!rant

After over 20 years as a Software Engineer, Architect, and Manager, I want to pass along some unsolicited advice to junior developers either because I grew through it, or I've had to deal with developers who behaved poorly:

1) Your ego will hurt you FAR more than your junior coding skills. Nobody expects you to be the best early in your career, so don't act like you are.

2) Working independently is a must. It's okay to ask questions, but ask sparingly. Remember, mid and senior level guys need to focus just as much as you do, so before interrupting them, exhaust your resources (Google, Stack Overflow, books, etc..)

3) Working code != good code. You are an author. Write your code so that it can be read. Accept criticism that may seem trivial such as renaming a variable or method. If someone is suggesting it, it's because they didn't know what it did without further investigation.

4) Ask for peer reviews and LISTEN to the critique. Even after 20+ years, I send my code to more junior developers and often get good corrections sent back. (remember the ego thing from tip #1?) Even if they have no critiques for me, sometimes they will see a technique I used and learn from that. Peer reviews are win-win-win.

5) When in doubt, do NOT BS your way out. Refer to someone who knows, or offer to get back to them. Often times, persons other than engineers will take what you said as gospel. If that later turns out to be wrong, a bunch of people will have to get involved to clean up the expectations.

6) Slow down in order to speed up. Always start a task by thinking about the very high level use cases, then slowly work through your logic to achieve that. Rushing to complete, even for senior engineers, usually means less-than-ideal code that somebody will have to maintain.

7) Write documentation, always! Even if your company doesn't take documentation seriously, other engineers will remember how well documented your code is, and they will appreciate you for it/think of you next time that sweet job opens up.

8) Good code is important, but good impressions are better. I have code that is the most embarrassing crap ever still in production to this day. People don't think of me as "that shitty developer who wrote that ugly ass code that one time a decade ago," They think of me as "that developer who was fun to work with and busted his ass." Because of that, I've never been unemployed for more than a day. It's critical to have a good network and good references.

9) Don't shy away from the unknown. It's easy to hope somebody else picks up that task that you don't understand, but you wont learn it if they do. The daunting, unknown tasks are the most rewarding to complete (and trust me, other devs will notice.)

10) Learning is up to you. I can't tell you the number of engineers I passed on hiring because their answer to what they know about PHP7 was: "Nothing. I haven't learned it yet because my current company is still using PHP5." This is YOUR craft. It's not up to your employer to keep you relevant in the job market, it's up to YOU. You don't always need to be a pro at the latest and greatest, but at least read the changelog. Stay abreast of current technology, security threats, etc...

These are just a few quick tips from my experience. Others may chime in with theirs, and some may dispute mine. I wish you all fruitful careers!

I want to pay respects to my favourite teacher by far.

I turned up at university as a pretty arrogant person. This was because I had about 6 years of self-taught programming experience, and the classes started from the ansolute basics. I turned up to my first classes and everything was extremely easy. I felt like I wouldn't learn anything for at least a year.

Then, I met one of my lecturers for the first time. He was about 50~60 years old and had been programming for all of his career. He was known by everyone to be really strict and we were told by other lecturers that it could be difficult for some people to be his student.

His classes were awesome. He was friendly, but took absolutely no shit, and told everything as it was. He had great stories from his life, which he used to throw out during the more boring computer science topics. He had extremely strict rules for our programming style, and bloody good reasons for all of them. If we didn't follow a clear rule on an assignment, he'd give us 0%. To prove how well this worked, nobody got 0%.

We eventually learned that he was that way because he used to work on real-time systems for the military, where if something didn't work then people could die.

This was exactly what I needed. In around one semester I went from a capable self-taught kid, to writing code that was clear, maintainable and fast, without being hacky.

I learned so much in just that small time, and I owe it all to him. So often when I write code now I think back to his rules. Even if I disagree with some, I learned to be strict and consistent.

Sadly, during the break between our first and second year, he passed away due to illness. There was so many lessons still to be learned from him, and there's now no teachers with enough knowledge to continue his best modules like compiler writing.

He is greatly missed, I've never had greater respect for a teacher than for him.

25 phrases you wish you could say at work more often

(Warning: Contains naughty words...:-)))

1. Ahhh...I see the fuck-up fairy has visited us again...

2. I don't know what your problem is, but I'll bet it's hard to pronounce.

3. How about never? Is never good for you?

4. I see you've set aside this special time to humiliate yourself in public.

5. I'm really easy to get along with once you people learn to worship me.

6. I'll try being nicer if you'll try being smarter.

7. I'm out of my mind, but feel free to leave a message...

8. I don't work here. I'm a consultant.

9. It sounds like English, but I can't understand a word you're saying.

10. I can see your point, but I still think you're full of shit.

11. I like you. You remind me of me when I was young and stupid.

12. You are validating my inherent mistrust of strangers.

13. I have plenty of talent and vision. I just don't give a damn.

14. I'm already visualizing the duct tape over your mouth.

15. I will always cherish the initial misconceptions I had about you.

16. Thank you. We're all refreshed and challenged by your unique point of view.

17. The fact that no one understands you doesn't mean you're an artist.

18. Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.

19. What am I? Flypaper for freaks!?

20. I'm not being rude. You're just insignificant.

21. It's a thankless job, but I've got a lot of Karma to burn off.

22. Yes, I am an agent of Satan, but my duties are largely ceremonial.

23. No, my powers can only be used for good.

24. You sound reasonable... Time to up the medication.

25. Who me? I just wander from room to room

I fucking love people like this.

Yesterday I met a 'friend' who I hadn't seen in a very long time. Just a guy I used to know tbh but let's call him Friend anyway. After a while in the conversation this happened...

*Friend doesn't know I have a degree in CS*

Friend: "WHAT?? YOU LIKE PROGRAMMING? NO WAY! ME TOO!"

Me: "THAT'S AWESOME! You've been programming for long?"

Friend: "A little over a year now. I know almost all languages now. C++, C#, Python, Java and HTML. Still a couple left to go. Once you're on the level I achieved programming becomes really, really easy. How long have you been programming?"

Me: "Almost a decade now"

Friend: "Damn dude you must know all languages by now I suppose?"

Me: "I've been mainly doing C++ so not really haha"

Friend: "I can always help when you're struggling with one language. C++ is pretty easy tbh. You should learn others too btw. HTML for example is pretty important because you can program websites with it"

Me: "Yeah... Thanks... So... What project are you working on right now?"

Friend: "I'm making a register page for my very own forum. The only problem I have is that PHP won't save the login details"

Me: "Hahaha I know the feeling. MySQL?"

Friend: "What?"

Me: "What do you use to save your data"

Friend: "Just a txt file. It's easier that way."

Me: "Hahaha true. Who needs safety right? *smiles*"

Friend: "Actually it's 100% safe because only I can see the txt file so other people can not hack other users."

Me: "Yes! That's great! Cya!"

Friend: "I'm working on a mmorpg too btw! I can learn you to make games if you want. Just call me. Here's my number"

Me: "Alright... Thanks... Bye!"

*Arrives at home*

*Deletes number*

I do not make this up.

I can understand that someone who isn't in the CS industry doesn't take it too seriously and gets hyped when their "Hello World" program works.
I'm fine with that.

The thing that really triggers me is big headed ass holes like this. Like how much more like a absolute dickhead could you possibly more act? Fucking hate people like that.

So I got the job. Here's a story, never let anyone stop you from accomplishing your dreams!

It all started in 2010. Windows just crashed unrecoverably for the 3rd time in two years. Back then I wasn't good with computers yet so we got our tech guy to look at it and he said: "either pay for a windows license again (we nearly spend 1K on licenses already) or try another operating system which is free: Ubuntu. If you don't like it anyways, we can always switch back to Windows!"

Oh well, fair enough, not much to lose, right! So we went with Ubuntu. Within about 2 hours I could find everything. From the software installer to OpenOffice, browsers, email things and so on. Also I already got the basics of the Linux terminal (bash in this case) like ls, cd, mkdir and a few more.

My parents found it very easy to work with as well so we decided to stick with it.

I already started to experiment with some html/css code because the thought of being able to write my own websites was awesome! Within about a week or so I figured out a simple html site.

Then I started to experiment more and more.

After about a year of trial and error (repeat about 1000+ times) I finally got my first Apache server setup on a VirtualBox running Ubuntu server. Damn, it felt awesome to see my own shit working!

From that moment on I continued to try everything I could with Linux because I found the principle that I basically could do everything I wanted (possible with software solutions) without any limitations (like with Windows/Mac) very fucking awesome. I owned the fucking system.

Then, after some years, I got my first shared hosting plan! It was awesome to see my own (with subdomain) website online, functioning very well!

I started to learn stuff like FTP, SSH and so on.

Went on with trial and error for a while and then the thought occured to me: what if I'd have a little server ONLINE which I could use myself to experiment around?

First rented VPS was there! Couldn't get enough of it and kept experimenting with server thingies, linux in general aaand so on.

Started learning about rsa key based login, firewalls (iptables), brute force prevention (fail2ban), vhosts (apache2 still), SSL (damn this was an interesting one, how the fuck do you do this yourself?!), PHP and many other things.

Then, after a while, the thought came to mind: what if I'd have a dedicated server!?!?!?!

I ordered my first fucking dedicated server. Damn, this was awesome! Already knew some stuff about defending myself from brute force bots and so on so it went pretty well.

Finally made the jump to NginX and CentOS!

Made multiple VPS's for shitloads of purposes and just to learn. Started working with reverse proxies (nginx), proxy servers, SSL for everything (because fuck basic http WITHOUT SSL), vhosts and so on.

Started with simple, one screen linux setup with ubuntu 10.04.

Running a five monitor setup now with many distro's, running about 20 servers with proxies/nginx/apache2/multiple db engines, as much security as I can integrate and this fucking passion just got me my first Linux job!

It's not just an operating system for me, it's a way of life. And with that I don't just mean the operating system, but also the idea behind it :).

I tutor people who want to program, I don't ask anything for it, money wise, if they use my house as a learning space I may ask them to bring cookies or a pizza or something but on the whole I do it to help others learn who want to.

Now this in of itself is perfectly fine, I don't get financially screwed over or anything, but...

Fuck me if some students are horrendous!

To the best of my knowledge I've agreed to work with and help seven individuals, four female three male.

One male student never once began the study work and just repeatedly offered excuses and wanted to talk to me about how he'd screwed his life up. I mean that's unfortunate, but I'm not a people person, I don't really feel emotionally engaged with a relative stranger who quite openly admits they got addicted to porn and wasted two years furiously masturbating. Which is WAY more than I needed to know and made me more than a little uncomfortable. Ultimately lack of actually even starting the basic exercises I blocked him and stopped wasting my time.

The second dude I spoke to for exactly 48 hours before he wanted to smash my face in. Now, he was Indian (the geographical India not native American) and this is important, because he was a friend of a friend and I agreed to tutor however he was more interested in telling me how the Brits owed India reparations, which, being Scottish, I felt if anyone was owed reparations first, it's us, which he didn't take kindly too (something about the phrase "we've been fucked, longer and harder than you ever were and we don't demand reparations" didn't endear me any).

But again likewise, he wanted to talk about politics and proving he was a someone "I've been threatened in very real world ways, by some really bad people" didn't impress me, and I demonstrated my disinterest with "and I was set on fire once cos the college kids didn't like me".

He wouldn't practice, was constantly interested in bigging himself up, he was aggressive, confrontational and condescending, so I told him he was a dick, I wasn't interested in helping him and he can help himself. Last I heard he wasn't in the country anymore.

The third guy... Absolute waste of time... We were in the same computer science college class, I went to university and did more, he dossed around and a few years later went into design and found he wanted to program and got in touch. He completes the code schools courses and understandably doesn't quite know what to do next, so he asks a few questions and declares he wants to learn full stack web development. Quickly. I say it isn't easy especially if it's your first real project but if one is determined, it isn't impossible.

This guy was 30 and wanted to retire at 35 and so time was of the essence. I'm up for the challenge, and so because he only knows JavaScript (including prototypes, callbacks and events) I tell him about nodejs and explain that it's a little more tricky but it does mean he can learn all the basis without learning another language.

About six months of sporadic development where I send him exercises and quizzes to try, more often than not he'd answer with "I don't know" after me repeatedly saying "if you don't know, type the program out and study what it does then try to see why!".

The excuses became predicable, couldn't study, playing soccer, couldn't study watching bake off, couldn't study, couldn't study.

Eventually he buys a book on the mean stack and I agree to go through it chapter by chapter with him, and on one particular chapter where I'm trying to help him, he keeps interrupting with "so could I apply for this job?" "What about this job?" And it's getting frustrating cos I'm trying to hold my code and his in my head and come up with a real world analogy to explain a concept and he finally interrupts with "would your company take me on?"

I'm done.

"Do you want the honest unabridged truth?"

"Yes, I'd really like to know what I need to do!"

"You are learning JavaScript, and trying to also learn computer science techniques and terms all at the same time. Frankly, to the industry, you know nothing. A C developer with a PHD was interviewed and upon leaving the office was made a laughing stock of because he seemed to not know the difference between pass by value and pass by reference. You'd be laughed right out the building because as of right now, you know nothing. You don't. Now how you respond to this critique is your choice, you can either admit what I'm saying is true and put some fucking effort into studying cos I'm putting more effort into teaching than you are studying, or you can take what I'm saying as a full on attack, give up and think of me as the bad guy. Your choice, if you are ready to really study, you can text me in the morning for now I'm going to bed."

The next day I got a text "I was thinking about what you said and... I think I'm not going to bother with this full stack stuff it's just too hard, thought you should know."

There is this salesman right across from me that always brags about how rich his parents are and how lucky us tech guys are for having such an easy job. He told me one day that he was going to quit and make his own software company currently having no developing experience at all because "I've seen some of these developers. If those guys can do it, it'll be a breeze." I convinced him that the best language to learn in order to make your own websites/apps is Linux command line. Hilariously enough, the other 2 devs heard me say that and when Glenn the sales douche followed up with them one of them told him "Yeah, If you think you're really going to be quick with it then Linux will be your best bet, but if you have trouble just learn C++ instead and you'll still be able to make websites." Best of luck on your new Venture, you spoiled jizz stain.

So easy to learn new things these days :P

Manager: How come the intern does way more tickets than you?

Dev: Because you told me to only give him the easy ones since he either can’t do them otherwise or takes too long on the hard ones

Manager: Well how is he going to learn if we only give him easy ones?

