How I've decided to answer the "can you hack" question from here on in...

"Can you show me how to hack this account please?"

"Sure, you'll need a hammer, a blow torch, chloroform, some pliers and couple of bottles of really pure vodka!"

"What the hell?!"

"Oh, it's so much quicker to just extract a password from a person, than it is to break into a system, I'm not exactly trained in inflicting pain on the human body, but I'm sure you'll be able to figure it out through trial and error, good luck!"

So I got the job. Here's a story, never let anyone stop you from accomplishing your dreams!

It all started in 2010. Windows just crashed unrecoverably for the 3rd time in two years. Back then I wasn't good with computers yet so we got our tech guy to look at it and he said: "either pay for a windows license again (we nearly spend 1K on licenses already) or try another operating system which is free: Ubuntu. If you don't like it anyways, we can always switch back to Windows!"

Oh well, fair enough, not much to lose, right! So we went with Ubuntu. Within about 2 hours I could find everything. From the software installer to OpenOffice, browsers, email things and so on. Also I already got the basics of the Linux terminal (bash in this case) like ls, cd, mkdir and a few more.

My parents found it very easy to work with as well so we decided to stick with it.

I already started to experiment with some html/css code because the thought of being able to write my own websites was awesome! Within about a week or so I figured out a simple html site.

Then I started to experiment more and more.

After about a year of trial and error (repeat about 1000+ times) I finally got my first Apache server setup on a VirtualBox running Ubuntu server. Damn, it felt awesome to see my own shit working!

From that moment on I continued to try everything I could with Linux because I found the principle that I basically could do everything I wanted (possible with software solutions) without any limitations (like with Windows/Mac) very fucking awesome. I owned the fucking system.

Then, after some years, I got my first shared hosting plan! It was awesome to see my own (with subdomain) website online, functioning very well!

I started to learn stuff like FTP, SSH and so on.

Went on with trial and error for a while and then the thought occured to me: what if I'd have a little server ONLINE which I could use myself to experiment around?

First rented VPS was there! Couldn't get enough of it and kept experimenting with server thingies, linux in general aaand so on.

Started learning about rsa key based login, firewalls (iptables), brute force prevention (fail2ban), vhosts (apache2 still), SSL (damn this was an interesting one, how the fuck do you do this yourself?!), PHP and many other things.

Then, after a while, the thought came to mind: what if I'd have a dedicated server!?!?!?!

I ordered my first fucking dedicated server. Damn, this was awesome! Already knew some stuff about defending myself from brute force bots and so on so it went pretty well.

Finally made the jump to NginX and CentOS!

Made multiple VPS's for shitloads of purposes and just to learn. Started working with reverse proxies (nginx), proxy servers, SSL for everything (because fuck basic http WITHOUT SSL), vhosts and so on.

Started with simple, one screen linux setup with ubuntu 10.04.

Running a five monitor setup now with many distro's, running about 20 servers with proxies/nginx/apache2/multiple db engines, as much security as I can integrate and this fucking passion just got me my first Linux job!

It's not just an operating system for me, it's a way of life. And with that I don't just mean the operating system, but also the idea behind it :).

Spaces Vs Tabs - A real world case.

So one of the menial tasks I was given here was to take a pretty mock and turn it into an HTML email template. Needless to say, I hate emails and HTML.

After many weeks of trial and error, rejection and tweaks, we're doing our final tests when someone noticed that Google's clients are chopping off the footer and saying "View Full Email".

A few searches yield that Google has a 102KB cut off for email size. We did some checks and found that we were at 104KB. I immediately thought it was my CSS inliner being a little too verbose, but as I went in to edit things, I noticed that the file was intended with spaces!

Now I'm a fan of Silicon Valley, and I recalled an episode from this past season where Richard mentioned something about saving file size by using tabs. I had never really considered that point.

So I went back into VSCode and told it to convert all of the individual templates that make up this giant email to indent with tabs...

The file size dropped from 104kb to 82kb.

I wasn't very polarized on the Tabs vs Spaces debate, but this here has given me a nice real world example as to why tabs rule.

!rant

I was in a hostel in my high school days.. I was studying commerce back then. Hostel days were the first time I ever used Wi-Fi. But it sucked big time. I'm barely got 5-10Kbps. It was mainly due to overcrowding and download accelerators.

So, I decided to do something about it. After doing some research, I discovered NetCut. And it did help me for my purposes to some extent. But it wasn't enough. I soon discovered that my floor shared the bandwidth with another floor in the hostel, and the only way I could get the 1Mbps was to go to that floor and use NetCut. That was riskier and I was lazy enough to convince myself look for a better solution rather than go to that floor every time I wanted to download something.

My hostel used Netgear's routers back then. I decided to find some way to get into those. I tried the default "admin" and "password", but my hostel's network admin knew better than that. I didn't give up. After searching all night (literally) about how to get into that router, I stumbled upon a blog that gave a brief info about "telnetenable" utility which could be used to access the router from command line. At that time, I knew nothing about telnet or command line. In the beginning I just couldn't get it to work. Then I figured I had to enable telnet from Windows settings. I did that and got a step further. I was now able to get into the router's shell by using default superuser login. But I didn’t know how to get the web access credentials from there. After googling some and a bit of trial and error, I got comfortable using cd, ls and cat commands. I hoped that some file in the router would have the web access credentials stored in cleartext. I spent the next hour just using cat to read every file. Luckily, I stumbled upon NVRAM which is used to store all config details of router. I went through all the output from cat (it was a lot of output) and discovered http_user and http_passwd. I tried that in the web interface and when it worked, my happiness knew no bounds. I literally ran across the floor screaming and shouting.

I knew nothing about hiding my tracks and soon my hostel’s admin found out I was tampering with the router's settings. But I was more than happy to share my discovery with him.

This experience planted a seed inside me and I went on to become the admin next year and eventually switch careers.

So that’s the story of how I met bash.
Thanks for reading!

A sidebar.
Literally just a sidebar.
And yes, this was in Hell.

Its code was spread across at least 40 files, and it used a bunch of freaking global variables to unfurl accordion sections, hide other sections/items, highlight the active item, etc. These were set (and unset!) in controller actions, so if you didn’t unset one, it remained open and highlighted until another action unset it.

Some of the global variable checks (and permissions checks) were done in the individual views, some outside of the `render` statements that include them. Some of them inherited variables from the parent, some from the controller, some from globals. Getting a view to work was trial and error. Oh, and some had their own inline css, some used css classes.

Subsections were separate views, so were some individual items, both sometimes rendered using shared templates, and all of the views and templates had the exact. same. filename. (They were located in different directories, and thus located automagically via implicit relative paths.) So, it was a virtually endless parade of`render partial => “sidebar”`. Which file does that point to? Good luck figuring it out!

Also, comments in several places said adding a new section required a database migration. I never did figure out why.

Anyway, I discovered this because I had an innocuous-sounding ticket to rearrange the sidebar, group some sections/items under different permissions, move some items to another menu, and nest some others differently.

It took me two bloody weeks, and this was when I was extremely productive every day.

Afterward, I was so disgusted by it that I took a day and removed every trace of the sidebar I could find, and rewrote it. I defined the sidebar in a hash, and wrote a simple recursive builder to generate the markup. It supported optional icons, n-level nesting, automatic highlighting of the current item and all parent nodes, compound and inherited permissions, wrapping of long names, hover and unfurl animations, etc. Took me a couple hundred lines of Ruby at the most, plus about the same of css.

