So a few days ago I felt pretty h*ckin professional.

I'm an intern and my job was to get the last 2003 server off the racks (It's a government job, so it's a wonder we only have one 2003 server left). The problem being that the service running on that server cannot just be placed on a new OS. It's some custom engineering document server that was built in 2003 on a 1995 tech stack and it had been abandoned for so long that it was apparently lost to time with no hope of recovery.

"Please redesign the system. Use a modern tech stack. Have at it, she's your project, do as you wish."

Music to my ears.

First challenge is getting the data off the old server. It's a 1995 .mdb file, so the most recent version of Access that would be able to open it is 2010.

Option two: There's an "export" button that literally just vomits all 16,644 records into a tab-delimited text file. Since this option didn't require scavenging up an old version of Access, I wrote a Python script to just read the export file.

And something like 30% of the records were invalid. Why? Well, one of the fields allowed for newline characters. This was an issue because records were separated by newline. So any record with a field containing newline became invalid.

Although, this did not stop me. Not even close. I figured it out and fixed it in about 10 minutes. All records read into the program without issue.

Next for designing the database. My stack is MySQL and NodeJS, which my supervisors approved of. There was a lot of data that looked like it would fit into an integer, but one or two odd records would have something like "1050b" which mean that just a few items prevented me from having as slick of a database design as I wanted. I designed the tables, about 18 columns per record, mostly varchar(64).

Next challenge was putting the exported data into the database. At first I thought of doing it record by record from my python script. Connect to the MySQL server and just iterate over all the data I had. But what I ended up actually doing was generating a .sql file and running that on the server. This took a few tries thanks to a lot of inconsistencies in the data, but eventually, I got all 16k records in the new database and I had never been so happy.

The next two hours were very productive, designing a front end which was very clean. I had just enough time to design a rough prototype that works totally off ajax requests. I want to keep it that way so that other services can contact this data, as it may be useful to have an engineering data API.

Anyways, that was my win story of the week. I was handed a challenge; an old, decaying server full of important data, and despite the hitches one might expect from archaic data, I was able to rescue every byte. I will probably be presenting my prototype to the higher ups in Engineering sometime this week.

Happy Algo!

I love listening to music and reading on the train every morning. On my way to the station, I get a text, "DUDE. ***** committed suicide."

He was a good friends of ours from high school. I remember once he got a few of us to go caving on homecoming since none of us had dates. He'd never finish a candy bar; would give half of everything away. He once drove out to California to try to start over; lasted three days and came home, but through a girl he met he was in Hawaii for a year.

He lived a lot of life, and he had a heart of gold.

I didn't get out my ebook on my phone. I didn't even put my headphones in.

I had lost another close friend from University while I was overseas. I remember being in the city art gallery when I got the news. I walked right out to the harbor, fell to my knees and cried. I always thought one day I'd be home and could shoot the shit with my old roommate. Now he was gone, and the only thing I had from him was a text from 10 days before saying, "I haven't been doing too well, but thanks for asking."

I'm back in another software engineering job, on the train to an 8-to-5, shakin it for the money. I couldn't read on the commute. I just looked out that window as the train car descended into the subway, and thought to myself, "What am I even doing anyway?"

I'm in my mid-30s; too young to be losing people like this.

I'm sorry man. I wish we had caught up sooner. I wish you weren't gone, but I know you're at peace.

She - So. Do you read ?

Me - Yes. Infact a lot. Daily. My life is filled with it.

She - Wow. Nice. So what do you read mostly ? Which one is your favourite

Me - Mostly Documentations. Vuejs documentation is my favourite followed by express and mongodb documentation. And yeah webpack. You should read them too. Then there is a book on ES6, 'Understanding ES6' by Nikolas S Zakas, famous author and programmer. Great stuff

Account guy saw me coding...

account guy: so you type a lot.. how can you remember so much??

me: ??

account guy: I mean there is NO LOGIC in what you do, so you must read these things and type them here... you need to remember a lot.. right??

me: ohh... that... well.. I have very good memory :)

p.s. last line was sarcasm

Today I read a lot 😂🙄

*Facebook Hackers follow the Rules*
(real story)

TL;DR: sorry, not available, can't do spoilers

One night I was with a group of friends out at a pub. A guy and his girlfriend show up, I didn't know them but they were my friend's friends.

The girl kept bragging the whole time about his boyfriend being a professional programmer, trying to remind it to everybody whenever possible (don't ask me why!).

So, after a while, the discussion moves towards "suspect Facebook activities" and the guy starts saying that he can hack Facebook.

- "What do you mean?", I ask.
- "Hacking into other people's accounts, even with 2 factor authentication. I did it a lot of times"
- "Wait, and they don't notice?"
- "Of course not! ^_^ He's a hacker", the girl replies.

Ok, time to do a coming out.

- "Hey, I'm a developer myself. Can you give me an idea of what you did in technical terms? Did you find a vulnerability? Used a virus? Maybe a keylogger?"
- "No... Uh... Well... The secret is to read the terms of service"
- "What?"
- "Yes... yes it's all in the facebook terms of service..."
- "Uhm, I'm not really sure I'm following. Could you prove it by hacking my Facebook account? I'm giving you the permission".

In less than a minute the discussion flew completely away and they never mentioned computers again.

😂😂

Every day.

I am a PHP developer.

Yeah, "another PHP is awful" rant... no, not really.

It's just unsuitable for some ambitious projects, just like Ruby and Python are.

First of all, DO NOT EVER use Laravel for large enterprise applications. The same goes for RoR, Django, and other ActiveRecord MVCs.

They are all neat frameworks for writing a todo app, as a better-than-wordpress flexible blogging solution, even as a custom webshop.

Beyond 50k daily users, Active Record becomes hell due to it's lazy fat querying habits. At more than a million users... *depressed sigh*.

PHP is also completely unsuitable for projects beyond 5M lines of code in my opinion. At more than 25M lines... *another depressed sigh*.

You can let your devs read Clean Code and books about architecture patterns, you can teach them about SOLID & DRY, you can write thousands of tests... it doesn't matter.

PHP is scaffolding, it's made of bamboo and rope. It's not brick or concrete. You can build quickly, but it only scales up to a certain point before it breaks in multiple places.

Eventually you run into patterns where even 100% test coverage still doesn't guarantee shit, because the real-life edge cases are just too complex and numerous.

When you're working on a multi-party invoicing system with adapters for various tax codes, or an availability/planning system working across timezones, or systems which implement geographical routefinding coupled to traffic, event & weather prediction...

PHP, Python, Ruby, etc are just missing types.

Every day I run into bugs which could have been prevented if you could use ADTs in a generic way in PHP. PHP7 has pretty good typehints, and they prevent a lot of messy behavior, but they aren't composable. There is no way to tell PHP "this method accepts a Collection of Users", or "this methods returns maybe either an Apple or a Pear, and I want to force the caller to handle both Apple/Pear and null".

Well, you could do that, but it requires a lot of custom classes and trickery, and you have to rewrite the same logic if you want to typehint a "Collection of Departments" instead of "Collection of Users" -- i.e., it's not composable.

Probably the biggest issue is that languages with a (mostly) structural type system (Haskell, Rust, even C#/JVM languages to some degree, etc) are much slower to develop in for the "startup" era of a project, so you grab a weak, quick prototyping language to get started.

Then, when you reach a more grown up phase, you wish you had a better type system at your disposal...

I've been very busy in the last weeks so I haven't read a lot about the recent "Linux CoC drama".

Now I'm reading what happened and, well... I'm disgusted.

Especially being a woman, I'm disgusted knowing that a group of people pretend to speak for me saying that we don't need meritocracy, but only more "inclusivity" (whatever that means). I don't give a fuck of your gender, write useful code and I'll appreciate you. And please, give me back the original Linus Torvalds: his irreverence made me laugh.

Sure, sometimes discrimination exists, however good companies will hire you if you are competent, no matter how you look. Instead, I encountered some incompetent women whining about "nobody listen to my ideas because I'm a woman". No, RTFM and maybe you will able to propose better ideas and people will listen to you.

Read a lot. Like this standard work

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.

Software engineering is doomed.

The next generation of developers is going to suck as fuck

I've come across a lot of situation that made me think this way.

The most notable examples are right here on devrant.

I've seen a shit ton of rants blaming languages for "bugs" when in fact those "bugs" wouldn't have happened if those fuckers would have read the specifications of said languages.

This new generation doesn't read, when they've got a problem they just fucking go to Google for answers, they don't bother reading specifications, language books, rfc, etc, they don't bother reading where the true source of information are. The documentation ? What's that ? Let's go to stackoverflow first, let's think second.

Same back in school I've seen people in the highest grades that couldn't fucking decompress a tar archive.

In the coming decades we will loose the high skilled people, the people that made the software world as it is today we will be left with fuckers only able to blame things for stuff they don't understand.

This is my first true rant. This is me being pissed off.

Ya know I'm getting really fucking tired of this female only shit in the tech field. Like yes, there's a representation gap in the field. But you ever think it's because lots of females just don't want to fucking do it?

Most of the females I graduated high school with are going for something medical, teaching, and other fields that allow lots of human interaction and helping people. (You sure as fuck don't see people breaking their neck over the misrepresentation of males in the nursing or education field, do ya?)

You know who needs fucking attention in the tech world? Small towns. There's no fucking actual computer classes in any of the fucking high schools near me. Not a fucking thing. I had one class but it taught me how to use office software (word, excel, access, the whole shitfest).

But noooo let's just fucking focus on one specific group and everyone else gets fucked over.

Not to mention, a lot of the females here (at least from the ones I've read) just want to be treated like normal people.

I'm tired of this bullshit. Fuck every bit of it. Don't even care if it makes me a fucking dick. It's unnecessary sjw bullshit.

Boss: we are going to build a blockchain. ( he is smiling proudly)
Me: we are doing data visualization boss!!! Why we need the blockchain?!?!?
Boss: I am disappointed in you!!! You don’t read any Tech news or follow the market trends? BlockChain is tending nowadays... ( showing angry emoji using his face)
Me: it is not related to our work by anything!!! What we will visualize? A success of the transition? The amount of it? A visualization of the nodes?
Boss: (shouting) there are a lot of opportunities using the BlockChain in our days, and it is critical to our business...
Me: boss, there many opportunities using the ******* BlockChain, and I am leaving this company by the end of the month... find a ******* BlockChain developer to visualize the ******* process...
Boss: ........ (silence)
Me: .... (already resigned)

Stackoverflow

When I was just starting with programming I used to google a lot (more) of my problems. But just just copying them made me feel guilty, since I could not handle the problem myself. So I decided to analyse a code to the point where i understand exactly how it works. Sometimes it took me a couple of hours to understand a method, which was written 1 or 2 levels over my current level, but it was totally worth it. I learned a lot about Java, how to write cleaner code in general and how to read and understand code quickly.

It seems like every other day I run into some post/tweet/article about people whining about having the imposter syndrome. It seems like no other profession (except maybe acting) is filled with people like this.

Well lemme answer that question for you lot.

YES YOU ARE A BLOODY IMPOSTER.

There. I said it. BUT.

Know that you're already a step up from those clowns that talk a lot but say nothing of substance.

You're better than the rockstar dev that "understands" the entire codebase because s/he is the freaking moron that created that convoluted nonsensical pile of shit in the first place.

You're better than that person who thinks knowing nothing is fine. It's just a job and a pay cheque.

The main question is, what the flying fuck are you going to do about being an imposter? Whine about it on twtr/fb/medium? HOW ABOUT YOU GO LEARN SOMETHING BEYOND FRAMEWORKS OR MAKING DUMB CRUD WEBSITES WITH COLOR CHANGING BUTTONS.

Computers are hard. Did you expect to spend 1 year studying random things and waltz into the field as a fucking expert? FUCK YOU. How about you let a "doctor" who taught himself medicine for 1 year do your open heart surgery?

Learn how a godamn computer actually works. Do you expect your doctors and surgeons to be ignorant of how the body works? If you aspire to be a professional WHY THE FUCK DO YOU STAY AT THE SURFACE.

Go learn about Compilers, complete projects with low level languages like C / Rust (protip: stay away from C++, Java doesn't count), read up on CPU architecture, to name a few topics.

Then, after learning how your computers work, you can start learning functional programming and appreciate the tradeoffs it makes. Or go learn AI/ML/DS. But preferably not before.

Basically, it's fine if you were never formally taught. Get yourself schooled, quit bitching, and be patient. It's ok to be stupid, but it's not ok to stay stupid forever.

/rant

Impostor vs Kenner syndrome

We got a new kid which does his internship from school. We talked and he asked me what stuff I had done with 14 - 16. I remembered with 14 I was really into reverse engineering, assembler and c/c++ but never managed to actually build something.

So he started to say stuff like he could replace me in an instant and he should get paid for this internship at least as much as I did, because he made some websites and games already.

I really was down. Kids today get a lot of shit done and I was a disappointing lazy little shit just playing games and try to reverse engineer stuff and learn assembler and c++.

It's been month and shit hit me when I've seen his stuff was copy pasted from a tutorial/ YouTube video.

Today's ressources, languages, frameworks make it really easy to build something but I still got respect for everyone every age who is interested and get into programming and stuff.

But I hope you'll read this you little shit and realise that you can use a simple physics engine by copy and pasting code. So don't talk disrespectful to people in general especially when they can create a whole game and physics engine.

(On a phone interview)

"So... in the entire span of your professional career, you've never had someone you could call a mentor?"

"Uh, nope, been mostly on my own."

"How did you learn new things?"

"I read a lot of Hacker News."

True story.

A decade ago 800x600 was pretty much the standard resolution for devices and 5 sec response time was considered fast. Animations were minimal and websites were easier to read. Programmers debated around topics like which loop runs faster, i++ or ++i, while vs doWhile and so on. In general, we were closer to understanding what happens behind the browser curtain and how code needs to be organized to make it more maintainable.

Today the level of abstraction is much higher. I don't think devs can contemplate on the finer aspects of programming efficiency; they'd rather rely on a code library to do all the grunt work. With the explosion of devices and platforms, the focus has shifted from programming to assembling. Programmers need to know their tools first, then write code. The tool is expected to work well with a millisecond response time, not the programmer's code.

Moving forward, I think programming would be more about building higher abstraction utilities/libraries that are integrated by other tools, which is already happening. Marketing an App would become more important than the actual skill needed to develop it.

A bit far-fetched, but I think the future programmer would be a lot like a stock market analyst who has a bunch of windows in front, just observing data or algorithm patterns created by an AI engine and cherry-picking a specific combination of modules that might make the next big sensational app.

Does anyone else have major issues with being interrupted whilst programming

I just lose track , I have it all in my head get an email read it try and get back into it but it takes me 10 minutes

Problem is I'm the main dev. I get a lot of emails 😔

#feature request

Anonymous rants!

