"You gave us bad code! We ran it and now production is DOWN! Join this bridgeline now and help us fix this!"

So, as the author of the code in question, I join the bridge... And what happens next, I will simply never forget.

First, a little backstory... Another team within our company needed some vendor client software installed and maintained across the enterprise. Multiple OSes (Linux, AIX, Solaris, HPUX, etc.), so packaging and consistent update methods were a a challenge. I wrote an entire set of utilities to install, update and generally maintain the software; intending all the time that this other team would eventually own the process and code. With this in mind, I wrote extensive documentation, and conducted a formal turnover / training season with the other team.

So, fast forward to when the other team now owns my code, has been trained on how to use it, including (perhaps most importantly) how to send out updates when the vendor released upgrades to the agent software.

Now, this other team had the responsibility of releasing their first update since I gave them the process. Very simple upgrade process, already fully automated. What could have gone so horribly wrong? Did something the vendor supplied break their client?

I asked for the log files from the upgrade process. They sent them, and they looked... wrong. Very, very wrong.

Did you run the code I gave you to do this update?

"Yes, your code is broken - fix it! Production is down! Rabble, rabble, rabble!"

So, I go into our code management tool and review the _actual_ script they ran. Sure enough, it is my code... But something is very wrong.

More than 2/3rds of my code... has been commented out. The code is "there"... but has been commented out so it is not being executed. WT-actual-F?!

I question this on the bridge line. Silence. I insist someone explain what is going on. Is this a joke? Is this some kind of work version of candid camera?
Finally someone breaks the silence and explains.

And this, my friends, is the part I will never forget.

"We wanted to look through your code before we ran the update. When we looked at it, there was some stuff we didn't understand, so we commented that stuff out."

You... you didn't... understand... my some of the code... so you... you didn't ask me about it... you didn't try to actually figure out what it did... you... commented it OUT?!

"Right, we figured it was better to only run the parts we understood... But now we ran it and everything is broken and you need to fix your code."

I cannot repeat the things I said next, even here on devRant. Let's just say that call did not go well.

So, lesson learned? If you don't know what some code does? Just comment that shit out. Then blame the original author when it doesn't work.

You just cannot make this kind of stuff up.

#thread
Any Home Assistant fans out there? Got myself a RPi3 a few months ago and got hooked on HA, because of the huge product support and great community. Didn't find any dashboards that I liked so created my own, written in JS, fully customisable and support for most if not all kinds of gadgets. The purpose was to have something easy to use for the whole family, on a wall-mounted tablet. What do you guys think?

Anyways, has anyone done some cool home automations/scripting? Would love to hear about it!

Learned bash scripting age 17 for the sole purpose of automatically downloading porn using wget.

We were all 16 once right? When I was 16, my school had a network of Windows 2000 machines. Since I was learning java at the time, I thought learning batch scripting would be fun.

One day I wrote a script that froze input from the mouse and displayed a pop up with a scary “Critical System Error: please correct before data deletion!!”. It also displayed a five minute countdown timer, after which the computer restarted.

I may or may not have replaced the internet explorer icon on the desktop with a link to my program on the entire student lab of computers. Chaos.

Programming

"Started playing around with C scripting, can you give me a hand with x?"

"Sure. Errr... this isn't C."

"Yeah it is, like the new C scripting stuff!"

"C scripting stuff?!"

"Yeah, the coffeescript stuff! You developers always shorten it to C right?"

😬😬

Interview (first job):

Interviewer: So what languages do you know?

Me: Well, i learnd C, C++ and Matlab scripting, but i'm learning C# as a personal project.

Interviewer: Perfect!

First day:

Interviewer(now boss): So, a guy is leaving next week and you will be replacing him. He has 70 projects and you will be responsible for this production test platform in JAVA

Woken up early by a WhatsApp message, classmate asked a stupid bash scripting question. Replied with profanity and foul language.
Turns out it was the official chat group with faculty and everyone. FML

When you write scripts to automate stuff because you're lazy, but you spend so much time writing them it makes you doubt your own laziness

I live in the terminal. I write lots of scripts (Shell, Python, node js) to automate tasks that would take hours to do by my teammates. Recently, I started automating everything that I put my hands on using Ansile: from pointing DNS server to continuons deployment, provisionning a fully customized infrastructure on the cloud using just a single command!

This is because automation gives you super power, the feeling that what you do help tl increase the productivity, reduce bugs etc.. Simply, once mastered, automation is ausome!

When I switch between windows scripting, web stuff and everything else.

Here we go again??

So today I was working on some PowerShell scripts and I get a question from a colleague
Colleague: So, How's your girlfriend doing ?
Me: "You cannot call a method on a null-valued expression" -ForegroundColour "Red"

*Colleague throws something at me*
Totally worth it!

Feels great to write a script that downloads consecutive episodes of a series sequentially ..

All because..
Hotstar doesnt support Linux ..

Blender.

3D modelling, UVs, texturing, animation, video editing, compositing, motion graphics, motion tracking, 2D animation, and a fucking powerful render engine? Check.
Great community? Check.
Powerful and easy scripting system? Check.
A well organized dev team? Check.
People who care about UI/UX? Check (look at Blender 2.8).
Does it compete with a major corporation that would go into sloth otherwise? Check. (If you thought M$ was shaftware wait till you see Autodesk)

There are other FOSS projects that I really like, but my vote definitely goes to Blender.

1. No more coding on paper! Why can some already write essays on laptops but programmers are stuck with "analog"?
2. No vendor lock-ins! Teach free, cross-platform development, not VB.NET.
3. No more professors stuck in the eighties! If all you know is 6800 assembly, GTFO. I heard NASA was hiring...
4. Enforce code style consistency, proper documentation and even VCS for larger projects
5. Algorithms -> scripting -> programming. Don't quickly explain the basics, then throw students straight into Java.

Spent 3 hours making a script that saves me 15 seconds every half an hour. Hmm not my best choice.

Goodbye web development; welcome back algorithms and scripting... How I missed you so much in these agonizing days we've been apart. But fear not, I shall never return to web development...

Well, I still have important websites to finish, but I won't let web development become my niche.

I hate when people get Java and JavaScript confused. One is a language used for smaller projects by am mature programmers, and the other is a scripting language for the web.

(Can't find quote author)

I recently got a job as a sysadmin and they've been debriefing me on their hacked websites (wordpress malware injection). Beats me why they still have their sites up at all...
BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE!
I wanted to see if they have any backups... NONE.

