Website design philosophies:

Apple: "...and a really big picture there, and a really big picture there, and a really big picture there, and..."

Microsoft: "border-radius:0 !important;"

Google: "EVERYTHING MOVES!!! And most websites get material design. Most."

Amazon: "We're slowly moving away from 2009"

Wix: "How can we further increase load times?"

Literally any download site: "Click here! No, click here! Nononono!! Click here!!..."

Facebook: "We can't change anything because our main age demographic is around 55"

University websites: "That information isn't hard enough to find yet. Decrease the search accuracy and increase broken links."

I tutor people who want to program, I don't ask anything for it, money wise, if they use my house as a learning space I may ask them to bring cookies or a pizza or something but on the whole I do it to help others learn who want to.

Now this in of itself is perfectly fine, I don't get financially screwed over or anything, but...

Fuck me if some students are horrendous!

To the best of my knowledge I've agreed to work with and help seven individuals, four female three male.

One male student never once began the study work and just repeatedly offered excuses and wanted to talk to me about how he'd screwed his life up. I mean that's unfortunate, but I'm not a people person, I don't really feel emotionally engaged with a relative stranger who quite openly admits they got addicted to porn and wasted two years furiously masturbating. Which is WAY more than I needed to know and made me more than a little uncomfortable. Ultimately lack of actually even starting the basic exercises I blocked him and stopped wasting my time.

The second dude I spoke to for exactly 48 hours before he wanted to smash my face in. Now, he was Indian (the geographical India not native American) and this is important, because he was a friend of a friend and I agreed to tutor however he was more interested in telling me how the Brits owed India reparations, which, being Scottish, I felt if anyone was owed reparations first, it's us, which he didn't take kindly too (something about the phrase "we've been fucked, longer and harder than you ever were and we don't demand reparations" didn't endear me any).

But again likewise, he wanted to talk about politics and proving he was a someone "I've been threatened in very real world ways, by some really bad people" didn't impress me, and I demonstrated my disinterest with "and I was set on fire once cos the college kids didn't like me".

He wouldn't practice, was constantly interested in bigging himself up, he was aggressive, confrontational and condescending, so I told him he was a dick, I wasn't interested in helping him and he can help himself. Last I heard he wasn't in the country anymore.

The third guy... Absolute waste of time... We were in the same computer science college class, I went to university and did more, he dossed around and a few years later went into design and found he wanted to program and got in touch. He completes the code schools courses and understandably doesn't quite know what to do next, so he asks a few questions and declares he wants to learn full stack web development. Quickly. I say it isn't easy especially if it's your first real project but if one is determined, it isn't impossible.

This guy was 30 and wanted to retire at 35 and so time was of the essence. I'm up for the challenge, and so because he only knows JavaScript (including prototypes, callbacks and events) I tell him about nodejs and explain that it's a little more tricky but it does mean he can learn all the basis without learning another language.

About six months of sporadic development where I send him exercises and quizzes to try, more often than not he'd answer with "I don't know" after me repeatedly saying "if you don't know, type the program out and study what it does then try to see why!".

The excuses became predicable, couldn't study, playing soccer, couldn't study watching bake off, couldn't study, couldn't study.

Eventually he buys a book on the mean stack and I agree to go through it chapter by chapter with him, and on one particular chapter where I'm trying to help him, he keeps interrupting with "so could I apply for this job?" "What about this job?" And it's getting frustrating cos I'm trying to hold my code and his in my head and come up with a real world analogy to explain a concept and he finally interrupts with "would your company take me on?"

I'm done.

"Do you want the honest unabridged truth?"

"Yes, I'd really like to know what I need to do!"

"You are learning JavaScript, and trying to also learn computer science techniques and terms all at the same time. Frankly, to the industry, you know nothing. A C developer with a PHD was interviewed and upon leaving the office was made a laughing stock of because he seemed to not know the difference between pass by value and pass by reference. You'd be laughed right out the building because as of right now, you know nothing. You don't. Now how you respond to this critique is your choice, you can either admit what I'm saying is true and put some fucking effort into studying cos I'm putting more effort into teaching than you are studying, or you can take what I'm saying as a full on attack, give up and think of me as the bad guy. Your choice, if you are ready to really study, you can text me in the morning for now I'm going to bed."

The next day I got a text "I was thinking about what you said and... I think I'm not going to bother with this full stack stuff it's just too hard, thought you should know."

Friend: Hey, can you fix my laptop? The hard drive is almost full.

Me: (Looking through his folders) Maybe it's because of this. Why do you have 3000+ files in your downloads folder? Maybe I should delete some of this.

Friend: No no, please don't touch the downloads folder, I have some very important documents there.

Me: Why don't you move them to a separate folder then? You should organize the ones you actually need and delete the rest. This folder is a complete mess.

Friend: No no, the problem is not the downloads folder, there must be something else. Can't you just uninstall some programs to free up space?

Me: I could, but I don't know which ones you actually use.

Friend: What? You should know!! You studied computer science for this!!

Me: First of all, there is not a single class in the whole 4 years of university called "How to uninstall programs and free up space on 128GB hard drives of shitty €400 computers". Second of all, I don't know why you were expecting me to find a magic button on your laptop that immediately frees up all the space in a hard drive without actually deleting anything. That's not how computers work, you know.

Friend: Hey if you didn't want to help me you could have said so in the first place.

Me: FML

Started university of applied sciences to become a computer engineer instead of a web developer.

Met a lot of kids that are in the "computer studies = games + YouTube".

They struggle hard, but don't do anything to learn...

Then there's this classmate, the guy is 10 years older than me, is trying really hard, and struggles a lot.

I've been helping him out with assigns by asking questions, and he asks me how to solve a problem in general, not the assignments which is super refreshing to see someone that wants to learn.

Currently trying to help him "translate" the simple stuff into c++:

So, if you want the char at a certain position in a string, how would you tell me to do it?

"well, take the list, look at position x and bam its done"

Try writing it like that!

And instead of "[i]" he writes "stringvar[i]"

He really appreciates the help and I hope he'll get the mindset soon :)

Would hate to lose a motivated guy when there's so many idiots copy pasting everything from tutorials...

Spending 5 years at University with a friend....uh???

Let me explain...

I have a friend. A very good friend I can say. I know him since 18 years but I started being everyday with him at the beginning of my "University's journey".

And when I say everyday, I am not joking...every lesson, every exam, every project...

The problem is that he is one of the smartest person I have ever met in the "scientific field". So? He is also unable to say that he doesn't understand something. He is unable to say the he is wrong or to admit that someone else is better then him.

Let just say that he is not good in "relating to other people".

I am very smart too and suddenly he started to fail where instead i was doing good. Jealousy, anger. Every occasion to point out my errors. Every occasion to say to the others that I am stupid and he is smart.

But I know him and I am not like him. So I continued to stay with him, work with him and also going out with him. Because he is my friend.

And you know what? After 5 years he started to be more "human". I learned so much from him and he learned to be respectful and humble.

It was a very stressful period but thanks to that I know that I can be strong and work hard also when someone try to stop me. I am not afraid to say my opinion just because someone is yelling at me. And I know that I can go over stupid judgements and still work good as a team member.

That's it.

Be respectful. Be patient but defend your opinions. Trust yourself but listen and learn from everyone. And if sometime you fail, remember that it's normal. No one is perfect. No one can be perfect alone.

I hope that this rant can help someone else.

Good week to all of you.

Wow this one deserves a rant. Where should I even begin? I got a new job for over half a year now doing work in an agency. We're building websites and online shops with Typo3 and Shopware (not my dream, but hey). All fine you might think BUT...

1) I have been working on the BIGGEST project we have all by myself since I started working at this company. No help, nobody cares.

2) If something goes wrong all the shit falls back to me like "wHy DiDnT yoU WoRk MoRE?". Seriously? How should one dev cover a project that's meant for at least two or three.

3) The project was planned four years ago (YES that's a big fat FOUR) and sat there for 3,5 years - nobody gave a fuck. I got into the company and immediately got the sucky shit project to work on.

4) I was promised some time to get familiar with the projects and tech we use and "pick something I like most to get started". Well that never happened.

5) I was also promised not to talk directly to our customers. Well, each week I was bombarded with insults, a shitload of work and nonsense by our customers because (you guessed it) I was obligated to attend meetings.

6) The scheduled time for a meeting was 30 minutes, sometimes they just went on for over two hours. Fml.

7) Project management. It does not exist. The company is just out to get more and more clients, hires more god damn managers and shit and completely neglects that we might need more devs to get all this crap finished. Nope, they don't care. By the way: this is not like a 200 employee company, it's more like 15 which makes it even sadder to have 4 managers and 3 devs.

8) We don't use trello (or anything to keep track of our "progress"), nobody knows the exact scope of the project, because it was planned FOUR FUCKING YEARS AGO.

9) They planned to use 3 months on this project to get it finished (by the way it's not just an online shop, it has a really sophisticated product configurator with like 20 dependencies). Well, we're double over that time period and it is still not finished.

10) FUCK YOU SHOPWARE

11) The clients are super unsatisfied with our service (who would have guessed). They never received official documents from us (that's why nobody knows the scope), nor did they receive the actual screen design of the shop so we just have to make it up on the go. Of course I mean "I" by "we", because appearently it is my job to develop, design and manage this shit show.

12) My boss regularly throws me in front of the bus by randomly joining meetings with my client telling them the complete opposite of things that we discussed internally (he doesn't know anything about this stupid project)

13) FUCK YOU COLLEAGUES, FUCK YOU COMPANY, FUCK YOU SHOPWARE AND FUCK YOU STUPID CUSTOMERS.

14) Oh btw. the salary sucks ass, it's barely a couple of bucks above minimum wage. Don't ask me why I accepted the offer. I guess it was better than nothing in the meantime.

Boy that feels good. I needed that rant. But hey don't get me wrong. I get that dev jobs can be hard and sucky, but this is beyond stupidity that I can bear. I therefore applied for a dev job in research at a university in my dream country. Nice colleagues, interesting projects, good project management. They accepted me, gave me a good offer and I can happily say that in 6-7 weeks my current company can go fuck themselves (nobody knows the 10.000+ lines of code but me). Just light it up and watch it burn!

Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for a rant with a capital R, this is gonna be a long one.

Our story begins well over a year ago while I was still in university and things such as "professionalism" and "doing your job" are suggestions and not something you do to not get fired. We had multiple courses with large group projects that semester and the amount of reliable people I knew that weren't behind a year and in different courses was getting dangerously low. There were three of us who are friends (the other two henceforth known as Ms Reliable and the Enabler) and these projects were for five people minimum. The Enabler knew a couple of people who we could include, so we trusted her and we let them onto the multiple projects we had.

Oh boy, what a mistake that was. They were friends, a guy and a girl. The girl was a good dev, not someone I'd want to interact with out of work but she was fine, and a literal angel compared to the guy. Holy shit this guy. This guy, henceforth referred to as Mr DDTW, is a motherfucking embarrassment to devs everywhere. Lazy. Arrogant. Standards so low they're six feet under. Just to show you the sheer depth of this man's lack of fucks given, he would later reveal that he picked his thesis topic "because it's easy and I don't want to work too hard". I haven't even gotten into the meat of the rant yet and this dude is already raising my blood pressure.

I'll be focusing on one project in particular, a flying vehicle simulator, as this was the one that I was the most involved in and also the one where shit hit the fan hardest. It was a relatively simple-in-concept development project, but the workload was far too much for one person, meaning that we had to apply some rudimentary project management and coordination skills that we had learned to keep the project on track. I quickly became the de-facto PM as I had the best grasp on the project and was doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

The first incident happened while developing a navigation feature. Another teammate had done the basics, all he had to do was use the already-defined interfaces to check where the best place to land would be, taking into account if we had enough power to do so. Mr DDTW's code:
-Wasn't actually an algorithm, just 90 lines of if statements sandwiched between the other teammate's code.
-The if statements were so long that I had to horizontal scroll to see the end, approx 200 characters long per line.
-Could've probably been 20 normal-length lines MAX if he knew what a fucking for loop was.
-Checked about a third of the tiles that it should have because, once again, it's a series of concatenated if statements instead of an actual goddamn algorithm.
-IT DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!

My response was along the lines of "what the fuck is this?". This dipshit is in his final year and I've seen people write better code in their second semester. The rest of the team, his friend included, agreed that this was bad code and that it should be redone properly. The plan was for Mr DDTW to move his code into a new function and then fix it in another branch. Then we could merge it back when it was done. Well, he kept on saying it was done but:
-It still wasn't an algorithm.
-It was still 90 lines.
-They were still 200 characters wide.
-It still only checked a third of the tiles.
-IT STILL DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!

He also had one more task, an infinite loop detection system. He watched while Ms Reliable did the fucking work.

