how email really works

For halloween I dress up as my current project deadline. Nothing is more scary than that shit!

Alright, I just wanna start off by saying that I'm a huge privacy guy. I hate all kinds of data collection companies like Google/Facebook/Amazon and all that. Yet I'm forced to have a Google account for certain reasons.

But the thing that I want to say is that I often talk to people to express my concerns about privacy. And most people agree and say that "yeah sure that's some scary shit" but don't actually do much about it.

And the thing is. If you just browse through all of the options in your Google account. You can turn off and remove almost all data collection/ad serving and identification options entirely.

And yet purple complain about that Google sees what you buy and shit. Turn everything off. Get and adblocker and get noscript. The single best browser add-on out there. It's almost that easy to get at least acceptable amounts of Internet privacy.

Please, don't ever ignore the significance of in Internet privacy. And the potential issue of net neutrality. Don't be ignorant. Don't be the client.

I'm a shit programmer

I'm 29 and I assumed that by this point I'd be successful some way or another, either by being financially abundant or technically complex.

I am not, just mildly accomplished instead.

Here'a list of thing I consider challenges that I have:
* I tend to tunnel vision ideas that are terrible or execute them poorly because of said tunnel vision.
* I don't hone my skills, I usually consider my potentials the same as my actuals, as if I achieved everything already, probably product of ny huge ego.
* I communicate poorly with my boss, I sidetrack into thing he didn't ask
* I'm a mess when it comes to reading documentation online, I have the attention span of a fucking fish.
* I work alone, I have 0 networking status or skills.
* I take huge amounts of time to finish my side projects
* Of all the side projects I started I only finished one, the ones that I couldn't finish usually bevame insabely stressful things, so much and so many that I questioned myself many times if I should be a programmer or not.
* I have little discipline or organization, if I work in more than one thing at a time, i get really anxious and stressed.

I am not saying I'm not competent, I think I am (I'm looking at you imaginary scary recruiter googling this online), I'm just not really proud of myself

Contenders for arseholes this week

- Elasticsearch as their implemented product identification and integration in client libraries like Python to exclude OpenSearch made a lot of things very painful. Yay....

- Microsoft decided to integrate kill switches in Exchange. Yeah.... Great stuff.

- Atlassian has another week of dumbness - after they botch release after release, they killed Slack with DNS

- Adoptium still hasn't managed to provide repositories after fucking up it's transition from AdoptOpenJDK

- No, a project with JDK 8 makes no sense anymore, take that shit and burn it. JDK 11 the same, would be great if we had a Repository working for JDK 17 Adoptium....

- unwanking a TLS setup by integrating an intermediary load balancer to deal with several outdated TLS implementation is a kind of thing that's really scary...
(TLS 1.3 in, TLS 1.1 - TLS 1.3 out... Theoretically all solutions have TLS 1.2… most of them non working. Solutions is a wild bunch from different vendors)

- If you buy a fucking new Apple with an Arm Chipset, ram it up so far up your arse it gets dissolved in stomach acid.
It's an arm. There's tons of compatibility problems of course. No you shouldn't listen to what the marketing says. No I cannot shit rainbows and make it work.

- German election. No politics I know, but still.

- New neighbors decided to move in. Friendly person's. Except I wanted to murder them since they choose 22 o clock for moving time.

- I forgot putting the heater on. Ever woken up frozen like fuck and having a hard week... It's a good combo to break any form of motivation.

The company next to me is renovating. Waking up to the feeling of an earth quake because they demolish their old building is another thing that makes me unhappy.

It's Friday. I survived.

At my previous job we had to complete an online security training exercise. It shows you how to behave secure in the work place, to not open unknown links etc. The scary part was that the entire training thing was BUILT IN FUCKING FLASH. So I'm suppose to listen to some god damn virus shitting flash application on how to do online security?! Get your shit together before teaching others.

This is some scary shit right here

Coming back here after years to rant about... myself.
TLDR: I fucked up and now have to call a thousand people as a dev, I'm not even getting paid for it and they all get crazy about a random ID that got assigned to them, so now I want to throw away all my electronics and become a skilift operator.

