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Got this from a recruiter:
We are looking for a **Senior Android Developer/Lead** at Philadelphia PA
Hiring Mode: Contract
Must have skills:
· 10-12 years mobile experience in developing Android applications
· Solid understanding of Android SDK on frameworks such as: UIKit, CoreData, CoreFoundation, Network Programming, etc.
· Good Knowledge on REST Ful API and JSON Parsing
· Good knowledge on multi-threaded environment and grand central dispatch
· Advanced object-oriented programming and knowledge of design patterns
· Ability to write clean, well-documented, object-oriented code
· Ability to work independently
· Experience with Agile Driven Development
· Up to date with the latest mobile technology and development trends
· Passion for software development- embracing every challenge with a drive to solve it
· Engaging communication skills
My response:
I am terribly sorry but I am completely not interested in working for anyone who might think that this is a job description for an Android engineer.
1. Android was released in September 2008 so finding anyone with 10 years experience now would have to be a Google engineer.
2. UIKit, CoreData, CoreFoundation are all iOS frameworks
3. Grand Central Dispatch is an iOS mechanism for multithreading and is not in Android
4. There are JSON parsing frameworks, no one does that by hand anymore
Please delete me from your emailing list.49 -
I've learned that trying to jump into a project without properly understanding everything it will entail is bad.
I recently worked on a project that involved modernizing a legacy system and no one on the team (including me) fully understood how the legacy system worked. This led to us missing a lot of edge cases and attacking the project in a way that really wasn't beneficial overall.
If we had thought about the entire system beforehand and mapped out the legacy system, the project would've turned out much better.10 -
I'm a self-taught 19-year-old programmer. Coding since 10, dropped out of high-school and got fist job at 15.
In the the early days I was extremely passionate, learning SICP, Algorithms, doing Haskell, C/C++, Rust, Assembly, writing toy compilers/interpreters, tweaking Gentoo/Arch. Even got a lambda tattoo on my arm after learning lambda-calculus and church numerals.
My first job - a company which raised $100,000 on kickstarter. The CEO was a dumb millionaire hippie, who was bored with his money, so he wanted to run a company even though he had no idea what he was doing. He used to talk about how he build our product, even tho he had 0 technical knowledge whatsoever. He was on news a few times which was pretty cringeworthy. The company had only 1 programmer (other than me) who was pretty decent.
We shipped the project, but soon we burned through kickstart money and the sales dried off. Instead of trying to aquire customers (or abandoning the project), boss kept looking for investors, which kept us afloat for an extra year.
Eventually the money dried up, and instead of closing gates, boss decreased our paychecks without our knowledge. He also converted us from full-time employees to "contractors" (also without our knowledge) so he wouldn't have to pay taxes for us. My paycheck decreased by 40% by I still stayed.
One day, I was trying to burn a USB drive, and I did "dd of=/dev/sda" instead of sdb, therefore wiping out our development server. They asked me to stay at company, but I turned in my resignation letter the next day (my highest ever post on reddit was in /r/TIFU).
Next, I found a job at a "finance" company. $50k/year as a 18-year-old. CEO was a good-looking smooth-talker who made few million bucks talking old people into giving him their retirement money.
He claimed he changed his ways, and was now trying to help average folks save money. So far I've been here 8 month and I do not see that happening. He forces me to do sketchy shit, that clearly doesn't have clients best interests in mind.
I am the only developer, and I quickly became a back-end and front-end ninja.
I switched the company infrastructure from shitty drag+drop website builder, WordPress and shitty Excel macros into a beautiful custom-written python back-end.
Little did I know, this company doesn't need a real programmer. I don't have clear requirements, I get unrealistic deadlines, and boss is too busy to even communicate what he wants from me.
Eventually I sold my soul. I switched parts of it to WordPress, because I was not given enough time to write custom code properly.
For latest project, I switched from using custom React/Material/Sass to using drag+drop TypeForms for surveys.
I used to be an extremist FLOSS Richard Stallman fanboy, but eventually I traded my morals, dreams and ideals for a paycheck. Hey, $50k is not bad, so maybe I shouldn't be complaining? :(
I got addicted to pot for 2 years. Recently I've gotten arrested, and it is honestly one of the best things that ever happened to me. Before I got arrested, I did some freelancing for a mugshot website. In un-related news, my mugshot dissapeared.
I have been sober for 2 month now, and my brain is finally coming back.
I know average developer hits a wall at around $80k, and then you have to either move into management or have your own business.
After getting sober, I realized that money isn't going to make me happy, and I don't want to manage people. I'm an old-school neck-beard hacker. My true passion is mathematics and physics. I don't want to glue bullshit libraries together.
I want to write real code, trace kernel bugs, optimize compilers. Albeit, I was boring in the wrong generation.
I've started studying real analysis, brushing up differential equations, and now trying to tackle machine learning and Neural Networks, and understanding the juicy math behind gradient descent.
I don't know what my plan is for the future, but I'll figure it out as long as I have my brain. Maybe I will continue making shitty forms and collect paycheck, while studying mathematics. Maybe I will figure out something else.
But I can't just let my brain rot while chasing money and impressing dumb bosses. If I wait until I get rich to do things I love, my brain will be too far gone at that point. I can't just sell myself out. I'm coming back to my roots.
I still feel like after experiencing industry and pot, I'm a shittier developer than I was at age 15. But my passion is slowly coming back.
Any suggestions from wise ol' neckbeards on how to proceed?
32 -
For this episode of practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker were going to move past developers and go straight to a CEO.
*sitcom audience oooooohhhhhhh*
I know! , always risky, everyone has a bad story, but lets try bring it home. Here we go, Most incompetent co-worker, candidate 2, "R".
R was ... now how do I say this ... R was a special kind of Bastard. A perfect blend of impatient, arrogant, a dickhead and to borrow a phrase from family guy "below the line of mental retardation".
I've actually spoken about him recently here: https://devrant.com/rants/1141873/...
I won't bother duplicating the content here, but its worth a read.
Some of the other highlights of R include:
- Not understanding that my first demo was UI / Frontend only (despite frequent explanations). I didn't slack off for the next 2 weeks, I was busy making all those buttons actually do stuff and connect to the server. Shockingly "Test 1", "Test 2" and "Lorem ipsum" wasn't our content.
- He once asked how long a bunch of tasks was going to take, I told him 2 weeks and he gave me 2 and a half days. He pulled me into a meeting the next week to see where it all was, and I literally sat there saying "I asked for 2 weeks" over and over until he shut up.
- R's favourite phrase was "when I was a developer", typically followed by some sort of insult, forever labelling him "asshole" by everyone who has ever worked for him.
- When apple launched iOS 7 and changed the UI and the methods you could use, he refused to invest the time in upgrading to iOS 7, but demanded the app look like an iOS 7 app. No amount of "There is no method to access the status bar in iOS 6" could make him comprehend the issue at hand.
- The worst was when I was dealing with an issue to do with 64bit being introduced (which I tried to explain ... christ give me strength). When another dev fixed a similar but unrelated issue he stood up in front of the office and said loudly "pfft practiseSafeHex tried to tell me this was something to do with 64bit, which made absolutely no sense, guess he doesn't know what he's talking about"
Thankfully I handed in my notice ... after less than 2 months, making in abundantly clear why. Will R make it to the top of the list of most incompetent?
Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!12 -
Was lead developer at a small startup, I was hiring and had a budget to add 3 new people to my team to develop a new product for the company.
Some context first and then the rant!
Candidate 1 - Amazing, a dev I worked with before who was under utilized at the previous company. Still a junior, but, she was a quick learner and eager to expand her knowledge, never an issue.
Candidate 2 - Kickass dev with back end skills and extras, he was always eager to work a bit more than what was expected. I use to send him home early to annoy him. haha!
Candidate 3 - Lets call him P.
In the interview he answers every question perfectly, he asks all the right questions and suggests some things I havent even thought of. CTO goes ahead and says we should skip the technical test and just hire the guy, his smart and knows what his talking about, I agree and we hire him. (We where a bit desperate at this stage as well.)
He comes in a week early to pick up his work laptop to get setup before he starts the next week, awesome! This guy is going to be an asset to the company, cant wait to have him join the team - The CTO at this stage is getting ready to leave the company and I will be taking over the division and need someone to take over lead position, he seems like the guys to do it.
The guys starts the next week, he comes in and the laptop we gave him is now a local server for testing and he will be working off his own laptop, no issue, we are small so needed a testing stack, but wasnt really needed since we had procedures in place for this already.
Here is where everything goes wrong!!! First day goes great... Next day he gets in early 6:30am (Nice! NO!), he absolutely smells, no stinks, of weed, not a light smell, the entire fucking office smells of weed! (I have no problem with weed, just dont make it my problem to deal with). I get called by boss and told to sort this out people are complaining! I drive to office and have a meeting with him, he says its all good he understands. (This was Friday).
Monday comes around - Get a call from Boss at 7:30am. Whole office smells like weed, please talk to P again, this cannot happen again. I drive to office again, and he again says it wont happen again, he has some issues with back pain and the weed helps.
Tuesday - Same fucking thing! And now he doesnt want to sign for the laptop("server") that was given to him, and has moved to code in the boardroom, WHERE OUR FUCKING CLIENTS WILL BE VIEWING A DEMO THAT DAY OF THE PRODUCT!! Now that whole room smells like weed, FML!
Wednesday - We send P a formal letter that he is under probation, P calls me to have a meeting. In the meeting he blames me for not understanding "new age" medicine, I ask for his doctors prescription and ask why he didnt tell me this in the interview so I could make arrangements, we dont care if you are stoned, just do good work and be considerate to your co-workers. P cant provide these and keeps ranting, I suggest he takes pain killers, he has none of it only "new age" medicine for him.
Thursday - I ask him to rather "work" from home till we can get this sorted, he comes in for code reviews for 2 weeks. I can clearly see he has no idea how the system works but is trying, I thought I will dive deeper and look at all of his code. Its a mess, nothing makes sense and 50% of it is hard coded (We are building a decentralized API for huge data sets so this makes no sense).
Friday - In code review I confront him about this, he has excuses for everything, I start asking him harder questions about the project and to explain what we are building - he goes quiet and quits on the spot with a shitty apology.
From what I could make out he was really smart when it came to theory but interpreting the theory to actual practice wasnt possible for him, probably would have been easier if he wasnt high all the time.
I hate interview code tests, but learned a valuable lesson that day! Always test for some code knowledge as well even if you hate doing it, ask the right questions and be careful who you hire! You can only bullshit for so long in coding before someone figures out that you are a fraud.16 -
So my Girlfriend bought a new iPhone at Verizon today. Cool story, I know, but here's where it's gone from there.
Firstly her debit wouldn't run as credit, so we used mine but that's the least of it (but began it).
So she has 16,000 photos... Alot, sure, but not the issue. Obviously with that amount of data she wasn't about to reasonably use iCloud to back it up (understandable only by me) so she was confronted both by me and the Verizon employee about this issue to where we both (the Verizon employee and I) agreed that an iTunes backup/restore was the only way to preserve her data. She was confused. No worry, told her I had it handled and the Verizon employee agreed. Great. Yet we get home and begin the process. My girlfriend was not on the latest iOS (understandable given the battery scenario and she was on an iPhone 6) and this was ridiculous to her because she had to update in order to do the iTunes back up. Whatever, I brushed it off. Her phone was updated, and backed up... Which took a while but we are talking 30gb (of which she had no understanding of how much that was). After the back up we discovered her new phone wasn't working due to a bad sim, great, no problem we have the old one... But oh no. "I don't want that shitty old sim" she said. Uhmm what... I say, and say let me get an earring (to switch the Sims) and she gave one to me and as soon as I went to pop the tray, she had a fucking heart attack as if I was demolishing her phone. I talk her down, get it switched, get the phone to restore (slow process as she's complaining... 30gb mind you) and it works. She goes to bed. Comes back, texts aren't working. I say imessages or texts (now she has no idea) I troubleshoot, seems nothing's working, and that's okay Verizon must of reinstated the new sim and deactivated the old (fine). I switch them and it works. She proceeds to berate me about the SIM cards because she didn't want the 'old shitty one' (the one that got us to the place of a functioning phone).
Now everything works and she claims a Genius bar employee would of done this in minutes.
I (obviously) lose my shit, now I'm sleeping on the couch.
Im an IT professional / programmer..... this shit really ticked me off.38 -
Navy story time, and this one is lengthy.
As a Lieutenant Jr. I served for a year on a large (>100m) ship, with the duties of assistant navigation officer, and of course, unofficial computer guy. When I first entered the ship (carrying my trusty laptop), I had to wait for 2 hours at the officer's wardroom... where I noticed an ethernet plug. After 15 minutes of waiting, I got bored. Like, really bored. What on TCP/IP could possibly go wrong?
So, scanning the network it is. Besides the usual security holes I came to expect in ""military secure networks"" (Windows XP SP2 unpatched and Windows 2003 Servers, also unpatched) I came along a variety of interesting computers with interesting things... that I cannot name. The aggressive scan also crashed the SMB service on the server causing no end of cute reactions, until I restarted it remotely.
But me and my big mouth... I actually talked about it with the ship's CO and the electronics officer, and promptly got the unofficial duty of computer guy, aka helldesk, technical support and I-try-to-explain-you-that-it-is-impossible-given-my-resources guy. I seriously think that this was their punishment for me messing around. At one time I received a call, that a certain PC was disconnected. I repeatedly told them to look if the ethernet cable was on. "Yes, of course it's on, I am not an idiot." (yea, right)
So I went to that room, 4 decks down and 3 sections aft. Just to push in the half-popped out ethernet jack. I would swear it was on purpose, but reality showed me I was wrong, oh so dead wrong.
For the full year of my commission, I kept pestering the CO to assign me with an assistant to teach them, and to give approval for some serious upgrades, patching and documenting. No good.
I set up some little things to get them interested, like some NMEA relays and installed navigation software on certain computers, re-enabled the server's webmail and patched the server itself, tried to clean the malware (aka. Sisyphus' rock), and tried to enforce a security policy. I also tried to convince the CO to install a document management system, to his utter horror and refusal (he was the hard copy type, as were most officers in the ship). I gave up on almost all besides the assistant thing, because I knew that once I left, everything would go to the high-entropy status of carrying papers around, but the CO kept telling me that would be unnecessary.
"You'll always be our man, you'll fix it (sic)".
What could go wrong?
I got my transfer with 1 week's notice. Panic struck. The CO was... well, he was less shocked than I expected, but still shocked (I learned later that he knew beforehand, but decided not to tell anybody anything). So came the most rediculous request of all:
To put down, within 1 A4 sheet, and in simple instructions, the things one had to do in order to fulfil the duties of the computer guy.
I. SHIT. YOU. NOT.
My answer:
"What I can do is write: 'Please read the following:', followed by the list of books one must read in order to get some introductory understanding of network and server management, with most accompanying skills."
I was so glad I got out of that hellhole.6 -
I am done with people, I just want one single room, with good internet, dual monitor setup... And I can spend my whole life like that... Being social, fuck that shit... I have devRant for that... and rest, I just want to code, listen to music, drink coffee and sleep like hell...
Why is it that I can understand some other dev's code faster that understanding someone's feelings. Why is it that I am good with principles of Programming Languages, but not the basic Principles of Humanity... Yes, I agree I don't have feelings, but is it wrong not to have feelings, I am a dev, I am supposed to be good with Codes, not humans... I want to be in my small space of close people. (My family), and that's it... I am no good with others. I hate Facebook, but love devRant, I spend more time on StackOverflow than that on WhatsApp. Why is it so... Why29 -
More sysadmin focused but y’all get this stuff and I need a rant.
TLDR: Got the wrong internship.
Start working as a sysadmin/dev intern/man-of-many-hats at a small finance company (I’m still in school). Day 1: “Oh new IT guy? Just grab a PC from an empty cubicle and here’s a flash drive with Fedora, go ahead and manually install your operating system. Oh shit also your desktop has 2g of ram, a core2 duo, and we scavenged your hard drive for another dev so just go find one in the server room. And also your monitor is broken so just take one from another cubicle.”
Am shown our server room and see that someone is storing random personal shit in there (golf clubs propped against the server racks with heads mixed into the cabling, etc.). Ask why the golf clubs etc. are mixed in with the cabling and server racks and am given the silent treatment. Learn later that my boss is the owners son, and he is storing his personal stuff in our server room.
Do desktop support for end users. Another manager asks for her employees to receive copies of office 2010 (they’re running 2003 an 2007). Ask boss about licensing plans in place and upgrade schedules, he says he’ll get back to me. I explain to other manager we are working on a licensing scheme and I will keep her informed.
Next day other manager tells me (*the intern*) that she spoke with a rich business friend whose company uses fake/cracked license keys and we should do the same to keep costs down. I nod and smile. IT manager tells me we have no upgrade schedule or licensing agreement. I suggest purchasing an Office 365 subscription. Boss says $150 a year per employee is too expensive (Company pulls good money, has ~25 employees, owner is just cheap) I suggest freeware alternatives. Other manager refuses to use anything other than office 2010 as that is what she is familiar with. Boss refuses to spend any money on license keys. Learn other manager is owners wife and mother of my boss. Stalemate. No upgrades happen.
Company is running an active directory Windows Server 2003 instance that needs upgrading. I suggest 2012R2. Boss says “sure”. I ask how he will purchase the license key and he tells me he won’t.
I suggest running an Ubuntu server with LDAP functionality instead with the understanding that this will add IT employee hours for maintenance. Bosses eyes glaze over at the mention of Linux. The upgrade is put off.
Start cleaning out server room of the personal junk, labeling server racks and cables, and creating a network map. Boss asks what I’m doing. I show him the organized side of the server room and he says “okay but don’t do any more”.
... *sigh* ...20 -
From Mr Robot
“Most coders think debugging hardware is about fixing a mistake.
But that's bullshit.
Debugging’s actually all about finding the bug.
About understanding why the bug was there to begin with.
About knowing that it’s existence was no accident.”
— ELLIOT
1 -
These fresh new college grads...calling themselves Full Stack Developers...
Ask them to consume a web service and I get a blank look...ask them to create a REST service and they are like WTF are you talking...
Has it come to the point that people just keep throwing around terms without understanding the inherent philosophy or idea behind them or is it like it's just to show that they are the "COOL" kids...with no actual idea of what the fuck they are doing ???10 -
The most pissed off I've been at work?
Client X came to us for a website.
We secretly outsourced the work.
Client X is coming for a visit in 10 mins...
MD to me: "I've told them your lead dev on this. They're not super-technical so if they ask you about the project just tell them it's going well."
Now I'm not a comfortable blagger, I don't have that kind of confidence, so to ask me to lie like this makes me feel really stressed and uncomfortable. Furthermore, I had literally no idea about any aspect of the work we were supposedly doing for this client. I can barely contain my panic but my colleagues help me piece together a basic understanding.
The MD returns: "They're here now. Can you quickly go and check that the toilets are clean."
WHAT THE FUCK!? The little prick. I'd knock him out if wasn't so meek and pathetic. I tell myself that I'm being helpful and nice but in truth I'm just his fucking doormat and he has zero respect for me.
I have no problem cleaning stuff (we all basically tidy up behind us) but this is something he could have done. Furthermore, who cares? None of us leave the loos with piss on the floor and shit smeared across the walls. They're never anything less than client-ready so to ask me to check means that he's already checked them himself and one of the loos is not quite shiny enough.
The reader may feel that this is no big deal (and in some ways you're right) but everything about this scenario was fucked up. The MD had embroiled the whole company in a lie and assumes we're all okay with that, then to add insult just nonchalantly orders me to clean the bogs. The cunt.
FWIW The client didn't ask to talk to me or use the toilet during their visit.8 -
OMFG it happened again. I'm always very explicit with recruiters that I don't take full time employment while I'm studying. This one was very understanding about it and said he found a great match for my skillset.
I just had a meeting with the CEO of this great match of a company.
- "No, we only seek people who can work full time, let's keep in touch when you've graduated".
What the fuck, way to waste everyones time.
10 -
When I opened my digital agency it was me and my wife as developers, I had no savings and I needed to get long contracts ASAP which luckily I did straight away.
Lovely client, had worked for them before as a consultant so i thought it would be a breeze. Let's just say the project should've been named "Naivete, Scope Creep and Anger: The revenge".
What happened is that when this project was poised to end I naively thought I would be able to close the job, so I started looking for a new full time consultancy gig and found one where I could work from home, and agreed a starting date.
Well, the previous job didn't end because of flaws in my contract the client exploited, leaving me locked in and working full time, for free, for basically as long as he wanted (I learned a lot the hard way at that time) and I had already started the new agreed job. This meant I was now working 2 full time shifts, 16 hours per day.
Then, two support contracts of 2 hours per day were activated, bringing my work load to 20 hours/day.
I did this for 4 months.
The first job was supposed to last one month, and I was locked into it, all others had no end in sight which is a good thing as a freelancer, but not when you are locked into a full time one already. I could've easily done one 8 hours shift and two 2 hours jobs per day, but adding another 8 hours on top of it was insanity.
So I was working 10 hours, and sleeping 2. I had no weekends, didn't know if it was day or night anymore, I was locked in my room, coding like a mad man, making the best out of a terrible situation, but I was mentally destroyed.
I was waking up at 10am, working until 8pm, sleeping 2 hours until 10pm, working until 8am, sleeping 2 hours until 10am, and so on. Kudos to my wife for dealing with account and project management and administration responsibilities while also helping me with small pieces of code along the way, couldn't have survived without the massive amount of understanding she offered.
In the end:
- I forcefully closed the messed up contract job and sent all the work done to another digital agency I met along the way, very competent people, as I still cared about the project.
- I missed a deadline on my other full time contract by 2 days, meaning they missed a presentation for Adobe, of all people, and I lost the job
- The other two support contracts were finished successfully, but as my replies were taking too long they decided not to work with us anymore.
So I lost 4 important clients in the span of 4 months. After that I took a break of one month, slept my troubles away, and looked for a single consultancy full time contract, finding it soon after, and decided I wouldn't have my own clients for a good while.
3 years since then, I still don't have the willpower or the resources to deal with clients of my own and I'm happily trudging along as a consultant, while still having middle of the night nightmare flashbacks to that time.2 -
Conversations I've genuinely had at work:
Me: "Do you want some advice understanding that function?"
Dev: "Yeah, please!"
Me: "Get a plastic bag and some super glue..."
Dev: "I think I'm seeing the light at the end of the tunnel!"
Me: "It's just the train of mental bitchslaps coming in the other direction."
... Some time later
Dev:"You were right... "
Dev: "If the system is so unstable, how does it keep working?"
Me: "Do you see any goats in the office?"
Dev: "Uhm no... Why would there be goats?"
Me: "There aren't, now, we ran out."
Dev: "The hell are you talking about?"
Me: "We just sacrifice our own blood to Cthulhu these days, it's cleaner and we didn't have to pay to have all the goats blood and waste matter to be cleaned up. That and it was needlessly cruel to the poor goats and that is why there is no goats and despite conventional logic the app continues to work."
Dev: "So what language is the web app written in?"
Me: "You need to understand I inherited this project, I had nothing to do with it's spawning..."
Dev: "OK, that sounds ominous... How bad is it?"
Me: "Java..."
Dev: "..."
Dev: "So what's it like working on this project? What should I expect?"
Me: "You'll call your grandmother during your lunch break just to know there's a world beyond this project. You'll go home, nose bleeding and you are gonna sit in the shower and rock back and forth, holding yourself and feeling like you're suffering imposter syndrome. You'll question why you joined this team and it'll get inside your head til it's all you think about..."
Dev: "Damn man, why are you still on it?"
Me: "Stockholm syndrome, it's too late for me..."
PM: "You're such a dark person, we're not gonna find you hanging from the lights one day are we?"
Me: "Impossible, we use those industrial fluorescent strip lights, there's no cord to hang from."
PM: "That really wasn't the comforting answer I was looking for."
Head of department: "So I need to apologize, you were never meant to be left on your to manage the product on your own, it's something someone way more senior should have been doing and we reassigned him. It wasn't professional of us, it wasn't fair of us, we're sorry. Truth be told,we're impressed you've not gone mad."
Me: "I think I have. Wibble."
A card goes round work for a sick member of staff I've never met.
Me: "How would you describe her condition?"
Dev: "She said that she 'survived' the surgery."
Me: "Yeah, I'm not great at being appropriate but even I think writing 'glad to hear that you are not dead' in a get well soon card isn't the done thing."5 -
I had to open the desktop app to write this because I could never write a rant this long on the app.
This will be a well-informed rebuttal to the "arrays start at 1 in Lua" complaint. If you have ever said or thought that, I guarantee you will learn a lot from this rant and probably enjoy it quite a bit as well.
Just a tiny bit of background information on me: I have a very intimate understanding of Lua and its c API. I have used this language for years and love it dearly.
[START RANT]
"arrays start at 1 in Lua" is factually incorrect because Lua does not have arrays. From their documentation, section 11.1 ("Arrays"), "We implement arrays in Lua simply by indexing tables with integers."
From chapter 2 of the Lua docs, we know there are only 8 types of data in Lua: nil, boolean, number, string, userdata, function, thread, and table
The only unfamiliar thing here might be userdata. "A userdatum offers a raw memory area with no predefined operations in Lua" (section 26.1). Essentially, it's for the API to interact with Lua scripts. The point is, this isn't a fancy term for array.
The misinformation comes from the table type. Let's first explore, at a low level, what an array is. An array, in programming, is a collection of data items all in a line in memory (The OS may not actually put them in a line, but they act as if they are). In most syntaxes, you access an array element similar to:
array[index]
Let's look at c, so we have some solid reference. "array" would be the name of the array, but what it really does is keep track of the starting location in memory of the array. Memory in computers acts like a number. In a very basic sense, the first sector of your RAM is memory location (referred to as an address) 0. "array" would be, for example, address 543745. This is where your data starts. Arrays can only be made up of one type, this is so that each element in that array is EXACTLY the same size. So, this is how indexing an array works. If you know where your array starts, and you know how large each element is, you can find the 6th element by starting at the start of they array and adding 6 times the size of the data in that array.
Tables are incredibly different. The elements of a table are NOT in a line in memory; they're all over the place depending on when you created them (and a lot of other things). Therefore, an array-style index is useless, because you cannot apply the above formula. In the case of a table, you need to perform a lookup: search through all of the elements in the table to find the right one. In Lua, you can do:
a = {1, 5, 9};
a["hello_world"] = "whatever";
a is a table with the length of 4 (the 4th element is "hello_world" with value "whatever"), but a[4] is nil because even though there are 4 items in the table, it looks for something "named" 4, not the 4th element of the table.
This is the difference between indexing and lookups. But you may say,
"Algo! If I do this:
a = {"first", "second", "third"};
print(a[1]);
...then "first" appears in my console!"
Yes, that's correct, in terms of computer science. Lua, because it is a nice language, makes keys in tables optional by automatically giving them an integer value key. This starts at 1. Why? Lets look at that formula for arrays again:
Given array "arr", size of data type "sz", and index "i", find the desired element ("el"):
el = arr + (sz * i)
This NEEDS to start at 0 and not 1 because otherwise, "sz" would always be added to the start address of the array and the first element would ALWAYS be skipped. But in tables, this is not the case, because tables do not have a defined data type size, and this formula is never used. This is why actual arrays are incredibly performant no matter the size, and the larger a table gets, the slower it is.
That felt good to get off my chest. Yes, Lua could start the auto-key at 0, but that might confuse people into thinking tables are arrays... well, I guess there's no avoiding that either way.13 -
A room full of mostly old male stressed out engineers sat in chairs, and the presenter said:
"So who watched Judging Amy last night?"
The presenter went on to express her surprise that nobody in the room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.... and wasn't going to drop the topic.
The meeting, if it ever had any, now had no chance of going anywhere good.
By the end of the meeting someone would walk out and "retire" shortly there after, and it certainly wasn't going to be the presenter....
Backstory:
The company built on the IBM model of sell pricey custom hardware (granted it worked really well) and sell expensive support contracts wasn't doing as well as it had hoped. Granted it was still doing better than most of its neighboring companies, but it was clear that with the .com bust the days of catered lunches every day were over.
The company had grown fat and everyone knew that while the company had a good enough product(s) to survive, there weren't enough lifeboats for everyone to survive.
In the midst of this an HR department that took up nearly 20% of the office space at HQ felt it needed to justify its existence / expenses.
They decided to do this in the same way they always had, by taking funding from other departments, this time not by simply demanding more direct budgets for themselves.... they decided to impose mandatory 'training' on other departments ... that they would then bill for this training.
When HR got wind that there were some stressed out engineers the solution was, as it always is for HR.... to do more HR stuff:
They decided to take these time starved engineers away from their jobs, and put them in a room with HR for 4 days. Meanwhile the engineer's tasks, deadlines and etc remained the same.
Support got roped into it too, and that's how I ended up there.
It would be difficult to describe the chasm between HR and everyone else at that company. This was an HR department that when they didn't have enough cubes (because of constant remodeling in the HR area under the guise of privacy) sat their extra HR employees next to engineering and were 'upset' that the engineers 'weren't very friendly and all they did was work'.
At one point a meeting to discuss this point of contention was called off for some made up reason or another by someone with a clue.
So there we all sat, our deadlines kept ticking away and this HR team (3 people) stood at the front of the room and were perplexed that none of these mostly older males in this room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.
From there the presentation was chaos, because almost the entire thing was based on your knowledge of what happened to poor stressed out Amy ... or something like that.
We were peppered with HR tales of being stressed out and taking a long lunch and feeling better, and this magical thing where the poor HR person went and had a good cry with her boss and her boss magically took more off her plate (a brutal story where the poor HR person was almost moved to tears again).
The lack of apparent sympathy (really nobody said much at all) and lack of seeming understanding from the crowd of engineers that all they should do is take a long lunch, or tell their boss to solve their problems ... seemed to bother the HR folks. They were on edge.
So then they finally asked "What are your stressers?" And they picked the worst possible person they could to ask, Ted.
Ted was old, he prickly, he was the only one who understood the worst ass hell of assembly that had been left behind.
Ted made a mistake, he was honest with folks who couldn't possibly understand what he was saying. "This mandatory class is stressing me out. I have work to do and less time because of this class."
The exchange that followed was kinda horrible and I recall sitting behind Ted trying to be as small as possible as to not be called on. Exactly what everyone said almost doesn't matter.
A pedantic debate between Ted and the HR staff about "mandatory" and "required" followed. I will just sum it up that they were both in the wrong for how they behaved for a good 20 minutes...
Ted walked out, and would later 'retire' that week.
Ted had a history and was no saint. I suspect an email campaign by various folks who recounted the events that day spared ted the 'fired' status and he walked with what eventually would become the severance package status quo.
HR never again held another 'training', most of them would all finally face the axe a few months later after the CEO finally decided that 'customer facing, and product producing' headcount had been reduced enough ... and it was other internal staff's time for that.
The result of the meeting was one less engineer, and everyone else had 4 days less of work done...4 -
"Debugging's actaully all about finding the bug, about understanding why the bug was there to begin with, about knowing that it's existence was no accident.It came to you to deliver a message."
-Elliot, Mr. Robot8 -
I hate my job. I am furious at my colleagues.
Last November I asked my colleagues (A and B) to help me learn to use something, let's call it Tool. They said okay and set a date for training. Next week they said that they had too much work to do so we'll have to postpone. And the next date was also postponed and the next one too, and so on.
Three months in, colleague C kept dicking around and being a complete jackass telling me that he refused to work with me for I don't use the Tool.
Not like I didn't want to learn to use the Tool, I simply couldn't. I have long before googled how to use the Tool but in no way can Google ever tell me about our own company workflow, our methods, habits and such.
I was furious, but I am also a the most fucking patient person ever so I let it slide. The Tool wasn't actually needed that much to do my job anyways. And I have known for a while that colleague C needed to push someone under him to feel good about himself.
A few more dates had been set but got cancelled for reasons.
Meanwhile both A and B started to look down on me for not knowing how to use the Tool. I started to feel depressed.
Today B held a "workshop" about the Tool. It took two hours. He was not prepared, had a hangover and generally had a hard time concentrating.
He used aliases that he set up only for himself to show the usage of the Tool instead of commands that a beginner would understand (or google). He kept mumbling and I hsd trouble understanding him. His lecture lacked direction and was all over the place.
I am devastated and furious. I had been waiting since November for this training and when the time actually came he pulled something out of his ass and called it a workshop.
I didn't even get answers for my questions.
Now I feel that I am actually in a worse position than before because while I still cannot use the Tool, they can tell me that there was a workshop and I should've paid closer attention.
I want to quit so bad.23 -
It's not motivation that you need, it's dedication.
You see, motivation is temporary thing, that sudden flow of dopamine running through your body that you get after some success or after being admired by someone or simply after good sleep and nice morning shower.
But the problem with motivation is that it's just temporary thing. After a while (hours, days, if you're lucky weeks) it just wears off and you're left pretty much where you started.
But there's one thing that remains and that's persistent. It's called DEDICATION. If you dedicate yourself to something, you are willing to do it no matter what it takes from you. Even if it frustrates you along the way or makes you angry, you wanna be able to say "It's finished. I'm satisfied with it" after you finish it. You are willing to crawl to the finishing line but no matter the obstacle, just knowing that you're getting closer to the finishing line is gonna motivate you. Your dedication is gonna become motivation generator. And that's the key. You need the passion and dedicate yourself to it.
But hey, sound simple but we all know the struggle. Sometimes it's even hard to recognize dedication from motivation. And sometimes you just go "Ok. Fuck it. I'm done" and leave it and that's okay AS LONG AS you get back to it after a while. As long as the inner you, the dedicated you that got you here in the first place, goes "Dude, it's tough. But it's alright, we refreshed a bit and now we're gonna fucking make it" (nope, I don't have schizophrenia) and you listen and get back at it.
Dedication is tough. It's about self control and understanding yourself deeply and balancing your mind. It's nirvana of success. It's the ultimate balance. But you can get there. If you want. Badly.
TL;DR You need dedication, not motivation. Punish yourself and reward yourself. Not too harsh and not too much. Just so that you don't lose track.
But most of all, GOOD LUCK YOU AMAZING FUCKS!5 -
Hey DevRant community :-) I’m Milo, I’m quite new to this app and to be completely honest I’m already addicted to it! And honestly just having a community which is full of developers or people with common interests like myself just makes me feel warm and happy! .
A bit about myself I’m from Australia and gained an interest in Coding about 2 years ago where i landed a course in TAFE. Now i had absolutely no prior experience i was a complete rookie, first day was basically (if I remember) only one day of using the console with what I remember to be sequential programming. Well after that it was all GUI and a disaster i had no clue whatsoever of what i was doing and well interestingly enough i still managed to enjoy it and move on😅.
