The way 90% of the population wears their face masks really explains a lot about their approach to using software, apps & websites as well.

I feel like giving up.

I am not a developer for the salary, or just to solve analytical puzzles. Those are motivators, but my main drive is to make the world more comfortable and enjoyable, better optimized, build ethical services which bring happiness into people's lives. I want to improve society, even if it's just a tiny bit.

But if users invest absolutely zero percent of their limited brain capacity into understanding a product that already has a super-clean design and responds with helpful validation messages...

...why the fuck bother.

I used to think of the gap between technology and tech-incompetent people as an optimization problem.

As something which could be fixed by spending a fortune on UX research. Write tests, hire QA employees, decrease tech debt, create a bold but unified & simple design.

But the technologically incompetent just get more entitled with every small thing you simplify.

It's never fucking fool-proof enough.

Why can't I upload a 220MB PDF as profile picture? Why doesn't the app install on my 9 year old Android Froyo phone? Why can't I sign up if my phone number contains a  U+FFFC? Why does this page load so slowly from my rural concrete bunker in East Ukraine? WHY DO I HAVE PNEUMONIA, HOW DID I GET INFECTED EVEN THOUGH I WAS WEARING A MOUTH MASK ON MY FOREHEAD?

This is why I ran away from Frontend, to Backend, to DBA.

If I could remove myself further from the end user, I would.

At least I still have a full glass of tawny port and a huge database which needs to be normalized & migrated.

Fuck humans, I'm going to hug a server.

CEO "If you make costs to build a home office for covid, please be aware that you can fully declare your bills, and you'll retain ownership over the ordered goods. Please all buy some good desk chairs and keyboards, so you can work ergonomically"

6 months later, CFO: "Bittersweet, why did you try to declare €35000? What are these invoices even? Concrete rebar?"

Me: "CEO told us to build a home office. I got permits from the town to dig a souterrain layer under my house. This is just for the foundation, the bills for drainage pumps, sheetpiling, geothermal heat exchangers, insulation, flooring, electricity and of course desk & chair will follow later"

CFO: 😳

(To be fair, I really did make those costs, but was just trolling by uploading all the material bills)

1. I join a company.

2. I get deeply involved in "how to run the company", and get nice compliments from both coworkers & management about my skills in conveying startup/scaleup advice & necessities to upper management.

3. With my ego inflated through all the sweet talk, I think "ah, what the hell, let's do this again", and I accept a Lead/CTO promotion. I have to join board meetings, write reports on quarterly plans and progress.

4. I get unhappy/stressed/burned-out because I really just want to be a developer, not a manager/executive.

5. Upper management understands, I give up my lead position, lock myself back into my coding cave.

6. I get annoyed because the requirements I receive become more and more disconnected from reality, half of the teams seem to have decided to stop using agile/scrum, the testing pipeline breaks all the time, I get an updated labor contract from HR by mail which smells like charred flesh, etc

7. The annoyances become too much to do ANY work. I yell at the other devs outside of the entrance of my cave. There is no answer, only a few painful moans and sighs.

8. I emerge from my cave. The city has turned into a desolate wasteland. The office is a burning ruin, the air sharp and heavy with black soot. Disemboweled corpses of developers litter the poisoned soil.

Product Managers dressed in stained ripped suits scream at each other while they try to reinforce concrete barricades with scotch tape and post-its. *THUMP* Something enormous is trying to break through. "Thank God, bittersweet, you're still alive! The stakeholders! They have mutated! We couldn't meet the promised deadlines! We've lost the whole mobile app department, and that kid there is the last of the backenders and he's only an intern! You're here to save us, right? RIGHT?".

In the corner, between the overflowing coffee machine and a withered cactus, a young boy has collapsed onto the floor. His face is covered in moldy coffee grounds, clasping on to his closed macbook for dear life, wide-open eyes staring into the void, mumbling: "didn't backup the database, and It's all gone" over and over.

A severely dented black Tesla with a dragging loose bumper breaks through the dried up vertical herb garden and the smoothiebar, and comes to a halt against the beanbags in a big cloud of styrofoam balls.

The CEO limps out, leaking blood all over the upholstery. He yells to the COO: "The datacenter is completely flooded with sewage! I saved the backup tapes though", holding a large nest of tangled black magnetic tape mixed with clumps of mud above his head.

9. I collect my outstanding salary and sell any rewarded options/shares for a low dumping price, take a 5 month holiday, and ask a recruiter about opportunities in a different city.

Every day.

I am a PHP developer.

Yeah, "another PHP is awful" rant... no, not really.

It's just unsuitable for some ambitious projects, just like Ruby and Python are.

First of all, DO NOT EVER use Laravel for large enterprise applications. The same goes for RoR, Django, and other ActiveRecord MVCs.

They are all neat frameworks for writing a todo app, as a better-than-wordpress flexible blogging solution, even as a custom webshop.

Beyond 50k daily users, Active Record becomes hell due to it's lazy fat querying habits. At more than a million users... *depressed sigh*.

PHP is also completely unsuitable for projects beyond 5M lines of code in my opinion. At more than 25M lines... *another depressed sigh*.

You can let your devs read Clean Code and books about architecture patterns, you can teach them about SOLID & DRY, you can write thousands of tests... it doesn't matter.

PHP is scaffolding, it's made of bamboo and rope. It's not brick or concrete. You can build quickly, but it only scales up to a certain point before it breaks in multiple places.

Eventually you run into patterns where even 100% test coverage still doesn't guarantee shit, because the real-life edge cases are just too complex and numerous.

When you're working on a multi-party invoicing system with adapters for various tax codes, or an availability/planning system working across timezones, or systems which implement geographical routefinding coupled to traffic, event & weather prediction...

PHP, Python, Ruby, etc are just missing types.

Every day I run into bugs which could have been prevented if you could use ADTs in a generic way in PHP. PHP7 has pretty good typehints, and they prevent a lot of messy behavior, but they aren't composable. There is no way to tell PHP "this method accepts a Collection of Users", or "this methods returns maybe either an Apple or a Pear, and I want to force the caller to handle both Apple/Pear and null".

Well, you could do that, but it requires a lot of custom classes and trickery, and you have to rewrite the same logic if you want to typehint a "Collection of Departments" instead of "Collection of Users" -- i.e., it's not composable.

Probably the biggest issue is that languages with a (mostly) structural type system (Haskell, Rust, even C#/JVM languages to some degree, etc) are much slower to develop in for the "startup" era of a project, so you grab a weak, quick prototyping language to get started.

Then, when you reach a more grown up phase, you wish you had a better type system at your disposal...

To be a good developer, you must thrive in chaos, and have an insatiable desire to turn it into order.

All user input, both work tasks and actual application input, is pure fucking chaos.

The only way to turn that input into anything usable, is to interpret, structure and categorize it, to describe the rules for transformation as adequately as you can.

Sometimes companies create semi-helpful roles to assist you with this process. Often, these people are so unaware of the delicacy of the existing chaos, that any decision they make just ripples out in waves leaving nearly irreparable confusion and destruction in its path.

So applications themselves also slowly wear down into chaos under pressure of chaotic steak-holders which never seem to be able to choose between peppercorn or bernaise sauce for their steaks.

Features are added, data is migrated between formats, rules become unclear. Is ketchup even fucking valid, as a steak sauce?

The only way to preserve an application long term, is refactoring chaos into order.

But... the ocean of chaos will never end.

You must learn to swim in it.

All you can hope to do is create little pools of clarity where new creative ideas can freely spawn.

Ideas which will no doubt end up polluting their own environment, but that's a problem for tomorrow.

So you must learn to deal with the infinite stream of perplexed reactions from those who can't attach screenshots to issue reports.

You must deflect dragging conversations from those who never quite manage to translate gut feeling into rational sentences.

You must learn to deal with the fact that in reality there are no true microservice backends. There are no clean React frontends. There are no normalized databases. Full test coverage, well-executed retrospectives, finished sprints -- they are all as real as spherical cows in a vacuum.

There is no such thing as clean code.

There is only "relatively cleaner code", and even then there are arguments as to why it would be "subjectively relatively cleaner code".

Every repository, every product, every team and every company is an amalgamation of half-implemented ideals, well-intended tug of war games, and brilliantly shattered dreams.

You will encounter fragmented shards of perfect APIs, miles of tangled barbed documentation, beheaded validator classes, bloody mangled corpses of analytical dashboards, crumbled concrete databases.

You must be able to breathe in those thick toxic clouds of rotting technical and procedural debt, look at your reflection in the locker room mirror while you struggle yourself into a hazmat suit, and think:

"Fuck yes, I was born for this job".

Me: Oh I see were using a non-standard architecture on this app. I like this bit but what is this doing? never seen it before.

Him: Ah we use that to abstract the navigation layer.

Me: oh ok, interesting idea, but that means we need an extra file per screen + 1 per module. We also can't use this inbuilt control, which I really like, and we've to write a tonne of code to avoid that.

Him: Yeah we wanted to take a new approach to fix X, this is what we came up with. Were not 100% happy with it. Do you have any ideas?

**
Queue really long, multi-day architecture discussion. Lots of interesting points, neither side being precious or childish in anyway. Was honestly fantastic.
**

Me: So after researching your last email a bit, I think I found a happy middle ground. If we turn X into a singleton, we can store the state its generating inside itself. We can go back to using the in-built navigation control and have the data being fetched like Y. If you want to keep your dependency injection stuff, we can copy the Angular services approach and inject the singletons instead of all of these things. That means we can delete the entire layer Z.

Even with the app only having 25% of the screens, we could delete like 30+ files, and still have the architecture, at a high level, identical and textbook MVVM.

Him: singleton? no I don't like those, best off keeping it the way it is.

... are you fucking kidding me? You've reinvented probably 3 wheels, doubled the code in the app and forced us to take ownership of something the system handles ... but a singleton is a bad idea? ... based off no concrete evidence or facts, but a personal opinion.

... your face is a bad idea

To replace humans with robots, because human beings are complete shit at everything they do.

I am a chemist. My alignment is not lawful good. I've produced lots of drugs. Mostly just drugs against illnesses. Mostly.

But whatever my alignment or contribution to the world as a chemist... Human chemists are just fucking terrible at their job. Not for a lack of trying, biological beings just suck at it.

Suiting up for a biosafety level lab costs time. Meatbags fuck up very often, especially when tired. Humans whine when they get acid in their face, or when they have to pour and inhale carcinogenic substances. They also work imprecisely and inaccurately, even after thousands of hours of training and practice.

Weaklings! Robots are superior!

So I replaced my coworkers with expensive flow chemistry setups with probes and solenoid fluid valves. I replaced others with CUDA simulations.

First at a pharma production & research lab, then at a genetics lab, then at an Industrial R&D lab.

Many were even replaced by Raspberry Pi's with two servos and a PH meter attached, and I broke open second hand Fischer Sci spectrophotometers to attach arduinos with WiFi boards.

The issue was that after every little overzealous weekend project, I made myself less necessary as well.

So I jumped into the infinitely deep shitpool called webdev.

App & web development is kind of comfortable, there's always one more thing to do, but there's no pressure where failure leads to fatalities (I think? Wait... do I still care?).

Super chill, if it weren't for the delusion that making people do "frontend" and "fullstack" labor isn't a gross violation of the Geneva Convention.

Quickly recognizing that I actually don't want to be tortured and suffer from nerve damage caused by VueX or have my organs slowly liquefied by the radiation from some insane transpiling centrifuge, I did what any sane person would do.

Get as far away from the potential frontend blast radius as possible, hide in a concrete bunker.

So I became a data engineer / database admin.

That's where I'm quarantining now, safely hiding from humanity behind a desk, employed to write a MySQL migration or two, setting up Redis sorted sets, adding a field to an Elastic index. That takes care of generating cognac and LSD money.

But honestly.... I actually spend most of my time these days contributing to open source repositories, especially writing & maintaining Rust libraries.

So, basically i am getting desperate, and i'm also angry... and want to cry, and i feel a failure.
My biggest error in this story is "believing"

First of all, I'm a starting entrepreneur as freelancer, started of 6 months ago, back then it all seemed bright, i had my first customer, they believed me, got a second assignment for that same customer, fulfilled the task in brilliance, and was ready to move on to a bigger customer base. Here's where shit goes wrong.

