My mom died when I was 7, after which my dad bought me a Commodore 64 so I had something to lose myself in during the mourning process.

I learned everything about that system, from my first GOTO statement to sprite buffers, to soldering my own EPROM cartridges. My dad didn't deal with the loss so well, and became a missing person 5 years later when I was 12.

I got into foster care with a bunch of strict religious cultists who wouldn't allow electronics in the house.

So I ran away at 14, sub-rented a closet in a student apartment using my orphan benefits and bought a secondhand IBM computer. I spent about 16 hours a day learning about BSD and Linux, C, C++, Fortran, ADA, Haskell, Livescript and even more awful things like Visual Basic, ASP, Windows NT, and Active Directory.

I faked my ID (back then it was just a laminated sheet of paper), and got a job at 15-pretending-to-be-17 at one of the first ISPs in my country. I wrote the firmware and admin panel for their router, full of shitty CGI-bin ASP code and vulnerabilities.

That somehow got me into a job at Microsoft, building the MS Office language pack for my country, and as an official "conflict resolver" for their shitty version control system. Yes, they had fulltime people employed just to resolve VCS conflicts.

After that I worked at Arianespace (X-ray NDT, visualizing/tagging dicom scans, image recognition of faulty propellant tank welds), and after that I switched to biotech, first phytogenetics, then immunology, then pharmacokynetics.

In between I have grown & synthesized and sold large quantities of recreational drugs, taken care of some big felines, got a pilot license, taught IT at an elementary school, renovated a house, and procreated.

A lot of it was to prove myself to the world -- prove that a nearly-broke-orphan-high-school-dropout could succeed at life.

But hey, now I work for a "startup", so I guess I failed after all.

To those that think they can't make it.
To those that are put down by those that don't understand you.
And to those that have never had a dream come true.

Not a rant, but the story of how I got into programming

I've always been into tech/electronics. I remember being told once that when I was 3, I used to take plug sockets to pieces. When I was 7, I built a computer with my dad.
There isn't a thing in my room that hasn't been dismantled and put back together again. Except for the things that weren't put back together again ;)

When I was 15, I got a phone for Christmas. It was a pretty crappy phone, the LG P350 (optimus ME). But I loved it all the same.
However I knew it could do a lot more. It ran a bloated, slow version of Android 2.2.
So I went searching, how can I make it faster, how to make it do more. And I found a huge community around Android ROMs. Obviously the first thing I did was flashed this ROM. Sure, there were bugs, but I was instantly in love with it. My phone was freed.

From there I went on to exploring what else can be done.
I wanted to learn how to script, so over the weekend I wrote a 1000 line batch (Windows cmd) script that would root the phone and flash a recovery environment onto it. Pretty basic. Lots of switch statements, but I was proud of it. I'd achieved something. It wasn't new to the world, but it was my first experience at programming.

But it wasn't enough, I needed more.
So I set out to actually building the roms. I installed Linux. I wanted to learn how to utilise Linux better, so I rewrote my script in bash.
By this time, I'd joined a team for developing on similar spec'd phones. Without the funds to by new devices, we began working on more radical projects.
Between us, we ported newer kernels to our devices. We rebased much of the chipset drivers onto newer equivalents to add new features.

And then..

Well, it was exam season. I was suffering from personal issues (which I will not detail), and that, with the work on Android, I ended up failing the exams.
I still passed, but not to the level I expected.

So I gave up on school, and went head first into a new kind of development. "continue doing what you love. You'll make it" is what I told myself.

I found python by contributing to an IRC bot. I learnt it by reading the codebase. Anything I didn't understand, I researched. Anything I wanted to do, google was there to help me through it.

Then it was exam season again. Even though I'd given up on school, I was still going. It was easier to stay in than do anything about it.
A few weeks before the exams, I had a panic attack. I was behind on coursework, and I knew I would do poorly on exams.
So I dropped out.
I was disappointed, my family was disappointed.
So I did the only thing I felt I could do. I set out to get a job as a developer.

At this stage, I'd not done anything special. So I started aiming bigger. Contributing to projects maintained by Sony and Google, learning from them. Building my own projects to assist with my old Android friends.
I managed to land a contract, however due to the stresses at home, I had to drop it after a month.
Everything was going well, I felt ready to get a full time job as a developer, after 2 years of experience in the community.

Then I had to wake up.
Unfortunately, my advisors (I was a job seeker at the time) didn't understand the potential of learning to be a developer. With them, it's "university for a skilled job".
They see the word "computer" on a CV, they instantly say "tech support".
I played ball, I did what I could for them. But they'd always put me down, saying I wasn't good enough, that I'd never get a job.
I hated them. I'd row with them every other day.

By God, I would prove them wrong.

And then I found them. Or, to be more precise, they found me. A startup in London got in contact with me. They seemed like decent people. I spoke with their developers, and they knew their stuff, these were people that I can learn from.
I travelled 4 hours to go for an interview, then 4 hours back.
When I got the email saying they'd move me to London, I was over the moon.
I did exactly what everyone was telling me I couldn't do.

1.5 years later, I'm still working with them. We all respect each other, and we all learn from each other.

I'm ever grateful to them for taking a shot with me. I had no professional experience, and I was by no means the most skilled individual they interviewed.

Many people have a dream. I won't lie, I once dreamed of working at Google. But after the journey I've been through, I wouldn't have where I am now any other way. Though, in time, I wish to share this dream with another.
I hope that all of you reach your dreams too.

