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
Search - "why did i have to grow up?"
-
Dear Indian Companies,
Why do you hire for a role and then say: "We dont have that role but then we want you to grow up to be a Generalist"!
6 years as a build, release and SCM guy at Moto and Nokia back then, I shifted to this big Indian IT corp coz Nokia was shutting down...
A week into my orientation (which is a crazy weirdness inducing ritual in and of itself), the new manager I'm supposed to be working with comes up and says- "Here's the code repo, there are 2 open jQuery issues, fix them!"
I'm not really sure what to say at this point because jQuery is nice and all but thats not who I am.. I'm the infra / DevOps guy. And this is circa 2012 when DevOps as a term was just hotting up...
Tell me to setup a multi-stage pipeline and automated test cycles, I'll do it drunk, but oh no! bug fixing on a jQuery script? Noooo!!!!! I just dont have the chops for it.
So long story short, I get reported to HR for insubordination - Yeah, Go Figure!
Cue: HR meeting
HR: You wont work?
Me: I cant work on jQuery. I am a sysadmin / devops guy... Give me a project that involves those skills and I'll work.
HR: But we hired you to work on jQuery.
Me: But you did not mention jQuery / UI / UX in the job description - Pulls up email and shows JD for interview which says Symbian, Build, Release, Configuration Management but NOT jQuery.
HR: ....
Me: :-/
HR: But we want you to be a generalist.
Me: #wtf
HR: We want an engineer to be able to do anything he is tasked with!
Me: Can I know my last working date here?
And thats how my career at a glorious IT corporation just went poof!
When I think back on it, I feel good that I chose to do what I wanted to get better at and what I loved working on...
And this is the problem with IT companies in our country - They play with people's aspirations and passions... To the point that all thats left of a software engineer is the looking forward to pay day so he can start the damn cycle all over again.11 -
Man, I think we've all gotten way too many of these.
Normally most interactions that I have are through email. Eventually some would try to contact me via phone. These are some:
"Hey! We are calling you from <whatever company name> solutions! (most of them always seem to end on solutions or some shit like that) concerning the Ruby on Rails senior dev opportunity we were talking about via email"
<niceties, how are you doing, similar shit goes here...eventually>
So tell us! how good/comfortable would you say you are with C++?"
Me: I have never done anything serious with c++ and did just use it at school, but because I am not a professional in it I did not list it in my CV, what does it have to do with Rails?
Them: "Oh the applications of this position must be ready to take in additional duties which sometimes happen to be C or C++"
Me: Well that was not anywhere in the offer you sent, it specifically requested a full stack Rails developer that could work with 3 different frontend stacks already and like 4 different databases plus bla bla bla, I did not see c++ anywhere in it. Matter of fact I find it funny, one of the things that I was curious about was the salary, for what you are asking and specifically in the city in which you are asking it for 75k is way too low, you are seriously expecting a senior level rails dev to do all that AND take additional duties with c++? cpp could mean a billion different things"
Them: "well this is a big opportunity that will increase your level to senior position"
Me: the add ALREADY asks for a senior position, why are you making it sound that I will get build towards that level if you are already off the bat asking for seniors only to begin with?
Them: You are not getting it, it is an opportunity to grow into a senior, applicants right now are junior to mid-level
ME: You are all not making any sense, please don't contact me again.
=======
Them: We are looking for someone with 15 years experience with Swift development for mobile and web
Me: What is up with your people not making these requirements in paper? if I knew from the beginning that you people think that Swift is 15 years old I would have never agreed to this "interview"
Them: If you are not interested in that then might we offer this one for someone with 10 years experience as a full stack TypeScript developer.
Me: No, again, check your dates, this is insulting.
===
* For another Rails position
Them: How good are you with Ruby on Rails in terms of Python?
Me: excuse me? Python has nothing to do with Ruby on Rails.
Her (recruiter was a woman) * with a tone of superiority: I have it here that Python is the primary technology that accompanies Rails development.
Me (thinking this was a joke) : What do you think the RUBY part of Ruby on Rails is for? and what does "accompanies Rails development" even means?
Her: Well if you are not interested in using Rails with Python then maybe you can tell us about your experience in using Javascript as the main scripting platform for Rails.
Me: This is a joke, goodbye.
====
To be fair this was years ago when I still didn't know better and test the recruiters during the email part of being contacted. Now a days I feel sorry for everyone since I just say no without even bothering. This is a meme all on itself which no one has ever bothered to review and correct in years for now. I don't know why recruiters don't google themselves to see what people think of their "profession" in order to become better.
I've even had the Java/Javascript stupidity thrown at me by a local company. For that one it was someone from their very same HR department doing the rectuiter, their shop foreman was a friend of the family, did him the service of calling him to let him know that his HR was never going to land the kind of developer they were looking for with the retarded questions they had and sent him a detailed email concerning the correct information they needed for their JAVAscript job which they kept confusing with Java (for some reason in the context of Spring, they literally wanted nothing with Spring, they wanted some junior to do animations and shit like that on their company's website, which was in php, Java was nowhere in this equation)
I think people in web development get the short end of the stick when it comes to retarded recruiters more than anywhere else.3 -
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 have a junior who really drives me up a wall. He's been a junior for a couple of years now (since he started as an intern here).
