Asks Cortana to tell a joke, and Cortana opens Bing. Made my day, well played Cortana

Microsoft support: "Your antivirus software is causing problems with the memory management."

Me: "I use Windows defender"

Microsoft support: "Oh..."

Me: 🙃

Well played

Well played, Google assistant! well played!

Well played google

University highlight

Professor: I uploaded 25 C exercises with a 3 week deadline at eclass.

*4 hours later* Me: I completed the exercises.

Professor: ﴾͡๏̯͡๏﴿ O'RLY?

Me: Let me show you

???

Professor : Feel free to skip class for the rest of the month

Well played!

We had a Commodore64. My dad used to be an electrical engineer and had programs on it for calculations, but sometimes I was allowed to play games on it.

When my mother passed away (late 80s, I was 7), I closed up completely. I didn't speak, locked myself into my room, skipped school to read in the library. My dad was a lovely caring man, but he was suffering from a mental disease, so he couldn't really handle the situation either.

A few weeks after the funeral, on my birthday, the C64 was set up in my bedroom, with the "programmers reference guide" on my desk. I stayed up late every night to read it and try the examples, thought about those programs while in school. I memorized the addresses of the sound and sprite buffers, learnt how programs were managed in memory and stored on the casette.

I worked on my own games, got lost in the stories I was writing, mostly scifi/fantasy RPGs. I bought 2764 eproms and soldered custom cartridges so I could store my finished work safely.

When I was 12 my dad disappeared, was found, and hospitalized with lost memory. I slipped through the cracks of child protection, felt responsible to take care of the house and pay the bills. After a year I got picked up and placed in foster care in a strict Christian family who disallowed the use of computers.

I ran away when I was 13, rented a student apartment using my orphanage checks (about €800/m), got a bunch of new and recycled computers on which I installed Debian, and learnt many new programming languages (C/C++, Haskell, JS, PHP, etc). My apartment mates joked about the 12 CRT monitors in my room, but I loved playing around with experimental networking setups. I tried to keep a low profile and attended high school, often faking my dad's signatures.

After a little over a year I was picked up by child protection again. My dad was living on his own again, partly recovered, and in front of a judge he agreed to be provisory legal guardian, despite his condition. I was ruled to be legally an adult at the age of 15, and got to keep living in the student flat (nation-wide foster parent shortage played a role).

OK, so this sounds like a sobstory. It isn't. I fondly remember my mom, my dad is doing pretty well, enjoying his old age together with an nice woman in some communal landhouse place.

I had a bit of a downturn from age 18-22 or so, lots of drugs and partying. Maybe I just needed to do that. I never finished any school (not even high school), but managed to build a relatively good career. My mom was a biochemist and left me a lot of books, and I started out as lab analyst for a pharma company, later went into phytogenetics, then aerospace (QA/NDT), and later back to pure programming again.

Computers helped me through a tough childhood.

They awakened a passion for creative writing, for math, for science as a whole. I'm a bit messed up, a bit of a survivalist, but currently quite happy and content with my life.

I try to keep reminding people around me, especially those who have just become parents, that you might feel like your kids need a perfect childhood, worrying about social development, dragging them to soccer matches and expensive schools...

But the most important part is to just love them, even if (or especially when) life is harsh and imperfect. Show them you love them with small gestures, and give their dreams the chance to flourish using any of the little resources you have available.

I just saw a website that hid the login and sign up buttons while ad block was enabled. No popups or anything asking me to disable the ad block.

Well played developer, well played.

Well played Google Assistant...

You know what?

Young cocky React devs can suck my old fuckin LAMP and Objective-C balls.

Got a new freelance job and got brought in to triage a React Native iOS/Android app. Lead dev's first comment to me is: "Bro, have you ever used React Native".

To which I had to reply to save my honor publicly, "No, but I have like 8 years with Objective-C and 3 years with Swift, and 3 years with Node, so I maybe I'll still be able help. Sometimes it just helps to have a fresh set of eyes."

"Well, nobody but me can work on this code."

And that, as it turned out was almost true.

After going back and forth with our PM and this dev I finally get his code base.

"Just run "npm install" he says".

Like no fuckin shit junior... lets see if that will actually work.

Node 14... nope whole project dies.

Node 12 LTS... nope whole project dies.

Install all of react native globally because fuck it, try again... still dies.

Node 10 LTS... project installs but still won't run or build complaining about some conflict with React Native libraries and Cocoa pods.

Go back to my PM... "Um, this project won't work on any version of Node newer than about 5 years old... and even if it did it still won't build, and even if it would build it still runs like shit. And even if we fix all of that Apple might still tell us to fuck off because it's React Native.

Spend like a week in npm and node hell just trying to fucking hand install enough dependencies to unfuck this turds project.

All the while the original dev is still trying TO FIX HIS OWN FUCKING CODE while also being a cocky ass the entire time. Now, I can appreciate a cocky dev... I was horrendously cocky in my younger days and have only gotten marginally better with age. But if you're gonna be cocky, you also have to be good at it. And this guy was not.

Lo, we're not done. OG Dev comes down with "Corona Virus"... I put this in quotes because the dude ends up drawing out his "virus" for over 4 months before finally putting us in touch with "another dev team he sometimes uses".

Next, me and my PM get on a MS Teams call with this Indian house. No problems there, I've worked with the Indians before... but... these are guys are not good. They're talking about how they've already built the iOS build... but then I ask them what they did to sort out the ReactNative/Cocoa Pods conflict and they have no idea what I'm talking about.

Why?

Well, one of these suckers sends a link to some repo and I find out why. When he sends the link it exposes his email...

This Indian dude's emails was our-devs-name@gmail.com...

We'd been played.

Company sued the shit out of the OG dev and the Indian company he was selling off his work to.

I rewrote the app in Swift.

So, lets review... the React dev fucked up his own project so bad even he couldn't fix it... had to get a team of Indians to help who also couldn't fix it... was still a dickhead to me when I couldn't fix it... and in the end it was all so broken we had to just do a rewrite.

None of you get npm. None of you get React. None of you get that doing the web the way Mark Zucherberg does it just makes you a choad locked into that ecosystem. None of you can fix your own damn projects when one of the 6,000 dependency developers pushes breaking changes. None of you ever even bother with "npm audit fix" because if security was a concern you'd be using a server side language for fucking server side programming like a grown up.

So, next time a senior dev with 20 years exp. gets brought in to help triage a project that you yourself fucked up... Remember that the new thing you know and think makes you cool? It's not new and it's not cool. It's just JavaScript on the server so you script kiddies never have to learn anything but JavaScript... which makes you inarguably worse programmers.

And, MF, I was literally writing javascript while you were sucking your mommas titties so just chill... this shit ain't new and I've got a dozen of my own Node daemons running right now... difference is?

Mine are still working.

Father bought a PC in 1997. Back then very few had it. I learned doing things like accessing the internet and sending emails, among others. I remember having added age on websites to be allowed to sign up at times :P My sisters used to play games on it sometimes. The first few ones we had were Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, Tomb Raider Chronicles, American McGee's Alice(Which caused us to upgrade the PC xD)... And some others.

I have a memory of this pseudo-3D-looking game where you move in a maze and try answering questions. I want to remember its name, but I cannot :(

We literally have video evidence of me liking the computer as a child, yet my parents either say I'm addicted or deny I've ever liked it before. Not only that, but continuously limiting my time with the PC hasn't been a literal obstacle in my way of trying to do things in their opinion. Funny how my parents think the last few years I've been my worst when they've hurt me in those years so much that our relationship is guaranteed not working out. There were doubts in my head before, but now it's cemented and there is no way of going back. Father, for example, tells me it's too late to do anything with a PC now(As well as how I've been unable to use the PC. He looks at these pro players' footage in some TV show and he's like, „You've been unable to use your hobbies“, as if they have never ever screamed at me for perceived gaming and not actually cared to check), and I need to look for a „real“ job.

Sorry. I went to bed at 2:00 in the morning. Feel like a zombie because of ongoing weirdly insufficient sleep, even though I sleep kinda more than normal. Even when I took Melatonine for that it didn't help at all.

Childhood was where beating began. I was about 6/7. Right when I entered school. The first school that I attended was a private one and supposedly for „Wunderkinds“, while in reality I haven't seen a SINGLE teacher or psychologist approve of it, their argument being that children were basically drowned in work that wasn't age-appropriate(I don't mean anything bad. Just that teaching about Galaxies and all in first grade isn't the brightest idea). There was always a mountain of homework to do and as opposed to some other countries, we had to do it on a day to day basis. We didn't have a week-long deadline. I was predictably not keeping up with it as I could have, had it been a normal amount, so my parents decided I didn't want to study and began their methods of getting me to „study“. I have yet to see a person able to keep up with that school's tempo, no matter the age.

This place was also where I got bullied. I felt I had nowhere to be: At home, the parents' situation, at school, the bully. I never really went outside to play with other children, so I missed that part of childhood.

After the second year of school I was transferred to an advanced German school, called like that because they taught German and not English there. I also got to learn a bit of Russian before they removed it from school. In that period I used to attend ballet. But for less than a year. And piano, which I remember having attended for quite a long while, some years, if my memory isn't fried. I quit it because of it having been forced on me. Last piece I ever played fully was Beethoven's Marmotte.

In this school I was once again the outcast of the class. I had some people to interact with. All of those interactions lasted a few years at most. Then, because of a part of my class choosing me as a laughing-stock N2 and another girl as the N1, I found my best friend, who I still have today. She's the only friend I have nearby.

Most of the time I hated myself. Even today I struggle with that sometimes.

After that came university. This us where I got something like a friend circle at last. But it still didn't last. I got in a relationship with one of the guys, but I was just attracted. There was another I couldn't dare getting close to. Turns out he also had something for me. Then he disappeared from our lives and a year after, I still cannot forget the person. If I want to, I have to deprive myself of my own personality. Not a thing I'm willing to give up. Then I broke up with the guy I was in a relationship with and completely disappeared from the friendship circle. To be honest, I had reasons to. They refused to even try to look for the guy and they called him a friend for years. Sometimes parents hitting me can occur even today, but if I REALLY piss them off.

Now I'm here and oh, my God, I'm officially am aunt now! My sister gave birth to a daughter this morning... She's in Berlin with mother and both she and the child are doing great. I just hope she manages to be a good mother.

Registration confirmation email received from clover community website. Well played Clover 👍

Well played Google, well played...

I fell for it for a sec, well-played devs 👏

Well played sir, well played! 😁😁

Summing up many ridiculous meetings I've been in.

Many years ago we hired someone for HR that came from a large fortune 500 company, really big deal at the time.

Over the next 6 months, she scheduled weekly to bi-weekly, 1 to 2 hour meetings with *everyone* throughout the day. Meeting topics included 'How to better yourself', 'Trust the winner inside you'...you get the idea.

One 2-hour meeting involved taking a personality test. Her big plan was to force everyone to take the test, and weed out anyone who didn't fit the 'company culture'. Whatever that meant.

Knowing the game being played, several of us answered in the most introverted, border-line sociopath, 'leave me the frack alone!' way we could.

When she got the test results back, she called an 'emergency' meeting with all the devs and the VP of IS, deeply concerned about our fit in the company.

HR: "These tests results were very disturbing, but don't worry, none of you are being fired today. Together, we can work as team to bring you up to our standards. Any questions before we begin?"
Me: "Not a question, just a comment about the ABC personality test you used."
<she was a bit shocked I knew the name of the test because it was anonymized on the site and written portion>
Me: "That test was discredited 5 years ago and a few company's sued because the test could be used to discriminate against a certain demographic. It is still used in psychology, but along with other personality tests. The test is not a one-size-fits-all."

