Anyone else used Stack Overflow for many years without ever asking or answering a single question?

For those who don't know, this is how Apple pictures a PC in the network, a CRT display with blue-screen-of-death!

We had a Commodore64. My dad used to be an electrical engineer and had programs on it for calculations, but sometimes I was allowed to play games on it.

When my mother passed away (late 80s, I was 7), I closed up completely. I didn't speak, locked myself into my room, skipped school to read in the library. My dad was a lovely caring man, but he was suffering from a mental disease, so he couldn't really handle the situation either.

A few weeks after the funeral, on my birthday, the C64 was set up in my bedroom, with the "programmers reference guide" on my desk. I stayed up late every night to read it and try the examples, thought about those programs while in school. I memorized the addresses of the sound and sprite buffers, learnt how programs were managed in memory and stored on the casette.

I worked on my own games, got lost in the stories I was writing, mostly scifi/fantasy RPGs. I bought 2764 eproms and soldered custom cartridges so I could store my finished work safely.

When I was 12 my dad disappeared, was found, and hospitalized with lost memory. I slipped through the cracks of child protection, felt responsible to take care of the house and pay the bills. After a year I got picked up and placed in foster care in a strict Christian family who disallowed the use of computers.

I ran away when I was 13, rented a student apartment using my orphanage checks (about €800/m), got a bunch of new and recycled computers on which I installed Debian, and learnt many new programming languages (C/C++, Haskell, JS, PHP, etc). My apartment mates joked about the 12 CRT monitors in my room, but I loved playing around with experimental networking setups. I tried to keep a low profile and attended high school, often faking my dad's signatures.

After a little over a year I was picked up by child protection again. My dad was living on his own again, partly recovered, and in front of a judge he agreed to be provisory legal guardian, despite his condition. I was ruled to be legally an adult at the age of 15, and got to keep living in the student flat (nation-wide foster parent shortage played a role).

OK, so this sounds like a sobstory. It isn't. I fondly remember my mom, my dad is doing pretty well, enjoying his old age together with an nice woman in some communal landhouse place.

I had a bit of a downturn from age 18-22 or so, lots of drugs and partying. Maybe I just needed to do that. I never finished any school (not even high school), but managed to build a relatively good career. My mom was a biochemist and left me a lot of books, and I started out as lab analyst for a pharma company, later went into phytogenetics, then aerospace (QA/NDT), and later back to pure programming again.

Computers helped me through a tough childhood.

They awakened a passion for creative writing, for math, for science as a whole. I'm a bit messed up, a bit of a survivalist, but currently quite happy and content with my life.

I try to keep reminding people around me, especially those who have just become parents, that you might feel like your kids need a perfect childhood, worrying about social development, dragging them to soccer matches and expensive schools...

But the most important part is to just love them, even if (or especially when) life is harsh and imperfect. Show them you love them with small gestures, and give their dreams the chance to flourish using any of the little resources you have available.

I found it!

(Me using the CMD in class)

Schoolmate: What are you doing?

Me: Using the CMD, it makes stuff really easier.

Schoolmate(loudly): *MY NAME* is hacking the schooooool.

Ignorant idiots now I am not allowed to use my laptop in class anymore.

Seen in Amsterdam, getting on a ferry.

I found a python virus online a while ago that just corrupts your .py files, so I wanted to do something similar and after writing it I ran it on my pc, it corrupted all of my .py files.

When someone tells you they're a programmer and you ask them what language they use and they say,

English.

This is a brand new office on the building across to ours

Wooohooo! I've finally bought myself an old school CRT TV. Now I can play my retro games like a human being.

My sister in law got me this guy for Christmas after I told her about devrant!

She found it in a rubber duck shop in Amsterdam.

Best sister in law!

In the school we were using slow PCs for learning MS Office things. Every single step we did took ages. There were one guy who was an informatics antitalent: he never were able to work fluently with any electric machine from a microwave to anything smarter. In addition he was a semi-pro athlete and he had some kind of anger management issues, sometimes yelled to the teacher after a bad mark or with us when we lost a in-school soccer match. You know, he was that competitive guy.
One time on computer science class he was very focused. He tried to follow every steps precisly and his machine seemed faster than as usual. He felt like he broke some kind of wall which was between he and the machine.
When we had a break and he went out we tought that we should make a prank. We made a fullscreen screenshot from the desktop and set it as the wallpaper, then killed explorer.exe. As a result the icons and the start menu was only on the screen by the wallpaper.
When he came back he said that there were some bad news from some of the sport event he wanted to go, so he was angry. But then... You know the gif when the guy first hit the side of the screen multiple times then throws out the machine? Yeah, we saw that in real life, but not in that office. First he was just clicking everywhere, we just watched how his face just transforming. Then he started to talk just in himself as the machine could understand. After two minutes he just yelled to the machine why did it freeze, but the last drop was when the teacher said: You'll have to send me your work and it will be marked. In this moment he was just roard a huge and droped the CRT out of the window from the second floor. Luckily the window was facing to a brushy part of the garden so no one was there. He just standed there, looked out to the CRT sitting in a brush for a while, then he turned to the teacher as "Mr, I think something is wrong with my machine"

I bet this is true for all of us

A common scenario strikes again today:

- Blocked on a problem at the end of the day
- Tell my wife I'm headed home
- Inspiration strikes
- time flies by coding in the zone
- realize I'm super late
- run out the door like a crazy person

And one thing led to another:

People always asked me how I got started with Python, I always have to come up with a reason to hide the fact that I started using it because I like the name

Night before flying internationally includes the following checklist:

- check VPN works, can access frontend sites and hit the backend
- git push

Our "monitoring" today.

