody used in like a year or so, and first thing I quickly figure out, is that one day for some what the fuck reason I dont even dont bothered to remember I installed Arch on both while I dont usually use Arch. I just needed it for some specific reason. Whatever. So I guess I will need to upgrade fucking system. Our network isn't really great so that was like... hour or so. In the meantime I figured what they know about coding in general etc, and holly shit. One of them (there was boy and girl), girl, apparently never ever in her life even touched code. Well... fuck. Why am I wasting my time? Becouse there was some programme or some shit like that... Someone could tell me before so I could mentally prepare.. fuck it. whatever. So while laptops are doing their pacman thing, I sit with them and slowly start to explain based on my machine some really basic concepts. Second guy actually had some expirience, he knew how to make some really really basic logic and stuff, so he had another world of problems, becouse it was PHP and, as we all know, everyone hates PHP, and... yeah.. You can probably imagine his approach. Yes, you get user input in super global array. I really wanted to say "Now shut the fuck up and write that fucking $_POST".

hour or so passed, I was close to giving up to not let my anger rise (im not really good teacher... I mentioned it. I suck at teaching others) but luckly machines upgraded. He wanted to use visual studio code, she didnt care too much, so I installed phpstorm in trial mode. whatever. Since that's linux and they were not comfortable with that, I walked them through installing LAMP stack, and when finally it started to look like LAMP stack, I requested them to google how to install xdebug, becouse xdebug is very usefull and googling skill is your best weapon on that field. I go for cig, come back and what I see boiled me a little bit. The girl was stuck looking at github page randomly looking through xdebug source code and idk... hoping for miracle (she admited she thought there will be instructions somewhere) and the guy was in good place, xdebug has a place to paste your phpinfo() for custom instructions. But it didn't work for him, he claims that wizzard told him it cant help him.. hmm intresting, you are sure you pasted in phpinfo? yes, he is sure. Okay, show me.

Again mindblown how someone can have problems with reading.

so his phpinfo() looked like that:
```<?php
phpinfo();```

I highlighted on the page the words "output of phpinfo". He somehow didn't see it or something. He didnt know, he thought that he needs to put in phpinfo so he did. OMG.

Finally, I figured out I can workaround my intern problem, and I just briefly shown them php.net, how documentation looks, said to allways google in english, if he uses tutorial to read whole fucking thing, not just some parts of it, and left them with simple task, that took them whole day and at which they ultimately failed.

To make 3 buttons labeled "1" "2" "3" and if someone presses one of them, remember in session that they pressed it and disallow pressing other ones.

Never fucking again interns. Especially those who randomly without apparent reason almost literally just spawn in front of you and here, its your fucking problem now.

Fuck it, I have some time to get back to my stuff. Time is running so lets not waste it.

After around 15 minutes my one of my superiors comes in and asks me if I can go on meeting with him and other superior. My buddy goes with us, and next 3 hours I was basically explaining that you cannot do some things (ie. know XYZ happened without any source of information) in code, and I can't listen for callbacks from ABC becouse it wont send anyc cuz in their fucking brilliant idea ABC can't even know that this script would even exist, not to mention it wants callbacks.

Sometimes I hate my job.

I need some opinions on Rx and MVVM. Its being done in iOS, but I think its fairly general programming question.

The small team I joined is using Rx (I've never used it before) and I'm trying to learn and catch up to them. Looking at the code, I think there are thousands of lines of over-engineered code that could be done so much simpler. From a non Rx point of view, I think we are following some bad practises, from an Rx point of view the guys are saying this is what Rx needs to be. I'm trying to discuss this with them, but they are shooting me down saying I just don't know enough about Rx. Maybe thats true, maybe I just don't get it, but they aren't exactly explaining it, just telling me i'm wrong and they are right. I need another set of eyes on this to see if it is just me.

One of the main points is that there are many places where network errors shouldn't complete the observable (i.e. can't call onError), I understand this concept. I read a response from the RxSwift maintainers that said the way to handle this was to wrap your response type in a class with a generic type (e.g. Result<T>) that contained a property to denote a success or error and maybe an error message. This way errors (such as incorrect password) won't cause it to complete, everything goes through onNext and users can retry / go again, makes sense.

The guys are saying that this breaks Rx principals and MVVM. Instead we need separate observables for every type of response. So we have viewModels that contain:

- isSuccessObservable
- isErrorObservable
- isLoadingObservable
- isRefreshingObservable
- etc. (some have close to 10 different observables)

To me this is overkill to have so many streams all frequently only ever delivering 1 or none messages. I would have aimed for 1 observable, that returns an object holding properties for each of these things, and sending several messages. Is that not what streams are suppose to do? Then the local code can use filters as part of the subscriptions. The major benefit of having 1 is that it becomes easier to make it generic and abstract away, which brings us to point 2.

Currently, due to each viewModel having different numbers of observables and methods of different names (but effectively doing the same thing) the guys create a new custom protocol (equivalent of a java interface) for each viewModel with its N observables. The viewModel creates local variables of PublishSubject, BehavorSubject, Driver etc. Then it implements the procotol / interface and casts all the local's back as observables. e.g.

protocol CarViewModelType {
isSuccessObservable: Observable<Car>
isErrorObservable: Observable<String>
isLoadingObservable: Observable<Void>
}

class CarViewModel {
isSuccessSubject: PublishSubject<Car>
isErrorSubject: PublishSubject<String>
isLoadingSubject: PublishSubject<Void>

// other stuff
}

extension CarViewModel: CarViewModelType {
isSuccessObservable {
return isSuccessSubject.asObservable()
}
isErrorObservable {
return isSuccessSubject.asObservable()
}
isLoadingObservable {
return isSuccessSubject.asObservable()
}
}

This has to be created by hand, for every viewModel, of which there is one for every screen and there is 40+ screens. This same structure is copy / pasted into every viewModel. As mentioned above I would like to make this all generic. Have a generic protocol for all viewModels to define 1 Observable, 1 local variable of generic type and handle the cast back automatically. The method to trigger all the business logic could also have its name standardised ("load", "fetch", "processData" etc.). Maybe we could also figure out a few other bits too. This would remove a lot of code, as well as making the code more readable (less messy), and make unit testing much easier. While it could never do everything automatically we could test the basic responses of each viewModel and have at least some testing done by default and not have everything be very boilerplate-y and copy / paste nature.

The guys think that subscribing to isSuccess and / or isError is perfect Rx + MVVM. But for some reason subscribing to status.filter(success) or status.filter(!success) is a sin of unimaginable proportions. Also the idea of multiple buttons and events all "reacting" to the same method named e.g. "load", is bad Rx (why if they all need to do the same thing?)

My thoughts on this are:

- To me its indentical in meaning and architecture, one way is just significantly less code.
- Lets say I agree its not textbook, is it not worth bending the rules to reduce code.
- We are already breaking the rules of MVVM to introduce coordinators (which I hate, as they are adding even more unnecessary code), so why is breaking it to reduce code such a no no.

Any thoughts on the above? Am I way off the mark or is this classic Rx?

Too many to name. In general though any meeting that could have been a short email and meetings about planning future meeting.

I can't come to terms with people's terrible reasonings.

You read a news about something. Let's assume it has to do with a sensitive topic, like race, gender, culture, religion, something polarizing, that makes you pick 1 of 2 sides.

So what do some people do? They ask themselves "ok what group do I adhere? How do I label myself?".

