As a developer, sometimes you hammer away on some useless solo side project for a few weeks. Maybe a small game, a web interface for your home-built storage server, or an app to turn your living room lights on an off.

I often see these posts and graphs here about motivation, about a desire to conceive perfection. You want to create a self-hosted Spotify clone "but better", or you set out to make the best todo app for iOS ever written.

These rants and memes often highlight how you start with this incredible drive, how your code is perfectly clean when you begin. Then it all oscillates between states of panic and surprise, sweat, tears and euphoria, an end in a disillusioned stare at the tangled mess you created, to gather dust forever in some private repository.

Writing a physics engine from scratch was harder than you expected. You needed a lot of ugly code to get your admin panel working in Safari. Some other shiny idea came along, and you decided to bite, even though you feel a burning guilt about the ever growing pile of unfinished failures.

All I want to say is:

No time was lost.

This is how senior developers are born. You strengthen your brain, the calluses on your mind provide you with perseverance to solve problems. Even if (no, *especially* if) you gave up on your project.

Eventually, giving up is good, it's a sign of wisdom an flexibility to focus on the broader domain again.

One of the things I love about failures is how varied they tend to be, how they force you to start seeing overarching patterns.

You don't notice the things you take back from your failures, they slip back sticking to you, undetected.

You get intuitions for strengths and weaknesses in patterns. Whenever you're matching two sparse ordered indexed lists, there's this corner of your brain lighting up on how to do it efficiently. You realize it's not the ORMs which suck, it's the fundamental object-relational impedance mismatch existing in all languages which causes problems, and you feel your fingers tingling whenever you encounter its effects in the future, ready to dive in ever so slightly deeper.

You notice you can suddenly solve completely abstract data problems using the pathfinding logic from your failed game. You realize you can use vector calculations from your physics engine to compare similarities in psychological behavior. You never understood trigonometry in high school, but while building a a deficient robotic Arduino abomination it suddenly started making sense.

You're building intuitions, continuously. These intuitions are grooves which become deeper each time you encounter fundamental patterns. The more variation in environments and topics you expose yourself to, the more permanent these associations become.

Failure is inconsequential, failure even deserves respect, failure builds intuition about patterns. Every single epiphany about similarity in patterns is an incredible victory.

Please, for the love of code...

Start and fail as many projects as you can.

Beware, this is gonna be a long one.

Today, in university, our professor wanted us to do an algorithm where a number was given in input, and we had to see if that number was, as she put it, "triangular".
For example:
3 is triangular because it's 1+2.
6 is triangular because it's 1+2+3.
10 is triangular because it's 1+2+3+4.
And so on.

While she was explaining this, I was programming it on my phone (because I didn't bring a PC there).
In about 10 minutes I completed it.

This student who was beside me, which I didn't know until today (I'm still in my first year here), saw me programming it, and when I finished it, he looked at it and said: "It takes too much time, like this."
So he spent another like 5-10 minutes """fixing""" it, and then showed it to me: "Here, now it's better."
Do you want to know what he did?
The only thing he did was putting a for cycle instead of my while cycle.
And he didn't even do it properly!
He put an else statement inside the brackets of an if, and some variables weren't correct.
You call that making a program more efficient? Deficient is more like it.

Also, like 5-10 minutes after I did it on my phone, on my own, I looked at the prof's desk: a guy (who apparently is "the best") wrote his algorithm on the blackboard, and the whole fucking class applauded.

Later, I saw on our Whatsapp group that someone sent a photo of him writing on the blackboard, with the caption "The student surpasses the teacher." Others agreed.
I replied with: "For the record, I did this algorithm in 10 minutes."
An asshole replied: "You'll never be superior to the master"

Fuck off. -.-"
...I'll show them.

I'm partially color deficient, which means I can differentiate most colors, except when there is a low contrast between them.
The genius freshers in my company (well, they joined at the same time as I did, but I still call them freshers because they never goddamn improved since they joined). Anyway, these freshers thought it'd be a great idea to take design decisions upon themselves and chose the shittiest colors ever for designing a complicated interface with the most horrifying color palette you'd have ever seen.
Everytime I'm asked to debug this page, I have nightmares as they explain things to me in terms of colors :/

If you think learning a language / working with a language you don't like is offensive to you and your morals .. Then don't do it.

