Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
Search - "rants make you feel better"
-
As a developer, sometimes you hammer away on some useless solo side project for a few weeks. Maybe a small game, a web interface for your home-built storage server, or an app to turn your living room lights on an off.
I often see these posts and graphs here about motivation, about a desire to conceive perfection. You want to create a self-hosted Spotify clone "but better", or you set out to make the best todo app for iOS ever written.
These rants and memes often highlight how you start with this incredible drive, how your code is perfectly clean when you begin. Then it all oscillates between states of panic and surprise, sweat, tears and euphoria, an end in a disillusioned stare at the tangled mess you created, to gather dust forever in some private repository.
Writing a physics engine from scratch was harder than you expected. You needed a lot of ugly code to get your admin panel working in Safari. Some other shiny idea came along, and you decided to bite, even though you feel a burning guilt about the ever growing pile of unfinished failures.
All I want to say is:
No time was lost.
This is how senior developers are born. You strengthen your brain, the calluses on your mind provide you with perseverance to solve problems. Even if (no, *especially* if) you gave up on your project.
Eventually, giving up is good, it's a sign of wisdom an flexibility to focus on the broader domain again.
One of the things I love about failures is how varied they tend to be, how they force you to start seeing overarching patterns.
You don't notice the things you take back from your failures, they slip back sticking to you, undetected.
You get intuitions for strengths and weaknesses in patterns. Whenever you're matching two sparse ordered indexed lists, there's this corner of your brain lighting up on how to do it efficiently. You realize it's not the ORMs which suck, it's the fundamental object-relational impedance mismatch existing in all languages which causes problems, and you feel your fingers tingling whenever you encounter its effects in the future, ready to dive in ever so slightly deeper.
You notice you can suddenly solve completely abstract data problems using the pathfinding logic from your failed game. You realize you can use vector calculations from your physics engine to compare similarities in psychological behavior. You never understood trigonometry in high school, but while building a a deficient robotic Arduino abomination it suddenly started making sense.
You're building intuitions, continuously. These intuitions are grooves which become deeper each time you encounter fundamental patterns. The more variation in environments and topics you expose yourself to, the more permanent these associations become.
Failure is inconsequential, failure even deserves respect, failure builds intuition about patterns. Every single epiphany about similarity in patterns is an incredible victory.
Please, for the love of code...
Start and fail as many projects as you can.30 -
Hey everyone,
Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrates, happy holidays to everyone, and happy almost-new-year!
Tim and I wanted to reflect on the year devRant has had, and looking back, there are a lot of awesome things that happened in 2018 that we are very thankful for. Here are just a few of the ones that we thought of (this list is not exhaustive and I'm definitley forgetting stuff, so please comment about those!):
- After nearly a year in the making, the completely overhauled devRant web version was launched (https://devrant.com/rants/1255714/...)
- @linuxxx became the first devRant user to hit 100,000++! (https://devrant.com/rants/1157415/...)
- We once again pulled off the greatest April fools joke everrrr (https://devrant.com/rants/1311206/...)
- @trogus started making awesome devComics and http://devcomics.com was launched
- We added a feature to allow rant filtering by post type (https://devrant.com/rants/1354275/...)
- We made it so avatars could have expressions! (https://devrant.com/rants/1563683/...)
- We had a booth at TechDay New York and got to meet some devRant users! (https://devrant.com/rants/1394067/...)
- We made major backend architectural improvements - including spinning up a special high-powered-CPU web server to handle avatar creation and make the creation process much faster (https://devrant.com/rants/1370938/...)
- App stability: mainly Android - we fixed crashes, did a push-notif overhaul, and tried to continue making the apps better and more stable
- A record amount of devRant meetups were held, and we couldn't be more proud about that, and we thank every person who organized one! (just a few: https://devrant.com/rants/1588218/... https://devrant.com/rants/1884724/... https://devrant.com/rants/1683365/... https://devrant.com/rants/1922950/...)
