So I need to create a nice new web app. Let's look at some cool JS frameworks that I can work with.

*5 mins later* Hm, Angular sounds good, is there any good competitor?

*5 mins later* Wow, React sounds awesome as well. Let me learn it.

Google search result:

"Planning to use react? Check out Vue JS first"

*5 mins later* Ok so vue seems faster than React and much easier to learn. Let me see if Vue is the final choice.

Google search result:

"Angular VS Knockout VS Ember VS React VS Mithril VS Mercury VS Ractive VS Vue VS Riot"

Nope, fuck it

Pro tip: If you are a junior, or senior but new at the company, don't start your conversations with:

"We're doing X wrong. At my previous company we did / at school I learned /in this book I read / according to this talk I watched, the right way to do X is ..."

Instead try:

"I'm curious why were doing X this way. I'm used to doing it differently."

I love flat-hierarchy teams, and people who think about flaws in procedures and proactively try to improve the tools we use are awesome, but the next kid walking up to me yelling we use git flow "wrong" will be smacked in the face with a keyboard.

If you come to me with curiosity and an open mind, I'll explain, and even return the favor by behaving the same way when I'm baffled by your seemingly retarded implementations.

Maybe we can learn from each other, maybe discover that "how I learned it" is sometimes good, sometimes bad.

But let's start with some social skills, not kicking off into every debate with a stretched leg and a red face.

I fucking love people like this.

Yesterday I met a 'friend' who I hadn't seen in a very long time. Just a guy I used to know tbh but let's call him Friend anyway. After a while in the conversation this happened...

*Friend doesn't know I have a degree in CS*

Friend: "WHAT?? YOU LIKE PROGRAMMING? NO WAY! ME TOO!"

Me: "THAT'S AWESOME! You've been programming for long?"

Friend: "A little over a year now. I know almost all languages now. C++, C#, Python, Java and HTML. Still a couple left to go. Once you're on the level I achieved programming becomes really, really easy. How long have you been programming?"

Me: "Almost a decade now"

Friend: "Damn dude you must know all languages by now I suppose?"

Me: "I've been mainly doing C++ so not really haha"

Friend: "I can always help when you're struggling with one language. C++ is pretty easy tbh. You should learn others too btw. HTML for example is pretty important because you can program websites with it"

Me: "Yeah... Thanks... So... What project are you working on right now?"

Friend: "I'm making a register page for my very own forum. The only problem I have is that PHP won't save the login details"

Me: "Hahaha I know the feeling. MySQL?"

Friend: "What?"

Me: "What do you use to save your data"

Friend: "Just a txt file. It's easier that way."

Me: "Hahaha true. Who needs safety right? *smiles*"

Friend: "Actually it's 100% safe because only I can see the txt file so other people can not hack other users."

Me: "Yes! That's great! Cya!"

Friend: "I'm working on a mmorpg too btw! I can learn you to make games if you want. Just call me. Here's my number"

Me: "Alright... Thanks... Bye!"

*Arrives at home*

*Deletes number*

I do not make this up.

I can understand that someone who isn't in the CS industry doesn't take it too seriously and gets hyped when their "Hello World" program works.
I'm fine with that.

The thing that really triggers me is big headed ass holes like this. Like how much more like a absolute dickhead could you possibly more act? Fucking hate people like that.

Me when I'm FREE :
Hmm, I don't have anything to do, let's sleep for 10 hours..

Me when I have to STUDY :
Let's watch that latest episode of Mr. Robot
Let's complete that side-project I started to 10 years ago..
Let's learn something new in Android Development...
Let's scroll devRant..

Yes Linus Torvalds is an asshole and the world is better because of it.

In short Linus's acid takes on code quality over developer fee fee's might be one of the things that has made the Linux kernel and the GNU/Linux project such a long lasting open source success and in my opinion the risk of him falling for all this "let's be nice and non offensive" bs trend may impact negatively on code quality.

Being an asshole has it's downsides and it's not always the best response, I'll give you that, but personally I think most of us who are viewed as assholes are seen like that because we put quality over convenience, facts before feelings and dedication over mediocrity; it is not because we hate you, it's because we measure ourselves with the same stick.

It depends on one's character, but when you've been toughened up because of bullying(I don't doubt many devs have been since being a nerd has never been hip) or life in general, you learn to stop whining & pick yourself up and you expect everyone to be competitive and competent as you are and it gets frustrating to manage people who don't fulfill your expectations.

Pros: You get shit done and you do it well.
Cons: People won't like you and you don't tolerate failure (much less mediocrity).

Yes Linus is an asshole, my coach was an asshole, some of my best teacher's have been assholes, I had friends who were assholes, heck I'm an asshole!

But I thank them because they made me better than I was, just as people have thanked me for being the right amount of asshole.

A warm thank you and fuck you Linus, keep being the asshole we need.

LET'S LEARN ANGULAR2

* look for some good tutorial *
* download atom-typescript *
* type "ng new demo" in console"

1185 errors.

FINISHED LEARNING ANGULAR2

So a friend of Mine asked me to check their Mail server because some emails got lost. Or had a funny signature.

Mails were sent from outlook so ok let's do this.

I go create a dummy account, and send/receive a few emails. All were coming in except one and some had a link appended. The link was randomly generated and was always some kind of referral.

Ok this this let's check the Mail Server.

Nothing.

Let's check the mail header. Nothing.

Face -> wall

Fml I want to cry.

Now I want to search for a pattern and write a script which sends a bunch of mails on my laptop.
Fuck this : no WLAN and no LAN Ports available. Fine let's hotspot the phone and send a few fucking mails.

Guess what? Fucking cockmagic, no funny mails appear!

At that moment I went out and was like chainsmoking 5 cigarettes.

BAM!

It hit me! A feeling like a unicorn vomiting rainbows all over my face.

I go check their firewall. Shit redirected all email ports from within the network to another server.

Yay nobody got credentials because nobody new it existed. Damn boy.

Hook on to the hostmachine power down the vm, start and hack yourself a root account before shit boots. Luckily I just forgot the credentials to a testvm some time ago so I know that shit. Lesson learned: fucking learn from your mistakes, might be useful sometimes!

Ok fucker what in the world are you doing.

Do some terminal magic and see that it listens on the email ports.

Holy cockriders of the galaxy.

Turns out their former it guy made a script which caught all mails from the server and injected all kind of bullshit and then sent them to real Webserver. And the reason why some mails weren't received was said guy was too dumb to implement Unicode and some mails just broke his script.

That fucker even implented an API to pull all those bullshit refs.

I know your name "Matthias" and I know where you live and what you've done... And to fuck you back for that misery I took your accounts and since you used the same fucking password for everything I took your mail, Facebook and steam account too.

Git gut shithead! You better get a lawyer

I absolutely HATE "web developers" who call you in to fix their FooBar'd mess, yet can't stop themselves from dictating what you should and shouldn't do, especially when they have no idea what they're doing.

So I get called in to a job improving the performance of a Magento site (and let's just say I have no love for Magento for a number of reasons) because this "developer" enabled Redis and expected everything to be lightning fast. Maybe he thought "Redis" was the name of a magical sorcerer living in the server. A master conjurer capable of weaving mystical time-altering spells to inexplicably improve the performance. Who knows?

This guy claims he spent "months" trying to figure out why the website couldn't load faster than 7 seconds at best, and his employer is demanding a resolution so he stops losing conversions. I usually try to avoid Magento because of all the headaches that come with it, but I figured "sure, why not?" I mean, he built the website less than a year ago, so how bad can it really be? Well...let's see how fast you all can facepalm:

1.) The website was built brand new on Magento 1.9.2.4...what? I mean, if this were built a few years back, that would be a different story, but building a fresh Magento website in 2017 in 1.x? I asked him why he did that...his answer absolutely floored me: "because PHP 5.5 was the best choice at the time for speed and performance..." What?!

2.) The ONLY optimization done on the website was Redis cache being enabled. No merged CSS/JS, no use of a CDN, no image optimization, no gzip, no expires rules. Just Redis...

3.) Now to say the website was poorly coded was an understatement. This wasn't the worst coding I've seen, but it was far from acceptable. There was no organization whatsoever. Templates and skin assets are being called from across 12 different locations on the server, making tracking down and finding a snippet to fix downright annoying.

But not only that, the home page itself had 83 custom database queries to load the products on the page. He said this was so he could load products from several different categories and custom tables to show on the page. I asked him why he didn't just call a few join queries, and he had no idea what I was talking about.

4.) Almost every image on the website was a .PNG file, 2000x2000 px and lossless. The home page alone was 22MB just from images.

There were several other issues, but those 4 should be enough to paint a good picture. The client wanted this all done in a week for less than $500. We laughed. But we agreed on the price only because of a long relationship and because they have some referrals they got us in the door with. But we told them it would get done on our time, not theirs. So I copied the website to our server as a test bed and got to work.

After numerous hours of bug fixes, recoding queries, disabling Redis and opting for higher innodb cache (more on that later), image optimization, js/css/html combining, render-unblocking and minification, lazyloading images tweaking Magento to work with PHP7, installing OpCache and setting up basic htaccess optimizations, we smash the loading time down to 1.2 seconds total, and most of that time was for external JavaScript plugins deemed "necessary". Time to First Byte went from a staggering 2.2 seconds to about 45ms. Needless to say, we kicked its ass.

So I show their developer the changes and he's stunned. He says he'll tell the hosting provider create a new server set up to migrate the optimized site over and cut over to, because taking the live website down for maintenance for even an hour or two in the middle of the night is "unacceptable".

So trying to be cool about it, I tell him I'd be happy to configure the server to the exact specifications needed. He says "we can't do that". I look at him confused. "What do you mean we 'can't'?" He tells me that even though this is a dedicated server, the provider doesn't allow any access other than a jailed shell account and cPanel access. What?! This is a company averaging 3 million+ per year in revenue. Why don't they have an IT manager overseeing everything? Apparently for them, they're too cheap for that, so they went with a "managed dedicated server", "managed" apparently meaning "you only get to use it like a shared host".

So after countless phone calls arguing with the hosting provider, they agree to make our changes. Then the client's developer starts getting nasty out of nowhere. He says my optimizations are not acceptable because I'm not using Redis cache, and now the client is threatening to walk away without paying us.

So I guess the overall message from this rant is not so much about the situation, but the developer and countless others like him that are clueless, but try to speak from a position of authority.

If we as developers don't stop challenging each other in a measuring contest and learn to let go when we need help, we can get a lot more done and prevent losing clients. </rant>

A while ago (few months) I was on the train back home when I ran into an old classmate. I know that he's a designer/frontend/wordpress guy and I know that he'll bring anyone down in order to feel good. I also know that he knows jack shit about security/backend.
The convo went like this:

Me: gotta say though, wordpress and its security...
Him: yeah ikr it's bad. (me thinking 'dude you hardly know what the word cyber security means)
Me: yeah, I work at a hosting company now, most sites that get hacked are the wordpress ones.
Him: yeah man, same at my company. I made a security thing for wordpress though so we can't get hacked anymore.
Me; *he doesn't know any backend NOR security..... Let's ask him difficult stuff*
Oh! What language did you use?
Him: yeah it works great, we don't get hacked sites anymore now!
Me: ah yeah but what language did you use?
Him: oh it's not about what language you use, it's about whether it works or not! My system works great!
Me: *yeah.....right.* oh yeah but I'd like to know so I can learn something. What techniques did you use?
Him: well obviously firewalls and shit. It's not about what techniques/technology you use, it's about whether it works or not!

That's the moment I was done with it and steered the convo another way.

You don't know shit about backend or security, cocksucker.

Please stop recommending arch. For real. Stop!

Let's back up. I'm an arch user. Have been for years. I love arch! Like hardcore! But for real, cut it out.

Either they didn't ask and you're being obnoxious or they probably asked "what's a good distro to learn?" Or "Ubuntu holds my hand too much, I want something more consoley" either way, arch is not the answer. Arch is a distro for us stuck up types who like spending all day fixing dependency errors, changing our WM every other week, debating the merits of X vs wayland, and acting better than everyone else.

But here's the thing: I found arch because I wanted something that I could compulsively configure and get really in the weeds. I think most arch users feel that way to some degree. You kinda have to if you want to not be miserable. But many Linux users aren't like that. And that's fine! Let them use mint, or Debian. So they never change their DE. Cinnamon is a great interface! Gnome 2 is totally fine! There's literally nothing wrong with being content with sane defaults and not manually installing every package, and having scheduled releases from a stable source.

Do you tell 7th graders "if you really want to get better at algebra, you should try calculus. You really gain a deep knowledge of math!" No! They will get there when they are good and ready! Or not. It's not a beginner distro. In fact (controversial opinion ahead) it's pretty shitty at being a distro. I have used arch for years! But I don't recommend it to anyone. Because if you want to configure a box for literally 100s of hours (it's never really over is it?), Then you aren't asking anyone about distro recommendations. You've tried them all. You've heard of arch. You been to /r/unixporn.

Stop acting better than everyone else and stop telling people it's better than <other distro here>. It's not. It's different. Very different. And it's not for everyone.

Always postponed learning vim. For my new job I need to know how to work with vim.

Finally a reason not to postpone anymore!

It's maddening how few people working with the internet don't know anything about the protocols that make it work. Web work, especially, I spend far too much time explaining how status codes, methods, content-types etc work, how they're used and basic fundamental shit about how to do the job of someone building internet applications and consumable services.

The following has played out at more than one company:

App: "Hey api, I need some data"
API: "200 (plain text response message, content-type application/json, 'internal server error')"
App: *blows the fuck up

*msg service team*

Me: "Getting a 200 with a plaintext response containing an internal server exception"
Team: "Yeah, what's the problem?"
Me: "...200 means success, the message suggests 500. Either way, it should be one of the error codes. We use the status code to determine how the application processes the request. What do the logs say?"
Team: "Log says that the user wasn't signed in. Can you not read the response message and make a decision?"
Me: "That status for that is 401. And no, that would require us to know every message you have verbatim, in this case, it doesn't even deserialize and causes an exception because it's not actually json."
Team: "Why 401?"
Me: "It's the code for unauthorized. It tells us to redirect the user to the sign in experience"
Team: "We can't authorize until the user signs in"
Me: *angermatopoeia* "Just, trust me. If a user isn't logged in, return 401, if they don't have permissions you send 403"
Team: *googles SO* "Internet says we can use 500"
Me: "That's server error, it says something blew up with an unhandled exception on your end. You've already established it was an auth issue in the logs."
Team: "But there's an error, why doesn't that work?"
Me: "It's generic. It's like me messaging you and saying, "your service is broken". It doesn't give us any insight into what went wrong or *how* we should attempt to troubleshoot the error or where it occurred. You already know what's wrong, so just tell me with the status code."
Team: "But it's ok, right, 500? It's an error?"
Me: "It puts all the troubleshooting responsibility on your consumer to investigate the error at every level. A precise error code could potentially prevent us from bothering you at all."
Team: "How so?"
Me: "Send 401, we know that it's a login issue, 403, something is wrong with the request, 404 we're hitting an endpoint that doesn't exist, 503 we know that the service can't be reached for some reason, 504 means the service exists, but timed out at the gateway or service. In the worst case we're able to triage who needs to be involved to solve the issue, make sense?"
Team: "Oh, sounds cool, so how do we do that?"
Me: "That's down to your technology, your team will need to implement it. Most frameworks handle it out of the box for many cases."
Team: "Ah, ok. We'll send a 500, that sound easiest"
Me: *..l.. -__- ..l..* "Ok, let's get into the other 5 problems with this situation..."

Moral of the story: If this is you: learn the protocol you're utilizing, provide metadata, and stop treating your customers like shit.

Well, here's the OS rant I promised. Also apologies for no blog posts the past few weeks, working on one but I want to have all the information correct and time isn't my best friend right now :/

Anyways, let's talk about operating systems. They serve a purpose which is the goal which the user has.
So, as everyone says (or, loads of people), every system is good for a purpose and you can't call the mainstream systems shit because they all have their use.

Last part is true (that they all have their use) but defining a good system is up to an individual. So, a system which I'd be able to call good, had at least the following 'features':
- it gives the user freedom. If someone just wants to use it for emailing and webbrowsing, fair enough. If someone wants to produce music on it, fair enough. If someone wants to rebuild the entire system to suit their needs, fair enough. If someone wants to check the source code to see what's actually running on their hardware, fair enough. It should be up to the user to decide what they want to/can do and not up to the maker of that system.
- it tries it's best to keep the security/privacy of its users protected. Meaning, by default, no calling home, no integrating users within mass surveillance programs and no unnecessary data collection.
- Open. Especially in an age of mass surveillance, it's very important that one has the option to check the underlying code for vulnerabilities/backdoors. Can everyone do that, nope. But that doesn't mean that the option shouldn't be there because it's also about transparency so you don't HAVE to trust a software vendor on their blue eyes.
- stability. A system should be stable enough for home users to use. For people who like to tweak around? Also, but tweaking *can* lead to instability and crashes, that's not the systems' responsibility.

