“That regex almost worked, lemme just tweak it a bit–”
*2 hours later*
“Fuck it we’re processing strings character by character with a while loop like granddad did.”

Well, here's the OS rant I promised. Also apologies for no blog posts the past few weeks, working on one but I want to have all the information correct and time isn't my best friend right now :/

Anyways, let's talk about operating systems. They serve a purpose which is the goal which the user has.
So, as everyone says (or, loads of people), every system is good for a purpose and you can't call the mainstream systems shit because they all have their use.

Last part is true (that they all have their use) but defining a good system is up to an individual. So, a system which I'd be able to call good, had at least the following 'features':
- it gives the user freedom. If someone just wants to use it for emailing and webbrowsing, fair enough. If someone wants to produce music on it, fair enough. If someone wants to rebuild the entire system to suit their needs, fair enough. If someone wants to check the source code to see what's actually running on their hardware, fair enough. It should be up to the user to decide what they want to/can do and not up to the maker of that system.
- it tries it's best to keep the security/privacy of its users protected. Meaning, by default, no calling home, no integrating users within mass surveillance programs and no unnecessary data collection.
- Open. Especially in an age of mass surveillance, it's very important that one has the option to check the underlying code for vulnerabilities/backdoors. Can everyone do that, nope. But that doesn't mean that the option shouldn't be there because it's also about transparency so you don't HAVE to trust a software vendor on their blue eyes.
- stability. A system should be stable enough for home users to use. For people who like to tweak around? Also, but tweaking *can* lead to instability and crashes, that's not the systems' responsibility.

Especially the security and privacy AND open parts are why I wouldn't ever voluntarily (if my job would depend on it, sure, I kinda need money to stay alive so I'll take that) use windows or macos. Sure, apple seems to care about user privacy way more than other vendors but as long as nobody can verify that through source code, no offense, I won't believe a thing they say about that because no one can technically verify it anyways.

Some people have told me that Linux is hard to use for new/(highly) a-technical people but looking at my own family and friends who adapted fast as hell and don't want to go back to windows now (and mac, for that matter), I highly doubt that. Sure, they'll have to learn something new. But that was also the case when they started to use any other system for the first time. Possibly try a different distro if one doesn't fit?

Problems - sometimes hard to solve on Linux, no doubt about that. But, at least its open. Meaning that someone can dive in as deep as possible/necessary to solve the problem. That's something which is very difficult with closed systems.

The best example in this case for me (don't remember how I did it by the way) was when I mounted a network drive at boot on windows and Linux (two systems using the same webDav drive). I changed the authentication and both systems weren't in for booting anymore. Hours of searching how to unfuck this on windows - I ended up reinstalling it because I just couldn't find a solution.
On linux, i found some article quite quickly telling to remove the entry for the webdav thingy from fstab. Booted into a root recovery shell, chrooted to the harddrive, removed the entry in fstab and rebooted. BAM. Everything worked again.

So yeah, that's my view on this, I guess ;P

Meanwhile at HTC:
Dev: Just gonna tweak this function to make our keyboard faster!
Dev: ha! Done, users will love this update

My friend brought me a simple python problem. He expected the output to be 2,2,3... instead of 2,3... I didn't know python, but with a quick tweak to differentiate the two prints, I understood that the range() function is exclusive.

Before coming to me, he asked his senior dev & that guy just said - "Oh, your editor has a problem". 😐

Don't want to break your commit streak on Github.
So you change one line and :-
git add .
git commit -m "Minor Tweak"
git push

VOILA ! the box is green for today . *Evil Smile*

Help.

I'm a hardware guy. If I do software, it's bare-metal (almost always). I need to fully understand my build system and tweak it exactly to my needs. I'm the sorta guy that needs memory alignment and bitwise operations on a daily basis. I'm always cautious about processor cycles, memory allocation, and power consumption. I think twice if I really need to use a float there and I consider exactly what cost the abstraction layers I build come at.

I had done some web design and development, but that was back in the day when you knew all the workarounds for IE 5-7 by heart and when people were disappointed there wasn't going to be a XHTML 2.0. I didn't build anything large until recently.

Since that time, a lot has happened. Web development has evolved in a way I didn't really fancy, to say the least. Client-side rendering for everything the server could easily do? Of course. Wasting precious energy on mobile devices because it works well enough? Naturally. Solving the simplest problems with a gigantic mess of dependencies you don't even bother to inspect? Well, how else are you going to handle all your sensitive data?

I was going to compare this to the Arduino culture of using modules you don't understand in code you don't understand. But then again, you don't see consumer products or customer-specific electronics powered by an Arduino (at least not that I'm aware of).

I'm just not fit for that shooting-drills-at-walls methodology for getting holes. I'm not against neither easy nor pretty-to-look-at solutions, but it just comes across as wasteful for me nowadays.