We hit our first of two deadlines successfully. We still didn't have a decent landing function but everything else was nice and polished, and we got graded incredibly well. The other projects had been going alright although the same issue of him not doing shit applied. Ms Reliable and I, seeing the shitstorm that would come if this dude didn't get his act together, lodged a complaint with the professor as a precautionary measure. Little did I know how much that advanced warning would save my ass later on.

Second sprint begins and I'm voted in as the actual PM this time. We have four main tasks, so we assign one person to each and me as a generalist who would take care of the minor tasks as well as help out whoever needed it. This ended up being a lot of reworking and re-abstracting, a lot of helping and, for reasons that nobody ever could have predicted, one of the main tasks.

These main tasks were new features that would need to be integrated, most of which had at least some mutual dependencies. Part of this project involved running our code, which would connect to the professor's test server and solve a server-side navigation problem. The more of these we solved, the better the grade, so understandably we needed an MVP to see if our shit worked on the basic problems and then fix whatever was causing the more advanced ones to fail. We decided to set an internal deadline for this MVP. Guess who didn't reach it?

Hitting the character limit, expect part 2 SOON

One of my best mentors was my father!

When i was very, very young (like 8 years old), he brought a new computer from his work! The first thing he did was play Doom (lol) but later, he always tried to show me all the things that could be done, coding in VB6.

He always told me: "You can use this to make the computer do what you want to do! You can do many things!". Even if at that time I did not understand much, he always tried to explain me how to develop a calculator or even a "Hello World" but with the name of my mother.

I will never forget his face of happiness, when I simulated a face that blinked with a counter. I do not even remember how I did it, but he hugged me so hard lol.

A couple of years ago, he was the first to try my first application on Android: An application that screamed when you shook the phone lol. He laughed a lot with that application.

He helped me in my university and we even developed several solutions together for different companies. Now we work separately, but he was an important part of what I am now.

PS: My english is kinda rusty, so forgive me ><.

Two years ago I moved to Dublin with my wife (we met on tour while we were both working in music) as visa laws in the UK didn’t allow me to support the visa of a Russian national on a freelance artists salary.

After we came to Dublin I was playing a lot to pay rent (major rental crisis here), I play(ed) Double Bass which is a physically intensive instrument and through overworking caused a long term injury to my forearm which prevents me playing.

Luckily my wife was able to start working in Community Operations for the big tech companies here (not an amazing job and I want her to be able to stop).

Anyway, I was a bit stuck with what step to take next as my entire career had been driven by the passion to master an art that I was very committed to. It gave me joy and meaning.

I was working as hard as I could with a clear vision but no clear path available to get there, then by chance the opportunity came to study a Higher Diploma qualification in Data Science/Analysis (I have some experience handling music licensing for tech startups and an MA with components in music analysis, which I spun into a narrative). Seemed like a ‘smart’ thing to do to do pick up a ‘respectable’ qualification, if I can’t play any more.

The programme had a strong programming element and I really enjoyed that part. The heavy statistics/algebra element was difficult but as my Python programming improved, I was able to write and utilise codebase to streamline the work, and I started to pull ahead of the class. I put in more and more time to programming and studied personally far beyond the requirements of the programme (scored some of the highest academic grades I’ve ever achieved). I picked up a confident level of Bash, SQL, Cypher (Neo4j), proficiency with libraries like pandas, scikit-learn as well as R things like ggplot. I’m almost at the end of the course now and I’m currently lecturing evening classes at the university as a paid professional, teaching Graph Database theory and implementation of Neo4j using Python. I’m co-writing a thesis on Machine Learning in The Creative Process (with faculty members) to be published by the institute. My confidence in programming grew and grew and with that platform to lift me, I pulled away from the class further and further.

I felt lost for a while, but I’ve found my new passion. I feel the drive to master the craft, the desire to create, to refine and to explore.

I’m going to write a Thesis with a strong focus on programmatic implementation and then try and take a programming related position and build from there. I’m excited to become a professional in this field. It might take time and not be easy, but I’ve already mastered one craft in life to the highest levels of expertise (and tutored it for almost 10 years). I’m 30 now and no expert (yet), but am well beyond beginner. I know how to learn and self study effectively.

The future is exciting and I’ve discovered my new art! (I’m also performing live these days with ‘TidalCycles’! (Haskell pattern syntax for music performance).

Hey all! I’m new on devRant!

So before today, I'd never used GoDaddy before. Not even once. My supervisor walks in and happily informs me that I'm going to be adding photos to a website that she does editing for. Okay, fine, that's stupidly easy. What I did not realize, however, is that this entire website had been built using GoDaddy's site builder, and if you're not familiar with it, thank whatever gods you worship that you've dodged that bullet. I hardly want to go wandering around somebody else's web hosting, so I search about for a bit praying that there's SOME semblance of a normal text editor someplace, because text editors make me happy and all, and find very little on the regular site. Already not thrilled. So I figure, how bad is this site editor? Really, how bad can it possibly be?
Oh, you poor misguided son of a -
Anyway, I go in and look at the site. Slideshows everywhere, nothing is aligned correctly, it's a web designer's nightmare. Thankfully, I'm not a web designer, so I press on and reorganize a little bit. I try slapping a new slideshow on their, and discover that unlike the way it SHOULD work, elements do not move to allow for other elements, they just sit there and let you throw things on top of them. I stare at my neatly-stacked slideshows for a second in utter disbelief, knowing but not really accepting that I'm going to need to take every last one of those slideshow elements and slide those little so-and-so's down by hand. ....why? Who designed this? Who decided that was a good idea? I do some Googling to see if there's anything out there to make this less horrid, and lo and behold I find a GoDaddy page about their FTP file manager! It's under web/classic hosting, which apparently means it's deprecated because I spent the next ten minutes hunting around for the "web hosting" link those chicken-lickers were so proud of and it's nowhere to be found.
Alright, so they want to do this the hard way.
At this point I'm screaming internally and PRAYING that I'm just being stupid and not seeing anything to make it easi-
No, not even easier. Just less stupid. This website builder makes no sense. It's like hiring a contractor to build a bridge and handing him a box of Legos and a banana.
So I do more googling and find instructions on getting to the file manager. FINALLY. The first step is find "Hosting" under "My Products." I rush over to My Products joyfully, hoping I can get this stupid website up and running reasonably quickly, and...!
There's no hosting tab.
No button.
Not even a little hard-to-see link. At this point my brain is screaming. WHY would you give me a website builder but absolutely no way to actually write the website? Do people actually use this thing? I mean, I get it if they want to make it nice and accessible for people to make websites without overwhelming them with HTML but if they know how to edit the website and they don't want your help, why would you force me in to this? Why? Then it occurred to me that maybe the organization just hasn't ever had a web developer in it, ever, or at least not one who was willing to help out with the website, so they purposefully signed up for hosting that deprived them of any kind of HTML editor. Then on top of all of that, I noticed that on the home page, which had been edited by someone else long before I ever looked at it, ALSO had one of these stupid slideshows that I had to reorganize by hand, and some sad, angry little man had put in one of the photos sideways. It was SIDEWAYS. Just sitting there on its side, the photo's occupants staring at me with sad eyes begging me to turn them facing up again. I sat there and stared at a badly-designed website in a questionably-designed editor. And I wondered. I wondered who put this all together, and I wondered why *I* was the one doing it, when I work for a university and the website was for some beach homeowner's association. And I wondered if this job was a task that my supervisor had agreed to do and just passed off onto an office monkey. And I wept bitter tears at the realization that I am that office monkey.

Am I the only one who is triggered by seeing all of the stupid articles claiming Java is bad introduction language? Just becuase Standford decided to change it to JavaScript? What the actual fuck? How students should learn the fundamentals concept of OOP in scripting language?
Don't get me wrong, I hate using Java for real life projects. But there is a reason why almost every university use it as introduciton language. It's great start to learn programming. Saying that the 'Hello World' in Java is complex and can scare people away, it's complete nonsens. For fuck sake, yes programming should be fun, but it is also hard. People can understand that they are going to learn what 'public static voiď means later. It's the structure of many Computer Science classes. It's the assigments that are not designed in engaging and fun way for newcomers. That's the problem, not the language.

Story time! This happened several years ago, back when I didn't have a computer and I was just using the computers at the university. They had 8 iMacs all in a row, and I would sign into one and do my work.

Now these computers have Deep Freeze on them, which is a fancy hard disk driver that treats the entire drive as copy-on-write, so when anything writes to the drive it makes a copy of the block and writes to that instead. That way all your changes are gone when you reboot. It's a real nifty idea, but it's annoying that you have to reset all your settings the way you like them.

So as part of my setup routine I signed into iCloud. This automatically synced my browser history and my email, and various other things I didn't really care about.

One of those things I didn't care about was Find My Mac. I found this out next time I signed into iCloud and saw the university computer on the list. I had never seen these computers on the list before since normally the computer reboots and forgets everything when you log out. What I think happened is the sysadmin forgot to check the "reboot on logout" option in Deep Freeze. So I was like "I wonder what would happen if I passcode locked the computer?" I clicked the passcode lock option and entered 5555, and it seemed to work.

The next day I come in and the particular computer I locked was gone. I thought "oh God what have I done". So I inquired with the sysadmin (who I really hope is not reading this) and he said "oh, someone got into the Find my Mac thing and locked it down. We were trying different codes, since if we couldn't unlock it we'd have to send it to Apple and provide proof of purchase and that could take weeks. We had tried all the obvious ones like 1234 and that wasn't working so I was about to give up, but then I tried 5555 and it rebooted! So yeah, it'll be back soon, and I decided to try installing OS X 10.11 on it because we'll all need to upgrade sooner or later eventually and it's best to have tested a bit first."

So in the end I somehow made it out with my skin still on, and also with El Capitan on one of the computers, which was the only one I used after that. Not so bad! Oh and if you've manged to read all the way through you deserve a cookie 🍪😄

Interviewer: So which university are you from?

Me: I am from "foo" university.

Interviewer: So why did you not go to "bar" university?

Inner Me: Wtf kind of a question is that. Why the fuck aren't you a unicorn with pigs flying out of your ass and a globally reknowned researcher at Stanford?
We all end up where destiny takes us. Some of us try very hard but things don't magically happen for us. We keep trying but at the end of the day you end up where you end up.

Real Me: I just finished my High School and had the entry test the next day. I was not prepared at all.

I already wrote one rant about how my family deals with me being a developer, but this rant I wanna dedicate to people close to my family and what they actually think...

Earlier this year I ended school, so I was supposed to find a job. Well...I live in region where only small IT "companies" exist. It is really hard to find job as a developer around here. These small companies either do not want to hire anyone or they just hire people with super amazing university or just family members and friends. Anyway, I did not want to move to the capital city, so I just kept seraching...and that is how this family friends started to be fucking toxic.

While searching for job everyone just kept telling me how am I lazy as fuck and will not just go digging fucking drains or work for minimum wage to some korean shit company around here. Of course not literally, but I can see when someone starts to look at me as I am completely crazy. Our family lost many fake friends who just do not understand because of this. But it did not ended here...

When I finally found a job 1.5 month earlier, I was so happy. Job from home in relative good company. Ho Lee Fuk! Nobody believes me I am actually working. People look at me as I am a lazy fuck laying all day in bed and watching fucking TV. I am done with these dick people.

End of story.

!dev !sex I promise this is a good read

I once read the whole bible.

Not in one sitting, ofc. I read it in a period of a year, just 3-4 chapters a day.

Is it something to boast about?
I'm not sure.

I mean, I guess being able to read through it despite not being exactly entertainment material (except some fun parts) kinda is. So I might feel a tad bit proud about that.

But I'm actually more happy that I did instead.

The reason I'm more happy than proud is because I took awareness of the religion I was in.

I became christian when I was an early teen. I grew up in an agnostic family. My dad was kinda hippie and my mom was into leftist ideas.

So me becoming a christian was a bit orthogonal to their philosophies.

I started assisting a church because I was very alone and misunderstood, and found some people there that seemed to get me, and viceversa.

But as time went on and I got more exposed to christian doctrine, my level of commitment grew.

I wanted to save people from going to hell. It sounds funny, maybe egotistical, but it's true.

3, 4 years of being in the church go by. I collaborate in the church, I make some very personal friendships, I was very deep in church by that point.

I then decide that I should take it to the next level and read the bible. So I did. And unknowingly, it started this feeling in me that I didn't liked being a christian at all.

I'm not gonna deny there are some christian values that are still compatible with today's modern society, such as being a good samaritan, working hard, being honest.

But there were too many verses in both old and new testament that I found morally repugnant,

The ones that made me feel the worst about christianity, though, were the ones that condemned homosexuality with death.

Since my dad was a hippie, he used to be in artsy things, like theater or music, and through that he had some gay friends

And for real, I think they were the nicest and most cheerful people I'd met as a kid. So I could not be part of that anymore.

Let me clarify that I didn't stop being a christian immediately after finishing the bible, but it did start a spark "of "what tf do I even believe in...?"

That spark turned into flame when I started the university, a place where people think for a living.