The latest snapshot was over a year ago...FML. Over a year ago when they barely have anything on their company site and client sites 😒

Now, I have to revive 10 websites from redirection. Time to do some shell scripting!

Can we all take a moment to appreciate what a complete mess web technologies are.

We're abusing a markup language made for scientific writing, by styling it with css and in order to make it dynamic somehow, we run a weird ass scripting language on the clientside.

Because nobody really wants to use this burning garbage can, some of us invented web frameworks.

And let's not get started on php...

Scripting languages, markup languages, database querying languages, etc. Are all types of programming languages. A program is a set of instructions for a computer to follow.

HTML is a programming language, fight me.

Boss asked me to make a script to automate some tasks. After some days i found out that my task will replace the job of one of our colleagues.
Now the *script, that looks like a big project, is almost done.
Feel for the guy.

It's vacation for me for two weeks of which one week will be a vacation outside the country and one will be home-time.

Will work on redesigning my entire server 'infrastructure' and an automated website/openvpn/whateverthefuckiwanttodeployorwhatever system solely written in bash/shell scripting.

Partly because it's awesome to learn new Linux-related stuff and partly because I really want to have this functionality and would love to write it myself.

Also working on three side projects of which two will become a service and one will be released into the open :)

But, tomorrow will be dancing my ass off to quite some of my favourite producers :D

My CV shows that I have experience with Java and also python scripting but I keep getting calls about Javascript positions..... Cmon HR you better than that...

During interviews about a month ago my friend and i saw an astonishing girl.we didn't knew her name but we had the interview list containg names of more than 1200 candidates which were selected. Fast forward today we started talking about that day and all of sudden we thought wouldn't it be fun if we used the interview list to find her on Facebook. Around 400 of the candidates were female. Instead of doing it manually i decided to write a python script.
Give script list of names
It will go to all the Facebook profiles which came up by performing a Facebook search though your fb account and take a screenshot of every profile
All of it is done through automations
At the end you just have to look at the screenshots manually
p.s. we failed to find her name. You've to trust me when i say we're not creep😂

Server side scripting using python

Worst of 2020?

Well, I've learnt never to do free / voluntary work.

Been spending many weekends helping out a former friend, mostlyby creating APIs, sites, managing servers & scripting.

Now that I have a girlfriend, my weekends are spent mostly with her.

He got really mad, said he doesn't want to waste time.

Then went to *pay* someone else to continue what I've been doing...

C++ - a scripting thing :|

Facepalm level : over 9000

In approximately 9 hours I'm probably going to humiliate myself in a meeting
I was given 5 days to write a sh script.
And guess what..
I still have not started
FML...🤦‍♂️

I didn't..
A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.

I pick up whatever is required by my projects, but I do prefer backend & scripting to graphic fuckery.. // pixel left, pixel up...blah, not for me..

I hate those people.
Ah

When I wrote a script to automate my commits to SVN... And then used that script to commit itself.... Pure bliss :)

A. Java at work and on my android app
B. Python for machine learning
C. Shell scripting for work and personal projects

I am writing echo in python and import in bash. My brain is like a soup now.

Am I the only one who thinks that with all the scripting languages starting programming becomes to easy and so learning really good programming is getting nearly impossible because every tutorial is made for total n00bs and every forum is full of: hey my hello world programs isn't working?

Ps:I have no problem with people starting programming with languages like c# and python, I think just there are too many people saying that they are programmers just because they wrote hello world.

Pps: sry 4 my English.

Co-workers: "But we have always written our scripts in Perl"

Me: "Nope not a good reason to keep using it."

learning some linux shell scripting.

First (working) attempts at writing a proxy that rewrites live requests from the devrant app, right now it only rewrites all notifications to be unread

Though the first attempt that finally works is built with mitmproxy and it's add-on scripting, plan is to get that stuff work with e.g. goproxy instead

What are your favorite programming/scripting languages and why?

Powershell should die.

I have a simple bash script I made that allows me to download almost any video from the internet. Works great and took me only a few minutes to make.

The only issue is it bash meaning Windows doesn't run it natively. I am not able to install linux Subsystem or bash, etc on the server.

So I decided to rewrite it in powershell thinking it should be Okay and I have never struggled with so much retardedness in my life. After 40+ tabs in chrome and a massive headache, it finally works.

Microsoft should kill powershell entirely and rethink their scripting language.

Also VBA should have died 10 years ago.

Many of you who have a Windows computer may be familiar with robocopy, xcopy, or move.
These functions? Programs? Whatever they may be, were interesting to me because they were the first things that got me really into batch scripting in the first place.

What was really interesting to me was how I could run multiples of these scripts at a time.

<storytime>
It was warm Spring day in the year of 2007, and my Science teacher at the time needed a way to get files from the school computer to the hard-drive faster. The amount of time that the computer was suggesting was 2 hours. Far too long for her. I told her I’d build her something that could work faster than that. And so started the program would take up more of my time than the AI I had created back in 2009.
</storytime>

This program would scan the entirety of the computer's file system, and create an xcopy batch file for each of these directories. After parsing these files, it would then run all the batch files at once. Multithreading as it were? Looking back on it, the throughput probably wasn't any better than the default copying program windows already had, but the amount of time that it took was less. Instead of 2 hours to finish the task it took 45 minutes. My thought for justifying this program was that; instead of giving one man to do paperwork split the paperwork among many men. So, while a large file is being copied, many smaller files could be copied during that time.

After that day I really couldn't keep my hands off this program. As my knowledge of programming increased, so did my likelihood of editing a piece of the code in this program.

The surmountable amount of updates that this program has gone through is amazing. At version 6.25 it now sits as a standalone batch file. It used to consist of 6 files and however many xcopy batch files that it created for the file migration, now it's just 1 file and dirt simple to run, (well front-end, anyways, the back-end is a masterpiece of weirdness, honestly) it automates adding all the necessary directories and files. Oh, and the name is Latin for Imitate, figured it's a reasonable name for a copying program.

I was 14, so my creativity lacked in the naming department >_<

So building a game engine and everything's internal name is wood/axe/lumberjack themed...

Started work on the scripting language and gave it the code name faggot script... Took me 48 hours to realise I should probably change that...