We had a busy year, and despite some things going on for us personally and some setbacks around those, we think this was a very productve year for devRant and that we are going in the right direction. We're continuing to constantly evaluate feedback from members of the community to decide where to take the app next. We're fully committed to improving the devRant community in 2019 and we have a lot of ideas about how we can do that. We're working on some things, but we're not really announcing them yet, so please sit tight for those :) In the meantime, feel free to let us know what you'd like to see improved/added the most as we always like to get updated feedback from the community.
As always, thank you everyone, and thanks for your amazing contributions to the devRant community!
Looking forward to 2019,
- David and Tim26 -
A devRant Update!
Hey everyone,
We thought now would be a great time for a devRant summer update on what we've added recently and what we've been working on.
Highlights since our last update:
- We launched devRant++, a supporter program for people who want to help us cover our costs while getting some cool extra features (a supporter badge on rants/comments/profile, reserved spot on our in-app supporter list, ability to edit rants/comments for up to 30 minutes instead of 5, and thanks to immediate user feedback, we also added the ability to post a rant every 1 hour instead of 2, and post comments that are up to 2,000 characters instead of 1,000!) We are extremely happy and thankful for the great response the program has gotten and we plan to continue to improve it using your feedback.
- We added the ability to subscribe to a user's rants. This makes it so you get a notification whenever that user posts a new rant!
- We added an "active discussions" feature (available in the "more" tab on the right). If you're looking to join a conversation happening in the moment, then this feature will help you discover those rants. It shows rants that have recently been commented on so if it's a topic that interests you, you can easily get in on the discussion!
Some stuff we have in the pipeline:
- More fun avatar stuff, including fun new OS/language-themed pets
- More perks for the devRant++ subscriber program - if you have anything you'd like to see, please let us know and we will try to make it happen!
- We will be testing some stuff to help classify rant types (rants, jokes, questions, etc.) in order to create a more personalized experience
- On that note, we're also going to take some more time to do some work on the algo as we haven't done much in terms of improvement since the initial smart algo launched
- Community projects page update - we've been slacking on updating the page and apologize for that. If you have created a devRant-related project and it's not on the community page, please resend it to david@hexicallabs.com (even if you sent it already) so we can make sure it gets added. Sorry about that!
A note on community etiquite regarding voting on content:
We've always believed that one of the most important and awesome experiences on devRant is getting your content noticed and appreciated by others. If you enjoy a piece of content, you should upvote it. If you enjoy 500 pieces of content, you should upvote them all. People really appreciate others enjoying their rants and comments so let them know if you do! If you don't like content, you can downvote it with the relevant reason. What we don't encourage is voting on content that you haven't actually looked at or spamming upvotes in mass for content you're not even actually reading/viewing. While we don't encourage that, it's not explicitly disallowed so we won't impose any penalty for it.
What is strictly prohibited and enforced is using scripts or automated procedures for voting on content. Anyone who is caught doing that will have their account deleted without warning. While very rare, we caught a couple of people doing that this week and both accounts in question were immediately deleted once discovered. To be clear, this is the practice of explicitly using a script or automation to mass vote on content. You will NEVER be banned/deleted for voting on a lot of content manually, even if you vote quickly and on lots of stuff. We just want to make that clear becuase this is not meant to discourage people from voting, it is only regarding votes not placed by humans. So if you're a human voting on content, you have nothing to worry about, we promise!
Please feel free to let us know if you have any questions or feedback on any of this. We love constructive feedback and in the past it has gone a very long way to improving and advancing the devRant community. And as always, thank you to everyone who contributed to the community in any way, we really appreciate it and want to keep making your experienfce better.
Happy ranting,
~David and Tim (Team devRant)
@dfox @trogus38 -
OH MY GOD, MY TEACHER DOES NOT TEACH MY FAVORITE LANGUAGE!
I've seen a lot of rants about teachers who use an outdated language, or don't accept the preferred framework or library of the ranter, or even force students to use a technology or even worse an OS they don't prefer.
