I worked with a good dev at one of my previous jobs, but one of his faults was that he was a bit scattered and would sometimes forget things.

The story goes that one day we had this massive bug on our web app and we had a large portion of our dev team trying to figure it out. We thought we narrowed down the issue to a very specific part of the code, but something weird happened. No matter how often we looked at the piece of code where we all knew the problem had to be, no one could see any problem with it. And there want anything close to explaining how we could be seeing the issue we were in production.

We spent hours going through this. It was driving everyone crazy. All of a sudden, my co-worker (one referenced above) gasps “oh shit.” And we’re all like, what’s up? He proceeds to tell us that he thinks he might have been testing a line of code on one of our prod servers and left it in there by accident and never committed it into the actual codebase. Just to explain this - we had a great deploy process at this company but every so often a dev would need to test something quickly on a prod machine so we’d allow it as long as they did it and removed it quickly. It was meant for being for a select few tasks that required a prod server and was just going to be a single line to test something. Bad practice, but was fine because everyone had been extremely careful with it.

Until this guy came along. After he said he thought he might have left a line change in the code on a prod server, we had to manually go in to 12 web servers and check. Eventually, we found the one that had the change and finally, the issue at hand made sense. We never thought for a second that the committed code in the git repo that we were looking at would be inaccurate.

Needless to say, he was never allowed to touch code on a prod server ever again.

Was lead developer at a small startup, I was hiring and had a budget to add 3 new people to my team to develop a new product for the company.

Some context first and then the rant!

Candidate 1 - Amazing, a dev I worked with before who was under utilized at the previous company. Still a junior, but, she was a quick learner and eager to expand her knowledge, never an issue.

Candidate 2 - Kickass dev with back end skills and extras, he was always eager to work a bit more than what was expected. I use to send him home early to annoy him. haha!

Candidate 3 - Lets call him P.

In the interview he answers every question perfectly, he asks all the right questions and suggests some things I havent even thought of. CTO goes ahead and says we should skip the technical test and just hire the guy, his smart and knows what his talking about, I agree and we hire him. (We where a bit desperate at this stage as well.)

He comes in a week early to pick up his work laptop to get setup before he starts the next week, awesome! This guy is going to be an asset to the company, cant wait to have him join the team - The CTO at this stage is getting ready to leave the company and I will be taking over the division and need someone to take over lead position, he seems like the guys to do it.

The guys starts the next week, he comes in and the laptop we gave him is now a local server for testing and he will be working off his own laptop, no issue, we are small so needed a testing stack, but wasnt really needed since we had procedures in place for this already.

Here is where everything goes wrong!!! First day goes great... Next day he gets in early 6:30am (Nice! NO!), he absolutely smells, no stinks, of weed, not a light smell, the entire fucking office smells of weed! (I have no problem with weed, just dont make it my problem to deal with). I get called by boss and told to sort this out people are complaining! I drive to office and have a meeting with him, he says its all good he understands. (This was Friday).

Monday comes around - Get a call from Boss at 7:30am. Whole office smells like weed, please talk to P again, this cannot happen again. I drive to office again, and he again says it wont happen again, he has some issues with back pain and the weed helps.

Tuesday - Same fucking thing! And now he doesnt want to sign for the laptop("server") that was given to him, and has moved to code in the boardroom, WHERE OUR FUCKING CLIENTS WILL BE VIEWING A DEMO THAT DAY OF THE PRODUCT!! Now that whole room smells like weed, FML!

Wednesday - We send P a formal letter that he is under probation, P calls me to have a meeting. In the meeting he blames me for not understanding "new age" medicine, I ask for his doctors prescription and ask why he didnt tell me this in the interview so I could make arrangements, we dont care if you are stoned, just do good work and be considerate to your co-workers. P cant provide these and keeps ranting, I suggest he takes pain killers, he has none of it only "new age" medicine for him.

Thursday - I ask him to rather "work" from home till we can get this sorted, he comes in for code reviews for 2 weeks. I can clearly see he has no idea how the system works but is trying, I thought I will dive deeper and look at all of his code. Its a mess, nothing makes sense and 50% of it is hard coded (We are building a decentralized API for huge data sets so this makes no sense).

Friday - In code review I confront him about this, he has excuses for everything, I start asking him harder questions about the project and to explain what we are building - he goes quiet and quits on the spot with a shitty apology.

From what I could make out he was really smart when it came to theory but interpreting the theory to actual practice wasnt possible for him, probably would have been easier if he wasnt high all the time.

I hate interview code tests, but learned a valuable lesson that day! Always test for some code knowledge as well even if you hate doing it, ask the right questions and be careful who you hire! You can only bullshit for so long in coding before someone figures out that you are a fraud.

Was irritated and annoyed because of a client.

Someone called the support line and I was ready for some temper-holding practice.

A very sweet lady was at the other side and she couldn't figure something out and was overwhelmed by all the options she had in her new hosting package.

Very calmly helped her and guided her to the right place, step by step. She did exactly what I said instead of playing a smartass.

She finally found it and said that she appreciated it and a ton of thanks 😊.

Now that's a good way to end a work day!

This rant is a confession I had to make, for all of you out there having a bad time (or year), this story is for you.

Last year, I joined devRant and after a month, I was hired at a local company as an IT god (just joking but not far from what they expected from me), developer, web admin, printer configurator (of course) and all that in my country it's just called "the tech guy", as some of you may know.

I wasn't in immediate need for a full-time job, I had already started to work as a freelancer then and I was doing pretty good. But, you know how it goes, you can always aim for more and that's what I did.

The workspace was the usual, two rooms, one for us employees and one for the bosses (there were two bosses).

Let me tell you right now. I don't hate people, even if I get mad or irritated, I never feel hatred inside me or the need to think bad of someone. But, one of the two bosses made me discover that feeling of hate.

He had a snake-shaped face (I don't think that was random), and he always laughed at his jokes. He was always shouting at me because he was a nervous person, more than normal. He had a tone in his voice like he knew everything. Early on, after being yelled for no reason a dozen of times, I decided that this was not a place for me.

After just two months of doing everything, from tech support to Photoshop and to building websites with WordPress, I gave my one month's notice, or so I thought. I was confronted by the bosses, one of which was a cousin of mine and he was really ok with me leaving and said that I just had to find a person to replace me which was an easy task. Now, the other boss, the evil one, looked me on the eye and said "you're not going anywhere".

I was frozen like, "I can't stay here". He smiled like a snake he was and said "come on, you got this we are counting on you and we are really satisfied with how you are performing till now". I couldn't shake him, I was already sweating. He was rolling his eyes constantly like saying "ok, you are wasting my time now" and left to go to some basketball practice or something.

So, I was stuck there, I could have caused a scene but as I told you, one of the bosses was a cousin of mine, I couldn't do anything crazy. So, I went along with it. Until the next downfall.

I decided to focus on the job and not mind for the bad boss situation but things went really wrong. After a month, I realised that the previous "tech guy" had left me with around 20 ancient Joomla - version 1.0 websites, bursting with security holes and infested with malware like a swamp. I had never seen anything like it. Everyday the websites would become defaced or the server (VPN) would start sending tons of spam cause of the malware, and going offline at the end. I was feeling hopeless.

And then the personal destruction began. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. I was having panick attacks at the office's bathroom. My girlfriend almost broke up with me because I was acting like an asshole due to my anxiety issues (but in the end she was the one to "bring me back"(man, she is a keeper)) and I hadn't put a smile on my face for months. I was on the brink of depression, if not already there. Everyday I would anxiously check if the server is running because I would be the one to blame, even though I was trying to talk to the boss (the bad one was in charge of the IT department) and tell him about the problem.

And then I snapped. I finally realised that I had hit rock bottom. I said "I can't let this happen to me" and I took a deep breath. I still remember that morning, it was a life-changing moment for me. I decided to bite the bullet and stay for one more month, dealing with the stupid old server and the low intelligence business environment. So, I woke up, kissed my girlfriend (now wife), took the bus and went straight to work, and I went into the boss's office. I lied that I had found another job on another city and I had one month in order to be there on time. He was like, "so you are leaving? Is it that good a job the one you found? And when are you going? And are you sure?", and with no hesitation I just said "yup". He didn't expect it and just said "ok then", just find your replacement and you're good to go. I found the guy that would replace me, informing him of every little detail of what's going on (and I recently found out, that he is currently working for some big company nowadays, I'm really glad for him!).

I was surprised that it went so smoothly, one month later I felt the taste of freedom again, away from all the bullshit. Totally one of the best feelings out there.

I don't want to be cliche, but do believe in yourself people! Things are not what the seem.

With all that said, I want to give my special thanks to devRant for making this platform. I was inactive for some time but I was reading rants and jokes. It helped me to get through all that. I'm back now! Bless you devRant!

I'm glad that I shared this story with all of you, have an awesome day!

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail!

This was something which my tech lead used to tell me when I was so obsessed with nosql databases a few years back. I would try to find problems to solve that has a use case for nosql databases or even try to convince me(I didn’t realise it back then) that I need to use nosql db for this new idea that I have, without really thinking deep enough whether the data in question is better represented using an sql schema or not.

Now, leading a team of young developers, I come across similar suggestions from few of my team members who just discovered this new and shiny tech and want to use it in production projects.

While I am not against new and shiny, it’s not a good practice to jump right in to it without exploring it deep enough or considering all the shortcomings. The most important question to ask is, whether some of the problems you are trying to solve can be solved with the current stack.

Modifying your stack requires more than just a week’s experience of playing around with the getting started guide and stack overflow replies. This is something which need to be carefully considered after taking inputs from the people who would be supporting it, that include operations, sysadmins and teams that are gonna interface with your stack indirectly.

I am not talking about delaying adoption by waiting for long list of approvals to get some thing that would bring immediate value, but a carefully orchestrated plan for why and how to migrate to a new stack.

Just because one of the tech giants made a move to a new stack and wrote about it in their engineering blog doesn’t mean that you need to make a switch in the same direction. Take a moment to analyse the possible reasons that motivated them to do it, ask yourself if your organisation is struggling with the exact same problems, observe how others facing the same issue are addressing it, and then make an informed decision.
Collect enough data to support your proposal.
Ask yourself again if you are the one holding the hammer.
If the answer is no, forge ahead!

Root interviews for a job

So I've been interviewing for fun lately (and for practice), and it's been going mostly well. This one company in particular looks interesting, and they seem to really like me. This morning was interview #4 with them; tomorrow morning is #5.

The previous interviews were pretty enjoyable, especially the last one where I interviewed with one of the senior devs who gave me his "grumpy old man rails quiz." He actually asked some questions I wasn't able to answer! (Mostly dealing with Rails' internals.) Also when showing me the codebase, there were a few things I hadn't seen before, so it's exciting that I'll actually be able to learn something if I sign on. We ended up talking for almost an hour past our allotted time, and we got along famously. He said he was very surprised I did so well on his quiz because most people don't. Everyone else I interviewed with so far has liked me and gave positive reviews, too.

I don't know if I want the job, but that's beyond the scope of this rant anyway. The real reason for this comes next.

My interview today was with the VP of engineering. It was more of a monologue, as he wanted to give me perspective to see if I actually wanted to work there, but it was still very much a monologue. He's an old white guy who seems to loves to drone, and he never seemed very happy when I responded, so I let him drone and drone. Good information though.

But he's very set in his ways in some regards, and two of them were pretty insulting. We never really talked about technicals, and he just assumed that since I wasn't old and graying that I was a junior dev. He said, and I'll quote: "We run a lean but senior team, so we typically only hire senior devs here. But the dev team is all old white men. There's no diversity in talent, age, sex, race, religion, etc, and I'm looking to change that." He made several more allusions to my more junior level, too. He made a lot of assumptions (like how I'm not comfortable with structure because I've been the only dev so often) and got annoyed when I countered them.

I realize he has no idea of my skill level -- even though he should if he was listening to his team -- but to just assume that I'm not talented because I'm young, and bloody hire me just because I'm female? I don't want to be your diversity hire, old man. 🤬

So I'm feeling angry.
I might still take the job because the it offers considerable benefits over where I'm working (despite being quite happy here), but it will absolutely be despite him.

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

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

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

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

Weaklings! Robots are superior!

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

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

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

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

So I jumped into the infinitely deep shitpool called webdev.

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

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

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

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

So I became a data engineer / database admin.

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

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

Boss asks me to prefer deadlines over good engineering practice. Says meeting a deadline is always more important than building things the right way.

Son, when the company goes out of business due to hundreds of millions of dollars in losses due to shoddy engineering, do you want to be the one to go to the spouses of everyone who lost their job and say "your spouse lost his job because we didn't take a few more days to build the product right"?

Son, when the company's product blows up in a child's face like a Note 7 because of your shoddy engineering, do you want to go to the funeral and tell the parents "your child died because we didn't take a few more days to build the product right"?

Fuck your arbitrary deadlines. I prefer not allowing for so much grief and suffering to be on my soul.

Perhaps not "best", but certainly most amusing, so what the heck!

Years ago as an intern, I applied to a large pharmaceutical company. On part of the application form, you had to enter the code of the department you were applying to.

What I *should have* put down was "IT", which is the department that houses all their devs. However, I didn't actually read any of what the codes meant, assumed that was the department for helping people with how to mail merge, and put down "COMPSCI" instead. This was computational sciences - loosely summarised as computational data analysis on various druggable molecules.

I do *not* have any sort of biology or chemistry background, so the interview was rather... interesting, and I muddled through on the basis of getting some more interview practice assuming it was a no go.

To my amazement, got a phone call saying that they'd been thinking they wanted someone more technical on the team, and despite my lack of scientific experience they thought I'd be a good fit. I was unsure as to whether I should accept for a while, but then decided to just go for it - and had a fantastic internship there, working on a great variety of stuff, and learning tons all under a supervisor who I'm still in touch with to this day.

tl;dr - Applied for the wrong job. Coincidentally got it anyway, and miraculously had a fantastic year working there.

Example #1 of ??? Explaining why I dislike my coworkers.

[Legend]
VP: VP of Engineering; my boss’s boss. Founded the company, picked the CEO, etc.
LD: Lead dev; literally wrote the first line of code at the company, and has been here ever since.
CISO: Chief Information Security Officer — my boss when I’m doing security work.

Three weeks ago (private zoom call):
> VP to me: I want you to know that anything you say, while wearing your security hat, goes. You can even override me. If you need to hold a release for whatever reason, you have that power. If I happen to disagree with a security issue you bring up, that’s okay. You are in charge of release security. I won’t be mad or hold it against you. I just want you to do your job well.

Last week (engineering-wide meeting):
> CISO: From now on we should only use external IDs in urls to prevent a malicious actor from scraping data or automating attacks.
> LD: That’s great, and we should only use normal IDs in logging so they differ. Sounds more secure, right?
> CISO: Absolutely. That way they’re orthogonal.
> VP: Good idea, I think we should do this going forward.

Last weekend (in the security channel):
> LD: We should ONLY use external IDs in urls, and ONLY normal IDs in logging — in other words, orthogonal.
> VP: I agree. It’s better in every way.

Today (in the same security channel):
> Me: I found an instance of using a plain ID in a url that cancels a payment. A malicious user with or who gained access to <user_role> could very easily abuse this to cause substantial damage. Please change this instance and others to using external IDs.
> LD: Whoa, that goes way beyond <user_role>
> VP: You can’t make that decision, that’s engineering-wide!

Not only is this sane security practice, you literally. just. agreed. with this on three separate occasions in the past week, and your own head of security also posed this before I brought it up! And need I remind you that it is still standard security practice!?

But nooo, I’m overstepping my boundaries by doing my job.

Fucking hell I hate dealing with these people.

Ranted about him before. The to the max windows fanboy. But next to being that, he had the habit of shooting down any and every idea/suggestion etc I had. Which is still quite 'fine' if you come up with good alternatives but he only came up with his own fucking preferences. (thing to keep in mind is that he wasn't even on our (me and one other guy) projects (!!!))

It would always go like this:

Him: soo, how are you planning on doing this?
Me: well I was thinking about {insert idea}.
Him: *wtf face* why?!?
Me: *comes up with constructive arguments*
Him: well, it's non of my business as I'm not on the project...... Buuuuuuut I'd do it with this: {insert anything in relation to Microsoft and the stack i said}.

It's bearable if that happens once.
It's annoying to fucking death when you hear that 10+ FUCKING TIMES EVERY DAY.

Every time I ended up completely boiling inside and getting the best possible practice at self-control. I never snapped even once.

When he finished his internship I talked to a colleague that he had to partner up with after a week or two to ask what he thought about that guy.
His reaction: he's a fucking disrespectful lowlife and a cunt. He was veeeeeeeeeery annoying with me and always shooting down my ideas but danm he was nearly fucking bullying/intimidating you every fucking day! He makes me fucking sick.

Ain't I right?

Insecure... My laptop disk is encrypted, but I'm using a fairly weak password. 🤔

Oh, you mean psychological.

Working at a startup in crisis time. Might lose my job if the company goes under.

I'm a Tech lead, Senior Backender, DB admin, Debugger, Solutions Architect, PR reviewer.

In practice, that means zero portfolio. Truth be told, I can sniff out issues with your code, but can't code features for shit. I really just don't have the patience to actually BUILD things.

I'm pretty much the town fool who angrily yells at managers for being dumb, rolls his eyes when he finds hacky code, then disappears into his cave to repair and refactor the mess other people made.

I totally suck at interviews, unless the interviewer really loves comparing Haskell's & Rust's type systems, or something equally useless.

I'm grumpy, hedonistic and brutally straight forward. Some coworkers call me "refreshing" and "direct but reasonable", others "barely tolerable" or even "fundamentally unlikable".

I'm not sure if they actually mean it, or are just messing with me, but by noon I'm either too deep into code, or too much under influence of cognac & LSD, wearing too little clothing, having interesting conversations WITH instead of AT the coffee machine, to still care about what other humans think.

There have been moments where I coded for 72 hours straight to fix a severe issue, and I would take a bullet to save this company from going under... But there have also been days where I called my boss a "A malicious tumor, slowly infecting all departments and draining the life out of the company with his cancerous ideas" — to his face.

I count myself lucky to still have a very well paying job, where many others are struggling to pay bills or have lost their income completely.

