Happy 0x7E2!
Fun fact:
2018 = 2 x 1009 (both prime)
8102 = 2 x 4051 (both prime)

Let we all finiah at least one side project this year!

Hello everyone, this is my first time here so hi! I want to tell you all a story about my current situation.

At 18 while in the military I was able to get my first computer, it was a small hp pavilion laptop with windows 7. The system would crash constantly, even though I would only use it for googling stuff and using fb to talk to people. 5 months after I got it and continuously hated it decided to find out why and who could I blame (other than myself) for the system making me do the ctrl alt del dance all the time....

Found out that there are people called computer programmers that made software. Decided to give it a go since I had some free time most days. Started out with c++ because it was being recommended in some websites. Had many "oh deeeeer lord" moments. After not getting much traction I decided to move to Java which seemed like an easier step than C++. Had fun, but after some verbosity I decided to move into more dynamic lands. Tried JS and since at the time there was no Node and I was not very into the idea of building websites I decided to move into Python, Ruby, PHP and Perl and had a really great time using and learning all of them. I decided to get good in theoretical aspects of computer programming and since I had a knack for math I decided to get started with basic computer science concepts.

I absolutely frigging loved it. And not only that, but learning new things became an obsession, the kind that would make me go to bed at 02:40 am just to wake up at 04:00 or 06:00 because the military is like that. I really wanted to absorb as much as I could since I wanted to go to college for it and wanted to be prepared since I did not wanted to be a complete newb. Took Harvard CS50, Standford Programming 101 with Java, Rice's Python course and MIT's Python programming class. I had so much fun I don't regret it one bit.
By the time I got to college I had already made the jump to Linux and was an adept Arch user, Its not that it was superior or anything, but it really forced me to learn about Linux and working around a terminal and the internals of the system to get what I want. Now a days I settle for Fedora or Debian based systems since they are easier and time is money.

Uni was a breeze, math was fun and the programming classes seemed like glorified "Hello World" courses. I had fun, but not that much fun, most of my time was spent getting better at actual coding. I am no genius, nor my grades were super amazing(I did graduate with honors though) but I had fun, which never really happened in school before that.

While in school I took my first programming gig! It was in ASP.NET MVC, we were using C#, I got the job through a customer that I met at work, I was working in retail during the time and absolutely hated it. I remember being so excited with the gig, I got to meet other developers! Where I am from there aren't that many and most of them are very specialized, so they only get concerned with certain aspects of coding (e.g VBA developers.....) and that is until I met the lead dev. He was by far one of the biggest assholes I had ever met in my life. Absolutely nothing that I would do or say made hem not be a dick. My code was steady, but I would find bugs of incomplete stuff that he would do, whenever I would fix it he would belittle me and constantly remind me of my position as a "junior dev" in the company saying things as "if you have an issue with my code or standards tell me, but do not touch the code" which was funny considering that I would not be able to advance without those fixes. I quit not even 3 months latter because I could not stand the dick, neither 2 of the other developers since the immediately resigned after they got their own courage.

A year latter I was able to find myself another gig. I was hesitant for a moment since it was another remote position in which I had already had a crappy experience. Boy this one was bad. To be fair, this was on me since I had to get good with Lumen after only having some exposure to Laravel. Which I did mentioned repeatedly even though he did offer to train me in order to help him. Same thing, after a couple of weeks of being told how much I did not know I decided to get out.

That is 2 strikes.

So I waited a little while and took a position inside another company that was using vanilla PHP to build their services. Their system was solid though, the lead engineer remains a friend and I did learn a lot from him. I got contracted because they were looking for a Java developer. The salary was good. But when I got there they mentioned that they wanted a developer in Java...to build Android. At the time I was using Java with Spring so I though "well how hard can this be! I already use Android so the love for the system is there, lets do this!" And it was an intense, fun and really amazing experience.

-- To be continued.

Story Time. Inspired by another rant.

