Oh my god... Storytime.

A customer comes in with I assume is his father or grandfather.

Customer: I need a computer, but without all the internals

Me: So a case?

Customer: Yes, I need a Dell computer outsides, but without the internal components.

Me: Well, we don't have Dell cases, but we sell custom build cases and they come with a power supply.

Customer: *says nothing, but looks interested*

Me: *walks over to the cases to show him* So this is what the cases look like and we have two types, one for a ATX and one for a micro-ATX.

Customer: *still says nothing, but looks at them*

Me: What motherboard do you have at the moment?

Customer: Well, I don't have anything right now, but I'm replacing another computer that didn't work very well. I'm going to be getting some Dell parts to put in here.

Me: O-okay. So this other computer, I'd like to see it in shop to see what's going on with it.

Customer: Oh, you do NOT want to do that. I hooked it up to another computer and it blew it up.

Me: Huh, that's weird. I'd still like to look at it if possible.

Customer: Oh no, it's all wired wrong and... *some bullshit, but stay with me*

Customer: I am the best at technology. My hand has computer parts in it--government funded. *some more bullshit*

Me: Okay... *I try to bring it back around* Well, I'd still like to see the other computer for myself. So you don't have parts for this new build yet, right? You don't know what type of motherboard you have?

Customer: No.

Me: Well, I would get the internals first, so you know what size of case to get, and then get the case.

Customer: Okay. Thank you for your time.

He shook my hand with his "cyborg" hand and I was tempted to say something about "try not to crush my hand," but elected not to. Also during this entire exchange, the old man continuously farted in the background.

First thing this morning I heard my boss had taken some PSDs to a client today. I thought it was a bit weird because he doesn't have a laptop. Midday I got a call to say all my PSDs were corrupted:

"I'm with the client now. We're very unhappy, we can't get your files to open."
"Oh, right. They should be fine. What version of Photoshop are you using?"
"The latest."
"Okay, what's the error?"
"There isn't one."
"Okay, so it's freezing?"
"No, we can't see the files at all."
"Which laptop are you using?"
"The Nexus."
"The what?"
"That tablet thing."

So after about 20 minutes we figured out he's copied the PSDs and a shortcut to Photoshop on to a USB stick. Then plugged the USB into a USB to micro USB cable and stuck that in an Android Nexus. Expecting to open Photoshop.exe and the PSDs.

I don't mind people being confused with technology but when it's your own boss, who doesn't even bother to let you know anything, then phones up and tells you off you just want to strangle him.

I'm drunk and I'll probably regret this, but here's a drunken rank of things I've learned as an engineer for the past 10 years.

The best way I've advanced my career is by changing companies.

Technology stacks don't really matter because there are like 15 basic patterns of software engineering in my field that apply. I work in data so it's not going to be the same as webdev or embedded. But all fields have about 10-20 core principles and the tech stack is just trying to make those things easier, so don't fret overit.

There's a reason why people recommend job hunting. If I'm unsatisfied at a job, it's probably time to move on.

I've made some good, lifelong friends at companies I've worked with. I don't need to make that a requirement of every place I work. I've been perfectly happy working at places where I didn't form friendships with my coworkers and I've been unhappy at places where I made some great friends.

I've learned to be honest with my manager. Not too honest, but honest enough where I can be authentic at work. What's the worse that can happen? He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks.

If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.

pour another glass

Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer.

When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it.

Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.

The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)

Related to above, writing good proposals for changes is a great skill.

Almost every holy war out there (vim vs emacs, mac vs linux, whatever) doesn't matter... except one. See below.

The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.

If I ever find myself thinking I'm the smartest person in the room, it's time to leave.

I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.

We should hire more interns, they're awesome. Those energetic little fucks with their ideas. Even better when they can question or criticize something. I love interns.

sip

Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.

Tech stack matters. OK I just said tech stack doesn't matter, but hear me out. If you hear Python dev vs C++ dev, you think very different things, right? That's because certain tools are really good at certain jobs. If you're not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It's a shitty programming language that's good at almost everything.

The greatest programming language ever is lisp. I should learn lisp.

For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.

Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.

Cushy government jobs are not what they are cracked up to be, at least for early to mid-career engineers. Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology. Much respect to government workers but seriously there's a reason why the median age for engineers at those places is 50+. Advice does not apply to government contractors.

Third party recruiters are leeches. However, if you find a good one, seriously develop a good relationship with them. They can help bootstrap your career. How do you know if you have a good one? If they've been a third party recruiter for more than 3 years, they're probably bad. The good ones typically become recruiters are large companies.

Options are worthless or can make you a millionaire. They're probably worthless unless the headcount of engineering is more than 100. Then maybe they are worth something within this decade.

Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks.

It's maddening how few people working with the internet don't know anything about the protocols that make it work. Web work, especially, I spend far too much time explaining how status codes, methods, content-types etc work, how they're used and basic fundamental shit about how to do the job of someone building internet applications and consumable services.

