Random Uncle: So what do you do?

Me: Uncle, I'm a dev at xyz company.

RU: Ah so what do they do

Me: Uncle we work in the internet advertising business, kind of like AdSense

RU: So you basically spam the web?

Me: Yes :/

Uncle Bob said to always be verbose with your naming 👍

Uncle: "It must be noisy, programming. I've seen a datacenter on TV, and those computers are loud" — "It is noisy, but that's more my coworkers fault"

Sales guy at the office: "So you see patterns in the code, you can read this cryptic mess?" — "Uh this is PHP, Its not the syntax that makes it hard to read, it's the dimwit who wrote it"

Father-in-law: "Could you reprogram my laptop, I got a virus trying to download por... nature documentaries" — "I'm not that kind of doctor"

Mother-in-law: "How will you sustain a family, you just play video games all day" — "I make your monthly teachers salary in four days"

Girlfriend: "I learned some Lua today because I needed a world of warcraft extension for..." — "I love you too"

classmate: Hey, "friend" told me you do freelance website development. right? I need to create a new website and need your help.

Me: umm... OK... what's it about?

Classmate: It's for my dad's friend's business.

Me: OK. but I will charge the standard rate.

classmate: No... I will make it myself. I just want your help.

Me(Internally): ...not again...

Me: Do it yourself then.

Classmate: It will be quick. an hour or two max.

Me: *speechless*

Classmate: And one of my uncle who did IT told me that c++ is faster. can we use that instead of HTML?

Me: huh...?

classmate: you don't know shit.

... classmate walks away...

This guy somehow manages to get As in exams (mostly cheating. and our papers are shitty theory papers which you can mug up. so that helps) and in a year will have an IT degree.

Uncle: Programmers who design physics engines do so by typing 1s and 0s on a console. That's why they get paid so much.

Me: 🤔🔪

Got my copy 😍

Uncle: I need a app for my company.

Me: Sure. What for?

Uncle: Managing my employees on the fly.

Me: So you need a backend, server cost around 20$ month.

Uncle: hmm ok I talk to you next time.

This happens literally with everyone that asks me for a App :/

In case you were wondering, I couldn't revisit it and was super groupie today with Uncle Bob!

My thoughts when my uncle was introducing me to one of his friends.
(M = me, U = uncle, F = Uncle's friend)

U : Meet M, he is a software developer, he works at * blah *.

M (Internally): That is a very reasonable introduction.

U : * Continues speaking. *

M (Internally): No, staph! It was good enough. Don't go any further.

U : He does * blah blah *

M (Internally): That's not even remotely related to what I do.

U : If you have any tech related problems, he is your guy.

M (Internally): You should have kept shut.

U : If your phone slows down, he can fix it.

M (Internally): Why would you even say that !?

U : He can fix all you printer issues.

M (Internally): Excuse me. What. The. Fuck!?

U : You should definitely consult him before purchasing any tech.

M (Internally): That's it. I give up. There is no hope left.

F : * Gestures U to clam down. *
F : * Nods at M in a very assuring manner. As if he were saying, 'chill bro! Its all cool, I understand.' *

M (Internally): Hold on. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe there is some hope left.

F : So, tell me, how good are you with excel formulas?

M (Internally): * Dies *

I can’t count money as quick. I don’t know how to operate a cash register. I’m bad at following small tasks in the kitchen. Ex: girlfriend yells at me for putting unstrained yolk in recipe (after straining it).

I can’t lift heavy stuff. Out of breathe helping my mom move. My uncle told me, “if you can’t do that, how can you work?” Then he touts his son around proudly for being in the army. I felt like shit for years.

My cousins told me to get a job at McDonald’s to learn the value of a dollar. I spent all this time studying and hadn’t found a single job at the time (not that I was looking). I was living off financial aid and some income from an app that sold for a dollar on the App Store.

I would mess up if I worked there. It was depressing guys. These people who worked at McDonald’s and Starbucks. It was like a cool club that I couldn’t be a part of! I wanted to be that smooth barista at Starbucks with a smug look on my face. Making coffee for all the ladies and writing hearts next to their name on the cup.

The responsibilities of going to work day after day and blowing your paycheck at a meal at Denny’s with your friends. Complaining about not getting enough hours and talking about adult stuff! Sigh sigh sigh. Oh and taxes! Let’s complain about taxes on a single W-2 just for the hell of it (not sure why they do this when you can file a simple 1040EZ) even though we get a refund.

Then..

After many paid internships (roughly 3), now I may be receiving an offer that is 100k+ with a 401k and all benefits I can imagine. Free food up the wazoo. Gym on site. Happy hour Friday’s.

I brag about taking a shit for an hour at work and coworkers don’t give a shit. Or taking a day off to do personal errands anytime.

Having my own place in a nice area (though the cost of living is enough to take care of 3 families in another state). Supporting my girlfriend through school and helping her with her dreams of art.

Going to fancy dinners and not worrying about the bill afterwards.
Accidentally damaging my 2017 Honda Accord and not giving a fuck because I can pay $900 for repair with less than a week of work.

But I can’t help but think that all this time..

I could’ve just quit and worked at McDonalds. I could’ve been one of the cool kids..

Saw my uncle using Microsoft Edge today.

Me: Uncle, you should use Chrome or Firefox. They are better.
Uncle: Windows 10 showed a pop up few days back that chrome drains battery faster. So I uninstalled chrome.
Me: But Windows is fooling you to use its product. Edge is horrible and useless.
Uncle: So you think you are smarter than Windows people? Are they idiots who designed this whole software?

Microsoft u got 1 more Edge user. Enjoy, you lying and misleading company.

One of the greatest books I've read so far.

There comes a moment in every coders life where he must prove his programming chops by solving an arbitrary problem for one of their random relatives. If they fail, they have brought shame to their family name. But if they succeed, there is no greater glory.

Random Uncle: "Hey my wifi isn't working. Can you fix it?"
Me: Restarts laptop. Wifi works.
Uncle: "Wow nice job!"

Indeed. There is no greater glory.

My great uncle came over this weekend, and he is a big Apple fan though he owns a little hp. He asked me if I knew windows ten, to which I said yes, and then said he had a problem. His internet wouldn't connect. I came to his laptop, and he already had the wifi menu up, which said in big letters "Your WiFi is turned off." So I said to him "Your WiFi is turned off." He proclaimed his disdain for "the software" and asked if I could fix it. Instead of clicking the very obvious button that took maybe 10% of his screen, I opened command prompt as admin and entered "netsh interface show interface" followed by "netsh interface set interface Wi-Fi enabled"

I followed it up by saying I fixed a problem with his wireless card and that he should be able to use the large wifi button that appears when he opens the menu to turn it off and on again

Found this treasure in Clean Code book ))

Uncle- What do you do?

Me- I'm a software engineer

Uncle- My brother's friend's son is also a software engineer.

Me- (so what am I supposed to do about it?) yes that's nice

Uncle- I have a great idea, u should implement, I'm just telling you, it is a revolutionary idea

Me- (oh fuck, not again) yes tell

Uncle- you should make a matrimonial site which tracks what people do on internet and tell their to-be-spouses about it

Me - (yeah, I'll get sued for breach of privacy, and it has got nothing to do with my current line of work, and will probably cause divorces before marriage) yes great idea uncle

Uncle- see I told you this billion dollar idea, u should do hard work and make it

Just WHY in god's name do all uncles think laptop is a magic box in which I just have to type their idea in and it will spit out a website/software in 2 minutes. I don't go around advising them about their line of work.

It goes like this.
I have one final task to solve before starting in a new job at a different company. This guy, which is also a board member in the company in which I'm currently hired, is also an IT consultant and project manager in a fairly large company. This said person is also a key person for me being able to solve this last issue. I send him a complete guide on what he has to do before I can move on and wrap it all up.
First conflict arises because he doesn't follow the guide and tells me something is not working. I kindly inform him why and the response I get is very personal and not kind in any way, telling me and my boss that I am bad at my job and that he will bill us for 1000 USD for the 5 hours he used "debugging" and testing. This should have taken him 30 minutes and I have no idea what he spent those 5 hours doing.
It comes down to that my boss sides with this asshole and tells me that I have to do the task all over and test the system for the 4th time (yes I tested it 3 times beforehand to make sure nothing could go wrong) What my boss and the asshole doesn't know is that my uncle is vice president in the firm the asshole is working for. After kindly reminding this asshat that he has to follow the guide and that I can confirm everything is working, he keeps on attacking me. It's very rare that I fuck up and I have consulted 2 colleagues and got them to test it as well. They found no issues at all. The asshole ignored my request of documentation that something was not working.
I'm so full of being treated as an idiot so I send my uncle the email correspondence with the asshole to confirm that this is not how any of their employees should behave independant of my ability to do my job.
He will speak with this fucker tomorrow at work as first thing in the morning. I'm not proud of the way I went about this, but that was like the last drop, if you know what I mean.
Sorry for the long rant.

When you are a CS major/part time developer and your uncle gives you a swiss army knife as a present "so if you have to fix computers you have the screwdriver ready"

Most memorable coworker? Definitely one of our devs in the first company I worked at. He was around fifty, quirky as fuck but damn knowledgeable about pretty much everything. Think some kind of uncle Iroh who could build his own compiler.
I haven't learned as much from university as I learned from our talks during smoking breaks. He never judged anyone for not knowing something (even really basic stuff) and was actually happy if he could help. Now, a few years later I still find myself applying techniques for conceptualizing software he explained to me on the balcony and I have to say I wouldn't be half the dev I am today if I'd have never met him so I guess that counts as memorable.

I don't want to write clean code anymore :(

I read Clean Code, Clean Coder, and watched many uncle bob's videos, and I was able to apply best practices and design patterns
I created many systems that really stood the test of time...

Management was kind enough to introduce me to uncle bob clean code in the first place, letting us watch it during work hours. after like one year, my code improved 400% minimum because I am new and I needed guidance from veterans...

That said, to management I am very slow, compared to this other guy, they ask me for a feature and my answer would be like "sure, we need to update the system because it just doesn't support that right now, it is easy though it would take 2 days tops"

they ask the same thing for the other guy : "ok let me see what I can do", 1 hour later, on slack, he writes : done. he slaps bunch of if-statement and make special case that will serve the thing they asked for.

oh 'cool' they say -> but it doesn't do this -> it needs to do that -> ok there is a new bug,-> it doesn't work in build mode-> it doesn't work if you are logged in as a guest, now its perfect ! -> it doesn't work on Android -> ok it works on android but now its not perfect anymore.

and they feel like he is fast (and to be fair he is), this feature? done. ok new bugs? solved. Android compatibility ? just one day ... it looks like he is doing doing doing.

it ends up taking double the time I asked for, and that is not to mention the other system affected during this entire process, extra clean up that I have to do, even my systems that stood the test of time are now ruined and cannot be extracted to other projects. because he just slaps whatever bools and if statements he needs inside any system, uses nothing but Singleton pattern on everything. our app will never be ready-for-business, this I can swear. its very buggy. and to fix it, it needs a change in mentality, not in code.
---------------

uncle bob said : write your code the right way, and the management will see that your code generates less errors, with time, you will earn respect even though they will feel you are slow at first.

well sorry uncle, I've been doing it for a year, my image got bad, you are absolutely right, only when there is no one else allowed to drop a giant shit inside your clean code.

note: we don't really have a technical lead.
-------------------
its been only two days since my new "hack n' slash" meta, the management is already kind of "impressed" ... so I'll keep hacking and slashing until I find a better job.

