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Joined devRant on 8/24/2016
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The first time I realized I wasn't as good as I thought I was when I met the smartest dev I've ever known (to this day).
I was hired to manage his team but was just immediately floored by the sheer knowledge and skills this guy displayed.
I started to wonder why they hired outside of the team instead of promoting him when I found that he just didn't mesh well with others.
He was very blunt about everything he says. Especially when it comes to code reviews. Man, he did /not/ mince words. And, of course, everyone took this as him just being an asshole.
But being an expert asshole myself, I could tell he wasn't really trying to be one and he was just quirky. He was really good and I really liked hanging out with him. I learned A LOT of things.
Can you imagine coming into a lead position, with years of experience in the role backing your confidence and then be told that your code is bad and then, systematically, very precisely, and very clearly be told why? That shit is humbling.
But it was the good kind of humbling, you know? I really liked that I had someone who could actually teach me new things.
So we hung out a lot and later on I got to meet his daughter and wife who told me that he had slight autism which is why he talked the way he did. He simply doesn't know how to talk any other way.
I explained it to the rest of the team (after getting permission) and once they understood that they started to take his criticism more seriously. He also started to learn to be less harsh with his words.
We developed some really nice friendships and our team was becoming a little family.
Year and a half later I had to leave the company for personal reasons. But before I did I convinced our boss to get him to replace me. The team was behind him now and he easily handled it like a pro.
That was 5 years ago. I moved out of the city, moved back, and got a job at another company.
Four months ago, he called me up and said he had three reasons for us to meet up.
1. He was making me god father of his new baby boy
2. That they created a new position for him at the company; VP of Engineering
and
3. He wanted to hang out
So we did and turns out he had a 4th reason; He had a nice job offer for me.
I'm telling this story now because I wanted to remind everyone of the lesson that every mainstream anime tells us:
Never underestimate the power of friendship.21 -
I actually lent a girl an umbrella yesterday which takes the total number of girls I've made wet this year to -1.12
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Colleague was doing something with a switch, wasn't working, he went to get another one:
C: hmm, this one isn't working, I'm gonna get another one.
Me: so you're gonna SWITCH them?
C: 😑😬
😅5 -
This is more just a note for younger and less experienced devs out there...
I've been doing this for around 25 years professionally, and about 15 years more generally beyond that. I've seen a lot and done a lot, many things most developers never will: built my own OS (nothing especially amazing, but still), created my own language and compiler for it, created multiple web frameworks and UI toolkits from scratch before those things were common like they are today. I've had eleven technical books published, along with some articles. I've done interviews and speaking engagements at various user groups, meetups and conferences. I've taught classes on programming. On the job, I'm the guy that others often come to when they have a difficult problem they are having trouble solving because I seem to them to usually have the answer, or at least a gut feel that gets them on the right track. To be blunt, I've probably forgotten more about CS than a lot of devs will ever know and it's all just a natural consequence of doing this for so long.
I don't say any of this to try and impress anyone, I really don't... I say it only so that there's some weight behind what I say next:
Almost every day I feel like I'm not good enough. Sometimes, I face a challenge that feels like it might be the one that finally breaks me. I often feel like I don't have a clue what to do next. My head bangs against the wall as much as anyone and I do my fair share of yelling and screaming out of frustration. I beat myself up for every little mistake, and I make plenty.
Imposter syndrome is very real and it never truly goes away no matter what successes you've had and you have to fight the urge to feel shame when things aren't going well because you're not alone in those feelings and they can destroy even the best of us. I suppose the Torvald's and Carmack's of the world possibly don't experience it, but us mere mortals do and we probably always will - at least, I'm still waiting for it to go away!
Remember that what we do is intrinsically hard. What we do is something not everyone can do, contrary to all the "anyone can code" things people do. In some ways, it's unnatural even! Therefore, we shouldn't expect to not face tough days, and being human, the stress of those days gets to us all and causes us to doubt ourselves in a very insidious way.
But, it's okay. You're not alone. Hang in there and go easy on yourself! You'll only ever truly fail if you give up.32 -
I think I'm going to delete my account.
I browsed through my personal feed, and even though I've spend some time curating, only about 1 in a 100 is a real rant. The rest are memes, mildly funny observations, the kind of programmer humor which is only funny to non-programmers, and bland anekdotes.
