Not sure if forums like DevRant ever helped me but it certainly gave me an impression of how work in the industry is. It sort of prepared
me for the bs that I could face and I ended up expecting and managing those situations. This will be both a happy, raw and a grumpy thought. I’m a self taught dev, I failed my education due to a situation outside my control but I always loved programming, it’s mostly because I love solving problems and creating something I feel is my own. Today I’m a core member in a company and I’m also a contractor in my own company. I love the variety of working on my own and I love helping team members, I love organising projects and the experiences others bring help me grow and expand what is literally my life’s passion. I started out as a consultant because someone saw my passion and my experience, they took a chance and well, I can’t say I’ve disappointed them. I just recently got to know into my adult life that I got ADD and meanwhile it probably pushed me out of the normal, it helped me focus on the things I liked. I was 6 years when I wanted to learn programming and I was 10 when I first started learning, I felt like a failure when I was 18 after literally 6 hours a day of learning development each day, I didn’t have a job for several years and when I was 24 - prior to becoming a consultant, someone offered me a job, it was one of those “5 day” interview assignments, where I practically delivered a finished, fully tested project for them. They offered me lowest of pay (15 usd/hr). They took advantage of my situation, put me on a solo project and said it wasn’t good enough because it didn’t fit their preferences after 50 hours of dedicated work without any guidance, specs or meetings. I’d say thanks but I was never considered before I had “experience” by others, I hope I’ll get the chance to give someone that experience before they go through the same as me. I could go on for so long about what I feel is wrong about this industry but one description that continually come up “impostors syndrome”, shut the fuck up if you don’t know what you’re talking about and give even “newbies” a chance. Programming and development is more than experience.

I had a pretty good year! I've gone from being a totally unknown passionate web dev to a respected full stack dev. This will be a bit lengthy rant...
Best:
- Got my first full time employment dev role at a company after being self-taught for 8+ years at the start of the year. Finally got someone to take the risk of hiring someone who's "untested" and only done small and odd jobs professionally. This kickstarted my career, super grateful for that!
- Started my own programming consulting company.
- Gained enough confidence to apply to other jobs, snatched a few consulting jobs, nailed the interviews even though I never practiced any leet code.
- Currently work as a 99% remote dev (only meet up in person during the initialization of some projects.) I never thought working remotely could actually work this well. I am able to stay productive and actually focus on the work instead of living up to the 9-5 standard. If I want to go for a walk to think I can do that, I can be as social and asocial as I want. I like to sleep in and work during the night with a cup of tea in the dark and it's not an issue! I really like the freedom and I feel like I've never been more productive.
- Ended up with very happy customers and now got a steady amount of jobs rolling in and contracts are being extended.
- I learned a lot, specialized in graph databases, no more db modelling hell. Loving it!
- Got a job where I can use my favorite tools and actually create something from scratch which includes a lot of different fields. I am really happy I can use all my skills and learn new things along the way, like data analysis, databricks, hadoop, data ingesting, centralised auth like promerium and centralised logging.
- I also learned how important softskills are, I've learned to understand my clients needs and how to both communicate both as a developer and an entrepeneur.
Worst:
- First job had a manager which just gave me the specifications solo project and didn't check in or meet me for 8 weeks with vague specifications. Turns out the manager was super biased on how to write code and wanted to micromanage every aspect while still being totally absent. They got mad that I had used AJAX for requests as that was a "waste of time".
- I learned the harsh reality of working as a contractor in the US from a foreign country. Worked on an "indefinite" contract, suddenly got a 2 day notification to sum up my work (not related to my performance) after being there for 7+ months.
- I really don't like the current industry standard when it comes to developing websites (I mostly work in node.js), I like working with static websites (with static website generators like what the Svelte.js driver) and use a REST API for dynamic content. When working on the backend there's a library for everything and I've wasted so many hours this year to fix bugs and create workarounds related to dependencies. You need to dive into a rabbit hole for every tool and do something which may work or break something later. I've had so many issues with CICD and deployment to the cloud. There's a library for everything but there's so many that it's impossible to learn about the edge cases of everything. Doesn't help that everything is abstracted away, which works 90% of the time but I use 15 times the time to debug things when a bug appears. I work against a black box which may or may not have an up to date documentation and it's so complex that it will require you to yell incantations from the F#$K
era and sacrifice a goat for it to work properly.
- Learned that a lot of companies call their complex services "microservices". Ah yes, the microservice with 20 endpoints which all do completely unrelated tasks?

Sometimes I just feel like voice chatting/chatting with some random folks but I can't ever find a forum to do it

Anyone else having issues with the devrant app crashing frequently on iOS?

Is knowing how to solve code challenges and whiteboard interviews normal?

What does everyone use to sync/upload/download files to servers? (For files not relevant/necessary to git)

I've used sftp drive, ssh, filezilla but the best solution for me so far has been using torrent syncing (I.e SyncThing). Any other good contenders/suggestions?

After 12 years of having programming as a hobby and getting more than proficient in doing sysadmin work and fullstack development - I finally got my first job interview and test-case!

Company policies when it comes to hiring in Norway is super strict. Being a self-taught developer for over 10 years and I still can't even land an interview because I don't have a formal education. Though this might be because I don't live in the capital and don't have a lot of chances to apply to jobs

I really can't find a good and light open source ecommerce solution that doesn't require Wordpress or any other bloated framework.

I got a small company which I just work as a microelectronics/programming teacher and I want an automated solution where people can order and pay for preconfigured kits.

I usually use Nginx with Nodejs. I had a look at Reaction Commerce however it requires 1.5GB RAM as of now (I got a 512mb RAM server). And I don't see how a few visitors should mitigate the use of such an overpowered solution.

How do other developers do ecommerce solutions without using bloaty software? As of now I'm considering to just create a solution myself with a template engine and an API.

I got in contact with a teacher I had at school many years ago and went to meet him, just generally chatting. He had a job offer to teach some children coding for a week at local library but he didn't have the time to do it alone. A few weeks later and I was the primary tutioner for the course with a bit help from said teacher.

I also had some experience with electronics which I incorporated, blowing some components up, show them Arduino's etc. And I can say most of the children seemed really interested and hopefully a few continued after the course.

Either way, I got a really good reference from the library and got a couple more job offers from both them and some other libraries. Finally got a use for the company I registered in 2014.

Just became an instructor at an microelectronics course, can't even finish a normal course due to social anxiety. Fuck.