This is more just a note for younger and less experienced devs out there...

I've been doing this for around 25 years professionally, and about 15 years more generally beyond that. I've seen a lot and done a lot, many things most developers never will: built my own OS (nothing especially amazing, but still), created my own language and compiler for it, created multiple web frameworks and UI toolkits from scratch before those things were common like they are today. I've had eleven technical books published, along with some articles. I've done interviews and speaking engagements at various user groups, meetups and conferences. I've taught classes on programming. On the job, I'm the guy that others often come to when they have a difficult problem they are having trouble solving because I seem to them to usually have the answer, or at least a gut feel that gets them on the right track. To be blunt, I've probably forgotten more about CS than a lot of devs will ever know and it's all just a natural consequence of doing this for so long.

I don't say any of this to try and impress anyone, I really don't... I say it only so that there's some weight behind what I say next:

Almost every day I feel like I'm not good enough. Sometimes, I face a challenge that feels like it might be the one that finally breaks me. I often feel like I don't have a clue what to do next. My head bangs against the wall as much as anyone and I do my fair share of yelling and screaming out of frustration. I beat myself up for every little mistake, and I make plenty.

Imposter syndrome is very real and it never truly goes away no matter what successes you've had and you have to fight the urge to feel shame when things aren't going well because you're not alone in those feelings and they can destroy even the best of us. I suppose the Torvald's and Carmack's of the world possibly don't experience it, but us mere mortals do and we probably always will - at least, I'm still waiting for it to go away!

Remember that what we do is intrinsically hard. What we do is something not everyone can do, contrary to all the "anyone can code" things people do. In some ways, it's unnatural even! Therefore, we shouldn't expect to not face tough days, and being human, the stress of those days gets to us all and causes us to doubt ourselves in a very insidious way.

But, it's okay. You're not alone. Hang in there and go easy on yourself! You'll only ever truly fail if you give up.

I’m kind of pissy, so let’s get into this.
My apologies though: it’s kind of scattered.

Family support?
For @Root? Fucking never.

Maybe if I wanted to be a business major my mother might have cared. Maybe the other one (whom I call Dick because fuck him, and because it’s accurate) would have cared if I suddenly wanted to become a mechanic. But in both cases, I really doubt it. I’d probably just have been berated for not being perfect, or better at their respective fields than they were at 3x my age.

Anyway.
Support being a dev?
Not even a little.

I had hand-me-down computers that were outmoded when they originally bought them: cutting-edge discount resale tech like Win95, 33/66mhz, 404mb hd. It wouldn’t even play an MP3 without stuttering.

(The only time I had a decent one is when I built one for myself while in high school. They couldn’t believe I spent so much money on what they saw as a silly toy.)

Using a computer for anything other than email or “real world” work was bad in their eyes. Whenever I was on the computer, they accused me of playing games, and constantly yelled at me for wasting my time, for rotting in my room, etc. We moved so often I never had any friends, and they were simply awful to be around, so what was my alternative? I also got into trouble for reading too much (seriously), and with computers I could at least make things.

If they got mad at me for any (real or imagined) reason (which happened almost every other day) they would steal my things, throw them out, or get mad and destroy them. Desk, books, decorations, posters, jewelry, perfume, containers, my chair, etc. Sometimes they would just steal my power cables or network cables. If they left the house, they would sometimes unplug the internet altogether, and claim they didn’t know why it was down. (Stealing/unplugging cables continued until I was 16.) If they found my game CDs, those would disappear, too. They would go through my room, my backpack and its notes/binders/folders/assignments, my closet, my drawers, my journals (of course my journals), and my computer, too. And if they found anything at all they didn’t like, they would confront me about it, and often would bring it up for months telling me how wrong/bad I was. Related: I got all A’s and a B one year in high school, and didn’t hear the end of it for the entire summer vacation.

It got to the point that I invented my own language with its own vocabulary, grammar, and alphabet just so I could have just a little bit of privacy. (I’m still fluent in it.) I would only store everything important from my computer on my only Zip disk so that I could take it to school with me every day and keep it out of their hands. I was terrified of losing all of my work, and carrying a Zip disk around in my backpack (with no backups) was safer than leaving it at home.

I continued to experiment and learn whatever I could about computers and programming, and also started taking CS classes when I reached high school. Amusingly, I didn’t even like computers despite all of this — they were simply an escape.

Around the same time (freshman in high school) I was a decent enough dev to actually write useful software, and made a little bit of money doing that. I also made some for my parents, both for personal use and for their businesses. They never trusted it, and continually trashtalked it. They would only begrudgingly use the business software because the alternatives were many thousands of dollars. And, despite never ever having a problem with any of it, they insisted I accompany them every time, and these were often at 3am. Instead of being thankful, they would be sarcastically amazed when nothing went wrong for the nth time. Two of the larger projects I made for them were: an inventory management system that interfaced with hand scanners (VB), and another inventory management system for government facility audits (Access). Several websites, too. I actually got paid for the Access application thanks to a contract!

To put this into perspective, I was selected to work on a government software project about a year later, while still in high school. That didn’t impress them, either.

They continued to see computers as a useless waste of time, and kept telling me that I would be unemployable, and end up alone.

When they learned I was dating someone long-distance, and that it was a she, they simply took my computer and didn’t let me use it again for six months. Really freaking hard to do senior projects without a computer. They begrudgingly allowed me to use theirs for schoolwork, but it had a fraction of the specs — and some projects required Flash, which the computer could barely run.

Between the constant insults, yelling, abuse (not mentioned here), total lack of privacy, and the theft, destruction, etc. I still managed to teach myself about computers and programming.

