To be a good developer, you must thrive in chaos, and have an insatiable desire to turn it into order.

All user input, both work tasks and actual application input, is pure fucking chaos.

The only way to turn that input into anything usable, is to interpret, structure and categorize it, to describe the rules for transformation as adequately as you can.

Sometimes companies create semi-helpful roles to assist you with this process. Often, these people are so unaware of the delicacy of the existing chaos, that any decision they make just ripples out in waves leaving nearly irreparable confusion and destruction in its path.

So applications themselves also slowly wear down into chaos under pressure of chaotic steak-holders which never seem to be able to choose between peppercorn or bernaise sauce for their steaks.

Features are added, data is migrated between formats, rules become unclear. Is ketchup even fucking valid, as a steak sauce?

The only way to preserve an application long term, is refactoring chaos into order.

But... the ocean of chaos will never end.

You must learn to swim in it.

All you can hope to do is create little pools of clarity where new creative ideas can freely spawn.

Ideas which will no doubt end up polluting their own environment, but that's a problem for tomorrow.

So you must learn to deal with the infinite stream of perplexed reactions from those who can't attach screenshots to issue reports.

You must deflect dragging conversations from those who never quite manage to translate gut feeling into rational sentences.

You must learn to deal with the fact that in reality there are no true microservice backends. There are no clean React frontends. There are no normalized databases. Full test coverage, well-executed retrospectives, finished sprints -- they are all as real as spherical cows in a vacuum.

There is no such thing as clean code.

There is only "relatively cleaner code", and even then there are arguments as to why it would be "subjectively relatively cleaner code".

Every repository, every product, every team and every company is an amalgamation of half-implemented ideals, well-intended tug of war games, and brilliantly shattered dreams.

You will encounter fragmented shards of perfect APIs, miles of tangled barbed documentation, beheaded validator classes, bloody mangled corpses of analytical dashboards, crumbled concrete databases.

You must be able to breathe in those thick toxic clouds of rotting technical and procedural debt, look at your reflection in the locker room mirror while you struggle yourself into a hazmat suit, and think:

"Fuck yes, I was born for this job".

Stupid fucking project managers, just posting some slurry in Slack:

"User can't get into app!" _sends useless screenshot_

Yeah? And? I have no context on what time this was, what device, where, how, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.

You want me to just telepathically jump to their location on earth, sniff the electromagnetic spectrum waves to sleuth out what exact requests they made and when to figure out what the problem is?

Just shut up. Shut up

UPDATE: devRant Trans-Oceanic Journey Community Project

It was a mere 12 days ago that I asked the question; 'Could devRanters, as a community, build a 21st Century Technology-Laden ‘devRant devie-Stressball-in-a-Bottle’ and send it on a journey across the Atlantic ocean?

I am thrilled to report that devRanters enthusiastically accepted this difficult challenge. A core team quickly formed and a tremendous amount of research and progress has been made in a short period of time. I want to give you a high level-flavor of what we are doing. Please keep in mind we still need your help. We welcome all develops to take part in this journey.

I want to give appreciation to the devRant Founders @dfox and @trogus. Without your support and sponsorship this project would not have been possible. devRant brought us together and it a reality. Devie journeying across the Ocean the Columbus sailed will stir the imagination of children and adults worldwide when we launch on May 1, 2017.

Some of the research and action items in progress:

- Slack and trello environments were created to capture research and foster discussion.

- A Stony Brook University Oceanography Professor suggested the Gulf Stream would be a good pathway across the ocean. We researched it very and agree. The Gulf Stream has been a trans-Atlantic conduit for hundreds of years. We are deciding whether to launch from Cape Hatteras, NC or the Virginia coast. Both have easy access to the rapid currents in the Gulf Stream.

- We are researching every detail of the Gulf Stream to make the journey easier and faster for devie. We have maps and a team member gathered valuable ideas reading a thorough book – ‘The Gulf Stream’.