And when I post something IN ALL CAPS WITH SOME FUCKING CURSEWORDS AND RAGE IN THERE YOU CUNTS ALL TELL ME TO CALM DOWN AND BE MORE POSITIVE?
What kind of a weak, smoothieslurping mindfulness convention has this community become? Do you guys just want to be a mildly funny reddit clone for easily offended hipsters?
This place was my outlet, my venting space, the spot where I didn't feel alone in frustrations.
I find this new content fucking sickening.56 -
My girlfriend is amazing:
After a long uphill battle trying to finish a huge open source project I started months ago. She noticed I was getting a little deflated.
So she donated a small amount to the donation page to lift my spirits.
She wanted to do it secretly but didn't know that it wasnt anonymous.
The little things spur us on.40 -
Just landed a new job as a developer for a company called NeuraLegion! They use Crystal on their stack, so guess what language I'll be using! But that's not even the best part. They hired me in part because they are using one of my open source Crystal libraries (a NLP library called Cadmium) and like the way I do things. So I am going to be getting paid to work on my FOSS libraries, whist sitting at home in my undies!
Holy shit I'm excited 😂😁7 -
When we finally get to Mars, all programmers on Earth will scream in pain over having to program another timezone13
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*In a team meeting*
Me: *happily jotting down notes in markdown*
Other guy: "Dude what are you doing? Pay attention."
Me: "Umm... I'm taking notes?"
Other guy: "But why does your MS Word have black background?"
Me (a bit lost): "Umm... That's not Word. That's my text editor."
Other guy: "Alright... But how do you convert your notes into Word then?"
Me: "... I don't."
Other guy: *stares at me*
Me: * stare back*
It was a nice conversation.12 -
I'm gonna be honest with you guys.
I need a friend. A real friend. And I'm looking for one (or many) among you.
Is any of you interested in being my friend?
I know, it sounds weird. My inner self bully is bringing to mind many adjectives for saying that: faggot, weak, snowflake, gay, pussy, clingy, demanding.
I know. But I'm at the edge of 30 and I think it's better if I cut the shit and just be very clear about the type of friend I'm looking for.
I need people that will be there when the shit gets tough.
I can joke with you,
I can laugh my ass off with you,
I can passionately argue about what's the better programming language.
But most importantly, I can be there when you're depressed, when you want to punch your boss in the face, when you're griefing a loved one that is gone.
And that exactly what I'm looking in a friend.
I used to have friends in life, but a variety of circumstances caused some distance: commitments, personality changes, physical distance, or just a feeling that they don't give two shits about me.
Am I the perfect friend? Not at all. I have a temper and am quite opinionated about my tools, but most of the times I try to be a not-asshole.
I might get angry and be very honest when I don't like something, but it would be very weird for me to turn my back on a friend.
It is impossible for someone to be friends with and to like everyone. But the least I can do is just give anyone a chance.
I think friendships are just things that take time and grow if there is enough care put into them.
Here's my discord chirptune#1829, so if you add me, please let me know your username here.
I think it'd be cool to have like a brotherhood on discord or slack of people looking out for each other (jesus christ, that sounds corny as fuck)
Not to rob people from devrant, I just think that the board style can't fulfill deeper social needs imo, that's all.18 -
When I hear that “you don’t have to use semicolons in Kotlin / Go / whatever” uttered with such excitement and relief, I am astonished. Semicolons are a problem now? Were they ever a problem?10
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my_girlfriend: who do you like more in your life?
me: linux
my_girlfriend: What????
me: you asked who i LIKE not Who i LOVE?
my_girlfriend: ok, who do you LOVE?
me: python
i dont know why she left me, i think she was php fan18 -
Sales employee Bob wants a clickable blue button.
Bob tells product owner Karen about his unstoppable desire for clickable blue buttons.
Karen assigns points for potential and impact (how much does a blue button improve Bob's life, how many people like Bob desire blue buttons)
Karen asks the button team how hard it is to build a button. The button team compares the request to a reference button they've built before, and gives an ease score, with higher score being easier (inverse of scrum points).
These three scores are combined to give a priority score. The global buttonbacklog is sorted by priority.