Fast forward about six months I’m now doing a proper degree and actually understanding concepts and better at coding and i love it!. Welp guys & gals i thank you for taking the time to read my post I certainly hope i posted this in the right section! :-)
Hope you all have a great night or day where ever you may be!.29 -
Last Friday company-wide call consisted of the sales CEO bossman, the remote contractor dev, and myself. The only topic of discussion was CTO-bashing (bossman's favorite). Neither person had much of anything to say about their week, and they didn't want to hear my rather-lengthy summary either (I did a lot). All they wanted to do was bash the CTO (API Guy).
The CEO asked how many hours I had worked, and seemed annoyed when I said less than 40. Well screw you. Monday was Christmas, and Sunday was Encroaching Estranged Asshole Day. (Earlier rant)
I've been spending most of my time trying to learn the steaming mountain of rancid hippo shit that API Guy squeezed out, since he's leaving forever in 10 days. Sure, CEO bossman says he'll still be around to answer questions, but even with him right next to me in the office he's less than useful. After he's gone and finally feeling free of this farce? It'll be worth fuck-all.
So bossman is mad at me for both not working enough over Christmas, and not pumping out features at a frantic pace despite multiple explanations of why this is a bad idea. And he didn't care about what work I actually did do.
My every interaction with him makes me angry. Whenever I -- or anyone else -- does something he doesn't approve of, seemingly no matter the reasoning, he makes it out to be a failure on their part, and like he can't trust them as much now.
Well I'm sorry we're trying to make sure our websocket works perfectly before putting it in the hands of our customers who rely on it for cash processing.
I'm sorry I'm trying to recall printers that aren't configured properly, which also prevent customers from using our goddamn service they're paying for.
I'm sorry I'm trying to learn how everything works while I still have someone to talk to and ask questions of.
I'm sorry I'm preparing for the day I have to take over and have you breathing down my neck. Once API Guy's gone I'll be responsible for everything, and you'll be yelling at me and having a @Root bashing session instead if I don't know how to fix everything right away.
But no. All you care about is that I talk to you about what's going in so you can micromanage development despite having zero fucking understanding of goddamn anything. All you ever fucking want is the next shiny feature you can push to make more sales / keep your current contacts happy. Doesn't fking matter if it makes development awful later; that's tomorrow's problem. And yet you have the gall to bash API Guy over and over and over again for the codebase being a mess? Sure he's a terrible programmer, but been putting up with this exact same shit for five years. No wonder it's a mountain of rancid hippo shit. That's as much your fault as his, asshole.
I'm so sorry you "have serious concerns" about me. I don't want to put up with your shit either.
Fuck off and die.22 -
Been reading devrant posts for a month or so, this is my first actual post. I'm hoping it will be therapeutic. ☺️ I need something to keep me from killing my boss when I see him again tomorrow..
Some backstory: Currently working in HR for the last 7 or so years with complete shit for brains boss, even worse when it comes to anything related to technology. For almost two years I've been working to get another bachelor's degree. This time in computer sciences, to make a career switch to systems and software engineer. Last week I roughly had the following wonderful conversation:
Boss: we've needed new Recruitment software for a while now. Can't you make us one as a school project?
Me: 'Make us one?' It's not really that simple.. I'm barely halfway through my education, maybe I could do it, but it would take me quite a long time even if I could work on it fulltime.. Combining a halftime job with a fulltime education is taking up enough of my time as it is and I have more than enough school projects btw..
Boss: it would be a win-win. Work a little harder in your spare time and when you graduate you have a real-life project on your resume.
Me: I'm sorry, i'm failing to see the 'win' for me here.. I work 10 hours a day, 7 days a week on average, trying to combine work and studies. I'm pretty much maxed out..
Boss: Your coworker(also extreme dumbass) told me you wrote some quick code the other day that helped him out. Don't underestimate yourself, I'm sure you can do this.
Me(in complete disbelief by now): I wrote him an Excel-macro! They don't even teach me that at school. It's a very very very long way from actual software development! I'm sorry, it just can't be done.
Boss: Thats too bad. I expected you to welcome an opportunity like this and be more motivated towards this company..
Me: ***more disbelief and silence, just staring at him***
I'm sorry you feel that way.
***walked away***
WTF, I work my ass off for 7 years for this fucking shithead.. Even before I started this bachelors degree I had at least some understanding of the work developers put in their software. It blows my mind, no, it fucking angers me how people think making software is so simple.. Why do you think it's a 3-year education you fucking cunt?
Please, someone tell me how I can keep myself from ramming his fucking head through a wall tomorrow...6 -
My second year of high-school, we started having class in computer science. I was really looking forward to it cause I always wanted to learn programming.
On first sight it appeared that the professor which taught the class knew something, he looked like a genuine geek with those dorky glasses, briefcase and pants like Steve Urkel, but after couple of his lessons you could see he had no real dev experience and just basic understanding of programming in theory. He was more reading stuff from the book than he was trying to explain them to students and give some real world examples.
So it was just one these days, everybody got back from vacation, it's hot outside, the guy is just reading sentences from his book, half of students talk with each other and other half doesn't give a fuck about him or his class. Pretty sure I was the only one trying to listen to him and learn something from his recitals.
All of a sudden he notices the atmosphere in the classroom, slams the book shut, gives out couple of F-s to the loudest students and yells out loud "NONE OF YOU IN THIS ROOM WILL EVER ACCOMPLISH ANYTHING IN YOUR LIFE, BARE ALONE IN PROGRAMMING"
At first I felt like shit, but soon after that I started thinking "who the hell are you to tell me what I could or will accomplish in my life". Couple weeks later I've bought myself a first book in programming and started learning C++ late at night since I understood that I won't learn anything about programming in that school. Two years later I was correcting this same professor with his claims on a whiteboard in front of a whole class.
Today, seven years after his words I'm a developer living in foreign country with what I could say somewhat a solid experience and understanding of how both software and web are build, while that same professor still recites to his pupils difference between assembly and object code, while praying nobody asks him where and how these are used. For maybe a quarter of my paycheck. So much about his psychic powers..4 -
So just about to head to the pub and I got the dreaded call from my boss.
The support team had developed some fixes. They "tested" and deployed without letting us know... And you guessed it there was failures all over the shop!
So it turned out their testing was running on a local base install with no integration compared to the live system with 15 years of customisation and complex integration. My they thought this was acceptable I don't know...
And the best part was the developers who made the changes didn't understand their own code (I found the tutorial they copied online) they just blindly copied it without understanding how it worked!
So 4 hours later we found the bug, nothing like having a query and s SQL connection but not executing the query....
There goes my Saturday evening. Now we're was my beer!7 -
Most coders think debugging software is about fixing a mistake. But that’s bullshit. Debugging is actually all about finding the bug, about understanding why the bug was there to begin with. About knowing that its existence was no accident. It came to you, to deliver a message, like an unconscious bubble floating to the surface, popping with a revelation you’ve secretly known all along.
-Mr Robot
4 -
I am DONE with this woman CONTINUED!
I didn't think I'd have to put another rant about this stupidity at least not this soon but she just keeps on giving!
I have my noise canceling headphones on most of the time and when I want to hear the people around, I just put the right earcup of it to the side of my ear so the music pauses. Today we had a huge disrupt on our services because of a network switch error on the hub. I was also trying to focus on my coding as I didn't wanna do a stupid mistake on the last working day and be sorry about it in the next week.
So this woman sneaks up on me from behind calling my name - meaning she has a question, surprise! -, I say 'yes' moving my head to her side ever so slightly without getting my eyes off of my screen stating subtly that I'm also listening to her while trying to focus on my shit. She starts yelling at me 'look at me!' out of nowhere! I turn my head and ask what the problem is and she asks why I'm not looking at her face! Stupid moron, I might not be too good in understanding your way of communication but you are the one asking so you WILL wait if you'd like to hear answers.
I say I'm working on something and her answer is again 'Why aren't you looking at my face it's going to be quick bla bla did we do this like that?' and I answered I didn't remember because there's no way I'd ever remember without looking further and it was no lie.
This woman clearly has stability issues and everyone else seem to be tolerating it. It's now obvious as I'm not tolerating the nonsense I'll be the one that 'she only has ever had a problem with'.
I was quick to de escalate the situation but now I'm thinking maybe I should've responded in a way that she could understand. I wouldn't ever give a shit about it but this is getting ridiculous.19 -
Studying Multimedia Arts, we are required to take a couple of courses in basic web development. (PHP). Since its known as new media grrr 🙄
Coming from a webdev background, I have no problem understanding PHP. However other designers in my course do.
A friend messaged me asking me how to fix a problem while in the dev environment. She tried explaining her problem without any of the terms we use in our general communication. You can read the conversation below.
14 -
Computer Science is a mysterious world of three kinds of devs, irrespective of what background/profile/language they had/worked in.
The ones at the top, who keep doing crazy shit in big companies or open-source and keep adding material to the unstoppable code flowing. These constitute 5% of the dev community.
The ones at the bottom are the newbies who try to become masters/ninjas of programming by following the shit on the internet but don't understand logic or how things work. This is like 75% of dev community on the web. If you don't agree to that percentage, you don't know the number of students and non-CS people trying to code. I can see hundreds of classmates/colleagues with no understanding of basic Javascript concepts but introducing themselves as a software developer and ruler of the Web.
The remaining 15% in the middle are the "experienced" fellows who keep building shit to get to the top 5%. They work on enterprise/commercial software until the next upgrade and while the wallets keep getting fatter, they don't actually contribute to the community.
This is the part where I want people to understand the power of a dev.
What sets apart programmers/devs from other engineers:
while everyone else is busy solving the current issues/requirements of the world, we devs are the ones who 'build'.
With a right motive, a developer can solve in-numerous problems of the society, be it education, poverty or unemployment.
An experiment by Lee to put data on the web created a world of unforeseeable opportunities.
Hope to see more of Musks and less of Zuckerbergs in the future.9 -
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.4 -
My 14 year old self stared at Chrome and decided to consult Google on a random fleeting thought...
"How is software made?"
The search resulted in my downloading Visual Studio. Without any understanding of what it was or how it worked I somehow managed to create a new Winforms project.
I started to drag controls from the ToolBox onto the form, and I specifically recall thinking "Wow! This is easy.". Little did I know...
I then inadvertently double clicked either a control or the form which as most will know switches from the designer view to the code editor taking you to the code that drives the form.
"What the hell is this?"
I had absolutely no idea what I was looking at, but decided I was determined to understand what all of that random text did.
So, yeah, my first dev project was a Winforms App consisting of a single button that did absolutely nothing, but yet happens to be the most important app I have ever created.
To think I'd be working in an entirely different sector if it wasn't for that one Google search.4 -
TL;DR :
"when i die i want my group project members to lower me into my grave so they can let me down one last time"
STORY TIME
Last year in College, I had two simultaneous projects. Both were semester long projects. One was for a database class an another was for a software engineering class.
As you can guess, the focus of the projects was very different. Databases we made some desktop networked chat application with a user login system and what not in Java. SE we made an app store with an approval system and admin panels and ratings and reviews and all that jazz in Meteor.js.
The DB project we had 4 total people and one of them was someone we'll call Frank. Frank was also in my SE project group. Frank disappeared for several weeks. Not in class, didn't contact us, and at one point the professors didn't know much either. As soon as we noticed it would be an issue, we talked to the professors. Just keeping them in the loop will save you a lot of trouble down the road. I'm assuming there was some medical or family emergency because the professors were very understanding with him once he started coming back to class and they had a chance to talk.
Lesson 1: If you have that guy that doesn't show up or communicate, don't be a jerk to them and communicate with your professor. Also, don't stop trying to contact the rogue partner. Maybe they'll come around sometime.
It sucked to lose 25% of our team for a project, but Frank appreciated that we didn't totally ignore him and throw him under the bus to the point that the last day of class he came up to me and said, "hey, open your book bag and bring it next to mine." He then threw a LARGE bottle of booze in there as a thank you.
Lesson 2: Treat humans as humans. Things go wrong and understanding that will get you a lot farther with people than trying to make them feel terrible about something that may have been out of their control.
Our DB project went really well. We got an A, we demoed, it worked, it was cool. The biggest problem is I was the only person that had taken a networking class so I ended up doing a large portion of the work. I wish I had taken other people's skills into account when we were deciding on a project. Especially because the only requirement was that it needed to have a minimum of 5 tables and we had to use some SQL language (aka, we couldn't use no-SQL).
The SE project had Frank and a music major who wanted to minor in CS (and then 3 other regular CS students aside from me). This assignment was make an app store using any technology you want. But, you had to use agile sprints. So we had weekly meetings with the "customer" (the TA), who would change requirements on us to keep us on our toes and tell us what they wanted done as a priority for the next meeting. Seriously, just like real life. It was so much fun trying to stay ahead of that.
So we met up and tried to decided what to use. One kid said Java because we all had it for school. The big issue is trying to make a Java web app is a pain in the ass. Seriously, there are so many better things to use. Other teams decided to use Django because they all wanted to learn Python. I suggested why not use something with a nice package system to minimize duplicating work that had already been done and tested by someone. Kid 1 didn't like that because he said in the real world you have to make your own software and not use packages. Little did he know that I had worked in SE for a few years already and knew damn well that every good project has code from somewhere else that has already solved a problem you're facing. We went with Java the first week. It failed miserably. Nobody could get the server set up on their computers. Using VCS with it required you to keep the repo outside of the where you wrote code and copy and paste changes in there. It was just a huge flop so everyone else voted to change.
Lesson 3: Be flexible. Be open to learning new things. Don't be afraid to try something new. It'll make you a better developer in the long run.
So we ended up using Meteor. Why? We all figured we could pick up javascript super easy.Two of us already knew it. And the real time thing would make for some cool effects when an app got a approved or a comment was made. We got to work and the one kid was still pissed. I just checked the repo and the only thing he committed was fixing the spelling of on word in the readme.
We sat down one day and worked for 4 straight hours. We finished the whole project in that time. While other teams were figuring out how to layout their homepage, we had a working user system and admin page and everything. Our TA was trying to throw us for loops by asking for crazy things and we still came through. We had tests that ran along side the application as you used it. It was friggin cool.
Lesson 4: If possible, pick the right tool for the job. Not the tool you know. Everything in CS has a purpose. If you use it for its purpose, you will save days off of a project.1 -
First of all, I hate crammers so much. These people kill the industry without even understanding it. They turned interviews into exams, missed the point of hiring, and saw no distinction between knowledge and information all the time. They don't understand that if you can google an answer in five seconds, it's not knowledge. It's information.
They don't understand that questions like 'what will Python do if you delete an item from a dict while iterating over it' are complete nonsense. They don't understand that it's not 'dig deep'; it's just a bad practice that leads to errors, thus must be avoided. The fact of remembering 'RuntimeError: dictionary changed size during iteration' means that you haven't been avoiding it enough.
One more example. Which signature is correct?
- ApplicationListener<ContextRefreshedEvent>
- ApplicationListener<ContextRefreshEvent>
- ApplicationListener<RefreshedEvent>
- ApplicationListener<RefreshEvent>
Second. What's the point of forcing you to write compilable code in google docs? Do they really expect that one could possibly remember 'import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;'? Seriously?
Third. Why do they expect me to know Spark, Java, J2EE, Spring Boot, Python, Kafka, Postgres, React/Redux, TypeScript, and work for miserable 70K EUR?
What's wrong with the European IT job market? Are they fucking nuts?9 -
What an absolute fucking disaster of a day. Strap in, folks; it's time for a bumpy ride!
I got a whole hour of work done today. The first hour of my morning because I went to work a bit early. Then people started complaining about Jenkins jobs failing on that one Jenkins server our team has been wanting to decom for two years but management won't let us force people to move to new servers. It's a single server with over four thousand projects, some of which run massive data processing jobs that last DAYS. The server was originally set up by people who have since quit, of course, and left it behind for my team to adopt with zero documentation.
Anyway, the 500GB disk is 100% full. The memory (all 64GB of it) is fully consumed by stuck jobs. We can't track down large old files to delete because du chokes on the workspace folder with thousands of subfolders with no Ram to spare. We decide to basically take a hacksaw to it, deleting the workspace for every job not currently in progress. This of course fucked up some really poorly-designed pipelines that relied on workspaces persisting between jobs, so we had to deal with complaints about that as well.
So we get the Jenkins server up and running again just in time for AWS to have a major incident affecting EC2 instance provisioning in our primary region. People keep bugging me to fix it, I keep telling them that it's Amazon's problem to solve, they wait a few minutes and ask me to fix it again. Emails flying back and forth until that was done.
Lunch time already. But the fun isn't over yet!
I get back to my desk to find out that new hires or people who got new Mac laptops recently can't even install our toolchain, because management has started handing out M1 Macs without telling us and all our tools are compiled solely for x86_64. That took some troubleshooting to even figure out what the problem was because the only error people got from homebrew was that the formula was empty when it clearly wasn't.
After figuring out that problem (but not fully solving it yet), one team starts complaining to us about a Github problem because we manage the github org. Except it's not a github problem and I already knew this because they are a Problem Team that uses some technical authoring software with Git integration but they only have even the barest understanding of what Git actually does. Turns out it's a Git problem. An update for Git was pushed out recently that patches a big bad vulnerability and the way it was patched causes problems because they're using Git wrong (multiple users accessing the same local repo on a samba share). It's a huge vulnerability so my entire conversation with them went sort of like:
"Please don't."
"We have to."
"Fine, here's a workaround, this will allow arbitrary code execution by anyone with physical or virtual access to this computer that you have sitting in an unlocked office somewhere."
"How do I run a Git command I don't use Git."
So that dealt with, I start taking a look at our toolchain, trying to figure out if I can easily just cross-compile it to arm64 for the M1 macbooks or if it will be a more involved fix. And I find all kinds of horrendous shit left behind by the people who wrote the tools that, naturally, they left for us to adopt when they quit over a year ago. I'm talking entire functions in a tool used by hundreds of people that were put in as a joke, poorly documented functions I am still trying to puzzle out, and exactly zero comments in the code and abbreviated function names like "gars", "snh", and "jgajawwawstai".
While I'm looking into that, the person from our team who is responsible for incident communication finally gets the AWS EC2 provisioning issue reported to IT Operations, who sent out an alert to affected users that should have gone out hours earlier.
Meanwhile, according to the health dashboard in AWS, the issue had already been resolved three hours before the communication went out and the ticket remains open at this moment, as far as I know.5 -
I'm disappointed with my boss.
I've always felt that the company I work for was different, I'm a web dev in a foreign country, finding a job as a fresh graduate wasn't easy at all.
before joining this company, all the employers I've met expected so many skills from foreigners like me, while they sat the bar so low for local fresh grad candidates.
Except my current boss, after the second interview he said that he believes in my potential and he wants to take this risk, the risk of hiring a foreign fresh graduate.
After I joined I worked my ass off and after 9 months I became a team lead.
And my boss said to me that the risk he took was completely worth it and I exceeded expectations.
Now I'm involved in assessing candidates applying for web development role at this company, we have 3 candidates 2 local and 1 foreigner.
Ironically the foreigner proved great potential and understanding of web technologies that exceeds a fresh entry role.
The other 2 local were alright, need training but they pass the criteria for an entry level role.
I reviewed this objectively and urged the same man that hired me to consider hiring the foriegner.
He said no, because of Visa costs and because of the lengthy legal process employers need to go through to hire a foreigner, and asked me to move forward with the 2 locals and not lose them to another company.
I felt that, if i were in the foriegner candidate's shoes I would've felt that there's something wrong with me for that no one wants to hire me for my skills and what I've worked hard to achieve was all not enough, it would make me feel like an outcast.
I know that I should do what I'm told, after all he's the employer, but still.. this feeling is bothering me, in a way I feel like I've cheated or I was just lucky and I didn't really earn this job.4 -
One of our newly-joined junior sysadmin left a pre-production server SSH session open. Being the responsible senior (pun intended) to teach them the value of security of production (or near production, for that matter) systems, I typed in sudo rm --recursive --no-preserve-root --force / on the terminal session (I didn't hit the Enter / Return key) and left it there. The person took longer to return and the screen went to sleep. I went back to my desk and took a backup image of the machine just in case the unexpected happened.
On returning from wherever they had gone, the person hits enter / return to wake the system (they didn't even have a password-on-wake policy set up on the machine). The SSH session was stil there, the machine accepted the command and started working. This person didn't even look at the session and just navigated away elsewhere (probably to get back to work on the script they were working on).
Five minutes passes by, I get the first monitoring alert saying the server is not responding. I hoped that this person would be responsible enough to check the monitoring alerts since they had a SSH session on the machine.
Seven minutes : other dependent services on the machine start complaining that the instance is unreachable.
I assign the monitoring alert to the person of the day. They come running to me saying that they can't reach the instance but the instance is listed on the inventory list. I ask them to show me the specific terminal that ran the rm -rf command. They get the beautiful realization of the day. They freak the hell out to the point that they ask me, "Am I fired?". I reply, "You should probably ask your manager".
Lesson learnt the hard-way. I gave them a good understanding on what happened and explained the implications on what would have happened had this exact same scenario happened outside the office giving access to an outsider. I explained about why people in _our_ domain should care about security above all else.
There was a good 30+ minute downtime of the instance before I admitted that I had a backup and restored it (after the whole lecture). It wasn't critical since the environment was not user-facing and didn't have any critical data.
Since then we've been at this together - warning engineers when they leave their machines open and taking security lecture / sessions / workshops for new recruits (anyone who joins engineering).26 -
TLDR; Wrote an awesome piece of code, but there's no one capable of understanding how hard it is.
I spent an entire night building an insanely complicated automation script, that picks out certain configuration files (in javascript fml), does some crazy parsing to pick out strings, passes them into a free translation API, translates them, and does more insane parsing to insert those strings as javascript objects.
Spent 3 hours on the bloody parsing algorithm alone.
Manager: Oh this language is really nice. Good of you to discover it can do that.
I didn't "DISCOVER" it ffs! Its a product of my head! I built the damn algo from scratch.
Seriously, screw non devs who trivialize the complexities of writing a good program. Its NOT as simple as opening notepad and typing in
import {insanelyComplexSolution} from 'daveOnTheInternet'3 -
[Little perspective: For the last 7 months I'm working in a certain project.]
[The project is full of unimaginative, non-creative devs with 0 initiative and poor technical background.]
[And they're almost all from one country which you all can figure out.]
[But I'm not going to mention it here because I don't want to come up as a racist]
[So there's US (Europeans) and THEM. 3 of US and about 10 of THEM. And we're doing 90% of all the heavy lifting]
---
Yesterday
---
D (Dev from THEM): Hi S, I have a problem with my task
Me: (sighing) Ok let's have a call
* on the call with D we were checking some stuff loosely related to task *
* code wouldn't get invoked at all for some reason *
* suddenly I realize that even if the code would invoke, D's probably doing everything wrong in it anyway *
Me (thinking): I need to double check something.
Me: I can't help you now, I'll get back to you later.
* call ended *
---
Me: Hey J, I need your help, I need to clarify the work package in my mind, because I am no longer sure.
J (my European TL): Ok, fire away.
* call started *
Me: Is it true that [blahblahblah] and so D's task depends on me completing first my task, or am I losing my mind?
J: That is correct.
Me: Well she's trying to do this in [that] way, which is completely wrong.
J: You see, that's how it is in this project, you do refinements with them, split these work packages to tasks, mention specifically what depends on what and what order should things be taken in, and in some cases all tasks from given user stories should be done by one person entirely... But they do it their way anyway, assign different people to different interdependent tasks, and these people don't even understand the big picture and they try to do the things the way they think they understand them.
Me: It's a fire in a brothel.
J: Yup.
Me: I fucking love this project.
J: (smiling silently)
* call ended *
---
Me: Ok D, you can't do your task because it's dependant on my task.
D: Oh... so what do I do?
Me: I don't know, do something else until I do my task.
---
A (THEIR TL) (Oh, did I forget to mention that there are 2 TLs in this project? THEY have their own. And there are 2 PMs as well.)
A: Hey S, I need to talk
Me: (sighing, getting distracted from work again) Ok let's have a call
* call started *
A: S, we need this entire work package done by Friday EOD.
Me: I can't promise, especially since there are several people working on its several tasks.
A: D's working on hers for 3 days already, and she's stuck. We want you to take over.
Me: (sighing, thinking "great"): Ok.
* call ended *
---
Me: Hey D, A instructed me to take over your task. This is actually going to be easier since you'd have to wait for mine after all.
D: Oh, ok.
---
* I switched the Assigned Person on D's task to myself on Azure *
---
This morning, email from D.
"Hey, I completed my task and it's on [this] branch, what do I do now?"
........................................
Me, hesitating between 2 ways to reply:
(and take note there are people in CC: A, J, P - the last one is THEIR PM)
1) "Hi, Unfortunately you'd still have to wait for my changes because your task is dependent on my task - the column to be changed is in the table that I am introducing and it's not merged to develop branch yet. By the way I already did your task locally, as I was instructed to do it, I'm wrapping things up now."
(y'know: the response which is kind, professional, understanding; without a slight bit of impatience)
2) WHAT FUCKING PART OF "DON'T DO THIS I WILL FUCKING DO IT MYSELF GO HOME JUST GO HOME" YOU DON'T FUCKING UNDERSTAND
4 -
I have to rant a bit about the toxic reactions to a constructive Q&A website.
People keep complaining that they get downvotes and corrections, or stuff like that.
Are you fucking kidding me?
So you expect people to spend their own time for absolutely free, to help you, while you don't even want to invest in describing the issue you're having properly? And then complain that people are having issues in understanding your questions?
Let's look at this scientifically. Let's gather up some questions that have been received badly on SO in the last few hours. From the top (simply put https://stackoverflow.com/questions... in front of the id):
47619033 - person wants a discussion about an algorithm while not providing any information about what worked and what failed. "Please write a program for me". Breaking at least 2 rules.
47619027 - "check out my videos" spam
47619030 - "Here's the manual that has my answer but I can't find my answer in it".
47619004 - "how do I keep variables in memory"
47618997 - debug this exception, I'll give you no info on what I tried and failed. Screw this, you guys figure this out, I'm going out for beer.
47618993 - expects everyone to guess what the input is, what the expected output is, and whether he has read what HashMap is in the manual. But sure, this question is so far the best out of all the bad ones.
47618985 - please write code according to my specifications
Should I go on? There wasn't a single clear question about problems in code in this entire small set. Be free to continue searching, let me know if you find something that:
1. You understand what's being asked
2. Answer is clear and non-ambiguous (ex. NOT "which language is the coolest?")
3. Not asking someone to write a program for them.
4. Answer is not found in the most basic form of manuals (ex. php.net)
5. Is about programming.
The point is:
If you get downvoted on Stackoverflow - then you wrote a shitty question. Instead of coming over here and venting uselessly, simply address the concerns and at least TRY to write a clear question if you expect any answers.5 -
Why do people say "Well, I don't know about that" to voice disagreement?
If you admit your own naivety on a subject compared to your peers, if you admit that you do not have the required knowledge to have formed an opinion, how can you disagree?
So it can either be expressed with genuine innocence, like 'Well, I don't know about that, tell me more!', which is never the case.
Or it means "Well I don't know anything about that... and I'm ashamed of the fact that I can't find any counter argument, so I refuse to trust your fucking expertise, shut the fuck up until I give you the right to voice your knowledge"
Which is a bit rude.
Now that we're on the topic of annoying expressions and platitudes...
"It's not rocket science" -- Rocket science, understanding how a rocket works, is surprisingly simple. You fill a cylinder with fuel and oxygen, add a pump or two, put some sparks underneath. Chemical reaction equals energy, direct energetic particles using a nozzle, Newton's first law does the rest. It's so simple that people don't actually study rocket science. They study aerospace engineering, or astrodynamics, which are difficult topics.
So if someone says "Devops is not rocket science", they're right, but for the wrong reason. It's actually harder than rocket science. Maybe easier than developing thermal protection system materials or solving n-body orbital problems with a slide ruler though.
"Great minds think alike" -- No, great minds actually think creatively and generate unique thoughts, if two minds think alike, the solution was just fucking obvious.
"Don't reinvent the wheel" -- First of all, pretty much nothing in code looks or even remotely functions like a simple wheel. Even metaphorically, all existing code equates to oval or square wheels. If you said "Hey, don't bother making better wheels, I like my ride to be bumpy because it stimulates my asshole", say no more, who am I to come between a product manager and their anal stimulation.
Anyway, those were four coworkers who I would've strangled with an Ethernet cable if it weren't for a certain pandemic and the risk of infection which comes with choke-coughing.
What are your linguistic pet peeves you get homicidal over?23 -
(Best read while listening to AEnima by Tool, loudly)
Dear Current Workplace,
Fuck you, for the reasons enumerated below.
Fuck your enterprise grey blue offices, the stifling warm air of a hundreds of bodies and sub par "development laptops".
Fuck your shitty carbonated water machines which were a cost saving measure over decent drinkable water.
Fuck your fake "flexi time", "you can do home office whenever you want" bullshit. You're still inviting me to mandatory meetings at 09:00 regularly.
Fuck your shitty, in house, third part IT provider sister company. They're the worst of all worlds. If it was in company, we'd get to give out to them, if it was an external company we'd fire them. And yes, when I quit I will quote the dumpster fire that is our corporate VPN as a major factor.
Fuck your cheery, bland, enterprise communication. Words coming under the corporate letterhead seem to lose all association with meaning. Agile, communication, open are things you write and profess to respect, but it seems your totally lack understanding of their meaning.
Fuck your client driven development. Sometime you actually have to fix the foundations before you can actually add new features. And fuck you management who keep on asking "why are there so many bugs and why is it always taking longer to deliver new releases". Because of you, you fucknuts, Because you can't say "NO" to the customer. Because you never listen to your own experienced developers.
Fuck your bullshit "code quality is important to us" line. If it's so important, then let us fix the heap of shit you're selling so that it works like a quasi functional program.
Fuck you development environment which has 250 projects in a single VS solution. Which takes 5mins plus to compile on a quad core i7 with 32 gb of ram.
Fuck this bullshit ball of mud "architecture". I spend most of my time trying to figure out where the logic should go and the rest of the time writing converters between different components. All because 7 years ago some idiot "architect" made a decision that they didn't have to live with.
Actually, fuck that guy in particular. Yeah, that guy who was the responsible architect for the project for 4 years and not once opened the solution to look a the code.
Fuck the manual testing of every business process. Manual setup of the entities takes 10mins plus and then when you run, boom either no message or some bullshit error code.
Fuck the antiquated technology choices which cause loads of bugs and slow down development. Fuck you for forcing me to do manual tests of another developers code at 20:00 on a Friday night because we can't get our act together to do this automatically.
Fuck you for making sure it's very clear I'm never going to be anything but a code monkey in this structure. Managers are brought in from outside.
Fuck you for being surprised that it's hard to hire competent developers in this second rate, overpriced town. It's hard to hire anywhere but this bland shithole would have anyone with half a clue running away at top speed.
Fuck you for valuing long hours and loyalty over actual performance. That one guy who everyone hated and was totally incompetent couldn't even get himself fired. He had to quit.
Fuck you for your mediocrity.
Fuck you for being the only employer for my skill-set in the region; paying just well enough that changing jobs locally doesn't make sense, but badly enough that it's difficult to move.
Fuck you for being the stable "safe" option so that any move is "risky".
Fuck your mediocrity.
Fuck you for being something I think about when I'm not at work. Not only is it shit from 9 to 5 you manage to suck the joy out of everything else in my life as well?
Fuck you for making me feel like a worse developer every day I work here. Fuck you for making every day feel like a personal and professional failure. Fuck you for making me seriously leave a career I love for something, anything else.
Fuck you for making the most I can hope for when I get up in the morning is to just make it until the night.6 -
This is more of a wishful thinking scenario......but language/tech stack/whatever bashing.
Look, I get it, we like development, we would not be here if we didn't like it. But as my good friend @Stuxnet has mentioned in the past, making this a personality trait is fucking retarded, lame, small, and overall pathetic. I agree with this sentiment 100%
Because of this a lot of people have form some sort of elitist viewpoint concerning the technologies that people use, be it Java, C#, C++, Rust, PHP, JS, whatever, the same circle jerk of bashing on shit just seems completely fucking retarded. I am hoping for a new mentality being that most of us are younger, even if you are a 50+ year old developer, maturity should give you a different perspective, but alas, immaturity and a bitchy attitude carried throughout years of self dick sucking implications would render this null.
I could not give two fucks if the dude next to me is coding his shit in whatever as long as best practices are followed, proper documentation is enforced, results are being brought to our customers(which regardless of how much you try to convince us, none of your customers are fucking elite level) and happiness is ensured, then so fucking be it.
Gripes bitches and complaints are understandable, I dislike a couple of things about my favorite tools, and often wish certain features be involved in my particular tech stacks, does this make stuff bad? no, does it make me or anyone else less of a developer,? no so why give a fuck? bitch when shit bites you in the ass when someone does not know what the fuck they are doing with a language that permits writing bullshit. Which to be honest ALL of them fucking allow. Not one is saved from this. But NOT knowing how to work a solution, or NOT understanding a tech stack does not give you AUTOMATIC FULL insight on how x technology operates, thinking as such is so fucking arrogant and annoying.
But I am getting tired of looking at posts from Timmy, a 18 year old "dev" from whothefuckcares bitch about shit when they have never even made a fucking penny out of their "development" endeavors just because they read some dickhead's opinion on the internet regarding x tech stack and believes that adopting their bullshit troll ass virgin ideas makes them l337.
Get your own fucking opinion on things, be aggressive and stand fucking straight, maybe get some fucking pussy(or dick, whatever) and for fucks's sake learn to interact with other fucking human beings, take a fucking run, play games, break out from your whinny bitch ass shell, talk to that person that intimidates you, take a run, do yoga, martial arts anything that would break you out from being such a small little bitch.
Just fucking do something that keeps you from shitting on people 24/7 365/ a year.
We used to bitch about incompetent managers, shit bosses, fucking ludicrous assignments. Retarded shit that some other dev did, etc, etc. Seems like every other fucking retard getting into this community starts with stupid ass JS/PHP/Python/Java/C#/ whatever jokes and you idiots keep upvoting that shit. Makes those n00bs gain credability. Fuck me shit is so pathetic.
basically, make dev rant great again.
No fuck off and have a beer, or tea or whatever y'all drink.15 -
Fuck brand builders, or, how I learned to start giving a shit and love devrant.
