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.

The project where I realized I wanted to go from chemist to pro dev.

I built a flow-chemistry spectrometer with monitoring backend in Haskell.

Spectroscopy is where you add a reagent to a glass tube, it changes color, and by measuring the exact color it tells you how much of something (for example, a toxin) is present in the sample.

I had to do that a lot on factory samples, writing down measurements using pen & paper.

I'm lazy so I decided to do the logical thing: Automate it. I bought a second hand spectrometer, stripped the casing, did a shitload of glassblowing and hooked up tubes to the production pipelines, so I could get samples, mixing them in the correct ratio with reagents in continuous flows using valves.

I ended up using 2 home-crafted arduino-like boards (etching PCBs is fun!).

One to calibrate the mixture against known samples and control solenoid valves to continuously cycle through various reagents and deionized flushing water, the other to record the measurements and send them to a server running a Haskell/Yesod API.

The server collected the information into InfluxDB (A time series database), displaying all data on a graphite dashboard.

Eventually I wrote Haskell plugins for most of the chemistry processes, from pH & temperature measurements to polymer property and pigment tests (they made a lot of printer ink).

Then I was fired because they didn't need chemists anymore, and the code "could be maintained by the intern" (poor guy)...

But I did find out that I loved functional programming, chemistry automation projects, and crafting my own electronics during that time.

HR sent around updated contracts asking everyone to sign them since the company changed its name, fair enough.

In the contract it stated "Your normal place of work will be X" - only X was many miles away, and I'd never worked there, never planned too. Assumed it was a mistake, sent it back. HR refused to change it, stating that the "normal place of work does not need to be the place where you normally work."

A lot of back and forth entailed, I refused to sign, I was reprimanded for not doing so, I was asked what my problem was as it made no material difference, and then I eventually replied with:

"Angela, I'm refusing to sign this as it's factually incorrect. No further explanation is required. I'll maybe consider signing this if you sign a piece of paper declaring you believe the moon is made of cheese, and you're the cow the milk came from to make it."

A very strongly worded email came back about how this was going on my record, I needed to offer a formal apology, etc. - all cc'd to my manager. I replied back, again copying my manager in, stating that this was ok, as I couldn't remain at a company who forced employees to sign dodgy contracts anyway.

Problem was (for them), I was a *massive* single point of failure for them at this point owing to some others leaving with no handover - hence I knew I wasn't going to be the casualty here. My manager flipped the lid at HR, got the CEO involved on threat of *him* leaving, and the whole thing massively blew up. Happy ending in that the HR person in question was fired, everyone else's contracts also had to be redone (I assumed everyone else just signed without looking which is worrying), and I actually got a pay rise out of it when higher ups realised the massive single point of failure I was.

But damn, I would've walked over crap like that. Walked pretty soon after anyway!

Hi there fellas,

I'm new to devrant and I'll like to share with you my first story.

It was my first payed job. A good friend of mine (media designer in print) called me "My customer needs a website, do you think you can do that?"
At this time I've never build a single page, so my answer was "Of course, easy-peasy".
She told me it was a family business and a nationwide player in finance sector.

I met the CEO, did my research and build a prototype. Well, the CEO and his staff liked it so I finished the website and prepared for the first review.

I booted the laptop and tried to connect to their network. There was none. They just never had a wireless connection not a single cable in the entire office. That was the time I realized that I work for a family business.
The CEO was an ancient guy who probably saw Jesus Christ hanging on the cross in personal and internet is weird thing controlled by the devil himself.

I took the laptop and went over to the CEOs personal office, plugged the network cable out of his Computer and into the laptop. Finally I could show them what I've done.

He took a look at it and called for his assistant. "Might you print that website for us?" That was my second wtf moment.

The assistant returned with a half chopped down and bleached rainforest that contained an image of their new website.

I tried to tell him that a website on paper can't show him the functions n shit, but he looked at me like I was talking two foreign languages at once.

So we reviewed the website on paper and his one and only problem was the size of the letters. "I can't read it well, please make the text bigger" At this moment I wanted to hit my forehead on the table and tell him that it is normal to have readings difficulties when you are walking the shores of Styx.

At the end everything went well, but I realized that dealing with customers is a lot more difficult than developing something for them. The future should prove me right.

That's it.
My first story about my first job.

Thank you for reading 😊

Back when I was in college I had this CS professor who was by far the worst I can remember. The class was some bullshit 100 level required intro to CS course, and the guy tried to make it as difficult as possible. Beyond that, he was just a bad professor and did stupid things.

One of the most memorable things he did was give homework assignments, and then in order to collect them (it was a lecture class of about 150 people), he would have everyone pass their printed assignments to the right, and these sheets of paper traveled all the way across the lecture hall in every row of seats. It was a complete mess.

As you can probably guess, he frequently misplaced homework assignments, and many were probably lost through this ridiculous method of turning them in. Some people almost failed this ridiculously easy class because he lost their homework assignments. I think he lost like one of mine so it didn't matter much, but some other people in the class almost failed because of this. I think in the end he had to make a lot of exceptions because of this obvious trend.

Beyond that, he was an older guy who had worked for IBM, and he made that known at least once per class, usually more. "IBM this, IBM that!" So fucking annoying.

I'm glad to be long done with college.

At the peak of the dotcom boom of the early 2000s I had been hired above my skill set because recruiters were desperate to fill seats. I had a pulse and could code even a little so they hired me.

I was the senior web developer on an agency contract with a major corporation working on an ASP (pre ASP.NET) website. I had hired a temp to help me with the workload and one day, in exasperation at my spaghetti code and non-understanding of MVC concepts, he threw his hands in the air and exclaimed, "Do you even know what you're doing?!"

Not having the type of personality to give any subordinate a dressing down for insubordination, I just felt awkward. He was right, of course. I used that as impetus to study more and attend conferences. I'm still a below-average coder because my brain struggles with math and logic. A lot. But that definitely took me down a peg. All those recruiters treating me like I was hot snot on a silver platter when I was really just a cold booger on a paper plate.

So this chick has been super nice to me for the past few months, and has been trying to push me towards a role in security. She said nothing but wonderful things about it. It’s easy, it’s not much work, it’s relaxing, etc.

I eventually decided I’m burned out enough that something, anything different would be good, and went for it. I’m now officially doing both dev and security. The day I started, she announced that she was leaving the security team and wouldn’t join any other calls. Just flat-out left.

She trained me on doing a security review of this release, which basically amounted to a zoom call where I did all of the work and she directed me on what to do next, ignored everything I said, and treated me like an idiot. It’s apparently an easy release. The work itself? Not difficult, but it’s very involved, very time consuming, and requires a lot of paper trail — copying the same crap to three different places, tagging lots of people, copying their responses and pasting them elsewhere, filing tickets, linking tickets, copying info back and forth to slack, signing off on things, tagging tickets in a specific way, writing up security notes in a very specific format etc. etc. etc. It’s apparently usually very hectic with lots of last-minute changes, devs who simply ignore security requests, etc.

I asked her at the end for a quick writeup because I’m not going to remember everything and we didn’t cover everything that might happen.

Her response: Just remember what you did here, and do it again!

I asked again for her to write up some notes. She said “I would recommend.. you watch the new release’s channel starting Thursday, and then review what we did here, and just do all that again. Oh, and if you have any questions, talk to <security boss> so you get in the habit of asking him instead of me. Okay, bye!”

Fucking what.
No handoff doc?
Not willing to answer questions after a day and a half of training?

A recap
• She was friendly.
• She pushed me towards security.
• She said the security role was easy and laid-back.
• I eventually accepted.
• She quit the same day.
• The “easy release” took a day and a half of work with her watching, and it has a two-day deadline.
• She treated (and still treats) me like a burden and ignores everything I said or asked.
• The work is anything but laid-back.
• She refuses to spend any extra time on this or write up any notes.
• She refuses to answer any further questions because (quote) “I should get in the habit of asking <security boss> instead of her”

So she smiled, lied, and stabbed me in the back. Now she’s treating me like an annoyance she just wants to go away.

I get that she’s burned out from this, but still, what a fucking bitch. I almost can’t believe she’s acting this way, but I’ve grown to expect it from everyone.

But hey, at least I’m doing something different now, which is what I wanted. The speed at which she showed her true colors, though, holy shit.

“I’m more of a personal motivator than anything,” she says, “and I’m first and foremost a supporter of women developers!” Exactly wrong, every single word of it.

God I hate people like this.

Public sector. Guy wants to upload a PDF file into our system that exceeds our file size upload limit by a factor of more than 10. The PDF contains a lot of pictures.

His idea: print the hundreds of pages of the PDF on paper in b/w and scan it because b/w takes less space then colored pictures.

I am perplexed. He asked first though, so we could prevent the actual printing.

Boy: I want to draw a door for my house drawing...
Teacher: Google it..
Boy: I found it. house-door.jpg. It seems popular. A lot of stars.
Teacher: download it, cut and paste to your paper.
Boy:Can I draw it myself?
Teacher: yes.. but this is easier, isn't it? Don't reinvent the wheel.
Boy: but, this door does not match with my french window.
Teacher: oh, integrate french windows with door? Try to search house-door-french-window.jpg. maybe someone already did something like that?

===rant

So I have been freelancing as web developer for 5 years. I was also playing basketball professionally so I was only working part-time, building websites here and there, small android apps to learn the job and I was also reading a lot to challenge my brain.

When I stopped playing basketball about a year ago, I thought I would really enjoy coding full time so I pursued a job.

With no formal education and just a basketball background on paper, in the collapsed Greek economy, as you may assume chances of landing a job are minimal.

After about 40 resumes sent I only got an internship. It was a 4 month, part-time, no pay deal, and then the company would decide if they would like to hire me later.

The company had 4 employees and they are one of the largest software distribution businesses in my area. They resell SaaS bought from a third company, bundled with installation support, initial configuration, hardware support, whatever a client may need.

I was the only one with any ability to code whatsoever. The other people were working mostly on customer support with the occasional hardware repair.

After the 4 month period they owner (small company, owner was also manager and other roles) told me that they are very happy with my work and would like to keep me part-time with minimum pay.

Just to give you and idea if the amounts of money involved, in Greece, after taxes, my salary was 240euros per month. And the average cost of surviving (rent, cheapest food possible, no expenses on anything but super basics) is about 600euros.

I told him I needed more to live and he told me ok, we will reevaluate a few months later, at the end of May 2017.

I just accepted it without having many options. The company after all was charging clients 30euros per hour for my projects so I kept thinking that if I worked a lot and delivered consistently I would get a full time job and decent money.

And I delivered. In the following months I made a Magento extension, some WordPress themes, a C# application to extract data from the client's ERP and import it to a third application, a click to call application to use Asterisk to originate calls from the client's ERP, a web application to manage a restaurant's menu and many more small projects. Whatever they asked, I delivered.

On time, version controlled, heavily documented solutions (my C# ones are not exactly masterpieces but it was my first time with the language and windows).

So when May ended I was pretty excited to hear they wanted to keep me full time. I worked hard for it, I was serious, professional, I tried a lot to learn things so I can deliver, and the company recognized that. YAY.

So the time comes to talk money. The offer was 480euros per month. Double my part-time pay, minimum wage. I asked for about 700. Manager said it's hard but I will see what I can do. So we agreed to keep the deal for June while they are working on a better offer.

During the first half of June I finished my last project, put all my work on a nice folder with a nice readme on every project's directory, with their version control and everything.

The offer never improved, so I said no deal, and as of today, I am jobless.

I am stressed as fuck and excited as fuck at the same time.

I will do my best to survive in the shitstorm that is called Greece.

Bring it on.

I ended up quitting my first job for many reasons, but this talk still haunts me:

"our workers need to input this data and they tab a lot because [...]"

Me: "ok... Where do they get the data from?

"A standard model compiled via web, sent via mail and then printed for them."

Me: "..."

Them: "..."

Me: "how about we make the import automatic?"

Them: "but then what will our workers do?"

To this day I am still impacted by this dialog... Not much for the stupidity from a business logic point of view (there are many bad companies, and this is not the only one I met in my career), but rather for the implications our job has and for the fact bs jobs are a thing because we are SO used to the capitalism that the bad guys are the ones removing boring tasks, rather than the shitty system which forces you to do a repetitive and automatable task and which reduces you to a shell doing a job a machine could do... And thanks for the wasted paper/ink, global warming ain't gonna get worse on its own!

From my work -as an IT consultant in one of the big 4- I can now show you my masterpiece

INSIGHTS FROM THE DAILY LIFE OF A FUNCTIONAL ANALIST IN A BIG 4 -I'M NOT A FUNCTIONAL ANALYST BUT THAT'S WHAT THEY DO-

- 10:30, enter the office. By contract you should be there at 9:00 but nobody gives a shit
- First task of the day: prepare the power point for the client. DURATION: 15 minutes to actually make the powerpoint, 45 minutes to search all the possible synonyms of RESILIENCE BIG DATA AGILE INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION MACHINE LEARNING SHIT PISS CUM, 1 hour to actually present the document.
- 12:30: Sniff the powder left by the chalks on the blackboards. Duration: 30 minutes, that's a lot of chalk you need to snort.

