So, you start with a PHP website.

Nah, no hating on PHP here, this is not about language design or performance or strict type systems...

This is about architecture.

No backend web framework, just "plain PHP".

Well, I can deal with that. As long as there is some consistency, I wouldn't even mind maintaining a PHP4 site with Y2K-era HTML4 and zero Javascript.

That sounds like fucking paradise to me right now. 😍

But no, of course it was updated to PHP7, using Laravel, and a main.js file was created. GREAT.... right? Yes. Sure. Totally cool. Gotta stay with the times. But there's still remnants of that ancient framework-less website underneath. So we enter an era of Laravel + Blade templates, with a little sprinkle of raw imported PHP files here and there.

Fine. Ancient PHP + Laravel + Blade + main.js + bootstrap.css. Whatever. I can still handle this. 🤨

But then the Frontend hipsters swoosh back their shawls, sip from their caramel lattes, and start whining: "We want React! We want SPA! No more BootstrapCSS, we're going to launch our own suite of SASS styles! IT'S BETTER".

OK, so we create REST endpoints, and the little monkeys who spend their time animating spinners to cover up all the XHR fuckups are satisfied. But they only care about the top most visited pages, so we ALSO need to keep our Blade templated HTML. We now have about 200 SPA/REST routes, and about 350 classic PHP/Blade pages.

So we enter the Era of Ancient PHP + Laravel + Blade + main.js + bootstrap.css + hipster.sass + REST + React + SPA 😑

Now the Backend grizzlies wake from their hibernation, growling: We have nearly 25 million lines of PHP! Monoliths are evil! Did you know Netflix uses microservices? If we break everything into tiny chunks of code, all our problems will be solved! Let's use DDD! Let's use messaging pipelines! Let's use caching! Let's use big data! Let's use search indexes!... Good right? Sure. Whatever.

OK, so we enter the Era of Ancient PHP + Laravel + Blade + main.js + bootstrap.css + hipster.sass + REST + React + SPA + Redis + RabbitMQ + Cassandra + Elastic 😫

Our monolith starts pooping out little microservices. Some polished pieces turn into pretty little gems... but the obese monolith keeps swelling as well, while simultaneously pooping out more and more little ugly turds at an ever faster rate.

Management rushes in: "Forget about frontend and microservices! We need a desktop app! We need mobile apps! I read in a magazine that the era of the web is over!"

OK, so we enter the Era of Ancient PHP + Laravel + Blade + main.js + bootstrap.css + hipster.sass + REST + GraphQL + React + SPA + Redis + RabbitMQ + Google pub/sub + Neo4J + Cassandra + Elastic + UWP + Android + iOS 😠

"Do you have a monolith or microservices" -- "Yes"

"Which database do you use" -- "Yes"

"Which API standard do you follow" -- "Yes"

"Do you use a CI/building service?" -- "Yes, 3"

"Which Laravel version do you use?" -- "Nine" -- "What, Laravel 9, that isn't even out yet?" -- "No, nine different versions, depends on the services"

"Besides PHP, do you use any Python, Ruby, NodeJS, C#, Golang, or Java?" -- "Not OR, AND. So that's a yes. And bash. Oh and Perl. Oh... and a bit of LUA I think?"

2% of pages are still served by raw, framework-less PHP.

Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for a rant with a capital R, this is gonna be a long one.

Our story begins well over a year ago while I was still in university and things such as "professionalism" and "doing your job" are suggestions and not something you do to not get fired. We had multiple courses with large group projects that semester and the amount of reliable people I knew that weren't behind a year and in different courses was getting dangerously low. There were three of us who are friends (the other two henceforth known as Ms Reliable and the Enabler) and these projects were for five people minimum. The Enabler knew a couple of people who we could include, so we trusted her and we let them onto the multiple projects we had.

Oh boy, what a mistake that was. They were friends, a guy and a girl. The girl was a good dev, not someone I'd want to interact with out of work but she was fine, and a literal angel compared to the guy. Holy shit this guy. This guy, henceforth referred to as Mr DDTW, is a motherfucking embarrassment to devs everywhere. Lazy. Arrogant. Standards so low they're six feet under. Just to show you the sheer depth of this man's lack of fucks given, he would later reveal that he picked his thesis topic "because it's easy and I don't want to work too hard". I haven't even gotten into the meat of the rant yet and this dude is already raising my blood pressure.

