A devRant Update!

Hey everyone,

We thought now would be a great time for a devRant summer update on what we've added recently and what we've been working on.

Highlights since our last update:

- We launched devRant++, a supporter program for people who want to help us cover our costs while getting some cool extra features (a supporter badge on rants/comments/profile, reserved spot on our in-app supporter list, ability to edit rants/comments for up to 30 minutes instead of 5, and thanks to immediate user feedback, we also added the ability to post a rant every 1 hour instead of 2, and post comments that are up to 2,000 characters instead of 1,000!) We are extremely happy and thankful for the great response the program has gotten and we plan to continue to improve it using your feedback.

- We added the ability to subscribe to a user's rants. This makes it so you get a notification whenever that user posts a new rant!

- We added an "active discussions" feature (available in the "more" tab on the right). If you're looking to join a conversation happening in the moment, then this feature will help you discover those rants. It shows rants that have recently been commented on so if it's a topic that interests you, you can easily get in on the discussion!

Some stuff we have in the pipeline:

- More fun avatar stuff, including fun new OS/language-themed pets
- More perks for the devRant++ subscriber program - if you have anything you'd like to see, please let us know and we will try to make it happen!
- We will be testing some stuff to help classify rant types (rants, jokes, questions, etc.) in order to create a more personalized experience
- On that note, we're also going to take some more time to do some work on the algo as we haven't done much in terms of improvement since the initial smart algo launched
- Community projects page update - we've been slacking on updating the page and apologize for that. If you have created a devRant-related project and it's not on the community page, please resend it to david@hexicallabs.com (even if you sent it already) so we can make sure it gets added. Sorry about that!

A note on community etiquite regarding voting on content:

We've always believed that one of the most important and awesome experiences on devRant is getting your content noticed and appreciated by others. If you enjoy a piece of content, you should upvote it. If you enjoy 500 pieces of content, you should upvote them all. People really appreciate others enjoying their rants and comments so let them know if you do! If you don't like content, you can downvote it with the relevant reason. What we don't encourage is voting on content that you haven't actually looked at or spamming upvotes in mass for content you're not even actually reading/viewing. While we don't encourage that, it's not explicitly disallowed so we won't impose any penalty for it.

What is strictly prohibited and enforced is using scripts or automated procedures for voting on content. Anyone who is caught doing that will have their account deleted without warning. While very rare, we caught a couple of people doing that this week and both accounts in question were immediately deleted once discovered. To be clear, this is the practice of explicitly using a script or automation to mass vote on content. You will NEVER be banned/deleted for voting on a lot of content manually, even if you vote quickly and on lots of stuff. We just want to make that clear becuase this is not meant to discourage people from voting, it is only regarding votes not placed by humans. So if you're a human voting on content, you have nothing to worry about, we promise!

Please feel free to let us know if you have any questions or feedback on any of this. We love constructive feedback and in the past it has gone a very long way to improving and advancing the devRant community. And as always, thank you to everyone who contributed to the community in any way, we really appreciate it and want to keep making your experienfce better.

Happy ranting,
~David and Tim (Team devRant)
@dfox @trogus

My mentor/guider at my last internship.

He was great at guiding, only 1-2 years older than me, brought criticism in a constructive way (only had a very tiny thing once in half a year though) and although they were forced to use windows in a few production environments, when it came to handling very sensitive data and they asked me for an opinion before him and I answered that closed source software wasn't a good idea and they'd all go against me, this guy quit his nice-guy mode and went straight to dead-serious backing me up.
I remember a specific occurrence:
Programmers in room (under him technically): so linuxxx, why not just use windows servers for this data storage?
Me: because it's closed source, you know why I'd say that that's bad for handling sensitive data
Programmers: oh come on not that again...
Me: no but really look at it from my si.....
Programmers: no stop it. You're only an intern, don't act like you know a lot about thi....
Mentor: no you shut the fuck up. We. Are. Not. Using. Proprietary. Bullshit. For. Storing. Sensitive. Data.
Linuxxx seems to know a lot more about security and privacy than you guys so you fucking listen to what he has to say.
Windows is out of the fucking question here, am I clear?

Yeah that felt awesome.

Also that time when a mysql db in prod went bad and they didn't really know what to do. Didn't have much experience but knew how to run a repair.
He called me in and asked me to have a look.
Me: *fixed it in a few minutes* so how many visitors does this thing get, few hundred a day?
Him: few million.
Me: 😵 I'm only an intern! Why did you let me access this?!
Him: because you're the one with the most Linux knowledge here and I trust you to fix it or give a shout when you simply can't.

Lastly he asked me to help out with iptables rules. I wasn't of much help but it was fun to sit there debugging iptables shit with two seniors 😊

He always gave good feedback, knew my qualities and put them to good use and kept my motivation high.

Awesome guy!

Senior: Why did you refactor those ten files?

Junior: There was a method copy-pasted in every one of them, so I moved it to a utils class.

Senior: Don't you know we will have to test all of those changed classes again? Please, rollback!

Junior: ok.

... two days later ...

Senior: Why did you just copy-paste that method? Don't you know it's bad practice?

Most constructive thing I've found on SO so far 😂

Ranted about him before. The to the max windows fanboy. But next to being that, he had the habit of shooting down any and every idea/suggestion etc I had. Which is still quite 'fine' if you come up with good alternatives but he only came up with his own fucking preferences. (thing to keep in mind is that he wasn't even on our (me and one other guy) projects (!!!))

It would always go like this:

Him: soo, how are you planning on doing this?
Me: well I was thinking about {insert idea}.
Him: *wtf face* why?!?
Me: *comes up with constructive arguments*
Him: well, it's non of my business as I'm not on the project...... Buuuuuuut I'd do it with this: {insert anything in relation to Microsoft and the stack i said}.

It's bearable if that happens once.
It's annoying to fucking death when you hear that 10+ FUCKING TIMES EVERY DAY.

Every time I ended up completely boiling inside and getting the best possible practice at self-control. I never snapped even once.

When he finished his internship I talked to a colleague that he had to partner up with after a week or two to ask what he thought about that guy.
His reaction: he's a fucking disrespectful lowlife and a cunt. He was veeeeeeeeeery annoying with me and always shooting down my ideas but danm he was nearly fucking bullying/intimidating you every fucking day! He makes me fucking sick.

Constructive critism at its best.

!rant
I must be dreaming .... Honestly! I am with a client that knows what he wants and has no problem to express it in clear words. They understand my tech talk and talk back in tech as well. We are on the same page regarding best practises. They envy my work and have really good ideas and express constructive criticism. What is going on here? I must be in a parallel universe or something?
Okay, one downside... Coffee is not free but a cup is 20ct, which is quite alright imho anyway. Oh, the even bigger downside... Things have been so constructive that my time there is almost over since shit got actually done in the most efficient way ever!

dear anyone looking to teach kids programming (especially organizations):

- please be realistic. teach things your students can use. how to debug, how to solve realistic, real-world problems. not how to make a turtle draw a circle, that's not programming.

- please don't have blocks. just don't. they hurt.

- focus on your content instead of putting up posters on the wall with celebrities talking about the importance of programming

- don't call it 'code,' call it 'program.' do you know how different muggles think they are?

- please teach in a logical order. too many times have I seen commands --> functions --> variables/variable types --> then back to functions and return types.

- don't set an appropriate "age" to do it. please. its enough for people to learn to program, but to be told they're too "old" for a course? I can't tell you how many forgetful seniors and special needs students have been insulted. and don't even get me started on being too young. knowledge is knowledge, skill is skill, ability is ability.

- teach concepts with programming. don't separate them. they work better when they're taught together.

- understanding is more important than style. for beginners, fuck style. all of your program could be all on one line for fucks sake. I've had teachers chose style > functionality, because, fuck working programs, right?

- let your content speak for itself. this is not the place for celebrity endorsements.