Dev: That’s what I told you when you orig—

Manager: Assign him ALL of the hard tickets on your board immediately!

*Tickets closed per day drops significantly*

Manager: WHAT IS TAKING SO LONG ON THESE TICKETS!!!!!

Dev: …

PHP 🐘 is so damn easy to learn, run straighforward in all OSs, that anyone can start coding in no time. Therefore, the amount of crap code around, made by unskilled devs, is just *unbelievable*. 💩

/*
It's a pretty long rant. Hope you didn't get bored :P
*/
So I have this friend of mine who has learnt Python at good level (that's what he says) and is with me in all classes in college. I have worked with C, C++, C# and Java only and hated Python when it was taught (wk44).
So the following happened in the last 2 weeks:
Once he wrote a Python function in terminal just returning a hard coded string (lame right) and will show me how cool is it and that it is sooo much easier.
Whenever we do a mini project together he will force that we use Python. Even in Image processing when everyone is ready to work on Matlab, he insists that Python would be a better option.
We asked that this XYZ is very easy to implement on Matlab.
We then had to listen about the large and great community of Python and that it has Libraries for everything and that it is the greatest programming language ever.
One day he saw my C# project for DFA and NFA simulation which was the greatest project I have "completed" myself, and went like "Hmph, if I was you, I would use python and make a more "professional" code" (then went on arguing as always)
This happened today in Networking lab-
(Sockets was taught and we are expected to learn its programming aspects)
All students: Open linuxhowtos.org and start reading on socket programming
He : Opens some websites and downloads books on Networking with Python or someting
Now while I am reading the documentation of sockets and bind, he opens spider IDE, copy-paste the code in the book and start bugging ME that he is getting all these errors like literally showing me those errors and whining about all those problems.
Me: We are supposed to learn this in C. Here take a look at this link.
HE: No I'll use Python cuz it is better than your C. It has libraries for everything and is much easier.
Me: Alright whatever I am fed up, do whatever you want

TABLE BASED WEB DESIGN

I was surprised there were no rants about this topic before I realized it was more than a decade back 😳

We've never had it better! So to help add a little perspective for all those ranting about what is unarguably the golden age for web developers... let me fill you in on web dev in the late 90's;

JavaScript was a joke. No seriously! - I once got laughed out of the room for suggesting we try use it for more than disabling a button - (I wanted to check out the new XHR request thingy [read AJAX]).

HTML was simple and purely a markup language (with the exception of the marquee tag). The tags were basically just p,ul,ol,h*,form inputs,img and table and html took 10 minutes to learn. Any style was inline and equally crude - anything that wasn't crude could not be trusted and probably wouldn't render at all in most browsers (never mind render correctly).

There were rumors of a style TAG and something called a cascading style sheet which were received with much skepticism since it went against the old ways and any time saved would be lost writing multiple [IE version specific] style sheets for each browser just to get it to work - so we simply didn't.

No CSS meant the only tags you had to work with to create a structured layout were br, hr and table... so naturally EVERYTHING was in nested tables! JS callback hell can't touch this! - it was not uncommon to have 50+ nested tables all with inline style in a single page which would be edited without any dev tools or linting.

You would spend 30 minutes scanning td tags until your eyes bled to find something, make a change, ftp the file to the server, reload the web page and then spend 10 minutes staring at the devastation on your screen convinced you broke
the internet before spotting an un-closed td tag with your bloodshot eyes.

Tables were not just a silver bullet - they were the ONLY bullet and were in the wild west!

Q: Want an inline form or to align your inputs left?
A: Duh table!

Q: Want a border with round-corners, a shadow or blur?
A: That's easy! Your gonna want to put that table in the center cell of another table then crop a image of the border into 6 smaller images to put in the surrounding cells... oh and then spend 10 minutes fucking with mystical attributes like cell-padding and valign to get them flush.

...But hey at least on the bright-side vertically & horizontally centering stuff was a breeze!

I hate everybody who says JavaScript is the best language because of loose typing and its easy to learn, YES OF COURSE IT IS EASY!

ITS FUCKING JAVASCRIPT! IT WAS MEANT TO BE EASY! AND THEN SOME ASSHOLE CAME ALONG, CREATED NODE AND THOUGHT THAT IT WAS A GOOD IDEA!
NOW WE HAVE TO DEAL WITH THIS SHIT EVERYWHERE BECAUSE PEOPLE WHO WROTE CODE FOR UX NOW THINK THEY KNOW WHAT NEEDS TO HAPPEN ON THE SERVERSIDE!!
GOD FUCKING DAMNIT I HATE THIS ANALTOY OF A LANGUAGE.
YOU THINK JAVASCRIPT IS THE BEST?! DO YOU REALLY??!!! OH YEAH!?!
WELL FUCK YOU AND GO TO HELL, YOU ARE NOT A DEVELOPER IN MY EYES, GO HOME KIDDO, LEARN C OR ASM OR HOW A FUCKING COMPUTER ACTUALLY WORKS!!
AND THEN TELL ME AGAIN JAVASCRIPT IS A WELL DESIGNED AND PROPER LANGUAGE!!
I'M OUT!

OH MY FUCKING GOD!
What is the point in separating us into backend/frontend developers if everyone has to learn/do everything?

And now this FUCKING DUMBASS that is leaving!!! The company convinced my FUCKING STUPID boss to start using react with nodejs on the new platforms ...

Did anyone think about talking to the fucking devops that maintain the fucking deployments about this????
By the way, this sucker is me.

And now I have one month to: deploy a new app... ALONE!! learning fucking react (please kill me) and probably merge it in a clusterfuck of unseparated backend/frontend because fuck it.

Oh, and figure out a way to make deployment automated and easy for me at least.

I'm about to rant in real life...

TLDR: I wrote one of my firsts codes to help my father. Was really excited after it worked, nobody cared. F*ck them (not really).

So my father comes and says he needs me to help making a simple presentation. Just a title and slides with images. It seemed to be an easy task so I'm like "sure, why not?". So I told him to email the images and I would have the presentation made in no time. The next day I recieve like 30 mails containing from 4 to 10 photos of boats (yes, boats). I stay chill and have the brilliant idea of automating the process with python, just to learn a bit more.

I took some to read the documentation of the modules I was going to use, then write a simple code and bam! In 3 hours I have a presentation with images in it. I open it, every image was 4 times the actual slide and all of the images were randomly rotated, it still was the most rewarding moment I've had in months :') I wanted to show it off to my brothers, so they came to my desktop, saw it and all I recieve was a "cool". Not a good "cool", a "meh" kind of "cool". So I thought it was because of the size bug.

Fastfoward some hours, now every image gets scaled into the slides prefectly, in the correct angle, etc. I tell my dad what I made and he says "yeah sure, the problem is that I need you to give them to have subtitles". He wasn't even impressed. My heart hurt a bit.

I could totally automate the subtitles too (and did it), but what hurt the most is that nobody cared for what I was so pationate about. I'm so fascinated with coding that it replaced all my gaming habits, and now all I do is learn. I want to dedicate a good portion of my life to this but at that moment it seemed nobody in my family cared about it. So this rant is for all those f*ckers that I love but don't know how much my code means to me.

I'm a week into my new job right now. What do I love the most about it?

Learning things all day long and getting paid for it!

I'm learning about hosting things, DNS, cyber security, configurations, Linux (although my current skill set with Linux has been enough for now) and so on!

Hell, easy day today (not that many tickets) so decided to start learning Ansible! Next to that I've gotta learn vim (it just autocorrected that to cum.... O.o), work with hosting panels, mail stuffs (dns, debugging etc etc) and so fucking on.

The boss hasn't been at location yet which will happen tomorrow but he seemed like a very chill guy.

I love this!

Manager: Hey how come you left so many comments on my PR?

Dev: Well you’ve just recently learned how to code so there’s going to be a lot of things to learn beyond what you’ve picked up in your online coding tutorials. Don’t worry it’s only minor things like you put everything all in one function, left outdated comments in the code, have if statements 4 levels deep, have a console.log after every line of code some of which log .env variables, skipped error handling, cast to “any” a bunch instead of using more specific types, didn’t write any tests and some unrelated tests are now failing due to a circular dependancy.

Manager: THAT IS SO DISRESPECTFUL!!APPROVE MY PR IMMEDIATELY. IT WASN’T EVEN EASY FOR ME TO CREATE THE PR, NOW I HAVE TO MAKE AN UPDATE!? YOU’RE THE DEV, YOU SHOULD FIX IT NOT ME!! NEVER COMMENT ON ANY OF MY PRS AGAIN.

*sees new trendy language*

- language is as fast as c
- cross platform
- extensive libraries, tools and tutorials
- easy to learn
- conceptually well thought-out

*doesn't like syntax*

oh well...

I'm helping a friend with programming in c#
He's a beginner and wants to learn. He learns as easy as I do.

I saw his project yesterday and everything was written in one method. I thought I was dying. Then remembered my first project... he will be fine

"Fuck JavaScript, its such a shitty language" seems to be quite a common rant today. It seems as if JS is actually getting more hate than PHP, which is certainly odd, considering the stereotype.

So, as someone who has spent a lot of time in JS and a lot of time elsewhere, here are my views. Please, discuss your opinions with me as well. I am genuinely interested in an intelligent conversation about this topic.

So here's my background: learned HTML/CSS/JS in that order when I was 12 because I liked computers. I was pretty shitty at JS until U was at least 15, but you get the point, Ive had it sploshing about in my brain for a while.

Now, JS certainly has its quirks, no doubt, but theres nothing about the language itself that I would say makes it shitty. Its a very easy leanguage to use, but isn't overdeveloped like VB.net (Or, as I like to call it, TheresAFunctionForThat)

Most of the hate is centered around JS being used for a very broad range of systems. I doubt JS would be in the rant feed so often if it were to stay in its native ecosystem of web browsers. JS can be used in server backend, web frontent, desktop and mobile applications, and even in some system services (Although this isn't very popular as of yet). People seem to be terrified that one very easy to learn language can go so far. And, oh god, its interpreted... How can a system app run off an interpreted language? That's absurd.

My opinion on JSEverything is that it's progress. Thats what we're all about, right? The technologies already in place are unthreatened by JS, it isn't a gamechanger. The only thing JS integration is doing is making tedius and simple tasks easier. Big companies with large systems aren't going to jump ship and migrate to JS. A startup, however, could save a fucking ton of development time by using a JS framework, however. I want to live in a world where startups can become the next Google, because technology will stagnate when youre trying to protect your fortune, (Look at Apple for fucks sake) but innovation is born of small people with big ideas.

I have a feeling the hate for JS is coming from fear of abandoning what you're already doing. You don't have to do that. JS is only another option (And a very good one, which is why it's becoming so popular).

As for my personal opinion from my experiences... I've left this part til the end on purpose. I love programming and learning and creating, so I've never hated a lamguage, really. It all depends on what I want to do. In the times i've played arpund with JS, I've loved it. Very very easy. The idea of having it on both ends of web development makes a lot of sense too, no conversion, just direct communication. I would imagine this really helps with speed, as well. I wouldn't use it in a complicated system, though. Small things, medium size projects: perfect. Running a bank? No.

So what do you think about this JSUniverse?

I fucking hate python and myself even more. Python is easy they say, Python has nice syntax but fuck you . Fuck you seriously I cringe if I see non-c-like syntax. Every time I leave my comfort zone I get fucked over by damn semicolons. Fuck this imports i don't know your damn library. But god damn In far too advanced for hello world. There are two versions and the lib I want to use is incompatible? Well fuck me? That kind of shit never hit me on PHP. Damn me! Fuck you python. I want to know you but you fuck me harder than life. GEHÖRT? DU FICKST MICH HÄRTE ALS DAS LEBEN DU HURENSOHN!!!!

What is even your problem? Indentation? Well thank you for not having braces! I mean come on I try, I really do. I know you are different but every thing I want to learn about you is either for uber beginners or so advanced I don't even know what's going on. Do magical shit in a few lines? What the fuck is in those packages? A wizard full filling whishes like "plz make this work"?

But don't worry you cum snorting unicorn as much as I hate you I'm more mad about me for not being a descendant of fucking slytherin!

Rant && story time

When I was in first grade of high school (age of 15) we had a class of informatics. Nothing unusuall, you say, but this teacher was ummm ... Let's just say special. Most of his classes looked like this:

TEACHER: Ok, class, today we are going to learn/work with <insert a name of a software here>. # And then he sat behind his desk, falling silent for the rest of the lesson. We had to look up the software ourselves, and learn to use it. Or not.

Next lesson, he just said:

TEACHER: Continue your work from the last time.

And on the third lesson of each cycle, there was grading in place. He walked through the class and if he saw you working with the software, you got a 5 (that is A for our western friends), but if you were doing something completely different, you got a 1 (that is F). That just ment that you had to open the program and wave the mouse around while he was looking at your screen, and you got a guaranteed 5.

And then the cycle repeated.

However, this is not the story about the teacher in general, it's a story about one specific event involving him.

Around the beginning of the year (calendar one, not school one; that is middle of the school year) a programming competition took place.

The first stage (school competition), was easy; I got 45 points out of 50 (I was second-best on the whole school, of all years (students from 15 to 20 years of age).

A few weeks later, second stage (national competition) took place. However, when I got to the registration dosk, things got weird.

I patiently waited in line, but when I got to the front, the assistant asked me for year and school.

ME: I come from SCHOOL_NAME and go to first year.
ASSISTANT1: All students who go to SCHOOL_NAME need to go to that separate line.

It seemed strange, but I walked over anyhow. Maybe there was enough students from our school so that new line opened for us.

ME: I go to first year. # I assumed I don't have to tell the name as the line was only for our school.
ASSISTANT2: Ok, but you need to go to that row. *points to the row wherexI just came from* # WTF is going on now?
ME: Ummm, I just came from there, and they told me to come here.
ASSISTANH2: Oh, you go to SCHOOL_NAME?
ME: Yeah
ASSISTANT2: Ok then. What is your name? # Thank Knuth, one mistery less
ME: My name is SELF.NAME
After a short search through the envelopes:
ASSISTANT2: Here you go # Both the fact that my name was completely misspeled and the procedure it took us to finally get to the correct envelope are a story for a different time.

Skip forward some 10 minutes, to the lecture hall where they just told us all the instructions and started to divide us into classrooms

ASSISTANT3:
for CLASSROOM, STUDENT_LIST in STUDENT_DIVISION:
for STUDENT in STUDENT_LIST:
STUDENT.invite(CLASSROOM)

At the end, only a few people, including me, remained.