Once every two weeks (a "sprint") the button team convenes, uses the ease scores to assign scrum points. Difficult tasks are broken up into smaller tasks, because there is a scrum point upper limit. They use the average of the last 5 sprints to calculate each developer's "velocity".
The sprint is filled with tasks, from the top of the global button backlog, up to the team's capacity as determined by velocity. Approximate due dates are assigned, Bob is a happy Bob.
What if boss Peter runs into the office screaming "OUR IMPORTANT CLIENT WANTS A FUCKING PINK BUTTON WHICH MAKES HEARTS APPEAR"?
Devs tell boss to shut the fuck up and talk to Karen. Karen has a carefully curated list of button building tasks sorted by priority, can sedate boss with valium so he calms the fuck down until he can make a case for the impact and potential of his pink button.
Karen might agree that Peter's pink button gets a higher priority than Bob's blue button.
But devs are nocturnal creatures, easily disturbed when approached by humans, their natural rhythms thrown out of balance.
So the sprint is "locked", and Peter's pink button appears at the top of the global backlog, from where it flows into the next sprint.
On rare occasions a sprint is broken open, for example when Karen realizes that all of the end users will commit suicide if they don't have a pink heart-spawning button.
In such an event, Peter must make Bob happy (because Bob is crying that his blue button is delayed). And Peter must make the button team of devs happy.
This usually leads to a ritual involving chocolate or even hardware gift certificates to restore balance to the dev ecosystem.23 -
This was my first freelancer project. Just dropped out of school, i think i was 17. No money, no proper hardware, i had a very old laptop & stolen wifi from our neighbor. I lived in a very small room at my mom’s flat, she wanted me out as soon as i turn 18. At the time my plan was to work on freelancer stuff and make my own games. “It will be fine, fuck school, who needs school? 😂“ I haven’t really finished anything back then, so i only had a few wip hobby projects to show ppl as my references. I saw a freelancer job posting. The task was to make a simple quiz game for mobile, it paid 350$. Back then that was a lot of money for me so i took it. I met the client, he said “2-3 week tops, i send you everything, you do the code” Cool. I finally had a “job”😃. The 2-3 weeks turned into a 8 month blur of all-nighting and just implement one more thing and its finished. I did not really have any experience on how to deal with clients and i really needed this project to finally have something on my porfolio. I motivated myself with “if i can finish this i can finish anything”. I think the story of my most definitive all-nighting was 3 months into the development. I finally got everything from the client so it was like just put it together and its done. The client wanted 300 levels, beeing a noob i was i started making all the 300 unity scenes by hand, aligning the pictures, the ui, testing each level, making adjustments to the code, etc.. after a really long night and a fuckton of caffeine i was done. I sent it to the client at around 9 am and gone to sleep. When i woke up i checked my emails to saw this: Cool! But can we do hints? (wich needed a fuckton of rework of my code) I think i had my first mental breakdown while working on the project. After that he wanted more modifications and because i made every level by hand i had to remake all of them like 10 times 😂
But in the end it turned out positive, he really helped me to start my carrier, we became sord of friends and the project gave me a lot of confidence and experience on how to deal with stuff when shit goes wrong because everything that can go wrong in a project gone wrong. It was the most valuable developer lesson. Plus it sounds so cool to say “i was born in development hell, b*tch!”🕶
I attached a pic of the laptop i worked on 😂
Thanks for reading 😃32 -
YOU CAN'T JUST SWAP THESE DATES AROUND WITHOUT TELLING US AND EXPECT IT TO BE FINE, YOU USELESS FUCKING SKIDMARK!
... ahem ... sorry about that, just needed to vent ... as you were1 -
Thought of this but no one would truly get it anywhere else...
Family myFamily = new Family();
myFamily.add("husband", "Sept 2011");
myFamily.add("wife", "Sept 2011");
myFamily.add("cat", "July 2012");
myFamily.add("child", "August 2019");13 -
True history... (I find in twitter)
⠀ ⠀ ⠀⠀ (\__/)
⠀ (•ㅅ•) my mentor defending
_ノ ヽ ノ\ _ my code to the team
/ `/ ⌒Y⌒ Y ヽ
( (三ヽ人 / |
| ノ⌒\  ̄ ̄ヽ ノ
ヽ___>、___/
|( 王 ノ〈 (\__/)
/ミ`ー―彡 \ (•ㅅ•) me2