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Where do I even start?
Personal projects?
So many. Shouldn't count.
Unpaid game dev intern?
Unpaid game dev volunteer?
Both worthwhile, if stressful. Shouldn't count either.
Freelancing where clients refused to pay?
That's happened a few times. One of them paid me in product instead of cash (WonderSoil, a company that [apparently still] makes and sells some expanding super potting soil thing). The product turned out to be defective and killed all of the plants I used it on. I'd have preferred getting stiffed instead. Their "factory" (small, almost tiny) was quite cool. The owner was a bitch. Probably still is.
Companies that have screwed me out of pay?
So many. I still curse their names at least once a month. I've been screwed out of about $13k now, maybe more. I've lost track.
I have two stories in particular that really piss me off.
The first: I was working at a large robotics company, and mostly enjoyed my job, though the drive was awful. The pay wasn't high either, but I still enjoyed the work. Schedule was nice, too: 28 hours (four 7-hour days) per week. Regardless, I got a job offer for double my salary, same schedule, and the drive was 11 minutes instead of 40. I took it. My new boss ended up tricking me into being a contractor -- refused to give me a W2, no contracts, etc. Later, he also increased my hours to 40 with no pay increase. He also took forever to pay (weeks to months), and eventually refused to pay me to my face, in front of my cowokers. Asshole still owes me about $5k. Should owe me the the difference in taxes, too (w2 vs 1099) since he lied about it and forced me into it when it was too late to back out.
I talked to the BBB, the labor board, legal council, the IRS (because he was actively evading taxes), the fire inspector (because he installed doors taht locked if the power went out, installed the exit buttons on the fucking ceiling, and later disconnected all of said exit buttons). Nobody gave a single shit. Asshole completely got away with everything. Including several shady as hell things I can't list here because they're too easy to find.
The second one:
The economy was shit, and I was out of a job. I had been looking for quite awhile, and an ex-coworker (who had worked at google, interestingly) suggested I work for this new startup. It was a "reverse search engine," meaning it aggregated news and articles and whatnot, and used machine learning to figure out what its users are interested in, and provided them with exactly that. It would also help with scheduling, reminders of birthdays, mesh peoples' friends' travel plans and life events, etc. (You and a friend are going on vacation to the same place, and your mutual friend there is having a birthday! You should go to ___ special event that's going on while you're all there! Here's a coupon.) It was pretty cool. The owner was not. He delayed my payments a few times, and screwed me over on pay a few more times, despite promising me many times that he was "not one of those people." He ended up paying me less than fucking minimum wage. Fake, smiling, backstabbing asshole.
The first one still pisses me off more, though, because of all the shit I went through trying to get my missing back pay, and how he conned me every chance he got. And how he yelled at me and told me, to my face, that he wasn't ever going to pay me. Fucking goddamn hell I hate that guy.8 -
3 years, part time, $0.
I used to volunteer my time to an old text based rpg, handling code changes, sysadmin maintenance and the likes - back when those were a thing in the mid 2000's and money wasn't my issue in life - free for them, experience for me - win win!
Was something to get my hands dirty back in the day and contribute to an active community, but since then that place has shut down and been disbanded.24 -
Drove 1.5 hrs for a interview at a company which was developing mgmt software for fire departments. They were very pleased with me, as i am with a volunteer FD and a perfect fit in their opinion. I declined after i found out they code base is mostly VB6 and they considered source control unnecessary.
Thanks, but no thanks.2 -
TL;DR: Tech companies. Don't ask for loyalty if you don't care about your people.
> I'm a gud Dev (and a gud boi).
> The company assing me a cool project.
> The company promised pay me the training. about that suite. They didn't.
> I finish the project and i'd accomplish the task with more effectivity than excepted.
> My company won an interview about "the success case of the implemented software and its integration with our software". They denied me the chance to fly and go to the meet. Instead they will send another guy...
> I asked for a "salary adjust" cos I'm finishing my engineering degree and my good work. They declined.
> Next day I'd present my volunteer job resignation within 15 days (because laws demands that). I have a better job option with +20% my actual salary and a lot of benefits. And they needs me ASAP.
> Everybody look at me shocked and if I am a traitor.
What the f!$-k they did expect?
My unconditional loyalty?
🤣🤣🤣1 -
Best : I moved on from Dev to SecOps and got a well paid job in a small company closer to my home. With three office dogs.
Really, the dogs are the main thing there. The money is just an additional benefit.
Worst : my Dev life keeps getting less and less relevant for me. In the last two years, I started volunteering a lot (local volunteer fire department and then some), investing into several side businesses that start paying off now, generally doing as much non-dev stuff as possible.
I wanted to do this since I was a kid, I'm good at it, but I keep finding other things to do, because they're more interesting and more of a challenge.
Honestly, the one thing that keeps me in IT is sunk cost fallacy.
Hell, I'm thinking about becoming a paramedic or something, at least I'll be helping people instead of entertaining managers.4 -
So this happened last week.
Last week I went as a volunteer to give an introduction class basic programming to some guys and gals who are going to attend computer science soon next year.
The class lasted one week and we had done some basic algorithms and programming in Python.
Besides that we also did some very basic websites (html, css and javascript).
Obviously all those people were very enthusiastic.
Some were a little bit too enthusiastic...
There were these 2 guys who were best friends. They already knew everything apparently. Even though they just finished high school they had been programming for over 10 years, had already made countless of websites, applications, 'hacked Windows', RATs and some amazing games.
So there were some people there who never had programmed before. I started giving the lecture and warned people who already knew some basics of programming the first day might be a quite boring but I could not simply skip it obviously.
Those 2 dickheads acted like the biggest childs ever, started screaming in class, making sure everyone knew they were bored, and were constantly complaining to me that they know what print, for, while and strings were. I stayed calm and tried to explain them again I simply couldn't skip parts of the lecture for them.
