(Interview for sde-3 position)
(continuation of https://devrant.com/rants/2132431/... )

Interviewer - *opens laptop. Gives a question.* solve this.

Me - *a bit surprised that such questions were being asked on a sde-3 level*
this is the 4th or 5th question from geeksforgeeks, isn't it? I know the answer to this. Do u still want me to solve it?

Interviewer - *not believing me* Yes

Me - okay. Well this *writing down the original solution mentioned on the site* is the verbatim code mentioned on the website, with complexity O(n^2).
However I feel this is not the optimal solution. Let me write a better solution.
*I provide a better solution*
This has a complexity of O(n log n) . What do you think?

Interviewer - Nope. This could be a lot better.

Me - okay. Let me see. Did some minor changes, added some caching (obviously this will have no effect on the base algorithm) etc
How about now?

Interviewer - nope. Still not good.

Me - okay. Can you tell me how to improve it?

Interviewer - no we are not allowed to solve problems for you. It is not our interview, it is yours.

Me - that makes no sense. Interviews are a two way street. I'd very much like to know the optimal answer to this.

Interviewer - okay
*copies down the answer from geeksforgeeks*
This is good

Me - *at first I thought this was a prank or something. *
I just mentioned this answer here.
Then I spent the next 10 minutes providing a BETTER solution.
May I know how yours is better?

Interviewer - this solution has 2-3 loops. Yours has a function calling itself.

Me - that's called divide and conquer using recursion mf!
Anyways let's take an example and do a dry run.

Interviewer - okay

*we do dry run*

Interviewer - oh yes. Yours ran faster. But it will run fast only sometimes.

Me - yes. Each time the algorithm rolls a dice to decide if it should run fast or slow. You have one goddamn awesome weed dealer man.
I got to go. Thank you for meeting me.

Continuation of rant https://devrant.com/rants/975261/...

I PASSED THE TEST!!!!! YEAHHHHH

Now only an interview left. Please....
If i fail this interview, no more tries.

Wish me luck.

From this point, all personal projects and requests will stop.

Continuation of https://devrant.com/rants/642962/...

You are the decryption key to my encryption,
No one can access my heart except you.

You are the loop in my life,
I always keep coming back to you.

You are my nodemon,
You are always watching over me.

You are the / to everything I do,
Am nothing without you and I will always preserve you.

You are my increment operator,
You add value to my life.

To be continued 😉

Continuation from :
https://devrant.io/rants/835693/...

Hi everybody! I am sorry that as a first time poster I am building 2 long stories, but I really like the idea of connecting with other people here!

Well, as I was mentioning before, I got a job in Android development and had a blast with it. Me and the developer clicked and would spend our time discussing PHP, the move to other stacks (I was making him love the idea of Django or Spring Java) games, bands and cool stuff like that. This dude was my hero, his own stack was developed in a similar MVC fashion that he had implemented from scratch before for many projects. It was through him that I learned how to use my own code (rather than frameworks and other libraries) to build what I wanted. I seriously thought that I had it made with a position that respected me and placed me in the lead mobile development position of the company. Then it happened. He had taken 2 weeks of unauthorized leave, which was ok since he was best friends with the owner of the company, those 2 along another asshole started it so they could do whatever they wanted. And I could not make much progress without him being there since there were things that he needed to do, that I was not allowed, for me to continue. When he came back I was quickly rushed to the owner of the company's office to discuss my lack of progress. The lead developer was livid, as if he knew that he had fucked up. He blamed the whole thing on me (literally told the owner that it was my fault before I was summoned) and that we lost 2 weeks of business time because I did not had the initiative to make progress on my own. I felt absolutely horrible, someone that I had trusted and befriended doing something like that, I really felt like shit. I had mad respect and love for this guy. It got heated, I showed the owner the text messages in which I showed him my pleas to led me finish the parts that were needed while he was away. Funny enough, he acted betrayed. After that it was 3 months of barely talking to one another except for work related stuff. He got cold and would barely let me touch the internal code that he was developing. It was painful. The owner kept complaining about progress and demanded that I do a document scanner for the company, which was to be attached to their mobile application. Not only that but it had to be done with OpenCV. Now, CV is great, but it is its own area, it takes a while to be able to develop something nice with it that is efficient and not a shitstorm.
I had two weeks.
Finished in one. After burning my brain and ensuring that the c++ code was not giving issues and the project was steady I turned it in...to their dismay. And I say so because I felt that they gave me such a huge project with the intention of firing me if it was not done. After that it was constant shit from the owner and the lead developer. I was asked then to port the code to the IOS version. I had some knowledge of it already so I started working on it. Progress was fast since the initial idea was already there and I really love working on Apple devices. And when I was 70% done the owner decided to cut me loose. At first he cited things such as lack of funding and him being unable to pay my salary. I was fine with that even though I knew it was not true. So at the time I just nodded and thanked the company for my time there. Before I left, he decided to blame it on me, stating that if they were not producing money that it was perhaps my fault. I lost my shit, and started using my military voice to explain to him how a software company is normally ran. Then I stormed out.
It was known to me, that the lead developer had actually argued against me being laid off. And that he was upset about it, we made amends, but the fact remains that I was laid off because the owner did not think of me as an asset, regardless of how many times I worked alongside the lead developer or how valuable I was actually to the company, their infrastructure did get better while we worked together, so I just assumed that he never actually did any mention of my value.