He always looks for the quickest, cheapest, easiest solution he can possibly think of to all his tickets. Most of it pretty much just involves copy/pasting code that has similar functionality from elsewhere in the application, tweaking some variable names and calling it a day. And I mean, I'm not knocking copy/paste solutions at all, because that's a perfectly valid way of learning certain things, provided that one actually analyzes the code they are cloning, and actually modifies it in a way that solves the problem, and can potentially extend the ability to reuse the original code. This is rarely the case with this guy.
I've tried to gently encourage this person to take their time with things, and really put some thought into design with his solutions instead of rushing to finish; because ultimately all the time he spends on reworks could have been spent on doing it right the first time. Problem is, this guy is very stubborn, and gets very defensive when any sort of insinuation is made that he needs to improve on something. My advice to actually spend time analyzing how an interface was used, or how an extension method can be further extended before trying to brute-force your way through the problem seems to fall on deaf ears.
I always like to include my juniors on my pull requests; even though I pretty much have all final say in what gets merged, I like to encourage not only all devs be given thoughtful, constructive criticism, regardless of "rank" but also give them the opportunity to see how others write code and learn by asking questions, and analyzing why I approached the problem the way I did. It seems like this dev consistently uses this opportunity to get in as many public digs as he can on my work by going for the low-hanging fruit: "whitespace", "add comments, this code isn't self-documenting", and "an if/else here is more readable and consistent with this file than a ternary statement". Like dude, c'mon. Can you at least analyze the logic and see if it's sound? or perhaps offer a better way of doing something, or ask if the way I did something really makes sense?
Mid-Year reviews are due this week; I'm really struggling to find any way to document any sort of progress he's made. Once in a great while, he does surprise me and prove that he's capable of figuring out how something works and manage to use the mechanisms properly to solve a problem. At the very least he's productive (in terms of always working on assigned work). And because of this, he's likely safe from losing his job because the company considers him cheap labor. He is very underpaid, but also very under-qualified.
He's my most problematic junior; worst part is, he only has a job because of me: I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt when my boss asked me if we should extend an offer, as I thought it was only fair to give the opportunity to grow and prove himself like I was given. But I'm also starting to toe the line of being a good mentor by giving opportunities to learn, and falling behind on work because I could have just done it myself in a fraction of the time.
I hate managing people. I miss the days of code + spotify for 10 hours a day then going home.11 -
I had spent the last year working on a online store power by woocommerce with over 100k products from various suppliers. This online store utilized a custom API that would take the various formats that suppliers offer their inventory in and made them consistent. Now everything was going swimmingly initially, but then I began adding more and more products using a plug-in called WP all import. I reached around 100k products and the site would take up to an entire minute to load sometimes timing out. I got desperate so I installed several caching plugins, but to no avail this did not help me. The site was originally only supposed to take three to four months but ended up taking an entire year. Then, just yesterday I found out what went wrong and why this woocommerce website with all of these optimizations was still taking anywhere from 60 to 90 seconds to load, or just timing out entirely. I had initially thought that I needed a beefier server so I moved it to a high CPU digitalocean VM. While this did help a little bit, the site was still very slow and now I had very high CPU usage RAM usage and high disk IO. I was seriously stumped the Apache process was using a high amount of CPU and IO along with MYSQL as well. It wasn't until I started digging deeper into the database that I actually found out what the issue was. As I was loading the site I would run 'show process list' in the SQL terminal, I began to notice a very significant load time for one of the tables, so I went to go and check it out. What I did was I ran a select all query on that particular table just to see how full it was and SQL returned a error saying that I had exceeded the maximum packet size. So I was like okay what the fuck...
So I exited my SQL and re-entered it this time with a higher packet size. I ran a query that would count how many rows were in this particular table and the number came out to being in the millions. I was surprised, and what's worse is that this table belong to a plugin that I had attempted to use early in the development process to cache the site. The plugin was deactivated but apparently it had left PHP files within the wp content directory outside of the actual plugin directory, so it's still executing scripts even though the plugin itself was disabled. Basically every time I would change anything on the site, it would recache the whole thing, and it didn't delete any old records. So 100k+ products caching on saves with no garbage collection... You do the math, it's gonna be a heavy ass database. Not only that but it was serialized data, so when it did pull this metric shit ton of spaghetti from the database, PHP then had to deserialize it. Hence the high ass CPU load. I had caching enabled on the MySQL end of things so that ate the ram. I was really desperate to get this thing running.
Honest to God the main reason why this website took so long was because the load times made it miserable to work on. I just thought that the hardware that I had the site on was inadequate. I had initially started the development on a small Linux VM which apparently wasn't enough, which is why I moved it to digitalocean which also seemed to not be enough, so from there I moved to a dedicated server which still didn't seem to be enough. I was probably a few more 60-second wait times or timeouts from recommending a server cluster to my client who I know would not be willing to purchase it. The client who I promised this site to have completed in 3 months and has waited a year. Seriously, I would tell people the struggles that I would go through with this particular site and they would just tell me to just drop the site; just take the money, just take the loss. I refused to, this was really the only thing that was kicking my ass. I present myself as this high-and-mighty developer like I'm just really good at what I do but then I have this WordPress site that's just beating the shit out of me for a year. It was a very big learning experience and it was also very humbling as well, it made me realize that I really don't know as much as I think I might. It was evidence that there is still so much more to learn out there, I did learn a lot from that experience especially about optimizing websites the different types of methods to do that particular lonely on the server side and I'll be able to utilize this knowledge in the future.
