Fixing a parents iPhone, episode 1.

Problem: "Whatsapp is gone off my phone"

Debugging:

Me: *unlocks phone and sees whatsapp*, it's right here.

Mam: no, I no that I can't see my messages.

Me: ok, that is definitely not what "whatsapp is gone off my phone means".

*opens whatsapp*
*inside add contact screen*

App seems ok, your trying to add a contact?

Mam: that's a problem, whenever I open it I only see that page.

Me: *taps cancel button with shocked face*

Mam: omg there's my messages, how did you do that?

Me: ... ... ... I tapped the very easy to see, large cancel button in the top right hand corner.

Mam: but why was it opened there?

Me: *looks at opened message from unknown number*

If I was to hazard a guess, now stay with me on this one as it's a bit complex. I think ... I THINK ... you clicked the "add to contacts" button on the screen in front of you.

I am suspicious of one thing though.

Mam: what's that?

Me: how you managed to click the add contacts button, and when brought to the add contacts screen, you assume the app is broken.

Mam: oh will you **** off you sarcastic little ****. Thank you very much.

Me: no prob, 4 year computer science course put to great use.

Dear Misinformed idiots,
Just because you watched Silicon Valley doesn't mean you actually understand how Software Development works.
-We don't sit in front of a screen in an AC room googling funny pictures
-We don't think of new Algorithms by pretending to be jerking.
-We don't "get lucky" with our code, it takes hours of studying and research to come up with a solution which actually works.
-And we definitely can't just "create the *next* Google", THAT is not how it works.
I swear to the God ya'll love and cherish, the next person to approach me to turn their shit idea into "The next big thing", I'll leave everything aside and drive a screwdriver through your neck.

- An Engineer tired of everyone's never ending shit storm.

I met my girlfriend cooking. She has no programming experience whatsoever and is quite computer illiterate. But that's fine as that's not something I need in a partner.

She regularly asks me what I'm working on. I'll try to explain it, and sometimes she definitely gets it, but sometimes she's clearly lost as fuck. She'll enthusiastically say things like "that's awesome honey!" To things that are just explanations. Sometimes it makes me laugh. Most of the time it leaves me in this weird confused state, like she's just pandering.

But I know she means well and wishes me the best. She's an amazing woman, and even if she doesn't get a single thing I try to explain, I'd much rather be with that than the "Why the fuck are you always playing on the computer?" Types of people I meet far more often.

Let me preface this by saying I'm not a designer.

While I can make individual bits of a site look good, and I'm actually pretty skilled with CSS/Sass, overall design completely escapes me. I can't come up with good designs, nor do I really understand *why* good designs are good. It's just not something I can do, which feels really weird to say. but it's true.

So, when I made the Surfboard site (that's the project's internal name), I hacked everything together and focused on the functionality, and later did a branding and responsive pass. I managed to make the site look quite nice, and made it scale well across sizes/devices despite being completely new to responsiveness. (I'm proud, okay? deal.)

After lots of me asking (in response to people loudly complaining that the UI doesn't have X feature, scale properly on Y device, and doesn't look as good as Z site), the company finally reached out to its UI contractor who does their design work. After a week or two, he sent a few mockups.

The mockups consisted of my existing design with a darker background, much better buttons, several different header bars (a different color) with different logo/text placements, and several restyled steppers. He also removed a couple of drop shadows and made some very minor styling changes (bold text, some copy edits). Oh, he also changed the branding colors. Nothing else changed. It's basically the same exact site but a few things look a little better. and the branding is different.

My intermediary with the designer asked for "any feedback before finalizing the designs" -- which I thought odd because he sent mocks for two out of the ten pages (nine plus a 404 page). (Nevermind most of the mocks showed controls from the wrong page...).

So, I typed up a full page of feedback. Much of it was asking for specifics such as responsive sizing on the new header layout, how the new button layout would work for different button counts, asking for the multitude of missing pages/components, asking why the new colors don't match the rest of our branding, etc. I also added a personal nitpick about flat-looking controls because I fucking hate them. Everything I wrote was very friendly and professional.

... His response was full of gems. Let me share a few.

1. "Everything about the current onboarding site looks like a complete after-thought." (After submitting a design basically identical to mine! gg!)

2. "Yes [the colors match our current branding]." (No. They don't. I checked. The dark grey is different, the medium grey is different, the silver is different, the light blue is different. He even changed the goddamn color of the goddamn LOGO for fuck's sake! How the fuck is that "matching"?!)

3. "Appreciate the feedback [re: overlapping colored boxes, aka 'flat'], design is certainly subjective. However, this is the direction we are going." (yet it differs from the rest of our already-redesigned sites you're basing this off. and it's ugly as shit. gg again :/)

4. "Just looked at the 404 page. It looks pretty bad, and reflects very poorly on the [brand name] brand. Definitely will make a change here!" (Hey! I love that thing. It's a tilted, dotted outline of a missing [brand product] entirely drawn with CSS. It has a light gray "???" underlay and some 404 text inside. Everyone I showed it to, coworkers and otherwise, loved it. "Looks pretty bad". fuck you.)

I know I shouldn't judge someone so quickly, but what the fuck. This guy reminds me of one of those pompous artists/actors who's better than everyone and who can never be wrong, even while they're contradicting themselves.

just.
asfjasfk;ajsg;klsadfhas;kldfjsdl.

My friend loves Dreamweaver... And continuously says that he doesn't understand what people see in it that is so wrong... It does the job right?...... Fucking blind...

Uses a bootstrap plugin which generates HTML code for bootstrap.
I did not know this at the time.

Comes to me the night before submission.
He: Dude i need help quick! I've got the presentation tomorrow morning and bootstrap fucked up the links to my style sheets or something, my page is broken and won't work. I should have done what you did and gone for Foundation...
Me: Yeah, because the bootstrap framework definitely affects the style links...
He: help me out man, please! I can't do this anymore!

I had my submission the day after him to prepare still...

Me: Teamviewer. Now.

Log on to Teamviewer.
See what he's using to code...
Dreamweaver..... Niiiiice....

I go through the code. There are empty divs with &nbsc; in them everywhere.. some HTML elements haven't been closed, no comments, indentation seems to be completely random. All the usual shit storm of a novice web designer.
The only thing is, this guy I know knows how to indent, I've seen his previous work. Why is this so horrible then???
I ask what the hell happened, it looked like a nuclear explosion happened!

He: Yeah I'm using this great plugin for Dreamweaver which lets me click and it puts in Bootstrap elements! It's great!

........ You're blaming the bootstrap framework for affecting your links to your stylesheets, you're using an elements generator, you're not checking what the FUCK it puts into your code, not fixing the indenting, not checking the standard HTML rules are followed AND YOU WONDER WHY IT'S BROKEN???

Kill me now.

The Steam Community forums for the Planet Zoo beta have really reinforced my decision to stay far away from game development.

A third of the posts are people who clearly have no idea what a beta is - "don't buy, too buggy". Sorry, were you expecting a finished game? You wasted your money, then.

Another third of the posts are people making decisions for the developers. A very common discussion is "Should they delay launch?" which makes my blood boil a bit. First of all, you have no fucking clue what kind of manpower this development team has. You don't manage them, and neither do I. So, neither you nor I should be making assumptions about how fast they can fix the issues, and definitely shouldn't make decisions about if the game should delay launch.

Second of all, neither you nor I know how the game is built. These fixes could mean a line of code, or they could mean a re-write of multiple core systems. We don't know, and I'm guessing you've probably never even written a line of code in your life so you REALLY shouldn't be telling these guys how to do their job.

The last third is benign discussion - people reporting bugs (even though there's an issue tracker, but that thing is fucking jam packed with 250 pages of reported issues), asking how to do xyz, posting feature requests, etc.

But if roughly 60% of the community is behaving poorly and actively working against development by pissing off the devs and drowning out constructive discussion, then yeah; I won't be going near game dev any time soon. Sure, developing business software means dealing with REALLY dumb people but at the very least they are in a business environment and not in a toxic forum of bullshit.

Oh, and as a closing remark, I love this game!

Best part about the covid19 manufactured crisis?
Liquor stores deliver. Worst part about liquor stores delivering? Needing to use their shoddy websites.

I've been using a particular store (Total Wines) since they're cheaper than the rest and have better selection; it's quite literally a large warehouse made to look like a store.

Their website tries really hard to look professional, too, but it's just not. It took me two days to order, and not just from lack of time -- though from working 14 hour days, that's a factor.

Signing up was difficult. Your username is an email address, but you can't use comments because the server 500s, making the ajax call produce a wonderfully ambiguous error message. It also fades the page out like it's waiting on something, but that fade is on top of the error modal too. Similar error with the password field, though I don't remember how I triggered it.

Signing up also requires agreeing to subscribe to their newsletter. it's technically an opt-in, but not opting-in doesn't allow you to proceed. Same with opting-in to receiving a text notification when your order is ready for pickup -- you also opt-in to reciving SMS spam.

Another issue: After signing up, you start to navigate through the paginated product list. Every page change scrolls you to the exact middle of the next page. Not deliberatly; the UI loads first, and the browser gets as close as it can to your previous position -- which was below that as the pagination is at the bottom -- and then the products populate after. But regardless of why, there is no worse place to start because now you must scroll in both directions to view the products. If it stayed at the very bottom, it would at least mean you only need to scroll upwards to look at everything on the page. Minor, but increasingly irritating.

Also, they have like 198 pages of spirits alone because each size is unique entry. A 50ml, 350ml, 500ml, 750ml, 1000ml, and 1750ml bottle of e.g. Tito's vodka isn't one product, it's six. and they're sorted seemingly randomly. I think it's by available stock, looking back.

If you fancy a product, you can click on it for a detail page. Said detail page lists the various sizes in a dropdown, but they're not sorted correctly either, and changing sizes triggers a page reload, which leads to another problem:

if you navigate to more than a few pages within a 10 or so second window, the site accuses you of using browser automation. No captcha here, just a "click me for five seconds" button. However, it (usually) also triggers the check on every other tab you have open after its next nagivation.

That product page also randomly doesn't work. I haven't narrowed it down, but it will randomly decide to start failing, and won't stop failing for hours. It renders the page just fine, then immediately replaces it with a blank page. When it's failing, the only way to interact with the page is a perfectly-timed [esc], which can (and usually does) break all other page functionality, too. Absolutely great when you need to re-add everything from a stale copy of your signed-out cart living in another tab. More on that later. And don't forget to slow down to bypass the "browser automation" check, too!

Oh, and if you're using container tabs, make sure to open new tabs in the SAME container, as any request from the same IP without the login cookie will usually trigger that "browser automation" response, too.

The site also randomly signs you out, but allows you to continue amassing your cart. You'd think this is a good thing until you choose to sign in again... which empties your cart. It's like they don't want to make a sale at all.

The site also randomly forgets your name, replacing it with "null." My screen currently says "Hello, null". Hello, cruft!

It took me two days to order.
Mostly from lack of time, as i've been pulling 14 hour shifts lately trying to get everything done. but the sheer number of bugs certainly wasted most of what little time i had left. Now I definitely need a drink.

But maybe putting up with all of this is worthwhile because of their loyalty program? Apparently if you spend $500, you can take $5 off your next purchase! Yay! 1%! And your points expire! There are three levels; maybe it gets better. Level zero is for everyone; $0 requirement. There are also levels at $500 and $2500. That last one is seriously 5x more than the first paid level. and what does it earn you? A 'free' magazine subscription, 'free' classes (they're usually like $20-$50 iirc), and a 'free' grab bag (a $2.99 value!) twice per month. All for spending $2500. What a steal. It reminds me of Candy Crush's 3-star system where the first two stars are trivial, and the third is usually a difficult stretch goal. But here it's just thinly-veiled manipulation with no benefit.

I can tell they're employing some "smarketing" people with big ideas (read: stolen mistakes), but it's just such a fail.

The whole thing is a fail.

I had a coworker that was an Air Force pilot (99% certain he was telling the truth as I was working for a government contractor and he had security clearance so I'd be a little surprised if he fooled HR and our whole team). Thing is... He genuinely believed the earth is flat. Whenever anybody would ask "haven't you seen the curvature of the earth? Like... More than once?" He'd respond with "yes I have, what's your point?". Uh.... Okay.

Didn't help that he also was convinced cpp is the only language you ever need for any project. Like, "what if instead of building a web API and two separate native mobile app frontends (Swift/Java)... We instead build our own proprietary C++ framework that somehow runs on IOS and Android and we can also use it for our Backend instead of .Net?"

I'm not saying I love Java or Swift or that at some point I haven't thought about why we can't just use cpp in both, but you're supposed to grow out of that kind of thinking. I think every noobie or college students thinks "oh there's got to be a way". But at some point in your career you realize even if you could, it wouldn't be any easier to use and the performance gain would crazy small compared to amount of effort and you'd be playing catch up with both IOS/Android forever.

But no matter how many times we'd shoot it down, he'd keep bringing it up. And he wasn't straight out of school or something. He had like 20 years of programming experience.

I don't have a lot of memorable co-workers that were positive but honestly I think that's because usually if they're good at what they do I don't have to interact with them a bunch or spend time thinking "Jesus what am I going to have to fix next from this guy". I definitely have worked with good/great programmers, they just don't stand out as much as the shitty ones.

I’m on this ticket, right? It’s adding some functionality to some payment file parser. The code is atrocious, but it’s getting replaced with a microservice definitely-not-soon-enough, so i don’t need to rewrite it or anything, but looking at this monstrosity of mental diarrhea … fucking UGH. The code stink is noxious.

The damn thing reads each line of a csv file, keeping track of some metadata (blah blah) and the line number (which somehow has TWO off-by-one errors, so it starts on fucking 2 — and yes, the goddamn column headers on line #0 is recorded as line #2), does the same setup shit on every goddamned iteration, then calls a *second* parser on that line. That second parser in turn stores its line state, the line number, the batch number (…which is actually a huge object…), and a whole host of other large objects on itself, and uses exception throwing to communicate, catches and re-raises those exceptions as needed (instead of using, you know, if blocks to skip like 5 lines), and then writes the results of parsing that one single line to the database, and returns. The original calling parser then reads the data BACK OUT OF THE DATABASE, branches on that, and does more shit before reading the next line out of the file and calling that line-parser again.

JESUS CHRIST WHAT THE FUCK

And that’s not including the lesser crimes like duplicated code, misleading var names, and shit like defining class instance constants but … first checking to see if they’re defined yet? They obviously aren’t because they aren’t anywhere else in the fucking file!

Whoever wrote this pile of fetid muck must have been retroactively aborted for their previous crimes against intelligence, somehow survived the attempt, and is now worse off and re-offending.

Just.
Asdkfljasdklfhgasdfdah

Enjoying the college life to the fullest was the mindset of the confident boy, who now burns the midnight oil to cope up with world and give himself a proud future.

Is this a story of some successful person, who has achieved a lot in his life?

No, it is the story of the guy who lost all his hopes of future after spending the very first month in his college.

The first month was enough to perceive the reality of the domain I got myself let into. It was enough for someone, who didn’t even knew what programming languages are, to realize how left behind is he from the people around him.

Being from a private college which hardly anyone recognizes, expecting them to prepare me to stand out lone would be foolishness. I took my first step and started learning my very first programming language , Python.

I met some people with similar interest .We discussed, we exchanged resources, we used to talk to seniors to guide us. And yes, we were guided.

There were many bad days. Days which made me regret about starting late. Many a times I myself confirmed me as useless and some other time people did. The good thing is I never stopped , and improved myself with each day.

And now, after spending more than a year in the same college, I look at the things I have learnt. Today I can develop decent websites, can train neural networks, can make me stand in good position in coding platforms.

All you need is to take a step.I may not be the best, but I am definitely better than what I was yesterday.

If you have started something, then concentrate on finishing it.

Holy shit. Didn't know I had to vent this out before I had revisited this shit.

Storytime!

Back in May last year, I started working on a dream project (call project X) of mine. Surprisingly it's still a novel idea and shit like this doesn't exist. Made some huge incremental changes. Added all the necessary automation pipeline stuff. Added some sick ass readme with screenshots/badges/glitz/glam.

Worked my ass of for about a month or so until I got distracted by other pending projects in need of clearances. Somewhere partway in that clearance period, I receive a mail from this "GitHub user" asking me why the development of project X had suddenly stopped.

I was a bit taken aback. Firstly because my project had ZERO stars and NO user interaction. Secondly because I hadn't encountered someone with confrontation like this since my middle-school teacher asking me for my homework.

Being the good, responsible child I am, I informed them on my situation and asked them to contribute according to the guidelines and I'd be more than happy to see this becoming a joint effort by the community.

Apparently, they were quite ecstatic to learn that my development was halted. They didn't have plans to contribute. Instead they wanted me to take down the project and stop working on it entirely.

Tough luck fucko.

Their organization had been working on something similar for longer than a couple of years. A similar open-sourced project will *apparently* ruin their market impact and I can *apparently* be sued for it.

I don't know much about open-source "laws" (and I've seen laws fuck people over) but this just seems retarded. At the moment, I'm not quite sure how to continue with the project. I'll still work on it but the fact being that I started receiving threats before stars makes me question the gatekeeping capacity of toxic market conditions (I still don't blame the person entirely. It's just really hard to keep your head above the water)

This is a one off thing but somehow it has definitely hampered my drive to work on the project (combined with the sheer amount of pending project that I've dug my grave with).

On the brighter side I've got 10 anonymous stars with zero promotion. 2 new message threads with productive insights and a person who says "I'm relying on this to work out". So not everything has gone to shit.

Man, most memorable has to be the lead devops engineer from the first startup I worked at. My immediate team/friends called him Mr. DW - DW being short for Done and Working.

You see, Mr. DW was a brilliant devops engineer. He came up with excellent solutions to a lot of release, deployment, and data storage problems faced at the company (small genetics firm that ships servers with our analysis software on them). I am still very impressed by some of the solutions he came up with, and wish I had more time to study and learn about them before I left that company.

BUT - despite his brilliance, Mr. DW ALWAYS shipped broken stuff. For some reason this guy thinks that only testing a single happiest of happy path scenarios for whatever he is developing constitutes "everything will work as expected!" As soon as he said it was "done", but golly for him was it "done". By fucking God was that never the truth.

So, let me provide a basic example of how things would go:
my team: "Hey DW, we have a problem with X, can you fix this?"
DW: "Oh, sure. I bet it's a problem with <insert long explanations we don't care about we just want it fixed>"
my team: "....uhh, cool! Looking forward to the fix!"
... however long later...
DW: "OK, it's done. Here you go!"
my team: "Thanks! We'll get the fix into the processing pipelines"
... another short time later...
my team: "DW, this thing is broken. Look at all these failures"
DW: "How can that be? It was done! I tested it and it worked!"
my team: "Well, the failures say otherwise. How did you test?"
DW: "I just did <insert super basic thing>"
my team: "...... you know that's, like, not how things actually work for this part of the pipeline. right?"
DW: "..... But I thought it was XYZ?"
my team: "uhhhh, no, not even close. Can you please fix and let us know when it's done and working?"
DW: "... I'll fix it..."

