Oh, man, I just realized I haven't ranted one of my best stories on here!

So, here goes!

A few years back the company I work for was contacted by an older client regarding a new project.

The guy was now pitching to build the website for the Parliament of another country (not gonna name it, NDAs and stuff), and was planning on outsourcing the development, as he had no team and he was only aiming on taking care of the client service/project management side of the project.

Out of principle (and also to preserve our mental integrity), we have purposely avoided working with government bodies of any kind, in any country, but he was a friend of our CEO and pleaded until we singed on board.

Now, the project itself was way bigger than we expected, as the wanted more of an internal CRM, centralized document archive, event management, internal planning, multiple interfaced, role based access restricted monster of an administration interface, complete with regular user website, also packed with all kind of features, dashboards and so on.

Long story short, a lot bigger than what we were expecting based on the initial brief.

The development period was hell. New features were coming in on a weekly basis. Already implemented functionality was constantly being changed or redefined. No requests we ever made about clarifications and/or materials or information were ever answered on time.

They also somehow bullied the guy that brought us the project into also including the data migration from the old website into the new one we were building and we somehow ended up having to extract meaningful, formatted, sanitized content parsing static HTML files and connecting them to download-able files (almost every page in the old website had files available to download) we needed to also include in a sane way.

Now, don't think the files were simple URL paths we can trace to a folder/file path, oh no!!! The links were some form of hash combination that had to be exploded and tested against some king of database relationship tables that only had hashed indexes relating to other tables, that also only had hashed indexes relating to some other tables that kept a database of the website pages HTML file naming. So what we had to do is identify the files based on a combination of hashed indexes and re-hashed HTML file names that in the end would give us a filename for a real file that we had to then search for inside a list of over 20 folders not related to one another.

So we did this. Created a script that processed the hell out of over 10000 HTML files, database entries and files and re-indexed and re-named all this shit into a meaningful database of sane data and well organized files.

So, with this we were nearing the finish line for the project, which by now exceeded the estimated time by over to times.

We test everything, retest it all again for good measure, pack everything up for deployment, simulate on a staging environment, give the final client access to the staging version, get them to accept that all requirements are met, finish writing the documentation for the codebase, write detailed deployment procedure, include some automation and testing tools also for good measure, recommend production setup, hardware specs, software versions, server side optimization like caching, load balancing and all that we could think would ever be useful, all with more documentation and instructions.

As the project was built on PHP/MySQL (as requested), we recommended a Linux environment for production. Oh, I forgot to tell you that over the development period they kept asking us to also include steps for Windows procedures along with our regular documentation. Was a bit strange, but we added it in there just so we can finish and close the damn project.

So, we send them all the above and go get drunk as fuck in celebration of getting rid of them once and for all...

Next day: hung over, I get to the office, open my laptop and see on new email. I only had the one new mail, so I open it to see what it's about.

Lo and behold! The fuckers over in the other country that called themselves "IT guys", and were the ones making all the changes and additions to our requirements, were not capable enough to follow step by step instructions in order to deploy the project on their servers!!!

[Continues in the comments]

I’m kind of pissy, so let’s get into this.
My apologies though: it’s kind of scattered.

Family support?
For @Root? Fucking never.

Maybe if I wanted to be a business major my mother might have cared. Maybe the other one (whom I call Dick because fuck him, and because it’s accurate) would have cared if I suddenly wanted to become a mechanic. But in both cases, I really doubt it. I’d probably just have been berated for not being perfect, or better at their respective fields than they were at 3x my age.

Anyway.
Support being a dev?
Not even a little.

I had hand-me-down computers that were outmoded when they originally bought them: cutting-edge discount resale tech like Win95, 33/66mhz, 404mb hd. It wouldn’t even play an MP3 without stuttering.

(The only time I had a decent one is when I built one for myself while in high school. They couldn’t believe I spent so much money on what they saw as a silly toy.)

Using a computer for anything other than email or “real world” work was bad in their eyes. Whenever I was on the computer, they accused me of playing games, and constantly yelled at me for wasting my time, for rotting in my room, etc. We moved so often I never had any friends, and they were simply awful to be around, so what was my alternative? I also got into trouble for reading too much (seriously), and with computers I could at least make things.

If they got mad at me for any (real or imagined) reason (which happened almost every other day) they would steal my things, throw them out, or get mad and destroy them. Desk, books, decorations, posters, jewelry, perfume, containers, my chair, etc. Sometimes they would just steal my power cables or network cables. If they left the house, they would sometimes unplug the internet altogether, and claim they didn’t know why it was down. (Stealing/unplugging cables continued until I was 16.) If they found my game CDs, those would disappear, too. They would go through my room, my backpack and its notes/binders/folders/assignments, my closet, my drawers, my journals (of course my journals), and my computer, too. And if they found anything at all they didn’t like, they would confront me about it, and often would bring it up for months telling me how wrong/bad I was. Related: I got all A’s and a B one year in high school, and didn’t hear the end of it for the entire summer vacation.

It got to the point that I invented my own language with its own vocabulary, grammar, and alphabet just so I could have just a little bit of privacy. (I’m still fluent in it.) I would only store everything important from my computer on my only Zip disk so that I could take it to school with me every day and keep it out of their hands. I was terrified of losing all of my work, and carrying a Zip disk around in my backpack (with no backups) was safer than leaving it at home.

I continued to experiment and learn whatever I could about computers and programming, and also started taking CS classes when I reached high school. Amusingly, I didn’t even like computers despite all of this — they were simply an escape.

Around the same time (freshman in high school) I was a decent enough dev to actually write useful software, and made a little bit of money doing that. I also made some for my parents, both for personal use and for their businesses. They never trusted it, and continually trashtalked it. They would only begrudgingly use the business software because the alternatives were many thousands of dollars. And, despite never ever having a problem with any of it, they insisted I accompany them every time, and these were often at 3am. Instead of being thankful, they would be sarcastically amazed when nothing went wrong for the nth time. Two of the larger projects I made for them were: an inventory management system that interfaced with hand scanners (VB), and another inventory management system for government facility audits (Access). Several websites, too. I actually got paid for the Access application thanks to a contract!

To put this into perspective, I was selected to work on a government software project about a year later, while still in high school. That didn’t impress them, either.

They continued to see computers as a useless waste of time, and kept telling me that I would be unemployable, and end up alone.

When they learned I was dating someone long-distance, and that it was a she, they simply took my computer and didn’t let me use it again for six months. Really freaking hard to do senior projects without a computer. They begrudgingly allowed me to use theirs for schoolwork, but it had a fraction of the specs — and some projects required Flash, which the computer could barely run.

Between the constant insults, yelling, abuse (not mentioned here), total lack of privacy, and the theft, destruction, etc. I still managed to teach myself about computers and programming.

In short, I am a dev despite my parents’ best efforts to the contrary.

Almost every really successfully project...is open source.

Some Examples:
- Linux
- PhP
- Node.JS
- The Chromium Engine
- All the Apache Stuff
- Unreal Engine(WAS closed source)
- nginx

and so many more

Open Source is the best way to build known, stable and useful software

For people who think/find that open source solutions are always better than commercial/paid/proprietary ones, you are not going to like this rant.

I'm starting to get really fucking fed up with people always, whenever I see someone (including myself) mentioning that an open source solution which is an alternative to a closed source one, saying that it's shit.
I've had countless encounters on here (also irl) where someone mentions that an open source solution (GIMP or Libre Office for example) is shit by default while they've maybe (or probably?) not even used it themselves.
Also people going "you can't even compare those two as for what they can do/features/functions". I'm definitely not saying that those open solutions are perfect. But to call them worthless or shit and/or to say that you literally 'cannot compare them' or that the open solution just doesn't work as a *FACT* is fucking bullshit.

Let's take GIMP for example, the use case of a friend of mine:

- He works both with macOS and Linux Mint, he *needs* a design/photo editing tool which is cross platform. (or at least one which works on macOS+Linux)
- He does not mind paying for software but he prefers to use software which is free as in freedom because he also likes to tinker with the software (a lot of people find this argument bullshit, I noticed on here. Why is that? It's a valid reason. Maybe not for you but we're not talking about you right now).
- He likes Photoshop but due to Linux incompatibility and the fact that he can't tinker around with the code, it's not an option for him.
- He'd gladly go for paid software but GIMP fills all his design/photo editing needs (also the more advanced ones but don't ask them to me because I have no fucking clue how that shit works)
- GIMP *just works* for him, he never has trouble with it.

Let's take Libre Office, my own use case:

- It *NEEDS* to work on Linux, which Libre does.
- It *HAS* to be open source, ethic/moral thingy; Libre Office is open source.
- It doesn't need to work complete magic but it needs proper basic document and 'excel' sheet functionalities which is the case with Libre and it works *for me*.
- I don't mind paying for it, will probably donate in the future (seeding the macOS+windows+linux versions fulltime at the moment)

See, for our use cases, it works very well. So why go into "it's no match for proprietary alternatives" mode right away? It actually is, as you see in the examples above.

Please stop saying that those solutions *don't work* or *are shit* because they do work and are useful for me and loads of people around the world.
Do they have *ALL* the features which their proprietary alternatives have? Maybe, maybe not, maybe they're missing some and maybe they even have some features which the proprietary alternatives don't have, I haven't checked out every feature.

I'm not saying that it works for you, for the record, I'm just saying that just because for you it is a fact that they're bad/shit/hardly working, doesn't mean they are for others.

The Orange Juice Saga ....

I've just come off one of the stupidest calls ever.

Firstly, I am not in tech support, I'm a software developer - read the below with this in mind.

My client called up to say the system I created as been compromised. When he attempts to login, he is logged off his Windows machine.

He'd also apparently taken his PC to ***insert large UK computer superstore here***, who took £100 plus to look at the machine and conclude his needs to buy a new PC.

I remoted into his computer to see WTF was going on.

As he described, visiting my login form did log you out. In fact, whenever you pressed the "L" key you were logged out. Press the "M" key, all windows were minimized. Basically, all Windows hotkeys appeared to be active, without the need to press the Windows key.

Whilst connected to his PC I spent a good 30 minutes checking keyboard settings and came up short.

After asking all the normal questions (has anything changed on your PC, have you installed stuff lately etc.) without any useful answers I got nothing.

I then came across an article stating several presses of the Windows in quick succession will solve the issue.

I got the client to try this, pressed the "L" key (which would have logged me off previously) and the issue was resolved.

Basically, the Windows key was "stuck", which oddly makes your PC kind of useless.

I asked the client if they'd split anything on the keyword whilst working. His exact word were simply lol:

"Oh yer, yesterday, I was trying to drink a glass of orange quickly and split some in the corner of keyboard. I did clean it up quickly though".

Yep, the issue was due to the client spilling orange juice on their keyboard , which in turn made the Windows key stick.

Disaster averted.

A call that started with the client stating I made a system that was easily compromised (i.e. my fault), morphed into a sorry saga of cold drinks.

The client did ask why the ***superstore name*** charged him money for that and recommended a new machine. That is a good question and demonstrated some the questionable tech support practices we see nowadays, even at very large stores.

To be fair to the client, he told me to bill him for half a days work as it was his own fault.

When I'm able to stop myself involuntarily face palming, I'm off for a swim to unwind :)

I have a lot of interesting code snippets from some kind of inhouse CRM/billing software, but for now let's look at this very useful PHP function.

I have what seems to be an unpopular opinion about buying software as a software developer.

First off, I support open source all the way. There should always be free and open tools for people to use if the need or want to.

Second, if you underpaid, broke, unemployed, or a student then this doesn’t apply to you. You keep pushing forward!

With that said, let’s get to the meat of it all...

I pay for good software. Even when it is expensive. Even when there are “workable” free or open source solutions.

I do this for a number of reasons...

1. They are better, hands down.
(Tower > GitKraken, SourceTree, GitHub Desktop) (Kalidascope > every other diff tool) (JetBrains IDEs > Atom, Brackets ...)

2. I’m no longer a broke student. I make enough money to buy them.

3. Most important: I’m a fucking professional software developer, not a fucking joker.
- If I was a carpenter then I could always hammer nails with the back of my work boot. It’s free and paid for and will do the job. Instead I would buy a good hammer because I’d be a professional and not a fucking joker complaining about the price of the tools to do my job.

4. I use a Mac, sometimes Linux and NEVER Windows. Which means I have a platform that actually has useful apps built for developers who are willing to pay for it.

5. I don’t get caught up in developer circle jerks about how all development software should be open source and free.

————

So there you go.

Does this offend you?

Good!

Come at me bro

Story time. My first story ever on devRant.

To my ex-company that I bear for a long time... I joined my ex-company 3 years ago. My ex-company assigned me and one girl teammate to start working on a brand new big web project (big one - two members - really?)

My teammate quitted later, I have to work alone after then. I asked if someone can join this project, but manager said other people are busy. Yea, they are fucking busy reading MANGA shit everyday... Oops, I saw it because whenever I about to leave my damn chair, they begin chanting some hotkey magic and begin doing "poker face" like "I'm doing some serious shit right here".. FUCK MY CO-WORKERS!

My manager didn't know shit about software development, and keep barking about Agile, Waterfall and AI shit... He didn't even fucking know what this project should look like, he keep searching the internet for similar functions and gave me screenshots, or sometimes they even hold a meeting of a bunch of random non-related guys who even not working on the project, to discuss about requirements, which last for endless hours... FUCK MY MANAGER!

I was the one in charge for everything. I design the architecture, database, then I fucking implement my own designed architect myself, and I fucking test functions that I fucking implemented myself based on my fucking design. I was so tried, I don't know what the fuck I am working on. Requirement changes everyday. My beautiful architecture began to falling off. I was so tired and began use hack fixes here and there many places in the project. I knew it's bad, but I just don't have time to carefully reconsider it. My test case began becoming useless as requirements changed. My manager's boss push him to finish this project. He began to test, he start complaining about bug here and there, blaming me about why functions are broken, and why it not work as he expected (which he didn't even tell my how he expected). ... I'm not junior developer, but this one-man project is so overwhelmed for me... FUCK MY JOB!

At this time, I have already work this project for almost 2.5 years. I felt very upset. I also feel disappointed about myself, although I know that is not all my entire faults. The feeling that you was given a job, but you can not get it done, I feel like a fucking LOSER. I really wanted to quit and run away from this shithole. But on the other hand I also want to finish this project before I quit. My mind mixed. I'm a hard-worker. I keep pushing myself, but the workplace is so toxic, I can feel it eating up my motivation everyday. I start questioning myself: "Is the job I am doing important?", "If this is really important project, didn't they should assign more members?", I feel so lonely at work... MY MIND IS FUCKED UP!

Finally, after a couple months of stress. I made up my mind that no way this project is gonna end within my lifespan. I decide to quit. Although my contract pointed that I only need to tell one month in advance. I gave my manager 3 months to find new members for project. I did handle over what I know, documents, and my fucked up ultra complexity source code with many small sub-systems which I did all by myself.

