As a developer, sometimes you hammer away on some useless solo side project for a few weeks. Maybe a small game, a web interface for your home-built storage server, or an app to turn your living room lights on an off.

I often see these posts and graphs here about motivation, about a desire to conceive perfection. You want to create a self-hosted Spotify clone "but better", or you set out to make the best todo app for iOS ever written.

These rants and memes often highlight how you start with this incredible drive, how your code is perfectly clean when you begin. Then it all oscillates between states of panic and surprise, sweat, tears and euphoria, an end in a disillusioned stare at the tangled mess you created, to gather dust forever in some private repository.

Writing a physics engine from scratch was harder than you expected. You needed a lot of ugly code to get your admin panel working in Safari. Some other shiny idea came along, and you decided to bite, even though you feel a burning guilt about the ever growing pile of unfinished failures.

All I want to say is:

No time was lost.

This is how senior developers are born. You strengthen your brain, the calluses on your mind provide you with perseverance to solve problems. Even if (no, *especially* if) you gave up on your project.

Eventually, giving up is good, it's a sign of wisdom an flexibility to focus on the broader domain again.

One of the things I love about failures is how varied they tend to be, how they force you to start seeing overarching patterns.

You don't notice the things you take back from your failures, they slip back sticking to you, undetected.

You get intuitions for strengths and weaknesses in patterns. Whenever you're matching two sparse ordered indexed lists, there's this corner of your brain lighting up on how to do it efficiently. You realize it's not the ORMs which suck, it's the fundamental object-relational impedance mismatch existing in all languages which causes problems, and you feel your fingers tingling whenever you encounter its effects in the future, ready to dive in ever so slightly deeper.

You notice you can suddenly solve completely abstract data problems using the pathfinding logic from your failed game. You realize you can use vector calculations from your physics engine to compare similarities in psychological behavior. You never understood trigonometry in high school, but while building a a deficient robotic Arduino abomination it suddenly started making sense.

You're building intuitions, continuously. These intuitions are grooves which become deeper each time you encounter fundamental patterns. The more variation in environments and topics you expose yourself to, the more permanent these associations become.

Failure is inconsequential, failure even deserves respect, failure builds intuition about patterns. Every single epiphany about similarity in patterns is an incredible victory.

Please, for the love of code...

Start and fail as many projects as you can.

Don't be like jimmy... test before committing! 😋

This is one of my favorite quotes when it comes to programming. So many developer are too eager to start coding instead of spending a bit more time on thinking.

Words of wisdom (WOW) !!

If only more manager would think like this! Constant interruptions are poison to the performance of any dev team.

Golden words of wisdom

The right mood.....

Wrote my friend Sam a letter when I was still working in support. I think it still holds up today.

---

Dear Sam,

I understand that you will join us in our overseas office. Congratulations on landing that job. It’s good steady work. I’ve been doing it for the last ten years.

Your still young so maybe I can give you some little wisdom that will help you in your working years to come.

Let me begin by shedding some light on phone calls.

I try. I really do try Sam. But it is getting so hard for me to hold back the rage that builds up during certain phone calls. Especially the ‘Sorry, I just don’t know anything about computers! -giggle-’ ones.

Those are the times that I have no access to what they see. I’ve no team-viewer, can not take over that screen in any other way. And why-oh-why can I not take over that terminal session dear Sam? It’s because the caller can not double-click an icon or find a terminal session number.

And what is the reason for this? Because they ‘just don’t know anything about computers! -giggle-’. This is a sort of get-out-of-jail-free card. Beware of these callers Sam.

There is nothing so nerve-wrecking then finding yourself at the mercy of people describing Internet Explorer (do not even get me started) as ‘the big ‘E’, if they use Chrome for their webmail then they most likely will say ‘Mail’ if they mean Chrome. There is no logic Sam. That is just the way these people work.

They will suck all enjoyment out of your work. They will make you want to hunt them down in dark office hallways and show them your tears Sam. Because cry you will.

Sure, I understand that not everyone can be tech savvy. Why, if everyone would be, where would that leave us? No. I love the technologically challenged. They put the fiber in my internet. They make me LOL for real. After the initial anger subsides anyway.

But just below that well-willing folk, on the other side of that border… there they dwell: Management.

Nice cars, suits and iphones Sam. First thing a new manager will require is a brand spanking new business-card. It will hold his/her new title. Then an iphone or overpriced android model will follow suit.

Then they will barge into your office, holding it like it’s the next best thing since sliced bread.

Any manager will automatically assume that you will drop anything you are doing at the present moment to acknowledge the presence of greatness. Failing to do so will result in awkward yet fulfilling situations. I recommend that you do not take your hands of the keyboard and give only the slightest of nods after 5 minutes of complete silence and glaring.

Well… you feel the glare. You do not glare yourself. You do not break eye-contact with the monitor. It does not even matter if you are typing for real or not. I once clicked away happily for 5 minutes. I just typed ‘he is still there’ over and over again. Do not break down Sam. This moment will decide your relationship with this individual.

After the nod there will be a flood of words aimed in your general direction. You can disregard anything that is said. It boils down to ‘can not operate device’.

You then take the device from this person and put it next to you on your desk. You’ll ask the name of this simpleton, write it down on a sticky-note, slap that on the phone. Then you’ll write a random date in the not so near future on another sticky and hand that to the bewildered person in front of you.

It will usually utter some incoherent words about ‘needing, time or but’ (I find that ‘but’is a word they like. They tend to use it three or four times consecutive before you usher them through the door).

Now you’ve won Sam. Well… not really. But it will feel good, I can guarantee that.

This must do for now. A new suit is glaring at me for the last five minutes.

Felt good to do something productive with this time.

Take care,

Baltasar

P.s. I just noticed that there is some foam around his mouth. So if you encounter this, don’t worry: it seems to be perfectly normal.

WRITE IN C ('LET IT BE')
When I find my code in tons of trouble,
Friends and colleagues come to me,
Speaking words of wisdom:
"Write in C."
As the deadline fast approaches,
And bugs are all that I can see,
Somewhere, someone whispers:
"Write in C."
Write in C, Write in C,
Write in C, oh, Write in C.
LOGO's dead and buried,
Write in C.
I used to write a lot of FORTRAN,
For science it worked flawlessly.
Try using it for graphics!
Write in C.
If you've just spent nearly 30 hours,
Debugging some assembly,
Soon you will be glad to
Write in C.
Write in C, Write in C,
Write in C, yeah, Write in C.
BASIC's not the answer.
Write in C.
Write in C, Write in C
Write in C, oh, Write in C.
Pascal won't quite cut it.
Write in C.

Nobody can teach programming, programming teaches you...

Saturday late night wisdom.