- give resources for after a lesson is complete. when a beginner is finished, recommend more resources. you're never done learning.

most of these were things code.org did wrong. fuck them. I was in a constructive criticism mood today…

Online tutorial pet peeves
————————————

My top 10 points of unsolicited ranting/advice to those making video tutorials:

1. Avoid lots of pauses, saying “umm” too much, or other unnecessary redundancy in speech (listen to yourself in a recording)

2. If I can’t understand you at 1.5 - 2x playback speed and you don’t already speak relatively quickly and clearly, I’m probably not going to watch for long (mumbling, inconsistent microphone volume, and background noise/music are frequent culprits)

3. It’s ok to make mistakes in a tutorial, so long as you also fix them in the tutorial (e.g., the code that is missing a semicolon that all of a sudden has one after it compiles correctly — but no mention of fixing it or the compiler error that would have been received the first time). With that said, it’s fine to fix mistakes pertinent to the topic being taught, but don’t make me watch you troubleshoot your non-relevant computer issues or problems created by your specific preferences (e.g., IDE functionality not working as expected when no specific IDE was prescribed for the tutorial)

4. Don’t make me wait on your slow computer to do something in silence—either teach me something while it’s working or edit the video to remove the lull

5. You knew you were recording your screen. Close your email, chat, and other applications that create notifications before recording. Or at least please don’t check them and respond while recording and not edit it out of the video

6. Stay on topic. I’m watching your video to learn about something specific. A little personality is good, but excessive tangents are often a waste of my time

7. [Specific to YouTube] Don’t block my view of important content with annotations (and ads, if within your control)

8. If you aren’t uploading quality HD recordings, enlarge your font! Don’t make me have to guess what character you typed

9. Have a game plan (i.e., objectives) before hitting the record button

10. Remember that it’s easier to rant and complain than to do something constructive. Thank you for spending your time making tutorial videos. It’s better for you to make videos and commit all my pet peeves listed above than to not make videos at all—don’t let one guy’s rant stop you from sharing your knowledge and experience (but if it helps you, you’re welcome—and you just might gain a new viewer!)

🙄 Windows asked me to install the update thrice. I asked it to remind me later. The fourth time it just shut my system down and started updating..

This is what you call a constructive and understanding OS-User relationship 🌝

The Steam Community forums for the Planet Zoo beta have really reinforced my decision to stay far away from game development.

A third of the posts are people who clearly have no idea what a beta is - "don't buy, too buggy". Sorry, were you expecting a finished game? You wasted your money, then.

Another third of the posts are people making decisions for the developers. A very common discussion is "Should they delay launch?" which makes my blood boil a bit. First of all, you have no fucking clue what kind of manpower this development team has. You don't manage them, and neither do I. So, neither you nor I should be making assumptions about how fast they can fix the issues, and definitely shouldn't make decisions about if the game should delay launch.

Second of all, neither you nor I know how the game is built. These fixes could mean a line of code, or they could mean a re-write of multiple core systems. We don't know, and I'm guessing you've probably never even written a line of code in your life so you REALLY shouldn't be telling these guys how to do their job.

The last third is benign discussion - people reporting bugs (even though there's an issue tracker, but that thing is fucking jam packed with 250 pages of reported issues), asking how to do xyz, posting feature requests, etc.

But if roughly 60% of the community is behaving poorly and actively working against development by pissing off the devs and drowning out constructive discussion, then yeah; I won't be going near game dev any time soon. Sure, developing business software means dealing with REALLY dumb people but at the very least they are in a business environment and not in a toxic forum of bullshit.

Oh, and as a closing remark, I love this game!

About 2 years ago, our management decided to "try outsourcing". I was in charge for coordinating dev tasks and ensuring code quality. So management came up with 3 potential candidates in India and I had to assess them based on Skype calls and little test tasks. Their CVs looked great and have been full of "I'm a fancy experienced senior developer." ....After first 2 calls I already dismissed two candidates because they had obviously zero experience and the CV must have been fake. ..After talking to the third candidate, I again got sceptical. The management, however, started to think that I'm just an ass trying to protect my own position against outside devs. They forced me to give him a chance by testing him with a small dev task. The task included the following statement

"Search on the filesystem recursively, for folders named 'container'. For example '/some_root_folder/path_segments/container' " The term 'container' was additionally highlighted in red!

We also gave him access to a git repo to do at least daily push. My intention was to look at his progressions, not only the result.
I tried the task on my own and it took me two days, just to have a baseline for comparison. I, however, told him to take as much time as he needs. (We wanted to be fair and also payed him.)

..... 3 weeks went by. 3 weeks full of excuses why he isn't able to use git. All my attempts to help him, just made clear that he has never seen or heard of git before. ...... He sent me his code once a week as zip per email -.- ..... I ignored those mails because I made already my decision not wanting to waste my time. I mean come on?! Is this a joke? But since management wanted me to give him a chance .... I kept waiting for his "final" code version.

In week 5, he finally told me that it's finished and all requirements have been met. So I tried to run his code without looking at it ..... and suprise ... It immediately crashed.

Then I started to look through the code .... and I was ..... mind-blown. But not in a good way. .....

The following is what I remember most:

Do you remember the requirement from above? .... His code implementing it looked something like this:

Go through all folders in root path and return folders where folderName == "/some_root_folder/path_segments/container".

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Alone this little peace of code was on sooooooo many levels wrong!!!!! Let me name a few.

- It's just sooooo wrong :(
- He literally compared the folderName with the string "/some_root_folder/path_segments/container"...... Wtf?!?
- He did not understand the requirement at all.
- He implemented something without thinking a microsecond about it.
- No recursive traversal
- It was Java. And he used == instead of equals().
- He compares a folderName with a whole path?!? Wtf.
- How the hell did he made this code return actual results on his computer?!?

Ok ...now it was time to confront management with my findings and give feedback to the developer. ..... They believed me but asked me to keep it civilized and give him constructive feedback. ...... So I skyped him and told him that this code doesn't meet the requirements. ......... He instantly defended himself . He told me that I he did 'exactly what was written in the requirements document" and that there is nothing wrong. .......He had no understanding at all that the code also needs to have an actual business purpose.

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

After that he tried to sell us a few more weeks of development work to implement our "new changed requirements" ......

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Footnote: I know a lot of great Indian Devs. ..... But this is definitely not one of them. -.-

tl;dr
Management wants to outsource to India and gets scammed.

Stackoverflow is an awesome way to find answers to programming problems. It can also be a toxic place in my opinion. I quit posting questions a few years ago. Whenever I posted a question after searching everywhere for hours and trying to be as constructive and everything as possible and making sure it wasn't a duplicate question, it would still be closed as non constructive or down voted or something else. This is why I also dislike stackoverflow next to it being really helpful very often.

I wonder why stack overflow gets so much hate on here. To me, it is a tremendously helpful community. People are usually pleasant and forthcoming.

I sometimes see questions closed as "not constructive", even though it has thousands of upvotes, but generally, if you follow the rules, you'll have a good time.

Maybe people want SO to be something it is not, or maybe people behave differently around different technologies. I mostly find Python, Djang and general web answers, and they are fine

Is it strange that I'm getting more constructive advice from the Devrant community than the co-workers around me?

No lie, I discovered gistboxapp, vue.js, hacker noon and a bunch of other cool stuff through here.

I have a junior who really drives me up a wall. He's been a junior for a couple of years now (since he started as an intern here).

He always looks for the quickest, cheapest, easiest solution he can possibly think of to all his tickets. Most of it pretty much just involves copy/pasting code that has similar functionality from elsewhere in the application, tweaking some variable names and calling it a day. And I mean, I'm not knocking copy/paste solutions at all, because that's a perfectly valid way of learning certain things, provided that one actually analyzes the code they are cloning, and actually modifies it in a way that solves the problem, and can potentially extend the ability to reuse the original code. This is rarely the case with this guy.

I've tried to gently encourage this person to take their time with things, and really put some thought into design with his solutions instead of rushing to finish; because ultimately all the time he spends on reworks could have been spent on doing it right the first time. Problem is, this guy is very stubborn, and gets very defensive when any sort of insinuation is made that he needs to improve on something. My advice to actually spend time analyzing how an interface was used, or how an extension method can be further extended before trying to brute-force your way through the problem seems to fall on deaf ears.

I always like to include my juniors on my pull requests; even though I pretty much have all final say in what gets merged, I like to encourage not only all devs be given thoughtful, constructive criticism, regardless of "rank" but also give them the opportunity to see how others write code and learn by asking questions, and analyzing why I approached the problem the way I did. It seems like this dev consistently uses this opportunity to get in as many public digs as he can on my work by going for the low-hanging fruit: "whitespace", "add comments, this code isn't self-documenting", and "an if/else here is more readable and consistent with this file than a ternary statement". Like dude, c'mon. Can you at least analyze the logic and see if it's sound? or perhaps offer a better way of doing something, or ask if the way I did something really makes sense?

Mid-Year reviews are due this week; I'm really struggling to find any way to document any sort of progress he's made. Once in a great while, he does surprise me and prove that he's capable of figuring out how something works and manage to use the mechanisms properly to solve a problem. At the very least he's productive (in terms of always working on assigned work). And because of this, he's likely safe from losing his job because the company considers him cheap labor. He is very underpaid, but also very under-qualified.