I guess the moral of the story is, never really give up. Ultimately things might get so bad that you're running on hopes and dreams. Those experiences are generally the most humbling. Now I can finally present the site that I am basically a year late on to the client who will be so happy that I did not give up on the project entirely. I'll have experienced this feeling of pure euphoria, and help the small business significantly grow their revenue. Helping others is very fulfilling for me, even at my own expense.
Anyways, gonna stop ranting. Running out of characters. If you're still here... Ty for reading :')7 -
Worst thing you've seen another dev do? Here is another.
Early into our eCommerce venture, we experienced the normal growing pains.
Part of the learning process was realizing in web development, you should only access data resources on an as-needed basis.
One business object on it's creation would populate db lookups, initialize business rule engines (calling the db), etc.
Initially, this design was fine, no one noticed anything until business started to grow and started to cause problems in other systems (classic scaling problems)
VP wanted a review of the code and recommendations before throwing hardware at the problem (which they already started to do).
Over a month, I started making some aggressive changes by streamlining SQL, moving initialization, and refactoring like a mad man.
Over all page loads were not really affected, but the back-end resources were almost back to pre-eCommerce levels.
The main web developer at the time was not amused and fought my changes as much as she could.
Couple months later the CEO was speaking to everyone about his experience at a trade show when another CEO was complementing him on the changes to our web site.
The site was must faster, pages loaded without any glitches, checkout actually worked the first time, etc.
CEO wanted to thank everyone involved etc..and so on.
About a week later the VP handed out 'Thank You' certificates for the entire web team (only 4 at the time, I was on another team). I was noticeably excluded (not that I cared about a stupid piece of paper, but they also got a pizza lunch...I was much more pissed about that). My boss went to find out what was going on.
MyBoss: "Well, turned out 'Sally' did make all the web site performance improvements."
Me: "Where have you been the past 3 months? 'Sally' is the one who fought all my improvements. All my improvements are still in the production code."
MyBoss: "I'm just the messenger. What would you like me to do? I can buy you a pizza if you want. The team already reviewed the code and they are the ones who gave her the credit."
Me: "That's crap. My comments are all over that code base. I put my initials, date, what I did, why, and what was improved. I put the actual performance improvement numbers in the code!"
MyBoss: "Yea? Weird. That is what 'Tom' said why 'Sally' was put in for a promotion. For her due diligence for documenting the improvements."
Me:"What!? No. Look...lets look at the code"
Open up the file...there it was...*her* initials...the date, what changed, performance improvement numbers, etc.
WTF!
I opened version control and saw that she made one change, the day *after* the CEO thanked everyone and replaced my initials with hers.
She knew the other devs would only look at the current code to see who made the improvements (not bother to look at the code-differences)
MyBoss: "Wow...that's dirty. Best to move on and forget about it. Let them have their little party. Let us grown ups keeping doing the important things."8 -
So i just had an interesting conversation.
View source images in comments
So some background. I used to do a lot of Minecraft development and server configuration. And Minecraft being made of mostly 12-year-olds they really don't pay very well. So I moved on from Minecraft but someone reached out for me to do their configuration for their server. (this was about a month ago) and I quoted them 40/hr because that's what I charge for my web dev work. So he promptly declined and I thought that was that. But tonight he messaged me and found a 5 month old post saying how I was looking to do free development work in order to get experience. And here is how the converstion when.
(His name is "Candy")
Candy:
Lol
Trying to take advantage of me with your bullshit $40/hour claims
Which is outright laughable
https://mc-market.org/threads/...
”I am looking for a network to stay long-term with and help/see it grow into a bigger server. (I would expect pay later down the road if we work together on an ongoing basis)”
—
Quoting your MC-Market post.
What do you have to say for yourself? Trying to take advantage of people?
Going to say something else completely delusional or own up to the fact that you were trying to take advantage of me?
I already knew you were, but now I have the hard evidence.
As I am not a stupid person.
Not only did your friend lie, but you tried to take advantage of me, thinking I was stupid enough to fall for your $40/hour bullshit for basic configuration work. MineSaga charges $30.00 an hour on the high. Don’t even try to do the same shit you did to me to anyone else. It won’t work.
Me:I was interested in doing plugin development and learning so I offered my services for free so I could learn in a more real environment. I no longer do minecraft plugins rather I am a web developer and my rate is $40/hr I am good at configuration which is why i contacted you but I am not going to lower my rate because it is "simpler" work. Just like how you can higher a prostitute to wash your car but it would be cheaper to get the kid from around the block to do it. Also not sure what your end goal is here. I gave you my rate and you didn't agree with it. So you should just move on. Plus this is the minecraft world let me know when you get to the real world so you you can pay in big boy money.
Candy:
So your configuration work for minecraft is $40/h as well?