Every hour and every day it started getting worse and worse with them. Not only but the whole class were furiously mad at them. Some other students even started screaming at them. They screamed back insulting everyone they even didn't what php was and stupid stuff like that.
At some point they interrupted me AGAIN and asked me how long I programmed. I told him little them over 5 years or something. They started laughing at me. Those 2 dickheads looked at me like they were so much better than me because they programmed over 10 years.
At some point, almost the last day, I had enough of their bullshit, interruption, screaming, insulting other students who asked questions, ... I said you know what, you give the lecture!
They refused because they felt too good for all these other 'noobs' (the other students). They would never become good and blah blah more bullshit.
I said alright, we're doing websites, you've made some websites, show me your most impressive website.
He was happy and felt honered.
He sent me the whole folder and I showed his website on code on the big screen in the room.
Then I said: "Everyone, pay close attention to this!"
That dickhead smiled and felt good
Me: "This is how NOT to make a website"
I started explaining to everyone all things that were complete shit and all things that were straight up sins.
That one friend of the dickhead stayed quiet. The other dickhead became as red as a tomato. At some points you even saw tears in his eyes. At some point he insulted me I was a scriptie and simply left.
The class started clapping.
One of the weirdest but also best moments of my life
Moral: Don't act like a complete bigheaded dickhead, don't feel better than everyone and show some respect
Thank you for reading
Have a nice day!3 -
On Saturday's I volunteer at this place where I teach/tutor kids how to program. I was sitting down with this kid and helping him when I found this pleasant surprise hidden in his code-
[go to my other rant for pt.2]
6 -
Did I ever tell you kids about the time I worked for a company that got a contract to develop an iOS application around some object detection software that had been developed by another team?
Company I was working for was a tiny software consultancy, and this was my first ever dev job (I’m at my second now 😅). Nobody at the company has experience building mobile applications but CEO decides that the app should be written in React Native because _he_ knows React Native.
During a meeting with the client, CEO jokes about how easy the ask is and says he could finish it in a weekend. Please note that Head of Engineering had already budgeted a quarter for the work. CEO says we can do it in a week! And moves up the deadline. And only assigns two engineers to project. I am not one of those engineers.
The two engineers that are put on it struggle. A lot. They can’t seem to get the object detection to work at all, and the code that’s already written is in Objective-C. I realize one of the issues is that the engineers on the project can’t read Objective-C because they have no experience with Objective-C or even C. I have experience with C, so I volunteer to take a look at it to try to see what’s going on.
Turns out the problem is that the models are trained on one type of image format and the iPhone camera takes images in a different format.
The end of the week comes, they do not succeed in figuring out the image conversion in React Native. There’s an in-person demo with the customers scheduled for the next Monday. CEO spends the weekend trying to build the app. Only succeeds in locking literally every other engineer out of the project.
They manage to negotiate a second chance where we deliver what we were supposed to deliver at the original schedule.
I spent the weekend looking up how to convert images and figure it would be a lot easier to interface with the Objective-C if we used Swift. Taught myself enough Swift over the weekend to feel dangerous. Spoke to Head of Engineering on Monday and proposed solution — start over in Swift. Volunteer to lead effort. Eventually convince them it’s a good idea (and really, what’s the worst that can happen? If this solves our main problem at the moment, that’s still more progress than the original team made)
Spend the next week working 16 hour days building out application. Meet requirements for next deadline. Save contract.
And that’s ONE of the stories of my first dev job that got me hired as a senior engineer despite only having 10 months of work experience in the industry.11 -
Some of the penguin's finest insults (Some are by me, some are by others):
Disclaimer: We all make mistakes and I typically don't give people that kind of treatment, but sometimes, when someone is really thick, arrogant or just plain stupid, the aid of the verbal sledgehammer is neccessary.
"Yeah, you do that. And once you fucked it up, you'll go get me a coffee while I fix your shit again."
"Don't add me on Facebook or anything... Because if any of your shitty code is leaked, ever, I want to be able to plausibly deny knowing you instead of doing Seppuku."
"Yep, and that's the point where some dumbass script kiddie will come, see your fuckup and turn your nice little shop into a less nice but probably rather popular porn/phishing/malware source. I'll keep some of it for you if it's good."
"I really love working with professionals. But what the fuck are YOU doing here?"
"I have NO idea what your code intended to do - but that's the first time I saw RCE and SQLi in the same piece of SHIT! Thanks for saving me the hassle."
"If you think XSS is a feature, maybe you should be cleaning our shitter instead of writing our code?"
"Dude, do I look like I have blue hair, overweight and a tumblr account? If you want someone who'd rather lie to your face than insult you, go see HR or the catholics or something."
"The only reason for me NOT to support you getting fired would be if I was getting paid per bug found!"
"Go fdisk yourself!"
"You know, I doubt the one braincell you have can ping localhost and get a response." (That one's inspired by the BOFH).
"I say we move you to the blockchain. I'd volunteer to do the cutting." (A marketing dweeb suggested to move all our (confidential) customer data to the "blockchain").
"Look, I don't say you suck as a developer, but if you were this competent as a gardener, I'd be the first one to give you a hedgetrimmer and some space and just let evolution do its thing."
"Yeah, go fetch me a unicorn while you're chasing pink elephants."
"Can you please get as high as you were when this time estimate come up? I'd love to see you overdose."
"Fuck you all, I'm a creationist from now on. This guy's so dumb, there's literally no explanation how he could evolve. Sorry Darwin."
"You know, just ignore the bloodstain that I'll put on the wall by banging my head against it once you're gone."2 -
So I booted up this "very exciting, bleeding edge project" that my boss so delicately forced me to volunteer for. This is what I see:
FATAL ERROR
The internal calendar ended on Dec. 21, 2012.