I'll be focusing on one project in particular, a flying vehicle simulator, as this was the one that I was the most involved in and also the one where shit hit the fan hardest. It was a relatively simple-in-concept development project, but the workload was far too much for one person, meaning that we had to apply some rudimentary project management and coordination skills that we had learned to keep the project on track. I quickly became the de-facto PM as I had the best grasp on the project and was doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

The first incident happened while developing a navigation feature. Another teammate had done the basics, all he had to do was use the already-defined interfaces to check where the best place to land would be, taking into account if we had enough power to do so. Mr DDTW's code:
-Wasn't actually an algorithm, just 90 lines of if statements sandwiched between the other teammate's code.
-The if statements were so long that I had to horizontal scroll to see the end, approx 200 characters long per line.
-Could've probably been 20 normal-length lines MAX if he knew what a fucking for loop was.
-Checked about a third of the tiles that it should have because, once again, it's a series of concatenated if statements instead of an actual goddamn algorithm.
-IT DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!

My response was along the lines of "what the fuck is this?". This dipshit is in his final year and I've seen people write better code in their second semester. The rest of the team, his friend included, agreed that this was bad code and that it should be redone properly. The plan was for Mr DDTW to move his code into a new function and then fix it in another branch. Then we could merge it back when it was done. Well, he kept on saying it was done but:
-It still wasn't an algorithm.
-It was still 90 lines.
-They were still 200 characters wide.
-It still only checked a third of the tiles.
-IT STILL DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!

He also had one more task, an infinite loop detection system. He watched while Ms Reliable did the fucking work.

We hit our first of two deadlines successfully. We still didn't have a decent landing function but everything else was nice and polished, and we got graded incredibly well. The other projects had been going alright although the same issue of him not doing shit applied. Ms Reliable and I, seeing the shitstorm that would come if this dude didn't get his act together, lodged a complaint with the professor as a precautionary measure. Little did I know how much that advanced warning would save my ass later on.

Second sprint begins and I'm voted in as the actual PM this time. We have four main tasks, so we assign one person to each and me as a generalist who would take care of the minor tasks as well as help out whoever needed it. This ended up being a lot of reworking and re-abstracting, a lot of helping and, for reasons that nobody ever could have predicted, one of the main tasks.

These main tasks were new features that would need to be integrated, most of which had at least some mutual dependencies. Part of this project involved running our code, which would connect to the professor's test server and solve a server-side navigation problem. The more of these we solved, the better the grade, so understandably we needed an MVP to see if our shit worked on the basic problems and then fix whatever was causing the more advanced ones to fail. We decided to set an internal deadline for this MVP. Guess who didn't reach it?

Hitting the character limit, expect part 2 SOON

Polished statistics

So just today I stumbled upon Deepin OS (Linux Distro based on Debian) and it looks amazing! Arguably even better than Elementary OS :D Has anyone else used this distro/what do you think?

During a meeting with the client

Client: I don't care how long it takes to complete the app, I want the app to be polished and give the users the best experience!
Us: Got it.
*Later that day*
Client: *wants to implement a new feature in the app*
Us: It'll take us a day or two.
Client: That long?! I need to get it to the market ASAP!
Us:.......

:D

Fuck Optimizely.

Not because the software/service itself is inherently bad, or because I don't see any value in A/B testing.

It's because every company which starts using quantitative user research, stops using qualitative user research.

Suddenly it's all about being data driven.

Which means you end up with a website with bright red blinking BUY buttons, labels which tell you that you must convert to the brand cult within 30 seconds or someone else will steal away the limited supply, and email campaigns which promise free heroin with every order.

For long term brand loyalty you need a holistic, polished experience, which requires a vision based on aesthetics and gut feelings -- not hard data.

A/B testing, when used as some kind of holy grail, causes product fragmentation. There's a strong bias towards immediate conversions while long term churn is underrepresented.

The result of an A/B test is never "well, our sales increased since we started offering free heroin with every sale, but all of our clients die after 6 months so our yearly revenue is down -- so maybe we should offer free LSD instead"

I wish the apple review team shove them white polished apples up their fucking asses

A problem solved over a month ago... Ipv6 works it's tested.

Now you come back with a very specific old iPad on a very specific os and say it doesn't work !?

The topping on this shit (apple) pie? They sent me a screenshot of the issue.

It's a screenshot of the fucking login page. I know what the fucking thing looks like you assholes.

Absolute tossers

I used to do audits for private companies with a team. Most of them where black box audits and we were allowed to physically manipulate certain machines in and around the building, as long as we could get to them unnoticed.

Usually when doing such jobs, you get a contract signed by the CEO or the head of security stating that if you're caught, and your actions were within the scope of the audit, no legal action will be taken against you.

There was this one time a company hired us to test their badge system, and our main objective was to scrape the data on the smartcards with a skimmer on the scanner at the front of the building.

It's easy to get to as it's outside and almost everyone has to scan their card there in order to enter the building. They used ISO 7816 cards so we didn't even really need specified tools or hardware.

Now, we get assigned this task. Seems easy enough. We receive the "Stay-out-of-jail"-contract signed by the CEO for Company xyz. We head to the address stated on the contract, place the skimmer etc etc all good.