Lol
Absolutely hilarious.
Me:
did you not read my message?
"I am not going to lower my rate because it is "simpler" work."
Candy:
Who were your most recent clients?
Me:
i'm not going to give you that information
Candy:
Because you know you are lying to me with your crazy rates, and if you aren't, that means you have near to no clients.
Yet another lie.
Me:
keep telling yourself that buddy
Candy:
Lol
Good luck getting any more clients.
rip
Me:
?
I get more clients all the time
They just are not in your realm of your minecraft imagination where you can pay a developer 20$/hr
Candy:
I just strongly disagree with the fact that you are charging $40/hour for configurative work
xD
Me:
Okay
But why even contact me? Did you really think trying to "Call me out" was going to have me lower my rates or something.
Just get over it
Candy:
I haven't called you out and overcharging like that to others in the minecraft realm for a significant gain in money for work that is not worth nearly that amount is absolutely delusional.
I would recommend you stop making up false assumptions
Me: What ever you say
I left it at that. There was some more stuff but it was not that interesting so i left it out6 -
These ignorant comments about arch are starting to get on my nerves.
You ranted or asked help about something exclusive to windows and someone pointed out they don't have that problem in arch and now you're annoyed?
Well maybe it's for good.
Next comes a very rough analogy, but imagine if someone posts "hey guys, I did a kg of coke and feeling bad, how do I detox?"
It takes one honest asshole to be like "well what if you didn't do coke?".
Replace the coke with windows.
Windows is a (mostly) closed source operating system owned by a for profit company with a very shady legal and ethical history.
What on earth could possibly go wrong?
Oh you get bsod's?
The system takes hours to update whenever the hell it wants, forces reboot and you can't stop it?
oh you got hacked because it has thousands of vulnerabilities?
wannacry on outdated windows versions paralyzed the uk health system?
oh no one can truly scrutinize it because it's closed source?
yet you wonder why people are assholes when you mention it? This thing is fucking cancer, it's hundreds of steps backwards in terms of human progress.
and one of the causes for its widespread usage are the savage marketing tactics they practiced early on. just google that shit up.
but no, linux users are assholes out to get you.
and how do people react to these honest comments? "let's make a meme out of it. let's deligitimize linux, linux users and devs are a bunch of neckbeards, end of story, watch this video of rms eating skin off his foot on a live conference"
short minded idiots.
I'm not gonna deny the challenges or limitations linux represents for the end user.
It does take time to learn how to use it properly.
Nvidia sometimes works like shit.
Tweaking is almost universally required.
A huge amount of games, or Adobe/Office/X products are not compatible.
The docs can be very obscure sometimes (I for one hate a couple of manpages)
But you get a system that:
* Boots way faster
* Is way more stable
* Is way way way more secure.
* Is accountable, as in, no chance to being forced to get exploited by some evil marketing shit.
In other words, you're fucking free.
You can even create your own version of the system, with total control of it, even profit with it.
I'm not sure the average end user cares about this, but this is a developer forum, so I think in all honesty every developer owes open source OS' (linux, freebsd, etc) major respect for being free and not being corporate horseshit.
Doctors have a hippocratic oath? Well maybe devs should have some form of oath too, some sworn commitment that they will try to improve society.
I do have some sympathy for the people that are forced to use windows, even though they know ideally isn't the ideal moral choice.
As in, their job forces it, or they don't have time or energy to learn an alternative.
At the very least, if you don't know what you're talking about, just stfu and read.
But I don't have one bit of sympathy for the rest.
I didn't even talk about arch itself.
Holy fucking shit, these people that think arch is too complicated.
What in the actual fuck.
I know what the problem is, the arch install instructions aren't copy paste commands.
Or they medium tutorial they found is outdated.
So yeah, the majority of the dev community is either too dumb or has very strong ADD to CAREFULLY and PATIENTLY read through the instructions.
I'll be honest, I wouldn't expect a freshman to follow the arch install guide and not get confused several times.
But this is an intermediate level (not megaexpert like some retards out there imply).
Yet arch is just too much. That's like saying "omg building a small airplane is sooooo complicated". Yeah well it's a fucking aerial vehicle. It's going to be a bit tough. But it's nowhere near as difficult as building a 747.
So because some devs are too dumb and talk shit, they just set the bar too low.
Or "if you try to learn how to build a plane you'll grow an aviator neckbeard". I'll grow a fucking beard if I want too.
I'm so thankful for arch because it has a great compromise between control and ease of install and use.
When I have a fresh install I only get *just* what I fucking need, no extra bullshit, no extra programs I know nothing about or need running on boot time, and that's how I boot way faster that ubuntu (which is way faster than windows already).
Configuring nvidia optimus was a major pain in the ass? Sure was, but I got it work the way I wanted to after some time.
Upgrading is also easy as pie, so really scratching my brain here trying to understand the real difficult of using arch.22 -
I dunno if you gents remember the Nickelodeon show known as Drake and Josh.
It was pretty big in Mexico and the U.S.
Well, one of the characters from that show is the singer/actor Drake Bell.
For a while, Drake Bell would **constantly** tweet about how much Justin Bieber sucks.
I aint denying that Justin Bieber sucks, i don't like his music at all.