And rinse and repeat the "it's done.. oh wait, it's broken" a good half dozen times on average. But, anyways, the birth of Mr. Done and Working - very often stuff was done, but rarely did it ever work!

I'm still friends with my team mates, and whenever we're talking and someone says something is done, we just have to ask if it's done AND working. We always get a laugh, sadly at the excuse of Mr. DW, but he dug his own hole in this regard.

Little cherry on top: So, the above happened with one of my friends. Mr. DW created installation media for one of our servers that was deployed in China. He tested it and "it was done!" Well, my friend flies out to China for on-site installation. He plugs the install medium in and goes for the install and it crashes and burns in a fire. Thankfully my friend knew the system well enough to be able to get everything installed and configured correctly minus the broken install media, but definitely the most insane example of "it's done!" but sure as he'll "it doesn't work!" we had from Mr. DW.

Im so frustrated with myself . I've always been afraid of being stupid . Perhaps it was because i was always called the "less intelligent" sibling by my parents . Well i did self-learn java , c++ and android (when i was 15) and made some apps and i did get acknowledged finally but i may have not acknowledged myself . I got into college a couple years ago and i can tell you right out that its like an island filled with stupidity. The teachers , the students. The other day i caught my teacher learning how a transistor works. This is unacceptable for someone who is teaching us advanced op-amps and other circuits . Well , I did get into this college cause it was less tedious and i thought college doesn't matter cause i can self-learn . All i needed was free time . Well college totally destroyed that too and provided no facilities in the process as well . So yeah should i blame my college for my inability to do things the past couple years. I mean i don't think i've learnt a single thing all this while. This is where my frustration begins cause i dont want to blame the college , it's not going to help me and i'll probably end up in a 9 to 5 call center job at this rate . Im also very heavily frustrated with myself , it's like everything i've done so far has been a path of least effort. I have tried a few things which were all just fads like machine learning and crypto and even trading . They felt good and thats what scares me , maybe i don't have the passion and am just looking for a quick buck . This is clearly reflected in the ideas i've been having as well . Well i've never had access to proper funds but now im just trying to justify this layman emotion . I just want to learn and be passionate about learning , researching and i just want enough funds for that . But im afraid , maybe its just that i want to feel superior than my circle . I mean i still don't know why i tried learning rust and wasted even more time setting up fedora and everything around it while i already had a working debian setup and a programming language i'm kind of versed with . i wouldn't say well cause im a self learner and i feel guilty for that . I definitely know i just learnt the surface of the language . Deep down i'm just another stupid fad obsessed guy who feels better by choosing a more complex language that my colleagues look upto . Is this what i am , if so im scared and i don't know what to do . People say that you are what you are and you cant change that . If i cant change this then i dont deserve this wasteful stupid life . I don't know what i should do and it makes me cry . Maybe acknowledging this would've helped but it hasn't , I've felt better playing fortnite rather than learning some basic electronics. Im another one of those aren't I ?

Branch Manager without actual credentials (just a manager no real business decisions are made by him).

- Constantly is sick
- at home a lot doing „home office“ and not being responsive in company chat or emails
- is in home office 3-4 days a week while company policy clearly states one day a week
- watches YouTube a lot at work and calls out other people when they check their emails or quickly order something on amazon or maybe just listen to a podcast at work
- is a scrum master but rarely acts like it as in softens up rules as he sees fit
- backstabs employees in front of ceo when he actually entrusts them beforehand and says he is definitely in the employees side
- actually tried to physically intimidate me and another employee
- has no real technological background but chimes in on technical discussions and thinks it’s a new round of bullshit bingo
- does personal errands during work and books the time for it as work time
- claims people cheat on their time management entries and gets them warned and fired for it, while doing the exact thing himself
- knows he is trusted by the ceo but actually takes 0 interest in the future of the company
- tirades and gossips about other employees that just aren’t around at that moment
- is sexist at times
- very untrustworthy
- is responsible for a very toxic environment around the office

So that are his attributes - he got me warned and sacked because I supposedly committed fraud with my time management and caused the company financial harm - I had no projects or todos and was keeping myself busy with learning JS and python stuff instead of sitting around waiting for a ticket to come around.

Needless to say I’m glad I don’t see that guy any more. I’d break his jaw if I’d have to see him again.

Did a bunch more cowboy coding today as I call it (coding in vi on production). Gather 'round kiddies, uncle Logan's got a story fer ya…

First things first, disclaimer: I'm no sysadmin. I respect sysadmins and the work they do, but I'm the first to admit my strengths definitely lie more in writing programs rather than running servers.

Anyhow, I recently inherited someone else's codebase (the story of my profession career, but I digress) and let me tell you this thing has amateur hour written all over it. It's written in PHP and JavaScript by a self-taught programmer who apparently discovered procedural programming and decided there was nothing left to learn and stopped there (no disrespect to self-taught programmers).

I could rant for days about the various problems this codebase has, but today I have a very specific story to tell. A story about errors and logs.

And it all started when I noticed the disk space on our server was gradually decreasing.

So today I logged onto our API server (Ubuntu running Apache/PHP) and did a df -h to check the disk space, and was surprised to see that it had noticeably decreased since the last time I'd checked when everything was running smoothly. But seeing as this server does not store any persistent customer data (we have a separate db server) and purely hosts the stateless API, it should NOT be consuming disk space over time at all.

The only thing I could think of was the logs, but the logs were very quiet, just the odd benign message that was fully expected. Just to be sure I did an ls -Sh to check the size of the logs, and while some of them were a little big, nothing over a few megs. Nothing to account for gigabytes of disk space gradually disappearing.

What could it be? I wondered.

cd ../..
du . | sort --sort=numeric

What's this? 2671132 K in some log folder buried in the api source code? I cd into it and it turns out there are separate PHP log files in there, split up by customer, so that each customer of ours (we have 120) has their own respective error log! (Why??)

Armed with this newfound piece of (still rather unbelievable) evidence I perform a mad scramble to search the codebase for where this extra logging is happening and sure enough I find a custom PHP error handler that is capturing (most) errors and redirecting them to these individualized log files.

Conveniently enough, not ALL errors were being absorbed though, so I still knew the main error_log was working (and any time I explicitly error_logged it would go there, so I was none the wiser that this other error-catching was even happening).

Needless to say I removed the code as quickly as I found it, tail -f'd the error_log and to my dismay it was being absolutely flooded with syntax errors, runtime PHP exceptions, warnings galore, and all sorts of other things.

My jaw almost hit the floor. I've been with this company for 6 months and had no idea these errors were even happening!

The sad thing was how easy to fix all the errors ended up being. Most of them were "undefined index" errors that could have been completely avoided with a simple isset() check, but instead ended up throwing an exception, nullifying any code that came after it.

Anyway kids, the moral of the story is don't split up your log files. It makes absolutely no sense and can end up obscuring easily fixable bugs for half a year or more!

Happy coding.

Life is hard.

You are born. DNA gets determined. You go through infancy.

Puberty comes and DNA is like
"uh from now you'll pretty much have strong sexual urges, a huge desire to be sexually prolific, nothing weird like being pedo or into rape though".

me: Uh ok.
dna: oh, also, you're gonna be one of those late bloomers, you know, you talk like shit, you dress like shit, you smell like shit.
life: that's true and also you don't have anyone in your life to teach you about that shit, so forget about kissing, having sex, let alone being in a relationship for a long time.

*a lot of years go by with a lot of missed opportunities, mistakes and regrets*

life: ok, you seem to have become a decent sex partner out of a lot of scarring experiences, but there's one problem: you've fallen in love with somebody.

and you're married

and you have kids

me: well, does that mean I can't fuck other people?
life: yeah, no. I'm surprised I even have to explain that, it's called cheating. It will pretty much ruin your marriage, and fuck up your kids.

me: ok, I guess no then. I'm still fortunate enough to have sex with my wife right?

life: yeah... but you still want to fuck other people
me: what???
life: yeah, did you think that falling in love would make you not want to fuck other people? fuck no

me: ok, well I'm very grateful that I get to experience sex at all.
life: yes... there's a thing though, your partner has a much much lower libido than you.

me: ok, well maybe if I exercise and dress better that might change
life: that will definitely help, you'll feel more confident and have more stamina, but every time you retry exercising, you remember how much you hate it and how little stamina you have.
oh, I'm sorry, I forgot you had kids and work, yeah no time or energy for that.

me: ok, then should I just embrace a more liberal lifestyle, like becoming a swinger?
life: ha, fat chance, it's a very taboo thing and you're not that liberal, neither is she.

me: uhhh, i guess i can sometimes watch porn then...
life: watching porn regularly will make the only sex that you have worse, according to statistics.

me: ok, I guess I should get ripped

When I was at university in my last semester of my bachelor's, I was doing a game programming paper and our last assignment was to group up and make a game. So I go with one of the guys I know and this other dude since his previous game was really neat. Then two randoms joined that from my first impressions of their games wasn't much at all (one guy made four buttons click and called it a game in Java when we had to make games in c++ and the other guy used an example game and semi modded it.

Anyways we get to brain storming, totally waste too much time getting organised because the guy that volunteered (4 buttons guy) was slow to getting things sorted. Eventually we get to making the game and 4 buttons guy hasn't learnt how to use git, I then end up spending 3 hours over Skype explaining to him how to do this. He eventually learns how to do things and then volunteers to do the AI for the game, after about a week (this assignment is only 5 weeks long) he hasn't shown any progress, we eventually get to our 3rd week milestone no progress from him and the modder, with only three classes left we ask them both to get stuff done before a set deadline (modder wanted to do monsters and help 4 buttons with AI) both agreed and deadline rolls up and no work is shown at all, modest shows up extremely late and shows little work.

4 buttons guy leaves us a Skype message the day of our 2nd to last class,, saying he dropped the paper...

Modder did do some work but he failed to read all the documentation I left him (the game was a 2d multiplayer crafting game, I worked so hard to make a 2d map system with a world camera) he failed to read everything and his monsters used local coordinates and were stuck on screen!

With about a week left and not too many group meetings left we meet up to try and get stuff done, modder does nothing to help, the multiplayer is working my friend has done the crafting and weapon system and the map stuff is working out well. We're missing AI and combat, with our last few hours left we push to get as much stuff done, I somehow get stuck doing monster art, AI is done by the other two and I try to getting some of the combat and building done.

In the end we completely commented all of modders work because well it made us look bad lol. He later went to complain to my free claiming I did it and was a douchebag for doing so. We had to submit our developer logs and the three of us wrote about how shitty it was to deal with these two.

We tried out best not to isolate ourselves from them and definitely tried to help but we were swamped with our other assignments and what we had to work on.

In the end leaving and not helping right when the deadline is close was what I call the most shittiest thing team mates can do, I think sticking together even if we were to fail was at least a lot better.

PM: "so I need you to deploy this new application to some new server. The deadline is in 2 days"

Me: "yeah I can do that, is the application ready and has been tested? Have the servers been set up properly by the IT guy?"

PM: "yep, all is set up and good"

Couple of hours later I try locating the server, only to find it didn't exist.

Me: "the server you mentioned earlier, is doesn't appear to exist?"

PM: "it definitely does, IT guy said he set it all up"

I dig around a little more, but this server definitely doesn't exist. The IT guy was on holiday for a week, so we had to wait for him to get back; delaying the release. On the morning the IT guy got back,

PM: " I though you said you set up that server for the application, we've had to delay it now!"

IT: "I just set it up this morning. Like I said in the email to you before I Ieft, I will have to do it first thing when I get back after holiday"

Turns out the PM had asked the IT guy to spin up the server, but never bothered to read his response. Assuming it was done he told the client he'd have it deployed in a couple of days.

The application was deployed successfully later that day, but not before the PM blamed us two for its delay.

Today on forgotten movies – Chronicle.

A very grim, very dark movie about accidental superpowers discovery, but with some school-shooter vibes.

Don't you find it predictable how in regular movies a hero saves the world against all odds in the very last moment? Well, forget about it here – this movie is not "cinematic" at all, and that's what I like about it.

A horror in regular movies doesn't usually scare because the image itself is too perfect – you don't usually see the world like this. It doesn't seem real, that's the problem. By adopting the "found footage" screen language, Chronicle delivers the horror perfectly, because the world in it seems perfectly real, just like you see it through obscure youtube videos named MOV_0115 or IMG1014.

I like it that the characters actually look like real people, not like stereotypical superheroes and not even like enhanced versions of people that try to sell you an idea of what "success" looks like.

People in the movie also act real. They're weak, they're scared, they're irrational, and you really start to believe that yeah, this is what probably gonna happen when a human faces something as unbearable as superpowers discovery. And, as weird as it sounds, the superpower itself also looks totally real – raw, unpolished, uncontrollable force that requires getting used to and probably is too much for a regular human. Definitely not a perfect, tailored thing that turns anyone into Mary Sue.

Overall, this movie is the most immersive one I've ever seen. If you want to see what would really happen if you discover a superpower, this movie is for you.

Not necessarily ignorant, but funny.
Before my current job I used to work for a company that provided software services to logistic type corporations, import export and all that jazz.

I was asked to generate an admin interface that would allow people to enter scans from different products, sort them in the right place and update the main interface. During the time we were using Classic ASP with VBScript. There, AJAX and similar functionality can get quite tricky, but definitely doable if you know what you are doing, VBScript has many limitations when compared to something like PHP for example. But thus the application was created in about a week once everything was sorted and then the storage manager came back to ask me if I could put a spinner or something in it to show that the information was loading. I asked him if the information was not being updated accordingly or if there were similar issues to that extent.

He said "no, it is working perfectly and I have no problem with the functionality, but these morons keep trying to scan shit because they can't tell if something is being populated into the main table in the interface because it all happens so quickly" Me: "well it is a very simple process, if you want I can add some sort of additional message to that or a spinner or something of the like that would show for two seconds or something, just so they can get some visual clarification"

Him: "This is a pretty stupid thing isn't it?". Me: Yes. Him: "I am so sorry to ask for this, how long will it take you?" Me: "Lol give me about 30 mins maybe less, it is no problem really, let me get this out of the way so that your people can get to it without loosing anymore time"

Such things are the reason why they literally brought me to the head of the company when I told them that I was leaving in an effort for him to try and convince me to stay. I was not to be contracted into their service anymore, but a full time employee. It was nice for them to ask really, but I declined in favor of the benefits I get from my current company.

To this day I think its funny and they remember as well.

So I left this company I was working for for about 6 years and then eventually came back earlier this year. It was basically 2 backend devs, 2 frontend, and a designer, with me being one of the frontend devs, and the other operating as the owner/alpha of the group. And our coding styles couldn’t have been more different. I wrote code with purpose that could scale, while he wrote garbage that I affectionally labelled "brute force code"; meaning it eventually got the job done, but was always a complete nightmare to work with. Think the windiest piece of shit you’ve ever seen and then times it by 10. Edit the simplest thing at your peril. And if you think you fixed something, all you’ve ever really done is create another 10 problems. And because the code was such shit, it relied on certain things to be broken in order for other things to work. Anyway, you get the drift.

In the beginning we used jQuery and so we just continued to use it throughout the years. But then when I finally left I realized we were operating in a bit of a bubble, where we didn’t really care much to ever try anything else, and mostly because we were arrogant. But eventually my boss started to notice the trend of moving away from jQuery, so he converted everything to vanilla JavaScript. Thing is, he hadn’t learned ES6 yet or any of the other tools that came along with it. And so it was a mess, and I was quite shocked at how many lengths he’d gone to create the full conversion. Granted, it was faster. But overall, still a nightmare to work with, as the files were still thousands of lines long. And when I dug deeper, I realized that he’d started to pluck things out of the DOM manually on-demand. And so it dawned on me: he’d been looking at sites built with React and other dif-engines, and then instead of just using one, he decided to reinvent the wheel. And the funny thing is, he thought it was just a matter of always replacing the entire HTML for whatever was needed. And so he thought what he was doing was somehow clever. And why not? He’s a badass mathematician who created an empire with jQuery. And so he obviously didn’t need input from anyone, and especially not from the shitty devs over there at Facebook. Anyway, while I was gone I learned quite a bit of React, and so it was just comical to me when I came back and saw this. Because it would have been a million times more efficient had he just used the proper tool. In short, he’d re-written the entire codebase for two full years and then ended up with another round of brute-force garbage.

So that’s my story. The lesson is, when you work for someone who’s a dumbass piece of shit, sometimes he’ll be so stupid the only recourse is uncontrollable laughter. I became a digital nomad somewhere in between and fucked off to Asia where I barely worked for 2 years. And I’d definitely recommend the same for anyone else with an asshole boss where the work is unfulfilling. Because it doesn’t matter what your job is when you’re living like a millionaire in Asia working 15 hours a week.

Probably the MOST complete software book on a very broad subject.

This is book to read for those of you are near college grad, first job in the industry. But to the level of detail and broad coverage this book has I think it’s actually a great book for everyone in the industry almost as a “baseline”

From requirements, project planning, workflow paradigms. Software Architecture design, variable naming, refactoring, testing, releasing the book covers everything, not only high level but also in reference to C.

Why C ...because in the consumer electronics, automotive industry, medical electronics and other industries creating physical products c is the language of choice, no changing that. BUT it’s not a C book... it contains C and goes into dept into C but it’s not a C book, C is more like a vehicle for the book, because there are long established, successful industry’s built around it. Plenty of examples.

When I say it’s the most complete on a broad subject seriously like example the chapter about the C language is not a brief over like many other books, for example 10 pages alone are dedicated to just pointer! Many C books have only a few paragraphs on the subject. This goes on depth.

Other topics, recursion, how to write documentation for your code.

Lots of detail and philosophy of the construction of software.

Even if you are a veteran software engineer you could probably learn a thing or two from the book.

It’s not book that you can finish in weekend, unless you can read and comprehend over 1000 pages.

Very few books cover such a broad topic ALL while still going into great detail on those subtopics. the second part is what lacks in most “broad topic books” ..

Code Complete.. is definitely “Complete”

So the image doesn’t match the rest of my book images because I tried to make an amage to cover of the book, inception style kinda haha 😂

TL;DR; windows XP + bat scripts + fascination about being able to make things yourself.

I was born and raised in a village. And the thing about living in a village is that you are free :) Among all the other freedoms you are also free to build your own solutions to various domestic problems, i.e. to build stuff. This is one of the things that fascinates me about living outside the city.

When I finally was old enough (and had the means to, i.e. a computer) to understand that programming is something that allows you to build your own solutions to computer problems, it got to me.

With win 3.1 I was still too fresh and too young. With win 95 I was more interested in playing with neighbours outdoors. With win 98 I was a bit too busy at school. But with win XP the time had come. I started writing automation solutions for windows administration using .bat scripts (.vbs was and still is somewhat repelling to me). I no longer needed to browse Russian forums and torrent sites to find a solution to a problem I had! That was amazing!!! [esp. when my Russian was very weak].