So, after my hiatus from web development, I've now been in a sort of internet platform project for a few months. I'm now directly confronted with all that you guys love and hate, frontend frameworks and Node for the backend and whatever. I deliberately didn't voice my opinion when the stack was chosen, because I didn't want to interfere with the modern ways and instead get some experience out of it (and I am).

And now, I'm slowly starting to feel like it was OKAY to work like this.

The DE life cycle of every Linux hobbyist:

1. Let's work with Unity.... it's so blah
2. Let's check out XFCE.... it does its job, but it needs more zing
3. Let's check out KDE...aah, my poor battery.
4. Let's check out LXDE.... Can you be any more boring?
5. Let's check out Pantheon.... This is perfect, but I'm tired of using a tweak tool to even enable minimize and maximize
6. Let's go to Gnome 3...Ah never mind
7. Let's go to Cinnamon... Blurgh, It reminds me of Windows
8. Let's go to MATE....Hmm, Mutiny layout?!! It reminds me of Unity. Wonder if Unity 8 has made any progress!
9. Go back to Step 1.

OCR (The exam board for my course) are fucking thick in the head when it comes to anything computing.

- I get a mark or two for saying open source software is worse than thier propritary counterparts
- ALL open source software forks must also be make open source. They spend so much time going over the legal stuff BUT HAVE NEVER HEARD OF OPEN SOURCE LICENCING!
- One exam paper had a not gate picture with 2 inputs...
- I have to differentiate between portable and handheld! YOU MEAN HANDHELD DEVICES ARE NOT PORTABLE!?!!?!?
- In level 2 education, OCR say 1 MB = 1024 KB - In level 3, they say 1 MB = 1000 KB, and 1 MiB = 1024 KiB, and expect you to differentiate. Why do you expect the wrong answer in level 2!?
- INFORMATION FORMATS AND STYLES ARE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THINGS! If you look up synonyms for "style", "form" is there, and if you look up synonyms for "format", "style" is there.
- When asked for storage devices, I have to say "smartphone", "tablet", "desktop PC" - I mean yeah they store data but when you ask me for storage devices I will say "hard disk drive", "solid state drive", "SD card", etc. >.>

I could probably go on an on about this...
I sure do love being asked to copy-paste existing HTML/JS/CSS and being asked to just tweak it here and there, and then wait for other people's incompetence in copy-pasting... I sure do love being stuck with this sort of "education" ._.

I don't believe this. I have to install Gnome Tweak Tools to remove the "Trash" icon from desktop. What the hell :/

Employer asked, whether I could tweak the site's admin template that was made in 2005.
It uses tables to generate new webpages.
It uses php.
UI is a nonsense spaggethi crap.
Whole thing is shit.

Well, for good money I will just write everything from scratch. Took me ~10 hours and I already have the functionality that was in the original crap. Crazy how these 'devs' scam people!

I make a presentation to explain to the boss why we had to tweak around the requirements in order to keep backwards compatibility and stuff. I take 15 minutes explaining how our system currently works and how these requirements would change it, etc etc.

"So... is this workflow okay for our customers?"

They stared into the presentation slide for a good minute.

"I think we should align this row over here with that square over there."

"Oh don't worry this is a demo. But do you think our customers will still be okay with these changes?"

"Yeah, but these two elements are unalligned and they look pretty bad."

I'm starting to think that fancy speech can deter people from questioning or complaining to you. I'm pretty sure they don't know their own product as well as I know it.

It seems like the project I'm tasked to tweak last edited when I was 4 years old... 😏 I doubt is there any dinasour alive who used that generation's technology. :P

Life cycle of code

1- See what sound code I have written! It's beautiful.

2 - Hey we missed something last time, just add this bit of tweak.

3 - We need to add some flags for some exception cases

4 - Hey there is a new requirement. Just add some more paths and more flags

5 - More flags!

6 - This shit runs now more on flags than on the design!

7 - Flagception!

I just don't get my coworkers. They tweak designs, they tweak functionality, but no task is made.

They just simply update designs in Figma, without notifying anyone or just msg me on Slack what to change...

How the fuck do you guarantee that all those tweaks will get reflected to the app? How do you guarantee I won't forget? How do you guarantee QA will test your stupid tweaks?

Freelance:

Me: I'm done with the major bugs. Can I do the minor bugs tomorrow?
PM: can you hang on just a moment? Can you pls remove the ...
Me: I'll try. I'm experiencing brain dysfunction right now.
PM: Oh? Hahaha! Just a minor tweak tho. Teeheehee.
Me: (fudge)

Okay, I'm interning at a government institution & boy let me just tell you... mmmh... A FUCKING MESS!

So I'm tasked with developing a HR system that the whole company should eventually use. I tell them I'm not familiar with the open source technologies they'd like me to use, they tell me no worries, you can develop a prototype with a tech stack that you're familiar with. Also, they tell me that they don't quite have the requirements from HR so what I can do for my prototype is just develop something "general" that works according to their "idea".

