Our programming teacher had a surgery on his left eye and will not be able to do the lessons with us. Guess what the subject of the email he sent us was.

"I can't C#."
He made a pun about his fucking health status, alright then.

Yesterday: Senior dev messages out a screenshot of someone using an extension method I wrote (he didn’t know I wrote it)..

SeniorDev: “OMG…that has to be the stupidest thing I ever saw.”
Me: “Stupid? Why?”
SeniorDev: “Why are they having to check the value from the database to see if it’s DBNull and if it is, return null. The database value is already null. So stupid.”
Me: “DBNull is not null, it has a value. When you call the .ToString, it returns an empty string.”
SeniorDev: ”No it doesn’t, it returns null.”
<oh no he didn’t….the smack down begins>
Me: “Really? Are you sure?”
SeniorDev: “Yes! And if the developer bothered to write any unit tests, he would have known.”
Me: “Unit tests? Why do you assume there aren’t any unit tests? Did you look?”
<at this moment, couple other devs take off their head phones and turn around>
SeniorDev:”Well…uh…I just assumed there aren’t because this is an obvious use case. If there was a test, it would have failed.”
Me: “Well, let’s take a look..”
<open up the test project…navigate to the specific use case>
Me: “Yep, there it is. DBNull.Value.ToString does not return a Null value.”
SeniorDev: “Huh? Must be a new feature of C#. Anyway, if the developers wrote their code correctly, they wouldn’t have to use those extension methods. It’s a mess.”
<trying really hard not drop the F-Bomb or two>
Me: “Couple of years ago the DBAs changed the data access standard so any nullable values would always default to null. So no empty strings, zeros, negative values to indicate a non-value. Downside was now the developers couldn’t assume the value returned the expected data type. What they ended up writing was a lot of code to check the value if it was DBNull. Lots of variations of ‘if …’ , ternary operators, some creative lamda expressions, which led to unexpected behavior in the user interface. Developers blamed the DBAs, DBAs blamed the developers. Remember, Tom and DBA-Sam almost got into a fist fight over it.”
SeniorDev: “Oh…yea…but that’s a management problem, not a programming problem.”
Me: “Probably, but since the developers starting using the extension methods, bug tickets related to mis-matched data has nearly disappeared. When was the last time you saw DBA-Sam complain about the developers?”
SeniorDev: “I guess not for a while, but it’s still no excuse.”
Me: “Excuse? Excuse for what?”
<couple of awkward seconds of silence>
SeniorDev: “Hey, did you guys see the video of the guy punching the kangaroo? It’s hilarious…here, check this out.. ”

Pin shoulders the mat…1 2 3….I win.

I guess she was fluent in C#

Interview with a candidate. He calls himself "C++ expert" on his resume. I think: "oh, great, I love C++ too, we will have an interesting conversation!"

Me: let's start with an easy one, what is 'nullptr'?
Him: (...some undecipherable sequence of words that didn't make any sense...)

In my mind: mh, probably I didn't understand right. Let's try again with something simple and more generic

Me: can you tell me about memory management in C++?
Him: you create objects on the stack with the 'new' keyword and they get automatically released when no other object references them

In my mind: wtf is this guy talking about? Is he confusing C++ with Java? Does he really know C++? Let's make him write some code, just to be sure

Me: can you write a program that prints numbers from 1 to 10?

Ten minutes and twenty mistakes later...

Me: okay, so what is this <int> here in angle brackets? What is a template?
Him: no idea

Me: you wrote 'cout', why sometimes do I see 'std::cout' instead? What is 'std'?
Answer: no idea, never heard of 'std'

I think: on his resume he also said he is a Java expert. Let's see if he knows the difference between the two. He *must* have noticed that one is byte-compiled and the other one is compiled to native code! Otherwise, how does he run his code? He must answer this question correctly:

Me: what is the difference between Java and C++? One has a Virtual Machine, what about the other?
Him: Java has the Java Virtual Machine
Me: yes, and C++?
Him: I guess C++ has a virtual machine too. The C++ Virtual Machine

Me (exhausted): okay, I don't have any other questions, we will let you know

And this is the story of how I got scared of interviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#3 Worst thing I've seen a co-worker do?

A 20-something dev, 'A', back in the early days of twitter+facebook would post all his extracurricular activities (drinking, partying, normal young-buck stuff). The dev mgr, 'J', at the time took offense because he felt 'A' was making the company look bad, so 'A' had a target on his back. Nothing 'A' did was good enough and, for example, 'J' had the source control czars review 'A's code to 'review' (aka = find anything wrong). Not sorting the 'using' statements, and extra line after the closing }, petty things like that. For those curious, orders followed+carried out by+led by 'T' in my previous rant.

As time went on and 'T' finding more and more 'wrong' with A's code, 'J' put A on disciplinary probation. 'A' had 90 days to turn himself around, or else.

A bright spot was 'A' was working on a Delphi -> C# conversion, so a lot of the code would be green-field development and by simply following the "standards", 'A' would be fine...so he thought.

About 2 weeks into the probation, 'A' was called into the J's office and berated because the conversion project was behind schedule, and if he didn't get the project back on track, 'A' wouldn't make it 30 days. I sat behind 'A' and he unloaded on me.
<'A' slams his phone on his desk>
Me: "Whoa...whats up?"
A: "Dude, I fucking hate this place, did you hear what they did?"
<I said no, then I think we spent an hour talking about it>
Me: "That all sucks. Don't worry about the code. Nobody cares what T thinks. Its not even your fault the project is behind, the DBAs are tasked with upgrades and it's not like anyone is waiting on you. It'll get done when it's done. Sounds like a witch hunt, what did you do? Be honest."
A: "Well, um...I kinda called out J, T, and those other assholes on facebook. I was drunk, pissed, and ...well...here we are."
Me: "Geez, what a bunch of whiney snowflakes. Keep your head down and you'll get thru it, or don't. Its not like you couldn't find another job tomorrow."
A: "This is my first job out of college and I don't want to disappoint my dad by quitting. I don't even know what I'm supposed to be doing. All J told me was to get better. What the fuk does that even mean?"
Me: "He didn't give you any goals? Crap, for someone who is a stickler for the rules, that's low, even for J."

Fast forward 2 weeks, I was attending MS TechEd and I was with another dev mgr, R.

R: "Did you hear? We had to let 'A' go today."
Me: "What the hell? Why?"
R: "He couldn't cut it, so we had to let him go."
Me: "Cut what? What did he do, specifically?"
R: "I don't know, 'A' was on probation, I guess he didn't meet the goals."
Me: "You guess? We fire a developer working on a major upgrade and you guess? What were these so-called goals?"
R: "Whoa...you're getting a little fire up. I don't know, maybe not adhering to coding standards, not meeting deadlines?"
Me: "OMG...we fire people for not forming code? Are you serious!?"
R: "Oh...yea...that does sound odd when you put it that way. I wish I'd talk to you before we left on this trip"
Me: "What?! You knew they were firing him *before* we left? How long did you know this was happening?"
R: "Honestly, for a while. 'A' really wasn't a team player."
Me: "That's dirty, the whole thing is dirty. We've done some shitty things to people, but this is low, even for J. The probation process is meant to improve, not be used as a witch hunt. I don't like that you stood around and let it happen. You know better."
R: "Yea, you're right, but doesn't change anything. J wanted to do it while most of us were at the conference in case 'A' caused a scene."
Me: "THAT MAKES IT WORSE! 'A' was blindsided and you knew it. He had no one there that could defend him or anything."
R: "Crap, crap, crap...oh crap...jeez...J had this planned all along...crap....there is nothing I can do no...its too late."
Me: "Yes there is. If 'A' comes to you for a letter of recommendation, you write one. If someone calls for reference, you give him a good one."
R: "Yea..yea...crap...I feel like shit...I need to go back to the room and lie down."

As the sun sets, it rises again. Within a couple of weeks, 'A' had another job at a local university. Within a year, he was the department manager, and now he is a vice president (last time I checked) of a college in Kansas City, MO.

Trying to concentrate. Co-worker from another room standing there, BLA BLA BLA, and she's fucking LOUD. But she hates coldness, and it's below 0 °C outside.

So I open two windows, and guess who instantly leaves! Now it's cold, but SILENT. HAR HAR!

Had a meeting with my boss earlier. Got yelled at for:
a) Working on a high-priority, externally-committed ticket (digit separators) that i was 85% done with on the Friday afternoon before my vacation instead of jumping to a lower-priority screwdriver ticket that just came in. Even though my boss agreed with me that what I did was exactly what I should have done, it's still bad because I was apparently rude to product by not doing as they asked?
b) Taking too long on that digit separator ticket that amounts to following a gigantic mess of convoluted spaghetti and making a few small changes, and making sure it doesn't break the world because it's all so fucking convoluted and fragile as hell. Let's not even mention my 4-10 hours of mandatory useless meetings every week.
c) Missing something that wasn't even listed in that same ticket -- somehow my fault? -- so I very obviously didn't test my work. Even though specs all passed and QA also tested and signed off on it as working and complete. Clearly half-assed and untested. Product keeps promising/planning UATs and then skipping them, and then has the audacity to complain about it.
d) Not recovering fast enough from burnout and daily mental breakdowns. I can still barely get out of bed and you want me to be super productive? Got it. Guess what? I'm being amazingly productive for my mental health. But my boss, Mr. Happy-go-lucky, thinks depression is dropping your icecream cone on your clean kitchen table, and this three-ton pile of spaghetti is "maybe a little messy, I guess."

So I need to somehow "regain the confidence" of both him and product because I'm taking awhile on difficult tickets (surprise), while having these ridiculous breakdowns (surprise), and because I don't fix things that aren't even listed in the fucking tickets (fucking surprise) -- and worse, that the lack of information is somehow entirely. my. fault. (surprise fucking surprise)

GOD I HATE THESE PEOPLE.

Most of the code I write nowadays is for GPUs using a dialect of C. Anyways, due to the hardware of GPUs there is no convenient debugger and you can't just print to console neither.
Most bugs are solved staring at the code and using pen and paper.

I guess one could call that a quirk.

!rant

So this year I had a subject at university called "Linux internal architecture", and for the last assignment I had to write a kernel module and interact with it with a separate program written in C.

Once I had finished and tested the driver, I went on to write the other program, which was supposed to use system calls to read and write data to the module. While debugging this program (~500 lines of code) I reached the level of frustration where you just start printing absurd messages everywhere in your code to see what's wrong. So for example instead of printing "This error happened in this function", my error messages were more like "Fuck this fucking function it doesn't fucking work".

Guess who forgot to delete all those messages before sending the code to the teacher...

Also, if a specific mode is selected, the program enters a while(1) that, apart from doing what it's expected to do, also creates a file in the user's home directory called something like 'motherfucker' and appends the words 'fuck this shit' to it. INFINITELY.

I really really hope this teacher doesn't try to run the program in his own computer, or he's in for a big surprise.

It wasn't my curiosity that introduced me to programming. Actually, it was my mother.

It was about six years ago, when I'd told her I'd like to make video-games, like all kids do. She didn't just nod and go about her way. She found a free course that taught programming to kids my age and immediately enrolled me. Looking back, it was surely the best thing she'd done for me, because it gave me a purpose and a future to look forward to.

The course was interesting. We learned the basics of C++, then moved on to harder topics like algorithms and data types. But more and more, I was beginning to feel left behind. Like I didn't belong there. It didn't help that I only programmed on the course, with no practice back home.

I felt scared of the future. Thought I didn't have what it takes to become a programmer. I might have broken the last straw when I started playing truant and went to McDonald's to pass the time. Because every time I did go to the course, I felt stupid and anxious. So I simply skipped.

Time passed. I got more depressed, became more antisocial, my self-esteem took a nosedive. And when it comes to depression, people always seek an escape path.

I got my escape in fiction. Started reading books, tried writing stories, and it got to the point where I asked my mother if I could become a writer and not a programmer.

And guess what? She said, "Do what brings you happiness. This is your life."

It's funny, that such a silly line stopped and got me to think. Turned out, I didn't program for fun, for myself or for my career. I'd done it for my parents, for their expectations and I was scared that in failing, I'd become a loser in their eyes.

I dropped out of the programming course. Not because it sucked, but because I wasn't going there for myself, but for my parents. But I didn't quit programming. No, I watched countless tutorials, youtube videos, browsed StackOverflow, read some books, coded every day, and now I can say without hesitation, that I love programming. I'm hooked. And I don't want to stop.

If you've read this so far, I'm sorry for my rambling. I will now leave you with only one tip: If you decided to do something, do it for yourself. Forget about parents, expectations, career, future, time or money and do it only because you want to. Because nothing else matters. Only your happiness.

I had to open the desktop app to write this because I could never write a rant this long on the app.

This will be a well-informed rebuttal to the "arrays start at 1 in Lua" complaint. If you have ever said or thought that, I guarantee you will learn a lot from this rant and probably enjoy it quite a bit as well.

Just a tiny bit of background information on me: I have a very intimate understanding of Lua and its c API. I have used this language for years and love it dearly.

[START RANT]

"arrays start at 1 in Lua" is factually incorrect because Lua does not have arrays. From their documentation, section 11.1 ("Arrays"), "We implement arrays in Lua simply by indexing tables with integers."

From chapter 2 of the Lua docs, we know there are only 8 types of data in Lua: nil, boolean, number, string, userdata, function, thread, and table

The only unfamiliar thing here might be userdata. "A userdatum offers a raw memory area with no predefined operations in Lua" (section 26.1). Essentially, it's for the API to interact with Lua scripts. The point is, this isn't a fancy term for array.

The misinformation comes from the table type. Let's first explore, at a low level, what an array is. An array, in programming, is a collection of data items all in a line in memory (The OS may not actually put them in a line, but they act as if they are). In most syntaxes, you access an array element similar to:

array[index]

Let's look at c, so we have some solid reference. "array" would be the name of the array, but what it really does is keep track of the starting location in memory of the array. Memory in computers acts like a number. In a very basic sense, the first sector of your RAM is memory location (referred to as an address) 0. "array" would be, for example, address 543745. This is where your data starts. Arrays can only be made up of one type, this is so that each element in that array is EXACTLY the same size. So, this is how indexing an array works. If you know where your array starts, and you know how large each element is, you can find the 6th element by starting at the start of they array and adding 6 times the size of the data in that array.

Tables are incredibly different. The elements of a table are NOT in a line in memory; they're all over the place depending on when you created them (and a lot of other things). Therefore, an array-style index is useless, because you cannot apply the above formula. In the case of a table, you need to perform a lookup: search through all of the elements in the table to find the right one. In Lua, you can do:

a = {1, 5, 9};
a["hello_world"] = "whatever";

a is a table with the length of 4 (the 4th element is "hello_world" with value "whatever"), but a[4] is nil because even though there are 4 items in the table, it looks for something "named" 4, not the 4th element of the table.

This is the difference between indexing and lookups. But you may say,

"Algo! If I do this:

a = {"first", "second", "third"};
print(a[1]);

...then "first" appears in my console!"

Yes, that's correct, in terms of computer science. Lua, because it is a nice language, makes keys in tables optional by automatically giving them an integer value key. This starts at 1. Why? Lets look at that formula for arrays again:

Given array "arr", size of data type "sz", and index "i", find the desired element ("el"):

el = arr + (sz * i)

This NEEDS to start at 0 and not 1 because otherwise, "sz" would always be added to the start address of the array and the first element would ALWAYS be skipped. But in tables, this is not the case, because tables do not have a defined data type size, and this formula is never used. This is why actual arrays are incredibly performant no matter the size, and the larger a table gets, the slower it is.

That felt good to get off my chest. Yes, Lua could start the auto-key at 0, but that might confuse people into thinking tables are arrays... well, I guess there's no avoiding that either way.

I'M AN IDIOT.

I accidentally typed the wrong command when I was compiling my C++ code with GCC, and guess what?

My .cpp file is gone. The .exe is still there, but that's useless to me right now.

It wasn't an important code, just something I recently started on, but I can't believe I did something so ignorant.

Well, it all started off with hardware-level programming involving jumpers and stuff like that... Then came Assembly, which was good.. B, C compilers. Finally came the interpreted languages, and that's where in my opinion the abstraction should've ended. But no, we needed more frameworks, more libraries, even more abstraction! Where does it end? As it seems to be going, I guess that users will have kid toys - no iToys! - for electronics and we'll be programming on with bloated Scratch GUI's. Nothing against Scratch, but that shit ain't proper programming anymore. God I can't wait for the future.

ABSTRACT ALL THE THINGS!!!

Oh and not to mention that all software will be governed in political correctness by some Alex SJW AI shit that became sentient. Not a single programming term will be non-offensive anymore, no matter how hard you try to not offend anyone, or God forbid - don't care about it because you just want to make something that's readable, usable and working!! Terms, UI names for buttons, heck even icons! REMOVE IT BECAUSE IT OFFENDS SOMEONE THAT I DON'T EVEN KNOW JACK SHIT ABOUT!!!

So... I learnt a couple things today about C++ language which I didn’t know before...

1. float var = 5.9;
std::cout << ( var == 5.9 );

// shows 0 (false) coz of float and double thing... apparently, 5.9 isn’t automatically converted to float when compared to one 🤔

2. arr[ i ] == i[ arr ]

Well... I guess I now like my college 1% more from the previous % whatever that was 😊☺️

!rant

Just wanted to share stuff. It's my first time.

<backstory>
I'm a c# dev, recently got excited about neural networks and stuff. I have a gf who studies biology
</backstory>

So i've noticed yesterday what my gf is doing for her science stuff. She has an image taken through a microscope of some erytrocytes and shit. And she's clicking on those tiny fuckers to count them. There are like almost a hundred of those things in an image and she has a butload of those images.

I was like "what the fuck? Don't you have an app that counts the stuff for you or something?"

And there is none. Or at least i wasn't able to find one. That's bullshit. My inner programmer screams with hate for boring repetitive tasks.

So i guess i'm going to write a neural network to count similar stuff in an image.

Monday morning, went to the local grocery store to get myself some croissants and 2 bottles of wine.

Cashier: "Already at it in the morning, you sure about that?"

Me: "Long story short, I've got a Wi-Fi driver from Intel to debug and rewrite, and it's a fucking piece of shit.. can't go at it without hitting or preferably exceeding the Ballmer Peak... Also I'm awake since yesterday evening already."

