Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
-
!rant
After over 20 years as a Software Engineer, Architect, and Manager, I want to pass along some unsolicited advice to junior developers either because I grew through it, or I've had to deal with developers who behaved poorly:
1) Your ego will hurt you FAR more than your junior coding skills. Nobody expects you to be the best early in your career, so don't act like you are.
2) Working independently is a must. It's okay to ask questions, but ask sparingly. Remember, mid and senior level guys need to focus just as much as you do, so before interrupting them, exhaust your resources (Google, Stack Overflow, books, etc..)
3) Working code != good code. You are an author. Write your code so that it can be read. Accept criticism that may seem trivial such as renaming a variable or method. If someone is suggesting it, it's because they didn't know what it did without further investigation.
4) Ask for peer reviews and LISTEN to the critique. Even after 20+ years, I send my code to more junior developers and often get good corrections sent back. (remember the ego thing from tip #1?) Even if they have no critiques for me, sometimes they will see a technique I used and learn from that. Peer reviews are win-win-win.
5) When in doubt, do NOT BS your way out. Refer to someone who knows, or offer to get back to them. Often times, persons other than engineers will take what you said as gospel. If that later turns out to be wrong, a bunch of people will have to get involved to clean up the expectations.
6) Slow down in order to speed up. Always start a task by thinking about the very high level use cases, then slowly work through your logic to achieve that. Rushing to complete, even for senior engineers, usually means less-than-ideal code that somebody will have to maintain.
7) Write documentation, always! Even if your company doesn't take documentation seriously, other engineers will remember how well documented your code is, and they will appreciate you for it/think of you next time that sweet job opens up.
8) Good code is important, but good impressions are better. I have code that is the most embarrassing crap ever still in production to this day. People don't think of me as "that shitty developer who wrote that ugly ass code that one time a decade ago," They think of me as "that developer who was fun to work with and busted his ass." Because of that, I've never been unemployed for more than a day. It's critical to have a good network and good references.
9) Don't shy away from the unknown. It's easy to hope somebody else picks up that task that you don't understand, but you wont learn it if they do. The daunting, unknown tasks are the most rewarding to complete (and trust me, other devs will notice.)
10) Learning is up to you. I can't tell you the number of engineers I passed on hiring because their answer to what they know about PHP7 was: "Nothing. I haven't learned it yet because my current company is still using PHP5." This is YOUR craft. It's not up to your employer to keep you relevant in the job market, it's up to YOU. You don't always need to be a pro at the latest and greatest, but at least read the changelog. Stay abreast of current technology, security threats, etc...
These are just a few quick tips from my experience. Others may chime in with theirs, and some may dispute mine. I wish you all fruitful careers!219 -
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.34 -
/*
It's a pretty long rant. Hope you didn't get bored :P
*/
So I have this friend of mine who has learnt Python at good level (that's what he says) and is with me in all classes in college. I have worked with C, C++, C# and Java only and hated Python when it was taught (wk44).
So the following happened in the last 2 weeks:
Once he wrote a Python function in terminal just returning a hard coded string (lame right) and will show me how cool is it and that it is sooo much easier.
Whenever we do a mini project together he will force that we use Python. Even in Image processing when everyone is ready to work on Matlab, he insists that Python would be a better option.
We asked that this XYZ is very easy to implement on Matlab.
We then had to listen about the large and great community of Python and that it has Libraries for everything and that it is the greatest programming language ever.
One day he saw my C# project for DFA and NFA simulation which was the greatest project I have "completed" myself, and went like "Hmph, if I was you, I would use python and make a more "professional" code" (then went on arguing as always)
This happened today in Networking lab-
(Sockets was taught and we are expected to learn its programming aspects)
All students: Open linuxhowtos.org and start reading on socket programming
He : Opens some websites and downloads books on Networking with Python or someting
Now while I am reading the documentation of sockets and bind, he opens spider IDE, copy-paste the code in the book and start bugging ME that he is getting all these errors like literally showing me those errors and whining about all those problems.
Me: We are supposed to learn this in C. Here take a look at this link.
HE: No I'll use Python cuz it is better than your C. It has libraries for everything and is much easier.
Me: Alright whatever I am fed up, do whatever you want11 -
!rant
Programming is a huge blessing i believe we all should be thankful to. For me, it literally turned my life around.
11 months ago i was fighting a losing battle with depression, and contemplated suicide constantly. I would use a self remedy of smoking weed and sleeping all day long. I was depressed because i felt my life had no real value. I was doing nothing, and its kind of an infinite loop.
You don't do anything, so you feel bad, so you don't do anything, and so on.
That was until i finally took the step that changed my life. I searched and wanted to learn something. I always liked web pages so i thought id get into web development.
Did some research, found out that the fastest way to go was to learn ruby on rails. I followed a tutorial i found online, and literally pushed myself through it. There were times when there where things i didnt understand, and when it was really bad, but i pushed myself through it and i finished the tutorial.
Just finishing the tutorial and learning something new helped me alot. I had already quit smoking and was feeling way better, but after a while i started feeling bad again since i wasnt doing anything after i had finished learning, so i started working on a personal project, creating it from scratch, and just working on it day and night. I worked 14 hours a day, never really leaving my room ( this was during summer vacation ) for a month.
There were many things i didnt understand, but i never gave up and always searched for the solution and read about it until i understood it better. Looking back, there were things i knew could have been done in a better way, but as a first project, im proud of myself, not because it rocks, but because i did not give up.
In the process of starting a new life, i was really lonely. I cut all ties with everyone i knew, since they were all toxic, all i had in my life was ruby on rails and my web application. I wanted to launch it but couldn't due to personal reasons.
Not being able to launch and see something live, something that you worked so hard on, that you put so much effort into, that was devastating to me. I felt as if all my efforts had gone to waste.
And here is what i love most about programming, NOTHING EVER GOES TO WASTE. All that effort you spent on something ? All these all nighters you pulled ? All that frustration from that bug ? It will pay off later. It always does somehow. You get more knowledge and become a better programmer, and sometimes it even gives way to new opportunities and chances you never even expected.
I included my web application in my resume and it helped land me a job as a junior developer in a really nice company. A job that i wouldn't even have dreamed of several months earlier.
Programming and creating something new and learning something new everyday, creating something that people use, that someone else will benefit from and be grateful for, i think we should never take that for granted !
Tl;dr : learning how to code and web development saved my life9 -
OH MY GOD, MY TEACHER DOES NOT TEACH MY FAVORITE LANGUAGE!
I've seen a lot of rants about teachers who use an outdated language, or don't accept the preferred framework or library of the ranter, or even force students to use a technology or even worse an OS they don't prefer.
Whats with that attitude?
I absolutely encourage young people to learn technology in their free time and it absolutely helps at building a career and become good at programming. I don't think being around 18 and never having worked in a real job is the time to select "the most superior language and technology".
Actually, that time is never.
Technology is evolving all the time and different tech evolves in different paths for different purposes. Get rid of the idea, that there is a "best" and get rid of the idea, that you will always be able to work with what you think is best.
If you're really really really awesome, you can chose to do what you like most. Not awesome as in "i learned programming in my free time, now i'm better than my programming-for-beginners-course teacher" but awesome as in "start my own company and can afford to only take the jobs i feel like doing", that awesome. Most likely, you're not (yet).
In the real world, you will very likely sometimes be required to work with technology you don't prefer. Maybe with something you think is really bad. Probably, it's not that bad. More likely, you read it on the internet from someone whose self-image is based on on loving TechA and hating TechB. A lot of much hated technology is at least okay for it's intended use. Maybe not the most pleasant time you will ever have, but no reason to jump out of the window. Hey, and if you get used to it, you may even start to like it. At least, learn to retain some dignity when confronted with things you don't like.
You can still think that one thing is better than another, but if you make a huge drama out of it, you just make it harder for yourself. The best programmer is the one who get's shit done, not the one with the saltiest tears.14 -
Two days ago I had a particularly retarded conversation with my father.
Father: Have you heard of [insert some language that will probably die in half a year]?
Me: Never heard of it.
Father: I talked with a friend yesterday and he said people pay millions for it.
Me: And?
Father: You have to learn it.
Me: *At this point trying not to facepalm* I don't think that's a good idea.
Father: Why?
Me: *begins explaining how the industry changes quickly, underused languages die out or how there simply aren't many materials on them*
My father then started shouting at me, saying that I don't listen to him and that his friend (who does stock trading for living) knows what's trending right now. Couple that with the fact that I was sick in bed when this random event happened, it led to me wanting to, ever so slightly, fucking kill myself.5 -
I had to open the desktop app to write this because I could never write a rant this long on the app.
This will be a well-informed rebuttal to the "arrays start at 1 in Lua" complaint. If you have ever said or thought that, I guarantee you will learn a lot from this rant and probably enjoy it quite a bit as well.
Just a tiny bit of background information on me: I have a very intimate understanding of Lua and its c API. I have used this language for years and love it dearly.
[START RANT]
"arrays start at 1 in Lua" is factually incorrect because Lua does not have arrays. From their documentation, section 11.1 ("Arrays"), "We implement arrays in Lua simply by indexing tables with integers."
From chapter 2 of the Lua docs, we know there are only 8 types of data in Lua: nil, boolean, number, string, userdata, function, thread, and table
The only unfamiliar thing here might be userdata. "A userdatum offers a raw memory area with no predefined operations in Lua" (section 26.1). Essentially, it's for the API to interact with Lua scripts. The point is, this isn't a fancy term for array.
The misinformation comes from the table type. Let's first explore, at a low level, what an array is. An array, in programming, is a collection of data items all in a line in memory (The OS may not actually put them in a line, but they act as if they are). In most syntaxes, you access an array element similar to:
array[index]
Let's look at c, so we have some solid reference. "array" would be the name of the array, but what it really does is keep track of the starting location in memory of the array. Memory in computers acts like a number. In a very basic sense, the first sector of your RAM is memory location (referred to as an address) 0. "array" would be, for example, address 543745. This is where your data starts. Arrays can only be made up of one type, this is so that each element in that array is EXACTLY the same size. So, this is how indexing an array works. If you know where your array starts, and you know how large each element is, you can find the 6th element by starting at the start of they array and adding 6 times the size of the data in that array.
Tables are incredibly different. The elements of a table are NOT in a line in memory; they're all over the place depending on when you created them (and a lot of other things). Therefore, an array-style index is useless, because you cannot apply the above formula. In the case of a table, you need to perform a lookup: search through all of the elements in the table to find the right one. In Lua, you can do:
a = {1, 5, 9};
a["hello_world"] = "whatever";
a is a table with the length of 4 (the 4th element is "hello_world" with value "whatever"), but a[4] is nil because even though there are 4 items in the table, it looks for something "named" 4, not the 4th element of the table.
This is the difference between indexing and lookups. But you may say,
"Algo! If I do this:
a = {"first", "second", "third"};
print(a[1]);
...then "first" appears in my console!"
Yes, that's correct, in terms of computer science. Lua, because it is a nice language, makes keys in tables optional by automatically giving them an integer value key. This starts at 1. Why? Lets look at that formula for arrays again:
Given array "arr", size of data type "sz", and index "i", find the desired element ("el"):
el = arr + (sz * i)
This NEEDS to start at 0 and not 1 because otherwise, "sz" would always be added to the start address of the array and the first element would ALWAYS be skipped. But in tables, this is not the case, because tables do not have a defined data type size, and this formula is never used. This is why actual arrays are incredibly performant no matter the size, and the larger a table gets, the slower it is.
That felt good to get off my chest. Yes, Lua could start the auto-key at 0, but that might confuse people into thinking tables are arrays... well, I guess there's no avoiding that either way.13 -
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 ;)23 -
My college organised some interview with a company, with the whole demn class. We went there, it was quite far away (50km) and the CEO invites us to a meeting room.
Where he bores me for 2 hours talking about their projects in argiculture and NSA like spying systems at tankstations.
They were caputuring license plates at gas stations and with that information gather data about the person, such as salary (by looking at their car), house adres ect. All without people knowing. And than targeting them with specific ads and offers.
The class of sheep were super excited but it pissed me off. Because he told it like it was some awesome advancement in technology that none of us could probably ever do.
He was demeaning us, saying we would do some simple wordpress sites there and other things. We are probably not good enough forc te big stuff.
Asking him some really hard questions about his projects made him so pissed he almost wanted to kick me out.
When it was finally over, there was some test that you have to do if you want to work there. If you were good enough at the test, you could!!!! (YEEY)
Uhm, I said; no thank you I dont want to work here.
Later I talked to my classmate and friend who always thinks he's better then everyone in class even tho he barely understands OOP programming. He was asking me if he should try to get the internship. I told him; dont. They have no value for us and they think they are the greatest company on the planet.
The fucking idiot go so pissed, he stopped talking to me alltogether and blocked me everywere. I AM NOT EVEN JOKING. Just because I gave my FUCKING opinon about a company he likes for no reason.
So this idiot does the test (which was fucking simple btw, I did it too and compared the results and I had 95%) He gets invited for another interview and gets told he will be paid 200 euro's per month 😂. and a free meal everyday!! 😪 hahaha . That doesnt even cover commuting costs!
My "friend" told him that the train costs more every day. You know what the CEO said? "Yeah but you can learn so much here the also brings value and you're just a last year student. But I think you are really brave for asking more"
So in the end, he couldnt take the internship and I was fucking right. Really I hate these kinds of companies thinking they are heaven on earth when they are clearly not.
I am happy I told them no before putting my dignity on thd line.14 -
I can't be a teacher. Ever. For the sake of my student on this app, I will try to not generalize the entire class, but HOLY MOTHER OF BASTARD DEMON FUCKS. How the blazes is it so damn difficult to pay attention to the lecturer? Especially when he's nice enough to relate the information to the REAL FUCKING WORLD so they know why it's important?
I feel like they can hear my annoyance when I reply to "how long does the summary have to be?"
And how is 5 sentences the same as 5 paragraphs that are all supposed to have introductory sentence, supporting arguments, and a concluding sentence. That's at least 15 sentences if only one supporting statement is provided.
If this were any other teacher I was helping, I'd quit. But the fucker is intimidating and I want to learn as much as I can from him.17 -
WHY THE FUCK DOES IT HAVE TO END?
WHY THE FUCK DOES ANYTHING HAVE TO EVER END?
When I left my previous employer, I was so connected to people there. In fact my entire direct team was just few months old.
I ended up crying like a baby on my farewell call in front of everyone. I just couldn't stop.
Definitely not the brightest or smartest people, but surely great at heart. I did hate them at times and we had our ups and downs but they made the place tolerable.
The work culture is created by colleagues at any organisation and not the leadership/management. And work culture was one of the major reasons why I stayed back for 7.25 years even when a rat was earning more than me.
I joined new organisation with a big smile on my face that, I will learn and earn more. And as I was buckling up, my lead quit.
She was one of the smartest person I met. She inspired me so fucking much. Our entire team is geographically located in multiple time zones. Still she never hesitated to jump on calls as early as 07:00 AM or as late as 12:00 AM. Yet she pinged me every time on Slack to check on me and made sure I was doing well. Kept pushing me to get enough sleep, take care and not burnout myself. Always handling her daughter while on calls with us without impacting the discussions.