Software developers you need to work on communication skills.
Everytime LinkedIn says need a problem solver. It means a guy who can understand what non technical guy is asking for and translate that to a software or at least come up with a example of why he is wrong. Explain them. They are not dumb fellows for asking that feature. You might think the feature is stupid. Don't assume this. Sit with them. Understand thier user flow, understand the frustration your software is causing them. Then you'll see why are asking for that X feature.

Every feature request made is basically my opportunity of understanding of product. Don't wait for users to tell you requirements. Understand and suggest, implement prototypes and show them, a causal question such as "Hey would you think providing a keyboard shortcut for this submission is great?"

Understand our job is not just to write software.

Our job is to solve thier problems using software knowledge.

Don't you agree ?

!rant

My personal wisdom of the day: You know you are getting older if you are too lazy to crack you program licenses and instead buy them legally.

Knowledge is knowing how to fix a computer.

Wisdom is knowing to start by rebooting.

The trick is to meditate instead of masturbate

Weekend weekend weekend. Yay!
After hard week at uni, took a day off and I am in bed since morning 😁
So I decided to find some kind of "dev social app" and got this. Not bad at all!

I am also fairly new at web development, using Python - at the moment Flask, later on Django so I am looking forward to meet some Flask/Django users here :)

And I just wanna add some wisdom here:)

"HTML and Css don't work well together" - some wisdom from my coworker after meddling with some height settings in css

What a great start to 2019 for me.

Uncles and aunties who don't understand a thing about development critiquing my work and offering their advises and vast wisdom based on their 1 second knowledge.

I almost turned to a psychopath.

Lol.

!rant

Some days ago I finished "Ray tracing in a weekend" (Peter Shirley) and I'm learning a lot :D

In the new year I will start with "Ray tracing the next week", but there are still some things I want to tackle before that (improve code quality, optimize... it's my first project that is bigger than a codeforces problem solution, a part from the projects at work).

Any sources of wisdom and recommendations are welcome!!

Starting next week I’m going to be a programming teacher.

Suck my nectar of wisdom!

A story from back when I was about to quit my first job,

I was the only front end in my first job after I graduated, it was a small IT company which needless to say, the pay sucks, the boss sucks, the manager sucks, everything sucks.

Despite that, I learnt a lot of things, but that's a story for another occasion.

So one day during my one month notice period, the HR asked me to help her in selecting candidates for my replacement. Being the good samaritan I am (trying to leave on good terms), I helped her by creating some practical test for the applicants.

It only took me an hour or so designing the tests, and another hour to try it out myself, and making sure it fulfill certain traits I'm trying to dig out of the candidates.

The test itself is pretty simple (in my opinion at least), in a sense that if someone are applying as a "front end", these are definitely the basic skills they should be having.

These may not be the exact wording as I remember, but the tests are,

1. Construct an HTML container which contains 4 other container, and responsively scales it's width on x screen size, x screen size ... and so on

(Requires a very basic media query)

2. [a screenshot of an HTML table], recreate the table in HTML, _as similar as you can to the screenshot provided_

(To check their attention to detail)

3. [similar HTML table screenshot, some javascript objects], create the table in HTML and use the data from the provided js array to dynamically populate the content, and sorted based on one of the column

(Basic javascript knowledge)

4. *I forgot this one but more or less it's about javascript also

*the test are to be done in 90 minutes, which is I believe is very plenty
**I only had 1.5 years experience at the time, from working at that company

In that one month period, 9 people applied as front end, 7 are fresh graduates, 2 applied as a "senior" front end developer

... none of them can finish the test

1 "senior", managed to finish 2, but the HR said he's too arrogant, so not preferable

1 freshman managed to work on all of them, but only finished 2, and the code looks better than the one above

In the end, the freshman was hired

Upon my last day, the new hires were assembled to be given a crash course, there were 5 backend devs and 1 front end devs, all of them are fresh graduates, and the boss decided to pay a visit (the devs worked in a different office from the administratives)

Just as I was passing my knowledge to the new guy, I can see that he is really new to coding (he doesn't even know stackoverflow), and I tried my best to be supportive, then the boss suddenly decided to "share" his wisdom, and started talking about how I managed to work on several different projects alone, and how he got new interesting projects in the future and such.

I could see the new guy is getting pale, and his life force seeping out from the top of his head as the flashbacks of his entire life up to that point passes right before his eyes.. Because that is what I felt on my first day joining the company.

But if I could survive that for 16 months -most developer only last a year at most, 14 devs has come and goes during that 16 months- why couldn't he? I passed the Friday of my last day peacefully, and went home for the evening.

2 days later on Sunday, I got a whatsapp message from the HR.

...the new guy sent his resignation yesterday.

Some words of wisdom passed on by our Scrum.

1. I am responsible for setting boundaries. Work time, sleep time, family time, me time. If I don't set them properly, things WILL get unbalanced very quickly. (And I would add, burnout will follow closely).

2. Being productive isn't about doing more and more in less time. It's about doing only the most important things well, and either saying no to the other things, or finding another way to get them done. (Prioritize!)

3. I can't win (let alone run) a marathon by thinking of it as a 26 mile long sprint, or a week as a five day sprint. (Eat a digital elephant a byte at a time).

4. Loved ones are good judges of when things are in and out of balance.

5. Taking time off is essential. Vacations, yes, but also nights and weekends. (Or you WILL burn out and hate what you do).

Comments in () are mine.

If you need to learn/teach object orientation, these are my approaches (I hate that classic "car" example):

1) Keep in mind games like Warcraft, Starcraft, Civilization, Age of Empires (yes, I am old school). They are a good example of having classes to use, instantiating objects (creatures) and putting them to work together. As in a real system.

2) Think of your program as an office that has a job to do, or a factory that has something to deliver. Classes are the roles/jobs and objects are the workers/employees. They don't need to be complex, but their purpose must be really (really, really) well defined. Just like in a real office / factory.

3) Even better (or crazier), see your classes and objects as real beings, digital creatures in a abstract world, and yourself as a kind of god, who creates species (define classes) with wisdom. Give life when it is the time for them to come into the world (instantiate object) and kill them when they are done with their mission (dispose an object). Give them behavior, logic, conditions to work with, situations where they take action, and when they don't. Make them kinda "smart". Build them able to make decisions and take actions based on conditions. Give them life. Think on your program as an ecossystem. There must be balance, connection, species must be well defined and creatures must work together to achieve a common objective. Don't just throw code and pray for it to run. Plan it.

-----

When I talk about my classes like they are real beings, and programs as mini-worlds, some people say I am crazy, some others say that's passion.

It is both! @__@

My friend brought me this, saying "I just found this in my junks, thought it might be useful for you. Weren't you a programmer?"

At first I thought I should explain about how fast everything changes over here and how it is out of style to talk about 2000s technologies, let alone a book from 1973!
I just said "Thanks! In fact it is a precious antique. I'll add it to my collection."
It really is.