Context: I'm In a coding camp years ago, it's the first day.

We're doing introductions (name, why you're here, etc). Always fun to do that....

The folks running the camp are excited to introduce a student who also at one point was a teacher for some sort of girl power coding organization. So this raises questions, why would someone who teaches be a student in this camp?? And even a bigger question is raised when this person introduces themselves for a long time, and as an aside puts down the girls she taught in this program they taught ... like who does that?

horribleLady does that ...

A few hours later horribleLady asks her 12th question of the day (we haven't even started talking about code). Before she asks her question actually says:

“I know, I’m going to be a problem.” -laugh-

🚨🚨🚨 ヽ ( ꒪д꒪ )ﾉ 🚨🚨🚨

Fast forward to group projects and she's this sort of emotional storm, tears, and a sort of angry shouting that isn't angry enough for some folks to say she's yelling at people ... but she is. Fortunately I'm not in the first group project with her, but because we're all working in the same room we all get to see the train-wreck unfold.

The moment she doesn't get something (all the time) everyone in her group has to STOP and figure out what they're going to do about it, then again STOP because she thinks someone is doing something different than what was planned. STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP.

In a way, everything had to go through her, she didn’t declare it that way, she didn't present herself as any sort of authority, she would just stop everyone the moment she thought anything was wrong, or she didn't understand it (all the time), and either inject herself or demand help from her team. Everyone around her had to be drawn into whatever problem she had. It was horrific to watch.

Private slack channels would light up like crazy with "OMG", "WTF", "I DON'T UNDERSTAND HER", "FUCK" and "SHE"S HOW OLD!?!?"

So finally it happens to me and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly (capable guy, nice dude, pretty sure he was high all the time).... we're teamed up to work with horribleLady. Thankfully for just one day. I accept this because I figure one day with her is enough penance to try to avoid any further contact later on.

My approach is straight stone face. I refuse to respond to her sulking, or sighing, or general emotional bait she throws out constantly. I saw other students unwittingly take her bait (they were trying to be helpful) only to have her crap all over them with her frustrations or whatever it is is going on.

Still we're teamed up with her her for the day so I'm going to be a good team member and I explain what guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I are doing / trying.... and so forth. But she's just too upset that she's even assigned to work with us, and tells me I'm just not doing it right, and her explanations about how we're not doing it right makes less than 0 sense. I ask her to show me what she means but she won't type anything on her keyboard, she'd just talk about how she’s thinking conceptually in circles and sulk about it rather than listen. I don't respond to any of her shit and say "I'm going to try this." and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I just keep working.

She would later call the instructor over and complain to him for a while and say: "These guys just get it, they're not helping me, I want to be assigned to another group." She doesn't get her way so she just moves to another table in front of us.

After that day I figured it was a great time to ask .... to NEVER be assigned to anything with her because "If I told her what I thought it would just get a lot worse." I got my way ;)

Other students weren't so lucky. Tears, sulking, her special way of yelling at people that somehow never got her in trouble (she should have been kicked out of the program) just kept going on. She refused to even present one group project she deemed not good enough despite the fact that she contributed nothing functional to the project that the TA's didn't write for her...

Amidst the stories she would tell to students was one of how she sued her totally sexist/racist/evil former employer. She never said what came of it, but that combined with her inability to do things reminded me of a rant I read on here.

I sometimes fear being hired someplace and walking in my first day to find I'm assigned to work with .... horribleLady. In this scenario she managed to get hired and they're too afraid to fire her so they assign the new guy to work with horribleLady...

I've no idea what happened to her after the camp.

(I rewrote this rant a few times because it kept circling back to a larger story about the coding camp I wrote about a few years ago, so if this seemed sort of broken up and wonky, yeah it was / is / yeah)

Why do people have to lie? I am seriously getting tired of it.