13:00, LUNCH TIME. You get back to work not one minute sooner than 15.00

- 15:00, conference with the HR. You need to carefully analyze the quantity and quality of the farts emitted in the office for 2 hours at least
- 17:00 conference call, a project you were assigned to half a day ago has a server down.
The client sent two managers, three senior Java developers, the CEO, 5 employees -they know logs and mails from the last 5 months line by line-, 4 lawyers and a beheading teacher from ISIS.
On your side there are 3 external ucraininans for the maintenance, successors of the 3 (already dead) developers who put the process in place 4 years ago according to God knows which specifications. They don't understand a word of what is being said.
Then there's the assistant of the assistant of a manager from another project that has nothing to do with this one, a feces officer, a sys admin who is going to watch porn for the whole conference call and won't listen a word, two interns to make up a number and look like you're prepared. Current objective: survive. Duration: 2 hours and a half.
- 19:30, snort some more chalk for half an hour, preparing for the mail in which you explain the associate partner how because of the aforementioned conference call we're going to lose a maintenance contract worth 20 grands per month (and a law proceeding worth a number of dollars you can't even read) and you have no idea how could this happen
- 20:00, timesheet! Compile the weekly report, write what you did and how long did it take for each task. You are allowed to compile 8 hours per day, you worked at least 11 but nobody gives a shit. Duration: 30 minutes
- 20:30, update your consultant! Training course, "tasting cum and presenting its organoleptic properties to a client". Bearing with your job: none at all. Duration: 90 minutes, then there's half an hour of evaluating test where you'll copy the answers from a sheet given to you by a colleague who left 6 months ago.
- 22:30, CHANCE CARD! You have a new mail from the HR: you asked for a refund for a 3$ sandwich, but the receipt isn't there and they realized it with a 9 months delay. You need to find that wicked piece of paper. DURATION: 30 minutes. The receipt most likely doesn't even exist anymore and will be taken directly from your next salary.
- 23:00 you receive a message on Teams. It's the intern. It's very late but you're online and have to answer. There's an exception on a process which have been running for 6 years with no problems and nobody ever touches. The intern doesn't know what to do, but you wrote the specifications for the thing, 6 years ago, and everything MUST run tonight. You are not a technician and have no fucking clue about anyhing at all. 30 minutes to make sure it's something on our side and not on the client side, and in all that the intern is as useful as a confetto to wipe your ass. Once you're sure it's something on our side you need to search for the senior dev who received the maintenance of the project, call him and solve the problem.
It turns out a file in a shared folder nobody ever touches was unreachable 'cause one of your libraries left it open during the last run and Excel shown a warning modal while opening it; your project didn't like this last thing one bit. It takes 90 minutes to find the root of the problem, you solve it by rebooting one of your machines. It's 01:00.

You shower, watch yourself on the mirror and search for the line where your forehead ends and your hair starts. It got a little bit back from yesterday; the change can't be seen with the naked eye but you know it's there.

You cry yourself to sleep. Tomorrow is another day, but it's going to be exactly like today.

Story time:

At a precious employer.
Hire shit-hot contractor.
No technical test at interview stage because he’s so shit-hot.
Is a uni lecturer.
PhD in mathematics.

Me: Shit, this guy must be good!

6 months later and a tragedy of errors and clearly misspent company funds later:

Manager: can you look at what x did and merge it into the product?

Me: Sure. *looks* *yells fuck very loudly*

*walks over to manager*

“Soooo... you know those 6 months and thousands and thousands you spent? It’s all for nought. There’s barely anything there, and none of it works.”

Manager: “Shit. What are we going to do? Can you fix it?”

Me: “To be honest, it would be quicker to just do it from scratch than try to work out what he’s done and failed to do.”

Manager: “Fuck. Ok. Go for it.”

I then had to build this entire new lot of systems, a workflow system, a user management and permissions system.

I got it done inside a month or so.

For context, we (the devs) knew something was afoot when the contractor couldn’t work out why his keyboard wasn’t working (it wasn’t plugged in), and he also *really* struggled to find his way around visual studio and git.

The moral of this tale? *always always* screen your candidates. Even if they seem amazing on paper.

*part rant part developers are the best people in the world*

years back a friend got a job at some non profit, as a program coordinator, and his first task was to "coordinate" the work on creating the new website for the organisation. current website they had was a monster built on some custom cms, 7 languages, 5 years of almost dayly content updates, etc. so he asked me if i would took the job of creating a new website on wordpress. i wasn t really keen on doing it, but he is a good friend so i said ok. i wrote down the SOW, which clearly stated that i will not be responsible for migrating the old content to the new website. i had experience working with non it clients, and made sure everyone understood the SOW before the contract was signed. everyone was ok with it. after three weeks my job was done, all milestones and requirenments were met. peechy! and then all hell breaks loose when the president of the organisation (the most evil person i ve met in my life) told my friend that she expects me to migrate the content as well. he tried explaining her that that was not agreed, that it will cost extra, etc. but she didn t want to hear any of that. despite the fact that she was a part of the entire SOW creation process, because she is a micro managing bitch. in any other situation i wouldn t budge, because we have the contract and i kept all the paper trail, but since my friends job was on the line i agreed to do it. my SQL knowldge at the time, and even now, was very rudimentary, the db organisation of their cms was confusing as fuck... so i took two days of searching tutorials and SO threads and was doing ok, until i got to a problem i couldn t solve on my own. i posted the issue on SO and some guy asked for some clarifications, and we went back and forth, and decided to move to chat. while chatting with him i realised that there was not a chance for me to do all the work in few days without a lot of errors so i offered him to do it for a fee. he agreed. i asked him for his rate, he said if this is a community work i will do it for free, but if it is commercial i will charge the standard rate, 50$/hr. i told him it was commercial, and agreed to his rate. i asked him if he needed an advance payment, he said no need, you ll pay me when the job is done. i sent him the db dumps, after two days he sent me the csv, i checked it, all was good and wired him the money.
now compare this work relatioship with the relatioship with that bitch from the non profit.
* we met online, on a semi-anonymous forum, this guys profile was empty
* he trusted me enough to say that he would do it for free if i wasn t payed either
* i wasn t an asshole to take advantage of that trust
* he did the work without the advance payment
* i payed him the moment i verified the work

faith in humanity restored

My third paper got accepted, doing localization with this cute baby in the picture. Had a lot of fun collaborating with a good friend of mine from ETH.
My advisor declines every request I have, and then ignores me most of the time. No wonder the motivation in the lab is lower than the Dead Sea.
I have no words to describe how much I hate every second of my existence, but simultaneously I refuse to change my toxic circumstances so I have only myself to blame. Cheers.

I just had to print out some bills for a colleague.
Nothing too bad you say?

Well.. She doesn't seem to care about security or privacy at all.
I opened the website of her email provider at my computer and moved away from the keyboard, so she could log in.
But instead she told me her email and password... In an office with some other colleagues... Multiple times and wrote it onto a piece of paper that the later left on my table.
After that I should look through her inbox to find the bills.
(Yup, I know a lot more about her now)
After finding and printing out her bills, she just thanked me and walked out of the office, because hey, why should I log out of her account?

It's nice that she trusts me... But that was a bit too much...

Old rant about an internship I had years ago. It still annoys me to this day, so I just had to share the story.

Basically I had no job or work experience in the field, which is a common issue in the city I live in - developer jobs are hard to come by with no experience here. The municipality tried to counter this issue by offering us (unemployed people with an interest in the field) a free 9-month course, linked with an internship program, with a "high chance" of a job after the internship period.

To lure companies to agree to this deal, the municipality offered a sum of money to companies who willing to take interns. The only requirement for the company was that they had to offer a full-time position to the interns after the internship, as long as there were no serious issues (ex. skipping work, calling in sick, doing a bad job etc.).
On paper, this deal probably makes sense.

I landed an internship fairly quickly at a well-known company in the city. The first internship period went great, and I got constant positive feedback. I even got to the point where I ran out of tasks since I worked faster than expected - which I was fairly proud of at the time.

The next internship period was a weird mix between school (the course), and being at the company. We would be at the school for the whole week, expect Wednesdays where we could do the internship at the company.

When I met at work on that first Wednesday, the company told me that it made no sense for me to meet up on those days, as I was only watching some tutorial videos during that time, while they were finding bigger tasks for me - which in turn required that they got some designs for a new project. They said that due to the requirements they got from the municipality (which I knew nothing about at the time), they couldn't ask me to work from home - and they said it would "demoralize" the other developers if I just sat there on Wednesdays to watch videos. Instead, they suggested that I called in sick on Wednesdays and just watched the videos at home - which is something I would register to the workplace, so I wouldn't get in trouble with the school. It sounded logical to me, so I did that for like 5-6 Wednesdays in a row. Looking back at this period, there's a lot of red flags - but I was super optimistic and simply didn't notice.

After this period, the final 2 months of the internship period (no school). This time I had proper tasks, and was still being praised endlessly - just like the first period.
On the last day of the internship, I got called to a meeting with my teamlead and CEO. Thinking I was to sign a full-time contract, I happily went to the meeting.. Only to be told that they had found someone with more experience.
I was fairly disappointed, and told them honestly that I would have preferred if they had told me this earlier, since I had been looking forward to this day. They apologized, but said that there was nothing they could do.

When I returned for the last school period (2 weeks), the teacher asked me to join him for a small meeting with some guy from the municipality. Both seemed fairly disappointed / angry, and told me what still makes me furious whenever I think about it.
Basically after my last internship period, the company had called the municipality, telling them that I had called in sick on those Wednesdays, and was "a lazy worker", and they would refuse to hire me because of that.
I of course told them my side of the story, which they wouldn't believe (unemployed person vs. well-known company).

Even when I landed a proper job a few months later, the office had called my old internship for a reference - and they told the same story, which nearly made them decline my application. This honestly makes me feel like it's something personal.

So basically:
Municipality: Had to pay the company as the deal / contract between them was kept.
Company: Got free money and work.
Me: Got nothing except a bad reputation - and some (fairly limited) experience..

Do I regret taking the course? .. No, it was a free course and I learned a lot - and I DID get some experience. But god, I wish I had applied at a different company.

Sorry for my bad English - it's not my first language.. But f*ck this company :)

Post after a long long time...

Wanted to reply to so many comments and mentions, rant about a bunch of topics, do a face reveal after I went for a vacation with family and got some pictures, update y'all on my job hunt, but was busy like hell.

Anyway, time for a story.

After my rejection with Meta and Booking, I started preparing like crazy and my interviews started going well. Refined my LinkedIn further and recruiters started reaching out as well.

Over time, with efforts and feedback, I was able to build a good pipeline.

One of my dream companies reached out to me and I got hired in just 1 round and all others were merely a formality. I was euphoric, but at the same time didn't get over excited as this seemed fishy.

They made a very good monetary offer and I didn't talk to my manager yet regarding resignation. They are pushing me for an early joining.

Read a bunch of Glassdoor reviews and also spoke to a friend who just recently quit that organisation.

He confirmed that the company has 3 months of notice, has sandwich leave policy, and some other XLT political mess.

I decided to decline the offer tomorrow.

Day saved? Not yet.

Because of this I slacked off work a lot. I am super screwed with work items pending because I thought I'd quit.

My boss resinged and new one isn't that supportive yet. He is trying to change everything overnight. Typical.

I ended up performing poorly in other companies because I was confident I'll pick this offer and didn't prepare for upcoming good companies.

Moreover, we have our offices opening up from April and I might be asked to relocate to another city which does not have a team but just because it is on paper, they might force me to be in office 50% of the time.

And what's worse is, my relationship with tech is deteriorating and they are putting the entire product team in bad light.

I have a planned weekend trip coming up, so I won't be able to prepare for interviews or work on case studies so that shit will pile up more.

I am sooooo fucking screwed. Life was stable and then all of a sudden too 180° flip.

I am hysterical right now.

Awkward recruiting process? Sit the fuck back!

So about a year ago I got laid off. I got some help setting up LinkedIn and realising I'm not trash and offers to talk started flowing in.

So this consultancy firm asks me to come in for a talk and having nothing better to do I oblige - they're working on big, exciting Greenfield stuff and I'm amazed they want me.
Fast forward the most nervous week in my life and the HR assistant brings me into the meeting room, I get some water and a nice first impression - also my last. I wait in the room for five minutes.

In walks madam HR, madam Team lead and miss assistant from before, all carrying big ass laptops. We shake hands and they sit down and all open up their laptops between me and them - I just sit there feeling naked with my block of paper and pencil I brought.

So we wait for their machines to start up and madam HR just starts throwing questions at me and seemingly noting my answers into a sheet. Meanwhile madam Teamlead is busy on her phone most of the time and my most human interaction remains smalltalk and questions between me and miss assistant.

I did manage to get madam Teamlead to look up from her phone when I asked how they felt about the fact that I have no formal training and would need to pick up a lot of skills as we go, to which she said something along 'well this ain't a candy shop, we expect you to work' and looked back down at her phone.

A bit shaken, I agreed to stay for the technical test (apparently I passed the interview...)
Now this test was designed by their CTO since he didn't feel like any of the available tests on the market could properly judge applicants' skilllevels. Yes, alarms went off already at that point.

What I'm presented with is a word document with questions, and another for answers and... It's just string gymnastics and reference/value difference knowledge - shit it takes you a split second to look up or test if you ever get into these insane cases where you need to know. And then there was a likewise one with sql statements that was also just convoluted query gymnastics and trying to hide changes in the seemingly same statement through various questions. No questions on design, no problem solving, just... Attention span testing with a dash of coding?

Anyway, it turned out they had evening and weekend shifts and round the clock support tournus which on top of the ridiculous recruitment process and way lower than average salary offer had me turn them down.

Don't enable bullshit people, run away!

I noticed that a lot of people are ranting about writing code on paper in the wk92 rant, but that got me thinking: does anyone here write something like "pseudo-code" (or some kind of plan) on paper before they type out their code?

School sucks.
Paying quiet a lot of money(not having that much) to a private school that used to impress me two years ago.
Now I can see all the hidden crap:
- Project work is graded after written lines

- "Do this project with scrum" Got two hours in the room with scrum board in a whole semester

- Exams are pushed if the teacher is to lazy to deal with bad results. A 3 ( or C ) became best grade.

- They could not find a teacher for OS & Networks. So instead of 1 semester Server architecture we got 5 days.. 1 of them for exam (exam = final grade)

- Guy took part with us during the 5 days. "How did you do that?!? Doesn't work on my PC I think" - half year later he is the new Network teacher

- Surpassingly he sucks at that, being half a week ahead of his lessons by googling shit together. Can't answer a single question beyond that..

Once he created a multiple choice exam. Questions in a word document online, answers on paper. Not just that he never blocked the internet during the exam, he also publicly uploaded the document a week ahead. Securing it with a 5 letter password... Somehow we all passed that one with a pretty good average.

Besides there a some teachers who are actually really good.