VP, in the front row, looked back at me, then at her.
HR: "Well....um...uh...um...We're not using the test that way. No one is getting fired."
DevA: "Then why are we here?"
DevB:"What was the point of the test? I don't understand?"
HR: "No, no...you don't understand...that wasn't the point at all, I'm sorry, this is getting blown out of proportion."
VP: "What is getting blown out of proportion? Now I'm confused. I think we all need some cooling off. Guys, head back to the office and let me figure out the next course of action."

She was fired about two weeks later. Any/all documentation relating to the tests were deleted from the server.

I thought, maybe, MAYBE I’ll meet a better class mate for uni group project since I’m at master degree instead of bachelor...

WELL FUCK, there is still people who played dead when I tried to chat them. Fuck group project, fuck you if you read this, I know you’re here sometimes

Well played Allo!

"Fuck JavaScript, its such a shitty language" seems to be quite a common rant today. It seems as if JS is actually getting more hate than PHP, which is certainly odd, considering the stereotype.

So, as someone who has spent a lot of time in JS and a lot of time elsewhere, here are my views. Please, discuss your opinions with me as well. I am genuinely interested in an intelligent conversation about this topic.

So here's my background: learned HTML/CSS/JS in that order when I was 12 because I liked computers. I was pretty shitty at JS until U was at least 15, but you get the point, Ive had it sploshing about in my brain for a while.

Now, JS certainly has its quirks, no doubt, but theres nothing about the language itself that I would say makes it shitty. Its a very easy leanguage to use, but isn't overdeveloped like VB.net (Or, as I like to call it, TheresAFunctionForThat)

Most of the hate is centered around JS being used for a very broad range of systems. I doubt JS would be in the rant feed so often if it were to stay in its native ecosystem of web browsers. JS can be used in server backend, web frontent, desktop and mobile applications, and even in some system services (Although this isn't very popular as of yet). People seem to be terrified that one very easy to learn language can go so far. And, oh god, its interpreted... How can a system app run off an interpreted language? That's absurd.

My opinion on JSEverything is that it's progress. Thats what we're all about, right? The technologies already in place are unthreatened by JS, it isn't a gamechanger. The only thing JS integration is doing is making tedius and simple tasks easier. Big companies with large systems aren't going to jump ship and migrate to JS. A startup, however, could save a fucking ton of development time by using a JS framework, however. I want to live in a world where startups can become the next Google, because technology will stagnate when youre trying to protect your fortune, (Look at Apple for fucks sake) but innovation is born of small people with big ideas.

I have a feeling the hate for JS is coming from fear of abandoning what you're already doing. You don't have to do that. JS is only another option (And a very good one, which is why it's becoming so popular).

As for my personal opinion from my experiences... I've left this part til the end on purpose. I love programming and learning and creating, so I've never hated a lamguage, really. It all depends on what I want to do. In the times i've played arpund with JS, I've loved it. Very very easy. The idea of having it on both ends of web development makes a lot of sense too, no conversion, just direct communication. I would imagine this really helps with speed, as well. I wouldn't use it in a complicated system, though. Small things, medium size projects: perfect. Running a bank? No.

So what do you think about this JSUniverse?

This new (probs April fools) score thingy...

Haven't been on devRant all day and now I'm tipsy on a quite some special beers and this score thingy happens....

I just literally blinked a few times to check if my eyes were functioning properly and restarted devRant to veeeeery much assure that 😅😆

Well played!

Wow. Well played Nintendo.

So as quite some people know on here, I am strongly against closed source software and have a very strong distrust in it as well.
So next to some principles (and believes etc etc etc) there is one specifc 'event' which triggered the distrust in CSS (No not Cascading Style sheet, I mean Closed Source Software :P). So hereby the story about what happened.

I think it was about 5 years ago when a guy joined my programming class (I wasn't in uni although I studied but for the sake of clarity, lets just call it uni for now (also, that makes me feel smarter so why the fuck not!)) in uni. He knew a shitload about programming for his age but he was convinced that he was always right. (that aside)
Anyways, at some point we had to work in groups on this project (groups for specific tasks) and he chose (he loved it, we hated it, he had the final say) Trello for 'project management'. He gave everyone (I was running Windows for a little bit at that moment because the project was in C# and the Snowden leaks had not arrived yet so I was not extremely uncomfortable with using Windows, just a lot) this addon program thingy he created for Trello which would make usage easier. I asked if it was open source, he replied with 'No, because this is my project.' and although I did understand that entirely, I didn't feel comfy using it because of it's closed source nature. Everyone declared me paranoid and he was annoyed as hell but I just kept refusing to use it and just used the web interface.

*skips to 2 years later*

I met that guy again at the train station at a random day! Had the usual 'how are you and what's up after a few years' talk with him and then he told me something that changed my view on closed source software for most probably the rest of my life.

"Hey by the way, do you remember that project of a few years back where you didn't want to use my software because of your 'closed-sourceness paranoia'? I just wanted to say that I actually had some kind of backdooring feature build in which (I am not going to say what) allowed me to (although I didn't use it) look at/do certain things with the 'infected' computers. I really wanted to say that I find it funny how you, the only one who didn't give in to my/the peer pressure, were the only one who wasn't affected by my 'backdoor' at that moment! Also your standards towards the use of closed source software probably played a big part probably. I find that pretty cool actually!"

Although I cannot confirm what he said, he was exactly the type of guy who would do this IMO (and not only IMO I think).

So yeah, that's one of the reasons AND the story behind a big part of why I don't trust closed source software :).

A friend uses git to store his pictures.

Well played.

Someone played a random game that I'd made. He was really impressed by the story (mostly dialogs). And he asked me:
Him: "Did you pay much?"
Me: "What???"
Him: "Well, I'm sure you had to pull some strings to get that dialog"
I laughed hysterically.

To those that think they can't make it.
To those that are put down by those that don't understand you.
And to those that have never had a dream come true.

Not a rant, but the story of how I got into programming

I've always been into tech/electronics. I remember being told once that when I was 3, I used to take plug sockets to pieces. When I was 7, I built a computer with my dad.
There isn't a thing in my room that hasn't been dismantled and put back together again. Except for the things that weren't put back together again ;)

When I was 15, I got a phone for Christmas. It was a pretty crappy phone, the LG P350 (optimus ME). But I loved it all the same.
However I knew it could do a lot more. It ran a bloated, slow version of Android 2.2.
So I went searching, how can I make it faster, how to make it do more. And I found a huge community around Android ROMs. Obviously the first thing I did was flashed this ROM. Sure, there were bugs, but I was instantly in love with it. My phone was freed.

From there I went on to exploring what else can be done.
I wanted to learn how to script, so over the weekend I wrote a 1000 line batch (Windows cmd) script that would root the phone and flash a recovery environment onto it. Pretty basic. Lots of switch statements, but I was proud of it. I'd achieved something. It wasn't new to the world, but it was my first experience at programming.

But it wasn't enough, I needed more.
So I set out to actually building the roms. I installed Linux. I wanted to learn how to utilise Linux better, so I rewrote my script in bash.
By this time, I'd joined a team for developing on similar spec'd phones. Without the funds to by new devices, we began working on more radical projects.
Between us, we ported newer kernels to our devices. We rebased much of the chipset drivers onto newer equivalents to add new features.

And then..

Well, it was exam season. I was suffering from personal issues (which I will not detail), and that, with the work on Android, I ended up failing the exams.
I still passed, but not to the level I expected.

So I gave up on school, and went head first into a new kind of development. "continue doing what you love. You'll make it" is what I told myself.

I found python by contributing to an IRC bot. I learnt it by reading the codebase. Anything I didn't understand, I researched. Anything I wanted to do, google was there to help me through it.

Then it was exam season again. Even though I'd given up on school, I was still going. It was easier to stay in than do anything about it.
A few weeks before the exams, I had a panic attack. I was behind on coursework, and I knew I would do poorly on exams.
So I dropped out.
I was disappointed, my family was disappointed.
So I did the only thing I felt I could do. I set out to get a job as a developer.

At this stage, I'd not done anything special. So I started aiming bigger. Contributing to projects maintained by Sony and Google, learning from them. Building my own projects to assist with my old Android friends.
I managed to land a contract, however due to the stresses at home, I had to drop it after a month.
Everything was going well, I felt ready to get a full time job as a developer, after 2 years of experience in the community.

Then I had to wake up.
Unfortunately, my advisors (I was a job seeker at the time) didn't understand the potential of learning to be a developer. With them, it's "university for a skilled job".
They see the word "computer" on a CV, they instantly say "tech support".
I played ball, I did what I could for them. But they'd always put me down, saying I wasn't good enough, that I'd never get a job.
I hated them. I'd row with them every other day.

By God, I would prove them wrong.

And then I found them. Or, to be more precise, they found me. A startup in London got in contact with me. They seemed like decent people. I spoke with their developers, and they knew their stuff, these were people that I can learn from.
I travelled 4 hours to go for an interview, then 4 hours back.
When I got the email saying they'd move me to London, I was over the moon.
I did exactly what everyone was telling me I couldn't do.

1.5 years later, I'm still working with them. We all respect each other, and we all learn from each other.

I'm ever grateful to them for taking a shot with me. I had no professional experience, and I was by no means the most skilled individual they interviewed.

Many people have a dream. I won't lie, I once dreamed of working at Google. But after the journey I've been through, I wouldn't have where I am now any other way. Though, in time, I wish to share this dream with another.
I hope that all of you reach your dreams too.

Sorry for the long post. The details are brief, but there are only 5k characters ;)

This is my most ridiculous meeting in my long career. The crazy thing is I have witnessed this scenario play out many times during my career. Sometimes it sits in waiting for a few years but then BOOM there it is again and again. In each case the person that fell into the insidious trap was smart and savvy but somehow it just happened. The outcomes were really embarrassing and in some cases career damaging. Other times, it was sort of humorous. I could see this happening to me and I never want it to happen to you.

Once upon a time in a land not so far away there was a Kickoff Meeting for an offsite work area recovery exercise being planned for our Oklahoma locations. Eleven Oklahoma high ranking senior executives were on this webinar plus three Enterprise IT Directors (Ellen, Jim and Bob) who would support the business from the systems side throughout the exercise.

The plan was for Sam Otto, our Midwest Director of Business Continuity to host this webinar. Sam had hands-on experience recovering to our third party recovery site vendor and he always did a great job. He motivated people to attend the exercise with the coolest breakfasts and lunches you could imagine. Donuts, bagels, pizza, wings, scrumptious salads, sandwiches, beverages and desserts. He was great with people and made it a lot of fun.

At the last minute Charles 'Don't Call Me Charlie' Ego-Smith, the Global Business Continuity Senior Vice President, decided to grand-stand Sam. He demanded the reins to the webinar. Pulled a last-minute power-play and made himself the host and presenter. You have probably seen the move at some point in your career. I guess the old saying, 'be careful what you wish for' has some truth to it - read on and let me know if you devRanters agree...

So, Charlie, I mean Charles, begins hosting the session and greets all of the attendees. Hey, good so far! He starts showing some slides in the PowerPoint presentation and he fields a few questions, comments and requests from the Oklahoma executives. The usual easy to handle requests such as, 'what if we are too busy to do recover all systems', 'what if we recover all of our processes from home', 'what if we have high profile visitors that month?' Hey you can't blame them for trying. You are probably thinking to yourself, 'been there - heard that!' But luckily our experienced team had anticipated the push-back. Fortunately, Senior Management 'had our backs' and committed that all processes and systems must participate and test - so these were just softball requests, 'easy-peasy' to handle. But wait, we are just getting started!

