You know what?

Young cocky React devs can suck my old fuckin LAMP and Objective-C balls.

Got a new freelance job and got brought in to triage a React Native iOS/Android app. Lead dev's first comment to me is: "Bro, have you ever used React Native".

To which I had to reply to save my honor publicly, "No, but I have like 8 years with Objective-C and 3 years with Swift, and 3 years with Node, so I maybe I'll still be able help. Sometimes it just helps to have a fresh set of eyes."

"Well, nobody but me can work on this code."

And that, as it turned out was almost true.

After going back and forth with our PM and this dev I finally get his code base.

"Just run "npm install" he says".

Like no fuckin shit junior... lets see if that will actually work.

Node 14... nope whole project dies.

Node 12 LTS... nope whole project dies.

Install all of react native globally because fuck it, try again... still dies.

Node 10 LTS... project installs but still won't run or build complaining about some conflict with React Native libraries and Cocoa pods.

Go back to my PM... "Um, this project won't work on any version of Node newer than about 5 years old... and even if it did it still won't build, and even if it would build it still runs like shit. And even if we fix all of that Apple might still tell us to fuck off because it's React Native.

Spend like a week in npm and node hell just trying to fucking hand install enough dependencies to unfuck this turds project.

All the while the original dev is still trying TO FIX HIS OWN FUCKING CODE while also being a cocky ass the entire time. Now, I can appreciate a cocky dev... I was horrendously cocky in my younger days and have only gotten marginally better with age. But if you're gonna be cocky, you also have to be good at it. And this guy was not.

Lo, we're not done. OG Dev comes down with "Corona Virus"... I put this in quotes because the dude ends up drawing out his "virus" for over 4 months before finally putting us in touch with "another dev team he sometimes uses".

Next, me and my PM get on a MS Teams call with this Indian house. No problems there, I've worked with the Indians before... but... these are guys are not good. They're talking about how they've already built the iOS build... but then I ask them what they did to sort out the ReactNative/Cocoa Pods conflict and they have no idea what I'm talking about.

Why?

Well, one of these suckers sends a link to some repo and I find out why. When he sends the link it exposes his email...

This Indian dude's emails was our-devs-name@gmail.com...

We'd been played.

Company sued the shit out of the OG dev and the Indian company he was selling off his work to.

I rewrote the app in Swift.

So, lets review... the React dev fucked up his own project so bad even he couldn't fix it... had to get a team of Indians to help who also couldn't fix it... was still a dickhead to me when I couldn't fix it... and in the end it was all so broken we had to just do a rewrite.

None of you get npm. None of you get React. None of you get that doing the web the way Mark Zucherberg does it just makes you a choad locked into that ecosystem. None of you can fix your own damn projects when one of the 6,000 dependency developers pushes breaking changes. None of you ever even bother with "npm audit fix" because if security was a concern you'd be using a server side language for fucking server side programming like a grown up.

So, next time a senior dev with 20 years exp. gets brought in to help triage a project that you yourself fucked up... Remember that the new thing you know and think makes you cool? It's not new and it's not cool. It's just JavaScript on the server so you script kiddies never have to learn anything but JavaScript... which makes you inarguably worse programmers.

And, MF, I was literally writing javascript while you were sucking your mommas titties so just chill... this shit ain't new and I've got a dozen of my own Node daemons running right now... difference is?

Mine are still working.

Father bought a PC in 1997. Back then very few had it. I learned doing things like accessing the internet and sending emails, among others. I remember having added age on websites to be allowed to sign up at times :P My sisters used to play games on it sometimes. The first few ones we had were Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, Tomb Raider Chronicles, American McGee's Alice(Which caused us to upgrade the PC xD)... And some others.

I have a memory of this pseudo-3D-looking game where you move in a maze and try answering questions. I want to remember its name, but I cannot :(

We literally have video evidence of me liking the computer as a child, yet my parents either say I'm addicted or deny I've ever liked it before. Not only that, but continuously limiting my time with the PC hasn't been a literal obstacle in my way of trying to do things in their opinion. Funny how my parents think the last few years I've been my worst when they've hurt me in those years so much that our relationship is guaranteed not working out. There were doubts in my head before, but now it's cemented and there is no way of going back. Father, for example, tells me it's too late to do anything with a PC now(As well as how I've been unable to use the PC. He looks at these pro players' footage in some TV show and he's like, „You've been unable to use your hobbies“, as if they have never ever screamed at me for perceived gaming and not actually cared to check), and I need to look for a „real“ job.

Sorry. I went to bed at 2:00 in the morning. Feel like a zombie because of ongoing weirdly insufficient sleep, even though I sleep kinda more than normal. Even when I took Melatonine for that it didn't help at all.

Childhood was where beating began. I was about 6/7. Right when I entered school. The first school that I attended was a private one and supposedly for „Wunderkinds“, while in reality I haven't seen a SINGLE teacher or psychologist approve of it, their argument being that children were basically drowned in work that wasn't age-appropriate(I don't mean anything bad. Just that teaching about Galaxies and all in first grade isn't the brightest idea). There was always a mountain of homework to do and as opposed to some other countries, we had to do it on a day to day basis. We didn't have a week-long deadline. I was predictably not keeping up with it as I could have, had it been a normal amount, so my parents decided I didn't want to study and began their methods of getting me to „study“. I have yet to see a person able to keep up with that school's tempo, no matter the age.

This place was also where I got bullied. I felt I had nowhere to be: At home, the parents' situation, at school, the bully. I never really went outside to play with other children, so I missed that part of childhood.

After the second year of school I was transferred to an advanced German school, called like that because they taught German and not English there. I also got to learn a bit of Russian before they removed it from school. In that period I used to attend ballet. But for less than a year. And piano, which I remember having attended for quite a long while, some years, if my memory isn't fried. I quit it because of it having been forced on me. Last piece I ever played fully was Beethoven's Marmotte.

In this school I was once again the outcast of the class. I had some people to interact with. All of those interactions lasted a few years at most. Then, because of a part of my class choosing me as a laughing-stock N2 and another girl as the N1, I found my best friend, who I still have today. She's the only friend I have nearby.

Most of the time I hated myself. Even today I struggle with that sometimes.

After that came university. This us where I got something like a friend circle at last. But it still didn't last. I got in a relationship with one of the guys, but I was just attracted. There was another I couldn't dare getting close to. Turns out he also had something for me. Then he disappeared from our lives and a year after, I still cannot forget the person. If I want to, I have to deprive myself of my own personality. Not a thing I'm willing to give up. Then I broke up with the guy I was in a relationship with and completely disappeared from the friendship circle. To be honest, I had reasons to. They refused to even try to look for the guy and they called him a friend for years. Sometimes parents hitting me can occur even today, but if I REALLY piss them off.

Now I'm here and oh, my God, I'm officially am aunt now! My sister gave birth to a daughter this morning... She's in Berlin with mother and both she and the child are doing great. I just hope she manages to be a good mother.

So I got the job. Here's a story, never let anyone stop you from accomplishing your dreams!

It all started in 2010. Windows just crashed unrecoverably for the 3rd time in two years. Back then I wasn't good with computers yet so we got our tech guy to look at it and he said: "either pay for a windows license again (we nearly spend 1K on licenses already) or try another operating system which is free: Ubuntu. If you don't like it anyways, we can always switch back to Windows!"

Oh well, fair enough, not much to lose, right! So we went with Ubuntu. Within about 2 hours I could find everything. From the software installer to OpenOffice, browsers, email things and so on. Also I already got the basics of the Linux terminal (bash in this case) like ls, cd, mkdir and a few more.

My parents found it very easy to work with as well so we decided to stick with it.

I already started to experiment with some html/css code because the thought of being able to write my own websites was awesome! Within about a week or so I figured out a simple html site.

Then I started to experiment more and more.

After about a year of trial and error (repeat about 1000+ times) I finally got my first Apache server setup on a VirtualBox running Ubuntu server. Damn, it felt awesome to see my own shit working!

From that moment on I continued to try everything I could with Linux because I found the principle that I basically could do everything I wanted (possible with software solutions) without any limitations (like with Windows/Mac) very fucking awesome. I owned the fucking system.

Then, after some years, I got my first shared hosting plan! It was awesome to see my own (with subdomain) website online, functioning very well!

I started to learn stuff like FTP, SSH and so on.

Went on with trial and error for a while and then the thought occured to me: what if I'd have a little server ONLINE which I could use myself to experiment around?

First rented VPS was there! Couldn't get enough of it and kept experimenting with server thingies, linux in general aaand so on.

Started learning about rsa key based login, firewalls (iptables), brute force prevention (fail2ban), vhosts (apache2 still), SSL (damn this was an interesting one, how the fuck do you do this yourself?!), PHP and many other things.

Then, after a while, the thought came to mind: what if I'd have a dedicated server!?!?!?!

I ordered my first fucking dedicated server. Damn, this was awesome! Already knew some stuff about defending myself from brute force bots and so on so it went pretty well.

Finally made the jump to NginX and CentOS!

Made multiple VPS's for shitloads of purposes and just to learn. Started working with reverse proxies (nginx), proxy servers, SSL for everything (because fuck basic http WITHOUT SSL), vhosts and so on.

Started with simple, one screen linux setup with ubuntu 10.04.

Running a five monitor setup now with many distro's, running about 20 servers with proxies/nginx/apache2/multiple db engines, as much security as I can integrate and this fucking passion just got me my first Linux job!

It's not just an operating system for me, it's a way of life. And with that I don't just mean the operating system, but also the idea behind it :).

It's fine if you're 'not good with computers' and need help. Ask me politely and sure I'll see how I can help and teach you what you need so that you can do it yourself in the future.

It's not fine, however, if you refuse to fucking learn after the millionth time I've taught you how to do the exact same thing because 'It's too hard' and 'I won't understand anyway'. And then proceed to call me a bad and ungrateful friend because I can't come to your rescue the very second you need me and don't seem 1000% enthusiastic to help at 1am in the morning when I'm still doing my own work.

Sure, I'm the 'tech person' amongst our friends. I *do* understand the frustration you experience when something isn't working. But that doesn't mean I'm obligated to be your 24/7 IT support, while listening to your complaints of how I was probably the one who fucked it up in the first place when I helped fixed your phone/laptop last time (for the record, this was *never* the case).

UGHHHHHHHH

ps: I just found this community and I love it already! Thought this mental rant I had earlier would fit right in lol
(Also, sorry English isn't my first language D:

Recruiter: “can you write your own framework?”

Me, after considering for a good minute: “well, I am kinda starting to automate lots of things so I guess if I wanted I may be able to... for sure I’d learn a lot along the way...”

Recruiter: “very good!”

Me:”wait, why would you want that skill?”

Recruiter: “our customers want custom code”

Me:”so you write a new framework every time?”

Recruiter: “ah you have also experience in [x]!”

Some people scare me 😟

TL;DR :

"when i die i want my group project members to lower me into my grave so they can let me down one last time"

STORY TIME

Last year in College, I had two simultaneous projects. Both were semester long projects. One was for a database class an another was for a software engineering class.

As you can guess, the focus of the projects was very different. Databases we made some desktop networked chat application with a user login system and what not in Java. SE we made an app store with an approval system and admin panels and ratings and reviews and all that jazz in Meteor.js.

