For me it was not do much a choice.

I started out using basic and simple text display (graphics existed but was quite difficult).

For a long time I was the sole or part of a pair of devs so specializing was not possible and once we grew to such a size I already was quite proficient in all areas from hardware to customer support and education.

But from that time onto today I have gravitated towards a more backend role mainly because I lack a good sense or visual design.

I know it something looks good, but doing it my self results in more boring or plain designs where more thought goes into UX than nice looking design.

That said, if we do web applications I can still keep up since it usually is more ux heavy ;)

But when it comes to adding background images, nice color sets and such I gladly defer that to colleagues with a better design sense.

No idea how I ended up here. So basically started with simple wordpress websites, transitioned to react. This move was the hardest.

Then caught up on node and mongodb. And before i knew i was doing db, backend and front end tasks. Now i know bits and pieces of everything

I don’t like the term “full stack dev”. I personally feel like I’m a Jack of all trades and master of none. There’s so much to learn if you’re a full stack developer. Endless possibilities, endless rants and endless frustration 🤯

Kubernetes is a breeze they said. Now I‘m sitting here for several hours trying to find out why my pods randomly fail to resolve domain names.

Coming along my adventure: broken systemd configs, systemd-resolved stub causing loops, broken k3s modules and finding out that busybox‘s nslookup is broken for versions greater than v1.28.4.

50 issues later, I figured out that the dude who setup the corporate network (where the machine in question is located) uses two nameservers: one to resolve the internal routes and one for all the external domains. Luckily, coredns randomly picks a nameserver for each request. Therefore, sometimes queries for external domains reach the nameserver dedicated to the internal network which then answers with NXDOMAIN.

I hate networking so so much...

I used to be a sysadmin and to some extent I still am. But I absolutely fucking hated the software I had to work with, despite server software having a focus on stability and rigid testing instead of new features *cough* bugs.

After ranting about the "do I really have to do everything myself?!" for long enough, I went ahead and did it. Problem is, the list of stuff to do is years upon years long. Off the top of my head, there's this Android application called DAVx5. It's a CalDAV / CardDAV client. Both of those are extensions to WebDAV which in turn is an extension of HTTP. Should be simple enough. Should be! I paid for that godforsaken piece of software, but don't you dare to delete a calendar entry. Don't you dare to update it in one place and expect it to push that change to another device. And despite "server errors" (the client is fucked, face it you piece of trash app!), just keep on trying, trying and trying some more. Error handling be damned! Notifications be damned! One week that piece of shit lasted for, on 2 Android phones. The Radicale server, that's still running. Both phones however are now out of sync and both of them are complaining about "400 I fucked up my request".

Now that is just a simple example. CalDAV and CardDAV are not complicated protocols. In fact you'd be surprised how easy most protocols are. SMTP email? That's 4 commands and spammers still fuck it up. HTTP GET? That's just 1 command. You may have to do it a few times over to request all the JavaScript shit, but still. None of this is hard. Why do people still keep fucking it up? Is reading a fucking RFC when you're implementing a goddamn protocol so damn hard? Correctness be damned, just like the memory? If you're one of those people, kill yourself.

So yeah. I started writing my own implementations out of pure spite. Because I hated the industry so fucking much. And surprisingly, my software does tend to be lightweight and usually reasonably stable. I wonder why! Maybe it's because I care. Maybe people should care more often about their trade, rather than those filthy 6 figures. There's a reason why you're being paid that much. Writing a steaming pile of dogshit shouldn't be one of them.

The debugging process is often complicated.

There are often many factors involved in troubleshooting an error, but usually I have a hunch.

Sometimes I'll ignore my hunch and try other, smaller fixes first. This will irritate me for a while until I actually go after my hunch, run the program, and INSTANTLY everything works again.

Found myself relating that to real life today when I had a slight belly ache and eventually decided to take a massive shit and INSTANTLY felt better. The relief was so quick that I actually looked up and paused in surprise.

Dependency injection is the most useless piece of crap ever invented. Convention over configuration my ass.
It simplifies nothing a good architecture and pattern can't solve. It's just the current trend but it's the hugest pain in the ass I've ever experienced. It just adds complexity to the project.
I think it's just a thing for masochists and lazy devs, but then why not sticking a huge dido up your ass it's the same fucking thing.

C++ or Python for coding interviews?

I used to do a lot of developments in Python and JS/TS. But now I have been doing a lot of back-end stuff in Golang at work (1+ year) and C++ for some of my side projects. So when I started grinding leetcode, I used C++ all the way.

Today this question struck me and I keep thinking if I should continue with C++ or use Python, which will help me focus more on the question than the language.