... The Mayans. The Mayans built the system.1 -
I got told once that "You don't need pay if you love your job" - what kind of bullshit logic is that? ( I work as a volunteer programmer on a community project, but the game is for-profit and making a fair amount ). People these days...7
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During my first year of working, I was offered to work part-time at another company. I actually took it to my supervisor and asked for his advice.
He began with a sigh, he knows that I like programming so much and wants the job because I wanna do more programmings. He gathered his thoughts and said calmly, "Look, I cannot stop you if you want to, but think about this, you already are doing programming for five days a week here. Take those extra times you have to develop other parts of yourself. Go learn public speaking or something" or something along that line.
I gave it a deep thought, took the advice, and rejected the offer. I eventually went on to commit myself on volunteering for the next two and a half years, and secured a promotion about a year from that conversation because my supervisor sees improvements in my communications with others and my soft skills in general (unlike programming, you can't volunteer in an organisation without speaking to people).
Sometimes we programmers only wanna code that we forget that what we're building are for humans and involves other humans. You wanna be the best at work? Try to grow on your horizontal axis, too.1 -
TL;DR:
Bunq gave a fitting sentence to a 18 year old for DDoS'ing them.
source(dutch): https://tweakers.net/nieuws/129639/...
dutch:
Fintechbank' Bunq heeft bekendgemaakt dat een 18-jarige man die achter een grootschalige ddos-aanval op de bank zat, zich vrijwillig bij een kantoor van Bunq heeft gemeld. De bank en de man zijn overeengekomen dat hij voor straf een week vrijwilligerswerk bij Amnesty International moet doen.
Fintechbank' Bunq has announced that an 18 year old man has voluntarily reported to be the one behind a big DDoS against the bank. The bank and the man agreed to the sentence of a week of volunteer work for Amnesty intornational.
My addition:
That's how it can be done too!
It's a lot closer to what I see as just punishment for a DDoS compared to going to jail for years.
Bunq it took balls to show such leinancy and I do applaud you for it.5 -
For the passed couple of years I've struggled with depression. This passed year has been so much better. I found a career path I enjoy, I learned a lot about myself, and I got a full time job.
I live with my grandparents and God bless their souls but I really want to move out. This realization really came last week when they left for a vacation and left me home alone. I've already lived away from home, volunteer work, internships. But now that I'm back home I'm bored, I have no responsibilities. I should also mention that I can't be myself around them, partly because I no longer believe in their God and partly because there never really was any transition between child and adult.
I talked it over with some older friends and they agreed that I should move out and offered some regally good advice.
I'm gonna wait until they get back and attempt to talk about it with them. I mean it's more of me telling them I'm moving out they can't really stop me at this point.
Anyway just wanted to get this off my chest. Hope you have a wonderful day.1 -
[context: sitting in a chair, posting a comment here in devRant]
Other Person (jokingly): "That doesn't look like volunteer work, that looks like texting!"
Me (awkwardly): "Haha, yeah..."
Me (internally): If only I had people to text...
3 -
Scared the shit out of me when I heard one of my volunteer side projects website was down. Because I just finished fixing my own hacked website today.
Turn out the server and website is fine but the domain was expired yesterday 😣
Don't fucking scare at me like that.
Tough week indeed.2 -
Just got accepted as a volunteer (teacher assistant) in a non-profit organization, funded by Microsoft.
They teach high school students CS twice a week.
I know it might not be much, because I will not be payed, but I will be trained and teach alongside Google and Microsoft engineers.
The organization is called TEALS.
I hope it is a good experience and build a good network.
I do not have any friends, nor any engineer friend since I moved in USA, so I think this is a good opportunity.
P.S. Please for the love of god do not bash here Microsoft. Everyone, even the people who rant about hating Microsoft, will accept a job there if they got the chance. So please stop the hypocrisy if you intend to do some "sarcastic" comment about this organization funded by Microsoft.9 -
On the game front, I see so much conflicting advice. "Start getting feedback" as soon as possible. "Donnt soft launch on steam! The algol will wreck you.", "soft launch on itch to get feedback", "dont soft launch on itch!"
"Start marketing today", "focus on influencers", "get to know communities *before* you advertise", "dont get to know communities beforehand if you're just planning on self prompting", "dont self promote".
"CPM is important.", "CPA is important". Etc.
Sounds a lot like "have a bunch of money upfront." The solution is just to succeed from the start! It's so obvious. Just invent the next gta. The next facebook. Get a small loan of 50,000 dollars, or a million. Donate for a year to other kickstarter projects so people will know you and reciprocate! But also dont ebeg!
How about no. How about fuck all this advice by silver spoon assholes that didnt have to work on shoestring budgets. The advice is the equivalent of having a 300 page tonedeaf book, every page blank except page 150, where the words "fuck you. I got mine." Are printed in times new Roman, 14pt font, neatly in the center of the page.
The truth is most of the "indies" already made it in the software industry proper, before switching over. $5k kickstarter videos, with $15k marketing budgets, no doubt funded in part through their own money funneled through services that provide shell donations, because KS is being used as a glorified advertising service. People buying off steam curators for promotions, youtubers making sponsored videos without disclosing they're sponsored. Fake viralility. Fake campaigns. Predetermined success for those who could *already* afford to develop and go commercial without a publisher. And they came into the market and cannibalized the opportunity, raising the bar for everyone that wasnt them. I guess that's actually a good thing, because we wouldnt have half the amazing games we do, and the pressure to produce quality. But then I see fantastic games utterly ignored or flailing in an attempt to compete for eyeballs in an industry frequently dominated by gatekeeping marketeers and influencers, where human grace determines success or complete oblivion. And I'm just disgusted with it.