In short, I am a dev despite my parents’ best efforts to the contrary.

One day I developed a simple website for a goldsmith who I already new for a year or so.

We discussed everything and agreed on a feature set, price and a deadline when it should be ready. Based on this we signed a contract and I started my work.

Unfortunately at the same time I lost most of my childhood friends. I moved to a new city and started to study computer science, which was awesome on the contrary.

This is where the horror began.

I was totally occupied by the studying, my partner, myself and by the shit of life.

It knocked on my door. The horror decided to pay me a visit.

"Had a look at your calendar recently? Just saying..."

Shit! The deadline came closer and closer everyday and the pile of work undone grew with it. At that point I had to do something. I don't know what it was or how I did it, but somehow I managed to finish the project just in time. I was totally not proud of it, but it featured what was required.

The day before I contacted my client, the horror knocked on my door again. He said:

"You really should have a look at your hard drive."
"Why? everything seems allright."
"Well, then look closer."
"Fuck."
"Right."

Well, there are backups at least, I thought to myself. I'll just recover the last state. That was an annoying thought, but nothing serious. That's just one or two days of w... - Wait, what? Where are my backups? What the actual fuck? Why is the zip file broken? Why doesn't the flash drive work anymore? FUUUCK!!

I was lost. It was a complete nightmare.

Each time my telephone rang the following days, my heart skipped a beat. Finally my client's name appeared on the display. I answered the call, my hands shaking.

"Hey there! I'm calling to discuss the website project with you."
"Well, about that..."
"Yeah, I know you put a huge amount of efford in it so I'm really sorry to say that I on the other hand can't effort the money. Actually I'd like to simply forget about this whole idea."

Seriously? What the fuck just happend? I suddenly noticed a sticky note infront of me reading:
"It was really fun to see you suffer, but I have to go! See ya
- The Horror"

"Hello, are you still there? Do you hear me?", yelled a voice through my phone.
"Uh, yeah. You know, that project was a lot of work and... but you know what? It was actually a pretty fun exercise and I'm doing well over here, so because it's you I'd agree."
I heared a reliefed sigh from the other end of the line.
"Really good! I owe you something! Bye!"

What. The. Fuck.

Contrary to most people I really love to receive email related to jobs when I'm in holiday. I keep important alerts on.

It's like:
email: ***urgent, server down***
me (sipping mojito by the pool): fuck them. let's them deal with that
email: ***requirements all wrong, must develop the feature again***
me (enjoying a dinner): oh, I told them 100 times!, fuck all of them, work for me now, stupid moron.
email: I destroyed by mistake the db with an update..."
me (dancing like crazy): ahahaha I told you that support guys should not have access to production db, fuckfuck you, fix it yourself!!!

and so on..... I don't know, it just boost my pleasure during holiday.

I'm leaving my job.

That had already been decided when I learned that the only other front end guy at the company put in his two weeks notice. I immediately decided that I was morally obligated to put in my 4 months notice to give the company enough time to find a replacement (because, contrary to the beliefs of some programmers, front end plays a critical role in web dev).

With only 2 weeks left, I was put on his project to do some "simple design work".

Jesus christ in heaven alive and dead...

I've never in my career seen CSS with such an intense level of specificity -- nobody on that team should have ever let that code get so out of control.

I've spent the past week cursing, walking out of the room, whispering "I can't believe you've done this", ranting to non-developer friends.

Here's an example: the application has a panel used all over the place with a header and a body. Every Single View has it's own duplicated panel, each with its own unique class names and CSS. And that's just one element.

Every view has hundreds of lines of duplicated CSS. Every button, link, list, all with unique styles.

To any junior developer reading this, please hear me: Write one block of CSS for any element that will be reused. DO NOT duplicate your code when it can be used over and over.

/rant

Just read this in a blog post by Jon Arundel, I think he's spot on:

"Programmers are incurable optimists: we always think our code will work, despite much evidence to the contrary."

Finally after one year I understood how to carry out my job. I should do exactly NOTHING. I stopped completely organizing the team, solving bugs, helping the team developing and solving problems, explore and try stupid things said by CEO, PM and consultants.
I stopped for 2 months now and nothing happened.
I work remotely, nobody knows if I'm working or not, because nobody cares really about priorities, bugs, customers or products development.

I gain 10K$ (ten thousand) per month.

I attend skype meeting once per week or less. I say yes to everything, nobody gives a shit to what I say, even if they consider me the technical director. Actually in the meetings I only take care of being considered the technical director.
I achieved the mythical 4 hours working week.

I keep skype open in all my devices in order to answer promptly in case of problem, wherever I'm am, that's the most important thing right now.

I attended some meeting from the toilet or from the bedroom.

It was hard. To understand that the board is only after the next funding and not looking to develop a real product. It's hard to pretend helping people while thinking inside you "fuck you".
You have to let go the "guilt": if you can't login, I KNOW that is my fault, that there is a bug, that is possible to solve it, that resources and planning are needed etc. That's guilt. Just let go and say "next release" and never include it in the next release.
In this way I discovered that some users are paying the application even if they can't login.

The company is not going to disappear in the next 5 years. On the contrary, it's going to receive more money.

So the only "bad" thing is, what will I write in my CV in 5 years?

VoIP meeting today lasted 7 minutes.
I have kept the board down to ~5 ticket average for the last 3 months.

Co-worker(jokingly): I guess we don't need you anymore.
CEO: Quite the contrary. @chenb0x may need a promotion.
Me: *smirks*

This is why I like working for this company. Love the culture....no matter how much I may bitch about the clients.

