We had a Commodore64. My dad used to be an electrical engineer and had programs on it for calculations, but sometimes I was allowed to play games on it.

When my mother passed away (late 80s, I was 7), I closed up completely. I didn't speak, locked myself into my room, skipped school to read in the library. My dad was a lovely caring man, but he was suffering from a mental disease, so he couldn't really handle the situation either.

A few weeks after the funeral, on my birthday, the C64 was set up in my bedroom, with the "programmers reference guide" on my desk. I stayed up late every night to read it and try the examples, thought about those programs while in school. I memorized the addresses of the sound and sprite buffers, learnt how programs were managed in memory and stored on the casette.

I worked on my own games, got lost in the stories I was writing, mostly scifi/fantasy RPGs. I bought 2764 eproms and soldered custom cartridges so I could store my finished work safely.

When I was 12 my dad disappeared, was found, and hospitalized with lost memory. I slipped through the cracks of child protection, felt responsible to take care of the house and pay the bills. After a year I got picked up and placed in foster care in a strict Christian family who disallowed the use of computers.

I ran away when I was 13, rented a student apartment using my orphanage checks (about €800/m), got a bunch of new and recycled computers on which I installed Debian, and learnt many new programming languages (C/C++, Haskell, JS, PHP, etc). My apartment mates joked about the 12 CRT monitors in my room, but I loved playing around with experimental networking setups. I tried to keep a low profile and attended high school, often faking my dad's signatures.

After a little over a year I was picked up by child protection again. My dad was living on his own again, partly recovered, and in front of a judge he agreed to be provisory legal guardian, despite his condition. I was ruled to be legally an adult at the age of 15, and got to keep living in the student flat (nation-wide foster parent shortage played a role).

OK, so this sounds like a sobstory. It isn't. I fondly remember my mom, my dad is doing pretty well, enjoying his old age together with an nice woman in some communal landhouse place.

I had a bit of a downturn from age 18-22 or so, lots of drugs and partying. Maybe I just needed to do that. I never finished any school (not even high school), but managed to build a relatively good career. My mom was a biochemist and left me a lot of books, and I started out as lab analyst for a pharma company, later went into phytogenetics, then aerospace (QA/NDT), and later back to pure programming again.

Computers helped me through a tough childhood.

They awakened a passion for creative writing, for math, for science as a whole. I'm a bit messed up, a bit of a survivalist, but currently quite happy and content with my life.

I try to keep reminding people around me, especially those who have just become parents, that you might feel like your kids need a perfect childhood, worrying about social development, dragging them to soccer matches and expensive schools...

But the most important part is to just love them, even if (or especially when) life is harsh and imperfect. Show them you love them with small gestures, and give their dreams the chance to flourish using any of the little resources you have available.

The 80s are calling. They want their smart watches back.

Does anyone recognise my new gaming PC with 64 KiB RAM and 'blazingly fast' 1MHz CPU ?

What kind of supercomputer you have to use to get these fucking websites to work smoothly????

I'm on a fucking gigabit connection, ryzen 7 7700x, 32GB ram, and a fucking nvme, all it takes is opening a fucking recipe site and I'm instantly transported back to the 80s. I swear if i see another 4k asset I'm gonna punch something.

WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED TO FUNCTION OVER FORM????

Oh do you want me to disable my addblocker??? How about: you make a site that works you fuck. No i will not fucking subscribe to your brain-dead newsletter why the fuck would I???
And since when are cookies needed for a fucking plaintext site you asshat??? Tracking??? I swear if you could you would generate metadata from my clipped fingernails if it meant you could stick "Big data" next to that zip-bomb you call a website.

I WOULD like to read your article, possibly even watch a couple of ads on my sidebar for you, but noooooo you had to have the stupid fucking google vinegrette or however the fuck they are calling the fucking thing now.

The age of the web sucks the happiness out of life, and despite having all of this processing power, I am jealous of my fathers RSS feeds.