But I realize I'm really not that easy to work with... Over time, I've recruited a team of compatible psychopaths and misfits, from a Ukranian ex-military explosives expert & brilliant DB admin to a Nigerian crossfitting gay autist devops weeb, to a tiny alcoholic French machine learning fanatic, to the paranoid "how much keef is there in my beard" architecture lead who is convinced covid-19 is linked to the disappearance of MH370 and looks like he bathes in pig manure.

So... I would really hate to ever have to look for a new employer.

I would really hate to ever lose my protective human meat shield... I mean, my "team".

I feel like, despite having worked to get my Karma deep into the red by calling people all kinds of rude things, things are really quite sweet for me.

I'm fucking terrified that this peak could be temporary, that there's a giant ravine waiting for me, to remind me that life is a ruthless bitch and that all the good things were totally undeserved.

Ah well, might as well stay in character...

*taunts fate with a raised middlefinger*

Hello there, just couple of words about PHP. I've been develop on PHP more than 10 years, I've seen it all 3,4,5,{6},7. Yes PHP was not good in terms of engineering and patterns, but it was simple, it was the most simple language for web to start those days. It was simple as you put code into file, upload it via FTP and it works. No java servlets, no unix consoles, no nothing, just shared hosting account was enough to host site, or even application with database. As database everybody used to have mysql, again because its simple to start and easy to maintain. So PHP+MySQL became industry standard on Web during 00-2012, and continues in some way.
You can write HTML and logic inside single file, within php code, even more single file may content few pages, or even kind of framework. That simplicity and agility sticks everybody who wants to develop sites with PHP.
This is pretty much about why it is so popular.

Each good or wannabe PHP developer in an early days write its own framework or library (like in javascript this days because of nodejs)

Imagine that PHP has hadn't have package manager, developers used to have host packages on their own sites, then various packages catalog sites created, and then finally composer. A gazillions of php code had spread over internet, without any kind of dependency control. To include libraries to your projects you have to just write include, or require. Some developers do it better than others.

So what we have ? A lots of code, no repositories, zip archives with libraries, no dependency control.
Project that uses that kind of code are still alive even today, they are solid hose of cards, and unmaintainable of course.

And main question that I'm trying to answer is Why PHP is not good ?
- First is amount of legacy code which people copy and pasted into their project, spread it even more like a virus.
- Lack of industry standards at the beginning lead to a lots of bad practices among developers. PHP code usually smells.
open source php projects in early days was developed in same conditions so even in phpbb, phpnuke, wordpress, drupal used to have a lot of bad practices in their codebase. So php developers usually not study by another library, instead they write their own frameworks/libraries.
- "It works", - there are no strong business demands, on web development, again because lack of standards, and concerns.
This three things are basically same, they linked to each other and summarize of answer of why PHP have strong smells and everybody yelling against it.

Whats is with PHP nowadays ? Of course PHP today is more influenced by good practice of webdev. Composer, Zend, Laravel, Yii, Symphony and language it self became more adult so to say, but developers...

People who never tried anything except PHP are usually weaker in programming and ecosystem knowledge than people who tried something else, python, perl, ruby, c for instance.

Summary

PHP as any other programming language is a tool. Each tool has its own task. Consider this and your task requirements and PHP can be just good enough solution.
"PHP is shit" - usually you heard that from people who never write strong applications on PHP and haven't used any good tools like Symphony or Laravel.
Cheap developers, - the bigger community, the more chance to hire cheap developers, and more chance to get bad code. That can be applied on any other language.
PHP has professionals developers, usually they have not only php on scope.

That's all folks, this is very brief, I am not covering php usage early days in details, but this is good enough to understand the point.

Enjoy.

Just my $.02:

One thing I think a lot of students/schools miss when learning/teaching, is that your code has to be *maintainable*. Your code is (hopefully) going to be used for a long time, so program it to make it not only easy to upgrade and maintain, but easy for SOMEONE ELSE to upgrade and maintain, too.

The best code to work with is the stuff that's been coded with maintainability in mind.

I have seen it. They say it doesn't exist; just a story we tell our children so that their innocence does not lead them down into a nightmarish adulthood from which there is no salvation. But the evil lives. So vile that were you to look inside its soul, all you would find is a terrible desperation for suffering. To cause it. To revel in it. To bathe in the tears of those it considers less than human and feed off the emotional detritus.

It was 2009. The financial crisis. I was one of the lucky, having found refuge in a large company right before the jobs dried up. General IT: system administration, documentation, project management, telephony, software training, second level help desk. No software development, but with a two-year-old at home and Ph.D.s lining up outside the local Olive Garden whenever a help wanted sign was posted, I grabbed the health insurance and entered into darkness.

The Thing did not need to hunt it's prey. A manager title with 21 reports brought it new opportunities for fresh meat by the hour. But I was special. I resisted. I needed to know my place.

My first mistake was incomprehension. I did not understand the Thing's lust to be right at all costs. I was reviewing some documentation it had brought forth from its bowels. I mentioned that two spaces were being used between sentences. That proportional type made that unnecessary. It insisted, I was wrong. It insisted that Microsoft itself, the purveyor of all good technical writing, required two spaces. I opened the Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications that it demanded its staff use and showed it that the spec was one space. It was livid. I was a problem.

From that point on my work life became exponentially more wretched. I was given three Outlook calendars to maintain: one with my schedule, one with the team's schedule and one with the Thing's schedule. Every time I had an appointment, I was to triple schedule it. If I was going to be away from my desk for more than 15 minutes triple schedule. Triple schedule my lunch, vacations, phone conferences.

Whenever it held a meeting, I and a colleague would be taken off mission critical IT projects to set tables with name tents and to serve as greeters as attendees arrived.

I was called into its crypt to be told never to say anything in a meeting unless I told the Thing beforehand what I was going to say. Naive, I mentioned that I often don't know what I will say as it is often in reply to someone else. Of course the response was that I should not say anything.

I would get emails 10-20 times a day asking about a single project. I would regularly complete work that was needed to be completed ASAP, only to have the Thing rake me over the coals for not completing it a week later. And upon resending the emails proving I notified it of the work being competed, disparaged at length a second time for not sending repeated notifications of the competed work.

I would have to sit in two-hour meetings to watch it type. Literally watch it try to create cogent thoughts. In silence.

I received horrendous annual reviews. At one, it created a development plan that stated a colleague would begin giving me lessons on the proper ways to socially interact with personnel. I pointed out to HR that this violated privacy concerns and would make the business liable in many areas, not least of which would be placing a help desk person in the role of defining proper business practice. HR made the Thing remove this from my review. She started planning to remove me.

I had given a short technical training to a group of personnel months earlier. Called into its tomb I was informed that feedback surveys on my talk were disturbing. One person stated that they did not think I was funny. Another wrote that I made an offensive statement. That person did not say what the offensive statement was. Just that I had said something he or she didn't like.

The Thing interviewed the training attendees. Gathered facts. Held three inquest-like meetings where multiple directors peppered me with questions trying to get me to confess to my offensiveness. In the end the request to fire me was brought to the man who ran the business at the time. The statement on high: "Humor is a subjective thing. Please tell This to be sensitive to that."

The Thing had failed, but would no doubt redouble its efforts. I had to find a new job. I sent hundreds of resumes. Talked to dozens of recruiters. But there were no jobs. And I had a family. And the wolf was at the door.

So I didn't say a word to the creature. For six months. Silence. At one group meeting it shrieked at me "what are you smirking at? If you've got something to say then say it!" I just shrugged. For my salvation was revealed. The Thing could not stand to be ignored. And at the end of my penance I was transferred to another group: Software Development.

I am one with the Force. The Force is with me. I am one with the Force. The Force is with me.

TL;DR I'm fucking sick and tired of Devs cutting corners on security! Things can't be simply hidden a bit; security needs to be integral to your entire process and solution. Please learn from my story and be one of the good guys!

As I mentioned before my company used plain text passwords in a legacy app (was not allowed to fix it) and that we finally moved away from it. A big win! However not the end of our issues.

Those Idiot still use hardcoded passwords in code. A practice that almost resulted in a leak of the DB admin password when we had to publish a repo for deployment purposes. Luckily I didn't search and there is something like BFG repo cleaner.

I have tried to remedy this by providing a nice library to handle all kinds of config (easy config injection) and a default json file that is always ignored by git. Although this helped a lot they still remain idiots.
The first project in another language and boom hardcoded password. Dev said I'll just remove before going live. First of all I don't believe him. Second of all I asked from history? "No a commit will be good enough..."

Last week we had to fix a leak of copyrighted contend.
How did this happen you ask? Well the secure upload field was not used because they thought that the normal one was good enough. "It's fine as long the URL to the file is not published. Besides now we can also use it to upload files that need to be published here"
This is so fucking stupid on so many levels. NEVER MIX SECURE AND INSECURE CONTENT it is confusing and hard to maintain. Hiding behind a URL that thousands of people have access to is also not going to work. We have the proof now...
Will they learn? Maybe for a short while but I remain sceptic. I hope a few DevrRanters do!

Agile in practice.

I finished my story with 3 days left in our 2 week sprint.

Me: What story should I pull in next?
PM: Story <number> to add <new feature>
Me: ok, sounds good
PM: Will you finish it before our sprint ends?
Me: No, probably will take me 5-7 days.
PM: But it can't spill over, it will make our metrics look bad.
Me: I can't finish it in 3 days.
PM: ....
Me: Can't you just explain the spillover as us working ahead?
PM: It will look bad on our <automated-report>
Me: ....
Me: So don't want me to get started on <new feature>?
PM: ....
Me: <internally sighing> What do you want me to do?
PM: Maybe you can pair program with <Overpaid-Idiot-Programmer> to help finish their story
Me: ....
Me: feelsbadman.jpg

Paranoid Developers - It's a long one
Backstory: I was a freelance web developer when I managed to land a place on a cyber security program with who I consider to be the world leaders in the field (details deliberately withheld; who's paranoid now?). Other than the basic security practices of web dev, my experience with Cyber was limited to the OU introduction course, so I was wholly unprepared for the level of, occasionally hysterical, paranoia that my fellow cohort seemed to perpetually live in. The following is a collection of stories from several of these people, because if I only wrote about one they would accuse me of providing too much data allowing an attacker to aggregate and steal their identity. They do use devrant so if you're reading this, know that I love you and that something is wrong with you.

That time when...

He wrote a social media network with end-to-end encryption before it was cool.

He wrote custom 64kb encryption for his academic HDD.

He removed the 3 HDD from his desktop and stored them in a safe, whenever he left the house.

He set up a pfsense virtualbox with a firewall policy to block the port the student monitoring software used (effectively rendering it useless and definitely in breach of the IT policy).

He used only hashes of passwords as passwords (which isn't actually good).

He kept a drill on the desk ready to destroy his HDD at a moments notice.

He started developing a device to drill through his HDD when he pushed a button. May or may not have finished it.

He set up a new email account for each individual online service.

He hosted a website from his own home server so he didn't have to host the files elsewhere (which is just awful for home network security).

He unplugged the home router and began scanning his devices and manually searching through the process list when his music stopped playing on the laptop several times (turns out he had a wobbly spacebar and the shaking washing machine provided enough jittering for a button press).

He brought his own privacy screen to work (remember, this is a security place, with like background checks and all sorts).

He gave his C programming coursework (a simple messaging program) 2048 bit encryption, which was not required.

He wrote a custom encryption for his other C programming coursework as well as writing out the enigma encryption because there was no library, again not required.

He bought a burner phone to visit the capital city.

He bought a burner phone whenever he left his hometown come to think of it.

He bought a smartphone online, wiped it and installed new firmware (it was Chinese; I'm not saying anything about the Chinese, you're the one thinking it).

He bought a smartphone and installed Kali Linux NetHunter so he could test WiFi networks he connected to before using them on his personal device.

(You might be noticing it's all he's. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't).

He ate a sim card.

He brought a balaclava to pentesting training (it was pretty meme).

He printed out his source code as a manual read-only method.

He made a rule on his academic email to block incoming mail from the academic body (to be fair this is a good spam policy).

He withdraws money from a different cashpoint everytime to avoid patterns in his behaviour (the irony).

He reported someone for hacking the centre's network when they built their own website for practice using XAMMP.

I'm going to stop there. I could tell you so many more stories about these guys, some about them being paranoid and some about the stupid antics Cyber Security and Information Assurance students get up to. Well done for making it this far. Hope you enjoyed it.

No rubber 🦆 . No problems..
it's a good practice for that moment when am ganna fist the screen !!

!dev at all

Was chilling with my t mobile rep trying to get some issues resolved regarding what Verizon's bitchass was trying to do after i left their shitty company.

While i was there and my dude was working his magic i noticed this smoking chick walking around the store waiting for someone to help her out. So being that everyone was busy and sorta scared of talking to her( i can sense that shit) i told my boy to go and pick her as his customer, to be flirty and cool and shit.

My poor dude was all like "nah man I dunno how to talk to girls...."

I was telling him "bro, you ain't bad looking, just go, introduce yo ass and tell her that you'll take care of her in a min!"

"But i get all anxious and shit"

"Nah man, just talk to her like you did to me when we first met, she is just a customer, i aint telling you to ask her out on a date, just i dunno practice talking to girls! No harm with that! Specially this one b look at them leeeeeeegs!"

Now, why did I care? The reason is that he mentioned to me after seeing my wife (total babe) that he pictures me as a player. Which I was but that is beyond the point. And he said that he had always had trouble talking to girls.

So i told him what to do, said to be calm and confident. Ninja is an alpha salesman, and great with t mobile services, so he has that confidence, told him to exude that shit as if he was talking to a guy.

Homeboy got ballsy, drank 5 gallons of man the fuck up and went and did what I did. Then she went ahead and stand next to us, and i put on the good words for my dude "ah you got the best rep right here! G boy is bomb with everything!!" She was laughing saying that she hopes that he can help her with her phone.

"Don't worry, i got you, its just a small thing and if you want i'll show you what to do for future occasions"

"Oh so you don't want me to come back if it happens?"

"Haha you can come back any time as long as I am the one helping you out"

DAAAAAAAAAAAMN son!!

"Ok, but only if its you"

Daaaaaaaaaamn

Went better than expected. The dude needs more confidence, he aint bad looking at all and don't want him missing out on some of the babes we got walking around town.

Lord knows I had my fun with them.

The good Java practices...

Some of these have been mentioned already but here they are, these things make me be a bit better at programming (at least I think so)

• sleep, I love sleep and I think a good night's sleep can do wonders

• music, music theory which is a language in itself and playing an instrument which teaches hand-eye-coordination and also creates patterns in your head, but certainly teaches us that you need to practice a lot to achieve your goals, that it's hard for beginners but gets a bit easier with time

• solving puzzles and riddles, I've been a huge fan of puzzles from an early age, it is something that teaches us solving problems and creating strategies

• other types of games that are helpful are games where you have to find things in a picture or in an environment, this has trained me a bit on finding nasty bugs in my code or at least syntax errors

• googling: sometimes you find out something that is not really related to your problem, but you remember it nevertheless and later on it can help you with something else

• maths, yes, you read correctly, I'm not a big fan of maths either, but what you learn in maths is that there are certain procedures you're often repeating and that you're always building on your knowledge and expanding it, sometimes solving mathematical problems is fun too ;)

• getting fresh air - self explanatory

• listening to other people's life stories, this helps me generally in life, to know that I'm not the only one struggling with something and so on

And I probably could go on with a lot more things, but I think that's enough for now

You know. I have mixed feelings on the way people have been reacting to senzory's rant regarding the way he deals with clients. Some people believe that he is unethical, some people see it as just business(me included) but to see what the community says is somewhat interesting.

First, let me be clear on something: i have been fucked over by clients many times for being a nice guy and trying to play it nicely.

Because of this I am selective of who deserves good treatment and who gets to fuck off. But regardless of the client I do the same thing: regardless of who it is, nice or otherwise. If a project will take 1 week to complete then I tell them that it will take 3 to 4 weeks. Why? Well because I have many things on my plate, I am married and have two children, one lives with me and I try to spend as much time with them as I can. I work from 8 to 6, sometimes later and when I get home I sometimes don't do shit since at work I maintain the web services of 2 fucking college campuses.
I don't look for my clients. Through word of mouth they come to me. And being in a privileged position(there are about 5 devs here and they all suck) they can either do with my times and fees or can fuck off over the border where Pedro will do their shit on vbscript and classic ASP(which I like, but you know why this is not an option in 2018)

Apps can be sold for large quantities of money, regardless of what their use case is, if a company wants to outsource their apps to an external developer(such as yours truly) that means that they are willing to play the game. And that is what business is: a game, a survival game.

Where I live, a company will not think twice of firing a single mother for whatever reason. In the U.S of A, and specially in Texas, you can be fired for whatever reason. I have automated people's jobs without knowing it, I have made people lose their jobs and saved companies thousands with my apps. Things like that were not know to me, had I known that someone would have lost their jobs I would have tried differently.

If a company is willing to tell employees(loyal employees) to fuck off, then i do not regret charging what I do and hustling the way I do with rat faced dickheads that care not for people. If I could I would destroy entire companies here. But that is for another story.

I have been used, insulted, gambled with and have been lied to, to my face by these companies. Which has left me jaded.

Oh now, trust me. I am still highly optimistic and nice. And if someone has a small business and I can help them out, then I will lower my rate and give positive vibes in the hopes of making things better through karma. I want to see the best in people. But this does not stop me from being a shark and giving quotes the way I do.

Because companies, as an overall entity are not people with the best intentions(sometimes) and they will not take your kindness, they will take advantage if possible in an effort to save money. Its just dickhead business.

So why, as a professional and privileged developer that obtained his skills through intense study and practice, a wizard by all means, should lower to these nameless, Faceless entities?
Why should i give them the fairness they do not give others? Why should I play the high morale game and come out as a loser?

At the end of the day, I get to swim in my own pool of success, knowing that they did not get the chance to fuck me over

So if you tell me that you took advantage of your hard earned skillset, and built a cross platform app(which compiles to native binaries) and sold 2 products for one, I will tell you that you are an excellent player at their game. If you tell me that you finished before and got to charge for 2 weeks of work doing just 2 days I will say that you are an excellent time manager. And if you tell me that at the end of the day you managed to keep said customer I will tell you that you are a true professional.