'How did I get here?' a young dev may ask.

1. Delegate where proper
2. Script whatever can be scripted
3. When the board is low in tickets, it becomes a recursive responsibility to keep it low.

Back story
-----------------
When I was hired, the VoIP board was sitting at a ~30-40 ticket average.

Not CS degree, but EE, and totally worth the effort. Not only that without degree, I wouldn't get jobs in many companies, but I actually learnt a lot. Laplace and Fourier will be as valid in a 100 years as they were 200 years ago.

Yeah, it was fucking hard. Math was rather OK, only 50% of the students failed the first exam. EE was harder, 90% failed at the first try. That wasn't regarded as problem - on the contrary, the exams were designed to weed out. After two semesters, we already had 50% student loss.

I remember what the EE prof told us in the first semester: we would learn a lot of things, but most importantly, to think like an engineer. Didn't make sense right away, but 5 years later, I knew what he had been talking about.

Dragging my significant other to devrant is totally a good idea and I will hear nothing contrary to that. 😐

Last day of work. Literally only few more hours before I give up this lifestyle. Feeling little emotional as i look at the screen of my work laptop. It's a Windows 10 Lenovo ideapad .

Gonna miss those days when it made me mad bugging with updates. But it has been good to me, did more than i expected from it. I kept it turned on since half year or so and contrary to popular belief about it's race, it never disappointed me. We had our little secrets going on. Time to wipe them off and say goodbye. 😿

Not a rant, in contrary.
When you post a suggestion on reactjs github and it is approved almost immediately.
You need to appreciate the small things.

NOT saving the world in 2019. I already did that in 2012 when the Maya calendar ended and wasn't being thanked - on the contrary, people said "haha look, nothing happened".

Got a hi-end latex mattress and it’s godly. We usually overlook mattresses because a person uses one since the early childhood and a mattress is not a thing that is often changed, contrary to clothes or boots.

Absolutely invest in a good one.

My distrust in technology does not come from it being foreign to me, on the contrary, being a developer, I have gotten to know, how things are coded and built.

I tried LSD yesterday!

Backstory: I have a weird combo of bipolar type 1 and autism. During the day, my brain works inconsistently. Here how my day usually goes:
09:00. I wake up. Uninterested, cold, masculine. No thoughts in the background. No OCD.
12:00. Brain warms up. Thought process begins. Thoughts are short in their length
14:00. Thoughts start to get longer. Stress starts to accumulate. Background thoughts start, now typically 2–3 at a time.
16:00. Twitching begins. Thought chains are now 5–6 concepts long, one following the other. Perception level rises quickly. I start to feel more feminine. It is in this state that I start to spot imperfections and mistakes looking at code or text without reading it. I see it like a painting, and mistakes appear as “visually wrong” parts. This does not depend on formatting.
17:00. OCD becomes more severe. I HAVE to touch all the surfaces around me, evenly, as if my hands were text highlighters, and I had to paint everything evenly, without overlaps or spots that are brighter or darker than the others. Some surface textures become irritating, and feel quite unpleasant to the touch. If I go for a run now, like 3 km or so, I feel somewhat relieved.
18:00. Things are getting serious. Creativity levels through the roof. I speak in long, never-ending, profound sentences. Background and foreground thoughts almost become one. I appear visually drunk and happy, despite never drinking alcohol. Femininity rises even further. Sometimes, when I speak to a small group of people, especially if I go with friends to meet new people, and we go to some bar, new people ask to record my voice or to write down whatever I’m saying. To be honest, this reason alone is a huge boost to how I see yourself.
19:00. OCD is crazy now. Surfaces have soul.
21:00 <— Gotta take my meds and go to sleep here to prevent what comes at 22:00
22:00. All thoughts, both foreground and background, fully became one. Now my brain officially disobeys me and thinks on its own, and I can ride it like a surfer at best. Twitching becomes concerning. I develop a 1000-yard stare. I am officially a female. Physical strength is somewhat enhanced. Pain tolerance lowered significantly.
23:00. Derealization begins. The world around me appears two-dimensional and flat, like a picture. It is hard to get home on foot, even in close (less than one km) proximity. Brain is fully numb. All that thought monstrosity that was building up is just noise now. Zero “flops” available to think about something I want to think about, like how much money I have on me or what time it is.

I go to sleep. I see nightmares. I wake up, and the cycle repeats.

Contrary to a popular opinion, I never take any “brain-boosting” meds like antidepressants, and I think now you can see why. I consume neither alcohol nor caffeine. Neither me, nor my doctors want my brain to explode. I only take lamotrigine that helps to “lower down” mania, and quetiapine, a neuroleptic, that slows down my brain, like a neuroleptic. Both are there to slow down my brain, to kinda “throttle” my brain like a CPU to cool it down.

That said, 100ug of LSD just… brought me my usual 18:00 state, but in the morning?

All that small-dose recreational ordeal? The thing that helps people feel more energetic and creative?

People pay money… for that? To feel the way I feel every evening?

!rant

I aliased the go package manager dep to derp

I do this because I consider myself a grade A derper.

I derp hard when I write in go, not because of not getting the language,on the contrary....I feel quite profficient in it which gives me the ability to derp whilst cosing.

Go is amazing. Such a boring language in the best way possible in terms of syntax but so fun in productivity.

Microservices galore l.

So first of all merry delayed Xmas and of course wishing you all a happy new year.

Now...