This morning I kept falling back asleep after the alarm went off, drifting in and out of a dream about programming.

My wife finally said "no more sleeping".

Still mostly sleep, I replied very confidently "you can't sleep in a sandbox!".

I was dreaming I was in a code sandbox. Obviously sleeping is not allowed.

Jeez, my head has been really full of programming since this conference. (One of the talks was on codesandbox).

So we are a development company, we have some remote coders.

This one is very good coding BUT

Sometimes he disappears and then comes back with an history, the other day he said his grandpa was about to die of cancer so he had to go to see him.

Three days ago, he had to finish a landing page manager, in React. just a form and unzip (nodejs server side) the files... It was not so difficult.

He said was going to finish later that day.

Then he disappeared, for 3 days!

And i got a message from him on facebook saying he got robbed and he was going to rent a laptop to continue working.

Then i asked if he had any progress on the code before that happened. and he started sending
me screenshots of the code , but in one screenshot i was able to see a part of the desktop background. Checked on the history of files @ Slack and that was his background lol.

Please guys , don't do these kind of things.
If he had told me that he needed to study or something i would have understood him

Now i feel i cant trust him anymore.

Moral: Lies/attitudes like these one can have a big negative effect on your life and you will miss some big opportunities!

Let me tell you a story.

Our company has a homegrown monitoring solution. Keeps track of our deployments and alerts us when something is broken. Really nice for the most part, except a little issue where we get up to 25 alerts PER DAY that our PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT IS DOWN. Including weekends.

With this many false positives, we quickly learn to ignore the alerts and miss real incidents.

So we approached this team, remember its our own tool, and told them about the problem. Turns out it is a known issue. And here's the kicker: they aren't planning on fixing it!

It gets better. Rather than fix this glaring issue, their solution is to make ANOTHER ALERT that lets us know the monitoring is misbehaving.

To recap, we can now expect to get up to 25 false positive alerts per day that our production is down, followed immediately by more alerts that the monitor is broken, which means we can ignore the previous alert.

As our PM said when he heard this: fuck that noise. We are escalating the shit out of this!

Old story, and yeah, it's all true, I shit you not!

So here I am at about age 11 (more or less). At the time, I had an almost brand new 333MHz beast, with 8 MB RAM, 2 (!!!) MB video card and (I think) about 300 MB of storage (yeah, I'm old :)) ).

Connected to this monster was sitting a 14" CRT monitor, mechanical keyboard and a 2 button, ball "powered" mouse.

There was no optical tracking tech at the time.

One evening, I notice my mouse starts lagging. Test it to see if Win95 is stuck. Nope, just mouse problems...

Fiddle with it a little, and at some point it stops working at all.

My room was dark now, so I got up to turn on the lights, sat down in front of the PC, and moved the mouse by instinct.

Surprise! It's working again!

My brother comes in and turnes off the lights. Mouse non responsive.

I tell him to turn them on again, mouse works again.

At this point, we were both scratching our heads at this mystery...

I decided to confirm it again using a desc light.

Conclusion: my 2 button, ball tracking, non light sensitive mouse was working only if light was shining directly oh it AND on my 14" crt monitor at the same time!!!

To this day I have no ideea why.

I kept them both for posterity, and they are still there in my parent's attic.

Fin.

cw: I need a server to put my node backend

me: sure, I'll run a docker container for you

cw: nice, I've never worked with docker but I learn quickly, I'm already reading the Docker file docs

me: no wait, you don't need to learn anything, you'll be inside the container, so you only need an ssh connection and that's it

cw: this Dockerfile stuff is really complicated, it'll take me a while, but it's ok you don't have to worry, I like learning new things

me: you won't need that, just imagine it's a cloud server with Ubuntu installed, you only have to use it, I'll put node, git and ssh there for you

cw: ok got it, I'll have to learn the commands to run the docker, I'm on windows but I can use PowerShell and stuff I'll figure it out

me: ...

cw: ssh is a linux command right? does it have a push or publish option? how do you upload files there

me: ...you can use a ftp client but you'll need ssh to run the node server

cw: ok, I'm almost done with the Dockerfile, I only need to add git and nodejs, I'm starting to understand this thing...

me thinking: yeah keep doing that, you're such a crack, such a quick learner...

This son of a bitch is either a retard or is doing it on purpose and laughing at me the whole time, making my life so miserable, but I'm about to go insane with this dude, I'm proud of how I've been able to control myself, BUT ONE OF THESE DAYS I'LL LOSE MY COOL AND FORCE THIS MOTHERFUCKER TO DRINK A BIG POT OF BOILING, SALTY AND STINKING VOMIT WITH A SIDE OF STEAMING DIARRHEAL GREEN DOG SHIT WITH WHITE CHOCOLATE CHIPS WHILE I PUT MY OLD CRT MONITOR TO GOOD USE BY BEATING HIS FUCKING HEAD WITH IT!!!

Who else is lonely this new years eve?

I'm such an idiot.

Spilled water on my MacBook today. Not that much water, but the cup landed right in the middle of my keyboard.

Worst part is I was gaming with my sister and didn't want to stop. So I wiped it off and shook it out a bit and kept playing. A bit later the screen started flickering and eventually went black.

Finally my brain turned on and I switched it off, shook out some more water, and set it up to dry. Just hoping it's not too late.

At least the drying setup recommended by the internet is pretty hilarious looking.

Now we play the waiting game. They say 72 hours before turning it on again. Seems a bit extreme. Will there still be moisture evaporating 3 days later? Not sure I can wait that long to see if it's toast.

Such an idiot.