Let me explain, many people here have chosen meaningless usernames to them, to be completely anonymous, many others didn't... For example if you Google Etrunon I guess that you'll find me in less than 5 minutes...

So I believe that this may lead to less and less hateful, frustrated and liberating rants. Mainly because of three reasons: fear to be discovered from the outside(boss, etc) , fear to be discovered inside (colleagues or friends invited here) and the latter is the community building aspect of this app.

So what I am asking (knowing that should be a lot eheh) is the capability to post new rants either signed or anonymous... This to prevent being discovered let us having rewarding rants to read while on the same hand being able to connect and getting in touch a little bit with each other :)

What do you think?

@dfox @trogus

"Read-only Friday" rule: On Fridays, you don't deploy new versions, don't merge code into production, don't update databases, and a lot of others "DON'Ts"

Yesterday my father called me and asked if I'd have a look at his website to exchange his logo with a new one and make some string changes in the backend. Well, of course I did and hell am I glad I did it.
He had that page made a few years ago by some cousin of a friend who "is really good with computers", it's a small web shop for car parts and, as usual costumer accounts. Costumer Accounts with payment infos.
Now I've seen a lot of bad practices when it comes to handling passwords and I've surely done a few questionable things myself but this idiot took the cake. When a new account was registered his php script would read the login page, look for a specific comment and add a string "'account; password'," below into to a js array. In clear text. On the website. One doesn't even have to breach the db, it's just there, F12 and you got all the log ins.

Seriously, we really need a licensing system for devs, those were two or three years this shit was live, 53 accounts... Now I've gotta decipher this entire bowl of spaghetti just to see if he has done any more unspeakable things.

Stack Overflow. Everyone uses it but everyone seems to hate the community. I very often read about someone getting down voted and they all say the same thing - "I have no idea why".

I have spent a lot of time moderating SO posts, which gave me a lot of reputation and medals. I find it fun to help people and it feels good to give back to the community.

I have asked a bunch of questions and I've never gotten a single down vote, which leads me to believe everyone of you that is constantly getting down voted are doing something wrong. Because the posts I see getting down voted are fucking stupid questions that either lack information or contain too much information.

Example 1:
Server java error

Why is my server not working? I am using Tomcat, port 8080 and I'm getting IOException.

Example 2:
Webpack configuration not working

My webpack is not a working, why?
[entire webpack config]

End examples.

What the fuck are you expecting asking questions like these?? No one gets paid for answering your questions, so the least you can do is write a CLEAR AND UNDERSTANDABLE question. I'm not gonna tell you how to do it because there's A LOT of information on how to do it.

People devote hours and hours to helping others on SO, and of course they get fed up with the stupid and lazy questions. That community is not about being nice, it's not about making people feel welcomed, it's about QUALITY OF CONTENT. No one is crying when they find a superb question + answer, right? That's the result of a community not accepting low quality content.

So please, the next time you get a down vote on SO - do not come here whining about it but instead take a look at what you have posted there and ask yourself if it could have held a higher quality.

Thanks!

Ooh this is good.

At my first job, i was hired as a c++ developer. The task seemed easy enough, it was a research and the previous developer died, leaving behind a lot of documentation and some legacy fortran code. Now you might not know, but fortran can be really easily converted to c, and then refactored to c++.

Fine, time to read the docs. The research was on pollen levels, cant really tell more. Mostly advanced maths. I dug through 500+ pages of algebra just to realize, theres no way this would ever work. Okay dont panic, im a data analyst, i can handle this.

Lets take a look at the fortran code, maybe that makes more sense. Turns out it had nothing to do with the task. It looped through some external data i couldnt find anywhere and thats it. Yay.

So i exported everything we had to a csv file, wrote a java program to apply linefit with linear regression and filter out the bad records. After that i spent 2 days in a hot server room, hoping that the old intel xeon wouldnt break down from sending java outputs directly to haskell, but it held on its own.

I like memory hungry desktop applications.

I do not like sluggish desktop applications.

Allow me to explain (although, this may already be obvious to quite a few of you)

Memory usage is stigmatized quite a lot today, and for good reason. Not only is it an indication of poor optimization, but not too many years ago, memory was a much more scarce resource.

And something that started as a joke in that era is true in this era: free memory is wasted memory. You may argue, correctly, that free memory is not wasted; it is reserved for future potential tasks. However, if you have 16GB of free memory and don't have any plans to begin rendering a 3D animation anytime soon, that memory is wasted.

Linux understands this. Linux actually has three States for memory to be in: used, free, and available. Used and free memory are the usual. However, Linux automatically caches files that you use and places them in ram as "available" memory. Available memory can be used at any time by programs, simply dumping out whatever was previously occupying the memory.

And as you well know, ram is much faster than even an SSD. Programs which are memory heavy COULD (< important) be holding things in memory rather than having them sit on the HDD, waiting to be slowly retrieved. I much rather a web browser take up 4 GB of RAM than sit around waiting for it to read the caches image off my had drive.

Now, allow me to reiterate: unoptimized programs still piss me off. There's no need for that electron-based webcam image capture app to take three gigs of memory upon launch. But I love it when programs use the hardware I spent money on to run smoother.

Don't hate a program simply because it's at the top of task manager.

**Web Host Rant**

I can't believe how saturated the market is. I also can't believe how many Web hosts do not know a thing about development. You would think you'd want to read up on development practices before going into the business since developers are your customers.

Not to mention that a lot of hosting services are resellers of resellers of resellers. It's to the point where a 15 year old with their mom's credit card can start doing Web hosting. The problem is... they don't know how to answer actually development questions... they won't be in a conference call with you while you do deployments.

It infuriated me to the point where I've started my own hosting company. Completely managed and using the most advanced technologies aimed towards developers. Not only that but an advanced managment package that will teach proper deployment procedures and be there to hold your hand when you do deploy.

Oh and did I mention git will be available to even shared hosting? Oh and did I also mention that we are currently setting up put own git server?

If you're gonna comment a lot or a little, at least be consistent. I just read some code like this:

//prints "are you ready?"
printf("are you ready?");

//get the value
int findVal(int x) {
/* some fucking complex algorithm with no comments whatsoever that seems to have an error messing everything up */
}

Coolest thing about platforms like devrant, is that it's so easy to get people to read what you have to say, and get them to notice you.

It doesn't matter if you have a nice profile picture, have a lot of friends/followers or anything like that.

The content is what matters.
Also, its not like everything here is developer related or is super nerdy, most of the stuff you see are normal things you'd expect people to post on things like Facebook when they want to be social and connect with people.

It's sad that this is not how most social media is done.

Today a colleague of mine asked me to help with some javascript. So I said sure, it will be done in 5 minutes. Im a fullstack developer with a focus on backend in this project.
So I opened the frontend part and was amazed how shit the javascript file was. Yes you read it right FILE...
One big file with a lot of variables in the window scope.
Because she was in “charge” of the frontenders because she works there a bit longer then me I never checked the frontend code.
I said I wont/cant help unless I see better code. I explained to a trainee what could be done to change it and Im impressed that the trainee did a better job then the employee and quick as well.
Got the whole code in seperate files with each part of the code in seperate scopes within 2 hours.

What Im saying here is that even as student, intern or trainee you can know things better thsn someone with experience, dont be afraid to speak up. Because everyone can learn from eachother.

So I made an android app for a client. It's a newspaper type of app for the clients webpage, as he has a lot of traffic on it and about 50-51% is from mobile. Which is all good an everything.

And so I've been working on it for a while now as it wasn't a primary focus, more of a like side project.

I was able to make full working build (publish ready) and sent it to the client for a review.

After about an hour I received an email saying that the app is requesting too many permissions from the user. So I started looking trough my manifest file and all of the 3rd party libs to see what were those permissions.

Well, when I finally installed the app on a physical device and looked trough the permissions in the settings all I found were permissions for the internet and prevent the phone from sleeping.

After asking the client to tell me in detail which permissions raised concerns he told me it were those 2 and if they could be removed.

So I just wasted an hour of my life trying to explain why the app that is losing content from the internet needs internet permissions.

Fml and ignorant people who think they know everything and won't accept anything else.

And all of this because he read on some click bait website how a "real" app doesn't need any permissions and every other is just trying to steal all of your data and money.

From the guy who wrote all the Programming Microsoft books and the Annotated Turing book. Comes this book.

This book is great for beginners great for people who don’t know a lot about software and how computers work, simple read. I like it because it also gives a different prospective, beginning at Morse code and works up from there all the way up to high level languages.

The book gives snippets of code to discuss it not really a tutorial book. It’s a different type of book that all people could understand.

Good read

!rant
Linux vs Microsoft

Well, this war is certainly one of the oldest. IMO,
Linux - great for automating stuff, free, and customisable.
Windows - user friendly, softwares much more easily available, much easier to use.

Frankly, I have tried using Linux a lot of times, but never liked it one bit. I am a GUI fan and hate to type commands for every little thing. Plus installing Ubuntu wiped out my disk once and I lost all my school memories ( this was in 2008, I didn't know much about backups, was quite young) ,so I am quite vary of it. I just don't feel it to be intuitive. Just to do a simple task, I loathe to learn difficult commands, and just read the syntax.

However, I have no bias against people who use Linux.

It is like religion, live and let live, follow whatever suits you.

On devrant, why's there so much hate for Windows? Because it is paid? Because it has updates? So what!
I never had a problem with it, I update once a month, takes 10 mins. If you set up your active hours correctly, it works great, you can disable updates also. Windows 10 is highly stable. It is paid, but in my country almost all laptops come with windows preinstalled. The OS-less laptops are about $10 cheaper, which is not that much to freak about.

Would love to hear your views and logical arguments.
Please be polite.

I fucking hate it when I see videos or read articles saying "you don't need a powerful laptop for development"

Do you even code?
From mobile to web Dev. Every tool now demands a lot ram and cpu power to run.

You at least have an ide and chrome open. These with the OS can reach the 8gb ram limit.

Also the screen, you need atleast a 1080p! I had a 15in 768p laptop for 5 years. I hated development on that.

Fucking hate people who think we can develop on a potato.

The more depressed you get over the current state of software is how you know you made it.When you start making your own opinions and say"wow these people are full of shit"

Primary example, the web development overblown bullshit. Fuck me dude, you really don't need that full featured react, vue, angular framework to make sense of shit. You are going over the top for fucking ajax functionality and state management that you could do by yourself without needing to learn a full framework, by the time you finish learning react you probably would have been better served with standard vanilla af JS and server side rendering.

Our world is full of fads and many talented people that perpetrate them. Its fine, it is a the nature of the beast. But a lot...A LOT of software is very POORLY written. And adding levels of abstraction over a very broken paradigm (web in this case) does and will not make it better.

Basically I am fucking hating being a web developer and want to go back to a time in which we cared about how much memory consumption our applications made as well as not worrying about the fucking frontend having the ability to implement machine learning.

I want to run sublime.exe and being sure that it is a native application to my system and not using a fucking contained web browser to implement my fucking text editor. With 20mb of ram at most instead of 500mb WTF.

I knew I made it when I could read comments on Hacker news and reddit and say "this idiot is full of shit", I knew I made it when I would sigh heavily at the idea of having another project rather than having a fan girl attitude towards it.

I knew I made it when people writing about software development meant shit to me rather than the wonder of what the fuck they were talking about.

I knew I made it when getting laid was more important to me than fucking around with code.

pussy > code
Fuck you.

It has come to my attention that people like to read!

Specifically, I mean that a lot of ranters like fiction.. :D

I've been trying to decide on something to write for a while now, and I think I have it..

"The Traveler" (name open to suggestions)

The Traveler is a magic-based fantasy where our main character travels between world's using ancient stone portals (think: Stargate) and uses her unique powers to play god.

Each world she visits will equal to a different story, and she might play a good or bad guy (or both) depending on what the world has in store for her.

Her powers will include my WIP magic system from RISE, as well as some extra querks that aid the flow of the story.

I may still work on RISE, and I will keep in mind that The Traveler and RISE come from the same universe (I think RISE will be a prequel to The Traveler, and tell the tale of how she got her powers, and the origin of the portals..)

Let me know your thoughts below! ^~^

... huh... That wasn't expected...

(Although makes a lot of sense when you read the article)

Source: goo.gl/3oQ1aG

Why is there so much hate against QA in general??

I read tons of rants about how bad testers are... and as a dev who does a lot of QA work, IT SUCKS!

We (devs) have to accept that are work needs to be tested! Otherwise we want be successful with our products.

BUT the testers need to know the development business! They should be trained at the same level as the devs are.

BECAUSE if the mug on my desk is smarter than the tester it is not going to work!
If the tester has full access to all the technologies, environments and tools (and are capable of using it) he has the ability to HELP!

I THINK that testing should be more than just follow predefined steps and let a random tool generate a bugreport.

I am sure that some of you are lucky enough to work with highly skilled testers so please let them help

Weirdest co-worker... We'll not to be judgy, but I think our industry is sort of home of the weirdos, but.. there's a few over-the-top weirdees we've had at work.

First one that comes to mind was a guy that walked liked Mr. Burns, hands behind the back & chest out. He microwaved the same thing every single day for breakfast - crackers, sausage and cheese. 😖This guy would get to his tasks very slowly, wouldn't talk to anyone on our team, and would go missing from his desk a lot, sometimes for extended periods (2+ hours). He really struggled to catch on to easy tasks. He quit after a few months, thank god.

Another weirdo we had was a girl who just couldn't dress to save her soul. She would wear these ugly ass sneakers that had neon colors reminiscent of bowling shoes (neon orange and green) and would wear turtlenecks and floor length skirts that all the colors just clashed. Her outfits were uglier than your great grandma's. Myself, her and 2 other girls dressed up as the Dr. Seuss things for Halloween, but did h1, h2, etc. tags instead and she put like rope from curtains in her hair with like 10 little pony tails. Just like wtf. She would play her gameboy at lunch and not talk to anyone much. She was really bad at our job, a lot of clients complained. She would literally read a book, braid her bangs or nap at her desk. Needless to say, she was fired.

Some of these have been mentioned already but here they are, these things make me be a bit better at programming (at least I think so)

• sleep, I love sleep and I think a good night's sleep can do wonders

• music, music theory which is a language in itself and playing an instrument which teaches hand-eye-coordination and also creates patterns in your head, but certainly teaches us that you need to practice a lot to achieve your goals, that it's hard for beginners but gets a bit easier with time

• solving puzzles and riddles, I've been a huge fan of puzzles from an early age, it is something that teaches us solving problems and creating strategies

• other types of games that are helpful are games where you have to find things in a picture or in an environment, this has trained me a bit on finding nasty bugs in my code or at least syntax errors

• googling: sometimes you find out something that is not really related to your problem, but you remember it nevertheless and later on it can help you with something else

• maths, yes, you read correctly, I'm not a big fan of maths either, but what you learn in maths is that there are certain procedures you're often repeating and that you're always building on your knowledge and expanding it, sometimes solving mathematical problems is fun too ;)

• getting fresh air - self explanatory

• listening to other people's life stories, this helps me generally in life, to know that I'm not the only one struggling with something and so on

And I probably could go on with a lot more things, but I think that's enough for now

It blows my mind that Google, advertisers, and a lot of companies seem to not understand the concept of a need fulfilled.

