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Search - "cs"
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I'm drunk and I'll probably regret this, but here's a drunken rank of things I've learned as an engineer for the past 10 years.
The best way I've advanced my career is by changing companies.
Technology stacks don't really matter because there are like 15 basic patterns of software engineering in my field that apply. I work in data so it's not going to be the same as webdev or embedded. But all fields have about 10-20 core principles and the tech stack is just trying to make those things easier, so don't fret overit.
There's a reason why people recommend job hunting. If I'm unsatisfied at a job, it's probably time to move on.
I've made some good, lifelong friends at companies I've worked with. I don't need to make that a requirement of every place I work. I've been perfectly happy working at places where I didn't form friendships with my coworkers and I've been unhappy at places where I made some great friends.
I've learned to be honest with my manager. Not too honest, but honest enough where I can be authentic at work. What's the worse that can happen? He fire me? I'll just pick up a new job in 2 weeks.
If I'm awaken at 2am from being on-call for more than once per quarter, then something is seriously wrong and I will either fix it or quit.
pour another glass
Qualities of a good manager share a lot of qualities of a good engineer.
When I first started, I was enamored with technology and programming and computer science. I'm over it.
Good code is code that can be understood by a junior engineer. Great code can be understood by a first year CS freshman. The best code is no code at all.
The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document. Fuck, someone please teach me how to write good documentation. Seriously, if there's any recommendations, I'd seriously pay for a course (like probably a lot of money, maybe 1k for a course if it guaranteed that I could write good docs.)
Related to above, writing good proposals for changes is a great skill.
Almost every holy war out there (vim vs emacs, mac vs linux, whatever) doesn't matter... except one. See below.
The older I get, the more I appreciate dynamic languages. Fuck, I said it. Fight me.
If I ever find myself thinking I'm the smartest person in the room, it's time to leave.
I don't know why full stack webdevs are paid so poorly. No really, they should be paid like half a mil a year just base salary. Fuck they have to understand both front end AND back end AND how different browsers work AND networking AND databases AND caching AND differences between web and mobile AND omg what the fuck there's another framework out there that companies want to use? Seriously, why are webdevs paid so little.
We should hire more interns, they're awesome. Those energetic little fucks with their ideas. Even better when they can question or criticize something. I love interns.
sip
Don't meet your heroes. I paid 5k to take a course by one of my heroes. He's a brilliant man, but at the end of it I realized that he's making it up as he goes along like the rest of us.
Tech stack matters. OK I just said tech stack doesn't matter, but hear me out. If you hear Python dev vs C++ dev, you think very different things, right? That's because certain tools are really good at certain jobs. If you're not sure what you want to do, just do Java. It's a shitty programming language that's good at almost everything.
The greatest programming language ever is lisp. I should learn lisp.
For beginners, the most lucrative programming language to learn is SQL. Fuck all other languages. If you know SQL and nothing else, you can make bank. Payroll specialtist? Maybe 50k. Payroll specialist who knows SQL? 90k. Average joe with organizational skills at big corp? $40k. Average joe with organization skills AND sql? Call yourself a PM and earn $150k.
Tests are important but TDD is a damn cult.
Cushy government jobs are not what they are cracked up to be, at least for early to mid-career engineers. Sure, $120k + bennies + pension sound great, but you'll be selling your soul to work on esoteric proprietary technology. Much respect to government workers but seriously there's a reason why the median age for engineers at those places is 50+. Advice does not apply to government contractors.
Third party recruiters are leeches. However, if you find a good one, seriously develop a good relationship with them. They can help bootstrap your career. How do you know if you have a good one? If they've been a third party recruiter for more than 3 years, they're probably bad. The good ones typically become recruiters are large companies.
Options are worthless or can make you a millionaire. They're probably worthless unless the headcount of engineering is more than 100. Then maybe they are worth something within this decade.
Work from home is the tits. But lack of whiteboarding sucks.39 -
CS graduates that have never gone beyond "Hello World", fuck college and it's "system".
So the actual victims of the story are friends of mine, CS colleagues, but I can't help but share as the existence of code freeloaders enfuriates me.
At college in order to graduate you need to present a project in form of a thesis a side from your actual thesis, there is a shortage of pre-approved projects and everyone wants one.
A talented friend of mine who has many years of programming experience got in one with another friend of mine and a lady who I've never seen before. One Saturday night my friend and I were having some beers at a local bar and his phone didn't stop beeping so I jokingly said:
"Bro, tell your girl you need some space", he laughed and explained it was the chick from her project having some "issues" with node.
"So? Tell her to google it, it's Saturday night", he explained the girl has never coded before even though she's about to graduate so she had take it upon herself to pressure him to finish ASAP so she can graduate and get an already agreed position at the federal energy commission... As dev!
I've seen my bud in a lot of dumb calls with said chick trying to explain how you CAN'T COMPILE THE NODE WEBSERVER TO A .EXE!
It frustrated me how such an idiot can go through a CS major buying homeworks and getting low self-esteem geeks to code for her. Then I realized that as an aspiring InfoSec guy, lazy idiots coding is good for business.8 -
It's crazy to me how much of a misguided superiority complex some CS college kids have.
"I'd never learn Python, that's just for kids"
"Front end is so easy, it's just HTML and making things look pretty"13 -
I've seen several rants about dumb/useless teachers, college and the CS degree studies; today is a good day to vent out some "old" memories.
Around two semesters ago I enrolled in a Database seminar with this guy, a tall geek from the 80's with a squeaky voice, so squeaky mice could had an aneurysm if they listened to him.
Either way this guy was a mess, he said he was an awesome coder, that we were still "peasants" when it came to coding, that relational databases had nothing on him since he was an awesome freelancer and did databases every day, that we had to redo the programming course with him and with his shitty, pulled out of the ass own C++ style guide with over 64 different redacted rules.