It's no wonder my mind started completing the puzzle, and slowly I started liking church and christianity less and less.

Until one sunday I didn't want to go, and I didn't, and from then on, I pretty much severed ties with that church and christianity.

Which is crazy considering I went every sunday without interruption for 6 years, and several saturdays too.

Anyhow, that's my story of me getting in n out of christianity. Like in the previous post, it sure how to end this, so go fuck a rock or something.

LONELINESS IS REAL
I am a freshman in a university ( about to complete my first year ) with a girl to boy ratio of around 1:10. During my first semester I was spending a lot of time with friends, chatting up with people and making connections. Due to this my productivity as a dev, if I am even capable of being called that decreased ( I was not a developer before joining , but I had an aim of being one , esp at least the best in my batch ) after 1st year. In retrospect I did nothing productive till 3 months out of 4 in my first sem and the guilt hit me hard . During the last month I had to catch up with my much neglected studies and all I had done was a little bit of html and css, and barely scratched the surface of js( please don't judge me for this :) , I had to start somewhere < although I learned a little bit of C++ > ). BUT I WAS A HAPPY CUNT, and had no sign of lonelines. Now during this sem , I had made progress ( learn js with es6 syntax and still learning, did c++ and extended my knowledge ) . Currently I am working on my Vue full stack app ( along with express and some websocket library , TBD ) < yeh I learnt some backend too > , and increasing my knowledge of dsa using clrs. Although my productivity has increased manifolds but I know feel the need of closure. I am kinda happy with the fact that I know a lot of people around here ( thanks to my extroverted 1st semester ) but sometimes it hits me hard at night when I don't have a monitor to drown my eyes and thoughts in. I have increased my academic performance too but I need someone to share and express my feelings with. I could have made a girlfriend earlier but now most of them are taken and I have lost touch. But believe me, all I want is a companion to spend these lonely days and night ( not talking about as a friend ). Staying away from home isnt easy you know...m :(

KUDOS TO DEVRANT FOR DEVELOPING A COMMUNITY WHERE PEOPLE LIKE ME CAN FEEL SAFE IN OUR NATURAL HABITAT. I COULDN'T HAVE EXPRESSED MY FEELINGS ANYWHERE ELSE EXCEPT IN A PERSONAL BLOG ( where no one would have read it )

PS1: I apologise if I sounded arrogant about any of my skill, I didn't mean that way. I ain't even that good, just kinda proud of myself a little for achieving something I couldn't have thought.

PS2: Any type of suggestions and help is much appreciated ( considering I am a college student who went into some serious development 4 months ago , I am pretty impressionable ;) )

PS3: Please don't confuse this with depression. I am HAPPY BUT LONELY

PS4: Is there a way so that I can change my username?

Lecturer I am a TA for said AT LEAST twice that the summaries should be executive summaries. With introduction, supporting paragraphs, and a conclusion while explaining the assignment in class.

Notice the plural form of paragraphs. WHY THE HOLY HELL am I grading papers that are a paragraph, or don't progress fluidly. Or look like a 4th grader wrote them instead of a college student about to graduate????

It's not that hard.
And if i have to send one more email repeating the requirements one more time including "yes, i will deduct points for bad grammar" the class is getting DDoSed. Idgaf. This is university, people. You should know this. Can confirm i write executive summaries regularly. Bosses want updates.

As a self taught C programmer starting comp sci in University, WTF is all this object oriented-ness. Constructors, parents, children, inheritance, polymorphism... I feel like more like an anthropologist than a programmer.

(But really, I get why it's better. Just so hard to learn)

Here's a prank I played at a university. They were using Windows on their computers. So I took screenshot of the desktop deleted all the icons hide the toolbar and set the screenshot as desktop background
After few while one girl sat on that pc tried to click on the icons but failed she was clicking the mouse hard that actually made me laugh and finally left off thinking that the pc is broken .
After few days turns out they called up an it guy for repairing that pc but even he failed at recognizing that prank and formatted pc think its some kind of virus or something.

Complete and total rant:

You know what fucking confuses the holy fucking shit out of me? DESIGN

I have MAD respect for motherfuckers that spend their days tailoring shit away in CSS, writing custom animations and toggles in JS and ensuring that their HTML is pristine as fuck. I really do and in my opinion they should b getting mad props from everyone, because if they so decide to learn GOOD server side scripting then they are most definitely on their way to create some awesome functional and beautiful shit.

But...

I am not a designer by any means of it. And I know that shit is supposed to look good and work across a multitude of devices. Doing something like that takes me a couple of lines of code (granted, after hours of work that is) that may take a designer way less.

But why oh why do I see THOUSANDS of lines of CSS code for shit that does not take me half the amount of work that it takes other people?
Like seriously. I am trying to emulate the menu that university of Chicago uses(as an example for a lil design practice cuz i suck at it) and looking into their CSS I see thooooousands of lines of code to do something that I did in about two hundred.

So wtf man, do I suck so hard that I am missing some serious shit? wtf is happening? This confuses me, because in my mind it should take me just about as much work as it takes them right?

AGAIN MAD RESPECT FOR DESIGNERS -- If you are a designer reading this please tell me wtf is happening

When I was at university in my last semester of my bachelor's, I was doing a game programming paper and our last assignment was to group up and make a game. So I go with one of the guys I know and this other dude since his previous game was really neat. Then two randoms joined that from my first impressions of their games wasn't much at all (one guy made four buttons click and called it a game in Java when we had to make games in c++ and the other guy used an example game and semi modded it.

Anyways we get to brain storming, totally waste too much time getting organised because the guy that volunteered (4 buttons guy) was slow to getting things sorted. Eventually we get to making the game and 4 buttons guy hasn't learnt how to use git, I then end up spending 3 hours over Skype explaining to him how to do this. He eventually learns how to do things and then volunteers to do the AI for the game, after about a week (this assignment is only 5 weeks long) he hasn't shown any progress, we eventually get to our 3rd week milestone no progress from him and the modder, with only three classes left we ask them both to get stuff done before a set deadline (modder wanted to do monsters and help 4 buttons with AI) both agreed and deadline rolls up and no work is shown at all, modest shows up extremely late and shows little work.

4 buttons guy leaves us a Skype message the day of our 2nd to last class,, saying he dropped the paper...

Modder did do some work but he failed to read all the documentation I left him (the game was a 2d multiplayer crafting game, I worked so hard to make a 2d map system with a world camera) he failed to read everything and his monsters used local coordinates and were stuck on screen!

With about a week left and not too many group meetings left we meet up to try and get stuff done, modder does nothing to help, the multiplayer is working my friend has done the crafting and weapon system and the map stuff is working out well. We're missing AI and combat, with our last few hours left we push to get as much stuff done, I somehow get stuck doing monster art, AI is done by the other two and I try to getting some of the combat and building done.

In the end we completely commented all of modders work because well it made us look bad lol. He later went to complain to my free claiming I did it and was a douchebag for doing so. We had to submit our developer logs and the three of us wrote about how shitty it was to deal with these two.

We tried out best not to isolate ourselves from them and definitely tried to help but we were swamped with our other assignments and what we had to work on.

In the end leaving and not helping right when the deadline is close was what I call the most shittiest thing team mates can do, I think sticking together even if we were to fail was at least a lot better.

I fucking HATE all those extremely high level abstractions, IT IS ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE to find anything low level, especially for ARM... IT CANT BE THAT HARD TO JUST FUCKING FIND SOMETHING THAT DOES NUT USE 100000 HEADER FILES, and stupid large frameworks. I feel like everyone is fucking retarded, I want to learn the real stuff, but everything is bloated with high level stuff, and some kind of cult that gets a horny from using extremely easy bullcrap, that completely takes away the interesting parts of processors and embedded systems, IVE Been searching for days to FIND SOMETHING FUCKING USEFULL, even an MOTHERFUCKING 'LOW LEVEL' book GOES AND USE A BILLION HEADER FILES, and STUPID IDE's from which you learn absolutely nothing, IF i wanted to do nothing and learn nothing I WOULD USE ARDUINO IDE, but no i wont, I want to learn something, and I dont have access to university or anything, and it literally is impossible to find anything usefull, every idiot uses library's for everything, and builds their crap on frameworks as large as the mount everest.. Fuck me, why cant this be different ?

So I recently had a university project which focuses video game audio. We had to work in groups of 3 students and the task was to create a video game which uses audio as a gameplay mechanic.

Our idea was to create a game where you collect different audio samples which get looped as background music, and you have to select the correct ones to have a nice tune. To make it a bit more challenging we had enemies, guns and grenades plus doors which only open if the correct music is playing.

The guns fire on-beat, and the grenades always explode on the first beat of the next bar.
It was quite challenging to get things synced since even small offsets are noticable.

I wrote some nice code and theoretically it should have worked but for some reason the gun shots and the grenades didn't quite hit the beat of the music.

I tweaked stuff, created workarounds, optimized lot's of code to get execution times down but it still only worked sometimes.

I tweaked more and more only to realize that the timing drifted over time.

At that time I worked 20-30 hours on tweaking and trying to get it perfectly timed.

After recalculating some numbers I realized that all the audio samples are recorded at 135 bpm, but the guys who did the recordings said it was 130bpm.

I asked them if it could be the case that the samples are 135bpm and they said:
"yes, they are at 135 bpm as we told you"

I scrolled back in the telegram conversation only to see that they said 130.
Changing the number to 135 resolved all the problems and all of my workarounds and tweaks weren't needed.

So I worked for nearly 30 hours just because they didn't notice their fault and even when they realized that the timing is off sometimes (which took forever because they never played the game), they didn't even consider that they might have given me the wrong numbers.

This all wouldn't be that bad if both of my teammates had worked for more than 15 hours but they didn't. I did all the hard work and the only single thing they did fucked up my workflow. It fucked up the system I created and it fucked up the gameplay as things got unpredictable. Because of their fucking fault I worked as much as both of them combined IN ADDITION to all the other work I did (built 3 maps, coded everything, created animations, ...)

I love working in teams, but only if the whole team is motivated. Those two fuckers were the exact opposite.
Luckily i found the error so I could fix it, but guess with whom I'll never ever work together again?

People telling me what to do. I am 19 yo. I havent got into university, i have passed the bachelor's degree exam with 83.5% in computer science, i am employed in web development and i like it. Im not even thinking about going to university for now, not even getting a driving license, the stress is too big for now. I love traveling by bike. I enjoy listening to heavy metal and hard rock and I love peace more and i enjoy talking with people.
The biggest hurdle is people who tell me "do that because everyone does". And I'm not talking about my mom. She supported me everytime. I'm talking about people who doesn't belive in someone's knowledge and bothers the others. It's good if you give me advice and talk with me about it, but never be strict about that advice.

This happened when I finished highschool.

I was looking for a programming related career at university, and I had two options: Computer systems engineering or Software engineering. I commented this to my mom.

Me: Mom, this university offers Software engineering. The thing is that the campus is 1 hour from the city and it’s a new career, so I don’t know if it’s a good idea or not.
Mom: Why Software engineering? Don’t you want to be a developer?
Me: Yes, that’s why I was thinking of taking Software engineering
...
Mom: Is not “Software” what is inside the computer? (Inside the chasis on desktop computers)

I started laughing so hard 😂 and, of course, I ran away

Sort of !dev

I can't do school anymore. I get so many panic attacks. I was shaking the entire time I was writing my essay today. It's hard to focus when your brain is fucking freaking out. I'm missing deadlines, failing tests left and right.

Real talk, I'm not dumb. This was never a problem. My University fucked me up and now I can't even look at an assignment without an electric feeling and I don't know what to do.

I had a panic attack during the opening crawl of Star Wars. I had to leave the theater. My anxiety is going to give me a heart attack one of these times. I'm 18, why am I experiencing health issues like this?

School isn't done right. How could this be the intended effect?

University, first year. I went to my Java/OOP teacher's office to about the course (I had started programming C++ ~5 years ago).

I wanted to discuss the fact that some parts of the course seemed too theoretical for beginners in my opinion. Rookie mistake : do not criticize the cursus of an academic if you are in your first year, even when you are right. I learned it the hard way...

The teacher started to tell me that I was just a first-year student, I had no experience yada yada...

To that I replied "I'm doing C++ for 5 years. This is OOP so yeah I do know a little more than you think".

I will never forget his reply "LOL C++ is not Object-Oriented !"

I never went to his course after that. I learned a few years later that the teacher was a well-known a**hole along his peers and got fired by the University...

Helping a friend who's a brilliant at mechanics and has his own patents, and got this question when downloading on his 10Mbit line:
"This was supposed to be a fast computer, so why is it taking so long to download?"

To explain the reason was surprisingly hard, considering that this is a guy who's been invited to give a lecture about innovation at a top tech university.

First day of the academic year(CS):

(some uni official) - "And remember to become a good programmer you have to become an excellent mathematician first"

(Me): Oh shit.

Little did I know...