ASSISTANT3: Is there anyone not from SCHOOL_NAME? # Umm, yeah, WTF is going on now?
Noone replied.
ASSISTANT3: OK, you all, come with me now, we will find you a classroom.

From there on, competition went fine, I came in second, got a new phone as a prize, no complaints.

However, later on, I realized what was the reason for all that weird behaviour.

Signup date for the second part was on LAST_SIGNUP_DATE, which was at least two weeks before the competition, and signups had to be done untill 1600 that day.

Our teacher signed us up at 2200. ON THE FUCKING DAY BEFORE THE COMPETITION. OF COURSE THEY HAD NOTHING PLANNED FOR US, NO ENVELOPES, NO COMPUTERS, NOTHING, IF WE WERE SIGNED UP LESS THAN FUCKING 12 HOURS BEFORE THE COMPETITION INSTEAD OF 2 WEEKS EARLIER. THE ONLY REASON WE GOT TO COMPETE WAS BECAUSE SOME PEOPLE DIDN'T SHOW UP AND WE USED THE PC'S MENT FOR THEM. IF EVERYONE SHOWED UP WE FUCKING COULDN'T COMPETE.

And from that moment on, I always signed myself up for all of the competitions; better safe than sorry.

Impostor vs Kenner syndrome

We got a new kid which does his internship from school. We talked and he asked me what stuff I had done with 14 - 16. I remembered with 14 I was really into reverse engineering, assembler and c/c++ but never managed to actually build something.

So he started to say stuff like he could replace me in an instant and he should get paid for this internship at least as much as I did, because he made some websites and games already.

I really was down. Kids today get a lot of shit done and I was a disappointing lazy little shit just playing games and try to reverse engineer stuff and learn assembler and c++.

It's been month and shit hit me when I've seen his stuff was copy pasted from a tutorial/ YouTube video.

Today's ressources, languages, frameworks make it really easy to build something but I still got respect for everyone every age who is interested and get into programming and stuff.

But I hope you'll read this you little shit and realise that you can use a simple physics engine by copy and pasting code. So don't talk disrespectful to people in general especially when they can create a whole game and physics engine.

I feel the need to take a different approach to this week's rant. I think someone needs to defend teachers, for a number of reasons. Obviously this is probably out of place on devRant but it is a kind of rant against those who think they know everything and have nothing to learn.

1) Teachers are not industry specialists. They do not spend their lives keeping on top of the latest framework or project management methodology or code management tool. They are educators and that brings its own set of out of hours challenges and training exercises.

2) They have a course to teach and have probably used the same one for quite some time. Years probably. They (should) teach the fundamentals of programming not a particular language or syntax or quirk. Those fundamentals don't really change. Logic, problem solving, precision, structures, etc.

3) They need to provide a course which will cater for different skill levels. There are always class members who are bored because it's too easy and others who struggle in any subject.

4) Teaching is like any profession - there are really, really good ones, OK ones and there are shit ones.

5) They have probably never developed a detailed project or solution in their lives. They don't know the pitfalls and challenges that teams face in this kind of environment. Should they - maybe. But the probably don't.

I think that's all... I'm not a teacher (although I did fancy the idea at a time) but just feel they get a rough ride sometimes (particularly on here).

A CMS raping WordPress so hard up the ass till there is no tomorrow. I hate that bastardized piece of fuck. “Hey I want you to fix my page and its wordpress. I pay 20 bucks.“ Well fuck you too sir. Wordpress is no cms you wanna be coders. Get back to your fucking photoshop and design something original! Every fucking wp page looks the same. Every “nice feature“ is some kind of monkeypatched workarround. No problem i set preview pictures for every post just to enable some weird slider to function.

I also love those buttfucked files with just a “require foo“ which also just requires “bar“. Drop that fuck. Implement autoloading. Nobody uses php4 anymore step into the future. “easy to learn“ fuck me and fuck you untill you vomit jizz! Clusterfucked spaghetticode thats easy, easy to put another rotten load of clusterfuck on top. Also those security features. I put an empty index.php to prevent directory traversal. N I C E! Stop using wordpress as CMS, its a blog engine. Nothing great has every been written on top of wordpress and never will. I dare you to deny everything related to it and if you are one of those designer guyd, you can gargle my jizz you fucknut!

Starting 2017 i will start a counter and rape every 10th Wordpress which gets abused as cms i encounter into oblivion on their 0,99$ webhosting shit.

Fuck this I'm so mad about that crap

Two years ago I moved to Dublin with my wife (we met on tour while we were both working in music) as visa laws in the UK didn’t allow me to support the visa of a Russian national on a freelance artists salary.

After we came to Dublin I was playing a lot to pay rent (major rental crisis here), I play(ed) Double Bass which is a physically intensive instrument and through overworking caused a long term injury to my forearm which prevents me playing.

Luckily my wife was able to start working in Community Operations for the big tech companies here (not an amazing job and I want her to be able to stop).

Anyway, I was a bit stuck with what step to take next as my entire career had been driven by the passion to master an art that I was very committed to. It gave me joy and meaning.

I was working as hard as I could with a clear vision but no clear path available to get there, then by chance the opportunity came to study a Higher Diploma qualification in Data Science/Analysis (I have some experience handling music licensing for tech startups and an MA with components in music analysis, which I spun into a narrative). Seemed like a ‘smart’ thing to do to do pick up a ‘respectable’ qualification, if I can’t play any more.

The programme had a strong programming element and I really enjoyed that part. The heavy statistics/algebra element was difficult but as my Python programming improved, I was able to write and utilise codebase to streamline the work, and I started to pull ahead of the class. I put in more and more time to programming and studied personally far beyond the requirements of the programme (scored some of the highest academic grades I’ve ever achieved). I picked up a confident level of Bash, SQL, Cypher (Neo4j), proficiency with libraries like pandas, scikit-learn as well as R things like ggplot. I’m almost at the end of the course now and I’m currently lecturing evening classes at the university as a paid professional, teaching Graph Database theory and implementation of Neo4j using Python. I’m co-writing a thesis on Machine Learning in The Creative Process (with faculty members) to be published by the institute. My confidence in programming grew and grew and with that platform to lift me, I pulled away from the class further and further.

I felt lost for a while, but I’ve found my new passion. I feel the drive to master the craft, the desire to create, to refine and to explore.

I’m going to write a Thesis with a strong focus on programmatic implementation and then try and take a programming related position and build from there. I’m excited to become a professional in this field. It might take time and not be easy, but I’ve already mastered one craft in life to the highest levels of expertise (and tutored it for almost 10 years). I’m 30 now and no expert (yet), but am well beyond beginner. I know how to learn and self study effectively.

The future is exciting and I’ve discovered my new art! (I’m also performing live these days with ‘TidalCycles’! (Haskell pattern syntax for music performance).

Hey all! I’m new on devRant!

Just before you, my fellow system programmer, scroll past this, let me say this:

🍬 The web is actiually simple. 🍬

Both HTML and CSS is declarative. It's all easy when you understand the concepts, learn how to be idiomatic and quit trying to do that imperative bullshit in languages that aren't imperative.

HTML is simple. You know the boilerplate: doctype, head, body, that's all. Just mark it up and do NOT look at it before you end, mark it up as it were article or something. The appearance is up to css.

CSS is simple. You may even forget bem or rscss, you're already a skilled software developer. Use common sense and your code-splitting and naming skills you gained reading The Code Complete or doing software development for years.

Forget mockups. Forget absolute positioning, forget setting width and height in pixels. Go to awwwards, find some inspiration. Draw some buttons and fields on paper with your good old pencil. Then go and write some css. Feel free to steal some shadows and transitions from codepen.

Read about 8-pixel grid system. Let every element push away from others by setting something like margin: 16px; and whoops! You've just got fully responsive and got great vertical rhythm without even using media queries!

Oh my god, do NEVER set width and height explicitly! Type something like button { width: 120px; } and bang! The entire web page is broken. Quit that shit. Let it resize as it should. It will resize itself to fit its contents.

HTML is by default ready for your template engine. That's how you receive data from server — as server-side rendered, plain old HTML page. On the other hand, the form element is the most axiomatic and simple way to send the data to server. That's how you send it — as plain old GET or POST that every webserver can handle.

All of there are true:
1. It's easy to get great 100% responsiveness without media queries.
2. It's easy to align items in row, it's just one line of css. Maybe two, if you still want elements to wrap, but want to use flexbox:
.parent {
display: flex;
flex-wrap: wrap;
}
3. HTML and CSS are fast by default.
4. You don't need mockups to achieve great visual experience. Mockups is imperative, web is declarative.
5. You may not even need JavaScript to make great website.

Go on, ask me a question about web! I'll ready to answer everything.

During a random meeting for a project:

PM: We'll need you to learn Go for this project. It says you know python in your job skills, so it should be easy.
Me: Uh, hiiii. I'm in security, not development. Can't help you, I really shouldn't even be here.
PM: I think Go has security built-in, does that help?
Me: ... I don't know, you need a developer.
PM: Do you know any Go people?
Me: I think that's something you should know.
- Silence enters the room -
PM: Yes perhaps, but you don't know anyone?

Fucking wat?

You know how it is when all your friends know you as the "computer guy".

Friend: Yo, I need this small script for school, can you do it for me?

Me: I don't really...

Friend: Come on, pretty please.

Me: See I...

Friend: I'll pay you good for this.

Me: Oh... What language does it have to be in, Python? JavaScript? Ruby? Perl? I don't know it but it shouldn't be too hard, I can learn it. Bash? Not a fan but it's quite easy. So what is it?

...

Friend: Visual Basic

Me: oh...

This was last week. 2017. A couple of days before 2018. Some schools still teach VB. Not even VB .NET.

(He had about 200 good reasons so I did it anyway. But boy, has that been a chore)

3 Easy step to learn and use git :
1. git commit
2. git push
3. git gud

Non-dev activity that made me a better dev?

That's an easy one.

Playing the piano. Or better: learning to play the piano.

(With the help of my teacher) I developed many skills that help me learn faster and I learned how to properly use and organize my time.

TL;DR I'm fucking sick and tired of Devs cutting corners on security! Things can't be simply hidden a bit; security needs to be integral to your entire process and solution. Please learn from my story and be one of the good guys!

As I mentioned before my company used plain text passwords in a legacy app (was not allowed to fix it) and that we finally moved away from it. A big win! However not the end of our issues.

Those Idiot still use hardcoded passwords in code. A practice that almost resulted in a leak of the DB admin password when we had to publish a repo for deployment purposes. Luckily I didn't search and there is something like BFG repo cleaner.

I have tried to remedy this by providing a nice library to handle all kinds of config (easy config injection) and a default json file that is always ignored by git. Although this helped a lot they still remain idiots.
The first project in another language and boom hardcoded password. Dev said I'll just remove before going live. First of all I don't believe him. Second of all I asked from history? "No a commit will be good enough..."

Last week we had to fix a leak of copyrighted contend.
How did this happen you ask? Well the secure upload field was not used because they thought that the normal one was good enough. "It's fine as long the URL to the file is not published. Besides now we can also use it to upload files that need to be published here"
This is so fucking stupid on so many levels. NEVER MIX SECURE AND INSECURE CONTENT it is confusing and hard to maintain. Hiding behind a URL that thousands of people have access to is also not going to work. We have the proof now...
Will they learn? Maybe for a short while but I remain sceptic. I hope a few DevrRanters do!

I met a guy on facebook group, where was post asking how to make easy platformer game in a week. And I tried to explain post author how to start. Everything was good untill this guy came in. He commented my comment "Yoo you are wrong, he can learn it in one day". My comment was about starting with unity and programming, and that need time to learn (without copying tutorial, everything made by himself). So I started to gently explaining him why it is unachivable in 1 day. Of course his respond was like "Omg you are so fooking stupid, It's sooo easyyy" this conversarion took good 15 minutes, and I ended it with "Ok, you are right" just to end thid. I hate people like that.

It's crazy to me how much of a misguided superiority complex some CS college kids have.

"I'd never learn Python, that's just for kids"

"Front end is so easy, it's just HTML and making things look pretty"

My code review nightmare part 2

Team responsible for code 'quality' dictated in their 18+ page coding standard document that all the references in the 'using' block be sorted alphabetically. Easy enough in Visual Studio with the right-click -> 'Remove and Sort Usings', so I thought.

Called into a conference room with other devs and the area manager (because 'Toby' needed an audience) focusing on my lack of code quality and not adhering to the coding standard.

The numerous files in question were unit tests files

using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
<the rest of the usings>

T: "As you can see, none of these files' usings are in alphabetical order"
Me: "Um, I think they are. M comes before S"
T: "The standards clearly dictate system level references are to be sorted first."
Mgr: "Yes, why didn't you sort before checking this code in? T couldn't have made the standards any easier to follow. All you had to do is right-click and sort."
Me: "I did. M comes before S."
T: "No You Didn't! That is not a system reference!"
Me: "I disagree. MSTest references are considered a system level reference, but whatever, I'll move that one line if it upsets you that much."
Mgr: "OK smartass, that's enough disrespect. Just follow the fucking standard."
T: "And learn to sort. It's easy. You should have learned that in college"
<Mgr and T have a laugh>
Me: "Are all your unit tests up to standard? I mean, are the usings sorted correctly?"
T:"Um..well..of course they are!"
Me: "Lets take a look."

I had no idea, a sorted usings seems like a detail no one cares about that much and something people do when bored. I navigate to project I knew T was working on and found nearly all the file's usings weren't sorted. I pick on one..

using NUnit;
using Microsoft.Something.Other;
using System;
<the rest of the usings>

Me: "These aren't sorted..."
T: "Uh..um...hey...this file is sorted. N comes before M!"
Me: "Say that again. A little louder please."
Mgr: "NUnit is a system level nuget package. It's fine. We're not wasting time fixing some bug in how Visual Studio sorts"
Me: "Bug? What?..wait...and having me update 10 or so files isn't a waste of time?"
Mgr: "No! Coding standards are never a waste of time! We're done here. This meeting is to review your code and not T's. Fix your bugs and re-submit the code for review..today!"

Linux... Is shitty... Ok it just is. I've tried all kinds of variations and they all just... Urgh

Now I know... I know devs are meant to love it ... But compare it to windows

(Yes windows fucks up more) but when it works it works.