Being the good intern I am, I develop quite a good functioning prototype & present it to the team who then present it to the managers.

Finally we're all called in for a final meeting with the managers & HR, and guess what? The requirements for the system are different. Almost 90% of the features we built into the prototype need to change. Also, the system must use open source technologies. The managers promise to send a detailed requirements specification document, with sample data. I think this is a great idea as there's still a lot I don't understand. I expected this to happen, so I soon start to redesign afresh, this time trying as hard as possible to consider open source technologies within my plans.

But noooo... My team wants me to "finish" the system!

"Finish" what system, I ask? That was a prototype!

"Just tweak the functionality you built to meet the new requirements".

WTF!

We don't even have the actual requirements specification document, so I'll still be coding blindly. Also, the whole system needs to be re-built using open source technology!

Instead of pushing me to develop a system blindly, with no requirements, how about you push HR to tell you exactly what they need and how it should work first!?

I'm honestly exhausted with the false sense of urgency from my team!!

If your client doesn't know what the fuck he wants to see on his website even with all text and images included - don't take this fucking job.

They will let you choose a template and you end up switching it 5 times. "Oh we don't like it. What else do you have? Oh, this looks better." Next day "We don't like this theme anymore. We want to switch to what we had before."

If people can't draw their home page on a paper I tell them go fuck yourself straight in a face. I always put these people on my reference list so my future clients know I'm straightforward, not lazy, not low skilled, but honest with dumbasses like some of my previous clients.

You are asking for a basic website with 5 pages, you have a shitty budget and then I have to customize the entire theme and tweak every fucking possible element in CSS, HTML and PHP. Go fuck yourself. All you get for your money is WordPress with 15 min consultation how to copy paste your shit and save it. Never do fixed budgets, never work on projects like this if it's under $500-1000. Meet with the client to understand him/her better and see if he is a jackass-perfectionist or a chill person who won't be picky.

That's my memories of being a freelancer, trying to get any job for any budget just to build my portfolio. Never going back to this, at least not for small businesses with less than $5,000 budget. Reading people before you start working with them is a good thing.

I think I have multiple but this guy stands out.

He was a fellow student at my software development study. Used primarily FOSS systems/software, not because he cared about ethics as much but because that way he could tinker with the software as much as he wanted.

He was always searching for new things to tweak, write, explore and so on. And he shared as much as he could with fellow students.

A few examples of what he did:
- wanted to change something about how Linux worked at its core (he mainly used debian based systems) so he learned how to write kernel modules and wrote his solution.
- wanted to be able to monitor his gas/power usage so he hacked an arduino thing into the power/gas meter and got it to send updates to a messenger at command.
- setup and automated mini data center because fuck it, fun to do.

His thinking was always very creative and to this day I still appreciate what he taught me on that!

Managed to succesfully tweak bootstrap 3 into using flex-box like attributes. Works perfectly... Aaaaand then there's Internet explorer...

Going through site after senior dev asked front end dev to go through it and tweak it for design and better responsiveness(he and I are back end oriented and have no design skillz).

Things are breaking visually on almost all devices.

Client sends an email saying it suddenly looks terrible on mobile and wants to know what happened. I let him know we were actively working on things and it should be good in a few minutes.

Looking over CSS...there are "!important" tags EVERYWHERE, media queries are in the wrong order and have "!important" attached to almost everything so the largest screen size settings win.

Why do I even bother?

that feeling when you start looking at code after dinner, correct a bug or two, start implementing new features, tweak the code a little bit, you are really focus in your coding... then look out the window and realize the sun is about to come up. it's great 🤓

Okay, can we just all agree to stop making YABSS? (Yet Another Bootstrap Standard Site)

Yes, Bootstrap can be used for nice things, if you actually dig into it and tweak it, but please don't just copy/paste a fucking getting started template!

FFS! Stop it!

Ah, developers, the unsung heroes of caffeine-fueled coding marathons and keyboard clacking symphonies! These mystical beings have a way of turning coffee and pizza into lines of code that somehow make the world go 'round.

Have you ever seen a developer in their natural habitat? They huddle in dimly lit rooms, surrounded by monitors glowing like magic crystals. Their battle cries of "It works on my machine!" echo through the corridors, as they summon the mighty powers of Stack Overflow and Google to conquer bugs and errors.

And let's talk about the coffee addiction – it's like they believe caffeine is the elixir of code immortality. The way they guard their mugs, you'd think it's the Holy Grail. In fact, a developer without coffee is like a computer without RAM – it just doesn't function properly.

But don't let their nerdy exteriors fool you. Deep down, they're dreamers. They dream of a world where every line of code is bug-free and every user is happy. A world where the boss understands what "just one more line of code" really means.