Especially the security and privacy AND open parts are why I wouldn't ever voluntarily (if my job would depend on it, sure, I kinda need money to stay alive so I'll take that) use windows or macos. Sure, apple seems to care about user privacy way more than other vendors but as long as nobody can verify that through source code, no offense, I won't believe a thing they say about that because no one can technically verify it anyways.

Some people have told me that Linux is hard to use for new/(highly) a-technical people but looking at my own family and friends who adapted fast as hell and don't want to go back to windows now (and mac, for that matter), I highly doubt that. Sure, they'll have to learn something new. But that was also the case when they started to use any other system for the first time. Possibly try a different distro if one doesn't fit?

Problems - sometimes hard to solve on Linux, no doubt about that. But, at least its open. Meaning that someone can dive in as deep as possible/necessary to solve the problem. That's something which is very difficult with closed systems.

The best example in this case for me (don't remember how I did it by the way) was when I mounted a network drive at boot on windows and Linux (two systems using the same webDav drive). I changed the authentication and both systems weren't in for booting anymore. Hours of searching how to unfuck this on windows - I ended up reinstalling it because I just couldn't find a solution.
On linux, i found some article quite quickly telling to remove the entry for the webdav thingy from fstab. Booted into a root recovery shell, chrooted to the harddrive, removed the entry in fstab and rebooted. BAM. Everything worked again.

So yeah, that's my view on this, I guess ;P

Dear children let's talk about how to ask a f***ing question.

You don't just go "I need help. I can't figure it out." We had trainings on this, I sat through 3 hours holding your hand to help you try and understand things.

And yet now we have scheduled another 3 hours to help you figure this out because you said you were having difficulty with it because you couldn't figure it out. How about instead of just saying you "Need help", you start by
1. Explaining what you are trying to accomplish
2. What specific issue are you facing? Is there an error message or something?
3. What have you already tried thus far that didn't work?

Instead of "I NEED HELP I CAN'T FIGURE IT OUT!" that is the sign of a lazy f****ing engineer, someone who doesn't want to think, who doesn't want to learn something new who wants to just coast by. Especially when this is going to become an increasingly important part of your job.

And of course you currently are still a whole job level above me because sitting around and keeping a chair warm for 10 years means you are a valuable contributor, instead of what you can actually DO!

This bugs me so much. So remember kids, when you need help, or need to ask a question, ASK IT THE RIGHT F****ING WAY!

Rant && story time

When I was in first grade of high school (age of 15) we had a class of informatics. Nothing unusuall, you say, but this teacher was ummm ... Let's just say special. Most of his classes looked like this:

TEACHER: Ok, class, today we are going to learn/work with <insert a name of a software here>. # And then he sat behind his desk, falling silent for the rest of the lesson. We had to look up the software ourselves, and learn to use it. Or not.

Next lesson, he just said:

TEACHER: Continue your work from the last time.

And on the third lesson of each cycle, there was grading in place. He walked through the class and if he saw you working with the software, you got a 5 (that is A for our western friends), but if you were doing something completely different, you got a 1 (that is F). That just ment that you had to open the program and wave the mouse around while he was looking at your screen, and you got a guaranteed 5.

And then the cycle repeated.

However, this is not the story about the teacher in general, it's a story about one specific event involving him.

Around the beginning of the year (calendar one, not school one; that is middle of the school year) a programming competition took place.

The first stage (school competition), was easy; I got 45 points out of 50 (I was second-best on the whole school, of all years (students from 15 to 20 years of age).

A few weeks later, second stage (national competition) took place. However, when I got to the registration dosk, things got weird.

I patiently waited in line, but when I got to the front, the assistant asked me for year and school.

ME: I come from SCHOOL_NAME and go to first year.
ASSISTANT1: All students who go to SCHOOL_NAME need to go to that separate line.

It seemed strange, but I walked over anyhow. Maybe there was enough students from our school so that new line opened for us.

ME: I go to first year. # I assumed I don't have to tell the name as the line was only for our school.
ASSISTANT2: Ok, but you need to go to that row. *points to the row wherexI just came from* # WTF is going on now?
ME: Ummm, I just came from there, and they told me to come here.
ASSISTANH2: Oh, you go to SCHOOL_NAME?
ME: Yeah
ASSISTANT2: Ok then. What is your name? # Thank Knuth, one mistery less
ME: My name is SELF.NAME
After a short search through the envelopes:
ASSISTANT2: Here you go # Both the fact that my name was completely misspeled and the procedure it took us to finally get to the correct envelope are a story for a different time.

Skip forward some 10 minutes, to the lecture hall where they just told us all the instructions and started to divide us into classrooms

ASSISTANT3:
for CLASSROOM, STUDENT_LIST in STUDENT_DIVISION:
for STUDENT in STUDENT_LIST:
STUDENT.invite(CLASSROOM)

At the end, only a few people, including me, remained.

ASSISTANT3: Is there anyone not from SCHOOL_NAME? # Umm, yeah, WTF is going on now?
Noone replied.
ASSISTANT3: OK, you all, come with me now, we will find you a classroom.

From there on, competition went fine, I came in second, got a new phone as a prize, no complaints.

However, later on, I realized what was the reason for all that weird behaviour.

Signup date for the second part was on LAST_SIGNUP_DATE, which was at least two weeks before the competition, and signups had to be done untill 1600 that day.

Our teacher signed us up at 2200. ON THE FUCKING DAY BEFORE THE COMPETITION. OF COURSE THEY HAD NOTHING PLANNED FOR US, NO ENVELOPES, NO COMPUTERS, NOTHING, IF WE WERE SIGNED UP LESS THAN FUCKING 12 HOURS BEFORE THE COMPETITION INSTEAD OF 2 WEEKS EARLIER. THE ONLY REASON WE GOT TO COMPETE WAS BECAUSE SOME PEOPLE DIDN'T SHOW UP AND WE USED THE PC'S MENT FOR THEM. IF EVERYONE SHOWED UP WE FUCKING COULDN'T COMPETE.

And from that moment on, I always signed myself up for all of the competitions; better safe than sorry.

I was assigned a girl that's new to the industry (but with a master's degree).

I had high hopes, as people told me she is quite a curious fellow. As I am just a junior Dev with 2 yrs of experience Ididn't know if I could handle her.

We started working on a project. Which was a change request for a previous project I had developed. I gave her 2 days to read and understand the functional requirements of previous project and this CR. Then explained everything too.

Then I gave here another 3 days to read the previous design document to learn how this code worked.

I asked her multiple times if she has any questions. She said she got everything. Cool.

One week goes by. We start to code the CR while she is shadowing me. I explained why we chose one of the two approaches. And why we are making any of the changes. She as usual nodded in agreement.

I asked her to create Unit test cases.

She couldn't write even one. So, I quizzed her, she knew nothing about the project! Nothing at all!

FUCK!

I wrote down the test cases in short hand and told her to document it (by reffering previous UTC). She wrote the test cases in short hand in the document. And she reused the previous document and did not even clean it out.

After fixing the document I asked her to execute them. But nope, she doesn't even know how the application flows for this project. FML.

It took her 3 days to write and test 8 test cases.

Now she is assigned to me in another project. This one is more complicated. And I gave her a function skeleton to complete. I figured that it will take me 15 minutes so let's give her a day. But nope. 3 days no progress.

I get it someone might not be quick to grasp something. But you know what grinds my gears? That even after this you act like a know it all! Fuck! For someone who hasn't worked with her she is the most dilligent developer.

How the fuck does someone survive masters and suck so bad!

I had to open the desktop app to write this because I could never write a rant this long on the app.

This will be a well-informed rebuttal to the "arrays start at 1 in Lua" complaint. If you have ever said or thought that, I guarantee you will learn a lot from this rant and probably enjoy it quite a bit as well.

Just a tiny bit of background information on me: I have a very intimate understanding of Lua and its c API. I have used this language for years and love it dearly.

[START RANT]

"arrays start at 1 in Lua" is factually incorrect because Lua does not have arrays. From their documentation, section 11.1 ("Arrays"), "We implement arrays in Lua simply by indexing tables with integers."

From chapter 2 of the Lua docs, we know there are only 8 types of data in Lua: nil, boolean, number, string, userdata, function, thread, and table

The only unfamiliar thing here might be userdata. "A userdatum offers a raw memory area with no predefined operations in Lua" (section 26.1). Essentially, it's for the API to interact with Lua scripts. The point is, this isn't a fancy term for array.

The misinformation comes from the table type. Let's first explore, at a low level, what an array is. An array, in programming, is a collection of data items all in a line in memory (The OS may not actually put them in a line, but they act as if they are). In most syntaxes, you access an array element similar to:

array[index]

Let's look at c, so we have some solid reference. "array" would be the name of the array, but what it really does is keep track of the starting location in memory of the array. Memory in computers acts like a number. In a very basic sense, the first sector of your RAM is memory location (referred to as an address) 0. "array" would be, for example, address 543745. This is where your data starts. Arrays can only be made up of one type, this is so that each element in that array is EXACTLY the same size. So, this is how indexing an array works. If you know where your array starts, and you know how large each element is, you can find the 6th element by starting at the start of they array and adding 6 times the size of the data in that array.

Tables are incredibly different. The elements of a table are NOT in a line in memory; they're all over the place depending on when you created them (and a lot of other things). Therefore, an array-style index is useless, because you cannot apply the above formula. In the case of a table, you need to perform a lookup: search through all of the elements in the table to find the right one. In Lua, you can do:

a = {1, 5, 9};
a["hello_world"] = "whatever";

a is a table with the length of 4 (the 4th element is "hello_world" with value "whatever"), but a[4] is nil because even though there are 4 items in the table, it looks for something "named" 4, not the 4th element of the table.

This is the difference between indexing and lookups. But you may say,

"Algo! If I do this:

a = {"first", "second", "third"};
print(a[1]);

...then "first" appears in my console!"

Yes, that's correct, in terms of computer science. Lua, because it is a nice language, makes keys in tables optional by automatically giving them an integer value key. This starts at 1. Why? Lets look at that formula for arrays again:

Given array "arr", size of data type "sz", and index "i", find the desired element ("el"):

el = arr + (sz * i)

This NEEDS to start at 0 and not 1 because otherwise, "sz" would always be added to the start address of the array and the first element would ALWAYS be skipped. But in tables, this is not the case, because tables do not have a defined data type size, and this formula is never used. This is why actual arrays are incredibly performant no matter the size, and the larger a table gets, the slower it is.

That felt good to get off my chest. Yes, Lua could start the auto-key at 0, but that might confuse people into thinking tables are arrays... well, I guess there's no avoiding that either way.

I finally got this book. Let's learn something new (for me)

I hate my job. I am furious at my colleagues.

Last November I asked my colleagues (A and B) to help me learn to use something, let's call it Tool. They said okay and set a date for training. Next week they said that they had too much work to do so we'll​ have to postpone. And the next date was also postponed and the next one too, and so on.

Three months in,​ colleague C kept dicking around and being a complete jackass telling me that he refused to work with me for I don't use the Tool.
Not like I didn't want to learn to use the Tool, I simply couldn't. I have long before googled how to use the Tool but in no way can Google ever tell me about our own company workflow, our methods, habits and such.

I was furious, but I am also a the most fucking patient person ever so I let it slide. The Tool wasn't actually needed that much to do my job anyways. And I have known for a while that colleague C needed to push someone under him to feel good about himself.

A few more dates had been set but got cancelled for reasons.
Meanwhile both A and B started to look down on me for not knowing how to use the Tool. I started to feel depressed.

Today B held a "workshop" about the Tool. It took two hours. He was not prepared, had a hangover and generally had a hard time concentrating.
He used aliases that he set up only for himself to show the usage of the Tool instead of commands that a beginner would understand (or google). He kept mumbling and I hsd trouble understanding him. His lecture lacked direction and was all over the place.

I am devastated and furious. I had been waiting since November for this training and when the time actually came he pulled something out of his ass and called it a workshop.

I didn't even get answers for my questions.

Now I feel that I am actually in a worse position than before because while I still cannot use the Tool, they can tell me that there was a workshop and I should've paid closer attention.

I want to quit so bad.

GOD FUCKIN DAMMIT
I WILL FUCKIN KICK YOU ON YOUR FUCKING THROAT.

Programming Languages and Linux groups in facebook are a fuckin pain to watch.

Some people make groups so all can benefit and help each other, talk about mutual interests, BUT NO SOME FUCKERS WILL SPAM SHIT AND MAKE YOU WANNA SMACK THEIR FUCKIN HEAD.

THERE IS A FUCKIN FAQ SECTION THAT ANSWERS ALL THE FUCKIN NEWBIE QUESTIONS. WHY THE FUCKIN HELL YOU SPAM IF YOU HAVE NO FUCKIN CLUE WHAT THE HELL YOU ARE DOING?

You come to a python group and ask if it's possible to get context from a site. I'M NOT MENTIONING THE FUCKIN FACT THAT THIS IS A SIMPLY FUCKIN QUERY TO A SEARCH ENGINE ALSO IT'S MENTIONED IN THE FUCKIN FAQ. Let's move on. We tell you yes, there is BeautifulSoup for that. After 5 fuckin mins YOU COME AND MAKE A NEW POST THAT SHOWS YOU CANT FUCKIN ITERATE A GODDAMN FUCKIN LIST. I'm not pro either, i don't forbid you to learn, BUT FUCKIN LEARN THE BASICS THAT ARE PROVIDED TO YOU FROM GREAT FUCKIN RESOURCES BEFORE TRYING TO ATTEMPT SOMETHING MORE COMPLICATED. AND IF YOU NEED HELP PROVIDE CODE THAT WE CAN USE. NOT A FUCKIN PHOTOGRAPH FROM YOUR MOBILE

Let's go on the Linux groups.
SINCE YOU FUCKIN JOIN A LINUX GROUP YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO KNOW WHAT THE FUCK IS LINUX. IT'S A FUCKIN OPERATING SYSTEM RIGHT?
Then you spam shit like, UBUNTU OR MINT 5 MINUTES AFTER SOMEONE ELSE MADE THE SAME VERY QUESTION 30 MINS AGO. WHICH WAS ANSWERED AGAIN YESTERDAY.

"What are the benefits of Linux". NONE YOU TWAT, IF YOU NEED ME TO TELL YOU THE BENEFITS OF THE SYSTEM THAT YOU USE THEN WHY THE HELL YOU BOTHER.

Next.
You say you have problems setting up XAMPP. We tell you that since you are on linux better use LAMP. You ignore us and spam your fuckin problem with XAMPP. IM GONNA FIND YOU AND IM GONNA MAKE YOU CHEW MY FUCKIN SHOES YOU PIECE OF SHIT.

I'm not even mentioning the kali wannabe hackers.

Conclusion:
DO A FUCKIN SMALL RESEARCH BEFORE SPAMMING THE SHIT OUT OF STUPID FUCKIN QUESTIONS. AND IF YOU CANT EVEN SEARCH, LEARN TO ASK IN ENGLISH THAT IS FUCKIN UNDERSTANDABLE SO SOMEONE CAN GUIDE YOU ABOUT WHAT YOU SHOULD SEARCH

OH FUCKIN GAWD IM GONNA THROW MY LAPTOP OUT OF THE WINDOW

At one of my previous companies, there was a guy, let's call him X.
X was the ideal employee.
X used to come to office at 8.
X used to go to sleep in AC office.
X used to wake up at 10 when everyone started coming in.
X used to play Uno and Pokemon Go till 6.
X was a master in Uno and Pokemon Go.
X used to wait till 8 to get free cab facility.
X didn't do one single productive piece of shit whole day.

My boss loved X Because he came early and left late.
My boss didn't give a damn if that person even switched on his laptop or not.
My boss didn't care about productivity.
I didn't come on time and didn't leave on time (I travelled in non-traffic hours)
I slogged my ass off because I really wanted to learn.
My boss scolded me, asked to be like X.
This was the last straw.
I resigned the next day.

I never wanted to be like X. Seeing him daily, motivated me so much.
When I worked, I focussed on it, I didn't keep checking the clock waiting for it to hit 5 pm.
I aimed for productivity, set realistic targets and always achieved them, no matter what.
My boss was an a--hole. I met X and Boss recently. Both are still in the same role, just scraping through.
Felt really good that I worked hard and have achieved something in life ^_^

!dev What pisses me off about today's job market is that the following idea is a naive one:

Let's just find a junior position and learn on the job so you can demonstrate your skills to your employer so they can promote you.