He gave us sample code of "how it should be done" in Java...it ain't my favorite language but fuck me a fucking donkey could have written better code with his ass!! He even rewrote Java's standard input function and made it highly inefficient. He still wrote in a structural paradigm in OOP languages! And he dared to make this code reviews were he would proyect someone's code and mock it in front of the class as he took off points, sometimes going to the negative realm (3,2,1,0,-1...)
But you know what's shittier? That he actually didn't even attend, 90% of the time, it was literally this:
> Good morning class
> Checks attendance. . .
> I'll be back, I'm going to check in...
> 1 hour 45 minutes later (class was 2 hrs long) - comes back
> do you have any doubts?
> O.o no...? I'm ok.
> We're done
Not only that, he scheduled from 4 to 17 homeworks throughout the week, I did the math, that was around 354 files from everyone; of course he didn't check them, other students from higher semesters did and they gained each point taken from students making students from lower semesters get the short end of the stick.
How did I pass? He didn't understood my code or database schema and he knew he couldn't fail me as he had no ground to stand on.
Thanks for listening, if you got to the end of this long ass post and had a similar experience I'd love to read it.13 -
Hi everyone, long time no see.
Today I want to tell you a story about Linux, and its acceptance on the desktop.
Long ago I found myself a girlfriend, a wonderful woman who is an engineer too but who couldn't be further from CS. For those in the know, she absolutely despises architects. She doesn't know the size units of computers, i.e. the multiples of the byte. Breaks cables on the regular, and so on. For all intents and purposes, she's a user. She has written some code for a college project before, but she is by no means a developer.
She has seen me using Linux quite passionately for the last year or so, and a few weeks ago she got so fed up with how Windows refused to work on both her computers (on one of them literally failing to run exe's, go figure), that she allowed me to reinstall both systems, with one of them being dualbooted Windows 10 + Linux.
The computer that runs Linux is not one she uses very often, but for gaming (The Sims) it's her platform to go. On it I installed Debian KDE, for the following reasons:
- It had to be stable as I didn't want another box to maintain.
- It had to be pretty OOTB, as first impressions are crucial.
- It had to be easy to use, given her skill level.
- It had to have a GUI abstraction to apt, the KDE team built Discover which looks gorgeous.
She had the following things to say about Linux, when she went to download The Sims from a torrent (I installed qBittorrent for her iirc).
"Linux is better, there's no need to download anything"
"Still figuring things out, but I'm liking it"
"I'm scared of using Windows again, it's so laggy"
"Linux works fine, I'm becoming a Linux user"
Which you can imagine, it filled me with pride. We've done it boys. We've built a superior system that even regular users can use, if the system is set up to be user-friendly.
There are a few gripes I still have, and pitfalls I want to address. There's still too many options, users can drown in the sheer amount of distro's to choose from. For us that's extremely important but they need to have a guide there. However, don't do remote administration for them! That's even worse than Microsoft's tracking! Whenever you install Linux on someone else's computer, don't be all about efficiency, they are coming from Windows and just want it to be easy to use. I use Mate myself, but it is not the thing I would recommend to others. In other words, put your own preferences aside in favor of objective usability. You're trying to sell people on a product, not to impose your own point of view. Dualboot with Windows is fine, gaming still sucks on Linux for the most part. Lots of people don't have their games on Steam. CAD software and such is still nonexistent (OpenSCAD is very interesting but don't tell me it's user-friendly). People are familiar with Windows. If you were to be swimming for the first time in the deep water, would you go without aids? I don't think so.
So, Linux can be shown and be actually usable by regular people. Just pitch it in the right way.11 -
I met a rather talented developer some time ago that is highly proficient in C# as well as React and Angular for the creation of web programs.
Dude knows the ins and outs of C#, has been working on it since the early stages of ASP.NET.
I am always intrigued as to why certain people chose certain languages. When I asked him, he admitted to being very lost during his early days, and somehow settled on C# because of the file extension being cs, which made him think that it was the proper Computer Science programming language, get it? because of CS?
Now a days he does use a wide variety of stacks and languages, and he keeps up to date, not one of those "I don't need to learn anything new!" types of developers, the dude is absolutely l337, but i keep thinking that such a talented developer had such a funny start.5 -
me: I will major in CS so I can work with computers, not people
narrator: But little did he know...4 -
* Calls themselves "Software Engineer"
* Doesn't know what a thread is.
I swear these coding boot camps are churning out code monkeys whose real skill is building shitty React apps.
I believe a CS degree is necessary if you want to work on something more than CRUD applications.
Nothing against devs without degrees, but at least make an effort because my head will explode next time I have to explain to someone what a thread is and why it's a very bad idea to run blocking code on the main thread.27 -
My CS teacher uses html 4 spec that has shit like <strong> and <font size=5> and all sorts of inline garbage. She writes the tags in ALL CAPS and it honestly looks like SQL had a baby with brainfuck. I can't handle this shit anymore. She feels like she's apparently very good at programming and has just been promoted to the School's CS HOD (Head of Department). I have no idea what to do I go to school everyday having to face her mutilating my interest in programming. My peers are all incompetent and don't care at all. Don't get me started on how she writes Python. What the fk man.32
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Most kids just want to code. So they see "Computer Science" and think "How to be a hacker in 6 weeks". Then they face some super simple algebra and freak out, eventually flunking out with the excuse that "uni only presents overtly theoretical shit nobody ever uses in real life".
They could hardly be more wrong, of course. Ignore calculus and complexity theory and you will max out on efficiency soon enough. Skip operating systems, compilers and language theory and you can only ever aspire to be a script kiddie.