Speaking of bosses, developers have a unique ability to turn simple requests into complex projects. "Can you make a small tweak?" the boss asks innocently. And the developer replies, "Sure, it's just a minor change," while mentally calculating the time it'll take and the potential for scope creep.

Let's not forget their passion for acronyms. TLA (Three-Letter Acronym) is their second language. API, CSS, HTML, PHP, SQL... it's like they're playing a never-ending game of Scrabble with abbreviations.

And documentation? Well, that's their arch-nemesis. It's as if writing clear instructions is harder than debugging quantum mechanics. "The code is self-explanatory," they claim, leaving everyone else scratching their heads.

In the end, developers are a quirky bunch, but we love them for it. Their quirks and peculiarities are what make them the creative, brilliant minds that power our digital world. So here's to developers, the masters of logic and the wizards of the virtual realm!

Working along in a codebase for a few weeks. Then finding out there is a better more performant way to do something. Having to go back and tweak everything to use that feature you should have been using in the first place.

Thankfully, this has taught me to be more modular in the code.

Most successful project at work: NodeJS utility for storing loads of measurements from an application running on various other systems and providing fast ways of getting at that data. No DB, just CSV files broken into time periods. Also has a search function written in C that can very quickly find all user sessions matching the criteria. It's not perfect, but it does the job pretty well and I can tweak the storage engine as much as needed for our use case since its all custom written.

Outside of work: Incomplete right now but I soldered some wires onto an old sound card and managed to get an Arduino to configure it and play some notes on its FM synthesis chip. Still quite a newbie to electronics so this was quite an achievement for me personally.

Designers, if you're on revision No. 12 and have changed every element of a design it's not a 'tweak', it's a sign you didn't think it through the first time...

No biometry... No electronic passport... Guess I would rumple my hair and tweak my face to fit in. 🤷

Combine multiple open source softwares.
Tweak it a bit
Voila! You've a 100 dollar software ready to be sold.

Recently installed SonarQube and its been amazing to see the level of code quality (or lack thereof)

Some projects have 30 to 60 days of technical debt and I found a few files with a cyclomatic complexity over 100. I’m still learning what the “good” numbers should be.

Yesterday, couple of devs were very proud they were going to start reducing the numbers, they started with one of my solutions that had 5 minutes of technical debt. Yes, 5 minutes.

DevA: “OMG…look at this…it has a cyclomatic complexity of 11…that’s terrible. I thought we were supposed to be professional developers.”
DevB: “And take a look at this, he used the double-slash instead of a triple slash for comments. How does any of code even compile?!”
Me: “Maybe we should tweak some of those SonarQube rules so they make more sense to our code base. We’re never going to use unicode, so all those string culture warnings should go away and code comment formatting? Who cares? Be happy we have comments. I think we should also focus on the bigger fish in that pond. The CRM project is one of the biggest and has a lot of improvement opportunities.”
DevB: “There you go again, don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions..ha ha”
DevA: “Yea, no kidding …hey…did you see the logger? OMG…the whole class is over 25 lines…we gotta split that up into smaller projects so it’s more manageable.”

It’s a good thing our revenue stream isn’t dependent on people getting work done.

I decided to tweak my two years old-mild overclocking on my main/home pc, to get more juice out of it.

Started with small steps running benchmarks each time I upped the clock.
Didnt crash me once up until it crashed while windows was booting after restart.
I thought to myself, that's normal, now I just have to lower it a bit until I find the sweet spot.

After windows finished crash dumping, restarted, lowered clock from bios, and headed to boot windows.

Windows recovery came up to scan my installation, pretty normal after a bsod.
I was waiting for it to finish, thinking that ofc there is no error you silly windows, until the recovery said that it could not recognize the error.

Proceeding to boot normal windows via the correspndent button in the recovery, the recovery itself came up again scanning for errors. I waited again only for the same outcome, and restarted my pc.
Yeap the recovery again scanning for errors.

How the hell did my boot became corrupted after just a crash. I've been fighting since yesterday for hours to fix this shitty situation but to no avail. I really dont want to clean install...

I couldnt even sleep well last night thinking that I have to fix this after work today...

Fuck my life, fuck windows

When I was young I'd play games and around age 11 received an Xbox for my bday. Hated the case, so I painted the case. Since I had it open looked into getting a replacement fan.Thats when everything changed. I discovered the modding scene and without having any computer background/literacy got to studying.

The program that caught my eye ran on Linux. *shrugs thinking how hard can it be? * Read about Linux and discover dual booting. To do that I needed to resize windows partition. Learn more about partitions and get to it. Finally prepped... Backup in case of the worst, resized windows partition, working Ubuntu bootable USB, and printed install tutorial. Check, check, and check. Install was good. Sort of.