One of our team gets caught fetching the data from the skimmer a week later (it had to be physically removed). Turns out: wrong Building, wrong company. This was a kind of "building park" (don't really know how to say it in English) where all the buildings looked very similar. The only difference between them was the streetnumber, painted on them in big. They gave us the wrong address.

I still have nightmares about this from time to time. In the end, because the collected data was never used and we could somewhat justify our actions because we had that contract and we had the calls and mails with the CEO of xyz. It never came to a lawsuit. We were, and still are pretty sure though that the CEO of xyz himself was very interesed in the data of that other company and sent us out to the wrong building on purpose.
I don't really know what his plan after that would have been though. We don't just give the data to anyone. We show them how they can protect it better and then we erase everything. They don't actually get to see the data.

I quit doing audits some time ago. It's very stressful and I felt like I either had no spare time at all (when having an active assignment) or had nothing but spare time (when not on an assignment). The pay also wasn't that great.

But some people just really are polished turds.

I've been using microsoft dev stack for as long as i remember. Since I picked up C#/.NET in 2002 I haven't looked back. I got spoiled by things like type safety, generics, LINQ and its functional twist on C#, await/async, and Visual Studio, the best IDE one could ask for.

Over the past few years though, I've seen the rise of many competing open source stacks that get many things right, e.g. command line tooling, package management, CI, CD, containerization, and Linux friendliness. In general many of those frameworks are more Mac friendly than Windows. Microsoft started sobering up to this fact and started open sourcing its frameworks and tools, and generally being more Mac/Linux friendly, but I think that, first, it's a bit too late, and second, it's not mature yet; not even comparable to what you get on VS + Windows.

More recently I switched jobs and I'm mainly using Mac, Python, and some Java. I've also used node in a couple of small projects. My feeling: even though I may be resisting change, I genuinely feel that C# is a better designed language than Java, and I feel that static type languages are far superior to dynamic ones, especially on large projects with large number of developers. I get that dynamic languages gives you a productivity boost, and they make you feel liberated, but most of the time I feel that this productivity is lost when you have to compensate for type safety with more unit tests that would not be necessary in a static type language, also you tend to get subtle bugs that are only manifested at runtime.

So I'm really torn: enjoy world class development platform and language, but sacrifice large ecosystem of open source tools and practices that get the devops culture; or be content with less polished frameworks/languages but much larger community that gets how apps should be built, deployed, monitored, etc.

Damn you Microsoft for coming late to the open source party.

I spent over a decade of my life working with Ada. I've spent almost the same amount of time working with C# and VisualBasic. And I've spent almost six years now with F#. I consider all of these great languages for various reasons, each with their respective problems. As these are mostly mature languages some of the problems were only knowable in hindsight. But Ada was always sort of my baby. I don't really mind extra typing, as at least what I do, reading happens much more than writing, and tab completion has most things only being 3-4 key presses irl. But I'm no zealot, and have been fully aware of deficiencies in the language, just like any language would have. I've had similar feelings of all languages I've worked with, and the .NET/C#/VB/F# guys are excellent with taking suggestions and feedback.

This is not the case with Ada, and this will be my story, since I've no longer decided anonymity is necessary.

First few years learning the language I did what anyone does: you write shit that already exists just to learn. Kept refining it over time, sometimes needing to do entire rewrites. Eventually a few of these wound up being good. Not novel, just good stuff that already existed. Outperforming the leading Ada company in benchmarks kind of good. At the time I was really gung-ho about the language. Would have loved to make Ada development a career. Eventually build up enough of this, as well as a working, but very bad performing compiler, and decide to try to apply for a job at this company. I wasn't worried about the quality of the compiler, as anyone who's seriously worked with Ada knows, the language is remarkably complex with some bizarre rules in dark corners, so a compiler which passes the standards test indicates a very intimate knowledge of the language few can attest to.

I get told they didn't think I would be a good fit for the job, and that they didn't think I should be doing development.

A few months of rapid cycling between hatred and self loathing passes, and then a suicide attempt. I've got past problems which contributed more so than the actual job denial.

So I get better and start working even harder on my shit. Get the performance of my stuff up even better. Don't bother even trying to fix up the compiler, and start researching about text parsing. Do tons of small programs to test things, and wind up learning a lot. I'm starting to notice a lot of languages really surpassing Ada in _quality of life_, with things package managers and repositories for those, as well as social media presence and exhaustive tutorials from the community.

At the time I didn't really get programming language specific package managers (I do now), but I still brought this up to the community. Don't do that. They don't like new ideas. Odd for a language which at the time was so innovative. But social media presence did eventually happen with a Twitter account that is most definitely run by a specific Ada company masquerading as a general Ada advocate. It did occasionally draw interest to neat things from the community, so that's cool.