You can't become a "data scientist" without statistics. And you can never grow to be even a mediocre one without solid basic research and physics training.
Hack, I've optimized literal millions of dollars out of cloud expenses by choosing the best processors for my stack, and weeks later got myself schooled (on devRant, of all places!) over my ignorance of their inner workings. And I have a MSc degree. Learning never stops.
So, to improve CS experience in uni? Tear down students expectations, and boil out the "I just wanna code!" kiddies to boot camps. Some of them will be back to learn the science. The rest will peak at age 33.17 -
In january 2023 i was contacted by a recruiter offering me a job position.
I DID NOT ASK FOR A JOB.
I WAS NOT LOOKING FOR A JOB.
THEY contacted ME.
Ok. So i went along with it and see how it goes. They probably wont hire me nor would i give a shit. Chatted with this recruiter for a while. She forgets to answer my message for 5 fucking days. Twice. Once because she was doing God knows what and the second time because she was on paid vacation. Fine i don't give a shit about you at all anyways.
So this recruiter chatting has been stretched out for several days. I think over a WEEK. So she forwarded me to their lead developer.
I applied to work as a full stack java spring boot backend + angular frontend engineer.
So:
- java backend
- angular frontend
- full stack
- shitload of devops
- shitload of projects i built
- worked with clients
- have CS degree, graduated
- worked a job at their rival company
What could go fucking wrong with all of these stats right?
During technical + hr interview (3 of us on google meets) they asked me what salary I'd be comfortable with.
I said $1500/month straight out.
keep in mind:
- In my country $500 or $600 is a salary for engineers per month
- You get a raise of +$150 which is around $750 after working for 1+ year
- You can earn $1000+ after you work for +2 years
- Rent here is $200-300 a month at minimun. And because of inflation its just getting worse especially with food. So this salary is not for living but for survival.
Their lead engineer gave me a WHOLE ASS FUCKING PROJECT TO BUILD and i had to code it within 10 days. Great so at least 17+ days of my fucking life to waste on these fucktards who contacted ME.
The project was about building a web app coffee shop literally what mcdonalds has when you order via those tablets. I had to build this in java spring boot and angular. I had to integrate:
- docker, devops
- barmen, baristas, orders
- people can order at the table or to go
- each barista can take 5 orders at a time
- each coffee has different types of fields and brewing time
- each barman brews each coffee different period of time
- barista cant take more than 5 orders for to go until barman finishes the previous order
- barista can take more than 5 orders but if those orders were ordered from table, and they have to be put in queue
- had to build CRUD admin functionality coffee's
- had to export them all of the postman routes
- had to design a scalable database infrastructure for all of this alone
- shitload of stuff more
And guess what. After 10 painful days I BUILT THE WHOLE THING MYSELF AND I BUILT EVERYTHING THEY ASKED FOR. IT WAS WORKING.
Submitted it. They told me they'll contact me within 7 days to schedule the final Technical interview after they review what i built. Great so another 17+7 days of my fucking time wasted.
OH and they also told me to send them THE WHOLE GITHUB REPOSITORY AND TRANSFER OWNERSHIP TO THEIR COMPANY'S OWNERSHIP. once you do this you cant have your repository back. WTF? WHY CANT YOU JUST REVIEW THE CODE FROM MY PUBLIC REPOSITORY? That was so weird but what can i fucking do argue with these dickheads?
After a week of them not answering i contacted them via email. They forgot and apologized. Smh. Then they scheduled an interview within 3 days. Great more of my time wasted.
During interview i was on a google meets with their lead engineer, 1 backend java spring boot engineer and 1 angular frontend developer. They were milking me dry for 1 whole fucking hour.
They only pointed out the flaws in what i built, which are miniscule and have not once congratulated me on the rest of the good parts. I explained them i had to rush those parts so the code may not be perfect. I had other shit to do in my life and not work for your shitty project for $0/hour for 10 days you fucking dickriders.
So they quickly ran over to theory. They asked me where is jwt token stored. Who generates it. How the backend knows to authenticate user by it. I explained.
What are solid principles. I said i cant explain what is it but i understand how it works, why its needed and how to implement it (they can clearly see in the project i just build that i applied SOLID principles everywhere) - but i do admit i dont know the theory behind it 100% clearly.
Then they asked me about observables and promises in angular. I explained them how they work and how subscribe method is used (as they can clearly see that i used it in the code). Then they asked me to explain them under the hood of how observables work. The fuck? I dont know and dont care? But i can learn it as i work there?
Etc
Final result: after dragging this for 1 fucking month for miserable $1500/month they told me: we can either hire you now but for a much lower salary which you probably wont be happy with, or you can study more these things we discussed "and know why the car leaks oil" and reapply back to us in 2-3 months!25 -
If it weren't for all the people who deleted their accounts, my avatar would be wearing a suit and tie right now.
Tsk tsk tak...
Now my avatar looks like a part time pimp + full time cs student. 😎😒👩🏻💻17 -
Being me. Fresh out of UNI with a three year bachelor in CS, no work experience. Starts in a big tech company with a lot promise of exciting project etc. Starts in 3 projects with one lead dev and two senior devs.
First month begins. I start by setting up my local environment and read documentations, which is fairly irrelevant and old. One of the senior devs quits.
Second month begins. Lead dev quits as well and the other senior dev having sick leave for the rest of the month. Basically I'm on my own, but thankfully not responsible for the projects.
Third month begins. The other senior dev is still sick. Nobody to help. Now I'm forced to talk to customer with a lacking knowledge of projects. Nobody knows what is going on. Hopefully my other senior dev will come back.
Fourth month begins. My senior have quit as well. I've been assigned as responsible of all three projects now. FML.