Also buy my game. Preorder NOW! And you'll get a REAL canvas bag, I'll go to like the goodwill and buy one and screen print the game logo on it or some shit. Buy the special collectors edition and get pictures of my feet. Buy the game of the year edition and get a real gasmask. Preorder now and I'll fucking suck your di k right now. No lie. Preorder the diamond edition RIGHT NOW in the next six minutes and I will send you one hundred thousand dollars in gold plated bottle caps. Limited supply. one million per customer. Offer expires soon. This is not a scam. I repeat. This is NOT a scam.
In other news I'm soft launching Atom Ranger in six months (assuming the nuclear apocalypse hasn't *actually* started by then). Its state of decay and fallout meets rimworld. Build and manage a sprawling base, resolving conflicts, exploring post apocalyptic Colorado and surrounding territories of no-mans-land. Navigate hazardous weather, radioactive terrain, collapsed bridges, dangerous rivers, and deal with cultists, bandits, slavers, and hungry cannibals. Broker peace between not just the factions outside your settlements, but within your base too. Manage conflicts, settle disputes, avert disasters, barter, scavenge, and survive in a fully dynamic world, where buildings slowly crumble, grass and trees sprout up in the road and vacant lots, fires burn out of control, and factions loot, ruin, and takeover settlements. Watch the world and the survivors in it change and survive. Help them to survive, or become a warlord and rule over the wastes.
Lets be honest. It's basically kenshi but less complicated.
If you want to volunteer to test (instead of paying to be a glorified tester, aka "alpha") let me know in the comments.
I'm currently setting up a discord and mailing list.28 -
Why did I volunteer to this shit...
I am supposed to maintain 4 old websites (like they were written 10+ years ago..). It's written in PHP, before mysqli, so all the calls to the DB is with mysql functions.. Now the server is to be updated and run PHP7.... guess what? those functions don't exist any more.... Now I have to patch several thousand files to use the mysqli functions... And no, there is no reason to rewrite it more than that, as I'm also developing the new versions om the sites, but those are so far from done and the new server needs the update as soon as possible, so bodging the shit out of this one...
Oh god the amount of repetitive labor 😫☹😭
And I'm not getting paid, because I'm doing it for my scout group... Tho they pay some of the Pizza 😜10 -
When there is a hard high priority bug come up and someone on the team assigns it to themselves and writes on JIRA: "I volunteer as tribute".
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So part of my job is to watch movies.
Unreleased movies. Premier special movies. Restricted access movies. Special screening movies.
Fun part about being in a media tech company is you get amazing perks.
One of the product verticals we have, competes with Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.
So, we have to determine which movies to license and resell on our platform.
For which we have volunteer program where they assign us movies to watch. A couple of movies everyday. Folks have to submit their feedback on certain parameters and then the team evaluates and makes the decision.
As of last few weeks, Cannes 2022 was on and we had a lot of movies lined up. Got to watch some real good ones while some were mediocre.
Surely fun, don't get paid for it. Good perks. Loving it so far.10 -
So yesterday ended with me becoming a first responder in front of my house. Talk about a crazy day.
Guy sped up down my very short dead-end road and flipped a school van down the embankment. Thankfully there were no kids in the van and the driver was okay.
I've never had to run into the scene of an accident before, and what the brain does in a time of crisis like that is absolutely amazing.
Feeling everything but the immediate need drain away. It was like time was slowed. I took in all the information of the scene and somehow worked fast while also double-checking every action I did.
I remember hesitating for a moment, worried about what I'd see. School students on the back. Would I see injured or dead children? Body parts? I remember saying "Fuck it" and running down the embankment and that was about it.
So serious props to any of you who read this that also volunteer as EMT or fire/rescue. I've long considered doing that myself and I may very well step up now that I've had first-hand experience.
And now for the requisite joke: Usually I only have to help out when Windows crashes. :)1 -
Teacher
I love teaching but I hated school so the thought of going back...
Still teach people stuff when I get the chance. Taught my brother to drive, teaching a friend to drive, bridge knowledge gaps with colleagues, volunteer with the children's programs at my church -
A few Challenges at my job:
- a CEO with zero tech skills and zero memory.
- a sysadmin with literal brain damage and epilepsy (but he's great, we just have had to learn how to deal with it)
- another (volunteer) sysadmin who we call @God on Slack and who usually only shows up in extreme crises.
- the budget of a tiny organization, the web traffic of a huge site.
- incoherent business logic subject to the whims of volunteers and the loudest users
- a main revenue stream that contradicts our main mission.
it's fun! woot.1 -
When I was a wee little lad of 13, still with that hopeful gleam in my eye, I signed up to work as the webmaster for a local org.
At the time, I had played around with HTML and CSS and a little JavaScript, and I thought all I'd be doing was updating some pages with announcements or whatever
I got paid in SSL, which is a thing kids in Maryland have to do to graduate, and the whole idea is that you need to do 75 hours of volunteer work in your community
The people there promised me 8 hours a month for what I thought would be easy work, and so I eagerly signed up.
What I thought would be updating a few html files and emailing them to the org was actually having to manage a full on server running PHP4 LAMP stack
Needless to say, I was overwhelmed. I tried to make the updates they wanted, but I had no idea how to write PHP, let alone manage a database and server.
I think I got out of it by just never responding to their emails once I realized how fucked I was, but that was definitely the worst learning experience of my dev career1 -
Today’s my work anniversary, which also means it’s the anniversary of the day my friend Kirk got a Twitter response from Missy Elliott after he tweeted about writing a function called missyElliott that takes a data structure, flips it, and reverses it (something that may have been a crazy thing that happened once but that we as his friends tell everyone about and celebrate every year, much to his horror).
https://kirkday.club
The org we volunteer for (and that he’s a maintainer of) even went so far as to create Kirk merch (https://store.virtualcoffee.io/sear...)
8 -
It's a toss up between a basic software portal for my old school as a volunteer thing or an old game designed around user content creation.