- We decided on using a highly resilient plastic rather than glass for the bottle material. Plastic is much lighter, faster and glass breaks down more easily. The lightweight enclosure will allow us to take full advantage of waves and ample trade winds. We are still discussing the final design as we want to minimize friction and mimic the non-locomotion fish that migrate thousands of miles riding the Gulf Stream.

-The enclosure might be 3D printed unless we can locate a commercial solution. We have 3D specs and are speaking with some experts. There are advantages and dis-advantages to each solution.

- We will be using Iridiums' RockBLOCK two-way satellite technology to bounce lat-long coordinate pings off their 36 low-orbit satellites. The data will be analyzed by our devRant devie analysis software. IOS and Android public apps being built by the team will display devie's location throughout the journey in.

- Arduino will be used as the brains

- Multiple sensors including temperature and depth are being considered

-A project plan will be published to the team Friday 12/9. Sorry I am a few days late but adding some new ideas.

There are still a lot of challenges we must overcome and we will.

That’s all for now. I will send updates and all ideas / comments are valued.

My dev skills currently feel like England in the mid 1600's.

Everyone around me has already conquered some projects while I sit in the side fighting a civil war with myself while having very humble accomplishments.

But I'll show them. I'll show them all. While they grow weak and weary over the ages, I'm slowly but surely getting stronger.

In the end I will conquer and rule the waves like no other. I will build a dev empire that will be remembered for years to come.

I drink so much coffee. I sweat coffee. I pee coffee. I probably emit coffee waves into the air and get other people caffeinated. Here's to all of my fellow coffee-emitting programmers!

HOW FUCKING HARD CAN IT BE TO NOT STORE PASSWORDS IN CLEARTEXT AND THEN PROCEED TO SEND ME AN UNENCRYPTED EMAIL WITH THE PASSWORD IN IT??? THE SITE HAS A PREMIUM FUCKING SSL AND SAFETY CERTIFICATES YET THEY STILL DON'T COMPLY TO THIS? FUCK YOU! IF IT WASN'T FOR THAT I HAD TO ORDER A NEW SCREEN FOR MY BROKEN PHONE, YOU COULD'VE SUCKED BETTER THAN ME + VACUUM CLEANER.

Sorry abt that. But for real, mytrendphone stores passwords in plain texts and waves a fucking safety certificate in your face...

OMG! I fucking hate it when people who have no idea about technology whatsoever have a conversation about some 'technical stuff' and I've got to listen to trash like:

A: "It's a wonder that all of this stuff actually works!"
B: "Yeah, I heard that it all connects over some kind of WAVES or something like that..."

FFS! I know you can't know everything, but please for the love of god ... just don't!

- Currently sitting on the train and cringing like a madman -

I study software engineering, so that obviously means I'm also free family tech support right?

Apparently some lady that lives nearby believes this, but she replaced family with vague acquaintance.

This lady is very computer illiterate, so much that I have to describe the wifi icon as a dot with two waves above it.

So one day, she calls me because her Outlook isn't receiving mail. I ask her if she has any internet and she confirms she does because she can visit Google. After trying a bunch of possible solutions in Outlook, I ask her to download a remote access program so I can look at what's wrong.

She didn't have internet. Visiting Google means seeing the Chrome logo apparently.

<supervisor>,

I would like to raise a concern of mine to your attention. I would urge you to inform <CIO> because I think he should know as well. In our recorded meeting this afternoon <bad_vendor> exposed another company’s credentials after failing to access our system, and proceeded to demo access into someone else’s system while exposing their client's sensitive data. Others noticed this as well. This is an alarming situation because not only did <bad_vendor> expose someones data to <us>, but to one of our vendors. While it is unlikely that <us> or <helpful_vendor> would abuse this situation, it could have easily been <us>’s data that was exposed to another company and their vendors had the situation been reversed. I understand we are all under tight deadlines and under a lot of stress — by no means am I trying to make waves — but nonetheless I felt compelled make light of this situation and felt in was echoed by <helpful_vendor> during the meeting as well.

Thank you

Static HTML pages are better than "web apps".

Static HTML pages are more lightweight and destroy "web apps" in performance, and also have superior compatibility. I see pretty much no benefit in a "web app" over a static HTML page. "Web apps" appear like an overhyped trend that is empty inside.

