Another programming job: the first 5,183 decimals of pi, in wood sticks. Took me three months to do. Now I start e

Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for a rant with a capital R, this is gonna be a long one.

Our story begins well over a year ago while I was still in university and things such as "professionalism" and "doing your job" are suggestions and not something you do to not get fired. We had multiple courses with large group projects that semester and the amount of reliable people I knew that weren't behind a year and in different courses was getting dangerously low. There were three of us who are friends (the other two henceforth known as Ms Reliable and the Enabler) and these projects were for five people minimum. The Enabler knew a couple of people who we could include, so we trusted her and we let them onto the multiple projects we had.

Oh boy, what a mistake that was. They were friends, a guy and a girl. The girl was a good dev, not someone I'd want to interact with out of work but she was fine, and a literal angel compared to the guy. Holy shit this guy. This guy, henceforth referred to as Mr DDTW, is a motherfucking embarrassment to devs everywhere. Lazy. Arrogant. Standards so low they're six feet under. Just to show you the sheer depth of this man's lack of fucks given, he would later reveal that he picked his thesis topic "because it's easy and I don't want to work too hard". I haven't even gotten into the meat of the rant yet and this dude is already raising my blood pressure.

I'll be focusing on one project in particular, a flying vehicle simulator, as this was the one that I was the most involved in and also the one where shit hit the fan hardest. It was a relatively simple-in-concept development project, but the workload was far too much for one person, meaning that we had to apply some rudimentary project management and coordination skills that we had learned to keep the project on track. I quickly became the de-facto PM as I had the best grasp on the project and was doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

The first incident happened while developing a navigation feature. Another teammate had done the basics, all he had to do was use the already-defined interfaces to check where the best place to land would be, taking into account if we had enough power to do so. Mr DDTW's code:
-Wasn't actually an algorithm, just 90 lines of if statements sandwiched between the other teammate's code.
-The if statements were so long that I had to horizontal scroll to see the end, approx 200 characters long per line.
-Could've probably been 20 normal-length lines MAX if he knew what a fucking for loop was.
-Checked about a third of the tiles that it should have because, once again, it's a series of concatenated if statements instead of an actual goddamn algorithm.
-IT DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!

My response was along the lines of "what the fuck is this?". This dipshit is in his final year and I've seen people write better code in their second semester. The rest of the team, his friend included, agreed that this was bad code and that it should be redone properly. The plan was for Mr DDTW to move his code into a new function and then fix it in another branch. Then we could merge it back when it was done. Well, he kept on saying it was done but:
-It still wasn't an algorithm.
-It was still 90 lines.
-They were still 200 characters wide.
-It still only checked a third of the tiles.
-IT STILL DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!

He also had one more task, an infinite loop detection system. He watched while Ms Reliable did the fucking work.

We hit our first of two deadlines successfully. We still didn't have a decent landing function but everything else was nice and polished, and we got graded incredibly well. The other projects had been going alright although the same issue of him not doing shit applied. Ms Reliable and I, seeing the shitstorm that would come if this dude didn't get his act together, lodged a complaint with the professor as a precautionary measure. Little did I know how much that advanced warning would save my ass later on.

Second sprint begins and I'm voted in as the actual PM this time. We have four main tasks, so we assign one person to each and me as a generalist who would take care of the minor tasks as well as help out whoever needed it. This ended up being a lot of reworking and re-abstracting, a lot of helping and, for reasons that nobody ever could have predicted, one of the main tasks.

These main tasks were new features that would need to be integrated, most of which had at least some mutual dependencies. Part of this project involved running our code, which would connect to the professor's test server and solve a server-side navigation problem. The more of these we solved, the better the grade, so understandably we needed an MVP to see if our shit worked on the basic problems and then fix whatever was causing the more advanced ones to fail. We decided to set an internal deadline for this MVP. Guess who didn't reach it?

Hitting the character limit, expect part 2 SOON

Buckle up kids, this one gets saucy.

At work, we have a stress test machine that trests tensile, puncture and breaking strength for different materials used (wood construction). It had a controller software update that was supposed to be installed. I was called into the office because the folks there were unable to install it, they told me the executable just crashed, and wanted me to take a look as I am the most tech-savvy person there.

I go to the computer and open up the firmware download folder. I see a couple folders, some random VBScript file, and Installation.txt. I open the TXT, and find the first round of bullshit.

"Do not run the installer executable directly as it will not work. Run install.vbs instead."

Now, excuse me for a moment, but what kind of dick-cheese-sniffing cockmonger has end users run VBScript files to install something in 2018?! Shame I didn't think of opening it up and examining it for myself to find out what that piece of boiled dogshit did.

I suspend my cringe and run it, and lo and behold, it installs. I open the program and am faced with entering a license key. I'm given the key by the folks at the office, but quickly conclude no ways of entering it work. I reboot the program and there is an autofilled key I didn't notice previously. Whatever, I think, and hit OK.

The program starts fine, and I try with the login they had previously used. Now it doesn't work for some reason. I try it several times to no avail. Then I check the network inspector and notice that when I hit login, no network activity happens in the program, so I conclude the check must be local against some database.

I browse to the program installation directory for clues. Then I see a folder called "Databases".

"This can't be this easy", I think to myself, expecting to find some kind of JSON or something inside that I can crawl for clues. I open the folder and find something much worse. Oh, so much worse.

I find <SOFTWARE NAME>.accdb in the folder. At this point cold sweat is already running down my back at the sheer thought of using Microsoft Access for any program, but curiosity takes over and I open it anyway.

I find the database for the entire program inside. I also notice at this point that I have read/write access to the database, another thing that sent my alarm bells ringing like St. Pauls cathedral. Then I notice a table called "tUser" in the left panel.

Fearing the worst, I click over and find... And you knew it was coming...

Usernames and passwords in plain text.

Not only that, they're all in the format "admin - admin", "user - user", "tester - tester".

I suspend my will to die, login to the program and re-add the account they used previously. I leave the office and inform the peeps that the program works as intended again.

I wish I was making this shit up, but I really am not. What is the fucking point of having a login system at all when your users can just open the database with a program that nowadays comes bundled with every Windows install and easily read the logins? It's not even like the data structure is confusing like minified JSON or something, it's literally a spreadsheet in a program that a trained monkey could read.

God bless them and Satan condemn the developers of this fuckawful program.

Whatever the fuck Python's ternary operator syntax is supposed to be.

(Not dev, not rant, although it might become one later on)

So as some of you may know, I am colorblind. I always avoid working with colors because of it. Yesterday I decided to do something I've always wanted, painting. And no I don't mean painting on a canvas but miniatures and other 3D models.

I love catan, I love 3D printing and I thought let's print a catan set and paint it myself, without depending on family to ask for colors.
I've got this German paint tubes and used the wikipedia color descriptions to decide what to paint which color.

The following is the result, its a wheat tile (and in the background a wood tile).
Feel free to give tips and suggestions. If I picked a wrong color please tell me so I can update my tactics.

Finally took this step. Yay

Good morning, mornin wood.
Good morning, chirping birds outside the window.
Good morning, handsome guy in the mirror.
Good morning, beautiful machine of mine.
Now where were we last night.
Hmpph
😒😒😒 morning segfault

Server died again today because a fellow housemate decided to plug a 1200W wood saw into the same power network.

I don't know how stupid one has to be to think that is a good idea.

!rant

I got hired!!

It's been a long month of jobhunting, interviews, and paperwork, but I finally got a job. Real world dev life here I come.

Today I got kicked out of a sports store in a city that I'm not from on Black Friday for *allegedly* walking onto the putting green and teeing off a little foamy practice ball with a 3 wood.

There were a lot of accusations(which was pretty ironic considering I *may* have).

My main defense is that I honestly didn't think I was talented enough for it to end up in hunting & fishing on the other side of the store.
On the plus side I may have found a new hobby outside of developing

Somebody put milk in the tea kettle.

To be entirely fair, I'm sure nobody from here has ever seen a kettle, let alone used one.

My non-programming project: the first 10.000 decimals of pi, in small wood sticks. 9.974 to go ...

I broke the toilet seat on day 2 at the office and have been watching it get worse and worse until it silently got replaced two weeks later.

Oops.

A glass of cognac, a blotter of LSD, go to the spa for a massage, turn on some Sibelius, Mahler or Tchaikovsky, and play Factorio all night.

Sometimes I also just work on my forever unfinished SciFi novel.

Or I install FL studio to realize 30 minutes later that I'm about as musically gifted as a pile of bricks.

Recently I was fed up with work and made a nice new bed for my daughter out of cherry & oak wood. Carpentry is a nice distraction from coding.