Wroooong. Reality: They only hire the most gifted geniuses who already know everything and they don't have the budget for someone who is rusty.

Welcome to the modern world of the CompSci market, where you are expected to have expert level knowledge in every language, especially in Software Engineering and Algorithms. And if you don't remember how to write an efficient Comparator algorithm in under 3 minutes, you're screwed.

Yaay.

!rant

Let's take a moment to appreciate interested and enthousiastic non-developers who really want to learn a programming language.

I am studying Medical IT at my college and most of my classmates aren't coming from an IT background.
We're currently working with Java, PHP, JavaScript and some require Node for their semester projects.

Some of my classmates approach me when they're stuck while coding and I try to teach them as much as possible so they understand what they are doing wrong and how to fix it.
I also show them how they can optimise their code step by step and they love it!

As a classmate told me yesterday:
"It's always so much fun working with you. I come up with a small problem, but I end up learning so much more about programming when solving a problem with you. I appreciate that."

It's a mindset I've learned when I was doing my developer apprenticeship back in the day. One of my colleagues told me: "if they want your help because they need a quick fix, tell them to kiss your ass. If you know they've already tried everything they could and ask you specifically because they want to understand what they are doing wrong, they are future developers with great potential, so go teach them."

May the force be with you, my enthousiastic little non-devs ❤️

For fucks sake, just because you don't know anything besides JS, you don't have to constantly complain how it's "so fucked up"!

Yeah there's a lot of frameworks. So what? Python has 50+ wsgi frameworks just for server-side apps, Linux has literary hundreds of desktop environments, C++ has over 30 actively-developed UI frameworks, and let's not even get started on CMSs or game engines. And each language comes with its own dependency management or two, NPM discourages static linking & bundling dependencies until the very end, while some others only recommend dynamically linking widely-available dependencies & always bundling the remaining ones.

Software development is constantly evolving, and for most time there's no right or wrong approach. And when one approach is chosen over another, there's a reason for that. Imagine you just found a perfect library for your use case, but some idiot decided to only offer minified code with bundled jQuery? Or a different idiot made it impossible to have multiple versions of a dependency on your system without resorting to one of various third-party hacks?

Every language has a ton of various frameworks & libraries that ultimately do the same thing, every language has a bunch of design choices you probably don't understand at first, and every language was made with a purpose and the fact that you're using it proves it achieved that.

Last but not least, all devs had to learn about quirks in various languages, and they're fucking tired when someone who barely knows a language tries to act smart going "ahaha how the fuck 0.1 + 0.2 isn't 0.3".

The year was 2021 and we have to implement X
Alice, the manager: let's do this and this
Me: actually that won't scale, I did the same in my previous company. Here's an analysis on why it doesn't scale
Alice: nope, we'll have to do it like that. If it doesn't scale we'll fix it. It's a learning opportunity.
The feature was rolled out, and we got tons of alerts after 1 week.
Alice: haha what a ride! At least the team learned something new
Me: I didn't learn anything new. All I got was stress and disrupted sleep because of those midnight incidents...

Then 2022 came, Alice was promoted thanks to the incredible leadership to deliver X, I joined a different project, a part of this project is to implement Y, similar to X.
Bob, the manager: let's do this and this
Me: actually that won't scale, I did the same in my previous project. Here's an analysis on why it doesn't scale, you can ask Alice if you want.
Bob: nope, we'll have to do it like that. If it doesn't scale we'll fix it. It's a learning opportunity.
The feature was rolled out, and we got tons of alerts after 1 week.
Bob: haha what a ride! At least the team learned something new
Me: I didn't learn anything new. All I got was stress and disrupted sleep because of those midnight incidents...

It's 2023 now, Bob got promoted thanks to the awesome leadership to roll out Y, I joined another project, which requires us to develop Z, similar to X and Y.
Chris, the manager: let's do this and this
Me: ah shit here we go again...

I see all these tools for the past few years claiming...

"build an app without writing code"

Great, if you want to build a prototype and then try to find a technical co-founder who can actually build something.

Otherwise, none of us need another shitty cookie-cutter app.

There is a 0% chance you can build anything that will scale without writing some code. Your best case scenario is you sell it to some sucker who doesn't understand that what they are buying is garbage.

I give those folks 3 options...

1. Find a technical co-founder
2. Learn to build software
3. Fuck off

Thinking you can build a software company without building actual quality software if fucking moronic.

Of course, that won't stop the thousands of business grads each year from trying and saying...

"I have such a great idea, I just need someone to build it"

Let's get things straight. You have nothing. NOTHING! You idea is worthless without execution.

Me: let's go learn ruby on rails
My cat: I don't think so buddy

So, after weeks of reading spicy rants from all of you, I finally decided to join your community ; even if I'm only a student, I've encountered some solid crap in my internships.

Let's go back in time bois. Two years ago, I started my first intership at a Fortune 500 company (this doesn't exists in France, but whatever, this is nearly the same category). I was supposed to build some file sharing system for the office. Before getting into it, I briefly thought aboyt what technos I could use to build it and make a sweet interface for my co-workers, in 10 weeks, and not a single another day.

Expectations
> Nice team with devs that I could ask things about and learn solid tricks that would even amaze David Copperfield
> Having a nice dev environment

Reality
> Alone on this project
> No fucking dev environment, I had to build everything on Notepad
> No CI
> No SCM
> And, the worst, Ladies and Gentlemans,

I FUCKING HAD TO WORK IN A SINGLE FILE IN A CLOSED ENVIRONMENT.
NO WEBSERVER, NO DEDICATED SPACE.
I HAD TO REQUEST A SPECIFIC ENVIRONMENT IN A CLOSED CUSTOM CMS THAT WAS SERVING FILES, SO THIS FORMAT COULD BE READ ON FOLDER OPENING IN IE9 (FIREFOX FORBIDDEN).
YOU HAD TO MIX HTML, CSS AND JS IN A SINGLE FILE. NO SERVER-SIDE LANGUAGES, ONLY STATIC LINKS, NO FRAMEWORKS (if we can call jQuery, Bootstrap, Semantic UI and all these thinks "Frameworks").

> mfw at the end of the intership

Hey there! I am pretty new but old to the community xD. Let me explain and introduce myself.

The post might be a little longer, depending on my inspiration, read it at your own risk ;)

I am here on devRant for almost a year now but, this is my first post. I wasn't active until a week ago or so. Why? Well, at the time, I didn't find posts interesting enough to keep me from work or school. I must addmit I was either stupid or confused (not uncommon for me).

Well, I am high school student who, when not prepearing for an entrance exam for faculty, is learning and doing indie game developent with my cousin's support.

Even though I was intermediate gamer whan I was younger, passionate but not addicted, I didn't even think about getting into game development until my cousin showed me one secific game and told me a story about it. Let's stop here and let me tell you why I tagged this rant with wk88.

I've already mentioned my cousin, he's my wk88 trouble. Why? I'll tell you only one thing. He studies CS at University of Cambridge, UK. He earned the scholarship by competing and earning multiple medals in programming in International Olympiad in Informatics. And here I am struggling with ******* trigonometric identities. But nvm, let's move on.

I told you about the game but didn't actually tell you the title and who developed it. So, my inspiration for getting into game development was Alexander Bruce , guy who designed Antichamber. If you haven't heard of it before/tried it yet, give it a shot, you probably won't be disappointed of you like fucking with your brain.

Here're some facts:
- Started learning programming at the age of 12, thought by my brother using Free Pascal in Lazarus.
- Have been learning C++ for 4 years and C# for 3, both at the same time.
- While learning these two, started building .NET based back-end and doing SQL stuff; failed to finish it, gave up after I realised I needed some advanced front-end skills, which I didn't want to learn, to implement a lot of things I wanted.
- Played a piano since I was 11 and been playing around with music production recently.

Here I am now, learning Blender and hoping that one day I will publish the game I've been developing for past year and a half.

Hope you didn't waste your time reading this. I will try to keep you up with things I experience durning future development.

Cheers! 🍻

Guys, please help me answer this intellectual being. The more stupid the answer, the better. Even better is if there is like a fake loooooonnnngggg step by step guide of it. NB: tafadhali == please.

"Let's create a docker-swarm cluster thingy for this application with horizontal scaling to learn docker and run this application better!"

This stuff is so overwhelming and I don't understand half of how to possibly set this up 😅

"Colleague" (he's there for day-time spending, he doesn't actually have a job) of mine keeps telling me I should F off with pushing for Docker, Git and CakePHP because they add an additional amount of learning for interns that they might not need to learn for school.

He wants us to keep working with the following:
- Google Drive for codebase sharing
- FileZilla (or atleast an FTP) for deployment
- "from scatch" PHP code where business logic and front-end code are all slapped into one big file and where functions are also slapped into one big file. also, opening and closing the database connection for each query made

Guy basically wants us to deliver a crappy products that we might not be able to maintain and are prone to a wide-variety of issues.

Yes, let's limit our company to *only* the things that interns need to learn for school, what could *possibly* go wrong :^)

Tl;dr younger people on here, especially passionate ones, don't worry about comparing yourself to people who appear to have tremendous laurels, those people are probably completely full of shit.

I say kids because you may be like me and more likely to underestimate your ability or more likely to be modest about your accomplishments, and you're too young to know you're doing that.

Either way. I've been doing a web development boot camp the last six months. It's been quite good with the teachers, and some of the classmates. Hell career services is now run by this woman who really actually seems like she knows what she's doing. It's pretty awesome.

That said, my teammates on the group projects have been a different story. I've primarily stuck with some of them out of loyalty and friendship. But one guy in particular has pissed me off to no end. He said he was a computer scientist going for masters. I thought I could learn from this guy. Now I wonder if he's a pathological liar.

Our first project he made one commit. Ripped straight from the homework. It was a simple api mash-up so alright. Fair enough. Next project was when he really started to piss me off.

He didn't do shit the first week and a half. No PM, no design, no programming. Nothing. Comes in two days before project is due, and me one other guy are fucking scrambling. Because of course no one else is there.

I live significantly further than my teammates mind you. We're busting ass. This fucking guy, this dumbass pick who is convinced he's a genius that will work in higher academia clobbers our whole fucking repo.

Why you ask? To put in an unrelated commit that replicated homework from the week before. Why you ask, again? Because this person is a borderline sociopath trying to appear busy in the commit logs.

We're onto the third project now. I spend days designing something original. Side note: I fucking hate design.

So I design my heart out come up with something awesome. This fuck ass, disappears. And another group member. This was the end of November, I hear from this prick last week about refactoring to ES6. But here's the kicker-fucker, our shit ALREADY WAS IN ES6!

I go in Saturday, slack a message I'll be late. I see this fucking "genius dedicated computer scientist" leaving the fucking university shadily checking to see who was watching. He saw me see him. Coward tried to shrug it off.

Here we are, end of semester. He gets the same certification as I do. The difference? I actually know what I'm taking about, I haven't paid in full to fail.

So never, ever fucking ever take what someone says on their resume or LinkedIn as truth. The better it sounds, the more full of shit they may very well be.

And as for our presentation on Saturday? I plan on handling that but letting him do all of the talking. Let's even see if he knows what the project is about :).

New boss: So, you'll do just some coding, we just need to restructure current DB.
Me: Ok

One month later...
Boss: So, we are creating new LMS in WORDPRESS (yeah, fcking wordpress) so you'll do this and that and...
Me: Oh, well I like challenges so let's see.

Another month later...
Boss: WE NEED OFFLINE MOBILE APP THAT WILL DOWNLOAD WHOLE FUCKING WP WITH EVERY SINGLE VIDEO AND EVERYTHING AND STUDENT WILL LEARN FROM THAT. WE ARE OPENING IT IN ONE MONTH.

I've been lurking on devrant a while now, I figure it's time to add my first rant.

Little background and setting a frame of reference for the rant: I'm currently a software engineer in the bioinformatics field. I have a computer science background whereas a vast majority of those around me, especially other devs, are people with little to no formal computer background - mostly biology in some form or another. Now, this said, a lot of the other devs are excellent developers, but some are as bad as you could imagine.

I started at a new company in April. About a month after joining a dev who worked there left, and I inherited the pipeline he maintained. Primarily 3 perl scripts (yes, perl, welcome to bioinformatics, especially when it comes to legacy code like is seen in this pipeline) that mostly copied and generated some files and reports in different places. No biggie, until I really dove in.

This dev, which I barely feel he deserves to be called, is a biology major turned computer developer. He was hired at this company and learned to program on the job. That being said, I give him a bit of a pass as I'm sure he did not have had an adequate support structure to teach him any better, but still, some of this is BS.

One final note: not all of the code, especially a lot of the stupid logic, in this pipeline was developed by this other dev. A lot of it he adopted himself. However, he did nothing about it either, so I put fault on him.

Now, let's start.
1. perl - yay bioinformatics
2. Redundant code. Like, you literally copied 200+ lines of code into a function to change 3 lines in that code for a different condition, and added if(condition) {function();} else {existing code;}?? Seriously??
3. Whitesmiths indentation style.. why? Just, why? Fuck off with that. Where did you learn that and why do you insist on using it??
4. Mixing of whitesmiths and more common K&R indentation.
5. Fucked indentation. Code either not indented and even some code indented THE WRONG WAY
6. 10+ indentation levels. This, not "terrible" normally, but imagine this with the last 3 points. Cannot follow the code at freaking all.
7. Stupid logic. Like, for example, check if a string has a comma in it. If it does, split the string on the comma and push everything to an array. If not, just push the string to the array.... You, you know you can just split the string on the comma and push it, right?? If there is no comma it will be an array containing the original string.. Why the fuck did you think you needed to add a condition for that??
8. Functions that are called to set values in global variables, arrays, and hashes.. function has like 5 lines in it and is called in 2 locations. Just keep that code in place!
9. 50+ global variables/hashes/arrays in one of the scripts with no clear way to tell how/when values are set nor what they are used for.
10. Non-descriptive names for everything
11. Next to no comments in the code. What comments there are are barely useful.
12. No documentation

There's more, but this is all I can think to identify right now. All together these issues have made this pipeline the pinnacle of all the garbage that I've had to work on.

Attaching some screenshots of just a tiny fraction of the code to show some of the crap I'm talking about.

how to become a true scum master:

- formulate jira tasks for your inferiors as vague as possible, best they don't make any sense

- before sprint start, ask the subhuman being to estimate storypoints, and if they say they can't really tell with this description and choose the highest estimate, say "okay, let's estimate it to one sprint length", so they can actually work on it within one sprint (which makes total sense)

- if the scum dares to question the content of the ticket and begs for more details, be like teflon and give no useful answer at all. if they continue asking for a meeting to discuss the ticket, tell them to have a meeting with a coworker about it (who also has no clue). don't be available for them because you have more important stuff to do.

- bully them during daily standups that they didn't create clear subtasks from this task and criticize them because you have no idea what they are doing. tell them they are having performance issues and suspect them to sit on their lazy asses all day.

- criticize the team in general for bad performance, bad item tracking and never say something nice, to make sure everybody loses even the last bit of intrinsic motivation for the project.

stay tuned to learn how to make yourself a skull throne out of those filthy dev smartasses ^.^

Here's a real tip for people new to the industry.

It's one of those things that's been said over and over again but very few can really seem to employ. I suggest you learn it /well/.

You are not your code. Criticisms of your code, ideas, or your thought processes, is not a criticism of YOU. You absolutely cannot take criticisms of your work personally.

We are engineers. We strive to seek the best solution at all times.

If someone has found a problem with your code or with an idea or whatnot, it is coming from a place of "this is not the best solution", NOT "you're an idiot".

It's coming from a place of "I'm closing this PR because it is not a change I feel suits this project", NOT "I'm closing this PR because it's coming from a woman".

It's coming from a place of "This feature request is ridiculous/this bug is not actually a bug", NOT "you're a fucking idiot, fuck you".

It's coming from a place of "I've already had to address this in a number of issues before and it's eaten up a considerable amount of my time already", NOT "I don't even know you and this I don't have time for a nobody".

You do not get to be bitchy to maintainers because they denied your request. It's not a reflection of you at all. But if you're arguing with someone who has maintained a piece of code for almost a decade, and they're telling you something authoritative, believe them. They're probably smarter than you on this subject. They've probably thought about it more. They've probably seen their code used in many different places. They have more experience than you with that codebase in almost all cases.

Believe me, if we cared about who was behind all of the issues, pull requests, etc. we get, we'd get NOTHING done. Stop taking shit personally. It's a skill, not a defense mechanism. Nobody has the time to sugar coat every little thing.