Google news: If you notify me of an article, and then I click on that notification, you can assume I read it. And you can also assume that I don't wish to read it again 2hrs later! So stop notifying me!!!

Amazon, AdSense, Facebook, everyone else: just because I bought new headphones, doesn't mean I wanna see ads for headphones. Actually it means the exact opposite. I don't want new headphones. I literally just bought some. And I especially don't want the exact same ones. I already have them.

Somehow, the targeted ads are worse than random. That's annoying.

How is this hard?

Reading 3GPP standards is so painful. I download a document to read it. A month or so later, an updated version is out. I need to download it again. It's so annoying to keep checking. I guess I'll have to write yet another script for yet another fucking problem.

The documents themselves are not that good too. My work would be a lot easier if there is a web interface for the standards.

I couldn't sleep. I was staring at the blinking cursor. A slow, comforting blinking. Like everyone else, I had become a slave to the JavaScript ecosystem. If I saw something like a new build system, or a new framework, I had to have it.

My client changed the requirements again. I'm in pain.

- "You want to see pain?" my colleague said. Go read Apple support forums. That's pain.

I became addicted. Every time I died and every time I was born again. Resurrected.
During the night, I was crying in the Apple forums for an official answer that would never come. During the day, I was surfing StackOverflow to fix my problems. You get "single-serving" friends there. They help you, you help them, and then you never see them again.

- "Then you install Stack and boom, you're done. It's that easy to go functional."

That's how I met him.

- "You know why they make so many javascript frameworks?"
- "No, why?"
- "So that they can distract you while they put backdoors in them. So that you don't have time to check all of their code".
- "You are by far the most interesting "single-serving" friend I've ever met"

Then, my hard disk died. Of course, I didn't have backups: nobody has enough space for all those node_modules folders. All my addictions, lost.

Then I wrote him. If you asked me now, I couldn't tell you why I wrote him. We chatted a lot.

- "It's late, I should really go search another hdd on ebay"
- "Ebay? You called me so you could have my old hard disk."
- "No, I..."
- "Come on."

He sent me his old hard disk. It was a 256MB hard disk, but it was fine for running Arch. Then he asked me to rant about my problems in front of him.

- "I want you to rant as hard as you can"
- "Are you serious?"

We ranted all night about our bosses and clients and their fucked up requests. We kept in touch, and after a while more people were ranting with us. Every week, he gave the rules that he and I decided.

- "The first rule of devRant is -- you don't talk about devRant. The second rule of devRant is -- you don't talk about devRant."

I like to think this is how devRant started. This might also be the reason why we never see @trogus, only @dfox. A lot of shit still needs to happen.

They've literally left me with nothing to do. I'm doing nothing. I can't be happy doing nothing.

To illustrate the chaos: Everyone on the team was trying to figure out some defect. No one knows what is going on in the code. It's unlike anything I've ever seen.

I found an API call with a misspelled endpoint. It was wrong since the code was written two months before. There's no way it ever worked. Obviously no one tested the code because they would have immediately seen that the call returned a 404 every time.

I fixed it. That was my only PR in about a month. It was literally one character.

The next week that PR got reverted. Apparently the app works better if the API call fails. No one said what goes wrong if the request is made, just that it "causes problems."

That's how bad it is. No one knows why anything does or doesn't work. People write code that doesn't work, never test it, and the application works better in some unspecified way if that code never gets executed.

The last straw for me was when an architect told us that if we want to improve our skills we need to learn how to read and debug stuff like this.

1) Not to be immodest, but I'm good at figuring out bad code.
2) Just because I can doesn't mean I want to do it all day instead of actually developing software
3) He trivialized the really important skill, not making a mess like this in the first place. If his idea of skill is to sling crap without tests at the wall and then debug it, how is he an architect?

I tried really hard but I can't keep a good attitude. I don't want to become toxic, but why would I consider working that way? I try my best to be good at this. Writing decent code means a lot to me. It should mean a lot to them. Their code is costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars. Maybe millions.

I can't write good code and add value if all I do is debug bad code.

So I'm out. I'm going to another project. Have a nice life.

My apprentice quit!

Posted the other day about him quitting ...

He did ( he could of read the old post )

Just took him two days to do it

Worst fucking thing he fell asleep this morning on his way to work , so he's late anyway 9 start time actually arrives 9:40 .... ! Normally today it was 10:50 till he arrived... On a day he quits

Now he expects me to pay him extra money .... Holiday days etc ...

I want an apprentice who wants to be good at software 😐

Thing is he said it's not what he wants , I think development is something you learn to love.. because of the challenges. You always when starting out facing huge brick walls you have to get through.

Some people just don't have the capacity to get through them. I think. Developer has to love the difficulty .. you fail multiple times before the finished product ... All the errors. Little fixes no one sees.

It takes dedication.... Hard work to be the best. He didn't get that.

I now have more respect for other devs ( I had a lot already ) knowing that we all went through all of that and now. We are people with true talents.

Assigned to a new project team..

Using git, in a creative way. So.. "master" is "dev" branch, usually. Everyone can push their branch to dev server .. so it's "dynamic for us". Production branch is whatever, as long as the branch has the release version. Sometimes, the release comes from "master".. that mean "dev" in normal geek..

That's just Git. The source code is a saturated spagetti of Entity framework and Caliburn. It is littered with antipatterns, especially basebean. Holy Christmas and Easter that baseclass do a lot of stuff that has no place as a base class ..

Fucking frameworks, I'm gonna start to evangelize frameworks as the no1 antipattern.

MS SQL as the main DB, but is dumped to json FILES through a scheduled task to increase read performance on web.

There is a soap endpoint to expose the json files, fml..

I am assuming I was placed here to improve stuff, I have never in my life seen anything like this before.

There is a special place in hell for this repository

Haven’t read many of this weeks rants but in my case I talk to shitloads of people through Signal.

Sometimes I meet friends and family in person, in case of friends it’s mostly updating each other on life while having a few beers.

I’ve got to say that I don’t see my best friends that much anymore but we compromise for that one by going to hard style/rawstyle festivals. Although I’m the most Fanatic one, at least one of the guys also loves rawstyle and the other one just tags along since he isn’t much of a fan but he just loves the atmosphere/energy there 😁

I don’t see family a lot but we’ve got a group Signal to stay in touch as well.

Talking about festivals, anyone going to Dreamfields Saturday?

Last week my company thought it would be a great idea to introduce a new sh*tty internal web portal that gives federated access to aws (instead of using our own accounts to assume dev roles like we used to do).

This broke a lot of sh*t that simply used to ask for an MFA token and used our practically permissionless accounts to assume a proper dev role. An MFA token that we'd enter directly into the terminal/tool. It was very seamless. But nooooooo we now have to go a webpage, login with sso (which also requires mfa), click "generate credentials," copy-paste those into terminal/creds file and _then_ continue our aws cli call. Every. Single. Day.

BUT TODAY I HAD ENOUGH.

I spent the entire day rewriting the auth part of our tools so they would basically read the cookie that's set by the web portal, and use it to call the internal api that generates the credentials, and just automatically save those. Now all we need to do is log into the portal, then return to the tool and voilà, the tool's also got access! Sure, it's not as passive as just entering an MFA token directly, but it's as passive as it gets. Still annoyed by this sh*tty and unnecessary portal, but I learned a thing or two about cookies.

devrant is the only community that I feel comfortable in.

I've been browsing since 2000 and been in many communities online so far, so that's saying a lot.

I've seen supportive comments towards me and others here, and that really makes me feel less hopeless.

I think the internet in general makes you feel like you're a number. Click the like and the sub button, just be one more in a million.

But here, you matter.
If you try to post something and you are sincere, but humble people will ++ and say nice comments.

If you get upvoted, you can WHO did it and what their online persona looks like.
It feels very organic and personal, which is saying a lot for a place like the internet.

In the standard online experience, people online take advantage of the anonymity to say shit they wouldn't online:
anything, from troll shit to presumptuous comments.

I don't understand how some people can connect being anonymous with denying themselves as moral beings.

Do these people walk around in real life fighting with every person that has an opposite point of view?

There's actual people out there that will read this post and think "what a fucking boy scout".
Sorry for having emotions.

how many fucked up people are there, so that devrant feels like a goddamn mirage?

Joined a new company...
It's been a week since I joined.I feel like shit.
There are over 20 employees, however I didn't had a chance to chat with a single person for more than a minute or two. Not a single meaningful or even a shitty but personal conversation. I'm trying to strike up conversations whenever I can, but there are no possibilities to do so. I think they have a few chat groups where I'm not added. At lunch time they suddenly start running to a guy that gathers the money to buy lunch, i saw that and joined, but I'm 99% sure they are communicating/speaking on some kind of chat.

I joined as a front-end developer, however I'm not sure if I'm a junior or whatever here. On the first day they showed me the system, they are using PHP and jquery + es6, the structure is messy and I'm not used to it It should be MVC-like, but messier, but it's not like anything I have seen. I usually work with opencart / cakePHP style systems. There are js files with a lot of custom funcions and sometimes there are functions that have mixed jquery and es6 inside script tags top or bottom of the view files. There are a lot of code that I don't understand, on the third day they gave me a task - to remodel a view (basically one page in the cms) I did it, but they didn't check up on me untill the next day, I gave them some notes on the task I finished, and I started making some of the code easier to read for myself after I was done. They didn't really gave me a new task, and I don't know what to do, don't have anyone to ask about what to do, because there are only 2 developers here, and the other guy is on vacation. The boss is also a coder, but he's never here and I feel like I shouldn't be asking him stupid coding questions, because you know.. He's a boss. I understand a lot more of their PHP code then their js/jquery. I feel like I'm stupid and I don't know what I am doing here and what I will be doing here in the future. I did move across the country to join this company, and if this won't work out i have a rent contract signed for a year. Today I was looking at the clock for the last 2 hours of the work day and waiting untill I could get out of there. To say that I feeling like shit would be an understatement.

I don't have anyone whom I could ask for coding advice outside of the company. Fuck.I have worked in a few companies before, but there was always an introduction to the staff, and or the working environment and usually there was a person that I could ask questions on the regular. This company is bigger however and I'm not an emotional guy whatsoever, but I feel like I will start crying.

Email: "We just launched our new web interface! It's so much easier to use, and should make life a lot easier for our users."

Me: Oh good this thing has been unusable since I've been working here. How do I get on the new version? Better read on...

"Download this PDF for more information!"

Erm... ok.

In the (20 page) PDF: "Email this address@example.com to get the URL!"

ffs ok

email: "Thank you for emailing us, you username is benoliver999, your password is 'passow0rd' and the url is in this attached PDF

god help me

(50 page) PDF: "Remember to disable pop up blocker, ad-block and to install Flash"

Today I have started building my own version of this product so we can stop using these idiots.

As an aside, the username 'admin' also had a password of 'passow0rd'...

Controversial tech rant begins here:

You know, I'm sure a lot of you guys know that it is pretty uncommon to encounter a woman who is who is into tech (and ranting about said tech). This has always made people question why. I personally feel like that is the case because those that do like tech, and those that don't just find a different interest. I thought that would suffice, but now Google and Microsoft are advertising their diversity programs. I was fine with all that until I was personally affected by it. I intended to apply for scholarships from Microsoft. They turned me away because according to them, they began giving them only to people who were "marginalized". That and their commercials trying to pressure young girls to join the STEM field. Again nothing wrong with women in the tech field, but now that this is turning into favoritism I have to fight harder battles to compete in the tech industry. Not only that, but now I read a study about their employment. Despite the number of people they turned away and the money they spent on these programs, thr companies STILL haven't become any more diverse, and from what it seems, their reaction lately has been to double-down and try harder. I just want an open, honest, and fair tech community. Has anyone else felt the affects of this situation?

Frustrated, tired and a bit lost.

I'm a "Senior PHP Backend Dev", which includes not the greatest tech stack nor the best job title, but it pays fine, and the company is awesome to work for.

I suck at writing features, but I'm great at bitching, and I easily put complex abstract concepts into usable models. So I'm also QA, tester, tech lead, database architect, whatever.

That makes writing PHP less annoying, because I create the rules, and whip devs around when they forget a return type definition or forget to handle an edge case. But I don't write a lot of code anymore, I mostly read (bad) code.

Lately I REALLY feel like doing something else... problem is that I know JS/ES6, but really dislike React/Vue and the whole crappy modern frontend toolchainchootrain of babelifyingwebpackingyarnballs. I know Python/Tensorflow/etc, but don't feel like I want to go into data science or AI. And then I'm awesome at the shit no one uses, like Haskell, Go and Rust (and worse).

I got a job offer which combines a very interesting PHP codebase with a Java infrastructure, where I could learn a lot... and I'm kind of tempted.

Problem is, everyone always shits on Java. I always made a bit of fun of Java myself. Don't even know exactly why, probably some really cruel instinct which causes kids to bully the least popular kid.

I know the basics, I've written the hello world, and a small backend app for a personal project. I know how strict and verbose it can be. I love the strictness in Haskell and Rust.... but those are both also quite terse.

Should I become a Java dev? I'm not talking about Android SDK, but an insane enterprise codebase at a life sciences corporation.

To the pro Java devs: What are the best and worst things about your job, about the weekly processes, about the toolchains? Have you ever considered other languages? Do you unconditionally love and believe in Java, or do you believe Swift, Kotlin, Scala or whatever will eventually make it completely obsolete?

Will Java hasten my decline into the cynical neckbeard I was always destined to be?

There are a lot more fun langauges, but looking at realistic demand and career value...

I read a lot about people complaining about their shitty jobs. Some of us actually have nice jobs, but could really need more coworkers.

Wouldn't it be nice if devRant had the possibility to post job offers? Of course, no recruiters allowed, just awesome job offers, so we can all work together on some nice projects.

PS: Could really need some help at work :-)

Just started developing a to-do list that interacts with Calendar in swift.

Having done a lot of frontend development with js frameworks, xcode + swift + CoreData makes me want to blow my brains out.

I thought Java was verbose, but swift takes verbosity to a new level. Why does unwrapping variables make my program better?

I have already permanently broken my project twice by changing class names and changing the CoreData datamodel in xcode.