Why even ask? Yeah I'm a fucking alcoholic, and guess why that is.. stupid nontechnical fucks, certified enganeers like that motherfucker at Intel who wrote this pile of garbage called ipw2200, and technology that can't be arsed to work properly on its own unless I build the fucking thing myself, just to name a few reasons.

You know what, fucking piece of shit from Intel, whoever it is? How about I let you choke on my dick while fucking hanging you with a sharp metal wire that's carrying 2kVAC from a microwave transformer, just to see whether I'd nut first, or you either choke, get electrocuted, or get your fucking throat slit first. Certificates aren't an excuse for committing this fucking pile of shit and calling it a fucking product!!

Now, it's time to dive into this giant stinking fucking turd I guess.. first glass of wine to get myself prepared for the shitstorm that's a giant 20k LoC C file with barely any comments, to look what the fuck causes this fucking pile of shit to disconnect and ask for WPA credentials after a while, despite having them stored.. and not reconnect after that, because why the fuck would you?!

On the top of a mountain, while skiing, -6 °C, no gloves, on my phone.

I use a live wallpaper I made with Processing and it uses gps location and forecast datas to change the background image according to the environment and climate. It sucks and drains battery like a bitch, and as soon as I got the top of the mountain it fucked up everything, home screen froze and camera wouldn't open.

So guess what, it was debug time. Hands dead cold and APDE with no autocomplete on a smartphone keyboard. The agony.

My gf yelled at me and after 10 minutes I switched to a static wallpaper, uninstalled that one and never touched it again since then

The world makes no fucking sense.

In 2013 I had a manager approve a couple days' leave coz my son was having medical issues.

He was super nice about it and told me I could take as much time as I needed. I said, a couple days is enough. I took Thursday and Friday off. I took two days.

On Monday, an emergency meeting was held with the CTO (it was a small company, it went me -> manager -> C suite). I was told that a production deployment happened on Friday that fucked up a few clients' systems and that it had cost said clients hundreds of thousands dollars and are now suing the company.

Turns out on Friday, lead developer was also given the day off for whatever reason and I was being scolded because as the next senior developer, it was my responsibility to review code and make sure shit like this doesn't happen.

I agreed (and still agree) but also explained I had already filed leave weeks prior and I wasn't informed about dev lead's absence. Sure I could've checked my messages but my kid was in the hospital and I was busy. Still I couldn't help but feel a little guilty.

Manager holds a separate meeting with me and talks me into just writing an apology note in the email chain and he'll do the rest of the talking for me and make sure I get minimal punishment. I trusted him, he was the one who found me and brought me into the company (I know, I was naive).

So I wrote the email. It was a small note. I apologized for not checking messages and explained my situation again and mentioned I would've definitely checked if I was informed that the lead dev would be away.

Another meeting was held the next day and after pleasantries the Manager started with this, "Ok so we've all seen the email and understand that this was all Angry's fault right?".

Now, we're not native English speakers and Manager doesn't really do well with grammar. I was alarmed by what he said but wasn't angry because I was pretty sure that's not what he meant. I'm sure he meant to say that "Angry feel's guilty but his actions were understandable given the circumstance" or that he forgot a "not" in there and really meant "not Angry's fault". Surely this is what he meant to say. Right?

But then the rest of the meeting went on and I was unceremoniously let go. Immediately for "failing to accomplish my tasks and costing the client 100Ks of dollars". I wasn't even given a chance to say anything else.

The meeting ended and since we were both in the office, Manager approached me with exit papers and a check (~1200 USD)--it was my month's pay. I was asked to leave that day and was told I didn't need to come back. No handovers, no knowledge transfers, not a even a documentation of open projects I was handling.

I realized I just was made the scapegoat by a management screwup that costed our clients a lot of money.

Of course, I wrote the CEO multiple emails the next couple days. I also cc'd the CTO. No response.

A couple of weeks pass, I get another job at a cool company and i promptly move on.

I write this story now because I just found out today that in 2016, Manager was let go by the company for **sexual harassment**. Apparently, he actually did it too according to friends I still had within the company.

Here's where it gets fucked up. He turns and sues the company for unlawful termination and I guess to avoid a long legal battle? the company settled. They fucking settled and handed this man 2 Million PHP (at the time about 40k USD).

2 fucking million. Life changing money around here. And he got it by being a slimy piece of shit.

The world makes no fucking sense.

HoD in my college is a "22 year experienced C programmer" with a PhD in CS.

One day I went to him and told, it is very hard to work with TurboC, and it isn't needed as we can easily migrate to GCC.

He asked me why was I complaining. No other student has any problem. They have been using it ever since the college started and everyone was "comfortable" with it.

I stood silent. He then went on to say, even JVM was coded in TurboC. I nodded and left the office as i didn't have an argument.

He's the same guy who had earlier said, "printf returns an array of characters printed", so I guess everything works here.

C: hey mate, what's the best tool to open up this 31.1M rows x 106 cols CSV file?

M: Umh...Pandas DataFrame or R DataTable I guess?

C: all right, Excell will do, thanks!

M: erhm...yeah, anytime?

Been reviewing ALOT of client code and supplier’s lately. I just want to sit in the corner and cry.

Somewhere along the line the education system has failed a generation of software engineers.

I am an embedded c programmer, so I’m pretty low level but I have worked up and down and across the abstractions in the industry. The high level guys I think don’t make these same mistakes due to the stuff they learn in CS courses regarding OOD.. in reference how to properly architect software in a modular way.

I think it may be that too often the embedded software is written by EEs and not CEs, and due to their curriculum they lack good software architecture design.

Too often I will see huge functions with large blocks of copy pasted code with only difference being a variable name. All stuff that can be turned into tables and iterated thru so the function can be less than 20 lines long in the end which is like a 200% improvement when the function started out as 2000 lines because they decided to hard code everything and not let the code and processor do what it’s good at.

Arguments of performance are moot at this point, I’m well aware of constraints and this is not one of them that is affected.

The problem I have is the trying to take their code in and understand what’s its trying todo, and todo that you must scan up and down HUGE sections of the code, even 10k+ of line in one file because their design was not to even use multiple files!

Does their code function yes .. does it work? Yes.. the problem is readability, maintainability. Completely non existent.

I see it soo often I almost begin to second guess my self and think .. am I the crazy one here? No. And it’s not their fault, it’s the education system. They weren’t taught it so they think this is just what programmers do.. hugely mundane copy paste of words and change a little things here and there and done. NO actual software engineers architecture systems and write code in a way so they do it in the most laziest, way possible. Not how these folks do it.. it’s like all they know are if statements and switch statements and everything else is unneeded.. fuck structures and shit just hard code it all... explicitly write everything let’s not be smart about anything.

I know I’ve said it before but with covid and winning so much more buisness did to competition going under I never got around to doing my YouTube channel and web series of how I believe software should be taught across the board.. it’s more than just syntax it’s a way of thinking.. a specific way of architecting any software embedded or high level.

Anyway rant off had to get that off my chest, literally want to sit in the corner and cry this weekend at the horrible code I’m reviewing and it just constantly keeps happening. Over and over and over. The more people I bring on or acquire projects it’s like fuck me wtf is this shit!!! Take some pride in the code you write!

Never thought I will be hired by Chinese software/hardware company located in NYC to code in languages I don't know so well. Instead of lying and saying I know everything about C, PHP and SQL, I said that I suck pretty much at everything, but I'm a quick learner and will study day and night to catch up with their practices. Now I see they have no regret about me, but I still suspect them in hiring me because there is another guy who is Russian too and we all communicate well. Our current squad is 17 Chinese, 2 Russians, 1 Americans. Guess what, I learn Mandarin quicker than PHP. Sometimes a small lie is OK, but sometimes honesty is better.

During a recruitment procedure I was provided a IDE to solve some programming questions. The computer had a bunch of fuck all anti virus including avast, mcafee, it stopped every execution and scanned it for like 10sec.
McAfee fucking deleted the program for no reason giving a malicious code alert on a normal c++ program.

I called the sys Admin to inspect, guess what he did.

Fucking uninstall McAfee. Woow.

i am BEYOND pissed at google.

as some of you know, i recently got android studio to run on a chromebook (you read that right), but it being a chromebook and google being a protective fucktard of their crappy operating system, i had to boot into bios every time i started it.

when i was with some friends, i started up the chromebook, and left, after telling my friends how to boot the chromebook.

ten seconds and literally one press of the esc button later, he broke the entire thing.

but that's not what that rant was about, i honestly knew it would happen eventually (although, this wasn't the best time).

so now this screen pops up.

"chrome os is damaged or missing, please insert a usb recovery drive" or something like that.

well, i'll create one. simple enough.

no wait, this is google, just your average 750 billion dollar company who cares more about responsive design then a product actually responding.

i started to create the recovery usb. of course, chrome developers thought it would be a good idea to convert the old, working fine, windows executable usb recoverer, and replace with with a fucking chrome extension.

i truly hope someone got fired.

so, after doing everything fine with the instructions, it got to the part where it wrote the os image to the usb. the writing stayed at 0%.

now this was a disk thing, writing os's and shit, so i didn't want to fuck it up. after waiting ten minutes, i pressed 'cancel.'

i tried again many times, looked things up, and frantically googled the error. i even tried the same search queries on bing, yahoo, duckduckgo and ecosia because i had the feeling google secretly had tracked me over the past 7 years and decided to not help me after all the times i said google was a fucker or something similar.

google is a fucker.

after that, i decided to fuck with it, even if it formats my fucking c drive.

i got to the same point where the writing got stuck at 0% and proceeded to fuck. i start spamming random keys, and guess what?

after i press enter, it started.

what the fuck google?
1000s of people read the article on how to make the recovery drive. why not tell them to press the goddamn enter key?

i swear there are hundreds of other people in my same situation. and all they have to do is press one fucking key???

maybe tell those people who tried to fix the shit product you sold them.

fuck you google.

Today I wanted to start learning C.
Windows wanted to update.
We did updates.
I guess this is my wife now.

I'm working on a programming language with a "bytecode" interpreter and a compiler that translates source code to said bytecode and... it sort of actually works!

I want to recreate an Erlang-style environment, currently you can write functions, call C++ functions via wrappers, have immutable-only values, and it has no explicit control structure apart from statement sequencing and the if-expression because I want to make it as functional as possible. Next thing on the list is to add a green threads implementation and ability to spawn and send messages to processes.

Still a WIP and heck even design-in-progress.

Now for the rant:
I'm using CMake for building C++ (interpreter) and Stack for Haskell (compiler) and I've been trying to get them to talk to each other for hours because I want CMake to manage the Stack build too and shove all the executables into one place. CMake documentation is weird and Stack isn't too helpful either, so I guess I'll just spend another few hours trying to get Stack to fuckin reveal its build directory to CMake and/or build to a given directory. Ugh.

So my schoolmate asked me to reformat his computer, not before backing up his father's work data. Medical data of his patients.
He had two hard drives, C: and D: . Easy job, it could be done in four steps:
1- collect all data into c:\backup
2- xcopy /e c:\backup d:
3- format c:
4- move all data from d:\backup back to their original places.

Guess which step did I forget to do?
Yes, step 2.

#include brain.h
/* Hello world. I am new to this community and just wanted to announce. I am here! About me? I am a student from Hannover in Germany and some dudes told me about this social app. Currently we are learning basics of C (I guess it is version 89) */

*plays game for 10h consecutive*
.. yeah yeah I know what you're thinking. This guy doesn't have a life. And you're probably right.

*gets hungry*
… I could really use a hamburger right now 🤔
… But the fast food tent is ~30 minutes walking distance away, and this game automatically logs you out after 30 mins inactivity...

What if I could program in some delayed input?

*jazz hand routine engages*
Hmm.. so if I do something like:
PS C:\Users\Condor> $wshell.AppActivate('BlueStacks'); Sleep 1; $wshell.SendKeys('abusing this chat~'); Sleep 1; $wshell.SendKeys('for upkeep of 10h play~'); Sleep 1; $wshell.SendKeys('while I get myself a hamburger~'); Sleep 1; $wshell.SendKeys('sorry~');
that should work, no?

Le output:
abusing this chat
sorry

Well, even for PowerShit.. good enough, right? It gets the message across 🙃

Hmm.. let's just put an afk message instead, as I'm using the guild chat and don't want any of the members to think that I'm a freak

PS C:\Users\Condor> Sleep 1; $wshell.AppActivate('BlueStacks'); Sleep 1; $wshell.SendKeys('afk~');

.. which seems to work like a charm.. alright, perhaps I can entrust PowerShell to do that again after a 900 second delay, which should give me enough time to get that hamburger.

*comes back home*

"Logged out due to 30 minutes of inactivity."

MICROSOFT POWERSHIT, YOU'VE HAD BUT ONE FUCKING JOB!!!!

Well, guess I'll do that no-life 10+h gaming session somewhere next year again then. Thanks Powercunt!

I starten when I was 12 years old. I got bullied and got interested in computers. One day I crashed my dads computer and he reinstalled it. After that my dad made two accounts. The regular user (my account) and the Administrator user (my dads account). He also changed the language from Dutch to English. Gladly I could still use the computer by looking at the icons :')

Everytime I needed something installed I had to ask my dad first (for games mostly because there was no cable internet at that time). Then I noticed the other user account while looking over my dads shoulders. So I tried to guess the password and found out the password was the same as the label next to the password field "password".

At that point my interest in hacking had grown. So when we finally got cable internet and my own computer (the old one) MSN Messenger came around. I installed lots of stuff like flooders etc. Nobody I knew could do this and people always said; he is a hacker. Although it is not.

I learned about IP-address because we sometimes had trouble with the internet. So when my dad wasn't home he said to me. Click on this (command prompt) and type in; ipcondig /all. If you don't see an IP-address you should type in; ipconfig /renew.

Thats when I learned that every computer has a unique address and I started fooling around with hacking tools I found on internet (like; Subseven).

When I got older I had a new friend and fooled around with the hacking tools on his computer. Untill one day I went by my friend and he said; my neighbor just bought my old computer. The best part was that he didn't reinstall it. So we asked him to give us the "weird code on the website" his IP-Address and Subseven connected. It was awesome :'). (Windows firewall was not around back then and routers weren't as popular or needed)

At home I started looking up more hacking stuff and found a guide. I still remember it was a white page with only black letters like a text file. It said sometime like; To be a hacker you first need to understand programming. The website recommended Visual Basic 6 for beginners. I asked my parents to buy me a book about it and I started reading in the holliday.

It was hard for me but I really wanted to hack MSN accounts. When I got older I just played around and copy -> pasted code. I made my own MSN flooders and I noticed hacking isn't easy.

I kept programming and learned and learned. When I was 16/17 I started an education in programming. We learned C# and OOP (altho I hated OOP at first). I build my own hacking tool like "Subseven" and thats when I understood you need a "server" and "client" for a successful connection.

I quit the hacking because it was getting to difficult and after another education I'm now a fulltime back-end developer in C#.

That's my story in short :)

C=consultant
M=Me
D=my Dumb boss

M: so how are you guys planning to implement the block all accounts feature?
C: oh it should be easy! We will just loop over every account and lock it!
M: what about implementing a flag that just blocks anyone from accessing the site till further notice?
C: what? I’m sure it’ll work. Just need a list of all accounts, we don’t need anything fancy!
M: what happens when we want to revert back to the pre-block state?
C: oh, so we will just unblock everybody
M: even people who were previously blocked for good reasons?
C: i guess so, unless you think otherwise
M: we r….
D: listen! We just need to be able to block all accounts, who cares about this details! So long as we block all accounts! We need this nuclear option in case something bad happens…
M: but what about when that bad thing passes and…
D: when it passes it passes who cares!

Arghhh so much rage here… like first at the stupid engineering design of looping over all of the accounts instead of using a simple flag. Like 1 http call (from one microservice to another) is a lot better than O(n)… not to mention, we won’t have to deal with failures and retries.

And second for my boss being a dumbass… ok you deal with being to afraid to unblock people after we used this “genius nuclear option”!

OK, I've had enough of this bullshit!
Why the hell do some people pronounce 'Z' as 'C' !?!
FUCK THESE PEOPLE!

Now, you might ask yourself: "But how is this tech related?".
WELL... I was trying to get into a server and had someone spell the password for me; AND GUESS WHO MISSPELLED THE PASSWORD THREE FUCKING TIMES SO HE GOT LOCKED OUT OF THE FUCKING SERVER BECAUSE OF THIS SHIT!!!
FUCK . FUCK . FUCK . FUCK . FUCK!!!!!

Currently i have a small web dev project and i set up a live preview website so he cant see it developing and This literally Just happened

Client : hey, are you currently working on my website?
Me : Yes on my computer and working on it, can i help you with something?
C: yeah just a little bit, that logo on the top left are just a bit squeezed in size and stay like that since 5 days ago and it's bothering me, can you fix it?
Me : nah, its just a simple thing. give me a sec and try reload--
C: why is your voice echoing? Don't tell me you are coding in the bathroom
Me: ummm.. No... I guess...? (I Am)
C: 🤣
Me: sorry 😅

Do you believe that anyone can do anything? (See: 13th Doctor)

Can anyone become a programmer? Or is it not for everybody?

My cousin has started "learning" C programming at college. I was actually surprised when he first told me that he wanted to study programming and get an IT degree. He would give an impression of a spoiled non-tech son of a non-tech manager to you. (He plays games on his Xbox One and Nintendo Switch and uses his MacBook Air to watch anime).He was never good at studying or learning. I immediately thought that it was totally not for him and he should give it a second thought, but he said that he was absolutely sure about it. It's been a few weeks now and he's finding it all really difficult.

I think one should like learning constantly and should like solving problems to make it all an enjoyable learning experience.

Self-study is also really important, especially if you have garbage professors (like he says he has).

I always try to help him. I told him to focus on self-study, recommended good books (he even bought one for C), recommended good online resources. But he's a procrastinator leveled over 9000. So, you'd understand, he's not doing any of that right now. I even told him that if he didn't self-study, he might regret it one day, but he just can't bring himself to self-study, he says. I'm gonna continue helping him in any way I can, but I guess you can't really help someone who doesn't want to help themselves.