The DB project we had 4 total people and one of them was someone we'll call Frank. Frank was also in my SE project group. Frank disappeared for several weeks. Not in class, didn't contact us, and at one point the professors didn't know much either. As soon as we noticed it would be an issue, we talked to the professors. Just keeping them in the loop will save you a lot of trouble down the road. I'm assuming there was some medical or family emergency because the professors were very understanding with him once he started coming back to class and they had a chance to talk.

Lesson 1: If you have that guy that doesn't show up or communicate, don't be a jerk to them and communicate with your professor. Also, don't stop trying to contact the rogue partner. Maybe they'll come around sometime.

It sucked to lose 25% of our team for a project, but Frank appreciated that we didn't totally ignore him and throw him under the bus to the point that the last day of class he came up to me and said, "hey, open your book bag and bring it next to mine." He then threw a LARGE bottle of booze in there as a thank you.

Lesson 2: Treat humans as humans. Things go wrong and understanding that will get you a lot farther with people than trying to make them feel terrible about something that may have been out of their control.

Our DB project went really well. We got an A, we demoed, it worked, it was cool. The biggest problem is I was the only person that had taken a networking class so I ended up doing a large portion of the work. I wish I had taken other people's skills into account when we were deciding on a project. Especially because the only requirement was that it needed to have a minimum of 5 tables and we had to use some SQL language (aka, we couldn't use no-SQL).

The SE project had Frank and a music major who wanted to minor in CS (and then 3 other regular CS students aside from me). This assignment was make an app store using any technology you want. But, you had to use agile sprints. So we had weekly meetings with the "customer" (the TA), who would change requirements on us to keep us on our toes and tell us what they wanted done as a priority for the next meeting. Seriously, just like real life. It was so much fun trying to stay ahead of that.

So we met up and tried to decided what to use. One kid said Java because we all had it for school. The big issue is trying to make a Java web app is a pain in the ass. Seriously, there are so many better things to use. Other teams decided to use Django because they all wanted to learn Python. I suggested why not use something with a nice package system to minimize duplicating work that had already been done and tested by someone. Kid 1 didn't like that because he said in the real world you have to make your own software and not use packages. Little did he know that I had worked in SE for a few years already and knew damn well that every good project has code from somewhere else that has already solved a problem you're facing. We went with Java the first week. It failed miserably. Nobody could get the server set up on their computers. Using VCS with it required you to keep the repo outside of the where you wrote code and copy and paste changes in there. It was just a huge flop so everyone else voted to change.

Lesson 3: Be flexible. Be open to learning new things. Don't be afraid to try something new. It'll make you a better developer in the long run.

So we ended up using Meteor. Why? We all figured we could pick up javascript super easy.Two of us already knew it. And the real time thing would make for some cool effects when an app got a approved or a comment was made. We got to work and the one kid was still pissed. I just checked the repo and the only thing he committed was fixing the spelling of on word in the readme.

We sat down one day and worked for 4 straight hours. We finished the whole project in that time. While other teams were figuring out how to layout their homepage, we had a working user system and admin page and everything. Our TA was trying to throw us for loops by asking for crazy things and we still came through. We had tests that ran along side the application as you used it. It was friggin cool.

Lesson 4: If possible, pick the right tool for the job. Not the tool you know. Everything in CS has a purpose. If you use it for its purpose, you will save days off of a project.

“Don’t learn multiple languages at the same time”

Ignored that. Suddently I understood why he said that. Mixed both languages. In holiday rechecked it and it was ok.

Sometimes mistakes can lead to good things. After relearning I understood it much better.

“Don’t learn things by head” was another one. Because that’s useless. If you want to learn a language, try to understand it.
I fully agree with that. I started that way too learning what x did what y did, ... But after a few I found out this was inutile. Since then, I only have problems with Git

Another one. At release of Swift, my code was written in Obj-C. But I would like to adopt Swift. This was in my first year of iOS development, if I can even call it development. I used these things called “Converters”. But 3/4 was wrong and caused bugs. But the Issues in swift could handle that for me. After some time one told me “Stop doing that. Try to write it yourself.”

One of the last ones: “Try to contribute to open source software, instead of creating your own version of it. You won’t reinvent the wheel right? This could also be usefull for other users.”

Next: “If something doesn’t work the first time, don’t give up. Create Backups” As I did that multiple times and simply deleted the source files. By once I had a problem no iOS project worked. Didn’t found why. I was about to delete my Mac. Because of Apple’s WWDR certificate. Since then I started Git. Git is a new way of living.

Reaching the end: “We are developers. Not designers. We can’t do both. If a client asks for another design because they don’t like the current one tell them to hire one” - Remebers me one of my previous rants about the PDF “design”

Last one: “Clients suck. They will always complain. They need a new function. They don’t need that... And after that they wont bill ya for that. Because they think it’s no work.”

Sorry, forgot this one: “Always add backdoors. Many times clients wont pay and resell it or reuse it. With backdoors you can prohibit that.”

I think these are all things I loved they said to me. Probably forgot some.

'Sup mates.
First rant...
So Here's a story of how I severely messed up my mental health trying to fit in university.

But the bonus: Found my passion.
Her we go,

Went to university thinking it'll be awesome to learn new stuff.
1st sem was pure shock - Programming was taught at the speed of V2 rockets.
Everything was centred around marks.

Wanted to get a good run in 2nd sem, started to learn Vector design, but RIP- Hospitalized for Staph infection, missed the whole sem and was in recovery for 3 months.
So asked uni for financial assistance as I had to re-register the courses the next semester. They flat out refused, not even in this serious of a case.

So, time to register courses for third semester, turns out most of the 2nd year courses are full, I had to take 3rd year courses like:
Social and Informational Networks
Human Computer Interaction
Image processing
And
Parallel and Distributed Computing (They had no prerequisites listed, for the cucks they are: BIG MISTAKE)
Turns out the first day of classes that I attend, the Image proc. teacher tells me that it's gonna be difficult for 2nd years so I drop it, as the PDC prof. also seconds that advice.

Time travel 2 months in: The PDC prof is a bitch, doesn't upload any notes at all and teaches like she's on Velocity-9 while treating this subject like a competition on who learns the most rather than helping everyone understand.
Doesn't let students talk to each other in lab even if one wants to clear their friend's doubt, "Do it on your own!" What the actual fuck?

Time for term end exams and project submission: Me and 3 seniors implement a Distributed File System in python and show it to her, she looks satisfied.
Project Results: Everyone else got 95/100
I got 76.
She's so prejudiced that she thinks that 2nd years must have been freeloaders while I put my ass on turbo for the whole sem, learning to code while tackling advanced concepts to the point that I hated to code.

I passed the course with a D grade.
People with zero consideration for others get absolutely zero respect from me.
Well it's safe to say that I went Nuclear(heh.. pun..) at this point, Mentally I was in such a bad place that I broke down.... Went into depression but didn't realise it.

But,
I met a senior in my HCI class that I did a project with, after which I discovered we had lots of similar interests.
We became good friends and started collaborating on design projects and video game prototyping.

Enter the 4th sem and holy mother of God did I got some bad bad profs....
Then it hit me
I have been here for two years, put myself through the meat grinder and tore my soul into shreds.
This Is Not Me
This Wont Be The End Of Me
I called up my sister in London and just vented all my emotions in front of her.
Relief.
Been a long time since I felt that.
I decided to go for what I truly feel passionate about: Game Design

So I am now trying to apply for Universities which have specialised courses for game design.

I've got my groove again, learnt to live again.
Learning C# now.
:)
It's been a long hello, and If you've reached till here somehow, then damn, you the MVP.
Peace.

Imagine if you will, a fictional world outside our own.

In this world, the requirement for getting a drivers licenses is 4 years of research into quantum mechanics.

- Was it interesting? Yeah.

- Did I learn it because I had to? Yup.

- Will I use the harmonic oscillation calculations of a particle when driving my car. Fuck no!

- Did it cost me an ungodly amount of money? It sure did!

- Will some dumb people still say it was useful because it is the minimum (fictional) barrier to entry for driving a car. You bet your sweet ass they will!!!

It was about as useful as any made up requirement, make-work, self-funding, circle-jerking, waste or time and money to feed the pockets of people who are too scared to do actual work so they teach, can be.

I paid all that money to be taught technology that was old when my mother was in school.

In the first year out of school, with only a $300 subscription to PluralSight some uDemy courses and hard work, I learned 100X as much as everything they put in front of me in school.

-------

School has its place.

Children who don't understand the importance of learning and need their hand help.

Adult children (some of which on on their 3rd or 4th degree) who also need their hand held.

People too afraid to enter the real world.

Doctors.

-------

I would do it again because it is the minimum requirement of entry, but thats nothing more than a bullshit make-work project.

Play their game as long as you need to. Keep your own game in mind. Don't drink the koolaid, just fake a sip. Then when the time is right, play by your own rules.

Peace

! exactly dev

I'd ditched Windows and spent a while exploring the Linux ecosystem for content creation. And I have to say, it was not a nice experience.

As much as I respect the Linux mantra of "free as in freedom" and "you need to roll up your sleeves and figure out stuff on your own", it just isn't good enough for non-dev work. Sorry guys, but I need software that gets out of my way and at least does what it's supposed to do. I can't stand a horrible UI or delays and random crashes, which is exactly what happens with most things under Linux.

To replace my Windows workflow I used the following:
1. Windows -> elementaryOS (because Debian/Ubuntu repositories seem to have the best software support, and elementaryOS is the least horrible looking thing that supports that) and then Arch, because, well, Arch.
2. Blender + Maya -> Blender + Maya on Linux.
3. Reaper + FL Studio -> Ardour + LMMS.
4. Photoshop -> GIMP + Krita + Inkscape.
5. ZBrush -> nothing :(

As you can see, my use cases are pretty much all over the spectrum.

Firstly, installing and configuring stuff. A pleasure on Windows, an absolute pain on Linux. Everything just worked on Windows, I had to wrestle with library versions and patches and unstable audio layers (Linux audio just sucks, except for JACK) on Linux.

Out of these, Blender and Maya were the best experience. But even then, both would suffer from random crashes that just didn't happen on Windows.
Ardour is actually really nice when it works. Its use of JACK for routing makes it really really flexible, but it just isn't stable enough to depend on. LMMS is utter crap. I'm sorry, but I just hate the UI. Can't stand it.
GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape can't beat Photoshop, even when you consider them together. Adobe software workflow is just so much better and more intuitive.
Blender 3D sculpting is not bad, but it's nowhere as good as ZBrush.

Also, if you're a C++ dev like me, nothing beats Visual Studio 2017. Nothing. That IDE just blows everything else out of the water. Even VSCode. And it's not slow at all, it handled a fairly large project (PBRTv3) just fine on my Windows development VM. Yes, a VM.

So...I ditched Linux and went back to Windows, but I keep Linux as a VM for when I actually want to mess with Blender or Ardour. Or some dev stuff which Windows sucks at (which is becoming less frequent because of WSL).

Out of all the above, the only one I'd consider ready for production use would be Blender. Developers of open source software, please learn from Blender. Kickass UI and user friendly operation is extremely important, you can't make a random window with GTK buttons and text boxes and arcane config files and expect people to use it for serious work.

Also, Windows beats Linux hands down as an everyday OS. It's always been rock solid, if you take care of it properly (and that goes for any OS). Updates hardly take any time because I run it on a SSD. As for all the advertising and marketing bullshit, you can block a large amount of stuff. And for what can't be blocked, well, I just have to live with it, because the alternative is compromising on my creative output, which is too much for me.

