about 18 years of "oh, you made this? that's nice, but don't you want to do/learn something you'll actually get paid for instead?" as a reaction to any game prototype i made and showed them. until i got my first programming job. after that, silence and pretending the previous 18 years never happened (except the since forever running "joke" of "oh, you're not going to finish it anyway").

also, the one time i begged my (dtp/graphic artist) mom to draw me some backgrounds for my game, because at least one time in my life i wanted to not have to work on a thing completely alone, it took about three months of begging and convincing, upon which she finally said "ok, i'll try", and after another month, and one unfinished image that i estimate took about an hour to make, she told me "sorry, i don't think i can make what you need".

also some years of having "maximum 2 hours of computer time per day, unless it's the weekend" rule.

Unreal Engine 4 has the worst for sure. And i mean official docs as well as forums.

Answers to most questions tend to kind of boil down to "it's easy!".

As in, that's the only thing the answer will tell you. that it's easy to do. And by that implication, they don't actually need to tell you how to do it.

Or something like "it's easy, just turn this setting on/off".

Nobody will tell you, though, which tab in what window opened by which tiny button in a property grid in a window opened by which dropdown submenu under which button in what toolwindow to find that option.

Second place in the list of worst is shaders: ShaderLab/HLSL. Because they at least don't pretend that it's easy and that they're giving you answers, they usually just don't exist.

i knew i was born to make videogames so i went to find out how they are made and i found they are made by programming, so i knew i need to learn programming.

i was helping a friend with their coding assignment - snake game.

we spent about 45 minutes of trying to figure out why the snake's self-collisions are not working.

then we realized that she's using two separate arrays/grids - one for the food, one for the snake itself.

she was checking both for food collisions and self-collisions on the food array.

it was very painful to realize it took me so embarassingly long to notice it.

probably the one who sent me 3 mails within 10 minutes regarding 3 different positions, and all were addressed to someone else (Hello, Mr. Completely Different Name), so i replied telling him that's not me, and gave him the info to fix it in their db. he apologized profusely and said he fixed the error.

Next day I got two mails for another two positions, with the same incorrect name.

Or the one with whom I had half an hour phone "interview" for a specific position, they couldn't answer even the most basic technical question about the project, but invited me to an in-person interview and said my questions will be answered there, the phone interview was just to make sure they don't send completely offtopic people to the interview with the client (so far acceptable).

On the in-person interview, it was partially a repetition of the phone one, but okay, lady from the company is talking to me first time in her life. We get to the part where I can ask my questions, so I ask those basics about the project again, and her answer is:
"Oh, i don't know, i'm not a technical person, you'd have to ask that to the technical person from the company, I'm an hr person from the recruiting company."

"Wait... so... not only was this whole meeting a waste of my time, but you also lied about what it is, when you scheduled it with me on the end of the phone interview?"

"Well... it wasn't a waste of time, we like to meet the candidates in person before we forward them to actual interviews in the company, to make sure that they're not completely offtopic."

"... and how exactly do you think you'd be able to evaluate that, since you're not at all a technical person and know nothing about the project??"

" Well, i talk to programmers a lot, so i've picked up quite a bit of the terms."

...

I misread elgringo-s username and came up with a joke thanks to it:
What does a mexican programmer call a bad white programmer?

Err Gringo

fuck hemmorhoids

not sure if this counts, but i'm sure it's going to hugely amuse at least a few people.

... sometimes when i get stuck in a coding task (when i'm working at home, of course) i go watch porn for a while, it clears my head nicely.

there was one day i was trying streaming my programming for the first or second time in my life, and... yeah, i got stuck. and yeah, i forgot i was streaming...

luckily, nobody was watching those streams, and i realized what i did as soon as i got back to coding, so i immediately stopped the stream and went and deleted the vod.

i think the next time i mustered enough courage to try streaming again was like two or three months later... XD

!rant && !IT

... why does the word "secret" means two things which are basically opposites?

one being something that is/should be kept confidential (kept inside company/organization/person)

the other one being something that is... secreted (expulsed) out of body?

isn't it weird?

how do i deal with impostor syndrome?

i read thedailywtf.com... daily.

also, since i'm trying to be a gamedev i watch youtube channels that foxus on reviewing/trying shitty games.

helps with the impostor syndrome quite a lot, but has a side effect of causing depression from "how the hell are all these incompetent morons successful, and i' m not?"