One of our dev teams has a tradition: after each post-sprint review one of the devs tells a wood joke. The lamer, the better.

So far the winner is:

Q: What did Batman say to Robin before Robin got in the car?
A: Robin, get in the car

It's so dumb it's actually somehow even funny :)

My little brother started learning coding AND design ar 12 years old and my only influence on this was telling him about it like two times.
Although he is, also, building a gun of wood so I really don't know what path he's taking there.

I was about 17 years old had tried wood & metal craftsmanship but never liked it, so I spoke with a counsellor and mentioned I like computers as I play a lot of games.

That counsellor laughed at me ( a shut in that rarely says anything ) and told me I'm too stupid..

Since then, I have scored almost pure top grades without any particular job goal.
But eventually met a good friend who wanted to be a Web developer, so I simply followed the same path and kept on reaping top grades lol.. :)

As Ana says in overwatch, "Never stop fighting for what you believe in."

Here's my current setup. Needs a bit of improvement still.

A few years back I thought getting two big touchscreens would be amazing to use for making music. I rarely touch them. They get dusty all the time. They are too reflective. The border around them is way too thick. They are too big to be useful in this configuration. I'll be replacing them with normal screens and probably go for a vertical arrangement instead.

As you can see, there's a fair bit of stuff on my desk. There's a USB sound interface that could be rack mounted but I've been too lazy to buy or make anything to house it. I have a pair of headphones, a wireless headset and a Rift hanging off of the microphone stand. I rarely use the microphone and guitar at the moment (considered trying some voice acting, not particularly good at guitar!)

The desk was originally 2 desks from an Internet cafe that was being refurbished. I cut the ends off them and joined them together to make a desk to fit the space I had and stuck some metal legs onto it (used to have a big ugly brown metal frame). Oh and made some holes to add cable grommets and it has an IKEA cable tray underneath.

There's also a slide out music keyboard underneath (made from some bits of wood and a drawer runner, it's quite clunky and I'm tempted to use some rack rails instead).

The drawers were to store stuff from my desk in but I just replaced that stuff with other stuff...

Six hours of meetings in one day.

Oh boy.

I've been partially on-loan to another team that's relatively new at the company for a couple of weeks now, mostly to help them get some testing sorted out, and had scheduled a call with their lead the other day. The call basically started like this:

Lead: Hi
sudo-woodo: Hey
Lead: Okay, so let's talk about <subject>, but I guess you've been told the news
sudo-woodo: What news
Lead: I'm putting in my notice

I love listening to seniors because they always drop some wisdom, but this was some serious wisdom. Guy sounded exhausted at everything, talking mad shit about the company and certain people and I'm just here like 🍿. Seems understandable, a lot of butting heads with the higher-ups and not being able to do his job properly.

Unfortunately we all kinda needed him to do his job because his job involved juggling fifteen different things that the project (and like 90% of my backlog to be honest) depends on.

shit's fucked 🙃

Just realized that this app and community is the perfect example of a rule-less functional online community, it has everything that people would mostly believe drama occurs but no drama
Anonymity, relaxed rules, huge base, long reaching form of social media, yet it's possibly the most Las online community I've ever seen *knock on wood*

I really like retro games and there is this thing called retropie which turns your raspberry pi into an arcade machine. Since I have way too much time, I decided to built an arcade machine case out of wood with an old TV and analog sticks from Amazon. So yeah, I wired everything together and wanted to share it with you guys. I'm still searching for stickers to put on the top and on the joystick panel, but for now I really like the result. Tell me what you think!

Life Before the Computer

An application was for employment
A program was a TV show
A cursor used profanity
A keyboard was a piano!

Memory was something that you lost with age
A CD was a bank account
And if you had a 3-inch floppy
You hoped nobody found out!

Compress was something you did to garbage
Not something you did to a file
And if you unzipped anything in public
You'd be in jail for awhile!

Log on was adding wood to a fire
Hard drive was a long trip on the road
A mouse pad was where a mouse lived
And a backup happened to your commode!

Cut - you did with a pocket knife
Paste you did with glue
A web was a spider's home
And a virus was the flu!

I guess I'll stick to my pad and paper
And the memory in my head
I hear nobody's been killed in a computer crash
But when it happens they wish they were dead!

After a nightmare weekend where moving my 80 year old desk caused the wood to completely split and almost broke my computer and screens in the process..... I felt physically sick.....

Somehow I became a carpenter for the day and rebuilt and resized my desk to make it better then ever.....

Couldn't be happier with the final result tbh!

So I just received this second DSP5005 DC-DC programmable power supply. Time to make an enclosure for the thing!! 3 power supplies totaling at around 1kW, and 2 variables connected to the 50V 10A one, through external banana wires (I want all of this to be modular). No biggie, take measurements for the AC-DC supplies, add in the variables on the front, and cut it out.

So, I went and did just that. Now my 500W (50V 10A) supply is a bit larger than the others, and it's got a fan. So I figured, well then probably my 24V 8.3A (200W) and 12V 15A (180W) supplies could use some cooling as well. But how am I going to achieve passive cooling without a spacing between the supplies?! So I thought of some spacer design. It had to be out of wood, and I had some 4mm MDF and some IKEA parts around. So, 4mm MDF for the plate and 8mm wood spacers from IKEA for the spacing. And some super glue to hold it all together.

Weighing my power supplies against a 1l bottle of milk, it seems like my power supplies are ~500g. Great, so the top spacer would take 500g and the bottom one 1kg + the weight of the top spacer.

I ended up building one plate with 6 spacers in it yesterday, until I got too tired. Then I placed my entire weight against it, 20kg at least. It didn't budge. Pretty good for something that's only designed to withstand a 1kg load!!

So, I made something good with only a 10x18cm piece of MDF, some garbage from IKEA, and most importantly a bit of a brain. Something that can handle 20x its designed load no problem. Manufacturers, is it really right to produce shit when I can beat your manufacturing processes big time without an assembly line?!

Customer call.

Customer: what's the status of the software?
Me: it's a bit of wood work.
Customer: wood work?!
Me: yes, I think it would work.
Customer: ...
Me: ...

So, now that companies are used to "WFH", maybe we can agree upon a better office for tech companies?

I do actually think the more "ideal" tech company office wouldn't have to be expensive.

It can be smaller. Any tech company worth it's salt should have discovered in the last few months that it's not just devs who can work from home. Sales, support, management — you really don't need to fight your way through highway traffic or cram yourself into a sweaty subway every day.

There's value in having an office. Not everyone can fit a good workspace in their apartment.

But we could at least center it around:

1. A bunch of small, completely soundproof isolation booths, for those who need a focus space, and can't find a silent spot at home.

2. A social lounge space, a communal living room with couches, a bar, creative relaxing stuff, whiteboards, etc. WFH can become depressing even for the most antisocial employees, chilling on a couch with some coworkers to brainstorm ideas or chat about random tech is valuable for building good relationships with your team.

The "open plan office" with rows of desks and monitors, no matter how luxuriously decorated with vertical gardens and hipster desks from reclaimed wood, can go die a fiery painful death.

I either want to work, or socialize.

Open plan offices (and it's even more dystopian suicide-inducing cousin, the cubicle) are like being unable to choose between fucking and a blowjob, so you end up humping a navel.

Oh, and conference rooms, go fuck yourself as well. I want to be able to minimize your ugly face if you plan to talk about company financial reports for 2 hours.

SuperCell is hiring.. Here is their job description:

Description

We need a new Builder. Are you an independent and passionate maker? Do you love spending 24 hours a day turning wood and gold into walls and defensive buildings? Do you answer the call to build even if that call comes at 4:00 a.m. and you haven’t had a day off in literally five years? If the answer to these questions is “Yes! Yes! A million times yes!” then we have a hammer with your name on it!

The Role

The focus of the Builder is to, uh, build.

You will be responsible for taking instructions from the player and building whenever and wherever they see fit. They say build and you say...well, you don’t say anything, you just build.

The world of Clash of Clans can get intense. Our Builder is expected to build quickly and expertly at all times, even while under great amounts of stress and/or attacks from Barbarians, Archers, Goblins, Giants, Wall Breakers, Wizards, and P.E.K.K.A.s.

Equally as important as building is rebuilding. All of the things you build will inevitably be destroyed, if not immediately, then soon after you just finished building or rebuilding everything. You can’t let it get you down. You must maintain your resolve and rebuild. Fast!

Responsibilities

Must be willing to relocate to the World of Clash
Must build and maintain a wide-range of buildings, statues, and war machines.
Must be on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year
Must have up-to-date Level 9 Tesla Tower maintenance certification 
Must have proficiency with building materials both common (wood, stone, etc.) and uncommon (lightning, lava, etc.)