Well, I am with a new employer right now. They are good company. At least, my new manager do know how to manage things. My co-workers are energy and hard-working. I am put to fight on the frontline as usual (because of my "Senior position"). But I can feel my team, they got my back. My loneliness is now gone. Job is still hard, but I know for sure that I'm doing things on purpose, I am doing something useful. And to me that is the greatest rewards and keep me motivative! From now, will be the beginning for first page of my new story...

Thanks for reading ...

Boss comes to me with an idea, we use a spreadsheet to store certain sets of links for clients, sometimes with dozens of links, he wants us to be able to push a button and open all the links in the sheet. I'll admit I'm not exactly proficient in excel but said I'd look into it.

I came up with a macro which seemed to work for a while but there were a few links now and then that didn't want to open due to the way excel apparently checks the links prior to actually opening them. I told my boss that I'd look into a better solution but was slammed in office with scheduled projects.

I ended up taking time at home over the next week learning how to make this happen in Python. After a week I've got a CLI Python app which takes in an excel workbook and asks the user to select a sheet. Well employees don't like CLI so they asked for a GUI. I had never made anything with a GUI before since I'm not a software developer, anything I had previously written was written for me so it didn't need a GUI to be useful.

Spent another two weeks at home developing this thing and finally got a working solution. Now several employees are using my app as part of their daily job, saving them well over an hour of just clicking links in a spreadsheet.

Boss goes on a long rant about how he appreciates me and is thankful I was able to figure this out in my own time and save him money. So I say "If you really wanna show you appreciate me, you could approve that raise I've been asking for."

He replies, "Haha, yeah, but that's not gonna happen."

(I and THE back end developer, and I make less than the copywriting interns, time to start looking)

TLDR;
Wrote a slick scheduling and communication system allowing me to assign photography resources based on time and location.

I'll tell you a little secret ... I'm not actually a dev. I'm a photographer, pretending to be a dev.

Or ... perhaps it's the other way around? (I spend most of my time writing code these days, but only for me - I write the software I use to run my business).

I own a photography studio - we specialize in youth volleyball photography (mostly 12-18 year old girls with a bit of high school, college and semi-pro thrown in for good measure - it's a hugely popular sport) and travel all over the US (and sometimes Europe) photographing.

As a point of scale, this year we photographed a tournament in Denver that featured 100 volleyball courts (in one room!), playing at the same time.

I'm based in California and fly a crew of part-time staff around to these events, but my father and I drive our booth equipment wherever it needs to go. We usually setup a 30'x90' booth with local servers, download/processing/cashier computers and 45 laptops for viewing/ordering photographs. Not to mention 16' drape and banners, tons of samples, 55' TVs, etc. It's quite the production.

We photograph by paid signup only - when there are upwards of 800 teams/9,600 athletes per weekend playing, and you only have four trained photographers, you've got to manage your resources!

This of course means you have to have a system for taking sign those sign ups, assigning teams to photographers and doing so in the most efficient manner possible based on who is available when the team is playing. (You can waste an awful lot of time walking from one court to another in a large convention center - especially if you have to navigate through large crowds - not to mention exhausting yourself).

So this year I finally added a feature I've wanted for quite some time - an interactive court map. I can take an image of the court layout from the tournament and create an HTML version in our software. As I mouse over requests in one window, the corresponding court is highlighted on the map in another browser window. Each photographer has a color associated with them. When I assign requests to a photographer, the court is color coded with the color of the photographer. This allows me to group assignments to minimize photographer walk time and keep them in a specific area. It's also very easy to look at the map and see unassigned requests and look to see what photographer is nearby.

This year I also integrated with Twilio and setup a simple set of text shortcuts that photographers can use to let our booth staff know where they are, if they have memory cards that need picking up, if they need water/coffee/snack, etc. They can also move assignments on their schedule or send and SOS for help if it looks like they aren't going to be able to photograph a team.

Kind of a CLI via the phone. :)

The additions have turned out to be really useful and has made scheduling and managing the photographers much easier that it was in the past.

hey there, long time no rant.
remember that manipulative, sociopathic angry manchild turdface PM, the kind that gives you a never ending rant inspiration? the one that got immortalized in like 90% of my rants?

well... it's time for the final update.
i decided to leave the team some months ago. my boss reacted very cool and supportive and suggested topics i could work on instead. when i told my colleague, he decided to leave the team at the same day. we both also complained at HR and added some papertrails about PM's shenanigans.
shortly after, another guy from the team quit and left the company, and i know that it was 100% because of this PM.
so, there were 2 devs left from originally 6 in PM's team.
some other people in the environment of this PM quit, one of his subordinates and someone from a greater project in which the PM's project was embedded.
after some internal investigations and discussions, the PM's team was completely kicked out of this greater project, since after ~ a year, this team was neither able to deliver anything useful nor to define what it actually was what they wanted to provide. instead, they actively blocked the project, solution finding and cooperation between teams. and this is quite very much PM's fault.

the final move came this month when PM got fired. i think, management finally realized that he is a total fraud who has no clue about the whole matter (neither what devices we build nor about software development). or management. or leadership. and that all he can do is produce hot air and bullshit people for some time to make them believe he knows something.
not sure how long he'll still be around, but i'm happy when i don't have to see his face ever again. i'm just sorry for the next company he'll be moving to...

Just thought I'd share my current project: Taking an old ISA sound card I got off eBay and wiring it up to an Arduino to control its OPL3 synth from a MIDI keyboard. I have it mostly working now.

No intention to play audio samples, so I've not bothered with any of the DMA stuff - just MIDI (MPU-401 UART) and OPL3.

It has involved learning the pinout of the ISA bus connectors, figuring out which ones are actually used for this card, ignoring the standards a little (hello, amplifier chip that is wired up to the +12V line but which still happily works at +5V...)

Most of the wires going to it are for each bit of the 16-bit address and 8-bit data. Using a couple of shift registers for the address, and a universal shift register for the data. Wrote some fairly primitive ISA bus read/write code, but it was really slow. Eventually found out about SPI and re-wrote the code to use that and it became very fast. Had trouble with some timings, fixed those.

The card is an ISA Plug and Play card, meaning before I could use it I had to tell it what resources to use. Linux driver code and some reverse-engineering of the official Windows/DOS drivers got me past this stage.

Wired up IRQ 5 to an Arduino interrupt to deal with incoming MIDI data, with a routine that buffers it. Ran into trouble with the interrupt happening during I/O and needing to do some I/O inside the handler and had to set a flag to decide whether to disable/re-enable interrupts during I/O.

It looks like total chaos, but the various wires going across the breadboard are mainly to make it easier to deal with the 16-bit address and 8-bit data lines. The LEDs were initially used to check what addresses/data were being sent, but now only one of them is connected and indicates when the interrupt handler is executing.

There's still a lot to do after that though - MIDI and OPL3 are two completely different things so I had to write some code to manage the different "channels" of the OPL3 chip. I have it playing multiple notes at the same time but need to make it able to control the various settings over MIDI. Eventually I might add some physical controls to it and get a PCB made.

The fun part is, I only vaguely know what I'm doing with the electronics side of this. I didn't know what a "shift register" was before this project, nor anything about the workings of the ISA bus. I knew a bit about MIDI (both the protocol and generally how the MPU-401 UART works) along with the operation of a sound card from a driver/software perspective, but everything else is pretty new to me.

As a useful little extra, I made some "fake" components that I can build the software against on a PC, to run some tests before uploading it to the Arduino (mostly just prints out the addresses it is going to try and write to).

I just lost faith in the entire management team of the company I'm working for.

Context: A mid sized company with
- a software engineering departmant consisting of several teams working on a variety of products and projects.
- a project management department with a bunch of project managers that mostly don't know shit about software development or technical details of the products created by engineering.

Project management is unhappy about the fact that software engineering practically never sticks to the plan regarding cost, time and function that was made at the very beginning of the project. Oh really? Since when does waterfall project management work well? As such they worked out a great idea how to improve the situation: They're going to implement *Shopfloor Management*!

Ever heared about Shopfloor Management? Probably not, because it is meant for improving repetitive workflows like assembly line work. In a nutshell it works by collecting key figures, detecting deviation in these numbers and performing targeted optimization of identified problem areas. Of course, there is more to Shopfloor Management, but that refers largely to the way the process just described is to be carried out (using visualisation boards, treating the employee well, let them solve the actual problem instead of management, and so on...). In any case, this process is not useful for highly complex and hard-to-predict workflows like software development.

That's like trying to improve a book author's output by measuring lines of text per day and fixing deviations in observed numbers with a wrench.

Why the hell don't they simply implement something proven like Scrum? Probably because they're affraid of losing control, affraid of self managed employees, affraid of the day everybody realizes that certain management layers are useless overhead that don't help in generating value but only bloat.

Fun times ahead!

Linus Torvalds. He created Linux and Git, both used by millions of people. He started to create Linux when he was 21 and still in university. It is currently running on a lot of devices including Android. That is really an accomplishment, to make an operating system is one of the most complex things you can create as a programmer. It is also cool that it's open source and how it is maintained. Both Linux and Git was created because he needed them, he creates things that are useful. He could have earned a lot of money but he cares much more about tools and software than money. I think he is a great person and speaker (and he is from my neighboring country Finland 🙂). I use Git everyday in my work and it makes it so much easier. He is for me without a doubt the best programmer in the world.

Rage at ANY software installer that automatically launches my browser to a fucking webpage on completion

IT HAS NEVER BEEN USEFUL

I've been lurking on devrant a while now, I figure it's time to add my first rant.

Little background and setting a frame of reference for the rant: I'm currently a software engineer in the bioinformatics field. I have a computer science background whereas a vast majority of those around me, especially other devs, are people with little to no formal computer background - mostly biology in some form or another. Now, this said, a lot of the other devs are excellent developers, but some are as bad as you could imagine.

I started at a new company in April. About a month after joining a dev who worked there left, and I inherited the pipeline he maintained. Primarily 3 perl scripts (yes, perl, welcome to bioinformatics, especially when it comes to legacy code like is seen in this pipeline) that mostly copied and generated some files and reports in different places. No biggie, until I really dove in.

This dev, which I barely feel he deserves to be called, is a biology major turned computer developer. He was hired at this company and learned to program on the job. That being said, I give him a bit of a pass as I'm sure he did not have had an adequate support structure to teach him any better, but still, some of this is BS.

One final note: not all of the code, especially a lot of the stupid logic, in this pipeline was developed by this other dev. A lot of it he adopted himself. However, he did nothing about it either, so I put fault on him.

Now, let's start.
1. perl - yay bioinformatics
2. Redundant code. Like, you literally copied 200+ lines of code into a function to change 3 lines in that code for a different condition, and added if(condition) {function();} else {existing code;}?? Seriously??
3. Whitesmiths indentation style.. why? Just, why? Fuck off with that. Where did you learn that and why do you insist on using it??
4. Mixing of whitesmiths and more common K&R indentation.
5. Fucked indentation. Code either not indented and even some code indented THE WRONG WAY
6. 10+ indentation levels. This, not "terrible" normally, but imagine this with the last 3 points. Cannot follow the code at freaking all.
7. Stupid logic. Like, for example, check if a string has a comma in it. If it does, split the string on the comma and push everything to an array. If not, just push the string to the array.... You, you know you can just split the string on the comma and push it, right?? If there is no comma it will be an array containing the original string.. Why the fuck did you think you needed to add a condition for that??
8. Functions that are called to set values in global variables, arrays, and hashes.. function has like 5 lines in it and is called in 2 locations. Just keep that code in place!
9. 50+ global variables/hashes/arrays in one of the scripts with no clear way to tell how/when values are set nor what they are used for.
10. Non-descriptive names for everything
11. Next to no comments in the code. What comments there are are barely useful.
12. No documentation

There's more, but this is all I can think to identify right now. All together these issues have made this pipeline the pinnacle of all the garbage that I've had to work on.

Attaching some screenshots of just a tiny fraction of the code to show some of the crap I'm talking about.

Me: I want to be a developer so I can make useful software that will help people!

Also me: *spends days making a bot for discord that just posts memes*

!rant, advice, !mine

Q: I'm [xx] years old [xyz] professional. Would that be a good idea if I try to change my career to software development right now?

A: Age is mostly doesn't matter. You can learn programming at any age. And, software is everywhere. Every background knowledge will be useful. Your prior knowledge will not be wasted.

But, should you change career?

- YES, if you deeply interested in programming.

- NO, if it's only because you feel there are better opportunities.

It's true that there may be better opportunities. But, without deep interest in the subject, you may struggle to become good software developer. Without being a good developer, your opportunities will be limited and you are likely to regret the decision.

Software development is easier for those who passionate but very difficult for those who doesn't....

When I saw the U-Boot prompt on the console of a system that we'd developed from scratch all from openly available documentation. When the board was fabricated and brought in for software bring up, it was basically less useful than a brick. It felt awesome giving life to it. We had to configure it and calibrate it. It's extra challenging when you have a lot of analog circuits. Yeah so we didn't win 'against' anyone but that victory stands for itself.

So lets see if i can get this devrant stuff right.

So a couple of years ago i worked for this company, where i worked in datawarehousing and business intelligence. I was in my 3rd year of working as a software engineer and was full of ideas, motivation and just wanted to do cool stuff.

Anyway, after the first couple of months of working where i learned what they actually wanted to achieve, i got some ideas on how to improve the workflow. They were just simple things, like updating our IDE (we were working with a very old Visual Studio version), getting useful editors, using some more modern ideoms like unittests, continous integration, etc. Simple stuff really.

So in my endless naiveness i went to my supervisor and told him my ideas. He was not particularly interested in my ideas and cut me off somewhere in the middle and said that he would talk to his boss.

So a couple of weeks after that (nothing happened), i went to him again and asked about it.
M:" Hey Bossman, have you thought about my ideas?"
B:"Yes."
M:"And?"
B:"We won't do them."
M:"None of them?"
B:"No."

So at this point i was a bit bummed out, but surely he has a good reason right? So i asked why.

M:"Why?"
B:"Well, because we always have done it the way we do it now."

I think i had a bit of a blank stare at that point, because he looked at me funny. If we would do things like we always have done them, we would be still in the stone age you moron.

God i hate it when people say stuff like that.

Red flags in your first week of your software engineering job 🚩

You do the first few days not speaking to anyone.
You can't get into the building and no one turns up until mid day.
The receptionist thinks you're too well dressed to work in this building, thinks you're a spy and calls security on you.
You are eating alone during lunch time in the cafeteria
You have bring your own material for making coffee for yourself

When you try to read the onboarding docs and there aren't any.
You have to write the onboarding docs.

You don't have team mates.
When you ask another team how things are going and they just laugh and cry.😂😭

There's no computer for you, and not even an "it's delayed" excuse. They weren't expecting you.
Your are given a TI PC, because "that's all we have", even though there's no software for it, and it's not quite IBM compatible.
You don't have local admin rights on your computer.💀
You have to buy a laptop yourself to be able to do your job.

It's the end of the week and you still don't have your environment set up and running.
You look at the codebase and there are no automated tests.
You have to request access every time you need to install something through a company tool that looks like it was made in 2001.

