Sit down before you read this.

So I interviewed a guy for a "Support Engineer" internship position.

Me and the team lead sit down and are waiting for him to enter, but apparently he's actually making a coffee in the kitchen.

This isn't exactly a strike since the receptionist told him that he can go get a drink, and we did too. It's just always expected for him to get a glass of water, not waste 3 minutes brewing a coffee.

In any case he comes in, puts the coffee on the table, then his phone, then his wallet, then his keys and then sits on our side of the table.
I ask him to sit in front of us so we can see him. He takes a minute to pack and tranfer himself to the other side of the table. He again places all of the objects on the table.

We begin, team lead tells him about the company. Then I ask him whether he got any questions regarding the job, the team or the company . For the next 15 minutes he bombards us with mostly irrelevant and sometimes inappropriate questions, like:
0: Can I choose my own nickname when getting an email address?
1: Does the entire department get same salaries?
2: Are there yoga classes on Sundays only or every morning?
3: Will I get a car?
4: Does the firm support workspace equality? How many chicks are in the team?
5: I want the newest grey Mac.

And then.. Then the questions turn into demands:
6: I need a high salary (asks for 2.5 more than the job pays. Which is still a lot).
I ask him why would he get that at his first job in the industry (remind you, this is an internship and we are a relatively high paying company).
He says he's getting paid more at his current job.
His CV lists no current job and only indicates that he just finished studying.
He says that he's working at his parent's business...
Next he says that he is very talented and has to be promoted very quickly and that we need to teach him a lot and finance his courses.

At this point me and the team lead were barely holding our laughs.

The team lead asks him about his English (English is not our native language).
He replies "It's good, trust me".
Team lead invites him for an English conversation. Team lead acts like a customer with a broken internet and the guy is there to troubleshoot. (btw that's not job related, just a simple scenario)
TL: "Hello, my name is Andrew, I'm calli..."
Guy: *interrupts* "Yes, yes, hi! Hi! What do you want?"
TL: "Well, if you let me fi..."
Guy: "Ok! Talk!"
TL: "...inish... My internet is not working."
Guy: "Ok, *mimics tuning a V engine or cooking a soup* I fixed! *points at TL* now you say 'yes you fixed'".

Important to note that his English was horrible. Disregarding the accent he just genuinely does not know the language well.

Then he continiues with "See? Good English. Told you no need to check!".

After about half a minute of choking on out silent laughter I ask him how much Python experience he has (job lists a requirement of at least 1 year).
He replies "I'm very good at object oriented functional programming".
I ask again "But what is your experience? Did you ever take any courses? Do you have a git repository to show? Any side.."
*he interrupts again* "I only use Matlab!".

Team lead stands up and proceeds to shake his hand while saying "we will get back to you".

At last the guy says with a stupid smile on his face "You better hire me! Call me back tomorrow." Leaves TL hanging and walks away after packing his stuff into the pockets.

I was so shocked that I wasn't even angry.
We both laughed for the rest of the day though. It was probably the weirdest interview I took part at.

This code review gave me eye cancer.

So, first of all, let me apologize to anyone impacted by eye cancer, if that really is a thing... because that sounds absolutely horrible. But, believe me, this code was absolutely horrible, too.

I was asked to code review another team's script. I don't like reviewing code from other teams, as I'm pretty "intense" and a nit-picker -- my own team knows and expects this, but I tend to really piss off other people who don't expect my level of input on "what I really think" about their code...

So, I get this script to review. It's over 200 lines of bash (so right away, it's fair game for a boilerplate "this should be re-written in python" or similar reply)... but I dive in to see what they sent.

My eyes.

My eyes.

MY EYES.

So, I certainly cannot violate IP rules and post any of the actual code here (be thankful - be very thankful), but let me just say, I think it may be the worst code I've ever seen. And I've been coding and code-reviewing for upwards of 30 years now. And I've seen a LOT of bad code...

I imagine the author of this script was a rebellious teenager who found the google shell scripting style guide and screamed "YOU'RE NOT MY REAL DAD!" at it and then set out to flagrantly violate every single rule and suggestion in the most dramatic ways possible.

Then they found every other style guide they could, and violated all THOSE rules, too. Just because they were there.

Within the same script... within the SAME CODE BLOCK... 2-space indentation... 4-space indentation... 8-space indentation... TAB indentation... and (just to be complete) NO indentation (entire blocks of code within another function of conditional block, all left-justified, no indentation at all).

lowercase variable/function names, UPPERCASE names, underscore_separated_names, CamelCase names, and every permutation of those as well.

Comments? Not a single one to be found, aside from a 4-line stanza at the top, containing a brief description of that the script did and (to their shame), the name of the author. There were, however, ENTIRE BLOCKS of code commented out.

[ In the examples below, I've replaced indentation spacing with '-', as I couldn't get devrant to format the indentation in a way to suitably share my pain otherwise... ]

Within just a few lines of one another, functions defined as...

function somefunction {
----stuff
}

Another_Function() {
------------stuff
}

There were conditionals blocks in various forms, indentation be damned...

if [ ... ]; then
--stuff
fi

if [ ... ]
--then
----some_stuff
fi

if [ ... ]
then
----something
something_else
--another_thing
fi

And brilliantly un-reachable code blocks, like:

if [ -z "$SOME_VAR" ]; then
--SOME_VAR="blah"
fi

if [ -z "$SOME_VAR" ]
----then
----SOME_VAR="foo"
fi

if [ -z "$SOME_VAR" ]
--then
--echo "SOME_VAR must be set"
fi

Do you remember the classic "demo" programs people used to distribute (like back in the 90s) -- where the program had no real purpose other than to demonstrate various graphics, just for the sake of demonstrating graphics techniques? Or some of those really bad photo slideshows, were the person making the slideshow used EVERY transition possible (slide, wipe, cross-fade, shapes, spins, on and on)? All just for the sake of "showing off" what they could do with the software? I honestly felt like I was looking at some kind of perverse shell-script demo, where the author was trying to use every possible style or obscure syntax possible, just to do it.

But this was PRODUCTION CODE.

There was absolutely no consistency, even within 1-2 adjacent lines. There is no way to maintain this. It's nearly impossible even understand what it's trying to do. It was just pure insanity. Lines and lines of insanity.

I picture the author of this code as some sort of hybrid hipster-artist-goth-mental-patient, chain-smoking clove cigarettes in their office, flinging their own poo at their monitor, frothing at the mouth and screaming "I CODE MY TRUTH! THIS CODE IS MY ART! IT WILL NOT CONFORM TO YOUR WORLDLY STANDARDS!"

I gave up after the first 100 lines.

Gave up.

I washed my eyes out with bleach.

Then I contacted my HR hotline to see if our medical insurance covers eye cancer.

A devRant Update!

Hey everyone,

We thought now would be a great time for a devRant summer update on what we've added recently and what we've been working on.

Highlights since our last update:

- We launched devRant++, a supporter program for people who want to help us cover our costs while getting some cool extra features (a supporter badge on rants/comments/profile, reserved spot on our in-app supporter list, ability to edit rants/comments for up to 30 minutes instead of 5, and thanks to immediate user feedback, we also added the ability to post a rant every 1 hour instead of 2, and post comments that are up to 2,000 characters instead of 1,000!) We are extremely happy and thankful for the great response the program has gotten and we plan to continue to improve it using your feedback.

- We added the ability to subscribe to a user's rants. This makes it so you get a notification whenever that user posts a new rant!

- We added an "active discussions" feature (available in the "more" tab on the right). If you're looking to join a conversation happening in the moment, then this feature will help you discover those rants. It shows rants that have recently been commented on so if it's a topic that interests you, you can easily get in on the discussion!

Some stuff we have in the pipeline:

- More fun avatar stuff, including fun new OS/language-themed pets
- More perks for the devRant++ subscriber program - if you have anything you'd like to see, please let us know and we will try to make it happen!
- We will be testing some stuff to help classify rant types (rants, jokes, questions, etc.) in order to create a more personalized experience
- On that note, we're also going to take some more time to do some work on the algo as we haven't done much in terms of improvement since the initial smart algo launched
- Community projects page update - we've been slacking on updating the page and apologize for that. If you have created a devRant-related project and it's not on the community page, please resend it to david@hexicallabs.com (even if you sent it already) so we can make sure it gets added. Sorry about that!

A note on community etiquite regarding voting on content:

We've always believed that one of the most important and awesome experiences on devRant is getting your content noticed and appreciated by others. If you enjoy a piece of content, you should upvote it. If you enjoy 500 pieces of content, you should upvote them all. People really appreciate others enjoying their rants and comments so let them know if you do! If you don't like content, you can downvote it with the relevant reason. What we don't encourage is voting on content that you haven't actually looked at or spamming upvotes in mass for content you're not even actually reading/viewing. While we don't encourage that, it's not explicitly disallowed so we won't impose any penalty for it.

What is strictly prohibited and enforced is using scripts or automated procedures for voting on content. Anyone who is caught doing that will have their account deleted without warning. While very rare, we caught a couple of people doing that this week and both accounts in question were immediately deleted once discovered. To be clear, this is the practice of explicitly using a script or automation to mass vote on content. You will NEVER be banned/deleted for voting on a lot of content manually, even if you vote quickly and on lots of stuff. We just want to make that clear becuase this is not meant to discourage people from voting, it is only regarding votes not placed by humans. So if you're a human voting on content, you have nothing to worry about, we promise!

Please feel free to let us know if you have any questions or feedback on any of this. We love constructive feedback and in the past it has gone a very long way to improving and advancing the devRant community. And as always, thank you to everyone who contributed to the community in any way, we really appreciate it and want to keep making your experienfce better.

Happy ranting,
~David and Tim (Team devRant)
@dfox @trogus

Oh, man, I just realized I haven't ranted one of my best stories on here!

So, here goes!

A few years back the company I work for was contacted by an older client regarding a new project.

The guy was now pitching to build the website for the Parliament of another country (not gonna name it, NDAs and stuff), and was planning on outsourcing the development, as he had no team and he was only aiming on taking care of the client service/project management side of the project.

Out of principle (and also to preserve our mental integrity), we have purposely avoided working with government bodies of any kind, in any country, but he was a friend of our CEO and pleaded until we singed on board.

Now, the project itself was way bigger than we expected, as the wanted more of an internal CRM, centralized document archive, event management, internal planning, multiple interfaced, role based access restricted monster of an administration interface, complete with regular user website, also packed with all kind of features, dashboards and so on.

Long story short, a lot bigger than what we were expecting based on the initial brief.

The development period was hell. New features were coming in on a weekly basis. Already implemented functionality was constantly being changed or redefined. No requests we ever made about clarifications and/or materials or information were ever answered on time.

They also somehow bullied the guy that brought us the project into also including the data migration from the old website into the new one we were building and we somehow ended up having to extract meaningful, formatted, sanitized content parsing static HTML files and connecting them to download-able files (almost every page in the old website had files available to download) we needed to also include in a sane way.

Now, don't think the files were simple URL paths we can trace to a folder/file path, oh no!!! The links were some form of hash combination that had to be exploded and tested against some king of database relationship tables that only had hashed indexes relating to other tables, that also only had hashed indexes relating to some other tables that kept a database of the website pages HTML file naming. So what we had to do is identify the files based on a combination of hashed indexes and re-hashed HTML file names that in the end would give us a filename for a real file that we had to then search for inside a list of over 20 folders not related to one another.

So we did this. Created a script that processed the hell out of over 10000 HTML files, database entries and files and re-indexed and re-named all this shit into a meaningful database of sane data and well organized files.

So, with this we were nearing the finish line for the project, which by now exceeded the estimated time by over to times.

We test everything, retest it all again for good measure, pack everything up for deployment, simulate on a staging environment, give the final client access to the staging version, get them to accept that all requirements are met, finish writing the documentation for the codebase, write detailed deployment procedure, include some automation and testing tools also for good measure, recommend production setup, hardware specs, software versions, server side optimization like caching, load balancing and all that we could think would ever be useful, all with more documentation and instructions.

As the project was built on PHP/MySQL (as requested), we recommended a Linux environment for production. Oh, I forgot to tell you that over the development period they kept asking us to also include steps for Windows procedures along with our regular documentation. Was a bit strange, but we added it in there just so we can finish and close the damn project.

So, we send them all the above and go get drunk as fuck in celebration of getting rid of them once and for all...

Next day: hung over, I get to the office, open my laptop and see on new email. I only had the one new mail, so I open it to see what it's about.

Lo and behold! The fuckers over in the other country that called themselves "IT guys", and were the ones making all the changes and additions to our requirements, were not capable enough to follow step by step instructions in order to deploy the project on their servers!!!

[Continues in the comments]

This was my first freelancer project. Just dropped out of school, i think i was 17. No money, no proper hardware, i had a very old laptop & stolen wifi from our neighbor. I lived in a very small room at my mom’s flat, she wanted me out as soon as i turn 18. At the time my plan was to work on freelancer stuff and make my own games. “It will be fine, fuck school, who needs school? 😂“ I haven’t really finished anything back then, so i only had a few wip hobby projects to show ppl as my references. I saw a freelancer job posting. The task was to make a simple quiz game for mobile, it paid 350$. Back then that was a lot of money for me so i took it. I met the client, he said “2-3 week tops, i send you everything, you do the code” Cool. I finally had a “job”😃. The 2-3 weeks turned into a 8 month blur of all-nighting and just implement one more thing and its finished. I did not really have any experience on how to deal with clients and i really needed this project to finally have something on my porfolio. I motivated myself with “if i can finish this i can finish anything”. I think the story of my most definitive all-nighting was 3 months into the development. I finally got everything from the client so it was like just put it together and its done. The client wanted 300 levels, beeing a noob i was i started making all the 300 unity scenes by hand, aligning the pictures, the ui, testing each level, making adjustments to the code, etc.. after a really long night and a fuckton of caffeine i was done. I sent it to the client at around 9 am and gone to sleep. When i woke up i checked my emails to saw this: Cool! But can we do hints? (wich needed a fuckton of rework of my code) I think i had my first mental breakdown while working on the project. After that he wanted more modifications and because i made every level by hand i had to remake all of them like 10 times 😂
But in the end it turned out positive, he really helped me to start my carrier, we became sord of friends and the project gave me a lot of confidence and experience on how to deal with stuff when shit goes wrong because everything that can go wrong in a project gone wrong. It was the most valuable developer lesson. Plus it sounds so cool to say “i was born in development hell, b*tch!”🕶
I attached a pic of the laptop i worked on 😂
Thanks for reading 😃

I’ve been inspired by programming many times, but a few early moments really stand out for me. Some of those most memorable early moments came when I developed Flash games with my friend in high school.

Growing up, at this point in time, around 2005, Flash games were really hot. All the kids in my school played games on addictinggames.com during any classes that took place in the computer lab, and when my friend and I started making games, it was our dream to get a game featured on addictinggames.com.

When one of our early games ended up getting featured, we were absolutely ecstatic and I’ll never forget the feeling of seeing our own work on this game website that we loved for years prior and that so manly people at our school used. It was the coolest thing and I think went a long way to encouraging me to continue to want to create things, after seeing the impact we were able to make with a simple game (as two high school students).

And I think that shows the beauty of the internet today and the power people with few resources have to get stuff out there. I think it’s maybe gotten harder as of late since there’s probably more competition, but I also think the audience is ever-growing and I hope many more people get to experience that awesome feeling of having something you worked hard on become popular.

IF PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES WERE DRUGS:

JavaScript = Methamphetamine:
Anyone can cook some up at home but only pros can make the good stuff without blowing everything up.
Under the influence it tries to do everything at once, in seemingly no specific order before running off and making plenty of promises - but you have no clue if it kept any until it returns.

C = Heroin:
It takes some prep before you can take a hit but when you do it's far more potent than expected. When prepped (compiled) correctly it will induce complete and utter ecstasy but any error or abuse may kill you, leave you on the floor, in a coma or wishing you were dead.

HTML = Paracetamol(Panado):
Some don't think it's a real drug and others do. Either way you should grow a pair and try something a little more hardcore.

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

I came up with these after I randomly explained asynchronous js to a junior as synchronous code on meth. These were just off the top of my head, please feel free to correct or expand on them :-)

TL;DR: Don't ever interrupt me while taking a shit.

>be me taking a shit comfortably in the bathroom, not bothering anyone
>hear my cousin outside calling his gf
>nofsgiven.jpg
>suddenly stuff comes flying through the window and hear her gf laughing in his phone speaker
>stupid asshat was trying to make his gf laugh by bothering me while in the debug room
>scream from the top of my lungs for him to stop interrupting my defecation process
>stuff keeps coming from the window
>my brown creation comes back inside like a scared turtle
>pull up pantaloons
>get out of thinking room
>open up laptop, start ubuntu
>sudo apt-get install aircrack-ng
>enable monitor mode, get phone, ap mac addresses
>vim shittyvengeance.sh
>write small script that deauths his phone and then waits some seconds and then starts over again so he doesn't think it's me
>:wq and make script executable
>sleep 180; cowsay ding dong ur vengeance has arrived; sudo ./shittyvengeance.sh
>tuck into bed and close laptop before sleep time ends
>his call suddenly drops
>"Matt are you messing up with my WiFi again?"
>"Nah man. Not working for me either. Must be localcompany's problem."
>mfw he can't talk with his gf for more than 15 seconds before losing connection
>omgitworks.jpg
>figure that it was the most useful thing I had made in a pc in these two years at uni
>be proud of me for making a stupid script
>think about going back to my pearl white throne
>no longer wanting to drop my supplies
>go to sleep
>mfw forgot to wipe ass

My first story in devRant! Was lurking for quite a while and finally felt like sharing something 🙃

Probably the biggest one in my life.
TL:DR at the bottom

A client wanted to create an online retirement calculator, sounds easy enough , i said sure.

Few days later i get an email with an excel file saying the online version has to work exactly like this and they're on a tight deadline

Having a little experience with excel, i thought eh, what could possibly go wrong, if anything i can take off the calculations from the excel file

I WAS WRONG !!!
17 Sheets, Linking each other, Passing data to each sheet to make the calculation
( Sure they had lot of stuff to calculate, like age, gender, financial group etc etc )

First thing i said to my self was, WHAT THE FREAKING FUCK IS THIS ?, WHAT YEAR IS THIS ?

After messing with it for couple of hours just to get one calculation out of it, i gave up

Thought about making a mysql database with the cell data and making the calculations, but NOOOO.
Whoever made it decided to put each cell a excel calculation ( so even if i manage to get it into a database and recode all the calculations it would be wayyy pass the deadline )

Then i had an epiphany

"What if i could just parse the excel file and get the data ?"
Did a bit of research sure enough there's a php project
( But i think it was outdated and takes about 15-25 seconds to parse, and makes a copy of the original file )

But this seemed like the best option at the time.
So downloaded the library, finished the whole thing, wrote a cron job to delete temporary files, and added a loading spinner for that delay, so people know something is happening
( and had few days to spare )

Sent the demo link to client, they were very happy with it, cause it worked same as their cute little excel file and gave the same result,

It's been live on their website for almost a year now, lot of submissions, no complains
I was feeling bit guilty just after finishing it, cause i could've done better, but not anymore

Sorry for making it so long, to understand the whole thing, you need to know the full story

TL:DR - Replicated the functionality of a 17 sheet excel calculator in php hack-ishly.

*meeting with boss about a quick site for one of her clients*

Boss- "okay so basically I just want you to copy the content from -already made site- and put it on the new one"

Me- "okay sure do you want it verbatim or "

Boss-"no but something similar"

Me-"okay so you want me to paraphrase this list that's on the homepage?"

Boss-"Well no we dont actually need the list at all as it isnt relevant to us so just take that out"

Me-"okay well that is the only thing on the homepage so what should I replace it with"

Boss-"I dont know, something similar to the list. You can figure something out"

Me-"....I dont know anything about the clients business. I am not going to just make up content, you guys can at least give me some direction there"

Boss-"i didnt think it would be that hard"

Me-"it's really not hard. You're making it harder than it needs to be for me though. Anyway, do you wanna keep the same exact pages as the other site or only transfer some of them or"

Boss-"something that resembles that website but isnt exactly it so some of the pages but not all"

Me-"which ones"

Boss-"the ones relevant to client's business"

Me-*closes notebook, stands up, starts to leave room*

Boss-"where are you going"

Me-"I'm going to get another two cups of coffee cause I didnt have enough this morning for this bullshit"

Boss-*raises eyebrow*

Me-"dont tell me to copy paste a website at first and then continue to tell me its going to be "similar" but different and then further continue to be as vague as possible about what is expected of me to be done in order to make it different! Take the time to decide what it is you want exactly and then tell me, with detail, what you're criteria is so I can do the thing!! I cant read your mind."

Boss-"..... I just didnt think it would be that hard to jot in a few sentences here and there"

I left the room at that point. Irritating as fuck. You dont know tech stuff, don't expect me to know enough about YOUR job to write about it as if I'm a professional. I cant fucking read minds, I have no interest in researching anything just to create the site content myself, and its fucking rude that they wont even take the time to sit down and decide what they want for a website that THEY are paying for. For fucks sake people get your fucking shit together

"You mean to tell me that you deleted the class that holds all our labels and spin boxes together?" I said exasperatedly.

~Record scratch.mp3

~Freeze frame.mp4

"You're probably wondering how we got to this stage? Let's wind back a little, shall we?"

~reverseRecordSound.wav

A light tapping was heard at the entrance of my office. 

"Oh hey [Boss] how are you doing?" I said politely

"Do you want to talk here, or do you want to talk in my office? I don't have anyone in my office right now, so..."

"Ok, we can go to your office," I said.

We walked momentarily, my eyes following the newly placed carpeting. 

Some words were shared, but nothing that seemed mildly important. Just necessary things to say. Platitudes, I supposed you could call them.

We get to his office, it was wider now because of some missing furniture. I quickly grab a seat.

"So tell me what you've been working on," I said politely.

"I just finished up on our [project] that required proper saving and restoring."

"Great! How did you pull it off?" I asked excitedly. 

He starts to explain to me what he did, and even opens up the UI to display the changes working correctly.

"That's pretty cool," admiring his work.

"But what's going on here? It looks like you deleted my class." I said, looking at his code.

"Oh, yeah, that. It looked like spaghetti code so I deleted it. It seemed really bulky and unnecessary for what we were doing."

"Wait, hold on," I said wildly surprised that he thought that a class with some simple setters and getters was spaghetti code.

"You mean to tell me that you deleted the class that organizes all our labels and spin boxes together?" I said exasperatedly.

"Yeah! I put everything in a list of lists."

"What, that's not efficient at all!" I exclaimed

"Well, I mean look at what you were doing here,"  he said, as he displays to me my old code. 

"What's confusing about that?" I asked politely, but a little unnerved that he did something like this.

"Well I mean look at this," he said, now showing his "improved" code. 

"We don't have that huge block of code (referring to my class) anymore filling up the file." He said almost a little too joyously. 

"Ok, hold on," I said to him, waving my hand. "Go back to my code and I can show you how it is working. Here we are getting all the labels and spin boxes into their own objects." I said pointing a little further down in the code. "Down here we are returning the spin boxes we want to work with. Here and here, are setters so we can set maximum and minimum values for the spin box."

"Oh... I guess that's not that complicated. but still, that doesn't seem like really good bookkeeping." He said. 

"Well, there are some people that would argue with you on that," I said, thinking about devRant.

He quickly switches back to his code and shows me what he did. "Look, here." He said pointing to his list of lists. "We have our spin boxes and labels all called and accounted for. And further down we can use a for loop to parse through them."

He then drags both our version of the code and shows the differences. I pause him for a moment

"Hold on, you mean you think this" I'm now pointing at my setters "is more spaghetti than this" I'm now pointing at his list of lists.

"I mean yeah, it makes more sense to me to do it this way for the sake of bookkeeping because I don't understand your Object Oriented Programming stuff."

...

After some time of going back and forth on this, he finally said to me.
"It doesn't matter, this is my project."

Honestly, I was a little heart broken, because it may be his project but part of me is still in there. Part of my effort in making it the best it can be is in there.

I'm sorry, but it's just as much my project as it is yours.

This rant is devoted to my study friends. You see, I never knew what it was to not have people making fun of you/bullying you until I started my study.

Elementary school + highschool was one big mess of bullying, being made fun of and hardly having any friends.

At highschool I decided I wanted to go into IT. Especially programming. Programming in particular because when I was programming, I, for once, was the one in control. The code listened to me and for that tiny moment I was god.