There is a difference lads, in selling a product to big momma jamma's cajun restaurant, to the largest logistics company around.

Be nice to those that desserve it.

Sometimes I feel like my job is just babysitting my coworkers. I need to find a way to teach them how to think for themselves.

I'm not a senior dev but I am the one my coworkers turn to for help. I like helping (even if it's annoying some times), so I'm thinking about embracing the mentor role in my team. My plan for now is to stop giving the answers right away (which I usually do to get back to my work) and instead try to guide my coworkers into figuring out the issue themselves. This will take more of my time of course and will require I practice my patience in a possibly stressful environment (depending on how close deadlines are), but I'm hoping that it'll produce better coworkers (one can dream, at least).

Do any of you know of any good reading resources about mentoring or becoming a mentor, specifically in tech/development?

My friend thinks commenting every goddamn HTML tag is a good practice.

For security purposes, it should be good practice to lock your pc when you walk away. At my office, we practice harmless pranks when someone forgets, to "teach them a lesson". Usually just involves reversing/inverting displays, reversing mouse buttons, or changing the desktop background like this (because everyone is a closet bronie apparently)

Spent 2-3 weeks on implementing a new feature, a guy with 10 years of experience jumps in and solves it within 5 days.

*Oh! I forgot to mention, it was his first time working with the framework.

I must say his OOP skills are really good, not sure if this is something you learn by reading books or simply by practice.

I strongly believe that if you have a good understanding of how to build apps with OOP pattern, you'll do a great job in the SW industry.

At a point in your life, you'll settle down abit, and you start to think about what you've done in the past (idk) years of your life.

Then you think about your career, how everything is ever since you discovered you were good at a certain thing since highschool.

be it programing, writing random codes, pentesting (or if you had that "hacker" phase in your life) or fixing laptops and etc.

"Good"

You think about the word, and you had a thought: You only know how to do it, how it works, how its done, and how to do it.

You only "Know", it takes practice, patience, dedication and years (or months depends on you) of experience before you can really say for sure you're "Good" at it.

Me? Im no where near good. but that doesn't stop me from going there.

And i hope the same goes for you. You can do it,

Have a great day.

NEVER USE GOTO!

Complete and total rant:

You know what fucking confuses the holy fucking shit out of me? DESIGN

I have MAD respect for motherfuckers that spend their days tailoring shit away in CSS, writing custom animations and toggles in JS and ensuring that their HTML is pristine as fuck. I really do and in my opinion they should b getting mad props from everyone, because if they so decide to learn GOOD server side scripting then they are most definitely on their way to create some awesome functional and beautiful shit.

But...

I am not a designer by any means of it. And I know that shit is supposed to look good and work across a multitude of devices. Doing something like that takes me a couple of lines of code (granted, after hours of work that is) that may take a designer way less.

But why oh why do I see THOUSANDS of lines of CSS code for shit that does not take me half the amount of work that it takes other people?
Like seriously. I am trying to emulate the menu that university of Chicago uses(as an example for a lil design practice cuz i suck at it) and looking into their CSS I see thooooousands of lines of code to do something that I did in about two hundred.

So wtf man, do I suck so hard that I am missing some serious shit? wtf is happening? This confuses me, because in my mind it should take me just about as much work as it takes them right?

AGAIN MAD RESPECT FOR DESIGNERS -- If you are a designer reading this please tell me wtf is happening

One of our senior dev enjoys berating the other devs because they don't check-in code according to his schedule (once a day, once an hour..he flip-flops a lot), then when they do, he 'reviews' their code, beating them up because of incomplete features, commented out code..petty..petty nonsense.
Ex. (this occurred couple of weeks ago).

Ralph: "The button click code in this event isn't complete"
Dev: "No, its not, the code in my development branch. You said it was best practice to check in code daily whether the code worked or not. I didn't finish the event last night and ..."
Ralph: "Exactly. Before you check any code into source control, it has to work and be 100% complete. What if someone moved that code into production? What happens if that code got deployed? I'm not even going talk about the lack of unit tests."
Dev: "Uh..well..the code is on the development channel, and I branched the project in my folder ...I didn't think it mattered.."
Ralph: "Ha ha...you see what happens when you don't think...listen..."
- blah blah blah for 10 minutes of hyperbole nonsense of source control check-in 'best practice'

This morning Ralph's computer's hard-drive crashed.
Ralph: "F-k! ..F-k! ... my f-king computer hard drive crashed!"
Me: "Ouch...did you loose anything important?"
Ralph: "A f-king week of code changes."
Me: "You checked everything into source control on Friday ...didn't you?"
Ralph: "F-k no!...I got busy...and...f-k!"
Me: "Look at the bright side, you'll have a good story to tell about the importance of daily check-ins"

Oh...if looks could kill. Karma...you're the best.

Not adding spaces in for statements.

ex) bad practice
for (i=0;i<10:i++)
{
//some code
}

ex) good practice
for (i = 0; i < 10; i++)
{
//some code
}

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!

every damn time

After designing the new server architecture for our software and the security to go with it, the boss decides we should ask our provider’s solutions architects to see if it is okay, they came back and said it all looks good apart from one part which my manager did and I always said was bad practice.

Being a programmer in a scientific discipline can be infuriating.

using "no one" ="almost no one"
using everyone = "almost everyone"

1. No one knows what even the very idea of good practice is. And everyone refuses to learn. 3k lines of repetitive copy pasted main. 500 lines of plotting method.

2. Raw C-style pointer based array creation. Won't use develope array libraries because what if development stops. FUCKING HAVE YOU SEEN YOUR CODE WHAT IF DEVELOPMENT ON YOUR CODE STOPS. FUCK.

3. LOOP VARIABLES DECLARED AT THE BEGINNING OF THE METHOD WHY.

4. Everyone wants to make modular, independent code. No one wants to use OOP. NOPE. ALL IN ONE FILE. WRITE C++ LIKE A FUCKING PYTHON NOTEBOOK. FUCK.

5. LIBRARIES OH MY GOD PLEASE DO NOT CODE UP YOUR MATRIX MULTIPLICATION. PLEASE DO NOT TRIPLE LOOP IT. NO. THE LINEAR ALGEBRA LIBRARY WILL STAY IN DEVELOPMENT.

6. Please realize that literally not one comment over an 1800 line file does not help anyone.

FUCKING. WHY. WHY ARE WE SCIENTISTS SO GOOD AT SCIENCE AND SO FUCKING SHIT AT THE CODE THAT MAKES OUR SCIENCE HAPPEN. WHY. FUCKING. WHY. FUCK.

"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.

Fml... you keep getting the weekly discussions right on point.

I started with the last guys right out of university... just out of Hospital.

With a brand new degree and a Crohn’s diagnosis I stepped into the first place I found hiring. They were good guys, after a junior dev... to get stuck in their muck.

I did! I nailed project after project, tricky development after tricky development. I spent 5 years with them and over those years things changed.

They had a mass cull... the original idea was to get rid of the useless middle managers, the ones managing other managers being managed by another manager for no real reason.... the ones that do fuck all with their day.

But the fucking idiots upstairs put the job of working out the cull in the shitty middle managers hands.

So, instead, they cut the titles senior, junior and everything in between. Everyone was just a thing, no senior things, no junior things. Just things.

Once they’d done that they said “we’ll we have this many things, they’re all the same, let’s get rid of the things with the highest pay checks because the other things can do it just as well for less money”...

And that’s how they cut 50% of their senior techs.

I was one of the ones left behind but the damage became obvious quick. The middle managers barked out orders at people who couldn’t complete them, and everything went to shit.

My team was rebranded twice in as many years... an obvious ploy for funding, but the cost of the team fluctuated like hell because contractors had to fill the senior positions at 3 times the cost.

Then the managers started barking out Self contradictory orders. Do this, but this way...

This would work, but not that way... try explaining that to a group of non-technical, useless as fuck middle managers. It took months, and shit flows downstream so we got the bulk of the hassle for it.

Then my boy Morpheus, got a warning... they threatened his contract for saying “this will work, but not that way”.

He kept the contract, and the manager giving him the warning said he didn’t think he should... but he, and all the middle fuckwits don’t have the balls to stand up against nonsense.

That was the breaking point for me, I handed in my notice and told them a month was what they could have.

I didn’t have a position or an idea of where to go, a few long-standing offers as back up in a pinch but not the perfect job.

On the Thursday I decided I was done, I let my manager know. Then I boshed the fuck out of my CV and updated my profiles.

My phone started ringing off the hook, a senior NG2/MEAN/Ionic dev on the market is like candy to recruiters. They’re lovely too.

I went to a few interviews that were okay but not great. Then a company got in touch... one that I immediately recognised as an IT book publisher. They said they were looking for NG/NG2 devs, senior. winner! Set up the interview.

So I’d spent the weekend with the missus, about an hour away from mine and 2 from the interview. I hadn’t planned on staying there but at 6ish she looked over at me and said “do you have to go” <- imagine that with puppy dog eyes from a gorgeous Slovenian lass.

I folded quicker than a shitty pancake toss.

We spent the night together but that meant I had to be up at 6, to go back to mine, iron my interview clothes and make it to the train to manage the interview. Fuck. I did it, but I was at the interview wired on caffeine and struggling to be awake and coherent. I still managed, that’s what I do, I make do and try to do well regardless of the situation.

That comes from being ill btw, when you’re dealt a shitty hand you learn to play it well.

They were good guys, the heads all knew what they were on about, not the middle management bs I was used to.

They demoed me live with an ng1 test, which was awesome as hell to play with.

We chatted, friendly and cool guys! I loved the place.

The end of the week they got me in for second round. Ng2 and competence test, again I went for it!

Positive feedback and a “we’ll get back to you ASAP, should be by Tuesday”...

Tuesday was the Tuesday before the Friday I was due to leave the old company... I was cutting it close.

On the Monday the offers started rolling in, a few C# ASP MVC positions, cool but I was holding out for the guys I’d interviewed with.

Then Tuesday comes around, I’m nervous as fuck but it’s okay because I knew regardless I can pay the rent in December with one of the offers.

Then said yes!

The thing that seemed most important in the process was my ability to talk to any fucker. If you’re coming up to interview, talk to everyone, the grocer, your barista, the binmen, anyone. Practice that skill above all others.

I start tomorrow morning! I can’t wait.

Final thought: middle managers are taints.

Man I really wish I knew how to implement TDD. Sounds so good in theory, seems impossible in practice 😅

So as all of you web developers know. If you are stepping into the world of web development you stepping into a world of unlimited possibilities, opportunities and adventure.

The flip side is that you step into a world of unlimited choices, tools, best practices, tutorials etc.

Since even for a veteran programmer, this is a little overwhelming, I'd like to take the opportunity to ask you guys for advice.

I know that 'there is no best' and that everything 'depends on what you want to achieve'. So how about just say the pro's and cons or when to use and when not to use. Or why you prefer one over another. Everything is allowed! :D

Maybe it will help others too. Start a nice, professional discussion:)

These are the parts I'd like advice about:

- frontend: what frameworks, libraries
- backend: language, framework, good practice
- server: OS, proxy (nginx, Apache, passenger), extra tips (like don't use root user)
- extras: git, GitHub, docker, anything

Thanks in advance everyone willing to help!:)

Also, if you only know frontend or backend. No worries, just tell me about your specialism!

"PHP does not need good practices, because the use of PHP it is already a good practice". This is one of the loading messages in the Slack where I work.

PS: We do not use PHP there.

One of the companies that rejected me sent me feedback which I took gracefully coz u sexy cunts told me it wasn't the end of the world when I ranted about it here. Well now they are offering me another interview and I am hella nervous coz I don't want to fuck it. Good thing is the feedback they gave me were actually all shit I know and use daily in my work, I am just bad at explaining plsu was nervous at the last interview. Now I am worried coz it's on monday and I have not had time to practice explaining the lang well coz work has been crazy (literally on a 10 min break now since 9am..almost 10hrs working) which is weird right coz last year I actually used to teach.

1 year and a half ago, I quit the job where I spent almost 6 years; My first job after that was as a freelancer for certain company here in colombia, but after sometime I learned that freelancing for local companies is not well payed at all, so I decided to try to work with toptal(a pre-vetted freelancer platform)

So the process included a first interview with a HR person, it was a british lady that mopped the floor with me(she wasn't rude at all but I felt horrible) 'cuz I couldn't speak english good enough, and then I was rejected... Some time down the line I created a rant for anyone that were willing to speak sometime to practice english conversations. @jesustricks and @orhun answered and in fact I got to speak with them.

@amyshackles spoke with me too, I reached her out over linkedin 😊

Just wanted to say thank you, finally I got a job offer with a nearshore company, you helped me a lot there, speaking with you people gave confidence and more knowledge. Again thank you, love you guys.

PS: you don't have to love me back

When the lead developer knows less about good practice than the apprentice..

It's my end of probation and I just got demoted, from originally "Senior dev" to "dev".

My manager found it a bit difficult to tell me but funny enough, I am completely fine with it apart from the little dent on my pay check. Let me talk about the bad first: money. I believe I have been on the lower end of the market pay range anyways so this step-back gives me about 5% cut, which is acceptable and fair enough.

And the good? Quite a bit. When I got this job offer 6 months ago, it was when everything literally went to shit. I was upset with a somehow not so smart but stubborn tech lead and I desperately wanted to quit. Then I got the offer, which even after 2 interviews I still didn't recall it was a job ads for "technical lead". The manager thought I was not there yet but wanted to keep me as a senior dev. Then, this pandemic almost took away this job. My manager brought my case to the CEO and convinced him to keep me, by saying a lot of good things about me (which I think might not be true for the tech side...)

Throughout the whole 6 months I have been working remotely from home. WFH is not new to me, just this time it's very challenging as I was starting a new job. I have been struggling to keep my pace. All people in the team are nice. However if I don't reach out, no one would notice I need help. And with zero knowledge for this job, I got stuck with "I don't know what I don't know". This ranges from company culture, practice, new tech.. everything. So, that's how this 6 months feels long, but also short.

In our review meeting I think my manager finally realise this. Otherwise he would have gone for the "terminate employment" option. Taking away the "senior" title also takes away the expectation of "I should know XYZ", which I don't. I told him I am kinda happy with it because this sets me up for a more comfortable position to catch my breathe. He told me he noticed my improvement along the way. I told him yes I have been putting in efforts but just given the situation it's not as quick as anyone would expect. We're on the same page now.

So compared to my previous job, I got paid less. But in return, I get many more opportunities to expose myself to new tech. I get a good team who are respectful and open-minded. This is exactly what I was looking for and the drive for me to quit my previous job.

Not to mention I got a reality check. This is also an indicator for me starting to become an imposter, which is the thing I despise most in the industry. I don't want people to value me for how many years I have got in my career. I want to prove myself by what I am capable of. If I'm not there, I should and will get there.

And the last thing which I'm not very keen but it's 100% worth mentioning, is that my manager said I should aim for taking the "senior" role back. He said the salary raise is waiting when I get there. But... Let me just take my time.

*Today*
Me: coding is fun , la la la, nothing can go wrong~~ ♡
*moment later*
Me: ahhhhh my back!! Why was i sitting in that terrible unergonimic position

Moral of the story , practice good seating posture and you wont get muscle knots! ;-;

How I got selected for GSoC'19:
I will describe my journey from detail i.e from the 1st year of the college. I joined my college back in 2017 (July), I was not even aware of Computer Science. What are the different languages of CS, but I had a strong intuition of doing BTech from CSE only?

So yeah I was totally unaware of the computer science stuff, but I had a strong desire to learn it and I literally don’t know why I had this desire. After getting into college, I was learning HTML, Python, and C, also I am really thankful to my friends who really helped me to learn, building logic and making stuff out of it. During the 1st month of joining the college, I got to know what is Open Source, GSoC, Github due to my helpful seniors. But I was not into Open Source during my 1st year of college as I thought it is very difficult to start. In my 1st year, I used to do competitive programming and writing scripts in Python to automate various stuff. I never thought that I would even start doing Open Source development, also in the summer vacations after the 1st year I used to practice programming on HackerRank and learnt an awesome course called Automate the Boring Stuff with Python(which I think is one of the most popular courses for Python) which really helped me to build by Python skills.

Now the 2nd year came, I was totally confused between doing Open Source development or continue with my Competitive programming. But I wanted to know about Open Source development, so I thought to start now will be a good idea. I started attending meetups of OSDC(Open Source Developers Club) which is a hub of my college, which really helped me to know more about Open Source development from my seniors. I started looking for beginner friendly projects in Python on the website Up For Grabs, it’s really helpful for the beginners. So I contributed in a few of them, and in starting it was really tough for me but yeah I continued, which really helped me to at least dive into Open Source. Now I thought to start contributing in any bigger project, which has millions of lines of code which will be really interesting. So I started looking for the project, as I was into web development those days so I thought to find a project which matches my domain. So yeah I finally landed on Oppia:
Oppia

I started contributing into Oppia in November, so yeah in starting it was really difficult for me to solve any issue (as I wasn’t aware of the codebase which was really big), but yeah mentors at Oppia are really helpful, they guided me which really helped me to start my journey with Oppia. By starting of January I was able to resolve around 3–4 issues, which helped me to become the collaborator at Oppia, afterward I really liked contributing to it and I was able to resolve around 9–10 issues by the end of February, which landed me to become a Team Member at Oppia which was really a confidence boost and indication for me that I am in the right direction.

Also in February, the GSoC organizations list was out, and yeah Oppia was also participating in it. The project ideas of Oppia were really interesting, I became even confused to pick anyone because there were 4–5 ideas which seemed interesting to me. After 1–2 days of thought process I decided to go for one of them, i.e “Asking students why they picked a particular answer”, a full stack project.

I started making proposals on it, from the first week of March. I used to get my proposal reviewed frequently from the mentors, which really helped me to build a good and strong proposal.

I must say a well-defined proposal is the most important key for getting selected in GSoC, also you must have done some contributions to the organization earlier which I think really maximize your chances of selection in GSoC.

So after my proposal was made, I submitted it on the GSoC website.
Result Day:

It was the result day, by the way, I had the confidence of being selected, but yeah I was a little bit nervous. All my friends were asking when is your result coming, I told them it will come at 12.30AM (IST). Finally, the time came when I refreshed the GSoC website, Voila the results were out. I opened the Oppia organization page, and yeah my name was there. That was the day I was really happy and satisfied, I was thinking like I have achieved something in my life. It was a moment of pleasure for me, I called my parents and told them my result, they were really happy for me.