Various tasks can only be performed by one single person and they are either out sick or on vacation.
You have to keep track of your time in 6 minute increments, assigned to projects you don't know, by project numbers everyone has memorised (and therefore aren't written down).
You have to fill in timesheets and it takes you 30 minutes each day to fill them in because the system is so clunky.🤮

Your first email is a phishing test from the IT department in another country and timezone, but it has useful information in it, like how to login to the VPN.
Your second email is not a phishing test, but has similar information as the first one. (You ignore it.)
Your name is spelled wrong in every system, in a different way. 2 departments decide that it's too much trouble, and they never fix the spelling as long as you work there. One of them fixes it after you leave, and annoys you for a month because you haven't filled out the customer survey.

Got fed up with having to use the mouse/trackpad while editing code or using the terminal, so I decided to (finally) learn proper vim keybindings and tmux.

Boooooy oh boy, this certainly changes things.

I think I'm in love with tmux. Damn that piece of software is so sexy. Disabled the mouse, propped up my dotfiles and installed tmux + my conf on all machines I use. It's so useful, so fast and so pretty...

Spent some time with vimtutor too. Finally getting faster with the keybindings. Installed neovim, got some plug-ins (nerdtree, fzf etc), disabled the mouse and arrow keys, and made it pretty. It's actually pretty nice, but I'm not at the "buff gorilla who took speed and pressed 24 keys in a microsecond" typing level yet. One day though.

Also I'm using the Nord color scheme on everything. Overall pretty satisfied with the end result. Still not as productive as I was with VS Code, but I think I'll eventually surpass my previous productivity levels.

If anyone has any tips for vim/nvim or tmux, feel free to share!

Hello World! First post here. I'm literally done with frontend stuff. I want to design code, not to code design. Unless it's Processing. I find it cute. So.. I have a somewhat handy grasp on C++ because of a class in electronics course, Python seems quite easy to catch. I'm totally new to programming. I'd like to get into software, game development and android development (but I would like to do things cross-platform).
Which paths, resources, languages, useful books, videos, or just anything would you recommend?

To be fair, I have no coding friends so mentorship or simply finding code buddies would be great. 💜

So... did I mention I sometimes hate banks?

But I'll start at the beginning.

In the beginning, the big bang created the universe and evolution created humans, penguins, polar bea... oh well, fuck it, a couple million years fast forward...

Your trusted, local flightless bird walks into a bank to open an account. This, on its own, was a mistake, but opening an online bank account as a minor (which I was before I turned 18, because that was how things worked) was not that easy at the time.

So, yours truly of course signs a contract, binding me to follow the BSI Grundschutz (A basic security standard in Germany, it's not a law, but part of some contracts. It contains basic security advice like "don't run unknown software, install antivirus/firewall, use strong passwords", so it's just a basic prototype for a security policy).

The copy provided with my contract states a minimum password length of 8 (somewhat reasonable if you don't limit yourself to alphanumeric, include the entire UTF 8 standard and so on).

The bank's online banking password length is limited to 5 characters. So... fuck the contract, huh?

Calling support, they claimed that it is a "technical neccessity" (I never state my job when calling a support line. The more skilled people on the other hand notice it sooner or later, the others - why bother telling them) and that it is "stored encrypted". Why they use a nonstandard way of storing and encrypting it and making it that easy to brute-force it... no idea.

However, after three login attempts, the account is blocked, so a brute force attack turns into a DOS attack.

And since the only way to unblock it is to physically appear in a branch, you just would need to hit a couple thousand accounts in a neighbourhood (not a lot if you use bots and know a thing or two about the syntax of IBAN numbers) and fill up all the branches with lots of potential hostages for your planned heist or terrorist attack. Quite useful.

So, after getting nowhere with the support - After suggesting to change my username to something cryptic and insisting that their homegrown, 2FA would prevent attacks. Unless someone would login (which worked without 2FA because the 2FA only is used when moving money), report the card missing, request a new one to a different address and log in with that. Which, you know, is quite likely to happen and be blamed on the customer.

So... I went to cancel my account there - seeing as I could not fulfill my contract as a customer. I've signed to use a minimum password length of 8. I can only use a password length of 5.

Contract void. Sometimes, I love dealing with idiots.

And these people are in charge of billions of money, stock and assets. I think I'll move to... idk, Antarctica?

5 stages of failing WIFI connectivity on Linux

This morning I woke up my laptop to start my work day. I have 2 very important meetings today, so I better get all prepared.

"Wifi connection failed"
Syslog says:
- wpa_supplicant: wlp9s0: SME: Trying to authenticate with <MAC>
- kernel: wlp9s0: authenticate with <MAC>
- kernel: wl9s0: send auth to <MAC> (try 1/3)
- kernel: wl9s0: send auth to <MAC> (try 2/3)
- kernel: iwlwifi: Not associated and the session protection is over already...
- kernel: wl9s0: send auth to <MAC> (try 3/3)
- kernel: wl9s0: authentication with <MAC> timed out

#### DENIAL #####

No biggie, let's try another AP (I have 3). All 3 failed to connect. Fine, let's try my phone's hotspot! FAILED!!!!!

w00t.... okay, let's restart the router... but failing to connect to a phone hotspot is already a worrying sign.

Wifi connection failed

wtf.. disable and re-enable wifi

Wifi connection failed

#### ANGER #####

the fuuuuuuck. Maybe my router is dead. But my phone connects to it, no fuss. My personal lappy also connects there easily.

wtf... Does that mean I'm about to lose my uptime?? Come one!! It's Linux - there MUST be something I could do! I don't see processes hanging in D state so the radio must be fine - it's gotta be a software issue!

ChatGPT – type all the log entries manually, via phone (that took a while...). Nothing useful there: update firmware, restart NetworkManager, etc.

#### BARGAINING #####

Alright... How about a USB dongle? Plug it in and wifi connects immediately! Yayyy!!! But that's only b/g/n and I'd very much like to have ac. It works well as a limping backup, but not something I'd use for the meetings.

rfkill block/unblock all the radios. No change. USB dongle connects right away but the PCIe adapter keeps throwing notifications at me with failure messages. It's annoying, to say the least.

So I've already tried
- restarting the router(s)
- disabling/reenabling the radios
- multiple APs
- suspending/waking again several times
- praying

#### DEPRESSION #####

The only thing I haven't tried yet is the most cruel one - restarting the laptop. But that's unfair... It's LINUX! How could it disappoint me. I have so many tmux sessions open, so many unsaved leafpad notes, terminal histories with oh so comfy ^r and ! retriggers all ready and waiting to be executed...

#### ACCEPTANCE #####

But I can't miss the meeting. So I slowly start closing off apps, starting with the least important ones, trying to preserve as much history and recent commands as I can. I'm gonna lose my uptime, that's the inevitable obvious truth... Linux has failed me. Or maybe it's a hardware issue... I can't be sure until I restart.

I must reboot.

#### A NEW HOPE #####
Hold on.. What if... What if before restarting I try to reload the Intel wifi kernel module? Just for the giggles. I've got nothing to lose anyway...

rmmod iwlmvm
rmmod iwlwifi
modprobe iwlwifi
modprobe iwlmvm

*WiFi Connected*

YESSSS!!!!!!!!! My uptime is saved!
403 days and counting! YEAH BABY!!!

Linux is the best!

Well, I was Always into Computers and Games and stuff and at some point, I started wondering: "why does Computer Go brrr when I Hit this Button?".

It was WinAPI C++ and I was amazed by the tons of work the programmers must have put into all this.

13 year old me was Like: "I can make a Game, cant be too hard."

It was hard.
Turns out I grabbed a Unity Version and tried Things, followed a tutorial and Made a funny jet Fighter Game (which I sadly lost).

Then an article got me into checking out Linux based systems and pentesting.
*Promptly Burns persistent Kali Live to USB Stick"
"Wow zhis koohl".
Had Lots of fun with Metasploit.

Years pass and I wrap my head around Javascript, Node, HTML and CSS, I tried making a Website, worked Out to some extent.

More years pass, we annoy our teacher so long until he opens up an arduino course at school.
He does.

We built weather stations with an ESP32 and C++ via Arduino Software, literally build 3 quadrocopter drones with remote Control and RGB lighting.
Then, Cherry on the top of everything, we win the drone flying Contest everyone gets some nice stuff.

A couple weeks later my class teacher requests me and two of my friends to come along on one of their annual teacher meetings where there are a bunch of teachers from other schools and where they discuss new technology and stuff.

We are allowed to present 3D printing, some of our past programming and some of the tech we've built.

Teachers were amazed, I had huge amounts of fun answering their questions and explaining stuff to them.

Finally done with Realschulabschluss (Middle-grade-graduation) and High school Starts.
It's great, we finally have actual CS lessons, we lesen Java now.
It's fuckton of fun and I ace all of it.
Probably the best grades I ever had in any class.

Then, in my free time, I started writing some simple programs, firstvI extended our crappy Greenfoot Marsrover Project and gave it procedural Landscape Generation (sort of), added a Power system, reactors, Iron and uranium or, refineries, all kinds of cool stuff.

After teaching myself more Java, I start making some actual projects such as "Ranchu's bag of useful and not so useful stuff", namely my OnyxLib library on my GitHub.

More time passes, more Projects are finished, I get addicted to coding, literally.
My days were literally Eat, Code, sleep, repeat.

After breaking that unhealthy cycle I fixed it with Long Breaks and Others activities in between.

In conclusion I Always wanted to know what goes on beneath the beautiful front end of the computer, found out, and it was the most amazing thing ever.
I always had constant fun while coding (except for when you don't have fun) and really enjoyed it at most times.
I Just really love it.

About a year back now I noticed that I was really quite good at what I was doing and I wanted to continue learning and using my programming.
That's when I knew that shit was made for me.

...fuck that's a long read.

Languages like python and R are some-what high level languages, with an easy syntax and very readable code. This useful essentially to make it easier for non-programmers to use it. For me as a software developer with +4 years of professional programming. I started with Assembly, Quick-Basic to C++, Java then C#, I found Python super convenient, and at times way too convenient.
At first it felt like I was cheating, and would not consider myself actually writing code, more like pseudo-coding.
After a year or so, I got used to it and it became my default, but it still does not feel right .. is anyone else feeling the same?
I do believe that coding the hard way is not always the right way, but I am just wired that way.

I hate when a software update changelog looks like this:

The latest update is now available, update your software to get the most out of it.

I want a fucking changelog before updating my things. Like: fixed a bug, new button with cool new feature. Just something. I have to know. Can't just install something blindly that could ruin my software, especially when it's not reversible..

*Has idea that will change the world!*
*finds awesome software to help accomplish said idea*

$apt install awesome-software

*Get weird error: Google error for 30 minutes and (of course!) come up with nothing useful and finally*

$apt install awesome-software

"Installation Succeded!"

Now.. What was my idea again?!?!

Stackoverflow...asking for a framework to do X.

Question gets closed by 20++ nitpickers because "... asking us to recommend or find a book, tool, software library, tutorial or other off-site resource are off-topic"

Scroll down 1 inch to find really useful answer.

The first two stories on slashdot's homepage are:
1. Google releases Angular 2, breaks backwards compatibility
2. Apple releases Swift 3, breaks backwards compatibility

If you use either of those tools, why do you put up with this? When did software engineering stop being about building useful or enjoyable things for our customers, and start being about doing thankless make-work for Silicon Valley billionaire companies? Is this the legacy we want to leave to the world?

AI is the future, and it's a future I want to be part of.

This week was very stressful, beside my usual depression and personal issues, I've received a lot of difficult tasks at work, to do in a very short amount of time.
Things I never did, tecnologies I've never used, and for a potential client that is critical for the company at this period in time, and if we won't be able to satisfy their requests we could go bankrupt really soon.
A lot of responsibility, almost no time and a person not competent enough to do it (me), especially on a hurry.

I couldn't sleep in these days, I couldn't think peacefully, concentrate to find the best solutions. I had really bad thoughts.

I couldn't find any useful solution online, on stackoverflow, forums, etc. and I spent hours searching them.

For who knows me here on devRant, probably knows also that I tend to work with old legacy code and dead languages as VB6 and VB.NET.
So integrate "new fancy stuff" isn't that easy and there are no documentation and examples to relay on.
I had fear to even try to understand the documentation (for other languages) and try to write code for it… I was panicking.

With no more ideas, I've decided to try to ask ChatGPT for help.

In maybe 3 or 5 seconds it was able to generate the solution, in VB.NET, with comments and all the explanation needed to understand it and integrate it correctly in my software.
With a few other requests it was able to change it to make it fit better my scenarios.

It's truely unbelivable how the tecnology advanced in the last years, how a computer on the other side is able to reply to my questions with answers that I couldn't find anywhere, because they probably never existed for my case, in VB.NET especially.

ChatGPT made my day, and allowed me to end this stressful moment and give me time to relax and focus on more important personal stuff this weekend.

Oh boy, this is gonna be good:

TL;DR: Digital bailiffs are vulnerable as fuck

So, apparently some debt has come back haunting me, it's a somewhat hefty clai and for the average employee this means a lot, it means a lot to me as well but currently things are looking better so i can pay it jsut like that. However, and this is where it's gonna get good:

The Bailiff sent their first contact by mail, on my company address instead of my personal one (its's important since the debt is on a personal record, not company's) but okay, whatever. So they send me a copy of their court appeal, claiming that "according to our data, you are debtor of this debt". with a URL to their portal with a USERNAME and a PASSWORD in cleartext to the message.
Okay, i thought we were passed sending creds in plaintext to people and use tokenized URL's for initiating a login (siilar to email verification links) but okay! Let's pretend we're a dumbfuck average joe sweating already from the bailiff claims and sweating already by attempting to use the computer for something useful instead of just social media junk, vidya and porn.

So i click on the link (of course with noscript and network graph enabled and general security precautions) and UHOH, already a first red flag: The link redirects to a plain http site with NOT username and password: But other fields called OGM and dossiernumer AND it requires you to fill in your age???
Filling in the received username and password obviously does not work and when inspecting the page... oh boy!

This is a clusterfuck of javascript files that do horrible things, i'm no expert in frontend but nothing from the homebrewn stuff i inspect seems to be proper coding... Okay... Anyways, we keep pretending we're dumbasses and let's move on.

I ask for the seemingly "new" credentials and i receive new credentials again, no tokenized URL. okay.

Now Once i log in i get a horrible looking screen still made in the 90's or early 2000's which just contains: the claimaint, a pie chart in big red for amount unpaid, a box which allows you to write an - i suspect unsanitized - text block input field and... NO DATA! The bailiff STILL cannot show what the documents are as evidence for the claim!

Now we stop being the pretending dumbassery and inspect what's going on: A 'customer portal' that does not redirect to a secure webpage, credentials in plaintext and not even working, and the portal seems to have various calls to various domains i hardly seem to think they can be associated with bailiff operations, but more marketing and such... The portal does not show any of the - required by law - data supporting the claim, and it contains nothing in the user interface showing as such.
The portal is being developed by some company claiming to be "specialized in bailiff software" and oh boy oh boy..they're fucked because...

The GDPR requirements.. .they comply to none of them. And there is no way to request support nor to file a complaint nor to request access to the actual data. No DPO, no dedicated email addresses, nothing.