That was the time when I built my first sort-of-malware - a bat script downloading and installing Radmin server, uploading computer's IP and admin credentials to my FTP.

I loved it!

However, I'd stumbled upon may obstacles when writing with batch. I googled a lot and most of the solutions I found were in bash (something related to Linux, which was a spooky mystery to me back then). Eventually, I got my courage together and installed ubuntu. Boy was I sorry... Nothing was working. I was unable to even boot the thing! Not to mention the GUI...

Years later I tried again with ubuntu [7.10 I think.. or 7.04] on my Pavilion. Took me a looooot of attempts but I got there. I could finally boot it. A couple of weeks later I managed to even start the GUI! I could finally learn bash and enjoy the spectacular Compiz effects (that cube was amazing).

I got into bash and Linux for the next several years. And then I thought to myself - wait, I'm writing scripts that automate other programs. Wouldn't it be cool I I could write my own programs that did exactly what I wanted and did not need automation? It definitely would! I could write a program that would make sound work (meaning no more ALSA/PA headaches!), make graphics work on my hardware, make my USB audio card to be set to primary once connected and all the other amazing things! No more automation -- just a single program or all of that!

little did the naive me knew :)

I started with python. I didn't like that syntax from the beginning :/ those indentations...

Then I tried java. Bucky (thenewboston), who likes tuna sandwiches, on my phone all the free time I had. I didn't learn anything :/ Even tried some java 101 e-book. Nothing helped until I decided to write some simple project (nothing fancy - just some calculations for a friend who was studying architecture).

I loved it! It sounds weird, but I found Swing amazing too. With that layout manager where you have to manually position all the components :)

and then things happened and I quit my med studies and switched to programming. Passed my school exams I was missing to enter the IT college and started inhaling every bit of info about IT I could get my hands on (incl outside the college ofc).

A few more stepping stones, a few more irrelevant jobs to pay my bills in the city, and I got to where I am now.

We had a blind auction at work. Selling off 'redundant hardware'

Most of it was old crap but a bit a couple of bids in for shits and giggles. Also, I'm a desktop man but we have rolling blackouts so an older laptop for the simple sake of having something bigger than my phone to browse definitely has some appeal.

So there was an old HP Elitebook 8540W. A chonky boi if ever I did see one.

Spec sheet as listed
4GB DDR3
i7 M 640 @ 2.80 Ghz
128GB SSD
Win 10 Pro
"not booting up/ power button flashing"

So bid R100. Now for context, a petrol is R22 a liter. A Big Mac is R43, a Big Mac meal is R90

So basically I big so I could harvest the SSD. And I won.

Much to my surprise, I simply attached the correct charger and it boots fine. The drive was empty though but that's fine cause I was gonna chuck Ubuntu on it anyway. Also found it was in fact 8GB of RAM. It also has a blu ray drive

So in summary, for the price of 1.1 Big Macs I got:
Full 1080p 15.6"
128GB Samsung SSD
8GB ram
First gen i7
Blu ray player

I'm most not sad about the 900x that I bid on as well. It was a cute little thing, my plan was to steal the ram and ssd out of this thing and put it in that, then boom ultra portable little machine for R400. Oh I also got an old monitor with a feint line down the screen for a grand total of R1

At work, my closest relation is with the DBA. Dude is a genius when it comes to proper database management as well as having a very high level of understanding concerning server administration, how he got that good at that I have no clue, he just says that he likes to fuck around with servers, Linux in particular although he also knows a lot about Windows servers.

Thing is, the dude used to work as a dev way back when VB pre VB.NET was all the rage and has been generating different small tools for his team of analysts(I used to be a part of his team) to use with only him maintaining them. He mentioned how he did not like how Microsoft just said fk u to VB6 developers, but that he was happy as long as he could use VB. He relearned how to do most of the GUI stuff he was used to do with VB6 into VB.NEt and all was good with the world. I have seen his code, proper OOP practices and architectural decisions, etc etc. Nothing to complain about his code, seems easy enough to extend, properly documented as well.

Then he got with me in order to figure out how to breach the gap between building GUI applications into web form, so that we could just host those apps in one of our servers and his users go from there, boy was he not prepared to see the amount of fuckery that we do in the web development world. Last time my dude touched web development there was still Classic ASP with JScript and VBScript(we actually had the same employer at one point in the past in which I had to deal with said technology, not bad, but definitely not something I recommend for the current state of web development) and decided that the closest thing to what he was used was either PHP(which he did not enjoy, no problem with that really, he just didn't click with the language) and WebForms using VB.NET, which he also did not like on account of them basically being on support mode since Microsoft is really pushing for people to adopt dotnet core.

After came ASP.NET with MVC, now, he did like it, but still had that lil bug in his head that told him that sticking to core was probably a better idea since he was just starting, why not start with the newest and greatest? Then in hit(both of us actually) that to this day Microsoft still not has command line templates for building web applications in .net core using VB.NET. I thought it was weird, so I decided to look into. Turns out, that without using Razor, you can actually build Web APIs with VB.NET just fine if you just convert a C# template into VB.NET, the process was...err....tricky, and not something we would want to do for other projects, with that in we decided to look into Microsoft's reasons to not have VB.NET. We discovered how Microsoft is not keeping the same language features between both languages, having crown C# as the language of choice for everything Microsoft, to this point, it seems that Microsoft was much more focused in developing features for the excellent F# way more than it ever had for VB.NET at this point and that it was not a major strategy for them to adapt most of the .net core functionality inside of VB, we found articles when the very same Microsoft team stated of how they will be slowly adding the required support for VB and that on version 5 we would definitely have proper support for VB.NET ALTHOUGH they will not be adding any new development into the language.

Past experience with Microsoft seems to point at them getting more and more ready to completely drop the language, it does not matter how many people use it, they would still kill it :P I personally would rather keep it, or open source the language's features so that people can keep adding support to it(if they can of course) because of its historical significance rather than them just completely dropping the language. I prefer using C#, and most of my .net core applications use C#, its very similar to Java on a lot of things(although very much different in others) and I am fine with it being the main language. I just think that it sucks to leave such a large developer pool in the shadows with their preferred tool of choice and force them to use something else just like that.

My boy is currently looking at how I developed a sample api with validation, user management, mediatR and a custom project structure as well as a client side application using React and typescript swappable with another one built using Angular(i wanted to test the differences to see which one I prefer, React with Typescript is beautiful, would not want to use it without it) and he is hating every minute of it on account of how complex frontend development has become :V

Just wanted to vent a little about a non bothersome situation.

I was laid off. The reason? Well, they didn't really want to say but they were clear it wasn't due to performance. (Thankfully, I got severence pay.) From my perspective it really came out of nowhere, no warnings or even hints that this was coming, which has me spinning. 😵 If I'm doing well at my job and the company is doing well, how in the seven hells could I get laid off??

What they said was partly the reason didn't seem true, or not the whole truth. They essentially stated that "they talked with everyone I worked with" (probably not true based on their decision, but who knows) and came to the conclusion I wasn't suitable to work on large teams, and that's the direction they are moving in. As if it wasn't something that could be improved on 🤔

I'll be the first to admit I'm not the best communicator face-to-face, mainly due to my social anxiety but also because I have too many thoughts. It can be difficult to condense them down for other people in the heat of the moment. (I'm an INTP, if that helps you to understand what I mean.) However, I know I'm a pretty good communicator overall since I listen and pay special attention to phrasing and word choice. So most people I worked with there seemed quite satisfied with communication with me. There were only 2-3 out of more than 12 who I had any difficulty working with.

So why did I have trouble properly working with a couple people? I hesitate to say this but, like other jobs I've had, well... they didn't have either the experience or knowledge to understand me. Basically, they were stupid. I was pretty frustrated working with such inadequately prepared people on a complex project with ludicrously short deadlines, and had no desire to work overtime so I could educate or guide them.

To give perspective, one React developer didn't understand how object properties work with JavaScript. 🤦‍♀️ (They are references, by the way. And yes you can have an object reference inside another object!) Another React developer thought it was okay to have side effects during the render lifestyle because they didn't affect the component itself, even if it was a state change in a parent component. 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♀️

So what is the real reason I lost my job, if not performance? Could be I pissed off the stupid (and loud) ones which hurt my reputation. My main theory, however, is that I was raising the cost of the company's healthcare. I had a diseased organ so I did miss some work or worked from home more than I should have, and used my very good health insurance to the fullest extent I could. Of course, if they say that's the reason then they can get sued.

Huge bummer, whatever the case. I definitely learned some lessons from this situation that others in a similar position could find useful. I can write that up if anyone expresses interest.

Honestly though, this is a good thing in the end, because I was already planning to leave in a month or 2 once I found a better job. I was waiting for the right time for the project I was on and for my own financial stability. So I'm trying hard not to let this affect my self-esteem and think of it as an opportunity to get my dream job, which is working with a remote-first company that is focused on improving the human condition.

Being unemployed isn't ideal, but at least I didn't have to quit! And I get to have a bit of a vacation of a sort.

So, with couple of new people in senior managerial roles, pink slips started flying left and right before the holiday season. That didn't happen before in the company. It's still relatively small and when people left that was for better paid or more interesting work.

While I can understand that from the business perspective and especially for a few who might have been considered dead weight (devs and other roles), I have a serious problem with the way it was handled. It's one of those 5 minute notices. If we weren't remote, I guess escorting out by security would follow.

Most recent person to go is actually one of the most senior devs at the position that became redundant over time, as it clashed in the "pyramid" with another dev. He was involved in many aspects of the product and greatly contributed to the overall success during years of hard work, i'd say maybe more than any of us.

He didn't fuck up anything major as far as I know, his services were just not needed anymore, compared to the other guy. Saving money. I get that.

At T-1 day he prepared a demo of his project. Meetings, Slack, everything as usual. Next thing we got was a "we wish him well in future endeavours" e-mail.

What I find most disturbing is the fact his account was removed immediately, and then we were asked to get any files and anything else we might need, all over personal communication channels (private e-mail, Skype etc.) because he was locked out of all company accounts.

I seem to have have survived this year. One thing they have definitely achieved, based on some off the record chat and some public updates, tweets etc I can see, is for many of us to start networking, polishing CVs and generally stop giving many fucks about the company and the outcome.

I've myself started brushing up on some new skills (stacks) and some old ones (algorithms, etc.) I may need any day now, as it seems.

If they can basically tell "thank you and fuck off" to one person maybe most involved with the company growth, with zero dignity and respect for the person, then fuck them.

I was just writing a long rant about how my rant style changed, and how I could fix anything that annoys me in a heartbeat by just putting my mind to implementing a change. Then YouTube once again paused the synth mix that was playing on my laptop in the background, with that stupid "Video paused. Continue watching?" pop-up. I even installed an add-on for it in Firefox to make it automatically click that away. I guess that YouTube did yet another bullshit update to break that, for "totally legitimate user interface improvements" or whatever. Youtube-dl faces similar challenges all the time, and it's definitely not alone in that either. I also had issues with that on Facebook when I wanted to develop on top of that, where the UI changes every other day and the API even changes every other week. And as far as backwards compatibility goes, our way or the highway!

So I did the whole "replace and move on" type of thing. I use youtube-dl often now to get my content off YouTube into a media player that doesn't fuck me over for stupid reasons like "ad fraud" (I use an ad blocker you twats, what ads am I gonna fraud against), or "battery savings" (the damn laptop is plugged in and fully topped up for fucks sake, and you do this crap even on desktop computers). Gee I wonder why creators are moving on to Floatplane and Nebula nowadays, and why people like yours truly use "highly illegal" youtube-dl. Oh and thank you for putting me in Saudi Arabia again. Pinnacle of data mining, machine learning and other such wank could not do GeoIP. for a server that used to be in a datacenter in Italy for years, and recently has been moved to another hosting provider in Germany. It's about as unchanging and static, and as easy to geolocate as you can possibly get. But hey, kill off another Google+ when?

Like seriously, yes I'm taking your Foobar challenges and you may very well be the company I end up working for. But if anything it feels like there's a shitton of stuff to fix. And the challenges themselves still using Python 2.7 honestly feels like the seldom seen tip of the iceberg.

Not as much of a rant as a share of my exasperation you might breathe a bit more heavily out your nose at.

My work has dealt out new laptops to devs. Such shiny, very wow. They're also famously easy to use.
.
.
.
My arse.
.
.
.
I got the laptop, transferred the necessary files and settings over, then got to work. Delivered ticket i, delivered ticket j, delivered the tests (tests first *cough*) then delivered Mr Bullet to Mr Foot.

Day 4 of using the temporary passwords support gave me I thought it was time to get with department policy and change my myriad passwords to a single one. Maybe it's not as secure but oh hell, would having a single sign-on have saved me from this.

I went for my new machine's password first because why not? It's the one I'll use the most, and I definitely won't forget it. I didn't. (I didn't.) I plopped in my memorable password, including special characters, caps, and numbers, again (carefully typed) in the second password field, then nearly confirmed. Curiosity, you bastard.

There's a key icon by the password field and I still had milk teeth left to chew any and all new features with.
Naturally I click on it. I'm greeted by a window showing me a password generating tool. So many features, options for choosing length, character types, and tons of others but thinking back on it, I only remember those two. I had a cheeky peek at the different passwords generated by it, including playing with the length slider. My curiosity sated, I closed that window and confirmed that my password was in.

You probably know where this is going. I say probably to give room for those of you like me who certifiably. did. not.

Time to test my new password.
*Smacks the power button to log off*
Time to put it in (ooer)
*Smacks in the password*
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

Whoops, typo probably.
Do it again.
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

No u.
Try again.
I N C O R R E C T L O G I N D E T A I L S.

Try my previous password.
Well, SUCCESS... but actually, no.

Tried the previous previous password.
T O O M A N Y A T T E M P T S

Ahh fuck, I can't believe I've done this, but going to support is for pussies. I'll put this by the rest of the fire, I can work on my old laptop.

Day starts getting late, gotta go swimming soonish. Should probably solve the problem. Cue a whole 40 minutes trying my 15 or so different passwords and their permutations because oh heck I hope it's one of them.
I talk to a colleague because by now the "days since last incident" counter has been reset.

"Hello there Ryan, would you kindly go on a voyage with me that I may retrace my steps and perhaps discover the source of this mystery?"

"A man chooses, a slave obeys. I choose... lmao ye sure m8, but I'm driving"

We went straight for the password generator, then the length slider, because who doesn't love sliding a slidey boi. Soon as we moved it my upside down frown turned back around. Down in the 'new password' and the 'confirm new password' IT WAS FUCKING AUTOCOMPLETING. The slidey boi was changing the number of asterisks in both bars as we moved it. Mystery solved, password generator arrested, shit's still fucked.

Bite the bullet, call support.
"Hi, I need my password resetting. I dun goofed"
*details tech support needs*
*It can be sorted but the tech is ages away*
Gotta be punctual for swimming, got two whole lengths to do and a sauna to sit in.
"I'm off soon, can it happen tomorrow?"
"Yeah no problem someone will be down in the morning."

Next day. Friday. 3 hours later, still no contact. Go to support room myself.
The guy really tries, goes through everything he can, gets informed that he needs a code from Derek. Where's Derek? Ah shet. He's on holiday.

There goes my weekend (looong weekend, bank holiday plus day flexi-time) where I could have shown off to my girlfriend the quality at which this laptop can play all our favourite animé, and probably get remind by her that my personal laptop has an i2350u with integrated graphics.

TODAY. (Part is unrelated, but still, ugh.)
Go to work. Ten minutes away realise I forgot my door pass.
Bollocks.
Go get a temporary pass (of shame).
Go to clock in. My fob was with my REAL pass.
What the wank.
Get to my desk, nobody notices my shame. I'm thirsty. I'll have the bottle from my drawer. But wait, what's this? No key that usually lives with my pass? Can't even unlock it?
No thanks.

Support might be able to cheer me up. Support is now for manly men too.
*Knock knock*
"Me again"
"Yeah give it here, I've got the code"
He fixes it, I reset my pass, sensibly change my other passwords.
Or I would, if the internet would work.

It connects, but no traffic? Ryan from earlier helps, we solve it after a while.

My passwords are now sorted, machine is okay, crisis resolved.

*THE END*

If you skipped the whole thing and were expecting a tl;dr, you just lost the game.

Otherwise, I absolve you of having lost the game.

Exactly at the char limit

While I was working on a university project with my team, a teammate asked me why the window of the program in my screen was bigger than in his. I simply answered him that his screen was a FullHD one that had a 1920x1080 resolution, while mine had a lower resolution, and he was like "Noo! This isn't a fullhd screen, it's not so sharp".
So I showed him the "1920x1080" sticker right below his screen, and him again "Yeah, it could have this resolution but definitely it's not a FullHD screen".
- Ok, as you say...

The same guy two days ago was talking about creating a GUI in C.
I told him that C was the wrong language to build programs with a GUI, although there's some very old libs that allow you to do that in 16bit.
And him again: "Ok but Linux (distros) do that and the UIs are great!"
- Do you think that all the fucking Ubuntu/Mint/any distro code is written in C??

The funny thing is the arrogance with which he says all these bullshits.

P. S. We are attending the 3rd year of Computer Engineering.

dev, ~boring

This is either a shower thought or a sober weed thought, not really sure which, but I've given some serious consideration to "team composition" and "working condition" as a facet of employment, particularly in regard to how they translate into hiring decisions and team composition.

I've put together a number of teams over the years, and in almost every case I've had to abide by an assemblage of pre-defined contexts that dictated the terms of the team working arrangement:

1. a team structure dictated to me
2. a working temporality scheme dictated to me
3. a geographic region in which I was allowed to hire
4. a headcount, position tuple I was required to abide by

I've come to regard these structures as weaknesses. It's a bit like the project management triangle in which you choose 1-2 from a list of inadequate options. Sometimes this is grounded in business reality, but more often than not it's because the people surrounding the decisions thrive on risk mitigation frameworks that become trickle down failure as they impose themselves on all aspects of the business regardless of compatibility.

At the moment, I'm in another startup that I have significantly more control over and again have found my partners discussing the imposition of structure and framework around how, where, why, who and what work people do before contact with any action. My mind is screaming at me to pull the cord, as much as I hate the expression. This stems from a single thought:

"Hierarchy and structure should arise from an understanding of a problem domain"

As engineers we develop processes based on logic; it's our job, it's what we do. Logic operates on data derived from from experiments, so in the absence of the real we perform thought experiments that attempt to reveal some fundamental fact we can use to make a determination.