I'm sorry web people, I know it's not your fault, I know designers and management don't give a shit how long a website takes to load. I just wanted to make a fucking omelette.

Woohoo! I fixed a huge memory leak in our app! ... In one class.

Time for noise cancelling head phones, 80s hacker music, tons of caffeine, and more leak hunting. :)

!rant
Finally did a clean reinstall of my six-year-old Macbook. Decided to change up the theme too, really liking the new 80s Outrun look. Running so smoothly too!

!rant

Few days ago I’ve had a room in a very '80s looking hotel in Poznań. Room number 11 on 10th floor. What a coincidence in their numbering...

A lot of engineering fads go in circle.

Architecture in the 80s: Mainframe and clients.

Architecture in the 90s: Software systems connected by an ESB.

Architecture in the 2000s: Big central service and everyone connects to it for everything

Architecture in the 2010s: Decentralized microservices that communicate with queues.

Current: RabbitMQ and Kafka.

... Can't we just go back to the 90s?

I hate fads.
I hate when I have to get some data, and it's scattered on 20 different servers, and to load a fucking account page, a convoluted network of 40 apps have to be activated, some in PHP, others in JS, others on Java, that are developed by different teams, connected to different tiny ass DBs, all on huge clusters of tiny ass virtual machines that get 30% load at peak hours, 90% of which comes from serializing and parsing messages. 40 people maintaining this nightmare, that could've been just 7 people making a small monolithic system that easily handles this workload on a 4-core server with 32GB of RAM.
Tripple it, put it behind a load balancer, proper DB replication (use fucking CockroachDB if you really want survivability), and you've got zero downtime at a fraction of the cost.

Just because something's cool now, doesn't mean that everybody has to blindly follow it for fucks sake!

Same rant goes for functional vs OOP and all that crap. Going blindly with any of these is just a stupid fad, and the main reason why companies need refactoring of legacy code.

I seriously wanna fucking knofe this guy who says JS is shit and Kotlin is superior well NEWS FLASH YOU FLYING PIECE OF WANK, every fucking language has its pros and cons

If you still think JS is supposed to be in browser well I say to you fucktard this isnt the 80s anymore and we ain't using Java applets and Flash for some limp dicked stuff JS has covered today. A language might have its dark sides but they are all fucking good. There is no superiour language there's only Mother fucking preference. I swear to god this is the worse limp dicked argument I've heard and I have to argue that JS has matured over the years

Its all fun and games until your malfunctioning software costs people their lives - if you're just starting out as a dev or in the "ain't nobody got time for writing tests" camp, I highly recommend you to lookup and read about the Therac-25 incidents during the 80s.

Even if you're not working on a life-critical/mission-critical application, the realization of the impact that us devs can have on the society can push you to become a better developer producing quality software...

My dev colleagues, the ceo, a external designer and me (dev) are sitting in the meeting room
and we discuss the result from the designer. He designed a complete relaunch of a
small CRM for the logistics sector.

The designer is a designer as you know him, big beart, small macbook, chai late
and he designed nothing, he hired a freelancer from romania.

My boss studied software development in the 80s but didn't really developed a software
for about 20 years, but he thinks he knows all and everything.

My boss is constantly complaining about the colors in the design and he would like
a iOS approach. Our system should complete copy the styles from iOS.

The really funny thing happend in just 1 minute. My boss is complaining again about the
colors and told the blue color is way to dark and the designer meant thats not possible the
blue color very bright. My boss sat next to the designer and looked not on the wall where
the picture was thrown from a projector, instead he looks from the side in the macbook screen
of the macbook which was in front of the designer. Then the designer says "Oh my god, the color
changes if I look from the side or from the top of the macbook." The Designer was blown away. My
boss couldn't believe it and did the same movements with his head and said. "Wow, you are right
the color changes".