Since I've been using both VisualStudio and an IDE this Ada company provides, I saw a very jarring quality difference over the years. I'm not gonna say VS is perfect, it's not. But this piece of shit made VS look like a polished streamlined bug free race car designed by expert UX people. It. Was. Bad. Very little features, with little added over the years. Fast forwarding several years, I can find about ten bugs in five minutes each update, and I can't find bugs in the video games I play, so I'm no bug finder. It's just that bad. This from a company providing software for "highly reliable systems"...

So I decide to take a crack at writing an editor extension for VS Code, which I had never even used. It actually went well, and as of this writing it has over 24k downloads, and I've received some great comments from some people over on Twitter about how detailed the highlighting is. Plenty of bespoke advertising the entire time in development, of course.

Never a single word from the community about me.

Around this time I had also started a YouTube channel to provide educational content about the language, since there's very little, except large textbooks which aren't right for everyone. Now keep in mind I had written a compiler which at least was passing the language standards test, so I definitely know the language very well. This is a standard the programmers at these companies will admit very few people understand. YouTube channel met with hate from the community, and overwhelming thanks from newcomers. Never a shout out from the "community" Twitter account. The hate went as far as things like how nothing I say should be listened to because I'm a degenerate Irishman, to things like how the world would have been a better place if I was successful in killing myself (I don't talk much about my mental illness, but it shows up).

I'm strictly a .NET developer now. All code ported.

2 things I'm working on now:

#1 a personal project I am hoping to commercialize and turn it into my moneymaker. Hoping it'd at least be enough to pay the bills and put food on my table so I could forget 9/5 for good. But it has a potential of becoming a much, MUCH bigger thing. This would need the right twist tho, and I'm not sure if I am "the right twister" :) We'll see.

#2 smth I'm thinking of opensourcing once finished -- a new form of TLS. This model could be unbreakable by even quantum computing once it's mature enough to crack conventional TLS. I'm probably gonna use md5 or smth even weakier - I'm leveraging the weakness of hashing functions to make my tool stronger :)

I mean how long can we be racing with more powerful computers, eh? Why not use our weakneses to make them our strengths?

Unittests are already passing, I just haven't polished all the corner-cases and haven't worked out a small piece of the initialization process yet. But it's very close

"Graphics don't matter."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That feel when you work 5h on a project only to have a friend link you the finished version of it, polished and used by millions.

I fucking got scammed.

Scenario 1: Had literally no experience in B2C, no experience in experimentation, 0% fitment.

Verdict: got hired in just one round in a top domestic brand which is a profit making startup.

Scenario 2: A friend from ex-org got referred in a global brand for an international location. Hadn't interviewed for 4+ years. Created his resume in 15 minutes, got shortlisted, screened, interviewed, and hired in less than 2 weeks.
(This guy is a good friend I am incredibly happy for him and that he scored the gig and in now way I wish bad for his outcome).

Scenario 3: I also got a strong refferal for the same brand and location. I have been interviewing for past 6 months, resume is super polished where companies like FAANG spoke to me.
Got rejected in shortlisting. The referral guy got me in the pool because it was his team
In screening round, I was a good fit, answered everything well. Yes, I wasn't concise as much (and that's the feedback I kept getting and I was working on it).
Verdict: rejected. They didn't ask me relevant questions and rejected me on the basis of not having the required experience.

Seems like the hiring manager didn't want me to clear so came up with reasons.

And now it feels that, if the HM wants you, they'll hire you irrespective of anything and if they don't they'll kick you out for lamest of the reason.

My life is split in two part, the first three decades were surely shit and this was my last chance of making sure the next three are worth remembering on the death bed.

I failed. Miserably. For the factors outside of my control. Not that I haven't failed in past. Not that I didn't try again.

But man, I am doing persisting. The game is rigged. One cannot win without extreme luck.

Millions of dreams shattered. A shitty day, is now a shitty life.

Being born in third nation is a fucking curse.

ARGH the next person to tell me how X is the best toolchain is getting their fucking head cut off! Holy fucking shit, this is even more annoying than the whole IDE debate. At least with IDEs everyone has a favourite one and they hate others accordingly, with build toolchains there's always a huge group of fucktards sucking each other's dick by adding new features, and they're always too busy wanking their sparkling features for small projects to realise how fucking inefficient their polished dings and dongs are for any bigger job.

For the millionth time, no, we're not switching to this popular toolchain just because it gave you a blowjob with your pet project (although that would indeed be a tempting offer), so stop talking how fast and flexible it is. Until you can show how it compiles a 500 MB project faster than our current setup, I don't give a shit how many people jerk on that nookie.

I hate silicon valley.

They enable so much of the state's and federal government's bullshit, the corporations and the banks subversion and destruction of society.

It's time to pop their fucking tech bubble.

From here on out, any time you hear or read the words 'startup', be sure to comment with "you mean speculative marketing investments?"