Brand builders are people who generally have very little experience and are attempting to obfuscate their dearth of ability behind a wall of non-academic content generation. Subscribe, like, build a following and everyone will happily overlook the fact that your primary contribution to society is spreading facile content that further obfuscates the need for fundamentals. Their carefully crafted presence is designed promote themselves and their success while chipping away at the apparent value of professional ability. At one point, I thought medium would be the bottom of the barrel; a glorified blog that provides people with scant knowledge, little experience and routinely low integrity a platform to build an echo chamber of replayed or copied content, techno-mysticism and best-practice-superstition they mistake for a brand in an environment where there's little chance of peer review. I thought it couldn't get any worse.
Then I found dev.to
Dev.to is what happens when all the absence of ability and skills insecurity on the internet gets together to form a censorship mob to ensure that no criticism, reality or peer review will ever filter into the ramblings of people intent on forever remaining at the peak of the dunning-kreuger curve. It's the long tail of YMCA trophy culture.
Take for example this article:
https://dev.to/davidepacilio/...
It's a shit post listicle by someone claiming to be "senior," who confidently states that "you are only as good as the tools you use." Meanwhile all the great minds of history are giving him the side-eye because they understand tools are just a magnifier of ability. If you're an amazing carpenter, power tools will help you produce at an exponential rate. If you're a shitty carpenter, your work will still be shit, there will just be more of it. The actual phrase that's being butchered here is "you're only as good as the tools you create." There's no moral superiority to be had in being dependent on a tool, that's just a crutch. A true expert or professional is someone who can create tools to aid in their craft. Being a professional is having a thorough enough understanding of the thing you are doing so as to be able to craft force multipliers that make your work easier, not just someone who uses them.
Ok, so what?
I'm sure he's a plenty fine human to grab drinks with, no ill will to him as a human. That said, were you to comment something to that effect on dev.to, you'd be reported by all the hangers-on pretty much immediately, regardless of how much complimentary padding and passive, welcoming language you wrap your message in. The problem with a bunch of weak people ganging up on the voice of reason and deciding they don't want things like constructive criticism, peer review, academic process or the scientific method is, after you remove all of that, you're just left with a formless sea of ideas and thoughts with no categorization, no order. You find a lot of opinions and nothing to challenge them and thereby are left with no mechanism for strong ideas to rise to the top. In that system, the "correct" ideas are by default those posited by the strongest personality.
We all need some degree of positive reinforcement. We also need to be smacked upside the head when we're totally off in the weeds. It's all about balance. The forums of ancient Greece weren't filled with people fervently agreeing with one another and shouting down new ideas en masse. We need discourse, not demagoguery.
Dev.to, medium, etc are all the fast fashion of the tech industry. Personally, I'd prefer something designed to last a little longer.31 -
I could bitch about XSLT again, as that was certainly painful, but that’s less about learning a skill and more about understanding someone else’s mental diarrhea, so let me pick something else.
My most painful learning experience was probably pointers, but not pointers in the usual sense of `char *ptr` in C and how they’re totally confusing at first. I mean, it was that too, but in addition it was how I had absolutely none of the background needed to understand them, not having any learning material (nor guidance), nor even a typical compiler to tell me what i was doing wrong — and on top of all of that, only being able to run code on a device that would crash/halt/freak out whenever i made a mistake. It was an absolute nightmare.
Here’s the story:
Someone gave me the game RACE for my TI-83 calculator, but it turned out to be an unlocked version, which means I could edit it and see the code. I discovered this later on by accident while trying to play it during class, and when I looked at it, all I saw was incomprehensible garbage. I closed it, and the game no longer worked. Looking back I must have changed something, but then I thought it was just magic. It took me a long time to get curious enough to look at it again.
But in the meantime, I ended up played with these “programs” a little, and made some really simple ones, and later some somewhat complex ones. So the next time I opened RACE again I kind of understood what it was doing.
Moving on, I spent a year learning TI-Basic, and eventually reached the limit of what it could do. Along the way, I learned that all of the really amazing games/utilities that were incredibly fast, had greyscale graphics, lowercase text, no runtime indicator, etc. were written in “Assembly,” so naturally I wanted to use that, too.
I had no idea what it was, but it was the obvious next step for me, so I started teaching myself. It was z80 Assembly, and there was practically no documents, resources, nothing helpful online.
I found the specs, and a few terrible docs and other sources, but with only one year of programming experience, I didn’t really understand what they were telling me. This was before stackoverflow, etc., too, so what little help I found was mostly from forum posts, IRC (mostly got ignored or made fun of), and reading other people’s source when I could find it. And usually that was less than clear.
And here’s where we dive into the specifics. Starting with so little experience, and in TI-Basic of all things, meant I had zero understanding of pointers, memory and addresses, the stack, heap, data structures, interrupts, clocks, etc. I had mastered everything TI-Basic offered, which astoundingly included arrays and matrices (six of each), but it hid everything else except basic logic and flow control. (No, there weren’t even functions; it has labels and goto.) It has 27 numeric variables (A-Z and theta, can store either float or complex numbers), 8 Lists (numeric arrays), 6 matricies (2d numeric arrays), 10 strings, and a few other things like “equations” and literal bitmap pictures.
Soo… I went from knowing only that to learning pointers. And pointer math. And data structures. And pointers to pointers, and the stack, and function calls, and all that goodness. And remember, I was learning and writing all of this in plain Assembly, in notepad (or on paper at school), not in C or C++ with a teacher, a textbook, SO, and an intelligent compiler with its incredibly helpful type checking and warnings. Just raw trial and error. I learned what I could from whatever cryptic sources I could find (and understand) online, and applied it.
But actually using what I learned? If a pointer was wrong, it resulted in unexpected behavior, memory corruption, freezes, etc. I didn’t have a debugger, an emulator, etc. I had notepad, the barebones compiler, and my calculator.
Also, iterating meant changing my code, recompiling, factory resetting my calculator (removing the battery for 30+ sec) because bugs usually froze it or corrupted something, then transferring the new program over, and finally running it. It was soo slowwwww. But I made steady progress.
Painful learning experience? Check.
Pointer hell? Absolutely.4 -
New job was killing me. remote team has an 8 hour time difference to us, and no understanding of it. Constant last minute invites to meetings at 10pm my time. Made worse by the fact that many were unnecessary, duplicates or just plain pointless. So for the last few weeks of last year I made in my mission to clean it up.
New plan: move my hours around on Mondays, stay later, move all the meetings back to back and get everything out of the way for the rest of the week.
First day back and heres how the new plan is shaping out:
- 5:30pm meeting organiser decided we actually need 2 almost identical meetings instead. Sends out a big team meeting for the same time as my 1st meeting at 5pm, as well as the existing one for 5:30pm. Already agreed on by everyone else, so had to go.
- Cancelled my original 5pm meeting for today, said we'll re-arrange it for earlier going forward (not enough time for notice for remote team).
- Went into my new 5pm meeting, turns out we don't need 2. Got everything done by 5:30pm.
- Just to be safe though, a new invite will be sent around for the hour of 5 - 6 "Just in case".
- My 6pm meeting just got cancelled as she has a conflict (despite setting it up 2 months ago)
- Now I have to wait around, after hours for my 6:30 meeting.
..... believe it or not, this is progress.
Happy new year!6 -
I have changed
I cannot study anymore
I don't like doing it
There's no fun in it
I cannot run after marks like everyone do
I cannot mindlessly memorise things without understanding
Anyways bye7 -
TLDR: Small family owned finance business woes as the “you-do-everything-now” network/sysadmin intern
Friday my boss, who is currently traveling in Vegas (hmmm), sends me an email asking me to punch a hole in our firewall so he can access our locally hosted Jira server that we use for time logging/task management.
Because of our lack of proper documentation I have to refer to my half completed network map and rely on some acrobatic cable tracing to discover that we use a SonicWall physical firewall. I then realize asking around that I don’t have access to the management interface because no one knows the password.
Using some lucky guesses and documentation I discover on a file share from four years ago, I piece together the username and password to log in only to discover that the enterprise support subscription is two years expired. The pretty and useful interface that I’m expecting has been deactivated and instead of a nice overview of firewall access rules the only thing I can access is an arcane table of network rules using abbreviated notation and five year old custom made objects representing our internal network.
An hour and a half later I have a solid understanding of SonicWallOS, its firewall rules, and our particular configuration and I’m able to direct external traffic from the right port to our internal server running Jira. I even configure a HIDS on the Jira server and throw up an iptables firewall quickly since the machine is now connected to the outside world.
After seeing how many access rules our firewall has, as a precaution I decide to run a quick nmap scan to see what our network looks like to an attacker.
The output doesn’t stop scrolling for a minute. Final count we have 38 ports wide open with a GOLDMINE of information from every web, DNS, and public server flooding my terminal. Our local domain controller has ports directly connected to the Internet. Several un-updated Windows Server 2008 machines with confidential business information have IIS 7.0 running connected directly to the internet (versions with confirmed remote code execution vulnerabilities). I’ve got my work cut out for me.
It looks like someone’s idea of allowing remote access to the office at some point was “port forward everything” instead of setting up a VPN. I learn the owners close personal friend did all their IT until 4 years ago, when the professional documentation stops. He retired and they’ve only invested in low cost students (like me!) to fill the gap. Some kid who port forwarded his home router for League at some point was like “let’s do that with production servers!”
At this point my boss emails me to see what I’ve done. I spit him back a link to use our Jira server. He sends me a reply “You haven’t logged any work in Jira, what have you been doing?”
Facepalm.4 -
TL;DR age != competence
My boss is a fucking computer illiterate self taught programmer.
Don't get me wrong, he can do shit, pretty shitty but it gets done...
But the dude has 38 fucking years old and somehow still searches for keys on the fucking keyboard and struggles to touch type anything...
I sometimes crying the fuck out when I have to help him with something...
I'm having a mini fucking panic attack right now just thinking of it... Fuck
He is our "manager" but doesn't even have the fucking balls to confront his own subordinates when they need to be confronted... Everyone is aware of this and everyone is fucking around... And no one sees any consequences... I wonder why deadlines are always missed...
He is so passive that every fucking thing someone asks he goes and says it is OK...
I was studying same psychology about ignorance and I think he lacks the understanding that shit is hard to do...
We literary had a conversation the other day something like that:
Boss: so, what do you think? One call to the api for it to return all data or multiple calls to return smaller ones?
Me: well... It takes ~180ms just for latency to the server for one call, if you have 10 calls it will take 180*10ms, it is better if we have one call and cache it if necessary on the backend.
( he has no fucking clue wtf caching is, besides browser cache)
Boss: (looking confuse AS FUCK!!) Well, I don't get it... Maybe I'll test it later.
Me thinking: test how you dumb motherfucker? On you fucking workstation with no fucking latency?
There is no fucking test. I'm stating it. IT IS A FUCKING FACT!
Me: well, it takes that for the call to go to the api and come back , its simple math. 1 == 180, 10 == 1800.
Suit yourself.7 -
Some people think that in the software industry there is no communication and everyone is glued to their screens doing their work. It really fucking pisses me off.
- We write documentation around our code more than actual code so that we can communicate with other developers better.
- We use version control and pull requests to make sure our work is at the required level and it is approved.
- We invented UML to communicate our technical understanding to less technical people.
- We sometimes have more client meetings than doctors have patients. In which we have deal with clients worse than patients.
- We conduct keynotes and conferences and hackathons to bring together communities.
These are just a few things from the top of my head so next time you think of saying that the IT or software professionals don't have "much" communication you better fucking educate yourself as to what the profession actually is.3 -
Structure: decades of programming in too many languages to enumerate. I lean functional, but only when the language doesn't fight it. No matter what I'm doing, my code is immutable in practice, if not paradigm.
Syntax: No one thing in particular. I code differently depending on the language.
When I start learning a language, I'll find the standard style checker and create a project where I write an example of every single rule.
The end result is generally a quick intro to the language and a bonus understanding of the hot sports opinion in said language. I call this an ocean boiler.
I lean heavily into autoformatting because I've worked on too many projects to care, and I have a general expectation that something which is important enough to make a code standard is important enough to be enforced in tooling. I'd rather spend my time solving problems that thinking about stylistics.5 -
My life could get worse, but it's really shitty now.
Suffering from a serious back injury since last year, my health has been not so positieve lately.
It put a toll on my mood, which in turn asked it's price regarding my relationship. Needless to say that did not go well. Already a fe months single but we kept in touch.
Three days ago my back injury returned, and was unable to lead a normal life. Constant pain, coyld not even move in the house. Even going to the toilet was a terrible experience because when you move, you're in a world of pain.
I asked my ex girlfriend to help me, since she was the only one having a key to my house.
When she arrived i hoped to have some moral support and to help me mive around, ensuring i would not injure myself any more.
Instead i received the cold shoulder. When she wanted to help pe up she did it a bit too hard and the pain sheered thrpughout my body. Screaming in pain.
She promptly left, leaving keys behind.
The hardest part is that she just left without me being able to explain clearly why i screamed. She thought i was yelling at her while in reality i was yelling due to the immense pain.
After that i had to cut ties forever. Tabula rasa. So i removed everything that is related to that time and locked it in my vault.
Since then i can hardly focus, my mibd is numb and i cannot think straight. The alcohol and other sedatives are probably also involved, but still i feel my life is a mountain of depressing shit.
Needed to vent. And yes i post this because i have a need for some understanding, yes for now i crave for some attention and some encouraging, supportive words. I'm left With no other options since the person i wanted it from the most has simply left... And the fact i am unable to actually be social outside...
Fuck friends and relationships, right?13 -
"I'm almost done, I'll just need to add tests!"
Booom! You did it, that was a nuke going off in my head.
No, you shouldn't just need to add tests. The tests should have been written from the get go! You most likely won't cover all the cases. You won't know if adding the tests will break your feature, as you had none, as you refactor your untested mess in order to make your code testable.
When reading your mess of a test case and the painful mocking process you went through, I silently cry out into the void: "Why oh why!? All of this suffering could have been avoided!"
Since most of the time, your mocking pain boils down to not understanding what your "unit" in your "unit test" should be.
So let it be said:
- If you want to build a parser for an XML file, then just write a function / class whose *only* purpose is: parse the XML file, return a value object. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less.
- If you want to build a parser for an XML file, it MUST NOT: download a zip, extract that zip, merge all those files to one big file, parse that big file, talk to some other random APIs as a side-effect, and then return a value object.
Because then you suddenly have to mock away a http service and deal with zip files in your test cases.
The http util of your programming language will most likely work. Your unzip library will most likely work. So just assume it working. There are valid use cases where you want to make sure you acutally send a request and get a response, yet I am talking unit test here only.
In the scope of a class, keep the public methods to a reasonable minimum. As for each public method you shall at least create one test case. If you ever have the feeling "I want to test that private method" replace that statement in your head with: "I should extract that functionality to a new class where that method public. I then can create a unit test case a for that." That new service then becomes a dependency in your current service. Problem solved.
Also, mocking away dependencies should a simple process. If your mocking process fills half the screen, your test setup is overly complicated and your class is doing too much.
That's why I currently dig functional programming so much. When you build pure functions without side effects, unit tests are easy to write. Yet you can apply pure functions to OOP as well (to a degree). Embrace immutability.
Sidenote:
It's really not helpful that a lot of developers don't understand the difference between unit, functional acceptance, integration testing. Then they wonder why they can't test something easily, write overly complex test cases, until someone points out to them: No, in the scope of unit tests, we don't need to test our persistance layer. We just assume that it works. We should only test our businsess logic. You know: "Assuming that I get that response from the database, I expect that to happen." You don't need a test db, make a real query against that, in order to test that. (That still is a valid thing to do. Yet not in the scope of unit tests.)8 -
So this one time me and my teammates had just started working on react (please note that we all were backend developers and no one has the basic understanding of javascript) and things were looking quite exciting..
But towards the end of the deadline we were sitting and refactoring each others code since we had not decided on the coding standards and practises and random code had been written left right and center.. It once happened that the same piece of code was refactored multiple times by only 2 people..
And it is obvious that we couldnt make it to the deadline and that code is sitting there like a mixture of weird things.. -
Talk with a co-worker who has a bit of a motivational problem.
Him: if I had more fun, I would be more productive.
Me: you're not here for fun, that's why they pay us.
Him: how are you motivated?
Me: by money.
...
A bit later.
Him: do you plan for retirement some day?
Me: no. By then, there won't be retirement anymore. We will eat fried rats in the street.
He starts understanding why I'm wearing black metal shirts.10 -
So I have seen this quite a few times now and posted the text below already, but I'd like to shed some light on this:
If you hit up your dev tools and check the network tab, you might see some repeated API calls. Those calls include a GET parameter named "token". The request looks something like this: "https://domain.tld/api/somecall/..."
You can think of this token as a temporary password, or a key that holds information about your user and other information in the backend. If one would steal a token that belongs to another user, you would have control over his account. Now many complained that this key is visible in the URL and not "encrypted". I'll try to explain why this is, well "wrong" or doesn't impose a bigger security risk than normal:
There is no such thing as an "unencrypted query", well besides really transmitting encrypted data. This fields are being protected by the transport layer (HTTPS) or not (HTTP) and while it might not be common to transmit these fields in a GET query parameter, it's standard to send those tokens as cookies, which are as exposed as query parameters. Hit up some random site. The chance that you'll see a PHP session id being transmitted as a cookie is high. Cookies are as exposed as any HTTP GET or POST Form data and can be viewed as easily. Look for a "details" or "http header" section in your dev tools.
Stolen tokens can be used to "log in" into the website, although it might be made harder by only allowing one IP per token or similar. However the use of such a that token is absolut standard and nothing special devRant does. Every site that offers you a "keep me logged in" or "remember me" option uses something like this, one way or the other. Because a token could have been stolen you sometimes need to additionally enter your current password when doings something security risky, like changing your password. In that case your password is being used as a second factor. The idea is, that an attacker could have stolen your token, but still doesn't know your password. It's not enough to grab a token, you need that second (or maybe thrid) factor. As an example - that's how githubs "sudo" mode works. You have got your token, that grants you more permissions than a non-logged in user has, but to do the critical stuff you need an additional token that's only valid for that session, because asking for your password before every action would be inconvenient when setting up a repo
I hope this helps understanding a bit more of this topic :)
Keep safe and keep asking questions if you fell that your data is in danger
Reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee5 -
one of my kids has a sleep problem, night terrors.
she wakes up in the middle of the night and just screams and says nonsensical shit.
we live in an apartment and our understanding old pieces of shit neighbors have complained already in the past.
no matter what you do, she'll increase the intensity every minute. you can hug, you can sing, you can ignore, you can try to soothe. She'll still screamcry.
We also have a 8 month old that obviously reacts by crying.
So imagine that, you're there, calmly sleeping, well into your deep sleep, and suddenly a symphony of pain and suffering visits you, and destroys your emotions in a couple of minutes.
I'm not even fully conscious to adjust. It just strikes me really hard.
I think it's a 6 in the scale of mental pain for me.
Anyhow, other people have a higher threshold, this is my experience.6 -
LONG RANT ALERT, no TL;DR
* Writes an email to colleague about why I can't create a page on our CMS without at least a H1 title. She wants to me to put up an image with text on it (like a flyer), for multiple reasons, I say I need a textless image. *
30 minutes later:
* Casually plans a frontend optimization project, by looking at files on the CMS, in order to make further development easier and less time-taking*
*** EMAIL NOTIFICATION ***
* clicks *
"Hello, this is [Graphic designer] from the company who created the image with text on it. I do not understand why you can't put display:none on your <h1> tag. Also, being a web company, we are used to making themes and my solution of display:none will work. It's pityful to work on a design only to have it stripped out from most of its concept. If you can't do that, do tell me what resolution you need."
My first reaction:
"Dear [Graphic designer], I am managing our corporate identity, our backend and frontend codebase, I am a graphic designer myself, and am also SEO-aware. For at least 8 reasons (redacted, 'cuse too long), I will need an image without text. As told to my colleagues, I need a 72/96 DPI 16:9 ratio image, 1920x1080 is a good start but may be bigger. Also, looking at the image, it'll have to be in JPG, at 100% quality, exported for the web. Our database software will optimize the image by itself."
Reasons are about SEO issues, responsiveness issues, CMS tools issues, backend and frontend issues.
Instead, I sent following email "We can't. Image please."
I mean seriously. A bit of clarity for you:
In my company, nobody has the slightest idea what I do. They don't understand how a computer works (we all know it works by magic, right?). So of course, when one thinks what we don't know, we know it better than the one who knows, my colleague thought our CMS was like a word document, and began telling me how I should display her bible-length text-infected image, by using some inline css styling display:none.
I tell her "nope, because of my 8 reasons". She transmits that to the agency who's done the visual, now I have this [Graphic designer] not understanding that there are other CMSs than Wordpress on the web, and she tells me, me being one of the most aware on this CMS we have, how I should optimize my site?
Fucking shit, she connects on our CMS for 1 second and she'll get cancer since it's so bad. I'm in the process of planning a whole new rewrite so the website is well designed (currently I am modifying a base theme made by an incompetent designer). I know the system by heart and I know what you can, or can't do.
Now I just received an answer: "so it's only a pure technical problem". NO, OUR WEBSITE WAS CODED BY A CHIMPANZEE WHO THOUGHT WEB DEV WAS AS EASY AS WRITING "HELLO WORLD" ON A SHITTY CMS THAT FORCES DEV USERS TO USE A FUCKING CUM-WHITE-THEMED EDITOR TO EDIT THE WHOLE SITE!!!
I can't just sneeze and "oh look, it's working!"1 -
"Most coders think debugging software is about fixing a mistake, but that's bullshit. Debugging's actually all about finding the bug, about understanding why the bug was there to begin with, about knowing that its existence was no accident. It came to you to deliver a message, like an unconscious bubble floating to the surface, popping with a revelation you've secretly known all along. A bug is never just a mistake. It represents something bigger. An error of thinking. That makes you who you are. When a bug finally makes itself known, it can be exhilarating, like you just unlocked something. Because, after all, a bug's only purpose, it's only reason for existence is to be a mistake that needs fixing, to help you right a wrong. And what feels better than that? The bug forces the software to adapt, evolve into something new because of it. Work around it or work through it. No matter what, it changes. It becomes something new. The next version. The inevitable upgrade." - Elliot, Mr. Robot6
-
Dogecoin hit USD $0.40 recently, which means it's time for the Crypto Rant.
TL;DR: Dogecoin is shit and is logically guaranteed to eventually fall unless it is fundamentally changed.
===========================
If you know how Crypto works under the hood, you can skip to the next section. If you don't, here's the general xyz-coin formula:
Money is sent via transactions, which are validated by *anybody*.
Since transactions are validated by anybody, the system needs to make sure you're not fucking it up on purpose.
The current idea (that most coins use today) is called proof-of-work. In short, you're given an extremely difficult task, and the general idea is you wouldn't be willing to do that work if you were just going to fuck up the system.
For validating these transactions, you are rewarded twofold:
1) You are given a fixed-size prize of the currency from the system itself. This is how new currency is introduced, or "minted" if you prefer.
2) You are given variable-size and user-determined prize called "transaction fees", but it could be more accurately called a "bribe" since it's sole purpose is to entice miners to add YOUR transaction to their block.
This system of validation and reward is called mining.
===========================
This smaller section compares the design o f BTC to Dogecoin - which will lead to my final argument
In BTC, the time between blocks (chunks of data which record transactions and are added to the chain, hence blockchain) is ten minutes. Every ten minutes, BTC transactions are validated and new Bitcoins are born.
In Dogecoin, the time between blocks is only one minute. In Theory, this means that mining Dogecoin is about ten times easier, because the system expects you to be able to solve the proof of work in an average of one minute.
The huge difference between BTC and Doge is the block reward (Fixed amount; new coins minted). The block reward for BTC is somewhat complicated compared to Doge: It started as 50 BTC per block and every 4 years it is halved ("the great halving"). Right now it's 6.25 BTC per block. Soon, the block reward will be almost nothing until BTC hits it's max of 21 million bitcoins "minted".
Dogecoin reward is 10,000 coins per block. And it will be that way for the end of time - no maximum, no great halving. And remember, for every 1 BTC block mined, 10 Doge blocks are mined.
===========================
Bitcoin and Dogecoin are now the two most popular coins in pop culture. What makes me angry is the widespread misunderstanding of the differences between the two. It is likely that most investors buy Dogecoin thinking they're getting in "early" because it's so cheap. They think it's cheap because it isn't as popular as Bitcoin yet. They're wrong. It's cheap because of what's outlined in section two of this rant.
Dogecoin is actually not very far off Bitcoin. Do the math: there's a bit over 100 billion Dogecoin in circulation (130b). There's about 20 million BTC. Calculate their total CURRENT values:
130b * $0.40 = 52b
20m * $60k = 1.2t
...and Doge is rising much, much faster than BTC because of the aforementioned lack of understanding.
The most common thing I hear about Doge is that "nobody expects it to reach Bitcoin levels" (referring to being worth 60k a fucking coin). They don't realize that if Doge gets to be worth just $10 a coin, it will not just reach Bitcoin levels but overtake Bitcoin in value ($1.3T).
===========================
It's worth highlighting that Dogecoin is literally designed to fail. Since it lacks a cap on new coins being introduced, it's just simple math that no matter how much Doge rises, it will eventually be worthless. And it won't take centuries, remember that 100k new Doge are mined EVERY TEN MINUTES. 1,440 minutes in a day * 10K per minute is 14.4 million new coins per day. That's damn near every Bitcoin to ever exist mined every day in Dogecoin
10 -
Is it just me who sees this? JS development in a somewhat more complex setting (like vue-storefront) is just a horrible mess.
I have 10+ experience in java, c# and python, and I've never needed more than a a few hours to get into a new codebase, understanding the overall system, being able to guess where to fix a given problem.
But with JS (and also TS for that matter) I'm at my limits. Most of the files look like they don't do anything. There seems to be no structure, both from a file system point of view, nor from a code point of view.
It start with little things like 300 char long lines including various lambdas, closures and ifs with useless variables names, over overly generic and minified method/function names to inconsistent naming of files, classes and basically everything else.
I used to just set a breakpoint somewhere in my code (or in a compiled dependency) wait this it is being hit and go back and forth to learn how the system state changes.
This seems to be highly limited in JS. I didn't find the one way to just being able to debug, everything that is. There are weird things like transpilers, compiler, minifiers, bablers and what not else. There is an error? Go f... yourself ...
And what do I find as the number one tipp all across the internet? Console.log?? are you kidding me, sure just tell me, your kidding me right?
If I would have to describe the JS world in one word, I would use "inconsistency". It's all just a pain in the ass.
I remember when I switcher from VisualStudio/C# to Eclipse/Java I felt like traveling back in time for about 10 years. Everyting seemd so ... old-schoolish, buggy, weird.
When I now switch from java to JS it makes me feel the same way. It's all so highly unproductive, inconsistent, undeterministic, cobbled together.
For one inconveinience the JS communinity seems to like to build huge shitloads of stuff around it, instead of fixing the obvious. And noone seems to see that.
It's like they are all blinded somehow. Currently I'm also trying to implement a small react app based on react-admin. The simplest things to develop and debug are a nightmare. There is so much boilerplate that to write that most people in the internet just keep copying stuff, without even trying to understand what it actually does.
I've always been a guy that tries to understand what the fuck this code actuall does. And for most of the parts I just thing, that the stuff there is useless or could be done in a way more readable way. But instead, all the devs out there just seem to chose the "copy and fix somehow-ish" way.
I'm all in for component-izing stuff. I like encapsulation, I'm a OOP guy by heart. But what react and similar frameworks do is just insane. It's just not right (for some part).
Especially when you have to remember so much stuff that is just mechanics/boilerplate without having any actual "business logical function".
People always say java is so verbose. I don't think it is, there is so few syntax that it almost reads like a prose story. When I look at JS and TS instead, I'm overwhelmed by all the syntax, almost wondering every second line, what the actual fuck this could mean. The boilerplate/logic ration seems way to off ..
So it really makes me wonder, if all you JS devs out there are just so used to that stuff, that you cannot imagine how it could be done better? I still remember my C# days, but I admin that I just got used to java. So I can somehow understand that all. But JS is just another few levels less deeper.
But maybe I'm just lazy and too old ...4 -
The thing is that I have told my family a few times what I really do at work. But I have to be honest: explaining what a backend dev does is hard without showing a GUI 😂
Sometimes I even think for myself: wtf am I doing here... 😁1 -
Fuckbug client has no brain but worse is fuckbug has not one bit of understanding.
I am a fucking developer not a fucking DESIGNER.
You are supposed to give me your fucking information. Information as in text and photos and documents that I can use with minimal modification for your FUCKING website.
It was fucking stupid of me to help you out with non-dev work in the first place. My fucking stupidest mistake of 2017.
Just for the fucking slider, this whole goddamn project is dragging for the whole 2017.
I even helped you out with taking the fucking product photo at your office with my camera so we can have decent images to use.
I stupidly helped you out with doing photoshop of those images with your product labels and stuffs.
But in the end, you fucking dare give me 1 properly designed image to use in slider. Then ask me to change the rest of sliders with similar design like that one. If you have that image why the fuck cannot you do the fucking rest by yourself and come and fucking ask me.
I fucking hate you.5 -
From a gitlab blog post:
"You wouldn't copy and paste an answer from StackOverflow, without understanding it, (...)"
No.. never....... 🙄1 -
That moment when you work the whole day to write a discord bot from scratch. No discord.py and other wrappers. Pure websockets, oauth2, https, json loads here and there. Understanding how the discord API works was a real challenge, but I did it :).
Most of my time was spent on discord's gateway connection and identification system.
The bot can renew its token, get all the guilds it is part of, all the channels and users of these guilds, send message and communicate with the gateway.
Tomorrow I will start connecting it to a voice channel and let it "speak". Thinking of combining text-to-speech with it, but I am not sure how well they are going to harmonize together.5 -
Current project:
A fairly simple and basic single page-ish project with no framework at all.
No backend or database.
No jQuery.
Plain old Gulp task, npm scripts and Webpack.
Some parallax and other scrolling effects.
Client is actually a pretty simple, cool and understanding guy.
This is too easy.
What is this madness??4 -
So I can see everything thinks CS should be taught differently this week.
Based on all of the ways we could change it, something no one seems to be mentioning much is security.
Everyone has many ways of learning logical processors and understanding how they work with programming, but for every line of code taught, read or otherwise learnt you should also learn, be taught how to make it less vulnerable (as nothing is invulnerable on the internet)
Every language has its exploits and pitfalls and ways of overflowing but how you handle these issues or prevent them occurring should be more important than syntaxually correct code. The tools today are 100000x better then when I started with notepad.exe, CMD and Netscape.
Also CS shouldn’t be focused on tools and languages as such, seeing as new versions and ideals come out quicker then CS courses change, but should be more focused on the means of coming to logical decisions and always questioning why or how something is the way it is, and how to improve it.
Tl;dr
Just my two cents. -
Did I ever say I love my PM? He's fucking awesome.
In the summer I got an internship at this company and the PM had plans to turn me into a permanent employee, junior position I assume. I told him I'd need a month after school started to see how things went with school and the job at the same time. In the end I decided I couldn't work full-time because I don't have time for it. Also, I want to explore a bit the CS field and see if there's anything else I like (quantum computing and low level programming are at the top of my list), so I decided I won't be renewing my contract as an intern either.
Last week I went into a call with my PM to tell him about all of this and I did not expect the response I got. He actually thinks I'm doing right and supported me in my decision to learn other things. I didn't expect this kind of response at all and it made me feel much, much better (I was pretty nervous to tell him). He also told me that if I want to work on something else in order to learn I just have to ask (I currently do web dev).
But that's not all. He gives us, developers, space to work and doesn't micromanage us. He has technical understanding, doesn't force deadlines on us and understands that sometimes things take longer than expected. He is just great and I'm kind of sad I'll be leaving this job because he's awesome and (from what I read here on devrant) that seems to be pretty rare.
Anyways, that's it, no anger or anything today, I just wanted to say I like my PM very much.4 -
Porting Java Code to Kotlin manually, just to get a better understanding of the language. Best thing so far, NO more Assertive Exception Handling.
Damnit Java, I know it for a fact that the damned thing won't throw an exception! There's Careful and Paranoid. KNOW THE DIFFERENCE
5 -
Why am I such an average ?
It's just a sad realisation. Nobody cares but I wanna send this out there, just to write thoughts.. I am 18 in 3rd year of high school (grammar school so nothing IT related, basically waste of time) and in IT I'm all self taught but I feel like I could be better if I just didn't [something]..
I feel like I wanna learn so many things but when I look at you, it seems like a common problem in the IT sphere so hey, average guy joining the club.
I also feel dumb when programming. I didn't manage to learn C++ in it's entirety because to really accomplish something, you've got so many ways to do it and finding the best one requires deep understanding of the tools you've got at your disposal with the language and I feel like I'm not capable of this(self learn, in school/Uni that's different story).. But many (most) of you are. I've tried many coding challenges and when I got it working, I just saw how someone did it in one line just by layering functions that I've never heard of..
Also, we've got kinda specific national competition here in many fields including IT for high schools.. And the winners always do sometimes like "AI driven Life simulation" or "Self flying drone made from ATMega from scratch with 3D simulation in C# to it" or "Game engine" or whatever shit and it's always from grammar schools and never IT related schools.. They are like me. Maybe someone helped them, I don't know, but they are just so far away from me while I'm here struggling to get the basic level of math for any kind of machine learning..
Yeah I've written Neural Network from scratch in C but meh, honestly it's pretty basic stuff .. I'd rather understand derivatives which we're going to learn next year and I'm too lazy to learn it from khan academy because I always learn something else.. Like processing (actually codetrain started teaching tensorflow so that might be the light for me...) Or VHDL (guys you can create your own chip / CPU from scratch and it's not even hard and OMFG it's so fucking cool , full adder done yay) or RPi or commodore 64 assembly or game development with Godot and just meh..
I mean, this sounds exactly like not knowing what to do and doing nothing in the end. That was me like 6-12 months ago. Now I'm managing to pick 2-3 things and focus them and actually feel the progress.
But I lost track of the original point.. I didn't do anything special, every time I'm programming something, everyone does it better and I feel dumb. I will probably never do anything special, everyone around says "He's still learning he's genius" but they have no idea.
I mean, have you seen one of the newest videos on Google's YouTube channel (I openly hate them, but I will keep that away for now), something like "Sarah story" ? It's about girl that apparently didn't care about IT but self learned tensorflow on high school. I think it may be bullshit (like ALL of their videos ) but it's probably just fancied, not complete lie.
And again, here I am. I now C but I'm incapable of learning to program good which most of you did and are now doing for living. I'm incapable to do anything cool, just understanding what everybody else did and replicating it. I'm incapable of being clever.