We all other people couldn't believe that they are so dumb and thought this must be a joke. But
that wasn't a joke. After the meetin my boss told everyone in our company his results regarding the screen.

I wrote every story in a document, and I'm planning to create a book with dumb shit like this.

Some more of Stux's !dev pet peeves

1) Teenagers who comment shit like "I'm from the wrong generation" or "today's music is trash. This is real music" on songs from like the 70s and 80s. Like shut the fuck up. You can like whatever music you want, but your taste in music doesn't make you unique, so just shut the fuck up and listen to the music. I was jamming out to 70s and 80s when I was 9, so you aren't the first to enjoy older music at a young age
2) "Old heads" who comment shit like "this isn't real *genre*" on a new song that isnt like the older version of that genre. News flash: music fucking evolves. Just because that country song doesn't have a twangy guitar in it, that doesn't mean the song ain't country. Just because the rap song ain't some deep ass poetic shit, it doesn't make it any less of a rap song.
3) People who edit their comments on YouTube to say shit like "wow thanks for all the likes, I wasn't expecting this." Wooptie fucking doo. Your comment got a few thousand likes. Fun fact: those likes are meaningless.
4) Humidity. Fuck that shit man.
5) General education classes. They're a fucking pain in the ass man. Like im 98% confident I don't need art history in the real world. Or mythology. "tHeY tEaCh YoU tO lEaRn." Teach me to learn in degree specific classes then. At least their content will be interesting to me.

My name is Stuxnet. Thanks for coming to my TED talk again.

"Here's an example code for Commodore 64. It should work on your Commodore 16 if you just leave out the POKEs and PEEKs."

Said by my sister somewhere in the mid 80s. This particular advice was silly, but I owe her for my interest in coding. It was actually her who begged our parents to get us a home computer, and took programming courses. She got bored with it though, and I got hooked up for life. Thanks sis!

ABC 80.

It was a Swedish computer in the 80s.

Used basic as main shell like c64 but its editor was worse than edlin if any one remembers that.

You could not use arrow keys to go to a line to change it but had to type a command like edit 80 to retrieve the line in an editor prompt.

It also lacked a lot of common basic commands.

I’m tired of all these profane “frontend developers” who do nothing but get cheap internet points by shitting on web technologies.

Bitch, NPM is just a package manager. That’s what it is. Anyone who ever used a package manager already knows how to use NPM.

Here on devrant, there at your workplace, people hear nothing but bitching when you open your mouth. You always need a “solid task description” and “best practices”. You always need somebody else to do your job for you. Frontend is the area where you have to constantly switch between heavy, performance-oriented coding, UX and graphic design while remaining in a dynamic environment that is called “web”, no wonder why you can’t do that. Instead of bitching, you could just present your own solution you designed with just a little bit of product-oriented thinking. But noooo, you fucking bother designers whenever you’re not sure about “how many pixels is that padding”.

You can only be barely productive (and only with a frozen spec) but can never take the lead just once.

In the 80s your kind of approaches were doubted, by the 90s they were dead. In 2020s they’re straight up laughable.

And don’t get me started on CSS. You have to be an absolute buffoon of a developer to not know how to use a DECLARATIVE tool that don’t even require real structural thinking.

No wonder why you praise php. You throw shit all over the place and tell everybody that you’re a “sociopath” and you don’t need that “stupid frontend” and “stupid users”. But you know what? Any real backend or embedded dev would’ve laughed at your face.

Because backend developers are respected.

You’re not.

Not a rant but an awesome moment. I am in the kitchen enjoying my morning rant reading session and I hear my 13 year old listening to jazz in his room. I listen to 80s hair bands and he listens to jazz. Cool.

The god damned education system in my country is completely fucked up. They teach TurboC++ in the name of programming, something that is no use in this world. This 80s ide is no use but it's compulsory to use turbo. Microsoft has fuckin removed support for 16 bit but they the syllabus won't change. I sent the concerned authorities an email about this but radio silence. This is too damn irritating.