Let's normalize directness and stop wasting time during technical discussions into opportunities for ego-stroking and circle-jerking and back-patting.

TL;DR you suck, I suck and everybody sucks, deal with it....

------------------------------------

Let me let off some steam, since I've had enough of people hating on languages "just because"

Every language has it's drawbacks and quirks, BUT they have their strengths also. Saying "I hate {language}" is just you being and ignorant prick and probably your head is so far up your ass that you look like an ass hat. With that being said, every language is either good or bad depending on the developer writing in it. Let's give you an example:

If I ware to give you a brick and ask you to put a nail in a plank, can you do it? Yes, it will be easier if you do it with a hammer, but you have a brick, so hammer is out of the question. If you hit your thumb while doing it... well... sorry, but it is not the bricks fault - it is YOU!

JavaScript, yes it has a whole lot of problems, but it works, you can do a ton of stuff and does a good job at that, it is evolving through node and typescript (and others, just a personal pref), BUT if you used js when you ware debugging that jquery (1.0) plugin written in the free time of a 13 yo, who copy pasted a bunch from SO, well, it is not js' problem - deal with it. Same goes for PHP, i've been there where you had a single `index.php` with bazillion lines of code, did a bunch of eval and it was called MVC, but it also is evolving.. thing is all languages allow you to do some dumb stuff so YOU have to be responsible to not fuck it up (which you always DO btw, we all do). Difference is PHP/JS roll with it because the assumption is that you know what you are doing, which again - newsflash - you don't.

More or less I would blame that shit on businesses which decided to go with undergrads to save money instead of investing in their product, hell, I am in a major company that does not invest that doesn't care a whole lot about dev /tech stuff and now everybody's mother is an engineer - they care about money, because investors care about money (ROI) and because clean code does not pay the bills, but money does.

If we get all of the good practices and apply them to each language every one of them has it's place, that is why there is no "The Language", even if there was, we STILL ware going to fuck it up and probably it was going to be even worse than where we are now.

Study, improve, rinse and repeat... There are SENIORS and LEADS out there that are about 25-30 and have no fucking clue about the language, because they have stuck up their heads up the ass of frameworks and refuse to take a breath of clean air and consider something different than their dogmatic framework "way" of doing things.. That is the result you are seeing. Let me give you a fresh example to illustrate where I am at atm:

Le me works with ZendFramework 2.3-2.5 (why not, which is PHP5+ running on PHP7 [fancy, eh]), and little me writes a module for said project, and tries to contain it in its own space, i.e not touching anything outside of the folder of the module so it is SELF-CONTAINED (see, practices), during 2-3-4 iterations of code review, I've had to modify 4 different modules with `if (somthing === self::SOMETHING_TYPE)` as requested by my TL, which resulted in me not covering 3 use-cases after the changes and not adding a new event (the fw is event-driven, cuz.. reasons) so I have to use a bunch of ifs in the code, to check a config value and do shit. That is the way of I am asked to do things I hate what I've done and the fact that because of CR I have lost case-coverage, a week of work and the same TL will be on my ass on monday that things are now "perfect".

The biggest things is "we care about convention and code style"... right.... That is not because of the language, not because of me, not because of the framework - it is some dude's opinion that you hate, not the language.

New stuff are better, reinventing the wheel is also good, if it wasn't you would've had a few stone circular things on your car and things ware going to be like that - we need to try and try, that is the only way we actually learn shit.

Until things change in the trade, we will be on the same boat, complaining about the same shit over and over, you and me won't be alive probably but things will not change a bit.

We live in a place where state is considered good, god objects necessary (can you believe it, I've got kudos for using the term 'God Object'... yep, let that sink in). If you really hate something, please, oh god I beg you, show me how you will do it better and I will shake your hand and buy you a beer, but until then, please keep your ass-hurt fanboy opinion to your self, no one gives a shit about what you think, we will die and the world will not notice...

Am I the only one?
Do {
I want to know EVERY FUCKN SKILL A DEV CAN POSSIBLYHAVE, but I want to know it all NOW..
googling 30 times for tutorials and posts about a topic,
opening 30 tabs,
then spending around 30 seconds on each one ...
Trying 1-2 tutorials,
not understanding why I dont get this shit...
this is stupid
loosing interest in 3..2..1...
Aaand let's try and learn this new skill..
} while(true)

Welp

Let's learn something new
P.S. look on the comments, that's something eye opener

I have a colleague, let's call him Zigo.

Each time we have a technical discussion inside the team Zigo wants to always impose his opinion. Even if it's the dumbest thing ever.

Zigo thinks he's always right.

Zigo never accepts other's arguments.

Zigo thinks he's smarter than everyone...

Hey Zigo... f**k off and learn to respect your teammates.

I'm sure all of you have (or had) a Zigo in your team.

PS : I've known people that were like Zigo, but they have the technical background & knowledge that "allows" them to be like that. The only problem is that our Zigo doesn't have all these qualities...

PPS : sorry for my English - it is not my strong suit.

Is it just me or what. I had begun learning web development (but prefer C, shell scripting, Linux... ).

One thing that amazes me - besides having to learn 1356367626785576 technologies to get something done and the fact we get a fresh new amazing framework every 0.00000000000234 seconds - is CSS.

Amazing, I made a navigation bar where I wanted the items to be displayed in the horizontal position, so I
.navbar li, a {display:inline-block}

Works fine.

Next day I'm doing the same from scratch, doesn't fucking work. I look the previous design, HTML structure looks identical, I only use a different font face and colors.

After a while I randomly decided to put a <div> around the a element in order to do something else, update the page and... Voilá, text is in line.

Like... Wtf.

I'm like fuck it. No way I want to work with this shit, let's go back to shell.

// This is not a Rant, it's a sad story

I am a Software Engg. Student at my college, and I am a scholar, I stand 1st rank in my department for my academics. Our college expects us to do an internship this semester break, and I am stuck. The college expects us to do an internship for a period of around 6 weeks from a company with a CMM level 3. The real pain is the fact that the college didn't prepare us with the right skill set to get an internship like that. And in the end all our college wants is a certificate to show to them that I have done an internship.

My problem is, the people who don't have the slighest skill to do an internship are getting certificates because they have contacts, and they have no intentions to learn anything. But, here I am, although I believe I don't have that good skill set either, but I am stuck with no contacts, no internship offers, and no responses from the company I have applied to. Don't know what I am gonna do, but I have a zeal to do perform well, let's hope I find an opportunity to exhibit my talents.

If anybody can help me, please do. 🙏❤

TL;DR: shitty day, but stickers made my day

First off, I'd like to thank @dfox and @trogus for the stickers.

I had a really shitty day, It started off something like this. Usual day at University, faculty not teaching anything. Messed up shit with the girl I like very much, still not talking at this point. Pretty much downhill. Start teaching myself some Android, while this junior comes up me to be like 'please teach me this', ok sure. He fucking leaves the moment I start installing homebrew on his mac and says "you exploiting my mac", NO FUCKER I NEED A PACKAGE MANAGER TO GET PACKAGES YOU DUMB FUCK. Further, that day, come to know its half day and not going to learn shit. WTF! But still, I get attendance so it's good. I suggest going to this new cool place to grab lunch. the girl I like goes like this "Let's GO TO JAILLLLLLLLL, IT'S COOL PLACE TO HANGOUTTTTT" , LIKE. WHY THE FUCK YOU WANT TO HANG OUT AT A PLACE WHICH LITERALLY IS NAMED 'JAIL'. Fuck it, let's go. SO. FUCKING. NEGATIVE. PLACE. Food is ok, not good, ok. I'm fucked up and sad at this point because love of my life is hanging out with other people, I'm ended up in the shit corner of the world, with shit food. AND I HAVEN'T DONE ANY THING PRODUCTIVE.

But in the end of the day, I reach home. open gates see this parcel and I'M HAPPY AS FUCK. IT'S FUCKING STICKERS, OMG.

Seeing those stickers I realized I don't need to be sad anymore. Writing this post just to thank this amazing community and the members in it. I love you guys all, :) <3

This was a comment I made on another ranter's post.

* Tailor your resume (and cover letter if needed) according to the job. No generic resume.
* Research about the company and make sure you have the same interests as the company. Clearly let them know why they should hire you. One question you can expect is: Why should we hire you?
* Show them that you're passionate about the job.
* Be curious. Ask questions. That's how they'll know you're interested.
* Be open to opportunities. Let's say you're applying for Full Stack developer role. Be open to take up Front End or Back End developer role. You don't have to accept everything but at least roles tangent to your job (provided they match your interest).
* Be flexible but focused.
* You don't have to know every listed requirement but make sure to know the majority.
* Don't lie. "Fake it till you make it" doesn't work with dev roles.
* Be confident in telling them "you don't know" if you don't know. Also make sure to tell you're willing to learn that.

Just got selected for Udacity google scholarship!!!

It's two stage process
Got selected for first one
After 3 months if I did good enough I can be one of very few to get a nano degree program. There are 10000 in first program and only handful of 350 will be selected for nano degree.
Let's fucking get that one 💪
Looking forward to learn everything I can.
It's gonna be awesome year, finally some shit is happening 😬😄
How's your all week going ?

Lessons I've learnt so far on programming

-- Your best written code today can be your worst tomorrow (Focus more on optimisation than style).
-- Having zero knowledge of a language then watching video tutorials is like purchasing an arsenal before knowing what a gun is (Read the docs instead).
-- It's works on my machine! Yes, because you built on Lenovo G-force but never considered the testers running on Intel Pentium 0.001 (Always consider low end devices).
-- "Programming" is you telling a story and without adding "comments" you just wrote a whole novel having no punctuation marks (Always add comments, you will thank yourself later for it I promise).
-- In programming there is nothing like "done"! You only have "in progress" or "abandoned" (Deploy progressively).
-- If at this point you still don't know how to make an asynchronous call in your favourite language, then you are still a rookie! take that from me. (Asynchronous operation is a key feature in programming that every coder should know).
-- If it's more than two conditions use "Switch... case" else stick with "If... else" (Readability should never be under-rated).
-- Code editors can MAKE YOU and BREAK YOU. They have great impact on your coding style and delivery time (Choose editors wisely).
-- Always resist the temptation of writing the whole project from scratch unless needs be (Favor patching to re-creation).
-- Helper methods reduces code redundancy by a large chunk (Always have a class in your project with helper methods).
-- There is something called git (Always make backups).
-- If you don't feel the soothing joy that comes in fixing a bug then "programming" is a no-no (Coding is fun only when it works).
-- Get angry with the bugs not the testers they're only noble messengers (Bugs are your true enemy).
-- You would learn more than a lot reading the codes of others and I mean a lot! (Code review promotes optimisation and let's you know when you are writing macaroni).
-- If you can do it without a framework you have yourself a big fat plus (Frameworks make you entirely dependent).
-- Treat your code like your pet, stop taking care of it and it dies! (Codes are fragile and needs regular updates to stay relevant).

Programming is nothing but fun and I've learnt that a long time ago.

-six months ago-
"Yo! Let's learn a web framework and build some sick apps!"
"Fuck yeah!"

-yesterday-
"Yo! Should we start doing that thing we talked about?"
"Fuck yeah!"

rant & question

Last year I had to collaborate to a project written by an old man; let's call him Bob. Bob started working in the punch cards era, he worked as a sysadmin for ages and now he is being "recycled" as a web developer. He will retire in 2 years.

The boss (that is not a programmer) loves Bob and trusts him on everything he says.

Here my problems with Bob and his code:
- he refuses learning git (or any other kind of version control system);
- he knows only procedural PHP (not OO);
- he mixes the presentation layer with business logic;
- he writes layout using tables;
- he uses deprecated HTML tags;
- he uses a random indentation;
- most of the code is vulnerable to SQL injection;
- and, of course, there are no tests.
- Ah, yes, he develops directly on the server, through a SSH connection, using vi without syntax highlighting.

In the beginning I tried to be nice, pointing out just the vulnerabilities and insisting on using git, but he ignored all my suggestions.

So, since I would have managed the production server, I decided to cheat: I completely rewrote the whole application, keeping the same UI, and I said the boss that I created a little fork in order to adapt the code to our infrastructure. He doesn't imagine that the 95% of the code is completely different from the original.

Now it's time to do some changes and another colleague is helping. She noticed what I did and said that I've been disrespectful in throwing away the old man clusterfuck, because in any case the code was working. Moreover he will retire in 2 years and I shouldn't force him to learn new things [tbh, he missed at least last 15 years of web development].

What would you have done in my place?

I feel like when I was a less experienced developer I was way more productive and undertook more complicated hobby projects.

I used to not give a fuck. Use a language I've never used before? Fuck it, let's learn it on the fly. I need to use a weird library with last commit 2 years ago? I don't care, let's import it. Make a computer vision project even though I know nothing about it and I end up just making up the techniques without reading any research? Let's make it my uni year project.

Now days I have so much doubt whenever doing anything. I always spend too much time thinking about what's the best way of doing it and doing research to see how others have done it. All of my experimentation spirit has been sucked away.

Our IT-Class project: Mathematics trainer in Java
Day 1 (was monday)

TL;DR we didn't save.

So we formed groups and I landed in the UI team with, let's call him Mage and let's call her Goth.

We had an eclipse project folder on our desktop (they said it only works when put on desktop) Btw they didn't even want to use a cloud or something (I wish we'd use git and I'd finally learn it). We should take the changes by USB from computer to computer.

So me, Mage an Goth are making a basic GUI for this Mathematic-Training App. We use this thing from Eclipse but I forgot the name. It has not enough functionality on surface and I hate things that break complex things up to ease things but leave away so much.

So after a productive hour of building a GUI and centering shit by calculating the top and bottom distance and use margins (hurts me really but Mage was designing, Goth intensively calculating on paper), the bell rings.

Mage wants to save the project on my USB-Stick and bamm💥
A black screen.
I don't know how it happened but it sure had something to do with the USB-port looking like you fucked it with a way to huge🍆. It looked damn broken.

So because we have a nice App called HD-Guard, which fucking wipes the desktop on startup and resets all but the documents/images/videos/music folder —

It's all's gone. Today is day 2 of this project so let's see how today turns out.

PM: this is our super fancy new CI/CD pipeline, it's the greatest. i expect you to learn and understand all this in no time.
devs: so i have to spend some more time on this topic because it's completely new to me and requires some learning...
PM: nooo, that's a super easy task with zero effort, my braindead hamster can do that in no time, so can i, and so can you! let's assign 1 story point for that.

~ 3 months latèr ~

also PM, after he has started developing as well: so i'm realizing there are many things that i have to learn, and it takes me some time. i haven't developed with C++ and <other tool stack> for a longer time. by the way, you guys don't need to check for any quality right now, we need to deliver fast. it's okay, when you have memory overflows, your code is completely crappy, poor architecture or memory overflows, it doesn't matter.

he even has a subtask for migrating his code from VS project to our new project structure, since he refused to learn our pipeline right from the beginning and created VS project instead. シ why is this a subtask? this job can be done in no time, my left vanishing twin named Klaus who has dislexia and hates vim can solve this task in 20 seconds!!!!11

(and still no PR, not even a feature branch in our repo)

Long time no rant from me. Sorry guys, has been a tough time for me.

Little background: I'm an apprentice and as such definitely not a fully trained professional. I'm working in a big company with people who have very let's say interesting ideas what I should be able to do.

This whole disaster begins shortly after I started my apprenticeship. I was offered to choose my first little project. "Something from the backlog, not very challenging and a nice beginner one. It's just about a PoC" ok, le me thinks. I choose to make a weather display.
Basic functionality was provided within the next 3 weeks. My direct boss (let's call him Jo) liked it and talked to his boss (Hugo) about it. Hugo was so excited he called our product manager to get my plugin into our software asap and began to think about where else we could use this.
This is where shit went downhill. Hugo told me it was my task to implement it on a totally different platform and to "host it in azure". I don't know much about azure and I never used it. I told him that I'd need time and some kind of sandbox to try and learn how things work. He promised but nothing ever came through. Not even Jo could do something about this.
They told me I should write this asap because "every customer would LOOOOVE this" and I honestly can't think of a way to meet all their requirements without access to our azure system/ sandbox. (There are a lot of requirements)
Am I wrong? Should I be able to do this? I'm a fucking trainee. I don't know everything.

I'm so done with flutter.

I wanted to give it a little try by rewriting a small android project I wrote a few years back. It brings some nice concepts especially when it comes to UI related programming but that's all I can really compliment it for. It's nothing more than something to play with as it is right now.

Also I think this text will be hidden behind the read more. Did I successfully bait you with that cat?