She taught me like her own child. So patient with a retard like me. Gave me good feedback and insights on how can I grow as a person and what all to look for in the organisation.
She bids her final goodbye early next week and with every meeting we have, I get more emotional. Doesn't feel like we are in different continents but just in same room, talking like we have known each other for years.
And you know what, after joining this org, I came to know that they hired me for a level below what I was in previous org (because how the job titles were structured here and I don't really care for titles). The product I am working on is highly ambitious and everyone is keen to make it live.
And now everything falls on me. Kickass opportunity to get a promotion, relocation, good hike, and all that I desire. And my employer is known to be quite employee friendly to actually fullfil all my wishes.
But that's not what I want. I want my people with me. It would have been so fucking awesome if she wouldn't have quit and together we would have built the product and have had so much fun doing so.
I am sure, the reason of my death will be empathy. I am next to tears while I type this.
I suck at goodbyes. Even though, with the help of technology, people are and will be connected, but still goodbyes are the shittiest things to ever exist.11 -
I had a huge epiphany on Friday... not all developers enjoy coding.
Discovered when they brought down 2 of our environments, well told them what was wrong with the changes in their code that caused the environments to break, gave them links directly to the file in the gitlab repo that needed to be updated, and...
They fucking went home. The change would’ve taken all of about 30-45 seconds to update and they fucking left.
This person’s team lead come storming in pissed off because her manager is furious about 2 environments going down and preventing everyone else from being able to deploy their changes.
We provide the exact same details to the team lead about what needs to be changed, and advise that her team member took off....
30 mins later, her manager is storming up to us (devops/sre) livid as hell.
Explain the situation for a third time... manager is like, why can’t you guys fix it?
Look here you dense motherfuckers, we can fix the code. We can be the plumbers that clean up your shit. But what value do you gain as a developer if you don’t understand how the systems work and you keep pushing shit in?
Made the changes, fixed the environments, done right? Wrong.
The original developer made more changes not knowing what would happen and thoroughly fucked the environments again.
This dumb-fucking dumpster fire of a dude then sends us a slack message. “It’s down again, can you fix it?”
Our manager steps in and tells us to send him a link to the logs and have him fix it himself!
Thank goodness we have a badass manager.
Send logs, send repo file links (again), and send line numbers in the logs to try and help just a bit more. Dude goes almost the whole day without fixing it, environments are down, other devs are pissed, we throw this dude to the wolves. His manager starts to head over and was about to talk with my team lead when our manager steps out of his office and tells him the in’s and out’s of the situation and that our job isn’t to play log parser/error fixer for the developers. This dude that’s breaking the environments needs to be the one to fix the issue and his team lead should be aware of the problems and should have been able to correct his errors before it ever came to us.
The amount of hand-holding we do is ridiculous.
(Disclaimer, this one guy making some mistakes doesn’t sound too bad, but this is actually a common occurrence for like 40% of all of our developers)
We literally have interns still in college running circles around some of our full time devs. I know I’m not a developer, but for anyone that’s new-ish to developing, when you see shit like that please don’t lose hope. Those ass-hats got into programming purely for a paycheck, not because of passion.
Stick with it and your greatness will know no bounds 👍
As for you craptastic dipstick lickers, FUCK YOU!!! Go back to school and learn how to give a damn.4 -
rant, but not an IT kind... okay, maybe not even a rant, more like depressive rambling:
in 3 days, I'll turn 29.
i'm living with my mom, in the apartment where I was born, in the room i've been living since I was born (with the exception of 2 attempts to move out which together lasted 9 months).
my theoretical monthly income should/could be around 4000€, based on my skills and experience.
but I'm a (manic)-depressive, chronically lonely idiot loser (and the manic phases come more and more rarely in recent years), so
my practical average monthly income fluctuates from 0 to about 200.
i am unable to keep a job for more than 4 months, so after being fired from about 20 or so of them since I was 18, it takes immense amounts of mental and emotional energy to even start looking for one now... so I usually don't.
i've been about 12000€ in debt for the past 8 or so years, half of which is just debt collector fees.
it's kinda funny, for years, i've been unable to solve a debt which theoretically amounts to 3 months of my theoretical achievable salary.
my father, who just left without a word of explanation when I was 18, has decided this is not viable anymore, so I'm supposed to move out by 10th of next month, "either to some cheap rooming house, or under the bridge, I don't care", as he put it.
I can't remember how it feels to exist a single hour without feeling existential dread and dreading each next day, not knowing what to do or if i'll even be able to try and do something, because this feeling is so strong that it often blocks me from being able to do anything. i just shiver most of the time that i'm awake, feeling like you feel few minutes before puking and crying at the same time. and that feeling is my "how are you?", "you know... normal".
i can't remember what it feels to feel any other way and can't even imagine it, and can't imagine that I'll ever achieve any less shit feeling.
literally all of my social contact consists of going out once to twice a month with the only 2 friends and 2 aquaintances I have who have the time and will to spend it with me.
oh, and hiding in my room, avoiding talking to my mom, because each time we talk she just reminds me what a piece of shit failure I am, and tells me how it's not that hard to change it, I just have to stop being lazy and start working for it.
she's... kind and caring about it, which somehow maybe makes it even worse.
i have about 10 almost complete game designs, each of them at least 50% more original and interesting (at least to me) than the things that are coming out for the past 10 years, being lauded as "the most original and unique".
I have been trying to make them, ANY of them, since I was 18, but I always lose all the drive and resolve and energy in like 4 months, because it's like trying to build a city on my own on a deserted island. too big for one person, but there was never anyone to help me. closest I ever got was one of my friends telling me "i've been thinking many times that i'd love to work on some project with you, if I had the time".
and second time, when I actually found an artist I was going to pay, and he was awesome, and after two weeks of me telling him how awesome what he does is and how it fits the project and my ideas perfectly, he backed out saying "i'm afraid I can't do the quality you require from me".
never ever in my life did I get actual help with something I actually wanted or tried to do.
i have no idea how it feels to have someone working with me on something I actually consider interesting and meaningful, on any of the things which I wanted to make, which made me learn programming.
I've learned graphics and animation and everything going into game making pipeline on my own because I realized nobody will ever help me, so I'll have to do all of it on my own.
I've tried to make a kickstarter once, but I started crying hysterically in the middle of writing it, because I felt like a begging piece of failure shit, even more than usual, so I deleted it.
most of people treat me like shit failure unworthy and undeserving of living, precisely as I myself know I deserve to be treated, because that's what I am, but when I ask for permission to kill myself, since I see no other solution to stop being a burden, they get angry at me that I'm just emotionally blackmailing them. when I afterwards ask them "so help me in any way to do any of the projects i want/need to do", they respond they've got no time for that.
when I talk about all of this, I get told to stop whining.
happy 29th birthday, me, a piece of shit who should've never survived this long, who should've never been born in the first place.
yay.
also, I know this is not the kind of crap that's supposed to be posted here, but i've got nowhere else. sorry.47 -
Tl;dr younger people on here, especially passionate ones, don't worry about comparing yourself to people who appear to have tremendous laurels, those people are probably completely full of shit.
I say kids because you may be like me and more likely to underestimate your ability or more likely to be modest about your accomplishments, and you're too young to know you're doing that.
Either way. I've been doing a web development boot camp the last six months. It's been quite good with the teachers, and some of the classmates. Hell career services is now run by this woman who really actually seems like she knows what she's doing. It's pretty awesome.
That said, my teammates on the group projects have been a different story. I've primarily stuck with some of them out of loyalty and friendship. But one guy in particular has pissed me off to no end. He said he was a computer scientist going for masters. I thought I could learn from this guy. Now I wonder if he's a pathological liar.
Our first project he made one commit. Ripped straight from the homework. It was a simple api mash-up so alright. Fair enough. Next project was when he really started to piss me off.
He didn't do shit the first week and a half. No PM, no design, no programming. Nothing. Comes in two days before project is due, and me one other guy are fucking scrambling. Because of course no one else is there.
I live significantly further than my teammates mind you. We're busting ass. This fucking guy, this dumbass pick who is convinced he's a genius that will work in higher academia clobbers our whole fucking repo.
Why you ask? To put in an unrelated commit that replicated homework from the week before. Why you ask, again? Because this person is a borderline sociopath trying to appear busy in the commit logs.
We're onto the third project now. I spend days designing something original. Side note: I fucking hate design.
So I design my heart out come up with something awesome. This fuck ass, disappears. And another group member. This was the end of November, I hear from this prick last week about refactoring to ES6. But here's the kicker-fucker, our shit ALREADY WAS IN ES6!
I go in Saturday, slack a message I'll be late. I see this fucking "genius dedicated computer scientist" leaving the fucking university shadily checking to see who was watching. He saw me see him. Coward tried to shrug it off.
Here we are, end of semester. He gets the same certification as I do. The difference? I actually know what I'm taking about, I haven't paid in full to fail.
So never, ever fucking ever take what someone says on their resume or LinkedIn as truth. The better it sounds, the more full of shit they may very well be.
And as for our presentation on Saturday? I plan on handling that but letting him do all of the talking. Let's even see if he knows what the project is about :).6 -
FUCK LINUX
now that I have your attention, and you’re probably angry, too, please, even if you don’t read this rant, never use code.org again. now, onto the rant…
god dammit, code.org sucks. I mean, anyone who created it or associates with it should, well, be considered a terrorist. they’re bombing students futures in computer science with false, useless, bullshit information. not to mention, their sponsors like bill gates, mark zuckerburg, and other rich asses, talk in a video about some boring ass shit that is hard to understand for anyone who doesn’t program, and not to mention, they use a fucking five dollar microphone. ear rape. even if you look at a textual version of it, then read the information on it, it’s practically useless because it's so terribly explained, and also useless. ironically enough, they focus on their animations more than their actual explinations, or their students for that matter. the fact that we had to encode a picture in binary, made me about 50% dumber, give or take a 0 or 1. then, we had to do it in hex, which wasn’t really much better, although more realistic I supposed. what's really the most depressing thing about this class is its application in the real world. I've learnt nothing whatsoever that will help me in the real world, or in computer science. I suppose there's two things that may be useful (that I already knew): hex, and that TCP doesn't lose packets. that's it. those two things. five seconds worth of knowledge from the first quarter of the year. the ideas just make me want to throw up. teaching the main ideas of computer science without actually teaching it? one of the teachers (probably a good one) enrolled her students in an online programming course just so they could understand, because the explanations are just so terrible. this is the only [high school] computer science course offered by code.org, and I signed up because it's an AP computer science class (tried to get into AP Java, the day I was supposed to take the test to get into an upper level class, I was told it didn't count as a tech credit). seriously, fuck code.org. it makes you dumber. their 'app lab' environment is pointless, just like everything else. the app lab is basically where you have a set of commands and have to make a dog bark() or a storm trooper miss() [and that's hell when they haven't introduced while loops yet]. the app lab is literally code.org going out of their way to make everything that their students are learning pointless in the real world. seriously, why can't we just use a <canvas> like an ACTUAL PROGRAMMER would do if they were to make a browser game, not use an app engine so slow it would be faster to update windows and android studio each time I run an 'app' in their 'environment'. their excuse is that the skills "transfer over" to the real world. BITCH! IF I DIDN'T KNOW JAVA, AND I WANTED TO MAKE A GAME IN JAVA, I'M NOT GOING TO LEARN PYTHON, THEN "TRANSFER" THE SKILLS I LEARNT, I'M GOING TO LEARN FUCKING JAVA. AND THAT GOES FOR EVER OTHER LANGUAGE, PROJECT, ETC.
I'm begging you code.org, stop, get help.9 -
Man, most memorable has to be the lead devops engineer from the first startup I worked at. My immediate team/friends called him Mr. DW - DW being short for Done and Working.
You see, Mr. DW was a brilliant devops engineer. He came up with excellent solutions to a lot of release, deployment, and data storage problems faced at the company (small genetics firm that ships servers with our analysis software on them). I am still very impressed by some of the solutions he came up with, and wish I had more time to study and learn about them before I left that company.
BUT - despite his brilliance, Mr. DW ALWAYS shipped broken stuff. For some reason this guy thinks that only testing a single happiest of happy path scenarios for whatever he is developing constitutes "everything will work as expected!" As soon as he said it was "done", but golly for him was it "done". By fucking God was that never the truth.
So, let me provide a basic example of how things would go:
my team: "Hey DW, we have a problem with X, can you fix this?"
DW: "Oh, sure. I bet it's a problem with <insert long explanations we don't care about we just want it fixed>"
my team: "....uhh, cool! Looking forward to the fix!"
... however long later...
DW: "OK, it's done. Here you go!"
my team: "Thanks! We'll get the fix into the processing pipelines"
... another short time later...
my team: "DW, this thing is broken. Look at all these failures"
DW: "How can that be? It was done! I tested it and it worked!"
my team: "Well, the failures say otherwise. How did you test?"
DW: "I just did <insert super basic thing>"
my team: "...... you know that's, like, not how things actually work for this part of the pipeline. right?"
DW: "..... But I thought it was XYZ?"
my team: "uhhhh, no, not even close. Can you please fix and let us know when it's done and working?"
DW: "... I'll fix it..."
And rinse and repeat the "it's done.. oh wait, it's broken" a good half dozen times on average. But, anyways, the birth of Mr. Done and Working - very often stuff was done, but rarely did it ever work!
I'm still friends with my team mates, and whenever we're talking and someone says something is done, we just have to ask if it's done AND working. We always get a laugh, sadly at the excuse of Mr. DW, but he dug his own hole in this regard.
Little cherry on top: So, the above happened with one of my friends. Mr. DW created installation media for one of our servers that was deployed in China. He tested it and "it was done!" Well, my friend flies out to China for on-site installation. He plugs the install medium in and goes for the install and it crashes and burns in a fire. Thankfully my friend knew the system well enough to be able to get everything installed and configured correctly minus the broken install media, but definitely the most insane example of "it's done!" but sure as he'll "it doesn't work!" we had from Mr. DW.2 -
Frustrated, tired and a bit lost.
I'm a "Senior PHP Backend Dev", which includes not the greatest tech stack nor the best job title, but it pays fine, and the company is awesome to work for.
I suck at writing features, but I'm great at bitching, and I easily put complex abstract concepts into usable models. So I'm also QA, tester, tech lead, database architect, whatever.
That makes writing PHP less annoying, because I create the rules, and whip devs around when they forget a return type definition or forget to handle an edge case. But I don't write a lot of code anymore, I mostly read (bad) code.
Lately I REALLY feel like doing something else... problem is that I know JS/ES6, but really dislike React/Vue and the whole crappy modern frontend toolchainchootrain of babelifyingwebpackingyarnballs. I know Python/Tensorflow/etc, but don't feel like I want to go into data science or AI. And then I'm awesome at the shit no one uses, like Haskell, Go and Rust (and worse).
I got a job offer which combines a very interesting PHP codebase with a Java infrastructure, where I could learn a lot... and I'm kind of tempted.
Problem is, everyone always shits on Java. I always made a bit of fun of Java myself. Don't even know exactly why, probably some really cruel instinct which causes kids to bully the least popular kid.