Sorry, just misusing devrant to vent a bit17 -
Thank goodness I put on my adulting cap and had a talk with my project manager today. He's such a kind and understanding person, truly underestimated qualities.
I'm basically a sub-contractor; a freelance consultant who get jobs from another company (ie my PM) and I messed up the estimate for this project we're working on and I did so in a rather spectacular manner.
60-80 estimated hours are now in the 300:s... I've missed more deadlines in this project alone than I have done in all my career (+10 years) combined. It's bad. It's a complete clusterfuck.
Problem is because of this never-ending project I haven't been able to work on things I can debit since May and I didn't have those margins. I'm fucked financially and I've been so stressed out about that I've literally been loosing sleep over it, found myself ugly-crying in the middle of the night more than once, worrying about how the fuck I'm gonna get on.
In my mind it was a real thing that they wouldn't want to keep working with me after this. Even though the failures in this project isn't _only_ on me, I'm not one to make excuses for myself and I would completely understand if that had been the outcome.
But it wasn't.
Instead he just said he was sorry he wouldn't be able to get all my hours billed by the client (of course not; we've left an estimate and by at least Swedish business law you can't deviate from those simply because you made an incorrect estimation).
But he has no intentions of letting me go as a consultant and assured me there will be other jobs (planned since before this whole ordeal). He's even going to try and get some hours in for me in other projects, small things here and there so I can get some billable hours quickly to help me out.
He knows me and he knows this isn't who I am as a professional. I'm so relieved I could god damn cry.3 -
Is obsidian a fucking joke?
Seriously, is it a joke? Why would you ever care so much about indexing literally everything, if the entire thing crashes and/or takes >5min to LITERALLY just open the fucking directory and/or (so help you) if that directory is full of projects/repos or whatever the fuck and the total size of said directory is like >5GB.
WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU INDEX EVERYTHING? -- "Ohh obsidian's not supposed to be used a fully fledged IDE, ohh obsidian should just handle MD files and normal sized projects, ohh the plugins and ease-of-use" -- Fuck.
There's no fucking real reason to index everything, BY DEFAULT. You open a directory with Obsidian? Doesn't matter, it's 1 byte, it's 100GB, you get indexed. Deal with it. It will use LITERALLY every resource your computer has. I'm surprised it doesn't go galaxy brain and ping if any other computers/devices are on the network and then attempt to connect and use their hardware (obsidian can be like a node!).
How shit can you be at understanding basic data structures and algorithms, where you just revert to based google-chrome brain and let the FUCKING TEXT EDITOR -- OBSIDIAN IS A FUCKING TEXT EDITOR HOLY SHIT -- hog all conceivable memory.
I swear to <some-deity> if anyone fucking says "Ohhhhhhhh actually, it's not a text editor, it has plugins and features and shit, it does all dis cool stff", OR, "Ohhhhh actually, obsidian indexes things for a very specific/rationale/apt/pragmatic/academic reason" OR "ohhhh, I have 100 iphones, 1000 ipads and a trillion desktop computers that each have 256GB of memory, why you hating on obsidian?" then go kick rocks. The fucking lot of you. Are you fucking kidding me.8 -
Tldr; its a long introduction
Hi Ranters,
I've been on this app for quite a while now. As a shy cat watching from a distance and reading all kinds of rants. Anywho I feel comfortable enough to crawl out of my shell and introduce myself. Since I feel you guys together made such a pleasant and safe community, I'm really happy to be a part of it!
Anyway I'm Sam, 24 year old, from the Netherlands. My favorite color is green. Mostly the green you can find in nature. The one that calms you down:). I'm a very introverted person but always very curious and eager to learn new things.
I started to program when I was 12. I did assembly and C++. Because I liked making cheats for online games. Later I learned about C#, Java and Python. Mostly used it for web stuff, scraping, services etc. But also chatbots (for Skype for example).
Currently I'm 2 years in as a data scientist, mostly working in Python.
But on the side as a hobby and with an ambition I have a basic understanding of full stack development.
Mostly Nodejs, express, mongo, and frontend, no frameworks.
(I will later ask you guys some more questions about that! I could really use some advice!)
Anyway enough about me! Tell a bit about yourselves! Happy to get to know you all a little better!22 -
“Debugging is actually all about finding the bug. About understanding why the bug was there to begin with. About knowing that it’s existence was no accident.”
Mr.robot1 -
I am the manager of a customer service team of about 10-12 members. Most of the team members are right out of school and this is their first professional job and their ages range from 22-24. I am about 10 years older than all of my employees. We have a great team and great working relationships. They all do great work and we have established a great team culture.
Well, a couple of months ago, I noticed something odd that my team (and other employees in the building) started doing. They would see each other in the hallways or break room and say “quack quack” like a duck. I assumed this was an inside joke and thought nothing of it and wrote it off as playful silliness or thought I perhaps missed a moment in a recent movie or TV show to which the quacks were referring.
Fast forward a few months. I needed to do some printing and our printer is in a room that can be locked by anyone when it is in use (our team often has large volumes of printing they need to do and it helps to be able to sort things in there by yourself, as multiple people can get their pages mixed up and it turns into a mess). The door had been locked the entire day and this was around noon, and the manager I have the key to the door in case someone forgot to unlock it when they left. I walked in, and there were two of my employees on the couch in the copier room having sex. I immediately closed the door and left.
This was last week and as you can imagine things are very awkward between the three of us. I haven’t addressed the situation yet because of a few factors: This was during both of their lunch hours. They were not doing this on the clock (they had both clocked out, I immediately checked). We have an understanding that you can go or do anything on your lunch that you want, as long as you’re back after an hour. Also, as you mentioned in your answer last week to the person who overheard their coworker involved in “adult activities,” these people are adults and old enough to make their own choices.
But that’s not the end of the story. That same day, after my team had left, I was wrapping up and putting a meeting agenda on each of their desks for our meeting the next day. Out in broad daylight on the guys desk (one of the employees I had caught in the printing room) was a piece of paper at the top that said “Duck Club.” Underneath it, it had a list of locations of places in and around the office followed by “points.” 25 points – president’s desk, 10 points – car in the parking lot, 20 points – copier room, etc.
So here is my theory about what is going on (and I think I am right). This “Duck Club” is a club people at work where people get “points” for having sex in these locations around the office. I think that is also where the quacking comes into play. Perhaps this is some weird mating call between members to let them know they want to get some “points” with the other person, and if they quack back, they meet up somewhere to “score.” The two I caught in the copier room I have heard “quacking” before.
I know this is all extremely weird. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to write you because of how weird this seems (plus I was a little embarrassed). I have no idea what to do. As I mentioned above, they weren’t on the clock when this happened, they’re all adults, and technically I broke a rule by entering the copier room when it was locked, and would have never caught them if I had obeyed that rule. The only company rule I can think of that these two broke is using the copier room for other purposes, preventing someone else from using it.
I would love to know your opinion on this. I tend to want to sweep it under the rug because I’m kind of a shy person and would be extremely embarrassed to bring it up.21 -
I started my internship at the end of the year..
Fuck my ass!!! This code I have to work with is a huge pile of shit.
The code base I need to work with is around 40k LOC. It is a mixture of C++, C, Java, Python, Bash and I think I saw some lonely js files around.
A list of awesome parts:
- Paths are hard coded.
- Redundant code everywhere
- No documentation or inline comments available
Most of the comments in the code are just old code that is not used anymore. But the cherry on the turd is the class that should provide all kind of useful functions in my daily routine. About ninety percent of the functions have the same description or nothing. Sometimes a function name says "readSomethingFromSomewhere" but instead it writes something to a file. It is really confusing and I need to check everything twice instead of rely on what the function name promises.
I have also learned why copy paste isn't that good. The brief descriptions of every method in a files are always the same.
getName() - Description: Fork child process
getIp() - Description: Fork child process
getIpv6() - Description: Fork child process.
Surprise: None of these functions forks a child process. :D
Another awesome feature is the thing that they store up to five different versions of libraries. Everyone with slight modifications but no hint which one you need to use. Sometimes it is the newest, sometimes the oldest which is running in production. Another case of try and error.
Oh and my dev machine is a potato with a power supply and a fan. I started with NetBeans and every time I compiled the code it sounds like the machine wants to lift off and leave for a better place. (At this point I switched to Emacs and everything runs smoothly now)
At first I thought that I'm just not that good at coding and understanding a big project from scratch but some colleagues have the same problem. The whole system is very inflexible and it is all about "std::cout"-debugging to check if your changes do what you want them to do.
Currently I'm just trying to fix this mess to make the life for the next student or employee easier. The first month was just frustrating as hell. I need to ask so many questions and most of the time the answer was "I don't know, haven't touched this code in years". Needless to say that my progress isn't that awesome but at least I get a nice payment for 20 hours of work a week.2 -
Both apps I'm working on have legacy code:
iOS app has 100's and 1000's of lines of code with no documentation, no proper naming conventions and cut and pasted code off the net.
Android app has skeleton code from a Spanish taxi app + remnants of a funeral webcasting app, there's also the same no documentation, bad naming conventions and cut and paste code off the net.
The server is also as bad, it had methods that we're never used, I for one don't fully understand the server but from what I can see it's a mess.
I had a hard time understanding both apps and gladly majority of the modifications I made we're not including existing stuff, so I guess I just basically pilled my code onto of the already existing software.
I would have gladly started from scratch given the chance.8 -
I gave up on learning math as a young person because no one was ever interested in teaching it in a way that made sense to me.
But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve started working on a pet projects that require understanding of (what I would consider) fairly advanced geometry, which as it turns out is called computational geometry. And it’s fun.
I just look back at the time I was afraid of this stuff with regret. All because my teachers weren’t terribly interested in teaching, but more interested in fulfilling useless metrics that only make it look like students are learning when they’re actually not.12 -
That I am not good enough for this shit.
Recently left my job because anxiety, a lot of it.
Tbh, I should not burntout myself, because:
- salary was a shit
- the scrum was a lie, there was no end of the sprint, so no retrospective meeting ever done.
- They change the """sprint""" task pile at any moment, usually adding more tasks for the same sprint.
- previous project manager was an idiot who said "yes" at EVERYTHING the client asked, even if the request was outside tje scope of the project.
The project was heavily delayed, and I was the only developer left on the most hideous backend you can imagine (the code was just tje very definition of "what not to do"). NO UNIT TESTING at all.
My task: clean the mess so we have a """stable""" release (with the tests), add the new features and re-do the backend again, but this time properly.
8 months of develop for this shit and they wanted the stable-shit-backend in a month and the new backend in other month "because everithing was already done in the shitty one". Do not forget the new features too.
So, I was doing the imposible to try to do tje task, overdoing hours and reading the docs of the project (because I was new in it), but it take me.a lot of effort to simply correct bugs because of complexity of the code and not understanding fully some parts of the project.
Then the comments like "why this is not finished yet?" Or "I do not understand why this is taking so long"
So, I had poor sleep, I was anxious because my inhability to do the imposible and in the end, a feeling kind of defeated because I quit.
So... that.
Sorry if something is wrong typed or so, english is not my native language.5 -
I do believe, genuinely that “I don’t know” is sometimes an acceptable answer. If you don’t know, you don’t know. I appreciate the honesty.
But at the same time
I don’t know how much longer I can take “I don’t know” as an answer from my boss when I ask about critical business things HE tasked me with, or things relating to career development and maximizing my time with this company.
Do I need my boss to have all the answers on company revenue? No.
Do I need my boss to at least have an understanding on wtf is going with projects when my priorities get changed mid-project for the 4th time? Hell yes.4 -
I don't know if I'm being pranked or not, but I work with my boss and he has the strangest way of doing things.
- Only use PHP
- Keep error_reporting off (for development), Site cannot function if they are on.
- 20,000 lines of functions in a single file, 50% of which was unused, mostly repeated code that could have been reduced massively.
- Zero Code Comments
- Inconsistent variable names, function names, file names -- I was literally project searching for months to find things.
- There is nothing close to a normalized SQL Database, column ID names can't even stay consistent.
- Every query is done with a mysqli wrapper to use legacy mysql functions.
- Most used function is to escape stirngs
- Type-hinting is too strict for the code.
- Most files packed with Inline CSS, JavaScript and PHP - we don't want to use an external file otherwise we'd have to open two of them.
- Do not use a package manger composer because he doesn't have it installed.. Though I told him it's easy on any platform and I'll explain it.
- He downloads a few composer packages he likes and drag/drop them into random folder.
- Uses $_GET to set values and pass them around like a message contianer.
- One file is 6000 lines which is a giant if statement with somewhere close to 7 levels deep of recursion.
- Never removes his old code that bloats things.
- Has functions from a decade ago he would like to save to use some day. Just regular, plain old, PHP functions.
- Always wants to build things from scratch, and re-using a lot of his code that is honestly a weird way of doing almost everything.
- Using CodeIntel, Mess Detectors, Error Detectors is not good or useful.
- Would not deploy to production through any tool I setup, though I was told to. Instead he wrote bash scripts that still make me nervous.
- Often tells me to make something modern/great (reinventing a wheel) and then ends up saying, "I think I'd do it this way... Referes to his code 5 years ago".
- Using isset() breaks things.
- Tens of thousands of undefined variables exist because arrays are creates like $this[][][] = 5;
- Understanding the naming of functions required me to write several documents.
- I had to use #region tags to find places in the code quicker since a router was about 2000 lines of if else statements.
- I used Todo Bookmark extensions in VSCode to mark and flag everything that's a bug.
- Gets upset if I add anything to .gitignore; I tried to tell him it ignores files we don't want, he is though it deleted them for a while.
- He would rather explain every line of code in a mammoth project that follows no human known patterns, includes files that overwrite global scope variables and wants has me do the documentation.
- Open to ideas but when I bring them up such as - This is what most standards suggest, here's a literal example of exactly what you want but easier - He will passively decide against it and end up working on tedious things not very necessary for project release dates.
- On another project I try to write code but he wants to go over every single nook and cranny and stay on the phone the entire day as I watch his screen and Im trying to code.
I would like us all to do well but I do not consider him a programmer but a script-whippersnapper. I find myself trying to to debate the most basic of things (you shouldnt 777 every file), and I need all kinds of evidence before he will do something about it. We need "security" and all kinds of buzz words but I'm scared to death of this code. After several months its a nice place to work but I am convinced I'm being pranked or my boss has very little idea what he's doing. I've worked in a lot of disasters but nothing like this.
We are building an API, I could use something open source to help with anything from validations, routing, ACL but he ends up reinventing the wheel. I have never worked so slow, hindered and baffled at how I am supposed to build anything - nothing is stable, tested, and rarely logical. I suggested many things but he would rather have small talk and reason his way into using things he made.
I could fhave this project 50% done i a Node API i two weeks, pretty fast in a PHP or Python one, but we for reasons I have no idea would rather go slow and literally "build a framework". Two knuckleheads are going to build a PHP REST framework and compete with tested, tried and true open source tools by tens of millions?
I just wanted to rant because this drives me crazy. I have so much stress my neck and shoulder seems like a nerve is pinched. I don't understand what any of this means. I've never met someone who was wrong about so many things but believed they were right. I just don't know what to say so often on call I just say, 'uhh..'. It's like nothing anyone or any authority says matters, I don't know why he asks anything he's going to do things one way, a hard way, only that he can decipher. He's an owner, he's not worried about job security.13 -
At work, my closest relation is with the DBA. Dude is a genius when it comes to proper database management as well as having a very high level of understanding concerning server administration, how he got that good at that I have no clue, he just says that he likes to fuck around with servers, Linux in particular although he also knows a lot about Windows servers.
Thing is, the dude used to work as a dev way back when VB pre VB.NET was all the rage and has been generating different small tools for his team of analysts(I used to be a part of his team) to use with only him maintaining them. He mentioned how he did not like how Microsoft just said fk u to VB6 developers, but that he was happy as long as he could use VB. He relearned how to do most of the GUI stuff he was used to do with VB6 into VB.NEt and all was good with the world. I have seen his code, proper OOP practices and architectural decisions, etc etc. Nothing to complain about his code, seems easy enough to extend, properly documented as well.
Then he got with me in order to figure out how to breach the gap between building GUI applications into web form, so that we could just host those apps in one of our servers and his users go from there, boy was he not prepared to see the amount of fuckery that we do in the web development world. Last time my dude touched web development there was still Classic ASP with JScript and VBScript(we actually had the same employer at one point in the past in which I had to deal with said technology, not bad, but definitely not something I recommend for the current state of web development) and decided that the closest thing to what he was used was either PHP(which he did not enjoy, no problem with that really, he just didn't click with the language) and WebForms using VB.NET, which he also did not like on account of them basically being on support mode since Microsoft is really pushing for people to adopt dotnet core.
After came ASP.NET with MVC, now, he did like it, but still had that lil bug in his head that told him that sticking to core was probably a better idea since he was just starting, why not start with the newest and greatest? Then in hit(both of us actually) that to this day Microsoft still not has command line templates for building web applications in .net core using VB.NET. I thought it was weird, so I decided to look into. Turns out, that without using Razor, you can actually build Web APIs with VB.NET just fine if you just convert a C# template into VB.NET, the process was...err....tricky, and not something we would want to do for other projects, with that in we decided to look into Microsoft's reasons to not have VB.NET. We discovered how Microsoft is not keeping the same language features between both languages, having crown C# as the language of choice for everything Microsoft, to this point, it seems that Microsoft was much more focused in developing features for the excellent F# way more than it ever had for VB.NET at this point and that it was not a major strategy for them to adapt most of the .net core functionality inside of VB, we found articles when the very same Microsoft team stated of how they will be slowly adding the required support for VB and that on version 5 we would definitely have proper support for VB.NET ALTHOUGH they will not be adding any new development into the language.
Past experience with Microsoft seems to point at them getting more and more ready to completely drop the language, it does not matter how many people use it, they would still kill it :P I personally would rather keep it, or open source the language's features so that people can keep adding support to it(if they can of course) because of its historical significance rather than them just completely dropping the language. I prefer using C#, and most of my .net core applications use C#, its very similar to Java on a lot of things(although very much different in others) and I am fine with it being the main language. I just think that it sucks to leave such a large developer pool in the shadows with their preferred tool of choice and force them to use something else just like that.
My boy is currently looking at how I developed a sample api with validation, user management, mediatR and a custom project structure as well as a client side application using React and typescript swappable with another one built using Angular(i wanted to test the differences to see which one I prefer, React with Typescript is beautiful, would not want to use it without it) and he is hating every minute of it on account of how complex frontend development has become :V
Just wanted to vent a little about a non bothersome situation.8 -
So, this is probably somewhat esoteric but...
While studying at university I had a "programming paradigms" module, dunno why they called it that, it was more like "introduction to functional programming".
So, it's kinda mind bending, we'd only really started to get our heads around classical object oriented programming and they throw functional programming at us.
It's worse than that though, for do they use an established language, like lisp/scheme, functional Python, or even given Haskell?
No, of course they didn't. They taught us Oz.
You probably won't have heard of it, but this language is burned into the back of my brain, along with a vague understanding of the n-queens problem we had to solve graphically (using qTk, which I dunno if someone took qt and tk and blended them, I stopped asking questions after a while).
To top it off did this language (at the time) have a stand alone interpreter? Did it buggery! It was coupled to the Mozart programming system, which is just Emacs (which has a bloody lisp built into it,so close, yet so far 😭).
It gets worse, though, oh does it get worse, for pause dear reader and consider, have you ever heard of Mozart/oz before, I'd put money on most of you had not heard of it until today.
For, you see, I believe at the time of writing, one, yes, ONE text book exists on this language. When I was doing my assignment there was merely some published conference notes and language design documents.
That's not all, I was not the only one experiencing difficulties with this language, someone in the class ended up pouring through the mailing lists and found the very tutor teaching the class struggling at first to understand the language.
I had to repeat that year. The functional programming class was one semester.
When I retook that year, it was a whole year long. However, halfway through the year, original tutor was fired and a new tutor was hired to teach the language.
He was, understandably, just as confused as we were.
There was a Starbucks and a pub equidistant from the lecture hall, though in opposite directions. From lecture to lecture we had no idea which one we'd end up in.
I have reason to believe Mozart/Oz it some sort of otherworldly abomination designed to give students the occasional nightmare flashback, long after they've left.
My room had post it notes, sheets of paper, print outs, diagrams, doodles and pens, just stuck to the wall, I looked like a raving lunatic three hours away from being institutionalised. There was string connecting one diagram to the next and images of a chess queen all over. As I attempted to solve the n-queens problem.
Madmans knowledge, I call it. I can never unlearn all that, in fact it seeps into much of the code I write. Such information was not meant for the minds of a simple country bumpkin such as myself...
Mozart/Oz... I wouldn't be the programmer I am today without it, and that's frankly terrifying...10 -
I don't know if this is the same thing everywhere over the world, but, in France, where I live, there's something that infuriates me on so many levels.
Dear HRs,
When you're processing through a recruitement process, you'll publish a job offer. In 95% of these offers, I notice things that follows the same pattern : "We require a highly trained developer in [insert language 1], especially with the [insert a framework from language 2] framework". This often happens when you're talking about Java in first place, but then switching to Javascript.
Please, dear HRs,
GET YOUR SH*T TOGETHER ! I don't know, ask to some of your developers to review your offer, to spot these beginner mistakes. This is an automatic turn-off for me when I notice this king of bullsh*t in job offers, and I understand that the person that wrote this offer has no fucking idea of the business his/her company is dealing with.
Later, these people are those who will interview you with generic IT questions, that they have no idea about what a correct answer might be, and they will only check if your answer matches what is written on their cheat sheet. If you're lucky enough, some people from the actual business will be with the interview crew, so you can actually expect some kind of understanding.
*angrily goes back to looking for a job*4 -
Fucking non technical managers and their shitty clients to whom they suck their tiny weiners need to realise that I cannot reorder elements every 10 minutes to the shape of their fart comming out of their ass, test it, deploy it, trigger webhook, clear cloudflare cache, and meanwhile be sure that it's written in quality manner for future upkeep with commits that have sense.Hope deadline driven development dies in hell where it belongs
-
"There's more to it"
This is something that has been bugging me for a long time now, so <rant>.
Yesterday in one of my chats in Telegram I had a question from someone wanting to make their laptop completely bulletproof privacy respecting, yada yada.. down to the MAC address being randomized. Now I am a networking guy.. or at least I like to think I am.
So I told him, routers must block any MAC addresses from leaking out. So the MAC address is only relevant inside of the network you're in. IPv6 changes this and there is network discovery involved with fandroids and cryphones where WiFi remains turned on as you leave the house (price of convenience amirite?) - but I'll get back to that later.
Now for a laptop MAC address randomization isn't exactly relevant yet I'd say.. at least in something other than Windows where your privacy is right out the window anyway. MAC randomization while Nadella does the whole assfuck, sign me up! /s
So let's assume Linux. No MAC randomization, not necessary, privacy respecting nonetheless. MAC addresses do not leak outside of the network in traditional IPv4 networking. So what would you be worried about inside the network? A hacker inside Starbucks? This is the question I asked him, and argued that if you don't trust the network (and with a public hotspot I personally don't) you shouldn't connect to it in the first place. And since I recall MAC randomization being discussed on the ISC's dhcp-users mailing list a few months ago (http://isc-dhcp-users.2343191.n4.nabble.com/...), I linked that in as well. These are the hardcore networking guys, on the forum of one of the granddaddies of the internet. They make BIND which pretty much everyone uses. It's the de facto standard DNS server out there.
The reply to all of this was simply to the "don't connect to it if you don't trust it" - I guess that's all the privacy nut could argue with. And here we get to the topic of this rant. The almighty rebuttal "there's more to it than that!1! HTTPS doesn't require trust anymore!1!"
... An encrypted connection to a website meaning that you could connect to just about any hostile network. Are you fucking retarded? Ever heard of SSL stripping? Yeah HSTS solves that but only a handful of websites use it and it doesn't scale up properly, since it's pretty much a hardcoded list in web browsers. And you know what? Yes "there's more to it"! There's more to networking than just web browsing. There's 65 THOUSAND ports available on both TCP and UDP, and there you go narrow your understanding of networking to just 2 of them - 80 and 443. Yes there's a lot more to it. But not exactly the kind of thing you're arguing about.
Enjoy your cheap-ass Xiaomeme phone where the "phone" part means phoning home to China, and raging about the Google apps on there. Then try to solve problems that aren't actually problems and pretty vital network components, just because it's an identifier.
</rant>
P.S. I do care a lot about privacy. My web and mail servers for example do not know where my visitors are coming from. All they see is some reverse proxies that they think is the whole internet. So yes I care about my own and others' privacy. But you know.. I'm old-fashioned. I like to solve problems with actual solutions.11 -
I wanna meet the dumbass that decided it was a good idea to teach scratch, basic, java, or even python as a first programming language course in college.
I’m so sick of seeing developers out of with shitty code structure and practices, and absolutely no understanding of what is going on behind the scenes of the IDE when you push run.
In order to be a good engineer you MUST know the basics, the root level, bare bones, bare metal shit.
I fear the future, less and less software engineers are comming out of colleges, the majority today is script kiddies, and folks with some basic java experience.
Who the hell is going to be writing firmware in the future then?
It’s insane the lack of foundational skills these students get in college. If they would get a strong foundation in C, and C++ they can easily attack at problem in any language, but missing the foundation, and relying on IDEs.. you will never be-able to go from a knowing only a high level languages and scripts to Lower level problems.
RIP the future of Software Engineering
Welcome to the hell full of script kiddies27 -
Alright lads here is the thing, have not been posting anything other than replies to things cuz I have been busy being miserable at school and dealing with work stuff.
Our manager left us back in February. Because she was leaving I decided that I wanted to try a different path and went on to become a programmer analyst for my institution, if anything I knew that it was going to be pretty boring work, but it came with nice monetary compensation and a foot in the door for other data science related jobs in the future. Thing is, the department head asked me to stay in the web technologies department because we had a lack of people there and hiring is hard as shit, we do not do remote jobs since our work usually requires a level of discretion and security. Thus I have been working in the web tech department since she left albeit with a different title since I aced the interview for the analyst position and the team there were more than happy to have me. I have done very few things for them, some reports here and there and mostly working directly with the DBA in some projects. One migration project would have costed my institution a total of 58k and we managed to save the cost by building the migration software ourselves.....honestly it was a fucking cake walk, if you had any doubts about the shaddyness of enterprise level applications regarding selling overpriced shit with different levels of complexity, keep them, enterprise is shaddy af indeed. But I digress.
I wrote the specification for the manager position along the previous manager, we had decided that the next candidate needed to be strong with development knowledge as well as other things as to properly understand and manage a software team, we made the academic requirement(fuck you, yes we did ask for academic requirements) to be either in the Computer Science/software engineering area or at least on the Business Administration side. We were willing to consider BA holders in exchange for having knowledge of the development process of different products and a complete understanding of what developers go through. NOT ONE SINGLE motherfucker was able to satisfy this, some of them were idiots that I knew from before that had ABSOLUTELY no business even considering applying to the position, the courage it took for some of these assholes to apply would have hurt their mothers, their God if they had one, and their country, they were just that fucking bad in their jobs as well as being overall shit people.
Then we had 1 candidate actually fall through the cracks enough to get an interview. My dude here was lying out of his ass through the interview process. According to him he had "lots of Laravel experience and experience managing Laravel projects" and mentioned repeatedly how it would be a technology that we should consider for our products. I was to interview him alongside the vice president of our institution due to the head of my department and the rest of the managers for I.T being on vacation leave all at the same bloody time.
Backstory before the interview:
Whilst I was going over the interview questions with the vice president literally offered me the job instead. I replied with honesty, reflecting how I did not originally wanted him but feeling that our institution was ready to settle on any candidate due to the lack of potentials. He was happy to do it since apparently both him and the HOD were expecting me to step up sooner or later. I was floored.
Regardless, out of kindness he wanted to go through the interview.
So, going back to the interview. As soon as the person in question referenced the framework I started to ask him about it, just simple questions, the first was "what are your thoughts on the Eloquent ORM? I am not too fond of it and want to know what you as a full time laravel dev think of it"
his reply: "I am sorry I am not too familiar with it, I don't know what that is" <--- I appreciated his honesty in this but thought it funny that someone would say that he was a Laravel developer whilst not knowing what an ORM was since you can't really get away from using it on the initial stages of learning about Laravel, maybe if one wanted to go through the hurdle of switching to something like doctrine...but even then, it was....odd.
So I met with the hod when he came back, he was stoked at the prospect of having me become the manager and I happily accepted the position. It will be hell, but I don't even need to hit the ground running since I have been the face of the department since ages. My team were ecstatic about it since we are all close friends and they have been following my directions without complaints(but the ocational eat a dick puto) for some time, we work well together and we are happy to finally have someone to stop the constant barrage that comes from people taking advantage of a missing manager.
Its gonna get good, its gonna get fun, and i am getting to see how shit goes.7 -
People who complain about wordpress have probably never tried working with Magento.
I've been going through their documentation for about 3 hours now, trying to figure out how this entire system works. And I'm no where close to understanding it...9 -
In a forum far far away...
<user> I need help understanding something about this library.
<various users> This is how it works. This is something to consider. Here is a good way to learn all of this. etc Really helpful people.
<user> I would say more about what I want to do, but I don't want to receive any more "mouthful of unsolicited advises ".
Really? You fucking ask a question on a forum about what you want to learn. Everyone there takes it seriously and provides some really golden shit on how to learn the topic. Then you shit on them for daring to provide ways to learn the topic?
I don't know if this is a language barrier, or if they are using Google translate. I have no idea. But they come across as an asshole.6 -
I think that two criterias are important:
- don't block my productivity
- author should have his userbase in mind
1) Some simple anti examples:
- Windows popping up a big fat blue screen screaming for updates. Like... Go suck some donkey balls you stupid shit that's totally irritating you arsehole.
- Graphical tools having no UI concept. E.g. Adobes PDF reader - which was minimalized in it's UI and it became just unbearable pain. When the concept is to castrate the user in it's abilities and call the concept intuitive, it's not a concept it's shit. Other examples are e.g. GEdit - which was severely massacred in Gnome 3 if I remember correctly (never touched Gnome ever again. I was really put off because their concept just alienated me)
- Having an UI concept but no consistency. Eg. looking at a lot of large web apps, especially Atlassian software.
Too many times I had e.g. a simple HTML form. In menu 1 you could use enter. In menu 2 Enter does not work. in another menu Enter works, but it doesn't submit the form it instead submits the whole page... Which can end in clusterfuck.
Yaaayyyy.
- Keyboard usage not possible at all.
It becomes a sad majority.... Pressing tab, not switching between form fields. Looking for keyboard shortcuts, not finding any. Yes, it's a graphical interface. But the charm of 16 bit interfaces (YES. I'm praising DOS interfaces) was that once you memorized the necessary keyboard strokes... You were faster than lightning. Ever seen e.g. a good pharmacist, receptionist or warehouse clerk... most of the software is completely based on short keyboard strokes, eg. for a receptionist at a doctor for the ICD code / pharmaceutical search et cetera.
- don't poop rainbows. I mean it.
I love colors. When they make sense. but when I use some software, e.g. netdata, I think an epilepsy warning would be fair. Too. Many. Neon. Colors. -.-
2) It should be obvious... But it's become a burden.
E.g. when asked for a release as there were some fixes... Don't point to the install from master script. Maybe you like it rolling release style - but don't enforce it please. It's hard to use SHA256 hash as a version number and shortening the hash might be a bad idea.
Don't start experiments. If it works - don't throw everything over board without good reasons. E.g. my previous example of GEdit: Turning a valuable text editor into a minimalistic unusable piece of crap and calling it a genius idea for the sake of simplicity... Nope. You murdered a successful product.
Gnome 3 felt like a complete experiment and judging from the last years of changes in the news it was an rather unsuccessful one... As they gave up quite a few of their ideas.
When doing design stuff or other big changes make it a community event or at least put a poll up on the github page. Even If it's an small user base, listen to them instead of just randomly fucking them over.
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One of my favorite projects is a texteditor called Kate from KDE.
It has a ton of features, could even be seen as a small IDE. The reason I love it because one of the original authors still cares for his creation and ... It never failed me. I use Kate since over 20 years now I think... Oo
Another example is the git cli. It's simple and yet powerful. git add -i is e.g. a thing I really really really love. (memorize the keyboard shortcuts and you'll chunk up large commits faster than flash.
Curl. Yes. The (http) download tool. It's author still cares. It's another tool I use since 20 years. And it has given me a deep insight of how HTTP worked, new protocols and again. It never failed me. It is such a fucking versatile thing. TLS debugging / performance measurements / what the frigging fuck is going on here. Take curl. Find it out.
My worst enemies....
Git based clients. I just hate them. Mostly because they fill the niche of explaining things (good) but completely nuke the learning of git (very bad). You can do any git action without understanding what you do and even worse... They encourage bad workflows.
I've seen great devs completely fucking up git and crying because they had really no fucking clue what git actually does. The UI lead them on the worst and darkest path imaginable. :(
Atlassian products. On the one hand... They're not total shit. But the mass of bugs and the complete lack of interest of Atlassian towards their customers and the cloud movement.... Ouch. Just ouch.
I had to deal with a lot of completely borked up instances and could trace it back to a bug tracking entry / atlassian, 2 - 3 years old with the comment: vote for this, we'll work on a Bugfix. Go fuck yourself you pisswads.
Microsoft Office / Windows. Oh boy.
I could fill entire days of monologues.
It's bad, hmkay?
XEN.
This is not bad.
This is more like kill it before it lays eggs.
The deeper I got into XEN, the more I wanted to lay in a bathtub full of acid to scrub of the feelings of shame... How could anyone call this good?!?????4 -
So here's my problem. I've been employed at my current company for the last 12 months (next week is my 1 year anniversary) and I've never been as miserable in a development job as this.
I feel so upset and depressed about working in this company that getting out of bed and into the car to come here is soul draining. I used to spend hours in the evenings studying ways to improve my code, and was insanely passionate about the product, but all of this has been exterminated due to the following reasons.
Here's my problems with this place:
1 - Come May 2019 I'm relocating to Edinburgh, Scotland and my current workplace would not allow remote working despite working here for the past year in an office on my own with little interaction with anyone else in the company.
2 - There is zero professionalism in terms of work here, with there being no testing, no planning, no market research of ideas for revenue generation – nothing. This makes life incredibly stressful. This has led to countless situations where product A was expected, but product B was delivered (which then failed to generate revenue) as well as a huge amount of development time being wasted.