Architecture for Java REST API going to build/port from existing NodeJS one.
So Spring Boot + *

Lots of concurrent requests and large MongoDB calls. Current APIs use like 4GB memory for each instance because they don't use stream/pipe the response. Hold all data in memory and then return it all at once to user.

And well we expect more load in the future, so want to do this the right way.

So my understanding since this morning, is there's the blocking? MongoClient, (find* returns List) and now a Reactive MongoClient which is very async and like JS promises. Based on Pub, Sub model.

But the downside of JS promises was callback hell.

So actually 2 questions.
1. For each request, the db call done using the same MongoClient/db connection such that if there are 2 requests one would block the other?
2. Reactive Mongo would be non-blocking by design so would be better to support streamed responses?

Is it gay to like Ed Sheerans music?

He’s one of the few new people with actual talent in my opinion.

Many people say men listening to Lana del Rey are gay so I don’t give a shit anyway.
But I’m still wondering.
How many of the guys without a life (like me) here listen to and actually enjoy listening to Ed Sheraan?

Gaaaaaaaaalway Girl, nananannananannaa gaaaaaalway Girl, nananannananananananananna
That shits is stuck in my head now..

Monday marks the beginning of a new month. In the new month, I turn a year older. As I steer further and further away from "youthfulness", I intend on starting a new chapter in my life.

Sunday 28th Feb is the last day I put any investment towards my "white-collar" professional career. Beginning March 1st, all my energy is going towards my entrepreneurial career instead.

This means that instead of learning that Huawei HCIA networking certification that I hate, I'm going to continue learning Docker (then Kubernetes) which I intend to use on my first product & the many more to come. Instead of studying the horrifyingly boring Data Science course, I'm instead going to put my energy behind understanding GCP & AWS, with the hopes of eventually getting certified.

Basically, I'm going to put all my energy into learning technologies that interest me AND have the potential to help me deliver on my entrepreneurial journey faster & better, rather than studying certifications which everyone believe will make me more employable.

Unfortunately, there aren't that many jobs going around & I'm currently under a year long internship with extremely smart graduates (a valedictorian included). The joke is we're earning $250 a month and have zero hope of getting employed anytime soon. I'm tired of going down this path.

I'm glad I got my degree in CS, now onto creating job opportunities for my fellow peers!

PS: Expect rants about my entrepreneurship challenges, and celebrations about my entrepreneurship wins!

do you get exciting challenges, work wise? I sometimes read the source code of android and visit various design articles of companies like gojek and zomato, and their content fascinates me.

Like in terms of architecture, the aosp source code repos are so beautifully organised. you will be opening at least 5 extra nested repos before going into the actual code. one has the owner details, readme and other non tech details. one layer has the samples alongside the next layer repo. the next layer will have integration test suite, the next layer will have some other test suite, etc and so on, before you reach the exact code.So beautifully organised.

Then i read those design articles. there is so much defined at the design level only. they define the animations( and damn so much of them), the components used(big orgs have so many many reusable components defined by design that nobody touches and use them as it is), the typography (and the reason for typography ) and some very technical things like accessibility and responsiveness.

Like before working professionally, i thought of designers to be just color artists that happen to use figma/adobe for making ui designs.

my current organisation changed this definition for me somewhat where we have designers define the whole looks for the screen and the various measurements, etc , but not at this awesome level.
plus there is like no real division between the powers of pm and designer. designer defined a particular font in design, we devs implemented it, but if pm doesn't like it, he changes it to a different font or increases/decreases size, margins , etc

And in terms of architecture, we devs are almost taking almost all the decisions with total independence . i mean, this feels good, but when it comes to implementation, we favour a maintainable/scalable codebase that gives a very basic product than a complicated codebase that gives a cool looking product with all those subtle/interesting animations +ux

I feel like i somehow landed up at a place that is already sufficient with my lack of better knowledge, and this is good as i am realising more things and learning a lot, but i really wonder how sexy it would be , if i got to work on designs/architectures like that

I really like that a lot of people in construction work just dont take anyones bullshit. If someone fucks up, it gets fixed. Sometimes with a lot of cussing.
Meanwhile as a programmer if you call out anyone or anything for doing something wrong, you get immediate backlash cause of it. Its a lot like that you are the problem for calling it out and not the one who caused the problem in the first place.

The company where i am working at currently is kinda weird. The company is run by a gujrati guy and he has placed almost all his cousins in high positions...and on top of that the CTO (whos the bro of the owner) micromanages people and also fires them on a whim...i am kinda worried that if i am not able to do a particular task, i would be fired too...He has asked me to do unit testing of some complicated functions on mocha/chai and i have never done all this before. I am not understanding what to do and there are no senior devs in the office who knows about these things...