I know the basics, I've written the hello world, and a small backend app for a personal project. I know how strict and verbose it can be. I love the strictness in Haskell and Rust.... but those are both also quite terse.
Should I become a Java dev? I'm not talking about Android SDK, but an insane enterprise codebase at a life sciences corporation.
To the pro Java devs: What are the best and worst things about your job, about the weekly processes, about the toolchains? Have you ever considered other languages? Do you unconditionally love and believe in Java, or do you believe Swift, Kotlin, Scala or whatever will eventually make it completely obsolete?
Will Java hasten my decline into the cynical neckbeard I was always destined to be?
There are a lot more fun langauges, but looking at realistic demand and career value...20 -
In the Ruhr area (Germany) we have some very old, very strange words with strange meanings. One of those words is ‚Prutscher‘.
A Prutscher refers to a person who does things but never gets a good result, due to lack of knowledge or simple carelessness. Most of the time, Prutschers are people who are interested in certain subjects and often work in the related jobs, but who lack the motivation to properly train themselves, learn what there is to learn and to always keep up with their technologies .
Here are a few examples I've stumbled upon so far in my career:
- Developers in their 60's who read a book about PHP 25 years ago and decided to become a software developer. Since then haven't read anything about it. Who then now build huge spaghetti monoliths for large companies, in which they prefix every function, every variable and constant with their initials and, of course, use Hungarian notation.
- People who read half a fucking tutorial about <insert any fancy js framework here> and start blogging/tweeting about it
- Senior web developers who need to be told what the fuck CORS is and who can't even recognize CORS related errors in their browser console.
- People who have done nothing else for 18 years than building websites for companies on Wordpress 1.x and writing few lines of PHP and Javascript from time to time. Those who are now applying as a frontend dev due to the difficult economic situation and are surprised that they are not accepted due to a lack of experience.
- Developers who are the only ones working on Windows in the team and ask their Linux colleagues for help when Windows starts bitchin.
- People who have been coding for 30 years, have worked with ~42 languages and don't know the difference between compiled and interpreted languages in the job interview.
- Chief developers at a large newsletter-publisher who think it's a good idea to build your own CMS (due to a lack of good existing ones, of course).
- Developers who have been writing PHP applications for multinational corporations for 25 years and cannot explain how PHP is executed. They don't even know what the fucking OPcache is, let alone fpm. FML
- People who call themselves professional developers but never ever heard of DRY, KISS, boy-scout rule, 12-Factor App, SOLID, Clean Code, Design Patterns, ...
- Senior developers wondering why the bash script won't run on their fucking Windows machine.
- Developers who consider Typescript to be a hindrance and see no value in it.
- Developers using ftp for deployments in 2022
- Senior Javascript Developer applying for a job and for whom Integer is a primitive data type in JS.
- Developers who prefer to code without frameworks and libraries because they are only an unnecessary burden/overhead and you can quickly code everything up yourself.
- Developers who think configuring their server(s) manually is a good idea.
You fucking Prutscher. What you have already cost me in terms of work and nerves. I can't even put it into words how deeply I despise you. I have more respect for the chewing gum that has been stuck in my damn trash can for the past 3 years than I do for you guys. You are the disgrace of our profession. I will haunt you in your dreams and prefix every fucking synapse of your brain with MY initials.
As a well-known german band once sang in a very fitting song: I wouldn't even piss on you if you were on fire.
If you recognized yourself in one of the examples here: FUCK YOU!29 -
So I Bought this bio metric pad lock for my daughter. She excitedly tried to set it up without following the directions( they actually have good directions on line) first thing you do is set the "master print" she buggered that up setting her print. So when I got home I was thinking, no problem I'll just do a reset and then we cant start again.
NOPE !!! you only have one chance to set the master print! after that if you want to reset the thing you need to use the master print along with a physical key that comes with it.
What sort if Moron designs hardware / software that is unable to be reset. Imagine how much fun it would be if once you set your router admin password it was permanent unless you can long back in to change it. Yea nobody has ever forgotten a password.
Well they are about to learn a valuable financial lesson about how user friendly design will influence your bottom line. people (me) will just return the lock to the store where they bought it, and it will have to be shipped back to the factory and will be very expensive for them paying for all of the shipping to and from and resetting and repackaging of the locks and finally shipping again to another store. Meanwhile I'll keep getting new locks until at no cost until she gets it right.
poor design
34 -
I miss old times rants...So i guess, here it goes mine:
Tomorrow is the day of the first demo to our client of a "forward-looking project" which is totally fucked up, because our "Technical Quality Assurance" - basically a developer from the '90-s, who gained the position by "he is a good guy from my last company where we worked together on sum old legacy project...".
He fucked up our marvellous, loose coupling, publish/subscribe microservice architecture, which was meant to replace an old, un-maintainable enormous monolitch app. Basically we have to replace some old-ass db stored functions.
Everyone was on our side, even the sysadmins were on our side, and he just walked in the conversation, and said: No, i don't like it, 'cause it's not clear how it would even work... Make it an RPC without loose coupling with the good-old common lib pattern, which made it now (it's the 4th 2 week/sprint, and it is a dependency hell). I could go on day and night about his "awesome ideas", and all the lovely e-mails and pull request comments... But back to business
So tomorrow is the demo. The client side project manager accidentally invited EVERYONE to this, even fucking CIO, legal department, all the designers... so yeah... pretty nice couple of swallowed company...
Today was a day, when my lead colleague just simply stayed home, to be more productive, our companys project manager had to work on other prjects, and can't help, and all the 3 other prject members were thinking it is important to interrupt me frequently...
I have to install our projects which is not even had a heart beat... not even on developer machines. Ok it is not a reeeeaaally big thing, but it is 6 MS from which 2 not even building because of tight coupling fucktard bitch..., But ok, i mean, i do my best, and make it work for the first time ever... I worked like 10 ours, just on the first fucking app to build, and deploy, run on the server, connect to db and rabbit mq... 10 FUCKING HOURS!!! (sorry, i mean) and it all was about 1, i mean ONE FUCKING LINE!
Let me explain: spring boot amqp with SSL was never tested before this time. I searched everything i could tought about, what could cause "Connection reset"... Yeah... not so helpful error message... I even have to "hack" into the demo server to test the keystore-truststore at localhost... and all the fucking configs, user names, urls, everything was correct... But one fucking line was missing...
EXCEPT ONE FUCKING LINE:
spring.rabbitmq.ssl.enabled=false # Whether to enable SSL support.
This little bitch took me 6 hours to figure out...so please guys, learn from my fault and check the spring boot appendix for default application properties, if everything is correct, but it is not working...
And of course, if you want SSL then ENABLE it...
spring.rabbitmq.ssl.enabled=true
BTW i really miss those old rants from angry devs, and i hope someone will smile on my fucking torture5 -
Question everything!
Comments lie.. sometimes code does too.. Customers..they lie the most..and are sloppy..
Don't be like customers, don't be sloppy. If you were sloppy own it & don't lie about it!
Pick your fights (trying to fix vs rewrite the shit out of it)..you will know what to do more with experience..
RTFM & docs.. If things still unclear, ask before your dick gets stuck in a toaster!
Ask away, learn about the customers & how they use your product.. you'll be surprised how something intuitive to you might be a rocket science for them..meaning more room to fuck things up when using it..more ways you can adapt & prevent things..
Most of all, don't fuckin lie.. ever!!
If you lie on you're CV, we will find out.. If you fuck up something & lie about it, we will find out.. but it will cost us precious time when solving it from scratch.. People fuck up..that's a fact..how you go about it is what makes/breaks it for me. So don't ever fuckin lie to me!!
And don't be arogant.. if you complain about fixing bugs, this is not a job for you.. if you can't even fix the obvious ones you've put there in the first place..twice as bad..
So think before you code..what do you want to do, how you want to accomplish this, is it reusable, can it be extended, does it introduce new technology into the project, will it fuck up current setup.. once you have this shit figured out, code will write itself..
Did I mention already you're not to lie to me, ever?!
And don't try talking about me behind my back either..I've seen it backfire before, results were not good..3 -
Background: Since last 3-4 months, was working with a senior engineer remotely on a project.
Present: Currently, I am Out of Office and yesterday late night, I opened my official mail and after sometime I got an email with subject: GOODBYE!
It was from him. The same senior engineer with whom I was working. I thought it was a joke. But people don't joke when they send such emails to a huge group of people.
I never knew he was going to leave so soon. I wanted to learn so many things working with him. I used to ask him the silliest doubts ever.
I still wonder why he left the company. I have so many questions to ask him.
I am sad. I am feeling left alone.
It's awkward that today, this very moment, I can't ping him anymore forever.
It's obvious to be more professional and such things are normal.
But, I am fresher and my first project was with him. So, it's kind of tough for me too.
I know this will help me to grow up stronger and teach me that time isn't constant and we need to always be ready and use the right time preciously and deal with the "constant change".
And also, wherever he goes, my best wishes to him and I hope I will meet him some day. -
Internships are fucking bullshit and if more senior developers were to take the role of an actual mentor to coach juniors properly then the state of software engineering would be better.
Some people can be let down easy in terms of "this is not for you bruh", others can be built. I know that social interactions are not common for a lot of the morons in here, but being polite and kind is relatively simple if you know what you are doing. Being a dickhead != "royal levels of expertise" and if we were to coach more people into proper development practices then software would not be in such a shitty state.
For an environment that thrives in cooperation I find it hard to believe that we are still subjecting new people to the field to what can be considered slavery with little to actual no monetary compensation.
I removed many of the requirements for the application to a software developer job where I am at (I am the boss, I get to do shit like that) and my fight with HR was "I would rather someone fresh from college that I can coach properly than some dickhead with years on the field that won't listen to anything else than their own words"
Sure it would be slow, sure it would be hard, nothing ever is that simple, but my idea is "train this mkfer, level the fuck out of him, let him be off to great shit rather than giving him to some dickhead that will treat him like shit on account of being a newbie"
And yes, I do know how and what can go bad, I am going to have someone desinging shit in basic html/js/css with some php here and there not giving them the keys to every server I control. Thank you for your fucking concerns, I know what I am doing.
the experiment fails? GOOD more data for me.
Plus, you learn more when you teach others.16 -
Why in the world IT work is so stressful?
I never been like that since I start developing code professionally, 8 years ago.
Since then, I had many health problems due stress, and some were really scaring (heart problem).
I'm trying to adapt to a healthier way of work, but I'm starting to doubt if that is possible.
Work in technology seems cruel and soulless sometimes. The constant pressure to learn new things all the time, to specialize in a lot of skills, simultaneously. The urgency nature of ALL tasks - even a simple form field slightly out of place seems to be an issue of life and death for clients.
Easy and quick communication made some people lost boundaries and respect. Many times I received calls and messages after midnight, about things like elements alignment.
And the worst is when clients blame you about their business problems. If they are not selling well this week, it's fault of the website you did ( which they are using for months now).
This actually happened to me today, first thing in the morning. After I slept just 3h, because I worked until late yesterday (oh yeah many more of these life/death updates).
What happens in this industry? Will this ever be different some day?6 -
EoS1: This is the continuation of my previous rant, "The Ballad of The Six Witchers and The Undocumented Java Tool". Catch the first part here: https://devrant.com/rants/5009817/...
The Undocumented Java Tool, created by Those Who Came Before to fight the great battles of the past, is a swift beast. It reaches systems unknown and impacts many processes, unbeknownst even to said processes' masters. All from within it's lair, a foggy Windows Server swamp of moldy data streams and boggy flows.
One of The Six Witchers, the Wild One, scouted ahead to map the input and output data streams of the Unmapped Data Swamp. Accompanied only by his animal familiars, NetCat and WireShark.
Two others, bold and adventurous, raised their decompiling blades against the Undocumented Java Tool beast itself, to uncover it's data processing secrets.
Another of the witchers, of dark complexion and smooth speak, followed the data upstream to find where the fuck the limited excel sheets that feeds The Beast comes from, since it's handlers only know that "every other day a new one appears on this shared active directory location". WTF do people often have NPC-levels of unawareness about their own fucking jobs?!?!
The other witchers left to tend to the Burn-Rate Bonfire, for The Sprint is dark and full of terrors, and some bigwigs always manage to shoehorn their whims/unrelated stories into a otherwise lean sprint.
At the dawn of the new year, the witchers reconvened. "The Beast breathes a currency conversion API" - said The Wild One - "And it's claws and fangs strike mostly at two independent JIRA clusters, sometimes upserting issues. It uses a company-deprecated API to send emails. We're in deep shit."
"I've found The Source of Fucking Excel Sheets" - said the smooth witcher - "It is The Temple of Cash-Flow, where the priests weave the Tapestry of Transactions. Our Fucking Excel Sheets are but a snapshot of the latest updates on the balance of some billing accounts. I spoke with one of the priestesses, and she told me that The Oracle (DB) would be able to provide us with The Data directly, if we were to learn the way of the ODBC and the Query"
"We stroke at the beast" - said the bold and adventurous witchers, now deserving of the bragging rights to be called The Butchers of Jarfile - "It is actually fewer than twenty classes and modules. Most are API-drivers. And less than 40% of the code is ever even fucking used! We found fucking JIRA API tokens and URIs hard-coded. And it is all synchronous and monolithic - no wonder it takes almost 20 hours to run a single fucking excel sheet".
Together, the witchers figured out that each new billing account were morphed by The Beast into a new JIRA issue, if none was open yet for it. Transactions were used to update the outstanding balance on the issues regarding the billing accounts. The currency conversion API was used too often, and it's purpose was only to give a rough estimate of the total balance in each Jira issue in USD, since each issue could have transactions in several currencies. The Beast would consume the Excel sheet, do some cryptic transformations on it, and for each resulting line access the currency API and upsert a JIRA issue. The secrets of those transformations were still hidden from the witchers. When and why would The Beast send emails, was still a mistery.
As the Witchers Council approached an end and all were armed with knowledge and information, they decided on the next steps.
The Wild Witcher, known in every tavern in the land and by the sea, would create a connector to The Red Port of Redis, where every currency conversion is already updated by other processes and can be quickly retrieved inside the VPC. The Greenhorn Witcher is to follow him and build an offline process to update balances in JIRA issues.
The Butchers of Jarfile were to build The Juggler, an automation that should be able to receive a parquet file with an insertion plan and asynchronously update the JIRA API with scores of concurrent requests.
The Smooth Witcher, proud of his new lead, was to build The Oracle Watch, an order that would guard the Oracle (DB) at the Temple of Cash-Flow and report every qualifying transaction to parquet files in AWS S3. The Data would then be pushed to cross The Event Bridge into The Cluster of Sparks and Storms.
This Witcher Who Writes is to ride the Elephant of Hadoop into The Cluster of Sparks an Storms, to weave the signs of Map and Reduce and with speed and precision transform The Data into The Insertion Plan.
However, how exactly is The Data to be transformed is not yet known.
Will the Witchers be able to build The Data's New Path? Will they figure out the mysterious transformation? Will they discover the Undocumented Java Tool's secrets on notifying customers and aggregating data?
This story is still afoot. Only the future will tell, and I will keep you posted.6 -
Me a month ago: "I'm done with full-time corporate work. I'm going to shift to freelance only so I can enjoy my life and not be in a grind, bowing and scraping to a manager all day."