While Ubuntu worked, the broadcam wireless chipset driver did not. Fast forward a week and I feel that i had mastered the terminal basics. And WiFi worked! Go download the aforementioned program and FTP into the Xbox and BOOM... It doesn't work. More days and hours spent researching. In the end it all chalked up to not setting a static IP address on Xbox.

After all was said and done I had a bitchin Xbox. I think the only thing I didn't put on it was some gold spinning rims.

Sad part about that Xbox is that I never used it after. Instead I just kept messing around with Linux and learning more about computers. Taught myself HTML/CSS. Learned more about shell scripting. Then Windows cmd basics. Tried programming languages but felt a little overwhelmed. Only messed with <10 lines of code to tweak existing programs.

Now I'm learning C# and loving it. Planning on C++ or Java next!

Holy shit sometimes I hate my job. Current assignment: translate a C++ COM class to C#. Requirement: interface should not change. I ask the other team using this interface to ask me any questions so I can address their concerns. First FUCKING thing they ask for: a diagram explaining how to access the interface. For. Fuck. Sake. The goddamn thing is not changing. At all. I have said that to every stakeholder every time. It's a changed reference and a tweak to some calls to make them .Net calls. Why am I redocumenting something that was documented years ago?

Package Installer on android needs to show something other than just the progress bar. Even a basic log like windows installers that say, "copying this, extracting this, done..." If it affects the minimalism of the interface, they could try doing what Tor browser does- swipe to see a log. It just feels heartbreaking to wait 5 long minutes for it to process on this tortoise device, and then get, "app not installed." with an OK button. :( Like, whyyyy? There should be a "THAT'S NOT OK" button.

Is there any magisk module for this? Or some other tweak?

As a sequel to my previous rant:
Me: git pull origin develop

Prettier: * runs *

* 5000 new changes in 43 files *

Thanks prettier, that's exactly what i wanted to happen. I guess it's time for me to tweak its settings a little.

Ever had the experience of looking for the perfect js library to do some small job for you, after hours of evaluating, trying to tweak the one that seems closest to what you want, you end up thinking I should rather just code this myself.

So, project needs vive headset + unity.
Set up done, unity project made, set up, plug the two, start tweaking, fixing stuff... Aaaaand need to tweak the script. Double click, MS studio comes up... Need to reactive the license...
I don't have a personal license (and I never will get one either, given how many times microshit has been a major pain in my glorious ass, I tend to avoid their shithole of products at all costs. Somebody else actually gave me access for this project.
So, that doesn't work, goes to download a free version, aaaaaaand apparently my level of access doesn't allow me to install this one.

... UrghhhhhAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Notepad++ it is. 😶

Random guy messages me on WhatsApp that he needs help, that his friend told him I'm good at blah blah blah.........

the issue: he paid for some random php bitcoin thingy blah blah, sent me a link to the site, pretty straightforward instructions on how to use it. I explained everything to him and he says he wants to tweak the php script before he puts it out.
me: then do it

him: how do I start?

me(in my head): did you not think of this before paying for the script?!

also me: oh well, download xampp, good for beginners, easy to setup.

him: not working! please help me

I knew from the onset that he was a windows user.

he started by running it without admin privileges
I had no idea and kept solving problems that didn't exist until I asked him to snap the log, after explaining how to run a software as administrator, we Solved it

port 80 was taken. had to go through the process of changing the ports, I had to validate every single change.

going through the procedure of reinstalling because he installed to some crappy directory. after all the headaches and then redoing all the processes stated above, it still doesn't work.

one final solution left and I am dropping him like a hot potato. I must have close to a hundred pictures of someone's screen on my phone.

little question: when he types localhost on his browser windows IIS page thingy pops up. I was thinking of changing the server name to localserver: new port address

When you need to tweak that css so it works on all devices

Samsung Keyboard is utter shit.
GBoard (Google Keyboard) is like a ray of sunshine in comparison.

The Samsung keyboard actually changes whole words to completely different words. It even replaces words with misspellings. No, these were not words I had misspelled before. Tried to turn off autocorrect and keep suggestions. They are the SAME setting. Like if you are going to make a shitty ass version of the GBoard, at least keep the same ability to tweak settings.

In contrast I installed GBoard and was able to disable JUST autocorrect and keep suggestions.

Just like most Samsung apps Samsung Keyboard is utter shit.

FUCK YOU SAMSUNG!

There was a "Snake" game on an old windows machine that came with the source code. I was able to tweak the code enough to add interesting twists to the game. From then on I was hooked.

When PM tells me tweak something like 10 times I’ll just write ‘progress’ when commit.

My biggest dev sin is premature optimization. I'll try to produce the best possible code without the need for it to be there. I will waste my time thinking of wierd edge cases that can be handled with a simple if-else, but why not tweak the algo to handle them internally.

10 hours ago I was trying to install manjaro on my laptop. I have run into problems with the nvidicancer drivers, as one would expect, but at least I had a working OS. I was following a video tutorial that instructed me to tweak some grub settings, and I was able to do it with no problem.

