I have been a mobile developer working with Android for about 6 years now. In that time, I have endured countless annoyances in the Android development space. I will endure them no more.
My complaints are:

1. Ridiculous build times. In what universe is it acceptable for us to wait 30 seconds for a build to complete. Yes, I've done all the optimisations mentioned on this page and then some. Don't even mention hot reload as it doesn't work fast enough or just does not work at all. Also, buying better hardware should not be a requirement to build a simple Android app, Xcode builds in 2 seconds with a 8GB Macbook Air. A Macbook Air!

2. IDE. Android Studio is a memory hog even if you throw 32GB of RAM at it. The visual editors are janky as hell. If you use Eclipse, you may as well just chop off your fingers right now because you will have no use for them after you try and build an app from afresh. I mean, just look at some of the posts in this subreddit where the common response is to invalidate caches and restart. That should only be used as a last resort, but it's thrown about like as if it solves everything. Truth be told, it's Gradle's fault. Gradle is so annoying I've dedicated the next point to it.

3. Gradle. I am convinced that Gradle causes 50% of an Android developer's pain. From the build times to the integration into various IDEs to its insane package management system. Why do I need to manually exclude dependencies from other dependencies, the build tool should just handle it for me. C'mon it's 2019. Gradle is so bad that it requires approx 54GB of RAM to work out that I have removed a dependency from the list of dependencies. Also I cannot work out what properties I need to put in what block.
4. API. Android API is over-bloated and hellish. How do I schedule a recurring notification? Oh use an AlarmManager. Yes you heard right, an AlarmManager... Not a NotificationManager because that would be too easy. Also has anyone ever tried running a long running task? Or done an asynchronous task? Or dealt with closing/opening a keyboard? Or handling clicks from a RecyclerView? Yes, I know Android Jetpack aims to solve these issues but over the years I have become so jaded by things that have meant to solve other broken things, that there isn't much hope for Jetpack in my mind 😤

5. API 2. A non-insignificant number of Android users are still on Jelly Bean or KitKat! That means we, as developers, have to support some of your shitty API decisions (Fragments, Activities, ListView) from all the way back then!

6. Not reactive enough. Android has support for Databinding recently but this kind of stuff should have been introduced from the very start. Look at React or Flutter as to how easy it is to make shit happen without any effort.

7. Layouts. What the actual hell is going on here. MDPI, XHDPI, XXHDPI, mipmap, drawable. Fuck it, just chuck it all in the drawable folder. Seriously, Android should handle this for me. If I am designing for a larger screen then it should be responsive. I don't want to deal with 50 different layouts spread over 6 different folders.

8. Permission system. Why was this not included from the very start? Rogue apps have abused this and abused your user's privacy and security. Yet you ban us and not them from the Play Store. What's going on? We need answers.

9. In Android, building an app took me 3 months and I had a lot of work left to do but I got so sick of Android dev I dropped it in favour of Flutter. I built the same app in Flutter and it took me around a month and I completed it all.
10. XML.

If you're a new dev, for the love of all that is good in this world, do NOT get into Android development. Start with Flutter or even iOS. On Flutter and build times are insanely fast and the hot reload is under 500ms constantly. It's a breath of fresh air and will save you a lot of headaches AND it builds for iOS flawlessly.

To the people who build Android, advocate it and work on it, sorry to swear, but fuck you! You have created a mess that we have to work with on a day-to-day basis only for us to get banned from the app store! You have sold us a lie that Android development is amazing with all the sweet treat names and conferences that look bubbly and fun. You have allowed to get it so bad that we can't target an API higher than 18 because some Android users are still using devices that support that!

End this misery. End our pain. End our suffering. Throw this abomination away like you do with some of your other projects and migrate your efforts over to Flutter. Please!

#NoToGoogleIO #AndroidSummitBoycott #FlutterDev #ReactNative

Asperger's/ASD in mild form is an advantage it seems

I wish all of you a really good week. I hope everything works out for you and that you are content with life.

Interviewer: Hello I’m calling for your phone interview now

Dev: You’re about an hour early calling but I can accommodate

Interviewer: Well it’s more convenient for me to do it now

Dev: …Alrighty then.

Interviewer: So I am from HR 😇*pause for effect*

Dev: …

Interviewer: Um, typically candidates start the interview by thanking me for consideration for this role.

Dev: Your job description was very vague so I don’t really know what I would be thanking you for.

Interviewer: 😡. It’s me that’ll be determining whether or not to pass you on to The Management.

Dev: …The Management?

Interviewer: Yes 🤗.

Dev: I’m no longer interested *click*.

developers should stop making Apps for iOS.