*Recruiter finds me and offers me a full-time opportunity*
Me now: "Well, I guess I can look into it..."
Me 9 months from now: "I'm done with full-time corporate work. I'm going to shift to freelance only so I can enjoy my life and not be in a grind, bowing and scraping to a manager all day."
Repeat until dead.2 -
These are the things that finally finally helped me stick to learning programming.
Hello world! This is my first story on devrant and I would like to share how I finally overcame the barriers that had always prevent me from learning programming in a more serious and structured way.
I know my way around linux, had some experience with BASIC many years ago and have more than basic notions of cryptography... however I never got myself to learn programming in such a way that I could write an app or interact with an API. Until now.
I have advanced more than ever before and I believe it might be thanks to these aspects:
1. C#
I have always had struggles with languages that were too compact or used many exotic or cryptic expressions. However I have found C# to be much more readable and easier to understand.
2. Visual Studio
My previous attempts at learning programming were without an IDE. Little did I know what I was missing!
For example when I tried learning python on Debian, I almost went crazy executing programs and trying to find the compile errors in a standard text editor.
Intellisense has been live changing as it allows me to detect errors almost immediately and also to experiment. I'm not afraid to try things out as I know the IDE will point out any errors.
3. .NET library and huge amounts of documentation
It was really really nice to find out how many well documented classes I had available to make my learning process much easier, not having to worry about the little details and instead being able to focus on my program's logic.
4. Strong typing
Call me weird, but I believe that restricting implicit conversions has helped learn more about objects, their types and how they relate to each other.
I guess I should be called a C# fanboy at this point, but I owe it to that language to be where I'm now, writing my first apps.
I also know very very little about other languages and would love to hear if you know about languages that provide a similar experience.
Also, what has helped you when you first started out?
Thanks!!5 -
Development world is always changing and evolving... It changes before you know it...
So, having the ability to quickly adapt and learn is a must for any Developer... And, this is the one thing that I am sure that everyone knows about or heard about..
But, my advice is quite simple:
"Don't rush into participating in a race, just because everyone else is doing so.
The trick is not to move quickly.. But, to move one step at a time, at the pace in which you are at your most comfortable...
It might seem counterintuitive and a contradiction to what I have said earlier.. But, I hope that by the end of this rant, you will be able to understand my perspective..
This advice is especially useful for people still finding and searching for their place in our world..
Charles Darwin, very wisely understood the philosophy behind 'Survival of the Fittest'..
By 'fittest', he didn't refer to the ones considered to be the strongest or having the most intelligence, but the ones that had mastered the ability to adapt to changing circumstances..
Adaptability is important, but not at the cost of understanding and learning about the fundamental pillars on which this world stands..
Don't rush because when you run, your visions starts to become more narrow.. In your pursuit to reach your goal, you lose the ability to look at the macro details surrounding your goal..
Learning new technology is important, but that doesn't mean that you don't learn about various approaches or how to design a more logical or efficient solution...
Refactoring the code, developing good Testing procedures, learning to interact with your fellow developers are as crucial as learning about the changing trends...
Even, in this ever-changing world, understand that some things will always remain the same, like the adrenaline that course through your veins when you finally solve a long-standing problem...
Curiosity, Discovery and Exploration are the key pillars and hence, when we rush in, we might stop exploring and lose curiosity to discover new and exciting ways to reach our goal..
Or, we might also end up losing the drive that grips us and motivates to continue moving forward inspite of the challenges standing between us and our destination..
And, believe me, once you lose this quality, you might still succeed but the contentment and the satisfaction that you feel will be lost..
And, then, you will remain a developer only through your designation... And, that in my personal opinion, the worst punishment.3 -
Github 101 (many of these things pertain to other places, but Github is what I'll focus on)
- Even the best still get their shit closed - PRs, issues, whatever. It's a part of the process; learn from it and move on.
- Not every maintainer is nice. Not every maintainer wants X feature. Not every maintainer will give you the time of day. You will never change this, so don't take it personally.
- Asking questions is okay. The trackers aren't just for bug reports/feature requests/PRs. Some maintainers will point you toward StackOverflow but that's usually code for "I don't have time to help you", not "you did something wrong".
- If you open an issue (or ask a question) and it receives a response and then it's closed, don't be upset - that's just how that works. An open issue means something actionable can still happen. If your question has been answered or issue has been resolved, the issue being closed helps maintainers keep things un-cluttered. It's not a middle finger to the face.
- Further, on especially noisy or popular repositories, locking the issue might happen when it's closed. Again, while it might feel like it, it's not a middle finger. It just prevents certain types of wrongdoing from the less... courteous or common-sense-having users.
- Never assume anything about who you're talking to, ever. Even recently, I made this mistake when correcting someone about calling what I thought was "powerpc" just "power". I told them "hey, it's called powerpc by the way" and they (kindly) let me know it's "power" and why, and also that they're on the Power team. Needless to say, they had the authority in that situation. Some people aren't as nice, but the best way to avoid heated discussion is....
- ... don't assume malice. Often I've come across what I perceived to be a rude or pushy comment. Sometimes, it feels as though the person is demanding something. As a native English speaker, I naturally tried to read between the lines as English speakers love to tuck away hidden meanings and emotions into finely crafted sentences. However, in many cases, it turns out that the other person didn't speak English well enough at all and that the easiest and most accurate way for them to convey something was bluntly and directly in English (since, of course, that's the easiest way). Cultures differ, priorities differ, patience tolerances differ. We're all people after all - so don't assume someone is being mean or is trying to start a fight. Insinuating such might actually make things worse.
- Please, PLEASE, search issues first before you open a new one. Explaining why one of my packages will not be re-written as an ESM module is almost muscle memory at this point.
- If you put in the effort, so will I (as a maintainer). Oftentimes, when you're opening an issue on a repository, the owner hasn't looked at the code in a while. If you give them a lot of hints as to how to solve a problem or answer your question, you're going to make them super, duper happy. Provide stack traces, reproduction cases, links to the source code - even open a PR if you can. I can respond to issues and approve PRs from anywhere, but can't always investigate an issue on a computer as readily. This is especially true when filing bugs - if you don't help me solve it, it simply won't be solved.
- [warning: controversial] Emojis dillute your content. It's not often I see it, but sometimes I see someone use emojis every few words to "accent" the word before it. It's annoying, counterproductive, and makes you look like an idiot. It also makes me want to help you way less.
- Github's code search is awful. If you're really looking for something, clone (--depth=1) the repository into /tmp or something and [rip]grep it yourself. Believe me, it will save you time looking for things that clearly exist but don't show up in the search results (or is buried behind an ocean of test files).
- Thanking a maintainer goes a very long way in making connections, especially when you're interacting somewhat heavily with a repository. It almost never happens and having talked with several very famous OSSers about this in the past it really makes our week when it happens. If you ever feel as though you're being noisy or anxious about interacting with a repository, remember that ending your comment with a quick "btw thanks for a cool repo, it's really helpful" always sets things off on a Good Note.
- If you open an issue or a PR, don't close it if it doesn't receive attention. It's really annoying, causes ambiguity in licensing, and doesn't solve anything. It also makes you look overdramatic. OSS is by and large supported by peoples' free time. Life gets in the way a LOT, especially right now, so it's not unusual for an issue (or even a PR) to go untouched for a few weeks, months, or (in some cases) a year or so. If it's urgent, fork :)
I'll leave it at that. I hear about a lot of people too anxious to contribute or interact on Github, but it really isn't so bad!4 -
Im now working as a fulltime dev for 3 years. I do programming since im 9 and now that I collected some experience, I have to to say, its horrible. Seriously. What the fuck is wrong with german internship companys? Letting me do 3 years of FUCKING CRYSTAL REPORTS. IN A DEVELOPMENT TEAM THAT CONSISTS OF A TEAM LEAD THAT ACTUALLY HAS TO LEARN SHIT LIKE PROPER OOP AND ASYNC/AWAIT FROM ME. THEY EVEN ASKED ME IF I CAN DROP OF MY HOBBY PROJECTS TO WORK ON SAMPLES THAT THEY CAN LEARN FROM! NO! FUCK! JUST BECAUSE THESE DOUCHBAGS ARE TOO LAZY TO FUCKING LEARN TECHNOLOGY THEY SHOULD BE PASSIONATE ABOUT IN THEIR FREE TIME, IM NOT MAKING IT MY JOB TO FREAKING SHOW THEM THAT HAVING A STATIC CLASS CONTAINING ALL MODELS EVER EXISTED IN THE APP IS A BAD THING! SERIOUSLY, THERES ONLY ONE INSTANCE OF EVERY MODEL WE HAVE! AND THEN THEY BLAME SQL SERVER FOR RACE CONDITIONS WHEN TRYING ASYNC!!!! WHAT THE FUCK!! AND STILL, IF I TELL THEM WHATS WRONG, IM AN IDIOT BECAUSE IM A JUNIOR! Please tell me that i didnt waste 10 years of my life dedicating to such bullshit. Will that change? Is it company specific?9
-
Eric Thomas' Top 10 Rules For Success
1- Know what you want.
If you don’t know what you want, how will you know what to say yes to in your life? Stop taking every body else’s leftovers and step up and take what you deserve!
2- Work on your gift.
We all have our own individual talents, gifts and strengths. But those natural gifts will only become truly great by refining and nourishing them. Natural ability will get you started, but commitment and determination to achieve greatness is what will get you to where you want to be.
3- No excuses.
Stop using your circumstances, finances or current position in life as an excuse to justify why you aren’t working towards your goals. You are in charge. If you aren’t where you want to be, take a look in the mirror and ask yourself honestly- WHY? Take responsibility for you life once and for all.
4- Upgrade your values.
Your values dictate your behaviours. And your behaviours create your results. If you want to a different result, you need to change your behaviour.
5- You reap what you sow.
Nothing in life is free. It is up to you to determine the course of your life. If you want success, you need to do what it takes, daily, to get there. Don’t focus so much on being successful. Focus on solving problems, helping others, and adding value to people’s lives, and success will come.
6- Education is the great equaliser.
If you are at the bottom, you need to learn. If you are at the top, you still need to learn. Never, ever, ever stop growing and educating yourself.
7- What is your WHY?
Why do you wake up in the morning and hustle? Why do you do what you do? Knowing the answer to this question is the single most important thing to know about yourself if you want to become successful. When you know WHY you are doing what you do, you won’t ever quit, even on a bad day.
8- Have boundaries.
If you want to be a huge success, you have to be strict on yourself with how you spend your energy. Distractions will come in many forms, family, friends, TV, but you have to make sure that your time is being spent wisely.
9- Speak from the heart.
Transparency is attractive. Don’t be afraid to open up to the world and let yourself be seen.
10- Succeed as bad as you want to breathe.
Everybody wants to be successful. But not everybody is willing to do the work that it takes to become successful. When you are willing to get so uncomfortable, so out of your depth, so blind that you have no other choice but to be successful, THEN you will become successful. The only question you need to ask yourself is this. Am I willing?
Credits: https://fearlessmotivation.com/2016...
2 -
I am a junior web developer, currently working in my first job for a small company, I was hired because I have an interest in meteor and modern web dev.
When I say small I mean I am the only full time js dev.
So the project we are working (my first ever professional project from start to finish) is a travel booking web app (being a little vague, for the sake of privacy). I am the lead developer, as a new programmer of a project that is far from trivial. There are no other javascript devs in office, no sort of code review. We have an outsourced dev but as I got in a flow with one dev my boss supposedly told him to do it part time (without discussing with me), but haven't heard anything from him, so assuming he's just disappeared (probably annoyed at being treated like a commodity).
Boss has set up the stages, and forces me to move on to the next stage before that stage has been finished. I will have to go back over the whole thing to finish things off.
He will only hire cheap juniors, one front end guy with barely any experience is styling the site.
He is used to churning out WordPress and Magento sites.
Wish I had a senior I could learn off.
I want to stick at this project and see it through, but i can only see it ending in a train wreck.
At the same time I want out, I want to work under a better team with senior programmers and better code review.
I just have to do my best and see how it goes I guess6 -
Winforms.
Thanks to my school I was introduced to this shit and by George is it some of the most unintuitive crap I've ever used.
The drag and drop shit should be fine, but oh if ever you doubleclick on something it will add a [name]_click method, and if you think you can just remove it fuck you!
Then there's the fact that splitting stuff up is unintuitive as hell as well. That is, you can't. You can define areas you can show and hide, and then you can drag stuff into them. That should be fine but everything is still in the same page (and if you have stuff overlapping then you better not move it with your mouse because then it will belong to another of those things). Contrast that with the more ~~~complicated~~~ and ~~~not what we learn~~~ WPF which has frames where the content can be define in different files.
Oh but if thatt wasn't enough, the autogenerated code is horrible as hell.
I died a little inside when I learned someone decided to take it to the web as well D:
https://i.imgur.com/NL5ggIc.png
6 -
I need to rant about life decisions, and choosing a dev career probably too early. Not extremely development related, but it's the life of a developer.
TL;DR: I tried a new thing and that thing is now my thing. The new thing is way more work than my old thing but way more rewarding & exciting. Try new things.
I taught myself to program when I was a kid (11 or 12 years old), and since then I have always been absolutely sure that I wanted to be a games programmer. I took classes in high school and college with that aim, and chose a games programming degree. Everything was so simple, nail the degree, get a job programming something, and take the first games job that I could and go from there.
I have always had random side hobbies that I liked to teach myself, just like programming. And in uni I decided that I wanted to learn another language (natural, not programming) because growing up in England meant that I only learned English and was rarely exposed to anything else. The idea of knowing another fascinated me.
So I dabbled in a few different languages, tried to find a culture that seemed to fit my style and attitude to life and others, and eventually found myself learning Korean. That quickly became something I was doing every single day, and I decided I needed to go to Korea and see what life there could be like.
I found out that my university offered a free summer school program for a couple of weeks, all I had to pay for was the flights. So a few months later I was there and it was literally the best thing I'd done in my life to that point. I'd found two things that made me feel even better than the idea of becoming the games programmer I'd always wanted to be. Travelling and using my other language to communicate with people that I couldn't in English. At that point I was still just a beginner, but even the simple conversations with people who couldn't speak English felt awesome.
So when I returned home, I found that that trip had completely thrown a spanner into my life plan. All I could think about after that was improving my language skills and going back there for as long as possible. Who knows what to do.
I did exactly that. I studied harder than I'd ever studied for anything and left the next year to go and study in Korea, now with intermediate language skills, everyday conversations no longer being a problem at all.
Now I live here, I will be here for the next year and I have to return to England for one year to finish my degree. Then instead of having my simple plan of becoming a developer, I can think of nothing I want to do less than just stay in England doing the same job every day, nothing to do with language. I need to be at least travelling to Korea, and using my language skills in at least some way.
The current WIP plan is to take intensive language classes here (from next week, every single weekday), build awesome dev side projects and contribute to open source stuff. Then try to build a life of freelance translation/interpreting/language teaching and software development (maybe here, maybe Korea).