Now on the other hand, I am following the EXACT SAME procedure (same partition, same installer, same settings),but after I update-grub,everything freezes including the command itself.

How is it possible that doing the exact same procedure at different times of the day gives me two different results? Is my laptop sentient and simply "not in the mood" anymore, or what the fuck?

So this is the story of myself getting from hating vim to find it pretty good.

When i started fiddling around with linux i was literally overrun by vim. I mean how the fuck should i remember all these stupid commands.
So there we go ... nano was my favourite (and only) editor i used.

Everything was fine in my little nano world. I saw some colleague editing every damn thing in vim. I asked him "man what the fuck are you damn crazy"? And thats where till that moment the deepest conversation about an editor in my life began. He told me he could do that much with vim, its almost everywhere nowadays and a must for any admin.

So after letting him tell me about every thing you can do he promised me he is going to help me getting started quicker. And i must say boi vim is really awesome. But for "real" development i still use a ide. Although i find myself programming go, python or bash scripts entirely in vim and its not that bad.

So if you find your way through the deep shit of that single damn command input down there you can get a pretty decent editor.

Dont get me wrong i am forced to use nano sometimes, when i help some of friends with their servers or so and they litterally uninstalled vim because they were to frustrated.

So as i am started to go into the devops area you get more and more towards you have to edit a file on a server, or just tweak around before automating the shit out of it.

And i must say vim has become a solid alternative for me to a full blown ide, or any other text editor.

So yeah i am gone from freaking hating vim to using it almost everyday. But why some people out their treat vim like a religion is not understandable to me in any way.

So whats your story why do you hate/love vim? Or are you just like me a "happy user" that would switch to another editor anytime it would be a better fit?

I am currently running a heavily modded version of Ubuntu 18.04. I remove gnome applications, installed xfce with sddm for my login manager, plus removed a bunch of their pre-installed applications. I mostly use AppImages and snaps for installations with occasionally using apt for packages I am too lazy to build or are not in snap form.

I have been contemplating switching to Arch/Antegros/Manjaro. Mostly because I am crazy and heard that I could get a performance boost and I like being more in control of my own software.

My question is this, does it make sense for me to switch distros? Also, I'd like to have a close to the metal Arch install, but last time I did that I got annoyed with configuring too much from the bare bone, took me like close to an hour of setup, it was not hard, just really tedious.... Is Antegros/Manjaro have options to be really close to the bare-metal? Is there maybe a really good install script that I can just tweak some basic settings for?

So we used to build these awful "promotion" pages for a leading manufacturer in the area. Because the website was old as dirt, there was no CMS and everything was static html using Coldfusion for a few include files like for the nav and such.

Every year we would get a new project to tweak the promotion details a little, and change the year from 2011 to 2012, etc.

My predecessor put the digit "1" in an HTML file called year.html, then included it like:
"valid from January 1 though December 31, 201<cfinclude template="year.html">..."

Why? Just why? And if you're going to use include files, for Pete's sake at least use the proper .cfm file extension!

Finally, after days of research and failures, I managed to understand and tweak TensorFlow's program for image classification.

The feel of power, arcane knowledge and fascination is just incredible.

Might not seem much these days, nobody was interested in it. But I, deep inside, knew: I was proud of myself.

Looking at JIRA and seeing 'Minor colour tweak' prioritised above 'Site spitting out 500 errors'

As promissed.

Day #1 on THE other project. Nothing fancy, just setting up my dev env. Got a decent pc with all the required network permissions. And this time I got w10 [last year I was working there on w7 pc via rdp from another w7 laptop. Dont ask...]
of course no localadmin rights to set shit up. Downloaded all the installs, found someone who has admin rights to run them. I even managed to get admin powershell!

Ran all installers, enabled long paths support, env vars, tweak here, tweak there,... Installed git bash to at least have a taste of shell. Decided to try out wsl. Enabled the feature, didnt reboot right away.
Rebooted. 2xclick on ubuntu setup and I get an error claiming wsl is not ebabled. Wtf? Did I do it wrong? I see bash command is there now so I must have done it right. After some googling I found out that even though I can enable wsl, it doesnt work on my version of windows. It's too okd they say. Yeah, tx MS, that's very intuitive and user friendly!

Allright, my hopes to habe a decent sub-os died. Git bash it is :( but I miss tmux soooo much. Then I came across smth that caught my eye. Msys2 it's called. Apparently it's based on cygwin and has a pacman package manager! ´pacman -S tmux´ -- hippee-ka-yay motherfuckers! It's not the best terminal emulation, but it works quite allright and it has tmux. And netcat!

Banished to mouseclickerland still managed to find a good enough shell. Yayy!