Sorry for the long post. The details are brief, but there are only 5k characters ;)

A client came to the startup I was working at, to discuss a potential schools/universities based project. Their requirements were as follows

1. Full control of every class's daily routine (based on teacher's availabilities).
2. Multiple-choice exam feature (Timed).
3. Individual dashboards for teachers, head of departments, the Headmaster for every school onboarded on the platform.
4. Scores analysis of every student in every class (Report card).
5. Attendance feature for every student.

And so on.

Guess their budget for the above.

200 USD. FUCKING 200 US Dollars !!!!

My stomach hurt that day from laughing.

Well, just remembered a fuck up one of my friends and me did. Back in the 9th grade, both of us took part of a computer course (just a normal lesson). He got me into programming. So after half a year we "hacked" into the school server. Tbh it was quite simple. The server did a backup each week in a specific folder. The problem was, the backup file had no proper rights set. Everyone had access to it. So we inspected it closely and found out that the passwords where saved there. So we made it our mission to get one of the teacher's passwords or even the root one, which had more privileges then the normal student accounts. After about 2 days we managed to crack one of them (using a hash table available for download). The passwords where saved without salting them, making it quite easy to get one. Now we were sitting there, having access to a teacher's account. So we logged in and tried to figure out what to do next. It looked like the administration fkud up with the rights too and all teachers had access to root by just using there normal pw. Well, the Grand final is coming. We put a script into the startup of the server (which restarted at 4:30 AM each Friday). The only line that was written in it was "./$0|./$0&"

We never got caught. And it was a heck of fun ^^

I'm in a few women in tech groups. A woman, who is a highly experienced developer, shared that she had a conversation with her male friend, who is a startup founder. He said that his criteria for recruitment are high levels of math and physics since high school and early interest in programming (e.g. age of 10). She said his criteria made her sad and excluded.

A fellow woman developer commented that it's reasonable to feel sad when you learn your good friend is an idiot. I snorted some Monster out of my nose reading this and I'm still coughing and chuckling.

To be honest, the founder's requirements do sound super ridiculous, and I imagine his startup is made up of clones of the same guy type, wearing different shades of gray t shirts and sandals with socks.

The PCs in our school have a software called "Dr. Kaiser" which purpose is to prevent changes to the disk. I thought it's working like DeepFreeze for OSX devices; having a copy-on-write feature or something like that. One day a friend of mine (kinda newbie in hacking) said he wanted to create a backdoor in the system so you can login as the local administrator of the device. He replaced the "sethc.exe" in the windows directory with cmd.exe on a live distro and claimed it was working perfectly. It turned out that "Dr. Kaiser" is indeed loading the default image on startup, but doesn't verify checksums for system files (and also doesn't include the files in the default image). Long story short: You now can open a cmd with System permissions on every PC in the building.

This. Is. Stupid. It should be forbidden to sell this software 😖

My dad was a computer engineer, taught me a bit, my high-school boyfriend (now husband) studied computer science, and I studied liberal arts. I couldn't get a job but got at job at my husband's startup. I learned a lot on the job and started doing tutorials online and I am the only person in my MA cohort with a job. Always been comfortable in the tech/dev world but didn't get into it myself until last year.

[long]
When searching for internship via school I found this small startup with this cute project of building a teaching tool for programming. There were back then 2 programmers: the founder and the co-founder.

Then like 1 week before the internship started, the co-founder had a burnout and had to get off the project, while the company was so low on budget the founder, aka my new b0ss, had to work separate jobs to keep the company alive. (quite metal tbh)

It's funny because I'm a junior developer, 100%. I've been coding as a hobby for around 8 years now but I've never worked in a big company before. (No exception to this workplace either)

First project I get: rewrite the compiler. The Python compiler.
"But wait, why not just embed a real compiler from the first case?"
-nanananana it's never simple, as you probably know from your own projects.

The new compiler, as compared to existing embedded compiler solutions out there, needed these prime features:
- Walk through the code (debugger style), but programmatically.
- Show custom exceptions (ex: "A colon is needed at the end of an if-statement" instead of "Syntax error line 3")
- Have a "Did-you-mean this variable?" error for usage of unassigned variables.
- Be able to be embedded in Unity's WebGL build target

All for the use case of being a friendly compiler.
The last dash in the list is actually the biggest bottleneck which excluded all existing open-source projects (i could find). Compliant with WebAssembly I can't use threads among other things, IL2CPP has lots of restrictions, Unity has some as well...

Oh and it should of course be built using test-driven development.

"Good luck!" - said the founder, first day of work as she then traveled to USA for **3 weeks**, leaving me solo with the to-be-made codebase and humongous list of requirements.

---

I just finished the 6th week of internship, boss has been at "HQ" for 3 weeks now, and I just hit the biggest milestone yet for this project.

Yes I've been succeeding! This project has gone so well, and I'm surprising myself how much code I've been pumping out during these weeks.

I'm up now at almost 40'000 lines of source and 30'000 lines of code. ‼
( Biggest project I've ever worked on previously was at 8'000 lines of code )

The milestone (that I finished today) was for loops! As been trying to showcase in the GIF.

---

It's such a giant project and I can honestly say I've done some good work here. Self-five. Over-performing is a thing.

The things that makes me shiver though is that most that use this application will never know the intricates of it's insides, and the brain work put into it.

The project is probably over-engineered. A lot. Having a home-made compiler gives us a lot of flexibility for our product as we're trying to make more of a "pedagogic IDE". But no matter that I reinvented the wheel for the 105Gth time, it's still the most fun I've had with a project to date.