*spends a long time crafting a huge eBay post (we're moving)
* tries to drag and drop first picture
* page navigates to the picture without warning
* loses everything

WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

WHEN DRAGGING A PICTURE INTO A WEB PAGE I NEVER WANT TO NAVIGATE TO A PAGE WITH JUST THAT IMAGE. WHY NO WARNING BEFORE LEAVING THE PAGE. WHY DON'T YOU SAVE TEXT LOCALLY. WHY DOES THE WEB SUCK SO HARD. AAAGGGHHHH.

* feels better
* starts over

Netflix, why is your loading spinner so horrible!

Do you know what a percentage is??? 99% means you are ALMOST done. Just a tiny fraction to go. I should not see 99% for seconds or even minutes on end. Much less after the first 98% took only a couple seconds!!

Stop the lies!!!

2 days into a new java project and I already miss scala so much.

You're as slow as the python interpreter.

FINALLY got my Raspberry Pi Zero W after 2 months of waiting, comment me some cool projects to do with it

My new fitbit reminds me take 250 steps each hour. When I do stop and take a walk, I find it helps my productivity, and I feel better. However, I'm not good at keeping to it.

It's always the same story.

"Quiet you, I'll get up and walk once I finish this one thing".

...

Another hour goes by.

If only I could keep to my own convictions.

When your company still uses CRT monitors :|

What the fuck

I spent more than an hour trying trying to debug why two functions were always returning undefined. I even put in conditional breakpoints and executed the statements to confirm the logic was correct.

I forgot return.

Last year the rewrite of an ancient system (VB6/mainframe COBOL) was started. Instead of moving to modern architecture management decided to rewrite the app's functionality into our last gen WinForms client/server arch. I set up a meeting to present alternatives and plead for some level of modernization. After presenting and asking management to plan for five to ten years in the future instead of just this year's budget my director said, "In five to ten years I'll be retired on a beach in Tahiti and this will be your problem to solve." It was the last straw and I left the company shortly after. Last week I found out the director was force retired out of the company. I sent her a congratulations slip and a cocktail umbrella with "Tahiti" written on it.

I feel like devRant is just a high-IQ society in disguise, anyone with me on this?

As a person who spends 99.99% of his time at home if not at school programming, reading, and watching netflix, what can I do to develop my social skills?

What are your favorite programming/scripting languages and why?

I just watched the gameplay for Cyberpunk 2077 and I'm super excited for it, CD Projekt Red did a fine job in everything in it, any cyberpunk fans on here?

An hour before my Mathematical Expression and Reasoning for Computer Science final...

Have reviewed all the material available but past exams are useless because new_prof == new_format.

This is not even a rant, I'm just scared because to get into the major I need an average between this and programming of 82. I fucked up in the second midterm and got a 50/100. Everything was so perfect (at least above 80) and now I need more than 70 in this final. I'm feel I can get more than 70 but I had the same feeling during the midterm I fucked up.

devRant already replace SoundCloud as my orange app in the main screen...

To be fair, SoundCloud was just there to complete the rainbow.

Rant: this app told me that my rant would be safe if I closed the Post Rant window (since I can't post more than one rant per hour or something) but it didn't save my awesome tags! I feel betrayed.

Coding has given me the ability to turn my favorite hobby into a career. This in turn gave me the chance to take jobs in three countries so far (US, Germany, UK). So, I can explore the world with lovely wife while doing something I'm really passionate about and constantly learning. It also allows me to relate more to my dad, a software engineer of about 30 years who got me started when I was a kid.

In short, coding changed everything for me.

PS: I met my wife in intro to CS, though she's not a developer.

After being live multiple years supporting only Safari, Firefox, and Chrome, one customer wanted IE support. After taking a close look at the usage numbers, and discussing with us front-end devs, our product guy shot it down. Pop the champagne!

When your company buys a third party solution and you spend all your time emailing them about bugs in their system.

Seriously, I even sent you the exact line of the bug in your JavaScript with a suggested solution, and deployed a new stack with your latest (broken) fix so you can test out that solution. Then you email back saying it is fixed but it is clearly still broken. If I email you a fixed version of your file will you deploy it? OMG!

And how the fuck can I use my laptop?

If an orange costs $6 and a grape costs $4, how much does a pineapple cost?

What linux distro should I choose to be my primary OS?

P.S: I have used linux before

Slow time so I can code more AND sleep more!

I propose a list of interesting readings. Not limited to developing.

Yes, I'm in need of something new to read...

I'll start in the comments, feel free to comment new readings or critique the ones proposed.

My introduction to programming and computers is quite different than most as in I didn't start programming first, I started by taking electronic parts from my toys and repurposing them or using them in different things, we had a computer I used to play games with but at age 7 my father died and my mother needed money so she sold it, the next laptop I got was at age 11 and then I started coding.

When you try to clap in a presentation while holding coffee and spill it all over yourself.

Year: 2006

Dad bought a 2nd hand computer from his office.

Configurations:
OS: Windows 98
RAM: 256MB
HDD: *Forgot*
15" CRT Monitor
Floppy Disk Drive

And the best moment of joy was when my then best friend who had 2 PCs with one of them was the best configured system of that era with wireless mouse and keyboard (wireless was extremely costly and rare then), comes to my house with a PC Game (WWE some year) and tells me that this game only works in 98.
Also, one of the most Proud moment I ever felt for my computer.

half day gone try to find or remember the password of some SSL/key/encrypt/crt/shit/whatever.

Blaming myself for hours, how could I not save the password somewhere?

#Enter Password:
(I pressed enter, no password).
it works.

I love IT security

Actually finishing a project.

I am a person who gets a lot of ideas for projects I want to work on, then I start writing the code for them, then I reach a wall, stop and restart the cycle all over again.

Fuck my life.

"Can you check what my password is?"