I always loved designing and coding, yes I actually like it, I must be absolutely mental or something.. I finally after pushing myself through hours upon hours of courses, finishing most within 15% of the allotted time, and doing more then was requested, I finally found a job, related to front-end development. You might think "Gee; good for you buddy, you filthy commoner.." Well; it didn't last all too long, I basically after nailing the interview process got my first day there within a few days, now I am absolutely stoked and my nerves are shot, plus the 4 cups of coffee aren't helping. I literally was so nervous to do well on my first day, that I slept for only one hour, literally one bloody hour.

I get into the office where I am greeted by an amazing laptop, I mean high-end gaming 360 no-scope all over the place gaming. I sit down and start on getting all my tools ready to go (they let us use whatever IDE we wanted, which I thought was amazing) after getting my IDE and the plugins and all the emails/Slack etc setup, I then get told to get a Dropbox account. I assumed the Dropbox account was just there to share things quickly with the designers, we would obviously be using Git right?! Well; no not exactly, actually not at all - we all used the Dropbox account of one of the bosses, I swear everybody pushed and pulled stuff all the time, a copy of the boss's passport was in there as well, and they had projects from and up to 3 years ago, still in there... It took my Dropbox 3 bloody hours to grab as much as it could to actually allow me to get started...

I then to my absolute dismay notice that I would be working on a prefab of a prefab, basically the only thing I would be responsible for, is to adjust the animations and aligning elements.... Aligning and animations.... Fine, I guess it could be worse right? Started going along with it, using a framework that I never heard of before, till like a good 3 days before starting there called "Greensock" which is amazing I must admit, could've helped me allot on my solo-projects. Problem was; we had designers who wanted things, that just looked plain horrible, it was never 'on-point' so to say, maybe it's just me being a perfectionist but it just looked wrong.

Finally got it done after struggling with the prefabs and what not, then the day was almost over and I finally got to go home, fortunately dodging the drinking that was occurring around 4 in the afternoon in the middle of the office, it wasn't beers or anything of the sort - but hard liquor along the lines of Wodka and straight up Gin. I fortunately had a personal issue I had to attend too, so I got out of there before things got too crazy and they went out for dinner stumbling all over the place.

Well this wen't for a few more days (minus the drinking), with 8 being the exact number of days and my grievance list only kept growing. I was for one a junior-developer and thus with them knowing was supposed to get training from our lead, however; that never occurred instead said 'lead' would leave early or be completely absent on most days, leaving me to mess around with prefabs that did my head in, with no comments nor any indication what it did or should've done, I spent hours just adjusting one line of code at a time to see what would happen.

Eventually they told us to work from home only, so I did - did a project here and there and then got told they wouldn't keep me on board any longer, stating I was too inexperienced and they didn't have enough work (which was a load of bs) and that I lacked "office experience" whatever the heck that means, I was always sociable and hell I ever cracked people up, kept a neat and orderly list of things that needed doing, I even contrary to most commented on my code, so the next poor sod wouldn't be going through 'try by error' hell that I wen't through.

Either way; I currently have been feeling absolutely wrecked in terms of motivation, that job would've solved my financial situation and allowed me to finally do what I wanted to do. Instead of doing some random dead-end job each week or month, I would've had a steady income and something I could've built on.

But to add some positivism to this endless and too long of a rant... I'm currently going through a boot-camp and doing a small Linux based course on the side, this little thing isn't going to hold me back; yeah it will be tough, but then again most things don't come easy..

Thank you for reading and I hope you have allot and I mean allot more luck on your first job.

Coding for MCUs gets more and more surreal every day.. On one hand we're cooding oldschool heavy metal C or C++, but on the other hand they tell you to use PuTTY to check if there is a working serial connection - what the fuck?

Also the IDEs they suggest you. VSCode or Eclipse. Both are so unbelievable unusable for this, even with plugins, I would compile this shit via CLI myself before using them.

It just feels so contrary - they act like professionals and just spit out 200 uncommented lines of C to start WiFi on the ESP32 - not explaining a single fucking thing, but on the other hand, they checked the connection via PuTTY after writing some uwu kawaii shit into Eclipse.

Not to mention Arduino with their FUCKING SKETCHES.

I'd like to talk about my first impression of the new product of Microsoft :
"New Edge Browser"
I just wanted to take a shallow glance at this browser, and it was horribly awesome in contrary with my expectations.
The design and animations and smooth transitions, ease of migration from chrome and enhanced UI were the things that aroused my interest at the first 5 minutes of usage, as a frontend developer, I'm so much eager to dig up more in it. Share your experience and opinions with me 😉

Contrary to popular belief, after having been in the working world I've realized that what matters and what is of value is book knowledge, not experience.

I find 'experience' an overglorified waste of time. Having in-depth knowledge of everything is what's important.

My parents didn't mind. Since childhood, they used to tell me that I can choose my profession freely. I tried with medicine. Burned lots of €s and lots of time. And then switched to IT. Parents did not get in my way - on the contrary, helped me wherever they could. And allowed me to shoot my own foot whenever I was so stupidly determined to.

I believe it's the best kind of parenting -- allowing your children to make their choices, their own mistakes and learn from them while suggesting a piece of advice along the way.

I miss psychological safety. I'll define it as the willingness to be vulnerable to criticism and the belief that contrary opinions are embraced and judged on their merit.

When I first entered the startup scene my manager had exceptional candor. He had no qualms talking about how kids and personal projects caused his investment in his work to wax and wane.

He always made time to talk to me when I was frustrated and made me feel like he truly listened to what I had to say, even if he didn't act on it.

At the time, I attributed the safety to the company culture created by the CTO. The startup failed and eventually, I found my way to that CTO's next startup.

Completely different experience. I find myself in despair as I hear "I'm more senior and therefore am right and don't have time or interest in your ideas" blatantly stated.

