Employer: "You know Html5 and Css3??

Me: "Of course! And Javascript."

Employer: "GREAT! We develope WordPress."

Me: 😊😊😊👋💣

Best: My first app on the play store got over 2000 downloads in 3 days, best Christmas present ever.

Worst: An update I published caused an equivalent of 1/4 of my user base worth of crashes. :/

Best: got an offer from Google.

Worst: family and friends trying to convince me to turn down the offer and take a local job.

(I'm from a small town where family is everything to everyone and leaving is blasphemous.)

Best: actually getting something working out there and having it visited by devRanters! (security/privacy blog)

Worst: rewriting entire applications because my code often fucking sucks

Best : learning php

Worst : learning php

So where to start... Let me preface this by saying I am a Software Architect for C# and do 99% dotnet development.

I just received a phone call from our Director of Development asking me to look at adding a feature for SSO with our companies main development project, which is written in PHP. I hope I made the correct changes but since I am not a PHP dev... I am not 100% confident in my code.

Now I am writing this as we are making the deployment Friday, December 29, 2017 at 5:00 pm. I should add that I am going on vacation for the next week.

So let me summarize... I am not a PHP developer, the non-PHP developer is making PHP changes on a Friday Night, and before a long weekend and before going on vacation.

I would like to point out that I said I was not 100% comfortable with this... but well this is what they wanted. I am not even sure what really to say about this though.

Best: I'm still employed.
Worst: I'm still working on a PHP codebase, which only got bigger (34M lines) and more entangled this year.

Best : learning git

Worst : couldn't solve merge conflicts in git

Best: got my first client during my birthday

Worst: my laptop was stolen 😭

Best: getting my favourite job 😍
Worst: waking up

Fucking teammate who did not know how to read/write a simple class diagram.
We warned him that he have to study or we just kick his fucking ass out of the team.

He just did nothing. When we had meetings he just stayed at home pretending to have an heart issue needing surgery.
After just 2-3 days he was tagged on FB in a photo shooted a few days earlier where he was riding a bike for a competition.

He skipped another scheduled-a-fucking-week-before meeting saying that he was on a surprise trip, when I called him 5 minutes before meeting start.

In the end we just kick him out because he did nothing. He went to professor talking about some relationship problem in the team and asked him if he could continue the project by himself just forking the ours.

Professor said HELL NO SON OF A BITCH.

But our team learned a precious lesson : choose your team carefully.

happiness is finding this in your inbox.

Best: Finally left the video game industry for a "real" software engineering role!

Worse: Left work at an exciting studio and fun projects for shorter hours and more pay, and it's incredibly boring and I actually *miss* the crunch and chaos.

When this year started I didn't have much knowledge of server side programming as web developer, only thing I knew was html/css. But this year I got started with:

- PHP
- Framework Phalcon (PHP)
- Javascript (jQuery, NodeJS, react)
- SASS (I can't without it anymore)
- Virtual Hosts (local development)
- Command Line stuff either in macOs and linux ubuntu

This is a huge deal for me because I always got laughed at I only wrote CSS and couldn't write anything else.

So knowledge-wise it was the most productive year ever.

Also, devRant helps me get through the day lately. Thank you for being a part of it!

best Dev experience was by far the Dutch devRant meetup! :D

let the future hold many more rants!

2017 was a dream come true literally.Long story short, I quit my job of 6 years as a PE teacher, studied Android Development through Udacity's Nanodegree program, moved my wife and kids out of our house (we were renting), moved in with my in-laws, Trusted God, learned how to build Android apps, applied at numerous tech companies, got offered 2 jobs, got hired as an Android Developer in Tennessee in December making almost more than twice I did as a teacher. My first day of work is January 8th. What a year it's been!

Worst: Got made redundant from a senior development role in a shiny new company - two weeks before I got married.

Best: Got an offer 4 weeks later as a development manager in an enormous Australian distributor, and I get to concentrate on API development.

Best. Job. Ever.

worst: having to code for 10 projects at same time.

best: completing all of them like a boss.