Fifth month begins. I begged my manager for help. Got a junior dev to help me with one of the projects. He and I still have no clue what we should do.
What a shitty start to a career as a developer.
Anybody having a similar experience?5 -
I used to work for a company that had a main website and a lightweight app. LW app was distributed to partners and added to other sites using an iframe.
Someone decided a requirement was to retain the shopping cart for anonymous users. Some dev thought the best way to do that was to issue auth cookies to anonymous users.
The auth cookie issued by the LW app was actually for the main site. A few users for LW app decided to just come to main site to make a purchase. Since they already had an auth cookie (issued from LW app), they were never prompted to log in, create an account, or use guest checkout on the main site. They were still able to complete their order and we had their shipping address, but we didn’t have their email address so we couldn’t contact them about their order.
Customer service had no way to email customers if something went out of stock or if there was a product recall. CS would have to call these customers and ask for email addresses. Good luck getting anyone to answer or return a call nowadays. Customers were asking where their confirmation email was. The admin website was polluted with “users” that had the placeholder email for non-logged in users.
This happened because of a combination of an understaffed and overextended engineering department. Of course when something goes bad it’s going to be bad. -
caution: just some dude sharing a random story.
started my own small business around half a year now. a month earlier from that my cousin also started his career as a self employed dev with his own small business and we work together.
next year we we will start a company together, where we merge our existing small businesses into one. we are developing software on our own and we design and implement software for our customers.
seems like we are doing something right because we are reaching our capacities almost all of the time.
we plan to hire apprentices (hope it's the right word) and to teach them all we know to be able to then increase our possible workload.
you know, I do not have a degree or some form of education in the field of IT. And here in germany it was almost impossible to land a job as a dev. needed my cousin who studied cs to get me my first position in that field - and even with his reputation it was not easy.
this shit will not happen on my watch. If I see someone with fire for development I will give them a chance, irrespective of their background. And I will be more than happy to let that person grow and to give every kind of support I can.
we also plan to have something like "if the employee has a good idea for software that sells, we will support it and share revenue". got to figure out the details on that one, but I want to give the employee the possibility to grow some passive income out of their normal job - because for me this was never an option. and I think that this will motivate in some way 😅
just wanted to get this out of my head 😣4 -
I hate these idiots that post source code examples as an image just so they can keep their cool highlighting and style. How the fuck am I supposed to test that without re-typing the whole thing myself? Ever try OCR on source code? Not too great, is it.12
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I have nothing to play recently so I started playing old games.
Today I launched gta vice city on my old pc. Got more than 200 hours in that game during my childhood. Game from 2002 and I laughed when driving a car. It was so natural and fun. Michael Jackson singing Billy Jean and police chasing my ass when I’m trying to find a bribe in the city. That was fun.
For me most of today’s games can’t compete in gameplay mechanics with that game from 20 years ago.
Maybe we have better graphics but gaming fun got worse.
I think it’s cause most of games are made on commercial engines to save money and game studios focus on graphics cause it’s cheaper than paying software developer.
They focus on games to be competitive between players so ai got worse.
Big studio games became generic like movies, they don’t want you to have fun but they want to give you a story around by delivering lots of content in game, achievements, stars but the gameplay itself is bugged and meh.
They don’t focus on things people want to do but they focus on target groups. Most today’s big title games are meh cause they’re made by people who don’t play them.
They don’t play them cause they don’t have time cause of management that changes requirements cause they asked target groups and that would sell. Well if I play a game I’m not interested in story despite some basic stuff to keep the progress forward, if I wanted a big story I would watch a movie or tv show. I play games to explore, feel the world and have fun. I don’t need a linear deep story for that cause I’m in game so give me good gameplay so I can feel the world.
Most of classic game hits didn’t had tons of text and tons of stuff to do but they somehow wanted you to play more. Cause they were competitive between player and computer, the controls felt natural and while progressing you was eaten by the game mechanics more and more not by the story but by amount of stuff you could do as you progress or difficulty increase or enemies behavior change.
Now we’re getting all at once, mostly pointed and with detailed tutorial what you can do. There’s no explanation there’s no discovery what you can and what you can’t do at start. You get all and you decide to throw game away because the moment you launched it you got everything so you spent money just to get stuff you won’t play cause it’s meh and you go back to cs or other looter shooter to kill people cause you’re pissed off that the game was meh.
Well I’m glad I was a kid in 90s and 2000s cause I could enjoy gaming before it was targeted to broader public and become another shallow mass media industry that don’t give a fuck about gameplay cause they want to tell you so many things, they want you to know them cause they’re so important that they forgot that I can read a book and I came to play game to get a different feeling then reading book.
Modern games are like books filled with small stories and nice graphics where you can open it on every page and read a little piece of shitty crap.
Just take this piece and go to toilet so you can wipe your ass with that story and begin other one, look around, puke and go to toilet to take a dump again. I lost my hope to get something fresh or filled with nice gameplay from gaming industry. It’s dead.5 -
oh to be a new cs student and to be excited about programming and coming up with solutions... i feel quite nostalgic about it, that sense of wonder6
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With all this fuckery around master/main nameing, I wonder what all those people, who are for the renaming, think of the SPI-Bus.
Its pinout is normally:
SCK: Clock line
MOSI: Master out slave In
MISO: Master in slave out
SS/CS: Slave or chip select5 -
University, first Java practical lesson.
I'm sitting near this guy, clearly hyped up because he managed to install his first linux distro earlier.
After 5 minutes he asks me how to do the task the Professor assigned that morning.
I'm playing dumbass in my head, thinking stuff like "oh big boy installed ubuntu but can't declare a fucking Rectangle class in java lol" (what a dickhead).
I helped him, and then proposed to go out for a quick smoke.