Whats with that attitude?
I absolutely encourage young people to learn technology in their free time and it absolutely helps at building a career and become good at programming. I don't think being around 18 and never having worked in a real job is the time to select "the most superior language and technology".
Actually, that time is never.
Technology is evolving all the time and different tech evolves in different paths for different purposes. Get rid of the idea, that there is a "best" and get rid of the idea, that you will always be able to work with what you think is best.
If you're really really really awesome, you can chose to do what you like most. Not awesome as in "i learned programming in my free time, now i'm better than my programming-for-beginners-course teacher" but awesome as in "start my own company and can afford to only take the jobs i feel like doing", that awesome. Most likely, you're not (yet).
In the real world, you will very likely sometimes be required to work with technology you don't prefer. Maybe with something you think is really bad. Probably, it's not that bad. More likely, you read it on the internet from someone whose self-image is based on on loving TechA and hating TechB. A lot of much hated technology is at least okay for it's intended use. Maybe not the most pleasant time you will ever have, but no reason to jump out of the window. Hey, and if you get used to it, you may even start to like it. At least, learn to retain some dignity when confronted with things you don't like.
You can still think that one thing is better than another, but if you make a huge drama out of it, you just make it harder for yourself. The best programmer is the one who get's shit done, not the one with the saltiest tears.14 -
Every single one of them, and every one that will come after them.
Google, it started out as 2 people in their garage, wanting to make a search engine that was better than the others. Nothing else, nothing evil. Just make the world a little bit better. And look what it's become now. A megacorporation with little to no regards for their user base. Because who cares about users anyway?
Microsoft, it started out with Bill Gates - young high school computer nerd - who wanted to make an operating system for the world to use. Something that's better than the competition. And boy did he do so. Well "better than the competition" aside, he did make it for the world to use. And the world adopted it. And look what it's become now. A megacorporation with little to no regards for their user base. Because who cares about users anyway?
See where I'm going here?
Apple, it started out with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in their garage, just like Google did, wanting to make hardware that was better than the others. Nothing else, nothing evil. Just to make the world a little bit better. And look what it's become now. Planned obsolescence has been baked into it, just like it is in every other piece of technology. Quality control and thinking through the design has become a thing of the past. User choice, yeah who cares about that.
Samsung, it started out centuries ago actually, and I don't really remember the details of it.. ColdFusion has a video on it if memory serves me right. Do watch it if you're interested. Anyway, just like all the others they started out as a company which wanted to make the world a little bit better. And damn right did they do so.. initially. Look what they've become now. Forcing their stupid TouchWiz UI upon their customers (or products?), a Bixby button that can't even be reprogrammed.. and the latest thing.. Knox, advertised as a security feature, but as everyone who likes rooting their devices and mucking with it knows, it is an anti-feature that only serves for lockdown. Why shouldn't you be able to turn in a phone for RMA when a hardware error occurs, when all you've personally modified is the software? Why should changing the software blow that eFuse, so that you can be sure that you can't replace it without specialized equipment and a very steady hand?
I could go on and on forever about more of the tech giants out there, but I feel like this suffices for now. Otherwise I won't have anything else left for future rants! But one thing I know for sure. Every tech company started, starts, and will start out with a desire to make the world a better place, and once they gain a significant customer base, they will without exception turn into the same kind of Evil Megacorp., just like the ones before them. Some may say that capitalism itself is to blame for this, the greed for more when you already have a lot. Who knows? I'd rather say that the very human nature itself is to blame for it. We're by design greedy beings, and I hate it. I hate being human for that. I don't want humans to be evil towards one another, and be greedy for ever more. But I guess that that's just the way it is, and some things do actually never change...17 -
Hello everyone!
This is a kinda follow up to my previous rant:
https://devrant.com/rants/1442655/...
So, it’s been a week since I started the internship. I am kinda lost to be honest.