I say cracking GSoC is worth it, the preparation you do, the contributions you do, the making of the proposal is really worth.

I got so many messages from my juniors, friends, and seniors, they congratulated me. After that when I uploaded my result of Facebook and LinkedIn, there were tons of comments and likes on the post. So yeah that’s my journey.

By the way, I am writing this post after really late, sorry for it. I must have done it earlier, but due to milestone 1 of GSoC, I was busy.

I'd never do anything "risky" in a prod environment if I considered it so at the time, but in retrospect there's *lots* of things considered risky now (both from a security and good practice viewpoint) that were standard practice not long ago:

- Not using any form of version control
- No tests (including no unit tests)
- Not considering XSS vulnerabilities
- Completely ignoring CSRF vulnerabilities
- Storing passwords as unsalted MD5 hashes (heck that was considered very *secure* in the days of plaintext password storage.)

...etc. I'm guilty of all of those previously. I daresay in the future there will be yet more things that may be standard practice now, but become taboos we look back on with similar disdain.

!rant
So, Rust again.
When I learned that Rust doesn’t support inheritance, only traits (interfaces), I was shocked at first.

Then I tried to remember when the last time was that I have used inheritance in the code that I write (not the code that I use).

And I could remember an instance some months ago. But I also remember that I was very unsatisfied with that design and refactored it to use composition instead. And it was much better.

One of Rust’s properties is that many good practices in other programming languages are enforced rules in Rust.
And in case of inheritance, it seems like Rust decided that composition over inheritance is such a good practice that it should be a rule.

I’m not 100% convinced that there never will be cases where inheritance is better. But I still like this radical idea of forcing the devs to do it "the right way" in the majority of (if not all) cases.

I think many devs will disagree.
What do you think?

Mentors, take note. This is a best practice over here.

I've spent two days digging through obscure documentation trying to accomplish one of those tasks that is simple in word and complex in deed. Namely, I wanted to concatenate (not delete) near-duplicate values in Pandas before rendering the data into a graph. Two days beating my head against the wall.

One of my mentors (I'm an intern) heard about the issue, wrote in the proper line (a very specifically and archaically formatted command), and pushed it to repo without even asking for thanks. Works like a charm and he saved my rear end. What a guy.

Please, mentors, don't leave your interns hanging on problems where the only solution is shrouded in dubious documentation and magic syntax. Especially when there's a deadline involved. Let them struggle on logic flow and writing good code.

Be like this guy. You'll build the importance of teamwork and your intern will think you're a wizard.

Since we're limiting this to things on my desk I can't do any more deep cuts out of my calculator collection, but this one is still somewhat interesting.

The HP 32S was my friend throughout university, it replaced the 15c I used before which does not live on my desk. The notable thing about the 32s is the fact it's an RPN calculator. RPN calculators are the best way to have friends never ask to borrow your calculator. The exchange will start by them asking to use it, you saying sure, and them handing it back a few minutes later without saying a word.

There's two kinds of people in this world. People who go "wtf" in an interview when asked to create a calculator program using a stack, and people who were oddballs and for whatever reason used reverse polish notation devices.

For those not familiar, rather than entering values into the calculator in "10+10" fashion, you instead provide it a compositional set of values until an operation is provided (10,10,+) at which point it executes. The why is, this type of operation allows the calculator to more naturally process operations, and eliminates the need for parenthesis which makes the operations less error prone in practice and easier to track.

The 32s had a 4 year run before being replaced by the 32SII. In the same way using a Curta will give you a significant understanding of how radix computations and floating points work. Using an HP 32s (or any of its predecessors) will do the same for algebraic functions, because you had to program them yourself using a basic label address system that also had subroutine support.

Kids who grew up with graphing calculators don't know how good you had it 😋

Scrum CSM course: it's good to accept that we can't be perfect.

Also CSM course (1): if it's not followed perfectly it's not scrum

Also CSM course (2): scrum won't work in your team unless the whole organization adopts it

CSM course provider after cert: $1k CSM cert isn't enough to practice Scrum responsibly

Inspired by @NoMad. My philosophy is that technology is a means to and ends. We’re a tool oriented species. As it relates to software and hardware, they should be your means to achieve your ends without you needing to think. Think of riding a bicycle or driving a car. You aren’t particularly conscious of them - you just adjust input based on heuristics and reflex - while your doing the activity.

For a long time Software has been horrendously bad at this. There is almost always some setup involved; you need to front-load a plan to get to your ends. Funny enough we’re in the good days now. In the early days of GUI you did have to switch modes to achieve different things until input peripherals got better.

I’ve been using windows from 95 and to this day, though it’s gotten better it’s not trivial to setup an all in one printer and scan a document - just yesterday I had to walk my mother through it and she’s somewhat proficient. Also when things break it’s usually nightmare to fix, which is why fresh installing it periodically is s meme to this day. MS still goes to great lengths with their UI so that most people can still get most of their daily stuff done without a manual.

I started Linux in University when I was offered an intro course on the shell. I’ve been using it professionally ever since. While it’s good at making you feel powerful, it requires intricate knowledge to achieve most things. Things almost never go smoothly no matter how much practice you have, especially if you need to compile tools from source. It also has very little in the ways of safe guards to prevent you from hurting yourself. Sure you might be able to fix it if you press harder but it’s less stress to just fresh install. There is also nothing, NOTHING more frustrating than following documentation to the T and it just doesn’t work! It is my day job to help companies with exactly this. Can’t really give an honest impression of the GUI ux as the distros have varying schools of thoughts with their desktop environments. Even The popular one Ubuntu did weird things for a while. In my humble opinion, *nix is better at powering the internet than being a home computer your grandma can use.

Now after being in the thick of things, priorities change and you really just want to get things done. In 2015 I made the choice to go Mac. It has been one of my more interesting experiences. Honestly, I wish more distros would adopt its philosophy. Elementary only adopted the dock. It’s just so intuitive. How do you install an application? You tap the installer, a box will pop up then you drag the icon to the application folder (in the same box) boom you are done. No setup wizards. How to uninstall? Drag icon from app folder to trash can. Boom done. How to open your app? Tap launch pad and you see all your apps alphabetically just click the one you want. You can keep your frequent ones on the dock. Settings is just another app in launchpad and everything is well labeled. You can even use your printers scanner without digging through menus. You might have issues with finder if your used to windows though and the approach to maximizing and minimizing windows will also get you for a while.

When my Galaxy 4 died I gave iPhone a chance with the SE. I can tell you that for most use cases, there is no discernible difference between iOS and modern android outside of a few fringe features. What struck me though was the power of an ecosystem. My Mac and iPhone just work well together. If they are on the same network they just sync in the background - you need to opt in. My internet went down, my iMac saw that my iPhone had 4g and gave me the option to connect. One click your up. Similar process with s droid would be multi step. You have airdrop which just allows you to send files to another Apple device near you with a tap without you even caring what mechanism it’s using. After google bricked my onHub router I opted to get Apples airport series. They are mostly interchangeable and your Mac and iOS device have a native way to configure it without you needing to mess with connecting to it yourself and blah. Setup WiFi on one device, all your other Apple devices have it. Lots of other cool stuff happen as you add more Apple devices. My wife now as a MacBook, an IPad s d the IPhone 8. She’s been windows android her life but the transition has been sublime. With family sharing any software purchase works for all of us, and not just apples stuff like iCloud and music, everything.

Hate Apple all you want but they get the core tenet that technology should just work without you thinking. That’s why they are the most valued company in the world

"Ha you commented your code that nobody is going to read! That's funny dude good humor!"

If good coding practice is funny then I'm in good standing.

*Pro tip:* add comments in your code stating what you're gonna write next! This helps the reader to know what to expect!

[filename EventsTable.js]

Ok now I'm gonna tell you about my "Databases 2" exam. This is gonna be long.

I'd like to know if DB designers actually have this workflow. I'm gonna "challenge" the reader, but I'm not playing smartass. The mistakes I point out here are MY mistakes.

So, in my uni there's this course, "Databases 2" ("Databases 1" is relational algebra and theoretical stuff), which consist in one exercise: design a SQL database.

We get the description of a system. Almost a two pages pdf. Of course it could be anything. Here I'm going to pretend the project is a YouTube clone (it's one of the practice exercises).

We start designing a ER diagram that describes the system. It must be fucking accurate: e.g. if we describe a "view" as a relationship between the entities User and Video, it MUST have at least another attribute, e.g. the datetime, even if the description doesn't say it. The official reason?

"The ER relationship describes a set of couples. You can not have two elements equal, thus if you don't put any attribute, it means that any user could watch a video only once. So you must put at least something else."

Do you get my point? In this phase we're not even talking about a "database", this is an analysis phase.

Then we describe the type dictionary. So far so good, we just have to specify the type of any attribute.

And now... Constraints.
Oh my god the constraints. We have to describe every fucking constraint of our system. In FIRST ORDER LOGIC. Every entity is a set, and Entity(e) means that an element e belongs to the set Entity. "A user must leave a feedback after he saw a video" becomes like

For all u,v,dv,df,f ( User(u) and Video(v) and View(u, v, dv) and feedback(u, v, f) ) ---> dv < df

provided that dv and df are the datetimes of the view and the feedback creation (it is clear in the exercise, here seems kinda cryptic)

Of course only some of the constraints are explicitly described. This one, for example, was not in the text. If you fail to mention any "hidden" constraint, you lose a lot of points. Same thing if you not describe it correctly.

Now it's time for use cases.
You start with the usual stickman diagram. So far so good.
Then you have to describe their main functions.

In first order logic. Yes.

So, if you got the point, you may think that the following is correct to get "the average amount of feedback values on a single video" (1 to 5, like the old YT).
(let's say that feedback is a relationship with attribute between User and Video

getAv(Video v): int
Let be F = { va | feedback(v, u, va) } for any User u
Let av = (sum forall f in F) / | F |
return av

But nope, there's an error here. Can you spot it (I didn't)?

F is a set. Sets do not have duplicates! So, the F set will lose some feedback values! I can not define that as a simple set!

It has to be a set of couples, like (v, u), where v is the value and u the user; this way we can have duplicate feedback values in our set.

This concludes the analysis phase. Now, the design.

Well we just refactor everything we have done until now. Is-a relations become relationships, many-to-many relationships get an "association entity" between them, nothing new.
We write down on paper every SQL statement to build any table, entity or not. We write down every possible primary key or foreign key. The constraint that are not natively satisfied by SQL and/or foreign keys become triggers, and so on.

This exam is considered the true nightmare at our department. I just love it.

Now my question is, do actually DB designers follow this workflow? Or is this just a bloody hard training in Pai Mei style?

My lessons both come from my current side project (I will share it with you in a week or two, the website isn't finished yet):
1. Every project comes to the point where it hurts to continue. Keep pushing, the result is worth it.
2. You aren't as good as you thought you were when you started, but you'll be better than you ever were when you finish.
3. Sometimes, there's more points to a list than you'd expect.
4. One hour per day is easier than five hours a week.

How?
Well. I started out my project knowing some C#, but Jack shit about unity. I know most of what I might build will end up being shit I'm gonna regret, refactor and recycle later. But I don't give a fuck. Doing it is better than planning it.

It sometimes hurts to get rid of a carefully planned algorithm that took hours to build because it fails in practice. But it's the right thing to do.

Never plan too much. If I'd have planned this project out, I wouldn't even have started with what I'm good at: write code, break shit and experiment.

It's easier to progress slowly but steady. Look at some awesome games that have been worked on for ages while the public had their say (RimWorld, Project Zomboid, Dwarf Fortress...) as opposed to those that are developed behind closed doors and rushed to the market before Christmas or some other major event (Mafia 3, Fallout 76, Fallout 4 VR...). Progress slowly, deploy early, push often. And the one hour per day approach is a good way to do this.

VIM! ViM! vim! Vi Improved! Emacs (Wait ignore that one). What’s this mysterious VIM? Some believe mastering this beast will provide them with untold mastery over the forces of command line editing. Others would just like to know, how you exit the bloody thing. But in essence VIM is essentially a command line text editor at heart and it’s learning curve is so high it’s a circle.

There’s a lot of posts on the inter-webs detailing how to use that cruel mistress that is VIM. But rather then focus on how to be super productive in VIM (because honestly I’ve still not got a clue). This focus on my personal journey, my numerous attempts to use VIM in my day to day work. To eventually being able to call myself a novice.

My VIM journey started in 2010 around the same time I was transiting some of my hobby projects from SVN to GIT. It was around that time, that I attempted to run “git commit” in order to commit some files into one of my repositories.

Notice I didn’t specify the “-m” flag to provide a message. So what happened next. A wild command line editor opened in order for me to specify my message, foolish me assumed this command editor was just like similar editors such as Nano. So much CTRL + C’ing CTRL + Z’ing, CTRL + X’ing and a good measure of Google, I was finally able to exit the thing. Yeah…exit it. At this moment the measure of the complexity of this thing should be kicking in already, but it’s unfair to judge it based on today’s standards of user friendly-ness. It was born in a much simpler time. Before even the mouse graced the realms of the personal computing world.

But anyhow I’ll cut to the chase, for all of you who skipped most of the post to get to this point, it’s “:q!”. That’s the keyboard command to quit…well kinda this will quit the program. But…You know what just go here: The Manual. In-fact that’s probably not going to help either, I recommend reading on :p

My curiosity was peaked. So I went off in search of a way to understand this: VIM thing. It seemed to be pretty awesome, looking at some video’s on YouTube, I could do pretty much what Sublime text could but from the terminal. Imagine ssh’ing into a server and being able to make code edits, with full autocomplete et al. That was the dream, the practice…was something different. So I decided to make the commitment and use VIM for editing one of my existing projects.

So fired the program up and watched the world burn behind me. Ahhh…why can’t I type anything, no matter what I typed nothing seemed to appear on screen. Surely I must be missing something right? Right! After firing up the old Google machine, again it would appear there is this concept known as modes. When VIm starts up it defaults to a mode called “Normal” mode, hitting keys in this mode executes commands. But “Insert” entered by hitting the “i” key allows one to insert text.

Finally I thought I think I understand how this VIM thing works, I can just use “insert” mode to insert text and the arrow keys to move around. Then when I want to execute a command, I just press “Esc” and the command such as the one for saving the file. So there I was happily editing my code using “Insert” mode and the arrow keys, but little did I know that my happiness would be short lived, the arrow keys were soon to be a thorn in my VIM journey.

Join me for part two of this rant in which we learn the untold truth about arrow keys, touch typing and vimrc created from scratch. Until next time..

:q!

I love linters and all. They’re great for maintaining good practice. But sometimes they’re a little too aggressive, and when the rules are being imported from elsewhere, I am not sure how to temporarily disable them.

This is especially frustrating when the linter decides it will break your shit instantly, so I found it easier to just call a method and remove it when the functionality is built.

Right now there’s at least 4 “this.stopBitchingAbout([all, the, things])” in my code.

// My First Rant

We have a developer that almost everyone adjust to what he want to avoid talking or working with him.

I have office mates that doesn't want to give tasks to him just to avoid working with him.

Even our devOps guy just did what he want so he would stop talking.

One bad experience of our devOps guy with him is that his infrastructure or other AWS stuff was blame why his APIs is not working. It turns our that his url for the database has FUCKING SPACES.

Not sure if a good practice but he wants the base url of our Endpoint to be set in environment variables instead of having DEV/PROD/TESTING and base the endpoint from there.

He said that he was given permission to study a language but he doesn't even ask for permission.

We had 1 Android app to be developed for charity org for data collection for ground water level increase competition among villages.

Initial scope was very small & feasible. Around 10 forms with 3-4 fields in each to be developed in 2 months (1 for dev, 1 for testing). There was a prod version which had similar forms with no validations etc.

We had received prod source, which was total junk. No KT was given.

In existing source, spelling mistakes were there in the era of spell/grammar checking tools.

There were rural names of classes, variables in regional language in English letters & that regional language is somewhat known to some developers but even they don't know those rural names' meanings. This costed us at great length in visualizing data flow between entities. Even Google translate wasn't reliable for this language due to low Internet penetration in that language region.

OOP wasn't followed, so at 10 places exact same code exists. If error or bug needed to be fixed it had to be fixed at all those 10 places.

No foreign key relationships was there in database while actually there were logical relations among different entites.

No created, updated timestamps in records at app side to have audit trail.

Small part of that existing source was quite good with Fragments, MVP etc. while other part was ancient Activities with business logic.

We have to support Android 4.0 to 9.0 of many screen sizes & resolutions without any target devices issued to us by the client.

Then Corona lockdown happened & during that suddenly client side professionals became over efficient.

Client started adding requirements like very complex validation which has inter-entity dependencies. Then they started filing bugs from prod version on us.

Let's come to the developers' expertise,
2 developers with 8+ years of experience & they're not knowing how to resolve conflicts in git merge which were created by them only due to not following git best practice for coding like only appending new implementation in existing classes for easy auto merge etc.

They are thinking like handling click events is called development.

They don't want to think about OOP, well structured code. They don't want to re-use code mostly & when they copy paste, they think it's called re-use.

They wanted to follow old school Java development in memory scarce Android app life cycle in end user phone. They don't understand memory leaks, even though it's pin pointed by memory leak detection tools (Leak canary etc.).

Now 3.5 months are over, that competition was called off for this year due to Corona & development is still ongoing.

We are nowhere close to completion even for initial internal QA round.

On top of this, nothing is billable so it's like financial suicide.

Remember whatever said here is only 10% of what is faced.

- An Engineering lead in a half billion dollar company.

Todays story: conversation between me and my brain about a app that i have planned for a long while.

The application is just a huge, specyfic json editor/manager for a game that i like. The game uses json files to determine unit charactetistics. So in order to make modding easier i want to make a tool for that that is fancier and easier to use than a notepad.