I lasted 2 months without a job, feeling horribly shitty because my wife had to work harder to ensure our stability whilst I was without any sort of salary. At this time I had already my degree, so all I had to do was look better. In the meantime I decided to study more about other technologies. I learn React, and got way better at JS and Node that I thought I could and was finally able to get another job as a full stack developer for another company.
I have been here since 2 months. It has been weird, we do classic ASP, which is completely pointless at this time, but meh. At this time though, I just don't really have the same motivation. Its really hard for me to trust the people that I work with and would like to connect with more developers.

Continuation of https://devrant.com/rants/4719838/...

First day of our hike complete. We met a reindeer, got covered by a huge cloud, and finally had the sky open up to cover us in rain as well. Not too eventful, thankfully. Time for a well earned shower.

Continued from:
https://devrant.com/rants/975261/...
https://devrant.com/rants/989191/...

Heading to the interview place in 8 in the morning! Wish me luck!

Will keep updated.

Peace! (insert music here)

EoS1: This is the continuation of my previous rant, "The Ballad of The Six Witchers and The Undocumented Java Tool". Catch the first part here: https://devrant.com/rants/5009817/...

The Undocumented Java Tool, created by Those Who Came Before to fight the great battles of the past, is a swift beast. It reaches systems unknown and impacts many processes, unbeknownst even to said processes' masters. All from within it's lair, a foggy Windows Server swamp of moldy data streams and boggy flows.

One of The Six Witchers, the Wild One, scouted ahead to map the input and output data streams of the Unmapped Data Swamp. Accompanied only by his animal familiars, NetCat and WireShark.

Two others, bold and adventurous, raised their decompiling blades against the Undocumented Java Tool beast itself, to uncover it's data processing secrets.

Another of the witchers, of dark complexion and smooth speak, followed the data upstream to find where the fuck the limited excel sheets that feeds The Beast comes from, since it's handlers only know that "every other day a new one appears on this shared active directory location". WTF do people often have NPC-levels of unawareness about their own fucking jobs?!?!

The other witchers left to tend to the Burn-Rate Bonfire, for The Sprint is dark and full of terrors, and some bigwigs always manage to shoehorn their whims/unrelated stories into a otherwise lean sprint.

At the dawn of the new year, the witchers reconvened. "The Beast breathes a currency conversion API" - said The Wild One - "And it's claws and fangs strike mostly at two independent JIRA clusters, sometimes upserting issues. It uses a company-deprecated API to send emails. We're in deep shit."