I still run Linux on my server, though. And on my embedded devices (Pi, BeagleBone, etc.). It absolutely rocks there.

I realize that Linux software is not going to improve unless we do something about it, so I'll be contributing fixes and code (the joys of being a C++ dev, yay). Still, I feel that the platform and software as a whole is just not mature enough.

Software Devs are less supportive than the community tries to convey. They're also part of the most self-deluded and obnoxious crowd that exists on earth.

Someone saying they don't enjoy coding 24/7 outside of work? You actually enjoy totally different hobbies that have next to nothing to do with coding?
- Shitty developer, you should probably work elsewhere. Maybe flipping burgers.

"Coding in <Framework X> is SO friggin' easy. You're basically subhuman garbage if you can't learn it within a month!"

Watch some YouTube Videos with the "Freelancer Success Stories" of dudes that haven't - apparently coded, ever - and started to code late in life and tell you how perseverance and learning brings the success and yet you never see any repos of those guys. You see those guys mostly go on for up to half an hour to regurgitate some hot garbage you can read up within two minutes yourself from ANY coding blog.

You're not using a macbook to develop?
- "Oooof, man! How can you?"

You don't really like "Popular Framework X"?
- Especially when it comes to Frontend Frameworks prepare to either die on the hill of your beliefs or die a futile and slow death when people - more or less - snarkily try to dissect your opinion in order to try - again, more or less - to hide their own bias. Because don't forget, your opinion is OBJECTIVELY wrong and you simply happen to a garbage developer for (dis-)liking something.

You DO like "Popular Framework X"?
- Well, rinse and repeat basically.

You struggle to get a new job?
- All your fault. You clearly didn't spend enough time coding; you should have at least 12 Open-Source Projects with at least 100k downloads the week.

There is actually a whole lot more, but I feel I'm basically done with software dev. Software development is neither creative nor terribly fun. I'm just angry at myself that I switched careers for the money.

TL;DR you suck, I suck and everybody sucks, deal with it....

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

Let me let off some steam, since I've had enough of people hating on languages "just because"

Every language has it's drawbacks and quirks, BUT they have their strengths also. Saying "I hate {language}" is just you being and ignorant prick and probably your head is so far up your ass that you look like an ass hat. With that being said, every language is either good or bad depending on the developer writing in it. Let's give you an example:

If I ware to give you a brick and ask you to put a nail in a plank, can you do it? Yes, it will be easier if you do it with a hammer, but you have a brick, so hammer is out of the question. If you hit your thumb while doing it... well... sorry, but it is not the bricks fault - it is YOU!

JavaScript, yes it has a whole lot of problems, but it works, you can do a ton of stuff and does a good job at that, it is evolving through node and typescript (and others, just a personal pref), BUT if you used js when you ware debugging that jquery (1.0) plugin written in the free time of a 13 yo, who copy pasted a bunch from SO, well, it is not js' problem - deal with it. Same goes for PHP, i've been there where you had a single `index.php` with bazillion lines of code, did a bunch of eval and it was called MVC, but it also is evolving.. thing is all languages allow you to do some dumb stuff so YOU have to be responsible to not fuck it up (which you always DO btw, we all do). Difference is PHP/JS roll with it because the assumption is that you know what you are doing, which again - newsflash - you don't.

More or less I would blame that shit on businesses which decided to go with undergrads to save money instead of investing in their product, hell, I am in a major company that does not invest that doesn't care a whole lot about dev /tech stuff and now everybody's mother is an engineer - they care about money, because investors care about money (ROI) and because clean code does not pay the bills, but money does.

If we get all of the good practices and apply them to each language every one of them has it's place, that is why there is no "The Language", even if there was, we STILL ware going to fuck it up and probably it was going to be even worse than where we are now.

Study, improve, rinse and repeat... There are SENIORS and LEADS out there that are about 25-30 and have no fucking clue about the language, because they have stuck up their heads up the ass of frameworks and refuse to take a breath of clean air and consider something different than their dogmatic framework "way" of doing things.. That is the result you are seeing. Let me give you a fresh example to illustrate where I am at atm:

Le me works with ZendFramework 2.3-2.5 (why not, which is PHP5+ running on PHP7 [fancy, eh]), and little me writes a module for said project, and tries to contain it in its own space, i.e not touching anything outside of the folder of the module so it is SELF-CONTAINED (see, practices), during 2-3-4 iterations of code review, I've had to modify 4 different modules with `if (somthing === self::SOMETHING_TYPE)` as requested by my TL, which resulted in me not covering 3 use-cases after the changes and not adding a new event (the fw is event-driven, cuz.. reasons) so I have to use a bunch of ifs in the code, to check a config value and do shit. That is the way of I am asked to do things I hate what I've done and the fact that because of CR I have lost case-coverage, a week of work and the same TL will be on my ass on monday that things are now "perfect".

The biggest things is "we care about convention and code style"... right.... That is not because of the language, not because of me, not because of the framework - it is some dude's opinion that you hate, not the language.

New stuff are better, reinventing the wheel is also good, if it wasn't you would've had a few stone circular things on your car and things ware going to be like that - we need to try and try, that is the only way we actually learn shit.

Until things change in the trade, we will be on the same boat, complaining about the same shit over and over, you and me won't be alive probably but things will not change a bit.

We live in a place where state is considered good, god objects necessary (can you believe it, I've got kudos for using the term 'God Object'... yep, let that sink in). If you really hate something, please, oh god I beg you, show me how you will do it better and I will shake your hand and buy you a beer, but until then, please keep your ass-hurt fanboy opinion to your self, no one gives a shit about what you think, we will die and the world will not notice...

Why am I such an average ?

It's just a sad realisation. Nobody cares but I wanna send this out there, just to write thoughts.. I am 18 in 3rd year of high school (grammar school so nothing IT related, basically waste of time) and in IT I'm all self taught but I feel like I could be better if I just didn't [something]..

I feel like I wanna learn so many things but when I look at you, it seems like a common problem in the IT sphere so hey, average guy joining the club.

I also feel dumb when programming. I didn't manage to learn C++ in it's entirety because to really accomplish something, you've got so many ways to do it and finding the best one requires deep understanding of the tools you've got at your disposal with the language and I feel like I'm not capable of this(self learn, in school/Uni that's different story).. But many (most) of you are. I've tried many coding challenges and when I got it working, I just saw how someone did it in one line just by layering functions that I've never heard of..

Also, we've got kinda specific national competition here in many fields including IT for high schools.. And the winners always do sometimes like "AI driven Life simulation" or "Self flying drone made from ATMega from scratch with 3D simulation in C# to it" or "Game engine" or whatever shit and it's always from grammar schools and never IT related schools.. They are like me. Maybe someone helped them, I don't know, but they are just so far away from me while I'm here struggling to get the basic level of math for any kind of machine learning..

Yeah I've written Neural Network from scratch in C but meh, honestly it's pretty basic stuff .. I'd rather understand derivatives which we're going to learn next year and I'm too lazy to learn it from khan academy because I always learn something else.. Like processing (actually codetrain started teaching tensorflow so that might be the light for me...) Or VHDL (guys you can create your own chip / CPU from scratch and it's not even hard and OMFG it's so fucking cool , full adder done yay) or RPi or commodore 64 assembly or game development with Godot and just meh..

I mean, this sounds exactly like not knowing what to do and doing nothing in the end. That was me like 6-12 months ago. Now I'm managing to pick 2-3 things and focus them and actually feel the progress.

But I lost track of the original point.. I didn't do anything special, every time I'm programming something, everyone does it better and I feel dumb. I will probably never do anything special, everyone around says "He's still learning he's genius" but they have no idea.

I mean, have you seen one of the newest videos on Google's YouTube channel (I openly hate them, but I will keep that away for now), something like "Sarah story" ? It's about girl that apparently didn't care about IT but self learned tensorflow on high school. I think it may be bullshit (like ALL of their videos ) but it's probably just fancied, not complete lie.

And again, here I am. I now C but I'm incapable of learning to program good which most of you did and are now doing for living. I'm incapable to do anything cool, just understanding what everybody else did and replicating it. I'm incapable of being clever.

Sorry, just misusing devrant to vent a bit

I wrote a node + vue web app that consumes bing api and lets you block specific hosts with a click, and I have some thoughts I need to post somewhere.

My main motivation for this it is that the search results I've been getting with the big search engines are lacking a lot of quality. The SEO situation right now is very complex but the bottom line is that there is a lot of white hat SEO abuse.

Commercial companies are fucking up the internet very hard. Search results have become way too profit oriented thus unneutral. Personal blogs are becoming very rare. Information is losing quality and sites are losing identity. The internet is consollidating.

So, I decided to write something to help me give this situation the middle finger.

I wrote this because I consider the ability to block specific sites a basic universal right. If you were ripped off by a website or you just don't like it, then you should be able to block said site from your search results. It's not rocket science.

Google used to have this feature integrated but they removed it in 2013. They also had an extension that did this client side, but they removed it in 2018 too. We're years past the time where Google forgot their "Don't be evil" motto.

AFAIK, the only search engine on earth that lets you block sites is millionshort.com, but if you block too many sites, the performance degrades. And the company that runs it is a for profit too.

There is a third party extension that blocks sites called uBlacklist. The problem is that it only works on google. I wrote my app so as to escape google's tracking clutches, ads and their annoying products showing up in between my results.

But aside uBlacklist does the same thing as my app, including the limitation that this isn't an actual search engine, it's just filtering search results after they are generated.

This is far from ideal because filter results before the results are generated would be much more preferred.

But developing a search engine is prohibitively expensive to both index and rank pages for a single person. Which is sad, but can't do much about it.

I'm also thinking of implementing the ability promote certain sites, the opposite to blocking, so these promoted sites would get more priority within the results.

I guess I would have to move the promoted sites between all pages I fetched to the first page/s, but client side.

But this is suboptimal compared to having actual access to the rank algorithm, where you could promote sites in a smarter way, but again, I can't build a search engine by myself.

I'm using mongo to cache the results, so with a click of a button I can retrieve the results of a previous query without hitting bing. So far a couple of queries don't seem to bring much performance or space issues.

On using bing: bing is basically the only realiable API option I could find that was hobby cost worthy. Most microsoft products are usually my last choice.

Bing is giving me a 7 day free trial of their search API until I register a CC. They offer a free tier, but I'm not sure if that's only for these 7 days. Otherwise, I'm gonna need to pay like 5$.

Paying or not, having to use a CC to use this software I wrote sucks balls.

So far the usage of this app has resulted in me becoming more critical of sites and finding sites of better quality. I think overall it helps me to become a better programmer, all the while having better protection of my privacy.

One not upside is that I'm the only one curating myself, whereas I could benefit from other people that I trust own block/promote lists.

I will git push it somewhere at some point, but it does require some more work:
I would want to add a docker-compose script to make it easy to start, and I didn't write any tests unfortunately (I did use eslint for both apps, though).
The performance is not excellent (the app has not experienced blocks so far, but it does make the coolers spin after a bit) because the algorithms I wrote were very POC.
But it took me some time to write it, and I need to catch some breath.

