!rant

After over 20 years as a Software Engineer, Architect, and Manager, I want to pass along some unsolicited advice to junior developers either because I grew through it, or I've had to deal with developers who behaved poorly:

1) Your ego will hurt you FAR more than your junior coding skills. Nobody expects you to be the best early in your career, so don't act like you are.

2) Working independently is a must. It's okay to ask questions, but ask sparingly. Remember, mid and senior level guys need to focus just as much as you do, so before interrupting them, exhaust your resources (Google, Stack Overflow, books, etc..)

3) Working code != good code. You are an author. Write your code so that it can be read. Accept criticism that may seem trivial such as renaming a variable or method. If someone is suggesting it, it's because they didn't know what it did without further investigation.

4) Ask for peer reviews and LISTEN to the critique. Even after 20+ years, I send my code to more junior developers and often get good corrections sent back. (remember the ego thing from tip #1?) Even if they have no critiques for me, sometimes they will see a technique I used and learn from that. Peer reviews are win-win-win.

5) When in doubt, do NOT BS your way out. Refer to someone who knows, or offer to get back to them. Often times, persons other than engineers will take what you said as gospel. If that later turns out to be wrong, a bunch of people will have to get involved to clean up the expectations.

6) Slow down in order to speed up. Always start a task by thinking about the very high level use cases, then slowly work through your logic to achieve that. Rushing to complete, even for senior engineers, usually means less-than-ideal code that somebody will have to maintain.

7) Write documentation, always! Even if your company doesn't take documentation seriously, other engineers will remember how well documented your code is, and they will appreciate you for it/think of you next time that sweet job opens up.

8) Good code is important, but good impressions are better. I have code that is the most embarrassing crap ever still in production to this day. People don't think of me as "that shitty developer who wrote that ugly ass code that one time a decade ago," They think of me as "that developer who was fun to work with and busted his ass." Because of that, I've never been unemployed for more than a day. It's critical to have a good network and good references.

9) Don't shy away from the unknown. It's easy to hope somebody else picks up that task that you don't understand, but you wont learn it if they do. The daunting, unknown tasks are the most rewarding to complete (and trust me, other devs will notice.)

10) Learning is up to you. I can't tell you the number of engineers I passed on hiring because their answer to what they know about PHP7 was: "Nothing. I haven't learned it yet because my current company is still using PHP5." This is YOUR craft. It's not up to your employer to keep you relevant in the job market, it's up to YOU. You don't always need to be a pro at the latest and greatest, but at least read the changelog. Stay abreast of current technology, security threats, etc...

These are just a few quick tips from my experience. Others may chime in with theirs, and some may dispute mine. I wish you all fruitful careers!

A cracker just fell under my desk.

I cannot find it.

It's not possible that the cracker traveled farther than everywhere I looked.

But I still can't find it.

I don't know why, but in DevRant's weekly rant, I always find a word that I cannot understand. Even google translate is not that helpful in those cases. for this rant, the word is "Procrastination" :-/
Why some English words have to be so terrifyingly hard? These words always make me stay away from writing for the weekly rants :-/

"Fatal Error"
Exceptions? No, let's just halt the entire program.

Apparently a CS professor wrote this code.

"Needed to keep the compiler happy"

So, me and my girlfriend were on a discord call and she said to me: "You know how you can get lost in someone's eyes? Well, I get lost in your code".

I've never been more touched and conflicted in my life. 🥰🤨

During my interview, I poured some water into a cup and it overflowed a little bit.
Interviewer: Nervous?
Me : No, I just always give my 110%

Tl;dr got to mass slaughter expensive winblow$ servers from AWS. The kicker - no-one was using any of them for over a year...good bye saved money that’s no going to my paycheck 😭

About 8 years ago I had a choice, go developer or system administrator. I chose developer and never looked back.

Then I've spent the last week or so - on and off - perfecting a Boxstarter script to setup our Software Developer laptops, right down to the Visual Studio Code extensions and Visual Studio Code Standards.

Boot up a new computer, join it to the domain and start the script. It's therapeutic to watch.

I actually enjoyed it... am I a closet system administrator?

Very fast deadlines. Even if how good you are. If they gave your team lots of tasks with a short deadline, it is very hard. You'll get sick.

Been using Vim for a long time, so long that I type :wq at the end of every text I write
:wq

New password cannot be one of your four previous passwords.
Password must conatin upper and lower case characters, at least two numbers and two special characters
Password cannot contain five or more consecutive letters of username.
Password cannot include any _illegal patterns_.