The portal is more of a personal success but the game was a success in the respect it ended up rolling past a Bethesda employee and he gave me a one on one Skype chat about there design methods. -
Ah, another day, another regression found in a major library
guess i work for all these companies as a volunteer
🤦♂️
good thing i'm no where near their 6 figure salaries either.
maybe i should get that 6 figure salary and then eat more salads and steaks at the free food court, type more shitty code on couches, and play more foosball during my approximate 4 hour work day to acheive their software levels
if only i was so good2 -
Does anyone here have anything interesting to do? I am free now so looking for something creative to work on.
I don't care about getting any money out of it. AS long as it's interesting I'm in!15 -
Translating win32 calls to whatever the hell there is in Unix and Unix-like OSes (well, most of them) in order to port a certain game net code library and dear god why did I volunteer myself for this task
At least pevents is there to help, but too bad cmake doesn’t want to compile it with the flag I need (“-DWFMO”) in order to make the “WaitForMultipleEvents” method to work at all. Instead no matter what options I give it on the command line or how I tell VS Code to do it, it seems to give me the finger to my fucking face.
Doing it for games on the cooler OSes... doing it for the community... come on...2 -
I haven't been able to work on the computer without getting a headache very soon after for almost 2 weeks straight now.
I presume I have grown a sensitivity to bright light, stemming from the time I dimmed my phone all the way about 5 months ago and never set it back until just now.
In my classes I will get random headaches that hurt like heck and make me feel groggy, making me unable to focus at all. And while doing computer work, I'll get the same thing.
I've tried getting my eyes checked again, and got new glasses about a week ago - still no help.
Prior to this incident I was working hard on a volunteer project with a small team. Since then my progress and commits have dwindled greatly, and I feel stressed out because I can't do what i want to do without hurting and feeling like absolute shit!
I'm currently trying to get my eyes used to bright lights again by setting things like my phone screen to a brighter setting, changing some dead light bulbs in different rooms of the house, and getting more involved outside.
I hope this goes away soon - I don't want to have this stupid headache every time I go to code or work in class.12 -
I have an idea but no time to build it. So I'll throw it out there and see if anyone does it.
How many times have you had an idea that just couldn't get off the ground without a little assistance. Where do you go? How to "pay" them for their work? Etc.
The development community needs a place where you can volunteer to help with side projects and get paid in karma... which you can then later use to "pay" other developers to assist on a side project of your own.
We are already a community that loves to give back, and collecting fake internet points. Why not put those to good use?9 -
Some cheapskate insists on writing a guide to selfhost <software> on Heroku and wants to add it to the official documentation, promising to maintain it (since none of the other devs are using or planning to use Heroku). I volunteer to give them a chance on grounds of it being high quality and maintained by that person in the future which they both promise.
Our docs are written as markdown files on github.
So here we go:
Starts a pull request: uploads their """guide""" as a docx. The content is completely unformatted, basically just an enumerated list.
Tell them to format it as markdown, suggest using github gists.
They go ahead and copy pasta their unformatted list into a gist.txt "allright i made it into gist for ya"
Tell them that they did not format it as markdown.
"sorry updated it in markdown :P"
I look at the file, it is still raw text in a gist.txt. Maybe a bit more spaced out, not that I would care to notice any changes at this point.
Tell them it is still not markdown and link them to a perfect example of another guide that takes advantage of code fragments for commands etc and is properly rendered since it uses .md
"I updated it to the markdown this time XP Can you give me some suggestions on how it looks?"
"How it looks"... "how it LOOKS"... I click the link for the 5th time and IT IS STILL JUST A RAW FUCKING GIST.
Jfc that person has some serious reading/thinking disability. To imagine them to be proactively keeping their guide up to date in the future is absolutely impossible. At that point I pulled out my support for the request since it was already taking more effort to even get a readable version of guide than I estimated for the whole process of adding it.
Oh, and one of the steps originally suggested in the """guide""" was adding the credentials file into the vcs.2 -
1) Never be afraid to ask questions.
There are so many instances of situations where assumptions have been made that shouldn’t have been made, resulting in an oversight that could have been rectified earlier in a process and wasn’t.
Just because no one’s asking a question doesn’t mean you’re the only person who has it.
That being said, it’s really important to figure out how to ask questions. Provide enough context so that the audience for your question understands what you’re really asking. If you’re trying to troubleshoot a problem, list out the steps you’ve already tested and what those outcomes were.
2) When you’ve learned something, try to write about it. Try to break it down as though you were explaining it to a child. It’s through breaking down a concept into its most simple terms that you really know that you understand it.
3) Don’t feel like you have to code *all of the time*. Just because this is what you’re doing for a living doesn’t mean that you have to make it your life. Burnout is real, and it happens a lot faster if it’s all you do.
4) Find hobbies outside of tech!
5) Network. There are a number of great communities. I volunteer for and am a member of Virtual Coffee, and can vouch for that community being particularly friendly and approachable.
6) Don’t let a company pay you less than industry standard and convince you that they’re doing you the favor of employing you.
7) Negotiate salary. Always.
8) If you’re a career transitioner, don’t be afraid to talk about your previous work and how it gave you experience that you can use in programming. There’s a whole lot of jobs that require time management, multi-tasking, critical thinking, etc. Those skills are relevant no matter where you got them.
9) If it takes a while for you to get a gig, it’s not necessarily a reflection on you or your abilities.
10) Despite what some people would say, coding’s not for everyone. Don’t feel like you have to continue down a road just because you started walking down it. Life’s not a straight path. -
Just give me anything BUT coding to work on and I'm instantly in the zone for coding. End of Year Review, access reviews for Audit, any other kind of paperwork, which is most of what my job is these days, and I have some brilliant insight into a problem on my back burner, or a brilliantly simple way to implement a feature I've been stewing on for weeks.