Don't we all just love that guy, that loudly talks about Linux and is almost zealous about it but when questioned about simply stuff, like basic *nix commands and shell scripting, looks like he just arrived from space... :D

Wasn't given a chance to test out of a scripting(bash, python, perl) class for my Bachelor's program. To "rebel" I finished all the assignments during this first week of the semester and have a perfect 100% in every one.

At least the assignments were fun.

Take that <school name redacted>!

We have RGB shit in computers...
We have dev ducks...
We need programmable RGB dev ducks that can change their color with a scripting interface.

If you choose to make your duck's color correspond to the compiler warning and errors displayed this can be done. Also, maybe have it plays sounds too.

They laugh at me when I'm still using windows batch scripts.

I ask them how to check the cpu architecture within a batch, to check whether administrator rights are present and if not, enabling the default windows admin and create another admin over the default admin. I ask them how they'd set a registry key within a batch...

They don't have any idea...

I've always been critical of python as a development language because of it's efficiency issues and the fact that it's essentially pseudocode. However, today I had to reflect 200 coordinated over the line x=355 for a course lab and I hella didn't feel like doing it in my normal languages. Wrote it using python in less than 2 minutes. It might be a bad language for efficiency, but it's one hell of a scripting language. Sorry, python. I never fully appreciated you until now.

A well written script is a lot like a spell.
You invoke it and well stuff( magic to few 😋 ) happens.
The resemblance is uncanny!

Well, off to the Wizarding world of IT Devops then.

A dynamically typed scripting language written in Go

I created an artificial intelligence using a scripting language.

Scripting and automation is my passion.

So....I would say laziness got me hooked into this world. :-D

The JavaScript everywhere trend.

Sure it's possible and the language develops at a fast pace since ES6 but JS like any other language just is not suited for everything. I think JS will stay in server side automation and as scripting language for customisation but not how it is abused now in electron or even node.js.

There will be better solutions if they are not already there.

I tried out Perl this year, really loved it. No one wanted to do a project with me in Perl though, so I moved on. Now I am doing my projects in javascript. I can't help but think that there is something very wrong with me for liking just the languages everyone hates with a passion. 🙃

When my boss acknowledged my effort in creating an in house scripting language. Makes me feel really really proud! 😁

- finish compiler
- get into gamedev
- learn Android dev
- finish framework (or at least make reasonable progress)
- create scripting language

We'll see what else comes to my mind during the year

I'm a game designer student in a Brazilian university. In my class I'm the only one who likes code and made the secure choice to be a future game programmer.

But recently some dudes on my class started to discourage me and telling me to give up that course and change to a computer science course.

I didn't feel that way... I think game programmers who know all the stuff and process of game development( modelling, concepts etc) are better professionals than the ones who just knows the scripting process. But sometimes their opinion flows up my head and I feel so unknown if I staying in the right way or not.

(Sry if my english still bad..hope you all understand anyway)

------------Weeklyrant-------------------------------------
So I bought a smart watch to go with my Samsung Galaxy back when I was 12, and upon inspecting the watchface maker app I came across lua scripting files. This amazed me. Animations, complex math, hexadecimal color system, variables, sensors...
I spent about four months
learning/experimenting with lua until I discovered arduino and C++.

I am now 14 and have been fascinated with robotics and learned java and dos since.

So building a game engine/framework/thing/thang and was working on a scripting language designed for the Dev terminals commands/applications...

Then I also have to design a language for the asset scripts, instances (probably going to do JSON) and it only took me about 4 months of planning to realise I could just use the same language for everything and just double down on the one.

Well aren't I a fucking dickhead .-.

TL;DR:
What do you think about visual scripting.

Pretty much anyone here knows Scratch. And most devs make fun of it (while most also know it's a real programming environment), yet what do you guys think about BLUEPRINTS or Visual Scripting?
Starting to learn Unreal, I have two choices. C++ or Blueprints. While some argue that Blueprints can't achieve and replace C++ in Unreal, I saw others ignoring the fact and making awesome stuff you didn't think was possible. I saw how powerful even this node-based programming environment is and started learning it. What do you think?

(Image from Masterclass, not by me)

ArmA 3, a great sandbox that I "wasted" a lot time scripting modding or, if you like to call it that: developing for.

A game so great, the Multiplayer-server-browser stores the amount of players on a server in an 8 bit integer.

Someone complaint a few years ago.
Response: " be happy, it were 4 bits not to long ago"

There were Servers who ran into that problem.

To clarify, that only affected the shown number, not the amount of players, at least not directly.
Who likes to be lonely in a multiplayer game.

Oh my fucking god which idiot decided to use JS as a scripting language for Minecraft Forge core mods

Literally what the fuck

Why so much hate for Windows? I can do all the scripting that I do on Linux on Windows as well. AutoHotKey for the win! In fact, the hacks that I can do on Windows directly cannot be done on Linux unless I have the terminal open. I'm still learning, yeah, so I'll learn how to do that in due time, but I've never had any issues with drivers, software issues, or security threats while using Windows.
And Windows Defender is so good now! I don't need an antivirus. Well, good browsing habits and common sense is enough of an antivirus so it's a moot point anyway.
Either way, I like embracing the power of AND. Why choose? I love both Windows and Linux!

When you write shell without knowing how to.

Digesting a dynamic scripting language !

Been using linux for 10 months now and finally figured how to write looping statements in terminal itself instead of writing a script for that .. Life just became simpler..

What if we were in an alternate universe where Java was a scripting language and therefore was the same as JavaScript, and all non-programmers thought they were different.

I hate web dev because I know enough to know how it "should" be done, know that it's not done that way, but also don't know enough to do it that way quickly.

Or why I spent the last 2 days scripting deployment of a website that costs 9$ a year to run, when I couldn't find a deployment script anywhere else.

Why WordPress is not very good:
I wrote a quick 230 line python script that uses the power of urllib, ebooklib and 12 regular expressions that would make any italian proud to download webnovels from virlyce.com and turn them into .epub files for me.
The chapters are all individual WordPress pages, and after sequentially downloading only 202 of them I got an internal server error.
Why, WordPress?

Of course, I saw this coming and put mitmproxy to good use caching everything, so even though my python script with terrible error handling crashed I don't have to do it all again (yay)

!rant
Question for all the people who know bash around here. Is there a standard for bash scripting? Kinda how like PHP has the PSR standard. I've downloaded a couple of pdfs from various sites but none have been an actual standard.