So there it is. My first day's ups and downs, disappointments and discoveries.
If you know a better shell I could set up on w10, please, share

I would enjoy a position where I would have to write tons of tiny scripts for solving different logic problems. Tweak data, visualise it, pass it through different mediums. I would feel the best in research, implementing and testing different ideas, and build solutions for later use. Right now I'm on the first line at the customer site where the upcoming problems have to be solved instantly, I have the constant feeling that the thing could be much more efficient but there is no time for change, test and implement differently, so I'm not really using my full capacity on anything. I'm kind of a user of the built stuff but I feel more a developer. At the other end I'm satisfied and this is the best job I ever had :)

Before get get source code for freelance job, the person who cantact me say the job is to continue the project for some update and tweak.

The UI from design is beautiful and he gave good explaination for the project and the update, continue to conversarion, negosiation and deal.

but he is not the IT guy and also the project is not his work or something that he do previosly. All the person who work on that project is already leave and not contactable.

And here that I get:
- source code
- domain cred.

And here what's missing:
- documentation
- .env file
- db backup / old db cred.
- server and hosting cred.

And after some hour of learning the code I find out that:
- latest commit was 2 year ago and different from production version.
- most of the branch is RnD.
- the code have many wtf/minute lol

And for now I still re-negotiate with the person who give me the project with 2 suggestion from me.
- continue with this code with condition, he need to search for the missing part at least backup db or documentation.
- recreate the project with more time

And here's one funny part of the code.
randomNumber(){
return 5 // this number was choose by dev team at random
}

I feel the need for a personal AI is real. I mean at this stage of my life I feel replacing humans around/close to me with a strong AI.
The idea is kinda creation of a strong AI but control its learning ability limited to one user.
Pros:
You have someone who understands you completely.
Knows what/how to talk no matter How's your mood.
Could be used to calm down the user even in critical situations.

Besides, if something doesn't workout just fucking tweak the code its yours no matter what the fuck you do with it.
Do I make sense??

Going trough word document with client comments on website and this is last small tweak "Please can you insert the ‘Shop’ tab to the top of the page on the far right. "

!rant
Experienced devs please tell help me.

Learning software development has been a challenge. Many times it's frustrating.

I also learn languages and I find them to share one trait with software development, which is complexity.

At first I looked at languages the way I'm currently doing with software. I'd look in a new language and after decided it's cool to learn it, I would stare at it for a few weeks trying to realize what the heck I was going to do. I wouldn't even know how to get started.

Eventually this stage goes away and I think that is about to happen with me with software.

But then a new challenge would come, which is me not making progress as I wanted. That's sort of happening with me by learning software as well, bit in language I now know how to deal with it.
That's because I work full time with something that isn't in my interests and when I arrive home Im tired and want to relax. So I decided my language learning had to go slower as long as I have this job, meaning no hours spent in front of books or a pc studying - that's what I could do with English, I was a teenager and had 12 hours a day to do whatever I wanted.

So I usually spent 5 minutes here and there learning something in my target language when I can, no frustration needed, my only rule is: practice everyday, even if I don't learn anything new.

With software, that doesn't apply though.

So, what I mean by tracing a parallel between these to fields is that I have a strong conviction is that once you get the principles on how a certain kind of learning works, you can apply it everywhere in the field. But with software it's been harder.
Anyways, I see that are some principles that apply, cause trying to learn software is changinge and teaching a lot of things like:

*you have to read a lot (of documentation) . At first I thought all documentation was painful to read and understand, but I found out some software are well documented and one can use those only to get used with it.

*immersion / discipline are important. I'm not very disciplined, I'm better with immersion but both are important if you need to acquire complex subjects/skills

*how to deal with complexity. I installed Arch Linux a few days ago. Just to install it I ended up reading more than 20 pages of documentation (install guide, Wpa supplicant, systemd, networkd, xorg, etc etc). Gradually I'm realizing that when you have to install/tweak something in that distro you necessarily spend a bunch of time trying to understand how it works, otherwise you don't get too far like in Ubuntu or Debian.

*and lastly the one that bothers me. Constantly getting frustrated and feeling crap about my poor skills. No matter how much I progress, it still seems like I'm stuck.
(that's when I ask your help/opinion :) )

I started a new job in engineering at CenturyLink a few weeks ago - before this I was doing IT for dental offices in the greater Seattle area. Anyway, I wanted a registry tweak to make Excel open files in separate windows, instead of putting them in one. Today I was told by our IT that you need 16GB of RAM to open multiple Excel spreadsheets in separate windows. Suffice to say I told him he was insane and ended the chat.

And yes, I know there are ways to do it anyway, like opening new instances of Excel and then opening the file inside of Excel, but that's unnecessary clicks, dammit.

I am new to Ubuntu or any Linux OS and have been hearing a few good things about them.