But this is really the ham: The amount on their portal as claimed debt is completely different from the one they came for today, for the sae benefactor! In Belgium, this is considered illegal and is reason enough to completely make the claim void. the siple reason is that it's unjust for the debtor to assess which amount he has to pay, and obviously bailiffs want to make the people pay the highest amount.

So, i sent the bailiff a business proposal to hire me as an expert to tackle these issues and even sent him a commercial bonus of a reduction of my consultancy fees with the amount of the bailiff claim! Not being sneery or angry, but a polite constructive proposal (which will be entirely to my benefit)

So, basically what i want to say is, when life gives you lemons, use your brain and start making lemonade, and with the rest create fertilizer and whatnot and sent it to the lemonthrower, and make him drink it and tell to you it was "yummy yummy i got my own lemons in my tummy"

So, instead of ranting and being angry and such... i simply sent an email to the bailiff, pointing out various issues (the ones

The piece of software I'm working on at my job just feels fucking stupid and brainless right now. I know it is not, I know it's working, I know it'll be actually useful to its users but I don't feel like that.
I usually go by telling myself "Most of the time I do like what I do, but sometimes it's just work that has to be done" - but for the last month or so it felt like my motivation is completly drained and not coming back fast enough. Just thinking about it feels like desperate, tired crawling on Legos.

On the other hand, at least I've got some motivation for my studies back which feels great.

I am currently looking for a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), because my music projects are starting to get a little too complex for Audacity.

So I started looking for a good, easy-to-learn, ideally free program, and quickly learned that Avid now has a free version of Pro Tools called First.

So I go to their site and fill out the registration form to get the download. In addition to creating an account with Avid, you also need to create one with iLok, which apparently has something to do with how they manage their licenses. Kinda overkill for a free program, but okay...

I download the program (about 3gigs...), install it and try to start it. It gives me an error message about missing some service. Okay? I'm confused because I notice that an 'Application Manager' service has appeared in my tray, and when I open that I can log into my new account just fine. But it still doesn't work.

There's a link in the error message to the iLok website, and it looks like ai need to dowload and install another component. Why didn't that get installed with the program if it's required?

Hmm...

So I go to the iLok site, download it and install it. Pro Tools First still won't start. I realize that the PTF installer asked me to reboot, which I didn't do because: a) I always have a lot of windows open, and b) How often is a reboot ACTUALLY required? Why would you need to reboot?

So I (begrudgingly) reboot, and now the program seems to start initializing... but then it throws an error message about some plugin that it can't load because it doesn't work for the 64 bit version. Then... why are you even looking for it?
And then it says something like: 'I can't handle that, I'm just gonna shut down'.

What?

I try starting it again. Same error appears, but then it gets past it this time... Only to throw another error message about something else it can't load, and therefore it must shut down.

Deep breath.

Third time is the charm, the program actually made it to the project create/load screen! Huzzah!
So I look around a bit, but don't do much. It doesn't seem too intuitive to me, so I start watching some tutorials on YouTube from Avid themselves. It's a little late by now, so I don't get my hands dirty that day.

Next time I want to try out the program I start it up, still get error messages, but it does seem to initialize okay. But then the 'Create project' button doesn't react when I press it.

It turns out that the program takes a looong time to log in to the avid account, even though the manager service is running and logged in...

When it finally logs on I create a new blank project, but it doesn't ask me where to save it to. I see there is a counter saying 1/3 and looking around I find some info about 'cloud based projects'.

It would seem that this program only supports saving projects to the cloud, and you get only 3 projects total. Three. THREE?

Ahem...

I add an instrument track to my new project and select the one and only plugin, which is a synth. I don't see the plugin window, like in the tutorials I watched. I fiddle around with the windows, but I only manage to get the layout fucked up. There's a handy 'Window' menu, but none of the options resets the view. The main window is now sporting a WINDOWS FUCKING 7 BORDER! And partially blocking the view of the top menu.

Blaaargh!

Frustrated, I shut the program down and restart it. I now select one of the project templates (after waiting for it to LOG IN AGAIN!) in the hope that I might have a bit more luck with that starting point.

But when the template has loaded, out of nowhere, the program goes from maximized to windowed mode! And the fucking Win7 border is back again, still messing with the main menu!

FFS!

I get the sucker maximized again and select one of the synth tracks, and Lo and Behold! The synth plugin window actually shows up! But of course there is no sound produced when I play, neither with the keyboard or my midi keyboard.

Oh no, that would have been too easy.

I see some the meters moving when I play, but no sound is produced. I check the options menu, but find out nothing useful except for the fact that the program only support 48kHz sample rate. That's pretty disappointing when you have a 192kHz/24bit soundcard.

I'm done. This piece of shit software is NOT for me. It's bloated, complicated to sign up for and install, extremely limited and buggy as hell!

The final insult is that it takes 5 minutes to uninstall because there is no uninstall option in the so-called 'Application Manager' (of course fucking not!), and doing it through Programs & Features there are 5 (FIVE!!) different apps and services to uninstall, one by one.

0/10, would not recommend.

I despise it when software developers remove features because "too few people use them".

Is this what those shady telemetry features are for? So they can pick which useful features to get rid of because some computer rookies whined that it is "feature creep" rather than just ignoring it?

Now I have to fear losing useful (or at least occasionally convenient) features each time I upgrade, such as Firefox ditching RSS, FTP, and the ability to view individual cookies. The third can be done with an extension, but compatibility for it might be broken at some point, so we have to wait for someone to come up with a replacement.
Also, the performance analysis tool in the developer tools has been moved to an online service ("Firefox profiler"). I hope I don't need to explain the problems with that.

But perhaps the biggest plunge in functionality in web browser history was Opera version 15. That was when they ditched their native "Presto" browsing engine for Chromium/Blink, and in the process removed many features including the integrated session manager and page element counter.

The same applies to products such as smartphones. In the early 2010s, it was a given that a new smartphone should cover all the capabilities of its predecessors in its series, so users can upgrade without worrying a second that anything will be missing. But that blissful image was completely destroyed with the Galaxy S6. (There have been some minor feature removals before that, such as the radio and the three-level video recording bitrate adjustment on the S4, but that's nothing compared to what was removed with the S6.).

Whenever I update software to a new version or upgrade my smartphone, I would like it to become MORE capable, not LESS (and to hell with that "less is more" nonsense).

So the Computer Science departent at my university has a shelf where people can give away technical books they don't need anymore. I found a giant UNIX system administration book from 1995 there the other day, and i am blown away by how many useful things i could find in such an old book; basically all of the unix flavours mentioned are long dead (with the exception of bsd and linux ofc), and so is 99% of the software, but all of the core concepts and basic tasks still hold true in 2018... Isn't that amazing? :D Where else can you find a system that still works the same after 23 years?

I need some advice here... This will be a long one, please bear with me.

First, some background:
I'm a senior level developer working in a company that primarily doesn't produce software like most fast paced companies. Lots of legacy code, old processes, etc. It's very slow and bureaucratic to say the least, and much of the management and lead engineering talent subscribes to the very old school way of managing projects (commit up front, fixed budget, deliver or else...), but they let us use agile to run our team, so long as we meet our commitments (!!). We are also largely populated by people who aren't really software engineers but who do software work, so being one myself I'm actually a fish out of water... Our lead engineer is one of these people who doesn't understand software engineering and is very types when it comes to managing a project.

That being said, we have this project we've been working for a while and we've been churning on it for the better part of two years - with multiple changes in mediocre contribution to development along the way (mainly due to development talent being hard to secure from other projects). The application hasn't really been given the chance to have its core architecture developed to be really robust and elegant, in favor of "just making things work" in order to satisfy fake deliverables to give the customer.

This has led us to have to settle for a rickety architecture and sloppy technical debt that we can't take the time to properly fix because it doesn't (in the mind of the lead engineer - who isn't a software engineer mind you) deliver visible value. He's constantly changing his mind on what he wants to see working and functional, he zones out during sprint planning, tries to work stories not on the sprint backlog on the side, and doesn't let our product owner do her job. He's holding us to commitments we made in January and he's not listening when the team says we don't think we can deliver on what's left by the end of the year. He thinks it's reasonable to expect us to deliver and he's brushing us off.

We have a functional product now, but it's not very useful yet and still has some usability issues. It's still missing features, which we're being put under pressure to get implemented (even half-assed) by the end of the year.

TL;DR
Should I stand up for what I know is the right way to write software and push for something more stable sometime next year or settle for a "patch job" that we *might* deliver that will most definitely be buggy and be harder to maintain going forward? I feel like I'm fighting an uphill battle in trying to write good quality code in lieu of faster results and I just can't get behind settling for crap just because.

Hey Code-tards,

We're announcing a new update to our software `FUCK YOU` to include a new 'feature' no one asked and would give a FLYING FUCK about, but we were sitting on our MOTHERFUCKING ASSES and had to justify our salaries somehow.

So this new feature really just makes your life horrible by taking away or breaking all useful features you were PERFECTLY HAPPY with before, but FUCK YOU if you aren't happy with it and don't throw half of your salary our way every month.

Remember our library you were perfectly OK with, that u integrated in your codebase? DEPRECATED from this second onwards. WHY? BECAUSE FUCK YOU ! That's WHY.

Oh yeah, and one last thing before we make your life a living hellhole, give us your SSN, credit card(s) and mortgage payments to us, you money-hungry CUNT. Haven't you heard the phrase already? YOU WILL OWN NOTHING AND YOU WILL BE HAPPY.

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

1. It's gonna be more and more specialized - to the point where we'll equal or even outdo the medical profession. Even today, you can put 100 techs/devs into a room and not find two doing the same job - that number will rise with the advent of even more new fields, languages and frameworks.

2. As most end users enjoy ignoring all security instructions, software and hardware will be locked down. This will be the disadvantage of developers, makers and hackers equally. The importance of social engineering means the platform development will focus on protecting the users from themselves, locking out legitimate tinkerers in the process.

3. With the EU getting into the backdoor game with eTLS (only 20 years after everyone else realized it's shit), informational security will reach an all-time low as criminals exploit the vulnerabilities that the standard will certainly have.

4. While good old-fashioned police work still applies to the internet, people will accept more and more mass surveillance as the voices of reason will be silenced. Devs will probably hear more and more about implementing these or joining the resistance.

5. We'll see major leaks, both as a consequence of mass-surveillance (done incompetently and thus, insecurely) and as activist retaliation.

6. As the political correctness morons continue invading our communities and projects, productivity will drop. A small group of more assertive devs will form - not pretty or presentable, but they - we - get shit done for the rest.

7. With IT becoming more and more public, pseudo-knowledge, FUD and sales bullshit will take over and, much like we're already seeing it in the financial sector, drown out any attempt of useful education. There will be a new silver-bullet, it will be useless. Like the rest. Stick to brass (as in IDS/IPS, Firewall, AV, Education), less expensive and more effective.

8. With the internet becoming a part of the real life without most people realizing it and/or acting accordingly, security issues will have more financial damages and potentially lethal consequences. We've already seen insulin pumps being hacked remotely and pacemakers' firmware being replaced without proper authentication. This will reach other areas.

9. After marijuana is legalized, dev productivity will either plummet or skyrocket. Or be entirely unaffected. Who cares, I'll roll the next one.

10. There will be new JS frameworks. The world will turn, it will rain.

College is worse than cancer.

Worse than tumor.

Worse than any (un)imaginable death or torture.

I feel dull.

I feel DUMBED DOWN.

I FEEL DUMBER AFTER 6 YEARS OF COLLEGE COMPARED TO BEFORE STARTING COLLEGE.

6 fucking years of wrecking my healthy brain in college.

Has now became unhealthy and mentally unstable.

I forgot almost EVERYTHING i knew about coding.

Because in a "COMPUTER SCIENCE" college they teach everything BUT coding.

The professors and assistants have no morals.

They are INHUMANE.

Professors are ready to walk across a fucking corpse.

If your mother gets cancer and you are unable to come to class or study, the professors dont give a FUCK, they will drop you down so you have to study for exams again instead of helping your ill mother.

Professors have NO COMPASSION.

NO DIGNITY.

They are just BRAINLESS robots.

Sentients, agents working for the matrix.

They keep reading the same script every year and call that a successful career.

IF PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS AT COLLEGE ACTUALLY KNEW TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL IN LIFE, THEY WOULD NOT BE PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS FOR THE MAJORITY (OR WHOLE) OF THEIR LIFE.

I gave my maximum effort.

I SACRIFICED MY LIFE FOR SCHOOL.

Just to end up with school spitting on my face.

I feel DUMBED down.

Robotic.

Procedural minded.

As some brainless retard who has to follow orders as if im a 6 year old who doesn't know what to do.

Like a computer.

Because of college - i have no will to live.

Because of college - i no longer have passion for coding.

Because of college - i no longer know what is my purpose in life.

Because of college - i feel like im floating in cosmos, somewhere far deep into the space, without knowing where im going, what im doing, why im doing what im doing...

I feel void inside me.

I also feel vengeance inside me.

SCHOOL HAS RUINED MY LIFE.

It made me mentally insane.

It made me mentally so sick that i had to watch head decapitation gore videos to calm myself down, so i can imagine the victims being murdered are the professors and assistants from my college.

PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS HAVE 0 UNDERSTANDING FOR OTHER HUMAN LIFE.

MILLIONS of people have private problems going on in their lives every day.

What if someone cant pass an exam because of private problems that's going on in their life?

What if the student is abused by a family member?

What if the student has ANY non-self destructive negative event happening to them, which they're not at fault, and can not control?

What if the student got cancer and cant study for exams, is he supposed to fail?

What if the student came home and the police knocked on his door and said "sorry for your loss, your whole family just died in car accident" and student falls into depression and cant study for exams, is he supposed to fail???

There are infinite multitude of random events this damned universe can do to a human life.

BUT PROFESSORS AND ASSISTANTS;
DO
NOT
GIVE
A
FUCK.

I feel soulless.

I feel like i signed a contract with the devil when i started college by selling him my soul.

School (when i say school, i also mean college, because its the same fucking shit under a different name) is supposed to represent "education".

Lets talk about it.

What exactly are we being "EDUCATED" in school?

To memorize pdf slides?

Memorize textbook?

Memorize notes?

Memorize formulas?

Memorize memorize memorize???

First of all, all of what we're "studying" is BULLSHIT, second of all MEMORIZING all of this means you're gonna forget 60% of it tomorrow, 80% in the next 2 days and you'll forget 100% of what you "learned" by the 7th day.

SOCIETY TOLD YOU TO MEMORIZE USELESS BULLSHIT AND TOLD YOU THAT YOU'RE BEING EDUCATED THAT WAY. YOU MUST BE FUCKING DUMB TO BELIEVE THAT.

If memorizing == education, then i do NOT want to be a part of this "education".

BEFORE starting college i coded many projects.

I self-learned everything.

6 years of college and it taught me LESS THAN ZERO.

NOT EVEN ZERO.

LESS THAN ZERO because i got dumbed down, below the underground, and had to dig myself up on the surface.