Turns out we're very similar, hyped as hell with linux (like I was at the time), with same CS interests. Still texting sometimes. -
I switched from CS programming to AI research field and I almost forgot about this community: it's quite a while i don't have a rant to share :)
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i think it's a waste of time and resources to memorize syntax and other stuff you can google. since we have a lot of material available, we should focus on logic, more abstract concepts, stuff you can't copy paste. well, I think that should be the way in every area, not only CS15
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Helping a friend study for a midterm for a web development class at the university I went to. They have a new teacher this semester and I’m reviewing his slides about javascript to see where the confusion is...
First slide: based off of Java, hence the name JavaScript, but is not Java. Borrows most syntax from Java.
And they wonder why employers comment on the surveys: “unprepared for the workforce”
Looked up the professor.. no experience teaching or any background in cs. And people pay 6-12k / semester for this state university.1 -
Just graduated in CS.
All jobs required experience in stuff I never seen/heard before (back then I didn’t know most job listings were copy pasted by people who knew less than me).
I felt so inadequate that I replied to a job offer as a seller as they asked only fluency in 2 foreign languages.
The company owner during the interview looked at me and told me I needed to look elsewhere, that mine was a good resume and then he dropped this:
“I can see you are a good guy, but for this job I need an asshole”
Back then it was very hard for me but now I understand10 -
Back from the dead with more vaguely-obscure technical bullshit
Working on a chatbot for my BS-CS. Almost done with college, so the assignment is to make a bot that recommends you a CS career. Cool.
I get through making a joint personality and skill-interest quiz that gives you number grades on different spectra. So far, so good. But this project has to be done entirely in pandorabots' online editor. So no scripting. Zero scripting. 100% markup language. That means to even do math, you need to copy a standard library off GitHub.
I mean, that's fine and all, but the syntax is just atrocious, because everything in AIML is input->response. If you ask the bot "what is 5+5?" you must have it go:
- recognize pattern WHAT IS * + *
-> redirect -> XADD * XS *
-> do math -> recurse result
-> 10
uncomfy. Plus, variables can only be accessed through <get> and <set> tags. But mangeable.
So here's where the story becomes a rant.
In the standard docs, there's all these math functions, and they work. There's also logic.
And then there's this fucker
XIF [ * ] XS [ * ]
Which has no documentation and just doesn't work. No idea what the brackets mean. Tried putting in TRUE, tried putting in true math statements (5 XEQ 5), tried putting in recursion tags to trick it, tried everything. It just ignores it.
There is not a single comment, stackOverflow post, or youtube video that even acknowledges the existence of this thing.
So unless I want to convert the entire logic of my program into nested SWITCH statements with the <condition> tag, I'm just fucked.
The icing on the cake is, I go to tech support on Pandorabots to ask for help with this. What do they have except a chatbot to cheerfully tell me that no humans are around to help me right now?
gonna have to build an entire fuckin turing machine in markup tags to calculate whether x = 3
(:1 -
my old CS professor disliked us using modern “heavy” languages instead of C for “trivial” tasks. He used to say “don’t whip your python out without a reason” ☝️14
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I met this guy on my very first job. An internship. He was an intern too. We were doing Java and he was a brilliant programmer. We would try to finish the job as quickly as possible then stay back late to play 1v1 CS. (Yes on company LAN). We worked together for only 2 months. We are still in touch. Right now helping him with SOP for his master's thesis.
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I don't have a Computer Science (CS) degree, but I do know a lot of Computer Shit. Major Computer Shit. So yeah, I guess I major in CS after all.2
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Is the CS field creating terms for the sake of creating terms?
Someone mentioned a "closure" in another post. I instinctively knew what they meant by that based upon the code I saw. I had heard the term thrown around before, but it had not yet connected in my mind. I wondered why I had not been exposed enough to care.
So I thought: What does C++ have as far as closures?
I found that C++ has lambdas. Those are definitions for function objects. They do not exist at runtime. But a closure does. The analog is you have classes. They are definitions and do not exist at runtime. But instances of classes do. So at runtime the instance is what you are working with. This is the same as lambdas vs closures in C++. The closure is the runtime counterpart. Why a separate term for what essentially is an instance? Is it because it captures data and code? As far as I know the closure is all data that gets passed around that calls a function. So it is essentially an instance of a lambda.
Another term: memoization. I have yet to see this added to any dictionary in online tools like a browser. Is the term so specific that nobody cares to add it? I mean these are tools programmers use all the time.
My guess is these terms originated a long time ago and I have just not been exposed to the contexts for these terms enough. It just seems like I feel like I have been in the field a long time. But a lot of terms seem alien to me. I also have never seen these terms used at work. Many of the devs I work with actively avoid CS specific terms to not confuse our electrical coworkers. My background started in electrical. So maybe I just didn't do enough CS in college.6 -
Another laptop bites the dust, thank you android Studio and gradle for showing me how poor my pockets are
About two to three years ago, I purchased a laptop: HP Pavilion 15-cs(I forgot the model name and number) which is one of the cheapest laptops I could get, a year ago, after trying to create my first application without a tutorial, the laptop's fan stopped working, I thought it was on cooldown(stupid me) but I realized it was dead, I tried looking for a replacement and found out that they don't sell spare parts of any laptop in my country, I thought since I was in an air-conditioned room all the time, my laptop doesn't need a fan, but I was proven wrong when the laptop started lagging a lot,
Now with my second laptop, again a cheap HP Pavilion 15, I am afraid of ever running that demon of a program again7 -
I spent 4 months in a programming mentorship offered by my workplace to get back to programming after 4 years I graduated with a CS degree.
