!rant

After over 20 years as a Software Engineer, Architect, and Manager, I want to pass along some unsolicited advice to junior developers either because I grew through it, or I've had to deal with developers who behaved poorly:

1) Your ego will hurt you FAR more than your junior coding skills. Nobody expects you to be the best early in your career, so don't act like you are.

2) Working independently is a must. It's okay to ask questions, but ask sparingly. Remember, mid and senior level guys need to focus just as much as you do, so before interrupting them, exhaust your resources (Google, Stack Overflow, books, etc..)

3) Working code != good code. You are an author. Write your code so that it can be read. Accept criticism that may seem trivial such as renaming a variable or method. If someone is suggesting it, it's because they didn't know what it did without further investigation.

4) Ask for peer reviews and LISTEN to the critique. Even after 20+ years, I send my code to more junior developers and often get good corrections sent back. (remember the ego thing from tip #1?) Even if they have no critiques for me, sometimes they will see a technique I used and learn from that. Peer reviews are win-win-win.

5) When in doubt, do NOT BS your way out. Refer to someone who knows, or offer to get back to them. Often times, persons other than engineers will take what you said as gospel. If that later turns out to be wrong, a bunch of people will have to get involved to clean up the expectations.

6) Slow down in order to speed up. Always start a task by thinking about the very high level use cases, then slowly work through your logic to achieve that. Rushing to complete, even for senior engineers, usually means less-than-ideal code that somebody will have to maintain.

7) Write documentation, always! Even if your company doesn't take documentation seriously, other engineers will remember how well documented your code is, and they will appreciate you for it/think of you next time that sweet job opens up.

8) Good code is important, but good impressions are better. I have code that is the most embarrassing crap ever still in production to this day. People don't think of me as "that shitty developer who wrote that ugly ass code that one time a decade ago," They think of me as "that developer who was fun to work with and busted his ass." Because of that, I've never been unemployed for more than a day. It's critical to have a good network and good references.

9) Don't shy away from the unknown. It's easy to hope somebody else picks up that task that you don't understand, but you wont learn it if they do. The daunting, unknown tasks are the most rewarding to complete (and trust me, other devs will notice.)

10) Learning is up to you. I can't tell you the number of engineers I passed on hiring because their answer to what they know about PHP7 was: "Nothing. I haven't learned it yet because my current company is still using PHP5." This is YOUR craft. It's not up to your employer to keep you relevant in the job market, it's up to YOU. You don't always need to be a pro at the latest and greatest, but at least read the changelog. Stay abreast of current technology, security threats, etc...

These are just a few quick tips from my experience. Others may chime in with theirs, and some may dispute mine. I wish you all fruitful careers!

Dear people who complain about spending a whole night to find a tiny syntax error; Every time I read one of your rants, I feel like a part of me dies.

As a developer, your job is to create elegant optimized rivers of data, to puzzle with interesting algorithmic problems, to craft beautiful mappings from user input to computer storage and back.

You should strive to write code like a Michelangelo, not like a house painter.

You're arguing about indentation or getting annoyed by a project with braces on the same line as the method name. You're struggling with semicolons, misplaced braces or wrongly spelled keywords.

You're bitching about the medium of your paint, about the hardness of the marble -- when you should be lamenting the absence of your muse or the struggle to capture the essence of elegance in your work.

In other words:

Fix your fucking mindset, and fix your fucking tools. Don't fucking rant about your tabs and spaces. Stop fucking screaming how your bloated swiss-army-knife text editor is soooo much better than a purpose-built IDE, if it fails to draw something red and obnoxious around your fuck ups.

Thanks.

Prototype devRant rubber duck. Depending on my craft skills, might have a variety of dev themed capes too

“Yeah but you’re not a *real* developer”

Fuck. you.

I wrote 80% of this code base. I do 80% of the tickets/storyboard points. I do all of the QA. My nose is to the grindstone every fucking day honing this craft and sweating my balls off like a blacksmith staring into the red hot kiln while the sores of previous mistakes scream bloody murder from the unrelenting exposure to heat. I saw this amazing industry of opportunity, freedom and self examination and wanted in no matter what it took. I glued myself to every pithy resource I could possibly get my hands on and crawled through the muck and filth of it all until I could keep myself warm with the smallest spark of my own making. I stoked that spark until it became a fire and stoked that fire until I could set entire forests ablaze. I listened to the ungrateful people keeping warm by my combustion saying it “wasn’t hot enough” or “would have been a nicer colour if they did it” or “could have warmed up just fine jogging on the spot”. I made painstaking alterations to my ignition and watched my undeserving benefactors gradually be silenced and begin to sit quietly by the heat. I jumped into that inferno daily, was reduced to ash daily and emerged reborn daily. But you are right! I didn’t get scammed out of $40k+ studying technology in an archaic institution from instructors who don’t give a shit and answering “D all of the above” for 4+ years straight therefor my opinion doesn’t mean shit. Push your bullshit to prod and watch the server come burning out of the cloud as the apocalyptic swarm of angry tickets come flooding in why don’t you? Bet they didn’t teach you that in school. You’ve never poked around inside an open source codebase in your life. They are just a mystery boxes of magic that unless someone holds your hands with finely crafted instructions containing a 50/50 picture to word ratio you throw a hissy fit. Every problem that comes up instead of working to solve it you reflexively point to the first person in the room while thinking with your pea brain how you can possibly scapegoat them into taking the fall for whatever it is that’s come up today you couldn’t possibly understand.

Not a real developer?

Fuck. You.

My employer keeps sending booze to our houses.

Officially meant for coronaproof zoom social meetings where they play stupid bingo games and quizzes on Friday afternoons.

Why they're sending 2 liter bottles of Rum, 3 bottles of rosé wine and 12 cans of craft beer for the 6th week in a row... I really don't know... I don't even attend the zoom meetings.

All I know is that during breakfast, rum is better mixed into coffee than through cornflakes.

Anyway... Why was this a rant again? Oh right. Can I sue my employer for baiting me into an addiction? 🤔

Sometimes I wish I was allowed to just strangle my colleagues...

Example from the 'code base':

try:
do_something()
except Exception as e:
log(e)
do_something()

When I asked why they would redo the same call right after it failed I was told that 'It works the second time because it takes time to raise the Exception '.

Bitch, you've got a race condition in your sensitive banking software. You know it's there. Do you really want to trust the time needed to raise your exception will always be enough to synch that dumpster fire you call code?
Show some fucking respect for your craft and fix that shit. But of course they won't, because it will work flawlessly until it suddenly stops working. Taking down who knows what in this damn, undocumenred monolith with it....

Sometimes I'm honestly afraid to trust banks with my money.

I'm a new developer. Here is the top advice I've received:

0. Think like a programmer, outside of work too.

1. Programming is tough. It takes a certain kind of mindset to sit in front of a monitor and think it through a problem till the end. Develop that mindset.

2. Handwork pays.

3. Do it for fun. Be exceptional. Money will follow.

4. Care about the craft you build. Write such a beautiful code that your fellow devs would think about your code and have a nerdgasm.

5. Simple is beautiful. Anybody can make things complex. It takes a stroke of genius to make things simple.

6. Write modular code. It makes your code reusable and easy to maintain. Future developers who will work on your piece of code will appreciate it.

7. Share your knowledge. Unlike materialistic things, knowledge grows when you share it.

8. Add comments. You think you'll remember why you wrote that piece of code that way or a clever hack you created but trust me, you won't.

9. Be humble. You'll never know everything. Don't hesitate to ask for help.

10. Writing code is exciting! Of course there will be some frustrating moments. But don't give up! You'll miss a lot of fun.

A simple, open source Neo4j client written in PHP - help craft project decisions and develop as a team

Why do some non-devs treat professional app development like some kids craft-making hobby that requires zero skill and knowledge or brain?
A friend (with ZERO knowledge about coding) said to me today, teach me, or tell me how to learn this app development, I'll learn it within a month and make my own apps plus do freelance app work in free time, apps fetch plenty of money easily. Blah blah.
Not the first time, other non dev friends have talked in the same way on other instances.
It's insulting and infuriating. I don't even know what to reply.

Two years ago I moved to Dublin with my wife (we met on tour while we were both working in music) as visa laws in the UK didn’t allow me to support the visa of a Russian national on a freelance artists salary.

After we came to Dublin I was playing a lot to pay rent (major rental crisis here), I play(ed) Double Bass which is a physically intensive instrument and through overworking caused a long term injury to my forearm which prevents me playing.

Luckily my wife was able to start working in Community Operations for the big tech companies here (not an amazing job and I want her to be able to stop).

Anyway, I was a bit stuck with what step to take next as my entire career had been driven by the passion to master an art that I was very committed to. It gave me joy and meaning.

I was working as hard as I could with a clear vision but no clear path available to get there, then by chance the opportunity came to study a Higher Diploma qualification in Data Science/Analysis (I have some experience handling music licensing for tech startups and an MA with components in music analysis, which I spun into a narrative). Seemed like a ‘smart’ thing to do to do pick up a ‘respectable’ qualification, if I can’t play any more.

