I actually just wanted to say - what a great time it is to be a developer.

C# has stolen so many good features now that it's pretty awesome.
JavaScript and typescript are really fun to work with.
I really love angular.
Docker is great!

I can setup pipelines and deploy an angular app for free and really easily with github-pages.

I can use linux inside windows.

I can use cloud providers to do all sorts for really cheap.

I can plug my cable-free oculus quest VR headset into my laptop and build a game pretty easily with unity (thanks to all the great oculus helper prefabs).

I can use tesseract and data science technology inside my browser!!

And I can go to medium and udemy and learn all sorts of things.

Honestly...

Just saying.
I'm actually really loving being a developer right now.

And if I do have off day, I can rant on here!

Valve:
*makes good games*
*gets fame and money*
*sells other peoples games*
*announcing future games*
*stops making games*
*sells virtual items for a ridiculous high price*
*get sued for gambling in their games*
---
*getting criticized for not making games*
*people hope*
*devs and writers for their popular games leave*
*people loose hope*
---
*valve experimenting with VR*
*not making games for over 10 years*
*still calling themselves a game developer*
---
*valve buys successful indie game developer*
*valve claims they're making games again*

Boss: agrees to unreasonable deadlines.
Team: misses deadlines because they're unreasonable.
Boss: "you just don't understand how important the deadline is"

He legit thinks the only reason we fall behind, is because we dont care. Not because we're doing stuff that hasn't been done before, and need to tech ourselves everything as we go.

Also, he's not a programmer, he's a salesman... and he runs the company like one too.

Anyone looking to hire a VR/AR developer?

I'm a VR developer, I'm working on a zombie survival, I want to finish that, then start an vrmmorpg 😍😍😍

I received 2 job offers:

1: c++ / c# / unity developer for a VR studio, tons of vr visors and shit to use

2: python / Java/somethingelse developer for machine learning, iot, big data

Offer n1 is from a small business 35 employees - casual outfit
Offer n2 is from medium/big business with 100-200 employees - suit and tie for all.

Same economic offer, 2 different and divergent paths on different but trending topics.

What do you choose and why

I started to get interested in programming at the age of 13. I was started spending a lot time in our school library and read mostly technical books (beginner/hobbyist stuff) about electronics.
Some book was about Quick Basic (hence my username).
On Windoze 95 in a DOS mode IDE I started trying stuff out and soon I had my first tiny console game.
A bit later I started with HTML and CSS stuff, made a website about ongoing jokes in our class and some rants, later I got into VB6 (I hate VB nowadays!) and wrote for a personal school project a learning software (relatively simple one) to learn vocabulary for foreign languages.

At about 15 I started with C++ and later C# .NET, which I liked the most, and started on some new Windows.Forms stuff, created some small websites.

Now I'm working parttime as a professional developer (mostly web, but VR & .NET too) and studying EE at a university.

My parents had no experience with computers at all, so I learned everything myself an with the help of the allmighty internet (the black box with the red dot on top).

That's my story. ;)

Insert your rant about this below this line:
-----------------------------------------

Any VR developers here?

The company I used to work for, despite me not working there contacts me to get a verification code because the crappy developer they hired can't change a couple settings on the apple website and add themselves as a developer.

At the start of this all, a couple months back I gave them the code out of courtesy, but at this point, as i'm heavily invested in the development stage of my actual job as a vr developer, I won't take time out of my day to even answer the phone for them.

But what really pisses me off is the person who contacts me, my assumbly best friend, who during the last 12 months has only called me for these codes, so work related shit or just personal shit and never to hang out or play games or generally what we used to do as friends before he got a job at that stupid company doesn't have the balls to tell his boss that i'm busy with my job, that maybe if payment was offered as an incentive that I would be happy to be contacted.

When I left that company I didn't setup anything to make it so they would have to contact me, all I did was add myself as a developer of their app. I also heavily documented everything I did, all the issues I faced and the workarounds I found, and everything including all login information needed to get things working, I went above just "developing" the app I added in all the credits to all work used in the app as partly to make sure we don't get sued for stealing someones work without the right credit.

I hate the fact that I worked for minimum wage and did all of this shit, but I never complained at all about things like the 1 1/2 hour travel time (one way I might add) to my boss, the amount of money I spent on public transportation, the little money left over that I didn't even spend and instead give to my parents.

They know nothing about how hard that year was for me, and if they want to get this code, my so called friend can come chat in person, in his off time and when I'm done working on my own shit and we can discuss terms because this shit is just not fair at all.

So I know i did a best and worst case already for 2017

But apparently it's not finished yet!

This will probably a short one:

Best thing to happen to me this year: I applied for a VR game and despite at this very moment i'm in thr trial period (to see if I can do work) i've succesfully landed a job.