It is a second year now. And the only course I failed is the one that he lectured.

I had no fucking idea that people like this (mad)man exist.

Almost at every lecture he was introducing at leas one topic that was way beyond our program; as he thought they were interesting and "fun".

Many teachers at the University refered to him as a very 'ambitious' man. Then I didn't blame him he truly loved his profession and wanted to share as much knowledge as possible(I thought).

But two months ago he went to far. It was a second exam(for those who failed the first one). And believe me there were a few(60 out of 160 to be exact).

Only ~30 people showed up as the rest failed to many courses and would be kicked out of the uni anyway.

He was handing out the exams when I saw that whoever gets one slowly starts turning white.

I finally got my copy and immediately I realized that the tasks are from his favorite topics, the "fun" ones. 🤦

At this point I knew that it will be extremely hard to pass. But when I was reevaluating my life choices something draw my attention.

One of the tasks had a note below it: "Homework after the exam: It is a very interesting problem just assume x instead of y and try to solve it. PS: it is a lot of fun!"

At this point I lost it.😠 I don't care how much you love math, you should always assume that not everyone loves it as much as you do. So don't push it down the throat of people who clearly don't need a degree in this subject!

Now I'm preparing for the second semester with this guy. And I have a strong feeling that it will be hell of a ride... again.😐

BTW: Sorry that the rant is so long, it's the first one I wrote, and had to share it with someone 😀

Long story short: University fucked up single sign on.

For every online service I have, I set a different password, randomly generated ~ 20 characters long. At our university we have multiple systems but they offer a single sign on service which is quite nice because it is so non-transparent which service now uses which authorization. I changed my password a while ago and around the same time they also updated our mail client. Since then I am not able to log in which is not a big deal for me because I have mail forwarding.

Yesterday however I needed another service and also got rejected with my password. I knew from a friend that the passwords are fucked up and that some services have different restrictions (only 12 chars max.), so I decided to search how to reset my password. What the fuck was wrong with these people? It takes you five different pages to get the tiniest bit of information how to reset the password. Then on one page you can login with your single sign on and change the password. On that page you can also set the single sign on password, but if you enter an invalid password (in respect of the the other services) guess what? No feedback that you just locked yourself out of half the systems. Nice job. Also the password requirements are not next to the input fields where you change the password. Noo. That would be way to easy, remember the little small one line on the wall of text three pages ago? There you go.

Ok step one done. Now it should work, shouldn't it? Ohh no not so fast. One needs to activate the seperate service. Where you ask? Perfectly fine question. On the top of page four is a fucking one line table which looks like some five year old had some fun in excel. The button which takes you to the activation page is nearly invisible because of the non existing contrast. Also it is not a button but some arrow pointer thingy. Behind set arrow you have a page listing all differnt kinds of services, the description which you find on page two btw. No padding to decipher this shit what so ever. Nearly on the bottom is your needed button. Yes finally.

Finally I want to login, no good. Try again. Still no good. Go back to the fucked up excel table look at my username and think to myself what's the difference here? The table is so small and again no margin or padding. Apparently they cut of the last character of my normal username which i have which is fucking ridiculous.

What is wrong with you people, we are a TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY, is it so hard for you to find someone decend to unify this shit?

Yeah. Kinda late to the WK 227 party.

Thing is: I've read a lot of rants and honestly, some of the rants were ... touchy.

Like that weird emotional thingy you don't like but that just kind of happens cause I'm human too.... And have that shitty emotional feature integrated, which feels most of the time like a heisenbug.

Me and my parents. Specifically mom. Are like ... Matter and antimatter.

You don't want them in a room. Bad things happen TM. My mom is responsible for ... Let's say severe psychological trauma starting with age 4 to age 17.

In 17 I moved out and lived on "my own" (truth: on heavy support, cause I wasn't what you'd called "psychologically stable" at that time).

I fucked up university and - as shared before - thanks to an math teacher who made my life an even more living hell and my parents, I'd started in IT mostly out of "resisting" certain assertations being made over my life.

The support I got from my family can be put together in one sentence:
"I survived, I tolerated - but will never forgive".

Thing is: Be it IT support or anything else. If your gut feeling tells you that family / coworkers / friends are not good for you.

Stay the fuck away from them till you've sorted yourself out.

I can tolerate my parents nowadays. Took > 10 years and a lot of hardships to "achieve" that.

It's not peachy. It's not loving. It's tolerance. (Yeah. That bit is muey importante to me).

The thing is: I cannot deny the fact that my parents tried to support me by money. That's what they still do _nowadays_ even though my income is like 60 % of the income my father and mother has combined... It's a bothersome detail.

There's a certain thing in this rant that I would like "to pass on": Emotional support matters.

When you let someone feel like an empty shell, you cannot fix it with money.

It will - severely - destroy the person.

TLDR: We all have rough edges, can be hard to deal with and be a pain in the arse, but all of us need emotional support sometimes. That's what matters the most. ;)

About 3 years ago, my girlfriend had this laptop that she got from her University. She had to give the laptop back to get reset, but didn't want to lose all of her data on it, and a backup would be around 750GB.

So I suggested that I would backup the laptop (was thinking to just dd an image and go from there). So I plugged in my mobile USB and external hard drive, and started the imaging process. Given the amount of data and setup, the process should have taken about 5hours. So we left it there for 5h.

Please be mindful that at this stage in my life I knew very little about boot processes, oses, and hardware.

5h after. The laptop screen is black and it ain't responsive. Not sure what happened, the dd process was completed, but the laptop refused to boot into windows. Tried a number of boot tools, and spent a crazy night hacking at the machine. But the university had some of sort of fail safe to not allow anyone to boot into windows if someone opened bios without entering a password. Whatever this was, I spent over 12h trying to either open mount the windows partition with a Ubuntu usb or mount the corrupt dd image on my laptop.

Long story short, after throwing at it a number of fixes. I was able to mount the image, copy out all of her personal data, and reinstall a new version of Windows on her laptop. The university didnt understand why the laptop was already reset. She still mentions this to me anytime I want to take a "custom approach" to software lol

Not myself but friend of mine. Early 2000s working at a large university. Top notch office PCs for the time, best internet connection in the country.

He discovers this "Bittorrent" program. Meh, just another file sharing thing... but who cares, it's 2003-ish so everyone downloads shit from the internet.

Installs it on his office PC, because its university so no one cares.

Friday afternoon, he starts download of his favourite music album (some hard to get live version or something), then goes off into the weekend, computer is left running as always.

Download is finished after an hour or so, then his Bittorrent client starts seeding. Lots of people want this album. Bittorrent adapts to bandwith and when your connection is good you get upvoted in the network and everyone is connecting to you.

Monday comes, my friend arrives back at his desk, bit late because he slept in and its university so no one cares.

Suddenly realises many missed calls on his desk phone. Calls back, it's from the IT department.

Friend: "You have called me? What can I do for you?"
IT Guy (screaming): "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING??? YOUR PC IS CAUSING 50% OF THE UNIVERSITY'S INTERNET TRAFFIC.!!!!"
Friend: "Whops."
IT Guy (hysterical): "WHATEVER YOU ARE RUNNING STOP IT NOW!!!!"

Friend: *stops Bittorrend client, enjoys his favourite album*

Lucky him, it's a university, so in the end no one cared.

I love how my University CSSE courses make it hard for Windows users.
Student: Is it possible use VALGRIND in Windows CMD?
prof: I don't know, I only use Linux command line. Next question.

All programs must compile and run on Linux using g++. So everyone using windows has strip the IDE bloat and transfer the project files over to the remote Linux lab every single time they compile and run.

Benefits of being a Linux user!

So in Germany we have something like 'cooperative study'. You are employed in a company and study 'normal' at a university. This is in 3 month phases, i.e. 3 months working, 3 months studying.

At the moment I'm working and there is a colleauge, that seems to have no high confidence in my programming skills.
Today I saw parts of his NodeJS code and I thought I'm going crazy.
No comments, no real usage of callbacks or at least promises and I dont want to talk about naming of the variables.
I caught myself arguing with this guy too often and always thought I'm the stupid one, that doesn't understand him.
But I'm starting to think, He is the one that is hard to understand.

How ever, I stay confident and also keep a nice tone (also help as much as I can) and sometimes we also have the same thoughts in some topicd. It's not that bad, but sometimes I feel underestimated.

But hey, so it's a bigger surprise if I'm presenting my results and show them what I'm able to do 👍🏻

So I recently returned from university and was catching up with people. Then this guy(childhood friend) who is in EE was "asking" me about how my academics were going. So I was describing my cs classes to him until he suddenly interrupted me saying he knows "how algorithms work" and also that IT == CS. I tried my best to explain to him that it is not the same thing, but his ego just couldn't allow me to talk. He continued on forcefully about how he did a project in java that used SQL and blahblahblah. After he was done exhibiting himself, he asked me what languages do you know(LOL)? When I tried to explain to him that cs is not about learning languages, the guy proceeded to interrupt me again and tell me how his curriculum is hard so as to imply that mine is shit. Finally, this human waste told me to "open java" so that he could code, I opened up my terminal, which he responded to by asking me "What is that?"

I recently accepted my first "real" Dev position. This has been a huge hurdle for me.

So my degree is in graphic design and it's pretty much what I spent the first 2-3 years after university doing. In fact, when I started at the place I am now (I am still working my notice) I was hired as a creative artworker.

I had always had a website I put together with some basic frontend skills, but always assumed the backend stuff was "beyond me". But, given the option here, I asked to be sent on a PHP course. Holy shit I took to it like a duck to water. Over the next few months I got my feet wet building a new website for the company, building out a little intranet, all that good stuff. I went from procedural spaghetti monstrosities to nice, OOP, documented code. It was beautiful. And no one here really have a fuck.

About 6 months ago, I started trying to leave. This was hard. I actually had several interviews for design positions, but always got turned down for some variation of "you're very technical and we think you'd get bored here" and thank god really, because they're right. I could never get a look in for Dev jobs though, because on paper I had no experience, hell my job title was still "Digital Designer" despite over a year of developing here.

But it finally happened. Through someone I used to know I got my foot in the door for a developer position. In the interview they even told me if it was a junior position they'd hire me on the spot - but sadly it wasn't. I had a good time though, a good laugh, and had a lot of fun finally, for the first time in my life, "working" and talking with other developers.

Over the next couple of weeks the agent kept telling me I had done really well and they were just dragging their feet getting things sorted, but I gave up hope a little. So imagine my surprise when I found out they turned the role into a junior one for me!

And so now, I get to go to a job where my job title includes the word "Developer". To some of you that might not mean much, but to me it's a fucking medal I wish I could mount on a plaque on my wall.

Ascended Anime Nerd

Got started with Dragonball Z when it first came stateside. Brother was borrowing fansubs of the Cell and Buu sagas back when people were wondering if Goku would ever finish Snake Road.

Around that time I started noticing some serious discrepancies between the broadcast translations and the fansubs, and so I decided to cut out the middleman—after all, how hard can it be to learn Japanese?—and did a search on AltaVista for a “kanji course”, turning up a course hosted by Rice University that taught basic Japanese using Magic Knight Rayearth and YuuYuu Hakusho.

Turns out the answer to the difficulty question is that anything van be simple to learn, if you don’t know it’s supposed to be hard. Especially if you embrace the parts everyone else dreads (falling in love with kanji, in my case).

Over the next nine months I ditched my Spanish class—and all my other classes, for that matter—to study Japanese in the computer lab. I was reviewing the lessons, playing JRPGs on SNES9X (stored on a ZIP disk, since every computer in the lab had a ZIP drive), and transcribing the scripts so I could transliterate and translate them thereafter. In a lab that went so far as to uninstall Minesweeper and Solitaire to discourage playing games on school computers, I had free reign to do so openly because the one time I got confronted for playing a game I had 150+ leaves of handwritten transcriptions to show them.

Long story short, by the time I took Japanese 101 9 months later it was like Hermione in Snape’s potions class, since I had already taught myself about 2 years’ worth of material. I then transferred out to a college that did a one-class-per-month “modular” system that basically allowed me to take 8 more Japanese classes full-time for the following year. By the time my exchange trip came up I was sofar ahead of the curriculum I was taking classes alongside the native Japanese students.

Running out of linguistic topics, I did an independent study on classical Japanese literature in its original, unmodernized grammar and orthography. A topic I’m still fairly active with 15 years later.

This is a guide for technology noobies who wants to buy a laptop but have no idea what the SPECS are meaning.

1. Brand
If you like Apple, and love their !sleek design, go to the nearest Apple store and tell them "I want to buy one. Recommendations?"
If you don't like Apple, well, buy anything that fits you. Read more below.

2. Size
There are 11~15 inches, weight is 850g ~ 2+kg. Very many options. Buy whatever you like.

//Fun part coming

3. CPU
This is the power of the brain.
For example,
Pentium is Elementary Schoolers
i3 is Middle Schoolers
i5 is High Schoolers
i7 is University People

Dual-core is 2 people
Quad-core is 4 people

Quiz! What is i5 Dual-core?
A) 2 High Schoolers.