Just started reading this book ..
The first chapter and half are pretty interesting.
Their explication of Optimal Stopping and “The Secretary Problem” made think about scenarios where its possible to use in my life.

Ps: I think that what the books wanted!

TIL...

"Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live."

John F. Woods

(found this in a demo snippet)

Google - I was going to type 'escaping # in json objects' but I am genuinely interested in what wisdom this Internet doohickie thang has on escaping polygamy...

If you wait till the last minute it only takes a minute

My CTO in the 'good old times', when he still talked to me and shared his wisdom, once told me what I should know about oop and explained me the world of programming and what really matters:

CTO about oop and C#:
"I think this object orientated stuff is overrated and useless. You don't get finished. I write everything in one file. You should do that too. The fastest way is always the best one."

So, dear readers, you might think, he maybe understood, what oop means. I have to disappoint you. He is as FUCKING STUPID as he sounds.
He didn't understand the whole concept of the language C# or oop.
He doesn't use properties, every single method is static void and there is nothing like an object.

Since there is more from where that came from, this will be continued...

Word Porn

When you just can't figure it out

Can't argue with this

JavaScript is like a gun.. if you don't know how to use it you will shoot yourself.

Hi devranters, I come to you for your wisdom...

Today a job offer was given to me in Poland with 2500 to 3000 euros after taxes + house + house expenditure + montlhy flights to my home country.

What do you think?

Devrant...
... give me the serenity to accept code that don't work
... The courage to fix code I can
... And the wisdom to find the typo before I throw my pc out of the window.
Amen.

Dear Devs,

Work Smart. 'cause working hard is time consuming ;)

Added Bjarne to my C++ cheatsheet for my exam tomorrow. He'll bring good luck and wisdom.

Got my first offer for a developer position and I start in a month. A lot of hard work has finally paid off and I can't wait to start. Any words of advice or wisdom?

Any task that starts with 'just' is one of these:

1, An underestimated problem not understood well.

2, An order to complete a task without considering the points of the developer.

3, Nike advertisement.

!dev

got 4 wisdom teeth pulled thursday, and i've been without solid food for 3 days

help

"If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in." - E. W. Dijkstra

Was going through some old books and found the mathematical proof that building good software from the beginning has positive long term effects... in case anyone had any doubts

"Most coders think debugging software is about fixing a mistake, but that's bullshit. Debugging's actually all about finding the bug, about understanding why the bug was there to begin with, about knowing that its existence was no accident. It came to you to deliver a message, like an unconscious bubble floating to the surface, popping with a revelation you've secretly known all along. A bug is never just a mistake. It represents something bigger. An error of thinking. That makes you who you are. When a bug finally makes itself known, it can be exhilarating, like you just unlocked something. Because, after all, a bug's only purpose, it's only reason for existence is to be a mistake that needs fixing, to help you right a wrong. And what feels better than that? The bug forces the software to adapt, evolve into something new because of it. Work around it or work through it. No matter what, it changes. It becomes something new. The next version. The inevitable upgrade." - Elliot, Mr. Robot

When you're stuck on a bug - take a shit or take a nap.

Do you know that feeling when you finally have no more errors, but then you can't tell if the software actually does the right thing?

🤢

Wisdom of the day:
'No crashes' is not equivalent to 'it works'...

My dads latest wisdom:
"Back in the days there were two types of people that whisper to themselves while walking down the street:
1. people that are building a house,
2. crazy people"
** looks at me ***
"... and in the recent times programmers are special category"

Important Announcement:

The word 'slack' must not be used as a verb.
For e.g.:

Person : Can you please slack me?
Me : Ummm ok, I will send you on slack...

Avoid those awkward moments. Stay alert!

Words of wisdom

When life gives you lemons just "rm -rf" if that doesn't work try "sudo rm -rf".

Wisdom teeth removal tomorrow morning. They're stuck up in there so they're putting me to sleep and really yanking on em. Gonna be out of action for a few days. Merry Christmas everyone!

I wish they gave me Xanax for a couple days in advance, not one hour in advance.

Master Foo and the Script Kiddie
(from the Rootless Root Unix Koans of Master Foo)

A stranger from the land of Woot came to Master Foo as he was eating the morning meal with his students.

“I hear y00 are very l33t,” he said. “Pl33z teach m3 all y00 know.”

Master Foo's students looked at each other, confused by the stranger's barbarous language. Master Foo just smiled and replied: “You wish to learn the Way of Unix?”

“I want to b3 a wizard hax0r,” the stranger replied, “and 0wn ever3one's b0xen.”

“I do not teach that Way,” replied Master Foo.

The stranger grew agitated. “D00d, y00 r nothing but a p0ser,” he said. “If y00 n00 anything, y00 wud t33ch m3.”

“There is a path,” said Master Foo, “that might bring you to wisdom.” The master scribbled an IP address on a piece of paper. “Cracking this box should pose you little difficulty, as its guardians are incompetent. Return and tell me what you find.”

The stranger bowed and left. Master Foo finished his meal.

Days passed, then months. The stranger was forgotten.

Years later, the stranger from the land of Woot returned.

“Damn you!” he said, “I cracked that box, and it was easy like you said. But I got busted by the FBI and thrown in jail.”

“Good,” said Master Foo. “You are ready for the next lesson.” He scribbled an IP address on another piece of paper and handed it to the stranger.

“Are you crazy?” the stranger yelled. “After what I've been through, I'm never going to break into a computer again!”

Master Foo smiled. “Here,” he said, “is the beginning of wisdom.”

On hearing this, the stranger was enlightened.

Mastering Tao!!

"Wisdom is knowing what to do next, skill is knowing how to do it, and virtue is doing it. " - David Starr

I posted 'programming partner wanted' on some social media app.

Some youngster immediately gives me his wisdom : 'JS sucks'.

Some people....sheesh

Asshole-Driven development (ADD) – Any team where the biggest jerk makes all the big decisions is asshole driven development. All wisdom, logic or process goes out the window when Mr. Asshole is in the room, doing whatever idiotic, selfish thing he thinks is best. There may rules and processes, but Mr. A breaks them and people follow anyway.

So I went to the store earlier today and an autistic young lad gave me one of the best pieces of advice anyone has EVER given me.

“Don’t let the haters stare into your eyes 👀”.

It took me a few hours for it to sink in and I now understood what he meant.

I feel better, enlightened, much more in control since I heard that young lad tell me those wise words of wisdom.

!dev

Just took out my four wisdom teeth at once. I can't feel my face, I look like a balloon and I'm drooling like I'm about to eat a delicious cake.

Except the cake is a fucking lie, my mandibular joints are hurting and I can't eat solids for a week.

At least I only have one postoperative to contend with. Hurray! 🙃

I'm basically an introvert. I've lived most of my childhood with my mother alone with few friends and the ones I had betreyed me real hard at some point. So how come that I'm now founding a startup, speaking in front of a big audience at meetups and have a nearly 60/40 work/social life?