The things I truly hate about it:

The ide integration makes me wanna use eclipse again. At least most nonsensical error messages disappear after saving the document on eclipse.
.
Wanna generate a new function? Yeah, let me just place it RIGHT INSIDE THIS FUCKING IMPORT STATEMENT

Over at Google: Let's just rename everything from java slightly different and put it in nonsensical context so that you have to learn all of it again. Also why don't we make it so that the code suggestions only suggest things you already imported, so that you have to look up every little piece shit feature.

When it comes to databases, I must say, I had more fun working with PHP and mysql than with sqFUCKlite. Throwing away the Room components for that? What a joke...

I already said what i think about the syntax here an devrant but I'm more than happy to repeat it here:
The syntax looks like someone looked at C#, Java and JavaScript and then decided to vomit the worst parts of it into a programming language. I can't really classify anything original about it. There are clear inspirations, but they are confusingly mashed together with the other languages making this one nuts of a language.

Android SDK documentation is a blessing in comparison to whatever the fuck flutter tries to do.

I don't think I'll want top touch that Google side project again within the next few years, if it hasn't been replaced with a new side project like billiard by then.

8years ago - me. "oh let's learn ruby it might be fun?"
"oh nvm let's get into php."

talk about bad decisions?

So in my last post I was angry that I didnt know many algorithms or how to make one, so you guys inspired me to learn about them and I found a course I'm gonna take about algorithms and such. I'm incorporating it into my learning schedule so let's hope this leads to me not being stupid.

I love it when asshats, that wear testicles for sunglasses, like to ask me a question about my past experience with a given technology. Let's call it "X". After I've said my piece about the desired effect "X" was supposed to achieve, and describe the environment/scope where "X" was used, and describe the pain points I've encountered with it or the headaches "X" has caused in those environments, these camel spunk garglers then try to immediately rebut me by saying that every one of the times they've set "X" technology up it's worked just fine.

So, I kindly remind them that my past experience was in large enterprises where "X" technology just doesn't scale well so I've seen some issues with it.

Spunk Gargler: "Hmmm, must've just not been setup correctly."

I lose my shit (internally of course because I can't afford to be without a job right now.) and say, "I'm not so sure that it wasn't setup correctly, I just don't think that 'X' works properly at the scale of 500+ employee environments well. You've only ever set it up in small offices of like - what, 20 users?"

Shitlord McHerp-a-Derp who's Drunk on Spunk: "Maybe, but it just sounds like a bad configuration was causing those issues to me."

He shuffled back into his office shortly after I basically told him he's a fucking chump playing small team tactics and I've seen shit at scale so I've seen first hand what does and does not work well.

I'm writing this because this is the same fucking imbecile that has only ever encountered a /23 network once before from a client they inherited from a previous MSP team and they didn't know how to "safely change it" to a /24 so they just left it in place.

(BTW, just for the non-networking guys/gals out there, I'm sure you've already guessed it, but a /23 network is NOT a fucking problem!)

These puffy cancerous taint boils that call themselves IT engineers are the fucking problem!

I'm not a dev by trade or training, but trying to learn DevOps, and I can totally see why Dev teams can/sometimes get pissed with infrastructure teams... infrastructure/helpdesk side of IT is full of these fucking meat heads.

I hate react so much. I hate it with the fiery rage of an old testament god. I tried to like it. I wanted to like it.

Unfortunately I picked up Angular (2). I'm now used to a framework that has you covered for most things. That has logical methods of laying out your app. A router that's actually built in and makes sense.

I'm used to writing HTML in the templates, not some horrible abomination of XML that's pretending to be HTML and just waiting to pull off its mask and smack you across the face with its penis while telling you what an idiot you are.

React apps all seem to be cobbled together in a different way. You have to go hunting for the logical stuff you expect to be there.

Let's not even get started on the tome of dependencies it needs to get itself off the ground, all written by vastly different developers from different planets with completely different life goals.

I hate it. The more I learn about it the more I find myself yelling "WTF!" while shaking a fist at the wall, hot tears of rage steaming down my pudgy cheeks until my wife comes running into the room and consoles me with my head on her bosom.

...and I just started a project that will have to be seen through to the end, using.. react.

Seriously, fuck you react, I hope you die of herpes.

what kind of dumb fuck you have to be to get the react js dev job in company that has agile processes if you hate the JS all the way along with refusing to invest your time to learn about shit you are supposed to do and let's add total lack of understanding how things work, specifically giving zero fucks about agile and mocking it on every occasion and asking stupid questions that are answered in first 5 minutes of reading any blog post about intro to agile processes? Is it to annoy the shit out of others?

On top of that trying to reinvent the wheels for every friggin task with some totally unrelated tech or stack that is not used in the company you work for?

and solution is always half-assed and I always find flaw in it by just looking at it as there are tons of battle-tested solutions or patterns that are better by 100 miles regarding ease of use, security and optimization.

classic php/mysql backend issues - "ooh, the java has garbage collector" - i don't give a fuck about java at this company, give me friggin php solution - 'ooh, that issue in python/haskel/C#/LUA/basically any other prog language is resolved totally different and it looks better!' - well it seems that he knows everything besides php!

Yeah we will change all the fucking tech we use in this huge ass app because your inability to learn to focus on the friggin problem in the friggin language you got the job for.

Guy works with react, asked about thoughts on react - 'i hope it cease to exists along with whole JS ecosystem as soon as possible, because JS is weird'. Great, why did you fucking applied for the job in the first place if it pushes all of your wrong buttons!

Fucking rockstar/ninja developers! (and I don't mean on actual 'rockstar' language devs).

Also constantly talks about game development and we are developing web-related suite of apps, so why the fuck did you even applied? why?

I just hate that attitude of mocking everything and everyone along with the 'god complex' without really contributing with any constructive feedback combined with half-assed doing something that someone before him already mastered and on top of that pretending that is on the same level, but mainly acting as at least 2 levels above, alas in reality just produces bolognese that everybody has to clean up later.

When someone gives constructive feedback with lenghty argument why and how that solution is wrong on so many levels, pulls the 'well, i'm still learning that' card.

If I as code monkey can learn something in 2 friggin days including good practices and most of crazy intricacies about that new thing, you as a programmer god should be able to learn it in 2 fucking hours!

Fucking arrogant pricks!

Boss: Let's hire a new person to help us recreate our website
Us: sounds good!
Boss doesn't hire anyone and starts the website on his own
Boss: I started the new website. It's in server X and the address is test.y.com. I also want all of us to work on it
Me thinking: great he just wants us to modify the hosted files like he does 🙄
Me: I'll move a copy to GitHub for version control.
Boss: Great!
Boss creates a backup folder on the same computer and folder path that the hosted files are on.

Someone please nuke that server so my boss learns version control like I've asked before. I think I'll opt not to work on a website where he and my other co-workers will just overwrite each other's changes because he doesn't want to learn to git 😑

This is a long post and if someone comments without reading carefully I don't care about that person's opinion.

I have 3 accounts here, and that is a must have for me. Let me explain:

Let's think of people and who they are in layers.

The innermost layers are made of private and intimate things: fears, dreams, shames, basically things that are mostly shared with very close people, like family, best friends, and specially significant others.

On the other hand, outermost layers are the public persona, who you are as a citizen, who you are in your profesion, and so on.

So, you wouldn't normally tell your boss about your favorite sex positions.

Let's also say there can be layers in the middle, and all the layers sometimes overlap, but let's not get too deep into this as I think I got the point across.

Here on I explain the original thesis.

I am a developer, and as such I want to fulfill my needs on dev communities, one of them being devrant.
I wish to learn from other devs, I expose my (sometimes controversial) points of view. I rant about annoying shit in the workplace.

But also, at some level, I wish to be taken seriously as a developer, I wish to build a reputation, and I wish to be accepted, even in a shallow social level. There is a social factor to what we do and it's totally normal.

Now, the problem is that I also would want to express my inner self.

So what I do is I don't use my main account for that, I use another, in fact 2 other accounts.

There are several reasons for that:

* I want to hide intimate shit from trolls.

Imagine I griefpost about a loved one that died, then later found myself in a heated discussion about some language, and then some troll comments something like "I'm glad your x died". i wouldn't react very well.

* I want to keep my posts consistent.

If people become interested in what I post as a dev, then they are going to expect dev related stuff from me. If I start posting like controversial points of view, that's not very cool because I'd be doing like a bait n switch on them.

* I want to maintain a reputation, and I want to not get banned on the main account

Reputation as a profesional is a real thing, and it shouldn't be affected by your personal shit.
Also sometimes you argue, and things get heated, and sometimes you get suspended or banned.

You try your hardest to be respectful, but in some communities, some mods are trigger happy.

By restricting this on your alt account, you're in a way promising that you'll have the upmost behaviour on your dev account because that means being professional.

Now, I said I had 2 other accounts.

The reason for having 2 is because I separate two layers:

In the 2nd account I am open and direct regarding my points of view, and more argumentative, but still trying to be relatively civil. I would also post things that might be controversial or not popular. I try to be real basically.

You can conclude that the 2nd account is the one posting this, since this post could trigger some people.

In the 3rd account, I talk about intimate shit like traumas, fears, emotional pain, things I know I'll get support for (the same support I give others when in need) and are not controversial in any way.
This way I can vent painful things and avoid trolls.

Cool people appreciate it when you're transparent about your shortcoming and dark thoughts.

But it takes one asshole in a high horse to judge you. And sometimes you need to give that asshole the middle finger without being afraid of ruining your reputation
or getting banned,
or being scared of that asshole laughing about your intimate shit (again, I use this account for that)

I know it sounds like I have multiple personalities but I swear I'm ok, and hopefully what I said makes sense. People might say "don't use alt accounts, go to another site", but I find that devrant has some interesting people.

The obvious downside is that you end up knowing people more than what they assume, because you interact with them through different accounts.

This is kinda shady, but I'm not interested in taking advantage of others anyway so...

Developers who think complex code is good.

"Oh, lookie here, I can swizzle methods and inject dependencies in the runtime!"

"Although we have no valid use case, let's use dependency injection and follow the commandory stateor patterns because I watched a video."

Just because you learn something new that looks cool does not make it practical, you tosser.

The convo between my friend and me back then
He: dude I heard you can code can you help me with this coding challenge on codechef
Me: bro, I try to let's check the problem
After 15-30 min we solve the question together
Then after 3 days or so he again meets me
He: do you know about Kali Linux
Me: no man not heard of Linux but what is Kali seems interesting
He: trying to hack WiFi
Me: *getting excited* bro teach me
He: I'm learning too
That day he got to know he can't hack WiFi and I got to know that my friend doesn't know jack shit about Linux, also Linux is awesome
But that moment changed my whole engineering life, I got to learn about Linux and I'm getting good at it every single day since then.
It's been 3 year since I met that fucker.
Tagging my amigo @ashwini0529

These ignorant comments about arch are starting to get on my nerves.

You ranted or asked help about something exclusive to windows and someone pointed out they don't have that problem in arch and now you're annoyed?

Well maybe it's for good.

Next comes a very rough analogy, but imagine if someone posts "hey guys, I did a kg of coke and feeling bad, how do I detox?"

It takes one honest asshole to be like "well what if you didn't do coke?".

Replace the coke with windows.
Windows is a (mostly) closed source operating system owned by a for profit company with a very shady legal and ethical history.

What on earth could possibly go wrong?

Oh you get bsod's?
The system takes hours to update whenever the hell it wants, forces reboot and you can't stop it?
oh you got hacked because it has thousands of vulnerabilities?
wannacry on outdated windows versions paralyzed the uk health system?

oh no one can truly scrutinize it because it's closed source?

yet you wonder why people are assholes when you mention it? This thing is fucking cancer, it's hundreds of steps backwards in terms of human progress.

and one of the causes for its widespread usage are the savage marketing tactics they practiced early on. just google that shit up.

but no, linux users are assholes out to get you.

and how do people react to these honest comments? "let's make a meme out of it. let's deligitimize linux, linux users and devs are a bunch of neckbeards, end of story, watch this video of rms eating skin off his foot on a live conference"

short minded idiots.

I'm not gonna deny the challenges or limitations linux represents for the end user.

It does take time to learn how to use it properly.
Nvidia sometimes works like shit.
Tweaking is almost universally required.
A huge amount of games, or Adobe/Office/X products are not compatible.
The docs can be very obscure sometimes (I for one hate a couple of manpages)

But you get a system that:
* Boots way faster
* Is way more stable
* Is way way way more secure.
* Is accountable, as in, no chance to being forced to get exploited by some evil marketing shit.

In other words, you're fucking free.
You can even create your own version of the system, with total control of it, even profit with it.

I'm not sure the average end user cares about this, but this is a developer forum, so I think in all honesty every developer owes open source OS' (linux, freebsd, etc) major respect for being free and not being corporate horseshit.

Doctors have a hippocratic oath? Well maybe devs should have some form of oath too, some sworn commitment that they will try to improve society.

I do have some sympathy for the people that are forced to use windows, even though they know ideally isn't the ideal moral choice.
As in, their job forces it, or they don't have time or energy to learn an alternative.

At the very least, if you don't know what you're talking about, just stfu and read.

But I don't have one bit of sympathy for the rest.

I didn't even talk about arch itself.
Holy fucking shit, these people that think arch is too complicated.

What in the actual fuck.

I know what the problem is, the arch install instructions aren't copy paste commands.
Or they medium tutorial they found is outdated.

So yeah, the majority of the dev community is either too dumb or has very strong ADD to CAREFULLY and PATIENTLY read through the instructions.

I'll be honest, I wouldn't expect a freshman to follow the arch install guide and not get confused several times.
But this is an intermediate level (not megaexpert like some retards out there imply).

Yet arch is just too much. That's like saying "omg building a small airplane is sooooo complicated". Yeah well it's a fucking aerial vehicle. It's going to be a bit tough. But it's nowhere near as difficult as building a 747.

So because some devs are too dumb and talk shit, they just set the bar too low.

Or "if you try to learn how to build a plane you'll grow an aviator neckbeard". I'll grow a fucking beard if I want too.

I'm so thankful for arch because it has a great compromise between control and ease of install and use.

When I have a fresh install I only get *just* what I fucking need, no extra bullshit, no extra programs I know nothing about or need running on boot time, and that's how I boot way faster that ubuntu (which is way faster than windows already).

Configuring nvidia optimus was a major pain in the ass? Sure was, but I got it work the way I wanted to after some time.

Upgrading is also easy as pie, so really scratching my brain here trying to understand the real difficult of using arch.

So I met this person via a social platform.

They were absolutely silly and weren't able to hold a conversation. So I, like a normal person, just stopped trying to keep things alive.

Over the years, I have realised and learnt that if a person is interested in being friends, they'd put in efforts and I alone will not have to drag things on my shoulder.

I started cutting out people right, left, and center who I felt were taking advantage of me or using me in some way or another.

I ended up saving a lot of time and energy. I no longer feel drained or anxious about something not working out. Not dragging saved me from draining.

Anyway, they reach out to me again after few weeks and I was like let's give it a try to establish a friendship, because befriending people is my weak point.

The cycle repeats. At first I thought it must be because of the asynchronous nature of the platform so I drop my Telegram Id in case they preferred an IM approach.

I swear in the name of sweet lord, the retard does the same behaviour. So, I stopped communication.

And one fine day, the person tells me that they lack social skills and want to learn how to make friends and stuff.

Very fair point. So, me being me, gave them a few tips and critically pointed out their behaviour on how they reply with a one liner after every 2 or 3 business days.

Absolutely no change in their behaviour. They kept texting me the same.

At this point, I was like why am I doing it? I could find better people easily. Because for me, communication is everything. I cannot function without a good communication between two living beings.

So, I asked them why are they even trying to learn social skills when they barely implement it and don't want to change to which they reply saying that so they can use it to befriend people and network to getter better job opportunities.

I fuck them off.

And fuck such people who have intentions, are not clear enough about it, and play people for their own selfish gains.

And this where another learning I got from @scout is have boundaries.

Why do all good people in my life leave? Damn it! I need those good people back and be friends with them and not retards who cannot even communicate beyond one liner.

Because I am very interested in cyber security and plan on doing my masters in it security I always try to stay up to date with the latest news and tools. However sometimes its a good idea to ask similar-minded people on how they approach these things, - and maybe I can learn a couple of things. So maybe people like @linuxxx have some advice :D Let's discuss :D

1) What's your goto OS? I currently use Antergos x64 and a Win10 Dualboot. Most likely you guys will recommend Linux, but if so what ditro, and why? I know that people like Snowden use QubesOS. What makes it much better then other distro? Would you use it for everyday tasks or is it overkill? What about Kali or Parrot-OS?