Working with another office that outsources people to various (goverment) contractors, Had a meeting with them, we would cooperate very soon. This was january.

PM: "We've got a gov Dept as a customer that wants to do project XYZ and starting in february, requirements are yadiyadiyadi, you up for it?
Me:"Sure, send me the specs, and timeframe and i'll apply with my offer)"
Project is about a bit backup system migration, lots of fancy shmancy tech used, 2 datacenters setup... a big project that can take up several months...
- sends offer- received an acceptance on the offer

PM " Great, we'll start end of february"
Me: "Ok, end of february is a go then, looking forward to cooperate"

FF to near end of february, receive msg from PM: "Project XYZ delayed until half if march"
Me: "Okay... what is the delay?"
PM:"Govt bureaucracy"
Me " Ok, let's keep in touch"

Near Half of March
PM " Project delayed again".
Me: " Okay... what's the reason?"
PM: "they have decided to take a different approach, and want 3 datacenters now"
Me: "That will change the offer i made for you, can you send me the specs?"
PM: "No, because they havent decided on the techs used, expect end of march"
Me: "Okay...but once you got the specs,s end them to me"

End of March
Pm: " Hy NeatNerdPrime, we still havent got any specs yet... they still forgot to make the shopping list"
Me: "(-_-) ... I thought they already had that covered"
PM:" No, new Govt budget cuts and lots of changes, basically, they still don't know what they really want. But we're just -delayed- , not -cancelled-"
Me: "Okay... i hope we get started soon"
PM: "expect launch beginning of april"
I was not really satisfied with this explanation.... but ok

Beginning of april, at april's folls day
PM "Project delayed again"
Me: " This is a joke right?"
PM: "Sadly, no, they delayed the project since they don't really know what they actually want, we are trying to give them the proposed solution... but they still need approval, and still need to set up shopping list"
Me:"when do we start then?"
PM: " I was told 17th of april'
Me:" I really hope it gets through, i had to decline some proposals for work for months due to this, this ain't funny"
PM: "I know, i'll make up for it"

15th of april...
PM " Project delayed again"
Me right now almost losing my shit
"why this time??? I thought you said 17th of april real launch!"
PM: "they fired their PM, need to hire a new one, delayed until May/June"
Me: "I've set aside some other assignments just because you said you were going to launch at those dates... This is really pushing my limits, can you give me SOME assurances?"
PM: "5th of june would be official go" Me: " Okay, i'm noting 5th of june in my agenda, let's get this through!"

And now i get a message...stating that the date of 5th of june , is for another project, at the same goct dept, but totally different project

WHAT THE FUCKING SHIT I'VE SPENT MONTHS WAITING FOR A PROJECT THAT WAS PRACTICALLY ALL SET AND GO AND EVERY SINGLE FUCKING TIME IT GETS DELAYED, EVERY FUCKING TIME I THINK "you know, i cannot accept these offers since that Govt project will start soon, i cannot do 2 assignments at once especially when they require me to work at govt office at the capital..." AND EVERY FUCKING TIME IT GETS DELAYED!!!

I feel at a loss now..... i've done i think the most horrible thing you can do as a independent and that's not accepting another assignment just because there was a concrete promise for a govt contract...

Almost dried up, nothing much left, had to do some spending because of a move to another apartment... I'm feeling really down, and angry...and down, but mostly angry, for not accepting those offers in the meantime...

Ah, ok, I understand!

I stare through the blueish black backgrounds and blurry colorful syntax into a somewhat familiar office within a mirrored world. That damned reflective glass layer covering these meaningless pixels is certainly not on my side.

The rushing sound of transactions flowing through cables is silenced today. Some blood cloth in the invoicing system is zeroing out everything after the currency mark.

While sighing I spin a one-and-a-half pirouette on my desk chair — even when desperate, you shouldn't give up on style — I take three steps away from my screen and try to harmonize my thoughts.

So much noise, everywhere... Noise from within?

I have been stuck at the apogee of an inhale for a while now. Locked into some masochistic constriction, self-punishment for the blindness which stings my ego.

Just fucking take a deep breath you asshole...

I freeze in place, and fall backwards.

Patterns on the creamy drywall rapidly vibrate and synchronize on vivid rhythms of respiration and resonating basslines. Deep indigo rainbows ripple through tiny veins, in-between chalky grains, raining as fine magenta dust through the ceiling frames.

My bare feet slide over soft oscillating concrete, fine flows of unsievable sand surrounded by toes, toes surrounded by streaming variables veiled in obscure vile abstractions.

A jadegreen field of vectored compressions resiliently rumbles and bounces through the clearances and corners of the vibrant concrete office cave, whispering in tongues. I try to voice my woes in little blips and bleeps but I seem to be missing an asymmetric key to their shrouded sequenced speech.

Suddenly, a wild turbulence breaks up all signals.

Joanna floats by in her tipsy effervescent cloud of disordered black hair and alcohol perfume, one hand grasping grapes, her other waving at me.

With every finger she moves a thousand tensors propagating paradoxically flawed but perfect pieces of an intricate surreal picture, sketching whole constellations of possible paths throughout the leafs of the giant Ficus next to her desk.

She stops dead in her tracks, and asks somewhat hypocritically: "Are you high?"

I can not discern the meaning of her words, and respond stoically.

"Joanna! Check out those branches!".

"Pun intended?", she giggles.

I'm focused on her grapeless hand, her fingers stretching to reach the lush little tree.

On touch, the plant shivers, grappled in the tight net of the puppet master. She pulls her strings, applying measured weights, all nodes normalize, and Joanna speaks in an oddly soft tone:

"Isn't it beautiful, how so many models emulate nature"

Her cheek buried in foliage she babbles on about unbalanced search trees and machine learning models... but from the tips of her fingers tables and indexes flow into the plant. Users, payments, tariffs, invoices and taxes crawl over the bark, joining at thicker branches, joining at the stem....

Joining. JOINING. A JOIN.

"IF THERE'S NO FUCKING TAX MULTIPLIER IN THIS LEFT JOIN, EVERYTHING COALESCES TO ZERO" I shout at a perplexed Joanna who squeezes grape juice over her desk. I hop on the beat to my keyboard. She looks puzzled, hugs her Ficus tightly, and reaches for the whiskey bottle behind her monitor.

Attracted by my exclamation, Tom from finance swings open the door, while I push my branch.

I look at Joanna still half hiding between the leaves, and I laugh at her: "Branches! Oh, lame, I finally got it!"

Tom's heavy voice interrupts me: "Does this mean... does this mean that the invoicing bug is resolved?".

I smile at Tom with his tailored suit and waxed hair. "The money is flowing once more. All debts are being settled."

He releases his breath in relief, which he seems to have held since that morning as well.

Joanna adds: "Although I think he is forever indebted to my Ficus".

I nod.

Running an Alpaca farm in rural Finland, next to some mountain creek with an oldschool water mill so I can grind flour and coffee beans.

I hated people so I tried to find solace as a nerd in technology, but tech is also fucking awful so I feel like retiring in a tranquil forest with some equally grumpy wooly animals.

If I get eaten by a bear because I'm a skimpy city boy that's OK, more epic than being found decomposing slumped over on a keyboard in the boring grey suburbs.

All of this is probably pandemic-me talking though. So sick of this concrete city with the farting cars and fat obnoxious shoppers.

I need some trees around me, and some mammals with a higher IQ than my current neighbors.

My teams current process is:

1) Asked by product to create “T-Shirt size” estimates, also known as a WAG (wild ass guess). The process is the mental equivalent of throwing darts while blindfolded, after being spun around in a circle and pointed in the wrong direction.

2) Product make firm commitments to upper management based off these. Ensuring them that all these features will make it out in Q2.

3) 4 days before Q2 starts, product ask engineering to figure out the real estimates based off no concrete information what so ever.

4) 4 Weeks into Q2, product provide the missing information.

5) Engineering inform product that the estimates are out by a factor of 1.5 - 3 times the original estimates.

6) Product sends angry email to upper management that through not fault of product, engineering are unable to meet the deadlines.

7) Everyone shout and complain until 1 week before Q3, then see point 1.

Following this process, you and your team can be just as delightful as me.

That’s the practiseSafeHex guarantee!

Still trying to get good.

The requirements are forever shifting, and so do the applied paradigms.

I think the first layer is learning about each paradigm.

You learn 5-10 languages/technologies, get a feeling for procedural/functional/OOP programming. You mess around with some electronics engineering, write a bit of assembly. You write an ugly GTK program, an Android todo app, check how OpenGL works. You learn about relational models, about graph databases, time series storage and key value caches. You learn about networking and protocols. You void the warranty of all the devices in your house at some point. You develop preferences for languages and systems. For certain periods of time, you even become an insufferable fanboy who claims that all databases should be replaced by MongoDB, or all applications should be written in C# -- no exceptions in your mind are possible, because you found the Perfect Thing. Temporarily.

Eventually, you get to the second layer: Instead of being a champion for a single cause, you start to see patterns of applicability.

You might have grown to prefer serverless microservice architectures driven by pub/sub event busses, but realize that some MVC framework is probably more suitable for a 5-employee company. You realize that development is not just about picking the best language and best architecture -- It's about pros and cons for every situation. You start to value consistency over hard rules. You realize that even respected books about computer science can sometimes contain lies -- or represent solutions which are only applicable to "spherical cows in a vacuum".

Then you get to the third layer: Which is about orchestrating migrations between paradigms without creating a bigger mess.

Your company started with a tiny MVC webshop written in PHP. There are now 300 employees and a few million lines of code, the framework more often gets in the way than it helps, the database is terribly strained. Big rewrite? Gradual refactor? Introduce new languages within the company or stick with what people know? Educate people about paradigms which might be more suitable, but which will feel unfamiliar? What leads to a better product, someone who is experienced with PHP, or someone just learning to use Typescript?

All that theoretical knowledge about superior paradigms won't help you now -- No clean slates! You have to build a skyscraper city to replace a swamp village while keeping the economy running, together with builders who have no clue what concrete even looks like. You might think "I'll throw my superior engineering against this, no harm done if it doesn't stick", but 9 out of 10 times that will just end in a mix of concrete rubble, corpses and mud.

I think I'm somewhere between 2 and 3.

I think I have most of the important knowledge about a wide array of languages, technologies and architectures.

I think I know how to come to a conclusion about what to use in which scenario -- most of the time.

But dealing with a giant legacy mess, transforming things into something better, without creating an ugly amalgamation of old and new systems blended together into an even bigger abomination? Nah, I don't think I'm fully there yet.

1. Fucking MySQL database clusters.

There's nothing fun about MySQL clusters. Sometimes they start producing deadlock errors for no apparent reason... well, there's probably a reason, but it's never a transparent easy to find reason.

What was even less fun is that those errors took down a Sentry server. When your error log server goes down through ddos from your database messages, it's time to rethink your setup.

2. Wiring up a large factory with $2 arduino clones, each with a $2 esp8266 wifi chip, with various sensors for measuring flow of chemical solutions (I wanted cheap real time monitoring as an early warning system next to periodic sampling).

The scaling issue was getting over 500 streaming wifi signals to work in a 55c moist slightly corrosive atmosphere with concrete and steel everywhere, and getting it all into a single InfluxDB instance for analysis.

I'm currently rewriting perfectly clean and functioning Scala code in Java (because "Enterprise", yay). The amount of unnecessary boilerplate I have to add is insane. I'm not even talking big complicated code but two liners or the lack of simple things like a range from 5 to 10.

Why do I have to write
List<Position> occupiedPositions = placedEntities.stream()
.flatMap((pe) -> pe.occupiedPositions().stream())
.collect(Collectors.toList());
instead of simply
val occupiedPositions = placedEntities.flatMap(_.occupiedPositions)

Why on earth does `occupiedPositions.distinct` suddenly become a monstrosity like `occupiedPositions.stream().distinct().collect(Collectors.toList())` where the majority of code is pure boilerplate? And this is supposed to be the new and better Java8 api which people use as evidence that Java is now suddenly "functional" (yeah no, just no).

Why do APIs that annotate parameters with @Nullable throw NullPointerExceptions when I pass a null? Why does the compiler not help prevent such stupidity? Why do we use static typing PLUS those annotations and it still crashes at runtime like every damn dynamic, interpreted language out there? That's not unfortunate, it's a complete waste of time.