The first day was awesome, but I have been going downhill since then. I make so stupid mistakes and it seems like I always think different than my mentor/employer (me making mistakes). Then he corrects me and I have to rewrite the code which I had to spend hours to think and get working. 😕😕
As @RantSomeWhere said, the guy is actually nice and still appreciates me and helps me all the time. I am really thankful for that. 🙂
As @plant99 said, I do have to be working a lot to try and meet the tasks that I am given. The employer does tell me to not over work but I still do if I have to, to get the thing done. I don’t feel nice if I don’t finish the work. So I do spend up to 12 hours (not continuously) on it at times. 😅
The code base… oh my god!! It is so bad (to me). Don’t get me wrong, we use the linting and auto formatting tools, but I can’t get over the 2 space tabs in C++ code. It makes me feel like I am not looking at code but at paragraphs of mumbo jumbo stuff. 😭😭
Oh and yes, it is confirmed. I HATE FRONTEND WORK! Especially when languages like JS and C++ are used in combination and interact with each other. 😨😨😱😱
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate JS or frontend, but I hate doing it myself. So not my cup of tea. Kudos to those who actually do it! 😎👏🏻🎊
Overall, I guess, it is going decently. I feel so scared at times, consumed by the fear, that my code will be wrong and he’ll be disappointed in me. Yea I know that I shouldn’t be upset with how others feel. But it does make me sad when I disappoint my mentor (who is still rooting for me). 🙁
I am hoping to get better over time. This is definitely a great experience for me because my code has never been judged before. I have always been the “king of code” in my college/social circle. 🤭🤭
Honestly, this is actually humbling. I guess I definitely needed this 😅😅. And as they say, you don’t improve by being the top. You improve by leaping forward, ending up at the bottom of the heap of the next level, and growing up from there. 😅
Oh and I also realized - remunerative benefits are DEFINITELY motivating 😂😂😂😂
And the 5 days work also definitely makes me MUCH more excited for the weekends 😆😆😂😂
Thanks everyone for cheering, motivating, and giving me advise.
@oudalally I definitely found your advise quite helpful 😁😁😊😊
PS: ooh this my biggest rant/story yet! Yiiipppeeeeeee 😁😁😊😊7 -
I'm a TA myself and just yesterday wanted to defend my fellow TAs and CS/IT teachers from some of the rants here. Of course not all of the rants are but I found a few quite unfair towards us and I can fully understand a TA getting confused and tired after 5-7 hours of helping and wrapping your head around some of the harder problems the students run into.
However, I'm also a student myself and right now I'm fucking fed up with the shit my supervisor gives me regularly .. So let the rant flow!
(disclaimer: the following text uses “you” to address the rant recipient. So, dear reader, don't feel offended)
First of, why do you fucking care when and especially where I'm working on your project when you know I'm only working part time since I'm usually tutoring students by daylight. Having me come in after my TA shift to work on your project instead of letting me go home, get some rest and food, and start working with a fresh head is neither helping you nor very productive. Also, if you want me to be productive and use your fucking tools to get going faster you better not make me fucking debug your fucking tools. For instance, I don't even have the same first name so all your fucking paths are invalid on my fucking machine! Also, I get that your machine is more powerful than mine and I don't really care about it as long as you don't fucking push convoluted messy timing sensitive scripts and make me search for the correct values on my machine. And, if a file your script is trying to delete is not there aborting is not an valid exception handling!
And don't get me started on the scripts that actually do some work besides setting up your fucking toolchain! -
Fuck I wish I knew what to do about low motivation!!! I have some ideas I think are really great, some that might be profitable, and fuck I just don’t do any of them. I spend more time panicking about what to do than anything else. But damn so much time wasted when I just needed a little guidance or a little planning or a little like less than $100 more money. That frustrates me to no end.
There’s so much bullshit to everything. This does follow up to my wk106 rant, where I’m trying to rationalize the tons of code that are behind the smallest features. How many thousands of builds go into a deploy. Just swallowing how much rite in software.