Then they ask "what do other people in said group/label think about the matter?", sometimes it's people in the media, friends,

sometimes people even create a mental construct of a stereotypical person of said group, a hypothetical one, and use the opinion of said construct as representative.

And final step is a knee jerk reaction of "I believe that too!!!!!!".

Obviously, all of this can't bring no one closer to the theorical truth or the least flawed conclusion.

What does? Case by case basis.

You judge every case as if every case was its own thing.

But why does some people have a hard time doing that? Just general ignorance maybe?

Maybe this tends to occur in families where parents don't teach their kids to challenge their beliefs, or teach them that doing so could result in lack of parental acceptance.

People also have peer pressure, the need to belong and feel accepted. That means sharing the same points of view with close people and considering the opposite taboo.

There's also the very ignorant people that have conspiracies for lunch.

In any case, I feel some people don't even fucking try to be neutral.

part of my workflow i want to improve?

in general, take more time to get to know better the technologies and tools i'm working with.
e.g. learn all the fancy hacks and features of my IDE or of a certain language or framework.

i tend to be in the mode "i don't have time for that, it already works the way i use it". if i spend "too much" time on learning stuff, i feel bad, since i could also spend that time working on my ever growing list of tasks. but i think, that's not a good habit...

I hate to offer some unsolicited critique of something I happily use for free... but I have to say this somewhere to just get it out. That's what this place is for, right?

The new MDN visual design fucking sucks.

It's like a purposeful example I might make for my students - of "what not to do." There were a few things they could have done to improve MDN for sure. Instead, they didn't improve it. They just "changed it." That is always a bad move. Now everything just has less contrast and is floating around with nothing to anchor it. Didn't they show it to anyone and get feedback along the way? "So, we made all the fonts closer to the same size, removed any differentiation in weight so that everything will look the same and just kinda blur out and put people to sleep, and just in general dulled everything out as much as possible - and also here's this logo thing too."

!rant

You knoe, my first insights into computer programming came out of spite. I thought windows to be garbage and wanted to blame someone other than myself for my machine constantly crashing. Thus I discovered programming and down the rabbit hole. But my interest in computer science came from videogames. Portal in particular. I found the idea of GlaDOS fascinating and thought that artificial intelligence would be something interesting to research. The web then gave me Lisp, and boy was the language different from all the other languages I went through. I remember feeling super excited when Racket, Common Lisp and eventually Clojure would help me discover many different ideas. Every time I work with reduce or maps or stuff like that in other languages I always thank languages such as Clojure for having me descipher different ways of manipulating data to get a result. To this day I feel sad whenever I find that my languages do not have the same constructs that Clojure has. I mention Clojure because it is my favorite flavor of Lisp. But one thing that always remains grest to me is firing up Emacs and plugin my code to Slime or Cider and see the repl pop up waiting for something to happen. This feeling is beautiful.

Please guys, if you have not tried it, do so! You might hate it at first or push it aside. But trust me, once you get it it will really change the way you think about programming in general. Try the great Clojure for the Brave and true, and go through the third chapter succesfully. If you do not like Lisp by them then no harm done! You would at least know that there are other options.

Now, here are some cool things:
For the standard implementation, try Common Lisp

For a more modern Scheme, try Racket or Guile

For targetting the JVM try Clojure (more akin to Common Lisp) or Kawa (scheme like)

For the python AST get Hy (pun totally intended)

For JS try Clojurescript

For emacs scripting try Emacs Lisp (has way too many disasdvantages but still relatively close to common lisp)

Honorific mention to more pure functional programming languages for Haskell, F#, Ocaml.

Also worth mentioning that Js , Ruby and Python have great functional constructs.

(println "you will not regret it!")

Some lofi music

discord and related software closed or in some do not disturb mode

And a general idea on what I need to do when I start

Good sleep helps too

One responsibility of our team is general code QA for the entire dev department, DevMgr walks in our area yesterday…
DevMgr: “Has anyone reviewed the new WPF threaded model execution code?”
- everyone on the team responds “no”
DevMgr: “Can we get a review on that code ASAP? If it works as well as the developer said, it’s going to solve the lock up problems users are experiencing and automatic logging of errors.”
DevA: “Well, no amount of code is going to stop users from performing bad searches locking up the user-interface. That code is just a band-aid around the real problem. If the developers would write unit tests first …”
- rant about 5 minutes on unit testing that had nothing to do with why the DevMgr was here
DevB: “Yea, the code probably isn’t written to handle threads correctly. All the threading they’ve done so far is –bleep-”
DevMgr: “Oh, I wasn’t aware of that. Get me the results of the code review and if they don’t have unit tests, delete it from source control and let the developer know it’s not up to our standards.”
OMFG!! You have not even seen the code!
OK, DevA ..what the –bleep- does unit testing have anything to do with the user interface! You know the DevMgr is too dim to understand the separation of concerns. Shut your pompous ‘know-it-all’ mouth.
DevB…what the –bleep- have ever done in WPF? You manage the source control and haven’t written any C# in two years and never, ever written code for any significant project. Take that “handle threads correctly” and shove it up your –bleep-. Pompous –bleep-hole. Go back and watch youtube and read your twitter while the grown-ups get the work done.

!rant

So I have bought a new laptop and this time instead of straight up booting linux I had an idea of giving micro$oft a try, so I have decided to use only their services for 2 weeks.

To be honest, I really did not expect windows to use do much cpu and hdd during updates and background tasks, but after a day it was ok and windows feels snappier than during my last encounrer (maybe cause the new hw?).

I was even so dedicated that I started to use cortana and I have to tell, that she is dumb as fuck, since she fails to understand even the basic tasks and if u want something advanced, she refers to the next update. But boy, tell her to open Visual Studio and she asks if you want VS Code or Visual Studio, which seems great. But my response was 'Code' then she insisted that I said Coke. Im like OK, Im not native english speaker, lets try Visual Studio Code, where she told me that there is no such thing and Spelling VS - Code ended me in bing search for Unesco :/

I really want to like Cortana, she has nice name, nice history, but she is like that A girl from class, who looks gorgeous, has great voice, but then u reallise that she just eats a book before exam and after that she is that dumb basic hoe.

I also gave a shot to Bing and Edge. Bing is something between Google and DuckDuckGo, since it gives you a liiitle less results from search history, yet if you want to find something in different language its even possible to tell you that what are you trying to find does not exist.

But I have to tell, that I like Edge and I mean it. Like... Its fast and has some good features, like pushing all your open tavs away, so you can open them Later. It also does not have that stupid ass feature that lets you control tab from left to right, not by chronological order, so you wont end up in infinity loop of 2 tabs. And even if people make fun of M$ trying to convince you to use Edge by being too aggresive. God go on edge and try to use some Google Service(You still dont use chrome?!).

I also tried to play with .Net core and I have to tell that against java they are a bit further. I liked some small features, but what I just simply loved was rhe fucking documentation. You basically dont need google, sincw they give you examples and explain in a human way.

What I didnt quite get was the 'big' Visual Studio. Tje dark theme to me feels strange(personal and irrelevant). Why the hell I do need to press 2 shortcuts to duplicate line?! Why is it so hard to find a plugin to give me back my coloured brackets and why the fuck it takes like a second to Cut one line of code on a damn i7?!

Visual studio Code was something different. It shows how dark theme should be done, the plugin market is full of stuff and the damn shortcuts are not made for octopi. So I have to recommend it ^^.