There are other more open efforts that seem to be more ethical, but they are usually hard to use or just incomplete.

commoncrawl.org is a free index of the web. one problem I found is that it doesn't seem to index everything (for example, it doesn't seem to index the blog of a friend I know that has been writing for years and is indexed by google).

it also requires knowledge on reading warc files, which will surely require some time investment to learn.

it also seems kinda slow for responses,

it is also generated only once a month, and I would still have little idea on how to implement a pagerank algorithm, let alone code it.

Ohh man i fucked up bad. 5 days as intern, and i fuck up really bad with my ego and ignorance.

I love my this company. A great environment, lots of people to learn from , i am given reasonable tasks and i feel happy to complete them. But what happened today was weird and fucked up.

I have never worked at a place with seniors designers tech leads and more people with positions. I have also worked with a lot of competitive people who are always in a race to be first.
And how do we come first? Have a lot of knowledge, hear the smallest of detail and sprint towards goal (because the combination your knowledge, assumptions and speed is enough to make you reach to the top). You don't ask for specific details, because they are obvious. And that's me in short.

Today i fucked up.
Mistake #1 ) first i was given a small task by my senior. It was a 20 mins task max if i had done it the normal noobie way . But i am a pro in mind , i have to do it with all the architecture , even if i don't understand why. So i asked for 50 mins. They gave it and did not had a problem with my time, but with the way i wrote my code.

He was like "who told you to make it like this ? Why did you made it like this?" And was visibly irritated. And i was like super chill saying "i don't know the why, but i know its correct way of using it" , pissing him even more. In my eyes he's just a super friendly sr, more like a bro and wouldn't mind some cheeky answers. And he didnt show any
consequences for that time.

Mistake #2 this is super fucked up. Our office is going under some renovation & interns were asked to sit in the co-working spaces (outside of the office). It was already very disturbing and i had to go to office every few minutes.

So after lunch this happens : We are working on a new module that already has a tonne of screens and logics. I have made a small part which is from the middle and now we can go both in the forward or in the backward direction.(Also, its quite a new module whose idea was recently discussed and decided. And weirdly i am also being treated like a core member as the ceo once himself asked what would he my flow for doing things in this. i am in direct contact and under direction of backend , designers , ceo and My senior and many ppl are giving me tasks ) And... Aagh fuck it. .. its a long story and i don't feel like repeating it but

inshort :

got a task,

didn't understood it completely and thought its my task to figure it out, took a long time figuring it my self ,

techlead/designer somehow changed my and my sr. direction of flow even tho we were taking a different approach

I sit in a noisy and irritating place

Techlead/designer comes during the time when i am figuring out the solution(already overtime the one in point #2) nags for result.

I get in an argument with him, justifying for my time and arguing that it's difficult to think technical logics for that design
( truth be told, it WAS a difficult logic which he thought was too easy. It consisted of 3 variables and 8 states we were doing different works for 4 of them and rejecting 2 and ... I don't know, i had got that wrong . But that shouldn't had been my problem to solve. I should have gone to my senior and didn't get into argument with tech lead ). It think i might have offended him too.

After he left, i am so angry on him that after sometime my senior comes and i misbehave with him. He just asks to meet me before i go, and i do so. During the meeting we discuss this whole fuck up and how many times i showed him my ego and indiscipline. And then i realise what a fuckup i did due to my ego and lack of asking, blindly following my own over confidence and blindly following or arguing with others.

Fuck fuck fuck

TL;DR; windows XP + bat scripts + fascination about being able to make things yourself.

I was born and raised in a village. And the thing about living in a village is that you are free :) Among all the other freedoms you are also free to build your own solutions to various domestic problems, i.e. to build stuff. This is one of the things that fascinates me about living outside the city.

When I finally was old enough (and had the means to, i.e. a computer) to understand that programming is something that allows you to build your own solutions to computer problems, it got to me.

With win 3.1 I was still too fresh and too young. With win 95 I was more interested in playing with neighbours outdoors. With win 98 I was a bit too busy at school. But with win XP the time had come. I started writing automation solutions for windows administration using .bat scripts (.vbs was and still is somewhat repelling to me). I no longer needed to browse Russian forums and torrent sites to find a solution to a problem I had! That was amazing!!! [esp. when my Russian was very weak].

That was the time when I built my first sort-of-malware - a bat script downloading and installing Radmin server, uploading computer's IP and admin credentials to my FTP.

I loved it!

However, I'd stumbled upon may obstacles when writing with batch. I googled a lot and most of the solutions I found were in bash (something related to Linux, which was a spooky mystery to me back then). Eventually, I got my courage together and installed ubuntu. Boy was I sorry... Nothing was working. I was unable to even boot the thing! Not to mention the GUI...

Years later I tried again with ubuntu [7.10 I think.. or 7.04] on my Pavilion. Took me a looooot of attempts but I got there. I could finally boot it. A couple of weeks later I managed to even start the GUI! I could finally learn bash and enjoy the spectacular Compiz effects (that cube was amazing).

I got into bash and Linux for the next several years. And then I thought to myself - wait, I'm writing scripts that automate other programs. Wouldn't it be cool I I could write my own programs that did exactly what I wanted and did not need automation? It definitely would! I could write a program that would make sound work (meaning no more ALSA/PA headaches!), make graphics work on my hardware, make my USB audio card to be set to primary once connected and all the other amazing things! No more automation -- just a single program or all of that!

little did the naive me knew :)

I started with python. I didn't like that syntax from the beginning :/ those indentations...

Then I tried java. Bucky (thenewboston), who likes tuna sandwiches, on my phone all the free time I had. I didn't learn anything :/ Even tried some java 101 e-book. Nothing helped until I decided to write some simple project (nothing fancy - just some calculations for a friend who was studying architecture).

I loved it! It sounds weird, but I found Swing amazing too. With that layout manager where you have to manually position all the components :)

and then things happened and I quit my med studies and switched to programming. Passed my school exams I was missing to enter the IT college and started inhaling every bit of info about IT I could get my hands on (incl outside the college ofc).

A few more stepping stones, a few more irrelevant jobs to pay my bills in the city, and I got to where I am now.

I know I was one at some point, but juniors can be so frustrating at times.

After some pairing for a while they're quick to adopt the "Dev" mindset and think as far as they need to...

... but with this latest batch... that day couldn't come sooner 🫠

Having to explain how exceptions work again is the last thing you wanna do under tight time constraints 🙃

Any chance we can do a polling system?

@dfox

I studied anthropology and ive been in this community for almost 2 years. Have discovered the coding landscape at pretty much the same time and i must say its an interesting bunch of people.

I came on here to learn about the geek way and how to become a better dev. Seeing the rants has been really helpful!

But i think the polling system could lead to interesting understanding. Of the community both for your own app (for marketing bullshit purposes) but also for us.

Id love to know what kind of music people listen to but in a summarized way rather than a unending list of comments which will be harder to extract the information from!

When I was in college OOP was emerging. A lot of the professors were against teaching it as the core. Some younger professors were adamant about it, and also Java fanatics. So after the bell rang, they'd sometimes teach people that wanted to learn it. I stayed after and the professor said that object oriented programming treated things like reality.

My first thought to this was hold up, modeling reality is hard and complicated, why would you want to add that to your programming that's utter madness.

Then he started with a ball example and how some balls in reality are blue, and they can have a bounce action we can express with a method.

My first thought was that this seems a very niche example. It has very little to do with any problems I have yet solved and I felt thinking about it this way would complicate my programs rather than make them simpler.

I looked around the at remnants of my classmates and saw several sitting forward, their eyes lit up and I felt like I was in a cult meeting where the head is trying to make everyone enamored of their personality. Except he wasn't selling himself, he was selling an idea.

I patiently waited it out, wanting there to be something of value in the after the bell lesson. Something I could use to better my own programming ability. It never came.

This same professor would tell us all to read and buy gang of four it would change our lives. It was an expensive hard cover book with a ribbon attached for a bookmark. It was made to look important. I didn't have much money in college but I gave it a shot I bought the book. I remember wrinkling my nose often, reading at it. Feeling like I was still being sold something. But where was the proof. It was all an argument from authority and I didn't think the argument was very good.

I left college thinking the whole thing was silly and would surely go away with time. And then it grew, and grew. It started to be impossible to avoid it. So I'd just use it when I had to and that became more and more often.

I began to doubt myself. Perhaps I was wrong, surely all these people using and loving this paradigm could not be wrong. I took on a 3 year project to dive deep into OOP later in my career. I was already intimately aware of OOP having to have done so much of it. But I caught up on all the latest ideas and practiced them for a the first year. I thought if OOP is so good I should be able to be more productive in years 2 and 3.

It was the most miserable I had ever been as a programmer. Everything took forever to do. There was boilerplate code everywhere. You didn't so much solve problems as stuff abstract ideas that had nothing to do with the problem everywhere and THEN code the actual part of the code that does a task. Even though I was working with an interpreted language they had added a need to compile, for dependency injection. What's next taking the benefit of dynamic typing and forcing typing into it? Oh I see they managed to do that too. At this point why not just use C or C++. It's going to do everything you wanted if you add compiling and typing and do it way faster at run time.

I talked to the client extensively about everything. We both agreed the project was untenable. We moved everything over another 3 years. His business is doing better than ever before now by several metrics. And I can be productive again. My self doubt was over. OOP is a complicated mess that drags down the software industry, little better than snake oil and full of empty promises. Unfortunately it is all some people know.

Now there is a functional movement, a data oriented movement, and things are looking a little brighter. However, no one seems to care for procedural. Functional and procedural are not that different. Functional just tries to put more constraints on the developer. Data oriented is also a lot more sensible, and again pretty close to procedural a lot of the time. It's just odd to me this need to separate from procedural at all. Procedural was very honest. If you're a bad programmer you make bad code. If you're a good programmer you make good code. It seems a lot of this was meant to enforce bad programmers to make good code. I'll tell you what I think though. I think that has never worked. It's just hidden it away in some abstraction and made identifying it harder. Much like the code methodologies themselves do to the code.

Now I'm left with a choice, keep my own business going to work on what I love, shift gears and do what I hate for more money, or pivot careers entirely. I decided after all this to go into data science because what you all are doing to the software industry sickens me. And that's my story. It's one that makes a lot of people defensive or even passive aggressive, to those people I say, try more things. At least then you can be less defensive about your opinion.

I am thinking about leaving this platform. To be honest I don't get anything out of it anymore and the only thing keeping me here is the less-rant'ish content like @devNews or the stories.

I am actually a bit disappointed, the quality of devrant really did degrade alot in the last few months. Don't get me wrong but I feel like people have become "normies" over here. I don't mean that in an edgy or degrading way but let me explain. When I started here I had a very high opinion of the people here. Everyone seemed like a passionate / knowledgeable individual from whom you could hear interesting stories or learn. Maybe I just saw it like that because I was still a very inexperienced dev and was looking for a dev community. But nonetheless I think devRant transformed into a place of mediocrity.

Dont get me wrong I wouldn't think of myself as aspiring or generally "better" than anyone else on here, but the content over here got a little stale.

I am not the kind of person who would "rant", in the first place, so I may have a different mindset and to be honest "ranting" has always been a thing I looked down upon. It just does not support my style of thinking. I totally get that people sometimes need to "vent" their feelings but there is nothing productive to gain from ranting, like you ain't not improving your situation by doing it. The more passionate raters over here call people things, I would never even dream about saying to people. Don't worry I'm no sjw or something like it, I don't care if you do it. If it helps you sure, why not. But there is a point where you corner yourself so much that you stop respecting your colleagues because they wrote that shitty code, instead of helping.