Best: getting a job at IBM

Worst: slacking on devRant

Best: go outside my birth town for a developer position in a big city

Worst: i Miss my little town :(

Best exp:
( ͡ ͡° ͜ ʖ ͡ ͡°)
\╭☞ \╭☞ learning python and working with big data
Worst one:
(╯°□°）╯︵ learning php and visiting classes of programming at my college

Best: write a lot of code for others and for company :)

Worst: not able to write code for myself and for open communities :(

Best 2017: that’s a tie:
- refinding devRant and feeling like this is the place I was missing from my life!
- getting to the end of the year with a stable and complete project, bring on next years insanity!

Worst: still working ( minor routine tasks ) during my annual leave!

I'm a WD newbie and I really like when I see myself doing things like this.

Best: Created my own company and have had 8 clients in 2017. Devrant has allowed me to find a community of fellow geeks. I've used github way more in 2017 than any past year.

Worst: Have had at least 2 ex-clients but I've lived and learned from them. I go on Devrant way more than I should.

Joining devRant

Best: Recalling code I wrote in 2017.
Worst: Being asked if I remember code I wrote in 2016.

Joining devRant.
Learning Kotlin.
Learning to dev, actually.
Being fascinated by software development.

Best: Defeating a seasoned IT professional who was unable to troubleshoot a problem for a week and me doing it in 25 minutes.

Worst: Dealing with anxiety and programmer's block.

Best: first internship during the summer

Worst: going back to uni afterwards

It is boring now :(

My classmate asks me; “So, do you know Windows Visual Sharp Sharp yet?”

Best dev experience of 2017:

Being able to support my family with my work.

Knowing that all of us have health, vision, and dental insurance solely because of me.

Finally being able to give back to those who have helped me over the years.

Worst:
Going through bankruptcy

Best:
Getting out of it, joining a team that is so on the edge of everything, that asking questions on SO is useless, and they can only be answered by us debugging the platform itself, as suggested by its maintainers.

... To boldly go where no man has gone before

My first internship
.
.
.

And also my first internship

Best:
- optimized a lot of queries and pieces of code
- graduated from the dutch equivalent of community college
- started a new education
- updated our password schema from a shameful algorithm to bcrypt

Worst:
- haven't been able to convince my colleague and bosses to automate stuff
- still no tests
- still a php dev
- still alone

2018:
Come at me with your c++ and robots! I'll fucking master you!

Best: I got my first job as Android dev

Worst: Long commute everyday (2.5 hours from home to work)

Best : there was nothing worst about this year.

Best: Ruby on Rails

Worst: had to work on so old php backend

Best: My projects are working, I could get a great salary
Worst: I'm working for a school project and I have no time.

Best: completely switching to (void)-Linux and leaving winblows behind me in the dirt.

Worst: everything else

I added semicolon, you know what? it works!!!

Worst dev experience:
"Learning" vhdl

Best dev experience:
Actually learning because of a new, more competent professor

Best : Finally getting my first internship after teaching myself how to code.

Worst : Was a preeeeeeetty shitty internship. I know you'll say all internships are hard BUT, this one was on another level.

Best: discovering devRant and meeting lots of cool people, switching to Linux as well

Worst: the programming lessons in school

Best: I’ve learned A LOT during this year. Some things from devRant, stackoverflow, even the school

Worst: I lost source code of my April Fools game (Super Fernando Bros, I posted a link on devRant about it) 😭

My best dev experience this year was the success of my company intern app at work, where I am employeed since last December beside my studies.
The company founder, the CEO, the head of department and the marketing department all like my app and in January it will be deployed to all company phones 😀
Whish me luck that there won't be any serious bugs 😅

Best: learned a lot of new things: vueJS, ES6, Bootstrap, CSS3 transitions and transforms, use of some cool JS libraries...