At some point I decided to be more social. Making that decision alone had a huge impact. It took several years though, to implement this decision. Some day I cut off my draining social bounds and found energyzing relationships by simple doing what I wanted to do. I started to reach out and experiment with a lot of hobbies like bow casting and going to board games evenings. I made little steps. E.g bow casting is a sport where you don't necessarily interact with others within the sport, but you have the opportunity to interact about the sport.

A physiologist once told me the neat fact, that being an introvert is just an attribute that does not contradict the skill being socially involved. So it is possible with training and decisions to learn how to be more extroverted. For in introvert this is more exhausting and challanging, but definitely possible.

So today I balance my social life and work by visiting meetups, playing board games and all that stuff that makes me comfortable. There I get to know people with similar interests and similar struggle ;)

At some point the work was just not enough to be happy, I identified my missing social interactions as the root cause so I decided to change that.

On the other hand, don't think you have to be social. Don't think you have to care about everything others expect you to care about. It's bullshit. Don't care about that. Rather ask yourself what you want for yourself. Certainly a social life is part of that, but you alone decide how this will look like. E.g. After I decided hey I just don't give a fuck if you like cuddling your cat and when it's birthday is, several months or years later I started to be interested in these things from my own, not because some dippshit society construct expects me to care about it.

So to wrap up:
Introvert is an attribute, social life is a skill.
Deciding for yourself and giving a fuck about others is key.
It takes a shit load of time. But it works.

Jack ma: "It's the heart where the wisdom comes from"

Elon Musk:

Staying in because I have some really awesome stomach pains this morning courtesy of my time in the wonderful U.S Army.

As such my daughter did not get dropped off at the daycare center.

It is 09:22am. She(daughter)would have stayed asleep till about 10 if we didn't mess with her.

For WHATEVER FUCKING REASON and knowing that my stomach is on a fucking murder spree right now my wife decided in ALL OF HER FUCKING WISDOM to wake her up.

I am so
Fucking
Upset

I really feel for the motherfucker that would today and I am really wishing a motherfucker would.

More wisdom from The Tao of Programming

Now the following might shock you, read on with caution.

FUCK YOU DEVRANT.

I was writing a beautiful comment, i wrote an eassay you do not find anywhere else, i was about to spread more wisdom than the fucken bible.
Decided to search some stuff to put in some references, change back to devrant anD THE FUCKING APP RESTARTED LIKE IT'S NORMAL TO DO SO. RANT GONE, COMMENT GONE, WILL TO LIVE GONE.

THANKS FOR FUCKING NOTHING.

but in all honesty, who cares. Not a big deal.

WSJ Editorial Board, slow claps for you.
Your wisdom shines so bright, its making us all blind.

Words of wisdom from Jack Ma

When I find my self in times of trouble, mother google comes to me, speaking words of wisdom "Restart PC"

This business philosophy is relevant no matter which industry, culture or century you're in. In software development a user- or customer-centered design approach is particularly important👌

Via Instagram @alphaimplement 🚀

You are what you code.

Now that github is also offering unlimited private repos to free users, I'm thinking of using it as a backup of my gitlab private repos.

Like pushing to a gitlab private repo auto push to a github private repo kind of workflow.

I will search how to do it online.
However it would be awesome if anyone with similar previous experience can share their wisdom here 😁

Here we go....

At our school we had different industry people come in and talk about whatever they want to.

My last presenation for the day is on 3D modelling in Game Design, and of course we have middle school kids being generally loud and obnoxious.

Some fuckers are being exceptionally obnoxious, and the teachers decided, in their infinite FUCKING wisdom, to stick them in front of a table where Juniors and Seniors are sitting, minding our own buisness.

Of course, the fuckers decided to continue being obnoxious and despite my request to keep it down, and another Senior's direct approach to tell them to shut up, they continue being disruptive.

At one point, a teacher, again using INFINITE FUCKING WISDOM, decided that instead of removing the fuckers from the room, put a Senior in between them, hoping that that would somehow keep them quiet. Yes, the fucking preschool level attempt didn't work.

Eventually a teacher concluded that the fuckers were pissing us off and removed them from the room. Thank fuck.

That feels much better, excuse me as I need to reinstall an OS on my desktop since the Universe seems to fucking hate me today.

My first dev job is my current job, but I'm leaving it tomorrow to go on on an internship overseas, then return my focus to completing my Computer Science bachelor's degree and getting into a Master's program.

Before this job, I was an office assistant at a small company that sold cosmetics products and fragrances. I had just returned to college after a 1.5 year hiatus and was tired of that job. I wanted to get into the field, even though my experience was limited to freelance web design and a few personal programming projects of which I no longer had any proof, and I still didn't have a degree, but I wasn't confident that someone would contact me. Yet I decided to update my resume and upload it to Indeed.com. I was already getting interviewed at a call center when this local tech startup called, and 2 weeks later, I had the job. We were 3 employees and I was, not only the first woman in the team, but also the first person to ever get hired by the directors without a college degree. Today​, I still hold those two titles and the team is 3 times bigger.

It was a very bumpy ride, and tomorrow I move on to other adventures, but I'll always be grateful for the opportunity, all the lessons, and the best team mates I could ever have. Without their wisdom and guidance, I wouldn't have half the blessings I have today. I will miss them dearly, but I know we'll stay friends.

Here's to better things and to a college degree! <3

You always think of the young buck, fresh-out-of-school hotshot devs as being the ones who are obsessed with chasing the Hot New Thing at the cost of stability and maintainability, but our head of front end is old enough to be my father and he's only getting worse and worse about forcing buzzword compliance on the company. New framework every six months. New language every two years. Containers on VMs on cloud boxes. I've got milk in my fridge that's older than our tech stack and probably twice as stable.

Apparently age only brings wisdom if you're capable of giving a fuck.

!rant

You can differentiate between a pro programmer and a newbie on how they react when they get an error.

Wisdom tooth is trying to burst through my fucking gum, but it's still less annoying than a friend I have who:
- Constantly posts shitty 'inspiring' quotes on his facebook and tags everyone on his friendlist in 'em.
- Watches motivational speakers and constantly links you up to them.
- Tells you to 'aim higher' or to 'look for a job in a bigger company' or I won't achieve 'the success'.

..bitch, what kind of success have you achieved to tell me what to do with my god damn life?

I changed my job, after 7 years at the same company going from dev to senior to lead, I'm now moving into a new role as a lead..... Thats scary.

All the experience in the world doesn't ease that imposter syndrome

Google in their *infinite wisdom* has decided the .dev domain they bought should be forced to https in Chrome 63 fully knowing it's a common test gTLD for Web developers.

I'm on my last year on my master in computer science. What can I except when I'm done? Give me your wisdom! :) Please don't answer "hell" etc without a explanation haha :) I'm doing a master in AI and distributed system.