The programme had a strong programming element and I really enjoyed that part. The heavy statistics/algebra element was difficult but as my Python programming improved, I was able to write and utilise codebase to streamline the work, and I started to pull ahead of the class. I put in more and more time to programming and studied personally far beyond the requirements of the programme (scored some of the highest academic grades I’ve ever achieved). I picked up a confident level of Bash, SQL, Cypher (Neo4j), proficiency with libraries like pandas, scikit-learn as well as R things like ggplot. I’m almost at the end of the course now and I’m currently lecturing evening classes at the university as a paid professional, teaching Graph Database theory and implementation of Neo4j using Python. I’m co-writing a thesis on Machine Learning in The Creative Process (with faculty members) to be published by the institute. My confidence in programming grew and grew and with that platform to lift me, I pulled away from the class further and further.

I felt lost for a while, but I’ve found my new passion. I feel the drive to master the craft, the desire to create, to refine and to explore.

I’m going to write a Thesis with a strong focus on programmatic implementation and then try and take a programming related position and build from there. I’m excited to become a professional in this field. It might take time and not be easy, but I’ve already mastered one craft in life to the highest levels of expertise (and tutored it for almost 10 years). I’m 30 now and no expert (yet), but am well beyond beginner. I know how to learn and self study effectively.

The future is exciting and I’ve discovered my new art! (I’m also performing live these days with ‘TidalCycles’! (Haskell pattern syntax for music performance).

Hey all! I’m new on devRant!

The rants I read here make me want to be a better developer. I started writing tests, linting code and ensuring 'quality code' because of the devrant community. Being a self taught developer, you never really have anyone to thank. But today I would like to appriciate you all for the rants, comments and advice that make us developers become better at our craft.

New to this but here's my rant I suppose. It bothers me how "non-tech" people kind of devalue what tech people do. Like they have zero understanding of it, so you make something in 30 minutes or an hour that took years of building said skills and involved complex logic and understanding of relational data and because it only took you 30 minutes or an hour it must have been "easy". Or the way you are everybody's free tech advisor with family and friends... And things are said like "I'm not good with this stuff, but you're so good with it". For the record nobody is just "great" at technology or coding from birth its been a 2+ decade craft that I've experimented with and learned and put effort into. So taking into consideration all this effort I have put in to understand all this you say you'll never remember to push that button so you'll just ask me again when the problem arises. Yes because its so fun for me to constantly maintain your electronics because you can't bother to remember to push a button.

Me: "I'm a programmer."
Them: "Oh! You work in IT!"
Me: "Kind of, except it takes years to mast the craft."
Then:: "Oh! You work in IT!"

Looking into a helper class written by someone who was clearly not a master of their craft. The class deals with some string IDs...

public getIDPosition1(String id){
return id.substring(0,1);
}

So far so useless. But it gets better. What is declared immediately below the above method?

public getIDPosition2(String id){
return id.substring(1,2);
}

And below that? You guessed it:

public getIDPosition3(String id){
return id.substring(2,3);
}

This continues to position 10.... -.-

Tech startups, an analogy:

After 18 years going from help desk teams to NOC teams, telecom engineering and all manner of startups in between I have concluded the following:

Imagine wanting to start an aerospace company because you know how to fold a paper airplane, but not how to actually design and engineer an actual craft that will pass basic air worthiness checks.

That’s 99% of “tech” companies.

Discuss. I’ll make drinks.

Why does the idea of having to develop social skills somehow seem to scare the fuck out of a large portion of you?

Is being a likeable human being such a weird concept? What do you expect? To people just validate your entire existence based on how good you can sit in front of a set of monitors and push code out? Thousands of monkeys can do that shit. Thousands of systems will eventually do such things.

for whatever reason the "I am a fucking asshole that can code" trope seems to be a "real thing" amongst developers. A mfker can know waaaaaaay less than you, have the same credentials (degrees etc) and will get the job because you were too busy building an online persona governing how better you are than everyone else. How "quirky" and Sheldon Cooper like you are. You think that makes you likeable? "i don't need to be likeable" <---- yes the fuck you are, because this shit is something in which people can be trained upon.

A team, regardless of how much you agree with this, can choose a person solely based on how well he/she/whatever clicks with them. You might be the end all be all of development, but if they don't like you or feel you will not be someone worthwile to be around, will not chose you. They will go with the charismatic newbie that can learn the same shit you so dear hold on to, because they are likeable.

Sticking to a merit based "I am the best there is" asshole mentality is a thing of the fucking past, boomer mentality. For which newer generations are parting ways with, with still profitable results. workable results. Production ready results.

Yet you chose to stick to a "I might be a quirky annoying fuck, but I am the best" mentality?

This is why you were bullied. This is why you can't get any dick, this is why you can't get any pussy, this is why you sit your ass in your little dark room trying to convince yourself that being lonely is a choice, not a situation in which you put your ass in. This is why I also dislike developers online.

Most of you might be the nicest mfkers on the planet when dealing with on a face to face basis, but if you put this shit on a screen for the world to see you will be viewed upon as some dickhead.

Fuck this "code is my life" mentality, shit is but a paycheck, a craft is not a glimpse into what you are as a person, but a way in which you make a paycheck. Molding your personality, based on what you do for a living, really?

Damn man, shit is just so fucking sad. So cringeworthy even.

begin_rant()

I like that coding is becoming more and more popular.

I like that more and more people are taking steps to manifest there ideas and potentially change the world.

But for fuck's sake... can't geeks be allowed to be the fat pimply introverts of the olden days?? This used to be a realm for the misfits, and now the same assholes who tormented said misfits are joining in and making the rest feel inadaquit all over again. You can't just be a coder anymore, now you have to be a good looking and health crazed professional with great personal skills and then somehow be able to also be a master of your craft.

I don't want to hear about how you write code in between your 100 pushups and avocado toast and having a few cold ones with the boys after your <insert sport here> game. I want to hear about how you ate pizza with one hand and crushed your build with the other in between sips of shitty soft drinks and fistfuls of candy while pulling an all nighter for the nth time cuz daylight is for pussies.

Too much pressure these days as it is, and this isn't helping.

break

TL;DR
A "friend" is a tech fraud. Faking his resume as a software engineer! Only interested on the salary. This is unfair to all of us putting the hours of effort/practice just to improve our craft! 😠😤

I have a "friend" who is faking his resume, putting fake experiences and putting jargons not even related to tech just to make himself smart. He's using his customer service rep experience to talk confidently. His resume fcking long, 3 pages of fakery. I can't help, but to laugh when he sent it to me.

He has a tech degree, but worked in a BPO industry for 4 years, then recently, he quit. He got jealous with the lucrative software development industry and he wants to relearn coding, as a friend and I like sharing my knowledge, I agreed to guide him in the process.

After 3 moths, he got his first job, but unfortunately he got fired after two weeks because he commited sensitive data to the remote repo.

Then after a month, he got his second job and worked there for 6 months, he still don't know what his doing and always ask me solutions when he is stuck.

He got his 3rd job, remote work with high compensation. Fast forward after 3 months, he only got 1 month of salary, the other 2 wasn't given for unknown reason, my best guess is the company noticed his experience on paper does not match on real life.

Currently, he's working on another remote work with same compensation as before, and he still asks me super simple questions from time to time.

This is so unfair to all the devs who truly deserves the opportunity.

I died and went to drunk debugging heaven

The amount of much political correctness in the dev community just pisses me off sometimes.

I've watched "Use the right tool / language for the job" has become *THE* excuse for shitty tools and languages. 

Case in point -- JavaScript. If you want to make a website that interacts with the end user, the right tool is JavaScript. But that's because IT'S THE ONLY TOOL. Does that make it a *good* tool?

HELL NO.

/midranttimeout

Brendan Eich, I forgive you. You had 10 days and a corporation on your case.

That's not saying JavaScript doesn't have some good things in it. It does. But "Javascript the good parts" is a fucking thin book.

Sure, some amazing things have been written in JavaScript. Great communities have coalesced around this cancer.

BUT THATS IN SPITE OF JAVASCRIPT, NOT BECAUSE OF IT. AS A LANGAUGE IT'S STILL A STEAMING PILE OF DOGSHIT.

A master can draw great art with a shitty piece of charcoal. That doesn't make charcoal THE BEST DRAWING TOOL EVARRR. It's just a testament to the master's craft.

If you started your programming journey with JavaScript, do expand your horizons.

Break free from Stockholm's syndrome.

Discard your cognitive dissonance.

See JavaScript for what it is -- a shitty language everyone was forced to use. 

PS: Don't even get me started on Java ...

Oh my fucking god.

How can you, after 2 decades as a developer, still produce code to this very day that has that many warnings and suggestions that Visual Studio lights up like a bloody pinball machine from all the squiggly lines!?!

Take your craft seriously or find something else to do!

dev1: "I wish I could craft something physical, something I can hold."

dev2: "Just print off one of your websites."

Put away the keyboard. Think about what you're going to do, chart it out, work through the logic and then, when the entire construct is before you, you start typing.

Yes it will take longer, you're a junior, enjoy that nobody expects you to do miracles (yet) and take the time, you'll get it back when you're so used to working through logical problems that it happens on its own as soon as you hear about the problem.

Cutting corners and "hacking a quick solution" without fucking over the entire system is an art form. Before you do art learn your damn craft.

I think Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by Robert Martin should be a must to read.
In school no teacher puts emphasis on code quality.
They should learn how to name variables and functions the right way at an early stage in order to better perfect their craft :)

> Last year wrote a unittest - I was asked to delete it
> no design patterns. Not a single one
> no encapsulation
> fucked up inheritance [I had no idea it was possible at all...]
> generics every-fucking-where
> I could go on...

this month the lead dev was not in and I had to make a new feature. Guess what I did :)

tdd [coverage >90%], a couple of builders, a factory or two, two composites, one decorator, only a few generics - only where really needed. Private fields, not a single @Autowired field [they were fucking my tdd], nicely abstracted integrations, and so on. Everything is writen according to clean code: max 10loc methods, <140col lines, reusable constants and utils, SOLID as a rock, etc.