Worst: an awesome web page turns a nightmare because of endless "upgrades" that the client wanted (I'm aiming to finish it soon)

Yesterday I reinstalled my system because I wanted to have linux on my ssd and windows on my hdd. So after 2 retries because first windows was bitching about the drive format even after I set the correct one and the second time I installed linux and windows broke. Now finally everything is back to normal and I can start coding. One thing suprised me (badly) windows is super slow now. Luckilly linux is the opposite. I love linux.

Fixing that one bug

Best: Was introduced to devrant.
Worst: Managing complex sql database.

Best: chief university lab position, 12 yrs as a 👨‍🏫 system engineer teacher, really need a break, updating me as a pro.

Worst: last chief just left email with CISCO passwords. No F* VLANS reference, no technical manual, deleted all Sh* documents on PC.

So I about 4 days no internet on university, reseted 25+ CISCO switches, reorganizing fibers, all week 💤 6am-11pm or more. VTP server core nice and clean, nice VLans, ClearOS formated an licensed, ubnt portal for Wifi.

December, organizing all the administrative stuff. We are back stable and documenting. Moving and painting office, delegation of staff.

Now in vacations with a “tepache 🍻 “ 🍍

Best: I have no work to do
Worst: I have no idea what to do with myself now

Best: building a far more complex website than originally planned, and successfully finishing it (Also, joining DevRant)

Worst: discovering Drupal 8.

Best: VSCode, Typescript, Webpack
Worst: mov ax, bl

Setting up a single node Hadoop cluster. Then installing intellij idea, to find that it doesn't detect any installed jdk. Then uninstalled all jdks, and then reinstalled one, then Hadoop won't work. Now everything seems fine.

Best: Realising I can code and I actually do have the drive to pursue this career but need to make some changes to get there.

Worst: Also realising I'm very logic oriented and process driven and work in a company that would rather piss on exposed power mains over training their staff.

Best: Got my first real job

Worst: Had to maintain an 8 year old java/jsf nightmare of a project

Best: Spending the summer contributing to one of the widely used tools by pentesters and developers (9k stars on Github)

Worst: Not being able to give enough time to programming because of other stuff

Best: Started working successfully, raised my self confidence, can finally see my future

Worst: Started feeling the effects of too much work on my mental and physical health (bad eyesight, back pain, weight...)

So I know i did a best and worst case already for 2017

But apparently it's not finished yet!

This will probably a short one:

Best thing to happen to me this year: I applied for a VR game and despite at this very moment i'm in thr trial period (to see if I can do work) i've succesfully landed a job.

I've spent months rewriting and rewriting my CV applying for standard software dev jobs, either being turned down for not enough experience for Junior roles, where they want someone out of university, where I have 1 year of both iOS and android experience, that is still not good enough for their shitty little app.

After all of that effort I turned to just borrowing my head and developing my game, to the point i have bits of the game practically done (bare bones crafting and building works 100% just has bugs in some specific cases). A friend of mine got a game dev job and he helped me out by showing me what his CV and cover letter looked like, i mimiced the style (in a sense) and added my own specific additions for VR. At the exact same time i got an invite from unity connect (which i had totally forgotten about) which i then scowered through jobs until I found something awesone "a job for a unity VR developer".

After contacting the guy about the job, we ended up having a voice chat over discord and he seems pleased with the fact I tome on my hands! Sadly the job is not some hourly paid job, however from what i've seen from youtube gameplay footage it looks very well done, and that leads me to getting revenue share.

Anyways i'm just so happy that with a couple days to spare in the year LOL i got a job! Sure i won't get paid yet but I got a flipping job, it is what i wanted for christmas!!

It is a gamble being revenue share and all but i'm willing to risk it!

Best: gaining experience and learning new ways to write programs in the best way possible, even beyond working hours

Worst: the amount of ABAP code I saw these past two years gives me nightmares, and older programmers don't seem to want to improve and advance from the old ways of the language 😥

Best thing: I started to understand how compilers work under the hood (sort of), was even able to implement a few scanners already

Worst thing: I have absolutely no clue how to continue ._.