The following has played out at more than one company:

App: "Hey api, I need some data"
API: "200 (plain text response message, content-type application/json, 'internal server error')"
App: *blows the fuck up

*msg service team*

Me: "Getting a 200 with a plaintext response containing an internal server exception"
Team: "Yeah, what's the problem?"
Me: "...200 means success, the message suggests 500. Either way, it should be one of the error codes. We use the status code to determine how the application processes the request. What do the logs say?"
Team: "Log says that the user wasn't signed in. Can you not read the response message and make a decision?"
Me: "That status for that is 401. And no, that would require us to know every message you have verbatim, in this case, it doesn't even deserialize and causes an exception because it's not actually json."
Team: "Why 401?"
Me: "It's the code for unauthorized. It tells us to redirect the user to the sign in experience"
Team: "We can't authorize until the user signs in"
Me: *angermatopoeia* "Just, trust me. If a user isn't logged in, return 401, if they don't have permissions you send 403"
Team: *googles SO* "Internet says we can use 500"
Me: "That's server error, it says something blew up with an unhandled exception on your end. You've already established it was an auth issue in the logs."
Team: "But there's an error, why doesn't that work?"
Me: "It's generic. It's like me messaging you and saying, "your service is broken". It doesn't give us any insight into what went wrong or *how* we should attempt to troubleshoot the error or where it occurred. You already know what's wrong, so just tell me with the status code."
Team: "But it's ok, right, 500? It's an error?"
Me: "It puts all the troubleshooting responsibility on your consumer to investigate the error at every level. A precise error code could potentially prevent us from bothering you at all."
Team: "How so?"
Me: "Send 401, we know that it's a login issue, 403, something is wrong with the request, 404 we're hitting an endpoint that doesn't exist, 503 we know that the service can't be reached for some reason, 504 means the service exists, but timed out at the gateway or service. In the worst case we're able to triage who needs to be involved to solve the issue, make sense?"
Team: "Oh, sounds cool, so how do we do that?"
Me: "That's down to your technology, your team will need to implement it. Most frameworks handle it out of the box for many cases."
Team: "Ah, ok. We'll send a 500, that sound easiest"
Me: *..l.. -__- ..l..* "Ok, let's get into the other 5 problems with this situation..."

Moral of the story: If this is you: learn the protocol you're utilizing, provide metadata, and stop treating your customers like shit.

Being a programmer on a non-tech startup company is not too bad. That means aside from coding:

- You have to check if the office printer works
- You need to figure out why the phone lines aren't ringing
- You have to teach a stupid colleague on how to unzip a file
- When they give you a task, they'll say that it's "not urgent", but, they just "need it by tomorrow"
- You have to be a "mind-reader" because if something goes wrong, they don't know how to describe what's going on. Or probably, they're just too lazy being specific. They'll just say, "Hey, I have a problem.", and you will be like "What problem? Your dog is sick? You shit your pants? You lost your faith in God? Fuck what?"
- You don't have a time to "focus", because everyone interrupts you for just about anything related to "technology". Yeah, because you're the IT guy
- You always have learned and applied the latest practices/stacks, but no one gives a fuck
- You will start to re-think your life and devrants make you feel better

(!dev)

Fuck Twitter.

I get sucked in for 10 minutes through some news article, and my blood is boiling.

I think the platform does not even deserve to exist.

And I didn't think I would ever say that.

I used to be a staunch defender of the free & open internet, even with it's ugly and extreme sides, because I was convinced the good would outshine the evil.

I displayed the Pirate flag with pride on the mast outside of my house, I was intimately involved in the founding of their political party in my country. I was convinced of the power of the internet, I believed it would empower democracy and debate.

So why do simple tweets, even just the ones about technology, incite an endless stream of vile ultranationalist & misogynist hate?

How is it that those who are reasonable get drowned out?

That fucking character limit is a cancer.

The orator's wings are clipped. The richness of language is wilting before our eyes. All that remains are a bunch of caged chickens pecking every argument to death.

I will defend the right to free speech, even when it comes to the most disagreeable and controversial opinions.

But Twitter does not promote free speech. It's poison to free speech.

It's an endless torrent of non sequiturs, which constricts all reason and intellect. It replaces free speech by pretending to have equal value.

I really don't care if you are left or right, socialist or libertarian, globalist or nationalist.

You can argue to me that we should close all borders for immigrants, that Apple makes great products, that genocide has its pros, you could try to convince me that Heineken tastes acceptable (sorry AlexDeLarge), that Linux should be outlawed or that we should really try to bring this Eugenics thing back again.

Just be fucking rational -- and "Rationality implies the conformity of one's beliefs with one's reasons to believe"

You can NOT fit both your beliefs and their supporting reasons in 140 or even 280 characters.

So what's left is just your beliefs.

Stripped of all reason.

Repeat it often enough, keep spewing, keep throwing out incomplete arguments, and you'll train yourself to forego ratio in your convictions completely.

All social platforms should get a forced captcha for every spelling/grammar error, and a 1000 character minimum.

The world would be a slightly better place.

Fucking gimmicks.

You know what the worst experience in technology is? A virtual keyboard. FUCK typing on a smooth piece of glass.

What's the solution? Attachable real keyboard. That blocks the bottom of the screen. Making it a normal laptop. Fuck off.

Why the fuck does people who teach in professional colleges doesn't have the mindset to update their godamnn fucking dinosaur knowledge to the least basics of modern technology.

Had to do this mini-project for uni, and the languages allowed included java, python, php or any similar frontend tools for creating desktop app or web app. I planned on taking React + Express cz apparently that'll fall in the category.

Now she starts yelling at my project saying its not allowed and when I fucking asked her "can I use node.js which is basically javascript" she said yes.