But the constant attacks came out as jealousy, at least to me.
What does this has to do with development or even computers? Well this is EXACTLY how I feel about Louis Rossman CONSTANTLY making videos about apple products.
We get it man we really do, sadly for a lot of us the only way to get ios development done is through a fucking Mac
EVEN if his whiny ass is right about the hardware not being top notch and all that shit I AM still not able to explain a 2013(early...as in january) macbook pro still working with literally NO fucking problems. Before that the other macbook was just changed because we wanted the 2013 model. The thing worked, the one before did so too and the 2017 model that I have works, amazingly so i will add.
Still, the army of dell,hp and lenovo laptops that I've had before just died or are not functioning properly. Either it is my shit luck or Apple's "shitty hardware" got something really fucking right.
I think its retarded really. If you don't like them then fine, you don't have to, personally I fucking love all computers and os, but I don't get fanboys hating for the sake of hate.
the fuck you care if I spend 2500 on a computer? I would the same shit for your mom and the computer would last me longer.
Does owning multiple macs make me better than you? No
Does this mean that you are piss poor and can't afford shit and that is why you are hating? No
Will I call you <insert number of insults> gor your choice of pc or os? No
What is retarded is this: you all are DEVELOPERS(at least a good chunk) and your ass better fucking know that some people USE a certain tool because IT IS THE RIGHT ONE FOR THE JOB.
It is a damn fine operating system, a really good computing experience. It ain't your taste? Fine, das cool, but for fucks sake it does not mean that the other people are idiots or whatever.
Grow the fuck up and get yourself an opinion.20 -
So I'm on my morning stroll. Walking, enjoying, watching the world around me.. It's nice how cherries blossom. They smell very tempting to stop there and enjoy the moment. Some flowers under the cherry...
Why do plants blossom again? Oh yeah, that's right, to exchange some speciments in order to grow fruit and seeds. To have their offspring. Just like every other living macroorganism [with a few exceptions ofc]. Life has no other way to survive but to exchange genetic material between two parties and only then trigger growth of the new life.
And that is a very strict rule. No more, no less: it takes exactly 2 organisms to make new life. But why is that? If my memory serves, theory of evolution says that life is like business: cut the losses and let the profits run. Over time it discards everything not required for the organism in order to save energy, and only successful new "investments" remain in the genome. The unsuccessful ones die before they proliferate, so the bad genes shall not survive.
It also says that very simple things, very simple changes lead to very complex outcomes. Us. Life.
But what is simple about life having to need 2 other lives? Exactly 2. It's either simple or efficient, depends on perspective. BUT IT IS NOT BOTH. Look at cells. They just split in half and multiply. Dead simple. It takes one of them to make another one. But with mammals, birds, reptiles, plants and other macroorganisms [excpt fungi] this is not the case! Why?!? I can't think of any scenario where two generic microorganisms, following some dead simple mutations, would come up w/ something that inefficient and overly complex. Like they're living on their own, multiplying by division, and smth very simple happens and they can no longer divide, only mate in pairs. The primitive, efficient and simple mechanism gets terminated and replaced with a different one, incredibly complex one!
Sure, we have protozoa which have similar reproductive mechanisms. They exchange genetic material to multiply.
But look at our, human cells. They dont need that! Look at some reptiles, some plants that only take one to make another. They don't pair as well! It's simple. Efficient. Why do protozoa need 2 for the species to survive?
It's not simple and efficient [tho helps us adapt, but its not my point for now]. See, things like this make ne wonder. What if we, the life, are not as accidental as we think? What if this whole mechanism was set off by someone or something billions of years ago? That's mean there are much older, much more superior cognitive organisms than us. What if protozoa was version 3 of new life [the first two did not survive]? Viruses - v2? Sea creatures - v3, reptiles - v4, and so on until they came up with us, mammals? That'd surely mean we are not alone in this universe. Are they watching us? Will they create a new species any time soon? What's our purpose, are we just an experiment?
And so, from cherry blossoms to existensial dilemma, my stroll is over. Time for breakfast :)1 -
Pinterest, one of the most wonderful and elegantly designed products has gone to rats.
The performance was smooth, the UX was kickass, the content was lit.
I once watched Ben's interview and absolutely loved his thought process on how he identified a problem and went ahead to build a solution for it.
Unlike Facebook/Instagram, which are designed to make you compete for dopamine shots and trigger jealousy, Pinterest was kind of different where you have a custom feed and yet no comparison or showing off. Cool right?
However, towards the end of the interview, Ben did mention that they are going (or already bagged) another round of cash. I was sceptical of why that was needed when they already had good reach, scaled product, and overall a stable ecosystem. They could instead focus on exit plans.
Pinterst has become a piece of garbage now. Cluttered with all the original features, which made it different, have been taken away. Moreover, not only the product is complicated and difficult to understand (let alone use), it is bloated with ads. The amount of ads and redirection of every search result to their shopping tab is just nauseating.
Feed has same content for days, if not weeks. You can no way customise the content been showcased and no matter how many times you report unwanted or inappropriate images, shit still shows up. The algo is rusted now.