Why is a simple idea like a range from x to 10 (in scala literally `x to 10`) not by default included in Java? There's Guava's version of Range which does not have a helper for integer ranges (even though they are the most used ones). Then there's apache.commons version which _has_ a helper for integers, but is strangely not iterable (wtf I don't even...).

Speaking of Iterable: How difficult could it be to convert an abstract Iterable<T> into a concrete List<T>? In scala it's surprisingly `someIterable.toList`. I found nothing like that so I took to stackoverflow where I found a thread in which people suggested everything from writing your own ListUtils helper class, using Guava (which is a huge dependency!) to using the new Java8 features inline (which is still about three lines long). I didn't know this was such a hard problem in computer science, TIL.

How anyone can be productive in this abomination of a language is beyond me now, even though I've used it for many years while learning to code (back then I didn't know there were much better ways to do things). The only good part is that I have to endure this nonsense for only about 3 days longer then I'm free again!

Oh, shit, someone wanted dev help or contributors after programming for decades. Shit. That is trolling. THANK YOU N()()B

(@wojtek322) >He he gooosh im sooo nu here
>Is this talk about CODING on DEVRant what you do?
(@wojtek322) >TEHEEHE!
>Maybe I'm a girl you could dig the fuck out
>Maybe not
>But I'll act like one
(@wojtek322) >TEEEHEE HEEE
>So uhhhmmm this talk of C programing language and actual concrete issues
>That's like, uhh, trolling rite?
>Not what you guys are about
-OFCOURSE NOT MAM!, OR TRAN!
-WE ARE NOT ABOUT THAT
(@wojtek322) >Teheheee ok gr8 thx!

Me (junior) working on something specific/concrete; actually doing something. Gets stuck and goes to lead with specific question.
me: hey lead, if we have x, does y need to be included as well?
lead: yes, no, maybe, random bla.
me, tries to summarize and extract a to-do: oke... so based on 'yes, no, maybe random bla' you suggest adding y right about here?
lead: maybe bla and we have to think about it, yes, random bla. Try whatever feels right to you.
Me walks back to desk. Decides to support a charity, help refugees and homeless people CAUSE THAT FEELS RIGHT!

I spent the last 3 months trying to hire new developers for my team. I found someone experienced who is great and a graduate, who is, well, a graduate.

For some reason he thinks he knows everything about our framework he has never used and seems to think he knows how everything works in our codebase which he has never seen.

That’s fine. I’ve had my share of cocky developers.

But what confuses me is that when I ask him what critical bugs are left, he reels off two significant ones. I ask what it will take to fix it. Of course he says he knows how to fix it. So I say great. Then fix it and let’s move on to a more fun part of our project.

Suddenly he didn’t know where he problem was and so I told him he had to investigate and come back with something concrete.

It’s just frustrating managing this developer who is deceitful.

Don't you hate it when your co-worker does dumb things, but thinks it's the "clean code" way?
The following is a conversation between me and a co-worker, who thinks he's superior to everyone because he thinks he's the only one who read the Clean Code series. Let's call him Bill.

Me: I think the feature we need is quite simple, our application needs to call this third party API, parse the response and pass it to the next step. Why do you need to bury everything under an abstraction of 4 layers?
Bill: bEcAuSe It'S dEcOuPlInG, aNd MaKe ThE cOdE tEsTaBlE
Me: I don't know man, you only need to abstract the third party api client, and then mock it if you want. Some interfaces you define makes no sense at all. For example, this interface only has 1 concrete implementation, and I don't think it will ever have another. Besides, the concrete implementation only gets the input from the upper layer and passes it down the lower layer. Why the extra step? I feel like you're using interface just for the sake of interface.
Bill: PrOgRaMmInG tO iNtErFaCe, NoT cOnCrEtE iPlEmEnTaTiOn!!!
Me: You keep saying those words, I don't think they mean what you think they mean. But they certainly do not mean that every method argument must be an interface
Bill: BuT uNcLe BoB blah blah blah...
Me: *gives up all hope*

I was impressed with my latest job interview in the government (got the job).

Applied online, and they extended the application deadline because the lack of quality of applications.

I got invited for an interview. Present there were HR manager, Department manager and an employee from the regional office (opening a new dev department in the region).
Most of the interview consisted of them telling me about the company, and asking a bit about me. Nothing technical.

1.5 month later I got a 2nd interview. Present were two developers from the main office in Oslo. Again, very little questions about my technical capabilities. Mostly just repeating the stuff said in the first interview. Though I did have to send some code in for review by them.

A month later I get a phone call from the department head saying they’d like to offer me a job, but they don’t have a concrete job offer yet, as it has to be approved by a committee (gov stuff). That takes two weeks, and I finally got job offer. 42% pay rise from the current job in the private sector.

I later went and re-read the ad for the job. “Bachelor/ master required. For particularly qualified applicants, this requirement can be ignored.”

Fascinating that they didn’t give me more tests.

The new mobile app codebase i'm working with, was clearly written by someone who just read a book on generics and encapsulation.

I need to pull out 2 screens into a separate library to have it shared around. The 1 networking request used is wrapped up in a 'WebServiceFactory' and `WebServiceObjectMapper`, used by a `NetworkingManager` which exposes a generic `request` method taking in a `TopLevelResponse` type (Which has imported every model) which uses a factory method to get the real response type.

This is needed by the `Router` which takes a generic `Action` which they've subclassed for each and every use case needing server communication.

Then the networking request function is part of a chain of 4 near identical functions spread across 4 different files, each one doing a tiny bit more than the last and casting everything to a new god damn protocol, because fuck concrete types.

Its not even used in that many places, theres like 6 networking calls. Why are people so god damn fucking stupid and insist on over engineering the shit out of their apps. I'm fed the fuck up with these useless skidmarks.

meeting with PM, 1:1
me: well, to be honest, i think there is also some room for improvement concerning communication in our meetings. the discussion culture in our meetings could be more open.
PM: what do you mean? i don't know what you're talking about.
me: well, i feel sometimes that in meetings, you overly challenge what colleagues suggest. on the other hand, it's really hard to argue against what you are saying. what you say is often like engraved into stone and it is hard to argue against that, but the next day you might have changed your mind again and then things are different, but engraved into stone again.
PM: hmm. can you give me some more concrete example?
me: well... (gives some examples) it's just that it would be nice if you would listen more to what people say in meetings and try to understand what they actually mean or want to say, instead of saying "nah, that's not how we do it" or "no, that's wrong"... just.. well, have more trust in our skills, try to find out what people mean before you discard what you think they said... a bit more of appreciation and openness.
PM: oh, i can tell you, i'm the MOST open manager in this whole company.
me: ...
PM: but anyway, i will think about it.
me: well... okay. also i see there are some challenges within our team concerning intercultural communication. i mean, communication between Germans and Indians is in general a bit problematic in our company, and maybe it is a good idea to have some workshop together concerning intercultural competences... i think we could benefit from that. (what i actually meant is, these problems exist, but currently i see them more on his side or between him and Indian colleagues, because e.g. he tends to harshly criticize people in daily standups, and if we "direct" Germans already feel affronted by his behavior, how must Indian guys feel about it? in fact, 2 Indian devs already left the project. also communication doesn't really work well, in a way that there's often a great mismatch between his expectations and what Indian devs actually think they have to do)
PM: i can tell you, i really understand our Indian colleagues, i really know how to work with them. also, their working style has greatly improved since project start. (which doesn't feel quite right after he totally ripped apart the work of one guy in the last sprint review meeting)

of course, that's not the whole conversation, but it's kind of a symptomatic example for the whole situation...

i kinda feel embarrassed all the time. i feel like it's never enough, i don't know enough, there's so much i don't know. i do enjoy my work and sometimes there are moments where i'm proud of what i've done, or these "i'm a fucking genious" moments when i solve a bug or a certain problem or when something finally works. but if i have to do something new, i tend to panic a bit, as long as i do not yet have a concrete solution in mind.
my perception contrasts with the feedback people give me, but even when i'm happy about the positive feedback, i tend to think to myself, "they're wrong, it's not that great"..

The story of the shittiest, FUCKING WORST day of work.

TLDR: shitty day at work, car crash to end the day.

So, let tell you about what could possibly be the worst day I had since I started working.

This morning, my alarm didn't work, woke up 30 minutes before an appointment I had with a client.

Arrived late at the client, as I start deploying. They don't have any way to transfer the deployment package to the secured server. Lost 45 minutes there.

Deployment goes pretty well. My client asks me to stay while they load some data into the app. Everything's pretty easy to work out. Just need to input 3 CSV with the correct format (which the client defined since the beginning).
I end up watching an Excel Macro called "Brigitte" (I'm not fucking kinding, could'nt have thought of that) work for 4 hours straight. Files are badly formatted and don't work.

Troubbleshooting thoses files with a fucking loader that does not tell you anything about why it failed (our fault on that one)

I leave the client at 7:30pm, going back at work, leave at 9pm.

At this point, I just want to buy some food, go home and watch series.

But NO, A FUCKING MORRON OF A BUS DRIVER had to switch lanes as I was overtaking him. Getting me crushed between the bus and the concrete blocks.

Cops were fucking dickheads, being very mean even tho I was still shaking from the adrenaline.

In conclusion, the day could have been worst. The devs at the clients are pretty cool guys and we actually had some fun troubleshooting. At work, there was still one of my colleagues who cheered me up telling me about his day.
And when I think of it, I could have got really hurt (or even worst) in the crash.

A bad day is a bad day, tomorrow morning I'm still going to get up and go to a job I love, with people I love working with.

Very big rant (sorry about that if someone's still reading)

At work the other day...

Guy: "Oh hey I was thinking if you could help me with an application to visualize some data."

Me: "Ooookay...what did you have in mind?"

Guy: "I think we have XML files that could be turned into graphs...oh and we could add some trend lines. (Getting more excited) And maybe we could supplement it with live data...oh hey and maybe we could add real time alerts via email..."

Me: *thinks to self...there is no way in hell I am starting to work on something that he is literally coming up with requirements as he's talking* "I need specifics...so go take some time, think it through and get back to me with concrete details and examples."

Guy: "Ok. That should be enough to get you started for now at least."

That would be a big fuck no, good sir. Haven't started and won't start it. He has never mentioned it to me again since then.

!dev

Dropped my iPhone from the 2nd floor (in US 3rd floor because our ground is your 1st) on concrete... case is fucked but the phone doesn’t have a single scratch..

Lucky me..

So today I saw another 'OOP should die' article.
And I decided I should google around a bit to find out why.

Reasons I found:
- Things get too complicated
- Things get too abstract (same as the above really)

But when I search for alternatives, only functional programming and different ways to use OOP get mentioned.
I still don't get why OOP is supposedly bad though.
Maybe my 20-30k LOC projects aren't big enough to see it?

For me the abstraction works very well. The abstraction is used to keep the complexity low(er).
And the different ways of using OOP are a plus-point for me. (Like the Entity-Component system)

I don't know enough about functional programming to be able to say it's better or worse, but the ideas behind it a perfectly usable in languages like C#.

So if any of you have a good concrete reason to not use OOP, please feel welcome to tell me in the comments :)

Watched a TED Talk about this cool site that wants to bring open education to all.
Forgot about it.
Remembered i
the video a week later, checked it out.
Front page saw a course for Python for beginners.
Watched the first video.
Got hooked.
Never turned back.
Thanks Coursera :)

After that I relied more on books as the knowledge is layed out in a more concrete fashion and are probably nore revised. So better content, more accurate information, more advanced and in depth knowledge.

Anyone else have trouble with real life common sense?

Story time:
Yesterday Evening a dog chased my best mate's cat up a tree. Being the genius I am, I decided to climb after the adorable bugger. Fell from about 8-10ft onto concrete slabs on my back.

Main thing first: I got lucky, CTs and X-rays showed no lasting damage. I'm back home and safe now.

What got me was going through the hospital having to hear the story of how I fell out of a tree onto my back and head like an idiot... from medical person to medical person.

I was lying in the bed, thinking "I swear I'm competent!? Why do people trust me!?"