Now the fireworks begin. Bob, one if the Enterprise IT directors started asking a bunch of questions. Well, Charles had somewhat of a history with Bob from previous exercises and did not take kindly to Bob's string of questions. Charles started getting defensive and while Bob was speaking Charles started IM'ing. He's firing off one filthy message after another to me and our teammate Sam.

'This idiot Bob is the biggest pain in the ass that I ever worked with'; 'he doesn't know shit', 'he never shuts the f up', 'I wanna go over to his office and kick his f'in ass...!'

Unfortunately...the idiot Charles had control of the webinar and was sharing his screen so every message he sent was seen by all of the attendees! Yeah, everyone including Bob and the Senior Oklahoma executives! We could not instant message him to stop as everyone would have seen our warnings, so we tried to call Charles' cell phone and text him but he did not pick up. He just kept firing ridiculously embarrassing dirty IM messages and I guess we were all so stunned we just sat there bewildered. We finally bit the bullet and IM'ed him to STOP ALREADY!!! Whoa, talk about an embarrassing silence!

I really felt sorry for Bob. He is a good guy. Deservedly, Charlie 'Yes I am going to call you CHARLIE' got in big time hot water after the webinar with upper management. For one reason or another he only lasted another year or so at our company. Maybe this event played a part in his demise.

So, the morale is, if you use IM - turn it off during a webinar if you are the host. If you must use it, be really careful what you say, who you say it to and pray nothing embarrassing or personal is sent to you for everyone to see.

Quick Update - During the past couple of months I participated on many webinars with enterprise software vendors trying to sell me expensive solutions. Most of the vendors had their IM going while doing webinars and training. Some very embarrassing things came flying across our screens. You learn a lot reading those messages when they pop-up on the presenters' screen, both personal and business related. Some even complaints from customers!

My advice to employees and vendors is to sign-out of IM before hosting a webinar. Otherwise, it just might destroy your credibility and possibly your career.

The riskiest dev choice...

How about "The riskiest thing you've done as a dev"? I have a great entry for that. and I suppose it was my choice to build the feature afterall.

I was working on an instance of a small MMO at a game company I worked for. The MMO boasted multiple servers, each of them a vastly different take on the base game. We could use, extend, or outright replace anything we wanted to, leading to everything from Zelda to pokemon to an RP haven to a top-down futuristic counterstrike. The server in this particular instance was a fantasy RPG, and I was building it a new leveling and experience system with most of the trimmings. (Talents, feats/perks, etc. were in a future update.)

A bit of background, first: the game's dev setup did not have the now-standard dev/staging/prod servers; everything ran on prod, devs worked on prod, players connected and played on prod, etc. Worse yet, there was no backup system implemented -- or not really. The CTO was really the only person with sufficient access. The techy CEO did as well, but he rarely dealt with anything technical except server hardware, occasionally. And usually just to troll/punish us devs (as in "Oops ! I pulled the cat5 ! ;)"). Neither of them were the most reliable of people, either. The CTO would occasionally remote in and make backups of each server -- we assumed whenever he happened to think of it -- and would also occasionally do it when asked, but it could take him a week, sometimes even up to a month to get around to it. So the backups were only really useful for retreiving lost code and assets, not so much for player data.

The lack of reliable backups and the lack of proper testing grounds (among the plethora of other issues at the company) made for an absolutely terrible dev setup, but that's just how it was, and that's what we dealt with. We were game devs, afterall. Terrible or not, we got to make games! What more could you ask for!? It was amazing and terrible and wonderful and the worst thing ever, all at the same time. (and no, I'm not sharing the company name, but it isn't EA or Nexon, surprisingly 😅)

Anyway, back to the story! My new leveling system also needed to migrate players' existing data, so... you can see where this is going.

I did as much testing and inspection of my code as I could, copied it from a personal dev script to the server's xp system, ... and debated if I really wanted to click [Apply]. Every time I considered it, I went back to check another part or do yet more testing. I ended up taking like 40 minutes to finally click it.

And when I did... that was the scariest button press of my life. And the scariest three seconds' wait afterwards. That one click could have ruined every single player's account, permanently lost us players ...

After applying it, I immediately checked my character to see if she was broken, checked the account data for corruption or botched flags, checked for broken interactions with the other systems....

Everything ended up working out perfectly, and the players loved all of the new features. They had no idea what went into building them, and certainly had no idea of what went into applying them, or what could have gone wrong -- which is probably a good thing.

Looking back, that entire environment was so fragile, it's a wonder things didn't go horribly wrong all the time. Really, they almost never did. Apocalypses did happen, but were exceedingly rare, and were ususally fixed quickly. I guess we were all super careful simply because everything was so fragile? or the decent devs were, at least. We never trusted the lessers with access 😅 at least on the main servers where it mattered. Some of the smaller servers... well, we never really cared about those.

But I'm honestly more surprised to realize I've never had nightmares of that button click. It was certainly terrifying enough.

But yay! Complete system overhaul and migration of stored and realtime player data! on prod! With no issues! And lots of happy players! Woooooo!

Thinking back on it makes me happy 😊

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Does anyone remember MUDs? Multi-User Dungeons — working on those in LPC was my first experience with real programming. Before that, I'd only made simple websites.

To get permission to program in one MUD, you had to prove that you knew the world, by reaching a certain level in the game. Death had consequences, with a level being lost, as well as risking loss of your items if someone looted you or your corpse was lost. This alone was hard enough to make most players give up. I played (and played wisely) to get there, being the first of my friends. It was hard work and fun.

After months of playing every day, finally, I was a wizard! Well, first, I had to convince someone else to take me as an apprentice, which was it's own challenge, because I was a 13 y/o girl. I ended up having to wait for an older male friend to get to the proper rank and get made a full wizard himself, because anyone else was reluctant (thinking that I'd just screw up or make them look bad), and no one was very happy about it. After some more weeks, I started programming my own content for the MUD, to share with others. It was a great opportunity to learn and express myself, seeing how creative programming could be.

I got called all kinds of names for asking questions and making mistakes, and I questioned why I even wanted to work with these people who hated my guts and didn't want to teach me anything, but I kept going. As I wasn't allowed to take computer classes in school, being able to do projects on my own like this was the only way to learn. I also became more stubborn, patient, and independent, which has always been necessary for this career.

Most importantly, I saw what could be done with programming, and was inspired to keep going with my own projects, no matter how much hate that I got for it. I went on to work on more games and software, often on my own. I always explore new technology, ignore the haters, and forge ahead with my own vision.

Hello again, everyone. I've been busy with all the paperwork at my ship (will make a post about it later) but for now, I'll bore you with another story (not navy one, fortunately) to justify my slacking off.
And this story... is the story on how I got into ITSec. And it is pretty damn embarrassing. It all began when I was 16. I was hooked on battleknight.gameforge.com, a browser game. My father had just had ADSL installed at our home, and the new opportunities before me were endless. Well...
After I've had my fill with the porn torrents and them opportunities dwindled to just a few dozens, I began searching for free games, and I stumbled on that game. I played a lot, but as a free-to-play game, it was also pay-to-win. I didn't have a credit card, so I paid for a few gems with SMS messages. Fast forward a couple of years, I got into the Naval Academy. A guy came in to advertise something (I think it was an encyclopaedia or something - yes, wikipedia wasn't a thing back then) and to pay for it, we could apply for a credit card. So I applied. And I resisted the temptation for a year.
Note: prepaid wasn't that known where I live, so using credit cards was the only way for online transactions.
So I made 1 transaction. Just one. After a couple of months my monthly report from the bank came, showing a 2.5$ (I think) transaction on Paypal. I paid no mind, thinking that it was some hidden fee. Oh boy, I shit you not, I was THAT much of an idiot. Six months later, BOOM!
600$ transaction to ebay via paypal. You can imagine all those nice things that came to my mind. In any case, the bank accepted my protest that I filed at their central offices and cancelled the transaction. I promptly cancelled my card, destroyed it right there for good measure, and got to thinking... what the fuck just happened?
As many people here, I am afflicted with a deadly virus, called curiosity. I started researching the matter, trying to figure out how. And, because I didn't like black boxes and "it is just like it is" explanations, I tumbled down the rabbit hole of ITSec. I soon found out that, not only it was possible, but also it was sometimes EXTREMELY easy to steal credit card info. There are sites, to this very day, that store user info (along with credit cards info) IN FUCKING CLEARTEXT. Sometimes your personal, financial and even medical info are just an SQLi away.
So, I got very disillusioned on many things. But I never regretted it. It may cause me to age prematurely and will kill me of stroke or heart attack one day, but as I still tumble down the ITSec rabbit hole, I can say with confidence that
I REGRET NOTHING
Plus, my 600$ were returned, so look on the bright side :)

I attended a data science meetup recently. There were many suits walking around the corridors because of some startup night taking place at the same time.

After some time a guy appeared infront of me, telling me he was afraid at first that this was a meetup for suits only. Until he saw all the dev and rock stickers on my notebook. He was reliefed that there was some nerd at least.

He asked what I was doing so I told him about my startup about optimization of heat generation plants jada jada. I asked him back.

He replied, "Well, I'm also part of some small startup. Among the things we develop processors and stuff. It's called Intel."

Well dude, that was nicely played. I had a lot of fun that evening.

during an interview for a software dev job...

interviewer: so in your opinion, what is the best part of git?

me: pushing to master

interview: damn that's the best answer anyone has ever answered. well played. *wink*

It's long, but trust me you won't get bored. So today, I went to work, even on a Sunday. My supervisor had given the task to finish off my custom module by this week.
There were only the 2 of us in the office. Everyone else enjoyed the holiday.
I got stuck somewhere in the code and approached his desk. We could never see what he was doing on his computer.
Suddenly, I could find him uneasy as I approached and he started jolting St those "ctrl+w" and "alt+f4s" and clutched his mouse to minimize. I said, "Uh sorry, sir but this taxonomy doesn't work in this code, help me out?"
He said, "Oh sure, sit. And he opened chrome trying to act cool. Guess what? Chrome played it like a boss, "Google Chrome didn't shut down correctly. Restore the following pages.
[] Shocking! 99 year old couple have s3x
[] xxx tiny teen shows her.... (i don't remember exactly.)"
The quickest possible glance I ever had. And the most sweaty face I ever saw of his.
He granted me a leave today and extended my deadline for the next week as well. I thought I was screwed :P

Hey there! I am pretty new but old to the community xD. Let me explain and introduce myself.

The post might be a little longer, depending on my inspiration, read it at your own risk ;)

I am here on devRant for almost a year now but, this is my first post. I wasn't active until a week ago or so. Why? Well, at the time, I didn't find posts interesting enough to keep me from work or school. I must addmit I was either stupid or confused (not uncommon for me).

Well, I am high school student who, when not prepearing for an entrance exam for faculty, is learning and doing indie game developent with my cousin's support.

Even though I was intermediate gamer whan I was younger, passionate but not addicted, I didn't even think about getting into game development until my cousin showed me one secific game and told me a story about it. Let's stop here and let me tell you why I tagged this rant with wk88.

I've already mentioned my cousin, he's my wk88 trouble. Why? I'll tell you only one thing. He studies CS at University of Cambridge, UK. He earned the scholarship by competing and earning multiple medals in programming in International Olympiad in Informatics. And here I am struggling with ******* trigonometric identities. But nvm, let's move on.