I even gave a shot to word and office as a whole and fuck I never knew that there are so many templates. It really made my life easier, since all you need to do is find the right one in the app, instead of browsing templates online, where half of them are for another version of your text editor.

Android Launcher was fast, had a clever widget of notes and the sync was pretty handy to be honest so I liked that one as well.

What made me furious was using the CLI. Godfucking damn what the fuck is ipconfig?! :/

Last thing what made me superbhappy was using stuff without wine and all of the addional shit. Especially using stuff like Afinity Designer and having good looking apps in general. I mean Open source has great tools l sometimes with better functionality. But I found out, that what is pleasure to look at, is pleasure to work with.

To Summarize a bit.

It wasnt that bad as I expected. I see where they are heading with building yet another ecosystem of It just works and that they are aiming at professionals once again.

So I would rate it 6/10, would be 7 if that shit was Posix compatible.

I know that for Balmer is a special place in hell... But with that new CEO, Microsoft at the end may make it to purgatory..

GM sucks. (General Motors)
There HR sucks, can't call on booked time, for phone screening and wanted me after I applied for job 4 months ago. I still entertained them. But now, it has gone too far.
I am blacklisting GM for life. I will never ever work for them, unless they give me 1 Million per month

Alright, fellow coders, I need your help this time <3

I was thinking about getting a full stack developer position after school, with mean/mern stack. (Yes, I love js, but you can hate me for that later)
So, I just got an offer for a front-end developer position that I didn't apply to but was recommended for by my full stack prof.
Everything is great about that company, but! I'm not sure I'm good for that!
My question is: does being a front-end developer mean being good at putting together nice looking website?
I'm good with angular, but suck at material or just CSS in general.
I can implement business logic, but anything more complex than grids causes my eye to twitch.
So, is front-end developer supposed to be good at design part of it or not?
Google says yes, but I got other opinions from my friends, but they are still students too!
All hope on you guys! Thank you

I have a rant. A genuine rant, not a funny story, etc.

I want a keyboard. I need one. It can cost €500, as long as it won't break in a year and fulfils all my needs. Make it a €1000, I don't care. What are my needs then? Well...

It has to be a split keyboard - two halves. But wireless in every aspect, ergonomic, with multimedia keys on its outer edges (preferably pointing outwards, not up) and a heavy metal trackball on the right outer edge (preferably upper right corner). That's a bare minimum.

On top of that it probably some magnetic scrolls for things like navigating pages, changing volume and fidgeting in general wouldn't hurt. Also I'd prefer it to snap back into a one-piece whenever I need it to lie on my knees, e.g. when I type while sitting on a coach (I have a coach PC setup, no desk, and there's a reason). Why do I need it to split then...?

I had an accident. Kind of broke my back when I was 11. It's mostly okay now after couple years of rehabilitation and many more years of careful living. Luckily the only two wheels I ride on are powered by a 105.97 hp @ 9,970 rpm engine. Still, I try to be careful so I tried tons of work hygiene techniques over the years and I found out anything over 2 hours is best done while lying flat.

Coding while lying flat has its challenges, mostly focused around screen and input. Ever since I got a VR headset half of them got solved but the other half - acquiring a suitable keyboard - it's very hard to satisfy. I tried that with a one-piece keyboard lying on my stomach. Turns out actively bending elbows quickly wears them out (hello tennis players). So a split keyboard it has to be. So far I tried 4 different ones and I had to modify the cable connecting both halves in each and every one of them so that it'd be long enough to go behind my back. The main cable itself I only had to modify once because usually there're extensions available.

Apart from cables, all of those keyboards had issues. Starting from some kind of de-syncing when keys from both halves would randomly register in a wrong order - I didn't know it's possible with a cable connected halves... I did try two generic WiFi keyboards (using one for each hand) and they unfortunately suffered from that very same issue but I was sure it wouldn't happen if the device was designed to be a one unit from the very beginning, right? And yet it in 2 of the tested devices.

Other than that, plugs disconnecting on their own forcing me to take off the headset and fiddle around, too high key travel that'd strain the wrists after a few hours, even the noise that would wake up my girlfriend sleeping in a separate room were all a common issue (I briefly had an almost completely silent WiFi mechanical keyboard from Logitech we both really liked, but it was a one-piece). Once I got a split keyboard that was "natively" WiFi but not only the two halves were still connected with a cable that turned out to be way too short for my needs, it also had a very noticeable lag despite the high price - a lag way higher than any of the cheap WiFi keyboards I owned in the past. So I sent it back. Now IDK what to do because AFAICT there are no more models available, at least where I live.

So yeah, I need a keyboard and I'll probably have to make one myself. Sorry, just had to vent.

WTF?

TL;DR Integration between software failed so hard I lost 20% of my progress in one hit. Yay! /s

I, being a Fool, signed up to do NaNoWriMo this year (50k words in 30 days of November). I've won it before, and failed it before, and this year was especially stupid as I've got a bigger pile on my plate than usual, what with getting as quickly up to speed on c# and React as I can in prep for starting the new job in December.

I started on a high - 4k on day one, woohoo! To my delight, my writing software Scrivener now had an integration feature to let you update your total word count straight to your account instead of manually entering it. I added my credentials, hit the button, refreshed the page, all updated. So far so good.

Then, on day two, I wrote 1700-ish words. Still good, well ahead of target, took me over 5k. Updated through Scrivener, checked it updated the site, still good.

Then, yesterday, I logged in and added a tiny tiny number of words (brain went blah), and was horrified to discover it had taken 1900 words off my count!

Cue panic as I frantically searched for the missing words, trying to find any evidence of where they'd gone. Gave up after half an hour of futility, bashed out enough to squeak back over 5k, confirmed it had updated.

I'm not unfamiliar with the general stupidity most organisations have on integration - they don't have it, or it's an afterthought, or it's just plain terrible - but this was a ridiculously simple thing to do, I'd have thought? Passing one fucking number and some date/time tracking?

This is what I get for trying to do too many things at once, I guess!

A bit late.. and not much about how to learn to code..but more of a figuring out if the kid has a right mind set to do so..

If the kid is not the type to question everything, not resourceful, not a logical/critical thinker, gives up easily and especially if not interested in how things work then being a dev is most probably not for them.. they can still persue coding, but it will end badly..

From my experience, people who have a better education than me, but lack those skills turned out to be a crappy dev.. not interested in the best tool to complete the tasks, just making 'something', adding more shit to the already shitty stack.. and being happy with that.. which of course is not the best way to do things around here..or in life!!

Soo.. if the kid shows all that and most importantly shows interest in learning to code.. throw him the java ultimate edition book and see what happens.. joke!

There are plenty of apps thath can get you started (tried mimo, but being devs yourself it's probably not so hard to check some out and weed out the bad ones) that explain simple logic and syntax.. there is w3schools that explains basics quite well and lets you tinker online with js and python..
so maybe show them these and see what happens.. If it will pick their interest, they will soon start to ask the right questions.. and you can go from there..

If the kids are not the 'evil spawns' of already dev parents or don't have crazy dev aunties and uncles, then they will have to work things out themselves or ask friends... or seek help online (the resourceful part comes here).. so google or any flavour of search engines is their friend..