Back in 2014, what I studied in my first programming class was not easy to digest. I would just try enough to pass the courses because I was more interested in the theory. It followed until I graduated because I never actually wrote code for myself for example I wrote a lot of code for my vision class but never took a personal initiative. I did however have a very strong grip on advanced computer science concepts in areas such as computer architecture, systems programming and computer vision. I have an excellent understanding of machine learning and deep learning. I also spent time working with embedded systems and volunteering at a makerspace, teaching Arduino and RPi stuff. I used to teach people older than me.
My first job as a programmer sucked big time. It was a bootstrapped startup whose founder was making big claims to secure funding. I had no direction, mentorship and leadership to validate my programming practices. I burnt out in just 2 months. It was horrible. I experienced the worst physical and emotional pain to date. Additionally, I was gaslighted and told that it is me who is bad at my job not the people working with me. I thought I was a big failure and that I wasn't cut out for software engineering.
I spent the next 6 months recovering from the burn out. I had a condition where the stress and anxiety would cause my neck to deform and some vertebrae were damaged. Nobody could figure out why this was happening. I did find a neurophyscian who helped me out of the mental hell hole I was in and I started making recovery. I had to take a mild anti anxiety for the next 3 years until I went to my current doctor.
I worked as an implementation engineer at a local startup run by a very old engineer. He taught me how to work and carry myself professionally while I learnt very little technically. A year into my job, seeing no growth technically, I decided to make a switch to my favourite local software consultancy. I got the job 4 months prior to my father's death. I joined the company as an implementation analyst and needed some technical experience. It was right up my alley. My parents who saw me at my lowest, struggling with genetic depression and anxiety for the last 6 years, were finally relieved. It was hard for them as I am the only son.
After my father passed away, I was told by his colleagues that he was very happy with me and my sisters. He died a day before I became permanent and landed a huge client. The only regret I have is not driving fast enough to the hospital the night he passed away. Last year, I started seeing a new doctor in hopes of getting rid of the one medicine that I was taking. To my surprise, he saw major problems and prescribed me new medication.
I finally got a diagnosis for my condition after 8 years of struggle. The new doctor told me a few months back that I have Recurrent Depressive Disorder. The most likely cause is my genetics from my father's side as my father recovered from Schizophrenia when I was little. And, now it's been 5 months on the new medication. I can finally relax knowing my condition and work on it with professional help.
After working at my current role for 1 and a half years, my teamlead and HR offered me a 2 month mentorship opportunity to learn programming from scratch in Python and Scrapy from a personal mentor specially assigned to me. I am still in my management focused role but will be spending 4 hours daily of for the mentorship. I feel extremely lucky and grateful for the opportunity. It felt unworldly when I pushed my code to a PR for the very first time and got feedback on it. It is incomparable to anything.
So we had Eid holidays a few months back and because I am not that social, I began going through cs61a from Berkeley and logged into HackerRank after 5 years. The medicines help but I constantly feel this feeling that I am not enough or that I am an imposter even though I was and am always considered a brilliant and intellectual mind by my professors and people around me. I just can't shake the feeling.
Anyway, so now, I have successfully completed 2 months worth of backend training in Django with another awesome mentor at work. I am in absolute love with Django and Python. And, I constantly feel like discussing and sharing about my progress with people. So, if you are still reading, thank you for staying with me.
TLDR: Smart enough for high level computer science concepts in college, did well in theory but never really wrote code without help. Struggled with clinical depression for the past 8 years. Father passed away one day before being permanent at my dream software consultancy and being assigned one of the biggest consultancy. Getting back to programming after 4 years with the help of change in medicine, a formal diagnosis and a technical mentorship.3 -
When engineers get so CS-driven they can’t see simple things 🙃
Another manager messaged me and my boss last night to ask whether he’ll have to expose a certain function to be available in objective c classes (we’re iOS devs and most of our code is in swift, but some older stuff is still in .m files). He said he dug into the lower level code and didn’t see any connections or exposures so he assumes he’ll have to add these. My boss concurred and told him to go ahead and make them available.
Then I showed up with my didn’t go to university brain & searched the codebase for calls to that function from .m classes. There were like a hundred lol, working just fine. It’s already exposed. Neither of them thought to do that.2 -
I spent eight years in college doing very little progress and didn't graduate in the end ("studied" CS). I'm pretty sure I have severe ADHD and can't even afford to try and treat it/medicate it.
Anyway, I understand the eight-years-in-college-without-graduating matter looks very bad on a resume, but it's a good college (one of the top in my country) that gave me invaluable knowledge in what little I managed to accomplish there.
The way in which LinkedIn allows me to put college education only allows me to input (and in fact in most websites it's kinda required) start and end years, but to be truthful I gotta set these years with their huge span and some kind of observation that I didn't graduate...
This really gives me huge anxiety, and discourages me from even applying to jobs at all, feels like I've ruined my chances at getting into the industry, feels like it locks me away from opportunities, and I know how bad it looks for the HR people, who probably just reject me outright because on top of everything I'm not even the kind of person to particularly attract positive attention from the "normies" as they say.
So, should I just not put my incomplete/dragged out "education" on LinkedIn? I'm not sure if *some* CS education with extremely poor academic results is better than showing no history of higher education at all.2 -
I will create a 1,000-job-application challenge.
The goal is to apply to 1,000 different companies and see if i can make a guineas world record of getting 1,000 rejections in a row.
Each job application i will record and document it on tiktok. I will do this freely to show everyone my achievements skills and knowledge of why i deserve the salary i want to have (which is btw less than $20,000 a year) -- so im not asking for abnormally high salary.
If you're a company spinning millions od dollars PER MONTH but it's hard for you to spend less than $20,000 PER YEAR to pay me for my hard work -- with absolutely no respect, FUCK OFF.
I want to do this in realistically 4 months.