So i just quit legally gotten GTA5, and i quit it with a thought of "fuck this unplayable shit, i'm gonna uninstall it to make space for illegal cracked version, because that one actually runs in playable manner".

I'm sorry, but i'm not sorry. Fuck all of the anticrack crap that makes it choke for half a second every 10 seconds.

that i'm actualy stupid, as in, intellectually insufficient to solve the task.

cataloguing and accounting for known unknowns and knowing when exactly you need to turn them into knowns (if ever).

basically getting used to the idea that you're always in some way and to some degree stumbling in/through the dark because your light is too dim to illuminate everything, so you have to choose the right direction to point it in. getting lost isn't not knowing what's everywhere around, it's not knowing what's in the specific direction that you need to go in.

oh and, also, sadly, this shouldn't be true, but at least in my life it is: there's nobody to ask for help when you're the one others come to to ask for help. either I solve something, or it will stay unsolved. which is... stressful and exhausting, and often desperation-inducing, but i guess it is what it is...

I use Windows because I like to use my OS to make stuff, as opposed to being used by my OS to make the OS.

having absolute control over my environment. if i want to be in bed, i'm in bed. if i want to take a 45 minute bath listening to podcast because i got stuck on a problem, I do. if I want to grab something to eat, i do.

etc.

!rant

so i've been playing around with this idea for some time... a relative reference frame physics engine.

why?
because in short, if it's not completely stupid (which I'm still not sure), and if it would work how I think it should/would, then it would solve most (if not all) problems current physics engines have with moving inside/on moving objects (which are inside/on other moving objects)...

...anyone reading this has at least a slight idea what I mean/am thinking about?

WHY IS IT SO FUCKIN ABSURDLY HARD TO PUSH BITS/BYTES/ASM ONTO PROCESSOR?

I have bytes that I want ran on the processor. I should:
1. write the bytes to a file
2a. run a single command (starting virtual machine (that installed with no problems (and is somewhat usable out-of-the-box))) that would execute them, OR
2b. run a command that would image those bytes onto (bootable) persistent storage
3b. restart and boot from that storage

But nooo, that's too sensible, too straightforward. Instead I need to write those bytes as a parameter into a c function of "writebytes" or whatever, wrap that function into an actual program, compile the program with gcc, link the program with whatever, whatever the program, build the program, somehow it goes through some NASM/MASM "utilities" too, image the built files into one image, re-image them into hdd image, and WHO THE FUCK KNOWS WHAT ELSE.

I just want... an emulator? probably. something. something which out of the box works in a way that I provide file with bytes, and it just starts executing them in the same way as an empty processor starts executing stuff.

What's so fuckin hard about it? I want the iron here, and I want a byte funnel into that iron, and I want that iron to run the bytes i put into the fuckin funnel.

Fuckin millions of indirection layers. Fuck off. Give me an iron, or a sensible emulation of that iron, and give me the byte funnel, and FUCK THE FUCK AWAY AND LET ME PLAY AROUND.

I wrote a whole article about it, and oh wow, it still exists. It was probably the first optimization I ever did in my life, and it was while I was learning SQL.

And writing an edu-tainment article aimed at total laymen as well as beginners was also fun.

http://swczdev.blogspot.com/2010/...

Sadly, czech language only. But... the english autotranslation actually looks readable:
https://translate.google.com/transl...

Long story short, though: 4 or 5-table join going from 7 seconds before optimization, to 0.08 seconds after optimization. Both were written by me, the optimized one was written without any reading on how to optimize SQL, based purely on me actually stopping to think about how I can reduce the DB load based on the little that I knew about how SQL servers work.