Easy peasy, right?

Now if you have a smartphone and ONLY use Messaging, Phone, and Whatsapp (lol), you can buy Pentium laptops.
If not, I recommend at least i3

Also, there are numbers behind those CPU, like i3-6100
6 means 6th generaton.
If the numbers are bigger, it is the most recent generation.

Think of 6xxx as Stone age people
7xxx as Bronze age people
8xxx as Iron age people
and so one.

4. RAM
This is the size of the desk.
There are 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, and so one.
Think of 4GB as small desk to only put one book on it.
8GB as a desk to put a laptop with a keyboard and a mouse.
16GB as a normal sized desk to put some books, laptop, and food.
32GB as a boss sized desk.
And so one.

When you do multitasking, and the desk is too small...
You don't feel comfortable right?
It is good when there are spacious space.
Same with RAM.

But when the desk becomes larger, it gets expensive, so buy the one with the affordable price.

If you watch some YouTube videos in Chrome and do some document words with Office, buy at least 8GB. 16GB is recommended.

5. HDD/SSD
You take out the stuffs such as books and laptop from the basket (HDD/SSD), and put in your desk (RAM).

There are two kinds of baskets.
The super big ones, but because it is so big, it is bulky and hard to get stuffs out of the basket. But it is cheap. (HDD)
There are a bit smaller ones but expensive compared to the HDD, it is called SSD. This basket is right next to you, and it is super easy to get stuffs out of this basket. The opening time is faster as well.

SSDs were expensive, but as times go, it gets bigger as well, and cheaper. So most laptops are SSD these days.
There are 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1024GB(=1TB), and so one. You can buy what you want. Recommend 256GB for normal use.
Game guy? At least 512GB.

6. Graphics
It is the eyesight.
Most computers doesn't have dedicated graphics card, it comes with the CPU. Intel CPUs has CPU + graphics, but the graphics powered by Intel isn't that good.
But NVIDIA graphics cards are great. Recommended for gamers. But it is a bit more expensive.

So TL;DR

Buying a laptop is
- Pick the person and the person's clothes (brand and design)
- Pick the space for the person to stay (RAM, SSD/HDD)
- Pick how smart they are (CPU)
- Pick how many (Core)
- Pick the generation (6xxx, 7xxx ....)
- Pick their eyesight (graphics)

And that's pretty much it.
Super easy to buy a laptop right?

If you have suggestions or questions, make sure to leave a comment, upvote this rant, and share to your friends!

A little background of me. I’m a firm believer of knowledge is power, skill is practice and hard work. Especially for this field, it’s easier to self learn the skills or language these days without having to take loans or burn a huge hole in ur wallet and stuff. But i personally feel, it’s hard to follow an effective path of learning when the info is everywhere. So have to be careful with that. (that’s why I’m here to learn from experts, lurking around)

Sure, degree is just a paper or validation that this person has completed this and that. But doesn’t reflect their actual skill. Especially for this field where u can just show ur skills by making projects. If ur potential boss is impressed by ur skills, u are hired. BUT if ure in Singapore, they require u to have degree by law. No matter how skilled u are, u only get specific amount of salary within a preset range. The range goes by Diploma, Degree, Master, PhD. Etc. U will still get hired by a company if they like u, but won’t get more than a preset range.

I was contented with just my Diploma. But decided to get degree cuz I wanted to earn more. And now considering to go for ms, just cuz my current company gives sponsorship.

Aside from salary, I do think getting a degree in University is one of the important phases of the life, where ure working hard, trying to juggle different things. Also, u do get other perks being a uni students, like discount for books, get access to latest devices if the uni has.

But all in all, whatever floats ur boat, right.

Let me recap everything i learned after graduating college with a computer science degree and entering the corporate world

---

1) College is a scam. Literally NOBODY EVER asked me on ANY interviews if i have a degree and if i had graduated university. Nobody cares. They treat me as if im a slave clown who didnt finish any school and thats how they view and treat everyone

2) By having a computer science degree, i do NOT have a privilege of getting hired, I do NOT have a privilege of getting more interviews, i do NOT get a privilege of having a higher salary, i do NOT get ANY benefits or privilege other than wasted time and brainwash.

3) Literally a senior technical software engineer told me on a technical interview "college is not meant to teach you anything useful or valuable, college is there just to teach you how to learn"

The FUCK? I was extremely shellshocked when i heard him tell me that in my face. I was in disbelief and too stunned to speak. if somebody told me that truth before i started college i would have never started college. I can do that on my own for free

4) I have applied to over 100s of interviews and nobody wanted to hire. Everyone wants a Google-Level Senior engineer in 2023 with 50+ years of experience and then pay him 600$ a month.

5) What is happening in this corporate world is absolutely fucking disgusting, sickening and immoral. This is no different than 1800s slavery. This is how modern day slavery looks like. And even when i accept working for 600$ a month i can barely afford to pay to live. I'd get like 50$ leftover every month if im lucky. This is SICKENING

6) "Engineering will make you rich" is a BULLSHIT saying that our parents and friends say. It is FAR from making you rich. You only get "rich" (but slave level rich) once you turn 40-50 years old. Is that success to you?

7) Engineering is so saturated that nobody appreciates this hard work anymore. You're a slave and you have to compete with other slaves by telling your master (employer) that you'll work for slave salary AND you'll work 10x more in exchange to earn 20x less. This is IMMORAL and DISGUSTING

Fuck my country's universities, fucking greedy assholes that ruin lives, suck wallets and sucks life from the young.

I'm currently studying something completely non related to programming: History. And I really love it. I love reading 1000 pages for each test and essay and talking about the problem of naming the Cold War a war and cold and etc. The problem is that I won't make as much money as I would make even as a self taught developer.

After considering my possibilities, I thought I could enter the computer science carreer. I don't know how this works in other countries but here you would have to study 3 years of an engineering common plan and then specialise in some sort of industrial engineering while getting an specialisation also in computer science. After some counting, I got to the conclusion that I would be studying 6 years (or more), and wasting half of those years learning stuff that I would never use nor care about.

But that's not all. This semester I took the introductory class for programming. It's pretty basic stuff but at least they teach a little bit about algorithms and problem solving. It turns out that a friend of mine that's about to graduate from computer science applied as a helper for the prof. I was so excited I could finally talk with someone about code!

Since the start of the semester I have been passing a lot of time with him and talking about the future. Turns out he doesn't understand shit about code but somehow he learns everything by hard and has passed every computer science course without having any practical abilities. I don't blame him, he's studying hard and playing by the rules, and turns out that he has wasted precious time of his life also learning biology, chemistry, structural engineering, hidraulic engineering, transportation engineering and a ton of engineerings that he won't use.

If the university would instead take that time to teach better courses of practical programming or leave him some time to try out the stuff he learns by hard, he wouldn't have to hear me talking about stuff he doesn't comprehend but feels that should, and wouldn't be utterly depressed, he wouldn't take SIX years to learn less than what he could learn in less than THREE years. And this isn't just a random university, it is one of the 2 best universities we have here and was in 2014 the best of all Latin America.

And wait, here comes the best part. In my country, levels of education are heavily stratified. After school, superior studies give different titles according to the time you've been studying. Yes just the time. And these titles are what your employers will see to give you different work positions. So for studying a 2 year carreer you get a technic job which pays well but not too well, then at 4 years you get a license title which only proves that you know stuff, then at 5 or more (depending on what you are studying) you get a professional degree and will get payed as a full fledged professional. So here, even though in other countries it takes 6 years to have a masters in engineering, they give you just the engineering degree, and it would take 2 (or more) more years to have a master. Even though you can totally teach engineering in 4 years, here they take BY LAW 2 years more, while paying what a fucking full stack of pairs of kidneys would cost in the black market.

So fuck that shit, I won't be throwing my money at any university. I hope they get reformed soon becouse this is fucking dumb, really really dumb. Like 2 year old shit dumb. I'll just learn a bit more, make some projects until I have a decent portfolio and apply to some company that cares for real knowledge and not just a piece of paper with letters and a shitty logo on it.

Former classmate: Our alma mater is looking for alumni to participate in career day. Share what skills you need and the steps you took for your career path!

Me: Thanks for the invite. But I’m not a good role model for this.

FC: Why not? You’re a successful engineer!

Me: So I used my full tuition university scholarship on an art degree because I was too depressed after a long physical illness. Oh, and for some reason a lot of y’all assumed I went to a private uni when I went to the public uni. Then I went to graduate school immediately after and during a recession and ended up with tens of thousands in student debt. Then I did a lot of part time jobs before going to a shady coding bootcamp. I’m lucky to have encountered an advocate and a company willing to take me on as a junior dev. I’m pretty sure I was a diversity hire and I was definitely underpaid. I’m lucky to have moved on from there and to be thriving now. I’d tell the students to skip college (like I had considered) and go into a trade. And I’d also tell them a lot of life is luck and not just hard work.

FC: 😧

About slightly more than a year ago I started volunteering at the local general students committee. They desperately searched for someone playing the role of both political head of division as well as the system administrator, for around half a year before I took the job.

When I started the data center was mostly abandoned with most of the computational power and resources just laying around unused. They already ran some kvm-hosts with around 6 virtual machines, including a cloud service, internally used shared storage, a user directory and also 10 workstations and a WiFi-Network. Everything except one virtual machine ran on GNU/Linux-systems and was built on open source technology. The administration was done through shared passwords, bash-scripts and instructions in an extensive MediaWiki instance.

My introduction into this whole eco-system was basically this:
"Ever did something with linux before? Here you have the logins - have fun. Oh, and please don't break stuff. Thank you!"

Since I had only managed a small personal server before and learned stuff about networking, it-sec and administration only from courses in university I quickly shaped a small team eager to build great things which would bring in the knowledge necessary to create something awesome. We had a lot of fun diving into modern technologies, discussing the future of this infrastructure and simply try out and fail hard while implementing those ideas.

Today, a year and a half later, we look at around 40 virtual machines spiced with a lot of magic. We host several internal and external services like cloud, chat, ticket-system, websites, blog, notepad, DNS, DHCP, VPN, firewall, confluence, freifunk (free network mesh), ubuntu mirror etc. Everything is managed through a central puppet-configuration infrastructure. Changes in configuration are deployed in minutes across all servers. We utilize docker for application deployment and gitlab for code management. We provide incremental, distributed backups, a central database and a distributed network across the campus. We created a desktop workstation environment based on Ubuntu Server for deployment on bare-metal machines through the foreman project. Almost everything free and open source.

The whole system now is easily configurable, allows updating, maintenance and deployment of old and new services. We reached our main goal for this year which was the creation of a documented environment which is maintainable by one administrator.

Although we did this in our free-time without any payment it was a great year with a lot of experience which pays off now.

A /thread.

I have to say something important. As the story progresses, the rage will keep fueling up and get more spicy. You should also feel your blood boil more. If not, that's because you're happy to be a slave.

This is a clusterfuck story. I'll come back and forth to some paragraphs to talk about more details and why everything, INCLUDING OUR DEVELOPER JOBS ARE A SCAM. we're getting USED as SLAVES because it's standardized AS NORMAL. IT IS EVERYTHING *BUT* NORMAL.

START:

As im watching the 2022 world cup i noticed something that has enraged me as a software engineer.

The camera has pointed to the crowd where there were old football players such as Rondinho, Kaka, old (fat) Ronaldo and other assholes i dont give a shit about.

These men are old (old for football) and therefore they dont play sports anymore.

These men don't do SHIT in their lives. They have retired at like 39 years old with MULTI MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN THEIR BANK ACCOUNT.

And thats not all. despite of them not doing anything in life anymore, THEY ARE STILL EARNING MILLIONS AND MILLIONS OF DOLLARS PER MONTH. FOR WHAT?????

While i as a backend software engineer get used as a slave to do extreme and hard as SHIT jobs for slave salary.

500-600$ MAX PER MONTH is for junior BACKEND engineers! By the law of my country software businesses are not allowed to pay less than $500 for IT jobs. If thats for backend, imagine how much lower is for frontend? I'll tell you cause i used to be a frontend dev in 2016: $200-400 PER MONTH IS FOR FRONTEND DEVELOPERS.

A BACKEND SOFTWARE ENGINEER with at least 7-9 years of professional experience, is allowed to have $1000-2000 PER MONTH

In my country, if you want to have a salary of MORE THAN $3000/Month as SOFTWARE ENGINEER, you have to have a minimum of Master's Degree and in some cases a required PhD!!!!!!

Are you fucking kidding me?

Also. (Btw i have a BSc comp. sci. Degree from a valuable university) I have taken a SHIT ton of interviews. NOT ONE OF THEM HAVE ASKED ME IF I HAVE A DEGREE. NO ONE. All HRs and lead Devs have asked me about myself, what i want to learn and about my past dev experience, projects i worked on etc so they can approximate my knowledge complexity.