Who else clicks on the profile of everyone who upvotes their posts?

When you make a mistake and try to fix it, but you can't remember how to spell amend...

git commit --ammend
error: unknown command `amend'

git commit -ammend
[branch-name] mend

Huh?

git log
commit #
mend

Created a new commit with message 'mend'. Now to clean this all up and go get some sleep!

Does anybody know a course on machine learning with python that doesn't need that much mathematical knowledge? Because in every course I find I need to know advanced mathematics yet I am still in grade 10 and haven't studied it yet.

My OS is trying to tell me something about my old CRT monitor 🤔

Oh gee whiz fellas. I lived through my nightmare. Recently too.

(Multiple rants over last few months are merged in this one. Couldn't rant earlier because my login didn't work.)

I joined a new shithole recently.
It was a huge change because my whole tech stack changed, and on top of that the application domain was new too.

Boss: ho hey newbie, here take this task which is a core service redesign and implementation and finish it in two weeks because it has to be in production for a client.

Normally I'd be able to provide a reasonable analysis and estimate. But being new and unaware of how things work here, I just said 'cool, I'll try my best.' (I was aware that it was a big undertaking but didn't realize the scope and the alarming lack of support I'd get and the bullshit egos I'd have to deal with)
Like a mad man I worked 17+ hours a day with barely a day off every week and changed and produced a lot of code, most of it of decent quality.

Deadline came and went by. Got extended because it was impossible (and fake).

All the time my manager is continuously building pressure on me. When I asked questions I never got any direct/clear answers. On asking for help, I'd get an elaborate word vomit of what was already known/visible. Yet I finally managed to have an implementation ready.

Reviewer: You haven't added parameter comments on your functions and there aren't enough comments in code. We follow standards. Clean code and whatnot. Care for the craft verbal diarrhea.

Boss: Ho hey anux, do you think we'll be able to push the code to production?

Me: Nope. We care for the craft and have standards. We need to add redundant comments to self documented code first, because that is of utmost importance as Nuthead reviewer explained.
(what I wish I had said)

What I actually said: No, code is not reviewed yet.

And despite examples of functions which were not documented (which were written by the reviewer nut), I added 6-7 lines of comments for my single line functions describing how e.g. Sum takes two input integers and returns their sum and asked for a review again.

Reviewer: See this comment is better written as this same-meaning-but-slightly-longer way. Can we please add full stops everywhere even though they were not there to begin with? Can we please not follow this pattern and instead promote our anti-pattern? Thanks.

Me: Changed the comments. Added full stops. Here's a link for why this anti-pattern is bad.

Reviewer: you have written such beautiful code with such little gems. Brilliant. It's great to see how my mentoring has honed your skills.
.
.
.
I swear I would have broken a CRT on his stupid face if we weren't working remotely (and if I had a CRT).

It infuriates me how the solution to every problem with this guy is 'add a comment'.

What enrages me more is that I actually thought I could learn from this guy (in the beginning). My self doubt just made me burnout for little in return.

Thankfully this living nightmare will soon be over.

!rant

Super awesome day today.

1. Got up early to do a risky production deploy and it worked!
2. Three PRs approved before lunch.
3. Got some time to continue learning scala.
4. Coffee and cupcakes with some refugees and discussed work as a software engineer.
5. Tried virtual reality for the first time. Really fun.
6. Helped prepare our goals for this quarter and present them to the department.
7. Department meeting had free local craft beer and pretzels.
8. Went bouldering after work and flashed a 6c.
9. Curled up with my wife watching Netflix.

I really love my life sometimes.

!rant

I just saw someone write about how much he hates school and it reminded me of all I am about to say:

I go to a fancy private school in my country full of shitheads and idiots that think that they can rely on their parents money for the rest of their lives, are always concerned about the latest trends (yeezys, dabs, fidget spinners... etc) and it just gets on my nerves as I have to live with all that and have almost no friends since I failed my class two years ago, when I sit in school I can't focus on anything the teacher says which in turn contributes to my shit grades and there is nothing I can do about it. I have been diagnosed with persistent depresseive disorderand bouts of major depression and my mom won't accept to give me adequate medication because she says(although this is not always the case) that antidepressants can trigger the bipolar disorder that runs in my family, and on top of all this shit, ever since I was 7 I have been raised by my single mother after my father died (I never tell people that my father is dead usually because I hate the look of pity I get coming out of their faces) and my mother has been screwed over for all her life because she can't make a good decision or call bullshit even if you put a gun to her head.

And what I hate most about all that is that I have no one to talk to because my mom is one of those religious freaks so I can't talk to her about my real deep thoughts, and every psychologist or counselor I have been to has been shit.

And this is just another chronicle of my miserable fucking existence.

Years ago, one of my friends in college was taking an intro to CS class. He asked me for help on one of his assignments. It was a simple Python program, but it wasn't running as expected. I go in figuring it will be easy to fix. But everything looks exactly right. An hour later I'm tearing my hair out! It isn't even entering the function although it's clearly called. I'm beginning to feel very self conscious, as a CS major who can't even debug a 15 line program for a friend.

Then it hit me. This is Python. I used an editor macro to convert all indentation to tabs, lined them up, and it ran on the first try. Turns out, he had somehow ended up with a mixture of tabs and spaces.

I'm not sure what the takeaway is, but I think he got a surprisingly honest introduction to the life of a developer...

This year I want to start a project that I'll be proud of, learn PHP, Java, PostgreSQL and Assembly.

PSA: negate your tests and make sure they fail!

I have what I thought was a weird and slightly paranoid habit. When I write tests sometimes just as a sanity check negate the assertion to make sure the test fails and isn't a false positive. Almost always fails as expected.