Well, this’ll get me a downrant and probably a pile of abusive and hateful comments, but I chose WordPress as my dev specialty. It’s in that sweet spot between my own uselessness as a full stack and front-end coder and my clients’ inability to comprehend how to click an “Update plugin” button. So they pay me to do that, plus the occasional “design”, and are seemingly happy to do so.

I think I won something. Not sure what. But my stress levels in my career are consistently at an all-time low. I have lots of flexible time in my day to do work, go outside, get exercise, work on hobbies, network with other people, and be with family. I guess being a WordPress “expert” isn’t all that bad.

I wanted to build a custom notetaking app, because all the alternatives are shit

I have a decent bit of experience with web development, but I've never tried electron before

Anyway, I decide to go with electron, because it seems like the easiest choice for my skill set

I build most of the app, and it's all working pretty well, and so I go to bed for the night

I come back the next day, and now the motherfucker won't load and display HTML pages aside from the main one.

So I start debugging. I go through each line of code, each external link, all my dependencies, everything. There's no JS debug output, nothing

I leave for a few minutes to get a glass of water, and now all of the sudden it works again

And I don't even know what happened, how it got fixed, or what even caused it

Electron is weird

There are eight hours in our work day, over 30 repositories in our GitLab, and over 30 JIRA issues in the current sprint. Somehow, the stars aligned and we submitted a merge request to master and assigned them to each other as reviewers for the same repository at almost exactly the same time.

Who will be the bigger person? Who shall take the sacrifice? In the land of the petty and the stubborn, only one would rebase. Join our heroes as they pretend they got disconnected, took a break, or didn't see the MR. Who will say "my ticket is more urgent than yours"? Who will click "close" and say "oopsie"?

Who will win?
*Netflix music*

So why the fuck did you go into code that I've written, change the name from "mode" to "type" throughout the >1500 lines of code that's relevant to the feature, and then move on to change my implementation to something that is arguably not common practice for the language and framework we're using, and in turn create duplicate state? And why the fuck weren't these changes in separate clear commits, but instead scattered over multiple commits? You're supposed to be senior!

I REMOVED every single thing that EVEN REMOTELY looked like it's handling redirections, I REMOVED ALL PLUGINS, and I STILL GET FUCKING REDIRECTIONS and THERE IS NO WAY TO DEBUG IT BECAUSE I GET REDIRECTED AND I DON'T GET A RESPONSE FROM THE CODE I WRITE and OF FUCKING COURSE it does not in any form LOG THIS SHIT ANYWHERE because fuck me that's why.

Truly, wordpress was created to punish us for our hubris.

Social History of the Holocaust

In Germany, during the Holocaust, the ghettos were secluded sections of a city where the Jews were expected to live. This was the only way to guarantee that they did not interact freely with the rest of the citizens. The ghettos were characterized by scarce food, poor sanitation, poor drainage, and cramped housing systems. There were many ghettos across Europe all through the Holocaust era with the largest being Warsaw Ghetto in Poland. All the Jews were in confined spaces within the ghetto, which each ghetto being surrounded by 19-foot walls to separate it with the city. In order to differentiate the Jews from other people, Nazis forced them to wear David’s band on their coats. The bands were supposed to be worn all the time.
Life in the concentration camps depicted the most inhuman manner in which people could survive; they became known as death camps. They worked as hard laborers with minimal or no food to eat. They wore stripped clothes or uniforms with an identification badges to indicate the different groups of people in concentration camps. Most people in the concentration camps died from starvation, disease, and harsh treatment they experienced within the camps. Those who survived in the concentration camps were herded to death camps to be killed.
The anti-Semitism feeling drove the Nazis to try to wipe out the Jewish, as they believed that they were the cause of their problems. Nazis managed to convince the ordinary citizens in where the Jews occupied of this theory, which fanned the anti-Semitic resents. People were forced to turn in any Jews they knew or risk persecution by the Nazi government. Most people decided to cooperate with the Nazis by handing over the Jews to them. They made the choice from the fear of retribution from the Nazi government. Only a few helped them to escape the country.

The article was conducted by a professional writer Eshley Durst, more her papers you can find at cheap-papers

Curiosity killed Ben the cat.
I work in Android Dev. I use scrcpy to control devices remotely. I realized some phones have chrome remote desktop on them...I thought, what if... I open my computer screen on the devices while these devices cast their screen to my computer. Classic mirror loop effect, align to the pixel, staring down the abyss of infinity mirroring... until i took off my earphones to go check this effect on one of the devices.... my computer audio was being played on all devices running chrome remote. :( I feel so stupid