EVEN TOPTAL! Their HR NEVER asked me about my fycking degree because no one gives a SHIT about your fucking degree. Do you know how can you tell if someone has a degree? THEY'LL FUCKING TELL YOU THEY HAVE A DEGREE! LMAO! It was all a Fucking scam designed by the Matrix to enslave you and mentally break you. Besides wasting your Fucking time.

This means that companies put degree requirement in job post just to follow formal procedures, but in reality NO ONE GIVES A SHIT ABOUT IT. NOOBOODYYY.

ALSO: I GRADUATED AND I STILL DID NOT RECEIVE MY DEGREE PAPER BECAUSE THEY NEED AT LEAST 6 MONTHS TO MAKE IT. SOME PEOPLE EVEN WAITED 2 YEARS. A FRIEND OF MINE WHO GRADUATED IN FEBRUARY 2022, STILL DIDNT RECEIVE HIS DEGREE TODAY IN DECEMBER 2022. ALL THEY CAN DO IS PRINT YOU A PAPER TO CONFIRM THAT I DO HAVE A DEGREE AS PROOF TO COMPANIES WHO HIRE ME. WHAT THE FUCK ARE THEY MAKING FOR SO LONG, DIAMONDS???

are you fucking kidding me? You fucking bitch. The sole paper i can use to wipe my asshole with that they call a DEGREE, at the end I CANT EVEN HAVE IT???

Fuck You.

This system that values how much BULLSHIT you can memorize for short term, is called "EDUCATION", NOT "MEMORIZATION" System.

Think about it. Don't believe be? Are you one of those nerds with A+ grades who loves school and defends this education system? Here I'll fuck you with a single question: if i gave you a task to solve from linear algebra, or math analysis, probabilistics and statistics, physics, or theory, or a task to write ASM code, would you know how to do it? No you won't. Because you "learned" that months or years ago. You don't know shit. CHECK MATE. You can answer those questions by googling. Even the most experienced software engineers still use google. ALL of friends with A+ grades always answered "i dont know" or "i dont remember". HOW IF YOU PASSED IT WITH A+ 6 DAYS AGO? If so, WHY THE FUCK ARE WE WASTING YEARS OF AN ALREADY SHORT HUMAN LIFE TO TEMPORARILY MEMORIZE GARBAGE? WHY DONT WE LEARN THAT PROCESS THROUGH WORKING ON PRACTICAL PROJECTS??? WOULDNT YOU AGREE THATS A BETTER SOLUTION, YOU MOTHERFUCKER BITCH ASS SLAVE SUCKA???

Im can't even afford to buy my First fuckinf Car with this slave salary. Inflation is up so much that 1 bag of BASIC groceries from Walmart costs $100. IF BASIC GROCERIES ARE $100, HOW DO I LIVE WITH $500-600/MONTH IF I HAVE OTHER EXPENSES?

Now, back to slavery. Here's what i learned.

1800s: slaves are directly forced to work in exchange for food to survive.

2000s: slaves are indirectly forced to work in exchange for money as a MIDDLEMAN that can be used to buy food to survive.

????

This means: slavery has not gone anywhere. Slavery has just evolved. And you're fine with it.

Will post part 2 later.

It is the time for the proper long personal rant.

Im a fresh student, i started few months ago and the life is going as predicted: badly or even worse...
Before the university i had similar problems but i had them under control (i was able to cope with them and with some dose of "luck" i graduated from high school and managed to get into uni). I thought by leaving the town and starting over i would change myself and give myself a boost to keep going. But things turned out as expected. Currently i waste time everyday playing pc games or if im too stressed to play, i watch yt videos. Few years ago i thought i was addicted, im not. It might be a effect of something greater. I have plans, for countess inventions, projects, personal, for university and others and ALL of them are frozen, stopped, non existant. No motivation. I had few moments when i was motivated but it was short, hours or only minutes. Long term goals dont give me any motivation. They give as much short lived joy, happines as goals in games and other things... (no substance abuse problems, dont worry). I just dont see point of my projects anymore. Im sure that my projects are the only thing that will give me experience and teach me something but... i passed the magic barrier of univercity, all my projects are becoming less and less impressive... TV and other sources show people, briliant people, students, even children that were more succesful than me

if they are better than me why do i even bother? companies care more for them, especialy the prestigious ones, they have all the fame, money, funding, help, gear without question!
of course they hardworked for ther positions, they could had better beggining or worse but only hard work matters right?

As i said. None of my work matters, i worked hard for my whole life, studing, crafting, understanding: programming, multiple launguages, enviorements, proper and most effcient algorithms, electronic circuits, mechanical contraptions. I have knowlege about nearly every machine and i would be able to create nearly everything with just access to those tools and few days worth of practice. (im sort of omnibus, know everything) But because had lived in a small town i didnt have any chances of getting the right equpment. All of my electronical projects are crap. Mechanical projects are made out of scrap. Even when i was in high school, nobody was impressed or if they were they couldnt help me.
Now im at university. My projects are stagnant, mostly because of my mental problems. Even my lifestyle took a big hit. I neglect a lot of things i shouldnt. Of course greg, you should go out with friends! You cant dedicate 100% of your life to science!
I fucking tried. All of them are busy or there are other things that prevent that... So no friends for me. I even tried doing something togheter! Nope, same reasons or in most cases they dont even do anything...
Science clubs? Mostly formal, nobody has time, tools are limited unless you designed you thing before... (i want to learn!, i dont have time to design!), and in addition to that i have to make a recrutment project... => lack of motivation to do shit.

The biggest obstacle is money. Parts require money, you can make your parts but tools are money too. I have enough to live in decent apartment and cook decently as well but not enough to buy shit for projects. (some of them require a lot or knowlege... and nobody is willing to give me the second thing). Ok i found a decent job oppurtunity. C# corporation, very nice location, perfect for me because i have a lot of time, not only i can practice but i can earn for stuff. I have a CV or resume just waiting for my friend to give me the email (long story, we have been to that corp because they had open days and only he has the email to the guy, just a easier way)
But there are issiues with it as well so it is not that easy.

If nobody have noticed im dedicated to the science. Basicly 100% scientist that want to make a world a better place.

I messaged a uni specialist so i hope he will be able to help me.
For long time i have thought that i was normal, parent were neglecting my mental health and i had some situations that didnt have good infuence on me as well. I might have some issiues with my brain as well, 96% of aspargers symptoms match, with other links included. I dont want to say i have it but it is a exciuse for a test. In addition to that i cant CANT stop thinking, i even tried not thinking for few minutes, nope i had to think about something everytime. On top of that my biological timer is flipped. I go to sleep at 5 am and wake up at 5pm (when i dont have lectures).
I prefer working at night, at that time my brain at least works normaly but i dont want to disrupt roommates...
And at the day my brain starts the usual, depression, lack of motivation, other bullshit thing.

I might add something later, that is all for now.

Any former freelancers who decided to move to traditional employment?

I have been doing freelance since I finished University. 8 years now. I really liked the flexibility and opportunity to work on different projects and people, but my enthusiasm is wearing thin. I'm currently updating my cv and setting up my LinkedIn profile, but it's hard to "prove" my experience, and many projects I worked on are private.

I am not sure if I can mention the companies I worked for, or how do to it... Feeling lost and doomed to keep freelancing.

Anyone made this transition before? How did you do it?

Today I finally experienced the power of something I learned in university: propositional and predicate logic.

Many developers I know think that such education is useless. Well, today I have proven that it is very useful. On a day to day basis, working on banking software, complexity in purely logic is very low. However, we have a screen that must show or hide elements based on some input values and conditions associated with certain elements. How hard can that be, right? Well, there are many variables to take into account and as such it's absolutely not trivial.

This screen didn't work properly and maintaining the code is hard as there is a lot of logic to show/hide, enable/disable things and so on. After quite some time and attempts by fellow developers, I decided to refactor the whole thing. I'm responsible for the quality of the software and it was quite degrading, so I had to do something.

In order to get things working properly, I defined collections of constants (ui elements) and predicates. Then, I defined for which element what predicates must be true, in order to hide/show, disable/enable etc. I then translated these predicates into code. And guess what? It works! Of course it works. It's logic. But I'm very pleased I finally could actually use some of all the math I studied!

what is the point of having massive HR departments if something as expected and frequent as university hiring can't go smoothly?

i managed to reach the interview round for a big 4 firm only for the interviewer to not show up for 4 hours from my time slot (i waited the entire time - took periodic screenshots for proof), HR to say "we'll reschedule your interview, this happened because of internal miscommunication" more than THREE months ago, and dip. until december they'd repeat the same. now they've ghosted. thanks, virtual hiring.

how is it the candidate's fault? found out this isn't rare by speaking to a few others from my network who i knew were interviewing for the same firm. for students whose lives can change completely based on the outcome of an opportunity that they came across due to sheer luck and could definitely make use of because of their hard work - this is so heartbreaking and demotivating.

Well it’s Sunday so last day to leave my thoughts on probably the only topic that’s current to me.

I think you should pay teachers a competitive salary.
The problem with teaching CS at high school level especially (in university there are grants, actually competitive salaries between unis and other perks) is if a person is versed in programming/cs theory why would they settle for a $40k job? When the alternative is finding a job in the field where salaries are around $80k+ (this figure came from my head, can’t remember the source) it’s hard to justify going into teaching even if you would enjoy it more than a desk job.

If the salary difference was smaller then one could maybe justify liking work over pay but here it’s basically double difference... Kinda makes you understand why some comp sci teachers seem incompetent in even using their own computer. Yes there will always be that odd person out who will teach (or go to a private school and negotiate a workable salary) but until education becomes a priority for government salaries there will be very limited progress, if any.

You can do anything to the syllabus, make it more verbose, make it appeal to the lowest common denominator, but if you can’t find people to teach it (and know it themselves) you are really screwed.

Recruiter from last week told me she will contact me next week with further HR interviews

No contact for the whole week until right now

---

RECRUITER: Hello, colleagues from ShitStain company have provided feedback, and unfortunately, they won't be proceeding with the further process. They mentioned they need someone with more experience and asked me to thank you for your patience and interest. Personally, I've had only positive experiences from our conversation, so if a similar position opens up with another client in the future, I'll be free to reach out to you. I hope we have the opportunity to collaborate again.

ME: Thank you for the response. If me having 5+ years of experience is not enough for them, what exactly are they looking for? I'd like to know more about what they think I'm missing, and if it's indeed a gap, I'll work on improving that aspect.

RECRUITER: Your experience is certainly valuable to offer employers. However, for this position, they specifically need experience in Java, and they're looking for someone who has been focused on that technology for 5+ years. I believe new opportunities will arise soon that I can offer you if you're still interested in making a change. 😊

---

Is she FUCKING STUPID?

I JUST SAID i have 5+ years of experience and she rejects me because they need someone with 5+ years of experience????? (we're both talking about the same thing -- java)

Even if someone has 5+ years of experience THAT IS NOT ENOUGH? WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT FROM ME 96+ YEARS OF EXPERIENCE?

Are you Fucking mental?

Am i being fucking gaslighted right now?

Can you fucking believe what kind of retards contact me?

NO ONE even gives a SHIT about the fact that i have a computer science degree from a VERY hard university?

My 5+ years of experience and 25+ years of school is worth between $0 and $500 ?????

I am disgusted

I am absolutely tired and exhausted from interviews

!rant

So, when I was young, I wanted to be a freelancing nomad. You know, live the live, work remote and travel.

But I didn't have the bones to pursue that. After 10 years of struggling as a normal "programmer", I did a little of everything. I did normal boring "erp maintenance" in C#, Oracle and some legacy stuff called Visual WEB GUI , which was fun, but required a full 9,5 hours work day, 8:00 am to 6:30pm, and the bosses where squares, and I was young and wanted to try something out of the corporate world.

Then I did some work for a newly funded consulting company that used python, Django, and postgresql, but the bosses promised a lot and delivered none, (I was supposed to work backend and have frontend support, which I did not have, and that hurt my productivity and bosses instead of looking at what they promised but did not deliver, they just discounted my salary 3 months in a row, so Bye bye MFs!!

Then I did some remote work for some guys, that, I managed to sustain for a whole year, the pay was good, the stack was simple, just node.js and pug templates, that gig was good, but communication with the bosses was hard, and eventually things started to get hard for them and me, and we had to say farewell to each other, I miss those guys. This is the only time I remember having fun working, I could work whenever I wanted, I only had to reach the weekly goals, and then my time was mine, I could work from home in the odd hours, or rent a chair in a co working space if I wanted to socialize.

Then fate got me one big gig with a multinational company, and I could hire some people, but I delegated too much and was asking too little of myself, and that project eventually died because I did not know how to negotiate.