1000 jobs / 4 months = 250 applications a month
Or 8.33 but lets round it to 9 job applications PER DAY that i will make.
I will record 9 fucking tiktoks PER DAY documenting this modern day bullshit where i struggle to get a job EVEN AFTER GRADUATING WITH A FUCKING CS DEGREE.
I want to show the world how college was really a scam and document the proof how no one gives a shit about degree and everyone treats me as if i have no degree.
I will also shitpost here on the status throughout this journey.11 -
I keep on checking if there are recruiters messaging me in LinkedIn,
but I am not actively looking.
and even if something is looking good to me, I feel so rusty on my CS I won't even give it a go... -
What's a no CS degree, zero experience, experienced a short boot camp, was hoping this would be his break and spent a shit ton of money on it, person gotta do to get a developer job?12
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A classmate I haven't seen in 2 years popped up in my Linkedin.
I looked up her profile and it seems like she now works at SWE in okayish company after an internship in a prestigious company.
This throws me a little bit (I am jealous obviously). We've worked in the same uni project before, she's okay when it comes to theoretical courses but a bit behind when it comes to anything related to computer. I would never think of her working as SWE as she did better in traditional engineering (think Civil Eng, Mechanical Eng etc, Aerospace Eng.).
And yet I heard a lot of people online complaining about difficulty of finding graduate/junior position. If a person like her can find something, surely someone with pure CS background should find something easier. But then again, job hunting is 50% pure luck. I have concern on the quality of work that she will produce, but maybe I underestimate her a lot? 🤔6 -
>start new job, not very professionally experienced dev
>spend couple of months working on a feature that is supposed to be an MVP kind of thing, be rushed to finish and told to cut corners because it's "just an MVP", still lose sleep and have relationship suffer (and ultimately ruined) as I try to not lose deadlines created by the boss with questions like "you can have this done by <very soon>, right?"
>frontend created by fellow developer is a garbled mess of repeated code and questionably implemented subpages, frontend dev apparently copies CSS from Figma and pastes it into new non-reusable React components as envisioned by designer, I am tasked with making sense of the mess and adding in API consumption, when questioning boss what to do with the mess I am often told to discard stuff that the frontend dev has made and just reuse his styling; all of this on top of implementing the backend feature that a previous developer wasn't able to do
>specs change along the way, I had been using a library as a helper in some part of the original feature, now the boss sees that and (without further testing the library) promises CEO that we'll add that as a separate subfeature, but the performance of the library is garbage for larger inputs and causes problems, is basically shit that might not have been shit if we had implemented it ourselves, however at this point CEO has promised new feature to some customers, all the actual sense of responsibility falls upon my hands
>marketing folk see halfway done application and ask for more changes
>everything is rushed to launch, plenty of things aren't implemented or are done halfway
>while I'm waiting for boss to deploy, I'm called up to company office by CEO, and get new task that is pretty cool and will actually involve assessing various algorithms and experiment with them, rather than just stitching API calls and endpoints together, it involves delving into a whole new field of CS that I never had the opportunity to delve into before
>start working on cool task, doing research, making good progress
>boss finally deploys feature I had been originally implementing
>cut corners of original boring insane feature start showing up, now I have to start fixing them instead of working on cool task, however the cool task also has a deadline which is likely expected to be met
I'm not sure if I'm having it bad or not, is this what a whole career in software development will look like?6 -
Hey y'all!
this is my first post, so mind me if my question sounds obvious, but googling around it gave me contradicting articles.
I wanted to ask if there's the possibility to make a living off being an AI developer outside my country (Italy), because, like I wrote in my bio, despite a CS degree and specialization in machine learning, the only jobs I landed were about maintaining useless outdated webapps. I can tell you that the first job's project was a JSP/servlet app that could run only in internet explorer (yes, internet explorer, in 2019), maybe you won't believe me, but if you do, maybe you can partially understand why I want to flee my place.
Add that I had to commute by train + subway to get to work, losing some 3 extra hours a day because of that.
I mean, if I really have to take the hassle of public transit in order to work, at least I want to enjoy it a bit. Please get me outta here.4 -
I feel like I am not CS major.
I doble major'ed on 3rd year, so don't have deep knowledge like other 'real' CS majors.2 -
Thread topic: religion, philosophy, matrix
Summary: skip if you don't like these topics, stay if you want to find out why the conclusion has relevance to programming
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Ok.
Let me get this straight:
There are 4 founders of the BAYC NFTs.
1 has a fasist/nazi pseudo name
1 has a racist pseudo name
1 has a satanic pseudo name
1 has a pedophile pseudo name
Their logo is a copy of Nazi Waffen Totenkopf emblem, which was the German division force of the Nazi concentration camps
And they became billionaires.
Ok
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Sam bankman the founder of FTX crypto shit robbed people for 32 BILLION dollars. And hes not in jail because he donated most of that money to democratic political party, leaving himself 1 billion dollars as allowance. Now that he bought political power, politicians protect him. So he's having fun in the bahamas and penthauses, having generational wealth and enriching his fraud parents.
Ok
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Balenciaga. They posted photos of female children holding fluffy toys with BDSM sexual bondage. Books on the table, with excerpt of Michael Borremans, who draws "art" of naked children covered in blood and being sacrificed in rituals. Then a book of "The Cremaster Cycle", which is a demented image that symbolizes "the murder and resurrection of Abiff". Hiram Abiff was the central character during Masonic initiation rituals as the culmination of a three-part process. Etc
Balenciaga is a multi million dollar "brand".
Ok.
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What i learned through all my years of existing on this planet is, being good and doing good, does not pay off. I still live in the matrix. I am still a slave. I am still playing the game of earn to survive. Even while doing software engineering. And I don't know 1 single wealthy person who has obtained all that wealth by doing something good.
