Have a wonderful weekend now, fellow devs!! Enjoy the sun, enjoy your company or maybe lack thereof. Is there something you have been thinking of trying but put it off as just a dream? Try it! Take the first step! Enjoy your life!

Most of the jobs I dream of are really just jobs I romantisize. Like being a journalist travelling the world with an audio recorder. Or being a barista. I’ve already done the barista thing though, and I’m happy I took the step into software engineering. But maybe one day I’ll go back and start my own little café.

I’m one of those who learned in adulthood. I had lost track of my life and tried to find something to grasp on to. I found inspiration from two friends I have. One who’s been a very gifted software engineer since his early years, and the other who one day unexpectedly turned to university and computer science and started a good work life right away after the studies. After failing miserably at my previous attempt at university I decided to jump ship and give CS a try. It was the best decision of my life. To my surprise programming very much matched many of my personality traits and how I think and make desicions in games and everyday life. After my first few lectures It all came very intuitively to me. Then thruout most of my education (and this is one of my less ”grown up” thoughts) it felt as though I could as well have been a student at Hogwarts and my professors were witches and wizards. Anything was possible and each day we learned new tricks to create the unimaginable. That aside, I now work as a software engineer, but I feel as though the list of things left to learn is endless. I don’t think I’ll ever stop learning.

Well, a question and then a statement.
Interviewer: ”What would you say about [salary here]?”
Me, completely incapable of bargaining: ”Well, maybe I would like it a bit higher...?”.
Interviewer: ”Policy states we start at [same salary]”
Me, still incapable. ”Alright then! I’ll take the job!”

Later same day when turning down the other jobs I was simultaneously in the process of aquiring.
Contact from other firm: ”Sorry to hear that. I hope the reason wasn’t salary, because we could have solved that.”
Me: *Sigh*

Well, the reason wasn’t the money, but maybe the reason for choosing the other job COULD have been money. Oh well...

I always work too much in bursts. Long days of intense work when I’m deep into something, skipping lunch and breaks. Then short days when I take it easy. Would probably be better to work more evenly.

I want to be more tech savvy. I love programming, am fluent in Java and have no problem in pickung up new languages from time to time. But I’m really not a tech person. I always feel like I lose my grip on things when it comes to servers, web stuff and databases.

Can’t find anything wrong with Java.

Well, throughout my life I've never really thought about programming. Then one day during some downtime on a backpacking trip with a friend, while I had nothing to do my friend sat there with his computer with the screen all dark, filled with funny colourful text in lines of different length, with some lines even starting more towards the middle of the page than to the left, almost following a vertical wave pattern. He said he was writing a program to control his home remotly as well as working as a security feature that could unlock his home automatically when he got home. I was amazed by the colorful text as well as the fact that he could just create this crazy program out of nothing.
Half a year later I attended my first lecture at the computer science programme. My first program was a command line tool used for baking bread. It asked you how much flour you'd use and how many eggs, then it'd tell you wether or not you'd got the correct ratio. I was blown away by the intuitive nature of programming. I could imagine the control flow as a tree or flow chart in my head. I mean the whole program was only a couple of user inputs followed by an if-statement and a print-statement, but for me it was awe inspiring. I knew then that I'd probably chosen the right path in education.

A whole lot of anxiety and confusion as to what I wanted and liked. A few interviews later this was then calmed down by the realisation that most interviews are the same and that you in time learn what you're supposed to want and like in the industry.

PS. Not really, but I learned what things are desired by employers and what skills are really required in the real world. These things are sometimes hard to grasp for CS students and graduates. It's like when one was in gymnasiet (Swedish highschool, I guess) and would have needed a few lectures in normal grown-up stuff like paying taxes, etc. DS.

Yay! Finally got my rubberduck and phone! :D

Hello, I'm now gonna rant for a bit. I'm usually not a ranty person (wait, why am I on this site again?) , but here we go. I sometimes feel misunderstood about my side projects.

I don't know about you guys, but when I program on my free time, sometimes I just want to grab a glass of wine and explore things I think bout during the day. So, during the start of my CS-education, when I started to get my programming feet a little warm, I wrote this tic-tac-toe game (as you do...), and I thought "Well I know how to play the game. Surely I can program an AI to play against". So I thought hard for an evening or two and came up with something that wasn't too shabby (I can't win).
Then another time when learned about creating GUIs we got to do simple menu based stuff with buttons and pulldown menus following a certain structure, but we also learned that positions of components can be set freely. So I thought "Well, if I can freely change the positions of components, surely I can animate stuff and if I map that to some keys I can create a real time game!". So I wrote a small platformer with two squares that ideally succeed in killing one another. After animation I started fantasising about 3D rendering, so I created a small application which creates the illusion of 3D, which was cool and all, but that got me dreaming of creating a real 3D engine. It became almost like a cause of mine; to understand how it all works and create a 3D engine from scratch.
So now I've written a 3D engine. A simple one, mind you, without all the bells and whistles, but still a 3D engine.

So, after all this rambling, what is this rant about? It's about how people react to all this. The reactions are divided. Some are impressed, mostly people who cannot program, but others are like "hm...". For example, during job interviews, when people ask me if I've done anything on the side and I mention this, people usually go like ".... hm... :| Well that's great. So mostly just done your own stuff?". Well YES! What is that supposed to mean? That I've not created shippable applications? I've explored, which I myself believe is valuable! I believe I've learned something along the way. And most importantly I've enjoyed it. Maybe I'm over interpreting this, but sometimes it feels like people don't even understand the joy in it, like it's illogical. Why create something that in the end won't create any real value?

Am I alone in this? Or perhaps, have I just written far to long and uninteresting a rant for anybody to read this far? I don't know. You tell me.

I feel like I mostly know programming. I wasn't fed HTML and bash commands mixed in with my mother's milk as a child. In fact I didn't know very much at all about computers before my computer science degree, other than what's to be expected from someone in his 20's.

On the endless journey of knowledge most of the road is ahed of me.

I recently got reminded: The new snipping tool for windows is great! But what the hell is the deal with that ruler? The vast majority of the time when I draw lines or highlight stuff on a snipped picture I want to draw straight lines. But this is only possible by clicking the ruler button, aligning the "physical" ruler that appears and then drawing the line along it. It's like someone really wanted the snipping tool to convey the feeling of sitting by your desk with pen, paper and scissors. Am I missing something?

I really love LaTeX. It’s very much what makes the written word enjoyable, which helps when writing a thesis. Then I insert an image.

...However, tough love is given where tough love is due. It would be great if one, using the mouse, could close several tabs sequentially without moving the pointer. Currently it's tedious due to the differently sized tabs.

VS Code. It caresses my code as a mother caresses its baby, it keeps it safe while I'm not there and tantalizes my senses like few other editors do.

Also, it's fast and aesthetically pleasing.

It's made me realize how much I miss drawing something on a piece of paper while explaining it.