Brain> Lets make a app that allows you to mod the game easier!
Me> Good idea. How would you want to make it?
Brain> Lets use C# cause you main that lang currently and you have experience with json parser lib.
Me> That is true. So what do you wanna implement first?
Brain> Oh. I have thought about it before! I want to implement: (10 000 features) and maybe few more later!
Me> It sounds like a infinity project, shouldnt you implement like 1 or 2 features at first and then jump to other ones?
Brain> Yes... but i dont wanna refactor those features latter so let just implement them all at once!
Me> Dammit brain! Let just implement just one feature now! Like a simple json editor. You can use inhieritance to reuse the code later.
Brain> Ok...
* Starts with that one feature but one day later starts coding 6 more *
* Cant publish the app yet, the code looks like shit, gui is unfinished because brain wanted only to test those 6 unfinished features without propely implementing them *
Me> Brain WTF! You said that you are going to focus on one feature at the time!
Brain> I got carried a bit...
Me> ...
Me> Ok. I understand. Let just refactor the code and clean the project out of those unfinished features.
Brain> No. I have a depression now...
Me> FUCK.

* 2 month passes by without any progress on ANY of my projects*

current day

Brain> I still have depression...
Me> Ok i dont care about that anymore! Tell me something that i dont know!
Brain> Oh I have good news as well!
Me> ???
Brain> What about the home server that is going to store all mods made by the users so they can share it? It would be a good practice with networking!
Me> * Gives up *

As a Dev in college working for teams in college, I don't really have a need to use git, since most of 'self proclaimed prestigious programmer child prodigies' I work with have no idea what it is; but I use it anyways as good programming practice and ease of backups.

So I tried using a GUI client after months of the git bash, and even though I looked up a few tutorials (was embarrassed the whole fucking time). I ended up adding, committing and pushing via bash.

Can anyone explain me how is the GUI client helpful in large projects and stuff?

To all the developers with a permanent job:

Do you guys still reference the web when working on a project or you know everything and code everything perfectly w/o help?

Just wanted to know if I need more practice with my skills or am I good to go.

It is the time for the proper long personal rant.

Im a fresh student, i started few months ago and the life is going as predicted: badly or even worse...
Before the university i had similar problems but i had them under control (i was able to cope with them and with some dose of "luck" i graduated from high school and managed to get into uni). I thought by leaving the town and starting over i would change myself and give myself a boost to keep going. But things turned out as expected. Currently i waste time everyday playing pc games or if im too stressed to play, i watch yt videos. Few years ago i thought i was addicted, im not. It might be a effect of something greater. I have plans, for countess inventions, projects, personal, for university and others and ALL of them are frozen, stopped, non existant. No motivation. I had few moments when i was motivated but it was short, hours or only minutes. Long term goals dont give me any motivation. They give as much short lived joy, happines as goals in games and other things... (no substance abuse problems, dont worry). I just dont see point of my projects anymore. Im sure that my projects are the only thing that will give me experience and teach me something but... i passed the magic barrier of univercity, all my projects are becoming less and less impressive... TV and other sources show people, briliant people, students, even children that were more succesful than me

if they are better than me why do i even bother? companies care more for them, especialy the prestigious ones, they have all the fame, money, funding, help, gear without question!
of course they hardworked for ther positions, they could had better beggining or worse but only hard work matters right?

As i said. None of my work matters, i worked hard for my whole life, studing, crafting, understanding: programming, multiple launguages, enviorements, proper and most effcient algorithms, electronic circuits, mechanical contraptions. I have knowlege about nearly every machine and i would be able to create nearly everything with just access to those tools and few days worth of practice. (im sort of omnibus, know everything) But because had lived in a small town i didnt have any chances of getting the right equpment. All of my electronical projects are crap. Mechanical projects are made out of scrap. Even when i was in high school, nobody was impressed or if they were they couldnt help me.
Now im at university. My projects are stagnant, mostly because of my mental problems. Even my lifestyle took a big hit. I neglect a lot of things i shouldnt. Of course greg, you should go out with friends! You cant dedicate 100% of your life to science!
I fucking tried. All of them are busy or there are other things that prevent that... So no friends for me. I even tried doing something togheter! Nope, same reasons or in most cases they dont even do anything...
Science clubs? Mostly formal, nobody has time, tools are limited unless you designed you thing before... (i want to learn!, i dont have time to design!), and in addition to that i have to make a recrutment project... => lack of motivation to do shit.

The biggest obstacle is money. Parts require money, you can make your parts but tools are money too. I have enough to live in decent apartment and cook decently as well but not enough to buy shit for projects. (some of them require a lot or knowlege... and nobody is willing to give me the second thing). Ok i found a decent job oppurtunity. C# corporation, very nice location, perfect for me because i have a lot of time, not only i can practice but i can earn for stuff. I have a CV or resume just waiting for my friend to give me the email (long story, we have been to that corp because they had open days and only he has the email to the guy, just a easier way)
But there are issiues with it as well so it is not that easy.

If nobody have noticed im dedicated to the science. Basicly 100% scientist that want to make a world a better place.

I messaged a uni specialist so i hope he will be able to help me.
For long time i have thought that i was normal, parent were neglecting my mental health and i had some situations that didnt have good infuence on me as well. I might have some issiues with my brain as well, 96% of aspargers symptoms match, with other links included. I dont want to say i have it but it is a exciuse for a test. In addition to that i cant CANT stop thinking, i even tried not thinking for few minutes, nope i had to think about something everytime. On top of that my biological timer is flipped. I go to sleep at 5 am and wake up at 5pm (when i dont have lectures).
I prefer working at night, at that time my brain at least works normaly but i dont want to disrupt roommates...
And at the day my brain starts the usual, depression, lack of motivation, other bullshit thing.

I might add something later, that is all for now.

Yay! I still don't get how I did this lol
Time to practice some more! (If you've got any good tutorials or projects let me know! I need the practice lol)

Why do most apps have a password reset page that redirects to a mobile site ?

Why not give them a code they can enter into the app which would then show a password reset page within the app or a link which opens the page within the app.

Isn't it good practice to keep the user within the app?

Isn't it better to serve a token than serve an entire html webpage for the server.

I've been thinking about this but 90% people follow the website pattern and Idk why. Am I missing something ?

Please fill me in on it. (Even devrant uses the same pattern)

!Rant; Week40
Honestly, before starting my post secondary education in Computer science I had wanted to become an architect.
Since I was maybe.... 10 years old all the way till the semester before graduating from highschool I was sold on becoming an architect.
I love design; Interior design, art, unique use of colors, architecture. I love systems that looked good and worked as well as they appeared.
Over the winter break of my grade 12 year a friend said to me, "Why don't you become a UI/UX developer? You love technology, software and design, why not go into a career where you practice on all three?".
I was surprised to hear that. It had honestly never really occurred to me since I had always told myself I would become an architect.
I guess that leaves me to where I am now. Still a student, but loving my time learning the details behind software development. I do not regret choosing Development over becoming an Architect.

Today was my last piano lesson with my jazzy teacher. I'll miss him. He teached me a lot and I nearly always looked forward to piano lessons.

I brought wine (Mosel life) and 5 songs - 3 jazz classics (It don't mean a Thing, Take Five and Fly me to the Moon), his favorite from the Daft Punk album I borrowed him and one of his own songs (surprise) and we improvised on these songs. I was a little nervous.. or sad but I didn't play as good as yesterday eve. He asked me why I never did that before. He'd love to practice improvising with me because I suck at reading sheet music (I said that and I'm a lazy learner with sheets).

R.I.P. Monday afternoon.

What do you tell interviewers as a "Senior developer" when they ask you what you do at your current job.

I've been with my current for almost 8 years, since graduating... Few different time but not very well managed (semi/barely agile). Hasn't really provided any skill growth opportunities. Mostly fixing production issues, chasing other teams.

The projects I've worked on are in many different languages either enhancements or some standalone stuff. But nothing that's huge and I don't think I've learned anything from them. I usually apply what I learn and practice outside of work to work.

So to me I can probably list a whole lot of projects but to me their not that amazing, I didn't learn anything from them.

Also about those algorithm questions. I've never used any of this stuff actually at work. Concepts yes but not how do you implement ... And honestly I've never once had a situation that required algorithmic thinking other than maybe writing recursive functions in rare occasions...

But to me I've never once done anything harder or new which I haven't already done on my own....

Sorry for the disorderly rambling this turned into... which is sorta a problem too.

Everytime I think about interviews, I want to give rants about we technical questions are BS, how I probably have enough real experience to tackle any problem and come up with a good plan/solution (in a realistic timeframe, not 20 minutes from design to implementation)

Today I got a reply to a PR comment from a coworker literally stating that "it's not a good practice to add unit tests to hotfixes".

I can't, just can't. Left me speechless. Wonder where this guy gets his "good practices" from.

Legit my only answer to fixing shit code for a nursing app at work is.....

Writing more shit code. Man the dude that developed this before had 0 clue what he was doing.....and because shit grew out of control there is shitcode everywhere.

I like writing shit code though. It is good practice.

Writing shit code without knowing is one thing. You really do reach expert level when you write shit code WHILE being fully aware of it.

Batteries and power.
Hey guys. I have a question I have to rectify so I can think without doubts.
Let's say I have a sistem with solar power, a 1 lipo battery, one lipo module and arduino + shields and I want to power only by the 🔋.
My question is: is it good practice to charge while discharging at the same time with a lipo module? Won't it damage the batery and incrise the chance of fire? Thank you

I'm learning python3 right now, advises or exercises to practice? I want to learn machine learning. I'm developng on elixir for now. But I hear good stuff about python.

During one of our 'pop-up' meetings last week.

Ralph: "The test code the developers are checking in is a mess. They don't know what they are doing."

ex.
var foo = SomeLibrary.GetFoo();
Assert.IsNotNull(foo);

Fred: "Ha ha..someone should talk to HR about our hiring practices. These people are literally driving the company backwards."
Me: "I think unit testing is complete waste of time."
- You could almost see the truck hit the wall and splatter watermelon everwhere..took Ralph and Fred a couple of seconds to respond
Fred: "Uh..unit testing is industry best practice. There is scientific evidence that prove testing reduces bugs and increases code quality"
Ralph: "Over 90% of our deployments are rolled back because of bugs. Unit testing will eliminate that."
Me: "Sorry, I disagree."
- Stepping on kittens wouldn't have gotten a worse look from Fred and Ralph
Fred: 'Pretty sure if you ask any professional developer, they'll tell you unit testing and code coverage reduces bugs.'
Me: "I'm not asking anyone else, I'm asking you. Find one failed deployment, just one, over the past 6 months that unit testing or code coverage would have prevented."
- good 3 seconds of awkward silence.
Ralph: "Well, those rollbacks are all mostly due to server mis-configurations. That's not a fair comparison."
Me: "I'm using your words. Unit tests reduces bugs and lack of good tests is the direct reason why we have so many failed deployments"
Boss: "Yea, Ralph...you and Fred kinda said that."
Fred: "No...we need to write good tests. Not this mess."
Me: "Like I said, show me one test you've written that would have prevented a rollback. Just one."
Ralph: "So, what? We do nothing?"
Me: "No, we have to stop worshiping this made up 80% code coverage idol. If not, developers are going to keep writing useless test code just to meet some percent. If we wrote device drivers or frameworks for other developers maybe, but we write CRUD apps. We execute a stored procedure or call a service. This 80% rule doesn't fit for code we write."
Fred: "If the developers took their head out of their ass.."
Me: "Hey!..uh..no, they are doing exactly what they are being told. Meet the 80% requirement, even if doesn't make sense."
Ralph: "Nobody told them to write *that* code."
Boss: "My gosh, what have you and Fred been complaining about for the past hour?"
- Ralph looks at his monitor and brilliantly changes the subject
Ralph: "Oh my f-king god...Trump said something stupid again ..."

At that point I put my headphones on went back to what I was doing. I'm pretty sure Fred and Ralph spent the rest of the day messaging back-n-forth, making fun of me or some random code I wrote 3 years ago (lots of typing and giggling). How can highly educated grown men (one has a masters in CS) get so petty and insecure?

Made my first open source contribution today. 6 months into my degree. It was just editing a README with a proper description of the game that was created but good practice to get more familiar with the flow and usage of everything in Github.

Since roughly 1 year ago I have been making "leftoff" comments in my code, whenever a work day ended or so, with a few notes on what I was doing and what I was about to work on next.

And I recommend it, I think that's good practice. Because I forgot to do it on friday and I have no GOD DAMN CLUE what I was working on :|

I'm just frustrated. I wanted a simple, statically-typed language that doesn't get in your way and offers GC. I can't find anything "just perfect".

- Go: enforces a style on you, nono.
- Rust: ownership system. I love it, but it's too low level for what I want.
- Scala: seems to have a bunch of useless and bug-prone features.
- Java: I hate how you have to declare and catch exceptions. Good practice, yes, but the code gets bloated with try-catch statements.
- C and C++: Too low level, no GC.
- C#: maybe? idk

I want to make a back-end for an app but I want it to be easy and fast. I need something with a gentle learning curve, not keep fighting the language. I'm between Java and Rust. Java's easier to use. Rust is rust <3, but it's hard, I haven't learned it properly and I just keep fighting the fucking compiler.

Disclaimer: I hold no grudges or prejudices toward [CENSORED] company. I love the concept of the business model and the perks they pay their employees. Unfortunately, the company is very petty, and negligence is the core of the management. I got into an interview for the position, of Senior Software Engineer, and the interview wouldn't take place if wasn't for me to follow up with the person in charge countless times a day. The Vice President of Engineering was the most confused person ever encountered. Instead of asking challenging questions that plausibly could explain and portray how well I can manage a team, the methodology of working with various technology, and my problem-solving skills. They asked me questions that possibly indicated they don't even know what they need or questions that can easily get from a Google Search. I was given 40 hours to build a demo application whereby I had to send them a copy of the source code and the binary file. The person who contacted me don't even bother with what I told her that it is not a good practice to place the binary in cloud storage (Google Drive, OneDrive, etc) and I request extra time to complete the demo application. Since I got the requirement to hand them the repository of the codebase, it is common practice to place the binary in the release section in the Git Platform (Jire, Azure DevOps, Github, Gitlab, etc). Which he surprisingly doesn't know what that is. There's the API key I place locally in .env hidden from the codebase (it's not good practice to place credentials in the codebase), I got a request that not only subscript to an API is necessary but I have to place them in the codebase. I succeed to pass the source code on time with the quality of 40 hours, I told him that I could have done it better, clearer and cleaner if I was given more grace of time. (Because they are not the only company asking me to write a demo application prior to the assessment. Extra grace was I needed)

So long story short, I asked him how is it working in a [CENSORED] company during my turn to ask questions. I got told that the "environment is friendly, diverse". But with utmost curiosity, I contacted several former employees (Software Engineer) on LinkedIn, and I got told that the company has high turnover, despises diversity the nepotism is intense. Most of the favours are done based on how well you create an illusion of you working for them and being close to the upper management. I request shreds of evidence from those former employees to substantiate what they told me. Seeing the pieces of evidence of how they manage the projects, their method of communication, and how biased the upper management actually is led me to withdraw from continuing my application. Honestly, I wouldn't want to work for a company where the majority can't communicate.

Argh! (I feel like I start a fair amount of my rants with a shout of fustration)

Tl;Dr How long do we need to wait for a new version of xorg!?

I've recently discovered that Nvidia driver 435.17 (for Linux of course) supports PRIME GPU offloading, which -for the unfamiliar- is where you're able render only specific things on a laptops discreet GPU (vs. all or nothing). This makes it significantly easier (and power efficient) to use the GPU in practice.

There used to be something called bumblebee (which was actually more power efficient), but it became so slow that one could actually get better performance out of Intel's integrated GPU than that of the Nvidia GPU.

This feature is also already included in the nouveau graphics driver, but (at least to my understanding) it doesn't have very good (or none) support for Turing GPUs, so here I am.

Now, being very excited for this feature, I wanted to use it. I have Arch, so I installed the nvidia-beta drivers, and compiled xorg-server from master, because there are certain commits that are necessary to make use of this feature.

But after following the Nvidia instructions, it doesn't work. Oops I realize, xrog probably didn't pick up the Nvidia card, let's restart xorg. and boom! Xorg doesn't boot, because obviously the modesetting driver isn't meant for the Nvidia card it's meant for the Intel one, but xorg is to stupid for that...

So here I am back to using optimus-manager and the ordinary versions of Nvidia and xorg because of some crap...

If you have some (good idea) of what to do to make it work, I'm welcome to hear it.

I really hate PHP frameworks.

I also often write my own frameworks but propriety. I have two decades experience doing without frameworks, writing frameworks and using frameworks.

Virtually every PHP framework I've ever used has causes more headaches than if I had simply written the code.

Let me give you an example. I want a tinyint in my database.

> Unknown column type "tinyint" requested.

Oh, doctrine doesn't support it and wont fix. Doctrine is a library that takes a perfectly good feature rich powerful enough database system and nerfs it to the capabilities of mysql 1.0.0 for portability and because the devs don't actually have the time to create a full ORM library. Sadly it's also the defacto for certain filthy disgusting frameworks whose name I shan't speak.

So I add my own type class. Annoying but what can you do.

I have to try to use it and to do so I have to register it in two places like this (pseudo)...

Types::add(Tinyint::class);
Doctrine::add(Tinyint::class);

Seems simply enough so I run it and see...

> Type tinyint already exists.

So I assume it's doing some magic loading it based on the directory and commend out the Type::add line to see.

> Type to be overwritten tinyint does not exist.

Are you fucking kidding me?

At this point I figure out it must be running twice. It's booting twice. Do I get a stack trace by default from a CLI command? Of course not because who would ever need that?

I take a quick look at parent::boot(). HttpKernel is the standard for Cli Commands?

I notice it has state, uses a protected booted property but I'm curious why it tries to boot so many times. I assume it's user error.

After some fiddling around I get a stack trace but only one boot. How is it possible?

It's not user error, the program flow of the framework is just sub par and it just calls boot all over the place.

I use the state variable and I have to do it in a weird way...

> $booted = $this->booted;parent::boot();if (!$booted) {doStuffOnceThatDependsOnParentBootage();}

A bit awkward but not life and death. I could probably just return but believe or not the parent is doing some crap if already booted. A common ugly practice but one that works is to usually call doSomething and have something only work around the state.

The thing is, doctrine does use TINYINT for bool and it gets all super confused now running commands like updates. It keeps trying to push changes when nothing changed. I'm building my own schema differential system for another project and it doesn't have these problems out of the box. It's not clever enough to handle ambiguous reverse mappings when single types are defined and it should be possible to match the right one or heck both are fine in this case. I'd expect ambiguity to be a problem with reverse engineer, not compare schema to an exact schema.