So the point of this rant is that before, I had a solid plan. Now I am sat in my bed in Korea writing this, thinking about how I have almost no idea how I'm going to build the life that I want. And yet somehow, the uncertainty makes this so much more exciting and fulfilling. There's a lot more worrying, planning and deciding to do. But I think the fact that I completely changed my life goals just through a small decision one day to satisfy a curiosity is a huge life lesson for me. And maybe reading this will help other people decide to just try doing something different for once, and see if your life plan holds up.
If it does, never stop trying new things. If it doesn't (like mine), then you now know that you've found something that you love as much as or even more that your plan before. Something that you might have lived your whole life never finding.
I don't expect many people to read this all, but writing it here has been very cathartic for me, and it's still a rant because now I have so much more work and planning to do. But it's the good kind of work.
Things aren't so simple now, but they're way more worth it.3 -
I have been working on this software for 3 years now. The code base was a working prototype made by my boss before I came, not more, not less. Php + Angular. Have been refactoring a lot, backend is backed with hundreds of tests now, frontend still lacks a lot. Still a lot of programm structures are still the same weird ones my boss once created in a rush between two meetings while learning Angular to get the prototype finished. Now it's used in production which makes hard to refactor, because we have to maintain backwards compatibility. Neither the parts I added or refactored completely are satisfying, because they are built on this structures, because i never got any feedback for anything I decided and because I changed my own paradigms over time.
So I am all alone on this project. All genuinly new projects are assigned to the new team members (i was the first one, no we are five plus my boss) because I wont have time, have to maintain the old one. So I never can do something new which is quite frustrating.
I did a little side tool, the only thing I invented and did completely by myself in our repertoire - and now some stakeholder shows big interest onto this. Instead of giving me the task to make a real project from this my boss wants to give it to them to develop it. Why? Because I need more time for the main application.
Also the more the software is used the more bug tickets and feature requests come. I was crying for help for months but the others had appareantly more important stuff to do.
This might be true to some extend. Yesterday we had some kind of crisis meeting and my boss wanted again to assing pur junior to help me, who has a shit load of other things to do and is a student. I insisted that this would not be enough, and one of the fulltime devs has to get involved because the thing is our core application and I am only part time btw. So my boss said we wont decide today but one of them should do it. They should have some time to figure out who which is understandable but it's not that I didn't keep saying this for months. Now they are all like whimp whimp when I have to do php i will quit. The new projects are all typescript, with node backend if any. But alas, one of them even said yesterday he doesn't want to do js anymore. Okay... but... this is our tech stack then get another job allready?
And I should do the same probably. But then again I feel very sorry for my boss who helped me in very dark times of corona and more. If both of us leave, the project he worked on for decade (including convincing poeole, collect money..) might be suddenly at it's end while he is so exited about it's access today...
I also get insecure if it's really that they hate php so much or that they don't want to work with me personally because maybe I am a bad team Player or what?
I experienced the same at my old workplace, got left alone with big parts of the project because they didn't want to do php and js in this case and it ended up five devs doing the python backend and me doing the frontend and the php cms part all alone. Then I quit and now everything seems to happen again.
And then again I think I am only fucked up so hard by this stuff because I do not really like being a developer at all. I only do it for the money and because I am good at it (at least i think so. Nobody ever bothers to ever to read my code and give me feedback, because you know, php and js). So I guess I would hate any other job in the field maybe likewise?
This job *is* convinient, salary, office
position, flexibility could not be better. At the end of the day it's not that stressfull. And i don't have any second of freetime (due to family) or energy i could offer a new and more demanding employer, can't work over time or even take a fulltime position, can't home office, can't earn less, can't travel very long to the office and especially can't go back to school to learn something completely new. Some of these constraints are softwe then other naturally but still my posibilities at the Moment are very limited. That might change in about five years if the family situation changed. So it would most likely be reasonable to stay until then at my current job? And bear being alone with this app, don't getting involved on any new project, don't learn anything new, don't invent anything.
There was one potential way out, they considered offering me PHD position to the upcoming ml part of the project... But I learned that I would attend to a bunch of classes at university first, which i would like to, but I don't think i have the time.
I feel trapped somehow. I also feel very lonely in the Office because those fucktards keep saying in home office.
Man, I don't want to go to work today.6 -
Remote work (for the software industry, at least) is PERFECT and I still haven't heard a single argument against it that could not be derived into one of the following explanations:
- the complainer is/has a terrible manager
- the complainer has a shitty house
- the complainer has a shitty family
- the complainer is a shitty person
Naturally I mean only real-adult healthy people who work in the software industry.
I will now list the complaints I have heard more often. All fit neatly in the categories above:
- "my family interrupts me a lot, require lots of attention and/or creates an environment I cannot work in" - in this case it is very irresponsible of the complainer to try and escape to an office. If the adults you live with cannot get by without you, how going to an office will help them? If you can't teach your children to behave, who will?
- "my house is noisy and/or uncomfortable" - move out! if you can go to the office, you can look for another place to live.
- "I need in person conversations to understand people / zoom meetings are a waste of time" - why? do you need the smell of other people to properly organize your thoughts? Yes, meetings are extra-shitty during the pandemic. But pandemics come and go and your terrible time management skills won't simply improve themselves. Learn to lead better meetings instead of blaming the medium.
- "I miss face-to-face interactions at work" - Those do not miss you. If you want to have personal conversations, do it *out of working hours* with consenting adults. If you want to have personal touch in work contexts, it is called "sexual harassment" and is a crime.
- "my employees / colleagues are not as effective without me breathing at their necks" - you are a terrible manager and leader if you can't inspire people in words only. Maybe even video.
My main point is, there is no argument against WFH. When people try to argue against it, they often actually mean "I don't like the pandemic". No shit. Life will be better after people stop dieing for breathing close to their friends and family. In the mean time, learn to organize your life instead of running away from it every day.
Have you ever been to love theatre? How many times? Have you ever seen a movie? How many?
Why so many more movies than live theatre? You think you would have liked the movies, and their price, more if it was live theatre? Would you have seen as many?
WFH is not perfect for everybody in the planet. But it sure is for the software industry.15 -
MENTORS - MY STORY (Part II)
The next mentor was my first boss at my previous job:
2.- Manager EA
So, I got new in the job, I had a previous experience in other company, but it was no good. I learned a lot about code, but almost nothing about the industry (project management, how to handle requirements, etc.) So in this new job all I knew was the code and the structure of the enterprise system they were using (which is why the hired me).
EA was BRILLIANT. This guy was the Manager at the IT department (Software Development, Technology and IT Support) and he was all over everything, not missing a beat on what was going on and the best part? He was not annoying, he knew how to handle teams, times, estimations, resources.
Did the team mess something up? He was the first in line taking the bullets.
Was the team being sieged by users? He was there attending them to avoid us being disturbed.
Did the team accomplished something good? He was behind, taking no credit and letting us be the stars.
If leadership was a sport this guy was Michael Jordan + Ronaldo Nazario, all in one.
He knew all the technical details of our systems, and our platforms (Server Architectures both software and hardware, network topology, languages being used, etc, etc). So I was SHOCKED when I learned he had no formation in IT or Computer Science. He was an economist, and walked his way up in the company, department from department until he got the job as IT Manager.
From that I learned that if you wanna do things right, all you need is the will of improving yourself and enough effort.
One of the first lessons he taught me: "Do your work in a way that you can go on holidays without anyone having to call you on the phone."
And for me those are words to live by. Up to that point I thought that if people needed to call me or needed me, I was important, and that lessons made me see I was completely wrong.
He also thought me this, which became my mantra ever since:
LEARN, TEACH AND DELEGATE.
Thank you master EA for your knowledge.
PART I: https://devrant.com/rants/1483428/...1 -
In 2015 I sent an email to Google labs describing how pareidolia could be implemented algorithmically.
The basis is that a noise function put through a discriminator, could be used to train a generative function.
And now we have transformers.
I also told them if they looked back at the research they would very likely discover that dendrites were analog hubs, not just individual switches. Thats turned out to be true to.
I wrote to them in an email as far back as 2009 that attention was an under-researched topic. In 2017 someone finally got around to writing "attention is all you need."
I wrote that there were very likely basic correlates in the human brain for things like numbers, and simple concepts like color, shape, and basic relationships, that the brain used to bootstrap learning. We found out years later based on research, that this is the case.
I wrote almost a decade ago that personality systems were a means that genes could use to value-seek for efficient behaviors in unknowable environments, a form of adaption. We later found out that is probably true as well.
I came up with the "winning lottery ticket" hypothesis back in 2011, for why certain subgraphs of networks seemed to naturally learn faster than others. I didn't call it that though, it was just a question that arose because of all the "architecture thrashing" I saw in the research, why there were apparent large or marginal gains in slightly different architectures, when we had an explosion of different approaches. It seemed to me the most important difference between countless architectures, was initialization.
This thinking flowed naturally from some ideas about network sparsity (namely that it made no sense that networks should be fully connected, and we could probably train networks by intentionally dropping connections).
All the way back in 2007 I thought this was comparable to masking inputs in training, or a bottleneck architecture, though I didn't think to put an encoder and decoder back to back.
Nevertheless it goes to show, if you follow research real closely, how much low hanging fruit is actually out there to be discovered and worked on.
And to this day, google never fucking once got back to me.
I wonder if anyone ever actually read those emails...
Wait till they figure out "attention is all you need" isn't actually all you need.
p.s. something I read recently got me thinking. Decoders can also be viewed as resolving a manifold closer to an ideal form for some joint distribution. Think of it like your data as points on a balloon (the output of the bottleneck), and decoding as the process of expanding the balloon. In absolute terms, as the balloon expands, your points grow apart, but as long as the datapoints are not uniformly distributed, then *some* points will grow closer together *relatively* even as the surface expands and pushes points apart in the absolute.
In other words, for some symmetry, the encoder and bottleneck introduces an isotropy, and this step also happens to tease out anisotropy, information that was missed or produced by the encoder, which is distortions introduced by the architecture/approach, features of the data that got passed on through the bottleneck, or essentially hidden features.4 -
Once upon a time i had a great idea.
Because i couldnt be bothered to do anything productive i created a simple app in the C# that would look into every .js file (from a game that uses it for the gui/main menu) and search for "//todo" lines.
I did it mostly for kicks. I got that idea when i encountered one //todo in a file when i was trying to mod that game.
Yes i know grep exists: fuck you.
It would have taken me more time to learn that than to write that 20 line program...
The result? Over 30 lines of //todo with some briliant pearls in the type of:
>Temp workaround because X
>Workaround for race condition
>Clean that up
>Obsolete
When i return home i will post real quotes. They might be amusing to read...
The game is based on a custom C++ engine. HTML, CSS and JS is used for main menu and some graphical interface in game.
The most amusing thing is that this inefficient sack of chicken shit is powering one of the biggest (no playerbase but unit, world, gameplay vise) rts that i have ever played.
But still in spite of a dead community, buggy gui as shit and other problems i love this game and a lot of other people love it too. It is a great game when it works correctly.
To the interested: JS portion uses jquerry and knockout lib.14 -
Here comes lots of random pieces of advice...
Ain't no shortcuts.
Be prepared, becoming a good programmer (there are lots of shitty programmers, not so many good ones) takes lots of pain, frustration, and failure. It's going to suck for awhile. There will be false starts. At some point you will question whether you are cut out for it or not. Embrace the struggle -- if you aren't failing, you aren't learning.
Remember that in 2021 being a programmer is just as much (maybe even moreso) about picking up new things on the fly as it is about your crystalized knowledge. I don't want someone who has all the core features of some language memorized, I want someone who can learn new things quickly. Everything is open book all the time. I have to look up pretty basic stuff all the time, it's just that it takes me like twelve seconds to look it up and digest it.
Build, build, build, build, build. At least while you are learning, you should always be working on a project. Don't worry about how big the project is, small is fine.
Remember that programming is a tool, not the end goal in and of itself. Nobody gives a shit how good a carpenter is at using some specialized saw, they care about what the carpenter can build with that specialized saw.
Plan your build. This is a VERY important part of the process that newer devs/programmers like to skip. You are always free to change the plan, but you should have a plan going on. Don't store your plan in your head. If you plan exists only in your head you are doing it wrong. Write that shit down! If you create a solid development process, the cognitive overhead for any project goes way down.
Don't fall into the trap of comparing yourself to others, especially to the experts you are learning from. They are good because they have done the thing that you are struggling with at least a thousand times.
Don't fall into the trap of comparing yourself today to yourself yesterday. This will make it seem like you haven't learned anything and aren't on the move. Compare yourself to yourself last week, last month, last year.
Have experienced programmers review your code. Don't be afraid to ask, most of us really really enjoy this (if it makes you feel any better about the "inconvenience", it will take a mid-level waaaaay less time to review your code that it took for you to write it, and a senior dev even less time than that). You will hate it, it will suck having someone seem like they are just ripping your code apart, but it will make you so much better so much faster than just relying on your own internal knowledge.
When you start to be able to put the pieces together, stay humble. I've seen countless devs with a year of experience start to get a big head and talk like they know shit. Don't keep your mouth closed, but as a newer dev if you are talking noise instead of asking questions there is no way I will think you are ready to have the Jr./Associate/Whatever removed from your title.
Don't ever. Ever. Ever. Criticize someone else's preferred tools. Tooling is so far down the list of what makes a good programmer. This is another thing newer devs have a tendency to do, thinking that their tool chain is the only way to do it. Definitely recommend to people alternatives to check out. A senior dev using Notepad++, a terminal window, and a compiler from 1977 is probably better than you are with the newest shiniest IDE.
Don't be a dick about terminology/vocabulary. Different words mean different things to different people in different organizations. If what you call GNU/Linux somebody else just calls Linux, let it go man! You understand what they mean, and if you don't it's your job to figure out what they mean, not tell them the right way to say it.
One analogy I like to make is that becoming a programmer is a lot like becoming a chef. You don't become a chef by following recipes (i.e. just following tutorials and walk-throughs). You become a chef by learning about different ingredients, learning about different cooking techniques, learning about different styles of cuisine, and (this is the important part), learning how to put together ingredients, techniques, and cuisines in ways that no one has ever showed you about before. -
Help. I work with a guy who really wants to learn programming (he’s sales/support rn) and is even taking some courses on it. He seems eager enough to learn, the problem is he is just so fucking stupid I don’t know whether to encourage him or level with him.
He somehow managed to pass a course on Java (which I still don’t believe since I had to help him put his lines of code in the right order ffs), but now he’s signed up for C++ and data structures and I honestly don’t know how he’s going to do it.
This is the type of guy who loves “coding” but thinks debugging is a waste of time.
Normally I encourage anyone who wants to learn programming do so, but let’s be honest it does take a modicum of intelligence and this guy has zero common sense at all. We’re talking about a guy who sent me a *screenshot* of an Excel file that I needed to copy some activation codes from. And then had absolutely no idea what was wrong when I replied “are you fucking with me right now?”
*sigh*
And that’s not even scratching the surface. I sent him a zip file containing some updated code and walked him through how to update them on Slack (really basic, copy/replace files stuff). Then the VERY next day when I sent him a second update he asks “is there something you want me to do with this?”
The instructions were literally the last thing we talked about in the chat log.
I actually fear the stuff this guy would unleash upon the world if someone were actually able to teach him how to write a whole program.