I had to create new projects, copy and paste the exact code from the old project into the new project and the code ran fine.

As soon as you need to do anything custom with a view, you have to pray to god someone has posted an example using very similar data.

Otherwise you have to read the apple documentation which is about as helpful as xcode's segfault dumps, unless you already know the names of the objects and methods that you need.

Last week I was erasing a 2Gb USB thumb while copying some really important shit to my backup disk. I look at the terminal and see it's taking a lot of time to did zeroes on dev/sdb.
Then I realized that dev/sdb is the backups drive and I just erased the firsts sectors of my only fucking backup.
It's ok, I said, let's see what can TestDisk do for me. And it only could find an empty sad partition that had useless shit on it. Whdd couldn't even find the drive. Cat and dd vomited 160Gb of nothing to a file that couldn't be read. I was lost, because I failed doing something I'm really good at. And I did it because I was to stupid to check fstab...
It's the very first time I couldn't recover data, so I'm thinking about delete "Data recovery" from my resume skills and put "Data cleaning. Really effective. I can send you 160Gb of pure horse shit to prove it" instead.

I'm resignating from Arch, Ive used it this week for a school project and as a linux newb- I cant do a lot. I have no clue how to print stuff, where to find my connected networks or how to connect to them etc. I like what it offers and I know it can be good but I'm too new to all of this to effectively use it. BUT I'm not giving up, I'll try Manjaro next as I read that it's newb friendly and I really like how it looks.

Also attached an screen of my Arch setup: i3gaps, plasma and whatnot

Being me. Fresh out of UNI with a three year bachelor in CS, no work experience. Starts in a big tech company with a lot promise of exciting project etc. Starts in 3 projects with one lead dev and two senior devs.

First month begins. I start by setting up my local environment and read documentations, which is fairly irrelevant and old. One of the senior devs quits.

Second month begins. Lead dev quits as well and the other senior dev having sick leave for the rest of the month. Basically I'm on my own, but thankfully not responsible for the projects.

Third month begins. The other senior dev is still sick. Nobody to help. Now I'm forced to talk to customer with a lacking knowledge of projects. Nobody knows what is going on. Hopefully my other senior dev will come back.

Fourth month begins. My senior have quit as well. I've been assigned as responsible of all three projects now. FML.

Fifth month begins. I begged my manager for help. Got a junior dev to help me with one of the projects. He and I still have no clue what we should do.

What a shitty start to a career as a developer.

Anybody having a similar experience?

Big rant.
Just finished my first year of uni. I took an extra course on c# (mvc, entity framework) and android development in java. We learned a lot of stuff and at the end of the semester they held a contest. We had to develop an app respecting their specifications and add something from ourselves for extra points. Problem was that we were supposed to work on the project during our finals, which we didn't, finishing uni is on the first place. But we had a week after finals to work on it. I, like many others, slept very littlre during that week, only to work on that app, I worked for more than 13 hours a day to finish it (it was a pretty big app) and I was pretty happy with the end result. Today they were supposed to announce the apps that made it to the final. They just announced that no app deserves to be in the final. They know that we had finals, but that we could still do better. They just peed on our work, probably threw our code away, fucking +13 hours a day, 5-6 hours of sleep everyday, almost no fun for a whole week after finals, and they think no one deserves to win. Fuck them, fuck their shit contest. Fuck you essensys, I hope your devs read this, fuck you bell ends.

CTO: Research, problem analysis, customer need validations, and data based prioritisation is stupid.

Me: So, then why should we solve this problem?

CTO: Because my team invests a lot of time in here (read "because we build a shitty system in past without thinking and we are doing it again").

Me: I don't see this as a good idea.

CTO: I become emotional when I request product to align and they don't. We must solve this problem and not what customers want.

Me: I am not participating here.

CTO: And I want you to work on weekends to support my team.

Me: *disconnects*

Because DevOps in a lot of organizations is really “help desk for clueless developers”, conversations like this happen a lot:

Dev “hey the thing seems to be not working right”

Me “what does that even mean? I need you to be a good deal more specific. What thing. What isn’t working?”

Dev “I dunno”

Me “Are there error messages?”

Dev “yes”

Me “….would you like to share them with me?”

Dev *sends error*

Me “ok did you actually read this error message?”

Dev “yes”

Me “…so you’re good then? It says you’re trying to use a variable that hasn’t been declared yet. You should fix that. “

Dev “…”

Me “good luck”

I hired 2 fresh out of school junior devs to work with me on my old web app.
They were brilliant, knew a lot of things, and were motivated.
They started complaining about how the code was shit, the db was shit, there were no best practices, the technology was old, bug fixing was boring, no comments in code.

I felt bad, very bad during 3 years, because they were absolutely right. I tried to work with them through better coding practices, rewriting, documenting etc.

Now they both have left.
I'm alone maintaining and evolving the application.
And I start to come across the code THEY developed.

What a bunch of shit. SQL queries bringing down the server. Duplicate code, because they didn't want even read the old one. Useless comments.
Performance killing functions. Exceptions swallowed without mercy. I have to clean up they poop.

I feel somewhat better, though. The application is still growing and holding the ground after many years and generating at least 800K$ per year in revenues.

Maybe better, but sad. I really wanted to share the project with somebody else but I failed, and I'm left alone....

As someone who doesn't know a lot about JavaScript, but occasionally needs to create some quick and simple scripts, I swear I'm going to kill someone if I read "just use jQuery" one more time on SO.

Some of y'all post some retarded quotes man no lie.

"A programmer does not fix computers" ~Some Indian dude

Really??!!

Does that need to be made into a quote? And do you honestly believe something soooo mundane should be attributed to one person only?

"Drink a glass of water every morning, best way to start your day" ~ Alecx(read with Indian accent even though I am Mexican American)

"Sleeping in your own bed is always the best" ~ Alecx

See how stupid that shit is? Quoting shit that is sooooo fucking generic and that literally anyone can think off?

I dunno why it pisses me off soooo fucking much. Ffs. The same thing about "dev jokes" do you have any idea how fucking cringey that shit is? And half the fucking time y'all post that shit in some of the most broken ass English I've ever seen man wtf.

The quality of rants has been going down in spirals and with a dogon YEEEE HAW and darling trust this motherfucker....I know a lil something about yeee haws.....this is a prime example.

Look, people can rant and post whatever the fuck they want. I ain't gonna hold you back on it. Just know that a lot of us think you are a moron.

A cringey moron at that.

Hey there!

So during my internship I learned a lot about Linux, Docker and servers and I recently switched from a shared hosting to my own VPS. On this VPS I currently have one nginx server running that serves a static ReactJs application. This is temponarily, I SFTP-ed the build files to the server and added a config file for ssl, ciphers and dhparams. I plan to change it later to a nextjs application with a ci/di pipeline etc. I also added a 'runuser' that owns the /srv/web directory in which the webserver files are located. Ssh has passwords disabled and my private keys have passphrases.

Now that I it's been running for a few days I noticed a lot of requests from botnets that tried to access phpmyadmin and adminpanels on my server which gave me quite a scare. Luckily my website does not have a backend and I would never expose phpmyadmin like that if I did have it.

Now my question is:
Do you guys know any good articles or have tips and tricks for securing my server and future projects? Are there any good practices that I should absolutely read and follow? (Like not exposing server details etc., php version, rate limiting). I really want to move forward with my quest for knowledge and feel like I should have a good basis when it comes to managing a server, especially with the current privacy laws in place.

Thanks in advance for enduring my rant and infodump 😅

I give MS a lot of cr@p for terrible API documentation, but even Google's API docs are pretty terrible to read through.

Seriously, guys... Your docs shouldn't read like an endless page of search results.

My coach during my first internship. The first 4 weeks he took the time to pair program at least 3 hours a day with me. He needed the time for his own work but still invested in me. His technical prowess was insane. His code was so easy to read that it took me less than 3 weeks to get to know the 500,000+ lines codebase. He could explain the most complex stuff at such a fundamental level. After those 4 weeks of coaching I wasn't an intern anymore. I was an actual member of the team. Also learned a lot of useful non-technical skills like planning and communication from him.
Then after those 4 weeks he resigned and started working for another company. At the time I found it a dick move. It took me months to realize he managed to get an intern with 0 experience so comfortable around a code base that everybody treated me as a worthy colleague and engineer. It was a matter of days before people would ask me hard questions and I found I could answer each and everyone of them.

Pure sensei this guy was. Such a different level of knowledge and ability. I hope to become such a model for all of my students.

Well I met my wife and decided my current profession wasn't going to give us the life I wanted for us. So since I did IT communications in the Army, I decided to look into that field, buy I knew I didn't want to do networking; I hated it in the Army. I read about programming I saw that I could learn some for free online before I chose that as a career. I did the website courses on Codacademy and thought it was a lot of fun! So I enrolled in It's software program, got 1 quarter away from an AAS in software development, then while I was on my honeymoon, they shut all the schools down and filed bankruptcy. Now I've started all over and community college to eventually get a BA in computer science.

Here's one that involves Windows, Linux (at the same time!), WInZip, Python, Lua and Minecraft, sort of.

So, when I get depressed I often find that old 2011 Minecraft videos help a lot from the nostalgia boost. If its stupid, but it works, it isn't stupid. Anyways, I was thinking about how much fun it must have been to just fuck around with code and make something like Minecraft. Naturally, I got a huge code boner and really wanted to do something I hadn't in a while: binding c to a higher level language.

This time around, I wanted to try Python. C + Python seems like a good pair. I watched a tutorial and it seemed pretty interesting and simple enough but I remembered that I actually like Lua a lot better than Python, so I went to the download page of Lua.

The download is a tar.gz so I let out a sigh and start typing "WinZip" into google. But no, fuck that, I hate 3rd party decompression programs on Windows. They all just give me this eerie feeling.

"This would be so much fucking easier on Linux"...

I remember that I haven't tried the Windows Subsystem for Linux. I guess it's time, isn't it?

I read the docs of how to do it. Nice little touch, they tell you how to enable WSL from PowerShell but don't mention the GUI way to do it. It's genuinely a nice touch.

So I get everything installed and go to the app store to choose a distro. I want Ubuntu. I click the Install button...

...

... "Something unexpected happened"

Windows and their fucking useless error messages. Jesus, okay. I restart computer. Same issue. I update Windows. Same thing. Uninstall WSL. Reboot. Install WSL. Reboot. Same thing. HOLY SHIT.

Went to bed. Woke up. Tried to install Ubuntu.

"Yea ok lul i'll work this time for no reason"

Finally unzipped Lua.

Another incident which made a Security Researcher cry
[ NOTE : Check profile to read older incidents ]
-----------------------------------------------------------
So this all started when I was at my home (bunked the office that day xD) and I got a call from a..... Let's call him Fella as I always do . So here we go . And yeah , our Fella is a SysAdmin .
-----------------------------------------------------------
Fella - Hey man sup!
Me - Good going mate , bunked the office , weather's nice , gonna spend time with my girl today . So what's goinon?
Fella - Bruh my network sharing folders ain't working no more .
Me - Did you changed or modified anything?
Fella - Nope
Me - Okay , gimme your login creds lemme check .
Fella - Check your inbox *texts me the credentials*

*I logged in and what I'm seeing is that server runs on Windows2008R2 , checked the event logs , everything's fine and all of a sudden what I found is fucking embarrassing , this wise man closed SMB service*
Me - Did you closed SMB service?
Fella - Yeah
Me - You know what it does?
Fella - Yeah it's a protocol , I turned it off to protect the server from Wannacry .
Me - Fuckerrrr!!!!! Asshole dumbass you fuckin piece of Dodo's shit!! SMB is the service responsible for files and network sharing!!!
Fella - But....I just wanted protection
Me - 😭😭😭

*A long conversation continues with a lot of specially made words to decrease the rate of frustration which I used already*

Fella - Okay I'm turning it on .
Me - Go on....... Asshole
Fella - It worked! Thanks a lot bro
Me - Just leave me and my soul away from evil and hang up .

*Now the question is , who the hell gives them the post of SysAdmin? While thinking this question , I almost thought of committing suicide​ but then my girl came with coffee and my rubber duck*

I AM TIRED

warning: this rant is going to be full of negativity , CAPS, and cursing.

People always think and they always write that programming is an analytical profession. IF YOU CANNOT THINK IN AN ANALYTICAL WAY THIS JOB IS NOT FOR YOU! But the reality could not be farther from the truth.

A LOT of people in this field whether they're technical people or otherwise, just lack any kind of reasoning or "ANALYTICAL" thinking skills. If anything, a lot of of them are delusional and/or they just care about looking COOL. "Because programming is like getting paid to solve puzzles" *insert stupid retarded laugh here*.

A lot of devs out there just read a book or two and read a Medium article by another wannabe, now think they're hot shit. They know what they're doing. They're the gods of "clean" and "modular" design and all companies should be in AWE of their skills paralleled only by those of deities!

Everyone out there and their Neanderthal ancestor from start-up founders to developers think they're the next Google/Amazon/Facebook/*insert fancy shitty tech company*.

Founder? THEY WANT TO MOVE FAST AND GET TO MARKET FAST WITH STUPID DEADLINES! even if it's not necessary. Why? BECAUSE YOU INFERIOR DEVELOPER HAVE NOT READ THE STUPID HOT PILE OF GARBAGE I READ ONLINE BY THE POEPLE I BLINDLY COPY! "IF YOU'RE NOT EMBARRASSED BY THE FIRST VERSION OF YOU APP, YOU DID SOMETHING WRONG" - someone at Amazon.

Well you delusional brainless piece of stupidity, YOU ARE NOT AMAZON. THE FIRST VERSION THAT THIS AMAZON FOUNDER IS EMBARRASSED ABOUT IS WHAT YOU JERK OFF TO AT NIGHT! IT IS WHAT YOU DREAM ABOUT HAVING!

And oh let's not forget the tech stacks that make absolutely no fucking sense and are just a pile of glue and abstraction levels on top of abstraction levels that are being used everywhere. Why? BECAUSE GOOGLE DOES IT THAT WAY DUH!! And when Google (or any other fancy shit company) changes it, the old shitty tech stack that by some miracle you got to work and everyone is writing in, is now all of a sudden OBSOLETE! IT IS OLD. NO ONE IS WRITING SHIT IN THAT ANYMORE!

And oh my god do I get a PTSD every time I hear a stupid fucker saying shit like "clean architecture" "clean shit" "best practice". Because I have yet to see someone whose sentences HAVE TO HAVE one of these words in them, that actually writes anything decent. They say this shit because of some garbage article they read online and in reality when you look at their code it is hot heap of horseshit after eating something rancid. NOTHING IS CLEAN ABOUT IT. NOTHING IS DONE RIGHT. AND OH GOD IF THAT PERSON WAS YOUR TECH MANAGER AND YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO THEM RUNNING THEIR SHITHOLE ABOUT HOW YOUR SIMPLE CODE IS "NOT CLEAN". And when you think that there might be a valid reason to why they're doing things that way, you get an answer of someone in an interview who's been asked about something they don't know, but they're trying to BS their way to sounding smart and knowledgable. 0 logic 0 reason 0 brain.