When I disagree with people, I try to ask clarifying questions to identify where the divergence occurs. Sometimes I'm surprised and learn something new, sometimes my questions prompt reconsideration.

With the CTO (now CEO), we go in circles where he squirms, deflects, and outright refuses to respond to my questions. He cancels 75% of 1:1's and when we do talk he suggests that if I disagree I "should introspect which of my beliefs is holding me back from embracing his superior way of doing things"

Multi-hour slack wars suck the life out of anyone trying to ask questions. It's so exhausting to ask questions it's often cheaper and faster to wallow in despair for an hour and hack something together than descend into people shouting preferences at each other and shaming me for not already knowing the answer.

Perks, pay, and tech-stack are all cool. It feels selfish to be unhappy because I can't innovate or challenge the status quo. Having tasted that safety though, I'm left with an unquenched thirst that grows stronger with every conflict.

I just recalled I once had to explain to my CTO what’s the difference between stack and heap memory

It baffled me a little bit, but contrary to what one might perhaps expect, this was a guy who was already making a living off of programming for about ten years selling his software to various clients, so he was clearly competent enough to create software that works, and he had in fact put this startup on its feet operationally with it already being profitable before outside investments were secured

And here I was with my theoretical CS knowledge making zero bucks before getting this job

!dev

Today's world has gone so corrupt and full of crime that its almost impossible to be identified as honest/right, even if you are one. We thought that power of Internet would help identify the correct things but on the contrary, the internet is being used for declaring the wrong as right.

Thanks to sheer volume of duplicate data and social media's unverified content, we can no longer trust anything. Plus the effect of government and powerful people is so much that any big company you believe in would be forced to do whatever these big guns want.

Today if government wants to declare that "banana is a god fruit", they will simply generate enough news articles, social media tweets and rumours to do so. They know they can't proof it, but they can generate enough resources to change enough mindsets that what they are saying is not right but not completely wrong.
Even GitHub, which i once believed to have the ultimate method of preserving the truth is no longer a real thing. US govt has shown enough power to tell the world, that if we don't like something, then not even github is strong enough to preserve it

Our Indian government is also no less. Yesterday i heard the news that Gujrat government is slowly replacing the junior school's history syllabus to remove important historical events and replace them with chapters on hindu supremacy.

Currently i am not sure if its a real news but WHAT THE FUCK!?! They are going to erase the history? If the new generation gets the biased version of history, won't they grow up hating a particular commodity?
And forget the new generation, what about our generation? Did the books i read on history were also biased? Is this all political agenda why i like a particular commodity and hate the others? And how can i know if the facts i read are correct and truth? Who is the person verifying them and on what grounds is his decision correct?

Clearly no one can answer that because at the end, its highly opinionated.
If a newspaper A says "this guy is good" and newspaper B says "this guy is bad" , then after a 100 years, we would only believe the newspaper whose fossil remains in the museum and not the one which people believed to be correct 100 years ago.

And this is the problem. Corrupt people are generating enough content to make sure the biased version of history remains preserved while the original version gets lost with time.

I sometimes think that i should be buying a server deep below some glacier in the Antarctic ocean , hosting the real version of history. But there is no guarantee that government won't be tracing it back or make attempts to down

You see, I was never really good at C. It felt too low-level for me to enjoy.

Right now, I'm forced to do a school project with C. For the last ~10 compilations, I've gotten no errors, contrary to my first prior experience.

Maybe I'm getting better at C.

Or maybe C is getting the better of me.

Thanks for reading, I'm rly tired.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any of you have further recommendations?

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

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

What about the basics of BDD and XP?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I really like helping other learn how to use a programming language or solve problems on general. I often go out of my way and stop working on my hobby projects, just to help someone.

Thag being said, I'm no prgramming god. I myself am striving to become a better programmer.
I make mistakes, I can't always help you, I am still learning, but I only have good intentions. And you are by no means obligated to follow my advice. Quite the contrary, fight me, try to prove me wrong or say point out possible flaws. THINK ABOUT WHAT I TELL YOU. DON'T JUST BLINDLY FOLLOW MY ADVICE AND BITCH ON ME LATER.

This happens rather often and I can see why you want to blame me. And I can't deny that part of this is also my fault.
Situations like these don't really tilt me.

But today someone had the fucking nerve to pop a file into the chat and get mad at me for sugvesting a cleaner, shorter and more efficient solution. LIKE I DON'T FUCKING CARE THAT IT TOOK YOU A WHOLE DAY TO IMPLEMENT SOMETHING I CAN DO BETTER IN MINUTES, I JUST WANT TO HELP YOU.
But the best thing I get afterwards: "But you told me to do it like that" BITCH WHAT!?
I have chat logs telling me loud and clear that the concept we never talked about before in private nor on a public server (bless discord's search function). And I will not accept your lousy excuse of having me cobfused with someone. You disrespected me greatly, you put words in my mouth, just to justify your pity anger, when I'm trying to help you?!

Get crucified and put on a shooting range!

I offer you out of pure goodwill. Something you'd normally have to pay for. And this is the treatment I get in return?
Just rm -rf your disastrous, dd -if=/dev/urandom your harddrive and sod off!

I haven't chimed in on this spaces vs tabs war at all on this platform, mostly because I personally don't care and adapt to my work's/project's conventions, but I just have to put this out there now.

I am honestly so confused about the entire thing since seeing a lot of recent rants on the topic. I was originally conditioned to believe that the majority of devs in the world were FOR spaces over tabs. Thus, whenever I start a project, I default to spaces.