This has further lead me to realization: God doesn't help you get rich or wealthy. God doesn't give a fuck if you're rich or poor. He aint gonna help you. But do you know who will? That's right - evil forces will help you get wealthy. Funny how that works?
Because I am christian and believe in God, pray to God and did good all my life - I haven't received anything good in return, my life has not improved, in fact it has devolved and became worse.
Therefore, I came to a conclusion: I will switch teams. I'll let the evil demonic forces take over and guide me to wealth. I'm ready to scam, defraud, develop ponzis and step on corpses and people to get out of the matrix. Perhaps this is how and why good people turn into villains?
Now you understand.
I dont ask to be on the top. I just want to Not play the Matrix game. Which is the game where you have to earn to survive. I want to get into any store and buy whatever i want, without worrying how much does it cost or asking for a discount. People dumber than me do it. But i cant? That means there has to be a loophole in the matrix. An escape plan is possible. I tried escaping since 2018 and failed. For 4, almost 5 years. Because i was trying to escape through good forces. I'll now try to escape using demonic forces and perhaps I'll end up like BAYC founders, FTX founder, Balenciaga brand and many others similar to them. Ending up even half of their success or a fraction - I'll be more than happy. I am not happy living in poverty. Im getting sick of it. I'm getting sick to be underpaid $600/month for doing a job as hard as software engineering, even with a CS degree. Life is not meant to be slaved away till 65+ years old. I can't even afford to buy a car with this slave salary.
So forgive me God. Im just tired of life. Im tired of being a slave. Im tired of watching my parents become older, weaker and still working. I'll shut down all of my morals and I am ready to rob people in Web3 using all of my programming knowledge that has been undervalued.
"A little boy asked God for a new bike for his birthday, but he knows God doesn't work that way. So he stole a bike and prayed to God for forgiveness"24 -
I work so hard to name things well and yet last year's code is always full of esoteric and misleading nonsense.4
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So I got accepted into a Master’s programme for CS - which is kinda cool but hardly unexpected. Guess I should feel elated about it, but honestly, I don’t know how I feel about it. Really it only adds additional complexity into the next few years of my life: I feel a little gutted that I have to switch over to my plan B regarding the sporting side of my life (there’s no way I can work full-time, study AND train for IM simultaneously - there’s just not enough hours in a day…), but that’s okay. At least I had a plan B knowing I might get accepted to these studies now.
What it really complicates is decisionmaking regarding this: https://devrant.com/rants/5571843/...
At my current workplace, I have officially 2hrs each week + an additional full work day a month to use for studying during work hours (in reality I tend to use more than that because I can, whenever there are no pressing matters need doing), and my gut is saying that’s unlikely to be possible in a consultancy position in a startup. Maybe it is, I don’t know. Need to ask.
In life, very few things are ever straightforward, aren’t they? But hey, at least I get to do my Master’s and I get to do it in a quality university! -
What did the CS student say when he totally killed his web API class and got an A?
"REST easy now."1 -
What web frontend library or framework do you recommend for the majority of web development projects and why?
Let's say you are a freelancer and you get all sorts of web dev jobs all the time from all sorts of customers.
Is there a go-to library for you, or is it "it depends" as all things CS are?3 -
Starting my bachelors in Computer Science this fall! Going to try to continue to work full time as long as possible (I’m a team lead at a call center, got a lot of downtime, not too stressful) to pay for school. Any tips for CS in college?2
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What do you do if you do not understand a CS concept/paper and you already graduated so there's no professors or TAs to help?8
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I never went to college, the main reason was financially so I self educated myself from home, and 1 year later I had a bigger salary than the average salary in my country.. so I diploma is just a paper to me.. in fact one of my friends who went to a well recognized college in my country came to me to do him a project, he ended up impressing the professor and getting highest marks. So no CS degree has 0 affect on your job today.
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Is it only me or is it bloody hard to get into freelancing or remote work ?
I am a CS graduate, I have worked for a company that owns an online business. I didn't last a year with them for various reasons but let's just say work in my country is not so great. So I have been trying to get a remote position for few months now without a shadow of a success. I've built a Portfolio with a couple of projects while trying Upwork and some remote working websites with no luck.
What are your thoughts on this, what do you recommend me to do ?2 -
Consecutive hours: ~24, it was a hackathon and not terribly interesting.
I did however have an exciting new experience this exam period; a 5 day crunch with strictly timed 6 hour sleep breaks, half-hour lunch breaks and the rest entirely populated by work. I live 5 minutes from the CS lab so this pretty much meant 18 hours of coding per day, 90 hours in total.
Think of this the next time you're trying to decide whether to announce that you aren't going to contribute to a group project. -
Anyone else get janky scrolling when reading the comments on a rant? I don't know what kinda funky thing they tried to do with the scrolling but it always strongly resists me scrolling down the page.
Anyways, I have to do this in the DevTools console to stop it:
document.body.innerHTML = document.body.innerHTML.replaceAll('scroll','');4 -
I keep having this recurring idea that I can fill in the gaps in my education by writing video games that allow me to explore those topics. This would force me to learn the subject well enough to share it with other people. So it would not be just surface level.
I keep thinking of a program that explores and visualizes math topics and programming topics. I would really like to have a program that allows me to visualize memory cells for algorithm exploration. Or a really nice graphing calculator in the computer that allows me to view multiple graphs to compare and contrast equations.
What holds me back is both math and CS are huge topics. I feel like any kind of playground would only cover a small subset. Ideally whatever I make should be extendable over time to add content and topics. It would need to be somewhat fun as well.
I can imagine an AI training program where you help your character navigate a room of hazards or die. This could be one such fun challenge.1