When I was at university in my last semester of my bachelor's, I was doing a game programming paper and our last assignment was to group up and make a game. So I go with one of the guys I know and this other dude since his previous game was really neat. Then two randoms joined that from my first impressions of their games wasn't much at all (one guy made four buttons click and called it a game in Java when we had to make games in c++ and the other guy used an example game and semi modded it.

Anyways we get to brain storming, totally waste too much time getting organised because the guy that volunteered (4 buttons guy) was slow to getting things sorted. Eventually we get to making the game and 4 buttons guy hasn't learnt how to use git, I then end up spending 3 hours over Skype explaining to him how to do this. He eventually learns how to do things and then volunteers to do the AI for the game, after about a week (this assignment is only 5 weeks long) he hasn't shown any progress, we eventually get to our 3rd week milestone no progress from him and the modder, with only three classes left we ask them both to get stuff done before a set deadline (modder wanted to do monsters and help 4 buttons with AI) both agreed and deadline rolls up and no work is shown at all, modest shows up extremely late and shows little work.

4 buttons guy leaves us a Skype message the day of our 2nd to last class,, saying he dropped the paper...

Modder did do some work but he failed to read all the documentation I left him (the game was a 2d multiplayer crafting game, I worked so hard to make a 2d map system with a world camera) he failed to read everything and his monsters used local coordinates and were stuck on screen!

With about a week left and not too many group meetings left we meet up to try and get stuff done, modder does nothing to help, the multiplayer is working my friend has done the crafting and weapon system and the map stuff is working out well. We're missing AI and combat, with our last few hours left we push to get as much stuff done, I somehow get stuck doing monster art, AI is done by the other two and I try to getting some of the combat and building done.

In the end we completely commented all of modders work because well it made us look bad lol. He later went to complain to my free claiming I did it and was a douchebag for doing so. We had to submit our developer logs and the three of us wrote about how shitty it was to deal with these two.

We tried out best not to isolate ourselves from them and definitely tried to help but we were swamped with our other assignments and what we had to work on.

In the end leaving and not helping right when the deadline is close was what I call the most shittiest thing team mates can do, I think sticking together even if we were to fail was at least a lot better.

So recently I did a lot of research into the internals of Computers and CPUs.
And i'd like to share a result of mine.

First of all, take some time to look at the code down below. You see two assembler codes and two command lines.

The Assembler code is designed to test how the instructions "enter" and "leave" compare to manually doing what they are shortened to.

Enter and leave create a new Stackframe: this means, that they create a new temporary stack. The stack is where local variables are put to by the compiler. On the right side, you can see how I create my own stack by using

push rbp
mov rbp, rsp
sub rsp, 0

(I won't get into details behind why that works).

Okay. Why is this even relevant?
Well: there is the assumption that enter and leave are very slow. This is due to raw numbers:
In some paper I saw ( I couldn't find the link, i'm sorry), enter was said to use up 12 CPU cycles, while the manual stacking would require 3 (push + mov + sub => 1 + 1 + 1).

When I compile an empty function, I get pretty much what you'd expect just from the raw numbers of CPU cycles.

HOWEVER, then I add the dummy code in the middle:

mov eax, 123
add eax, 123543
mov ebx, 234
div ebx

and magically - both sides have the same result.

Why????

For one thing, there is CPU prefetching. This is the CPU loading in ram before its done executing the current instruction (this is how anti-debugger code works, btw. Might make another rant on that). Then there is the fact that the CPU usually starts work on the next instruction while the current instruction is processing IFF the register currently involved isnt involved in the next instruction (that would cause a lot of synchronisation problems). Now notice, that the CPU can't do any of that when manually entering and leaving. It can only start doing the mov eax, 1234 while performing the sub rsp, 0.

----------------

NOW: notice that the code on the right didn't take any precautions like making sure that the stack is big enough. If you sub too much stack at once, the stack will be exhausted, thats what we call a stack overflow. enter implements checks for that, and emits an interrupt if there is a SO (take this with a grain of salt, I couldn't find a resource backing this up). There are another type of checks I don't fully get (stack level checks) so I'd rather not make a fool of myself by writing about them.

Because of all those reasons I think that compilers should start using enter and leave again.

========

This post showed very well that bare numbers can often mislead.

My company just acquired another company from some losers.
Gotta load their pittance database onto our thing.
Their entire "Technology Department" is one old fart.
One even older fart runs their accounting.
I asked the IT boomer for their accounting data.
He tells me to get the head accountant.
The head accountant says they do not have any historical accounting data.
I threaten to call the (equivalent of the) IRS on them.
They give up, admit that they do have some historical data. But they attempt to pull a "malicious compliance" on me, send me a pallet full of old receipts, on paper.

I do what I have done one hundred times before, I go to the closest community college (equivalent) and ask/bribe a teacher to offer the most trustworthy kids some pretty pennies to scan all those files for me.
A dozen of them barely took a week to do it using their not-so-bad camera phones.
It all for about the same price as a couple of older-but-still-good iPhones.
Then it's on to some simple OCR and data normalization tasks.

This morning I had another meeting with the losers, the first since I told them their "data" had just arrived in the mail (but a couple weeks after that). They log in for the meeting all smug, thinking we would ask for more time to load their data, and it would be my team's fault for any delays.
Then the regional business evaluator logs in and said he reviewed their financials yesterday and we have a lot to talk about.
I will remember their "just got punched in the gut" faces forever :)

Web3 truly is a fucked up space. All of the fuckertry happening over here is out of control. Literally a dystopian shithole of scams frauds crimes theft and ponzi schemes.... As much as i try to defend web3 since im a web3 dev it's getting real fuckin hard. The more i work in this space the more i understand economics and how all of this shitshow flows.

Without diving into details, I'll tell you right now from a very deep economic perspective: i realized that all of these cryptos are just.. shams, quasi buzz words to keep the "investors" giving them money. Essentially like wolf of wallstreet scams mixed with bernard madoff multi billion dollar ponzi schemes. The "investors" earn a lot of money.... But on paper! As unrealized gains. And by the time they are able to withdraw their money, that money becomes worthless because of insufficient liquidity in the pool that has been drained from top to bottom of the pyramid. So the only person truly getting filty rich is the one on top of this pyramid - the founders!

After the FTX disaster that happened 2 days ago the prices of ALL coins dropped drastically and it isnt stopping. So much for your glorified "decentralization" 😹😹😹😹😹

How can something be decentralized if its enough for 1 influential man to tweet some shit and the company/token price value drops or increases within minutes? In this case the whole of crypto got sliced by 1 influential man... Again. It's only a matter of time until someone else goes bankrupt and cycle repeats... Again.

I am the manager of a customer service team of about 10-12 members. Most of the team members are right out of school and this is their first professional job and their ages range from 22-24. I am about 10 years older than all of my employees. We have a great team and great working relationships. They all do great work and we have established a great team culture.

Well, a couple of months ago, I noticed something odd that my team (and other employees in the building) started doing. They would see each other in the hallways or break room and say “quack quack” like a duck. I assumed this was an inside joke and thought nothing of it and wrote it off as playful silliness or thought I perhaps missed a moment in a recent movie or TV show to which the quacks were referring.

Fast forward a few months. I needed to do some printing and our printer is in a room that can be locked by anyone when it is in use (our team often has large volumes of printing they need to do and it helps to be able to sort things in there by yourself, as multiple people can get their pages mixed up and it turns into a mess). The door had been locked the entire day and this was around noon, and the manager I have the key to the door in case someone forgot to unlock it when they left. I walked in, and there were two of my employees on the couch in the copier room having sex. I immediately closed the door and left.

This was last week and as you can imagine things are very awkward between the three of us. I haven’t addressed the situation yet because of a few factors: This was during both of their lunch hours. They were not doing this on the clock (they had both clocked out, I immediately checked). We have an understanding that you can go or do anything on your lunch that you want, as long as you’re back after an hour. Also, as you mentioned in your answer last week to the person who overheard their coworker involved in “adult activities,” these people are adults and old enough to make their own choices.

But that’s not the end of the story. That same day, after my team had left, I was wrapping up and putting a meeting agenda on each of their desks for our meeting the next day. Out in broad daylight on the guys desk (one of the employees I had caught in the printing room) was a piece of paper at the top that said “Duck Club.” Underneath it, it had a list of locations of places in and around the office followed by “points.” 25 points – president’s desk, 10 points – car in the parking lot, 20 points – copier room, etc.

So here is my theory about what is going on (and I think I am right). This “Duck Club” is a club people at work where people get “points” for having sex in these locations around the office. I think that is also where the quacking comes into play. Perhaps this is some weird mating call between members to let them know they want to get some “points” with the other person, and if they quack back, they meet up somewhere to “score.” The two I caught in the copier room I have heard “quacking” before.

I know this is all extremely weird. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to write you because of how weird this seems (plus I was a little embarrassed). I have no idea what to do. As I mentioned above, they weren’t on the clock when this happened, they’re all adults, and technically I broke a rule by entering the copier room when it was locked, and would have never caught them if I had obeyed that rule. The only company rule I can think of that these two broke is using the copier room for other purposes, preventing someone else from using it.

I would love to know your opinion on this. I tend to want to sweep it under the rug because I’m kind of a shy person and would be extremely embarrassed to bring it up.

Just another big rant story full of WTFs and completely true.

The company I work for atm is like the landlord for a big german city. We build houses and flats and rent them to normal people, just that we want to be very cheap and most nearly all our tenants are jobless.
So the company hired a lot of software-dev-companies to manage everything.

The company I want to talk about is "ABI...", a 40-man big software company. ABI sold us different software, e.g. a datawarehouse for our ERP System they "invented" for 300K or the software we talk about today: a document management system. It has workflows, a 100 year-save archive system, a history feature etc.
The software itself, called ELO (you can google it if you want) is a component based software in which every company that is a "partner" can develop things into, like ABI did for our company.

Since 2013 we pay ABI 150€ / hour (most of the time it feels like 300€ / hour, because if you want something done from a dev from ABI you first have to talk to the project manager of him and of course pay him too). They did thousand of hours in all that years for my company.

In 2017 they started to talk about a module in ELO called Invoice-Module. With that you can manage all your paper invoices digital, like scan that piece of paper, then OCR it, then fill formular data, add data and at the end you can send it to the ERP system automatically and we can pay the invoice automatically. "Digitization" is the key word.

After 1.5 years of project planning and a 3 month test phase, we talked to them and decided to go live at 01.01.2019. We are talking about already ~ 200 hours planning and work just from ABI for this (do the math. No. Please dont...).

I joined my actual company in October 2018 and I should "just overview" the project a bit, I mean, hey, they planned it since 1.5 years - how bad can it be, right?

In the first week of 2019 we found 25 bugs and users reporting around 50 feature requests, around 30 of them of such high need that they can't do their daily work with the invoices like they did before without ELO.
In the first three weeks of 2019 we where around 70 bugs deep, 20 of them fixed, with nearly 70 feature requests, 5 done. Around 10 bugs where so high, that the complete system would not work any more if they dont get fixed.

Want examples?
- Delete a Invoice (right click -> delete, no super deep hiding menu), and the server crashed until someone restarts it.
- missing dropdown of tax rate, everything was 19% (in germany 99,9% of all invoices are 19%, 7% or 0%).

But the biggest thing was, that the complete webservice send to ERP wasn't even finished in the code.
So that means we had around 600 invoices to pay with nearly 300.000€ of cash in the first 3 weeks and we couldn't even pay 1 cent - as a urban company!

Shortly after receiving and starting to discussing this high prio request with ABI the project manager of my assigned dev told me he will be gone the next day. He is getting married. And honeymoon. 1 Week. So: Wish him luck, when will his replacement here?

Deep breath.
Deep breath.

There was no replacement. They just had 1 developer. As a 40-people-software-house they had exactly one developer which knows ELO, which they sold to A LOT of companies.

He came back, 1 week gone, we asked for a meeting, they told us "oh, he is now in other ELO projects planned, we can offer you time from him in 4 weeks earliest".

To cut a long story short (it's to late for that, right?) we fought around 3 month with ABI to even rescue this project in any thinkable way. The solution mid February was, that I (software dev) would visit crash courses in ELO to be the second developer ABI didnt had, even without working for ABI....

Now its may and we decided to cut strings with ABI in ELO and switch to a new company who knows ELO. There where around 10 meetings on CEO-level to make this a "good" cut and not a bad cut, because we can't afford to scare them (think about the 300K tool they sold us...).

01.06.2019 we should start with the new company. 2 days before I found out, by accident, that there was a password on the project file on the server for one of the ELO services. I called my boss and my CEO. No one knows anything about it. I found out, that ABI sneaked into this folder, while working on another thing a week ago, and set this password to lock us out. OF OUR OWN FCKING FILE.
Without this password we are not able to fix any bug, develop any feature or even change an image within ELO, regardless, that we paid thausend of hours for that.

When we asked ABI about this, his CEO told us, it is "their property" and they will not remove it.
When I asked my CEO about it, they told me to do nothing, we can't scare them, we need them for the 300K tool.

No punt.
No finish.

Just the project file with a password still there today

A dollar or a peso is a certain amount of work stored in a piece of paper. You need to work to get them or have other people work for you. When governments print new money and push it into circulation they reduce what you were compensated with for the work you did. Essentially they are taking your wealth (spending power) away without you even realizing. It is a modestly sophisticated form of theft. When public companies issue new shares onto the market they are doing same thing by reducing the percentage of the company you own. This is why you will see non-inflationary assets such as Bitcoin, land, gold bars and gold ETFs, etc. continue to rise in value and certainly outpace inflation. It’s because people who are smart with money are fearful of holding cash and they are looking for a safe place to store it. If you are not afraid of holding substantial amounts of cash, then I suppose you don’t really understand what it is. There is a reason why they don’t teach teenagers about inflation in any country of the world. As long as the masses are focused on earning and saving fiat, governments have so much more power and control. If you remove all of the fiat from circulation, then we will revert to a barter/trading system which would substantially reduce government power, at that point they would only maintain control using physical force, which is a lot more challenging to carry out. #btc #gold #rant #av

Ahh it's been a while since I've posted.. My skills with python are getting better (I'm a beginner) and I know for everyone else it's probably nothing but my first big project/idea I came up with was to program a simple rock paper scissors game that prints if you win lose or tie. I got the input and random output right without having to look anything up and that actually makes me proud of myself which is rare but for the printing out you win, lose, or tie I looked it up but I'm noticing that I'm getting better.