I built software for an american real estate agency and sold it for 5 figures.

I built software for 3 people from New York for another 5 figures.

I even got offers to work in local software companies without having a degree.

At internship i was given a task to finish in 2 weeks. I finished it in 3 days. They were shocked and wanted to hire me for further work.

At another internship there was 4 of us working together as a team. At the end company contacted only ME and told me i showed the best results on their list out of ALL the teams and the team members that were with me.

Ever since i had to study for disgusting college i had to stop working.

Because of college, i have no source of income for MONTHS now.

Because of college, i had several mental breakdowns.

---

To all professors and assistants:

I pray that karma ruins your life with lethal outcome, and your kids die of cancer in pain.

I want you all to think back on how "transparent" and "helpful" everyone was to you when you were useful to the company.

And then as soon as you were gone, did they just complain and say something like "how could fullstackclown leave us??!?!?!"

I swear, the last call I was on, I literally heard the phrase "we are such a good team, we think up great MVP products and you guys execute so well"

Let me translate: "we are whimsical fucksticks and you are our slaves to implement it because we ourselves are too incompetent to do it"

Well no more.

Fucking tools, all of them, everyone just wants to use us to get ahead. No competence, no self-understanding, just encapsulate the "IT" or "tEcHiE" people to some department - doesn't even have to even be near us, they can be from any geographic location; they can just be replaced at a moment's notice!

Yeah, well fuck you, because we're growing in skill and understanding, and fighting against you.

Fucking 🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡s

The unionized revolution of software developer is coming soon.

I believe it is really useful because all of the elements of discipline and perseverance that are required to be effective in the workforce will be tested in one way or another by a higher learning institution. Getting my degree made me little more tolerant of other people and the idea of working with others, it also exposed me to a lot of topics that I was otherwise uninterested and ended up loving. For example, prior to going into uni I was a firm believer that I could and was going to learn all regarding web dev by maaaaaself without the need of a school. I wasn't wrong. And most of you wouldn't be wrong. Buuuuuut what I didn't know is how interesting compiler design was, how systems level development was etc etc. School exposed me to many topics that would have taken me time to get to them otherwise and not just on CS, but on many other fields.

I honestly believe that deciding to NOT go to school and perpetuating the idea that school is not needed in the field of software development ultimately harms our field by making it look like a trade.

Pffft you don't need to pay Johnny his $50dllrs an hour rate! They don't need school to learn that shit! Anyone can do it give him 9.50 and call it a day!<------- that is shit i have heard before.

I also believe that it is funny that people tend to believe that the idea of self learning will put you above and beyond a graduate as if the notion of self learning was sort of a mutually exclusive deal. I mean, congrats on learning about if statements man! I had to spend time out of class self learning discrete math and relearning everything regarding calculus and literally every math topic under the sun(my CS degree was very math oriented) while simultaneously applying those concepts in mathematica, r, python ,Java and cpp as well as making sure our shit lil OS emulation(in C why thank you) worked! Oh and what's that? We have that for next week?

Mind you, I did this while I was already being employed as a web and mobile developer.

Which btw, make sure you don't go to a shit school. ;) it does help in regards to learning the goood shit.

So opinions: should a software engineer get certifications? I mean, to me they seem like pointless wastes of money, but my coworkers don't seem to think so. I design and write code, why do I need MCSD or whatever? Follow up, if you feel they are useful: which ones and why?

Positive reviews are ok.
Compliments are weird.

I love receiving good reviews on my software.
(negative but constructive feedback is welcome as well, of course)
But receiving compliments, especially in person is really weird.
On the one hand I know that I did a good job, I know that the features are useful and the UI is classy and comfortable. On the other hand I still feel not comfortable receiving compliments for doing something good.
I don't have any social awkwardness and yet this feels so weird.

Am I alone at this?

As a junior dev from a sysadmin and security background, this is a list of software development concepts I never seemed to truly understand but hope to(rated from most intimidating to least):

1) Frontend web development and all the huge world of javascript frameworks and tools. - It's more overwhelming than the political geography of the Holy Roman Empire in the Middle Ages.

2) Machine Learning, Deep Learning and A.I- too much math that fucks with my brain.

3) low-level programming(kernel,drivers) - sounds extremely interesting but the code in assembly/C/C++ looks like Linear A Minoan hieroglyphics.

4) Rx(insert language here) - I never get why it is useful or why someone invented this. Seems interesting though.

5) Code Reflection - sounds like Thelemic magick.

6) Packaging, automation, build tools, devops, CI, Testing -seems too complicated. I just want to run an executable at the client or make a web app that does something. Why all this process?

Everyone talking about Docker as the next big step in productivity. I still miss why Docker is so useful, to be honest, I see it as a "micro-vm " running your own software.

I have used this technology before but I really struggle to see where I could apply it usefully.

At this point, I'm thinking I'm just too naive about the issues it solves. So lemme go straight to the point:

1. How does Docker speed up your productivity?
2. How do you use it?

I HATE SPRING JPA HIBERNATE AND EVERYTHING RELATED TO FUCKING JAVA.

Everything behaves like it was created with a human as an afterthought, so it torments people and target audience are masochists. This whole ecosystem is an abomination of the software world.

Every fucking error has a thousand possible solutions for every single person AND NOT A SINGLE ONE WORKS!!!

The stupid thing will just keep throwing its internal problems in a stack DUMP DIARRHEA that you have to sort through to find anything remotely useful! I DON’T give a fuck about your stupid internal implementation, just tell me what the fuck you want!

And you have to play the guess game and find the right combination of their stupid little configurations to make it barely work. I couldn’t believe reading stackoverflow, people are just poking at it hoping it will work. And I’m literally stuck and can’t fix the damn thing no mater what I do, and I’m abandoning it.

I won’t touch this pice of shit with a twenty meter pole ever again! Last time I was this frustrated was the stupid java ee. Nothing in the software world has frustrated me this much. How does one even come up with this…
I’m done… I’m just done…

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!

Software developers be like: “Let's remove useful features that I'm sure no one will mind being revoked!”
Also software developers: “WHY, OH WHY WON'T USERS UPDATE THEIR SOFTWARE???? WHYYYYY????? :'-CCCCCC ”

My CS degree was useful in getting me 70,000 dollars in debt. ( Software developer from US) but most softwarr jobs require a degree in the US today unless you have plenty of experience it seens

I think Chromium is definitely one of the best and most useful Open Source Projects, because so many modern technologies are based on it:

- Chrome + Chromium Browser
- Electron (Which is in my opinion the future of software development, as long as Web Apps don't have that many possibilities)
- Android WebViews
- Chrome OS (and Chromium OS)
- Many other Browsers like Opera, Samsung Mobile Browser, Vivaldi…

I think without Chromium the Internet wouldn't be the same today. It helped to popularize WebApps and helped to set many modern web Standards. Also, in addition with V8 it paved the way for modern JavaScript, as it provided (and still provides) developers and so also users with massive performance boosts.

Sooooo... I've felt a bit lost during my years as a student and maybe this is a nice place to finally talk about it.
I've had my first programming experiences in school (back then it was delphi, a Pascal variant), then decided after graduating I want to study computer science. I've stuck with it and will finish my masters degree in a few months. (Took me a year longer than the university plans but will likely have a very good grade)

Since i have little programming experience and never coded anything useful (mostly study projects or simple programming tasks) I've always been struggling with depressions, worries of being not good enough and never finding a job etc pp, but in the last few months it got worse since I NEED to apply for jobs now as i graduate next may. I'd really like to improve and found some "learn how to code" websites but the progress seems still slow and meaningless when I compare myself to all those guys out there:
- those comparing several hardware/software pieces casually since they know all the (dis)advantages and specs off by heart
- those who have fierce discussions about languages, libraries, runtimes etc
- those who solve the problems in coding websites with 3 lines and incredibly mathematicsl proofs for why this shortcut works (fastest)
- basically the guys who discuss so many things i've never even heard of

I just feel so lost, useless and like i missed years of learning things everybody else just obviously knows now. Is there any way to catch up? I thought about trying to join a local Chaos Computer Club but they sound like they wouldn't be fond of a noob like me.

go fuck yourself with your fucking communities. i went into computing because i like being left alone. who are all those fucking freaks building their communities? this is capitalism mother fuckers, everybody in the world agreed on it, on each person being an independent individual doing their job to the best possible standard, instead these low-skill low-iq oversocialised sheeple started conglomerate into communities and brainwash everybody that this is what it is about. get stuffed alright. all my life i've been introverted, just leave me alone to write code alright? take my library i don't mind i'll take yours no strings attached, just push the code and forget about it. but no, all these degenerate morons without CS degrees have occupied our safe space, pushed us out of it and just can't get enough of using the buzzword "community-driven" "volunteers" volunteer my ass assholes you can't even make software nobody in real industry needs you because you have no skill at all you learn a bit of js which is any 14-15 yo can do and now think you're some kind of prodigies, unsung heros of humanity who selflessly bring the progress. nothing can be further from the truth - because of you we don't have real software, we don't have investment we don't get no respect everybody walks all over software engineers treating us like shit, there's an entire generation of indoctrinated parasitic scum that believes that software tools is grown for them on trees by some development teams that their are entitled to automatically, because some corporation will eventually support those big projects - yeah does it really happen though - look at svelte, the guy is getting 50k a year when he should be earning at least 500k if he had balls to start a real businesses, but no we are all fucking prostitutes, just slaving away for the army of people we never see. are you out of your mind. this shit should be fucking illegal alright it's modern day slavery innit bruh, if a company wants to pay their engineers to work on open source this is fine, i love open source like java or google closure compiler, but it's real software made by real engineers, but who are all these community freaks who can't spend a 10 seconds on stage in their shitty bogus conferences without ringing the "community" buzzer? you're not my community i fucking hate your guts you're all such dumb womenless imbeciles who justify their lack of social skill by telling themselves that you're doing good by doing open source in your free time - mate nobody gives a shit alrite? don't you want money sex power? you've destroyed everything that was good about good olde open source when it was actually fun, today young people are coerced into slavery at industrial scale, it's literally impossible to make a buck from software as indie unless you build something really big and good, and you can't build anything big without investment and who invests in software nowadays? all the ai "entrepreneurs" are getting fucking golden rained with cash while i have to ask for a 5$ donation? what the actual fuck? who sanctions this? the entire industry is in one collective psychotic delusion, spurred by microsoft who use this army of useful idiots to eliminate all hounour dignity of the profession, drive the abundance and bring about poverty of mind, character, as well as wallet as the natural state of things. fucking amatures of course you love your shitty little communities because you can't achieve anything on your own. you literally have no personality, just one homogenous blob of dumb degenerates who think and act all the same. there used to be a tool called adobe flash builder, i could just buy it, then open and make a web app, all from start to finish in one program, using tutorials of adobe experts on youtube, sure it might have had its pitfals but it was a product - today there's literally no fucking product to make websites. do you people get it? i can't buy a tool that i need to do my job and have to insult myself by downloading some shitty scripts from some shitty unemployed devs and hope my computer doesn't blow up in my face in the process because some freak went off his nut and uploaded some dodgy ass exploit on npm in his package. i really don't like. it's not supposed to be like that. good for me i build by own front/back end. this "community" insanity is just a symptom of industrial degeneration, they try to sell it to us like it's the "bright" communist future but things never been worst, i can't give a shit about functional programming alright i just need to get my job done mate leave me alone you add functional because you don't know how to solve the problem properly, e.g., again adobe flex had mxml where elements had ids and i could just program to id, it was alright but today all this unqualified morons filled the whole space after flash blew up and adobe execs axed flash builder instead of adapting it to js runtime, it was a crime against humanity that set us back to 1000s

I started fully exploring different aspects of tech in a middle school technology class where the teacher gave me a good grade as long as I did something that could be useful or interesting. I learned how to design webpages by playing with inspect element, and then decided to make my own with Notepad. One of my friends showed me how to use Sublime Text, and I found that I loved programming. Other things I did in there included using two desktops with NIC's wired directly to each other with an old version of Synergy and a VNC server, and at one point, I built a server node out of old dell Optiplex desktops the school had piled in a storage room.

Last year in high school, I took a class on VB.net and made some money afterwards by freelance refreshing legacy spaghetti, and got burned pretty badly by a person offering $25,000 for a major POS to backend CMS integration rewrite. The person told me that I had finished second, and that another dev had gotten the reward, but that he liked my code. A few days later, I was notified through a *cough*very convoluted*cough* system of mine by a trigger that ran once during startup in a production environment and reported the version number as well as a few other bits, and I was able to see that *cough*someone*cough* had been using my code. I stopped programming for at least six months straight because I didn't want to go back.

This year in high school, I'm taking the engineering class I didn't get into last year, and I realized that Autodesk Inventor supports VBA. I got back into programming with a lot of copy-paste and click-once "installers" to get my modelling assignments done faster than my classmates. Last week, one of my friends asked me to help him fix his VB program, which I did, and now I'm hooked again.

I've always been an engineer at heart, but now I'm conflicted with going into I.T., mechanical or robotical engineering, or being a software developer.

A little long, but that's how I got to where I am now. (I still detest those who take advantage of defenseless programmers. There's a special place for them.)

I'm finishing up the most depressing client engagement ever. Ultimately it all traces back to their worthless Expert Beginner EA who thinks he's a genius but can't write code. I don't mean that he's not great at it. It's some of the worst I've ever seen by a person in his position.

In the time I have left here I could do so much to help them clean this stuff up so that future developers could ramp up more easily and there wouldn't be tons of duplicate code.

But I've just given up. You can't help someone who thinks their code is perfect. I don't even bother suggesting stuff any more (like don't have two methods in a class - a "real" one and one for unit testing) because he gets mad or just says that's his "pattern."

If I have a useful improvement, first he'll want me to put all new code in some new library, which is fine as an end result but you don't start with putting single-use code in a library separate from where you're using it. You work with it for a while to see what's useful, what's not, and make changes. But, you see, he just loves making more libraries and calling them "frameworks."

He tells me what he wants me to name classes, and they have nothing to do with what the classes do. When you haven't done any development yet you don't even know what classes you're going to create. You start with something but you refactor and rename. It takes a special breed of stupid to think that you start with a name.

I've even caught the dude taking classes I've committed and copying and pasting them into their own library - a library with one class.

The last time we had to figure out how to do something new I told everyone up front: Don't waste time trying to figure out how you want to solve the problem. Just ask the EA what he wants you to do. Because whatever you come up with, he's going to reject it and come up with something stupid that revolves around adding stuff to his genius framework. And whatever he says you're going to do. So just skip to that.

So that's the environment. We don't write software to meet requirements. We write it to add to the framework so that the EA can turn around and say how useful the framework is.

Except it's not. The overhead for new developers to learn how to navigate his copy-pasted code, tons of inheritance, dead methods, meaningless names, and useless wrappers around existing libraries is massive. Whatever you need to do you could do in a few hours without his framework. Or you can spend literally a month modifying his framework to do the same thing. And half the time his code collapses so that dozens of applications built on his framework go down at once.

I get frameworks. They can be useful, but only if they serve your needs, not the other way around.