Press F to pay respects fellow Indians

Do arcade games (Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Berserk) count? I got my allowance in quarters.

Atari 2600? Ti/99 with a tape drive to play a game at my friend's house?

Having to buy a 5.25" floppy in the HS bookstore for typing class on the TRaSh-80s and finding a way to put a break in the program and save it to disk so I got top score on assignments?

Tron. That's what really did it for me. To this day, I like to imagine there is a vast world inside the computer.

After a BASIC programming class in HS, I got an Apple IIGS and started writing my own load menus for these little games I'd find around FIDO and newsgroups. Instead of "PR#6, brun gumball" a nice styled menu would show where you could press the number of the game you wanted to play.

I bought a book on Apple assembler and promptly got disillusioned with full blown programming (in 1988), instead sticking to BASIC and, later, JavaScript, HTML, PHP, CSS, and Python.

Who remembers sharing hacked PCP accounts to dial out of state BBSes?

Applied Engineering customers and 300 baud chatroom lurkers represent.

User #243, God's Country chat

for your next edition of "TI's constantly been smoking crack since the 80s and has no intention of ever stopping":

the TI-8x calculators have a hardware buffer and an OS-provided buffer for screen data, effectively being an "immediate" buffer in hardware, to be displayed next VBlank, and a "slower" buffer, being what's copied to the "immediate" buffer when the OS decides it's time to update the screen. All well and good, maybe a little weirdly done but all in all makes sense. (You can even define a third buffer in RAM if you need to triple-buffer your shit.)

The problem arises when you use TI-BASIC and try to draw to the screen:
If you do something like, say, draw a circle, you'll notice that it's visibly drawn to the screen one pixel at a time. However, looking through what bits of the SDK I can find, the OS' "draw circle" assembly routine *doesn't update the immediate buffer!*

This means that, in TI-BASIC, the "draw circle" routine doesn't use the ACTUAL circle-drawing routine the OS provides, but instead individually calculates and plots a pixel, then updates the hardware buffer (an ENTIRE 768 bytes are copied EVERY TIME) and waits for VBlank to pass before repeating for the next one. In other words, it's deliberately slow as fuck.

Why? All the drawing commands, outside of like 2 or 3, do this. Why would you deliberately slow down the process of drawing to the screen on a system that you KNEW would be popular for people to code on???

Fuck pep8 in general. Fuck harder anything to do with line limits. Fuck with a rusty spatula those who tie it into their git precommits or CI tests.

What's that, it's 2018 and even the shittiest walmart-tier computers have 1080p OR BETTER at a 16:9 aspect ratio?

"lol, 80 character line limit."

Eat a bucket of rancid dicks.

Oh, and since we're forcing you to be so economical with your characters, we're going to force four space tabs. Yknow, rather than simple single tab characters, which could mean everyone can set their preferred level of spacing without bloating the code with whitespace.

Because, yknow, it's entirely reasonable to chew up 1/8 of a line because you're editing a function inside a class definition. God Almighty forbid you try to do a for loop inside that function! Fuck you!

"Oh but you can't have two editors or terminals open side by side without that limit!"

BULL FUCKING SHIT. Here's my shitty 1280x1024 display on my shitty computer with two Sublime editors open side by side. You'll notice the break is at 100 characters. You'll notice I don't have to scroll horizontally to do two things at once. You'll notice I even have room for COMMENTS!

If your code standards require you to make your code *less* readable and *less* clear and take up *more* space to accomplish the same tasks, YOUR CODE STANDARDS SUCK!

Enough with this stupid meme. We're not in the 80s anymore and it's high time to start fucking acting like it.

This isn't about dev, but is related as it was one of my first times seeing how tech could be abused or used in a creative way.

When I was a kid doorbell ditching was a thing. Also, flashing was a thing. Dudes would be naked in a trench coat and flash random people. The 80s was a strange time.

