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In the before time (late 90s) I worked for a company that worked for a company that worked for a company that provided software engineering services for NRC regulatory compliance. Fallout radius simulation, security access and checks, operational reporting, that sort of thing. Given that, I spent a lot of time around/at/in nuclear reactors.
One day, we're working on this system that uses RFID (before it was cool) and various physical sensors to do a few things, one of which is to determine if people exist at the intersection of hazardous particles, gasses, etc.
This also happens to be a system which, at that moment, is reporting hazardous conditions and people at the top of the outer containment shell. We know this is probably a red herring or faulty sensor because no one is present in the system vs the access logs and cameras, but we have to check anyways. A few building engineers climb the ladders up there and find that nothing is really visibly wrong and we have an all clear. They did not however know how to check the sensor.
Enter me, the only person from our firm on site that day. So in the next few minutes I am also in a monkey suit (bc protocol), climbing a 150 foot ladder that leads to another 150 foot ladder, all 110lbs of me + a 30lb diag "laptop" slung over my shoulder by a strap. At the top, I walk about a quarter of the way out, open the casing on the sensor module and find that someone had hooked up the line feed, but not the activity connection wire so it was sending a false signal. I open the diag laptop, plug it into the unit, write a simple firmware extension to intermediate the condition, flash, reload. I verify the error has cleared and an appropriate message was sent to the diagnostic system over the radio, run through an error test cycle, radio again, close it up. Once I returned to the ground, sweating my ass off, I also send a not at all passive aggressive email letting the boss know that the next shift will need to push the update to the other 600 air-gapped, unidirectional sensors around the facility.11 -
"WE'RE HIRING!!"
Skills Required:
BEFORE: HTML, CSS, JS, jQuery
NOW: REACT/VUE/ANGULAR, NODE, CI/CD PIPELINE, DOCKER, GRAPHQL, JOHN CENA12 -
My friend (not in CS) said his computer was a bit slow.
I told him I'd fix that for 10, he agreed.
I increased the cursor speed.
He bought it.16 -
Pro tip: If you are a junior, or senior but new at the company, don't start your conversations with:
"We're doing X wrong. At my previous company we did / at school I learned /in this book I read / according to this talk I watched, the right way to do X is ..."
Instead try:
"I'm curious why were doing X this way. I'm used to doing it differently."
I love flat-hierarchy teams, and people who think about flaws in procedures and proactively try to improve the tools we use are awesome, but the next kid walking up to me yelling we use git flow "wrong" will be smacked in the face with a keyboard.
If you come to me with curiosity and an open mind, I'll explain, and even return the favor by behaving the same way when I'm baffled by your seemingly retarded implementations.
Maybe we can learn from each other, maybe discover that "how I learned it" is sometimes good, sometimes bad.
But let's start with some social skills, not kicking off into every debate with a stretched leg and a red face.23 -
Last year I built the platform 'Tindex'. It was an index of Tinder profiles so people could search by name, gender and age.
We scraped the Tinder profiles through a Tinder API which was discontinued not long ago, but weird enough it was still intact and one of my friends who was also working on it found out how to get api keys (somewhere in network tab at Tinder Online).
Except name, gender and age we also got 3 distances so we could calculate each users' location, then save the location each 15 minutes and put the coordinates on a map so users of Tindex could easily see the current location of a specific Tinder user.
Fun note: we also got the Spotify data of each Tinder user, so we could actually know on which time and which location a user listened to a specific Spotify track.
Later on we started building it out: A chatbot which connected to Tinder so Tindex users could automatically send a pick up line to their new matches (Was kinda buggy, sometimes it sent 3 pick up lines at ones).
Right when we started building a revenue model we stopped the entire project because a friend of ours had found out that we basically violated almost all terms.
Was a great project, learned a lot from it and actually had me thinking twice or more about online dating platforms.
Below an image of the user overview design I prototyped. The data is mock-data.51 -
NEVER ACCEPT to be the ONLY DEV in the company who knows the whole product!
I am in the position of being the only one who knows all modules, there are even modules I developed which no one else will be able to maintain as soon as I leave the company, which I am planning right now and this also makes me getting depressed about.24 -
I have a teacher that does nothing but reading from powerpoint slides.
Wrote a script that does a better job.19 -
The creation of an e-ink usb stick showing how much space is in use was to this day one of the best things lexar ever did.19
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This is a view from a rooftop in NYC that I sometimes get the pleasure to work from. I really like the view and it’s pretty quiet usually. It also overlooks one of my favorite buildings, the Empire State Building.
I’m looking forward to seeing everyone else’s desks, setups, and remote/outdoor workspaces.
We’ll be featuring them on our recently launched devRant Instagram account, devDesks (https://www.instagram.com/devdesks).35 -
My girlfriend knows what a coder needs when it’s their birthday. Lucky to have her. Walked into my room and it was set up like this.51
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Management : "How long you think it would take?"
Me : "now this is a rough estimate, but I think building the back-end and database alone could take 6-months minimum"
Management : "WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? YOU ARE NOT SERIOUS"
me : "its a big proj..."
Management : "I thought it will be something like 10 days, already told the client it can be done"
me : "but we are not ready"
Management : "how are we not ready? we already have the virtual 3D shop, and we can use this ready-to-deploy eCommerce service as our data base "
... "you need to figure this out, this is not acceptable" he continued
* 2 Days Later -talking to my direct boss *
Boss : "since you don't know how to do it..."
me : "what ? I didn't say I can't do it, all I said it will take six months"
Boss : "yeah yeah, anyway there is this studio, a professional polish studio, we called them and they can do it, we will sign a contract with them, this will let you focus on the front-end. good?"
me : "well alright then"
Boss : "please write a doc, explaining everything needed from the backend"
-to me that was the end of it, took a long time to tell me they made the deal-
* 5 Months later *
- "Abdu, can you come here for a minute..."
- "yes boss?"
- "the document we asked you to do for the Polish studio, did you specify that we needed an integration with the API we are using for eCommerce?"
scared to death I answered : "why of course I did!"
I ran to my PC to check it out because I didn't know, I forgot because no one even comment on my doc. I check it out, and it was clearly explained... I got relaxed...
turns out they didn't even do what we asked them for. took them 5 months, and with no communication whatsoever. all their work was useless to us. complete dump waste.
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never mentioned this until a year later... in a heat of moment when they were asking me to make an impossible task with no men and no time... I reminded them of this story... management didn't like it. but it was the truth. they didnt push this crazily this time13