Le me having a chit chat with a student after sharing about programming in my former high school..

Student: "I learnt Java the other day, and I don't really like it"

Me: "Why?"

Student: "Because we can import existing packages on the community to do almost anything"

Me: "And? How is that bad for you?"

Student: "It's not very challenging, isn't it? I want to build everything in my program with my own code!"

Me: [silence]

Me: "Listen here, you little shit..."

Me: *Working intently on project*
Gf: "Why are you just googling stuff & copying"

WELCOME TO PROGRAMMING 101

Different levels of programming...

How not to copy code 101

So, I'm programming a control system for a prototype aerospace vehicle. You know, the stuff that needs to work to prevent falling out of the sky.

Anyway, test day was today (was -- not anymore). Wiring all the electronics, everything is actuating and works well. Except for one part, a little thruster for stability.

I spent hours - literally, fucking hours - trying to fix the problem. Wrong address? Wrong syntax? I had absolutely no clue what was wrong. Queue the hardware guy, $stupid:

$stupid: "How have you not got it working yet?!"

$me: "I don't know, everything I'm trying isn't working. I've spent hours digging through this code and nothing is fucking working."

$stupid: "Well have you set it up for the new thruster?"

$me: "What...What new thruster?"

$stupid: "Oh, the one we installed this morning, did noone tell you?"

WHY WOULDN'T YOU TELL ME THIS?! COMMUNICATION 101!

teach yourself programming 101

Programming 101

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is 2 strikes.

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

-- To be continued.

Day of the interview sr. Architect says: "We have near 100% unit test coverage in our code."

One month later when I tell him there are 0 unit tests written against 300 projects: "Yeah, I knew that was a problem."

What can you do when the people who want to hire you lie outright to your face?

Oh yeah, and not a god damned one was written using any sense of object oriented programming at all. Every single damned project is written like its on a motherfucking punchcard put together by a cs 101 student with a 2 hour fucking deadline.

I can understand if it needs some work, just tell me. Don't fucking lie to me just to get me in the door to fix a problem you know you have. JUST HAVE SOME FUCKING RESPECT FOR YOUR CANDIDATES AND DON'T FUCKING LIE TO THEM!

Off to drink some scotch and think about what it would be like to shove a finger deep enough into my nostril to hear a pop and smell popcorn before going off into that good night.

I said good day.

dear api author at my company pt. 2:

If you're gonna create an api method that takes some arguments.

And one of those arguments is an array.

THEN MAKE THE FUCKING ARGUMENT'S NAME PLURAL YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT.

REPEAT WITH ME, MOTHERFUCKER.
ARRAY, PLURAL, NON-ARRAY, SINGULAR.

I need to pass a shitload of filters for the data for this table, and for every suckin fuckin filter I need to singularize this shit. Thank god for es6.

I know this sounds like nitpick, but I swear to fucking alpha omega this guy is inconsistent as fuck.

Every time it feels like he makes up a new rule.

Sometimes I need to send arrays of ids, other times arrays of objects with an id property on each.

He uses synonyms too, sometimes it's remove, other times erase.

PICK ONE MOTHERFUCKER.

If you can't do the basic things well, then what is to expect of more advanced stuff?

Naming conventions you fucking idiot, follow them. It's programming 101.

You're already sending them as plural in the fucking response. Why change them for the request?

And that's just style, conventions.

This idiot asshole also RARELY DOES ANY FUCKING CHECK ON THE ARGUMENTS.

"Oh, you sent a required argument as null? 500"

We get exceptions on sentry UP THE ASS thanks to this useless bone container.

YOU'RE SEEING THE EXCEPTIONS TOO!!!!! 500'S ARE BUGS YOU NEED TO FIX, YOU CUMCHUGGER

And sometimes he does send 400, you know what the messages usually are?
"Validation failed".

WHYYYYYY YOU GODDAMN APATHETIC TASTELESS FUCK???
WHAT EXACTLY CAUSED THE FUCKING VALIDATION TO FAIL????

EXCEPTIONS HAPPEN AND THANKS TO YOU I HAVE NO IDEA WHY.

The worst of all... the worst of fucking all is that everytime I make a suggestion to change shit, every time, you act like you care.
You act like the api is the way it is because you designed it in a calculated manner.

MOTHERFUCKER. IF A USER HAS ONLY PRODUCT A, THEN HE SHOULDN'T BE ABLE TO ACCESS DATA FOR PRODUCT B. IT IS NOT ENOUGH TO JUST RESTRICT SHIT WITH ADMIN ROLES. IDIOT!!!!!

This is the work of someone who has no passion for programming.

so java thinks any jdk different from what the jre is targeting is "out-of-date", you should learn this in "how to not look like an idiot 101" programming class in elementary school. oracle.

programming 101

TL;DR; windows XP + bat scripts + fascination about being able to make things yourself.