Stupid me deployed a project shortly before we have the largest amount of orders in the year. (Like 90% of yearly orders in a couple minutes cause they are sold out fast and people wait to order first)

I got this horrible legacy "plain self written framework php" project which I tried to upgrade state of the art.
There was one piece missing to upgrade everything and nicely deploy it to some fresh new servers which can handle the high load which peaks at the time orders open.

So I did it the day before orders open and... everything worked well! Nothing crashed.
I wrote my client to wait a little before he confirms the orders, since after confirmation each of the people who ordered will receive an email where they can choose a unique number which they'll receive as a sticker with the order.

Since it's an event my client is promoting, people will meet each other wearing those unique stickers and being able to identify each other online and in person with this number.

Suddenly my clients call me that "customers are complaining about that there is something wrong"
Turned out he confirmed all orders straight away and that part of the application which makes the number unique was broken on the update.
So everyone could chose any number (also taken ones) as his "unique" number.

In my panic, I told my client "It's my mistake, I'll deal with it of course and call the affected people in my free time, since it's my mistake you don't have to pay for it". (it's my largest client by far, am a freelancer)
Realizing when people can chose any number it'll not be a few ones who have the same, it's like almost everyone did chose "69", "1", "420", "88 (a scary amount of people)",... (with 69 being the number being chosen by most people btw, even more then "1")

So now I have to call about a thousand people telling them a new random ID will be assigned to them. I thought of course about mailing them, wrote a script that deals with the issue automatically, and FUCKED IT UP TOO so everyone is confused and the only way to deal with it is by a call basically.
And while I'm sitting here now for 2 days straight calling people in my free time about their random ID will have to change, I realized that some people are quite crazy about random ID's.
I'm talking about yelling and threatening because "is it too much to ask for a working website when ordering this expensive product".

I hate my life right now and am getting quite serious about throwing all my electronic devices away and become a skilift operator instead. Fuck the higher pay, it's not worth the shit, I wanna have only responsibility about one button to press while watching people fall on their face.

Why is it so hard to just build machines that work without all this ideological bullshit? Code doesn't care if politics==true. The world is scary enough without you assholes making modern life a data minefield for even the most educated experts, and taking advantage of the ignorance of everyone else. Fuck you.
I just wanna <look at web pages> without having to consider, counteract, or silently assist some fucking regime. Why is EVERYTHING this way? Everything is a back door or a data mine or a political statement? This isn't a fucking art piece! It's not your espionage tool, fucking codes in invisible ink and tiny cameras and shit everywhere! It's a <web browser>, and if it does ANYTHING besides <browse the web> that I didn't explicitly tell it to do, you better better not be the one who made it. Because if you did, you are what's wrong with the world.

This is a story of me trying out maintaining a game server and eventually making a mistake, although I do not regret experiencing it.

A month ago I set up a small modded minecraft server because I wanted to experience a fun modpack together with some people from reddit. Besides this, I also wanted to see if I was capable of setting up a server with systemd and screen running in the background. This went great and I learned a lot.

The very next day I was playing with $annoyingKid on the server and everything was well. However the second day, $annoyingKid started pushing the idea to start up a normal minecraft server to build a playerbase.

I asked $annoyingKid 'What about financing, staff management and marketing?'

$annoyingKid: "I don't know much about that, but you can do that while I build a spawn!"

He also didn't want to reveal his age, which alerted me that he's young and inexperienced. He also considered Discord 'scary' because there were haxors and they would get his location and kidnap him, or something. So if he was supposed to become owner (which he desired), he had no way of communicating with a community outside of the game.

He also considered himself owner, while I was the one who paid for the server. 'Owners should be people who own the server', no matter how many times I told him that.

$annoyingKid also asked if he could install plugins on his own, I asked him if he knew anything about ssh, wget or bash because I used ssh to set up the server (I know rcon exists, but didn't want to deal with that at the time), he had no idea what any of those terms meant and he couldn't give proper arguments as to why he should get console access.