Felt so good to remove that blight.

It's finished.

After switching between Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Manjaro, Antergos and a dozen WM's I've settled for Arch on the desktop.

Took me over a week of trial and error, but it's worth the pain for the level of control you get.

Switching to Linux reminded me much of trying to find out if I liked text editors or IDE's more when I first started programming. I changed tools every day before I settled.

Screenshots of course. Now to actually get back to my JDBC projects before I start obsessing over how to get all my apps on the terminal. :D

When will Google understand what an ecosystem means ?

Love it or hate it. What makes Apple devices homely is the ability to build a banded and consolidated associative user space that feels the same anytime on any platform. Crafting an ecosystem might be a daunting task , and requires adaptive and perfective rework through a long period. But it pays of , just like apples utility app suite does today. It was a journey to get it right.

Now we have Google , a company that is confused most of the time , releasing new apps everytime they have new feature in mind. According to me , Google did a phenomenal job in building hangouts and Allo , hangouts was a huge step forward from gChat , and Allo was way ahead of its time for a fun and innovative IM app. But what's the need for 2 different apps ? One has video calling , text messaging , group sharing , everything the Allo had.

Then all of a sudden you get Google Duo " The best ever video calling app " Why wasn't this integrated with hangouts and marketed the same way ?

Trial and error is one thing , this seems a lot like the lack of effort in architecting coaction and a well designed internetworking application framework. A lot of unnecessary choices have led to the shutting down of majority of their apps. Allo and hangouts included , but all this would have been unnecessary if the goal was to always build upon iteratively.

While I believe Allo was marketed as a cross platform chat application unlike hangouts , an integration plan could have always circumvented this issue.

I have to talk about another one of Google's failed efforts in recognition of potential , the hello app , but this rant has gone a bit too far already. So I'll post 6 hours later 😅

Well I'll always have the hope to see Google integrate the best of their ideas in a more relaxed and realised structure than what exists today. :)

Programming tip of the day:

Several hours of trial and error can save you many minutes of reading the docs.

Not really a bug, but once I tried to learn building function ajax per table asynchronously instead of calling all of them at once. Spend like couple of hours of trial of error. It wasn’t needed at the time, but suddenly I need to fetch something separately because of a new feature. Just write a couple and line it’s done

Hey Root, we have a high priority ticket for you! It's adding some columns to a report. Should be simple. Details are in the ticket.

First: reports are some of the most boring, drool-inducing drudgery i have ever worked on.

Second: Specs for these reports are a nightmare since everything is ... very indirectly tested, and the specs are everywhere but where you'd expect them to be, so it's a lot of spelunking and trial/error. It's also slow as beans.

Anyway. The ticket's details are in ... not the worst engrish i've ever seen, but it's bad enough that i have no idea what they're asking despite (thus far) five attempts at deciphering it. There's also a numbered list of "fields" to add, so you'd think it would be straightforward. It is not. Half the list is crossed out, and half of the remaining items are feature requests (in yet more engrish), not columns to add. Also, one of the actual fields is impossible as the data it's asking for is not recorded anywhere.

yeah...

I cringe every time I see this person's name as the reporter because it's always the same. and honestly, there are more of these engrish people every month, and believe me: it isn't just a language barrier...

When I learnt programming, sugar was still made out of salt and hence not used in coffee.

Also, we didn't have source level debuggers, only the "print" method. However, compiling was also slow. It was faster and more convenient to go through the program and execute the statements in one's head. This helped understanding what code is doing just by reading it. It also kept people from trial and error programming, something that some people fall for when they resort to single step debugging in order to understand what their own code is even doing.

Compiling was slow because computers in general were slow, like single digit MHz. That enforced programming efficient code. It's also why we learnt about big Oh notation already at school. Starting with manual resource management helped to get a feeling for what's going on under the hood.

I could bitch about XSLT again, as that was certainly painful, but that’s less about learning a skill and more about understanding someone else’s mental diarrhea, so let me pick something else.

My most painful learning experience was probably pointers, but not pointers in the usual sense of `char *ptr` in C and how they’re totally confusing at first. I mean, it was that too, but in addition it was how I had absolutely none of the background needed to understand them, not having any learning material (nor guidance), nor even a typical compiler to tell me what i was doing wrong — and on top of all of that, only being able to run code on a device that would crash/halt/freak out whenever i made a mistake. It was an absolute nightmare.

Here’s the story:

Someone gave me the game RACE for my TI-83 calculator, but it turned out to be an unlocked version, which means I could edit it and see the code. I discovered this later on by accident while trying to play it during class, and when I looked at it, all I saw was incomprehensible garbage. I closed it, and the game no longer worked. Looking back I must have changed something, but then I thought it was just magic. It took me a long time to get curious enough to look at it again.

But in the meantime, I ended up played with these “programs” a little, and made some really simple ones, and later some somewhat complex ones. So the next time I opened RACE again I kind of understood what it was doing.

Moving on, I spent a year learning TI-Basic, and eventually reached the limit of what it could do. Along the way, I learned that all of the really amazing games/utilities that were incredibly fast, had greyscale graphics, lowercase text, no runtime indicator, etc. were written in “Assembly,” so naturally I wanted to use that, too.

I had no idea what it was, but it was the obvious next step for me, so I started teaching myself. It was z80 Assembly, and there was practically no documents, resources, nothing helpful online.

I found the specs, and a few terrible docs and other sources, but with only one year of programming experience, I didn’t really understand what they were telling me. This was before stackoverflow, etc., too, so what little help I found was mostly from forum posts, IRC (mostly got ignored or made fun of), and reading other people’s source when I could find it. And usually that was less than clear.

And here’s where we dive into the specifics. Starting with so little experience, and in TI-Basic of all things, meant I had zero understanding of pointers, memory and addresses, the stack, heap, data structures, interrupts, clocks, etc. I had mastered everything TI-Basic offered, which astoundingly included arrays and matrices (six of each), but it hid everything else except basic logic and flow control. (No, there weren’t even functions; it has labels and goto.) It has 27 numeric variables (A-Z and theta, can store either float or complex numbers), 8 Lists (numeric arrays), 6 matricies (2d numeric arrays), 10 strings, and a few other things like “equations” and literal bitmap pictures.

Soo… I went from knowing only that to learning pointers. And pointer math. And data structures. And pointers to pointers, and the stack, and function calls, and all that goodness. And remember, I was learning and writing all of this in plain Assembly, in notepad (or on paper at school), not in C or C++ with a teacher, a textbook, SO, and an intelligent compiler with its incredibly helpful type checking and warnings. Just raw trial and error. I learned what I could from whatever cryptic sources I could find (and understand) online, and applied it.

But actually using what I learned? If a pointer was wrong, it resulted in unexpected behavior, memory corruption, freezes, etc. I didn’t have a debugger, an emulator, etc. I had notepad, the barebones compiler, and my calculator.

Also, iterating meant changing my code, recompiling, factory resetting my calculator (removing the battery for 30+ sec) because bugs usually froze it or corrupted something, then transferring the new program over, and finally running it. It was soo slowwwww. But I made steady progress.

Painful learning experience? Check.
Pointer hell? Absolutely.

I hate it 😫

The stranges computer error I have seen.

When modems still was the way you communicated I worked with support.

We where the general distributor for TDC's PCCard modems.

One day we got a computer with modem with intermittent problems (worst kind).