Due date is next week. Took me 3 weeks to craft it.

Guess who's gonna be piiiiiiiiiiiiisssedd 😁

the best part - I don't even work there, our company was hired for xx hours as helping hands 😁

that's not all. They have like 6 envs and their deployment is all-fucking-manual. Will try to learn how to dockerize that app and deploy it on docker. Gosh I wish I could see his face when he's back 😁

p.S. From ethical point of view, he's the only dev who believes his code is perfect. No other dev in the team agrees. AND he once said: 'it's gonna be my way or no way at all'. So I don't think I did wrong... Did I? :)

The other day a non-programmer colleague asked me:
"How do you know what to type in, like, did you write all of that?"
As I responded, he asked me another question; "but how do you know wuat to type".

I use to have those same thoughts years ago.

It occurred to me that through constant bugs, errors, bad (team) projects and failures that its become second nature, like breathing.

So, as an experienced developer to people just learning the craft and juniors. Don't give up on your collabs, don't be disheartened by group projects, don't be discouraged by your peers who seemingly try to make your life harder.

Take it as an experience to better yourself and teach them something.

These are the experiences that will make you a better developer.

I just realize that companies dont value a good developer, they just want a developer that can do the job done for clients to get money, i understand that just recently and im sad that some people are just in it for the money not for the love of the craft and technology.

Can't fucking stand permanently lazy devs who don't give a shit about their craft.

Fuck off and go do something else that you actually give a shit about! *

😤😤😤😤🤬

* unless you're burnt out - then I'm sorry they overworked you x

I've promised to do the Mozilla rant about the whole meritocracy thing a few days ago.. well, this is that. Along with some other stuff along the way. Haven't ranted for a couple of days man, shit happened! But losing 6 days that could've been spent on finishing my power supply project.. to a stupid cold, it got a little bit on my nerves, so that's what I've been working on for the time being. Hopefully I'll be able to finish it up in a couple of days.

1. COCKtail party thingy

Turns out that there's this conference in Brussels in a couple of days about the whole Article 13 copyright stuff. I've been letting a mail to the MEP's about it mature on my systems for a while now.. well, maturing or procrastinating, you be the judge 😛
Now I'm glad that I waited with that though. It's mostly a developer-centric insight into how the directive would be a horrible idea.. think AI, issues with context recognition, Tom Scott's video on Penistone and Scunthorpe etc etc. But maybe I can include some stuff from the event afterwards.
Also, if you're coming to the conference too, do let me know! Little devRant meet while we're at it, it'd be fucking great! I'll try to remember to bring my Christmas ducks, they've got these cute little Santa hats 😋

(P.S.: about the whole COCKtail, I saw the email while drunk and during registration I had to choose an email address.. I figured, feminazis are doing such a great job at going out of their way to find offense in everything, I figured that I'd make their job a little bit easier by sending a COCK bomb in my registration mail address, in the hopes that it finds its way to one of them.. evil, I know XD)

2. The whole feminazi stuff at Mozilla

So Mozilla hates meritocracy now? I've been wanting to rant about the big bad meritocracy for a while now. Thank you Mozilla for giving me an incentive to actually do it!

Meritocracy, feminazis think it's bad because it's about power relationships and discrimination, right? But what if I told you that that is exactly what makes great software great. Good code, good merit, is what's welcomed in software development.. or at least it should be. Because it's a job of fucking knowledge, experience, and quality! Also, meritocracy is a great thing because nobody cares if you're a professional developer in a suit, getting paid to work on a piece of OSS, or a homegamer neonazi who's coding shit in their underwear while wanking to child porn.. nobody fucking cares. If your code, your merit, is good, contribute ahead! Super inclusive, yet apparently bad because bad code is excluded to ensure the health of the project.

So what is the alternative to the big bad meritocracy? Inclusion (or as it's looked like in practice, more like exclusion) based on gender/sex, political orientation, things like that. But not actual fucking merit, the ability to write good code. How the fuck is politics and gender going to be any good at all to an inherently meritocratic craft?! Oh but yeah, it's great for inclusion. It's like females in tech. Artificial growth is just a matter of growth numbers and the only folks who like it are fucking HR and wanketeering cunts, and feminazis. Merit, that's what matters!! And have you ever considered that females are generally not interested in technology? Or for that matter, where's our inclusion movement for men in healthcare?! Gender equality my ass.

That's just my two cents on it of course. Meritocracy shouldn't be abandoned in tech. And even if it's just a matter of calling it something else. How the fuck is it a good idea to not call a pot a fucking pot just because someone might take offense at it?! It's meritocracy, call it fucking meritocracy!!! And while we're at it, call a master a fucking master and a slave a fucking slave!

I thought I'd opened every shitty type of Chinese-grade electronics by now. Glued in shit, ultrasonically welded shit, potted shit. And occasionally the now very rare piece of electronics that has actual screws.

Until now. Remington, apparently yet another company filled with certified enganeers. My razor is from them, and I wanted to open it up to see why the lithium cell inside was failing, and to replace it with a bigger one. 2 screws in the back of the unit, Phillips head. But holy fuck, those things sat in there more tightly than the glory hole of the Asian girl that probably assembled this thing. Externalizing our own features in our craft? Check!

Pretty hard to remove them but that's fine. But the unit didn't open up, and there seems to be no screws left. I guess that they leveled up their level of certified enganeering and actually used both screws and ultrasonic welding. Because why wouldn't you, right?!

Motherfuckers.

Oh come on... Does even ecosia need to craft their truth. First party trackers aren't that better than third-party...
At least there is only one url to block. Easy.

"Graphics don't matter."

I ranted a while back about gamedev being hard to get into for me, and, today, user @DOSnotCompute posted a similar experience.

I had a couple more thoughts, so thought should post them here (FUCK! It ended up being too fucking long! sorry!)

So I was watching the making of mortal kombat 3 on yt, which was pretty amazing btw because I got to see the actors of the sprites in game which were engraved in my and thousands of others kids minds.

Anyhow, the creators of the series, John Tobias and Ed Boon, were interviewed and what not. And it hit me that while both were the designers, John was the main artist and Ed was the programmer (at least for MK1). Another game that comes to mind Super Meat Boy, and I bet hundreds of others did the same.

And it got me thinking, maybe that's my problem, I just need an artist.

And I think the reason why I never thought of that is because of this idea that graphics don't matter.

"you don't need an artist. You don't need graphics. The most important thing is the gameplay."

What a load of shit.
A lot of people believe that because they got tired of polished AAA games with automatic and predictible gameplay.

People started parrotting this knee jerk of a conclusion since then.

It's dumb. Imagine if Infiminer, one of the games Minecraft was based on, which btw looks terrible, had all the same features Minecraft had.
I would still not touch that shit with a pole.

Graphics ARE important. Games are on the VISUAL medium.
That doesn't mean you're sucking Sony's dick on every AAA release or that every game should be made with UnreUnityCocksReloadedEngine.

Some level of visual craft is required for a game ro be considered such.

(btw, I think most of you guys here get this, not trying to pander, just that I want to make it clear that I'm not accusing this community of being guilty of this)

If a game looks bad (given, bad can be subjective), if it gives the impression that it wasn't seriously made, then you kinda lower your expectations.

People get hyped on games that look good, because it means that the game could be good. Games that look unoriginal or terrible won't get played, wether they're good or not. And I think it's a reasonable reaction.

How many times did I hear things like "Look at x video game from the 90s, the graphics are terrible but it's fun as hell".

That is an absurd statement. The level of production some NES games went through is insane. We're talking millions of dollars for games that today might look primitive.

The graphics weren't shit back then, and even today you could say that they are simpler but also of excellent craftsmanship.

I'm not into creating art, I hate it in fact because you can't quantify the success of produced art.

So, duh, find an artist. Ok, how? This is the part where I have no fucking idea how.

You start spamming shit like "I need an artist" online? I dunno, something for another post I guess.

I guess the most healthy thing I could do is making demos that might look like shit just to get experience so that when I get to find an artist, I have practice already.

I have been playing skyrim on my switch. The reason is simple, family watches movies or whatever, and I get to sit comfortably in my little screen shooting mofockas with my bow(i made an archer build)

Its my first time playing the game after all these years and I love it, far better than I expected. The story is great and the side quests are fun instead of boring, it does not take much to learn how to craft, enchant etc and I dig the simplicity.

But it has got to be one of the buggiest glitchiest majorly famous game I had ever played. Literally, and I have it for both the ps4 and the switch and it still is so fucking buggy its unbelievable.

Copying a Perler bead craft.

I now understand why ink jet printers are temperamental.

Man, I'm sure there are a million of these posts right now but...

The hiring market and hiring culture nowadays is so damn frustrating. I have a decade of experience in multiple senior/lead/principal roles at both big name companies and high-growth startups, along with a very well-written resume.

Even with this, I can barely get an interview these days. I'll apply to a role that lists qualifications for which I'm an exact fit, and either get a quick auto-denial or just never hear back at all. It doesn't matter if I custom-craft my resume and cover letter to match the job description or just send my standard resume and cover letter. We all love those pandering and patronizing "We know that this isn't the news you wanted to hear, but keep trying! Maybe you'll be good enough for us someday!" auto-denial email.