During my web browsing experience, static HTML pages have consistently loaded faster and more reliably, since the browser is immediately served with content useful for consumption, whereas on JavaScript-based web "apps", the useful content comes in **last**, after the browser has worked its way through a pile of script.

For example, an average-sized Wikipedia article (30 KB wikitext) appears on screen in roughly two seconds, since MediaWiki uses static HTML. Everipedia, in comparison, is a ReactJS app. Guess how long that one needs. Upwards of three times as long!

Making a page JavaScript-based also makes it fragile. If an exception occurs in the JavaScript, the user might end up with a blank page or an endless splash screen, whereas static HTML-based pages still show useful content.

The legacy (2014-2020) HTML-based Twitter.com loaded a user profile in under four seconds. The new react-based web app not only takes twice as long, but sometimes fails to load at all, showing the error "Oops something went wrong! But don't fret – it's not your fault." to be displayed. This could not happen on a static HTML page.

The new JavaScript-based "polymer" YouTube front end that is default since August 2017 also loads slower. While the earlier HTML-based one was already playing the video, the new one has just reached its oh-so-fancy skeleton screen.

It would once have been unthinkable to have a website that does not work at all without JavaScript, but now, pretty much all popular social media sites are JavaScript-dependent. The last time one could view Twitter without JavaScript and tweet from devices with non-sophisticated browsers like Nintendo 3DS was December 2020, when they got rid of the lightweight "M2" mobile website.

Sometimes, web developers break a site in older browser versions by using a JavaScript feature that they do not support, or using a dependency (like Plyr.js) that breaks the site. Static HTML is immune against this failure.

Static HTML pages also let users maximize speed and battery life by deactivating JavaScript. This obviously will disable more sophisticated site features, but the core part, the text, is ready for consumption.

Not to mention, single-page sites and fancy animations can be implemented with JavaScript on top of static HTML, as GitHub.com and the 2018 Reddit redesign do, and Twitter's 2014-2020 desktop front end did.

From the beginning, JavaScript was intended as a tool to complement, not to replace HTML and CSS. It appears to me that the sole "benefit" of having a "web app" is that it appears slightly more "modern" and distinguished from classic web sites due to use of splash screens and lack of the browser's loading animation when navigating, while having oh-so-fancy loading animations and skeleton screens inside the website. Sorry, I prefer seeing content quickly over the app-like appearance of fancy loading screens.

Arguably, another supposed benefit of "web apps" is that there is no blank page when navigating between pages, but in pretty much all major browsers of the last five years, the last page observably remains on screen until the next navigated page is rendered sufficiently for viewing. This is also known as "paint holding".

On any site, whenever I am greeted with content, I feel pleased. Whenever I am greeted with a loading animation, splash screen, or skeleton screen, be it ever so fancy (e.g. fading in an out, moving gradient waves), I think "do they really believe they make me like their site more due to their fancy loading screens?! I am not here for the loading screens!".

To make a page dependent on JavaScript and sacrifice lots of performance for a slight visual benefit does not seem worthed it.

Quote:

> "Yeah, but I'm building a webapp, not a website" - I hear this a lot and it isn't an excuse. I challenge you to define the difference between a webapp and a website that isn't just a vague list of best practices that "apps" are for some reason allowed to disregard. Jeremy Keith makes this point brilliantly.
>
> For example, is Wikipedia an app? What about when I edit an article? What about when I search for an article?
>
> Whether you label your web page as a "site", "app", "microsite", whatever, it doesn't make it exempt from accessibility, performance, browser support and so on.
>
> If you need to excuse yourself from progressive enhancement, you need a better excuse.

– Jake Archibald, 2013

When a co working waves his hand at you every 5 minutes to get your attention and you have your headphones in and try to not see the waves because you know it's just going to be you coding his function for them

Well, my client likes the sailboat picture that I put up on his site as the hero area.

Now he wants to know if I can animate the water and put the sounds of waves and seagulls in the background.