I feel like a failure at my job at times but what sucks is I’m just in the middle. Not the most experienced dev, not the least. I’ve got my feet wet in a number of things, but not a solid enough stack for a lot.
BUT SOMEHOW I GOTTA BE MOTIVATED TO LEARN. FFS I CAN DO BETTER BUT MY INSIDE IS BROKEN SOMETIMES AND I JUST WANK OFF FUCK GET IT TOGETHER.
Yea, I fight with myself a lot. I have a big ego and I’m a piece of shit at the same time. Idk. That is annoying too. If only I could get really motivated and focused on some of these projects I could do amazing things. I’ve never struggled with a subject I applied myself to. I just wasn’t motivated. I don’t know how to fix it and I wish I did. I also don’t know what the end game for me holds.
This whole complex really scares me for later life. I will have regrets because my mind builds impossible plans for good, but if I achieve any of it I WILL THINK damn I should have not dealt with this and done x. Like I could make world peace but be like damn coulda rebuilt cars or some stupid shit.
So I’ll conclude with that I’ve done a lot of jobs around the house, and yes working with drywall sucks. So sometimes I’ll think about that. But damn. That doesn’t last because I know I can do it well if I apply myself.
All this leads to getting overextended which is another huge motivation killer. I’m trying to learn self control and focus. But also I need small victories along the way. Very annoying.
Well at least I was motivated to finish this rant. I have a few weekly rants I wanted to participate in but couldn’t even find the motivation for that. There was a toxic person in my life then and I’m slowly getting back to normal but I know that even normal me struggles with motivation. Plus that toxic person was my friend and I’ve lost a lot of (long term) friends recently and that is a real drag. But they needed to go. But I wish they had just shut up sometimes then they wouldn’t have been so toxic. But I digress.
I know I have so many ideas I can’t do them all even if I am motivated and for some time is of the essence.
So look out for some collabs. And grab that motivation wherever you can find it.1 -
Argh! (I feel like I start a fair amount of my rants with a shout of fustration)
Tl;Dr How long do we need to wait for a new version of xorg!?
I've recently discovered that Nvidia driver 435.17 (for Linux of course) supports PRIME GPU offloading, which -for the unfamiliar- is where you're able render only specific things on a laptops discreet GPU (vs. all or nothing). This makes it significantly easier (and power efficient) to use the GPU in practice.
There used to be something called bumblebee (which was actually more power efficient), but it became so slow that one could actually get better performance out of Intel's integrated GPU than that of the Nvidia GPU.
This feature is also already included in the nouveau graphics driver, but (at least to my understanding) it doesn't have very good (or none) support for Turing GPUs, so here I am.
Now, being very excited for this feature, I wanted to use it. I have Arch, so I installed the nvidia-beta drivers, and compiled xorg-server from master, because there are certain commits that are necessary to make use of this feature.
But after following the Nvidia instructions, it doesn't work. Oops I realize, xrog probably didn't pick up the Nvidia card, let's restart xorg. and boom! Xorg doesn't boot, because obviously the modesetting driver isn't meant for the Nvidia card it's meant for the Intel one, but xorg is to stupid for that...
So here I am back to using optimus-manager and the ordinary versions of Nvidia and xorg because of some crap...
If you have some (good idea) of what to do to make it work, I'm welcome to hear it.6 -
Valentine's Week is here. What are you going to do to make your SO feel better?
Me: Every year I give my SO a photograph of me and write on it, "You are welcome.".
Last Weekend:https://devrant.com/rants/102368515 -
@Flux
I read https://devrant.com/rants/1845851/...
I was going to comment until I realized it was a post from 300 days ago.
Just want to say ask you how it went or give a post mortem. Also Congratulations. I hope you brought a long run way when you started almost a year ago.
Remember starting is 80% of finishing, and carrying through is the other 20%.
Success looks easy when all you see are the success stories. Steve jobs wasn't the most famous marketer, he was the most famous salesman, and what he sold was a dream.