... Windows isn't perfect... But it doesn't try to be.

Linux has that feel of... Clearly made by a dev... It works consistently but doesn't take into account how people want to use something...

Linux is something you have to learn to love. And I'm sure I could.
But with windows it's intuitive it's straight forward

I feel like if I was to pick up windows having never used it... I would know how it works. I could at least use it go online and watch videos do the basics... In Linux ... No it's not as easy, sometimes not possible

An os you should just know how to do everything you want to do, and not have to download tonnes of shit to get it that way

It is, the future... But holy fuck get your act together Linux

Developed my own programming language to teach programming at community college.
I needed an easy to learn language with as few brackets as possible cz these caused the most problems for beginners. Called it robocode. =)
Then i built an IDE around it where you have to program a little sheep to eat all gras in an area. The goal was to teach how to learn the syntax, the libary, debugging and to "see" the code run while the program and the little sheep runs, ..halt the programm, inspect variables, check the positions on the grass, ...i think you get the picture.
Later i built another IDE where you can program a Tetris.

robocode now also powers the calculation in our buisness application.

...i think thats my most successful project so far.

here's a screenshot of the RoboSheep IDE (be nice, it's a few years old) and the links to the download sites. I'm sorry, it's all german cz i never localized it.

(I am an entry-inter-intermediate level dev)
P = Person

P:Hey Can you build me a POS system for free?

Me: Yea whatever. (because... immediate family member)

P:Ok Great.

Me: *starts working on it.. almost done with inventory control and layouts in one night*

P: When will it be done? and I need it in a full screen window not a browser!!

Me: Soon..and I have not worked in ASP yet. So it will be a full screen browser app.

P: Aww you cant do it fast? You are not skilled enough??? Poor you, you are not good enough. I can do it in a few hours. Just write a C program which stores entries in a txt file. I dont want sql shes-que-el on my system. You dont want to use .txt because it will be harder for you. Poor you.. no skill.

Me: *raging to a level where i turn into kryptonium and burn superman to death but still keeping my calm* You will get it when you get it. Period

Inner Me: GO FUCK YOURSELF. IM DOING THIS FOR FREE SO THAT IT HELPS YOU OUT. NAGGING ME WONT HELP YOUR CAUSE ONE BIT. GO FUCKING LEARN HOW TO CODE YOURSELF AND MAKE IT YOURSELF OR BUY IT FOR A FUCK TON OF UNJUSTIFIED MONEY. IM GIVING YOU A BEAUTIFUL LAYOUT, GREAT APPLICATION ARCHITECTURE USING LARAVEL AND GREAT DATABASE DESIGN WHICH WOULD BE SCALABLE AND PRODUCE MEANINGFUL REPORTS. WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU PREFER A .TXT FILE OVER A WELL DESIGNED DATABASE. WOULD YOU FUCKING OPEN THAT HAMSTER CAGE OF A BRAIN OF YOURS WITH A KNIFE OR A SCREWDRIVER?
IF ITS THAT EASY FOR YOU GO FUCKING DO IT YOURSELF AND STOP BOTHERING ME. I AM TAKING MY TIME OUT FROM FREELANCING TO HELP YOU OUT. I COULD BE SPENDING THIS TIME ON OTHER PROJECTS WHICH WOULD GET ME SOMEWHERE. THE ONLY FUCKING REASON IM DOING IT BECAUSE I MIGHT BE ABLE TO RESELL THE POS (PIECE OF SHIT) TO OTHER PEOPLE IN FUTURE AND MAKE MY SHARE OF UNJUSTIFIED SHIT TON OF MONEY.

"Install through npm"
"Install through gulp"
"Install through compiling"
"Install through x"
"Install through y"

WHY CAN'T I JUST SIMPLY INCLUDE THE MOTHERFUCKING THING IN THE HTML LIKE A FUCKING NORMAL PERSON?!

ALL I WANT IS TO INCLUDE A GODDAMN UI FRAMEWORK.

When I just started web development, this stuff was so fucking easy! Why did it become so motherfucking complicated to include simple shit like this?!

All I want is to start programing this motherfucker, not spend 3 hours on compiling CSS and whatnot (because I'd have to learn this bullshit first).

Mother of god, why did this become so fucking obnoxious?

I. JUST. WANT. TO. INCLUDE. TWO. FUCKING. FILES.

I'm a Javanese, life in Java island about 20 years. And I say it's not easy to learn java.

As much as I love opensource I hate really hate some of its actvie community members (read this as "freetards" <-- see urbandictonary). As a .Net + web devloper with minimal C experience (I just started learning it) and literally no Python experience its not really easy to contribute for me to many (most) opensource software for linux. I am using some <unnamed software> and I found a <critical bug>, it was easy to reproduce and I wrote for list of possible solutions, found it in a code and linked and basically wrote a docummentation longer than any other I ever wrote for every single project I did ever, combined. This <software> was critical for my server and since owner of github repo and few other people there were really active, I hoped that this bug with pretty good documentation will be solved fast, I went to my bed with a heroic feeling of an open source community contributor that helped saving world. I was horribly wrong. Tomorrow, I got 3 passively agressive responses from owner and other 2 freetards that summed up said <other1>:"oh thats nice, fix i yourself and commit it", <other2>:"have a sex with yourself" in a nice way, and <owner>: "fix my softwate and create mrege request". After replying that I have no experience my Python skills are not on a level requied for such an action, he messaged me on twitter I have linked to my GitHub profile saying even less nicely that I am a "retarded c*nt" and that I should learn Python and fix it myself. This makes me stay with my Windows based Server for some time now, fuck this. I googled his github nickname and guess what. Our main freetard is admin on an <unnamed linux forum> and mebmber of many other "computer help" with literally half of his posts just slightly toxic posts about how everyone should use linux and how supreme it is ober anything other, the other hals was crying why linux has only 1% of market share. Oh boi I am not sure why but ITS MAYBE BECAUSE OF FREETARDS LIKE YOU.
And the funnies thing is, hes not only freetard, he is just fullstack retard. One of his posts is "helping" to some <noob windows user> installing Linux. tl:dr for this las part: Freetard basically wiped all data of that <noob>.

PS: Bless everyone who do not respond "oh nice, now you can do it yourself"

So just finished the presentation for my internship project. I'm free now!(and can sleep normal times too) But I have a few things I need to get off my mind. Dunno if it'll seem a bit stupid to some of you..but yeahh....
Anyway, during my demo yesterday
Lecturer: So this project of yours uses some open-source stuff?
Me: Yeah.
L: And if the company wants to use if for commercialization they need to pay for the license?
M: Thats basically it. Yes.
L: Well, see..thats the problem with your project. You need to think of all this things. If there's no other options then just code the whole shit yourself. Or maybe discuss with the management on this.
Yeah...see, I doubt the management here cares about us anyway. Oh, you're working on your intern stuff. Not important. Just resize the pictures in my powerpoint will you? Oh and you want to use the company computers for your project? No can do..confidentiality stuff. But make sure the thing will work on our system anyway when you're done with it. And even if you use our computers, they restart everytime you open Word anyway..hahaha. You want access to this thing so you can learn a bit on our company's work. Sorry but no. EVERYTHING is confidential so you can't access it since you're interns, eventhough our company is the one that took you inanyway.
Manager: Oh, the thing you're making is pretty cool. You know,all of you can just give your systems to us later.
Friend: Yeah well, maybe we can ask the company for payment? Haha.
Manager: Hahaha well the company can just take your systems for free since you're doing it on our working hours.
Fuck. You. When we ask to do our stuff you said noooo its the company hours. Do our work. And do your stuff back at home or something. Oh, but then we'll drag you around the state to see the clients, and you'll reach home at 8-9pm or something, but of course you're not tired right? So just code then. Or you're not going anywhere today? You're still not allowed to code here eventhough you don't have any work though...so just sit there and be quiet. Or maybe shred my papers for me. Fuck your working hours.
Lecturer: And well, thats the problem with some students *looks pointedly at me* they want to go to non-technical companies so that they can have it easy. Your friends who go to other companies will learn a lot more.
Do you think I fucking want to be here??? This is the only company I got so fuck that. Even when I get different offers and apply to change companies, you go nope. No can do. Stick with your current company eventhough we know that its shit for IT students because its a big company, see? And we have our university's reputation to upkeep. I came here to learn, not make you the No.1 university or something. And its not like you, or the staffs here, help us with anything.
So fuck all of this. We're gonna tell the other lecturers to stop sending students here. You don't learn anything. I'm done with this shit, not gonna think or worry about it anymore..I'll just, go get cake or something. Yeah.

Just because you can learn HTML in a day doesn’t mean that you don’t need a degree.

Did you know that your browser, HTML, CSS, Javascript, and even your operating system use linked lists, binary trees, hash tables, and other so-called “useless” data structures?

It’s important to understand the roots and fundamentals of computer science even if you won’t use that knowledge day to day.

It changes your perspective on programming once you learn what actually goes on under the hood, and makes you think twice about the impact of what you write.

It’s relatively easy to get a programming job without a degree nowadays, but it often leads to web developers claiming that degrees aren’t important to their web apps.

There is much more than just the web to computer science, and that’s something to always keep in mind.

I really really want to start working.

I have social anxiety, but my mom is really on my ass about bringing in money. I need some sort of job that I can do from home on my computer.

Something related to programming.. Administration.. Whatever. I don't mind having to learn something new to find work.

I have no formal qualifacations.

I don't care how easy or hard it is, as long as I can make at least $100/mo.

Non CS friend: I want to learn Hacking, and Hack Facebook.

Me: That's pretty easy, We'll start with Hacking Twitter today, then tomorrow Facebook.

F: Ya, thats ok.

Me: 1. Login into your Twitter account,
2. Open the account you want to hack,
3. Right click on the tweet, and click inspect element, and Change the tweet as you want.

F: Wowww... Man that's amazing...

*** He believed that he is a hacker for one whole day ***

"I keep telling you, I'm not a pilot"
"and I keep telling you, you fly boys crack me up!"

I'm not a developer, but I'm doing some complex things and I need the benefit of computers to work things out, so I know enough programming to get me by. Recently one of the uppers decided that all the amateur spaghetti python programs I'd quickly slapped together should be developed into tools that the clients engineers can use!

"How long do you need!."
" I have no idea how to make something like that",
"but it's all just maths right! you can figure it out",
"probably, given long enough bu.. "
"okay get started and we'll check in in a couple of weeks" "hold o.." "I'll give your pride and joy to the graduate to fuck up while you're working on that" "wai.. " "anyway got take this call, good luck"
┗|｀O′|┛

So here I am.. I have no idea what I'm doing.

So since I have a working knowledge of python, fortran and VBA, someone suggested I learn nim, which was not what he sold it as. Then a software engineer that went to the same uni as me, suggested RUST! you can't mess up rust, and look at this I created (shows me a decent looking desktop application) "I'll help you out". But it wasn't really that easy.

Then I asked some questions... that was my first mistake, that's not acceptable until you know what you're doing apparently. Especially when the answers are in the docs you can't find in a topic you don't understand for a version you're not using solved with a tool you've never heard of for an operating system you forgot existed. Look at this moron asking a question.

Okay to be fair, I went through the rust docs and it was well written, and I do really like this language. But I do not have a degree in computer science, and so many docs for crates are just written with an expectation of a certain level of knowledge. As soon as there's a build error, it's at least 3 -4 days of me faffing about trying to decipher hieroglyphics.

..and the graduate is about to unwittingly commit manslaughter..

I'm sure whoever needs to fix this mess in the future will post a rant about this train wreck.

Did anyone else find Javascript fun and easy to learn?
Or am I doing something wrong?

Just curious.

I'm still at my first job, got the job by word of mouth from a friend.

This company wants me to develop both their iOS and Android apps, and being the solo developer it's a long process. I forgot to mention I had to learn objective-c on the job, and being from a java background Android was easy to pick up but it wasn't exactly 100% easy either.

8 months down the line I finished the iOS app and working on the Android app, which is more so copying the features I did with the Android prototype I worked on at the start.

I get paid minimum wage with from the looks of it no sight of a pay raise.

This company doesn't seem to know about how difficult it is to be the only developer for two apps in two different languages.

Anyway aside from this I was wondering if I could get some advice, I want to apply for jobs while I finish up the Android app, but is it a good idea to put the company I work for on my CV? I don't want to risk getting found out for looking for a job, without my boss knowing.

Would it be ideal to just have some sort of more information on request type thing if the jobs I apply for respond?

I guess I could stay until I'm here for one year (student advisor said this) but in saying that I don't think he understands that software development is done in projects rather than time, and after these apps I'll have to start on a new app from scratch, which I'm not looking forward to.

Anyways for any advice you guys give me thanks in advance I really appreciate any input, just wanna get out of this job, the 10 hours of commute I spend a week is killing me :/ along with it being expensive.

I like PHP.

It's not as bad as its reputation. Just because it's easy to learn, does not mean it's bad. In fact, with a framework like Laravel or Zend it's not so simple and keeps the whole spaghetti code developers away, which led to the bad reputation.

Hi every developer! My name is Allen. English is not my native language so forgive me if I say something that does not make any sense. Let me tell you my story how I become a programmer. (I am still learning) My first computer was a DELL OptiPlex GX 720 desktop. My father bought it for our self-employee job. Before he allow me to use the computer, I used to sit next to him and watching what he do, what he click and what he gets. When he allow me to use the computer, I was slow at typing. One or 2 WPM (word per minute) my father taught me how to use the computer. Very slowly, my typing speed improves. I understand how to use the computer. but one day, I do what make me regret. I was playing with some executables, when I double clicking it, it does not work I used to associate files with apps. I associate music files with every player I want. So, I did what I used to, I associate exe files with windows media center! The computer started to open hundreds of windows media center (WMC for short) whenever an app is clicked, it opens windows media center. Today, I realized that windows were trying to open every app and every process that regularly run. However, since I associate it with WMC, instead of the app itself, it opens WMC some days after the mistake, I wonder how apps work and how I can create my own. My father  told me before that a program is simply a binary file that the computer can read. However, it was too advanced to me at the time.I begin my search with google. Everytime I search, it says "learn to code" or something like that. I see some C++ code but, it was disgusting. when I read just a few lines of a hello world code in java. it was too complex

What I seen

#$$#% $%&$%&*#!@

~

(&*%&$ (_(*^% #&&* (^^$(&^$%^( %^*$())

~

^$70^(`*#%`*#&%^)*!"   Hello world   "#@

~

~

The actual code:

class helloworld

{

    public static void main(String args[])

    {

         System.out.println("Hello World!");

     }

}

I look for an easy way but my attempts fail. then. I push

I to learn how to code.I try learning java. but it still

Very complex. i tried LibertyBASIC. from LibertyBASIC to

Java. after learning LibertyBASIC, it was easy!