Requirements

Must provide own leather helmet
Must possess a passion for building
Must be comfortable working hands-on with molten lava.
Must adhere to strict dress code (orange sleeveless shirt, brown canvas pants, and boots).
Must speak fluent Barbarian

How to Apply

Send us your qualifications via e-mail to bethebuilder@supercell.com or write out your qualifications and send them to us via Baby Dragon. Either format is accepted. 

"When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through." - Steve Jobs

While this wasn't technically a real client, it's still one of the most insane requests I've ever had.

I chose to specialize in software engineering for the last year and a half of my degree, which meant a lot of subjects were based around teamwork, proper engineering practises, accessibility, agile methods, basically a lot of stuff to get us ready to work in a proper corporate dev environment. One of our subjects was all about project management, and the semester-long coursework project (that was in lieu of a final exam) was to develop a real project for a real client. And, very very smartly, the professors set up a meeting with the clients so that the clients could tell us what they wanted with sixty-odd students providing enough questions. They basically wanted a management service for their day-center along with an app for the people there. One of the optional requirements was a text chat. Personally not something I'm super interested in doing but whatever, it's a group project, I'll do my part.

The actual development of the project was an absolute nightmare, but that's a story for another day. All I'll say is that seven juniors with zero experience in the framework we chose does not make a balanced dev team.

Anyway, like three months into the four-month project we've got a somewhat functional program, we just need to get the server side part running and are working our asses off (some more than others) when the client comes in and says that 'hey, nice app, nobody else has added the chat yet, but could you do voice recognition okay thanks?'.

Fucking.
Voice.
Recognition.

This was a fucking basic-ass management app with the most complicated task being 'make it look pretty' and 'hook up a DB to an API' and they want us to add voice recognition after sitting on their ass for three months??? The entire team collectively flipped its shit the second they were out of earshot. The client would not take no for an answer, the professor simply told us that they asked for it and it was up to us whether we delivered or not. Someone working on the frontend had the genius idea of 'just get them to use google voice recognition' so we added the how-to in the manual and ticked the requirement box.

What amazes me about all that is how the client probably had no idea that their new last-minute request was even a problem for us, let alone it being in a completely different ballpark in terms of implementing from scratch.

Yesterday I experienced a developer related situation in a completely different scenario. Let me explain:

A friend asked me if he can borrow my angle-grinder. As I was curious, I asked what he needs it for. As he is not that experienced in woodworking he wanted to cut small piece of wood with it. Of course I told him, that this tool is a complete overkill and recommend him to use a small saw.

Now what makes this programmingrelated:

I believe that often unexperienced programmers tend to use to heavy tools for small tasks. His lack of experience let him choose the most powerful tool, but made him blind for analysis of the actual problem.

A box with 20 blotters of LSD, a bottle of Tawny Port, some rock climber's hand strength training clay which is great against RSI, a very undomesticated purring feline, some leatherworking tools (making a new folding case for my phone), 2 sesame bagels with cream cheese, a piece of cherry wood, two routers (one woodworking, one internet), one Ducky Horizon and one ErgoDox keyboard, two boxes of baby wipes and a bottle of formula, an expired ticket to a corona-cancelled concert, my sleeping newborn daughter wrapped in a black hoodie, a bottle of cognac, 3x 1440p displays, a chunk of chocolate, one freshly brewed cortado, a bottle of dimethylsulfoxide, 3 laptops, a TV remote, a glass of water, and one bolt which was left over from an IKEA box but I'm unsure which furniture item it belongs to.

It came to me, a brilliant idea, a simple solution to an everyday problem and easy route to market. Great, starts looking for domains and writes down idea in full in case i forget. Later that day, picks up 12 year old son from school, tells him my great idea. He told me how shit it was and why straight away.

Well here's my new setup.

My desk wasn't big enough width wise, so instead of buying another one, I just cut some wood to be longer. Gotta improvise 🤷🏻‍♂️🤷🏻‍♂️

Just got the monitor today. Next item is a mechanical keyboard.

I'll post one with the lights off so the RGB LEDs are a bit more visible.

Most hobbies need funding to get started and to continue. Wood to carve, cables and electronics to solder. Programmers need only their time (as long as they have a computer). It is the most cheap thing to pick up and learn.

English is weird.
Take the double oo for example.
There are so many different pronunciations for it and there seems to be no rules whatsoever.

mood
wood
blood
door

All different

So building a game engine and everything's internal name is wood/axe/lumberjack themed...

Started work on the scripting language and gave it the code name faggot script... Took me 48 hours to realise I should probably change that...

Team meetings on the toilet

Adult site..

you will have contract length free premium membership
and contract length wood.

Friends of mine have a new flat.

It's a nice flat. Cheap. Noone wanted it. 100 square meters.

Reason noone wanted it...

Previous owners were bastards from hell.

Really. Every motherfucking room needed to be completely renovated by the owner.

Door frames were made of wood, nice and old - at least the part that was left of them. Splinters, scratch marks, partially broken out of the wall.

2 windows needed to be fully replaced. Rest of the windows needed to be bleached, PET abrasive cleaning solution and the frames needed repair with resin as they drilled into the frames. Then treatment with sealant of course.

Yes. There was no other solution. After bleaching you recognized the windows were white. Before... Let's not talk about it.

The previous owners even managed to destroy the bathtub.

The kitchen tiles... Fat cleaner. Bleaching. Abrasion. Polishing.

Soooo.

Day of moving.

The apartment is in the 6th floor / level.

Cran / lift was ordered.

16 people wanted to come.

7 people came.

2 including myself couldn't lift heavy stuff nor walk the stairs due to health issues.

Crane broke after first try.

Today. I want to murder the previous owners. After torture and crucification.

I'm feeling levels of pain I couldn't Imagine before.

Only hate and beer let's me keep my shit together.

I REALLY didn't think after renovating and cleaning the flat for my friends in the last several weeks that it could get worse.

Boy. I was wrong.

Thanks for letting me vent here. I really feel devastated currently -.-

And I need to help them tomorrow, too.

Bikini Atoll, tchernobyl and every other atom bomb desaster Zone combined looks better than the chaos in their flat.

Everyone who could lift shoved everything inside.

I solo carried everything that wasn't too large in the room and then, as every room looked like desaster, completely managed the kitchen (cleaning, unpacking, trash, placing everything where it belongs and so on) :( :(

I appreciate Minecraft and Minecraft mods. Teaching kids to eat tasty animals, and make glue from blood. There is a mod the literally makes glue by putting horses in a smelter. You can even heal the horse and keep it alive indefinitely. In constant agony. lol

Although, the idea that you can sustainably produce energy from wood is a bit suspect. Thankfully mods jumped in with nuclear reactors for real power generation.

Leslie is a crazy beatch, no wood can't resist her.

Matryoshkas are better companions than Ducks, and here's why:

-Made with wood. The material of Men! No industrialized rubber to spread Capitalist propaganda

-Multi-layer. Explain your code with different levels of complexity. Babushka Matryoshka is keen on C!

-Never feel alone. Maybe you want some intimate one on one, maybe you want a whole party of helpers, all thanks to pocket dimensions (included with the Matryoshkas).

So what's your excuse for not having a Matryoshka Comrade cyka!

Finished my internship today, turns out I won't be getting hired because upper management is cutting back due to COVID.

Fuck fuck fuckity fuck, compared to the horror stories I've read here, it was beautiful. The work experience was super worth it though, despite the intern pay. Time to start looking for a real job I guess.

! Rant
Today's project...
Target for airsoft.
The prototype bullseye didn't survive the trials but it works. Just need to upgrade to wood.

Hey! First post on rant by saying merry Xmass!
This is my Christmas tree made from JavaScript ! I can change the height of the foliage and the wood part follow !
For those like me who live in a country where you only have the cold but not the snow 😅❄️

For the Nth time in a row now, the team has met...

...with no agenda...
...with no note-taking...
...with no off-topic course correction...

...and has gone almost an hour over time.

Please stop doing this oh my god, we're wasting time and nobody has a fucking source when two months later somebody asks when/why this was decided and our only answer is "uh we agreed at some point" and we do this all over again.

Day 2 of having to use linux at work and I almost nuked the /etc folder.

what a good start

3 store types I require supervision in: shoe store, technology store, and hardware store...

Yay! Finally got my first job in IT.

They call it just "IT admin/sysadmin", but it's... eh..
What I do is make sure the servers work (sysadmin part) and make desktop/mobile apps. So far, the company seems to be quite nice, there are already 4 devs who are friendly. *knocks on wood*

Will see how it goes, and I'd like to thank you for sharing your stories. Learned quite a lot from them!

That one time a Brazilian got into ny GitHub account.