This rant means YOU if you are one of those people that "fix" their family's computers.

I was visiting my family over the holidays and while I managed to stay away from fixing their computers for the most time, I offered to help my grandfather to update the Garmin navigation device he wanted to gift my father. (They do not use smartphones for navigation, and my father doesn't want "these modern shitty phones".)

When booting up my grandfather's laptop, I realized something odd: Linux Mint boot screen. Wut?

And immediately I said: "It could be impossible to update your navigation device on this laptop."

As true enough, the Garmin Express update software requires either a Windows PC or a Mac; and even though I vaguely hoped it might be possible to upgrade through Linux, I just could not be bothered to find out that day.

What I wondered though is why did my grandfather of all people ran Linux!?

Don't get me wrong, I use Linux myself on my work machine and I never want to work with something else when coding; yet my grandfather is an end user of the show-me-where-and-what-and-how-often-to-click-kind.

What could he gain by it?

As it turns out, the computer nerd's friend of my uncle managed his PC. And my uncle and he decided unanimously my grandfather should better run Linux. Is it something my grandfather needs? No. BUT IT'S RIGHT! Suck it up! (My father's laptop therefore also runs Linux Mint. So he can't upgrade his new device either.)

This is the ugly kind of entitled nerd-dom I truly detest.

When discussing things further, my grandfather told me that he had problems ever since with his printer. Under Windows, he knew how to print on the special photo paper. Under Linux, all he can barely manage is to print on normal papers. Shame, printing photos was the only thing he liked doing on that device. What did my uncle's friend tell him?

"Get a decent printer!"

Fuck that guy.

It's fine if Linux works for you, but before you install it on a PC of a relative, you better make sure it fits their needs! If you have that odd member that only wants to write letters, read emails, use facebook, and wants to play that browser game, feel free to introduce them to Linux.

Yet if they have any special wish, don't stand in their way.

If they want to do something that requires a certain OS, don't just decide for them that their desire is wrong, but help them achieve their goal. If you can't align that with your ideology, then get the fuck out of my way and stop "helping".

For some people, a computer is a device to achieve a certain goal, a work. They only get hindered by your ill-advised attempts at virtue signalling.

The Absolutely True Story of a Real Programmer Who Never Learned C.

I have a young friend named Sam who is quite a programming prodigy. Sam does know C! I need to make this clear: he’s not the titular programmer.
But a couple years ago Sam told me a story about a different programmer who never learned C, and I liked it so much that right on the spot I asked his permission to repeat it. (I could never just steal such a tale.)
Sam wasn’t always a programmer—actually he started in his later teens, in part because he was more of a jock, and in part because he was related to programmers and wanted to do his own thing. But, like all great programmers, once he was bitten by the bug he immersed himself completely in it.
One day Sam happened to be talking programming with his uncle, who was also a programmer but from way, way back.
“Hey,” said Sam, “I’m learning this language called C. You must know a lot of languages, did you ever study C?”
“No,” said the uncle, to Sam’s surprise. “I am one of the very few programmers who never had to learn C.”
“Because I wrote it.”
Oh, Sam’s last name is Ritchie.
What I love about this story is the idea of Dennis waiting Sam’s entire life to deliver this zinger. Just imagine sitting on a line that good, watching your nephew grow up and waiting, waiting until the one day he finally starts learning to code. Did he work on the line in his head at night? Like, “Hmm, how should I word it so I can deliver the punch line perfectly? Should I say ‘I never took a class on C?’ Nah, too awkward…”
The great thing about geniuses is how much effort they put into everything.

Courtesy : Wil Shiply.

The proper use of comments is to compensate for our failure to express ourself in code.

Quote of the book "Clean Code" by "Uncle Bob".

#ShotsFired

Talked dev with my uncle today at the dinner table. Every other family member slowly backed away in boredom and confusion as we discussed spaces vs. tabs

What is it with clients who have never even seen a single line of code in their entire lives telling me how long they believe a certain change request should take to code.

I mean, what if I told you that your "seemingly simple enough" change needed an update to 36 class files, 9 oracle stored procedures AND several database schema changes. Also, who the fuck is going to perform a regression test to make sure I didn't break anything? Your Uncle Bob??

Working for an indian code sweatshop. The job you've got by bribing the University headmaster to give you a degree without ever attending class. Your uncle who worked at the sweatshop as a manager already gave you the job by bribing his boss.
After a half a year on the bench you've beeing sent off for a contract for the USA. You moved to Seattle where you've "coded" the software for the Boeing 737 Max Airplane. Your code downed 2 airplanes. You're responsible for the death of 350+ people. You're alone and the US is foreign to you and you're missing your mothers indian food. And you wish you could soothe your pain with some freshly pressed sugar cane drink and a jalebi from your favorite food joint back home.

An application based on a single MySQL stored procedure that contained all the application business logic inside of it (plus a poor webapp that simply called it). The stored procedure had 97 (yes, NINETY SEVEN) parameters... and about half of them were boolean flag used for enabling/disabling another parameter. I think that Uncle Bob could follow you holding an AK-47 if he saw that. The saddest part is that the shit was written by a guy having a PhD in computer science, and he knew that was bad, but the boss asked him to do it in that way. The guy left the company before I joined it and I had to maintain that crap. Guys, the first time I saw it I thought that should be a joke. Code generated by decompilers was easier to read, maybe even Brainfuck. I tried complaining with the boss but she said that the system was wonderful and very efficient. This was one of the reasons I moved to another company after some months.

I had been a "hobby" programmer for well over a decade, with my primary career being in repair or a "technician". I had taught myself dozens of languages because it was fun, but never really accomplished much.

I was laid off from my job as a technician and I found myself listless and without purpose. I started doing development again on random things to pass the time and I ended up volunteering as a developer for a game I had played for years.

At the same time I had an uncle who encouraged me to consider software as a career. These two things gave me the confidence to apply for a local software job I saw on Indeed.

They called me pretty quickly, and I was brutally honest. "No, I don't have a degree. I'm self-taught. I have no professional experience really."

I got a proficiency exam anyway and I took it - apparently doing well enough on it that the CTO called me a week later. We had a long talk and I finally asked him why he called me.

He told me that while a degree means something, the passion to learn this job means more to him. It was a month before I was offered the position, and I graciously accepted it.

We had a call about my compensation before starting. It was rather low, but we both agreed that my skill level was quite an unknown.

A year later and my pay was bumped up a sizable amount. My skills are defined now and growing rapidly as new challenges are sent my way. I went from a naive hobbyist to a professional in a short period of time.

I realized that I was always a professional. I had a desire to learn and a desire to do things the right way. I may not have known what to call things. I didn't know some of the design patterns I had used over the years were standards that had names and meaning.

I basically work two jobs now. My full-time job and also on the game that helped propel my career forward and gave me the confidence to reach for it.

As for my hobby? I turned to electronics and the maker community. It's a nice marriage with my programming skill set, and I never knew how rewarding a blinking LED would be. :)

I'm one of those people who have literally no value of education and skills between family members, yes as soon they hear I'm doing bachelors in computers they all come too me with *Can you please fix my phone*

But today a letter came it was from devRant and it had stickers for me, my uncle received the letter and you can't imagine how surprised he was and asked me who sent me letter from NY, I explained him that we are an awesome community and this letter is just a way to motivate us. It's the first time something come for me and even tho it's just some stickers but meant alot to me.

Thankyou devRant and the community for making me feel this awesome 😊

Uncle:What do you do?
Me: I'm a software developer
Uncle: So which laptop should I buy?
Me:....

My uncle was a programmer. My whole extended family lived very close together, so I saw him almost every weekend. He would tell me tall tales about the war between corporations and open source. I started hating all things Microsoft and advocating for Linux. For my 12th birthday, he gave me a computer he had recently fixed. Of course, it had Ubuntu Linux.

That's when he started teaching me the basics: Bash, Lisp, and C. I know some of you are tired of the cliche "I started coding at 12 and built my first OS at 16," but of course that's not reality. I really just wrote simple math formulas like chicarronera^[1] for my homework, a super simple text-input videogame, and a button-filled GUI. That's nothing compared to what I do now, so I won't dare put that into my resume. But it did give me an advantage over my peers, and by the time I had to self-learn web development for my job, my uncle had already given me all of these tools.

[1] Spanish slang for the quadratic equation. Literally means "street vendor who sells chicharron". The formula is taught so fierce in school that even street vendors must know it.

Ive just bought a domain name for my nephew of now 36 hours old. Ive a really common lastname and it took me 8 years to get a domainname with my name in it.

By the time he is ten (or how old they will be when they get their first email address) he will have his own personalized email and when they learn the basics of programming he can use his own domain for his site.

JUST GO DIE ECLIPSE YOU FUCKING ABOMINATION I HATE YOU AND YOUR CHILDREN AND YOUR COW AND YOUR VAGUELY RELATED UNCLE WHO LIVES IN SIBERIA

Uncle Bob says:
Software Craftsmanship is not about glory and rockstar status. It’s not about being the overtime hero, or the last minute cowboy. Rather it is about discipline, professionalism, and the desire to constantly improve.

So... I've seen my dad talking a lot about quantum computers, and it's getting quite embarrassing to be there when he talks about them. He doesn't understand shit about them, except that they somehow use quantum mechanics for something.

Last week my uncle from Spain visited us. He's a Cristian pastor, and a cool guy, so they always talk about god and similar themes. We gathered the family to have a dinner with my uncle as he only was going to be one day with us. This is how part of the dinner went by:

" so, <Uncle's name>, have you heard about quantum computers?"

me thinking:*Oh my God. Please not again... *

"The nasa, the US government and all kinds of powerful entities are getting the quantum computer."

He always talks about THE quantum computer as if it was just one big machine.

"They have found that multiple universes exist through it. If this is what they are telling us, imagine how far they've gone. Remember that technology is always 8 years ahead of actual public technology."

Me:*please dad, stop. Who the fuck is made that claim and how many fucking years ago?*

"Did you know that many people remember that Mandela died in prison, while in the oficial version, he died after it? They must be messing with multiple universes, or multiple timelines are getting intertwined."

Me: *please, not the mandela effect again*

Then my dad procceded to talk about multiverses and how THE quantum computer was the future and about some parts of the Bible that supported it. Bizarre, I know.

When we are alone, I always try to tell him how things actually work but he always twists my claims to support his. Last time I told him that the mandela effect was perfectly explainable by psychological phenomena around forgotten memories. But this is going to far... Fuck the guys that made zeitgeist. Fuck Alex Jones. Fuck random youtube conspiracy channels. They make technology look like fucking magic for muggles.

Your old uncle : I bought an internet but Google isn't working.
You search the house and there isn't even a smell of internet connection, not even subscription line...

Uncle Bob and Martin Fowler. Their books (“Clean code”, “Clean architecture”, “Refactoring”) and Twitter posts have changed the way I look at software development.

dad to uncle: you know, my son is a programmer
uncle to me: what do you do son, as a programmer
me: catch bugs
uncle( thinking ): 🐞🐞🐝🐝
uncle: I hope you find a better job in the future!!