Let me give you a couple of examples from my unfortunate encounters in the land of the delusional.

I was working at this start up which is fairly successful and there was this guy responsible for developing the front-end of their website using ReactJS and they're using Redux (WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS TO ELIMINATE PASSING ATTRIBUTES FOR THE PURPOSE OF PASSING THEM DOWN THE COMPONENT HIERARCHY AGIAN). This guy kept ranting about their quality and their shit every single time we had a conversation about the code while I was getting to know everything. Also keep in mind he was the one who decided to use Redux. Low and behold there was this component which has THIRTY MOTHERFUCKING SEVEN PROPERTIES WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS BE PASSED DOWN AGAIN LIKE 3 TO 4 TIMES!.

This stupid shit kept telling me to write code in a "functional" style. AND ALL HE KNOWS ABOUT FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING IS USING MAP, FILTER, REDUCE! And says shit like "WE DONT NEED UNIT TESTS BECAUSE FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING HAS NO ERRORS!" Later on I found that he read a book about functional programming in JS and now he fucking thinks he knows what functional programming is! Oh I forgot to mention that the body of his "maps" is like 70 fucking lines of code!

Another fin-tech company I worked at had a quote from Machiavelli's The Prince on EACH FUCKING DESK:

"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things."

MOTHERFUCKER! NEW ORDER OF THINGS? THERE 10 OTHER COMPANIES DOING THE SAME SHIT ALREADY!

And the one that got on my nerves as a space lover. Is a quote from Kennedy's speech about going to the moon in the 60s "We choose to go to the moon and do the hard things ..."

YOU FUCKING DELUSIONAL CUNT! YOU THINK BUILDING YOUR SHITTY COPY PASTED START UP IS COMPARABLE TO GOING TO THE MOON IN THE 60S?

I am just tired of all those fuckers.

Not really a rant, but here goes...
I want to personally thank each and every member of devRant! Here’s why. (First, a little boring backstory): I’m visually impaired, and stuck in quarantine like the rest of us. (Not totally blind, but y’all definitely DO NOT want me out on the roads driving,) I also work a Tech Support job which largely deals with macOS. Due to this eye condition, there simply isn’t a lot of shit to do while stuck in the house other than work and learn node.js. So my pastime has largely been to sit and read Facebook while not on the clock. One day, while working from home, I was so bored and pissed off, I googled “macOS fucking sucks” for fun, and found devRant! Your stories, jokes and rants have turned my life around! I’m no longer on Facebook. (I know, I know, but what’s a half-blind guy to do except read about COVID-19 and get more pissed off at the state of the world?) and you guys have inspired me to start learning new things and delve deeper into node, which I had put down for awhile (I’m at a kindergarten level anyway, brand new). Anyway, thanks again! I’ll refrain from asking stupid questions, I promise. But I need a TechSupportRant now...

WHY THE FUCK DO MY TEACHERS KEEP USING SHITTY TRANSLATIONS FOR PROGRAMMING CONCEPTS?! Like dude, everything related to programming is in english, just use the fucking terms in english for fucks sake. There are some words like "array" that fit into portuguese sentences without needing translation, so why translate it?

Why do you use acronyms in portuguese? People in the Database Systems class will later read a lot the acronym DBMS but won't know what the fuck that is because they teach the acronym SGBD, which is a translation.

It's so cringy and useless, so many terms the students will have to translate back to english when they get out to the real world because everything related to programming is in english.

"oh but what if the person doesn't know english" you don't even have to know english, just associate the concept (which will be explained to you in your language) with an english word. Also if you don't know english you'll have a very hard time, so I'd suggest taking english classes as your electives.

Ok I'm done, I got it out of my system.

Today I saw, and heard, two attractive young women show a lot of annoyance over a dude revving his car's engine as he drove past them in an obvious effort to somehow impress them.

I have not once in my 32 years of age met a single regular woman (read as in, not a woman who is a car enthusiast, and even then they are annoyed) that has been impressed over a dude driving a car as if he were in a race track. Not once.

So I seriously wonder, what is the point? annoying people? I am a very standard dude, I like cars, but that shit fucking irritates me and I seriously do not get the point.

What is the point of disabling the fullscreen button on a youtube video embed?

And funnily enough, I seem to find this on a lot of sites for software, that have a demo video embedded the page or some shit, like a screen recording in this tiny little frame where I can't read anything because it's in this 400 pixel wide box, that I can't fullscreen. I don't understand it at all! What purpose does it serve? You're actually encouraging me to leave your stupid site to view the damn video on youtube.com so I can actually read the text in your stupid ass video.

Why does youtube even give you the option to remove the fullscreen button in your embeds in the first place? They even recently removed some of the "modest branding" features, like hiding the title, or removing the recommended videos at the end, but they thought that this feature was valuable enough to keep?

This may seem irrational to complain about, but I'm confused and befuddled more than anything else? If I'm embedding a video on a website, the last thought I have in my mind is "Oh, I really don't want people to see my video fullscreen. Better make sure I disable that!"

hello devranters,

been a while, past few weeks have been a painful one for me.

I finally got that second monitor and also built the small home server( I'll give details in another rant).

been a lot going on around me, there's a protest going on and a lot of young "unarmed" people including children killed, lots of gory images, all we were asking for was to stop police brutality, they're still shooting at people. it's a lot going on here. I can't even concentrate. I took some time off social media because all the bodies I was seeing was beginning to get into my head.
I really can't Express how I feel right now. we were expecting the international community(I really dont know who exactly) to come to our aid, lol
It's all over Twitter. images, videos, everything.
I just hope everything gets better.

the image is my new setup. I just log hello world on the console and that's all I do with it.
my table is basically two wooden slabs supported by textbooks on chairs(at last I found use for them since I never read them in school ). server is under the table.

keep us in your prayers. thanks

1. Learn to read and understand the errors and exception messages. While writing code you're going to be facing exceptions most of the time and the real cause of them is under a lot of generic error messages. That and a lot of patience and perseverance.

2. You're going to face clients and bosses that ask you to do a temporary "workaround" even though you know there is a best way to solve a problem even if it takes more time and effort. Don't "crash" against their ideas, try to find a mid-term between the fast and easy work around and the best solution and leave it open to improve it in the future. I have met a lot of developers that let the frustration stops them to be creative just because the approved development is not what they wanted to do.

Yeah. Kinda late to the WK 227 party.

Thing is: I've read a lot of rants and honestly, some of the rants were ... touchy.

Like that weird emotional thingy you don't like but that just kind of happens cause I'm human too.... And have that shitty emotional feature integrated, which feels most of the time like a heisenbug.

Me and my parents. Specifically mom. Are like ... Matter and antimatter.

You don't want them in a room. Bad things happen TM. My mom is responsible for ... Let's say severe psychological trauma starting with age 4 to age 17.

In 17 I moved out and lived on "my own" (truth: on heavy support, cause I wasn't what you'd called "psychologically stable" at that time).

I fucked up university and - as shared before - thanks to an math teacher who made my life an even more living hell and my parents, I'd started in IT mostly out of "resisting" certain assertations being made over my life.

The support I got from my family can be put together in one sentence:
"I survived, I tolerated - but will never forgive".

Thing is: Be it IT support or anything else. If your gut feeling tells you that family / coworkers / friends are not good for you.

Stay the fuck away from them till you've sorted yourself out.

I can tolerate my parents nowadays. Took > 10 years and a lot of hardships to "achieve" that.

It's not peachy. It's not loving. It's tolerance. (Yeah. That bit is muey importante to me).

The thing is: I cannot deny the fact that my parents tried to support me by money. That's what they still do _nowadays_ even though my income is like 60 % of the income my father and mother has combined... It's a bothersome detail.

There's a certain thing in this rant that I would like "to pass on": Emotional support matters.

When you let someone feel like an empty shell, you cannot fix it with money.

It will - severely - destroy the person.

TLDR: We all have rough edges, can be hard to deal with and be a pain in the arse, but all of us need emotional support sometimes. That's what matters the most. ;)

Ahh it's been a while since I've posted.. My skills with python are getting better (I'm a beginner) and I know for everyone else it's probably nothing but my first big project/idea I came up with was to program a simple rock paper scissors game that prints if you win lose or tie. I got the input and random output right without having to look anything up and that actually makes me proud of myself which is rare but for the printing out you win, lose, or tie I looked it up but I'm noticing that I'm getting better.

Then today I made a coin flip script that returns heads or tails in like 2 minutes and the only reference I used was my own code!!

Thanks if anyone actually read it I envy a lot of you for doing it for a living and I can't wait to do it too :)

My best code review experience?

Company hired a new department manager and one of his duties was to get familiar with the code base, so he started rounds of code reviews.
We had our own coding standards (naming, indentation, etc..etc) and for the most part, all of our code would pass those standards 100%.

One review of my code was particularly brutal. I though it was perfect. In-line documentation, indentation, followed naming standards..everything. 'Tom' kept wanting to know the 'Why?'

Tom: 'This method where it validates the amount must be under 30. Why 30? Why is it hard-coded and not a parameter?'
<skip what it seemed like 50 more 'Why...?' questions>
Me: "I don't remember. I wrote that 2 years ago."
Tom: "I don't care if you wrote it yesterday. I have pages of code I want you to verify the values and answer 'Why?' to all of them. Look at this one..."

'Tom' was a bit of a hard-ass, but wow, did I learn A LOT. Coding standards are nice, but he explained understanding the 'What' is what we are paid for. Coders can do the "What" in their sleep. Good developers can read and understand code regardless of a coding standard and the mediocre developers use standards as a crutch (or worse, used as a weapon against others). Great developers understand the 'Why?'.

Now I ask 'Why?' a lot. Gotten my fair share of "I'm gonna punch you in the face" looks during a code review, but being able to answer the 'Why?' solidifies the team with the goals of the project.

!dev
I used to read.. A lot. Long and complicated stories, where the plot would only unveil itself after a long time. I used to dig myself into a book, learning about the writer's thoughts and mental image, reflecting on our differing viewpoints on the question at hand. I didn't expect action or beauty, merely thoughts which, by themselves, constitued a value to me.
But pulp and especially social media had lowered my attention span to the point that even reading through a short story without getting sidetracked takes a lot of effort. I still value what I used to value, the only thing that's changed is that I no longer have the patience and I feel discomfort due to the lack of sensations.
What do I do? Had anyone solved this problem before?

This is a controversial topic and I tell you about this how I perceive it.

There are a lot of women in tech/IT groups with really interesting topics and discussions I'd like to join ... you know ... because I don't want to pay a lot of money to a course or read a book about it and be with the topic myself (or in online forums) ... I want to be in a cool offline community that shares the love about developing.

But I can't. Because they do not allow men. With the reason that women are not respected in tech/IT and therefore men are not allowed to join.

This is just racist and this policy makes no difference between them and those guys who really are just assholes. Even if I tried to discuss this, it was instantly shut down with "this is our rule and we do not discuss this" or "you just don't understand this". That is right. I can't understand it if I never get a reasonable explanation.

I can understand that they want to build a nice community but this is just a stupid limitation and a huge loss to get other perspectives of things.

In my studies and career I had never seen the problem where things escaleted that seperation was needed. If somebody feeled attacked about something, they said it and we stopped doing or changed it. It's not easy but it helps. Communication is key.

What is your opinion about it? Do you see it the way I see or can you help me see this from another perspective?

Lessons I've learnt so far on programming

-- Your best written code today can be your worst tomorrow (Focus more on optimisation than style).
-- Having zero knowledge of a language then watching video tutorials is like purchasing an arsenal before knowing what a gun is (Read the docs instead).
-- It's works on my machine! Yes, because you built on Lenovo G-force but never considered the testers running on Intel Pentium 0.001 (Always consider low end devices).
-- "Programming" is you telling a story and without adding "comments" you just wrote a whole novel having no punctuation marks (Always add comments, you will thank yourself later for it I promise).
-- In programming there is nothing like "done"! You only have "in progress" or "abandoned" (Deploy progressively).
-- If at this point you still don't know how to make an asynchronous call in your favourite language, then you are still a rookie! take that from me. (Asynchronous operation is a key feature in programming that every coder should know).
-- If it's more than two conditions use "Switch... case" else stick with "If... else" (Readability should never be under-rated).
-- Code editors can MAKE YOU and BREAK YOU. They have great impact on your coding style and delivery time (Choose editors wisely).
-- Always resist the temptation of writing the whole project from scratch unless needs be (Favor patching to re-creation).
-- Helper methods reduces code redundancy by a large chunk (Always have a class in your project with helper methods).
-- There is something called git (Always make backups).
-- If you don't feel the soothing joy that comes in fixing a bug then "programming" is a no-no (Coding is fun only when it works).
-- Get angry with the bugs not the testers they're only noble messengers (Bugs are your true enemy).
-- You would learn more than a lot reading the codes of others and I mean a lot! (Code review promotes optimisation and let's you know when you are writing macaroni).
-- If you can do it without a framework you have yourself a big fat plus (Frameworks make you entirely dependent).
-- Treat your code like your pet, stop taking care of it and it dies! (Codes are fragile and needs regular updates to stay relevant).

Programming is nothing but fun and I've learnt that a long time ago.

fuck me. I started the night with the question "what are classes, in JavaScript?", did a lot of reading, and just came to the conclusion "religious colonialism.", and I didn't even read a single Crockford essay.

I'm just going to give up, go learn Haskell, get a lambda tattooed on my ass, and be done with it.

A lot of people are very good at making extremely complex and hard-to-read React components.

Very very few are good at making clean and easy-to-understand React components.

I have seen in a lot of forums (here, Imgur, reddit, LinkedIn etc) that there are a lot of developers without a job.

And most of them live in USA. I have not seen a person who is struggling to find a job in EU or some other place.

Why is this the case? In USA where the demand for developers is very high.

I read a post on LinkedIn: "40 INTERVIEWS and no one HIRED! Yet another friend telling me she can not find good talent. My thinking - If you interviewed 40 people and did not hire someone, then it's time to look in the mirror. The problem is recruiters and hiring managers are looking for the 'PERFECT" candidate. NEWSFLASH! There is no 'perfect' candidate. If you have someone with the right attitude and skill set, and they fit in with the team, why not HIRE them? There are so many qualified individuals still job searching. Yet I see the same jobs re-posted, over and over again, being left vacant for months. Who took a chance on you? Maybe it's time you a took chance on someone."