[Last year me]: Dammit, javascript is the worst language ever! Where are my var types? Why are there so many frameworks? Why the people are using it? Why? Why?

[Today me after updating my Linkedin profile with my javascript experience and receiving some good job offers almost instantly]: Oh good Lord, thank you for giving Mr. Eich the wisdom to create such a beautiful language, I'll build a new framework as a sacrifice to show my gratitute.

Friday wisdom:
Test's cannot prove absence of bugs. Tests can demonstrate the presence of features though.

P.S. I didn't came up with that

What's the deal with some devs, that genuinely know their stuff and can answer almost everything off the top of their head, yet they seem unable to apply their knowledge when it comes to actually using it.

Kinda like being ace at theory but shite in practice.

guys/gals, I need your wisdom. Especially from the ones owning startups.

How do you juggle between your project and work at some company (stable income source)? Accelerators, personal financers (mom, pops, best-bud swimming in $$$s, some fat guy in the neighbourhood, etc.), or do you simple multitask btwn daily job and your project?

I'm trying the latter but it's nearly impossible to do anything productive at home after 9 hours at office..

I'm curious .... Devs seem to love quotes that try to give you some profound wisdom

Personally I don't care for them kind of like reading cards but id like to know if you guys have any 🤔

Mainly what you think of when you need to get things done what keeps you driven

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.

I received a computer to work on for work and needed a knife to open the box. That's when my coworker pulled out this nugget of wisdom:

Coworker: My knife has a knife on it.
Me: Really?! Who would've thought?

ZNC shenanigans yesterday...

So, yesterday in the midst a massive heat wave I went ahead, booze in hand, to install myself an IRC bouncer called ZNC. All goes well, it gets its own little container, VPN connection, own user, yada yada yada.. a nice configuration system-wise.

But then comes ZNC. Installed it a few times actually, and failed a fair few times too. Apparently Chrome and Firefox block port 6697 for ZNC's web interface outright. Firefox allows you to override it manually, Chrome flat out refuses to do anything with it. Thank you for this amazing level of protection Google. I didn't notice a thing. Thank you so much for treating me like a goddamn user. You know Google, it felt a lot like those plastic nightmares in electronics, ultrasonic welding, gluing shit in (oh that reminds me of the Nexus 6P, but let's not go there).. Google, you are amazing. Best billion dollar company I've ever seen. Anyway.

So I installed ZNC, moved the client to bouncer connection to port 8080 eventually, and it somewhat worked. Though apparently ZNC in its infinite wisdom does both web interface and IRC itself on the same port. How they do it, no idea. But somehow they do.

And now comes the good part.. configuration of this complete and utter piece of shit, ZNC. So I added my Freenode username, password, yada yada yada.. turns out that ZNC in its infinite wisdom puts the password on the stdout. Reminded me a lot about my ISP sending me my password via postal mail. You know, it's one thing that your application knows the plaintext password, but it's something else entirely to openly share that you do. If anything it tells them that something is seriously wrong but fuck! You don't put passwords on the goddamn stdout!

But it doesn't end there. The default configuration it did for Freenode was a server password. Now, you can usually use 3 ways to authenticate, each with their advantages and disadvantages. These are server password, SASL and NickServ. SASL is widely regarded to be the best option and if it's supported by the IRC server, that's what everyone should use. Server password and NickServ are pretty much fallback.

So, plaintext password, default server password instead of SASL, what else.. oh, yeah. ZNC would be a server, right. Something that runs pretty much forever, 24/7. So you'd probably expect there to be a systemd unit for it... Except, nope, there isn't. The ZNC project recommends that you launch it from the crontab. Let that sink in for a moment.. the fucking crontab. For initializing services. My whole life as a sysadmin was a lie. Cron is now an init system.

Fortunately that's about all I recall to be wrong with this thing. But there's a few things that I really want to tell any greenhorn developers out there... Always look at best practices. Never take shortcuts. The right way is going to be the best way 99% of the time. That way you don't have to go back and fix it. Do your app modularly so that a fix can be done quickly and easily. Store passwords securely and if you can't, let the user know and offer alternatives. Don't put it on the stdout. Always assume that your users will go with default options when in doubt. I love tweaking but defaults should always be sane ones.

One more thing that's mostly a jab. The ZNC software is hosted on a .in domain, which would.. quite honestly.. explain a lot. Is India becoming the next Chinese manufacturers for software? Except that in India the internet access is not restricted despite their civilization perhaps not being fully ready for it yet. India, develop and develop properly. It will take a while but you'll get there. But please don't put atrocities like this into the world. Lastly, I know it's hard and I've been there with my own distribution project too. Accept feedback. It's rough, but it is valuable. Listen to the people that criticize your project.

FUCK YOU NODE JS AND FUCL YOU SYNOLOGY

Decided to give an old Synology DiskStation that sits at home slme new life besides just sharing files. Since Synology has SSH but not a full Linux OS, installed DebianChroot (so far so good). At one point I needed Node JS, so installed NVM and tried to install Node. Well guess what didn't work. Tried a few more things including directly downlosding node from the official node website. Trying different versions, the whole drill.

After about 5 hours of installing and errors, well really usfull errors like "There where 2 errors during installation" WELL HOW ABOUT YOU FUCKING TELL ME WHAT THE ERROR IS YOU FUCKING FUCK!

I found a formum wkith a guy haveing similar problems. Able to install legacy 0.10.x versions but not 4.x.x. Or 6.x.x oder whatever. He found that you have to have at least an ARMv6 compatible processor, otherwise it won't run. Checked it and well, that old fuck of mine only has ARMv5. FUCK! But honestly. You detect it's an ARM architecture. You detect it's not one of the v6 or v7, you try to install the general arm version, BUT YOU DON'T GET THE FUCKING IDEA TO MENTION TO CHECK WAHAT VERSION YOU HAVE AND IF THAT IS SUPORTED BY FUCKING NODE!

One afternoon wasted, at least I got a little more wisdom. Fuck do I hate Node now. On the bright side, I've ordered a Raspberry Pi and two cases for Harddisks, I'll create my own diskstation with blackjack and hookers (I realy hope you get that reference)! Fuck you Synology and Node JS (yeah yeah, it's not Synologies fault, but I'm mad anyways!)

"Do it right do it light..do it wrong do it long"

My old peewee football coache's sage advice on the pitfalls of technical debt..

Warnings are insufficient errors that failed to create a problem.
- Me

All is code.

Think about it. Do you agree?

"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference " - Reinhold Niebuhr

Given enough time I can meet any software deadline.

Says every software engineer.

Went out, got hammered, came home and decided in my infinite wisdom that I'd stuff my face with cold pizza (fuck yeah left over pizza) and get some code written before bed.

The code was great, worked absolutely fine, but the commit messages were completely ineligible. Decided to quickly reword those the next morn-... Afternoon.

“Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. I think a lot of what people call intelligence boils down to curiosity.” - Aaron Swartz

Hi friends and others. There is a task I want to automate. I want to convert .docx files to .pdf and then minify those. Are there JavaScript libraries or npm- packages which can do that? Because I would like to use Gulp or Webpack for this task. I would not mind if external APIs are involved, but I would rather not use those if not required.

Pls share your wisdom. Bye.

Not drunk, still underage. I can share a wonderful story from when my wisdom teeth were pulled. My mom made me agree to not work on anything, especially code, when I came home. However, I had an awesome CPU architecture design project, and I was ready to make a few example programs in the assembly language. When I woke up the next morning with a clearer mind, I looked at the code again. ^A , ^X. Mom said "I told you so."

Once again! You lovely, lovely area of thought and wisdom, absent pain.

I have to show weekly progress on my 2D game engine this monday in order to be graded.. but I can't focus due to tooth of wisdom.

I'm THIS fucking close to using these:

My Boss Abuses me, should I leave my job?

I overheard this tidbit on a bus recently. Okay I'm lying. But in the great spans of
time I've spent reading "dear annie" type articles, many involving how often my meth head step dads beat me while growing up, or in turn how often *I* beat me (oh yeah)..I've come across this in one form another, this, and other dumbfuck questions from the stuttering meek and halfhearted.

They say there are no dumb questions. Well, like that guy who smoked too much weed and
asked "what is the sound of one hand clapping?" (fap fap fap), there are in fact dumb questions.The world is overflowing with them, like a clogged shitter full of tacobell and glitter covered brown gutter wisdom. And it smells like roses, if roses smelled like shit.

Questions like "How do I make sure my cats don't feel lonely once I have my first child?"

I don't know, they're fucking cats. Did you even google this before asking?

Or

"How to make spaghetti?"

Really, is this question written by a bot?

"What is the best javascript framework in year x?"

All of them and none of them. Welcome to hell.

"Whats your favorite color?"

My answer: I'm not five years old any more. And obviously you are. Why are you on this site instead of eating crayons at daycare?

Yes indeed, this and many more dumbfuck questions await you and can be found on the preeminent quora, amongst other sites.
A place, which censored an eminently reasonable answer of mine (I was totally not being a shithead btw).
I responded in kind by removing a whole mess of long form answers of mine.

What I have learned from the experience is this: Humanity is greatly comprised of many people who, having no brains to speak of, wander aimlessly like beasts of the field, glass eyed and slack jawed, in search of a savior. But their savior came a long time ago, once, and many times before. An engineer, or programmer, or perhaps in another reincarnation a guy parting a sea of koolaid after the local ruler swindled his peeps out of another payment for moving some heavy ass stone blocks, but I digress.

And in response to peoples worries, anxieties, everyday problems and concerns, every one of these would be wiseman, every one of these saviors, leaders, and great men spoke these magic words which resonate now down through the ages like the voice of reason and providence:

"Read the FUCKING manual."

"And don't bother me again asshole." (well this last bit is all me, but I'm sure others said it too.)

Don't try and fix parts of the code that isn't 'broken' in the clients eyes.... You'll spend hours fixing something they'll neither appreciate or understand

The six stages of debugging:
1. That can't happen.
2. That doesn't happen on my machine.
3. That shouldn't happen.
4. Why does that happen?
5. Oh, I see.
6. How did that ever work?

To explore and collect knowledge, power and wisdom while wandering through the infinite abyss of space....

I recently celebrated a rather significant birthday and it got me to thinking what's changed about me over the years.

Young me: Feared that I wasn't a supremely talented software developer and completely insecure about it.

Older me: I know I'm not a supremely talented software developer... and that's ok.

I haven't been ranting in a while but y'all are so smart that I can't get enough of your wisdom!

So... Client wants me to build something. That something has a lot of commercial value as a product or even a startup...
How do I go about communicating that? Do I reach an agreement to release it open-source and then I can offer commercial support? Do I offer them a discounted price for my services and I remain the owner of the code?

Thanks! 😊

How do you eat an elepant?
One small bits at a time.

How much experience do you have in asp.net? Answered. Next question - How about web development, how much in that? These so called fucking tech recruiters in India are making this industry a mess. These fucking donuts have no clue what are they hiring for, study done on profile is next to zero and then they call you and ask you such questions.
The day was going pretty badly already and this tech recruiter calls me up and starts evaluating my profile and whether it matches with her clients requirement or not! So she starts with some basic stuff and then drops the said pearl of wisdom. After listening that question I went full retard in less than 3 seconds. But our miss mumbo Dumbo proceeds and asks me how many years of experience in xml and Json and whether I have worked on html (!!!!!!). You fucking knucklehead why don't you fucking first have a basic knowledge about your job first and then start dialing? You just caused me a massive migraine attack you dimwitted slack jawed idiot.

I was working for a project with one of the project managers. Despite several discussions, he was not ready to have provisioned for procurement of couple of extra drives for database backups. Also because it's always how they worked, developers were allowed to make changes to the production databases directly.

Since I knew it was going to be burning some day, despite his negligence, I ran a script to take full database backups every night, compress, and remove old backups all to do in the drives we had on server. Sat it automated using scheduler.

One day it happened that one of the junior developers deleted one major table taking whole production down. Next thing you know everyone went crazy. Since I felt bad for the managers and users, I was able to restore database using backup from last night.

You know who jumped in first before senior management to take credit of all this and got some nice kudos..that project manager. Also, you know who got burned..it would not be a rant if I did not got schooled for not following on the wisdom of project manager.

Anyways, we are still not taking database backups (as per project manager)

What's some valuable things you've learned this year?

I'll start.
Always ask myself, if I can elaborate on any given statement, otherwise just keep shut.

Always ask yourself before writing any code, if it's gonna be easy to modify later on, if not, take a step back and evaluate the bigger picture.

Don't bother with writing things clean in the first go.
It'll be much easier to refactor later on and take less total time.

Learnt a lesson today:

Never try out new hotkeys in a SQL query editor window.

Or if you do, at least make sure it's not connected to anything important :)

I was trying out new hotkeys and accidentally executed a SQL deploy script to rename something in multiple stored procedures in a large system.

Thankfully - so I saw after my heart stopped - it was only our QA db so not too bad, just a couple of devs set back.

Who woulda thought ctrl-l would execute :O

What do you think about this assertion: 'When I’m on my deathbed, I won’t look back at my life and wish I had worked harder. I’ll look back and wish I spent more time with the people I loved' ?

Apparently when looking for diagrams to add to your ML presentation, 'ANN model images' is not a term you should search while in office.

Though no one was watching, it was hysterical.