Locked out of your system? Drive over to HQ and ask the admins to reset your password in person.

Oh God.

So I'm working on something and I needed to see how it looks when you type a command into the terminal (like the animation).

Quickly Google "Kali linux terminal," since it's kinda where I'm getting some of the design from.

First video "Kali Linux basic commands (every ethical hacker must know in 2018)"

1st command: whoami
2nd command: date
3rd command: pwd
4th command: cd
5th command: ls

I'd say that's a wee bit basic there and those are commands that literally anyone who touches linux should know, dontcha think there pal?

Nice job using buzz words to try and get views on your "tutorial"

Lately ive noticed that 90% of rants is "heres this thing that would come up in the first 3 lines of any documentation but instead of that, im gonna rant about it"

The other 10% is meta rants like this and the last 5% is from people who are bad at maths.

Everytime I go back to native Android, I end up: -Wasting a lot of hours with gradle and the shitty dependency system.
-Doing a couple of cours of actual coding and finishing what I needed to do.
-Swearing to never come back

Spot on

So I got this as a first step of an interview process.

So I'm still new to programming. Mind blown every day learning python. Although self learning does get confusing sometimes. Somehow I'm learning pen testing now and already installed Kali on a virtual box. Pretty sure I aimed at making a multi platform mobile app to begin with.... Yep, from Kivy to changing Mac addresses, am I lost? Or this is the way to dive in?

just a programmer girlfriend

How do I know my office is pretty chill?

My lead dev just sent me a text with:

"U suck penis"

I said "wow, uncalled for"

And then he said:

"U r uncalled for"

Well alrighty then

Friend of mine passed away several years ago. All other friends known me as Cooke monster so finally got my tattoo. He drew it for me before he died so it's quite personal! But nice to have something to remeber him for!

We all have that experience

So if Verizon agreed to not SIM lock phones in order to get the the 700MHz Block C license aka LTE Band 13, and now they're SIM Locking phones, does that mean they're going to lose their LTE license?
.
.
.
Just kidding, that'd require an FCC with a spine. But it fucking should.

And the time has come, my gf and I are just a month away from deploying yet we still call the project "project".

Usually solutions jump in my head when programming at least once a day but I can't name the damn thing for the love of God! It's the first night since we started development I have felt clueless.

Plus I don't want to be "that guy" that just gives it a generic name, like there's already a "ratemyprofessors", professor this, teacher that, fuck that shit!

I'm brain dead.

Why does the phrase, "Software Developer", always lead to the question, "You're a hacker??!"

Deleted a failed test instead of fixing it.

My sleep pattern is royally fucked. I searched around for alarm apps that can help me get back on track. I found one called Alarmy. The list of features was mindblowing. Fast forward a couple of weeks and I’m on vacation. I’m using my mobile data as a hotspot to browse and do research as there are no other internet options here.

My alarm goes off at 6 AM. Everyone besides me is sleeping. Here is where the first problem arises. The only way to turn the alarm off is by taking a picture of something I have at home (This is how I force myself out of bed). I start panicking. How the hell am I going to shut this damn thing off. I try to turn the phone off, and that’s when I realize I’ve made a huge error. The pro version of Alarmy has a setting that allows you to prevent yourself from turning it off at all. Genius me thought that was a good idea. I fumble with my phone as the 1 minute mute timer they give you is slowly ticking down, before all hell breaks loose. That’s when it hits me. I have an LG G3 with replaceable batteries. My violently pounding heart rate start to slow down as I take off the case and slamdunk the phone until the battery falls out. I did it. I’m saved. 5 minutes later I turn my phone on, start the hotspot and get back to my browsing.

BEEP F*CKING BEEP. Alarmy is not done with me yet. It turns out they’ve implemented a new feature that continues the damn alarm after a shutdown. At this point I have ran out of options. I take the battery back out, and now I’m sat here without no phone or internet for the rest of my vacation, and with no clue what to do.

Team of 5 post-grad students working on a single big project for final grade. Been working on this project since last 3 months. 2 of the memebers of my team doens't even know what we are building and we have to present it in 2 weeks, their contribution is less than 5%. How do people not think that its a project for all of us to do and its fucking 30 credits when the course itself is 90. The professors have asked us to give feedback for each member privately and i dont want to give negative feedback about them as they will lose way too many points for it.

Somehow it works...

If you had to choose only one of these apps, which would you choose? 🤔

The biggest joke on mankind is that a computer program is asking human to prove that they're not robot.