Then today I made a coin flip script that returns heads or tails in like 2 minutes and the only reference I used was my own code!!

Thanks if anyone actually read it I envy a lot of you for doing it for a living and I can't wait to do it too :)

So I help out in a development forum for a framework I use at work. I learned a crap ton by seeing questions people ask, then learning to solve them myself. I have really enjoyed being in that forum that past 4 years.

Yet, I see people who cannot seem to reason themselves out of a paper bag at times. I see questions of I cannot run this linux executable because there are parenthesis in the filename. I mean most console interfaces are just tab complete even with special characters. This is for a developer in their 50s that has been coding 30 years. Or I see other programmers asking basic questions that 5 minutes with the docs would solve. Most of the ones that I have issue with seem to have been a part of that community a lot longer than myself.

How do developers survive without problem solving skills to understand the frameworks or tools they use?

I had another conversation with a dev in another forum about using "man" in Linux to figure out how to use something. They said something to the effect: "try learning awk from a manpage". I explained about how "back in the day" we learned EVERYTHING from man pages. That is why they are called "man" pages.

Is the industry flooded with idiots now?

Good question, what wasn't bad about 2020?

As far as good things go.. well, COVID-19 actually. Back in February the lockdown began in Belgium, and while many people got bored out of their minds, I actually became a lot more productive. So many projects started back then, and I got a lot better at programming because of it. Now I can confidently write most bash stuff without ever looking anything up. And the code is maintainable, on account of putting everything into functions. You can literally navigate the code just by looking at it. On older code I always had issues with that.

I'm very glad that essential travel even back then wasn't really restricted. Because my bank is retarded about online banking, I have to go to the bank every so often to check my balance. At the time I tended to do that late in the evening, when nobody else was outside and I had the entire town to myself. That was one of the travels considered essential. So I kept doing it and made that my biweekly walk. I really enjoyed that. Gets your mind off things.

Bad things would be the utter stupidity that the general public had shown me during that pandemic. Burning down 5G antennas and not even getting the right ones, toilet paper, 5G death beams in street lamps?! They even sent death threats to telco workers over sensationalist bullshit from what IIRC was just a random Twitch streamer. Those people should just fucking kill themselves, choke yourselves in that pile of toilet paper you got yourself and then called yourself financially challenged. You braindead fucking retards!

Another dev-related thing is the normalization of SJW terminology. Now even "blind playthrough" gets your ass banned on Twitch. I saw a tweet about a Twitch employee (I think) proudly saying that they implemented it. Most upvoted comment on it was from a blind person, asking why they did this and not made the Twitch app more friendly to use for blind users. They too thought this was bullshit. Yet it still got added in, and more and more people are starting to think that "this is fine". Hell even that "this is necessary".

What annoys me the most is that this mostly comes from the US, where around that time they laid their knee on George Floyd, and didn't fix their legal system at all. As a European it baffles me since we have many immigrants here (the Drumpf even called Belgium a hellhole over it) and we just don't give a shit about whether or not they are "truly Belgian". We just let them live their daily lives like everyone else. Imagine just not giving a shit. Imagine not bothering them, not with racism, not with reverse racism, not with anything. Just let them do their thing and that's it. Yet despite Belgium being one of the most inclusive countries in the fucking world, I still got called a racist many times for asking.. why did you implement this? Why this, and not tackling the problem at its actual and pretty fucking obvious core?

So all in all I can only hope that 2021 will get a little bit better. But that's the same thing I said in 2019, and it didn't quite come true.

1. No paper-pen exams asking defination of OOPs.
2. Introduction of VCS (e.g. GitHub, SVN, etc.)
3. Introduction of new programmimg languages in the curriculum.(Pls stop with C/C++...there are 1000s of tutorial for that)
4. Give access to licensed software. (Especially in India we were forced to use cracked softwares).

There is a lot to change. But i think mentioned all the important stuff.

I hate the feeling you get when you do a lengthy, drooling task that once finished got you nowhere.

My day was mostly productive for a Sunday, woke up late as all Sundays, spent the afternoon writing a proposal and exercising when I saw a notification for a homework for tonight at 12.

A research paper about Dijkstra's philosopher problem, 8 pages minimum. To be honest I've seen the problem a long time ago while studying C++ and I had the theory down and that is my issue, it becomes inherently boring and useless in my head. Is in this situations that my mind gets lazy.

I wrote the first 3 pages in half an hour but I was done, I started revising the proposal and fixed a calculation error, checked Rust's take on the philosophers issue and decided to save it for winter break along with learning Rust (although got some basics down), made rough budget approximations for the next 3 months, lost myself a little bit on deep house music (notable tracks tadow from masego, nevermind - Dennis Lloyd and gold - Chet faker), etc...all in all it took me 3 hours more to finish the assignment, including breaks and dinner.

I am working on a lot of stuff lately and my main project's sprint ends this Tuesday and it pisses me off, after all that I learnt nothing new, got nowhere with my project and will probably get 80 because Google docs has no margin setting. Worse than being lazy for fun is inevitably being lazy for being compelled to do low priority tasks by your head's standards.

Can anyone recommend a good English to German translator?

Don't trust Google Translate enough to put it's words to paper, only asking here because I've noticed a lot of German dev's on here ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I recently accepted my first "real" Dev position. This has been a huge hurdle for me.

So my degree is in graphic design and it's pretty much what I spent the first 2-3 years after university doing. In fact, when I started at the place I am now (I am still working my notice) I was hired as a creative artworker.

I had always had a website I put together with some basic frontend skills, but always assumed the backend stuff was "beyond me". But, given the option here, I asked to be sent on a PHP course. Holy shit I took to it like a duck to water. Over the next few months I got my feet wet building a new website for the company, building out a little intranet, all that good stuff. I went from procedural spaghetti monstrosities to nice, OOP, documented code. It was beautiful. And no one here really have a fuck.

About 6 months ago, I started trying to leave. This was hard. I actually had several interviews for design positions, but always got turned down for some variation of "you're very technical and we think you'd get bored here" and thank god really, because they're right. I could never get a look in for Dev jobs though, because on paper I had no experience, hell my job title was still "Digital Designer" despite over a year of developing here.

But it finally happened. Through someone I used to know I got my foot in the door for a developer position. In the interview they even told me if it was a junior position they'd hire me on the spot - but sadly it wasn't. I had a good time though, a good laugh, and had a lot of fun finally, for the first time in my life, "working" and talking with other developers.

Over the next couple of weeks the agent kept telling me I had done really well and they were just dragging their feet getting things sorted, but I gave up hope a little. So imagine my surprise when I found out they turned the role into a junior one for me!

And so now, I get to go to a job where my job title includes the word "Developer". To some of you that might not mean much, but to me it's a fucking medal I wish I could mount on a plaque on my wall.

Ok now I'm gonna tell you about my "Databases 2" exam. This is gonna be long.

I'd like to know if DB designers actually have this workflow. I'm gonna "challenge" the reader, but I'm not playing smartass. The mistakes I point out here are MY mistakes.

So, in my uni there's this course, "Databases 2" ("Databases 1" is relational algebra and theoretical stuff), which consist in one exercise: design a SQL database.

We get the description of a system. Almost a two pages pdf. Of course it could be anything. Here I'm going to pretend the project is a YouTube clone (it's one of the practice exercises).

We start designing a ER diagram that describes the system. It must be fucking accurate: e.g. if we describe a "view" as a relationship between the entities User and Video, it MUST have at least another attribute, e.g. the datetime, even if the description doesn't say it. The official reason?

"The ER relationship describes a set of couples. You can not have two elements equal, thus if you don't put any attribute, it means that any user could watch a video only once. So you must put at least something else."

Do you get my point? In this phase we're not even talking about a "database", this is an analysis phase.

Then we describe the type dictionary. So far so good, we just have to specify the type of any attribute.

And now... Constraints.
Oh my god the constraints. We have to describe every fucking constraint of our system. In FIRST ORDER LOGIC. Every entity is a set, and Entity(e) means that an element e belongs to the set Entity. "A user must leave a feedback after he saw a video" becomes like

For all u,v,dv,df,f ( User(u) and Video(v) and View(u, v, dv) and feedback(u, v, f) ) ---> dv < df

provided that dv and df are the datetimes of the view and the feedback creation (it is clear in the exercise, here seems kinda cryptic)

Of course only some of the constraints are explicitly described. This one, for example, was not in the text. If you fail to mention any "hidden" constraint, you lose a lot of points. Same thing if you not describe it correctly.

Now it's time for use cases.
You start with the usual stickman diagram. So far so good.
Then you have to describe their main functions.

In first order logic. Yes.

So, if you got the point, you may think that the following is correct to get "the average amount of feedback values on a single video" (1 to 5, like the old YT).
(let's say that feedback is a relationship with attribute between User and Video

getAv(Video v): int
Let be F = { va | feedback(v, u, va) } for any User u
Let av = (sum forall f in F) / | F |
return av

But nope, there's an error here. Can you spot it (I didn't)?

F is a set. Sets do not have duplicates! So, the F set will lose some feedback values! I can not define that as a simple set!

It has to be a set of couples, like (v, u), where v is the value and u the user; this way we can have duplicate feedback values in our set.

This concludes the analysis phase. Now, the design.

Well we just refactor everything we have done until now. Is-a relations become relationships, many-to-many relationships get an "association entity" between them, nothing new.
We write down on paper every SQL statement to build any table, entity or not. We write down every possible primary key or foreign key. The constraint that are not natively satisfied by SQL and/or foreign keys become triggers, and so on.

This exam is considered the true nightmare at our department. I just love it.

Now my question is, do actually DB designers follow this workflow? Or is this just a bloody hard training in Pai Mei style?

Nearly 30 days into my new job. Haven't done any coding.

Just a lot of paper pushing and meeting scheduling.

What do?

Sorry if I'm just ignorant but: I see a lot of rants about designers expecting pixel perfect implementations of their designs. Is that for real? In my world there is hardly ever pixel values at all. It's not paper publishing. It's web, things have to scale. For an iOS app where you have a few known screen sizes - fine. But web? Come on...

And that's without even going into CSS or browser quirks.

Fuck my country's universities, fucking greedy assholes that ruin lives, suck wallets and sucks life from the young.

I'm currently studying something completely non related to programming: History. And I really love it. I love reading 1000 pages for each test and essay and talking about the problem of naming the Cold War a war and cold and etc. The problem is that I won't make as much money as I would make even as a self taught developer.

After considering my possibilities, I thought I could enter the computer science carreer. I don't know how this works in other countries but here you would have to study 3 years of an engineering common plan and then specialise in some sort of industrial engineering while getting an specialisation also in computer science. After some counting, I got to the conclusion that I would be studying 6 years (or more), and wasting half of those years learning stuff that I would never use nor care about.

But that's not all. This semester I took the introductory class for programming. It's pretty basic stuff but at least they teach a little bit about algorithms and problem solving. It turns out that a friend of mine that's about to graduate from computer science applied as a helper for the prof. I was so excited I could finally talk with someone about code!

Since the start of the semester I have been passing a lot of time with him and talking about the future. Turns out he doesn't understand shit about code but somehow he learns everything by hard and has passed every computer science course without having any practical abilities. I don't blame him, he's studying hard and playing by the rules, and turns out that he has wasted precious time of his life also learning biology, chemistry, structural engineering, hidraulic engineering, transportation engineering and a ton of engineerings that he won't use.

If the university would instead take that time to teach better courses of practical programming or leave him some time to try out the stuff he learns by hard, he wouldn't have to hear me talking about stuff he doesn't comprehend but feels that should, and wouldn't be utterly depressed, he wouldn't take SIX years to learn less than what he could learn in less than THREE years. And this isn't just a random university, it is one of the 2 best universities we have here and was in 2014 the best of all Latin America.

And wait, here comes the best part. In my country, levels of education are heavily stratified. After school, superior studies give different titles according to the time you've been studying. Yes just the time. And these titles are what your employers will see to give you different work positions. So for studying a 2 year carreer you get a technic job which pays well but not too well, then at 4 years you get a license title which only proves that you know stuff, then at 5 or more (depending on what you are studying) you get a professional degree and will get payed as a full fledged professional. So here, even though in other countries it takes 6 years to have a masters in engineering, they give you just the engineering degree, and it would take 2 (or more) more years to have a master. Even though you can totally teach engineering in 4 years, here they take BY LAW 2 years more, while paying what a fucking full stack of pairs of kidneys would cost in the black market.

So fuck that shit, I won't be throwing my money at any university. I hope they get reformed soon becouse this is fucking dumb, really really dumb. Like 2 year old shit dumb. I'll just learn a bit more, make some projects until I have a decent portfolio and apply to some company that cares for real knowledge and not just a piece of paper with letters and a shitty logo on it.

I'm here in my bed. I can't sleep and in less than 5 hours I will have an important exam. I was thinking that a few months ago I went to a IT company as a school program. I would have to stay there for 2 weeks and "work" for them.

Upon arrival, the guy who had to monitor me gave me a sheet of paper with 5 alghoritmic problems to solve. He tells me to use java and hands me a laptop. naturally with windows. I try to look for some ideas but I can not find anything. I go to the control panel and search for something. Obviously there is a lot of bloatware and nothing catches my attention. then strangely I find something called oracle ... something ... but when trying to open it it gives me an error.

Fuck me. I decided to open notebook(normal one not ++ or something) and start solving the problems trying to remember the names of the methods and the classes based on what I had learned in school. then the guy comes back and looks at me puzzled. I tell him I did not find any IDE for java and the only one I found seem to give me an error. The guy double clicks and the program opens...fucking shit... He tells me to finish the problems and goes away perplexed. I copy the code from notepad to the IDE, I check the errors, I run it and the add some comments and I call the guy. he looks at the code, says that everything seems fine and then assigns me other things to do.