He's my most problematic junior; worst part is, he only has a job because of me: I wanted to give the benefit of the doubt when my boss asked me if we should extend an offer, as I thought it was only fair to give the opportunity to grow and prove himself like I was given. But I'm also starting to toe the line of being a good mentor by giving opportunities to learn, and falling behind on work because I could have just done it myself in a fraction of the time.

I hate managing people. I miss the days of code + spotify for 10 hours a day then going home.

Kind of disappointing that devrant rewards and attracts bot'esque accounts for exclusively re-posting facebook memes - with stickers.

Those accounts are even as bold to constantly spam everywhere "HOW LONG DID IT TAKE FOR YOU TO GET THEM?" as if they are entitled to next day delivery, feels wasted and especially insulting to people that actually use and flourish the platform.

Not really great input nor constructive criticism, more a vent, because I know that it's the "maybe some of the shit will stick" idea - maybe some of those shit posters will turn to actual content creators on here or them being free advertisement to maybe less useless beings.

I'm coming off a lengthy staff augmentation assignment awful enough that I feel like I need to be rehabilitated to convince myself that I even want to be a software developer.

They needed someone who does .NET. It turns out what they meant was someone to copy and paste massive amounts of code that their EA calls a "framework." Just copy and paste this entire repo, make a whole ton of tweaks that for whatever reason never make their way back into the "template," and then make a few edits for some specific functionality. And then repeat. And repeat. Over a dozen times.

The code is unbelievable. Everything is stacked into giant classes that inherit from each other. There's no dependency inversion. The classes have default constructors with a comment "for unit testing" and then the "real" code uses a different one.

It's full of projects, classes, and methods with weird names that don't do anything. The class and method names sound like they mean something but don't. So after a dozen times I tried to refactor, and the EA threw a hissy fit. Deleting dead code, reducing three levels of inheritance to a simple class, and renaming stuff to indicate what it does are all violations of "standards." I had to go back to the template and start over.

This guy actually recorded a video of himself giving developers instructions on how to copy and paste his awful code.

Then he randomly invents new "standards." A class that reads messages from a queue and processes them shouldn't process them anymore. It should read them and put them in another queue, and then we add more complication by reading from that queue. The reason? We might want to use the original queue for something else one day. I'm pretty sure rewriting working code to meet requirements no one has is as close as you can get to the opposite of Agile.

I fixed some major bugs during my refactor, and missed one the second time after I started over. So stuff actually broke in production because I took points off the board and "fixed" what worked to add back in dead code, variables that aren't used, etc.

In the process, I asked the EA how he wanted me to do this stuff, because I know that he makes up "standards" on the fly and whatever I do may or may not be what he was imagining. We had a tight deadline and I didn't really have time to guess, read his mind, get it wrong, and start over. So we scheduled an hour for him to show me what he wanted.

He said it would take fifteen minutes. He used the first fifteen insisting that he would not explain what he wanted, and besides he didn't remember how all of the code he wrote worked anyway so I would just have to spend more time studying his masterpiece and stepping through it in the debugger.

Being accountable to my team, I insisted that we needed to spend the scheduled hour on him actually explaining what he wanted. He started yelling and hung up. I had to explain to management that I could figure out how to make his "framework" work, but it would take longer and there was no guarantee that when it was done it would magically converge on whatever he was imagining. We totally blew that deadline.

When the .NET work was done, I got sucked into another part of the same project where they were writing massive 500 line SQL stored procedures that no one could understand. They would write a dozen before sending any to QA, then find out that there was a scenario or two not accounted for, and rewrite them all. And repeat. And repeat. Eventually it consisted of, one again, copying and pasting existing procedures into new ones.

At one point one dev asked me to help him test his procedure. I said sure, tell me the scenarios for which I needed to test. He didn't know. My question was the equivalent of asking, "Tell me what you think your code does," and he couldn't answer it. If the guy who wrote it doesn't know what it does right after he wrote it and you certainly can't tell by reading it, and there's dozens of these procedures, all the same but slightly different, how is anyone ever going to read them in a month or a year? What happens when someone needs to change them? What happens when someone finds another defect, and there are going to be a ton of them?

It's a nightmare. Why interview me with all sorts of questions about my dev skills if the plan is to have me copy and paste stuff and carefully avoid applying anything that I know?

The people are all nice except for their evil XEB (Xenophobe Expert Beginner) EA who has no business writing a line of code, ever, and certainly shouldn't be reviewing it.

I've tried to keep my sanity by answering stackoverflow questions once in a while and sometimes turning evil things I was forced to do into constructive blog posts to which I cannot link to preserve my anonymity. I feel like I've taken a six-month detour from software development to shovel crap. Never again. Lesson learned. Next time they're not interviewing me. I'm interviewing them. I'm a professional.

Woo, rant time.

I've recently changed jobs to a new company due to a number of factors at my old job. I didn't tell my old boss (let's call him X) my expected salary, nor did I tell him which company I was going to.

However, I've been informed by someone that still works there that X has been discussing my new wage in front of everyone; he was telling everyone that I'm going to lose money by moving job and that I made a stupid decision.
I didn't leave due to money, it was due to X's inability to take constructive criticism, the constant subtle sexism of the office and just a generally bad overall feeling about the job/office going forward. Yes, I will admit that money did have a minor part in my decision to leave but I didn't verbalise that to anyone in the office, and I made X aware that my departure wasn't to do with money. I left on good terms.

I feel as though it was wrong of X to talk about his opinions on my new job in front of my ex-colleagues and friends. I don't know, maybe this is the norm and I've just been living in a cave before this, or maybe my last boss was just a bit of a douchenugget. Has anyone else had this experience?

I've got to meet up with everyone from my last place tomorrow to properly say goodbye and things.. but I'm not sure how to approach my old boss when leaving drinks are held now. Should I say anything? Should I just act as though I know nothing about it?

What would you guys do in this situation???

Constructive criticism at its finest coming all the way from:

Fuck You
Fuck You - Fuck You
Fuck You, AL 10101

Note: Joe is my coworker, not the customer that wrote in. The form sends from his address.

I'm fairly new as an engineer (less than a year of experience in industry), and I'm happy that I get so much constructive feedback in my code reviews. However, sometimes I come out of them feeling like absolute trash. The review I had yesterday highlighted my lack of experience with API development, and I left the meeting feeling like I didn't even deserve to work here.

I'm trying to take everything as a learning opportunity, and grow as an engineer... But sometimes it is hard to see myself improving.

Our current programming teacher actually being able to teach us good practices and give us constructive criticism on our code.

The worst thing I've seen another developer do is not give constructive criticism where needed, as well was fail to accept constructive criticism when offered.

If you dish out the same shit you inherited from your senior colleagues onto your juniors, you have just successfully become the part of an ongoing shit show.

Be kind and supportive. Earn their trust, be approachable. Listen to them and help them learn to solve problems. Give constructive feedbacks, not harsh criticisms. Point out room for improvements, not belittle someone. Be that mentor/teacher you wish you had.

Learn. Build. Teach. Grow

Oh boy, this is gonna be good:

TL;DR: Digital bailiffs are vulnerable as fuck

So, apparently some debt has come back haunting me, it's a somewhat hefty clai and for the average employee this means a lot, it means a lot to me as well but currently things are looking better so i can pay it jsut like that. However, and this is where it's gonna get good:

The Bailiff sent their first contact by mail, on my company address instead of my personal one (its's important since the debt is on a personal record, not company's) but okay, whatever. So they send me a copy of their court appeal, claiming that "according to our data, you are debtor of this debt". with a URL to their portal with a USERNAME and a PASSWORD in cleartext to the message.
Okay, i thought we were passed sending creds in plaintext to people and use tokenized URL's for initiating a login (siilar to email verification links) but okay! Let's pretend we're a dumbfuck average joe sweating already from the bailiff claims and sweating already by attempting to use the computer for something useful instead of just social media junk, vidya and porn.

So i click on the link (of course with noscript and network graph enabled and general security precautions) and UHOH, already a first red flag: The link redirects to a plain http site with NOT username and password: But other fields called OGM and dossiernumer AND it requires you to fill in your age???
Filling in the received username and password obviously does not work and when inspecting the page... oh boy!

This is a clusterfuck of javascript files that do horrible things, i'm no expert in frontend but nothing from the homebrewn stuff i inspect seems to be proper coding... Okay... Anyways, we keep pretending we're dumbasses and let's move on.

I ask for the seemingly "new" credentials and i receive new credentials again, no tokenized URL. okay.

Now Once i log in i get a horrible looking screen still made in the 90's or early 2000's which just contains: the claimaint, a pie chart in big red for amount unpaid, a box which allows you to write an - i suspect unsanitized - text block input field and... NO DATA! The bailiff STILL cannot show what the documents are as evidence for the claim!