Bob Martin. His books Clean Code and the Clean Coder, and all his talks on architecture, SOLID and TDD. I could listen to him talk for days, and he taught me everything i know about writing clean code.

Became an uncle to two beautiful girls the other week. But the plan to make them the future tech support of the family is already in play! Hopefully they will exceed me in about 10 years, I'm a front-end dev so it shouldn't be that hard...

Odd things that non-technically-inclined people do, say, or believe:

"Back in my day we didn't have our faces planted in cell phones!" True, but they sure did love them some magazines and newspapers.

"I don't need internet! I need that 'wee-fee'" -- from my wife's stories about one of her clients, who wanted to set up WiFi.

A restaurant owner who, in 2017 mind you, refuses to upgrade his phone above a touch-tone with a handheld receiver.

When my wife, son, and I were visiting her aunt and uncle in Florida, her uncle kept asking her help on how to configure his smart phone. She's a saleswoman and I'm a computer engineer. Not complaining, just an observation. Actually I'm glad because I can avoid a million questions that I won't ever have time for.

When someone in line at the store causes a glitch in the chip reader because they don't know how to follow directions on-screen. Then they blame "those damn computers!" during a verybquick reboot.

People who enjoy sunshine. I don't understand this obsession that non-technical people have with sunny days. Maybe if I were on a tropical beach drinking whisky all day, but I live in NYS so...

When I'm describing a computer program I put a lot of effort into, only to have the conversation derailed adter thirty seconds by an hour-long family gossip section.

Don't you hate it when your co-worker does dumb things, but thinks it's the "clean code" way?
The following is a conversation between me and a co-worker, who thinks he's superior to everyone because he thinks he's the only one who read the Clean Code series. Let's call him Bill.

Me: I think the feature we need is quite simple, our application needs to call this third party API, parse the response and pass it to the next step. Why do you need to bury everything under an abstraction of 4 layers?
Bill: bEcAuSe It'S dEcOuPlInG, aNd MaKe ThE cOdE tEsTaBlE
Me: I don't know man, you only need to abstract the third party api client, and then mock it if you want. Some interfaces you define makes no sense at all. For example, this interface only has 1 concrete implementation, and I don't think it will ever have another. Besides, the concrete implementation only gets the input from the upper layer and passes it down the lower layer. Why the extra step? I feel like you're using interface just for the sake of interface.
Bill: PrOgRaMmInG tO iNtErFaCe, NoT cOnCrEtE iPlEmEnTaTiOn!!!
Me: You keep saying those words, I don't think they mean what you think they mean. But they certainly do not mean that every method argument must be an interface
Bill: BuT uNcLe BoB blah blah blah...
Me: *gives up all hope*

!rant

I promoted duckduckgo to friends on Facebook and got them in a discussion about it. People generally are fairly receptive (with one annoying uncle pointing out the irony of posting it on Facebook xD).

One mentioned it was difficult to switch because Google was "just there", so I pointed to instructions on how to make it default.

Also enticing them with theme changes.

Feels good. Next to teach them how to use proxies :p

meta rant: I categorised this as a rant/story, mainly because it is related to tech, should I have just done "random"?

My uncle: „You are good with computers, right? My Word is broken, repair that.“

Yeah sure, let me just call my bros at Microsoft and repair your Word with them 🤨

looking at my uncle's webpage because he wants to switch hosts.
The logo has a white background, we want to change that.
Uncle: "It's not supposed to look like this"
Me: "the jpg file type is not transparent, you have to make something like a png."
U: *pulls up word* "hmm... I don't have that font on this laptop..."
M: *slowly loses sanity*

My uncle introduced me to basic and used to challenge me to solve problems. One day he challenged me to write a program that generates the Fibonacci series. Thirty minutes later I had the solution and was irrevocably hooked :)

!dev

And again...

Our ISP doesn’t say it blocks any port on our Business Fixed IP. Currently I’m trying to access port 25 for SMTP. Guess what? Indeed port blocked. Called them “The port is open”, I visit a port checked, the same thing “Port Closed”

Always the fucking same thing. Every fcking time. These are just criminals. Lastly I removed their router, that they mentions was the only working router in our house and our signal from the other router, not provided by them was much better. They blocked the hotspots because we removed the router then. Guess what? On their site is an option Enable Hotspot on your home router (this enables your access to hotspots). Just pressed it. Haaa they can’t acces my router to set that up and it works.

In our second home, we have another ISP, Proximus, first they did difficult to come and install everything. Because in the appartment the previous owners didn’t pay the bills. After a week or so someone came to install it. Because they cut the cables couldn’t do it myself. Ok it worked for some time. After 3-4 months by once I can’t access the camera there, strange. My uncle went there and there was no internet. Neither TV. But we never received any invoice. Because they didn’t send them. We contacted them, no response. My father sends them an email, with politic people in copy and by once they called to say they will turn it back and scrap the invoices that were not send. They said no technician needed to come, as it’s second home. Guess what, next day a message came “We will arrive in less than an hour”
My uncle went. They did nothing, only restart the modem.
There still was no internet after two days after they came. We called back, response was: “There wasn’t anyone.” Yeah right, we have proof of a technicial that passed (Local Video). By once the internet worked.
Now 4 months later, still didn’t receive any invoice, neither via post or email.

Fuck those criminals, called ISPs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What could it be? I wondered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy coding.

Oh fucking Huawei.
Fuck you.
Inventory:
- Honor 6x (BLN-L22C675)
- Has EMUI4.1 Marshmallow
- Cousin brother 'A' (has bricking XP!)
- Uncle 'K'
- Has Mac with Windows VM
Goal:
- Stock as LineageOS / AOSP

Procedure (fucking seriously):
- Find XDA link to root H6X
- Go to Huawei page and fill out form
- Receive and use bootloader code
- Find latest TWRP
- Flash latest TWRP
- TWRP not working? Bootloops
- XDA search "H6X boot to recovery"
- Find and try modded TWRP
- TWRP fails, no bootloop
- Find & flash TWRP 3.1.0
- Yay! TWRP works
- Find and download LineageOS and SuperSU
- Flash via TWRP
- Yay! Success.
- Attempt boot
- Boot fails. No idea why
- Go back to TWRP
- TWRP gives shitload of errors
"cannot mount /data, storage etc."
- Feel fucked up
- Notice that userdata partition exists,
but FSTAB doesn't take
- Remembers SuperSU modded boot
image and FSTABS!
- Fuck SuperSU
- Attempt to mod boot image
- Doesn't work (modded successfully
but no change)
- Discover Huawei DLOAD
Installer for "UPDATE.APP" OTAs
Note: Each full OTA is 2+ GB zipped
- Find, download, fail on 4+ OTAs
- Discover "UPDATE.APP Extractor"
Runs on Windows
Note: UPDATE.APP custom format
Different per H6X model
- Uses 'K''s VM to test
- My H6X model does not have
a predefined format
- Process to get format requires
TWRP, which is not working
- FAIL HERE
- Discover "Firmware Finder"
Windows app to find Huawei
firmwares
- Tries 'K''s VM
- Fails with 1 OTA
- Downloads another firmware ZIP
- Unzips and tries to use OTA
- Works?!
- Boots successfully?!
- Seems to have EMUI 5.0 Nougat
- Downloads, flashes TWRP
- TWRP not working AGAIN?
- Go back to XDA page
- Find that TWRP on EMUI 5 - NO
- Find rollbacks for EMUI5 -> EMUI4
- Test, fail 2-4 times (Massive OTAs)
- DLOAD accepts this one?!!!
- I HAVE ORIG AGAIN!!!
- Re-unlock and reflash TWRP
- Realise that ROMs aren't working on
EMUI 4.1; Find TWRPs for EMUI5
- Find and fail with 2-3 OTAs
Note: Had removed old OTAs for
space on Chromebook (32GB)
- In anger, flash one with TWRP
instead of DLOAD (which checks
compatability)
- Works! Same wasn't working with
DLOAD
- Find and flash a custom TWRP
as old one still exists (not wiped in
flash)
- Try flashing LineageOS
- LineageOS stuck in boot
- Try flashing AOSP
- Same
- Try flashing Resurruction Remix
- Same
- Realise that need stock EMUI5
vendor
- Realise that the firmware I installed
wasn't for my device so not working
- FUCK NO MORE LARGE DLs
- Try another custom TWRP
- Begin getting '/cust mounting' errs
- Try reflashing EMUI5 with TWRP
- Doesn't work
- Try DLOADing EMUI5
- Like before, incompatability
- DLOAD EMUI4
- Reunlock and reflash TWRP
- WRITE THIS AS A BREAK
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

What is one supposed do when their boss says things like "Your UNCLE passed away, why do YOU have to go"?

Was watching a lecture by Uncle Bob on SOLID and reminded me of this...

I'm so fucking tired of OOP.
This bullshit never ends. Everyone treats OOP in their own, proper (of course) way. You read tons of those fashion books, like uncle bob and shit. and then comes a dumb asshole that starts reviewing your code, and tells you doing it wrong. FUCK. and you can't tell anything to your TL or PM cuz they are same dumb asholes. Because after you fix all the bullshit from the first asshole, those more responsible assholes come and tell you that you still doing it wrong.

- uh.. bruh, why don't you make interface for everything? that' S.O.L.I.D, you know.. it just right thing.
- bruh, why don't you use enum and switch case. we need a factory.
- bruh, we don't use abstract classes, use interface
- could you rewrite your linq/stream thing into a class and a method. it's just simpler for us. foreach loop is something everyone knows.

well,then go and LEARN the tool you're dealing with, coderfucker.

FUUUUCK.

"No matter how slow you are writing clean code, you will always be slower if you make a mess." - Uncle Bob Martin

IM BECOMING ANN UNCLE

While reviewing a PR from one of our newer FE devs, I ended up spending more time than I would like mulling over its composition. The work was acceptable for the most part; the code worked. The part that got me was the heavy usage of options objects.

When encountering the options object pattern (or anti-pattern, at times) in complex scenarios, I have to resist the urge to stop whatever I'm doing and convert it to the builder pattern/smack them in the head with a software design manual. As much as I would like to, code janitor is one of the least valuable activities I engage in daily, and consistently telling someone to go back to the drawing board for work that is functional, but not excellent is a great way to kill morale. Usually, I'll add a note on the PR, approve it, add a brown bag or two on that sort of thing, and make attendance mandatory for repeat slackers. Skills building and catharsis all rolled up in a tiny ball of investing in your people.

Builders make things so much cleaner; they inform users what actions are available in a context; they tend to be immutable, and when done well, provide an intuitive fluent interface for configuration that removes the guesswork. As a bonus, they're naturally compositional, so you can pass it around and accumulate data and only execute the heavy lifting bits when you need to. As a bonus, with typescript, the boilerplate is generally reduced as well, even without any code generation. And they're not just a dumping ground for whatever shit someone was too lazy to figure out how to integrate into the API neatly.

They're more work in js-land, sure; you can't annotate @builder like with Lombok, but they're generally not all that much work and friendlier to use.

If you're good at the debugger it means you spent a lot of time debugging. I don't want you to be good at the debugger.
- Uncle Bob

I remember when I was just a child, 6 or 7 I think, my uncle bought a computer and it was a magical thing for me.
When I became a little familiar with it, I told my dad: "I really like to make programs for computer".
And I still like programming.