Some tech sure is bad, but it is not getting any better by insulting it.

Another thing I use to notice are people, thinking so highly of them selfes / being so close-minded - that they only accept their own views as true. These are the people that I always try to avoid, but that is getting harder and harder as time goes on.

Collectivism and group thinking are very strong on devRant making it really hard to defend a unpopular opinion - I get that devRant is not the kind of platform that would support actual proper arguments/discussions - but I still feels like some people shove opinions down another people's throat with no reasoning behind it.

Arguments on devRant are always won by the person coming up with the most witty response. Having another opinion is always seen as offensive. That's not exactly the definiton of open-mindedness.

Another rather annoying thing are what I call the "non dev, dev's". See: As a developer you should aspire to understand what your doing - I won't get into this too much but one sentencd: How are things like serious "Semicolon memes" a thing? I am as much into memes as the next guy, but debugging 3 hours, just to find out its a typo. I mean come on...

I sure get that devRant is not the kind of place where you would find the people I am looking for, and that's why I am leaving.

My whole post may seem super negative of the platform - and it is to an extend - but I sure also had a good time back in the day - devRant as in "the platform" surely is not at fault, but a forum is only as good as the people on it. Maybe I changed, maybe devRant did. All I know is that it is not for me anymore.

I won't delete my account and I probably will not leave completely, but all I will do is the "once a week" checkout.

Once again I have loads.

My best teachers were...

The contractor that taught me C#, ASP MVC and SQL Server. Dude was a legend, so calm and collected. He wanted to learn JQuery and Bootstrap so at the same time as teaching, he was learning from me. Such an inspirational person, to know your subordinates still have something to teach you. He also taught me a lot about working methodically and improving my pragmatism.

The other, in school I studied computing A-Level. 100% scored at least one of the exams... basically I knew my stuff.

But, as a kid, I didn’t know how to formulate my answers, or even string together coherent answers for the exams. This dude noticed, first thing he did was said “well you’re better at this bit than me, practice but you’ll be fine” (manually working out two’s complement binary of a number).

Second thing he did was say “you know what man, you know what you’re on about but nobody else is ever going to know that”.

He helped me on the subjects I wasn’t perfect on, then he helped me on formulating my answers correctly.

He also put up with my shit attendance, being a teenager with a motorcycle who thinks he knows it all, has its downsides.

As a result, I aced the hell out of that course, legendary grades and he got himself a bit of a bonus for it to use on his holiday. Everyone’s a winner.

Liam, Jason, if you guys are out there I owe you both thanks for making me the person I am today.

The worst, I’ve had too many to name... but it comes down to this:
- identify your students strengths and weaknesses, focus on the weaknesses
- identify your own and know when to ask for help yourself
- be patient, learning hurts.

You can always tell a passionate teacher from one who’s there for the paycheck.

What do you tell interviewers as a "Senior developer" when they ask you what you do at your current job.

I've been with my current for almost 8 years, since graduating... Few different time but not very well managed (semi/barely agile). Hasn't really provided any skill growth opportunities. Mostly fixing production issues, chasing other teams.

The projects I've worked on are in many different languages either enhancements or some standalone stuff. But nothing that's huge and I don't think I've learned anything from them. I usually apply what I learn and practice outside of work to work.

So to me I can probably list a whole lot of projects but to me their not that amazing, I didn't learn anything from them.

Also about those algorithm questions. I've never used any of this stuff actually at work. Concepts yes but not how do you implement ... And honestly I've never once had a situation that required algorithmic thinking other than maybe writing recursive functions in rare occasions...

But to me I've never once done anything harder or new which I haven't already done on my own....

Sorry for the disorderly rambling this turned into... which is sorta a problem too.

Everytime I think about interviews, I want to give rants about we technical questions are BS, how I probably have enough real experience to tackle any problem and come up with a good plan/solution (in a realistic timeframe, not 20 minutes from design to implementation)

It's utterly frustrating to work with someone who has been in the same job for five years but still hasn't bothered to learn the basic tools necessary to do their job effectively. It's like they're stuck in a time warp, refusing to adapt and improve their skills.

How can you possibly expect to be successful in your career if you're not willing to invest time and effort into learning the tools of your trade? It's not rocket science, and these tools are there to make your job easier, not harder.

And what's worse is when these same people complain about their workload, blaming the tools for their inefficiency. Well, guess what? If you took the time to learn how to use them properly, maybe you wouldn't be drowning in work right now.

It's not even about being tech-savvy or a quick learner. It's simply about taking some initiative and responsibility for your own professional development. It's about having the basic level of competency required for your job.

Not to mention that constantly asking for help and guidance on tasks you should be able to handle on your own is not only a waste of your colleagues' time but also reflects poorly on your work ethic and reliability.

So, please, if you've been in the same job for five years and still struggle with basic tools, do yourself and your team a favor and take the time to learn them. It will make everyone's lives easier and improve your chances of success in the long run. Don't stay stagnant and hold yourself back – embrace opportunities to learn and grow. Your career will thank you for it.

The tools in question is Kubernetes and it's directly related to the persons day-to-day work (SWE + SDET mainly), 5 years is more than enough time to learn and adapt to a new toolset, and yet this particular person refuses to invest time into it. It's frustrating, to say the least, but also a disservice to themselves as they are limiting their potential and hindering their own career growth.

This is real rant, not one of these funny stories!

So, I spent 4 years to get a Computer Science degree, and did two specializations, 3.5 years more in Uni. I have 6 years of experience working in IT, from support to programming. I also speak 3 languages.

I'm from a South America country, and now I'm living in EU.

I'm 30 now and earning a little more than a MacDonald's cashier earns in the US. I have to live in a shared apartment like a fucking Uni student. I have nothing, no car, no house, no girlfriend. WTF!

IT is a fucking lie! Profession of the future my ass!

In Uni they said that finding a good job was easy, that companies would literally grab us by the neck to work for them. LIE!
I did found a low paying job though, where at least I could learn a lot more.
People were really satisfied with my work and I even received a proposal of one of our clients to work for them, but the offer wasn't good enough.

I tried entering some big companies as a Trainee, but it was so ridiculous, they said they were looking for an IT person, but they asked things related to economy and other stuff that had nothing to do with IT. I always failed in the group work/interview, it was so ridiculous, I remember one candidate saying her dream was to work for the company since she was a child, SERIOUSLY!

When the opportunity came, I moved to EU and now I'm working as a dev. But as I said, I'm not satisfied with it! In the US the yearly average software engineer salary is about 100K, I earn less than 1/4 of it. And don't come saying that US pays more because of the cost of life, here the cost of life is the same or even more expensive, a super small apartment/loft is at least 180K, a simple new car 18K and a Big Mac costs 4€.

In the US, the average salary of someone that just graduated from uni is 60K to 70K! LOL

In EU, it's super hard for someone to earn 100K, that's why many companies are creating offices here, good workforce, 2 to 3 times smaller salary!

IT also sucks because it's too volatile, there's new stuff all the time. Someone always has to come with a new language, new framework, new library, etc etc. And you have to keep learning new stuff all the time.
Also job openings always ask for experienced people, like you must have at least two years of experience with VUE.js, or something.

Do you remember the last time you went to a doctor for a checkup, did they use a new tool, or did something different during the checkup? Probably not, the medic don't have to learn new stuff all the time, he is still using a stethoscope, he is still placing a wooden stick in your mouth to check your throat...
But in IT, almost no one nowadays is going to create code using CoffeeScript, they instead will use TypeScript.

I read an article saying that an IT professional must study 20 hours a week to keep up with new trends. So I must work 40 hours and study another 20? LOL
It's not that I don't like learning new stuff, but this sucks, I want to maybe learn something different or have a hobby.

Today I regret going to uni, I feel it was a waste of time and money. They taught things like calculus and physics that I never had to use professionally, and even programming stuff like linked lists I never had to use.

If instead I had studied dentistry or studied to be a ophthalmologist I think I would be earning more, would be working more independently and wouldn't need to keep up learning new things so much.

Also to work in IT you don't need a diploma, I read an article by a dude that learned programming by his own, did some software for his portfolio and got a job at Google.
When I read these kinds of story I regret even more going to uni, It really feels I wasted my time.

For these reasons I can't recommend going to uni to study IT, if you want to go to uni go study something else!
If you want to study programming do it on your own, there's everything you must know online for free, create a portfolio, and look for a job or even try working for yourself!

Living the life I have now, there's just no incentive to keep going.
Should I keep learning new stuff so maybe I can get a better job that will still pay low, or quit and try creating something on my own?
Or even ditch IT all together and go back to uni? LOL NO!

These ignorant comments about arch are starting to get on my nerves.

You ranted or asked help about something exclusive to windows and someone pointed out they don't have that problem in arch and now you're annoyed?

Well maybe it's for good.

Next comes a very rough analogy, but imagine if someone posts "hey guys, I did a kg of coke and feeling bad, how do I detox?"

It takes one honest asshole to be like "well what if you didn't do coke?".

Replace the coke with windows.
Windows is a (mostly) closed source operating system owned by a for profit company with a very shady legal and ethical history.

What on earth could possibly go wrong?

Oh you get bsod's?
The system takes hours to update whenever the hell it wants, forces reboot and you can't stop it?
oh you got hacked because it has thousands of vulnerabilities?
wannacry on outdated windows versions paralyzed the uk health system?

oh no one can truly scrutinize it because it's closed source?

yet you wonder why people are assholes when you mention it? This thing is fucking cancer, it's hundreds of steps backwards in terms of human progress.

and one of the causes for its widespread usage are the savage marketing tactics they practiced early on. just google that shit up.

but no, linux users are assholes out to get you.

and how do people react to these honest comments? "let's make a meme out of it. let's deligitimize linux, linux users and devs are a bunch of neckbeards, end of story, watch this video of rms eating skin off his foot on a live conference"

short minded idiots.

I'm not gonna deny the challenges or limitations linux represents for the end user.

It does take time to learn how to use it properly.
Nvidia sometimes works like shit.
Tweaking is almost universally required.
A huge amount of games, or Adobe/Office/X products are not compatible.
The docs can be very obscure sometimes (I for one hate a couple of manpages)

But you get a system that:
* Boots way faster
* Is way more stable
* Is way way way more secure.
* Is accountable, as in, no chance to being forced to get exploited by some evil marketing shit.

In other words, you're fucking free.
You can even create your own version of the system, with total control of it, even profit with it.

I'm not sure the average end user cares about this, but this is a developer forum, so I think in all honesty every developer owes open source OS' (linux, freebsd, etc) major respect for being free and not being corporate horseshit.

Doctors have a hippocratic oath? Well maybe devs should have some form of oath too, some sworn commitment that they will try to improve society.

I do have some sympathy for the people that are forced to use windows, even though they know ideally isn't the ideal moral choice.
As in, their job forces it, or they don't have time or energy to learn an alternative.

At the very least, if you don't know what you're talking about, just stfu and read.

But I don't have one bit of sympathy for the rest.

I didn't even talk about arch itself.
Holy fucking shit, these people that think arch is too complicated.

What in the actual fuck.

I know what the problem is, the arch install instructions aren't copy paste commands.
Or they medium tutorial they found is outdated.

So yeah, the majority of the dev community is either too dumb or has very strong ADD to CAREFULLY and PATIENTLY read through the instructions.