So, I quit the whole entrepreneur idea, and got a public job at my University, I was a public employee with all the perks, but none of the fun, I just had to clock-in, work, and clock-out. That experience led me to discover a lot of myself, I worked as a public employee for a year and a half, and in that time, I discovered more about myself than what I learnt in 27 years of previous life experience.

Then, I grew bored of that life, and wanted some action, and I found more than enough fun in a VC funded startup ran by young narcissists that did not have a clue of what they were doing, I helped them organize themselves into "closing stuff", you know, finish the things you say you have finished. Just to give you an idea of what it was like before I got there, the were working for 3 months already on this project, they had on paper 50% of the system done and working, when I tried to use the app, I couldn't even sign-up without hacking some database commands, (this was supposedly done). So I spent a month there teaching these guys how to finish stuff, they got, Sign Up, (their sign up was a mess, it is one of those KYC rich things, that financial apps have), Login, and some core functionality working in a month, while in the previous 4 months they only did parallel work, writing endpoints that were not tried, and an app that did not communicate with the backend. But the bosses weren't happy with me, because I told them time and time again that we were not going to reach the goal they needed to reach to keep receiving funds from the investors, and I had to quit before it became a mayhem of toxic employer/employee relationship.

So now I decided to re-engage with life, I have funds to survive about a month and half, I have a good line of credit in case I need some more funds, and the time of the world.

So wish me luck!!! And I'll be posting often, because I would like opinions, hear from people with similar life experiences and share anecdotes.

Next post, it's going to be about how I discovered taskwarrior, and how implemented my first weekend following some of the aspects of GTD to do all my housekeeping chores, because, I think that organizing myself will be key to survive as a freelancer nomad.

We have been at a university of applied sciences today with our class.
It was kind of ok. I did expect more surprising things there. The whole building was smaller than our college (not the same as in the US). The rooms, where profs tell you things with a series of rows of seats, were dirty and pretty much used to the point that the seats are about to break easily.
I was expecting the university to be kind of the same as the universities you see in the movies lol.
It could have at least been bigger than our college and more "modern" than our school.
[...]
Anyways, let us get to the point here.
We were first in the foyer and afterwards in their main lecture hall.
We were introduced to the day's plans by a team of engaged students from different study programs and the president of the professors. Yada yada yada.
We got the full program in each room and each individual time span filled with study programs on a sheet of paper.
I did select pharmacy, media production, architecture, data science, applied computer science, computer engineering, mechanical engineering and future energies.
Pharmacy and data science were the most interesting study programs to me. I have asked one of the professors if deep learning was a topic for bachelor students, as well.
He said that that is only the usual case for people who got a promotion.
As an example he told me that yesterday he was at a conference hall with 10.000 people in which he gave a talk about deep learning. "Most of them were professors" he said. "Since this study program is new, it might change in a few years" he added to his conversation.

It is quite hard having to decide now.
Geo informatics and Aerospace Engineering did sound interesting, too.
There are a lot of things I would like to study at the same time haha.

Idk if I should just pick mechanical engineering first and add one or two after it to it. But that would take a lot of time. Geez.

Okay, this is quite hard to explain properly, but I'm actually scared of my personal future.

In about a year, I finish school and I don't have a straight plan of what to do next. I want to work independently, preferably as a game dev, but I imagine that to be a hard task. I have thought of doing a bachelor's degree in game development, but the university I prefer to go to costs 20k€, which is a huge sum and I don't even know whether it would be actually worth it. The university states that 20% of all their graduated students work independently afterwards and they even offer you a flexible "loan" (not sure if it's the right term) you can pay off while you start working, but I fear I won't be able to pay it back, I cannot imagine making this much money any time soon after I start working independently as game dev. Additionally I fear I won't be able to keep my motivation up, since I struggle doing so already, on the other hand my lack of motivation could be caused by this toxic environment I live in.

I've also considered doing freelancing, but when I'm scrolling through the requests made, I never find something I am experienced in, I don't know what request is best to get started with freelancing.

I just don't know what to do in the future and I'm scared and considering to go to this university is probably pretty stupid already and I consider it as me ranting myself, because of my nonexisting self-esteem. So I don't know what to expect from this post, I just needed to share.

Ok please guys I need a little help here.
So I'm in my second year of my Computer science course and all subjects except one went well.So I failed my first year maths module so I decided to redo it and study much harder.Low and behold I worked really hard towards passing the exam but it was still extremely difficult.So I haven't gotten my mark and all but if I do fail it again I will not be able to continue in this University.I do not have a plan B at all and I really don't know what to do.I live in South Africa(if that's relevant).So basically if I pass I'll continue with the course but the question is what do I do if I don't pass.should I start working or try another degree at another University which will be another 4 years.PS I'm heading for 20 years old in a few weeks time.I appreciate anyone who gives any feedback.

The final company who was the most interested in hiring me, has finally replied to my email today, being late 7 days.

Cant show the screenshot here because its not in english.

"We want to thank you for participating in this process. This time we have decided to choose another candidate..."

AND GET THIS NOW:

"...the only reason was the number of years of experience."

????

- it's not enough that i have graduated such an extremely hard university
- it's not enough that i have this apparently worthless computer science degree
- it's not enough that i have knowledge
- it's not enough that i have a fuck load of projects done and showcased
- it's not enough that i worked with international clients
- it's not enough that i have the knowledge and skills they're looking for
- it's not enough that i had answered everything correctly on a technical interview

now the new standard is to have minimum 3+ years of working experience on top of all of that.

I have so many thoughts I literally cannot scream

I don't know where to go and find what I'm looking for
is this the world I remember? scrolled through some current events and this isn't the world I grew up in in the 90s
it's strange life goes on like that
and my teeth keep cracking and will probably fall out of my mouth
I've learned all of dentistry and that ain't it
and the AIs are told to be contradictory and when you catch them they cease communicating
and the search don't work
and forums don't exist
this isn't the world I remember
where you could find real people and real things
it's such a strange world

there's new fads,
people care about weird things... not like actors, but whole technology stacks,
everything is work is stressful, how to be a "leader" (wtf), look at this muffin I made, anti-aging foods or some nonsense, some dude survives on an island for 7 days
I remember when the Internet was like "how to install a printer!"

I've been looking around for stuff to buy, like I wanted a treadmill for a standing desk but they're all sus. I wanted a lamp but they're all sus. I wanted a Roomba but they're all sus. all the pictures are photoshopped on every site, the reviews look fake or outright are 90% "got product for free" and it even states so in the disclaimer, or just plain most things don't have a single rating
it's like the whole economy is dead
why did everyone decide to resell lamps, treadmills, and roombas, wtf
nobody wants this shit. I mean I wanted it but not from scammers. and you can't find not scammers.

there's no real news (like exciting shit), there's no real stuff, there's no real people
I guess life just goes on, we're just parasites on a rock hurdling through space
things I was sentimental about are gone now
I don't even know what people do. I guess everyone my age does meetups and retarded middle-age going to die in their house shit, and I'm stuck at 12 year old shit poster
and anyone interesting got gobbled up by a university and made unofficial nerd clubs and have personal phone calls or something to discuss cool things, but I hated the snobbiness and never fit in with those due to my punchiness, willingness to sound retarded and sometimes gender

it's strange to see articles for dating. I used to have such unified theories about everything, but things have changed so much it's not like slightly off but I just looked outside my window and I appear I'm on an alien planet now

something something mortality I guess. makes me wonder if just the random-ass direction societies take is all that matters. but then why would that even matter anyway? I've always been such a perfectionist, and been lauded for predicting the future everywhere, but somehow I feel blindsided
I don't get the point
I feel like some metamorphosis is happening
but I don't know what I'm giving birth to
I guess it's not the right way to do things but just the way you want to do things
people my age focus on the upbringing they had but I'm not fond of being defined by things I didn't choose, it just doesn't meet my perfectionistic standards you see
it's strange to want to go in a direction but being so out of touch you don't know how
I used to spend so many evenings reading everything and finding the weirdest things nobody knew about
but these things are so hard to find
or are they? maybe I'm mixing my unconscious stuckness to my own familiarity with feeling caged in
word of mouth used to exist but now it's a promo that gets you banned
reddit is a ghost town with the amount of people they banned
and people are so weird now. you enter a room you never get anything interesting
how many uninteresting places is there per interesting place?
if I don't know where to go to find what I'm looking for I need to go everywhere and survey everything so I can itemize and know how to navigate in the directions I'm looking for

maybe it's the crushing defeat in realizing muting tactics work
that barrier to do a task will drop the lazy, but eventually even the relentless can't find their way out because every step is so far

maybe I thought of the world as an infinite garden of infinite gifts, and it's like it's coming to an end. the party ends. but I don't like anything else

I just went to a new barber for a haircut. Costed me $8. The barber earned $8 in 20 minutes and immediately went to cut another guy. This means the barber earns $24 per hour.

I, a software engineer with a computer science university degree working in IT tech field as a java backend software engineer on complex government software that sells gas & energy, get paid, and I will be exact to the cent: $3.75 per hour.

This means a barber earns 6.4 TIMES MORE per hour than I do as a software engineer with a computer science degree.

This also means that, it takes me 1 WHOLE DAY to earn as a software engineer with computer science degree, what the barber earns in 1 hour.

Therefore, this further means, after all of life expenses food bills rent taxes etc, that i can barely afford to go to barber. A barber for $8, is not very cheap for me as a software engineer with computer science degree.

I can not explain the utmost disrespect towards me and disappointment to be working as a software engineer with computer science degree.

I, as a software engineer with computer science degree, feel like I am used as an african wage slave to work extremely hard jobs for a below average wage. I am saddened and disgusted. This is shameful and must be illegal.

After all of what I've been through and everything I've seen, it turns out school was everything BUT the path to success. School was a path to failure... A path to eternal wage slave and poverty...

iAPPLIED CS UNIVERSITY, DAY 1 (2018-09-24)

11:00 UTC+3: Arrived at the secretary's office to complete my registration. I met quite some people; I forgot the names of some. I spent some time over there, so I took the 13:00 class instead of the 11:00 one. It's still early, so we pick whichever we want.

13:00: Procedural Programming at the Computer's lab. The computers were running Windows 8.1! 😱 I might connect to my laptop via RDP. It would be very cool. The course was about C, but the first time was just an introduction. We are going to use Code::Blocks. We were also explained the (HTTP only) web platform in which we are logged in via our passwords and submit our assignments. The professor was very nice, but this day at least was very boring. I was watching CodeMinkey cartoons, trying to solve AdLitterams.

18:00: Back for Applied Mathematics I. At the same computer lab. No lesson did happen, because we have to s learn theory stuff first (every Friday I think). Back to home.

Tommorrow is going to be a hard day...:wq

Tldr: fuck me!

Ok this is only marginally dev-related, but I need to let off some steam as if I was valve. And this is, as I understand, the general purpose of this app.
So: fuck my university, I really love what I study, but the over all circumstances are far from ideal. In addition to that the pressure from the exams and the workload that is expected really stress me out to an extend where I suffer from anxiety and stress related health issues, which again makes me less able to do a good job, which again stresses me out more. This is an incredibly hard time for me but I am sure I will make it. Thanks for listening.

All summer I've been working at a company doing some full-stack development. Starting my last year in university, I really wanted some real life experience that ties into my studies.

I did not expect to find horrible, undocumented, code that has been written 5 years ago, where the senior developer who wrote it doesn't even know what it does. The worst part? They are STILL not documenting! I tried to document, but got this in return "you don't have to document everything. Especially if it is understandable". But they don't even understand their old code!

Monday morning, we had a meeting and they asked what I thought of working here, seeing as I am done this week. I respectfully told them that their code is not readable, and it will make it hard for new employees to understand. The boss in return says "you're the third newly hired employee this summer to say this... Maybe we do have a problem then"..

No shit. Please for the love of God, comment your code!

I am so close to crying it is just not funny, every time i close my eyes I picture Superman's Scream after snapping Zod's neck in man of steel i.e. filled with pain, anguish and not being able to accept what you have become... I am not a dev but I have been glued to a computer screen since 7 years old.

I work for a company as the I.T. Administrator that does quite a bit of specialized work in the regulatory industry and has there own in-house software. This was built by one developer after another, hired straight out of university/college and you cannot believe how big of a monster this became being built with direction from someone who cant code and a bunch of "drunk children" who do not know good principles (swear to god thousands of lines with no comments and no OOP)

Now I am validating and testing a system, i keep being asked if we will be ready by the end of the week and due to my lack of qualifications after dropping out of school I keep thinking yes, but every time i test something I find another problem, I may not be able to code but understanding quickly is my strength and I know this shit is not simple.

I am under constant pressure to deliver something quickly.

Any concerns I raise are almost brushed off because I am an idiot with no qualifications who should be greatful for the work I am doing and the low as balls salary

The problems I solve are commended by the 10+ years of experience senior developer writing the application for us, yet I get shit for taking an hour to find the problem that existed in our network setup because it is the devs job (OMFG HE WOULD NEVER HAVE REALIZED WITHOUT COMING HERE AND LOOKING AT OUR INFRASTRUCTURE... WE WOULD HAVE BEEN STUCK FOR A FUCKING MONTH!!!!)