In the end, he did jack shit, he had no chance of becoming co-owner or even head-admin because he had no sense of responsibility or hard work. I kept him around as an admin because he was the one who came up with the idea. I banned him on day one after he started abusing his power when someone tipped him of. Even after me ordering him to ignore an annoying player he kept going, of course I could have prevented all this by kicking him earlier since all the red flags around him had already formed a beacon of light. He tried coming back, complaining that he should at least have his moderator rank back, but he never got in again.

A week later I got bored, I had had enough fun with ssh and the server processes to know that I didn't want to continue the small project, so I shut it down and went on to do stuff on GitHub.

Lesson learned: Don't let annoying kids with no sense of responsibility talk you into doing things you aren't sure you want to be doing. And only give people power after they've proved to you that they are capable of handling it.

You know something is ABSOLUTELY NOT RIGHT when you see this code.

Even more when you notice the parameter is not being used at all!

Holy crap, it is a web api deployed in production. Imagine it being called!

!dev !rant
You guys talk about having too much coffee occasionally - enough to where you weren't able to even focus;
I, being the dumbass I am overachieved a little and actually drank so much once and basically seized up
My friend was driving me home and all of the sudden i felt my arm muscles contracting, and then my abdomen and chest
shit was scary
we had to pull over and i had to struggle to shove a bottle and a half of water down my throat before he could drive me home

moral of the story = Make sure you eat in the morning, and there IS such a thing as too much coffee

Had coffee in the late evening.
And can’t fall asleep till now.
Browsed fb for abit.
Saw someone shared some scary shit.
Shook to the core.
Opened dev rant.
Heart felt almost instantly at ease.
Thank u Devrant 😭

Most succesful project was around this time last year.

A scary club of privacy haters made a 'webapp' to advise people what to vote for in the national elections.

The tool was really bad in multiple ways. For instance, if two parties would score the same amount of points, one would, at random take second place without conveying this to the user.

Oh and it also collected all the data people entered "for scientific purposes". A very sketchy practice, a non profit, funded by the government and George Soros (I kid you not, illuminatie confirmed ;) ).

The tool had this disclaimer on the bottom, saying this webapp needs cookies to function. So that triggered me to make a copy of the tool that works better and ... offline, and without cookies. You could download a html file and turn of your wifi (for the paranoid ppl among us), use the tool, delete the file. No trace.

It was a little bit of tung and cheek project, a gimick, the original was called stemwijzer, mine was called offline stemwijzer.

It was a one day build and a day after launching I got a call of the original stemwijzer project leader. Demanding to take the thing offline for infringing copyright (yeah sort of was). I tried to explain him why I made this and why privacy for such things should be held in high regard. He basicly told me I was talking shit and did not want to discuss, I told him I don't take stuff offline because of phone calls. I told him to email me a seist and desist.

So that guy prolly had a stressful day (because of the launch of his tool), had a few glasses of wine, and wrote an email. He wrote me I was a pathtic kid and I should do more useful stuff. He wrote that anyone could program a tool like that. And he wrote me I should do him a favour not share this email with my measly amount of twitter followers. Super professional email.

So I did him that favour, I did not share it with my twitter followers, I shared it with one of the largest political blogs in the country.

My tool sort of took of after that. To stop infringing copy right I changed the name and I removed their content from the script and wrote instructions on how to copy and paste in the json content yourself and "make your own tool".

The response was great, people actually emailed me job offers and I think that the current job I have is due to the succes of said project. So be balsy, challenge giants, start riots, it will get you places.

!dev

It’s midnight, I’m alone in the big house, it’s pitch black outside, I had a few beers already and I thought it would be a good idea to watch some horror stuff..

I want to go out to have a smoke but I’m scared as fuck now.
There are cats running around in the dark and there are so many great opportunities for some alien zombie monsters to hide and sneak up to me..

Think I became too old for this shit.

HELP!!!