Modern English is the JavaScript of natural languages:
1. Abundant, very popular
2. Influenced by god knows how many foreign concepts, historically, especially the modern / USA variant
3. The most popular second language
4. A failed attempt to replace it (and others) with more efficient Esperanto, which is a Dart of natural languages then

It feels like we have a "kickoff meeting" for something every few days.

Maybe we wouldn't have to kick off so often if anyone actually guarded the... goals.

(sorry)

Just went through my first week of working while on chemo. Life is hell and I'm contemplating not being a part of it anymore. It's only going to get worse and worse.

console.log("debug");
.
.
.
console.log("debug1");
.
.
.
console.log("debug2");
- The only way. Try to change my mind

I can't be the only one who didn't know that Linux has a specific command to delete a directory

I've used Linux all my developer career and I never knew the command 'rmdir' existed. I always just used 'rm -rf'

Some people have rubber ducks for debugging. I however, take it a step further and have these 2 ticked-off fuckers

These guys just speak to me

Builded my first avatar. Thanks for all the ++'s..

Christmas lights were blinking randomly IN SECTIONS without any sort of "control brick", just with a plain wall plug and TWO wires coming out of it.

In this house we obey the laws of physics, I immediately called magic on this and started digging. I found out that was like five chains of lights wired in parallel, and every chain contained one special lamp that had a thin plate of some thermal-sensitive material inside. It heats up which makes it go straight, thus breaking its chain until it cools down enough to curl again and make the contacts touch.

Brilliant and really cheap way of making randomly blinking Christmas lights without any kind of controller, with just two wires and some physics. That's what I call "nocode".

Of course a good, long playlist of my personal jams with a beer next to me :)
But reasons to actually get to work:

1. If it's an interesting task and everything goes according to plan, I get a positive feedback loop of motivation.
2. Deadlines.
3. Personal projects are always easier for me to begin with and stay focused on.

Personal projects are also dangerous for me because I keep going back to them until I don't have any motivation to go back to my work projects... Kinda like a double edged sword I guess

Anytime my fucking noisy neighbors stop making shit ass crazy noises like it's a FX set for a sci-fi movie.

*has a great company name idea*
*tries to register domain*
*domain taken*
*looks at whois*
*i already own it*
i don’t know how to feel

If HRs were html tags, they would be <hr>
- purely decorative
- can be easily replaced with css

I lost my sanity and googled ”FUCK YOU XCODE YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT”...

That's how I found devRant.

Mayakovsky, Malevich, Kandinsky and all that art movement.

Too bad was neither bauhaus nor Aalto. My code would’ve been much cleaner but waaaay less expressive, and expression is what I strive for.

I’m proud to announce my collaboration with IZIPIZI France and Carl Zeiss. Enter the Antibouba Glasses!

Any successful public persona knows how important mental hygiene is. Our product is aimed at public personas who are either mentally special or not yet used to haters.

Antibouba glasses work like this:
1. You put them on,
2. You can’t see boubas and anything they broadcast.

Works like a charm with any medium including real life. Also blocks bouba-insinuations of non-bouba people.

Comfortable lightweight frame, highest grade oleophobic coating, also blocks 60% of blue light.

Dm me to make an appointment. Provide your kiki certificate to be included to the shortlist. My telegram is in my bio.

Spilling some tea about devrant ui again. The tea is hidden in the comments. DON’T CLICK YOU CAN’T UNSEE THIS

To all my people who don’t like to code emails (the sane people): there is MJML. It’s an easy, quick and overall the best way to create emails nowadays. You won’t need to learn quirks, you can learn MJML in a day and make pretty much any email you need.

There’s even a vscode live preview plugin, don’t know about other ides though but I’m sure there is something.

LONG LIVE MJML

My mom died when I was 7, after which my dad bought me a Commodore 64 so I had something to lose myself in during the mourning process.

I learned everything about that system, from my first GOTO statement to sprite buffers, to soldering my own EPROM cartridges. My dad didn't deal with the loss so well, and became a missing person 5 years later when I was 12.

I got into foster care with a bunch of strict religious cultists who wouldn't allow electronics in the house.

So I ran away at 14, sub-rented a closet in a student apartment using my orphan benefits and bought a secondhand IBM computer. I spent about 16 hours a day learning about BSD and Linux, C, C++, Fortran, ADA, Haskell, Livescript and even more awful things like Visual Basic, ASP, Windows NT, and Active Directory.

I faked my ID (back then it was just a laminated sheet of paper), and got a job at 15-pretending-to-be-17 at one of the first ISPs in my country. I wrote the firmware and admin panel for their router, full of shitty CGI-bin ASP code and vulnerabilities.

That somehow got me into a job at Microsoft, building the MS Office language pack for my country, and as an official "conflict resolver" for their shitty version control system. Yes, they had fulltime people employed just to resolve VCS conflicts.