No better feeling than being able to debug something with your own scripting language... Kind of makes you feel like a god!

Even better when you debug your own scripts with it :-D

Yay! My first bash project :D
disclaimer - my bash is not pretty. yet.

Why I created it?
I encountered several footlong scripts in a new project at work. And they had no logging. And I am in charge of making it sing again. So here it is a tiny logging framework.

Big win today. Set up a custom motion capture pipeline for Unity using my Vive/controllers today. Quote a bit of scripting but I went from nothing to complete animation reel for our character model in a single day.

Successful day for once. I can sleep well tonight.

Been trying to learn code for almost two years now, started with C++, took a break because I couldn't figure out what to do with the knowledge, started Python 'cause I thought I'd be inspired by scripting and automating stuff, same thing happened, switched to java, same problem, aaaaaand I'm back to C++ and still can't figure out what the fuck I can do, I don't code anything and I'm tired of following tutorial in the hope of getting something interesting done
Long rant I know but fuck I'm so depressed about that...

I had to implement an internal tool in C++ which parses a file and converts the content into another format.
It did take hundreds of lines of code to get it working, file handling and parsing data in C/C++ is terrible.

I'd rather done it with some scripting language, and additionally implemented it in python as a side-project (in less than an hour and < 20 lines of code, BTW) but it should be C++ "Because that is how we do it here".

At the end the tool was only used for a few weeks, because someone had an idea how to completely avoid the need for that converted data.

Javascript, simply the best.

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 😂

My newest BASH project: reactive BASH
:)
Yes, I do like shell THAT much!

Since today my bhttp lib supports STOMP [still need to work on 1.2 compliance], i.e. I can carry out live communication with MQ. Meaning I can script the whole thing, be it 5 calls 5 reads, be it 20 subscriptions and reacting to unlimited number of messages in either of them with separate actions. WITHOUT A FOREST OF IF-ELSEs OR CASE-ESACs!!!

Boi do I love shell scripting... :D

Next project: AI in BASH

I had to use XSS (cross site scripting) and tag injection to change one tiny CSS property on a bug tracker site where I have no actual file access and can only add custom footer text. Why not just give me file access, or at least some way to customise the CSS, you stupid thing!

CMAKE, YOU PILE OF SCRIPTING SHIT!

WHY THE FUCK CAN I NOT CHANGE MY BUILD DIRECTORY? I HAVE WASTED AN HOUR ON THIS UNBEARABLE SHITWEASEL OF AN EXCUSE FOR A BUILD SYSTEM!!!!

STOP SHITTING YOUR STUPID CACHE FILES INTO MY SOURCE FOLDER!!! AAAAAHHH!

"Let's create this tech so that people don't have to only use JS in web scripting."

People:

That feeling when you've been programming, scripting and developing games, software and web pages for nearly a decade and you still feel like a talentless hack that doesn't deserve the wages you are paid, and constantly fear being exposed as a fraud by your peers... :x

There was this project where a bunch a scripts had been running for three weeks analysing a bunch of fileshares. The project was in overrun and the analysis wasn't anywhere near done.

I was given complete isolation and a team of people who were instructed to do anything I needed. I had them replicate the data to as many machines as possible and I started scripting the analysis with some sample data. After half a day of collecting laptops, desktops and severs I transfered my scripts to those machines and ran the analysis in 5 hours.

I felt like I saved the project.

I've been using C, C++ and Python for 10+ years and suddenly I moved to a new job where I had to learn and use JavaScript.
I think that it is different, as many say, but it is full of lacks and it's like a pile of hacks to make things work. It's a scripting language used as a programming language. What do you think about it?

It takes so much effort to put a quality video on YouTube.
1. Researching
2. Scripting
3. Recording ( screen record while doing the hands on of the topic, drawing concepts on whiteboard + voice over )
4. Editing
5. Thumbnail

Then upload.

Was working on my game engines scripting language for the terminal and this is how things went in roughly the space of 30 minutes

"Ok let's get a basic language structure defined..."

*Time passes*

"Ok, so now I have basic structure and concepts of a potential auto translation framework, external library use and just a dash of complicated file structures and use"

And I still haven't written a single line of code except for ignoring whitespace when starting to lex the file to transpiling ;-;

Scripting with Java is like trying to write a haiku and ending up writing The Odyssey- and it takes 20 years to run too.

I've been interested in security for years but despite knowing the theory I've always had this disconnect with actually doing it, about two years ago I finally managed to find and exploit my first cross-site scripting vulnerability in my companies Product whilst doing some routine acceptance testing. It was a penny drop moment for me which has led to some very interesting projects and It was pretty badass.

Taught myself assembler at 13 (this was the mid 1980s) and wondered how the hell people could stand to do this. Then I found out there were more abstract languages like BASIC or COBOL. So I taught myself BASIC and MS-DOS batch scripting. Various other languages came later (PROLOG, Pascal, C, Smalltalk, C++, VisualBasic, etc). But it’s never been easy for me because I suck at math and complicated logic structures. Especially not good with OOP. My brain was ruined by learning procedural coding first. It refuses to incorporate OOP.

- Played with and learned Scratch
- Learned some Python, made some weird little programs
- Learned C, using two good books: K&R C and Zed Shaw's "Learn C the Hard Way" (back when it was still in development and was free to read on the internet)
- Made LOTS of programs in C
- Came back to Python when I wanted to learn network programming
- Learned some Racket/Lisp, Bash scripting along the way
- Now I use all of the above, minus Scratch

Ugh! So boring writing the same thing over and over! So instead I wrote a ruby script to generate some C# code for me!

Honestly...I just make excuses to do stuff with Ruby 😂

Is python a good language for building a RestAPI? Personally I don't have any experience with python yet, but what I've gathered, is that python is great for scripting, and big data.

I have a bit of knowledge about Node.js, and I really like the structure, and it's so easy to make an API using express.js.

I've already read a bunch of articles about it, but I'd like to know what the community feels about the two languages?

Guys, a company's HR mailed me for a position that requires strong experience of ">3 years in Python with C or C++".

Does it mean Python and C/C++?
Or do they need someone who is using C/C++ to write Python?

I have some experience with adding Python support to C++ code. Does it count? 😁

So my father asked me what I think about filemaker. I researched, while we were waiting for the food (restaurant) bs holy fuck, I've never gotten this bad vibes from a from something I believe to be a scripting language.