This is numpty country. Changing TINYINT UNSIGNED to TINYINT UNSIGNED. IT can't even compare two before and after strings.

There's a few other boots I could use but who cares. The internet seems to want to use that boot function. There's also init stages missing. Believe it or not there's a shutdown and reboot for the kernel. It might not be obvious but the Type::add line wants to go not in the boot method but in the top level scope along with the class definition. The top level scope is run only once.

I think people using OOP frameworks forget that there's a scope outside of the object in PHP. It's not ideal but does the trick given the functionality is confined to static only. The register command appears to have it's own check and noop or simply overwrite if the command is issued twice making things more confusing as it was working with register type before to merely alias a type to an existing type so that it could detect it from SQL when reverse engineering.

I start to wonder if I should just use columnDefinition.

It's this. Constantly on a daily basis using these pretentious stuck up frameworks and libraries.

It's not just the palava which in this case is relatively mild compared to some of the headaches that arise. It's that if you use a framework you expect basic things out of the box like oh I don't know support for the byte/char/tinyint/int8 type and a differential command that's able to compare two strings to see if they're different.

Some people might say you're using it wrong. There is such a thing as a learning curve and this one goes down, learning all the things it can't do. It's cripplesauce.

I really really hope that no one post this,a friend texted it to me and I wanted to share it because made my day.

Idk where it comes, so feel free if know where this came from to post it:

//FUN PART HERE
# Do not refactor, it is a bad practice. YOLO

# Not understanding why or how something works is always good. YOLO

# Do not ever test your code yourself, just ask. YOLO

# No one is going to read your code, at any point don’t comment. YOLO

# Why do it the easy way when you can reinvent the wheel? Future-proofing is for pussies. YOLO

# Do not read the documentation. YOLO

# Do not waste time with gists. YOLO

# Do not write specs. YOLO also matches to YDD (YOLO DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT)

# Do not use naming conventions. YOLO

# Paying for online tutorials is always better than just searching and reading. YOLO

# You always use production as an environment. YOLO

# Don’t describe what you’re trying to do, just ask random questions on how to do it. YOLO

# Don’t indent. YOLO

# Version control systems are for wussies. YOLO

# Developing on a system similar to the deployment system is for wussies! YOLO

# I don’t always test my code, but when I do, I do it in production. YOLO

# Real men deploy with ftp. YOLO

So YOLO Driven Development isn’t your style? Okay, here are a few more hilarious IT methodologies to get on board with.

*The Pigeon Methodology*
Boss flies in, shits all over everything, then flies away.

*ADD (Asshole Driven Development)*
An old favourite, which outlines any team where the biggest jerk makes all the big decisions. Wisdom, process and logic are not the factory default.

*NDAD (No Developers Allowed in Decisions)*
Methodology Developers of all kinds are strictly forbidden when it comes to decisions regarding entire projects, from back end design to deadlines, because middle and top management know exactly what they want, how it should be done, and how long it will take.

*FDD (Fear Driven Development)*
The analysis paralysis that can slow an entire project down, with developments afraid to make mistakes, break the build, or cause bugs. The source of a developer’s anxiety could be attributed to a failure in sharing information, or by implicating that team members are replaceable.

*CYAE (Cover Your Ass Engineering)*
As Scott Berkun so eloquently put it, the driving force behind most individual efforts is making sure that when the shit hits the fan, you are not to blame.

[this post is not a joke, it's about health, ladies might want to avoid reading it as it about defecating]

i did mindfulness during shitting and i think more people shud try this.
instead of just pooping without giving any attention to it or using phone while pooping, you can use your phone for guided meditation with apps like Trip, Calm, ...
While shitting I noticed small things like the water tap, I slowly rotated it; first the water came in drops(listen to it), then in a small stream, then a turbulent flow.
If your attention drifts away, gently observe that its a thought and let it pass.
focus on what is happening right now. Feel how your anus vibrates to fart, giving a tingling sensation.
focus on how the turd comes out of the anus, the way it expands your sphincter muscles and finally drops in the crapper.

Practice gratitude. I realised how lucky I'm to shit comfortably in solidarity, many people in the world don't even have such privilege.
I feel good that I've flush mechanism in my toilet and 24x7 water supply. The shitting time can be utilised in a very positive way like this.
Look at your shit and wonder this used to be food, and be grateful to your digestive system.

Did I really go to university, have object oriented programming taught to me from scratch and embedded in me as best practice, work with OO frameworks for 3 years and become a damn good web dev just to use Drupal?

My brain: Testing is a good practice

Me testing my project:

I love working on legacy products. You just need a good shower and possibly a therapist after.

- Sensitive data sent over the internet encrypted with DES (not even 3DES). Guess it doesn't matter that the key (singular, for the last decade) is basically 0123456789ABCDEF.

- Client databases with open default port, admin/admin superuser.

- Critical applications (potential for substantial property damage, maybe loss of life) with a single point of failure and without backup.

Suggestions, to slow down a bit with sales, so we have time to rewrite this steaming pile of crap are met with the excuse: be more pragmatist, this is standard industry practice.

Some of this shit can be fixed on my own time if my conscience nags too much, but others would require significant investment of time from multiple developers, which would slow down new business.

Guess the pay is ok, so that's something...

Hey guys, need an opinion.
Please have a look at the picture and let me know if it's a good practice to code like that. The code still works and I still get the output.

This basically is me rambling all my thoughts that have been clouding my mind.

Learning other programming languages after learning the first is harder than I expected. I learned python first but that's making learning others (which I know arent similar but ) C, ES6, PHP, etc. I need to figure out what makes each one special and get a proper path instead of learning them all the same way. Which is easier for the web dev languages but fuck man I just need a good path for them and I'm good. Like learn this this this this that and that and I've got a basic understanding of the language I dont need to stress and I can casually build my knowledge from here now that I understand all this. Cause I love programming and I want to be the best I can be and just get to the level I am with python. And at some point I have to learn about basic electronics and learning how to program Arduinos with C so I can do stuff with that because I really really REALLY want to.

It doesnt stop there. I want to learn another language and no I'm not talkin bout programming anymore I mean I wanna learn Japanese and German (but japanese primarily) but it doesnt help that I'm always either in school, studying, programming, or playing games. I just cant find time to practice Hiragana&Katakana (two basic writing systems in japan) and it doesnt help that I'm a lazy procrastinating piece of shit that doesnt have or can keep a proper schedule and hell I barely can English and Its my native tongue. Ugh. Itd be better if I had a native speaker to help me tbh.

And finally I want to learn basic pixel animating I have dreamed as a kid to do some kind of animation and programming and I want to do both for games I want to program for fun but it doesnt help that I cant draw sprites or anything for shit. I cant get it and I just am fucked but I'm going to ask some people I know and a few subreddits for advice/help/resources with that

Welp that was the Bubbles Power Hour none of you probably are keen followers of mine and if I had any I'd be shocked and honored but thanks for reading anyways and any advice on anything is always appreciated!

Combatting imposter syndrome is all about being more realistic with yourself imo.

Not in the way you might think. By realistic, I mean you NEED to regularly tell yourself that you are doing your best - especially in the work or areas that can promote insecurities of “not being good enough”. Acknowledge that you are only human, that all of us are different, that all of us make mistakes, and all of us have different interests in life. That, and practice gratitude for your situation. Your interests and decisions lead your different paths, so might as well embrace, enjoy, and love your uniqueness.

That being said, I also think it’s important to do difficult things. I think @wisecrack said it the best in that “real learning feels like falling”. Like the uncertainty of the abyss causes the most anxiety. Next time you feel like you don’t belong, recognize and separate that feeling and reframe it as a symptom to your own self improvement process. Take that risk and do things that are uncomfortable in the pursuit of personal success.

I dug up my old ledger web app that I wrote when I was in my late twenties, as I realized with a tight budget toward the end of this year, I need to get a good view of future balances. The data was encrypted in gpg text files, but the site itself was unencrypted, with simple httpasswd auth. I dove into the code this week, and fixed a lot of crap that was all terrible practice, but all I knew when I wrote it in the mid-2000s. I grabbed a letsencrypt cert, and implemented cookies and session handling. I moved from the code opening and parsing a large gpg file to storing and retrieving all the data in a Redis backend, for a massive performance gain. Finally, I switched the UI from white to dark. It looks and works great, and most importantly, I have that future view that I needed.

client: i want u to build me this site and please disable javascript on it

me: thats not a very good practice but whatever

client: Remember... No Javascript...

...

i smiled because it took me 10 seconds to get the reference

successful = false;
return successful;

!rant

So this has probably been asked loads of times but I've never seen it. When working on solo projects for yourself do you still use source control like git or mercurial?

I usually don't because when I do personal projects its usually filthy and fast development to prototype quickly.

However, this current project I'm working on I am using git and I'm finding that slowing myself down just to follow good practice is actually improving my code quality and my understanding of my own project.

It was the last year of high school.

We had to submit our final CS homework, so it gets reviewed by someone from the ministry of education and grade it. (think of it as GPA or whatever that is in your country).

Now being me, I really didn’t do much during the whole year, All I did was learning more about C#, more about SQL, and learn from the OGs like thenewboston, derek banas, and of course kudvenkat. (Plus more)

The homework was a C# webform website of whatever theme you like (mostly a web store) that uses MS Access as DB and a C# web service in SOAP. (Don’t ask.)

Part 1/2:

Months have passed, and only had 2 days left to deadline, with nothing on my hand but website sketches, sample projects for ideas, and table schematics.

I went ahead and started to work on it, for 48 hours STRAIGHT.

No breaks, barely ate, family visited and I barely noticed, I was just disconnected from reality.

48 hours passed and finished the project, I was quite satisfied with my it, I followed the right standards from encrypting passwords to verifying emails to implementing SQL queries without the risk of SQL injection, while everyone else followed foot as the teacher taught with plain text passwords and… do I need to continue? You know what I mean here.

Anyway, I went ahead and was like, Ok, lets do one last test run, And proceeded into deleting an Item from my webstore (it was something similar to shopify).

I refreshed. Nothing. Blank page. Just nothing. Nothing is working, at all.

Went ahead to debug almost everywhere, nothing, I’ve gone mad, like REALLY mad and almost lose it, then an hour later of failed debugging attempts I decided to rewrite the whole project from scratch from rebuilding the db, to rewriting the client/backend code and ui, and whatever works just go with it.

Then I noticed a loop block that was going infinite.

NEVER WAIT FOR A DATABASE TO HAVE MINIMUM NUMBER OF ROWS, ALWAYS ASSUME THAT IT HAS NO VALUES. (and if your CPU is 100%, its an infinite loop, a hard lesson learned)

The issue was that I requested 4 or more items from a table, and if it was less it would just loop.

So I went ahead, fixed that and went to sleep.

Part 2/2:

The day has come, the guy from the ministry came in and started reviewing each one of the students homeworks, and of course, some of the projects crashed last minute and straight up stopped working, it's like watching people burning alive.

My turn was up, he came and sat next to me and was like:

Him: Alright make me an account with an email of asd@123.com with a password 123456

Me: … that won't work, got a real email?

Him: What do you mean?

Me: I implemented an email verification system.

Him: … ok … just show me the website.

Me: Alright as you can see here first of all I used mailgun service on a .tk domain in order to send verification emails you know like every single website does, encrypted passwords etc… As you can see this website allows you to sign up as a customer or as a merc…

Him: Good job.

He stood up and moved on.

YOU MOTHERFUCKER.

I WENT THROUGH HELL IN THE PAST 48 HOURS.

AND YOU JUST SAT THERE FOR A MINUTE AND GAVE UP ON REVIEWING MY ENTIRE MASTERPIECE? GO SWIM IN A POOL FULL OF BURNING OIL YOU COUNTLESS PIECE OF SHIT

I got 100/100 in the end, and I kinda feel like shit for going thought all that trouble for just one minute of project review, but hey at least it helped me practice common standards.

“Let’s spend two pages and 100 lines of code on bad practice before you learn good practice in 5 lines.”

Django (& REST) tutorials in a nutshell 🙄

Wrote this on another thread but wanted to do a full post on it.

What is a game?

I like to distinguish between 1. entertainment, 2. games, 3. fun.

both ideally are 'fun' (conveying a sense of immersion, flow, or pleasure).

a game is distinct (usually) from entertainment by the presence of interaction, but certain minimalists games have so little decision making, practice, or interaction-learning that in practice they're closer to entertainment.

theres also the issue of "interesting" interaction vs uninteresting ones. While in broad terms, it really comes down to the individual, in aggregate we can (usefully) say some things, by the utility, are either games or not. For example if having interaction were sufficient to make something a game, then light switches could become a game.

now supposed you added multiple switches and you had to hit a sequence to open a door. Now thats a sort of "game". So we see games are toys with goals.

Now what is a toy?

There are two varieties of toy: impromptu toys and intentional toys.

An impromptu toy is anything NOT intended primarily, by design, to induce pleasure or entertainment when interacted with. We'll call these "devices" or "toys" with a lowercase t.

"Toys", made with the intent of entertainment (primarily or secondarily) we'll label with an uppercase T.

Now whether something is used with the intent behind its own design (witness people using dildos, sex toys, as slapstick and gag items lol), or whether the designer achieves their intent with the toy or item is another matter entirely.

But what about more atmospheric games? What about idle games? Or clickers?

Take clickers. In the degenerate case of a single button and a number that increases, whats the difference between a clicker and a calculator? One is a device (calculator) turned into an impromptu toy and then a game by the user's intent and goal (larger number). The second, is a game proper, by the designers intent. In the degenerate case of a badly designed game it devolves into a really shitty calculator.

Likewise in the case of atmospheric games, in the degenerate case, they become mere cinematic entertainment with a glorified pause/play button.

Now while we could get into the definition of *play*, I'll only briefly get into it because there are a number of broad definitions. "Play" is loosely: freely structured (or structured) interaction with some sort of pleasure as either the primary or secondary object, with or without a goal, thats it. And by this definition you can play with a toy, you can play a game, you can play with a lightswitch, hell you can play with yourself.

This of course leaves out goals, the idea of "interesting decisions" or decision making, and a variety of other important elements.

But what makes a good game?

A lot of elements go into making a good game, and it's not a stretch to say that a good game is a totality of factors. At the core of all "good" games is a focus on mechanics, aesthetics, story, and technology. So we can already see that what makes a good game is less of an either-or-categorization and more like a rating or scale across categories of design elements.
Broadly, while aesthetics and atmosphere might be more important in games like Journey (2012) by Thatonegamecompany, for players of games like Rimworld the mechanics and interactions are going to be more important.

In fact going a little deeper, mechanics are usually (but not always) equivalent to interactions. And we see this dichtonomy arise when looking at games like Journey vs say, Dwarf Fortress. But, as an aside, is it possible to have atmospheric games that are also highly interactive or have a strong focus on mechanics? This is often what "realistic" (as opposed to *immersive*) games try to accomplish in design. Done poorly they instead lead to player frusteration, which depending on player type may or may not be pleasureable (witness 'hardcore' games whos difficulty and focus on do-overs is the fun the game is designed for, like roguelikes, and we'll get to that in a moment), but without the proper player base, leads to breaking player flow and immersion. One example of a badly designed game in the roguelike genre would be Early Access Stoneshard, where difficulty was more related to luck and chance than player skill or planning. A large part of this was because of a poorly designed stealth system, where picking off a single enemy alerted *all enemies* nearbye, who would then *stay* alerted until you changed maps, negating tactics that roguelike players enjoy and are used to resorting to. This is an important case worth examining because it shows how minor designer choices in mechanical design can radically alter the final quality of the game. Some games instead chose the cheaper route of managing player *perceptions* with a pregame note: Darkest Dungeons and Amnesia TDD are just two I can think of.

HEYYY!!
Glad to see ya all, how have ya been?

Gosh, it has been forever since the last time! I feel like I forgot about this platform too much, it feels good to have a place full of wonderful people to speak to, and you don't see those everywhere. I'm sorry I haven't been here much, it was mostly due to me not being able to practice programming much and thus falling back on tech stuff.

BUT - that period is now over. Maybe.
I'm gonna be more active on here, in the past recent years I've seen how bad most social medias turned out to be, with a few very special exceptions. I think devRant deserves more activity, so for better or for worse (hopefully better), I'm back!

I think my biggest problem right now is the need for a better PC, one Italians would call "a PC with the controcazzi", lol. A good one, is what I'm sayin. But would ya look at that, thr moment I start searching up for one, a friggin pandemic takes place and prices skyrocket! Ain't that fun. XD

I would probably have found an awesome PC build by now if I knew jack shit about hardware, but unfortunately I was always more into software than hardware. ^^"
So if anybody has any idea, I mean, I'm open to suggestions~ they'd be very appreciated, and thanks in advance. <3

But enough about that - how are you holding up? I hope you're doing good.
Misadventures and bad stuff happen, but I promise you we're all gonna get out of it soon. In the meantime, always remember to drink water, eat properly, keep yourself sanitized, exercise, and do things you love doing. That's what life is about. I'm looking forward to hearing from y'all, once again. 💙

Keep fighting the good fight, and kick ass! And chew gum, too.

Some of you know I'm an amateur programmer (ok, you all do). But recently I decided I'm gonna go for a career in it.

I thought projects to demo what I know were important, but everything I've seen so far says otherwise. Seems like the most important thing to hiring managers is knowing how to solve small, arbitrary problems. Specifics can be learned and a lot of 'requirements' are actually optional to scare off wannabes and tryhards looking for a sweet paycheck.

So I've gone back, dusted off all the areas where I'm rusty (curse you regex!), and am relearning, properly. Flash cards and all. Getting the essentials committed to memory, instead of fumbling through, and having to look at docs every five minutes to remember how to do something because I switch languages, frameworks, and tooling so often. Really committing toward one set of technologies and drilling the fundamentals.

Would you say this is the correct approach to gaining a position in 2020, for a junior dev?
I know for a long time, 'entry level' positions didn't really exist, but from what I'm hearing around the net, thats changing.

Heres what I'm learning (or relearning since I've used em only occasionally):

* Git (small personal projects, only used it a few times)
* SQL
* Backend (Flask, Django)
* Frontend (React)
* Testing with Cypress or Jest

Any of you have further recommendations?