Just hope they don't venture to stack overflow too soon or they will want to kill themselves /* a little joke, but also a bit true.. */

Anyhow, if the kid is exhibiting 'dev traits' it is not even a question how to introduce it to the coding.. they will find a way.. if not, do not force them to learn coding "because it's in and makes you a lot of moneyz"..
As with other things in life, do not force kids to do anything that you think will be best for them.. Point them in direction, show them how it might be fun and usefull, a little nudge in the right direction.. but do not force.. ever!!!

And also another thing to consider.. most of the documentation and code is written in english.. If they are not proficient, they will have a hard time learning, checking docs, finding answers.. so make sure they learn english first!!
Not just for coding, knowing english will help them in life in general. So maaaaybe force them to learn this a bit..

One day my husband came to me and asked me how he can learn.. and if it's too late for him to learn coding.. that he found some app and if I can take a look and tell him what I think, if it is an ok app to learn..
I was both flattered and stumped at the same time..
Explained to him that in my view, he is a bit old to start now, at least to be competitive on the market and to do this for a living, but if it interests him for som personal projects, why not.. you're never too old to start learning and finding a new hobby..

Anyhow, I've pointed out to him that he will have to better his english in order to be able to find the answers to questions and potential problems.. and that I'm happy to help where and when I can, but most of the job will be on him.

So yeah, showed him some tutorials, explained things a bit.. he soon lost interest after a week and was mindblown how I can do this every day..

And I think this is really how you should introduce coding to kids.. show them some easy tutorials, explain simple logic to them.. see how they react.. if they pick it up easily, show them something more advanced.. if they lose interest, let them be.

To sum up:
- check first if they really want to learn this or this is something they're forced to do (if latter everything you say is a waste of everybodys time)
- english is important
- asking questions (& questioning the code) is mandatory so don't be afraid to ask for help
- admitting not knowing something is the first step to learning
- learn to 'google' & weed out the crap
- documentation is your friend
- comments & docs sometimes lie, so use the force (go check the source)
- once you learn the basics its just a matter of language flavour..adjust some logic here, some sintax there..
- if you're stuck with a problem, try to see it from a different angle
- debugging is part of coder life, learn to 'love' it

I just came home from opening of the fiscal year of a small drivers' club and it was quite an amazing life experience.

I got about a 5-times "rise" for a first, small, post-due-time project.

All of the members were so relaxed in one of the most serious moments of an association. We ate, drank beer and had as much fun as possible without break the law and other rules.

The story goes like this:

I was an intern in a website development company as students tend to do. In middle of the internship my teacher asked me if I'd be willing to develop a website to the before mentioned organization.
School will help with the money by being as a middle-man. It wasn't going to pay much, about 120€ or so, it's nothing really for the job, but I said yes for the experience. We organized a meeting, school provided the space, and went straight to the business.

The development went quite well: I got the final design requirements late (there weren't too much), research a lot about CMS:s, ended up with a beta version CMS (a risk), learned it, developed some plugins (not published yet), kept copyrights for most of the work and so on.

I was done _relatively_ quickly with the project and was quite happy with it. Only things still pressing my mind was bugs of the beta CMS, support for the plugins and my somewhat inexperienced graphical design.

Then it hit me, the world. Hosting, domain transfer, certificates, registry agreements. Arrgh. Most of things were fine, I know them. I had luck that I had a technical contact for the club. It would have been a nightmare of it's own otherwise.

We had problems transferring the domain, again, as you do. The other hosting company was to blame. They were the n00bs here. I went trough the law, technical guidance, etc. I was having heavy messaging with my technical contact about it, who was a middle-man for me and the hosting firms.
After a long while loop of waiting, reconfiguring, researching and messaging, until he transfer was finally over.

We had a long while of radio silence after some bug fixes. Until the Christmas came and I was invited to a Christmas party in a cottage, third Christmas party that year. It was great fun. We ate, drank, talked, went to sauna and had a playful adult stiga or sledging competition, etc.
I updated the site yet again, a stable version of the CMS were published. Yess!

Another radio silence came and year changed. It was broken off by a call to the opening of the fiscal year, the same day. This is today, or yesterday by now. This was just after my current company's board game night. I was really busy that day. A whole afternoon of second-hand shopping around the city with a bike. I counted 35 kilometers. Yes I go by bike, don't own a car or have an driving license... Yet.

I wasn't horribly late, around 30 minutes. I started eating and drinking. Free food and beer! They was also late, they should've got trough the business before I got there, before eating. So I ate and listened. Learned more about having business or an association in general. Until my matter came to be heard. They thanked me of the co-operation and made public the change of my reward sum, I WAS GRANTED 500€ REWARD for the work. It's still not an amazing sum in a larger point of view, but I can imagine that it's big deal for a small non-profit organization, which was loosing money. Everybody applauded, every 25 members of the club. I was greatly pleased. I will have to update their site a bit still, but they are going to pay the reward ASAP.

Did I mention that the school works around the taxes, legally. Taxes for the reward, if it were assumed as a wage would be 15%, for me, at the worst case scenario, only for getting the money to my hands.

I was offered another gig at the event, but didn't promise anything yet. I left before sauna, so we didn't get to change contact details. He will find a way to reach me if he really wants so. I'm a busy free man.

If there's something I fucking hate with all my goddamned soul is when you post something online and people get in their fucking high horse and judge you or tell you what to do

Like I understand if you're talking shit about people in the same community, then if someone tells you you're an idiot, I get it.

But if you're ranting about someone off site, then why judge this person? What's the damage being caused to you or the site?

For example, let's say I rant about my wife and the things that annoy me about her, and I use some colorful language to get it off my chest.

There's always one motherfucker, one stupid piece of shit that says something out of line.

In general it's one of these things:

* "wow, you need to calm down, you clearly treat her like shit, she is better than you*

YOU IGNORANT PIECE OF DOGSHIT. DO YOU HAVE CAMERAS IN MY HOUSE AS TO ASSUME THAT I TALK TO HER IN THE SAME MANNER AS I DID IN THIS POST?

YOU GULLIBLE SHIT EATER.

OF FUCKING COURSE I DON'T TALK TO HER LIKE THIS. I'M NOT AN ASSHOLE OR A MONSTER. I AM JUST R-A-N-T-I-N-G.

AND I RANT IN THIS MANNER SO AS TO GET IT OFF MY CHEST AND NOT FIGHT WITH HER. AND IT TENDS TO WORK. DOES IT REALLY NEED TO BE EXPLAINED?

Jaysus fucking christ. These people actually have the imagination of a fish, they can't fucking connect the dots.

Judging someone online is an egotistical thing. People like to judge others because of that morality high. It's the snack of the morally lazy.

Repeat with me: "I am flawed too, I have problems too. I should never judge others easily, let alone without full fucking context".

* "op, you should do <terrible advice>"

these ones are better, because they are trying to help, but still annoying as fuck.

they come in two forms:
old smug and condescending washed up idiots who overrate their life lessons and think they are applicable to every person A PRIORI.

yeah, fuck case by case analysis, these dinosaurs think they're the wise elders of the village.

Age does not immediately mean your advices are valid, your advices are valid on the sole merit of being valid by themselves.

I don't give 2 fucks if you're 60 or 120. If your advices are bullshit, please spare me the idiocy and the lack of case analysis.

I had old people tell me "trust me kid, happy wife, happy life" wtf is that shit? MY WIFE IS NOT YOUR WIFE.