Thanks for reading. :)

As much as I love opensource I hate really hate some of its actvie community members (read this as "freetards" <-- see urbandictonary). As a .Net + web devloper with minimal C experience (I just started learning it) and literally no Python experience its not really easy to contribute for me to many (most) opensource software for linux. I am using some <unnamed software> and I found a <critical bug>, it was easy to reproduce and I wrote for list of possible solutions, found it in a code and linked and basically wrote a docummentation longer than any other I ever wrote for every single project I did ever, combined. This <software> was critical for my server and since owner of github repo and few other people there were really active, I hoped that this bug with pretty good documentation will be solved fast, I went to my bed with a heroic feeling of an open source community contributor that helped saving world. I was horribly wrong. Tomorrow, I got 3 passively agressive responses from owner and other 2 freetards that summed up said <other1>:"oh thats nice, fix i yourself and commit it", <other2>:"have a sex with yourself" in a nice way, and <owner>: "fix my softwate and create mrege request". After replying that I have no experience my Python skills are not on a level requied for such an action, he messaged me on twitter I have linked to my GitHub profile saying even less nicely that I am a "retarded c*nt" and that I should learn Python and fix it myself. This makes me stay with my Windows based Server for some time now, fuck this. I googled his github nickname and guess what. Our main freetard is admin on an <unnamed linux forum> and mebmber of many other "computer help" with literally half of his posts just slightly toxic posts about how everyone should use linux and how supreme it is ober anything other, the other hals was crying why linux has only 1% of market share. Oh boi I am not sure why but ITS MAYBE BECAUSE OF FREETARDS LIKE YOU.
And the funnies thing is, hes not only freetard, he is just fullstack retard. One of his posts is "helping" to some <noob windows user> installing Linux. tl:dr for this las part: Freetard basically wiped all data of that <noob>.

PS: Bless everyone who do not respond "oh nice, now you can do it yourself"

So, my UpWork account request is rejected, with a reason that
"already many freelancers with a similar skillset to yours".

In skills I entered
"AngularJS, ASP.NET MVC, .NET Framework, C#, jQuery, Semantic UI, Bootstrap"

Then I resubmitted the request with by adding blockchain and Ethereum.

Again rejected.

What should I do 😫
I guess I never can start freelancing.

Coworker: since the last data update this query kinda returns 108k records, so we gotta optimize it.
Me: The api must return a massive json by now.
C: Yeah we gotta overhaul that api.
Me: How big do you think that json response is? I'd say 300Kb
C: I guess 1.2Mb
C: *downloads json response*
Filesize: 298Kb
Me: Hell yeah!
PM: Now start giving estimates this accurate!
Me: 😅😂

I'm still at my first job, got the job by word of mouth from a friend.

This company wants me to develop both their iOS and Android apps, and being the solo developer it's a long process. I forgot to mention I had to learn objective-c on the job, and being from a java background Android was easy to pick up but it wasn't exactly 100% easy either.

8 months down the line I finished the iOS app and working on the Android app, which is more so copying the features I did with the Android prototype I worked on at the start.

I get paid minimum wage with from the looks of it no sight of a pay raise.

This company doesn't seem to know about how difficult it is to be the only developer for two apps in two different languages.

Anyway aside from this I was wondering if I could get some advice, I want to apply for jobs while I finish up the Android app, but is it a good idea to put the company I work for on my CV? I don't want to risk getting found out for looking for a job, without my boss knowing.

Would it be ideal to just have some sort of more information on request type thing if the jobs I apply for respond?

I guess I could stay until I'm here for one year (student advisor said this) but in saying that I don't think he understands that software development is done in projects rather than time, and after these apps I'll have to start on a new app from scratch, which I'm not looking forward to.

Anyways for any advice you guys give me thanks in advance I really appreciate any input, just wanna get out of this job, the 10 hours of commute I spend a week is killing me :/ along with it being expensive.

Hardware of laptops today.
Displays: Glossy screens everywhere. "Hurr durr it has better colors". Idgaf what colors it has, when the only thing I can see is the wall behind me and my own reflection. Make it matte or get it out.
Touchpads: Bring back mechanical buttons. Haptic feedback dying with touchscreens/surfaces is a tragedy. "But we can have bigger touchpad area without buttons" ...why? the goal shouldn't be 1:1 touchpad vs. display ratio. It ain't a bloody tablet.
Docking stations: Some bright fucker figured out that they can utilize USB C. That thing keeps falling out with slightest laptop movement disconnecting all peripherals (guess why microUSB had those small hooks?). Also it doesn't have sufficient throughput, so the 5 years old dock can feed 3 full HD monitors just fine and the new one can't.
Keyboards: Personally I hate chiclet. And it's everywhere, because "apple has it so we must too". But the thing I hate even more is retardation of the arrow keys (up and down merged into size of one key), missing dedicated Home/End/PgDwn/PgUp buttons and somebody deciding the F keys are not needed and started replacing them with some multimedia bullshit.

My overall feeling is that this happens when you give the market to designers and customer demand. You end up with eye candy and useless fancy gadgets, with lowered ergonomy and worse features than previous generations of the same hardware. My laptop dying is my daily nightmare as I have no idea with what on the current market I would replace it.

*removes Paint 3D as well as a bunch of other apps that I never use*
*Windows shits the bed every now and then again, BSOD here and there like the usual piece of shit it is*
After a few of those occurences..

Windows: Oh look, you want to open this PNG image? Well I guess that I'll open it in my newly (re)installed Paint 3D!!!

Me: For real, Microshit. Just how pushy can you fucking be. If I want to edit images, I'll just use the "legacy" fucking Paint for that, thanks!!! No need to convince me anymore, and get this 3D shit out of my fucking system already!!!

PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> Get-AppxPackage *paint* | Remove-AppxPackage

AND NOW JUST FUCK OFF, FUCKING PAINT 3D!!!

Dropped out after 4 months at Uni when I realised that I will learn absolutely nothing useful for my future career. We were either learning HTML/CSS or coding calculators in C# . At this point I was already writing my own PHP CMSs with huge databases for real life clients. I guess I can only blame my course level and maybe I could go someplace else but it probably wouldn't be so much different.

A month after I dropped out I got my first job as a junior Drupal developer. That was 7 years ago, now I'm a FrontEnd dev in a really great environment and throughout the years no one looked at my grades or even asked for them.

Experience and passion as as valuable if not more as your education.

Just now I realized that for some reason I can't mount SMB shares to E: and H: anymore.. why, you might ask? I have no idea. And troubleshooting Windows.. oh boy, if only it was as simple as it is on Linux!!

So, bimonthly reinstall I guess? Because long live good quality software that lasts. In a post-meritocracy age, I guess that software quality is a thing of the past. At least there's an option to reset now, so that I don't have to keep a USB stick around to store an installation image for this crap.

And yes Windows fanbois, I fucking know that you don't have this issue and that therefore it doesn't exist as far as you're concerned. Obviously it's user error and crappy hardware, like it always is.

And yes Linux fanbois, I know that I should install Linux on it. If it's that important to you, go ahead and install it! I'll give you network access to the machine and you can do whatever you want to make it run Linux. But you can take my word on this - I've tried everything I could (including every other distro, custom kernels, customized installer images, ..), and it doesn't want to boot any Linux distribution, no matter what. And no I'm not disposing of or selling this machine either.

Bottom line I guess is this: the OS is made for a user that's just got a C: drive, doesn't rely on stuff on network drives, has one display rather than 2 (proper HDMI monitor recognition? What's that?), and God forbid that they have more than 26 drives. I mean sure in the age of DOS and its predecessor CP/M, sure nobody would use more than 26 drives. Network shares weren't even a thing back then. And yes it's possible to do volume mounts, but it's unwieldy. So one monitor, 1 or 2 local drives, and let's make them just use Facebook a little bit and have them power off the machine every time they're done using it. Because keeping the machine stable for more than a few days? Why on Earth would you possibly want to do that?!!

Microsoft Windows. The OS built for average users but God forbid you depart from the standard road of average user usage. Do anything advanced, either you can't do it at all, you can do it but it's extremely unintuitive and good luck finding manuals for it, or you can do it but Windows will behave weirdly. Because why not!!!

HR: you didn’t write in your job experience that you know kubernetes and we need people who know it.

Me: I wrote k8s

HR: What’s that ?

…
Do you know docker ?
Do you know what docker is ?
Do you use cloud ?
Can you read and write ?
Are you able to open the door with your left hand ?
What if we cut your hands and tell you to open the doors, how would you do that ?
What are your salary expectations?
Do you have questions, I can’t answer but I can forward them. Ask question, ask question, questions are important.
What is minimal wage you will agree to work ?
You wrote you worked with xy, are you comfortable with yx ?
We have fast hiring process consisting of 10 interviews, 5 coding assessments, 3 talks and finally you will meet the team and they will decide if you fit.
Why do you want to work … here ?
Why you want to work ?
How dare you want to work ?
Just find work, we’re happy you’re looking for it.
What databases you know ?
Do you know nosql databases ?
We need someone that knows a,b,c,d….x,y,z cause we use 1,2,3 … 9,10.
We need someone more senior in this technology cause we have more junior people.
Are you comfortable with big data?
We need someone who spoke on conference cause that’s how we validate that people can speak.
I see you haven’t used xy for a while ( have 5 years experience with xy ) we need someone who is more expert in xy.
How many years of experience you have in yz ??? (you need to guess how many we want cause we look for a fortune teller )

Not much changed in job hunting, taking my time to prepare to leetcode questions about graphs to get a job in which they will tell me to move button 1px to the left.

Need to make up some stories about how I was bad person at work and my boss was angry and told me to be better so I become better and we lived happy ever after. How I argued with coworkers but now I’m not arguing cause I can explain. How bad I was before and how good I am now. Cause you need to be a better person if you want to work in our happy creepy company.

Because you know… the tree of DOOM… The DOMs day.

Few years ago a girl from our HR was hitting on my co-worker. She was asking all kinds of personal and professional favours just so he would come by her place, etc. One time she asked him to send her few C/C++ questions that she could use to thin the crowd of potential candidates before inviting them for the formal interview that he'd conduct later on. Obviously she wouldn't know if the answer is good or not but hell with it, he was ready to storm that pink fortress! So he came up with some mind twisters. She left two days later before he even reached the drawbridge. Sad.

So about six months ago he got fed up with some bullshit and left the company. Yesterday we had dinner. He was interviewing for quite some time being picky about which offer to accept and, surprisingly, during his last interview he got asked very familiar set of questions. He answered each. Then he couldn't resist and asked if the girl works there. The guy confirmed and, without a warning, called her. As if it wasn't awkward enough this is how I was told the conversation went:

- "Joan! You won't guess who I've got here! Your very good friend, Peter! Nope. Yeah, that one - how did you kn... Uh-huh. Oh? Yeah. Are you sure? I mean, I wouldn't. Deal!"

Then he turned out to Peter and said:

- "You know what? I wasn't going to hire you for shit because in my opinion your knowledge on the subject matter, how to put that gently, sucks ass... But apparently Joan here says you're professional and can handle everything we'll be able to throw at you. So when can you start?"

Needless to say he took the job. The fortress fell soon after and he wanted to meet to ask if I'm coming for the bachelor party. I'm ordering t-shirts with "batch mode off" in monospace.

Is it just me who sees this? JS development in a somewhat more complex setting (like vue-storefront) is just a horrible mess.
I have 10+ experience in java, c# and python, and I've never needed more than a a few hours to get into a new codebase, understanding the overall system, being able to guess where to fix a given problem.
But with JS (and also TS for that matter) I'm at my limits. Most of the files look like they don't do anything. There seems to be no structure, both from a file system point of view, nor from a code point of view.
It start with little things like 300 char long lines including various lambdas, closures and ifs with useless variables names, over overly generic and minified method/function names to inconsistent naming of files, classes and basically everything else.
I used to just set a breakpoint somewhere in my code (or in a compiled dependency) wait this it is being hit and go back and forth to learn how the system state changes.
This seems to be highly limited in JS. I didn't find the one way to just being able to debug, everything that is. There are weird things like transpilers, compiler, minifiers, bablers and what not else. There is an error? Go f... yourself ...
And what do I find as the number one tipp all across the internet? Console.log?? are you kidding me, sure just tell me, your kidding me right?
If I would have to describe the JS world in one word, I would use "inconsistency". It's all just a pain in the ass.

I remember when I switcher from VisualStudio/C# to Eclipse/Java I felt like traveling back in time for about 10 years. Everyting seemd so ... old-schoolish, buggy, weird.
When I now switch from java to JS it makes me feel the same way. It's all so highly unproductive, inconsistent, undeterministic, cobbled together.
For one inconveinience the JS communinity seems to like to build huge shitloads of stuff around it, instead of fixing the obvious. And noone seems to see that.
It's like they are all blinded somehow. Currently I'm also trying to implement a small react app based on react-admin. The simplest things to develop and debug are a nightmare. There is so much boilerplate that to write that most people in the internet just keep copying stuff, without even trying to understand what it actually does.
I've always been a guy that tries to understand what the fuck this code actuall does. And for most of the parts I just thing, that the stuff there is useless or could be done in a way more readable way. But instead, all the devs out there just seem to chose the "copy and fix somehow-ish" way.
I'm all in for component-izing stuff. I like encapsulation, I'm a OOP guy by heart. But what react and similar frameworks do is just insane. It's just not right (for some part).
Especially when you have to remember so much stuff that is just mechanics/boilerplate without having any actual "business logical function".

People always say java is so verbose. I don't think it is, there is so few syntax that it almost reads like a prose story. When I look at JS and TS instead, I'm overwhelmed by all the syntax, almost wondering every second line, what the actual fuck this could mean. The boilerplate/logic ration seems way to off ..

So it really makes me wonder, if all you JS devs out there are just so used to that stuff, that you cannot imagine how it could be done better? I still remember my C# days, but I admin that I just got used to java. So I can somehow understand that all. But JS is just another few levels less deeper.
But maybe I'm just lazy and too old ...

Ok, so teacher (which should be something like a professional dev or whatever) assigned us a homework for a Christmas (I dont care, I can complete his assignments in like 10 minutes max). We have to do some simple shit in C++, just some loops and input + output. Nothing hard. He challenged me to write it as short as possible, so I did. My classmates have codes around 60 to 70 lines long (after propper formating). I made it 20 lines long using some pointer magic and stuff like that. I tried my code, it ran fucking perfectly, so I sent that to him. He replied that the code does not work. I tried to recompile it and it ran perfectly. Again, it does not work. Afeter 13 fucking emails he fucking finally sent me the error message. Some fucntion was not found (missing some library but literally everywhere else it works without it...). Thats strange, because it run perfectly on my Fedora with CLion, so I switch to Windows and try to run same code in Visual Studio (which we are using in school btw). Works perfectly. So I start arguing with the teacher more and more. I tried around 10 online compilers. Works fuckng everywhere. Teacher is pissed, me too. So I rewrote my whole code, added comments and shit, reinvented wheel literally everywhere. Now I have C99 standardised code over 370 lines long that run even on a fucking arduino after changing input output methods so it can work with it. It (suprisingly runs) on his PC too.

After a bit more arguing, he said that he is using CodeBlocks from fucking 2015. Wow. Just fucking wow. Even our school has some old Visual Studio (2007 I guess) and it worked there.

iPhones are ridiculously picky when it comes to finding a mate- um charger. And knowing why doesn't really make it any easier to understand why. If anything it baffles me more.

So, let's start with appliances that are not phones. Think Bluetooth headsets, keyboards, earbuds, whatever. Those are simple devices. They see 5V on the VCC line and 0V on ground, and they will charge at whatever current they are meant to. Usually it will not exceed 200mA, and the USB 2.0 spec allows for up to 500mA from any USB outlet. So that's perfectly reasonable to be done without any fuss whatsoever.

Phones on the other hand are smarter.. some might say too smart for their own good. In this case I will only cover Android phones, because while they are smarter than they perhaps should be, they are still reasonable.

So if you connect an Android phone to the same 5V VCC and 0V ground, while leaving the data lines floating, the phone will charge at 500mA. This is exactly to be within USB 2.0 spec, as mentioned earlier. Without the data lines, the phone has no way to tell whether it *can* pull more, without *actually* trying to pull more (potentially frying a charger that's not rated for it). Now in an Android phone you can tell it to pull more, in a fairly straightforward way. You just short the data lines together, and the phone will recognize this as a simple charger that it can pull 1A from. Note that shorting data lines is not a bad thing, we do it all the time. It is just another term for making a connection between 2 points. Android does this right. Also note that shorted data lines cannot be used to send data. They are inherently pulled to the same voltage level, probably 0V but not sure.

And then the iPhones come in, Thinking Different. The iPhones require you to pull the data lines to some very specific voltage levels. And of course it's terribly documented because iSheep just trying to use their Apple original white nugget charger overseas and shit like that. I do not know which voltage levels they are (please let me know!), but it is certainly not a regular short. Now you connect the iPhone to, say, a laptop or something to charge. An Android phone would just charge while keeping data transmission disabled (because they can be left floating or shorted). This is for security reasons mostly, preventing e.g. a malicious computer from messing with it. An iPhone needs to be unlocked to just charge the damn thing. I'm fairly sure that that's because the data lines need to be pulled up, which could in theory enable a malicious computer to still get some information in or out of it. USB data transmission works at at least 200mV difference between the data lines. It could be more than that. So you need to unlock it.

Apple, how about you just short your goddamn data lines too like everyone else? And while you're at it, get rid of this Lightning connector. I get it, micro USB was too hard for your users. I guess they are blind pigs after all. But USB-C solved all of that and more. The only difference I can think of is that the Lightning connector can be a single board with pads on either side on the connector, while in USB-C that could be at the socket end (socket being less common to be replaced). And at the end of the day, that really doesn't matter with all the other things that will break first.

Think Different. Think Retarded. Such tiny batteries and you can't even fucking charge them properly.

FUUUU!!!!!! 3h of colleagues work gone in sconds.. & yes, actually it is all my fault, even though I was not aware of being a totall ass at that time..

What happened?! You know the ctrl+s shortcut?! Yes? Weeeell...doesn't go well with oracle sql developer and packages.. o.O

I was totally unavare that I was typing in ctrl+s ctrl+s all the time. I know I do that with c# code.. Anyhow, when I first moved to sql developer from other tool I noticed that compile thingy.. Oooops, ok, let's remove that shortcut to not stab yourself absentmindenly and overwrite other peoples work.. OK that's taken care of, shortcuts removed and I go back to work..