3 - I can’t work in a business that lives paycheck to paycheck. I’ve never been somewhere where the salary payment had to be delayed due to someone not paying us on time. My last paycheck was 4 days late.
4 - The management style is far too aggressive and emotion driven for me to be able to express my opinions without some sort of backlash.
5 - My opinions are usually completely smashed down and ignored, and no apology is offered when it turns out that they’re 100% correct in the coming months.
6 - I am due a substantial pay rise due to the increase of my skills, increase of experience, and the time of being in the company, and I think if the business cannot afford to pay £8 per month for email signatures, then I know it cannot afford to give me a pay rise.
7 - Despite having continuously delivered successful web development projects/tasks which have increased revenue, I never receive any form of thanks or recognition. It makes me feel like I am not cared about in this business in the slightest.
8 - The business fails to see potential and growth of its employees, and instead criticises based on past behaviour. 'Josh' (fake name) is a fine example of this. He was always slated by 'Tom' and 'Jerry' as being worthless, and lazy. I trained him in 2 weeks to perform some basic web development tasks using HTML, CSS, Git and SCSS, and he immediately saw his value outside of this company and left achieving a 5k pay rise during. He now works in an environment where he is constantly challenged and has reviews with his line manager monthly to praise him on his excellent work and diverse set of skills. This is not rocket science. This is how you keep employees motivated and happy.
9 - People in the business with the least or zero technical understanding or experience seem to be endlessly defining technical deadlines. This will always result in things going wrong. Before our mobile app development agency agreed on the user stories, they spent DAYS going through the specification with their developers to ensure they’re not going to over promise and under deliver.
10 - The fact that the concept of ‘stealing data’ from someone else’s website by scraping it daily for the information is not something this company is afraid to do, only further bolsters the fact that I do not want to work in such an unethical, pathetic organisation.
11 - I've been told that the MD of the company heard me on the phone to an agency (as a developer, I get calls almost every week), and that if I do it again, that the MD apparently said he would dock my pay for the time that I’m on the phone. Are you serious?! In what world is it okay for the MD of a company to threaten to punish their employees for thinking about leaving?! Why not make an attempt at nurturing them and trying to find out why they’re upset, and try to retain the talent.
Now... I REALLY want to leave immediately. Hand my notice in and fly off. I'll have 4 weeks notice to find a new role, and I'll be on garden leave effective immediately, but it's scary knowing that I may not find a role.
My situation is difficult as I can't start a new role unless it's remote or a local short term contract because my moving situation in May, and as a Junior to Mid Level developer, this isn't the easiest thing to do on the planet.
I've got a few interviews lined up (one of which was a final interview which I completed on Friday) but its still scary knowing that I may not find a new role within 4 weeks.
Advice? Thoughts? Criticisms?
Love you DevRant <33 -
Honestly, mentoring is in my opinion the best part of the job. My firts mentee was a student in my last job, smart af but lazy and unable to trust in herself. I wasn't really too sure in myself at the time either but since I had to teach hery craft there was no place for me to doubt myself.
So I taught her everything I knew and in turn I learned to trust myself and once I had mastered the art of self confidence I could make her believe in herself. Since then I trained five more test automation engineers, some of them might be close to surpassing their 'master' (though won't make it easy for them 😏) and with every Single one I've developed a deeper understanding of my craft by explaining. I needed to research stuff I never questioned to answer their questions and therefor became better at what I do.
Three weeks ago I got an email from the girl I first mentored, she's in another company now and she thanked me for what I taught her. In my opinion I did a rwally Bad job at it (it was my first time teaching) but reading someone actually believing that one made an impact in their life is something special.
I always loved talking about my craft and I love sharing the knowledge I aquired. Test automation is not a thankfull craft but I'm always happy whenever I can interest someone in it and I fully enjoy seeing them grow and improve into fully fledged TAEs. -
So before the Age of JavaScript, when programming was trying to be an engineering discipline, I felt like we were getting close to figuring out what worked and what didn't. We had rules of thumb (more general than Patterns) and code smells.
Then JavaScript came in and no one had time to think about "engineering" anymore. I'm fine with MVP and small iterations, but the disdain I see for making code clean and extendable and improvable is baffling (and annoying). First-time coders might never have had to fix someone else's code, but two weeks in a chair should have fixed that.
It's not that understanding code is so hard (although it can be); understanding the _intent_ is hard. This MVP is great, but when no one had time to document what is actually supposed to happen, programmers have to reverse-engineer the *design*.4 -
A story from around 2005:
Customer laying out specifications: “We expect this software to need to last 25 years or so, and it will need to keep historical file processing data by dates for at least that long, assume storage is no issue.”
Devs at the time: “look best I can do is support that start with 200 or 201, anything else is really too much to ask. Also understanding how to work with dates at all and not just string manipulation is waaaaayyy hard yo.”
Fuck you lazy motherfuckers. This is why people thought Y2K would be a problem. -
Like someone else already mentioned here, remember that interview goes both ways: youre there to gauge wether workplace suits you or no. Always ask to meet teamleads/project leads or potential colleagues before accepting the job and try talking with them.
I applied to 3 jobs and in all of them managers did put a brave face and told me lots of bs just to get me accept the job. Managers live in their own world, sometimes they dont even know what you will be working on.
Once I accepted a job and got stuck with a perfectionist teamlead for 8 months which could have been avoided given I had the chance to catch the bad vibes during the interview.
Another time I accepted a job and had to work with a backend guy for one year and his accent was so thick+stuttering that I had trouble in understanding anything he says. Every conversation felt like trivia contest. I wish I had knew that stuff before accepting the job -
This Book....
Before doing any systems programming you should definitely read this book... most people think they know what they are doing but in fact they are completely clueless and the worst part is you don’t realize how clueless you are... you don’t know what you don’t know nor do you know how much you really don’t know.. a most people are part of this group, including myself lol.
Computers are much more than a bunch of CPUs, buses and peripherals. (Embedded folks realize this). But this goes beyond embedded this is a systems book, on architecture of computers in general.
Learning only java and the java/C# python and the others SDK/Api and spending your life with horse blinders for what’s going on below only sets you up for failure in the future, and when you that point it’s gonna be a shocker. Could be tomorrow could be 20 years from now, but most people with those horseblinders get to that point and have that “experience” no avoiding the inevitable lol.
I really enjoyed this book in their quantitative approach to teaching the subject. Especially understanding parallelism and multi core systems.
5 -
http requests
literally the bread and butter of any software engineer building applications, you would ASSUME they know what they are doing...
and you're gonna write a seperate http get and post function for every type you have?
apparently stuff like this that is written by "senior" developers? you don't even have a basic understanding of software...
i'm won't do it that way, becuase i'm an adult, not a child
what i'm going to do is write a HTTP request util function that can be used for any type and HTTP verb. DRY, single responsibility, etc.
imagine making the http request itself a responsibility coupled to the type 😂😂😂😂
get a clue and come back later
i can't tell anymore if my thoughts are so outlandish compared to everyone else that no one understands them, or if i've been doing this so long that i just immediately understand what needs to be done and don't know how to explain it to anyone else anymore (or take the mental effort to)
peace out
oh P.S.: imagine thinking the SOLID principles are only applicable to OOP
stay safe out there folks, its getting more painful every day
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Oh gosh... This week a "friend" of mine will have a job interview for a company I am working at. This guy really just can't Code. He has no understanding of clean code, abstraction etc. He just knows the basics. But he loves to brag how good he is and got his bachelor degree. Damn I hate this guy and I hope HR won't hire him.7
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Best: Writing my first bash script, understanding Object Oriented programming
Worst: Dealing with team members who claim to have work experience but in reality have no clue why they are doing what they are doing -
I thought of posting this as a comment to @12bit float' post, but then decided it better goes out as a post by itself.
https://devrant.com/rants/5291843/...
My second employer, where I am on my last week of notice currently, is building a no code/low code tool.
Since this was my first job switch, I was in a dreamy phase and was super excited about this whole space. I indeed got to learn like crazy.
Upon joining, I realised that an ideal user persona for this product was a developer. Wow! No code tool for developer. sO cOoL...
We started building it and as obvious as it could get, the initial goal was adoption because we were still at top of the funnel.
We launched an alpha release shortly followed by a beta.
Nobody used it. Tech XLT/LT kept pushing product and design team to run a feature factory so that their teams can use this tool.
The culture set by those two leaders was toxic as fuck.
Now, I decided to do some research and some more product discovery to understand why folks were not using it. Mind you, we were not allowed to do any research and were forced to build based on opinions of those two monkeys.
Turns out that the devs were really happy with their existing tools and our tool was another tool being forcefully added into their toolbox by the said XLT/LT.
Not only that, even if they decide to use our tool, out of pressure, they still cannot because the product was missing key capabilities like audit control and promotion from one environment to another.
Building those would essentially mean reinventing Github aka version control and Spinnaker aka CI/CD pipeline.
My new boss (I got 3 managers in 4 months because of high attrition across levels due to the toxic culture), thinks that tech XLT/LT are doing great and we all suck as a product and design team.
He started driving things his own way without even understanding or settling down for first 90 days.
Lol, I put in my resignation got out of that mess.
So agreeing to what our boy said here, no code tools are a complete waste, especially for a developer, and even as a non tech person, I prefer keyboard over mouse.2 -
dev, ~boring
This is either a shower thought or a sober weed thought, not really sure which, but I've given some serious consideration to "team composition" and "working condition" as a facet of employment, particularly in regard to how they translate into hiring decisions and team composition.
I've put together a number of teams over the years, and in almost every case I've had to abide by an assemblage of pre-defined contexts that dictated the terms of the team working arrangement:
1. a team structure dictated to me
2. a working temporality scheme dictated to me
3. a geographic region in which I was allowed to hire
4. a headcount, position tuple I was required to abide by
I've come to regard these structures as weaknesses. It's a bit like the project management triangle in which you choose 1-2 from a list of inadequate options. Sometimes this is grounded in business reality, but more often than not it's because the people surrounding the decisions thrive on risk mitigation frameworks that become trickle down failure as they impose themselves on all aspects of the business regardless of compatibility.
At the moment, I'm in another startup that I have significantly more control over and again have found my partners discussing the imposition of structure and framework around how, where, why, who and what work people do before contact with any action. My mind is screaming at me to pull the cord, as much as I hate the expression. This stems from a single thought:
"Hierarchy and structure should arise from an understanding of a problem domain"
As engineers we develop processes based on logic; it's our job, it's what we do. Logic operates on data derived from from experiments, so in the absence of the real we perform thought experiments that attempt to reveal some fundamental fact we can use to make a determination.
In this instance we can ask ourselves the question, "what works?" The question can have a number contexts: people, effort required, time, pay, need, skills, regulation, schedule. These things in isolation all have a relative importance ( a weight ), and they can relatively expose limits of mutual exclusivity (pay > budget, skills < need, schedule < (people * time/effort)). The pre-imposed frameworks in that light are just generic attempts to abstract away those concerns based on pre-existing knowledge. There's a chance they're fine, and just generally misunderstood or misapplied; there's also a chance they're insufficient in the face of change.
Fictional entities like the "A Team," comprise a group of humans whose skills are mutually compatible, and achieve synergy by random chance. Since real life doesn't work on movie/comic book logic, it's easy to dismiss the seed of possibility there, that an organic structure can naturally evolve to function beyond its basic parts due to a natural compatibility that wasn't necessarily statistically quantifiable (par-entropic).
I'm definitely not proposing that, nor do I subscribe to the 10x ninja founders are ideal theory. Moreso, this line of reasoning leads me to the thought that team composition can be grown organically based on an acceptance of a few observed truths about shipping products:
1. demand is constant
2. skills can either be bought or developed
3. the requirement for skills grows linearly
4. hierarchy limits the potential for flexibility
5. a team's technically proficiency over time should lead to a non-linear relationship relationship between headcount and growth
Given that, I can devise a heuristic, organic framework for growing a team:
- Don't impose reporting structure before it has value (you don't have to flatten a hierarchy that doesn't exist)
- crush silos before they arise
- Identify needed skills based on objectives
- base salary projections on need, not available capital
- Hire to fill skills gap, be open to training since you have to pay for it either way
- Timelines should always account for skills gap and training efforts
- Assume churn will happen based on team dynamics
- Where someone is doesn't matter so long as it's legal. Time zones are only a problem if you make them one.
- Understand that the needs of a team are relative to a given project, so cookie cutter team composition and project management won't work in software
- Accept that failure is always a risk
- operate with the assumption that teams that are skilled, empowered and motivated are more likely to succeed.
- Culture fit is a per team thing, if the team hates each other they won't work well no matter how much time and money you throw at it
Last thing isn't derived from the train of thought, just things I feel are true:
- Training and headcount is an investment that grows linearly over time, but can have exponential value. Retain people, not services.
- "you build it, you run it" will result in happier customers, faster pivoting. Don't adopt an application maintenance strategy
/rant2 -
This will definitely trigger many but the truth regardless of how you feel is the greatest programmers are those who understand both the hardware level and software .. only then are you more than a dev or programmer.. you are an engineer...
I challenge the devs who dis believe to go out and learn to build circuits, write optimized, efficient bare metal code.: no sdk.. no api... no drivers ..remove the unneeded abstraction layers that have blinded you...build it yourself, expand your potential and understanding..
Not only will you become more valuable overall, but you will write better code as you are more conscious of performance and space and physics of the physical layer.
I’m not talking about Arduino or raspie
Those who stand strong that high level abstraction languages and use of third party apis is a sufficient sustainable platform of development are blind to reality.. the more people who only know those levels, the less people pushing the industry of the low level.., which is the foundation of everything in the industry.. without that low level software the high level abstractions and systems cannot run
Why did we have huge technology advancements from 70s to early 2000s.... because more people in our industry understood the hardware layer..: wrote the software at the less abstracted layers..
Yeah it takes longer todo things at that low level abstraction.. but good robust products that change the world and industry don’t take a few week or months to build.....
Take this with what you will... I’m just trying to open the eyes of the blind developers to the true nature and reality of our industry23 -
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.4 -
IMHO technical dept is kind of like smoking cigarettes for some decades.
You were told that shit will hit the fan but you do not take proper action. And one day you'll realize that you fucked up (or not, also seen that).
Worked for a company in IT, where we maintained an ERP which was "in progress" for over a decade. The basic implementation was done by people with zero technical understanding. To clarify: not self coded. Software was bought. We are talking about integrating the system.
Therefore, the foundation was like a wet noodle. When I joined that company, I told them that they need to address that. I told them that things will get slower and slower and that shit will hit the fan if no proper actions taken.
Even made a list with flaws I found. With potential risk and actions to take, that could then be measured.
At that time, five people worked in said department (including me).
People did not want to listen. "Would be too expensive to rewrite stuff".
Nothing has changed about the wet noodle, but I tried to fix as many things in a working system as I could. Felt like heart surgery, because changes got implemented and "tested" in prod. No version control, no documentation, everyone implemented things like they felt (no guidelines for consistency).
A lot of small fuckups that summed up over the years.
I left the company after two years because I had the chance to land a job as a dev.
Been around two years now since I left. Now 9 people work in that department with around the same efficiency as us 5 people back then.
The new employees struggle to be productive, because things are just implemented poorly and not maintainable anymore.
Had some dialogs with them some time ago. Everything I told them would happen, actually happened. What a suprise :-|
I will not go into too much detail about all the shit that's going on there, as it would be just too much (and my morning coffe is almost finished).
I think that we all know the difference between "not beautiful, but does the job" and "oh, that will backfire - badly". And I wish that my communication skills increase so that people start listening in future.8 -
Worst hackathon experience? Going to one where you must only use app inventor 2 and my team didnt know jackshit, no understanding and rest or anything else, then in the end another team did something similar to us, so during presentation they thought we somehow copied them, we lost terribly, never again.1
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Biggest pet peeve is when someone develops a shitty project using XYZ technology/language and a tutorial and they somehow think they know XYZ and all of it's intricacies and are an expert dev in XYZ. 😐😐😐. No you fucking know how to follow a tutorial and you have a small understanding of XYZ. End rant.
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Sure go ahead throw me off a bridge into a task thats completely out of my ability in an area I have no experience or understanding almost completely unrelated to the role in which I applied for.2
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A few years ago I would whine, complain and rant about shitty software, which I knew could be so much better than it was. But I didn't yet write software of my own.
Now I complain about shitty libraries, API's and users. Not much has changed really. And every time I write code, I curse myself, and whoever made this trashpile I have to work with. I curse the user to the moon and beyond for using the program wrong. Funny thing is, exactly the thing I was complaining about (input validation, see earlier rant) is also exactly what no more than 5 minutes after release, a user fucked up with. The bot just does not respond at this point. But fuck these braindead retards for users.
In a few years I expect myself to be complaining about shitty compilers and buffer overflows, segmentation violations, bad coding style (don't make your program a fucking colander kthx), and so on.
Next decade I expect myself to be complaining about physics itself, and why the universe is governed by the laws it's governed by. Whoever this God is, he's a fucking retard. Funny thing is, the signs for it are already there. Electron theory! If only those electrons were positrons, then the math would check out properly. Instead of negative electrons traveling from negative to positive, we'd have positive positrons traveling from positive to negative. At least from what I understand so far, this is still a decade away after all.
The point I'm trying to make is that nothing changes, only my understanding of the world around me does, as I tumble further and further down the rabbit hole. Sometimes I wish I had taken the blue pill... Either complain about others' software or perhaps not give a shit at all. Become one of those filthy users I now despise.1 -
I worked at a startup that indulged in pair programming thing. Where as a junior, you'd be partnered with a senior developer.
My mentor, always insisted on having shortest variable names possible, so that the "size of codebase" will be very small.
It was a nightmare going through his code and understanding what's he's done. Best part, no comments as well.
In a way it has primed me to go through any codebase possible.5 -
I had some fun with ChatGPT today. I wondered how good its problem solving skills are. Turns out, it's no better than an entry/junior dev armed with all the docs out there - it knows what's written there, how to use the thing (language/framework/tool/etc.), but it has no "understanding" neither of the problem nor the tool, in a holistic way. It's got the knowledge, but it neither has the skill nor understanding of how/why to use it to solve a problem (any problem beyond plain simple complexity).
So the problem I asked it to solve was related to this one I had: https://devrant.com/rants/6312527 .
It was painful to troubleshoot this problem with ChatGPT. It kept on focusing on this particular problem and reacting to errors while trying to fix its initial solution. It took us a good while. Eventually, it reached a working solution, but it was an ugly, convoluted approach that was not feasible to cover my use case with.
FWIW I think it is interesting to follow its line of thought. Eventually, a pattern emerges of how it tries to solve the problem. And it reminds me a lot of myself on the first week in the IT field :)6 -
Worst code review had to be when a senior architect told me that my new library was good, but should be a bunch of files that we copy paste from project to project instead.
His comments were just so out of touch with a) what we were trying to fix with the team. b) basic understanding of good modularized code.
I’m far from a stuck up dev. Not stupid enough to think I’m better than everyone, or have nothing to learn from anyone.
But I totally had a “my boss is a ****ing retard” moment. It was hard to listen to him after this as it was hanging over my head “was I wrong? Or is this just no-library man striking again?” -
let RANT = $state(true);
Don't even get me started on frontend engineering right now. It's like the wild wild west out here, with no rules or regulations.
I mean seriously, what is going on with frontend engineering these days? It's like we're stuck in some sort of weird limbo state where nothing seems to make sense and everything is a struggle. And to top it all off, the project I've been working on for the past two years has the same damn issues as an existing codebase that I was hoping to leave behind.
For some reason the npm build runs when container starts. Are you kidding me? Every time I have to restart the app, I have to wait for 30+ minutes just for the damn thing to build. And what's worse, it's not even a complex app. It's a simple frontend for a research website. So why the heck does it take so long to build?
I'll tell you why, because some genius thought it would be a good idea to build the entire codebase every time the container starts. And I have no doubt that this same genius probably thought it would be efficient and time-saving. Well let me tell you, it's neither efficient nor time-saving. It's just plain infuriating.
And don't even get me started on the codebase itself. It's like a labyrinth of tangled and convoluted code (multiple versions of React and now rewriting on Nextjs). Trying to make even the simplest changes feels like unraveling a giant knot (every freaking component have it's only style and everything from React is being used - hooks, Redux, whatever else is popular). And heaven forbid you make a mistake, because then you have to wait another 30 minutes for the whole thing to build and see if your change even worked.
And let's not forget about the old codebase that is still being used, because the new one wasn't ready in time. So we're constantly having to switch back and forth between two different codebases, trying to remember which one has which functionality, and hoping that we don't break anything in the process.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against rewrites. In fact, sometimes they are necessary for a project to move forward. But when frontend engineers can't seem to make up their mind and constantly want to rewrite the code, it's a recipe for disaster.
And don't even get me started on the experience level of the frontend engineers who started this project. Most of them only had 2-3 years of experience (at the time of inception some of them has less than 1 year of experience), and yet they managed to convince management to approve this mess. It's like the blind leading the blind.
But hey, who needs experience and expertise when you have shiny new technologies and frameworks to play with, right? Isn't that what matters most in frontend engineering these days? Keeping up with the latest trends and constantly jumping on the "hype train" without any real understanding of how it will impact the project in the long run.
As a backend engineer (so I kinda don't give a flying freak about frontend) with almost two decades of experience and who was doing frontend with jQuery back in 2005 - that's frustrating and all the inconsistency is literally killing people (a couple of clients literally dropped the contract because of frontend quality).
RANT = false;
PS: why I used Svelte runes? Because some freaking genius suggested to port new (unreleased, only beta version) frontend UI to Svelte 5 because of runes.6 -
I want you all to think back on how "transparent" and "helpful" everyone was to you when you were useful to the company.
And then as soon as you were gone, did they just complain and say something like "how could fullstackclown leave us??!?!?!"
I swear, the last call I was on, I literally heard the phrase "we are such a good team, we think up great MVP products and you guys execute so well"
Let me translate: "we are whimsical fucksticks and you are our slaves to implement it because we ourselves are too incompetent to do it"
Well no more.
Fucking tools, all of them, everyone just wants to use us to get ahead. No competence, no self-understanding, just encapsulate the "IT" or "tEcHiE" people to some department - doesn't even have to even be near us, they can be from any geographic location; they can just be replaced at a moment's notice!
Yeah, well fuck you, because we're growing in skill and understanding, and fighting against you.
Fucking 🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡s
The unionized revolution of software developer is coming soon.3 -
Gotta hand it to a faculty at my college. She is the best teacher, ever! Period.
She is pretty lenient, understanding, and always supports us and helps us.
She taught us Data Structures and the only thing that was bad was us students not giving as much effort as she gave to teach us.
She was so well that it always felt that we weren’t doing well enough.
Her subject was the only one in which every student passed!!
And still now, although she no longer teaches us, which hopefully changes next semester, I still love to go to talk to her about various things I do in programming and computers overall.
M just gonna say it...
U. R. The. Best.!!!! 😎☺️😊8 -
All it takes is one jackass somewhere in the world with no understanding of character encoding to ruin things for everyone else.
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Sooooo ok ok. Started my graduate program in August and thus far I have been having to handle it with working as a manager, missing 2 staff member positions at work, as well as dealing with other personal items in my life. It has been exhausting beyond belief and I would not really recommend it for people working full time always on call jobs with a family, like at a..
But one thing that keeps my hopes up is the amount of great knowledge that the professors pass to us through their lectures. Sometimes I would get upset at how highly theoretical the items are, I was expecting to see tons of code in one of the major languages used in A.I(my graduate program has a focus in AI, that is my concentration) and was really disappointed at not seeing more code really. But getting the high level overview of the concepts has been really helpful in forcing me to do extra research in order to reconnect with some of the items that I had never thought of before.
If you follow, for example, different articles or online tutorials representing doing something simple like generating a simple neural network, it sometimes escapes our mind how some of the internal concepts of the activity in question are generated, how and why and the mathematical notions that led researchers reach the conclusions they did. As developers, we are sometimes used to just not caring about how sometimes a thing would work, just as long as it works "we will get back to this later" is a common thing in most tutorials, such as when I started with Java "don't worry about what public static main means, just write it up for now, oh and don't worry about what System.out.println() is, just know that its used to output something into bla bla bla" <---- shit like that is too common and it does not escape ML tutorials.
Its hard man, to focus on understanding the inner details of such a massive field all the time, but truly worth it. And if you do find yourself considering the need for higher education or not, well its more of a personal choice really. There are some very talented people that learn a lot on their own, but having the proper guidance of a body of highly trained industry professionals is always nice, my professors take the time to deal with the students on such a personal level that concepts get acquired faster, everyone in class is an engineer with years of experience, thus having people talk to us at that level is much appreciated and accelerates the process of being educated.
Basically what I am trying to say is that being exposed to different methodologies and theoretical concepts helps a lot for building intuition, specially when you literally have no other option but to git gud. And school is what you make of it, but certainly never a waste.2 -
It is the time for the proper long personal rant.
Im a fresh student, i started few months ago and the life is going as predicted: badly or even worse...
Before the university i had similar problems but i had them under control (i was able to cope with them and with some dose of "luck" i graduated from high school and managed to get into uni). I thought by leaving the town and starting over i would change myself and give myself a boost to keep going. But things turned out as expected. Currently i waste time everyday playing pc games or if im too stressed to play, i watch yt videos. Few years ago i thought i was addicted, im not. It might be a effect of something greater. I have plans, for countess inventions, projects, personal, for university and others and ALL of them are frozen, stopped, non existant. No motivation. I had few moments when i was motivated but it was short, hours or only minutes. Long term goals dont give me any motivation. They give as much short lived joy, happines as goals in games and other things... (no substance abuse problems, dont worry). I just dont see point of my projects anymore. Im sure that my projects are the only thing that will give me experience and teach me something but... i passed the magic barrier of univercity, all my projects are becoming less and less impressive... TV and other sources show people, briliant people, students, even children that were more succesful than me
if they are better than me why do i even bother? companies care more for them, especialy the prestigious ones, they have all the fame, money, funding, help, gear without question!
of course they hardworked for ther positions, they could had better beggining or worse but only hard work matters right?
As i said. None of my work matters, i worked hard for my whole life, studing, crafting, understanding: programming, multiple launguages, enviorements, proper and most effcient algorithms, electronic circuits, mechanical contraptions. I have knowlege about nearly every machine and i would be able to create nearly everything with just access to those tools and few days worth of practice. (im sort of omnibus, know everything) But because had lived in a small town i didnt have any chances of getting the right equpment. All of my electronical projects are crap. Mechanical projects are made out of scrap. Even when i was in high school, nobody was impressed or if they were they couldnt help me.
Now im at university. My projects are stagnant, mostly because of my mental problems. Even my lifestyle took a big hit. I neglect a lot of things i shouldnt. Of course greg, you should go out with friends! You cant dedicate 100% of your life to science!
I fucking tried. All of them are busy or there are other things that prevent that... So no friends for me. I even tried doing something togheter! Nope, same reasons or in most cases they dont even do anything...
Science clubs? Mostly formal, nobody has time, tools are limited unless you designed you thing before... (i want to learn!, i dont have time to design!), and in addition to that i have to make a recrutment project... => lack of motivation to do shit.
The biggest obstacle is money. Parts require money, you can make your parts but tools are money too. I have enough to live in decent apartment and cook decently as well but not enough to buy shit for projects. (some of them require a lot or knowlege... and nobody is willing to give me the second thing). Ok i found a decent job oppurtunity. C# corporation, very nice location, perfect for me because i have a lot of time, not only i can practice but i can earn for stuff. I have a CV or resume just waiting for my friend to give me the email (long story, we have been to that corp because they had open days and only he has the email to the guy, just a easier way)
But there are issiues with it as well so it is not that easy.
If nobody have noticed im dedicated to the science. Basicly 100% scientist that want to make a world a better place.
I messaged a uni specialist so i hope he will be able to help me.
For long time i have thought that i was normal, parent were neglecting my mental health and i had some situations that didnt have good infuence on me as well. I might have some issiues with my brain as well, 96% of aspargers symptoms match, with other links included. I dont want to say i have it but it is a exciuse for a test. In addition to that i cant CANT stop thinking, i even tried not thinking for few minutes, nope i had to think about something everytime. On top of that my biological timer is flipped. I go to sleep at 5 am and wake up at 5pm (when i dont have lectures).
I prefer working at night, at that time my brain at least works normaly but i dont want to disrupt roommates...
And at the day my brain starts the usual, depression, lack of motivation, other bullshit thing.
I might add something later, that is all for now. -
Is apple a fruit? Yes.
Is orange a fruit? Yes.
Is apple an orange? No.
Does apple equal a fruit? No.
Does orange equal a fruit? No.
If you're capable of understanding this, then WHY IS IT IT SO DAMN HARD TO UNDERSTAND 0 == ""?14 -
Hired by large prestigious company to do web development. Understanding at the outset, I was not a web developer, just wanted my foot in the door with the company. 2 days after orientation, I am placed on a $20 million contract expansion with 3 other developers. All new to this contract. So: new language, new technologies, new team, no leadership, no mentorship. 2 months later after a month of asking for help, I'm asked why I'm not delivering solid code by the project exec and moved to the testing team. Testing team lead introduces me to people on the contract and answers questions or tells me vaguely where to loom. Spend last 4 months building a professional fuck you by making myself a yes man to everyone and their mother. Left the contract and have been getting regular hours with them since (including developing for them). New contract loves me and despite the project execs attempt to torpedo me, I have an excellent reputation and am positioned for career advancement already.
I couldn't give him the finger, but I made him regret lettimg me go. Original team lead has since been released for unrelated HR complaint. -
Context: Am Sysadmin, occasionally a programming job flies in.
I just told my superiors that i will can no longer program for a specific customer i already poured ~90hrs into due to stress and thus health issues that have been accumulating since the beginning of the year. Everything relating to this customer is giving me chills. I can't even do my other stuff without hinderance anymore.
Because this is in parrallel to an existing customer complaint that came in yesterday i just received a rather rant-y email about what the fuck would be wrong with me, which immidiately disappeared again.
It was revoked as i now know. So far they seem to be understanding, but i still don't feel good with the decision i made.
I really want to finish the project, but i just can't. It drives me insane. I never felt like this.
Sorry for the wall of text and any errors. I'm really not having a good time right now.4 -
"This is ridiculous, why don't the docs explain this? This is absurd, it seems like thousands of people should be having this issue. Why do maintainers fucking not get it? Why write software if you don't intend for anyone else to use it?"
versus
"Hey, could you explain X to me? I'm having trouble understanding it."
"Sure, here: ..."
"Thanks - maybe we could add it to the docs, that's the first place I looked."
"Absolutely, good idea."
<closed in a8b7cb8d>
Which one was easier, folks? It's not this difficult. 100% going to help you if you ask - to me, at least, there's no such thing as a stupid question (seriously, I'll answer the most inane questions 100 times over if I need to). However, there's definitely a stupid comment, and unfortunately they seem to be the majority I receive on Github.6 -
when you have to use one language inside of another, and you basically have to call functions allowing you to call the other's language function within it, and you get the hell confused, since it gets harder and harder to see what is what and who can call who and how, and the compiler ofc. won't say anything about it since it only cares about the main language you are in and not the nesting of the other...
I just have no idea what I'm doing right now, or if my thought process and understanding of this is even close to where it is supposed to be.
D: I'm just confused and insecure about this right now....
time for experiments to figure this out, and get the hang of it13 -
Fuck, I'll always be a noob. Knowing next to nothing about software development, hacking, exploits - just anything.
Felt a bit proud to had reached the level "hacker" on hack the box. Was fun solving stego, crypto and reversing challenges, diving into assembly the first time. Felt cool stepping through a disassemblied executable with radare, and understanding what a NOP slide is...
However all the illusion crumbled down, when I watched this CCC talk on OpenBSD security, where the speaker was underwhelmed with one of OpenBSD mitigations, where they tried to disallow them: "NOP slides?! Srly? No one is using that anymore. Just look at current exploits."
I felt so stupid, which I probably am. Will never catch up with those guys.
But whatever. In the end we all know nothing. We have no clue, but some are more apt in disguising it behind big speech.
(really like this German song: https://youtube.com/watch/...
Those lines always give me a chuckle:
"Man has no idea.
The house has no idea.
The tree has no idea.
The fawn has no idea.
The squid has no idea.
The tapir knows, but doesn't tell us.")3 -
Just because you have no idea what you are doing does not make you an artist.
So can we please treat software development as engineering?
I get that in software there are a lot of unknowns and you won't always find best practices, especially if you want to be a pioneer on the bleeding edge.
Yet maybe that issue you were trying to solve with your hackish -- I mean artfully -- solution is a lack of understanding of the basic technology?
If you want to do art, try poetry.3 -
Fellow Deviants, I need your help in understanding the importance of C++
Okay, I need to clarify a few things:
I am not a beginner or a newbie who has just entered this community...
I have been using C++ for some time and in fact, it was the language which introduced me to the world of programming... Before, I switched to Java, since I found it much better for application development...
I already know about the obvious arguments given in favour of C/C++ like how it is a much more faster and memory efficient than other languages...
But, at the same time, C/C++ exposes us and doesn't protect us from ourselves.. I hope that you understand what I mean to say..
And, I guess that it is a fair tradeoff for the kind of power and control that these languages (C/C++) provide us..
And, I also agree with the fact that it is an language that ideally suits our need, if we wish to deal with compilers, graphics, OS, etc, in the future...
But, what I really want to ask here is:
In this age and times, when hardware has advanced so much, where technically, memory efficiency or execution speeds no longer is the topmost priority... These were the reasons for which C/C++ was initially created...
In today's time, human concept of time matters more and hence, syntactical less complicated languages like Java or Python are much more preferred, especially for domains like application development or data sciences...
So, is continuing with C++, an endeavour worth sticking with in the future or is it not required...
I am talking about this issue since I am in a dilemma about the use of C++ in the future...
I would be grateful if we could talk about keeping AI, Machine Learning or Algorithms Optimisation in mind... Since, these are the fields in which I am interested in...
I know that my question could have been posted in a better way.. But, considering the chaos that is present in my mind, regarding this question doesn't allow me to do so...
Any kind of suggestion or thoughts would be welcome and much appreciated...
P.S: I currently use C++ only for competitive programming or challenges...28 -
Power tripping idiots who just chase brads for their personal gain without understanding the underlying scenarios are primarily driven by money and have no sense of responsibility towards others or their surroundings.
Fuck such money hungry job seekers.
29 -
M so angry at one of my faculties today!!
Basically, the faculty is utter garbage ( although he is supposed to b the best and most experienced guy ). He teaches us data communication but all he does is start up a presentation, read from there and tell that to us adding a thing or two...