YOU DON'T KNOW MY WIFE. MY WIFE IS ACTUALLY COOL, BUT SHE COULD BE AN ACTUAL PSYCHO AND I COULD BE OMITTING THAT FROM MY POST.

THEREFORE, HAPPY WIFE HAPPY LIFE IS A TERRIBLE THING TO SAY.

JUST STFU.

This reminds of that disgusting reddit post where a father asked advice on /r/relationships about her wife, and people told him "dude, duh, divorce her".

Guess what, she ends up murdering both of her children.

You would think such post would serve a lesson as to be careful giving advice online. But no, people think they're fucking dr phil or something with EXTREMELY LITTLE case knowledge.

People need to talk a bit less and listen a whole lot more.

You want to know how to help a person who is expressing problems?
You want to know how to be REALLY conpassionate?

Just listen. You can give minimal advice, but listening is the most important, with some occasional "i feel you man".

Everytime a journalist asks a suicide disuader what do they do, they always say the same " i just listen to their problems".

ITS NOT FUCKING ROCKET SCIENCE FOLKS. YOU WANT TO KNOW HOW TO BE A GOOD PERSON? CLOSE THE MOUTH AND TAKE THE WAX OUTTA YA EARS.

There's also the younger ones who think they can help when they don't even have no experience at all.

This is being naive, but I Iike that more than the smugness of old people.

I feel like some developers focus too much on concepts like clean code, software craftsmanship, TDD and so forth, to a point where they almost forget end user needs (ease of use, intuitive experiences, general UX principles).
Don’t get me wrong. I do my best to stick to a decent standard of quality and maintainability. However my solutions are adapted to the specific needs that are being addressed rather than the other way around.
I’ve heard some devs say things to the effect of ”well I know that’s not most intuitive behavior for the user but it’s the cleaner way to do it, so the user will just have to figure it out“. So in essence they’re just coding for their own pleasure rather than addressing user needs

Back home from vacations tomorrow.
It wasn't the best time I had but the thought of returning to daily life is already giving me a stomach ache.

Gotta take care of my little pug too, my anxiety about his partial eye keratosis isn't doing great too. Since the caretakers don't apply eye medication regularly.

There's this fear of my productivity before uni begins, I really don't want my vacation to end with me returning without completing my application.

I've still got a lot to do, anyone want to partner up with me ? I've still got load balancing and failover mechanisms which I have no real-time experience with (excluding api related stuff). I've got a general idea to use nginx.

Okay c/c++ megaminds, I have a question about how something is generally designed that I feel like is too broad for SO or to be effectively Googled (though my Google-Jitsu may just be a tad weak, idk)

Lets say I have, for example, a simple graphical interface system where each widget/ control may have child controls. We could store it as a simple list/ array/ vector/ whatever - say Widget.children

Now these children could be added with a function like addChild(Widget*). This function would accept widgets allocated both on the stack and on the heap... but only widgets allocated on the heap would need to be freed.

My question is: on the destructor of the parent widget, how would it free all of its child widgets, if some are on the stack and some are on the heap and we don't know which is which...

And my broader question is what's the general design for this sort of thing? Should all items just be heap allocated always? Should it never be the responsibility of the parent widget to free the child widgets?

Recruiter reached out on a certain other social network where people seem to be humbled a lot.

First interview (a day later) goes well

Second interview (a week later) also goes well. They tell me there's one more technical interview, but that shouldn't be a problem.

A week later, that interview is a breeze too. Interviewer said they'll prepare the paperwork.

Another week goes by without communication, so I ping them.

A week after that they send me an email saying that they need references they can talk to. A co-worker and a direct manager.
Uncommon in my part of the world in general. But coming up with that idea this late in the process? Really? But ok, I provide those in like an hour.

They take their time, but eventually call the co-worker. Another week after that, they still haven't called the manager, so I ping them again.

Silence for another couple of days, then a very sad email about how the general situation has changed and they've now stopped hiring indefinitely

I just started a new job last week. Old-school sysadmin role for a pretty old-school company, but the pay is nice and the kids've gotta eat.

They gave me a windows laptop. I haven't used windows for work or as a daily driver since 2016, and now, a week into trying to make this machine work for me, I have the following observations to report.

WSL is nice. It's nice to have it installed(though actually installing it was an adventure unto itself), and to set alacritty to open my default user prompt straight into that is very nice. As terminal emulators are by far my most used piece of software, that's nice to have.

Command-line software management through powershell, winget, and chocolatey are also very nice.

I like the accessibility offered by autohotkey, though there is something of a learning curve on it. Once I get better with it, I suspect that what follows will be largely mitigated.

The Bad:
In general, Windows is janky. It feels like it's all kinda taped together without any particular cohesion in mind. As a desktop, it feels decidedly amateur, compared to the feature-mountain polish of MacOS, and especially compared to the flexibility and infinite possibilities of Linux.

Lots of screen real estate is wasted, with window decorations, and fonts that look terrible at smaller sizes, because the antialiasing of fonts is just terrible. Almost all the features I depend on in other desktops: ad-hoc searches and launches(alfred, rofi) are-- again --janky. They work, but they typically require more typing than alfred or rofi. I admit I haven't spent weeks on this problem yet, but I haven't found a workable solution yet with wox, hain, and keypirinha. Quick searches like what you get with alfred, alfred workflows, and the swiss army knife that is rofi, just aren't possible or reliable with the tools I've used so far, and most require some kind of indexing agent to fully function.

It beggars imagination that a desktop in which users are subjected to "default apps" that is purported to be acceptable for enterprise, professional use, does not have a default entry for text editor. I installed nvim-qt, and I want to use it to edit anything and everything I ever edit with text, but all too often, apps have hard-coded instructions to open text files with notepad.

I want to open certain URLs with firefox, certain ones with firefox developer edition, and others with vivaldi, and yet there is not an app available that I have seen yet in my searches that allows me to set this kind of configuration. I found one that's supposed to, but it just ignores everything I put into its config, and just opens MS Edge for everything. Jank.

Simple things take too long. Like the delay between when I laboriously hit ctrl-alt-del to bring up the login and when the actual text field appears, and the delay between that and when I want to start using the computer.

Changing some settings requires a reboot. Updating some software requires a reboot. Updating permissions on something sometimes requires a reboot. And those are all on top of the frequent requests to reboot for updates.

I would have thought Windows would have overcome most of the issues that create these problems, but it's just, as I said, amateur.

So I get this email from google for my development account about these new general data protection regulations and what they're doing with admob and all that good stuff.

I didn't dive too deep and there's nothing crazy in it but it definitely feels like it's spawned on by this "selling you data to advertisers thing."

We live in such a weird society where it's like outrage after outrage. I've never known anybody who has NOT known that their statistics and data was sold to third party for marketing for EVERYTHING they do on the computer or phone. For a DECADE or longer. It always seemed to be such a second hand thought but now out of nowhere everyone has their panties in a wad for something they ALREADY knew.

Are we like that miserable/bored/no hobbies/unsatisfied with our first world life that we have to just flip out about dumb crap all the time?

I'm so confused by our architecture and development process in general

We planned what features are to be implemented (e.g. what endpoints should do what), but there are parts of tasks which depend on others, and I'm not sure what classes to build or when to start a task given that related ones are being done by other developers, I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing

I could maybe do all of this alone my way if it was just me, but when I ask in planning about how we should go about implementing shit together, I just get backlash from this senior developer telling me we shouldn't waste time discussing implementation details in planning

Like, what the fuck do you want me to fucking do, just implement all the dependencies of what I'm doing from zero, without reusing any of the code other devs are doing that touches on the same parts?