LibertyBASIC -> Java -> Ruby -> NOW, C# and XAML

Today, I am learning C# and XAML.

My first OS                         :  Windows 7

My first Computer             :  DELL OptiPlex GX 720

My first successful click  :  The Start menu

My first used App              : Microsoft Encarta 2009

My first created App         : Hi-Lo(number-guessing game. written in LibertyBASIC)

Thankyou for reading this Long story.

 

Why do people jump from c to python quickly. And all are about machine learning. Free days back my cousin asked me for books to learn python.
Trust me you have to learn c before python. People struggle going from python to c. But no ml, scripting,

And most importantly software engineering wtf?
Software engineering is how to run projects and it is compulsory to learn python and no mention of got it any other vcs, wtf?

What the hell is that type of college. Trust me I am no way saying python is weak, but for learning purpose the depth of language and concepts like pass by reference, memory leaks, pointers.

And learning algorithms, data structures, is more important than machine learning, trust me if you cannot model the data, get proper training data, testing data then you will get screewed up outputs. And then again every one who hype these kinds of stuff also think that ml with 100% accuracy is greater than 90% and overfit the data, test the model on training data. And mostly the will learn in college will be by hearting few formulas, that's it.

Learn a language (concepts in language) like then you will most languages are easy.

Cool cs programmer are born today😖

I fucking HATE all those extremely high level abstractions, IT IS ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE to find anything low level, especially for ARM... IT CANT BE THAT HARD TO JUST FUCKING FIND SOMETHING THAT DOES NUT USE 100000 HEADER FILES, and stupid large frameworks. I feel like everyone is fucking retarded, I want to learn the real stuff, but everything is bloated with high level stuff, and some kind of cult that gets a horny from using extremely easy bullcrap, that completely takes away the interesting parts of processors and embedded systems, IVE Been searching for days to FIND SOMETHING FUCKING USEFULL, even an MOTHERFUCKING 'LOW LEVEL' book GOES AND USE A BILLION HEADER FILES, and STUPID IDE's from which you learn absolutely nothing, IF i wanted to do nothing and learn nothing I WOULD USE ARDUINO IDE, but no i wont, I want to learn something, and I dont have access to university or anything, and it literally is impossible to find anything usefull, every idiot uses library's for everything, and builds their crap on frameworks as large as the mount everest.. Fuck me, why cant this be different ?

Do you have a ‘Drama Queen’ on your team?
This happened last week.
DK = Drama Queen
DK: “OMG..the link to the document isn’t working! All I get is page not found. I’m supposed to update the notes for this project…and now I can’t! What the _bleep_ and I supposed to do now?!...I don’t understand how …”
This goes on for it seems 5 minutes.
Me: “Hold on...someone probably accidently mistyped the file name or something. I’m sure the document is still there.”
DK: “Well, I’ll never find it. Our intranet is a mess. I’m going to have to tell the PM that the project is delayed now and there is nothing I can do about it because our intranet is such a mess.”
Me: “Maybe, but why don’t you open up the file and see where the reference is?”
DK: “Oh, _bleep_ no…it is HTML…I don’t know anything about HTML. If the company expects me to know HTML, I’m going to have to tell the PM the project is delayed until I take all the courses on W3-Schools.”
Me: “Um…you’ve been developing as long as I have and you have a couple of blogs. You know what an anchor tag is. I don’t think you have to take all those W3 courses. It’s an anchor tag with a wrong HREF, pretty easy to find and fix”
DK: “Umm…I know *my* blog…not this intranet mess. Did you take all the courses on W3-Schools? Do you understand all the latest web html standards?”
Me: “No, but I don’t think W3 has anything to do the problem. Pretty sure I can figure it out.”
DK: “ha ha…’figuring it out’. I have to know every detail on how the intranet works. What about the javascript? Those intranet html files probably have javascript. I can’t make any changes until I know I won’t break anything. _bleep_! Now I have to learn javascript! This C# project will never get done. The PM is going to be _bleep_issed! Great..and I’ll probably have to work weekends to catch up!”
While he is ranting…I open up the html file, locate the misspelling, fix it, save it..
Me: “Hey..it’s fixed. Looks like Karl accidently added a space in the file name. No big deal.”
DK:”What!!! How did you…uh…I don’t understand…how did you know what the file name was? What if you changed something that broke the page? How did you know it was the correct file? I would not change anything unless I understood every detail. You’re gonna’ get fired.”
Me: “Well, it’s done. Move on.”

Easy fix! have students that actually want to learn. That’s what makes the difference.

Linux is hard to learn and master. That's fine with me. Windows is intuitive, but not user-friendly. Linux has a steep learning curve, but then is far more user-friendly than any other operating system. To me, that steep learning curve was far more than worth it, as I now have a desktop that does whatever I want, and behaves exactly as I want.

People come to Linux hoping that it will be easy to pick up, and then get angry when it isn't. Then they claim that the community is toxic, because Linux users are happy with something they think is broken.

Linux is hard to learn, and that's fine. That's valuable, to me. That's part of the appeal to me(and millions of others). Linux is unforgiving when you lack the knowledge gained in that steep learning curve. That's fine with me too. As its userbase grows, so too does the number of knowledgeable people who work to make it better and invent more amazing things for it.

If Linux was easy to learn, it wouldn't be as good as it is, and to me, that's reason enough to love it.

I'm now trying to learn Java for 1,5 years last weekend I started to learn python, this was so easy 😅

!rant
As a self taught, I used to break what i want to learn into pieces and watch tutorials where people use these pieces. Then I could easily do what I learned, but I could do it exactly how I learned it from the tutorials.
Until one glorious day I found a tutorial about js that doesnt teach you the "how" of things but the "why" of things.
I cant describe how easy and in depth I understand js tutorials now. It is easier even when I have to learn a new framework.
It feels like I fast-forwarded my knowledge growth overnight.
I now see my 3 weeks old code and it disgusts me.

So I am going to talk about interviews from a different perspective, the being on the question side of the technical interview.

We have had four interviews for a single Senior Dev position. I threw some very hard questions at the people and some very easy ones. The thing that amazed me was that people actually went for an interview when they where woefully under qualified.

The latest in this list was someone who didn't understand how inheritance works for object orientated programming, and when I asked him something very specific he needed to look at his notes...

The person that I felt did the best on the interview was the person that didn't have every answer but said clearly that he didn't know and talked about his ability and desire to learn. The people that failed the worst were the ones that were certain, arrogant, and wrong.

Technical interviews are fun 😏

I feel JS has taken over...

The good.

Easy to learn, thus everyone knows it

The bad.

Everyone knows it, so npm has disgusting code that's used in prod.

Npm itself is still an unstable mess at times.

No one knows what it is to be a good programmer .

Dozens of frameworks every year since everyone thinks they can make it a bit better.

Classes still suck , no interfaces !

Really getting tired of these web design ads. I would turn on Adblock but I want to support YouTubers that are actually interesting to watch. I saw this ad today, Divi. A plugin of some sort for WordPress and the lady in the video is talking about how building a website is like painting a master piece but not​ really. And then goes on about "creating" a website with their tool on the page itself. (Like a Wix or Weebly but on the actual page and live). I watch the video to the end and decide to check the comments and someone said "or you know, learn HTML and stop being lazy" *liked* then one smart ass replied, "or use Wix, or use Weebly, or use any other thing online that lets you design a website without typing code". It annoys me how ignorant people can be about designing, but I don't blame them. People are lazy in general and would want to do things the easy way even though it's not the best way. You know the saying, give a man a CMS or WYSIWYG builder and he'll make a website, but teach a man to code and he'll make more, improved websites.

>dad nagging to learn python
>i hate python
>cuz i hate snakes
>whatever
>so started learning it
>with some awesome video tutorials
>even though i like the instructor
>i find the language
>boring
>uhh
>why do u use this?
>oh and you say it is easy 4 begineers
>oh good
>then why does only
>del keyword gets highlighted in pycharm
>just to look cool i guess
>lua is way better
>hope lua is more used than python
>and more supported
>but i still like C#

Moral: C# rocks

Internships are fucking bullshit and if more senior developers were to take the role of an actual mentor to coach juniors properly then the state of software engineering would be better.

Some people can be let down easy in terms of "this is not for you bruh", others can be built. I know that social interactions are not common for a lot of the morons in here, but being polite and kind is relatively simple if you know what you are doing. Being a dickhead != "royal levels of expertise" and if we were to coach more people into proper development practices then software would not be in such a shitty state.

For an environment that thrives in cooperation I find it hard to believe that we are still subjecting new people to the field to what can be considered slavery with little to actual no monetary compensation.

I removed many of the requirements for the application to a software developer job where I am at (I am the boss, I get to do shit like that) and my fight with HR was "I would rather someone fresh from college that I can coach properly than some dickhead with years on the field that won't listen to anything else than their own words"

Sure it would be slow, sure it would be hard, nothing ever is that simple, but my idea is "train this mkfer, level the fuck out of him, let him be off to great shit rather than giving him to some dickhead that will treat him like shit on account of being a newbie"

And yes, I do know how and what can go bad, I am going to have someone desinging shit in basic html/js/css with some php here and there not giving them the keys to every server I control. Thank you for your fucking concerns, I know what I am doing.

the experiment fails? GOOD more data for me.

Plus, you learn more when you teach others.

bro just learn C bro I promise it's all smooth sailing bro haha lol just take up HTML with CSS bro its a piece of cake bro what bro lol just start coding up differential equations with numpy library haha its so simple bro just start with Ruby bro it will take only couple days bro what lol bro take this aeronautical course on how to code an airplane simulation bro its so simple bro just start algorithms on cryptography bro its so easy i cant bro just start writing drivers for printers bro haha lol just start writing a bootloader for a new Linux distro bro lol haha easy bro just make a billion dollar company bro haha its so simple.
keep going bro haha invent your own JS framework over a billion existing ones haha bro typescript is so easy bro lol what u say take up redis bro go from the first command bro learn mongodb and mysql together bro its so simple.

but bro don't try to master JS bro .. u will regret it forever bro.

!rant

Got back into android development recently and while everything was pretty flawless ( I managed to get the basic concepts implemented in a day) something wasn't right.

For some reason I was not happy with the code i wrote, although I took examples from google and tried to adapt their code style. It looked aweful. I hated my code.
But the code itself wasn't the core of the problem. I could easily add new features and replace components with new implementations without breaking the app. All those "good code quality" identifiers were there.

Turn out the problem is Java. Or to be more specific: Java 1.6
Every listener which only calls a single function once a worker has finished needs 6 lines of code. If you implement the inferface in the class it gets messy once there are multiple workers and you have a generic interface. And there are no lambdas!

So I made the switch to Kotlin.
The app was converted to kotlin in 30 Minutes​. Android studio can convert the classes automatically and very little manual work is needed afterwards.
After that I spent 2 hours replacing the old java concepts with Kotlin concepts: lamdas, non-nullable types, getters and setters in kotlin style (which in this case is c# style) and some other great thing.
The code is good looking now. I like it. I like kotlin as it has a lot of cool things.
Its super easy to learn. It took me about 2 hours to get into it. It combines concepts from java, javascript, c# and maybe a few other languages to form a modern jvm 1.6 compatible typesafe language.

Android dev is fun again!

I'm not going to have a lot of new friends here but I am fed up with all those guys complaining about CSS on devRant.

CSS is damn easy. Get over it. Take some lessons, learn it the right way and shut your mouth.

I'd prefer you share your enlighten opinion on CSS in JS with React Native or CSS compositing with ReactJS which are both huge pain in the ass.

Plain CSS isn't the cause of all your pain. You are.

1. Learn to read and understand the errors and exception messages. While writing code you're going to be facing exceptions most of the time and the real cause of them is under a lot of generic error messages. That and a lot of patience and perseverance.

2. You're going to face clients and bosses that ask you to do a temporary "workaround" even though you know there is a best way to solve a problem even if it takes more time and effort. Don't "crash" against their ideas, try to find a mid-term between the fast and easy work around and the best solution and leave it open to improve it in the future. I have met a lot of developers that let the frustration stops them to be creative just because the approved development is not what they wanted to do.

Dual Boot Linux & Windows.

I hardly ever see anyone do it right. And there is just two tricks that make a completely new experience out of it. I am not sharing it with you to be nice, I am sharing because I am curious if you're already doing it.

1. Install on a second hard drive, not a different partition. Learn which button to hold on the boot screen to select the boot drive. You can still chain-load via Grub, but the major advantage, updates of neither OS will fuck up your boot loader. You can update it abso-fucking-lutely risk free. Second advantage, advice 2. becomes trivially easy.

2. Set up a virtual machine. Select as its hard drive the raw disk volume where you have installed your Windows. You can do this with VirtualBox, but QEMU with virtual machine manager make is far easier to set this up in. You can now start Windows under Linux as a virtual machine. You can always start a small application, but the big deal is installing. Start a Steam download, have it installed and ready without switching over. Running windows updates. And when you then have time to play the game, just reboot and you have it already installed.

I feel like many are not aware that you can start a virtual machine of a real hard drive. It's one of those things that improve usability of it enormously. It's something where many will just not think about it because they keep dual booting and virtual machines in two different categories in their brains, but immediately will think it is obvious as soon as they hear about it.

So, who already did this? Raise your hands!

Today I had a programming exam

We had to read a request, write uml, use case etc...

I think "it's going to be easy!"

Than I remember that for some unholy reason we use java7

Than I remember that the keyword to automatically add getters and setters was added in java10

Had to write getters and setters by hand, on a piece of paper, for 5 classes...

I hate my university, we are Information Engineering that is the closest thing we have to Software Engineering in my city and we still do our programming exams on paper, that doesn't test your ability to program, but your ability to learn a load of information by memory

Master Foo and the Script Kiddie
(from the Rootless Root Unix Koans of Master Foo)

A stranger from the land of Woot came to Master Foo as he was eating the morning meal with his students.

“I hear y00 are very l33t,” he said. “Pl33z teach m3 all y00 know.”

Master Foo's students looked at each other, confused by the stranger's barbarous language. Master Foo just smiled and replied: “You wish to learn the Way of Unix?”