It's been almost 6 months since the move & first incident and today I guess I did the same.. ctrl+s.. But this time I wasn't so lucky.
Coworker pissed off, that is not my procedure. When did you compile?! Someone overwrote my code..
Wasn't me.. Then I started thinking about ctrl+s.. OMFG!! I check this on another package, it compiled. O.o I almost died. I check the shortcuts. They are back! And even after removing them the package still compiled.. FML!! 😭😭😭😭
I removed them again & closed the tool. Reopended.. BACK!! We're back to fuck your life up!! Fuuuuuuu!!

Now I worry wtf else I fucked up without notice.. o.O hopefully not much.. I hope.. O.O boss will kill me...

BTW anyone knows how to really get rid of this feature?! Cuz for me its a bug (since I am buggy and press ctrl+s all the time.. )

Worst collaboration experience story?

I was not directly involved, it was a Delphi -> C# conversion of our customer returns application.

The dev manager was out to prove waterfall was the only development methodology that could make convert the monolith app to a lean, multi-tier, enterprise-worthy application.

Starting out with a team of 7 (3 devs, 2 dbas, team mgr, and the dev department mgr), they spent around 3 months designing, meetings, and more meetings. Armed with 50+ page specification Word document (not counting the countless Visio workflow diagrams and Microsoft Project timeline/ghantt charts), the team was ready to start coding.
The database design, workflow, and UI design (using Visio), was well done/thought out, but problems started on day one.
- Team mgr and Dev mgr split up the 3 devs, 1 dev wrote the database access library tier, 1 wrote the service tier, the other dev wrote the UI (I'll add this was the dev's first experience with WPF).
- Per the specification, all the layers wouldn't be integrated until all of them met the standards (unit tested, free from errors from VS's code analyzer, etc)
- By the time the devs where ready to code, the DBAs were already tasked with other projects, so the Returns app was prioritized to "when we get around to it"

Fast forward 6 months later, all the devs were 'done' coding, having very little/no communication with one another, then the integration. The service and database layers assumed different design patterns and different database relationships and the UI layer required functionality neither layers anticipated (ex. multi-users and the service maintaining some sort of state between them).

Those issues took about a month to work out, then the app began beta testing with real end users. App didn't make it 10 minutes before users gave up. Numerous UI logic errors, runtime errors, and overall app stability. Because the UI was so bad, the dev mgr brought in one of the web developers (she was pretty good at UI design). You might guess how useful someone is being dropped in on complex project , months after-the-fact and being told "Fix it!".

Couple of months of UI re-design and many other changes, the app was ready for beta testing.

In the mean time, the company hired a new customer service manager. When he saw the application, he rejected the app because he re-designed the entire returns process to be more efficient. The application UI was written to the exact step-by-step old returns process with little/no deviation.

With a tremendous amount of push-back (TL;DR), the dev mgr promised to change the app, but only after it was deployed into production (using "we can fix it later" excuse).

Still plagued with numerous bugs, the app was finally deployed. In attempts to save face, there was a company-wide party to celebrate the 'death' of the "old Delphi returns app" and the birth of the new. Cake, drinks, certificates of achievements for the devs, etc.

By the end of the project, the devs hated each other. Finger pointing, petty squabbles, out-right "FU!"s across the cube walls, etc. All the team members were re-assigned to other teams to separate them, leaving a single new hire to fix all the issues.

I've just found out that the Chinese can even fuck up the most basic of manufacturing processes. A goddamn fucking perfboard, why on Earth would that need good adhesive with decent mechanical strength, right?!!

Initially I was told by other electronics chaps that the adhesive under the pads melts because I'm soldering at such a high temperature (470°C). Well I thought at the time that these boards are really shitty and their adhesive is garbage, and now that I've even seen a cold pad just rip off cleanly, I guess it's confirmed. That adhesive IS fucking garbage and that temperature on the iron is really just fine.

Well, I guess that I'll just design my own PCB's then, and hope that JLCPCB isn't even more Chinesium shit. Because honestly I'm pretty fucking sick of it.

I haven't ranted for today, but I figured that I'd post a summary.
A public diary of sorts.. devRant is amazing, it even allows me to post the stuff that I'd otherwise put on a piece of paper and probably discard over time. And with keyboard support at that <3

Today has been a productive day for me. Laptop got restored with a "pacman -Syu" over a Bluetooth mobile data tethering from my phone, said phone got upgraded to an unofficial Android 9 (Pie) thanks to a comment from @undef, etc.

I've also made myself a reliable USB extension cord to be able to extend the 20-30cm USB-A male to USB-C male cord that Huawei delivered with my Nexus 6P. The USB-C to USB-C cord that allows for fast charging is unreliable.. ordered some USB-C plugs for that, in order to make some high power wire with that when they arrive.

So that plug I've made.. USB-A male to USB-A female, in which my short USB-C to USB-A wire can plug in. It's a 1M wire, with 18AWG wire for its power lines and 28AWG wires for its data lines. The 18AWG power lines can carry up to 10A of current, while the 28AWG lines can carry up to 1A. All wires were made into 1M pieces. These resulted in a very low impedance path for all of them, my multimeter measured no more than 200 milliohms across them, though I'll have to verify and finetune that on my oscilloscope with 4-wire measurement.

So the wire was good. Easy too, I just had to look up the pinout and replicate that on the male part.

That's where the rant part comes in.. in fact I've got quite uncomfortable with sentences that don't include at least one swear word at this point. All hail to devRant for allowing me to put them out there without guilt.. it changed my very mind <3

Microshaft WanBLowS.

I've tried to plug my DIY extension cord into it, and plugged my phone and some USB stick into it of which I've completely forgot the filesystem. Windows certainly doesn't support it.. turns out that it was LUKS. More about that later.

Windows returned that it didn't support either of them, due to "malfunctioning at the USB device". So I went ahead and plugged in my phone directly.. works without a problem. Then I went ahead and troubleshooted the wire I've just made with a multimeter, to check for shorts.. none at all.

At that point I suspected that WanBLowS was the issue, so I booted up my (at the time) problematic Arch laptop and did the exact same thing there, testing that USB stick and my phone there by plugging it through the extension wire. Shit just worked like that. The USB stick was a LUKS medium and apparently a clone of my SanDisk rootfs that I'm storing my Arch Linux on my laptop at at the time.. an unfinished migration project (SanDisk is unstable, my other DM sticks are quite stable). The USB stick consumed about 20mA so no big deal for any USB controller. The phone consumed about 500mA (which is standard USB 2.0 so no surprise) and worked fine as well.. although the HP laptop dropped the voltage to ~4.8V like that, unlike 5.1V which is nominal for USB. Still worked without a problem.

So clearly Windows is the problem here, and this provides me one more reason to hate that piece of shit OS. Windows lovers may say that it's an issue with my particular hardware, which maybe it is. I've done the Windows plugging solely through a USB 3.0 hub, which was plugged into a USB 3.0 port on the host. Now USB 3.0 is supposed to be able to carry up to 1A rather than 500mA, so I expect all the components in there to be beefier. I've also tested the hub as part of a review, and it can carry about 1A no problem, although it seems like its supply lines aren't shorted to VCC on the host, like a sensible hub would. Instead I suspect that it's going through the hub's controller.

Regardless, this is clearly a bad design. One of the USB data lines is biased to ~3.3V if memory serves me right, while the other is biased to 300mV. The latter could impose a problem.. but again, the current path was of a very low impedance of 200milliohms at most. Meanwhile the direct connection that omits the ~200ohm extension wire worked just fine. Even 300mV wouldn't degrade significantly over such a resistance. So this is most likely a Windows problem.

That aside, the extension cord works fine in Linux. So I've used that as a charging connection while upgrading my Arch laptop (which as you may know has internet issues at the time) over Bluetooth, through a shared BNEP connection (Bluetooth tethering) from my phone. Mobile data since I didn't set up my WiFi in this new Pie ROM yet. Worked fine, fixed my WiFi. Currently it's back in my network as my fully-fledged development host. So that way I'll be able to work again on @Floydian's LinkHub repository. My laptop's the only one who currently holds the private key for signing commits for git$(rm -rf ~/*)@nixmagic.com, hence why my development has been impeded. My tablet doesn't have them. Guess I'll commit somewhere tomorrow.

(looks like my rant is too long, continue in comments)

I have been watching the latest episode of 12 monkeys and it seems that in the year 2043 they are still using C programming language to code sophisticated time travel thingy. I guess I don't have to worry we'll be replaced by AI.

I finally fucking made it!

Or well, I had a thorough kick in my behind and things kinda fell into place in the end :-D

I dropped out of my non-tech education way too late and almost a decade ago. While I was busy nagging myself about shit, a friend of mine got me an interview for a tech support position and I nailed it, I've been messing with computers since '95 so it comes easy.

For a while I just went with it, started feeling better about myself, moved up from part time to semi to full time, started getting responsibilities. During my time I have had responsibility for every piece of hardware or software we had to deal with. I brushed up documentation, streamlined processes, handled big projects and then passed it on to 'juniors' - people pass through support departments fast I guess.

Anyway, I picked up rexx, PowerShell and brushed up on bash and windows shell scripting so when it felt like there wasn't much left I wanted to optimize that I could easily do with scripting I asked my boss for a programming course and free hands to use it to optimize workflows.

So after talking to programmer friends, you guys and doing some research I settled on C# for it's broad application spectrum and ease of entry.

Some years have passed since. A colleague and I built an application to act as portal for optimizations and went on to automate AD management, varius ssh/ftp jobs and backend jobs with high manual failure rate, hell, towards the end I turned in a hobby project that earned myself in 10 times in saved hours across the organization. I felt pretty good about my skills and decided I'd start looking for something with some more challenge.

A year passed with not much action, in part because I got comfy and didn't send out many applications. Then budget cuts happened half a year ago and our Branch's IT got cut bad - myself included.

I got an outplacement thing with some consultant firm as part of the goodbye package and that was just hold - got control of my CV, hit LinkedIn and got absolutely swarmed by recruiters and companies looking for developers!

So here I am today, working on an AspX webapp with C# backend, living the hell of a codebase left behind by someone with no wish to document or follow any kind of coding standards and you know what? I absolutely fucking love it!

So if you're out there and in doubt, do some competence mapping, find a nice CV template, update your LinkedIn - lots of sources for that available and go search, the truth is out there!

I guess I could say back to the old LOGO turtle days, but it wasn't until university that I began using the good turbo c compiler and it's DOS platform

So there is this really cute guy in my class and he recently started to learn coding. Since I am 'the computer guy' in school, of course he got to me and asked for help. I introduced him to C# and for the next two weeks helped him learn and understand the language. It was so neat and he was so cute, doing all the mistakes I did too (1+1=11, that kind of stuff)

Now he informed me today that he switched to Java. Of all the languages, Java!! Guess I'll need to search for a new Padawan, fml

Why the fuck does Arduino use C++ macros for min, max, abs, etc. ???????

---
For those who don't know what a macro is, basic example:
#define abs(x) (x > 0 ? x : -(x))
Which looks like a function, but instead abs() will be replaced by the expression and all x will be replaced literally with what you pass to abs
So
abs(i++)
would evaluate to
(i++ > 0 ? i++ : -(i++))
which would call i++ twice
---

I guess I will have to double check every built in function and rewrite it if it's a macro -_-. Not taking any chances. Btw all Arduino functions are in one big file, so now I have to pollute my code with namespaces.
Macros can be great but what the fuck.

I wanna learn rust, go, Ruby, lolcode, brainfuck, the meaning of life, etc... And then every time I start a new side project I always do that in C xD I guess it's because you can not easily forget your first love :D

>dad nagging to learn python
>i hate python
>cuz i hate snakes
>whatever
>so started learning it
>with some awesome video tutorials
>even though i like the instructor
>i find the language
>boring
>uhh
>why do u use this?
>oh and you say it is easy 4 begineers
>oh good
>then why does only
>del keyword gets highlighted in pycharm
>just to look cool i guess
>lua is way better
>hope lua is more used than python
>and more supported
>but i still like C#

Moral: C# rocks

Here's one that involves Windows, Linux (at the same time!), WInZip, Python, Lua and Minecraft, sort of.

So, when I get depressed I often find that old 2011 Minecraft videos help a lot from the nostalgia boost. If its stupid, but it works, it isn't stupid. Anyways, I was thinking about how much fun it must have been to just fuck around with code and make something like Minecraft. Naturally, I got a huge code boner and really wanted to do something I hadn't in a while: binding c to a higher level language.

This time around, I wanted to try Python. C + Python seems like a good pair. I watched a tutorial and it seemed pretty interesting and simple enough but I remembered that I actually like Lua a lot better than Python, so I went to the download page of Lua.

The download is a tar.gz so I let out a sigh and start typing "WinZip" into google. But no, fuck that, I hate 3rd party decompression programs on Windows. They all just give me this eerie feeling.

"This would be so much fucking easier on Linux"...

I remember that I haven't tried the Windows Subsystem for Linux. I guess it's time, isn't it?

I read the docs of how to do it. Nice little touch, they tell you how to enable WSL from PowerShell but don't mention the GUI way to do it. It's genuinely a nice touch.

So I get everything installed and go to the app store to choose a distro. I want Ubuntu. I click the Install button...

...

... "Something unexpected happened"

Windows and their fucking useless error messages. Jesus, okay. I restart computer. Same issue. I update Windows. Same thing. Uninstall WSL. Reboot. Install WSL. Reboot. Same thing. HOLY SHIT.

Went to bed. Woke up. Tried to install Ubuntu.

"Yea ok lul i'll work this time for no reason"

Finally unzipped Lua.

Two days ago, I was solving a coding challenge on hackerank, I was so frustrated I couldn't get one year to pass, I tried c++, python, Golang, same shit, still that same test...I couldn't sleep, I close my eyes, I see this in my sleep, I go back to my keyboard, 4am, I am still on this challenge, 6am, nothing, then I decided to go have breakfast and hang out with a friend, then while hanging out he said "don't finish the pizza, that's my lunch" immediately it clicked in my head that I was missing a logic of less than zero as it was stated as a constraint, I immediately went back home and now all test cases passed....guess what, I now have malaria from not sleeping under the net 😭😭...

P.S: I am Nigerian tho, mosquitoes are a thing

That moment when your mobile internet is so slow and you decide to ssh into your server and use elinks to browse the web and everybody around you is like "he's hacking" and I'm like IM JUST TRYING TO READ FUCKING NEWS BECAUSE GUESS WHO DOESNT PAY SO MUCH FUCKING MONEY FOR 1GB PER MONTH WHERE 500MB ARE USED AFTER VISITING ONE FUCKING SITE BECAUSE THERE ARE SO MANY DAMN ADS ON IT. I JUST WANT TO READ NEWS OR LEARN SOME C++++++++++ BUT INTERNET IS TOO SLOW TO OPEN FUCKING DDG.

Browsing the web in terminal is super nice btw. Really recommend that

TL;DR Pluralsight should be ashamed for taking 299 USD a year and writing some very low-quality quizzes.

I've always heard that Pluralsight is a great platform having some high quality courses, so I chose it as a benefit, as our company was giving us some budget for learning purposes. I've paid (or rather the company did it in the end) 299 USD for this year, which, I guess is not much for US standards, but it is a lot for Eastern European standards.

I didn't actually get to the point of watching any of the courses, but I started to use a feature called "Stack up", which is a long series of questions in a specific theme, like Java, Kotlin, C++, etc., accessible once a day. I must say, I'm amazed by the fact, that people pay quite a great amount of money and they get something so poorly made with a lot of errors and stupid questions.

Take the question from the included image for example. Not only that the 2 possible answers are repeated (and thus I failed to select the correct one from 2 equal answers), but the supposedly correct answer is also missing some type specifications. No Java compiler will compile it this way as far as I know. There would be at least 3 ways to fix it.

Then there is today's gem (should be included as first comment) as well, where the answer is wrong in both Chrome 96, Firefox 95 and Node v10. Heck, THIS IS one of the reasons why you should never use `var` in your JavaScript code, but always `let` and `const`!

So the courses on Pluralsight might be good, but I would be ashamed, if I were to release something like this. People might actually try to solidify their knowledge by solving these quizzes but instead of learning something useful, they will be left with some bullshit. I just don't get how could they release a feature with so much incorrect information and I am kind of disappointed, even if I didn't try the courses yet.

So ok here it is, as asked in the comments.

Setting: customer (huge electronics chain) wants a huge migration from custom software to SAP erp, hybris commere for b2b and ... azure cloud
Timeframe: ~10 months….

My colleague and me had the glorious task to make the evaluation result of the B2B approval process (like you can only buy up till € 1000, then someone has to approve) available in the cart view, not just the end of the checkout. Well I though, easy, we have the results, just put them in the cart … hmm :-\
The whole thing is that the the storefront - called accelerator (although it should rather be called decelerator) is a 10-year old (looking) buggy interface, that promises to the customers, that it solves all their problems and just needs some minor customization. Fact is, it’s an abomination, which makes us spend 2 months in every project to „ripp it apart“ and fix/repair/rebuild major functionality (which changes every 6 months because of „updates“.

After a week of reading the scarce (aka non-existing) docs and decompiling and debugging hybris code, we found out (besides dozends of bugs) that this is not going to be easy. The domain model is fucked up - both CartModel and OrderModel extend AbstractOrderModel. Though we only need functionality that is in the AbstractOrderModel, the hybris guys decided (for an unknown reason) to use OrderModel in every single fucking method (about 30 nested calls ….). So what shall we do, we don’t have an order yet, only a cart. Fuck lets fake an order, push it through use the results and dismiss the order … good idea!? BAD IDEA (don’t ask …). So after a week or two we changed our strategy: create duplicate interface for nearly all (spring) services with changed method signatures that override the hybris beans and allow to use CartModels (which is possible, because within the super methods, they actually „cast" it to AbstractOrderModel *facepalm*).
After about 2 months (2 people full time) we have a working „prototype“. It works with the default-sample-accelerator data. Unfortunately the customer wanted to have it’s own dateset in the system (what a shock). Well you guess it … everything collapsed. The way the customer wanted to "have it working“ was just incompatible with the way hybris wants it (yeah yeah SAP, hybris is sooo customizable …). Well we basically had to rewrite everything again.
Just in case your wondering … the requirements were clear in the beginning (stick to the standard! [configuration/functinonality]). Well, then the customer found out that this is shit … and well …

So some months later, next big thing. I was appointed technical sublead (is that a word)/sub pm for the topics‚delivery service‘ (cart, delivery time calculation, u name it) and customerregistration - a reward for my great work with the b2b approval process???