And for gods sake she has a Masters degree and phd but doesn't even know what's the difference between get and post request!! Fed up with this college shit!!

I recently joined a new company where work is quite different than my previous company.
Every day at work is challenging for me. There is good exposure to learn technology in depth. But time constraint to deliver module like under 3 days does not let me learn my work, also I am not satisfy with the quality of my code that I provide, it more looks like a patch. In my previous company I was favorite developer of my team but here I feel like a fresher who doesn't know from where to start.

Even I feel like my presence does not make any impact in office as I am just like an extra player of the team. I am slow at my work because I learn then I code due to which my manager does not consider me for any new work. I feel like left out in my team.

Once I overheard one of my colleague he called me helpless and were making fun of me. With every passing day I am losing my confidence.

I have no github reputation. It's like I am jack of all trades but master of none.

Every day is like big fight day in office.
I know our only way to survive in this industry is to keep on learning but in smart way. I am not sure what's that smart way?

Any advice would be helpful.

So, I'm living in a completely computer illiterate family and I was called to help my father with something on a Laptop where he wanted to stream his favorite Soccer-Club.

So I walk up to him, ask what's wrong, and he says (roughly translated from German) "That thing doesn't work!"

And I'm just like ((Wat u mean))
So I ask him to explain the problem in detail.
Apparently his streaming service wasn't loading his stream.

Well damn I say, try searching for the problem on Google and find a solution.
((But no no no imma just call my son for everything that's freaking wrong with tech, he sure knows what to do))

As I'm not that experienced with Webservices as of yet, I had no idea what to do.

He was fucking furious!

"You always act like you know everything about tech and programs and stuff and can't even help me with fixing this Stream-Thing?!"

I responded simply by saying "It's not my area of work!"

Seems like he didn't know the difference between TECH-JESUS and hobbyist software engineer.

So I stand there and he just goes on one of these typical boomer tech illiterate rants, of which I'm sure you can imagine enough being on this platform.

tl;Dr; It pisses me of big time how people are not even trying to understand technology, nor attempting to help themselves by eG. Googling some simple problem, but rather just ask around and then being pissed off if the asked person just doesn't know the answer or can't help!

I've promised to do the Mozilla rant about the whole meritocracy thing a few days ago.. well, this is that. Along with some other stuff along the way. Haven't ranted for a couple of days man, shit happened! But losing 6 days that could've been spent on finishing my power supply project.. to a stupid cold, it got a little bit on my nerves, so that's what I've been working on for the time being. Hopefully I'll be able to finish it up in a couple of days.

1. COCKtail party thingy

Turns out that there's this conference in Brussels in a couple of days about the whole Article 13 copyright stuff. I've been letting a mail to the MEP's about it mature on my systems for a while now.. well, maturing or procrastinating, you be the judge 😛
Now I'm glad that I waited with that though. It's mostly a developer-centric insight into how the directive would be a horrible idea.. think AI, issues with context recognition, Tom Scott's video on Penistone and Scunthorpe etc etc. But maybe I can include some stuff from the event afterwards.
Also, if you're coming to the conference too, do let me know! Little devRant meet while we're at it, it'd be fucking great! I'll try to remember to bring my Christmas ducks, they've got these cute little Santa hats 😋

(P.S.: about the whole COCKtail, I saw the email while drunk and during registration I had to choose an email address.. I figured, feminazis are doing such a great job at going out of their way to find offense in everything, I figured that I'd make their job a little bit easier by sending a COCK bomb in my registration mail address, in the hopes that it finds its way to one of them.. evil, I know XD)

2. The whole feminazi stuff at Mozilla

So Mozilla hates meritocracy now? I've been wanting to rant about the big bad meritocracy for a while now. Thank you Mozilla for giving me an incentive to actually do it!

Meritocracy, feminazis think it's bad because it's about power relationships and discrimination, right? But what if I told you that that is exactly what makes great software great. Good code, good merit, is what's welcomed in software development.. or at least it should be. Because it's a job of fucking knowledge, experience, and quality! Also, meritocracy is a great thing because nobody cares if you're a professional developer in a suit, getting paid to work on a piece of OSS, or a homegamer neonazi who's coding shit in their underwear while wanking to child porn.. nobody fucking cares. If your code, your merit, is good, contribute ahead! Super inclusive, yet apparently bad because bad code is excluded to ensure the health of the project.

So what is the alternative to the big bad meritocracy? Inclusion (or as it's looked like in practice, more like exclusion) based on gender/sex, political orientation, things like that. But not actual fucking merit, the ability to write good code. How the fuck is politics and gender going to be any good at all to an inherently meritocratic craft?! Oh but yeah, it's great for inclusion. It's like females in tech. Artificial growth is just a matter of growth numbers and the only folks who like it are fucking HR and wanketeering cunts, and feminazis. Merit, that's what matters!! And have you ever considered that females are generally not interested in technology? Or for that matter, where's our inclusion movement for men in healthcare?! Gender equality my ass.

That's just my two cents on it of course. Meritocracy shouldn't be abandoned in tech. And even if it's just a matter of calling it something else. How the fuck is it a good idea to not call a pot a fucking pot just because someone might take offense at it?! It's meritocracy, call it fucking meritocracy!!! And while we're at it, call a master a fucking master and a slave a fucking slave!