Now we stop being the pretending dumbassery and inspect what's going on: A 'customer portal' that does not redirect to a secure webpage, credentials in plaintext and not even working, and the portal seems to have various calls to various domains i hardly seem to think they can be associated with bailiff operations, but more marketing and such... The portal does not show any of the - required by law - data supporting the claim, and it contains nothing in the user interface showing as such.
The portal is being developed by some company claiming to be "specialized in bailiff software" and oh boy oh boy..they're fucked because...

The GDPR requirements.. .they comply to none of them. And there is no way to request support nor to file a complaint nor to request access to the actual data. No DPO, no dedicated email addresses, nothing.

But this is really the ham: The amount on their portal as claimed debt is completely different from the one they came for today, for the sae benefactor! In Belgium, this is considered illegal and is reason enough to completely make the claim void. the siple reason is that it's unjust for the debtor to assess which amount he has to pay, and obviously bailiffs want to make the people pay the highest amount.

So, i sent the bailiff a business proposal to hire me as an expert to tackle these issues and even sent him a commercial bonus of a reduction of my consultancy fees with the amount of the bailiff claim! Not being sneery or angry, but a polite constructive proposal (which will be entirely to my benefit)

So, basically what i want to say is, when life gives you lemons, use your brain and start making lemonade, and with the rest create fertilizer and whatnot and sent it to the lemonthrower, and make him drink it and tell to you it was "yummy yummy i got my own lemons in my tummy"

So, instead of ranting and being angry and such... i simply sent an email to the bailiff, pointing out various issues (the ones

I had a performance review with my boss and his boss today.

After they told me what they wanted to, they asked for my feedback. I was very honest with them and didn't only tell them the good stuff but the things I've been disappointed with as well.

Well, last year was mostly a big fat disappointment for me at the company, both on a professional and a personal level, which seemingly took them by surprise and hurt their feelings because they think it is the best place to work at. Even though I tried to make my feedback as constructive as possible, they didn't really seem to understand the problems and kept saying what a good company this is and what amazing opportunities will this year hold.

And they gave me a raise before I could even ask for it.

When your teacher gives awesome, constructive feedback on all of the male student's code and then says he's going to 'go easy' on you and the other female student... 😡😡😡😡

If there is 2 books you should read before trying to tackle TAOCP... this might be on it.. as well as the Concrete Mathematics book.

Anyway. This book covers not just the fundamentals of modern algorithms and data structures but it also makes the leap to understanding multithreading and algorithms using multithreading.

Some argue the certain concepts in this book are presented without explanation of how they work, but I guess that should be something the reader try’s to figure out from another book or constructive thinking critically. Keeps the reader on their toes for understanding.

This is also the reason many people suggest the sedgewick algorithm books, of which will be posted another day.

Guys, I just received a *constructive* comment about a code of mine on StackOverflow.

WTF is going on?

When the poet in me fuses with the geek in me:

Will you be the css to my html?

When I encountered you,
My system threw a fatal error
My RAM was overloaded,
And my CPU went haywire

Will you be the css to my html?

I would show you my source code,
And let you merge your branch into mine
I will help you fix your memory leaks
And I will try filling all your nullpointers

Will you be the css to my html?

Your frontend would perfectly plug into my backend
I can compile all your heavy code,
Just in time

Baby just promise me,
You'll provide the JSON
To my API calls

Will you be the css to my html?

This is my first draft... Constructive criticism is welcome!

Long time lurker, I now have something to show you and it's something I've proudly made!

I've been working on OctoLenses lately, a Chrome extension allowing you to filter your PR and issues on Github. I find it really useful on a daily basis; and you might too

It can be used to:
- Monitor the PRs that need a review (or that have been reviewed successfuly)
- Find issues on open-source projects you like that you could take on
- Anything you can express with a Github search basically

It's good enough that I feel like I can share it with you, and I'd really like if you could take some of your time to give me a bit of feedback.

What do you like?
What you don't?
Which feature should I add?
Anything constructive basically :)

Thank you (and sorry for the self-promotion)!

(I guess the Question category is the best for this)

Do you believe that someone can be a good dev even if they write shit code?

I personally do, if that person acknowledges the fact that their code is shit, wants to improve it, is humble, is always in the search for constructive, etc as in to make their code better and more readable, I'd think they are a pretty good dev.

I did my portfolio website as part of a college project. I had it posted when i finished it to a local fb page where around 200 people commented on it to say how they like it. A lot of them liked the website while most of them had CONSTRUCTIVE CRITISISM to share (this is important). After i fixed what people didint like i posted the website to css awards and since then i had two site of the day awwards on different websites and some other features or smaller awwards. I was happy as I thought this was the best project i did so far (in frontend). I got the highest grade for it too.

Now for the rant part. Yesterday i ran into the proffessor that is in charge of the degree orientation I am on. He started to call me out and shit on that project basicly saying it was shit. No reason why or any constructive critisism. I felt such fuking anger. Im all for critisism as long people state their opinions in a way that they prove why something is bad. But this was just disgusting. Well fuck me

what kind of dumb fuck you have to be to get the react js dev job in company that has agile processes if you hate the JS all the way along with refusing to invest your time to learn about shit you are supposed to do and let's add total lack of understanding how things work, specifically giving zero fucks about agile and mocking it on every occasion and asking stupid questions that are answered in first 5 minutes of reading any blog post about intro to agile processes? Is it to annoy the shit out of others?

On top of that trying to reinvent the wheels for every friggin task with some totally unrelated tech or stack that is not used in the company you work for?

and solution is always half-assed and I always find flaw in it by just looking at it as there are tons of battle-tested solutions or patterns that are better by 100 miles regarding ease of use, security and optimization.

classic php/mysql backend issues - "ooh, the java has garbage collector" - i don't give a fuck about java at this company, give me friggin php solution - 'ooh, that issue in python/haskel/C#/LUA/basically any other prog language is resolved totally different and it looks better!' - well it seems that he knows everything besides php!

Yeah we will change all the fucking tech we use in this huge ass app because your inability to learn to focus on the friggin problem in the friggin language you got the job for.

Guy works with react, asked about thoughts on react - 'i hope it cease to exists along with whole JS ecosystem as soon as possible, because JS is weird'. Great, why did you fucking applied for the job in the first place if it pushes all of your wrong buttons!

Fucking rockstar/ninja developers! (and I don't mean on actual 'rockstar' language devs).

Also constantly talks about game development and we are developing web-related suite of apps, so why the fuck did you even applied? why?

I just hate that attitude of mocking everything and everyone along with the 'god complex' without really contributing with any constructive feedback combined with half-assed doing something that someone before him already mastered and on top of that pretending that is on the same level, but mainly acting as at least 2 levels above, alas in reality just produces bolognese that everybody has to clean up later.

When someone gives constructive feedback with lenghty argument why and how that solution is wrong on so many levels, pulls the 'well, i'm still learning that' card.

If I as code monkey can learn something in 2 friggin days including good practices and most of crazy intricacies about that new thing, you as a programmer god should be able to learn it in 2 fucking hours!

Fucking arrogant pricks!

Hello devRant fellows, I have a question for those who avoid Google products...

What are your main motivation behind the decision of not using any (or almost any) Google product?

Respectful-for-everyone analogy:
Google is meat, you are a vegan and your non-vegan friend asked you why to start being vegan?

I'm going to highlight the word -friend- because I'm looking for constructive, argumentative, educational and respectful answers.

"I don't like it. Fix it."

No more explanation available. Plenty of constructive criticism to work on there then...

I'm trying really hard not to be sensitive, but my manager is making it difficult with their "constructive criticisms" ...

Just finished up a call with them. And I'm so tired. I'm not even angry or upset, I just feel so tired of their bullshit.

I set up a meeting as a courtesy to get them up to date on all the code changes I made. Last night I stayed up late to try and get things in before the deadline and this morning just killed me when they say.

"I don't think I should have given you this."

"I was right, you weren't ready to start doing this."
(Then don't even bother giving me anymore tasks then, I don't fucking care.)

"you clearly don't understand how branches work"
(Absolutely fucking false, I fixed that shit and am very familiar with how to understand the structure of the fucking repo)

"you are rushing and I don't need you messing up the website"
(I'm being proactive you twat, not rushing, making it very difficult for me to do the work and being productive)

Like seriously bro! Don't fucking patronize me for the work I was trying to get out. And trust me this fucking meeting is done in order to get ahead of potential issues, not a time to be condescending of my skills or lack there-of as you seem to so keenly think.

If you had this much doubt about my abilities then why give me the fucking Sr. title? Fucking trust that I'm being honest, and I'm trying to get us to a good spot, not fucking sabotage the company. God fucking damn.