Seriously? WHY THE FUCK, are there no English speaking, no god damn accent tutorial videos on YouTube regarding VLSI design, or hell even any of the fucken layout tools ... allllllll of them in very strong Indian accent .. OR not even spoken in English... the fuck folks? Some of them are “ok” to understand but I can’t get past the accent of speeding up and slowing down, and repeating the words and phrases, and then emphasizing shit like a question, but turning it into a unneeded statement, emphasizing the wrong shit... uggh I just wanna pull my fucken hair out.

Americans either are keeping VLSI knowledge a secret.. or nobody who fucken speaks English knows wtf they doing.. and that’s scary.

It all starts with a small regex script to automate my coding session. Now I start to automate every shit I used to hate (without notice it).

Where was Python all my life. Where was it when I have to configure my server, run integration tests or benchmark all by myself. The past was really scary 😂

Been on a Android dev meetup yesterday.
Guy in front of me started solving exercises of Graph Theory on his laptop.
I took a peek to see what this shit is all about(I have never studied for a CS degree).

Holy moley this is some scary shit. How the fuck you people study this.

Most used book on the shelf. This is some scary shit.

What a satisfying and yet freaking scary thing when you run

# git checkout -b feature/lostHoursWorkingOnThis
# git reset -- hard <commit from 3 months ago>
# git push upstream master --force

Just when you're at the final sign off of a major change and the business goes "nope, we want to make even more changes before we sign off ok this"

🤷‍♂️out of scope gone wrong!!

Well fuck you, I got shit to deploy, all this work can get out of my way!

It was around for a while but I didn’t realize it was it for a long time. I was fixing computers for cash and spending in on booze while in primary school. Making websites for cash and for fun while in high school. Some guys wanted to buy my databases at the time and sending me emails that my websites rocks. I didn’t cared cause I party a lot and I didn’t need money.
Sex drugs and rock and roll was my life not a fucking computer.
Since I never had problems with math I passed exams and got myself to university and dropped out cause of those 3 funny things above. Turned out to pass exams after second year when math and physics disappeared you need to study more then 1 day before exam and party was more important for me.

I failed tremendously. My girlfriend left me I was out of money I got back to my hometown with my laptop and I somehow between depression, drugs, alcohol and killing myself reminded I was getting money from websites and I can try to follow that movie.

At that time I didn’t read single book in english in my life. I know some basic english so I decided to try to read some actionscript2 pdf. Why actionscript ? I liked those simple games. Those were fun and there was nothing better. I was reading first book at least 10 times with vocabulary that took about a month until I remembered whole book and second book was faster like 1 week third was 1 day and from then thing moved a little faster. I discovered flex just before adobe acquired macromedia and started writing in it. Started answering to some questions on forum and build some portfolio website with fancy 3d animations and stuff and finally applied for 2 jobs.
They both were amazed by my website and one of them sent me some task to do and I did it overnight and sent them back. They wanted to hire me and I need to respond to them.
Second job they invited me for talking and asking about math, if I’m ok with 3d and stuff and they offered me job closer to my home town so I picked them. The code was amazing, 3d equations, quaternions, complicated stuff bit very well written by some company that dropped project before launch and my first task was add some small feature.
I remember first day in elevator with my former boss who told me to not to get scary and take it slowly I was trying to do my task as fast as I can worried I will be fired if I don’t do it and nobody else will hire me and I won’t manage to recover from second failure. It was even more fighting with myself that I will fail again then with this task lol.
I’ve done the feature third day and when they said it’s cool and I can commit my changes it appeared to me that It might be this shit that will get me out of trouble.
I was never again wrong about programming and so wrong about trouble but that’s a different story...

How's Irene and other friends from Ukraine holding up?

Shit is about to get real it seems and it's scary when big nations enter the playing field.

"Don't worry I used to be a programmer, I'm a cool project manager"

...Scariest words I've herd in a long time

I think that we should have a global tech free day once a year. A day when no one is allowed to use their phone/computer/tablet etc.

It's scary how addicted we are to that shit and it would be very nice if everyone just got a day off.