In this instance we can ask ourselves the question, "what works?" The question can have a number contexts: people, effort required, time, pay, need, skills, regulation, schedule. These things in isolation all have a relative importance ( a weight ), and they can relatively expose limits of mutual exclusivity (pay > budget, skills < need, schedule < (people * time/effort)). The pre-imposed frameworks in that light are just generic attempts to abstract away those concerns based on pre-existing knowledge. There's a chance they're fine, and just generally misunderstood or misapplied; there's also a chance they're insufficient in the face of change.

Fictional entities like the "A Team," comprise a group of humans whose skills are mutually compatible, and achieve synergy by random chance. Since real life doesn't work on movie/comic book logic, it's easy to dismiss the seed of possibility there, that an organic structure can naturally evolve to function beyond its basic parts due to a natural compatibility that wasn't necessarily statistically quantifiable (par-entropic).

I'm definitely not proposing that, nor do I subscribe to the 10x ninja founders are ideal theory. Moreso, this line of reasoning leads me to the thought that team composition can be grown organically based on an acceptance of a few observed truths about shipping products:

1. demand is constant
2. skills can either be bought or developed
3. the requirement for skills grows linearly
4. hierarchy limits the potential for flexibility
5. a team's technically proficiency over time should lead to a non-linear relationship relationship between headcount and growth

Given that, I can devise a heuristic, organic framework for growing a team:

- Don't impose reporting structure before it has value (you don't have to flatten a hierarchy that doesn't exist)
- crush silos before they arise
- Identify needed skills based on objectives
- base salary projections on need, not available capital
- Hire to fill skills gap, be open to training since you have to pay for it either way
- Timelines should always account for skills gap and training efforts
- Assume churn will happen based on team dynamics
- Where someone is doesn't matter so long as it's legal. Time zones are only a problem if you make them one.
- Understand that the needs of a team are relative to a given project, so cookie cutter team composition and project management won't work in software
- Accept that failure is always a risk
- operate with the assumption that teams that are skilled, empowered and motivated are more likely to succeed.
- Culture fit is a per team thing, if the team hates each other they won't work well no matter how much time and money you throw at it

Last thing isn't derived from the train of thought, just things I feel are true:

- Training and headcount is an investment that grows linearly over time, but can have exponential value. Retain people, not services.
- "you build it, you run it" will result in happier customers, faster pivoting. Don't adopt an application maintenance strategy

/rant

How to delete 16 days of commits 101 🤯:

First of all, me and my class (computer science in college) were working on a project for around 12 weeks, our “client” is one of our teacher and we literally just finished today to work on the project since our degree terminal projects are starting next week.

So now there's this guy in our class who kinda has the reputation to be stuborn and clumsy; he’s going to do his assigned task, commit, push it and put his task into QA (which is just peer evaluation and testing nothing really complex) and then when we try his functionality and finds out it isn’t working, we tell him and the only thing he always answers is : “but it works on my machine” and then we will need to explicitly ask him to be sure he has all the latest changes (database and codebase) and to see if it still works on his side since it doesn’t work for anyone else.

This actually happened quite a lot in these 12 weeks and you can definitely imagine that of course it would definitely not happen again today when we thought we were finally done with this project…

So another teacher gave us an assignment to create a development environment for our big project so we could try out Docker instead of virtual machines, he made GitHub Classroom repos with a minified version of our project and up to this point everything is fine and clear. That is until 3 hours ago, that our little clumsy friend somehow pushed his Docker related files on the main project, maybe he was trying his Docker setup on the real project no big deal you know EXCEPT IF HE HADN’T NOT PULLED SINCE 16 DAYS 😤.

He was doing maintenance on another project so I can maybe understand but gosh how did he not see the big warning of Git that he wasn’t up to date with master ? And yes we only have a master branch bear with us but hopefully we were able to create a new branch with the up to date project and then merge master.

A couple of us had a gut feeling that this guy would do something that would break the whole project right before we ended, turns out we were right 😅

Nope, definitely not going to work for that customer anymore. Fuck this shit. At least for this week.

My background: mid-30 years old, some kind of business & IT consultant / lead dev working for a mid sized CRM consulting company, with approx 15 years of experience in development and software architecture, most of the time "thinking" in C#, still learning new languages, being a cloud evangelist and team lead. We usually have customers with customers (B2B/B2C).
Personality type "campaigner" (ENFP-A).

Today the project lead of my client (a big corporation in the energy industry) told me that he still didn't order all the necessary resources for the cloud project. Just to be clear: He's on the client side. We (the architects, one internal and me) told him one month ago what we need for the beginning. Just a few things - an Azure subscription, a license for the CRM platform, and our dev tools.

And now let's guess when the project is planned to begin? Yeah, right: 1st of April. NO APRIL'S FOOL. And guess what? Next Tuesday we'll do the onboarding for the new (external) devs, and NOTHING will be ready. Yeah, just let us build stuff in our minds, and on the whiteboards, because it's an AGILE project, right? We don't need any systems and tools...

And now he sent me the questionnaires which need to be answered before any cloud service can be ordered by the corporate IT. And yes, he didn't answer a single thing, and just meant "Those are architecture questions" (they are not) and (of course) "please provide the answers until Monday morning, so we can FINALLY order the services."

Yeah, you fucktard. Of course it's MY FAULT now. Maybe I should write an email to your boss asking how we can speed things up a little bit...

I’m so sick and tired of the cattle-minded people in the software world. I love coding and improving myself; I've got over 18 years of experience. I enjoy what I do, and I like being good at it. I know my way around a variety of different technologies, and I could easily outperform most engineers with similar experience. If I don’t know something, I get excited to learn and I ask questions. I don’t enjoy standing in the spotlight about what I know; I prefer supporting, helping, solving problems, improving solutions, and simplifying everything.

From my experience, the best solution is the simplest, shortest, fastest, and leanest one. But unfortunately, there are people in the workplace who think the opposite of me and blindly follow this so-called prophet named Uncle Bob, zealously writing all his SOLID principles and dogmatic code, turning their work environments into a toxic mess. I’m so done with it. You have no idea how harmful a person can be when they cling to the teachings of a guy like Uncle Bob—someone who probably hasn't even written the "s" in software himself and is just trying to sell his book. In almost every job or team I join, there’s one of these people who drags junior developers into writing dogmatic code by chanting about SOLID principles, Uncle Bob, and object-oriented programming.

Software engineering isn’t something you can learn from a book written by people like Uncle Bob, who haven’t coded a decent product in a real development process. Experience is something entirely different, and from my experience, everything taken to extremes turns out badly. Wherever I see an Uncle Bob disciple, the work inevitably slides into the extremes. For someone writing in C and C++, it’s disheartening to hear about object-oriented programming, SOLID principles, and agile nonsense. I’m tired of seeing people cluttering their code with interfaces for every little thing, over-engineering patterns, and stuffing every piece of code with interfaces to make it “testable.” They run around claiming they’re writing SOLID code, doing TDD, following “best practices,” yet they can't solve any real problems or algorithms. They take a week-long task and drag it out to six, making simple things complex and distancing themselves from real solutions. I’m sick of these types.

If you’re a junior developer, please ignore the fools trying to lead you down this path, and don’t become dogmatic about what you learn, especially if you’re writing C++.

I’ve never seen any real engineer who takes this SOLID, object-oriented nonsense seriously. Believe me, once you reach a certain threshold, you won’t hear these words anymore. Software isn’t just about that. Object-oriented programming, especially if you’re not writing Java or C#, and especially if you’re working in C++ (thankfully, C doesn’t even have it), is something you should definitely steer clear of. Robert C. Martin, aka Uncle Bob—if only you had written your book with a focus on Java or C#. These dogmatic code writers with 7-8 years of experience crying at the sight of free functions in C++ really give me a headache. Because of you, these people exist, and I don’t have the energy to deal with this nonsense at my age.

There's little irritations that happen when working with clients over time that let you know that they're stuck in the past and definitely not the kind of client you want to have long term.

My personal favorite example:

"Can we put an icon that shows the weather on the banner of the website?"

Note: I don't make "websites," information portals, content pieces, etc.

It doesn't to matter what type of application it is; time tracking, HR, mortgage application, industrial control system, etc. I don't know why, but every single client I've ever had where I've been saddled with one or more people who have no business being anywhere near the term "stakeholder" asked for this stupid, banal, 1995 web portal fuckery. Their shitty little mushroom stamp contribution wasting everyone's time.

What's worse, they want it be prominent in the screen real estate. It can't just be a responsibly sized waste of space like the screenshot's top example (from a company whose entire business is weather, nonetheless). No, it has to be the busiest fucking thing in the control space, as in the example inferior.

Or maybe I'm just wrong and people desperately want to know if the sky is going to piss on them if they leave the cave.

Anyone else have a pet peeve in regards to recurrent, pointless functionality?

Hey ranters!

I'm here to ask a huge favor.
So I used to be on the app more frequently last year, but I started to work on a shit ton of personal/professional projects. I'm not technically back to being a regular again (probably never will be), I'm back to ask all you great devs to possibly check out a platform I'm working on. It's not 100% completed yet, but I'm at that weird 90% mark where you're almost done but you start to find other interesting things to do, so I'm forcing myself to ask people to hop on it to give me that push. It's going to have some interesting (if I say so myself) features.Definitely appreciate it! (Please don't kill me over the UI/UX, I'm primarily a backend dev...but it'll definitely improve by 100% Launch)

AND ONE LAST THING....I don't have a good name for it yet so..there's that..

THANKS!

!dev, just a couple little things that happened to me recently.

First off, I just (like 20 minutes ago) replaced the save battery in my Pokemon Silver, so that's fun. Now I want to start modding my GBC (new shell, glass screen, all the fun stuff)

My friend is talking to me again, as of yesterday. The whole situation is still kinda touchy so I'm gonna be careful about talking to her for now, but after some time it should be all good.

I recently took up vaping (I know, it's bad and I shouldn't do it, but I'm an adult and that's my fucking decision).

Then yesterday, I gave a friend a ride home from school. He didn't have his house key so he was locked out and had to wait for his dad to get home. The neighborhood I live in, you don't really leave someone sitting outside for too long, cause shit might happen to them (drug deals are a regular thing across the street from my house, gunshots aren't too common, but still), so I stayed with him.

I'd never met his dad, and I didn't want his first impression to be me letting out a huge vape cloud, so if I was going to take a hit, I would check to make sure nobody was around. At one point, I checked, then took a huge hit. Then I heard my friend say "oh there's my dad". Cue me practically gluing my mouth shut, not breathing at all as I waved bye, turned my car on, pulled out of the driveway, and drove down the street some.

When I let the cloud out, it was a HUGE fucking cloud too. Much bigger than the ones I've normally had. Definitely would have been a bad introduction, especially considering that friend's family is not very fond of that type of stuff (smoking/vaping, drinking, etc) from what I know.

I am a big fan of the Go programming language. I really am. From syntax to the purpose and everything in between, I dig the language. I normally use it as a hobby language. My escape from my daily dosis of php, js and Java.....or when my workplace insists on believing that I am a designer instead of a developer........I am definitely not a designer....I am super slow at design.

But back at my main topic! Go. The language is cool, the environment is cool and it is booming here in the states.......can we PLEASE PRETTY PLEASE WITH CHERRIES ON TOP change the stupid mascot logo? I swear that thing looks absolutely fucking retarded. Much like the Perl 6 Mascot......I know this is a small thing but looking at that stupid "gopher" really irritates the fuck out of me. Coolest logo ever? Rust or Python really.

"This is ridiculous, why don't the docs explain this? This is absurd, it seems like thousands of people should be having this issue. Why do maintainers fucking not get it? Why write software if you don't intend for anyone else to use it?"

versus

"Hey, could you explain X to me? I'm having trouble understanding it."
"Sure, here: ..."
"Thanks - maybe we could add it to the docs, that's the first place I looked."
"Absolutely, good idea."
<closed in a8b7cb8d>

Which one was easier, folks? It's not this difficult. 100% going to help you if you ask - to me, at least, there's no such thing as a stupid question (seriously, I'll answer the most inane questions 100 times over if I need to). However, there's definitely a stupid comment, and unfortunately they seem to be the majority I receive on Github.

I coded part of feature 2 months ago.

Left it to help frontend guy a bit, deal with fire after release. ( we’re missing frontend integration tests and every release is pain in the ass ).

My backend code coverage is about 80% so not much can go wrong at this point.

So I added more code today and it looks like new feature is working but don’t know what the code I added 2 months ago exactly do.

The only thing I know is that it definitely needs refactoring ...

Being only backend dev / release manager / administrator/ dev ops in project is painful I need to deal with everything on my own 😔

At least client doesn’t care if it’s done in one week or in one month right now.

My job environment is either fucked up or am too young to understand what a job life is.
I was hired to intern for a startup having 2 main bosses/founders . one of them is mostly administrative and comes to office daily. He sets some tasks and i have to complete them, as soon as possible or sometimes till a deadline. He has little knowledge about the complexity of wotk so usually he says "just complete it as soon as possible so we could release it" but we haven't pushed any updates since i joined (of course i have completed some tasks, but they are just not pushed to the release version)

The other one , as i ranted previously is a completely different story.I think he is an elder bro or senior of the other boss,but he is just a superman: dealing with the distributers, commanding the hardware ppl, discussing with the othr boss, handling the server and most importantly the guy who wrote all the code i am working on. So he comes extremely rarely(1 or 2 days / week) , tries to communicate with me , but is immediately diverted by some other call/person and goes away.

The problem is : am feeling a little helpless. They give me tasks and i start working on them with excitement .( I don't believe myself to be a terrible beginner: i have been learning/working on android development for past 1 year, i know my things. And even if i don't, i know how to search/debug and produce results) . So as usual, i start and try to apply my skills / search for things i don't / try to understand his large,overwhelming and confusing codebase and at the end am stuck at some point where i don't understand what to do next. Sometimes its a bug which doesn't seems to fix, sometimes its a thing thats in the codebase but i couldn't find or sometimes it's just something i couldn't seem to understand why isn't it working. At that time, I only wish that boss to be here and look at what and how i have done, if its a correct approch and how can we together take it to completion (or simply wtf am i doing wrong, see my shit and tell me) .

But again, the tech boss is busy or wouldn't have time to understand my problem in our short , incomplete meetings. But he or the nontech boss will definitely have the time to ask the sttus of project and pressurise for the "deadline" .

Like today, i was so stuck at this fucking one line error that i couldn't detect that i just messaged him that am leaving for home 3 hours early. He came running and for the first time in history gave me a complete undisturbed time. It was such a small mistake, but i wasn't able to catch on my own. But when i told him, he immediately caught , changed a single line and the code started to work.

I am feeling irritated. Is this all a correct environment?

Got one right now, no idea if it’s the “most” unrealistic, because I’ve been doing this for a while now.

Until recently, I was rewriting a very old, very brittle legacy codebase - we’re talking garbage code from two generations of complete dumbfucks, and hands down the most awful codebase I’ve ever seen. The code itself is quite difficult to describe without seeing it for yourself, but it was written over a period of about a decade by a certifiably insane person, and then maintained and arguably made much worse by a try-hard moron whose only success was making things exponentially harder for his successor to comprehend and maintain. No documentation whatsoever either. One small example of just how fucking stupid these guys were - every function is wrapped in a try catch with an empty catch, variables are declared and redeclared ten times, but never used. Hard coded credentials, hard coded widths and sizes, weird shit like the entire application 500ing if you move a button to another part of the page, or change its width by a pixel, unsanitized inputs, you name it, if it’s a textbook fuck up, it’s in there, and then some.

Because the code is so damn old as well (MySQL 8.0, C#4, and ASP.NET 3), and utterly eschews the vaguest tenets of structured, organized programming - I decided after a month of a disproportionate effort:success ratio, to just extract the SQL queries, sanitize them, and create a new back end and front end that would jointly get things where they need to be, and most importantly, make the application secure, stable, and maintainable. I’m the only developer, but one of the senior employees wrote most of the SQL queries, so I asked for his help in extracting them, to save time. He basically refused, and then told me to make my peace with God if I missed that deadline. Very helpful.

I was making really good time on it too, nearly complete after 60 days of working on it, along with supporting and maintaining the dumpster fire that is the legacy application. Suddenly my phone rings, and I’m told that management wants me to implement a payment processing feature on the site, and because I’ve been so effective at fixing problems thus far, they want to see it inside of a week. I am surprised, because I’ve been regularly communicating my progress and immediate focus to management, so I explain that I might be able to ship the feature by end of Q1, because rather than shoehorn the processor onto the decrepit piece of shit legacy app, it would be far better to just include it in the replacement. I add that PCI compliance is another matter that we must account for, and so there’s not a great chance of shipping this in a week. They tell me that I have a month to do it…and then the Marketing person asks to see my progress and ends up bitching about everything, despite the front end being a pixel perfect reproduction. Despite my making everything mobile responsive, iframe free, secure and encrypted, fast, and void of unpredictable behaviors. I tell her that this is what I was asked to do, and that there should have been no surprises at all, especially since I’ve been sending out weekly updates via email. I guess it needed more suck? But either way, fuck me and my two months of hard work. I mean really, no ego, I made a true enterprise grade app for them.

Short version, I stopped working on the rebuild, and I’m nearly done writing the payment processor as a microservice that I’ll just embed as an iframe, since the legacy build is full of those anyway, and I’m being asked to make bricks without straw. I’m probably glossing over a lot of finer points here too, just because it’s been such an epic of disappointment. The deadline is coming up, and I’m definitely going to make it, now that I have accordingly reduced the scope of work, but this whole thing has just totally pissed me off, and left a bad taste about the organization.

We basically don't unit test at work. I write some tests for my code and honest to God people complain I'm wasting time saying a test bed and manual tests are good enough. We don't write test beds for about half of our production code and rely on integration tests for the rest. We only test release builds which have been symbol stripped, I get handed a crash report with no stack trace that I'm unable to reproduce and expected to stay late to fix it for some arbitrary internal deadline.

I've since moved to R&D where basically I'm left to do my own thing so it's better.

We don't project manage. Project leads take time estimates and double them so management might cut them some slack. This doesn't matter because management made up time estimates before the project started. Last project I was on had a timeline of 3 months and took a year.

We have released broken products. Not that any of the above really matters, our software products have made about 50k revenue in 2 years. There are 6 people on software. Fortunately hardware has made about 3 mill. That said our hardware customers are getting frustrated with us as we keep fucking up, shipping broken products and missing deadlines.

I've been working there about a year and a half and will be looking for a job at the end of the current project.

I joined devRant about when I was most pissed off with my job, my rant frequency has definitely gone down since I moved over to R&D.

Here comes lots of random pieces of advice...

Ain't no shortcuts.

Be prepared, becoming a good programmer (there are lots of shitty programmers, not so many good ones) takes lots of pain, frustration, and failure. It's going to suck for awhile. There will be false starts. At some point you will question whether you are cut out for it or not. Embrace the struggle -- if you aren't failing, you aren't learning.