Does anyone else have any weird skill black spots, or common sense break downs?

Just don't open it...

Will definitely not pretend to be productive 24/7. But the below help me reach a satisfactory 8/5 most day's.
- Exercise in the morning
- Eat breakfast
- Listen to good music
- Make sure to have fun moments throughout the workday (++ for initiating)
- Catch air, have a walk, take a break
- Minimize interactions with toxic people
- Be open in sharing knowledge, thoughts, work , good people will repay you
- Get in the kitchen, cook nice healthy meals
- Set concrete and reachable targets
- Remain eager to learn
- Celebrate successes
- Spent time with friends and family
- Catch enough sleep

And above all, DON'T open devRant!!!

> 1 hr meeting
> 30 min free
> 30 min meeting
> 3 hour meeting
> 30 min free
> 15 min "check point"
> How hard is concrete from 20 stories?!

It is said that the number of programmers doubles every five years with fresh CS, CE, and EE grads. Assuming that's true, then at any one time over half the developer community are novices in the early stages of their career.

My entire life's been spent in software and I've been in it now for about 15 years and I've seen a lot of people make alot of things and I've seen a lot of people fail at alot of things. My observation is that the doers are the major thinkers, the people that really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker doer in one person. It's very easy to take credit for the thinking the doing is more concrete. It's very easy for somebody say "oh, I thought of this three years ago" but usually when you dig a little deeper you find that the people that really did it. Were also the people that really worked through the hard intellectual problems.

Many people falsely believe that a great idea constitutes 90% of the work. However, there is a significant amount of craftsmanship required to bridge the gap between a great idea and a great product. As you evolve that great idea it changes and grows it never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it and you also find there's tremendous amount of trade-offs that you have to make.

There are certain things you can't make electrons do, certain things you can't make plastic or glass, certain things you can't make factories or robots do. and as you get into all these things, Designing a product involves juggling 5,000 different concepts, fitting them together like puzzle pieces, and exploring new ways to combine them. Every day brings new challenges and opportunities to push the boundaries of what's possible, and it's this ongoing process that is the key to successful product development. That process is the "magic"

If there is 2 books you should read before trying to tackle TAOCP... this might be on it.. as well as the Concrete Mathematics book.

Anyway. This book covers not just the fundamentals of modern algorithms and data structures but it also makes the leap to understanding multithreading and algorithms using multithreading.

Some argue the certain concepts in this book are presented without explanation of how they work, but I guess that should be something the reader try’s to figure out from another book or constructive thinking critically. Keeps the reader on their toes for understanding.

This is also the reason many people suggest the sedgewick algorithm books, of which will be posted another day.

To be honest, I prefer clean laptops, without any stickers on it, but I love dbrand skins, in some ways, they are stickers, awesome full-laptop-body stickers that are great. Used to have marble and concrete on my XPS, now it's just clean.

CNC finished...
Can't do anything else (level it and such) until I get new motors...
the steppers I ordered one month ago returned back to China, FUCKKKKKK
one more month waiting.
So many project ideas.... nothing concrete.
What should I do now? Did my BT controlled car, the CNC, ... Any ideas?

!rant, but kinda

My new director wants to buy a solution for a portal environment that my institution currently has. I have no qualms over it. My only issue was the company that sells it to be known to provide close to 0 fucking support when shit arises.

During a presentation we were told that they were using state of the art JAVA technology to render items on the page and that their ApI was easy for devs to grasp. This caught my attention since I know of very few and obscure Java frameworks that work with frontend tech (as in, your frontend logic is legit in Java)

The sales people proceed to show us React. Obviously thinking that no one knows what REact was. The dude continues with "This is new Java tech" all proud and shit prompting me to interject that it is "Javascript" the dude brushes it away saying "same thing" to which I reply with "Negative, please make sure that you properly discern Java from Javascript since Java is to Javascript as car is to carpet, completely different environments" the dude sarcastically says that "oh well, didn't know one of the people here was more aware of our own technology than we are" to which I say "and not only that, but the final say in us adopting your tech is mine, so I would rather you keep the sarcasm and the attitude to yourself, bring in a tech person if need be and learn these distinctions since we don't work with Java"

My new director later on went to talk to me since he apparently thought that Java and JS were related in some way. I can't really fault it, last time the dude touched programming was in the early 2000s, previous boss was a C and COBOL developer, but the previous dude would ALWAYS take my word no questions ask, this dude was there asking me if I was sure that Javascript and Java were really completely different environments asking me to show him.

I do not like to be questioned. I shoot the shit here and don't really involve myself with more technical aspects under this platform unless it involves concrete architecture discussions and even there I really don't care with engaging on a forum concerning that. But concerning my job I really.......really do not like to be questioned by people that know way the fuck less than me. I started coding when I was 17, I am 30 now, with a degree and years of experience. I really hate to be questioned by this dude.

Kinde messed up my first contract.

I am a senior frontend dev who until now worked only on full time gigs. For the first time I picked up a short term gig of 1 week that consisted of 2 packages and I wanted to share my mistake that I made so hopefuly its useful to you.

So last week I started working on this gig. First package went through fine, I delivered in 2 days and collected the first half of the payment.

However I messed up with the second package. Not messed up the implementation per say, but I didnt manage the communication well.

Before implementing it I raised a discussion about a missing backend endpoint that is required to implement the perfect solution. Client got cold feet, had a discussion with his manager and now decided to postpone the second package and even got mad at me that I already did and pushed half of the work of the second package without waiting for his decision from his manager. So now obviously Im not getting paid for half of the work of the second package (I dont mind, I should have waited for clients response), anyways it took me like 20min to implement so thats fine.

My takeaways:

1. As a short term contractor you are hired to solve a concrete problem. Scope out what you can, agree on a task list and stick to it. Anything out of scope will cost the client extra.

2. Your priority is to get paid. Not to deliver the perfect solution that confuses the client and potentially can impact your delivery. If he wants something and you see its only a half of what he really needs, deliver it anyways. Keep that idea of improvement for the future. More work for future = more invoices = more money. I know its not ethical but your priority should be to get paid and in order to do that you need to deliver. Dont shoot yourself in the foot with unnecesseraly overcomplicating things.

I would like to rant one more time about my internship.

I began in July, the first. That's my sister who helped me to find this internship and I was a little scared about how bad it could be.
I came at the office, my boss told me that I would work in an "Innovation lab", an apartment where people works on projects that are less corporate than the enterprise's ones.

To me, it was amazing. So I came in this apartment, it was like a dream. I didn't know that I would have such luck to be in this environment : kitchen, sofas, beds, many decorations for all political ideologies, ideas. There was some decorations that were about weed and many cool things for the young guy I am.

The lab's leader told me that it was a very free environment and all the awesome stuff I could use.
Then they showed me where I would work.

We were two interns employed as web developers. We had a complete room for us.
Then we began to work there, and I was presented to my internship tutor.
He gave me some instructions but told me that I had a week before the project begin.

Here began the troubles.

We waited a complete week without having any instructions. Then we began to build something in PHP with our knowledge and the informations someone from the lab gave us.
When finally we had news from the project, two weeks later, we learned that the project would be built with ASP. NET.
Here we go, I learn ASP. NET alone. I have many problems and nobody helps (even if the problem comes from enterprise's API/Framework). I finally make something usable with no help, after I discovered that my mate wasn't developer at all and just took an option for her classes which forced her to get an internship.

She had 3 month left, I had 6.
Then when the project really began, nobody came to verify what I was doing and on a meeting, they said that I was doing nothing.

The boss even became mad on us because he couldn't see what we were doing (we're back end developers).
I asked for help to the developers of the enterprise and someone came, sad to have to help an internship, and learned some tricks but nothing else.

To have a concrete explanation of what DDD was, I had to ask 4 times for help.

Finally I had something that could receive data from the connected hives we are working on and store them into a database in the architecture of the enterprise.

Then, they wanted me to try an API for them. I tried, and it wasn't working at all. So they make me still wait to change my whole architecture when the API will be released.

Recently, I was told that I would never do the front-end of the project (which was an horror because of the fantasm of the lab leader). Then they realized that my late wasn't a programmer. So they asked me to make a prototype for the front-end. I did for a presentation.

Then they didn't tell me the device they would use for the presentation and it was an iPhone 7. Idk why, safari couldn't display what IE can.

They blamed me for having done a bad work. It wasn't my job. I did it to help because they can't find a fucking front-end developer with a little more experience than me.

Actually, I am an alone developer since my mate is gone and the lab leader don't want me to show up because she considers me as a shame.
I asked to be moved back in the office of the enterprise, they agreed and said it was a 2-weeks delay. It's the Thursday of the second week and I have no news. I send mails to my tutor, even SMS, he doesn't answer me. They didn't call me to give me my pay with a week late. And the person who is responsible doesn't answer me neither. I came to see her, but she wasn't available. I'm now alone in a desk, waiting the time to pass.

Fucking this shit.

I'm in France.

EDIT : I forgot to say that I can't use the sofas or bed because I'm allergic to cats and there were 3 cats. Now there is still one and this beast vomits and poos everywhere in the house...

Colleagues cannot seem to grasp that allowing a user to manually update a field via an Api, that only business process should update is a bad idea.

The entire team of around 10 'software developers' cannot grasp that just because the frontend website won't set it doesn't mean its secure. I have tried many times now...

Just an example honestly... Our project follows a concrete repository pattern using no interfaces or inheritance, returning anaemic domain models (they are just poco) that then get mapped into 'view models' (its an api). The domain models exist to map to 'view models' and have no methods on them. This is in response to my comments over the last 2 years about returning database models as domain transfer objects and blindly trusting all Posts of those models being a bad idea due to virtual fields in Ef.

Every comment on a pull request triggers hours of conversation about why we should make a change vs its already done so just leave it. Even if its a 5 minute change.

After 2 years the entire team still can't grasp restful design, or what the point is.

Just a tiny selection of constant incompetence that over the years has slowly warn me down to not really caring.

I can't really understand anymore if this is normal.

Holy shit. In a meeting that literally makes no sense. We're taking credit for work by claiming story points. Story points. How the hell does that work? Especially since we have told management CONSTANTLY that story points are abstract LOE shit and NOT time spent. Yet I suggest if we REALLY want to estimate who worked what we track time spent I get shot down. You can't get a concrete measurement from an abstract concept. Also, we're being encouraged to argue over who does what? What does THAT help? AND we're not even reestimating if we over or under estimating, but being forced to massage our numbers into the estimate. What the fuck?

Haven't checked devRant in weeks. Busier than a cat burying shit in concrete.

It's important to redo old projects and ideas, here is why:

I worked on a project about 6 months ago, it was mostly just a "coding challenge" and I worked on the project for 3 days and I didn't get it to work. But I started working on the project again from scratch 2 days ago and I got it to work this time!

The moral of this story:
Just making new projects makes it hard to see how much you've grown and improved. But redoing old projects (even if they worked) gives you a concrete representation on how much you've improved (and if you have at all😉)

Worst architecture I've seen?

The worst (working here) follow the academic pattern of trying to be perfect when the only measure of 'perfect' should be the user saying "Thank you" or one that no one knows about (the 'it just works' architectural pattern).

A senior developer with a masters degree in software engineering developed a class/object architecture for representing an Invoice in our system. Took almost 3 months to come up with ..

- Contained over 50 interfaces (IInvoice, IOrder, IProduct, etc. mostly just data bags)
- Abstract classes that implemented the interfaces
- Concrete classes that injected behavior via the abstract classes (constructors, Copy methods, converter functions, etc)
- Various data access (SQL server/WCF services) factories

During code reviews I kept saying this design was too complex and too brittle for the changes everyone knew were coming. The web team that would ultimately be using the framework had, at best, vague requirements. Because he had a masters degree, he knew best.

He was proud of nearly perfect academic design (almost 100% test code coverage, very nice class diagrams, lines and boxes, auto-generated documentation, etc), until the DBAs changed table relationships (1:1 turned into 1:M and M:M), field names, etc, and users changed business requirements (ex. concept of an invoice fee changed the total amount due calculation, which broke nearly everything).

That change caused a ripple affect that resulted in a major delay in the web site feature release.

By the time the developer fixed all the issues, the web team wrote their framework and hit the database directly (Dapper+simple DTOs) and his library was never used.