“I want to b3 a wizard hax0r,” the stranger replied, “and 0wn ever3one's b0xen.”

“I do not teach that Way,” replied Master Foo.

The stranger grew agitated. “D00d, y00 r nothing but a p0ser,” he said. “If y00 n00 anything, y00 wud t33ch m3.”

“There is a path,” said Master Foo, “that might bring you to wisdom.” The master scribbled an IP address on a piece of paper. “Cracking this box should pose you little difficulty, as its guardians are incompetent. Return and tell me what you find.”

The stranger bowed and left. Master Foo finished his meal.

Days passed, then months. The stranger was forgotten.

Years later, the stranger from the land of Woot returned.

“Damn you!” he said, “I cracked that box, and it was easy like you said. But I got busted by the FBI and thrown in jail.”

“Good,” said Master Foo. “You are ready for the next lesson.” He scribbled an IP address on another piece of paper and handed it to the stranger.

“Are you crazy?” the stranger yelled. “After what I've been through, I'm never going to break into a computer again!”

Master Foo smiled. “Here,” he said, “is the beginning of wisdom.”

On hearing this, the stranger was enlightened.

So I found this consulting job a while ago thinking that some extra cash while studying would be nice to have.

I meet with the guy, a researcher trying to start a business up, good for him I think, maybe we'll hit it off, continue working, why not? Except he has no clue how to write working code, all he ever did was writing matlab scripts he says, thats why he hired me he says.
Okay, fine, you do your job I do mine.

He hands me the contract, its about comparing two libraries, finding out which one is better suited for his job, cool, plots and graphs everywhere.

Except this is an unpaid job. YOU WHAT?! It's a test job. FINE. At least it'll look good on my resume.

We talk about the paid part where I'm supposed to scale the two libraries, looks good, as expected from an ML engineering perspective. It comes to payment. The dude has no idea how taxes work, says he has a set amount to pay and not a penny more. I explain with examples how taxes are paid, how you get reimbursed for them and so on. Won't budge. Screws me over.

Opens the door for other jobs I think, he'll learn next time I think and take the job.

Fast forward a month, 90% of the job done, he adds a third thing to compare. Gives a github link to a repo with 2 authors, last commit a year ago. There are links to a 404, claiming compiled jars. Fuck.

Not my first rodeo, git clone that shit, make compile, the works. The thing uses libs that ain't in no repo, that would be too easy. Run, error, find lib, remake all the things, rinse repeat.

The scripts they got have hardcoded paths and filenames for 2 year old binaries, remake that shit.

It works, at least I get a prompt now. Try the example files they got, no luck, some missing unlinked binary somewhere, but not a name mentioned. Cross reference the shit outta the libs mentioned on readme, find the missing shit, down it.

Available versions are too new, THE MOLDING NUTCRACKER uses some bug in an old version of the lib.

I give up. Fuck this. This ain't worth the money OR time. Wanker...

Why in the world IT work is so stressful?
I never been like that since I start developing code professionally, 8 years ago.
Since then, I had many health problems due stress, and some were really scaring (heart problem).

I'm trying to adapt to a healthier way of work, but I'm starting to doubt if that is possible.

Work in technology seems cruel and soulless sometimes. The constant pressure to learn new things all the time, to specialize in a lot of skills, simultaneously. The urgency nature of ALL tasks - even a simple form field slightly out of place seems to be an issue of life and death for clients.

Easy and quick communication made some people lost boundaries and respect. Many times I received calls and messages after midnight, about things like elements alignment.

And the worst is when clients blame you about their business problems. If they are not selling well this week, it's fault of the website you did ( which they are using for months now).

This actually happened to me today, first thing in the morning. After I slept just 3h, because I worked until late yesterday (oh yeah many more of these life/death updates).

What happens in this industry? Will this ever be different some day?

!rant I need job advice. Please reason with me.

I am 26, got 2 years of experience in c# and unity3d.
I did some research and it turns out that the minimal paying average with my job/experience over the whole country is at least 300€ a month more than what i get payed currently.
I made a list of pros and cons, and am just not sure what would be smartest to do in the long run. Here is a list for both options, please chime in on me if you can!

Points for current job:
Permanent contract (hard to fire me etc.)
Get to make mostly mobile games but nothing really big
Fun small team whom i get along with (i am on the spectrum and can be hard to deal with social or costumer related things)
Rarely any overtime (i like to know my hours)
Easy but slow jobs (badly organized, drag on forever)
Rarely challenged and thus boring me
I get to shoot nerf guns at colleagues whenever
Low chance of a 300€/m pay increase (not worth it to boss, financials aren't that great but the company is promising)

Points for any other job:
Unknown working condittions
I am probably bad and uknowledgeable about any tool they give me to work with because my experience is so monotone
Start on short term contract again all over
At the least a 300€ net increase a month
Prob closer to home then 1h drive away
I get to learn new things but give up on games/apps as i know them
Probably get knowledgeable seniors
Probably end up in a bigger more serious company where i am just a number
I am bad in new social envirnoments, oh the angst is real

And a few things besides it are that i personally only have as goal to own my own house with my fiance as soon as i can. And this means i will need to take out a 200k loan or something along those lines, to be paid off over 30 years max.
This means that the permanent contract is very valuable in my eyes, but so is monthly pay increase.
I want to have fun in my job, i want to learn new things and better ways. But i also want to be able to say "enough" to something if it overwhelms me. I just know some things are not for me and i would mess up if i were made to do them. I fear that to not be an option in a big company. I would be forced out of my comfort zone without any regard for me or my learning curve.

Any advice is welcome. Please keep it general if you can so others can learn from this as well. Seniors advice will probably be helpfull to all starting programmers!

That moment when you teaching your coworkers about vba:
Me: and you close the formula with a curly bracket
Co-worker: Wow that's easy, and you say coding is hard
Me: you're right, here try to learn Java

PM: this is our super fancy new CI/CD pipeline, it's the greatest. i expect you to learn and understand all this in no time.
devs: so i have to spend some more time on this topic because it's completely new to me and requires some learning...
PM: nooo, that's a super easy task with zero effort, my braindead hamster can do that in no time, so can i, and so can you! let's assign 1 story point for that.

~ 3 months latèr ~

also PM, after he has started developing as well: so i'm realizing there are many things that i have to learn, and it takes me some time. i haven't developed with C++ and <other tool stack> for a longer time. by the way, you guys don't need to check for any quality right now, we need to deliver fast. it's okay, when you have memory overflows, your code is completely crappy, poor architecture or memory overflows, it doesn't matter.

he even has a subtask for migrating his code from VS project to our new project structure, since he refused to learn our pipeline right from the beginning and created VS project instead. シ why is this a subtask? this job can be done in no time, my left vanishing twin named Klaus who has dislexia and hates vim can solve this task in 20 seconds!!!!11

(and still no PR, not even a feature branch in our repo)

My very first wow, was back in 2011 as a freshman at university, algorithm classes. Our first language was Pascal, (because it was easy to learn and get to the idea of programming.) so, lecturer wrote Hello World! and that moment was the best part, when I realized that was called a program. After all these years I still remember this output. ❤️ awesome.
After this, its injected in my veins and soul. Even when I come home drunk or coming from the friends, I open my macbook and trying to write some cool , nerdy staff.

Its my life, my passion, my hobby. I dropped everything for this. ^^

Long story short, every time I feel amazing when I do something new and interesting.

The best language to learn.

well actually there's no "best" language, only a good programmer.

all languages can be useful, coding for games, coding for apps, for hacking.

don't choose language because people says it's the best language.

choose 4 languages you find them easy to understand, do basic coding in this 4 languages.

after this, compare it and take the one that was most fun to write.

of course language like Python is more easy for non programmer to study.
but some people find C++ more fun and easy to understand from the beginning.

enjoy and if you have a question, comment it.

!rant
Flutter is the best SDK I've ever used in my life. So insanely easy to learn and use, and it lets you build both Android and iOS apps?!?!
If you haven't checked it out, even if you've never touched mobile app dev, give it a shot. Super fun and super easy.

!rant, but some kind of story

I work as a lead dev on a gmod server of a pretty big german community. With the fun stuff, there come the duty‘s to help Jr. Devs or even help people get into Developing. The part, where you help junior devs is always fun, but what I find interesting is the part where you help people learn coding. It’s not easy work, but you learn more every “lesson”. I catch myself exploring and learning something new, even if I know the topic. For me it’s a new journey every time.
Not sure if there are many people who can relate but I just wanted to tell my side on it.

It is said that the number of programmers doubles every five years with fresh CS, CE, and EE grads. Assuming that's true, then at any one time over half the developer community are novices in the early stages of their career.

My entire life's been spent in software and I've been in it now for about 15 years and I've seen a lot of people make alot of things and I've seen a lot of people fail at alot of things. My observation is that the doers are the major thinkers, the people that really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker doer in one person. It's very easy to take credit for the thinking the doing is more concrete. It's very easy for somebody say "oh, I thought of this three years ago" but usually when you dig a little deeper you find that the people that really did it. Were also the people that really worked through the hard intellectual problems.

Many people falsely believe that a great idea constitutes 90% of the work. However, there is a significant amount of craftsmanship required to bridge the gap between a great idea and a great product. As you evolve that great idea it changes and grows it never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it and you also find there's tremendous amount of trade-offs that you have to make.

There are certain things you can't make electrons do, certain things you can't make plastic or glass, certain things you can't make factories or robots do. and as you get into all these things, Designing a product involves juggling 5,000 different concepts, fitting them together like puzzle pieces, and exploring new ways to combine them. Every day brings new challenges and opportunities to push the boundaries of what's possible, and it's this ongoing process that is the key to successful product development. That process is the "magic"

Lets play a game of spot the bug...

Too easy you say?
What if I told you that this code was written by a well paid dev over an exceptionally large period of time?

Crazy huh, but that's still nothing. The most ludicrous thing about it - is that you (like me) probably suffer from a mild case of impostor syndrome.

I just ended that suffering. The only thing worse than impostor syndrome is believing you actually know what the fuck your doing. Keep it in check but learn to love it... it's probably the reason you could spot the bug after all.

If you're as bad at web design as me, I recommend tailwind css to you.

I've been using it today and had a good time.

By providing a set of design-centric classes, it makes it easy to learn and apply good design practices without losing css control.

This is paramount to me since I know a couple of css tricks, but not too many. With this you can't miss any of the fundamental ones.

It also lets you combine multiple classes into one via the @apply directive, so the html classes don't go crazy, and you don't have to write too much css. Huge amount of lines saved.

To top it off, they have plenty screenscasts that not only teach you how to use tailwindcss, they show you fundamentals good web design.

Part of me loves devRant for it's diverse community of awesome people doing varied and interesting projects. And their ability to support and learn from each other, or at least agree to disagree.

Another part of me wants to host an API with an isTwat call that allows you to find out if someone's a twat or not, with links to their offending comments and rants. Along with a website for easy Twact™ checking.

Before I decided to learn C, I had heard tell of pointers being "hard to use". Of course I thought "maybe so, " after all, that was basically the only thing I heard about pointers, "they are hard!".

And so, when I learned C, and I got to the part about pointers, I was expecting at least some trouble (I can't know everything) and it was just... easy? Maybe the trickiest thing was how * has two different meanings based on the context (declare/dereference) but that was easy too.

Why the hell is all I hear from people about pointers is that they're difficult?

Rant time of 'Derp & Co.'

Today I decided that I am going to find another job, I just can't keep with this shit.

They said that use Agile: FALSE.
• Daily (best scenario) take like 1 hour and a half.
• New task enter the sprint and "Fuck you, more task in the same time". This is something regular done.

• "Oh, dev, we need you to check this other project" I am in the middle of my sprint on this project. "But you have to fix this bug here". (3 fucking days the bloody bug) "You are late again with tasks".

• Meeting for fresh sprint: 6 BLOODY hours... nonstop

The workflow is garbage:
• SOMEONE should did all the devops shit on the first sprint, guess what? They did nothing!, guess now who is being blamed for it (not only me, but a few coworkers).

• Nothing is well designed/defined:
~ task are explained like shit
~ times measured wrongly
~ We are in the last fucking SPRINT and still doing de ER of the DataBase cause Oh, apparently no one has work before with SQL (damn you MongoDB! (Not really)) so I am doing my best, but "jezz dev, this is so hard... maybe we can do it WRONG and easy".
~ No one is capable of take responsability of their mess, they just try to push down the problems. (Remember the devops situatuion? Why is.my fault? I came at the 3 or 4 sprint and I am doing backend tasks, I know nothing about devops).

But the big prize, the last one:
• Apparently you can't send whatever you want to the boss, it has to pass a filter previously of coordinators and managers, hell yeah!

And I am an idiot too!
because I see that we can't reach our schedule and do hours on my spare time!
This is because there are a few good coworkers who probably ended with my unfinished tasks... and they are equaly fucked as me...

This is just the tip of the iceberg. I am not a pro, I am not a full stack developer and still need to learn a lot, but this is just not normal, eight months like this...

When I wrote my first algorithm that learns...

So in order to on board our customers onto our software we have to link the product on their data base to the products on ours. This seems easy enough but when you actually start looking at their data you find it's a fuck up of duplication's, bad naming conventions and only 10% or so have distinct identifiers like a suppler code,model no or barcode. After a week or 2 they find they can't do it and ask for our help and we take over. On average it took 2 of our staff 1-2 weeks to complete the task manually searching one record of theirs against our db at a time. This was a big problem since we only had enough resources to on board 2-4 customers a month meaning slow growth.

I realized when looking at different customers databases that although the data was badly captured - it was consistently badly captured similar to how crap file names will usually contain the letters 'asd' because its typed with the left hand.

I then wrote an algorithm that fuzzy matched against our data and the past matches of other customers data creating a ranking algorithm similar to google page search. After auto matching the majority of results the top 10 ranked search results for each product on their db is shown to a human 1 at a time and they either click the the correct result or select "no match" and repeat until it is done at which point the algo will include the captured data in ranking future results.

It now takes a single staff member 1-2 hours to fully on board a customer with 10-15k products and will continue to get faster and adapt to changes in language and naming conventions. Making it learn wasn't really my intention at the time and more a side effect of what I was trying to achieve. Completely blew my mind.