> proprietary (Apple)
> only articles I found about it were related to LinkedIn or at least written like they were
> not a single text based tutorial on the first pages of the search result, only videos (didn't watch them, because my mobile data is too scared for that)
> I can't find anything remotely explaining what this shit is about.
wikipedia was the most best resource I could find
> Free ebook about "how to train your junior developer" for filemaker requires me to enter way too much personal information.

Wrote a bunch of Python scripts that alter an lsf script for software that we use in our lab. So now we have a Python 'library' of sorts that runs the simulation files, changes variables in the files, exports data, analyzes, tabulates, and continues until done.

I've automated potentially weeks of work to happen in minutes. I know this is run of the mill here, but I am fairly proud.

What do you think of shell scripting?

Not Friday FML...SCCM SCRIPTING TODAY

If you like scripting I can recommended you Perl6.
It may be no as popular as other languages or its predecessor, but its definitely worth a try.
Its also and excellent replacement for Shell-Scripts.

I'm boutta make a scripting language with classes, trait generics AND two kinds of value types

Call me Mr. Dangerous 😎

So today I started working on a code base someone else wrote and stubled across this and thought it was worth sharing.

Why somebody would be doing something like this is beyond my understanding.

Not commenting on the empty catch block keep in mind the whole snippet has nothing to do with rest of the code...

WHY!!!!!?!?!?!?!

Maybe people have not been around a long time here. But this JS bashing has been going on for half a decade. I honestly don't care about the merits of the language. It does what I need it to for my work. If I need more performance I drop to the C++ anyway. I like a lot of the functionality especially for arrays/lists. I love the ... operator for dynamic lists. It is very useful in the my GUI work. As a scripting language it is pretty nice.

But know this, the bashings will continue until morale improves...

Probably when I took my first dip into scripting and realized it was possible to inject stupid jokes into any website I knew.

I have a pretty successful project on github

Which I don't think is necessarily my best achievement but all the stuff I do at work is not open

I used the project as a way to learn bash scripting and it kinda caught on.
Sadly I'm not a sys admin or anything I'm more of hardware/embedded engineer but it's still cool to have one of my projects being so used. And I got to learn a little of bash along the way 😁 I now feel super comfortable in a terminal and reading man pages to figure things our which was a skill i lacked previously. I definitely learn better by doing and fixing mistakes along the way

- scripting some unix helpu script
- searching google and stackoverflow for simple solutions:

"Just use 'sed --akeib )-£?"/'/#'. Can't you read man pages ffs?"

"Dude, awk is totally the thing you want to use for this kinda thing!"

"Honestly, have you ever heard of perl?"

Mhhh. CMake scripting. Always fun. I can barely describe how enfuriating it is dealing with this. Literally shaking.

how long have you been programming?
(I'm a 14y/o that's been programming/scripting for ~5 years now)

I've started learning shell scripting to help me write npm scripts for my web dev workflows. I'm actually really enjoying working with the shell.

Oh boy. 2.5k loc of legacy bash code. The task is to give every function its own script since that is literally what this script is. Cha8ned together individual scripts . Fingers crossed its actually just breaking out functions :x

Having a crack at switching from vim to emacs, my understanding of the major differences are as follows

* departure from modal editing
* emacs provides a more comprehensive environment
* More powerful scripting capability,
* my pinky will complain,
* I might just about to enter a new church

Any advice for a newb? Hoping there's a few of you out there

That moment when your code works and the results are flooding in. But still waiting for something to fail

I would really love a type-safe python - quickly write a script with all the IDE-coddling that a type system can bring, and run/debug it with no compilation.

I'm a big typescript fan but the compile step and all the issues of the node ecosystem are a pain.

Really wanna play with F#'s scripting capabilities but not yet supported on dot net core.

MyPy is somewhat promising but it's slow and not the most ergonomic, library support is still lagging behind, and it's not expressive as a proper type system.

For all the languages we are blessed with these days, it's an odd void.

Did I ever mention how much I hate reading through perl scripts?

Seriously, I can read through BASH hell anyday, Python's fine, PHP... But out of all of the scripting languages, Perl is just something that makes me want to scratch my eyes out.

It doesn't help it used to be the sysadmin's language of choice in the past.

Perl just hurts my brain.

Why isn't the Lua scripting language widely used in the industry? It's flexible, modular and it's packages aren't bad; seems like a great fit.

we(Friends) discovered this yesterday.

Steps:
1. created a file.js and added a console.
2. renamed the file.js to file.java
3. ran that file.java through node

result: displayed in that image.

Javascript running .java .....seriously?
js how many hidden surprises you have for me. it was even running in .txt, .php etc

Okay let's come to actual point .

I tried to research on this. however, i couldn't find any links related to it.

Well, I tried the same with casperjs and python.It behaved the same.
is this behaviour because it is a scripting language?
Please do share your thoughts on this

Started working on a per project in Rust (first time using Rust) .. a scripting language.

Rust is great, so fast, compiles in 0.5-1.2seconds on my $200 laptop as well! Pretty rare for safety, speed, AND compile speed to exist in one beautiful language.

Also my scripting language is the opposite of beautiful. Oh God.

My mom was a data analyst in the Army when I was a kid. At around 10 I remember her teaching me batch scripting. Just seeing code and working with the machine was amazing to me and since then I've tried to learn all I could.

I spent a long time not doing this kind of work and finally in the last few years decided to follow that passion. So for me 20 years of my own private passion has turned into a skilled and profitable career I wasn't expecting.

📋A hand-curated collection of useful and informative Swift Scripting materials.

the moment when i found the scripting panel on macromedia flash 5

What was the first programming/scripting language you learnt? 🤔

First day of job. Im doing jack shit. They just make me watch udemy courses of Azure and linux shell and bash scripting all for devops purposes so they can pay a microsoft certificate for me to pass and get certified and they pay for udemy courses. Im basically getting paid to watch courses on the job

After opening game files for Ragnarok Online and saw the quest files are human readable (lua or other scripting language). Had some Flash workshops to confirm my interest.
Later in college, I make games for every lecture projects (with my friends). Now our game studio is 7 years old.

My Gripe With Implicit Returns

In my experience I've found that wherever possible code should be WYSIWYG in terms of the effects per statement. Intent and the effects thereof should always be explicit per statement, not implicit, otherwise effects not intended will eventually slip in, and be missed.
It's hard to catch, and fix the effects of a statement intent where the statement in question is *implicit* because the effect is a *byproduct* of another statement.