I've spent months rewriting and rewriting my CV applying for standard software dev jobs, either being turned down for not enough experience for Junior roles, where they want someone out of university, where I have 1 year of both iOS and android experience, that is still not good enough for their shitty little app.

After all of that effort I turned to just borrowing my head and developing my game, to the point i have bits of the game practically done (bare bones crafting and building works 100% just has bugs in some specific cases). A friend of mine got a game dev job and he helped me out by showing me what his CV and cover letter looked like, i mimiced the style (in a sense) and added my own specific additions for VR. At the exact same time i got an invite from unity connect (which i had totally forgotten about) which i then scowered through jobs until I found something awesone "a job for a unity VR developer".

After contacting the guy about the job, we ended up having a voice chat over discord and he seems pleased with the fact I tome on my hands! Sadly the job is not some hourly paid job, however from what i've seen from youtube gameplay footage it looks very well done, and that leads me to getting revenue share.

Anyways i'm just so happy that with a couple days to spare in the year LOL i got a job! Sure i won't get paid yet but I got a flipping job, it is what i wanted for christmas!!

It is a gamble being revenue share and all but i'm willing to risk it!

(Part 1/2?)

Ohhh my god am I furious and this one's a gem.

Also I'm gonna namespoil all of the entities in my post. If this is against rant rules I'll reframe it.

So the story starts over an year ago. Me, being in a bad place, where I couldn't do a job due to external issues, wanted to try out an internship. Thought I could pull off a 5 hour shift and then attend to my problems.

THE INTERNSHALA ARC:

I apply to a bunch of applications on Angel, Internshala and Indeed.

I was contacted by a few handful of these places. One of them was called "ARCHITECTA SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS". These guys had arranged an online aptitude test for me which I promptly took.

I looked up this company and they seemed like a pretty okay big firm from the outset but didn't have many reviews on Glassdoor and likes of such. (first red flag). Post aptitude test, I was quite sure I fucked up and wouldn't get further contact. Surprisingly, a person from the company sends me his Whatsapp number over chat and asks me to save it. The message is worded like a bulk email (Starting with Hello everyone!!) which I thought was quite odd since the interaction from these platforms has always been a person-to-person contact for me. Since Internshala showed that only around 40 people applied for the position I was quite intrigued but attributed this to my lack of exp in internship operations.

THE WHATSAPP ARC:

I was contacted by the number on WhatsApp saying that they'd be interested in moving forward and I gave them my work experience details.

The person sends me over a development assignment to complete within a few days. The assignment consists of massive scope of details. I'm talking production level concept and implementation. Asks to me implement a custom emotion detection CV model (worded as "emotion camera" lmao), generate a 3d model (specified nowhere and expects to implement a mono-ocular system for the curious) and deploy it over AWS with a website to go along with it and also host that. The website should contain a VR ("360 rotatable") view that can explore the depth-map ("not worded as depth-map") of the face. My first assumption was that they had picked this work up for outsourcing and didn't bother to chip off parts so as to create an assignment out of it (I know very optimistic).

So I shoot it at him on WhatsApp asking which parts of the assignment should I do?

Him: So, which parts CAN you do?

I thought of it as an HR thing.

Me: I could do most of it but given the time-frame of the assignment and my applied position as a web developer it is perhaps out of scope for my application.

Him: Don't worry about the assignment. You can submit when you complete the whole assignment.

I was visibly angry over the stupidity of this man.

Me: This task is a Full-Stack + CV + VR task. It will take over two months to get working. Am I supposed to work on it for that long for an assignment?

Him: Okay just do the basic functionalities like add to cart. But also try to do the camera thing before next week.

At this point I'm sure that they are having trouble handling an eager client and they're offloading work to interns. So I do only the backend and minimal frontend and submit the assignment (a 2 day job done over a weekend).

Nothing. Empty. No messages since then. I tried sending in a Whatsapp message on the application and how to proceed. Then, if I could get to know if I have been rejected. Nothing.

And all this time I can clearly see the account is active as it pushes pretentious motivational quotes over it's Whatsapp status.

I'm a software developer, but I'm finding myself more interested bio and electro-mechanical engineering. And to top it off, I'd most like to be a bio-mechanical engineer — which is very different from the other two previous mentions. ...But, I'm well paid now, my last retail start-up failed, and money talks. For now my fogponic ecosystem (fish + biofilter + fog + plants) in my backyard will have to suffice. Now I'm actually interested in waste recycling...

Yeah... I get bored while waiting for parts to come from China. Can never have too many hobbies.

