My parents (mom and grandma) helped me buy my first PC. I had some money saved from mowing lawns and they supplemented the rest. Mom, a library director, got a bunch of DOS and Assembler and BASIC books and encouraged me to teach myself.

That turned into computer camps and helping with tech at the library and school. That turned into a computer science and aerospace scholarship to college where I learned C and Unix.

That turned into a degree in business information systems and a career in web development.

19 more years to go and I can retire.

I was assigned a task to troubleshoot some buggy code. I am a developer and I don’t know how to get started. Does anyone else experience this kind of anxiety? Where you’re asked to apply your skills and suddenly your brain just shuts down and you feel like you know exactly nothing? I’m older than most coders in my field. Onset of some kind of brain disorder?

I need to have a hosting company upgrade the Debian OS install on a VPS. But I also need to know things like what MySQL or Perl modules were added to the server by other admins prior to me outside the /home directory. I don't have any documentation on it at all. If I don't preserve custom stuff like that, it could result in a dead website. Anyone got any tricks for figuring out what was added and when?

Super depressed rn and nobody to talk to about it. Stupid life problems. Can’t seem to learn new tech so if I lost my job I’d have to switch to landscaping or something. Can’t talk normal with people without someone taking offense at something I never dreamed could be offensive (stupid cancel culture) or trying to shut me down. Friends ending friendships and family cutting me out of their lives without communication as to why. My kids just don’t seem to care about anything I have to try to teach or share with them anymore. Nothing I do seems to matter to anyone or make a difference even when I’m trying to do good things for people. I don’t want to take my life but tbh if COVID got me I wouldn’t even be mad. I’d embrace it as my get out of jail free card.

My daughter made me two things:
1) She found a rock in the shape of an “alien” head. Knowing I love to research UFOs, she used nail polish to decorate the rock like an alien. And I just love it!

2) I have a reputation for being just like Charlie Brown with my luck in life. I also suck at math. Like, really, really bad. I was diagnosed with dyscalculia 22 years ago. It’s a running joke at our house such that I even have the t-shirt she depicts me wearing in this painting of “me” she did for my birthday.

I have an opportunity to speak to a large and well mixed group of web designers and developers plus _clients_ of designers and developers. Part of what I want to cover is what affects the client/professional relationship and project(s) in both positive and negative ways. I want to include your (dev/designer) real world perspective on that. So, please share a positive and/or negative client behavior or experience that typifies how hard it is to work with some clients and/or easy it is to work with others. If you have a solution that works well for bad situations, I’d love to add that to my presentation as well. THANKS!

I’m so frustrated and I don’t know whether to blame my 2015 Mac, Audacity, both, or my present inability to be able to afford a new Mac because EVERYTHING/EVERYONE IN MY HOUSE IS BREAKING, NEEDS THERAPY OR BRACES, AND LIFE IS NOTHING BUT EXPENSES!

I had just finished tediously transferring, restoring, and trying to export tracks from some old cassette I had of a jazz concert I played in years ago. Audacity froze because my Mac is now apparently underpowered at 8GB of RAM. But Audacity autosaves and on restart usually can restore you back to where you left off. So I tried to force quit it.

I couldn’t even force quit the stupid app and had to totally restart. I think that ruined whatever autosave I had because it could only restore half of the work I’d done. Another freeze finished off the Audacity project, making it TOTALLY BLANK AND WORTHLESS. I just deleted the whole damned thing and will have to start over. I WAS MINUTES AWAY FROM BEING DONE AFTER HOURS OF WORK!!!!!

Now the Mac wants to update to a supplemental release. With each release this expensive boat anchor gets slower and slower.

I just wanna throw all tech out the window. Every damned thing is planned obsolescence in 2 years and made in China anymore and I HATE giving that totalitarian regime any more of my money. Apple is complicit. ALL computer companies are. They could just bring the jobs back here and walk the walk, but they’re all talk.