"The only way to make the deadline - the only way to go fast - is to keep the code as clean as possible at all times."
Uncle Bob

Spread the word.

When your uncle is an Assembly Language programmer, developing Gym Trademills and shit
And he thinks working with Web Technologies is damn easy..

Hahah seriously?

Oh Wait a Min.. :|

Currently playing "the IT guy" for my uncle. I'm supposed to "speed up" the laptop. It's a low tier Toshiba from about 5 years ago, that while idle sits at about 100% CPU usage and 80% RAM usage.
From what I can tell, it has NEVER been turned off since I set it up for him 4 years ago, or unplugged..

Many people know Kaiser Chiefs song Ruby
So yesterday my uncle sang that song this way:
Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby,
Java Java Java Java
Python Python Python Python
...
That is freaking stupid, it made my day, though)
Besides, that 3 are my fav langs)

My CEO uncle: "anyone can program."

A quote from when we were discussing strategy for my sit down with the CEO of a company I was applying at (FYI, his advice was to research the company, be familiar with their long term strategies and such). I get that there's no need to prove my technical prowess to a business exec, but it isn't because "anyone can program."

I mean, sure, in a philosophical sense, anybody has the capacity to learn. But developers aren't a fungible asset. Treating them as such leads to ruin.

[...] we should never ignore any part of code. The parts we ignore are where the bugs will hide.
- Uncle Bob

I hate people who dog on wsl

Windows subsystem Linux

I use it. It has been wonderful. No problems that Google couldn't fix. Always a patch or an update.

And I can use Windows just fine.

No dual boot needed, no bullshit wine needed, no having to do without Photoshop

There,.. I'm out of the closet

My uncle showed me how to use it ok mom and dad

I'm starting a wsl parade who's in

My uncle who thought me Computers and Networking ( I once worked with him on a project ) came by to my house today. He said that he created a software that automates his work on the boring stuff so when he has free time he works on his own company. My man!

Started my CS degree, first term in. My uncle asks asks me to but "watchers" on my cousins' computers so that he can make sure they are not doing anything "bad'".... Then he wants me to put one on my aunt's Facebook.... Creepiest weekend ever.

When I was in high school Facebook was just coming out and it was...

- a way for the cool kids to exclude anyone they didn’t like from a visible social circle.

When I was in university Facebook was taking over the world and it was...

- a place for your mom to embarrass you and your racist aunt/uncle to make uncomfortable racist comments.

Today Facebook is...

- a serious threat to society itself. A direct threat to truth and the enemy of the press.

And yet most of these weak-minded, short-term dopamine addicts are still sucking Facebook’s flaccid cock.

———

To loosely quote iceberg slim...

A real pimp can eye a bitch and gauge right away how much mileage she has...

“That hoe is good for 500 fucks”

Once the mileage runs out the bitch gets strung out and you gotta let her go.

I wonder how many more likes these dopamine-driven Facebook hoes have left in them? I wonder?

Ps. Yes, Facebook is a pimp and every time you look at it you are a hoe. You give up the preverbal pussy to them, they sell your pussy to the ticks (advertisers) and then you get fucked, getting just enough dopamine so that your fine with them selling your pussy for profit.

i want your data!
(poor at photo editing :(, please bear with it!)

An uncle of mine, owns an NFT/Betting startup (early 30s, so no veteran and no doesn't know much coding).
Got 3-4m USD as investments.

It's an utter garbage "app" that he knows will die in an year, and he's drawing big salary and buying properties from the funding until he has the "runway" of funds remaining while app/company works in the background

What bugs me isn't that he's feasting on some random investors' petty change, but that such "ideas" get money thrown at them while ive seen 100s of more fun ideas/apps back in uni-days that died in obscurity when people graduated and retired them as projects, being talked about in 1 liner in their CVs.

This world ain't right :v

So, my uncle gave me an old computer: 1GB of RAM, 1.7GHz dual-core, HDD 80GB, I'm definitely NOT going to trash it, so... What do I do with it? Ideas?

Today I had a dinner with several members of my family. At some point my uncle decided to bring up ‘tech stuff’ so we can talk about it. Nevertheless, few seconds in he was trying to convince me that IE is the best browser, being far superior than firefox, chrome etc.
I just nodded and started talking about how HTML is the language to learn if you want to be a dev 😅😂

Uncle Bob: *finishes his talk*
Every sane developer:

Sorry I haven't been as active lately, however this is one of the better prompts, so I feel I should have it in my track record. Beware, it's a long one...

Let's trace the roots: My uncle was building desktops and he told my dad he'd build him one if my dad paid him for the components. These days I know builds aren't rocket science, but back then my parents didn't do their research. So my dad paid him.

Give or take some time, and most of the parts are complete. He underestimated the prices of a few things and had to ask for $200 more to complete the build. This...caused my dad to explode.

Later, I heard my dad ranting to my stepmom in January 2017 about how the last convo he had with his brother was a "Fuck-you conversation" - it was the last because my uncle had died in 2003.

Flash forward to March 2017. My mom and I are sitting in a Fazoli's, a nice sunset out of the full-length windows. I had to probe. HAD TO.

"You promise you won't tell your dad I told you this?" she asked.

"You know Kellie and I can't stand to be around him." I replied.

As the story goes, that last "Fuck-you conversation"? Over a fucking measly $200. Yup, the last conversation between my dad and his brother to ever happen was a shouting match over a relatively short amount of money. I wish I could say my dad had remorse, but he doesn't. He still talks shit. He's also technologically illiterate, so I doubt there was a way his brother was going to be able to reason with him.

In late 2003, my uncle, who had been a smoker, passed away due to cardiac arrest. The build was still not finished. This was one of the OTHER things that I have mixed feelings about.

After my uncle passed, my aunt paid someone to finish the build and get it shipped to my dad. We'll get back to why I feel this is fucked up, stay tuned...

---------

It's Spring 2004. I'm in the last half of what I think is Kindergarten or some shit...too lazy to do the math. Anyway, my dad announces we have a family computer - however, I couldn't read yet. That didn't stop the waste of oxygen that is my father from going in the Windows XP screensavers and putting text in that said "GAGE MORGAN WILL NOT TOUCH THIS COMPUTER." He's such a fuckin' dick, now AND back then.

My mom had an issue with this. I don't know why, but she did. Later, I was slowly taught how to use the mouse, under heavy supervision. Then I went to my grandma's house. She taught me one very specific thing on her old Win98 (386, maybe? IDK my old hw shit man), and because I know you guys are gonna love this one:

"The blue "e" opens up your games!"
The blue "e" does not open up your games, it opens something that can lead to your games.

I went home and tried this...without permission. My dad came down and discovered my lollygagging on the homepage - this is fucking weird. It was before Nextel, IIRC, so Sprint's logo was red still. Yes, we had broadband from Sprint. I don't know what saga led to that going the way of the dodo, but...

Back on track, I literally got my pants pulled down and had my bare bottom beat. He was gonna drag my ass upstairs and lock me in my room, but before he could, he accidentally slammed MY FUCKING RIGHT TEMPLE into the corner of a hardwood table at the bottom of the staircase.

The wailing that resulted probably was different than the previous form, which is probably what got my mom involved. My dad had a way of going too far, and in retrospect I'm more terrified now of what could've happened than I was then.

Later, I was given access to games in the form of my own account and bookmarks bar. That wasn't the end of the madness/drama from my use of that machine, but it was the earliest form.

Ever since Kindergarten, that one fateful day, I've been defying any/all imposed limitations on tech set on me by my parents...well, not anymore, but literally grades K-12. I'm living on my own, aka "adulting" now. It sucks more than you think, man.

---------

Let's tie this up before I reach the limit. I said I thought it was fucked up when my aunt paid to have the build finished and shipped to us after my uncle's death.

Yes, my aunt's intervention led to me ultimately majoring in computer science.

That doesn't change the fact that she shouldn't have done it.

My dad was an asshole to her husband, who passed. She is ultimately too caring. I don't think my jackass father should've been able to get by with that, he didn't deserve the freebie. Someone else should've told him his brother did in fact need that $200.

I haven't seen her IRL since the funeral when my grandpa passed in 2005. 2006 spelled the end of my parents' marriage.

Hope you guys enjoyed this - it's only a small segment of how I got to where I am now - tiny, actually.

So my uncle just bought an old hp server round that he didn't use at work anymore and I have no fucking clue what to do with it 😂

My special usb from my uncle 🚗

I’m so sick and tired of the cattle-minded people in the software world. I love coding and improving myself; I've got over 18 years of experience. I enjoy what I do, and I like being good at it. I know my way around a variety of different technologies, and I could easily outperform most engineers with similar experience. If I don’t know something, I get excited to learn and I ask questions. I don’t enjoy standing in the spotlight about what I know; I prefer supporting, helping, solving problems, improving solutions, and simplifying everything.

From my experience, the best solution is the simplest, shortest, fastest, and leanest one. But unfortunately, there are people in the workplace who think the opposite of me and blindly follow this so-called prophet named Uncle Bob, zealously writing all his SOLID principles and dogmatic code, turning their work environments into a toxic mess. I’m so done with it. You have no idea how harmful a person can be when they cling to the teachings of a guy like Uncle Bob—someone who probably hasn't even written the "s" in software himself and is just trying to sell his book. In almost every job or team I join, there’s one of these people who drags junior developers into writing dogmatic code by chanting about SOLID principles, Uncle Bob, and object-oriented programming.

Software engineering isn’t something you can learn from a book written by people like Uncle Bob, who haven’t coded a decent product in a real development process. Experience is something entirely different, and from my experience, everything taken to extremes turns out badly. Wherever I see an Uncle Bob disciple, the work inevitably slides into the extremes. For someone writing in C and C++, it’s disheartening to hear about object-oriented programming, SOLID principles, and agile nonsense. I’m tired of seeing people cluttering their code with interfaces for every little thing, over-engineering patterns, and stuffing every piece of code with interfaces to make it “testable.” They run around claiming they’re writing SOLID code, doing TDD, following “best practices,” yet they can't solve any real problems or algorithms. They take a week-long task and drag it out to six, making simple things complex and distancing themselves from real solutions. I’m sick of these types.

If you’re a junior developer, please ignore the fools trying to lead you down this path, and don’t become dogmatic about what you learn, especially if you’re writing C++.

I’ve never seen any real engineer who takes this SOLID, object-oriented nonsense seriously. Believe me, once you reach a certain threshold, you won’t hear these words anymore. Software isn’t just about that. Object-oriented programming, especially if you’re not writing Java or C#, and especially if you’re working in C++ (thankfully, C doesn’t even have it), is something you should definitely steer clear of. Robert C. Martin, aka Uncle Bob—if only you had written your book with a focus on Java or C#. These dogmatic code writers with 7-8 years of experience crying at the sight of free functions in C++ really give me a headache. Because of you, these people exist, and I don’t have the energy to deal with this nonsense at my age.

So I was planning on a single page website for my relatives hotel websitte and offered to make it for free ( as an offer for other huge project i was doing for same person )

But just got told that one of my uncle told to tell me that website design should like the website design of another hotel xyz.

For second, I thought that other would be very nice. So I checked it out.

Guess what! That other site looks like it hasn't updated since 2005! No HTTPS. No responsive design. Looks like fugly crap from 2005 to me. Has a huge Click to enable Adobe Flash banner on homepage.