Never really had much friends though and when I told my parents I wanted to do an MBO study (application development), my mother warned me that although she and my dad supported me with whatever my decision would be, MBO level studies were rough because of the general mindset/atmosphere there.

I thought fuck it, I want to do programming because that seems awesome and maybe I'll even make some friends with the same interests!

Then study arrived. Met a few guys with similar interests and we started hanging out together.

And then it came back just like before. Two guys who loved bullying and I was still a quite easy target because I couldn't stand up for myself.

But, then something happened. I liked a girl, she was in the hallway and two of the bullies (there were about 4-5 in total) got up and started fucking around with me (about her) and I just sat there, not daring to do anything with tears in my eyes.

Then two of my classmates noticed it, quickly came to my desk and started pushing the guys away with 'back the fuck off, what the fuck has he done to you?!'. Then one of those guys (now still about my best friend) came to me to see if I was alright.

We started talking. Then at some point, another bully had a go at me. This would be the final time. He was about 2 meters tall (I was about 160cm or something) and stood there in the door opening with a very nasty smile saying all nasty stuff, trying to intimidate me and probably tried to make me feel like crap again.

Nice guy on my right asked me to step to the left. Gave that guy a huge fucking foot in his chest and he smacked onto the ground. Made a gentleman's sign like 'go ahead, sir!' while gesturing towards the door.

From that moment on the bullying stopped. Throughout my study, some other bad things happened but those guys were always there for me.

Although I've lost touch with most of the guys (they're on social media, I'm not really), we still meet up once in a while and have a lot of beers while talking and laughing and thinking back to the good times we had together.

The study wasn't the best for what we were taught as in studying but it's the best choice I've ever made nonetheless.

Oh and that best friend and I still have loads of contact!

How I went from loving my job to wishing i dont wake up tomorrow just to avoid it.

Ive been a backend dev in the company im at for 2 years now.

First year was a blast, i loved my work so much, I used to get so many random features to do, bug fixes, campaigns, analytics, etc..

Second year i started getting familiar with the part of the code that has to do with Search in our music streaming app. Nobody wanted to work on it, so i wanted to take initiative and start doing a few tasks.

A few tasks turned into sprints, and sprints turned into months worth of sprints. And because the code was the definition of tech debt, and because it was so messed up that changing one thing can blow up everything else, working on Search was not too fun.

However, people seemed to be happy search tasks are no longer piling up and someone is handling them so that used to make me feel good about it. They also gave me so much freedom and i felt like my own manager because no one told me what to do (not even my actual manager) they just let me be and were happy i was handling the part they want nothing to do with. I was also given an intern to mentor and have her work on Search tasks with me which turned out amazing.

During the last few months, I completely rewrote search, made it 10 times more performant in such a neat way, made an inhouse dashboard to automate certain tasks so we wont need to waste developers on them (all of which were extra effort on my own time without being asked), all meanwhile still tending to the fixes of the old implementation.

I felt so accomplished, and in a way, i felt like a lead (even tho im not managing any employees, i had so much freedom and I was literally responsible for everything about Search and if i decide to play with the sprint task order i can even do that).

Then 6 or so weeks ago my manager left the company, and while i thought id be a standalone team / person (single person teams are not uncommon in the company) i was instead put under someone else. Someone who likes to micro manage the fuck out of me. I have been happy working on shit code because it was my baby, my project, no one interferes and no one tells me what to do and everyone would call me the search lead (unofficially). now if i dont report to that guy every two hours he calls to see if im working. preplans sprints i no longer have a say in, and im the only dev who knows the code so all tasks go to me. I feel i got demoted so fucking much. I felt like a lead on a project and now im back to being a normal code minion. From deciding everything about a project to blindly following a some irrelevant manager's opinion. (who btw is making Search worse) And after all the extra effort i put in, after actually caring, after actually embracing Search as my responsibility i get rewarded with losing everything i liked about my job...My Independence. From feeling like a lead to feeling demoted. I am so demotivated.

I love the company, but this is hell for me and this made me hate a job i always loved. I am thinking of talking to the CTO asking to work on other stuff because i no longer want this. If i am to be a code minion at least let it be on code i like, let me go back to dealing with PMs, fuck my new manager I dont wanna work with that guy he can take the project along with all its poopoo.

"devRant has changed" "I'm so fed up with this site" "Its a bunch of hate and memes, it was so much better before"

A rebuttal.

devRant is approximately the same as it was when it was just a newborn. Remember the days of semicolon jokes being unironically funny?

Look at the top rants of all time, for fucks sake. #2 ever is:

"A different error message! Finally some progress!"

Posted three years ago. That's the second most upvoted rant in history (Remember, this was a "rant" because the joke/meme category didn't exist back then), it made it's way into the app store screenshots, and was a welcome post.

Now imagine that posted today. It would probably go over okay, in fairness, but it's certainly at risk of any number of pretentious pricks complaining about how this is "devRANT not 4chan" or how they had seen the joke before and it's a shitty repost.

And sure, the repost bullshit is fair. I'm not saying that all the reposts are good content. What I'm saying is devRant has always been full of reposts - they just weren't reposts in the early days. The quality of content is the same.

There's also the common misconception that your posts need to be directly related to tech to post on devRant. This is a myth propagated by 0 IQ heathens that don't read any further than the name of the application. Your posts can be anything that isn't prohibited, like porn, spam, and, importantly, politics (commonly overlooked rule)

"All the memes are just too much". Oh you poor fucking baby, let me pour you a healthy serving of pity juice. First of all, you can turn off the memes category, and while they will still find their way to your feed, the concentration will be much lower and it will once again be bearable for your pitiful, weak little soul. Do you seriously get annoyed that severely by shitty posts that you need to leave the app altogether, or do you just want the attention of being a "cool hipster that hates on xyz"?

"This place is just filled with hate! Why can't you just respect xyz technology, it isn't actually that bad!"

This is probably the most stupid fucking thing you could possibly ejaculate from your fingers into whatever device you are using to type. Welcome to devRant, we hate on shit. That's at our core. No, xyz technology ISN'T actually that bad, you're correct. But we're here to tear it apart because it probably has frustrated us in the past. I fucking hate JS because it was my first language and it confused the shit out of me. JS is a great language. But I still talk shit about it, and that's what we're here to do.

Like seriously, I know a lot of people post stuff they're proud of here, and then they're met with "Would be great if you didn't use xyz tech", and that hurts, but holy shit, this is devRant. If you're sensitive to criticism, or even just straight up being made fun of, don't post shit that you're proud of. You won't have a good time. It's just not what we do here.

Quick interlude before the conclusion, "My girlfriend dumped me after I named a class after her. She felt I treated her like an object." is also on the first page of all-time most popular posts.

In conclusion, devRant has not changed. Reposts have been a nuisance since day 0, and just because reposts look different these days doesn't mean the quality of content has decreased in any manner. The two main sources of your frustration are the volume of low-quality posts (Mind you, not the concentration of them, but the volume of them) and your own prejudices about the platform. You're looking back with rose-tinted glasses.

Here are some tips for a more enjoyable experience:

-Make sure you have the "Hide reposts" setting ENABLED in settings. Any posts marked as repost will be hidden in your feed, pulling down the concentration of low-quality posts.
-Keep to the algo sorting method. Obviously, algo is a bot, and there's still gonna be some shit content in there anyways, but if you're in recent, you are absolutely guaranteed to see low-quality posts. It's unfiltered.
-Keep in mind that what you consider a "quality" post is not what others consider a "quality" post. Just because you don't like memes doesn't mean memes are poor content. There are people here who have never seen the bobby tables comic. And they deserve the same experience we got when discovering dev humor.
-Don't be a prick. And if you cannot help yourself, leave. Ironically, you're making the site worse by complaining about how bad the site is. You can always come back if you aren't a prick anymore. And you can leave permanently if you choose as well.
-Downvote and move on. You're not doing anything but making yourself more aggravated by leaving a shitty comment about how shitty the shitty post is.
-Think critically. Obviously optional, and I know not many people like to use their brain when a phone is suspended between their hands, but if you want a better experience, remember to use your head and not to lose it.

Looks like Apple is the new Microsoft and Microsoft is the new Apple...

I remember when every release of Windows was a catastrophic mess and you had to wait until at least SP2 to get the OS to work in a stable way. And Internet Exploder was *the* browser that broke everything, every time. And there was the whole embrace/extend thing, where they tried to impose their vision of web standards and compatibility, and *everything* you used *had* to come from Microsoft...

And now, it's Apple who fuck up every single OS release, on mobile and desktop, and whose browsers openly shit on web standards (ever try developing anything for Mobile Safari?). Apple's stuff that only works with Apple stuff (down to things like headphone jacks - OOPS, forgot, they dropped those now).

Microsoft is making interesting, beautiful hardware (Surface machines) while Apple is pushing un-innovative, overpriced garbage year in year out. And they're open-sourcing more and more, while Apple walls itself further and further behind its walled "garden". Bleh.

Be interesting to see in 10 years what will have shifted, because it'll change again by then.

So I had my exams recently and I thought I'd post some of the most hacky shit I've done there over here. One thing to keep in mind, I'm a backender so I always have to hack my way around frontend!

- Had a user level authentication library which fucked up for some reason so I literally made an array with all pages and user levels allowed so I pretty much had a hardcoded user level authentication feature/function. Hey, it worked!

- CSS. Gave every page a hight of 110 percent because that made sure that you couldn't see part of the white background under the 'background' picture. Used !important about everywhere but it worked :P.

- Completey forgot (stress, time pressure etc) to make the user ID's auto incremented. 'Fixed' that by randomly generating a user id and really hoping during every registration that that user ID did not exist in the database already. Was dirty as fuck but hey it worked!

- My 'client' insisted on using Windows server.Although I wouldn't even mind using it for once, I'd never worked with it before so that would have been fucked for me. Next to that fact, you could hear swearing from about everyone who had to use Windows server in that room, even the die hard windows users rather had linux servers. So, I just told a lot of stuff about security, stability etc and actually making half of all that shit up and my client was like 'good idea, let's go for linux server then!'. Saved myself there big time.

- CHMOD'd everything 777. It just worked that way and I was in too much time pressure to spend time on that!

- Had to use VMWare instead of VirtulBox which always fucks up for me and this time it did again. Windows 10 enjoyed corrupting the virtual network adapters after every reboot of my host so I had to re-create the whole adapter about 20 times again (and removing it again) in order to get it to work. Even the administrator had no fucking clue why that was happening.

- Used project_1.0.zip etc for version control :P.

Yup, fun times!

tl;dr
A former colleague of mine, who used to suck at web development is now a kick-ass who knows how to get things done.

We are of the same age. We got hired on this company at the same time. He was a front-end guy, and I am a full-stack. So, we were like a yin and yang in development roles.

Initially, we have this big gap of skillset. I was solely assigned on a project which I worked on from ground up, while he was barely able to make an HTML table look properly on a separate existing project. My impression of him that time is that he's kind of a simpleton. But, I was wrong.

Few months passed, our seniors left the company, and I was promoted to be a team lead. Eventually, I was teamed up with this guy. I had a hard time working with him, but I was able to share him some of my knowledge.

Every time I teach him something new, he's exploring more. From proper indentation, writing SASS, using streaming build system (GulpJS), etc., he's making sure that he applies it on every project he's assigned to — even practicing it on his personal projects during break time. I can see him improve each day.

After a year in the company, he became so much better. I even ended up teaching him more than just front-end stuff. I shared the gospel of Jesus of PHP community (Jeffrey Way), tought him how to set up his own server, how to configure DNS, etc.. Again, it's tough for him even to write a simple for..loop statements. But, after a lot of consistent practice, he became better and better. We've done quite a number of projects together. He's fun to work with because of his "hungry" spirit.

Unfortunately, he was laid-off from the company, and I worked on the company til the very end. We parted ways.

He went back to his hometown to launch his own e-commerce business — apparently, this was the "practice" project he was working on the whole time during breaktimes.

Another year has passed, that project worked out and got a funding. And now, he's launching his second project. The best thing is, when I lookup his projects on builtwith.com, every damn stack I tought him, he used it. It's like a project built by me.

To be honest, I am a little jealous of him, but at the same time, I am so proud of him. I thought him how to make things work, he thought me how to get things done. He's my inspiration now.

Biggest scaling challenge I've faced?

Around 2006~2007 the business was in double-digit growth thanks to the eCommerce boom and we were struggling to keep up with the demand.

Upper IT management being more hardware focused and always threw more hardware at the problem. At its worst, we had over 25 web servers (back then, those physical tall-rectangle boxes..no rack system yet) and corresponding SQL server for each (replicated from our main sql server)

Then business boomed again and projected the need for 40 servers (20 web servers, 20 sql servers) over the next 5 years. Hardware+software costs (they were going to have to tear down a wall in order to expand the server room) were going to be in the $$ millions.

Even though we were making money, the folks spending it didn't seem to care, but I knew this trajectory was not sustainable, so I started utilizing (this was 2007) WCF services and Microsoft's caching framework Velocity. Started out small, product lookup data (description, price, the simple stuff) and within a month, I was able to demonstrate the web site could scale with less than half of our current hardware infrastructure.

After many political battles (I've ranted about a few of those), the $$ won and even with the current load, we were able to scale back to 5 web servers and 2 sql servers. When the business increased in the double-digits again, and again...we were still the same hardware for almost 5 years. We only had to add another service server when the international side of the business started taking off.

Challenge wasn't the scaling issue, the challenge was dealing with individuals who resisted change.

I can’t count money as quick. I don’t know how to operate a cash register. I’m bad at following small tasks in the kitchen. Ex: girlfriend yells at me for putting unstrained yolk in recipe (after straining it).

I can’t lift heavy stuff. Out of breathe helping my mom move. My uncle told me, “if you can’t do that, how can you work?” Then he touts his son around proudly for being in the army. I felt like shit for years.

My cousins told me to get a job at McDonald’s to learn the value of a dollar. I spent all this time studying and hadn’t found a single job at the time (not that I was looking). I was living off financial aid and some income from an app that sold for a dollar on the App Store.

I would mess up if I worked there. It was depressing guys. These people who worked at McDonald’s and Starbucks. It was like a cool club that I couldn’t be a part of! I wanted to be that smooth barista at Starbucks with a smug look on my face. Making coffee for all the ladies and writing hearts next to their name on the cup.

The responsibilities of going to work day after day and blowing your paycheck at a meal at Denny’s with your friends. Complaining about not getting enough hours and talking about adult stuff! Sigh sigh sigh. Oh and taxes! Let’s complain about taxes on a single W-2 just for the hell of it (not sure why they do this when you can file a simple 1040EZ) even though we get a refund.

Then..

After many paid internships (roughly 3), now I may be receiving an offer that is 100k+ with a 401k and all benefits I can imagine. Free food up the wazoo. Gym on site. Happy hour Friday’s.

I brag about taking a shit for an hour at work and coworkers don’t give a shit. Or taking a day off to do personal errands anytime.

Having my own place in a nice area (though the cost of living is enough to take care of 3 families in another state). Supporting my girlfriend through school and helping her with her dreams of art.

Going to fancy dinners and not worrying about the bill afterwards.
Accidentally damaging my 2017 Honda Accord and not giving a fuck because I can pay $900 for repair with less than a week of work.

But I can’t help but think that all this time..

I could’ve just quit and worked at McDonalds. I could’ve been one of the cool kids..

A couple of months back I got an interview for a junior android devel position. I do not consider myself a junior devel, bt fuck it they paid 78k a year plus benefits and this is for south texas where it ain't thaaat expensive. So i kept my mouth shut and went with it.
The company was glorious, one of those hipsert marketing companies with cool couches and shit and people doing fuckign whatever all over the place and cool tools and desks.

So the initial interview with the hr dept went amazing, real cool guys and very down to earth. Next was the senior android dev.

This dude.

It was to be a phone interview, with a lil coding test. Fine whatevs. But the moment he called i knew shit was going down hill. Dude sounded dead af. Like he could not stand being himself that day. Asked asshole questions that every developer in Android should know that were frankly quite insulting ("what company develops the Android os" kind of deal) but kept my mouth shut and answered as needed.

Then the coding portion. Given a string, find the first position of the first repeated char, so if I had , fuck i dunno "tetas" then t was the first (and only) char repeated and it should have given out 2.
Legit finished it up in less than 6 mins and only because he was making me explain my entire thought process.

He got angry for some reason. Mind you I speak like a hippie, with a melow town and calm voice all the damned time, got that Texas swag going on as well as any good ol' boy from Texas should right?
Well this dude was not having none of that shit that day.

Dude was all like "ok now....why exactly did you do it this way?"

With a VERY condescending tone. And i explained that at first I normally think about solutions in pseudocode, so I wrote that as well...1 min or less. In python. This is after I still had the Java solution on screen with perfectly clean and working Java. I saif that since Python was as close to pseudocode as it gets that I figured i would just write the "pseudocode" in python and then map it to Java with all the required modifications.

"Welk i did not ask you to write it in java, so i dunno why you would even do that to begin with"

That is one of many asshole remarks. The first when I mentioned that I found React Native good for prototyping complex ideas for FUCKING FUN. Passion motherfucker. Shit so fly I do it for fun. "We don't deal with that here so I am not interested in what you can do with that or how would it help me"

Mofocka plz.

Well going back to the python shit. I explain (calmly) that it was just a way that I had to figure details, to think of different implementations. He continues by saying that it takes valuable company time.

Then he proceeds to tell me that he believes that i cheated since i fi ished the java "problem" too fast.
I told him that simple stuff like that should take even less for any senior java dev and that we could run another example if he wanted.
Bring it puto.
But no.

He then said that he still did not understand the need for Python in my solution. I lost it.

"Look man, getting real tired of your tone, i explained already, it is just a mental process, i do this when comming up with solutions, thinking in theory, not languages, helps me bridge the gap between problem and implementation, the solution works, it is efficient and fast and i can do it in 5 diff ways if you wanted, i offered and you said no. Don't really know what else you want"

"All i am saying, i am not going to hire you if you are going to be writing Python for Android, that is useless to me"

Lost it more.

I do sound different when pissed. So I basically told him that he asked for my reasoning behind and it was given, that not getting it was a you problem.

Sooooo did not get the job. Was relieved really. Can't imagine having a twat like that as a lead devel.

#3 Worst thing I've seen a co-worker do?

A 20-something dev, 'A', back in the early days of twitter+facebook would post all his extracurricular activities (drinking, partying, normal young-buck stuff). The dev mgr, 'J', at the time took offense because he felt 'A' was making the company look bad, so 'A' had a target on his back. Nothing 'A' did was good enough and, for example, 'J' had the source control czars review 'A's code to 'review' (aka = find anything wrong). Not sorting the 'using' statements, and extra line after the closing }, petty things like that. For those curious, orders followed+carried out by+led by 'T' in my previous rant.

As time went on and 'T' finding more and more 'wrong' with A's code, 'J' put A on disciplinary probation. 'A' had 90 days to turn himself around, or else.

A bright spot was 'A' was working on a Delphi -> C# conversion, so a lot of the code would be green-field development and by simply following the "standards", 'A' would be fine...so he thought.

About 2 weeks into the probation, 'A' was called into the J's office and berated because the conversion project was behind schedule, and if he didn't get the project back on track, 'A' wouldn't make it 30 days. I sat behind 'A' and he unloaded on me.
<'A' slams his phone on his desk>
Me: "Whoa...whats up?"
A: "Dude, I fucking hate this place, did you hear what they did?"
<I said no, then I think we spent an hour talking about it>
Me: "That all sucks. Don't worry about the code. Nobody cares what T thinks. Its not even your fault the project is behind, the DBAs are tasked with upgrades and it's not like anyone is waiting on you. It'll get done when it's done. Sounds like a witch hunt, what did you do? Be honest."
A: "Well, um...I kinda called out J, T, and those other assholes on facebook. I was drunk, pissed, and ...well...here we are."
Me: "Geez, what a bunch of whiney snowflakes. Keep your head down and you'll get thru it, or don't. Its not like you couldn't find another job tomorrow."
A: "This is my first job out of college and I don't want to disappoint my dad by quitting. I don't even know what I'm supposed to be doing. All J told me was to get better. What the fuk does that even mean?"
Me: "He didn't give you any goals? Crap, for someone who is a stickler for the rules, that's low, even for J."

Fast forward 2 weeks, I was attending MS TechEd and I was with another dev mgr, R.

R: "Did you hear? We had to let 'A' go today."
Me: "What the hell? Why?"
R: "He couldn't cut it, so we had to let him go."
Me: "Cut what? What did he do, specifically?"
R: "I don't know, 'A' was on probation, I guess he didn't meet the goals."
Me: "You guess? We fire a developer working on a major upgrade and you guess? What were these so-called goals?"
R: "Whoa...you're getting a little fire up. I don't know, maybe not adhering to coding standards, not meeting deadlines?"
Me: "OMG...we fire people for not forming code? Are you serious!?"
R: "Oh...yea...that does sound odd when you put it that way. I wish I'd talk to you before we left on this trip"
Me: "What?! You knew they were firing him *before* we left? How long did you know this was happening?"
R: "Honestly, for a while. 'A' really wasn't a team player."
Me: "That's dirty, the whole thing is dirty. We've done some shitty things to people, but this is low, even for J. The probation process is meant to improve, not be used as a witch hunt. I don't like that you stood around and let it happen. You know better."
R: "Yea, you're right, but doesn't change anything. J wanted to do it while most of us were at the conference in case 'A' caused a scene."
Me: "THAT MAKES IT WORSE! 'A' was blindsided and you knew it. He had no one there that could defend him or anything."
R: "Crap, crap, crap...oh crap...jeez...J had this planned all along...crap....there is nothing I can do no...its too late."
Me: "Yes there is. If 'A' comes to you for a letter of recommendation, you write one. If someone calls for reference, you give him a good one."
R: "Yea..yea...crap...I feel like shit...I need to go back to the room and lie down."

As the sun sets, it rises again. Within a couple of weeks, 'A' had another job at a local university. Within a year, he was the department manager, and now he is a vice president (last time I checked) of a college in Kansas City, MO.

To all young freelancers in low-income countries: I want to share my experience, of 6 years working for a piss-poor country, and 6 years working in freelance, and then emigrating. Here's what you should watch out for, and what to expect:

My first salary was barely 1.5$ per hour. I lived in a piss-poor country that taught me a lot (like why it's piss-poor).
The main thing to note when you're a developer in such a country, is that you're being fucked. Your employer might scream at you and tell you how bad you are, while barely paying you. That is you ... being ... fucked. Gain some confidence with the help of friends and family, and a great effort from yourself, look at what freelance gigs you can find, and ditch anything related to jobs in your country.

Being a somewhat able developer, but with modest experience, I started my freelance gigs for 5$ per hour. Because I was lazy, and freelance gigs weren't exactly being thrown at me, I was making 100$ per week, AFTER the companies I worked for appreciated what I did and offered themselves to up my pay to 12$ per hour. Yep. I was lazy. You will likely get lazy in freelance too, so be prepared for this.

My luck changed when one of my clients became a full-time employer, at 15$ per hour, with a well organized team where I actually worked for 40 hours per week (I had already amassed 8 years of experience...). For people in first world countries that will seem laughable, but in my country I was king of the hill, getting paid more than government CEOs that ended up in the news as the "most well paid".

That was the top of the pyramid for international indie freelance, as I would later find out.
I didn't do stuff that was very difficult. In fact, I felt like my abilities were rotting while I worked there. I had to change something. So I started looking for better offers. I contacted many companies that were looking for a senior developer, and the interviews went well, and all was fine, except for my salary demands. I was asking for 25$ per hour. Nobody was willing to pay more than 15$ per hour. That's because of my competition - tons of developers in cheap-to-live countries that had the same, or more to offer, for the same rates. Globalization.

So I moved to Germany. As soon as I was legally able to work, I was hunted down by everybody. I was told that it takes a month to pass the whole hiring process in Germany. My experience demonstrated that 2-5 days is enough to get a signed contract with "Please start ASAP".
There is freelance in Germany as well. And in the US. And everywhere else. A "special" kind of freelance, where you have to reside locally. The rates that this freelance goes for is much, much higher than international freelance. I'd say that 100€ per hour is ok-ish. Some people (newbies, or foreigners who don't speak the language well) get less, around 60 or so. Smart experienced locals get around 150-200 or even more.

It's all there. Companies want good developers to solve their business problems with IT solutions, and they'll beg you to take their money if you can deliver that.