Best:
Huge update and refactoring on my private infrastructure (gigabit lan, ipv6, new vpn architecture, new dns, new mailserver and much more). And there is no more microsoft in my little kingdom :)

Also i stumbled over devrant ;)

Worst:
Still a lot of unfinished projects, more and more problems at work because of lack of concentration. Been diagnosed with adhd this year, so at least i know the source of my problems, but it still hurts to fail :(

Best wishes for 2017++ to the devrant community!

Best: Qiskit and devrant
Worst: Nothing had a great year

Talking to someone from devRant on messaging app!!

Learn:

Docker, kubernetes, ceph, s3, and aws in general. Not really dev per se, but still worthy technical goals.

Worst: I guess not having actual income for more than half a year (finding a job is so hard) not really the end of the world since having a job i made so little progress on the game and had tp sacrifice a lot of sleep due to getting up early and getting home late

Best: Progress on the VR game, it's coming along well and it could be my income for next year (I really really hope so) otherwise it'll be a good show piece for when i apply for jobs, if i make a demo i'll post stuff on here (just realise it will be VR only)

Worst dev experience: Started vim, could not escape, had to get a new computer... 😐

Just kidding, everything was good 😜

Okay so after a few days of thinking I think I'm sure about what I'm about to write :
Best : Discovering how to use streams while making a service that should extract a tar.gz, extract the tar.gz within it, filter the extracted files and correct some of them, then compress each folder as tar.gz and compress all the archives as .zip. The amazing thing for me is that with streams I could do all the operations in just two passes, maybe one if I had more time, saving disk writing time.
Worst : upgrading a bunch of legacy Access 97 apps and its VBA code to Access 2013

Best: I started a little game project with a coworker for our "8 hours a month" research/fun time.
Worst: I can't get used to be "just a soldier" on my actual team.

Best: i learned a lot this year, cant really highlight anything but i got better at networking stuff, im happy about that

Worst: using xamarin forms probably, it was a literal hellhole and midway through the project microsoft abandoned winphone so there was absolutely no reason to keep using that shit

This one is easy, being forced to use visual studio! In fact I made one or two rants about it.

To top it off using NuGet as a pm was also not a great experience to say the least.

Luckily I was not alone and my team agreed and we rewrote the entire legacy code in Java... A much much better experience!

So that was my worst experience.. My best experience was that I started my first big non-school related project and I am super excited!!

Interviews

I find it hard to be retrospective of the last year, work has been at times good but stressful, others tedious and frustrating. This year was an improvement over the last but everything good that I try to write about has some elements of frustration. My social life has also been somewhat stifled as I'm working at a company in a small town with very few people my age. I don't know how long I'll continue to be here.

The best experience of the year I guess is having my idea be viewed as a significant improvement over an existing piece of intellectual property, even if someone else is trying their damndest to take credit for it.

The worst is other people's ego's getting in the way. I've had people be rude, dismissive and belittling. Then when I argue my case if I am shown to be right I get a "well you learn something new every day" if I'm lucky.

Best: Hacktoberfest 2017 :p

Worst: Still in same job :(

Firefox Quantum not coupling with Selenium IDE addon

Worst: not getting paid for months in previous job

Best: new job, new company is freaking awesome.

Best/Worst dev experience 2017:

Well I started my DevRant-Stats site and got my RandomQuote bot up and running again (although the quotes aren't as good as before)

I also started a little company with my friend and made some sites for clients.

I reached #13 on Sololearn in Austria! Kinda proud of it.

I learned Lua and Ruby which are one my favorite languages now!

And as always I started some side projects that I've never finished...

Don't remember everything I experienced in 2017 but these are some I won't forget.

Best: ...😓...

Worst: having to deal with excel data import in C# in a server environment without drivers for working with excel files 🤐

Worst: Java EE + Spring

Best: ... still waiting for it. (Too late, I know)

Best Experience: When I finally got my own machine so I could do whatever the heck I wanted to it. Learned and applied more than ever.

Worst Experience: Being an idiot and getting kicked off the only dev team I have ever been a part of because I asked too many questions and did no actual effort...