2) Your go-to privacy/security tools? Personally, I am always conencted to a VPN with openvpn (Killswitch on). In my browser (Firefox) I use UBlock and HttpsEverywhere. Used NoScript for a while but had more trouble then actual use with it (blocked too much). Search engine is DDG. All of my data is stored in VeraCrypt containers, so even if the system is compromised nobody is able to access any private data. Passwords are stored in KeePass. What other tools would you recommend?

3) What websites are you browsing for competent news reports in the it security scene? What websites can you recommend to find academic writeups/white papers about certain topics?

4) Google. Yeah a hate-love relationship, but its hard to completely avoid it. I do actually have a Google-Home device (dont kill me), which I use for calender entries, timers, alarms, reminders, and weather updates as well as IOT stuff such as turning my LED lights on and off. I wouldn"t mind switching to an open source solution which is equally good, however so far I couldnt find anything that would a good option. Suggestions?

5) What actions do you take to secure your phone and prevent things such as being tracked/spyed? Personally so far I havent really done much except for installing AdAway on my rooted device aswell as the same Firefox plugins I use on my desktop PC.

6) Are there ways to create mirror images of my entire linux system? Every now and then stuff breaks, that is tedious to fix and reinstalling the system takes a couple of hours. I remember from Windows that software such as Acronis or Paragon can create a full image of your system that you can backup and restore at any point to get a stable, healthy system back (without the need to install everything by hand).

7) Would you encrypt the boot partition of your system, even tho all data is already stored in encrypted containers?

8) Any other advice you can give :P ?

I'm really not sure. When I was 7-8 years old, I liked to view source in IE, then I somehow managed to use Javascript in the browser. First only some dumb opening of windows. And I liked Batch, so I made some files for copying, backup and stuff.

Then I got to PHP during the years from some online tutorial about making dynamic websites. My website was more static than stone, but yeah, I did page loading with PHP! Awful experience anyway, because I had to install Xampp, get it work and other stuff. 11 years old or so. (and I used Xampp only as a fileserver between laptop and desktop later, because.. PHP4... just no.)

As 12 years old or so I experienced my first World of Warcraft (vanilla) on a custom server in an internet cafe and I thought it's a singleplayer game. When I found out that no, I googled how to make my own server (hated multiplayer back then and loved good games with huge storylines). Failed miserably with ManGOS, got something to work with ArcEMU. There I learned some C++ basic stuff, which I hoped would helped me to fix some bugs. When I opened the code I was like: "Suuure." and left it like that. I learned what a MySQL database is, broke it like four times when I forgot WHERE and still rather played with websites i.e. html, css, js and optionally php when I wanted to repair a webpage for the server. With a friend we managed to get the server work via Hamachi, was fun, the server died too soon. Then I got ManGOS to work, but there wasn't really any interest to make a server anymore, just singleplayer for the lore. (big warcraft fan, don't kick me :D )

I think it was when I was 13y.o. I went to Delphi/Pascal course, which I liked a lot from the beginning, even managed to use my code on old Knoppix via Lazarus(Pascal). At this age I really liked thoae Flash games which were still common to see everywhere. So I downloaded .swfs, opened and tried to understand it. Managed to pull some stuff from it and rewrite in Pascal. Nope, never again that crap.

About the same time I got to Flash files I discovered Java. It was kind of popular back then, so I thought let's give it a try. I liked Flash more. Seriously. I've never seen so much repetitiveness and stupid styling of a code. I had either IDE for compiling C++ or Pascal or notepad! You think I wanted my code kicked all over the place in multiple folders and files? No.

So back to Pascal. I made some apps for my old hobby, was quite satisfied with the result (quiz like app), but it still wasn't the thing. And I really thought I'd like to study CS.

I started to love PHP because of phpBB forums I worked on as 15 y.o. I guess. At the same time I think there was an optional subject at school, again with Pascal. I hated the subject, teacher spoke some kind of gibberish I didn't really understand back then at all and now I find it only as a really stupid explanation of loops and strings.

So I started to hate Pascal subject, but not really the lang itself. Still I wanted something simpler and more portable. Then I got to Python as hm, 17y.o. I think and at the same time to C++ with DevC++. That was time when I was still deciding which lang to choose as my main one (still playing with website, database and js).

Then I decided that learning language from some teacher in a class seriously pisses me off and I don't want to experience it again. I choose Python, but still made some little scripts in C++, which is funny, because Python was considered only as a scripting lang back then.

I haven't really find a cross-platform framework for C++, which would: a) be easy to install b) not require VisualStudio PayForMe 20xy c) have nice license if I managed to make something nice and distribute it. I found Unity3D though, so I played with Blender for models, Audacity for music and C# for code. Only beautiful memories with Unity. I still haven't thought I'm a programmer back then.

For Python however I found Kivy and I was playing with it on a phone for about a year. Still I haven't really know what to do back then, so I thought... I like math, numbers, coding, but I want to avoid studying physics. Economics here I go!

Now I'm in my third year at Uni, should be writing thesis, study hard and what I do? Code like never before, contribute, work on a 3D tutorial and play with Blender. Still I don't really think about myself as a programmer, rather hobby-coder.

So, to answer the question: how did I learn to program? Bashing to shit until it behaved like I desired i.e. try-fail learning. I wouldn't choose a different path.

I've always wanted to make games, I went into university doing mechanical engineering and while at the start I enjoyed it, getting closer to the end I had a hate for engineering, as this hate grew I ended up trying to learn programming in my spare time, actually I spent my spare doing lots of things which basically gave off the impression I wouldn't be happy with engineering.

After I graduated I decided to do my BCIS and I loved every minute of it, I was fortunate to get a lecturer in my second semester that was an experienced game devloper, someone I look up to and someone who pushed me to my absolute limits, even with the sleepless nights I was still happy with programming, the logical thinking that goes into programming and also the near instant feedback is what I really love.

But as it comes down to it, I've gotten closer to my dream of becoming a game developer, it may only be as a hobby for now but I'm really grateful I have gotten into programming.

So I guess with coding has changed my life for the better, since I know I'd never be happy as an engineer, and even with all the issues I run into I still enjoy it in the end.

Let's see how long this lasts lol

Let's learn Rails.

I'm just super disappointed in people. A lot of people flaky and not as good as I think they are. I tend to be an idealist, and I believe in helping others to do a net positive. But what I find is that people just don't give a shit about anyone else except for themselves. If it's even a slightest inconvenience to them they won't do it. You ask for one little thing despite you helping them out a shit ton, and they won't do it for you.

Also, I'm so tired of people who always come up to me and talk big game about how we should work on a project together. But when shit hits the fan and I say let's do the work they don't do anything. Or I have to drag them along to get anything started.

Yeah, everybody is out for themselves, but I wish we were more kind to others and learn to take a hit to our own convenience every once in a while.

But maybe I should just find a better group of people to hang out with and fuck you all to my current group of friends. JK.

I'm going for a run to clear my head. Hopefully after I come back I'll be in a better mood.

Heh promotion? I only get fake promotion..

For two years, I was doing so many *free* overtime, manager is a big liar, he said that it will he considered on the yearly evaluation.. cool, the thing is there is no evaluation at all, just lying and lying.

Few months ago I took a vacation of 1 month (I am expatriate so I get one vacation per year, my home town is too far..) I talked to tye manager about salary taise and he said absolutely we will talk after I get back..
He called me during my vacation to do some urgent (as always) work, I worked about 5 days, and for free.

After I get back to work, he was angry about my *attitude* that I wasn't available more time.. oh and there was no fucking raise. always lying..

In this country, if you're an expatriate so you can travel outside the country without the validation of the employer (yeah like that) and the notes period is about 3 months, what makes very hard to find another job, no one will wait for 3 months, unless you vanish during a vacation.

So, why didn't I gave my resignation? well, life is hard when you have unemployed wife and a little baby, and the pay is, let's say OK comparing to costs here.

I am charged to learn and work with another language and framework, and when I asked for a raise they said no, so I will stop working in this language and let's see..

The problem is that other employees in thus company are literally bitches, they don't say no to anything, so I am the special guy here who does not a blowjob..

So, what do I do? I am hunting for a new job since a while but no luck.

For context, I've been working for a couple years now with Rust, and, I have to say, the experience has been astoundingly pleasant. The language is both incredibly productive and meets each of my use cases and stipulations regarding speed, safety, and complexity. That said, I've come to beg the question, "what is the point of functional languages like Haskell?" To me, what seems attractive about Haskell is the inherent thread safety, and the added syntactic niceties of code written in the language. However, one must keep in mind, my experience with Haskell has been pretty limited, simply due to the massive learning curve that the language presents. Such a "learning curve" brings me to my central point: these days with languages like Rust which bring together the best from functional and imperative worlds, it seems like functional languages are becoming increasingly irrelevant. Let's face it: no sane person will choose to learn a functional language as their first language, outside of academia and mathematics, and OOP/OOP-like languages remain dominant in the space. So, why then, is Haskell any different? What benefit do languages like Haskell pose in the modern CS space that thread-safe, non-GC languages don't already provide?

Aight devs, let's start a war.

Throw at me your best UI framework yet.

Anything (except game engines), cross platform preferable.

++ for why and how easy/hard to learn.

I wanted to build a smart home system with arduino or pi when I'd have my own place. But since that is a ways off, let's park that.

Just learn me some linux, python, node, typescript and some js frameworks, maybe handlebars, knockout and angular?

I decided to learn Flutter, because the idea of a common code base between Android and iOS sounds nice. I'm late to the party, I know.
So I install everything and start typing in the tutorial. TAB... two spaces. I absolutely hate that so let's change it. In the settings, it sends me to a FAQ which more or less says this is the way it is, deal with it. But I want my tabs to be four spaces, every code editor since the dawn of time could do this... I'M PAYING FOR THIS SHIT!!!!!!!
Ok, let's check the JetBrains website, I'm starting to lose my patience, but let's do it. At this point I should also mention that I'm feeling pretty stupid. I mean, I'm checking on the internet about how to do something which obviously must be obvious, why am I not seeing it?
I find a page on the official website. JetBrains' replies are along the lines of "Why would you want that?", "The holly wars between tabs and spaces are over", "Most people like it this way", "The overlords said this is the coding style to be used" (Ok, the last one was me reading between the lines). At the end of the thread, they provide a "hackish solution" (their words, not mine). Which doesn't work. Because why should it?
Not even when PyCharm's debugger randomly shat itself and I had to use print statements I got so angry. That was relatively fine, bugs are a fact of life, and the overall package is good, so I kept paying.
But now you're telling me that I cannot use what should be a common feature of every code editor just because you and the overlords know better?
Well, fuck you and the horse you came in on JetBrains, you've just lost a customer.

I have so much shit I want/need to learn. I've started learning C while picking JavaScript back up, I'm learning basic electronics but I have a lot planned for that. Not even related but I want to fucking Cook, yeah i said it i wanna cook but why does that make me feel like i should just stop and go back to programming. Idk I just spill shit in these rants. Also wanna learn to speak another langauge but can't find the time, and I have college and dude I'm trying and trying and I need someone to appreciate something I do before I flip or before C destroys my entire being from being the weirdest yet interesting yet fucking brain melting. And fuck JS I Love it but sometimes it's a twat let's be honest

In a time where a web dev is expected to know, well.. everything... Backend -JAVA, python, nodejs and C++ would be great.
Front- angular, react, other 10 libs
DBs -sql, mongo, redis, elastic, kafka, rebbitmq
Also be devops on the side with AWS and docker kubernetis and more stuff

How the f is that possible?

In my real job for the last couple of years and different companies, I usually use 1 language/framework & 1 main DB.. and although it's possible in some companies, but in mine, ppl dont get access to AWS etc..

So let's say there's me.. a server side dev for years.
So I decide to be better and learn Golang.. cool lang, never needed in my job, after few days of not using it I forgot all I learned and that was it.

Then I realized I gotta know some frontend cause everyone want a fullstack ninja nowadays.. so I tried Vuejs.. it was amazing .. never got to use it at work, cause i was a backend, and we didnt use frameworks on our products back then..
Also forgotten.

Then I decided to learned nodejs, because this is the coolest thing ever.. hated it, but whatever... Never got to use it at work, cause everything was written in other lang which the whole team knew... Forgot the little i knew.

Then I decided, its time to see what Angular is, cause everyone started using it... similar idea to vuejs which i barely remembered, but wow it's a lot of code to remember, or I'll have to google everything.. so I went over it, but can't say i even learned it.

Now Im trying to move on to python, which, I really am learning in depth.. however, since I dont have real experience with it, no one gives me a shot at being a python dev, so again i feel like I'm trying to memorize syntax and wasting my time..

Tired of seeing React in all job ads, i decided to have a look what's that all about.. and whadoyaknow... It's fucking the same idea as vue/angular with again different syntax..

THIS IS CRAZY!

in how many syntaxes do i need to know how to make a fucking crud api, and a page with same fucking post form, TO BE A GOOD PROGRAMMER?!?

I'm going nuts with this isolation, so next on my agenda... let's learn flutter!

Anyone have some half decent app tuts (preferably not videos) that they can suggest? I'm sure the usual "to do" list has been done and dusted a billion times, I'm looking for something more explorative into different features of flutter rather then just a "build this"

This is gonna get someone illogically upset, but idc about that.

I know it's ignorance of semantics but I'm tired of propagated ignorance changing the meaning of things.

Non-binary is NOT a legitimate term for whatever 'gender' you are!

I get what *whoever-started-it* was going for, but it's NOT valid. If you want to say that youre not male or female, fine... just don't abuse binary systems to do it. Just say youre non-bool/anti-boolean or identify with one of the, apparently 50, shades of gray.

I keep getting into logical loops to nowhere about this nonsense. No one is even defining what's supposed to be the 1 vs the 0. Which then makes me think '1 must be male... genitalia=1 in many ways...' which then sources back to the historic validity of males vs undervalued/less than human interpretations of females...

Then <brake>.
Ofc these people aren't going into the historical significance... they don't even realise how binary works! Ofc they'd have no clue that all 0s= no data... and 0s only have significance when viewed in placement to the 1s.

Let's all start using proper terminologies, like non-boolean. Maybe i can start a trend by paying people pennies to learn/teach wtf a boolean value is, and that binary can represent anything. With proper encoding the array is limitless... so being binary is actually a giant spectrum... therefore makes no sense to be "non-binary".

Ok... im done. It had to be said.

Who wants to start identifying as non, or educating wtf is, boolean with me???

Here in Spain instead of calling it CS we use the term "Informática", which is closer to the broader IT. Which means that hyped me enrolled in all the "Informática" courses since high school, only to be shot in the face by yet another "Let's learn PowerPoint" course. I honestly hate that.

I've been giving small courses (one week long) to kids at age 12-16 about real programming, starting from scratch to real-world arduino or Java, because that is what I hoped I would have found at their age.

!rant

What is something I can complete in a week (let's say 30-40 hours) as a newbie (I made an android app, played around with engines like unity and unreal here and there, tried some c#, and I always mess around with the linux command line, my RPi, etc etc)? I'll start working in a dual-studying job ('applied CS') in 2 weeks so I'll have enough learning-without-doing to do. I just want to learn something by doing something useful (e.g. a small android app that I can put ads in or sell, or maybe provide something for free that people like. I don't want to write my own engine( that'd take very long anyways) or make a compiler because I feel that'd be kind of useless and even though it'd probably be fun, I would lack initiative.

Got some detailed feedback from Booking.com, upon asking.

I answered all the questions right. But they said I am not ready for a Sr PM role (which might be true).

Here are three points that I captured from the feedback:

1. Focus on details
2. Clear and better reasoning for WHY
3. Realistic over idealistic scenarios

While it makes me feel low that I didn't make it but this feedback will surely help me overcome the challenges and clear interviews in future.

On to the next one now. Let's see what comes my way..

One thing for sure, there is lots and lots to learn for me yet.

One thing I surely lack is articulating my thoughts and keeping things crisp while conveying the information aptly.

Anyone has any tips/resources on how to improve in this area?

Keep your state of mind to be either one of "This is a lot I can learn from this" or "Let's get this over with, as fast as possible", depending upon the client and nature of work.

!rant
After 4 - 5 months of learning webD, I am trying to build my first fullstack web application (simple chat one ).

My stack :
FRONTEND:
Vue.js + Materialize

Backend:
Express ( handling routes )
Mongoose/MongoDB ( Database )
Socket.io ( web sockets for real time connection )
JWT

Had dreamt of this 2 months ago where I built a basic front end using html and css, and now porting it to Vue is like a breeze.