I've spent months disciplining myself not to solve problems and not to use my skills.

Good luck to those of you who actually work there. I am deeply sad for the visa worker I'm handing this off to. He's a nice guy and smart. If he was stupid then he wouldn't mind dragging this anchor behind him like an ox pulling a plow. Knowing the difference just makes it harder.

When my manager, blatantly miscommunicated several things to me a couple of years ago, and scapegoated me by saying a comment I NEVER once heard said about me, in any context ever, "you communicate badly-- you need to communicate better", I took it seriously.

Fast forward, two years later. I'm doing wonderful at my job, yet I cannot get over that incident. I thought about it some more. Why did she say that to me? Why did she address it to me after her mistake? Why was she not aware of the real reason I missed the meeting?

Out of all useful bits of knowledge I gathered over the years, it's kinda comical that psychology came in the most handy at the workplace. There's very little to be gained from trying to psychoanalyze strangers, friends, and family... but it's almost saved my life at the job.

You see, if I attack an approach even in the most formal tones, or even worse, defend my approach, there's nothing coming from that. The situation now becomes my situation. When I become "aware" of the truth of the situation I become able to control the situation, not just myself. That way, you're not in a fisticuff fight with your boss, and you are not left defeated by the situation. Exercising control of the situation in such a manner that they are left defeated by the situation, not by you directly, is the only way you can win as an employee.
Any other way, you'll get under-appreciated, underpaid, overworked, overlooked, etc.
So, my boss at the time, was defeated by the situation of her being a bad leader; and instead of clarifying those feelings to me or ignoring them entirely... she validated her false self using her real emotions.

You can only reverse that, by developing fake emotions, to display a real self.

They can't blame you, and when they feel self-defeated, they cannot pretend it was you who caused it (bringing it back to a sane level of reality). They might rage if they're childish but it will not cause a single hair in your body to twitch because you did not "respond to their email" or "throw someone under the bus for their convenience", the situation did, they beat themselves by attacking you while the situation came down on them.
If I had to explain I would say that the situation is controlled by creating a mirror of the employee that follows their orders perfectly. That employee won't feel defensive: they already do everything right. The employee is crafted by becoming aware of the teams impacted in the situation and their true intent and creating "the situation", "the owner".
"The owner" reflects to people from the perspective of the situation and not from your own. This way you can't make a wrong move and are not emotionally involved with yourself.
It enables you to emotionally notice others. It also makes you safe, because you have the situation-mirror that's really doing the battling. The situation-mirror eventually creates a situation where the other person starts attacking reality (the situation) instead of attacking you.

Now, it's up to you whether you want to use that as a way to cooperate with your boss to beat this new reality, or as a way to gain coherence on your reality outside of your boss. I have noticed most people tend to realize this somewhere along the line and retreat and stop fighting, and quit their jobs.

I've been doing this in a corporate environment for a couple of weeks. I have already become greatly stressed and subjugated by the company for which my company works for. 20 of them sit here every day and devalue everything. Yet.... They're completely incompetent, spoilt, lazy and worst of all, they control how the software is being created. There isn't a single person on their side responsible for their requests to make sense and work with each other. So you can imagine how much blame they need to assign to us devs. They don't know what they want but want something anyway and then they'll see if that's what they want but everything under the tightest deadline possible. They're all clients and they all escalate to the board of directors any bad word directed at them. So you can imagine the narcissism that develops in that environment.
I have made them argue with reality and self-defeat numerous times. They have now started to back off and are being more polite and courteous. They have also not escalated anything anymore. Just as I was faking "happy" while I felt intimidated by them. I have not committed a single angry act and yet they are not feeling superior anymore. The reality of the situation is that we need to make a software and if you make them battle this instead of battling you, they can't beat you.

Is there something you find genuinely cool and would recommend ? Some webpage, program, OS, library or anything ?

I mean hey. There are SO MANY reaaaally cool things I didn't know until last few months.. Things I'd be so grateful for if I knew them earlier. I'll list some of them and I just know you have few of yours too. Feel free to educate the rest!

Processing - Program so fun to code in + CodingTrain(YTB channel)
Microcorruption.com - so freaking awesome if you wanna learn hacking / assembly (not x86 necessarily)
LiveOverflow - cool hacking channel
Radare - cool cmd Linux disassembler
vim-adventures.com - LEARN VIM (not just how to quit it) LITERALLY by playing a game!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
slashdot - stay updated , like really
"BEST-WEBSITES-A-PROGRAMMER-SHOULD-VISIT" - GUYS THIS! Sorry for caps but search this on GitHub and you will fucking die of happiness of how freaking useful links there are and no bullshit to dig through , just pure awesomeness. REALLY
HandBrake - Top media converter without bullshit and bloat stuff in it
Calibre - Best eBook management software capable of literally everything ebooks related. Kindle is a bloated joke compared to this
QubesOS - You know you can have every OS running at once - you have a Linux but are playing win games. Yup. It's there. Free
Computerphile - You all know it, it's just for completeness
Khan Academy - Same
VulnHub - download vulnerable VMs and hack them, or learn by reading writeup on how to do it!
Valgrind - MUST HAVE for C/C++ programmers
Computer Science crash course videos

That's all I can think of from top of my head but hey, there's more to it so definitely add your 2 cents!

Last thing, if nothing, just check the websites on GitHub, that's lifechanger

Looking forward to see some cool links & recommendations!

So in my org, as far as I can see, senior engineers and normal engineers do about the same amount of work, and the senior engineer is useful at PBRs for bringing up tech points that other engineers might not know about due to lack of experience. Is this a common thing across the whole software business? In terms of responsibilities, I’m seeing pretty much the same amount, don’t wanna sound arrogant here but we never task work etc based on seniority which I like but just want to know if it’s common

Biggest dev ambition? I've got a couple.
For my career, becoming the "go-to-guy" or even lead architect at an ambitious and professional software company. For my free time, releasing one or more apps that people find useful. Also releasing and maintaining a piece of open source software that devs find useful and see potential in. Inspiring others in general.
Those are some goals I've had from the very beginning.

Got a high paying job, with great benefits, and a big name, straight out of college. I was hired as a software engineer. Comfy, relaxed, and flexible.

The problem comes where it was not the job I was expecting. It has been almost a year and the only programming I've done has been 1 small copy pasta project. I am worried because I am bored and feeling my coding skills fade away. I'm still a novice programmer and feel like this impacts future career opportunities not learning useful skills for outside of this company. I'm going to grad school to do what I really want but still have the 2 years.

Do I stay or do I make the stressful change again? Other fun thing is I just relocated a distance to an area with not a lot of opportunities so would likely involve relocating again.

I'm having to use MS Word again today, and yet again I want to punch my computer in the balls, and frankly I could pull a better piece of software out of a pig's arse.

So there is a feature that automatically adds up the figures in a column to give you a total. Useful, right?

No. Because the total doesn't update automatically. There is even a setting somewhere to have it update before save, and when you turn this setting on, it sometimes updates before save depending on what mood it's in.

You can have it reliably update before you "print to pdf", but not before you "save as pdf".

Fine, there's probably another setting buried somewhere that actually works, but why the fuck is it not turned on by default? What kind of moron wants an automatic total that doesn't update automatically?

I first encountered this feature about 20 years ago, and in all that time none of the thousands of developers at MS has thought "this is shit, let's fix it."

But that's what a developer does, surely. They look at things and say "this is shit, let's fix it".

If you've been looking at something that's so obviously shit, and so easily fixed, for 20 years and not had any urge to fix it, you're not a developer, you're a cretin.

The stupidity cries out from the earth for vengeance.

I am a programming teacher in Colombia and the week's topic is very useful for me, thanks to all for writing your ideas, but in the other hand I think that some points have not been understood, for example in my college we use in the beginning of the course notepad so that the students learn the sintaxis and good practices and they no dependent of a especific tool or Ide (an advantage of this practice is that the student learn to use command tools easily). We want that que student learn programming and not a language or software . This because in our experience the students learn to use a tool but not to resolve a problem and this is bad in a long term.

The problem when you spend basically all if your technical life working by yourself, is that you are not used to understand programs you didn't create. Specially when there are no documentation or a single line of useful comment.

I've tried to help in an open source software just to get frustrated and fall short because I couldn't understand where things were getting initiated/called and I don't have too much free time to keep trying/searching.

Any tip here? I don't really need to learn that, but I think it is important. We never know about the future and I don't want to get stuck/uninployed in the future if I loose my ~15 years job someday.

A few months back I was talking with our web team and we determined a ticketing software would be useful for clients to submit website updates. Rather than request we buy one, because we constantly get told to stop spending, I spent my free time building it out. We tested it and decided it was ready to present to management.

Management tells us that clients aren't going to use something like this (4 fields and optional file upload). The project sits in a repo untouched for some months.

<Time passes>

Company-wide email come in announcing our brand new ticket system for clients to submit issues about our software. Then a second email comes in to me asking why the web team never thought to do something like that and went on about how useful it would be if we had something similar. I link them to the one I built and my notes from our previous meeting.

Manager who told me clients would never use this: Let's talk about this next week and see if we can get people to use it.

It's been 3 weeks and the meeting has been rescheduled 5 times.

I just come up with new business👔\projects💻 ideas, once in a while, without stop✋.

Nowadays I'm implementing ☝️ of them and I don't know about the future but for sure it will be busy with useful software for nontechnical 🚶 people around the world 🌍🌎🌏,
possibly 👄 source.

Ideal job

I do creative projects whatever I want with no deadlines or pressure, everyone loves whatever I make except me because I know I can do better than that last crap I made, getting paid plenty of money to pay off all my family and friends debt and have plenty left over. Specifically making fun programs useful software or web apps and have plenty of free time for taking retreats and going out into nature away from computers and technology.

WARNING - a lot of text.
I am open for questions and discussions :)

I am not an education program specialist and I can't decide what's best for everyone. It is hard process of managing the prigram which is going through a lot of instances.
Computer Science.
Speaking about schools: regular schools does not prepare computer scientists. I have a lot of thoughts abouth whether we need or do NOT need such amount of knowledge in some subjects, but that's completely different story. Back to cs.
The main problem is that IT sphere evolves exceedingly fast (compared to others) and education system adaptation is honestly too slow.
SC studies in schools needs to be reformed almost every year to accept updates and corrections, but education system in most countries does not support that, thats the main problem. In basic course, which is for everyone I'd suggest to tell about brief computer usage, like office, OS basics, etc. But not only MS stuff... Linux is no more that nerdy stuff from 90', it's evolved and ready to use OS for everyone. So basic OS tour, like wtf is MAC, Linux (you can show Ubuntu/Mint, etc - the easy stuff) would be great... Also, show students cloud technologies. Like, you have an option to do *that* in your browser! And, yeah, classy stuff like what's USB and what's MB/GB and other basic stuff.. not digging into it for 6 months, but just brief overview wuth some useful info... Everyone had seen a PC by the time they are studying cs anyway.. and somewhere at the end we can introduce programming, what you can do with it and maybe hello world in whatever language, but no more.. 'cause it's still class for everyone, no need to explain stars there.
For last years, where shit's getting serious, like where you can choose: study cs or not - there we can teach programming. In my country it's 2 years. It's possible to cover OOP principles of +/- modern language (Java or C++ is not bad too, maybe even GO, whatever, that's not me who will decide it. Point that it's not from 70') + VCS + sime real world app like simplified, but still functional bookstore managing app.
That's about schools.

Speaking about universities - logic isbthe same. It needs to be modern and accept corrections and updates every year. And now it depends on what you're studying there. Are you going to have software engineering diploma or business system analyst...
Generally speaking, for developers - we need more real world scenarios and I guess, some technologies and frameworks. Ofc, theory too, but not that stuff from 1980. Come-on, nowadays nobody specifies 1 functional requirement in several pages and, generally, nobody is writing that specification for 2 years. Product becomes obsolete and it's haven't even started yet.
Everything changes, whether it is how we write specification documents, or literally anything else in IT.

Once more, morale: update CS program yearly, goddammit

How to do it - it's the whole another topic.

Thank you for reading.

Is there any free software or website one can use where it takes a screenshot or page and you can mark areas on it, then add comments to those areas? (kind of like powerpoint comments, but without the awkward canvas limitation)

Then later the viewer sees instead of huge message bubbles, only those marked areas on top of the screenshot and when he hovers them - sees the comment pop up somewhere.

I remember QA having something like that, but don't remember anything about it. (I think it had a palmtree logo?..)

It would be amazingly useful for clients to just go through screenshots and marking on it "that looks nasty, put ajit pai on it".

I want to read a good Software Engineering book. A modern one, which contains new agile approaches, useful diagrams, etc. Not the classical, not so useful, class diagram.

What do you recommend? I'm currently more into web and mobile apps, and I want to be able to describe my backend and frontend with useful diagrams which describe better to users and other developers my desired design.

Like age 8?
As a kid I really liked flash games and animations and wanted to get into it. I couldn't do flash, it looked too complicated but I found a little software by the name od KoolMoves that was just a simpler flash animation tool.

I did a bunch of shitty stick figure animations in it (hello to everyone from stick figure death theatre) but eventually I realized that I can make it do things (interactive menus, choose your story kinda things, move the player around, shoot...!)

I fell in love with AS1 and later AS2.0 and made bunch of demos and proof of concepts for systems and games. Most are lost to time and datarot by now)

Age 12
Eventually I found out I can make the entire Windows machine do what I want using first Batch files and later Visual Basic script (made a skype bot!) At this point I was also really into graphics and logo/web design

Age 15 - 20 or so
Then it was pretty natural to move to actual Visual Basic, then C# and finally I to C++. And I had the C family in my heart forever. I managed to get a but into 3D graphics too and got a part-time in archviz

Even by this point I never believed I could be a programmer as a profession. I thought of it just as something I love, but have no chance getting into compared to some of the names out there. I half expected to be either doing graphics (cause I found it simple at the time) or some shitty random job in an office.

20+
Finally I decided to go to uni and study software development, see if I can touch the future I always dreamed of! And... Well... I found out more than 80% of the people there never touch a language up until now and most people are just as retarded as I thought..

For a while I also worked as a game designer (still not being comfortable calling myself a programmer, so I chose a non programming position) but I ended up going into the code and improving and fixing game designer tools (it was unity and C#)

After seeing actual programmers at work in a company, and talking to a bunch of them I realized I already have everything I need to do this seriously and with that experience out of the way I breezed through uni, learned to love Linux and landed a proper job :)

I kinda hope my experience with long lasting self doubt will be useful for someone

Build my own phone and support the Zerophone project by writing code.

Seriously what the fuck is going on with the development of major companies smartphones. Every year all there is are larger displays, better and more cameras, faster processors and some more 'AI' thrown into the mix.

What the heck am I supposed to do with a phone costing multiple hundreds of euros but locked down with an OS spying on you. The processing power available is hardly ever used because most people just use apps like Instagram, WhatsApp or other messaging services.

I get why larger screens are useful but at some point it gets ridiculous.
Better cameras are useful to some degree as well but there's a limit to it.
If you really want to get into photographing then please buy an actual camera.