2023 After a big working day ! I just want to relax with an easy movie to watch
The movie
- Political
- overpower woman that spite on man
- the message
- remake, spin off
- predictable as fuck story line
- actors that have no fucking emotions
- plots twist predictable
- predictable boring scary jump
- watch it on netflix, disney+, Amazon prime, HBO, Crave, Helix, Tou.tv for only 25$ a month
- CGI are fucking ugly shit
- story incoherence
- movie are always politicly correct
- i see the camera man in the cars window is fucking obvious
- people working in movie are poor as fuck because shit actors want lot's and lot's of money
- lot of movie are make for the branding not the movie itself
- you notifications are more interesting than the movie itself
- you want to go to the theater... 99$ popcorn and M&M bag of 20 pieces
- kids want to listen something else
- woman want help with the dishes at 10 PM
- no more beer or chips

You know what ? I think i will go feed some duck 🦆 at the park next time

Some times I like to think what would I do with my life if suddenly all electronics stopped working...

It's scary as shit, but I think I would survive. I have some other skills (wood working and construction).

Would you?

Most of us have scary stories about professors that think that they know about what they are talking about when it comes to teaching comp sci subjects. Shit is so backwards in most parts of the world with teachers showing outdated or completely pointless tech.

A friend called me the other day asking for classic ASP help because it was being used in his web class. Another was asking me about flipping c cgi web scripting. Wtf are schools teaching? Having the drive to LEARN actuall useful topics that are relevant on the market is hard enough as it is...shouldn't schools help at least a little bit? I was lucky, we were thaught Java, Python, cpp, js, sql, html5, css3, php, ruby and we had classes for node (for those interested) and asp.net mvc. Those were RELEVANT and good classes and while some outdated tech was good the rest is just bullshit. Specially since most teachers have 0 market value as develpers...but hey!! Wtf do I know! Of course my word is shit against all them doctorate and master degrees.

Gimme a break. School can be great. But a lot of the leadership there is toxic af for our industry. And while I appreciate the effort in me being thaught modern languages (and thaught is a hard word since I already knew how to program way before going to school) i still remember a teacher taking points away from an assignment for not using switch statements in Python...despite my explaining that there was no such thing (you can go around it by using a lil technique using functions, its pretty cool..pero no mames)
Or what about the time I mentioned to a fellow student how he could use markup for having more control with his windows forms while the very same teacher contradicted me saying that shit was not possible. Or the guy at the school in which I work teaching intro to programming using fucking vba...fk man if you are going the BASIC route at least teach them b4j or something fuuuuck.

I had good teachers, but they were always cast asside by dptmnt heads as if they knew better. I just hate pendejo teachers I really do.

Chinguen a su madre, bola de babosos.

So, the internet is over. Just in case you didn’t notice. If you post a link to anything that involves you: an article, a podcast, a thing you built, a video you made - then mods and admins and trolls get their pitchforks and ban you or roast you or delete you.

This is not the way.

Not only are the walled gardens of apple, Twitter, Facebook/Instagram, breaking the web into little areas - and marketing is buying your time - but we’re doing it to ourselves too.

I can’t post a video about some of my favorite programming books in
/learnprogramming or I’m immediately banned!? Every link that takes people away from your ad dollars is ‘spam?’ Without any useful discourse and content - then why would anyone be there in the first place.

One time I posted a link HERE about how people could get CSS help in the CSS discord and I got fire-stormed for self-promotion. Really? Hundreds of hours helping people learn programming - for free... is my self promotion? Is everyone so insecure that they can’t allow anyone else to talk about their work? It’s super scary.

This is how you control people. This is Nazi shit. It’s a slippery Slope. Watch out.

And whatever you do... don’t share links to your things. That is NOT what the internet was made for.

!dev

Through life, I've heard some people say horror movies are bad, that they promote violence (usually religious people).

Of course I think that's pure bs, but I think I could provide one argument that is hard to deny, so here it goes, although I might go off rails at the end.

I'll preface with this: life itself is violent. Violence, the word, is mostly used to describe immoral inflictions of harm on other beings.