Contrary to that, it seems most devs here (or at least those who enjoy instigating some banter) actually prefer tabs. Now, I recently binged Silicon Valley and can't help but wonder if people around here are simply jumping on that band wagon for the sake of the joke.

Side note: I also thought Vim was more widely used over Emacs but Richard Hendricks asserts otherwise there too.

I know the main arguments for both sides - spaces yield code that looks the same in all editors while tabs produce smaller code. Anybody who argues that spaces are less efficient because you need to physically press the space bar 2/4/8/etc times is just retarded. If soft tabs weren't a thing, I don't think anybody would be on the side of spaces and for that reason I believe that episode in Silicon Valley was just trying to be overdramatized and push peoples' buttons.

All of that being said, I wonder if it's just a generational/field of development thing. Would it be wrong to propose that more older devs in the field of embedded and OS development (using C and the like) are in the spaces party while younger devs perhaps more into application and web dev (Javascript, C#, and shit) are all about tabs? I'm actually fresh out of university, but like I said my preference is spaces, though I don't really care.

I'm actually interested to find out what kind of environments breed these opposing mindsets so what do you guys think?

Contrary to popular opinion, I still firmly stand by my belief that you should thoroughly study something in-depth before you attempt to do anything serious with it. Failure to do so will have an enormous cost of waste of time attached to it.

Here's an example:
I was using AJAX to post a multi-part request containing a file.
Now here was the problem: no matter what code I forced in the backend, the browser would in all cases refuse to prompt a SaveFileDialog (and I had turned on the option in the browser to ask the user if download). This took me two entire days and at least 100 Google queries and several RFCs to figure out.

From StackOverflow:
The cause was simply that you can't (typically) make a browser prompt a SaveFileDialog via an AJAX request, even if you set the necessary headers. Why? The browser will just dump everything back into the XmlHttpRequest object..

If you make a regular request with Content-Disposition: attachment; and so on, then it works, but yeah, not with an XmlHttpRequest.

Conclusion:
Had I better studied the HTTP spec, networking and AJAX in-depth, I would have instantly known what the cause was.

Contrary to popular belief, not everyone loves a big dict

The most frustrating part of the "your password must be min. 8 characters long and include a number and a special character" thing is that it does not improve security.

On the contrary.

I wonder how many people in the company have the name of the city they are located in, and the current year in their password...

#newyork18 #beijing2017

Caution: only half RANT
I AM FUCKING ANGRY RIGHT NOW BECAUSE OF THE FUCKING MEDIOCORE THINKING OF MY COWORKER WHO WILL BE SOON MY EX COWORKER. AND WHEM HE WILL BE , I WILL DRAFT MY CURRENT ANGER IN SOME SOPHASTICATED WORDS NOT ONLY FOR DEVRANT BUT ALSO FOR MEDIUM AND TUMBLR
FUCK HIM AND FUCK HIS SHORTSIGHTEDNESS

So far it has been a collaboration with a shoemaker. I produced the most awful website I (never thinked I) could make… and not by my design, quite the contrary! This guy was there asking me to break rule after rule of design and would refuse suggestions and advices to follow their vision!

Pointless to say the site was down 6 months after being created.

just read about that DRAGONBRIDGE takedown.
Apparently it was some system set up to disseminate pro-China anti-USA propaganda in multiple channels.
Now, I totally can believe something like this would exist - too easy a jab to a fantastically big payout if it actually works. However, isn't it easy to call *anything* contrary to *anything* a propaganda plot?

That is why I believe in NOTHING that is on the internet. NOTHING. The internet says I have "credit card" "outstanding debt" to "pay" "ASAP".
Yeah, right. Half of those aren't even real words (I mean, "card"?! come on). You won't get me, opposing view propaganda machine!

If there is something I hate, it's when peoples emails end with "Sent from my iPhone".
It literally doesn't add anything of value to the conversation, on the contrary it only shows that the person is either too indifferent or lazy to turn it off, or *shivers* actually thinks it's cool.

is being a tech/dev person, a dead end job?

i have been thinking about this for sometime. as a dev, we can progress into senior dev, then tech lead, then staff engineer probably. but that is that. for a tech person :

1. their salary levels are defined. for eg, a junior may earn $10k pm , and the highest tech guy (say staff engineer) will earn $100k pm, but everyone's salary will be spread over this range only, in different slots.

2. some companies give stocks and bonuses , but most of the time that too is fixed to say 30% of the annual salary at max.

3. its a low risk job as a min of x number of tech folks are always required for their tech product to work properly. plus these folks are majorly with similar skills, so 2 react guys can be reduced to 1 but not because of incompetency .

4. even if people are incompetent, our domain is friendly and more like a community learning stuff. we share our knowledge in public domain and try to make things easy to learn for other folks inside and outside the office. this is probably a bad thing too

compare this to businesses , management and sales they have different:
1. thier career progression : saleman > sales team manager> branch manager > multiple branch manager(director) > multiple zones/state manager (president) > multiple countries/ company manager (cxo)

2. their salaries are comission based. they get a commission in the number of sales they get, later theybget comission in the sales of their team> their branch > their zone and finally in company's total revenue. this leads to very meagre number in salaries, but a very major and mostly consistent and handsome number in commission. that is why their salaries ranges from $2k pm to $2-$3millions per month.

3. in sales/management , their is a always a room for optimisation . if a guy is selling less products, than another guy, he could be fired and leads could be given to other/new person. managers can optimise the cost/expenses chain and help company generate wider profits. overall everyone is running for (a) to get an incentive and (b) to dodge their boss's axe.