Today I attended an interview with one of the biggest companies in Automative Technology. What's the worse that could happen. I waited at the reception, then I was taken in. Pushed into a small room. The room could accommodate a single person, but the interviewer and a lady cramped in. I sat on a small chair pushed to the wall. Fuck, I felt claustrophobic. The whole atmosphere was unpleasant. Especially when I tried to see the interviewer, his chest hair kept screaming at me. For God sake, button your shirt man. As the interview went, I figured out, they were not interested in having interview in the first place. Demeaning it was. As I got up to leave, the interviewer walked out first. Then I noticed his feet. Sandals. Goes well with the unbuttoned shirt. Isn't it. If he was going to be my manager, I rather not go even if I get selected.

Want to make someone's life a misery? Here's how.

Don't base your tech stack on any prior knowledge or what's relevant to the problem.

Instead design it around all the latest trends and badges you want to put on your resume because they're frequent key words on job postings.

Once your data goes in, you'll never get it out again. At best you'll be teased with little crumbs of data but never the whole.

I know, here's a genius idea, instead of putting data into a normal data base then using a cache, lets put it all into the cache and by the way it's a volatile cache.

Here's an idea. For something as simple as a single log lets make it use a queue that goes into a queue that goes into another queue that goes into another queue all of which are black boxes. No rhyme of reason, queues are all the rage.

Have you tried: Lets use a new fangled tangle, trust me it's safe, INSERT BIG NAME HERE uses it.

Finally it all gets flushed down into this subterranean cunt of a sewerage system and good luck getting it all out again. It's like hell except it's all shitty instead of all fiery.

All I want is to export one table, a simple log table with a few GB to CSV or heck whatever generic format it supports, that's it.

So I run the export table to file command and off it goes only less than a minute later for timeout commands to start piling up until it aborts. WTF. So then I set the most obvious timeout setting in the client, no change, then another timeout setting on the client, no change, then i try to put it in the client configuration file, no change, then I set the timeout on the export query, no change, then finally I bump the timeouts in the server config, no change, then I find someone has downloaded it from both tucows and apt, but they're using the tucows version so its real config is in /dev/database.xml (don't even ask). I increase that from seconds to a minute, it's still timing out after a minute.

In the end I have to make my own and this involves working out how to parse non-standard binary formatted data structures. It's the umpteenth time I have had to do this.

These aren't some no name solutions and it really terrifies me. All this is doing is taking some access logs, store them in one place then index by timestamp. These things are all meant to be blazing fast but grep is often faster. How the hell is such a trivial thing turned into a series of one nightmare after another? Things that should take a few minutes take days of screwing around. I don't have access logs any more because I can't access them anymore.

The terror of this isn't that it's so awful, it's that all the little kiddies doing all this jazz for the first time and using all these shit wipe buzzword driven approaches have no fucking clue it's not meant to be this difficult. I'm replacing entire tens of thousands to million line enterprise systems with a few hundred lines of code that's faster, more reliable and better in virtually every measurable way time and time again.

This is constant. It's not one offender, it's not one project, it's not one company, it's not one developer, it's the industry standard. It's all over open source software and all over dev shops. Everything is exponentially becoming more bloated and difficult than it needs to be. I'm seeing people pull up a hundred cloud instances for things that'll be happy at home with a few minutes to a week's optimisation efforts. Queries that are N*N and only take a few minutes to turn to LOG(N) but instead people renting out a fucking off huge ass SQL cluster instead that not only costs gobs of money but takes a ton of time maintaining and configuring which isn't going to be done right either.

I think most people are bullshitting when they say they have impostor syndrome but when the trend in technology is to make every fucking little trivial thing a thousand times more complex than it has to be I can see how they'd feel that way. There's so bloody much you need to do that you don't need to do these days that you either can't get anything done right or the smallest thing takes an age.

I have no idea why some people put up with some of these appliances. If you bought a dish washer that made washing dishes even harder than it was before you'd return it to the store.

Every time I see the terms enterprise, fast, big data, scalable, cloud or anything of the like I bang my head on the table. One of these days I'm going to lose my fucking tits.

Cockies, what's that? Some new technology?

I was reminded of people's posts about preferred text editors in another post, so I thought I'd do the same, but also add some super old technology that I used along the way.

The first text editor I consistently used was pico. I used it to write my first webpage at school.edu/~username. It was a natural choice, because the it was the default text editor in pine, which is what we would all use for our email after opening a serial connection to the college's Digital Unix server. Or if we were the lucky ones who had a computer in a wired dorm, telnet. My dorm was not wired until my sophomore year.

I got my first job in tech in 2001, working as a night shift tier-one support technician. By this time, most people were using web based email, or POP3, but I wanted to keep using pine (or elm, or mutt) because I was totally in love with the command line by this time, and had been playing with Linux for two or three years by now. I arranged a handshake deal with a guy in my home town who had a couple well-connected NetBSD servers, to let me have an account on one for email and web hosting (a relatively new idea at the time).

I recall telnetting into my shared hosting account from the HP-UX workstations we had in the control room. I would look at webpages on HTML conventions and standards, and I kept seeing references to this thing called vi. I looked into it more deeply, and found that it was a text editor, and was the reason I always had to CTRL-Z out of elm. I was already finding pico to be lacking, so I found a modern implementation of vi called vim that was already installed on the aforementioned NetBSD server, and read through vimtutor on it. I was hooked instantly. The modality massively appealed to me, and I found editing files to be an absolute delight, compared to pico, and its nascent open source offspring/successor, nano.