Don't reuse passwords kids!

Started to clean up my projects and delete all my deprecated things and starting to shift focus to one - three projects at max...

Buying my first car (2005 VW golf 2L diesel)

Got a new job interview that they seem eager to meet me about...

Getting money under my belt and closer to buying a house....

Everythings coming up Alex :-D

(Knock on wood)

Of course I can code with vi. I can also cook by burning wood. It might taste better, but it doesn't cook faster.

Welcome to this week's episode of "sudo-woodo tries to get a single Python script merged", starring...

•The software architect so senior they were working here while I was still in pre-school. Wasn't added as a reviewer and was completely absent on this project for two months but came in on this PR with a few questions, including questioning design decisions they agreed on the last time they saw the project.
•The QA lead with ten years of experience... in Java. Has never even touched Python and asked to review, only for every issue raised but one stemming from not knowing the language.
•The CI guy. A script guru who will find a problem with literally anything. Honestly the most helpful person of the bunch.
•My coworker. Hasn't said anything yet.

please send help

I worked on a game jam last year, and for the first time I managed to finish a full software project that wasn't for a job or university. It was really fun to work on, and seeing my vision come to life, even if compromises had to be made, as well as applying all the programming and project management knowledge I'd picked up until then was an experience unlike anything I'd had before.

The community aspect was great too, everybody shared and discussed each other's games and were super friendly and encouraging.

Literally painful dev learning experience: Do your damn stretches and invest in a good chair.

Spent a couple of months of WFH working eight hours a day in an awful chair and started getting back pain out of the blue. Part of my first paycheck after that went into a decent office chair, in hindsight I should've spent more on it but goddamn what a relief it was not having to spend an entire day in the tiny, back-breaking piece of shit my landlord calls a desk chair.

I own my grandfather's Victorinox Swiss Army Knife, probably from the eighties. I absolutely love it — it's just like the standard Unix toolkit. Minimalist, multi-purpose, efficient. This is what I have in my knife:
1. Two blades. I call them master (yes) and slave
2. Corkscrew. I call it "ed".
3. Hole puncher, but not just any hole puncher. Mine has an angular sharp edge to carve holes instead of just punching them. Super efficient for wood, plastic and thick fabric. It also has a hole so it can be used as a needle. I call it "vi".
4. Bottle opener which is also a screwdriver. I call it "more".
5. Can opener. This is my favorite one.

It can help you open just about anything. Any type of cans, closed pistachio nuts, oysters, your barely legal girlfriend's virginity — anything. When I eat pistachios, I'm holding my Victorinox in my hand opening tough ones with the speed of rm -rf ripping through your files. Oh, and it's also another screwdriver. I call it "cat".

But let's take a look at modern Victorinox. Maybe it's better? No, not at all. It's totally metrosexual featuring nail files, nail clippers, nail scissors and a flash drive (not even a good one).

Newer doesn't always mean cooler.

(I have the exact same one, photo from the internet because I'm too lazy)

Hey guys, I have a serious question for you: How do you define science?

And yes this is going to be a long Rant. This topic really pisses me off.

A bit of context first. I come from a "humanities" background. I study history and dude, I love it. The problem is that even though we fucking pull our brains out studying historical phenomena with a fucking ton of conceptual tools, our work is mostly seen as literature to entertain the elderly during their lonely evenings. But that's not really the point of this rant.

My fucking problem is that while we try to do some serious work; actual work that could help society for real, it all goes into that magical fucking kingdom called "humanities". HOW THE FUCK DO THEY DARE TO CALL SOMETHING "HUMANITIES". IT'S A FUCKING HISTORICAL TERM THAT MEANS "TO FULFILL MEN IN ALL IT'S ASPECTS", AND NOW THEY'VE REPURPOSED IT, MAKING IT CONTAIN ANY STUDY THAT ISN'T "EMPIRICAL", "OBJECTIVE", ADD ANY FUCKING SCIENTIFIC DELUSIONARY TERM YOU CAN THINK OF.

And don't get me started on "objectivity". Oh boy, your fucking objectivity is hollow as a kid's balloon. There is no such thing as a objective study, even when it applies your "rational" "godly" scientific method. Some guys follow that shit as if it was a fucking religion. I do understand it's useful and all that, but in the end it's just a tool, you can't fucking define "science" by it's tools.

"""Q: What is carpintery?
A: Well, it's hammers, nails and wood. Yep. Hammers, nails and wood."""

THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD WAS FUCKING INVENTED DURING THE XVIII CENTURY, WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK WAS GALLILEI BEFORE THAT? "HUMANITIES"?

Why do I say objectivity isn't posible? Well, guess what? YOU ARE FUCKING HUMAN. Every thing you know is full of preconceptions and fucking cultural subjectivities invented to understand the world. And it's ok, becouse if you understand your own subjectivity, at least you can see yourself in a critical sense, and at least "tend" to objectivity, in the same way functions tend to infinity.

And here comes the best part: people studying "cs" in my university pass most of the time studying a ton of shit that isn't really science, but is taken as scientific becouse it is related to "science". These guys spend entire semesters just learning programming fundational stuff that in my opinion isn't really science, it's just subjective conceptual constructs built to make the coding process better. They only have TWO fucking classes on discrete mathematics and another 3 or 4 in actual scientific fields related to computing. THESE GUYS AREN'T FUCKING BEING TAUGHT TO BE COMPUTER SCIENTISTS; THEY ARE TEACHING THEM TO BE PROGRAMMERS. THERE'S A HUGE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CS AND PROGRAMMING AND THAT IS THE WORD SCIENCE. And yes, I'm being drastic on the definition of science on purpose becouse guess fucking what? I'M PISSED OFF.

"Hey, what are you doing?"
"Just doing science with scrum and agile development."

I understand most of you guys would think of science as "the application of the scientific method", "Knowledge by experimentation and peer-review", "anything techy". Guys, science is a lot broather than that. I define it as "the search for truth", mainly becouse that's what we are all doing, and what humans have been doing to gain knowledge through the ages. It doesn't matter what field of truth you are seeking as long as you do it seriously and with fundaments. I don't fucking care if you can't be objective: that's impossible. Just acknowledge it and continue investigating accordingly.

I believe during the last centuries the concept of science has been deformed by the popular rise of both natural and applied sciences. And I love the fact that these science fields have been growing so much all this time, but for fucks sake don't leave every other science (science as I define it) behind. Governments and corporations make huge mistakes becouse they don't treat history, politics and other sciences seriously. Yes, I called history a "science", fuck you.

And yes, by my definition programming is not a science. I don't know what most of you think programming is, but for me it's a discipline that builds stuff, similar to carpintery or blacksmithing. Now if you are pushing the limits, seeking ways to make computing go further, then that's science. The guys that are figuring out AI are scientists, the guys that are using it to detect hotdogs aren't - unless they are the same person- deal with it. I guess a lot of you guys are with me on this point.

In the end, we are all artisans building abstract tools by giving orders to a machine.

I still have some characters left, so I want to thank the community as a whole for letting me vent my inner rage. I don't have much ways to express myself on these matters, so for me DevRant is a bless.

Whenever Facebook decides to do one of its fancy animations about all the things you've posted pictures of in the past month etc. I'm sure they expected people to be posting pictures of parties, holidays etc.

I only post either pictures of my pets or something I'm working on (running cables in walls, cutting up bits of wood, decorating etc.) So it looks utterly ridiculous when one of those animations plays.

Fun stuff from the few most recent pages in Dwarf Fortress bug tracker:

Human civilization's soldier is an Alligator Recruit.

Dead suspects confess to crimes

Crash due to zero-size weasel

Pets and other animals from retired fortresses appear as selectable 'workers' in request screen, die of old age on arrival

Some animal people have extra fingers

People dying twice?
Most confusingly, one necromancer shows as having died from old age twice, despite this not being possible.

My Nature Hating Adventurer Who Lacks Altruism And Is Very Cruel Isn't Happy After Butchering Animals

bat man males don't have geldables

Reanimated severed werebeast necromancer hand has a full body

Dwarf likes "cacao wood wood"

Dwarves turn hostile againt the player and defend their prison from raid sent to free them

Visitors giving birth during visit leave their baby behind

a water buffalo got stuck inside a rough tetrahedrite wall

Animals which retract into body parts forget to come out

Herbalist stuck on stepladder, starving to death.

