WebStorm

Because fuck looking for missing semicolons in a text editor.

#changemymind

Heading out to see family tomorrow. My Christmas wish this year is for my dad to not ask me to repair his computer.

I have a Ubuntu thumb-drive to solve all his troubles anyways. :D

Happy Holidays everybody.

Arch I want to love you. But you're so freaking unstable and I just want to code in peace without you freaking out every week about config files being screwed up. Why can't we have the stability of more mainstream distros AND the Pacman package manager + AUR? Some of us have to code for a living you know.

I'm really tempted to just go back to Debian to set it and forget it. PPA's be damned.

For everybody who's had to start job hunting for their first real programming job, I have a few questions.

Is starting to apply for jobs 4-5 months ahead a good idea or is it better to wait it out with a 2-3 month time frame? I'm graduating in June 2019.

Is it better to apply for jobs with a search field of "junior developer" or to be more specific like "Jr Java web dev/Jr node.js"?

I know a lot of job descriptions are just company wishlists and not real indicators of skill. I have enough job experience to know how that part of the world works.

My aim is to try for Chicago(go Cubs) or New England, maybe Boston or NYC. I'd say I have a better shot with Chicago being just a 4 hour drive from home base. But, you never know. This is my first real shot at a job in this field so I'm trying to keep my expectations in check.

Hopefully I can get something to work before rumblings of the 2020 election start in my home state. 🙄

College Senior Thesis is done. Wrote the whole fucker as a Spring Boot Microserivce and my brain is fucking jello after 4 straight months of work.

I need something lightweight, I need something fun to code as I wind down at the end of the year.
I think I'll play around with Node.js and Typescript and learn about this docker thing people keep talking about before I go back to Java exception hell.

I'm not ready to be a Jr Dev next year. I'm too young to work this kind of job for the next 40 years.

Well it's been a while I suppose. Sorry I haven't been around for over a month guys. That's what happens when you're a full-time student with a full-time job.

Unfortunately, or fortunately depending on how you look at it, I need some advice/help. I've been working on a senior thesis project that I'm trying to deploy but I'm going crazy trying to figure out how to do it. It's a Spring Boot Java application built as a micro service. I've tried for the past 5 days to get this sucker working on Cloud Foundry with no luck. I've got a deadline to get this fucking thing live in 2 weeks and I'm getting closer to being in a panic. My question basically is, would it be easier to learn a different service/build my own solution from scratch then trying to fuck around with this? I'd appreciate anyone's advice who's had more experience with deploying Java web applications.

Here's a link to the project if anyone's interested: https://github.com/starrynights89/...

So, I'm really really impressed with London. This place has an amazing history, culture, and the people are great. After visiting Copenhagen, Stockholm, Berlin and now London, I love London the most.

I've never tried to get a visa and my American friends tell me it's hard. Well fuck you I don't care if it's hard. All the better if it gives me a goal in life.

I leave at the end of the week but I swear I'm going to get back here next year. Don't care how hard it is.

Also I saw Alan Turing's Bomb. Pictures below.

That moment when you wanted to see Big Ben since you were 8 and it's under renovations. 🤬😭

Man you guys don't pay as good as America but I'm seriously ready to say fuck it and try it out here for a few years.

London feels like a calmer version of New York or my native Chicago. I'm starting to get tempted to work here.

Going out to London for my second week of vacation. Hope it doesn't rain much and your beer is as good as you claim it to be. 😝

Well, I made a choice in life.

I'm going to stay and work in America after I graduate. In spite of all the shit talking I've done about its work ethics, benefits, politics, and culture.

This place is still home.

After trying out a trip to Europe for a few weeks I can't handle the idea of being 4,500 miles away from family and what few friends I have. I figured out what was true the whole time: I wanted to run away from my past. Breakups, a failed marriage proposal, a dead end job that I put up with only because I need to graduate. I've been angry and depressed over these things, but running away won't fix it.

I need to face reality and own up to it. I'll get a job as a developer in the states through hell or high-water.

Finally on vacation.

As an American the first surprise I got in Berlin is that Burger King serves beer. Never seen that ever back home. (Okay I was in Denmark on a plane but it still was cool darn it)

I've been thinking for the year about working here, but now that I showed up the idea is scaring me a bit. Go figure. 😭

I want to see more of Germany beyond Berlin, what do our German natives like here?

No more coding tonight. 10hrs straight today. 😴 My project can host images but the RESTful setup has fucked up my comments API to hell and back.

I think this senior thesis is one of those points where I seriously wonder if I made the wrong career choice. 🤯😬

I started using Google Docs over the weekend working on my thesis paper for my CS degree. I've come to the conclusion that it's a suitable replacement for MS Office and my need for Microsoft's ecosystem. Don't know why I kept paying it for so long.