Anyway, my brothers liked to pull pranks. So they took apart a flashlight and mounted a switch into some wires to hold in their hand. They wore a trench coat, had all their clothes on, but wired the light part of the flashlight to their belt at about crotch level.

Then they went to houses at night, rang the doorbell. When people opened the door they flung open their trench coat and blinked the flash light a couple of times and ran away. Everybody in the neighborhood thought it was hilarious.

Ever since then I have had an interest in repurposing technology and code for fun things.

I dunno if I should have but I told my clients their video they are having made is shit (not exactly like that)

And that it would likely drive people away and we shouldn't put it on the site if it's going to be like that

80s TV animation is better seriously.

I have a Devrant tee shirt and stickers. Everyone knows I like 80s Rock and metal. I hope know figures out my identity. Never mind I don't care. I am freelancing.

I couldn’t help myself

A recruiter asked what year I graduated college. I had to tell the truth and say 1988. The 80s were a great time to be young.

i dont give a fuck why would you take a perfectly good domain name and shit out a fucking 80s useless website THAT DOES NOT EVEN DO ANYTHING

FUCK U

I got invited to take part in the "senior" games in my town. The person inviting me is in their 80s. They said people in their 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s will compete. I told them I am not yet 50. They were oh, okay. I said, I will tell Ed at work though. He could be in them!

Then I told Ed about this. He laughed. Then I said he could be in them. He told me to get out of his office, jokingly. I asked him if he was going to go to HR. He said yes. Then he said it was really funny I got invited.

Ed is great to work with.

I know I'm gonna get downvoted to hell but the only reason I didn't tried Vim is because thay it has such a shitty logo. It's like stuck in 80s. It's seriously bad. I used to be a designer so I can safely say, design or at least how things look do matter sometimes.

Ive been working on pseudo-Java (ie some 3rd company's UNDOCUMENTED programming language) that they parse into Java in their backend

It doesnt even support if-else (only ifs and elses) or a boolean combination of False and OR together lmao

mainly a GRPC middleware-language

Given its lack of features (arrays/collections) or documentation, I just had to implement a flag-array using a 0-1 string

Im throwing exceptions unless combined strings equal Lengths and is only 1s

living like in 80s-90s 💀

My 2009 ThinkStation has been running loud for a couple of years now, reaching temps in the 70s-80s at max load (40s idle) with stock settings, fans spinning like jet engines to try to cool it. Only recently (today) did I consider that maybe there's dust stuck somewhere, so I took the fan off my cooler and began the hunt there.

IT WAS FUCKING COVERED. Half of the fin intake area behind the fan was completely clogged up with dust. I was starving the poor thing and I never figured out why until now.

I deep-cleaned the entire system, and now it's running a gentoo install with all cores maxed running compiler tasks... Fans are much quieter, barely above idle noise, the main difference is just pitch of the noise because of the higher RPMs.

I dont have the firmware installed to measure temps, but I will update once I get that data.

Specs, in case anybody is curious:

> Xeon W3520 4c/8t 2.67Ghz
> 8GB DDR3 1066MHz
> RX 460 2GB (my student-budget upgrade)
> Dual 500/750GB HDD

Okay, honst question:
What the fuck is up with all that self deprecation?
I am not talking about the usual irony that comes with certain stereotypes about being a developer.

I am talking about people telling themselves that they are unable to socialize, find a girlfriend or generally justifying bad things just because they belong to a certain group.

It's not the 80s. Software devs and nerds in general are not all social outcasts anymore. I don't understand how some people can just "accept their fate as a dev" and act as if anything is keeping them away from social success.

What's your take on this issue?