Well we have been tolerating him for the entire semester at this point so... whatever, we have come to peace with the fact that we simply attend to get attendance...
But, yesterday, there was a seminar going on and I asked a question to the speaker... the speaker started replying and the faculty interrupted the speaker to crack an ill joke about me... and started laughing... I mean what the hell!!! Ur supposed to be a faculty and THAT is how u behave?!
Anyway, many people laughed... more so because of the way he laughed than his “joke”.
Made me burn with rage but i forgot about it thanks to the seminar being decent.
Today, he was checking our assignments... he became angry and the reason being we didn’t write answers from the presentation and instead used the Internet.
This is what he said:
“ I have given u the presentation and that is exactly where u will write the assignments from... if u wanna use the internet to find the answers, then why do u come to my class!! “
I literally wanted to say - “ to get freaking attendance!! “
Somehow I didn’t... my assignment wasn’t checked today so nothing bad happened...
And btw, the assignments that he gives r 30 terminologies ( words and meanings ),
And nearly 25-30 question answers...
Just go thru the presentation to get all the answers... and this is called “teaching” and “education” !!!! 😠😠😠😠
No research, no understanding, simply do as he says, even in quizzes, even if ur answer is correct but it is not exactly the point he asks, screw u!
He will scold u...
I CAME TO COLLEGE TO LEARN AND UNDERSTAND!!! NOT MUG UP UR STUPID ANSWERS TO PASS IN EXAMS!!!!!!
M now imagining ways to kill him 😠😠😠😠🔥🔥🔥🔥2 -
I was waiting all week for a meeting with the business strategist, to get a minimal understanding of what is happening in her fucking little confused mind.
At 15 o'clock she says, sorry, I have an headache, I must leave no meeting.
And I answer:
Lucky you! by chance I just powdered my cock with Aspirine and Iboprufene, so you can choose and take it through oral or rectal administration...4 -
I currently have my dream job as a web developer, with a little above average salary, good colleagues and an understanding boss.
Today I had a recruiter contact me with a job opportunity (Senior developer) that would easily net me 1.5 times more salary, and a lot of other advantages.
It almost hurts to say no.4 -
Client wants some CMS text to be automatically translated. So I checked and Google seems to have a solution for that. I thought to to be as simpel as doing a request and parsing the response. That's how API's work, right?
No. First I must create an account, that account must have a credit card, then I need to setup credentials, the default ones working with path variables, an API key... etc etc etc.
I feel so stupid for just not understanding their docs. I'm just a dude that installs a CMS and makes pretty CSS for it. I've worked with REST APIs before (Mollie, Carerix) but none of them ever demanded the level of knowledge and setup the Google Translate API demands.
Am I just a bad developer or is this shit just too complex for your average web developer?9 -
I don't consider myself a guru in JavaScript (hell I studied theoretical chemistry), but I do hate much of the rationalization behind building a Jenga stack of libraries, frameworks, dependencies... for building everything web related.
Many of the problems I see people solving with these giant stacks could be easily solved understanding how websites work (html, css, js and how interact with each other) with no dependencies giving smaller (for end users at least) and more maintainable code (in the sense it would not require updating dependencies that may be discontinued...)
I do imagine situations where these are ideal... Since there are not absolutes and developing is very context sensitive, but man if I have js article fatigue for ridiculous scenarios.2 -
I really really hope that no one post this,a friend texted it to me and I wanted to share it because made my day.
Idk where it comes, so feel free if know where this came from to post it:
//FUN PART HERE
# Do not refactor, it is a bad practice. YOLO
# Not understanding why or how something works is always good. YOLO
# Do not ever test your code yourself, just ask. YOLO
# No one is going to read your code, at any point don’t comment. YOLO
# Why do it the easy way when you can reinvent the wheel? Future-proofing is for pussies. YOLO
# Do not read the documentation. YOLO
# Do not waste time with gists. YOLO
# Do not write specs. YOLO also matches to YDD (YOLO DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT)
# Do not use naming conventions. YOLO
# Paying for online tutorials is always better than just searching and reading. YOLO
# You always use production as an environment. YOLO
# Don’t describe what you’re trying to do, just ask random questions on how to do it. YOLO
# Don’t indent. YOLO
# Version control systems are for wussies. YOLO
# Developing on a system similar to the deployment system is for wussies! YOLO
# I don’t always test my code, but when I do, I do it in production. YOLO
# Real men deploy with ftp. YOLO
So YOLO Driven Development isn’t your style? Okay, here are a few more hilarious IT methodologies to get on board with.
*The Pigeon Methodology*
Boss flies in, shits all over everything, then flies away.
*ADD (Asshole Driven Development)*
An old favourite, which outlines any team where the biggest jerk makes all the big decisions. Wisdom, process and logic are not the factory default.
*NDAD (No Developers Allowed in Decisions)*
Methodology Developers of all kinds are strictly forbidden when it comes to decisions regarding entire projects, from back end design to deadlines, because middle and top management know exactly what they want, how it should be done, and how long it will take.
*FDD (Fear Driven Development)*
The analysis paralysis that can slow an entire project down, with developments afraid to make mistakes, break the build, or cause bugs. The source of a developer’s anxiety could be attributed to a failure in sharing information, or by implicating that team members are replaceable.
*CYAE (Cover Your Ass Engineering)*
As Scott Berkun so eloquently put it, the driving force behind most individual efforts is making sure that when the shit hits the fan, you are not to blame.2 -
This basically is me rambling all my thoughts that have been clouding my mind.
Learning other programming languages after learning the first is harder than I expected. I learned python first but that's making learning others (which I know arent similar but ) C, ES6, PHP, etc. I need to figure out what makes each one special and get a proper path instead of learning them all the same way. Which is easier for the web dev languages but fuck man I just need a good path for them and I'm good. Like learn this this this this that and that and I've got a basic understanding of the language I dont need to stress and I can casually build my knowledge from here now that I understand all this. Cause I love programming and I want to be the best I can be and just get to the level I am with python. And at some point I have to learn about basic electronics and learning how to program Arduinos with C so I can do stuff with that because I really really REALLY want to.
It doesnt stop there. I want to learn another language and no I'm not talkin bout programming anymore I mean I wanna learn Japanese and German (but japanese primarily) but it doesnt help that I'm always either in school, studying, programming, or playing games. I just cant find time to practice Hiragana&Katakana (two basic writing systems in japan) and it doesnt help that I'm a lazy procrastinating piece of shit that doesnt have or can keep a proper schedule and hell I barely can English and Its my native tongue. Ugh. Itd be better if I had a native speaker to help me tbh.
And finally I want to learn basic pixel animating I have dreamed as a kid to do some kind of animation and programming and I want to do both for games I want to program for fun but it doesnt help that I cant draw sprites or anything for shit. I cant get it and I just am fucked but I'm going to ask some people I know and a few subreddits for advice/help/resources with that
Welp that was the Bubbles Power Hour none of you probably are keen followers of mine and if I had any I'd be shocked and honored but thanks for reading anyways and any advice on anything is always appreciated!11 -
User: If we use Oauth2, can we audit exactly where this data is going and who sends it there, and in addition cam we audit who grabs that data from the Authenticating app and make sure it doesn't violate our requirements?
Me: No
User: Why not?
Me: Because thats like asking us to audit whether or not a user accessed files and then uploaded them to their personal drive instead of corporate. We don't mandate that application owners take responsibility for their data outside of their application, why would we require that in this case???
User: Uhhhhh
FFS the lack of understanding of application accounts here boggles my mind. I understand that the security concerns are real but throwing out all permissible contexts based on a mandate that we dont even apply to extremely permissive accounts (i.e. users compared to apps) is folly1 -
There has been a post today about the existence of too many js frameworks. Which reminds me of this awesome post https://hackernoon.com/how-it-feels...
At first I thought someone was corpseposting, as it is my understanding that the js ecosystem is calming down a bit. But then I noticed that post got almost 20 upvotes. So here's my thoughts:
(I'm not sure what I'm ranting about here, as it feels kinda broad after writing it. I think it's kinda valid anyhow.)
I'm ok with someone expressing frustration with js. But complaining about progress is definitely off to me.
How is too many frameworks a bad thing?
How does the variety and creation of more modern frameworks affect negatively developers?
Does it make it hard to understand each of these new frameworks?
Well, there's no need to. Just because it has a logo and some nice badges and says it will make you happy doesn't mean you should use it.
You just stick to the big boys in the ecosystem and you'll be fine for a while.
Does it make you feel compelled to migrate the stack of every project you did?
Well, don't. If you don't like being on the bleeding edge of js, then just stick to whatever you're using, as long as it's good code.
But if a lot of companies decided to migrate to react (among others frameworks), it's because they like the upsides: the code is faster to write, easier to test and more performant.
In general, I'm more understanding/empathic with beginner js programmers.
But I have for real heard experienced devs in real life complain about having to learn new frameworks, like they hate it.
"I just want to learn a single framework and just master it throughout my life" and I think they're lowering the bar.
There's people that for real expect occupying positions for life, make money, but never learn a new framework.
We hold other practitioners to high standards (like pilots or doctors), but for some reason, some programmers feel like they're ok with what they know for life.
As if they couldn't translate all they learned with one framework to another.
Meanwhile our lives are becoming more and more intertwined with technology and demand some pretty high standards. Standards that historically have not been met, according to thousands of people screaming to their devices screens.
Even though I think the "js can be frustrating" sentiment is valid, the statement 'too many js frameworks is bad' is not.
I think a statement like 'js frameworks can go obsolete very quickly' is more appropriate.
By saying too many js frameworks is a bad thing you're
1) Making a conspiracy theory as if js devs were working in tandem to make the ecosystem hard,
But people do whatever they want. Some create packages, others star/clone/use them.
2) Making a taboo out of a normal itch, creating.
"hey you're a libdev? just stop, ok? stop"
"Are you a creative person? Do you know a way to solve a problem in an easier way than some famous package? it doesn't matter, don't you dare creating a new package."
I'm not gonna say the js world is perfect. The js world is frantic, savage, evolves aggressively.
You could say that it (accidentally) gives the middle finger to end users, but you could also say that it just sets the bar higher.
I liked writing jquery code in the past, but at the same time I didn't like adding features/fixing bugs on it. It was painful.
So I'm fine with a better framework coming along after a few years and stealing their userbase, as it happens almost universally in the programming world, the difference with js is that the cycle is faster.
Even jquery's creator embraced React.
This post explains also
https://medium.com/@chrisdaviesgeek...13 -
I just want to thank Windows 10. Because of 3 updates in a week I got to do almost no work, spend 4hrs understanding why I was in a recovery mode loop, and make me lose a days worth of work by hiding the only folder I stupidly left on my C drive post update.
Without this I’d actually have to do work to get paid, and that’s just gross. -
I turned down another women who was absolutely, 100% flirting with me, because, from what I can gather, she was trying to get out of a relationship with her current boyfriend, a military veteran.
I outright ignored her and then when that failed, I made our work relationship 100% about that, work.
Even though I'm friendly with everyone else.
I'm an absolute shit, aren't I? I feel genuinely bad.
I'm not sure if I did it out of a misplaced sense of honor for a dude who obviously has some ptsd, or because I don't feel like I'm able to connect with anyone anymore.
I feel like I'm alone in this world. Not, like, sexually or anything, but more like I don't want to burden anyone with the shit I'm going through. Like a man on a mission on a sinking ship, and it would be wrong to let anyone else on board.
Like a one-man shit-show, all singing, all dancing, driven to one end, with one purpose. And it'd be wrong to let anyone get attached, or invite anyone else in.
Fuck I got so many irons in the fire. I have an ARG in the works, a full game, a social platform that the code and marketing plan is laid out and I'm saving money for, two more games already planned, plus spending an in-ordinate amount of time with my father and sister and mother as they deal with the loss of my sister, plus volunteering to help the homeless, plus working, plus studying.
I barely sleep.
It's just me. I'm like a cruise missile heading to one destination, to some final destination, I just don't know what. And I don't let anyone in, because then they might see how fucking crazy I am, and how crazy my life is, and how crazy my goals are. Thats not a humblebrag. Thats more of a "wholly shit, I'm so in over my head, I'm fucking drowning" type thing. But I'm not giving up, I'm just going deeper.
And it feels like drowning but somehow I'm okay with it. Like I've passed the crux of loneliness, and settled for going for it all, alone, shooting out of orbit, and saying "fuck it all' to everything and everyone. They say "if you got everything you wanted, everything you wished for, you'd wish you hadn't, which is why god isn't a genie". And lately I've been thinking god doesn't exist, or doesn't care, because he's left it all up to me, and I've fucked it up good and proper, and am on my way to either nothing, or everything I've ever wanted.
Is this what happiness feels like? Or suicide?
I don't know. I mean I really don't. I don't want to die. I think I could stop existing and be okay with it. Having achieved at least a modicum of understanding the universe, at least accomplished something small but meaningful.
Or maybe I'm delusional, driven mad with the full comprehension of human floundering against a meandering existence.
I don't fucking know.
I feel like I'm spinning my wheels, so much, that even two weeks feels like a fucking eternity. I don't sleep anymore. When I do, I escape into my dreams, where I can fly, or float, and the people in my dreams tell me I'm living in the matrix and I believe them..in my dreams. Feel it even.
And when I wake up, the feeling persists. Leaves me in wonderland, for hours after waking.
And I have visions, of going homeless, like some buddha, all the time, and then I say "wake up J, you're fucking crazy! You want to go be some couch surfing homeless bum living off other's good graces? get the fuck outa here! While others suffer, schlep it at whatever job they work, day in day out, toil. In this economy? In this inflation? What a dishonest way of thinking. What a dishonest way of dreaming."
And yet I daydream. Because its the only escape there is from all the world has become.
And I bring joy to others, earnestly, vicariously, because its the closest joy I can feel, when I've become numb.
It is this quasi-permanent sense of alienation that permeates my whole world, a sort of invisible force field that separates me from others, even as I reach out to understand them, to comfort them, to smooth the corners off their world, so that they don't become like I have, something not entirely human, but...other.
Often when we meditate, long and hard enough,
at the center that emerges, at the center of ourselves, we find an abyss, a whole universe, devoid of anything, a perfect silence, mirroring back the cosmos, and other people. Observing, silent, irreducible, implacable.
Sometimes I feel like I don't exist. Sometimes I think others don't exist.
Very often I feel like nothing is real. And that I am playing some sort of game. Not like a video game per se, but that there is a bigger pattern, a hidden pattern to it all, just out of reach, and I'm reaching for it but understanding eludes me.
Not that the universe has made me for some special purpose, but merely that the universe observes me specifically, for no special purpose, other than that it can, whatever trivialities may impede or push forward my life.
As if the universe were bored.24 -
So while exploring some new ideas, I decided to figure out if I could use variables in the known set to determine the bounds of variables in the unknown set.
The variables in question are algebraic identities derived from the semiprimes, so you already know where this is going.
The existing known set is 1194 identities.
And there are, if I recall, roughly two dozen unknowns.
Many knowns have the unknowns as their factors. The d4 product set for example is composed of variables d4a, d4u, d4z, d4z9, d4z4, d4alpha, d4theta, d4omega, etc.
The component variables themselves are unknown, just their products are known. Anyway.
What I've found interesting is if you know the minimum of some of these subsets, for example d4z is smallest out of the d4's for some semiprimes, then you know the upperbound of both the component variables d4 and z.
Unless of course either of them is < 1.
So the order of these variables, based on value, changes depending on the properties of the semiprime, which I won't get into. Most of the time the order change is minor, but for some variables they can vary a lot between semiprimes, rapidly shifting their rank in the known set. This makes it hard to do anything with them.
And what I found myself asking, over and over again, was if there was a way to lock them down? Think of it like a giant switch board, where flipping one switch lights up N number of others, apparently at random. But flipping some other switch completely alters how that first switch works and what lights it seemingly interacts with. And you have a board of them thats 1194^2 in total. So what do you do?
I'd had a similar notion a while back, where I would measure relative value in the known set, among a bunch of variables, assign a letter if the conditions were present, and generate a string, called a "haplotype."
It was hap hazard and I wrote a lot of code to do filtering, sorting, and set manipulation to find sets of elements in common, unique elements, etc. But the 'type' strings, a jumble of random letters, were only useful say, forty percent of the time. For example if a semiprime had a particular type starting with a certain series of letters, 40% of the time a certain known variable was guaranteed to be above a certain variable from the unknown set...40%~ of the time.
It was a lost cause it seemed.
But I returned to the idea recently and revamped the entire notion.
Instead what I would approach it from a more complete angle.
I'd take two known variables J and K, one would be called the indicator, and the other would be the 'target'.
Two other variables would be the 'component' variables (an element taken from the unknown set), and the constraint variable (could be from either the known or unknown set).
The idea was that relationships between the KNOWN variables (an indicator and a target variable) could be used to indicate the rank relationship between the unknown component variable and the constraint variable.
You'd think this wouldn't work either, but my intuition was there were so many seemingly 'random' rank changes of variables in the known set for any two semiprimes, that 1. no two semiprimes ever shared the same order for every variable, and 2. the order of the known variables had to be leaking information about the relationships of the unknown variables.
It turns out my intuition was correct.
Imagine you are picking a lock, and by knowing the order and position of the first two pins, you are able to deduce the relative position of two pins further back that you can't reach because of the locks security features. It doesn't let you unlock the lock directly, but by knowing this, if you can get past the lock's security features, you have a chance of using information about the third pin to get a better, if incomplete, understanding about the boundary position of the last pin.
I would initiate a big scoring list, one for each known element or identity. And then I would check it in tandem like so:
if component > constraint and indicator > target:
indicator[j]+= 1
This is a simplication, but the idea was to score ALL such combination of relationship, whether the indicator was greater than the target at the same time a component was greater than a constraint, or the opposite.
This worked out to four if checks and four separate score lists.
And by subtracting one scorelist from another, I could check for variables that were a bad fit: they'd have equal probability of scoring for example, where they were greater than the target one time, and then lesser than it for another semiprime.
So for any given relationship, greater or lesser between any unknown variable and constraint variable, I could find any indicator variable and target variable whose relationship strongly correlated to the unknown's.18 -
Anyone who formats their code manually is a fuck there I said it.
Also stop using a tool that has no contextual understanding of your code. You're wasting more so much fucking time trying to guess shit that an ide would automatically know and doing stuff that an ide would automatically do.4 -
The company where i am working at currently is kinda weird. The company is run by a gujrati guy and he has placed almost all his cousins in high positions...and on top of that the CTO (whos the bro of the owner) micromanages people and also fires them on a whim...i am kinda worried that if i am not able to do a particular task, i would be fired too...He has asked me to do unit testing of some complicated functions on mocha/chai and i have never done all this before. I am not understanding what to do and there are no senior devs in the office who knows about these things...7
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I was fine with Eclipse. Then everyone around me told me that Eclipse is old and IntelliJ is new and super cool and makes me super fast and much more productive. Finally in our company we got a Ultimate 2018 license and I started to use it. There is a function: import from Eclipse. Hey cool - let’s import and go... but no. After importing I needed one day to get that running. But I’m not really convinced. After that... ok let’s try another project where colleagues have used IntelliJ already. But after checking out - that also didn’t work well and I spent the whole day it running locally. Although it’s a maven project. Up to know I think Eclipse is better in handling Tomcat and better shows the version control state of files. And for me the workspace concept of Eclipse seems to be better than the project concept of IntelliJ. But maybe I just have to get a better understanding of IntelliJ. Hopefully I can do my first coding in IntelliJ tomorrow. Maybe then I can see all the benefits. So far...4
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So this happened some years ago:
The phone rings and as soon as I pick it up some fast talking sales rep begins his spiel.
"Good afternoon my name is [don't remember, calling him 'jigglybum'] and we have a device that you plug into your phone line and it will allow you to make free international calls over the internet. It's real easy to set up and you can have it on us for the first three months absolutely free, if you could just confirm your address..."
"Don't want it."
"I'm sorry sir but I think you're throwing away a massive opportunity here we're offering you free international calls."
"No you're not. You're offering me a free trial of some sort of VoIP hardware."
"We yes, but it's free for the first three months and..."
"We also don't make international calls."
"That maybe true sir but with this box you could."
"I'm really not interested in your product."
"I don't think you fully understand all the benefits..."
*there's a clicking noise followed by a dial tone for a second and a new voice*
"Hi, I'm the supervisor for 'jigglybum' and I think perhaps he is having difficulty explaining what it is that we are trying to give you here..."
"Listen to me, from what I have understood you are offering to send us a VOIP hardware device that directly connects to our broadband and facilitates international calls, and presumably any calls for that matter on a three month trial which after will presumably have a subscription fee, have I had any difficulty understanding the nature of the device and terms of use?"
"Well, no sir, that's a very accurate description, so if you could just confirm your address for me..."
"NO! As you have just admitted there was no misunderstanding about what your product is or what it does. There seems to be a real misunderstanding on your part on the concept of 'no'. We don't want this product, we don't need the product and if we want to make VOIP calls, we have Skype!"
"Ok sir, goodbye."
This is, to my knowledge the only and only time that a supervisor in a call centre has wanted to talk to ME.2 -
My Gripe With Implicit Returns
In my experience I've found that wherever possible code should be WYSIWYG in terms of the effects per statement. Intent and the effects thereof should always be explicit per statement, not implicit, otherwise effects not intended will eventually slip in, and be missed.
It's hard to catch, and fix the effects of a statement intent where the statement in question is *implicit* because the effect is a *byproduct* of another statement.
Worse still, this sort of design encourages 'pyramid coding recursion hell', where some users will first decompose their program into respective scopes, and then return and compose them..atomically as possible, meaning execution flow becomes distorted, run time state becomes dependent not on obvious plain-at-sight code, but on the run time state itself. This I've found is a symptom of people who have spent too much time with LISP or other eye-stabbingly fucky abominations. Finally implicit returns encourage a form of thinking where programmers attempt to write code that 'just works' without thinking about how it *looks* or reads. The problem with opaque-programming is that while it may or may not be effortless, much more time is spent in reading, debugging, understanding, and maintaining code than is spent writing it--which is obviously problematic if we have a bunch of invisible returns everywhere, which requires new developers reading it to stop each and every time to decide whether to mentally 'insert' a return statement.
This really isn't a rant, as much as an old bitter gripe from the guy that got stuck with the job of debugging. And admittedly I've admired lisp from afar, but I didn't want to catch the "everything is functional, DOWN WITH THE STATE" fever, I'm no radical.
Just god damn, think of the future programmer who may have to read your code eventually.2 -
JavaScript is new the PHP.
Reading a stackoverflow question about async functions and await-usage, and lot of well-intended answers show no understanding of the concept. Some fail to understand that the scope is about promises. They don't know that, yes, *every* async function *always* returns a Promise and that within an async function it's synctically the same to do either `return x` or `Promise.resolve(x)` or `return new Promise((resolve) => {resolve(x)}), and they fail to realize what await does or doesn't do and are oblivious about how awaiting at certain stages can have huge performance impact when compared to either Promise.all or Bluebird.map.
Grasping promises is hard in the beginning, I get that. But please don't share your lack of understanding as fact. -
I was returning something at MicroCenter the other day. The guy in front of me was picking up a laptop be brought in to have fixed. They had replaced the motherboard, and put all his old data on an external drive.
"So what's this?"
"This is an external hard drive. We copied all the data from your laptop onto it and put a fresh install on it."
"So .. how do I get to it?"
"You just plug it in, over USB."
"So how ... how does that work."
This goes on for a while. Shop owner has to start his computer. Plug in the drive. There was a lot of, "So everything that was on here, is now on here?"
The guy had no basic understanding of external hard drives, USB, copying files ... thankfully while the files were copying from the hard drive to his desktop, he said he needed a longer cable to the router so he could put it on the other side of the room. It took the guy behind the desk an unreasonable amount of time to direct him to the isle with the Ethernet cables, but once he did, I was finally able to return my item.
I'm glad I no longer work in desktop support.1 -
* Gets handed additions to current software platform (web)
* Gives back estimte of time after meeting with everyone and making them understand that once the testing phase of the project is reached there will be no changes, tests should be exhaustive and focus on SAID FUNCTIONALITY of the new additions. NO CHANGES OR ADDITIONS AT THIS POINT IN TIME
* All directives, stakeholders, users etc agreed on my request and spend an additional hour thinking of different corner and edge cases as provided by me in case they can't think of them (they can't, because they are fucking stupid, but I provided everything)
* Boss looks irritated at their lack of understanding of the scope and the time needed, nods in approval after he sees my entire specification, testing cases, possible additions to the system etc
* All members of the committee decide on the requirements being correct, concrete and proper.
* Finish the additions in a couple of weeks due to the increased demand for other projects, this directly affects the user base, so my VP and Director make it a top priority, I agree with their sentiment, since my Director knows what he is doing (real OG)
* I make the changes, test inside of my department and then stage for the testing environment. Everything is ready, all migrations are in order, the functionality is working as proper and the pipeline for the project, albeit somewhat lacking in elegance is good to go.
* Testing days arrive
* First couple of hours of test: Oh, you know what, we should add these two additional fields, and it would be good if the reporting generated by the system would contain this OTHER FORMAT rather than this one.
* ME: We stated that no additions would be done during the testing environment, testing is for functionality, not to see if you can all think of something else, even then, on June 10 I provided a initial demo and no one bothered to check on it on say something.
Them: Well, we are doing it now, this is what testing is for.
Me: Out of this room, the software engineer is me, and I can assure you, testing is not for that. I repeatedly stated that previously, I set the requirements, added corner cases, tables charts everything and not one single one of you decided to pay attention or add something, actually, said functionality you are requesting was part of one of my detailed list of corner cases, why did you not add it there and then before everything went up?
Them: Well I didn't read it at the time (think of the I in plural form since all of these dumb fucks stated the same)
Then my boss went on a rampage on their dumbasses.
I fucking hate software development sometimes.
Oh well. Bunch of fucking retards.4 -
I work remotely for a team that works together in an office, and this morning on the conference call a team member said
"one thing i think we need to do with this is stay on task, because while these things that have been added are cool we don't need to be doing anything not outlined in the MVC requirements"
Okay first of all -- this is a completely foreign technology to this team. It's not like I diddled around adding fancy animations and no function. The problem working in a new technology with an old mindset is assuming that it's going to move linearly from step 1 to step 2. And that drives me fucking insane.
- Progress in paid contracted work is done by staying on task.
- Progress in research isn't done linearly. You have to try shit -- and figure out what doesn't work.
I feel bad because I'll chime in and shoot down ideas with a fucking guided missile because I know the answer and I've done the fucking research -- I'm not a dick about it, but replying with a simple "no that's not possible, because of this or that", the call becomes silent for 30 seconds because I've shattered their understanding of the technology because nobody has taken the time to understand anything about how this thing works!!
So until they either listen to me, ask me, or learn the smallest amount to get on my fucking level, I'll keep progressing -- because whether the old world idealists like it or not -- that's my job.
Progress.
</ rant>14 -
Being a full stack developer has been an amazing journey. Looking at a project and understanding how the entire stack work starting from the mobile apps, APIs and DB is a total bless.
Nevertheless, lately switching context between modern languages has been extremely frustrating.
Swift looks like kotlin, elixir looks like ruby. Hell even swift and ruby are very similar.
Writing ruby in Xcode and wondering why the fuck Xcode complaining. Well no shit, swift is not ruby. Took me 5 mins of head scratching to notice it 😢
Hell I am now writing down the latest language I am working with on my hand to keep track 😂
5 -
I’m currently working with a devops team in the company to migrate our old ass jboss servers architecture to kubernetes.
They’ve been working in this for about a year now, and it was supposed to be delivered a few months back, no one knew what’s going on and last week they manage to have something to see at least.
I’ve never seen anything so bad in my short life as a developer, at the point that the main devops guy can’t even understand his own documentation to add ci/cd to a project.
It goes from trigger manually pipelines in multiple branches for configuration and secrets, a million unnecessary env variables to set, to docker images lacking almost all requisites necessary to run the apps.
You can clearly see the dude goes around internet copy pasting stuff without actually understanding what going on behind as every time you ask him for the guts of the architecture he changes the topic.
And the worst of all this, as my team is their counterpart on development we’ve fighting for weeks to make them understand that is impossible the proceed with this process with over 100 apps and 50+ developers.
Long story short, last two weeks I’ve been fixing the “dev ops” guy mess in terms of processes and documentation but I think this is gonna end really bad, not to sound cocky or anything but developers level is really low, add docker and k8s in top of that and you have a recipe for disaster.
Still enjoying as I have no fault there, and dude got busted.9 -
I’d been working event based and freelance jobs in the security and entertainment fields for years, with odd stints as a bartender sprinkled in. My pay was mostly decent, but I had no job security, and I was more on the road than at home. A few years before this job search experience I had already realised I can’t continue on this path for ever, especially if I ever want a serious relationship (e.g. 16 weeks straight touring Europe with on avg. 16h work days pretty much every day isn’t ideal in that regard, and also really though on both body and mind). So I decided to study. As I applied in autumn, not every line of study accepted students. The closest to my interest I found was BBA in Business IT.
Fast forward 1,5 years. After moving away from my previous base due to then-gfs studies, I had also been able to accept less work. Well, there were really two reasons: I didn’t want to go on weeks long big tours anymore, and I’d had to price up on my freelance job due to reasons. I still managed to keep our household going, but not knowing when the next paycheck would be available was becoming a little too stressful. I wanted job security. So a few weeks after my wedding I scoured the internetz for positions I could apply to, and applied to a dozen or so places. They were a variety of positions I had a vague understanding of from what I’d learned at UAS: from sales to data analytics to dev… I was aware pretty much all of the applications were a long shot by best, so I expected to be ghosted…
Two of the organizations I applied to wanted to go forward with me. Both dev jobs. I can’t even remember the specifics of the other one anymore, but I do remember the interview: I got in to their office (which was ridiculously open), and got marched into a tiny conference room. The interviewer was passive-aggressive and really bombarded me with questions, not really leaving a socially awkward introvert with any time to answer. I started to get really anxious and twitchy, sweating like a pig. Just wanted out. But nooo, they wanted me to do a coding test live. So they sat me on a computer with Eclipse open, gave me an assignment and told me not to use the internet. What’s even worse is that I could literally feel the interviewer breathing down my neck when I tried to do the test. Well, didn’t happen cause I was under so much pressure that I couldn’t think at all… yeah, that was horrible.
Anyhow, the other position I really applied to because it was in my hometown and I recognised the company name from legendary commercials from the 90s - everyone in this country who watched TV in mid-to-late 90s remembers those. Anyway, to my surprise, my present day manager contacted me and wanted me to do a coding test. At the time he asked I was having a bout of fevers after fevers, not really able to get healthy. I told him that I’d do it as soon as I’m healthy. A month went by, maybe more. He asked again. Again I replied that as soon as I get healthy, but promised to do it next week the latest. I didn’t deliver on that, but the next week after that, even if I was the most feverish I had been, I did the tests. I could only finish half of them, cause I couldn’t look at a screen for long at a time and had to visit the loo every 10min or so, but apparently that was enough. Next week I was already going to the interview… oh I also googled what is PHP on the way there, since it was mentioned as a requirement and I had no idea what it was. Imagine that…
The interview itself couldn’t have been more different from the other one. We were sitting in a nice conference room with my manager and the product’s lead dev, drinking coffee, our feet on the table and talking smack. Oh, and we did play a game of NHL<insertNumber> on PS4 during the interview… it was relaxed. Of course the more serious chat was there, too, but I can only really remember how relaxed it was. When I left the interview, I had been promised the position and that I would be sent the contract to be signed as soon as the CEO had reviewed and approved it. Next day, I had signed it and some time later I started at my current job (I gave a date when I was available to start, since there was a tour still agreed upon between the interview and the start).
Oh, and the job’s pretty much like the interview. Relaxed. It’s a good place to be in, even though the pay could be better (I regularly get offers for junior positions with more pay, and mid level positions with double the pay). I do value a pleasant working environment and the absence of stress more than big munny, what can I say?1 -
I have always been interested in computers. when I was in second grade, I decided I was no good at electronic circuits, and decided I wanted to program instead. My dad told be to check out free basic, and I immediately downloaded FBIDE, and followed tutorial videos on YouTube. once I finished the videos, I started to write mad libs programs. I made various types of calculators, etc. and loved it, so later I learned a bit of VB. I messed with that a bit, but didn't like it too much, and started web developing. The moment I saw some JS code, it was like an instinctive second language to me. I learned js and started making some ugly, but cool interactive web pages. When computercraft came out for minecraft, I learned lua and got a deeper understanding of programming. Now, I am using node to build a personal-use IoT server and currently making a drone flight program using a raspberry pi3
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I chose Network/Cyber Security because it was my internship experience and they were willing to pay me good money to stay on... No but seriously I am much better at understanding how complex systems work than coding them. This job, as stressful as it is, is a different kind of stressful that the deadline-fraught jobs of software developers worldwide.
And i can do it fully remote.2 -
!rant
Had to build an app using Cordova because... well, I am a web dev and know a shitload of PHP and a good part of JS, but no Swift or Java or whatever.
So there is a deadline set to like half a year after we had the initial talk with the customer. 6 months to build a relatively easy and small app.
So yeah, I procrastinated like one would do when he's got that kind of time left and not much else to do.
And yeah, I did work, but also procrastinated some more. The development was as expected, and I was well in the anticipated time frame.
Then I got a really bad disc prolapse and was sick at home and the hospital for (all together) 5 weeks.
After that, I came back to work for a week, then leaving for a (previously planned) vacation with my little family.
On my first day back at work after the vacation, I quit my job with a 6 weeks notice, of which I have to work 3 weeks.
I know it sounds like I'm a real prick, but it was never planned this way. I never searched for a new job. It just came to me.
I am still finishing the app, though :)
Why am I telling you this?
Well, I do that to show that there still are great bosses out there. My boss has NEVER spoken a bad word to me, even after I quit my job. He's always been kind, fair and understanding.
I just wanted to show that between all these rants about bad bosses and colleagues (which I have had my fair share of in the past), there still are some real gems out there.
Gotta my my boss - he's been one of the best I have had so far.
Peace out folks. Good night... -
Working on something...
-Hun?! Why the hell doesn't it work?
Attempt a few fixes...
-Still doesn't work? Damn what am i doing wrong?
Attempt other changes...
-Why is it still not working!?
Debug step by step, validate my values are fine...
-Why does my output not correspond to my values!?! What the hell is this black magic!?
Rebuild the same solution for the 5th time...
-...Why does it work now... -
From a junior developer, "who's responsible for making sure I understand the context of the feature when we're looking at the story? Are you going to drive that?"