Another aspect I'd of course like to talk about is privacy. It's hardly existent on IOS or Android smartphones with Google services. Of course one can install different ROMs like Lineage OS but if I already pay multiple hundreds for a device then I'd prefer it working for and not against me.

And dare you break a single part of your phone. You can't really repair it yourself anymore and one can't even change its battery. Most people either have it repaired or just buy a new one and throw it away. There is so much electronic waste, very difficult and expensive to dispose of, just buried in the ground somewhere.

Summing up: I don't really know where the development of smartphones is heading. A phone is a device you carry around with you almost everyday so I'd like it to be tailored to me and not spy on me.

I hope the Librem phone will be a success and other open source phone projects will gain more attention. I want a phone I can repair myself and tailor the software running on it to my needs. I'd like to write messages, listen to music, make calls, run a WiFi hot-spot on the phone and maybe play some tiny games on it once in a while.

can you recommend any ubuntu software which would allow me setup notes on the screen?

microsoft sticky notes for windows has been very useful for me in windows env, but couldn't find an alternative for ubuntu.
A browser plugin, which could turn my opera homepage to a set of sticky notes/ clock/music widgets would also be equally awesome

How resource calculations for software services like code analysis, monitoring, etc are done:

Opening fridge, putting all the beer one can find in it.

Opening the necessary tools, e.g Excel, Accounting software, ....

Drinking the first beer.

Starting to aggregate the monthly costs - cause you can never trust the reports written by someone else...

First beer poof.

Looking at the monthly cost, adding columns "Intended use", "Actual usage pattern", "Usage factor"...

Opening next beer...

Usage factor is btw a factor of 0.1 ... 1.0 - to give an estimate how much the products feature are actually used, for further analysis if the invest is justified or not...

Oh. Another half bottle gone...

Filling in the columns...

Oh. Bottle empty and the next one toooooooooooooooo...

*burping*
*cracking finger joints*

Now let's get to the sad part...

Next worksheet, adding infrastructure costs...

Cost and description as columns.

Hehe. Column sounds like gollum.

Another beer...

Ugh. Need the paper reports, manually typing off things for stuff that was e.g. tax deductible.

Many beers die during this task. Poor little beers, dying for such an boring and mundane task...

SUM is a real useful function. I don't think I can add numbers anymore.

Now we can add another sheet.

Hehe. Sheet sounds like shit. And yes, everything in this file is shit.

Summing up costs from both sheets and including the cost factor from 1
... Beeeeeeeer Beeeeer beer we need more beer here... Beer beer beer...

Where was I. Oh yeah. Cost factorization total vs effective.

Why do I want to get even more drunk.

Oh yeah. Most software is completely underused and the costs aren't justified.

Let's add some colored highlighting ...

Uuuuh. ,Too much red. Better change the highlights.

Too much red.

More beer.

Don't give a fuck.

Hm.

Time for some whiskey.

What else is there to do....

Oh yeah.

Diagrams.

The bloody wankers from accounting need diagrams as numbers are too boring.

Not that everything in accounting is boring, no matter how much you paint colors on it... *sigh*

Hm. More whiskey...

Hehe. Whiskey rhymes with frisky.

Uff. Now just need to write mail. Mail mail mail....

"Copy paste the last mail from last month"

Hm.

Ah.

*sipping whiskey*

Spell check extension - to the rescue.

Thesaurus *burps*.

Let's change a few words here and there... Maybe another paragraph there.

Uh....

Trying to attach file...

*fucking mouse is pretty constantly crashing into empty beer bottles*

Done.

Damn.

Need to press send button.

*Creating mess on the desk by just randomly crashing the beer bottles*

Done.

*Pressing computers power button*

Mwahahahaha. No mouse needed.

*regretting to stand up too quickly, nearly barfing on the floor*

Couch ... Where Couch...

After hitting several doors, frames and other stuff, the glorious mission ended successfully with a most graciously executed gut buster on the couch.

(Regretting next morning to have emptied two 6 packs and a few glasses of whiskey)

Ticket: here's something wrong with the export of transactions, please check.

Very useful description, let me just go over this logic I've written months ago.

Yeah, I went extra sure that everything's right, besides the ones for created during the initial testing that we left. Took me a hell a long time to prove because there's such a vague description but ok.

Of course I have the time to make an eyecandy of an excel spreadsheet for you.

Only for you I'll also go and fix these entries manually. If you want me to do it so badly, I'll gladly do it.

Oh what, you're upset that I wasted 5h for this complete bullshit? Well fucking go and learn the database structure yourself then or get sued idk

Hope it was worth that 1€ difference the customer paid himself.

Not to mention that I also had to do an emergency setup to work from home because those people who are responsible for giving me an appointment for a covid test sure like to wait days after my sick leave is over. ffs, I just had a cold...

Also fuck all this bullshit mac software required to work in this network, half of this shit flat out requires you to use the same software and ofc it's all closed source to the point where I'd be glad to have an electron app for everything.

WHITEPAPERS.

Not exactly a programming problem, but one of my many task (as i am apparently a multi headed hydra) is it to find Software for tasks. I made the experience, as more marketing experts are on it, and as more SEO is poured in as more information about a topic degrade.

Two examples:
i wanted to find out if there is anything that speaks AGAINST "the cloud" as a concept for Data Procesessing and Storage. (Beside that the company internet connection is crap). There are tons of documents that in a semi "scientific" way show that having a data centre with a constant staff of experts is superios to everything. And it goes on, every company has a different version of basically the same document, and they all subtley show that THIS company is the best.

Example 2:
ERP Software, the most infested pool of filth i have entered yet, be it just a tiny CRM System or a full blown SAP clone, they all have those "Whitepapers" that first look somewhat scientific or informative. Like "the top8 common pitfalls when introducing an ERP system". 7 of them read logically and were what i expected, the 8th was "dont get your IT involved".
Yeah sure, IT doesnt understand economical processes, fair enough, but not getting it involved at all sounds like selfdefense. A further look showed me that this particular vendor has a web-based solution but doesnt provide any further informations (srsly, the website is starved of actual hard informations). The screenshots let the software look a bit oldschool but what really threw red flags for me was the sentence "we are ready for Win10, we did significant adjustment to perform excellent with Windows 10"
So, either they have some system interwoven stuff (so why bother with Webbase then?) or its just another marketing bullshit sentence.

Either way, i found it to be really hard to get ANY reliable information about this particular topic which adds to the overall world experience of missinformations and the all-being "fakenews". But for many things one can usually filter through a lot of different informations that can be pieced together, with this..its all outright propaganda camouflaged as "useful information", some even try to let it look scientific. In the end its all biased..

ultimativly, this rant is about all the people that write those missleading whitepapers, fill the world with biased informations and make the whole planet a worse place.

I'm an apprentice software engineer, have been for about a year now. I feel so dumb all the time. Used to be I'd just teach myself at my own pace for about a year or two (which was slow, on and off because of life getting in the way). Now I'm surrounded by programmers with decades more experience than me and I can't help but feel inferior.
I want to get better faster but, I work full-time now so I don't know how to supplement my studying. I've been studying linear-algebra online because my maths is crap and I remember one of my colleagues mentioning that it would be useful. But now I'm not sure because apparently discrete mathematics is better.
I also need to keep up with Java since that's what I'm learning in university but, I'm mostly using React/Typescript in my current project. By the time I finish work I don't even want to look at a line code and I lack the self-discipline to force myself to study in the evening.
I need to pick a direction and stick with it but, it's seems to just be increasingly harder as I've gone on.

Oh no, yeah, little error icons with no accompanying error messages are my absolute favorite, especially when there's no apparent way to check what the error is.

Love software that does this. Perfect design, super useful./s

This is more of an essay than a rant. TLDR at the end. I simply can't choose from all the shitty lecturers I've had, so I'm going to have to go through them one by one. But of background. I'm currently in 7th year of college, I did a multimedia degree in 2 years, a intro course to Software Dev and I'm currently in my final year of my Software Dev degree. So let's start.

Intro Software Course
- we had a database module, which was thought by, I shit you not, the head of the psychology course in the college, she attempted to teach us Databases using access. And not even using SQL, using access GUI components and it's query builder. Need I say more?

1st year software dev
- We had a networking module, the guy that taught the labs, he literally didn't say more than 12 words the entire 12 week semester, his answer to any question you asked him was a grunt and "research it"

- We had a psychology module, I have no fucking idea why, but instead of learning something useful we were told to read this and get in touch with your feelings...

- database module. Yes we actually did SQL here, 12 weeks of select statements and normal form, talked about by a guy in a monotone voice, who sounded like he was contemplating bringing in an assault riffle some day. Also instead of using MySQL he decided to use Ingres. Why I will never know.

2nd Year Software Dev
- We had a module called Algorithms and Data Structures. The lecturer gave us problems she couldn't solve. Simple problems. She was also crazy. Absolutely nuts.

- Object Orientated Programming. I had this lecturer for 3 semesters up until 3rd year. This guy did COBOLT in college, graduated in the 70s or something and went straight into teaching, he taught us Java for nearly 2 years. He literally copied and pasted texts from PDFs and read through them in class. He told myself and another guy at one stage he really didn't care, and was just counting down the days to his retirement.

- Databases again, different lecturer from 1st year, taught us for 2 semesters (24 weeks) and somehow managed to teach us nothing.

3rd Year Software Dev
- software engineering.. This is where the biggest cunt I've ever met was introduced. He arrives into class 15 minutes late every time without fail, talks shit about stuff that has no relevancy to the topic at all, tries to turn everything into a rugby metaphor and every time you ask a question he somehow dodges it and swiftly changes topic. This cunts past profession? A Project Manager. Fucking typical. This dickhead has also thought me 2 other modules.

4th yr Software Dev
- El cunto mentioned above for 2 more modules. Need I say more.
- real time systems, this module took the piss, the module was written by the lecturer which is what earns his space here. Assignments given to us, which required more time to do than we had in labs so we had to work at home, the problem we that is we were using an obscure RTOS called OS9 which would only work on the college computers. When brought to the lecturers attention he just said "figure it out"

Internet of Things - There was 2 lecturers, each lecturer seemingly working off a different plan, one week you'd have one lecturer, the next would be the other one going on about something completely different and unrelated to anything else we'd done.

Some lecturers didn't even make this list as I couldn't be bothered trying to think back about how shit other ones were. These were the ones that always stood out in my mind.

My main take away point from this is that you go to college for the paper which says you have a degree. Learning things that are going to benefit you in a career is up to yourself.

TLDR; 90% of my college lectures were shit. You need to learn useful stuff yourself.

I have this fried that gives me some advice on how to find work, he said i need to come up with a project idea as something to put on my CV and also as a way to learn front-end dev.

Easy enough if not for the fact that this project should be something that's actually useful and has some concept behind it (like, something that might seemingly work for a startup)

I've been raking my brain for a week now, and all i can come up with is small meme projects, neat but sort of inconsequential experiments, or things that might be useful to me but have no reason to be web-based.
I never realized how hard it is for me to come up with professional-sounding project ideas :D

I'm just not that kind of guy, i don't really have the drive or motivation to do anything professional: If people wanna use my rice or whatever spaghetti software i create they are welcome to, i'll even write them some documentation, but its just kinda out there on the internet because i like sharing. I don't really have any grand product ideas, nor do i really care about what other people think or need.

Just saw that the University of Hawaii has a Collaborative Software Development Lab, I think that's one of the more useful things in university

The ability to create something, something useful. Software is the intersection of artistry and invention. Honestly, why do anything else?

Im trying to land my first internship for Software Engineering anybody have some useful tips or places to look?

Started playing around with HTML and CSS when I was about 8. Tried JavaScript but it never stuck. Started to learn a bit of Python when I was about 13 and enjoyed it, but never applied it to anything other than some maths. Used some basic ActionScript in Flash animations. Wrote some simple VBA in Excel. Learnt Matlab during my Engineering degree. Now I use Mathematica for my PhD work, Python for fun and useful bits of software for myself, and the occasional bit of PHP and whatever else I need at the time to get something working.

Hey all, just wondering what it was like for you when starting out your career.

I'm a newish dev, been full time for about a year hired right after my internship. My role has a bunch of hats ranging from DevOps/sys admin to software engineering, sort of a weird mashup of skills so it's not pure software engineering. I mainly work with python, Ansible, and some terraform.

However I still just want to say I'm sorely disappointed in my undergrad classes.

I have a "concentration" in software engineering. I did struggle in classes as I was working full time to pay for classes without taking out loans, but I don't really remember learning a whole lot that was useful in industry.

Overall I just feel like just paid money for a degree that didn't teach me very much useful stuff. Maybe I'm just lacking experience? Maybe what I learned I just don't notice myself applying because it's subconscious?
My coworkers have taught me so much, and I'm very thankful they invested that time into me. I still get ripped to shreds during code reviews lmao (definitely not as much compared to when I first started but I'm also still learning and will always be)
Plus our company docs are pretty good so I can always read through them or search our codebase for examples on how to utilize in house tools etc.

I definitely hit the jackpot with this job, just feeling like I should have been prepared more.

Microsoft is buying GitHub?

Actually, that sounds great. A lot of people here are making it sound like this is the end of the world as we know it, but how do we know that they will make it awful? The Microsoft of today is different than the Microsoft of 2007. The purchase is simply a way to expand their enterprise offerings. I have experimented with Office365, and it is actually really useful. GitHub will be a way to expand that offering to software development companies.

Who knows? We may even get some kind of Azure CI service built directly into GitHub repos?

However, I see why some people are concerned. If they want to move to GitLab, I don't actually blame them a bit. I was already using it before it was cool!

The point of this rant is that we should give Microsoft a chance, and not jump ship right away.

Is a masters degree in IT worth it? I mean I've just started my masters in Software Engineering after my Computer Science bachelor's and I expected to learn something useful from it. So far they have taught only bullshit and stuff that I haven't found useful since I've started my IT career 3 years ago (now I am the team lead at a small startup, and I consider myself a really good developer). To summarize, is a masters diploma useful? Will it help me with anything, give that I've started working as a developer (freelancer, didn't know much back then) when I was still in high school (CV bragging rights)?

What do you hate about software and developer tutorials and how would you change them? What would totally disrupt the status quo with tutorials and make them easier to finish/useful/memorable/fun?

I'm bored.

Waiting on people to answer and on software to finish running ... again.
What do?
I've started viewing CMake tutorials on YT, played that interactive git 'game', read some SO topics and archWiki entries.
Just struggling with concentration and getting myself to wanting to concentrate.
Oh and I'm almost finished with XKCD

Any tips how to spend waiting time useful but interesting/catching?

Things I say to my clients when I know that a reboot is required to fix their issue but I don't have enough evidence to prove it to them :

"... On any computing platform, we noted that the only solution to infinite loops (and similar behaviors) under cooperative preemption is to reboot the machine. While you may scoff at this hack, researchers have shown that reboot (or in general, starting over some piece of software) can be a hugely useful tool in building robust systems.