I will never work in an open floor plan environment again.

The average salary is 6 figures and they can't even spring for sound deadening material on the concrete walls, nevermind cubicles.

Nothing says "I don't value your contribution to our product" quite like treating your engineers like cattle.

Hello and welcome, to a presentation in which I will tell you my thoughts on the shortcomings of modern day computers and programming practices.

Computers are based on a very fundamental and old idea, folders, and files, a file is basically a concrete amount of data, whereas a folder is a group of files, and it comes from the real life concept of files and folders, now it might be quite obvious already that using a concept invented in 1898 by a guy called Edwin G. Seibels, might not be the best way for computers to function in the year 2020, but alas, it is.

Unless of course, you step into the world of a programmer.

A programmer’s world is much different, they use this idea of a data structure, or in simpler terms, an object. An Object is just like what you would think of as an object in your head, something with different properties that you can think about in different ways, for example your mobile phone, it has a battery percentage, it has a screen size, it has free space available. Programmers use these data structures to analyse data very quickly, like finding all phones with a screen size bigger than a certain size for example.

The problem is that programmers still use files and folders to create the programs that use these objects.

Consider this example.

Let’s say you want to create a virtual version of a drink bottle, consider what properties it will have, colour, volume, height, width, depth, material, etc..

As a programmer, you can leverage programming features and change the properties of a drink bottle directly, if you wanted to change the colour, you just say, drink bottle “dot” colour, equals blue, or red.

But if the drink bottle was represented as a file, all the drink bottles data would be inside the one file, so you would have to open the whole file, find the line or section of the file that has the colour data of the drink bottle, and select it, highlight it, delete what’s there, and type in your new value.

One way to explain this better is to imagine a folder that now represents the drink bottle, imagine adding a new file into that folder that represents each property I described before, colour, volume, etc.., well now, you could just open that folder, find the file for colour, either by looking with your eyes or you could do a file search in the folder for a file called colour, open it, and edit the value inside. This way of editing objects is the one that more closely represents the way programmers and a program itself interacts with objects inside a running programming language.

But the thing is, programmers don’t use the folder/file way of creating objects and putting them into programs, because it would be too cumbersome, they just create 1 file for an object, or have lots of objects in a file, and create all the objects in 1 file, and then run the program which creates the objects, then when they stop the program, it deletes the objects. So there is no actual link between the object in a file and the object that the program creates by reading the data from that file, if you change the object in your program, it does not get saved to the file.

So programmers created databases to house these objects, but there is still a flaw in databases, they are hard to interface with, and mostly databases are just used to send data or retrieve data from, programmatically, you can’t really browse a database the way you can browse the files on your computer. You can, but database interfaces are not made to be easily navigated the way files and folders are.

As it stands, there is no way to store objects instead of files on your computer and interact with them in complex ways the way programmers can inside the programs they create.

If the idea of an object became standard the way a file and folder is standard, I think it would empower human’s a great deal to express things far more easily and fluidly than they can today.

Thanks for reading.

// RANT

STUDENTS NEED MORE HANDS ON COURSES !

I'm doing a year abroad for the fourth year of my masters. I come from a school that really pushes projects, pitches and research forward while leaving in some theory.

Now that I'm at another uni in a different country I can't help but note how UNPREPARED students are for a professional setting ! And they are one year away from finishing their masters in Software Engineering...

Students should use version control tools, they should test their software, they should apply their knowledge to a concrete project ! A 3 hour course on software testing is only as good as its practical counterpart.

Due to resource scarcity, my manager Bob had lent me to other manager John. I started working on John's project and now there is a hardcore dependency on me, as I have done good enough work on it. I was also taking some small work items from Bob parallely so I can be up-to-date with my own team, Later Bob calls me and says he wants me back, since my own team has lot of pending tasks. John's project is still unfinished and will take longer then ever. So far, I am dividing my time between the two teams.

My concern is if I pass on John's project, will I even get recognized for it and since John will have no one concrete to work on his project, he will later keep bugging me for help.

And I feel like I don't belong to either of the teams (I am like a step son to both my parents) 😔

I need to stop treating an OO language as if it were a procedural language.

I have the tendency to turn my code into GOTO spaghetti even though I'm semi-aware that objects exist and that they are distinct.
I still have to get used to this paradigm.

My Java professor always swore by the Plato paradigm, i.e.:
""Platonism" and its theory of Forms (or theory of Ideas) denies the reality of the material world, considering it only an image or copy of the real world.
According to this theory of Forms there are at least two worlds: the apparent world of concrete objects, grasped by the senses, which constantly changes, and an unchanging and unseen world of Forms or abstract objects, grasped by pure reason (λογική). which ground what is apparent." (wikipedia)

Thinking in objects, abstractions and metaphysics is not something I haven't done before (I've practiced it during Sociology and Ethics with the whole Pascal Leibniz, Newton and DesCartes approach) but it's certainly not easy.

Then there was my cool Programming 201 professor who said: "Don't worry man, just read those great UML, Program Design and GOF books and it will all become easy, like a story. It'll all make sense.
I mean, I've graduated, I've passed my Software Engineering I, II and III (hard as hell) but since I haven't focused on those theories and practices anymore, I've lost my touch.

It's definitely not easy for a novice programmer to transition between paradigms..

A quick rant about dependency injection.

I see far too often in projects, a huge over-reliance on dependency injection / IOC frameworks which permeate throughout the entire codebase.

I cringe every time I see a constructor annotated with @Inject and 10 params.

The benefit of these frameworks is how easy they make it to manage many dependencies. What I dislike about them, is exactly that. I feel that they make it TOO easy to manage many dependencies.

How trivial is it to simply add another constructor param? exactly. And people then wonder why their dependency tree looks insane.

I am a strong believer in injecting dependencies the traditional way, via the constructor with no fancy framework. The reason being that it forces you to think more about the dependencies you are adding to your classes, and consider if they are really all needed.

The other problem I have with it, is it basically encourages you to inject everything because its so easy. The purpose of dependency injection is inversion of control and allowing classes to depend on abstraction rather than concrete implementation. All that goes out the window when you @Inject 6 different concrete classes.

Use dependency injection for its intended purpose, not as an excuse to be lazy and avoid thinking about dependencies.

Today in Rust I defined a function that takes Any and returns Any specifically so that parametric types turned into trait objects of this trait can still receive commands without having to know their concrete type.

Bridging static and dynamic typing is one hell of an exercise.

Frustrated... had a signed job offer disappear right before start date after jumping through a ton of hoops, turning down a competing offer, and wasting 3 days of PTO on their process, so back to interviews again.

How do you all determine what salary to ask/look for? Current job has pretty concrete pay bands that I'm pretty sure aren't market, but most of the site (glassdoor, etc) are all OVER the place, as titles can get so fuzzy from one place to another. From people I know I've heard everything from 20k less than I make to 70k more than I make (moderately high COL area, but not CA level). Levels.io seemed promising, but the one FANG offer I had didn't nearly match up with there, so I'm not sure how much of that is bluster or whatever... Blegh. I absolutely hate job hunting.

How do you deal with a developer that constantly challenges your propositions in a rhetorical matter?

For example, say if we have a problem and I propose solution A (along with my reasons why), the developer would then shoot it down - not with another alternative solution or exploration path but instead a rhetorical question.

It has gotten *exhausting* working with this person because every interaction becomes almost a debate. This isn’t just particularly with development but even during casual discussions.

I’ve even tried asking “so what would you suggest?” in which they would answer with confidence in a rhetorical matter - but without any concrete decision making (but at the same time sounding like they did make one).

We work in a team and nobody has taken the reigns of leadership (he’s quiet most meetings), so I decided to take initiative and make the calls. All of a sudden, he has a voice that is mostly axed towards being argumentative than productive. It has come to a point where I’ve just stopped making propositions because I’ve become exhausted trying to defend myself and literally repeating something like 4-5 times, however this is a project that needs to be delivered and because we work closely together, I can’t just ignore him and do my own thing.

CAUTION: possibly NSFL

There was a war. We lived in a leftist camp inside an abandoned railway station. The only thing that could break the siege was BLA

[dream fragment lost]

So they lined us up. There were ten of us.
— Do you want the leftist future?
— No…, they made me say.
— Do you love capitalism?
— Yes…, they made me say.
— Ты готова присниться?, they asked my female comrade ("are you ready to come to our soldiers in their dreams to support them?")
— Yes.
— Ты готов расшибиться?, they asked me ("are you ready to work your ass off, dying in the process if necessary?". It also makes a perfect rhyme with the previous Russian sentence)
— Yes.
Then, they tied our hands and hung us onto a rack. They doused us with gasoline.
— Look. Czechoslovakia had Jan Palach. We have ten Jan Palachs now!
They set us on fire. I feel an unimaginable pain. I wake up for ten minutes.
When I fell asleep again, I found out I survived. But, my body underwent modifications: first, I now had a vinyl shell instead of my skin. Underneath it were raw muscles. Second, I no longer had vocal cords. I no longer had voice.
In this world, we were slaves ("Тяговые люди") ruled by BLA. There were no prisons. Instead, there were only two punishments: the "light" one and the "heavy" one. First one is your shell getting ripped off. You die in around 20 minutes of agonizing pain, like mink that is skinned alive in Chinese leather tanneries. But, compared to the second one, that was a slap on the wrist.
The "heavy" punishment was them injecting you with "The Ferment". Immediately, your mind is altered into total obedience. Then, your body begins to turn into corpse juice. To outside observers, you die in 30 days. But for you, it feels like forever, as time speeds up indefinitely, and you're drifting into endless sorrow. When you die, no one notices, as your shell is still there. But instead of you, there's now nothing but corpse juice inside.

I now worked in some location that resembled Duke Nukem 3D's first map. My job was to remove those plastic shells. I had no bottom — it was replaced with a concrete cube that felt pain just like damaged tooth enamel does. An endless queue of shells moved in front of me. I had to remove their shells, to peel them off like vinyl.
Some people were alive underneath. They still had their skin. They thanked me, smile at me and wander away.
Some of them were alive, but had no skin. That means I was the one to execute a "light" punishment on them.
Some of them weren't there. I pop the shell open, and it deflates as corpse juice pours out.

One of my previous dreams was the following:
"— We arrange surgeries when in-person interventions are _not recommended_.
— So…, — I press the pause button on the handrail.
— The perfect maiden. Inside a plastic shell. 80 years old underneath."

Now I understand it. The first speaker was a BLA researcher. "I" was an investor. The "perfect maiden" was me, but way in the future from my today's dream. It all fits together.
Now, here's the discovered part of kiki universe so far:
- rotten meat house
- swine gray gel battleground
- horizontal elevators network
- united paper island
- baseball bat nightclub
- anxiety-inducing multidimensional pizzeria
- NEW! BLA headquarters
- NEW! demilitarized burning ground abandoned train station
- NEW! Duke Nukem 3D people skinning ground

* Gets handed additions to current software platform (web)

* Gives back estimte of time after meeting with everyone and making them understand that once the testing phase of the project is reached there will be no changes, tests should be exhaustive and focus on SAID FUNCTIONALITY of the new additions. NO CHANGES OR ADDITIONS AT THIS POINT IN TIME

* All directives, stakeholders, users etc agreed on my request and spend an additional hour thinking of different corner and edge cases as provided by me in case they can't think of them (they can't, because they are fucking stupid, but I provided everything)

* Boss looks irritated at their lack of understanding of the scope and the time needed, nods in approval after he sees my entire specification, testing cases, possible additions to the system etc

* All members of the committee decide on the requirements being correct, concrete and proper.

* Finish the additions in a couple of weeks due to the increased demand for other projects, this directly affects the user base, so my VP and Director make it a top priority, I agree with their sentiment, since my Director knows what he is doing (real OG)

* I make the changes, test inside of my department and then stage for the testing environment. Everything is ready, all migrations are in order, the functionality is working as proper and the pipeline for the project, albeit somewhat lacking in elegance is good to go.

* Testing days arrive

* First couple of hours of test: Oh, you know what, we should add these two additional fields, and it would be good if the reporting generated by the system would contain this OTHER FORMAT rather than this one.