What should I do? Right now my plan is to be vaguely supportive but secretly hope he will realize he’s in over his head and drop out before any damage is done. But my worry is he may just be SO dumb that he actually thinks he can do it. At that point I guess I just have to put my faith in his school and pray that they aren’t just giving degrees away to whoever can afford them. Because fear the day this guy ever gets a degree in programming.9 -
!rant
For all of youse that ever wanted to try out Common Lisp and do not know where to start (but are interested in getting some knowledge of Common Lisp) I recommend two things:
As an introductory tutorial:
https://lisperati.com/casting.html/
And as your dev environment:
https://portacle.github.io/
Notice that the dev environment in question is Emacs, regardless of how you might feel about it as a text editor, i can recommend just going through the portacle help that gives you some basic starting points regarding editing. Learn about splitting buffers, evaluating the code you are typing in order for it to appear in the Common Lisp REPL (this one comes with an environment known as SLIME which is very popular in the Lisp world) as well as saving and editing your files.
Portacle is self contained inside of one single directory, so if you by any chance already have an Emacs environment then do not worry, Portacle will not touch any of that. I will admit that as far as I am concerned, Emacs will probably be the biggest hurdle for most people not used to it.
Can I use VS Code? Yes, yes you can, but I am not familiar with setting up a VSCode dev environment for Emacs, or any other environment hat comes close to the live environment that emacs provides for this?
Why the fuck should I try Common Lisp or any Lisp for that matter? You do not have to, I happen to like it a lot and have built applications at work with a different dialect of Lisp known as Clojure which runs in the JVM, do I recommend it? Yeah I do, I love functional programming, Clojure is pretty pure on that (not haskell level imo though, but I am not using Haskell for anything other than academic purposes) and with clojure you get the entire repertoire of Java libraries at your disposal. Moving to Clojure was cake coming from Common Lisp.
Why Common Lisp then if you used Clojure in prod? Mostly historical reasons, I want to just let people know that ANSI Common Lisp has a lot of good things going for it, I selected Clojure since I already knew what I needed from the JVM, and parallelism and concurrency are baked into Clojure, which was a priority. While I could have done the same thing in Common Lisp, I wanted to turn in a deliverable as quickly as possible rather than building the entire thing by myself which would have taken longer (had one week)
Am I getting something out of learning Common Lisp? Depends on you, I am not bringing about the whole "it opens your mind" deal with Lisp dialects as most other people do inside of the community, although I did experience new perspectives as to what programming and a programming language could do, and had fun doing it, maybe you will as well.
Does Lisp stands for Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses or Los in stupid parentheses? Yes, also for Lost of Insidious Silly Parentheses and Lisp is Perfect, use paredit (comes with Portacle) also, Lisp stands for Lisp Is Perfect. None of that List Processing bs, any other definition will do.
Are there any other books? Yes, the famous online text Practical Common Lisp can be easily read online for free, I would recommend the Lisperati tutorial first to get a feel for it since PCL demands more tedious study. There is also Common Lisp a gentle introduction. If you want to go the Clojure route try Clojure for the brave and true.
What about Scheme and the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs? Too academic for my taste, and if in Common Lisp you have to do a lot of things on your own, Scheme is a whole other beast. Simple and beautiful really, but I go for practical in terms of Lisp, thus I prefer Common Lisp.
how did you start with Lisp?
I was stupid and thought I should start with it after a failed attempt at learning C++, then Java, and then Javascript when I started programming years ago. I was overwhelmed, but I continued. Then I moved to other things. But always kept Common Lisp close to heart. I am also heavy into A.I, Lisp has a history there and it is used in a lot of new and sort of unknown projects dealing with Knowledge Reasoning and representation. It is also Alien tech that contains many things that just seem super interesting to me such as treating code as data and data as code (back-quoting, macros etc)
I need some inspiration man......show me something? Sure, look for a game called Kandria in youtube, the creator, Shimera (Nicolas Hafner) is an absolute genius in the world of Lisp and a true inspiration. He coded the game in Common Lisp, he is also the person behind portacle. If that were not enough, he might very well also be Shirakumo, another prominent member of the Common Lisp Community.
Ok, you got me, what is the first thing in common lisp that I should try after I install the portacle environment? go to the repl and evaluate this:
(+ 0.1 0.2)
Watch in awe at what you get.
In the truest and original sense of the phrase (MIT based) "happy hacking!"10 -
Have u guys ever wonder, all those devs we rant about (mostly senior developer), how it feels like to be them? Today I realized, I am most probably becoming like one.
I joined devops 7 month back(around one and half year in industry). Right now, I am 2nd senior member in project. I have done deployment on multiple environments more than 100 times. But till today, I never knew how the deployment is being done. I knew to trigger job but I never knew how it worked. Today when a junior asked me, then I learn ansible, then I understand whole deployment process.(and remember I am 2nd senior most with 7 month in project)
Sometime I wonder, till now I always had good rating and most responsible title. But how much is that because of my technical knowledge? Sometime it feels like I have very good luck. But man, it's very depressing. Sometime it feels like my junior don't get enough limelight because I am in their way although they have good knowledge but they lack the though process for now. Most of the time my senior present me as role model to juniors, and it's very embarrassing for me(this will not continue on as I talked to my seniors) . I did work on good projects from time I joined company. And never had any issue and always deliver what needed. But I still can't write code in Java to take input or do for each on array in javascript without seeing stackoverflow once.
Now I fear that someday I will write piece shit of code and whole efficiency of project will go down cause of me. Atleast, the person who will get to fix it will get a chance to have good rant here. I tried open source projects to understand how to write good code but I always have hard time understanding new-projects which I never worked on.
Then there is reputation on Indian devs. This is my another Fear. That someday cause of me, my fellow devs will get bad reputation as well.
This coming year, my goal is to fill up all the holes but I don't know why my fingers are crossed.
Sorry, I had to bring this out somewhere. And please ignore my grammatical mistakes.3 -
A bit late.. and not much about how to learn to code..but more of a figuring out if the kid has a right mind set to do so..
If the kid is not the type to question everything, not resourceful, not a logical/critical thinker, gives up easily and especially if not interested in how things work then being a dev is most probably not for them.. they can still persue coding, but it will end badly..
From my experience, people who have a better education than me, but lack those skills turned out to be a crappy dev.. not interested in the best tool to complete the tasks, just making 'something', adding more shit to the already shitty stack.. and being happy with that.. which of course is not the best way to do things around here..or in life!!
Soo.. if the kid shows all that and most importantly shows interest in learning to code.. throw him the java ultimate edition book and see what happens.. joke!
There are plenty of apps thath can get you started (tried mimo, but being devs yourself it's probably not so hard to check some out and weed out the bad ones) that explain simple logic and syntax.. there is w3schools that explains basics quite well and lets you tinker online with js and python..
so maybe show them these and see what happens.. If it will pick their interest, they will soon start to ask the right questions.. and you can go from there..
If the kids are not the 'evil spawns' of already dev parents or don't have crazy dev aunties and uncles, then they will have to work things out themselves or ask friends... or seek help online (the resourceful part comes here).. so google or any flavour of search engines is their friend..
Just hope they don't venture to stack overflow too soon or they will want to kill themselves /* a little joke, but also a bit true.. */
Anyhow, if the kid is exhibiting 'dev traits' it is not even a question how to introduce it to the coding.. they will find a way.. if not, do not force them to learn coding "because it's in and makes you a lot of moneyz"..
As with other things in life, do not force kids to do anything that you think will be best for them.. Point them in direction, show them how it might be fun and usefull, a little nudge in the right direction.. but do not force.. ever!!!
And also another thing to consider.. most of the documentation and code is written in english.. If they are not proficient, they will have a hard time learning, checking docs, finding answers.. so make sure they learn english first!!
Not just for coding, knowing english will help them in life in general. So maaaaybe force them to learn this a bit..
One day my husband came to me and asked me how he can learn.. and if it's too late for him to learn coding.. that he found some app and if I can take a look and tell him what I think, if it is an ok app to learn..
I was both flattered and stumped at the same time..
Explained to him that in my view, he is a bit old to start now, at least to be competitive on the market and to do this for a living, but if it interests him for som personal projects, why not.. you're never too old to start learning and finding a new hobby..
Anyhow, I've pointed out to him that he will have to better his english in order to be able to find the answers to questions and potential problems.. and that I'm happy to help where and when I can, but most of the job will be on him.
So yeah, showed him some tutorials, explained things a bit.. he soon lost interest after a week and was mindblown how I can do this every day..
And I think this is really how you should introduce coding to kids.. show them some easy tutorials, explain simple logic to them.. see how they react.. if they pick it up easily, show them something more advanced.. if they lose interest, let them be.
To sum up:
- check first if they really want to learn this or this is something they're forced to do (if latter everything you say is a waste of everybodys time)
- english is important
- asking questions (& questioning the code) is mandatory so don't be afraid to ask for help
- admitting not knowing something is the first step to learning
- learn to 'google' & weed out the crap
- documentation is your friend
- comments & docs sometimes lie, so use the force (go check the source)
- once you learn the basics its just a matter of language flavour..adjust some logic here, some sintax there..
- if you're stuck with a problem, try to see it from a different angle
- debugging is part of coder life, learn to 'love' it4 -
A friend of mine who wants to learn about Linux has a stronger will than me, as I think installing Linux in 2020 is gonna break me but he's still stoked as shit. I'm fucking serious. He asked me to install several distros, in order of interest (because they all fucking failed, because of fucking course they did) on a USB HDD he was using just for this.
We tried, in order:
Arch: initramfs wiped his Windows HDD when it crashed. IDFK how, but it zeroed the top 32KB of the drive. It wasn't even the right HDD...
Linux Mint: nvidia drivers refused to see his GPU after install. No matter what we did. Live media saw it fine until it was installed on the external drive, too.
Debian: Installer couldn't see the external HDD, ever. No matter what we did. It had a /dev entry, lsblk and fdisk saw it, I could format and mount it, but the installer crashed when it refreshed the device list when it was present. Every goddamn time.
Fedora: Installer broke halfway through as an executable (or 70) were corrupted, but the disc matched the ISO and the ISO sums correctly, so this is apparently how it was packed and shipped.
CentOS: Refused to boot. Just entirely. GRUB would go to load the kernel and it'd hang.
All ISOs and discs were verified as matching provided sums using MD5 and SHA256. How the fuck is Linux so fucking hard to get working on older hardware in 2020? Worked great in 2008, worked great in 2018, why is 2020 such a goddamn issue?11 -
... worst drunk coding experience?
none. or to be more precise, all of the three of them I had. I can't code drunk, i hate doing it, i hatw even thinking about doing it when drunk.
so after those initial three attempts i don't try to do it again, ever.
BUT, best coding experience while high?
ALL OF THEM.
some of the best pieces of code I wrote i did when I was high. my mind goes into overdrive at those times, and my thinking is not lines/threads of thought, but TREES of thought, branching and branching, all nodes of each layer of the tree coming to me AT ONCE, one packet == whole layer across all of the branches.
and the best was when one day, in about 14 hour marathon of coding while high, i wrote from scratch a whole vertical slice of my AI system that i've been toying around in my head for several years prior, and I had all of the high-level concepts ALMOST down, but could never specify them into concrete implementations.
and I do mean MY ai system, my own design, from the ground up, mixing principles of neural networks and neuropsychology/human brain that I still haven't seen even mentioned anywhere.
autonomous game ai which percieves and explores its environment and tools within it via code reflection, remembers and learns, uses tools, makes decisions for itself for its own well-being.
in the end, i had a testbed with person, zombie and shotgun.
all they had pre-defined in their brains were concepts of hunger and health. nothing more.
upon launching it, zombie realized it wants to feed, approached oblivious person, and started eating it.
at which point, purely out of how the system worked, person realized: "this hurts, the hurt is caused by zombie, therefore i hate zombie, therefore i want to hurt it", then looked around, saw the shotgun, inspected its class by reflection, realized "this can hurt stuff", picked the shotgun up, and shot the zombie.
remembered all of that, and upon seeing another zombie, shot it immediately.
it was a complete system, all it needed to become full-fledged thing was adding more concepts and usable objects, and it would automatically be able to create complex multi-stage, multi-element plans to achieve its goals/needs/wants and execute them. and the system was designed in such a way that by just adding a dictionary of natural language words for the concept objects on top of it, it should have been able to generate (crude but functional) english sentences to "talk" about its memories, explain what happened when, how it reacted, what it did and why, just by exploring the memory graph the same way as when it was doing its decision process... and by reversing the function, it should have been able to recieve (crude) english sentences that would make it learn what happened somewhere else in the gameworld to someone else, how to use stuff and tell it what to do, as in, actually transfer actual actionable usable knowledge to it...
it felt amazing to code for 14 hours straight, with no testruns during that, run it for the first time after those 14 hours, and see that happen.
and it did, i swear! while i was coding, i was routinely just realizing typos and mistakes i did 5-20 minutes ago, 4 files/classes ago! the kind you (and i) usually notice only when you try to run the thing and it bugs out.
it was a transcendental experience.
and then, two days later, i don't remember anymore what happened, but i lost all of that code.
and since then, i never mustered enough strength and resolve to try and write the whole thing again.
... that was like 4 years ago.
i hope that miracle will happen again one day...3 -
Not sure if forums like DevRant ever helped me but it certainly gave me an impression of how work in the industry is. It sort of prepared
me for the bs that I could face and I ended up expecting and managing those situations. This will be both a happy, raw and a grumpy thought. I’m a self taught dev, I failed my education due to a situation outside my control but I always loved programming, it’s mostly because I love solving problems and creating something I feel is my own. Today I’m a core member in a company and I’m also a contractor in my own company. I love the variety of working on my own and I love helping team members, I love organising projects and the experiences others bring help me grow and expand what is literally my life’s passion. I started out as a consultant because someone saw my passion and my experience, they took a chance and well, I can’t say I’ve disappointed them. I just recently got to know into my adult life that I got ADD and meanwhile it probably pushed me out of the normal, it helped me focus on the things I liked. I was 6 years when I wanted to learn programming and I was 10 when I first started learning, I felt like a failure when I was 18 after literally 6 hours a day of learning development each day, I didn’t have a job for several years and when I was 24 - prior to becoming a consultant, someone offered me a job, it was one of those “5 day” interview assignments, where I practically delivered a finished, fully tested project for them. They offered me lowest of pay (15 usd/hr). They took advantage of my situation, put me on a solo project and said it wasn’t good enough because it didn’t fit their preferences after 50 hours of dedicated work without any guidance, specs or meetings. I’d say thanks but I was never considered before I had “experience” by others, I hope I’ll get the chance to give someone that experience before they go through the same as me. I could go on for so long about what I feel is wrong about this industry but one description that continually come up “impostors syndrome”, shut the fuck up if you don’t know what you’re talking about and give even “newbies” a chance. Programming and development is more than experience.1 -
This is more of an essay than a rant. TLDR at the end. I simply can't choose from all the shitty lecturers I've had, so I'm going to have to go through them one by one. But of background. I'm currently in 7th year of college, I did a multimedia degree in 2 years, a intro course to Software Dev and I'm currently in my final year of my Software Dev degree. So let's start.