After years of only breaking even or low profitability BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE CHEAPSKATES WHO THINK WHAT I DO IS EASY AND SHOULD BE FREE OR $5 OR WHATEVER AND FRIENDS I DID WORK FOR FOR FREE TOTALLY ABANDONED OUR FRIENDSHIP AFTERWARDS FOR STUPID MISUNDERSTANDINGS ON THEIR PART I closed down my web dev business and now focus only on full time employment. I don’t even do sites for friends anymore.

But did that stop people who before wanted to haggle prices from now BEGGING me to go back into business or to help their referral or to please-pretty-please just help them with one more problem?

Nnnnnnope!

And even now I hate disappointing people and telling them no even though I know they’ll have tiny budgets and will stall and delay and not deliver content or make decisions so I can finish and GET PAID.

WTF IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE? WTF IS WRONG WITH ME?! AND WHERE WERE ALL THESE OPPORTUNITIES WHEN FEWER PEOPLE WERE INTERESTED IN MY SERVICES?!

What would you say to an employer offering a job at a starting point of only a percentage of the top salary you'll earn once the project is finished? Let's say they offered to pay you $40k to work full time building a highly complex website with multiple API integrations and sophisticated estimate calculation workflows, plus you'd be doing marketing and copywriting, with a goal of achieving 300 signups a day. In the middle of the project they boost the pay to, say, $60k salary rate. At the 12 month mark, which is the final "launch" date anticipated (and onward), you get $100k/year and you're the only person paid to do All The Things.

Oh, and also, the previous person they hired to do it failed to deliver and was let go.

Would you turn that down because to earn so little at first on the speculation that the venture will be a success and that you'll eventually get to the $100k level, plus their failure with the previous person, is too much of a gamble? Asking for a friend. ;)

What's an "old language" that has had significant momentum, but has also had its day and really needs to just go away now and be replaced by something else? FORTRAN? COBOL? BASIC? Any others?

No matter how hard you try to cover every requirement, there will always be at least one you missed, if not 100.

I need to code up a basic API/JSON consumption script and I literally just can’t bring myself to do it because I’m afraid to fail at doing it right. What is WRONG with me?! Am I the only person who goes through this kind of self-sabotage?

Everyone’s a remote worker at our company by default. Literally no HQ or central physical office to report to. As it should be for most people who are knowledge workers or coders. Why commute and pollute and all that nonsense? It doesn’t make sense anymore for a lot of people like us.

I would really like to know the backstory on why Boeing just completely skipped integration testing on a craft designed to carry humans to the ISS. This seems particularly egregious and is an indicator of just how comfortable companies get when they’ve entrenched themselves with government largesse. https://orlandosentinel.com/space/...

Maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm the Charlie Brown of development and Lucy with the football is the XAMPP/MAMP/WAMP software in this world. EVERY. TIME. I. TRY. TO. SPIN. THIS. UP. IT. FAILS. It doesn't matter which tutorial I follow for which technology stack or CMS, the result is always the same. Something about the database or htaccess or some other stupid setting makes it impossible for me to create a simple dev environment on my system.

I have been doing this dance for 24 YEARS NOW!!!! The original programmer of Apache is a 2nd-degree acquaintance who used to be available to help me with this, but no more. I feel like a complete and utter failure as a web developer every time I try to set up XAMPP, and, the rare times I've succeeded and gotten a basic CMS up and running, I fail again and again with all these build/run/task tools I'm now supposed to be using. After a week of fiddling with my local dev environment, I give up and delete it all. I go right back to on-server development "the old fashioned way". WHY!? WHY IS THIS SO HARD?

I'm stepping on rakes here and about to quit. I'm probably just too OLD and STUPID for all these stacks and frameworks and tools and maybe even for this career now. I should probably quit and become a "facilities manager" at a tech firm somewhere, cleaning up the bathrooms and sweeping floors and watching all these young geniuses tut-tut about "Poor StackODev. I hear he had 24 years as a web developer, but then he snapped and he's never been the same."

Have you ever gotten so frustrated with coding and dealing with constant churn and issues and stupid people that you just wanna burn it all down and start a whole new career in a completely different field?