Lots of people seem to have awful PM's, so I just thought I'd express appreciation for my PM (who I found out last week goes to my church, which was cool). He regularly asks questions about how our system works so that he can be constructive in directions instead of acting like he knows what's up. Woo Tim! Ok feel free to go back to negativity time

I'm pretty sure some users only browse StackOverflow looking for questions to flag as "Not Constructive" or "Opinion Based". Some of the best programming discussions I've read have been in the answers and comments to closed questions, so get over it, happiness haters! Sometimes I want to hear people's opinions.

If somebody wants to do something constructive, this kind of website design distracts the flow.....

Not being given constructive criticism.

Positive reviews are ok.
Compliments are weird.

I love receiving good reviews on my software.
(negative but constructive feedback is welcome as well, of course)
But receiving compliments, especially in person is really weird.
On the one hand I know that I did a good job, I know that the features are useful and the UI is classy and comfortable. On the other hand I still feel not comfortable receiving compliments for doing something good.
I don't have any social awkwardness and yet this feels so weird.

Am I alone at this?

During one of our visits at Konza City, Machakos county in Kenya, my team and I encountered a big problem accessing to viable water. Most times we enquired for water, we were handed a bottle of bought water. This for a day or few days would be affordable for some, but for a lifetime of a middle income person, it will be way too much expensive. Of ten people we encountered 8 complained of a proper mechanism to access to viable water. This to us was a very demanding problem, that needed to be sorted out immediately. Majority of the people were unable to conduct income generating activities such as farming because of the nature of the kind of water and its scarcity as well.
Such a scenario demands for an immediate way to solve this problem. Various ways have been put into practice to ensure sustainability of water conservation and management. However most of them have been futile on the aspect of sustainability. As part of our research we also considered to check out of the formal mechanisms put in place to ensure proper acquisition of water, and one of them we saw was tree planting, which was not sustainable at all, also some few piped water was being transported very long distances from the destinations, this however did not solve the immediate needs of the people.We found out that the area has a large body mass of salty water which was not viable for them to conduct any constructive activity. This was hint enough to help us find a way to curb this demanding challenge. Presence of salty water was the first step of our solution.

SOLUTION

We came up with an IOT based system to help curb this problem. Our system entails purification of the salty water through electrolysis, the device is places at an area where the body mass of water is located, it drills for a suitable depth and allow the salty water to flow into it. Various sets of tanks and valves are situated next to it, these tanks acts as to contain the salty water temporarily. A high power source is then connected to each tank, this enable the separation of Chlorine ions from Hydrogen Ions by electrolysis through electrolysis, salt is then separated and allowed to flow from the lower chamber of the tanks, allowing clean water to from to the preceding tanks, the preceding tanks contains various chemicals to remove any remaining impurities. The whole entire process is managed by the action of sensors. Water alkalinity, turbidity and ph are monitored and relayed onto a mobile phone, this then follows a predictive analysis of the data history stored then makes up a decision to increase flow of water in the valves or to decrease its flow. This being a hot prone area, we opted to maximize harnessing of power through solar power, this power availability is almost perfect to provide us with at least 440V constant supply to facilitate faster electrolysis of the salty water.
Being a drought prone area, it was key that the outlet water should be cold and comfortable for consumers to use, so we also coupled our output chamber with cooling tanks, these tanks are managed via our mobile application, the information relayed from it in terms of temperature and humidity are sent to it. This information is key in helping us produce water at optimum states, enabling us to fully manage supply and input of the water from the water bodies.
By the use of natural language processing, we are able to automatically control flow and feeing of the valves to and fro using Voice, one could say “The output water is too hot”, and the system would respond by increasing the speed of the fans and making the tanks provide very cold water. Additional to this system, we have prepared short video tutorials and documents enlighting people on how to conserve water and maintain the optimum state of the green economy.
IBM/OPEN SOURCE TECHNOLOGIES
For a start, we have implemented our project using esp8266 microcontrollers, sensors, transducers and low payload containers to demonstrate our project. Previously we have used Google’s firebase cloud platform to ensure realtimeness of data to-and-fro relay to the mobile. This has proven workable for most cases, whether on a small scale or large scale, however we meet challenges such as change in the fingerprint keys that renders our device not workable, we intend to overcome this problem by moving to IBM bluemix platform.
We use C++ Programming language for our microcontrollers and sensor communication, in some cases we use Python programming language to process neuro-networks for our microcontrollers.

Any feedback conserning this project please?

I'm writing a book that teaches everything I have learned in the past 20 years about writing small niche software and selling it.

Need some help from my fellow DevRanters.
Anyone who comments here with something constructive gets a free copy when it's done.

When I say:
"Why don't you just write your own software and sell it to end users"

What is the first thing that pops into your head?

Is it "I don't know how to advertise"
or
"that's a pipe dream"
or
"I tried starting my own business, but _______"
or
"I am doing that, i have this side project "
(how long have you spent on that side project?)

I need to know all your concerns questions fears, skepticism etc around the idea of writing your OWN software.

After 20 years I have like, so much knowledge, but it's sometimes hard to get it all out, UNLESS someone has a question or concern, then, out it comes.

So, I'm going to (hopefully) collect all the questions here ... and answer them, and it'll help me out a lot to extract this knowledge.

A lot of stuff I do without even thinking and realizing all the years it took to even know that.

What would you like to know the most?

You have the skills, you have the know how, you can probably see it in your head, so what's stopping you from making the leap?

After building some automated regression tests to verify parts of the company website were working, it was discovered that a test case was missing.
Instead of a constructive meeting about fixing the issue and adding a test, I was reamed and my manager was reamed that we "missed this case".
Nevermind that the automation caught several issues before release in nearly every other aspect of coverage.
Nevermind that the missing test case was a useless feature added after the automation was completed.
Nevermind that automation was meant to be the last stop in the gate, not the first...

I was so livid after that meeting I nearly resigned on the spot. My manager was so livid over being told to write me up he was ready to resign.

!rant

I know this may not be the typical post on Devrant and it may be a little off topic, but I could really use some advice from fellow colleagues here.

The thing is, I just finished engineering school and I got my first job as a software engineer. So far so good. I've never been a natural talent in this field, and I suck at writing code. I find things like architecture, system design, innovation, requirementsspecification, management and business development much more interesting.

These past weeks as a software engineer has been really challenging for me. I seem to be totally "in over my head", and fuck everything up. I can't understand how the code I'm supposed to write works, and can't solve even the simplest of tasks that are assigned to me if they involve any implementation of code, or fiddling with Github or build servers.

Is it normal to feel like this as an engineer with zero experience? Will things get better, or should I just resign or wait to be fired?

What would a natural next step for a software engineer who'd like to move more into business and management be? A MBA? Project management courses?

I hope to get some advice from you guys. Maybe you've felt like this when you started out as well? Anyway, any constructive feedback would be really much appreciated.

This will definetly be an unpopular rant but god damn it I hate to work with untreated depressed people. It's fucking nearly impossible to convince them to try out something new. They are always pessimistic or think that they know everything. They don't care about new things happening around them. Every time in work when we encounter some obstacle it looks like the world has ended for them and every god damn time I need to give pep talks to them like we are in some war and I feel like I need to inspire soldiers to fight even though they are 100% convinced that they will die.

Im done with being a therapist for them. I don't have unlimited amounts of tolerance and energy, I am a human also. I can't keep sugarcoating what I see and I can't continue walking like on eggshels just because somebody is too weak to even take a constructive criticism without becoming passive agressive for days or weeks. I realized that their negative pessimism has started to rub off on me and I think it's time to put an end to this.

Please if you have depression get some help, don't expect that new workplace or employer will motivate you enough to turn your life around. Don't expect that putting on a mask will actually hide who you are and that your condition will not impact others around you in work. Just stop pretending and get some actual help. Start from yourself.

!rant First code review in the new team, came back with list of helpful suggestions and constructive criticisms. Yep I'm going to like it here. Excited to be learning from the bests.

For the last 2.5 weeks I have been working on a application for a client that essentially amounts up to a glorified asset management tool. This project had a crazy deadline and I was tasked to solo dev. Because I could choose what to build the application with I thought I would try out Bun and Elysia. Loved it. Thats not the point of the story. I spent about 130 hours in 2.5 weeks on the project, slept 3 hours last night delivered the project after multiple QA rounds. Clients response on slack: This is unusable. We can not test. Client shares screenshot of design and my implementation. I went off script with a silly input field that they designed that never got used in any other place in the app but in this one model, so I decided to rather reuse a working component than creating a stray one. Oh and obviously the panel that the comments live in is full hight and not 80% like the designs. So the app is unusable. FML. How does that make the app unusable? Can you post comments. Yes tard, can you upload assets, yes tard. So what about constructive feedback. *constructive feedback left the building* THE APP IS UNUASABLE. FIX NOW.