Artifact has an image of nothing

Cave Dragons are sometimes intelligent, and sometimes join human civilizations

A goblin knocked over a workshop and now my dwarves are killing each other

Ambusher elves are being spotted, but the giant monsters they're riding on aren't.

runs with food from table to table. Can't eat

Intelligent Undead Sent on Mission Return as Ghosts

Horrified merchants immediately destroy their wagons, pack their goods and leave the depot

Dwarf king abdictates to become commoner necromancer apprentice

Internal body parts with certain tags can still wear clothing & armor, without being otherwise accessible

Necromancer marries zombie

Single dad dwarf with buggy dead wife leaves kid behind when he takes over holding

Large quantities of adamantine coins causes trade depot to burst into flame

How ignorant we all are about the world. It's not necessarily a bad thing, just a fact. After a four year degree I've learnt so much, how a computer works from the physical phenomena on the hardware level to the inner workings of an OS to the highest level abstractions of modern web development, a wide array of programming languages covering several different paradigms, mathematics from calculus to statistics to algebra, how to work with databases, how to administrate a server, how to build a website, and much more.

And that's just in a degree. I have knowledge in one domain and I wouldn't even call myself an expert in it. Medicine, physics, biology, the hundreds of branches of engineering from civil to nautical to aerospace to automobile, to geology to meteorology to astronomy, to the practical application of this knowledge in hundreds of trades. There's so much more to know in so much depth and only recently have I realized how little we all know on an individual level.

Finding this out has been a mixed bag, on the one hand it's made me value what I know and what others can teach me a hell of a lot more, on the other, knowing that people haven't realized this and adamantly discuss and impose from a position of ignorance isn't very nice.

tl;dr I know that I know nothing

"Turning away bad clients can leave you feeling oddly guilty. They’re sort of like alcoholic or meth head cousins who force you, by their own bad behavior into denying them things you wouldn’t deny other people. You’re left feeling not quite yourself." - Carolyn Wood

Every task is for fucking yesterday

Desk build in progress, love the reclaimed wood look so thought I'd make my own!

Managers at my jobs for the most part leave me be. Though I often have no clue whether I'm doing OK. I guess no news is good news right?

My worst experience isn't that bad. At one place, I was the only tester working on things coming from 20-30 devs. After about a year+, the company finally hired more testers, but it was still only 3 of us.

We were in the final stages of releasing a build to prod. It was going smoothly, or so we thought. At the last minute, I found a buried bug that was a showstopper.

A lot of hatred on me that day, that once it was fixed, and the release was finally deployed, I just shut off my laptop and left. I took all the blame because I was the one who found it rather than blaming the team as a whole for not finding it earlier. Oh well. Stuff happens.

Let's knock on wood that I don't run into worse higher up stories.

The more I use LinkedIn the more I hate it. I know I shouldn't be a nosy fuck but sometimes I've got nothing better to do for a couple of minutes on my work OS and the tab's right there. Every time I open it up it reminds me of why I'm not on Facebook. My coworkers are probably the most benign people to follow, all they do is repost company videos and blogposts. Basically advertizing, whatever.

It's the other people who get to me, the ones who are advertizing themselves. The soapboxing, the 'look at all the cool shit im doing', the reposting shit from people who I have no clue about. It's literally a window into just the good parts of peoples lives, like any other shitty social media site, but put through the filter of corporate PR bullshit. At least you can be yourself somewhat anywhere else, everything on LinkedIn needs to conform to what's acceptable to the sterile corporate environment, which amounts to showing off your certs or marketable products and the most surface-level 'progressive' social politics.

Fuck LinkedIn and fuck my curious ass for opening it like a dumbass kid who doesn't understand why you shouldn't touch a hot stove.

I have had it with this wack-ass code, with its spaghetti-looking call tree, nonsensical variable naming, comments a screen-height long and as clear as mud mixed with diarrhea, conditions incomprehensible enough to make kafka depressed, and condtions nested deeper than a goddamn ant colony.

In fact, it has more levels of indentation than one of those stupid iceberg memes - the top is pretty and barely afloat while the rest of it is a fat mess all the way down that only serves to sink your motherfucking hopes and dreams.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Holy shit, my first freelance project will be field-tested for the first time tomorrow!

After a few more rounds of fixing bugs, some serious improvements, and some new features additions, I can actually say that I'm proud of the code I've written! It's not perfect, but I definitely like the way it works - AND IT ACTUALLY WORKS!

Knock on wood, hopefully it won't shit the bed tomorrow.

Is it normal for productivity to wildly fluctuate from one week, or even one day, to the next? There are days where I hardly get a couple of hours of real work in and others where it's eight hours straight, and I find it hard to "justify" to myself why the former happens if I'm capable of the latter.

Do you suffer from low motivation ? For three easy installments of $79.95 plus shipping & handling , the secrets of overcoming low motivation can be yours . Act now , don’t delay !

Operators are standing by & the first caller will receive a free set of dollar general steak knives in a faux wood gift box , excellent for regifting for that team party or potluck where if you’re lucky , you might get tofu .

Shitty meme I made when talking to a friend about how much I hate dealing with UX and people problems:

It's so nice when kindness is retributed...
When on a flash shopping for wood, to fix my chair. Found out that the shop was way cheaper than a big chain I went a few days ago... Like up to 2/3 and 3/4 cheaper... Well, spent 1-hour shopping in such a small shop.
Meanwhile, started talking, telling what I'm doing with the wood and the tools... and eventually asked if she had any leftovers because I would use them.
A little more shopping, a little more talk and she asked, what will you do with the leftovers??
I've started talking about my new hobby, then the why I started this hobby (burn out), and that I'm making machines and tools with the stuff I'm buying...
Left with a big box full of leftovers, even a catalog with fine wood, all the same size...
It's nice when people reward kindness with kindness.
Also, gained a new costumer, never shopping anywhere else again if they have it.

Why would companies ever hire a manager from a non-tech background, at least for managing engineers? After reading @IAmNotARobot's latest rant I just have to ask because it makes absolutely no sense to me. Surely non-tech people should be reserved for managing non-tech roles like sales, HR, and maaaaybe team leads, right? How can you manage someone if you don't understand anything of what they do?

Woodworking.
Making furniture or flooring.
Making music instruments with wood. Wood is life. I’ll probably switch to wood next decade so I don’t have to debug stupid bugs but kill them while renovating furniture.

I've just bought a new table, I think that's the best thing anyone without a proper table can do.

25 € and solid wood, I hope it lasts forever.

Carving wood is more interesting than engaging in meaningless conversations with selfish women and drinking wine.

Fuck Google! I'm trying to write a fucking parential app that I can install on my little sisters phone, because I won't download something that is meant to monitor activity on a child's phone when I am capable of writing one. Problem is, I test it on my phone which has Android 10, because I am not keen on testing with a slowpoke out of wood brick that the target phone is. Android 10 does not let you do a single shit that is needed for a parential software. You try to turn on airplane mode to prevent messages from arriving and such? Well.... nope, you can't. Okay... airplane mode is too drastic. Let's try turning off WiFi and Data. Fuck me, you can't do that either. I gave the app fucking system permissions and It laughs in my face when I try to access some simple shit like... WiFi state. Miserable. I wonder if it will let me mute the fucking volume on the phone. I guess It won't, because "You shouldn't set these things on a user's phone.". Well, fuck that. That's exactly what I need. That old brick does not have built in parental settings. Jesus.

Followup to my wk200 rant.

I'm like 90% sure I wasn't muted when I flushed last meeting

That moment when you get your first job after getting your degree and one of your co-workers with about 5 years of experience asks you what is a static class because he never used one...

I mean come on... You have 5 years of xp and never used a static before? x)

This project is going places...

Docker broke, swarm was a bloddy house of cards, from the first days of swarm, consul was somewhat bent around that crap
No docs, no one has a clue, no support and got somewhat backstabbed

Well... Maybe i should do something with wood or orchids ...

Notepad++

don't @ me

Interview question : How far can you walk into the wood?
#no cheating # no googling

nice

In other news, I am upset that there is no way to make my avatar look like a tree.

Is it just me or have the spammers come out of the wood works today?

Some times I like to think what would I do with my life if suddenly all electronics stopped working...

It's scary as shit, but I think I would survive. I have some other skills (wood working and construction).

Would you?

First or second week of my first job (internship) and my manager mentions that upper management has decided that a couple of engineers are being reassigned to the new technical writing team, myself included, effective tomorrow with no prior warning, before dragging us into a tech-writing standup.

A couple of hours later my manager apologizes to me for forgetting to tell me about this and asked how I felt about this. I basically answered "not well, this isn't what I signed up for", and credit to him, he pulled enough strings to get me out of that team and back to my actual job. In hindsight I suspect that it was more due to the fact that this internship was a three-way contract with the university and that if I complained they might get their intern supply cut off.

Salesforce is like a great bridge with awesome design... But made of wood and aluminum, it tends to fail and doesn't present any good improve... Fuck you Salesforce and your fucking communities profiles and permissions!!!