Remember kids, this is NOT how you build and grow products. Lesson learned, capitalism has the power to destroy everything.12 -
I'm shitting there hammering out some code butchering some real problems when I suddenly realise I'm surrounded. I look around and yes it's the bloody committee.
The committee is what I call the rest of the department and it is dominated by the old guard which comprises of the programmers that have been around for longer.
None of the old guard can program particularly well but because they had been around the longest they'd all grown senior. The committee had free reign but anyone else doing anything differently has to get approval from the committee.
The only way to code otherwise was to copy and paste existing code then to primarily rename things. If anyone did anything that hadn't been seen before then it would have to be approved by the committee. Individual action was not permitted unless you were old guard.
I swept my headphones away expecting it to be something unimportant. It was.
First things first they announce. We're going to add extraneous commas to the last element of all possible lists separated by comma including parameters or so they say. Ask but why so I do.
Because the language now supports it. They added support for it so it must be the right way someone proclaimed. Does it? I didn't realise we were waiting for it. Why do we want it though?
Didn't you hear? It's all over the blogosphere. It massively improves merge requests. But how I ask?
Five minutes later I grow tired of the chin stroking, elbow harnessing, slanted gazes into the yonder and occasionally hearing maybe its because and ask if they mean when you for example add an element the last element registers as changed from adding a comma. Turns out that's all it is.
How often do we see that tiny distraction and isn't it pointless to make the code ugly just for a tiny transient reduction in diff noise I ask. Everyone's stumped. This went on and on and got worse and worse. But it makes moving things around easy half of them say in unison like the bunch of slobs that they are. I mean really. It doesn't make expanding and contracting statements from multiline to single line easy and it's such a stupid thing. Is that all they do all day? Move multi-line method parameters up and down all day? If their coding conventions weren't totally whack they wouldn't have so many multiline method prototypes with stupid amounts of parameters with stupidly long types and names. They all use the same smart IDE which can also surely handle fixing the last comma and why is that even a concern given all the other outrageously verbose and excessive conventions for readability?
But you know what, who cares, fine, whatever. Lets put commas all over the shop and then we can all go to the pub and woo the ladies with how cool and trendy we are up to date with all the latest trends and fashions then we go home with ten babes hanging off each arm and get so laid we have to take a sick day the following to go to the STD clinic. Make way for we are conformists.
But then someone had to do it. They had to bring up PSR. Yes, another braindead committee that produces stupid decisions. Should brackets be same line or next line, I know, lets do both they decided. Now we have to do PSR and aren't allowed to use sensible conventions.
But why, I ask after explaining it's actually quite useful as a set of documents we can plagiarise as a starting point but then modify but no, we have to do exactly what PSR says. We're all too stupid apparently you see. Apparently we're not on their level. We're mere mortals. The reason or so I'm told, is so that anyone can come in and is they know PSR coding styles be able to read and write the code. That's not how it works. If you can't adjust to a different style, a more consistent style, that's not massively bizarre or atypical but rather with only minor differences from standard styles, you're useless. That's not even an argument, it's a confession that you've got a lump of coal where your brain's supposed to be.
Through all of this I don't really care because I long ago just made my own code generators or transpilers that work two ways and switch things between my shit and their shit but share my wisdom anyway because I'm a greedy scumbag like that.
Where the shit really hit the fan is that I pointed out that PSR style guide doesn't answer all questions nor covers all cases so what do we do then. If it's not in PSR? Then we're fucked.4 -
I reported to our team leader (who is not a developer) that me and my colleague has been having problems with our senior developer whose codes are unmaintainable and messy. I told the team lead that I am losing my trust towards my senior developer and that his codes are messy and not following the coding standards. I was nervous at first because this certain team leader is tight with the senior dev. But still, I expected the team lead to be objective.
I was surprised because the team lead asked me if 'I was perfect' and then the team lead continued to shift the conversation towards me. Team lead then started to compare me with the senior dev which is unfair because I've only been working for 2 years whereas the senior developer has been doing this for 6+ years. Team lead said that I was arrogant. Team lead sent our convo to the other teammates and friends. Team lead told me that I am such a baby.
Fast forward, the senior dev talked to me. Told me that he was busy so he didn't get to improve his codes. Which I dont buy because I often see his discord status as playing during work hours. Told me that it wasnt him. Which I dont know if i should believe since he always lies. Told me that his knowledge is outdated. Told me that maybe because I came from a good university and he did not. He apologized and told me he will improve. Sounds good right?
It's a lie. Because then my friend gave me a recording of his voice ranting about me after our talk. In that recording, he said that I have nothing to prove so I dont get a say. He said that he doesnt care about me. He said that I am cocky. Which I dont understand. I only commented abt his work, why is he attacking me personally? Plus, if someone new like me already already noticed the flaws in his work, what does that say about his skill?
My teammates then asked me to just take the fall lol take note that these teammates were also complaining about this senior dev. they asked me to just give them what they wanted to hear. That I am the one who's wrong and the bosses are right. I said I wanted to defend myself but they hated me for that. They told me to think about what would happen to them. They told me I am selfish. Is it selfish for wanting to defend myself?
I defended myself. I told the senior dev that my intentions are for the right reason. He told me he understands. Later that day, a friend told me he talked behind my back again.