I'll be honest, I wouldn't expect a freshman to follow the arch install guide and not get confused several times.
But this is an intermediate level (not megaexpert like some retards out there imply).

Yet arch is just too much. That's like saying "omg building a small airplane is sooooo complicated". Yeah well it's a fucking aerial vehicle. It's going to be a bit tough. But it's nowhere near as difficult as building a 747.

So because some devs are too dumb and talk shit, they just set the bar too low.

Or "if you try to learn how to build a plane you'll grow an aviator neckbeard". I'll grow a fucking beard if I want too.

I'm so thankful for arch because it has a great compromise between control and ease of install and use.

When I have a fresh install I only get *just* what I fucking need, no extra bullshit, no extra programs I know nothing about or need running on boot time, and that's how I boot way faster that ubuntu (which is way faster than windows already).

Configuring nvidia optimus was a major pain in the ass? Sure was, but I got it work the way I wanted to after some time.

Upgrading is also easy as pie, so really scratching my brain here trying to understand the real difficult of using arch.

(I highly recommend to you to not read this, it's just something that I had been wanting to take off my head; seriously, if you want to read it, do it at your own risk, because it will be a huge waste of your time)

Oracle Academy is the worst crappy attempt from a Corporation to create a learning platform.

The directive and academic personnel of my faculty decided that it could be a good idea to teach SQL and PL/SQL during whatever online classes will last with Oracle Academy, and I truly strongly believe (including most of my friends and classmates) that it's one of the worst ideas that could be done.

At that platform you simply don't learn shit, you read page by page of shitty PPT-like PDF presentations (that most of those are from a decade ago and other from 5 years ago) that are a pain in the ass to read due to how poorly formatted they are or how it explains badly certain concepts due to how badly made some explaining examples are, and then at each section of the "Learning Course" I have to do a Quiz that asks theorical questions and tells you to make certain code reviews to see if something is wrong or not (also which they are just alike the presentations, poorly formatted, up to the point that those have many syntax errors that end up consufing anyone a lot) and the main problem with the quizes is that also the Oracle's PL/SQL Docs are so fucking badly made, that I have to check PDF by PDF and page by page the concept that I just forgot to see how to answer the goddamn question; I mean, there are Doc pages that are way better structured and obviusly external to Oracle, but not even those pages fully cover certain SQL and PL/SQL concepts.

Seriously though, who could be so fucking ill-minded to create a shittyful learning platform and not try to fucking improve nor enhance it at least every 2 fucking years, so the goddamn "learning" process isn't that stressful.

Some of you know I'm an amateur programmer (ok, you all do). But recently I decided I'm gonna go for a career in it.

I thought projects to demo what I know were important, but everything I've seen so far says otherwise. Seems like the most important thing to hiring managers is knowing how to solve small, arbitrary problems. Specifics can be learned and a lot of 'requirements' are actually optional to scare off wannabes and tryhards looking for a sweet paycheck.

So I've gone back, dusted off all the areas where I'm rusty (curse you regex!), and am relearning, properly. Flash cards and all. Getting the essentials committed to memory, instead of fumbling through, and having to look at docs every five minutes to remember how to do something because I switch languages, frameworks, and tooling so often. Really committing toward one set of technologies and drilling the fundamentals.

Would you say this is the correct approach to gaining a position in 2020, for a junior dev?
I know for a long time, 'entry level' positions didn't really exist, but from what I'm hearing around the net, thats changing.

Heres what I'm learning (or relearning since I've used em only occasionally):

* Git (small personal projects, only used it a few times)
* SQL
* Backend (Flask, Django)
* Frontend (React)
* Testing with Cypress or Jest

Any of you have further recommendations?

Gulp? Grunt? Are these considered 'matter of course' (simply expected), or learn-as-you for a beginner like myself?

Is knowing the agile 'manifesto' (whatever that means) by heart really considered a big deal?

What about the basics of BDD and XP?

Is knowing how to properly write user-stories worth a damn or considered a waste of time to managers?

Am I going to be tested on obscure minutiae like little-used yarn/npm commands?

Would it be considered a bonus to have all the various HTTP codes memorized? I mean thats probably a great idea, but is that an absolute requirement for newbies, or something you learn as you practice?

During interviews, is there an emphasis on speed or correctness? I'm nitpicky, like to write cleanly commented code, and prefer to have documentation open at all times.
Am I going to, eh, 'lose points' for relying on documentation during an interview?

I'm an average programmer on my good days, and the only thing I really have going for me is a *weird* combination of ADD and autism-like focus that basically neutralize each other. The only other skill I have is talking at people's own level to gauge what they need and understand. Unfortunately, and contrary to the grifter persona I present for lulz, I hate selling, let alone grifting.
Otherwise I would have enjoyed telemarketing way more and wouldn't even be asking this question. But thankfully I escaped that hell and am now here, asking for your timeless nuggets of bitter wisdom.

What are truly *entry level* web developers *expected* to know, *right out the gate*, obviously besides the language they're using?

Also, what is the language they use to program websites? It's like java right? I need to know. I'm in an interview RIGHT now and they left me alone with a PC for 30 minutes. I've been surfing pornhub for the last 25 minutes. I figure the answer should take about 5 minutes, could you help me out and copypasta it?

Okay, okay, I'm kidding, I couldn't help myself. The rest of the questions are serious and I'd love to know what your opinions are on what is important for web developers in 2020, especially entry level developers.

Damn. I am so blessed to have friends that i have. 90% of them don't even care if you live or die (60% of them would be the first to throw me in fire if that's benefitting to them) remaining 10% would be someone that slightly care, but will move on pretty quickly.

But the best thing about 1 of them is that he is bluntly honest , and willing to share his opinion.
Today we were just talking about stuff when i see this placement offer in my mail.

I have been recently feeling bad about my grades, my choice of persuing android , my choice of leaving out many other techs (like web dev or data sciences , whose jobs are coming in so much number in our college) and data structures, and my fear of not getting a good career start.

This guy is also like me in some aspects. He is also not doing any extreme level competitive programming. He doesn't even know android , web dev, ai/ml or other buzz words. He is just good in college subjects. But the fascinating thing about him,is that he is so calm about all of this! I am losing my nuts everyday my month of graduation , aug2020 is coming . And he is so peaceful about this??

So i tried discussing this issue with him .Let me share a few of his points. Note that we both are lower middle class family children in an awful, no opportunity college.

He : "You know i feel myself to be better than most of our classmates. When i see around , i don't see even 10 of them taking studies seriously. Everyone is here because of the opportunity. I... Love computer science. I never keep myself free at home. I like to learn about how stuff works, these networking, the router, i really like to learn."

"That's why i dont fear. Whatever the worst happens , i have a believe that i will get some job. Maybe later, maybe later than all of you , but i will. Its not a problem."

me: "but you are not doing anything bro! I am not doing anything ! So what if our college mates suck , Everyone out there is pulling their hairs out learning data structures, Blockchain, ai ml , hell of shit. But we are not! Why aren't you scared bro? Remember the goldman sach test you gave ? You were never able to solve beyond one question. How did you feel man? And didn't you thought maybe if i gave a year to that , i will be good enough? Don't you too want a good package bro? Everyone's getting placed at good numbers."

Him : "Again, its your thoughts that i am not doing things. I am happy learning at my own pace. Its my belief that i should be learning about networking and how hardware works first , then only its okay to learn about programming and ai ml stuff. I am not going to feel scared and start learning multiple things that i don't even wanna learn now."

"My point is whatever i am doing now, if its related to computers , then someday its gonna help me.
And i am learning ds too , very less at a time. Ds algo are things for people with extreme knowledge. We could have cleared goldman sachs if we had started learning all this stuff from 1st year, spend 2-3 years in it and then maybe we could have solved 2 -3 questions. I regret that a little, but no one told us that we should be doing this."

"And if i tell you my honest thoughts now, you ar better off without it. You are the only guy among us with good knowledge of android , you have been doing that for last 2 years. Maybe you will get better opportunity with android then with ds/algo."

"You know when i felt happy? When we gave our first placement test at sopra. I was thinking of going there all dumb. But at 11 am in night i casually told my brother about this ,and he said that its a good company. So i started studying a little and next day i sat for placement. And i could not believe myself when they told me that am selected. I was shit scared that night, when my dad came and said " you don't even want that job. Be happy that you passed it on your own". And then i slept peacefully that night and gave the most awesome interview the next day."

"Thus now i am confident that wherever my level of skills are, it is enough to get into a job . Maybe not the goldman sachs ,but i will do well enough with a smaller job too."

"Bro you don't even know... All my school mates are getting packages of 8LPA, 15LPA, 35LPA. You see they are getting that because they already won a race. They are all in better colleges and companies which come there, they will take them no matter what (because those companies want to associate themselves with their college tags). But if worst comes to worst, i won't be worried even if i have to go take 4lpa as job offer in sopra"

Damn you Aman Gupta. Love you from all my heart. Thanks for calming me down and making me realise that its okay to be average

!rant

I was propably 15 years old the first time i saw my friend coding html and and other related stuff i cannot remember! It intriqued me and i really wanted to learn it (i wanted to learn to hack.. xD..) but at the given time i wasn't happy in life and i was pretty much addicted to WoW..

So.. forward 12 years, where i had gone to the military, thought about becoming a physiotherapist, psychiatrist, korean translator and game designer.. oh and countless attempts from another friend to get me interested in c#.. i decided to start studying computers (software/hardware) at DTU (danish university).

That was rougly 8-9 months ago and i am now pretty decent in C, HTML, C++, Java, MySQL and koncepts about networks and OOP designs :).

I am super grateful to all the trial and errors throughout my life that have brought me to this place :)

Still 27, still has alot to learn, but i am really happy where i am right now. Even so, that i am spending my free time making my own projects :)

I also get super happy whenever i fix a bug of mine :p.

I truly believe that you will skyrocket to succes if you do what you love.

For me, i just discovered that part of myself a little late :)

Not sure what i hope to achieve with this post, but i hope it can give an insight into what people go through and yeah.. go for what you want!

Have a great time everyone!

And first !rant on this app!
I love all your rants! vs !rants

after exploring a lot of ui frameworks and architectures, i am trying to go back to android dev but again with the curiosity for the one single question that i had at the start of my career 5 years back : why is it's ui so complex?

can anyone help me understand it?

like comparing with the most basic ui framework : html/css/js, why android is so different? we got activities, fragments and views. the worst thing in android is lifecycles, that each of these ui components have.

The view lifecycle is simple to get over with : whatever is the lifecycle of its parent, is the lifecycle of view.

a view's parent is another view, whose parent is another view, whose parent is... and so on until we reach the root view which is stored by either a fragment or activity

therefore a view's lifecycle = lifecycle of activity or fragment

till here its very clear. the fuckup is simply in the next part:
WTAF is activity ?WTAF is fragment? why are their various functions called in the sequence they are called? oncreate, on start, onstartview, ondestroy... why?
activity is still somewhat okay, but fragment is completey weird af : it can be a part of activity: basically it can cover your complete screen and behave as an activity itself (so you don't get to say that activity === screen and fragment === view) AND IT HAS ITS OWN FUCKING LIFECYCLES! So does that mean fragment's fucntions cna also be called by OS?

what's more mind fucking, is the fact that android activity can destroy/pause or recreate fragments on its own, by some "views" like viewpager , or even hold multiple fragments as "alive" at the same time, using something called a "backstack" ??!??!

and each of these fragments in the stack can be called by system at any time? like wtf???

all these stuff is super confusing and i haven't even scratched the surface. the newer , more complicated stuff like viewmodel, livedata and again "lifecycles" has a complete seperate behavior and functionality of their own. plus the various "reality-check" scenarios like: when a user is streaming a video in picture-in-picture mode while keeping your app in split screen with maps in the second split, when a call comes and the video keeps running, and user rotates the device, let me know the clusterfuck situation for the 3rd fragment in your 5 icon navigation view currently at the payment page with 2 fragments and 1 activity in backstack!!!

god bless thy soul for this shitty framework isn't going anywhere , rather its super strong and getting more clusterfucked with new beautiful shit everyday.