4. this makes it a cut-throat and a network-first domain. people are arrogant and selfish, and have their own special tricks and tactics to ensure their value.

as a manager , you don't go around sharing the stories on how you got apple to partner with foxconn for every iphone manufacturing, you just enjoy the big fat bonus check and awe of inspiration that your junior interns make.

this sound a little bad , but on the contrary , this involves being a people person and a social animal. i remember one example from the office web series, where different sales people would have different strategies for getting a business: Michael would go wild, Stanley would connect with people of his race, and Phyllis would dress up like a client's wife.
in real life too, i have seen people using various social cues to get business. the guy from whom we bought our car, he was so friendly with my dad, i once thought that they are some long lost brothers.

this makes me wonder : are sales/mgmt people being better at being entrepreneur and human beings than we devs?

in terms of ethics, i don't think that people who are defining their life around comissions and cut throat races to be friendly or supportive beings. but at the same time, they would be connecting with people and their real problems, so they might become more helpful than their friends/relatives and other "good people" ?

Additionally, the skills of sales/mgmt translate directly to entrepreneurship, so every good salesman/manager is a billionaire in making. whereas we devs are just being peas in a pod , debating on next big npm package and trying to manage taxes on our already meagre , "consistent" income :/

mann i want some people skills like these guys

"Delete all code!" That should be the mantra!

Was watching some stuff from destroyallsoftware.com. Not entirely convinced. So I should cook up my own shit.

So here is how the argument goes:
There's quite some negativity in the term "legacy" software. Partly it may be the envy to software that runs on actual machines and is not that phantasm, that perfect first lines on a greenfield project until it gets messed up as it has to put up with all the real world messiness. But the negativity it deserves is actually for the code that we cannot get rid of. This ugly class or function that soaked all the complexity and functionality so it defies any positive change. And always when it appears on your screen, it irks you, enrages you, makes you punch the screen, because you can almost feel the distaste physically. - *That* is the definition of "legacy" in its true negativity. No software should be like that. On the contrary. Every line should be replaceable, dispensable, disposable. At the verge to deletable. Because you know: the best code is no code.

This is where my hatred of code could get productive: Delete all the wretched, loathsome stuff and replace it, with something that just sucks less and can be thrown away any time. Don't expect beauty or perfect design. It'll never finish.

Contrary to popular belief, HP laptops do not have air vents. They do, however, have dust vents.

I am looking for a better job, to do that I expand my knowledge by learning new stuff after work. I do this to have a better live, but my relatives pulling me down...
My wife complains that I am always at work, even if I tell her I do programming as a hobby and I learn new stuff to get a better paying job.
In contrary my parents always say that I am lazy bum, because If man doesn't work with his muscles, they don't consider this as a real job.

"Leafing through an old magazine, I noticed a small ad about a design course by mail. The headline read, 'Art for pleasure and profit!' I have never found a better definition to describe my profession. Of course, at times it is more the pleasure and less the profit, at times the contrary. But if one of the components were missing, design wouldn’t exist. " - Carlo Angelini

How do you find the balance between just howing the junior how it's done (or end up doing it yourself) and giving them hints so they can figure it out on their own?

Not trying to be an ass, on the contrary, I just want to help.

But it's frustrating as fuck seeing all the little, simple stuff going wrong over and over and I end up just giving in and take time off my assignments to "help out" (point out the error/give the solution).

GOOGLE.. GOOGLE..Imagining a phone without google services is just insane,Contrary to that GOOGLE is one such company which has all it's user's information-the time we surf,watch videos,the type of video we watch at what moment,our contacts,location,reads our mail too,knows our complete device... Directly or indirectly it knows all our activities more than us.....

check ur activity...at
myactivity.google.com
#not_an_era_of_complete_ Privacy

Calling something "idempotent" is fucking stupid. Why do you have to overcomplicate an already complicated shit such as terraform?

Why not call it unchangeable? Something that can be understood by a 2 year old. What even is the "immutable" word for if not even that is being used??? Why have 2+ words that define the same shit. Are u fking stupid who the fuck coined this phrase Idempotent and thought it was a good idea

When i read idempotent i have to remember and translate in my mind that it actually means "not changeable". On contrary theres "Non-Idempotent" so this fucks up the complexity even more cause Now i have to translate it as "non-not changeable -> which means it is everything But not changeable -> so if it is NOT not changeable -> it means it IS changeable" Fffuck offf

I knew I made it as a dev when I started talking with authority.

I engrossed myself into my field with enough genuine interest that I learned through practical means.

This isn't to say I'm simply head-strong, but I don't second-guess myself unless evidence to the contrary is provided, analysed and proven.

I learbed that your salary only goes so far as a developer (peoole who are in "the one and only" positions notwithstanding), eventually if you want to push further, you teach, you manage and you focus not on trends, but what youre good at.

That's actually why I love answering "What do I do during interviews?" questions.

Having two monitors despite my socialist penny-pincher boss contrary opinion ;)

#opinion {
popular:false;
}

not to continually bring up net neutrality, but I'm starting to understand the stance of people who defend net neutrality. there is a very obvious con in repealing it - the "results" the FCC cites are actually experimental, and we know that title II regulations have successfully levelled the playing feild for ISPs. It just works.