So code!
Learn!
Accummulate experience!
Screw the scumbags that screw you for 1-2$ per hour!
Anyone able to write something more than "Hello World!" deserves more.

Do the climb! There's literally room for everybody up there! There is so much to do, that I feel like there will never be too many developers.

Thank you for bearing with my long story. I hope it will help you make it shorter and more pleasant for you.

Aaaah...I just got back from a meeting because of a production data problem caused by an analyst who keeps making mistakes that screw up client data. I wrote a program to automate most of it and everybody initially accused me of having a buggy program, only to find out she wasn't using it, never did.

"Why aren't you using the program then?" was asked. "Oh, well, I just understand my way better," she replies, "When I make a mistake at least I understand why."

Pause....

"Then, um, if you know you're making a mistake, why don't you fix it?"
"Because my process is so manual and labor intensive sometimes it's not worth it to go back and fix it, because I'd have to do everything over again, and you guys are much better at fixing this stuff than I am."

I indicated that everyone is too busy to stop and fix her mistakes, to which she then asks:

"So if you can't fix my mistakes, what am I supposed to do?"

I'm 20, and I consider myself to be as junior as they come. I only started programming seriously in June 2016,and since then, I've been doing mainly Android Work, and making my own servers and backends(using AWS/Firebase nd stuff).
For the first time in life, I was approached by a recruiter for a company on linkedIn. They "stumbled upon" my Github profile and wanted to see if I was interested in an internship opportunity. This company is an early stage start up, by that I mean a dude with an idea calling himself the CEO and a guy who "runs a tech blog" and only knows college level C programming (explaination follows).

So they want me to make the app for their startup. and for that, I ws first asked to solve a couple problems to prove my competence and a "technical interview" followed.
They gave me 3 questions, all textbook, GCD of 2 numbers, binary search and Adding an element to the linked List, code to be written on a piece of paper. As the position was that of an Android Developer, I assumed that Java should be the language of choice. Assumed because when I asked, the 'tech blogger' said, yeah whatever.
But wait, that ain't all, as soon as I was done, Mr. Blogger threw a fit, saying I shouldn't assume and that I must write it in C. I kept my cool (I'm not the most patient person), and wrote the whole thing in C.
He read it, and asked me what I've written and then told me how wrong I was to write 2 extra lines instead of recursion for GCD. I explained that with numbers large enough, we run the risk of getting a stackoverflow and it's best to apply non recursive solution if possible. He just heard stackoverflow and accused me of cheating. I should have left right then, but I don't know why, I apologized and again, in detail explained what was happening to this fucktard. Once this was done, He asked me how, if I had to, I'd use this exact code in my Android App. I told him that Id rather write this in Java/Kotlin since those are the languages native to Android apps. I also said that I'd export these as a Library and use JNI for the task. (I don't actually know how, I figured I can study if I have to).
Here's his reply, "WTF! We don't want to make the app in Java, we will use C (Yeh, not C++, C). and Don't use these fancy TOOLS like JNI or Kotlin in front of me, make a proper application."
By this I was clear that this guy is not fit to be technical lead and that I should leave. I said, "Sir, I don't know how, if even possible, can we make an Android App purely in C. I am sorry, but this job is not for me".
I got up and was about to leave the room, when we said, "Yeah okay, I was just testing you".
Yeah right, the guy's face looked like a howling monkey when I said Library for C, and It has been easier for me to explain code to my 10 year old cousin that this dumbfuck.
He then proceeded to ask me about my availability, and I said that I can at max to 15-20 hours a week since my college schedule is pretty tight. I asked me to get him a prototype in 2 months and also offered me a full time job after I graduate. (That'd be 2 years from now). I said thank you for the offer, but I am still not sure of I am the right person for this job.
He then said, "Oh you will be when I tell you your monthly stipend."
I stopped for a second, because, money.
And then he proceeded to say 2 words which made me walk out without saying a single word.
"One Thousand".

I live in India, 1000 INR translates to roughly $15. I made 25 times that by doing nothing more than add a web view to an activity and render a company's responsive website in it so it looks like an app.

If this wasn't enough, the recruiter later had the audacity to blame me for it and tell me how lucky I am to even get an offer "so good".
Fuck inexperienced assholes trying shit they don't understand and thinking that the other guy is shitsworth.

I am sure that a lot of you have heard about the gap between poor and rich growing. You know that the amount of really poor people and the amount of really rich people is increasing and that the amount of people in between is decreasing. The gap between poor and rich is growing.

But this rant isn't about economy or anything, I think something similar is happening in the technology sector.

I think that the gap between people knowing close to nothing or just really the stuff to get along and people that really know a lot about it is growing. Right now there are so many things happening in technology, quantum computers and especially machine learning. While on the other hand there are so many people not caring or rather not knowing about all of this stuff. Now you might think that this only is true for some of the 'older generations', those that didn't grow up with all the technology. But I can say that today's youth isn't any better.

For example:
One of my classmates had to copy a file into a folder. They both were on the desktop. He clicked on the file and dragged it onto the folder. It was loading and after around 10 seconds it still wasn't finished, so he stopped it, moved the file closer to the folder and tried it again. This really happened and I am 99% sure that he was serious.

Now I don't know if this is just some 1am thought I had but I really think that the 'gap' between people with almost no technology knowledge / interest and people who are making the stuff and really know stuff about it is growing at an alarming rate.

3 billion devices may run java but there aren't 3 billion people who know Java.

Please let me hear your opinion about this :)

Sooo, in my 5 years of high school, I had 5 different IT teachers...
Now, in Italy Highschool goes from 14 to 19 years old, I started programming some days after becoming 13, and "programming" classes begin on the third year, so I had quite a headstart on my classmates...

Now, for the third year, I had an awesome teacher, he noticed I was ahead and... Bored, so he gave me some extra stuff to study, he's the only teacher I've learnt anything from, it was awesome, very stingy with grades, but getting a perfect score with him was so satisfying.

Fourth year, the new guy was old, very old, at least 70, his lessons were just him talking about how programming was when he was young.

But then... During the second half of the fourth year I changed class due to bullying under a teacher's advice, and HE happened...

My new IT teacher, one of the most ignorant, awful people I ever met...
He's literally the reason I only went back to that school once, because another teacher needed help with a course...
One day I made the HUGE mistake to say that his "while(i <10000000000000);" wasn't very efficient for making a delay, because it didn't free the CPU, and since then:
- I never got more than 7 out of 10 at his tests
- He insulted me in front of the whole class
- He sabotaged the oral part of my final exam, shouting that he hated D'Annunzio when he saw he was in the literature part of my thesis (needed him to connect to WW2, and the Memex, that then allowed me to start talking about PCs and programming, my thesis was about the influence of lisp on modern programming languages), loudly chatting with other teachers when I was trying to keep calm (a teacher who knows me quite well, and was there to see my "performance" thought I was going to snap at some point), distracting the english teacher when I was exposing the english part of my thesis and pressuring the commission to give me 99 instead of 100 out of 100

So yeah, he almost made me hate the only thing I'm good at, undervaluing my work and my skills, undervaluing and humiliating me as a person, and I think that if I meet him again I might spit on his face...

So yeah, my biggest "programmer enemy" was a person that then did everything in his power to make my last year and a half of highschool hell

Now I can gladly say that with the help of my tutoring, some of my university colleagues are starting to appreciate programming, and my engineer friends ask for my help when they need advices about their code, and it's giving me motivation to keep doing it and becoming a better programmer to keep up with their expectations

This is my first post on devRant!
Story time:
It was on my first job as a developer, learning a lot but getting paid less than 50% of the minimum monthly wage of my country.
It was settled in the interview that as I gained more experience, I could handle more projects and earn more money.
At the time, I was living with my parents and didn't have to pay rent and some stuff, so I was like "Well, I'm gonna learn a lot and, if I put a lot of effort into it, soon I'll be making more money".
We agreed that I'll only develop, but 4 months into the job, I was already going to clients
and started coding there (having the client on my back every minute, not being able to work properly) and fixing some computer/network issues they had,
because my boss said I should do it.
Things at home started to go south, and suddenly I needed more money, so I kept doing the work and getting paid a little bit more
A year goes by, devs came and go beacuse of the work/payment situation, and I was still there.
From my first "paycheck" to the last day I never got paid on time, and that was the same for everybody else
The last month I was there, I had a job offer with a better salary and weekends free, so I wanted to take it (I worked saturdays there).
We were working at our biggest clients place at the time (a hospital, working in the server room, desk and chair were a total crap),
so I wanted to have a good conversation with my boss and tell him whats up, after all, I was really grateful for the job despite all things.
We headed outside and started talking. He basically begged me to stay, said that he will pay me on time and offered me more money (less than the other company was offering me),
and that he needed me to finish the implementation and "minor issues" with the app.
I thought about it for a couple of days, and decided to stay. I politely rejected the job offer, and even recommended someone else.
As the days passed, regret was building fast inside of me, until the day that I was supposed to get paid.
He never showed up to the client, told me in a call that he will be there sometime in the morning, that he had the money for me.
So I stayed until my day ended, and still no sign of him. I had no money on me, needed some for gas so I could go, and I called him 5 times.
He picked up the last time, talks to me like nothing is happening and I started to shout at him like I never shouted to anybody before,
got all the things of my chest, and when I was done, he said that he will send the money to my account right away.
This happened on a Saturday, so I quit the following Monday, and lost the other job offer.

A programmer once explained Nietzsche like this:
A long time ago, god created the world, but forgot to leave a developer documentation, thus the whole world was like legacy code...
And humans are like the end user of this world, and some among them spent time studying it, using the Moral API, hoping to get a result of "http 200 ok" from our world for the peace of mind. But the true operation of this world is still yet unknown...
As time passes, humans begin to find that in Moral API, good and evil are two base classes, and all the other moral properties (like ethic, justice and stuff) are just other classes based on those two classes through multiple inheritance.
One day, when programmer Nietzsche was observing the world's runtime behavior, he came up with a question:
"Did god really use good and evil as base classes? Could it be that they are actually derived classes?"
Most of the world is currently in the favor of mankind, and god must've wrote individual user cases for it's end users, he thought.
This made Nietzsche thinking: if end users are considered into two cases: the strong and the weak, how would the world be designed base on its user story?
Let's think about the strong, they can bully the weak as they please, and there's nothing the weak can do to stop them. In this case whether the Moral API exists or not doesn't fulfill the need of the strong.
But when it comes to the weak, Nietzsche thinks that because the weak cannot fight the strong, they need to belittle bullying and praise the strong for being nice. When the weak does this, it covers their powerless state to some extent, making them look somehow equal to the strong by being capable of commenting.
God might have coded the Moral API to fit the weak's requirement, also adding some public methods for the weak to comment on the strong. If the strong takes care of the weak, they call him nice and good, if the strong bullies people, they call him bad and evil.
That's when Nietzsche realized, that good and evil are both derived classes from the weak, and the base class should be the strong and the weak.
Then he started a series of studies about the Moral API, and got some thesis that persuaded lots of other end users...

A lite story about how i was hired at 16 years old.
Me at 11. Modifying HTML templates to create a sign up page for a game. Me at 14. Created some worthless websites in the past (at a training), barely knowing the structure of HTML.
Me at 15. Made my first website for a customer (using WordPress for the first time, didn't know how to use it before). The website was selling apartments, it was looking very good and went on the first place on SEO. Got my first money (100E).
Me at 16. Made some other WordPress websites for other customers (one of them still haven't paid, the website was made way back in 2015), so i shut down the website and replaced it with a text saying "This website is currently down until the customers pays the developer".
Me still at 16. A friend of my mom sent my CV to multiple companies, to work as a intern to learn more, and one of them accepted me for a interview (a well known and one of the best company with 30~ people)
Went to the interview, asked me about what i realized, what i can do, about my knowledges in others languages etc (forgot to mention that i love the computers from young age, so i was very good in them, specially at the age of 11), so they were happy about it and asked called me for another interview with the boss. Went to it, the boss asked me some tricky questions, i answered them immediately, he was very surprised about my knowledge at that age and accepted me immediately. After working for 2 weeks, instead of hiring me as a intern for 4-6 months, they instead hired me as a normal person, as a front end developer, for an undefined date, making 250 E / Month (6 hours per day in summer)
Now, I'm in the 11 grade, working for them about 9 months, making 315 E / Month, working for 4 hours per day after school, the place is cool, my entire team (family) is very funny and very cool, and they asked me many times to help them with different problems they had and i fixed them immediately (they really didn't know some stuff which i knew). Worked on big projects and worked on some from scratch by myself and they were very happy about how it went.

TLDR: was talented in computers (software), I'm a fast learner, barely knew about making websites, hired as a front end developer at 16 yr.

Btw, I'm in love with DevRant, I'm feeling like home everytime i visit this community :').

P.S. Sorry for my bad English and the mistakes i made.

alert("Thanks for reading my first rant!");

I fucking hate toxic positivity. Every fucking corporation pushes the notion that "lifE iS aWeSomE, wE cArE abOuT pEoPle" and other such bullshit, and when you point it out, they call you a bad, toxic person.

No, you don't care about your community, let alone the whole world. You're just trying to make people believe that spyware, wage slavery and being fired by a neural network is the norm. You're making money off of those who don't have a choice.

If you account all people, not just American white rich 1%, it turns out that for the vast majority of people life is either an uphill battle or straight up nightmare. People are working in shifts and have no time or emotional resource to spend on themselves. Most of the people can't afford a house or a flat. Even those who can still suffer from mental illnesses, to the point where there are more mentally challenged people than mentally healthy ones. The word "neurotypical" meaning "mentally healthy" is wrong.

You want nothing but to sell your stuff and earn more money off of Chinese and Indian factory workers who work 16-hour shifts. Maybe your life is great, but aggressively pushing this notion is a big, wet spit in the face of humanity.

Fuck you. Fuck your space rockets. Fuck your twitter accounts. Fuck your institutionalized exploitation of the weak. Fuck your products. Fuck your "open source". Fuck your "GDPR compliance". Fuck your offshores, your hedge funds and your tax evasion. Fuck your bailouts. Fuck your ships spilling tons of crude oil, fuck your factories, fuck your slave labor, fuck your anti-suicide nets in Chinese dormitories.

One day, because of you, our planet will become unlivable. You will hop into your fancy space rocket to go to that top-1% elite Mars colony. Nice job.

But I will pray for a solar flare to hit you and turn you and your fucking rocket into radioactive ash.

The list would be quite long.

I think Google is still making good tools, but just like Apple the integrations get all so tight and constricting... And with their data, if it goes wrong, it will go wrong hard.

I feel like YouTube is gliding into a state where cheap clickbait floats to the top and finding quality gets more difficult as well, their algorithm is more and more tuned to choose recent popular stuff over good older gems.

Microsoft is all pretend lovey dovey cuddling open source, but I'm still suspicious it's all a hug of death. I was never a big fan, but they're seriously dropping balls when it comes to windows-as-a-service, taking away so much personal control from end users even though they can't be trusted to babysit either.

Amazon is creeping it's way through the internet, charging $10/m to join the vip club infesting houses with spytubes to sell more plastic crap. Bezos' only right to keep wasting oxygen is BlueOrigin, but he'll probably fuck that up as well turning spaceflight into a decadent prime consumer orgy instead of something inspiring.

Facebook... Well, that's self explanatory. Fuck it, everything it pretends to be, and everyone who still has an account with a rusty spike.

Uber and AirBnB, with their fake ass mission of a green shared economy, but they trample over employees, customers and neighbors to build their ivory towers of progressive illusions.

Then there's a million declining brands.

I liked Skype for example when it was first released, Just like how I started out liking (and then hating) Discord, Slack, etc... They're all tools which seem fast and easy, but then they get us further away from solid protocols, get us entrenched into limiting, bloated and sometimes even dangerous tools. As my dad used to say: "Companies are like women, if you go for cheap, fast and easy you'll end up with a burning dick and half your savings gone"

You know what, fuck all tech companies.

OK, devrant is still pretty nice... For now.

Hesitated for a while before posting this, as I don't like to whine in public but this should be therapeutical

Beware, it's a #longread

Years ago, I thought about how cool it'd be to have conversation-based interactive fiction on my phone. I remember showing early prototypes to my ex in 2012. It took me over 2 years to build up the courage to make it my priority and to take time off. FictionBurgers.com was born.

A few weeks in, a friend of mine forwarded me a link to Lifeline. I was devastated. I literally spent 2 days cursing my past self for not making a move sooner.

I soldiered on, worked 7 months straight on it. Now the tech is 90-95% finished, content is maybe 60% finished and I just... gave up. Every other week now, similar projects are popping up. I'm under-staffed and under-financed compared to them. Beyond the entertainment space, "conversation-based" is hot stuff in 2016, and I still can't seem to know what to do with what I have.

I feel like I had this fantastic opportunity and squandered it, which makes me miserable.

Anyway, just so you get some cheese with my whine, here are a few lessons I learned the hard way:

Lesson #1 : Don't go it alone. I thought I could hack it, and for over 7 months, I did. But sooner or later, shit gets to you, it's just human. That's when you need someone; just so that their highs compensate your lows and vice versa. Most of the actual writing was done by a freelancer (and he did AMAZING WORK, especially considering that I couldn't pay him much) but it's not the same as a partner, who's invested same as you.

Lesson #1.5 : Complementary skills. Just like my fiction project failed because I was missing a writer partner, my fallback plan of getting into conversational tech hit the skids for lack of a bizdev partner. It's great to stick among devs when ranting, but you need to mingle with a variety of people. Some of them are actually ok, y'know :)

Lesson #2 : Lean Startup, MVP. Google those terms if you're not familiar with them. My mistake here (after MVPing the shit out of the tech) was to let my content goal run amok : what made my app superior to the competition (or so I reasoned) was that it would allow for conversations with multiple characters! So I started plotting a story... with 9 characters. Not 2 or 3. NINE FREAKING CHARACTERS! Branching conversations with 9 characters is the stuff of nightmare -- and is the main reason I gave up.

Lesson #3 : Know your reasons. I wasted some much time early on, zig-zaging between objectives:
"I'm just indulging myself"
"No, I really want it to be a project that pays off"
"Nah, it's just a learning opportunity"
"Damn, why is it bothering me so much that someone else is doing the same thing ?"
"Doesn't matter, I just mine finished"
"What a waste of time !!"
etc etc
And it's still a problem now that I'm trying to figure out what to do!

So anyway, that's my story, thanks for readin'
Check out chatty.im/player/sugar-wars if you want to test the most advance version.

Also, I've also tagged this #startupfail, if any of you fine people want to share the lessons you've dearly paid to learn!

My first dev job was a paid internship at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. But I wasn't in the computing division with the supercomputer and the 30-foot 18-screen wall display. In a way, I was doing something more exciting. I was in the Hollifield Radioactive Ion Beam Facility.

That meant that I was working next to a radioactive ray gun that they fired at different targets to try and make new kinds of particles. To refine the beam components, there was a tower with the world's highest voltage Van de Graf generator at 25,000 kilovolts. I got training on how to put on a radiation suit, and was told that if I got locked in the wrong room and red lights began to flash, I had about five seconds to run to the far wall and push the E-stop, before I got irradiated and died slowly over the next five weeks.

But, I was reassured, that never happened. Radiation leaks are rare too (that's why we wore dosimeters). More likely, there would be a leak in the generator tower. To explain why that's bad, that tower wasn't filled with normal air. 25,000 kilovolts would punch through that like nothing, arc against the walls, and we'd lose the electric charge. No, instead, the tower was filled to a few atmospheres of pressure with sulfur hexafluoride gas. You know how helium makes your voice go up? This stuff makes your voice go down. It's heavier than air, and it kills you by displacing and starving your lungs of oxygen.

So, while I was happily coding away on PHP, CSS and the Bash shell, making a log book for all the ion gun settings and targets the scientists used in their experiments, I was keeping an ear out for the oxygen alarm. I had a blast!

Hello everyone, this is my first time here so hi! I want to tell you all a story about my current situation.

At 18 while in the military I was able to get my first computer, it was a small hp pavilion laptop with windows 7. The system would crash constantly, even though I would only use it for googling stuff and using fb to talk to people. 5 months after I got it and continuously hated it decided to find out why and who could I blame (other than myself) for the system making me do the ctrl alt del dance all the time....

Found out that there are people called computer programmers that made software. Decided to give it a go since I had some free time most days. Started out with c++ because it was being recommended in some websites. Had many "oh deeeeer lord" moments. After not getting much traction I decided to move to Java which seemed like an easier step than C++. Had fun, but after some verbosity I decided to move into more dynamic lands. Tried JS and since at the time there was no Node and I was not very into the idea of building websites I decided to move into Python, Ruby, PHP and Perl and had a really great time using and learning all of them. I decided to get good in theoretical aspects of computer programming and since I had a knack for math I decided to get started with basic computer science concepts.

I absolutely frigging loved it. And not only that, but learning new things became an obsession, the kind that would make me go to bed at 02:40 am just to wake up at 04:00 or 06:00 because the military is like that. I really wanted to absorb as much as I could since I wanted to go to college for it and wanted to be prepared since I did not wanted to be a complete newb. Took Harvard CS50, Standford Programming 101 with Java, Rice's Python course and MIT's Python programming class. I had so much fun I don't regret it one bit.
By the time I got to college I had already made the jump to Linux and was an adept Arch user, Its not that it was superior or anything, but it really forced me to learn about Linux and working around a terminal and the internals of the system to get what I want. Now a days I settle for Fedora or Debian based systems since they are easier and time is money.

Uni was a breeze, math was fun and the programming classes seemed like glorified "Hello World" courses. I had fun, but not that much fun, most of my time was spent getting better at actual coding. I am no genius, nor my grades were super amazing(I did graduate with honors though) but I had fun, which never really happened in school before that.

While in school I took my first programming gig! It was in ASP.NET MVC, we were using C#, I got the job through a customer that I met at work, I was working in retail during the time and absolutely hated it. I remember being so excited with the gig, I got to meet other developers! Where I am from there aren't that many and most of them are very specialized, so they only get concerned with certain aspects of coding (e.g VBA developers.....) and that is until I met the lead dev. He was by far one of the biggest assholes I had ever met in my life. Absolutely nothing that I would do or say made hem not be a dick. My code was steady, but I would find bugs of incomplete stuff that he would do, whenever I would fix it he would belittle me and constantly remind me of my position as a "junior dev" in the company saying things as "if you have an issue with my code or standards tell me, but do not touch the code" which was funny considering that I would not be able to advance without those fixes. I quit not even 3 months latter because I could not stand the dick, neither 2 of the other developers since the immediately resigned after they got their own courage.

A year latter I was able to find myself another gig. I was hesitant for a moment since it was another remote position in which I had already had a crappy experience. Boy this one was bad. To be fair, this was on me since I had to get good with Lumen after only having some exposure to Laravel. Which I did mentioned repeatedly even though he did offer to train me in order to help him. Same thing, after a couple of weeks of being told how much I did not know I decided to get out.

That is 2 strikes.

So I waited a little while and took a position inside another company that was using vanilla PHP to build their services. Their system was solid though, the lead engineer remains a friend and I did learn a lot from him. I got contracted because they were looking for a Java developer. The salary was good. But when I got there they mentioned that they wanted a developer in Java...to build Android. At the time I was using Java with Spring so I though "well how hard can this be! I already use Android so the love for the system is there, lets do this!" And it was an intense, fun and really amazing experience.

-- To be continued.

I am fed up working with unskilled software developers. Or to be more specific, working with people who have no idea of sofware architecture.

Most people I've worked with have simply no idea what they are doing in the broad picture, they can only follow patterns they see and implement their feature in the same way. They can't think about the abstract concepts which should be the foundation of the project.

They fail to write unit tests which are maintainable. They write one fucking test per method which is testing 50 things at the same time, making it often impossible to understand what is being tested.

They think putting stuff in private methods makes their class better and is some kind of separation of concerns.

They write classes and afterwards create interfaces for these classes named {Class}Interface, shoving all the methods into that interface. They think it's good design to do so.

They are unable to think about the reasons why things are done the way they are done and that you don't do stuff for the sake of doing stuff, but to achieve certain goals like interchangeability.

They don't undestand how to separate business logic from the application code.

They have no sense for naming things beautifully. They don't see how naming things is a major part of good software architecture.

They get layer concepts wrong and then create godlike {EntityName}Service classes, which do everything related to a particular entity.

They fail to shape the boundaries within a software project, entangling stuff which should live in individual modules.

All I want is to work in a team with professionals.