But not today! Turns out I had forgotten to wrap my equality check in an assertion so it would always pass. It freaks me out to imagine pushing a test that always passes not just because it doesn't do its job, but could also obscure a bug and trick me into thinking it works differently than it does. Broken tests are the worst!

But it pays to be paranoid.

After ten years of working sh*t jobs I finally got the chance to study CompSci at a top university... All the kids look at me as if I've been programming for years, truth is I just study a lot because my scholarship requires me to get B+ or above.

I don't write comments on my code

Me: *adds a shiny new graph to our foos web app showing player ratings*

Fred: Can I please have a button to see just my scores?

Me: *adds "JUST FRED" button*

Fred: perfect, thanks

Years ago when I was younger than currently I got this first summer job as help in IT departament to answer calls from distressed workers.

Once this lady calls that "her monitor went black" and she cannot work, so I have to get her a replacement. They got only this big heavy CRT monitors as replacements so I had to drag it to 4th floor (no elevator) from basement.

As I reached her it turned out that her monitor is fine, only the wallpaper was changed to black, that what she was meaning :p

Well, at least I got some exercise back then.

Heathrow express having some trouble this morning.

First exposure...
When I was a kid, my parents would put on Tom & Jerry and other cartoons on an old family computer (you know - yellowed plastic, big, bulky tower, and an even bigger CRT monitor) for me to watch (Windows 95 didn't cut it, so they booted up Geexbox from CD)... Sometimes the playback would stop / the volume would be too quite - so I had to figure out how to control it by myself, without the help of my parents... Slowly, I was able to boot up Windows, and use my father's CD collection of All-In-One CDs (utilities and games). Later we were able to afford connecting to the internet through our phone landline - it was all downhill since then. Nowadays I'm helping my dad when it comes to computers (he's currently learning how to use Excel properly). :-)

When you offer to help out a fellow coworker on the top priority feature he is developing and he just sends you the branch and stops working on it.

What aren't there any 2k 32 inch 144 Hz monitors out there that are: flat. I want to upgrade my home setup from a 24" setup, which is, you know, flat. Even back in the days of the CRT monstrosities I've spent a premium on getting a flat panel, as the outside curvature was a technical obstacle to overcome.

I don't understand the need to curve the display. It distorts the lines, hinders other people looking at your screen as you have to be in the right spot, and every camera records on a flat surface. Why should it be a good thing to go curved?

I am reminded of the 3D craze.

I get home today and my wife says:

"Just finished some chores and really want to play stardew valley, but the computer has been updating for an hour!"

Windows 10 anniversary update strikes again.

I have a new personal project that I hope I'll share with you guys one day. It just came to me. A fog simulation for a window manager such that it has fog behind the transparent console while you code and the fog goes in front when the terminal is locked. How about it?

(Saturday morning)
Me: I've never been so long without exercising (since before this, my first winter), I should get in shape now that this God forsaken weather is finally reaching livable levels.

(some time later at the gym)
Also me: You've always been in good shape, why stop with just chest, let's do some arms and shoulders.

(48 hours later, Monday morning)
I had to turn my whole torso to look if any car was coming while walking to the library, moved like terminator because of the massive neck muscle pain, suffered through the pain of setting up all my study material to the realize (just now) I can't even fucking look down to my notebook... Can I be more stupid?

First experience with a PC....

It would have been the Commodore64 and those giant 5.25" floppies, ah those were the days with CRT TV's.

Watching a friend load up Tetris on that big screen was eye opening for a 8-9 Year old.

When I was 6yo I was playing next to my dad with his old PC on a good old CRT a game called “Sperms” where you catch sperm with condoms and every time you do it made a really loud “YIPPIE” sound. I was playing this game for 4 years.

Somewhere around when I was 10 my dad told me we should build a PC and I was asking “Why does everyone has to make their own PC?”, I didn’t yet know what an cheap ass my dad is, so we did. Had a lot of fun and was very scared of the PSU, like really scared.

It blew up a few months later because I switched the toggle on the back from 220v to 110v, and got even more scared of PSU’s until I started an electricians apprentice.

Anyways, one day my dad and I where at a friends place and I played Tux Racer on his super loud Maschine that would crash if you kept the side door of the table closed, it ran some kind of Linux and I was fascinated how “simple and clean” it looks. I got a mini-cd to install it at home and immediately was hooked because the windows installation was such a pain in the arse those years. I did that all by myself just because I also wanted to play Tux Racer at home.

Anyways, somewhere right before GTA IV came out I started with VB.Net and ever since I was totally hooked and spend more time doing that than actually going to school.

My dad didn’t care and just let me do this, my mum just made sure I would have been up at least after the first lession, I don’t miss the bus and that I went to bed in a timely manner, which never happened because the PC was in my room and my mum slept downstairs and couldn’t notice that I was doing script kiddie things after an hour or so of “sleeping”.

So yeah, they didn’t care and were happy I didn’t annoy them.

Actually I didn’t wanted to become a developer because I always wanted to have it be a hobby or something and I liked woodwork more, but then people more qualified than me were more stupid than this script kiddie that still just wanted to play Tux Racer. That’s it.

Got my first job, 3rd year student from my country took me in to help making an app for a company in Texas... All the other guys are from 4th year or graduate school. Feeling nervous, let's hope I don't fuck up.

Anyone paying attention to Ripple?

OMG... I want to thank my mother for changing my diapers for many years, my brother for all the games he no longer plays, my wife for actually making money, my plant for the awesome smell, God for maybe doing something (I guess), thanks @dfox, @trogus, and each one of you guys that deemed my rants worthy of your ++.

When you immediately regret your career decisions.