I can, but fuck you. I won't. I have respect for the people that visit your site.

we are learning how a disk rotates in order to preserve memory on the physical computer hardware. in order for this disk to preserve memory, it has to rotate by following laws of physics as a circular sphere with sine and cosine waves on the coordinate system. these sine and cosine waves that vibrate independently and periodically, which means that the disk rotates 10,000 orbits per second. a drill rotates 2000 orbits per second. 10,000 orbits per second is fast enough to cut your hand off in less than 1 millisecond. we are learning that this disk has to rotate so fast in order to preserve the memory which was stored by the database system with sql.

on a subject called sql databases.

For the first time that I can remember I see ordinary people everywhere are unhappy with windows. In XP through win8 days I'd see people complaining about one crash here or there, but most of the times you had to be more experienced to notice why windows sucks.

Now, this week I already heard three complaints of people wanting to back to windows 7.

And I feel so happy... I feel waves of joy growing in me, as I burst in a sarcastic, obscure laughter.

Why do?

Because somewhere deep inside I hate windows.

Not becausebthe great amounts of frustration I used to have with it. But because it's so crazy I don't even consider it an OS, but rather a patchwork.

Microsoft's code base must be so fucked up they don't even know what to it with anymore.

That's my idea at least.

Buy it's good to see ordinary people are getting fed up of windows. This might be a way one of my dreams will come true, the day which Microsoft will not be able to maintain Windows anymore, and I think it's not more than ten years until we reach this day.

As a final result, if one day windows really gets to die, I want to be present, but not unnarmed, so I can shoot it at least 15 times, just to make sure this piece of crap is already dead.

Bye

Good god. In an entry level CIS course, the teacher is literally explaining binary as slowly as possible and then spouting misinformation about sound waves and telephone stuff. Ugh.

Ftp must be making some huge waves for FileZilla to need an update everyday..

A wild project appears!
The deadline is set in two months.

It's a 3D environment interactive app with some oil drilling models and other stuff, for a stand on a show. It needs to look nice, but The Company we're working for needs to figure out where the fuck their product is located on those machines. Think tiny pipes, O-rings etc.

I prepare a build in the first couple of days for The Company to figure shit out.

Management holds the build back because:
> the ocean waves are going the other way
> the underwater area doesn't look so nice
> the antialiasing could be better
> one pipe is 5cm off center
> the sky is not blue enough
> the drillship propellers are pointed the wrong way
> one icon is too far to the right
> the shadows could use some work
> there are shadows on the seabed
> some flickering on ambient occlusion
> it loads too slow
> one random object is flipped on it's Z axis
> it's too green
> camera locks up if you move about 2km out of the range
> the name of the build should represent the date of the build
> the name of the build SHOULDN'T be anything else than just a simple three-word name, no dates because their environment doesn't allow apps that are not allowed (by name) by admin
> lots more random things that won't prevent them from using the app

I'm only a month late, but it's good progress. In about a week I hope we can get some feedback if we can use those models at all and what to showcase.

Then I can work on the basic functionality. And then it's a simple case of time travel to meet the deadline.

Not a rant but as an intern that is older than several of the members of the team I'm assigned to, including my mentor, it was still nice to be complemented on my ability to find workable solutions on my own rather than running for help whenever there is a problem.

I thought it was rather weird to be complemented on this but apparently how I work isn't always the norm.

The most powerful weapon an engineer can ever have, is his mind.

What happens when someone attacks the mind and their mind is the system with most power?

When you attack the central system with most power of any person, they become extremely vulnerable and defenseless.

What happens when the mental state of an engineer has been attacked and damaged?

How to focus with a damaged mind?

I paid $55 for a therapy app on the ios store with binaural waves sound programming and mind healing sounds.

It helps. But temporarily. When the attacker gets in sight, the mind becomes vulnerable again.

How to develop a strong mind that can not be disturbed by external real world triggers or attackers?