After much trial and error we found that stroking the computer lightly in the top right corner made the modem work perfectly :)

Cause will be reviled later :p

Me: *spends 5 hours screwing around with recursion and performing operations in reverse order*
Unit tests: *pass*
Me: Wow. Okay, that’s interesting.
*run tests again*
Me: Right, well, that’s just dandy. Now, how did I get here and how do I document this...

TL;DR I spent 5 hours fucking about and accidentally came up with a working solution that I can’t explain

EDIT: RIP wrong category

THE TIME HAS COME, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN.

I finished the avatar editor on the rewrite. It works so well.

After trial and error in design, API reversing and more, I've finally done it.

!rant
... so... maybe not that much of a thing, but i think it is:

a gal (27 years old) i started teaching programming two weeks ago, who had literally no previous experience with programming, algoritmization nor c#...
... just now, after 3 lessons of 6 hours altogether, and after yesterday when i explained to her what arrays are and reminded her what loops do...

... invented bubble sort. on her own. no googling. on paper. no "trial and error code typing and running".

i'm actually pretty proud of her :)

... putting the algo concept into actual code will still be a bit of a struggle, but yeah, hell, can't help thinking that she's actually pretty smart :)

(p. s. fist lesson was i drew uml of a fibonacci algo and forced her to understand what it does, second lesson was i explained the minimum required c# syntax for her to be able to implement it and forced her to write it (with as little help as i could), third lesson was the concept of array and "okay, now here's array of numbers, make a function that will sort them")

looking forward to what will happen when i explain recursion and nudge her towards quicksort O:-)

!rant
print("Hello World!")

Erm..... Here goes nothing.
Hello everyone, I'm [REDACTED] from [REDACTED] in the SEA region. I'm a highschool student, 17, with a hobby of programming in Python 3 as a self-taught trial-and-error script kiddy, mostly small scripts from random "Yea I should do that, how long will it take?! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"-moments. I found DevRant while talking with people in a few programming Discord servers. Hope this is enough for a "Hello World!" post....and yea, welcome me to DevRant *pop confetti and hope not forced to clean up later*

Doing tons of research and learning, trial and error to infinity and pushing through when I thought 'fuck this shit I'm so fucking done'!

Finally fucking managed to setup quite fast map tile hosting including the tile generation after ages of research and trial and error.

I love this open (source) maps (openstreetmaps) project but man, figuring out what to do from a gazillion sources can be rather hard.

Now I'm just having some styling issues and the filesize is fucking insane (only the Netherlands with all data, 20gb+ if I remember correctly) so I'm just generating road maps for now. If someone knows some more about the styling as for the maps, please let me know!

Yeah, this is fucking satisfying.

Trial and error

It was not until 20 that I had access to regular computing. In school I had to take up Finance as my Maths was weak. I couldn't take Sciences including computers and how could I , my childhood wasn't as fortunate as my peers.

When I entered college I got my brothers old gaming pc as we had a couple of work laptops at home. I was always the inquisitive one. I got interested in web development just because of curiosity while I was on my first job and I hated it. I used to write article and freelanced and ran a website for friends where I learned a lot by trial and error. I single handedly learned mySQL, PHP and basic web development.

The main job was a core night from 11pm -8 am . Drained me and my social life drowned. I lost my brother in an accident. Silver Lining: I quit my job.

I understood I was interested in computers like nothing else. I single handedly learned a programming language. After leaving the job I took up classes to learn from root level in a structured manner: Web design and Development.

Now though I am jobless and I am searching for my second job it is for something I love. :)

In college when we had programming labs where we had to use the schools unix server to compile and run.

My professor was very bad at explaining what actually needed to be done in the labs to the point where even the TAs didn't know what to do.

We were suppose to write an application in C to find out by "trial and error" how large we could make an array (or something like that, it's been too long). This not being explained well and no one knowing that much about C, I wrote a loop that just kept growing an array until it couldn't anymore. I watched it consume 72GB or memory from the servers before quitting the loop and realizing with the TA what the professor really meant.

I now feel bad for the IT staff monitoring the system wondering where 72GB just went...

When you finally understand how a RxJava operator works in different multithreaded scenarios after hours of trial and error...

A little late but whatever.

About half a year ago, I started working on setting up self hosted (slippy) maps. For one, because of privacy reasons, for two, because it'd be in my own control and I could, with enough knowledge, be entirely in control of how this would work.

While the process has been going on for hours every day for about half a year (with regular exceptions), I'll briefly lay out what I've accomplished.

I started with the OpenMapTiles project and tried to implement it myself. This went well but there were two major pitfalls:
1. It worked postgres database based. This is fine but when you want to have the entire world.... the queries took insanely long (minutes, at lower zoom levels) and quite intimate postgres/tooling knowledge was required, which I don't have.
2. Due to the long queries and such, the performance was so bad that the maps could take minutes to render and when you'd want that in production... yeah, no.

After quite some time I finally let that idea sail and started looking into the MBTiles solution; generating sqlite databases of geojson features. Very fast data serving but the rendering can take quite some time.

After some more months, I finally got the hang of it to the point that I automated 50-70 percent of the entire process. The one problem? It takes a shitload of resources and time to generate a worldwide mbtiles database.
After infinite numbers of trial and error, I figured out that one can devide a 'render' (mbtiles aka sqlite database) into multiple layers (one for building data, one for water, one for roads and so on), so I started doing renders that way.
Result? Styling became way more easy and logical and one could pick specific data to display; only want to display the roads? Its way more simple this way. (Not impossible otherwise but figuring out how that works... Good luck).

Started rendering all the countries, continents and such this way and while this seemed like a great idea; the entire world is at 3-4 percent after about a month. And while 40-70 percent generates 10 times as fast, that's still way too slow.

Then, I figured out that you can fetch data per individual layer/source. Thus, I could render every layer separately which is way faster.

Tried that with a few very tiny datasets and bam, it works. (And still very fast).

So, now, I'm generating all layers per continent. I want to do it world based but figured out that that's just not manageable with my resources/budget.

Next to that, I'm working on an API which will have exactly the features I want/need!

Dont become a dev if you:

- Cant sit in the office for 8-10 hours a day

- Dont know how to google information/ errors, instead you interrupt your teammates with stupid questions every 5 minutes

- Are a perfectionist and don't like constant change.

- Are neurotic and give up easily. If you get triggered about broken or messy things to the point where it ruins your day to you and everyone else around you. You need to separate your work from your life.

- Don't have good communication skills. Worst I saw was a guy who speaks with a stutter(nobody understands him) and also writes very poorly (nobody understands his emails). Also he gets very angry when you ask additional questions to clarify what he said. How can you work with someone like that?

- Are very sensitive to critique. I prefer someone telling me that my code is shit and telling me why, instead of feeding me delusions and false validation.

- Dont know how to balance working in team and working solo. Nobody likes lone wolfs who are arrogant and not in sync with the team. But also nobody likes to drag teammates who cant think for themselves and even after years of spent in the field are required constant spoonfeeding because they are unable to google and teach themselves with trial and error.

It has been a long long time since I posted, a lot has happened the past couple of months.

I lost my grandfather, I got a nice dev job and God I miss ranting here. I finally published my side project and all I have to say is

AWS is a b*tch! But beautiful at the same time, had to learn a lot the old way (trial and error).

I don't have any anime pictures as I've changed phones recently but I find this picture just as awesome.