My position on that hasn't changed in the years that have passed since then.

What's your text editor origin story?

Mobile phones are from hell >:[ Well, at least my gf's Samsung is from hell. It makes noise for anything. If someone calls, play a stupid melody. If there is a text, play a stupid melody. If its battery needs to be charged, play a stupid melody. If its battery is fully charged, play a stupid melody. Even if it's in the middle of the night and people just maybe would like to get a few minutes of sleep! What's next? Play a stupid melody when the stupid Samsung Android piece of junk wants its diaper changed? Or when it's bored? Or just needs attention? Or when it realises that the word "smart" in smart phones actually means stupid? SHUT UP!!! We don't need a tamagotchi, we already have two kids and two cats to fullfill our tamagotchying needs! Technology is supposed to make life easier, not worse FFS! No wonder so many people get stressed out these days! And you, pathetic people at Samsung, or whoever that come up with these "smart" features that deprave decent people of their sleep, now it's your turn to be woken up! WAKE UP IDIOTS! Get outside your small mobile-bound shitholes of confined fart-filled bubbles! Learn about REAL LIFE, get yourselves nagging gfs, screaming kids and a PUNCH IN YOUR FACES! Maybe that will teach you to manufacture phones that SHUT THE FUCK UP during sleeping hours!

Alright... how the FUCK is an IP address considered personal data by GDPR????

Fucking boomers don't even know what an IP is. Guess what, every website you've ever been to has your IP! It's in your router, your fucking ISP's registry, and in every DNS server within 1000 miles of you!

Imagine thinking your IP gives up private information, god, just fuck me, I hate all of it, idiotic fools fumbling around with shit they don't understand.

...WKO making every developer's life a living nightmare because fucking GOOGLE FONTS stores a copy of your IP for their stupid analytics. You know what? Just don't use the internet either, that needs your IP too. In fact, don't pay taxes either, the tax office has a copy of your address, that's pretty personal information if you ask me! Just live in the woods and survive with the wolves.

I already know the future 'resolution' to this one - store fonts locally, resolve this dangerous "issue"... "waaaahhh fullStackClown! the site is slower now!!!"

...an infinite circle of clownshipness continues...

tune in next week as the world continues to approach it's circus fate!

Soooooo had 2 phone screenings with 2 different recruiters.

So all was going well with the first call until she asks me about certain technology, and I'm a little confused as to how she was working it, so I asked, "do you mean....?". And her reply was....,"I don't know, I guess. That's what's written down here." I seriously almost hung up the phone!! 🤣🤣🤣

The second one was worst! This genius had the bright idea to call me from...wait for it....HOME! I mean all I heard was brats in the background and they kept destructing her. She's like ," so how long have u been-- Billy! Get down off that, NOW! Sorry about that." I'm thinking, "what the hell?"(only seconds into the call) She continues, "So what's your favorite lang-I told u to get off that! Hold on..." phone goes silent.... "Hello, I'm so sorry...." Asked me more programing questions few seconds later..."I thought I told you-------" phone drops! At this point I'm trying to hold my laughter in. She gets back on. "Sorry, dropped my phone. Well, I think that's all the questions I had, did you have any for me?" "Really?" I'm thinking. "Nooooope" I say.

🤣🤣🤣🤣 I was having somewhat of a crappy day, I needed that.

So it looks like my 80+ yr old grandma finally managed to get hang of her touch screen smartphone. She was recently set up with WhatsApp.

She has called me quite a few times today and when i ask what's up, she says she is just testing it out. It's so cute *-* and makes me happy to know she has learned to use it and called me.

I wonder how it must feel for her to be able to use this technology which was probably never even imagined during her young age.

So, I've had a personal project going for a couple of years now. It's one of those "I think this could be the billion-dollar idea" things. But I suffer from the typical "it's not PERFECT, so let's start again!" mentality, and the "hmm, I'm not sure I like that technology choice, so let's start again!" mentality.

Or, at least, I DID until 3-4 months ago.

I made the decision that I was going to charge ahead with it even if I started having second thoughts along the way. But, at the same time, I made the decision that I was going to rely on as little external technology as possible. Simplicity was going to be the key guiding light and if I couldn't truly justify bringing a given technology into the mix, it'd stay out.

That means that when I built the front end, I would go with plain HTML/CSS/JS... you know, just like I did 20+ years ago... and when I built the back end, I'd minimize the libraries I used as much as possible (though I allowed myself a bit more flexibility on the back end because that seems to be where there's less issues generally). Similarly, any choice I made I wanted to have little to no additional tooling required.

So, given this is a webapp with a Node back-end, I had some decisions to make.

On the back end, I decided to go with Express. Previously, I had written all the server code myself from "first principles", so I effectively built my own version of Express in other words. And you know what? It worked fine! It wasn't particularly hard, the code wasn't especially bad, and it worked. So, I considered re-using that code from the previous iteration, but I ultimately decided that Express brings enough value - more specifically all the middleware available for it - to justify going with it. I also stuck with NeDB for my data storage needs since that was aces all along (though I did switch to nedb-promises instead of writing my own async/await wrapper around it as I had previously done).