Optimization made it about 99,9999422% more efficient, based on my improvised efficiency metric of how many rows the query retrieves and produces versus how many are thrown away on the end due to the WHERE part of the query.

And that was also the day when my question of "what is there even to optimize in SQL?) was answered... by myself.

there was a third part of a rant linking previous part, so i tapped it, and second part linked the first one, so i tapped it. read and tapped the system back button. read the second part and tapped system back button again. or maybe (probably) twice by accident, which took me back to rant list.

and then i spent half an hour looking for that third part, but it's nowhere to be seen in the list.

weird.

not sure if counts as a compliment, but the follwing exchange with my team lead programmer felt pretty good:

"... wait, where did you find this function you're using here?"

"i didn't, it was missing so i wrote it."

"but... oh, i didn't realize you're gonna need it, if i had, i'd have given you a different task... noooo, that's internal framework functionality, i write that stuff for you guys so that you can just use it, cause it's complicated... oh, god, no, where did you put, how did you imple... (right clicks, go to definiton)... oh, it's exactly where it's supposed to be... (skims the code)... and is written exactly as if i had written it.
(looks at me and smiles, then turns to the rest of the team), guys, that component i told you to wait with making because i first need to write that complicated utility function that you'll need to use? you can start working on it now, Midnight wrote that function for me. (turns back to me) Nice, quick learner. But next time, at least let me know first, yeah?"

(that was third day in a new job, corporate-sized system. the rest of the team had been working there on that system for the past 2 years.

(probably not a good form, kinda going over team lead's head, but tbh i didn't realize i'm not supposed to touch that code because "it's complicated", while doing my task i just realized i need a function similar to a family of already implemented ones, so i just followed their convention amd added it.)

tl;dr - best programming compliment is people being surprised/confused that i did something which they thought as a normal thing that they will have to do for me, because it's in their job description to be doing it for people on my position/with my job description)

Quicksort demonstrated by hungarian folk dance =D

https://youtube.com/watch/...

What were some of your "OH MY GOD I'M AN AWESOME CODE WIZARD!" moments?

For example, I can remember two or three:
One was when I, with only cursory knowledge of C, never having worked with it but having been exposed to it (and having lots of experience with C# therefore familiar with the c-family syntax), took 5 minute look at a source code and pointed out a bug that the student working on it was trying to solve for the past 2 hours. Sadly, I don't remember what the bug was anymore.

Second one was on reddit, someone posted to gamedev group a 2minute video from his voxel+ai framework he was working on, I watched it, and without any idea what it's written in, or how, I was like "you seem to be dropping frames in a pretty regular manner unrelated to anything I see happening on the screen. You're creating too much garbage on frame-by-frame basis (probably while your AI is exploring what to do), look into object pooling, it'll help".

And the guy responded in a few hours like "by gosh, you're right! thank you! and what do you think about the source code?" (he linked git repo below the video.

And I was like OMG I'M A MAGE, I DIDN'T EVEN CLICK THE REPO LINK, ONLY NOW AFTERWARDS, AND yeah, it's c++ so sadly nothing for me, but OMG I JUST WROTE THE FIRST THING THAT CAME TO MY MIND, DIDN'T EXPECT IT TO BE CORRECT, I'M AWESOME.

=D and the feeling stayed with me for about two days.

(If it's not clear yet, it's perfectly okay, in fact, required, to brag about yourself in answering this question ;) )

personal projects, of course, but let's count the only one that could actually be considered finished and released.

which was a local social network site. i was making and running it for about three years as a replacement for a site that its original admin took down without warning because he got fed up with the community. i loved the community and missed it, so that was my motivation to learn web stack (html, css, php, mysql, js).

first version was done and up in a week, single flat php file, no oop, just ifs. was about 5k lines long and was missing 90% of features, but i got it out and by word of mouth/mail is started gathering the community back.

right as i put it up, i learned about include directive, so i started re-coding it from scratch, and "this time properly", separated into one file per page.

that took about a month, got to about 10k lines of code, with about 30% of planned functionality.