Customer's office: 20+ people, mostly SAP related, a few c# guys, and drumrole .... the main (external) overall superhero ‚im the greates and ur shit‘ architect.
Aberage age 45+, me - the ‚hybris guy’ (he really just called me that all the time), age 32.
He powerpoints his „ tables" and other weird out of this world stuff on the wall, talks and talks. Everyone is in awe (or fear?). Everything he says is just bullshit and I see it in the eyes of the others. Finally the hybris guy interrups him, as he explains the overall architecture (which is just wrong) and points out how it should be (according to my docs which very more up to date. From now on he didn't just "not like" me anymore. (good first day)
I remember the looks of the other guys - they were releaved that someone pointed that out - saved the weeks of useless work ...

Instead of talking the customer's tongue he just spoke gibberish SAP … arg (common in SAP land as I had to learn the hard way).
Outcome of about (useless) 5 meetings later: we are going to blow out data from informatica to sap to azure to datahub to hybris ... hmpf needless to say its fucking super slow.
But who cares, I‘ll get my own rest endpoint that‘ll do all I need.

First try: error 500, 2. try: 20 seconds later, error message in html, content type json, a few days later the c# guy manages to deliver a kinda working still slow service, only the results are wrong, customer blames the hybris team, hmm we r just using their fucking results ...
The sap guys (customer service) just don't seem to be able to activate/configure the OOTB odata service, so I was told)
Several email rounds, meetings later, about 2 months, still no working hybris integration (all my emails with detailed checklists for every participent and deadlines were unanswered/ignored or answered with unrelated stuff). Customer pissed at us (god knows why, I tried, I really did!). So I decide to fly up there to handle it all by myself

These are the things that finally finally helped me stick to learning programming.

Hello world! This is my first story on devrant and I would like to share how I finally overcame the barriers that had always prevent me from learning programming in a more serious and structured way.

I know my way around linux, had some experience with BASIC many years ago and have more than basic notions of cryptography... however I never got myself to learn programming in such a way that I could write an app or interact with an API. Until now.

I have advanced more than ever before and I believe it might be thanks to these aspects:

1. C#
I have always had struggles with languages that were too compact or used many exotic or cryptic expressions. However I have found C# to be much more readable and easier to understand.

2. Visual Studio
My previous attempts at learning programming were without an IDE. Little did I know what I was missing!

For example when I tried learning python on Debian, I almost went crazy executing programs and trying to find the compile errors in a standard text editor.

Intellisense has been live changing as it allows me to detect errors almost immediately and also to experiment. I'm not afraid to try things out as I know the IDE will point out any errors.

3. .NET library and huge amounts of documentation
It was really really nice to find out how many well documented classes I had available to make my learning process much easier, not having to worry about the little details and instead being able to focus on my program's logic.

4. Strong typing
Call me weird, but I believe that restricting implicit conversions has helped learn more about objects, their types and how they relate to each other.

I guess I should be called a C# fanboy at this point, but I owe it to that language to be where I'm now, writing my first apps.

I also know very very little about other languages and would love to hear if you know about languages that provide a similar experience.

Also, what has helped you when you first started out?

Thanks!!

I said "Let's use C for this year's hashcode challange" as a joke.

Guess who's writing C code tomorrow

Running a fucking conda environment on windows (an update environment from the previous one that I normally use) gets to be a fucking pain in the fucking ass for no fucking reason.

First: Generate a new conda environment, for FUCKING SHITS AND GIGGLES, DO NOT SPECIFY THE PYTHON VERSION, just to see compatibility, this was an experiment, expected to fail.

Install tensorflow on said environment: It does not fucking work, not detecting cuda, the only requirement? To have the cuda dependencies installed, modified, and inside of the system path, check done, it works on 4 other fucking environments, so why not this one.

Still doesn't work, google around and found some thread on github (the errors) that has a way to fix it, do it that way, fucking magic, shit is fixed.

Very well, tensorflow is installed and detecting cuda, no biggie. HAD TO SWITCH TO PYHTHON 3,8 BECAUSE 3.9 WAS GIVING ISSUES FOR SOME UNKNOWN FUCKING REASON

Ok no problem, done.

Install jupyter lab, for which the first in all other 4 environments it works. Guess what a fuckload of errors upon executing the import of tensorflow. They go on a loop that does not fucking end.

The error: imPoRT eRrOr thE Dll waS noT loAdeD

Ok, fucking which one? who fucking knows.

I FUCKING HATE that the main language for this fucking bullshit is python. I guess the benefits of the repl, I do, but the python repl is fucking HORSESHIT compared to the one you get on: Lisp, Ruby and fucking even NODE in which error messages are still more fucking intelligent than those of fucking bullshit ass Python.

Personally? I am betting on Julia devising a smarter environment, it is a better language already, on a second note: If you are worried about A.I taking your job, don't, it requires a team of fucktards working around common basic system administration tasks to get this bullshit running in the first place.

My dream? Julia or Scala (fuck you) for a primary language in machine learning and AI, in which entire environments, with aaaaaaaaaall of the required dlls and dependencies can be downloaded and installed upon can just fucking run. A single directory structure in which shit just fucking works (reason why I like live environments like Smalltalk, but fuck you on that too) and just run your projects from there, without setting a bunch of bullshit from environment variables, cuda dlls installation phases and what not. Something that JUST FUCKING WORKS.

I.....fucking.....HATE the level of system administration required to run fucking anything nowadays, the reason why we had to create shit like devops jobs, for the sad fuckers that have to figure out environment configurations on a box just to run software.

Fuck me man development turned to shit, this is why go mod, node npm, php composer strict folder structure pipelines were created. Bitch all you want about npm, but if I can create a node_modules setting with all of the required dlls to run a project, even if this bitch weights 2.5GB for a project structure you bet your fucking ass that I would.

"YOU JUST DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING" YES I FUCKING DO and I will get this bullshit fixed, I will get it running just like I did the other 4 environments that I fucking use, for different versions of cuda and python and the dependency circle jerk BULLSHIT that I have to manage. But this "follow the guide and it will work, except when it does not and you are looking into obscure github errors" bullshit just takes away from valuable project time when you have a small dedicated group of developers and no sys admin or devops mastermind to resort to.

I have successfully deployed:
Java
Golang
Clojure
Python
Node
PHP
VB/C# .NET
C++
Rails
Django

Projects, and every single fucking time (save for .net, that shit just fucking works on a dedicated windows IIS server) the shit will not work with x..nT reasons. It fucking obliterates me how fucking annoying this bullshit is. And the reason why the ENTIRE FUCKING FIELD of computer science and software engineering is so fucking flawed.

But we can't all just run to simple windows bs in which we have documentation for everything. We have to spend countless hours on fucking Linux figuring shit out (fuck you also, I have been using Linux since I was 18, I am 30 now) for which graphical drivers for machine learning, cuda and whatTheFuckNot require all sorts of sys admin gymnasts to be used.

Y'all fucked up a long time ago. Smalltalk provided an all in one, easily rollable back to previous images, easily administered interfaces for this fileFuckery bullshit, and even though the JVM and the .NET environments did their best to hold shit down, and even though we had npm packages pulling the universe inside, or gomod compiling shit into one place NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO we had to do whatever the fuck we wanted to feel l337 and wanted.

Fuck all of you, fuck this field, fuck setting boxes for ML/AI and fuck every single OS in existence

LOL that's why I love C!

The function pointer cast for strcmp because qsort expects a compare function with two const void * pointers instead of two const char * pointers, that's just beautiful.

Not to mention the hack to abuse strcmp on a struct - which just works because the first struct member is a string and the rest just gets swapped with memcpy as opaque data.

I guess that wouldn't pass a code review at work. :-)

So, it's time to fucking rant!

Location: A small startup where direct contact with C-Level members is frequent.

A while back we had a customer using our SaaS product who had gripes about the way it worked.

He contacted our CEO and made a bunch of claims based on bad assumptions.

In the end, he wanted all images removed from his site. I was pulled aside by the CEO and asked if I could handle this for him and make a new screen for them without images.

So I did. I tried to discuss and get deeper into the problem by saying "this seems like a symptom of a problem and not the actual problem. What do you think?" He responded with "That was his request so it must be the problem if it won't take long then let's fix it for him.

- a week later

The problem is fixed and in the wild. No more images. Now he has another request :/

He does not like the pagination on his site. He says " I shouldn't have to click a button when I scroll so I want the be able to scroll and see all my products!"

This time the CEO asks me if this can easily be done and I take him aside and say "no, this will be a big change to our system and will need to be discussed with the team."

The main point I make is that we should go down and spend some time with this customer to find out what the real problem is.

After a half hour of discussion about the real issue he decided to bring in the CTO.

In the end, we implemented infinite scroll, dropping our current product building tasks to service one customer (yeah, it's a bad scene). But we got infinite scroll built and shipped.

- 2 Weeks later

This time he demands that infinite scroll isn't good enough. "If I scroll fast then I have to wait for them to load, they should all load at once!"

This time I have had enough. I can see the CEO is coming over to me to as me how much work is in this. I tell him there are 3 things I have to say...

1. I'm going to implement exactly what he asked by the end of the day.
2. We will only release it to him because it is going to be a shit-show loading everything at once, the load times will be mental!
3. We should fire this customer, right now.

So, I built it. Customer hated it (of course, who the fuck wants to wait 30s for loading. That's basically a lifetime). We changed it back and he was still mad.

- 2 weeks later

Customer leaves. Good riddance.

- sometime later

I am in the customer's store on a road trip. I get a feel for how their store works and they have a different system for making things operate.

It turns out that they did not know what the real problem was. They actually needed a completely different system (from a UX perspective) for accessing their data.

To top it all off, the system would have taken less time to build than the shitty fixes we made over weeks of work. FFS

I guess the moral of the rant is to find the problem, not a symptom of the problem.

!multirant

1. MonoDevelop

Installed Unity for a game I'm working on. Realized I didn't reinstall VS when my SSD got corrupted. Didn't install VS plugin w/ Unity.

So now I have MonoDevelop. It's not a bad editor, but PLEASE. IF YOU ARE GOING TO HIGHLIGHT A FUNCTION WITH RED BECAUSE IT DOESNT EXIST IN THE CLASS, THEN TELL ME, WHAT THE FUCK EXISTS IN THE CLASS!

2. UnityJS

Unity's JS implementation is terrible.

First, let's throw basic syntax shit out on the window. string.toUpperCase? Nah, let's make it string.ToUpperCase to annoy the shit out of devs.

AND SOME OF THE STANDARD FUNCTIONS ARENT EVEN FUCKING WORKING!

Need to use parseInt(string, 2)? WELL GO FUCK YOURSELF, BECAUSE WE DIDNT IMPLEMENT THAT SHIT.

...or use C# I guess...

FUCK UNITY.
🖕🖕🖕

I am writing much less code for certain things in C++ than I would in Go...
I guess that sticking to traditional languages has its advantages. ;)

Any idea how to make a fan in an HP laptop spin at lower temperatures? The fan in my Pavilion dm-1 only starts spinning when CPU reaches 75°C and enters full speed when the GPU also becomes 75°C. Which is strange because this CPU and GPU are one and the same thing.. an APU. And overheating freezes often happen at around 75-80°C.. which isn't too much of a headroom really. I'd rather have it kick in at 50-60°C already, but would like to avoid using the power of the soldering iron for it.. I've already lost a fan to that previously (current one is a spare part from AliExpress). Granted, my soldering experience was much less back then.. nowadays I can probably even solder 1206 SMD packages comfortably. But I don't want to risk it, and I've got experience with custom kernels anyway.. are there any fan speed governors in the kernel that you know of?

FWIW, fancontrol doesn't seem to be supported on this laptop, and neither is pwmconfig. Perhaps I'll have to stick to the electronics method after all? Given that it's just a 5V fan, I guess that I could feed it power by tapping some power from a USB rail and controlling its speed from an ATtiny85.. but inside the laptop there isn't enough space for that and I don't feel like freeing this hardware out of its laptop chassis yet (though that is on the list). Either way running at 60°C under no load is terrible.. some HP certified enganeering "feature" I guess...

Nope, definitely not going to work for that customer anymore. Fuck this shit. At least for this week.

My background: mid-30 years old, some kind of business & IT consultant / lead dev working for a mid sized CRM consulting company, with approx 15 years of experience in development and software architecture, most of the time "thinking" in C#, still learning new languages, being a cloud evangelist and team lead. We usually have customers with customers (B2B/B2C).
Personality type "campaigner" (ENFP-A).

Today the project lead of my client (a big corporation in the energy industry) told me that he still didn't order all the necessary resources for the cloud project. Just to be clear: He's on the client side. We (the architects, one internal and me) told him one month ago what we need for the beginning. Just a few things - an Azure subscription, a license for the CRM platform, and our dev tools.

And now let's guess when the project is planned to begin? Yeah, right: 1st of April. NO APRIL'S FOOL. And guess what? Next Tuesday we'll do the onboarding for the new (external) devs, and NOTHING will be ready. Yeah, just let us build stuff in our minds, and on the whiteboards, because it's an AGILE project, right? We don't need any systems and tools...

And now he sent me the questionnaires which need to be answered before any cloud service can be ordered by the corporate IT. And yes, he didn't answer a single thing, and just meant "Those are architecture questions" (they are not) and (of course) "please provide the answers until Monday morning, so we can FINALLY order the services."

Yeah, you fucktard. Of course it's MY FAULT now. Maybe I should write an email to your boss asking how we can speed things up a little bit...

Guess I'll fuckin try again tomorrow.

Building a cross platform c program. On Linux side, just using a makefile. Today I tried using visual studios "clone" feature for git. It just downloads the files and makes them available to the editor, it doesn't make a project, obviously.

But this has some disadvantages. For one, you can't build, or run. Two, you don't get any project properties. My project needs to set the character encoding to Unicode. Can't do that without a project.

So I use their tool to create a project from existing code. It didn't really work. The build profiles were janky at best and I still couldn't set the character encoding.

Ended up just deleting the whole thing.

I fucking hate Electron, what ever happened to developing software natively? It's not like you have to stick to dot Net and C# or whatever, there's literally Lazarus or Delphi, which, at least Lazarus, not only is open source but also supports all major platforms.

Even Python has GTK, Qt and Pywin32 or whatever its called. While not exactly cross platform, it's still not eating up 1GB of RAM when you launch it.

I don't care if Bob from across the street uses it because he's too lazy to learn anything new, but when huge companies like fucking Discord (valued at 10B dollars) use it, it's insane.
More than once has Discord had a memory leak and was reaching upwards of 6.5GB of RAM usage.

Whats the most popular code editor? VSCode, Electron.
Chat client? Discord, Electron.
Wanna use something other than Discord? Maybe Matrix? Well guess what, while they do have multiple clients, the most developed and usable one is Element, yeah, Electron.
Slack? Electron
My crypto wallet? Exodus, Electron.

I genuinely don't think 16GB of RAM is enough nowadays. Thankfully I'm running a very minimal install of Arch Linux and do most of my work in a KVM, but it still hurts my brain.

By the way things are looking nowadays, We'll be using Javascript for Kernels soon.
Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

Also apparently the filter on this site sees ". net" as an url.

Apple please... I just love physical keys, and you just make a pointless touchbar...

I really don't know the position of a macbook pro. I guess mainly graphic designer or programmer will buy macbook pro, and the touch bar feature is a completely pointless to us.

Not to mention that you replace all the USB port to a really "popular type C USB"

I'm the kind of person that says "Fuck python, worst language, fuck C#, Java, Golang", assembly and C are superior.

But I have learned my lesson; Yesterday I learned enough C# to be able to make a windows app that connects to a another app via sockets. I tried first to do it with C++ but my app looked like shit and took me about a whole day to make. Then I tried with C#, got the App working on an hour, now I'm delighted with C#. I guess I have to be open-minded.

TIL Python doesn't really give a fuck about semicolons -.-

So after spending the past couple years almost exclusively using C# and Unity I decided to come back* to Python for no real reason except wanting a change of pace.

I almost ripped my hair out backspacing semicolons I kept putting in out of force of habit after having worked in C# for so long

Well guess what... I just learned (purely by accident)... Python couldn't care less. I feel internal conflict if that makes sense.

TBH now I'm randomly putting in semi-colons at the end of some statements just because I can and I want to abuse this freedom ^_^

Yeah yeah it's not very "pythonic" or pretty but screw that

* I started programming in Python back in high-school but switched over to C# + Unity after graduating and pursuing indie-gamedev.

Note: After some searching I realize you can use semicolons to have multiple statements on the same line but I never really needed to do that during my time with Python so I didn't even remember it was even a thing

One of my worst WFT moments was just over 2 years ago.

A former colleague had been tasked with “upgrading” our solution for handling customer specific CSS on our platform for building newsletter emails.

He had been with us for about 5 years and ported most of the front end gui over that time from classic asp to .net and C#.

This work started in November and with a pause over dec-mid jan for high season and Christmas leave he continued.

In the beginning if mars we had the first of multiple WTF on that when I realized that his solution required a lot of special CSS or rather LESS, more than the a actual HTML for the template, and all was custom less rules that was very hard to understand.

We found that he actually never really understood how LESS worked and had tried to do things in a very backward way. Another colleague jumped in and manage to clean it up a bit so it got down to manageable levels.

Then in the end of Mars came the next bigger WTF. This is a newsletter building application. Turns out the new LESS based solution was entirely dependent on the js version of LESS and only worked when running in the browser. Guess what, the email send engine is not a browser and css classes and rules generally does not work in emails.

The new solution was impossible to integrate with the part that built and sent the emails without some very heavy rework.

Oh, and it was also completely incompatible with 12 years of old newsletters and customer templates that just did not work.

And of cause, he had not shown any of this in code reviews but rather just merged it part by part to the new version branch interleaving it with 5 months of other work.

He left the company short after.

I got an interview on monday but i completely forgot i even applied. They said its java AND c#, so i can guarantee a 50% score i guess.

Can someone explain what the fuck is a namespace while we r at it?