A large update on UI rolls out, after around 10 rounds of public testing. Waves of complaints finally arrive.
Complaint 1: I liked the old plaintext UI because the UI now has some markdown
Complaint 2: I wish the tabs weren't multiline but I don't want to reduce the number of tabs nor sacrifice the accessibility by making it scrollable or something
Complaint 3: Why did you make boxes we did it fine with a single box filled with plaintext
Complaint 4: The lag is gone but I liked the old laggy UI because it was there for years

Me: dafuq?

PS: dev lead is happy with the results so things are okay at least for now

I took a bit of a break from devRant because I was way too disgruntled at my current position. Flash forward and I am now a manager at the same company.

Note to new devs:
Make waves, make tons of waves. Get the attention of your superior’s superiors by making things better. Never rely on your superior relaying information, they only have their job security in mind.

Annoying part of fancy names for systems are the amount of wrong results when googling.
Im trying to learn Flutter and I want a striped background to move endlessly. I i get are either far more advanced animations, or hair salons...

This is the reason why I can't sleep at night.

Can someone help me how to focus for 6 straight hours/day until the end of this month? Got 1 last exam left till i graduate with comp. science degree. I have to study databases but only theory. And i fucking hate reading text. I hate theory. I like solving problems analytically and theory is my weakness.

I read theory shit for a few mins and then distract myself with mobile games and tiktok for a few hours... I cant concentrate studying this shit...

How do i forcefully focus.

Can someone suggest me the best app that actually works to help me focus or something? Or some yt sound waves music?

I'm literally in pain right now and not a thing I can do.

If I eat whatever the fuck is wrong with my jaw (cracked tooth or cavity) starts throbbing from the chewing action, in addition to coming on for no reason at all. vision-blurred-waves-of-nausea levels of pain. Enough that I'm alternating between laughter and almost tears.

I've downed four aspirin and it's still just barely enough WITH the numbing gel.

Got lock jaw something aweful.

Barely convinced a dentists office, which is supposed to be closed (and cancelled all it's appointments due to corona), to come in during quarantine. But thats monday. Dont kno how I'll make it. They do payment plans but I'm flat broke because I decided to pursue programming right when all this fucking bullshit went down.

And all I can think of while im typing this is the pain.

And fuck me I cant do weed because my backup plan if I fail at coding is the military.

And this stray dog that the neighbors 'adopted' but leave outside WONT STOP FUCKING BARKING.

Fuck me. Just kill me now. Do it.

Gonna go watch comedy because I read a research paper that says genuine laughter raises pain threshold by up to 10%.

My classmate and I stumbled into the idea of third wave programming, like the waves of feminism but coding.

The first is functional programming, the second is object oriented programming, and the third is making everything in electron and bundling an entire chrome in your application.

More network/hardware than dev but anyway: I use OPNsense as a firewall at home on an embedded system. Had everything set up nicely and appearing to be working fine, quite a lot of things set up (static leases, VLANs with various firewall rules etc. - a fair bit of stuff involved). I noticed my remote system was failing to back up to my local one. Turned out port forwarding wasn't fully working (initial packet got through but nothing else). I noticed this at midnight.

Ran an update to see if that helped - nope. Reboot time then! It made its shutdown noises and I waited 15 minutes before giving up (no noises, no ping response). Took SD card out. Copied a fresh install onto it, thus wiping all settings. Booted up fine, set up my internet connection, all good. Proceeded to configure it. Noticed I couldn't access the internet from my PC, but could from the firewall itself. Rebooted the firewall. It didn't come back up. Argh!

Reinstalled AGAIN. Attached a serial cable and it was complaining about something which sounded like it couldn't read the SD card. Tried another. Nope. Looked online (using phone): known issue to do with boot delays.

Gave up and went to bed at this point (4am).

Next day: Installed it in a VM instead. Still no internet from my PC! Another known issue to do with default gateway not being the PPPoE interface. Got into shell, manually changed the default route. Was then able to update to the latest version which fixes the gateway issue. Rebooted the VM. All good.

Put all my settings back in, this time taking a backup afterward.

Only to discover....

....port forwarding wasn't working properly. Back to square 1.

Poked around with some NAT settings (outbound ones), made no difference, undid those changes and suddenly it started working.