I told you about the game but didn't actually tell you the title and who developed it. So, my inspiration for getting into game development was Alexander Bruce , guy who designed Antichamber. If you haven't heard of it before/tried it yet, give it a shot, you probably won't be disappointed of you like fucking with your brain.

Here're some facts:
- Started learning programming at the age of 12, thought by my brother using Free Pascal in Lazarus.
- Have been learning C++ for 4 years and C# for 3, both at the same time.
- While learning these two, started building .NET based back-end and doing SQL stuff; failed to finish it, gave up after I realised I needed some advanced front-end skills, which I didn't want to learn, to implement a lot of things I wanted.
- Played a piano since I was 11 and been playing around with music production recently.

Here I am now, learning Blender and hoping that one day I will publish the game I've been developing for past year and a half.

Hope you didn't waste your time reading this. I will try to keep you up with things I experience durning future development.

Cheers! 🍻

Well played Google...

Well played algo

Google told me I was speaking their language and asked if I wanted to play a game in a very Matrix-esque way. I'm now in the middle of coding challenges and when I finish one of them a ascii white rabbit hops across the in browser console. You have my attention Google, well played.

Well... I could have played a CSGO match in that time...

There was a time when I couldn't code a line in Python. My friends were all very proficient at the language as well as different Frameworks.

I started off with a strategy where I did 10 lines of coding today, 20 next, 30 day after and it grew. I became proficient with the language and built a stock market simulator for my college project.

Learnt multiple topics from math, programming, and DevOps to deploy it as well.

Most satisfying feeling was when 300 people played it for 2 weeks' time. That was when I realised I made it. Not literally, but figuratively.

well played.

IntelliJ has this tutorial where it teaches you a bunch of shortcuts for making life easy, since version 2017.3 or something like that. Most of it is pretty meh, some of it is pretty useful. And I just came across a keybind to auto format code.

What else do I need. If I can quickly format my code and make it look pretty, that's all I'd want.

"Try reformatting the selected code with Ctrl+Alt+L"

*Linux Mint goes to lock screen*

*logs back in, code is unchanged*

Well played...

Just when i am about to sleep

Well, at least give me another option. Well played Google. Good Game.

GG Git well played. RIP Vim

So Patanjali(aka Ramdev Baba trying to sell you even a fucking underwear as ayurvedic and locally made) released their chat application "Kimbho" and was taken down within 24 hours because of major security flaws.

Some obvious ironies I would like to point out here.

1. Coming up with a chat application with gaping security flaws at this stage when privacy related discussions are happening at every nook and corner, worst move ever.

2. There are elections in 2019 and 1 year would be the right amount of time to gather data on public and start targetting and influencing people. It shouldn't be so obvious and everyone knows which political party Patanjali leans towards.

3. You are promoting an app citing Make In India initiative. You are the biggest Indian based FMCG operating in India, courtesy exploiting nationalist sentiments. Whatever you aim of doing, at least invest a decent amount of money in hiring good developers and designers. If not anything get a content writer who will write you an original description of your app for as low as ₹1000.

4. Promoting a competitor of whatsapp on whatsapp is a brilliant move. Give that marketting fellow a big raise.

5. Replacing the phone icon with a shankh is not innovation. Also, everyone knows about spam farms in Bangladesh and many places in India. So boasting about 1.5 lakh downloads in less than an hour only speaks more about your ignorance and lack of technical knowledge.

6. If you really are promoting "swadeshi app", why are you offering logging in through facebook? I mean even a blind person can clearly see your agenda here.

7. Hike is a messaging app made in India and they are here since long and still it are nowhere near the usage of whatsapp. Selling shit in the name of Make in India is not cool and its high time Patanjali realises this. But then again, it is their only marketting strategy because how else can you sell something as gross as cow urine and that too people buying it voluntarily.

8. If this stunt was carried out to be in the news, well played. You are getting a good amount of publicity, but this time a bad publicity will do more harm than good. People are calling out your bluff and you will get to see the results.

Mr. Baba Ramdev, fraud karo, itna blatant mat karo. India ki public sentimental hai chutiya nahi.

Oh man. I have been waiting for this one. Gather round lil' chil'rens it's story time.

So. I was looking for a new project because my old one was wrapping up and that's what my company does. So I was offered some simulation type stuff. I was like "sure why not, I want to make a computer pretend it isn't a computer no more." Side note I should not be a psychiatrist.

So, prior to coming on to this job I felt stifled by my old job's process. This job was a smaller team so I thought the process would be a little smoother. But it turned out they had NO process. Like they had a bug tracking system and they held the meeting to add things to the system, but that was just fucking lip service to a process.

First of all, they used the local disk on the test box as their version control. and had no real scheme as to how they organized it. We had a CM tool but gods forbid they ever fucking use it. I would be handed problem reports and interface change requests, write a bug to track it, go into the code and about 75% of the time or more it had already been worked. However, there was no record of it being worked and I would have to fucking hunt that shit down in a terribly shitty baseline (standardize your gods damned indentation for fuck's sake) and half the time only found out it was done because when I finally located the piece of code that needed changing, the work was already done.

Then, on top of all that, they ask me what time I want to come in. I said 10am, they said okay. One day I roll in at 10 and my boss is mad. Because I missed a meeting. That was at 9. That I wasn't told about. He says I can keep coming in at 10am though (I asked and volunteered to help get him up to speed on the things I was working he said it wasn't necessary) so I did, but every time I missed a 9am meeting he would get pissed. I'm like PICK ONE!!! They move the meeting to 9:30am (which is not 10am).

This shit starts affecting my health negatively. Stress is apt to do that. It triggered an anxiety relapse that pushed me back in to therapy for the first time in 7 years. On top of that the air quality in the office is so bad that I am getting back to back sinus infections and I get put on heavy antibiotics that tear up my stomach along with the stress and new meds tearing up my stomach. So one day as I am laid out in pain, I call out sick. Two days in a row. (Such a heinous crime right.) Well I missed a test event, that I wasn't even the primary or secondary on.

So fast forward to the most pissed off I have ever been. I get called in to a meeting with my boss's boss. As it turns out, my coworkers are not satisfied by the work that I'm doing (funny because I thought I was doing pretty good given that my only direction was fix the interface change reports and problem reports. And there was no priority assigned to any of them).

And rather than tell me any of this, they go behind my back to the boss and boss's boss. They tell me I need to communicate (which I did) and ask for help when I need it (I never did). That I missed an important event (that I played no part in and gods forbid I be sick) and that it seemed like I didn't want to be there (I didn't but who WANTS to work a corporate job).

They put me on a performance improvement plan and I jumped to another project. I am much happier now. Old coworkers won't even say hi, not even those I was friendly with, but fuck them anyway.

Working for a company where the coworkers working 24/7 and the boss (ceo) expect me to do the same, even working on weekends.

But when i mentioned I have life distinctly personal and working life. But no, boss wouldn’t care much about my life anyway.

I got call names for being a not team player, not committed much , a thief (“ I paid you money but you didn’t work 24/7”) and they even claimed I don’t have heart to work.

It affect my personal so much that I can’t be happy even on the weekends. I got perturbed sleeps. Keep thinking of working .

Obviously they played well on guilt tripping me.

It's 2:10 AM on a Friday night.
Well played "cordova ionic".
.
.
.
Fuck you too :'(

Good game well played allo

I doubt many will understand it, but well played ESPN, well played.

I just remembered something I did like freshman year of high school lol

So our school system had just adopted a new site blocking program. It did even better than the one we had used before it.

Literally every good site to play games was blocked, and it really pissed me the fuck off. I had an easy class that was in a lab, and I finished my work early literally everyday, so I played the games to kill time.

Finally I got fucking fed up, and I made a site using weebly where I put the games I wanted to play on it. This way I was in control of it, and I had all the game files on a flash drive, so if it got blocked, I could just keep making new ones.

It actually got to the point that after a week, a few of my friends were using the site daily as well, and they kept asking for games to be put on it.

Simpler times man, simpler times.

!dev

A child's mind is fascinating.

I remember how it felt being a kid, just deliriously happy.

Things were magical, mystical and happy.

I knew the world wasn't perfect, I knew bad things happened to good people.

But a kid's mind is so powerful that it can fill in the blanks with the most cheerful and optimistic perspectives.

And at some point in my childhood I was exposed to videogames, and that kinda took me down fantasy lane even further.

I was extremely young and barely retaining any memories when I was exposed to my first console, a famicom.

I have a somewhat vivid memory of my mind being blown away for the first time by watching my brother play New Ghostbusters II for NES.

From then on, we never stopped and played several console and dos/pc games.

When I was 10, someone from the neighborhood brought in a couple of floppys with Pokemon Yellow.

"What? Pokemon? How the fuck is that even possible? This is a pc, not a gameboy".

I didn't know at the time what an emulator was, but I was super fucking stoked to be able to play that.

My dad had a 1 gb laptop from work that he didn't use, so I hoarded that shit, and I would get to bed and play nearly everyday.

The experience was surreal. I was doing pc gaming... not on a chair, on a fucking bed, and I was playing a gameboy game... on a pc.

It was so intense to me, that even after more than 2 decades of that time in my life, I still remember how it feels like.

Like, you know how you can "feel" things if you think about them? like for example if you think about the taste of chicken, you can somehow feel it for a second.

Well I have like an actual physical sensation linked to that experience but I can't explain it at all, because it's just a sensation.

I think people usually say they feel that way, for example, about the PSX (usually refered to as ps one) loading screen. I experienced that too but when I was 12, so it was not as intense (it does make me feel the fuzzies though).

I also remember other things with very high detail, like the texture of my bed cover, the weather, mom cooking, the clunky shape of the laptop, the way I carelessly stored it above a pile of magazines, etc.

I rememeber ofc how it felt looking at the game sprites, interacting with NPCs, and the goddamn fucking glorious music.

It was dreamy.

Years and years later, I grew up and I stopped living in fantasy world and became more aware of the grim aspects of life my younger self was sugarcoating.

So I tried to play pokemon again, again and again, and no matter how hard I tried to revive that euphoria, I could not never do it.

I started to get annoyed at the game.

"Come oooon, I did the tutorial already, let me skip this.
This pokemon is useless, why am I even training it.
Fuck, I'm tired of grinding"

At some point I accepted that the feeling would never return, and that it would just live in my memory.

Ironically, I can recall that memory and how it felt anytime I want to.

And I can actually still feel it, and throughtout these years, it has never wore down.

And eventually I learned how to play pokemon and enjoy it:

I read tier lists at smogon online and just catch and train the pokemons that are higher on the list, which is how i got to beat yellow in like 3 days.

(This is nothing compared to what speedrunners do, but much better than the weeks it had taken me in the past).

That served as an important lesson that when a kid plays a game, his mind is also the game at the same time, filling the blanks with its imagination.

A very similar experience happened to me with harvest moon, which is the precursor of stardew valley.

and that game is faaar more emotional: you talk to people, overtime you befriend them and they open up, you meet a girl, you marry her, have a kid

you get farm animals, you brush them, they become happy

you get attached

that game was also so powerful in me that in all naiveness I thought I wanted to be a farmer.

Eventually I grew up and hit puberty and from then on, I focused more on competitive games, like smash bros, cs and tf2.

and i dunno how to end a post so eat my fucking nuts

Well, I suppose there's no rules against talking about a non-tech company situation.

Before I made it into my career as a developer, I wrote code as a self-learned hobby programmer. I had a job though, which was selling chips. No, not ICs... potato chips. Funny enough, I made a killing doing it.