I promised myself that if I didn't start up a new relationship by September that I would plan to start a new lease in life and move in 2019. The online dating subscription I've used for a few years will cancel at the end of this month.

I used to doubt that fate was real, but times like this make me come close to believing in it. Maybe fate is just one large karmic refactoring.

Holy hell some of you people are crazy. 16 hrs for me. Usually when I get really pissed at a bug and stay up till 5 in the morning to fix it.

He's so smol.

*He's not actually mine but my brother's. I am planning to get a smol after college is over.

Warn: long rant is long

So for the past couple of weeks I've been frustrated/confused over my thesis course with the kids gloves the professor gave us. This week I found out that in actuality this class isn't just for the IT majors, but a mix of Software Engineering majors, IT majors with minors in the SE department (me), and Information System majors who do product management but don't know much about coding anything.

As a result, we have this really strange set of discussions going on where on one hand we have the professor giving the okay to students making a website in !!Wix because they don't know much about HTML and CSS, to students like me busting ass to get a Java/MongoDB/Bootstrap web application off the ground from scratch.

I'm not as nearly upset as a I was, but it's still a really bizarre thing to lump these two departments together and getting it all coherent. The SE and IT majors is a much easier fit as there's so much overlap between the two that it's next to impossible to see any difference, it's the IS majors who are off in their own little world.

One thing is relieving to me from all this. I've realized I didn't need to major in Software Engineering to become a competent software engineer. It's amazing what one can self teach in 2 years to get the equivalent knowledge and skill sets. In the end this makes it all up for when I dropped out Computer Science in my mid 20's.

It's jaw dropping to me how much my perception of the education system for STEM has changed from when I was freshman to being a senior.

Make two of everything. So when one project tanks you can pick up the pieces and improve the second project.

My professor asked me today why I wanted to build my project using OOP.

This is a 480 level course and I have 2 1/2 years experience building well over 30 projects with OOP. And yes, we have students here who are nervous about the idea of using OOP. Nevermind that I and others took two classes on the topic.

I have hit my dispair event horizon. It has to get better from here. 🤯😬🤬🤬🤮☠️

Chrome...

Chome what the hell is this?

In Firefox with my default theme I can tell which tab is open and which one isn't. In Chrome, you put !!white as a highlight over gray.

You have actually managed to design a UI element almost on the same level of terrible as IE6-11, almost.

Why are all my classmates building their web applications in PHP for our thesis? I know it's used a lot but for smaller projects there's tons of better ways to build a web application. Besides myself and another guy in this class (I'm using Java and mongoDB, he's working in ASP.NET and Microsoft SQL), nobody else wants to use something different. We only did PHP in one class so this seriously can't be the only language 2/3rd's the class knows.

Oh God it probably is.

Spring Frameworks and the projects surrounding it such as Spring Boot, Thymeleaf, and recently lombok. Without these API's and frameworks I wouldn't be using Java half as competently as I am.

Development is moving further and further towards containerization and it's a massive time saver.

I'm done fighting with my professor over my thesis project. They want me to go slower in building my project and we only have 7 weeks to deployment. Well screw you how in the hell do you expect me to prototype, build, bug fix and deploy all this and go SLOWER. YOU AREN'T AIMING TO BE A CAREER DEVELOPER ARE YOU?

I feel really sick this morning. Between the anxiety of graduating soon and my debt...

I just want live for myself. Not the sake of a school or some corporate entity. When this is over I want to work overseas in Europe. Do something for myself for once.

So I moved my full-stack in-progress web application to a docker container to ease development, and it's certainly accomplished that. I can simultaneously run a SQL database, node.js, java, and a Linux server all within my Linux operating system. It's like a mini vm. And when I need to deploy I just deploy it directly with Heroku, no configuring a host manually.

In a way I'm happy with this because it makes both development and deployment much easier, but I'm also sad because I'm basically admitting that I don't have the resources to both learn full-stack and be a linux server wiz.

Has IT gotten so big and complex that you have to compromise how much you can learn at a given time? It seems my limit is at learning 2 languages and 2 frameworks at a time. 😵

Why is it that Browsersync works so much faster and cleaner in Chrome then Firefox. I want to dev in Firefox but Chrome is seriously tempting me with it's faster refresh rate with HTML and JS.

Google I want to hate you and dammit sometimes I just can't. 😫

One squishy Boi to help you after sudo rm -rf / 😂

Sometimes comments are the only defense between me and completely fucking up my HTML editing. Front-end is scary. 😰😭😢

So I've begun working on my senior thesis for college (a full stack Java/node.js application) and a student overheard this and offered to manage my project. He has no idea how to read Java or Javascript.

....You work as a project manager in your day job don't you?

My desk is as crazy as I me. It's kind of a mess but it means I'm productive. Not pictured is Tux, he's coming in the mail.

....I really like IBM hardware. 🤓