Wish me luck and let's hope it doesnot become one of the unfinished projects. ( My university semester exams are coming up , would have to complete this as fast as possible ). I am also learning DSA + STL and aim to learn basic python syntax before holidays so that I can focus my time on ML during them. It's so fucking overloaded that I have my doubts ::((

After playing et and wow a few year it all started when I hosted my own ts2 server with npo license. Rented a server for 90 bucks as a highschool student (13) with no job. (Who the fuck rented to me? I had my own bank account and lied about my age. Had a credit card at 14 but that's another story)

*Shit is expensive*

How does one get some value out of a server? Oh right, let's host Webspace and ftp accounts.

That got me into server administration and bash.

After dropping wow in bc i started playing on private servers.

*Shit is buggy*

How do you fix wow server? Let's learn c++ and push patches to arcemu. Why is this part crashing on this one server? Let's look at the binary. Wtf is this? Oh assembler?!? Ok let's try to read this. Ok I get it now. Let's fix the code.

Ok let's host my own wow private server. We need a website for account creation.
Let's learn php. Wait php is easy compared to mastering c++? I need an app for my first smartphone (iPhone 3g) to manage the server on the go. Let's learn how to do that. Why is this so easy? Switching to Android: wait java is even easier?

And that's how I learned that if you start with the hard part and grasp the concept, everything more abstract is significantly easier. If you start to read code to learn any language it's easier then following books (for me at least). If you get an error, track it down, you might learn amazing things in the way.

And if you want to get into reverse engineering, start by being passionate for the thing you want the reverse. It will be hard before it gets easier and you will need all the willpower you can muster not the just stop.

Programming for me is not a job but my passion. It's like I'm on vacation every day of the year (expect meetings, fuck meetings)

First day at my job and once I got home I immediately crashed into my bed and woke up at 3 AM.

For some reason I still feel physically tired. Even though I woke up by myself (no distractions from my environment).

+ I feel like having worked out even though I did not. I can feel the muscles aching everywhere in my body.

Anyway back to how it went...
I got there (company) and met a young people like me who are also working in this company for the first time.

Once I saw them + the chief and the leaders, my anxiety kicked in, but I made sure not to show it.

We took photos and saw the cubes (data center cubes) and it felt like I was in a hacking scene from Mr Robot or Watch Dogs lol. It was so cool.

After that we were assigned to our temporary work places and mine was at a place where you get packages from the delivery trucks, cut them, sort them, put etiquettes on them and register them in the system.

Another boy (let's call him Daniel) and me were assigned to this place. He is going to be a sys admin.

The people at this workplace were very chill, cool and mature.
You can joke with them and they will not get offended (looking at you, Twitter) lol.

Daniel however is the opposite.
He is so god damn extroverted that he literally won't stop talking.
At some point he asked me if I was even listening and I admitted that the unconcious side of the brain of mine built a filter over the years that only let's valuable information flow through. When there is no valuable information, I do not process them in my conciousness.

Poor guy got a bit sad, but me whatever. Not my problem. He gave me an headache by talking nonstop nonsense.

Today, when my shift begins, I will learn to do drive a forklift and I'm excited about this.

I do not even need a license for it which you normally need in other companies :D

Made a dockerfile for a reproducible build environment today. It's been a few months since I had this much fun working, so refreshing.

This counts as devops right? In that case I might take a better look at devops sometime in the near future, I think I might like it. I just did it out of necessity (didn't want to bloat my system with build tools and sdks) but I ended up liking it. For some reason devops seems exceedingly boring to me, which prevented me from looking into it until now, let's see if I can overcome my laziness and learn it.

If you just stay calm and focus on building, you'll eventually come across things you've always wanted to learn, but didn't really see the purpose of it, this applied to everything in life.

For example, today was the first time I needed to use generics in my app, this is something I've always wanted to learn but didn't truly understand it. I've read docs and watched videos online, but still didn't see the benefit of learning generics.

However, once I needed it, I realized why it is relevant, and thus created stronger memory muscles.

Let's break this down:
- You learn more if the thing you need has a purpose.

- Information is simply data, once you apply it, information turns to knowledge.

And this my fellow dev friends is what you get paid for, not information, but knowledge.

And what is knowledge? - experience.

Soo, i just downloaded unreal engine, let's connect it to clion and write / learn some cpp i guess

When your business classes curriculum hasn't been updated in over 15 years...

Today let's learn about folders! The "internet"!
Introducing Windows XP, the best OS yet!

I want to rant about tech YouTubers. As one myself, I feel like I do an even exchange with my viewers.

I want your attention, I don't feel like I deserve it, so I teach you something coding related. You get something of value, I get your attention.

But that's not the case with most in this space. Idiots feel like they can spout whatever bullshit they think about.

They're all stupid with their stupid fucking titles and ideas. Let's review some.

Video Title: How much Javascript you should know to get in tech??
Anyone with > 2 braincells: WTF !!!!!

Video Title: How would I start over to learn coding if I could?
My Reaction: Nope, I wouldn't. The things that I did and didn't is exactly what my journey is and I would do it all over again.

And I get the intent, you're trying to put a roadmap for beginners but they're not going to follow exactly how you lay it out. And why are you trying to establish that there is a correct way of learning coding? Everyone learns at different paces at different times. It's a journey not a race.

Video Title: A day in the life of {COMPANY} engineer.
My Reaction: What do you want to show everyone? Your fancy office? Your perks? The job perks which 99% of other devs won't have?

Video Title: How to crack FAANG interviews.
My Reaction: Well, only the top 1% is going to get an interview anyway. You're not acknowledging the fact that the acceptance rate is < 1% in these companies. Creating a video like this creates false expectations in beginner's heads. And they only see these companies as their only shots of making careers. They dont consider startups or starting their own companies.

Video Title: Top 4 dying programming languages.
My Reaction: WTF !!! COBOL was invented in 1959 and there still is demand for it. And my blood started boiling when Tiff in Tech said PHP is a dying language. Like seriously????

Video Title: Top paying programming languages in 2023.
My Reaction: Please, come on. We know it's Java. And 99% of the viewers ain't getting that job. You're just wasting time listing out languages. By the time someone starts from scratch and gets to a position of getting a job, something else will be the new fad.

Video Title: What advice would I give myself when I was starting?
My Reaction: Really? You couldn't think about saying what advice you'd give to your viewers? Are you really that full of narcissism?

There are good techies though, it's just that I get angrier and angrier the more YouTube recommends me these stupid videos. Ah, my chest feels lighter now.

So, it's been a while since I've been working on my current project and I've never had the "luck" to touch the legacy project wrote in PHP, until this week when I got my first issue.

And damn, this goddamn issue. It was a bug, a very strange bug, that only happens in production and that nobody has any idea what was happening, so yeah, I didn't have anyone to ask and I got less time than usual ( because Thanksgiving ).

And thus, I have no starting point, no previous knowledge on PHP and less time! I expected a very fun week 😀 and it was beyond my expectations.

First I tried to understand what might be causing the issue, but there wasn't any real clue to star with, so no choice, time to read the flow on the code and see what are they're doing and using ( 1k line files, yay, legacy ). Luckily I got some clues, we're using a cookie and a php session variable for the session, ok, let's star with the session variable. Where it's that been initialize ? Well, spoiler alert, I shouldn't start with that, because my search end up in the login method of the API that set a that variable and for some reason in the front end app it was always false and that lead me to think that some of the new backend functions were failing, but after checking the logs I got no luck.

Ok, maybe the cookie it's the issue, I should try open the previous website on the brow...redirect to new project login, What? Why ? I ask around and it's a new feature push on Monday, ok I got Chrome Dev tools I can see which value of the cookie it's been set and THERE IT WAS it has a wrong domain! After 2 days ( I resume a lot of my pain ) I got what I've been looking for, so now I should be able to fix the bug. Then where is the cookie initialized ? In the first file the server hits whenever you tried to enter any page of the app, ok, I found the method, but it's using a function that process the domain and sets it correctly? wtf ? Then how in heaven do I get the incorrect domain ? Hello? Ok, relax, you still have one more day to fix this, let's take it easy.

Then, at the end of the Wednesday, nope I still have no clue how this is happening. I talked with the Devops guy and he explain me how this redirection happens and with what it depends on, I followed the PHP code through and nothing, everything should works fine, sigh. Ok I still have 2 days, because I'm not from US and I'm not in US, so I still have time, but the Sprint is messed up already, so whatever I'm gonna had done this bug anyhow.

Thursday ! I got sick, yay, what else could happen this week. Somehow I managed to work a little and star thinking in what external issue could affect the processing, maybe the redirection was bringing a wrong direction, let's talk with the Devops guy again, and he answer me that the redirection it was being made by PHP code, IN A FILE THAT DOESN'T EXIST IN THE REPOSITORY, amazing, it's just amazing. Then he explained me why this file might be missing and how it's the deployment of this app ( btw the Devops guy it's really cool and I will invite him a beer ) . After that I checked the file and I see a random session_star in the first line of the code, without any configuration, eureka ! There was the cause and I only need to ask someone If that line it's necessary anymore, but oh they're on holiday, damn, well I'll wait till Monday to ask them. But once and for all that bug was done for ! 🎉

What do I learn ? PHP and that I don't want any more tickets of PHP 😆.

I don't use an antivirus and I probably never will.

I'll share two experiences from two different people to provide you people some base.

Firstly, this friend of mine wants to learn Android. He doesn't even have chrome installed. So I'm like let's get you a decent browser. I open the website to Firefox and I'm ready to install it.

He stops me.
He says don't install anything this isn't my laptop it's my father's and it'll get a virus.
*Facepalm*
I assure you it won't get a virus. You already have a fucking premium anti whatever the fuck suite installed so why are you worried?

Viruses are intelligent they can get anywhere. The argument was proving a waste of time besides I realized I had the files on my computer and just needed to transfer them via a thumb drive or something.

I bring over my thumb drive. Mr.viral fuck here is so shocked I thought his balls fell off. No! He doesn't want a thumb drive either, apparently they carry and generate viruses.

At this point I gave up to retain my health in the long run.

You know what I ain't going to share the other experience cause it's even more messed up.

Seriously what's with the paranoia ? I never have used an antivirus ever on my Windows installation and have never gotten infected by one either. How the fuck do people get infected by them ? I'm seriously missing something here.

Let's all flock to facebook's (I'm sorry, META's) latest application, forgetting all the trouble they've had about privacy breaches and the selling of customer data and other shady shit.

Sounds like a wonderful idea.

And give that company even more of a monopoly over the internet. Communication? Whatsapp and facebook messgenger. Social Networks? Facebook and Instagram.

I understand not giving a shit if you do not have a background in tech but come on. Learn to live without twitter you internet addicted dumb fucks

"I wanna learn C++. But nah. Python might help. Let's learn Python"

Let's see: Right now I am in two recruitment process of two enterprise.

One enterprise (Genexus, a big enterprise) I would join the I+D team, good salary, EXCELLENT work place, and 2hs of travel from home.

The other enterprise (InnovaAge, a little but powerful enterprise in grow) I would join as trainee / junior developer who helps in the development team and I would constantly learn to become like my teammates, same salary than Genexus, good work place, and 1.5he of travel from home.

Same working hours amount and same salary but InnovaAge have the GREAT advantage of be near from my University, Genexus is TOO far from there.

So, I ask you: if both enterprises would want to recruit me ... What offer should I accept?

I ask to you because you have more knowledge and exp. You are lvl 20-40 xD

Friday: I have done a lot of work this week... Should take rest in the weekend
Saturday: Who needs rest? Let's learn new hobbies, watch movies, play games and have fun🤩
Sunday: I think I will take some rest today...But that series is so cool...
Monday Morning: Why did not I take sufficient rest the whole weekend 🥱🤦🏽‍♂️
Monday Afternoon: Slept for two hours in the office time😑

Normal Developers: We will learn some new stuff by joining Devrant.

Me: Let's complete the task asap and grab the cool swags

Javascript and Java.

Imagine java is an indigenous language to an island spoken by everyone there.

A non-native visits, and in order to understand them they need to decode their java into meanings and reapply those meanings to their own language.

More non-natives start visiting more and more often, and the javanese naively welcome them in.

The natives happily create trinkets and souvenirs for the tourists, and a market starts forming. The docks get busier every day.

Soon it appears that there are more non-natives on the island than natives, and their polity of origin starts to lay claim to their land.

Fights and legal altercations become common.

Some of the native javanese begin to modify their language to meet the colonists halfway, and some of the colonists begin to learn this new language.

They begin to understand each other more fundamentally and tensions fade.

Meanwhile, the more stoic javanese retain their claim to the island, and fight the pidgin "rebels".

The island splits into Java and Papua New Java. The populace of both claiming having nothing much to do with the other.

Nothing but fun and funerals for any new tourism.

It's so sad.

Let's Make Java Great Again.
Let's Make Papua New Java Great Again.

Let's build a wall.

This is more of an essay than a rant. TLDR at the end. I simply can't choose from all the shitty lecturers I've had, so I'm going to have to go through them one by one. But of background. I'm currently in 7th year of college, I did a multimedia degree in 2 years, a intro course to Software Dev and I'm currently in my final year of my Software Dev degree. So let's start.

Intro Software Course
- we had a database module, which was thought by, I shit you not, the head of the psychology course in the college, she attempted to teach us Databases using access. And not even using SQL, using access GUI components and it's query builder. Need I say more?

1st year software dev
- We had a networking module, the guy that taught the labs, he literally didn't say more than 12 words the entire 12 week semester, his answer to any question you asked him was a grunt and "research it"

- We had a psychology module, I have no fucking idea why, but instead of learning something useful we were told to read this and get in touch with your feelings...

- database module. Yes we actually did SQL here, 12 weeks of select statements and normal form, talked about by a guy in a monotone voice, who sounded like he was contemplating bringing in an assault riffle some day. Also instead of using MySQL he decided to use Ingres. Why I will never know.

2nd Year Software Dev
- We had a module called Algorithms and Data Structures. The lecturer gave us problems she couldn't solve. Simple problems. She was also crazy. Absolutely nuts.

- Object Orientated Programming. I had this lecturer for 3 semesters up until 3rd year. This guy did COBOLT in college, graduated in the 70s or something and went straight into teaching, he taught us Java for nearly 2 years. He literally copied and pasted texts from PDFs and read through them in class. He told myself and another guy at one stage he really didn't care, and was just counting down the days to his retirement.

- Databases again, different lecturer from 1st year, taught us for 2 semesters (24 weeks) and somehow managed to teach us nothing.

3rd Year Software Dev
- software engineering.. This is where the biggest cunt I've ever met was introduced. He arrives into class 15 minutes late every time without fail, talks shit about stuff that has no relevancy to the topic at all, tries to turn everything into a rugby metaphor and every time you ask a question he somehow dodges it and swiftly changes topic. This cunts past profession? A Project Manager. Fucking typical. This dickhead has also thought me 2 other modules.

4th yr Software Dev
- El cunto mentioned above for 2 more modules. Need I say more.
- real time systems, this module took the piss, the module was written by the lecturer which is what earns his space here. Assignments given to us, which required more time to do than we had in labs so we had to work at home, the problem we that is we were using an obscure RTOS called OS9 which would only work on the college computers. When brought to the lecturers attention he just said "figure it out"

Internet of Things - There was 2 lecturers, each lecturer seemingly working off a different plan, one week you'd have one lecturer, the next would be the other one going on about something completely different and unrelated to anything else we'd done.

Some lecturers didn't even make this list as I couldn't be bothered trying to think back about how shit other ones were. These were the ones that always stood out in my mind.

My main take away point from this is that you go to college for the paper which says you have a degree. Learning things that are going to benefit you in a career is up to yourself.

TLDR; 90% of my college lectures were shit. You need to learn useful stuff yourself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Given an opportunity to develop an application for R&D. What do we do as a team? Let build it exactly the same way our current stack is built. (This app won't actually be used for anything useful, just an exercise for a fun R&D task)

It still amazes me with the number of developers that literally have the mindset, let's just do what we know & don't want to learn anything new.

Let's showcase new technologies? No. Let's create a serverless application? No. Let's create some microservices? No. Let's wrap the application in a Docker container so we can easily spin it up? No. Let's have multiple services that sit behind an API gateway? No. Let's for fucks sake at try a different design pattern? Why would we do that? Can we do anything differently? No.

No innovation, nothing - it just blows my mind. Everyone seems to think that the way the stack is built is how every application is. Sorry but a huge monolithic application that can't scale isn't how the other half live...

I don't know why the lack of wanting to try something new bothers be so much, but it does.

Had a real opportunity to showcase some cool tech, design patterns, new services in the cloud. Show not only other devs but upper management that there are alternative ways to develop. It's not like anything that I put together was "new or shiny" - I just wanted to do anything... Anything that isn't how currently do things.