Worse still, this sort of design encourages 'pyramid coding recursion hell', where some users will first decompose their program into respective scopes, and then return and compose them..atomically as possible, meaning execution flow becomes distorted, run time state becomes dependent not on obvious plain-at-sight code, but on the run time state itself. This I've found is a symptom of people who have spent too much time with LISP or other eye-stabbingly fucky abominations. Finally implicit returns encourage a form of thinking where programmers attempt to write code that 'just works' without thinking about how it *looks* or reads. The problem with opaque-programming is that while it may or may not be effortless, much more time is spent in reading, debugging, understanding, and maintaining code than is spent writing it--which is obviously problematic if we have a bunch of invisible returns everywhere, which requires new developers reading it to stop each and every time to decide whether to mentally 'insert' a return statement.

This really isn't a rant, as much as an old bitter gripe from the guy that got stuck with the job of debugging. And admittedly I've admired lisp from afar, but I didn't want to catch the "everything is functional, DOWN WITH THE STATE" fever, I'm no radical.

Just god damn, think of the future programmer who may have to read your code eventually.

I think scripting makes your brain dead. I miss feeling like a "programmer" I hate web dev.

Why the fuck can't ls have the size listings like Windows' DIR command?

Why can't there be a simple command scripting solution, like BATCH, without it being as potentially complicated as SH to set up?

Goddammit, even though Windows sucks dick, they did do some things better...

Why people uses Python for OS scripting? What’s the point in forcing me to download a proper interpreter to run a script when the same result can be achieved with a more portable and cleaner Bash/PowerShell script?!?!

From long Using Visual Studio Code for Programming.

Why i love
supports Typescript
supports java
Lighter
plugins available like linter, git lense

Best for small web app projects.

And Favourite IDE, intellij Idea

Why ?
For writing java i use as
it can easily generate getter setters
constructor
importing
and build process.
best for java.

last but not the least
Nano
why ?
because most of the devops configuration, requires to be done via terminal only and i often use nano.
it is good for shell scripting,
editing configurations

that is all....

Bought a new toy drone to play with at home, Ryze Yello. It boasts an Open SDK on the box and claims to be programmable. Awesome, I think, I end up buying and going home to get to work.

All is great using the app, I can fly the drone and the video feed is mostly usable. Now let's get in to the SDK and see what we have.

Docs say I've got a few basic commands, 8 directional flips, 6 directions of movement, rotate, takeoff, and land. Plus a config option to set the speed. After a bit of tinkering I discovered that only 3 commands actually work: takeoff, flip, land. The rest error out with no (currently) useful message.

A bit more searching online tells me that they borked the commands with a recent firmware update and are working on it as of 3 months ago.

I wish I knew more about firmware or deconstructing the wifi packets from the app so I could try to do something useful.

So many stupid things I wanted to do with an automated drone and I'm stuck waiting for them to fix their firmware to put functionality back into the device.

Got anymore runtime exception handlers with that?

When a paid service that promises a million connection types can't even do an initial sync 🤦‍♂️. Back to bash scripting it is...

A friend suggested that I'd start learning a scriptable language like Ruby, Python or JavaScript instead of beginning with HTML and CSS, until I feel comfortable with programming.
I want to be a web developer and Ive learned some HTML.
So, any opinions?

I was browsing the jobs secion on SO, and came across a position looking for a 'Python Software Engineer.' WHAAAAA? PYTHON IS A FUCKING SCRIPTING LANGUAGE! SINCE WHEN IS IT SUITABLE FOR SOFTWARE ENGINEERING?

shutdown an old Jenkins CI pipeline from one of our teams... after one month they call us to bring it online again because they don't know how to build it manually.... lol #automation #scripting #jenkins

I get really bored doing the same work again and again. I found that with programming/scripting I can automate boring stuff.

So now I spend twice the time doing a program to automate things. XD

Finally. Fuck the exams (eventhough they went quite well). At last I can start work on my scripting language

Can gamedevelopers stop using lua as their freaking scripting language..
Every time I try and figure out how tables work and think I finally get it it throws a big fuck you curve ball.

Oh and then they use json file to store the data of a table except that those json interfaces are complete retards.

If you are going to support json files then why the fuck won't you put in a small fucking inconsecential JS interperter so you can actually find some docs regarding more complex fucking docs then those simple minded t[guildName] = "guild"

Another thing, why the fuck does lua not use {} like every other langauge. I use those curly brackets to figure out where shit start and ends half the freaking time.

Fuck this I'm out for today...
And a big fuck you with both middle fingers to any dev that thinks lua is a great scripting language for plugins.

Going back to my guilty pleasure and working on my Cosmos based operating system, going to take the shit task of building a scripting language and building some custom libraries to allow people to develop applications, system utilities and even custom shells and graphics managers!

Wish me luck!

I wasted fucking hours just trying to find out why curl doesn't send the data I've interpolated from a variable.

It doesn't even send the fucking hardcoded part of the data. I've compared it with a curl command generated by firefox, which works fine. Literally the only difference is that I interpolate a variable and I've echoed the contents of that variable and that was fine as well. I've even checked the interpolated string and it was fine.

And then I moved more stuff into the hardcoded part and it just started to work.

Wtf is this bullshit. I really feel like learning intermediate bash scripting is just a waste of time, just how complicated can you make debugging something so simple.

Every fucking time I give bash scripting a chance this shit costs me so much time, patience and motivation, I really wanna prefer that shit to python, because managing python dependencies for a script sucks ass^2,, but at least I can get shit done in Python. Just fucking end me or give me a language that doesn't make me wanna shoot myself

Final year of my diploma in Information Tech, I overhear a coursemate, well-known know-it-all, explaining what Javascript is:
"It's somewhat like Java but it's used for scripting purposes."
I swear to the Lord Almighty, I wish I could drive my palm through my face.

Fucking project lead!!! I was told to make a configuration script i have no experience in scripting yet he expects me to deliver it the following day!!!

What technology/concept/programming language did you learn that made you feel way way more brilliant?

Me: Shell scripting, feel like god 😌

Why have I never touched bash scripting before?!

Using it to create an easier .NET Core build command thing for myself because I really don't like the default command syntax, been using it for 5 minutes and already in love with it...

Is there somebody with good linux script tutorials?

Everything is welcome.