Anyway, this isn't about me. It's about the guy who quit shortly after I showed up. You see, we all had company trucks and most of us parked them at the warehouse and commuted in our own vehicles. We'd load the trucks up with product and lock them up in the yard for the next day.

It used to be that there was an option to take the truck home, but after this gentleman, that was reserved for special instances.

That would be due to the fact that the guy played "hide the chip truck" and called up to quit his job, forcing my former boss to hunt around an entire city to find the damn thing.

I've found it isn't so different in software, except when people quit, it's more like "hide the actual deployed branch you didn't commit".

Over the past week I've been working on a game written in JavaScript (in the browser) which can be played with hand gestures seen by a camera (wanted to use an IR camera but couldn't get one in the time I had). It is the well-know Shell Game!

Blood, sweat and tears went into this because I wrote my code extremely bad so it became a huge clutter.

Will refactor some day, but I'm happy with the result!

To long to read. So don’t do it.

I feel disappointed. It’s not about job or stuff. I’m disappointed about world in general. I don’t see my future on this planet anymore.

The world more or less looks like that :

Politics are trying to help you by stealing more money from you. The more you’re lucky the more money you will pay for it.

Media punch you with some family stuff from everywhere, give you young rich and far away, beautiful picture photos of places, people and food that you at most could visit once or twice per year during holidays that are break from work concentration camps.

If you’re lucky you’re rich or got rich or wealthy and infamous so you can walk wherever you want and don’t give a fuck what you wear but again your old friends are not so lucky bastards so you need to find new friends that are probably assholes. At the end most of the days you you’re doing nothing except killing time to meet with people you like during weekends or evenings.

Then there are families and everyone want to tell you that’s important. Family is like herd of assholes, if you’re weak they will sacrifice you and tell that you’re looser behind your back but when you get wealthy they will come back to tell you that when you were young and stupid they played with you so now you have to buy them some stuff or get them a job.

At the end there are people with “I wrote that book” certificate of excellence try to sell you opinions on everything starting from sexual positions ending on how to take a good dump. The problem is that the moment they wrote that book it becomes obsolete. Teachers of useless knowledge from last century that forgot about google or wikipedia.

All of them are playing your emotions, cause impulses and hormones are what makes you weak and people are looking for your weaknesses to take advantage of you. Get your money or get your attention and maybe even both at the same time. Cause views matter you know it. So like and subscribe dumb fucks.

If you’re lucky you find couple of them who aren’t doing that. Who the fuck knows why but this shit happens. It doesn’t matter if they’re family or you met them month ago. Those are only to keep and hardest to find. Unluckily those also can change by other people they meet or when they’re young.

If you can’t find a friend get a dog or cat or whatever animal you like. Their love is unconditional and obvious to read.

Well that’s most of the “I want to be spotted” culture that is all boring as fuck. Personalized ass and glamorous pictures and short movies of everything you don’t need but looks awesome. And as you see it’s still growing with more specialized portals like onlyfans, twitch and tiktok. We all need to look at what everyone else have or want to have cause 99% of time 99% of us are boring and is bored as fuck. Most of us can repeat same small amount set of stories all their life cause we’re not created to entertain.

I don’t feel joy looking at this shit fucked full of shit people arguing who’s dick is bigger. Who can post most dumb thing. I think I need a break but how to break from everything ? How to break from culture of money where to live on your country land you need to pay property tax ?

That’s all fucked up. Life’s fucked up.

Well played, Valve

Well played, Bard.

Well played Samsung....👏🏻

(On the phone)
Internet Provider Support: "Hello, how can I help you?"
Me: "Hi, I've been unable to connect to internet for the past few hours and-
IPS: "Haven't you heard the pre-recorded message?!"
Me: "Uh... No? I'm sorry, but no message was played before you answered."
ISP: "Well, internet services are experiencing technical issues in your whole area. We'll contact you soon as it's resolved." *Hangs up*

...The company then proceeded to state that everything was fine, after a few hours. On their website. Without specifying how to manually restore the connection at all, since apparently this was needed.

...Great job?
This looks kinda dumb to me but... Is it just me?

Half Life, Portal and Halo as well as a hate over windows vista.

I don't shit on things I can't comprehend. So when I bought my laptop with vista and hated how shitty it was I decided to find out the culprits. Turned out they were software engineers, but I was not about to shit on engineers without knowing what they go through. Down the rabbit hole.

Portal and Half life are what inspired to focus on Comp Sci afterwards and Glados and Cortana fascinated me. The fact that good money follows in the field played a big part as well.

Also, and more importantly, mom wanted me to be a programmer since she wanted to be one, she always thought this was the future. She won't read this, but I always thank her for pointing me on this path, she is my biggest fan.

well played Microsoft for redirecting me to a website while I don't have internet.

Why can't I connect to the internet?

If point-and-click game made in PowerPoint, that my grandma actively played because of boredom, is "creative hacky solution", then there you have it.

First game is "The Adventures of Sayid", second "Hide and Seek" with creepy pasta sound and graphic assets from Shrek: Activity Center.
Well, that's my childhood without Internet, what I can say!

Trying to reserve a tour guide at Auschwitz in Birkenau. Google captcha wants me to prove I'm not a roboot. Pops up a collection of images where I should select only those with a TRAIN station..

well played google.

You know how my 'about' here says I create features from bugs?!? Well if you didn't before, now you do.. :P

Anyhow, today the most bizzare thing happened.. Customer played 'reverse uno card' on me..

Meaning?!

They reported a feature missing on uat env, when in fact I fixed a bug they have on prod..

Not sure how I should feel about this, but it sure made my day! (: I just hope they will not open a bug report for this missing bug..

I just felt like Google is the best player out there in terms of Companies.
Seriously, Well played Google.
This is not a negative opinion, I am just awe-struck at its tactics.
See, Google is currently the biggest name in terms of development in Android, ML and multi-platform software but no one can say it being a monopoly due to its dedication to open source community.
Recently Android emerged out to be One of the Biggest , most advanced, trusted and loved Technology . It saw great achievements, and up till 2016-17, it was at its peek. BUT when the market started shifting towards multi-platform boons and Ai, it got its hands into that too with its flutter and kotlin environment
One could have a negative opinion about this, But i can't seem to engulf the vast amounts of positive situations i see in this:
1) this IO18 (and many months before that) saw ML/AI being incorporated in Android (also the arcore, proje tango and many more attempts in the past) meaning that Android will not officially "die". It will just become an extremely encouraged platform( not just limited to mobiles) and a beginning of the robot -human reality ( a mobile is handling everything of your everyday life: chats, music apps sxhedules, alarms, and with an actively interacting ML, it won't be long when Android comes installed in a green bug lime droid robot serving you tea xD). Meanwhile the market of Windows games may shift to mobiles or typically " Android games" (remember, Android won't be limited to mobiles)
2)java may or may not die. The animations and smooth flow it seems to provide is always appreciated but kotlin seems to do so too. As for the hard-core apps, they are usually written in c++ .So java is in the red zone
3) kotlin-native and Flutter will be the weapons of future , for sure. they will be developing multi-platform softwares and will be dividing the market of softwares into platform specific softwares(having better ml/ai interactions,animations) and platform independent apps(access and use anywhere softwares).
And where does google stand?Its the lord varys of game of thrones which just supports and enhances the people in the realm. So it benefits the most . That's a company for you, ladies and gentlemen! If seen from common eyes they seem to be the best company ever and our 1 true king but it can also be a very thick fur cloak hiding their negetive policies and tactics , if any.

Well played, Google.

"Hey business, we've done some style changes in a new test evnvironent, can you check to see everything looks fine?"

"Page Y (which you've never heard of before) looks terrible!"

"It does! Sorry" - go check the page on the other test environment.

That's just what it looks like.

On your standard epitome of being a geek, I started to show my coworkers how to play Cardfight Vanguard, a TCG since we all love TCG's (we play Magic, Pokemon and a few others) and we had made Friday our official "TCG or Board Game" day.

List of games we have played:
Star Wars CCG (dear lord this game is BEAUTIFUL shame it is no longer being published)

Magic the Gathering, we have a love hate relationship with this game, mana plays a big reason as to why we do not fully love it, it sucks getting stuck with no possibility of drawing proper mana.

Pokemon - Easy to get into, easy to play, there is nt much more to say, by far, our favorite in terms of how much money we can make out of selling rare cards that we do not use.

Dice Masters - My Personal favorite, and I am also the undisputed champion of our group

Cardfight Vanguard is my current favorite, very tactical in a lot of ways, luck of the draw hits in a funny way, I feel it is properly balanced, not much bullshit ass rules or mana issues. Reminds me of Duel Masters, I used to LOVE that Game, but Wizards of the Coast and the anime fucked it up so well....

Anyone here likes playing card games?

You could win free Premium!
But you can't even complete the survey.
Well played! Spotify!

Every time when you're facing depression, and doubt yourself. Just think about there are companies much bigger than yours, and they struggling to put a form together... 🤦‍♂️

Think I am going to try out my first stuff for my game engine in 2D. The games I have the most fond memories of were 2D. Sure I like what has happened on the 3D side. But it would be fun to recreate some of my favorite 2D games. Except with one caveat: procedural generation. Never play the same game twice. For testing purposes I will have a seed system to regenerate the same worlds. I would have played these games so much longer if they had been based on a seed for generation of content.

I also like the idea of weapons and armor never being exactly the same. Sure they can look similar, but on close inspection you could see differences. It will be fun to start with base models and then add imperfections and differences.

Another issue I have with fantasy games is always leveling up the weapon by buying something better. Sure we have improvement systems though smithing and magic, but some weapons are always better than others. I wanted to have a game where weapons could be improved by usage and upgrades. Kill 1000 trolls and the weapon gets imbued with trollbane. Kill a dragon and the blood infuses and it deals fire damage. So a player could start out with the family sword and end up with a god tier weapon at the end of the game. Make weapons become legendary. Not because it has more power, but because trolls recognize the blade and the wielder and are scared shitless.

Terrain in 2D should be a lot easier to generate. Weapons, armor, etc should be easier to modify and generate. This should give me the grounding I need to develop the algorithms for a future 3D system. Godot is currently stronger in 2D than 3D. That will change in the next couple of years as more focus is put on the engine. There is no reason I cannot experiment with mixing 2D and 3D as well.

Holy shit, I was just thinking I cannot imagine the amazing shit they could have done with the games I played as a kid with 2D physics!

Haha, something they had in the older games was actual gambling. You could bet on monster fights and slot machines in game. I wonder if that takes a hard hit with ESRB now?

Currently stuck in tutorial hell. Learning how the engine works and seeing what features are available. I get more excited each video I watch. The engine is packed with goodies and the addons are crazy good.

tldr: First project will be short game in 2D. Will explore procedural content.

@dfox and @trogus, well played.

Somewhere, on one of my webpages...

I've been sort of lost after New Year's...

Last few years, my main goal was just to learn stuff to pass technical interviews. I also did a lot of personal dev in C#... and played with the js, python, and when a bit of c++.

But this year I kinda feel sorta of "ah screw it". Interviews never work out, haven't for years, what's the point in even trying... I get paid enough though the work is sort boring and team sort of feels like the Wild West, no rules, code reviews, processes...

But ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Feels like coding has lost its place at the top now. The future is all cloud, machine learning, big data/real time analytics but feels like these are out of reach for just 1 guy...

And well doesn't seem like anyone is going to give me a job because I'm not a good fit or have enough experience in these areas...

Sorta lost now but guess this is what a sudden thought leads to...