!rant

Gonna make like Robotnik because I just got a prrrrrrrrromotion!!!!

Ok so first off i cant get my damn mic working, despite every setting change i can find and every driver update i can do and every damn mic i've used. Then i try updating windows ten because maybe thats the problem, sure enough after i've done that my whole damn computer is messed up. Even opening folders or applications take between five and ten minutes. Not to mention i can't open my windows settings to rollback. I literally build and fix computers for a living and yet i have not clue what else i can do at this point. Think i might renounce technology and float off into the Atlantic on a plank of wood :/

Our git subtree completely stop working somehow. No one can get latest.
Now we are playing wood sword and pretend nothing happened.

!rant

I've never given much thought to coffee and brushed off anybody saying it's deep as a hipster, but I'm a simple man who's only ever had instant coffee, basic cafeteria stuff and 50c vending machine trash. Well there's a coffee machine at work and there's actually a decent variety of capsules. All I have to say is holy shit, the hipsters were right. The flavours, the aroma, the strength, they're all so different and all so good, goddamn!

I just watched a video where a guy used a homemade band saw made of wood to make another homemade band saw made of wood. This is the very definition of recursion, amirite?

! Rant
Social life.
Can anyone explain to me what's happening to the world?
Earthquakes... Hurricanes... Looks like the beginning of the end of the world...
We just didn't had any big tsunami this year (knocks on wood)

I have already started the process of a side project by desiging the software, the architecture, the 3d model, ordered all the electronics of a pet 'smart' stable for my guinea pigs.

Which would automatically feed them and refill their water tanks silently but for me the point on playing around with dozens of sensors for like different water levels, water quality, hay, temperature, water quality (you get the point) ... Building a nice looking web interface or an App to control everything and get a live feed from different angles ( sounds a bit crazy altogether but it looked like a cool project )

I even started a instructable and had a github repo for sharing the source of the app/web interface and the whole micro service based server

I'm still at it and hopefully will start to build the ***ing wood and acrylic parts in the next month's but currently and for the last month's free time ist my archenemy

Keep you posted if you are interested 😀

I have too many geeky non-dev activities. I don't know which is the geekiest...

Built a server rack out of bits of spare wood (going to rebuild and improve it in future). Wired up the entire house with network cabling. Didn't need to, just prefer not to use WiFi for things where possible. Also ceiling mounted a PoE WiFi AP for things that have to use WiFi (e.g. smartphones).
DIY built a rack mountable Pi shelf with faceplate.
Configured a dedicated TV tuner/PVR PC used by Kodi running on Raspberry Pi for a couple of TVs (all diskless/network boot).
Got a colocated server running in a data centre for running various VMs on for different things. Run my own email, webserver, DNS, VPN, voice chat server, various other stuff.
Gradually getting into electronics, which overlaps with dev a bit.
Sometimes I play games. I built a dedicated VR PC which occupies the smallest room of the house.

Unsure which is the geekiest thing!

Before I went to school I was copying game code from book to atari computer cause it was faster than waiting for game to load from tape recorder ( especially when people are walking around on wood floor and you have constant read errors).

I probably wrote some magic spell that cursed me on my lifetime cause this shitty programming happened to chase me everywhere I go.

Damn you software you’re everywhere I go, why you’re haunting me all the time. It’s hard to find some quiet place without you watching.

So remember kids don’t write code you don’t understand cause it may fuck your life.

Oh my fucking god, we're doing SCRUM, why does every task get stuck in review limbo and take a sprint and a half minimum because of it.

!!rant life toptags bottags
My tags seem to be okay. Let's go.
I'm 14. I live in a place where nobody smart lives, and the school I go to has no coders.
Last year, all my friends moved. The only friend I had left now hates me, simply because they yelled at me everyday and I yelled at them once.
I am in the middle of my exams. I also have the flu, but thankfully it's not the e-flu, otherwise you guys should prepare for 24/7 headaches.
Due to the medications I am taking, I'm half-asleep all the time, and I probably am messing up all of my grades.
My entire extended family is in India, and I go there 2 times a year. I miss them so much right now :(.
At the same as doing exams, I am trying to keep my laptop (primary) and PC (secondary, desk) configuration and setup approximately synchronized. In order to do that, I am setting up my dotfiles repository.
Except that all my laptop config (which works) is written horribly, and I need to rewrite it all.
At the same time, I have 3 other projects going on: An OS written in D, a source-based package management system written in D, a small website (not online), and a whatever's cooking in my mind at this moment.
Right now, I'm supposed to be studying for my French exam.
Instead, I'm here, typing this out on my phone.
I have a classmate in school who can type QWERTY at 80WPM. I'm learning Dvorak (Programmer's!) and my current speed is 33WPM, after about 2 months of half-hearted practise during work time and at school.
Sometimes, I look at the world we have here, and what we're doing to it, and I wish that sometimes we could simply be content with life. Let's just live, for once.
I find ~60 random songs in one go, simply by finding a song I know on YouTube and going to the 'Mix - <song>' playlist. I download them all (youtube-dl), and I listen to them. Sometimes, I find this little part in a song (Mackelmore & Ryan Lewis - Can't Hold Us beginning instrumentals, or Safe and Sound chorus instrumentals) that make me feel so happy I feel like all's good in the world. Then the song moves on and with it, my happiness.
I look at Wayland, and X, and I think - Why can't we have one way of doing things - a fixed interface to express anything, so that one common API exists for everything of that type? And I realise it's because they feel that they're missing something from the others. Perhaps it's a bug nobody's solved or functionality that's missing, and they think that they can do better than that. And I think - Well, that's stupid. Submit a fucking bug report or pull request instead of reinventing the wheel. And then I realise that all the programming I've ever done in my life IS simply reinventing the wheel. And some might say, "Well, that guy designed it with spokes and wood. I designed it with rubber and steel," but that doesn't work, because no matter what how you make it, it's just a wheel. They both do the same thing. Both have advantages and disadvantages, because nothing's perfect. We're not perfect because we all have agendas and wants and likes and dislikes and hates and disgusts and all kinds of other crap, and our DNA's not perfect because it manages to corrupt copy operations (which is basically why we die of old age, I think).
And now I've lost my train of thought and this is too large to scroll over so I'm just going to move on to the next topic. At this point (.), I have 1633 letters left.
I hate the fact that the world's become so used to QWERTY because of stuff that happened 100 years ago that Dvorak is enough of a security to stop most people from being able to physically use my laptop.
I don't understand why huge companies like Google want to know about me. What would you do with this information? Know how to take over my stuff when the corporation-opocalypse comes around? Why can't they leave me alone? Why do I have to flash a ROM onto my phone so that Google cannot track me? What do you want, Google?
I don't give a shit any more, so there's my megarant.
Before anybody else (aside from myself) tells me that this is too big, all these topics are related simply because my train of thought went this way. There's a connection between each of these things, but I just don't know what it is.
Goodnight, world. 666 is the number of characters I have left. So is 42, for that matter (thanks, Douglas Adams!). Goodbye.

!rant

Finally (kinda) done with the nicknames addon. I wanted to hook into the sites actual modal menus for the UI, but I don't know JQuery and I somehow doubt modifying the existing javascript of a site from a plugin is possible, so we're stuck with knockoffs for now. But it works, it saves and loads nicknames correctly and displays them everywhere except on the notifications because I didn't add an onload listener to them.

My boss has been pretty insistent on us writing good tests (which I wholeheartedly agree with) for our new project, and being the less-experienced junior that I am, asked if we could get some guidance or a demonstration.

Took two weeks, but I finally got it said guidance... by opening a pull request with tests that weren't absolutely perfect.

Learning how to make browser plugins by shamelessly ripping off my favourite dumb Reddit Enhancement Suite feature. DevRant Nicknames, coming Soon™️.

So here I am coming to the end of the week after getting The Porcupines big web project into production. Pulled a 38 hour straight from Sunday to Monday chopping wood to make the thing fly. Pulled in other programmers and content creators to get the site full of something we did not have a week before. The fun part was having the account manager right there for 30 plus hours and actually seeing what it take to save a project when the client just thinks "it's just code". Now the boss has is asking for a list of all the work out of spec as they are bitching about the extra cost. These were the clients who did not read the functional spec and raked me over the coals after release that the home page did not match the design (the home page matched the design). I warned my team this would happen. They get all swept up in the hype and We can win! frame of mind and you can bet when the bitching starts it will come back to the paperwork you did at the beginning and the change requests and productions systems reports so you can wave it in front of ungrateful clients and not end up sad. Make sure you keep notes and document all of the requests and changes from internal and external even if you do not have to. one day it will save your ass and you will be able to whip it out and be a smiling motherfucker.