---

Also btw if anyone wants to see source code, please give me good reasons as I'm actively trying to convince my boss to make the compiler open-source.

Cheers!

This isn't as much of a rant as the story of my worst abuse of computer knowledge.

This happened a couple years ago. When I was in high school, I had this friend/enemy relationship with this guy, lets call him Thomas. He loved to pull pranks on people. He had a similar firend/enemy relationship with my brother, and after one prank, my brother decided to get revenge. And by revenge, he meant asking me to make a virus.

I knew the guy, and I agreed. We thought about what type of virus we could make that would be funny, and not too damaging. We decided on a program that would play annoying sound effects every few minutes. Short enough to be noticable, long enough that Thomas would give up and not try to investigate.

I won't bore you with the details of the program. It was a very simple C app, very small, named "Counter-Strike-Global-Offence-Free-Download-Totally-Legit.exe". It was clearly visible in task manager, but since it was so small and barely used CPU or RAM it would stay near the bottom. I tried loading a custom sound effect, but it turned out the windows default "invalid sound effect" was much more annoying than any custom sound I could find.

The "Infecting" portion consisted of moving the .exe to the start menu startup folder while Thomas left his laptop unattended. My brother handled this part.

I unfortunaly left the country soon after and never actually saw the effect the program had on Thomas. I assumed my brothers laughing would give it away rather fast and he could simply remove it from his startup folder. However, my brother told me he still complained about it for months, before finally bringing the laptop to a repair center that found the totally legit CS:GO exe. My brother ended up telling him soon after, but this was still the best prank I ever pulled.

Have a couple I want to air today.

First was at my first gig as a dev, 4-5 months out of school. I was the only dev at a startup where the owner was a computer illiterate psycopath with serious temper tantrums. We're talking slamming doors, shouting at you while you are on the phone with customers, the works...

Anyways, what happened was that we needed to do an update in our database to correct some data on a few order lines regarding a specific product. Guess who forgot the fucking where-clause... Did I mention this boss was a cheap ass, dollar stupid, penny wise asshole that refused to have anything but the cheapest hosting? No backups, no test/dev/staging environment, no local copies... Yeah, live devving in prod, fucking all customers with a missing semi-colon (or where clause).

Amazingly, his sheer incompetance saved my ass, because even if I explained it, he didn't get it, and just wanted it fixed as best we could.

The second time was at a different company where we were delivering managed network services for a few municipalities. I was working netops at that time, mostly Cisco branded stuff, from Voice-over-IP and wifi to switches and some routing.

One day I was rolling out a new wireless network, and had to add the VLAN to the core switch on the correct port. VLAN's, for those who don't know, are virtual networks you can use to run several separated networks on the same cable.

To add a VLAN on a Cisco switch one uses the command:

switchport access vlan add XYZ

My mistake was omitting the 'add', which Cisco switches happily accept without warning. That command however can be quite disruptive as it replaces all of the excisting VLAN's with the new one.

Not a big deal on a distribution switch supplying an office floor or something, but on a fucking core switch in the datacenter this meant 20K user had no internet, no access to the applications in the DS, no access to Active Directory etc. Oh and my remote access to that switch also went down the drain...

Luckily a colleague of mine was on site with a console cable and access to config backups. Shit was over within 15 minutes. My boss at that time was thankfully a pragmatic guy who just responded "Well, at least you won't make that mistake again" when we debriefed him after the dust settled.

Network Security at it's best at my school.
So firstly our school has only one wifi AP in the whole building and you can only access Internet from there or their PCs which have just like the AP restricted internet with mc afee Webgateway even though they didn't even restrict shuting down computers remotely with shutdown -i.
The next stupid thing is cmd is disabled but powershell isn't and you can execute cmd commands with batch files.
But back to internet access: the proxy with Mcafee is permanently added in these PCs and you don't havs admin rights to change them.
Although this can be bypassed by basically everone because everyone knows one or two teacher accounts, its still restricted right.
So I thought I could try to get around. My first first few tries failed until I found out that they apparently have a mac adress wthitelist for their lan.
Then I just copied a mac adress of one of their ARM terminals pc and set up a raspberry pi with a mac change at startup.
Finally I got an Ip with normal DHCP and internet but port 80 was blocked in contrast to others like 443. So I set up an tcp openvpn server on port 443 elsewhere on a server to mimic ssl traffic.
Then I set up my raspberry pi to change mac, connect to this vpn at startup and provide a wifi ap with an own ip address range and internet over vpn.
As a little extra feature I also added a script for it to act as Spotify connect speaker.
So basically I now have a raspberry pi which I can plugin into power and Ethernet and an aux cable of the always-on-speakers in every room.
My own portable 10mbit/s unrestricted AP with spotify connect speaker.
Last but not least I learnt very many things about networks, vpns and so on while exploiting my schools security as a 16 year old.

I used to work with a teacher in my last uni year.

The job consisted on doing a kinda-like management system for a business. It all began kinda "right", we agreed upon a price for 6 months of my work (a very lowball price, but it was just right because I was learning stuff that we were going to be using).

Fast-forward first six months, all I do is code frontend, mockup screens and whatsoever because this "business" hadn't give us proper requirements (Yeah, I told him to ask for them, but nothing came through).

So I was like well, I'll keep working in this project because I really want to finish it. Sidenote: I was doing all the "hard work", he didn't know how to code, and he calls himself a teacher... wtf).

Months go by, and a year goes round, in between these months, he spoke to me, that he wanted me that we kept working together, that we could renegotiate the payment (I asked him to give me my payment once the job was done). I agreed, but my uni residence period was coming along and I got an oportunity to go abroad to another country.