Now. HOW FUCKING STUPID MUST SOMEONE BE TO THINK THAT WRITING JAVA IN NOTEPAD IS A VIABLE CHOICE, AMONG ALL THE POSSIBLE SANE CHOICES I COULD HAVE MADE LIKE TRY TO UNDERSTAND THE ERROR OF THE IDE OR CALL THE GUY... NO. MY LITTLE SHOTTY FUCKING BRAIN DECIDED THAT NOTEPAD WAS A GOOD CHOICE. IF I COULD GO BACK IN TIME IN THE SAME MOMENT THAT I OPENED NOTEPAD I WOULD BITCH SLAP MYSELF SO HARD THAT I WOULD LOSE MY SOULD AND THE LAST 2 NEURON THAT MADE THAT SHITTY CHOICE. I WOULD BITCH SLAP MYSELF SO HARD THAT THE KINETIC ENERGY PRODUCED WOULD COLLAPSE THE UNIVERSE ITSELF. AND FROM THE DARKNESS A NEW UNIVERSE WILL BE BORN. A UNIVERSE WHERE THERE IS NO JAVA OR WINDOWS. A UNIVERSE WHERE MY 2 NEURONS WOULD HAVE MADE THE SHITTIEST DUMBEST CHOICE EVER IN A I LAST MISERABLE SELF DESTRUCTIVE ATTEMPT.

but then I come on devrant and I read about people who did thing worse than writing java on notepad and then everything is fine

PS my English is so bad I had to use Google translate, write an original version, translate it and do a side by side comparison with my translated version to check If I could improve something. Don't now If It improved the quality or not...

QA personal voice assistant that runs locally without cloud, it’s like never ending project. I look at it from time to time and time pass by. Chat bots arrived, some decent voice algorithms appeared. There is less and less stuff to code since people progress in that area a lot.

I want to save notes using voice, search trough them, hear them, find some stuff in public data sources like wikipedia and also hear that stuff without using hands, read news articles and stuff like that.

I want to spend, more time for math and core algorithms related to machine learning and deep learning.

Problem is once I remember how basic network layers, error correction algorithms work or how particular deep learning algorithm is constructed and why is that, it’s already a week passed and I don’t remember where I started.

I did it couple of times already and every time I remember more then before but understanding core requires me sitting down with pen and paper and math problems and I don’t have time for that.

Now when I’m thinking about it - maybe I should write it somewhere in organized way. Get back to blogging and write articles about what I learned. This would require two times the time but maybe it would help to not forget.

I’m mostly interested in nlp, tts, stt. Wavenet, tacotron, bert, roberta, sentiment analysis, graphs and qa stuff. And now crystallography cause crystals are just organized graphs in 3d.

Well maybe if I’m lucky I retire in the next decade or at least take a year or two years off to have plenty of time to finish this project.

"Suggest an AV/AM product, Avast refuses to install."

I do malware research as a hobby and have for a while, so I can generally spot when something's up before I even run a program. If i'm unsure about it (or know something's up and wanna see its effects for S&Gs) I throw it into one of a variety of VMs, each with a prepped, clean, standardized "testing" state.

I see no point to AV/AM products, especially as they annoy me more than anything since they can't be told not to reach into and protect VMs (thereby dirtying up my VM state, my research, crashing the VM hypervisor and generally being *really* annoying) and they like to erase samples from a *read-only, MOUNTED* VHDX.

However, normal people need them, so I usually suggest this list:
• MBAM is good and has a (relatively) low memory footprint, but doesn't have free realtime protection.
• Avast is very good as it picks up a lot, but it eats a FUCKTON of resources. It also *really* likes to crash VM hypervisors if it sees anything odd in them.
• AVG is garbage. Kill it with fire.
• Using Windows Defender is like trying to block the rain with an umbrella made of 1-ply toilet paper.
• herdProtect is amazing as it's basically a VirusTotal client but it's web-based and not currently available to be downloaded. (Existing copies still work!)
• Kaspersky. Yes, it spied on US gov't workers. No, they don't care about anyone BUT US gov't workers. Yes, it's pretty good.
• BitDefender: *sees steam game* "Is this ransomware?"

hope this helps

Ok so: today I have an ISO 27001:2013 audit at work, wish me luck!

The more I'm on here the more I remember all the shit I have had to deal with in the past.

Anyway, lets rant! I just moved cities after college to be closer to my family, I didnt have any work lined up at that stage but started job hunting the moment I was settled in, I did some freelance for smaller companies to stay afloat.

Eventually I got a job at this agency startup where "SEO" was there main focus, still very inexperienced they put me on frontend and data capturing but will teach me how to code using their systems in due time. At this stage I was getting paid minimum wage, but I was doing minimum work and it wasnt that bad.

A new investor bought 49% of the company and immediately moved into the office space to focus more on marketing (He was one of those scaly marketing guys that will sell you babies if he could get his hands on enough to make a profit).

This is where everything starts going to shit. He hires a bunch of "SEO Gurus", fills up the small office with people like sardines squished together. Development was still our main money maker at this stage, so there where 3 new more senior developers at this stage and I started learning a lot really fast.

Here are some of the issues we had to deal with:

1. Incentives - Great more money, haha! No, No, you where 5 minutes late so you only get half of the promised amount.

2. For every minute you are late we will deduct it from you paycheck (Did I mention I was getting paid minimum wage).

3. If you take a smoke break we will dock it from your pay.

4. Free gym membership to the gym downstairs, but you can only go once a week during your lunch.

5. No pay raises if you cant prove your worth on paper.

He on purposely made up shitty rules and regulations to keep us down and make as much profit as he could.

Here are some shitty stuff he has done:

1. We arent getting a 13th check this year because the company didnt make a big profit - while standing next to his brand new BMW.

2. Made changes over FTP on clients work because we where too slow to get to it, than blames me for it because its broken the next day and wants to give me a written warning for not resolving the issue Immediately. They went as far as wanting to fire me for this, gave me 1 day notice for meeting and that I can bring a lawyer to represent me (1 day notice is illegal, you need 5 days where I am from), so I brought a lawyer since my mom was a lawyer. They freaked the fuck out and started harassing me about this a week later.

3. Would have meetings all the time about how much money the company is making, but wont be raising our pay since no one has proven they are worth it yet.

4. Would full on yell at employees infront of the entire office if they accidentally made an mistake on a clients project.

One one occasion I took a week off for holiday, my coworker contacted me to ask a question and I answered that I will handle it when I am back the following week. Withing 2 hours my other boss phones me in a rage, "he is coming to fetch the company laptop from my house in 5 minutes, he will let me know when he arrives. Gives me no time to talk at all and hangs up - I have figured out what has happened by now so when he showed up he has this long speech about abandonment, and trust and loyalty to the company. So I pass him my laptop once he shut up and said: "You do know I am on holiday leave which you approved, right?", he goes even more silent and passes me back my laptop without saying anything, and drives off.

While the above was happening Douche manager back at the office has a rage as well and calls the whole office (25 people) to a meeting talking about how I abandoned the company and how disgraceful that is.

Those are the shitty experiences I can remember, there where many more like this. All of the above eventually led to me going into a deep depression and having panic attacks weekly, from being overworked or scared to step out of line. Its also the reason I almost stopped coding forever at that stage. I worked there for 2.5 years with the abuse.

I left 2 weeks after the last shit show, I am ok now and have my anxiety and depression well under control if not almost gone completely.

Ran into Douche Manager a few months ago after 9 years, the company got bought out and the first person they fired was him. LOL! He now has his own agency and is looking for Developers (They are hard to find he says), little does he know I spread his name far and wide to all and every Dev I knew and didnt know to avoid working for him at all costs. Seems like word of mouth still works in this digital age.

Thanks for reading this far!

The fact that buying a paper train ticket from automates in Germany requires you to write your name on it afterwards with a pen is putting me through a lot of pain.

I think I am going to start doing lets play series for minecraft and post online. I spend a lot of time playing modpacks with my kids and I should just start recording and add audio commentary later. I can compress the video and do speedups for boring parts and cut other segments. If I create a spreadsheet for the modpack and do it by numbers then I can burn through the modpack fast. I like watching lets play series to figure out modpacks. Especially direwolf. However, these lets play episodes are a good 30 to 45 minutes long. I want to play, not watch someone else play. I hate the ones where they don't know how to do the modpack and they don't cut the video. Direwolf does a great job editing his videos. His video is FULL of good content.

If I can get the videos short enough it will keep the attention span of the mass plebes that cannot find their way out of a paper bag. This is definitely catering to the lowest denominator. I can turn my hobby into something useful. I want to try and compress the 30 minute video into 5 to 10 minutes. It will be a minecraft junky playthrough. Maybe add some time lapse stuff too.

I think I should do the playthrough first, reset server and do again with video capture. I want to incorporate comedy into the videos too. Gaming should be fun. I wonder how much space a 30 minutes video will take?

I think I need some "programming detox", a couple weeks away from any kind of software development. It's just not fun anymore, I have lost my drive, I'm lazy to learn new stuff, I never finish my projects, I don't even know if I enjoy web development anymore.

Actually, I'm kind of lost on what to do with my life.

I don't want to become a full time web developer because it's boring, it's always the same shit: write frontend with some sort of framework, design database, write backend, rinse and repeat. There's nothing new, all projects seem to have the same requirements.

I don't want to get into machine learning and whatnot because it's a lot of math and theory, I like math but idk if I would like doing that all day. Same goes for basically anything related to research.

Low level stuff: on paper I like it, it's interesting, but I'm too lazy to learn and whenever I come up with a robotics project I end up making a shopping list and forgetting about it because either 1) stuff is too expensive or 2) I can't make the parts I want without spending a lot of money on tools. Also from what I can see in school, VHDL is boring af.

I just don't know what I like anymore, nothing gets me excited, not even video games. I used to like csgo but I just suck at it and I only play it because there's nothing else to play and deep down I still have a little bit of hope of becoming a decent player, even though I know I never will.

I just don't know what I want out of life. Sometimes I just like having tons of school assignments (especially calculus ones) just to keep me busy.

College degree.

I don't have it. Not because I don't like to study or don't like to evolve.

I tried several times go back to college, but unfortunately I don't see myself wasting money and time inside a classroom hours per day for something I can read on a book and learn by myself in few days / hours.

I know there's some subjects it's quite hard and we need some guidance for help us, but, we have the community to ask, forums and a lot information on internet.

OK, but why I'm doing this rant?

Recently I got a good job offer in a good country but my potencial employer and me is facing issues to go trough the process because the country to give me the IT visa requires the college degree.

Sometimes I regret to not have enough cold blood to finish the damn college just becuase of the piece of paper (which doesn't proff anything and we cannot even use to clean the $_@#$"@).

My home country (which is a third world country) is already noticed that and they start doing some laws and visas to ease the hiring IT professionals and they're leaving at companies expanses and responsabilities to verify is a good professional or not, but, the price is high for that. But at least the companies there's a way now to get someone.

And also I start see a loot excelent and genius programmers and others IT professionals which are skipping the degree to see and face same issues as me.

I hope our field finally put a end to this burocracies.

Bloody mother fucking jesus christ....

It's working.

Sometimes I really wish I had the gift to be creative and to e.g. draw a (metaphoric) image of the shit I had to fix and how it felt to fix it.

It's sad not being able to share stuff in a way everyone can understand it :/

I uncludged the last bits of the networking / loadbalancer / craptastic network.

The whole chart that includes most of the associations / information for the network fits easily on a A2 paper. Internal only.

Just migration of a few remaining servers to Proxmox and a large MySQL to Postgres migration outstanding....

1.75 years and it's the first large milestone achieved. Large milestone as in it will not be a total clusterfuck anymore.

Still a lot of stuff to do...

But down to one major OS, Debian, for everything (container / VMs)... only LTS supported versions for services...

No more stuff that's so old it's near fossil state. We stillhad Ubuntu 12.04 running... :) ;) And XenServer is nearly gone...

Too many feels. Too many brain poofs. And way too much pain.

so, me and my best friend started playing pen and paper and after a wile we decided to create our own system. After a year of improving and testing we thaugth about a new java side project and more improvements for our system. time goes by and now we have three java apps for our own pen and paper and a lot of reusabilly code.

Playing and planing a new session of p&p is now so comfortable and fast 🤗

Desk inventory(not counting computer hardware):

-Three interlocking polished high density particle board squares, cut by an industrial-grade 3d printer at the office of an architect friend. I use them as coasters.
-A roll of toilet paper, as I have a deviated septum and blow my nose so often that proper facial tissue would be wasteful.
-A landline phone, for work. I'm thinking about getting rid of it though, as I can do the majority of my work phone calls through Google Hangouts and our company's webrtc client, and because it costs me about $7 a month for the service, through ooma.

What's on your desk? No computer hardware, please. Also, please try to use your words, because it's a lot of fun to imagine the layout rather than see it.

Just a quick poll here to anyone who does a lot of programming, which IDE do you use? Do you prefer almost paper coding with little or no extensions or features or a full blown solution such as Eclipse?

I feel like a lot of us write code without thinking it through beforehand. I spend more than half my day working everything out via diagrams on paper or lucidchart or with a coworker/previous maintainer (if applicable) before line #1 of code is written. Ideas are to code as source code is to build products - the latter is made (essentially by rote) from the former.

I'm glad I work from home thanks to 'rona, but before that, gah. Everyone else was visibly grinding away, and here I am staring into space thinking about the problem/project I'm working on. I'm not gonna sit there all day debugging code I once rushed. There's a reason the sites I maintain stay up and untouched by hackers (I think, you can never be sure...).

I just saw that ARM released their design start IP for Cortex M0 for free to the masses , it’s obfuscated verilog code.
I worked on SoC design based on this in college but it took a lot of paper work to get these file but now they are free to download

This is exciting as this makes a open-source community based microcontroller design possible.