After 8 hours of carefully installing Gentoo in my laptop I ended up with a... Completely unusable OS. Guess I'll try again tomorrow, apparently I didn't set up the kernel with the appropriate drivers.

We've been using private GitHub repos as a distribution method for our personal npm packages at work for years.

I finally got sick of it and did the work to publish them to artifactory yesterday. Today, I worked out the remaining kinks, fixed the CI builds, and wrote a wiki page explaining the change with step by step migration instructions and sent it around to the rest of the devs. And it's working great!

I feel simultaneously like a hero for finally getting this fixed and an idiot for putting up with it for so long.

Also thankful for my devops friend who helped a bunch.

Today's accomplishments:
- Actually got the fuck out of bed this morning

- Fixed the RCA connector on the CRT I got from a friend (I got scared while discharging it but it turned out fine). Basically the metal piece that carries the signal through the connector was bent to hell and sticking out, so I desoldered it, bent it right again, put it in, and resoldered it.

- Went to taco bell twice within 8 hours

- Sat and talked with a couple friends for like 2 hours after school

- Met and briefly talked to a very cute girl that my friend introduced me to. She has colored hair (I REALLY like colored hair) and she vapes. So perfect girl for me.

- FINALLY FUCKING STARTED LAUNDRY

Things I didn't accomplish today:

- Working on the web page I posted about this morning

- Getting to school on time (ONE DAY I WILL)

- Staying in school once I was actually there (left during my 6th period to go to taco bell the second time, first time today was in the morning after I was already late to school cause they won't let me into class if I'm late)

- Fixing the boot errors on my laptop (sometimes when I boot it fucking freezes after flushing the journal, I've been trying to figure it out for a while but I have no fucking clue)

- Figuring out why my PS2 doesn't want to recognize controllers or memory cards (got a new motherboard and now it just isn't recognizing the controller/memory card, I feel like some of the traces broke at some point while it was apart??)

Intentionally write code that might be buggy just to finish earlier and start something else.

How can I contribute on github, I always say that I will yet I never do?Any tips?

I learned C with a K&R copy a friend gave me years ago. Now at University we in CompSci get taught in Python the first year and Java next while the engineers start with C and (I'm guessing) move on to assembly later on.

This friend comes to me all worried because he has to submit the next day a working Reversi game for the console written in C. Turns out the game was divided among two labs and he failed to submit the first one.

The guy is smart but once a week or so, when we met to smoke a joint and relax with some other friends, he was always talking about how he would prefer something like law but that would be bad business back in Egypt.

Back to the game, I get completely into it. First hour checking all the instructions he was given, then reviewing the code he wrote and copied from Internet. We decide start from scratch since he doesn't really get what the code he copied do. It took us 10 hours only stopping to eat but we get all the specifications of both labs perfectly.

A week after that he comes to me: "my TA said your code is the ugliest shit he's ever seen but he gave me a perfect score because it passed all the tests". I'm getting better (the courses I'm taking help me a lot) but what really made me happy is that he solved the next lab by himself (Reversi wasn't the first time I helped him, only the first time he was absolutely lost). Now he actually gets excited about coding and even felt confident for his programming final.

No more talking about being a lawyer after those 10 hours, totally worth it.

Just moved countries and started a new job at an awesome company, which is so great I have nothing yet to rant about.

Oh here goes: almost three weeks with no internet at home and no end in sight.

Finally got few cables and now I can connect my laptop and even my cubietruck (device llike rasp) to the crt TV which was lying waste. Thinking to provide cast service to use it to watch movies. I know the resolution will be poor up but still with a try ☺️

git pull origin master --allow-unrelated-histories

Because I like to keep life interesting.

I want to buy a beer for everyone who developed the mobile pass app. Just breezed through immigration and customs without waiting in the 1 hour+ line. Technology wins. Cheers!

!rant

A while ago I ranted about how the programming club in my school decided to start teaching programming with arduino and it was causing the students to drop out because they were finding it hard, well today I went to the club and got there 10 minutes late, yet when I arrived, thinking that they would have started without me, there was only 2 people other than the instructor and assisstant. And the funny thing is that although 90% of the class stopped going to the programming club because they were finding arduino hard, the instructor still doesn't want to teach anything else and is adamant on teaching them arduino.

What a fucktard

Yesterday, I started taking the new programming classes in my school. I am utterly disappointed, before even teaching my classmates who are new to programming some basic python or javascript, the teacher started the class with teaching arduino and C and because of that many of my friends have since dropped the class and we are only 3 left out of an original 20.

Although some of you might say that arduino is a good introduction to programming, I believe you should teach a kid basic python or java before getting into arduino or raspi..etc

Things you should not say on your last day of work:

If I broke it, I think it would be pretty obvious.

Best thing about adulting, having half a freezer full of ice cream and cones in the pantry...

Programming in c++ on DOS (dosBox) feels so amazing, I really like it, I'll get a CRT monitor just for this (also a bit of Doom)! So cool!

I was trying to learn HTML CSS so that I could become a fullstack developper yet felt so bored doing so I didn't like them at all, did anyone else go through this why learning them also? Think I'll stick to django.

You haven't lived until you've experience the sheer power of a CRT monitor, hooked up to a 286/12, with a 2600 baud external zoom for m00fing the shit out of other users in chat, so your friends with leech accounts can help download the 38 pkzip files via ZMODEM.

Shit... gotta go! iCE just released the latest pack on Sanctuary, and my ANSI art is being featured as the welcome screen on Pair O' Dice.