Hope you are having a great day ranters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah his style

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

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

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

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

Learned basic Java syntax and created an Android app by reading a lot of posts on stackoverflow
Also a lot of trial and error...

I'm really into coding now for half a year. I really love that kinda flow when there pop up no errors and you work yourself through the code writing using trial and error. It's really addicting and the perfect evening.
But here comes my question: There are sometimes unsolvable errors for me (still not figuring out how to use firebase properly 😞). Is this stuff going to be fewer as I advance in coding, or am I just terrible at googling? To other beginners: Do you have often errors to that feel unsolvable for you?

I think I'm getting crazy...
Yesterday evening I finally thought it was a great idea to set up Gitlab CI to let the server build (ng cli) and deploy (via FTP) an Angular5 SPA on commits on the master branch.

BUT...

The npm package "vinyl-ftp" thinks it is pretty fucking funny to just randomly stop in the middle of uploading files or just upload some files with 0 bytes in size.

WHAT THE HELL?

After some hate infested trial and error, it seems that the more parallel channels I set up, the more chance I get that all files are correctly uploaded, but never all.

If anybody here happens to be some kind of mighty byte bender and knows what to do, I'd be thankful. But I will probably try out a different client in the docker image...

Not really a rant and not very random. More like a very short story.

So I didn't write any rant regarding the whole Microsoft GitHub topic. I don't like to judge stuff quickly. I participated in few threads though.

Another thing is I also don't use GitHub very much apart from giving 🌟 to repos as a bookmark. Have one hobby project there. That's all. So I don't worry that much. I'm that selfish and self concerned. :3

I was first introduced to version control system by learning how to use tortoisesvn around 2008. We had a group project and one of the guys was an experienced and amazing programmer unlike the rest of us. He was doing commercial projects while we were at our 1st and 2nd year. Uni had svn repo server. He taught us about tortoisesvn. He also had Basecamp and taught us how to use it as well. So that's how I learned the benefits of using versioning tools and project management tools. On side note, our uni didn't teach any of those in detail :3

After that project, I was hooked to use versioning tools. So until school kicked me out, I was able to use their svn server. When I was on my own, I had to ask Google for help. I found a new world. There are still free svn services that I can use with certain limited functions. That's not the new world; I found people saying how git is better than svn in various ways. It was around 2010,2011.

At first I was a bit reluctant to touch git because of all the commands in terminal approach. But then I found that there is tortoisegit. I still thank tortoisesvn creator for that. I'm a sucker for GUI tools. So then I also have to pick which git servers to use. Hell yeah, self hosted gitlab is the way to go man. Well that's what the internet said. So I listened. I got it up and running after numerous trial and error. I used it briefly. Then I came back to my country on 2012-2013; the land of kilobytes per minute (yes not second, minute).

My country's internet was improved only after 2016. So from 2013 to 2016, I did my best not to rely on internet. I wasn't able to afford a server at my less than 10 people, 12ft*50ft office. So I had to find alternative to gitlab which preferably run on windows. Found bonobo and it was alright. It worked. Well had crazy moments here and there when the PC running Bonobo got virus and stuff. But we managed. We survived. Then finally multi national Telecom corporates came to our country.

We got cheaper and faster mobile data, broadband and fiber plans. Finally I can visit pornhub ... sorry github. Github is good. I like it. But that doesn't mean I should share my ugly mutated projects to the rest of the world. I could keep using Bonobo but it has risks. So I had to think for an alternative. I remembered that gitlab didn't have cloud hosting service when I checked them out in the past. So I just looked into Bitbucket and happy with their free plans of 5 users and unlimited private repos. I am very very cheap and broke.

That's why I said I don't really care that much about the whole M$GitHub topic at the beginning. However due to that topic, I have visited GitLab website again and found out they have cloud hosting now and their free plan is unlimited users and unlimited repos. So hell yeah. Sorry BB. I am gonna move to cheaper and wider land.

TL;DR : I am gonna move to GitLab because of their free plan.

Be me, get a consultant job, go to a supposedly great client that has fame of getting scouted by Google. (attn: I doubted all this shit before I started)

Learn the basics by a awesome mentor and trial/error stuff at the same time to get the hang of things, after that was done, I noticed there was no documentation whatsoever, code is spaghetti and your documentation, good luck!

Royal spaghetti, you can't make heads or tails of it, dev code in production, empty try/catch blocks, empty statements, if (true)... (incl. their core classes)

Keep in mind this is a multi milion dollar company...

Someone please understand my pain...

Is it weird that I'm excited to get to test my code for my side project that I'm working on? It feels like I should hate this since I'm going to graduate next year and my career will be doing this as a job. Really, though, I'm glad to make sure my code is designed properly. It gives me confidence in my programming skills. BTW, if anyone is trying to use a build tool in Python there are NO guides to get started that I've seen! I had to go through trial and error to get pybuilder running!

How many of you feel you learn something on the job?

As for myself, I learn much more from books than sitting day in, day out at work, doing more or less of the same things.

To me, this whole trial-and-error way of 'learning' is not really learning. I don't subscribe to this dogma. I don't 'learn' by messing up and fixing something. I need a full specification of why something works, when and how. I'm not satisfied by just being a code plumber.

This, next to the fact that most jobs in small startups don't provide a budget for you to expand your knowledge.

For two projects, I have been in a solo work pattern, been a time bottleneck, and been irreplaceable on the projects. Four months ago I told management, "If anything happens to me these projects will be in trouble. I want to train a backup. I can't sustain this momentum. It isn't good for me, or for the success of these projects."

Four months later I still have no backup. They decided to diversity hire some new developers in the wrong area and now there is no money for a backup for me. I can't do all the work on both projects as a solo developer. I could have if I wasn't pushed into doing trial and error development on a poorly defined MS Dynamics API. Since the projects were behind schedule the customers lost confidence in the company to deliver. So the executives railroaded both project managers to save face.

Instead of addressing the development issues they did a bunch of other silly things. I got a job offer lined up and issued my resignation. That news absolutely exploded. After resigning my executive decided to say how awful I am in front of the customer in an attempt to save face for the company. The customer contacted the recently railroaded project manager and asks why. Former project manager tells customer, "You noticed how much faster the development of that part of the application went when he joined. You noticed how much better the quality of the project was. What do you think is happening? Do you think that a very good developer and an experienced project manager are to blame for the failures here?" So the executive is 13/10 pissed off because I may have accidentally struck a death blow for millions of dollars of business. I committed to taking care of the handover to the customer, and the company can't afford to get rid of me without completely losing confidence of the customer. The developers that I work with don't blame me at all and they are disgruntled that executive tried to character assassinate me and realize that it could have been them. I sense that I also may have initiated a developer mass-exodus. So the last few days have been the most stressful of my career but none of it is sticking to me because I followed all of the correct process.

You play stupid games you win stupid prizes.

Everyone argues about the perfect date, so I searched and found it using complex machine learning, a lot of trial and error, and too much alcohol:

'#76ab%Y%Y@98:%M%D%h@()%m&%m%Y%D%Y€¥$¢%M%h+%s-%s%%'

Where:
- %Y stands for one number of the last year
- %M stands for one number of the following month
- %D stands for one number (09 are two numbers for example) of SQRT((CURRENT_DAY^7)/3)
- %h stands for one number of the hour next evening(12h system)
- %% stands for either 7 or 3, 7 means that the hour(%h) is a.m., 3 means that the hour is p.m.
- %m stands for the minute the next solar eclipse will happen
- %s stands for one number of the second you will hate yourself to have this system implemented.