Oh and maybe just with tech in general. It feels this year I'm just not as interested as I was before... Spent a lot of time binge watching movies and stuff instead....

I'm so fucking done today.

The VB project I ranted about earlier was apparently just the top of the iceberg of madness that is my workplace.
So the same ninjacoder who managed to code himself as a dependency in the VB project apparently had his greasy little fingers in a bunch of other projects around here.
A script for automating new workstation installs that went haywire last week had traces from this Omnipotent mastermind all over it. He got us this time with static urls and zero errorhandling.
Well played sir.
Getting so done with undocumented projects that I have to dig through several hours just to find and fix.

Update to my previous desire to install Arch Linux on my MacBook...

Well, I installed it, played around a bit... now gonna install OS X back... primary reasons being the fact that there r a lot of things which u must do to get arch to work perfectly in MacBook... ( special kernels and stuff ) and I use an iPhone 😐... in other words, m locked to the ecosystem... for now...

I was so hoping to use arch... it wud have been amazingly fast on the SSD... 😍😍

No m not gonna use VM since it’s not fun 😂😂

Wish iTunes worked in Linux too ☹️😕

I see what you did there Tesla. Well played!

!Rant But this is hilarious 😂

Appraisal interview of Gayle:

Gayle:- Sir, I scored 211 Runs in 118 Balls. I made the team win the crucial match. I should get “A” rating.

Management:- You hit 17 Sixes and 23 Fours. Though, that is good but that is not something new you have done. That is why we hired you. As this is not something new, I will mark it as “Innovation Lacking”.

Gayle:- But sir, I played according to the situation. I took 21 singles as well.

Management:- Exactly, your performance is not consistent. You played 15 Dot Balls as well. This means, you failed to optimize the resources.

Gayle:- But…

Management:- Also, I would like to mention that you are not a team player. The whole team scored 112 and you all alone made 211.

Gayle:- What??

Management:- Yes. So, overall, you are getting a “C” rating for the year. Improve Consistency, Innovation, Utilization and Team Work...

Team outing.

Planned to send out a code review before the trip. Everything was ready.

Then, someone pushed new changes, and I got damn stuck in fixing the UTs.

Currently, ranting from the resort, missing the commit that wouldn't reach a code review.

I expected to finish this task in 1 hour. Well, I should never ever estimate things.

Note: Played a grand piano though.. yeahhhhh..

Three days after I purchased iPhone XS, I had to install a new modem at home. The phone wouldn’t connect to the wifi network in the higher frequency band. The guy who came to install the modem dished out the theory that the phone must be too damn old to support it. That burn!

PS: it connected almost a couple of seconds later that. As if it was some kind of extra layer of authentication. Well played Apple.

!rant

I laughed.
Well played TeraData.

Pressed update and shutdown which lead to a BSOD
And now the windows won't boot.
Well played windows

Let me tell you a tale, children. Of how one of the mostly ghastly, horrid pieces of software currently on this earth came to be in its current, pitiful state.

It all began on January 28th, 2015.

On that day, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, sat leisurely in his office. He had just finished watching a live stream for a conference held by Facebook.

Minutes after the stream ended, he quietly sat in his chair, pondering over what was just shown.

The whole keynote was well done, he thought. But something about it just didn’t sit right with him. It was one specific line uttered by one of the keynote speaker that bothered him.

“React Native will help developers easily write code that will work on both iOS and Android”.

Out of all the talking done throughout that conference, it was that sentence, in particular, that stuck out like a sore thumb t Cook.

Those words began to echo in his head. “...Android”, Tim muttered to himself, gritting his teeth.

He immediately grabbed his Iphone from his pocket, and called the Technical Director of Xcode.

On the phone, the two discussed Xcode as it pertained to Facebook’s latest tool.

“Now, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t provide any support for React Native”, Cook told the director; “Just make it a bit more inconvenient for anyone using React, that’s all”.

The director thought his boss was nuts. Why on earth would you want to intentionally make using an IDE as painful of an experience as possible? But the technical director also knew that, more importantly, he wanted to keep his job.

“...We’ll do our best to make it a total pain in the ass to use React Native in Xcode”, the director told his boss with a shrug.

And so began one of the sickest jokes ever played on developers. A joke so twisted and cruel, it would make even the creator of PHP gasp in abject horror.

Who knew that someone would go out of their way to create an IDE that doesn’t even bloody work half of the time.

And don’t get me started on the absolute piss poor excuse for documentation this thing has.

Does anyone else have that project that they work on in there spare time? Well mine was a Pokemon MMO because I'm not a games developer and found it a really nice challenge/break from normal work. It's almost ready to be played but it's sad that it'll never be released. I mean I could recreate all of the sprites and game mechanics but that wasn't what I originally set out to do.

!dev but is somewhat tech related

So I was like 7. I was hanging out after school with a friend who's mom worked there. We were in her office. So there was a song l really liked are the time (Song of the South by Alabama) and it was on a CD.

So I put that CD in the computer and play my favorite song. Well literally 15 seconds after a line in the song, which was "Sweet potato pie and I shut my mouth," played, my cousin who was in another teacher's office decided to
prank call us.

What did they say when I picked the phone up and said hey? "Sir your order for 1,000 pounds of sweet potatoes is ready to be delivered."

I nearly shit a brick as I slammed the phone down and started freaking out. I ran to where he was and bust in there to see themn laughing really hard

Now I look back and laugh, but I genuinely
thought that by somehow playing that song ordered a lot of potatoes.

And the wild part of the story is that of literally all the things they could say, they chose sweet potatoes. Like it still blows our minds that that's the choice he made.

that moment when your friend messes with your code and it took you hours to find what was wrong... well played XD

So... umm...
Just remembered my Informatics teacher left me and my friend a side project to do by the end of summer:
The task is to replicate the game "Minesweeper" in a C# form.
Now, I never actually even understood that game when I played it, how the hell can I program that? ;-;
Well okay, yeah, I might have to actually start looking into it... but freak, it's almost the end of summer already, and I'm still on vacation... my fault I guess. ;—;

!!!rant

Most exited I've been about some code? Probably for some random "build a twitter clone with Rails" tutorial I found online.

I've been working on my CS degree for a while (theoretical CS) but I really wanted to mess with something a bit more practical. I had almost none web dev experience, since I've been programming mostly OS-related stuff till then (C). I started looking around, trying to find a stack that's easy to learn since my time was limited- I still had to finish with my degree.

I played around with many languages and frameworks for a week or two. Decided to go with Ruby/Rails and built a small twitter clone blindly following a tutorial I found online and WAS I FUCKING EXITED for my small but handmade twitter clone had come to life. Coming from a C background, Ruby was weird and felt like a toy language but I fell in love.

My excitement didn't fade. I bought some books, studied hard for about a month, learned Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, SQL (w/ pg) and some HTML/CSS. Only playing with todo apps wasn't fun. I had a project idea I believed might be somewhat successful so I started working on it.

The next few months were spent studying and working on my project. It was hard. I had no experience on any web dev technology so I had learn so many new things all at once. Picked up React, ditched it and rewrote the front end with Vue. Read about TDD, worked with PostgreSQL, Redis and a dozen third party APIs, bought a vps and deployed everything from scratch. Played it with node and some machine learning with python.

Long story short, one year and about 30 books later, my project is up and running, has about 4k active monthly users, is making a profit and is steadily growing. If everything goes well, next week I'll close a deal with a pretty big client and I CANT BE FKING HAPPIER AND MORE EXCITED :D Towards the end of the month I'll also be interviewed for a web dev position.

That stupid twitter clone tutorial made me excited enough to start messing with web technologies. Thank you stupid twitter clone tutorial, a part of my heart will be yours forever.

So my day started well.

I come in an the DVR monitor is not working, ok lets turn it off and on, nope. Lets turn the DVR on and off, nope still nothing. Played around with the VGA cable, nope. I cant replace the cable because its hard wired into the monitor....

I grab the spare screen next to me and connect it all up and it works!

Boss tells me to throw "broken" monitor out, I say I want to test it just to make sure, connect it all up to my pc and now it fucking works!

There are days I hate technology....

For the one I currently have. Spent about 2 weeks looking to get as much of my PHP skillset in the right place since I knew PHP was their main technology as well as JS, C# and VB.NET, we seldom use them tbh, and it is mostly extension or maintenance stuff, so I focused on PHP.

I was not panicking, I rarely ever do, but my body tends to disagree with my state of mind and I can feel myself trembling in certain situations, such as the interview.

The interview was on Monday and my last day of preparation was Sunday (obviously) so what I did was drank a lot of beer and played videogames, I just wanted to take my mind off things. I was, and have always been annoyingly confident in myself and could not understand why I was feeling so nervous internally.

Everything went away when the manager came to greet me, lovely looking gal with an awesome sense of style and a big smile, we clicked instantly and to this day the place is kinda like my second home, as hectic as it is to work in an institution of this size it is really my peace and quiet zone. The entire I.T department is a big family, before the pandemic we would go to bbqs together all the time, would go to a friend's ranch to shoot shit and just chill, parties and gatherings, it really is a nice place to be at and they take the "we are family" very fucking seriously, I fucking love it. The boss lady ain't here no more, but she recommended me for the position and well, here I am.

I severely hope everyone here finds the same kind of place, there are a lot of assholes in this industry and a lot of places that seem very into the idea of making you absolutely miserable with no chance of leveling up, I know because all other jobs previous to this place was the same way for me.

Have faith, keep them chins up, and don't ever fucking let anyone make you think you are something you are not. You glorious beautiful basterds!

So Vivo made a bezeless phone this time
But guess what its again gonna contain a fucking kazillion Megapixel Selfie camera with Mars Light Flash to make you look Unique paired with a shit mediatek Processor.
Also,
They have got stones from krypton and their next phone is gonna have krypton light flash just so the fuckin superman can't use that just because they partnered with marvel to get infinity stones so that they can use them in their later phones as a light for the selfie flash.
Guess what? Thanos preodered it ..
Well Played Vivo

Google apparently blocked users of small browsers like Konqueror, Qutebrowser or Falkon from loggining into their account, because of "security" concerns. Well played, Google! I hope you will be happy if a few users will switch to your data crawling machine.

Well played Blizzard.

When I was in School we had one Computer room where the PC's were the school used to 'teach stuff about pcs' (mostly office and some Maya). These where connected to another via the network and reset to a predefined state Everytime they were rebooted.

Since we were somehow able to get into the room during breaks between the lessons we obviously abused the room and played Minecraft in there but since the machines reset each reboot there was not much progress. Also there was no Java installed, so we needed to install that as well (that can take ages on old, school machines.).

Since the machines were connected via the school network I found out how to reboot or shutdown the other machines remotely. That was really funny for me and a friend who quickly found that Minecraft is too boring. We were just constantly rebooting the PC's the others were just launching Minecraft on and thus resetting the whole Java and Minecraft installation.

Got a lot of angry curses but nothing serious happened afterwards. Was the first I felt really badass on the computer tho.

Well played Amazon. Oh I mean Amzaon

I like how this one gets you out of 2 weeks of making up topics. Well played @dfox @trogus 👍

When Elden Ring come out I ignored it, I was jobless, no money, game was expensive and I got into hate relationship with it.

Some time ago I launched twitch and saw that DLC come out. Struggled between buying or not because it reminded me my struggle with money.

Found that shop in my city sells box version of Elden Ring with DLC for PS5 and they have last one in their store.

I reserved it online without payment and it wasn’t immediate, I started thinking that someone bought it and I won’t play it. Felt happy I won’t spend money on game I hate.