305, bitches!!1one

I had an interesting mystery the other day. I work in the UK, but I'm working remotely from the US for a while. First day, I made some changes, ran the tests and they failed. Weird part was the failing test was for a component I hadn't touched. I took a closer look, and realized it was a date off by several hours. The test was checking that a passed in date appears in the output. But it was creating the date by parsing a string. The library I was using defaults to local time, but the component uses UTC. So, I had inadvertently created a unit test that only passes when run from UTC. But I had never noticed before because my work is in that timezone. Yikes!

Just attended my first conference and it was awesome! So many new ideas, but also tired and overloaded. Can't decide if I should code tonight, go to bed early, or just do something mindless.

Uh... how many?

Is it possible to create a browser extension for Firefox and Chrome using python?

Since day 0, I have been fond of computers. One of my first plush was called "DataDog" and looked like a CRT screen with dog ears around. According to my mum I was "addicted" to it.

At year 2, my dad was arranging some music on some software while I was watching him on his lap. Quick jump to the present: nowadays and since 10 years I run my own home studio with three guitars, two keyboards, one bass, three monitors, a microphone, an amp and a cabinet... coincidence? I think not!

Fast forward 5 years later (so I'm 6-7 years old), and I was playing with the legendary pinball game on Win95, as well as Flight Simulator. Then I was hogging mum's laptop to play settlers II (<3 that game), I eventually got my computer, and got into Quake III Arena being aged 10 (and had to tell my mum that game was safe for my age haha - I eventually removed the blood effects).

The Quake 3 Arena chapter is interesting: it got me into router configuration as I wanted to open a port through the router to host my own dedicated games with friends, it got me into DNS configuration (I was running a no-DNS client that allowed friends to join me through a DNS while having a dynamic IP) and eventually... to modifying .cfg files to tune my server as I wanted it. No programming here but a nice intro into :)

Then I hated the fact everybody would point their finger at me and say "geek" - I was only 13, fragile, sensitive, and I wanted everything but a bad image on me.

Meanwhile I continued on getting interested in hardware and configure my own computers, and investing myself into music production.

Then, university. "What do you want to study?" I thought of everything but IT, fleeing the image of a "geek". Turns out it was a waste of time, and at 21 yo I got into web development (well, just html and css), then learned a bit of PHP, finally got a specialized 2-year training and now here I am!

I was bound to be in IT either way since day 0, and funny fact, I've used every windows edition since Win95.

A few years back I was still using a CRT screen and I used to degauss it quite often as a result of having my speakers right next to it. Nowadays I use an LED screen but now I started getting this kind of "degaussing" effect where my vision shakes and waves and I get it quite randomly when looking at lights of different frequencies. (Like the Sun and my phone's screen) It only lasts like 2 seconds at most but I'm wondering if someone has the same problem as me and I would be quite interested to know if this has been caused by the CRT screen or something else.

Why is so Fitbit so bad at multiple time zones??

Guess what, people get on planes and travel.

Every time, my Fitbit gets so screwed up, including things like changing previous step counts, or duplicating an entire day of steps.

I understand MTZ is a tough problem, but this is just unacceptable. I'm not obsessed with my steps, but when your product is all about counting something, seems like you should be more careful to avoid double counting or not counting at all. Seriously, how much R&D have they invested in their hardware and apps, but it completely fails when you travel. Get it together!

I have 3 mid terms tomorrow and haven't even started and can't concentrate, I'm fucked.

Anyone else feel like @dfox is like the creator in marvel?

They finally arrived!!!!!

What books or courses would you recommend to further my knowledge in C/C++?

How can I learn assembly language, any ideas on books or sites where I can do that?

I remember that when I was about 8 years old, my dad brought a desktop computer home one day.

I don’t remember any specs, but it had a huge ass CRT monitor, a very loud clicky keyboard, a mouse with a real ball inside, and a CPU that uses floppy discs and CDs. Nope, CDs, not DVDs. And on that computer, it ran Windows 95. There’s was no internet most of the time (it was still quite expensive and unnecessary and dial up was troublesome to set up back then).

I remembered playing bootlegged games sold in CDs that my dad bought during his trips to China back then. Duke nukem, Command and Conquer Red Alert 2, Microsoft solitaire and GTA 3. Those were the games I played.

As a kid, it was glorious, looking through a box on a table, seeing and interacting with so many different worlds, stories, characters and games. I really miss those simpler times.

These days, every time I open my laptop, and I see that new mail that need to be dealt with, that homework that’s about to be due and a reminder of my next class in 15 min. Well shit.

Computer does a BSOD right at the end of a tiebreaker competitive overwatch match where the enemy is about to cap the point and win. I'm one of the tanks. Hard reboot and back in the game within 45s. Just barely hold them off in overtime and win the match. Epic!

Thank God for SSDs!

I was always interested in computers. My dad was a big computer geek and a programmer to boot. Usually had a couple old PCs in the basement to play with.

In middle school, I took tech ed and we made simple web sites with html and css. I remember the struggle of nested tables.

In high school, I couldn't fit any CS into my schedule. But someone gave me a learning to code book in ruby. I loved it, and have been hooked ever since.

When everyone thinks FE is easier, quicker, and less important than BE. Just because our fantastic UX people made you a high fidelity mockup in a day does not mean we can build the whole FE in a week.

This is why I'm returning to full stack.

It drives me crazy when there are unclosed parens or quotes anywhere.

Is it too much to ask for people to run their Facebook posts through a compiler first?

Best tip for getting unstuck? If it's after your usual leaving time, GO HOME.

So many times I solved the problem right away the next morning. Only wish I followed my own advice more often...

Current Mac and Windows user here looking to get back into Linux. Any distro suggestions?

Looking for something not too high maintenance.

How about for once in your fucking life, before saying that my code is wrong because it is giving you errors, you fucking check to see if you have the semicolons in place

Why the fuck why are tslint and prettier are always sucking their dicks and fuck each others asses.