It's my procrastinating nature to not want to do the thing I HAVE to do.
Maybe I should volunteer for more paperwork?1 -
Acting as a volunteer project manager temporarily at the moment, it angers me that people don't read documentations before they ask questions.1
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Update: for those of you who know cougar woman/ my self proclaimed "work mom" in my previous posts (bitch who keeps stealing my lunch), yesterday she really tipped me over the edge. So I'm fucking hauling ass on my sprint work because I had to take over another team member's tasks (because he "doesn't have time" for it being prod support but all I see him doing is shitposting at his desk) and someone from another team asked the cougar a question about something. she comes up to me all demanding like "HEY you, you got the worksapce open?"
I was like um... no I don't. I'm working on the other application.
and then she's like "Look at my laptop and show him". Okay bitch let me just drop everything I'm doing to help a random person. The fact that she commanded me instead of just asking me pissed me off. Not even a single sign of "please". I'm tired of her truly. She is a snake. Even to her friend on our team. Every time he's out she's like "hey where is _____? huh why isn't he here??? hmmm" in an instigating way to remind everyone that he might've taken off for no reason. When I was too sick to volunteer at an event she organized in the morning on Saturday, she asked me the following Monday, "oh did you drink too much? lmao. a spiteful, grudge holding bitch for sure2 -
Be a nice guy and volunteer for a weekend release that's supposed to be fast.
1. Release team person doesn't have permission to deploy our app
2. Dev that raised the change ticket didn't make sure it was fully approved and usable
-My whole morning go bye bye
-ah fuck it, clean up your own shit, I'm out...
Learn and don't do it again next time... Or not5 -
Nobody asks about your education because you have to self-educate to pass an interview.
Usually, you work for a foreign company. And usually, you pay small taxes because you're not counted as an employee.
You pay lots of money to volunteers helping your country's army. I think every volunteer knows IT-workers help the army a lot. Though others help too, more or less.1 -
Here's an idea:
What if we bundled swag store orders to a particular country so the cost of shipping everything gets spread across?
Although I don't live in a central area of the UK, I'd volunteer to receive multiple orders and then further post them to their final destinations. Posting locally is definitely cheaper, so if the math is done right, everybody wins.
:)14 -
So I had this idea on doing some volunteer teaching in programming in the US. I would not say I can teach anything on coding though I can code. Any resources that would be good for learning to teach coding skills to people who may not have that technical background?
Edit: this is for volunteer work. Think inner city and disadvantaged individuals.2 -
Lost my temper at one of our volunteer moderators the other day. We had to do a test using live data, our sysadmin warned him, but not far enough in advance and not really by the right channels. So that was on us. sorry not sorry. But so then he didn't believe us. He must be a geek too cuz he responded with some stupid math problem for me to solve, as if that would prove we work here and aren't hackers or scammers. I replied "how about if i just kick you out of your own group and delete your account, would that convince you?" And so I did. Asshole. Of course I had to apologize later and get a lecture from the boss, but it was kinda worth it.1
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This entire project. Be glad when it’s over. Remind me never to volunteer for this front-end bullshit again... ☹️2
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So I was at my second meeting about a project I just joined as a volunteer. There's two teachers, me (1st semester CS), a guy almost graduating and a guy in the second semester. In the first meeting the teachers explained what the project's about and what we need to do. Me, wanting to show that I'm good hoping I'd get offered a paid position in the future, got to the second meeting with some stuff already done in Rust. Teachers mistook me for the 2nd semester student (which, by the way, thinks everything server-side is done in node.js) and told him it was a very good job "he" had done with the rust program. The fucker didn't say shit and just took all credit for what I did.
Later that day I sent an email to everyone with the repo link to make sure they knew I was the one that wrote the program and a month or two down the road I made some pretty awesome work while the other two just sat on their asses, so I think they know it was me.
Nonetheless, I got pretty pissed about that and kinda regret not saying anything at the meeting. I do think I kinda made the right choice of keeping quiet, trying to show team loyalty (?) or something like that.
Should I have done it differently? Would you say something at the meeting if it was you?5 -
Fuck this fucking shit...
Be me, plan a trip to a festival with friends, vacation approved, get up at 3am to drive 9 hours from Germany to Italy, find a nice spot for our tent and yeah...
I was unloading stuff of my car and standing in range of the tailgate and get the shit smashed onto my head...
Yeah I'm a volunteer firefighter, so good at paramedics, so I applied a pressure bandage myself, because shit was bleeding all out of my head...
Then I got a ride with the ambulance to the hospital and now about a hour in the waiting room...
Please cross your fingers, that the X-ray that I'm waiting for shows no damages and that i can continue my festival...
What a happy first festival day...5 -
So I needed something to log how many volunteer hours im spending coding something for my school.... I logged 11 hours today. I have no life. Check it out though, it's called wakatime it ties into PHPStorm and everything. It really is a great "you need to go outside more" Indicator.1
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hi guys I've got a question for you
what if your manager asks for a programmer of a certain programming language (that you know but is not a master of it) for a certain project and there are only few people you know who would volunteer and they might hire other people if they don't find people inside, would you volunteer yourself given that you don't have any project with you right now or no?
thanks for those who will answer! :)
PS background abt me: univ. student, no experience in the industry yet4 -
When you spend so much time at an event you start to get anxiety near the end of it because you have no idea how many unread emails you have waiting for you.
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So it’s promotion season in my org and once again I got passed up. Manager says “you’re right there just a little bit longer” but he’s been saying that for the better part of a year. I’ve consistently done the job not in my job description but the job of the position above me. Some of my senior engineers and staff engineers have told me personally that they are shocked that I haven’t been promoted yet. And I know I should be patient but hearing other people (albeit in different teams) get recognized when you work just as hard if not harder than they do, and you go to conferences and you volunteer to be on call and you lead meetings and when you’re one of the technical anchors of the team… I don’t know. I shouldn’t take it personally I get it but it’s a huge blow to my confidence and my mental health. I work hard and when I see news like this I work harder and get burned out and when I still see news like this it makes me work even harder and get even more burnt out until I reach a mental breaking point. Makes me feel like I’ll never be good enough.