I don't think it is the "competition" because I see everywhere. I have seen entry-level or JR. open positions that are not filled for months.

It took me 1 month, sending nearly 20 applications every day to find a job in USA.
And the second one I got lucky. I applied in Europe and after some month I got transferred in offices in USA.

I do not know how true this is, but seriously, what's wrong with companies in USA that require the PERFECT candidate. Or is it something else?

A friend came to me whether i want to do a project on c++(someone asked him to find a c++ guy).
Me needing money didn’t refuse. Even though i am a Java developer with 0 skills on c++, but wanted to give it a try.
So project started, and it was about a plugin for rhinoceros app(3d graphics app).
The plugin was simple, had some views and some services to upload a file into s3 and some api calls, not something complex..
So i ended up working on the project together with my friend(web dev).
So long story short, we had a lot of issues, but considering we both had no knowledge on c++, we were really lucky to finish the product almost on time(3 days after).
Did no memory management even though i’ve read that we have to do that by our selfs and that c++ doesn’t have garbage collector.
But the plugin worked great even without garbage collector.
Had a lot issues with string manipulation, which almost drive me crazy.

PS: did a post here before taking the project, to ask whether it is a good idea to take the project or not, had some positive and some negative replies, but i deleted the post since i thought i was breaking the NDA i signed 😂😂

PS2: just finished OCAJP 8 last week with a great score😃

Bad managers, rude clients and annoying colleagues...

A lot of the stories here I read have at least any of the words listed above. My advice to most of you guys is: LEAVE.

And do it NOW.

The thing is, most of the stuff you're complaining about won't change. And you will be stuck there longer than you want to be and/or notice, trust me i've been there.

Especially the rude client part is where I've had lots of experience in, you have to search for a company which will abstract that layer for you. If you're on here most likely you're a developer and not everybody is a team lead. So why the F in hell are you even in conversations about budget and/or are you doing the most of the talking in the retrospective? If your project manager is ANY good he is doing that all for you.
There is so much to choose from (my experience in western countries) so please dont be stuck in a dead end job. Or start freelancing or whatever..

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.

So I had a really big personal project the last 2 years, which certainly thaught me a lot. But on Tuesday this week it got shut down. How you ask? Let me first explain what kind of project it was.

It was a mobile application for my school to look up substitutions and events, read news and some other stuff. I talked about it with the principal a lot, but back 1 year they said there were too few features. So the last year I spent improving and adding features.

Then the last few weeks, it was time to make everything ready and talking with the leadership of the school about everything necessary. Then one big problem arose. No teacher in school could maintain the app, the ones who maintained IT-Stuff at school left this year.

So it was decided to "kill" the app and wait for an IT interested teacher to come.

And now every day of the week, I sat infront of my PC and didn't know what to do...

Dear compiler, I know you have plenty of files to compile (like a lot), but could please stop flushing an error when I'm trying to read it ?

The more I hear about algorithms creating political bubbles the more I start to think about if I'm in one. Its crazy how as soon as you watch certain types of content you get a lot of political stuff. Eg. watch fishing and outdoor stuff and soon you will find a lot of conservative politics in your feed.
I feel like the science and engineering side has been mostly untouched, but on this topic people are more clever to hide a political agenda. Theres a lot of content that shows if we can do something and almost none whether we should do it. So we have a lot of unaware people that are pushing tech without understanding the deeper consequences of their agenda. I get the feeling of a trend, that a lot of people, sometimes myself included, don't do much thinking about the things they know and simply let others do the processing. Any new information then gets stored and never processed.

TLDR: Fuck you, take the time to read it or get lost!

Just remembered one day from university
So, I've not been on any programming lectures and labs
Decided to go for one at least
Terrible hangover, late for half of a hour
Grab list of tasks
Fuck, 15 tasks. All very easy, but a lot
Half of a hour later teacher started to check works
- Oh, please, come back to me later, I need another 5 tasks to be done
- What? Did you read header? You were supposed to do two tasks of your choice
- ...

> you are a teacher at a university
> you are supposed to teach advanced things to students
> your slides are screenshots of the book that you told us to get
> you sit at the desk and just read the slides
> you don't even try to win student's attention
> students prefer not to come to your lectures
> you wonder why a lot of people fail your subject
> WADAFAK
> ??????????

>Wanted to become a hacker because I thought it was cool and fun
>Googled how to become a hacker
>Read a lot of articles
>Talked about it with nerdy friends who ended up helping me with a few resources
>Found Hack Forums
>Stayed on Hack Forums for a while and learnt a lot about malware and hacking and realized I needed to learn how to code to build my own hacking programs
>Got a book from a friend (It was a dev book based on basic)
>Got fascinated with programming and quickly moved on to C++
>Got frustrated with C++ and quit programming for months
>Got introduced to VB.Net and I finally could write codes and development a lot of applications, mainly malware creators and crypters as they were called on HE
>Quit HF and hacking and got into coding seriously and learnt web dev , then java and developing android apps and I have been happy since.

Work on projects and read a lot of source code like if you are reading a book.

Seeing so many posts of unsupportive family members makes me sad. :(

I was supported a lot by my family, got provided with all the books I wish for... In a time when there was no Stackoverflow or good tutorials.

I read most books during high school and got beat up for it... But look at me now! :D

how do i deal with impostor syndrome?

i read thedailywtf.com... daily.

also, since i'm trying to be a gamedev i watch youtube channels that foxus on reviewing/trying shitty games.

helps with the impostor syndrome quite a lot, but has a side effect of causing depression from "how the hell are all these incompetent morons successful, and i' m not?"

I read a lot about people that think that millennial are the most entitled and demanding group of people. The more i work in technical support, or any Client based job, i know how it's an half truth.

Truth is Older people usually are WAY worse. Can't fucking make a decision by themselves, i always have to CHOOSE their fucking language. How can you so stupid, you can't figure out which language you want you computer in... You don't know which language you talk dumb fuck? (Not talking about keyboard layout here, you can imagine it's even worse! But at least i know why somebody that has no technical knowledge can be confused)

I have to take them hand by hand because they can't figure out how to read... Younger people usually just say: Okay i'll try that! Thanks! And just hang up, no fucking dicking around on things i don't know what they are doing or why they are asking. They are rarely the fuckers that want to talk to a supervisor to get free repairs and returns. Entitlement at it's best...

Stupidity and entitlement have no age. Period.

How do you debate the "it's more complex in my opinion" statement?

So, some months ago I was looking at some code which has stuff as 300 lines of code function(s) and I could feel the bad smell irl...

I analyze it a bit and there is a lot of stuff which is misplaced, repeated or unsafe.
I first re-arrange it and remove redundancy, then break it down in about five functions (plus a caller), all is now readable and assignIcon k(made-up name) only assigns an icon, it doesn't also send a rocket in space.

But then I put the code in review and the previous author of the code says that it's now unreadable, because s/he has to look as multiple functions. I counter by showing how s/he does not need to read 300 lines of code to find a bug, but approximately 60, and I point at how misleading having an `assignIcon` function which also sends rockets in space is.
The counter? "But it looks confusing to have smaller functions, revert it."

How would you debate that? I am shy and hate myself a lot, so I have issues debating good points, but I am really really sure a lot of bugs I encountered were due to stuff like this so I would like to be able to explain my point in a more efficient way, for future teams.

I work as a .Net consultant. Currently I am at a company that blocks all sociale media sites and sites that look like 'em. I don't mind the social media, but YouTube is also blocked and I need my dose of daily epic music world while developing. So, I set up a proxy on my server to easily bypass these blockades. Note: company policy says nothing about not being allowed certain websites, I always read this before using this trick.

Last week, a new guy joined the company and gets a desk just next to me. After a lot of looking at my screens and trying stuff he asks me for the entire office: "Hey how are you going on YouTube? It doesn't see to work for me.". 😫

The rest of the day, I had to explain to co-workers what a proxy is (they don't care about any tech they don't need...). And I had to explain to the pm that I was not hacking their network...

I'm not sure if I will be getting along with this new guy.... 😧

I honestly maintain a positive opinion that almost (again read almost) all devs are not inherently evil. Those who are made do those autoplay vids were probably asked by management, the game devs at EA are forced to use Frostbite which isn’t suitable for everything, like RPGs, and Apple devs aren’t trying to maximise profits by limiting so much to the consumer world (e.g the bloody XCode license), but are forced in by this corporate model.

A lot of shit is given to devs and sometimes I think it’s undeserved. In their shoes most people would too go against their moral compass if it meant that they won’t lose their jobs. I’m sure when battlefront was in the works it wasn’t the devs that came up with that whole shitstorm model.

Sometimes I just HATE Google.

No, this is NOT because they keep all your data, are evil and all the usual things. I just think they suck, yes there are super cool things and a lot of things are just the best in the field but I just feel like we could do better, there are so many smart people out there I just do not understand why everything is taking so much time.

PS. Just deleted all my browsing histroy accidentally because I didn't read the small print - in the picture attatched.

I started to get interested in programming at the age of 13. I was started spending a lot time in our school library and read mostly technical books (beginner/hobbyist stuff) about electronics.
Some book was about Quick Basic (hence my username).
On Windoze 95 in a DOS mode IDE I started trying stuff out and soon I had my first tiny console game.
A bit later I started with HTML and CSS stuff, made a website about ongoing jokes in our class and some rants, later I got into VB6 (I hate VB nowadays!) and wrote for a personal school project a learning software (relatively simple one) to learn vocabulary for foreign languages.

At about 15 I started with C++ and later C# .NET, which I liked the most, and started on some new Windows.Forms stuff, created some small websites.

Now I'm working parttime as a professional developer (mostly web, but VR & .NET too) and studying EE at a university.

My parents had no experience with computers at all, so I learned everything myself an with the help of the allmighty internet (the black box with the red dot on top).

That's my story. ;)

Insert your rant about this below this line:
-----------------------------------------

Some time ago I posted rant "I love go".
After 3 months of being interested in go community, read couple of books and a lot of articles, I got my first job in Go.
#FromJavaToGo

Warning: this is not a rant. I'm too happy and excited to rant right now.

Today I "finished" my first webpage!!!

Wohooo!

It's the blog I'll use. It's currently offline for obvious reasons but I intend to put it out there when I have more confidence on my skills and some content to put in it. I only used django, html and css, and I really dig the looks of it. My gf liked it so it can't be that ugly.

I still have a lot to learn with django, and I will add a thing or two to this
webpage but now I feel confident enough to make the backbone of my first real project : a platform to ease essay writing for history students. It's something simple for students to keep track of their essays thesis and ideas but also the bibliography they'll use and the thesis and ideas they think each text they read for the essay has. I intend later to extend the functionality so it can store all the texts the user has used in some useful and atractive manner so they can keep track of everything they've read, share it and use it for later works.

I'm so fucking excited I can't fucking sleep (it's 3 am right now).

You wrote a little simple and clean mvc framework to work faster on some new projects. It can "compile" tags as {% var %} or {% array.key %} in the html code with support of {% for arrayOfHash in hash %} foreach construct and nice features, it can call api's callback in a smart way as ghost methods of a class, he can make routes with the route provider. You tested it and made a little example, after you went in the bathroom you read the index code and you started staring at the beauty and elegance of it. You go to bed happy and sleep. The day after you wake up and realize that it's unuseful because there's a lot of mvc framework that surely are better and ready to use, so you lost useful time. Have you ever feel this way? MVC: Me Versus Creativity.

"Suggest an AV/AM product, Avast refuses to install."

I do malware research as a hobby and have for a while, so I can generally spot when something's up before I even run a program. If i'm unsure about it (or know something's up and wanna see its effects for S&Gs) I throw it into one of a variety of VMs, each with a prepped, clean, standardized "testing" state.

I see no point to AV/AM products, especially as they annoy me more than anything since they can't be told not to reach into and protect VMs (thereby dirtying up my VM state, my research, crashing the VM hypervisor and generally being *really* annoying) and they like to erase samples from a *read-only, MOUNTED* VHDX.

However, normal people need them, so I usually suggest this list:
• MBAM is good and has a (relatively) low memory footprint, but doesn't have free realtime protection.
• Avast is very good as it picks up a lot, but it eats a FUCKTON of resources. It also *really* likes to crash VM hypervisors if it sees anything odd in them.
• AVG is garbage. Kill it with fire.
• Using Windows Defender is like trying to block the rain with an umbrella made of 1-ply toilet paper.
• herdProtect is amazing as it's basically a VirusTotal client but it's web-based and not currently available to be downloaded. (Existing copies still work!)
• Kaspersky. Yes, it spied on US gov't workers. No, they don't care about anyone BUT US gov't workers. Yes, it's pretty good.
• BitDefender: *sees steam game* "Is this ransomware?"

hope this helps

Had this life not turned out the way it is. Had you not been a dev, what would you imagine you would have been?

I'll go first.. i would probably have been a librarian or a security guard. Someone with lot of time at hand to read.

WOOH!!!!! AFTER 3-4MONTHS, I HAVE REGAINED **INBOX ZERO**

...AND A WHOLE LOT OF TIME!

though my reading list is still just as large, but now I don't know what I've missed.... unless I really want to.... and therefore no longer have the desire to read everything 😀

Probably also need to add a time decay and weighting algorithm... just like devRant's 😉

Why do people who cannot write specs still write specs? There are guys who just cannot produce anything human readable.
- Don't list 50 things in the same sentence separated with semicolon. Don't you have list bullets in your Word?? Or table, anyone??
- Now that you managed to add a table, don't write a novel into the cells. Especially now that you have decided to use 30pt font size and 3cm wide columns.
- If it's not an equation, don't use parenthesis. Why? Since they (and this is just my opinion (someone else might think otherwise)) are a little bit (or a lot, depending on the reader(s)) annoying (or otherwise irritating) since they (the parenthesis) tend to make the text (of any kind) very difficult (hard) to read especially (there can be other reasons) when you (or someone else in the company) have decided to write reaaaally long and complex sentences which add no information but make the reader go back and forth of the text trying (and sometimes not succeeding) to make any sense out of it.
- Always remember to use cross-reference number like [1] but don't tell what it is referring to. Special bonus will be awarded, if the link is broken!
- Save space and time by not explaining things that you can just refer to. Just add vague "read from [1], [2] and [3] for info about this." And then expect the reader to go through thousands of pages of boring jargon.

And oh yeah, please ask comments in the review session and then ignore all of them, since "well technically all the information was in the spec". You just need to be Sherloc Holmes to connect the dots.

I know people have mixed feelings about Uncle Bob and I really never followed the guy at all, but back in college I found his book Clean Code on a shelf and read it cover to cover. A lot of it really stuck with me. In fact, I might dig it up again now that I'm thinking about it.

So this post by @Cyanide had me wondering, what does it take to be a senior developer, and what makes one more senior than the other?

