As I have a break between uni courses, and I’m bored of C# I thought I’d try learning C++.
I’m working my way through Bjorne Stroustrup’s book at the moment and also have the C++ Primer in my kindle library.

Can anyone recommend any other good sources to learn the language?

What are peoples thoughts on taking a sort of backwards step in their career in order to get more experience?

I took my current job as I thought it would be a stepping stone to go on and do more development work (it was my first dev role), but I’ve been here 4.5 years and I rarely do anything other than maybe fix a bug every now and then.

They mainly have me doing non-dev support type stuff, and they don’t use any best practices or anything like that, and I feel that I am falling behind where I should be experience wise.

I am doing a degree (distance learning with the Open University) so I am working on personal development but that’s not much help when I go to interviews.

Should I think about trying to go for junior jobs, rather than just developer jobs, and the pay cuts that may go with that, or should I just grind out leet code etc and keep booking interviews?

Is it easy to switch to a different type of development?

I.e. going from desktop to web development, or to game development or systems development etc?

I recently got rejected for a couple of jobs I was going for, no dramas they both wanted someone with a bit more experience.

They both returned feedback which I like, much better than getting ghosted.

But one of them said that they didn’t “see any enthusiasm for IT/Technology throughout the interview”

This annoyed me a little as I’m not entirely sure how they measured this I’ve the course of a 40 minute teams meeting. Especially given my work and study history etc.

Has anyone else ever had anything like this given as part of a reason why you didn’t get a job, and if so did you do anything to rectify it or just ignore it as meaningless feedback?

What have you suggested at work which sounded like a good idea at the time, but now sounds like a nightmare?

I inherited a nasty old legacy c# desktop app a few years ago, I was a sql developer so it was a steep learning curve, but I’ve tried to make it better, fixing things as I go.

I had the bright idea of mentioning that I would look at starting to add unit tests etc.

It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now I’m not so sure.

How do you pick a new language to learn?

I am a C# developer and at work I work on desktop apps and legacy web services etc.

I fancy learning something else so I can have a bit of variety when working on personal projects etc.

I am doing a distance learning degree which has used Java and Python so far, with some PHP and JS etc to come later.

I’m drawn to Ruby as I already have experience there, but I was also thinking about looking at Node as that covers back end and front end all using JS which is definitely useful in general as I look at moving to a more web based role.

Can anyone recommend resources on learning/revising big O and big Theta notation?

It’s the one thing that never seems to stick in my head, and the course material provided by university isn’t particularly useful.

First assignment of the algorithms, data structures and computability module Im doing for my degree.

Priority queues can all eat a bowl of dicks.

It’s just an insert method, I can insert a node into an empty queue, I can insert a new node at the start of the queue.

But trying to insert a node into a specific place in the queue is making my brain hurt.

Can anyone recommend some good resources to brush up on Big O notation?

I’ve bought some books etc, but just looking for more information.

I stupidly applied for a job at a FAANG company, and they’ve invited me in for an interview (thought I’d get knocked back at the sifting phase).

How do you decide on what languages and/or frameworks to use in personal projects?

My uni work is done for the summer on Friday and I want to start working on a couple of side projects.

I use c# at work, and this year I’ve been doing Java and next year I’ll be doing python with uni.

There’s a handful of languages I’d like to work with, but I know that I’ll get the best out of picking one language and digging into it, but I’m not sure how to pick the right one.

So after a few struggles on my current uni assignment I’ve come to the realisation I need to change the way I write code, or at least the way I think about the code before I start.

I have a tendency to rush into coding something before I’ve planned it out properly, and over the last couple of days stupid mistakes on my part caused hours of stressing.

Are there any good methods for sitting down and planning stuff like this out, or is it just a case of getting some paper and a pen and writing out the logic etc in whatever way makes sense to you (me)?

Uni assignments can go and eat a bowl of dicks.

Lying recruiters really make my shit itch.

A couple of months ago a recruiter got in touch on linked in as he’d seen my cv on Indeed or somewhere.

He asks what I’m looking for and I tell him I want to move to a more development focused role rather than mosh mash of support, admin and Dev that I do at the moment.

He’s says he’s got just the role at a fairly local software company, and that the role would be at least 90% development blah blah blah.

So I set up a video call, and it immediately becomes clear that they want someone to do support/admin who might get to do a tiny bit of dev (they mainly asked about my experience with HTML) and I could tell they lost interest when I said I was more interested in backend development etc.

They didn’t want to progress the application as I wasn’t what they were looking for, which is fair enough they weren’t what I was looking for either.

But, do recruiters intentionally set out to lie to applicants about what a job is/entails or do they either get duff info from clients, or just not understand the job specs they are given?

I mean it wasted my lunch break (not including calls with the recruiter) and an hour of time for the CEO and Dev from the company.

Working on an assignment for uni, object oriented programming with Java.

Just spent 40 minutes banging my head against the table because I’m a fucking idiot

Can anyone suggest good resources for revising OOP principles etc?

I’m doing a degree with the Open University, and I have an exam at the end of this module, but I’ve not had a proper exam since I left school nearly 20 years ago.

I’ve been getting on OK with the various assignments etc so far, and I have all my text books etc, but I’m worried that’s I’m going to crash and burn come exam time.

People of DevRant who are involved in recruitment.

Eventually I want to look for a new job as a "proper" developer.

I've just started the 2nd level/year of my OU degree and I'll be working on that for another few years.

I won't start looking seriously until after covid etc and the economy has calmed down a bit.

What sort of projects do you recommend someone trying to get their foot in the door should have on their portfolio?

Should it be fully fledged applications like a big tracker/help desk or smaller projects which showcase knowledge of a particular subject e.g. programs that show knowledge of different algorithms etc?

