just discovered this http://dev.to/rly
( image from: https://github.com/thepracticaldev/... )

Fuck brand builders, or, how I learned to start giving a shit and love devrant.

Brand builders are people who generally have very little experience and are attempting to obfuscate their dearth of ability behind a wall of non-academic content generation. Subscribe, like, build a following and everyone will happily overlook the fact that your primary contribution to society is spreading facile content that further obfuscates the need for fundamentals. Their carefully crafted presence is designed promote themselves and their success while chipping away at the apparent value of professional ability. At one point, I thought medium would be the bottom of the barrel; a glorified blog that provides people with scant knowledge, little experience and routinely low integrity a platform to build an echo chamber of replayed or copied content, techno-mysticism and best-practice-superstition they mistake for a brand in an environment where there's little chance of peer review. I thought it couldn't get any worse.

Then I found dev.to

Dev.to is what happens when all the absence of ability and skills insecurity on the internet gets together to form a censorship mob to ensure that no criticism, reality or peer review will ever filter into the ramblings of people intent on forever remaining at the peak of the dunning-kreuger curve. It's the long tail of YMCA trophy culture.

Take for example this article:

https://dev.to/davidepacilio/...

It's a shit post listicle by someone claiming to be "senior," who confidently states that "you are only as good as the tools you use." Meanwhile all the great minds of history are giving him the side-eye because they understand tools are just a magnifier of ability. If you're an amazing carpenter, power tools will help you produce at an exponential rate. If you're a shitty carpenter, your work will still be shit, there will just be more of it. The actual phrase that's being butchered here is "you're only as good as the tools you create." There's no moral superiority to be had in being dependent on a tool, that's just a crutch. A true expert or professional is someone who can create tools to aid in their craft. Being a professional is having a thorough enough understanding of the thing you are doing so as to be able to craft force multipliers that make your work easier, not just someone who uses them.

Ok, so what?

I'm sure he's a plenty fine human to grab drinks with, no ill will to him as a human. That said, were you to comment something to that effect on dev.to, you'd be reported by all the hangers-on pretty much immediately, regardless of how much complimentary padding and passive, welcoming language you wrap your message in. The problem with a bunch of weak people ganging up on the voice of reason and deciding they don't want things like constructive criticism, peer review, academic process or the scientific method is, after you remove all of that, you're just left with a formless sea of ideas and thoughts with no categorization, no order. You find a lot of opinions and nothing to challenge them and thereby are left with no mechanism for strong ideas to rise to the top. In that system, the "correct" ideas are by default those posited by the strongest personality.

We all need some degree of positive reinforcement. We also need to be smacked upside the head when we're totally off in the weeds. It's all about balance. The forums of ancient Greece weren't filled with people fervently agreeing with one another and shouting down new ideas en masse. We need discourse, not demagoguery.

Dev.to, medium, etc are all the fast fashion of the tech industry. Personally, I'd prefer something designed to last a little longer.

https://dev.to/rly
Enjoy.

can we make a dev confession/bad practices you do anyway chain in the form of o'reilly books in the comments?

https://dev.to/rly

here's mine:

https://dev.to/rly

Make your own o’reily book and post it here

So I hear some drama going on in Vuejs community related to next version which will bring breaking changes.

https://dev.to/danielelkington/...

I was just getting into Vue and feeling happy about learning such a beautiful and simple framework.

What do you guys think?

Warnings are design errors.
https://dev.to/sebach1/...

I think is better to paste the post here, but it doesn't allow MD :(

Wanna hear your opinions.

Fuck warnings.

That's gotta hurt dawg: Emotion(a CSS-in-JS library)'s 2nd most active maintainer ditches own solution for SASS + CSS modules: https://dev.to/srmagura/...

Didn't feel right from the start. Everyone showing their true feelings for CSS-in-JS in the comment section.

Please tell me the next big thing will be going back to basics & not go to even more insane lenghts for marginal DX improvements.

Not an angry rant, and not strictly related to code, but I think it's important, nonetheless.

If you've ever considered or been approached by Amazon, please read this short real-life story first and judge for yourself: https://dev.to/voodooattack/...

P.S: I didn't post this here because I needed markdown for formatting. Sorry. :(

Having a hard time thinking the alternates to if statements is a good idea. I was genuinely curious how this was done. The examples I am finding seem to just spread the logic everywhere across multiple objects. To me this makes the logic objectively less clear. I didn't understand the obsession with objects until I saw the examples that creates a fuckton of boiler plate objects. How someone can say this is preferred over a few if statements boggles my mind. I actually am trying to understand the functional mindset as well. It is not going well for me. I can sorta see some value in using a map. Technically a lookup could be faster. But again it spreads the code all around adding more boilerplate.

https://blog.bitsrc.io/reduce-if-el...

https://dev.to/phouchens/...