Sometimes I'll receive a denial, look back at the job posting, that they needed somebody with NLP experience or something, and say to myself "Fair enough, that makes sense." Other times, I'll look at the posting and say "Oh come on, I check every single box." It makes you wonder "What the fuck are you actually truly looking for?"

Sometimes I'll look at the company's current employees and see that almost every single one is ex-FAANG, indicating that the company will almost only hire other ex-FAANG employees (despite there being thousands of other well-qualified candidates out there who are just as talented and skilled as those ex-FAANG candidates.)

Other companies seem to be "brand shopping" for ex-FAANG employees after all the recent FAANG layoffs, hoping to land a bargain on an ex-Google engineer so they can brag that their product was built by the same people who built Google.

Then there's the question of even making it past the ATS and in front of an actual human's eyes. The hiring culture seems to be an ATS SEO game nowadays. God forbid that you didn't include the super secret magic keyword in your resume, else you'll automatically be filtered out and denied.

It's just incredibly frustrating and makes you wonder what kind of candidate you need to be to even get a first round interview nowadays. Do we all need to have a glowing personal recommendation from the ghost of Steve Jobs in order for a 50-person startup to even open our resumes?

Dragon on falcon 9. First re-use of a commercial orbit-class space-craft!

Launched successfully
*giggles*

An online community I've been part of for years has seen a lot of popularity/hate overnight due to a new policy. The influx of new people who want nothing to do with us but just drop by to troll and be cunts is impressive. Also, a significant amount of bots. I want my online home back :( I'm for the new policy and very much against these new clowns who don't really have any reason to be on our page. Before anyone yells gatekeeping, it's a site about knitting and crochet. Why would you go there if you don't know either craft and have no desire to learn or talk about those? So disappointed. I hope it brought new crafters in and that the trolls will go away soon. It's been such a nice place for so long with barely any idiots because it was reasonably small.. And now look at this mess. I logged in to 20 friend requests from people I don't know and am almost certain aren't real people.

Why is it so hard for humans to accept that some people may disagree with them and that's okay?

I got an interview with a big multinational software company as a senior dev - the kind of place I never thought I would be privileged or knowledgeable enough to work for and wasnt expecting to get In to...

I aced it. They gave me an offer but - FOR DEVOPS 😬

basically my skills fit in perfectly with the server/ scaling issues they have and are far more valuable there. I know they do, I also know I can fix the issue and will have alot of fun coding it - I just dont think I want to monitor it or anything else.

I mean I do devops stuff all the time in aid of anything I code but their stack is a full time job- im scared that once the toolchain is automated ill be pulled towards sys admin like duties and lose touch with my craft... what do you guys think? Anyone shifted from dev to devops?

Honestly, mentoring is in my opinion the best part of the job. My firts mentee was a student in my last job, smart af but lazy and unable to trust in herself. I wasn't really too sure in myself at the time either but since I had to teach hery craft there was no place for me to doubt myself.

So I taught her everything I knew and in turn I learned to trust myself and once I had mastered the art of self confidence I could make her believe in herself. Since then I trained five more test automation engineers, some of them might be close to surpassing their 'master' (though won't make it easy for them 😏) and with every Single one I've developed a deeper understanding of my craft by explaining. I needed to research stuff I never questioned to answer their questions and therefor became better at what I do.

Three weeks ago I got an email from the girl I first mentored, she's in another company now and she thanked me for what I taught her. In my opinion I did a rwally Bad job at it (it was my first time teaching) but reading someone actually believing that one made an impact in their life is something special.

I always loved talking about my craft and I love sharing the knowledge I aquired. Test automation is not a thankfull craft but I'm always happy whenever I can interest someone in it and I fully enjoy seeing them grow and improve into fully fledged TAEs.

Oh gee whiz fellas. I lived through my nightmare. Recently too.

(Multiple rants over last few months are merged in this one. Couldn't rant earlier because my login didn't work.)

I joined a new shithole recently.
It was a huge change because my whole tech stack changed, and on top of that the application domain was new too.

Boss: ho hey newbie, here take this task which is a core service redesign and implementation and finish it in two weeks because it has to be in production for a client.

Normally I'd be able to provide a reasonable analysis and estimate. But being new and unaware of how things work here, I just said 'cool, I'll try my best.' (I was aware that it was a big undertaking but didn't realize the scope and the alarming lack of support I'd get and the bullshit egos I'd have to deal with)
Like a mad man I worked 17+ hours a day with barely a day off every week and changed and produced a lot of code, most of it of decent quality.

Deadline came and went by. Got extended because it was impossible (and fake).

All the time my manager is continuously building pressure on me. When I asked questions I never got any direct/clear answers. On asking for help, I'd get an elaborate word vomit of what was already known/visible. Yet I finally managed to have an implementation ready.

Reviewer: You haven't added parameter comments on your functions and there aren't enough comments in code. We follow standards. Clean code and whatnot. Care for the craft verbal diarrhea.

Boss: Ho hey anux, do you think we'll be able to push the code to production?

Me: Nope. We care for the craft and have standards. We need to add redundant comments to self documented code first, because that is of utmost importance as Nuthead reviewer explained.
(what I wish I had said)

What I actually said: No, code is not reviewed yet.

And despite examples of functions which were not documented (which were written by the reviewer nut), I added 6-7 lines of comments for my single line functions describing how e.g. Sum takes two input integers and returns their sum and asked for a review again.

Reviewer: See this comment is better written as this same-meaning-but-slightly-longer way. Can we please add full stops everywhere even though they were not there to begin with? Can we please not follow this pattern and instead promote our anti-pattern? Thanks.

Me: Changed the comments. Added full stops. Here's a link for why this anti-pattern is bad.

Reviewer: you have written such beautiful code with such little gems. Brilliant. It's great to see how my mentoring has honed your skills.
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.
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I swear I would have broken a CRT on his stupid face if we weren't working remotely (and if I had a CRT).

It infuriates me how the solution to every problem with this guy is 'add a comment'.

What enrages me more is that I actually thought I could learn from this guy (in the beginning). My self doubt just made me burnout for little in return.

Thankfully this living nightmare will soon be over.

Hands down, my favorite part being a dev the HUGE range of industries I can apply my craft to.

In 10 years, I've bounced from structural engineering, to vision accessibility, to healthcare, to eCommerce. All from the comfort of my developer's keyboard.

While this isn't necessarily unique to the dev role, it's the spice of life that keeps my mind to young.

My colleague just made a very subtle rant in real life:

"I wish we could become more software developer and be less software producer"

Network, talk to people, and get yourself on the spot, document everything and make sure that you take action when others do not.

Kissing ass can take you far, but I ain't about that life, because sooner or later the fucker that promoted you because he liked his pp getting suckd by you will leave or get put in the spot. Or change alleagiances.

Your best bet is to be ANYTHING OTHER THAN A FUCKING NECKBEARD WITH AUTISM and be someone that people likes being around, I know it sounds hardcore, but people around you will ignore the things you don't know if you are a charismatic guy. Dress well, work out or find ways to improve yourself in ways that are noticeable, use human psychology to be fucking likeable.

Work hard, both on yourself and on your craft, study, get better, be social.

Stop being a twat because high chances are that the higher executives of your branch will not give a shit about your knowledge, but how good is to have you around. Join the circle, fuck your opinions about anything else, this is business, and business doesn't care about a lot of things. Don't cut throats, but make yourself a force to be reckoned with.

Source: Upper management, deals with VPs on a daily basis, knows that being a neckbeard will not take you anywhere.

1. Always have a backup
2. Don't be afraid to fail

Failing is one of the best ways to get better at our craft. Fear is a healthy response to a challenge, but don't let it control you. Go for it. Things will break and that's okay because you have a backup or a way to undo the change. Learn from the mistake and perfect your craft.

!rant

Super awesome day today.

1. Got up early to do a risky production deploy and it worked!
2. Three PRs approved before lunch.
3. Got some time to continue learning scala.
4. Coffee and cupcakes with some refugees and discussed work as a software engineer.
5. Tried virtual reality for the first time. Really fun.
6. Helped prepare our goals for this quarter and present them to the department.
7. Department meeting had free local craft beer and pretzels.
8. Went bouldering after work and flashed a 6c.
9. Curled up with my wife watching Netflix.

I really love my life sometimes.

If you write blogs and tutorials about programming,
Please don't just throw blocks of code at people. Explain what this code does, why you wrote it in this particular way and not the other, when people should use this technique and when they shouldn't. Also don't make your tutorial specific to a particular library/package unless you specify in the title.

Stop making blogs just for the sake of making them. Make blogs that help people become better. Advertise for your proficient and show others why you love it. Put some effort into your craft people!!

Yes, a plus, i.e. `+`, is a fucking valid char for an email address.

Your online service is shit, you don't know your craft, and you should feel bad about yourself!

But you thought email is fucking simple, google for email validation regex and took copy pasted the first fucking find from some random blog that validates anything but an actual fucking valid email addresses, didn't you!?

(Funfact, the plus sign allow to create email aliases in some free mailer services. GMail for instance. That's why I l like using emails like my.actual.mail+I_KNOW_WHY_YOU_ARE_SENDING_SPAM@gmail.com as my registration email. Also, brute-force that login email.)