Hi All,

I am currently doing a degree through the Open University. it's a BSc (Hons) in Computing and IT (Software) which is the closest they offer to a full on software engineering degree.

Anyway, I'm not having any second thoughts about it or anything like that, but I was wondering if a degree is going to make that much difference when it comes to applying for jobs when I'm already employed as a developer.

How do you plan your personal projects?

I have a couple of ideas rattling around inside my head, and I know if I just sit down and start typing away something will happen but it'll be crap and I'll end up starting over numerous times before giving up.

But if I try and plan then I end up procrastinating, then other things like work, family, and distance learning degree eat up what little time I have available

What are people's thoughts on having a personal website/portfolio?

I've set one up on GitHub pages with my custom URL, mainly to host SQL tutorials etc that I make, but do employers look at them?

How do you diagnose speed issues?

I've been lumped with looking after a legacy app.

It connects to our ERP system to handle raising invoices etc. And in June is developed slowness, which we sort of fixed by making one section load later (the SQL was a horrible view in a view in a view).

We then upgraded our ERP software, and the SQL issues are resolved (had to upgrade SQL server etc at the same time) and now the legacy app is running really slowly.

I know that it is when it loops through a data set to set column values etc.

A particular project has 1900 time transactions and takes upto 2 minutes to load.

This part of the program hasn't been changed in over a year, and has only started running slowly since the upgrade.

Are there any good way I can investigate and diagnose exactly why it has suddenly started running slowly?

How many of you have started a job and ended up doing something totally different, and how did deal with it?

I was hired to be an SQL Developer, writing reports, views, stored procedures etc, but knew I would be asked to do some work on some internal c# apps.

Roll on almost 2 years and I'm pretty much a DBA in all but name, and the C# app I was supposed to be doing a little work on is now mine, so as well as being the sole programmer, I'm also the product owner, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd line support.

All of this and I've not even had a change in title, let alone a pay rise that reflect the new roles and responsibilities I've taken on.

Long time no rant.

Spent the last two days trying to figure out why a legacy app that I adopted (was a surprise considering I'm a database developer not c#).

Long story short horrendous view causing issues retrieving data in an app that is slow enough as it is.

I may have suggested starting a proper product roadmap and using sprint's etc for managing development of said app. And the boss agreed, currently the process is someone asks for a feature and we drop everything and develop it so things get forgotten/pushed to the back of the queue.

So to cut to the chase, can anyone suggest any places I can read up about managing this properly?

Why dont people trust you?

I was hired to be an SQL developer, I don't actually get to do much development, normally doing something involving copying and pasting in Excel.

Some of our databases were running slow and we noticed some (a few hundred) indexes were in shit state.

I knocked up a couple of scripts, one to reorganise indexes that were up to a certain amount of fragmentation and one to rebuild the indexes

My boss wants them tested (they were several times in dev) we've had these for over 3 weeks, but she doesn't want to run them.

Instead of fixing hundred of indexes she decided I should contrate on fixing some historic data issues that are preventing 10 indexes from being rebuilt.

Now there are serious issues and the CTO is asking why the indexes haven't been fixed.

I could have done this nearly a month ago, but now it's turned into a huge fucki g deal, and no doubt they'll try and push it back on me

Another rant got me thinking about this.

There must be plenty of us on here who have worked as part of or with a customer support department at some point in our careers.

What is the stupidest idea you've ever heard with regards to support?

To start things off my last place had problems with support, over worked, under staffed and expected to support 12+ versions of the same software, some clients were running installations over 15 years old without ever having applied an upgrade.

The management decided that they would get rid of the conventional triage system for tickets, you know the sort priority 1 would be system down etc.

Instead we had to log tickets at whatever priority the client said it was. Customer report written by the client has a spelling mistake? Yep that's a P1.

Client wants to change the colour of their menu? Yep P1

As you can imagine that went down like a shit sandwich

Ive been looking at starting a degree through the Open University for a while, but the prices of the courses are pretty steep (cheaper than a conventional uni) when I've got a kid on the way in a couple of months, and not wanting to take out loans etc.

The other half mentioned that some of her colleagues had paid for their uni courses with help from the Army (she is a paramedic).

I looked into it, and despite leaving the Army in 2014 I am still entitled to two claims 80% of a course upto £2000

That coupled with an unexpected bonus means I should be able to partially fund the first 2 years of the course.

I need to phone the OU to discuss how to apply etc, but I'm feeling pretty good.

I've been thinking about ways to improve my workflow for my personal projects.

I'm getting to grips with continuous integration and deployment etc, but I want to also automate, or at least semi automate my changeling generation.

I don't like using any sort of gitlog shenanigans, and I quite like the girls way of doing it.

I.e you run a script which generates a yaml file with your changeling info in, and then all the files are written into the changelog.md file.

How do you guys handle the generation of your changelings?

Had an interview at 0730 this morning, also had a surprise aptitude test, which was nice

Now we play the waiting game

Ubuntu always pulls me back in.

Fucking Debian can kiss my sweaty balls

Has anyone ever had the joy of dragging their employer kicking and screaming into the 20th century?

I've been here a little over a year, and slowly but surely I'm moving us forward.

We implemented git via GitLab (our it department already had an on premise installation), I've got us up and running with basic pipelines, I'm pushing TDD, im leading the move towards APIs for new development, and I'm implementing new projects to streamline our work, mainly by automating tasks which currently can take hours with hundreds of manual changes.

It's slow going, and there's lots of legacy business critical apps which we won't be able to change, but we're getting there.

If things keep going smoothly then I might even ask for a ride to reflect my benefit to the business, and extra responsibilities I've taken on which are far beyond my official job as an SQL Developer

Upgraded my phone at the weekend. New phone turned up a day early, and Vodafone also sent me a surprise Google Home Hub