What I DIDN'T do though is go with TypeScript. In previous versions, I had. And, hey, it worked fine. TS of course brings some value, but having to have a compile step in it goes against my "as little additional tooling as possible" mantra, and the value it brings I find to be dubious when there's just one developer. As it stands, my "tooling" amounts to a few very simple JS scripts run with NPM. It's very simple, and that was my big goal: simplicity.

On the front end, I of course had to choose a framework first. React is fine, Angular is horrid, Vue, Svelte, others are okay. But I didn't want to bother with any of that because I dislike the level of abstraction they bring. But I also didn't want to be building my own widget library. I've done that before and it takes a lot of time and effort to do it well. So, after looking at many different options, I settled on Webix. I'm a fan of that library because it has a JS-centric approach. There's no JSX-like intermediate format, no build step involved, it's just straight, simple JS, and it's powerful and looks pretty good. Perfect for my needs. For one specific capability I did allow myself to bring in AnimeJS and ThreeJS. That's it though, no other dependencies (well, at first, I was using Axios because it was comfortable, but I've since migrated to plain old fetch). And no Webpack, no bundling at all, in fact. I dynamically load resources, which effectively is code-splitting, and I have some NPM scripts to do minification for a production build, but otherwise the code that runs in the browser is what I actually wrote, unlike using a framework.

So, what's the point of this whole rant?

The point is that I've made more progress in these last few months than I did the previous several years, and the experience has been SO much better!

All the tools and dependencies we tend to use these days, by and large, I think get in the way. Oh, to be sure, they have their own benefits, I'm not denying that... but I'm not at all convinced those benefits outweighs the time lost configuring this tool or that, fixing breakages caused by dependency updates, dealing with obtuse errors spit out by code I didn't write, going from the code in the browser to the actual source code to get anywhere when debugging, parsing crappy documentation, and just generally having the project be so much more complex and difficult to reason about. It's cognitive overload.

I've been doing this professionaly for a LONG time, I've seen so many fads come and go. The one thing I think we've lost along the way is the idea that simplicity leads to the best outcomes, and simplicity doesn't automatically mean you write less code, doesn't mean you cede responsibility for various things to third parties. Those things aren't automatically bad, but they CAN be, and I think more than we realize. We get wrapped up in "what everyone else is doing", we don't stop to question the "best practices", we just blindly follow.

I'm done with that, and my project is better for it!

What's devRant's technology stack?

Why in 2017 it's still so important for companies that their candidates have a motherfucking CS degree?

Most people I know with a CS degree are less skilled and knowledgable as I am in technology, and they tell me that all you learn in CS degree is a lot of irrelavant math and a lot of theory, with some rare places actually teaching you relevant courses.

What's more prefarable to a company, someone with a diverse tech experience or someone with a CS degree?

Translation:
"According to Xiaomi, the U-Disk (Xiaomi's new USB drive) has UDP technology that prevents damage by splashing and dust."

HOW A TRANSPORT PROTOCOL CAN'T PREVENT THAT?

What's next? "The new notebook has HTTP technology that makes it waterproof."

I watch a lot of coding content these days just to get a feel for what's the message given to freshers or non tech people about the IT industry.

One of the things I immensely disagree with, is the idea that software engineers learn throughout their career. I disagree with the word 'throughout'.

They completely ignore stagnation on the job and also this fact that learning new technology at some point in ur career just wouldn't make sense, effort wise and financially.

Here's something I'll never do - Learn Ruby and then proceed to Ruby on Rails. Because the system wouldn't consider my past experience with NodeJS and Laravel, as a result I would be considered a fresher. So it wouldn't make sense for me to put this much effort and start all over again.

Also, your learning curve does plateau at some point in ur career for a certain amount of time. You may learn new things but sometimes you're only concerned with maintaining pre-built stuff so you don't learn new things.

I know some engineers are motivated enough to learn new things outside of a job. But I just wanted to say this.

Speaking of "living"...

When was the last time you looked up in the sky and admired the beauty of its deep blueness or the beauty of the clouds floating up there?

We live in a beautiful world. And yet we spend our lives dawn-to-dusk staring at things made by ourselves rather than enjoying what's already there - the beauty all around us we don't bother to even think about, not to mention look at it.

No, I'm not a spiritual person. I just really love the world around me :) Not people. Not technology. Pure raw nature and the mind-bending balance of EVERYTHING in it.

So... when was the last time you've admired what's out there, rather than what's in our artificial world?

One of the most annoying things I find about being in the field of Computer Science: you have to read thick book after thick book, just to stay ahead or on par with technology.

Oh, technology x came out. New item appears in to-do storyboard: "read book x". Oh, only 900 pages huh? Oh, deadline this week huh? There goes my weekend.
What's this? After having read book x, now I have to read book y and also read about design patterns again?

Sigh.

What's a good way to guage someone's domain modelling expertise in an interview? I don't want to make people go do an at-home project because we aren't big enough to be filtering candidates who won't do it, simply because they can't be doing that for every application.

Technology I can ask questions about, but stuff like DDD I think it's hard to know without seeing them work.