How to use it im 3 simple steps:

1. Implement it using ???
2. ?????
3. Profit?

!rant real talk though.

I am frustrated. Lately i have been having a slow time on the job, and it somehow dulled me down a lot.

In games you often have to think about transforms and rotations and offsets and hell knows what else.

I am usually pretty good at 3d object manipulation, it's one of those IQ test skills i generally score well on.

However lately i have not been able to come up with jack shit, i am simply unable to coherently think through a set of positioning and rotation changes to aquire the correct outcome for a mechanic and it pisses me off.

I have to fall back to slow as all hell trial and error and i don't even know what to do otherwise. It's been months now, do i have brain cancer or some shit? Arrrrrrg!

Working in my first "modern" website, a personal blog. Holy fscking crap does this shit suck. Layout and CSS etc is basically a trial and error gig at best. There is no rhyme or reason. Why?!?!

probably every time I see my tests failing.

Each time I am writing tests I'm convincing myself "it's an investment", "spend 2 hours now to save 2 days later", "unit-tests are good".

And each time I'm chasing away ideas like "perhaps they are right, perhaps writing unit tests is a waste of time..", "this code is simple, it should ever break - why test it??", "In the 2 hours I'll spend writing those UT I could build another feature"

Yes, it is terribly annoying to write tests, especially after writing the production code (code-first approach). Why test code that you know works, right?

But after a few weeks, months or years, when the time comes to change your feature: enhance it, refactor it, build an integration with/from it, etc, I feel like a child who found a forgotten favourite candy in his pocket when I see my tests failing.

It means I did a very good job writing them
It means it was not a waste of time
it means these tests will now save me hours or days of trial-and-error change→compile→deploy→test cycles.

So yeah, whenever I see my tests fail, I feel warm and fussy inside :)

I do not have the capacity to look for a job. I hate trial-and-error, I can't lie and I suck at talking to people in all but a cooperative context. I'm a decent webdev and I'm willing to learn, but to be able to do it I need skills that I don't have and I wouldn't need.

A simple bot on Telegram
Just hit and trial

Wanted same for Facebook, some error while accessing token tho. :(

Personally, I prefer learning from examples, trial-and-error and official user manuals over teachers or online courses.

UI development is like...
Solving a jigsaw puzzle...
In pitch dark...

Oh my dear internet,

FUCK THIS FUCKING SHIT
I AM SICK AND TIRED OF IT, WHO BUILT THIS HACKED TOGETHER ORWELLIAN SWAMP PIT?

Fuck the same fucking Envato template on every content page with 70 layers of sidebars, inline ads, popups, cookies and content shifting as if I was playing CATCH UP WITH YOUR FUCKING CONTENT.

FUCK the same fucking annual upselling 'plans' on every 7-day trial overengineered scam app that requires me to sign up for 1 fucking, falsely advertised task where my fucking password generator doesn't even recognize the input as a password field so I have to cmd+, to my FUCKING BABYLONIAN PASSWORD ARCHIVES PROMPTING ME FOR THE MASTER PASSWORD.
Thank god I can at least CREATE A BURNER CREDIT CARD THAT FREEZES ITSELF BECAUSE I CANNOT BE BOTHERED TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM YOUR FUCKING STEAMING CRAP.

FUCK every fucking step I take being recorded by our CYBERPUNK OVERLORDS REQUIRING ME to sign up for 5 different fucking privacy protection tools' annual plan or duct tape some open source shit onto my browser just for some BASIC PRIVACY WHILE TRYING TO NAVIGATE ALL THE OTHER 5000 annuals plan naval mines like A FUCKING FRENCH SUBMARINE IN 1940 GERMAN WATERS.

FUCK my walled garden scam ecosystem not being compatible with your walled garden scam ecosystem prompting me to reactivate my old SATANIC GOOGLE DON'T BE EVIL ACCOUNT from 2012 sending me on a DANTE ALIGHIERI STYLE ODYSSEY THROUGH THE 9 LAYERS OF PASSWORD RESET QUESTIONS, UNEXPECTED ERROR, 2FA MY PHONE DIED HELL to come out on the other side as a broken man.

Thank GOD I have your useless SUPPORT PAGE to aid with my signup problems that is actually just an FAQ with a hidden EASTER EGG HUNT for your support form CRISP AI BOT THAT IS ALSO 'currently experiencing high demand due to COVID' which is peculiar since that has been 3 years ago, but fortunately for you enabled you to fire ALL YOUR SUPPORT STAFF AND REPLACE IT WITH THIS BANNER.

I might as well just SCRAPE your fucking content, it'd be faster.

And although it is quite funny, FUCK THIS PAGE TOO for having me create another of 10.000 accounts to write this shit, where my browser firmly placed a newly created burner email into the PASSWORD FIELD.

I do not know how we managed to create something that is even more unwieldy than 56k DIAL-UPS, but I know that if this shit continues I'll have to train my own AGI to proudly interact with of all this STUPID SHIT on my behalf or I'll have to move into THE FUCKING MOUNTAINS AND LIVE WITH THE DEER.

29 november 2018 i was blessed for the first time after months and months and Months of trial and error

not gonna say what happened cause its kinda private

but i will forever remember this date. this date is sacred to me.

1) Search for "what is *language-I'm-interested-in* useful for?" on ddg;
2) Google the same thing 'cause you never know;
3) If it looks cool/useful and adds something to the tech I already know, I find a tutorial and follow it.
4) Trial and error on a new project that I will end up doing in another language because by that time I will find the new project so cool that I have to finish it in a language I use proficiently.

Every damn time.

The worst technology i had to deal with was probably a piece of hardware. It was a mini-pc combined with sensors and digital IOs and thus, it should have been able to do process control all by itself.

At that time, there was hardware that did that, but this one had an intel cpu, windows embedded and some powerful libraries pre-installed.

Sounds good, didn't work. The thing was so unstable and buggy and crashed on everything. The sensor part had lots of parameters and the right order was trial and error, documentation didn't match behavior, fixes promised but never delivered.

Lucky for us: it was just a demokit, no real project.

I still remember it with a smile. We got in contact to that company at a trade fair and they had most impressive booth. I also remember their companies image movie from their homepage with developers in dark labs with holographic monitors and the boss in his shiny bright office as he looked out of the window and quoted a famous german author.

Hilarious and sad. :-)

I think my biggest issue is learning, I never really learned how to 'learn' like take notes or 'study' things. My method of learning is more akin to skimming books (not knowing a good way for me to take notes on it) and articles, while also just testing stuff like I'm throwing things at a wall till it sticks and I pick up a lesson from that after wasted hours of trial and error that might have been avoided with properly knowing how to learn.

I need to figure out how to properly note-take and learn and properly go through all the books I've 'read' but never really learned.

How I learned programming?
Trial and Error!... Yup. Trial and Error.

Recipe for reverse engineering data structures / binary formats:

1℅ understanding the theory.
1℅ expections about what you will find.
3% luck.
45% trial and error.
50℅ persistence.

When some gotchas aren’t documented so you need to trial and error the api

Trial = error!

And teaching myself stuff is a lot better than reading and watching stuff

I think the difference between a monkey and a good developer is that good devs ask why? And try to find out.