Intro Software Course
- we had a database module, which was thought by, I shit you not, the head of the psychology course in the college, she attempted to teach us Databases using access. And not even using SQL, using access GUI components and it's query builder. Need I say more?
1st year software dev
- We had a networking module, the guy that taught the labs, he literally didn't say more than 12 words the entire 12 week semester, his answer to any question you asked him was a grunt and "research it"
- We had a psychology module, I have no fucking idea why, but instead of learning something useful we were told to read this and get in touch with your feelings...
- database module. Yes we actually did SQL here, 12 weeks of select statements and normal form, talked about by a guy in a monotone voice, who sounded like he was contemplating bringing in an assault riffle some day. Also instead of using MySQL he decided to use Ingres. Why I will never know.
2nd Year Software Dev
- We had a module called Algorithms and Data Structures. The lecturer gave us problems she couldn't solve. Simple problems. She was also crazy. Absolutely nuts.
- Object Orientated Programming. I had this lecturer for 3 semesters up until 3rd year. This guy did COBOLT in college, graduated in the 70s or something and went straight into teaching, he taught us Java for nearly 2 years. He literally copied and pasted texts from PDFs and read through them in class. He told myself and another guy at one stage he really didn't care, and was just counting down the days to his retirement.
- Databases again, different lecturer from 1st year, taught us for 2 semesters (24 weeks) and somehow managed to teach us nothing.
3rd Year Software Dev
- software engineering.. This is where the biggest cunt I've ever met was introduced. He arrives into class 15 minutes late every time without fail, talks shit about stuff that has no relevancy to the topic at all, tries to turn everything into a rugby metaphor and every time you ask a question he somehow dodges it and swiftly changes topic. This cunts past profession? A Project Manager. Fucking typical. This dickhead has also thought me 2 other modules.
4th yr Software Dev
- El cunto mentioned above for 2 more modules. Need I say more.
- real time systems, this module took the piss, the module was written by the lecturer which is what earns his space here. Assignments given to us, which required more time to do than we had in labs so we had to work at home, the problem we that is we were using an obscure RTOS called OS9 which would only work on the college computers. When brought to the lecturers attention he just said "figure it out"
Internet of Things - There was 2 lecturers, each lecturer seemingly working off a different plan, one week you'd have one lecturer, the next would be the other one going on about something completely different and unrelated to anything else we'd done.
Some lecturers didn't even make this list as I couldn't be bothered trying to think back about how shit other ones were. These were the ones that always stood out in my mind.
My main take away point from this is that you go to college for the paper which says you have a degree. Learning things that are going to benefit you in a career is up to yourself.
TLDR; 90% of my college lectures were shit. You need to learn useful stuff yourself.1 -
life becomes sulking when you have no support.
1. bought a new car. finally everything went good and i was able to get out of the infinite loop of anxiety : "where would i park?" "fights with neighbour" , "how to become confident after learning to drive in driving schools?" , efc
2. on delivery day, a friend helped park the new car near home. the plan was that from next day , we will start taking classes on self car with a car trainer
3. this morning, i took a class with car trainer alongside my mom as she wanna learn too. she used to drive somewhat shakily 10 years ago.
She got scared seeing me to drive. i was driving fine as the trainer hmmself didn't scolded me anything. i was driving at 30kmph on empty roads, while she is trained to drive at 10-15kmph. whe she drove, her driving was full of jerks and sudden break/clutch release, but i remained mum
4. later on, one of my friend also rejected going with me for driving. and the car trainer is also citing some time issues for next few days. i am now stuck with:
- a brand new car wrapped under sheets with no future for getting out
- a driving license in my wallet that will keep on taking dust as i would rarely be allowed to ever take my car out for a 60km drive to office.
-some overly anxious parents trying to take out my morale
- a sad me. when will the life give me a chance to fuckin grow up?
i have cracked the IT for fuck's sake. i started from peanuts salary, and worked my way to a great package, i am a person who understands how to live. why the fuck can't i learn this skill5 -
I get anxious when I try to learn new things.
I'm not even sure how to describe it. Low self esteem? Low confidence? I dunno.
It feels like stage freight, but there's no audience or stage, it's just me and my computer.
No one really ever watches me, or judges me or anything.
I guess I'm a bit self emasculating because I don't really have a reason for feeling ashamed for trying out something in private.
But I feel that the fear, the stress is very distracting and it's limiting my progress.
Now, there's this project I'm rewriting in my company that I'm taking pride in and think that it has the potential to actually increase profits.
The stack is way better, it's visually better, the load times are better, the product is easier to access and try out, bla bla bla.
I guess I never felt truly proud of anything I've ever done in any company, most of what I did felt like grunt work.
But this one is actually a very well designed improvement.
So I'm hoping that this will be the excuse for not needing to prove myself anymore so that my mindset will be something like:
so what if I abandon another side project?
so what if I publish a game that looks like shit?
I may fail at newer projects, but I did win at that project I did in my company, and it wasn't a victory just because I say so, but also because my coworkers and bosses do too.
I don't know what else could help at this point.2 -
"Averice - a serial novel"
2021 - found on the remnents of an old 'youtube' server rack.
A gaunt but handsome man walks into the view finder. Adjusts the camera. "Hi guys and girls." he smiles weakly. rubs his blonde unshaved stubble, running his hand over his mouth, inhaling as if trying to find the right words.
"How can I say this. god. ...americas fucked and rapidly going down the shitter,
college is a fucking scam,
all success in the modern day is based on fraud, bullshit, mythmaking, and "who you know."
we're on the verge of a new cold war, the merger of the fed and the treasury combine with negative oil is the legit death signal of the petrodollar, we're gonna go through a *50% haircut* in living standards and a doubling of taxes on *everything* in the next six months, the tech bubble is gonna burst taking with it half the industry jobs overnight, the credit bubble will burst even as the fucking stock market climbs higher, a quarter or more of all retail will shut down leaving empty assets turning every state property market into the equivalent of fucking detroit. MAD as a protective doctrine is dead with the spread of hypersonic weapons so enjoy living with the constant threat of being obliterated without warning, my entire generation basically has no meaningful or stable future to look forward to, and none of us have really had an actual, genuine say in anything involving society for decades."
He exhalled visibly on camera, as if exhausted by the demons of anxiety he'd poured forth, a torrent of fears, uncertainties, and revelations like the tormented ghost of christmas past
A long pull from a bottle of southern comfort.
"look. we have an out of control intelligence apparatus that are in their operation more orwellian than the real life stasi ever were, a government at both the federal and state level thats made of millionaires and billionaires who give no fucks at all except for their own power, out of control and absolutely dogshit-corrupt *local* leaders, nothing is audited, nothing is meaningfully transparented, rampant fraud, destruction of evidence, witness tampering, railroading, intimidation, violence, threats of violence, skyrocketing cost of living, skyrocketing spending, skyrocketing taxes, skyrocketing policies of total control by police, skyrocketing homelessness, fatherlessness, poverty, political corruption, drug abuse, massive politically funded thinly veiled state propaganda, collapsing and decaying infrastructure, the loss of all tradition, culture, community cohesion we might have had, and on and on and on and on.
and all I want right now is to get my dick sucked. drink a beer and blow my motherfucking brains out.
and when people start fighting in the streets over some bullshit and it turns into race riots, because the motherfuckers in the media serving wallstreet always make it about race or some stupid shit like that, I wont be in america to put up with it.
do us all a favor. when you're hanging bankers, hang some fucking journalists too. they never tell the truth. doesnt matter which side they are on
they only divide people and advocate for more of the same bullshit, expanded state powers, more federal dollars, more workers for their campaign, more privileges. they're fucking cancer. yes even your favorite journalist. they're a tumor on society.
our government has become hostile to us even being *alive* anymore. it has for me become intolerable, and in time I have grown to hate it.
there is no way to change it. no way to salvage it. I cannot see any hope for the future anymore. And if you search yourself I know many of you feel the same."
He took another long pull from the bottle.
"we no longer have a voice in america and no means to air our grievances peacefully.
theres nothing in it left worth saving when it all can be taken away at a moments notice by a deaf and hostile bureucratic government. I should have voted for bernie last year. At least he would have destroyed it.
many of you will disagree with this sentiment, thinking things can still work out. because you still have your creature comforts. your apartment which you cant afford. your car with its maintenace bills and monthly payments you've fallen behind on same as half the country now out of work, but in a short few months, a year at most, you will learn what I have learned, and the reason I drink, what I knew about as early as june of 2019, that this is it. this was as good as it was ever going to get. and that the good days, the best days are behind us. that all that you hold dear could be taken. all that you worked for, was already gone, and you just havent realized it yet. I've set this to autoupload once it's done recording. I built a company just to watch the people who dont want any of us to succeed burn america down around it. Im done. Goodbye america."
The man got up from his chair, camera still recording, and left. Only the red flashing dot remained, the only witness to the silence.12 -
I'm currently having a problems sleeping my inner philosopher just keeps thinking about various things. I wanna try to write some of them down as an simply to see what will happen.
I'll write my opinion down as honest as possible so feel free to disagree, but point out what I should rethink, if you want me to consider it.
To me respect has to be earned. I think especially on the internet many people try to skip this crucial step when they try to get respect. Most often when they want an opinion or their ideals to be respected. Most of the time it doesn't even feel like they want to be respected, but rather accepted.
There's nothing wrong with accepted in my opinion, but there are several approaches to get to this point and I despise some of them.
Earning acceptance by earning respect is one of the right ways to do it. Working hard towards your goals, showing your individual strength, standing behind your ideals. These are things I can respect.
I should also mention that these Ideals should be concrete, based on rational thought and a general good will or you will just twist my words to say that I support e.g. IS, Stalin's politics ect.
On a side node, I think it'd be wrong to disrespect everything Stalin did, since, from an economical point of view, he pushed Russia forward by quite a bit.
Then on the other side I see crybabies. People who want to be accepted, without putting effort in their ideals. Most of the time not even aiming for acceptance through respect, but through pity. Honestly, that's all they're going to get from me.
Pity, for their petty ideals.
Basically all I ever see these people doing is attention whoring and practicing multiple deadly sins at once.
Wrath, jealousy, sloth, pride, greed and optionally also gluttony.
Lust is rather a separate package. When I think about it, I link it mostly to horny teens and "send bob and vegane" type of stuff.
Gluttony being powered by sloth or vice versa, enhancing it.
The clear image I have in mind, while I write about this packages of deadly sins however, is that of a jealous person, complaining / getting angry about something they could change change themselves, but want them to be changed for them. Mostly through social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and whatever the fuck Tumblr is supposed to be.
"I wanna be rich, why is <person> richt but I'm not? This world is so unfair 😡". Have you tried working towards becoming rich?
"I don't don't feel pretty. Accept me". Accept yourself. Done.
"I don't like <person or organization>'s doing". If that's the whole message, all you probably did so far is complaining or crying. Sweet tears.
Stuff like that can happen to any person, just like any person makes mistakes.
Mistakes are made to learn from them. If you realize realize and accept your mistakes others may do so as well and forgive you.
But we are he towards this idiotic trend where people just can swallow their pride even for microscopic things. They instead push their pride to higher levels of ignorance, blaming other people, l(ying)mfao, creating black holes of density in the process. Makes me wonder whether their real motive is an inside bet on who can get the most people to kill them selves by face palming.
Most of my life I have been fairly protected against these people, besides some spikes of incompetence, but recently the have invaded 2 areas in my world that make the world somewhat less of a pain. Programming and the internet culture.
Yes, I'm talking about that master / slave BS renaming and article 11 and 13.
The remaking itself isn't really the problem, but rather the context. This was basically a show of power for the self proclaimed "social justice warriors" or SJW for short.
The fact that this madness has spread. That's what worries me. To me it feels like the first zombie has spawned.
Then we have this corrupted piece of incompetent shit, called Axel Voss, and other old farts.
They live in a galaxy far away from reality, somewhere in the European Parlament, making laws they don't know shit about, regulating things they know shit about.
All in the name of the people of the EU of course. And by people we obviously talk about the money.
I can honestly not think of another reason, after reading the replies Voss and his party gave on Twitter regarding the shit they pulled off.
Well, at least none that doesn't involve some firm of brain death.
For now I'll show them as much as possible how much I despise / reject them. Currently playing with the thought of some kind (social media?) website were posts from other sites or actions in general can be rated only with "Fuck you"s.
Given these articles, I should not have them hosted in an European country though 😅.
Almost hitting that 5k character limit 😰1 -
How useful is my degree? I'm not sure to be honest. I did get to dive into a lot of subject matter which I find interesting and challenging. I also had to learn stuff I hate (solving matrices of differential equations). Strangely though, even though I doubt I will ever use this I am proud of myself for having slugged though it.
The teachers were helpful and supportive, I got to study in groups and had access to resources such as the university's GPU cluster.
In my day2day? So far, I cannot see anything I use directly. However, the university forced me to learn to pick up different technologies quickly, read the documentation, ask for help when your don't understand something. So, in that regard I think I profited from university.
I wasn't the best student by a long shot. My class mates helped me a lot. I struggled A LOT. Having been in the recieving end of a helping hand, o return the favour where ever I can. -
The only valuable life lesson I have ever gotten and I could give is 'fake it till you make it'. Doesn't it begin by playing an adult as a child? It's the same throughout whole life: Whenever they think you are good at something they will give you chances to actually do it and practice it. Regardless of we are speaking about sports at school (where they have to think you are good enough to give you the ball from time to time so you can even learn the game) or getting laid, or whatever job you are going to have: you have to fake some competence at first to get a chance to even try it. The key to success is to have a good feeling of how much fake is appropriate in which situation.
A lot of ppl in their early twenties and below think ppl are getting something they call mature or professional (when speaking about work) at one point in life. When they grow older and don't feel mature or prefessional at all but has to act as if they where, they feel like an imposter. But lemme tell you, now that I have to do with literal professors and other successful ppl: behind the scenes it's all the same fights and fears, the same anger and the craving for approval and friends hip, the same teaming IP and intrigues between them like between you and your mates back then on the playground.
At the latest when it comes to parenthood, you realize it. you got thrown into this huge quest with a shitload of responsibility and unnumbered side quests without any chance to be prepared and the same happened to your parents and theirs and to all the other parents you now are used to meet, back at the playground. All they can do is trying there best and keep a professional face. although some will tell you they are better at parenting bc they have have always the right size of diapers with them they are amateurs (or imposters if you want it) like you. Like your parents when you looked up to them pretending to know what they do. In fact, nobody knows. Maturity is a lie. Professionalism a fake. We stay always the same children playing in the sand we used to be. We only got better in playing adults.
So what now is imposter syndrome? Just another way modern society invented to hate yourself for being human.
That's it. Thats all I can tell about life after i survived the first half. I gave it all to you devrant, thank you for your attention, now get of my lawn.5 -
Maybe you people will like this story.
The past semester I studied Java in class. First time doing object oriented programming, I had an annoying teacher but got the hang of it. I still miss C from the last year.
As a final project we had to do any program and apply some stuff we saw in class (The program should have an array list, use interfaces, bla bla bla bery simple stuff). It also must have a complete documentation, a manual and a diary explaining what was developed every week. Bonus points if it was in a repository like GitLab.