I actually never felt the need to scream at a co-worker so let's talk about that time a co-worker screamed at me instead.

tl;dr : some asshole boss screamed and threatened me because someone else's project was shit and didn't work.

Context: I was in my third year of school internship (graded) and my experience is C, C++, C#, Python all in systems programming, no web.

I was working as an intern for a shit company that was selling a shit software to hospitals (though not medically critical, thank God) the only tech guy on site was the DBA (cool guy) the product was maintained by a single dev in VB from his house, the dude never showed up to work (you'll understand why) and an other intern who couldn't dev shit.

I was working with the DBA on an software making statistical analysis from DB exports, worked nice, no problems here if we forget the lack of specs or boundaries (except must work in ieShit).

The other intern was working on something else (don't ask me what it is) I just remember it was in GWT before the community revived it. His webapp was requesting the company http server for a file instead of having one of it's java servlet to fetch it (both apps ran on sane server) which caused a lot of shit especially CORS error. That guy left (end of contract) and leaves his shit as is, boss asked me to deploy the app, I fiddle with it to see if it works and when I find out it doesn't then that asshole starts screaming at me in front of every other employee present, starts threatening to burn me in the tech world and have me thrown out of my school for no goddamn reason than the other dude's project doesn't work.

After the screaming I leave and warn my school immediately.

I guess that's why the other dev never came to work.

I had three weeks of internship left, that I did from home and worked probably less than 2 hours a day so suck it asshole.

Still had a good grade because I was reviewed by the DBA and he was happy with the work I did.

It was only later that I realized that what he did was categorizing as harassment (at least in France) and decided that never again this would happen without a response from my lawyer.

On Friday I was planning on working on getting the MVVM pattern down in C# and WPF. Today I watched episodes of Smallville all day. I seem to have a lack of motivation, but I guess it is the weekend. 😜

Well just blew up a coding interview.

Got an offer to be a Drupal dev and was expecting questions on Drupal API and module dev but got asked how to find the closest Enemy in an array and blah blah blah.

Interesting question but man. My mind got blank and got nervous. It's been a while since I've done a question like that and I've been coding for 10+ years.

I would've love to solve that in another language such as Python or C++ but got stuck on PHP because it was a Drupal position. But I only use PHP for Drupal modules and templates who are highly dependant on Drupal API. Or even WordPress plugins. But I try to avoid WordPress because is shit.

Guess the job market hasn't changed since I graduated back in 2014. So I feel a little bummed down. But I guess I'll just have to practice those type of problems as well. At least the problem solving method.

At least it will be an excuse to do those leetcode problems.

The guy thinks I'm her friend but I deeply hate her !
Just because she thinks she knows everything but she is actually an idiot !
Last term I was in her team for the c++ project (she fooled me ! I thought she is advenced !!) And guess what?
I ended up doing the whole project myself ! (Not fair at all but she got the score cuz of me)

I really don't need enemy so I'll just stay away from her :/

Been a few weeks now back at the office after a good four weeks off… still no work to do….

”Guess I’ll write a compiler in C then, a good chance to brush up on it.”

”… hmm, haven’t touched any simple html in ages, maybe I try and do this frontend as vanilla as possible”

”What if I tried remaking this backend with Suave? Haven’t written much F# in a while, here’s a chance to brush up on mah mad skillzors”

Never a dull moment, and while I’m cranking out code like a maniac, I feel very, very unproductive due to no actual work getting done.

• Learn new things!
• Continue my programming projects (mostly C#), and eventually publish them!
• Create more programming side-projects!
• Create more music, of various genres, and finish unfinished tracks! (I love music 💙)
• Buy a violin, or another instrument! (I already play harpsichord and piano, and I love them both)
• Buy a new PC setup! (maybe?)
• Get a driver's license!
• Create more music sheets!
• Create more custom maps, on rhythm games! (like osu! or Cytus / Cytunity)
• Make new friends, and meet with my older ones more!
• Go to places, new and old!
• Open myself more to others! (I'm kinda shy)
• Do my university's exams, properly!
• Do my conservatory's exams, also properly!
• Try drawing!
• Try all sorts of new things!
• Get a cat into the family! (I love cats, but I never got one because I don't know how to raise them, yet)
• Be more confident about myself!

And... yeah, I guess that's it :D
What about you?
Have a happy 2019, everyone! 💙

During 6 months I updated myself day and night on java, springboot and AWS.

I failed most of the technical interviews on my preferred stack, however I got a job, where the probable stack is C#, dotnet and Azure.

So, I have a couple of weeks of very good quality rant ahead.

I just started.

hmmm let's see, should I use Visual Studio or Visual Studio CODE. I spent the morning before understanding they were different. I could have spent the morning Studying how To Visually fuck you, lame name chooser.

Now I'm following a tutorial.
I need .NET 5.0, but guess what, I have .NET core 3.1.
But wait, fuck, .NET and .NET CORE are not the same thing! Will .net core 3.1 work for a .NET project or not?

And there goes the afternoon. Is he the same guy who choose the names?
I'll tie you with a barbed wire net and fuck you to the core, you asshole

So we had a guy who spend decade in automotive, flight simulation and stuff. C mostly. Lasted only a month of his probation period. Didn't seem to know about double pointers. Maybe coding standards in automotive even discourage them...

But made me wonder how to judge skills. - I tend do be on the cautious side, as I hadn't really understood inheritance and many basic things when I started. But luckily my first boss believed in me, saw me gnawing through (Well about my 'initiation' that'd be others stories to tell). Well, guy was hired as a 'senior', so they expected bit more. Dunno, still feel a bit strange about it, even if I ranted about his chattering before, coz he also had his heart in the right spot, but maybe it's for the best anyway...

But guess who's taking his place in our team! Drumroll.. Yes, Mr gitmaster is.

So,
Yesterday was Google CodeJam's Kickstart event ( or something like that ).
Participated in competitive programming for the first time. It was kinda fun I guess...
Nope I still hate competitive programming. I like being a laid back programmer who develops in his own pace.
I know it's not what industry wants but I can't jst go for competitive programming.

On the positive note, I started using goto in C++ because of it and created a better Graph library than I had before 🤗🤗

P.S. I did read on how to use goto and when to not use it. I guess my usage was fine... Or better yet, IT WORKED 😜😂

Well, I am done as far as competitive programming goes... 😭😭

Here’s the second book for today.

Another small 100 page or so book.

It’s called advanced programming techniques, personally I don’t like the title, I don’t consider most of the items in here advanced, I would consider them more “better ways of solving a problem”, they do talk about recursion and linked lists, so I guess that could be a little advanced.

But like table based solutions is not advanced it’s just a technique that allows for simpler, scale able and main table code.. I been doing it for a long time, most easiest way to determine if something can turn into a table solution is look for a function that has a bunch of calls to the same function or something of that nature lots of repeated code with slight changes in a function or range of functions .. those of simplist way of “tablefiying”a solution I will picture the example from the book below.

The book, is all in java except for linked lists Thats in C..

But anyway this book is a great quick reference book, into the pile with programming pearls book, and those like that.

I've been sort of lost after New Year's...

Last few years, my main goal was just to learn stuff to pass technical interviews. I also did a lot of personal dev in C#... and played with the js, python, and when a bit of c++.

But this year I kinda feel sorta of "ah screw it". Interviews never work out, haven't for years, what's the point in even trying... I get paid enough though the work is sort boring and team sort of feels like the Wild West, no rules, code reviews, processes...

But ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Feels like coding has lost its place at the top now. The future is all cloud, machine learning, big data/real time analytics but feels like these are out of reach for just 1 guy...

And well doesn't seem like anyone is going to give me a job because I'm not a good fit or have enough experience in these areas...

Sorta lost now but guess this is what a sudden thought leads to...

Oh and maybe just with tech in general. It feels this year I'm just not as interested as I was before... Spent a lot of time binge watching movies and stuff instead....

So, first: I'm a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to code and love to think I know everything.

We had a group project at university and me being laid back but unknown to the other people, the "rest" of them was together with me in a group. We got to know each other and actually we were a pretty cool group. I guess "the rest" in a computer science course means you get the cool guys.^^

1/6 of us did ever code in C# and 2/6 even knows what an engine is and how unity works. I was in both sixths, got group leader somehow (if you'd know me from school. Omg. I was that one guy not knowing what went on, saying my two sentences at the presentation and took the B-.:D), so what to do to have a nice 2 weeks with them?
We did a crash course, I taught them some basics and everything.

The point is, i was hella nervous and i really get anxious if something is expected from me.

Long story short, I talked a whole week for 5-7 hours straight without real pauses and eating wayyy less a man should. Dude I was literally dead on my way home on friday evening. I felt like I would fall over any fucken second, i was all shakey, dizzy as hell, weird vision, everything. It felt like I was about to die on the spot.

I got home though, ate like 1/2 kilograms of pasta and felt myself coming back to life.:D

What to learn from this:
Keep the fuck calm, do pauses, drink and eat enough and don't rush all in for a fucken week without real rest..^^
It fucks you up and doesn't do anything good for your productivity.

We got an A btw, so in the end, all went good.(:

Hey guys, I've hit a major snag in my dev life.

My backend/frontend Java project has hit a wall as the material I was using from Udemy on advanced Java programming was boiling down to copy and paste programming without the learning. That doesn't really work for someone with 2 years programming experience but only a good 2 months of Java knowledge. I need to learn not just follow along what's written on a screen. Thankfully I learned to give in about 2 weeks in so I didn't waste a ton of time on it.

Would books be a better option? I self taught C++ mainly from books and preferred that over videos, but when I did C# videos were mostly better than books.

And...I guess I'll open the floodgates to recommendations for other stacks. I like Java and I'd like to keep using it but I know you don't want to get married to a way of doing things. My end goal is to make an E-commerce website that I can show off in interviews about a year from now.

Please be kind, I'm feeling a bit like crap right now. :(

A few days ago I decided to learn C by writing a simple Minecraft clone. Guess who has less than 26¼ hours to do university exercises for two weeks. And It's not like I had double that time because of Christmas Holidays.

*Not a rant, but a very long vent*
I'm 20 and facing the worst dilemma I ever experienced.
Been working at a company for more than half a year, got the job thru a friend and started as an intern to take care of customer problems, crap they do to PC's, printers that wouldn't work, answer emails and phone calls about our point-of-sale software.
Soon everything started to change, on one day my boss asked my what I knew about coding, all I could answer was about some really basic stuff that I learnt on a previous semester at college, just some very basic coding stuff we got for C, how for loops works, conditions, that kind of thing. Soon I was being asked to code a client management software for our company, I was starting to grasp a little of this wonderful world, soon I could write some more complex code in C#, even did a program that in 30 seconds did a 3 day's worth of work, and then I got assigned to develop a mobile POS application, earned a raise, and man, is this wonderful.
I feel that I really found my place in life, found something that makes me jump out of bed every morning.
But here comes the dilemma part: I'm enrolled in a mechanical engineering school for two years now, and it's my second place already (been enrolled at a agronomy school before that) and I'm starting to feel out of place, in all the classes I'm taking, I cant help but feel that this isn't for me, I don't see myself doing that for a future, but I don't know if jumping to another boat would make it any better or just worse, I don't know how good are my odds at a tech oriented course are, I don't really know what to do with the rest of my life.
Guess I'm just afraid of doing something stupid and regret it later, don't know if I should listen to the voice that shouts to me to do whatever I want to with my life or the one that assures me of a stable path... Don't know if anyone will read this much, but if so, thanks a lot, just wanted to put it out of my shoulders and maybe get to know anyone that has been here. I'm new here, but I feel already at home. ☺

Stories like the one I'm about to tell you are just another reason why people hate Windows. I know I usually preach 'Don't hate everything' and shit, but this is a real big fucking deal when it hits your desktop for no reason.
Now, onto the actual story...

Background: Playing with my Oculus, fixing issues like forgetting to use USB3 and stuff. I learned about an issue with Nvidia GPUs, where in Windows, they can only support 4 simultaneous displays per GPU. I only have the one GPU in my system, Nova, so I have to unplug a monitor to get Oculus and its virtual window thingy working. Alright, friend gave me idea of using my old GPU to drive one of my lesser used monitors, my right one. Great idea I thought, I'll install it a bit later.

A bit later...

I plug the GPU in (after 3 tries of missing the PCI-E slot, fuckers) and for some reason I'm getting boot issues. It's booting to the wrong drive, sometimes it'll not even bother TRYING to boot, suddenly one of my hard drives isn't even being recognized in BIOS, fuck. Alright, is the GPU at least being recognized? Shit, it isn't. FUCKFUCKFUCK.

Oh wait. I just forgot the power cable Duh. Plug that in, same issues. Alright, now I have no idea. Try desperately to boot, but it just won't I start getting boot error 0xc000000f. Critical device not found. Alrighty then. Fuck my life, eh?

Remove the GPU, look around a bit while frantically trying to boot the system, and I notice an oddly bent SATA cable. I look at it and the bastard is FRAYED AT THE END! Fuck, that's my main SSD! I finally replace the SATA cable and boot, still the same error... Boot into a recovery environment, and guess what?

Windows has decided to change my boot partition, ya know, the FUCKING C: DRIVE, from NTFS to RAW format, stripping it of formatting! What the actual fuck Microsoft? You just took a shit on yourself while having a seizure on the fucking MOON! Fine, fuck you, I have recovery USB! Oh, shit, that won't boot... I have an old installation! Boot ITS recovery, try desperately to find a fix online... CHKDSK C: /F... alright, repairing, awesome! Repaired, I can see data, but not boot. So now I'm at the point where I'm waiting for a USB installer to be created over USB 2.0. Wheeeeeeeeee. FML.

THESE are the times I usually hate Windows a lot. And I do. But it gets MOST of my work done. Except when it does this.

I'm already pissed, so don't go into the comments and just hate on Windows completely. Just a little. The main post is for the main hate. Deal with it. And I know that someone is going to come at me "Ohhhhh, you need FUCKIN LIIIIIIINUUUUUUUXXXXXXXX!' Want to know my response to that?

No.

Why do teachers tend to not explain parts of their code?
I got some C++ material and example code for doing some rendering, and the material says "these parts are not important".
Guess what? If the whole thing does not compile when i remove the unimportant code, it was fucking important!

Fuck...
I'm not getting that job then.

So I just had one of those interview coding tests on hacker rank and screwed it up big time.

I'm a C# guy and it was a Java position. I worked with Java, like 10 years ago, and they're pretty similar so I brushed up over the last week when I had free time.

Absolutely blew it. It's not like it was hard, I just got into one question (of 6) and it ate up all of my time. The task was simple, make a JSON call, read the data, check if you need more calls, pull out a data field from all the concatenated results and return it in a sorted list. ONE HOUR it took me. A combination of not knowing the API well enough, simple syntax errors and relatively slow compilation.

Godammit.

The next question was implement an Object hierarchy but since I'd run out of time, all I got was the class declarations before the timer ran out.

fuck, fuck, fuck.

I guess the test did it's job and weeded out someone who can't contribute to the team...

Roses are red

Boost I need you

You do so much I cannot breath

You fucking need to be hacked around every time I have to compile you for a different compiler or VS version getyourshittogheter fucking hell it makes me hate you

Fellow Deviants, I need your help in understanding the importance of C++

Okay, I need to clarify a few things:

I am not a beginner or a newbie who has just entered this community...

I have been using C++ for some time and in fact, it was the language which introduced me to the world of programming... Before, I switched to Java, since I found it much better for application development...

I already know about the obvious arguments given in favour of C/C++ like how it is a much more faster and memory efficient than other languages...

But, at the same time, C/C++ exposes us and doesn't protect us from ourselves.. I hope that you understand what I mean to say..

And, I guess that it is a fair tradeoff for the kind of power and control that these languages (C/C++) provide us..

And, I also agree with the fact that it is an language that ideally suits our need, if we wish to deal with compilers, graphics, OS, etc, in the future...

But, what I really want to ask here is:

In this age and times, when hardware has advanced so much, where technically, memory efficiency or execution speeds no longer is the topmost priority... These were the reasons for which C/C++ was initially created...

In today's time, human concept of time matters more and hence, syntactical less complicated languages like Java or Python are much more preferred, especially for domains like application development or data sciences...

So, is continuing with C++, an endeavour worth sticking with in the future or is it not required...

I am talking about this issue since I am in a dilemma about the use of C++ in the future...

I would be grateful if we could talk about keeping AI, Machine Learning or Algorithms Optimisation in mind... Since, these are the fields in which I am interested in...

I know that my question could have been posted in a better way.. But, considering the chaos that is present in my mind, regarding this question doesn't allow me to do so...

Any kind of suggestion or thoughts would be welcome and much appreciated...

P.S: I currently use C++ only for competitive programming or challenges...

That time when I wowed all my colleagues with C++-code that executed over 2.5x faster than theirs, without changing one line of code.

I guess they didn't know what -O2 does (or that it exists, for that matter).

This is a story about my disappointment in modern GUI editors for desktop applications.

Well, first of all, I grew up with Delphi 5. Delphi has an awesome form editor. It's intuitive and works without any problem. It always does what you want it to do. Prototyping is really a problem of seconds here, even for people that never used it (I guess).

But the problem is that it is Delphi. Its so old, bloated, and most problems you'll ever have have been solved (through a hack) 20 years ago in some weird forum.

So I looked on and tried many other drag'n'drop gui editors.

The one for java is the biggest pile of crap I've ever seen. It slows down eclipse /intellij and does almost never do what I want. At least its not really intuitive.

Right after that, the one for C# (this xml Designer ) is okay-ish, but it's also not really intuitive and does not always what the user wants.

I also tried other ones. But I still miss an intuitive one that works without weird side effects.

I now can understand why the Web dev stack grows in the region of desktop apps. I can prototype stuff even faster in angular than in Delphi.
But shouldn't we improve the desktop stack instead of taking some bloated stack using a language that should have never existed?

Entering Week4 post-layoff. Week2 of pretty much nothing but playing with my kids, doing house chores, exercising and job searching.

I spent like 3 hours in the gym last Friday. Instructor there turned to me and said "tough divorce?". To what I answered "very happily married, got laid off from work". He said that it would be his second guess.