What could possibly be wrong with me if I had to look at almost every single answer of the Basic Algorithm Scripting exercises on FreeCodeCamp? I spend days tying to solve some of them and just couldn’t. Had to look at the answers. Then I try few days after and maybe remember half of the answer. How can I change this?

I decided to try shell scripting by making myself a nice configurable menu using dmenu that I can add commands to and that isn't cluttered with desktop entries. Worked suprisingly well tbh

This rant can basically be boiled down to the name of the software in use/question:
FileMaker Pro 8.5

Please chime in if you have ever had the privelege of working with this gem of a database program, especially the scripting capabilities...

Trying to make it print/save/export an individual PDF file into a folder specified/created by one field with the filename set from another field. Will probably get it to work but the drag and drop scripting style reminds me of setting up an autoclicker for runescape; so fricken painful. Love to hear your comments.

Also happens to be running on an ancient PPC G5 iMac with 1 Gig of RAM running 10.4.11 hidden in the back room of an old warehouse with extra creepy flickering lights...

EFFF EMMM ELLL

So yeah thats my rainy Friday rant, hope you all are having this much fun.

Still using a database from 90' - Enea Polyhedra:
- no decent visual sql client
- utterly limited scripting language
- weird communications protocol
- no redundancy beyond master-replica
- no encryption of communication protocols
- etc.

## Scripting myself out of the company

who needs an expensive profiler, when you can make thread dumps and compile them into a flamegraph for free without any risk of outages!

Though what bothers me is that I'm yet to come across a person in this company who knows how to read them (besides me)...

Are flamegraphs really THAT unpopular?

I mean.. you can represent the whole profile in a single image!

Everything that works on your machine, will most likely fail at scale.

Ensure that you have the right toolset. Learn more than just scripting.

Learn databases

Need some dev feedback here, went to twitter and got nothing and thought here is probably the best place...

I'm working on a dev terminal for my game engine and I'm building a basic app development for it (CLI and CLGUI) but not sure if I should allow for full RGB via Hex or should I just stick with the standard CGA 16 colour pallet...

And I'm thinking of building a basic scripting language that will transpile into an obfuscated JSON structure (Mostly because I have a lot of experience at building systems that use JSON as a scripting language) but just want to know if anyone could recommend things to try

first time i learned to programme was, when i discovered the scripting window on macromedia flash 5

My Linkedin feed is bombarded with .NET and C++ jobs.

I don't like C# and don't know C++.
I understand the demand for C++ but not .NET.

Every time I use C# or Powershell I feel weird and handicapped by Microstuff's prison.
Java, Python,Node.js and bash scripting feel so much better. Why there is such a demand for .NET devs?

Looking to sharpen and pursue a SysAdmin/DevOps career, looking at online job offers to get the big picture of required skills and I say FUCK. It would take me a lifetime.
Azure, AWS, Google cloud platform.
CD tools: Ansible, Chef or Puppet
Scripting ninja with Python/Node and Shell/Power shell.
Linux & Windows administration
Mongo, MySQL and their relatives.
Networking, troubleshooting failure in disturbed systems
Familiarity with different stacks. Fuck. (Apache, nginx, etc..)
Monitoring infrastructure ( nagios, datadog .. )
CI tools: jenkins, maven, etc..
DB versioning: liquibase, flyway etc.
FUCK FUCK FUCK.
Are they looking for Voltron? FUCK YOU FROM THE DEEPEST LEVEL OF MY DEEP FUCK.

In searching for 2 days now if python is a scripting language or programming language, it seems to be a Neverending discussion...

What’s the point in writing huge server side applications in scripting languages?

Been meaning to rant about this for awhile. Currently in college and in this class we have to write BASH scripts which isn't ever that hard. Except for the fact that everything is checked against a pre-written script. FUCK I just wrote a complex script that does work but because it's not EXACT its coming back failed even tho it prints everything correct and works.

So now instead of fixing the script I'm back on DevRant wasting more time.

I haven't. Yet.

I started taking programming seriously when I got to 9th grade. 3 years isn't enough time. Probably enough to be able to put out okay-ish code in a scripting language, but not good code.

Due to sad circumstances at my current company, I had to work with bash scripting exclusively.

At least I found joy even in this situation and now I'm satisfied with my bash TDD practices...

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I don't know what to do because union and sum types both totally suck but I need them for my scripting language

Union types are fun and intuitive because they can be used with type refinement but they're not hierarchical thus bad for generics.

Sum types (or tagged unions) are great because they're hierarchical and can be nested properly but they need ugly type matching constructs.

The positive thing is I'm not making a systems language anymore so I only wanna jump of a bridge every second day

Opinion | What kind software project could be submitted to college as a supplement ... Like a scripting language build from scratch?

Is there anyone who has ever used frappe/erpnext?

It drives me nuts, as much as I like the framework doing any thing that needs some basic scripting is a pain!
I MEAN, COME ON MAN, WHY ARE DOCS SO HARD TO COME BY? WHY DOES YOUR "CUSTOM SCRIPT" EDITOR LACK BAISIC LINE NUMBERS? WHY ARE YOUR ERROR MESSAGES TELLING ME EVERYTHING BUT THE LINE THE ERROR'S ON, SO I'LL BE HOPEFULL THE ERROR IS IN THE DEV CONSOLE? WHY NOT USE MONACO, SOMETHING, ANYTHING THAT WILL SHOW SYNTAX ERRORS? I'VE WAISTED HOURS ON LITTLE AUTOMATION SCRIPTS!!!! WHY WHY WHY WHY????

My Dad wakes up at 4AM catches me in front of my Pentium 4 PC writing a scripting text editor and yells at me to shut down that crappy machine and go to sleep. 10 years ago🙄

- Understand programming and how the software work... then choose whatever programming language to build it, it is just Scripting after all.

Let's discover some Python stuffs tonight !

I think it's one of the best scripting language to automate easily boring tasks, am I right ?

What would be the easiest starting point on low level languages?

I started with java, learned to hate it.
I continued with web development, learned to hate it.
Continued with PHP, learned to hate it.
Continued with scripting languages like Python, NodeJS, etc.., hated it from the beginning but it was easy.

But everytime i touch something like c/c++/rust/etc i immeadiatly give up, because the syntax is so different than all these other high level languages and so much null/type safety and so on.

But i want to get into low level programming languages which compile to an executable and don't get executed on some "vm".