I see only 2 courses ahead for my life. The easy way and the hard way.

Easy way, buy a gun and end it all.

Suffer for 3 more years in the place that is causing constant breathing difficulty and the occasional pain in my left arm, finish my matric, continue learning to code and leave.

But right now I just want cry scream like Superman!!!

Been writing a paper for university the last week or so.
It's not my bachelors thesis, but still rather important.
The project itself didn't go too well, but it is what it is now.

The only issue... I can't seem to get productive when writing the document.
I sit in front of my desk, staring at my monitor, and I can get out a sentence or two every 15 minutes.

At this point I genuienly fear that I might have some form of ADHD. Can't be that hard to document the little amount of work I actually made......

Young aspiring dev asking for career advice here. I have to choose between two job offers:

1. The first for a larger company that mainly works with a top-tier company's solutions.
2. The other for a smaller company where I have more freedom to choose a stack.

I'm not really straight out from university. I'm wondering about what would be the most developing for me personally and professionally. Does the size of the company matter? I work hard and like to be rewarded for hard work, where is that more likely to happen? Should I choose from what stacks I prefer? Salary?

Do you fellow devs have any other input or advice? Perhaps guidance on other questions I should ask myself?

The most I have worked on something is 14 hours. It was for a university project, that involved creating a "banking" app that was intended to demonstrate the use of an SQL database. I had a partner, and we had done nothing about the project until the previous day. We started working at 5 PM and the demonstration was at 12 PM (noon) in the next day. We used PostgreSQL for the database, and C# and Windows forms for the GUI. My partner took on the database creation and I took on the GUI. I had minimal experience with C# and had never worked with Windows forms or DB bridging in a program. On top of it, lack of sleep hits me really hard, so by midnight I was just like a zombie with near zero focus capacity. As a result, I ended up rewriting numerous components with identical logic and appearance and some different elements that could be parameterized, simply because organizing my thoughts to write proper code was out of the question in my condition. The writing, debugging, testing and packing of the project ended at 7 AM, the morning of demonstration. I slept for 3 hours and then met with my partner and headed to uni. I never left a project for the last moment again. We ended up taking a 9/10 grade.

!rant. Story:

There are a lot of things I would like to do, but the lack of enough money makes it hard.

My goals are to become more active on YouTube, find clients and hold them, try to learn how to sell products convincingly, become better at web design, understand university-level mathematics, leave Germany (one particular reason for this is the need of the redundant imprint), help people around the world, become more fit bodywise (by doing e.g. swimming, jogging and going to the gym), eat healthy and drink a lot of water, work on my emotional intelligence, learn peoples' behaviours and why they do what they do, write my own book, finally start practicing yoga and muay thai, live on my own, make a world tour for a year, learn the skill of powered paragliding, getting the license for powered paragliding, glide with a powered paraglider the whole day, build a house in the woods, create my own satellite and launch it, develop new things (like building some sort of vehicle that can fly in a special way), learn about biology, chemistry, physics (I hate it, but I believe in the power of what is going to happen once you learn it), become more aware of what is happening, live on the streets with no money to learn the ability to survive in more extreme situations, learn how to use guns, bombs, snipers and knifes properly (don't assume that I am a terrorist now haha, I am just interested in that type of stuff. That's all to it) ...

But all of that, obviously, not in 2020. More like within 10 years.

it's been a month of job hunting with no real progress except getting first time calls from the smaller local companies, I decided to take a look at my resume and I figured out that I might be applying the wrong way,

I am applying for a web developer job but I only have work experience in IT support, the closest I have to web development is freelancing( I was really that desperate, lol)

with no university degree and parents that constantly remind me that I am no longer in school like my "mates". I'm trying so hard to be able to fucking prove myself.

I got called by three companies while I was away on unpaid labor with my dad, refused to release me. I thought they would always keep coming that way, I was totally wrong, I'm fucking stupid

I should have put my foot down and stood by my own decision but I was a chicken

this sucks, this "job search" territory and the disappointments that come with it is new to me, I just want to be anything at this point, anything that pays

How do I help a software engineer student be better at developing software?

Background: I have this friend that started university with my young brother, two-or-so years ago my brother finished the career and got his degree while she is still there trying to finish the same career (!), we were looking the chance of changing careers but due to her low grades this is not possible and according to her U's counselor is better that she just finishes the career and gets her degree.

We scheduled a Zoom meeting for Sunday next week, to talk about her pain-points and see what improvement we can chase; issue is that I've never mentored anyone ever in my professional life (my brother from time to time drops a question to me or so, but that's different).

My plan is to either see if she suffers from lack of practice (meaning: she does not write software more often in order to improve her skills) or if it's hard for her to think in abstracts, either way, I believe that the latter improves if you do the former (just correct me if I'm wrong), thus the plan would be to assign her a bunch of programming exercises and have meetings at least once a week during her vacations.

My plan would be for her to actually learn game development with Godot, since the final result is always a game my hope is that having something to show encourages her to do the thing, but, who knows.

Have you ever done something like this for someone with the same issues? What was your experience and what nuggets of knowledge can you lend me?

P.S.: We don't live in the States but in Costa Rica, she does not have to deal with crippling student loans.

(a bit late for wk73 but I wanted to post this anyway)

Back in my first year of university, we had to write a relatively simple (though it looked super complicated back then) C++ console application. I don't know what it's called, but it's that game where the computer generates a random 4 digit code and you have to try to guess what it is. Every time you try, it will tell you which digits are correct, which would be correct if they were in a different position and which are outright wrong.

Anyway, the program had a main menu with a help option that would output a short guide on how to play the game. Instead of hard coding it into the source code, the "guide" had go be written in a separate text file and then read and dumped to the screen when necessary.

Here came my great idea on how to read files. Instead of looping through the file until I reached the end, I counted the number of lines my text file had and wrote some gem of a piece of code like this:

for (int i = 0; i<11; i++){
line = file.readline();
cout << line << endl;
}

My teacher obviously took points off for doing such a stupid thing, and I remember complaining A LOT about it. I argued that 11 was a constant because I didn't plan on changing the text file, and that the teacher had no right to take points off for only reading 11 lines because the file only had 11 lines, so it was read in full.

Goddammit, what an innocent little brat I was. I'm glad my first programming teachers were good enough to stay firm and teach me how to do things the right way, even if it's the hard way.

Well, not best experience per se, but most memorable one.

So I am accepted to CS program at the university - happy days!

First lecture of the first day of the first semester in the first year...

...It just had to be that guy. He was famous for for his strictness among the faculty as we later found out.

But, the lecture. It's 8.25 am, I am making my way into auditorium, and it's filled with freshmen like me, of course. Instead of cheerful chatter noise I hear literally silence. What the? I catch the glimpse of the blackboard - the professor is there, hard at work writing out some stuff that can't comprehend. Double checked the name of the lecture - computer architecture.

8.30 - so it begins, I remember taking a place along the front rows in order to see more clearly. Professor turns to us and just starts the lecture, saying that he'll introduce himself later at the end and there is no time to waste. OK...

And he just dumps the layout of x86 computer architecture and a mixture of basic ASM jargon on us WITHOUT TURNING TO US FOR LIKE 30 MINS while writing things out on the blackboard.

The he finally turns 180 degrees very quickly, evaluates our expression (I know mine was WTF is this I don't even understand half the words), sighs, turns back and continues with the lecture.

Feel like shit, can't focus on work, exam coming up in about 2 weeks...
These stupid numerical algorithms are easy, and yet I manage to get stuck on every shitty little detail, I panic, and I completely lose focus.

This shit has been destroying my academic career... Can't focus properly anymore, cannot study even the simplest things - things that I used to do off the top of my head just a year ago.

My sleep schedule is FUBAR, it's a miracle if I manage to stick to the same timezone for three nights in a row.

Yet I'm still learning new things, trying out stuff and solving problems. Just not the ones that I need to pass my exams.
And before anyone says that university is useless and whatnot: I'm studying aerospace engineering.
I love it, I'm having great fun, learning amazing things, and I've met a lot of amazing people thanks to it. It's one of the few choices in life that I am certain of, and would gladly repeat over and over again.

I've burned myself out from stress, far harder and longer than I've ever done before, and I cannot figure out a way to recover from it.
I've been doing better in the last month or so, but I still cannot get any proper work done, and this is gonna bite me in the ass really hard, once again.

Funny story: I had 3 days of break between the end of the previous semester and the beginning of this one. 3 days of pure freedom.
In those 3 days, I spontaneously reverted to a normal sleep schedule (didn't even need an alarm clock) and felt like a mountain had been lifted off my shoulders.

A year ago I had no idea what truly panicking in the middle of an exam felt like.
My mind had never gone completely blank.
I had no idea what impaired cognitive ability felt like.
This shit is scary.

Why do our minds have to make things so complicated?

How do I know I’m not developing fast enough?

I compared to a lot of students at my university, I find myself working the opposite - documenting and planning first, then coding.

Everyone at my school seems to be hitting the keyboard and just hanging out solutions in a day for our labs.

Even at my internship, I sometimes found myself staring at existing code bases for a week before I could even do anything.

Is this normal? It’s so hard to know how well I am doing when it feels so hard to measure...I mean, even with all the tools of git etc, should I even be measuring?

So it's been a long semester and I was writing my final project earlier today. I wrote a for loop which removed objects from the list it was iterating through. And my linter let me. Why do I even use you, pylint? I could have saved hours of debugging if you gave me a message that I was doing a stupid thing

In free days is hard to decide within code practicing for the whole day or gaming rush for the same amount of hours you spend on work or university projects.

Hey everyone, need some advice here. To give some background, I am 17 years old, and currently residing in New Zealand. I love software and have my career path set on being a developer, most likely full-stack web. (Windows/native development & Game development I wouldn't mind either). I would say I am confident in JavaScript (incl. TS), web-dev languages (HTML & CSS) and Python. And with less experience, but a strong interest in Rust, C# and C++. I plan to go to my local university to study Computer Science. Because of factors like my age, location, lack of previous job experience and degree(/s) make it hard to meet any requirements for the few jobs available locally, or even remotely. Anyways, what have you done to get where you are today or what would you recommend based on my current background? My main goal is to get my foot in the door than to "have money" or "be occupied", so if other paths like certifications or more temporary contract-like work (similar to Fiverr) is a better idea then let me know.

So I'm a windows person through and through.. I used them at school college and university, but
I've heard a lot about Linux and unbuntu and it's got me a little curious Now the question I'm asking is can someone eli5 what unbuntu is? is it free to use? how hard is it to install? How hard is it to use? What is it good for? work/games/music?

Guidance is a key to sucess of one's life.
What i mean to say here? I'm a student from a very low ranked college and here we don't get much of guidance on diverse fields. I totally agree that its not all college fault, i'll clarify in end.
When I was in my 1st year i had no clue from where to start, i did my research and got to know about git then i asked my teachers about it and they said they don't know what it is. I was like now what to do, i started exploring on my own. I wasted my 1st year , just learned c and c++, then 2nd year came, i got introduce from linked in i started exploring it but didn't got anywhere, i asked for help but didn't get much of some path i can walk on. Now it's3rd year and now i'm aware of many things that i wish i did in my previous years, so I'm exploring it now. I'm now the Google DSC Lead for my campus which is the first ever official group of my college as well as my university. I'm hustling, fighting, trying to explore as many things possible. But some things that i wish i knew but it's alright, now i am at the right path, and i will for sure add this too my sucess speach that i was nothing and now i'm something.

I stopped blaming my college long time ago because world is not here to listen my excuses they want results and i'm fine with that.

I'm looking forward to opportunities that will come to my way.

Also i forgot to mention that when i wasn't able to crack premium colleges and i can't go to private college i decided to work hard
From 60% scoring student to topper of my class, its just when you realize you are good to go. Just don't stop and give your best.

Thanks
Hitesh Tomar

I wanted to build a platform for student who wants to do research and are having hard time finding a good professor within university or from outside, so naturally I started asking professor I knew and this is what I get:

Normally they will only hire students from within university unless student himself has funding, and even with that hiring students from outside is a lot of procedures.

And no, such platform probably won’t be that useful as they get a lot of emails asking about research.

Startup idea instantly killed.

At the beginning of a master course at my university the students need to do a little task to ensure they know fundamentals about programming. 70% fails the test. They had no Internet access but a reference card for c, c++, Java & python. Is this really that hard?

First of all what is the world that we are living in? So many people so many opportunities and the competition just keeps getting increased? In any field that you get into millions already have excelled in it you have to compare yourself there. Earning money is hard these days yet some people are just living their lives so easily. anyways back to grind. back to preparing for a pointless exam of a pointless semester in a pointless university in a pointless country in a pointless world. No wonder the Earth is round.