Generally devs who are too arrogant to accept help or constructive criticism. There’s this data visualisation library that missed a specific feature that psychologists use quite frequently, so I added it myself and opened a PR. The maintainer closed it because people should use whatever he’d already implemented. It’s like not giving someone the option to listen to disco because rock music is better. Yeah, cool story bro. Now all my visualisation projects depend on my fork instead. Same with the now abandoned Material Design Library devs. They didn’t have a drop down with free input, so I opened a PR with my solution. Closed as it was out of scope, simply because Google didn’t specifically include that in the Material specs, only an input and a drop down separately which my solution matched. I also opened a PR for an obviously missing feature (being able to validate forms via JS), closed as this behaviour wasn’t in the Material specs either. No wonder MDL died before it was ever finished.

fucking flutter.

i'm trying to make a simple app. it would be an easier to do both natively.
for fucks sake flutter, add some functionality. flutter recently got out of beta but it's not fucking done. no native webviews, no native push notifications. fuck that.

however, i do have to give credit where credit is due. coming into flutter i expected a different feel of the app on iphone and android. it was exactly the same, and it was smooth too. in that respect, i love flutter.

also guys, i have an app (not finished yet) i built with flutter and i would like some constructive criticism for changing the ui. only android right now though, i can't afford ios.

dictive.app/download

Rejection 4 / 1000 of my 1000 job applications TikTok journey

Another reply with apsolutely no constructive feedback for me. No explanation why they decided not to choose me. Just fuck you we'll go for the next one. No. Fuck YOU

How do you guys deal with reviewing garbage code?

Do you waste a ton of time, trying to understand the code, so you can write constructive feedback?

Today I wasted 4 hours reviewing something like that and I'm still not finished.

So there is this social institute I invested three years in.
Left them a record budget to play with. After being chair person for two years before and even administrating the whole 1900 of em.

Turns out they're FRICKIN' MORONS!

Instead of welcoming constructive criticism
/* which is because they can not read one single line of simple text without a fidget spinner at hand. And the second line of text, they ask their meds being upgraded! */.
They start fucking people up by spreading lies publicly!
On the fakken Web!
In so called protocols
/* which they don't manage to spellcheck before publishing. As freaking "devs" they major in */.

Just because I told them, that another institution which is conjoined to them within the universities senate, DOES NOT STAND IN COMPETITION!

They don't get it.
Is it that difficult?
Downvote if it is.
And please help me with those worm infested no brainers marrying in circles.
Its incredible how much you can achieve in some years and still so many people stay ignorant enough to start spewing their verbal vomit all over the campus thus fist fucked professors reign in, because "muh truth! no development. just money, I like money. muh moving student, not like it! not like work!".

What the hell is going on in this society?!

The code of conduct is a good thing. It doesn't persecute cis white men. All it does is tell you not to harass people on the basis of traits they cannot control. You say you only care about code quality and nothing else? There's a whole untapped market of talent from women and lgbtq+ people who stay the fuck away because of toxic communities. When you call people faggot it makes them not want to contribute to your codebase.
Linus stepped down of his own volition to try to become a more constructive voice. Heaven forbid the assholes have some introspection.

Hate it because it's vague. Hate it because it means anyone can be banned without evidence. Don't hate it because the assholes are finally being called on their bullshit.

So couple days ago I posted my meme website: meme4meme.me

Now after some constructive suggestions I have finally redesigned the thing, now it is:
Better with mobile device
Link is unique for each meme so you can share
Can download content

Please enjoy the memes I collected over the year and let me know any suggestions you have

Can we all please try to keep emotion out of coding? It never ever helps to get upset at a code review.

Please please please accept constructive criticism, and dish it back to me! You can hate my code just don't hate me. :/

My colleagues want to forbid the usage of the shorthand constructor in TypeScript.

I feel strongly about this.

At least they find it annoying that I call the more verbose one "PHP-style constructor" :D

Dear reviewers, feedback givers, coworkers, clients and critics...

There is a subtle difference between constructive criticism and just spewing hate!

One offers advice & points in the direction of a better solution, while the other one makes me value you less, as a human being...

If your comment/review/feedback is:
“I don’t like it, I don’t know why, I just don’t” - please keep it to yourself because it makes us less likely to listen to you when you actually have something worthwhile to say...

Yours,
Any and all creative professionals,
including developers.

Just had my performance review conversation with my manager today and basically it's another "great work"

Which is what I get every year. So wondering does anyone actually get constructive criticism or things they should improve upon?

Wow..so i can’t believe this but i just got told by my “senior” in company that he “knows his shit” when i tried to give him constructive feedback on why doing calculations for users on backend is a bad idea and is not going to scale very well.
I mean we could do those calculations on frontend using web workers ( if they are so complex ) and that would have been clearly a better idea.

I also tried to give him feedback on why its a bad idea to couple backend apis with frontend. Honestly, i don’t feel like giving any sort of feedback anymore. I don’t even feel like trying my best to “improve” the codebase because if its going to be maintained by shitheads like him that get their pride easily hurt, then no matter how hard i try to improve it, its going to end up shit either way.

if it works with 6 common browsers it is definitely solely my fault if the site doesn't work with your niche product. thanks for the constructive input today of 'doesn't work' for this nine year old site containing photos of your grandchildren dad.

Today Phoronix posted a short article about a (in my opinion cool) new feature I implemented in my file manager (Dolphin). Most of the feedback was positive/constructive criticism but some people attacked me personally because they don't like the feature/think "true" Linux users wouldn't use it.
I gave you something cool for free. Would you please stop bitching about it?
If you don't like it don't use it. You can even disable it if it threatens your ego as a Linux master user

When your coworker is a "yes...but". If your solution is either non-existent, or vague, and mine is actual code, PLZ STFU. Nobody wants your "constructive criticism".

Mr developer are you giving me constructive criticism? or forcing your programming faith down my throat again? i really cant tell.

I've never rejected a pull request, I just out in loads of comments with constructive criticism.

When shoukd you reject and when should you just sdd in comments?

So ive been seing a couple funny unattended PC pranks lests here yours!

my ultimate favourite : when someone walk of without locking his PC i go and switch his mouse to left handed. its hilarious how some ppl take for ever to figure it out.

so funny and constructive, you can gage problems solving on the fly! plus the average i now lock my pc goes up 90%

So this just happened and I am mystified as to how. When I talk on the phone with my cell phone in my left pant pocket I get a sensation of being poked with a hot pin in my leg about 1 to 2 inches above the phone. It almost feels like the sensation of a bee sting. It happened the other day as well. I did not have this sensation with my 4G phone I just retired. My new phone is 5G. Its the most random thing and I would not have believed it. So I search a bit and some dude has been experiencing some weird phone related pain for like 20 years. Of course, none of the replies are constructive. Just assholes poking fun at someone who is trying to understand what they are experiencing.

I checked all of my clothing and there is nothing like a pin or anything stuck in my clothes. The temperature outside is about 32 degrees. So nothing actually stung me. I am going to be pissed if its actually my phone. Going to try putting it in another pocket to see what happens. My hope is its my clothing pulling on a damn hair or something. But it didn't do this at all when walking around the building without my phone. Just when I walked outside.

I can still feel the pain lingering in my leg with my phone on the desk. I checked and the spot where I scratched at it is red. Just another weird thing to deal with I guess.

I always thought electrosensitives were nutjobs. Now I am not so sure.

Good people of devRant, hear me! Today is a proud day, a day of happiness, peace, and prosperity!

Theatrical opening lines aside, I need your help. I have finally completed the setup for one of my long ongoing projects and need some input from experienced developers of any kind. I've recently started a blog focused around building a community for people who want to learn more about all engineering disciplines or want to see if they would like being an engineer. The majority of the content will be posts about various topics that relate to either specific disciplines or engineering as a whole, and cool projects you can do to work out what is fun to you.

HackTheWorld.io is the URL and I'd welcome any feedback you can give, from design to development. I used the hexo framework, which is a static html blog generator that I then upload to a web host via FTP. Let me know what you think and if you have any ideas form posts on the site, feel free to leave those as well. I've got a few I'm writing now that will hopefully help some people out there.

Why do I get downvoted on Reddit when I post a link to my new blog post without any constructive feedback? It's even harder than StackOverflow.

MOBBING DICTIONARY - 3 -

Sentence (harsh public remark)
- You always want to do everything.