Gulp? Grunt? Are these considered 'matter of course' (simply expected), or learn-as-you for a beginner like myself?

Is knowing the agile 'manifesto' (whatever that means) by heart really considered a big deal?

What about the basics of BDD and XP?

Is knowing how to properly write user-stories worth a damn or considered a waste of time to managers?

Am I going to be tested on obscure minutiae like little-used yarn/npm commands?

Would it be considered a bonus to have all the various HTTP codes memorized? I mean thats probably a great idea, but is that an absolute requirement for newbies, or something you learn as you practice?

During interviews, is there an emphasis on speed or correctness? I'm nitpicky, like to write cleanly commented code, and prefer to have documentation open at all times.
Am I going to, eh, 'lose points' for relying on documentation during an interview?

I'm an average programmer on my good days, and the only thing I really have going for me is a *weird* combination of ADD and autism-like focus that basically neutralize each other. The only other skill I have is talking at people's own level to gauge what they need and understand. Unfortunately, and contrary to the grifter persona I present for lulz, I hate selling, let alone grifting.
Otherwise I would have enjoyed telemarketing way more and wouldn't even be asking this question. But thankfully I escaped that hell and am now here, asking for your timeless nuggets of bitter wisdom.

What are truly *entry level* web developers *expected* to know, *right out the gate*, obviously besides the language they're using?

Also, what is the language they use to program websites? It's like java right? I need to know. I'm in an interview RIGHT now and they left me alone with a PC for 30 minutes. I've been surfing pornhub for the last 25 minutes. I figure the answer should take about 5 minutes, could you help me out and copypasta it?

Okay, okay, I'm kidding, I couldn't help myself. The rest of the questions are serious and I'd love to know what your opinions are on what is important for web developers in 2020, especially entry level developers.

Today I tried teaching a 36 years old student about HTML and layout. My inner self is always restless for practice as an excuse for less talking, but in the end I end up doing even more talking and getting kinda embarrassed.

Good thing is that student understood everything well enough in this 1 hour. I also inserted some good stuff: tips and tricks, conventions mentioned, trends... He even craved for more information.

I'm going to prepare to make further studies more fruitful, because the next synopses won't be as theoretical as today's one.

I've been feeling very bad because I don't think I've been making good use of my free time. So I decided to change.

Looked at my goals, first in line, getting a driver license.
For that, I need to arrange times for practice with my dad.
For that, I need a clean timetable. I had one but teachers are lame and don't respect the times of course.
So, I need to print the new one I already had done.

So I went to the printer.
And it prints awful, everything is pink because it doesn't print yellow.
Fine, let's change the cartridge.
Printer refuses to work, it throws a stuck paper error.
My dad tries to fix it putting fingers inside. Nothing.
We suspect it's the new cartridge, change the new cartridge chip with the one the old one had. Printer fooled.
It still doesn't work. Stuck paper.
My dad admits he felt he broke something when he reached inside the printer..
We had to disassemble it and fix the broken part.
Now it works again.
It still doesn't print yellow.
We'll have get it fixed or get a new one.

I guess I have to draw my timetable by hand...
Sucks, I made it using html and flex. Every 1fr was 5'.
I'll make a gist if anyone is curious about it.

To all the masochists who spent hours debugging misspellings:

1. Learn your tools
2. Learn good practice

Every IDE should point out when you're not using a variable you've initiated or using an uninitiated variable as well as at least highlight, if not simply list, every occurrence of the variable under your cursor and let you find all references or even display the number of references next to a variable at all times, and finally, every IDE should autocomplete for you so when it doesn't you know you've messed up. Good IDE makes all the easy mistakes hard and all of the hard tasks easy. Including running tests. If you don't know how to configure your IDE to do all these things take time and learn it. If you still can't figure it out, replace your IDE maybe...?

Also use the debugger. Preferably one that nicely integrates with your IDE. If you don't, check point 1.

Also write tests and *run them*.

Also if your misspellings tend to consist of a missing `s` at the end of a plural noun just call it `entityCollection` instead of `entities`. And read up on more good programming practices and naming conventions.

Final year at the university, and I only feel regret.
I hoed around in different technologies and fields. I had developed a game that i played with my friends back in high school. They liked it, so in varsity, i tried game development, 3d modelling scared me off, or rather I pussied out.
Web development, didn't go too deep, App Development with Flutter, didn't go too deep, Cybersecurity, went as far as passing the EC council's exams (the training wasn't that good). I tried putting my knowledge into practice, but resources like HTB aren't really free, you need money to learn (one would say i didn't try hard enough ) but now the certificate sits, useless in my resume, anything I learned fading away. I had an idea that applied blockchain, but my dad said "blah blah blah you could be targeted" (are there symbols for paraphrasing ?). I decided to decide on a stack (picked MERN, good idea ?) and work on it, but I feel like maybe tech isn't for me. AJR songs really hit now.
Final year at the university, and I only feel regret.

I usually just block every possible entry point of errors instead of handling them directly with try-catch or on-error callbacks. Is that a good practice?

In case you ask, yes, i am that lazy.

I recently went to an office to open up a demat account

Manager: so your login and password will be sent to you and then once you login you'll be prompted to change the password

Me: *that's a good idea except that you're sending me the password which could be intercepted* ok

Manager: you'll also be asked to set a security question...

Me: *good step*

Manager: ...which you'll need to answer every time you want to login

Me: *lol what? Maybe that's good but kinda seems unnecessary. Instead you guys could have added two factor authentication* cool

Manager: after every month you'll have to change your password

Me : *nice* that's good

Manager: so what you can do change the password to something and then change it back to what it was. Also to remember it keep it something on your number or some date

Me: what? But why? If you suggest users to change it back to what it was then what is the point of making them change the password in the first place?

Manager: it's so that you don't have to remember so many different passwords

Me: but you don't even need to remember passwords, you can just use softwares like Kaspersky key manager where you can generate a password and use it. Also it's a bad practice if you suggest people who come here to open an account with such methods.

Manager: nothing happens, I'm myself doing that since past several years.

Me: *what a fucking buffoon* no, sir. Trust me that way it gets much easier to get access to your system/account. Also you shouldn't keep your passwords written down like that (there were some password written down on their whiteboard)

Manager: ....ok...so yeah you need sign on these papers and you'll be done

Me:(looking at his face...) Umm..ok

I am a programming teacher in Colombia and the week's topic is very useful for me, thanks to all for writing your ideas, but in the other hand I think that some points have not been understood, for example in my college we use in the beginning of the course notepad so that the students learn the sintaxis and good practices and they no dependent of a especific tool or Ide (an advantage of this practice is that the student learn to use command tools easily). We want that que student learn programming and not a language or software . This because in our experience the students learn to use a tool but not to resolve a problem and this is bad in a long term.

Fuck C!
It sucks so badly!
Our College Teachers are Teaching this to us in the first year.

I know many of you will disagree with this.
But I like Python as I am digging into ML/AI and for this domain Python is powerful. I am trying to practice in C language but still, it sucks badly as sometimes I can't even figure out what is the error even after debugging or looking on StackOverflow. Anyways this is a good programming language because of Low TLE and versatility.

Anyways this was my thought. No offense.

This is Devrant so I Typed my frustration.

So.. We probably have thousands of rants on git and muggles here's one from me.

I've been roped into this ongoing project, guys with 1-1.5 years of experience are already working on it.

When they shared repo with me ...
I see 195 branches WTF! What are these idiots up to 🤔
And only handful of people working on project.

This one time I was merging branch with master ( branch #196) with master, guy sitting besides me asks me what I am doing I said it's good practice to pull before you push, right?(the line I remember reading here on devRant, I thought let's bee cool 😎 😋) And I explained him that I am merging 'em locally and will push once everything looks good ( I realized later that I shouldn't have wasted my couple of minutes explaining him)
He says don't waste your time and download (clone) the project folder(repo) from github and then paste or add your change to it.
Fuck you man, you should go fuck yourself instead of telling me that I'm wasting my time.

Sometimes I wonder, What do these guys think of github? Assholes, chutiya saale

My college years was actually quite helpful.

I'm from a college that value academic proficiency over industrial skills. There are only 2-3 courses top that are focusing more on coding or software development. The others are theoretical and focus more on the math behinds everything (with fun projects tho, so they are not boring at all).

The importance is that, you could easily learn coding and software dev practice from good examples in your workplace, probably way better what you can get in college. But chances are that our daily job rarely touches hardcore algorithm and mathematical principal behind. Where when you actually need it (bi-weekly scenario), your knowledge and research experience in college comes to play.

And of course, by all means, that was an enjoyable college life!

The datepicker saga

Part one

So I begin work on a page where user add their details, project is late, taking ages on this page

Nearly done, just need a component to allow users to put in some date of births. Look for react components.

Avoiding that one because fuck Bootstrap.

Ah-ha, that looks good, let's give it a go.

CSS doesn't exist, oh need copy it over from npm dist. Great it applied but...

... WTF it's tiny. Thought it was a problem with my zoom. Nope found the issue in github.com and it's something to do with using REM rather than EM or something, okay someone provided a solution, rather I saw a couple of solutions, after some hacking around I got it working and pasted it in the right location and yes, it's a reasonable size now.

Only it's a bit crap because it only allows scrolling 1 month at a time. No good. Hunting through the docs reveals several options to add year and month drop downs and allow them to be scrolled. Still a bit shit as it only shows certain years, figure I'd set the start date position somewhere at the average.

Wait. The up button on the scroll doesn't even show, it's just a blank 5px button. Mouse scroll doesn't work

Fucking...

... Bailing on that.

Part 2

Okay sod it I'll just make my own three drop down select boxes, day, month and year. Easy.

At this point I take full responsibility and cannot blame any third party. And kids, take this as a lesson to plan out your code fully and make no assumptions on the simplicity of the problem.

For some reason (of which I regretted much) I decided to abstract things so much I made an array of three objects for each drop down. Containing the information to pretty much abstract away the field it was dealing with. This sort of meta programming really screwed with my head, I have lines like the following:

[...].map(optionGroup =>
optionGroup.options[
parseInt(
newState[optionGroup.momentId]
, 10)
]
)...

But I was in too deep and had to weave my way through this kind of abstract process like an intrepid explorer chopping through a rain forest with a butter knife.

So I am using React and Redux, decided it was overkill to use Redux to control each field. Only trouble is of course when the user clicks one of the fields, it doesn't make sense in redux to have one of the three fields selected. And I wanted to show the field title as the first option. So I went against good practice and used state to keep track of the fields before they are handed off to the parent/redux. What a nightmare that was.

Possibly the most challenging part was matching my indices with moment.js to get the UI working right, it was such a meta mess when it just shouldn't have taken so stupidly long.

But, I begin to see the light at the end of this tunnel, it's slowly coming together. And when it all clicks into place I sit back and actually quite enjoy my abysmal attempt at clean and easy to read code.

Part 3

Ran the generated timestamp through a converter and I get the day before, oh yeah that's great

Seems like it's dependant on the timezone??!

Nope. Deploying. Bye. I no longer care if daylight savings makes you a day younger.

Week 1 Day 1

It's a little late to do a whole big list of things I want to change going into 2018 so I'll just keep this focused on one thing: I do NOT want to work a minimum wage job by the end of 2018, preferably by the end of May.

So I'm gonna change that; starting now. I got accepted to the Grow with Google Challenge scholarship I may or may not have applied to while blackout drunk and I realize that drunk me was watching out for sober me. He set up a good start to getting me away from unloading trucks at 2AM and into a nice comfy chair where I can replace physical pain with mental anguish. But all kidding aside I'm really excited to start this course but I have no drive and motivation is a little hard to come by around here (The Fairy Godmother is MIA) so I'm going to be posting these rants daily in the hopes that it keeps me obligated to not waste the opportunity given to me. So without further ado, day 1 everybody.

I started today really simple. I signed up for a slack account, got Udacity set up so I was officially enrolled and everything, then moved on to setting up my laptop for android development. I wanted a fresh start so I when ahead and wiped my hard drive and looked at a few different OSes to see what fit my needs. After trying to mess around with Arch Linux and failing, I moved to Debian, I liked Debian a lot but I'm not completely comfortable with it just yet and I don't want to waste a lot of time having to familiarize with a new OS when I just want to dig in. So eventually I ended up with Windows 10, for the convenience and ease of use, but decided to put a spin on it and download the Ubuntu subsystem for W10 so I could still practice on something similar to a GNU/Linux OS. So far everything is set up, I have the only 4 applications I will need: chrome, android studio, google play Music, and devrant of course, and I intend to keep all other distractions off of this machine. Overall I'm feeling really good and I'll follow up tomorrow with some actual coding and whatnot and we'll go for there.

Guys, do you know any good source to learn MVVM to android (kotlin would be nice). I know MVVM theory and practice (I used it in WPF, C#). But i have hard times understanding how it work with android. I watched reso coder, but his tutorials are even harder to understand. Thanks

StackOverflow veterans: "this is an elitist meritocracy, so play by the rules to earn reputation and practice the same gatekeeping behavior that we have established for years." Then they wonder why mostly white male US academic guys keep engaging in their community.

Yes, it's "stackoverflow again".

Another one of those sites you can't really avoid as a dev, too good to ignore, to bad not to get upset about. Maybe also a mirror of antisocial patterns still prevalent in society and especially in the developer industry.

Are sql joins a bad practice? :o
I recently did some work on a page for a site ive never worked on cause my boss told me to. So they recently added product detail video urls to a table that has a relationship to the products table. The existing code was querying for the products on that said page and then during the loop that was outputting the products ,there was another query for getting the url for the current iteration/product. Told my coworker that this imo was pretty inefficient way to do it and switched it to a join and did 1 query then output that but his words were "The way it is now maybe ineffecient in your opinion but it works. Also combining inner joins with left or right is not a good practice. If the data is changed upstream the entire query would need to be redone to accommodate the change". Mind you that they query views a lot which are all made from queries that use joins and I'm also pretty sure these views were written by someone who used to be here because these guys are not good at sql or at least that's what there queries show. I'm at the point now where I'm realizing that my boss and this other guy don't give a fuck about efficiency or doing things the right way they just want it "to work". So this coworker changed my query back to the way it was because he said it broke the shopping cart even though that was already broken when I started... What is life? Maybe I'm the stupid one?

What should I do to practice being a "good coder" vs a "code Googler" who slaps other people's code into the site just because "it's enough to get the damn thing working"?

I feel really overwhelmed with all that Ive learned thus far. At this point I feel width with know depth when it comes to my knowledge of websites.

I've been messing around with html/css/js for a while and played with plenty of other languages,pre-processors, frameworks, etc. I never went to school for programming and have done work for small businesses independently for some time. Most of what I know comes from codecademy treehouse and similar sites. I can refer to Google on a lot of things but I feel like there are habits that I should be implementing so I don't have to re-do things later. I love the book apart series but I still feel like it's missing the foundational knowledge that I'm looking for.

After all of the time I've spent going through courses I feel like my experiences have given me solutions to build a few things and now I'm just jamming those solutions onto whatever I can until something I like comes on to the browser.

It's really easy to sit down and bang my head against the keyboard until something comes out that looks the way I want it to. However, I know there is way more going on that could help me make better decisions. I just feel like I'm missing something. Maybe it's experience, or maybe it's just the lack of commroddery from working alone and not being able to approach problems with a team.

I hate pulling up my css file and feeling like it's rubbish, and feeling like I don't completely understand things like flex, or display, or position. I've been pushing at this for a while but I don't think I've found a resource that has really made me feel like I'm anywhere close to being a competent coder.

There are tons of watch and learn and do type classes that show you how to make stuff, but I guess what I want to know now is why we make it that way.

At some point do you just sit down and read the MSN start to finish?

I wonder sometimes if my brain has been reprogrammed because I grew up in Google world and don't actually have to solve anything for myself. I read about a guy who locked himself away for hours with books on code and he just sat there and wrote his code on paper until he was confident that he was getting it right.

I love listening to music when programming. It's not something I started because I wanted to, but it just kinda happened.

In my first job as an intern, they followed concept of open office, a very shitty strategy as it led to chaos and noise all the time around my desk. To move away from that, bought a pair of Sony headphones, which I still consider as my best investment.

Started listening to songs since they're a better choice in the cacophony of chaos present around. These days, even though I work in a regular and calm environment still can't seem to get rid of the practice of listening to songs.

Anyone here have similar experience??

P.S. Suggest some good songs to listen to while programming!!

So I joined a company as an Angular dev and the code they gave me was stupid AngularJS ported to Angular 7 mixed with thousands of lines of jQuery inside index.html,

also all the css was scattered into a few files with 8000+ lines of code and no idea about which file does what, we decided to rebuild the project in Angular,

I built a huge portion of it with PrimeNg (a UI library like Angular Material) but after building all of that they tell me to remove PrimeNg and also asked me to import all SCSS modules in angular.json like wtf,

they forced me to use bootstrap with jQuery IN AN ANGULAR PROJECT this was my first job and I think I have a pretty good understand of Pakistani IT industry after this.

I learned programming from online paid courses and tons of practice so I expected others to be on the same level but that's not the case.

Worst: lost my job due to the pandemic, and struggling to get interviews! Yes in spite of how well i did at my previous role (and please don’t give me crap about how they never would’ve laid me off if I was good, you’re just saying that to stroke your golden e-penis, you fucking reptilian scumbag) and with all that “experience” on my resume, I’m apparently not smart enough for these companies to even bother with. Yes if i kept failing tests a blind monkey would pass i would question my ability but that’s not the case. Yes my stack may be old but learning these newer tech stacks that recruiters love is a total cakewalk for me! They do so much cognitive lifting for you that I worry that if I don’t practice lower level stuff my mental capacity will diminish which is why I still solve leetcode problems lol.
Let’s not forget, I lost my dog this year too ☹️

At work we develop for embedded systems. Using the heap can raise unknown effects sometimes. So we always try to avoid using it. To show our attitude regarding the heap we want to make T-Shirts like the No Ma'am shirts from Married... with Children but with No Heap instead of No Ma'am. Now we need a meaning of the acronym. Our currently idea is:

Nerdy
Opponents of
HEAP
E
Allocation
Practice

We do not find a good word for the E, we also aren't native speaker, thus we are not sure which synonym for word like based can be used in such context. So i want to ask if someone has a good idea or even a better idea for the whole acronym :)

When I quit my job making multiple bullshit excuses of how tired I am and how much better my life would be if I work from home and here I am been lazy for 2 - 3 months and didn't learn anything new also didn't practice what I know.