I lost my hope in humanity and I quoted a price for making that. I guess I just gotta do a shit job and will get paid for it now 😂

My family had no particular reaction. I wanted to be a programmer since school, and they knew it was my intended goal.
I guess, my uncle being a professional programmer was something that showed it is a good choice.

To my dear friends complaining about GDPR, if companies providing free services in exchange for users data didn't fuck up completely, there wouldn't be any GDPR. In history, regulations always come after people fuck ups, uncle Bob has some nice talks about that.

let gfInput = '';
try {
gfInput = getInput('Will you marry me? ')
if(gfInput == 'Y'){
// KISS HER
}else{
throw {msg: 'she dumped you.', code: 'red'}
}
} catch( err ) {
//if err.code !== red . just cry but if red... uh oh
if(err.code == 'red'){
// GOTTA DO SOME DAMAGE
let msg = {
sender: 'anonymous',
recipients : ['dad', 'mom', 'brother', 'sister', 'uncle'],
messageBody: '****ntha has been fucking some dude...'
}

sendText(msg);
}
} finally{
// send ****ntha a good bye message
var msg = {
sender: 'pk359',
recipients: ['****ntha'],
messageBody: 'I invite you ****ntha to my wedding with your best friend *licia. PEACE, bit*h'
}
sendText(msg)
}

Uncle gives me a call one day - "hey aren't you a computer science graduate? Can you fix my computer for me it does not open Internet Explorer"
Me - 😖😡

tl;dr Do you think we will any time soon move from editing raw source code? Will IDE or other interfaces allow us to change the code in graphic representation or even through voice?
---

One thing I found funny watching Westworld is how they depicted the "programming" - it is more like swiping on a smartphone, a bit maybe like Tom Cruise's investigations in Minority report. Or giving certain commands and key words by voice.

There was one quote from Uncle Bob's "Clean Code" I could never find again, where he said something along the lines, that back in the seventies or eighties they thought they would soon raise programming languages to such a high level they would use natural language interfaces, and look at us now, still the same "if's".

So I feel uncomfortable without my shell and having tried a graphical programming language once this particular (Labview) seemed clumsy to me at best. But maybe there are a lot of web devs here and it seems with them frameworks you might be able to abstract away a lot of the pesky system programming... so do you feel like moving to some new shiny programming experience or do you think it will stay the same for more decades as the computer is that stupid machine where you have to spill it out instruction by instruction anyways?

My uncle: I am very updated with technology, you can download the ebooks I torrented on my server
Also my uncle: Ipad 2 is the newest generation, it's definitely after the ipad mini
Me: no it isn't
Uncle: yes it is
Me:

At every family outing (I was typing "family function" but that may confuse this audience..

Uncle: That Mark Facebook guy is worth billions now! And the Twitter guy too. When are you going to think of something?

Me: You think of a unique idea, I'll build it.

Uncle: I don't know, that's what you do isn't it?

Me: *sigh*

(This is the same Uncle that shares "Free Holiday" posts on FB and is always quick to answer FB questions such as "I bet you can't name a fruit starting with A"...)

I know people have mixed feelings about Uncle Bob and I really never followed the guy at all, but back in college I found his book Clean Code on a shelf and read it cover to cover. A lot of it really stuck with me. In fact, I might dig it up again now that I'm thinking about it.

My uncle wanted to get rid of this random-ass cable box, but i took it to salvage it.

Then I got curious.

i had a 2-day, sat & sun, coding contest on codingame, but after coding for 24h my mother called me and said that her brother (and my uncle) died from alcoholic addiction
i did not commit my solution on that contest and now, for already five years, i'm afraid of participating in any similar contests

# Retrospective as Backend engineer

Once upon a time, I was rejected by a startup who tries to snag me from another company that I was working with.
They are looking for Senior / Supervisor level backend engineer and my profile looks like a fit for them.
So they contacted me, arranged a technical test, system design test, and interview with their lead backend engineer who also happens to be co-founder of the startup.

## The Interview

As usual, they asked me what are my contribution to previous workplace.
I answered them with achievements that I think are the best for each company that I worked with, and how to technologically achieve them.

One of it includes designing and implementing a `CQRS+ES` system in the backend.
With complete capability of what I `brag` as `Time Machine` through replaying event.

## The Rejection

And of course I was rejected by the startup, maybe specifically by the co-founder. As I asked around on the reason of rejection from an insider.

They insisted I am a guy who overengineer thing that are not needed, by doing `CQRS+ES`, and only suitable for RND, non-production stuffs.

Nobody needs that kind of `Time Machine`.

## Ironically

After switching jobs (to another company), becoming fullstack developer, learning about react and redux.
I can reflect back on this past experience and say this:

The same company that says `CQRS+ES` is an over engineering, also uses `React+Redux`.
Never did they realize the concept behind `React+Redux` is very similar to `CQRS+ES`.

- Separation of concern
- CQRS: `Command` is separated from `Query`
- Redux: Side effect / `Action` in `Thunk` separated from the presentation
- Managing State of Application
- ES: Through sequence of `Event` produced by `Command`
- Redux: Through action data produced / dispatched by `Action`
- Replayability
- ES: Through replaying `Event` into the `Applier`
- Redux: Through replay `Action` which trigger dispatch to `Reducer`

---

The same company that says `CQRS` is an over engineering also uses `ElasticSearch+MySQL`.
Never did they realize they are separating `WRITE` database into `MySQL` as their `Single Source Of Truth`, and `READ` database into `ElasticSearch` is also inline with `CQRS` principle.

## Value as Backend Engineer

It's a sad days as Backend Engineer these days. At least in the country I live in.
Seems like being a backend engineer is often under-appreciated.
Company (or people) seems to think of backend engineer is the guy who ONLY makes `CRUD` API endpoint to database.

- I've heard from Fullstack engineer who comes from React background complains about Backend engineers have it easy by only doing CRUD without having to worry about application.
- The same guy fails when given task in Backend to make a simple round-robin ticketing system.
- I've seen company who only hires Fullstack engineer with strong Frontend experience, fails to have basic understanding of how SQL Transaction and Connection Pool works.
- I've seen company Fullstack engineer relies on ORM to do super complex query instead of writing proper SQL, and prefer to translate SQL into ORM query language.
- I've seen company Fullstack engineer with strong React background brags about Uncle Bob clean code but fail to know on how to do basic dependency injection.
- I've heard company who made webapp criticize my way of handling `session` through http secure cookie. Saying it's a bad practice and better to use local storage. Despite my argument of `secure` in the cookie and ability to control cookie via backend.

The hand of IT guy in family

My family sees me as guy who works on IT stuff. The best part is that I will have to help them whenever they encounter problem regarding electronics in daily activities.

Son! The internet is not working
Son! The printer is not working
Son! The TV is not working
Son! My phone didnt get any signals
Son! The microwave is not working
Son! The TV remote is not working
Son! Why is this whatsapp popup always appear whenever I opened it
Son! The dvd player is not working
Son! My phone wont charged
Son! I want to buy online stuff
Son! The email that ur uncle sent me cannot be opened
Son! The email that ur aunt sent me is not there
Son! Can u help me download this travelling app
Son! I opened a website and it told me that I have 163718362 virus!
Son! I forget my password of my facebook account!
Son! Some guy idk on facebook added me as his/her friends, what should i do?
....
Son! The internet is not working (again)

The fact is that, most if these problem, I helped them by just.. restarting the router, reboot the router for 1 min interval, find specific toggler in disfunctional hardware that they accidentally hit during sweeping the floor, take out the power and put it back again, show them how to's in many account/payment mechanism in apps, etc

The very best part that whenever they satisfied, whenever things back to work again, whenever they can reset the password:

"I've tried what you told me, but it just didnt work, but idk when u did it, it works! you are really an IT guy"

And i was like
🙃

My Dev hero is without a doubt Robert C Martin (Uncle Bob). His books clean code and the cleans coder changed the way I program and his work on TDD too

Years ago I was working in local cinema as a student job from time to time and used to sleep after shifts at my uncle's. Uncle did not had internet but there were so many wlans all around. Since I had nothing to do for hours after shift, I downloaded Backtrack linux at home, made live dvd of it and saved a two articles of "how to hack wifi" to text files.

It took me 4 hours to break WEP, since I was total lame, and it was the only one WEP around. They also had mac restrictions set to router, so I changed my mac address to one of their devices, logged in to router and added our mac address. For my uncle it was complete magic but since he is total geek to linux he liked it.

Fast forward weeks later. When I came to my uncle's house he was downloading like ton of linux distributions. Literally each one. Gigabytes of data. I told him not to do so because sooner or later neighbour will notice, but he did not care. Guess what, he notices, probably slow internet and (maybe) bigger bills, I do not know, but owner just changed protocol to WPA2, not changing password. So the story continued for almost 2 years. Felt a bit sorry for neighbour but did not expect such an outcome. I just wanted to watch youtube videos and scroll social networks, keeping low profile so no one notice.

If Uncle Bob Martin took all software engineers who are better in designing architecture than him, he could fully book Hilbert's hotel.

My uncle wants me to get a faster OS on this (I'm thinking android since its touch screen) he wants to embed it in his car as a GPS computer (older car) he's an actual mechanic don't worry lol so he won't fuck up any car wiring

But this monster doesn't have a USB-A it has usb-mini. Oof. Wish me luck while I try to figure this out

So my dad calls me because my uncle is freaking out about how a client messaged him and he doesn't know how to check if he can do what them asked him to. I tour them around the website he's using (as he understands little to none of it, and my dad doesn't use the site regularly so he's not versed into it as well) as to where they're supposed to look and they go check this one tab. In it, there's info of what is sold out in what day. And for each day it says "day x - y sold out" and he asks me what day it is that y things are sold out, and that it is confusing, and I'm like "are you serious it's right there". Goddamn it this guy sometimes

Since we’re adding new backronyms every day, I propose SIMPLE.

S - Spaghetti: write tapestry of code like a chef.

I - Interlinked: if the project has modules, they should all depend on each other (we are strongest when we can depend on one another).

M - Micromanaged: if the product owner doesn’t expect reports in the daily stand-up, do they even care?

P - Perplex: diversity for the codebase.

L - Lazy: Bill Gates once said “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job, because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it”, for example, without testing, collaborating with team members, or ensuring the feature works with anything else in the codebase.

E - Opinionated: because I believe E should stand for opinionated and everyone else will have to work around this with adapters. But E should mean Opinionated because Uncle Bab said so.

You think NORMAL updates are slow?
I have to install these twice, once from the desktop then again at boot-time!

(gift desktop for my uncle, but we're almost out of bandwidth for the LAN network for the month... had to go sit outside (yes, OUTSIDE) a McD's so I could have both power and network access. It was 2° outside.)

Quote by Uncle Bob: “Never forget that, as programmers, you are stakeholders too. Your technical and ethical reputation is on the line. You have a say. You also have feet.”

18 year ago today the earth stood still... and everything that was never was again ..it truly was the day that changed the world for the future.

I remember where I was when it happened... My aunt and uncle, worked In the pentagon on that day... they remember but they have never talked about that day

Every year its suppose to get easier to cope with that day, but I feel like each year gets harder and harder as the more I realize the things that changed or the other things that also happened around that time... or was popular prior and slowly died out afterward... each year that goes on just reminds me how long ago it was and it’s only getting longer, for the days of “old” ... days and culture of what I remember growing up to never return.