i put it up, and then i learned that php can do objects, so i started another rewrite from scratch. two or three months later, about 15k lines of code, and 60% of the intended functionality.

i put it up, and learned about ajax (which was a pretty new thing since this was 2006), so i started another rewrite, this time not completely from scratch i think.

three months later, final length about 30k lines of code, and 120% of originally intended functionality (since i got some new features ideas along the way).

put it up, was very happy with it, and since i gathered quite a lot of user-generated data already through all of that time, i started seeing patterns, and started to think about some crazy stuff like auto-tagging posts based on their content (tags like positive, negative, angry, sad, family issues, health issues, etc), rewarding users based on auto-detection whether their comments stirred more (and good) discussion, or stifled it, tracking user's mental health and life situation (scale of great to horrible, something like that) based on the analysis of the texts of their posts...

... never got around to that though, missed two months hosting payments and in that time the admin of the original site put it back up, so i just told people to move back there.

awesome experience, though. worth every second.

to this day probably the project i'm most proud of (which is sad, i suppose) - the final version had its own builtin forum section with proper topics, reply threads, wysiwyg post editor, personal diaries where people could set per-post visibility (everyone, only logged in users, only my friends), mental health questionnaires that tracked user's results in time and showed them in a cool flash charts, questionnaire editor where users could make their own tests/quizzes, article section, like/dislike voting on everything, page-global ajax chat of all users that would stay open in bottom right corner, hangouts-style, private messages, even a "pointer" system where sending special commands to the chat aimed at a specific user would cause page elements to highlight on their client, meaning if someone asked "how do i do this thing on the page?", i could send that command and the button to the subpage would get highlighted, after they clicked it and the subpage loaded, the next step in the process would get highlighted, with a custom explanation text, etc...

dammit, now i got seriously nostalgic. it was an awesome piece of work, if i may say so. and i wasn't the only one thinking that, since showing the page off landed me my first two or three programming jobs, right out of highschool. 10 minutes of smalltalk, then they asked about my knowledge, i whipped up that site and gave a short walkthrough talking a bit about how the most interesting pieces were implemented, done, hired XD

those were good times, when I still felt like the programmer whiz kid =D

as i said, worth every second, every drop of sweat, every torn hair, several times over, even though "actual net financial profit" was around minus two hundred euro paid for those two or three years of hosting.

(in 2008)
my boss in my first job. in general every time when he randomly burst into office. one specific time when he burst i to office and INSISTED that we've got to go to a parking lot to see something.

that something was a remote-controlled helicopter he just bought. (this was before the age of drones).

oh, and he was a chain smoker, always had a cigarette behind his ear (wat), and was dragging me out to have a smoke (i was the only other programmer smoker, but not as heavy as him) every 10-15 minutes under the implied pretense of needing to discuss something about the code, and frowned heavily when i refused (because i was actually in the middle of actual work), because he took it as me refusing to have a work meeting with him.

no, we almost never talked about anything work-related, while on that smoke "work meeting".

also, my boss' boss in my first job, when she entered the office asking "we need a clickable map of our country where clicking each region brings you to a search page with filter set to results from that region. how would we do that?"

i answered "html imagemap linking to the right search url for each region, or embedded flash doing the same, if you want the region buttons to be animated", and turned back to my work.

upon which she proceeded to talk about it with the second programmer, both pretending they're solving some aspects that my answer didn't already solve, INSISTING that i stop doing "whatever nonsense you're doing" and pretend that i'm paying attention as if anything they said was in any way relevant or important. i kept returning to my work because i was solving an annoying bug and their talk was empty and useless.

this second incident was then cited as one of the reasons i was let go, because "he ignores important conversations with his superiors about upcoming tasks"

in general, my first job was a shitshow where nobody had any time or energy to do actual work because they all expended all of it to PRETEND for their superiors that they're working, since the superiors had no clue how it looks when we actually do our actual jobs.