I wanted to do an RPG game in a matrix, like a rougelike or an old FF game, that should be a map or two, a few monsters and items and that's it. Enough to show what can I do and to have enough excuses to apply everything that the teacher asked. I had a team with two friends who wanted to do the same.
After making accounts in three different pages that apparently would help us to be more organized (One to make charts and two task trackers) I lost all patience and made an account in GitLab, made the basic classes that we had defined in a chart, divided the tasks and put them in to do on GitLab and we started to work.
One of my companions caused a lot of problems. First, he didin't wanted to learn how to use GitLab (I simply asked them to do merge requests) and he insisted to use GitHub. Then he started to say that using the console version was even better (Pretty sure he said thet he never used Git, but maybe was gas poisoning). The GitLab repository never had a single commit to his name.
BUT WAIT IT GETS BETTER all the entire time, he was complaining about the graphical interface of the game, wanting to use some SDK for RPGs that he found. I told him that we will see that at the end, that first we should have all the mechanics done, test it in ASCII in the console and then, if we have time, we will put the visual interface, separated and optional from the main program to avoid problems.
After two weeks where he gave me very simple standard stuff late, half done and through Google Drive, I discovered he was most of the time working on... the graphical interface SDK! He took the job already done by me and the other guy and making a pretty hardcoded integration with the graphical interface and making everything that he tought it would be necesary. Soon enough the GitLab repository was totally outdated and completly useless. He had the totallity of the project in his half broken laptop, and sometimes he gave us a zip with all the code, outdated after a few minutes. Most of the stuff that I made was modified, a lot of the code was totally unknown to what it was and I had no idea even of how the folders were organised.
We had a month to finish it. I got totally disconected from the project and just hoped for the best, sometimes doing a handful of generic and adaptable lines of code for a specific thing (Funny enough, many core mechanics were nonexistent). The other guy managed to work more on the project, mostly fixing the mess that the guy did: apparently he didin't read the documentation of the SDK and just experimented and saw tutorials and tried to figure out how to do what he wanted.
Talking about documentation: we dont had yet. The code wasn't even commented propely. We did all that the last week and some stuff was finished the last night. The program apparently worked but I had no idea.
Thank God, the teacher just looked over everything and was very impressed by the working camera and the FF tiles. I don't think he saw the code or read too much of the documentation, much less when I directly wrote how I lost all access to the project.
I had a 10/10. I didin't complained. Most easy and annoying ten I ever had. I will never do a project with that guy. -
Having a lot of bad experiences while working as intern in startups and about to join a MNC, i wanted to share my work life balance and technical demands that i expect from a company. These are going to be my list of checkpoints that i look forward , let me know which of them are way too unrealistic. also add some of yours if i missed anything :
Work life balance demands ( As a fresher, i am just looking forward for 1a, 2a and 8, but as my experience and expertise grows, i am looking forward for all 10. Would i be right to expect them? ):
1a 8 hr/day. 1b 9h/day
2a 5days/week. 2b 6 days/week
3 work from home (if am not working on something that requires my office presence)
4 get out of office whenever i feel like i am done for the day
5 near to home/ office cab service
6 office food/gym service
7 mac book for working
8 2-4 paid leaves/month
9 paid overtime/work on a holiday
10.. visa sponsorship if outside india
Tech Demands (most of them would be gone when i am ready to loose my "fresher " tag, but during my time in internship, training i always wished if things happened this way):
1. I want to work as a fresher first, and fresher means a guy who will be doing more non tech works at first than going straight for code. For eg, if someone hires me in the app dev team, my first week task should be documenting the whole app code / piece of it and making the test cases, so that i can understand the environment/ the knowledge needed to work on it
2. Again before coding the real meaningful stuff for the main product, i feel i should be made to prepare for the libraries ,frameworks,etc used in the product. For eg if i don't know how a particular library ( say data binding) used in the app, i should be asked to make a mini project in 1-2 days using all the important aspects of data binding used in the project, to learn about it. The number of mini tasks and time to complete them should be given adequately , as it is only going to benefit the company once am proficient in that tech
3. Be specific in your tasks for the fresher. You don't want a half knowledgeable fresher/intern think on its own diverging from your main vision and coding it wrong. And the fresher is definitely not wrong for doing so , if you were vague on the first place.
4. most important. even when am saying am proficient , don't just take my word for it. FUCKIN REVIEW MY CODE!! Personally, I am a person who does a lot of testing on his code. Once i gave it to you, i believe that it has no possible issues and it would work in all possible cases. But if it isn't working then you should sit with me and we 2 should be looking, disccussing and debugging code, and not just me looking at the code repeatedly.
4. Don't be too hard on fresher for not doing it right. Sometimes the fresher might haven't researched so much , or you didn't told him the exact instructions but that doesn't mean you have the right to humiliate him or pressurize him
5. Let multiple people work on a same project. Sometimes its just not possible but whenever it is, as a senior one must let multiple freshers work on the same project. This gives a sense of mutual understanding and responsibility to them, they learn how to collaborate. Plus it reduces the burden/stress on a single guy and you will be eventually getting a better product faster
Am i wrong to demand those things? Would any company ever provide a learning and working environment the way i fantasize?3 -
TL;DR I just recently started my apprenticeship, it's horrible so far, I want to quit, but don't know what to do next...
Okay, first of all, hey there! My name is Cave and I haven't been on here for a while, so I hope the majority of you is doing rather okay. I'm programming for 6 years now, have some work experience already, since I used to volunteer for a company for half a year, in which I discovered my love for integrations and stuff. These background information will probably be necessary to understand my agony in full extend.
So, okay, this is about my apprenticeship. Generally speaking, I was expecting to work, and to learn something, gaining experience. So far, it only involved me, reading through horrible code, fixing and replacing stuff for them, I didn't learn a thing yet, and we are already a month in.
When I said the code is horrible, well, it is the worst I have ever seen since I started programming. Little documentation - if any -, everywhere you look there is deprecated code, which may or may not been commented out, often loops or simply methods seem to be foreign for them, as the code is cluttered with copy paste code everywhere and on top of that all, the code is slow as heck, like wtf.
I spent my past month with reading their code, trying to understand what most of this nonsense is for, and then just deleting and rewriting it entirely. My code suddenly is only 5% or their size and about 1000 times faster. Did I mention I am new to this programming language yet? That I have absolutely no experience in that programming language? Because well I am new and don't have any experience, yet, I have little to no struggle doing it better.
Okay, so, imagine, you started programming like 20 years ago, you were able to found your own business, you are getting paid a decent amount of money, sounds alright, right? Here comes the twist: you have been neglecting every advancement made in developing software for the past 20 years, yup, that's what it feels like to work here.
At this point I don't even know, like is this normal? Did git, VSCode and co. spoil me? Am I supposed to use ancient software with ancient programming languages to make my life hell? Is programming supposed to be like this? I have no clue, you tell me, I always thought I was doing stuff right.
Well, this company is not using git, infact, they have every of their project in a single folder and deleting it by accident is not that hard, I almost did once, that was scary. I started out working locally, just copying files, so shit like that won't happen, they told me to work directly in the source. They said it's fine, that's why you can see 20 copies of the folder, in the same folder... Yes, right, whatever.
I work using a remote desktop, the server I work on is Windows server 2008, you want to make icons using gimp? Too bad, Gimp doesn't support windows server 2008, I don't think anything does anymore, at least I haven't found anything, lol.
They asked me to integrate Google Maps into their projects, I thought it is gonna be fun, well, turns out their software uses internet explorer 9.. and Google maps api does not support internet explorer 9... I ended up somehow installing CEF3 on that shit and wrote an API for it in JS. Writing the API was actually kind of fun, but integrating it in their software sucked and they told me I will never integrate stuff ever again, since they usually don't do that. I mean, they don't have a Backend as far as I can tell, it looks like stuff directly connects with their database, so I believe them, but you know... I love integrating stuff..
So at this point you might be thinking, then why don't you just quit? Well I would, definitely. I'm lucky that till December I can quit without prior notice, just need a resignation as far as I can tell, but when I quit, what do I do next? Like, I volunteered for a company for half a year and I'd argue I did a good job, but with this apprenticeship it only adds up to about 7 months of actual work experience. Would anybody hire somebody with this much actual work experience? I also consider doing freelancing, making a living out of just integrating stuff, but would people pay for that? And then again, would they hire somebody with this much experience? I don't want to quit without a plan on what to do next, but I have no clue.
Am I just spoiled, is programming really just like that, using ancient tools and stuff? Let me know. Advice is welcomed as well, because I'm at a loss. Thanks for reading.10 -
Apart from the fact that I arrived at a good framework at work to play in problem space than in solution space, this post is more about self realisation and a slight progress in my happiness levels.
Monsoons started in India. The vibe somehow had always been melancholic for me triggering SAD (aka seasonal depression).
However, this year I find it cosier than ever. Hot showers, lazing around on a holiday when it's pouring outside, watching my favourite show/movie. I feel very relaxed in the moment, even when work and life is not as expected/under control.
What I realised is that my problem can be solved. I need a bigger house. That would give me privacy, some personal space for hobbies, and put a barrier between me and parents easing the tension and clashes. I could then get married, and with all the money I will save (from not buying a house myself), can be used to pursue hobbies like music, art, travel, etc.
Whenever I relax, my sleep pattern changes where I have longer duration of deep sleep with many dreams (perhaps processing everything). Does anyone else experience such a phenomenon?
Anyway, life doesn't get easy or hard, we just learn to put up with shit.4 -
[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 job11 -
People, help me out.
(first some abstract thoughts)
I am a final year undergrad yet to take steps in the world and i am trying to figure out what to do with my time, what my end goal and next steps should be.
As of now I think my end goal is "relaxation , peace and happiness of me and my loved ones", and to reach there , i need money.
My younger self chose engineering for a particular reason(that i vaguely remember) and weather it was a right or wrong/illogical decision, i guess i am stuck with it and have to use this only to reach my end goal.
Maybe i am regretting this and want to change. Maybe i am just a lazy ass who is bad in his assigned role of an engineer and is running towards glitter in other fields, whatever it is , i am not going against the decision of my past and accepting my identity as an engineer.
I believe once i am able to achieve my goal( that am still not sure about but overall is a good one from general perspective), i guess i will be satisfied
------------------------------------------------
(enough with the deep stuff)
I want to learn how to "learn" . like i am always conflicted about what to do next once the tutor leaves my hand.
for eg, let's say i goto a site abc.
1. They got 1 course each for android , web dev and ai. I choose the web dev course and give my hardworking attention to it
( At this point my choice is usually based on the fact that <A> i should not be stupid to buy all 3 course even if i have money/desire to buy all of em because riding 2 horses is only going to break my ass and <B> some pseudo stats like whichever got more opportunity, which i "like", etc(Point B is usually useless in the long run i guess) )
2. From what i have experienced, these courses usually have a particular list of topic that they cover and apply them to 1 or 2 projects. For eg, say that my web dev course taught me 20 something concepts of basic html/css/js/server and the instructor applied it to blog website
BUT WHAT IS NEXT ?
2.1.
>> Should I make more projects using only those particular list of concepts?
I usually have a ton of ideas that i want to implement now that i know how to build a blog site.
say i got a similar idea to make say url shortner. I start with full enthusiasm but in the middle way there is some new thing that i don't know and when i search the internet, i realize that there are 5 ways to implement such concept, making me wander off towards a whole list of concepts that were not covered in my original 20 concept course. This makes the choice 2. 2
2.2
>> Should I just leave everything , go to docs and start learning concepts from the scratch ??
Usually when i start a project, i soon realize that the original 20 concepts were just the tip of iceberg and there are a ton of things one should know, like how os works, how a particular component interacts with another, how the language is working, how the compiler is executing, etc .
At that point i feel like tearing all my notes away, and learning every associated thing from the scratch. No matter how much my project suffers, i want to know how the things are working from the bottom , like how the requests are being mad, how the routes are working, etc which might not even be relevent for the project.
Why i want to follow approach 2? because of the Goal from abstract thoughts. in theory, having deep knowledge is going to clear my interview thereby getting me a good job.
I will get good money, make projects faster and that will be a happily ever after story.
But in practical this approach is bringing me losses and confusion. every layer of a particular thing i uncover, turns out there is another layer below that. The learning never stops. Plus my original project remained incomplete.
What is your opinon, how do you figure out what to do next?8 -
all this talk of australian crypto laws got me thinking. here's a hypothetical (this might get a little complicated):
for the sake of the security facade, the government decides to not ban encryption outright. BUT they decide that all crypto will use the same key. therefore you can not directly read encrypted things, but it's not really encrypted anymore is it?
part two: there's a concept called chicken sexing, named after people who determine the sex of baby chicks. male chicks are pretty useless and expensive to keep alive, so they are eaten. female chicks go on to lay eggs, so ideally, from a financial standpoint, you only raise hens to maturity. this is nearly impossible to discern early on so at first you're just straight up guessing. is this one female? sure? that one? no? really 50/50. BUT if you have a skilled chicken sexer looking over your shoulder, saying right or wrong, then eventually you get better. why? nobody knows. they can't explain it. nobody can. you just sort of "know" when it's female or not. some people can do 1000s of chicks/hr with success up to 98% but nobody can explain how to tell them apart.
part three. final part:
after years, even decades of using this encryption with only one key, I wonder if people (even if only people who are regularly exposed to crypto like NSA analysts or cryptographers) can ever learn to understand it. in the same way as above. you don't know exactly what it says. or how you know it. you didn't run an algorithm in your head or decrypt it. but somehow you get the gist.
28464e294af01d1845bcd21 roughly translates to "just bought a PS5! WOOT!" or even just pick out details. PS5. excited. bought.
but how do you know that? idk. just do.
oh what a creepy future it has become.8 -
I was watching an Ancient Aliens episode called "Beyond Roswell". The show described the idea of some of our tech being seeded slowly by introducing alien technology to specific companies. They suggested that computing technology has advanced very fast and introducing this tech could be part of that.
At first I was kinda pissed about this. I have read about the creation of the first transistor back in the 40s or 50s. WWII really advanced our need for computing devices such as what Turing built. Then I realized a lot of the explosion of computer tech did occur after key ET events. This kind of made me wonder how much is "us" and how much is ET tech. I also realized it can take a lot of effort to understand something really advanced. So reverse engineering can take a LOT of effort to figure these things out. Being seeded by external tech does not take away from humans at all.
A parallel to this is a programmer that learns how to use a C++ compiler. They could go their whole career without ever understanding how the compiler itself is doing its job. I find myself wanting to learn how compilers work and started down this path. I look at the simple grammar I have learned to parse. Then I look at the C++ grammar and think "How can I ever learn to do that?" So I see us viewing potentially advanced things and wondering how the heck can we ever learn to do that. The common reaction when faced with such tech would be disbelief and in some cases ridiculing the messenger. When I was a kid the idea of sending a picture over a phone was laughable. Now this is common and expected. It was literally a scifi concept when I was a kid.
So, back to the alien tech. I am now thinking it would be cool to be working with alien technology through computing. This is like scifi stuff now! So what if what we have was not all invented here (Earth). If anything this will prepare us programmers to get jobs working for alien corporations writing ship level programs and brain interfaces. Think of it as intergalactic resume building. 😉
Top Tags
Weekly Rant
View