Um no. YOU are responsible for understanding the information I've pointed you to on multiple occasions. I'm not your mother.2 -
So I got the LSTM working in keras.
Working from a glorified tutorial.
Why the fuck do people let their github pages go down with no other backup?
Especially if its a link in your blog?
Why would you do that and not post the full script (instead of bits and pieces interspersed with *partial* explanations)?
In any case, its working and training on a test set and examples just to debug my own understanding of the process.
Once thats done I can generate some training data and try training on a small set. If that goes smoothly and the loss looks like it is heading in the right direction, then I'll setup the hardware for the private cloud and start writing the parallel computing component.2 -
I spent 4 months in a programming mentorship offered by my workplace to get back to programming after 4 years I graduated with a CS degree.
Back in 2014, what I studied in my first programming class was not easy to digest. I would just try enough to pass the courses because I was more interested in the theory. It followed until I graduated because I never actually wrote code for myself for example I wrote a lot of code for my vision class but never took a personal initiative. I did however have a very strong grip on advanced computer science concepts in areas such as computer architecture, systems programming and computer vision. I have an excellent understanding of machine learning and deep learning. I also spent time working with embedded systems and volunteering at a makerspace, teaching Arduino and RPi stuff. I used to teach people older than me.
My first job as a programmer sucked big time. It was a bootstrapped startup whose founder was making big claims to secure funding. I had no direction, mentorship and leadership to validate my programming practices. I burnt out in just 2 months. It was horrible. I experienced the worst physical and emotional pain to date. Additionally, I was gaslighted and told that it is me who is bad at my job not the people working with me. I thought I was a big failure and that I wasn't cut out for software engineering.
I spent the next 6 months recovering from the burn out. I had a condition where the stress and anxiety would cause my neck to deform and some vertebrae were damaged. Nobody could figure out why this was happening. I did find a neurophyscian who helped me out of the mental hell hole I was in and I started making recovery. I had to take a mild anti anxiety for the next 3 years until I went to my current doctor.
I worked as an implementation engineer at a local startup run by a very old engineer. He taught me how to work and carry myself professionally while I learnt very little technically. A year into my job, seeing no growth technically, I decided to make a switch to my favourite local software consultancy. I got the job 4 months prior to my father's death. I joined the company as an implementation analyst and needed some technical experience. It was right up my alley. My parents who saw me at my lowest, struggling with genetic depression and anxiety for the last 6 years, were finally relieved. It was hard for them as I am the only son.
After my father passed away, I was told by his colleagues that he was very happy with me and my sisters. He died a day before I became permanent and landed a huge client. The only regret I have is not driving fast enough to the hospital the night he passed away. Last year, I started seeing a new doctor in hopes of getting rid of the one medicine that I was taking. To my surprise, he saw major problems and prescribed me new medication.
I finally got a diagnosis for my condition after 8 years of struggle. The new doctor told me a few months back that I have Recurrent Depressive Disorder. The most likely cause is my genetics from my father's side as my father recovered from Schizophrenia when I was little. And, now it's been 5 months on the new medication. I can finally relax knowing my condition and work on it with professional help.
After working at my current role for 1 and a half years, my teamlead and HR offered me a 2 month mentorship opportunity to learn programming from scratch in Python and Scrapy from a personal mentor specially assigned to me. I am still in my management focused role but will be spending 4 hours daily of for the mentorship. I feel extremely lucky and grateful for the opportunity. It felt unworldly when I pushed my code to a PR for the very first time and got feedback on it. It is incomparable to anything.
So we had Eid holidays a few months back and because I am not that social, I began going through cs61a from Berkeley and logged into HackerRank after 5 years. The medicines help but I constantly feel this feeling that I am not enough or that I am an imposter even though I was and am always considered a brilliant and intellectual mind by my professors and people around me. I just can't shake the feeling.
Anyway, so now, I have successfully completed 2 months worth of backend training in Django with another awesome mentor at work. I am in absolute love with Django and Python. And, I constantly feel like discussing and sharing about my progress with people. So, if you are still reading, thank you for staying with me.
TLDR: Smart enough for high level computer science concepts in college, did well in theory but never really wrote code without help. Struggled with clinical depression for the past 8 years. Father passed away one day before being permanent at my dream software consultancy and being assigned one of the biggest consultancy. Getting back to programming after 4 years with the help of change in medicine, a formal diagnosis and a technical mentorship.3 -
While teaching theory is actually good, it doesn't mean that there is no room for any practical education either. Students needs to be exposed to modern programming languages like Python, Ruby while at the same time be trained in the pioneers of programming like C, C++, Java. It is only then would they be able to make informed decisions on who they really want to be. If you had one practical lab session on C and Java and then the rest of the semester about HTML, students would end up moving away from programming.
Concepts like programming and networking concepts should be included whereas ancient technologies like programming micro-processors (x386, x486, etc) should be excluded. Who programs x386 and x486 micro-processors anymore? While the understanding of how micro-processors and other low-level components in the computer systems work is very essential, doing practicals on them isn't really a good use of students' time, energy or effort. -
I don't care about market cap. Stick your hype-driven business practices up your ass. Infinite growth doesn't exist. I won't read your fucking books and attend your fucking bootcamps and MBAs. You don't have a business model. Selling data is not a business model. Fuck your quick-flip venture capital schemes, and especially fuck your “ethics”.
I will be the first alt-tech CEO. I only care about revenue. The real money, not capitalization bubble vaporware. You don't need a huge fleet of engineers if you're smart about your technology, know how to do architecture, and you're not a feature creep. You don't need venture capital if you don't need a huge fleet of engineers. You don't need to sell data if you don't need venture capital. See? See the pattern here?
My experience allows me to build products on entirely my own. I am fully aware of the limitations of being alone, and they only inspire lean thinking and great architectural decisions. If you know throwing capacity at a problem is not an option, you start thinking differently. And if you don't need to hire anyone, it is very easy to turn a profit and make it sustainable.
If you don't follow the path of tech vaporware, you won't have the problems of tech vaporware, namely distrust of your user base, shitty updates that break everything, and of course “oops, they raised capital, time to leave before things go south”.
A friend of mine went the path I'm talking about, developed a product over the course of four years all alone, reached $10k MRR and sold for $0.8M. But I won't sell. I only care about revenue. If I get to $10k MRR, I will most likely stop doing new features and focus on fixing all the bugs there are and improving performance. This and security patches. Maybe an occasional facelift. That's it. Some products are valued because they don't change, like Sublime Text. The utility tool you can rely on. This is my scheme, this is what I want to do in life. A best-kept secret.
Imagine 100 million users that hate my product but use it because there are no alternatives, 100 people in data enrichment department alone, a billion dollars of evaluation (without being profitable), 10 million twitter followers, and ten VC firms telling me what to do and what data to sell.
Fuck that. I'd rather have one thousand loyal customers and $10k MRR. I'm different, some call it a mental illness, but the bottom line is, my goals are beyond their understanding. They call me crazy. I won't say it was never about the money, of course it was, but inflating your evaluation is not “money”. But the only thing they have is their terrible hustle culture lives and some VC street wisdom, meanwhile I HAVE products, it is on record on my PH. I have POTDs, I have a fucking Golden Kitty nomination on health and fitness for a product I made in one day. Fuck you.6 -
Those who had the "pleasure" of working directly with clients know a thing or two about how a clumsy communication can have grave consequences.
Software developer and an Imgur user BackDoorNoBaby shed some light on these humorous situations and misunderstandings that often occur with clueless clients. Because we all have our niche interests and specializations, and it’s easy to sneer at the plebs who just don’t get it. To be fair though, dealing with unrealistic demands by clients who have no real understanding of what you do must get pretty frustrating at times, and if you work in IT, you’ll surely have come across at least one of these situations before.
What we have here are the daily trials and tribulations of an IT worker. Clients that read the latest trends in a tech magazine and want it right now. Business people who think that because they have the money, solutions should magically materialize. Clients that complain about something not functioning properly, when they clearly don't have a clue how to use it properly. We all know this kind of clients, and these kind of 'horror' stories are part of what makes working in IT so special. Sometimes humour is the only suitable response.2 -
We had a tutorial on how to use spark/Hadoop.. part of the tutorial was the installation instructions for Ubuntu vms.
The Prof insisted we used an older version of Hadoop (v2.1.5), so naturally this required pulling older repos and older versions of java.
Naturally, some of the people in the class got some namespacing issues and garbage left from uninstalled packages.
Now, the tutorial was geared towards business/math people, not com sci. So most of the people didn't understand why apt didn't let them run certain commands (even though it very clearly just asked for them to run autoremove or autoclean, like in the "error message"). When the Prof and their "experienced TA" saw these messages, their recommendation was "make a new fresh vm".
The fuck? I heard that, run over and was like no. Just run the suggested command, it's literally a simple issue. And the guy didn't believe me. I had to sit him down, show him how I literally typed what the console was asking for, and everything just worked... The guy's response was "well that's Linux for you, its really complicated and can never trust anything, this time it worked, but next time it might not". Dude... Do you even know what you are saying? Like you are a supposed expert, least have some understanding of the package manager you are using. Maybe things will then be less "schrodinger cat".
God damn I can't wait to be out of this stupid fucking school. Never going back to academia.1 -
Listen dude I get it, you've been in more of a Systems Admin role for a long time, you haven't really worked on a devlike team.
I can be patient I can be understanding. But when you break the build you need to fix it.
Yes I know you didn't change any of the files that are now failing, but you the pipeline is no longer deploying and so we can't fix anything.
Okay dude we are being prevented from deploying because you broke the build, you need to fix it. It's stopping everyone else.
DUDE FIX THE FLIPPING BUILD EVERYONE IS WAITING FOR YOU TO FIX THAT!
Seriously I know we should be patient with people learning new things, but some days it is difficult.5 -
I never wanted to be a programmer. I spent years in education being confused and bombarded by information that was poorly explained and made little to no sense.
Then in my final year after having a basic understanding of the building blocks, I just sent out to solve a problem >I< had.
It all just clicked into place and it turns out I had learned but perhaps didn't have an appreciation of how to apply it.
I'm guessing my education was too theoretical and not enough practical. -
NO FUCKING WONDER I SUCKED-ASS IN HIGH SCHOOL ALGEBRA!!!!!
Arghgghhghgh ughhh....
I want to beef up the hell out of my Maths Chops so I can maybe try going back to school for a A.S. in EE or hell even an B.S.
I'm using my company's Safari Learning account for getting free-ish access to college algebra books and I'm self studying.
I'm still in Chapter 0 where the book covers shit you're supposed to know from previous years of education. I'm just learning about some of this shit now!!!
While it's possible that I didn't pay attention in high school lectures, I took geometry in 9th grade and was an A/B+ student and felt confident in maths. I got to Algebra II in High School and suddenly nothing made sense anymore, reality fucking-fell-apart!
Suddenly, I'm failing tests left and right and struggling with the lecture concepts and I could never seem to grasp materials covered in class anymore to even be able to finish the homework assignments.
Fast forward to me being 15 years older and wanting to take a stab at this shit again, but with new found determination to get into EE so I can fuck around with small electronics for pet projects I want to do. I'm starting with College Algebra to try and learn when suddenly, low and behold I have a HUGE FUCK-MOTHERING GAP in my core understanding of the language/syntax/grammar of mathematics.
Been fucking knee-capped for the last decade+ because I either slacked off during those fundamental lectures (which again; is totally plausible) or I had a complete fucking imbecile for a math teacher that glossed over the topics and fucked not only me but the 40+ other kids in that class.
I'm not going to blame the teacher, although I really fucking want to, but I can't remember how the class scored on tests or homework to be able to fairly and objectively make that judgement against the educator.
FUCK!!! I hate my 15 y.o. self right now6 -
META-LUCK: A Pseudo-Ontology Of An Authentic Future
* * *
I think in the not-to-distant future we will abandon the idea of authenticity (messaging, corporate responsibility, ethos) in favor of other factors, such as cost. We won't abandon it and replace it with fakeness, so much as realize
that we don't, as a society favor it at all, not in the absolute sense, nor in the relative sense like in relation to things like cost.
We will either abandon authenticity entirely, or alternatively, transition to a world where authenticity is the highest valued quality, being adjacent to truth.
Heres why. Authenticity, like all social qualities, can be 1. mimicked, 2. simulated,
or 3. emulated.
In the first case, a corporation, product, leader, organization, or other, apes authenticity simply by its knowable, external features. It mimics the sounds, like a jungle bird copying a jack hammer to scare away predators or attract mates.
There is no understanding, let alone model, external or internal. The successful mimic
is little more than a lifeless, unthinking puppet.
In the second case, the attempted authentic simulates authenticity: That is, an external
model is formed, or pattern, that is predictable, and archetypal. It may have an internal
model even, a set of policies and processes for deciding the external-facing behavior.
But these policies and internal processes and models are all strictly outward facing. It is purely pathological in its goal, desiring only at minimum to achieve *externally attribute* authenticity (public opinion) rather than those internal changes that generate the true perception of the public--a perception not of surface behaviors and shrewd calculating policies and processes, but as a quality of authenticity for its own sake. This is in some sense the difference between the mundane and the atavistic, that the benefit, while not definable strictly, is assumed as a 'matter of course', culturally, within the organization or individual or company. It is to say, a *quality* of the thing, that *generates* outputs of a certain character and nature, rather than a *goal* that is attained 'after-the-fact' by behaviors generated for *other* than being authentic.
Here we reach the limitation of definitions.
Finally, we arrive at the case of number three, the emulation. We have in part already described it, but lets try and summarize a bit.
The Authentic is an *originator* of behavior and outward appearances, being an internal quality of a person or organization. It originates behavior, rather than being the goal of behavior and outward appearances.
Its benefit is assumed, though not always nameable or definable, even though this sounds naive, superseding other factors like cost and profit. As such the authentic does not emerge in a cost-focused environment, not readily, not often, and not cheaply either.
It is in some sense an experimental state of being, of goal-seeking only after-the-fact of "being true to ones origins" is established above and beyond those goals--setting and achieving only those goals which ultimately align with the origin and intent of the authentic.6 -
So I was thinking about SSL and trying to understand it (random thought that just came up while eating lunch). I came up with this analogy, not sure if maybe I've heard it before... Is this understanding correctly?
A and B want to send letters but make sure no one other than them can get in on the conversation or impersonate them.
Each is able to create a pen and glasses that must be used to see the ink.
So when they first connect, they exchange the pens.
So even if a middle man can duplicate the pen he can't actually read what anyone is saying. And if he tried to write something, the receiver will know it's not sent by the other since it makes no sense. So they then write a new letter and agree to send each other new pens and use new glasses?1 -
So i wasted last 24 hours trying to satisfy my ego over a shitty interview and revisiting my old job's codebase and realising that i still don't like that shit. just i am 25 and have no clue where am i heading at. i am just restless, my most of the decisions in 2023 have given very bad outcomes and i am just trying doing things to feel hopeful.
context for the interview story-----
my previous job was at a b2b marketing company whose sdk was used by various startups to send notifications to their users, track analytics etc. i understood most of it and don't find it to be any major engineering marvel, but that interviewer was very interested in asking me to design a system around it.
in my 1.2 years of job there, i found the codebase to be extremely and unnecessarily verbose ( java 7) with questionable fallbacks and resistance towards change from the managers. they were always like "we can't change it otherwise a lot of our client won't use our sdk". i still wrote a lot of testcases and tried to understand the working of major features.
BTW, before you guys go on a declare me an embarrassment of an engineer who doesn't know the product's code base, let me tell you that we are talking SDKs (plural) and a service based company here. their was just one SDK with interesting, heavy lifting stuff and 9 more SDKs which were mostly wrappers and less advanced libraries. i got tasks in all of them, and 70% of my time went into maintaining those and debugging client side bugs instead of exploring the "already-stable-dont-change" code base.
so based on my vague understanding and my even more vague memory from 1 year ago, i tried to explain an overall architecture to that interviewer guy. His face was screaming the word "pathetic" from his expressions, so i thought that today i will try to decode the codebase in 12-15 hours, publish a cool article and be proud of how much i know a so called martech system design. their codebase is open sourced, so it wasn't difficult to check it out once more.
but boy oh boy i got so bored. unnecessary clases , unnecessary callbacks static calls , oof. i tried to refactor a few classes, but even after removing 70% of codebase, i was still left with 100+ classes , most of them being 3000-4000 files long. and this is your plain old java library adding just 800kb to your project.
boring , boring stuff. i would probably need 2-3 more days to get an understanding of complete project, although by then i would be again questioning my life choices , that was this a good use of my 36 hours?
what IS a correct usage of my time? i am currently super dissatisfied with my job, so want to switch. i have been here for 6 months, so probably i wouldn't be going unless i get insane money or an irresistible company offer. For this i had devised a 2 part plan to either become good at modern hot buzz stuff in my domain( the one being currently popularized by dev influenzas) or become good at dsa/leetcode/cp. i suck bad at ds/algo stuff, nor am i much motivated. so went with that hot buzz stuff.
but then this interview expected me to be a mature dev with system design knowledge... agh fuck. its festive season going on and am unable to buy any cool shirts since i am so much limited with my money from my mediocre salary and loans. and mom wants to buy a home too... yeah kill me3 -
This is a question and a rant about my frustrations with an API description. First take a look at this usage information for a library I have been playing with:
https://github.com/avaneev/avir/...
Now my first question: Is it clear as to you what the formats are for the InBuf and OutBuf parameters are?
Now, read his response to people (including me) struggling with determining the format of the buffers for this resize function:
https://github.com/avaneev/avir/...
Does the guy come across as condescending as hell? Am I reading into this? It is like the guy takes every opportunity to find fault with people not understanding the details he didn't put in his API description. I would find it difficult to have to work with someone like this.
The irony about this is the description of his code makes me think it is going to magically create this wonderfully rescaled image preserving details. The result is that a standard bilinear filtering scaling function looks practically the same. I saw no real perceptible improvements of his code over the scaler I tested against. When I adjusted parameters using presets he provided it didn't improve the results and added artifacts I could not accept. His scaler is also at least a magnitude slower than the bilinear version. So the code is pretty much a non-starter for my current project.
Ah well, I appreciate him posting the code and making it a very permissive license. That part is really cool.16 -
I don’t know if someone is following me. Well at least if you’re drunk and behave common you can expect the same treatment no matter what country you’re about to stop by. I hope if we start be polite the same way across the continent we can get the same understanding of our problems. Peace ✌🏽and love ❤️1
-
I have a PHP related question.
I noticed a few frameworks make use of this structure of code and it makes absolutely no sense to me. There would be a PHP file, and the contents of the file would be as follows:
<?php
return [
‘a’ => ‘b’
];
My only understanding is that this is an array/object but I have no idea how these values would even be accessed.
Like, there is no array variable, how can a php file simply return something into a void? There isn’t a function or variable to catch that array.
How does this even work?23 -
Been struggling with an issue all weekend (it had to go to client today) with no solution and without understanding why it was returning the wrong values.
Arrive this morning to the office and team leader asks me about the issue and gives me a new one with higher priority, so I decide to pass my issue to a junior I work with.
While doing so and explaining everything he should look into, by some magic powers I found the reason for the issue
Thank the rubber ducking god!!! -
I think I finally, really, comprehend why secret societies have historically been created... I mean the potentially logical ones. This train of thought is logically terrifying.
I want a logic check.
I've been jokingly mentioning some of my totally true, practically useless in most scenarios, skills/specific fields of knowledge/ability under a moniker of 'extremely useful, assuming apocalyptic event' for years. Things like advanced knowledge of Coefficients of glass expansion, Fortran, various things that have caused friends to refer to me as MacGyver after the reboot came out.
In recent years, I've personally encountered several varieties of the ones defined by helplessness, self-victimisation, some version of a real disability... that theyve expounded into a personified personal nemesis-- to flashily battle yet never overcome, etc... the vast majority perplexing me as to why that's a valid form of life to them... it's not that they never consider some other way; the ball is just quickly dropped and never picked back up.
College?(not that I'm a big fan) they wish they could but so expensive... aide? The form was hard/confusing/past-due...
Lookup/learn something more indepth than a tiktok? *some self-deprecating bs*
Yet it's "I always wanted to do/be/learn X"
Shows like 'How It's Made' fascinate, but don't inspire enough for a 5min google query.
In the dev world its a clear, inverted pyramid-- one of the first posts I saw when I rejoined here was ostream's rant on Apple sucking because after they stop support/updates you "can't" load a different OS... ofc you can. But several comments down... no mention of that... i think it was @LensFlare who was the only one in ~15 respondents to point out the core logical fallacy.
Basic shit is totally forgotten... try asking some random adults what plastic is made from... or pay attention to how many people declare they have a gluten "allergy".
I get people frequently telling me that things im pointing out as differences don't matter because "it's just semantics"... semantics is literally the epitome of "significance", with roots in 'meaning' and 'truth'
Back to the main issue... We are in a world where DIY is typically something you pay more to do as a catered experience than actually learning anything, people destroy their own arguments hopes of validity unwittingly often by stating the arguement, get 'offended' or 'triggered' by factual statements, propagate misinformation and bastardise words until MW needs money enough to print a new version, likely adding the misuse as an actual definition and basic knowledge and the thought to actually learn is vetoed by the existence of google translate, the wisdom of tiktok and the pure brillance of troubleshooting every random linux issue you have from not knowing basic CLI and thinking linux makes you cool, with chmod 777 because so many other dumbasses on forums keep propagating misinformation. Ask them what 777 means, most have no clue... as they didnt consider googling that one before putting it in a terminal several times.
The number of humans that actually know the basic shit that the infrastructure of the world is built on keeps decreasing... and we aren't even keeping a running tally.
The structure of the internet has the right idea... dns- 13 active master root servers, with multiple redundancies if they start dropping... hell ICANN is like a secret society but publicly known/obfuscated... the modern internet hasnt had a global meltdown... aside from the lack of censorship and global availability changing the social definition of a valid use of braincells to essentially propagating spam as if it's factual and educational.
So many 'devs' so few understanding what a driver is, much less how to write one... irl network techs that don't know what dhcp is or that their equiptment has logs... professionals in deducated fields like Autism research/coping... no clue why it was called "autism", obesity and malnutrition simultaneously existing in the same humans... it's like we need to prepare a subterranean life-supporting vault and stock it like Noah's ark... just including the basic knowledge of things that used to be common/obvious. I've literally had 2 different, early 20s, female, certified medical assistants taking my medical history legitimately ask if not having a uterus made it harder to get pregnant...i wish i was joking.
Any ideas better than a subterranean human vault system? It's not like we can simply store detailed explanations, guides, media... unless we find a way to make them into obfuscated tiktok videos apparently on nonsense or makeup tutorials.11 -
There are tools i use more often, but a place in my heart is reserved for ILSpy.
It shows IL code as c# code and it helped me so much at understanding how components work.
Best moment was when a support guy from a company told me stuff that wasn't correct according to the code...
...no need to tell him. Hope it stays unencrypted :-D -
Soo question for the few embedded engineers on here. Do you guys use microchip’s, or NXP’s SDK for the hardware drivers? Or do you read the ref manual and build the HAL and PAL drivers per the need of the project for less code bloat and saving code space.
I and my coworkers always end up writing the drivers ourselves , so we have a better understanding of the specific hardware of the chip. Just trying to see if We’re the majority or the minority of embedded engineers.
Not really sure how many embedded folks are even on here.
And no not talking about RasPie, and arduino folks (no offense)8 -
Another 'fun' rant
Wrote a new server application and got the request from customer services to make it compatible with a slightly older DB version.
Today, CS asked me to install everything on the customer's test environment so I made a build and installed it there.
Wanted to run the service, no .Net framework 4.7.1 installed. Fine, download the installer ...
Start installing .Net framework 'unsupported OS'. Started looking into it. Customer is still running an old unsupported Windows Server 2008 ...
Asked some colleagues whether this was normal. Apparently, yes.
Seems CS isn't capable of telling customers to at least have a supported windows version when they want our software. As if security issues due to people here not understanding TCP/IP isn't enough, we now have security issues due to old, unsupported Windows versions.
Note to self: never trust anyone who says that 'security is the most important thing in our software enviornment'. -
Imagine you're in a company, one year in now. You've tried your best to amass as much knowledge of legacy services as you can (specially given no documentation) and you think you've done the best you can.
Now imagine your manager is upset that you haven't gotten as much domain knowledge as an engineer who's been in the team for five years now. Then also imagine that your manager whenever asked about specific product or tech or any knowledge on a service just keep tagging the 5 year engineer. If he ever gives an update in slack on any incident, he doesn't read what everyone has written in the channel so far, but invites the team on a call, and asks them to verbally tell him what to write as an update so as to show he actually understands it all and is showing leadership. What do you do?
Also I've read a good manager let's his team self function without any micromanaging but I feel this is literally hypocritical (lack of knowledge comparison) and useless of him to essentially making no decisions or understanding anything without pointing fingers. What would you all do about this kind of manager, or am I just inexperienced and maybe not seeing what he's actually doing and contributing. -
Getting tired of old business types managing software projects... I really don’t care if you have fifty years of experience in managing loans in banks, please don’t try to manage software or data projects... this is sooo out of your realm of understanding.
PS I actually like this person, they are a wonderful human, but keep nosing in areas they have no knowledge, and derail the conversation from talking about things we actually need to discuss. Like “how do we build this?”5 -
I'm following this fucking tutorial (https://blog.ssdnodes.com/blog/...) and everything goes well, I have docker running, docker compose installed properly, but when I start trying to create the docker-compose.yml and accessing the stupid site using the virtual host domain i set I can't it keep getting "503 Service Temporarily Unavailable" or "502 Bad gateway" what the hell am i doing wrong, I just want to get this working in my VM so i can move it to my damn server and have my own fucking cloud. This damn bullshit is exactly why i went into programming rather than dealing with configuring servers and bullshit like this i know it's outside my level of understanding but I really fucking want my own cloud system but I want it containerized for both isolation and learning purposes.
I have no idea what the hell i'm doing wrong and all the damn articles and links i'm reading aren't helping at all with my level of stupid not allowing me to understand what i'm doing wrong1 -
I recently went through a very detailed and well-explained Python-based project/lesson by Karpathy which is called micrograd. This is a tiny scalar-valued autograd engine and a neural net on top of it.
The project above is, as expected, built on Python. For learning purposes, I wanted to see how such a network may be implemented in TypeScript and came up with a 🤖 micrograd-ts - https://github.com/trekhleb/... repository (and also with a demo - https://trekhleb.dev/micrograd-ts/ of how the network may be trained).
Trying to build anything on your own very often gives you a much better understanding of a topic. So, this was a good exercise, especially taking into account that the whole code is just ~200 lines of TS code with no external dependencies.
The micrograd-ts repository might be useful for those who want to get a basic understanding of how neural networks work, using a TypeScript environment for experimentation.
With that being said, let me give you some more information about the project.
## Project structure
- [micrograd/](https://github.com/trekhleb/...) — this folder is the core/purpose of the repo
- [engine.ts](https://github.com/trekhleb/...) — the scalar `Value` class that supports basic math operations like `add`, `sub`, `div`, `mul`, `pow`, `exp`, `tanh` and has a `backward()` method that calculates a derivative of the expression, which is required for back-propagation flow.
- [nn.ts](https://github.com/trekhleb/...) — the `Neuron`, `Layer`, and `MLP` (multi-layer perceptron) classes that implement a neural network on top of the differentiable scalar `Values`.
- [demo/](https://github.com/trekhleb/...) - demo React application to experiment with the micrograd code
- [src/demos/](https://github.com/trekhleb/...) - several playgrounds where you can experiment with the `Neuron`, `Layer`, and `MLP` classes.
Demo (online)
---------------------
To see the online demo/playground, check the following link:
🔗 https://trekhleb.dev/micrograd-ts
3 -
Why don't most products follow a minimalist approach right till the end? Most start ups start like that. But when things begin to fall apart or become better they tend to deviate. While the earlier reason is understandable (because no one likes to fail so they'll do anything to not fail), the second reason seems to me more of an organisational creation than what the users want.
From my understanding as the product becomes popular positions (managerial or product) created need to justify their presence. What do they do? So the breath of fresh air brings in a lot of garbage that may not be required and would be in deviance from the main product idea.
It is debatable that audiences would not accept such ideas that are being brought in, because hey audiences are smart. And they are. But the organisation in order to justify the original wrong decision tends to push their new features (through offers or marketing campaigns). This makes the organisation invested into a wrong direction and security of jobs of the new managers/product people. Win win situation, but lose lose for the organisation and the original product. -
Programming Lesson #7
TLDR: Beating deadlines is difficult
Long version:
There is no easy way to give an estimation or deadline for a particular development task. Sometimes it takes a lot less or often a lot more time to finish a task than estimated deadlines and that's totally fine. Just make sure you have a manager/senior mentor who is well aware of this fact and doesn't scrutinize you regularly for missing deadlines.
I am going to make sure that when I get into a senior management position, I would show understanding and empathy towards my juniors similar to how my seniors show to me currently when I miss deadlines.4 -
Do you feel that people are prefering to go through a bunch of tuts than sitting down and read a book.?
SO has made it so easy -- got an error just google and fix it. No need to bother about underlying concepts.
SO is great but do you feel like it's making younger programmers more focused on trouble-shooting rather than solving and understanding.?2 -
Not using design pattern on a school project because he was too busy understanding what the fuck was Smalltalk since no one understood it in classes.
yes it was me. I don't blame myself, I really took too much time understanding that (and I was the only one to do that, the other just asked me. ALL OF THEM). But I should, I guess. -
Okay so update/JS pt2
This is just me throwing my thoughts down and some questions
I've been practicing arrays/objects and loops more and I'm getting more understanding it helps that you can do them both at the same time. But like I need more looping techniques (if that makes sense) like instead of always using for(let i = 0; i <= x.length; i++) and I havent completely learned how or when I use for(x in y)
Questions.
• what's the difference between class objects and objects that look like a python dictionary
• when should I use classes over the other kind of classes
• any good resources and projects I can practice with loops cause I'm kind of running dry on ideas
and I dont wanna google cause I barely already have no social interaction2 -
On page 19 of the ethereum yellow paper: http://gavwood.com/paper.pdf it defines the address of a wallet as: A(pr) = Β[96...255](KEC(ECDSAPUBKEY(Pr))), which is the right most 160-bits of the Keccak hash of the public key generated by the private key.
If I expose the public key to the network, do I allow people to impersonate me and sign transactions even though they don't have Tr, Ts, or Tw? My understanding is no, that without those values you can't hash the transaction.
Subsequently, this leads me to wonder if the purpose of the address (besides identifying users) to obscure the public key so that the private key is at a less risk of being reversed? Or can the public key of any address be captured?
If the public key of any address can be identified on the network or off network (without actually being the owner of that key), how do you do that? Are there any resources on how to perform this that are computationally easy?1 -
(I'm not completely sure of what I'm saying here, so don't take this too seriously)
Settling on a language to write the api for ranterix is hard.
I'm finding a lot of things about elixir to be insanely good for a stable api.
But I'm having a lot of gripes with the most important elixir web framework, phoenix.
Take a look at this piece of code from the phoenix docs:
defmodule Hello.Repo.Migrations.CreateUsers do
use Ecto.Migration
def change do
create table(:users) do
add :name, :string
add :email, :string add :bio, :string
add :number_of_pets, :integer
timestamps()
end
end
end
Jesus christ, I hate this shit.
Wtf are create, add and timestamps. Add is somehow valid inside the create, how the fuck is that considered good code? What happens if you call timestamps twice? It's all obscure "trust me, it works" code.
It appears to be written by a child.
js may have a million problems. But one thing I like about CJS (require) or ESM (import) is that there's nothing unexplained. You know where the fuck most things come from.
You default export an eatShit() function on one file and import it from another, and what do you get?
The goddamn actual eatShit function.
require is a function the same way toString is a function and it returns whatever the fuck you had exported in the target file.
Meanwhile some dynamic langs are like "oh, I'll just export only some lang construct that i expect you to specify and put that shit in fucking global of the importing file".
Js is about the fucking freedom. It won't decide for you what things will files export, you can export whatever the fuck you want, strings, functions, classes, objects or even nothing at all, thanks to module.exports object or export statement.
And in js, you can spy on anything external, for example with (...args) => debugger; fnToSpyOn(...args)
You can spoof console.log this way to see what the fuck is calling it (note: monkey patching for debugging = GOOD, for actual programming = DOGSHIT)
To be fair though, that is possible because of being a dynamic lang and elixir is kind of a hybrid typed lang, fair enough.
But here's where i drop the shit.
Phoenix takes it one step further by following the braindead ruby style of code and pretty DSLs.
I fucking hate DSLs, I fucking hate abstraction addiction.
Get this, we're not writing fucking poetry here. We're writing programs for machines for them to execute.
Machines are not humans with emotions or creativity, nor feel.
We need some level of abstraction to save time understanding source code, sure.
But there has to be a balance. Languages can be ergonomic for humans, but they also need to be ergonomic for algorithms and machines.
Some of the people that write "beautiful" "zen" code are the folks that think that everyone who doesn't push the pretty code agenda is a code elitist that doesn't want "normal" people to get into programming.
Programming is hard, man, there's no fucking way around it.
Sometimes operating system or even hardware details bleed into code.
DSLs are one easy way to make code really really easy to understand, but also make it really fucking hard to debug or to lose "programming meaning".7 -
(Note: I got a bit carried away while writing this, so the end result is a lot longer than I expected. Apologies for the long post!)
The beginning of my programming journey started with a book.
This was back in 7th grade. I had some basic exposure to BASIC (pun maybe intended?) from our school curriculum, but it was nothing too interesting as our teachers never really treated it as anything important. They would stress a lot on those Microsoft Office chapters (yes, we actually studied Microsoft Office as part of our computer science course at school) and mostly ignore the programming chapters because I dare say many of them struggled with it themselves. So although I had been exposed to *some* programming, it was mostly memorizing the syntax without actually understanding what was going on.
Then one day there was this book fair thing going on at this local Carrefour (for those of you who've no idea, it's a pretty famous hypermarket chain) in this mall, and for some reason my mother and I were in that mall on that day. Now the interesting thing is that this usually never happens -- I usually visit malls with my dad or my friends, this is the only instance I remember where I had actually visited one with just my mom. This turned out to be fortuitous. My father is the kind of person who's generally not amenable to any kind of extraneous shopping requests. My mother, on the other hand, was and remains pliable.
So I basically saw this book -- Sams' Teach Yourself JavaScript in 24 Hours -- being sold at half price. I vaguely remembered having read somewhere that JavaScript is a good introductory programming language (and it helped that this was the time when I was getting into a Google-craze -- I basically saw some photos of Google Zurich and went all HOLY SHIT THAT'S WHERE I NEED TO WORK WHEN I GROW UP (for those of you who haven't seen it, I recommend googling it. That office is the bomb) -- and I'd also read that you need programming skills to join Google). So I begged and begged my mum to buy that book, and thankfully she did.