“A computer language is not just a way of getting a computer to perform operations but rather that it is a novel formal medium for expressing ideas about methodology. Thus, programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines [including the human] to execute.” (The Structure and Interpretation of a Computer Programs, 1985)

“If you try to make something beautiful, it is often ugly. If you try to make something useful, it is often beautiful.” -Mr. OSCAR WILDE

Ok. I got it. I need a portfolio. That will speak for you. I’m working on it. I’m building great stuff. In the meantime. How the heck do I get a job as a junior web developer with no experience. I only have a coding bootcamp and a 4 month internship. All companies want people with experience. You won’t even have an interview without experience. So what’s the strategy then? Looking out for some words of wisdom from fellow devs.

Salutations fellow devs,

I come here today to seek your wisdom about an issue that is troubling me more and more lately. Here is the situation: I am a data scientist, my core skills are to build and implement models for classification/regression/clustering purposes. Working at a Startup, we don't have a person in charge of putting into production the models I build, so I'm in charge of that; the problem is that I'm really not skilled at it. We use an IaaS cloud service to deploy our code, and I manage to somehow make things work, but the whole thing could be improved to make the deployment faster, do continuous integration, make the servers handle more requests per time unit, and reduce the costs of the cloud infrastructure. So here is the question: can you point me to books/tutorials/online courses about "this stuff" (I'm guessing DevOps but I'm not really familiar with the term)?

Side note: I would really like to know if any of you was in this situation and how did you manage it.

One of the great lessons I've learned in this career was to: "Stop rewriting up that code to perfection and start moving on to better things. Keep moving ahead. That code will be replaced and get messy again anyway."

But that doesn't mean you should write bad-designed or sloppy code.

Thinking of migrating to Stockholm...
Life in Greece is pretty intolerable and only getting worse...

Any tips? Pointers? General wisdom?
Is it relatively easy to get a job there (competition-wise)?

Wednesday Wisdom
Tomorrow I am a better developer than today.
Today I am a better developer than yesterday.

Friday wisdom.

Software is not written. It is rewritten.

After spending 3 days approx. On thinking over a design problem. The first 2 days I was clueless how the problem is going ahead. Today I deleted all classes started again and voila.!! It works like magic and I did it with a TDD approach so got good test coverages too.

P.S. I didn't come up with that line. I got it from a tech talk and now understood it's meaning.

wk145

A uni kicked out here, enough said :3

// I don't wanna share my great achievement and wisdom in the official weekly topic thread 😆

had all four wisdom teeth pulled out last Saturday and been under pain killer otherwise I could neither chew shit nor sleep - feeling drowsy af but still have to server debug with another internal team - fml

Meditation. Or Awareness Meditation to be precise. It enables me to regain control over my mind, because I get distracted really fast. It really helps sorting things out, taking a step back and getting an overview where I actually am and if what I'm doing right now is actually relevant/has priority. I mostly find that it's not, so I have to return to the important stuff.

For those interested: meditation sounds weird, even obvious at first or you just don't get what's it all about. You actually have to practice meditation for a long time and study the concepts until you start to understand what all these phrases and talking means. Behind them lies great wisdom/huge amount of concepts which is easily underestimated. So don't be frustrated too much if you don't feel it working right away. Be assured I've been there too. Also don't start with meditations like 'just stop thinking or think nothing' because in my opinion this is highly complex shit and frustrating at first. Start with awareness or breathing meditations or even get an app to support your daily habit.

Code has no conscience.

HOLY FUCK! Why is JS world so fucking confusing? I haven't even started learning it and its already giving me a headache. I feel like there are a billion different things i have to learn that aren't just "vanilla js". All i want to do is learn some web dev, take on freelance work, become a digital nomad. Im a simple C++ and ios/android developer things are so straight forward. JS seems like a clusterfuck of just stuff 😧 Id like to say this isnt a my language is > than yours rant. This is a "like what the fuck" rant. My brain was like Html, Css, JS cool thats all i have to learn... boy was i wrong. Can someone give me a word of wisdom as i go down this apparent rabbit hole?

The story by @orimligt reminded me of this: I was on an HTC Droid Incredibly and kept running out of disk space, so some insane sequence of events led me to try to store the Dalvik cache on the cache partition or something. I unpacked the boot image, edited the init script to bind mount the directory, repacked it, and...it bootlooped great.

I still had the boot image, but in my ~14yr-old wisdom I hadn't taken a nandroid backup. How do I flash the new image if I can't boot? The ROM wasn't even available anywhere on the Internet anymore.

After two days of tinkering, I finally realized something: I could take a nandroid backup, swap out the boot image, and then restore it. Lo and behold, it worked, and the phone lived to see another day (it still works too, of course also still on Android 2.3).

On that note, now that I'm writing this, I think maybe adb + dd while in recovery mode or fastboot flash boot would've been easier. But hey, if it works it works. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I need some Dev wisdom for you wonderful devRanters!

I have the opportunity to intern at a large multinational company overseas. I can get flown there and have a place to stay so that's not the issue. These are:

#1 it's cutting edge block-chain tech (not that I'll get to do anything super important) that I have no idea how it works. written in a language I don't know.

#2 they're trying to make a certain application of block chain technology proprietary and that goes completely against everything I stand for.

3# I'm only a 2nd year student and don't think I can handle uni while trying to catch up on a new development prosses, maintain decent grades and work part time at a job a might lose, if I go.

So, do I go?

Oh DevRant community, I've come seeking for help and wisdom.
In my university the basic programming course uses Java and it's getting a bit outdated. The class has a lot of resources, like online videos and examples, but teachers from other departments say that the class doesn't teach students correctly.
I'm a student at that university, and I'm working in a group tasked to diagnose the class and seek for possible solutions. I need to know if some of you know about tools used to teach programming and algorithmic thinking in an interesting way at a university level. Something like Scratch or Karel, but for university students. If you have an example university I would love that!

I need a life advise - pls share your wisdom!

I have my first client located in the US. He wants to pay with a cashier's check and I have no idea how that works. How do you European or even german freelancer are getting paid by american clients?

Fucking wisdom tooth. I just wanted to learn about deploying and that fucker gives me the worst headache since months

Wisdom teeth are the worse. I woke up 3 hours ago with a migraine.

I always see job posts for:
• ASP.NET
• Wordpress
• PHP & mySQL

Would you consider applying for these when you don't like these technologies? Why? I need your advice & wisdom guys. Thank you so much!

Yesterday (March 13) was the start of spring break. I get to do statistics homework, write a political term paper, and prepare a biology presentation this week. Yesterday was also my 22nd birthday. I listened to Taylor Swift's song and declared it my theme song for the next year (I'll regret this decision in a few days). In about 9 hours (9 AM EDT), I will be getting my wisdom teeth removed. I will be on pain medication and eating soft foods and soup all week. Fun stuff right there. At least I'll have an awesome video game called LEGO Worlds to retreat to. I kept typing regret instead of retreat right there. Here, have a picture of my mouse pad at my desk. My dad gave it to me. This post is already pretty random and I'm not on any medicine yet. It must be the nervousness and perpetual collegiate sleep deprivation talking.