The worst question was asked by me once. At least I guess it must have been the worst question for an applicant. She applied for a job as Ruby dev and gave her knowledge of the language a solid 5 Star rating. Something I wouldn't give myself unless my name is Mats. So I prepared some really nice questions about metaprogramming and the object model and stuff. As a warm-up I decided to go easy on her and asked her something simple: "how do you define getters and setters in Ruby?" Which is like one of the first things you learn but not too simple. She got a really red face and told me she didn't know. In the end I had to learn that she never even really programmed Ruby but only wrote some method calls in a file she named .rb and she didn't even know what an object was m(

Never had any doubt in my skills and have always judged them accordingly.

I am very....very...annoyingly confident (and in love with) myself.

This does not mean i do not acknowledge me fucking up and being wrong. It just means that even when I fuck up I learn from it, add it to my toolbelt and then continue to think that i am the bomb.

I don't compare my shit to others. I have never seem anyone effortlesly do anything, it is always the result of practice, passion, love and dedication and saying that it must be easy for them is an insult to them and their crafts.
I do not get jealous, nor do I feel smaller, i get pumped and motivated.

*cracks knuckles*

Boy was I happy to see this when I opened devRant up.

So for starters, more group projects are necessary. Many reasons why. To begin with, it allows for more complex programs than getting some input and printing some shit out. It also develops interpersonal skills (I hate people too, but when you go out to look for work you'll be with them, so better get used to it soon). If a platform like GitHub is used, it's easy to track who did what, and see what each person in the group did, so it should be fairly easy to discourage lazy asses.

Beyond that, stop giving us half completed assignments and asking us to fill in a function/method. Yes, it will take longer. But one doesn't learn to program by doing the minimum required work, you've got to crash and burn a lot in order to git gud. So ffs, let us do all the work. We're like AI, we learn through reinforcement learning.

Stop giving us a spec to follow. We'll do plenty of that in the future, right now we need to make mistakes, not be held by the hand all the way. Let us do dumb shit so you can fail us and tell us our code is repulsive, and this other way was better. Explain why. That's how people learn, not by telling us what each function should return, what can and can't be used, etc. And if you can't come up with a scenario in which what you're teaching is useful, then maybe you're not teaching us the right material.

I'll leave it at that for today... But I'll be back 😈

!rant, but kinda

My new director wants to buy a solution for a portal environment that my institution currently has. I have no qualms over it. My only issue was the company that sells it to be known to provide close to 0 fucking support when shit arises.

During a presentation we were told that they were using state of the art JAVA technology to render items on the page and that their ApI was easy for devs to grasp. This caught my attention since I know of very few and obscure Java frameworks that work with frontend tech (as in, your frontend logic is legit in Java)

The sales people proceed to show us React. Obviously thinking that no one knows what REact was. The dude continues with "This is new Java tech" all proud and shit prompting me to interject that it is "Javascript" the dude brushes it away saying "same thing" to which I reply with "Negative, please make sure that you properly discern Java from Javascript since Java is to Javascript as car is to carpet, completely different environments" the dude sarcastically says that "oh well, didn't know one of the people here was more aware of our own technology than we are" to which I say "and not only that, but the final say in us adopting your tech is mine, so I would rather you keep the sarcasm and the attitude to yourself, bring in a tech person if need be and learn these distinctions since we don't work with Java"

My new director later on went to talk to me since he apparently thought that Java and JS were related in some way. I can't really fault it, last time the dude touched programming was in the early 2000s, previous boss was a C and COBOL developer, but the previous dude would ALWAYS take my word no questions ask, this dude was there asking me if I was sure that Javascript and Java were really completely different environments asking me to show him.

I do not like to be questioned. I shoot the shit here and don't really involve myself with more technical aspects under this platform unless it involves concrete architecture discussions and even there I really don't care with engaging on a forum concerning that. But concerning my job I really.......really do not like to be questioned by people that know way the fuck less than me. I started coding when I was 17, I am 30 now, with a degree and years of experience. I really hate to be questioned by this dude.

Lua is one of the stupidest languages to ever exist.

Oh, the language is easy to learn? The syntax is friendly? There's only like negative 10 functions you ever need to know? Everything is a table?

EVERYTHING IS A TABLE?! WTF CARES? WHAT ABOUT NIL?!

The arrogance this language has is extraordinary, literally. No lang, except Lua, imposes such an opinionated dichotomy. Everything is a fucking table, or, it's nil. -- That's so fucking stupid.

And look, I get it, this lang (oh sorry, scripting language (?)) CAN be good and fun and whatever... the moment you start to do IO is the literal end of days.

Everything is nil. Except, if it's defined... then it's not nil. -- OK. That sounds sensible/reasonable enough. -- What if it's not defined? You get nil. What if it's not the right data? You get nil. Do I get errors/exceptions or whatever? No, absolutely not, you get nil... unless the application you're using with Lua with has a lib that handles that.

There are so many more issues I have with this lang, but honestly... Am I fucking missing something? Is this lang like actually super dooper awesome and I'm missing something? -- I can't not look at this language as just dumb and arrogant. -- It's literally a language where you have to manage and remember ALL conceivable state at ALL times.

Idk who demonized vim but I finally took efforts to learn it and damn it is fucking great and easy

JavaScript was made easy to learn for all people , but the people are retarded

can we all take a moment to appreciate the developers of flutter. they're smart, and they took the time to make flutter the *right* way.

they used an easy to learn language that's ideal for mobile development, which means hot reload/restart is possible (because dart supports aot and jit compilation)

the way it's designed is beautiful. everything is a widget, and it's easy to customize them via named parameters.

the community is great. it's not large, but it's supportive, with two active subreddits. yesterday i asked a question on r/flutterdev, and a member of the flutter team at google answered the question with a comprehensive answer.

flutter is very consistent across platforms. if it works on android or ios, you can bet it'll work on the other just as well, with the exception of platform-specific code.

it is VERY performant. unless you write a major bottleneck, 60fps is easy to achieve.

animations are EASY. define a tween and animation controller and then write a callback function. not to mention it's straightforward, and complex/combined animations are easy, too.

you can get almost direct access to the canvas, should you need it, with custompainter.

oh my god, this is revolutionary in the programming world. development is quicker than it is with native android alone, and for people who have no access to a mac, like me, i can develop for ios and compile via code magic. if you haven't checked it out and you develop for mobile, check it out.

oh yeah, did i mention it's not just mobile. hummingbird - flutter compiled to web - is already in experimental public betas, and will likely be released by the end of the year. there's also experimental desktop support, which is amazing, and much better than electron. not to mention flutter is the future, as it will be the primary way to make apps on fuchsia os.

Earlier this year, we built a custom gift box builder for a local popcorn company. I had decided to use vue.js for the interface which was really fun to learn.

I hadn't used any reactive frameworks like vue before this project, but I was surprised how easy it was to use, and it was so satisfying watching the frontend change just by modifying the data. I was able to easily add little transition animations when the states changed which was really fun too (something that would be really tedious otherwise).

That's was probably the most fun I've had on a project in a while.

It is easy to believe something is over-engineered as a junior. You open a solution and get slapped in the face with a wet fish of many classes, with strange names, doing very little, with everything coming together in ways you don't understand.

My advice is to learn about design patterns, clean code, clean architecture, and model driven design. Until that point I don't think you can make such a distinction. And indeed once knowledgeable of patterns and techniques as well as the domain, the same solution can look obvious, elegant and readable.

In a field where everyone is saying 'dont over-engineer', one must be able to tell if something is actually bad, or just uses techniques you don't recognise.

Telling your senior you think something is over done just because you don't understand it is not good. First learn techniques, understand the code, then form opinions that are at least relevant then.

From someone who committed that crime.

Started learning Python from Java, C#, Objective-C, Swift.
It’s like Rocket Engineer who have to build a car. It’s easy but you have to learn almost everything from the beginning.

Ok I know there have been a lot of similar rants to this one, but now I have to write one by myself!

Fuck freelancer.com or whatever that shit is called. I once started using it when I was in school because I thought it was a convenient way to earn money on the side without fixed work times, so I could adjust to how much time I have. But soon I realized that wouldn't happen. It is easy for me to make a website, I have written some css templates from scratch and can apply them, but when will these cocksucking assholes learn that $25 for a website is not only a joke, but a fucking insult? Or a logo for 4? In his video on fiverr, pewdiepie has a point on the thing where he said that you can shit out a logo in 2min and make an easy 4 to 5 bucks, but I like doing things more properly and I bet those fuckers will give you shit for not designing the perfect logo. I once accepted a job where I ended up busting my ass 3 days log for $100 and I thought that was the normal mess at the beginning, before you have former customers rate your profile, but I got perfect ratings and still didn't get or even find any proper jobs. Most are complete shit, like write a fucking book for me or design a fucking Website or pull a logo out of your ass, but some projects are just rediculous. I once saw a project where they wanted some engineer to do the layout for the pipes in a huge processing plant. Yeah, because engineers are so poor and unemployed, even when they are entrepreneurs they dont go to those shity sites. Since I am actually qualified for such a job, I applied just to see if I could land a job that is actually not shitty, but of course it turned out the person had no idea what he was talking about. It is basically a platform where people can pay you in exposure. And the absolutely fucking worst thing about it is that they get away with it. There are always a ton of people, mostly from countries where cost of life is significantly lower, who flood the freelance market with cheap, presumably horrible logos, mobile apps, websites, texts and apparently pipeline layouts. I haven't found a similar platform but where there are only high quality biddings. But that is something that I would love to use.

Sorry for long rant, no potato.

These ignorant comments about arch are starting to get on my nerves.

You ranted or asked help about something exclusive to windows and someone pointed out they don't have that problem in arch and now you're annoyed?

Well maybe it's for good.

Next comes a very rough analogy, but imagine if someone posts "hey guys, I did a kg of coke and feeling bad, how do I detox?"

It takes one honest asshole to be like "well what if you didn't do coke?".

Replace the coke with windows.
Windows is a (mostly) closed source operating system owned by a for profit company with a very shady legal and ethical history.

What on earth could possibly go wrong?

Oh you get bsod's?
The system takes hours to update whenever the hell it wants, forces reboot and you can't stop it?
oh you got hacked because it has thousands of vulnerabilities?
wannacry on outdated windows versions paralyzed the uk health system?

oh no one can truly scrutinize it because it's closed source?

yet you wonder why people are assholes when you mention it? This thing is fucking cancer, it's hundreds of steps backwards in terms of human progress.

and one of the causes for its widespread usage are the savage marketing tactics they practiced early on. just google that shit up.

but no, linux users are assholes out to get you.

and how do people react to these honest comments? "let's make a meme out of it. let's deligitimize linux, linux users and devs are a bunch of neckbeards, end of story, watch this video of rms eating skin off his foot on a live conference"

short minded idiots.

I'm not gonna deny the challenges or limitations linux represents for the end user.

It does take time to learn how to use it properly.
Nvidia sometimes works like shit.
Tweaking is almost universally required.
A huge amount of games, or Adobe/Office/X products are not compatible.
The docs can be very obscure sometimes (I for one hate a couple of manpages)

But you get a system that:
* Boots way faster
* Is way more stable
* Is way way way more secure.
* Is accountable, as in, no chance to being forced to get exploited by some evil marketing shit.

In other words, you're fucking free.
You can even create your own version of the system, with total control of it, even profit with it.

I'm not sure the average end user cares about this, but this is a developer forum, so I think in all honesty every developer owes open source OS' (linux, freebsd, etc) major respect for being free and not being corporate horseshit.

Doctors have a hippocratic oath? Well maybe devs should have some form of oath too, some sworn commitment that they will try to improve society.

I do have some sympathy for the people that are forced to use windows, even though they know ideally isn't the ideal moral choice.
As in, their job forces it, or they don't have time or energy to learn an alternative.

At the very least, if you don't know what you're talking about, just stfu and read.

But I don't have one bit of sympathy for the rest.

I didn't even talk about arch itself.
Holy fucking shit, these people that think arch is too complicated.

What in the actual fuck.

I know what the problem is, the arch install instructions aren't copy paste commands.
Or they medium tutorial they found is outdated.

So yeah, the majority of the dev community is either too dumb or has very strong ADD to CAREFULLY and PATIENTLY read through the instructions.

I'll be honest, I wouldn't expect a freshman to follow the arch install guide and not get confused several times.
But this is an intermediate level (not megaexpert like some retards out there imply).

Yet arch is just too much. That's like saying "omg building a small airplane is sooooo complicated". Yeah well it's a fucking aerial vehicle. It's going to be a bit tough. But it's nowhere near as difficult as building a 747.

So because some devs are too dumb and talk shit, they just set the bar too low.

Or "if you try to learn how to build a plane you'll grow an aviator neckbeard". I'll grow a fucking beard if I want too.

I'm so thankful for arch because it has a great compromise between control and ease of install and use.

When I have a fresh install I only get *just* what I fucking need, no extra bullshit, no extra programs I know nothing about or need running on boot time, and that's how I boot way faster that ubuntu (which is way faster than windows already).

Configuring nvidia optimus was a major pain in the ass? Sure was, but I got it work the way I wanted to after some time.

Upgrading is also easy as pie, so really scratching my brain here trying to understand the real difficult of using arch.

Anyone else fucking pissed off by all the shit saying "Learn to Code in 21 Days".

You don't see anyone trying to become a doctor in 21 days so why the fuck do people think our work is so easy that any fucking asshole can do it in 21 days.

Fuck this whole fucking stupid world...

This is real rant, not one of these funny stories!

So, I spent 4 years to get a Computer Science degree, and did two specializations, 3.5 years more in Uni. I have 6 years of experience working in IT, from support to programming. I also speak 3 languages.

I'm from a South America country, and now I'm living in EU.

I'm 30 now and earning a little more than a MacDonald's cashier earns in the US. I have to live in a shared apartment like a fucking Uni student. I have nothing, no car, no house, no girlfriend. WTF!

IT is a fucking lie! Profession of the future my ass!

In Uni they said that finding a good job was easy, that companies would literally grab us by the neck to work for them. LIE!
I did found a low paying job though, where at least I could learn a lot more.
People were really satisfied with my work and I even received a proposal of one of our clients to work for them, but the offer wasn't good enough.

I tried entering some big companies as a Trainee, but it was so ridiculous, they said they were looking for an IT person, but they asked things related to economy and other stuff that had nothing to do with IT. I always failed in the group work/interview, it was so ridiculous, I remember one candidate saying her dream was to work for the company since she was a child, SERIOUSLY!