Do you know this moment when you think:.... 🤔 They have millions of downloads, why do I bother formatting my code so much. Mabye all this people are smarter and saving so much time.

Then you set up eslint and prettier adjusting 10000k rules just to find eslint and prettier five minutes later in one file fucking their asses again how to indent on save😠😱

Decides to fork an OS repo and make some modifications.

It's written in coffeescript.

Just thinking, there must be a shitload of CRT monitors in landfill. Can you even recycle those heavy bastards?

I like the settings on my phone as dark as the dungeons with Geralt and a torch or the awesomely dumb flashlight from Doom 3.

Hey guys, I know there are a lot of germans on here and I just wanted to ask if any of you know of any free resources to learn german?(not superficially but like to be able to read and write german)

These new pet options are nice and all. But why so unrealistic? I mean there is no way to put the cat on the keyboard. Nor an option for CRT monitors with cat on top. I am horrified by the lack of sense and mostly dissapointed. 5/7 would still choose a ground cat though.

Hey guys, this question isn't really dev related, I just want to know some of the devs on here's musical tastes, so please commemt your favorite music genres, bands...etc

Trying to add money to a prepaid SIM card today. Their website is a mess. Plus and minus buttons were not functioning, so my only option was to add 15 euro. Checked the console, no errors. Tried triggering the buttons jQuery, no luck. Found a data value attached to the submit button set to 15. Changed to 10, clicked submit, and BOOM, it worked! You just got engineered!

After I paid, I was curious, went back and set it to -15, and tried it again. Unfortunately, they know about backend validation.

This is your Antivirus

I use the Parrot OS linux distro and I think my built in python interpreter is broken, when I run a .py program from the command line, I get errors that I don't get when I run them in pycharm, why is this happening?

I walk by our devops dashboard several times per day. It keeps track of key metrics for all our live services. I noticed an interesting trend the last few weeks.

3 weeks ago: all metrics green
2 weeks ago: 1 metric red
1 week ago: 1 metric still red
this week: 1 metric still red but covered with a post it note

Hey guys, I have a low spec machine with these specs:

32 GB SSD
4 GB RAM
Intel Pentium processor 1.66 GHZ 64 bit

I want to install a lightweigh Linux distro, could you recommend one.

P.S: Currently I am thinking of Bodhi or ArchLabs.

Somebody screwed up...

Not only can I not download the attachments in bulk from my Outlook account, but the download button opens a new f*cking tab where I have to click download again after it fully loads the whole page. I'd gladly use this shit software if for every attached file I download a wrench would tighten on the genitals of the idiot that design it.

Any recommendations for moving a blog?

My wife and I just cancelled our account with siteground hosting a WordPress blog. Looking for a cheaper alternative. Willing to get my hands dirty as a web dev, but would like a nice CMS experience for my wife. Also want to keep our existing content. If we can keep our custom domain somehow that would be a win.

Thanks!

Don't do it, it sucks.

I despise whovere come up with VBA IDE. Why is all the code confined within one window when multimonitor setups existed even back in the 14'' CRT era? And what sort of a fuckhead thought it's a good idea to throw a pop-up (with a notification sound!) every time you want to move from partially written line to a different one?

But hey, I managed to optimise the data parsing from 97 down to 3 sec.

Just enrolled myself in Andrew Ng's Machine Learning course at Coursera for the summer, is it a good place to start? Any recommendations?

I was probably 5 or so.
This was during the time when i heard that dial up modem sound from my dad's "computer room" every night when i went to bed.

The computer had a huge CRT monitor which made that annoying high pitch noise but i loved playing with it so much i didn't mind.

My dad installed a Croatian knock off version of Super Mario from a floppy disk he got from a magazine (i still have it lol).
Every time you died you'd have to start the game again by typing "mario" in CMD. Me and my sister played it so much we became pros.
He also tried explaining how he codes in Turbo C but i guess i was too young to understand it.

PROTIP: Using ed(1) can be a fun experience. Just remember to RTFM and be patient.
Using a cheesy amber CRT helps, as well.

Still wondering why Microsoft at some point removed this really cute UX to set the position of the form on your CRT monitor instead of writing the values manually. 😢

When you are tearing you hair out trying to figure out why the PR you're reviewing isn't working. Then you realize you forgot to pull the latest changes!

Does anyone know of a course that will help me write an adbolcker extension to a browser?

I'm kind of in a bit of a conundrum.

Abou 6 months ago, a friend and me were speaking about how bored I was and how I don't have any new ideas for projects, and he gave me one, and it is the basis of the project I am currently building, yet I changed one of the variables he had gave me as to appeal to a wider audience, yet now as I resumed work on it, I think it is a good idea and would make me some money( I'm not writing about this grounbreaking idea that would make me millions, hell, I'm not sure it will be successfull, but it might make me some money to help me when the time comes to go to university) but I am a firm believer in open-source and I don't know if I should make it open source and rely on the donations and let them modify the code, or just charge for it?

If it were another case, I wouldn't think twice before making it open source yet I probably won't be able to afford uni and this would be good for me and help me along with the freelancing jobs I am starting to work on.

What would you guys recommend I do?

Tower case with a turbo button and seven segment led display showing 10 or 100 when button pressed. Heavy CRT monitor. Running Windows 3.x ?

Runtime Error 200 - 'Divide by 0' when using Crt unit

You know it's Friday afternoon when your interface is broken because you tried to set the type to the string 'string' instead of the keyword string.

Interface IEnvironment {
name: 'string',
...
}

Hi there ...

My favorite place to go...

2017: supporting IE now somewhat less painful.