Is it because these are contrived examples? I initially searched to find ways of reducing ifs in a functional approach. I did find it in the second example. I was however hoping to find that by lazy eval or something. I see people making references to how one you "get it" functional logic is easier to understand and evaluate. I cannot tell if this is straight up gaslighting or my brain is just too fucking imperative.

!rant

O RLY Cover Generator
https://dev.to/rly

;)

I'm starting a 30 days of code + technical articles challenge

Stay tuned for flames 🔥

I'll be blogging about it on https://dev.to

https://dev.to/jordanirabor/...

!rant !dev

So, following up my last rant.
https://devrant.com/rants/2433162

I quit on Friday, this is what I said to my bosses.

"In the last week I had, 2 panic attacks, and I have 2 theories for this, one is that I have underlying psychological problems, the other theory is that we are under an impossible task, I choose to say now that I have to quit because I have psychological issues, but if you are willing to hear my other theory, that involves saying that meeting the deadline is not viable, then I can tell you that, so do want to listen that part?.

Bosses: No, we heard enough, we are going to have your contract terminated in order, and we will let you know when you can come and pick your paycheck."

So, that's them. Now about me and how I re-discovered GTD, or more precisely how I organized my whole weekend using taskwarrior with GTD, and why I think is going to be useful as a freelancer.

Before I feel good about telling you about my weekend I have to tell you a few things about myself.

I am a very impulsive person, I have a lot of energy in short surges, so I have to be able to maximize my activity when I'm in a surge, and I have to maximize my rest when I am not.

That's hard to do, it requires a balanced lifestyle, I am also very prone to being neurotic, and overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that I want to do.

And on top of that, when I am resting, I have surges of things that I want to have, do, or implement, it could be software related, as "Doing an app that will be the Uber of home services", to house improvements like, "I have to fix that leaking roof", and all the sort of stuff that happens in between hardware and software. That surge of consciousness doesn't allow me to have the proper rest that I need before I engage with activities again.

Because of this I have a very cyclic rhythm, with whole weeks burning my energy into doing stuff, and weeks resting doing very little and thinking too much.

Now about my weekend. Friday night I was browsing the web, and a thought came to my head. "The way you use your terminal, says a lot about your personality", and I got curious, so I searched for, "Show me your terminal", and found a post in dev.to to see all kind of nice terminal setups, from the very minimalist to very feature rich oh-my-zsh themes with plugins for git, aws and what not. One of these pictures really got my attention, a guy had set up his terminal to show him, how many task has he done in the day, and how many cups of coffee has he had.

So by investigating how he set up his terminal to show in the prompt the number of successfully completed tasks in the day, I found out that he was using taskwarrior, he was also kind enough to share the source code of his prompt setup, which I bookmarked to later incorporate that into my oh-my-zsh config.

After reading about taskwarrior, I also got a reference to GTD, I don't remember if this was one of those thoughts that I have and follow immediately, or if I read something that led me to a YouTube video summarizing GTD.

In the end, after watching that GTD video, I decided to give it a try to organize my life, and help me find a remote job, keep my house in order, plan my social activities as "hang out with friends", "visit mom and dad", and give the proper amount of attention to my GF, with whom I am deeply in love, and willing to spend the remaining of my years with her.

So my fist task was.

task add Ask for GF's parents blessing.

Which of course I have no intention of doing right now, but is one of the things that I will eventually have to do.

Then it started, I started adding tasks, and things to do, and go through the whole Capture phase of GTD.

Now it is a good time to write a small summary of what I think GTD is.

GTD is a life habit of organizing your life in todo-lists. And it was a very specific core method, that in the video summary that I watched was called CPR.

Capture, Process and Review.

Capture:
When you capture you just add your tasks to a bucket list.
So I took a notebook and started writing down everything that I wanted to have done. I also started to capture ideas as they came up to me, I did this by writing a telegram saved message in my phone, or directly adding it as a task in TW.

Process:
I read my telegram messages and put them into my task warrior list, then I started to organize my tasks into projects, breaking down every task that was not an atomic unit.
* And different projects started to emerge from this. One of them was project:Housekeeping.

And here's my screenshot of what I did this weekend, also the number of projects that I have, and all the things that I have to do in order to have what I think would be a very balanced, fun, and productive life.

You'll be able to see in the screenshot, that there's a blocked task, yes, tw allows you to organize dependencies too, so one task is delegated, and blocked by the delegation task.

CSS is like a deterministic FPGA language; you describe a loop-free dataflow diagram and then switch to a different one to cycle data around.

https://dev.to/janeori/...

This gives me an idea