Dev: Now that I finally know PHP and JS it must be really easy to find a good framework and use to build my beautiful website.

The options are limited: AngularJS, ReactJS, Ember, ActivateJS, BackboneJS, ExpressJS, Laravel, RactiveJS, Node.JS, Meteor, Knockout, Symphony, Codeignitor

And yes, you thought if you don't like AngularJS you can easily switch to ReactJS. But guess what, every framework will use their own scripting languages like Jade, Blade, Typescript making it learning something new extremely smooth.

The documentation will be part of another rant

As a novice programmer, learning about the logging package in Python and how to utilize it is really exciting to me. It's basically what I've been working with recently (besides the script for macOS that won't fucking work).

Any one here have a degree in Electrical Engineering or Electronics Engineering? I'm thinking about going back to school, but I'm not sure it's worth the money since I live in the US. (cries in over-expensive education costs)

I do a lot infrastructure work and some super basic programming/scripting but I think I really want to get into hardware maybe zone in on either RF or take a stab at amps/effects pedals for guitar and bass.

as an aside, I'm not trying to go back to school for job or career related reasons, I just want to noodle with stuff and maybe create my own circuitry for stuff.

I've gone through so many tiling wm this semester and can't figure out what I like best...
i3, bspwm, xmonad, windowchef, herbstuffwm, awesomewm, fvwm, etc.

I love the cleanliness and productivity aspect of them compared to something like Windows and it's floating/snap feature. Awesomewm looks like a good choice but the config scripting is quite verbose.

So many choices! Probably doesn't help I want to keep it consistent across my laptop and 3 monitor setup (1 21:9, 2 16:9).

1. I like making stuff that I can use again and again later.
2. I can't draw for shit, so it's a way to be creative.
3. Automating/scripting things is a general passion.

After a big part of the day spending in Angular i decided to do something else. I went studying a bit on how to increase conversion. Partially because this was the main goal of the webdev team in the coming months. The UX designer saw it and told me if he where me he would study more code and scripting.

Like dude. Wtf. Im doing this for 1 in the 8 working hours. Get off my back asshole.

I said and will say again (over and over) Microsoft WTF!

Set-CalendarProcessing -Identity $userUpn -AutomateProcessing AutoAccept -AllowConflicts $false -BookingType 'Standard' -BookingWindowInDays 365 -MaximumDurationInMinutes 1440 -AllowRecurringMeetings $true -EnforceSchedulingHorizon $false -ScheduleOnlyDuringWorkHours $false -ConflictPercentageAllowed 0 -MaximumConflictInstances 0 -ForwardRequestsToDelegates $true -DeleteAttachments $true -DeleteComments $true -RemovePrivateProperty $true -DeleteSubject $true -AddOrganizerToSubject $true -DeleteNonCalendarItems $true -TentativePendingApproval $true-EnableResponseDetails $true -OrganizerInfo $true -AllRequestOutOfPolicy $false -AllBookInPolicy $true -AllRequestInPolicy $true -RemoveOldMeetingMessages $true -AddNewRequestsTentatively $true -ProcessExternalMeetingMessages $false -RemoveForwardedMeetingNotifications $true

ok I "splatted" that command but yet does not look much better :-)

Oh how I miss my dear old VIm and SSH sessions can't wait to go back to where I belong!

Got into an argument the other day over the definition of scripting languages.

He said python isn’t because it can be compiled while I said it can be both since you can you can use without compiling. Same could be said for Java when using with Selenium for automation.

Thoughts?

Again new language!!
This time scripting language...php and start learning today and finds interesting.
Suggest some best resources?
BTW i m enjoying learning php.yeahhhh✌️

My first introductions to programming was in Garry's mod.
There'e a mod called wiremod, which added logic gates, buttons, and other entities that manipulated the game with input/output. And on top of that a little scripting language they called Expression 2.

Me and some friends would code stupid things in Expression all day to use in the game.
I wasn't too good at it, but I had fun. Shortly after I started going to a high school with a computer science focus, and had 2 years of proper education in C#.

The closest thing to cutting edge was probably the first survey project.

We found something named remote scripting in a sub folder in the visual interdev default site.

It was the precursor to ajax, a few years before ajax was born and we used it to interactively call the backend from the page.

Otherwise I have mostly worked on mature projects where cutting edge is mostly avoided.

So... My brother got his computer when I was 6 years old... It was a 286 with the new 64mb HD and the screen had 16 gray scale color...
Latter it was given to me when my brother got his 486dx2 and I did a course in ms-dos and batch scripting.
That's it, lots of sfigher, puzzle bubble, Dina blast, wolfeinstein 3D...

Couldn't be arsed with all the conditional compilation that angelscript required, so I dumped right back to good ol' lua for now.

Got lua in, vm started, loading strings and pushing/popping the stack.

Got SDL actually drawing as intended.

I don't know even half of what I'm doing.
Apparently header files that end in ".hpp" are specific to c++, while .h are for c headers.

I like the new SDL2 though, little bit different than SDL1. Not a lot of tutorials cover the difference, but I could kinda suss out from the documentation where I needed to adapt, even though I'm still pretty loose on the library, on the docs, and on c++ itself.

Still just a learning project.

Also, I'm continually surprised there isn't a portable, platform independent tool or little language just for replacing all pseudo-languages out there like .bat and .sh, and .zsh

Maybe even just a tool that standardizes it all, then takes config files that map the new standard to system dependant commands, so you can download the damn thing, configure the relevant environment variables, drop in the platform dependent configuration (or your browser or package tool detects what platform you are on and chooses the relevant package/download for your platform), write a console script and the tool automatically translates, and emits the system-relevant commands to that platform's console (so you don't even need much platform-specific code to do things like file access).

I started in Lua in a program called AMS (it made autorun programs but has full scripting support making it pretty powerful) making little software applications.

That evolved into PHP and shortly after JS, HTML and CSS.

After a while i added other languages and it continues to grow today.

The UI aspect has just been something i have always had an eye for.

I'm about to graduate and I have no idea what I'm doing. I tried learning the basics and even went through a lot of extra stuff. I can only say I dabbled in scripting, web scraping and a little bit of software development. However when I compare myself to my peers, I feel so out of place. I can't confidently say I know even the concepts I practiced. I am really interested in the field but I feel like I'm way behind and this is constantly nagging me. Is this normal or is there anything I can do about it?