Can these requirements stop having issues...

FOR FIVE MINUTES?!

On This Episode of Ghetto Medium..

Posted after midnight for extra spooky effects. Read in the dark at your own risk. You've been warned.

So my mother has been on a binge watching shows like long island medium (apparently the taller your hair the closer you are to god or something), and every time we talk she begins at length to talk about, you guessed it.. 'ghosts.'

Now don't get me wrong, I've had some 'spooby' shit occur in my lifetime, the sort that will tighten your sphincter faster than bill cosby asking you if you want some koolaid or grape drank, but I digress.

The ghost talk is tiring. Lately theres been a *flood* of these new shows, purportedly showing mediums and people who can 'look into the other side' and I realize just how vapid and ridiculous it's all become, as if they all are being personally haunted by the ghost of John Edwards burnt out husk of a career. Theres long island beehive big-hair medium, celebrity medium, allison DuBois (the inspiration for that one sappy show *medium*) whos red hair and vacant stare speak of glimpses into centuries past like an intimate unseen horizon. or maybe she forgot to unplug her curling iron in a hotel one time and has been rendered permanently catatonic. And who can forget *Beyond With James Van Praagh* (everyone) whos face, as measured by the width of his mustache, appears to be expanding at a constant rate like a bad image macro edit thats been memed and repasted a thousand times. Then theres Chip Coffee, whos name is about as believable as his teaching degree on the show *Psychic Kids* where he mentored, again, you guessed it, *psychic kids*. Of course theres Tyler Henry, a youthful, uh, "flamboyant" medium for celebrities with ghost problems. Never trust a man with two names, this ones no exception, he looks so clean cut hes either secretly mormon, or secretly gay, maybe both. I'm not judging, but I am saying if I ever saw his clean cut, smooth, wrinkless (seriously, how tyler? how?), all american face, say smiling that subtle smile outside my kitchen sliding glass door at 3 am, his face watching me from the pitch dark outside, I wouldn't at all be surprised, except for the hospital bill I'd have to pay after shitting a brick and needing anal surgery.

At this rate we have mediums popping out left and right, like clowns at one of them R.L Stein nightmare carnivals, or beggers outside a methodone clinic. Geez, they're coming out the wood work, like those painting you see with hidden faces in them, or wheres-waldo posters, only you're trying to find the non-waldo guy amongst all the characters because they're ALL waldo: goofy acting, goofy dressing, and just all around goofy looking.

At this rate I'm fully expecting "pet medium" (starring a character named Stephen King and his marital problems, played by johnny depp eating way to much corn), and "haunted objects medium", and "car medium" (it's just seinfeld in a car, talking to psychics instead of other people), and "ghetto medium."

Today on this episode of "Ghetto Medium"..

Medium: Teneesha, aw yeah girl, u *definitely* ded gurl, uh huh! You WAY to white too be alive, you done passed over gurl!

And in the next episode of Ghetto Medium, one man claims "every time I bend over I can hear "wOoOoOoOoO!, Is my asshole possessed? Find out is it real or fake, and what our verdict is in Ghost Medium, episode 3: A Haunting In My Nether-regions."

Cut commercial break.

"Jerry Springer: One women asks, 'jerry, is my unborn child's foreskin haunted? And later today we ask the crowd, would you have sex with a ghost?"

Welcome to American television 'programming' in 2019.

Yes, it's all brainwashing.

This 2018 order students 👨‍🎓 👩‍🎓 lab. From painting walls, logistics, etc to statistic per user usage. Last admin in 2 years in a dark-age. Like these wood for students Id computer assignments. Hate it.

Automatization please.

Question: How was you registration Computer lab? Recommend

!rant && offline
I just finished one of my house projects this weekend, I had the initial "concept" more than a year ago, then had to look around for wood that could actually be used, as many projects it also stayed dormant for weeks, so when I had the will and time I'll would go back to it. Yeah I know it could have been done in 2 or 3 weeks probably, but I like to do those things nice and slow, as someone in a movie said: - Slow, long moves. :)
In the next days I'll write an instructable with all the steps, if anyone is interested.

Watching "Shaft" with Mr. Jackson as Shaft. Gotta say I like how he quit the job. Flings his badge like a ninja star and it sticks into the wood panel near the judge in the courtroom.

Gonna have to come up with something dramatic like that.

...and not get arrested. Lol.

I was always into computers, ever since I was a kid. Played a lot of videogames on Windows 98 and XP, and a lot of my earliest drawings were level ideas for those games. My first encounters with code were with game creation software like GameMaker, but I barely touched the code proper outside of editing a few variables from other people's code. After that I basically forgot all about it and spent most of my teen years being a shutin.

Skip ahead to my last year of high school without much idea on what to do. I was good at math when I wasn't being a lazy shit, so between that and what my parents expected of me, I was prepared to go to university for civil engineering. However, two things changed that decision, the first being a great IT professor, when me and a friend were so far ahead, he started assigning us some harder work, and suggested we study computer science at university. The second was a super jank and obscure open-source early 2000's game that somehow still has a thriving community and is actively being developed. I stumbled upon it by chance, and after playing for a while, I submitted a balance change on the GitHub repo. Even though it was just a single variable change, that time I got it. That time I saw how powerful programming could be and what could be done with it. I submitted PR after PR of new features, changes and bugfixes, by the time I left there I had a somewhat solid grasp of the fundamentals of programming, and decided to enrol in the computer science degree.

Enrolling was possibly the best decision I ever made (not america; debt isn't an issue), as well as giving me actual social skills, every course I took just clicked. The knowledge I already somewhat intuitively had a vague grasp on from videogames, general computer use and collaborating with russian coders who produced the jankiest shit that was still somehow functional was expanded upon and consolidated with a high-quality formal education. Four years later and I'm fresh out of uni, it was a long road between when the seed was first planted in my mind and now, but I've finally found out what I want to do with my life.

won't know for sure until i find a job though ffs

Now that the weather is nice, I've started doing some landscaping in my back yard. I thought I'd start easy with taking down a shed that was starting to lean that I inherited when I moved in.

In the process of taking it down, I discovered a wire that went from the house to the shed. The wire in the shed wasn't live but I had no idea where it terminated and I didn't want that sickle of death hanging over my neck.

After I finished taking down the shed, I started working on the wire. This wire was buried about 18 inches deep and was about 25 feet from where it was supposed to attach, which was another 25 feet from the house.

I finally got the first section dug up only to discover that the second section was attached to my retaining wall and traveled under a rotting wood patio also built directly on top of dirt. I needed to take it down regardless, but I wanted to wait until I was ready.

Protip: don't build anything made of wood directly on the ground. Given time, even treated wood will rot.

This second section was live and exposed to air. It's truly a wonder nothing bad happened with it. And most of it was only an inch under the dirt. Also, no conduit. Just a wire.

So now, several days into a simple teardown, my back yard has a deep trench dug into it going from one corner of the yard to the house. I have a huge patch of muddy dirt where I had to tear down a patio to fix an actual threat to life and limb.

I also discovered my retaining wall was built directly on top of dirt, no gravel in sight, which explains why it is leaning. Fortunately, I've built retaining walls before, so I know how to fix it.

It's a good thing I like landscaping because it's going to be an expensive and messy summer.

So today a file my PHP application made went through to a machine (50x50 meters) and out came the finished product exactly as it should have.

Sidenote; fuck you haters

Emotionally painful dev learning experience: My laptop (and only computer I had in the area) broke at the worst possible time during university and the guy fixing it fucked it up meaning it took even longer. Combine this with:

*Stuck having to learn Android Studio in two weeks to make a whole-ass app with a professor who didn't know how to make a Hello World and gave us no resources. Pair project so I had someone depending on me to do my part, meaning a lot of sharing their computer just to be able to use Android Studio.
*Having to work on another solo project by using various public and awfully specced university computers. Said project involved real-time 3D graphics and was running at about a third of the speed it should on every machine.
*Realizing how much I depended on my laptop for entertainment and that I basically had nothing that could help me de-stress and relax at home.
*Not knowing when the laptop's spare parts would arrive or if the repair man would give me bad news and even more delays.
*A very poorly timed issue in my relationship.

I know university can be stressful even though it never really affected me before or since but man, those couple of weeks broke me.

Is the devRant website not feature complete or am I just stupid? Liked rants and comment history only go like 30-40 entries back unless you use the app.

!rant "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."

I'm learning Java/Android Development with the Udacity Nanodegree (hey we all gotta start somewhere). Got to one project that was intended just to demonstrate use of basic form elements in a static quiz. Predicted time was about 20m I think.

Three days, much hair pulling, and many SO pages later I've built a little app that displays any number and type of question, dynamically generating the views.