I really wish to live in the 80s era. I guess i was born in the wrong timeline. Watching the footage and movies of that time really makes me think yall lived a far more enriching life while half of us genz scroll our life away on these fucking apps.
Also not being rich wasn't a problem as much as it is now with all the social media narcissism that is normalized with every other joe and joess labelling their puberty as some earth shattering transformation and posting all these glow ups with filters that make em look unreal and stupid shit

I have a LOT of Floppies but no floppy drive that works with my current Win7 machine, and my XP one is in multiple boxes for parts... so for now I can only stare at NetWare 4 to 4.2, WfW 3.11 and DOS 6-22.

Smart me made VMs on his XP machine and transferred them to his Win7 one.

I also have data tapes... now that is NEVER gonna work on my Win7 so... anyone knows how it could *possibly* work out?

Also... I got documentation on Compaq servers... those are nice.

AAAAAAND since I’m a huge MIDI nerd... I have a SC-55mkII hooked on the UM-ONE mkII and those shitty cans that I’m gonna switch (hopefully) soon for a nice pair of Cakewalks MA-15Ds.

Also, I’m looking for one of them 5150s because 80s IBM and since I also like keyboards... the one and only Model M.

Anyone can hook me up with a cheap one?

Sad how the easy to make softwares are already flooding the market and making millions so now we actually need to work a lot and innovate on something if we wanna a few bucks.

Also sad how in the 80s you could rob banks with just sql injection and now its almost impossible unless you’ve been devoting you being to cybersecurity for years.

Basically I feel it would have been cooler to be a computer scientist 30 years ago :/

Just finished watching "Halt and Catch Fire" on Netflix. If you haven't checked it out, you definitely should. It's about 80s tech disruptions. Also, any other suggestions for tech related TV series / movies? Silicon Valley, Mr. Robot etc.?

Soo... Let me get this straight... My boss reeeeeeally wants me to reconfigure our database system to sync data between each of our 15 sites... Let me this about this...

Our database is an MS Access database originally written about 17 years ago. It was written as a standalone database that runs a unique instance for each of our sites.The person responsible for the database (still not the original developer) before I took over 6 years ago bragged about how they were "an 80s developer" (w...t...f!). Even with all of the fixes and additions (additions because... F&$#ing of course there are!) It's still basically held together by duct tape and spit.

Hmmm... Ok, still possible. What's the environment I'm working in... I have absolutely ZERO control of our workplace network... That's a whole other department. Due to the nature of the workplace (and it's sites) there is extreme limitation on network access.

Well... If I'm Reeeeeeally nice to the people in charge of the network, maaaaaybe they can give me access to a little server space.

A very long shot, but, doab.... Oh, the boss would really like this handled in the next couple months...

F$#k you! There is no way on God's (still) green earth that I... Alone... Can rewrite a legacy database... written across 4 or 5 different versions of FU$KING MS Access, and give 15 sites, with extremely limited networking, real time data sync in... Oh, a few months.

Now, I do not work with "computer people". I'm usually lucky when my coworkers remember their passwords (which, even if they don't, WHY tell ME! I don't run the network!)

And when I tell my boss basically what I just said... In a nice, pleasant way... They suggest I'm not giving the problem enough thought...

FU#K YOU IGNORANT ASS! Write me a ToDo list in MS Access (no, I'm not going to tell you where to start) in under an hour then, MAYBE, we can talk about... No... Just NO... Can't be done!

*Takes deep breath* so... Lovely weather we're having, right?

Halt and Catch Fire is finally back!!

I'm always wondering what was there in people minds when Cmake build system was invented.. I mean, I know drugs were super strong in the '80s, but this is ridiculous..

Aside from simple programs I wrote by hand-transcribing code from the "Basic Training" section of 3-2-1 Contact magazine when I was a kid in the '80s, I would say the first project I ever undertook on my own that had a meaningful impact on others was when I joined a code migration team when I was 25. It was 2003.

We had a simple migration log that we would need to fill out when we performed any work. It was a spreadsheet, and because Excel is a festering chunk of infected cat shit, the network-shared file would more often than not be locked by the last person to have the file open. One night after getting prompted to open the document read-only again, I decided I'd had it.