I feel guilty when I spend time after work writing code, because there's that voice in the back of my head saying I should switch to leisure activities. "You've worked enough, don't sit all day, it's unhealthy".

Then I go for a walk or start planning something to cook. And there's still this weird feeling of guilt for not being productive enough, telling me I should learn a new programming language. "Work on your skills, you need to learn stuff to stay relevant in your field"

BRAIN, BE FUCKING CONTENT WITH WHAT I'M DOING FOR ONCE!

And stop fucking bullshitting me.

You're not trying to make me take a walk, you're not having my best interests at heart by making me learn or work.

I'm fucking on to you, you treacherous shitlitter of neurons. You're betraying me, and it happens every single fucking time I let my guard down.

I alt-tab out of my IDE, and within seconds you're there, impeding my intellect, making me click bookmarks to check the feculent streams spraying from the fingers of "friends" on Facebook.

I take a poop, and you just let me slide into a slowwitted state where I pick up my phone and stare at some crapfilled mire of memes.

You're the retarded digital-era id, wearing the disguise of a renaissance smart-ass ego, and you're dumping the fucking guilt on ME?

FUCK YOU AND YOUR MEMES, I'M GONNA BAKE A STEAK WITH MUSHROOM SAUCE AND WATCH PROGRAMMING VIDEOS WHILE DANCING.

NAKED.

(and maybe browse devRant later. I still love you, devRant)

So I used to do some freelancing in web development last year, nothing too fancy just some simple PHP websites. Comes the worst meeting in my life. So I am from India and we have a lot of long lasting business here being passed on over generations. TL;DR the guy was the owner of a very old business which was actually very huge and the guy was educated too, so I assumed that he'll be sensible as compared to other people.

The meeting was in an expensive cafe and he paid for it, he even told me upfront that meeting is on him. Great, right? So we sit down, order some coffee and then start discussing what he needed.
The guy needed an ecommerce website built with backend and logistics system integrated. We discussed possible designs for the website and stuff too and so far the deal looked promising to both of us.
I explained him the cost estimate and told him that I would email him the final quote from myself once we discussed server cost and shit.
So now comes the bargaining part where he asked me to give him server and domain for free.
At this point, I suspected that he didn't know that servers and domains are not something that you make. You have to purchase and renew them periodically.
So I told that guy that he didn't understand the cost estimation and explained to him that X is the cost of making this fucking thing and Y is its monthly maintenance cost, if he wanted annually could be done too. And this Y did not include server and domain costing.
Now came the fucking tide, the guy straight up turned to his shit and told me I am lying and trying to con him. So I gently asked him if he had ever gotten any website made. To which, he said No, but he knows how the costing works.
I was like "Bitch?". So I calmly tried to explain that that's not how websites are done, delivered and maintained.
He didn't seemed to be understanding and kept on fucking repeating that he knows his shit and blah blah.
At this point, I was like "Okay. Fuck this dude then. I can find another project. " and then I told him that he'll need to find someone according to his needs.
Interestingly enough, the guy called someone and then walked out of the cafe while talking on phone. I waited for 5 minutes and he didn't come back so I decided I would pay for my coffee and leave. Turns out the guy had paid his bill before my arrival and ditched me with the excuse of the call.

But oh well, I think working with such an idiot would have been much worse than paying for that coffee.

Hello.

Is there anyone else who starts massive amount of projects and never finishes one?

It's a big problem when you lose time you should spent on orders because you work on that-amazing-idea that you'll drop few hours later.
I'm lucky as my employer thinks that all these unfinished stuff are pushing my experience forward, but for me it's depressing to not be able to focus on my work.

What do you do to fight with the urge to code that one more project? What do you do focus on the current work?

I've tried making myself a system for better client-programmer communication to keep myself motivated with better organised feedback and deadlines but ended up dropping it and sticking to terribly messy mailbox.

Rather than singling out one person, I wanna present what I see as incompetent/stupid/ignorant:
- no will to learn
- failure to follow the very specific instructions & later asking for help when they FUBR sth & not even knowing what they did to fuck up in the first place
- asking how to solve stuff, then ignoring the suggestions & doing sth totally against recommendations
- failure to remember most basic stuff, especially if not writing it down to look at later when needed
- failure to check logs & 'google' stuff before asking why something isn't working the way they want it
- after two weeks, asking me how feature xy works, mind you they coded it, not me
- asking me why they did something in a specific way - WTF, am I a mind reader?! Who designed that crap?! Me or you?!!
- being passive/aggressive & snarky when told to do something or being asked why isn't it done already
- not testing their shit properly
- not making backups when upgrading (production) servers
- not checking the input value, no validation.. even after many many debacles on production with null ref exceptions
- failure to admit they fucked up
- not learning from (their) mistakes

DISCLAIMER: UNPOPULAR OPINION

I'm tired of the Linux community, they effectively discourage me of taking part in any discussion online

I'm currently making Windows-only soft, some game stuff, some legacy DirectX stuff you got it.

Everytime I go online, this shitty pattern happens, when I stumble upon a problem in project I don't know how to fix and I ask for help
These are responses
- HA, HA, WINDOWS BAD, HA, HA, GET REAL SYSTEM
- In Linux, we can do X too. I mean it has 4x less functionality and way shittier UX and is even harder to implement but it can probably work on too Linux, so it's better, yes, just move to Linux
- btw you didn't like Linux before? Try this distro man, it's better <links random distro>

Is there anything valuable in the Linux community? I feel like these people don't like Linux anyway, they just hate Windows. Every opinion, tip is always opinion based. Anyone who works on internals knows how much better and how well thought is Windows kernel compared to Linux kernel. Also, if someone unironically uses Linux distro on desktop PC then he's a masochist because desktop Linux is dieing. So many distros ceased work only this year.

Is it a good tool for servers and docker containers? I don't have my head stuck up my ass to admit that yes, it's much better than Windows here.

This community got me stressed right now, I fear that when I go to bathroom or open my microwave there's gonna be a Linux distro recommendation there

😠😡😠😴

Manager: The way you built this doesn’t accommodate any of my future plans!

Dev: What future plans?

Manager: I have a bunch of different ideas, I haven’t decided which ones to go with yet or how it will all work but you’re making it so we’re running out of room in the UI. It’s too busy, you need to clean it up so we can add more stuff!

Dev: …

I hate that trend of making things more lax in terms of implementation quality while writing it off with a simple but stupid "oh computers are faster now, users have the RAM, yadda yadda". Yeah but back in a day things were actually running pretty damn fast in comparison while doing it on hardware that is totally potato in comparison to what's used now. This trend eats away ANY gains we get in terms of performance with upgrades. It deprecated the whole notion of netbooks (and I kinda liked them for casual stuff), since now every goddamn one-page blog costs you from several megabytes and up to tens of megabytes of JS alone and lots of unnecessary computations. Like dude, you've brought in a whole Angular to render some text and three buttons, and now your crappy blog is chewing on 500 MB of my RAM for whatever reason.

Also, Electron apps. Hate them. Whoever invented the concept, deserves their own warm spot in Hell. You're doing the same you would've done more efficiently in Qt or whatever there is. Qt actually takes care of a lot of stuff for you, so it doesn't look like you'll be slowed down by choosing it over Electron. Like yeah, web version will share some code with your desktop solution but you're the whole reason I'm considering your competitor's lack of Electron a huge advantage over you even if they lack in features.

Same can be said pretty much about everything that tries to be more than it should, really. IDEs, for example, are cancerous. You can do 90%+ of what you intended to do in IDE using plain Vim with *zero* plugins, and it will also result in less strain on your hands.

People have just unlearned the concept of conscious consumption, it seems.

Best co-worker quitting story?

"T" I've refereed to in previous rants knew he was close to being fired, so he jumped ship. 'T' sent the usual "I'll miss you guys" email to the department, except me (and a few others that didn't fall for his BS and not scared of him). His mistake was he sent the email out a day early (buddy forwarded me the email) and left the stuff (box of pics, books, etc) he planned on taking with him. One item in particular was a new company provided laptop bag, which technically wasn't his to keep (supposed to leave/turn-in any company provided equipment), so I grabbed the bag and hid it.

The next day I heard him slamming drawers (looking for the bag) and a loud cursing. Other devs peeking over the walls asking what's wrong.

Dev1: "Dude, what's up? Whatcha' looking for?"
T: "Nothing...fuck!...damn it...nothing...assholes...fucking assholes!"
Dev2: "Who's the ass? What's wrong?"
Dev3: "Need help looking for something?"
T: "No..no...nothing...I'm fine...making sure I don't forget anything."

'T' never found out who took the bag and I've had that laptop bag underneath my desk ever since.

Xpost from /r/sysadmin:
I occasionally see posts from people who seem like they want to spend every waking hour of every waking minute working on home lab stuff and studying for certs.

If you do this, you're missing out on life which you will regret later, but even if you don't care about missing out on life, it actually is hurting your career.

Being well rounded helps you interact with others at work in a number of ways. It makes you less one dimensional as "the computers guy" and it also gives you topics to discuss with people. If you know how to cook, or brew beer, or bake bread you end up using a lot of your technical and troubleshooting skills. Biking long distancing and learning how to fix your bike helps with your troubleshooting skills too. You learn to look at things from other angles.

Reading novels or writing poetry or making art work also helps because it exercises your brain. Woodworking or metal working involve a lot of skills that'd help your IT career including project planning and measuring and budgeting for each project. Working on cars or motorcycles would be similar. You just have to do SOMETHING.

I have a member of my team who literally has nothing going on in his life other than studying for certs. No friends, no hobbies, and he basically eats nothing but McDonalds and frozen dinners because even making a meal takes time away from his studying. He thinks means he's dedicated and will experience great career success.

But instead he has nothing to talk to anyone about, and when I say nothing, I mean literally nothing. It's borderline terrifying. Even if he was into comic books and video games it might help, which might help him relate to SOME of the IT staff even if the rest of the people at the company know nothing about it. But he doesn't even have that.

This isn't a solitary field anymore. Even if you truly are "the best" you still have to interact with other people and stay mentally stable enough to not burn out. Even if you know more than everyone else (or think you do) you have to try to broaden your horizons.

Who the fuck came up with the idea of using SharePoint? What it even is?! Is it a website, wiki, document repo...?

Our version seems to be a broken wiki with no info content, old links, illogical navigation. And somehow word documents are integrated into it. Sometimes you see some weird calendar and timelines (from old projects). You can navigate into a folder, but you cannot get back. There's no ".." button?? You can map it like OneDrive to yourself, but Windows doesn't support any document version control. Where's the check in/out option from explorer menu??? I sure as shit have those for SVN, GIT etc. Is there a new version created everytime I press ctrl-s or only when I close the document?

Well, I could open the document in "online" mode. Ok, the formatting goes weird and everything is super slow. But at least I can fuck up someone elses document by accidentaly copy/pasting stuff, deleting lines, hitting my face into keyboard etc. There's automatically new version added!

Somehow you can enable the forced check in/out for documents. Obviously only the library admin can do that. And since he's just a program manager, he has no clue what the fuck is version control or document management. So he has this thing on his "things to do" list. For him, document management means sending various spec versions as email attachments. And the developers can figure out together who has the most recent one.

How did M$ push shit piece of shit to corporations? They even use this crap for the intranet making it slower than creation of galaxies. Though it's ok, since you cannot find anything from the intranet. It's all just head honchos blogs, seasonal greetings and stock market statuses. Nowhere is seen the downstairs cafeteria menu for the day. Or where to report for broken toilet. You know, stuff that 99% of people would like to see.

I complained to M$ about the SharePoint, but apparently there's no problem. You can code it yourself? Yeiii! So, instead of just updating some line in design spec, I have to take a 3 month class and get a MS sertificate, code some class-based-web-shit for 6 months and maybe, maybe then I can make the page/document look normal?

I am thinking, that I will just start writing my specs on paper. I will put them on the shelf and if you want to read it, you will check it out manually. And if someone else tries to edit it while you are editing it, you just cover the paper with your hands. There might be a requirement to make the document look more like MS Word, but that's easy to do. Just go to WC with the paper and wipe with it a couple of times.

//An okay long rant..

So i work at this small robotics start-up company I Copenhagen.
The first dumb part is that it only uses interns as staff, because then they don't need to pay people. (I am working part time, for free. Just to get experience (I am only 20 btw))

So.. I often get into an argument with my boss, since she is a designer with a "passion" for robotics (she has no clue how to do anything related to the work) But I often try to explain to her some current limitations in the staff, and what is possible for us to do, but she will never listen. She really wants us to design our own microcontroller board PCB, and she want it at the size of a coin. However when I tell her that none of the, non paid works has the experience or education to design such a thing, she never wants to acknowledge it, and it really pisses me off.
And her dad, who is the top boss, only care for esthetics when he is making a work environment, which is dumb when we just need to develop stuff...

Sorry if the rant was too long but had to get it out..

TLDR - you shouldn't expect common sense from idiots who have access to databases.

I joined a startup recently. I know startups are not known for their stable architecture, but this was next level stuff.
There is one prod mongodb server.
The db has 300 collections.
200 of those 300 collections are backups/test collections.
25 collections are used to store LOGS!! They decided to store millions of logs in a nosql db because setting up a mysql server requires effort, why do that when you've already set up mongodb. Lol 😂
Each field is indexed separately in the log.
1 collection is of 2 tb and has more than 1 billion records.
Out of the 1 billion records, 1 million records are required, the rest are obsolete. Each field has an index. Apparently the asshole DBA never knew there's something called capped collection or partial indexes.

Trying to get approval to clean up the db since 3 months, but fucking bureaucracy. Extremely high server costs plus every week the db goes down since some idiot runs a query on this mammoth collection. There's one single set of credentials for everything. Everyone from applications to interns use the same creds.
And the asshole DBA left, making me in charge of handling this shit now. I am trying to fix this but am stuck to get approval from business management. Devs like these make me feel sad that they have zero respect for their work and inability to listen to people trying to improve the system.

Going to leave this place really soon. No point in working somewhere where you are expected to show up for 8 hours, irrespective of whether you even switch on your laptop.
Wish me luck folks.

Be me, making a self hosted website-blog thing because why not

making the backend: yeah cool, easy, ive been doing this stuff for a while

making a frontend: ehh, some template will do fine, im not that great at js

making an admin page: yay this is actually fun

setting up portforwarding on my router to my pi: fucking piece of shit work already dammit

So this happened last week.

Last week I went as a volunteer to give an introduction class basic programming to some guys and gals who are going to attend computer science soon next year.

The class lasted one week and we had done some basic algorithms and programming in Python.
Besides that we also did some very basic websites (html, css and javascript).

Obviously all those people were very enthusiastic.
Some were a little bit too enthusiastic...

There were these 2 guys who were best friends. They already knew everything apparently. Even though they just finished high school they had been programming for over 10 years, had already made countless of websites, applications, 'hacked Windows', RATs and some amazing games.

So there were some people there who never had programmed before. I started giving the lecture and warned people who already knew some basics of programming the first day might be a quite boring but I could not simply skip it obviously.

Those 2 dickheads acted like the biggest childs ever, started screaming in class, making sure everyone knew they were bored, and were constantly complaining to me that they know what print, for, while and strings were. I stayed calm and tried to explain them again I simply couldn't skip parts of the lecture for them.

Every hour and every day it started getting worse and worse with them. Not only but the whole class were furiously mad at them. Some other students even started screaming at them. They screamed back insulting everyone they even didn't what php was and stupid stuff like that.

At some point they interrupted me AGAIN and asked me how long I programmed. I told him little them over 5 years or something. They started laughing at me. Those 2 dickheads looked at me like they were so much better than me because they programmed over 10 years.

At some point, almost the last day, I had enough of their bullshit, interruption, screaming, insulting other students who asked questions, ... I said you know what, you give the lecture!

They refused because they felt too good for all these other 'noobs' (the other students). They would never become good and blah blah more bullshit.

I said alright, we're doing websites, you've made some websites, show me your most impressive website.

He was happy and felt honered.

He sent me the whole folder and I showed his website on code on the big screen in the room.

Then I said: "Everyone, pay close attention to this!"

That dickhead smiled and felt good

Me: "This is how NOT to make a website"

I started explaining to everyone all things that were complete shit and all things that were straight up sins.

That one friend of the dickhead stayed quiet. The other dickhead became as red as a tomato. At some points you even saw tears in his eyes. At some point he insulted me I was a scriptie and simply left.

The class started clapping.

One of the weirdest but also best moments of my life

Moral: Don't act like a complete bigheaded dickhead, don't feel better than everyone and show some respect

Thank you for reading

Have a nice day!

Tl;Dr - It started as an escape, carried on as fun, then as a way to be lazy, and finally as a way of life. Coding has defined and shaped my entire life from the age of nine.

When I was nine I was playing a game on my ZX spectrum and accidentally knocked the keyboard as I reached over to adjust my TV. Incredibly parts of it actually made a little sense to me and got my curiosity. I spent hours reading through that code, afraid to turn the Spectrum off in case I couldn't get back to it. Weeks later I got hold of a book of example code to copy out to do various things like making patterns on the screen. I was amazed by it. You told it what to do, and it did it! (don't you miss the days when coding worked like that?) I was bitten by the coding bug (excuse the pun) and I'd got it bad! I spent many late nights on that thing, escaping from a difficult home life. People (especially adults) were confusing, and in my experience unpredictable. When you did things wrong they shouted at you and threatened to take you away, or ignored you completely. Code never did that. If you did something wrong, it quietly let you know and often told you exactly what was wrong. It wasn't because of shifting expectations or a change of mood or anything like that. It was just clean logic, simple cause and effect.

I get my first computer a year later: an IBM XT that had been discarded by a company and was fitted with a key on the side to turn it on. With the impressive noise it made it really was like starting an engine. Whole most kids would have played with the games, I spent my time playing with batch scripts and writing very simple text adventures. And discovering what "format c:" does. With some abuse and threatened violence I managed to get windows running on it. Windows 2.1 I think it was.

At 12 I got a Gateway 75 running Windows 95. Over the next few years I do covered many amazing games: ROTT, Doom, Hexen, and so on. Aside from the games themselves, I was fascinated by the way computers could be linked together to play together (this was still early days for the Web and computers networked in a home was very unusual). I also got into making levels for Doom, Heretic, and years later Duke Nukem 3D (pretty sure it was heretic; all I remember is the nightmare of trying to write levels entirely by code!). I enjoyed re-scripting some of the weapons and monsters to behave differently. About this time I also got into HTML (I still call this coding, but not programming), C, and java. I had trouble with C as none of the examples and tutorial code seemed to run properly under a Windows environment. Similar for my very short stint with assembly. At some point I got a TI-83 programmable calculator and started rewriting my old batch script games on it, including one "Gangster Lord" game that had the same mechanics as a lot of the Facebook games that appeared later (do things, earn money, spend money to buy stuff to do more things). Worried about upcoming exams, I also made a number of maths helper apps, including a quadratic equation solver that gave the steps, and a fake calculator reset to smuggle them into my exams. When the day came I panicked and did a proper reset for fear of being caught.

At 18 I was convinced I was going to be a professional coder as I started a degree in Computer Science. Three months later I dropped out after a bunch of lectures teaching what input and output devices were and realising we were only going to be taught Java and no C++. I started a job on the call centre of a big company, but was frustrated with many of the boring and repetitive tasks we had to do. So I put my previous knowledge to use, and quickly learned VBA to automate tasks. It wasn't long before I ended up promoted to Business Analyst where I worked on a great team building small systems in Office, SAS, and a few other tools.

I decided to retrain in psychology, so left the job I was in and started another degree. During my work and placements my skills came in use a number of times to simplify and automate tasks. I finished my degree, then took a job as a teaching assistant while I worked out what I wanted to do next and how to pay for it. Three years later I've ended up IT technican at the school, responsible for the website, teaching a number of Computing lessons each week, and unofficial co-coordinator for Computing as a subject. I also run a team of ten year old Digital Leaders who I am training in online safety and as technical experts; I am hoping to inspire them to a future in coding. In September I'll be starting teacher training with a view to becoming a Computing specialist teacher. Oh, and I'm currently doing a course in Android Development in my free time.

And this all started with an accidental knock on the keyboard of a ZX Spectrum.

I'm not enjoying my current experience with the web.

I feel sad, alone most of the time.

Let me disclaim first that I don't have like an apocalyptic view of the world, I actually think it's improving (in very broad terms).

I also understand that the web is a complex thing and everyone being happy with is going to be very unlikely, specially as more and more people use it, since the entropy will naturally increase.

I don't have solid evidence of what I'm saying next and I'm not even entirely what exactly I'm saying, but maybe I'm onto something.

I feel that when the internet first started, businessmen were like "meh, geek stuff".

But slowly, things changed, and every greedy person tried to just fucking unload his greed filled cum onto it

And now it feels like 1984. And I hate when people reeeee 1984. But it does feel like it.

The ads are like "ok, I know you like that other shit, but CHECK THIS SHIT OUT".

It's AI driven to maximize profits, with little care for people happiness.

I miss when youtube had related videos. The algorithm wasn't perfect but at least it was exactly that, related videos.

Now though, youtube likes to be smart. But not smart in a way that enriches your youtube experience.
It's smart in a way that maximizes ad revenue.

"what? did you think we were going to use AI to make you happier? that we were going to enrich your youtube experience?
NO MOTHER FUCKER! OF COURSE NOT. We're gonna use it to show you whatever shit that will make us richer faster."

Controls for customizing the recommended videos behaviour? Pff, no.
They're gonna decide for you what it is that you like
They're going to decide what you should be watching.

Everytime i turn on my samsung tv, the youtube app recomends me watching "BETTER THAN SEX EYE LINER". Jesus christ, what the shitcum, I'm the only motherfucker on the house that uses youtube, and I couldn't care less about this cunt's disguised ad video, let alone fucking eye liners.

Why youtube, why do you promote whatever porn video VEVO uploads?

Why do you ruin every youtube rewind?

Why do you pander to the lowest common denominator?

Why can't you be shining beacon, a moral company considering you're a cultural icon?

Fuck you youtube, and while we're at it, fuck you too samsung, I must have been drunk the day I bought this shitty closed source software piece of shit "smart".

And these are just 2 companies. The internet is FILLED with these greedy bastards. They have no passion for their products, for making people happy. They only have passion for the MUNNNEY.

Thanks a lot business schools, thanks a lot CEOs of the world, thanks for making the world a happier place.

Ok, now that I said that, I want to back up a bit.

Youtube may bot be perfect, but it's ad revenue system enables some youtubers I love to be able to make that their careers.

I appreciate that, so maybe youtube isn't that bad... so sorry for saying those horrible things man!

TL;DR: No YouTube Music! Fuck you.

Disclaimer: I could use an Adblocker but my old one always crashed and YouTubes Ads are short and not that bad - mostly just banners in the video player.

Rant: Yes google, I AM listening to music on youtube. I am your target audience for YouTube Music. But I am NOT interested.
You see, I wouldn't listen to music on YouTube if I had the spare money for Spotify, Apple Music or some other stupid overpriced service that gives the actual artists not enough of what they charge.

And giving me the same ad over and over again just annoys the fuck out of me. I DON'T WANT FUCKING YOUTUBE MUSIC. I am not interested in a free trial. I am not interested in buying it.
The most stupid thing is that Google provides a dislike and like button for ads. I pressed dislike so often yet it still comes up. GOOD QUALITY!

Why on earth is every fucking big company lost in copying every shit that others make and that has success? Where is my loved innovative Valve?! The innovative Google? They all just crave for fucking money making stuff. As if they still needed more...

A month or so ago this manufacturer of soldering equipment contacted me with the request to make a video about a review unit (a soldering handle) that they'd send to me for free in exchange. Initially I was really pumped about it - company would send me free stuff!! - but fast-forward to today and I realized how terrible a choice I've made by accepting that offer.

See, that handle is worth only €40 and I've spent so much time on the bloody video material already that it'd make my "pay" expected to be close to €1/h if not less. I feel like I've been exploited, especially since I don't even like the handle's design and am not using it. It's just collecting dust, making my work essentially free labor.

I could return the item but that's gonna cost me a fuckload of money, I could pay for the handle and cut my losses that way.. or I could do the review anyway and end up feeling very bad about that company. Or I could tell them to fuck off and lose a supply chain for my soldering equipment.

I have no idea what to do about this..

Oh and the fact that the correspondent in that company has the worst Chinglish skills imaginable, the communication skills of a toddler and is also super indecisive (they asked me to make a YouTube video first which led me to assume a video format for YouTube, but instead they want to put it on their fucking AliExpress product page, rendering my existing video footage useless!) doesn't help either.. I hate that shit company. Fucking leeches!