Because most tech runs on shit-tier semi-polished iterations of glorified CRUD anyway, thats all most of it is. And it 100% relies on grabbing network share through massive advertising and presence campaigns. A lot of vc money is being flushed straight down the toilet and this is a point to emphasize. Crash the fucking tech sector. Do it.

It'll have a knock on effect to the advertising space, which will put the hurt on google's bottom line when they and their ilk are already under pressure for all the poisonous, monopolist shit they pull like helping china build their surveillance tech.

Extra points for emphasizing "pot-fueled ideas sketched out on napkins while sitting in fucking chipotle, in unwashed sweater vests, originated by guys who are fresh out of college and never ran a business in their life. 90% of them fail in the first year. VCs and investor are losing their shirts." etc.

The entire dishonest fucking trade relies on other people's money, being bought out in either techno land-grabs or turf-protection e.x. atlassian acquiring trello, a **glorified todo app**.

Thats the business model. Hell go build your own and make a buck.

Build your own. Build something better and most of all... *fuck silicon valley*.

Let it burn, let burn, let it burn.

Years later the supposed 'cancer' that is linux: a fully featured, and more and more polished FREE operating system running Microsoft development tools, a rich GUI which does away with the crappy windows 98 taskbar, multiple virtual desktops, and steam !

It's not that big of a deal, but it's kinda embarrassing since I was one of the best students in the class.

Took a web design (HTML, CSS & a tiny bit of JS) class. I never really struggled; more like polished everything I already knew to become a bit better.

In class working on an assignment. So we have a folder dedicated on a server just for this class. The folder is accessible as long as you're on the school internet or using the VPN. So I have an assignment there. I drop it onto my desktop, because i had worked on it since the last time I was at this computer.

I opened the project in VSCode and begin making changing things. I opened the HTML file wasn't updating. "That's odd" I thought. Cleared the cache, opened and closed the browser. Still nothing. I called the professor over to see if had any clue what was going on.

My dumbass self was editing the file that was on my desktop, but I had opened the HTML file from the server. I felt so stupid but we both just laughed it off and went on.

I've always liked Windows more than MacOS, but known deep in my heart that MacOS is more polished. More shiny, attractive, makes more sense, is easier to use, etc. Windows was never that far behind (however, they were probably furthest behind in Vista and 8), but they were always behind.

Looking at the new MacOS, I genuinely think that Microsoft offers a better experience now. While Android and iOS are still firmly battling, Windows just beats the living shit out of MacOS.

Windows is an OS built for either touch or mouse. If you use touch controls, the OS automatically adapts to it (larger context menus if you press and hold, smaller ones if you right click). You can enter tablet mode. The start menu has a good interface for both touch and mouse.

MacOS is an operating system designed for touch input on a device which famously has none.

It has fallen victim to a very common design error: too much fucking spacing. Every little thing, even items in a list, has a ton of pixels between them, and they all have rounded corners. Again, this is common for touch displays where you don't wanna fat finger stuff. But they don't offer a touch screen Mac and have expressed no interest in ever doing so.

Now they're going ARM on custom silicon. This is a good move in the long run, but it's going to be a rough couple of years. Apple admits two. You can probably reliably double that.

Is Apple killing the Mac on purpose or by accident?

I was working on this ER model today and making everything look polished and alligned and then I proceed to generate the PNG out of it, but it turns out blurry and disgusting and eww and why the hell can't I change the dpi or ppi even? 96 dpi is not enough ...

Oh my! This guy is such a dickhead! We have a release tomorrow and he just changed everything a coworker did in the past few weeks because it had some errors and looked not polished enough.

Now it looks quite nice.

*sigh* Sometimes I can be such an asshat.

"Here's the sprint, it's well defined. fullstackchris, can you do this in two weeks?"

"Hmmm... nice work, looks well defined. It'll be tough, but sure, I can do it two weeks!"

Two days before sprint ends:

"Can we quickly duplicate n number of features from apps with literal armies of devs like whatsapp, airbnb, and Instagram?!?!?! We NEED these features to be polished and work perfectly!"

Scope creep will be my ONLY feedback in this retro.

Work overtime for a month to develop a polished product inside and out. Not a peep from anyone. Throw together a simple script in a few minutes to run some daily reports and suddenly you're a god.

(mostly !dev) Fuck humans! Really: what a scum bag race. All that shit talk about human dignity, the highest values are just sugar coating the low base motives we mostly live by. Like people have such fine antennas for your income, social status, the power or lack thereof you exert over other. They know it before you open your mouth, that they can pick on you, harass you, because you're the one on the receiving end, the one that bows away. The bullies feel that. On an overcrowded chicken yard you'll find more dignity than in human society.

Everybody drooling over that polished photoshop life on facetubeinsta: materialistic, consumeristic, masturbatic wastage. At least we now say it openly: that if we were the winners, we'd also take it all, live that empty luxury, life of fame. But 99,99% of us, we aren't in that position, just working off our arse to only keep afloat. And for the stars, those fake images, we're just rats to click on ads to better train Google.