Fucking hell, man, this is the third sprint where I'm confused like this

Maybe I'm just too dumb to be a developer after all lol

Had virus cause growth thing on my uvula. Dentist saw it got bigger. So we got another doctor to remove it. He suggested we just take the whole uvula out. He said, "You won't miss it." He had it done as well. They want to biopsy to make sure I don't have "the cancer". Not too worried. Been taking things to prevent that. Mostly good general health foods. Good vitamins and anti-oxidants.

So it took like a month to actually line up the time to do it. I was thinking this would take a while. It took somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes to burn it off. They used a cauterizer thing to cut it off. The whole time I couldn't breath out my nose because my mouth was wide open. I was breathing out seared flesh smoke during this time out of my mouth. Burnt me doesn't taste all that good.

I didn't gag nor puke. The doctor said he was good at dodging just in case. I have a feeling he would be fun to have drinks with.

So he said my uvula was large at the base. So it would take more than a week to heal. He gave me script for meds. I appreciate that because it kinda hurts. It feels like there is that large burn at the back of my throat. Because, there is a large burn at the back of my throat. I told them I came to the doctors office and lost weight. Got the nurse to snort.

I hope this turns out like getting my teeth pulled. Needed meds for right after and not again later. We shall see. It feels like a really bad sore throat. It kinda IS a really bad sore throat. Go figure.

There are some who view software as a social construct (like Pieter Hientjes), and I think it's a valuable perspective. So if we know about the intrinsic brokenness of software, can we deduce sth about the brokenness of human interactions? Did social API's evolve to similar clusterfucks of dead entropy we have to shovel in our brains to get along?

I think the answer is an emphatic yes. And you know what's even making it worse? Software. Y'know there are all these whining about the millenials, and I too have had my experiences with stuff of that category. Like back when we searched a new roommate for our flat, we needed three rounds because people who had said yes suddenly reconsidered. Similarly now when we tried to sell our couch: people tried to push the price. Said they were interested, never showed up at the appointed time. It's like they have been spoiled by Amazon: expecting to buy with one click, for the cheapest price and send back if they don't like. And that is not a generation thing. Those old blokes ranting on the young are just as bad. They are just as lost in antisocial media as anybody else. It's a general erosion of not sticking to civility and courtesy, to the yes or no once said, coz everything is now as flexible and fluid as the digital projections of ourselves transmitted round the globe, changing in realtime.

I fucking hate it. - I'm out like this stupid Tom Cruise character in Oblivion.

So I was looking into phone app development again (as you do) and I'm working on a simple QoL app for me and my SO that will help us automate some home management and finances stuff. Naturally I delved down the rabbit hole deep and wanted to have push notifications so we don't have to check the app periodically to know when certain things happen... Oh boy... Why is mobile development so convoluted, especially if you don't want to rely on Google Services...

It seems that the most accepted way of doing this is Firebase (FCM). Well me being me, I refuse to use google services for this and I prefer self hosted solutions (for data privacy reasons) which eliminates most products out there.

It also didn't help that my framework of choice is Flutter/Dart, because fuck Android Studio and the insane buggy XML stuff and fuck Android and it's constantly changing APIs...

Well In the end I decided on a rather simple solution and self hosted an AMQP service (RabbitMQ in my case, as I have some experience with it already) and implemented a foreground service in android platform specific code on top of my flutter project to kickstart it and made my phone a queue listener... This now means I can push notifications from my server to the Messaging Queue and it will be pushed into my App automatically!

One thing I found out on this journey was that Android now kills most background services and enforces foreground services to have a visible notification in the status drawer... which I actually approve of. It's a bit annoying that you can start a reliable background service, but I'm absolutely on-board with long running processes started by my apps are constantly visible...

Long story short, I love reinventing all the wheels, especially if it's for free and private... And I also went to sleep at 2AM again because this took longer that I'd like to tune... but it works, and it's google free...

I'm thinking of trying to package this up as a flutter module later, but first I want to do testing on battery life and the general life cycle of the service. RabbitMQ says they have the client library optimized for long-lasting connections and it should be just using a tcp socket, which should pretty much be what all the push notification services are doing anyway. I'm also not completely satisfied with how the permanent notification looks.. it isn't collapsible like some of the other ones from other apps and it's about 2 lines high instead of single line... which is something quite annoying and I'm struggling to find any relevant docs on how this is done other than possible making a custom Notification Style... but I just can't believe that everyone is doing that.. there must be a built-in somewhere -_-... Ugh Android is hell...

Anyway, if any android devs here have some hints, tips and tricks on how to handle this type of background/foreground process stuff and I'm doing something wrong let me know, cause googling this shit is a nightmare too!

Making a hard switch to ubuntu on my desktop at home. Getting just a teeny tiny, tad, bit: absolutely fucking livid....

Trying to learn ansible, vagrant, and docker more in depth for both work and my personal projects. All that I’ve been doing is just spinning my wheels trying to figure out the stupid fuck-mothering quirks with running this shit on Windows. Yes you absolutely can use all of these tools on a Windows box. There’s plenty of ports, patches, and workarounds. But I have spent all day trying to build a few vagrant boxes and use ansible to set them up. Simple LAMP stack boxes on CentOS7. Nothing major... unfortunately I spent like 90-110 minutes trying to figure out why virtualbox wouldn’t run properly. Dumbass me forgot that I installed Hyper-V ages ago.

O...K.... whelp... hyperv provider it is...

Luckily it only took about 15 minutes to determine that Hyperv’s networking can’t be setup from vagrant because vagrant doesn’t know how to interact with the hyperv - vswitch. So networking config is ignored and all VMs run on default switch (NAT) which is annoying but workable.

Ran into other issues trying to stay SSH’ed into the VM. PowerShell core (6) ssh’es into the box perfectly fine, but every time I opened vi to edit configs my terminal color scheme and fonts got fucked harder than a 2 dollar hooker on nickel night.

I’m a bright-green text on black background kinda guy. However the terminal kept changing to bright-red text on white background! It was like getting skull-fucked by a minotaur.

After a while I said fuck it, let’s try putty. Vagrant was using it’s own ssh keypair for the boxes, at work on my mac. Works like a dream. Putty failed me hard and shit the bed, kept getting all kinds of keypair errors. At this point I was finished spent too long trying to make shit work correctly on this jankbox. With enough time and patience I probably could’ve figured all of these problems out. I’m certain that at least 70% of them were caused by user error. I’m known by many as the walking ID-10t.

But alas, I have no time left in the day to fuck around with shit that doesn’t work immediately for morons like myself. My only hang up for the longest time with a complete switch to Linux was gaming. But with Proton and WINE I’m comfortable with giving it the ol’ college try. (Shhhh, don’t remind me I dropped out of college...

...Thrice.)

The gamble here is that I’ll give more than 2 halves of a fuck about trying to get my games working. A Study environment and materials for certs and general training won’t be getting anywhere near my full attention.

So, at long last, I hope this attempt at a full *nix switch finally sticks!!!

👾

Its funny whenever i see an apple fanboy use the note 7 as a reason to switch. A few iPhones in the past exploded too.

No hate to apple users in general, im talking about the hardcore fans.