I know I’ll get mixed views for this one...

So I’ll state my claim. I agree with the philosophy of uncle bob, I also feel like he is the high level language - older version of myself personality wise.. (when I learned about uncle bob I was like this guy is just like me but not low level haha).

Anyway.. I don’t agree with everything because I think he thinks or atleast I get the vibe he thinks everything can be solved by OOP, and high level languages. This is probably where Bob and I disagree. Personally I don’t touch ruby, python and java and “those” with a 10 foot pole.

Does he make valid arguments, yes, is agile the solve all solution no.. but agile ideas do come natural and respond faster the feedback loop of product development is much smaller and the managers and clients and customers can “see things” sooner than purly waterfall.. I mean agile is the natural approach of disciplined engineers....waterfall is and was developed because the market was flooded with undisciplined engineers and continues to flood, agile is great for them but only if they are skilled in what they are doing and see the bigger picture of the forest thru the trees.. which is the entire point of waterfall, to see the forest.. the end goal... now I’m not saying agile you only see a branch of a single tree of the forest.. but too often young engineers, and beginners jump on agile because it’s “trendy” or “everyone’s doing it” or whatever the fuck reason. The point is they do it but only focus on the immediate use case, needs and deliverables due next week.

What’s wrong with that?? Well an undisciplined engineer doing agile (no I’m not talking damn scrum shit and all that marketing bullshit).. pure true agile.
They will write code for the need due next week, but they won’t realize that hmm I will have the need 3 months from now for some feature that needs to connect to this, so I better design this code with that future feature in mind...

The disciplined engineer would do that. That is why waterfall exists so ideally the big picture is painted before hand.

The undisciplined engineer will then be frustrated in the future when he has to act like the cool aid man thru the hard pre mature architectural boundaries he created and now needs links or connections that are now needed.

Does moving to agile fix that hell no.. because the undisciplined engineer is still undisciplined.

One could argue the project manager or scrum secretary... (yes scrum secretary I said that right).. is suppose to organize and create and order the features with the future in mind etc...

Bullshit ..soo basically your saying the scrum kid is suppose to be the disciplined engineer to have foresight into realizing future features and making requirements and task now that cover those things? No!
1 scrum bitch focuses too much on pleasing “stake holders” especially taken literally in start ups where the non technical idiots are too involved with the engineering team and the scrum bastard tries to ass kiss and get everything organized and tasks working so the non technical person can see pretty things work.

Scrum master is a gate keeper and is not needed and actually hinders the whole process of making a undisciplined engineer into a disciplined engineer, makes the undisciplined engineer into a “forever” code grunt... filling weekly orders of story points unable to see the forest until it’s over because the forest isn’t show to the grunt only the scrum keeper knows the big picture..... this is bad this is why waterfall is needed.

Waterfall has its own problems, But that’s another story for another day..

ANYWAY... soooo where were we ....

Ahh yess....

Clean code..

Is it a good book, yes.. does uncle bobs personality show thru the book .. yes lol.
If you know uncle bob you will understand what I just did with this post lol. I had to tangent ( at least mine was related to the topic) ...

I agree with the principles of the book, I don’t agree with the extreme view point. It’s like religion there’s the modest folks and then there are the extremists. Well he’s the preacher of the cult and he’s on the extreme side.. but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.. many things he nails... he just hits the nail thru the wall just a bit.

OOP languages are not the solution... high level languages do not solve everything.. pininciples and concepts can be used across the board and prove valuable.. just don’t hold everything up like the 10 commandments of which you cannot deviate from.. that’s the difference here I think..

Good book, just don’t take it as the Bible as a beginner, actually infact DONT read this book as a beginner. Wait a bit learn then reflect by reading this.

I'd say Uncle Bob, since I ended up flying through his Clean Code book in order to get a placement job, but in reality, it's probably only partially that.
Most of my influence probably comes from the guy I shadowed under when I was on placement. He taught me way more than he probably ever realises.

My first ever dev project was a website I setup with my dad, it was for my uncle's company. 😃

You can barely call it a dev project because we did it in WordPress and the only thing we touched was a bit of HTML and a bunch of CSS 😅,
but it was really fun working together with my (programmer) dad and it motivated me to study programming as well.

The site turned out ugly as fuck, but the standards for websites are very low where my uncle is from so that wasn't a problem. 😊

I earned 90€ and bought myself a new mouse (Logitech G502), which I still use now 4/5 years later. 😎

So, when I was like 18 I made an app for a guy who stole a phone book database in paper and was paying people to pass it to access.
He asked me a program to make it easier to add data, he was paying people to do it one by one to an access db.
So I made that and a module to join all the dbs and check for existing ones (there was no way to join access db back then).
When he told me he didn't want it anymore...
So I deleted the sorce code and gave the binary to an uncle to use as a phone book for work.
Two weeks latter the guy called because he didn't know how to join the dbs. Well the source wasn't lost... I just deleted it and told him that if he had paid my software would take care of it...

My uncle has definitely been my biggest influence. My parents never understood computers and refused to buy one. Eventually my uncle gave me an old Win95 box with an 8GB HDD, and 512 MB of RAM(most other people in the world were running XP at this point). The thing was completely useless as a computer to do work on when I received it.

The internet wasn't really a thing yet back then, but I managed to figure out how to clean up the OS, as well as taking it a part and figuring out the parts.

He was the one who taught me that with computers, all things are possible.

From there he was always buying me books about programming, and pointing me in the right direction. He was never one to give me the answer, but always told me where to look or what to ask.

Now I'm the main web developer at my company and I love what I do.

My uncle is a solution architect so it was already in the family. so the reaction was pretty good.

"Can't you just…" are the favorite words of my company's president. He uses them like a magic wand. When faced with a complex problem that will take thousands of development man hours, he utters the words, "Can't you just…" He believes that if he can over-simplify the problem, and summarize the necessary work into a sentence or two, it should only take a week or two to complete.

Of course, I then explain that what seems simple to him is actually very complex once you peel back the layers of the problem. I then explain the specifics until his eyes glaze over, and he cries uncle.

A couple weeks later, he has forgotten everything I said, and the Monday meeting begins with, "About that project. Can't you just…"

Debugging WebRTC is pure hell.

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

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

Getting ready to start working a little something something on the side. Client (read as uncle-in-law) wants it in Wordpress because he
1) has heard of it
2) can buy themes. I told him I can make it look any way he wants and use something else, something that I'm actually familiar with. He wants Wordpress. At least it looks like writing my own plugins to do stuff will be really easy.

thank god, Microsoft decided not to use lignite coal for updating their OS. I was worried to update windows, it used to cause so much smog in the neighbourhood, one uncle even died because of lead poisioning.

now, I can update Windows in peace, no more pollution.

Uncle Bob paraphrase: You're a professional craftsman, act like it.

So I just started learning programming specifically c# cause that's what my dev uncle recommended for beginners. I hope I can meet interesting and good people around me :)

I did something potentially extremely stupid today

In 2020 when I was a teenager I suggested my uncle who ran a family business with my father to start a e commerce website. I did lot of stupid stuff doing this too. Planned to use AWS free tier to host the website and used Godaddy for domains IIRC. Setup godaddy email forwarding to his gmail account too IIRC

I registered a AWS account with my email(bad idea since my uncle's debit card was the payment method). I then setup a EC2 instance but instead of using the free instance I used some other instance because I didn't read what instance was free and setup his debit card as the payment method.

Setup woocommerce on it and pointed the domain to instance's static IP. We didn't do a lot of stuff on the website but next month on AWS we got a bill but it was a small amount. Uncle paid the bill and I terminated the EC2 instance IIRC. Next month there was a very small bill I don't remember what I did after it.

Today I remembered about it logged in to AWS and paid the bill. The problem is I used the default billing address which is in my uncle's name and the address of the family business. IIRC we didn't give them tax details of the business so we can't claim tax credit on it.

But still since there is a bill with the address of the business which Amazon probably reported to the government there could be tax discrepancies. Bill was due 4 years ago so maybe it will affect his 2020 returns which could be painful. The bill was also paid by me not from my Uncle's account so that might complicate things.

Thankfully the surprise AWS bill had basically zero affect on my relationship with my uncle.

I'm trying to convert a legacy .NET Framework web api to .NET Core, the project and its supporting libraries are in awful conditions and to make things worse at a certain point someone has the genius idea of introducing Uncle Bob's "Clean" Architecture into a part of it so stuff which could simply look like this

public string doStuff(string input){
// Do the stuff
return output;
}

becomes a convoluted mess like this

public class StuffDoerRequest {
public string Input{get;set;}
}

public class StuffDoerResponse {
public string Output{get;set;}
}

public interface IStuffDoer {
public StuffDoerResponse Execute(StuffDoerRequest request);
}

public class StuffDoer {
public StuffDoerResponse Execute(StuffDoerRequest request) {
// Do the stuff
return new StuffDoerResponse() {
Output = actualFuckingOutput;
}
}
}

Edit: sorry for the lack of indentation, apparently DevRant trims leading whitespace

In-laws are vacationing in London right now (wife's parents and aunt/uncle), so to keep in touch with the kids, I installed+configured Skype on their phones (these are folks in their 70s, no where close to tech savvy), I think they are good to go.

Last night we try to connect (I 'see' them online)...nothing, so we call.

Me: "Did you see or hear the skype notification?"
Grandma: "Was that you? My phone made a weird sound I never heard before and I saw your picture. I wasn't sure what to do so pressed the red button."
Me: "Its the same sound and picture I showed you before you guys left, remember? That's OK, the kids want to see you and say hi. Hang up and when you hear the sound and see my picture, click the green accept button"

I try again...ring..ring...nothing. About a second later we receive a text "Grandpa hit something and your picture went away. What do I do now?"

So, I try again...ring..ring...they finally pick up (we can only hear them)

Grandma: "Hello...hello? I don't hear or see anything, damn it Fred, what did you hit?"
Grandpa: "Nothing Betty, you aren't holding it right, turn it sideways .."
Wife: "Guys..we can hear you, can you see us?"
Grandpa: "Press this button with the line crossed through it .."
Wife: "Dad.."
Grandpa: "Hey!..See Betty, you had the phone turned wrong. Can you see us?"
Me: "No, you may have hit the video button..it looks like a little video camera, press it."
Grandma: "We did...nothing happened."
Me: "Are you sure? Try it again. The image may be grey or a little darkened, I don't remember."

Then we lose the sound.
Wife: "Oh good Lord they muted us. We're going to have to forget Skype and call them..."

All of a sudden we get video and sound. Cheers all around.

Then I hear in the background..

Uncle: "I thought 'PaperTrail' knew what he was doing? Apparently not."

I heard that and FU you, you old bastard. If you weren't a millionaire and paid for their London trip, I'd take 'knew what he was doing' and shove it up your ass when I see you.

"There is a reason that we keep our variables private. We don’t want anyone else to depend on them. We want to keep the freedom to change their type or implementation on a whim or an impulse. Why, then, do so many programmers automatically add getters and setters to their objects, exposing their private variables as if they were public?"
-Uncle Bob, Clean Code.