Context: While I was on vacation the company hired some guy we’ll call Bob.
Bob is a senior with 10+ years of experience. 5 of those years in React (supposedly).
I got back from vacation and was told I’d be working on a project with Bob.
I’ve worked in teams before so I thought no problem.

Now I am aware that different people have different styles, so that’s why we agreed on a lint config with some fancy git hooks.

I was excited at first because the project actually seems nice, but my excitement soon turned into terror.

First of all, Bob doesn’t seem to understand Git…fair enough, I’ll give him a quick guide…

Mf calls me at 11pm on a Friday because he can’t push because the tests are failling.

Now tests. Bob doesn’t write those. Great.

We had created a few components to use throughout the project.

Bob seems to consistently forget what components are and why you write them and just imports the defaults from the UI library we’re using.

Bob also has a kink for hardcoding values for some reason.

I talked to Bob multiple times about this and he just tells me he’ll change it but in the end the PR stays open for 5 days, before it’s actually me who goes in and fixes it. Oh and yeah this shit keeps happening over and over again.

Now I know some of us devs hate meetings but for the love of God Bob just show up. You don’t even have to speak. Or at least answer a message that corresponds to the working hours and not in the middle of the night.

I am getting tired of this behavior and am seriously holding back from reporting this to the management. It’s been a month and I am seriously worried about the project. I have my own stuff to do but it takes time for me to clean up his absolute mess that doesn’t even pass the CI.

Call me an asshole I don’t care. It’s been a month and I’m legit worried about the future of the project.

Am I the only one who doesn't understand apple card? Like really, it's just the worst pitch ever!

"Apple card. Made by apple. Not a bank" that's a REAL ad I saw today. Why would you trust APPLE more than an FDIC insured bank with decades or (in some select cases) CENTURIES of experience in finance?

"No more card numbers and CVV"
Cool. I get it. Card numbers get leaked and stolen. But that's why banks insure cards and reverse fradulant transactions. How an I'm supposed to use it on Amazon?! I'm sure they have an answer. Like maybe one time use generated cards. But they haven't advertised it yet, and that's a problem!

Why do they think people want this!? And even more so, because I've seen some people are excited: WHY DO PEOPLE WANT THIS?! why is apple trying to make everything?!

I don't seem to understand why so many developers nowadays are focused on learning newer frameworks rather than focusing on best practices and learning how to code better.

"Hey I learnt React today, we should totally switch to it because it's so amazing"

> mfw the same guy doesn't even know how to follow coding styles, write good code that scales or document his code.

I think some people need to take a step back and focus on the more vital tasks of writing good code to begin with rather than getting so excited about every new thing that surfaces. It's annoying as fuck to deal with some of these people who you have to work alongside and be able to read their loopy shit code and all they are doing in their time is refreshing hackernews.

I have just started working in this industry, and so annoyed by the fact that managers are insensitive to the efforts put in by the developers.
1. They ask for estimates, and sometimes consider it to be the hard line for everything and then they make you feel guilty if you are not able to live up to them.

-- I am not asking to be always lenient but they need to understand that this is problem solving and one might not be able to gage the problem at first sight. A problem might have several sub problems or a solution to one issue might raise compatibility issues with other which were tough to foresee .

2. Why do they always want an instant response to their email or query, a developer being online isn't just there to answer your damn obvious and sometimes stupid questions which can be understood just be glancing at the logs once.

-- How annoying would it be if the manager himself is being poked every other minute for trivial things. Does he have the same patience with his/her developers?

3. In tough times the manager easily delegates the responsibility to the developer and instead of standing by his/her side, interrogates them as if we have done some crime.

-- Wasn't this approved by you. Weren't you the one who had these stupid demands before and didn't let me do things the correct or optimized way. I am not saying I am always right, but you can be atleast open for feedback or discussion.

Why are you the first to take credit for the success and yet hold us responsible for any mishaps.