Anyway, what would you do when you're in a position like that?

Adventures​ Of The New COO

So when that new COO joined our company ( read my previous rant to know that story ) he brought a graphic designer with him

as a designer he's ok, more of a old school package designer type, but as a person one of the most annoying one I've ever met, always want to be included with our conversations, talk about rain and stuff

so few days ago, i was working on a website, headphones plugged in, music playing, he comes near my seat

Designer​: Are you busy ?
Me: yeah, I've this website to finish
Designer: So i have this idea for an app
Me: *taking off headphones while thinking doesn't this dumbass know the meaning of busy*
Designer: what if we create an app for super markets, like this isle has this stuff, that isle has soap or something and how it'll be easy to find what you want to buy and keeps going on and on for about 5 minutes
Me: *making my voice as polite and sarcastic as possible*
It wouldn't work, every market has a different layout even among same market chain it's different
Me: have you ever been to a super market, they have a board saying what the isle is above the isle, all you have to do is just look up
Designer​: hmm yeah i guess
*walks away*

everyone​ wants to make apps and make money, but doesn't have the fucking brain capacity to think about the idea for a bit and do some research, instead they come and waste our time

My company that I work for now is making me work on my personal laptop for the past 4 months! Like wth! It’s work from home y’all, and you gotta work 24/7 but on your own laptops! A thing came up for a new project, and my laptop doesn’t have enough space for it, they were like, delete your stuff, make space! Wtf! It’s called a personal laptop for a reason!

brain: ABSTRACTION ABSTRACTION ABSTRACTION too much ABSTRACTION!

me: jeez calm down a lil i just deployed a boilerplate ember web app with cli tools with next to nothing amount of 'my' code.

b: YES U SUCKER THAT'S WHAT WENT WRONG U DON'T KNOW SHIT ABOUT THE LIL STUFF THAT HAPPENS BEHIND THE SCENES THE FUCK MAN U CALL YOURSELF A CS STUDENT YOU CAN'T EVEN WRITE A COMPILER YET

m: sooo remember when we were studying logic gates and binary conversions and you sigkilled all my threads cuz it was 'boring'?

b: why yes why do you ask

m: WELL that's where we'll end up again if you don't stop nagging me about going down. Trust me, I KNOW how to starve you and you'll beg me to use Python again. You start making advanced data structures in C and the next thing you know you're writing assembly code 'just for fun'.
I have a hackathon coming right up and I have to use a framework or my team loses the advantage. Are we good?

b: well if you put it that way...BUT AFTER THAT YOU'RE TAKING ME TO AN ALGORITHM SESSION

m: *eerily stares at the dusty book in the corner*
you... have a deal

When I was at university in my last semester of my bachelor's, I was doing a game programming paper and our last assignment was to group up and make a game. So I go with one of the guys I know and this other dude since his previous game was really neat. Then two randoms joined that from my first impressions of their games wasn't much at all (one guy made four buttons click and called it a game in Java when we had to make games in c++ and the other guy used an example game and semi modded it.

Anyways we get to brain storming, totally waste too much time getting organised because the guy that volunteered (4 buttons guy) was slow to getting things sorted. Eventually we get to making the game and 4 buttons guy hasn't learnt how to use git, I then end up spending 3 hours over Skype explaining to him how to do this. He eventually learns how to do things and then volunteers to do the AI for the game, after about a week (this assignment is only 5 weeks long) he hasn't shown any progress, we eventually get to our 3rd week milestone no progress from him and the modder, with only three classes left we ask them both to get stuff done before a set deadline (modder wanted to do monsters and help 4 buttons with AI) both agreed and deadline rolls up and no work is shown at all, modest shows up extremely late and shows little work.

4 buttons guy leaves us a Skype message the day of our 2nd to last class,, saying he dropped the paper...

Modder did do some work but he failed to read all the documentation I left him (the game was a 2d multiplayer crafting game, I worked so hard to make a 2d map system with a world camera) he failed to read everything and his monsters used local coordinates and were stuck on screen!

With about a week left and not too many group meetings left we meet up to try and get stuff done, modder does nothing to help, the multiplayer is working my friend has done the crafting and weapon system and the map stuff is working out well. We're missing AI and combat, with our last few hours left we push to get as much stuff done, I somehow get stuck doing monster art, AI is done by the other two and I try to getting some of the combat and building done.

In the end we completely commented all of modders work because well it made us look bad lol. He later went to complain to my free claiming I did it and was a douchebag for doing so. We had to submit our developer logs and the three of us wrote about how shitty it was to deal with these two.

We tried out best not to isolate ourselves from them and definitely tried to help but we were swamped with our other assignments and what we had to work on.

In the end leaving and not helping right when the deadline is close was what I call the most shittiest thing team mates can do, I think sticking together even if we were to fail was at least a lot better.

@dfox, I heard another DevRant meetup was coming. I just made this up right now but it's trending on Twitter... which I also made up.

So... maybe in the Pittsburgh area?

I just signed up to get this off my chest.
Dear Windows, you god damn moronic, ugly, unuseable abomination of an excuse for an OS. I wonder how we could end up here in this situation. You suck, in every way imaginable. I didnt choose Linux or Mac, you made me do it.
I know no other OS that can screw you up this bad when setting up. My friend is an experienced windows user and the last install took him 2 days. I just spend the last day trying to get this uncompatible sucker installed. I manage to set up an hackintosh quicker than I was able to install Windows the last three times I checked, you scumbag.
Your error messages suck ass, there is nothing I cant figure out given enough time, except your useless hints and pathetic attemps to get anything done on your own.
And you are fucking slow. Just why, do you keep installing stuff I didnt ask you to. Now I got this ugly ass Bing-Toolbar because I missed a damn checkbox in an .exe, which could have also been an exploit, you never know.
You are cluttered with useless stuff. I dont care about you lame ass app store, idc about your cortana annoying spy assistant and I certainly dont care about your forced updates.
Just sit back and feel your PC getting slower every day by background processes. Watch your productivity decline while dealing with their brain dead privilege and file system.
You ugly malformed mutation of software. When I look at your UI I feel disgust while wondering how you can fail with the most basic principles of UX.
How pathetic, badly supported, bug ridden and dangerously unsecure can an OS be you ask while trying to navigate through the settings, a pile of legacy software debt this garbage pile was build on. And your shell... what a sick joke.
I hate you Windows. For screwing other OS with your asshole boot manager, hardware driver requirements and making people send me .zip and .docx. You should be embarrassed to charge money for this unfunctional junk, but you do, a lot.
I really try to see the positive here. You got all the software, but thats not on you, thats because all those poor suckers are trapped with you and the effort to change is too big.
This OS is the most disappointing thing technology could come up with today. I would rather set myself on fire than work with this pain in the ass software professionally. I mean if you are a serious developer at some point you have to admit that you just cant develop on windows. You will get fucked 5 times as often as any Mac or Linux user. Fuck you, Windows.
Hey Microsoft, thanks for Typescript and VSCode and all the other good things you have done. But burn in hell for what you have done to all of us with this piece of shit OS.

One of the first things I learned while screwing around in Linux for the first time was the calendar in the terminal. I never thought I'd have an actual use for cal, and it just sat in the back of my mind for a year.

Then, two weeks ago, I needed to find the date for a saturday in December, because I thought it was the seventh. My duck was like "Hey, your terminal is right there, why not use that cal function instead of looking for your calendar?" And I was like "Dude, that's genius!"
I have since done it thrice more for various reasons, and it has saved me like four minutes in total. I love all the little things like this in Linux (I'm pretty sure Windows and obviously MacOS do the same thing with practically the same command, but shut up and let me enjoy myself (and it just feels more accessable in Linux because I use the terminal so much more often))

So yeah
Stuff

God I need something to do...
Wait! I have several things to do! The first one will be making a list of all my projects.
Or spending another two hours on devRant.

When I cost the company half a million.

We recently got incubated and signed up for an accelerator programme, it was a life changing moment for me especially after having worked with my startup unpaid for almost a year. So naturally, it meant a lot to me.

But my friends / colleagues had to leave for a trip leaving me to work along side this other startup in the same batch. They needed a front end guy for their web stuff so we naturally offered our services except they needed me to work on Angular and I didn't know jack shit about it but pretended I did.

I couldn't reach out to my friends for help because I felt bad and wanted to prove my worth, and I pressured myself to the point where I called the client our batch mate brought on board making him leave.

I lost credibility as a professional, trust as a friend and my place at the office because it's gotten extremely awkward to go back there.

I fucked up my one way ticket out of my current certain household circumstances and realized I'm just a shitty developer who's all talk and no show.

My company has two offices in separate cities but they treat each the devs of each location very very differently.

In one office the devs get full power to experiment with whatever tech they want, they just stomp their feet and management gives em whatever they ask for, freedom of choice regarding anything they are working on, to be allowed to do greenfield work or experimental stuff

But in my office we are forced to do ONLY. Bug fixing and refactoring shitty code from over a decade a go, our tech is ancient and we are not allowed to to
Shit , anything we ask for is denied
And improvements to our process is shut down with the reasoning that whatever we got works so why meddle ??

For us , management is solely focussed on making sure we respond to support calls , deployments , configurations and little bug fixing. Basically they only care that we manage to finish for out next delivery.
No new work whatsoever!
If there is any hint of something new to to
Implemented the golden boys from the other office just stopm their feet tillmthey get it or just go off and start working on it then seek permission afterwards, with their much larger team they obviously get further than we do by the time management hears about it so they end up taking over the work since they already have more done already

My manager decided to push us to attend a company devCon to share ideas with our devs from our other location. This rapidly turned into a sour experience

Basically we do all shitty boring work which puts money on the table which goes straight to those idiots to play with...

They have the guts to laugh when we mentioned that we never get anything interesting to work on

Never seen so many of our devs looking up job sites on the bus back...
This is gonna blow up in management's face...

Today I'm ranting about Windows. No, it's not "WiNdOwS sUcKs!", it's more like "But why!?"

See, I'm an IT guy for the year, and in my office they use Windows. Now once upon a time, they had Active Directory and all that (well, actually, they still do) but then they got some new computers running Windows 10, and for some reason they just couldn't join them to the domain!

Why can't they, you ask? Well, Microsoft only allows Win 10 Pro and up to join a Domain, and since these computers came with Win 10 Home, that wasn't possible.

Long story short, I now have some 30 computers that need to be upgraded (possibly from 7) to Win 10 Pro, and joined to the Domain.

Thing is, I would like to do that all in one go, so I look into how to automatically setup Windows.

"Ah! Got it, provisioning packages!"

Lest you think they work let me spare you now: they don't. Just like real computers where everything is different, provisioning packages failed to work twice, and after wasting about a week trying to make it work, I gave up.

So now I realized that I need to try a different method, a custom windows image. Issue is, I've got no clue how to make one. See, microsoft decided to go all in on the provisioning packages thing (they do have advantages in certain use cases), and seemed to decide that making custom images was no longer necessary, so they documentation was nearly impossible to find.

But after a lot of searching, I figured out how to do it:

1. Install Windows in a VM.
2. Put it in audit mode.
3. Install your stuff.
4. Create an unattend.xml file with certain customizations.
5. Put the unattend in Windows\System32\Sysprep
6. Generalize the image.
7. Boot WinPE.
8. Open the console.
9. Capture the image.
10. Wait an hour or two.
11. Done!

I'm over simplifying, it was a huge PITA, and yet there were still issues.

Maybe another time I'll talk about those.

Well, I was Always into Computers and Games and stuff and at some point, I started wondering: "why does Computer Go brrr when I Hit this Button?".

It was WinAPI C++ and I was amazed by the tons of work the programmers must have put into all this.

13 year old me was Like: "I can make a Game, cant be too hard."

It was hard.
Turns out I grabbed a Unity Version and tried Things, followed a tutorial and Made a funny jet Fighter Game (which I sadly lost).

Then an article got me into checking out Linux based systems and pentesting.
*Promptly Burns persistent Kali Live to USB Stick"
"Wow zhis koohl".
Had Lots of fun with Metasploit.

Years pass and I wrap my head around Javascript, Node, HTML and CSS, I tried making a Website, worked Out to some extent.

More years pass, we annoy our teacher so long until he opens up an arduino course at school.
He does.

We built weather stations with an ESP32 and C++ via Arduino Software, literally build 3 quadrocopter drones with remote Control and RGB lighting.
Then, Cherry on the top of everything, we win the drone flying Contest everyone gets some nice stuff.

A couple weeks later my class teacher requests me and two of my friends to come along on one of their annual teacher meetings where there are a bunch of teachers from other schools and where they discuss new technology and stuff.

We are allowed to present 3D printing, some of our past programming and some of the tech we've built.

Teachers were amazed, I had huge amounts of fun answering their questions and explaining stuff to them.

Finally done with Realschulabschluss (Middle-grade-graduation) and High school Starts.
It's great, we finally have actual CS lessons, we lesen Java now.
It's fuckton of fun and I ace all of it.
Probably the best grades I ever had in any class.

Then, in my free time, I started writing some simple programs, firstvI extended our crappy Greenfoot Marsrover Project and gave it procedural Landscape Generation (sort of), added a Power system, reactors, Iron and uranium or, refineries, all kinds of cool stuff.

After teaching myself more Java, I start making some actual projects such as "Ranchu's bag of useful and not so useful stuff", namely my OnyxLib library on my GitHub.

More time passes, more Projects are finished, I get addicted to coding, literally.
My days were literally Eat, Code, sleep, repeat.

After breaking that unhealthy cycle I fixed it with Long Breaks and Others activities in between.

In conclusion I Always wanted to know what goes on beneath the beautiful front end of the computer, found out, and it was the most amazing thing ever.
I always had constant fun while coding (except for when you don't have fun) and really enjoyed it at most times.
I Just really love it.

About a year back now I noticed that I was really quite good at what I was doing and I wanted to continue learning and using my programming.
That's when I knew that shit was made for me.

...fuck that's a long read.

TL;DR, I do node.js now.

__________________

There's much I was working on the past weeks. First of all some of you may know I don't work in IT and therefore always am learning how to make things easier in my workspace with tech. And my boss once told me how annoyed he is converting stuff to PDF for easier sending via mail.

Then I started to build PDF converter with
PHP and the Laravel framework. My first steps into it succeeded and I could even deploy my Pdf-wizard website, but everything feels like a hustle and making this application bigger don't really seems like a enjoyable task for me.

I tried the same stuff with Node.js then. It was damn good. It was simple, because there are plenty of packages wich do this tasks on NPM. Afterwards I spent some time on doing research and ended up learning Express Framework.

This brought new inspiration to me and I wanted to share this with you guys.

Got my first Webdev job at a small marketing company, felt very lucky as I didn't have much experience. Turns out I'm the only one that could program. The other guys just use Wordpress. It felt wrong at first, using plugins instead of developing, but we got results and clients were happy. I felt like there was a lot less to this development thing than I'd previously thought! And so we continued.

But I noticed that some of our more plugin heavy sites (not made by me - these were made in some drag/drop Wordpress interface) were running slow. I mean 15 seconds load time slow. I joined devRant around the same time and discovered that no - this is not what normal development actually is. Wordpress seems universally hated. Thank god, because something seemed very wrong!

So with us getting complaints all over the place over page speed from relatively high-profile clients, I've gone and set up a script on a server that downloads the whole front end of these Wordpress sites and serves them up instead of the 'real' thing. Did I mention that there's basically no dynamic content on most of these sites? It works like a charm! I'm now trying to figure out how to get forms and route them into the real, hidden version of the site, as well as automatically updating the html views whenever the client changes anything in the Wordpress backend. Not sure if this has fixed the problem or just enabled bad practice, but I don't think I'm going to be able to stop the others from doing things this way...

For the record, yes there are plugins that do similar stuff but I thought it'd be nice to never use plugins again! And hey, I got to learn all about bash scripting so I can't complain.

For real though, I didn't quite realise how bad the Wordpress thing really was until I came here. Thanks for making me aware, all!

Let me just get right down to it.
FUCK YOU Hewlett-fucking-Packard FOR YOUR SHITTY LAPTOPS! Don't you even keep your customer's needs in mind when you design these things? Besides all the bloatware you stuff into the Windows you ship it with, at least make the quality of your shit better. These flimsy screens and loose hinges, I've had to get that shit replaced multiple times in just the past year.
Want to upgrade to an SSD or plug in more RAM? Guess what! I've to tear the whole thing apart! Keyboard, palm rest, all if it! What even happened to just popping a cover at the bottom to swap out the hard drive!? I have to fucking congratulate you, you fucking cunts, for making an easy process as difficult as it can fuckin possibly get. You guys deserve an award for this, preferably presented to you, shoved up your asses.

During my first internship, my boss had me build a social network type of platform for doctors, all by myself, using Drupal 7. I was like 'aw yeah sure!'...*sigh* younger me...

While I was working there, he didn't have any particular input on the project other that the occasional brainstorming session, where he would tell me things that big firms do (Facebook, Twitter etc.) that should be implemented. It was 2012 so you can imagine that many standard concepts of today, were making their first appearance back then.

I remember that he was sitting on his desk, a little further next to mine, watching a video about how to treat your employees like mine-digging goblins, in a way that would bring profit to the company. He didn't notice that the volume was loud enough and that I could hear what the video said. Still to this day, that moment was one of the most awkward experiences I had in any workspace.

Well the project turned out to be a really well-built prototype and then canceled because reality hit me and I left after my internship ended, even though he told me that he wanted to hire me and have me work on the project full-time.

So happy to have been there, just to learn to avoid people and places like that in the future, it really paid off (seriously, this is the type of stuff that you have to experience in order to armor up in the future).

I hate some parts of this company.

They literally have a "Designer" which made a mockup for our new UI and honestly when I first saw it I almost threw up.

Having made a lot of designs myself for personal projects and for fun I LITERALLY SAW he barely put any effort into it he just threw some stuff together took a shit on it and called it a UI.

For that interview we were actually expecting wireframes and not mockups since we were not sure what workflow we wanted for the UI.
Of course this would have come with feedback from us and then would have been reiterated and this was clear from our last talk with him.

Maybe he didn't know what wireframes were ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If this wasn't enough, he was also consistently misspelling words all over the place, not aligning parts of the UI, misplacing common UI elements and stupid stuff like having a GIGANTIC + button for adding a object to a list for a NO TOUCH SCREEN UI.

(The plus button was all the way to the bottom left of the screen as far away from the list so users get a good hand workout).

But everyone just loved it because "We have known him for a long time and he has a big portfolio so he must know what he's doing".

I couldn't bring in anything, you truly notice the difference between "I don't agree with your opinion but you are heard" and "Shutup my buddy the designer is amazing".

I was not being an asshole I was giving critique on specific parts of the UI and not just saying "it's shit" hoping we could improve on it. Still having naive hope for the future of this project.

He even looked kinda mad and irritated by my opinion and just looked at the people previously mentioned.

I truly hate people who just keep using the exact same worthless piece of garbage people because they have known them for a long time.

Personally I wanted to grab him off his chair and throw him out through the window, 2 floors down, straight into the garbage bin, making damn sure he doesn't accidentally fall into the recycle bin.

Never ever would I enjoy or like this application's UI if I had to work with it as a user.

The story of how I got my dream job.

I was working for a company with a job I got just after graduating university. It was ok, not very exciting tech but I learned a lot by just surrounding myself with professional code monkeys. I was there for about a year when my company bought parts of another company and there was talk about people getting fired. This made me worried since I was the last one to get hired, so I started looking around for other jobs. I received this e-mail from a company saying they were looking for interns, what a coincidence! I adjusted my CV and sent it in.

--A few weeks pass--

It's Friday and I'm at a dinner party, it's 10pm and someone is calling me. I pick up and it's a recruiter from this company. I get very nervous but the alcohol helps me keep my cool, I pass the initial idiot test and they invite me for an interview. Yay!

I go to work on Monday and in a 1-on-1 and I tell my boss about the upcoming interview, he gives me a high-five :)

The interview is approaching and I'm feeling that I'm about to get sick, I refuse to believe this so I start taking a lot of medicine (painkillers, cough medicine etc.). I feel a bit better and thank the gods for medication.

--D-day--

I wake up, put on my nicest clothes and get on the train. I had one hour to spare just in case, which was well needed because the fucking train is late by 30 minutes. I'm still heavily medicated because of my ongoing fever. When I arrive I basically have to run there and somehow I manage to pick up a coffee on the way there which I devour in two seconds. I'm ready for the interview!

Some guy meets me in reception and the first thing he says is "My colleague doesn't speak our language so we'll have to speak english". This is fine, I speak good english but I was not prepared for this so it caught me off-guard and made me even more nervous. We get in and start talking. Things are going OK despite my numbed brain. I try to make eye-contact to make a good impression with the foreign engineer but he keeps staring somewhere which is making me nervous.

We get to the technical part on a whiteboard and this is where my brain decides to stop communicating. I'm presented a simple task which I'm struggling with finishing, and I feel the embarrassment coming over me. "NOOOOO THIS IS MY DREAM JOB, THIS CANNOT BE HAPPENING!" I'm thinking to myself. After making myself look like a complete arsehole for some time we wrap it up and just before I step out the door I say to the engineer "You should checkout my Github page, I have lots of interesting stuff there" and he says "I'll be sure to do that" but I don't believe him.

I leave the office in fury (of myself) and make my way to the train station and even though it's the middle of the day I quickly devour two beers to calm my nerves and make me feel a bit better. I was so damn disappointed in myself, I wasted the opportunity of a lifetime! I go back home to my regular (now shitty) job.

--Two days later--

I get a call from an unknown number. I pick up the phone and it's the same recruiter guy. "So how did you think it went?" he says. "To be honest, I think it went really bad", I replied. "What? Really? Because they loved you, you got the job". (this was an obvious recruiter lie) "... wat, are you sure you called the correct person?" I said and he just laughed. The day after I quit my old job the whole department gets fired - such impeccable timing.

--A few months later--

I finish my internship and they want to keep me. I'm so happy. The engineer that was in the interview works on my team. I ask him "Why did you hire me? You know as well as I do that my interview was horrible". It turns out he _did_ look at my Github profile and that's how he knew I could write code. I also heard later that for my position there was about 2000 applicants and somehow I made the interviews.

I still work there today and I couldn't be happier (Sorry for the long text).

try philosophy()
catch markAsSpam()
Do you ever think of organizations as people? People personify Google and stuff all the time, but I mean something deeper.
When I look at devRant threads, I feel like we're all part of a collective consciousness, growing and thinking and making decisions. Society is a living thing of its own, in the same way that living cells unknowingly make up an individual body. When a question is asked from one node, another node answers, and the result is a repository of questions, answers, opinions, and jokes on an app that might appear as the scrolling thoughts of a singular mind rife with pure, aggressively structured information.

this was about office politics. for context, a lot of non tech people think they can borrow our time willy nilly and our boss agrees, so we're often pulled out of our tasks to do random shit.

these girls asked for my consultation on a simple problem, because another team wasn't fixing an issue for them and they said it wasn't possible. i said it was possible and simple to solve, i spoke to the other team, showed them how to do it and thought that was done. they kept asking me to produce proof that it was possible, excessively, like i had nothing to do.

that went on for a week, lots of back and forth, i was getting tired, so i told this girl fine, I'll do this stupid thing IF you send me an email making this a formal exchange, she says fine. the next day i find out they went after another guy in my team, who's much busier than i, and he stopped everything to coddle them.

i told him to be careful about that stuff, because he's setting himself up for this shit, he's making the rest of the team look bad and he's stopping his work to do something that was already done, because they couldn't bother to send an email. had a huge discussion about this, he was super condescending and overall, he was an asshole.

next time, I'll just send the girls his way

This is a story of me trying out maintaining a game server and eventually making a mistake, although I do not regret experiencing it.

A month ago I set up a small modded minecraft server because I wanted to experience a fun modpack together with some people from reddit. Besides this, I also wanted to see if I was capable of setting up a server with systemd and screen running in the background. This went great and I learned a lot.

The very next day I was playing with $annoyingKid on the server and everything was well. However the second day, $annoyingKid started pushing the idea to start up a normal minecraft server to build a playerbase.

I asked $annoyingKid 'What about financing, staff management and marketing?'

$annoyingKid: "I don't know much about that, but you can do that while I build a spawn!"