I was born and raised in a village. And the thing about living in a village is that you are free :) Among all the other freedoms you are also free to build your own solutions to various domestic problems, i.e. to build stuff. This is one of the things that fascinates me about living outside the city.

When I finally was old enough (and had the means to, i.e. a computer) to understand that programming is something that allows you to build your own solutions to computer problems, it got to me.

With win 3.1 I was still too fresh and too young. With win 95 I was more interested in playing with neighbours outdoors. With win 98 I was a bit too busy at school. But with win XP the time had come. I started writing automation solutions for windows administration using .bat scripts (.vbs was and still is somewhat repelling to me). I no longer needed to browse Russian forums and torrent sites to find a solution to a problem I had! That was amazing!!! [esp. when my Russian was very weak].

That was the time when I built my first sort-of-malware - a bat script downloading and installing Radmin server, uploading computer's IP and admin credentials to my FTP.

I loved it!

However, I'd stumbled upon may obstacles when writing with batch. I googled a lot and most of the solutions I found were in bash (something related to Linux, which was a spooky mystery to me back then). Eventually, I got my courage together and installed ubuntu. Boy was I sorry... Nothing was working. I was unable to even boot the thing! Not to mention the GUI...

Years later I tried again with ubuntu [7.10 I think.. or 7.04] on my Pavilion. Took me a looooot of attempts but I got there. I could finally boot it. A couple of weeks later I managed to even start the GUI! I could finally learn bash and enjoy the spectacular Compiz effects (that cube was amazing).

I got into bash and Linux for the next several years. And then I thought to myself - wait, I'm writing scripts that automate other programs. Wouldn't it be cool I I could write my own programs that did exactly what I wanted and did not need automation? It definitely would! I could write a program that would make sound work (meaning no more ALSA/PA headaches!), make graphics work on my hardware, make my USB audio card to be set to primary once connected and all the other amazing things! No more automation -- just a single program or all of that!

little did the naive me knew :)

I started with python. I didn't like that syntax from the beginning :/ those indentations...

Then I tried java. Bucky (thenewboston), who likes tuna sandwiches, on my phone all the free time I had. I didn't learn anything :/ Even tried some java 101 e-book. Nothing helped until I decided to write some simple project (nothing fancy - just some calculations for a friend who was studying architecture).

I loved it! It sounds weird, but I found Swing amazing too. With that layout manager where you have to manually position all the components :)

and then things happened and I quit my med studies and switched to programming. Passed my school exams I was missing to enter the IT college and started inhaling every bit of info about IT I could get my hands on (incl outside the college ofc).

A few more stepping stones, a few more irrelevant jobs to pay my bills in the city, and I got to where I am now.

Had to work with a lazy, stupid idiot who (literally) couldn't declare an empty string. Got in via nepotism and not only were there no basics but also no willingness to improve.
Something tells me that throwing someone out shouldn't be a pleasant thing to do but hell, I'm so happy that we can finally stop carrying that piece of dead weight and get back to pure coding without having to teach Programming 101 on the side.

Programming 101

Obligatory this happened last night, roughly 1-2 hr before my first rant. And obligatory this is rookie and human error

After some encouragement from a few folks from a programming Discord server, I decided to give git a try. And it feels good! After an hour struggling, scouring the web and reading, I finally got the hang of git 101 and made my first working repo on GitHub!

.......except for one thing. My Picross generator (doesn't generate the image, just clues) was lost while I was struggling to get rid of the SCM from my generator in VSCode (turned out it was as simple as deleting ".git" folder), I accidentally deleted the generator. 4hr of work, down the drain. At least I kept the papers on the generator's logic so rewriting isn't gonna be a pain in the ass but...ughh.....

Should I switch from Electrical Engineering to Comp Sci?

I am about to start my second semester at college. I took programming 101 and realized I might like coding more than engineering. All the classes I have taken are inside the Comp Sci. Courses in my university so I would not be losing time if I switch now.
Also I started messing around with Android Studio with some friends and that made me realize how easy comparison it is to make a good portfolio and have sideprojects.
Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

<notarant>
Just got my class schedule for freshman Computer Science. Find out they teach C++ for Programming 101. Guess I should stop using C for the next couple months and buy a C++ book.
</notarant>

I got bored / fed up with my previous line of work after just ending up on that path a good decade earlier, and started thinking what could be the thing I either could potentially be any good at or would possibly enjoy - and also make a steady income from as well, which was a luxury my previous career could never have offered me... for the longest time I couldn't think of anything. I just started browsing for some edu to apply, and saw an ICT BSc. And off I went... I guess the final realization I wanted to be a programmer, not a data analyst or ICT salesperson or something such was sometime during the series of Programming 101 courses that I found thoroughly enjoyable.