It's sad to see that some of these people have been tech developers.
I can go on ranting for many more things.
I am not saying all those people out there are like this. But trust me many are.

Note: I am not seasoned as you guys out there. I may even be biased by my own experiences. But this is in complete contrast to what I was expecting when I graduated from college and was excited to finally learn by working.

Story time.

We are all alike as devs, just surrounded by the people who has an idea of "new facebook", but i like how their mind works and how they long for a change, so it does not annoy me that much. I just simply explain how it is not likely to happen, without decent marketing and innovation.

However, yesterday i went to my dad's workplace, because i was bored. He has lots of friends there, and i happen to meet one. When he heard me that i am a software engineer, he told me that he has an idea.

I prepared my words to explain why it is not possible, but when i heard what it is, i was ashamed of myself.

He sells and manages car tires. He wants a simple showroom website to show what tires he has,( not stock-wise. Price, size, type, brand etc. ) and he wants to update them himself.

I swallowed my words and told him that i could do it. Normally i don't make websites, i provide utilities and APIS to make the front-end devs job easier at my work. But i will turn his idea into reality.

He said that he hired someone else for that years ago, but the one he hired made the website in ASP.NET 2.0, so making one from scratch would take much less time.

No way i would touch that mess came from the seventh layer of hell itself, to torment developers endlessly.

Just a simple front-end seasoned with bulma and pure JS, node to communicate with the DB ( maybe golang for fun ? ) and a simple admin panel for him would do the trick. I am excited !

So I have a pet peeve to talk about here, I'm excited for the Atari box as I have some inside information that is officially confirmed about it (unfortunately am not allowed to talk about it :-C) and I see people out there saying it is "an underpowered Linux steam machine)...

How the fuck are people coming to this conclusion when the specs, OS or anything technical about it haven't even been released yet?!

Why must people immediately assume that because it's not a standard windows PC it must be a piece of shit?

Boggles my mind that so many people can be so defensive and go on the offence without knowing anything.

Just so I can clarify, I'm a console gamer, Linux lover yet still develop for windows and the like so this isn't a biased rant and I know people will look at this, see the word Linux and go on the attack... So... Just... Chill?

TD;DR: I have school instead of vacation but 5 hours of spare time. I got my laptop with me and I'll work in school.

I didn't want to take part of the course-trip with the 12th graders (my course sucks, there are too many assholes for the neutral people to compensate). After speaking with the director, and the only condition was to tell the course why. I did deliver them a nicely put "fuck you, you bullied my only friend out of this school" and now is the time where I visit the 11-graders while the other 12-ers are on "school vacation".

I got a "new" plan for the courses I should visit. Today, Wednesday, I have 5 FUCKING FREE HOURS IN A ROW. Oh yes, baby, the teacher generating the plan hates me as well. (He really does but it's probably just unlucky not his fault).

So today, I decided, I would take my heavy-ass laptop with me, in a laptop bag, which doesn't fit into the school bag I have and my laptop doesn't fully fit in the laptop bag as well (sticks out), that's the perks of having a laptop!!
— so I can work on my (I wanna say this once in my life without being a professional) "CLIENTS PROJECT" - the funny thing is that the client is a (really fucking good but small) advertising agency and too lazy to design their own website. Since I had my internship, they know how hard I *can* work even without being payed. Now they do wanna pay me but that's another story.

I'm on the bus and I have this monster of a bag which isn't lighter than a freaking huge bag of rice and I'm so fucking excited for this day. The library is my best friend. Hopyfully I'm going to find a socket for power..

Sorry for so many commas, I'm german. :D

This shit is long story of my computer experience over my lifetime.

When I was young I got my first PC with windows it was not so bad. It required safe shut down of it’s fat32 partition. From time to time I needed to reinstall it cause of slow down but I got used to it I was only a gamer.

Time passes and I got more curious about computers and about this linux. Everything worked there but installation of anything was complete madness and none of windows programs worked well, and I wanted to play games and be productive so I sticked with windows.