I have a dream that I will find a group of programmers that enjoy their craft and we are able to bond together and create the coolest shit we want and monetize it. We will inspire programmers to overthrow corporate America. We will all live in a big house and everyone will have their different hobbies and we can learn from each other and work on whatever we want to do each day. We will have unlimited dried mangoes, chocolate chips, and chips n salsa. We will create a kingdom.

Craft CMS deployment on shared server, PHP5, Apache takes 10 - 30 seconds to load.

Craft CMS deployment on virtual shared server, PHP7, Nginx takes 1 - 2 seconds to load.

I didn't have a job during week 15, but I have one now! My favorite desk item: a picture of a dinosaur riding a bicycle, which I picked up at a craft fair this weekend.

... Do you think my coworkers can tell I like cycling?

I started with C#at the age of 12, it was way too complicated and I learned Lua for Computer craft instead. Next I learned Ruby for RPG Maker and finally Javascript for web Dev stuff.
Now comfortable enought with Javascript but put off by its quirks I learned Java for compiling faulty minecraft mods, but I only fully learned it in school.
At the same time I learned python and quite liked it for scripting, but ultimately it was not a good match for my projects.
Disapointed with Java I returned to C# and liked it quite a lot, but started learning C++. After touching my first Microcontroller I learned C and I've stuck with it as my favorite language.
Along the way I picked up Kotlin, in case I need to do some Java shit. Much better.
But how did I come to an understanding of programming. Well I got better after each time I got a layer deeper until I hit silicon.
I had tinkered with electronics since I was 15 so I just had to study some boolean mathematics in school and some vintage computers architecture and instruction sets and...
Then I finally understood how that shit I wrote in Lua way back when was actually executed by my hardware.

Allways dig deeper and you'll find enlightenment eventually.

Fartin' around with Godeps and having difficulties, but things aren't nearly as annoying when you are able to work from anywhere while drinking craft beer :^)

Because I didn't start coding until 21 I constantly feel behind, but the pure satisfaction from finally getting something to work or to see a project grow iteratively over time keeps the gears turning. The bad part is I feel like I am constantly stressed because of my feelings of always being inadequate. The thing is I didn't only have to learn how to code but I basically had to start from scratch tech wise. i had a decent acer laptop in high school and basically just web browsed and gamed with it. So needless to say most of my life has been away from a computer. Now I feel at a constant rush to compensate for my ignorance. I have slowly become more introverted because I feel like if I don't work on my skill set everyday I stray further away from making myself marketable; this has caused me to become more irritable and to close myself inside more. I want to make a career doing this and I also have the added pressure of not having a degree, so projects and skills are even more mandatory. I truly love programming to the fullest extend, but not having local friends to express code with and to bounce concepts and ideas off of is torture. But I try to keep my head up and make progress out of the day- if the will is there- so I can land my first job as a developer and actually make a living doing something that brings me a little piece of meaning. So overall there is a tradeoff of having added pressure, stress, anxiety and sometimes depression to build a craft that still has ages to go to reach a stage of maturity.

Am I the only one who encounters these dickhead teachers, who live in a world, where they think that you have just their subject?

I mean that kind of professor, who shows up 30 minutes late to a lecture, sends you source code with no commetary because fuck you with a rusty fork and tells you that we have no time to write the code during the class?

The one who shows you a shitty presentation with the same code he just sent you, just cut into 72 slides and at every slide tells something like this is pretty self explanatory, x just does y and if you ask a question he gives you that deep stare, like if you really mean it seriously to waste his time, since he really really wants to go to his office sooner so he can scratch his balls?

That type of professor who tells you that as a student of CS degree you are required to put some passion to your craft and study when you arrive at home and hes there just to give you guidelines, but apparently somehow forgotten that people usually need to sleep?

That same cunt who doesnt give a shit that you have 4 more projects to finish this week, doesnt push the deadline, nor give you advice, because you had opporturnity to ask the whole time?

But still that motherfucker, who gives you test questions that he took from mouth of Satan himself and then questions your answers like Where did you get that from?

Well fuck yall who do that shit, hope that you suffocate yourself while eating bread.

Why these douches doesnt understand, that even if we arent under the Working Laws, working more than 40 hours a week isnt the best way to keep us sane or motivated.

i was hired to join a team of old devs (40+) in an unnamed European country "yay goodbye 3rd world it's time to enjoy the quality of life" assist with enhancing already existing software and creating new solutions.
prior to my arrival most things were slow and super buggy, looking at the code base it shouldn't be a surprise, amateur hour everyone, logic implemented that is not needed, comment driven development, last time code review was done back in 1996. lots of anti patterns.
i swear there is a for loop that does nothing but it loops through a 100+ elements list, trunk based development with tfs since git is "not really needed"
test projects are not there.
>enter me an educated fool, with genuine passion for the craft and somehow a decent amount of knowledge.
>spent the last year fixing stuff educating people on principles and qualities.
> countless hours of training and explaining. team is showing cooperation, a new requirement comes in to develop with react.
> tear my ass creating reusable shit and self explanatory code with proper naming etc using git with feature branching, monday is first deployment day.
> today a colleague was working on an item submit a pull request and self approve it
> look at the code..... WTF the dumb fuck copied and pasted the whole code from different kendo components but somehow managed to refractor the name to test component, commented out all the code that he didn't use did the api call directly from the component, has 2 useeffects that depends on the a fucking text box changes for no reason, no redux implementation, the acceptance criteria is not achieved, and it doesn't work it just look right.
> first world country shit cannot scold, cannot complain, lead by example.
>asked him why you did this, the response was yeah probably i shouldn't have done that, i really didn't understand anything in the training but didn't want to waste time!!!!
> rest of the team created a different styled disaster with different flavors they don't even name their shit the same way.

fellow developers I'm stuck in a spaceship with a bunch of imposters, seriously i never cried in my entire life now I'm teary and on the verge of a break down.
talk with management "improving needs time" and offers me to join a yoga session to release the stress as if reaching nirvana would deliver shit on monday.
i really don't know what do is this a rant, is this a cry for help, I'm not sure, any advice is welcomed.

Come on guys, use those JSON schemas properly. The number of times I see people going "err, few strings here, any other properties ok, no properties required, job done." Dahhh, that's pointless. Lock that bloody thing down as much as you possibly can.

I mean, the damn things can be used to fail fast whenever you misspell properties, miss required properties, format dates wrong - heck, even when you want to validate the set format of an array - and then libraries will throw back an error to your client (or logs if you're just on backend) and tell you *exactly what's wrong.* It's immensely powerful, and all you have to do is craft a decent schema to get it for free.

If I see one more person trying to validate their JSON manually in 500 lines of buggy code and throwing ambiguous error messages when it could have been trivially handled by a schema, I'm going to scream.

I just wasted 2 hours together with a colleague to trace a bug, through several modules, functions, data, etc to find out it was usage of the wrong information in the wrong place. The data used was never intended to be used this way.

I HATE SUCH SOFTWARE ARCHAELOGY.
Carefully uncovering layer over layer, getting one detail after another, from which you don't know if it's really necessary to trace the bug, until you lose the sight of the whole picture. Then when you're confused to the maximum, try to figure out what's important and what not and reassemble the puzzle until you can see where the road is heading.

At least we found the cause of the bug, so it wasn't useless. Now we have to waste more time to develop a solution (...preparing for next rant 🙇)

Every website we craft at work has some email substitution logic so that addresses you see on the site don't actually exist in the HTML source like that (you wouldn't find them in a format like "foo@example.com").

Instead the @ and the period right before the TLD get replaced with something else (to prevent (dumb) spam bots from using that address and blast it with junk).

Some people replaced them with images in the past (ew), replaced the @ with "(at)" or other stuff.

I made it a habit to render the @ and . by replacing them with span tags which then get a ::before in CSS that contains "content: '@';", so that the @ is visible but is not actually inside the HTML source code.

The classes for these spans then have a random name (persistent for that website though). The first one was called "move-along-nothing-to-see-here", but then I started naming them after Star Wars quotes.

One website's @ class is called "that-s-no-moon" (Obi Wan), others are called "i-have-a-bad-feeling-about-this" (Han Solo), "powerful-you-have-become-the-dark-side-I-sense-in-you." (Yoda) and "these-are-not-the-droids-you-are-looking-for" (Obi Wan).

Check in, check out, punch in punch, out, wax on (my balls), wax off. Do your duty. Be a good citizen. Work overtime. Conserve the environment: buy a tesla that runs on afghan lithium conflict minerals. Post your life to facebook. Get married. Have exactly 2.5 kids.
Use jquery. Use knockout. Use react. Use vue. Use svlete. Use heroin. Used needles. Used people. Used toilet paper. Toilet paper apocalypse. Social trends. Be a good citizen.

