1.) good exercise for brain
2.) like the abstraction
3.) like building things from mental constructs

First time having 2 monitors and actual full size desk inside my own apartment. Very liberating and I should take advantage... nothing beats the privacy of your home where you can think uninterrupted!

Found out all my coworkers use light theme... guess I’ll be the oddball then.

Thoughts about System76 laptops?

Does anyone else buy something expensive and feel like you have to be super productive to justify the expense? I just bought a new laptop and feel like I should step my game up with my study time before it arrives haha. I do this every time I buy something whether it’s a book, clothes or tech.

Didn’t want people staring at a random coding problem so I converted the board to something relevant to the event hehe

Probably teaches you advanced ways to store passwords as plain text

Have to choose between RPA developer or android... any thoughts?

Is it just me or does anyone else get more worn out from the meeting a than the actual technical shit... being introverted and having to do so many meetings a day is exhausting

Me: “I think I’ll check linkedin today”

Clicks on video: “... good perspective on growth and blockchain micro service apis that leverage ML models for understanding interfaces that welcome scalability within a agile environment...”

Me: *jumps out window*

Sadly took me a little longer than I’d like to admit to go from well placed print statements to using a debugger. Granted there are times when print statements are needed, but for all the devs out there who are using an IDE with a perfectly good debugger and yet doesn’t use it... please use it. It literally gives you a mapping of all objects and data types around a break point that you can easily glance at to speed up debugging. Go figure!

Spend 14 hours a week studying more with my free time.

Things to be studied:

-discrete math
-data structures
-algorithms
-coding challenges
-problem defining
-abstraction
-other relevant maths

Other things I want to improve:

-confidence at work
-reaching out to teams with questions
-social skills
-time management
-enjoying the little things
-patience
-consistency (with everything above)

Last big thing would be being more conscious with what type of data/platforms I am digesting everyday. Just like a good diet I want to get in the habit of consuming “good” useful content that’s thought provoking or knowable rather than fast food social media carbs

Wish everyone a productive New Year!

Have a question for more seasoned developers/techies in the industry. I started my first software development job 7 months ago and I am contract to hire. There’s only two developers (including myself) on my team and we’ve been working on two separate projects that’s apart of a bigger system. He was a contractor but because our company took too long to get back to him about converting he interviewed and accepted an offer at Amazon (don’t blame him). Now I have to take over his project as well as mine which would be overwhelming to say the least... our team is almost entirely remote so it can be difficult to communicate sometimes and our company is heavy in process so development moves slow. Should I start looking for other opportunities or should I stick it out and gain experience even though the workload is unrealistic?

What's the size of the devRant family currently at? And what's your hopeful projects for 2019? @dfox

@AlexDeLarge

Interviewed for a Mid/Senior developer role and finally got feedback. The company feels I'm not experience enough for the senior role but think I'm a good fit for the company. Bad thing is they don't have any entry level positions available. I honestly feel like I am ready for a mid level role and maybe even a senior role. They say to keep considering them while they try to get approval for entry level position, but this is a massive company and who knows how long that will take. Recruiter said it's not a no, just not a right now. /:

Oh and going off my last rant, I found out that the senior dev was wrong about set interception being '|' in python, I found out that it's actually a method called interception(set). So even the senior dev didn't know off the top of his head. /:

Have some projects in GitHub but my biggest one is a private repo I'm doing the entire backend and even frontend. Can't share that repo or share details because it's a project a friend (his idea) and I are planning on releasing. (:

Overall feeling pretty bummed because I was looking forward to steady work that'll improve my skills even further... I'm self taught so it's a bit tougher to land interviews because of the automated process most companies have with resume filtering. ):

Going to keep doing small contracted projects until I land another interview. In the meantime trying to keep my spirit up. (:

So I did an interview today and the problem was given a = 1 2 3 and b = 2 3 write code that finds the common elements.