What's more important to you guys. Getting the chance get knowledge or make money ?
I recently graduated as the second best, making a little less then the average (in Germany) but get all kinds of certifications and courses for free and working on a 90million Dollar Projekt using modern technology (Java)

I'm totally happy with this situation for the start of my professional career what u think

I thought this was gonna be so simple, now I'm going down an infinite rabbit hole of technology and concepts I have no idea what's for and zero clue of what I'm doing.

Use Maven, they said... it's better, they said... you don't have to manage dependencies yourself, they said...

...only now I've spent three days in hell trying to figure out why Maven keeps insisting on sticking INCOMPATIBLE JARs in my WAR that causes a breakage when deployed. No matter what I do it still sticks stuff in the WAR that shouldn't be there!

Like, I'm not a lazy cunt, I can manage my own dependencies! I know what's supposed to be there, oh, and by the way, everything fucking works when I build with Ant instead and I'm in full control of what winds up in the WAR.

So, basically, instead of the "hassle" of having to download JARs myself, I've now got the hassle of dealing with Maven trying to be more clever than me.

I know which I'd rather have, especially right now. ARGH!

You know, any time someone says "this is an industry-standard and that's why you should use it" my first thought is "hmm, which of these buildings is tallest and will ensure a quick death when I inevitably jump off of it?" MOST ESPECIALLY when the company just decides X is what everyone is going to switch to, regardless of what they're using now and regardless of how many YEARS it's been that way and working perfectly. Nope, doesn't matter, just get onboard the freight train, and if your productivity takes a hit, if you start missing deadlines dealing with shit you didn't have to deal with when using the "worse" tools, well, I guess that doesn't fucking matter, does it?!

And that's not even talking about the fact that the Maven build takes almost four minutes, which is just about 4x as long as the Ant build it replaced, each and every fucking time I make a change.

Look, I'm sure there are solutions and I'm sure I'll find them next week because I always do... and I'm sure there's some tweaking we can do to improve the performance... and it's not like this is my first go-round with Maven, though it's probably the most complex project I've ever tried to do with it... by my fucking dear god this is a nightmare, and it's not a nightmare of my choosing.

I'm disgusted, tired and defeated, three things I never get when it comes to technology. Congratulations Maven, you're on the verge of breaking someone who doesn't get broken. Another day like the last three and I'm not gonna need Stackoverflow, I'm gonna need a bus schedule so I can figure out exactly when to step off the fucking sidewalk!

Me and a couple of friends have this group on WhatsApp where we can share stuff that we do and maybe come up with new stuff to work on as well.

For giggles (honestly irritating to me) I'm gonna summarize some conversations on the group.

26/11
Me: Finally completed my first FPGA program, these devices are amazjng!
NO REPLY

28/11
Me: gonna make the Jacobs ladder thing today! Hope I don't get zapped
Anyone interested ?
NO REPLY

29/11
Me: hey here's a nice electronic circuit, try to analyze how this circuit oscillates (we're all ec 'engineers' well... soon at least)
NO REPLY

2/12
Friend: Guys creed 2 was amazing I don't mind watching it twice
F2 : Really? Why don't we go soon?
F3 : I'm in!!! What's the plan
F4 : how about tomorrow ?
....

3/12
F1 : Guys anyone have notes for X exam
F2 : here. {Link}
F3 : here. {Link}
F4 : how many of you are done ?
F5 : what are the important questions
(just a stupid aptitude test)

{Me} changes group title from X to Notes group

Let's give this another shot
6/12
Me: There's a conference on X technology by Y industry leader ..
Should we check it out ?
There's even a workshop on X
NO REPLY

Alright time to acknowledge my stupidity and my lack of brains for even belonging to this kind of social circle/COUNTRY

7/12
ME: New fortnite season is out
F1: woah it's crazy let's play
F2: already on it, client is updating
F3: are you shitting me? gonna get BROS laptop (i'm going to suck my brothers cock and take his computer)
F4: Hang on bro wait for me also call me on discord.

I hope you guys could stick through that. Well there's no crazy moral to this but if you're one of these guys just appreciate your friend for his efforts once in a while even at the cost of acknowledging your stupidity.

Also, words like BRO are instant triggers and I'll make sure I find you can kill you if you use it more than once every couple of sentences ( I have relatively high tolerance )

I have not used a lot of technology, but among the worst experiences was working with OR mapper. I don't think OR mappers are bad by themselves, but all the tutorials and entry level documentation drag the unknowing user slowly into a world of hurt. It looks super easy and super cool, but in fact if you don't know _exactly_ what's happening in the background you're about to deal with slow performance, terrible SQL statements, missing indices, etc. It makes shooting yourself in the foot a Starbucks-like experience, everywhere, all the time, and fast.

It's one of those promises that do not deliver the easy way despite most people advertising it like this. Except when you plan to write a book'n'author application with only 5 books and 3 authors. Yeah...

My dream dev-power would be to have a prescient warning with a couple years advance on what's the next interesting AND money-raking technology, so I will be already an expert just at start and I could even get a job at the sponsor company.

[CONCEITED RANT]
I'm frustrated than I'm better tha 99% programmers I ever worked with.

Yes, it might sound so conceited.
I Work mainly with C#/.NET Ecosystem as fullstack dev (so also sql, backend, frontend etc), but I'm also forced to use that abhorrent horror that is js and angular.
I write readable code, I write easy code that works and rarely, RARELY causes any problem, The only fancy stuff I do is using new language features that come up with new C# versions, that in latest version were mostly syntactic sugar to make code shorter/more readable/easier.