HTML Writers Guidelines

When designing your web site you want to make the visiting experience as enjoyable as possible and at the same time make it so that if the site needs to be changed in any way, the changes are not too difficult to make. You want the look to be as appealing as possible for all browsers and also make the site accessible to users with disabilities. In order to accomplish all this there are some general guidelines when creating your HTML code.

1. The first thing that will really make your life easier is through the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) - CSS is used to maintain the look of the document such as the fonts, margins and color. HTML directly on the page is not a good choice to handle these aspects because if say, the font color you are using for certain paragraphs needs to be changed from blue to red, you would have to go in and change each color tag manually. By using CSS you can designate the color for each of those paragraphs just once in the CSS file. That way if you have to change the font color from blue to red you make one change instead of the countless number of changes you might have to make, especially if your web site contains hundreds of pages. This is a big time saver and a must for all professionally designed web sites.

2. Don't use the FONT tag directly in your HTML code - This becomes a problem when using some cheap authoring tools that try to mimic what a web page should look like by using excessive FONT tags and nbsp characters. These tools end up creating web pages that are impossible to keep maintained. There is a program you can use, if you've created one of these disaster pages, called the HTML Tidy Program which you can actually download here . This will clean up your code as well as possible.

3. You want your web pages readable to people who have disabilities - People who surf the Internet depend on speech synthesizers or Braille readers to interpret the text on the page. If your HTML markup is sloppy or isn't contained in CSS the software these people use to read pages have a difficult time in interpreting these pages. You should also include descriptions for each image on your page. Also, don't use server side image maps. If you are using tables you should include a summary of the table's structure and also associate table data with the correct headers. This gives non visual browsers a chance to follow the page as they go from one cell to another. And finally, for forms, make sure you include labels for form fields.

By following just these three guidelines you give your visitors, especially disabled visitors the best chance of having an enjoyable visit to your site while at the same time making it so that if you have to make changes to your site, those changes can be made easily and quickly.

!rant
learned about antd on Reddit when it had version 4.0.1 released and so far rewriting from scratch the frontend of one of my products has been a breeze, specially since I'm using Typescript.

I'm absolutely happy with the results so far, and how forms are managed within the library makes Formik redundant, great!

having React Cosmos is helping a lot when designing my components too.

In general, I'm really happy!

What are some good awards for a software development competition?

Budget: $1200

Some context:
We are organizing our flagship event with six tracks - each has its own set of talks and events. For the Software Development track, we are organising a Battlesnake competition and would love to get some ideas about the awards.

P.S. We are giving them general event swags too, but need something relevant to software dev as an addition

P.P.S. Giving money directly is not an option due to some administrative stuff

How do you implement TDD in reality?

Say you have a system that is TDD ready, not too sure what that means exactly but you can go write and run any unit tests.

And for example, you need to generate a report that uses 2 database tables so:

1. Read/Query
2. Processor logic
3. Output to file

So 1 and 3 are fairly straightforward, they don't change much, just mock the inputs.

But what about #2. There's going to be a lot of functions doing calculations, grouping/merging the data. And from my experience the code gets refactored a lot. Changing requirements, optimization (first round is somewhat just make it work) so entire functions and classes maybe deleted. Even the input data may change. So with TDD wouldn't you end up writing a lot of throwaway code?

A lot of times I don't know exactly what I want or need other than I need a class that can do something like this... but then I might end up throwing the whole thing out and writing a new one one I get a clearer idea of what i or the user wants or needs.

Last week I was building a new REST API, the parameters and usage changed like 3 times. And even now the code is in feasibility/POC testing just to figure out what needs to be used. Do I need more, less parameters, what should they be. I've moved and rewritten a lot of code because "oh this way won't work, need to try this way instead"

All I start with is my boss telling me I need an API that lets users to ... (Very general requirements).

You know, I don't mind getting dragged if I deserve it. But it would be nice to have ALL the information I need to make an estimate BEFORE you hang me out to dry.

First I was told that work on this issue could be kicked down the road since we were getting big contracts. The next day the issue was in the sprint.
I tell you I won't be able to get it done with the business critical stuff you said absolutely had to be done that sprint (turns out we had 3 months of leeway even before COVID). You say alright cool. We push it to next sprint. The next day you say we have been pushing that issue too much and we absolutely have to get it done this sprint. At least have it so QA can look at it by Tuesday.
I give a preliminary look to QA cuz I found a bug, but they can test other shit about this fucking issue, but then get shut down fucking again because it isn't code complete.
STOP. MOVING. FUCKING. GOAL POSTS. AND. GASLIGHTING. ME.

And as a bonus, I disagree with the necessity of this work in general. I think it's fucking stupid, unnecessary, and zero value added. It's a management jerkoff issue that is going to piss off all of our users.

Do I have just a bad version of ecma script or is this some stupid shit in JS in general? I want each sub array to be separate entities, not that same one for all. I assume the fill in just putting the same list in all of them? I honestly don't care I guess, replacing a sublist is fine too. Rather than editing each element separately. Saves ram in long run.

let arr = Array(5).fill(Array(1,2))
console.log(arr)
arr[0][0] = 3
console.log(arr)

[[1,2],[1,2],[1,2],[1,2],[1,2]]
[[3,2],[3,2],[3,2],[3,2],[3,2]]

Congratulations, you are my dev duck today.

! Dev

I don't know much about the biology, but from what i know, a virus is never treatable. In due course of time we might generate a medicine that will modify our immunity system to fight against it, like polio and when this medicine is available, all the human race would get it and that's how this epidemic ends.

Until then, we all would need a total social isolation at some instance of time, as it is being done now.

But here is my main question : what to do until then? How will the economy survive? General stores, grocery markets, restaurant and fast food, clothings and many other industries and dominantly involves direct interaction.

Shutting down and going online is also not the solution. Poor/small businesses can't afford it. companies like amazon , dominos, etc have huge network of delivery guys for e shopping, but won't that be soon banned too?

Looks like our technology in robotics and drone delivery is too slow to be proved effective in this situation . I am hoping the technology would be a solution to such situation.

What are your thoughts about it?

I recently switched back from Android to using a BlackBerry Bold – a 9700, specifically. This transition was made because I have been growing increasingly impatient with the many, many flaws of Android, and iOS wouldn't work for me, even though it does work well for many people. There are many features of which I was unaware when I was using BlackBerry back in the day, such as general tinkering abilities; while I may not understand everything, I am smart enough to be able to use technical references to figure out most of that which I do not understand. I won't go into detail about this so I don't sound like an advertisement for a product which was abandoned by its own creator, but I thought that the people here might find the ability to fiddle with the device to be interesting.
Having an actual keyboard is pretty nice, too.

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

Internship/Career Question

I was able to get a referral for a software engineering internship at a company I like this summer. This will be my first “real-life” internship and I’m super excited.

The referral ended up getting me an interview with the company’s “Principal Talent Attraction Consultant”.

What show I expect for this meeting? Is it possible that there is a whiteboarding part of this interview? Or would it be more general?

Lmk if I’m being too vague. Thanks guys!

Any tips to stop getting pissed at your designer's design?

I was given a frontend task after so long (I'm a backend developer who has frontend experience) and the design is very good except architecture wise it's very difficult to build. It's not impossible, but it's very tricky to implement.