Honestly I'm so disappointed in myself and the fact that it was a good opportunity for me makes it harder on me blaming myself.

My job is decent, but now I've got one developer who's been there a few months longer than me who pushes back on stuff that's considered standard, good practice.

We have a domain with lots of business rules. He's opposed to any sort of domain-centric architecture that puts business logic in one place. He doesn't give any coherent reasons. He can't describe his alternative clearly. He just wants to put stuff all over the place.

If I don't cite any references he says it's just my opinion. If I do, I'm talking down to him.

Then he decided that the database shouldn't have concurrency checks. His reasoning is that as the application grows we'll have more and more concurrent updates, and they all have to succeed.

What if that corrupts our data? He mentions "eventual consistency." which has nothing to do with what we're talking about.

The idea that our code should carefully ensure that our data is correct is "extreme." What are we going to tell people when bugs happen? That expecting the application to work correctly is extreme?

He's not a terrible developer. He's an advanced Expert Beginner. He's convinced himself that whatever he doesn't already know isn't worth knowing. That's fine if he wants to stop learning, but this affects the whole team. He makes such a fuss that it everyone gets stressed out and eventually I have to back off.

The problem is that someone with a reasonable degree of competence can pass off his experience as superior to all knowledge from outside sources.

I've been doing this as long as him. I don't claim to be a rock star genius, but I do keep learning. I don't tell myself that I've reached the pinnacle. But all of that learning goes to waste if I can't use it.

MDN best practice recommends not to sniff browser versions but rather detect features. So far, so good. In reality, we don't need to detect features, we need to detect bugs to handle outdated mobile Safari versions. Apple again. 🍎🍏🤢🤮

Practice? Also good is relative, I don't considered myself "good" but it depends on compared to what/who.
Weird question overall.

TL;DR: I have some rambly shit to say...

Update on the Uni stuff: I think I got a pass in all the subjects. Two exams left but I am holding on. It's a big deal to me since last year I could barely do a single subject per semester - a subject I had failed a few times because of lack of interest and good ol' depression. Anyways, I persisted with that subject, got my Bachelor's in Food Technology and now I'm doing that Master's of mine... It probably looks wild to people here that I did that switch but I have always had a relationship with computers as long as I remember myself. So it's not surprising that as soon as I got a choice in what I *actually* wanted to do I chose this kinda thing. But I do have to rant that it took me 10 fucking years to choose! And that I did not choose it before choosing food technology which I will probably never use anyways. I wasted so much of my energy and time on that. I did elect programming as one of the subjects while doing food tech but I really should have moved to something else. But oh well. Guess I had to find out the hard way.

For all those reading, this is what it looks like when you're 30, have very little experience in doing programming for anything else than academics and are doing a major career switch through studies after struggling for 10 years with a 4-year Bachelor's. But such is life.

Also a bit off topic but I just cannot handle people not telling what they mean because of the inability or lesser ability to tell what that is in the first place.

I can't deal with the fact of how fucked human societies are. I just can't. I am way too nice for it. So I listen to stuff like true crime to really get a feel of how evil people can be. I know it's ~problematic~ or whatever, but to me it is a way of engaging with the lesser spoken side of human beings.

And maybe, just maybe, I should get checked for ADHD again because I feel like despite my therapy for depression, nothing really has changed with the ADHD symptoms I was diagnosed with. And maybe for autism since people have labelled me that way and it might explain some stuff... All that is to say I need some good mental care. And this society is shit for it. Hell, apparently one of the psychologists I was under the care of thought depression resulted from ungratefulness. All this while I was legit being abused. But that abuse has stopped now that I found a psychologist that is actually standing up for me. I just mourn for all the time I spent being depressed and how it fucked my memory and stuff. How much it affected me and all. I have no idea why I'm being this vulnerable but it feels somewhat fitting... How do you cope with being 30 and not remembering almost all your life? What you remember being what you managed to write down or has been negative enough it stuck in the brain for forever...

Just why am I fucking supposed to be all happy and shit when I am just tired of life because it is too goddamn much? I have no real reason to look forward to things, online friends and the offline one included. Because ultimately, I have no damn motivation to look forward to anything, really. I am supposedly doing better but in reality I am just getting better at going through the motions. The therapy, while mindblowingly effective, is not actually addressing the core cause of everything and just expecting me to fake it till I make it. And this is me saying that about CBT. Why should I have to tell myself things just to feel human? I am one and as long as I'm alive, nothing will change that. So why do I have to always feel like an alien wherever I am? So out of touch with myself that I don't have a self image or an ability to even tell what the actual fuck I want from life... I am getting better with the latter, but still. It hurts. I wanna shed so many tears but I'm frustratingly unable to do so.

I am just a human trying to human in this ocean of 8 billion humans. Maybe I will find some more connections, maybe I won't.

I wanna end this rambling session by a few things:
1. I will have to go to Canada at some point this year to see my in-laws and some other family over there...
2. I will probably have to seek a job there (for financial reasons it is much better for me to have one there and to work remotely in Georgia) and I have no idea of where to start since I am not the greatest material for it.
3. Life is going alright-ish.
4. I will hear from the startup company at some point this month.
5. I have plans for my future but no idea if they will ever come true at this point.
6. My family arrangement will have to change in more ways than one.
7. I should resume my unofficial first music album and engage in creative stuff because at the core, I have a need to do so.
8. Do I really have to do Duolingo again? I really want to not forget German and Russian, but I just never have practice. And Duolingo is surprisingly easy to forget to do for me.

The end.

I've been doing interview prep for almost two months now (off and on). Doing this course online to better understand algorithms and doing Leetcode problems here and there. Definitely not putting in 6 or even 8 hours a day into studying since I'm working, but fuck I feel so discouraged when I'm not even able to get an "easy" problem.

I really want to get better, and I know it takes a lot of patient and practice when it comes to problems. I try my best to tell myself "you haven't learned this yet" or "you'll get it soon", but in the end I just feel so discouraged that I want to quit practicing for interviews.

I hate that this profession requires people to spend X months or even years studying for an interview. That the 3-5 years of relative and good work experience means nothing more than passing a resume screening to get to a coding interview where they ask you a problem you'll never face in your career at X company.

Do I hate the process because I'm just bad at algorithms I don't use often? Or would I feel like it's just and fair if I understood things easier and were able to land jobs easily because I get all the algorithms?

I just want to be better.

You know what is THE stupidest and most fucking anoying thing ever? (And partially my fault) I recently reinstalled Ubuntu on my device, meaning I lost my SSH keys. Today I wanted to make a quick change to a website hosted on digitalocean. Now as per good practice I had disabled the root account and the only way to log in is via SSH or using their web terminal. Obviously I couldn't use SSH so I had no choice but their awful web terminal. Not only is it laggy as balls but it would keep hanging up meaning I had to close it and start again. As if that wasnt fucking frustrating enough all I wanted to do was add my new SSH so I could just use my terminal. But NO you can't fucking paste anything into their terminal! Like what the fuck? How can you not have this basic functionality in 2017???

Do you guys still see the relevance of using code freezing instead of just properly managing versions, repositories and branches in a cyclical manner, given how advanced software practices and tools are supposed to be?

To give some context, the company I work for uses the complete trash project management practice of asking teams to work on a sprint basis, but there is still a quarterly milestone and code freeze to commit to and it's where shit hits the fan.

Development teams rush features at the end of the quarter because they had to commit at the very least to a 6 months in advance planning (lol?) and turns out, not being able to design and investigate properly a feature combined with inflexible timelines has high chances to fail. So in the end, features are half-assed and QA has barely any time to test it out thoroughly. Anyways, by the time QA raises some concerns about a few major bugs, it's already code freeze time. But it's cool, we will just include these bug fixes and some new features in the following patches. Some real good symver, mate!

Of course, it sure does not help that teams stopped using submodules because git is too hard apparently, so we are stuck with +10Gb piece of trash monolithic repository and it's hell to manage, especially when fuckfaces merges untested code on the main branches. I can't blame Devops for ragequitting if they do.

To me, it's just some management bullshit and the whole process, IMO, belongs to fucking trash along with a few project managers... but I could always be wrong given my limited insight.

Anyways, I just wanted to discuss this subject because so far I cannot see code freezing being anything else than an outdated waterfall practice to appease investors and high management on timelines.

Question for devs who use Intellij IDEA.

How often do you use livetemplates?

I am a new android dev with ADHD and just discovered live templates. They make my life much easier, for example I have shortcuts for generating recyclerview adapter/viewholder/implementation boilerplate code.

In that way I am able to focus on implementation, and do my coding like building blocks, rather than memorizing every detail of implementation. Also I don't need to go to stackoverflow and copypaste basic things multiple times. Even for example during live coding interview having livetemplates seems awesome, copypasting from stackoverflow would be shameful (I think). Using my own custom shortcuts for livetemplates seems the best way for how my brain functions (I suck at memorizing tiny details, but I remember general idea/flow of a pattern and I would prefer memorizing what to use and when to use, instead of all small details of implementation).

Is getting to dependent on livetemplates a good practice to get used to? Do other developers frown upon a dev who has dozens of livetemplates and relies on them instead of writing all code from memory by hand?

Today is thursday. Oh no.

At thursdays I have a 8h30-19 schedule (I have 1h30' of free time to go home and cry after I finish a class at 15h30 though) and there's this one class I DREAD. It's a 2h class at 17h and it's an exercise class. This wouldn't be so bad it I actually understood the code behind the exercises, because they don't teach us code in the theory classes (btw it's C. I hate that language because of all this). The teacher pretty much tells us "do this exercise", waits like 10' and then starts to (try to) explain what we're supposed to do. Oh my god.
The other day he was like "write "exec ( ... "text" ... )", compile and execute". It didn't work. Of course it didn't why would it? I was switching around between terminal, manual and text editor, to no avail. In the end he explained but I don't think I got it.
Every time I think about this class I die a little inside and start to become somewhat anxious to be honest. The theory is not that that hard, the practice part is what is killing me (I have test in 2w but I'm just gonna start studying earlier so I can go watch this match LoL).
Does someone know a good book (preferably online, if possible) or a good website on C? I really need to read that, that language is killing me.

Bonus: the other day I had to do a homework that was to be delivered. We had to write a program that read the program and its arguments like this:

./program_name
numArgs
arg1
arg2
etc

I wrote the code, had some bumps in the way, asked a colleague for help because we needed to have a custom function made that was to be done in the class but that I couldn't make because of the reasons above. Then it came the time to test. My VM broke (I think I'm gonna format my PC to try to fix that. Have installed some other versions of the VM but the installations fails or the machine doesn't start) so I sent it to said colleague to test. She said it did OK and so I sent the work to this website we have to send our works to.
"2 errors".
What? What happened? She said it worked just fine.
Looked at my code, couldn't see anything wrong.
Asked the same colleague for help.
Turns out I missed a space. A SPACE. I don't think I've ever felt so frustrated in my life. A presentation error in Java is a good thing, at least we know the program works fine, it's just the output that's wrongly formatted. But C? Nope, errors all around, oh my god. I'm still mad about it.
And I owe her a chocolate.

Anyone got a good practice to become a data scientist?

After I finished the university, I felt like I didn't know anything. I'm learning everyday something new in my work (I'm working 8 years as a dev), but I can't say comfortably that I'm good at programming. After work I'm going home, where I learn and practice new things and deepen my understanding of the core concepts, but again, I feel like I don't know anything. Will I ever feel that I'm a good programmer?

JavaScript has made my mind a battlefield of positive and negative thoughts. One side is telling me I'm not good enough, I cant do anything on my own, I dont understand how to do anything and it's always going to be like that. And the other side is telling me I'm fine it's a whole new side of programming (compared to python) and I just have to get used to it and its behavior, and I have to practice more and find good resources (which I have now thanks to a lot of you) idk I'm just struggling cause I realize how far behind I am and I wont be able to get and hold a job if I'm this shit at everything

I have a disagreement with my product owner (PO). Our team develops APIs in Mulesoft. We've got a release coming up and PO wants to release one of the APIs that has *some* working endpoints, but other endpoints in that same API have some open bugs.

Given that it's *unlikely* that those broken endpoints will be used, does it seem like good practice to release the API with known bugs in it to hit the deadline?

Understand that we're not just releasing the working endpoints. We're releasing all of it, bugs and all. PO's logic is that those broken endpoints won't be used therefore it's fine to send known bugs into production.

I just need some advice in dealing with this

Shame on you Facebook Developers!

I’m neither messy or anal coder, but whenever I push something to production I make sure to handle all debugger warnings... I don’t think it’s perfectionism, rather good practice, makes important bugs easier to find. ;)

A single Facebook SDK Framework has 70+ unhandled warnings, trivial things, could be fixed in a half day...

I had to use ‘inhibit_all_warnings!’ flag literally for the first time, not to get frustrated every time it gets updated :/

P.S Not to mention I had to change the dependency manager because (with the newest update) they have written themselves out of compatibility with the one I was using... C’mon guys. Not cool.

I hate programmatic auto layout. It's such a mess! Simple shit like cells that can easily be defined in a .nib become spaghetti coded messes that violate every good programming practice ever. Want to recreate the same style of cell again? Good luck reverse engineering the hieroglyphics your teammate wrote when creating the layout by hand. Never mind a whole bunch of useless shit is done in code that could easily be defined via runtime attributes through the storyboard. But why learn a new approach? Cause job security. Or because for some reason Interface Builder tools are seen as "too hard" or "not scalable" to use.. fuck me.

"Being a graphic designer gets you used to rejection of your brilliance. So it’s good practice for dating. " - Heather Phillips

I did software engineering but it was total waste of 4 years for learning. It was good for networking and exploring the shit going on in tech world but learning is always self work. You have to learn most of things by self i.e self-taught. The second main thing is practice every single day, there is no fucking shortcut.. I repeat no.

Alright so I'm in need of a little advice.

So I recently decided to go back and practice basic problem solving and from what I can tell now it's just me not used to JS like I am with python but I want to move on to bigger projects and other basic concepts (like manipulation of the DOM) and move away from basic problems.

But my concern is that I'll look at that list and only pick the ones that I feel I understand I can solve instead of the ones I cant. And theres a large list of them and I see that people are doing a lot of them while I'm just doing a few per page. And I'm afraid I'm just not good enough or stupid if I just ignore the basics and move on because the basics are there for you to figure out the easy stuff.

But I really just want to move on and I dont know when I need to. And last time I asked for advice I mentioned I have been programming for a few years, left out the normal accomplishments I've posted on here but I was just told since it's taking me this long I should just quit I tried to rebuttle but they kept telling me no that literally broke me and my confidence so now I'm sensitive to asking questions also fuck whoever that was.

Saving time data with timezone in the server is really headache!
Someone says keeping server time in UTC is good practice. -_-

So, our lab professor in university for data structures was evaluating my friend's group assignment next to me and my colleague.

Professor: So, what does this method do?

Friend: I feel it would be best to explain our structure first and then how our methods work.

P: No, no. It's okay, I'm seeing it here in my laptop. *Looking at their report which included nothing about the structure of the assignment since she asked specifically only to place the methods and their complexity analysis due to not having time to look and evaluate a full report for each group*

F: Okay, *proceeds to explain*.

P: Okay, and why is your code commented?

F: Because it's good practice and we learned in subject x last semester.

P: Impossible! I teach that subject and I did not teach that in my classes.

F: Okay, but our professor did.

P: *Says nothing*.

They got a 3.25/5 as a grade for it and got really pissed off. I mean, they spent a lot of time making the assignment's structure perfect, optimizing their code and the professor did not care for the structure, just the methods, on the data structures subject.
FYI, they are workaholic, dedicate a lot of time improving their skills and their normal grades are usually >= 4.25.

Is granting read access to a client app a good practice? Intefrations should be done through APIs, jms and the like, right? My opinion is it should be a no no to do the integration on the database layer bypassing the app even if both apps are internal service which are completely different products. opinions are much appreciated.

Recently, I launched a website to practice and perfect a lightweight Larval CMS that is forcing me to learn Databases and good sanitization practices.

Trolling Zuckerberg's Facebook for Images to make potential MeMes, I can't help but notice he has quite a ridiculous and unrealistic amount of instances in which he seems to be talking to military and government officials.

Figured I'd use the old humor as a weapon to shed light upon this.

Okay so update/JS pt2

This is just me throwing my thoughts down and some questions

I've been practicing arrays/objects and loops more and I'm getting more understanding it helps that you can do them both at the same time. But like I need more looping techniques (if that makes sense) like instead of always using for(let i = 0; i <= x.length; i++) and I havent completely learned how or when I use for(x in y)

Questions.

• what's the difference between class objects and objects that look like a python dictionary

• when should I use classes over the other kind of classes

• any good resources and projects I can practice with loops cause I'm kind of running dry on ideas

and I dont wanna google cause I barely already have no social interaction

Week 1 day 3 and 4.

I didn't feel like I did a whole lot yesterday so I just pushed it into today. In the past I tried to program for hours everyday and expect to keep up my stamina for it but it didn't work so this time I'll just take days off every now and then and see if that works at all. Yesterday was one of those, the only thing I did was watch some videos on OOP and practice some more with OOP and recursion.

As far as today goes I started sketching our the ideas for my own personal app I hope to develop once I get the skill set. I tried to focus on looking at it not just from the perspective of a developer but also a user and a marketer to see vialibity and such but I have a LONG time to go before I can get my idea rolling. I decided to push starting the actual course until tomorrow because Ina small questionnaire before you go into it it asks if you're familliar with threading and networking, which I am not. So that was my main focus today, expanding my base Java skill set. If any Android Devs can give from their experience want I need to know I would love that but other than that I feel pretty good about what I did today.

A client once asked me if he would have to adjust the Google maps internal gyroscope monthly or every quarter. I told him it was a good practice to do it every two months or so.

I've been off the PHP game for a good bit now so I'm not sure if this is an established practice.

But why in the flying fuck would someone want to use .htm in place of .php files? Especially when you already use .php on other files on the same codebase?!