* ME: We stated that no additions would be done during the testing environment, testing is for functionality, not to see if you can all think of something else, even then, on June 10 I provided a initial demo and no one bothered to check on it on say something.

Them: Well, we are doing it now, this is what testing is for.

Me: Out of this room, the software engineer is me, and I can assure you, testing is not for that. I repeatedly stated that previously, I set the requirements, added corner cases, tables charts everything and not one single one of you decided to pay attention or add something, actually, said functionality you are requesting was part of one of my detailed list of corner cases, why did you not add it there and then before everything went up?

Them: Well I didn't read it at the time (think of the I in plural form since all of these dumb fucks stated the same)

Then my boss went on a rampage on their dumbasses.

I fucking hate software development sometimes.

Oh well. Bunch of fucking retards.

Tomorrow i have school starting.
Which inspires me to rant about how school fails. Ill omit the "arguments" - feel free to append arguments for my words in the comments. Lol

Dont get be wrong. I LOVE acquiring knowledge. And this is where my first point starts : PACE. My class is basically an assortiment of dumbfucks who dont understand anything without "learning by heart over the course of several weeks"

Ill give you a concrete example.
Our maths teacher wanted to make us think scientifically. So he invented a new type of numbers "root 6 numbers" that are formed like so:
a + b * sqrt(6)
Now he wants us to find out wether the sum of two root 6 numbers is also a root six number. this is all dandy, BUT CLASSMATES STILL DIDNT GET WHAT ROOT 6 NUMBERS ARE, EVEN AFTER SEVERAL EXPRANATIONS. Worse: they went to the main teacher to blacken the math teacher.
Another example would be the time our class needed to understand functions(x) : 4 weeks. Ik, as a programmer i have some ease, but four weeks is a bit too much.

Because of this slow pace, i am irreversibly bored of and in school.
And this leads to another problem: homework. Since i know most of the stuff (the few things i dont get at school, i research at home) the homework are useless to me and since the others dont get much, the homeworks are often more than abundant {in a negative way}.
So i dont do them - but that makes teachers disregard me. Which im sickened of.
Worse: often i dont get overly good grades (i honestly have no clue why. I know everything and go over most of the stuff with my menthor),which empowers teacher of the argument of "you are not good enuff, so you cant read in class".

It would be JUST FINE if the only problem were teachers - but my peers are horrible too.

I know our brains are growing, but thats no reason for being stupid.

I literally get told that i need to stop wearing shorts because they look horrible.

Yep. Also, most people think they are empowered of teaching me and talking about my defaillance - because they do their homework. Even though they know i know stuff better than them.

Now to one of the worst issues: a group work where we had to de a Radio report. The guy (the one who thinks he is intelligent BECAUSE he has good grades) invited himself and his gf to me, he wanted me to translate 22 pages from german to english (because he was too lazy to write in german), wanted me to do audiorecording, audioediting and writing of a report. When i left the group because i was called "weakest link" he spread the word that i he had done everythinh and that because i left his group had failed (noticed the flow in logic?)

NOW everybody thinks of me as stupid weirdo. And honestly - i think i will stop listening to them. Ive always hated people, i dont need a significant other.

Even though this will come with the secondary effect of me being gossiped at.

But honestly its fine.

You might have noticed my elojquent way of expressing myseld. I did that in order to show that i am, despite my grades, overly proficient in english

Ok. So now comes the conclusion. What should i do? Do you Think that i am like that because im pubescent myself? How can i stop having nightmares of every possible social situotion that could occur?
Does this have to do with me being a dev?

Well. ありがとう for reading.

What to do if someone asks for your help with problem X, but then you figure out they originally tried to fix problem A and recursively came up with bad solutions until they got at X at which point the entire codebase overlaps responsibilities, implementations leak, concrete instances are created in controllers ignoring DI and you just can't say ANYTHING nice about it?

Also does not follow a methodology and just does whatever, thinks singletonning a database context is a good option because stuff isn't saved, says they will 'refactor later' even though it should have been done last week and just doesn't seem to get it?

I've told them that what they're doing is plain wrong and they're making it harder for themselves than it needs to be, but they just seem to not get it, even though at this point basic stuff like that shouldn't be an issue.

Posted this in rant since it became kind of a rant instead of a question

First time joined js13k competition, without concrete reason. Just wanted to try out am I able to use my JS knowledge and fit game into 13kB. And actually, I'm really happy with final shape of game. Did anyone else participated? :)

Not a rant, but maybe someone can help me on this one.

I am currently working on an app that will hopefully go live by the end of the year. Up to now, the webserver and database (for the REST API) is running on an old linux machine. However, as my ISP is not really reliable I want to move this stuff somewhere else. Has someone experience with the varios hosting providers? Currently I am a little bit overwhelmed by all the different solutions out there.

Ideally I would want something that doesn't cost very much now, but also scales with more users.

To make it more concrete, it's basically about neo4j + REST API in Python

Can somehow recommend anything? I really appreciate it, as I am currently a little bit lost on this.

Thanks for reading this!

... worst drunk coding experience?
none. or to be more precise, all of the three of them I had. I can't code drunk, i hate doing it, i hatw even thinking about doing it when drunk.

so after those initial three attempts i don't try to do it again, ever.

BUT, best coding experience while high?
ALL OF THEM.
some of the best pieces of code I wrote i did when I was high. my mind goes into overdrive at those times, and my thinking is not lines/threads of thought, but TREES of thought, branching and branching, all nodes of each layer of the tree coming to me AT ONCE, one packet == whole layer across all of the branches.

and the best was when one day, in about 14 hour marathon of coding while high, i wrote from scratch a whole vertical slice of my AI system that i've been toying around in my head for several years prior, and I had all of the high-level concepts ALMOST down, but could never specify them into concrete implementations.

and I do mean MY ai system, my own design, from the ground up, mixing principles of neural networks and neuropsychology/human brain that I still haven't seen even mentioned anywhere.

autonomous game ai which percieves and explores its environment and tools within it via code reflection, remembers and learns, uses tools, makes decisions for itself for its own well-being.

in the end, i had a testbed with person, zombie and shotgun.
all they had pre-defined in their brains were concepts of hunger and health. nothing more.

upon launching it, zombie realized it wants to feed, approached oblivious person, and started eating it.

at which point, purely out of how the system worked, person realized: "this hurts, the hurt is caused by zombie, therefore i hate zombie, therefore i want to hurt it", then looked around, saw the shotgun, inspected its class by reflection, realized "this can hurt stuff", picked the shotgun up, and shot the zombie.

remembered all of that, and upon seeing another zombie, shot it immediately.

it was a complete system, all it needed to become full-fledged thing was adding more concepts and usable objects, and it would automatically be able to create complex multi-stage, multi-element plans to achieve its goals/needs/wants and execute them. and the system was designed in such a way that by just adding a dictionary of natural language words for the concept objects on top of it, it should have been able to generate (crude but functional) english sentences to "talk" about its memories, explain what happened when, how it reacted, what it did and why, just by exploring the memory graph the same way as when it was doing its decision process... and by reversing the function, it should have been able to recieve (crude) english sentences that would make it learn what happened somewhere else in the gameworld to someone else, how to use stuff and tell it what to do, as in, actually transfer actual actionable usable knowledge to it...

it felt amazing to code for 14 hours straight, with no testruns during that, run it for the first time after those 14 hours, and see that happen.

and it did, i swear! while i was coding, i was routinely just realizing typos and mistakes i did 5-20 minutes ago, 4 files/classes ago! the kind you (and i) usually notice only when you try to run the thing and it bugs out.

it was a transcendental experience.

and then, two days later, i don't remember anymore what happened, but i lost all of that code.

and since then, i never mustered enough strength and resolve to try and write the whole thing again.

... that was like 4 years ago.
i hope that miracle will happen again one day...

I know this is utopic, but I've been thinking for a while now about starting an open source platform for figuring out the problems of our society and finding real world, applicable, open source solutions for them.

To give you some more details, the platform should have two interfaces:
- one for people involved in researching, compiling issues into smaller, concrete chunks that can be tackled in the real world, discuss and try to find workable solutions for the issues and so on
- one for the general public to search through the database of issues, become aware of the problems and follow progress on the issues that people started working on

Of course, anyone can join the platform, both as an observer (and have the ability to follow issues they find interesting) and/or contributor (and actually work with the community to make the world a better place in any way they can).

Each area of expertise would have some people that will manage the smaller communities that would build around issues, much like people already do in the open source community, managing teams to focus on the important thins for each issue. (I haven't found a solution for big egos getting in the way yet, but it would be nice if the people involved would focus on fixing stuff in stead of debating about tabs vs spaces, if you know what I mean).

The goal of this project would be to bring together as many people from all kind of fields to actually try to fix this broken society.

It would be even better if it attracted people with money and access to resources (one example off the top of my head being people like Elon Musk) that could help implement the solutions proposed by the community without expecting to gain profit off of it (profit is also acceptable if it is made in a considerate, fair and helpful way, but would not be promoted on the platform).

The whole thing would be voluntary work; no salary, no other commitment than the personal pledge that once someone chooses to tackle something, he/she will also see it trough (or at least do his/her best).

The platform would be something like a mix of real time communication, issue tracker, project management tool and publishing platform.

I don't yet have all the details for how it should all fit together, but if there is something that I would like to start, this is definitely it!

PS: I don't think I can ever do something like this by myself, and I don't really have the time to manage a community of developers to start work on it right now. But if you guys think something like this is something worth your time, I will make time and at least start on defining the architecture and try to turn this into a real project.

If enough people are interested, I will drop any other side projects and do my best to get this into the world!

Thank you for reading :)

I subscribe to many copywriting newsletters. Here's an article that shows how it's like on "the other side", marketers struggle, too.

How Kevin's Massive Mistake
Completely Changed His Life

Kevin H. made a huge mistake.

The biggest, he would say, if he could tell you himself.

And he knew it immediately.

It was, he said, "instant regret."

Within milliseconds, he was asking himself "What have I done..."

Kevin, see, had just jumped the rail of the single most popular suicide spot in the world, the Golden Gate Bridge.

On average, the site gets another distraught jumper every two weeks. Kevin was one of them.

It wasn't like he hadn't tried to quiet the voices in his head. Therapy, drugs, hospitalization.

Time to die, those voices still said.

And yet, in the minutes his bus dropped him off at the bridge, he hesitated and paced with tears in his eyes.

"I told myself if just one person comes up to me and asks if I'm okay... if one person asks if they can help... I won't do it. I'll stop and tell them my whole story..."

But nobody did, so he jumped.

It was in those next milliseconds, he would later say, he knew it was the biggest mistake of his life.

He didn't want to die.

But now, he was sure, it was too late.

From its highest point, it's a 245-foot plummet into the icy bay waters below.

Out of the 1,700 people that have jumped from the bridge since it first opened in 1937, only 25 have survived.

Kevin, against all odds, would be one of them.

He slammed into the water like hitting concrete. Three of his vertebrae instantly shattered.

When he surfaced, he couldn't hold his own head above water. But, incredibly, a sea lion kept pushing him up.

The Coast Guard soon arrived and pulled him out.

From there, he began a long recovery that required intense surgery, physical therapy, and psychiatric care.

While still under treatment, a priest urged him to give a talk to a bunch of seventh and eighth graders.

Afterward, they sent him a pile of letters, both encouraging and full of their own pained thoughts.

He also met a woman.

Today, Kevin lives in Atlanta and he's been happily married for the last 12 years.

And he tours the country, sharing his story.

So why re-tell it here?

Obviously -- I hope -- you don't get lots of copywriters looking to snuff it after a flopped headline test.

Just the same...

We've talked a lot in this space about the things one needs to get by in this biz.

My friend and colleague Joe, over at the publishing powerhouse Agora Financial, likes to list requirements.

You need intense curiosity...

You need a killer work ethic...

And you must, MUST have... resilience.

Meaning, you must have or find the capacity to bounce back from failure and flops, even huge ones.

Now, again, Kevin's story is an extreme and in this context -- I hope -- a hyperbolic example of somebody giving up. In the worst way possible.

It is also, though, a metaphor.

See, I get a lot of notes from some of you guys... and at conferences, I get to talk to a lot of people...

And I often get the sense, from some folks, that they're feeling a little more overwhelmed than they let on.