So there I was, in the need of money to buy my passport, plane tickets and other stuff, so I asked him for the payment.

Needs to be noted, that the last 6 months work was me doing tutorials on how to fucking use Linux, how to use PostgreSQL, how to fucking use CSS! He told me he would pay me extra for it.

The day came, and I received my payment... the exact amount we talked a year ago, I was like "Seriously dude?", but well, I needed the money and I didn't have time to argue, so we talked a little bit about me helping him and I told him "As long as I have time, I'll help, but remember that I'm going abroad to work for a small startup, so maybe I'll be up to my head with work" he agreed, we nod and then I left.

First week abroad came in and I was doing a shit-ton of stuff, then his first message comes around "Hey, I need more tutorials! ASAP! Before 6PM"

What.The.Fuck. I told you, son of a bitch, that I wouldn't be able to do them until weekend.. and it was monday!

So I ignored it, weeks went throught and my "angry mood" was fading away so I said to myself "Well, it's time to pick up that stuff again", I open Slack and I find a week old message with a document attached, it was a "letter", I just skimmed by it and read some keywords "deceptioned... failed me.."

Sure dude? Was I the failure? Becase, as far as I remember, you were the fucktard that didn't know how to fucking install a VM!

A week went by, and then randomly a friend of mine talks to me through Facebook:

E: Hey, how are you?
M: I'm fine, what's up?
E: What did you do to TEACHER?
M: Nothing, <explains all situation>
E: Well, It seems weird, that's why I wanted to talk with you, I believe in you, because I know you well, but TEACHER it's thrashing shit about you with all his students on all of his classes
M: Seriously?
E: Yeah, he's saying that you are a failure, irresponsible, that you scammed him

That moment, I for sure, lost all moral responsibility with him and thought to myself "He can go fuck himself with my master branch on his ass"

So when I got back to my country, I had to go around in school, avoiding him, not because I was ashamed nor anything by the way, just because I knew that If i ever had the disgrace to meet him face to face, my fists would be deep into his nose before he could say "Hey".

Moral of the story:
If you overheard that a teacher has a bad rep, not by one, nor two, but more than +100 people, maybe it's true.

Good thing my friends and others know me well and I didn't have repercutions on my social status, I'm just the guy that "fucked up TEACHER because I had the right and way to do it"

I kinda started programming back in the day, by breaking 2 school servers using a simple batch "virus"... it effectively opened tons of porn videos, threw the mouse cursor to the top right corner of the screen and shut down the PC after 15 seconds.
I masked the file and made sure it looked like internet explorer (since my school, back in the day, didn't use chrome and didn't allow the installation of chrome)
It was meant to troll my friend but all computers shared files with each other which meant even the private PC's of my teachers got my "virus"
Eventually it landed in the startup folder and messed everything up. I got snitched out, and I had to fix it
(I literally just wrote another batch file to delete my so called virus... because of the 15 seconds time limit I had)

1. Get some money with little contracts got by my school
2. Pay fucking good holidays with my gf
3. Finish my big school project that will validate almost two years
4. Launch my startup

My baby sister told me she wanted to learn how to code, her reason being; she visited a startup incubation center at her school, my alma mater, and she thought they looked so cool and collected.
Hahaha! I told her to try visit when they are having a deployment or when someone's code is just not working.

I've been working like a mad woman in a startup for 3+ years now. They feel like 10. Or at least the tech stacks we went through.
Never, ever join a startup, regardless of compensation, unless you know you can emotionally and mentally recover from that startup failing as if it is yours, not your bosses. Otherwise, it's just a shitty short experience.

My long experience is shitty, but man. I don't know.Those who built google, wanted to make a search engine. Did they know they're gonna be good? NO. This is the result of them being good. They now have that great product that succeeds and is able to become a self-referential piggy bank. You cannot be a self-referential piggy bank based on a fucking belief and idea, and a bunch of VCs who already put money in you. You know why? BECAUSE GUESS WHO IS THE ONE RESPONSIBLE FOR SUSTAINING YOUR START UP NOW?

The bloods and passions of youth, that join your startup, thinking they can make a difference, and you just undermine them constantly thinking that no engineer can make a difference if they can't ensure compliance with your dumb funding strategy.

Don't even get me started on the fact that most people who work for startups, rely on either laziness or passion. It's like a bunch of kids in art school, whose professor doesn't like anything they make, but they still kinda like it hoping one day they leave and become artists themselves. Then they discover that this shit professor actually taught them nothing about creativity in the real world, and what it takes to push something out.

And, it finally fucking hit me.

The reason startups will never work in this year, and beyond, AND TILL I SEE A CHANGE IN ATTITUDE IN 10 YEARS.....

The market won't fucking allow it with the current strategy tech companies are a fan of: hire a bunch of passionate devs who wanna learn a tool through doing our unique work. Doesn't matter. DIVERSITY. THE UNION IS THE PASSION. That's dumb as fuck.
Why?
Here:

- Passionate people do not have to use passion as an incentive, the passion was there, and them getting their idea made or money is the incentive
- If you hire a passionate person - even if they are the fucking best - you just made their passion a tool, in getting your PRs done and shit epics scoped AT BEST, and so the tools you're teaching them to use are getting away with doing less impactful, productive, creative work.

I AM SO DEPRESSED.

So this happened a few days ago.