Remember that in 2021 being a programmer is just as much (maybe even moreso) about picking up new things on the fly as it is about your crystalized knowledge. I don't want someone who has all the core features of some language memorized, I want someone who can learn new things quickly. Everything is open book all the time. I have to look up pretty basic stuff all the time, it's just that it takes me like twelve seconds to look it up and digest it.

Build, build, build, build, build. At least while you are learning, you should always be working on a project. Don't worry about how big the project is, small is fine.

Remember that programming is a tool, not the end goal in and of itself. Nobody gives a shit how good a carpenter is at using some specialized saw, they care about what the carpenter can build with that specialized saw.

Plan your build. This is a VERY important part of the process that newer devs/programmers like to skip. You are always free to change the plan, but you should have a plan going on. Don't store your plan in your head. If you plan exists only in your head you are doing it wrong. Write that shit down! If you create a solid development process, the cognitive overhead for any project goes way down.

Don't fall into the trap of comparing yourself to others, especially to the experts you are learning from. They are good because they have done the thing that you are struggling with at least a thousand times.

Don't fall into the trap of comparing yourself today to yourself yesterday. This will make it seem like you haven't learned anything and aren't on the move. Compare yourself to yourself last week, last month, last year.

Have experienced programmers review your code. Don't be afraid to ask, most of us really really enjoy this (if it makes you feel any better about the "inconvenience", it will take a mid-level waaaaay less time to review your code that it took for you to write it, and a senior dev even less time than that). You will hate it, it will suck having someone seem like they are just ripping your code apart, but it will make you so much better so much faster than just relying on your own internal knowledge.

When you start to be able to put the pieces together, stay humble. I've seen countless devs with a year of experience start to get a big head and talk like they know shit. Don't keep your mouth closed, but as a newer dev if you are talking noise instead of asking questions there is no way I will think you are ready to have the Jr./Associate/Whatever removed from your title.

Don't ever. Ever. Ever. Criticize someone else's preferred tools. Tooling is so far down the list of what makes a good programmer. This is another thing newer devs have a tendency to do, thinking that their tool chain is the only way to do it. Definitely recommend to people alternatives to check out. A senior dev using Notepad++, a terminal window, and a compiler from 1977 is probably better than you are with the newest shiniest IDE.

Don't be a dick about terminology/vocabulary. Different words mean different things to different people in different organizations. If what you call GNU/Linux somebody else just calls Linux, let it go man! You understand what they mean, and if you don't it's your job to figure out what they mean, not tell them the right way to say it.

One analogy I like to make is that becoming a programmer is a lot like becoming a chef. You don't become a chef by following recipes (i.e. just following tutorials and walk-throughs). You become a chef by learning about different ingredients, learning about different cooking techniques, learning about different styles of cuisine, and (this is the important part), learning how to put together ingredients, techniques, and cuisines in ways that no one has ever showed you about before.

If your phone had taken photos of your face for your whole life without you knowing, would you watch a video that was automatically generated from the photos?

Back in college, we were assigned a group of 3 other students to complete a duplicate of a current popular site. My team received Kijiji, a Canadian ad listing platform similar to Craigslist/eBay. This was to be done with JSP and JavaEE. We had to create a 30 minute presentation to go along with it.

Fairly simply, except we had one week. As I worked 2 jobs at the time, I typically left my college work to the last minute. Initially, we split up the work, myself taking 50% of the code and splitting the rest between the other 3. I was perfectly okay with this, until the night of the last day, they messaged me saying they had done nothing.

Extremely annoyed, I told them to just do the fucking presentation and that I would now finish the other 50% of the code myself. I coded 16 hours straight, went to bed, woke up and coded for another 8 hours. It wasn't exactly what I wanted, but it covered all the points.

The day of, they showed me their presentation. It was complete trash. When we ended up presenting, I improvised the entire thing. The others didn't even speak. Not once. At the end of it, we received 65%. The professor said that if the project had been completed by one person, it would've received a perfect grade, but because there were 4 of us, he expected more. They all looked at me in fear of saying something. I just thanked the professor for his time and left.

The professor knew I did the entire thing myself. My code was by far the most consistent in his class, constantly receiving perfect marks and him asking me to assist other students.

When I graduated, I didn't have 100%, but I did have a 90%. Considering that project was worth 25% of our final marks, he definitely bumped my grade.

Ok this is a weird story.

So myself and two friends were working on a chrome extension several years ago, probably late high school/early college years.

So before any of us had seen the ballmer peak xkcd, I had discovered it on my own. I was telling my friend that we should start drinking because a)it's Saturday night, and b) I code better buzzed. So he decided to push the limits. He poured my drink super heavy, then another, then didn't finish his and insisted I did. He ended up getting me super drunk. I started going off on how they were doing it wrong, then took over the keyboard. What I wrote cannot even be considered code. I went on an incoherent rant, puked in a trash can, and then woke up in the bathroom with a towel as a pillow.

And that's the story of why my friends are convinced the ballmer peak is definitely not a thing.

I was about 8. A family member was like a secretary, but not exactly. There are was a term used, but I can't remember. It's not really that important.

Anyways, I was like 8. Their job consisted of backing data up on.... Floppy disks. The software they used to back this data up just used a console and you had to input commands. Well this was amazing to me at the time. So they taught me the order of the commands and let me do it. Was the most fascinating thing to me. And it definitely planted the seed of interest in computers.

Some other early experiences also involve me hanging around the IT guy that worked with my relative. He taught me a little bit, such as some keyboard short cuts.

I deployed one of our staging websites to a free plan because the site is rarely used. Project Manager sends the stakeholders the new url. There will be a lot of 🤦‍♀️🤦‍♂️🤦 all around. Some of it’s my fault. A lot of it is just WTF.

Stakeholder: We still need the staging site because we don’t want to test in the live site…

PM: Okay. We didn’t say we were deleting the site. We are just moving it to a new and better hosting platform, so we’re letting you know the url has changed.

Stakeholder: This url is for the front facing page. How do I access the backend? [they mean the admin interface]

Me: The only thing that’s changed is the url for the staging website. So domain-A/account is now domain-B/account.

I thought that was a pretty straightforward way of explaining things, that even a non technical person would get it. They took the /account example as the literal login url.

Stakeholder: I forgot the password for our admin login and I submitted a password reset, but I realize I don’t know if I have access to the admin email. Or if it’s even a real email account.

WTF

I look back at the email chain and I realize that I gave the PM the wrong url.

Also, WTF x 2. How did this stakeholder not realize they were looking at the wrong website?? There are definitely noticeable style and content differences. And why would you have an admin login that uses a fake email??

Me: My apologies. I sent over the incorrect url. My instructions are mostly the same. All that’s changed is the domain.

Stakeholder’s assistant: [DMs me] How do we access the backend?

WTF…are they seriously playing this game and demanding I type out the url for them?! 🤬 I’m not playing this game and I just copy and paste the example that I already sent over.

They figure it out eventually. Apparently, they never used /account to login before They used /admin/index… but that would still bring them to /account, but with ?redirect=/admin/index appended to the url if they weren’t logged in. Again, WTF.

I know I made mistakes in this whole thing, but damn. I can’t even. I’m pretty sure this whole incident is fueling my boss’s push to stop supporting this particular website anymore so I can focus on sites that actually bring in revenue…and have stakeholders that aren’t looney and condescending like this.

So I am driving home and stop at a light. Some dude in a truck behind me starts flipping me off at the light. The road is 45mph and 2 lanes. I am in the right lane. So when the light changes I speed up to 35mph so he can pass me. He decides to tailgate me and honk at me. So I stay steady and he eventually goes around me. I keep my distance. But it looks like he is going to the same place as me. Before I get to the road I want to park for my destination he takes the same road and parks his truck and trailer where I normally park facing the wrong direction. Okay, wtf, but okay. So I go further down the road to turn around and park somewhere else. He guns his truck to cut me off from that parking spot. I have to hit my brakes to prevent hitting him. I raise my hands in the are like "why?" I then finish turning around and head back to my parking spot and park. So this guy tried to cause a car accident. At this point I took my stuff inside and put it away. Came back out and called the police to report the incident. They said they cannot identify a crime, but I can fill out a police report. While I am on the phone with the police this guy leaves that street giving me this bizarre deranged smile. I refuse to engage. I spent the next hour filling out the police report. In the process I find out he lives on that street a few houses down. I am nowhere near his house, but he seems to not like me parking on that street. This guy must have seen my car on that street before and decides to randomly road rage. I gave his name and address to the police. My intent to build a case file if he doesn't knock this shit off.

So now I gotta buy a fucking dash cam and put it in my car because of some nutjob plumber. I have nothing against plumbers, but this guy fits the definition of knuckle dragger. His name isn't even Mario or Luigi, bummer.

Another thing that might be related is that during the winter somebody dumped a ton of snow onto my car when it was parked there. It looked like it was on purpose. If this is the same guy this guy drove his snow plow 4 houses down. Definitely has mental problems.

Tried installing Antergos on an external 1TB SSD to give it a try after having checkout Mint, now my laptop won't boot from it anymore after having removed and reinserted the disk and it skips to Ubuntu's grub on my HDD or windows.

Ubuntu's grub does show antegros whenever the ssd is plugged in though, and then I get this error while trying to boot it. Also changing the boot order doesn't do much and it skips to the next thing on the list.

I'm probably going to overwrite antergos and try to use portable antergos on it, perhaps it wasn't made to hoot from a removable drive. Ubuntu and windows still work fine but ubuntu is on my hdd because the internal ssd is full of windows, and super slow.

So now I have a partitioned ssd that doesn't work and a grub entry that gives an error ugh :/ (and a slow ubuntu but that's not as bad)

Anyone else have any idea of what happened? I have definitely seen antergos work before packing up and removing the drive, so the installation was succesful.

Yet another day at my company, Im rewriting some old code for client (rewriting old, php 4 system for vindications managment) and you know the moment when you are focused and someone comes to you to absolutely ruin your focus. Fine, whatever. Oh, for fuck sake. Again dev is doing as support becouse one moron with second can't login into zimbra admin panel and add fucking mailbox. I show them exacly how they login, remind them they are admins too, slowly show them, so you click "manage" than you click that gear icon and than you click "new", fill in email address and password. As simple as 1-2-3. Okay, fuck it, time to go for a cig. I just finish up few lines and stand, grab my vape and start walking towards door. In door I find my buddy with 2 random people. He told me that they are interns and that I should show them some basics and stuff around that. Oh god, fuck my life. If anything, Im definitely very bad teacher, mainly becouse I often have problems with saying what I mean in the way that somebody actually understans and knows what I am trying to say. Whatever. Fuck it all. I grab two of our old laptops that nobody used in like a year or so, and first thing I quickly figure out, is that one day for some what the fuck reason I dont even dont bothered to remember I installed Arch on both while I dont usually use Arch. I just needed it for some specific reason. Whatever. So I guess I will need to upgrade fucking system. Our network isn't really great so that was like... hour or so. In the meantime I figured what they know about coding in general etc, and holly shit. One of them (there was boy and girl), girl, apparently never ever in her life even touched code. Well... fuck. Why am I wasting my time? Becouse there was some programme or some shit like that... Someone could tell me before so I could mentally prepare.. fuck it. whatever. So while laptops are doing their pacman thing, I sit with them and slowly start to explain based on my machine some really basic concepts. Second guy actually had some expirience, he knew how to make some really really basic logic and stuff, so he had another world of problems, becouse it was PHP and, as we all know, everyone hates PHP, and... yeah.. You can probably imagine his approach. Yes, you get user input in super global array. I really wanted to say "Now shut the fuck up and write that fucking $_POST".

hour or so passed, I was close to giving up to not let my anger rise (im not really good teacher... I mentioned it. I suck at teaching others) but luckly machines upgraded. He wanted to use visual studio code, she didnt care too much, so I installed phpstorm in trial mode. whatever. Since that's linux and they were not comfortable with that, I walked them through installing LAMP stack, and when finally it started to look like LAMP stack, I requested them to google how to install xdebug, becouse xdebug is very usefull and googling skill is your best weapon on that field. I go for cig, come back and what I see boiled me a little bit. The girl was stuck looking at github page randomly looking through xdebug source code and idk... hoping for miracle (she admited she thought there will be instructions somewhere) and the guy was in good place, xdebug has a place to paste your phpinfo() for custom instructions. But it didn't work for him, he claims that wizzard told him it cant help him.. hmm intresting, you are sure you pasted in phpinfo? yes, he is sure. Okay, show me.

Again mindblown how someone can have problems with reading.