Worst: Having Toolchain Problems while responsible colleague is on sick leave and a software release is tightly planned
Best: Fixing that fucking toolchain, delivering in time and getting commendation from SW Project Lead

Best: rediscovering auto hotkey. It's weird how much it pleases me. 😳

Worst: Oh so many. I've tried to overcome these with varying success rates but there's one that is still a big pain: job.

Best : working at school on pathfinding algorithms
Worst : meh, my full 6-months-long internship

Well, I've been learning to program and hopefully I can make my drea-eh... I have no idea what to make!

Best: getting a job in systems programming which was my dream since I wrote my first hello world about ten years ago.
Worst: recognizing that time isn't the restricting factor but energy, I'm often just too tired to work on side projects

Best: finding Laravel and how well works out with production deployment with GitLab

Worst: didnt implement this right from the beginning. Had to copy paste from the dev folder to production folder FOR 3 MONTHS when i wanted to update the website.

Best: discovering the pleasure of coding for fun.

Worst: not being able to code more.

Best thing: Getting into some pure functional programming

Worst thing: Being forced to work with VS2013

Upgraded the company operations system system from AIX to Red Hat EL with near zero issues and no business interruptions. Platform and OS all in one. Been trying to repeat that with. NET 4 years into it and only 30% done with nothing but problems until we implemented CI & CD.

Best: getting some awesome code buddies, making my first game for my college event

Worst: not able to work and even abandoning a game dev project I wanted to make for 2 years due to college stuff
But I hope i will start working on the game again next year🤞

Revolution of Communication/Chat/Data

Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, Snapchat, LinkedIN, ETC

WE BASICALLY ARE BRINGING SKYNET TO LIFE.
AI REV HAS BEGUN!!!

Yaayyyy, the day Humans can live peacefully, and Date the right person, is sooo close.

Best: Learn a lot of stuffs, managed to make reading as a habit (tho still limited to tech and startup yet), did an awesome intern n learned a lot from there plus got an invitation to work there, happened to pass exams (which some of them I was horrible at) and primarily found devRant! :D

Worst: got most of the load in a team bec ppl see I am more credible n can do stuff properly, has to stay another semester in this country (foreign student stuff)

Finished developing the complete clean build of the app by 4am....
And tomorrow, the day of the presentation,
ALL THE BUGS ARE BACK!
Doomed!
Was I dreamin last night ? 🤔

Good Experience -

1.)Became proficient in Web development!

2.)Wanted to learn it for a very long time but didn't know where to start, but this year got opportunities to work on some good projects!

3.)Also got to lead a awesome team of good developers in my college!

4.) Got to work on a awsome internship with a very nice employer :)

5.) Became a Devrant Supporter :D

Bad Experience -

1.) Had to face shit ass seniors who blamed me and my team all the time for their inefficiencies.

2.) Team had developed many good projects in android and web for the college,but the stupid seniors failed to implement them,it was a big mood!

3.) I had planned to learn ML and improve my competitive coding and also finish my game,but failed to do so :(.

Hopefully 2018 will be productive:)

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 🎆🎄🎅

Best: working on a cool xamarin project for a few months with a very cool client which made me a better dev;

Worst: working on a shitty legacy web - a clusterfuck of technologies, crappy workarounds and even shittier clients for the rest of the year;

Best: Completing the first year of my professional career doing what I like and learning from my team mates, which have been awesome. Wrote a couple of blog posts, they were my first, that helped me learn more and improve my communication.

Worst: On the last months of the year some work just got too repetitive which I think will lead me to some stagnation.

My biggest mistake was i'd ignore the whole documentation / flow how the new function should work on a existing module

So I had this Case tools lab during my 5th semester of college and they asked everyone to do a project. Me hoping that they will see the project and appreciate the work, did a good one and I spent day and night on it. Then came the finals. The fucking teacher who was asked to evaluate me didn't even open my project properly and just entered the marks just seeing the home page. It was that fucking day that I hated my college so much. Now I don't spend too much time on projects for my college. Worst Dev experience!

Worst experience was being kicked out of university. Best thing was the job I landed right after.