Whereas a monkey just does what he's told and learns just enough to do what they need to do, usually by being told directly rather then figuring it out themselves through trial and error.

Could say uni, or first job, or mentor...but I think what 'how I learned to program' boils down to is: trial and error

Trial and error.

Taking an existing code base and playing with it to see what does what. Eventually learning enough to create basic programs. Eventually I wanted to make more complicated things so started reading documentation.

I got good by trial and error, documentation and blog posts.
Anyone resembling my experience?

The things I know how to do I'm always least likely to even start and definitely unlikely to finish.

But anything I need to trial and error or experiment and learn I'm way more likely to waste days on for a coin flip of an eventual result

So, I decided over the weekend that I would move my entire dev environment to Linux. No Windows on the laptop and only as a backup boot system for my home PC. I wanted to wean myself off of Linux as only being a VM and move to the full blown desktop.

I can only describe my experience to that of having your first kid: lot's of crying and joy at the same time.

Things I've learned:
1. The install is amazingly painless. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth work straight out of the box no configuring needed.
2. OH MY GOD THE CUSTOMIZATION. Rocking Arc Dark theme on Gnome3 = EVERYTHING IS
ALWAYS DARK MICROSOFT WHY IS THIS NOT A THING.
3. Getting Java servlets to work has been hell. I gave up trying to get them to work in eclipse and moved over to IntelliJ. More trial and error before I can figure out why tomcat won't fucking work in eclipse but it's fine in IntelliJ.
4. The UI and overall work flow has been improved after getting past the learning curve. Gnome3 is way better from when I tried it out 4 years ago.
5. Vim has a steep learning curve but I am starting to understand the net benefits of it. It'll probably be a solid month before I get good with it.
6. Loosing Microsoft Office has been a little bit of a challenge but their suite is online so....meh. I do miss Visual Studio though, and am still looking for an adequate replacement for C++ and C# development.

Overall it's been a challenge but I think it's been a net gain. Now if only I could get the whole sys-admin team to use it. ;)

It's always irked me that people can't RTFM simple things. But I've often just hacked my way through code, brute-forcing equations here and there until they work by trial and error. Nothing for an employer or anything, but nonetheless, I was not RTFMing. I was doing all the D and as little of the R as possible in R&D, just to save time. I'm trying to change that about myself. It's easier to implement systems when you properly understand them. No more hackery.

I suppose this rant was from me, about me.

IIS curse you and your nuances!

I launch my local web application (which was working fine) and now get CORS errors and 404 not found. Wtf. I clean the solution rebuild, same thing. Then I restart my PC and try again. Same thing.

Then I use Firefox instead if chrome and it magically works. Wtf!

It's hard to fix broken things when they fix themeselves afyer trial and error

I'm not sure if I'd say I'm "deeply inspired" but I spent more time coding a personal project this week than I've spent on any other project in a similar timeframe for the past several years. All because I wanted to build a personal dashboard/startpage that queries the APIs of a couple of MMOs I play and displays it nicely on a grid of cards.

I wrote my own API wrapper, built a Flask site for the first time in years, tried out a few things I've never done before, and stuffed the whole thing in a docker container.

I'm no web developer (my job is more about the infrastructure than the web apps which run on it) so I'm learning a lot just through trial and error and it's actually kind of fun.

Let me just say that I've been playing whack a mole with a new feature for while now. And it's becoming very tiring.

TLDR; CTO is changing the way we're going to implement this, every other day.

June 1st,
CEO: let's implement feature AAA,
CTO: we're going to have a call with Andy to tell us all about his product that will make this super easy, call will be June 4th.

Days before June 4th,
Me: Researchs product X, makes demo works flawlessly.

June 4th,
Call all good, few tips from Andy. We come to the pricing section of Product X

CTO: this will not work, pricing doesn't fit on our budget, fair enough.

June 7th -11th
Me: research altenative approach. Makes second demo.

CTO: Works good, seems to have too many moving parts, let's have call with Bob to check Product Y. It should make our lifes easier.

ME: Geee, ok let's check it out.

June 14th,

Call with Bob, all good, product has a fair price, stuff is experimental.

CTO: let's use Product Y, and just use what we get from their api now, and worry about changes later.

Me: Hmmm, that's a bit risky, but ok, you the boss, right?, starts again new demo. API doesn't work as documented.

Lots of trial and error to figure out how the api is working now, finally demo works well,

June 17th,

API changed, now it works as documented, (expected as it is experimental), previous demo doesn't work anymore.

June 18th,

Redoing research. inputs are completely different from Product Y now, need to redo all that is working and do and a lot more of research.

Go live is scheduled for end of next week, I hope that the API is stable now, and that I get to go live on schedule.

It is funny to see, that it would probably been the same if we just waited on the API to stabilize, and check the pricing section before choosing a product? Who knows.

Anyways, I actually feel happy that over the years I developed the patience to work with ever changing situations like this one.

After many days of trial and error,i finally found my preferred way of passing Django objects and variables to angularjs,now I can create killer apps with Django and angularjs.

gradle is infuriating.

firstly there are so limited resources to understand how it's building a java/android code. everything happens by magic and hit+trial

secondly the plugins and the tasks works in mysterious ways. sometime they work when applied in the project root's gradle file, other times they work when applied in module's gradle file, nd other times they need configuration at both levels.

then there are gradle tasks like build ,test, assemble , clean etc. these are less of an action and more of an alias to run a bundle of actions.

then we have 3rd party plugins which attach themselves to these "fat-actions" and run before/after them

and finally we have the fuckup from the java world where the only available code coverage plugin is jacoco and IT FUCKING SUCKS!!! it is a test environment plugin, it should impact test tasks , but somehow it's fucking with the assemble taskin such a manner, that the jars ans aar files generated via plugin are giving runtime errrors. yes , runtime! as if we are back in the messed up js world of "everything is good unless running live"

even if it was a compile time eeror, i would have considered. but runtime?!! fucking runtime error?! i barely understand this shit, there is absolutely no info available as to which classes are being used to create a build and how, and i am supposed to fix this? wtf?!

1. For my employer to invest in QA. Honestly, even if I'm 101% confident about my code, if nobody tests it other than me, I would advise against prod-ing(Is that a word?) it.

2. For recruiters so stop expecting a Full stack dev to be perfect in both ends (especially with an entry level salary. Stop taking advantage of them!!). Just stop using the term full stack entirely, please.

3. For API docs of other companies to be deserving of the title 'Documentation'. I'm so tired of figuring out other API parameters via trial and error. Just make your docs as clear as you can please, so we don't have to bother each other with so much email.

That's all for now. Thanks dev Genie.

Trial and Error!!!

XAML data bindings seem to be like trial and error... any advice?

Finally decided to get myself some remote server on DO, faffing around and setting things up, and suddenly I decide to look at my access logs, someone was trying to figure out how to connect to mysql, phpMyAdmin and what's not... Too bad for him I won't have any of those installed until I know how to properly secure all this :)

Heh... Welcome to the real world I guess?

Strapi...

So much promise let down by poor documentation. Adding custom commands is not in the docs but is supported in the code.

Spent 2 weeks through trial and error trying to get custom commands written to import content and its been a pain in the ass.

When your documentation is written, give it out to novice or intermediate programmers with minimal exposure to your system. Note down their issues and improve the documentation.

Hell, why not add a form to submit feedback on the docs to a dedicated team of writers.

Anyone here good with Strapi who could assist?