No wonder that software, as a picture of human communication is such a shitfest of arbitrary, entropic conventions and endemic epidemic of quirks, bugs and evil trap doors. As a whole: an insults to reason, a challenge to sanity. (...Conway's law)

And I'm still a bit pissed at our profession, that, you know, as engineers, scientists, physicists, we still see us in the lineage of that "great" age of enlightenment and reason,.. while it's all just a cover up. Sure science and their ideas are nice as long as you serve a purpose or make some money. Sure democracy and free speech are great achievements, but in the end some elites and monopolies rule the world at their gusto - and will not stop destroying the world unless we're already one feet in the abyss (like 1962, be we ain't had enough of that shit, hadn't we?)

Desk inventory(not counting computer hardware):

-Three interlocking polished high density particle board squares, cut by an industrial-grade 3d printer at the office of an architect friend. I use them as coasters.
-A roll of toilet paper, as I have a deviated septum and blow my nose so often that proper facial tissue would be wasteful.
-A landline phone, for work. I'm thinking about getting rid of it though, as I can do the majority of my work phone calls through Google Hangouts and our company's webrtc client, and because it costs me about $7 a month for the service, through ooma.

What's on your desk? No computer hardware, please. Also, please try to use your words, because it's a lot of fun to imagine the layout rather than see it.

Old story, happened some way back. I worked part-time for a small web development company that did between other things something called SharePoint development, basically .net webforms with shit glitter on top of it.

The most weird part of it, was the fact that we were working on vms that hosted the app, it was our dev, test and staging environment, as well as were we showed the client the polished turd.

Did I say that it was on a vm? Well it was on a remote vm, that each of use had access to it, through our domain accounts, and they couldn't configure the windows server to accept more than two or three users at once to be connected.

That was our test enviroment and dev enviroment, sooo showing the app to the client meant for the rest of us to not write any code because it might crash or get stuck.

The app was accessible and discoverable by url and through google search from outside, I dont think that should have been allowed.

The most disastrous part was that we had NO source versioning whatsoever, just plain old copy and paste in different folders.
Deploying to client meant remoting to the clients host or whatever it was, and manually copying the source files

If someone wanted to debug the application you had to shout, and you also could hear it, in the office: "I'm debugging!" or "I'm deploying!". Because we were on the same machine, there was only one process with the server and it meant that if you debug or deployed it would block it for the others.

Should I talk about code quality? Maybe not.

Oh great, now garbage websites can even break the browser's reload button. Wanna reload the page that never stops loading or crashes its scripts? Click the button and watch the browser do fuck all and a little bit of nothing.

Nah, you see to refresh that polished rotten turd you gotta close the tab and then restore it, and if that doesn't work open a new one and copy-paste the URL because who the fuck doesn't like some invalid state.

Can't wait for the day I have to shutdown and disconnect the battery because some idiot messed up the layout.

So I was reading a comment where someone said that Windows is sure as hell not polished, just 'psychologically pleasing.' I get that, and I've tried to main with Mint Cinnamon/KDE for a while, and I've tried so many distro, but I have too many issues with Linux to make it a true daily workstation and personal os.

For example, Windows apps typically have installers, graphical ones, which allow you to choose an install location and stuff. Does apt or yum do that? Not unless you use some crazy parametets or some shit.

Okay, fine, what if you DON'T CARE about everything being open source and you just want your 3-monitor Nvidia setup to work without vsync issues? Also a PITA, need to do either cmdline driver install and co fig or some other complicated shit.

I may be considered a power user, but damn if Linux isn't friendly to windows users. Don't get me wrong, I don't like windows, but so far it's the best option for me versus aillion Linux issues. Get me something that functions like Windows on multiple levels (Aesthetic not completely required, but core functionality of programs is.) and only then can I attempt a full migration.

A pm asked about a feature I was developing and I went on to show them what I got so far. Feature-wise almost finished, but it still needed to be polished and thoroughly tested, as such it wasn't merged yet. Weeks later - I couldn't finish it yet for unrelated reasons - there was great confusion about why the feature is not there as it had been billed to the customer already. So I gotta pull some sunshine out of my ass and bring it to the last release branch..

Former android fan, I’ve been using iPhone SE for a while, and now I’m ready to give feedback. We are talking about brand new, iOS 11.2.2 device, never jailbraked (jailbroken?) or made anything fucked up to.

The main problem is battery life. It’s poor. I mean, my cheap ass Meizu m3s stands for about three times longer. Now I always need to carry power bank or charger around, keeping it up from one outlet to another.

iOS 11 is unstable and flawed. Music widget on lock screen freezes randomly, ui falls apart sometimes, apps sometimes start in landscape mode. I never found android ui falling apart, just like webpage marked up by interns.