I asked what the data structures are and they said it can be whatever so I said cool then we can use sets and do an interception to get unique elements.... this was in Python... but for the life of me I couldn't remember what the intercept notation was... and brought that up hoping they're give me a hint haha.

So I ended up writing a 8-9 line solution for what could've been a one liner fml: return a | b.

All because I didn't know the notation and still needed to give them something. Painful to write when I knew I was reinventing the wheel. Sign

I almost never use sets so this was heartbreaking hopefully I still get an offer!

How bad of a fail is this in y'all opinion?

Russ: "Life's barely long enough to get good at one thing"
Marty: "If that long."
Russ: "Yeah, so be careful what you get good at."

-True Detective season 1

Love the writing in season 1. Very raw and to the point.

At the club, only one sitting... will spectate and bring intel when possible... think I'm spotted will report asap

What's better for finding candidates for a development role: having the candidate solve a complex whiteboard problem or have the candidate refactor some code (maybe a couple of small modules) while explaining as he/she goes through each step?

I personally feel both are good, but I think refactoring is a very much needed skill when you're dealing with the complexity of millions and millions lines of code, so being able to change your inital design to make it more readable and flexible later on is crucial. And refactoring usually goes hand and hand with having tests in place.

An interesting exercise would be to give the candidate a test suite with the corresponding code that's tested in a working state and let the candidate decide how much refactoring needs to be done. In the process the candidate would need to break and fix tests of course while changing things... it'll give a good measure of their ability to take code and change it to a "better" state of design and flexiblity.

On the other hand I do think there is a place for cliche white boarding problems because it really shows one willingness to tackle complex problems which do arise in most development jobs. Asking the questions and being persistent goes along way and can really help when you're collaborating with other developers to solve an issue at hand.

Overall I think there should be a white board problem, but I don't think that should be the deciding factor. Rather couple it with other very practical skills you should have as a developer already; among those being refactoring.

Got a call from Google!

Asked for two months to study: Discrete mathematics, Calculus, introductions to algorithms, design patterns, CTCI and linux/unix OS workings in general.

I know I'll be banging my head against the wall and I don't have my expectations too high. But regardless I feel like this is a good excuse to speed up my studies and push myself in the direction I want to go already. It'll be a win-win even if I don't land the position because I'll definitely gain a ton in the process of preparing.

I will be expose to all of this material (except for calculus because I've been learning it for a couple of months) for the first time so I know it'll be a challenge and I am looking forward to it.

If any of you have any tips on good study habits that'll be much appreciated; I currently like to read most of my material and supplement with videos/tutorials... Khan is great but they lack material on discrete mathematics unfortuantely. Thanks in advance!

Wish me luck (:

Prospects of AI developments making software developers obsolete.

Thoughts, opinions and quibbles.

Wordpress for E-Commerce? Is this a practical thing to do... I am certainly not a WP user but thought it was cool to construct a bloggling site or something else similar, but E-Commerce? Maybe on a small scale, but I can't see a big sophistcated shopping center being effective with wordpress? What are your thoughts? Secruity issues with plugins ect?

How experienced is some one at front end if they use Wordpress for every site? Genuine question because I've never used it and usually create my templates and design (not very good but hey I'm not frontend) from scratch.

For you metal coders:

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

If you haven't heard this album yet it's worth a listen.

Devrantron for desktop recommend 10/10

CHECK IT OUT

Spending days on a recursion problem and never solving it. That was a low time for me-especially when I looked at how short and elegant the solution was online. I've recovered now and have gotten better at it, but damn that's one thing I need master or it'll haunt me to I die.

Pro whiteboard interviews or against?

Umm Trello tells you specifically if the password is wrong... /:

Wow spent another 20-25 mins mapping out the stack calls to see why varchar was trying to be converted to Nchar which isn't supported and found in my mapper class one fucking method had rs.getNString() which I swear I never touched the mapper class since I made it and was working just fine!!!! I swear IntelliJ is straight up fucking with me