Money is important to you ? Then you're just prostituting yourself to some higher authority. So DONT COMPLAIN!

You have the right to hate stuff while being paid for it. Understandable.

But don't shit on the shit you think is shit just cause you put yourself in the situation of not having an option !!

You're a worthless. Money hungry whore.

Yes, you hate Java/ x language but have to work on it ?

You're either a whore or have serious problems with standing up for yourself, but on the internet you become this amazing troll saying the language has problems.

Half the people who hate languages hate them cause it's common to hate them. Like being racist in the early American ages cause it was "normal".

Brain deficient motherfucking whores. Manipulated cocksuckers.

Sidenote : if you've honestly gotten shit on by a new version of the language you were using .It's understandable and I'm on your side. Using it without thorough research on the other hand is your mistake. Languages aren't ideal. Just Like most women don't like your dick cause, well it doesn't fit their use case. Deal with it not, troll about it.

I'm not like you. I experiment with whatever I like before using it. I work on my own stuff. I suck my own fucking dick and I get paid.

If you honestly disagree with me, put a couple points down on the language you hate and why you hate it ( considering the fact that you have actually used it and are not just trying to disagree with me )

At this point i'd like to talk about the original PHP founder Rasmus Lerdorf, who was obviously too distracted by his own beard while watching the NBA Playoffs in 1995 to write a proper language.

There's not a language more inconsistent, ilogical, deficient, and best of all, bad structured.

Seriously, which substances was he smoking when thinking up such things as: non objective strings, incasesensitive functions and associative arrays?

What have objects ever done? any other honorable language does that, python, javascript, rails, C#, take your pick.
Not to mention the order of needle/haystack parameters.

RANT!
AAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!

BLOODY FUCK TURD BORN FROM THE BACTERIA OF YOUR MOTHER'S POOP, BRAINLESS WHORE
. JUST ONE SECOND OF YOUR NON EXISTENCE WILL CHANGE THE WORLD FOR ME.

Well this is what I would say to my brain deficient friends who think I don't have a life and sit at the computer all day playing GAMES and that I should get away from my computer and learn to PLAY with them in real life

BITCHES DON'T EVEN UNDERSTAND HOW IT IS TO WORK YOURSELF A LIVING, ALL THEY KNOW IS THROW MONEY AND GET THEIR DICKS SUCKED OFF. FUUUUUCCK!! AND DON'T EVEN GET ME STARTED ON THE GAMES PART. ALL THESE PUNY FUCKS CAN DO IS TO POST POUT FACES FILLED WITH DOG FAECES AND CRY ABOUT THEIR LOST LIKES.

Another day, another shitty set of JIRA tickets.

In this week's edition, we run into an issue you'd think is a meme, something you couldn't even make up: three tickets with IDENTICAL titles, but miraculously, they actually refer to three DIFFERENT tasks! (Also comical, they're not bugs, they're tasks, but mouth breathers don't really know the difference, and at this point I just don't have the energy to attempt to explain what could be explained to elementary school children.)

I present a rare look into our national archives!

This document features two exhibits:

Exhibit A: product owner's original ticket titles

Exhibit B: translated-into-competency-because-i'm-not-mentally-deficient ticket titles

Just more proof that 'product owners' don't own shit, the devs are the real ones who actually know what is going on.

I mean just LOOK at Exhibit A's titles. As a big smart manager, do you write those tickets, smile, and say to yourself "Ah, yep, that's very clear, I'll definitely remember what each of these mean literally 5 seconds from now!"

Is asking for literally 30 seconds more of thought too much to ask for? Apparently.

Just kill me

Happy friday ☠️

I keep phones for two years, or try to anyway. Later this year I will hit that two year mark, and rather than excitement at the idea of getting a new phone, I find myself thinking that there's nothing out there that excites me at all. And also, my current phone is in no way deficient. It doesn't hold a charge like when it was new, but that's totally normal, and as degraded as it may be, it's still not a problem at all.

A powerful phone with a snapdragon and 6 or more GB of memory, that measures under 5" and doesn't have some bullshit OEM skin on it. To my knowledge, it doesn't exist.