so his phpinfo() looked like that:
```<?php
phpinfo();```

I highlighted on the page the words "output of phpinfo". He somehow didn't see it or something. He didnt know, he thought that he needs to put in phpinfo so he did. OMG.

Finally, I figured out I can workaround my intern problem, and I just briefly shown them php.net, how documentation looks, said to allways google in english, if he uses tutorial to read whole fucking thing, not just some parts of it, and left them with simple task, that took them whole day and at which they ultimately failed.

To make 3 buttons labeled "1" "2" "3" and if someone presses one of them, remember in session that they pressed it and disallow pressing other ones.

Never fucking again interns. Especially those who randomly without apparent reason almost literally just spawn in front of you and here, its your fucking problem now.

Fuck it, I have some time to get back to my stuff. Time is running so lets not waste it.

After around 15 minutes my one of my superiors comes in and asks me if I can go on meeting with him and other superior. My buddy goes with us, and next 3 hours I was basically explaining that you cannot do some things (ie. know XYZ happened without any source of information) in code, and I can't listen for callbacks from ABC becouse it wont send anyc cuz in their fucking brilliant idea ABC can't even know that this script would even exist, not to mention it wants callbacks.

Sometimes I hate my job.

I found the best text editor for basic code fixing

For a couple of days, I was looking for a simple terminal-based text editor for taking simple code notes or basic code fixing kinds of stuff.

As an aspiring developer, I really like the concept of coding without touching the mouse.

So I downloaded the king of CLI text editors, Vim.

Now, guess what happened.

Yeah, you're right. I stuck inside vim and couldn't even quit from there.

Then, I started watching a bunch of tutorials and started reading vim's documentation.

But then I realized, I have to learn a lot of things only to operate vim and it's a pretty lengthy process.

At that time, I really needed a very simple text editor for doing basic stuff.

But, vim is not simple... you know :)

So, I had to come back to 'nano' & I was not happy enough to write codes by using 'nano'.

Suddenly, I discovered another really cool text editor called 'micro'.

It's really awesome.

It's not as advanced as vim but definitely a lot better than nano.

Micro is an open-source command-line text editor created by Zachary Yedidia.

Some basic key points of Micro:
1. It's really easy to operate.
2. It has different colours and highlights.
3. It supports syntaxes for over 70+ programming languages.
4. It has mouse support.
5. Plugins & colour schemes.

The best thing for me is colour schemes & screen split support.

Check out my full article on DEV - @souviktests.

HELP, ITS A MESS!!

Here is a thing : 30 hours ago, i was completely free nd useless .Had a lot of reminders to open source & learn new techs for upcoming summer vacations .

But day before yesterday my friend called me to say that he got a 6 month internship in web from some (not so big) startup and they were looking for some Android dev too, so he gave my name and wanted me to mail him my resume.

I did, and within half an hour he called, discussed about the work and wanted to test me.(as i said i didn't had plans for internship , leave alone a sudden test, but the company was work from home so i didn't denied ) The test was a big one but easy, he wanted me to design 15 UI activities for an app by looking at the wireframe. I asked for next 6 hours, did it in 4.5 and submitted him the repo...

THE TROUBLE STARTS NOW...
1) He seemed impressed i guess, coz the next day when he saw my message, he Created a group of 5 people within a few minutes and started assigning tasks(?!) And in the personal chat what he said was just weird : "You are the lead for this project" (WTF??!?)

2)I had already mentioned him that i currently had exams so won't be doing any much of practical work but after every few grp messages, he was trying to assign me some task and a deadline. Weirdly, the test was actually a wireframe based on the project idea from some of their client , and just to show my skills, i have designed layouts of 15 of their activities of their app.

3) The negetive part comes like this: THERE IS NO MONEY AND ITS A 6 MONTH INTERNSHIP !! Fed up of this continues indirect deadlines, i asked him What's my responsibilities as a team dev, what will be my tenure and what will be the pay to which he replies that:

"there is no stipend for this, we have multiple projects lined up in which you can contribute and your internship period is 6 months which could be increased/decreased on the basis of your performance. You will get a PPO, Internship certificate , mentor support and intellectual code rights (which i am guessing means my 2 word name in the about pages of the apps i develop for them ) .And as a lead , you will be getting an experience in leadership skills "

I am really confused. Work from home seems like a relaxing thing , and being a team lead for the first time definitely would make me a little more confident. But why does it feel to be kind of fraud plan? Plus there is no pay and i would be ignoring my creativity ideas for this (not completely but i am sure anyone giving a job would expect some work from me eceryday ).

WHAT SHOULD I DO???

The universe has taken a cactus.

It proceeded to gift the cactus with a toxin that greatly enhances the stimulus of pain.

After the universe watched it's miraculous creation it decided to shove it up so far my arse that my gag reflex turned on and I puked a lot of cactus.

Didn't sleep well, weekend hardware migration finish, today an old server got moved.

Some part, most likely the redundant PSU, had a short circuit - decided to take the switches out... Which are the only non redundant hardware...

There was only one critical system in the whole rack, that was one redundant firewall.

Guess what happened..... Naaaa?

*drum roll*

For whatever reason, the second firewall didn't kick in, so large part of internal network unreachable as VPN was on the firewall.

:thumbsup:

That's not cactus level yet.

Spontaneously a large part of the work at home crew decided to call, cause getting an email wasn't enough.

So while all the phones were ringing and we had the joyful fun to carefully take apart a whole rack to check for possible faulty wiring / electric burns / hardware damage and getting firewall up and running again...

Some dev decided to run a deployment (doable as one of the few working at the company at the moment -.-).

I work from home, but we had a conference phone call running the whole time so I could "deescalate" and keep others up-to-date. So me on headphone with conference call, regular phone for calls, while typing mails / sms for de-escalation.

Now we're reaching cactus level, cause being tortured by being annoyed out of hell by all telephone ringing, the beeping of UPS (uninterruptible power supplies), the screaming of admins from the server room and the roaring of air coolers…

Suddenly said dev must have stood in the midst of the chaos… and asked for help cause "the deployment broke, project XY is offline"...

I think it was the first time since years that I screamed at the top of my lungs.

Bad idea (health issues)… but oh boy was it a pleasure to hear my own voice echo through the conference speaker and creating an echoic sound effect.

It was definitely worth coughing out my loungs for the next hour and I think it was the best emotional outburst ever.

I feel a bit sorry for the dev, but only a tiny bit.

After the whole rack thing, the broken deployment fixing and the "my ears are bleeding and I think I will never be able to talk again" action...

We had to roll out several emergency deployments to fix CVEs (eg libexpat).

This day was a marvelous shit show.

I will now cry myself to sleep with some codein.

I've spent so many years not coding, I could never get over the initial hump, which was definitely a mistake. Mistakes are fine, we all make them. The best thing is to learn from them. On the plus side I've learnt firewalls, Web hosting. Windows domains, Azure cloud, virtual machines etc etc, skills which are hopefully very useful for Dev to have. I look forward to joining the ranks of skilled developers. If you are interested in development but are afraid to take the leap. Just go for it, start to learn and play with it. My recommendation for anyone looking for a starting point is a Udemy course called "The Complete ASP.NET MVC 5 course". I'm not affiliated in any way or advertising it. I just think it's brilliant and you get to the fun stuff really quick. You will start with the basics of getting and setting up visual studio. Also. If anyone could recommend other very good courses they know of I would appreciate it

proxying youtube

today I thought writing a quick project, a youtube proxy server, as in, you browse localhost:<PORT> and youtube comes in the response.

this is not rocket science as proxy servers have around for a long time.

I thought it'd be interesting to code it in userland, as opposed to "systemland".

And 50 lines of code and some minor hurdles later I see youtube "running" in localhost.

Although youtube didn't just work as usual since the videos don't actually come from youtube.com, but from googlevideo.com instead. And my browser, expectably, enforces CORS and forbids any requests to it.

At that point I started to think of ways to somehow proxy googlevideo.com too. But the solutions are not at all trivial.

Then I thought what was the payoff of all this. I tried to proxy serve youtube out of curiosity, and sure thing, you can do it.

But what problem would proxying youtube solve? Maybe I should think in a fuller way what are the problems I have with youtube.

One issue I have is the exposure, discoverability. To explain it, let's say I have been watching a very, very big amount of videos as of today.

Personally I would expect youtube to understand very well by now what my tastes are, what do I want to watch and what I do NOT want to watch.

Notice that I am very black and white, and I do not have much interest in watching certain types of videos.

It could be true that if my expectations of how youtube should work became reality then youtube recommendations would become polarizing or echo chambering.

But that is my decision though, and the problem with youtube is that it's seemingly forcing a single recommendations algorithm onto everyone.

Some people are more open minded and want to watch EVERYTHING, and a lot of people don't.

But users aren't deciding what they should get recommended. Youtube is making that decision for them. And it sure feels like it's trying to maximize ad revenue.

I for one don't give two flying fucks about pranks or diva youtubers. Yet youtube is adamant in presenting some of these to me.

Now, trying to come up with a solution for this is really non trivial. It would definitely require some youtube mining, or some kind of network so as to not get rate limited when mining, and even then you still have to think of how a good recommendation system would work.

I think the implementation of all that would be too much for me (time and skill wise). But I think it's fun to at least try to outline how recommendations could work.

I would very much prefer that when youtube recommended something, at least it has some number of confidence meaning how much would I like that video, so at least I know what to expect.

It should also have some indicators like what is the mood of the video. As in, sometimes I watch youtube in the mood of learning, like programming videos, but most of the time I watch to get entertained.

These ideas are just brainstorms and could be terrible on reproduction, but I'd like to hear what ideas can some of the people here can come up with.

Is there something you find genuinely cool and would recommend ? Some webpage, program, OS, library or anything ?

I mean hey. There are SO MANY reaaaally cool things I didn't know until last few months.. Things I'd be so grateful for if I knew them earlier. I'll list some of them and I just know you have few of yours too. Feel free to educate the rest!

Processing - Program so fun to code in + CodingTrain(YTB channel)
Microcorruption.com - so freaking awesome if you wanna learn hacking / assembly (not x86 necessarily)
LiveOverflow - cool hacking channel
Radare - cool cmd Linux disassembler
vim-adventures.com - LEARN VIM (not just how to quit it) LITERALLY by playing a game!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
slashdot - stay updated , like really
"BEST-WEBSITES-A-PROGRAMMER-SHOULD-VISIT" - GUYS THIS! Sorry for caps but search this on GitHub and you will fucking die of happiness of how freaking useful links there are and no bullshit to dig through , just pure awesomeness. REALLY
HandBrake - Top media converter without bullshit and bloat stuff in it
Calibre - Best eBook management software capable of literally everything ebooks related. Kindle is a bloated joke compared to this
QubesOS - You know you can have every OS running at once - you have a Linux but are playing win games. Yup. It's there. Free
Computerphile - You all know it, it's just for completeness
Khan Academy - Same
VulnHub - download vulnerable VMs and hack them, or learn by reading writeup on how to do it!
Valgrind - MUST HAVE for C/C++ programmers
Computer Science crash course videos

That's all I can think of from top of my head but hey, there's more to it so definitely add your 2 cents!

Last thing, if nothing, just check the websites on GitHub, that's lifechanger

Looking forward to see some cool links & recommendations!

To you, who use Windows 11. Is there at least one feature that makes you glad you switched from 10 to 11? Or maybe not necessarily glad, but it would make you appreciate the new OS? One thing that would make the upgrade worth it... I myself can not think of a single fucking thing. (Please don't say better HDR support, that's the one most often mentioned feature. Definitely not good enough reason to have a new OS)

Well, this happens time to time...

I'm freelancing as a backend guy. I like to take care of all infrastructure before really starting to build anything, this mostly includes dev/staging/prod environments with some linear promotion strategy. So.. I did this API. Still on staging, proceeding with the development as planned, everything goes according the timeline.

And then.. this happens... At some point PM told frontend guy that it's time for production (without notifying me), so the frontend guy does what "anyone" would do in this case - tells PM to create DNS record for production to point to staging app.

Time passes, I'm still unaware of this. But I'm starting to see some quality entries in the DB, not the usual QA crap. I write to them that they're doing good job and continue with my tasks.

One of the tasks required some major DB change. I could've written migrations script, but since we're not in "production" yet, I just wipe the DB and recreate schema as I need it.

In 10 minutes the furious PM starts shouting that "production" is down and I need to fix it ASAP.

I'm lost, I'm asking questions, I'm slowly understanding what's happening...

So I want to grab some coffee, sat back down, wrote politely that they suck, added a finger emoji and terminated the contract.

Felt like the right thing to do as I definitely don't want to continue within the same "team".

Interesting...

On Friday, I was playing with the ChatGPT integration in DBeaver. I was using the DBeaver sample SQLite database. This database has a couple of tables, among them Album and Artist, where Album has a foreign key into Artist.

So, I asked it:

"give me a query that lists all albums from artists who's name starts with s"

The query I got back was:

SELECT * FROM Album

Uhh, okay.

But then, I noticed that I wrote "who's" instead of 'whose', which would be proper grammatically. So, I changed that, and then I got this query:

SELECT * FROM Album WHERE ArtistId IN (SELECT ArtistId FROM Artist WHERE Name LIKE 'S%');

Hooray, that works! I'm not sure it's the best way to write the query... I might have written:

SELECT * FROM album a, artist r WHERE a.artistid=r.artistid AND r.name LIKE 'S%'

...I'd have to check to see if one performs better than the other, and consider which syntax I find clearer, but that's a separate issue, it's just nice to see a working, reasonable query generated because that's the point, after all.

But I found it interesting that such a minor error would cause it to not work, that's my main point.

Interestingly, it seems to have learned: I just tried the same thing, and I got the right query either way. So that's pretty cool.

It's a pretty neat feature and I can see some legitimate value in it. I'm pretty good writing SQL myself... I've managed to write some truly hideously complex queries over the years... but there are definitely instances I can recall where the query didn't seem obvious at the start, and having an AI that can MAYBE produce something that is AT LEAST a starting point is definitely something I can get onboard with.

When everyone on YouTube has interfaces that definitely do NOT appear to you :/
I was supposed to create my pixel, give it a cute lil name and then test events ( Facebook ).
But NOOO ofc I would get a ton of issues in the process, everyone is able to connect their pixels safely but it took Facebook more than what, 4 days now ? To kindly inform me that:
Server external ID not matching to pixel external ID
You're sending the external_ID parameter for your PageView event from your server, but you're not sending the external_ID parameter for this event from your pixel. If you send external_ID for an event from your server, you must send it from your pixel as well in order for that event to be valid.
How am I even supposed to know how to fix that ! I just started learning programming, the only thing I know how to do is use Linux and write a ciao mundo C program. Now my store was supposed to be launched a week ago and I am still looking for solutions to this. Ugh.

I know this is utopic, but I've been thinking for a while now about starting an open source platform for figuring out the problems of our society and finding real world, applicable, open source solutions for them.

To give you some more details, the platform should have two interfaces:
- one for people involved in researching, compiling issues into smaller, concrete chunks that can be tackled in the real world, discuss and try to find workable solutions for the issues and so on
- one for the general public to search through the database of issues, become aware of the problems and follow progress on the issues that people started working on

Of course, anyone can join the platform, both as an observer (and have the ability to follow issues they find interesting) and/or contributor (and actually work with the community to make the world a better place in any way they can).

Each area of expertise would have some people that will manage the smaller communities that would build around issues, much like people already do in the open source community, managing teams to focus on the important thins for each issue. (I haven't found a solution for big egos getting in the way yet, but it would be nice if the people involved would focus on fixing stuff in stead of debating about tabs vs spaces, if you know what I mean).

The goal of this project would be to bring together as many people from all kind of fields to actually try to fix this broken society.

It would be even better if it attracted people with money and access to resources (one example off the top of my head being people like Elon Musk) that could help implement the solutions proposed by the community without expecting to gain profit off of it (profit is also acceptable if it is made in a considerate, fair and helpful way, but would not be promoted on the platform).

The whole thing would be voluntary work; no salary, no other commitment than the personal pledge that once someone chooses to tackle something, he/she will also see it trough (or at least do his/her best).

The platform would be something like a mix of real time communication, issue tracker, project management tool and publishing platform.

I don't yet have all the details for how it should all fit together, but if there is something that I would like to start, this is definitely it!

PS: I don't think I can ever do something like this by myself, and I don't really have the time to manage a community of developers to start work on it right now. But if you guys think something like this is something worth your time, I will make time and at least start on defining the architecture and try to turn this into a real project.

If enough people are interested, I will drop any other side projects and do my best to get this into the world!

Thank you for reading :)

It’s not the degree itself or even cs specifically that I find useful, but rather that you learn to put thoughts and ideas on paper in a structured manner. Explaining things you think you know is harder than it seems, especially when you know a teacher is going to grade you on how well you explain that thing.

Technology moves too fast these days for a program to he worth it in my opinion but the degree definitely raises the salary roof, so there’s always that.

The taboo of not finishing.

(As I prefaced to many posts I made, don't take this too seriously)

It is very normal in the programming world to get recommended to finish projects.

But I was wondering "what if you don't?".
Of course, we can agree that having little patience or persistence is not good for any endeavor.

But what if this recurrent focus on finishing is also bad?

Granted, I have started dozens of things and only finished one or two of them and none have become popular.
So there's not a lot of support to back my take.

But I definitely learned a lot from these projects. And I definitely had a lot of fun at some points.

In fact, I think if I had switched more often early on I would have been less miserable, and maybe I would have learned more by the virtue of not getting stuck with some project.

Of course this applies as long as you stay within the same field; it doesn't help learning gardening one day but karate the following.

But even then, there are so many hobbies in life that the chance of finding the one that you love and are the best at are very slim. So switching out of the least pleasant ones might bring you to a favorite one.

But, let's go back to programming.

Here, people recommend finishing things as means to become profitable. If you want to live as a gamedev, then you need to sell games, and to do that, you need to finish games.

That is understandable.

But if gamedev isn't your main profit, why is finishing games a requirement?

What's the point of publishing a game that you know looks like shit?

Why? Why should you put time and energy, pain and stress, all the way through the end only to finish or even publish a game that you can feel ashamed of how awful it looks? (because most 1st games look awful).

Why would you ever want to finish something that looks horrible?

First tries are always terrible, and that's fine, nothing wrong with that.

What's wrong is this sheepthought that you should publish to the public every turd that you can produce in your early learning stages.

I've been a programmer for almost 8 years now. I'm not the best out there, but I consider myself ok.

And considering I had some pretty deep depression pits thanks to this mentality, here's my advice to folk having stress with unfinished projects: don't give a single fuck.

If a side project has become stressful, shelf that shit, maybe tell someone about your issues with it. But don't care much about it.

In fact, if you manage to finish a project but it has costed you a great deal of stress, maybe that should be the shameful thing.

Life is too short to waste it considering suicide because you're not a prolific programmer.

And i would argue that iterating 100 times on different things is far more productive (and fun) than fetting stuck or spending shitloads of time on the first one, even if you don't finish any of them.

Okay this is my first time posting on this site. I've browsed it (definitely not in class) and the community looks beautiful, so I'm going to just kind of slide in here. Anyways this is the part where I use my caps lock button and type lots of naughty words I guess...

<rant type = 'school'>
Our programming classes are fucking DISMAL uuugh... Okay so we have four technology classes: Tech Exploration, Coding 1, Coding 2, and Intro to CS (a 'high school' level class)... So this means a fuck ton of kids in programming classes, mostly because I WANNA MAKE MINCERAFT AND BE A KEWL BOI LIKE GAME DEV BUT I'M ALSO A FUCKING IDIOT AND WILL NOT LEARN ANYTHING YAAAAAAY but that's a mood and so there's a fucking tidal wave of dumb kids in these classes. So right we're dealing with like 80 kids per class period. Sorry if I'm repeating myself but there are a FUCKTON of students. Now, we have... wait for it... ONE FUCKING TEACHER. ONE. I fucking swear this district does not give a SINGLE SHIT about possibly THE SINGLE FUCKING MOST IMPORTANT SUBJECT WHYYYYYY... Okay so the teacher is kinda overworked as fuck lol. She can't really teach eighty kids at once so she mostly gives us exercises from websites but when she can she teaches us shit herself and actually knows a good bit about her field of study. She's usually pretty grumpy, understandably, but if you ask her a good question that makes her think you can see the passion there lol. So anyways that's a mood. Now at the other school it's even worse. They have this new asshole as a teacher that knows NOTHING about ANYTHING IT IS SO FUCKING REDICULOUS OH MY UUUUUGH... THEY STILL DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT A FUCKING LOOP IS LIKE OKAY YOU'VE BEEN TEACHING PROGRAMMING FOR A YEAR AND YOU'RE THE ONLY ONE TEACHING IT AT THAT DISTRICT SO MAYBE YOU SHOULD AT LEAST FUCKING TRY WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU... so he just makes them do shit from a website and obviously can't do half of the shit he assigns it's so fucking sad... I swear this district is supposed to be good but maybe not for the ONE THING I WANT IT TO BE GOOD FOR. Funny story: in elementary school once I wrote down school usernames for people I didn't really know and shared them a google doc that said "you have been hacked make a more secure password buddy" etc etc and made them the owner and these dull shits report it to the principal... So I'm in the principles office... Just a fucking dumb elementary school kid lol and the principal is like hAcKiNg Is BaD yOu ShOuLd NoT dO iT and I'm like how did you know it was me... so he goes on to say some bullshit about 'digital footprint' and 'tracing' me to it... he obviously has no clue what he's saying but anyways afterwards he points to where it says last change made by MY SCHOOL ACCOUNT... HOW DULL CAN YOU FUCKING POSSIBLY BE IT WAS FROM MY ACCOUNT THAT LITERALLY PROVED THAT I DID --NOT-- 'HACK' INTO THEIR ACCOUNT YOU DUMB FUCK. Okay so basically my school is a burning pile of garbage but it's better than most apparently but it's GARBAGE MY GOD... Please fucking tell me it gets better...