(if someone can ignore my gentle language, i would really like to know/get redirected to some resources where i can learn more on this)

So what exactly does "Learning" mean in a tech industry?

From my experience,
"learning" from college's pov
"Welcome to the class. your parents has paid us already for this. Now we are supposed to stand here for next 6 months, study very slowly and learn about the topics of our curriculum and give a test on it. we might as well make a good nice project to check our knowledge"
(worst college will also add "Sorry the above message was just fiction, i am here to drink tea & enjoy my day,while you guys are here to enjoy,mark attendance and get a degree because we only care about our reputation and we are gonna pass you anyway")

"learning" from startups pov:
"Here is an idea, here is a design, here is your months salary and here is your deadline.
Make a 100% polished,working product out of it before the deadline. You are solely responsible for this project and you have to figure out on your own how to make our fantasy idea into reality before deadline hits( else you are shit).
This way you learn.
We will also provide you with a free all time learning course on how to be fine without getting any respect for your hardwork and tolerate our insults, which will help you in the life long journey of dealing assholes.
Our company is great and providing you an amazing learning opportunity, kiss our feet."
(worst startups will also add "We don't have/ wont provide you any seniors to help you with this stuff, the internet is your source of truth"/ "if you don't hit the deadline, your salary will get deducted"/ "work on weekends to hit the deadline")

"Learning" from an MNC pov (never really experienced those but from what i have heard):
"Welcome to our company. we here provide you with a similar experience as that of your shitty college during training period and then put you in low brain-ish low paying repetitive job for life until you leave us or we find a replacement for your work or salary"

Serverless and death of Programming?!

_TL;DR_
I hate serverless at work, love it at home, what's your advice?
- Is this the way things be from now on, suck it up.
- This will mature soon and Code will be king again.
- Look for legacy code work on big Java monolith or something.
- Do front-end which is not yet ruined.
- Start my own stuff.

_Long Rant_

Once one mechanic told me "I become mechanic to escape electrical engineering, but with modern cars...". I'm having similar feelings about programming now.

_Serverless Won_
All of the sudden everyone is doing Serverless, so I looked into it too, accidentally joined the company that does enterprise scale Serverless mostly.
First of all, I like serverless (AWS Lambda in specific) and what it enables - it makes 100% sense and 100% business sense for 80% of time.

So all is great? Not so much... I love it as independent developer, as it enables me to quickly launch products I would have been hesitant due to effort required before. However I hate it in my work - to be continued bellow...

_I'm fake engineer_
I love programming! I love writing code. I'm not really an engineer in the sense that I don't like hustle with tools and spending days fixing obscure environment issues, I rather strive for clean environment where there's nothing between me and code. Of course world is not perfect and I had to tolerate some amounts of hustle like Java and it's application servers, JVM issues, tools, environments... JS tools (although pain is not even close to Java), then it was Docker-ization abuse everywhere, but along the way it was more or less programming at the center. Code was the king, devOps and business skills become very important to developers but still second to code. Distinction here is not that I can't or don't do engineering, its that it requires effort, while coding is just natural thing that I can do with zero motivation.

_Programming is Dead?!_
Why I hate Serverless at work? Because it's a mess - I had a glimpse of this mess with microservices, but this is way worse...

On business/social level:
- First of all developers will be operations now and it's uphill battle to push for separation on business level and also infrastructure specifics are harder to isolate. I liked previous dev-devops collaboration before - everyone doing the thing that are better at.
- Devs now have to be good at code, devOps and business in many organisations.
- Shift of power balance - Code is no longer the king among developers and I'm seeing it now. Code quality drops, junior devs have too hard of the time to learn proper coding practices while AWS/Terraform/... is the main productivity factors. E.g. same code guru on code reviews in old days - respectable performer and source of Truth, now - rambling looser who couldn't get his lambda configured properly.

On not enjoying work:
- Lets start with fact - Code, Terraform, AWS, Business mess - you have to deal with all of it and with close to equal % amount of time now, I want to code mostly, at least 50% of time.
- Everything is in the air ("cloud computing" after all) - gone are the days of starting application and seeing results. Everything holds on assumptions that will only be tested in actual environment. Zero feedback loop - I assume I get this request/SQS message/..., I assume I have configured all the things correctly in sea of Terraform configs and modules from other repos - SQS queues, environment variables... I assume I taken in consideration tens of different terraform configurations of other lambdas/things that might be affected...

It's a such a pleasure now, after the work to open my code editor and work on my personal React.js app...

When Do You Stop Taking Responsibility?

Let me clarify by describing four scenarios in which you are tasked with some software development. It could be a large or small task. The fourth scenario is the one I'm interested in. The first three are just for contrast.

1. You either decide how to implement the requirements, or you're given directions or constraints you agree with. (If you hadn't been given those specific directions you probably would have done the same thing anyway.) **You feel accountable for the outcome**, such as whether it works correctly or is delivered on time. And, of course, the team feels collectively accountable. (We could call this the "happy path.")

2. You would prefer to do the work one way, but you're instructed to do it a different way, either by a manager, team lead, or team consensus. You disagree with the approach, but you're not a stubborn know-it-all. You understand that their way is valid, or you don't fully understand it but you trust that someone else does. You're probably going to learn something. **You feel accountable for the outcome** in a normal, non-blaming sort of way.

3. You're instructed to do something so horribly wrong that it's guaranteed to fail badly. You're in a position to refuse or push back, and you do.

4. You're given instructions that you know are bad, you raise your objections, and then you follow them anyway. It could be a really awful technical approach, use of copy-pasted code, the wrong tools, wrong library, no unit testing, or anything similar. The negative consequences you expect could include technical failure, technical debt, or significant delays. **You do not feel accountable for the outcome.** If it doesn't work, takes too long, or the users hate it, you expect the individual(s) who gave you instructions to take full responsibility. It's not that you want to point fingers, but you will if it comes to that.

---

That fourth scenario could provoke all sorts of reactions. I'm interested in it for what you might call research purposes.

The final outcome is irrelevant. If it failed, whether someone else ultimately took responsibility or you were blamed is irrelevant. That it is the opposite of team accountability is obvious and also irrelevant.

Here is the question (finally!)

Have you experienced scenario number four, in which you develop software (big as an application, small as a class or method) in a way you believe to be so incorrect that it will have consequences, because someone required you to do so, and you complied *with the expectation that they, not you, would be accountable for the outcome?*

Emphasis is not on the outcome or who was held accountable, but on whether you *felt* accountable when you developed the software.

If you just want to answer yes or no, or "yes, several times," that's great. If you'd like to describe the scenario with any amount of detail, that's great too. If it's something you'd rather not share publicly you can contact me privately - my profile name at gmail.com.

The point is not judgment. I'll go first. My answer is yes, I have experienced scenario #4. For example, I've been told to copy/paste/edit code which I know will be incomprehensible, unmaintainable, buggy, and give future developers nightmares. I've had to build features I know users will hate. Sometimes I've been wrong. I usually raised objections or shared concerns with the team. Sometimes the environment made that impractical. If the problems persisted I looked for other work. But the point is that sometimes I did what I was told, and I felt that if it went horribly wrong I could say, "Yes, I understand, but this was not my decision." *I did not feel accountable.*.

I plan on writing more about this, but I'd like to start by gathering some perspective and understanding beyond just my own experience.

Thanks

I can't help it sounding bitter..
If you work some amount of time in tech it's unavoidable that you automatically pick up skills that help you to deal with a lot of shit. Some stuff you pick up is useful beyond those problems that shouldn't even exist in the first place but lots of things you pick up over time are about fixing or at least somehow dealing or enduring stuff that shouldn't be like that in the first place.
Fine. Let's be honest, it's just reality that this is quite helpful.

But why are there, especially in the frontend, so many devs, that confuse this with progress or actual advancement in their craft. It's not. It's something that's probably useful but you get that for free once you manage to somehow get into the industry. Those skills accumulate over time, no matter what, as long as you manage to somehow constantly keep a job.
But improving in the craft you chose isn't about somehow being able to deal with things despite everything. That's fine but I feel like the huge costs of keeping things going despite some all the atrocities that arose form not even considering there could be anything to improve on as soon as your code runs. If you receive critic in a code review, the first thing coming back is some lame excuse or even a counter attack, when you just should say thank you and if you don't agree at all, maybe you need to invest more time to understand and if there's some critic that's actually not useful or base don wrong assumptions, still keep in mind it's coming from somebody that invested time to read your code gather some thoughts about it and write them down for you review. So be aware of the investment behind every review of your code.
Especially for the frontend getting something to run is a incredibly low bar and not at all where you can tell yourself you did code.
Some hard truth from frontend developer to frontend developer:
Everybody with two months of experience is able to build mostly anything expected on the job. No matter if junior or senior.
So why aren't you looking for ways to find where your code is isn't as good as it could be.

Whatever money you earn on top of your junior colleagues should make you feel obligated to understand that you need to invest time and the necessary humbleness and awareness of your own weaknesses or knowledge gaps.
Looking at code, that compiles, runs and even provides the complete functionality of the user story and still feeling the needs do be stuff you don't know how to do it at the moment.

I feel like we've gotten to a point, where there are so few skilled developer, that have worked at a place that told them certain things matter a lot Whatever makes a Senior a Senior is to a big part about the questions you ask yourself about the code you wrote if if's running without any problems at all.
It's quite easy to implement whatever functionality for everybody across all experience levels but one of your most important responsibilities. Wherever you are considered/payed above junior level, the work that makes you a senior is about learning where you have been wrong looking back at your code matters (like everything).

Sorry but I just didn't finde a way to write this down in a more positive and optimistic manner.

And while it might be easy to think I'm just enjoying to attack (former) colleaues thing that makes me sad the most is that this is not only about us, it's also about the countless juniors, that struggle to get a food in the door.
To me it's not about talent nor do I believe that people wouldn't be able to change.
Sometimes I'm incredibly disappointed in many frontend colleagues. It's not about your skill or anything. It's a matter of having the right attitude.
It's about Looking for things you need to work in (in your code). And investing time while always staying humble enough to learn and iterate on things. It's about looking at you
Ar code and looking for things you didn't solve properly.

Never forget, whenever there's a job listing that's fording those crazy amount of work experience in years, or somebody giving up after repeatedly getting rejected it might also be on the code you write and the attitude that 's keeping you looking for things that show how awesome you are instead of investing work into understanding where you lack certain skills, invest into getting to know about the things you currently don't know yet.
If you, like me, work in a European country and gathered some years of industry experience in your CV you will be payed a good amount of money compared to many hard working professions in other industries. And don't forget, you're also getting payed significantly more than the colleagues that just started at their first job.
No reason to feel guilty but maybe you should feel like forcing yourself to look for whatever aspect of your work is the weakest.