WTF? /waves arms in the air

OPNsense folk were very helpful, producing a new build for me to try within a couple of hours of me asking about the problem.

But days like that, I start to question whether I really enjoy technology as much as I thought I did...

A few years back I was still using a CRT screen and I used to degauss it quite often as a result of having my speakers right next to it. Nowadays I use an LED screen but now I started getting this kind of "degaussing" effect where my vision shakes and waves and I get it quite randomly when looking at lights of different frequencies. (Like the Sun and my phone's screen) It only lasts like 2 seconds at most but I'm wondering if someone has the same problem as me and I would be quite interested to know if this has been caused by the CRT screen or something else.

Coworker asked to complete a part of a client's implementation that I trained them on so that I can be freed up for other projects. Month later asks me to take it back over as the client wants it done next week and they are going on vacation. Completed none of the work and didn't follow up/resolve an issue that I explained when they took it over. Thanks for that.

Do all of you guys listen to music all the time? I see a lot of rants about some music apps not working properly in some Linux distro or posts about how music helps you to concentrate on coding etcetera. And, I don't even recognize half of those music apps.

It's not that I hate music, I just don't listen to it. I prefer silence over sound waves bombarding my eardrums.

So there is this thing called chirp.io which allows you to transmit data via ultrasonic sound. No special hardware needed. Only a mic and a speaker. I wonder why this isnt used in smart watches instead of BLE as it requires even less power. Probably because sound is less penetrating than radio waves??!

Unusual play ocan waves sounds effect or rain or a moving train sounds .
Close my eyes and just be null ...
For like 5 min ..

Why isn't physics an optional class in my computer science degree?

I mean, why would they assume I will need more physics in my life? I had physics until my senior year in school, we're pretty much learning the same thing! The only purpose I see in this crappy class is to lower my average, I will never need to know how to measure forces, sound waves or magnetic fields.

I know some people will need some of this in the future but it's a very small portion I bet.

I've always hated physics and to make matters worse I need to go to exam (if we fail the class by tests we need to go to exam) and I've been studying ever since the semester is over when I could've been on vacation and studying stuff that really matters, like how to make gui's and playing more with Linux and C. But no, I have a shitty exam in the 13th (Friday) and because of it I only have 1.5 weeks until classes start.

I just hate physics so God damn much...

To everyone that struggles with addictions or self-destructive thoughts (mental), you are not alone.

I just want to say, look around you for a second, and grasp the amazing world we live in. How everything is balanced, day turns to night, nigh turns to day, water turns to a cloud, cloud turn to water, you came to existence from nothing, and you'll turn back to nothing.

Don't fool yourself with all this media bullshit, do this and that and so on. You don't need anything to feel loved, you have yourself.

Life is like the ocean, some waves are hard, while others are soft. Learn to surf.

Enjoy life, my brothers and sisters, enjoy the small things and accept things are sometimes fucked up.

I have a picture of breaking waves above my desk. I lean back, remember times I was out on my surfboard just sitting in the water. Sometimes I make some green tea and just breath.

If that doesn't work, black coffee, somafm EDM and stress the fuck out until it's done.

Anyone not a fan of Material Design especially the ripple effect? If not a fan, please tell me why. If yes, please tell me why, too.

For me, I feel like there's too much animation going on and I agree to someone that said it's cognitively distracting and it kinda breaks my train of thought. Any thoughts you can share?

Coolest project I've worked on would be my CS final project where I created video poker.

i'm so desperate to get a demo effect working i've asked a math teacher a question which feels trivial but i can't crack

how the FUCK do you stretch sine waves???

Things that wasted my time this week:
bash in my .cshrc
Using the wrong application to open waves.
Logs after an if(a thing) return;
Updating i3-gaps and using my config and it locking up.
A testing machine having the wrong kernel as default.
Not a bad week :)

Shred some waves at the local break and drink some salt water in the process! That's my way to get unstuck.

A game controller which works with your brain waves

Why there is always a communication gap between designers and developers? A designer should always think from a developer's perspective if a design is feasible or not. Just making a mess of waves in the front end won't make a good design.