Marketing is a buzzword, and a lot of companies try to use marketing as a replacement for sales people, but nothing really beats a good sales person or team. Thats the secret to marketing: forgo it as much as possible and work on sales and relationships instead. Awareness is nice, but money and sales are better.
This coming from a guy who had six businesses by the time he was twenty six and helped his family to start two other successful businesses.
Apparently I'm good at helping other people make money just not good at helping myself do it.
What I've learned is if you can get 1 customer you can get 10 and if you can get 10 you can get 100. And then keep going.
Good luck.3 -
not a rant.
More coronavirus doomporn so click away now if you're sicking of reading and hearing about it.
As I wrote to sweetnothings and Demolishun over here https://devrant.com/rants/2476697/...
Looting already started in my area.
Store was robbed in broad daylight after it was broken into just a few days ago.
And when the next surge of stimulus money hits people are gonna be like "I better stock up seeing as the shelves are kinda empty."
And then the shelves are gonna empty *quick*.
And people will see that and empty them *even faster*.
And then even faster than *that*, in a vicious cycle.
At some point people might panic and proper looting could begin.
Got my tax return before any stimulus so I took the time to go shopping.
Of course I didn't buy up all of any one item. Don't know why people feel like they need to do that.
Why wouldn't you want a variety of supplies anyway?
Gravy for example. No one can get any meat. Saw that coming a month ago.
If you're just buying for bulk, packet gravy is nice for things like pasta and staples like rice and potatoes.
Little things go a long way.
And salt. Salt is cheap now. Probably will remain cheap, but expect panicking buying to make supply spotty, like
everything else.
I expect these shortages to last 2-4 weeks, excluding things like dairy and meat which *could* go on longer.2 -
Valentine's Week is here. What are you going to do to make your SO feel better?
Me: Every year I give my SO a photograph of me and write on it, "You are welcome.".
Last Weekend:https://devrant.com/rants/102368513 -
Reply to my 2018 version: https://devrant.com/rants/1346392/...
Dear holodreamer ( version 2018 ),
I'm just glad that I'm still alive now. You won't believe how terrible 2020 is at the moment! Anyways, a lot has happened since you wrote me and I'm gonna reply it all to you.
Thanks for noticing. I really like my hairstyle now and my insecurity of going bald have gone. I couldn't be more happy.
Unfortunately, I'm not financially independent yet. Thanks to the crypto crash, the crypto ban in the country and some bad calls on my end. :/. But the good news is that we are back on the crypto market as the ban has been lifted recently. I don't have enough crypto to buy a lambo or go to the moon, but I have something that I could give to my grand kids. At this point, I don't really care anymore how much the value it is going to be, I have come to learn to think them of as a souvenir.
Your prediction of me preparing to move out of country seems to have come true. Honestly, I had given up that dream, but thanks to one of my best friend for reigniting those dreams - I may be moving somewhere really better by next year. I hope that I get this financial independence thing figured out before I move there. I don't wanna live there paycheck to paycheck.
Fortunately, I'm not getting any pressure to get married yet. I think I'm heading the way to a better life filled with some travel and adventures. I had a great opportunity to attend Google I/O 2020, but it got cancelled. Hopefully, covid19 will be over in few months.
Yea, I remember her. I got really carried away to the point that things she said started to hurt my heart. But eventually we had some argument and we stopped talking last September and I cut all contacts with her on the new years. If it makes you feel any better, last time i checked, she looks quite plumpy and totally different.
Thankfully, I'm not that lonely to need a chat bot. But I found some good online friends. They are fun to talk to.
No, AI didn't replace developers yet. Calm down! Javascript seems to be the most popular programming language now. But I hear there is a new contender to JavaScript that could change everything. It's called WebAssembly. Maybe in few years, we will see the decline of JavaScript.
Thinking about you, I feel some guilt for wasting your potential. I could have done much better if I was little more careful and responsible with you. I don't wanna make 2022 version of me feel bad for me.
Regards,
holodreamer ( version 2020 )1