What do you hate about software and developer tutorials and how would you change them? What would totally disrupt the status quo with tutorials and make them easier to finish/useful/memorable/fun?

Before you fire me and delete me as admin from managing your website, also be sure to check on and have me transfer to you the third-party stuff, like Cloudflare or Mailchimp. Remember how I had to set these up on my own on your behalf (because you don't know what you're doing and those alerts would disappear into your unmanaged inbox)? Think first to make sure you have full control over your WHOLE site. You see, what happens when I delete those accounts is no longer my problem once I walk out the door.

I built a fairly simple database and website to showcase school curriculum “reader” books searchable and sortable by levels of difficulty and other metadata. I didn’t think much of it when I was building it but apparently it won the company a few million bucks in revenues once it launched. The big wigs rewarded that by selecting me as one of a few folks that got to go to a big corporate retreat in the Bahamas. This was before the company management went to crap and stopped incentivizing innovations at the employee level.

Weeks later and I’m still watching a former client/friend completely thrash his own website trying to do what I had been doing for him. When I built the thing, I did so in anticipation of him wanting to take it over so I made it as easy as possible. All we needed to do was have a one hour or less meeting to go over some particulars and he would’ve been golden. But, no, he deleted my access and tried to go it on his own. If he EVER comes back begging to have me fix his problems, I swear I’m going to have the biggest belly laugh of my existence right in his face. No. Freaking. Way.

1. Fire all of my clients, including ungrateful friends I’ve done free work for
2. Shut down my business
3. Maybe start a new business, or completely switch careers to something more interesting
4. Keep working my full time job which, miraculously, allows me lots of time to keep screwing around with my own career and entrepreneurial goals
5. Keep saving and investing so I can retire and travel well before I have to wear adult diapers and walk with a cane

Thought this might be useful to some of you having trouble with cheap clients.

I have a 16 year old son who is off-and-on showing interest in learning electronics. He wants to work for NASA someday. I’ve looked at dozens of Arduino and Raspberry Pi kits but I feel like he would benefit not so much from “mostly done for him” types of kits that are more like toys, but the kind that teach more fundamentals like resistors, capacitors, transistors, relays, etc. In other words, knowing first what the principles are behind the fancier kits. Do any of you have a recommendation of kits that start with the fundamentals, but that can still be inspiring and engaging?

Watching someone screw up their own website...

The one you did for them for free because you're good friends...

Who then kicks you to the curb and "unfriends" you IRL over some stupid misunderstanding...

Well, it's time to pop some popcorn, kick back, and watch that dumpster fire from afar. https://gph.is/2p6q53C

Building sites for friends as a favor. You’d think I’d have learned by now that this is an eventual friendship killer. And if the site isn’t the friendship killer, when a friendship goes bad, the site becomes like a kid in a custody dispute. In my case, I’m happy to turn the kid over, but you gotta pay attention to what I tell you about him because when he misbehaves, you’re not gonna want to seek me out for a solution.

I finally have a quiet Saturday to record a tutorial video for a client. I begin recording the video and every damn lawn mower in my neighborhood starts up simultaneously. The universe is _absolutely_ conspiring against me.

*Website exists*

Client: “I should be rich by now. Please fix.”

Me: “... Did you do any ... marketing?”

Client: “I don’t have money for marketing. That’s what the website is for.”

I got hired to run an A/B test between a competitor landing page and a new page. While I didn’t do the new page initial design, I did advise on and completed its final tweaks. The result was a 430% increase in leads generated over the original.

I've been using Git since 2014. So why do I STILL cringe whenever I have to revert commits or do a hard reset back to HEAD? What's going to disappear? What will remain? Will my entire Git history be vaporized? It's a total game of Russian Roulette to me. So, without the certainty level I want, I just do what feels safer...I grab the versions of the files I think are what I need and stick them back into my repo, then git status and commit the correct changes back in.

Discussion forum software: what is the most stable and secure as well as regularly updated package out there?