Idk.2 -
As my internship’s over, I cannot work before receiving my PGWP.
I am wanting to volunteer but its funny I’m not able to find active organisations who need volunteers. My skills are but not limited to web development.
Leads would be appreciated! -
How many keywords are appropriate to put in a "skills" section on a resume?
Technically I've played with a lot of tech and stacks, and done tiny one offs, tutorials and independent projects but nothing that wasnt more than a day on any one of them.
Basically im fast at picking up a language and api and just rolling with it and getting something done, even without tutorials or tons of googling. Though I find myself constantly relying on manuals and reading apis.
Is this normal or should entry level be familiar with the api of something from the get go?
I see a lot of people say to game the system just to get your foot in the front door past the automated keyword filters and on to an interviews where the real requirements are listed.
But I'd rather not list under the skill section something I only used for all of ten hours in one or two sittings.
Also is it acceptable to list a "learning", "would like to learn/know more of", or "planned skill additions" section?
Also what do I add for extras? "Achievements"? "Volunteer work"? "Hobby projects?", "past times?"
Is any of this seen as necessary or well rounded?
If it is really just about the numbers I'll just go scrape junior and entry level positions and take their keywords and automatically fill out template resumes to automate applying.
Could even use SQLite to store the results and track progress lol.
I've never worked as a professional programmer, but it's the only thing I ever enjoyed doing for 12 hours a day.16 -
Volunteer to rep company at STEM day fair. Have to build robot. Volunteer activity now reflects on me professionally. Robot doesn't work.4
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Why is it that people volunteer on behalf of developers!?? For anything remotely technical!
No we're not a "tool" for you to use! Or a "magic wand" to make your problems disappear! FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU! -
> Be me
> Fresh out of school
> Do some volunteer work for 1 year before starting to work
> Start work at local hospital
> One day get assigned new task
> "We have this directory where there is a file for every employee who has a key - File contains legal stuff"
> Current naming scheme "MaxMustermann"
> Desired naming scheme "Max Mustermann"
> Task: rename every file.
> 1974 Files
> OHNONONONO.JPG
> Hol up buddy
> A repetetive automatable task?
> I know this
> Im a hackerman
> Let's write a script....
> *SMASHES WINDOWS BUTTON*
> "Python"
> No results
> I could have guessed that
> *SMASHES WINDOWS BUTTON*
> "Java"
> No Java compiler
> OH no
> *SMASHES WINDOWS BUTTON*
> "Powershell"
> "tHe eXEcUTIon oF poWeRsheLL sCriPts Is dIsAbLeD"
> REEEEEEEE
> *SMASHES WINDOWS BUTTON*
> "cmd"
> "YOu dO noT haAV thE rEqUiReD peRmIsSionS To oPeN tHis proGrAm"
> DAFUQ
> Wait this is windows.
> Windows ships with .NET
> *SMASHES WINDOWS BUTTON*
> "csc"
> No results
> OHHELLONO.gif
> mfw I have to rename 1794 files by hand.
( Please send help )7 -
Dahhhhhh. Retrofitting CSP to an established, legacy site with inline scripts and random CSS/js loaded from all over the place is damn stressful.
Why did I volunteer to sort this crap out... What a pleb.4 -
Today, I found out that the webmaster for the organization I volunteer at is using a security-by-obscurity PHP implemented design for the private data of our members. I've talked with him about it, but for a variety of reasons to do with organization and workload, it won't be changing.
Fml.3 -
Friend suggests I find volunteer work as a Java developer at summer. I'm a freshman, what do you think?3
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!rant
Right now i'm working as a volunteer developer for a discord server. I've recently been learning JDA (a Discord API java wrapper) and I wanted to get some experience in a more real world environment by working on a Discord Bot. What a mistake
The owner of the server has written some pretty messy, but solid code, and I was asked to build as sort of “punishment system” (warns, kicks, mutes, bans, all of which timed). It started off fine, me doing some work, getting some critic, all good. Soon, it started to get worse. At every point of the way, while i’m working I have him trying to make me add new features, and change massive existing ones even after i’ve done them and moved on with his permission! I keep telling him, “it’s a work in progress, please wait”, but it never stops.
I’m planning to resign, but I have to continue to dodge him and his “suggestions” as I simply want to finish my work, and get out. The reason I need to avoid his as, I feel that if I was to alert him I was to leave in advance, things would only get worse in the time while I stayed.
:/5 -
Today was my first day at work, as an intern. I'm doing it as a volunteer though. My school is not accept internship before passing the 3rd year... I have a mixed feelings about this. Like am I doing good working as a volunteer or will it be ok, because there are some other interns too, and as you can guess, they've already assigned some works before I accepted. Should I go for it, or leaving and waiting next year and gain more knowledge before the job ?1
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TL;DR how much do I charge?
I'm freelancing for the first time; regularly, I get paid a salary.
I'm freelancing as a donation: the hours I put into this work directly translate to deductions in my tax. I don't get paid any money directly.
I'm doing some web-based enterprise software for an organization. Handling the whole process from writing responsive front-end code to setting up the server and domain for them and even managing myself. So full stack plus dev ops.
My normal salary is $31 an hour and at work I do less. I largely do maintenance for existing applications plus some very minor new systems design. I don't do any server management (different team) and I damn well didn't buy the domain names for my company. So I think it's safe to say I'm taking on a drastically larger role in this freelance gig.