Lend me your wisdom o wise ones!
I'm tired of windows updates and im tired of it eating my background resources on my low end convertible(atom, 2gigs ram).
The only reason i'm still on windows is the touch support. Haven't yet found a distro where everything just works. Anyone here using a touch screen with linux?

Edit: I've tried hacking away with drivers and shit but feeble touch support just doesn't help as i primarily use it as a tablet

This year I'm asked to teach Python with a GUI, but I've never used a graphic interface with Python. The chosen GUI must:
- Have an IDE, a sort of "drag and drop builder"
- Be capable of building software with forms, menus and multiple windows.
- Work with Windows 7 at least.
- Work with Python 3+

Any suggestions?

So far I tried:

- Tkinter: comes with the language (point in favor), but wasn't really able to make it work. Has no proper IDE, tried to use a builder called PAGE but doesn't seem to work.

- WxPython: didn't really play much with it. I've read some articles, but that's all.

- Qt: used several years ago with Ruby. Has an IDE (point in favor), but never tried with Python. This is my winner so far, the one big problem being the amount of stuff to install to properly work.

My favorite xkcd quotes (order is not significant )
1. _*It's the world's tiniest open-source violin.*_
2. ...too honest. Scale it back.
3. I'd like to bestow upon you the first annual AWARD of EXCELLENCE in BEING VERY SMART. May you continue to grace our internet with your wisdom.
4. wait, what?
5. Yeah, uh ... I accidentally took the Fourier transform of my cat ...
6. Okay, we _suck_ at this.
7. You either need more medication or less. Not sure which.
8. I THINK EVERYONE INVOLVED HERE IS CUTE
9. World's Greatest Daughter
10. People who open bananas for the other end
11. Just for the sake of the argument, we should get a boat! You can invite the Devil, too, if you want.
12. This explain a lot.
13. My bag is 90% backup batteries.
14. Well- will you be my "it's complicated" on facebook?
15. Oh God. Gotta get out. The window.
16. Sweet! I finally got my subduction license!
17. I'll tell you later - you wouldn't appreciate the punchline over this 12kbps cell phone codec.
18. RON PAUL evolves into TRON PAUL
19. Just talk to them like a f***ing human being
20. In ordering #5, self-driving cars will happily drive you around, but if you tell them to drive to a car dealership, they just lock the doors and politely ask how long humans take to starve to death.
21. I eat my body weight in food every 31 days. That's slightly faster than the human average.
22. Nice try, Mike. Get out of the well.
23. Apollo retroreflectors
24. Can't see space vampires
25. My class on screenshots was a big hit, although for some reason I only ever sold one copy of the digital textbook.
26. WHAT.
27. Introducing The xkcd Phone 6, VIII, 10, X, 26, and 1876. We didn't start this nonconsecutive version number war, but we will not lose it.
28. My morality has evaporated over the harsh UV light.
29. Come on. Somewhere at the edge of the bell curve is the girl for me.
30. P.P.S. I can kill you with my brain.
31. Time to accelerate this giant machine up to terrifying speeds and steer it using my hands, which I am allowed to do because I took a 20-minute test in high school!
32. My normal approach is useless here
33. Wake up, sheeple!
34. Sir- strategic command has send us a lunch order.
35. Yeah, but first I'm gonna go comatose for a few hours, hallucinate vividly, and maybe suffer amnesia about the whole experience.
36. HOLY S***. Guys- people are complicated!
37. OH GOD- SPIDERS
38. Perhaps you need a crash course in taking hints. Here's your first lesson: We're not actually walking somewhere together; I'm trying to leave this conversation and you're following me.
39. How did the pole vaulters get up to our balcony?
40. Friggin' Python
41. I am the goddamn *Michael Jordan* of blurring the line between metaphor and reality. [tosses a basketball]

I think discussing / talking about whether your educations are useful or not is always gonna be a never ending debate.

Each person has their own unique way to nurture their true potentials. In my case, I always "thought" that taking college in Computer Science is such a waste of time and money, even I still try to survive with it these 3 years. In my first year, I fight a lot with my parents because I always said I wanna drop out and just get to work. But in the end...I still continue my journey for 3 years and yeah...I currently struggling to graduate. Maybe, after graduate, it will be a waste of time and money like how I thought about it. But I also learn that taking college journey have teach me a lot of things, like meeting so mane different kind of friends / people, time-management, etc. Maybe those Study Materials in Class will be forgotten in just a few years after I graduate, but those other life-lessons I believe will remain in myself for a long time...

Some people said if you are someone who wanna work hard, study hard, and have the grit to learn by yourself and committed to become a developer by yourself, you don't need college. But if you are someone who still find out your way, still figuring out whether it's the best choice to take computer science or not as a carreer, and you don't wanna waste time doing nothing, just get yourself to college.

The point is...it's just how we try to find out what's actually worked for us even if it's not the best choice.

In my dev travels and dev journeys, i have learnt nothing but one thing. The secret of life. I will share with you devs today.
"Life is a free form jazz odyssey of mastubatory bullshit"

Ah, the end of a very long work day, a beatiful time for me to click"update and shutdown" instead of "shutdown" on my laptop and being to scared to close the lid because I don't want to meet the thorn of God for ignoring the ancient wisdom of "Do not turn off your computer"

Is your train really late if you already know that it's late and then adjust accordingly to reach on time for a train that is late?

A customer coming up with new phrases to describe features:

"I remember in the future"

PHP gurus / masochists.

I've been using Symfony components for new, isolated features in a legacy php application for awhile now. the time has come to integrate using the kernel, and routing for new endpoints while existing endpoints use the existing apache means of loading pages.

It's not my first rodeo doing this, but I'd appreciate any wisdom/resources/patterns you followed for anyone who's had to do the same.

My clients don't have the means to do hire the appropriate ammount of devs to do a proper port, so this is a long path towards modernization by ceasing to bolt on features to existing code and instead, when working on something, updating it to the new design pattern and then extending that, with a spec, documentation and code coverage.

Mass notification vendors lack of understanding that to create value for clients they must turn raw data into information into knowledge into wisdom. Shoveling oceans of raw data at us does not impress us.

I am lost. Which package should I use?

1. ImageIntervention
2. Spatie/image

Pls share wisdom.

Making a balance need some wisdom to make it happen. Make a time recipe for everything. 8 hours dev, 4 hours spent with family, 8 hours sleeping etc.

My eyes bulge out when a wisdom says "Sometimes when unit test doesn't passes, there is a need to remove all the asserts "

.....death RIP !!

Has anyone here worked with Superpowered SDK?

There seems to be no guide or detail as to how to get it to work for android.
So much for marketing yet so less for actual ground work!

Would be glad if someone can impart some wisdom