Back home I returned with my new prize under my arm. Dad took one look at it and scoffed that I'll never actually use it. Pretty much entirely out of spite (to prove him wrong), I attacked the book with a zeal. I still remember how I felt when I wrote my very first JavaScript program (printing the current system date in an h1 tag) and marveling at the output. I guess that was when something struck -- the realization that this was probably what I wanted to do in life.
Fast forward to today, and I've never looked back and wondered what it would be like to have done something else.
PS: for all you beginners out there, JavaScript is a horrible language. Please start with something like Python. Also there are better resources than Sams' Teach Yourself JavaScript in 24 Hours available, that I just didn't know of back then. I'd recommend Eloquent JavaScript any day. -
Every once in awhile i go into a dark zone... Not talking about being depressed or shit like that... I'm talking about a dark place filled with nothing but anger and hatred towards everyone and everything. Where I'm no longer logical or understanding. Where I'm fully controlled by my anger and fueled by the grade A hatred in me.
It's been a couple of weeks now since the last time... I miss it... I need to find a way to get back in there.
Any good bands or songs that can feed my anger with hate?10 -
Learning how to break a result into the steps necessary to produce it, along with the broader concept of abstraction in computer science has allowed me to apply this thinking to my personal experience. I've traced personality traits and behaviors to specific events from my childhood, and can finally relax knowing that understanding computers has given me all the linguistic tools I need to talk to myself, which traditionally has been impossible. I no longer feel trapped in a terrifyingly imaginative mind.
-
Just need to vent out a bit. There's already been a few times at work where the senior developer asks me why I take so long to do something, and I'm unable to fully explain why.
Now, I could think of several reasons. Maybe it's my lack of experience; I just start researching on Google for solutions, start putting things together, and then I guess things start to get too complicated for me to be able to explain clearly. Maybe I end up "over-engineering" to solve problems that could be solved in a simpler way.
And this leads to my second reason, and that is there's no code review going on. I've wanted to just tell him, "If you'd just take a long look at my code, you'd understand why it's taking me so long! So you can tell me if I'm doing it right or wrong, or if I'm making it too complicated!" But, of course, being the junior developer, I also think that when he's explaining how to do something, I'm just not understanding it right.
I could ask for clarifications, and believe I've done that on some things, but my third reason is that he's just not good at explaining things, or that there's some miscommunication happening. English isn't his first language. His English is ok, but I know there's a lot of room for improvement. I also notice that our other co-workers are also having a bit of a hard time but it seems they already developed some sort of adaptation to communicate with him.
So yeah, there's my rant, and I'd love to know everyone's input on this. -
Anybody seen the The "Boring Software" manifesto? what do you think?
As software developers we are tired of the false claims made by evangelists of the latest and greatest technology. We will no longer confront them with their lack of understanding of computer science fundamentals, nor will we defend our lack of knowledge of their hyped and volatile technologies.
More at https://tqdev.com/2018-the-boring-s...2 -
More like a confession.
Had a task that involved invalidating a string if it contained more than five digits (anywhere in the string.)
"No problem", I thought. That sounds like a simple regex!
^(\D*\d?\D*){5}$
Turns out catastrophic backtracking had other ideas, and I revert to my usual "atomic grouping fudge that will hopefully work without me really understanding what's going on" of:
^(?>\D*\d?\D*){5}$
...anyone else shamefully follow this mantra, or am I the only one that hasn't skilled up properly on regexes...7 -
I'm mostly self-taught, but there are a couple people who defined my understanding of computing
- My amazing elementary school friend whose father worked at IBM and who initially turned my interest from astrophysics towards computing. I don't know whether physics would've been fruitful but I know computing is.
- My high school friend, who taught me the basics of OOP. Though we agree on almost nothing today, his explanations about code quality defined my understanding of the matter which I then used to draw completely different conclusions
- My high school mathematics teachers, who tolerated the way I abused every tool at my disposal to construct proofs that resembled a rollercoaster, and helped me develop my own understanding of mathematics
- 3blue1brown for producing replayable videos in a similar quality to my high school maths lectures with additional stunning visuals. No content on the internet fits the way I think quite as much as that channel. -
So I'm assigned once again to fix a new someone else created and that seems to be the case whenever there's an issue...
Boss just assigns it to whoever is most likely to be able to investigate it... which is basically me. Other than the little time I can use to develop stuff, I'm usually cleaning up other people's messes.
And these other people are to busy working on new crap to properly explain how their existing code/processes/changes works.
And well the fact that anything breaks in production (that's not due to upstream one off issues) whoever does not think he needs to take responsibility for it.
So everyone else and especially me has to spend time understanding the shit they wrote and fixing it for them.
How do I tell my boss this nicely that we need clearly definitely ownership and whenever a component blows up in prod, the guy that wrote the code fixes it no matter what? Thereby incentivizing him to not write shit code in the first place and be more proactive in making sure it doesn't in the first place since he knows otherwise he's doing overtime to fix it?
Is it just me or is there really no such thing as a dev job where something doesn't blow up due to poorly tested and designed code every other day?3 -
It's high time people start understanding the difference between 0 (zero) and NULL.
Zero: You visiting the toilet and notice the exhausted toilet paper roll.
NULL: You visiting the toilet and notice that there's no toilet paper roll.
Get the difference?1 -
Having a lot of bad experiences while working as intern in startups and about to join a MNC, i wanted to share my work life balance and technical demands that i expect from a company. These are going to be my list of checkpoints that i look forward , let me know which of them are way too unrealistic. also add some of yours if i missed anything :
Work life balance demands ( As a fresher, i am just looking forward for 1a, 2a and 8, but as my experience and expertise grows, i am looking forward for all 10. Would i be right to expect them? ):
1a 8 hr/day. 1b 9h/day
2a 5days/week. 2b 6 days/week
3 work from home (if am not working on something that requires my office presence)
4 get out of office whenever i feel like i am done for the day
5 near to home/ office cab service
6 office food/gym service
7 mac book for working
8 2-4 paid leaves/month
9 paid overtime/work on a holiday
10.. visa sponsorship if outside india
Tech Demands (most of them would be gone when i am ready to loose my "fresher " tag, but during my time in internship, training i always wished if things happened this way):
1. I want to work as a fresher first, and fresher means a guy who will be doing more non tech works at first than going straight for code. For eg, if someone hires me in the app dev team, my first week task should be documenting the whole app code / piece of it and making the test cases, so that i can understand the environment/ the knowledge needed to work on it
2. Again before coding the real meaningful stuff for the main product, i feel i should be made to prepare for the libraries ,frameworks,etc used in the product. For eg if i don't know how a particular library ( say data binding) used in the app, i should be asked to make a mini project in 1-2 days using all the important aspects of data binding used in the project, to learn about it. The number of mini tasks and time to complete them should be given adequately , as it is only going to benefit the company once am proficient in that tech
3. Be specific in your tasks for the fresher. You don't want a half knowledgeable fresher/intern think on its own diverging from your main vision and coding it wrong. And the fresher is definitely not wrong for doing so , if you were vague on the first place.
4. most important. even when am saying am proficient , don't just take my word for it. FUCKIN REVIEW MY CODE!! Personally, I am a person who does a lot of testing on his code. Once i gave it to you, i believe that it has no possible issues and it would work in all possible cases. But if it isn't working then you should sit with me and we 2 should be looking, disccussing and debugging code, and not just me looking at the code repeatedly.
4. Don't be too hard on fresher for not doing it right. Sometimes the fresher might haven't researched so much , or you didn't told him the exact instructions but that doesn't mean you have the right to humiliate him or pressurize him
5. Let multiple people work on a same project. Sometimes its just not possible but whenever it is, as a senior one must let multiple freshers work on the same project. This gives a sense of mutual understanding and responsibility to them, they learn how to collaborate. Plus it reduces the burden/stress on a single guy and you will be eventually getting a better product faster
Am i wrong to demand those things? Would any company ever provide a learning and working environment the way i fantasize?3 -
How can people stand this bitten apple? With this mojave update I now feel in the most unfriendly desert for developers.
Not only did your update render all my VM's unusable, but the new AppStore seems a joke. This new icon there if a piece is downloading or installing or whatever. I cannot tell what it should tell me. That an alien took a crap on my display? There's no percentage, nothing indicating what's actually happening. Is this your understanding of user experience through obscurity? - shunning the user from any useful information, hiding everything behind some nice looking vapourware?4 -
!Rant
TL;DR - Getting married can lead to installing life malware.
MARRIAGE SOFTWARE....
A young husband wrote this to a Systems Analyst -
(Marriage Software Div);
Dear Systems Analyst,
I am desperate for some help! I recently upgraded my program from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0 and found that the new program began unexpected Child Processing and also took up a lot of space and valuable resources. This wasn't mentioned in the product brochure.
In addition Wife 1.0 installs itself into all other programs and launches during systems initialization and then it monitors all other system activities.
Applications such as "Boys' Night out 2.5" and "Golf 5.3" no longer run, and crashes the system whenever selected.
Attempting to operate selected "Soccer 6.3" always fails and "Shopping 7.1" runs instead.
I cannot seem to keep Wife 1.0 in the background whilst attempting to run any of my favorite applications. Be it online or offline.
.
I am thinking of going back to "Girlfriend 7.0", but uninstall doesn't work on this program. Can you please help?
.... The Systems Analyst replied:
Dear Customer,
This is a very common problem resulting from a basic misunderstanding of the functions of the Wife 1.0 program.
Many customers upgrade from Girlfriend 7.0 to Wife 1.0 thinking that Wife 1.0 is merely a UTILITY AND ENTERTAINMENT PROGRAM.
Actually, Wife 1.0 is an OPERATING SYSTEM designed by its Creator to run everything on your current platform.
You are unlikely to be able to purge Wife 1.0 and still convert back to Girlfriend 7.0, as Wife 1.0 was not designed to do this and it is impossible to uninstall, delete or purge the program files from the System once it is installed.
Some people have tried to install Girlfriend 8.0 or Wife 2.0 but have ended up with even more problems. (See Manual under Alimony/Child Support and Solicitors' Fees).
Having Wife 1.0 installed, I recommend you keep it Installed and deal with the difficulties as best as you can.
When any faults or problems occur, whatever you think has caused them, you must run the.........
C:\ APOLOGIZE\ FORGIVE ME.EXE Program and avoid attempting to use the *Esc-Key for it will freeze the entire system.
It may be necessary to run C:\ APOLOGIZE\ FORGIVE ME.EXE a number of times, and eventually hope that the operating system will return to normal.
Wife 1.0, although a very high maintenance programme, can be very rewarding.
To get the most out of it, consider buying additional Software such as "Flowers 2.0" and "Chocolates 5.0" or "HUGS\ KISSES 6.0" or "TENDERNESS\ UNDERSTANDING 10.0" or "even Eating Out Without the Kids 7.2.1" (if Child processing has already started).
DO NOT under any circumstances install "Secretary 2.1" (Short Skirt Version) or "One Nightstand 3.2" (Any Mood Version), as this is not a supported Application for Wife 1.0 and the system will almost certainly CRASH.
BEST WISHES!
Yours,"
Systems Analyst.
-----------------------------------------------
I'm not sure if this is a repost - if it is I apologise, but it's too good not to share.1 -
Just got back from my interrailling trip across Europe! Are there any folks from Florence ? French Riviera ? Paris ?
It was awesome and I'm kind of sad I didn't have more time to meet some of you there!
It's also nice to shut off all the tech and nerdy jokes you laugh at before starting to cry and falling to anxiety because understanding them means you have no life
Hope some of you will travel to my country too 😎5 -
Not sure if I could care any less about the choices being made anymore.
But the best choice I made was actually quitting the working from home job I had right when they were starting to use WordPress and outsourcing it to whatever Indian developer they found to do that for them (pun intended, though no hard feelings and understanding of the situation) for their general projects. I just wasn't open to it anymore.
I was setting up websites for almost zero to no money, a website in 4 hours upto 2 days, whilst doing internal support to save their frigging mailboxes from the Outlook Demon all the time. (Exaggerated in some sense, but I abide by the thought)
Best decision would be to start working full-time in an E-commerce fulfillment company, learning the good stuff, both structural and management wise. Working on one entity, but still doing it whilst using 100's of technologies, connecting to a ton of platforms and projects and most of all being able to aid in lessening the work-load for both my co-workers and customers as much as is deemed possible.
I'm fine. -
I committed a pr which got accepted to a big open source project… and that’s good! I should feel better about my skills!
(Imagine the following as the Simpsons meme where they go: and that’s good, and that’s bad)
But it was just documentation… and that’s bad… maybe I should not feel better about my skills…
But it may save two or plus hours to the next dev who doesn’t understand what’s going wrong! And that’s good! So I should feel better about my skills cause I spent time debugging and going into details and understanding what was happening just to produce a better documentation!
But I have lack of certain vitamins and a bit of depression.
“And… is that good?”
“No, it’s bad, you should feel ashamed of your skills and about the way you answered someone twenty years ago!”3 -
So I thought I had a basic, high level understanding of C++ STL strings, pointers, copy constructors and stuff. In comes a dirname, a -D_GLIBCXX_USE_CXX11_ABI=0 and... Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.
So what is happening? I copy a string expecting a deep copy, but then I do the dirname or manipulation on the copy and it messes up *both* strings. gcc/C++ I know you're a beast, but what's going on there? Thing is only possible if I cast away const from c_str - which of course is a doubtful operation - but there also seems to be some strange copy on write logic that the data pointers initially point to same memory location and only with first manipulation on the copy they start to point to different addresses.
I had no clue. And still don't have.4 -
It annoys me immensely when I struggle with myself, criticizing my own lack of knowledge in certain areas and my colleagues say: "You'll learn by doing". No, I won't, that's a foolish dogma.
I won't and I have never learned by 'doing'. The best results I've obtained have been through understanding every last bit of what's under the hood of a particular functionality. I'm not going to understand the white box by constantly probing the black box, it's just unsatisfactory and insufficient information. It's even dangerous to base yourself on the black box results because you often might get false positives.
I got through university by massive multilateral sensory focus: kinesthetic (writing things down), auditory (listening to the professor), visual (observing graphs and models of the material taught), conscious (mentalizing it all and interlinking information so that later it's accessible from long-term memory). I can confirm this is necessary for the brain because a Neurologist once told me just that.
At least for me, I had the most horrible grades (D's and F's) in freshman year with the 'learn by doing' method and the best grades (A, A+) with the multi-sensory method in later years as I matured my studying methods. In fact, with that method I've continuously outsmarted other people who had 10 years more experience than me ('experts', 'consultants',..) but they preferred to stay in the ignorant 'bro zone' rather than learning things properly. Even worse, the day they arrived on the scene, they completely broke the production environment and messed it up for the whole team. I felt like banging my head on my desk. It just makes me disappointed in the system.
If you follow popular method, you'll soon find yourself in the same problems that arise from doing what everyone else does. What happens at that point? That's right, they have to call in someone who actually bothered learning things.10 -
Workflow? More like chasing answer from a community that is not, and never has been, famous for its pedagogical skills. So hand me some coffee, weed and/or some snacks because I'll still search high and low, skip sleep and build up a few hundred pages browsing history so that in the end, I'll reach the understanding I'm looking for anyways. Even if whatever person trying to help me - in their delusion that I already know everything, except for that thing I'm asking about of course - really, REALLY just failed at saying "that goes there because of that" instead of "did you try insertSomeAppropriateRandomNameOfAThingYouAssumeEveryoneKnowsHere..?".
But who am I kidding? The tools are better than ever (IDE'S). The pedagogical skills are getting its own arenas to build on and its coming along greatly (coding block apps, treehouse and the likes etc. etc).
And no matter the struggle, I can't escape that I love coding and learning more than anything else.
Now how do I.. Where.. When.. Why the.. -
My vague naive extreme understanding of interview questions are on a spectrum from situation a to situation b.
But what should the industry be doing? Is the industry just going wrong blindly copying big N companies hiring process without the same rationale? (e.g. they need computer scientists able to deal with problems specific to them at their size and that often means creating new tech, unreal problem solving abilities and cuh-rayzee knowledge)
a) stupid fucking theoretical shit that some people argue you won't ever need to be doing in practice for most companies, while giving you no ability to google, leetcode hard problems kind of stuff
b) practical work similar to what you'd be doing on the job, small bugs, tasks, pair programming on site with your potential future coworkers
Lots of people hate option a because it's puzzle/problem solving that isn't always closely related to what's on the job. Whiteboarding is arguably very much a separate skill. (Arguably unless it's like a big N company where you want computer scientists to deal with specific problems that aren't seen elsewhere, and you're making new tech to deal with your specific problems.)
We could go to the extreme of Option b, but it tends to trigger people into shitfits of "NO, HOW DARE YOU MAKE ME DO REAL WORK, BUT NOT PAY ME FOR IT AT THE INTERVIEW STAGE"
That's before we get into how to execute option b whether or not it's being given as a take home assignment (which is a huge pain in the ass and time sink, among other issues) vs a few hours at the potential workplace working with some of the future potential coworkers and soaking in the work environment (you have to figure out how to take the time off then)
Is it really just poor execution overall for the wrong use cases for the majority of the industry? What should the industry be doing in which cases.
Then this is all before HR screening with shit like where they might ask for more years of swift experience than its existed. -
I wonder sometimes is maybe management just like. Forgot that I'm my partner's primary transportation or something. I cannot imagine how else they would have approved putting them on a 4p-1a shift where they are alone and have no other transportation options save for me, their roommate who has to be up at 6a M-F, or walking home. But like it's 1a and actually freezing outside, so...
I dunno, maybe it's the sleep-deprivation, but it seems to me like they didn't think very hard about this, despite being made well aware a month or better in advance, and clearly understanding it then since HR had me take them for their drug test just before they were hired on because they didn't have another available ride.
But, then too, this is the same management and HR that left my partner without "official" access to clean drinking water or a working bathroom for almost 3 weeks because they delayed getting them a door code, so I'm not sure what I expected, exactly 😒4 -
I'm having a weird time with my current project.There are many companies involved and we are several teams coordinating with each other. My team was initially very large, for various reasons we were divided into smaller groups and I must say that the transition has been catastrophic.
We are doing SCRUM…sort of. The customer assigns the tasks to be completed at the end of the sprint, the story points are given without full understanding of the implementation and the deadlines are tights. I always find myself rushing to the release day with code that isn't production-ready but since the customer requests it and there's no objection among my superiors (please note, i tell them the deadline is tight) I gotta rush to deliver.
The customer doesn't know what he wants, but if he does know the deadline is unreasonable, or if he has just an idea of what he wants he still demands it... somehow without specifying what kind of implementations is expecting.
The current senior project developer takes everything (any task) as an emergency, it's never possible to defer to the next sprint, it's quite demeaning.
And I'm here wondering if maybe I've missed something, if the project simply lacks method and coordination, if I have more responsibility than I think, if my project leadership is too absent but I know one thing, at the moment I'm in anxiety about the current sprint due date because there is a task that will take longer than expected.
Any advice?5 -
Hey Everyone, first of all I’d like to start with my usual, hope all is well today as always! Today I’d like to post my first official rant.... so anyone that knows me in person or in general knows me as a good helpful young man, right now Milo is happy but has the urge to rant..
So... not naming anyone specifically from uni... one person specifically always on Facebook messaging me for my assessments, now me being me i try to say No, but the issue is i want people to do well, i put my heart into my work and people just want assignments handed to them on a gold platter, it takes me a lot longer to try and get concepts around my head , I usually always stay up late nights to get a better understanding of things. As you may see my work means a lot to me.
I always mention to my friends if they wish to do well, they must sacrifice going out clubbing or other social things for a later time. I spend my majority of the week learning new things related to programming Monday - Saturday, and on Sunday i have my free time , with the usual work out session thrown inbetween :-).
So anyways, thats it for my rant, I’d love to know if anyone has been through a similar instance? If so would love to hear about it!.
Thank you for taking the time to read my long rant once again :-)
Milo 🥂☺️5 -
Critical Tips to Learn Programming Faster Sample:
Be comfortable with basics
The mistake which many aspiring students make is to start in a rush and skip the basics of programming and its fundamentals. They tend to start from the comparatively advanced topics.
This tends to work in many sectors and fields of Technology, but in the world of programming, having a deep knowledge of the basic principles of coding and programming is a must. If you are taking a class through a tutor and you feel that they are going too fast for your understanding, you need to be firm and clear and tell them to go slowly, so that you can also be on the same page like everyone else
Most often than not, many people tend to struggle when they reach a higher level with a feeling of getting lost, then they feel the need to fall back and go through basics, which is time-consuming. Learning basics well is the key to be fast and accurate in programming.
Practice to code by hand.
This may sound strange to some of you. Why write a code by hand when the actual work is supposed to be done on a computer? There are some reasons for this.
One reason being, when you were to be called for an interview for a programming job, the technical evaluation will include a hand-coding round to assess your programming skills. It makes sense as experts have researched and found that coding by hand is the best way to learn how to program.
Be brave and fiddle with codes
Most of us try to stick to the line of instructions given to us by our seniors, but it is extremely important to think out of the box and fiddle around with codes. That way, you will learn how the results get altered with the changes in the code.
Don't be over-ambitious and change the whole code. It takes experience to reach that level. This will give you enormous confidence in your skillset
Reach out for guidance
Seeking help from professionals is never looked down upon. Your fellow mates will likely not feel a hitch while sharing their knowledge with you. They also have been in your position at some point in their career and help will be forthcoming.
You may need professional help in understanding the program, bugs in the program and how to debug it. Sometimes other people can identify the bug instantly, which may have escaped your attention. Don't be shy and think that they'll make of you. It's always a team effort. Be comfortable around your colleagues.
Don’t Burn-out
You must have seen people burning the midnight oil and not coming to a conclusion, hence being reported by the testing team or the client.
These are common occurrences in the IT Industry. It is really important to conserve energy and take regular breaks while learning or working. It improves concentration and may help you see solutions faster. It's a proven fact that taking a break while working helps with better results and productivity. To be a better programmer, you need to be well rested and have an active mind.
Go Online
It's a common misconception that learning how to program will take a lot of money, which is not true. There are plenty of online college courses designed for beginner students and programmers. Many free courses are also available online to help you become a better programmer. Websites like Udemy and programming hub is beneficial if you want to improve your skills.
There are free courses available for everything from [HTML](https://bitdegree.org/learn/...) to CSS. You can use these free courses to get a piece of good basic knowledge. After cementing your skills, you can go for complex paid courses.
Read Relevant Material
One should never stop acquiring knowledge. This could be an extension of the last point, but it is in a different context. The idea is to boost your knowledge about the domain you're working on.
In real-life situations, the client for which you're writing a program for possesses complete knowledge of their business, how it works, but they don't know how to write a code for some specific program and vice versa.
So, it is crucial to keep yourself updated about the recent trends and advancements. It is beneficial to know about the business for which you're working. Read relevant material online, read books and articles to keep yourself up-to-date.
Never stop practicing
The saying “practice makes perfect” holds no matter what profession you are in. One should never stop practicing, it's a path to success. In programming, it gets even more critical to practice, since your exposure to programming starts with books and courses you take. Real work is done hands-on, you must spend time writing codes by hand and practicing them on your system to get familiar with the interface and workflow.
Search for mock projects online or make your model projects to practice coding and attentively commit to it. Things will start to come in the structure after some time.4 -
So I started learning html, css and javascript this year... After getting stuck in understanding a few concepts I started learning a little of sql and Java...
Now after a few begginer tutorials I have no idea where to go or what to dedicate my studies...
Most companies around my city use Java, but I'm already 29 years old and I feel like this will be a problem... Should I focus on learning frameworks and try big companies internships, or go for web development and start working on my own?5 -
Warning - Not IT related.
Long ago, I had a chemist professor who told us a story. She worked in a laboratory where they have studied cristal formations, so basically made a liquid highly capable to form cristals, and they watched them forming, doing tests and so on. In the meantime new building of the campus opened and they had to move the lab to the new location, which was a fourth floor of newly made building. Few of them started to work there even before they moved the old materials and equipment and they started few cristalisation studies, the interesting part is that the cristals didn't formed. She said that at the end they had many cups with prepared liquid and apsolutely no cristals for weeks, but one day the lead researcher arrived with the old, already formed cristals, from the old lab, and toon those inside of the room with prepared cups all the cristals started to form at the same time. After telling us a story she asked us not to tell this to anyone because the science currently doesn't accept this phenomenon and we will be demonised and looked fools it the scientific community.
This story made a hole in my brain...
It was like 10 years ago, and as a problem solver I still have sometimes some weird ideas about it, and strange explanations comming from nothing, and without any deep understanding of quantum physics or even cristalisation. :D1 -
A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.
Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: "You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong."
Knight turned the machine off and on.
The machine worked -
How do I create a Collab..
Well, I'm looking to form a team of 2 - 4 members. We will be devoted to learning machine learning through books, Kaggle, self assignments and various group discussions and pair programming. We will form a group name, open a GitHub account and upload our projects there. Am looking up to extending it to build projects together. This can also help us build our portfolios.
There are no tight requirements. But some good programming skills especially in Python will be great and a good understanding of high school math. We will be learning together.3 -
Hi So I need some solid advice from you all wonderful people.
I think i am now ready to look into job side of this world, but have lots of doubts , read my story.
I have been learning android for last 2 years. Most of the time i have been trying to understand how stuff works in android , but i have also gained a few other skills ( python programming, kotlin/flutter basics data analysis basics, testing, some graphic designing, aweful web dev ,etc). But i really want to work with Android. I don't have any specific Salary figure in mind, but i guess my knowledge is better or atleast par with most of the good android developers.
So i want to know how is this fresher/placement thingy work?
1.) GETTING KNOWN? : How can i make some good android based company aware that I am available for hiring? Should i start emailing every android related company that i know of? Should i start listing my profile on recruitment sites like linkedin or internshala? This year it is being said that companies will come for placements. From the status of my college, they are going to give me way to less $ , nd i know am not going to like any of them, but i guess i have to sit for them too.
2.INTERVIEW OR DIRECT PLACEMENTS? A little pre-context: i am currently starting my 4th year in clg. Afaik , 4th year isnt that strict and their can be leniency in terms of attendance. But my college is a place full of political cun*s in the name of directors and HODs and I don't know if they are again going to enforce the old 75% mandatory criteria. Plus if the company is from a different state/country , then my attendance would definitely not suffice.
So mainly i am unsure if somehow a company hires me, i would be able to start immediately. I heard that there are interviews for job recruitment after which the candidate is binded with an agreement to do some months training followed by permanent working after college completion.
This type of agreement is very much suitable for me, since from what my friend tells me, trainings can be lenient and understanding regarding exam preparations nd stuff.
So what do company usually chooses? Binding a fresher on immediate working basis or do they consider graduate completion?
Also, i suck at competitive coding. Do i need to polish myself on that or some company is willing to give me chance on the basis of my other skills 🙈(okay, no kidding , that's a serious question. I need to either work on getting better in competitive or build more apps based on that)
3.) ANDROID OR EVERYTHING? From what i have heard, working as a professional fresher is more like being an allrounder than being a domain specialist. But as i already stated, i really dig android and that's no small framework. I may di other stuff too, but won't interest me nd my output might be less efficient than expected.
So freshers can really be asked to do any stuff? Or can i still be in the area i like being into?
4.) COMPANY OR START-UP? Yeah, this is a general debate starter. Ignoring the business side of the conversation ( job safety vs more salary, experience, etc) the thing that's most important for me is the presence of a team. I want someone to assign me a task, whose vision i could follow, from whom i could learn, and some other people who are supportive and doing the same amount / similar work that am doing . This is so much import8 for me that i can easily ignore other factors for a better team. I once took a call from a startup ceo who hired me, a 2 month old android beginner at that time, as the "lead android developer"
But if am being on a team where i am supposed to do any random stuff that is assigned, then obviously this whole point of "visionary, helpful leader, guiding team, "etc goes moot9 -
!dev
!!Lyrics
Really a random post but related to my personal dev-life so maybe it’s at least arguable if it belongs here.
This is one of my all time favorite songs, I can identify myself with it (although I’m reinterpreting some parts).
Back in Highschool I had girlfriends, I had time, I had my entourage, everything except money. All my dad wanted me to become was a rich fucking millionaire. Failure was never accepted, no matter what it was about and everything could always have been done better.
It was pretty much a military childhood. I already loved programming back then but only as a hobby, kinda.
I really wanted to make good money so I started a dev career (with makes gooooood money where I came from). The more I invested in my career, and that was a lot, I more and more lost the understanding of what’s really important, just pursued my goal of being the best fucking dev out there and start my own company in the next 10 years.
Well.. 10 years are over now, I’m still an engineer and I lost everything I had before I started this. Especially friends and relations to women (which I’m not even able to connect to anymore).
In this lyric, the blackbird and raven are the career that just ate me alive. Hope that makes any sense to some of you?..
Anyway, here the lyrics if you wanna read it:
—————————————-
Sons of Anarchy
Come join the murder - white buffalo
There's a blackbird perched outside my window
I hear him calling
I hear him sing
He burns me with his eyes of gold to embers
He sees all my sins
He reads my soul
One day that bird, he spoke to me
Like Martin Luther
Like Pericles
Come join the murder
Come fly with black
We'll give you freedom
From the human trap
Come join the murder
Soar on my wings
You'll touch the hand of God
And he'll make you king
And he'll make you king
On a blanket made of woven shadows
Flew up to heaven
On a raven's glide
His angels they turn my wings to wax now
I fell like judas, grace denied
On that day that he lied to me
Like Martin Luther
Like Pericles
Come join the murder
Come fly with black
We'll give you freedom
From the human trap
Come join the murder
Soar on my wings
You'll touch the hand of God
And he'll make you king
And he'll make you king
I walk among the children of my fathers
The broken wings, betrayal's cost
They call to me but never touch my heart, now
I am too far
I'm too lost
All I can hear is what he spoke to me
Like Martin Luther
Like Pericles
Come join the murder
Come fly with black
We'll give you freedom
From the human trap
Come join the murder
Soar on my wings
You'll touch the hand of God
And he'll make you king
And he'll make you king
So now I curse that raven's fire
You made me hate, you made me burn
He laughed aloud as he flew from eden
You always knew, you never learn
The crow no longer sings to me
Like Martin Luther
Or Pericles
Come join the murder
Come fly with black
We'll give you freedom
From the human trap
Come join the murder
Soar on my wings
You'll touch the hand of God
And he'll make you king
And he'll make you king
Come join the murder
Come fly with black
We'll give you freedom
From the human trap
Come join the murder
Soar on my wings
You'll touch the hand of God
And he'll make you king
And he'll make you king3 -
I was given a project to fix and improve a legacy unity VR project I was told was for the oculus rift Now the problems started almost immediately partly stemming from the fact I’ve never used unity before this project was handed to me as my long term TA assignment
And partly from the fact there was no oculus integration in the game at all. it was built for GoogleVr and most of the code the last person wrote consisted of massive sections (25-50 lines) of commented out code and no explanation of what the hell the non-commented parts are supposed to be doing
So long story short. I’m now in a basic unity course, six feet deep in documentation trying to read resources that go way over my head in understanding, and am rebuilding the project from basically scratch (took the assets and saved the c# scripts for reference) and have finally figured out how to at least get the player character constantly moving forward and stream in the WRLD3D environment like the last guy did. Now to get the player character to turn and change direction when the player turns their head with the oculus headset
By the way. WRLD3D is a really cool api thing in my opinion -
Anyone noticed that SitePoint is permanently "on sale", with discounts and stuff since they launched their premium programme 1 or 2 years prior?
When one sale ends, another one comes.
Plus now they hid away the subcategories, one must access them by knowing the subcategorie's URL haha
I have no understanding of this reasoning they have...1 -
Need some advise from all you clever devs out there.
When I finished uni I worked for a year at a good company but ultimately I was bored by the topic.
I got a new job at a place that was run by a Hitler wannabee that didn't want to do anything properly including writing tests and any time I improved an area or wrote a test would take me aside to have a go so I quit after 3 months.
Getti g a new job was not that hard but being at companies for short stints was a big issue.
My new job I've been here 3 months again but the code base is a shit hole, no standardisation, no one knows anything about industry standards, no tests again, pull requests that are in name only as clearly broken areas that you comment on get ignored so you might as well not bother, fake agile where all user stories are not user stories and we just lie every sprint about what we finished, no estimates and so forth, and a code base that is such a piece of shit that to add a new feature you have to hack every time. The project only started a few months back.
For instance we were implementing permissions and roles. My team lead does the table design. I spent 4 hours trying to convince him it was not fit for purpose and now we have spent a month on this area and we can't even enforce the permissions on the backend so basically they don't exist. This is the tip of the iceberg as this shit happens constantly and the worst thing is even though I say there is a problem we just ignore it so the app will always be insecure.
None of the team knows angular or wants to learn but all our apps use angular..
These are just examples, there is a lot more problems right from agile being run by people that don't understand agile to sending database entities instead of view models to client apps, but not all as some use view models so we just duplicate all the api controllers.
Our angular apps are a huge mess now because I have to keep hacking them since the backend is wrong.
We have a huge architectural problem that will set us back 1 month as we won't be able to actually access functionality and we need to release in 3 months, their solution even understanding my point fully is to ignore it. Legit.
The worst thing is that although my team is not dumb, if you try to explain this stuff to them they either just don't understand what you are saying or don't care.
With all that said I don't think they are even aware of these issues somehow so I dont think it's on purpose, and I do like the people and company, but I have reached the point that I don't give a shit anymore if something is wrong as its just so much easier to stay silent and makes no difference anyway.
I get paid very well, it's close to home and I actually learn a lot since their skill level is so low I have to pick up the slack and do all kinds of things I've never done much of like release management or database optimisation and I like that.
Would you leave and get a new job? -
I have to write a text that explains the kalman filter and I'm expected to include some light technical details, too. I've just barely used it in its simplest form and have almost no understanding about the stochastic aspect of it. Also don't have much time left and I barely understand the simplest literature about it.
This is gonna be great. 🙃4 -
Soooo what would be wrong for a developer to aim for a partner in a similar profession or the same?
I had my fair share of exp now and must say that i really love what i do and am really into learning and developing and applying all that I learn. I missed that drive in the dates that I had. I feel passion, purpose and understanding with what we as devs deal all day would be really helpful for a prolonged relationship. I dont wanna go for a power coupling but it would be nice to have ur partner on board no??2
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