Transferring files to Linux PC is huge pain in the ass. Nuff said.

Aaaand... that’s all. There is literally only three problems present.

On the other hand, there is huge advantages over android:

Speed. It’s unbeatable. It’s absolutely stunning. Need camera? Here it is, quarter second away. Android camera needed straight 15 seconds to start up. Taking picture? Here it is, flawless as always. Zero motion blur, gamma is ideal, focus is so sharp so you may hurt your eyes. Need 100 pictures? Here you go, just press the button and hold it. Maybe s9 or another shiny ass android takes pictures as fast as iPhone, but I bet my iPhone will be taking pictures same flawlessly after 5 years, while your android will probably become sluggish ass piece of crap.

Not. A. Single. Fucking. Lag.

Asphalt 8? 60 FPS all the way down. 2GIS? Fraction of a second away. That’s it, that’s how it have to be.

Sound quality. Just as neat as my Sansa Clip. EarPods are crap, so I’m using my SE215. Not going to ever come back to Sansa. Xperia TX had much less quality audio btw.

Apps. As long as the whole enterprise world sucking Apple’s dick, apps are running silky smooth and the things are not going to change. Come on. Apple is the king nowadays, admit it or not.

Keyboard is amazing. Screen is amazing. It’s just that pleasing. The sounds iPhone makes are great, while android sounds piss me off and making me hold myself from throwing the phone straight to the wall.

iPhone makes me feel cared about. Everything is on it’s place, everything fits perfectly. You are watching YouTube, you need to adjust volume and volume bar appears as tiny strip on the very top, just to not distract you. Make screenshot, draw something on it, share and hit delete. Every action you need is one tap away. Look up word? One tap away. Position the cursor between words? Polished as fuck, here you go, have your handy magnifying glass. Adblock in safari? Install it from the App Store and it will be literally two taps away, right at the settings. No VPN needed. Safari doesn’t become slow with Adblock, it’s just the same amazingly fast browser, but without ads. And Apple Music is just one dollar a month for students, filled with high quality songs.

Even google apps working better on iOS.

The advantages are clear for me, while downsides aren’t significant. @irene, you wanted to know what I’ll tell after a while, so I’m saying it proudly:

I’m never ever coming back to android.

So what exactly does "Learning" mean in a tech industry?

From my experience,
"learning" from college's pov
"Welcome to the class. your parents has paid us already for this. Now we are supposed to stand here for next 6 months, study very slowly and learn about the topics of our curriculum and give a test on it. we might as well make a good nice project to check our knowledge"
(worst college will also add "Sorry the above message was just fiction, i am here to drink tea & enjoy my day,while you guys are here to enjoy,mark attendance and get a degree because we only care about our reputation and we are gonna pass you anyway")

"learning" from startups pov:
"Here is an idea, here is a design, here is your months salary and here is your deadline.
Make a 100% polished,working product out of it before the deadline. You are solely responsible for this project and you have to figure out on your own how to make our fantasy idea into reality before deadline hits( else you are shit).
This way you learn.
We will also provide you with a free all time learning course on how to be fine without getting any respect for your hardwork and tolerate our insults, which will help you in the life long journey of dealing assholes.
Our company is great and providing you an amazing learning opportunity, kiss our feet."
(worst startups will also add "We don't have/ wont provide you any seniors to help you with this stuff, the internet is your source of truth"/ "if you don't hit the deadline, your salary will get deducted"/ "work on weekends to hit the deadline")

"Learning" from an MNC pov (never really experienced those but from what i have heard):
"Welcome to our company. we here provide you with a similar experience as that of your shitty college during training period and then put you in low brain-ish low paying repetitive job for life until you leave us or we find a replacement for your work or salary"

getting my new laptop today. Thinkpad X1 Yoga (2nd Gen). Can you guess the first thing I'll do?

if you guessed "install a Linux distro" you guessed right. I'm looking to try something new; I'm a sucker for dank animations and polished UI/UX. suggestions?

nb4 "use arch"... no.

Ok so I love being a programmer, but I've been programming for about 6-7 years now and to this day, have nothing to show for it.

I hate that I'm a no compromise sort of person but it means I just can't settle for something, I want to deliver a flawless and engaging product with plenty of polished features, but I'm 1 person trying to do what teams of devs do.

I even have a couple programmer friends that a couple years ago were begging to collaborate with me for there project but as soon as I ask them about collaborating they suddenly have a different view -,-

What do you guys do when motivation and moral starts wearing thin? :-/
Not having anything get completed is really bringing me down!

I have these gulp tasks to preprocess my css and html. months ago it was all polished and working great.

I run the commands today, npm complains about deprecated something and doesn't let me run... I do updates, I try to run again: "Right now osX is not supported".

I literally did not change anything all these months.

Fuck you npm.

Ubuntu 20.4 is not very cool.