Watch tv. Watch nightly news. CNN says. Fox news says. Hey, did you read this article by important funny guy on tv? American taliban. Scary. Be afraid. Hey did you read this article on cute puppies? Funny! Did you see this meme? What a funny meme! HAHAHA. Do we need prisons for dissidents? Do we need to release all the prisoners in federal prison? Should we round up people who dont follow health authorities? Science says. Science is wrong. Science is right. Man in robe agrees with me. Man in robe disagrees with me. You're evil. These people are bad. Is doing bad always wrong? Should we tolerate intolerance? Its time to stop tolerating intolerance. Be an individual, like everyone else. Be you. Be the best you that you can be. Individualism. But we're all in this together. We're all different and unique. But we're all the same. Love each other. Love humanity. But not these guys over here. Punch a nazi. Punch a commie. Isn't it time we punched a nazi? Isn't it time we had socialism? Isn't it time the old get out of the way for the young? Why are the old hateful? Why do they horde all the money? Do we need rent controls? We need rent controls. Its time for rent controls. I think I believe what others believe. Believe different. Think different. Apple. An apple a day keeps the windows away. Open windows, a breathe of fresh air. Is climate change real? We need to have a national conversation about climate change! The world is freezing. The world is flooding. We're all gonna drown. The world is overpopulated. We need to talk about overpopulation. People who have too many kids are polluting the world. America doesnt have enough kids! Is it time to bring in more immigrants to have more kids? Who will work the fields? Thats racist. Is racism an epidemic? Is white flight an epidemic? Lets talk about epidemics. Lets have a conversation about mandatory vaccination. Lets have a national conversation about mandatory pandemics. I mean, vaccinations. Lets change the world. Trust the science. Don't trust the science. Bu-bu-bu-bu-bu I'm loving it. Love who you are. Live love laugh. If you don't love me at my best, then you can't handle me at my worst. People who disagree with [current year] are the worst. Is it time to regulate speech? Its time to regulate speech. Should there be laws against hatespeech. I think there should be laws against hatespeech. People who upset me should go to jail. Its current year. Think big. Think outside the bun. Have it your way. All the time, always. All for freedom, freedom for all. Because this is america, and current year. I like to work hard. But you have to remember to play hard too. Work hard. Play hard. With a childlike sense of wonder. Be you. Belong anywhere. Just do it. Challenge Everything. Because you're worth it. Save money...live better...have an abortion. You're in good hands. Democracy dies in darkness. Is it time to regulate hatespeech. Politician in current year is hurting our democracy. War is a racket. We need to liberate afghanistan. Why are we bombing afghanistan? Its there culture. They're oppressing people! Don't criticize anyones culture. Be kind. Rewind. Go further. Lets go places. Because Impossible is Nothing.
Lets change the world. I'm a smart passionate funny guy with a childlike sense of wonder and play. You ever want to travel? I want to travel. See the world. Eat new food. Eat. Love. Pray. Eat love. kill. Is meat murder? I think meat is murder. Go vegan. Go home. Order out. Support your local economy. Think global, act local. I'm a good corporate citizen. Be the change you want to see. Did you hear about this local brewery? Do you like craft beer? Hey try this new IPA. I shared it on twitter. Twitter is a very important part of my life. I think what other people say matters, and them reading what I think matters. What I ate for lunch matters. Hey what did you eat for lunch? I LOVE FOOD. You want to order door dash. There new commercial is amazing. Commercials are SO FUNNY. Hey did you see this meme of this commercial? I shared it on tiktok. Heres a funny dance. Watch these nurses dance. I wish I could dance like that. They're so overworked. So brave. Our hospitals are overflowing. People are dying. Hey did you see this new dance trend on tiktok? I like tiktok. I think its a very important part of life to share your life with others. Nurses are dying. Look at this image of hospitals. Scared. Very scary. Very bad. Bad and scary. Big thoughts! Thoughts and prayers!

Because Yes we can!

Beep boop.

I feel like there should be "dev recruiter" position that people with developer skills could fill. Every time I go to an interview, I just know the person asking me dev related stuff has no fucking clue about anything I'm saying, it's printed all over their faces.

A good developer almost instantly knows if you know your craft or not.

Let's not keep wasting everyone's time

Why are most developers/software engineers so absolutely fucking shit at their craft?

I understand incompetence exists in every occupation but it seems in development the ratio of bad developers to good developers is like 9:1. There’s a serious lack of quality in this industry and it’s only further exacerbated by coding bootcamps and orgs like general assembly pumping out more dog shit

What the hell is wrong with me?

It was even less than maybe 2 months ago since I loved my job, had co-workers I happily called friends, wrote code I was proud of, and felt like I had a meaning and a place in the industry. I had plans for my future and everything was great.

But this entire week felt terrible. Everything was awful.
I despised every single word of those idiots I called friends.
Their craft - our craft - is a colossal and monumental failure; A sad joke, that insults more than it entertains.

I can't bring myself to program, not even to fuck around at home...

And I have no idea what to do now.

Spending hours trying to identify the source of your linking errors to find you misspelt #pragma once 😐

> be me, working while at the beach
> SO: " hey, do you want me to make a bracelet?"
> me: "sure, make me whatever, something that fits me."
> what I get is picrel.

Damn true

Read this somewhere: Most students don't love programming so much because they are taught it as a science, while it is a craft.

Got me thinking. So true.

Reason for rejected pull request on hacktoberfest: "wrong commit message"

...are you fucking dumb or what?

damn robot machine clowns, you wonder why you don't get better at your craft

"we love open source, making it so prohibitively convoluted to participate!!! why won't anyone contribute to our repo?!?!?!"

clowns, absolutely everywhere i swear

Show a comment field below a discussion, with rich text and link functionality, to inspire people to craft a detailed answer.

Maybe they will forget to type Ctrl+A, Ctrl+C before hitting send.

So when they do, show a message that "you must be logged in to comment". Use a JS SPA to make sure that there is no way for users to restore their drafted comment. Don't show it after they logged in. When they use their browser's back button, they surely want to exit the application, so make sure to discard any transient data in that case.

Seen on WordPress.org using their infamous Gutenberg block editor.

(IMHO) The current system fails to identify that there are at least 2 main paths one can take in our field. Software engineering and computer science.
Software engineering should not be just a course. It should be a craft, a degree. Where one can learn practical things not just algorithms that are used in niche cases.
Computer science branch won't be that different from what we've got now. It can be even more focused on theory.

Besides assorted craft materials and PC my desk has a dual purpose crocheted rubber duck: it serves as a pin cushion and my debugging friend! I made him and he has lived there since my first year of university.
I also keep a mug from my university, scented candles, notepad and pen (for all my tech savvy-ness, quick notes are still better handwritten) and whatever crafty project I'm working on.

My desk is honestly a mess (I have to clear it ~three times a week to have any space to work on) but they say creative people have messy workstations so I take my inability to keep an orderly environment as an expression of my creativity.

Make a fantasy MMORPG with a cool magic system in which you can craft spells kind of like coding.

So in my current workplace we have an IT department of... 7-8 people, with 3 developers (or 2.5, but that's debatable)

The oldest dev is old school, over 65 now came from Visual Basic, of course, and is a father of department's director - this is a story in of itself, but besides the point of this rant

Anywho, this dev is of course in this workplace way longer than me, and historically is in charge of finance and Microsoft CRM systems.

Guess the reason why Microsoft CRM was chosen at all in the company?

Because dev said he is not good with creating web forms from scratch, and apparently with MSCRM you can craft them without much trouble.

Yes, that's it, our MSCRM is used as a web application with custom forms that store data into custom DB tables that dev creates... nothing to do with actual CRM use cases.

Personal projects, I think, are 50% of the battle, and projects you are required to complete are the other 50%.

Personal projects encourage you to try new and hard things without too much fear of failure.

Required projects make you learn something and complete it.

Both are absolutely essential to craft a well-rounded dev.

Today I woke up 🌅 wanting to write code that is more art 🎨🖌️ than just the usual dry technical stuff...

I want to look at my commits this afternoon and feel proud about mastery and craft!

Designing with "real" data

In Interaction Design Uni i've got this assignment to design a prototype for an "Ebay for used books". A requirement is that we have use "real" Data and not lorem ipsum for our design prototype tools. Which is a fair point but....

It's about 50 book categories (crime, history, romance) we have to cover, and for every category the prof wants at least 2 Books.

I've don't have the time to type in the (meta)data for 100 books at 30 JSON properties by hand. What would be your advice?

Do you maybe know a easy to use online bookshop API? (remember I'm a tech savy designer not a dev)

Or do you know someone in a low income country who does data entry? Or any experience with hiring someone on fiverr?

Thank you for your help. :)

I was brought into my new position as part of an transformation of waterfall to agile methodology.

We are now running 4 while projects and need to restart the remaining 29 projects using agile principles. The business management type people love agile, but somehow the people inside the current waterfall practices doesn't.

They are afraid their silo work will either expand or not exist thus making it hard to transform the company. Also the company have been subjected to the dead sea effect.

Therfore, the project that is currently in the space of transformation is making my blood boil because people just ain't passionate enough about software.

Either you craft software, or, well you sit and suckle other's money. People suckling should please grow up and start venturing beyond there cozy 9 to 5 and transform to be a professional software doer rather than a BA, DEV, IT GUY.

YOU BASTARDS GET A SHITLOAD OF MONEY AND DON'T DESERVE IT FOR THE EFFORT YOU BRING.

It is your software, own it, be proud of it. Read up to make it better. And as always, the people debugging your code can be a violent psychopath

Ah, so the great war I my head has begun. When you're a CS major in college, you can't help but realize that knowing everything about computers and how to develop everything on thrm is next to impossible. So you start to question "what will be my specialty?". "Web dev or Low-level? "swirl through my head. I work on projects when I should be writing that 5-page essay for that College Composition course I care nothing about. Then on my own time I need to openly practice and refine my craft, and studying. Sheesh, I hate time (or the lack thereof). How do you do anything major on your own these days?

Teach students the importance of clean code/architecture and testing. Even if they dont yet understand the more complex topics such as architecture, they should understand why quality is important and that software is a craft more than a science. You cant just apply principle X and insert design pattern Y and profit++. You actually have to think and constantly improve. AND TEST.
Think I would probably also cover things like build automation and continuous delivery. These are now important things for junior devs to know about going into companies.