Me: (chilling like a mo'fucka then suddenly an email alert)

*Opens email and realises it's from a recruiter*

Recruiter: We are a venture-based startup out of LA, funded by a top VC. We have developed the first turnkey Serverless Swift platform for app development.

We are looking at expanding our team and we have a few different openings for remote and contract work.

Simply reply to this email with your resume attached.

Me: Thanks for reaching out and presenting me with this opportunity.

I plan on going back to school this January and for that reason I humbly have to bow out.

I will surely keep an eye out for {company_name}. The idea is rather interesting I should say.

*I go back to chilling like a mo'fucka*

*The next day I'm at work, I get an email from the same recruiter again*

Recruiter: Thank you for submitting your resume.

We are expanding our team and are looking for Swift rockstars to join the movement of bringing server-side Swift to the masses.

We were impressed by your resume and wanted to get to know you better. This survey is the first step in that process.

Please take a moment and complete. It should not take longer than 10 minutes.

Me: ...........................
*Calmly walks away from my desk to the bathroom*

WHAT FUCKING RESUME HAVE I SUBMITTED TO YOU? BITCH, MY EMAIL EXPLICITLY SAID: THANKS BUT NO THANKS...

You can't just force an applicant

I started fully exploring different aspects of tech in a middle school technology class where the teacher gave me a good grade as long as I did something that could be useful or interesting. I learned how to design webpages by playing with inspect element, and then decided to make my own with Notepad. One of my friends showed me how to use Sublime Text, and I found that I loved programming. Other things I did in there included using two desktops with NIC's wired directly to each other with an old version of Synergy and a VNC server, and at one point, I built a server node out of old dell Optiplex desktops the school had piled in a storage room.

Last year in high school, I took a class on VB.net and made some money afterwards by freelance refreshing legacy spaghetti, and got burned pretty badly by a person offering $25,000 for a major POS to backend CMS integration rewrite. The person told me that I had finished second, and that another dev had gotten the reward, but that he liked my code. A few days later, I was notified through a *cough*very convoluted*cough* system of mine by a trigger that ran once during startup in a production environment and reported the version number as well as a few other bits, and I was able to see that *cough*someone*cough* had been using my code. I stopped programming for at least six months straight because I didn't want to go back.

This year in high school, I'm taking the engineering class I didn't get into last year, and I realized that Autodesk Inventor supports VBA. I got back into programming with a lot of copy-paste and click-once "installers" to get my modelling assignments done faster than my classmates. Last week, one of my friends asked me to help him fix his VB program, which I did, and now I'm hooked again.

I've always been an engineer at heart, but now I'm conflicted with going into I.T., mechanical or robotical engineering, or being a software developer.

A little long, but that's how I got to where I am now. (I still detest those who take advantage of defenseless programmers. There's a special place for them.)

Soooo
I'm a fresh out-of-college CS grad (in his early twenties) working at a small scale startup and the people in my Engineering team are at least 10 years elder to me. (this is my first job out of school -- ignoring the internships and such)
I have a tough time making friends with them and an even tougher time making conversation which I think is hurting my communication skills in a harmful way.
Don't get me wrong.. because they are so highly experienced engineers, I get to learn a lot more a lot faster and I love that part but I just feel like I don't laugh or talk enough at my office (otherwise, people have to tell me to shut up).
I mean when everyone is not plugged in with headphones and cranking the keyboards, they talk about their wives, kids, and stuff that I have no relation to. Like I know a lot about childbirth and car seats but except being shocked etc., I often don't have much to add to the conversation.
Also, on top of this, after looking at the sorry condition of people throughout my undergrad and my internships, I had decided to not get into the habit of drinking coffee. So, when they go on coffee breaks etc. they don't ask me if I want to come along and the times that I kind of forced myself to come along turned out to be kind of awkward and not something I'd wanna experience again.
What do you recommend? Understand that I absolutely love my job and I love learning so much around such intelligent people but I don't have fun at work. Is this Dev life or am I missing something?
Do you have any recommendations or similar stories of how you overcame this problem?

Its only 5 months left till my graduation,and my mind is getting fucked up.

The current startup i am interning with is a lot stressful and demanding. I am giving my 1000%, only because this is the only place to.. how can i explain..
if world is a race of horses, then i am the tortoise and these guys are the only slow horses that i think i can catch up with. These people are your next door app dev startup, releasing multiple apps fastly and trying to hit the magic recipe. I am not sure if i am learning anything besides how to search stuff on my own and produce faster results. But still, better than nothing.

However i am a far sighted person and am not sure if this is the future that i want.

I am currently giving 14+ hours to this startup as an intern (including all the traveling from home). The only relaxation i could make in future is to shift near the office which will save me 3-4 hours but then what?

I am currently running out of goals. My childhood was shit, but i want to make my youth meaningful.

Leaving my home means leaving the only 2 people (mom/dad) currently present actively in my life.

My college would be over by then, all my colleagues are all on their own ,going into different companies. We don't meet now leave alone meeting then. I am also not much into( or have the time to be into) online games and anime where those guys meet/chat
Not that i was able to gather courage to get into some relationship or talk to people till now. I don't have much talks with my officemate or gals coz 1 :i am so full of work and (2) i simply can't

Currently i spent my whole Saturday sleeping and watching movies and Sunday doing the office work.

Is this going to be my whole working life now? I often think other people's jobs as less demanding but i don't think that would be the case.

I just want to be in touch with people, the people that i know, the people i can trust somewhat.