Purpose
- highlight a (true or false) defect of the target, a lie repeated thousands of time will become true.

Result
- whether or not that is true, everybody will start to see the target with that particular defect. Every action will be justified to correct the defect.

While it is often true that people at time have difficulty to delegate, usually the reason is not that they don't want to, but they don't know how.
The mobber want to remove the person rather than helping on the "how".

This strategy get the best result when the target is self aware, take the mobbing sentence as a constructive feedback and start to effectively delegate. He/she will contribute to make him/herself useless and could be later easily disposed of.

Part of my remote work is to have a daily call reporting in on what I have done yesterday and what I am about to today. My colleague calls me for it. She's hired as a tech support and is suddenly assigned to take note and report on my work activities to our boss. Several times, I caught her pretending to know what I'm talking about like with Puppet configurations, Firewall diagnosis packets, ActiveMQ, Regex, etc. Most of the time, I just let it go as its not my job to validate her knowledge on these different but many services. Just do the call, get the report in, carry on. How difficult was that?

Yesterday, our call was left sour because I somehow blew up. I think I've reached my patience with this woman's assumptions to how these services work. Now I feel guilty for yelling at a lady but goddamn she stoopid for fibbing through my ear. Somebody help! What do I do?

If I report to our boss about her technical incompetence (politely), she might get sacked. She's a good tech support as long as she still has her trusty manuals by her, she can fix specific problems. But when it comes to unknown tech to her, she assumed she knew.

If I tell her about her weaknesses, however constructive I can get and as politely as I can get, all the while complimenting something about her, showing her how to improve herself, maybe she'll do better not to ask silly questions like buying a Puppet certificate? At least getting rid of ignorance would definitely help but not sure how she would take it. The worst thing I would imagine is her backfiring and yelling at me and then we ended up fighting.

If I kept quiet and tuck it all into a can, it will eventually implode as we go on.

This is not about her gender. I don't see her as a woman. I see her as a tech support engineer who should know her stuff.

I've lost count of the days at this point...

First things first, lets all praise musky for getting David Bowie stuck in my head for the next month or so, not a bad thing, his song choice was on point. Also the rants have become few and far between because apparently I have to be an "adult" and go to work, pay my bills, and other things that distract me from programming.

Okay, now to the actual dev stuff. I've started to think that maybe my scope of languages is limited somewhat to my comfort zone, which is only java at this point. So for my project (game development), I've decided to pick a language based on what will work best instead of what I'm comfortable with, my runners so far...

C++: The default go to for game development. I would chose this but if I did, my best C++ game would look like Frankenstein's monster and would be filled with terrible code. For that alone I have scratched C++ from my list, for lack of experience.

Java: My usual, my go to, my comfort zone. I don't want to be comfortable though, I want to learn things. That asides, java has tones of resources, frameworks, libraries, and tutorials available. In addition, it's also able to run on pretty much anything, huge ++. The cons are trying to find the best resources, frameworks, libraries, and tutorials to use for a particular situation and that can be hard and confusing. Java may still be my go to but I'll get to that with the next language.

C#: I have never touched C# in my life, and the only things I know about it are what I've heard or read. So far I've heard it is SIMILAR to java, based around C++, and has aged really well compared to other languages. I like that it is similar to java without it being the same language, it will force me to learn things over and you can never reinforce the basics enough. It also has the huge benefit of being Microsoft based while still running on iOS, linux, macOS, windows, and android. This gives me really easy access to implement a mobile version (in the future obviously), while being able to run well on windows, the default OS for most gamers.

Overall I will start writing in C# and see if I like it. If I don't it's no big deal, I still have a good option in java to fall back on. I'm open to hearing opinions on this topic, java vs. C# but please keep your bias nonexistent and you constructive conversation very high. If any actual game developers that have experience with both languages are out their, and reading this, please comment so I can pick your brain.

Some of you may ask about the android scholarship, I contacted google and told them android development wasn't for me so they sent someone a late invite and rescinded mine, hopefully someone else will put it to better use.

Holy god this is long. I'm sorry.

Should rants contain a message/lesson/formulated statement, or fo you consider rants a venting mechanism?

Out of curiousity, since I see some people in the comments asking what the message/constructive idea is on some posts

Hi guys I'm new here. I have been learning python since past few days. And I'm also fimiliar with javaScript as well. but its been quite a while.
Can anybody help me in telling me about stuff that how can I make android apps using python. and what all I need to learn ? looking for a constructive feedback. Thank you.

so what do think ? - i built an entire app with html pages.
With client side - angularjs and
server side - .net webapis working with sql db. The app has over 100 forms and works crazy fast in html form compared to the same form in an aspx. Should I leave it this way or do you guys see any problems with it. All forms are post and https enabled site. Open to constructive criticism and don't be a dick

I have no problem reading constructive criticism of systemd. It has its problems. However, sometimes those critics try to claim that init run levels, or rc scripts, with their arbitrary meaning and the Bourne shell's ad hoc syntax, are a perfectly acceptable solution to the problem that don't need replacing.

I've never seen an OS startup mechanism that tells me, while the system is up, "the change you just made will make it impossible to bring the OS up if you restart it". And that's a real problem.

Best dev experience...a colleague who was my team lead when I joined a company as a "from-scratch" PHP developer, and gave me a ton of tips, assistance, encouragement and praise along the way. And for the bits that were not so good (on my part), he gave me constructive criticism delivered in a friendly and helpful way rather than chew me out.

And when the boss(es) of the company talked shit behind my back in meetings I was not invited to, about things they had no clue about (my performance as a developer)) he defended me and set the record straight.

Later he was demoted from team lead for office politics reasons. But was doing the same job as before, for less pay. Never complained.

His job consisted of, all at once, being the company IT/server/printer guy, first line customer support over phone and remote desktop, .NET and PHP developer, course holder to teach our customers how to use our product, and mentor to me.

Good guy. I'd give him a ++ if I could.

Constructive feedback on what you have built

I'll have to make some tough choices over the next 6 months. With my tech career beginning and my college education ramping up, time is of the essence, and the skills I develop now will be at the forefront of my future. So what does this have to do with Microsoft?

Well, the story begins in the Spring of 2016. Social Forums was about to turn a year old, Trump's campaign was ramping up, and I had just found my love for technology. With all my friends having phones, I had to get a phone and get working on development. The year before, Windows 10 was launched, and I was psyched. I found Microsoft's products to be underrated with potential. That day, I purchased a Lumia 640, upgraded it to Windows 10, and immediately began working. After another year-and-a-half gone by, I went from loving Microsoft, to defending Microsoft, to tolerating Microsoft. I could go on and on about the lousy structure, the privacy issues, the forced upgrades, the redundant developer platform, and other such issues that is leading me away from them. But if there is one thing they have proven over the years, is that the they are completely out of touch with its developers and its customers. They spent years ramping up their phones. They failed. They spend years ramping up their phones. They failed. They spend years ramping up their semi-annual OS updates. They failed. So why did they fail? It's not that they made the wrong prediction out of chance. They legitimately don't care about feedback. It's their way or the highway. This sounds vaguely familiar. They have been spending a decade ignoring feedback from the community because they want to become just like Apple. Right now, Apple LIVES off of brand loyalty and its stable, useful ecosystem. This cannot work for Microsoft as they don't have a lot of brand loyalty. But most of all, they don't have a working ecosystem. They have Windows Insiders, which provides them with hundreds of feedback messages per day. These include suggestions, bug reports, and constructive criticism. The feedback is public. You can have several pages of the same complaint, and they still won't do anything about it. They say they have a good relationship with their community, and that this Beta program helps Windows become better for all. But in the end, we are nothing more than a glorified unpaid labor force. They fired hundreds of professional debuggers just before the Insider Program took off. We are only here to provide bug reports for free. Now that their phones, AR headsets, browser, online services, and VR headsets are failing for all these reasons, I see little reason to develop for Windows anymore. I don't just mean their UWP and App Store platforms, I mean Windows as a whole. I'm definitely not a Mac guy either. I never see myself going to Mac either, as they are really no different in terms of how they treat their Developers and PC users. If things continue down this route, I will leave the platform all together. I've always wanted to be a Systems Programmer, so I don't really need an established paid platform to be successful. Even now, I'm not certain about leaving Windows altogether but as a developer, I need to find my place. Time is of the essence in my life, and I need to find out my place in the software world. Now I think it isn't on the Windows platform like I had dreamed it would be. But where do I go?