But you can also say that some deaths are violent by themselves too, event those that weren't caused by humans, like a disease or a natural disaster.

This would be the "visual" meaning of the word, "the way it looks", the shock of humans when observing something gruesome/violent.

That described, it's not hard to also think that technological advancements in modern western life has made such observations of violence very unfrequent for people.

And naturally, modern people get accustomed to the lack of these observations. So accustomed that when they happen they become traumatic.

Because of this, people react weirdly to death. One reaction is censoring the topic. Another reaction is trivializing it, as if it doesn't really matter.

Sometimes they can't even accept old people dying at 90, an awfully stupid reaction in my opinion.

Another interesting reaction is personifying diseases as if they were villains ruining lives intentionally.

Or at least that's what it feels until you look at them through a microscope and realize that diseases aren't more evil than bread changing flavour after toasting.

All of these irrationality and cowardice comes from low exposure to violence, and that's where horror movies balance things out.

Some diseases in the real life can put some of the worst horror movies to shame.

The human body itself is pending violence. Why? Because when you die all sort of worms eat your fucking flesh. And sometimes that happens even before you die.

We bury humans because of the diseases corpses transmit, but also because we don't like the spectacle and the aesthetics of the rotting process.

Just picture for a second bad things happening to your body, and if you feel that is making you too uncomfortable, then maybe you got too used to this too.

I think horror movies help us to remember the reality of our inminent and intrinsic violence.

In ancient times, you would live outdoors, stepping on dirt, and be very used to "bad" things happening to humans.

Nowadays, most homes are sterile clean, and it's unlikely to observe violence.

Oh, some family member is pucking blood and dying from something? Send em to a hospital, or an elderly care center. Don't need to witness that!

I understand and accept grief. What I don't understand or accept is the vilification of death, describing it as something wrong that shouldn't happen.

it almost feels like a burden, like you shouldn't die when you're young, that it's an unforgivable thing to happen.

Well thanks, society, you can't even fucking die in peace.

I would love to die (no suicide) in a mildly celebratory way, watching people around me smile. I think that would be a good ending for me.

But no. Most of my relatives would be fucking crying like the chickenshits they are, ruining it for me.

And that scares the shit out me: people usually say the scary part of dying is that they die alone.

Well that's what dying alone would mean to me: watching people cry instead of smiling at me.

When my grandma died at 80, with all the achievements she made, I considered her death a success, also considering how quick it was. And because of that I didn't mourn for too long.

In fact, I don't even consider her dead, and not because of some religious mumbo jumbo. I guess the memories are still alive in me, I don't know.

Some famous chunk of coal said once that he felt people don't believe they're gonna die. And I agree with him.

Another upside of horror movies is that they hurt nobody, which is why you can enjoy it and not get ptsd, unlink watching a snuff film.

I will also be fair and add that this might a be a cultural thing, but deep down desire for survival is a genetic thing could play a big part in this too.

I did it today...
It wasn't easy, and I'm scared that the consequences may out weigh the rewards, but it was worth the risk.

I posted a question on stackoverflow.
Sorry to sound super dramatic, but the last time I posted to that site I was noob at coding and the responses I got actually made me generally feel bad for asking questions and I can see why people stop coding after they visited it.
Anyway wish me luck and hopefully someone can see what I'm doing wrong or if it's a bug in React Native.

Also I swear to God, if some motherf*cker marks my question as duplicate I will... prove them wrong because I looked all over google like a starving polar bear looking for food in the arctic tundra and found nothing of substance. So I dare you.

Ok completely unrelated to develop stuff but has anyone else started watching the unmasking a killer series? Holy shit it is so fucking good. They brought on actual victims of the East Area Rapist/Original Nightstalker/Golden State Killer and it just fucking shows how scary it is. It's such an interesting documentary.

Ctrl + t wasn't working on the browser
Unplugging and plugging back the keyboard fixed it but they were the scariest 20 minutes of my life

Can we invent a firewall which blocks out all the shit about: woke, alt right, left, right, politics in general, global warming, aging of population and the rest of scary or extremely divisive stuff? I know which is impossible because of HTTPS but if it existed I would gladly install it on my home network.