You see, I started at my current company about three or four years ago. It was my first job, and I got it before even having started any real programming education. I'd say that at this point I was beyond doubt a junior. The thing is that the team I joined consisted of me and my colleague, who was only working 50%. Together we built a brand new system which today is the basis on which the company stands on.

Today I'm responsible for a bunch of consultants, handle contact during partnerships with other companies, and lead a lot of development work. I'm basically doing the exact same things as my colleague, and also security and server management. So except for the fact that he's significantly older than me the only things that I can think of that differentiates the seniority in the team are experience and code quality.

In terms of experience a longer life obviously means more opportunities to gather experiences. The thing is that my colleague seems to be very experienced in 10 year old technologies, but the current stuff is not his strong side. That leaves code quality, and if you've ever read my previous rants I think you know what I'm thinking...

So what in the world makes a person senior? If we hired a new colleague now I'm not sure it'd be instantly clear who should guide and teach them.

I really don't mind it as long as the work is on track but damn it hurts to read the git commit messages with messed up spellings. In some cases it's not just that, but variable names, file names, etc. as well.

English isn't the first language in my country and a lot of people are not as proficient with it so it's probably not appropriate to judge, but the cringe is real.

Sometimes I wonder if I am that cringeworthy person to someone else.

I am a little bit old fadhioned when it comes to new dev tech stuff. I am at first, not an early adopter ( others should proof it first) and second I like to read books. If there is someone who has understood the matter and has written a book, then I go for it 😁 and third, when I have to use an early technology then the simplest thing is to read the doc to get a grasp what this is all about. Youtube as others describes is lame, because if you are forced to watch 40min when you are just interested in one small thing, you will loose a lot of time finding the relevant piece of content..

Positive on reading is, that you have to think for yourself!

(I highly recommend to you to not read this, it's just something that I had been wanting to take off my head; seriously, if you want to read it, do it at your own risk, because it will be a huge waste of your time)

Oracle Academy is the worst crappy attempt from a Corporation to create a learning platform.

The directive and academic personnel of my faculty decided that it could be a good idea to teach SQL and PL/SQL during whatever online classes will last with Oracle Academy, and I truly strongly believe (including most of my friends and classmates) that it's one of the worst ideas that could be done.

At that platform you simply don't learn shit, you read page by page of shitty PPT-like PDF presentations (that most of those are from a decade ago and other from 5 years ago) that are a pain in the ass to read due to how poorly formatted they are or how it explains badly certain concepts due to how badly made some explaining examples are, and then at each section of the "Learning Course" I have to do a Quiz that asks theorical questions and tells you to make certain code reviews to see if something is wrong or not (also which they are just alike the presentations, poorly formatted, up to the point that those have many syntax errors that end up consufing anyone a lot) and the main problem with the quizes is that also the Oracle's PL/SQL Docs are so fucking badly made, that I have to check PDF by PDF and page by page the concept that I just forgot to see how to answer the goddamn question; I mean, there are Doc pages that are way better structured and obviusly external to Oracle, but not even those pages fully cover certain SQL and PL/SQL concepts.

Seriously though, who could be so fucking ill-minded to create a shittyful learning platform and not try to fucking improve nor enhance it at least every 2 fucking years, so the goddamn "learning" process isn't that stressful.

Reinvent the wheel but be prepared to let that little project aside.

Follow a lot of people (twitter, rss, slack, etc) but do not jesusify anyone.

Listen to podcasts but remember most of them are advertising.

Read technical papers but don't take every idea as brilliant.

Use DevRant!

College degree.

I don't have it. Not because I don't like to study or don't like to evolve.

I tried several times go back to college, but unfortunately I don't see myself wasting money and time inside a classroom hours per day for something I can read on a book and learn by myself in few days / hours.

I know there's some subjects it's quite hard and we need some guidance for help us, but, we have the community to ask, forums and a lot information on internet.

OK, but why I'm doing this rant?

Recently I got a good job offer in a good country but my potencial employer and me is facing issues to go trough the process because the country to give me the IT visa requires the college degree.

Sometimes I regret to not have enough cold blood to finish the damn college just becuase of the piece of paper (which doesn't proff anything and we cannot even use to clean the $_@#$"@).

My home country (which is a third world country) is already noticed that and they start doing some laws and visas to ease the hiring IT professionals and they're leaving at companies expanses and responsabilities to verify is a good professional or not, but, the price is high for that. But at least the companies there's a way now to get someone.

And also I start see a loot excelent and genius programmers and others IT professionals which are skipping the degree to see and face same issues as me.

I hope our field finally put a end to this burocracies.

I'm getting beat up pretty bad by Rust. I like it so far but man is it hard. Imposter-syndrome is almost making me lose motivation. Almost, but I won't quit, one day I'll get there.

I think the primary reason I think I'm having such a hard time is that I'm trying to learn stuff that prevents me from making some mistakes that I have never run into. I know a bit of the theory but no hand's on experience on double-free errors, memory leaks and weird low-level stuff. I read the documentation, mostly understand what stuff is for but when I go write code I'm just like "now what?". I don't have enough experience to know when and where to use some concepts and I'm super lost. I don't know where to start and the feeling of being completely overwhelmed by all sorts of new stuff is at the same time exciting and frightening.

I have never, as a programmer, thought something was hard. All of my past knowledge required dedication, work and patience, but I wouldn't say I ever felt something was *hard*. But Rust... damn. Rust is hard.

Hopefully at the end of this super steep learning curve I'll know a lot more stuff and have stronger "dev powers" and be one step closer to being as knowledgeable as some of you guys around here to whom I look up to.

Hi ranters :) it has been a while since i posted. I always install devrant when am changing phones and read rants when i am on road (like today). It has been a huge insight in a lot of things and was a great time spent reading rants so thank you for that :)

I wish you all a great day/night and a fantastic weekend.

If Apple computers have cores (in their processors), where are the seeds and stems?

Welp this sounds a lot more stupid after having typed it and read it, but I'm still posting it :D

I've spent a lot of time messing around with C, having struggled with object-oriented programming (due to not really knowing how best to structure things, not knowing when to apply certain design patterns).

When writing C code, I'd write OOP-esque code (pass around a struct to routines to do things with it) and enjoyed just making things happen without having to think too much about the overall design. But then I'd crave being able to use namespaces, and think about how the code would be tidier if I used exceptions instead of having every routine return an error code...

Working with Python and Node over the past couple of years has allowed me to easily get into OOP (no separate declaration/definition, loose typing etc.) and from that I've made some fairly good design decisions. I'd implemented a few design patterns without even realising which patterns they were - later reading up on them and thinking "hey, that's what I used earlier!"

I've also had a bit of an obsession with small executable files - using templates and other features of C++ add some bloat (on Windows at least) compared to C. There were other gripes I had with C++, mostly to do with making things modular (dynamic linking etc.) but really it's irrelevant/unreasonable.

And yes, for someone who doesn't like code bloat, working with Node is somewhat ironic... (hello, node_modules...)

So today I decided to revisit C++ and dust off my old copy of C++ in a Nutshell, and try to see if I could write some code to do things that I struggled with before. One nice thing is that this book was printed in 2003, yet all of its content is still relevant. Of course, there are newer C++ standards, but I can happily just hack away and avoid using anything that has been deprecated.

One thing I've always avoided is dynamic_cast because every time I read about it, I read that "it's slow". So I just tried to work around it when really if it's the right tool for the job, I might as well use it... It's really useful!

Anyway, now I've typed all this positivity about C++ I will probably find a little later on that I hit a wall with what I'm doing and give up again... :p

Not actually solving the problem in an error and instead implementing a workaround thinking "no one's going to read this code anyway" when I'm actually just condemning my future self to a lot of hell.

I would like to have more time to work on the old, lonely, dust gathering site I started to build. There was a lot of new skills I wanted to test and train. But my personal life is getting stressful in the last time. Wife broke her leg and my son started in kindergarten.

I'm starting a new job in Dec, so I quit my current job. I had to reduce my work hours to collect my son from kindergarten. Sounds like I have much time now? Nope, there somehow is few time for programming. I enjoy bouldering (thats where the leg thing happend 🙄) and that's where even more of my time goes.

I see my project become ugly in the meantime, because there are even more new things I read about and would like to use...

Took a week of PTO for a vacation because I'm pretty close to spent these days. Planning on getting in some kayaking and fishing I think, maybe some noodling on the guitar or read some Tolkien, as I really need to take a break from the computer and screens in general, and living in the latest COVID epicenter in the US I can do fuck all else.

I'm /really/ trying to force myself to ignore slack and work emails. I did all I could to leave my team prepared, and given that most are juniors who need A LOT of supervision since working remote, I fully anticipate having to fix everything and get shit back on track when I return next week. Telling myself it's inevitable so worrying about it now won't be any better than waiting till next week. LEARN TO READ CODE AND COMMIT HISTORY FUCKERS!

I know I have a full workload slated for the rest of the year and into Q1 21, so I know letting shit go for a little while is the best thing I can do for myself, and so that my family doesn't have to deal with me being a bastard all the damn time.

Worst documentation? Unreal Engine 4's documentation on editor customization (custom panels/windows and whatnot). It might have improved in the last two years, but the last time I made a custom editor there was almost zero documentation on the matter and on their Slate UI framework. The little documentation that existed was very vague and had awful examples.

I don't remember very well, but I think it took me close to two weeks to get something very basic working. I had to read a LOT of C++ code filled with generics and macros to figure everything out, but after I did I enjoyed a lot working with that stuff.

I just don't know how I was able to do that, working with UE4 was a pain the butt every. single. day. Runtime error on the gameplay code? Too bad, the whole editor will crash and then take ~40s to reopen. It was crash after crash, ~1min of compilation time for any little change to the code, so so so so much frustration.

I do miss a those times a bit though, because even though it was hard, it felt good to feel competent, to know something complex reasonably well to the point I could help people on forums. Today I always feel I don't know enough about the languages/frameworks I use. It's kinda depressing, it takes a huge toll on my self confidence. But whatever, let's keep going, one day I'll get there :)

Once upon a time i had a great idea.
Because i couldnt be bothered to do anything productive i created a simple app in the C# that would look into every .js file (from a game that uses it for the gui/main menu) and search for "//todo" lines.

I did it mostly for kicks. I got that idea when i encountered one //todo in a file when i was trying to mod that game.

Yes i know grep exists: fuck you.
It would have taken me more time to learn that than to write that 20 line program...

The result? Over 30 lines of //todo with some briliant pearls in the type of:
>Temp workaround because X
>Workaround for race condition
>Clean that up
>Obsolete

When i return home i will post real quotes. They might be amusing to read...

The game is based on a custom C++ engine. HTML, CSS and JS is used for main menu and some graphical interface in game.

The most amusing thing is that this inefficient sack of chicken shit is powering one of the biggest (no playerbase but unit, world, gameplay vise) rts that i have ever played.

But still in spite of a dead community, buggy gui as shit and other problems i love this game and a lot of other people love it too. It is a great game when it works correctly.

To the interested: JS portion uses jquerry and knockout lib.

Ok I need a second post for this week. A tech lead decided to have a one on one meeting with me in public on the clients' floor where he decided to get angry at me (in public mind you) about using too many design patterns and inheritance because that "makes the code too hard to read. Instead use a lot of if-else's like I do." So not just is he an idiot, he did this in public on a floor with people who didn't know programming so now I look awful. I was furious.

I hate React. I keep reading that people have problem of grasping it, but that's not the case for me. I get it, I understand it, but I hate with passion HOW it's done knowing how nice it's done elsewhere. What really triggers me is how ugly it looks, both from architecture and code level. To me it really say a lot when even code shown in documentation looks ugly, and while reading it you ask ourself constantly "why it's done this way?". When I read React being called an "elegant" solution something explodes in me. Did you saw Svelte? Vue? Damn, even Alpine.js?
I just cannot how overengineered this API is. Even doing simplest things there produces so much junk code written only because this is what library requires. Why? I feel like working with it is a punishment.
And scalability and maintainability? I've never seen large-scale projects more messed up than those wrote with React. And yes, you can blame teams working on them for lack of skills, but it is the library which encourages or not good practices also, and I've never seen such bad situation with other libraries/frameworks.

I just finished reading the last chapter of the DevOps Handbook, its an eye opener, but not an easy read. And still recommended.

I've been reading this book for the past year and a half, little by little. It was hard since I started understanding why my work was so frustrating (I'm in System-Cloud-Ops position). The book made sense, while the work did not, it got harder since the book provides solutions, but whenever I dicussed any solutions with management they dismissed everything.
I started to initiate improvements by myself:
Prioritizing tasks I thought were more important to improve the way of work - do now and ask questions later... I got yelled at, I got my managers angry, but afterwards more often then not they admitted I was right.
To make it possible I worked overtime and on weekends, trying to prove a better way is possible, by implementing a long term solutions to solve problems instead of workarounds, automating a lot of stuff, creating labs, preparing presentations and documentation.
Time and time again I tried to pitch more ideas related to DevOps but the managers didn't care...
I know now my burnout started 8 months ago slowly, my hairline started receding, I started clenching my teeth (the doctor said stress was the cause) which was very fainful.
I continued to work but I noticed I was also more cynical, frustrated, and tired.

In the process I neglected myself.
So finally after 2 years and a half I quit my job, to focus on myself, at least for a little while.
I hope in my next job will be better.

¡rant|rant

Nice to do some refactoring of the whole data access layer of our core logistics software, let me tell an story.

The project is around 80k lines of code, with a lot of integrations with an ERP system and an sql database.

The ERP system is old, shitty api for it also, only static methods through an wrapper to an c++ library

imagine an order table.

To access an order, you would first need to open the database by calling Api.Open(...file paths) (yes, it's an fucking flat file type database)

Now the database is open, now you would open the orders table with method Api.Table(int tableId) and in return you would get an integer value, the pointer.

Now for the actual order. first you need to search for it by setting the search parameter to the column ID of the order number while checking all calls for some BS error code

Api.SetInt(int pointer, int column, int query Value)
Then call the find method.

Api.Find(int pointer)

Then to top this shitcake of an api of: if it doesn't find your shit it will use the "close enough" method of search.

And now to read a singe string 😑

First you will look in the outdated and incorrect documentation given to you from the devil himself and look for the column ID to find the length of the column.

Then you create a string variable with ALL FUCKING SPACES.

Now you call the Api.GetStr(int pointer, int column, ref string emptyString, int length)

Now you have passed your poor string to the api's demon orgy by reference.

Then some more BS error code checking.

Now you have read an string value 😀

Now keep in mind to repeat these steps for all 300+ columns in the order table.

News from the creators: SQL server? yes, sql is good so everything will be better?

Now imagine the poor developers that got tasked to convert this shitcake to use a MS SQL server, that they did.