When i was in 7th std, life was so easy. There was this just 1 irritating thing called school that we had to attend.
After that, we used to run down to nearest park in our shorts and cricketbats or rsckets, play till our heart's content, then sit in some friends house for hours and talk shit , then come back home , do some irritating study, then go back to watching television and playing online games with those same friends , while deciding the birthday party of some guy and game plans for the next day.

Damn

Need some advice. I'm 19, working on my own fintech startup. Should I apply to Ycombinator or finish high school first? The prototype is basically ready, but the Winter 2018 YC is taking place while I have school. What should I do?

working at an MNC is like dating the hottest girl in campus. everyone stares at you, but only you know of the tantrums and the expenses that you have to take.

Every random aunty and uncle I come across gets a wide smile on their face when i tell them my company's parent company name. i goto this temple , and there, one uncle was introducing me to his wife "meet X ji's son , he is at Y company" .
previously when i worked at a startup, most of the time , people were like "huh? what does this company do?" and when i would explain them how our DBs are sending billions of notifications and interaction each second, they would be like "oh , so you work at IT" , YES DUDE, YOU WANNA GIVE YOUR DAUGHTER'S HAND NOW?

And this mentality is sick. i loathe the place where i currently work. i loved my previous org and now am just here coz my mom is too scared to let her son live in a different state.

The only reason a person works in a company is money and WLB. Indian service based MNCs don't give a penny more than basic industry standards. and when they want their employees to be available 2 days a week + x number of days when any CEO , ED or other sugar daddy is coming to office, you get an idea of the shitty Work life balance.

my previous company was a b2b startup, it always paid me more than industry standards and we had wfh until a notification came to enforce hybrid working bh end of 2024. till now not a single person from my team has relocated. All i had to do was to *plan* for living in a state and my mom got cold feet :/

i think so much about my future. i earn decent, so i wanna spend it to live and grow.
i wanna go party at friday nights and go on night outs. i wanna meet this cute school crush at anytime after office and don't worry about the 9 pm curfew. i wanna go look for a new home in a different area and get out of this parking hellhole. i wanna prepare for exams and do a hugher studies from aborad.

everything needs money and growth mindset. money makes money and i am trying to earn every minute. but a chained mind cannot fly . a non growth mindset will not let you evolve. and someone needs to tell it to people who control my every . fucking. action

i have seen people switching from one big name to another. i personally feel that you are just too comfortable in the environment of big names and deliberately ignoring the smaller names which are doing the actual build fast and break reality stuff. reward is proportional to risk and if you are okay with just attributing to a big name, then that's on you

Guys, this is not a rant. But I need a career advice. I don’t have a BD in CS, but I studied by myself and took some other classes and was working in the field for more than an year now after graduating from university. I do full stack developing with javascript and sometimes java at a startup now.

My goal was to eventually get to grad school in CS. I found some programs what accept students from non CS back grounds too. I can’t do BD again it will take too long. And I’m old ! lol

If any of you had similar experiences, or know some good programs would you let me know? Should I prepare portfolio or should I accomplish something great in order to get accepted? Or should I just try applying first? I’m focusing more on east coast to choose schools from but open to anything for now.

It’s quite scary to really start working on this since I already have a job and there are so much information regarding grad school, I get overwhelmed. Though it’s something i need to overcome. It would be really helpful for me if you could share your two cents.

I love what I do now, and really hope that I get to study further and explore in depth. Also I’m interested in AI or machine learning. Also if you know good source for reading recently published papers on CS let me know!

Thanks for reading! :)

After spending the year after graduation trying to do a business with some school friends, that didn't make a dime for a year, I decided to look for a real paying job.

My first step was to go to a hackathon and hack for the week-end. I got involved in not one, but 2 projects: the second was because someone I met and won with at a previous hackathon asked me to, and I finished the first project early. Let's call her "S"

Then comes the end of the hackathon, and after it concludes I muster the courage to go on stage and say that I'm looking for a job, so feel free to chat me up.

No one really came to me for a job, but S came to talk to me about the startup she wants to launch, and how she is looking for a tech guy. I was close to dismiss it, because I was looking for a job paying $$$, but agreed to met so that she could show me her business plan and try to convince me.

Turns out she did convince me, because the business plan was solid, she was very motivated, and had already started validating the idea: there was a real need.

Now there we are, 5 years later, about 10 employees and paying ourselves real salary.

Not my CS lecturer but my ICT teacher in high school convinced me that it would be a great idea to go study CS at University. It was the best decision of my life as I'm now happily working full time as an Android developer for a startup. Couldn't imagine myself doing any other well paid job and being this happy.

Sadly I never got to tell him where I ended up post graduation but I did get to tell him that I secured myself a good placement year when I was at university when I found out he was sick.

He was so grateful of me getting in touch and I'm glad I managed to get to say thank you to him before he passed away.

Leukemia fucking sucks. RIP.

!rant
TL;DR - not sure if I should take a full-time gig at my current pretty good job, or go do an internship with AWS for the summer.

Needing some wizened development career advice, guys. I am coming to a small crossroads at the moment.

I am in my last year of school getting a BS in Computer Science. I love it. I had a pretty sweet job at a cool startup, until recently, when they were bought by a bigger company. This turned out to still be alright though, since they hired everyone on to the new company to keep our codebase alive and well (it's a pretty good product that they don't want to get rid of). Except they hired me as an Intern instead, which I thought was weird, but they said that's normally what they do with peeps that are still in school. Whatevs. But then I got offered an internship at some company called Amazon Web Services to be a Systems Analyst Intern (basically cloud support engineering from the sounds of it). And then I told the cats at the new company that I was considering this internship and they started saying they'd consider giving me full-time. And they didn't want to lose me.