(one month after i was let go (because, in my boss' words, yes, the one with the helicopter, "the IT productivity is very low and I have to hold someone responsible") , the second programmer was let go as well, and one month after that, our boss (head of IT) was let go too. to this day I keep being fascinated how did the company manage to survive long enough for me to even be there, let alone how it STILL manages to survive. i guess being part of a nation-wide conglomerate is very effective in covering your company's losses and uselessness)

"full stack" means "you'll be doing everything from gathering client requirements through data architecture up to the UI design and of course implementing all of it"

"backend" means "you'll be coding everything from database through server-side code and client-side code including html and css"

"we need you on-site all day every day" means "we have no idea how and why we should use repositories with remote access despite being a company developing an internet app, and we don't trust that you would be working anyway"

"interesting challenging projects" means "the same boring crap as every other company, running on an incredibly botched and dezorganized codebase".

"competitive pay" means "actual pay is around 1.5 times the minimum allowed pay, and everything else is being siphoned off into (stupid and useless) 'benefits' like massage and fitness discount coupons"

"friendly collective having fun at numerous company events each years" means "it is mandatory for you to participate on our weekend drinking retreats but you'll only find out when we fire you because you're 'not a team player' after you refused to participate on those"

Me: Calling [emergency number in my country] : Hi, can you connect me to police in [my city + district]?

Operator: No, but I will connect you to country-wide police cetral, please wait... "

LIKE WHAT THE FUCK

travelling by train, supposedly first class.

asked for headphones on stewardess' first pass through our carriage.

that was an hour ago. since then, she made three other passes of our carriage, serving out beverages, foods and coffees.

because fuck you, headphones take most time to prepare so first we will serve everyone else.

"Does river direction make waterflow go downwards?"

Originally I selected it just to copypaste the "does effect support cause?" formulation, but as I selected, it unrolled the answer, and... oh...

there was a post about banning of Alex Jones and a pretty interesting discussion unravelled under it.
To those who participated, and are interested in the topic, I recommend watching this video with new information, kind of proving my point from that discussion and elaborating on it.

(For example, Mastercard is now revoking cards from people with... "incorrect opinions", it seems)

https://youtube.com/watch/...

!rant, more of an incredulous/cruelly amused "you had ONE job..."

so: biggest IT/PC/electronics store in my (and neighboring) country. their webpage, of course with the function to buy online, because of course.

the big green "Buy" button does nothing. doesn't work. doesn't react. I keep clicking it multiple times, shorter, longer, etc, because maybe their JS scripts are just shit so they slow.

nope.
okay. open devtools, JS console.
hover over the button: "Error: isMobile is not a function".
click the button: "Error: isMobile is not a function"

WAT.
search for isMobile in the script.
173 occurences.
fuck this.
console: isMobile = function(){return false;}
because I'm not on my phone.

click the "Buy" button.
works flawlessly.

...HOW?
THE WHOLE PAGE IS AN ESHOP YOU COMIC RELIEF INCOMPETENTS! =D

173 uses of non-existing function that blocks business-critical feature, THE ONLY CORE FEATURE FOR WHICH YOUR SITE EVEN EXISTS, and NOBODY, not the dev who fucked it up, NOT EVEN QA, noticed it??? =D =D

if I was the boss of the devs, or even boss of the whole company...
git blame
...and then i'd go the whole chain from the dev who caused the bug, through all of the QA people who "tested" that version before deploy, and I would personally, on the spot, fire each and every single one of them.

mainly because of who knows how much money this stupid not even a proper bug lost them.
but secondarily, because clearly none of those people give a single shit (n)or have an idea how to do their jobs.

=D =D

yeah but I was a good guy, filed a bug report in the "Complaints" section of their Contact form.
it goes to some call-center-like peon, so it starts with a sentence "forward this to your site's dev people outright to file as a bug, thank you".

but... HOW.... =D
HOW can you let something like this through? =D
the bottleneck of your whole user interaction, which forms first of the three steps OF THE MAIN AND MOST IMPORTANT FUNCTION of your whole business... =D
...I...
...does not compute =D

...BUT THEY USING ANGULAR, SO THEY ALL MODERN AND HIGH-TECH AND EVERYTHING'S FINE!!! =D =D