I bought hp laptop once with nvidia card, it was overheating and got broken. So I bought toshiba and all I told to the seller was I want ATI card. Took me 5 minutes to do it and I was faster then my friend buying pack of cigarettes because I was earning money using computer.

Then I grown up running my small one person programming businesses and I wanted to run and compile every fucking program on this world. I wanted linux shell commands. I wanted package manager, and I wanted my os to be simple because I wasn’t earning money by using my os but by programming. So after getting my paycheck I bought mac. I can run windows and linux on vm if I need it. I try not to steal someones work so I didn’t want to run hackintosh. I am using this mac for some time.

Also I use playstation for gaming. Because I only want to run and play game I am not excited about graphics but gameplay. I think I am pragmatic person.

I can tell you something about my mac.
When I close lid it go sleep when I open it wakes up instantly. I never need to wonder if I want to hibernate or shut down or sleep and drain battery. It is fucking simple.
When I want to run or open something it doesn’t want me to wait but it gives me my intellij or terminal or another browser or whatever I search for. Yeah search is something that works.
Despite it got 8 gigs of ram I can run whatever number of programs I want at the same speed. The speed is not very fast sometimes but it’s constant fast.
I have a keychain so my passwords are in one place I can slow down shared internet speed, I can put my wifi in monitor mode and I don’t need to install some 3rd party software.
And now I updated my mac to high sierra, cause it’s free and I want to play with ios compilation. Before I did it I didn’t even backup whole work. I just used time machine and regular backups. And guess what, it still works at the same speed and all I did was click to run update and cook something to eat.
When I got bored I close the lid, when got idea open lid and code shit, not waiting for fucking wakeup or fucking updates.

I wanted to rant apple products I use but they work, they got fucking updates all along at the same time. And all of updates are optional.

I cannot tell that about all apple products but about products I use.

I think I just got old and started to praise my limited time on this world. Not being excited about new crap. When I buy something I choose wisely. I bought iPhone. I can buy latest iPhone x but I bought iPhone 7 cause it’s from fucking metal. And I know that metal is harder then glass, why the fucking apple forgot about it? I don’t know.
I know that I am clumsy and drop stuff. Dropped my phone at least 100 times and nothing.

I am not a apple fan boy I won’t buy mac with this glowing shit above keyboard that would got me blind at night.
I buy something when I know that it can save my time on this world. I try to buy things that make me productive and don’t break after a year.

So now piece of advise, stop wasting your time, buy and update wisely, wait a week or a month or a year when more people buy shit and buy what’s not broken. And if something’s broken rant this shit so next customer can be smarter.
Cheers

// long rant sorry

A few jobs ago I had a meeting that was scheduled for 15 mins. It was not going to be a bad meeting. I was looking at the people that were invited a few dev's, few pm's, and this one guy (Fuck!!). This one guy we will call him R.

So R is a pm but not just any pm he is the pm that will keep asking why like a 5 year old trying to understand how a car works. To top it off he loved to debate in the work place anything and everything. How something worked or why something was the way it is.

So this one meeting was about a project that I had started on my own and turned in to this huge project. I was super excited it was one of those project that you are excited to work on and love to add new things to it. The meeting was to talk about how it was going to be used and what customers sites this was going to be added to in the coming weeks. 15 mins not bad.

Well the meeting comes we finished in about 10 mins I was trying to get out of the room before R started. Well I waited a little a little to long and sure enough he asked the question. "What about this drop down?". Instantly I thought "FUCK!!! Here we go." Now I don't remember what his exact question was about said drop down but it ended extending the meeting by another 30 mins with me almost cussing him out and walking away.

There was a heated debate about this thing and R continuing to ask questions and want to debate this. I was only saved by the lead dev and lead pm say that they think that this is something that could be talked about at a later date. Lucky for me I was leaving the company in the following weeks.

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.