Devs these days, go all fancy with tech, cutting edge Uber cool shiny toys for designing a system.
Right tool for the right job is a passé. Now, the more you stuff bleeding tech buzz words, the design attracts admiration from bewildered management. [QUOTE] Again, nothing is true, everything is permitted.
Common sense is the craft and simplicity is the soul of efficiency.

"Programming is a craft. At its simplest, it comes down to getting a
computer to do what you want it to do (or what your user wants it to do). As a programmer, you are part listener, part advisor, part interpreter, and part dictator. You try to capture elusive requirements and find a way of expressing them so that a mere machine can do them justice. You try to document your work so that others can understand it, and you try to
engineer your work so that others can build on it. What's more, you try to do all this against the relentless ticking of the project clock. You work small miracles every day.

It's a difficult job. "
- The pragmatic programmer

At some point I was watching a sethbling video about programming mining turtles in a Minecraft mod called computer craft, which uses a reimplementation of lua with some mod specific functions. This inspired me to learn lua, then as I got bored with that I started moving through different languages until I settled on primarily kotlin and rust

I've been wondering about SQLite, how it decides to execute your SQL and then generates byte code to do it.

Hypothetically if you were sufficiently familiar with the quarks of SQLite at a low enough level, one could craft web requests on sites running it, such that the results of each subsequent request, leave the SQLite engine in a particular state, no?

Suppose previous states, when interleaved with subsequent carefully crafted states, lead to execution and injection vulnerabilities.

Arent ideas like this what lead to the randomization of jump addresses in modern architectures?

Aaaah the joy of carefully crafting and testing extensively on multiple aspects (code, UX, compatibility) your own craft...

... Only to get "IT DOESN'T WORK ON MY MACHINE LOL"

They didn't even read the very simple instructions of "double click on that exe"

It really grinds my gears when new hires just start adding themselves to every fucking slack channel and then start crapping up the channel history with irrelevant chatter.

Business Analysts and Project Managers do not need to be in #developers sending mock-ups to a UI/UX designer for one team, or posting an xkcd strip you found on the internet because you "got it" and you think you are proving that you are one of us by posting it there. This channel isn't a fucking club, its where ALL developers at this company across all teams share tools and practices for us to maintain consistency and best practices and to improve our craft, or to give a heads-up about vulnerabilities.

There is a specific channel for your role, and your project. You don't need to be everywhere and in every conversation. And for fuck's sake, PLEASE stop @someone adding people to these channels just because you think you saw something in there posted by someone else that they should see. You can just fucking share that message directly with that person, or in another channel.

I can't help it sounding bitter..
If you work some amount of time in tech it's unavoidable that you automatically pick up skills that help you to deal with a lot of shit. Some stuff you pick up is useful beyond those problems that shouldn't even exist in the first place but lots of things you pick up over time are about fixing or at least somehow dealing or enduring stuff that shouldn't be like that in the first place.
Fine. Let's be honest, it's just reality that this is quite helpful.

But why are there, especially in the frontend, so many devs, that confuse this with progress or actual advancement in their craft. It's not. It's something that's probably useful but you get that for free once you manage to somehow get into the industry. Those skills accumulate over time, no matter what, as long as you manage to somehow constantly keep a job.
But improving in the craft you chose isn't about somehow being able to deal with things despite everything. That's fine but I feel like the huge costs of keeping things going despite some all the atrocities that arose form not even considering there could be anything to improve on as soon as your code runs. If you receive critic in a code review, the first thing coming back is some lame excuse or even a counter attack, when you just should say thank you and if you don't agree at all, maybe you need to invest more time to understand and if there's some critic that's actually not useful or base don wrong assumptions, still keep in mind it's coming from somebody that invested time to read your code gather some thoughts about it and write them down for you review. So be aware of the investment behind every review of your code.
Especially for the frontend getting something to run is a incredibly low bar and not at all where you can tell yourself you did code.
Some hard truth from frontend developer to frontend developer:
Everybody with two months of experience is able to build mostly anything expected on the job. No matter if junior or senior.
So why aren't you looking for ways to find where your code is isn't as good as it could be.

Whatever money you earn on top of your junior colleagues should make you feel obligated to understand that you need to invest time and the necessary humbleness and awareness of your own weaknesses or knowledge gaps.
Looking at code, that compiles, runs and even provides the complete functionality of the user story and still feeling the needs do be stuff you don't know how to do it at the moment.

I feel like we've gotten to a point, where there are so few skilled developer, that have worked at a place that told them certain things matter a lot Whatever makes a Senior a Senior is to a big part about the questions you ask yourself about the code you wrote if if's running without any problems at all.
It's quite easy to implement whatever functionality for everybody across all experience levels but one of your most important responsibilities. Wherever you are considered/payed above junior level, the work that makes you a senior is about learning where you have been wrong looking back at your code matters (like everything).

Sorry but I just didn't finde a way to write this down in a more positive and optimistic manner.

And while it might be easy to think I'm just enjoying to attack (former) colleaues thing that makes me sad the most is that this is not only about us, it's also about the countless juniors, that struggle to get a food in the door.
To me it's not about talent nor do I believe that people wouldn't be able to change.
Sometimes I'm incredibly disappointed in many frontend colleagues. It's not about your skill or anything. It's a matter of having the right attitude.
It's about Looking for things you need to work in (in your code). And investing time while always staying humble enough to learn and iterate on things. It's about looking at you
Ar code and looking for things you didn't solve properly.

Never forget, whenever there's a job listing that's fording those crazy amount of work experience in years, or somebody giving up after repeatedly getting rejected it might also be on the code you write and the attitude that 's keeping you looking for things that show how awesome you are instead of investing work into understanding where you lack certain skills, invest into getting to know about the things you currently don't know yet.
If you, like me, work in a European country and gathered some years of industry experience in your CV you will be payed a good amount of money compared to many hard working professions in other industries. And don't forget, you're also getting payed significantly more than the colleagues that just started at their first job.
No reason to feel guilty but maybe you should feel like forcing yourself to look for whatever aspect of your work is the weakest.

There's so many colleagues, especially in the frontend that just suck while they could be better just by gaining awareness that there code isn't perfect.

TL;DR - Coding standards are a shit practice IMO.

What we don't talk about enough among software engineers, is the artistic aspect of the craft of writing code.

For example, consider your client saying this to you.

"Build me a web app where a user will login. They will have a wallet to purchase subscriptions of 3 products of different prices."

Give these two statements to say, 10 devs and see how each of them will come up with their own vision of the problem and how they would implement it in their own ways.

So now you are working on a big team with say 30 people and you have a big project to work on. Different members of the team bring different styles of code to you to review and if, the Team Leader is as incompetent as mine is, they would find it troubling to understand the pull requests.

So what do you do in these scenarios? Implement Coding standards !!! They take away the artistic vision of the devs and tries to force them to follow rules like sheep.

Also the company doesn't give two shits about the code standards cuz, as long as they have working code that makes them money, they wouldn't care how the code is written.

Thoughts ?

I'm just a dumb frontender and I should start flipping burger.

But then some idiots will probably explain that cheese burgers is not a real burger flipping craft. Or does the burger flipping community contain less shitheads?

You know, in my limited experience, I find the whole CS degree debate to be quite unnerving. I mean, if you can teach yourself to be a computer genius, I greatly respect you. You're really going placed. Sadly though, learning everything on my own is a bit of a challenge for me. I just find this whole degree-holding VS non-degree-holding conversation to be very confusing. I'm currently enrolled in a 4-year CS program. I personally have learned more there iny first week than I have in months on my own. Now I know all too well that development is often more of a craft or a trade than it is a typical procedural job, but I'm honestly really anxious because I have half of the world telling me to pursue a degree (which I am) and I have the other half telling me to gain experience (which I did). The thing that is stressing me out is the continual pressure to do all of one option instead of a little of both. My life is changing faster than the tech industry, and boy is it a bumpy ride. So unless there is good advice to be said regarding the path you take to become an amazing developer, why fight over the need for a CS degree?

I'm rewriting the wrapper I've been using for a couple years to connect to Lord of the Rings Online, a windows app that runs great in wine/dxvk, but has a pretty labyrinthine set of configs to pull down from various endpoints to craft the actual connection command. The replacement I'm writing uses proper XML parsing rather than the existing spaghetti-farm of sed/grep/awk/etc. I'm enjoying it quite a bit.

"I think design would be better if designers were much more skeptical about its applications. If you believe in the potency of your craft, where you choose to dole it out is not something to take lightly." - Frank Chimero

I wish there was more dedicated, physical spaces that were tailored to programmers in particular. I know there’s a lot of collectives out there, but it’s hard to implicitly discourage startup fiend management from taking it over it seems like. We should organize more around a common craft. Free mason type shit.

"[Designers’] primary competence lies not in the technicalities of a craft but in the mastery of a process." - Ralph Caplan

Any craft CMS users out there? Seems pretty slick...starting my 1st project using it tonight

Not to dislike 9 to 5 developers who have no passion for their craft and leech my hard work and knowledge while getting mad at me for not taking my time to sit with them and explain every small aspect of their tools to them that they should already know after having used them for 15+ years.

"When a company gets to certain size, it’s easy just to let things happen. You have to constantly craft and nurture a brand. You can’t just let it be or it’ll fritter away to mediocrity." - Fiona Morrison

Change of plans, I'll be streaming later tonight and it'll be star craft. I'm fucking horrible in comparison to other players but I do like talking. Give me of your thoughts on world events or scientific discoverys!