Quote of the day:

"U think that's scary you should see the shelve sets belonging to the team lead,

Its like Stephen Kings's IT,

except this version, the clown writes horrendous code instead of scaring the shit out of you"

I’m afraid that some day, services will come along that destroys the need for actual programmers. That all of us will simply be stuck at work, drag & dropping these new software solutions in place.

TL;DR I just recently started my apprenticeship, it's horrible so far, I want to quit, but don't know what to do next...

Okay, first of all, hey there! My name is Cave and I haven't been on here for a while, so I hope the majority of you is doing rather okay. I'm programming for 6 years now, have some work experience already, since I used to volunteer for a company for half a year, in which I discovered my love for integrations and stuff. These background information will probably be necessary to understand my agony in full extend.

So, okay, this is about my apprenticeship. Generally speaking, I was expecting to work, and to learn something, gaining experience. So far, it only involved me, reading through horrible code, fixing and replacing stuff for them, I didn't learn a thing yet, and we are already a month in.

When I said the code is horrible, well, it is the worst I have ever seen since I started programming. Little documentation - if any -, everywhere you look there is deprecated code, which may or may not been commented out, often loops or simply methods seem to be foreign for them, as the code is cluttered with copy paste code everywhere and on top of that all, the code is slow as heck, like wtf.

I spent my past month with reading their code, trying to understand what most of this nonsense is for, and then just deleting and rewriting it entirely. My code suddenly is only 5% or their size and about 1000 times faster. Did I mention I am new to this programming language yet? That I have absolutely no experience in that programming language? Because well I am new and don't have any experience, yet, I have little to no struggle doing it better.

Okay, so, imagine, you started programming like 20 years ago, you were able to found your own business, you are getting paid a decent amount of money, sounds alright, right? Here comes the twist: you have been neglecting every advancement made in developing software for the past 20 years, yup, that's what it feels like to work here.

At this point I don't even know, like is this normal? Did git, VSCode and co. spoil me? Am I supposed to use ancient software with ancient programming languages to make my life hell? Is programming supposed to be like this? I have no clue, you tell me, I always thought I was doing stuff right.

Well, this company is not using git, infact, they have every of their project in a single folder and deleting it by accident is not that hard, I almost did once, that was scary. I started out working locally, just copying files, so shit like that won't happen, they told me to work directly in the source. They said it's fine, that's why you can see 20 copies of the folder, in the same folder... Yes, right, whatever.

I work using a remote desktop, the server I work on is Windows server 2008, you want to make icons using gimp? Too bad, Gimp doesn't support windows server 2008, I don't think anything does anymore, at least I haven't found anything, lol.

They asked me to integrate Google Maps into their projects, I thought it is gonna be fun, well, turns out their software uses internet explorer 9.. and Google maps api does not support internet explorer 9... I ended up somehow installing CEF3 on that shit and wrote an API for it in JS. Writing the API was actually kind of fun, but integrating it in their software sucked and they told me I will never integrate stuff ever again, since they usually don't do that. I mean, they don't have a Backend as far as I can tell, it looks like stuff directly connects with their database, so I believe them, but you know... I love integrating stuff..

So at this point you might be thinking, then why don't you just quit? Well I would, definitely. I'm lucky that till December I can quit without prior notice, just need a resignation as far as I can tell, but when I quit, what do I do next? Like, I volunteered for a company for half a year and I'd argue I did a good job, but with this apprenticeship it only adds up to about 7 months of actual work experience. Would anybody hire somebody with this much actual work experience? I also consider doing freelancing, making a living out of just integrating stuff, but would people pay for that? And then again, would they hire somebody with this much experience? I don't want to quit without a plan on what to do next, but I have no clue.

Am I just spoiled, is programming really just like that, using ancient tools and stuff? Let me know. Advice is welcomed as well, because I'm at a loss. Thanks for reading.