So in grade 11 (2 years ago),i had to do something called "job shadowing".basically you choose a profession and you go to a workplace. My cousin (who's in the same SAP industry)got me into this SAP development place.there were like quite a few "developers" but mostly business analysts.they made me learn this (in my oppinion) absolute shit language called ABAP which I found to be mostly glorified SQL . First I had to just create a small program which I did in like a few minutes after my mentor taught me the basic commands but you have to learn alot of module numbers and other shit.and guess what ,I remember I had to end one liners with a damn full stop,seriously fucking irritating.
So,worst dev technology I've worked with ever is SAP.Bad thing is my cousin and my uncle are really trying to take me into that bullshit SAP shit of theirs but I always refuse.will never step my foot into a SAP development job ever.

Did a website for my uncle. I'm not a web dev and I don't normally do this kind of thing for family but he's putting me up for two weeks. So he asked how difficult websites are, basically just needed me to drop some stuff in a template and host it. Not a problem. The man then brings me a printed piece of paper with changes he wants.... No copy paste for me...

I got inspired to make my code as closest to perfection as possible for me by my uncle. Seriously - he was real handyman.

Once he had an accident in his car (I think it was Škoda 100) because of the drunk pedestrian. The car engine was ruined, as like back of the car. He disassembled the car bolt by bolt (he was writing all the actions in his notebook). He then bought exact parts and paint (which wasn’t easy in 80’s Poland) and fixed the car alone in his garage.
Even tho everyone was telling him to give up, it will not work, etc. the car started at the first try and you couldn’t spot any damage. Even the paint on the body was matched 1:1.

This story inspires me to don’t give up and try to do my job as best as possible - even if everyone else says I can’t do it.

How is there no open, accepted, widely used standard to store & tag things like old family photo albums, diaries, books, etc.? Surely I can't be the only one who wants to digitise all this stuff to preserve it many years from now in case the drunk Uncle pisses on it, or Grandma's dodgy electrics burn the house down and it's all lost permanently. Or perhaps I am; it does seem that most other people doing genealogy work have the technical competence of a lemon.

Like, I get it, there's *some* online solutions for this stuff (not many and they tend to cost a fortune), but if I want to store it locally or in a private git repo or whatever... well, no-one seems to do it. I want to be able to interlink individual photos with their contextual pages in albums, store metadata about them, store audio recordings of older relatives with transcripts linked, etc. - and it just doesn't seem to be a done thing.

Ah well. Perhaps I'll do it all anyway as some kind of side project, then all being well my great great grandchildren will be immensely thankful if family history stuff ever becomes popular again.

My uncle wants a website for his company. Should I do it in Wordpress, or do you know any other, better CMS? Node.js would be awesome :)

Uncle Bob, Martin Fowler, Kevlin Henney, Doc Norton, Allen Holub.

They have all taught me great things about software development, whether through books or superb conference talks.

A really sad story of my cousin's carrier,

My cousin was a smarter guy in math during school grades but there comes his devil aunt and uncle during his high grades forcing him and his family members to go for biology in high school. They just want to use my cousin for their benefit, as they own many medical stores in the town they can use my cousin in future in their field. The uncle reached the school's principal and confirmed his admission in biology giving bribe.

Here where my cousin's carrier starts to demolish, as he was interested in math but he was forcefully admitted in biology class.
It was all ok till high school but further the uncle fought with family members misguiding them and took cousin's admission in pharmacy discipline in a university offering bribe. Here the min problems starts, As he is not interested in pharmacy he is failing in the exams and now he is under a great depression.

PS : The uncle ruined whole carrier of my cousin just for his future monetary benefits.

At this point, I feel so far from tech and programming so nothing is exciting anymore, although, I'm working as a "software engineer".

Every job feels deadend and requires nothing but absolute mundane skills. I mean "make the text bigger"-joke does not come out of thin air. No science, engineering, and little-to-no standards are involved in most jobs.

This leads us to this: you can get excited about rust, fp, extra dazzling clean code, uncle Bob's sect of salvation coders or whatever but you'll be hit with reality so don't get your hopes up.

the moment when we made a Miami Vice inspired Rambo parody game with John Rasta ninja fighting Federal Agent Man to save his uncle from arrest because he possessed some sacred herbs. This was a school project... never got to know if our teacher got the hidden message or not...

One of my uncle is becoming a classic nightmare.

He was kind of getting offended that I never payed much attention to his request of making a website for his impromptu travel agent sidejob.

He claims he gets approached by some people for tour packages. His revenue model is simply taking the payment from them with his commission and passing over responsibilities and everything else to some other travel agent. I don't know how he has the connections to make it happen or build it as a sustainable business but that's none of my business.

Anyway, what irritates me most is that he doesn't seem willing to invest in building the site. I strongly suspect he expects me to build it free ( free as in I cover expense for server and domain ) for him. He didn't have a solid plan on what features he is looking for in the website or even come up with a proper name for the site. He basically told me to buy whatever I think is good.

When I asked him to pay some money for buying the server space, he has gone mum about it.

My best guess is that he is probably looking on internet to do it himself and outsmart me.

Well, good for me.

@dfox
Awesome devrant podcasts.
Seriously, if you enjoy devrant you will be really impressed with the two they have done so far.

Surprised at the five star guests they have gotten so far.

Just need to net Uncle Bob.

My uncle was right, I should've gone for hotel management instead of being computer nerd.
My bartender friends think I'm more successful than them, but guess who's Virgin in his twenties and fixing bugs on a friday night..

Stuck in the washing machine.
Who should I call?

A) Step Bro
B) Uncle
C) Stepdad

I had an uncle named Severin. He died just three days after birth because of lung malfunction.

His grave is long abandoned and no member of my very large family can remember where it is.

The first Computer experience i can think of is when i was ~4 years old i used to draw things on paint I could print them as well, i think the computer was running windows 98 or 2000.
A few years later i remember my uncle showed me a irc server for pirated software, the client was a CLI so it looked all hacky but i had no idea what was irc,i thought it was just a search engine like google but for piracy stuff.

working at an MNC is like dating the hottest girl in campus. everyone stares at you, but only you know of the tantrums and the expenses that you have to take.

Every random aunty and uncle I come across gets a wide smile on their face when i tell them my company's parent company name. i goto this temple , and there, one uncle was introducing me to his wife "meet X ji's son , he is at Y company" .
previously when i worked at a startup, most of the time , people were like "huh? what does this company do?" and when i would explain them how our DBs are sending billions of notifications and interaction each second, they would be like "oh , so you work at IT" , YES DUDE, YOU WANNA GIVE YOUR DAUGHTER'S HAND NOW?

And this mentality is sick. i loathe the place where i currently work. i loved my previous org and now am just here coz my mom is too scared to let her son live in a different state.

The only reason a person works in a company is money and WLB. Indian service based MNCs don't give a penny more than basic industry standards. and when they want their employees to be available 2 days a week + x number of days when any CEO , ED or other sugar daddy is coming to office, you get an idea of the shitty Work life balance.

my previous company was a b2b startup, it always paid me more than industry standards and we had wfh until a notification came to enforce hybrid working bh end of 2024. till now not a single person from my team has relocated. All i had to do was to *plan* for living in a state and my mom got cold feet :/

i think so much about my future. i earn decent, so i wanna spend it to live and grow.
i wanna go party at friday nights and go on night outs. i wanna meet this cute school crush at anytime after office and don't worry about the 9 pm curfew. i wanna go look for a new home in a different area and get out of this parking hellhole. i wanna prepare for exams and do a hugher studies from aborad.

everything needs money and growth mindset. money makes money and i am trying to earn every minute. but a chained mind cannot fly . a non growth mindset will not let you evolve. and someone needs to tell it to people who control my every . fucking. action

i have seen people switching from one big name to another. i personally feel that you are just too comfortable in the environment of big names and deliberately ignoring the smaller names which are doing the actual build fast and break reality stuff. reward is proportional to risk and if you are okay with just attributing to a big name, then that's on you

It started when i was about 10 old.
My uncle showed me how to display something in dos-prompt using the echo command in a custom batch-file.
A few commands later, i was able to "program" a flip-book of an ascii ski-driver. Each ascii picture was separated by pressing any key and cls ^^
Aaaaah. Sweet childhood memories!

Later on i used a programming-language for beginners in windows.
This language gave you control of a triangle called "turtle".

My first high-level programming language was Delphi.
Since i had no idea of databases, i created a pseudo database of magic the gathering play-cards. Each card had it's very own windows formular filled up completely with an uncompressed image object displaying the chosen card modally. *sigh*
I scanned each card by using a feed scanner.
Finally, my application consisted of 200 cardimages and forced my PC to swap the required memory from my harddisk.
Boy o boy. I was such a noob! ^^

Over the years i discovered and felt in love with a lot of languages (jsp, java (script), c#, php, ...) and concepts (mvvm, mvc, clean-architecture, tdd, ...)! ;)

Anyone an Uncle Bob fan?

It’s all a blur but in 5th grade I was using a TRS-80 with a cassette player for storage at the library where my mom worked. Also an Apple IIe at school in the computer lab. My first personal computer was an IBM XT clone with an 8086 processor and dot matrix printer. I bought it after having fun with my cousin’s Commodore 64 and wanting one, but his uncle sold me on the IBM platform as something that I could upgrade over time. I was 13 when I first learned Assembler and BASIC. Big Blue Disk was my favorite subscription software with all the games and other shareware stuff that came every month in the mail.

There's this ceremony in my family performed after a few months of our birth where we are "taught" the basic alphabet to be symbolic of our commitment to learning and education and there's this part where we use a random book as part of the ceremony. My grandfather asked my uncle to get a random book, and turns out the book that he got for me was 'Unix System Programming'. 😂😂

Just got done watching a 2 1/2 hours of Uncle Bob on programming. I really like his style of speaking. Great data and interesting viewpoints. Really easy to follow. I'd read some of his articles, but never listened to him before. Will definitely be watching more. For those of you in organizations using "agile" development and having a tough time of it, his talk called The Land that Scrum Forgot was really interesting.

And he really looks amazingly like my uncle, Tom, who's also been a programmer for decades! So I just think of him as Uncle Tom instead.

my uncle showed me how to create applications in VB when I was 10 yo

Gonna have a lesson with Uncle Bob tomorrow

Just read Uncle Bobs book series:
Working with Legacy Code,
Clean Coder,
Clean Code,
Clean Architecture

Read it in this exact order and each book was better than the one before.

What did you think of them and what other books do you recommend reading?
(Coding books of course)

Fuck you WooCommerce and fuck you shopify, also a big fuck you to every developer who thinks it's a good idea to notify other customers about what another customer just bought in real time.

Guess fucking what. I don't fucking care what uncle deadinthehead just bought. Get fucking raped in a columbian prison and die to aids infested rain..

Will I be classified as the weird uncle if i want to teach my nephew how to understand binary? (Thinking)

A 1 || 0 would suffice

My mentor to me when I joined the job fresh out of college (in a somewhat dramatic tone, which is why I remember it so vividly):
"Gone are the days when you wrote programs with a small number of big functions, and lots of comments. Write code which is easy to read by humans - small functions which do 1 thing and are named after the 1 thing it does."

TL,DR: well named modular code.