okay lol that was longer than I thought it would be guess I just needed to vent... later I guess
</rant>

In today's job interview for an apprenticeship for the "Anwendungsentwicklung" position where they specialize in SAP systems (ABAP).

They told me that this position is a new thing in their company and that they want me, once I agree with their contract (which they will send later), to take responsibility for that.

I'm fine with that.

Now comes the part that is bugging me. They also said that the IT manager does not want to be disturbed often, if I have questions.

(I mean I will definitely have some questions. I am an apprentice after all, right? Like why should I join your apprenticeship program, if you refuse to teach me stuff? I can study on my own, as well and not be in your program.)

Just a few times and that's it. They admitted that they do not know much about that position and that I have to learn most things myself. No books and no other resources. They also do not know where the school is going to be yet.

The people in the interview I've spoken to where nice and we made some jokes here and there, but the fact that the company does not want to support me in an apprenticeship is saddening.

I do not know...maybe I'm just too concerned and this is normal day to day stuff for apprentices, but from what I have read about apprenticeships this is not the right thing to do as a company on the internet.

Correct me in the comments, if you think differently.

I will use this company as a last resort.

So I get this email from google for my development account about these new general data protection regulations and what they're doing with admob and all that good stuff.

I didn't dive too deep and there's nothing crazy in it but it definitely feels like it's spawned on by this "selling you data to advertisers thing."

We live in such a weird society where it's like outrage after outrage. I've never known anybody who has NOT known that their statistics and data was sold to third party for marketing for EVERYTHING they do on the computer or phone. For a DECADE or longer. It always seemed to be such a second hand thought but now out of nowhere everyone has their panties in a wad for something they ALREADY knew.

Are we like that miserable/bored/no hobbies/unsatisfied with our first world life that we have to just flip out about dumb crap all the time?

Hey people. I am writing a script(not any computer's script, but just a simple dialogue-script) for an adventure game that I have been thinking of designing. But It's a dialogue based game , so i need someone with Fine grammar to edit it.(i guess it's kinda visible from this rant how aweful my English is )

I can't say it is open source ( kind of like my first amazing idea that i want to get recognized for ), but the thing is, i won't be earning from it and I will definitely give you an equal recognition for contribution.

Can anyone Help?

Trying out Gnome again, because KDE is "just ok", and Hyprland and DWM are fine, but I wanted to try something different. (Actually DWM is amazing, and Hyprland is sorta weird?)

You know, it's not that bad. Doesn't even seem to be as memory crazy as everyone seems to say either...idk what I did, but it appears to be using around a GB, maybe a little less. Definitely not the experience I remember from the Gnome 2 days. Anyway, I was curious, so I was looking at the source on Github....and why the fuck is there javascript in this DE code? WHY. I do not understand.

Maybe I'm fucking nuts, but I actually kind of like the workflow, once I've applied a couple of "tweaks". But seriously, I am fucking gobsmacked at the JS thing. Why.

Definitely random question.
Anything to essentially grab as a visitor in Los Angeles this August ?
Techy thing, but not that expensive preferred.
Amazon deliverable preferred as well

not sure if actual bad habit, or just a natural consequence of what i'm writing often being de-facto "exploratory code" so the "bad habit" is actually the right choice, or...

but very often when i finish a functionality and look at the first version of the code, and realize how bad it is, and how it blocks me to implement following features... rather than just fix/improve that code, i just want to nuke all of it and write it from scratch again, and "better this time", because it seems like much less work and effort than trying to gradually fix it "in-place".

it definitely feels like a bad habit though, because it often results in me deleting and implementing to completion the same thing 4 times in a row.

Sooooo I came in to work yesterday and the first thing I see is that our client can't log on to the cms I set up for her a month ago. I go log in with my admin credentials and check the audit logs.

It says the last person to access it was me, the date and time exactly when we first deployed it to production.

One month ago.

I fired a calm email to our project managers (who've yet to even read the client complaint!) to check with ops if the cms production database had been touched by the ops team responsible for the sql servers. Because it was definitely not a code issue, and the audit logs never lie.

Later in the day, the audit log updated itself with additional entries - apparently someone in ops had the foresight to back up the database - but it was still missing a good couple weeks of content, meaning the backup db was not recent.

Fucking idiots.

!rant
TL;DR - not sure if I should take a full-time gig at my current pretty good job, or go do an internship with AWS for the summer.

Needing some wizened development career advice, guys. I am coming to a small crossroads at the moment.

I am in my last year of school getting a BS in Computer Science. I love it. I had a pretty sweet job at a cool startup, until recently, when they were bought by a bigger company. This turned out to still be alright though, since they hired everyone on to the new company to keep our codebase alive and well (it's a pretty good product that they don't want to get rid of). Except they hired me as an Intern instead, which I thought was weird, but they said that's normally what they do with peeps that are still in school. Whatevs. But then I got offered an internship at some company called Amazon Web Services to be a Systems Analyst Intern (basically cloud support engineering from the sounds of it). And then I told the cats at the new company that I was considering this internship and they started saying they'd consider giving me full-time. And they didn't want to lose me.

Well... my thing is that both are tempting. Like the company that'd offer me a full-time gig would be cool because I'd get to keep working on the projects I'm currently on and I'd be immersed in a good development cycle and whatnot. Probably more full-stack programming, which I like a good bit and want to master more of. The Amazon thing seems cool, but I worry that it'd be more of a support gig. And as well as they pay, I may not get as good of development experience. Granted I was told I could definitely get into scripting to automate various things. But I just don't know how much would actually be that. Except having Amazon on my resume would likely be pretty great to have also coming out of graduation.

Down yet another avenue of thought, the AWS internship would only be for a few months in the Summer. So there's a chance I could come back and I could get my old job back. But maybe they would see me as disloyal or something and not want me to come back. I would also likely forfeit my retention bonus (which is an ok amount, but not a deal-breaker and it's spread out over 3 years) for staying on with the company after the acquisition.

I just don't know. Would it be better to stay where I'm at or go on a wild adventure over the summer? Help me, DevRant Kenobi you're my only hope...

The good thing about a Google search that includes "words in speech marks" is that Google will *only* return pages where that phrase definitely appears.

Or not.

After a few years at one company, most of the colleagues that take their dev education seriously have left. We had a mini community keeping ourselves up to speed as technology progresses. As time passed, I've noticed that I'm stagnating which is one of the biggest signs, for me, that I should move somewhere.

I'm now at a new company, working on a project that is in a much worse place than any of the project I've worked on previously.

I've done my due diligence and checked the company before joining, of course. And I've asked all the questions I wanted to know so I can know with some level of certainty whether we're the right fit. Sadly, that definitely didn't turn out to be true.

I'm currently working on tasks that any intern/junior can work on, while being paid a senior salary. There are a lot of areas in the project where I can spend my time more efficiently, e.g. stability, performance. But, it turns out that swapping colors, brushing some css here and there is more important to the client than fixing very, very unstable project.

And I'm not the share holder. It's not up to me to decide. The only thing I can comment with certainty is, why just not hire 2 juniors that can do the same work I do right now, instead of wasting my time/energy on meaningless tasks and such boring issues that I've left behind years ago. I've emphasized that being challenged is very important to me, and I'm given breadcrumbs to deal with.

And I'm unsure what to do now. I don't want to be that guy leaving just a few months after joining. Should I wait it out? I already mentioned that I don't think I'm properly utilized to lead dev and PM. I guess I should give them a month or two to see whether something will change?

I have an interest in methods to make myself smarter. At times some ideas seem to be just out of my reach. I don't always know the reason why. Eventually with persistence I am able to figure things out. However, I always wonder if there are techniques to learn things faster, better, more completely, with less struggle, etc. Would being smarter help with this. I wondered, "Can I create a program/method to increase IQ through training?"

So I found an interesting book called "The Neuroscience of Intelligence" by Richard J. Haier.
Very quickly I was engrossed in this book. It is written in a very accessible way and slowly trickles in the jargon. The book is basically the culmination of 40 years of studying the subject. The main point of the book is: you cannot increase your IQ through techniques and tricks. The only realistic avenue for increasing IQ is through genetics. Your IQ is based upon nature, not nurture. This is a result of the data, not opinion. The writer of this book follows what the science is telling him. This was not what I wanted to hear. He also went on to explain that the statement "You can be whatever you want to be if you work hard enough." He said this is false. Some people, no matter how hard they try, will not be able to get past certain limitations in aptitude. This statement will probably make a lot of people mad, but the data led this researcher to this conclusion. Though I sense he found this disheartening (my opinion). I know I did.

So after reading this book over the weekend I am a bit perturbed that there are not recognizable techniques to increase IQ through mental exercises. Websites all over will say otherwise, but it isn't a thing.

What to do? I decided I am going to find ways to maximize my potential. I will create a set of mental exercises that help me use what I got to the full potential. I know when I see different ways to think about things I get a bit better at solving problems. So learning and experience is still a way to improve your intellect, if not IQ. If I feel like I have made progress in this endeavor I will definitely share.

If you have any interest in neuroscience then I recommend the book I read this weekend. It is very accessible for the reader not versed in the subject. I knew virtually nothing about the topic and now I feel I have a good grounding in the state of the art. It has some neat info on some potentially better approaches to AI as well.

So, i have that assignment about docker stuff. nifty piece of software i must say.

anyways im installing docker software on windows bc im thinking if i have something that gives me at least the correct structure and some skeletal syntax i will have a faster grasp of the thing. expecting some sort of high level ide but end up instead with what looks like a blank window, with the only obvious choice being sign into some bullshit i dont need. but thats another story

my point is:
when installing the thing it prompted me to install WSL2. which i supposedly am not supposed to have because my cpu doesnt support intel virtualisation. but being impatient (thats why i came to look for an assisted solution), i pursued the installation.

lo and behold: i end up with a shell prompt at the root of a linux filesystem!
i ran 2 or 3 muscle-memory commands and closed the prompt, i was in docker stuff up to the neck.
later on, when i go back to my project, in a virtual machine its sluggish af and screams at me that amd-v is not supported because of something something nested pages (will look up later how that one works).

dont have time to explore it some more yet, and especially experiment or even barely look at this glorious mess because i have something barely working and no time to have it fail.
but this story definitely left me perplexed.

and also : you can run WSL2 on an fx8350

My coworkers and I work in close quarters in a laboratory all day. We all get along well, and since we don’t have “offices” and often work together on things, we are a pretty close team.

We recently got a new member, Jill, who is 22, and this is her first job out of college. She lives at home with her parents, who are incredibly well-off, and has lived at home all through college. The rest of us are late 20’s to late 30’s. Jill is very nice but also very sensitive and somewhat immature, and I’m not sure if she’s just not 100% sure how to deal with people in professional settings yet or what’s going on, but almost everything that comes out of her mouth has to do with money, mainly how much money her family has. If it might offer some context, Jill and her family are not from the U.S., but have been here since Jill was a teenager.

I usually just kind of inwardly roll my eyes and change the subject, but with the holidays it’s gotten considerably worse and Jill is driving my team and me crazy. Some examples of things she has said just in the past week are: “My dad’s buying my mom a new car for Christmas!” “I’m going to buy my mom a Gucci Keychain for Christmas. It’s $225 dollars!” “I’m so excited, my mom is buying my puppy a Tiffany collar for Christmas!”

The thing that sent me over the edge was when a male coworker asked for ladies’ opinions on a very nice coat he was considering buying for his girlfriend. My opinion was something along the lines of “I like it, but I would go with the gray because white coats get dirty very easily, in my experience,” whereas Jill’s opinion was “It’s not even a name brand, you should go with either a North Face or a Michael Kors.”

I am honestly not sure if Jill knows there are people in the world who are not as well-off as her family is, and that people who aren’t as “fortunate” don’t want to hear these kinds of things every day. We are not paupers, but we are definitely not buying our dogs Tiffany collars. Is there a way that I can tell her to please stop talking about how rich her family is, without sounding jealous or mean, or causing a lot of friction on my team? Like I said, she’s a nice person, but money is a touchy subject in any capacity and I think this might hinder her professionally in the future, not to mention that we’re all sick of hearing about it!

I need advice.

I'm going to apply for PhD this year, but here's the thing, I don't have a specific interest in anything.

This sounds weird but I only want to do thinking. Like solving problems.

I would have a paper coming out this month as first author, but we discovered some weekends of our algorithm recently and decided to postponed the paper (there are 4 professors on the project and one researcher), so I guess this will definitely affect my application.

Like, what shall I say even on the personal statement? That I have one active mind that just won't stop thinking? The very fact that everything is interesting to me made me not interested to anything.

I’m working on a new app I’m pretty excited about.

I’m taking a slightly novel (maybe 🥲) approach to an offline password manager. I’m not saying that online password managers are unreliable, I’m just saying the idea of giving a corporation all of my passwords gives me goosebumps.

Originally, I was going to make a simple “file encrypted via password” sort of thing just to get the job done. But I’ve decided to put some elbow grease into it, actually.

The elephant in the room is what happens if you forget your password? If you use the password as the encryption key, you’re boned. Nothing you can do except set up a brute-forcer and hope your CPU is stronger than your password was.

Not to mention, if you want to change your password, the entire data file will need to be re-encrypted. Not a bad thing in reality, but definitely kinda annoying.

So actually, I came up with a design that allows you to use security questions in addition to a password.

But as I was trying to come up with “good” security questions, I realized there is virtually no such thing. 99% of security question answers are one or two words long and come from data sets that have relatively small pools of answers. The name of your first crush? That’s easy, just try every common name in your country. Same thing with pet names. Ice cream flavors. Favorite fruits. Childhood cartoons. These all have data sets in the thousands at most. An old XP machine could run through all the permutations over lunch.

So instead I’ve come up with these ideas. In order from least good to most good:

1) [thinking to remove this] You can remove the question from the security question. It’s your responsibility to remember it and it displays only as “Question #1”. Maybe you can write it down or something.

2) there are 5 questions and you need to get 4 of them right. This does increase the possible permutations, but still does little against questions with simple answers. Plus, it could almost be easier to remember your password at this point.

All this made me think “why try to fix a broken system when you can improve a working system”

So instead,

3) I’ve branded my passwords as “passphrases” instead. This is because instead of a single, short, complex word, my program encourages entire sentences. Since the ability to brute force a password decreases exponentially as length increases, and it is easier to remember a phrase rather than a complicated amalgamation or letters number and symbols, a passphrase should be preferred. Sprinkling in the occasional symbol to prevent dictionary attacks will make them totally uncrackable.

In addition? You can have an unlimited number of passphrases. Forgot one? No biggie. Use your backup passphrases, then remind yourself what your original passphrase was after you log in.

All this accomplished on a system that runs entirely locally is, in my opinion, interesting. Probably it has been done before, and almost certainly it has been done better than what I will be able to make, but I’m happy I was able to think up a design I am proud of.

Part of my remote work is to have a daily call reporting in on what I have done yesterday and what I am about to today. My colleague calls me for it. She's hired as a tech support and is suddenly assigned to take note and report on my work activities to our boss. Several times, I caught her pretending to know what I'm talking about like with Puppet configurations, Firewall diagnosis packets, ActiveMQ, Regex, etc. Most of the time, I just let it go as its not my job to validate her knowledge on these different but many services. Just do the call, get the report in, carry on. How difficult was that?

Yesterday, our call was left sour because I somehow blew up. I think I've reached my patience with this woman's assumptions to how these services work. Now I feel guilty for yelling at a lady but goddamn she stoopid for fibbing through my ear. Somebody help! What do I do?

If I report to our boss about her technical incompetence (politely), she might get sacked. She's a good tech support as long as she still has her trusty manuals by her, she can fix specific problems. But when it comes to unknown tech to her, she assumed she knew.

If I tell her about her weaknesses, however constructive I can get and as politely as I can get, all the while complimenting something about her, showing her how to improve herself, maybe she'll do better not to ask silly questions like buying a Puppet certificate? At least getting rid of ignorance would definitely help but not sure how she would take it. The worst thing I would imagine is her backfiring and yelling at me and then we ended up fighting.

If I kept quiet and tuck it all into a can, it will eventually implode as we go on.

This is not about her gender. I don't see her as a woman. I see her as a tech support engineer who should know her stuff.

[CONCEITED RANT]
I'm frustrated than I'm better tha 99% programmers I ever worked with.

Yes, it might sound so conceited.
I Work mainly with C#/.NET Ecosystem as fullstack dev (so also sql, backend, frontend etc), but I'm also forced to use that abhorrent horror that is js and angular.
I write readable code, I write easy code that works and rarely, RARELY causes any problem, The only fancy stuff I do is using new language features that come up with new C# versions, that in latest version were mostly syntactic sugar to make code shorter/more readable/easier.

People I have ever worked with (lot of) mostly try to overdo, overengineer, overcomplicate code, subdivide into methods when not needed fragmenting code and putting tons of variables.

People only needed me to explain my code when the codebase was huge (200K+ lines mostly written by me) of big so they don't have to spend hours to understand what's going on, or, if the customer requested a new technology to explain such new technology so they don't have to study it (which is perfectly understandable). (for example it happened that I was forced to use Devexpress package because they wanted to port a huge application from .NET 4.5 to .NET 8 and rewriting the whole devexpress logic had a HUGE impact on costs so I explained thoroughly and supported during developement because they didn't knew devexpress).

I don't write genius code or clevel tricks and patterns. My code works, doesn't create memory leaks or slowness and mostly works when doing unit tests at first run. Of course I also put bugs and everything, but that's part of the process.

THe point is that other people makes unreadable code, and when they pass code around you hear rising chaos, people cursing "WTF this even means, why he put that here, what the heck this is even supposed to do", you got the drill. And this happens when I read everyone code too.

But it doesn't happens the opposite. My code is often readable because I do code triple backflips only on personal projects because I don't have to explain anyone and I can learn new things and new coding styles.

Instead, people want to impress at work, and this results in unintelligible, chaotic code, full of bugs and that people can't read. They want to mix in the coolest technologies because they feel their virtual penis growing to showoff that they are latest bleeding edge technology experts and all.

They want to experiment on business code at the expense of all the other poor devils who will have to manage it.

Heck, I even worked with a few Microsoft MVPs.
Those are deadly. They're superfast code throughput people that combine lot of stuff.
THen they leave at you the problems once they leave.

This MVP guy on a big project for paperworks digital acquisiton for a big company did this huge project I got called to work in, which consited in a backend and a frontend web portal, and pushed at all costs to put in the middle another CDN web project and another Identity Server project to both do Caching with the cdn "to make it faster" and identity server for SSO (Single sign on).

We had to deal with gruesome work to deal with browser poor caching management and when he left, the SSO server started to loop after authentication at random intervals and I had to solve that stuff he put in with days of debugging that nasty stuff he did.

People definitely can't code, except me.
They have this "first of the class syndrome" which goes to the extent that their skill allows them to and try to do code backflips when they can't even do code pushups, to put them in a physical exercise parallelism.

And most people is like this. They will deny and won't admit, they believe they're good at it, but in reality they aren't.

There is some genius out there that does revoluitionary code and maybe needs to do horrible code to do amazing stuff, and that's ok. And there is also few people like me, with which you can work and produce great stuff.

I found one colleague like this and we had a $800.000 (yes, 800k) project in .NET Technology, which consisted in the renewal of 56 webservices and 3 web portals and 2 Winforms applications for our country main railway transport system. We worked in 2 on it, with a PM from the railway company.

It was estimated 14 months of work and we took 11 and all was working wonders. We had ton of fun doing it because also their PM was a cool guy and we did an awesome project and codebase was a jewel. The difficult thing you couldn't grasp if you read the code is if you don't know how railway systems work and that's the only difficult thing.

Sight, there people is macking me sick of this job

So I'm assigned once again to fix a new someone else created and that seems to be the case whenever there's an issue...

Boss just assigns it to whoever is most likely to be able to investigate it... which is basically me. Other than the little time I can use to develop stuff, I'm usually cleaning up other people's messes.

And these other people are to busy working on new crap to properly explain how their existing code/processes/changes works.

And well the fact that anything breaks in production (that's not due to upstream one off issues) whoever does not think he needs to take responsibility for it.

So everyone else and especially me has to spend time understanding the shit they wrote and fixing it for them.