Only missing piece here is the verilog compiler they use is not open source .
Has anyone messed around with Cortex M0 DS + ghdl or iverilog. I am about to start a little side project will update more on this

Having gone to a bank to reset a password again today (Yes, I forgot it for like... 3rd time, don't judge me, its my backup bank account I need to access like... once a year), I was once again made to think - I come in, give them my state ID by which they authorize that I can even make a password reset request.

Then they give me a tablet to... sign a contract addendum?

Its not the contract part that always makes me stop and think though - its the "sign" part.

I'd wager that I am not the only one who only ever uses a computer to write text these days. So... My handwriting got a lot jerkier, less dependable. Soooo... My signature can be wildly different each time.......

And if my signature varies a lot... then... what is the point of having it on a piece of paper?

I know its just a legal measure of some sort... And that, if it came down to someone impersonating me and I'd go to court with the bank, there would be specialists who can tell if a signature was forged or not... But...

Come on, the computer world has so much more reliable, uncrackable, unforgable solutions already... Why... Don't all folks of the modern world already have some sort of... state-assigned private/public keypairs that could be used to sign official documents instead?

It costs money, takes time to develop etc... But... Then, there would not only be no need to sign papers anymore... And it would be incredibly hard to forge.

The key could even be encrypted, so the person wishing to sign something would have to know a PIN code or a password or something...

tl;dr: I hate physical signatures as a method of authentication / authorization. I wish the modern world would use PKI cryptography instead...

I am SOOO fucking sick of being asked if our website and gaming servers are going to be GDPR compliant. All these game owners in a panic changing everything they do just to conform to this law.

Fuck GDPR. In all reality COME AT ME BITCH. The EU wants to grow a pair of balls and act like the world internet police? Bring it the FUCK on. You can't even stop pirating in your own country, so how the FUCK are you going to regulate and enforce this law on HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of servers, when your punk ass government can't even shutdown a single torrenting website.

Give me a fucking break, and shame on you pussies for allowing it. All you people running around scared acting like your private gaming servers are important. I give a shit less how much work you put into your server. I have put more work than most anyone else, but you don't see me trying to act self important as if my gaming server is some fortune 500 company.

Your server isn't important and neither are you. The government doesn't give a shit about your server so can we all just stop acting like this fucking matters. NO ONE FUCKING CARES ABOUT YOUR SERVER.

NO ONE is going to come and sue you for not complying. GDPR is for business, and anyone that wants to argue no look it says right here it applies to all is a fucking MORON. Do you idiots stop and think or do you just believe everything typed out on paper.

THEY CANT ENFORCE THIS ON EVERYONE. They don't have the resources. So use your fucking heads and stop being so fucking scared of a law that has no resources to stop you. THEY CAN"T DO ANYTHING. EU and whoever made their polices, I DARE them to try and touch my server, I WANT them to start something with me, just so I can show the rest of the world why the Internet is still the wild west and why they have no power over me.

You think pirate bay is the only one who knows how to hide their server? You think pirate bay is the only one who keeps backups of their server to be able to re release in an instant somewhere else in the world? Bitch get real this is the internet, a place where a 5 year old can buy hand grenades from the Red Silk Road, and you wanna talk to me about your privacy? Go fuck yourself.

It's not my problem some douche bag went onto a site that used his personal information in the wrong manner. So how about you do what everyone else does and browse ANONYMOUSLY. But no it would be to easy for governments to make their own citizens responsible. Instead they have to hold all of YOUR hands, because you people are to stupid to protect yourself.

Wake the fuck up world, and stop being a bunch of whining little brats who cry for the government to bubble wrap your world so you can live safer. Natural selection is long overdue for a lot of morons still breathing air.

My Data Communication & Computer Networks (DCCN) teacher was the best teacher I've seen.

Teaching can be super hard. You're one against like sixty others who aren't interested in being there. To make that good learning environment, making the subject interesting etc, it not easy. Some justify that, "I can only bring the horse to the water" & proceed to just regurgitate whatever is on the book. Others cross question you & impose punishments - try to make you learn by fear.

But my DCCN teacher - she had the right balance between strictness & humour. So kids took her seriously (did homework, weren't late), yet never feared her - we felt comfortable asking doubts/questions.

She had some good tactics, like asking us to teach certian chapters - that made us learn better. She would revise them in the end also, incase we missed anything.

My best moment with her was when I scored the highest in my internals. She picked up my paper & showed the class - "see? Just two pages & he scored so much". There's was always those students who pump out a lot of stories/essays or whatever that comes to their mind about the topic in question. Lots of teachers just blindly give marks - "oh, s/he wrote this much, so it must be right".

But my DCCN teacher had zero tolerance for garbage. If you're wrong, you're wrong. Some even believe that the number of marks = number of lines you have to write!! Doesn't matter what you write. So, I was super glad when this teacher upped the standards.

Do you have ever tried to recover a very valuable shredded stack of paper (4 sheets)? They are shredded into A LOT OF PIECES and not stripes as I hoped for!!

After 5 hours work I have found 15 pieces which fit together! I am so pissed about myself and my incompetence when it comes to data cleaning 😡😠🤬

How do you feel about ieee and other paid research websites?

Every time i search something complex, an ieee research paper would pop up and i couldn't read it, coz i don't have the membership. Even if i did, i had to pay Rs. 1000 (~=$12) . For every paper i want to see

I am not saying its bad to demand a price for your work. But i wish ieee was more like github or medium, where people could also optionally publish their content for free viewing. The cost is making a lot of students miss deep knowledge of research papers.

The main thing that currently frustrates me as a student is the fact that University subject syllabus are made by sulky old phd teachers who have been long term members of ieee and other paid research orgs, and thus have designed the syllabus with topics which are covered nowhere but in research papers.

I also know that some of you sre thinking "dude , just google search anything and you will find tons of videos and content on anything", but from what i have observed, free internet takes time to grow for a perticular topic . If i search a relatively complex topic i may find some surface info and basic videos, but to go deep, i have to rely on paid/pirated books and papers.

These organisation has gathered a lot of content and renowned people. Maybe they can give away a few knowledge to the open source.

Did I suffer through 2023? Hell yes! Fuck 2023! A LOT of doubt, anxiety, thinking that I live wrong somehow.

Yet, I’m completely satisfied with the results of 2023, with what I was able to accomplish. It means I do, in fact, live my life right. If I carry on doing what I do, I’ll be getting what I get. Here’s what happened to me in 2023:
- Cat!
- No more sugar
- No more smoking
- First time reading paper books in 15 years
- Made me a new website (miloi.am/engine) that, for the first time in my life, isn’t about me as a job candidate, but about me as a person.
- SENT MY DEVRANT LINK to my CEO! Dreaded this coming out for YEARS. Finally did it. He read my posts, told me I’m free to be who I am, told me he already knows me well, that he wasn’t surprised, and overall didn’t care much.
- New name, new pronouns
- Learned how to cook: soups, pancakes, falafel, other popular dishes. Most importantly, now when I go through the store, I’m not afraid of thinking about cooking. I look at something, and I know how to cook it, more or less.
- Found a good psychiatrist, got properly diagnosed, got properly prescribed
- Made a FIRE architecture at my work
- Conceived (and partly implemented) four monetizable side projects (that I can’t monetize yet because of my passport situation)
- Several VERY important insights that completely changed who I am. Several super crucial self-therapy skills.

Let’s see what happens in 2024 😛

!rant

So, when I was young, I wanted to be a freelancing nomad. You know, live the live, work remote and travel.

But I didn't have the bones to pursue that. After 10 years of struggling as a normal "programmer", I did a little of everything. I did normal boring "erp maintenance" in C#, Oracle and some legacy stuff called Visual WEB GUI , which was fun, but required a full 9,5 hours work day, 8:00 am to 6:30pm, and the bosses where squares, and I was young and wanted to try something out of the corporate world.

Then I did some work for a newly funded consulting company that used python, Django, and postgresql, but the bosses promised a lot and delivered none, (I was supposed to work backend and have frontend support, which I did not have, and that hurt my productivity and bosses instead of looking at what they promised but did not deliver, they just discounted my salary 3 months in a row, so Bye bye MFs!!

Then I did some remote work for some guys, that, I managed to sustain for a whole year, the pay was good, the stack was simple, just node.js and pug templates, that gig was good, but communication with the bosses was hard, and eventually things started to get hard for them and me, and we had to say farewell to each other, I miss those guys. This is the only time I remember having fun working, I could work whenever I wanted, I only had to reach the weekly goals, and then my time was mine, I could work from home in the odd hours, or rent a chair in a co working space if I wanted to socialize.

Then fate got me one big gig with a multinational company, and I could hire some people, but I delegated too much and was asking too little of myself, and that project eventually died because I did not know how to negotiate.

So, I quit the whole entrepreneur idea, and got a public job at my University, I was a public employee with all the perks, but none of the fun, I just had to clock-in, work, and clock-out. That experience led me to discover a lot of myself, I worked as a public employee for a year and a half, and in that time, I discovered more about myself than what I learnt in 27 years of previous life experience.

Then, I grew bored of that life, and wanted some action, and I found more than enough fun in a VC funded startup ran by young narcissists that did not have a clue of what they were doing, I helped them organize themselves into "closing stuff", you know, finish the things you say you have finished. Just to give you an idea of what it was like before I got there, the were working for 3 months already on this project, they had on paper 50% of the system done and working, when I tried to use the app, I couldn't even sign-up without hacking some database commands, (this was supposedly done). So I spent a month there teaching these guys how to finish stuff, they got, Sign Up, (their sign up was a mess, it is one of those KYC rich things, that financial apps have), Login, and some core functionality working in a month, while in the previous 4 months they only did parallel work, writing endpoints that were not tried, and an app that did not communicate with the backend. But the bosses weren't happy with me, because I told them time and time again that we were not going to reach the goal they needed to reach to keep receiving funds from the investors, and I had to quit before it became a mayhem of toxic employer/employee relationship.

So now I decided to re-engage with life, I have funds to survive about a month and half, I have a good line of credit in case I need some more funds, and the time of the world.

So wish me luck!!! And I'll be posting often, because I would like opinions, hear from people with similar life experiences and share anecdotes.

Next post, it's going to be about how I discovered taskwarrior, and how implemented my first weekend following some of the aspects of GTD to do all my housekeeping chores, because, I think that organizing myself will be key to survive as a freelancer nomad.

What should I do to practice being a "good coder" vs a "code Googler" who slaps other people's code into the site just because "it's enough to get the damn thing working"?

I feel really overwhelmed with all that Ive learned thus far. At this point I feel width with know depth when it comes to my knowledge of websites.

I've been messing around with html/css/js for a while and played with plenty of other languages,pre-processors, frameworks, etc. I never went to school for programming and have done work for small businesses independently for some time. Most of what I know comes from codecademy treehouse and similar sites. I can refer to Google on a lot of things but I feel like there are habits that I should be implementing so I don't have to re-do things later. I love the book apart series but I still feel like it's missing the foundational knowledge that I'm looking for.

After all of the time I've spent going through courses I feel like my experiences have given me solutions to build a few things and now I'm just jamming those solutions onto whatever I can until something I like comes on to the browser.

It's really easy to sit down and bang my head against the keyboard until something comes out that looks the way I want it to. However, I know there is way more going on that could help me make better decisions. I just feel like I'm missing something. Maybe it's experience, or maybe it's just the lack of commroddery from working alone and not being able to approach problems with a team.

I hate pulling up my css file and feeling like it's rubbish, and feeling like I don't completely understand things like flex, or display, or position. I've been pushing at this for a while but I don't think I've found a resource that has really made me feel like I'm anywhere close to being a competent coder.

There are tons of watch and learn and do type classes that show you how to make stuff, but I guess what I want to know now is why we make it that way.

At some point do you just sit down and read the MSN start to finish?

I wonder sometimes if my brain has been reprogrammed because I grew up in Google world and don't actually have to solve anything for myself. I read about a guy who locked himself away for hours with books on code and he just sat there and wrote his code on paper until he was confident that he was getting it right.

After waiting for almost a month, yesterday I went to check on how my computer was doing, since I hadn't got any messages or calls ever since.
I go to the store and ask one of the workers about how my laptop is doing, and that I'd left it there almost a month ago and that they'd tell me when it was time to get the papers and then the laptop itself. The girl asks me for my phone number and then my name, and found nothing on the computer. She goes somewhere inside the store and comes back with a colleague, who tells me that I need a process paper. I pull out the receipt the technician photocopied and signed because that was the only thing I had. I hadn't touched that part of my paste for the whole time after I left the computer there and I was 100% sure I didn't have the process paper with me until he started pressing me for it. I kept repeating that the technician told me that they'd call or message me when said process paper was ready, which I hadn't got any of those to go pick it up. The guy asks me if that were the number and name I'd given the tech guy and I said yes. Both of them disappear into the store again. They come back with a cardboard box and say that the surname written there was wrong by a char (as I've said before my name is unusual, and my surname is also unusual where I'm studying, but where I'm from there's like 5 or 6 families with that surname), so that's why they couldn't find it in the computer. After that they went through all the details I gave on the time of handing the PC and the number they told me was there was off by miles. I think I may have said a wrong digit but that number was way off. There should be some person who got calls or messages about a computer they don't even own LoL
They told me to try it and see if it was running OK and that I had 15d to go back if something was wrong
When I got home I turned it on, afraid it would start dying on me again LoL
I pass the login screen and the fan just starts working really hard and I'm worried. The ASUS guys reinstalled Win8 and the CPU is running wild already, going at about 3,5 GHz (2,5 max) and over 30% usage on nothing
After some minor inconveniences (making the USB with Win10 took longer than expected) I finally installed Win10 and the CPU usage drops to < 10% and runs at way below the 2,5 GHz max. It constantly uses <= 10-15% CPU and the fan makes no noise unless I put in a heavier game (like Oxygen Not Included - it asks for 4GB RAM minimum 8I), in which case it goes up a bit and runs at around 3 GHz, but it doesn't make as much noise as before, thank jesus. I'm gonna keep trying to see how it does and hope I don't have to go back to the store after the next 15d 8I
I can finally work and not be a leech on my friends because my old toshiba - which I forgot I'd brought with me to uni - is really old and it makes a lot of noise (the fan is constantly working too much but it's so old I don't bother anymore) and it heats my room a lot, so it's gonna be a nice change of pace HaHa

My best teacher was with me for C++ in high school and in college. He had the most relaxed, laid back style while managing to both make the lessons fun.