Two hours later I got email that product is ready for picking up and it meant it will be rush hours when I go get it and didn’t liked it.

I work remotely and I’m not used to seeing many people, but well I wanted to play the game if it’s waiting for me.

After I arrived to the shop and went in I met the most honest guy who is selling games.

He asked me if I am souls fan. I said I never played souls game.

He asked three times if I really want to buy this game because it’s hard.
Told me he approached it 3 times already and didn’t stand a chance.

After chitchat I bought the game, paid cash because I love box games and cash anonymity.

Woman cough on me when I was on my way back, I said to myself fucking hell I’m going to be sick and I am starting my vacation next week.

I got really sick with a flu, played straight 2 weeks, I don’t have playstation plus so I can’t read any clues or play online but I don’t care.

It’s even better because you can enjoy more of the world not reading messages like you’re on gaming forum instead of playing game.

Dying from sickness helped me to don’t care about dying in game.

Two weeks later here I am, just killed Mohg and unlocked DLC on my ps5.

In achievements it says that only 38.5% of people killed Mohg.

Now I sit and wonder how many people bought DLC and will never play it because they can’t kill Mohg.

I love Elden Ring now. One of best games I played to this day.

The timing for it was perfect, the sickness, the game, one of the best vacations and one of the best journey in my life.

To whomever organized that adventure in my life.
Thanks, now it’s time to kill some more bosses.

My math teacher.

Simple story: His way of teaching was like bible study - he dictates the mathematical rules, the students had to write it down _exactly_ as told.
(Yes. He even dictated spaces / newlines / ....).

Had him for many years....
Since I was the rotten apple in class (I was always very weak regarding math), he had joy in mobbing me specifically.

It was one of the reasons I never thought about programming at all - or to be more precise, I _feared_ programming since everyone told me it would require intense knowledge of math.

Well. Fast forward. I went to university despite my fear, just because I was too stubborn to prove my math teacher right.

He was one of the counseling teachers too - and he made _very_ clear that I would fail in _anything_ regarding mathematics job wise.

I failed university, yes.

I gave up simply because I was too bored to learn and replay stuff by heart you'll certainly never need to remember your whole life.

Math played a role, too. Since I lacked the whole mathematical background, I barely passed the tests (mostly by a point).

But thanks to a lot of friends I learned that mathematics is helpful for programming - but not a must.

After giving up university, I started an apprenticeship.

And while I dreaded the decision for a long time, I couldn't be more happy about it.

Well played Alexanderr. If only, you stopped wasting time and put some aside to improve yourselves but no, you'd rather keep crying for me.

Well then, do as you please. And get rekt.

Story of my first successful project

Being part of a great team, I've shared in a lot of successes, one I am particularly proud of is my first attempt to use agile methodologies in a deeply waterfall-managment culture.

Time was June/July-ish and we applied for a national quality award where one key element in the application stated how well we handled customer complaint resolution.
While somewhat true (our customer service is the top-shelf good stuff), we did not have a systematic process in resolving customer complaints. Long story short,
the VP lied on her section of the application. Then came the 'emergency', borderline panic meeting (several VPs, managers, etc) to develop a process to better manage
complaints before the in-house inspection in December.
As most top priority projects go, the dev manager allocated 3 developers, 2 DBAs, and any/all network admins we would need (plus all the bureaucratic management that wanted their thumb in the pie).
Fast forward to August, after many, many planning meetings, lost interest, new shiny bouncing balls, I was the only one left on the project. The VP runs into the dev manager in the hallway and asks "Is my program done yet? If its not ready before December with report-able data, we will not win the award."
The <bleep> hit the fan...dev manager comes by...
Frank: "How the application coming along? Almost done?"
Me:"No, haven't really started coding. You moved Jake and Tom over to James's team, Tina quit, and you've had me sidetracked helping other teams because the DBAs are too busy."
Frank: "So, it's excuses. You really think the national quality award auditors care about your excuses? The specification design document has been done for months. This is unacceptable."
Me: "The VP finished up her section yesterday and according to the process, we can't start coding until the document is signed off."
Frank: "Holy f<bleep>ing sh<bleep>t! No one told you *you* couldn't start. You know how to create tables and write code."
Me: "There is no specification to write to. The design document is all about how they plan on reporting the data, not how call agents will be using the application to serve customers."
Frank: "The f<bleep> it isn't. F<bleep>ing monkeys could code against that specification, I helped write it! NO MORE F<bleep>ING EXCUSES! This is your top priority from now on!"

I was 'cleared' to work directly with the call center manager and the VP to develop a fully integrated customer complaint management system before December (by-passing any of the waterfall processes that would get in the way).

I had heard about this 'agile' stuff, attended a few conference tracks on the subject, read the manifesto, and thought "I could do this.".

Over the next month, I had my own 'sprints' and 'scrums' with the manager (at the time, 'agile' was a dirty word so I had to be careful of my words and what info I shared) and by the 2nd iteration had a working prototype.
Feature here, feature there (documenting the 'whys' and 'whats' along the way), and by October, had a full deployed application.

Not thinking I would get a parade or anything, the dev manager came back from a meeting where the VP was showing off the new app to the other VPs (and how she didn't really 'lie' on the application)

Frank: "Everyone is pleased how well the project turned out, except one thing. Erin said you bothered him too much with too many questions."
Me: "Bothered? Did he really say that?"
Frank: "No, not directly, but he said you would stop by his office every day to show him your progress and if he needed you to change anything. You shouldn't have done that."
Me: "Erin really seemed to like the continuous feedback. What we have now is very different than what we started with."
Frank: "Yes, probably because you kept bothering him and not following the specification document. That is why we spend so much time up front in design is so we don't waste management's time, which is exactly what you did."
Me: "We beat the deadline by two months, so I don't think I wasted anyone's time. In fact, this is kind of a big win for us, right?"
Frank: "Not really. There was breakdown in the process. We need better focus on the process, not in these one-hit-wonders."

End the end, the company won the award (mgmt team got to meet the vice president, yes the #2 guy). I know I played a very small, somewhat insignificant role in that victory, I was extremely proud to be part of the team.

I played around with game scripts (in C-like syntax) and even wrote my own (well, halfway) before learning some Java at school. Had a bad internship and decided to waste a few years by studying engineering, where I failed everything but programming. Before getting kicked out I exmatriculated myself then I kinda came to the conclusion of "How about doing something that seems quite natural to me?".

!rant

@dfox @trogus

I just watched the "die bastard die" cartoon and have to say it's fucking excellent.

I never actually laugh out loud at these things, but this made me piss myself a little bit.

Well played.

My colleagues don't look at me weird when I reply to "so what did you get up to in your week off" with "played the new World of Warcraft expansion launch".
Well not always weird.

I remember that when I was about 8 years old, my dad brought a desktop computer home one day.

I don’t remember any specs, but it had a huge ass CRT monitor, a very loud clicky keyboard, a mouse with a real ball inside, and a CPU that uses floppy discs and CDs. Nope, CDs, not DVDs. And on that computer, it ran Windows 95. There’s was no internet most of the time (it was still quite expensive and unnecessary and dial up was troublesome to set up back then).

I remembered playing bootlegged games sold in CDs that my dad bought during his trips to China back then. Duke nukem, Command and Conquer Red Alert 2, Microsoft solitaire and GTA 3. Those were the games I played.

As a kid, it was glorious, looking through a box on a table, seeing and interacting with so many different worlds, stories, characters and games. I really miss those simpler times.

These days, every time I open my laptop, and I see that new mail that need to be dealt with, that homework that’s about to be due and a reminder of my next class in 15 min. Well shit.

Any recommendations for introductory books on electrical engineering? I'm looking for something that goes into detail on the basics: tension, current, resistance, inductance, capacitance, etc. I have very little knowledge on the subject (I know what the basic components do and that's it) and I found myself struggling a bit with the most basic concept: voltage.

I grabbed my multimeter, a few resistors and a battery and played around a bit. For some reason it doesn't really "click" why on a 5v circuit with 3 2.2k ohm resistors (I think) the voltage around each resistor was like ~1.3 volts or something, while on a circuit with 2 resistors the voltage accross each one was ~2.3 something volts (I don't remember exact values). Like, I know that voltage is a difference in potential, but I still don't get it and idk what I'm missing. Why is the difference in potential accross a resistor different if the circuit has 2 resistors in series instead of 3. It kinda makes sense in my head but at the same time it doesn't.

In short, I want to know the "why" stuff works the way it does, not just the "how".

Also, if the book covers common practices, components, and circuits that'd be very helpful. I want to learn how to build well-designed, reliable and safe circuits.

God, playing SoulSilver has made me remember an era (or two, but I wasn't alive for one and the other was my childhood) where games were actually fucking *GOOD.* Some games can be absolute home runs now on rare occasion, but if I name consoles from these periods, you can INSTANTLY tell me at least one game that is pretty universally regarded as a best-ever.

Examples and predicted responses:

-Gamecube: Too fucking many to even count. Instant answers vary immensely, but everyone who's played games on this thing have one.

-Original Xbox: Halo 2 is the one instantly on one's lips, or maybe CE for some. Also JSRF.

-Dreamcast: SA2 or Phantasy Star or JSR or...

-PS1/2: Resident Evil, Spyro, Final Fantasy, Ratchet & Clank...

-PS3: Lara Croft games, Uncharted, Infamous... (this one's right on the border, it seems)

-NES: The fucking birthplace of modernized gaming.

-Genesis: Sonic games, obviously. Some may answer with arcade titles, too.

-SNES: Mario games. Mario Paint, SMW, SMW2, SMAS, a couple like Super Metroid or Kirby's Dreamland or F-Zero may come up too.

-N64: Banjo Kazooie, F-Zero GX, Waveracer, 1080, Zelda games...

-Gameboy (all systems:) Pokemon is the instant answer.

Now, a harder one:

-Wii U? Maybe one of the Mii game things? U-less games? Not many people remember the games for this system.

-Xbox One? Halo 5, pretty much. You probably played everything else on PC.

-PS4? The PS3 lineup, but without any soul? You played pretty much everything here on PC, too.

Is there a point to this rant? Yes. Kind of.
Games used to be great, not just due to better hardware, but due to people putting some goddamn heart and soul into making games, and due to creativity stemming from working on such limited hardware. It seems the more powerful consoles (and PCs!) get, the more gaming becomes a soulless cash grab to drain cash from wallets on subpar products with paywalls every 20 feet you have to clear to get the "full experience." Gaming has become less about letting people have fun and being creative with games and more about the bottom dollar, whether that be through making games as fast and as cheap as possible with as much paid content dumped on top as possible, or the systematic erasure of archival efforts to preserve gaming history. From what I read here on devRant, that seems to be the moral of anything computer-related as well. Computers are made to slow down and fail far faster than normal via OEM bloat and shitty OSes, and are used to constantly empty one's wallets with constant licensing fees and free trials and deliberate consumer ignorance. None of it's about having fun anymore. Fun seems to no longer have a place in computing at all.

If you take anything from any of the madman-esque loosely-structured rambling i'm saying here, make it that "the enemy of creativity is the abscense of limitations... and the presence of greed." Another message i'd like to leave you with is "start having fun when making things whenever possible, as it improves not just the dev process, but user experience, too." You can't always apply this, and sometimes you can never do so, but always keep it in mind.

In year 2000, I was 10, Tunisian government had made it possible for middle class families to get cheap computers and pay later. So my dad brought one home.
I played with it then I got more interested in what was inside.
Think of it as a 10 years old with no prior experience playing puzzle with computer parts.
It can't end well.
But the thrill I felt while doing it definitely had something to do with my career.
Hint: I don't do hardware :v

Equifax had "admin" as password in Argentina.
Well played (yourself) man!