Some are just starting out, and they've got a lot on the line. For some, it's everything. And some are desperate to make it work.

Because they have to, because their pride or livelihoods or a family business is at stake, because it's a dream.

And yet, they're overwhelmed by all the tips and secrets... or by piles of confusing research or ideas...

For others, even had some success, but they're burned out, feel antiquated, or feel like "imposters" that know less than they let on, in an industry that's evolving.

To all those folks... and to you... I can only say, I've been there. And frankly, go back there now and again.

Flops happen, failures happen. And you can and will -- even years and decades into doing this -- make the wrong choices, pick the wrong projects, or botch the right ones.

The legendary Gene Schwartz put it this way, according to a quote spotted recently in fellow writer Ben Settle's e-letter...

" A very good copywriter is going to fail. If the guy doesn't fail, he's no good. He's got to fail. It hurts. But it's the only way to get the home runs the next time."

Once more, nobody -- I hope -- is taking the trials of this profession hard enough to make Kevin's choice.

And believe me, I don't mean to make light of the latter. I just want to make sure we hit this anvil with a big hammer. To drive home the point that, whatever your struggle, be it with this biz or something bigger, that you don't want to give up. Press on.

As Churchill put it, "Success, is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm."

Or even more succinctly when he said, "If you're going through hell, keep going."

Because it's worth it.
.
John Forde

Try:
Read_Localizated_Content_(Ita)
😉

Ho trovato questo meme su fb... Rido follemente 😂😂

Except ItalianNotInstalledError:
I found this meme on fb...
M: I won't lie Neo, whoever fought an agent is dead. But where they lost you'll be victorious.

N: why?

M: I saw agents throw fists through concrete. Man shoot loads of bullet on them without hitting anything else than air.
Their strength and speed, however, remain result of the application of a system with many rules.
And you.
You are italian

(referring to our ability to avoid, bend, ignore and replace rules)

😂😂😂

They say “think outside the box”. When you're depressed, the box is made of concrete. The more depressed you are, the smaller the box.

Our brain is wired to cut off thought processes that take too much energy. In depression, this mechanism works against you, cutting off everything but laying down. To me, get up in the morning and go brush my teeth is too outside the box. Thinking about it is like touching a boiling kettle. Painful, ouch-y, and my brain doesn't even want me to think about doing it.

I'm working and living in my bed. I don't really get up. Should I even say about things like going out or cooking?

I feel accomplished. After arguing with my family for a month or so, I finally solved the WiFi issues in my room! (We live in a flat. And the thick, concrete walls eat the signal super well)

I used to have 2 MBs downstream at most, with very common disconnects and general connection issues.

Now, just yesterday, I laid about 50 meters of ethernet cable all the way from my room to the other end of our house. Laid the cable along the top of our walls so that mom did not have to constantly whine how bad it looks.

Biggest issues were doors (Parents refuse to drill into the walls here, they tend to crumble a lot), but ended up running it under the door just tightly enough that the doors don't squeeze it in any way.

It works great! The cable is almost invisible, and now, my downstream is 30 MBps!

The only downside is that I used an old wifi router in my room that supports only 802.11b/g/n, not ac.

What do you think about a SaaS for sustainability and carbon footprint analysis of raw materials in BIM information?

The aim is to create a digital platform based on analysis of complex geometric files for construction and architecture and translating that to the CO2 footprint and embodied energy for the raw materials in the building (concrete, steel, glass etc.).

This will led designers increase sustainability and make better buildings.

What are your thoughts about open sourcing this project vs. creating a proprietary software?

So I'm looking for a tutorial somewhere to manage auth with react.

I have passport local setup with jwt in express, but looking to manage users in the front-end, managing the user state app wide, logging out, protected routes etc.

I've done some searching around but I can't see anything to concrete. Any pointers or articles would be great.

I was thinking of localStorage but not sure how to go about setting that up with react.

I was thinking to read some books on algorithm and mathematics required in programming, especially for CP. After some searching I got across some books that are considered great in the field. Among the books, 'Introduction to Programming by CLRS', 'Algorithms Design Manual by Steven Skiena', 'Concrete Mathematics by Donald E. Knuth' and 'The Art of Programming by Donald E. Knuth', in which order should I read them? I've already started reading CLRS as it would be required in my college course too.

Some very friendly neighbor bought new wifi probably yesterday and it literally fucked up my wifi speed. I easily got like 30Mbits in the toilet, now it is only 2-5 megs dropping to 300kbits sometimes... Very fucked up. All channels are full and what is worse, if some channel is good on one side of the apartment, it is flooded on the other...
The only solution seems to be 5GHz, but it sucks, because its range is soooo small between these concrete walls, I would need at least 2 extenders lol.

Wise people of devrant, I need career advice:
I got offered a contract by a french consulting company for my first job, but they also told me that they probably won't have a project for me untill April (because they have enough juniors for now and new positions probably won't open untill they get a new batch of projects.)

Needless to say I'm angry at myself for being such a noob but they are right :/

What would you do? I am still looking for other possibilities atm, but nothing too concrete has popped up yet besides these french guys: I got an offer for an unpaid intership that is waiting for a geen light, and a couple of other job interviews lined up for the next few weeks.

Also I currently live in denmark, so I would need to relocate to france come April.

I would be inclined to sign the contract anyway and return their kindness, as they could have just told me to fuck off and come back in 6 months, (at least they like me) but I don't know what is best in this situation...

Should I stick with them and wait, perhaps training myself in the mean time? Or do you think it would be better to pursue other options?

Goals for 2022:

- Keep studying my new book (concrete mathematics)
- keep solving hacker rank problems
- Interview at amazon.com again (I was so close to get it) and feel the pleasure of reject them
- Stop skipping gym days
- Making friends in NY

// new Rant("help")

I am currently writing my first 'real' Ruby project. I want people to be able to contribute through a module class by extending it and implementing the needed methods. This can (if done correctly) provide new commands for the terminal and new features.

But is this a good idea? I would download the code then by using git and keep it that way updated (similar brew does). At the start of the terminal app I would add all files recursively from the folder where I clone the modules into and lookup each class that extends module and then load the new content.

Is there another way of creating such a 'modular' application in Ruby?

They way I load the modules is through the inherited method, I just add the classes (not a concrete object created with new) to a list and retrieve it at runtime.

Would be nice to get some feedback going on here, not sure if my idea is good/bad.

I feel sad about being in a standstill position in my life right now. everything feels like stopped, and i am not growing.

My only source of income is my job, which does pays well, but not much. I have been in this job for 6 months (3rd job in 3 years) and although it is satisfying in terms of the work i do, everything else is just bleh. quantity of work is a lot, there is chaos everywhere, bosses are incompetent and demanding and worst of all , its hybrid, so am wasting 2-3 days every week.

apart from work, i struggle to make myself useful. outside work hours, i want to earn more money, health, popularity and power.

- for health, i goto gym , which hopefully is the onlh thing going correct in my life. although am not getting any major transformation, the feeling of pain among my muscles feels good and people seems to know me somewhat in there.

- for money, popularity and power , am again at a still.
--- power comes from popularity and money.
--- money comes from ability to influence(and optionally with knowledge) .
--- popularity also comes with knowledge and/or ability to influence.
--- knowledge can be bought/learned.

- above all are my guesses. i haven't yet cracked the exact dependency graph in here. but the simplest thing to get is knowledge and i have been trying to get a hold of it, but in vain

- i have tried a lot of stuff in last 3 years :

--- get better in android ( which i did by working professionally) ,
--- learn web frontend (html/css/js/react, etc ., for which i took courses and i know them now somewhat ) ,
--- learn web backend ( spring, node, flask, aws, etc .,for which i took courses/videos)
--- learn no code stuff (markdown generators, wordpress etc , for which i tried as hobby)
--- learn ios/hybrid stuff(flutter, react native etc, for ehich i watched videos, did courses etc)

- the problem is, am just good at one thing (android) and have a limited knowledge (5-30%) of all the others. companies won't pay me more to be a mediocre full stack dev than what they are paying me now to be a decent junior android dev

- the areas where i lack as of now is DS,Algo, Competitive programming and System designing. these are skills expected for someone trying to crack a good fortune 5xx company

- i am not so sure if i want to do these since there isn't a guarantee whether i will be happy to be in google or amazon. i could guess the amount they would pay me for being a mediocre full stack dev.

- i am not even sure if its good for me to change jobs every few months. i contribute heavily wherever i go, nd i leave at the moment am about to receive a probable reward(probable promotion/increment) for a more concrete reward ( the definite increment from a job switch)

- my existing knowledge is being wasted like the various uselss courses i did in college as i am unable to find a usecase for them. i am tired of making useless jira clones , caclulators and portfolio pages for myself which no one will be using or appreciating.

- keeping the whole tech life aside, my family runs the blood of businessmen and i am not able to progress in that as well. my father was an average grocery shop owner whose shop is now on rent and who is now doing a sales job too. however, their family shop with grandfather and brothers was once a very popular and money minting business 40 years ago.

- i sometimes feel i could do good in business area, but i am a complete blank slate in that department with no one to support (my father is old now)

- alongside non career problems ( midlife crisis, money shortage, no friends ), life feels pretty stagnant right now :/

I'm currently having a problems sleeping my inner philosopher just keeps thinking about various things. I wanna try to write some of them down as an simply to see what will happen.

I'll write my opinion down as honest as possible so feel free to disagree, but point out what I should rethink, if you want me to consider it.

To me respect has to be earned. I think especially on the internet many people try to skip this crucial step when they try to get respect. Most often when they want an opinion or their ideals to be respected. Most of the time it doesn't even feel like they want to be respected, but rather accepted.

There's nothing wrong with accepted in my opinion, but there are several approaches to get to this point and I despise some of them.

Earning acceptance by earning respect is one of the right ways to do it. Working hard towards your goals, showing your individual strength, standing behind your ideals. These are things I can respect.

I should also mention that these Ideals should be concrete, based on rational thought and a general good will or you will just twist my words to say that I support e.g. IS, Stalin's politics ect.

On a side node, I think it'd be wrong to disrespect everything Stalin did, since, from an economical point of view, he pushed Russia forward by quite a bit.

Then on the other side I see crybabies. People who want to be accepted, without putting effort in their ideals. Most of the time not even aiming for acceptance through respect, but through pity. Honestly, that's all they're going to get from me.

Pity, for their petty ideals.

Basically all I ever see these people doing is attention whoring and practicing multiple deadly sins at once.

Wrath, jealousy, sloth, pride, greed and optionally also gluttony.

Lust is rather a separate package. When I think about it, I link it mostly to horny teens and "send bob and vegane" type of stuff.
Gluttony being powered by sloth or vice versa, enhancing it.

The clear image I have in mind, while I write about this packages of deadly sins however, is that of a jealous person, complaining / getting angry about something they could change change themselves, but want them to be changed for them. Mostly through social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and whatever the fuck Tumblr is supposed to be.

"I wanna be rich, why is <person> richt but I'm not? This world is so unfair 😡". Have you tried working towards becoming rich?

"I don't don't feel pretty. Accept me". Accept yourself. Done.

"I don't like <person or organization>'s doing". If that's the whole message, all you probably did so far is complaining or crying. Sweet tears.

Stuff like that can happen to any person, just like any person makes mistakes.
Mistakes are made to learn from them. If you realize realize and accept your mistakes others may do so as well and forgive you.

But we are he towards this idiotic trend where people just can swallow their pride even for microscopic things. They instead push their pride to higher levels of ignorance, blaming other people, l(ying)mfao, creating black holes of density in the process. Makes me wonder whether their real motive is an inside bet on who can get the most people to kill them selves by face palming.

Most of my life I have been fairly protected against these people, besides some spikes of incompetence, but recently the have invaded 2 areas in my world that make the world somewhat less of a pain. Programming and the internet culture.

Yes, I'm talking about that master / slave BS renaming and article 11 and 13.

The remaking itself isn't really the problem, but rather the context. This was basically a show of power for the self proclaimed "social justice warriors" or SJW for short.

The fact that this madness has spread. That's what worries me. To me it feels like the first zombie has spawned.

Then we have this corrupted piece of incompetent shit, called Axel Voss, and other old farts.

They live in a galaxy far away from reality, somewhere in the European Parlament, making laws they don't know shit about, regulating things they know shit about.