Perhaps my favorite lesson was around C++ and Pointers. Lessons generally we mixed with long ramblings about the military and live coding examples. He was talking about object references and Navy ships when he told a student to "give me the USS Wisconsin". Perplexed, my classmate said he wasn't sure he could do that without a lot of help. So this teacher drew an arrow on a piece of paper, showed it to the class and then found the general direction he wanted it to aim for and taped it to a pole next to the stage. He called that a Pointer to a USS Wisconsin and then asked the student to give him the USS Wisconsin again.

I understand pointers today because of that lesson.

My first memories of the very first computer i got?

Not sure exactly when that was but all the first memories are of me playing games:

Some paper plane game on the really old macs (giant screens i think it was highlighter orange)

My auntie also had a computer when i was little i'd visit her for the holidays and j played some kid game about dogs.

When we got our first computer i remember some 2d metroid like game but it was where you play as some lady with a whip.

Also duke nukem 1, one of the games me and my dad played together.

Then later on we got a win98 computer i played age of empires and solitaire!

(i used to ride around on my bike with a sword pretending i was a cataphract LOL, i was never very good at RTS games when i was little so i'd build things and not have room for units to move, i kept building houses thinking you need a lot lol, me and the AI were at a stalemate, most because the buildings were in the way)

I remember my teacher giving me tips about age of empires when i was in primary, one of my favourite teachers too.

Good times

We have been at a university of applied sciences today with our class.
It was kind of ok. I did expect more surprising things there. The whole building was smaller than our college (not the same as in the US). The rooms, where profs tell you things with a series of rows of seats, were dirty and pretty much used to the point that the seats are about to break easily.
I was expecting the university to be kind of the same as the universities you see in the movies lol.
It could have at least been bigger than our college and more "modern" than our school.
[...]
Anyways, let us get to the point here.
We were first in the foyer and afterwards in their main lecture hall.
We were introduced to the day's plans by a team of engaged students from different study programs and the president of the professors. Yada yada yada.
We got the full program in each room and each individual time span filled with study programs on a sheet of paper.
I did select pharmacy, media production, architecture, data science, applied computer science, computer engineering, mechanical engineering and future energies.
Pharmacy and data science were the most interesting study programs to me. I have asked one of the professors if deep learning was a topic for bachelor students, as well.
He said that that is only the usual case for people who got a promotion.
As an example he told me that yesterday he was at a conference hall with 10.000 people in which he gave a talk about deep learning. "Most of them were professors" he said. "Since this study program is new, it might change in a few years" he added to his conversation.

It is quite hard having to decide now.
Geo informatics and Aerospace Engineering did sound interesting, too.
There are a lot of things I would like to study at the same time haha.

Idk if I should just pick mechanical engineering first and add one or two after it to it. But that would take a lot of time. Geez.

I hate the elasticsearch backup api.

From beginning to end it's an painful experience.

I try to explain it, but I don't think I will be able to cover it all.

The core concept is:
- repository (storage for snapshots)
- snapshots (actual backup)

The first design flaw is that every backup in an repository is incremental. ES creates an incremental filesystem tree.

Some reasons why this is a bad idea:
- deletion of (older) backups is slow, as newer backups need to be checked for integrity
- you simply have to trust ES that it does the right thing (given the bugs it has... It seems like a very bad idea TM)
- you have no possibility of verification of snapshots

Workaround... Create many repositories as each new repository forces an full backup.........

The second thing: ES scales. Many nodes / es instances form a cluster.

Usually backup APIs incorporate these in their design. ES does not.

If an index spans 12 nodes and u use an network storage, yes: a maximum of 12 nodes will open an eg NFS connection and start backuping.

It might sound not so bad with 12 nodes and one index...

But it get's pretty bad with 100s of indexes and several dozen nodes...

And there is no real limiting in ES. You can plug a few holes, but all in all, when you don't plan carefully your backups, you'll get a pretty f*cked up network congestion.

So traffic shaping must be manually added. Yay...

The last thing is the API itself.

It's a... very fragile thing.

Especially in older ES releases, the documentation is like handing you a flex instead of toilet paper for a wipe.

Documentation != API != Reality.

Especially the fault handling left me more than once speechless...

Eg:
/_snapshot/storage/backup
gives you a state PARTIAL
/_snapshot/storage/backup/_status
gives you a state SUCCESS

Why? The first one is blocking and refers to the backup status itself. The second one shouldn't be blocking and refers to the backup operation.

And yes. The backup operation state is SUCCESS, while the backup state might be PARTIAL (hence no full backup was made, there were errors).

So we have now an additional API that we query that then wraps the API of elasticsearch. With all these shiny scary workarounds like polling, since some APIs are blocking which might lead to a gateway timeout...

Gateway timeout? Yes. Since some operations can run a LONG (multiple hours) time and you don't want to have a ton of open connections hogging resources... You let the loadbalancer kill it. Most operations simply run in ES in the background, while the connection was killed.

So much joy and fun, isn't it?

Now add the latest SMR scandal and a few faulty (as in SMR instead of CMD) hdds in a hundred terabyte ZFS pool and you'll get my frustration level.

PS: The cluster has several dozen terabyte and a lot od nodes. If you have good advice, you're welcome - but please think carefully about this fact.

I might have accidentially vaporized people sending me links with solutions that don't work on large scale TM.

I'm feeling burnt due to the lack of direction at my job instead of overwork.
I'm working as a data scientist at a large corporation and have been remote for a little over a year. I'm very savvy at programming and other technical skills but my manager wants me to develop my leadership skills and want me to move to a management role eventually. So he's been kinda "grooming" me to take on more leadership responsibility in the projects I'm currently involved in.

However, to be honest, I'm a little torn about getting more management or leadership responsibilities. I'm an extreme introvert and absolutely abhor meetings and having the same thing to people all the time and this sort of things stresses me out very easily. My manager seems set on pushing me towards pursuing a path towards leadership and just basically assumed that this is what I want out of my career and started putting me in the deep end without asking me what I want.

I really want to voice my honest thoughts about what I really want to do in my career (to be a technical specialist rather than a manager) but I've kinda procrastinated over the past year when he first started "grooming" me for a leadership role and it's my bad that I didn't tell him earlier.

Right now, I'm thrown in the deep end. I'm given a lot of projects without much of any direction and I'm asked to figure out the people I need to reach out to, the types of meetings I need to set with them, the relationships I need to develop both in and out of my department, etc. However, my real passions lie in writing code, fixing bugs, building models, understanding new technologies and applying them to the business, etc.

On paper, I'm involved in a ton of projects and I seem to be a really busy worker. But right now, I'm having a lot of difficulty reaching out and developing relationships with people that I barely have any actual work to do during the day, because I'm constantly waiting for replies from people or for permission or red tape to get some key information or access to a system in order for me to build something like a model or a program for a particular project. I'm spending maybe 1 or 2 hours of my workday actually "working" which is attending meetings, reading emails, etc., reaching out to someone for the n-th time (even though they continue to ignore me), etc. And that's because I'm blocked on all of my projects - I need an essential piece of information, data, or access to a system or server and the person I'm reaching out to to get this isn't responding. I brought this up with my manager and he says he's gonna try to reach out to these people to help me but so far, it doesn't seem like his help has been effective as I'm continuing to wait.

Though I get paid pretty well, I feel guilty logging in to work everyday and doing very little work, not because I'm lazy but because there really isn't much work for me to do because I'm waiting on so much here and I'm at a point where I can't make any progress in any of my projects without the approvals or other critical information that others aren't providing me.

I know I probably should find another job and I'm currently looking but in the meantime, is there anything else that I should be doing at my current job to hopefully make this situation better?

I see a lot of people ranting about programming exams on paper. I acknowledged that not having a texteditor is not ideal. But not having a compiler is essential in testing the students programming skills in the first few courses.To many students are completely dependent on the compiler.

Syntax:
Some students writing C++ code have to try to build their program as many times they have lines because of all the syntax errors they make. Why think about all the ; if your compiler will tell you where they are missing?

Computational thinking:
As a programmer you should be able to look at (your own) code and be able to tell what the result should be. Of course this has its limits, but in the small exam questions they get in the first few courses they should be able to do that. To many first year students write a for loop without thinking about the starting value and the end condition. With the repeated process of running the program, changing the starting value or the end condition randomly they eventually get to the loop they need.

I think people underestimate the value of an exam without being able to compile or run your program. But I like to hear your reactions.

Out of curiosity, is there anyone else who feels a bit late to the game in terms of their programming skills and training?

I got my start at about 10 with a slightly obscure BASIC dialect for classic MacOS, and while I got the logical bits down strong, I never really branched out too much at the time because I had difficulty understanding some of the more advanced examples I had available on my own.

Skip ahead to college and I tried CompSci my first semester, and did fairly well on paper, but could not get the compiler to work, even copying out known examples character for character and verifying them repeatedly. So after my first semester (and the hardest-earned D I’ve ever gotten) I ended up switching my major.

Skip another 10 years and I’m talking to some people about setting up a website, but the programmer flaked out on us, so I decided to start experimenting in PHP, and while that project never went anywhere I got good at developing resources for helping me keep my Japanese skills up (lots of logic/DB work, minimal interface).

Finally, after 10 more years of tinkering and during a bout of unemployment, I had a friend lament that he needed another programmer for his shop, but didn’t know anyone reliable. I apprenticed under him, learning WordPress along the way, and these days he’s moved on while I run the shop on my own, picking up new skills as needed.

There are times I feel absolutely confident in what I’m doing, but there are several areas where I feel like I’ve got a lot of fundamental gaps I can’t figure out how to address due to my near complete lack of formal training (like when I’ve tried to do non-web programming).

Anyone else have a similar path to where they are now? Ideas on how to break out of this limiting feeling?

I have a bookshelf full of tech books. What should I do with outdated ones? What approach should I take to buying new ones? A lot of them are probably irrelevant now. Things that don't change significantly are fine (I have old C++ and Make books whose content is still relevant even if some new stuff is missing) but web development has evolved significantly and I'm reluctant to get anything framework related due to needing to replace books frequently.

I could get ebooks, but having tried a few, I much prefer a physical book.

In the case of old books I no longer need, I can recycle them (as waste paper, or at a book recycling place) or donate them to a charity shop. It seems silly to recycle them as waste paper, but on the other hand I doubt the content will be that useful to others nor will it be that useful in a charity shop!

So instead they just sit on my shelf and remain unused...

What do you folks do with your books when you don't need them any more?

I don't know how it's out there, but where I'm from, we don't get a lot of practical classes. The curriculum has tried to include practical alongside theory but its just not working. All we do is theory and more theory. Maybe include a major portion of marks for practicals rather than theory. And yes, please no coding in paper.

Another major thing we lack is teaching logical thinking. I have met final year under grads who find using a (!foo) to invert the value of foo mind blowing. They would rather use a full blown if-then statement to do the same. I think we need to incorporate chapters that motivates students into logical thinking to make better programmers.

Another essential part CS education around here lacks is in relevant examples and chances for internship. If you're studying something, I believe you would understand it much better if you see and experience it. Curriculum should include a real world project that you would use in a daily basis. Maybe break down and analyse a successful application and its component.

!rant
I tend to do a lot of sketching and note taking and like to use pen on paper. But sick of tearing out notes and accumulating bits if paper that contain notes here and there. I was thinking of going digital with this specific task (for cheap) i don't own an ipad so was thinking of getting a Fire HD 8" and a Boxwave EverTouch stylus. Im all Apple so don't know android, would this hardware do the trick and what would be a decent note taking and organising app for it? Appreciate any advice comments. Other uses for it are irrelevant.

Fuck this. I need a data science job title.

We're implementing something based on a paper, as requested by our head of DS. The head of DS hasn't read the paper. I have. So has my team. We're discussing something, they don't understand how we should do something, I understand it coz I have a maths background but they want to ask head of DS to be sure. Who hasn't read the paper. I knew he hadn't read the paper because he came up with a stupid newfangled solution to a problem, when the paper already solves the problem, so his idea isn't needed but we implemented it as an optional feature to keep him happy anyway. So why the fuck are we asking him? He's not an idiot, but he does throw a lot of stuff at the wall hoping it'll stick. And he's not very methodical. And not reading the paper is unprofessional as fuck.

It's the first day of school and they try to make an entertaining segment on TV.
There has been a lot of controversy whether electronic books should replace paper ones.
They ask a mother about her opinion on electronic books:
Her: I myself like the idea of lighter school bags a lot. But yesterday I tried to open one of the books on my perfectly working laptop, and it was all white. I tried to zoom but nothing changed...

People are simply not ready for that much technology in their lifes. Teachers also can't use the technology to its full potential. They have been teaching the same thing the same way for tens of years, they'll always fallback to their old methods

February will be the first full year at this company as full time employee.

I've updated so many legacy projects, optimized a lot of workflows as well as built new tools to improve efficiency and remove unnecessarily duplicate projects (sometimes literally only 3 variables were different between multiple projects)

My one co-worker taught himself enough code to do the job but doesn't think like a programmer though he is asking me for help and advice to improve what he does since ive proven i know a little. my other direct co-worker I'm practically teaching a Programming 100 course to them

My direct manager at one point said he was so happy he took a chance on me even though I didn't interview well

I like my job, I find it so much better than my last job which was horribly toxic, and more fun than my first 'real' job as a night shift help desk for basically a warehouse environment.