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.

I got banned from facebook for being a fake profile... And I literally stumbled upon hundreds of fake profiles and never seen them banning.

Well played fb 😑

I got my first PC when i was 8 years old.
I played games, and just played around with the computer configurations etc..
I also remember in my English class, I was asked to say what i wanted to be when i grow up, so I told the teacher: "When i grow up, i want to become a computer"
well who's laughing now b*tch

I was always into computers, ever since I was a kid. Played a lot of videogames on Windows 98 and XP, and a lot of my earliest drawings were level ideas for those games. My first encounters with code were with game creation software like GameMaker, but I barely touched the code proper outside of editing a few variables from other people's code. After that I basically forgot all about it and spent most of my teen years being a shutin.

Skip ahead to my last year of high school without much idea on what to do. I was good at math when I wasn't being a lazy shit, so between that and what my parents expected of me, I was prepared to go to university for civil engineering. However, two things changed that decision, the first being a great IT professor, when me and a friend were so far ahead, he started assigning us some harder work, and suggested we study computer science at university. The second was a super jank and obscure open-source early 2000's game that somehow still has a thriving community and is actively being developed. I stumbled upon it by chance, and after playing for a while, I submitted a balance change on the GitHub repo. Even though it was just a single variable change, that time I got it. That time I saw how powerful programming could be and what could be done with it. I submitted PR after PR of new features, changes and bugfixes, by the time I left there I had a somewhat solid grasp of the fundamentals of programming, and decided to enrol in the computer science degree.

Enrolling was possibly the best decision I ever made (not america; debt isn't an issue), as well as giving me actual social skills, every course I took just clicked. The knowledge I already somewhat intuitively had a vague grasp on from videogames, general computer use and collaborating with russian coders who produced the jankiest shit that was still somehow functional was expanded upon and consolidated with a high-quality formal education. Four years later and I'm fresh out of uni, it was a long road between when the seed was first planted in my mind and now, but I've finally found out what I want to do with my life.

won't know for sure until i find a job though ffs

Well I used to play games at my Father’s computer, it was an old FPS online game really fun, I played it like everyday when I was 6 yo. Two years later the computer broke and we had to buy a new one, so my father insisted that we buy two computers, one for him to work and one for my own computer and assembled it myself. I thought myself to do it by a book and took me like 2 weeks to figure it out and assemble the whole thing. I love every minute of it.

I started down my career path to make games. I have never really made anything good. I think I am finally fed up with not doing this. So I am going to be working on selecting a game engine. I want 3D, I want to experiment with voxels, I want a permissive license, I don't want something huge, I want to contribute back in a meaningful way, it needs to support 3D. So after looking around I found Godot. Another programmer who lives near me uses this as well.

Does anyone else have some good positive experience with game engines for smaller projects? I have played with UE4 and Torque3D/2D. I don't like the bloated feel of UE4 even though its a very cool engine. I didn't like their install system at all. T3D is old and not up to date.

So when writing golang code, you can put alias into the imported library
And one of interns in my office include include our company's library called "helper/session", and alias it with 'hSession'
Now all the code which use that library has to look like "hSession.ErrUnexpected", "hSession.NewSession"

Well, i think i've played too much VN and anime, but still i'm having a good laugh when doing the code review

That rabbit in my grandpa's left table drawer, in the home I grew at. I wanted to finally catch it, and kill it. I was bad with animals all along, especially this one. My grandpa died the year before I was born, and my grandma said we would've got along really well. So much to talk about, a scientist to an engineer. So, I travelled back, but my home somehow turned from a city stone-walled house into a half-soaked, decaying wooden one. I caught that rabbit though, but while I was holding it at its neck and twisting it, it somehow disappeared, distributed evenly as if I were twisting a crayon. I was trying to find it, but in that left drawer, among century-old pencils and that red liquid thermometer I played with as a kid, only a faded out, dusty duckling resided. I picked it up, and unlike the rabbit, it was paper, no, cigarette paper thin. It wasn't hostile. It wasn't trying to run away. It just turned from yellow to grey, feathers leaving my fingers covered in fine dust. I realized it will never die, dwelling and decaying there forever, happy.

I did my calculations, and I knew for a fact when and where the rabbit should've appeared. It was the middle drawer, not the left one. I opened it and looked in anticipation how something chewed through the bottom. I caught it, but it was no rabbit, it was an alive, rubber rat. The rubber was white turned grey, old, aged, dusty, probably Soviet. I poked the rat's eye with a pen rod, but the rat's body inflated a bit, leaving it invincible. It was mocking me.

Of the same white rubber, a ball appeared. I knew for a fact it was alive too, I felt the bones inside holding it. I found its lips, and was prying it open. The massive, dry mouth emerged, with a full set of human teeth, albeit wider and nastier ones. Huge eyes looked at me. It was alive, it was intelligent. It was my grandpa's personal financial assistant all along. It told me to leave the rat and the rabbit alone. He told me not to worry about the ducking, as it was in safe hands.

It made friends with my brother during the "blue age", when he was wearing thin, worn out rugs instead of clothes, tiny faded blue flowers on them, screaming and annoying my grandma he lived with in that room, not a single person other than the two in sight. The house was slowly submerging. The water was rising.

I love this weekly group rant, it made me think back when my mom started to work in a kindergarten and she used to take me to work when i was 4-7 years old ('94 - '97).

There was this "TV" and all the kids used to smash the buttons on it. It also played sound, but there was always a lot of kids there so I was shy to ask them if I push the buttons too. But I was the teachers son, so I didn't had to sleep in the afternoon, and then I discovered this computer thing I was amazed, it was like nothing I saw before, you push it and it does what you pushed and, *_* this smiley is exactly me back then. It was probably an old commodore with green text on the black screen. It was the moment when I decided to get more information about this wonder.

In elementary school (around '98) we had this computer room and as I was one of the best students back then I was granted access to it. It was a huge success in a post communist country to get money for new computers to teach us kids to use them back then, so only the chosen ones could use them, and I was one of them, one of the best time time of my life, honestly. At this moment I knew for sure, I want one and when I grow up I gonna work with them. I had no idea what you can do with it but every adult is talking about how well paid are the people who use them at work. :D it sounds funny now

In '89 or '99 we visited our family in a town far away. My grandfathers sisters boyfriend had a computer and he said, look I also have internet. This face again *_* what the hell is internet. So he explained me this internet thing which "makes all computers connected, but you have to pay for it and it kinda works like wired phones you know. Here you put the address and you can open the website"
me: website, whoooa *_*
8-9 year old clever me: "but how do you know what are the addresses, do you have a phonebook for these addresses?"
he showed me google, and a slovak and czech search engine, I remember searching for "funny pictures" on the slovak search engine, because I was thinking If I search google, its english so he would pay too much :D

I didn't had a computer until I was 13 years old, but then I started to messing with Microsoft Front Page 2003, was amazed with the html and css generated by it and started to editing it.

Now Im a front end web dev

First computer I saw was an Apple II running Oregon Trail in grade school. Then I played computer games on my uncles Apple IIe. The first home video game I ever saw was Pong. It was a device you hooked to the RF input on the TV. It had 2 paddles to control the input (single axis controllers). The first game console I played on was the Atari. The first computer I programmed was on a black and white Macintosh. Then the other programmers in my high school told me the PC was better. Well, it was better for learning IMO. That was with Windows 3.0. But the programming was Turbo Pascal in DOS. DOS gave you complete control of the machine. Better at the time for me learning to do graphics and sounds programming. The first computer I bought was a 386 and I played with VR programming. Made my own joysticks using the limited joystick port. Fun times learning electronics and software together.

Anyone knows of any worthwhile android mobile games to kill the time going to and fro work, when not in the mood to read?

I'm tired of all the "Causal Clicker" or "Freemium" crap that is on the playstore these days...

Some of the best titles that I ever played were:
* Plague.inc - Strategy, infect and wipe out all of humanity kind of game
* Battle of Polytopia - Strategy, 4X game with very well done controls and cute graphics
* Pocket City - Cities: Skylines-esque city builder
* Stardew Valley - Farming-centered RPG

I want to play some games in my free time, what would be the best option for me ?

choice 1 : ps5 or xbox?
choice 2 : monitor or 4k tv
choice 3 : above choices or simply buy a windows laptop?

context :

1. i have never been a hardcore gamer. i don't dig multiplayer global kinda games like pubg, or other fps. I rather like offline story games like takken or NFS most wanted 2005

2. my current laptop is a macbook. i started development with windows laptop years ago, and at that time i was free enough to complete most wanted 2005 and max payne 1/2 (with cheats) i liked gta vice city / sanandreas as well, but i could not pass its missions and would rather end up roaming around

3. i recently played it takes 2 , some bmx bike racing and some archery game with my friend on his PS5 and damn i liked that crispy super fast and detailed graphical games. might be a good investment for relaxation and weekend time pass

4. i am shifting homes and in need of a personal tv/display as I don't want to share family tv anymore. i don't really watch any cable tv shows apart from news channels and mainly consume ott content (netflix ,prime Hotstar etc) i am wondering if a display could also be mounted on wall and could be able to run otts vis some firestick, jio stick or google cast etc.

5. as i mentioned that i never had a taste for gaming, i wonder if all above would be a bad choice and if i should simply buy a good windows laptop

( whatever that technology is , all i want is to control that screen content with a remote, like we do in tv)

So what's best for me?

I started a rice after 3 years of happily using KDE, and apparently everything uses CSS for styling now? I'm not complaining, Polybar offered like 4 options and we just played around with glyph fonts, compared to that this is a joyride.

Also, Eww is brilliant. I've seen people make full fucking UIs and custom notification centers and shit with it. I don't have that much time on my hands, but the option is there. All this with janky Lisp and Sass.

Eww also confirmed a suspicion of mine regarding Orchid; language adoption is a matter of convenience. I can get people to learn my language by offering cool trinkets and useful tools to people who have a predisposition to learning. Yuck is an aptly named language but it's not totally unusable, and because I had to learn it to make my status bar I'm now more inclined to write the corresponding scripts in it as well and I'm actually quite disappointed that I have to use Bash for that.

So, ya boi was making a google action and struggling with account linking. Everytime I tested, it just instantly crashed. 3 days of asking slack forums and searching online.

I was so desperate that I made a second account and made it an editor on my skill. Tried to test and there we go.

Google actions don't run account linking when the owner tests it. Well played google, well played

semiRant
The debugging options in VSCodium for when working with golang have certain limitations on them that have made me start writing more tests inside of my codebase (s).

I find this both beautiful and frustrating at the same time since for 1 it has made me(no, forced me) to learn testing on the language as a primary thing rather than an afterthought (judge me all you want) and if this was added by design to force people into properly writing tests then BRAVO.

Well played Mr. Pike and Mr. Thompson, well fucking played you outstanding beautiful bastards.

the last several times i reached out to support there were at least 5 days of tumbleweed and cricket noises. fine with that while not accessing personal mails during the week. last time i got a response the next day with request for more information and case closed the other day due to lack of response. well played...

Back in the day when I was a student, I travelled for almost 3 hours by train multiple times per month... I played Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 on my laptop all the way. Surprisingly, even while wearing large headphones, I connected with many people who saw me playing a game that they loved.

RCT2 remains a brilliant game today. The OpenRCT2 project is very well maintained and I can highly recommend it if you want to play it on your modern computer.