Well... my thing is that both are tempting. Like the company that'd offer me a full-time gig would be cool because I'd get to keep working on the projects I'm currently on and I'd be immersed in a good development cycle and whatnot. Probably more full-stack programming, which I like a good bit and want to master more of. The Amazon thing seems cool, but I worry that it'd be more of a support gig. And as well as they pay, I may not get as good of development experience. Granted I was told I could definitely get into scripting to automate various things. But I just don't know how much would actually be that. Except having Amazon on my resume would likely be pretty great to have also coming out of graduation.

Down yet another avenue of thought, the AWS internship would only be for a few months in the Summer. So there's a chance I could come back and I could get my old job back. But maybe they would see me as disloyal or something and not want me to come back. I would also likely forfeit my retention bonus (which is an ok amount, but not a deal-breaker and it's spread out over 3 years) for staying on with the company after the acquisition.

I just don't know. Would it be better to stay where I'm at or go on a wild adventure over the summer? Help me, DevRant Kenobi you're my only hope...

Is a masters degree in IT worth it? I mean I've just started my masters in Software Engineering after my Computer Science bachelor's and I expected to learn something useful from it. So far they have taught only bullshit and stuff that I haven't found useful since I've started my IT career 3 years ago (now I am the team lead at a small startup, and I consider myself a really good developer). To summarize, is a masters diploma useful? Will it help me with anything, give that I've started working as a developer (freelancer, didn't know much back then) when I was still in high school (CV bragging rights)?

Big party at school coming soon, I'm busy working on my startup, too shy to ask someone out. Fuck, why does it always have to be like that? When I have something important to do, there is ton of other cool stuff elsewhere. I could go, but knowing me I will constantly think about everything I could be doing and how much code I could write. And my fucking annoying shyness. Fuck, even if I like someone so much, I won't tell them because it will destroy our "friendship" and I may loose my dance partner. Flying fuck, why can't one simply change himself.

See I'm a curious case.
Back when I graduated high school my father and I started a startup. We build an Android app revolving around personal safety. It was cool. Had news coverage. It flopped.

In the process off the two months time it took me to build the fucker I had to "Learn" Java and the Android SDK enough to push this app out.

I burned myself out and on top of that I felt like I did not really learn the language. So now years later I want to Learn C# for myself for game Development with unity. However I also want to learn Web Development Properly. Which I have tinkered with on and off since the old days of Xhtml when I built a website for my senior project in HS.

I still feel burned out. Anyone else with a similar feel. I know it's silly being burned after one failed project. But it does not help either that I rushed through learning Java did not retain fuck all and now I feel like I can't learn anything new because mental blockage. Even reading this sounds stupid.

Might also be new shiny object syndrome. Between C# and JS. Lol.

Hello!. I have a little tech app idea I'll love to startup. I made an educated guess that my target users are mostly on the android platform. At least 70-80%.Now I don't have funds to get a development team and I want to keep the expenses to the barest minimum. I have a little tech background. I have, used html, css, c# in the past. I always hated Java in school. But it seems I have to embrace it or Kotlin for the development of the app. I want to be able to build at least the MVP and try to gain traction. I am also thinking about cross platform options to cater for both Android and the few iOS users we may have. React Native and Flutter comes to mind. I also think I can get someone highly technical than myself as a co-founder to help. I will appreciate it if you can drop your 2 cents.

1) Reader Rabbit on an Apple IIGS in the late 80s. I might've been in Kindergarten. Found the boxes stored in an unreachable storage area at my dad's house recently. Knowing how he took care of things, it probably still works. He won't let me touch it.

2) Fast forward to early middle school, Ultima VII on an NEC desktop, 90s. That game was great but also a pain in the ass. Had to make a startup floppy disk to help with memory allocation and something else. Learned DOS things. For some reason the disk wouldn't work from one day to the next so would have to reconfigure it frequently. Also learned the hard way not to fork too much with autoexec.bat during this period.

Okay so there are a lot of things that are left by us students as "this would be taught to us on job, why bother now?" So i have many questions regarding this:

- is it a safe mentality? I mean University is teaching me, say a,b,c and the job is supposed to be like writing full letters, than am i stupid to stick to just a,b,c and not learning how to write letters beforehand?

- what is even "taught" on job? This is especially directed towards people in Big firms. I mean i can always blame that small ugly startup who treated me badly and not gave me any resources, but why do i feel its going to be same at every other company?

I guess no one is gonna teach me for 6 months on how to write classes with java, or make a ml engineer out of me when i don't know jack shit about ml.... That's the task for college, right?

I feel that when these companies say they "teach", you they mean how to follow instructions regarding agile meetings, how to survive office politics and how to learn quickly and produce an output quickly. I don't think that if i don't know how MVI works, then they are gonna teach me that, would they?i guess not unless they already have someone knowledgeable in that topic

- what about the things that are not taught in our colleges and we wanna make a career in it? Like say Android. From what i have experienced , choosing a career in a subject that's not taught you in grad school immediately takes away some kind of shield from you, as you are expected to know everything beforehand. So again, the same questions bfrom above

i did learned something from job life tho, and that too twice. Once it was when i first encountered an app sample for mvvm and once when i found out a very specific case of how video player is being used in a manner that handled a lot of bugs.

Why i didn't knew those approaches when i was not in job? Well, the first was a theoretical model whose practical implementation was difficult to find online that time and the second was a thing that i myself gave a lot of hours, yet failed to understand. However when i was in the company , i was partnered with a senior dev who himself had once spent 30 days with the source code to find a similar solution.