I went to a used computer store and paid $75 out of pocket for an old beater, brought it back to the office, hooked it to the network, installed Lunar Linux on it, and built a simple web-based logging application that used a bash-generated flat file backend. Two days later, I had it working well enough to show it to the team, and they unanimously agreed to switch to it, rather than continue to shove Excel's jagged metal dick up our asses.

My boss asked me where I was hosting it, as such an application in company space would have certainly required his approval to procure. I showed him the completely unauthorized Linux machine(remember, this was 2003, when fortune 500 corporations, such as my employer, believed Ballmer's FUD-spew about Linux being a "virus" was real and not nonsense at all), and he didn't even hesitate to back me up and promise to tell the network security gestapo to fuck off if they ever came knocking. They never did.

I was later informed that the team continued to use the application for about five years after I left.

Here's some delphi code where one random developer from the 80s tries to force an error
if k=N then
begin
Memo.Lines.Add('Error, [some info]');
a:= 0 ; b:=b/a; {Here we try to force an error}
end ;

Oh god :'(

Collecting vintage computer, c64, trs-80s, apple II, etc.
It's so addictive...

I was telling a coworker about the shit hole known as San Fransisco. I don't say this lightly because it was a great place to visit when I was a child in the 80s. Some of the best memories in my life as a kid. Riding the trolleys was amazing. Watching the street performers was really really fun. Seeing the Golden Gate was awesome too.

Sadly, this is rapidly disappearing. The powers that be are allowing drug addicts to use anytime anyplace. They are giving them free food. People are shitting on sidewalks and dropping half eaten sandwiches on the sidewalk. So you will find half eaten sandwiches and poop next to each other. They have had to pay people 6 figures to clean this shit up.

As I was telling my coworker about this I said you will find poop and half eaten sandwiches on the sidewalk. Then I said: "old sandwich, new sandwich". He was unsure if he should laugh or puke.

My dad used to write DbaseII programs for the Marines in the 80s (logistics officer, was moving the batallion’s local copy of maintenance records to digital in parallel with the mandatory file card system), then went on to manage enterprise-level software development programs as a government contractor when he got out, so he has a pretty good sense of what goes on in my small, 1-man web shop, and has even advised on best practices at times. Mom knows the basics from years of observation.

Recently my dad also became a business partner in a venture we’re working on launching, so for that particular project he has a *very*clear idea of what goes on and where things are at.

Not necessarily a work related rant but fuck me for choosing me become a developer…
I’ve basically become the go-to tech support for senior family members who can’t bother to even remember their e-mail password.
And the excuse “Oh that wasn’t around when I was your age” is a bullshit at best.
You didn’t fall asleep in the 80s and magically wake up when Gmail was launched.
I’ve legit had to go through a maze of 30 different e-mails and reset the password on all of them just to get fucking OneDrive working so that I could see a dumb picture of fish stew my dad made.
Fml.

My father had always been a computer enthusiast: in the 80s he was the first student in his faculty to write his diploma thesis on a computer (in social sciences, so not quite a scientist dominated area). When I was 3 or 4, he bought a Macintosh (I think it was the Classic or Classic II) and the rest is history. I learned to type and more in general to be around computers very young. That computer is still in my parents' basement, I should dig it out. 😍

It was the mid 80s, and Dad had a Spectrum. I played games like Pud Pud and The Secret of Levitation.

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.

JetBrains' IDEA. For being smart and integrated out of the box.
Mercurial + hg-git + MutableHistory. Like Git, but actually works and doesn't speak gibberish.
Fish shell. For leaving 80s in peace.
openSUSE Tumbleweed. For actually tested up-to-date software.
GNOME. For actually trying to improve UX.

fuck VBA, fuck retard business users, who think it's proper to use it in 2019....
fuck them all, with their "save money" shit, then expect old shit to work "like at google".... let's STOP USING SHITTY LEGACY TECH, JUST BECAUSE THE LEADERS ARE TOO INCOMPETENT AND NEVER INVOLVE TECHNICAL PEOPLE FOR SELECTING SOFTWARES / SOLUTIONS....
Go back to the 80s and give'em a terminal to work... I'd like to see those fuckasses in pain....

listening to music of a random rock list on youtube.. meanwhile, my project is compiling and suddenly a romantic 80s song started playing!!
fuck i was so inspired!!