How do I tell my boss this nicely that we need clearly definitely ownership and whenever a component blows up in prod, the guy that wrote the code fixes it no matter what? Thereby incentivizing him to not write shit code in the first place and be more proactive in making sure it doesn't in the first place since he knows otherwise he's doing overtime to fix it?

Is it just me or is there really no such thing as a dev job where something doesn't blow up due to poorly tested and designed code every other day?

Hi guys, I need your help. Mostly those who use MacBook for development. I'm looking to buy a new laptop and was thinking of getting a MacBook. This will be my first time owning one. I always used Windows but for almost over a year now, I've been on Elementary OS. I do programming on my current laptop in Eclipse, IntelliJ and mostly, Android development in Android Studio. Also, I'm learning HTML and CSS. The battery of my current HP laptop has degraded to the point this thing only last 30 - 40mins when unplugged. Because of this, I can't do much on-the-go. Buying a new windows laptop, I know I will definitely dual boot with another Linux distro or better full boot Linux and get rid of Windows. My question is, how is programming or development on a MacBook. How's does Android studio perform? Are there anything that MacBook users wished worked better on Macs which involves Development? Please help because I can't decide and since I haven't used a MacBook as my daily driver, I'm not sure how it will affect my work writing code in there.

Thanks I'm advance for your answers. 😁

Not the 'most embarrassing' part but not my proud moment either.

My sir have recently put me alongside him as the teacher assistant in this summer's batch. Last week he had to go somewhere so he asked me to take a github session with the class( well not exactly asked, but i just voluntarily commented) . mind you am myself a novice, never done anything beyond pushing data commits and pull requests. (But sir was fine with it , saying he wants the students to atleast enough knowledgeable to submit there homeworks.)

Fast forward to Night before class and i am trying to sleep but couldn't. I had all ppts prepared, hell i even prepared a transcript( hell i uploaded it to pastebin thinking i will look at it and read ).

But worst shit always has to happen when you do a presentation.

When the class started, the wify was not working. Those guys had never had done anything related to it so first thing we did was to make sure every of them gets git installed(with lots of embarrassments and requesting everyone to share their hotspots.not my faluts, tbh).

Then again, am a Windows-linux user with noobie linux and null mac experience. So when this 1 girl with mac got problems installing, i was like, "please search on SO" 🐣 .
So after half an hour, almost everyone had their git/github accounts ready to work, so i started woth explaining open source and github's working. In the middle of session, i wanted to show them meaning of github's stars ("shows how appreciated a repo is"), nd i had thought of showing them the react js repo . And when i tried searching it i couldn't find it (its name is just react, not reactjs ) so ,again :🐥🐥🐣

So somehow this session of 1-1.5 hour got completed in 4 hours with me repeating myself many many many times.
And the most stupid thing: our institute has every session recorded, so my awkward presentation is definitely in their computers 🐣🐣🐥🐥

I'll have to make some tough choices over the next 6 months. With my tech career beginning and my college education ramping up, time is of the essence, and the skills I develop now will be at the forefront of my future. So what does this have to do with Microsoft?

Well, the story begins in the Spring of 2016. Social Forums was about to turn a year old, Trump's campaign was ramping up, and I had just found my love for technology. With all my friends having phones, I had to get a phone and get working on development. The year before, Windows 10 was launched, and I was psyched. I found Microsoft's products to be underrated with potential. That day, I purchased a Lumia 640, upgraded it to Windows 10, and immediately began working. After another year-and-a-half gone by, I went from loving Microsoft, to defending Microsoft, to tolerating Microsoft. I could go on and on about the lousy structure, the privacy issues, the forced upgrades, the redundant developer platform, and other such issues that is leading me away from them. But if there is one thing they have proven over the years, is that the they are completely out of touch with its developers and its customers. They spent years ramping up their phones. They failed. They spend years ramping up their phones. They failed. They spend years ramping up their semi-annual OS updates. They failed. So why did they fail? It's not that they made the wrong prediction out of chance. They legitimately don't care about feedback. It's their way or the highway. This sounds vaguely familiar. They have been spending a decade ignoring feedback from the community because they want to become just like Apple. Right now, Apple LIVES off of brand loyalty and its stable, useful ecosystem. This cannot work for Microsoft as they don't have a lot of brand loyalty. But most of all, they don't have a working ecosystem. They have Windows Insiders, which provides them with hundreds of feedback messages per day. These include suggestions, bug reports, and constructive criticism. The feedback is public. You can have several pages of the same complaint, and they still won't do anything about it. They say they have a good relationship with their community, and that this Beta program helps Windows become better for all. But in the end, we are nothing more than a glorified unpaid labor force. They fired hundreds of professional debuggers just before the Insider Program took off. We are only here to provide bug reports for free. Now that their phones, AR headsets, browser, online services, and VR headsets are failing for all these reasons, I see little reason to develop for Windows anymore. I don't just mean their UWP and App Store platforms, I mean Windows as a whole. I'm definitely not a Mac guy either. I never see myself going to Mac either, as they are really no different in terms of how they treat their Developers and PC users. If things continue down this route, I will leave the platform all together. I've always wanted to be a Systems Programmer, so I don't really need an established paid platform to be successful. Even now, I'm not certain about leaving Windows altogether but as a developer, I need to find my place. Time is of the essence in my life, and I need to find out my place in the software world. Now I think it isn't on the Windows platform like I had dreamed it would be. But where do I go?

tldr: I am looking for recommendations for a basic website for my parents. GOTO question;

Pre-Story:
My parents have a small (offline) business. They have a website to give some general information and list their weekly offers.
When I felt that what has come out of the website-building tool (you know, clicky clicky stuff) looked a bit too early 2000's and is a total ripoff for what you get (almost 20€ per month), I created something with Google Sites for them. Feel free to roast me, but web development is not my field and now it looks much more modern, is mobile friendly and does what it is supposed to do. Weekly offers are edited in a google sheets file, which is embedded in the website. Not great, but this way my mom doesn't have to deal with editing a tables on the page - trust me, it won't look good. This also meant they could downgrade the hosting package to discard the clicky-tool and just the domain (maybe 1€ per month). The website itself is hosted for free by Google.

Some time ago GDPR became a thing and then I was tasked to have a look at it. (side note: I don't want to rant about being responsible for it, that's fine. My parents don't really ask me to do a lot for them.) You can't enter any data on the website, it's just very basic stuff and data protection wise there's just the "usual" stuff (cookies, embedded tools, logs). I added another site with a halfway complete privacy policy. Regarding the whole cookie issue (do not enforce unnecessary cookies) I couldn't find an easy solution. It's not 100%, but what can you really expect from a small business like this? I've seen worse.

Now to the question:
Can you recommend a good alternative to the current solution (Google Sites)?
It should be cheap (<3€/month incl. domain) and my parents should be able to make some basic changes (just text in predefined locations). I am not afraid to get my hands dirty - I can deal with some HTML, CSS, JS - but I don't want to sink a lot of time into this. No need for analytics or the like. Maybe a newsletter would be cool (with the weekly offers), but that's just a random thought of mine and definitely not necessary.

Thanks for reading :)

TL;DR I just recently started my apprenticeship, it's horrible so far, I want to quit, but don't know what to do next...

Okay, first of all, hey there! My name is Cave and I haven't been on here for a while, so I hope the majority of you is doing rather okay. I'm programming for 6 years now, have some work experience already, since I used to volunteer for a company for half a year, in which I discovered my love for integrations and stuff. These background information will probably be necessary to understand my agony in full extend.

So, okay, this is about my apprenticeship. Generally speaking, I was expecting to work, and to learn something, gaining experience. So far, it only involved me, reading through horrible code, fixing and replacing stuff for them, I didn't learn a thing yet, and we are already a month in.

When I said the code is horrible, well, it is the worst I have ever seen since I started programming. Little documentation - if any -, everywhere you look there is deprecated code, which may or may not been commented out, often loops or simply methods seem to be foreign for them, as the code is cluttered with copy paste code everywhere and on top of that all, the code is slow as heck, like wtf.

I spent my past month with reading their code, trying to understand what most of this nonsense is for, and then just deleting and rewriting it entirely. My code suddenly is only 5% or their size and about 1000 times faster. Did I mention I am new to this programming language yet? That I have absolutely no experience in that programming language? Because well I am new and don't have any experience, yet, I have little to no struggle doing it better.

Okay, so, imagine, you started programming like 20 years ago, you were able to found your own business, you are getting paid a decent amount of money, sounds alright, right? Here comes the twist: you have been neglecting every advancement made in developing software for the past 20 years, yup, that's what it feels like to work here.

At this point I don't even know, like is this normal? Did git, VSCode and co. spoil me? Am I supposed to use ancient software with ancient programming languages to make my life hell? Is programming supposed to be like this? I have no clue, you tell me, I always thought I was doing stuff right.

Well, this company is not using git, infact, they have every of their project in a single folder and deleting it by accident is not that hard, I almost did once, that was scary. I started out working locally, just copying files, so shit like that won't happen, they told me to work directly in the source. They said it's fine, that's why you can see 20 copies of the folder, in the same folder... Yes, right, whatever.

I work using a remote desktop, the server I work on is Windows server 2008, you want to make icons using gimp? Too bad, Gimp doesn't support windows server 2008, I don't think anything does anymore, at least I haven't found anything, lol.

They asked me to integrate Google Maps into their projects, I thought it is gonna be fun, well, turns out their software uses internet explorer 9.. and Google maps api does not support internet explorer 9... I ended up somehow installing CEF3 on that shit and wrote an API for it in JS. Writing the API was actually kind of fun, but integrating it in their software sucked and they told me I will never integrate stuff ever again, since they usually don't do that. I mean, they don't have a Backend as far as I can tell, it looks like stuff directly connects with their database, so I believe them, but you know... I love integrating stuff..

So at this point you might be thinking, then why don't you just quit? Well I would, definitely. I'm lucky that till December I can quit without prior notice, just need a resignation as far as I can tell, but when I quit, what do I do next? Like, I volunteered for a company for half a year and I'd argue I did a good job, but with this apprenticeship it only adds up to about 7 months of actual work experience. Would anybody hire somebody with this much actual work experience? I also consider doing freelancing, making a living out of just integrating stuff, but would people pay for that? And then again, would they hire somebody with this much experience? I don't want to quit without a plan on what to do next, but I have no clue.

Am I just spoiled, is programming really just like that, using ancient tools and stuff? Let me know. Advice is welcomed as well, because I'm at a loss. Thanks for reading.

How is complaining about npm install taking forever still a thing? I reinstalled my whole npm folder over cellular the other day while talking shit over coffee... relatively quick as fuck.

In saying that though, it should definitely only pull necessary requirements to run the project not every fucking thing.

Not really most painful, but definitely most painful of the recent bunch..
// yup, a bunch.. I've managed to fuck up a little on every thing I did that day :/ little friday the 13th for me, especially as I went on sick leave the next day and had to fixup my fuckups with a friggin migrane..

Anyways, I was fixing fallback to some default value in plsql.. before it didn't check what the input format was and simply relied on certain format, parsed that and converted to number..threw an error, duh!

I fixed it somehow elegantly to check with regex if the format is as expected and if not default to xy value..and if format is as expected to parse out the number..except that when I copied (or typed?! for the sake of me, I cannot recall how the fuck I managed to fuck this up) over the code to the package I didn't see additional [ at the begining, so everything went to the default.. Most embarrassing part is I commented everything, how it should work, use cases, what the input was and what was expected output..and failed to see the friggin extra [..
It was fixed easily, the extra [ stood out later when I saw the code, but it bothers me how I managed to overlook that in the first place. I think I need a vacation.. but have to fix other fuckups first.. :/

I have joined a new company recently and I'm worried.
Really have worry because of my people skills and little doubt on the manager. I mean what do I know I just joined but still overthinking it.

There are people who speak confidently and I feel intimidated because in the casual conversations I don't feel like I can contribute at this point at least, it's been a week only. Other thing is as I do not know much about the work, I can't speak in the meetings. I know that I'm expecting a lot from myself here as I just joined but I have a history of being silent in the meetings and in my previous organisation I could deal with it as I got comfortable finally.
How can I be more interactive with people, given that some are cold?

About my manager, he is young. He definitely has a good IQ that's why he is a manager now.
The thing is, he talks a lot. Conversations are not 2 way, and he kept on saying things without even understanding that I'm overwhelmed. I have previously told him that I am overwhelmed, he listened, took 2 minutes and continued with his all work related talks.

I don't like the way he's stating his expectations from the time I didn't even join. He told me everything about the organization, on first day, he gave me a 2 months rough expectations of me. I don't agree with all the points he makes but it doesn't seem plausible for me to interrupt and say my thing. For example when he stated his expectations, I should have stopped him and politely tell that it's too soon we can discuss these things in upcoming weeks. But just because he continues rambling, I can't say it. It seems a small thing but I know it's not proper conversation and will create issues for me. As I have had similar kind of manager before, who used to ramble and didn't stop talking. But couldn't understand my problems etc.

1. Speaking strictly physiologically, masturbation and intercourse orgasms aren't that different in what it feels like down there. The only difference is what it feels like in your mind, but that depends on your partner and your compatibility.
2. Fleshlight Stoya edition obliterates everything that breathes in terms of orgasm power, except for one single blowjob I received from an autistic mind-reading trans boy. But he's rare.
3. If you wonder whether no-fap or no-orgasm lifestyle has benefits, it doesn't. My high score is three months without orgasm. After two weeks, you stop thinking about sex. Morning wood disappears completely. You have considerably less energy, and every time you ask yourself why, you remember: “ah, it's that no orgasm thing.” Then, it's quite hard to go back to having sex — your penis just won't go up.
4. Sucking your own dick feels weird, just like tickling yourself. It's hard to focus, and the pleasure is next to none. If you always wanted to do that, you can forget about it — it's not worth it.
5. If you're a penis person, high quality anal orgasm is THE best physiological feeling you can get without drugs. Totally blows anything penis-related out of the water, including edging and other advanced techniques. If you chase self-exploration and wonder what your mind/body are capable of, definitely try it, though you have to find an experienced partner & be patient with your body.
Pro tip: if you're a man in a traditional monogamous relationship (if so, what are you even doing with your life?…), it might be easier to convince your female partner to allow you having affairs with penis people than to go full polyamorous mode.

!dev
So the day started at 12am(lol) when I woke up, because the day usually starts when you wake up, except that for me it started when I didn't go to sleep. No problem, worked on web project, I also do some sysadmin stuff, I love these two fields and I learn so much by just doing it so it is a fucking pain to go to school where I can only sleep coz the shit they teach I already know or not relevant/makes no sense to me and my life. Drains the fcking life out of me.

Question:
Is college the same or it is possible to enjoy because you can focus on what you love in your full time?
I consider myself a self-taught(coz I just sit at my computer and use the internet lolz, no one has helped me in my profession before, mainly coz I hate asking for help) and I see a lot that degree is not worth it, go for a job...
One thing I know is that I'll definitely try to find any job as soon as I get the fuck out of here, I'm 17 and I feel I'm already late (yeah, that's stupid).

I wanted to ask you guys, maybe someone is/was in the same situation or something but I'm just thinking loudly here :D

Right now I'm at a theatre with my class, I am so lonely here I have a whole free row for myself, at least I'm less anxious now. Such bullshit, I could be at home learning and developing.

Hi So I need some solid advice from you all wonderful people.
I think i am now ready to look into job side of this world, but have lots of doubts , read my story.
I have been learning android for last 2 years. Most of the time i have been trying to understand how stuff works in android , but i have also gained a few other skills ( python programming, kotlin/flutter basics data analysis basics, testing, some graphic designing, aweful web dev ,etc). But i really want to work with Android. I don't have any specific Salary figure in mind, but i guess my knowledge is better or atleast par with most of the good android developers.

So i want to know how is this fresher/placement thingy work?
1.) GETTING KNOWN? : How can i make some good android based company aware that I am available for hiring? Should i start emailing every android related company that i know of? Should i start listing my profile on recruitment sites like linkedin or internshala? This year it is being said that companies will come for placements. From the status of my college, they are going to give me way to less $ , nd i know am not going to like any of them, but i guess i have to sit for them too.

2.INTERVIEW OR DIRECT PLACEMENTS? A little pre-context: i am currently starting my 4th year in clg. Afaik , 4th year isnt that strict and their can be leniency in terms of attendance. But my college is a place full of political cun*s in the name of directors and HODs and I don't know if they are again going to enforce the old 75% mandatory criteria. Plus if the company is from a different state/country , then my attendance would definitely not suffice.
So mainly i am unsure if somehow a company hires me, i would be able to start immediately. I heard that there are interviews for job recruitment after which the candidate is binded with an agreement to do some months training followed by permanent working after college completion.
This type of agreement is very much suitable for me, since from what my friend tells me, trainings can be lenient and understanding regarding exam preparations nd stuff.

So what do company usually chooses? Binding a fresher on immediate working basis or do they consider graduate completion?

Also, i suck at competitive coding. Do i need to polish myself on that or some company is willing to give me chance on the basis of my other skills 🙈(okay, no kidding , that's a serious question. I need to either work on getting better in competitive or build more apps based on that)

3.) ANDROID OR EVERYTHING? From what i have heard, working as a professional fresher is more like being an allrounder than being a domain specialist. But as i already stated, i really dig android and that's no small framework. I may di other stuff too, but won't interest me nd my output might be less efficient than expected.
So freshers can really be asked to do any stuff? Or can i still be in the area i like being into?

4.) COMPANY OR START-UP? Yeah, this is a general debate starter. Ignoring the business side of the conversation ( job safety vs more salary, experience, etc) the thing that's most important for me is the presence of a team. I want someone to assign me a task, whose vision i could follow, from whom i could learn, and some other people who are supportive and doing the same amount / similar work that am doing . This is so much import8 for me that i can easily ignore other factors for a better team. I once took a call from a startup ceo who hired me, a 2 month old android beginner at that time, as the "lead android developer"
But if am being on a team where i am supposed to do any random stuff that is assigned, then obviously this whole point of "visionary, helpful leader, guiding team, "etc goes moot

!Rant
Question for all you wise neck beards:
I was talking with my boss in his office (I'm an intern), and he was saying one thing I need to work on is making more accurate estimates for when a project will be done. He asked if it was just an attempt to "paint a rosey picture" and asked if I was just afraid to be honest, to which I answered definitely not, I just didn't realize I was being that inaccurate. Any suggestions on how I can correct this? I feel like if I just overestimate by a lot i'm just going to give off a lack of confidence, but I also don't want my boss to think I am just lazing around and not working as hard as I could. Feel like I am in a pickle here.

Also, what are some tips you guys have for staying Focused/Productive? I do a pretty good job as it is, but any more advice would be handy :D

Happy Tuesday Everyone!

#Suphle Rant 2: Michael's obduration

For the uninitiated, Suphle is a PHP framework I built. This is the 2nd installment in my rants on here about it.

Some backstory: A friend and I go back ~5 years. Let's call him Michael. He was CTO of the company we worked at. After his emigration, they seem to have taught him some new stack and he needed somewhere to practise it on. That stack was Spring Boot and Angular. He and his pals convinced product owner at our workplace to rebuild the project (after 2+ years of active development) from scratch using these new techs. One thing led to the other, and I left the place after some months.

Fast forward a year later, dude hits me up to broach an incoming gig he wants us to collab on. Asks where I'm at now, and I reply I took the time off to build Suphle. Told him it's done already and it contains features from Spring, Rust, Nest and Rails; basically, I fixed everything they claimed makes PHP nonviable for enterprise software, added features from those frameworks that would attract a neutral party. Dude didn't even give me audience. I only asked him to look at the repo's readme to see what it does. That's faster than reading the tests (since the docs are still in progress). He stopped responding.

He's only the second person who has contacted me for a gig since I left. Both former colleagues. Both think lowly of PHP, ended up losing my best shot at earning a nickel while away from employed labour. It definitely feels like shooting myself in the foot.

I should take up his offer, get some extra money to stay afloat until Suphle's release. But he's adamant I use Spring. Even though Laravel is the ghetto, I would grudgingly return to it than spend another part of my life fighting to get the most basic functionality up and running without a migraine in Spring. This is a framework without an official documentation. You either have to rely on baeldung or mushroom blogs. Then I have to put up with mongodb (or nosql, in short).

I want to build a project I'm confident and proud about delivering, one certified by automated tests for it, something with an architecture I've studied extensively before arriving at. Somewhere to apply all the research that was brainstormed before this iteration of Suphle was built.
I want autonomy, not to argue over things I'm sure about. He denied me this when we worked together. I may not mind swallowing them for the money, but a return to amateur mode in Spring is something I hope I never get to experience soon

So, I'm wondering: if his reaction reflects the general impression PHP has among developers globally, it means I've built a castle on a sinking ship. If someone who can vouch for me as a professional would prefer not to have anything to do with PHP despite my reassurance it'll be difficult to convince others within and beyond that there could be a more equipped alternative to their staple tool. Reminds me of the time the orchestra played to their deaths while the titanic sank