He also didn't want to reveal his age, which alerted me that he's young and inexperienced. He also considered Discord 'scary' because there were haxors and they would get his location and kidnap him, or something. So if he was supposed to become owner (which he desired), he had no way of communicating with a community outside of the game.

He also considered himself owner, while I was the one who paid for the server. 'Owners should be people who own the server', no matter how many times I told him that.

$annoyingKid also asked if he could install plugins on his own, I asked him if he knew anything about ssh, wget or bash because I used ssh to set up the server (I know rcon exists, but didn't want to deal with that at the time), he had no idea what any of those terms meant and he couldn't give proper arguments as to why he should get console access.

In the end, he did jack shit, he had no chance of becoming co-owner or even head-admin because he had no sense of responsibility or hard work. I kept him around as an admin because he was the one who came up with the idea. I banned him on day one after he started abusing his power when someone tipped him of. Even after me ordering him to ignore an annoying player he kept going, of course I could have prevented all this by kicking him earlier since all the red flags around him had already formed a beacon of light. He tried coming back, complaining that he should at least have his moderator rank back, but he never got in again.

A week later I got bored, I had had enough fun with ssh and the server processes to know that I didn't want to continue the small project, so I shut it down and went on to do stuff on GitHub.

Lesson learned: Don't let annoying kids with no sense of responsibility talk you into doing things you aren't sure you want to be doing. And only give people power after they've proved to you that they are capable of handling it.

So I am getting back into game dev. I keep going back and forth about making a 2D or 3D rpg. Maybe I will end up making a mix.

I also want to make customizable characters in game. I found a decent solution for 2D. An artist is making 2D sprites that allow things to be overlaid. Each component has animations. I can layer sprites and animate them in sync to keep all the pieces moving together.

For 3D this journey of what is possible is a lot longer I think. It is hit or miss finding generic 3D characters with build in morphing. I want to be able to change the body for customization. I think I will have to relearn how to 3D model. As I learn what kind of model I need I am also learning what it takes to do this in Blender. And holy hell, Blender is so amazing now! The stuff I can do easily is staggering. You can sculpt a mesh using sculpting tools. Then do a remesh of that to make a more easily animateable mesh. No remeshing by hand, other than installing a plugin. There are a bunch of plugins that you can buy too. I found one for free that looks promising. But the paid ones are not that bad either. Between $25 to $100 depending upon source, license, and features.

However, being a programmer I want to figure out how to generate 3D and 2D models. There is code out there to do this, but I wonder what the learning curve is on that. The engineer side of me wants to be able to model the shape of humanoids and then auto skin that. I think I will start with modeling a few by hand to learn the way it should work. I want a simple anime look. I did find info on automating face rigs and body rigs. Oh the tools we have now!

Anyway, I am having fun.

Sooooo I am not a fanboy. I do have my reservations when it comes to technology and whatever, but I live and let live and normally don't shit on stuff as long as it does not affect me or has any reasonable opportunity to affect others.

But my lead developer does, highly opinionated dude for a lot of shit (he ain't really my lead dev anymore in the sense of him being over me, i actually got promoted to a different department but have to continue working with him) and as such we sometimes go on some huuuuge rants regarding tech. With me, shit is simple man, you tell me you like something and I'll dig it, even if i don't necessarily dig it....i am pretty chill like that...ya dig?

Well the other day he was talking about how tvs like mine were too small for him, mine is a 55 inch, i don't think its small, it doesn't inconvenience me in any way really. But to his royal blindness shit is small.

I mentioned that I watch most of my shit lying down on my ipad pro, to were he starts talking massive amounts of shit about apple.

Now, as a previously hired and annoyed mobile developer, ios has a special place in my heart in which my only complaint about the platform was how xcode would fuck up from time to time. The languages were glorious(Obj C and swift) the cocoa apis were amazing(between ios and mac desktop....oooh la la) and the care that the apple store takes in not letting every other add infested garbage app to play a part in their store, the gloriousness of having your data secured as well as havinf applications compiled into the actual fucking operating system REALLY TOUCHES HOME WITH ME. ITS COOL IF IT AIN'T YOU, I AM TALKING ABOUT ME.

Oh. And ipads are smooth as fuck. This was something that I had to mention when he said that anything that I could do with my 1000+ dllr ipad could be done with his samsung table. Normally, I would be like "cool man" but diz doode insisted on making an android vs ios argument.

He insisted on me trying on his tablet. Boy it was the jankiest, laggiest shit I had laid hands on.......just like any other underpowered Android device. Don't get me wrong, my s9 works fucking amazing, but why in the name of heavens would you make an argument against a tablet whilst simultaneously using a piece of shit that doesn't even work properly? Are people really that delusional in their arguments that they would really be that wrong while still insisting on being right?

I'm basically an introvert. I've lived most of my childhood with my mother alone with few friends and the ones I had betreyed me real hard at some point. So how come that I'm now founding a startup, speaking in front of a big audience at meetups and have a nearly 60/40 work/social life?

At some point I decided to be more social. Making that decision alone had a huge impact. It took several years though, to implement this decision. Some day I cut off my draining social bounds and found energyzing relationships by simple doing what I wanted to do. I started to reach out and experiment with a lot of hobbies like bow casting and going to board games evenings. I made little steps. E.g bow casting is a sport where you don't necessarily interact with others within the sport, but you have the opportunity to interact about the sport.

A physiologist once told me the neat fact, that being an introvert is just an attribute that does not contradict the skill being socially involved. So it is possible with training and decisions to learn how to be more extroverted. For in introvert this is more exhausting and challanging, but definitely possible.

So today I balance my social life and work by visiting meetups, playing board games and all that stuff that makes me comfortable. There I get to know people with similar interests and similar struggle ;)

At some point the work was just not enough to be happy, I identified my missing social interactions as the root cause so I decided to change that.

On the other hand, don't think you have to be social. Don't think you have to care about everything others expect you to care about. It's bullshit. Don't care about that. Rather ask yourself what you want for yourself. Certainly a social life is part of that, but you alone decide how this will look like. E.g. After I decided hey I just don't give a fuck if you like cuddling your cat and when it's birthday is, several months or years later I started to be interested in these things from my own, not because some dippshit society construct expects me to care about it.

So to wrap up:
Introvert is an attribute, social life is a skill.
Deciding for yourself and giving a fuck about others is key.
It takes a shit load of time. But it works.

So at this startup i was single iOS dude age 34, android had 1.5 dudes, one older, one you ger. That 0.5 younger was tech director, really good, so they churned for two guys. Millenial, nice guy, never making conflict, just being sleazebag.

Nobody explained to boss why iOS was always late with features, even when i complained. So i got help, 10 months later, project was unpolished but stable, codewise. Now i interview and hire a guy, age 27, who was all yeah dude no problem, and that being my first interview, i fell under his friendly appearance. I ignored a fact that he didn’t know 90% of stuff i was asking him, because he was so friendly and outgoing and we will do anything attitude.

The guy knew very little, was childish and irresponisble. He showed at work at noon. He started telling me what to do, his senior collegue who started the project. He argued about everything that i would tell him. So i spent three to four hours a day charting with him, because we were in different cities. He had two uears of experence, but he was below junior level. And he refused any of my advices for learning in free time. No, he said, thats my free time, you will not tell me what to do. Well, how do you plan on being better, i asked. He said, i learn by doing. But, since he was at his job only six hours a day, instead of eight, and since he was productive only for 2, i guess he was lazy.
He would deliver a UI he would make, without business logic, and tell it is done. Then clients would call me and ask why text fields are not saved..

This all took me month to understand. I lost time, i lost trust, and soon he was fired.

But, soon i was fired also, replaced by another two devs who i had interviewd and formed a team. I was discarded as trash, just like that. I have even worked overtime to catch up with android guys, unpaid.

Took me year to recover mentally from this.

Lessons learned: be objective when interviewing. Job is business, not friendship, trust no one, keep neutral on work. Leave honesty for someone else, honesty will be used against you. Never criticize two girls in office who disturb developers by talking about sex and dicks all the time, dressed sexy, they are girlfriends of people ranked above you. Leave code perfection for your projects.

Update on my Facebook and Booking.com interviews. I had them back to back today.

Even before I start, I accept and admit that I am a hypocrite. I hate Amazon yet order stuff from there. I hate Microsoft yet use their products. I hate Facebook yet went ahead to interview with them.

I fucking hate myself for compromising my ethics, values, and integrity. I had promised myself that even if I work for any major shit company, I'd never go with Facebook. Here I am after many years. Not an excuse, but I am doing it because I see it as an entry point into the UK. That's all.

Community's hate towards me is justified and I'd accept the discrimination from this community because this place is my digital home and you all are my family. Infact first thing I told mom was, dR boys are gonna disown me when they get to know about this.

Anyway, coming to the update part.

I had applied leave at work from last Friday. 4 days of leave earned me 10 days off (including weekends and 2 days of Diwali company holiday).

Last Thursday I got to know that Facebook has scheduled their interview today (Friday). I spent insane amount of time preparing. Approximately 8 hours everyday including weekend. I added nearly 40+ hours preparing for it in last 7 days, because I had to get in. Failure isn't an option now.

I sacrifice my family time, preparing for the interview.

I sacrifice Diwali break, sitting in front of the screen and studying.

I sacrifice my only vacation of 2021, doing mock interviews as late as 11.30 PM.

I sacrifice my free time and enjoyment, stressing over what could happen.

I was prepared like perfect for screening stage.

Interview 1: this guy comes and ask 'what is the best compliment you have got as a PM?' and 'Why do you want to quit the current company?'

He wasn't supposed to ask those as per Facebook's policy and interview stage.

Then he gave me a shit problem to solve and rejected my approach and wanted it his was. I tried to follow him and made sure I was able to convince with the reasoning but he kept pushing me back. He kept putting me down. Did not listen to me or what I had to convey or what was expected as an answer. He had certain output in his mind and wanted me to come up with it as an answer.

For the uninitiated: Facebook gives ton of preparation material and tells upfront the kind of questions they'll ask they just focus on few things. Moreover, in Product interviews, there isn't right or wrong answer.

Anyway, this guy started making funny expressions which put my morale down and I stood my ground with losing my cool. I managed to get all my answers right and the key points the look into a candidate. It went decent. Yet the interviewers attitude was something I did not like.

Interview 2: the lady was really kind and warm. Very accommodating and easy person to deal with. It went amazingly well.

I have two observations I want to share with you all.

1. I hate what Facebook does. Lizardberg is awful human being. But I absolutely liked HOW they are doing things, at least from an interview stand point. They even had mock sessions by their PMs and upfront told how to prepare and how to answer.

2. While it seems to be a 5 star experience, I found them to function mechanically. No small talk, no human connection (ironic to their mission), no conversational flow of the interview (again something that they kept saying a zillion times in all their material). They came, formally introduced themselves, and had a checklist kind of attitude, and left.

I now await for the feedback.

In the next hour, I had Booking.com first round.

Amazing people. Warm friendly experience. Treated me as a human. Heard me. Made me feel part of the conversation rather than someone just being judged.

It went 1000x better than Facebook.

I await the feedback from them as well.

I don't know what's gonna happen but one thing for sure, the kind of expectations Facebook set for their interviews, was nowhere close to the reality. It was awful.

180° was for Booking.com

Guess the saying stands true, expectations always lead to disappointment.

Finally I feel de-stressed and my Diwali vacation starts AFTER Diwali ended. Or rather just a regular weekend.

2021 has been terribly awful year for me. Hope this shitty year ends soon.

i don't think that i'm having a burnout but i think that i'm maybe not so far away from it... several people, including friends, my therapist and also a colleague, told me they see me at risk of sliding into a real burnout.

i've known this for longer that i have a crappy work life balance. the habit of making work the most important part of my own life. thinking about work even in my private time, when i fall asleep, when i wake up in the night or in the morning. the tendency to think about problems, plans, coworkers, not being able to quit work mentally. the idea that i have to prove to everybody at work that i'm awesome. the feeling that, after a work day, i'm just "waiting" at home for the next day, in idle mode, so i can continue working on a problem (like a bug) that's occupying my whole mind. and at the same time, feeling totally empty after work, having no energy. i've lost interest and quit several hobbies in the last two years that once were important for me. and i think one important reason is that i didn't have any mental energy left to deal with that.

another factor for this development was also the pandemic for sure, because for some time, i had no real social life except for that at work.
but more important is probably that i find my job most of the time really fun and am highly motivated. i have the tendency to say yes to everything and to really commit to and own the problems that are handed to me. (right now, however i feel like there's not much motivation left)
then again there is the feeling that what i do is never good enough, i have little self confidence in my own abilities as a software engineer. there's a big discrepancy between how i myself perceive my work and how other people do (not only at work). on a rational level, i know that what i do is at least "good enough", otherwise i wouldn't have this job, and i wouldn't receive this amount of positive feedback from people. but it's hard to really deeply understand this thing, when there are deep-rooted beliefs like "only perfect is good enough" or "your colleagues will be disappointed and get a negative idea of you (and something bad will happen), if you don't give your best"... and there's also this idea that i have to be this super nerdy person who also codes in their free time, reads IT magazines and stuff, because only then i will fit this stereotype of a software developer, and only then i can be taken seriously and be good enough. no matter if this is fun for me or not.

anyway, right now i'm at a point in life where i'm realizing all this not only rationally, but with full emotional impact... :/ my life feels like it's gone stale and empty. i've lost creativity, warmth and human connection and that hurts a lot.

i'm trying to change my life.
one thing that really helps me right now is to talk with people who have (made) similar experiences. can you relate? if yes, how do / did you address those problems? i would really appreciate to hear your stories...

tldr:
first year in college we programmed 24 hrs straight to fix somebody's mess before the deadline. Decided not to screw him over, instead he claimed to have done everything and we failed the assignment.

Long version:
var group= new[]{"Mike", "Gavin", "Gus", "I", "Ben" };
var client = "Jack"';

First year of college we had an assignment to make a web program for somebody.
Ben wanted to join our group and he already knew a client so we let him join.

After joining Ben wanted to be project lead, but we already decided Mike based on his experience.
Ben claimed to be much better in every way than Mike at and kept coming with stuff the following weeks why we should make him project lead. He kept pointing out when Mike did something wrong and he even came with an audio file where he clearly made jack say that he wanted Ben to be project lead .
After that we were all a bit pissed and told him that he should get it in his head that he was not going to be project lead and just start working on his part of the assignment.

We also found out that Ben was a documentation addict, what we could write in a small paragraph, he wrote a whole page about it. No joke, I rewrote a page of his in 5-6 rows with the same information in it.
No problem you thing, wrong! Because of this he kept bothering us arguing and claiming that our documentation was wrong because it was to short.

In the week of the deadline we asked Ben if he was also done, and told us that he was done for a while now.

The day before the deadline we came to school thinking we only had to do some merging and finishing up documentation.
Then we found out that Ben has almost nothing, and what he had the IDE was screaming that it was incorrect, spaces in Id's and css class names for instance. A really good programmer, my ass!
We were so pissed off at this point, but we had 24 hrs and needed to come up with a plan to fix it.

We decided that Mike and I were going to fix Ben his shit in the coming 24 hrs and Ben was going to make our last bit of documentation because we would not have the time for that, Especially if we had to argue with him like we had to do for each bit of documentation. Gus did not have time and Gavin could not program on his own yet, he wanted to help, but helping him help us would cost more time than we had.

We all went home after that and Mike and I started to program 24 hours straight while in a Skype call, making what Ben had 2 months for. Shortly before the deadline Mike looked at our finishing up documentation received from Ben and told me it was "Okay" and zipped everything up and uploaded it to school with a few minutes to spare.

After that we thought everything was good, we made Ben's part work and delivered it in time. We also decided not to throw Ben under the bus, because this would hurt all our grades because we did not work good as a group since we should have noticed it earlier.

A few weeks go by till the assessment.
The assessment start with asking if we want individual grades or as a group when you all think you did equal amount. We choose as a group, because if we chose individual not only Ben but also Gavin would get a lower grade and we did not think that was fair because he tried so hard.

We demo the product and the teachers are positive. When the teachers start about the documentation, the first thing they tell is that they found something interesting in the documentation, and they read it to us:

"I, Ben, have made all the documentation because my group did not want to."

That was so far from the truth, we all did make our documentation about the parts we made. Yes he did do overall a little bit more because every single bit of documentation we had to argue with him, so every time he volunteers to make it, we would all agree. And he made Mike's and i's last bit of documentation.

Telling the teachers on that point would not have mattered, it would only have hurt is in another way, so we did not and all failed the assignment. And we all felt like to strangle him.
This is now a few years back, but i still want too.

Fuck you google android IME team and fuck their open source policy..

So recently i had a chance to work with AOSP LatinIME code, basically our Android keyboard was forked from very old code base of LatinIME and my job was to change its base version to latest Version available on AOSP repository. Downloaded latest Android 8 codebase. Did 2 weeks of deep investigation of what improvements we will get from upgraded code base.

And I came to know that those Google fucking cunt sucking dick heads deprecated that project and broke the whole thing to a pice of shit. Half of the code is broken with fucked up todo stuff and motherfucking missing method implementation with not implemented warnings. What those motherfucker did is that they abandoned the open-source project after they released Google GBoard, and fucked the stable code by adding quard gram support and dictionary download with multi account features which was never completed by those motherfuckers..

Those misguiding donkey shit fuckers kept a depreciated project in AOSP build tree which has not received a single fucking commit from shitty ass Google IME team, is said to be reference model of Android IME implementation..

What kind of fucking shit is going with open-source code in name of making competition high with thirt party Android keyboard developers ..

Fucking shit fucking ime team .. fuck you .. wasted my fucking time reading your shitty code base .. Fucking shit

This is PART 1/2 of a series of rants over the course of a software engineering class years ago.

We were four team members, two had never failed a class, I’ll refer to them as MT and FT, male and female top students, respectively, and an older student with some real world experience who I’ll refer to as SR.

Rant 1: As I was familiar with the agile methodologies I became the Scrum Master and was set with the task of explaining it to the team members, SR showed up late and nobody seemed interested in learning new methodology. At this point I knew we'd have trouble as a team.

Rant 2: FT made up her project proposal without informing anybody, which required a real client/product owner. We only figured it out after her proposal was accepted as the project, so we ended up working with fake requirements.

Rant 3: This one is partly my fault. I researched first and then worked, which meant I was the last to turn up my work. In one activity MT pressures me and I agree to a deadline so everyone can send their work to the teacher in a timely manner. Since I was the last to finish, I was also asked to give the doc some formatting, which I did in a hurry so it wasn't the best.
The next day MT and FT start complaining about me, saying I took too long and that they expect me to do better next time or else. At the same time they were stressed and in a hurry because we had to explain the project outline in front of the class and they didn't study.
Turns out copying and pasting all your work in less than an hour means you don’t learn anything. FT actually asked me for help days before and I sent her a website in English, which she wasn't very good at, so she just ran it through Google Translate and called it a day.
Later FT called me rude for interrupting MT in the presentation, which I did because he started making up stuff about the project.

Rant 4: SR expressed his dislike for school through profanity in variable names and commit messages. This caused MT and FT to dislike him. I thought it was immature but if anything it should’ve been reported to the teacher and move on.

Rant 5: I was stuck trying to get the REST API working for the project Admittedly this was my fault, too, because I was pushing for the usage of things nobody was familiar with for the sake of learning. This coupled with SR’s profanity led to drama and the progress was dropped, starting over from scratch.

At this point I stepped down from the Scrum Master role as nobody seemed to listen anymore.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I started to hate programming.
I started with a lot of enthusiasm 11 years ago up to become in 2 years a full stack dev, a sysadmin and had also my fair share of technical assistance on every device plus hardware experience mounting hardware like cctvs, routers, extenders, industrial printers and so on. At the time you actually had the tools to solve problems and had to crack your head and pull hairs to solve stuff and people actually was developing solution and frameworks that solved stuff.

Today I can't stand anything.

Every midschooler feels entitled to release a framework that is announed as the next cure for cancer. Web dev once was thin and simplistic, now simplicity is considered a bug and not a feature.
I'm working on an angular project for the nth time and the whole environment is a clusterfuck of problems held togheter with kids glue.
Someone did a tool/framework for everything but most of it is barely well tested or mature.

Just to start this project we had to know, beside html/css/js techs like Angular, Kafka, Kubernetes, Docker, git, Lit, npm/node, mysql/sql server, webpack/grunt and the hell that it brings, C#/Asp.NET/MVC/WebAPI, and so on, the list is long.

DAMN. Making a simple page which shows a tabbed view with some grids requires you to know a whole damn stack of technologies that need to cooperate togheter.
It's 10x more complex and I actually find it much less productive than ever.

But what bugs me most, is that 90% of that stuff is bug ridden, has some niche use case or hidden pitfall and stuff because with this whole crap of "hey we put on github you open a ticket" they just release spaghetti code and wait for people to do the debug for them.

Angular puts out a version every 2 days and create destructive updates.

I am so tired that I spend most of my 8hrs binging youtube vids in despair to procrastinate work.
I liked to do this once....

I just installed Opera Mini on my PSP. That alone isn't very exciting on its own, although I am stoked that my website does in fact render on a device from 2009. With the helpful guidance of a laptop from 2004 that's doing the hotspot duties for this thing.

No, what really got me stoked is that Opera still supports these old platforms, and how small they managed to make it. The .jar file for Opera Mini 4.5 is ~800kB large. There's a .jad file as well but it's negligible in size and seems to be a signature of sorts.

Let that sink in for a moment. This entire web browser is 800kB. Firefox meanwhile consistently consumes 800 MEGABYTES.. in MEMORY. So then, I went to think for a moment, how on earth did they manage to cram an entire functioning web browser in 800kB? Hell, what makes up a web browser anyway?

The answer to that question I got to is as follows. You need an engine to render the web page you receive. You need a UI to make the browser look nice. And finally you need a certificate store to know which TLS certificates to trust. And while probably difficult to make, I think it should be possible to do in 800k. Seriously, think about it. How would you go *make* a web browser? Because I've already done that in the past.

Earlier I heard that you need graphics, audio, wasm, yada yada backends too.. no. Give your head a shake. Graphics are the responsibility of the graphics driver. A web browser shouldn't dabble with those at all. Audio, you connect to PulseAudio (in Linux at least) and you're done. Hell I don't even care about ALSA or OSS here. You just connect to the stuff that does that job for you. And WebAssembly.. God I could rant about that shit all day. How about making it a native application? Not like actual Assembly is used for BIOS and low-level drivers. And that we already have a better language for the more portable stuff called C.

Seriously, think about it. Opera - a reputable browser vendor - managed to do it in 800kB on a 12 year old device. Don't go full wank on your framework shit on the comments. And don't you fucking dare to tell me that there's more to it. They did it for crying out loud. Now you take a look at your shitpile for JS code and refactor that shit already. Thank you.

It’s perfect that this week’s topic is “Most awkward video meeting” because I just had two.

The first one was to demonstrate a software process. I had everything lined up and perfectly (or so I thought) ready to demo, kind of like a cooking show. Except the deployment totally failed. I’m still struggling to figure out why several hours later. Luckily I’m getting a second shot at it soon and they weren’t mad.

Then I went and took a shower. Checking out my eyebrows in the mirror, I decided they were getting overgrown, so I took out a trimmer with a guard on it to thin them out a little. Except for some STUPID and INEXPLICABLE reason I TOOK THE GUARD OFF right before I shaved off the right eyebrow almost to the skin! I couldn’t believe it. It was like my brain sabotaged me knowing I had an important video call coming up where I might be making a ton of money if all went well.

What the hell was wrong with me?! What could I do?! I stood there cursing my existence and making plans to become a hermit in the desert. Well, I couldn’t do that. And I still had a video call in a few minutes. I couldn’t just leave one eyebrow unshaven. So, I did the only thing I could do. I cropped the left one and tried to make it match as much as possible.

It wasn’t terrible, but it was definitely noticeable on HD video and certainly up close and in person when my wife and kids returned home soon. I started panicking and wondering just how I could literally save face after idiotically mutilating my face for all to see.

Then, I got an idea.

Now, I’m a manly man. At least, I consider myself to be. I don’t shave my eyebrows for any kind of metrosexual caché. I do it because if I don’t the grease from my face that gets into my brows eventually transfers to my glasses and then I get annoyed by all the smudges. As a dad who was never comfortable when my girls wanted to put makeup on me, I suddenly became aware that their massive trove of makeup “stuff” might just save my bacon!

So, I snuck into their bathroom and, lo and behold, the exact right shade of color for my missing brow brooms was sitting right on the counter. I dabbed a little on each finger tip and carefully (oh so carefully) tinted the area mangled by my apparent dementia.