Hasn't technology become magic - and we ignorant sorcerer's apprentices who can perform a video call to the other side of the globe perhaps while we understand only some bytes of the thousands software snippets that were piled up by us code monkeys to perform the miracle? ...

This however has always been the state of software (for us developers): that this house of cards needs constant care by our hands to not collapse - in constant fear we may preserve the facades while the number of components that interact, the sheer mass of code only allow for guesswork and hotfixes accumulating the technical debt. Yes, we have all that terms for that. The problems are known since the 80s or 60s, so we might be relabeling it once in a while, but mainly it is just: complexity.. or entropy.

!rant

What movies/reality around me tells about free time:
- the "grand parents" generation (people who are in there 70-80s now) used to go out hang in tea shops, bars, parks,churches , wander in fields, chop woods in their leisure time in their 40s

The "parents" generation (people who are in their 30-40s now) were more into sports and would go for basketball , soccer , cricket for leisure time and later transitioned to playing board games/video games /xbox-PlayStation stuff/comics In their leisure time

The "our generation"(people who are between 18-30 now) are/would be more into playing mobile games and watching anime/web series/movies/weird porn and scrolling social media feed as leisure time in our 40s

( I have taken 40s as a criteria because i am guessing that as a standard age where you are "settled" and have things figured out)

Is this how the pattern is going? And isn't it sad that we are Going from doing stuff that's fun and making you street smart to doing stuff that's useless , time wasting and a little depressing ?

Three
Iphone keyboard contrived to be the worst input device every created by men. It's effect wiser than 80s keyboard before they know where to put the keys that didn't break you're wrists just trying to use then.

This message bright up you buy the iphone. Think doubt.

Some 80s and 90s books. And the more the time goes by the more I lean towards FP and stateless systems...

On the syntactic side I love the work of Kevlin Henney. For me it's all about readability. So a lot of choices are based on that.

2 weeks+ ago I made a PR into our codebase containing sample refactor that streamlined a significant portion of code. Also, I did refactor only on two handler packages (for MVC folks, that's Controller) as proof of concept, to figure out how convinient / logical the part would be for everyone.

We have rule of 2 approvals for merge (for 5 team members)

While writing refactor, it obviously blown up a lot of unit tests, but still coverage was fairly poor (that stuff was rushed, there was back than no time for unit tests). After my refactor I spent couple of days writing tests that hit fairly sweet (comparatively) coverage. (I managed to bump coverage from low 20s to high 80s, and have less code for tests)

I got first approve pretty much immidietely, other team member was on vacations, and 2 of them forgot.

We generally try to close PRs fairly quickly (usually same day kind of deal), but that one was just.. hanging in there. So I pinged everyone to re-check it to greenlight it but of course, loo and behold, merge conflicts arised. I ended up fixing actual logic (just some method signatures changed, not a big deal) and ran the units.

So, one of that handlers got quite a few of edits, and guess who is pretty much rewriting unit tests for second time now...

Dude, sometimes I question why tf I even bother with these tests... Feels like sabotaging my productivity, especially with bullshit like that

Just watched the movie Caveman again after about 7 years since the last time. The movie never gets old. The fun part is relearning the language of the movie again. It is funny that a lot of successful actors may have made their debut in this movie.

The innovation of the 80s: Teddy Ruxpin, Hypercolor and Magic Shell were WAY ahead of their time. Tell me I'm wrong.

I wish I'd thought of that.