So few days ago I decided to try out the Ubuntu 17.10, after which I installed Gnome Tweak Tool to customize the look and feel. After installing some themes and applying them I found the whitish bar appear as you can see in the photo I attached. I do not like it (hated it also when I used Windows). Please how do I make this go away as I have googled alot about it but cant get anything helpful.

I also have the issue of my Windows button not performing any shortcut task as before like showing the desktop screen (this now happens when I click the Windows buttton + A key)

Thank you all

Suffering from the cash flow blues.

Remote contracting roles are far and few between, and so far I’ve only found the one client, the problem is that because they’ve been burned in the past by contractors, they only operate on an order by order basis.

So we’re stuck in this perpetual cycle of issues > estimates > order > development > test > tweak > pay and repeat.

The problem is that there is always significant delay between the stages from both sides, either because they’re busy on stuff, or I’ve burnt myself out rushing to meet an estimate and having to take a bit of breathing room.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s great working in blocks of a few days to a week and then having some time to myself (and the money is nice too), but the cash flow inconsistency is super scary when you’re having to manage corporation tax, accountancy fees and a salary.

Anyone else have these issues / know good places to find remote contract work?

git cherry-pick -n <commit>

The "-n" is alias for "--no-commit" and it applies the content of the target commit into your working directory without making any commit. Usefull if you want to cherry-pick many commits, tweak them and make a new one or simply want to grab some functionality into your index.

What's yours well-appreciated but not-that-well-known git functionality?

When you forget to push the code on Git, you reload the website and nothing has changed. Go back to code to tweak some more and then push to Git. Now you have to go back to code to remove the extra tweak you've done and test again... 😅

Well today my boss wants me to “tweak” our coldfusion framework to behave like a REST api....talk about an entire rewrite.

There’s a reason why no one uses coldfusion anymore.

my brain is shit right now but I just open rust to tweak some little things and next thing I know I have a finished product and like 3 more ideas I could probably put in in the next 30 minutes but I didn't plan to be so productive so I'm a bit turned off frankly

I'm also not mentally tracking any of this

how dare it

I am upset

Congratulated a Dev at my company after he had finished all the functional testing...

Until he mentioned that he just needs to tweak the test to work with the new code now..

I'm writing a minor productivity app which consumes and modifies a vbscript file on a network drive which apparently gets included in other productivity tools to drive the business, as well as updates the relevant DNS entry the field is associated with, and because I care about making the world a better place now writes the data out to what I hope becomes the authoritative source for said data which eventually replaces these who-the-knows-why-they-are-there network drive files and snippets.

The tool removes the need for an ISP tech in the field to make TWO phone calls when they update network equipment. One for the vbscript tweak, one for the DNS update.

Oh, did I mention that some PHP app under a L1 helpdesk guy's desk that the company has made absolutely necessary for their business (and I subsequently moved to a god damn server) consumes the vbscript file and parses it into something PHP can understand?

You can't make this shit up.

The only saving grace is that I have my team rewriting all of this ridiculous shit in Haskell. Type safety and long term refatorability will keep us sane.

I have been searching for a suitable bootstrap web app template for a project for two days now...
I am done with the backend, it’s just remaining a nice template, I can tweak to fit in my requirements.

Hear me out:

Since keras and tf are pretty much schema design rn what if someone made a no-code solution where you drag and drop layers and tweak things in a UI so those data scientists can design it in a UI instead of writing shitty code?

Thank you modpagespeed to use shit methods to compress the source and your amazing work with client side cache. The whole site was fucked up for a day and I didn't notice.

Note: press Ctrl F5 20 times if you tweak anything in js. Even if it's 100% working, pagespeed can fuck it up. Turn that shit off.

When you're testing a website on the iPhone and in order to clear the cache you have to go through settings menu just to try a fucking tweak out.

Is there any way on the iPhone to do it quickly? < iOS11 you could tap refresh 5 times. ARGHHH

Bit of a stupid oopsie I had today that someone might appreciate.

We’re working on a microservice project in Spring Boot, running in a docker swarm. Past few days I get a Spring Cloud config server going in separate stack, create an overlay network, and get CI deployments to use the right profiles etc. It’s looking great, and the first component is working spectacularly.

Now just to do the other 6. Move config files to the Git repo, tweak CI, all the other faffing and hoohas; and deploy. Health checks keep failing, the containers are murdering themselves and resurrecting ad infinitum. They’re doing this so quickly that by the time I get the container ID to exec in and curl health, it’s no longer running. Cue frustration, increased caffeine and nicotine consumption; my sanity is slipping.

No errors in the logs, because from experience the Cloud Config errors ar at debug level. Whhhyyyy?? Some time later (way longer than it should have been) I realize I had never actually included the Spring Cloud Config starter. Boot 101, get your starter!
Since config client is just additional setup in properties.yml, there’s no issue of the dep isn’t there, it just doesn’t try to get the config.

The containers are still unhealthy, I can hear them screaming. But now at least it’s about something else...