People I have ever worked with (lot of) mostly try to overdo, overengineer, overcomplicate code, subdivide into methods when not needed fragmenting code and putting tons of variables.

People only needed me to explain my code when the codebase was huge (200K+ lines mostly written by me) of big so they don't have to spend hours to understand what's going on, or, if the customer requested a new technology to explain such new technology so they don't have to study it (which is perfectly understandable). (for example it happened that I was forced to use Devexpress package because they wanted to port a huge application from .NET 4.5 to .NET 8 and rewriting the whole devexpress logic had a HUGE impact on costs so I explained thoroughly and supported during developement because they didn't knew devexpress).

I don't write genius code or clevel tricks and patterns. My code works, doesn't create memory leaks or slowness and mostly works when doing unit tests at first run. Of course I also put bugs and everything, but that's part of the process.

THe point is that other people makes unreadable code, and when they pass code around you hear rising chaos, people cursing "WTF this even means, why he put that here, what the heck this is even supposed to do", you got the drill. And this happens when I read everyone code too.

But it doesn't happens the opposite. My code is often readable because I do code triple backflips only on personal projects because I don't have to explain anyone and I can learn new things and new coding styles.

Instead, people want to impress at work, and this results in unintelligible, chaotic code, full of bugs and that people can't read. They want to mix in the coolest technologies because they feel their virtual penis growing to showoff that they are latest bleeding edge technology experts and all.

They want to experiment on business code at the expense of all the other poor devils who will have to manage it.

Heck, I even worked with a few Microsoft MVPs.
Those are deadly. They're superfast code throughput people that combine lot of stuff.
THen they leave at you the problems once they leave.

This MVP guy on a big project for paperworks digital acquisiton for a big company did this huge project I got called to work in, which consited in a backend and a frontend web portal, and pushed at all costs to put in the middle another CDN web project and another Identity Server project to both do Caching with the cdn "to make it faster" and identity server for SSO (Single sign on).

We had to deal with gruesome work to deal with browser poor caching management and when he left, the SSO server started to loop after authentication at random intervals and I had to solve that stuff he put in with days of debugging that nasty stuff he did.

People definitely can't code, except me.
They have this "first of the class syndrome" which goes to the extent that their skill allows them to and try to do code backflips when they can't even do code pushups, to put them in a physical exercise parallelism.

And most people is like this. They will deny and won't admit, they believe they're good at it, but in reality they aren't.

There is some genius out there that does revoluitionary code and maybe needs to do horrible code to do amazing stuff, and that's ok. And there is also few people like me, with which you can work and produce great stuff.

I found one colleague like this and we had a $800.000 (yes, 800k) project in .NET Technology, which consisted in the renewal of 56 webservices and 3 web portals and 2 Winforms applications for our country main railway transport system. We worked in 2 on it, with a PM from the railway company.

It was estimated 14 months of work and we took 11 and all was working wonders. We had ton of fun doing it because also their PM was a cool guy and we did an awesome project and codebase was a jewel. The difficult thing you couldn't grasp if you read the code is if you don't know how railway systems work and that's the only difficult thing.

Sight, there people is macking me sick of this job

What's with the updates in our technology ? has it always been this situation that Computer manufacturers stop providing upgrades after a few time?

Like android tries hard, but no device older than 3 years is going to get the latest android . i phone guys say they get the latest ios on iphone 6 plus, but isn't that also like 6 generations later device?what about iphone 4s or iphone 3g or iphone1 ?

So far i guess microsoft and laptop manufacturers are winning at this area... i believe i could find some peeps with their 10 yo fatass pc running win 10 . Or maybe iot, i am not sure but i wonder if those microwaves won't be compatible with the latest version of whatever OS they are using (if there is a mechanism to update one)

I was actually reading about the operating systems. My point regarding this post was that the OS's have been architectured to be modular and h/w independent for years . Nearly every OS has this HAL layer which literally has the function to abstract hardware and give apis to system such that whatever the hardware there is down below, the system would not have to worry.

So why does new updates to the os not pushed to older devices? why do manufacturers give the reasons that we don't push updates because the hardware is incompatible with the os?

This isn't too big, but it was big for me.
I was on a school trip to place X, it was a math competition. I was in grade 8.
The kid whose family hosted me and my friend for the competition was in 10th grade. One night, we were playing on the PS4 when he went off to work. Turns out he had to make a website for a technology assignment. I looked at it, and told him, "What's this? Looks easy. Really easy." I'd done a similar thing in grade 6. When I told him he asked me to show him the website. I downloaded it off Google drive(where I keep it) and showed it to him.
It took me a couple of minutes to convince him that I'd made in grade 6. Made me so happy :)

What's with the resurgence of mechanical keyboards? Things are supposed to get better, not recycled.
This is technology, not fashion.

For me, the flat scissor switch keys on laptops have the best feel, speed and ease.

What keeps you motivated about learning new coding language / technology? I learn something but then get distracted by either some movies or anime or something else. What's your driving force?

Hey testing geeks, I just come up with "FinTech product" when I was on the train. I am just curious about what's the trendy technology for FinTech product in banks. So what would be the best automation testing scenarios to be used to test FinTech product? Time to open your bain.