"I've found The Source of Fucking Excel Sheets" - said the smooth witcher - "It is The Temple of Cash-Flow, where the priests weave the Tapestry of Transactions. Our Fucking Excel Sheets are but a snapshot of the latest updates on the balance of some billing accounts. I spoke with one of the priestesses, and she told me that The Oracle (DB) would be able to provide us with The Data directly, if we were to learn the way of the ODBC and the Query"

"We stroke at the beast" - said the bold and adventurous witchers, now deserving of the bragging rights to be called The Butchers of Jarfile - "It is actually fewer than twenty classes and modules. Most are API-drivers. And less than 40% of the code is ever even fucking used! We found fucking JIRA API tokens and URIs hard-coded. And it is all synchronous and monolithic - no wonder it takes almost 20 hours to run a single fucking excel sheet".

Together, the witchers figured out that each new billing account were morphed by The Beast into a new JIRA issue, if none was open yet for it. Transactions were used to update the outstanding balance on the issues regarding the billing accounts. The currency conversion API was used too often, and it's purpose was only to give a rough estimate of the total balance in each Jira issue in USD, since each issue could have transactions in several currencies. The Beast would consume the Excel sheet, do some cryptic transformations on it, and for each resulting line access the currency API and upsert a JIRA issue. The secrets of those transformations were still hidden from the witchers. When and why would The Beast send emails, was still a mistery.

As the Witchers Council approached an end and all were armed with knowledge and information, they decided on the next steps.
The Wild Witcher, known in every tavern in the land and by the sea, would create a connector to The Red Port of Redis, where every currency conversion is already updated by other processes and can be quickly retrieved inside the VPC. The Greenhorn Witcher is to follow him and build an offline process to update balances in JIRA issues.
The Butchers of Jarfile were to build The Juggler, an automation that should be able to receive a parquet file with an insertion plan and asynchronously update the JIRA API with scores of concurrent requests.
The Smooth Witcher, proud of his new lead, was to build The Oracle Watch, an order that would guard the Oracle (DB) at the Temple of Cash-Flow and report every qualifying transaction to parquet files in AWS S3. The Data would then be pushed to cross The Event Bridge into The Cluster of Sparks and Storms.
This Witcher Who Writes is to ride the Elephant of Hadoop into The Cluster of Sparks an Storms, to weave the signs of Map and Reduce and with speed and precision transform The Data into The Insertion Plan.
However, how exactly is The Data to be transformed is not yet known.

Will the Witchers be able to build The Data's New Path? Will they figure out the mysterious transformation? Will they discover the Undocumented Java Tool's secrets on notifying customers and aggregating data?

This story is still afoot. Only the future will tell, and I will keep you posted.

Continuation of https://devrant.com/rants/4720819/...

So here we go, the start of day three. A bit of pain in the hips from a badly balanced backpack, but after some adjustments to the contents of my backpack I think I'm ready for another day. 20 km, here we go!

This is a continuation of a Collab, please check it out before answering this:
(https://devrant.com/collabs/...)

I am thinking about making a crowdfunding campaign - should I? I am a terrible person when it comes to recruiting people and getting people to actually become interested in such thing. I hate using my voice also in order to create some promotional video also.

I know that some of you are interested in such thing, but how many of you would actually contribute to such project with your time, coding skill or money?
I am looking into to buy some SuperMicro stuff (would probably cost me around $4000) in order to get started but I am very unsure.

Continuation of https://devrant.com/rants/4725253/...

So I didn't get the time to post an update this morning, so an afternoon post will have to do. Today's walk was just a little past 12km, giving us all some hope to get it done in a reasonable time. The first six or so kilometers were quite harsh with winds reaching speeds of at least 15 m/s, probably closer to 20. With the rain smattering like tiny bullets our morale was pretty low. What kept us going was the knowledge that just a few kilometers ahead lay a valley a few hundred meters below our current altitude, promising warmer air, and most importantly, less wind.

As we approached the valley we could see trees appearing over the horizon, a good sign as the Swedish Fjäll generally isn't very inviting to trees, and from this point on our walk became more and more pleasant. During lunch everyone could feel the feeling of achievement lingering between us, and another three kilometers later we arrived at our cabins.

So here I am, sitting in a couch in a cozy cabin. Most of us just left the sauna, and in an hour or so we'll have a great meal and probably some celebration. Tomorrow I think we'll just chill out, perhaps pick some mushrooms, and then head to the train to wake up the next day in Malmö, ready for another week of work. Who knows, perhaps I'll even have time to squeeze in another update.