Specifically, reboot is useful because it moves software back to a known and likely more tested state. Reboots also reclaim stale or leaked resources (e.g., memory) which may otherwise be hard to handle. Finally, reboots are easy to automate. For all of these reasons, it is not uncommon in large-scale cluster Internet services for system management software to periodically reboot sets of machines in order to reset them and thus obtain the advantages listed above.
Thus, when you indeed perform a reboot, you are not just enacting some ugly hack. Rather, you are using a time-tested approach to improving the behavior of a computer system."
😎

Time sheets. I'm not a fan of our task management system, you don't check out jobs or tasks like moving cards on a kanban board, it's more of a loose, calendar-based setup. We're also in a small, open office so it can be difficult to remember to log things in the software when you could tell the person opposite you that their task is finished. On top of that a lot of the time it takes me longer than the scheduled time to get a job finished as I'm learning a lot of new stuff, so digitally documenting things like that worry me a little. I don't want to look like I can't hack it just because a job takes me longer than my much-more-experienced colleagues.
I should note that I understand it's all incredibly useful data to the company, but I hate doing it and it's very easy to forget or ignore.

Got this software engineering job set up once I graduate, honestly I think I was lucky, but on to the rant. I'm realizing that I didn't study core CS knowledge 1/2 as much as I should have (c++based). I need this core knowledge for my job, so how can I best prepare with the remaining months? Friends said to just code something, but I have no idea what I would make.

I don't want to be the new guy that just had a nice resume and good extracurriculars, I want to get interested in code! I want to love this field, but have no clue where to start or get the motivation. I want to swap my video game hours with useful ones. Thanks fellow devs.

I started in school with visual basic at the age of 13. my father then told me to learn php cause it could be useful one day. I wrote a little browser game and got really into it. In the meantime we switched to c++ in school and did a bit of Java.

Now I am studying software engineering and got my first job as a php developer thanks to my father. This led me to nodejs + angularjs development which I am currently working with (and Java at the university)

I feel compelled to figure out how to use software in a gaming setting to teach skills like CS and Math. But do it in a way that is fun and not feeling like a "math game".

I want to spend more time learning about algorithms, architectures, design approaches, etc. Writing such a game would force me to understand what I present in a very intimate way.

I can see a way to create algos in game using very visual ways. Then allowing someone to make superstructures combining those algos to solve tasks.

I was inspired by how some algos require data to be sorted a certain way before starting. As the algo as a side effect resorts the data to know when it has completed. I realized if an algo is generic enough it can be combined just like functions or objects.

I also want to learn math better, especially in conjunction with code. So making a platform for learning these would be a lot of fun. I would definitely want both visual and textual interfaces to the code. I have to imagine a real programmer being frustrated with a visual interface unless it was really compelling.

I find it interesting that a lot of algos are represented visually when trying to show how it works. I realize some probably cannot be visualized so easy though.

I also want to use software like this to teach someone to think more deliberately and help people be more disciplined in their thinking. I know I could use this.

I have a secret goal of being able to use such software to help someone become a math/programming wizard. I don't know if this is achievable, but having exercises that help solidify root concepts in a fun way would be really useful IMO.

I think that the metaphors we use to design software can hold us back sometimes.

Specifically, I’ve been thinking about file systems.

“File” is a fine metaphor for “chunk of data” I guess but we use two conflicting metaphors on top of that to describe the same thing: “folder” and “directory”.

Why do we limit ourselves to this rigid, hierarchical system for managing our data?

Maybe something based on tags, or attributes or some other metadata.

Hierarchy can be useful so I don’t want to completely get rid of it, or anything drastic like that, but we (or at least *I*) don’t think in those terms.

I am not a programmer, but I know a little bit of Python, C# and C++, but mostly basic syntax of latest two. Nevertheless it gives me higher ground, why?

I develop way od thinking which maker my life easier. I Havel intershop in Pharmacy and they print small papers with number which you show to get remaining drugs. Currently is number, 17592 which makes someone to type almost 40k numbers and erase also this amount. I use variable function in Libreoffice Writer and you have to type one number and it autonumber 64 (easily to expand but unnecessary) and save fucktone of time 😃 And this is why I thing that teaching programming is beneficial, because it develops mindset of resolving problems in easier way.

On the other hand in a few hours I wrote program for my girlfriend to draw randomly picture of herbal material (leaf, root, fruit etc) and ask for Latin name of this material, check if is correct and display necessary information. Programming was quick, most of time I prepare data for this software and this feels so fuxkibg awesome that I could use my knowledge to help my girlfriend and make something useful which makes me proud (code looks like blue waffle, but it works 😃). Fucking deadlines, but at least I could finish it 😃

I'll have to make some tough choices over the next 6 months. With my tech career beginning and my college education ramping up, time is of the essence, and the skills I develop now will be at the forefront of my future. So what does this have to do with Microsoft?

Well, the story begins in the Spring of 2016. Social Forums was about to turn a year old, Trump's campaign was ramping up, and I had just found my love for technology. With all my friends having phones, I had to get a phone and get working on development. The year before, Windows 10 was launched, and I was psyched. I found Microsoft's products to be underrated with potential. That day, I purchased a Lumia 640, upgraded it to Windows 10, and immediately began working. After another year-and-a-half gone by, I went from loving Microsoft, to defending Microsoft, to tolerating Microsoft. I could go on and on about the lousy structure, the privacy issues, the forced upgrades, the redundant developer platform, and other such issues that is leading me away from them. But if there is one thing they have proven over the years, is that the they are completely out of touch with its developers and its customers. They spent years ramping up their phones. They failed. They spend years ramping up their phones. They failed. They spend years ramping up their semi-annual OS updates. They failed. So why did they fail? It's not that they made the wrong prediction out of chance. They legitimately don't care about feedback. It's their way or the highway. This sounds vaguely familiar. They have been spending a decade ignoring feedback from the community because they want to become just like Apple. Right now, Apple LIVES off of brand loyalty and its stable, useful ecosystem. This cannot work for Microsoft as they don't have a lot of brand loyalty. But most of all, they don't have a working ecosystem. They have Windows Insiders, which provides them with hundreds of feedback messages per day. These include suggestions, bug reports, and constructive criticism. The feedback is public. You can have several pages of the same complaint, and they still won't do anything about it. They say they have a good relationship with their community, and that this Beta program helps Windows become better for all. But in the end, we are nothing more than a glorified unpaid labor force. They fired hundreds of professional debuggers just before the Insider Program took off. We are only here to provide bug reports for free. Now that their phones, AR headsets, browser, online services, and VR headsets are failing for all these reasons, I see little reason to develop for Windows anymore. I don't just mean their UWP and App Store platforms, I mean Windows as a whole. I'm definitely not a Mac guy either. I never see myself going to Mac either, as they are really no different in terms of how they treat their Developers and PC users. If things continue down this route, I will leave the platform all together. I've always wanted to be a Systems Programmer, so I don't really need an established paid platform to be successful. Even now, I'm not certain about leaving Windows altogether but as a developer, I need to find my place. Time is of the essence in my life, and I need to find out my place in the software world. Now I think it isn't on the Windows platform like I had dreamed it would be. But where do I go?

Making our software so useful and versatile that we can finally outcompete the asshole monopolist of a company that dominates the market right now.

Fuck nrwl.
This stupid puddle of barf software that gets talked over like it's the shit. Nothing remotely useful works when using it. It always craps out some dumb exceptions that have nothing to do with your actual code but the dumb fuck, that didn't have the brain cells to think half a step ahead when doing his job.
It's just a buggy, mostly useless piece of shit that some guys in nice suits sell like it's jesus 2.0.
I hope you burn in hell.

I haven't been this mad since a looong time.

Common Man: How do you software developers earn so much? What's the secret of your success?
Software Developer: It's not a secret really. It's like any other job, we make sure we are always needed. So we create a mess and then get paid to solve the mess. How you ask? Software developers create the most complex and useful software. Since it's complex, others learn it and become part of the so called the few experts and then get paid tons as very less experts are there for the software and the creators of the software are also of course experts and in fact considered Guru, because, well, they wrote the complex software. They are geniuses, because it's so hard to write complex software. And many of these experts also create new tools to make the software easier to use, for newbies. They also write articles around it - explanations, tutorials, inner workings and gotchas, and also publish books and videos - in paid tutorial sites, and some videos on YouTube too.

Every day is tempting to me..tempting to use some solutions i am not sure that i can handle it.

The Company i work for has an external IT Partner that does all the heavy lifting when it comes to our infrastructure, like installing servers, doing the installations and such. I mostly monitor it and do basic maintenance. Its all windows.

Recently i thought about adding a fifth Hyper V instance for an intranet webserver...based on some linux distro (probably ubuntu cause that is what i am familiar with). But i am not THAT familiar with ubuntu or any linux distro..buts its just the intranet and i already installed nginx and apache with success, what could go wrong?

today i sketched some intranet websoftware our production might find useful to collect data input from our workers (we are somewhat small so there is no big ERP software as of now). When thinking how to realize the data input i thought that maybe a basic raspberry and some cheap 1280x800 10.1 inch touch panels would be best..its very tempting, but on the other hand i am not sure i am ready for that, my experience is shallow and only based on my own RaPi that i 99,99% run headless. On the other hand it would be a very small and space safing concept..and cheap..compared to the use of Laptops (the go to company solution when computers are needed).

It also had the risk that i am the only one that could unfuck anything if things go south..it also has the advantage that i am the only one who could fix things when it goes south...

so much temptation

Most of the web stuff I have done in the past have been PHP, Wordpress, cgi, etc. I read about nginx and was very impressed by what it accomplished in the last 20 years. Now I have a desire to play with this tech for fun.

What I want to do:
- create, manage, and launch minecraft servers
- provide a web interface for managing servers (I would like to learn how to make the server use the infrastructure of nginx to be managed like its other services)
- make this packaged so others can use this (probably on github)

I don't know anything about nginx other than it is really really cool, can serve massive amounts of web pages, and can do a whole lot more than that.

Question:
Is nginx suitable for this? Is this a big learning curve? Will I have fun doing this?

I am currently running a multi-instance minecraft server being managed by a piece of software called Crafty Controller. It is really neat. However, I am finding it buggy. I also see that the next version of this software will be behind a patreon. This is really disappointing. So this is spurring me to consider building something fun for myself, and if useful, for others.

I will most likely do very barebones and inflexible web interface that just gets the job done. I know enough to get by. So I assume I have a large learning curve ahead to do this.

Any advice? Is this going to turn into a large time sink?

You can make your software as good as you want, if its core functionality has one major flaw that cripples its usefulness, users will switch to an alternative.

For example, an imaginary file manager that is otherwise the best in the world becomes far less useful if it imposes an arbitrary fifty-character limit for naming files and folders.

If you developed a file manager better than ES File Explorer was in the golden age of smartphones (before Google excercised their so-called "iron grip" on Android OS by crippling storage access, presumably for some unknown economic incentive such as selling cloud storage, and before ES File Explorer became adware), and if your file manager had all the useful functionality like range selection and tabbed browsing and navigation history, but it limits file names to 50 characters even though the file system supports far longer names, the user will have to rely on a different application for the sole purpose of giving files longer names, since renaming, as a file action, is one of the few core features of a file management software.

Why do I mention a 50-character limit? The pre-installed "My Files" app by Samsung actually did once have a fifty-character limit for renaming files and folders. When entering a longer name, it would show the message "up to 50 characters available". My thought: "Yeah, thank you for being so damn useful (sarcasm). I already use you reluctantly because Google locked out superior third-party file managers likely for some stupid economic incentives, and now you make managing files even more of a headache than it already is, by imposing this pointless limitation on file names' length."

Some one at Samsung's developer department had a brain fart some day that it would be a smart idea to impose an arbitrary limit on file name lengths. It isn't.

The user needs to move files to a directory accessible to a superior third-party file manager just to give it a name longer than fifty characters. Even file management on desktop computers two decades ago was better than this crap!

All of this because Google apparently wants us to pay them instead of SanDisk or some other memory card vendor. This again shows that one only truly owns a device if one has root access. Then these crippling restrictions that were made "for security reasons" (which, in case it isn't clear, is an obvious pretext) can be defeated for selected apps.

I hate it when colleagues name their commits with a non descriptive name like "minor changes", "minor fixes", "small changes" and so on. I know that good naming is a difficult task in software development, but do I expect to much when I want them to explain shortly what exactly they changed since the last commit?
Good commit messages are always helpful if you want to do good PR reviews and furthermore if you want to go back to an older commit because someone fucked something up.
Don't get me wrong, my colleagues are great people and great developers, but some of them ignore the fact that good commit messages might be useful in the future for others and themselves

So I was building opencv some time back.
Nice enough package, like most python linked packages I'm finding though I know you can use it via c and its meant to be but why would you want to ? .. it contains a whole bunch of half finished crap that is actually useful in part including the capacity to tear apart video files and manipulate frames one at a time and then rewrite them back to a file. about the only lib that's easy to use that I saw that does that. hell I can even compose my own video frames. also the only other lib I saw that does that thus far.

so...

I post a bug, because of FUCKING CMAKE NOT WORKING. not conforming with the well thought out build environment that most GNU style c packages use.

you know like when you need an upstream source package to build the code, or a downgraded package to build the code and don't want to fuck up your host environment so you have to specify a bunch of lib paths and the like so that ld and gcc work correctly etc etc etc from your custom build location and so you can later use these same values to find the compiled lib and build software against it.

fucker closes my ticket saying i hijacked the c environment................

no.

its because cmake sucks.

they're using and i don't know why a module specifically written to find libtiff.

specifically written but doesn't find the only source on my system that provides tiff which my env variables point directly to !!!!

lazy fucking cocksuckers !

I want to code a solution this issue.
something that translates ac files and am files and cmakelists into something intelligent and easy to follow that doesn't sacrifice the flexibility of make and gnu shit and unfucks cmake based projects !

Hi,I want to provide a button when clicked txt file should be uploaded to cloud account.I want to do it using Java and JavaFX. UI Is easy but how to use GOOGLE DRIVE API? No complete code is given on internet.I don't know how to start from scratch.I am making a software where i need this function to link users drive account to it. Help appreciated :) .(official site of Google api is not useful)

What kind of innovation approach has helped humanity in a better way? Is it some group of obscure indie devs working overnight to write some software which is free, useful and purposeful devoid of licensing shit or the too-honorary-to-shit-from-arse organizations which put marketing gimmicks like making world better place and which compromise user data either to governments or to other corporations for monetizing given the first chance. If innovation is happening in both the spectrums then what is the viable kind of required innovation at the moment for us humans. IMHO I don't trust corporate innovation and shitty innovations happening in Facebook, Google and likes. Has corporate greed bought innovation for market price.

With the move forward with many places trying to rebuild the internet to suit there needs it's time we take the internet back with our own networks, there are many old means to do it what is useful but most of the white paper and software as been blocked or deleted, what a sad world we live in, freedoms have always been a thing of your madness but now they are even removing the feeling of freedom, god I love the world...... NOT

Anyone know of a good and easy set up mesh what will work for windows, linux and mobile devices?

Does anyone know of any good opensource time tracking software with a focus on privacy?
I don't trust the proprietary stuff but it's useful software

Challenge: what do you think is the most useful bit of software ever made?