Suffering from the cash flow blues.

Remote contracting roles are far and few between, and so far I’ve only found the one client, the problem is that because they’ve been burned in the past by contractors, they only operate on an order by order basis.

So we’re stuck in this perpetual cycle of issues > estimates > order > development > test > tweak > pay and repeat.

The problem is that there is always significant delay between the stages from both sides, either because they’re busy on stuff, or I’ve burnt myself out rushing to meet an estimate and having to take a bit of breathing room.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s great working in blocks of a few days to a week and then having some time to myself (and the money is nice too), but the cash flow inconsistency is super scary when you’re having to manage corporation tax, accountancy fees and a salary.

Anyone else have these issues / know good places to find remote contract work?

Feel like shit, can't focus on work, exam coming up in about 2 weeks...
These stupid numerical algorithms are easy, and yet I manage to get stuck on every shitty little detail, I panic, and I completely lose focus.

This shit has been destroying my academic career... Can't focus properly anymore, cannot study even the simplest things - things that I used to do off the top of my head just a year ago.

My sleep schedule is FUBAR, it's a miracle if I manage to stick to the same timezone for three nights in a row.

Yet I'm still learning new things, trying out stuff and solving problems. Just not the ones that I need to pass my exams.
And before anyone says that university is useless and whatnot: I'm studying aerospace engineering.
I love it, I'm having great fun, learning amazing things, and I've met a lot of amazing people thanks to it. It's one of the few choices in life that I am certain of, and would gladly repeat over and over again.

I've burned myself out from stress, far harder and longer than I've ever done before, and I cannot figure out a way to recover from it.
I've been doing better in the last month or so, but I still cannot get any proper work done, and this is gonna bite me in the ass really hard, once again.

Funny story: I had 3 days of break between the end of the previous semester and the beginning of this one. 3 days of pure freedom.
In those 3 days, I spontaneously reverted to a normal sleep schedule (didn't even need an alarm clock) and felt like a mountain had been lifted off my shoulders.

A year ago I had no idea what truly panicking in the middle of an exam felt like.
My mind had never gone completely blank.
I had no idea what impaired cognitive ability felt like.
This shit is scary.

Why do our minds have to make things so complicated?

The project that I’m working on right now. The more features I build, the more I realize how much more shit I need to build. What the fuck is this. This is getting really stressing. Really annoying. Really scary really fast.

Am I missing something?

Am I doing something fucking wrong?

Am I over engineering shit?

Shit looks like it has NO END.

Mann i will always be a newbie to the world of linux, but running cmd on it, its always scary. Like one purge command and it went on deleting so many packages i didn't knew even existed at the first place.

I feel like a blind man following the blogs hoping to god that no wrong shit happens. And the blogs are also like "do step1 then step2 then step3, you will see x , do y and it will work" , and surprisingly it works!.

Linux is a beautiful mystery.

And why the hell is almost every browser in linux broken?
- Netflix, hotstsr and Spotify won't run on any versions of opera or chromium because opera didn't got some widevine installed.
- chrome runs but no good free vpn(i prefer hola/1click) works
- firefox is weirdly slow.

And yet this is the world's most lovable platform for web dev

Why in the hell does everyone have to have a different fucking CMS and why do they all make it so goddamn difficult to put a simple javascript in the head?

it's 2016 fuckers, sometimes the end user hires a dev to do things and I can't do shit in your fucking site-builder. I want to add a tiny javascript specifically for fb pixel, but frankly this is how most analytics work and it shouldn't be a complicated task for someone to perform if you built a halfway functional fucking CMS.

One simple function is all it would take to let users put a little bit of js in the head, fuck you could even name it something scary to keep idiots away or hide it behind a developers options in the settings or something that would allow someone with the IQ of a dolphin or higher to install some goddamn tracking code on the fucking shitstorm of a site your "builder" came up with.

your SEO practices suck too, but that's a rant for another time

The midjourney stuff…

It’s truly some scary shit!

My colleagues make such scary angry faces when they are focused. It scares the shit out of me everytime.