Senior dev told me that the team leader cried because of the words I said. Which i found confusing because it was my own feeling, my own opinion that i am losing trust with this certain senior dev so why would the team lead be so affected by that? Also, i showed our convo to the most objective people i know and they said that i didnt say anything that is offensive nor arrogant I have no control as to how people would react to the words I say. It's beyond me.
I feel so helpless. I told those things to the team lead because I think a team should be open to each other but I was blown out of proportion instead. My friend told me that the team lead and the senior dev are still talking behind my back.
If they do this every time someone tries to speak up, will they ever grow?24 -
!dev
Today's world has gone so corrupt and full of crime that its almost impossible to be identified as honest/right, even if you are one. We thought that power of Internet would help identify the correct things but on the contrary, the internet is being used for declaring the wrong as right.
Thanks to sheer volume of duplicate data and social media's unverified content, we can no longer trust anything. Plus the effect of government and powerful people is so much that any big company you believe in would be forced to do whatever these big guns want.
Today if government wants to declare that "banana is a god fruit", they will simply generate enough news articles, social media tweets and rumours to do so. They know they can't proof it, but they can generate enough resources to change enough mindsets that what they are saying is not right but not completely wrong.
Even GitHub, which i once believed to have the ultimate method of preserving the truth is no longer a real thing. US govt has shown enough power to tell the world, that if we don't like something, then not even github is strong enough to preserve it
Our Indian government is also no less. Yesterday i heard the news that Gujrat government is slowly replacing the junior school's history syllabus to remove important historical events and replace them with chapters on hindu supremacy.
Currently i am not sure if its a real news but WHAT THE FUCK!?! They are going to erase the history? If the new generation gets the biased version of history, won't they grow up hating a particular commodity?
And forget the new generation, what about our generation? Did the books i read on history were also biased? Is this all political agenda why i like a particular commodity and hate the others? And how can i know if the facts i read are correct and truth? Who is the person verifying them and on what grounds is his decision correct?
Clearly no one can answer that because at the end, its highly opinionated.
If a newspaper A says "this guy is good" and newspaper B says "this guy is bad" , then after a 100 years, we would only believe the newspaper whose fossil remains in the museum and not the one which people believed to be correct 100 years ago.
And this is the problem. Corrupt people are generating enough content to make sure the biased version of history remains preserved while the original version gets lost with time.
I sometimes think that i should be buying a server deep below some glacier in the Antarctic ocean , hosting the real version of history. But there is no guarantee that government won't be tracing it back or make attempts to down2 -
After reading mostly sad (and astonishing!) stories, I didn't really want to share my story.. but still, here I am, trying to contribute a wholesome story.
For me, this whole story started very early. I can't tell how old I was but I'm going to guess I was about 5 or 6, when my mom did websites for a small company, which basically consisted of her and.. that's it. She did pretty impressive stuff (for back then) and I was allowed to watch her do stuff sometimes.
Being also allowed to watch her play Sims and other games, my interest in computer science grew more and more and the wish to create "something that draws some windows on the screen and did stuff" became more real every day.
I started to read books about HTML, CSS and JS when I was around 10 or something. And I remember as it was yesterday: After finishing the HTML book I thought "Well that's easy. Why is this something people pay for?" - Then I started reading about CSS. I did not understand a single thing. Nothing made sense for me. I read the pages over and over again and I couldn't really make any sense of it (Mind you, I didn't have a computer back then, I just had a few hours a week on MOM-PC ^^)
But I really wanted to know how all this pretty-looking stuff worked and I tried to read it again around 1 year later. And I kid you not, it was a whole different book. It all made sense now. And I wrote my first markups with stylings and my dream became more and more reality. But there was one thing lacking. Back in the days, when there was no fancy CSS3. It was JavaScript. Long story short: It - again - made no fucken sense to me what the books told me.
Fast forward a few years, I was about 14. JavaScript was my fucken passion, I loved it. When I had no clue about CSS, I'd always ask my mom for tips. (Side story: These days it's the other way around, she asks me for tips. And it makes me unbelievably proud!)
But there was something missing. All this newschool canvas-stuff wasn't done back then and I wanted more. More possibilities, more performance, more everything.
Stuff begun to become wild. My stepdad (we didn't have the best connection) studied engineering back then, so he had to learn C. With him having this immensely thick book for C, I began to read it and got to know the language. I fell in love again. C was/is fucken awesome.
I made myself some calculators for physics and some other basic stuff and I had much fun using and learning it. I even did some game development, when I heard about people making C-coded games for PSP. Oh boy, the nights I spent in IRCs chatting with people about C, PSP-programming and all that good stuff, I'll never forget it - greatest time of my life!