Full disclosure, I'm not a great Dev - I'm pretty dam average but I'm always willing to try new techniques or approaches.

personal projects, of course, but let's count the only one that could actually be considered finished and released.

which was a local social network site. i was making and running it for about three years as a replacement for a site that its original admin took down without warning because he got fed up with the community. i loved the community and missed it, so that was my motivation to learn web stack (html, css, php, mysql, js).

first version was done and up in a week, single flat php file, no oop, just ifs. was about 5k lines long and was missing 90% of features, but i got it out and by word of mouth/mail is started gathering the community back.

right as i put it up, i learned about include directive, so i started re-coding it from scratch, and "this time properly", separated into one file per page.

that took about a month, got to about 10k lines of code, with about 30% of planned functionality.

i put it up, and then i learned that php can do objects, so i started another rewrite from scratch. two or three months later, about 15k lines of code, and 60% of the intended functionality.

i put it up, and learned about ajax (which was a pretty new thing since this was 2006), so i started another rewrite, this time not completely from scratch i think.

three months later, final length about 30k lines of code, and 120% of originally intended functionality (since i got some new features ideas along the way).

put it up, was very happy with it, and since i gathered quite a lot of user-generated data already through all of that time, i started seeing patterns, and started to think about some crazy stuff like auto-tagging posts based on their content (tags like positive, negative, angry, sad, family issues, health issues, etc), rewarding users based on auto-detection whether their comments stirred more (and good) discussion, or stifled it, tracking user's mental health and life situation (scale of great to horrible, something like that) based on the analysis of the texts of their posts...

... never got around to that though, missed two months hosting payments and in that time the admin of the original site put it back up, so i just told people to move back there.

awesome experience, though. worth every second.

to this day probably the project i'm most proud of (which is sad, i suppose) - the final version had its own builtin forum section with proper topics, reply threads, wysiwyg post editor, personal diaries where people could set per-post visibility (everyone, only logged in users, only my friends), mental health questionnaires that tracked user's results in time and showed them in a cool flash charts, questionnaire editor where users could make their own tests/quizzes, article section, like/dislike voting on everything, page-global ajax chat of all users that would stay open in bottom right corner, hangouts-style, private messages, even a "pointer" system where sending special commands to the chat aimed at a specific user would cause page elements to highlight on their client, meaning if someone asked "how do i do this thing on the page?", i could send that command and the button to the subpage would get highlighted, after they clicked it and the subpage loaded, the next step in the process would get highlighted, with a custom explanation text, etc...

dammit, now i got seriously nostalgic. it was an awesome piece of work, if i may say so. and i wasn't the only one thinking that, since showing the page off landed me my first two or three programming jobs, right out of highschool. 10 minutes of smalltalk, then they asked about my knowledge, i whipped up that site and gave a short walkthrough talking a bit about how the most interesting pieces were implemented, done, hired XD

those were good times, when I still felt like the programmer whiz kid =D

as i said, worth every second, every drop of sweat, every torn hair, several times over, even though "actual net financial profit" was around minus two hundred euro paid for those two or three years of hosting.

Happy Christmas and happy new years. 2018 was not a good year for me. Many project got delayed and not happy with my performance. I wanted to learn many thing and do many things but was not able to achieve those things.

I don't even feel like enjoying my birthday anymore. (It's on 27).

Let's hope the 2019 will be better than this dumpster fuck 2018.

I have a dream of founding a community where students can learn basic of programming for free. Developers will contribute their time and teach students over online and offline based on the sole purpose of giving back to society. Anyone Interested !!! Let's built this community together :) The community will focus on helping poor people from developing nations to live a better life.

I used to learn touch-typing, but playing games without changing keys makes me forget it.

Why the fuck game markers set WASD as default moving keys? In this case people who play the game don't use the keyboard as they have to. Come on, let's use the keyboard in correct way guys...

!rant
I'm not sure if it's good or bad, but lately I've lost that "love" for code, not coding itself, but the code in projects.

Because most of the time the projects are inherited, there is never enough time, It's always a priority. And let's be honest, most of the time programmers don't like others code. (Is it God Complex?).

What I do notice with this "new" philosophy it is that I do not stress when I do not like some development, I ask the "bosses" if there is time to change it or if we continue with how it is. I learn that it should be done better and I continue my life

So technical interview time but whenever I look at algorithm, data structure questions now I feel demotivated... it sort of feels like boring pointless work.

But if i remove the context of preparing for an interview and say I have as much time as i need, it feels like a logical puzzle, challenge, something interesting I could use to kill some time, learn something new...

It feels like there's a divide like how I can go on and on about my personal projects but if you ask about work projects, I give you the boilerplate or have to really think about what to say...

And so now I'm feeling fucked for the phone screens and algo interviews that I'm supposed to be having soon... and let's just say one of them may be with a really really big tech company...

I'm teaching a couple of classes where students (~18 years old) work on their own projects. I just deleted two of those from my machine: one Angular and one Spring Boot, but just boilerplate. Together, they were about 500 MB. I spent 2-3 hours working on a little Go tool to make concurrent HTTP requests and to report statistics on the response time. The entire repository is roughly 500 kB in size, but solves a genuine problem. My students have a bloat ratio of 1000 compared to me as a baseline, but my stuff actually does things. Today, I programmed prime factorization in PHP for some load tests (mod_php vs. PHP-FPM). The PHP script is 1148 bytes long (but the file system reports 4 kB). My students could learn more from such a script than from their overblown "projects", but "PHP sucks" I hearsay, so let's bloat on.

[long confession/question]
So I was asked by a client to make an app similar to prisma(not exactly that but let's say a caricature app) and I knew I have to research a lot.

Now I have been loyal to PHP for over 5 years so I first tried with GD and imagick but the results were not very good, so I thought let's try opencv. I didn’t wanna make any compromises so I didn't go the bridging way, I worked on native python even though I am a newbie in it. I was fairly impressed with the cartoonizing results but others weren't. Soon I got to know that this would take much more than simple filter combinations or matrix manipulations.
I read about prisma and got to know it uses deep neural networks for the same.
Now, in the five years I have learnt almost all the things a run-of-the-mill "Full stack Web Developer" should know.
I have a fair knowledge of PHP, many of its frameworks, many js frameworks(obviously jquery), I have a very good understanding of CSS and its models, I have worked on some cool algos and found solutions to many problems but I haven't gotten to stage where I can implement neural networks/machine learning in my projects.
It just scares me.
___
A little back story: I have been the CTO of a small scale company for about 1.5 years now.
___
So all this got me to asking myself should I just step down from the post to a position where I can learn more skills. Managing takes a lot more time where I can't learn a lot. Sure I learnt some other important things but not as much tech knowledge as I would have in a more basic position.

I know not many of you must have read this far, but if you did what do you think I should do? Really depressed at the moment.

Just had a memory popup about my uni days about 5 years ago. I was in my Junior year in business school and was doing a "consulting" project involving the whole Class (200 students). Groups of 4 were assigned an international company in either Europe, Asia, or South America. We'd visit them (as well as do some sightseeing) and learn about them (performance, market positions, products) during Spring Break and come up with a real proposal. We would then compete with other teams, and the winning pitchs for each would be presented in the school auditorium in front the entire class.

Our team didn't get that far but that's not the point. We did win the individual classroom competition. Our company was Deutsche Telekom (owner of T-Mobile).

This was in 2010, when the iPhone/smart-phones started to become mainstream... And our team's idea was location-based advertising.

Looking back, we basically predicted the future... though we got the wrong industry...

It's also sort of funny though because I remember the main reason we came up with the idea was to be different.

All other teams just went with some expansion plan to a neighboring country or cutting costs.... pure MBA/business plan. But I guess I was being a natural techie so thought of a tech idea instead.

We had a meeting with our professor after he picked us and he told us he had a history of spotting future hits. We were like "hm... ok... let's give it a shot... we definitely got an A!" but at that point I was sort of skeptical if this would actually work in real-life (the basic idea was they would sell ads to local businesses and if you were nearby, you would get a text message with an offer).

But guess he was pretty right... we just needed to have Google or Facebook to have been our company... though Groupon or Yelp works too... basically a tech company with larger scale rather than a mobile carrier...

I see you've gone ahead and decided to code this part using Ramda library + point free style. Let's go around and make 4 other developers learn it real quick.

What the hell am I!? I wonder if you guys can help me...

I've been programming most of my life but I've never actually been a developer by title or job role. I thought maybe if I list what I do and have done someone here could help? I'm sure there are more of you in a similar boat.

- C# and VB dev for some quick DBMS projects to help me understand and mine databases and create a nice simple view for project teams to show findings from the data to help make certain decisions.
- Automating a lot of my colleagues work with Python and if very restricted then just VBA macros in Excel and MSP. This did also include creating tools to gather data during workshops and converting the data for input into other systems.
- Brought Linux to the office with most team members now moving over to Linux with the peace of mind to know that though they do need to try solve their own problems, I can help if need be.
- Had to learn AWS and then implement an autoscaling and load balanced data center installation of a few Atlassian toolsets.
- Creating the architecture diagrams documentation needed for things like the above point.
- Having said that, also have ended up setting up all the Jira/Confluence etc. servers we use and have implemented so far whether cloud (Azure/AWS) or on prem and set up scripts to automate where possible.
- Implemented an automated workflow view in SharePoint based on SP list data and though in an ASPX page, primarily built in JS.
- Building test systems in PHP/JS with Laravel and Angular to help manage integration between systems. Having quite a time right looking into how to build middleware to connect between SOAP and REST API's, the trouble caused more by the systems and their reliance on frameworks we're trying to cut out of the picture.
- Working on BI and MI and training a team to help on the report creation so that I can do the fun creative stuff and then set them to work on the detail :)

Actually it seems safe to say that it seems that though I've finally moved into a dev office (beforehand being the only developer around) I seem to be the one they go to when a strategic solution is needed ASAP and the normal processes can't be followed (fun for someone with a CompSci degree and a number of project management courses under the belt... though I honestly do enjoy the challenges)

But I always end up Jack of all but master of, well hopefully some at least. let's not even get started on the tech related hobbies from circuit design and IoT to Andoid / iOS and game dev and enjoying a bit of pen testing to make sure we're all safe at work and at home.

As much as I don't like boxes, I'm interested to know if there is in fact a box for me? By the way, the above is just a snapshot of my last two years minus the project management work...

People, help me out.

(first some abstract thoughts)

I am a final year undergrad yet to take steps in the world and i am trying to figure out what to do with my time, what my end goal and next steps should be.

As of now I think my end goal is "relaxation , peace and happiness of me and my loved ones", and to reach there , i need money.

My younger self chose engineering for a particular reason(that i vaguely remember) and weather it was a right or wrong/illogical decision, i guess i am stuck with it and have to use this only to reach my end goal.
Maybe i am regretting this and want to change. Maybe i am just a lazy ass who is bad in his assigned role of an engineer and is running towards glitter in other fields, whatever it is , i am not going against the decision of my past and accepting my identity as an engineer.
I believe once i am able to achieve my goal( that am still not sure about but overall is a good one from general perspective), i guess i will be satisfied

------------------------------------------------
(enough with the deep stuff)

I want to learn how to "learn" . like i am always conflicted about what to do next once the tutor leaves my hand.

for eg, let's say i goto a site abc.

1. They got 1 course each for android , web dev and ai. I choose the web dev course and give my hardworking attention to it
( At this point my choice is usually based on the fact that <A> i should not be stupid to buy all 3 course even if i have money/desire to buy all of em because riding 2 horses is only going to break my ass and <B> some pseudo stats like whichever got more opportunity, which i "like", etc(Point B is usually useless in the long run i guess) )

2. From what i have experienced, these courses usually have a particular list of topic that they cover and apply them to 1 or 2 projects. For eg, say that my web dev course taught me 20 something concepts of basic html/css/js/server and the instructor applied it to blog website

BUT WHAT IS NEXT ?

2.1.
>> Should I make more projects using only those particular list of concepts?
I usually have a ton of ideas that i want to implement now that i know how to build a blog site.
say i got a similar idea to make say url shortner. I start with full enthusiasm but in the middle way there is some new thing that i don't know and when i search the internet, i realize that there are 5 ways to implement such concept, making me wander off towards a whole list of concepts that were not covered in my original 20 concept course. This makes the choice 2. 2

2.2
>> Should I just leave everything , go to docs and start learning concepts from the scratch ??
Usually when i start a project, i soon realize that the original 20 concepts were just the tip of iceberg and there are a ton of things one should know, like how os works, how a particular component interacts with another, how the language is working, how the compiler is executing, etc .
At that point i feel like tearing all my notes away, and learning every associated thing from the scratch. No matter how much my project suffers, i want to know how the things are working from the bottom , like how the requests are being mad, how the routes are working, etc which might not even be relevent for the project.

Why i want to follow approach 2? because of the Goal from abstract thoughts. in theory, having deep knowledge is going to clear my interview thereby getting me a good job.
I will get good money, make projects faster and that will be a happily ever after story.

But in practical this approach is bringing me losses and confusion. every layer of a particular thing i uncover, turns out there is another layer below that. The learning never stops. Plus my original project remained incomplete.

What is your opinon, how do you figure out what to do next?

Well, what should I say. I don't know if it happens to anyone here. But I recently made a backend in Go. I am not an experienced programmer either and I had to complete my main project in Node.js first. I was short on time too.
But me being a great lad, thought: let's do the server side in go. So, started learning go and then web programming in go. And well, didn't complete the project in time.
Lost the guy who hired me. I am a freelancer btw. Although my thirst for learning was gone. I have faced this problem many times. The desire to learn new stuffs instead of trying perfect what I already know.

Once a React aficionado, twice the frustration we endure,
In the realm of libraries, React's problems seem impure.
With Svelte's elegance and grace in our sight,
Let's vent about React, as day turns into night.

Boilerplate Overload, a monotonous affair,
Classes, constructors, lifecycle steps we declare.
In Svelte's simplicity, we find a breath of fresh air,
Just markup and magic – a coder's love affair.

Complex State Management, React's Achilles' heel,
Redux, Mobx, and their massive code appeal.
Svelte's state handling is a cinch, for real,
No more tangled webs of logic to conceal.

Unnecessary Re-Renders, React's performance woe,
Countless updates, like a never-ending show.
Svelte updates what's needed, like a pro,
Efficiency and speed, in its radiant glow.

Verbose Syntax, JSX's verbosity on display,
HTML in JavaScript, causing dismay.
Svelte's concise template syntax lights our way,
No more endless tags, just code that's here to stay.

Lack of Truly Reactive Behavior, React's hurdle high,
Hooks to wrangle, state to satisfy.
Svelte's reactivity, no need to question why,
It just works, oh my, oh my.

Ecosystem Complexity, React's sprawling sprawl,
Choices galore, making us bawl.
In Svelte's world, simplicity is the call,
A coherent ecosystem, it has it all.

Learning Curve, React's mountain to climb,
Classes, hooks, context, a hill of time.
Svelte's gentle curve feels sublime,
A smoother path to code, so fine.

Tooling Overkill, React's complex array,
Build tools, linters, configs in disarray.
Svelte's streamlined setup leads the way,
No more intergalactic code buffet.

Debugging Headaches, React's mysterious realm,
Complex state, intricate components overwhelm.
Svelte's predictable model, a soothing helm,
Debugging becomes a peaceful realm.

In the end, React, a complex labyrinth we explore,
Svelte's elegance and simplicity we adore.
If only React could learn, its problems to deplore,
A brighter future, for React we'd implore.

Where can I find those types of "homework assignments" where let's say a company sends you a sample project and asks you to add few features where in that way you learn new technology in a practical way?

I know there are some public "homework assignments" projects from Wix where you're given a sample project that uses let's say react framework and typescript where you have to learn react and add features and send it.

These projects IMO are the best way to learn new technologies fast instead of going through the documentation and figuring wth are they talking about before you realize the full potential.

Are there any of those "awesome lists" in GitHub or something? No I'm not talking about "algorithms and data structures" type of thing, I'm talking real practical samples that I can learn from and extend it.

I thought you had to be great in the computer fields before your friends started asking to make their idea games. Just happened to me this morning.
Friend: Hey let's make an MMORPG!
Me: Bro that would take years...
F: Hmmm... fine then just an RPG.
M: *in my head* cuz that really changes things, it's still an RPG...
M: Lemme hear your idea
F: *proceeds to describe Fallout /but better/
F: And I'm willing to learn game design an hour or two a day

Idk how to make him realize that it takes money, time and more than two people!!

Insider tips and tricks for a PhD, if we have grad students of any sort here. Literally anything at all. I'm enthusiastic but not naively so (I like to think), so let's learn stuff from the vets.

Me: let's focus on this aws developer - associate course and learn something new..

My Brain: hey look, Prince Harry just got engaged.. Let's read all about UK's monarchy!!!