My moral dilemma is the organization will basically say yes to any price - because they don't pay it, the government will (up until the point I pay 0 taxes, I suppose)
I've done some minor research on what other freelancers charge for somewhat similar things and I get pretty wildly varying results. I've seen as low as $20/hr but I really doubt the quality of such a service at that price.
I'm thinking around $50 USD an hour would be a fair price. For even further reference besides my actual salary, I will say that I am in a urban / suburban part of Florida, where developers are very hard to find locally.
Is $50 too high? Too low? This is a very complicated system with (frankly excessive) security practices and features. Before this they had a handful of excel spreadsheets in a OneDrive folder.7 -
TL;DR I just recently started my apprenticeship, it's horrible so far, I want to quit, but don't know what to do next...
Okay, first of all, hey there! My name is Cave and I haven't been on here for a while, so I hope the majority of you is doing rather okay. I'm programming for 6 years now, have some work experience already, since I used to volunteer for a company for half a year, in which I discovered my love for integrations and stuff. These background information will probably be necessary to understand my agony in full extend.
So, okay, this is about my apprenticeship. Generally speaking, I was expecting to work, and to learn something, gaining experience. So far, it only involved me, reading through horrible code, fixing and replacing stuff for them, I didn't learn a thing yet, and we are already a month in.
When I said the code is horrible, well, it is the worst I have ever seen since I started programming. Little documentation - if any -, everywhere you look there is deprecated code, which may or may not been commented out, often loops or simply methods seem to be foreign for them, as the code is cluttered with copy paste code everywhere and on top of that all, the code is slow as heck, like wtf.
I spent my past month with reading their code, trying to understand what most of this nonsense is for, and then just deleting and rewriting it entirely. My code suddenly is only 5% or their size and about 1000 times faster. Did I mention I am new to this programming language yet? That I have absolutely no experience in that programming language? Because well I am new and don't have any experience, yet, I have little to no struggle doing it better.
Okay, so, imagine, you started programming like 20 years ago, you were able to found your own business, you are getting paid a decent amount of money, sounds alright, right? Here comes the twist: you have been neglecting every advancement made in developing software for the past 20 years, yup, that's what it feels like to work here.
At this point I don't even know, like is this normal? Did git, VSCode and co. spoil me? Am I supposed to use ancient software with ancient programming languages to make my life hell? Is programming supposed to be like this? I have no clue, you tell me, I always thought I was doing stuff right.
Well, this company is not using git, infact, they have every of their project in a single folder and deleting it by accident is not that hard, I almost did once, that was scary. I started out working locally, just copying files, so shit like that won't happen, they told me to work directly in the source. They said it's fine, that's why you can see 20 copies of the folder, in the same folder... Yes, right, whatever.
I work using a remote desktop, the server I work on is Windows server 2008, you want to make icons using gimp? Too bad, Gimp doesn't support windows server 2008, I don't think anything does anymore, at least I haven't found anything, lol.
They asked me to integrate Google Maps into their projects, I thought it is gonna be fun, well, turns out their software uses internet explorer 9.. and Google maps api does not support internet explorer 9... I ended up somehow installing CEF3 on that shit and wrote an API for it in JS. Writing the API was actually kind of fun, but integrating it in their software sucked and they told me I will never integrate stuff ever again, since they usually don't do that. I mean, they don't have a Backend as far as I can tell, it looks like stuff directly connects with their database, so I believe them, but you know... I love integrating stuff..
So at this point you might be thinking, then why don't you just quit? Well I would, definitely. I'm lucky that till December I can quit without prior notice, just need a resignation as far as I can tell, but when I quit, what do I do next? Like, I volunteered for a company for half a year and I'd argue I did a good job, but with this apprenticeship it only adds up to about 7 months of actual work experience. Would anybody hire somebody with this much actual work experience? I also consider doing freelancing, making a living out of just integrating stuff, but would people pay for that? And then again, would they hire somebody with this much experience? I don't want to quit without a plan on what to do next, but I have no clue.
Am I just spoiled, is programming really just like that, using ancient tools and stuff? Let me know. Advice is welcomed as well, because I'm at a loss. Thanks for reading.10 -
Anyone know if we still can apply to We Are Developers 2018 as a volunteer? Can't find option to apply on their site :/
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Woke up yesterday morning from a dream where I was explaining what needed to be done to upgrade a Drupal 6 site. It hasn't been supported officially for years and I was explaining how there isn't a decent port of the main module we use Audio. And even the guy I was explaining this too seemed somewhat exasperated. So yeah, this is reality.
I could probably write a real upgrade path for the Drupal module and take all of our content into a new version of Drupal. But it would involve a fair amount of learning and outdated syntax and then learning Drupal 8. This would be all volunteer and take away from my time working on my other open source radio automation project.
All the while I've been learning Ruby on Rails for a class and I could just upgrade the app right out of Drupal, but this would require me to support the site into perpetuity. Which I already more or less do.
Drupal at this point is like an ex- girlfriend who I've grown away from, we did cool things but always got into fights about stupid things. Now I have to revisit my past mistakes and decide what to clean up and what to take into the future. I'm a better programmer now but I'm still not sure if it is worth my time to rekindle my romance with Drupal or it would just distract me from my current pursuits. Anyone who has been through the transition of a Drupal site from one major version to the next should feel my pain. At least it's not Word Press. -
Old co-worker from a help desk job messaged me asking if i could build him a program. Was gonna turn him down but decided to ask what it was before I did.
Actually like the idea of the project, seems like something I'd have done if I ever thought of it. It's not outside my skill level and I won't have to learn too much to pull it off how he wants. And it's something I can easily adapt for my own use cases later.
Also it's not for sole-ly him, it's for a TCG shop he volunteers at so technically I can list this as volunteer work (i think) if I ever need volunteer experience for anything
Alright guess I'm gonna work on the app this weekend and see what I can do.3
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