It was actually pretty amazing how it all turned out. Even on HD video it was undetectable. And when the true test occurred…i.e. my wife and kids returned home and I had to talk to them face-to-face, absolutely NO ONE was any the wiser!

Now I gotta figure out how to keep up this charade for at least a week, maybe two. I hope they don’t put that makeup tray away somewhere where I can’t…oh, wait, they never put anything away. I’m good.

I once agreed to maintain and develop an application used in a different section of the school to keep inventory and make sure everything is where it is supposed to be.

At first there was enthusiasm, together with 2 of my classmates we agreed and git clone-d the .NET application that now graduated students built and maintained for the past few years. What could go wrong right?!

It became clear that the original students that worked on it followed an older curriculum, meaning they still got taught .NET instead of the core variant that we get now, not only that but it also seemed that they either did not fully grasp the Clean/Onion architecture or didn't get it in class since there were infrastructure components in the 'Domain' project of the solution. Think of 2 DBContexts in the domain model, yep.

One of us bailed in the first week, the other one and I felt bad for the people using the app so we went on and tried to work on the first bugs that were described in a document. One of these bugs was 'whenever I filter on something in the list, everybody gets to see that filter on their screen instead of only me'. Woah that's weird! Let's see how they put that together!

Oh god, they are using a _static_ variable to store filters, no wonder that it doesn't work properly. Ever heard of sessions?!

Second bug: Sometimes people can't create an account when we sign them up from the admin panel. Alright that is weird, let's figure that one out! Wait a second it seems to work in development? What's this about.

Oh wait I can't create an account on production either? Oh that's weird, wait a second... Why do I have to put my e-mail in a form that was sent to me through e-mail? Why is my address not filled in already? OOH, if someone types in the wrong e-mail address (which is easy since our school has 4 variants of the same f*cking e-mail address) it won't work since it can't recognize the user! Brilliant! Remove e-mail input box and make a token/queryparam determine the user account.

Ah that seems good, it's a mess but it seems a tiny bit better now, great! We're making progress and some sweet buck.

Next bug, trillions of 50x errors on random pages, that's a weird one.

Hm everything works in development, that's odd. Is the production data corrupted?

DID I MENTION that in order to get into the system in development we have to load in a f*cking production database backup ON OUR DEVELOPMENT MACHINE and then ask one of the users' password to login to it and create an account for ourselves? Seeding? What's that, right?!

Anyway, back to bug fixing. I e-mail the the people responsible for the app and get a production admin account, oh I also can't ssh into it because of policies so I have to do everything over e-mail and figure out what's causing the errors. I somehow also wonder if they have any kind of virtualization in place, giving students a VM to do that stuff in doesn't seem so weird does it ? Even with school policies?

Oh btw, 'deploying' means sending a .zip file to a guy in another building and telling him how to configure it, apparently this resulted in a missing folder that the application needed to work and couldn't make on its own. This after 2 weeks of e-mailing back and forth.

After 3 months i quit out of despair and sadness, and due to the fact that I just couldn't do it anymore. I separated everything into logical subprojects and let the last guy handle it, he was OK with that and understood why I left.

Luckily, around that time I already had an actual job at a software development company :)

Please take sleep deprivation seriously!
Take care of it and don't allow stress to take you over.

Here's a little story of what happened to me:

I've had sleep problems for all of my life, but the beginning of last summer 2018 it went too far. I turned 18 and somehow all the school, dev and personal work started to pile up, I stressed about them and started to have no sleep every other day and little sleep another. Immediately I took time off from everything for trying get better sleep.

Having no sleep means that your brain starts to run in really low gear but you might not even notice it. So I started stressing about every little detail, making ridiculous decisions and doing stuff that didn't really make any sense.

I went to a doctor and was ordered to take time off for a month or so and start medication with bunch of different pills. At the time I thought the medication could wait for a day and went to an old work friend's place for night stay to discuss about everything. That wasn't obviously the thing I should've done. I was up all of that night, he slept, and in the morning he noticed something was really a bit off about me.

We went to the hospital and I agreed for a treatment in there. They got me to sleep normally again and I rested there for a while. I went back home or actually my parents' place and the problems continued, and back to the hospital I go. This time there was no choice. After a really long while, my mind started to stabilize enough that I was allowed to return to my everyday life: enjoying my summer break. It was an awful summer. I often felt lonely and bored. But at least I slept normally.

In the fall I returned to my usual busy schedule. And life's good again. This time I will manage my stress and sleep better and take them to account when planning schedule.

Guys what I want to know is how do you secure your code so that they pay you after you deliver the code to them?
So recently I was in this internship that I secured with an over-the-phone interview and the guy who was contacting me was the CEO of the company (I'm going to refer to him as "the fucking cunt" from now on). He asked me to do some OCR and translations and I managed to write a few scripts that automate the entire process. The fucking cunt made me login remotely to his desktop which was connected to the server (who the fuck does that) and I had to operate on the server from his system. I helped him with the installation and taught him how to use the scripts by altering the parameters and stuff, and you know what the fucking cunt did from the next day onward? Dropped contact. Like completely. I kept bombing emails upon emails and tried calling him day after day, the fucking cunt either picked up and cut the call immediately on recognising its me or didn't pick up at all. And the reason he wasn't able to pay me was, and I quote, "I am in US right now, will pay you when I get back to India." I was like "The fuck was PayPal invented for?" Being the naive fool that I was, I believed him (it was my first time) and waited patiently till the date he mentioned and then lodged a complain in the portal itself where he had posted the job initially. They raised a concern with the employer and you know what the fucking cunt replied? "He has not been able to achieve enough accuracy on the translations". Doesn't even know good translation systems don't exist till date ( BTW I used a client for the google translate API). It has been weeks now and still the bitch has not yet resolved the issue.And the worst part of it was I got a signed contract and gave him a copy of my ID for verification purposes.
I'm thinking of making a mail bomb and nagging him every single day for the rest of his life. What do you guys think?

!rant !notrant !confession_maybe? Bit of a read.

Last year, around September (around 8 months into my first job in the industry), I started loosing motivation to be a developer. By then I had consistently dropped out of 3 or 4 courses for my degree (no penalties as it was pretty much within the starting weeks of the each course). I was think that I do not want to do this. It got so bad that I was looking for other jobs and even trade apprenticeships (I am old-ish so chances of that are so bloody low).
I had my mind set. Including not wanting to finish the degree I had started, which only had 1 year as full time to complete.

My missus supported me in my decision making, but she insisted that I finish the degree as the years I spent on it would have been a waste if I don't. So I agreed, with the idea that I will do this part time when I find another job.

Fast forward to New Years and a very spontaneous decisions was made. I resigned from my dev job and we ended up moving away to another city, two weeks later. By this point on I was so certain that I did not want to be in the IT industry. I had not done any dev work (personal projects or learning new technology etc) outside of the job for months. It had been months since I've visited devrant (to be honest it was not even installed on my phone, mainly because I broke my phone and after having it replaced I had not reinstalled a large portion of the apps I used). I had sold my custom built pc thinking that we do not need two PC's (we kind of don't, she's fine with her laptop) which meant no more dev stuff as none of this stuff was set up on my missus pc. I was looking for all kinds of jobs outside of the IT industry, anything really.

But then something happened. And this is that something. I mean this, deverant. I was flicking through the apps list on google play store, and I saw devrant, and I choose to reinstall it. I began reading rants and comments and I am certain that this made me realise why I want to be a developer. Within about 2 weeks of redownloading deverant I was enrolled full time as a uni student fully motivated to earn my degree.

There are bits and pieces left out of the story. I don't regret leaving my first ever dev job and moving away, it does seem drastic but it changed me for the better I believe. I have the experience from that role and I new fresh start so to speak. I think my missus new this was just a phase, although it felt so certain about it.

I am more of a lurker than a ranter or a commenter on this social platform but I felt that I need to share this. Thanks for reading this. Not really sure what to tag this. Has anyone else experienced this before?

I really fucking hate somebody asking me to implement a scammy function on a shop/marketplace like "if theres 54% items left, put up a red label that says almost sold out", it works, it drives sales, and they will just find someone else to do it, if its not me, but its such a fucking dirty and ugly way of making people buy your own sold shit more than actual legitimate sellers (that already pay like 25% off of sold items) in the same category, since the shop/marketplace allows for other sellers to sell their stuff on there too, but those tricks don't apply to them, only after they cash into the "booster" program that costs almost 150$ a month, disgusting.

After exhaustive talking to my boss, who always expresses the same concerns, we always end up agreeing that we need to separate development across our coworkers competences ...
We are even gonna hire a full front-end developer this time (as we did with the last 3 hires)..

And what did he do you may ask...
Put our front ender in charge of:
- Build a api in python
- Build the front-end
- 2 months deadline

The front ender is smart and is constantly asking me stuff and learning a lot.

But wtf boss? I could do it in no time...
I literally spent this whole week doing nothing, waiting for some approvals...

He is making everyone unmotivated as fuck ...

I'm starting to wonder pretty fucking every time if he is genuinely retarded.

(first post/rant on here)
So I recently started at a new company. I was kinda aware that the project I'm working on would be rather old school (to put it in a nice way :-)).

Part of my job is to 'industrialize' and update/clean up the existing code so there is less time spent on fixing bugs due to bad design.

One of the first things I had to do was to write a new interface to integrate with external software.

I already noticed some rather nasty habits, like prefixing every variable with m (don't know why), private fields for every property (all simple properties) and a whole lot of other stuff that either is obsolete or just bad practice.

Started writing clean code (simple classes with properties only, no m prefixing, making sure everything is single responsibility, unit tests, ...).

So I check in the code, don't hear much from it again besides the original dev/architect that started the project using my code to further work on that integration.

Now recently I started converting everything from TFVC to Git (which is the company standard but wasn't used by our team yet). And I quickly skimmed through my code to check if everything was there before pushing it to the remote repo.

To my surprise, all the code I had written was replaced by m prefixed private variables used in simple properties. BL classes were thrown in together, creating giant monstrosities that did everything. And last but not least, all unit tests were commented out.

Not sure what I got myself into ... but the facepalming has commenced.

I just got started in my web development course in college now but I'm really not interested in waiting another year or two to finish my prerequisites when I could be learning and making my own stuff by now. I'm learning HTML and doing pretty well. But any tips for a guy trying to get into the industry? I know CSS and JavaScript are some of the basic tools I should know and also WordPress. Any advice is appreciated? Any good online courses I could also take to speed things up a bit?

1. Learn to use Google.
2. If you don't know English, learn it. Most good resources are in English.
3. Be patient and don't give up. You'll get *very* frustrated, believe me.
4. Don't bother other people with stupid questions, refer to item 1. Only ask in forums/answer hubs if you can't find what you're looking for through Google. Yes, that means going into Google's second result page.
5. Don't get discouraged if you don't have friends your age that like programming. You'll find people with the same interest later :)
6. If you don't understand stuff right away, don't worry. Copy code from YouTube tutorials and change them a bit. No Ctrl + C Ctrl + V though, copy it by writing. Little by little it'll start making sense and soon enough you'll be able to write stuff of your own.
7. Most importantly, have fun!

(This advice comes from someone that started programming at age 10 in a county that doesn't speak English)

Since it's 42 & I am fond of the number..

The 'most fun' I had was making a completely useless feature for our customers that we (our team) knew will be useless (&wrong) once finished and we will have to rewrite it. But we had to do it nevertheless till the end of the week, since the customer is the king. It turned out hilarious and fun because everyone was making jokes on the floor about what idiotic stuff we code and implement. Even the boss was like: yes, yes, I know but please do it, you can rewrite it later to not do anything, just leave the button on gui. It was crazy it was fun, a little bit of mindless coding to lighten up the atmosphere and it (coding & jokes) brought closer the whole colective reaponsible for that particular customer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Once again I have loads.

My best teachers were...

The contractor that taught me C#, ASP MVC and SQL Server. Dude was a legend, so calm and collected. He wanted to learn JQuery and Bootstrap so at the same time as teaching, he was learning from me. Such an inspirational person, to know your subordinates still have something to teach you. He also taught me a lot about working methodically and improving my pragmatism.

The other, in school I studied computing A-Level. 100% scored at least one of the exams... basically I knew my stuff.

But, as a kid, I didn’t know how to formulate my answers, or even string together coherent answers for the exams. This dude noticed, first thing he did was said “well you’re better at this bit than me, practice but you’ll be fine” (manually working out two’s complement binary of a number).

Second thing he did was say “you know what man, you know what you’re on about but nobody else is ever going to know that”.

He helped me on the subjects I wasn’t perfect on, then he helped me on formulating my answers correctly.

He also put up with my shit attendance, being a teenager with a motorcycle who thinks he knows it all, has its downsides.

As a result, I aced the hell out of that course, legendary grades and he got himself a bit of a bonus for it to use on his holiday. Everyone’s a winner.

Liam, Jason, if you guys are out there I owe you both thanks for making me the person I am today.

The worst, I’ve had too many to name... but it comes down to this:
- identify your students strengths and weaknesses, focus on the weaknesses
- identify your own and know when to ask for help yourself
- be patient, learning hurts.

You can always tell a passionate teacher from one who’s there for the paycheck.

INTERVIEW. It tells everything about the company. I recently applied for a "big" company for the position of ML Engineer. The Job description was like "someone with good knowledge of visual recognition, deep learning, advanced ML stuff, etc." I thought great, I might be a good fit. A guy called me the next day. Introduced himself as a manager of the Data Science team with 8+ years of experience. Started the talk saying "it is just an informal intro". But things escalated very quickly. Started shooting Data Science questions. He was asking questions in a very bookish way. Tells me to recite formulas (like big formulas). When I explained to him a concept, he was not understanding anything. Wanted a very bookish answer. I quickly realized I know more about ML stuff than him (not a big deal) and he is arrogant as fuck (not accepting my answers). Plus, he has no knowledge about Deep Learning. At the very end, he tells me "man, you need to clear up your fundamentals". WTH??? My fundamentals. Okay, I am not Einstein or Hinton, but I know I was answering things correctly. I have read books and research papers and blogs and all. When I don't know about things, I tell straight away. I don't cook answers. So the "interview" ended. I searched that man on LinkedIn. Got to know he teaches college students Data Science and ML. For a fee of 50,000 INR. It's a big amount!! Considering the things he teaches. You can find the same stuff (with far higher quality) free of cost (on Coursera, Udacity, YouTube, free books, what not). He is a cheater. He is making fool of college students. That is why I sometimes hate "experience". 8+ years of exp and he is such an a**hole!! BTW, I thanked God for saving me from that company. Can't imagine such an arrogant boss.

TLDR: Be vigilant during interviews. It tells a lot about the company.

Need to rant. I am doing programming 2 at university with java and the assessment is to make a card game. The subject is shit and is basically going over loops, variables, conditionals ect which we learned in introduction to programming and programming 1.

This leaves little time for oop principles, design patterns inherentance and all other useful stuff.

I am dedicated to making a career in programming and want to do my assessment the correct oop way. Although the lecturer doesn't care and is instructing the class to do it procedurally and shit.

I could do the program really quickly the shit procedural way and still get full marks but I feel dirty as hell coding like a scrub. So I'm 60 hours in on this assessment and there are so many classes and even more because of unit testing (we don't have to unit test) and I am spending way too much time.

My code is beautiful, my classes are tiny and maintainable, easy to modify and I'm learning so much about how to code oop the correct way with the help of a mentor and someone I look up to. But god does it take forever to code this way. And soo many iterations and redesigns because I'm still learning.

It's almost done but now I have another programming assessment for another class I'll have to do the dirty way because of time restraints and other assessments.

Sorry for wall of text but this is stressing me out 😛

Whelp. I started making a very simple website with a single-page design, which I intended to use for managing my own personal knowledge on a particular subject matter, with some basic categorization features and a simple rich text editor for entering data. Partly as an exercise in web development, and partly due to not being happy with existing options out there. All was going well...

...and then feature creep happened. Now I have implemented support for multiple users with different access levels; user profiles; encrypted login system (and encrypted cookies that contain no sensitive data lol) and session handling according to (perceived) best practices; secure password recovery; user-management interface for admins; public, private and group-based sections with multiple categories and posts in each category that can be sorted by sort order value or drag and drop; custom user-created groups where they can give other users access to their sections; notifications; context menus for everything; post & user flagging system, moderation queue and support system; post revisions with comparison between different revisions; support for mobile devices and touch/swipe gestures to open/close menus or navigate between posts; easily extendible css themes with two different dark themes and one ugly as heck light theme; lazy loading of images in posts that won't load until you actually open them; auto-saving of posts in case of browser crash or accidental navigation away from page; plus various other small stuff like syntax highlighting for code, internal post linking, favouriting of posts, free-text filter, no-javascript mode, invitation system, secure (yeah right) image uploading, post-locking...

On my TODO-list: Comment and/or upvote system, spoiler tag, GDPR compliance (if I ever launch it haha), data-limits, a simple user action log for admins/moderators, overall improved security measures, refactor various controllers, clean up the code...

It STILL uses a single-page design, and the amount of feature requests (and bugs) added to my Trello board increases exponentially with every passing week. No other living person has seen the website yet, and at the pace I'm going, humanity will have gone through at least one major extinction event before I consider it "done" enough to show anyone.

help

Get ready for a awesome conspiracy theory/ WhatsApp forward :D i like how people are coming with new stuff every minute of their boredom . Makes you ponder:

====================================

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

How to dominate the world quickly?

THE GREAT CHINESE STAGE

1. Create a virus and the antidote.

2. Spread the virus.

3. A demonstration of efficiency, building hospitals in a few days. After all, you were already prepared, with the projects, ordering the equipment, hiring the labor, the water and sewage network, the prefabricated building materials and stocked in an impressive volume.

4. Cause chaos in the world, starting with Europe.

5. Quickly plaster the economy of dozens of countries.

6. Stop production lines in factories in other countries.

7. Cause stock markets to fall and buy companies at a bargain price.

8. Quickly control the epidemic in your country. After all, you were already prepared.

9. Lower the price of commodities, including the price of oil you buy on a large scale.

10. Get back to producing quickly while the world is at a standstill. Buy what you negotiated cheaply in the crisis and sell more expensive what is lacking in countries that have paralyzed their industries.

After all, you read more Confucius than Karl Marx.

PS: Before laughing, read the book by Chinese colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, from 1999, “Unrestricted Warfare: China’s master plan to destroy America”, on Amazon, then we talk. It's all there.

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

Worth pondering..
Just Think about this...

How come Russia & North Korea are totally free of Covid- 19? Because they are staunch ally of China. Not a single case reported from this 2 countries. On the other hand South Korea / United Kingdom / Italy / Spain and Asia are severely hit. How come Wuhan is suddenly free from the deadly virus?

China will say that their drastic initial measures they took was very stern and Wuhan was locked down to contain the spread to other areas. I am sure they are using the Anti dode of the virus.

Why Beijing was not hit? Why only Wuhan? Kind of interesting to ponder upon.. right? Well ..Wuhan is open for business now. America and all the above mentioned countries are devastated financially. Soon American economy will collapse as planned by China. China knows it CANNOT defeat America militarily as USA is at present

THE MOST POWERFUL country in the world. So use the virus...to cripple the economy and paralyse the nation and its Defense capabilities. I'm sure Nancy Pelosi got a part in this. . to topple Trump. Lately President Trump was always telling of how GREAT American economy was improving in all fronts. The only way to destroy his vision of making AMERICA GREAT AGAIN is to create an economic havoc. Nancy Pelosi was unable to bring down Trump thru impeachment. ....so work along with China to destroy Trump by releasing a virus. Wuhan,s epidemic was a showcase. At the peak of the virus epidemic. ..

China's President Xi Jinping...just wore a simple RM1 facemask to visit those effected areas. As President he should be covered from head to toe.....but it was not the case. He was already injected to resist any harm from the virus....that means a cure was already in place before the virus was released.

Some may ask....Bill Gates already predicted the outbreak in 2015...so the chinese agenda cannot be true. The answer is. ..YES...Bill Gates did predict. .but that prediction is based on a genuine virus outbreak. Now China is also telling that the virus was predicted well in advance. ....so that its agenda would play along well to match that prediction. China,s vision is to control the World economy by buying up stocks now from countries facing the brink of severe ECONOMIC COLLAPSE. Later China will announce that their Medical Researchers have found a cure to destroy the virus. Now China have other countries stocks in their arsenal and these countries will soon be slave to their master...CHINA.

Just Think about it ...
The Doctor Who declared this virus was also Silenced by the Chinese Authorities...

Today, a freelance javascript developer at my office told me that he designed a new website for one of his customers. I was intrigued that he is also designing and was very interested.

He showed me some images and I asked how he designed it. I thought he would come up with Figma, Sketch or whatever software, but he showed me the AI prompt.

I told him that he did not design it, but AI did that, prompting AI is not designing. He did not agree and rephrased it as "I made this".

After I said "But if I go to a bakery and ask for a cake with some nice decorations, and the baker is making that, I did not make the cake". He angry said, "You don't understand AI," and put his earplugs in and isn't talking to me since.

Prompting an AI is not creating. The AI/computing power with it's context is creating your stuff..

I am so fucking lost.

I literally have zero expectations from life for now and future.

There was a time when I had so much clarity in my life. Rather, I was known for it.
Folks used to reach me out for guidance and my approaches even worked for others.

I was goal oriented and biased towards action. Failing and learning from it, I used to make things happen and with constant feedback kept progressing.

While none of that has changed, I still feel lost and numb. No, I am not depressed or suffering through any mental illness. I am physical active and able to feel the happiness.

But the recent incident with a narcissistic, left me emotionally handicap. I can no longer feel any kind of love or affection. I overcame the damage done and healed myself.

But now, I am done. Even if I engage with anyone for a relationship it would be mostly for sex. I can care for people around me and be affectionate towards them but when it comes to an intimate relationship, I feel it's not something I can do in this lifetime. I tried multiple times but failed.

These days, all I am doing is putting my heads down and working like crazy. Never in my life I worked more than 10 hours in an entire week. Now, I work 10+ hours everyday. During that time, I am highly productive.

And in my free time, I am busy housekeeping different life problems. Either paying bills, figuring out an insurance, planning some investment, or making some kind of life decision.

It's draining me. I feel as if I am losing sanity. But that's the only thing I am able to do.

Maybe it's the lockdown effect. Maybe some damage is yet to be healed.

But I got nothing better to do. I have some good ideas. Not those hipster-ish disruptive Million dollar ideas, but decent enough to solve a problem for a strong use case.

However, all of this is becoming overwhelming these days. Because decision making is complex and difficult task. It can make or break the future.

As of now I am confused how should I go about pursuing two of the important projects that I want to accomplish.

1. Migrating out of Google ecosystem. Is it even practically possible for my use case? What are the alternatives? Planning to opt in for a paid cloud storage so have to factor in that aspect as well.

I want to keep this new setup only for official use like bank and government stuff. Maybe family and close friends. Then have current ids for public logins and sharing it with retards whom I can block or ignore if they harass me. The research is overwhelming but having a structured setup gives insane amount of efficiency when life is spam free.

2. Migrating my Pihole and OpenVPN setup out of Digital Ocean to GCP. Primarily because $5 is a lot of amount for my computational requirements and Google has used my data enough, for me to use the free tier.
However, there isn't a simple script for a tech noob like me, to go ahead and setup something. I did find a Github repository but the documentation is kind of outdated so RTFM failed for me.

I don't know whether to pursue my start-up or let it go and focus on moving to Europe.

It's just so fucking stupid to even exist. And let's not forget taxes. Bloody taxes.

I'm so fkin happyyyyyy!!
2 months ago a friend hits me up and says "lets make a fkin website"
I had no knowledge of web dev and didn't take it seriously cuz "web dev is for losers who can't code, also they get paid in peanuts" as stated by someone I highly respected back in school.

Fuck him.
It's all changed.
I never thought I'd say this.
But web dev is the best thing I've picked up in 3 years

Been making steady progress in js, php, sql then picked up jquery and made a few dynamic test sites. God it was so fkin satisfactory. Started node- it's intimidating but I'll get the hang of it soon and thinking of starting vue or ember as soon as I'm confident in all the stuff I've picked up. Oh and friend's website?
Fuck that it's a trash concept. I still thanked him for getting me to start web dev and moved on.
I still have my roots in c++ and Python and I'll never forget them but I think this may be the start of a wonderful journey. Be sure to burst my bubble I'm just a noob now

This week I got a promotion after being a junior for a year. Boss said Im a medior now and my monthly salary raised with 400 euro per month

Feels good but what feels bad is that a coworker of mine which has been contracted recently without any development experience is still making 400 more a month..