Tmw your carefully crafted plan of some feature you thought would be a particually bit of tricky code turns, through a bit of stumbling and trial and error, into something even better than your well calculated plans -- however clever you thought you were -- you have to admit that the result exceeded your expectations and intelligence. Especially when it works!

Today I discovered trial and error driven development for myself:

Me, reading spec..
Spec: „Do something with an CSR“ (not the exact wording :D)

So instead of just googling C# + CSR and copying the code examples,
I went like:
What means CSR -> Certificate (Something Something)
-> could be this namespace (Something with „Crypto...“ in its name)
-> could be this class (Something with „Certificate“ in its name)
-> take the easiest overload (string is always nice)
-> try filling in the parameters from the spec
-> start debugger and inspect properties
-> repeat if necessary

I don’t know if this is the correct pattern to proceed my project with...
But hey, today it worked and now I also know, what „distinguished“ means

My path into development started with my dad. He was a COBOL programmer and would bring his work home to debug by hand. He would explain his thinking and programming concepts as he went through his code.

I then got into Basic, and Visual Basic 6.0 (right before .NET). In high school CS I and CS II consisted of VB.NET and Java, but it also solidified some foundational concepts I was missing; binary, hex, flow charts, etc.

After that though, everything else was self exploration and trial and error. It all came together. I love my path, and it brought me here to devRant via the programming friends I have made along the way.

Dear Diary,
Today is October 31st, ‘Halloween’ according to ancient pagan tradition. I can’t help but wonder if those pagans of yore felt as I do now in their attempts to yoke unruly bands of spirits. I sit wearily at my desk in painful and tiresome reckoning with those new hellcats we call node dependencies. Many an hour I have toiled, maestro of a cacophonous orchestra akin to that tucked in later pages of Bulgakov’s magnum opus, pleading with the band to follow my wand. And to no avail. In the wee hours of the morn I can scarcely tell who is conducting who. My sleep laden eyes blink on each execution of yarn install, my fingers knowingly re-execute with an up-arrow enter when that instruction is returned with gnarled, gruesome errors. And I ask again: “who is conducting who?!“. Will this great devil of machinery eventually meet me with an error so fearsome that I myself lay asunder? It is a battle, make no mistake. It is the “trial of a thousand years”! And who shall come out victorious I know not, but rest shall not come until I either lay myself down into the jaws of dependency hell or emerge victorious.

Dear Diary,
Today is November 1st. Compiled on the first try, no additional changes FML

What is worse than editing legacy CSS code? Trying to style a page using only no-code / low-code tools. Simplest things like a border only on one side seems nearly impossible or requires hours of trial-and-error with drag-and-drop-modules and their arcane option dialogs.

I have no idea why this doesn't work...
* 5 h later *
Wow... I have no idea why this works...

I hate the fucking Spring WebFlux and the goddamn Project Reactor on which it depends!
Even debugging a simple CRUD microservice with simple business logic is such a pain in the ass, exception handling has a lot of "magic" implicit stuff which makes me waste hours in fucking trial & error and I have to use very little breakpoints because if a request is paused for more than few seconds it gets terminated.
I love functional programming but why shove it in fucking Java making me waste 90% of my time in trying to guessing what the fucking framework is doing, why not just use Scala which runs in the JVM? We don't even need compatibility with legacy code since it's a greenfield project!

And before you ask yes, I read a fucking book about Project Reactor and Java reactive programming and a lot of docs on Spring, Spring Boot and Spring Web Flux.

commodore amiga 500, when I was 5 or 6.
what was the very first thing on it that i experienced, i don't know, but some things i remember:

Cannon Fodder 2
A-Train, a game that i played for months, it utterly fascinated me and i was utterly unable to keep my company afloat, because i was utterly unable to understand how the mechanics of the materials moving around worked (i still don't, actually, but in a different way)

some Apache simulator, which took us (me and father) literally a week to figure out how to get into the actual game from the main menu stylised as a military office. it took us several days to even realize it's the menu.

the Lotus Esprit 2 game, which we played regularly.

some Airbus simulator where i took two weeks of trial and error to figure out how to take off, without manual.

some experiments with midi sequencing and notation music programs.

how every two months, dad came with a 20page long list of programs and games from some pirate seller, which we would go through, mark stuff that sounded interesting (going by name only), then he would send it by post to him, and after a week, we would go take a package from post office full of floppies, literally like 200, and the next two or three weeks, we would be trying all of it out, seeing what the things we got were about, putting the good ones on one pile, the boring ones on another (cheap floppies for use)...

ah the magical times of wonder and exploration...

Do reports actually make people dumber?

I write a lot of reports that output for our customers into excel. I'm starting to suspect that for many customers it doesn't actually help them, rather it might actually hurt them (also eat all my time).

If a user generates their own report via search options or etc to pull out some data, they usually SEEM to have put some thought into the actions required to find the data they want.

Accordingly:

1. They immediately know what information is there, and why some information might be excluded.

2. They can do a little trial and error to solve their own problems / better understand what is going on.

3. They're a hell of a lot less likely to insist that something is "MISSING!!!" without seeming to actually know what the thing(s) are that are missing.

With auto generated spreadsheet that shows up in the email there's just little no critical thinking outside of some stray thoughts in their head when the spreadsheet showed up ...

unigine sim engine has the worst documentation i've ever seen. it was written in bad english, occasionally did not follow a word convention (i.e. functions doing analogous work used different keywords), most items were just reiterations of function names (made up example for clarification: getAngularVelocity(): gets angular velocity...). i had to use it for my first ever job, and had to learn in from scratch, mostly by trial and error. it's been months since i switched jobs, and they were rolling a version 2 when i left, i hope they improved on their docs.

I had a splash of inspiration. I would like to develop a method for analyzing unknown bitstreams of data. The method would involve determining the format of the data by trial and error machine learning algorithms. This would allow determining data types and byte formats and meanings of streams of data. Could be useful in data forensics. I would call the method: heuristic translation machine learning. I am currently developing code that does this. It will be fun to learn about reinforcement algorithms.

I started learning to programming when my dad introduced me to it, I then just started teaching myself and learning via trial and error. Started in C#, went to web (learnt HTML, CSS, JS) then started on SASS and CoffeeScript, after that went to C and C++, then started looking at Angular, and now I'm on Ruby.

And every project from these languages has at least 10 errors -.-

For all the iOS developers in here, Xcode 8.2.1 has a bug, when trying to sign an archive for store deployment, you will get an unexplained error saying "code signing fail", after for hours of frustration, tears and trial and error, I ended up signing it with xcode 7. I hope this helps

I googled the topic I was interested in (a topic that I never worked in) for personal research purposes. I found the call for applications online, but I was 10 days late. I sent mine anyway, one month later I had the job.

I'd call it a mix of sheer luck and trial-and-error.

I "programmed" (or better changed code) long before I even knew this is programming. I basically changed levels in gorillas and nibbles back then during my DOS time thru trial and error by looking and guessing what was written there in the BASIC files. I basically used goto alot 😂.
Later I copied code listings from computer magazines that never worked but took days to type down. My first real programming experience where I bought a much to expensive book and went through it front to back was Java 1.1 or 1.2 ( don't know exactly anymore but it was no later than 1.2) and I learned it because there was this guy that told me about it and I wanted to find out what he was talking about.