Hi devs hows it going?
is there a java or javascript game engine i can use on my pc?or how exactly can i start developing games on my pc.
items i have: visual studio code, eclipse (JDK for mc hack clients (pls dont come for me))
thats all i got lel

i seen the legend himself used java to create mini craft which was my childhood school game

he also used typescript to build his pixel game xd
let me know!

Started with the old computer craft mod for Minecraft that put Lua into a form I could understand with clear goals (I was 12 or 13 at the time), and from there learned Java and some web dev tools. Now I'm here writing simple compilers to procrastinate uni work

I just started playing terraria and holy shit, it puts minecraft to shame in so many aspects.

It actually makes you feel like the mc devs are some fucking lazy ass morons sitting on piles of cash.

Minecraft is 11 years old and it has 4 bosses and they are all underwhelming pieces of shit, jesus christ.

They can't even make mining fun for fucks sake. Work an half an hour or more to get a full set of diamond only to accidentally lose it to lava in the nether.

They added netherite? Holy shit I can't wait to see the new gear I can craft with it.

Pickaxe, axe, shovel, hoe, sword, helmet, chestplate, leggings, boots. Wow, netherite shovel, that's what the minecraft community needed.

How about an actual battle axe, knives? a baseball bat? Spells? Fucking something minecraft, come on, you can't just have 10 weapons man!

The lack of creative content and variety in minecraft is staggering. Adding a block of a different color and texture is not new content!!!

Also, fuck villagers and the sound they make and their faces. Worse character design ever. Not a single redeeming aspect. And fuck their trading system.

The trade system is horrible!!! One item at a time per character. No text from villagers. They don't have names!!!! They don't feel like villagers!!! They feel like robots!!!! Not a single one of them fights back!!!!! WHAT THE FUCK???? JUST ADD ONE THAT FIGHTS BACK YOU MORONS!!! NOT THAT WEIRD ASS GOLEM!!!

AND NO ONE GIVES TOO FUCKING SHITS ABOUT THE GOSSIP SYSTEM MC DEVS. NO OONEEEEE!!!

Terraria is not a perfect game, but it doesn't just try to be a good rpg, it actually is.

Meanwhile every 3d sandbox after minecraft will either be a filthy clone or not exist at all by fear of being labeled as such. Because of that I will keep on trashing on minecraft, even though I still play it a lot.

Goodbye Ampps, hello Valet!!

Just got a Macbook Pro recently for personal web dev stuff. Previously, I usually use Ampps (like MAMP) for my local development.

But I want to move away from that as I wanted to go through the whole process of setting up my own local dev env.

After 3 days of trial and errors and many deadends, finally managed to get an existing Craft project running on Valet. The most tedious part was figuring out how connect Sequel Pro to local MySQL.

Through this whole process I've learned how to use Homebrew, setup MySQL with Sequel Pro, use Valet and most importantly, learning how to troubleshoot these problems...

Exclaimed a big YES! And mum came rushing into my room thinking I was mad... whateva...

Next step, figure out Docker.

#feellikeimoncloudnine

"To be truly great, we have to understand the motivation of our clients, maintain constant two-way communication with shockingly uncreative people, get a firm handle on copywriting and how that craft exists symbiotically with the visual element, and foresee how the finished whole will be greater than the sum of the bits and pieces we spent hours obsessing over. All of these factors cascade into the final product." - Kevin Potts

I'm wasting fucking hours to crop a fucking svg file!
I swear, I tried in all the ways, firstly I didn't want to download a software so I searched for some online editor, I tried fucking 10 of them, but none of these had a way to crop images. How the hell should I be able to craft images if I'm not able to decide the size, eh?
I read online that inkscape gives a lot of problems when it's about to crop images, and of course I didn't want to pay illustrator to fucking crop a file, so in the end I decided to give a chance to inkscape. The website gives me 502 bad gatweay.
Ok.
FUCKING CROP AN IMAGE.
2018.
TWO THOUSAND AND EIGHTEEN

Fellow devsmen who are parents, how do you manage to keep yourself sharp in your craft while managing your family life?

Being a modern day sorcerer, capable of building exotic creations through sheer force of will, constantly learning and advancing the craft

Craft CMS, where is the examples in you damn documentation

"As a profession, graphic designers have been shamefully remiss or ineffective about plying their craft for social or political betterment." - Steven Heller

"You have to roll up your sleeves and be a stonecutter before you can become a sculptor – command of craft always precedes art: apprentice, journeyman, master." - Philip Gerard

Anyone here done DIY projects with old hardware? Thinking of converting and old case into a bookshelf or something.

If you post about how your program runs on first execution without testing it up until said execution, I will call you a terrible, unprofessional programmer, and an insult to the craft right in your mother's face.

Currently work at frontier. Two job offers one at keystone the other at dk cannot decide so ran it through decision craft and the results are so close. How you normally pick which job to take. Any methods welcomed to be discussed.

"Design is a mix of craft, science, storytelling, propaganda, and philosophy. " - Erik Adigard

What gets me in the zone, is I need a couple of Monsters, a good anime with a good dub, and no one around. I may need a good craft beer or a shitty PBR or Rolling Rock.

Trying to craft a capturing subtraction group without having a good grasp of regex... That's a bad practice, right?

Do you hand craft each IP packet in binary before you send it out through the network? No. Who cares. We're computer scientists and the entire field is built on layers upon layers of abstraction.

"[Designers’] primary competence lies not in the technicalities of a craft but in the mastery of a process." - Ralph Caplan

Design in Motion: Real-Time Rendering's Impact on Architecture

Architecture, a discipline that once relied heavily on blueprints, models, and lengthy render times, has undergone a revolutionary transformation in recent years. The advent of real-time rendering technology has fundamentally altered the way architects visualize, present, and interact with their designs. This paradigm shift has not only enhanced the creative process but has also empowered architects to make more informed decisions and create immersive experiences for clients and stakeholders.

Real-time rendering, a technological marvel that harnesses the power of high-performance graphics hardware and advanced software algorithms, allows architects to generate photorealistic visualizations of their designs in a matter of milliseconds. Gone are the days of waiting hours or even days for a single rendering to complete. This acceleration in rendering time has not only expedited the design process but has also encouraged architects to explore multiple design iterations rapidly.

One of the most significant impacts of real-time rendering on architecture is the ability to visualize a design in various lighting conditions and environmental settings. Architects can now instantly switch between daytime and nighttime lighting scenarios, experiment with different materials, and observe how their designs respond to different seasons or weather conditions. This level of dynamic visualization offers insights into how a building's appearance and functionality evolve throughout the day, contributing to more holistic and thoughtful design solutions.

Moreover, real-time rendering has transformed client presentations. Architectural concepts can now be communicated with unprecedented clarity and realism. Clients can virtually walk through spaces, observing intricate details, exploring different angles, and even experiencing the play of light and shadow in real-time. This immersive experience fosters a deeper understanding of the design intent, enabling clients to provide more targeted feedback and make informed decisions.

The impact of real-time rendering on collaboration within architectural teams cannot be overstated. Traditionally, architects and designers would need to wait for a rendering to complete before discussing design changes or improvements. With real-time rendering, team members can make adjustments on the fly, observing the immediate effects of their decisions. This seamless collaboration not only enhances efficiency but also encourages interdisciplinary collaboration as architects, engineers, and other stakeholders can work together in real-time to refine designs.

The integration of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) into the architectural workflow is another transformative aspect of real-time rendering. Architects can now create VR environments that allow clients to step inside their designs and explore every nook and cranny. This not only enhances client engagement but also enables architects to identify potential design flaws or spatial issues that might not be apparent in 2D drawings. AR, on the other hand, overlays digital information onto the physical world, facilitating on-site decision-making and construction supervision.

Real-time rendering's impact extends beyond the design phase. It has proven to be a valuable tool for public engagement and community involvement in architectural projects. By creating virtual walkthroughs of proposed structures, architects can offer the public an opportunity to experience the design before construction begins. This transparency fosters a sense of ownership and allows for constructive feedback, contributing to the development of designs that resonate with the community's needs and aspirations.

The environmental implications of real-time rendering are also noteworthy. The ability to visualize designs in various environmental contexts contributes to more sustainable architecture. Architects can assess how natural light interacts with interior spaces, optimizing energy efficiency and reducing the need for artificial lighting during the day.

In conclusion, real-time rendering has ushered in a new era of architectural design, propelling the industry into a realm of dynamic visualization, immersive experiences, and enhanced collaboration. The ability to witness designs in motion, explore different lighting conditions, and interact with virtual environments has redefined how architects approach their craft. From facilitating client presentations to fostering sustainable design solutions, real-time rendering's impact on architecture is profound and multifaceted. As the technology continues to evolve, architects have an unprecedented opportunity to push the boundaries of creativity, efficiency, and sustainability in the built environment.

Software is your craft, be as much detailed and tidy as you can.

"I think design would be better if designers were much more skeptical about its applications. If you believe in the potency of your craft, where you choose to dole it out is not something to take lightly." - Frank Chimero

Exciting and challenging projects really helps with burnout. I didn't really believe that the solution is to work more it sounds stupid, but it reminded me why I love my craft, it was worth the sleepless nights(wouldn't do it in the long term). I hope you get the opportunity to work on something that you are passionate about and reignite that fire 🙂