But I got back to JS more and more and today I do it for money and I love it. I'll never forget my roots and my excurse into the C/C++ world and I'm proud to say, that I was able to more or less grow up with coding and the mindset that comes with it.1 -
So I ran into a perplexing "issue" today at work and I'm hoping some of you here have had experience with this. I got a story-time from my coworker about the early days of my company's product that I work on and heard about why I was running into so much code that appeared to be written hastily (cause it was). Turns out during the hardware bring-up phase, they were moving so fast they had to turn on all sorts of low level drivers and get them working in the system within a matter of days, just to keep up with the hardware team. Now keep in mind, these aren't "trivial" peripherals like a UART. Apparently the Ethernet driver had a grand total of a week to go from nothing to something communicating. Now, I'm a completely self-taught embedded systems focused software engineer and got to where I am simply cause I freaking love embedded systems. It's the best. BUT, the path I took involved focusing on quality over quantity, simply because I learned very quickly that if I did not take the time to think about what I was doing, I would screw myself over. My entire motto in life is something to the effect of "If I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it to the best of my abilities." As such, I tend to be one of the more forward thinking engineers on my team despite relative to my very small amount of professional experience (essentially I screwed myself over on my projects waaaay too often in the past years and learned from it). But what I learned today slightly terrifies me and took me aback. I know full well that there is going to come a point in my career where I do not have the time to produce quality code and really think about what I am designing....and yet it STILL has to work. I'm even in the aerospace field where safety is critical! I had not even considered that to be a possibility. Ideally I would like to prepare now so that I can be effective when that time does come...Have any of you been on the other side of this? What was it like? How can I grow now to be better prepared and provide value to my company when those situations come about? I know this is going to be extremely uncomfortable for me, but c'est la vie.
TLDR: I'm personally driven to produce quality code, but heard a horror story today about having to produce tons of safety-critical code in a short time without time for design. Ensue existential crisis. Help! Suggestions for growth?!
Edit: Just so I'm clear, the code base is good. We do extensive testing (for lots of reasons), but it just wasn't up to my "personal standards".2 -
Obviously the top item on the table is NN, the "end users" from both sides of the connection on the net are for the saving it, and the middlemen that only own the "cables" want it to be repealed.
We have the solution to end this issue forever. It wont be easy, nor will it be fast.. unless certain "entities" team with us in secrecy. (There's a reason why certain "entities" have stayed silent regarding NN, due to agreements to not get involved due to the risk of backlash. AND if NN is repealed Those Entities cannot fix the problem as their hands are tied to continue to provide content to the end users.) Read between the lines you will understand it will all make sense later.
I will make The Official Public Statement within 24 hours of the FCC Vote. That statement will be how to get involved, help, get us jump started in your area, funding, the ENTIRE details of the plan, goals, and timeline. AS WELL as how to contact us. This will take time and we are not a magic solution that will fix the problem overnight.
We are however THE solution to the underlying problem with ISPs of today. We have been researching for quite a while and digging deep into the entities that have caused us to get where we are now. The further you go digging into 'THEM' the more pissed off you become as you truly realize whats going on and has been on among the ISPs its MUCH deeper than you are being told.
OUR solution will remove all of "them" from the equation completely as well as being faster, and cheaper than the Tier 1 as you wont be paying for the connection or speed, you would be paying for the hardware/overhead cost. AND we will be bringing you closer to the content providers than EVER before.
AND we will be the only solution capable for competing in the current Tier1 Monopoly zones, I promise you they cannot match our plan's price, IF they did it would be only as a loss leader and NOT a sustainable long term solution for those competing with us at are for-profit....
In order for our solution to work, and to keep the internet service non-bias, well non-bias from OUR members :) this will need to be a collective effort, focused one clearly defined vision. WE WILL AND WE MUST ALL set "profits" aside on this as profits in selling nothing other "connection" to the internet has gotten us in the mess we are in now. AND YES we realize profits help maintain and upgrade the infrastructure, BUT that isn't true in this case...Overhead from our view includes those anticipated costs.
Smaller ISPs will need to make a decision, give up profits, become one with us, and be apart of the mission OR they will be left to suffer at the mercy of the ISPs above them setting the cost of bandwidth eventually leading to their demise.
This will happen because we wont be bound by the T1s .... WE would be the "Tier 0" that doesn't exist ;)
This sounds crazy, impossible, BUT its not, it will work WILL happen, regardless of the FCC's vote. as if the FCC choices to keep NN, its only a matter of time till the big lawyers of the ISPs find some loophole, or lobby enough to bring us back to this.
Legistlation is NOT the solution its just a band-aid fix as the cancer continues to grow within.
PLEASE understand that
Until the vote is made, and we release what we are doing, stay put, hang in, it will all be explained later, we are the only true solution.
BIG-ISPs WILL REGRET WHAT THEY HAVE DONE!
What needs to be understood by all is with net neutrality inplace the ability to compete aginst the Tier 1s directly over customers and reinvent the internet to lower or remove costs completely, increase speeds AND expand to underserved/unserved communities ITS NOT POSSIBLE WITH NN
NN REPEAL is the only way to the fixing the problem for good... yes the For profit BIG ISPs will benefit but not forever.. as repealing it opens the doors for outside the box big picture innovators to come in and offer something different, the big ISPs have clearly over looked this small detail being the possibility of a “NonProfit CoOp TIER 1 ISP” entering into the game thru end users and businesses working together as one entity to defeat them... THE FOR PROFIT ISPs over looked this because they are blinded by the profit potential of NN Repeal, never did they consider our option as a possible outcome because no one has attempted it....
We will unite as one
Be the first to know! -stay updated
SnapChat: theqsolution