How can I avoid coding in trial/error when learning a new framework (recompiling and testing)? I’m learning Unity and find myself constantly recompiling just to test if a single line works. This adds up to a lot of wasted time - am I missing something or not doing something properly?

A website called Team Treehouse, alongside some trial and error

Im deploying a nextjs site via amazon aws amplify. Working with amazon is truly hell. But once it works its truly amazing. Jess bozos have outdone himself. I still dont understand what im doing every time im using aws. Its just trial and error every time for me. (note i still cant deploy the site to my domain there is some build error. Hours of fucking with this and still cant resolve it). However i somehow managed to assign an Amazon SSL Certificate to my domain

I can work productively and for very long hours with a lot of stuff which many dev considers productivity hurdles:

- single small monitor? No problem (in fact in one occasion in which my roommate accidentally broke my laptop charghing port and I couldn't get a spare I worked on an iPad connected trough SSH to a Linux machine completing one of the hardest tasks I ever did without significant loss of productivity)
- old machine? That's ok as long as I can run a minimal Linux and not struggle with Windows
- noise and chatter around me? A 10€ pair of earbuds are enough for me, no noise cancelling needed
- "legacy" stack/programming language? I'd rather spend my days coding in Swift or Rust but in the end I believe which is the dev and its skill which gets the job done not fancy language features so Java 8 will be fine
- no JetBrains or other fancy IDE? Altough some refactoring and code generation stuff is amazing Neovim or VS Code, maybe with the help of some UNIX CLI tools here and there are more than enough

despite this I found out there is a single thing which is like kryptonite for my productivity bringing it from above average* to dangerously low and it's the lack of a quick feedback loop.
For programming tasks that's not a problem because it doesn't matter the language there's always a compiler/interpreter I can use to quickly check what I did and this helps to get quickly in a good work flow but since I went to work with a customer which wants everything deployed on a lazily put together "private cloud" which needs configurations in non-standard and badly documented file formats, has a lot of stuff which instead of being automated gets done trough slowly processed tickets, sometimes things breaks and may take MONTHS to see them fixed... my productivity took a big hit since while I'm still quick at the dev stuff (if I'm able to put together a decent local environment and I don't depend on the cloud of nightmares, something which isn't always warranted) my productivity plummets when I have to integrate what I did or what someone else did in this "cloud" since lacking decent documentation everything has do be done trough a lot of manual tasks and most importantly slow iterations of trial and error. When I have to do that kind stuff (sadly quite often) my brain feels like stuck on "1st gear": I get slow, quickly tired and often I procrastinate a lot even if I force myself out of non work related internet stuff.

*I don't want this to sound braggy but being a passionate developer which breathes computers since childhood and dedicating part of my freetime on continuously improving my skill I have an edge over who do this without much passion or even reluctantly and I say this without wanting to be an èlitist gatekeeper, everyone has to work and tot everybody as the privilege of being passionate in a skill which nowadays has so much market

Codeacademy, books, friends, w3schools(until I figured out the issues with it) and a whole lot of trial and error. Oh and SO helped when I was stuck as it does now.

I once did this project with Apache Tika, which also has a batch module to add concurrency (Tika by itself is not thread-safe).
However, there is maybe 2 pages of documentation which don't explain any of the classes etc, and no javadoc, so I had to figure everything out through trial and error. At the end it still threw an error but magically worked. Turns out it was not fast enough anyway.

Is docker even suitable for anything that isn't deployment?

So much time, so much effort, so much trial and error, and I still feel like I don't know what Docker is for.

I had a development VirtualBox machine, which I used just to compile my code and test my application. So I said "why don't I just use Docker? It would be way simpler". Also because that fucking Virtualbox image was like 10GB, and it was slow af.

The VirtualBox machine wasn't created by me, but it was just given to me by a previous developer, so I just had to imagine what I needed and pick up the pieces. In few hours I was ready with my Dockerfile.

So I tried it, and....... obviously it didn't work. I entered inside my container and I tried to manually execute commands in order to see where it breaks, and I tried to fix each of them. They were just the usual Linux dependencies problems, incompatibility among libraries, and so on.

Putting everything in order, I started over again with a virgin Ubuntu image, and I tried to fix every single error that appeared, I typed something like 1 hundred commands just to have my development machine up and running.

Now I have a running container that works, I don't know how to reproduce it with a Dockerfile, and I don't know what I'm supposed to do with it, because I'm afraid that any wrong command could destroy the container and lose all the job I did. I can't even bind folders because start/exec doesn't support bindings, so I've to copy files.

Furthermore, the documentation about start/exec is very limited, and every question on StackOverflow just talks about deployment. So am I wrong? Did I use containers for something that wasn't their main purpose? What am I supposed to do now? I'm lost, I feel so much stupid.

Just tell me what to do or call a psychologist

Test your code. Take extra time to do self-review. It'll improve your code quality and position within your peers.

When you enter that "minor change-trial-error" phase. Go to sleep or take a long break. You're loosing time and adding more work to be reviewed and corrected later

I guess these days I work with Golang, gRPC, and Kubernetes. I guess that's a dev stack. Or turning into one at the very least. The only thing that annoys me about this stack, is how different deployments for kubernetes are different for CSPs. The fact that setting up a kubernetes/Golang dev environment is take a lot of time and effort. And gRPC can be a pain in the ass to work with as well. Since it's fairly new in large scale enterprise use, finding best practices can be pretty hard, and everything is "feet in the fire" and "trial by error" when dealing with gRPC.

And Golang channels can get very hairy and complicated really really fast. As well as the context package in Golang. And Golang drama with package managers. I wish they would just settle on GoDeps or vgo and call it a day.

And for the love of God, ADD FUCKING GENERICS! Go code can be needlessly long and wordy. The alternative "struct function members" can be pretty clunky at times.

If i have 2 branches on git
- main
- infra

You cannot push directly to main. It is forbidden. You can only merge to main

Now. Once i push to infra branch. Assuming all the shit went good pipeline passed tests passed etc. Then i merge it to main.

Now

Locally while im on infra branch. I have to pull latest changes from main otherwise ill fuck up everything and cause conflicts.

After trial and error i realized i just have to do:
git fetch

This fetches all shits from main (defaukt branch) into infra branch. And now it works. No rebase. No pull. Wtf?

Is this the correct way to do it?

Also i need someone to explain this to me like im 5:
- git pull
- git pull --rebase
- git fetch

What is the difference between those 3 commands? I tried googling and chatgpting but i cant seem to understand any explanation. Explain it to me in simple terms with examples

This begs the question: how do you define being good at programming? How can you tell if you are actually good or just think you are?

Having asked that, I think I’m getting there... by reading other people’s code, by listening to feedback from better devs than I am, by asking questions and discussing matters I may not fully comprehend, by reading books and articles, by trial and error and by constantly seeking new concepts, languages and other relevant matters to learn. That’s how one becomes better - when one is good, is another story altogether.

Involuntary trial-and-error brute force

Client purchases platform from large tech company. Needs to be able to add custom CSS and JS. Spend weeks combing through sites looking for documentation. Compile my own from my own trial and error, a half ass wiki, and forums.

Client's platform is years out of date.

Is this DevOps, full-stack, or even just ordinary web development madness, when Docker, npm, and IDE plugins keep bitching around with unhelpful warnings and error messages, until hours after researching contradicting recommendations and tutorials and a lot of trial and error, the tools finally begin to behave in a helpful way again?

I mostly trial and error maths stuff because I suck at maths.