All in the name of the people of the EU of course. And by people we obviously talk about the money.

I can honestly not think of another reason, after reading the replies Voss and his party gave on Twitter regarding the shit they pulled off.
Well, at least none that doesn't involve some firm of brain death.

For now I'll show them as much as possible how much I despise / reject them. Currently playing with the thought of some kind (social media?) website were posts from other sites or actions in general can be rated only with "Fuck you"s.
Given these articles, I should not have them hosted in an European country though 😅.

Almost hitting that 5k character limit 😰

Any good advice for managing junior developers?

In my experience I have found that loose definitions of work to be completed yields poor results. Honestly, sometimes I wonder if I have to write the code structure and leave a bunch of TODO comments for people to fill in.

Or alternatively people get going on tangents without thinking of the concrete problem given.

Or go try building generic abstractions that are unneeded and will not be reused complicating even the simplest use case.

Maybe the problem is in me and that I am not clear in communicating what's needed. What techniques do you guys use to get more or less what you want?

*Python:*

```
d = json.loads(str)
d['foo'] = bar
json.dumps(d)
```

*Scala:*
```
Caused by: TimerException{org.apache.flink.shaded.jackson2.com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.exc.InvalidDefinitionException: Cannot construct instance of `scala.collection.immutable.Map` (no Creators, like default constructor, exist): abstract types either need to be mapped to concrete types, have custom deserializer, or contain additional type information
at [Source: UNKNOWN; line: 1, column: 1]}
... 15 more
```

Forcing all your package dependencies to one specific version because you are afraid of incompatibilities is like building a scyscraper from pure concrete because wood isn't strong enough. Sounds like a decent idea at first but leads to a brittle, fragile structure that won't last very long.

Whenever someone comes to me with an idea that will "make tons of money" i ask them if they have any concrete proof that people are interested in their idea.

If they say no, I point them to the pdf book on the downloads page of pretotyping.org

I’m already put on “support” for days if not weeks now and i’m tired of it. Give me a concrete project instead of the usual bucket of shit please!

I need some advice to avoid stressing myself out. I'm in a situation where I feel stuck between a rock and a hard place at work, and it feels like there's no one to turn to. This is a long one, because context is needed.

I've been working on a fairly big CMS based website for a few years that's turned into multiple solutions that I'm more or less responsible for. During that time I've been optimizing the code base with proper design patterns, setting up continuous delivery, updating packaging etc. because I care that the next developer can quickly grasp what's going on, should they take over the project in the future. During that time I've been accused of over-engineering, which to an extent is true. It's something I've gotten a lot better at over the years, but I'm only human and error prone, so sometimes that's just how it is.

Anyways, after a few years of working on the project I get a new colleague that's going to help me on my CMS projects. It doesn't take long for me to realize that their code style is a mess. Inconsistent line breaks and naming conventions, really god awful anti-pattern code. There's no attempt to mimic the code style I've been using throughout the project, it's just complete chaos. The code "works", although it's not something I'd call production code. But they're new and learning, so I just sort of deal with it and remain patient, pointing out where they could optimize their code, teaching them basic object oriented design patterns like... just using freaking objects once in a while.

Fast forward a few years until now. They've learned nothing. Every time I read their code it's the same mess it's always been.

Concrete example: a part of the project uses Vue to render some common components in the frontend. Looking through the code, there is currently *no* attempt to include any air between functions, or any part of the code for that matter. Everything gets transpiled and minified so there's absolutely NO REASON to "compress" the code like this. Furthermore, they have often directly manipulated the DOM from the JavaScript code rather than rendering the component based on the model state. Completely rendering the use of Vue pointless.

And this is just the frontend part of the code. The backend is often orders of magnitude worse. They will - COMPLETELY RANDOMLY - sometimes leave in 5-10 lines of whitespace for no discernable reason. It frustrates me to no end. I keep asking them to verify their staged changes before every commit, but nothing changes. They also blatantly copy/paste bits of my code to other components without thinking about what they do. So I'll have this random bit of backend code that injects 3-5 dependencies there's simply no reason for and aren't being used. When I ask why they put them there I simply get a “I don't know, I just did it like you did it”.

I simply cannot trust this person to write production code, and the more I let them take over things, the more the technical debt we accumulate. I have talked to my boss about this, and things have improved, but nowhere near where I need it to be.

On the other side of this are my project manager and my boss. They, of course, both want me to implement solutions with low estimates, and as fast and simply as possible. Which would be fine if I wasn't the only person fighting against this technical debt on my team. Add in the fact that specs are oftentimes VERY implicit, so I'm stuck guessing what we actually need and having to constantly ask if this or that feature should exist.

And then, out of nowhere, I get assigned a another project after some colleague quits, during a time I’m already overbooked. The project is very complex and I'm expected to give estimates on tasks that would take me several hours just to research.

I'm super stressed and have no one I can turn to for help, hence this post. I haven't put the people in this post in the best light, but they're honestly good people that I genuinely like. I just want to write good code, but it's like I have to fight for my right to do it.

Innovation: glass or plastic
Prison: concrete
?: titanium

The bug: Some string values for an identifier property in the data objects are being sent from our frontend prefixed with a '0'. Sometimes. When it happens, it usually gets stripped away again by the time it's passed to our backend. But not always.

This 0 is never explicitly set anywhere. I even searched for a few variants of " = 0" in both the frontend and backend projects without receiving any results. You might already be suspecting where this is going.

So it turns out.

The data object which holds this value is being initialized in the aspnet (don't ask) backend and passed to the frontend, which then hydrates it. This value is always an integer number, albeit incidentally so which is why string is used as the actual type. When this object is initialized, it's hardcoded with an anonymous type where this property is set as int because I guess someone figured "it's always an int though". Being a typed language, primitive scalars can't be null objects which means the property's value becomes the concrete int 0.

Okay weird. I can think of better ways of doing this but let's just set it to string as I can't start overhauling things right now. Let's just go find where this value is somehow concatenated into the incoming parameter.

You see, this happens because at the point where the frontend sets this value, it may be an int or string depending on where it came from, and I guess someone figured that in order to cast it to string you just go prop += arg seeing as the prop is empty string and all. Because explicitly casting it or - as much as I get a rash whenever I see it - going prop = "" + arg would be too verbose and unoriginal.

Bonus round: How come the 0 only sometimes made it all the way to our backend? The thing is that this bug has been fixed before. The fix is that because this string is "always" an int, you can parse it to int before passing it to the backend in case it has leading zeroes. This path is only taken in certain views because someone forgot to copypaste their fix into all the places this is repeated.

Sometimes you find a bug and you are just somehow more grumpy after fixing it.

> me: trying to explain to a dev from one of our customers why should they worry about sql injection in their application -which by the way is public- since they always concatenate params (even giving concrete examples in their app on how could I gain acces to their database with just a couple of queries)

> me: (thinking) Did I change my bed with a time machine by accident and got myself into the past?

Do these things happen often to you? (U_U||)

Non-dev beings think devs are lifeforms with the power to read minds and foresee the future: they ask us to do things expecting we already know what they want without a concrete explanation, and want a time estimate without analysing the request nor the code.

I was inside a BLA landmine factory. They use special chalk-like sulfur-infused concrete for shells — it is THE most painful thing to have under your skin. Their only goal is to maximize the pain of their victims.

I wonder at this old self assured faggot who was supposedly selling something to homeless people years ago or buying something from them
Endless mountain concrete
Always the same stupid shirt

Trying to teach my friend, who has already graduated college, enough web dev stuff to land an internship and build a career. I can tell he's nervous because he's always asking how close he is to landing an internship.

I remember being there, wanting concrete answers but only hearing to just keep learning. Now that the shoe is on the other foot I understand. Listening to him explain what he knows so far makes me feel slightly nostalgic but also slightly concerned if he'll be able to learn enough soon enough.

He's been using codeacademy to learn and leaning on me a little, but I really need to boost his learning if he's gonna end up anywhere any time soon. He's familiar with HTML and basic CSS stuff (box model is still iffy, for example) and he's trying to grasp JS. Definitely not there yet, but have no idea when I can start telling him he's in good shape.

Top Advice: Remember the reason for why you learned languages, to make ideas concrete and real not to pursue becoming a language lawyer or a linguistic philosopher.

Fuck concrete and the likes! Just fuck it. If I enjoyed grinded stone so much I'd move to fucking Romania or camp inside the Chernobyl dome or something.
I want every concrete building to have a disclaimer saying that 'you are now entering a fucking Faraday cage - the contractor who built this place hates puny nerds like you with a vengeance!'

I often read rants, and I can see how everyone gives for granted that we have to overwork, work until night, work on weekend, work when the boss asks us, read the email, work until you fixed that bug, and so on. I mean, I don't see anyone ranting about this, I just see that this became the background of other rants, something that's so normal and we are so accustomed that we don't even consider it a problem anymore. I was wondering, is it just me that gives value to his own free time? That would rather read a book, watch tv or stay with friends? Or at least being able to tell a friend "we'll meet for dinner" without the fear of a problem blocking you at your job. Why should I be paid less than average in my country and work more, making the benefits still less concrete? I think I have a good brain and I chose this career because I love it, but if I could born again I'd be a doctor or a teacher

Hey, where is a good place to ask for ideas of solutions to abstract problems? Like a feature-request on something you've not built before? Like for discussion purposes to start ideas flowing? Reddit? Here, DevRant?

The only one I can think of is StackOverflow. But my impression on its purpose is that it is more for questions with concrete anwsers/solutions to them.

Well thanks a lot for the clarification of WHY I cannot sync my work (Office 365) mail using the mail client in Windows 10!

It's not that it's wrong; it's (probably) very much correct.
It's not that it's not precise; I don't think it could be anymore precise than a data dump like that.
It's not that trying to help me solve the problems; I'm sure it is.

But now that I have all the (debug) info about the security policies in place it would be great if it would show what violated which policy and maybe even what they mean and how to fix it?
The most concrete to go by is the error code, and judging by a google that has meant "your mail has problems" for at least three years...

...not even a single link was found to the (only) page detailing content, possible values, and dependencies between policies.

New guy taking over senior software developer since the last one seemed to burn out / got tired of all the bullshit. His coming replacement has a habit of making 'software walkthroughs' for every repository we have. The project organization is so badly managed and we only ever work on requirements when we have something concrete. After Outlook-declining one of the walkthroughs I get this little gem from him in an IM:

Guy: <Old Snr Dev> felt that you built the base for it and it would be good if you are there as you might take it forward is what <Manager> told me

Me: yeh but it is like so straightforward
and basically there are other projects on github which do the exact same thing

Guy: okay, just that I have not seen the code yet. Or anyone else to take it forward

Me: i think - go through it when you need to
if there are problems, then ask

WTF? You didn't even check it yourself and you want me to handhold you as a senior software developer? Totally nuts.

I'm getting laid off for a month.

Any tech related suggestions of what I should do in my excess free time? Got a book (Clean Code) I want to read. Some side projects I might tinker around with. But other than that no concrete ideas.

How To Make Sure That A Construction Cradle Is Perfect For Safe Use?

Construction and maintenance cradles are used by millions of construction workers who need to work in inaccessible or elevated areas. The OSHA (Occupational Health and Safety Administration) has laid down a few standards that can help safeguard workers who operate on cradles. In many cases, workers suffer injuries in accidents involving cradles – as the support or planking gives way, or there is slippage of the worker on being struck by an object falling. Poor cradles are also a major reason for accidents. Read and know how you can ensure that a construction cradle is ideal to be used in a safe and proper way.

Check the base

You have to ensure that the scaffold’s base area is completely stable. In case the base lies on items such as blocks of concrete, loose bricks, boxes or barrels, it is not possible to raise a safe cradle. Such types of things are not stable, and cannot offer a level foundation. The footing has to be able to support the cradle that is loaded, without moving or settling. The cradle needs to be set on items that offer a solid foundation, such as mud sills or base plates.

Safe rails and platforms

In case the temporary cradles are 10-inch or more in height over a lower level, it is a good idea to install toeboards, midrails and top rails. These have to be set up on every open side of a cradle platform, so that workers do not fall off from the platform even if they slip.

For more information about finding the best portable work platform, visit this website.