Even before this whole crap I had enough cash flow-yielding investments to just about make rent. My wife makes enough to make sure we will want for nothing, our old folks have our kids' tuition fees covered, and we have some savings anyway.
But the anxiety-laden period between "send a dozen messages and resumė's" and having the same "greetings, fellow millenial!" meetings with different sets of tech-illiterate boomers and toddlers is becoming a boring nuisance, one that "having a side project to keep my mind warm" could solve.

Maybe I will fix the Stardew Valley Mods API for Android. I haven't done the C#/.NET thing since uni, and my frontend Java game is weak (at best) but how much could have it changed this last decade or so? /s

Maybe I will write a MongoDB Runner for Apache Beam. But I'm afraid that won't yeld enough street cred to be worth it Does anyone knows what it means?

Maybe I will finally be done consolidating a lifetime of cloud storage into a big-kid glacier-level LTS solution.

Dunno, bored here. Need some 20h/week project I can quit as soon as some job appears to be lining up. Ideas?

I'm really not sure. When I was 7-8 years old, I liked to view source in IE, then I somehow managed to use Javascript in the browser. First only some dumb opening of windows. And I liked Batch, so I made some files for copying, backup and stuff.

Then I got to PHP during the years from some online tutorial about making dynamic websites. My website was more static than stone, but yeah, I did page loading with PHP! Awful experience anyway, because I had to install Xampp, get it work and other stuff. 11 years old or so. (and I used Xampp only as a fileserver between laptop and desktop later, because.. PHP4... just no.)

As 12 years old or so I experienced my first World of Warcraft (vanilla) on a custom server in an internet cafe and I thought it's a singleplayer game. When I found out that no, I googled how to make my own server (hated multiplayer back then and loved good games with huge storylines). Failed miserably with ManGOS, got something to work with ArcEMU. There I learned some C++ basic stuff, which I hoped would helped me to fix some bugs. When I opened the code I was like: "Suuure." and left it like that. I learned what a MySQL database is, broke it like four times when I forgot WHERE and still rather played with websites i.e. html, css, js and optionally php when I wanted to repair a webpage for the server. With a friend we managed to get the server work via Hamachi, was fun, the server died too soon. Then I got ManGOS to work, but there wasn't really any interest to make a server anymore, just singleplayer for the lore. (big warcraft fan, don't kick me :D )

I think it was when I was 13y.o. I went to Delphi/Pascal course, which I liked a lot from the beginning, even managed to use my code on old Knoppix via Lazarus(Pascal). At this age I really liked thoae Flash games which were still common to see everywhere. So I downloaded .swfs, opened and tried to understand it. Managed to pull some stuff from it and rewrite in Pascal. Nope, never again that crap.

About the same time I got to Flash files I discovered Java. It was kind of popular back then, so I thought let's give it a try. I liked Flash more. Seriously. I've never seen so much repetitiveness and stupid styling of a code. I had either IDE for compiling C++ or Pascal or notepad! You think I wanted my code kicked all over the place in multiple folders and files? No.

So back to Pascal. I made some apps for my old hobby, was quite satisfied with the result (quiz like app), but it still wasn't the thing. And I really thought I'd like to study CS.

I started to love PHP because of phpBB forums I worked on as 15 y.o. I guess. At the same time I think there was an optional subject at school, again with Pascal. I hated the subject, teacher spoke some kind of gibberish I didn't really understand back then at all and now I find it only as a really stupid explanation of loops and strings.

So I started to hate Pascal subject, but not really the lang itself. Still I wanted something simpler and more portable. Then I got to Python as hm, 17y.o. I think and at the same time to C++ with DevC++. That was time when I was still deciding which lang to choose as my main one (still playing with website, database and js).

Then I decided that learning language from some teacher in a class seriously pisses me off and I don't want to experience it again. I choose Python, but still made some little scripts in C++, which is funny, because Python was considered only as a scripting lang back then.

I haven't really find a cross-platform framework for C++, which would: a) be easy to install b) not require VisualStudio PayForMe 20xy c) have nice license if I managed to make something nice and distribute it. I found Unity3D though, so I played with Blender for models, Audacity for music and C# for code. Only beautiful memories with Unity. I still haven't thought I'm a programmer back then.

For Python however I found Kivy and I was playing with it on a phone for about a year. Still I haven't really know what to do back then, so I thought... I like math, numbers, coding, but I want to avoid studying physics. Economics here I go!

Now I'm in my third year at Uni, should be writing thesis, study hard and what I do? Code like never before, contribute, work on a 3D tutorial and play with Blender. Still I don't really think about myself as a programmer, rather hobby-coder.

So, to answer the question: how did I learn to program? Bashing to shit until it behaved like I desired i.e. try-fail learning. I wouldn't choose a different path.

So I am working on a cloud app, Angular on the frontend and NestJS with heavy AWS dependency at the backend. I took my time to learn the stack and I have a couple of years of experience with each piece involved.
Since I am a Level 1 developer, management thought (and I felt same way) it would be nice for me to work with a couple of Level 3 devs.

Well, they hired Level 3 devs:
- a senior Java developer who never touched AWS, any kind of frontend or Typescript
- a senior c++ dev with the same “never touched” as above

And guess what? I have to train them both in Angular, Typescript etc. Kinda defeats the whole purpose of L3, “they will help you to deliver stuff fast”, and adds load on me (I am already a shared resource on 3 teams).
Oh, and yeah, management already promised to release the app by the end of the year and so far I am the only capable and functional developer on the team who has to deliver everything.

I had so much hope for new hiring cycle lol

Some more favorite 'about mes' from users I've talked with in the past:

RememberMe
"Generic McGenericsson"

Real name: Smith, John.

Experience: University

Occupation: Doing stuff.

From: Somewhere.

kescherRant
Skills
"something I guess"

How I feel any given day.

Location
Vienna, Austria

Did you get rejected from art school too?

akshar
"please teach me React before php swallows me :c"

I'LL SWALLOW YOUR SOUL! - php, probably.

SortOfTested
"Building software to make the electric utility industry .05% less shitty"

relevant: If you stare long enough into the abyss, it'll stare back into you.

A post today made me think about this interview I had about a year ago... I shall tell you all about it.

Went to a hiring event for this company everyone was cool but this one guy (who would have been my boss) was a total arrogant, douchey, know it all.

So anyways cue interviewing with him a week later. He says if I give you task A, B, C and they need to be done by the end of the week in which order do you do them. (Note: he literally said abc not actual tasks)

Me: I don't really know how to answer that question without more information.

Him: Well I like to see how people answer it... So think about it for a second.

Me: Ok I guess if doing one task would help me do the next task faster I would do it in that order. Like I can use code or concepts from C to do B faster.

Him: What if A would take 2 days and B and C would take 1 day.

Me: I don't see how that would influence the order I do them in.

Him: Would you complete one task after another or switch between them or do see simultaneously.

Me: It would depend on my previous answer and what would be the fastest way to get them done but without more info I literally cannot give you an answer of like I would do B, C, A.

Him: Would you do the longest task first or the shorter tasks.

Me: I don't know I guess it depends on if it would help you or somebody else move forward with something if I got a particular task or the shorter tasks done first.

So cue more of this kind of back and forth about arbitrary details about undefined theoretical tasks for like 10 minutes.

Suffice is to say I didn't get the job and I'm glad.

Holy fuck EA (yea I went there)

So here I am playing NFS Heat, and my laptop is hot enough to cook eggs on the keyboard, no joke, yet spec wise I should have 0 issues running this game.

I switch on the turbo cool (basically spin the internal fans at full speed... It's an MSI) and this usually covers any heating issues, nope... not this time.

this fucker of a fan can't keep up , so I've turned down the settings from ULTRA, that's depressing, to Medium... it feels like 2006 showed back up, but here's this laptop still burning a whole in my fingers.

My GPU (GTX1060 6GB) is running at 95'c on Medium graphics, and LOW looks like I fell into a 8bit world with slow ass rendering.

Guess I'm going to need to get some cooling assistance for this thing.

Thank you EA for turning my 2.5k laptop into a stove top, I appreciate it.

I guess the name checks out, "heat"

I am a computer science student and have worked with Java and C++ until now. A week ago i started in a job i have gotten from my professor. I have to reverse engineer a big python project and figure out how some things work on the serverside. This is the first time i have to work with python.

I get that you can write code fast with this dynamically typed language, but BOY. Is it just me or is this language fucking hard to reverse engineer? I mean what the fuck. There are some member variables in which can be anything. Like you suggest there is an object of this and that and then python comes in and is like: Good guess, but fuck you.

So... umm...
Just remembered my Informatics teacher left me and my friend a side project to do by the end of summer:
The task is to replicate the game "Minesweeper" in a C# form.
Now, I never actually even understood that game when I played it, how the hell can I program that? ;-;
Well okay, yeah, I might have to actually start looking into it... but freak, it's almost the end of summer already, and I'm still on vacation... my fault I guess. ;—;

Somebody ranted about his teacher showing windows presentation and teaching nothing. I wanted to comment that post but i have enough material to make the whole rant out of it.

Well at least you have those presentations! In my school we have 2 IT classrooms one with win xp, 1ghz cpu, 0,5gb ram computers and one with win vista, 2 core 2ghz cpu and 2gb of ram PCs.

Guess what room our teacher is using... of course the worse one! The second one is fine, few years ago another theacher had been using it!

I tried to convince him to change rooms but he is coming up with silly exciuses! (like "server is not working here!", well i fixed it with my friend but why are you even talking about it when you are not using yours in old class!)

PS. That server is useless anyway, every pc is connected to router that is connected to internet so supervisor pc is not mandatory, only acces restriction is enforced by win accounts.

I heard from students from my class (that picked that optional IT course) (i'm in high school) that gimp is not working because pc's are so bad!
Sometimes even notepad frezzes.🤔

Not only class is shite but teacher clearly has no idea what is he doing. (in order to pass the final from IT you need to learn simple C++, up to simple foo objects) and of course he isn not even talking about that! On one lesson about sorting algorithms he gave everybody 10 small pieces of paper with numbers on them and told everybody to sort them manualy, because he didnt know how to do it himself! So there is no doubt they wont be able code it.

I need to mention that i volontered to "clean, fix" that classroom (in order to convince teacher to move). And in that class i saw programms written in c++ on every computer! That means somebody was teaching propely before! 😣

I feel sorry for those guys, they are just waisting time. I would fall for it as well but i decided i can learn coding in home ;).
Well, results are shocking, after 1 month of coding i learned C# and i can basicly make any algorithm i ever wish. I learned about computer operation so well that i can nearly teach computer science. (i helped my friend in usa that is a electronic student with that and i'm very proud of it 😁) and it class still can't even use all 3 loops correctly... 😥 Ok i must admit i have been coding for a looooong while so i had time to learn basic c,c++ and pc operations before, but point still stands.

Why the hell are you wasting life of those studends? Why are you giving them a choice to learn coding WHEN YOU CANT EVEN USE PC YOURSELF?! (that it course is optional so you can apply if you want so)

I dont regret not bothering about it.

so they are really out there...

people who beleive C# is just the one source of truth and all other languages are just garbage

🤡

sad to be so ignorant - though i guess ignorance is bliss

to be clear: I use C# like anyone else, but it's just a tool in the toolkit, that's all

Well this is the thing. I have been starting to replace a lot of my shit with Golang. I think it is a great language because of one small fact: it is a boring language.

With this I don't mean that it is not incredibly fun to use. It is and honestly I feel that a lot of the concepts that I had from C passed quite nicely with some additions. The language does not do anything special and there is no elegant code. It works in a very procedural fashion without taking into consideration any of the snazzy things found in JS, Python, c# etc etc. Interfaces and struct make sense to me, way more than oop does in other languages. I don't need generics with the use of interface parameters and I have hadly found a situation in which I have to strive too far away from the way things are done with Go to be happy with it, then again my projects are not hard or by any means groundbreaking (most of them deal with logistics or content management and a couple of financial apps that I am rewriting in Go from work)

The outcome is fast and easy to read since idiomatic go is for the most part very readable(no people...single letter variable names are by no means a standard and they should feel ashamed from it)

I miss the idea of a framework, but not so much and the docs and internal code for Go is just way top inviting. I believe the code to be readable enough than anyone that has gotten used to the syntax and ideas of the language can just jump in and start learning. This is the first language that I have learnt from studying the code as it is inside of the standard lib, the same I cannot say for any other language or framework.

Also, it play beautifully nice with vs code.

I dunno man, I feel that I am doing something wrong. I have projects built in Node, php, python, ruby and spring java as well as .net core and I still find Golang way more appealing simply because it goes harder than Python with "one preferred way" to do things.

The lang does not make me feel like a pro, i certainly develop in it at pro speeds, but it was made with beginners in mind to built fast and concurrent apps, with the most minimal syntax possible.

I guess my gripe with it is that it gets shunned from this, saying that it ignored years of lang research to make it as dumbed down as possible. Which it did, lack of generics amongst other things certainly make it seem like, but I will not say that it was poorly designed. Not at all, I believe it is a testament of amazing engineering. To be able to create such a simple yet amazingly powerful language.

Wish there were more to it. Wish there was a nice gui lib or a ml framework comparable to the ones offered by python and java. But I guess such things will come with time.

I feel stupid with this language.

And that is fine.

My C# class loves to come up with weird/unrealistic scenarios to teach a specific language feature... I feel like the more effective way to teach would be to mention a real life scenario where it makes more sense to use the feature and give it some context rather than coming up with some arbitrary series of classes to represent departments and employees and then say "write extension methods for them to write them out"

If you tell me that I'm going to go, ok this works, but is there a specific reason I should do this instead of using a for or foreach to do the exact same thing? Don't get me wrong I see the appeal of extension methods as well as LINQ but this class never gives any sort of context as to why we're doing stuff. This class could be good, I've had classes that focus on language specific features taught in ways that make sense... My Java prof did a great job...

Also all the slides are terribly written...

Like I attached an example of the description for extension methods... The slides then go on to explain how the syntax for them works and gives an example...

Like ok I guess technically you told me what they are and how to use them, but gave zero context...

On the opposite end of the spectrum, I go to MSDN for their definition of extension methods, and it is much more clearly written and gives context to where/why they're used... and this is supposed to be a 5th semester course...

My "dev specialty" when I first started was Flash and ActionScript. I just wanted to make funny games and shitpost animations on Newgrounds.

Eventually I got steered into building basic websites. Those were the Dreamweaver MX days. JavaScript + jQuery were all the rage.

Then I got a job building SharePoint modules, got exposed to legitimate programming languages like C# and learned more about enterprise software architecture, design patterns, yadda yadda. I started hanging out more with the front-end guys, who taught me SASS and SMACSS and all that jazz.

Eventual jobs kept leaning me towards front-end, so I guess that's the hole I find myself in lately. Sometimes I get a sprinkle of devops, some infrastructure stuff, maybe a little solution design here and there.

Now I maintain shitpost enterprise applications built by other devs who like spaghetti and meatballs. At least I put in funny ASCII art for strings in my unit tests.

Got one right now, no idea if it’s the “most” unrealistic, because I’ve been doing this for a while now.

Until recently, I was rewriting a very old, very brittle legacy codebase - we’re talking garbage code from two generations of complete dumbfucks, and hands down the most awful codebase I’ve ever seen. The code itself is quite difficult to describe without seeing it for yourself, but it was written over a period of about a decade by a certifiably insane person, and then maintained and arguably made much worse by a try-hard moron whose only success was making things exponentially harder for his successor to comprehend and maintain. No documentation whatsoever either. One small example of just how fucking stupid these guys were - every function is wrapped in a try catch with an empty catch, variables are declared and redeclared ten times, but never used. Hard coded credentials, hard coded widths and sizes, weird shit like the entire application 500ing if you move a button to another part of the page, or change its width by a pixel, unsanitized inputs, you name it, if it’s a textbook fuck up, it’s in there, and then some.

Because the code is so damn old as well (MySQL 8.0, C#4, and ASP.NET 3), and utterly eschews the vaguest tenets of structured, organized programming - I decided after a month of a disproportionate effort:success ratio, to just extract the SQL queries, sanitize them, and create a new back end and front end that would jointly get things where they need to be, and most importantly, make the application secure, stable, and maintainable. I’m the only developer, but one of the senior employees wrote most of the SQL queries, so I asked for his help in extracting them, to save time. He basically refused, and then told me to make my peace with God if I missed that deadline. Very helpful.

I was making really good time on it too, nearly complete after 60 days of working on it, along with supporting and maintaining the dumpster fire that is the legacy application. Suddenly my phone rings, and I’m told that management wants me to implement a payment processing feature on the site, and because I’ve been so effective at fixing problems thus far, they want to see it inside of a week. I am surprised, because I’ve been regularly communicating my progress and immediate focus to management, so I explain that I might be able to ship the feature by end of Q1, because rather than shoehorn the processor onto the decrepit piece of shit legacy app, it would be far better to just include it in the replacement. I add that PCI compliance is another matter that we must account for, and so there’s not a great chance of shipping this in a week. They tell me that I have a month to do it…and then the Marketing person asks to see my progress and ends up bitching about everything, despite the front end being a pixel perfect reproduction. Despite my making everything mobile responsive, iframe free, secure and encrypted, fast, and void of unpredictable behaviors. I tell her that this is what I was asked to do, and that there should have been no surprises at all, especially since I’ve been sending out weekly updates via email. I guess it needed more suck? But either way, fuck me and my two months of hard work. I mean really, no ego, I made a true enterprise grade app for them.

Short version, I stopped working on the rebuild, and I’m nearly done writing the payment processor as a microservice that I’ll just embed as an iframe, since the legacy build is full of those anyway, and I’m being asked to make bricks without straw. I’m probably glossing over a lot of finer points here too, just because it’s been such an epic of disappointment. The deadline is coming up, and I’m definitely going to make it, now that I have accordingly reduced the scope of work, but this whole thing has just totally pissed me off, and left a bad taste about the organization.

Wrote my first programs on my Commodore C64.
First program was a number guessing game where you needed to guess a number between 1 and 100. Shit had 300+ lines because I only new the if clause and the equals comparison.
I was 9.

Later a friend showed me Modula 2 and I was instantly in love with that language.

Real programming then in school (C, C++, µC assembler).

I FUCKING GIVE UP!

Yep I'm pissed of :D I spend the last two months waiting like a idiot some business to answer about their job offers (more or less 3 in my area..)

Well I failed the last test of the first one, it was expected I guess. Lot of things happened but let's say I didn't use the approach that they were hoping me to use (you could have tell me you know...).