Cheers, time for a nap.

Continuation of https://devrant.com/rants/4723170/...

So last post I said day three. That's incorrect, and here we are at the end of day two. Today was filled with everything from extraordinary views from snowy peaks, to rain and snow being blown parallel to the ground, as well as river crossings without bridges or paths, and a whole lot of soaked socks. After our 22km hike we finally arrived at the outpost at which we were served an amazingly good meal. Due to us arriving so late and having to eat almost immediately I didn't the chance to snap a picture, but I have this picture of a few reindeer, so I guess you can have that instead.

Now it's time to button up my pants, leave this toilet booth and head to bed. Cya tomorrow!

This is the third part of my ongoing series "The Ballad of the Six Witchers and the Undocumented Java Tool".
In this part, we have the massive Battle of Sparks and Storms.

The first part is here: https://devrant.com/rants/5009817/...

The second part is here: https://devrant.com/rants/5054467/...

Over the last couple sprints and then some, The Witcher Who Writes and the Butchers of Jarfile had studied the decompiled guts of the Undocumented Java Beast and finally derived (most of) the process by which the data was transformed. They even built a model to replicate the results in small scale.
But when such process was presented to the Priests of Accounting at the Temple of Cash-Flow, chaos ensued.
This cannot be! - cried the priests - You must be wrong!
Wrong, the Witchers were not. In every single test case the Priests of Accounting threw at the Witchers, their model predicted perfectly what would be registered by the Undocumented Java Tool at the very end.
It was not the Witchers. The process was corrupted at its essence.

The Witchers reconvened at their fortress of Sprint. In the dark room of Standup, the leader of their order, wise beyond his years (and there were plenty of those), in a deep and solemn voice, there declared:
"Guys, we must not fuck this up." (actual quote)
For the leader of the witchers had just returned from a war council at the capitol of the province. There, heading a table boarding the Archpriest of Accounting, the Augur of Economics, the Marketing Spymaster and Admiral of the Fleet, was the Ciefoh Seat himself.
They had heard rumors about the Order of the Witchers' battles and operations. They wanted to know more.

It was quiet that night in the flat and cloudy plains of Cluster of Sparks and Storms. The Ciefoh Seat had ordered the thunder to stay silent, so that the forces of whole cluster would be available for the Witchers.
The cluster had solid ground for Hive and Parquet turf, and extended from the Connection River to farther than the horizon.
The Witcher Who Writes, seated high atop his war-elephant, looked at the massive battle formations behind.
The frontline were all war-elephants of Hadoop, their mahouts the Witchers themselves.
For the right flank, the Red Port of Redis had sent their best connectors - currency conversions would happen by the hundreds, instantly and always updated.
The left flank had the first and second army of Coroutine Jugglers, trained by the Witchers. Their swift catapults would be able to move data to and from the JIRA cities. No data point will be left behind.
At the center were thousands of Sparks mounting their RDD warhorses. Organized in formations designed by the Witchers and the Priestesses of Accounting, those armoured and strong units were native to this cloudy landscape. This was their home, and they were ready to defend it.
For the enemy could be seen in the horizon.

There were terabytes of data crossing the Stony Event Bridge. Hundreds of millions of datapoints, eager to flood the memory of every system and devour the processing time of every node on sight.
For the Ciefoh Seat, in his fury about the wrong calculations of the processes of the past, had ruled that the Witchers would not simply reshape the data from now on.
The Witchers were to process the entire historical ledger of transactions. And be done before the end of the month.

The metrics rumbled under the weight of terabytes of data crossing the Event Bridge. With fire in their eyes, the war-elephants in the frontline advanced.
Hundreds of data points would be impaled by their tusks and trampled by their feet, pressed into the parquet and hive grounds. But hundreds more would take their place. There were too many data points for the Hadoop war-elephants alone.
But the dawn will come.
When the night seemed darker, the Witchers heard a thunder, and the skies turned red. The Sparks were on the move.
Riding into the parquet and hive turf, impaling scores of data points with their long SIMD lances and chopping data off with their Scala swords, the Sparks burned through the enemy like fire.
The second line of the sparks would pick data off to be sent by the Coroutine Jugglers to JIRA. That would provoke even more data to cross the Event Bridge, but the third line of Sparks were ready for it - those data would be pierced by the rounds provided by the Red Port of Redis, and sent back to JIRA - for good.