So again , both of above things could have been done by me had i spent more time trying to learn those "professional tools" and/or dwelve deeper into the tech. And i did felt pretty guilty not knowing about those...

A bit long, sorry.

I "inherited" an A+ certification book from my older brother over 10 years ago after he saw me meddling with some old computers that still used SIMM's. I still lived in my native country at the time and got my A+ certification through my high school when I moved to the US. I knew before I got the book that my career would revolve around IT.

I learned HTML and CSS right after I finished high school and started working with JS and PHP because of WordPress a year later. To this day I still help family and friends with IT related stuff, but after digging into web development I made it my main focus. I am now working on my CS degree after failing at college years ago because of laziness and procrastination. I also work at an amazing startup as a software engineer for the web. That's it in a nutshell, questions are welcome.

Can I get a stress ball? 😅

Still as a scholar who has had his intership I decided that I was finally confident enough in my ability to apply for a small part-time programming job. I had an internship at a cool exhausting place with tons of expertise and I've proven myselve over there. So now I wanted a job on the side. Nothing special, just something that would make a little money with programming instead of washing dishes at the restaurant.

So I started at this small internet based startup (2 or 3 progammers) as a backend-oriented programmer. The working hours were amazingly compatible with my school schedule.

The lead dev also sounded like a smart guy. He had worked as a backend guy for years and had code running on verry critical public infrastructure that if it were to fail we'd be evacuated from our homes.

As a first asignment I got an isolated task to make an importer for some kind of file format that needed integration. So I asked for access to the code. I didn't get it since they were going to re-do the entire backend based on the code I wrote. I just needed to parse the file in a usable object structure. So I found out that the file format was horrible and made a quite nice set of objects that were nice. At the end of the first week or so I asked if I could get access to the code again, so I could integrate it. Answer was no. The lead dev would do that. I could however get access to my private repository.

Next week a new intern was taken to build a multiplatform responsive app. Only downside was that all the stuff he had ever done was php based websites. It wasn't going anywhere anytime soon, but I figured that that was where internships were for. So I ended up helping him a lot and taught him some concepts of OOP and S.O.L.I.D. and the occasional 30 minute rants of IndexOutOfRangeException, ArgumentException and such.

So one day he asked me how to parse a json string and retrieve a specific field out of it.
I gave him something like the following to start with:
"
JObject json;
if(!JObject.TryParse(jsonString, out json))
{
//handle error
}
string value;
if(!json.tryget("foo", out value).../// code continues
"

but then the main dev stepped in and proposed the following since it wouldn't crash on an API change:
"
dynamic json = new JObject(jsonString);
string value = json.myJsonValue;
"

After me trying to explain to him that this was a bad choise for about 15 minutes because of all kinds of reasons I just gave up. I was verry mad that this young boy was forced to use bad programming pracises while he was clearly still learning. I know I shouldn't pick up certain practises. But that boy didn't.

Almost everytime the main dev was at the office I had such a mindboggling experience.

After that I got a new assignment.
I had to write another xml file format parser.
Of course I couldn't have any access to our current code because... it was unnecesary. We were going to use my code as a total replacement for the backend again.
And for some reason classes generated from XSD weren't clear enough so after carefull research I literally wrapped xsd generated code in equivalent classes.

At that moment, I realized I made some code that was totally useless since it wasn't compatible with any form of their API or any of the other backend code. (I haven't seen their API. I didn't have access to the source.) And since I could've just pushed them generated XSD's that would've produced thesame datastructure I felt like I was a cheat. I also didn't like that I wasn't allowed to install even the most basic tooling. (git client or, Ide refactoring plugins, spelling checker etc...)

Now I was also told that I couldn't discuss issues with the new guy anymore since it was a waste of my valuable time, and they were afraid that I taught him wrong concepts.

This was the time that my first paycheck came in so I quitted my job.
I haven't seen any of the features that I've worked on. :)

I started programming pretty young, launched many small businesses (from gaming to eCommerce, nothing really successful), by the time I got to my engineering school to get my CS degree, I already had a good knowledge base and I was way advanced than the other students, I even could learn faster alone compared to having a teacher and fixed hourly classes. But now after graduating, I become a developer at a startup (a story for another day), I totally lost my motivation to learn, to programme and to start side projects. Maybe it's become boring or maybe I just hate being an employe.

Did you ever feel that way?

Once upon a time I worked for a startup in school as one of two developers.

I learned many technologies in this role. I built massive front end systems, debugged back end systems. They even gave me a little section on their site that was all about me and giving me credit for me work. The only actual employee was the "CEO, owner, and designer". A team of three in total.

Inevitably the company went under but the site remains. A skeleton of a dead dream. The CEO took my name and info off their website and took credit for all the work I put months into. I was never paid, never giving any recognition whatsoever for the work I did.

I'm not looking for an award or anything like that, but like bro?!?? I built your companies interface for free and you throw me out like trash.

Wtf is being a developer?!?

so I offered to help a guy with his startup idea which is in the making for a year at least. (A telemetry data collection device, mind you). It's an unpaid internship with no strings attached, no contract, mind you.

I am nowhere near the programming pro like most of you guys here, so that's what I want to focus on improving.

First thing he tells me to do is a market research on competitors.... I thought I left that bullshit behind when I left business school..

If I want to work without getting paid, I'd rather stay at home and learn c++ and opencl, and work on the MSc thesis full time, thanks.

Do you think it's the right thing to do or should I give it time?