So... There is even one of the job offer, I called them already twice. Asking when they will call back. Each time it was : this week or the week after. Yeah I think that makes 5/6 weeks since the first time I called now...

But the thing which really piss me of. Is that I was waiting like a idiot, doing mostly nothing. Like if I couldn't focus on my projects before that I get a job... Well I guess when everyone is asking about when you will have a job or a girlfriend, that's not the atmosphere that I love to work with T. T

Oh yeah, no dev related. But I fall in love with a Russian girl (I'm a French guy btw). I completely messed up the relationship though xD well no way that I'm giving up anyway. And that's mostly thanks to her that I just woke up of that shitty period ^^

Sooo I started to gather people from all over the world on LinkedIn. Checking job offers on StackOverflow. And Monday I'll start writing some post on LinkedIn searching for a job in the whole fucking world. I hope there will have a business who wants a junior C++ dev :P Remote probably, I'd like to travel easily (yeah, I probably want to go to Russia a little too xP)

That's all :D I FUCKING GIVE UP ABOUT WAITING DOING NOTHING LIKE A IDIOT!!!

So c++ isn't really ideal for robotics? I could just not understand c++ correctly. I think it's just my terrible understanding of why a compiler is needed. I am an intermediate Python Dev, so I guess I'd like to download the "language" and go, ya know?

What do you think about my language choice set for the future (knowing I want to work as a software and app developer) ? Anything to add / remove ?

- C++: Fast and well-documented, so I think it's a standard even in the next decades to come

- Java: Although I think that this language will more likely die in the next decade, I'll maybe keep this language because some dinosaurs enterprises still rely on it. Ah and mainly because it's still widely used in Android apps programming. For now.

Talking about Android, does learning Kotlin worth it ?

- Python: Will mainly use it for automation and prototyping, but nothing more, as it seems not to be widely use in the software development field (or it is ?). I'll also keep it for hobbies, however.

- Rust: This language seems to be a rising star in the industry since it is very clean, classic, as fast as C / C++ while introducing more safety. However I'll wait a bit for this one since it requires more complicated and abstract knowledge I do not have yet.

- Javascript (or more particularly JSX): Hurts to say I'll keep it, even more than Java. I'd let it in the web development hell I won't step in if it was not used in webapps / cross-platform mobile applications. And since this kind of stuff looks trendy, I don't think I can avoid it. Plus, I liked working with React Native. Sorry.

- C#: Seems to be a must when working on Windows software interfaces, so guess I'll have to learn this one. Will do so gladly, it looks better than Java

Ok, so, serious question.
How the frick do you time a music game properly?
IN C#?

...Ok, maybe in C# it's just impossible, isn't it? Because I've done a metronome, it kinda works, but it's... wobbly... Because the thread stops every time the music effect is being played.
And also how do you make the notes...? ...I should design an entire editor for charts/maps, I guess, but how do I make that in C#?

So maybe I should try in Unity?
What do you think? I want to make a music game so bad ;–;

It is approximately 42 degrees C outside. And guess whose fucking compressor just went to shit? Mine. Fucking piece of shit. I absolutely fucking hate this shit. Finding the time to go to the shop is pointless when I can fix it myself, but IN the fucking event that the compressor is actually faulty and needs to be replaced then I would have to struggle to wait for the fucking part to get here. If my luck permits and this is an issue that is fixable through a simple relay change then fucking hooray.

But I know how fucking shitty my fucking luck is and its going to fuck me in the ass probably. I will troop through the heat, no problem, but I am the one that carries my 2 year old daughter everywhere and I am not about to put her through that bullshit.

So I call my wife and explain to her the situation, I don't need for her to do fucking anything, I can take care of it myself, but I tell her NOT to have me go out on random bullshit with the girl while the car is like that, I did it to make her understand beforehand because every day is an additional 1 and a half hours of driving around the city to take her do bullshit. I told her that in the event of me needing to go pick something up then it would have to be after the fucking sun goes out(which in this fucking bullshit ass town it happens after fucking 7 or 7:30pm) and she would have to stay home with the girl. What does she do? she gets upset. Of course she got fucking upset. Like if I need that fucking bs right now. OH and my fucking main Linux machine is apparently having battery issues.

OAN my manager gave me my performance review yesterday. The she made are outstanding and my score is perfect. The board is going to give a raise to everyone of us that got an high enough score so that got me in a good mood. I am holding on to that feeling before I lose my shit. Every single fucking time some bs puts me in this mood I am constantly wishing that a motherfucker would.

Fucking bullshit man. Can't have a FUCKING break anyfuckingwere.

This just in on an episode of Murphy's fucking law.

Who else wishes the ATM throws an exception after withdrawals

Why is it that every python project I come across seems to not even want you to use it.
The deployment always sucks, you get some random ass errors because some parts are in python 2 instead of 3 I guess. If there's a C library involved it most definitely won't work. What the fuck is conda and why do I need it to install software?
Where is the documentation to build a release yourself if the public ones don't work?

Finally started my side project. Everyone says I'm gonna drop it far before it's done, but I still have hope! I'm not sure if I'm blind or motivated, but I guess I'll find soon enough!
FYI, I'm a mobile dev (c#) but I'm gonna try to learn something else along the way : it's a web project!!!
I'm in the excitement phase, I'll see you in the depression phase.

Help. I work with a guy who really wants to learn programming (he’s sales/support rn) and is even taking some courses on it. He seems eager enough to learn, the problem is he is just so fucking stupid I don’t know whether to encourage him or level with him.

He somehow managed to pass a course on Java (which I still don’t believe since I had to help him put his lines of code in the right order ffs), but now he’s signed up for C++ and data structures and I honestly don’t know how he’s going to do it.

This is the type of guy who loves “coding” but thinks debugging is a waste of time.

Normally I encourage anyone who wants to learn programming do so, but let’s be honest it does take a modicum of intelligence and this guy has zero common sense at all. We’re talking about a guy who sent me a *screenshot* of an Excel file that I needed to copy some activation codes from. And then had absolutely no idea what was wrong when I replied “are you fucking with me right now?”

*sigh*

And that’s not even scratching the surface. I sent him a zip file containing some updated code and walked him through how to update them on Slack (really basic, copy/replace files stuff). Then the VERY next day when I sent him a second update he asks “is there something you want me to do with this?”

The instructions were literally the last thing we talked about in the chat log.

I actually fear the stuff this guy would unleash upon the world if someone were actually able to teach him how to write a whole program.

What should I do? Right now my plan is to be vaguely supportive but secretly hope he will realize he’s in over his head and drop out before any damage is done. But my worry is he may just be SO dumb that he actually thinks he can do it. At that point I guess I just have to put my faith in his school and pray that they aren’t just giving degrees away to whoever can afford them. Because fear the day this guy ever gets a degree in programming.

Is the CS field creating terms for the sake of creating terms?

Someone mentioned a "closure" in another post. I instinctively knew what they meant by that based upon the code I saw. I had heard the term thrown around before, but it had not yet connected in my mind. I wondered why I had not been exposed enough to care.

So I thought: What does C++ have as far as closures?

I found that C++ has lambdas. Those are definitions for function objects. They do not exist at runtime. But a closure does. The analog is you have classes. They are definitions and do not exist at runtime. But instances of classes do. So at runtime the instance is what you are working with. This is the same as lambdas vs closures in C++. The closure is the runtime counterpart. Why a separate term for what essentially is an instance? Is it because it captures data and code? As far as I know the closure is all data that gets passed around that calls a function. So it is essentially an instance of a lambda.

Another term: memoization. I have yet to see this added to any dictionary in online tools like a browser. Is the term so specific that nobody cares to add it? I mean these are tools programmers use all the time.

My guess is these terms originated a long time ago and I have just not been exposed to the contexts for these terms enough. It just seems like I feel like I have been in the field a long time. But a lot of terms seem alien to me. I also have never seen these terms used at work. Many of the devs I work with actively avoid CS specific terms to not confuse our electrical coworkers. My background started in electrical. So maybe I just didn't do enough CS in college.

I'm delirious so here's your daily dose of fuck:

```fasm
; --- * --- * ---
; 64-bit byte-by-byte mash

macro clamp_u8 {
mov cl,$08;
mov rdx,rax;
rept 8 \{
rol rdx,cl;
xor al,dl;
\};
};

; --- * --- * ---
; give 8-bit random seed

macro prng_u8 {
rdtsc;
shl rdx,32;
or rax,rdx;
clamp_u8;
};

; --- * --- * ---
; roll dice

d20: prng_u8;

; x%20, according to gcc ;>
mov edi,eax;
mov eax,-51;
mul dil;
shr ax,12;
lea eax,[rax+rax*4];
lea edx,[0+rax*4];
mov eax,edi;
sub eax,edx;

; discard high and give
and rax,$FF;
ret;
```

I guess `d20` could be inlined too but I thought it'd be too much.

Is it faster than straight C? Probably not. But it's way lighter, so it loads faster. Below five hundred bytes mother fucker.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'll go sit in the darkness repeteadly typing roll 1d20 on the terminal. For reasons.

<notarant>
Just got my class schedule for freshman Computer Science. Find out they teach C++ for Programming 101. Guess I should stop using C for the next couple months and buy a C++ book.
</notarant>

Got a bad question here. I've got my homepage (login + some archives with access permission) which I made in HTML + php (yeah I know). But I just hate how php looks. So I'd like to rewrite that whole little bastard now using some other language (not php obviously). What do you recommend? Which Lang's/frameworks are being used. I heard python and java spring were good but I wanted to hear the opinion of some real devs I guess. I'm rather a back end dude (c++) but I think it would be useful to learn some web programming too (not interested in fancy animations and shit, just a good ol' single colored site that displays the content)

Visual studio code

I usually use IDEs and am in love with everything made by Jetbrains. I am also to lazy to setup dual boot on my pc, so I live with windows 10. After one of the recent downgrades Microsoft distribute, they shipped this lightweight text editor called visual studio code with it.

It lied to me, that it's a good editor for coding C. It even tells me that I can compile and execute the code from inside the editor, similar to vim. I went to the settings and found a dark theme, for the best best feature this "editor"has to offer.

I give it a try by opening a source file with a normal double click. Editor gets focused, but the code is nowhere to be seen. Retrying conforms my, that this piece of shit is literally not able to open files UNLESS you drag and drop them into the editor. HOW FUCKING USELESS IS THAT?

Next I want to compile the program. Guess what, that functionality was not given or at least I could not find it (same goes with the manual)

Even with dark theme it burns my eyes to use this editor. There are almost no useful shortcuts. The functionality is not even comparable to vim. I always thought eclipse was bad, until this shit was installed.

It might work well for other people. Maybe it has functions, that just don't work on my pc, but from what I've seen: visual studio in general and especially that editor feels like Microsoft trying to replace the toolet paper with sandpaper.

Here's an incomplete list of things my mother did to me:
- She insulted my body when I was 13. She told me it was weak and feminine. I identified as a boy back then, and I was going to the gym.
- She told me my face was ugly because of acne.
- She shamed me for having better vision than her.
- She shamed me for having longer eyelashes than her, the told me I looked like a girl.
- She always wanted me to learn everything and have all A's. When I got B+, she destroyed me mentally every time. When I got C, this was a catastrophe. Yet, if I told her she was wrong about mundane things like how many volts there are in an outlet, it was me who's in the wrong, despite me having an A for physics. There was no contradiction here in her eyes.
- She forced me to carry heavy things as a punishment. At the age of fifteen, I had an inguinal hernia. The surgery was needed. After that, doctors told me (and her) that I should go easy on carrying heavy things for a month. She didn't listen and forced me to carry heavy things again after two weeks. I had another inguinal hernia. Now, I needed a much more invasive laparoscopy to implant nylon webbing. Because of all of that, now I have messy, ugly scars all over my belly. Guess what happened next? She shamed me for having them!
- Since I was 18, even though I was studying in the uni, she demanded money for rent, for me living in my parents' house I grew up in. The sum she demanded was 27x my scholarship money.
- When I broke my toe, it was obvious that I broke it. It was swollen, twice the size of a normal toe, for two weeks straight. She told me to quit whining and go to PE/Taekwon-do lessons she forced me to attend.

i had an epiphany today, in a discussion with the software architect of our new project.

i'm having the epic job to design & implement a prototype for a C++ library in a new software project and collected some inspiration in our "old" software, where i'm maintaining the module that fulfills the same functionality (i thought). i've been maintaining this module for around a year now. i analyzed the different features and stuff to consider and created a partial model of the new library.

when i showed it to the architect today, he was like "oh my god, no no no, you don't need all this functionality, this shall not be part of the new library!"

this was the moment when i realized how deeply fucked up the code base of the old module is.

imagine it like this:
you want to automate the process of making yourself a good ol' cup of coffee.
the reasonable thing would be to have

- a smart water boiler where you set parameters water temperature and amount of water to be fetched from the water supply
- a smart coffee bean grinder where you can set type of beans, amount of beans and grinding fineness
- a component where water and ground coffee are joined to brew the coffee, where parameters like duration, pressure etc. are set
- a milk tank where amount of milk, desired temperature and duration / speed of foaming can be set
- a sugar dispenser where amount of applied sugar can be set
- optionally, additional modules with spices, syrup, ice cubes, whatever for your very personal coffee experience

on requesting a coffee, you would then configure and orchestrate all components to your wishes to make you a fine cup of coffee. you can also add routines like "makeCappucchino()", "makeEspresso()", or whatever.

our software is not like this.
it is like this:
- a smart water boiler consisting of submodules that know how to cook water for e.g. "cappucchino with sugar" or for "espresso without sugar, but with milk and ice cubes"
- 5 smart bean grinders that know how to grind beans for e.g. cappucchino, espresso, latte macchiato and for 73ml of water preheated to 82°C
- a very smart sugar dispenser that knows how to add sugar to 95, 98 and 100°C coffee and to coffee made of BOTH coffee arabica AND coffee robusta beans.

etc. etc., i think you're getting the gist.

when i realized this, it was like, right in front of my eyes, this terrible pattern emerged like a foul, corrupted caleidoscope of chaos, through the whole code base of this module.
i've already known how rotten from the core this code base is, but today i've actually identified a really bad pattern that i hadn't realized before. the whole architecture is so bloated that it is hard to have an overview of the whole thing. and it would require a LOT of refactoring to repair this pattern.
but i guess it would also be infinitely satisfying because i could probably reduce the code base for 30% or something...

but unfortunately, this is never going to happen, because screw refactoring.

it's a great feeling to start this new library from scratch, tho...

I give software support to Rugged handhelds in a company and everyday some IT support moron comes to me with a crazy request. The day just started and...

IT Tech: "Hello, C, can you improve the touchscreen sensibility? It's not so responsive and sometimes we have to click more than one time to something work"

**breath in**

Me: "That's ok, the rugged ones that you have are very old, besides they have resistive screen, so your fingers won't do a good job"

IT Tech: "THERE'S NO WAY TO FIX IT? I guess I'll open a ticket for you to study more calmly about the issue"

**NGGGGGGGGGHHHH**

Me: "If it's not a software thing, I can't do that, I don't have hardware skills, I guess you'll have to call our provider about that, but, before you do something, try to recalibrate your handhelds, the majority of the users don't do that at the system's start and the touch experience really can become a mess"

IT Tech: "Hmmm, I'll try that, otherwise I'll back to you, thanks!"

OMFGGGGG

I am open to suggestions of a magic batch file/ .NET CF 2.0 software that will turn their handhelds into a Galaxy S6 touch experience. THANKS!

I wanted to update my previous rant in the comment but what happened is such a fucking nonsense I think it deserves its own.

For those who don't want to look what it is, just another C++ noob (aka me) complaining about how the language was a bitch to him by throwing a random SEGFAULT on release while it didn't show up on debug. Welp.

Half an hour and a ton of std::cout later (thought I would try to read a disassembly ? Think again) I figured out what was the problematic section of code. And guess what ? It was a section I didn't even modify and I never had problems with. Something completely unrelated to what I was rightly imagining causing the issue.

To identify which exact subsection was throwing the error to my face I added more tag code.
Rubbing my hands and ready to fix the fuck out of this damn shit, I built it, launched it…

And all of a sudden the code worked.

All I did. Was to add more cout to know which line fucked up. And now it works.

So. Serious question now: is it a clear sign from heaven I should stop working with such languages and should go back in my shitty high level languages kindergarten ?

There a times I love python for its quick way of writing things. But there are more times that python makes me angry or just frustrates me with its indentation logic.🤪
When the indentation in my project lets the code either accidentally run a million times more or a tab/spaces inconsistency that no tool warns me about except runtime error.
What about a language that combines pythons easy way with brackets on top?😪 I guess it already exists?😅
For my project C++ would be a viable alternative, but so far the language seems very weird to write.

// First rant
So I've spent the last three days trying to send requests to a website in C# (never had done that, so I had to learn from scratch) and using XPath to select certain nodes from the html.
Today, I port it to a new UWP project and turns out it doesn't support XPath. I guess I should learn LINQ now...fml

WTF?

TL;DR Integration between software failed so hard I lost 20% of my progress in one hit. Yay! /s

I, being a Fool, signed up to do NaNoWriMo this year (50k words in 30 days of November). I've won it before, and failed it before, and this year was especially stupid as I've got a bigger pile on my plate than usual, what with getting as quickly up to speed on c# and React as I can in prep for starting the new job in December.

I started on a high - 4k on day one, woohoo! To my delight, my writing software Scrivener now had an integration feature to let you update your total word count straight to your account instead of manually entering it. I added my credentials, hit the button, refreshed the page, all updated. So far so good.

Then, on day two, I wrote 1700-ish words. Still good, well ahead of target, took me over 5k. Updated through Scrivener, checked it updated the site, still good.

Then, yesterday, I logged in and added a tiny tiny number of words (brain went blah), and was horrified to discover it had taken 1900 words off my count!

Cue panic as I frantically searched for the missing words, trying to find any evidence of where they'd gone. Gave up after half an hour of futility, bashed out enough to squeak back over 5k, confirmed it had updated.

I'm not unfamiliar with the general stupidity most organisations have on integration - they don't have it, or it's an afterthought, or it's just plain terrible - but this was a ridiculously simple thing to do, I'd have thought? Passing one fucking number and some date/time tracking?

This is what I get for trying to do too many things at once, I guess!