They fought for six days and six nights, taking turns so that the battles would not stop. And then, silence. The day was won, all the data crushed into hive and parquet.

Short-lived was the relief. The Witchers knew that the enemy in combat is but a shadow of the troubles that approach. Politics and greed and grudge are all next in line. Are the Witchers heroes or marauders? The aftermath is to come, and I will keep you posted.

Continuation of the events ranted here: https://devrant.com/rants/9895220/...

In a turn of events and very emotional moments of human admissions, it turned out that the team leader in question is in fact suffering a lot on a personal level. Not to detail here but suffice to say that, if his story is true, is enough to make everyone have a very short fuse.

He - eventually - admitted his wrongdoings, asked/begged me to stay, promised on his life and soul to never communicate unprofessionally ever again, to take a long vacation to mourn and reflect and will consider relinquishing the position of team leader for my team and just focus on the other one he manages.

I considered this a win. I stood my ground, made very clear the terms on how I continue working in the organization, the project, and with him, and kept my client and money rolling.

That being said if it ever happens once more. I immediately resign and he will be left without any chance of recovery.

Update on the kid with computer parts in his hand (ref: https://devrant.com/rants/1098717)

The old man came in and bought a refurbished computer. He didn't fart, thankfully.

A continuation to https://devrant.com/rants/2629107/...

Again the idea is bird/flock of birds.

Thanks to all the people who gave their opinion last time around.

DEAR NON TECHNICAL 'IT' PERSON, JUST CONSUME THE FUCKING DATA!!!!

Continuation of this:
https://devrant.com/rants/3319553/...

So essentially my theory was correct that their concern about data not being up to date is almost certianly ... the spreadsheet is old, not the data.... but I'm up against this wall of a god damn "IT PERSON" who has no technical or logic skills, but for some reason this person doesn't think "man I'm confused, I should talk to my other IT people" rather they just eat my time with vague and weird requests that they express with NO PRECISION WHATSOEVER and arbitrary hold ups and etc.

Like it's pretty damn obvious your spreadsheet was likely created before you got the latest update, it's not a mystery how this might happen. But god damn I tell them to tell me or go find out when the spreadsheet was generated and nothing happens.

Meanwhile their other IT people 'cleaned the database' and now a bunch of records are missing and they want me to just rando update a list of records. Like wtf is 'clean the database' all about!?!?!?

I'm all "hey how about I send you all records between these dates and now we're sure you've got all the records you need up to date and I'll send you my usual updates a couple times a day using the usual parameters".

But this customer is all "oh man that's a lot of records", what even is that?

It's like maybe 10k fucking records at most. Are you loading this in MS Access or something (I really don't know MS Access limits, just picking an old weird system) and it's choking??!?! Just fucking take the data and stick it in the damn database, how much trouble can it be?!!?!?

Side theory: I kinda wonder if after they put it in the DB every time someone wants the data they have some API on their end that is just "HERE"S ALL THE FUCKING DATA" and their client application chokes and that's why there's a concern about database size with these guys.

I also wonder if their whole 'it's out of date' shit is actually them not updating records properly and they're sort of grooming the DB size to manage all these bad choices....

Having said all that, it makes a lot more sense to me how we get our customers. Like we do a lot of customer sends us their data and we feed it back to them after doing surprisingly basic stuff ever to it... like guies your own tools do th---- wait never mind....

Continuation of: https://devrant.com/rants/2784730/...

So, the potential client was in contact with me again, after our initial discussion ended with "okay, we'll try to figure out more clearer requirements", and then they procrastinated (as they confessed).