Now I can honestly say that I found the best SQL server benchmark tool. This sucker creams out just above ~105K sql statements per second on peak and ~15K per second for 1.5 second to read an order. 1.5 second to read less than 4 fucking kilobytes!

Right at that moment I released that our software would grind to an fucking halt before even thinking about starting it. And that me & myself and I would be tasked to fix it.

4 months later and two weeks until functional beta, here I am. We created our own api with the SQL server 😀

And the outcome of all this...

Fixes bugs older than a year, Forces rewriting part of code base. Forces removal of dirty fixes. allows proper unit and integration testing and even database testing with snapshot feature.

The whole ERP system could be replaced with ~10 lines of code (provided same relational structure) on the application while adding it to our own API library.

Best part is probably the performance improvements 😀. Up to 4500 times faster and 60 times less memory usage also with only managed memory.

man this google android documentation fuckin sucks shit

i have NO idea in what order to read the document

they did a great job separating components into each different category but there are a lot of categories that use the knowledge of other categories so all of them are dependent on one another

and even when i read the documentation, they explain it like this in steps:

1. do this
2. do this
3. do this
7. do this
8. do this
45. do this
83. do this
84. do this
85. do this

and for the last step, step 2357 do this

I am trying to reverse engineer a fingernail hardening device for rapid hardware prototyping (becoming some kind of hardware developer I guess)

Since it is a fucking mess (all cables are black) they've chosen a weird construct to operate microcontroller on 240Vac (seems to be possible and made in very low energy consuming devices) i do not find any datasheet for one of the used products. It would help a lot but no. And messing around with high voltage is no fun.

I'm unsure if this fits as a dev rant since most/all I've read so far are software-related.

This weekend, I have been grinding a lot on leetcode. Even though I am grinding part of me believe that the interview process is broken for relying too much on those questions. I know it's a way to filter but I still think it's broken. But I guess I have no choice since that's how the interviews work .

I guess from now to next 1-2 months I will be busy with leetcode. I also have to read some system design questions.

Fuck, so many things to prepare

I see a lot of people on this weekly rant telling they go lunch, read a book, play guitar...

And then i look at me, working in an office, only being able to silently cry in front of the screen.

Yesterday I bought a book. I did not know about it. So I read the first few pages before purchasing it. I did not look for the review online. I paid by card - not through my phone or contactless, just plain old card going into a chip and pin device.

This morning I got an advert in Facebook that I should buy the second part of the book. I know they snoop my online activity. In a weird way I kind of accepted it. I guess my question is how'd they know so much of my personal life.

I'd probably will leave Facebook today. I am sure they are watching this status as well. I hope the jackass behind this learns in my own small way I tried to stand up against their jackassery. Like everyone else here I from IT. I hope some one (or many) from this extraordinary community who is a lot more capable than I am, stands up to this invasion and make an end to this snooping.

This is more of a story than a rant, but it has some rant-ey elements, so whetever...

I work for a pretty big company. Several departments, teams, many different markets...so it's a big orchestration. The programming department (aprox. 5% of all employees) is the core of the whole company, because everybody else uses software we've written...(a bit off topic, the point is there are a lot of people)

So today, I got assigned with a side-project. The project spec arrives, and as I read through it, I start realizing that upper-management whats me to build an app to fire people instead for them. The app is supposed to track salary, connect with Trello (for departments that use it) to track finished tasks, track sick days, work attendence...a lot of stuff, and at the end, if the situation requires, spit out a person that is of least benefit to the company, to be fired...

Now from coding perspective, this will be very interesting and fun to build, but from a moral standpoint, I'm a bit woried...simply because, indirectly, I'm firing those people. Because, the way I tune the the app(specifically the algorithm that weighs the value of an employee to the company) will cause certain people to get fired...

So I'm woried I'm gonna have a small breakdown when the app goes live and I see someone saying goodbye to theie colegues of something similar...heck, the app might even spit out my name some day(I should probably add a tiny if statement somewhere in there :) )
What do you guys think about this, from a moral standpoint? Would you be okay with building something like this?

(Sorry for the long post :/ )

Need to rant / maybe some advice.

Working remote is hard.
New company, remote on boarding. I feel like my coworkers are robots, and I'm being tossed into the deep end with minimal guidance.

The codebase is so unnecessarily complicated, its impossible to read. I've been trying to figure out how things work for a whole month, still not sure.

My mentor that is supposed to help onboard me is a robot, and answers questions in a somewhat acceptable manner, but it still feels like a lot of "figuring out" is still left for myself.

My other work partner that is also a newbie like myself is also a robot - doesn't talk or ask many questions whenever we have a sync up meeting.

The codebase is huge and feels quite overwhelming, I don't feel like I got a team "with my back", I don't enjoy work as much as I have before, I barely do any coding (mostly reading code and trying to understand how everything is working by setting breakpoints and debugging tests that take foreeeever to run), and some days I'm seriously considering cutting my losses and jumping ship just to save my sanity.

Am I paranoid? Am I just dumb? Should I just suck it up and be happy I have a job? Is this how Remote work is supposed to feel like? Why does it feel like my soul is dying?

Anyone in similar situations, or who can give some insight/advice/etc, I would highly appreciate it.

And this is supposed to be a good company too from the reviews. I don't know how it can be so crappy in reality. Did I make the wrong choice joining? Should I jump ship sooner rather than later? I've only been here about a month or so, and maybe its too soon? Halp!

“Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. I think a lot of what people call intelligence boils down to curiosity.” - Aaron Swartz

Back in my study days software dev was this weird almost magical thing where you tell a electrocuted stone in a fantasy language what to do.
Now after working in the field for 4 years it has lost its shine and I mostly connect software dev to work grind and people who complain even though they just don’t read.
Maybe the time is near to look into a new field of work. Maybe it’s just not my kind of work to earn money. It’s not even like my higher ups are unsatisfied with my work. My current boss complimented my work a lot in our meeting last week.

Is this normal for developers to feel/experience?

semi dev related(later half)
A common and random thought I have:

A lot of units that humans use are either needlessly arbitrary or based on something weird. Like Fahrenheit. That shit is weird! 0°F is the freezing point of a water and salt solution. What a weird fucking thing to use!

But also, I like Fahrenheit more. Probably because it's what I was raised with and switching is tedious (though I'm trying. I'd like to use metric more), but also because one degree F is a smaller, more precise change. You can describe more accuracy without decimals.

On the other hand I prefer metric for length. Centimeters, and centimeters are way more precise and way less confusing than inches and .... 1/8th inches? Who the fuck decided on 1/8ths?!

Which brings me to my common thought:

If you look at a Unix timestamp, you can approximate somewhat when it happened. Knowing the current timestamp and a few reference points you can see RELATIVELY what a epoch stamp translates to. A few days ago, an hr ago, 2014ish.

This leads me to think that if we actually taught from a young age to think in epoch as a unit (not as a replacement to normal date formats but as a secondary at first) that we could just naturally read epoch time in the same manner we read dates like "28/01/2006 14:24:10 UTC"

In your brain you automatically know how old you were when that timestamp happened. What grade/job and where you lived at the time. What season it was. You know how far into the day it was, a little before lunch (or after or whatever, your time zone will vary). Now try with 1138458250. I can usually get roughly the year, and month if I really think about it, but that's it. And it takes much more effort

I'm sure there's other units we could benefit from but epoch is the one that usually brings this to mind for me.

I've always thought that in order to become a project manager it was necessary a period as programmer (as it was a sort of promotion).
But according to what I read here it seems like a lot of pm have no idea how to/how long it takes to develop software... Am I wrong or what?

Sooo... The ways my coworker fucks me:

Last week I have been working on setting up aWireGuard VPN server... Been trying for 4 FUCKING DAYS, the easiest VPN that has ever existed, 2 commands and that's it, I wasn't able to reach it, I checked every forum, tested every possible solution without success, checking ubuntu firewall but it was inactive... Nothing that should cause this. Why? 2 weeks ago we had a security breach and my coworker added a firewall from the cloud console with basic rules allowing only 3 ports, the port I was communicating with was blocked. He didn't bother to mention that he added an external firewall. And the junior me, not wanting to be a pain in the ass, and since that security breach wasn't my responsibility to fix, I didn't ask too many questions, just read the emails going back and forth and "learning" how to deal with that. Kill me please. Next mont a new guy is joining, we had a "quick meeting" of 30 minutes and he managed to make it 2 hours meeting. So a partner who lacks communication and a partner who talks a lot... Will be fun. And I probably should change my username... Is that even possible? @root?

so... is ReScript just a bunch of butthurt javascript developers who couldn't hack it to learn TypeScript (older, better tooling, better community, massive support with library typings, etc.)

seems like just a lot of extra, seemingly pointless and useless differentiating syntax rules

why do we need to keep reinventing the wheel?

"Our type system is guaranteed to *never* be wrong."

seen statements like this way too many times in my career... welcome to programming pain world, i should just read the rescript issues on github just to get a laugh here

but again, just a 🤡 giving his two cents

update: confirmed, all i've found on the web is rescript shillers trying REALLY HARD to defend it, and mostly failing

I find dynamically typed language a lot easier to read and understand than statically typed language.

What's up with all these interfaces, types and abstractions, its just too much!

I do want structure when writing code, but also the flexibility to test things without the f*** interface/type errors!!!

"Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. I think a lot of what people call intelligence boils down to curiosity." - Aaron Schwartz

On the MSc I was participating in, there is a teacher that has a lesson about Databases.

The MSc was not only for experience computer science students. We were informed that the first semester would be as an introduction to all.

So, Databases. No introduction at all. Just read the powerpoint and the pdf he had just translated (or not, because some were just from the internet), just refers to how they are structured briefly. He showed everything about Databases without the students that didn't know much to be involved (we didn't get to our lab for some reason) and then there was his assignment.

His assignment was written as it would be from a customer that knows shit about Databases (sorry but I had to rant). We sat down student's that knew already Databases and some of us worked as database engineers. We agreed on some steps that after read the next chapter of the assignment we reconfigured them. And so on, until we had nothing and we were back at the beginning.

Needless to say, I did not lose my Christmas holidays for him. It took me 2 days after to build a database that was not a full solution but a part (I wad noy sure, the assignment was ambiguous). I passed the lesson with the minimum passable grade.

So, I wrote a nice email to the MSc teacher that had to organize it (or something like that). I did not swear at all. I was professional and wrote what I encountered and what it should have been. The Databases teacher had always that smirk and face that he was THE boss and had no respect for his own lesson. But I didn't mention it. The organizing teacher shared the email with the databases teacher.

And the time came that we had another lesson (web development, it was awful under him) with the databases teacher. And he had the wonderful idea to read the email out loud in front if everyone. He did noy mention my name. I raised my hand and told my colleagues it was me. Then I asked him in front of them, if he was contented with the results (only a few passed the databases lesson and max grade was the smallest passable), first he avoided the question. I asked again. And he said yes. We all looked at each other and somehow knew. No one spoke and I didn't push because I didn't want to take the web lesson's hours for this. It was just hopeless.

From there on, the teachers said we were their best class ever but the most complaining one. They didn't even bother to analyze the "complaints".

So, there you go. One of the lot of those teachers.

I'm so motivated after joining this community and i want to start learning again and keep this up
I started to read eloquent js and watch cs50 course and meanwhile working on my forum
i love to hear your advices for a beginner Including opinion, book, etc.
share with me your experience, thanks a lot ;D

Things that piss me the fuck off about user programs(in this case text editors):

No fucking documentation or signs of it available, a promise from like 3 years ago to post: tutorials/actual docs and yet unfulfilled shit. Yet the author sells the editor, you can get a free version of it, but the extension api is only given in the paid version. It's like $12 bucks, which depending on where you are from is really the cost of a meal.

The editor in question is 4coder, seems like a good stack for building C/C++ based applications with a lot of cool utilities underneath, I see dudes using it to create a lot of cool shit online, but things like moving input, stopping the thing from formatting pasted code etc etc. Shit, even reaching the documentation is fucky, you get the names of the commands......ok...awesome...wtf do I do with these? Why do i need to watch a 20+ minute tutorial from the developer instead of being able to read a retarded ass tutorial regarding how to do the most basic shit? For an editor that is set to replace Emacs and Vim for developers inside of a windows platform....it sure is lacking AF in that regards.

I really want to work with this thing because it seems to be made with a lot of heart, just can't stand the fact that the documentation is lacking like a motherfucker

The best motivational comment

I posted a rant in which I mentioned that "few" developers who don't want other to progress and are present to show off at every platform....
Got a comment, which I want to share...
Thanks to @MrCush

Ya, most of them tend to stalk the stack overflow and Arch Linux communities. On stack overflow they tend to refresh their browser nonstop to see who their next victim is on a new question and then spend an abnormal amount of time searching the site for a similar question and then downvote you and report as a duplicate. “Umm ya, the question you linked is similar to mine. I found that one as well but unfortunately it wasn’t in the same environment with the same conditions that I raised and didn’t help me. Oh btw, he posted that back in 2002 and HEY LOOK, he got reported for a duplicate as well. Seems like you reported him as well.” 
The issues of arrogance and being unhelpful on that site are so vast that nobody else that registers can get enough points to be able to be allowed to answer someone else’s question so you never get any new blood.

Arch Linux “elites” like to answer your question with a link that you’ve already been to as they always link the same site. “Dude! There’s a wiki for a fucking reason. Did you read this page?”
Yes I did read that page and it was helpful to a degree but since I’m absolutely new to Arch, a lot of the information on the wiki is a bit too descriptive and over my head. Not to mention every paragraph links you to another wiki page which then links you to another and so on that I have no idea where I left off....
“Dude! If you don’t understand everything on the wiki then you shouldn’t be using Arch Linux man! Gtfo scrub.”
Took me a long time to get comfortable with Arch because of these assholes. You got to start somewhere and doing is the best way to learn.
Reading the wiki on how to install Arch now seems so simple to me because I know what to ignore and what is required but back when I first started it was absolutely confusing.

I usually improve when I have to make workshops and courses for school students. Since then I try to look into things as indepth as possible since I have to be able to explain it in multiple ways and know the backgrounds.
I'm also currently trying to read a lot about the things I have to work with.

I see. They have to be geeky...mmmmh

I read a lot about biology, chemistry, physics and mathematics.

My two fav subjects are biology and math from the above. And I try to attend to as many lectures as I can.

Biology fascinates me to no end and it helps that one of my closest friends works as a resesrcher in Mexico, we are far but we get to talk about it all the time. He is more than happy to go on large lectures about the subject.

I also read a fuckload of fantasy books as well as manga. I also go on anime binged here and there.

In perspective though, i don't think anything is as nerdy as software development. SPECIALLY if it involves large portions of math(which in my case does for the things we develop for the accounting department)

( . Y . ) <--- chichis