There's so many colleagues, especially in the frontend that just suck while they could be better just by gaining awareness that there code isn't perfect.

oh my goodness if I dhsfjhsjfhj
i can barely type right now im so frusterated

I've told my manager multiple times that I don't feel comfortable with the task hes trying to give me because it feels way too large (its designing/programming/testing/documenting an entire prototype cloud file sync application and server backend service on my own, replacing one we have had for several years) and he still just ignores me and persists that I should be thankful for the opportunity and challenge.

It pisses me off so much when people say dumb shit like, 'its a great opportunity to learn' at work. No it isn't. Your boss is going to be on your fucking case for taking too long or not delivering enough, and thats exactly what happened. He got upset and said he was expecting more things to have been written down by now, like design notes. I was just fuming. Design notes? I'm not even a freaking designer, I've never designed any type of big software ever, what the fuck do you want from me.

On top of that, I don't know where the hell he expects me to get time for this. I'm apparently also devops so I get yoinked off of anything im doing if some stupid thing breaks in some other environment about something I really don't even care about. Any other random ass task just gets dumped on me too. I'm supposed to be a 'junior developer', and get paid as such (i've wanted to go to the intermediate level but get told the title doesn't actually matter and no pay raise for you) but I get the responsibilties of a whole fucking team dumped on me and its just

do I just quit now? I'm just, for fuck sakes man

buying a car is such an exhausting and depressing experience. i feel like being less of a man and somewhat blind right now.

I, a 24 year old guy, have never driven a car. afaik, we were poor, my city's public infrastructure is very good and cheap, and my family majorly never needed it.

6 years ago, i got my first 2 wheeler. i still didn't needed it but dad did, and so i learnt it a bit, was somewhat comfortable driving it on my own, gave a driving test, failed, nd forgot about it ( coz again, still not needed much). to this day this bit is true about me.

at that time my father had bought a few scooters before, so he had some experience, and we ended up buying a new one. currently that fella sits outside our home and my father uses it for supplies.

coming to 2023, i was/am thinking of buying a car. why? coz (1) car trips while sitting in the backseat have been super fun (2) people with cars tend to reach anywhere independently, and help others easily (3) my few friends have one and they are super smug about it and (4) i am starting a wfo job which requires 2 days of wfo and is 60km away from home (although train route with 3 interchanges is less time taking)

but WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK WHEN YOU *THINK* ABOUT BUYING A CAR!?

1. buy first or learn to drive first or get a driving license first?
getting a learner's permit is like filling a form; driving schools require no documents but money, and car sellers also do not want any complicated documents. so first step is easy for all.
HOWEVER, driving schools teach the very basics and are controlling your car for 90 % of the time. you can't learn without having your own car, but at the same time you can't buy new car just to *learn*, you will end up denting it.

2. the confusion around how to buy a car?
there are so many fucking parameters.

money being tha major 1 : old cars are coming from $800-$12000 new cars start at $8000 . my current budget is aroud 3-4k as I want to learn on it first with an expected usage of <1000 km per month

brand : there are literally 1000+ models whose base varients start at 8-9k and whose used version is available in my range. i have no idea how to choose.

year : in our country, a petrol car's registration expires in 15 years. cars from 2009 to 2012 are coming in my range but they are gonna expire in 1-4 year . not sure if its a deal breaker, as i plan to buy a new car later, but people are warning me about usage.

km driven : not 1 person is there who i talked to and told me to trust the kms on odometer. most of the cars i saw show 30-60,000kms driven but i am expecting them to be 5-7x more

cng/petrol : cng is cheaper, while petrol is better for engine life, from what i heard. I was inclined towards cng, but everyone i discussed adviced against this as those cars tend to have been driven for very long due to mileage efficiency.

engine power, cc, power steering, body... there are so many stuff that neither i know about and nor am i considering, which makes me more sad and scared of these deals. i have never bought anything without a proper research.

overall its the first time when i am feeling so much dependent on others and being an inefficient and inexperienced adult . my family once bought a used car 10 years ago, which was a total sham and got us to spend so much on it that we had to sell it for scrap in 3 months. It was a painful and nightmarish experience. i don't want that.

I think discussing / talking about whether your educations are useful or not is always gonna be a never ending debate.

Each person has their own unique way to nurture their true potentials. In my case, I always "thought" that taking college in Computer Science is such a waste of time and money, even I still try to survive with it these 3 years. In my first year, I fight a lot with my parents because I always said I wanna drop out and just get to work. But in the end...I still continue my journey for 3 years and yeah...I currently struggling to graduate. Maybe, after graduate, it will be a waste of time and money like how I thought about it. But I also learn that taking college journey have teach me a lot of things, like meeting so mane different kind of friends / people, time-management, etc. Maybe those Study Materials in Class will be forgotten in just a few years after I graduate, but those other life-lessons I believe will remain in myself for a long time...

Some people said if you are someone who wanna work hard, study hard, and have the grit to learn by yourself and committed to become a developer by yourself, you don't need college. But if you are someone who still find out your way, still figuring out whether it's the best choice to take computer science or not as a carreer, and you don't wanna waste time doing nothing, just get yourself to college.

The point is...it's just how we try to find out what's actually worked for us even if it's not the best choice.

Having a lot of bad experiences while working as intern in startups and about to join a MNC, i wanted to share my work life balance and technical demands that i expect from a company. These are going to be my list of checkpoints that i look forward , let me know which of them are way too unrealistic. also add some of yours if i missed anything :

Work life balance demands ( As a fresher, i am just looking forward for 1a, 2a and 8, but as my experience and expertise grows, i am looking forward for all 10. Would i be right to expect them? ):

1a 8 hr/day. 1b 9h/day
2a 5days/week. 2b 6 days/week
3 work from home (if am not working on something that requires my office presence)
4 get out of office whenever i feel like i am done for the day
5 near to home/ office cab service
6 office food/gym service
7 mac book for working
8 2-4 paid leaves/month
9 paid overtime/work on a holiday
10.. visa sponsorship if outside india

Tech Demands (most of them would be gone when i am ready to loose my "fresher " tag, but during my time in internship, training i always wished if things happened this way):

1. I want to work as a fresher first, and fresher means a guy who will be doing more non tech works at first than going straight for code. For eg, if someone hires me in the app dev team, my first week task should be documenting the whole app code / piece of it and making the test cases, so that i can understand the environment/ the knowledge needed to work on it

2. Again before coding the real meaningful stuff for the main product, i feel i should be made to prepare for the libraries ,frameworks,etc used in the product. For eg if i don't know how a particular library ( say data binding) used in the app, i should be asked to make a mini project in 1-2 days using all the important aspects of data binding used in the project, to learn about it. The number of mini tasks and time to complete them should be given adequately , as it is only going to benefit the company once am proficient in that tech

3. Be specific in your tasks for the fresher. You don't want a half knowledgeable fresher/intern think on its own diverging from your main vision and coding it wrong. And the fresher is definitely not wrong for doing so , if you were vague on the first place.

4. most important. even when am saying am proficient , don't just take my word for it. FUCKIN REVIEW MY CODE!! Personally, I am a person who does a lot of testing on his code. Once i gave it to you, i believe that it has no possible issues and it would work in all possible cases. But if it isn't working then you should sit with me and we 2 should be looking, disccussing and debugging code, and not just me looking at the code repeatedly.

4. Don't be too hard on fresher for not doing it right. Sometimes the fresher might haven't researched so much , or you didn't told him the exact instructions but that doesn't mean you have the right to humiliate him or pressurize him

5. Let multiple people work on a same project. Sometimes its just not possible but whenever it is, as a senior one must let multiple freshers work on the same project. This gives a sense of mutual understanding and responsibility to them, they learn how to collaborate. Plus it reduces the burden/stress on a single guy and you will be eventually getting a better product faster

Am i wrong to demand those things? Would any company ever provide a learning and working environment the way i fantasize?

Yo, DevRat! Python is basically the rockstar of programming languages. Here's why it's so dope:

1. **Readability Rules**: Python's code is like super neat handwriting; you don't need a decoder ring. Forget those curly braces and semicolons – Python uses indents to keep things tidy.

2. **Zen Vibes**: Python has its own philosophy called "The Zen of Python." It's like Python's personal horoscope, telling you to keep it simple and readable. Can't argue with cosmic coding wisdom, right?

3. **Tools Galore**: Python's got this massive toolbox with tools for everything – web scraping, AI, web development, you name it. It's like a programming Swiss Army knife.

4. **Party with the Community**: Python peeps are like the coolest party crew. Stuck on a problem? Hit up Stack Overflow. Wanna hang out? GitHub's where it's at. PyCon? It's like the Woodstock of coding, man!

5. **All-in-One Language**: Python isn't a one-trick pony. You can code websites, automate stuff, do data science, make games, and even boss around robots. Talk about versatility!

6. **Learn It in Your Sleep**: Python's like that subject in school that's just a breeze. It's beginner-friendly, but it also scales up for the big stuff.

So, DevRat, Python's the way to go – it's like the coolest buddy in the coding world. Time to rock and code! 🚀🐍💻

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 have been an armchair neuroscientist in my interests. I am fascinated by the brain, how we believe it works, how it really works, and what different research has shown. I have found books written by real neuroscientists that talk about how the brain works and what the research they have shows about intelligence. I am also fascinated by the idea of rewiring your brain. I just found another neuroscience book that has research from some neuroscientists that have challenged the established belief that adult brains have little to no neuroplasticity. This is the ability for the brain to rewire itself to accomplish new tasks or repurpose different parts of the brain. I didn't know this was a limiting factor in the theory of neuroscience. The book also includes information about how Buddhists and neuroscientists are working together to unlock more knowledge about neuroplasticity. The traditional neursoscience belief is that the brain affects the mind solely. However Buddhists have long believed that the mind can affect the brain physically. I am just starting to read this book, but so far the experiments that have been performed seem fascinating. It also has not gotten to the part about the Buddhism influence on the research yet. So far I have just read about how scientists have shown that plasticity can be shown to occur with normal everyday tasks. I don't know where this will lead, but its really cool to read about.

Okay, great, so what?

The why was I looking for this is interesting. I have been looking for some time ideas on how to improve my thinking. I had the idea that I could help myself think better by training my brain with mental exercises. I want to create a program that runs on the computer or phone that one could use with visual and audible cues to play mental games. These games would be designed to make one better at solving puzzles, remember things better, and more. If these exercises could be made in such a way that they were fun to do then we could use our own addictions to improve ourselves. The research I had before frustrated me because they always said you couldn't make yourself smarter. Maybe you cannot increase your mental capacity (not sure if that is true if we can grow neurons, also mentioned in the book), but reorganizing what you have might be possible. Maybe if there is a finite capacity to the brain that reorganizing might cause you to drool. I don't know, but if I could create a puzzle game with the purpose of helping me visualize algorithms, I would find that useful. Also, helping me remember short strings of data would be helpful as well. It seems like I have trouble when it is more than 7 numbers (ten?). Which is also why phone numbers are that long. To make them easier to remember.

I just don't know where this will lead. It might be a wild goose chase. But I think I will learn something about my mind and myself in the process. It also sounds like a great deal of fun.