It might look "polished" in some (barely noticeable) areas , which doesn't matter to me as i already used better themes and icon packs. Moreover they tried make ui and icons flwt which looks terrible. It feels like to ubuntu's designers , flat= every icon in a dark gray color. Am not a fan of black topbar either, the old darkish looked much better

The worst thing is that now i have to go through multiple start screens since my laptop is dualboot :/ .

Its now like : black screen > (hp+ubuntu logo) + grub > (hp) > (hp+ubuntu logo + loading icon) > lockscreen > my system

Earlier it was just hp> grub>lockscreen>my system. The fast start up was one of my favourite features of Ubuntu, now its a million loading screens. The lockscreen is cool tho

So Im still a college student but my worst burnout happened a week before finals this year as a sophomore at DigiPen

On the same week, I had to conduct and submit 10 playtests for my competitive Unity game by Friday, submit said game polished and completed on Sunday, finish and submit my team game project that I've been working on the whole year with 10 other people also on Sunday (which we would discover so many TCR submission issues we ended up finally resubmitting on Thursday the following week).

On top of this I had to write a memory manager for my operating systems class due Thursday, a water retainment assignment involving recursive queues for my Data Structures class due Saturday, and to top it all off that class also had a final Thursday when that memory manager was due :'). I don't know how I managed to get OK sleep.

All stuff was due that week so all game teams could have next week before finals to work on submitting, so some CS teachers also move their finals to before that to theoretically distribute the load (which sucks for people in my major because we're almost a double major for CS and Game Design) However my team wanted to submit early to snatch some bonus points but we ended up having to resubmit late anyways :(. Due to the week of hell we were already burned out when trying fix our resubmission.

I love the school and the people in it but there's a reason why our most heard phrase is "I want to die" and no its not just a millenial thing I swear.

I just realized my NLegs app has probably become the most well-polished app, fictionally and GUi-wise, that I've ever built....

{TL:DR/ a super non web dev non frontend non interested person aka me somehow cracked the interview(through wrong practices i guess) landed into an internship that would have gone to a better person.I cracked the interview but am shit scared if i could stand the job}

- So 3 days ago i was talking to my friend regarding random stuff, when he told about needing a front end dev for making static template based html pages for their company.

- (I haven't ever worked in deep with web dev, just generated a few websites using mardown to html convertors, and was recently trying to learn flask/bootstrap/js) I was in need of some work so immediately requested him to talk about me in their company.

- yesterday i get an interview call from the hr of that company . She ask what i know, what they want and if i could do. I honestly tell them about my experience with web dev( with some maybe's)

- moments later , she adds me to a group with another guy, and gives us both a task to use create a clone of same website in 2 days.

- The website is a super graphically designed web page with lots of animations, custom mouses and what not. I could sense the basic elements out of it , like the nav bar and the carousals, but those animations were way beyond my knowledge. yet i start working on it

- I try with taking the clever top down approach of cloning the website and fixing its structure. It has such long code files of 10k+ lines, but i was still able to clean the css and html files and some of js code to make the website work

- later my friend calls and tells me that the other guy is a 1st year student / his brother and he doesn't know much stuff so he's kinda like me.

- He shows me a video of his code that he sent to him. That guy took the honest, bottom up approach, used the design as inspiration and was trying hard to create the similar design and animations via js.

- among other things, he also tells me that this challenge is super difficult and the level of difficulty in the work is certainly going to be lesser than this.

- In my task, I was super stuck at js because i haven't learned it much, therefore after spending 1.5 days, i made a submission without the main thing, i.e one particular carousal working

- later I get a call from another friend (B) of mine and while discussing random things, i show him my code over anydesk and ask him if he could somehow get my code to work. He asks for some time and sends me a complete refactored version of code with the same design but fully working carousal and other stuff.

- meanwhile i get to see the other guy's code and he had legit made all the designs and functions by himself, but his code looked less polished and different from the design.

- I pushed my friend(B)'s refactored version and added a comment on the group the carousal in mu code is now working.

- later at night my friend1 calls and tells me that their company was considering my submission and i would be getting the selection call

- I feel like a crazy fraud who somehow cracked the interview but is going to get his ass whipped. Where and how can i learn js, and jquery?

So I'm working on this little personal project (also as a way to keep my "skills" sharpened for the coming semester), that first started as a workaround to do this other thing, and I wanted to develop it and make it a full fledged thing, with a GUI (or something that resembles it, I don't know how to make GUIs yet, and IDK why is it a 3rd grade thing) and all instead of existing just in the IDE's terminal. When it was on the workaround stage it was just this ugly monster, with only 2 things one could do, but it worked. Now I'm going for a more polished thing and it's starting to break on me, and in places I didn't expect it to LoL
It's like I'm on a boat and I'm getting leaks from everywhere. Arr gotta get me a bucket and save me boat from sinking