Our client has already approved the design, so I guess there's nothing I can do about it
But I am getting constantly annoyed when implementing the design. Whenever I look at the design, I feel like swearing all the time. I feel the designer is very inconsiderate. The design looks very good at big desktop screen, but some part looks dumb in responsive or tablet.

Does anyone ever feel the same? And maybe have tips for me to get by?

My managers have started telling me to stop saying "it's difficult" or "it's too hard". But it is difficult! And I am getting more annoyed when they tell me that.

Whenever I tell the designer that certain part is not gonna work (because we try to make things general so we can reuse), he will argue and somehow ended up saying "come on, just think how prideful you will be after implementing this".

So I work in a school as a network manager and general admin, but it is commonly known I am a programmer too. Anywho, I got asked by a member of staff to find a way to add all teachers to the classrooms (we use Google classroom) and I wrote down what he asked. I spent my evening at home working on it and got it 50% done and finished at work the next day. This member of staff comes in and was happy, so I read back what he asked me for and he turns around and says "Oh, I wanted you to add all classrooms to one account, didn't I say that" I tried to explain he didn't but he chocked it up to me not listening. I even showed him the piece of paper on which I wrote down what he wanted but no, it turned into a shouting match and I told him to leave. I finished the script but I'm wondering if I should actually give it to him. What's your thoughts?

I haven't had anything dev related to rant about in a few weeks due to the fact that I haven't done any developing in a few weeks. I have a lot of personal shit going on that I'm slowly getting past. Basically some shit went down, the girl I posted about a few times, we're just friends at this point. My best friend won't talk to me and hasn't in about 2 weeks now. Fun.

Then there's the fact that I have school Monday through Friday, and work Thursday through Sunday, so I get zero days off. So I just..don't have the time to do developing right now. But, here's a kinda funny story (not that funny)

So this Sunday, I was leaving work. I decided to roll my car's window down to say bye to a few people as I was pulling out of the parking lot. It was cold so I went to roll my window back up....and it's fucking stuck. I'm sitting in about 15°F (-9.5°C) with no driver's side window. Turned out the fucking motor that moves the window had died. And I had no money to get it replaced. So I did the logical thing, I called my mom to try and figure out what I should do. She was asleep but my dad picked up. He called me a dumbass and said he'd pay to get it fixed, since it was his car before and he never told me that the window was faulty.

Actually got it fixed just yesterday by my cousin. Then I went to get my paycheck (a whole $200!) since my work has my name spelled wrong in their system so I currently can't do direct deposit (gonna talk to the general manager about that tomorrow). And now I'm just sitting in bed, waiting for my check to go through. (As I was typing that last sentence, someone from my bank called actually). I would really appreciate that $200 right now, cause I have about $2 after paying for car insurance and gas and stuff. I actually need to fill up my gas soon too..

ASP.NET Core (MVC) is frustrating me.

I’m a big fan of ASP so far but I’m just struggling to understand a lot.

First off to use it you have to fucking memorize every class in the fucking framework and the functions within them. It just expects that I automatically know which classes I need to implement or inherit from and why, but if I don’t? I can fuck off. But this is also just a C# problem in general.

And it does so much for you and that bothers me so much. I was so excited to actually implement protection against SQL Injections, using HTTPS, validating logins, interacting with the SQL for the database but FUCKING NOPE BECAUSE IT DOES IT FOR YOU.

I don’t want my hand held I want to feel like I’m actually doing things and I want to learn how shit works and how it’s made. It’s just disappointing. I appreciate that it wants me to focus on the app and I will appreciate it a lot more when I’m done learning how everything works but I won’t actually get to understand how those features work or how I can implement them myself because it’s spoiling me too fucking much.

I guess I’m just gonna have to practice more. And don’t bother telling me to look at the documentation, I’ve never seen such a fucking piece of shit mess before I laid eyes upon the docs for C# & ASP

Have a general class about problem solving. Too many people are unable to understand the problem input, the problem output, and how to break that problem down into steps before sitting down to code.

Like fuck, the biggest issue here isn't that students don't know how to code, it's that they can't fucking solve a simple problem

tldr: I am looking for recommendations for a basic website for my parents. GOTO question;

Pre-Story:
My parents have a small (offline) business. They have a website to give some general information and list their weekly offers.
When I felt that what has come out of the website-building tool (you know, clicky clicky stuff) looked a bit too early 2000's and is a total ripoff for what you get (almost 20€ per month), I created something with Google Sites for them. Feel free to roast me, but web development is not my field and now it looks much more modern, is mobile friendly and does what it is supposed to do. Weekly offers are edited in a google sheets file, which is embedded in the website. Not great, but this way my mom doesn't have to deal with editing a tables on the page - trust me, it won't look good. This also meant they could downgrade the hosting package to discard the clicky-tool and just the domain (maybe 1€ per month). The website itself is hosted for free by Google.

Some time ago GDPR became a thing and then I was tasked to have a look at it. (side note: I don't want to rant about being responsible for it, that's fine. My parents don't really ask me to do a lot for them.) You can't enter any data on the website, it's just very basic stuff and data protection wise there's just the "usual" stuff (cookies, embedded tools, logs). I added another site with a halfway complete privacy policy. Regarding the whole cookie issue (do not enforce unnecessary cookies) I couldn't find an easy solution. It's not 100%, but what can you really expect from a small business like this? I've seen worse.

Now to the question:
Can you recommend a good alternative to the current solution (Google Sites)?
It should be cheap (<3€/month incl. domain) and my parents should be able to make some basic changes (just text in predefined locations). I am not afraid to get my hands dirty - I can deal with some HTML, CSS, JS - but I don't want to sink a lot of time into this. No need for analytics or the like. Maybe a newsletter would be cool (with the weekly offers), but that's just a random thought of mine and definitely not necessary.

Thanks for reading :)

I have decided to set up a full Linux desktop pc, and go for everyday use and learn, mostly to catch up and understand better the whole UNIX and to get familiar with the command line there.
The problem is that there are hundreds of them, so if you can write some tips which one shall I go for?
Here is the info about what I need:
1 - I'm a web developer, so later I will move the work there too, capable of running a web server.
2 - I'm NOT looking for windows likeness or easiness, I'm looking for a distro which will help me the most to understand how it works in general, the file system, and the command line.

I imagine what I want it to do at its core and what I need. Then research and get to work!

Started building a YouTube downloader using nficano's Pytube library.
I know there are a ton of them out already, but I am doing this to learn some Python and nuances. I tried YouTube-dl but that's more cli oriented and I've already built cli GUI wrappers before.

So the key I think is persevering even if it's already been done. By building this I'm learning tkinter, Python in general, and when I try to build this into an executable (so the user won't need to have Python) I'll learn how that works too.

Hey guys,
Excuse me for my bad english in advance. I am not a native speaker.
I wanted to ask if someone has experience with humanoid robots.
I am currently searching for a master thesis in IT and have stumbled upon one offer at which you are supposed to realize a humanoid robot. At the end the robot is supposed to be able to bring coffee to people. To come to the point. On the one hand I have always wanted to do something like that and I think it would be a lot of fun. On the other hand I fear that the project might be too difficult. In the offer it is said that you should assemble the robot yourself. I have a little bit experience with arduino but in general probably not very much electrical knowledge, only knowing the base principles. The time limit would be 6 months, which in my opinion might be very little time.
So my actual question is: Do you think that such a project is realizable with some help of the engineers within 6 months or something compareable? I fear that that the task itself would be a handful in this time span with a fully assembled robot.