I have been an expat since graduating and have been moving a lot. More than a decade ago, when I was still young, I was in a relationship with a woman, Sylvia, in a country where we both lived. Sylvia wanted to settle down but I was not ready to commit so young. We clearly had different expectations from the relationship. I did not know what to do and, well, I ghosted her. Over the Christmas break, while she was visiting her family, I simply moved out and left the country. I took advantage of the fact that I accepted a job in other country and did not tell her about it. I simply wanted to avoid being untangled in a break-up drama. Sylvia was rather emotional and became obsessed with the relationship, tracking me down, even causing various scenes with my parents and friends.

Anyhow, fast forward to now. I now work as a math teacher in an international school. I have been in other relationships since, so Sylvia is a sort of forgotten history. Sadly, till now. This week, I learnt that our fantastic school director suddenly resigned due to a serious family situation and had to move back to her home country over the summer. The school had to replace her. We are getting a new director. I read the bio of the new boss and googled her and was shocked to discover it is Sylvia. We have not been in touch and do not have any mutual friends anymore. I am not a big fan of social media and had no idea what she had been up to since the unpleasant situation a long time ago.

I have no idea what to do and how to deal with this mess. It is clear this will be not only embarassing but I will also be reporting to my ex. I am not in a position to find another job at present. There are no other international schools so finding another job in this country is not an option. Even finding a job elsewhere is not possible on such a short notice. These jobs usually open for school terms so I have to stay put for few months. But more importantly, I am happy and settled here so do not want to move. To make the situation worse, the expat community here is very small and tightly knit so teachers also socialize a lot.

Do you have any suggestions for me how to handle it and what should I do? I understand that this would not have happened if I did not ghost her back then, but I cannot do anything about it now. I gathered from the comments that readers usually have a go on people like me for “bad behavior” but I am really looking for constructive comments how to deal with the situation.

Definitely my current manager. He is very supportive of our career goals and has us choose both goals related to team performance and personal progression. He supports us having time at the end of the sprint to innovate and research things to bring back into the product. He gives constructive feedback and doesnt breathe down peoples necks.

Just received code review from interview technical task. 50 percent of it was because of encapsulation (that 5-8 variables could have been private instead of public). 20 percent was about shit that was expected but missing (error validation, dependency injection). It was missing because it was not specified in app requirements and also noone said that I have to build a production level application for a simple interview here. 10 percent was nitpicking about formatting(I used default intellij formatter) and one ide error that appeared because of project importing. And only 20 percent of feedback was actually constructive and useful. Cool. Also developer said that he was shocked that I made loading animation but didnt call it in my app. However I made it, but if you have fast internet connection it doesnt show up. I mean if you run my app on a phone with gprs connection u will see that damn animation. What Im supposed to do slow down the app so u could see it? But we are building production level app here no? Shit. It feels like he applied double standards to me or something. Half of review nitpicking about useless details and another half about shit that is expected to be in the app but was not even communicated. Also I did not get developers contact so I could ask him what the fck he wanted from me.

I am particularly guilty of this, embedding non-constructive comments, code poetry and little jokes into most of my projects (although I usually have enough sense to remove anything directly offensive before releasing the code). Here's one I'm particulary fond of, placed far, far down a poorly-designed 'God Object':

/**
* For the brave souls who get this far: You are the chosen ones,
* the valiant knights of programming who toil away, without rest,
* fixing our most awful code. To you, true saviors, kings of men,
* I say this: never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down,
* never gonna run around and desert you. Never gonna make you cry,
* never gonna say goodbye. Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you.
*/
I'M SORRY!!!! I just couldn't help myself.....!

And another, which I'll admit I haven't actually released into the wild, even though I am very tempted to do so in one of my less intuitive classes:

//
// Dear maintainer:
//
// Once you are done trying to 'optimize' this routine,
// and have realized what a terrible mistake that was,
// please increment the following counter as a warning
// to the next guy:
//
// total_hours_wasted_here = 42
//

When I get one with constructive feedback. It's rated since I'm usually the one that tells people their code sucks.... After it causes a production issue.

Yes no one does a proper code review on my direct team.... Just the stuff a linter would tell you to fix....

if I say that I just started uploading vids on yt ,
would ya'll be interested to give constructive criticism and maybe give video suggestions ?

P.S : I am thinking to keep track of my journey ( i am not sure how to draw my journey in a video )

It has come to my attention that an IRL acquaintance praised my constructive activity in social media, but the only substantial activity I've had for like a year was on DevRant.

I wonder if any of my friends other than Mayank are on here.

Not very worried though, I hardly ever say things about other devs that I couldn't own if they found out.

Design in Motion: Real-Time Rendering's Impact on Architecture

Architecture, a discipline that once relied heavily on blueprints, models, and lengthy render times, has undergone a revolutionary transformation in recent years. The advent of real-time rendering technology has fundamentally altered the way architects visualize, present, and interact with their designs. This paradigm shift has not only enhanced the creative process but has also empowered architects to make more informed decisions and create immersive experiences for clients and stakeholders.

Real-time rendering, a technological marvel that harnesses the power of high-performance graphics hardware and advanced software algorithms, allows architects to generate photorealistic visualizations of their designs in a matter of milliseconds. Gone are the days of waiting hours or even days for a single rendering to complete. This acceleration in rendering time has not only expedited the design process but has also encouraged architects to explore multiple design iterations rapidly.

One of the most significant impacts of real-time rendering on architecture is the ability to visualize a design in various lighting conditions and environmental settings. Architects can now instantly switch between daytime and nighttime lighting scenarios, experiment with different materials, and observe how their designs respond to different seasons or weather conditions. This level of dynamic visualization offers insights into how a building's appearance and functionality evolve throughout the day, contributing to more holistic and thoughtful design solutions.

Moreover, real-time rendering has transformed client presentations. Architectural concepts can now be communicated with unprecedented clarity and realism. Clients can virtually walk through spaces, observing intricate details, exploring different angles, and even experiencing the play of light and shadow in real-time. This immersive experience fosters a deeper understanding of the design intent, enabling clients to provide more targeted feedback and make informed decisions.

The impact of real-time rendering on collaboration within architectural teams cannot be overstated. Traditionally, architects and designers would need to wait for a rendering to complete before discussing design changes or improvements. With real-time rendering, team members can make adjustments on the fly, observing the immediate effects of their decisions. This seamless collaboration not only enhances efficiency but also encourages interdisciplinary collaboration as architects, engineers, and other stakeholders can work together in real-time to refine designs.

The integration of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) into the architectural workflow is another transformative aspect of real-time rendering. Architects can now create VR environments that allow clients to step inside their designs and explore every nook and cranny. This not only enhances client engagement but also enables architects to identify potential design flaws or spatial issues that might not be apparent in 2D drawings. AR, on the other hand, overlays digital information onto the physical world, facilitating on-site decision-making and construction supervision.

Real-time rendering's impact extends beyond the design phase. It has proven to be a valuable tool for public engagement and community involvement in architectural projects. By creating virtual walkthroughs of proposed structures, architects can offer the public an opportunity to experience the design before construction begins. This transparency fosters a sense of ownership and allows for constructive feedback, contributing to the development of designs that resonate with the community's needs and aspirations.

The environmental implications of real-time rendering are also noteworthy. The ability to visualize designs in various environmental contexts contributes to more sustainable architecture. Architects can assess how natural light interacts with interior spaces, optimizing energy efficiency and reducing the need for artificial lighting during the day.

In conclusion, real-time rendering has ushered in a new era of architectural design, propelling the industry into a realm of dynamic visualization, immersive experiences, and enhanced collaboration. The ability to witness designs in motion, explore different lighting conditions, and interact with virtual environments has redefined how architects approach their craft. From facilitating client presentations to fostering sustainable design solutions, real-time rendering's impact on architecture is profound and multifaceted. As the technology continues to evolve, architects have an unprecedented opportunity to push the boundaries of creativity, efficiency, and sustainability in the built environment.

People who generalize any technology as 'bad' or "worthless" (or worse, proclaim it is not secure, doesn't work correctly, or has specific problems it doesn't have) when the technology is widely and obviously appropriately used in practice just make themselves look bad. It's like getting mad at a hammer. It's just a tool. If you don't like it, don't use it. If you think it needs improvement, contribute to improving it. Non-constructive criticism is a waste of your time as a software developer.

So I was remembering something today. And the ugliness of it makes it difficult to focus on constructive things.

Apparently one of the things they were doing during the vietnam war was buying the identifies of either dead, murdered, or awol soldiers to put people in their place who were running from the law, or were monsters in general trying to hide from things they did. how nice. the whole unit would claim it was the person. for what payout ? or was the unit just some of these people undiscovered ? always the question. but if things like this became common knowledge someone talked, which is likely why I was spared iraq.

dumped a whole bunch of trash there, as the war made no sense in the first place. :P