The competition that would be generated after repealing T2 would incentivize companies to lower prices, if they only had a single "package", or to make the delegated sets of packages they produce affordable. it's common sense guys - If we can't afford the packages, they can't afford the business loss. Contrary to popular banter, smaller companies will not "just get pushed out" of business. Providers are going to scramble to find "the best deals" for their customers and, in the end, companies like Verizon might actually be the ones going under.

just a little thought ig

I realized that my mood swings based on how my gf behaves. She is one of the few triggers

If she is sad depressed angry or disrespectful towards me i am no longer in a positive mood, it kills the whole vibe. On the contrary if she is happy acts feminine behaves normally and is respectful towards me i also become happy and in a better mood

Bad mood does not stop me from doing my work, but depending on how terribly bad it becomes, it may or may not impact my coding and work life. Since the main and central tool for coding is my brain and mental state, not physical muscles, Once the central part of anyone's tool (thats used to get the job done) is attacked or threatened, it weakens the person's ability to perform as good as they have been, or worse, completely blocks them off from performing well

This is one of my biggest fears; Anyone who's capable, intentionally or not, of weakening the central part of my tool for work (in this case mind and mental state), begins to gain power and leverage over me (hold on this is actually a brilliant idea to have in mind, a malicious way to exploit and leverage the target victim is by attacking the central tool they use to get the work done)

However i am a mentally strong person (due to way too much trauma from school, solving extreme difficulty coding problems, hoes and financial struggles), but it does not help if i am attached to a person who i have feelings towards, a person who became the second half of me, "the better half". It is difficult to reject or all of a sudden stop loving the person who you loved for years or months. Such person can more easily attack my central tool

My question is--does anyone know how to protect the central tool from anyone being able to exploit or weaken it? For example if my gfs bad behavior puts me in a bad mood, how to prevent that from happening? How do i not care? Or how do i care but still not let it affect my mood in a negative light? If that makes sense

Does being dictate consciousness or does consciousness dictate being?

In this layman form, the answer is undefined. But let's dig deeper.

The layman form doesn't account for the difference between discrete and continuous. Without that difference, the paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise can't be solved. Yes, it took from ancient Greeks up until 17th century to solve it, introducing that distinction.

Both being and consciousness are discrete entities. This way, technically being was the first, because you were born to it. But when you became self-aware, your consciousness started to dictate being, and not the other way around.

If being truly fully dictate consciousness, then consciousness can be cut away by Occam's razor. In the same way, your parents are technically the reason you exist at all, but if that fact fully dictated who you are, then _you_ could be cut away in similar fashion.

Contrary to that, if consciousness fully dictated being all the time, being could be cut away too.

So, yes, being created your consciousness. But later, when your consciousness was created, it started to dictate being. This is the only way they're both can't be cut and are aligned with the timeline.

in contrary to what you guys might think about me, I am way too fucking good person for this world. Even the boss of the company out of my city that I worked in last week when we met the first time told me that I am a good person and that is very dangerous in today’s world, especially because of people like him. Whatever that means

You nut butter, contrary to pizza devs. This plus chocolate and fresh medium roast, plus Yerba mate is what can help me when working.

"I don’t think that all people read in the same way. Today, entire generations are growing up watching MTV and playing video games and it is safe to assume that these people have a high degree of visual sophistication. and are not easily discouraged by a lens straightforward or ambiguous typography. On the contrary, they are attracted and enticed to read something because of visual richness." - Ruby Vanderlans

Ugh, fuck the SSRS web service. Spent all week trying to consume the service with PowerShell, doesn't make it any easier when there are undocumented behaviours. TypeName property has to be Type, for instance, when creating a search condition, TOTALLY contrary to the documentation.

Want to change the data source for a report you uploaded? Gl;hf! Back to it next week, think I'm close to having a working deployment script...so close.

#Suphle Rant 8: Strange star discovered

I was searching for a project I'd starred earlier, on my github feed, when I realised a user had starred suphle at some point but for some reason, it wasn't reflecting on the stargazers. I was half overjoyed and half confused. Overjoyed over unlocking the milestone.

User seemed legit –an Italian with projects in C that were not forked. Followers and commit graph are organic. Did he star in error, feel the project is a stinker, or encounter installation challenges? Luckily, I found his email address but all his repositories are in Italian so I wasn't too sure he'd understand English, or if the mail was being attended to. Yet, I took my chances

He surprisingly got back to me, affirming that the star-unstar was actually deliberate. He withdrew the star cuz project's documentation is not hosted online and still requires npm start.

I try to persuade him by reminding him it's just a one liner but that markdown files are equally rendered directly on github. Never heard from him again, sadly

I'm kind of bothered cos I find it funny I thought suphle's APIs are all cast in stone, but the more I work on the docs, the closer I am to spotting something that doesn't sit right with me, and diving in to modify it. This not only prolongs ETA, there's the risk of someone who may have stumbled upon it and is studying it, having the rug pulled from under their feet. Things like validator rules and route-collection service-coordinators have been converted from methods and classes to native decorators. I guess I'm safe since nobody has indicated any signal to the contrary. It'll be pedantic to start tagging versions for each change.

Another consideration is that these breaking changes would go to the first segment of the semver scheme, which is hilarious because the rate at which I push such changes is so alarming, we'd probably progress through 15 versions under a year

I am looking for an alternative to Heroku where I can push and test my research and referencing application. I have been using Heroku for developing and testing my applications but I am wondering if there are other similar platforms with more streamlined and advanced features and functions. I am not saying that Heroku is bad. On the contrary, I believe that they are doing a great job. I am just curious if there are other better platforms that could make my work easier and enjoyable.

Updated my pfsense router today, from 2.3.2_1 to 2.3.3.
Its a task I have done before and so has a buddy of mine, but for some reason only known to it and the devil it decided to crap it's pants and completely crash.. 😢
I wasn't home, had to travel home force shut it down only to find out that it worked perfectly fine, when I was looking at it 😐
Lesson learned, some times a task will work when you hover over it, contrary to popular belief 😐