Just got a new soldering iron set for xmas, courtesy of my uncle. I went to use it to hardmod a PS2. Good news: PS2 hardmodded for easy discswap and SwapMagic with original ejector. Bad news: the iron barely made it through that before oxidizing to unusability. Even after I properly wiped the tip off with a damp, clean rag before and during use, it still corroded to s**t in seconds once power was applied. (No, refiling and tinning didn't help. The solder layer oxidized too.)

Soldering irons rust to dust in my hands in seconds. Every time. Even when taken care of properly. f**k me...

(If anyone remember) A lot of mine two months old rants were related to one of my client who also happened to be my relative. Now this client's uncle (who is also a relative) sent a message to me and asked me if I can put one of his nephew in my company. He assured me he's a good programmer.

Are you fucking kidding me? Just like that? If he was any good, he would have got a job or at least would have done anything by himself.

P.S. When I looked at his CV, he knew almost all languages :-/

Wondering about how I should continue with my blog.
One the one hand, Ive always liked the video format Uncle Bob uses, and I think Id actually find it easier to talk about my ideas rather than write about it.
On the other hand, I know a lot of people prefer a written article they can read at their own pace.
Thinking I might try a hybrid of some sort, like record a vlog and then write the article afterwards, using the video for reference since I already got the words out.

just realized they share the name :P

Hello fellow Ranters,

I'm in need of some help, I want to try building a small website, like maybe 4 pages worth of work for my uncle. But I'd like to build it in such a way that a non-programmer (my uncle) could upload photos to a portfolio section through an administrative console page. I'm doing this mostly to learn how to build something like this and also as a side project to help out my uncle.

From what I've read, I'm thinking that Angular (maybe?) might be the right way to go about building dynamic pages, but I'm not really sure and was wondering what you guys would suggest? If possible can you please also recommend a place where I can find examples for something like this?

Thank you in advance for your help and recommendations, I really appreciate it!!!

my uncle, he presented my first love:

the computer 🥰

The first would be playing some Pac-Man on a bootleg ZX Spectrum that my uncle made (allegedly, he made more than one and sold them).

Outside of games, had a Win95 PC at some point. I don't remember much as that was something around 20 years ago.

someone sending us a strong signal... with traffic patterns.

At the end of the avenue, lived its creator. Well, used to leave. The weird half-house is hoarded, and his skeleton is there somewhere.

When flying above, I noticed a small enclave with fancy but small buildings. I put on my cloak and landed.
“What is it? It’s easier to answer what it is not”.
The hatch opened. I went in, about 30 meters. The hatch closed behind me. The tube-powered holographic screen lit up. “I think the secrets of the universe is more important than knowing today's weather”, she said, smiling.

I put on a blueprint of their superbug. Incurable, it had molecular ammo on it.
“Thanks”, I said, leaving. “Forgive my autistic antics. As for my cat, well, they copy their owners’ behavior, don’t they?”
And I took off.

I finally got some tattoos. I don’t know why, but all of them were about menstruation.
“I don’t want to let _him_ into our tattoo life club!”, my cousin said.
I then connected our M1A1 Abrams to a military tablet I stole from the avenue creator. “What’s that?”, my uncle said. “It’s the fourth time already that I get us new fiber optic cable. Think about my father! He’s dying!”
I hug my cousin. She was already dead.

This is why I’m stuck here. In the middle of nowhere, in a rusted trailer, naked, eating uncooked human meat from a dog bowl.

When my electrician uncle does some work for me for free it feels like he is a good person. When I do work for family for free I feel like an idiot (only since a year or two). Hustle culture can really mess with your values even if you don't notice it.

Ecuador finally expelled Assange. Time for the UN-United Queendom to ship him to Uncle Sam for debugging

so my uncle (in my father’s side) and my auntie (from my mother’s side)... we were in a car and they started talking about me, i pretended to be asleep. THEN they talked about how quiet I am.. like???
They were talking about how much they hate me for being too quiet. SO DID I RUIN YOUR LIFE FOR BEING QUIET? one of the reasons why i wanna live alone or be with the people who loves me the way i am.

My uncle is a tester for android+ios apps and he doesn't even own a smartphone...?

uncle bob and his “cLeAn aRcHiTeCtUrE” was a setup all along. His teachings were conceived by managers, the most useless part of our field, to cripple and disempower developers. They wanted to make our work excruciatingly slow and unnecessarily difficult, so they could maintain their job security.

It is obvious that if you were to ditch all that useless boilerplate, the work process becomes way easier, quicker and more streamlined. In that scenario, managers aren’t needed, at all.

They have played us for absolute fools. uncle bob is the biggest disgrace to ever happen to our field. Let’s leave this dark chapter in the past and move on into the world of quick, effortless development, with happy engineers, happy business and the complete lack of burnout. Also, it is time to make managers a thing of the past.

When I was 11, my uncle called me genius and I should study computers after I went online to HP's official website (using a 56k modem connection) to download the drivers for the printer we had at hone, since somebody lost the cd with the installation that came with the printer. Today, I am 25 yo software developer earning 25k+ a year :) #thanksuncle

ugh, company discussion on WhatsApp sucks. i want to take a leave from this new company i joinedbas i am bored the hell out

the company policy is that we got 16 pl 7 mandatory leaves and 8 emergency leaves. pretty good deal i guess. but as a new joiner, i am on probabtion for 6 months and I can't take either of those mandatory/paid leaves.

i was neck deep in work so could not get time to call my manager. plus had a 1 hour incredibly boring and frustrating call with another 50 yo tech lead from another team who was goin on an on like a 90 yo uncle with his wartime stories so could not think straight.

i sent my manager a "hey a***" at 7.08 pm on WhatsApp.

that's a great shoot oneself in the foot situation. i could not call because it's 7.08 pm, and don't wanna give an impression of a corporate non living dev who makes or supports making calls at odd hours. i also can't dele6 the message coz that would be more awkward

but i had went with the creepy hey text , and didn't wanna keep him waiting, so quickly add anothe message with the context : "i wanted to discuss a small leave related query, will call tomorrow"

another classic shoot oneself in the foot.

the probation guy wants to take leaves? he doesn't have any, what could he talk about it? oh right, i was gonna cheese him to give me an informal permission. but now i made it all formal.

noice :/

My uncle had a computer with a dot matrix printer attached. I remember that there was a Python turtle like drawing program. Spend quite some hours making blocky single line drawings with that. Printed some too.
No clue what kind of computer it was though. Probably a PC clone like headstart.

My family mostly get it because my uncle is a solution architect. They probably still dont realise just how complex it can be though.

My uncle is interestes in security, but personal security, he wants to be more peivate. So he told me he had installed Kali linux and got a course it, so I tried to explain him that this is more of a professional thing... that he needs something else.. and so he asked me: "What do I need, which book can I buy?"

I didn't really know. For me it's common sense to get a NAS, maybe have a laptop that is never connected to the internet, or maybe encrypt trafic encrypt hard disks.

But is there a book for that? You have 30 seconds to shine, how would u respond?

Im at an internship right now. It is 4h per day and I start at 8am(cause im at a course in the afternoon, that its already to finish in some days).
But my boss want to hire me full time(7:30am to 5pm) and asked if I want to do some course(in the afternoon period) before start full time. The thing is, Im at the company for only 3 months doing backend dev ( thats the ~objective of the internship). But my objective in life is DataScience, and the company is big AF. That job that I got cause an uncle that works there told my boss about me (before) so I got the internship.
It is ok to tell my boss that I want to do a DataScience course ( and maybe the company pay for it) knowing that will not be replicated at the company right now?

I. FUCKING HATE MY STUPID ASS UNCLE. HE IS SUCH AN ASSWIPE BRO ISTG he moved in with us and like I didn't think it would be such a big deal but HIS ASS SCREAMS AT ANYONE WHO DISRUPTS HIM WHILE HES LITERALLY DOING POT IN THE KITCHEN AND LIKE.. BRO DISRESPECTS HIS MOTHER WHO KEEPS THE ENTIRE HOUSE STABLE. HE TAKES ALL HER MONEY and doesnt lay her back like EVER?? And HE FUCKING RUINS EVERY HOLIDAY WE HAVE. And i cant even say anything to him because i have to respect grownups like man.. he aint even man enough to be respected 😹😹😹 he thinks hes scary bro like no. hes just a self centered lazy ass bitch. Im waiting for the day he moves out lmao.

This should sound like a no-brainer but I need some opinions. Is it worth it to use a pi-top instead of buying a laptop? For programming on the road, i'll just squeeze in a commit while traveling, ill just code instead of talk to my uncle in this reunion, quick commit while le gf is cooking, etc..., purposes? Are the disadvantages worth it enough for the advantages? I was hoping for an overall general programming companion including IoT.

So. Wow I have a question. Ok for real... I am in need of advice. I have a concept for a platform based on a specific interest which almost all of us have, based on a peer-to-peer principle with multiple services and user types/needs/agendas/reasons. The platform is intellectually straight forward and users will all participate on the platform as they see fit which will benefit other users as well as motivate more to join. The platform will serve it's own purpose and meet the users needs in a way that you may have seen before but the intellectual property and how the platform is used, is so unique that I can't risk too much information.

The question is. How do I protect my idea / intellectual property so I can recruit help and market without someone coming along and stealing it out from underneath me?

This isn't uncle Vinnys Cologne idea...

Everyone thinks they have the million dollar winner. I'm not sure if this puts gold toilet paper in my bathroom just yet but... I have something that an existing platform with money will absolutely steal and try to push as their own idea... They will probably succeed too.

So how do I protect this from happening so only I get to fail or ruin this good idea?

I have multiple ones, my uni has for one several amazing professors that I admire. Then there's there's the classics Thompson, kernighan, djikstra et al. T.A.D, uncle Bob and last but not least Stallman

All of them has provided insights, knowledge and a better way to view code and software

Watching my uncle playing Empire Earth and thinking that's what I want to do all day long.

“The proper use of comments is to compensate for our failure to express yourself in code.” – Uncle Bob Martin

My uncle is a dba so gets it, my dad sort of gets it because he also works in the transport sector, my mom doesn't Really understand but knows it's computers. Everyone else thinks it's it support

My first close encounter with a computer was with a came called "Skunny: Save our pizzas" in I think 1996 or 1997" and it used to run in dos.

And then next one that I remember was in 98/99 with my uncle ordering groceries on a PC. With a dial up modem.

I got my first machine in 2005 and the first game that I installed was Skunny: Save our pizzas.

My uncle Kyle works for @creativeMISFITS and he taught me about his coding style so that's what I'm used to.

Once upon a time to prevent people from stealing my work I created a program that converted photos and files into double sided sheets of at codes with packeted contents so I could scan them into a high resolution file later and recompose them into a series of files

So very aggressively insistent we’re the dumb slaves that run all this crap in being cruel and evil and fucking themselves over that they stole these sheets from the document folders I carried in my backpack and sent me into a traumatized state pre amnesia and wasted 5 years of my life

Now all these same period are either leering programmed fools or withered miserable sacks of skin and I’m no closer to moved on from this bs and I find myself exasperated that everyone and their retard incestuous uncle would want to deny and repeat the same crap over and over as they as they are only making themselves crazy as well. Says something no records equals no future in essence essentially the reason if it’s not physically secured on land that cannot be taken away and we keep trading law and order for .., whatever these idiots get out of this well all die before we reach much furthet