After that I worked at Arianespace (X-ray NDT, visualizing/tagging dicom scans, image recognition of faulty propellant tank welds), and after that I switched to biotech, first phytogenetics, then immunology, then pharmacokynetics.

In between I have grown & synthesized and sold large quantities of recreational drugs, taken care of some big felines, got a pilot license, taught IT at an elementary school, renovated a house, and procreated.

A lot of it was to prove myself to the world -- prove that a nearly-broke-orphan-high-school-dropout could succeed at life.

But hey, now I work for a "startup", so I guess I failed after all.

My latest calligraphy isn’t ready yet (ugh!), but I’m proud of this stupid song, so here you go:

https://smule.com/p/...

Complete with cat-bombing cameo!

Okay, which one of you goofballs made IIS?

Why have all that “pRoDuCtiViTy lIfeHacKs” and schedules and workflows when you can just be manic

TL.DR.: Emojis in commit messages + bad commit messages made by Microsoft™ employees.

Yes, I'm looking at you Microsoft. It would be helpful if I can, you know, understand your commit messages instead of trying to guess wtf _that_ emoji means. That is, if it is the same emoji on my machine. We didn't figure that one out yet. And no, "Some 💄 changes ✨" is not a good commit message, even if you interpret it correctly (which depends on your emoji icon set).

idk about you, but that shitty 💄 emoji tends to be (see image) and I happen to associate that with an XLR audio cable. I had to ask someone else to understand a commit message; a message supposed to be explicit—stating what you changed and optionally why you changed it (you can off-load that part to an issue tracker).

Furthermore, that "Some 💄 changes ✨" commit did none of that. "I made cosmetic changes somewhere for some reason without linking to an issue." If you didn't catch that little detail yet: "COSMETIC CHANGES" is vague as fuck. What is a cosmetic change?

* Does a cosmetic change mean adjusting indentation?
* Does it mean deleting unnecessary abstraction to make the code more readable?
* Does it mean refactoring code to add that beauty factor?
* Does it mean all of the above? Or perhaps a specific combination of these?

Human communication is shit enough, don't make it worse than it already is.

I applied for the wrong job for my placement year. Put down COMPSCI on the form (which, it turns out, is computational biology, which I knew nothing about) rather than ITSEC, which was the software dev side of things.

I only found out in the interview, when the first question was asked:

"So Almond, I'm a bit confused as to why you've applied to this role specifically given you've no biology background at all - could you fill us in?"

...errr...

I spewed some kind of crap on the spot about wanting to work in a field where I saw a direct & differing application of computing than I'd seen before, and thought my focus on the technical, rather than the scientific side of things might be an asset to them. This awkward exchange went on for a while - but somehow it seemed to work, because I was offered the job, and decided to take it - had a fantastic year there.

ok, fuck people. i mean the people who talk about things that are a big deal. you don't need to take a course in html/css to build a website, you need documentation.

people act like programming languages are a whole separate literacy. they're not. it is not a big deal, nor an accomplishment of any significance, to learn any language to a basic extent. variables, control flow, functions and scope should not be considered challenging topics, and people should stop bragging about them. i'm pretty sure this is because programming is new. as people, i think when something is new we tend to think of it as more complex and harder to understand. basic programming is not that.

ok that was a tangent from my real point. college is a scam. anyone can learn anything from books and the internet. any time you want to learn about something, go to google, and search "${my topic} site:*.github.io" and you'll have a page about that topic written by someone who is knowledgeable and passionate of the topic. colleges don't teach people how to think like these books/websites do. and i'm fucking sick of people who'd rather see a degree then a portfolio. fuck them shits bro. i can distinct my smart friends because my smart friends speak logically and enjoy becoming smarter. i would take the kid who watches aerodynamics videos on youtube and then built a plane over a kid who studied and got a five on his ap physics exam. watching then doing is better learning than watching and repeating. after all, creativity is not at all measured in our grades, and i'd like to argue that sometimes intelligence isn't even measured. i mean, people can say they're good at math, but the kids who talk about fibinnoci numbers and why there can never be two primes more than 7 (i if i remember properly) integers apart or the ones who prove cryptographic algorithms. i guess what i'm trying to say is the dumb kids aren't dumb and the smart kids aren't smart (well not that) but kids who are passionate and just do something instead of waiting for their degree to do the same thing are the best and brightest. i forgot what i was talking about. sorry it is almost 2 am and i am intoxicated , and i don't believe i got my point across very well either.

My latest "joke-app" has been published yesterday.

I highly doubt that anyone will buy it, but still, I hope someone will!

The whole point, of course, is that you can show off how rich you are by buying this stuff. nothing else.

If anyone is about to tell "rich people will have iPhones" the answer is "the app is only on playstore because I'm not rich at all and don't want to pay Apple, plus if you're really rich, just buy a phone and then buy the app"

https://play.google.com/store/apps/...