Anyways AMA, if you like. It can be about robots, fish, plants, IoT, apps, web, solar power, 3D printing, VR... You name it!

Do you think it's possible to get enough of a following on YouTube and twitch to fund your living expenses and use the rest of your free time to work on your own studio projects?

For example I'm a VR and AR game developer. I do the whole shebang for game development and design on my own. I could stream play throughs of the current game I'm working on as a weekly thing and create tutorial videos for other developers and students for more content on my channel, but to also stimulate growth in the VR and AR industry. I'd in a way be creating my own market. I could also stream the development of the art assets and whatnot.

Could possibly make some money from the ads at first. Maybe even within the game?

Idk I'm trying to avoid having to get a job anywhere else if I can float my own success as an indie start up. So thoughts on this rant please?

I came from being a game developer, to doing VR/AR stuff, to mobile app/game development, to website development, to arduino, IoT and robotics.

... And now most of my time is spent on updating a portal site using a shitty cms with each page needing to be crafted manually using html and deadlines are always a few hours away, with revisions on the launch day itself.

I really wanna go back to the interesting stuff. :/

Recently I started to study app development (I am frontend/backend developer) and I noticed unlike when I was younger, I have a focus limit of about 6 hours. After 6 hours I become super distracted... I am slowly getting back to normal but recently I got so distracted I decided to play a breve game and which one better than half life alyx?

Well, if you have a vr headset play it: I swear I spent 2 hours just fucking around and looking at the environment... in one scene you enter a house and I went full detective trying to understand why the house was messed up: picked up stuff, looked in the corners and so on... it really gives you an impression of what vr could be

!Rant

So . . . for the first time ever I feel like I'm a part of something I genuinely care about. I'm a Unity3D VR developer, albeit for a small company, which has me in and out of VR constantly most days as I test things. Pretty cool right?

Well here's the thing. For me . . . what I do is trivial in meaning. I love what I do, don't get me wrong, but what's so good about what I do, is that I am a valued team member. My opinion is heard, I am given freedom to innovate, and most importantly I am allowed to create!

So what did I do today? I started building a UI framework for Unity3D, the beginning of which dynamically binds zenject signals to UI elements, like a button's onClick for example. If anyone here has worked with Unity3D you probably can attest to the festering heap of dogs vomit that is Unity UI....

Well here's a story for you. I can't work on my game till the developer of a package I use updates his package. I can't research how to add the newer features I want to add till I know what the base code is gunna look like. I can't work on my second game idea because unreal engine has a major bug since version 4.15 that is crippling the performance of what I want to do. I can't work any assets for that game till I know what performance is gunna be like after the fix is implemented. It's now version 4.17 almost 4.18 and it might get pushed till version 4.19. I need to work on something like right now because my game studio is otherwise just sitting. It is a VR / AR only studio and there is no real direction to move in at the moment till somebody other than me gets their collective shit together.

I need something fairly "quick" but still fun to play to work on so I can sell sell sell. No idea wtf it's gunna be though. The steam market place is so full of garbage that I really don't want to contribute to that with more garbage. I also don't know anyone I can collaborate with to make something interesting.

WHAT DO I DO?

i feel its a great time to be a developer we have so many toys to play with

machine learning, scientific python, nodejs, frontend js frameworks, nosql, NLP, elasticsearch, mongodb, open source .net, big data with java, arduino..., VR, 3d printing

what toys are you playing with?

Hey, any advice on VR Development for a beginner in the field as I'm thinking could link something In for a final year project 😊

Holy crap, Meta Developer Connect keynote. Amazing innovation. This is what Apple **used to be**

Granted, the hardware is not as elegant as Apple but the cost is 1/10 and the capabilities are close, same, or exceed (Llama) what Apple is offering.

Now here is the gut punch, they figured out that the mobile app build system needs to build AR/VR/MR apps. That was Apple's edge.

As a developer, I am not enamored with Swift and it is pretty clear that if I have to change and use a niche language like Swift or change and do dev on Android, to target new Meta hardware and AI... well... lets just say I think Swift is crap from a language standpoint and I suspect it is the reason Apple's hardware uses so much more memory, battery and storage than it should. At the same time Meta's Orion runs on a god damn battery in the early piece of glasses. My AVP's have a huge brick.

#define kApple kGigaBloat

If I were Apple I would be shitting my pants watching this Meta presentation.

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?

!rant

Recommend some interesting/innovative VR games that may be harder to come by? I want to get an idea of what's out there.

Platform doesn't matter (I can access any).

web dev. ui/ux. full stack.

I am not a senior developer but im doing multiple jobs like full stack dev, ux designer and architect.

I only like front end given the choices.

I want to do some vr but the market seems not ready for that so i can only do some learning at home.