The thing is that this "developer" wanted to become a Java developer, he has been given time during work to study Java and in the meanwhile join the team thats working on a saas product (my team, where im lead dev)

During the 3 months ive counted a maximum of 10 commits and i was done with him which conflicted in a very bad vibe at the office.

During a refinement I asked if everybody understood what needs to be done, no questions asked. Next day when i was working at a clients office on another project 9 am i git a Skype message "Can you tell me What to do? I have no idea" where I replied "you should have asked me yesterday, i am not going to help you unless u come up with a question that makes sense.. what have u tried urself?".. Well then he got mad and stopped doing what he was trying to do.

The next morning i talked with him and we agreed to have a 1hour session to talk him through the user story. When we were done, he said that he understood and was going to work on it.

Next day I check, no commits, so during stand up i confronted hmj with this and he admitted hes been lacking and wanted to talk with the boss and me after stand up.

Well he admitted things were going to fast to keep up for him because he is doing some sysadmin stuff aswell.. the plan of becoming a Java dev was now history and he left the team..

Now he is just doing some sysadmin stuff but its been 3 days that hes been saying today ill setup a tomcat on the servers and give you SSH acces to deploy your .war files, today I finally gained access but he couldnt figure out how to move the war to the webapps folder.. And i wasnt allowed to transfer it to there..

Late night ramble warning.

I like to fix issues. I like to roll up my sleeves and fetch my keyboard or soldering iron on a mission to build a custom solution for whatever real world annoyance that has just triggered my problem solving caveman brain.

I have prided myself in that. I am the kind of guy who doesn't shy away from getting my hands dirty, I tell myself, and it's good because it makes my life easier, I tell myself. But increasingly, I've been wondering if this is really so. Am I really making my life easier? Am I fixing the world or just scratching an itch?

Example 1:
Instead of using conventional backup methods for my personal files like a commercial cloud based service or buying a Synology NAS or something similar, I decided it would be better to build my own linux server and set up a rather obscure configuration in order to address things like parity, ECC, bit-rot and the likes while staying cheap.

Learning a lot? Sure. Fun? Sure. Never have to worry about backups again? The opposite, of course.

While I set out to build the perfect bespoke solution to all my personal backup needs - it's as if I, by putting my time and effort into the nitty gritty of technical implementation, placed a vote for my future to contain more of that stuff. In reality this project has burdened my little brain with many new things to consider in regards to storing my files.

Example 2:
Qwerty and the conventional staggered keyboard layout are relics of past technical limitations and both of them inefficient and bad from an ergonomic perspective.

Possible solution: ignore and carry on or possibly transition to Colemak on a somewhat more ergonomic full size keyboard.
My solution: well, let's also hand build a tiny-ass super obscure ergo keyboard and spend two days to come up with my own layout for all special characters, numbers and function keys.

Fun? Somewhat. Learning a lot? I guess. Never have to think about keyboard layouts again? Lol.

I'm living in a world of pain with various key commands in various apps and edge cases. Could I fix it? Probably make it better but not without quite a bit of effort.

Anyways, it'd be interesting to hear if anyone can relate to this feeling of wanting to fix something once and for all only to find yourself deeper in it then ever before. Idk might be a just me thing. Anyways, goodnight lovely people.

Small company, sole engineer. Non-tech management. Increasingly fancy job titles despite working alone most of the time, with the promise of hiring someone (again) I can actually manage soon.

Backlog of projects/tasks is truly a mindfuck, with new things being added each week. This backlog will never ever get done, and nothing matters anyway because the next idea is "the future", all the time.

While I have influence on some aspects of decision making, it usually ends up being what the boss wants. Actively opposed a project because it's just too big of an undertaking, it was forced through anyway. I'm trying to keep the scope manageable as I'm building it now, and it's hard.

"It's the future, we absolutely have to do this. It will be the biggest thing we've ever done."

Boss's excitement then quickly faded since it's actually in development, now nobody really seems to want to know where it's at, or how it will all work. I need to scope it out, with the knowledge that many decisions boss signed off will be questioned when he actually looks at it. We now have even more "exciting" ideas of utter grandeur. Stuff that I can't even begin to comprehend the complexity of, while struggling to keep a self imposed deadline on the current one.

Every single morning we sit on Zoom for a "valuable" "catch-up". This is absolutely perfect for one thing: Completely destroying whatever drive and focus I have going into the day. Unrelated topics, marketing conversations, even more ideas, ideas for ideas sake, small problems blown out of proportion, the list goes on. I recently argued in detail why it should be scrapped or at least be optional to attend. No luck, it's "valuable".

Today a new idea was announced, and we absolutely have to do it ASAP because it can only be better than the current solution. I raise my concerns, saying it's not as easy as you make it out to be, we should properly think about it. Nope! We'll botch something to prove that it works... So you'll base your decision whether it's good on some half ass botch job that nobody really has the mental capacity to actually pay attention to. What a reliable way to measure!

"Our analytics data isn't useful enough to tell us the impact of things we do. We (you) have to fix this." Over the last 2 or so years, I've been pushing for an overhaul and expansion of our data analysis capabilities for exactly this reason. Integrating different data sources into a unified solution so we can easily see what we're doing, etc. Nope, never happened.

The new project idea which is based on wild assumptions is ALWAYS more important than the groundwork.

Now when I mentioned that this is what I wanted to do all along, it got brushed aside. "We don't need to do anything complicated, just fix this, add that, and it's done. It should be an easy thing to do. This is very important for our decision making." Fine, have it your way.

I'm officially burned out. It's so fucking hard to get myself to focus on my work for more than an hour or two. I started a side project, and even that effort is falling victim to my day-job-induced apathy.

I'm tempted to hand in my resignation without another offer on the table. I just need time to rediscover my passion, and go job hunting from that position, instead of the utter desperation of right now.

If you've read through all this rambling, kudos to you!

This new job has more work than I can possibly complete in a day, week, or month. Deadlines pile up and I’m thoroughly exhausted all weekend. My mind feels lethargic and dull. People around me seem to be getting stuff done and I feel like I’m making too many mistakes and holding everyone back. Not sure I can stick with this job for the long haul to retirement. But freelancing absolutely sucks because nobody wants to pay you enough to feed yourself and it doesn’t scale to a full time salary for me. I simply don’t have the mental capacity to do the equivalent of four peoples’ jobs to design, code, QA, launch, and do all the digital marketing, advertising, writing, and maintenance for enough sites to make up my salary.

This is the story of the API documentation.
Which btw I couldn't find on the producent's website anywhere. I had the pdf shared with me by a coworker.

I knew the api was fucked up the moment I looked at endpoint documentation.

GET params? WHERE, ORDERBY etc. Literally make a SQL select in a GET request.

Returned stuff? The whole thing. Not some DTO, you literally get everything you can get.
Eg if you get IP in your response, you get it in several formats: dotted form, as hex, and as int. In 3 different json fields.

Oh, and regarding IP - one would imagine you can use masks or prefixes for subnets, right? Nope. The only param you can use there is the subnet size. So you have to calculate the power of 2 every time you want to make a request.

That's from the endpoint documentation. But what about some general info on the API, before all that?

As I was looking for something, I decided to read that intro and general info about the API.

Okay, so there was a change log between API versions. "removed [endpoint which sounds like correct REST design], please use [this generic thing with SQL-like GETs]"... Several of them.

And there was also this sentence which said that the API is not restful, "it's REST-like". <facepalm>

If it was a bad attempt at REST API, I would let it go. But this sentence clearly showed they knew they did everything wrong. And the changelog showed they didn't stop there, they were actively making it worse.

The more I'm on here the more I remember all the shit I have had to deal with in the past.

Anyway, lets rant! I just moved cities after college to be closer to my family, I didnt have any work lined up at that stage but started job hunting the moment I was settled in, I did some freelance for smaller companies to stay afloat.

Eventually I got a job at this agency startup where "SEO" was there main focus, still very inexperienced they put me on frontend and data capturing but will teach me how to code using their systems in due time. At this stage I was getting paid minimum wage, but I was doing minimum work and it wasnt that bad.

A new investor bought 49% of the company and immediately moved into the office space to focus more on marketing (He was one of those scaly marketing guys that will sell you babies if he could get his hands on enough to make a profit).

This is where everything starts going to shit. He hires a bunch of "SEO Gurus", fills up the small office with people like sardines squished together. Development was still our main money maker at this stage, so there where 3 new more senior developers at this stage and I started learning a lot really fast.

Here are some of the issues we had to deal with:

1. Incentives - Great more money, haha! No, No, you where 5 minutes late so you only get half of the promised amount.

2. For every minute you are late we will deduct it from you paycheck (Did I mention I was getting paid minimum wage).

3. If you take a smoke break we will dock it from your pay.

4. Free gym membership to the gym downstairs, but you can only go once a week during your lunch.

5. No pay raises if you cant prove your worth on paper.

He on purposely made up shitty rules and regulations to keep us down and make as much profit as he could.

Here are some shitty stuff he has done:

1. We arent getting a 13th check this year because the company didnt make a big profit - while standing next to his brand new BMW.

2. Made changes over FTP on clients work because we where too slow to get to it, than blames me for it because its broken the next day and wants to give me a written warning for not resolving the issue Immediately. They went as far as wanting to fire me for this, gave me 1 day notice for meeting and that I can bring a lawyer to represent me (1 day notice is illegal, you need 5 days where I am from), so I brought a lawyer since my mom was a lawyer. They freaked the fuck out and started harassing me about this a week later.

3. Would have meetings all the time about how much money the company is making, but wont be raising our pay since no one has proven they are worth it yet.

4. Would full on yell at employees infront of the entire office if they accidentally made an mistake on a clients project.

One one occasion I took a week off for holiday, my coworker contacted me to ask a question and I answered that I will handle it when I am back the following week. Withing 2 hours my other boss phones me in a rage, "he is coming to fetch the company laptop from my house in 5 minutes, he will let me know when he arrives. Gives me no time to talk at all and hangs up - I have figured out what has happened by now so when he showed up he has this long speech about abandonment, and trust and loyalty to the company. So I pass him my laptop once he shut up and said: "You do know I am on holiday leave which you approved, right?", he goes even more silent and passes me back my laptop without saying anything, and drives off.

While the above was happening Douche manager back at the office has a rage as well and calls the whole office (25 people) to a meeting talking about how I abandoned the company and how disgraceful that is.

Those are the shitty experiences I can remember, there where many more like this. All of the above eventually led to me going into a deep depression and having panic attacks weekly, from being overworked or scared to step out of line. Its also the reason I almost stopped coding forever at that stage. I worked there for 2.5 years with the abuse.

I left 2 weeks after the last shit show, I am ok now and have my anxiety and depression well under control if not almost gone completely.

Ran into Douche Manager a few months ago after 9 years, the company got bought out and the first person they fired was him. LOL! He now has his own agency and is looking for Developers (They are hard to find he says), little does he know I spread his name far and wide to all and every Dev I knew and didnt know to avoid working for him at all costs. Seems like word of mouth still works in this digital age.

Thanks for reading this far!

I am not the only one that has ranted about this but it needs to be repeated: FUCK QUORA

Can't they just please go out of business already? Services that force you to sign up to read stuff are making me want to torture the company's decision makers slowly to death anyways. Also fuck reddit for promoting their absolute garbage app that adds ZERO value to the reddit experience other than bugs and really shitty loading times.

Finally making it.
I'm now closing down my company due to way too high costs and way too much work to try to stand those costs.

Good things will happen, now it's time to simply pay for the debts I now have just because I tried to dream too big without having enough financial support to sustain those dreams.

Hopefully I'll pay my debts in less than a year.

I really wish to go back in time, do stuff differently or even just don't do anything at all.

What a fucking year, I didn't even feel covid, lockdowns and such as I was too busy working at home.
Completely destroyed various relations in order to try to keep things up, now I just can't stand this stuff anymore.

To finish my photography portfolio website and get it online. I've been putting this off for YEARS. Just started again (and from scratch) and I've been making some progress for the last couple of days. I don't want to even look at that old project I scrapped, or maybe I will once I finish (read: publish) this one.

My problem before was that I was always looking at the big picture and was trying to figure everything out in one go.

In contrast with that, I now figured out a relatively simple and straightforward way to start off with no back end at all and just use static resources instead (with some logic to parse them every time I "upload" new stuff), which should be fine even in the long run if I end up being too lazy and/or busy to do the back end. In general, I now try to tackle small tasks one by one (even if I don't always write them down and/or track them) and realise that it's better to be done (even not in the best way I imagine it) than to not be done at all. It's as if I learn how to do stuff properly for the first time. Oh, well...

I'm getting beat up pretty bad by Rust. I like it so far but man is it hard. Imposter-syndrome is almost making me lose motivation. Almost, but I won't quit, one day I'll get there.

I think the primary reason I think I'm having such a hard time is that I'm trying to learn stuff that prevents me from making some mistakes that I have never run into. I know a bit of the theory but no hand's on experience on double-free errors, memory leaks and weird low-level stuff. I read the documentation, mostly understand what stuff is for but when I go write code I'm just like "now what?". I don't have enough experience to know when and where to use some concepts and I'm super lost. I don't know where to start and the feeling of being completely overwhelmed by all sorts of new stuff is at the same time exciting and frightening.

I have never, as a programmer, thought something was hard. All of my past knowledge required dedication, work and patience, but I wouldn't say I ever felt something was *hard*. But Rust... damn. Rust is hard.

Hopefully at the end of this super steep learning curve I'll know a lot more stuff and have stronger "dev powers" and be one step closer to being as knowledgeable as some of you guys around here to whom I look up to.

It's so nice when kindness is retributed...
When on a flash shopping for wood, to fix my chair. Found out that the shop was way cheaper than a big chain I went a few days ago... Like up to 2/3 and 3/4 cheaper... Well, spent 1-hour shopping in such a small shop.
Meanwhile, started talking, telling what I'm doing with the wood and the tools... and eventually asked if she had any leftovers because I would use them.
A little more shopping, a little more talk and she asked, what will you do with the leftovers??
I've started talking about my new hobby, then the why I started this hobby (burn out), and that I'm making machines and tools with the stuff I'm buying...
Left with a big box full of leftovers, even a catalog with fine wood, all the same size...
It's nice when people reward kindness with kindness.
Also, gained a new costumer, never shopping anywhere else again if they have it.

Sometimes life takes unexpected turns:

I studied mechanical engineering and did some "computer stuff" in my free time, you know, "programming" with Java, toyed around with HTML/CSS/PHP a few years ago, some local server stuff with a raspberry pi, nothing fancy.

Half a year ago i got hired as engineer first but they said they needed an "IT Guy" also.

What i did since then
*Researching, Testing and Planning the introduction of an ERP software
*Planning, coordinating and (partially) setting up a new server for the company (actually two cause redundancy (heavy lifting got done by our IT partner, its not like i suddenly know how to do the entire windows server administration)
*Writing 3 minor tools for some guys in the company in java
*Creating numereous excel vba scripts that make work a lot easier
*doing all the day to day business that comes up when absolutly noone know how to use a pc in the company
*consulting the boss about webshops and websites in general and finding a decent partner
*and some engineering

Did i mentioned that i studied mechanical engineering? I know nothing about all this, or rather, i know enough to know that i know not enough.

My current side project is creating a small intranet, so creating a new VM in Hyper V, setting up some OS (probably slim CentOS), getting a Webserver running and making it somewhat secure. Then i need to create some content, i am very close to just install a mediawiki and call it a day. If i write anything in PHP i fear that i make way to many erros or just reinvent the wheel, on the other hand, i couldnt find anything resembling what i need. I also had to create the front end side, i knew CSS around 2010, there is probably tons of stuff i dont know and i will make so many errors.

This is frustrating, everything i touch feels like i am venturing the beaten path but noone ever showed me the ropes so everything i do feels like childs play. I need an adult. Also the biggest Question remains: What i am?

Hey guys, quick question regarding employers and stuff.

I'm 14 and I've been learning and making things in PHP for around 1 and a half years now. I quite like PHP as, despite the code being quite messy sometimes, it's super easy to learn, and has plenty of features for any use case. My biggest concern is that, when I end up getting a job, whilst 5 and a half years of experience using the language is good, do you guys think PHP will still be in-demand, or should I look towards learning a new stack? Perhaps I should use Ruby on Rails, or Express - React and Redux, or maybe Django? With so many options available for developers, I'm finding it difficult to choose a stack that will stay in-demand in the future. Could anyone help me out with this? Thanks.

Edit: I've been learning Laravel, too.

I think I need some "programming detox", a couple weeks away from any kind of software development. It's just not fun anymore, I have lost my drive, I'm lazy to learn new stuff, I never finish my projects, I don't even know if I enjoy web development anymore.

Actually, I'm kind of lost on what to do with my life.

I don't want to become a full time web developer because it's boring, it's always the same shit: write frontend with some sort of framework, design database, write backend, rinse and repeat. There's nothing new, all projects seem to have the same requirements.

I don't want to get into machine learning and whatnot because it's a lot of math and theory, I like math but idk if I would like doing that all day. Same goes for basically anything related to research.

Low level stuff: on paper I like it, it's interesting, but I'm too lazy to learn and whenever I come up with a robotics project I end up making a shopping list and forgetting about it because either 1) stuff is too expensive or 2) I can't make the parts I want without spending a lot of money on tools. Also from what I can see in school, VHDL is boring af.

I just don't know what I like anymore, nothing gets me excited, not even video games. I used to like csgo but I just suck at it and I only play it because there's nothing else to play and deep down I still have a little bit of hope of becoming a decent player, even though I know I never will.

I just don't know what I want out of life. Sometimes I just like having tons of school assignments (especially calculus ones) just to keep me busy.

Just compleeeetteellyy messed up a technical interview.. stupid theory.. I can apply all that stuff but when I get asked to explain then . Well.. I messed up.

And the coding part, I had the right approach but had one big brainfart in it making the whole thing useless (pseudo code so couldnt test it). I realized just after the interview was finished..

I hate the feeling of failure.
Was a really nice position which is why I applied. Ah well, tonight is whiskey night I guess.

Most pissed off I've ever been at work when was I attending some development meeting about the "slow progress we were making", in which the boss (same one giving us shit for being slow) came up with several new good ideas that he wanted implemented ASAP. Same thing he'd been doing all year; fucking up our plans and adding a metric shitton of feature creep. I tried to give realistic estimates for how long it would take to implement, and casually mentioned that working on this would also push back the other stuff on our plate, but he snapped at me and accused me of being a "negative influence" and "sabotaging the project", and went on in a long rant about how we didn't take the work seriously enough and that we didn't put in enough effort.

I was a hair's breadth away from flying over the table and strangling him with his keyboard cable, and the only thing that kept me in check was the tiny amount of steam I vented by snapping the pen I was holding in two. We'd been working overtime every day for months to try to meet his insane demands and accomodate him by doing all the changes and additions he wanted done, and I found his tirade - mainly targeted at me - highly unfair.

Somehow I managed to exercise restraint, and I'm not sure if he even realized what happened.

I left class early today

I understand me and this kid are both students and both of us are still learning. But when he asks me to help him solve an issue I fucking expect him to listen then try what I’m saying unless he knows for certain that my idea won’t work

I don’t expect him to start ignoring the person HE asked for help to try things on his own and end up DELETING THE FUCKING GRADLE FOLDER because the 1.5.1 version of Android studio my teacher makes us use told him gradle was corrupt

I also didn’t expect him to tell the professor I didn’t tell him not to And them end up with the professor fucking assigning me to help him fix everything even though the kid won’t listen to me anyway refusing to just copy he java and XML to a new project so I grabbed my stuff and left Fuck that bullshit

I understand we’re both students and in the grand scheme of things we’re both idiots. But when I’m asked for help I expect the person to at least listen and not do something absolutely stupid like delete something we don’t understand how to fix

Now I’m making common sense a requirement to ask me for help I don’t need any extra stress I’ll deal with the consequences of walking out tomorrow But I can’t say I regret it

If you've ever tried using Go plugins raise your hand.
If you've ever tried doing plugins in Go, raise your hand.
If you think that the following rant will be interesting, raise your hand.
If you raised your hand, press [Read More]:

This is a tale of pain and sorrow, the sorrow of discovering that what could be a wonderful feature is woefully incomplete, and won't be for a very long time...

Go plugins are a cool feature: dynamically load pre-compiled code, and interact with it in a useful and relatively performant way (e.g. for dynamically extending the capabilities of your program). So far it sounds great, I know right?

Now let me list off some issues (in order of me remembering them):
1. You can't unload them (due to some bs about dlopen), so you need to restart the application...
2. They bundle the stdlib like a regular Go binary, despite the fact that they're meant to be dynamic!
3. #2 wouldn't be so bad if they didn't also require identical versions of all dependencies in both binaries (meaning you'd need to vendor the dependencies, and also hope you are using the right Go version).
4. You need to use -trimpath or everything dies...

All in all, they are broken and no one is rushing to fix it (literally, the Go team said they aren't really supporting it currently...).

So what other options are there for making plugins in Go?

There's the Hashicorp method of using RPC, where you have two separate applications one the plugin, one the plugin server, and they communicate over RPC. I don't like it. Why? Because it feels like a hack, it's not really efficient and it carries a fear of a limitation that I don't like...

Then we come to a somewhat more clever approach: using Lua (or any other scripting language), it's well known, it's what everyone uses (at least in games...). But, it simply is too hard to use, all the Go Lua VMs I could find were simply too hard to set up...

Now we come to the most creative option I've seen yet: WASM. Now you ask "WASM!? But that's a web thing, how are you gonna make that work?" Indeed, my son, it is a web thing, but that doesn't mean I can't use it! Someone made a WASM VM for Go, and the pros are that you can use any WASM supporting language (i.e. any/all of them). Problem inefficient, PITA to use, and also suffers from the same issues that were preventing me from using Lua.

Enter Yaegi, a Go interpreter created by the same guys who made (and named) Traefik. Yes, you heard me right, an INTERPRETER (i.e. like python) so while it's not super performant (and possibly suffering from large inefficiency issues), it's very easy to set up, and it means that my plugins can still be written in Go (yay)! However, don't think this method doesn't have its own issues, there's still the problem of effectively abstracting different types of plugins without requiring too much boilerplate (a hard problem that I'm actively working on, commits coming soon). However, this still feels to be the best option.

As you can see, doing plugins in Go is a very hard problem. In the coming weeks (hopefully), I'm going to (attempt to at least) benchmark all the different options, as well as publish a library that should help make using Yaegi based plugins easier. All of this stuff will go (see what I did there 😉) in a nice blog post that better explains the issues and solutions. But until then I have some coding to do...

Have a good night(/day)!

!dev

I didn’t posted for a while cause I didn’t have anything interesting to say. My job is fine, got no major problems in life, everything looks good so I started thinking about the fucking civilization future stuff.
Either I’m to old or we’ll end up back in ancient Egypt one day.

The knowledge is still not moved from old to young, not categorized and protected well enough and we’re busy fighting with each other about nothing important. We’re carrying about stuff that have nothing to do with our lives. All those fucking movements make world worse place then it was. Just marginalize those that are good and give more powers to those who shout more and have more money.

As a result I think in a matter of couple generations there won’t be anyone who could replace grandfathers keeping this machine alive and future people will end up looking at pictures and videos of ancient stuff that nobody is capable of doing cause nobody understands it.

This super friendly human politics of the world like any other politics will make people unfriendly and not able to communicate with each other - stupid and unable to think reasonably.

My advice I also took as a mantra, turn off the internet and read or listen to the books - at least one book a month is your goal.
My last book I listened to was about history of gender and you know what ? I learned that clown fish can change gender when it’s young. I learned more from listening to this book for 8 hours then from a year reading stupid articles in the internet. I understand what gender is, what are the problems and all the fucking history of it staring in 1800-something or maybe even earlier. Maybe because there is still lots of difficulty to write something interesting that is more than 1 page of paper long. Most of stuff in the internet weather it’s an article or video have only 1 page amount of content. This content is none, it have no value to the community. You won’t learn anything from it. If you want to learn something read book cause making good quality book is very expensive and takes lots of person life and self esteem. Probably one book takes more time then most of influencers spend making their stupid pictures and stuff like that.

That’s sad truth of our times. We turned technology made for knowledge exchange to advertising tv - again.