But I feel under paid sometimes for how much i do and all ive improved in my first year, I have my first yearly review coming up. I'm hoping to get a decent raise for all ive done and I want to somehow go over everything with the HR person to justify it. But I have no idea how to talk about my dev work to them in a way a non technical person could understand. I'm also not sure how the review process will work. Like will my manager be there. Or is it just me and HR, is there a paper I'll be sent to fill before hand,

Some updates:

> Going to get another paper published (hopefully) once my exams end
> Got a intern, not a lot of money, ₹2L≈$2.6k per month for 2.5 months
> Will get a Mac from company for the intern(probably not new, and most likely will be taken back soon after the internship)
> Planning on entrepreneurship after getting a degree

Ohh and the rant:
1. Fucking sent me a 2 page list of links as "pre reads for internship" during my exams -- and intern will start soon after exams
2. Have missed 3 paper submission deadlines till now, hopefully will run more experiments on time this time and finally get that paper submitted (on 15th May)

Final year kids at a technological university: "Well, we just get a job and then cool down for a bit."
University ten days later: *publishes a notification*
Summing up the notice: "No no no, you better write a research paper, even though you are a tech student and you should be making a cool ass project for your Major.
WHY?
We don't want you to do a semester-long internship to get some relevant experience because we have a lot of Ph.D. students who aren't worth shit but we gotta give them doctorates. SO, YOU BETTER WRITE A PAPER, MAKE HIM/HER THE FIRST AUTHOR EVEN THOUGH HE/SHE IS INCOMPETENT AND HASN'T CONTRIBUTED EVEN A LINE WORTH TO THE PAPER. AND IF YOU DON'T WRITE A FUCKING PAPER, WE'LL FUCK UP YOUR FUCKING GRADES."

From the last 3 years, i have accumulated interest and experience in android dev. Not sure about the future, but that's probably where i will be.
But this fact is moot to our 50 year old grumpy professors teaching 1000 year old rusted computer syllabus, who rejected my idea of a video streaming app as major project, simply because i projected it as a social media app, and "everyone is making a social media app, its such an old topic". yeah right sir, its younger than your daughter that fucks in the lobby

Now we are doing a project on file conversions website, a project suggested by my team member and my good friend. its such a shitty topic, there is no resources available, even the research papers are bad , every search points to a shitty site, and i don't know shit about web dev.

Technically i am the team leader, but my team mate won't let me make the project as android native app, because "Brooo, i am going to make a react app that would be completely offline, completely client side, full secure and shitt small" and sometimes "Bro its my idea" .

Well, 1. the whole point of client side is stupid because the 18 mb jsfile isn't going to get downloaded first in the client's cache(or whatever the process is, idk). The top stack overflow answers i saw told me to buy an ec2 instance and run liberoffice commands on it for every request, and that's SERVER SIDE. even if we could, i am sure its going to be bigger than what i would have made in kotlin.
2. what am i supposed to do? look at you coding while make all the ppts and research paper? you are going to use undocumented libs that "just works" , and i am suppose to curate the theory behind this, looking at all the researches of the world?well i guess okay that's a light job since THERE AREN'T ANY.

And we are targetting all types of conversions, nice. from what i know, handbrake.fr: video conversion s/w = 16 mb. photoshop: image conversion s/w=1gb and ms word: doc to pdf/other formats= 500mb.
Plus all those proprietary and undocumented formats, ugh. Thank you ugly ass companies.

Internet is great but web dev has become a whole lot mess. "I am going to build a software that is going to run in your system only using your device's processor" is a desktop/mobile app, not a website

I remember when one of my lecturer give the test about writing a lot of insert update delete query.. On a paper. I bet he can't do it either. Damn it.

I work in a small team. As the senior dev I tens to focus on important tasks that shape the core of the product but some times I can’t divide my self when there are multiple tasks at hand, so I pass some tasks to the an other mid level dev.

So the task was to create an automation in order to CD (continuously deliver) an order from WHMCS of the (git versioned) product to customers UAT, PROD envs.

To get a background this is an old guy with “constricted” experience in PHP/jQuery/Joomla/Wordpress.

So when we were breaking up the tasks he told me he would like to implement this so i gave him the task as i was busy with core features.

I was like what could go wrong? I know he doesn’t know much about CI/CD but he can read right? He will google right? He will search for CI/CD solutions that do this out of the box right? He will design on paper or what ever and do small POCs right? He will design the flow first before starting the implementation right? RIGHT?

So fast forward to today I had a call with him this morning about some DB staff. And he wanted to show me his progress…

His solution is:
(parentheses is my brain)
1. Customer completes WHMCS order (perfect)
2. Web Hook 🪝 action (YES)
3. cpanel gets source and “automatic!” Init, all using pure PHP code ignoring the usage of the current framework (ok… something is missing)
4. cpanel web hooks(?) WHMCS to send email to customer with the envs initial setup page(?)
5. Customer opens link and adds setup info (ok fuck, fuck, fuck)

(Ok stay cool composed, lets ask some questions maybe he thought it all in a cool way I can’t get my mind around)

Me: So how are you gonna get the correct version from the repo to the env and init the correct schema?

Dev: I haven’t thought about it yet.

Me: Are we gonna save each version to a file system then your code is going to fetch them?

Dev: I haven’t really thought about it we will see. But look on customer init user setup I implemented a password strength validation and it also checks if the password is the same.

So after this Pokémon encounter I politely closed teams. Stood up drank some (a lot) coffee ☕️. Put out the washed laundry while reflecting on life’s good things, while listening to classical music 🎼 .

Then I sat on my office chair drank some more coffee, put some linking park starting with in that order:
“Numb” then “What I’ve Done” and ended with “In the end, it does really fucking matter”

Depends on which desk we're talking about...

Office desk: an empty can, a tophat well as a demo and some Russian paracetamol I found from a pocket of my winter coat.

Home Office #1 desk: the keyboard for another computer, a plant, a bunch of magazines and newspapers belonging to someone else, a roll of kitchen paper, someone else's meds, a cup of cookies, another cup of small tomatoes, a Swiss army knife, a bike computer and a tablet.

Home Office #2 desk: wife's laptop, a bunch of chargers for a myriad of devices, a Kindle, some envelopes full of stickers, others with bills, a lot of random crap, and usually when I'm at the desk, one or two purring felines

How many of you guys have an actual development life cycle at work (documenting every step, officially closing out of design, implementation, testing, etc)?

My place has a pretty stringent cycle. It is usually useful, but can occasionally just feel like paper pushing. It seems, though, that a lot of devs on here just sit down and start typing until someone says stop?

!rant but I'd like some advice.

This summer I'm taking a brief course on programming, very generic and mostly just to get it officially on paper, and as of what I can tell a lot of it will be stuff I'm familiar with. Basic syntax, loops, logic, good practices, etc.

However, I get to choose the language I get to work in myself. I assume they have a set of the most commonly used ones (couldn't find a list of them though) and I was wondering if anyone had advice on which to pick?

I already have a base of decent JS and Python, but I feel like it might be good to pick something other than Python? Because even though I love it to bits, I do realize that it's not the optimal language in all situations. What I'm pondering is Java or one of the C-languages, but again, I'm not one of the pros here. Any recommendations?

Me: We're going to use git for its versioning to document the changes to these documents because doing this non-electronically would be resource intensive and use a lot of paper.
(One year later.)
Boss: Can you show me the steps on how to do this?
MFW boss doesn't know how to git: 😧

I’m very complicated financially and I got a project where the client feels like a geek and influences the project a lot, plus we started a tremendous bureaucracy by mail that made me desperate, not to mention that the designer has these artistic ideas that work on paper but not on the web. Neither of us allowed opinions so I decided to say no before starting.

Looking at @striker28 's rant made me think of my time I did my MSc and I think it needs it's own separate rant so here it goes:

So I did an MSc at one of the big league unis in London. First clue was during week 1 where in one of the class a mature student asked whether there would be actual coding during the course. There was an audible gasp from everyone else! Once the lecturer said the unfortunatly they wouldn't be you could hear the sigh of relief from the students...

Next up was all the lectures being placed in the freakin' basement of the university in crap, smelly rooms with annoying ticking A/Cs whereas all the social siences, business and other subjects had lecture halls and classrooms above ground. The contempt for CS from the university's direction was palpable.

Then there was the relegation to the theory-only (i.e. abstract with pen/paper) "tutorial" to the hand of T/As with bugger-all teaching experience. In short most were terrible and should've found a way to abscond themselved from this obligation which was part of the terms of their phd grants unfortunatly.

Further into the course there was the "group project". Oh boy! Out of the 5 in the group my now mature student friend and I were the only one commiting to the repo. There was either no code and a lot of bullshit from the others or crap code that didn't even compile despite their assurances it was all good.. Someone clearly never actually coded and pressed "run" in their lives which is fucking surprising since they've managed to graduate with a BSc and get into a MSc somehow. None of the code "made" by the other 3 persons made it into the master branch for release.
The attitude was that of "We (hahahah) wrote loads of code. We'll get a great mark!". At that stage the core wasn't even complete and the software didn't work yet.

Some of the courses where teaching things already 10 years out of date and when lecturer where pressed on that the few mature students that happen to be there the answer was always "yes, we are planning to update it for next year". Complete bullshit. Didn't help that some of the code on the lecture slides was not even correct! I mean these guy are touted as "experts" in their field...

None of the teory during the entire year was linked to any coding. Everything was abstract with no ties to applied software engineering. I.e. nothing like the real world.

The worst is that none of the youger students realised they were being screwed over and getting very little value for their money. Perhaps one reason why these evaluation forms have such high scores given on them. If you haven't had a job and haven't lived outside academia yet there is nothing to compare it to. It tends to also fall into confirmation bias (hey it's a top UK university, it must be worth it afterall! Look how much they ask for).

By the end of the year I couldn't wait to get the hell out. One of the other mature student sumed it quite well: "I will never send my children here."
Keep in mind that the guy had just over a decade of software engineering experience in the industry and was doing this for fun.

In the end universities are not teaching institutions. The lecturers's primary job is research and their priorities match that. Lectures tend to be the most time efficient teaching format for the ones giving them but, on their own, are not for the consumer.

To those contemplating university for CS: Do the BSc. Get your algo/datastructure chops and learn the basic theory. It is interesting. Don't get discouraged by the subject just because it is taught badly.
Avoid the MSc unless you want to do a phd and go for an academic carrer. You are better off using that year and the money to learn more on your own and get into colaborative projects (open source) on top of some personal ones. Build up your portfolio. It will be cheaper and more interesting!

I'm starting to gain a dislike for OOP.

I think classes make it easy for me to think of the entities of a problem and translate them into code.

But when you to attempt to test classes, that's when shit hits the fan.

In my opinion, it is pointless to test classes. If you ever seen test code for a class, you'll notice that it's usually horrible and long.

The reason for this is that usually some methods depend on other methods to be called first.

This results in the usual monolithic test that calls every goddamn method on the class.

You might say "ok, break the test into smaller parts". Ok. But the result of that attempt is even worse, because you end up with several big tests cases and a lot of duplicate code, because of the dependency of some methods on others.

The real solution to this is to make the classes be just glue: they should delegate arguments onto functions that reside on its own file, and, maybe afterwards emit events if you are using events.

But they shouldn't have too much test code classes though. The test code for classes should be running a simple example flow, but never doing any assertions other than expecting no exceptions.

For the most part, you'd be relying on the unit testing that is done for each delegated function.

If you take any single function you'll see that it's extremely easy to write tests for it. In fact, you can have the test right next to the fuction, like <module>.xyz <module>.test.xyz

So I don't think classes shouldn't be used at all, they should just be glue.

As you do normal usage of this software this way, when a bug is discovered you'll notice that the fix and testing code for this bug is very usually applied to the delegated functions instead of being a problem of classes.

I think classes by themselves sound sane in paper, but in practice they turn into a huge fucking messes that become impossible to understand or test.

How can something like traditional classes not get chaotic when a single class can have x attributes and y methods. The complexity grows exponentially. And sometimes more attributes and methods are added.

Someone might say "well, it's just the nature of problems. Problems can have a lot of variables".

Yeah, but cramming all of that complexity into a single 200 lines class is insanity.

Infineon infineon infineon...
Your aurix tricore is amazing for all safet systems... On paper.

Your support is abysmal. Tried forums, support line to verify a demo that only seems to work sometimes.

I just wanted to get ethernet communication using the demo. But hey one week gone and no success....

And the code seems to behave differently for each run :| the debugger works only on global variables and no printf statements. But hey just make a lot of globals right? So little footprint available so not possible :-\

Hoped that some forum could confirm the demo so I knew I was just making a fuck up, but cannot get that verified...

Embedded programming not for me... :/

How to Create Beautiful and Durable Pie Boxes

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Protect delicate items
Using pie boxes is a good way to protect delicate items such as pies, cakes and desserts. However, you need to be sure that the box is the right size and shape to ensure that your item is safely packed. If you don't pack your delicate products properly, they could suffer from moisture and change in temperature.

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Make a gift
Whether you are giving a pie for a birthday, wedding, or as a thank you gift, you can make pie boxes that are beautiful and durable. Several pie box designs are available online, but you can also create your own. Here are some simple instructions to make a simple, yet elegant box.

The first step is to print out a template of a pie box. You can use a piece of scrap paper or decorative paper for your design. If you are using decorative paper, cut out a rectangle the size of your box. If you are using colored cardstock, you will need to cut out a pie filling layer. Once you have a pie filling layer, copy it for several boxes. You can also add other designs or embellishments to your boxes.

Next, place your colored cardstock on your cutting mat. With your x-acto knife, cut out a rectangle that is as large as your box. You will need to fold it on the dotted line. If you are using an x-acto knife, it will be easier to fold the box. Alternatively, you can use a scoring stylus. If you have a Cricut, you can score the cardstock to make a scalloped box top. You can also use burlap ribbon or twine to wrap your box.

Once you have the box finished, you can decorate it with other decorations or embellishments. You can even use calligraphy or other techniques to make the box more special. To close the box, you will need a sticker or piece of tape. You can decorate the lid with patterned paper and a clear plastic screen. This will allow you to see the contents of your pie. You can also use embellishments such as ribbon, glitter, or other materials to make the box more fun.

If you are giving a pie for a holiday or party, you can decorate your box with a festive theme. For example, you can have a holiday tree on the front of your box. Or, you can dress it up for a tailgate party.

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