Now, they want a "simple portfolio type website with testimonial videos, a contact form and a hidden section with more videos for logged in customers"

... Okay, why don't you just... I basically linked them a bunch of service providers who have ready templates that they can just subscribe to for some monthly fee and have even someone at those providers' make the work for much less than I'd do it from scratch. My suggestions were ignored... and when I told them my best estimates of how long I'd take me and hoe much it would cost, the eventual reply was:

"Our CEO's going to think about it. He knows some dude who'd make a WP site for free.."

... well, that's going to end well.

Tbh, my correspondent did add that the "dude" is known to be extremely unreliable, so I might end up with this project after all.

I'm already ruing my decision to try my hands at some freelance work. I hate dealing with clients, so why do I even...?

# continuation of https://devrant.io/rants/2195230

I replied, that I need the pictures as seperate jpg/png files and that he should upload it somewhere for me to access them.
and well, he did - i was suprised ... BUT

he srsly just did screenshots of these pictures from whithin the pdf file - ON HIS PHONE.
u have ever seen an apple phone these days? those with the missing home button? yeah, you have a digital on screen overlay home button now. and guess - it is in every picture.

I dont care any more. it goes online as is....
tiny, pixelated pictures with beautifull shiny white on-screen home button on them. this is how we roll these days!

In continuation with https://devrant.com/rants/1911995/...

Here it's worse than Australia
https://m.economictimes.com/news/...

Cont. on this: https://devrant.com/rants/2991618/...

So, after I gave them my estimates and pricing and whatnot, they msgd me back a few days ago.. guess what?

"We're going to go with the dude making that [shitty] WP site for free, we'll be in contact again when we need the online store" ... No surprise. Somehow it just baffles me how people think devs' work is nigh on free even though the avg salary of a dev is known to be quite high. Like how can you not count 1+1=2?

!rant

Continuation from: https://devrant.com/rants/979267/...

My vision is to implement something that is inspired by Flow Based Programming.

The motivation for this is two fold

* Functional design - many advantages to this, pure functions mean consistent outputs for each input, testable, composable, reasonable. The functional reactive nature means events are handles as functions over time, thus eliminating statefulness
* Visual/Diagrammable - programs can be represented as diagrams, with components, connections and ports, there is a 1 to 1 relationship between the program structure and visual representation. This means high level analysis and design can happen throughout project development.

Just to be clear there are enough frameworks out there so I have no intentions of making a new one, this will make use of the least number of libraries I can get away with.

In my original post I used Highland.js as I've been following the project a while. But unfortunately documentation is lacking and it is a little bare bones; I need something that is a little more featureful to eliminate boilerplate code.

RxJS seems to be the answer, it is much better documentated and provides WAY more functionality. And I have seen many reports of it being significantly easier to use.

Code speaks much louder so stay tuned as I plan to produce a proof of concept (obligatory) todo app. Or if you're sick of those feel free to make a request.

In continuation to : https://devrant.com/rants/1661103/...
(first read the linked rant)
Things are going great now!

continuation of "testing is not needed" series
https://devrant.com/rants/4407958

a second former colleague (which works as backend dev) was seeking frontender, and remembered about the React frontender we both worked with.

I decided to warn him:
> *Giggles* According to his words, front is not like back. Git and testing aren't required there.

I received next replies:
> actually I don't need tests as well
> I did not write them all this time
> I have testers in a team for that, which do the testing for me
> I think I'll need it in cv though.

My comments:
I am trying to imagine their code... architecture, and I am a bit scarried to see how it looks like, are you?

Continuation from
https://www.devrant.io/rants/605332

Alright, shit happend during presentation, but thanks to frech humour (don't ask why) and a good examination I got the better mark! Thank you guys for listening to my story

Kind of continuation of this my other rant https://devrant.com/rants/2345105/...

I have now reached the point where I want to tear off my exes with my own hands, turn off my brain and "unsee" what's in this garbage bag of code.

I swear to the programmer's gods (assuming something like this do exist apart from the D&D Story in my brain) if I do see another GLOBAL variable I'm gonna kill somebody!

It will take me good part of 2020 to sanitize this shit!

Continuation of this rant...

https://devrant.com/rants/10224064/...

I was hoping to make a fast buck on Google Play to fund purchasing a Fruit Mini, so that I can develop the same app for Fruit Watch. Seems like pipedream now...