I may do things the hard way, but I learn a heck of a lot more for doing so.

!dev

Fuck, I hate moving. All the tearing down and subsequent assembly takes sooo bloody long. And you have to be extra careful not to destroy all your (no so) cheap IKEA furniture when taking off the screws and nails. ~Lê stupid me didn't think he'd have to disassemble this stuff, so I actually used nails. D'oh. So now I have some splintered wood. Congrats, you cockwomble. Good luck repairing that.
I'll use screws (torx head, of course) when reassembling though, not making the same mistake again.

Oh, and then there's all the dust and cobwebs and fucking spiders living under the furniture, because I can't tilt my wardrobe to vacuum underneath it. Just. Fucking. Lovely.

On the upside, I get to do an early spring cleaning on all my accumulated trash. New apartment is gonna be so clean and minimal, you'd mistake it for a monastic meditation room. With a pair of monitors and my beautiful desktop to the side. Meditation is lovely, but I also pray to the silicon and transistor gods. Need mah tech shrine.

Best documentation have probably been most language docs and references I've worked with, official or otherwise, especially C++. Completeness, consistency, tidiness and examples really help a lot, since I know I can rely on the docs for basically any problem and makes work so much easier since I'll be guaranteed to leave understanding what's up.

Worst documentation has got to be the internal docs we had to create for a seven-man uni project, you couldn't find shit in the sea of docs that were out of date or just plain wrong. It was so much easier to ask whoever was working on that part about the intricacies of the cobbled-together mess than to either read the code or the docs. One absolute mouthbreather was working on the database docs and put in that it stored ArrayLists. Fucking Java ArrayLists in a motherfucking database. One day I am going to rant so hard about this dumbass and it's gonna be a spectacle.

Bonus points goes to the company's public documentation at my internship. It was good and pretty complete, but sometimes there was a document from 2 years ago that had been written by a non-english speaker that was absolutely awful. Some of them were so bad that as soon as I'd finished learning what I needed to, my mentor told me to go and fix the docs, I don't blame him.

Dealing with government bureaucracy today. Prepare for pure anger.

First of all, what fucking dipshit site does testing and maintenance in production without letting users know? Bitch I'm getting an invalid date error when I use your own stupid date selector and I had to waste the office lady's time asking about it because you couldn't be arsed to either test your shit properly or actually take it down if it's broken. Who made that stupid ass decision and why the fuck did nobody question it. Fuck you.

Day one of the sprint and my coworker has already found some fucked up requirements.

Goddamn do I hate this shit sometimes.

I go through cycles of what I want to work on during my off time. Sometimes I code utilities for video games. Other times I get engrossed in games. One of the games I like to play is Minecraft. Not vanilla Minecraft, but modded Minecraft. It scratches that itch for creativity, fun, relaxing, hanging with people, and technical interest. I am currently playing a medium sized older modpack that has most of the mods I like to play: magic, tech, building tools, dimension building and more.

I am early game on a server with some other people. I already overloaded the server with a population explosion of villagers I am melting down for emeralds. That was interesting. I started automating this and decided to try using ComputerCraft to automate some pieces of this. I stared at the code and just "no, I am not working on my off time". I am going to automate this another way. I used to really like computercraft, but it was code and looked like work. I find that interesting.

Anyway, this is random ass shit I do for fun. Wood house/shack, workroom and ore processing are with no walls, decent small tree farm, and a nuclear reactor in the basement...

Forcing all your package dependencies to one specific version because you are afraid of incompatibilities is like building a scyscraper from pure concrete because wood isn't strong enough. Sounds like a decent idea at first but leads to a brittle, fragile structure that won't last very long.

Just got back to a solo project I hadn't touched in 5 months due to having other priorities. The whole thing is probably less than 1k LOC split over a half-dozen files and I'm not sure whether I should be angry at my past self for leaving the most recent part untested and insanely bug-ridden, taking almost an hour a fix, or be happy that past me organized and documented everything well enough for it to only take almost an hour to fix.

The best part about professors is that they ask you to come on a specific day for the recommendation but when you reach there you’re in for a surprise. Suddenly the WiFi goes away and there are departmental reviews. Wtf. This they can’t tell the day before... bloody hell knowing that you’re coming from far... away ... they’ll test you that you your patience so much that you keep wishing they die a very bad death or say under a bridge! Man o man such is life !

My homies really out here giving me three units to test spread out across two + four thirds of a file and expect me not to raise an eyebrow.

No, that is not three + one third. That would imply that the thirds all belong to one unit, or one file for that matter.

Today I finally smashed/carefully took apart an old piece of furniture.
Kept all the big pieces of wood, because I'm gonna turn them into cutting boards.
The furniture has been with my scout group for 15 years, so it has some sentimental value to some people, but to most it was just a useless piece of shit.

Reduce-reuse-recycle I guess.

No matter how hard you try to stick magnet with a wood it just won’t work out in any way.

i hope its possible to change the wood into metal just like as easy as type-casting an integer into string, but it just won’t happen anyway~~

1. Speaking strictly physiologically, masturbation and intercourse orgasms aren't that different in what it feels like down there. The only difference is what it feels like in your mind, but that depends on your partner and your compatibility.
2. Fleshlight Stoya edition obliterates everything that breathes in terms of orgasm power, except for one single blowjob I received from an autistic mind-reading trans boy. But he's rare.
3. If you wonder whether no-fap or no-orgasm lifestyle has benefits, it doesn't. My high score is three months without orgasm. After two weeks, you stop thinking about sex. Morning wood disappears completely. You have considerably less energy, and every time you ask yourself why, you remember: “ah, it's that no orgasm thing.” Then, it's quite hard to go back to having sex — your penis just won't go up.
4. Sucking your own dick feels weird, just like tickling yourself. It's hard to focus, and the pleasure is next to none. If you always wanted to do that, you can forget about it — it's not worth it.
5. If you're a penis person, high quality anal orgasm is THE best physiological feeling you can get without drugs. Totally blows anything penis-related out of the water, including edging and other advanced techniques. If you chase self-exploration and wonder what your mind/body are capable of, definitely try it, though you have to find an experienced partner & be patient with your body.
Pro tip: if you're a man in a traditional monogamous relationship (if so, what are you even doing with your life?…), it might be easier to convince your female partner to allow you having affairs with penis people than to go full polyamorous mode.

I've been looking for an internship for the past couple of weeks and just had another interview today. I was given a simple code test that involved changing some of the features in a small program, nothing too challenging except that the program was insanely buggy and had a tendency to spit out the wrong result if you looked at it funny, and that was before I started touching it. I don't even want to know what production code looks like...

mushrooms time

!rant
Ya boy is now officially an intern! I'm starting next week, everything is sorted except one thing: we have to bring our own computers and basically get to use whatever software we want. I've got a fresh install of Mint and was wondering what IDEs or editors everybody here uses (and recommends), since I only really have a bit of experience with Atom and Netbeans, and I don't think I'll be able to get away with coding in Notepad++ or Gedit here.

I wanted to make a (shit)post when my ++'s were at the same number as Sudowoodo's pokedex ID. Missed it ages ago by a long shot but I woke up today to find out that I missed Bonsly's pokedex ID by a single ++ that I got an hour before.

How did you decide what you wanted to do with your career? I'm fresh out of uni and am looking for work but have no idea what roles or languages or software types I want to work in, only a vague idea of stuff I don't want and a vague idea of what could be nice. I'm also at a bit of a crossroads because I've applied to multiple very different jobs and have no idea which one to accept if multiple offer me a job (given that there weren't any red flags when interviewing).

Hunter Kitchen & Bath, LLC

We are a boutique renovation firm that will custom design your kitchen, bath, library, outdoor kitchen or other home project. Come to our brand-new showroom in Bryn Mawr to select from cabinetry, countertops, tile, wood, hardware, & plumbing fixtures.

Address: 1042 W Lancaster Ave, Bryn Mawr, PA 19010
Phone: (484) 872-8801
Work Hours: Mon-Fri: 9:30AM-4:30PM-Sat:10AM-2PM

I see DIY aircraft videos on YouTube every now and then. All of them are from Africa. People are building poorly designed, dangerous planes that don't fly (surprise, isn't it?). I get that they have very limited resources, but what bugs me is… why not just implement WWI-era designs? They require no exotic materials (essentially wood, sheet metal and canvas), can be built relatively easily, and they are literally battle-tested. They _will_ fly. I get that for those people flight is a dream, but why skip the quickest, cheapest and safest way to achieve that dream?

Is LinkedIn actually any good?

Never used it and now that I'm a few months away from graduation I might just start. devRant is usually straight to the point about these things, what do I get out of bothering to use it?