When the opportunity came, I moved to EU and now I'm working as a dev. But as I said, I'm not satisfied with it! In the US the yearly average software engineer salary is about 100K, I earn less than 1/4 of it. And don't come saying that US pays more because of the cost of life, here the cost of life is the same or even more expensive, a super small apartment/loft is at least 180K, a simple new car 18K and a Big Mac costs 4€.

In the US, the average salary of someone that just graduated from uni is 60K to 70K! LOL

In EU, it's super hard for someone to earn 100K, that's why many companies are creating offices here, good workforce, 2 to 3 times smaller salary!

IT also sucks because it's too volatile, there's new stuff all the time. Someone always has to come with a new language, new framework, new library, etc etc. And you have to keep learning new stuff all the time.
Also job openings always ask for experienced people, like you must have at least two years of experience with VUE.js, or something.

Do you remember the last time you went to a doctor for a checkup, did they use a new tool, or did something different during the checkup? Probably not, the medic don't have to learn new stuff all the time, he is still using a stethoscope, he is still placing a wooden stick in your mouth to check your throat...
But in IT, almost no one nowadays is going to create code using CoffeeScript, they instead will use TypeScript.

I read an article saying that an IT professional must study 20 hours a week to keep up with new trends. So I must work 40 hours and study another 20? LOL
It's not that I don't like learning new stuff, but this sucks, I want to maybe learn something different or have a hobby.

Today I regret going to uni, I feel it was a waste of time and money. They taught things like calculus and physics that I never had to use professionally, and even programming stuff like linked lists I never had to use.

If instead I had studied dentistry or studied to be a ophthalmologist I think I would be earning more, would be working more independently and wouldn't need to keep up learning new things so much.

Also to work in IT you don't need a diploma, I read an article by a dude that learned programming by his own, did some software for his portfolio and got a job at Google.
When I read these kinds of story I regret even more going to uni, It really feels I wasted my time.

For these reasons I can't recommend going to uni to study IT, if you want to go to uni go study something else!
If you want to study programming do it on your own, there's everything you must know online for free, create a portfolio, and look for a job or even try working for yourself!

Living the life I have now, there's just no incentive to keep going.
Should I keep learning new stuff so maybe I can get a better job that will still pay low, or quit and try creating something on my own?
Or even ditch IT all together and go back to uni? LOL NO!

When you actually think about it, the Lazarus IDE for the Free Pascal compiler has the coolest name.

Them: what are you working on?

Me: **looks at screen and whispers** Lazarus......

I have been fucking around with Pascal more since I started to remember my Delphi days. Shit is tight af man.

I think I will try and build a site around it. Something sexy and modern to make this tech stack more l
Known to people. So far I have been having a blast playing with it.

Such an easy and powerful environment. And the syntax is so easy to learn.

I'm starting to feel super frustrated with my job.
Sometimes I feel like people who work for large tech companies must have it easy. My company is trying to do this digital transformation thing. Modern development practices Scrum, agile, CI/CD etc. So I was put on a team to work on a project with this new methodology. The idea was we would build the front end and interface with the core systems via service calls. Of course it didn't work out that simple and we had to add our own server side stuff but whatever. It's really hard without a point of reference for any of this stuff. We don't have established coding standards, the data we are working with is a mess, incompetent vendors, the infrastructure team supporting the environments can be such arrogant fucks when we need their help to get shit done. The team also doesn't have any members who really know the core systems well. I am the only developer on the team who is an employee of the company the rest are contractors who are in and out. Last week it was literally just me. This is my first job out of school btw I've been here a year now. I guess I just feel frustrated that I have to figure out so much on my own I don't really have many senior devs at the company I can look to. And on the team I've sorta ended up in an unofficial leadership position. Feels like a lot on my shoulders. I feel like if i could have worked for a bigger company I could learn to do a lot of things better. I feel like there's too much on me for the amount of experience I have or am I wrong ?

The whole CSS "centering" thing is so funny because that problem is easy per se but it can pop up in ways you've never seen before and you have to learn how to center your stuff for 9832 different situations

Trying to learn C and thought a easy file copy was a good start. The program read the size of the file, reserved that size in memory, can copied data there and then to the new file. For some reason I never thought that the file might be bigger then available memory... Took a couple of BSOD to find that "bug".

I started my career 7 years back (at the same company I am currently working) as an Asp.net developer. My company used to work in Microsoft domains back then. 5 years back one of our directors decided to dig into the open-source technologies and move away from Microsoft. And I was the first employee who was assigned to learn python. I thought about switching the company so that my 2 years of asp.net experience doesn't go waste. But I didn't as I started liking python. It was easy, powerful, clean, and same code ran on every fucking platform. And I was introduced to open-source.

Don't know best or worst, but this decision definitely changed my view about software development. I understood that money is not everything, passion is also important. The open-source community runs on passion and dedication. And I love the way it works. The bottom line is, I am happy. And python is beautiful.

Hey guys, quick question regarding employers and stuff.

I'm 14 and I've been learning and making things in PHP for around 1 and a half years now. I quite like PHP as, despite the code being quite messy sometimes, it's super easy to learn, and has plenty of features for any use case. My biggest concern is that, when I end up getting a job, whilst 5 and a half years of experience using the language is good, do you guys think PHP will still be in-demand, or should I look towards learning a new stack? Perhaps I should use Ruby on Rails, or Express - React and Redux, or maybe Django? With so many options available for developers, I'm finding it difficult to choose a stack that will stay in-demand in the future. Could anyone help me out with this? Thanks.

Edit: I've been learning Laravel, too.

Well I wish I could abandon jQuery and bootstrap all together and just use some vuejs admin template with my Laravel app. But things are not that easy and I am a lvl 1.0 vuejs user.

So sorry V girl, you gotta learn how to live with Mr.J for a few more months.

Aight devs, let's start a war.

Throw at me your best UI framework yet.

Anything (except game engines), cross platform preferable.

++ for why and how easy/hard to learn.

Today I fucked Up by making friend install Linux when he doesn't even know what OS is.

Friend's Windows 7 broke. Unbootable & unfixable. I told him to reinstall. He has no idea how so he told me he will rent a PC (apparently that's a thing) until he buys a new one (he wanted it anyways). I told him it's bullshit to rent for PC when yours is totally ok only without OS.

He agreed and that's where I fucked Up. I told him how to make bootable flash disks(it was pain to get some info from him tho..) and he said he downloaded cracked Win7.. I told him it's suicide to use cracked OS for MANY fucking reasons. He agreed and I told him to install Ubuntu.... I thought it's easy that even my grandma could use it...... Well, apparently I was, in technical terms, "FUCKING WRONG"(all caps cuz tech terms).

He wasn't even able to Google how to install Steam on Ubuntu(apt install steam?) ... Constantly asking me "well and what should i write to Google?" And other shit..

I Always woke up to messages From him like "This shit doesn't work I'mma uninstall it" and I Always responed in one command or first Google result and it suddenly started to work.

After 2 days he gave up and is using cracked Win7. Can't wait for his reaction when I pwn him on nearest LAN party 😂 Maybe he will reconsider using cracked OS.

Anyway I learn from my Mistake. Just fuck me...

!!!rant

Most exited I've been about some code? Probably for some random "build a twitter clone with Rails" tutorial I found online.

I've been working on my CS degree for a while (theoretical CS) but I really wanted to mess with something a bit more practical. I had almost none web dev experience, since I've been programming mostly OS-related stuff till then (C). I started looking around, trying to find a stack that's easy to learn since my time was limited- I still had to finish with my degree.

I played around with many languages and frameworks for a week or two. Decided to go with Ruby/Rails and built a small twitter clone blindly following a tutorial I found online and WAS I FUCKING EXITED for my small but handmade twitter clone had come to life. Coming from a C background, Ruby was weird and felt like a toy language but I fell in love.

My excitement didn't fade. I bought some books, studied hard for about a month, learned Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, SQL (w/ pg) and some HTML/CSS. Only playing with todo apps wasn't fun. I had a project idea I believed might be somewhat successful so I started working on it.

The next few months were spent studying and working on my project. It was hard. I had no experience on any web dev technology so I had learn so many new things all at once. Picked up React, ditched it and rewrote the front end with Vue. Read about TDD, worked with PostgreSQL, Redis and a dozen third party APIs, bought a vps and deployed everything from scratch. Played it with node and some machine learning with python.

Long story short, one year and about 30 books later, my project is up and running, has about 4k active monthly users, is making a profit and is steadily growing. If everything goes well, next week I'll close a deal with a pretty big client and I CANT BE FKING HAPPIER AND MORE EXCITED :D Towards the end of the month I'll also be interviewed for a web dev position.

That stupid twitter clone tutorial made me excited enough to start messing with web technologies. Thank you stupid twitter clone tutorial, a part of my heart will be yours forever.

I decided to run Ethernet to a different part of the house figuring oh that's easy enough, only 30 feet or so, I bet it will take 20 mins....

3 hours later after spending 2 fishing wire through an Arizona attic I am dehydrated and sore. When will I learn to stick to coding and leave the labor to guys with callused hands and ladders.

I don't advocate low code solutions. But what Microsoft is doing with Power Fx is legit pretty cool.

If anything it would expose people to learn about proper development since the formulas can grow bigger than standard small Excel formulas while simultaneously exposing them to a declarative and functional style of coding. According to what I am seeing, and y'all correct me if I am wrong, but this seems to be made to let pro devs jump in and help with more complex code while at the same time exposing it to non devs in an easy way.

I kinda dig this one

How to fuck a web developer:
1- Introduce a shiny new shitty web component that is nearly impossible to figure out how to change it’s fucking background color, yeah.
Welcome everyone to 2019 why even it was so easy to change and customize your own shit, let’s just introduce thaaa faaacking web components and fuck everyone else. Let everyone learn again how to do the simplest shit ever.
Yes fuck everyone that is used to change and customize in an easy way.
“yUo wAnT uS nOt tO UsE SoC anD cLEan koOde?”
No no no. We will fuck you instead.

Today I had a casual chat with my friend and we were discussing how human mind limits the things one can achieve. Like giving up after constant failures, or lack of determination, blaming destiny for failures. I told him I am never easy about the fact that your destiny is pre-written and you can't do anything about it. If you are willing, you can change it. You just need to have the right mindset.
He said I am going to do MBA after engineering. You can't be rich with just engineering. I told him if you work smart and hard enough, and just follow your passion, there is no need for an MBA. And he went on to tell me how top richest persons mostly comprise of businessmen.

I fear for the future. People like this with no goals when take up engineering, they blame everyone but themselves and the stream gets the bad name. People want money, but they don't want to work from the beginning. Even after that they give up too easy.

People like Bill and Mark were not pre-destined. They made themselves. They were just like us, but they never got satisfied with themselves. We all have the capabilities to be them or even better. We just need to keep driving ourselves until we reach there, we don't have to get satisfied. We have to keep improving and learn from our mistakes, then try again.

What will happen if every school starts teaching with binary numbers before the easy decimal number system?

I think it would be challenging initially but it can have a much greater impact on how we think and it can open a completely new possibility of faster algorithms that can directly be understood by computers.

The reason people hate binary systems is that all their life they make the decimal system a habit which makes them reluctant to learn binary systems into that much depth later on.

Just a thought. But I really believe if I would have learned the binary system before the decimal system than my brain would see things in a totally different way than it does now.

It sounds a little geeky yet thoughtful

I have never understood why there is so much animosity from seasoned devs in the community.

I see it in a lot of places. Stackoverflow, reddit, even devRant. In so many cases, an inexperienced dev will post to the web, only to be shot down by things like "this question is stupid" or "you all have it too easy and its apparent you never learned basic CS principles" or things of that nature. In a lot of cases, these are generally unhelpful replies and often teach new devs to be wary of seeking help.

Please help me to understand, why this is.

Is it because the community is angry at these devs trying to get a high paying job by going to a bootcamp and shortcutting the hard work it takes to understand core CS principles to become a decent developer? Then why not take a moment to provide resources or insight to these folks so they can learn to be better?

Is it because the community feels that devs from bootcamps are just watering down the pool of talent making our worth decrease? I feel this isnt really valid because seasoned, experienced architects will always be needed to build good software. And at that, why are we not ensuring that the next wave of developers is equipped to handle tasks like that?

There are a lot of good people in this community who want to help and make the net a better place for all developers (after all, many of us consider it home), but there's a lot more people out there with really shitty attitudes, and it frustrates the hell out of me that my juniors now equate arrogant, self-entitled responses and attitudes with "seasoned devs" and discourages them from even bothering to get involved in the community.

One thing I truly fucking dislike about the development life is knowing about server administration. I think that the mental hurdle that is to develop a huge application, make a stable dev environment, learn all the tools, tricks, techniques, modern standards, processes whatever, detailing software engineering are way tf too much to also handle server admin shit.

We don't have anyone at work that deals with that, and as such my devs need to know how to do entire series of maintenance shit that just takes time and effort plus hours of notetaking and study. I mean I get it, they should know their way around a linux environment enough to troubleshoot issues that are related to the os when working with some tools, but fuuuuuuuck me man, setting up a server, even for the holy grail of easy (standard lamp stack) takes way tf too much.

Wish we could have a dedicated server admin in the team.

I know where my faults are, setting up servers is something that I know but just can't be assed with in terms of keeping up, I wish we had a devops dedicated server admin deployment guru cuz I really cannot stand losing hours doing this shit.

It also diminishes good s admins in value, "weLl ThE deVs caN do It" YEAH BITCH but wouldn't it be nice to have an expert concentrating on JUST THAT?

FUCK man

Easy. I've learn Bash, Python and Java just by constantly getting assigned to projects that require those languages. Also tiny bit of Perl, but I don't want to talk about this.

I was hired as a C++ developer BTW and never had contact with those languages.

Do anybody remember when i wrote a rant about the IT teacher in my high school?

Few months ago we got the results from final exams! (we have precentage based grades)

Another thing to remember:
You can pick basic or extended version of the every test you take.
Everybody has to get at least 30% on basic exams (they are nessesary for everybody) to graduate from the school. The extended exams give you more points at university and they are not mandatory.
In addition to that extended ones dont have the lower limit

The IT exam has only the extended version (because its not mandator, you pick it yourself). It is pretty easy: just basic algorithms, basic C++ programs and general PC things.

I didnt take the IT class because i thougt i can learn much more at home. My friend took it. He is very good. He uses linux he wants to become a pen tester. I know he is worth getting 100% on that extended IT exam. (We did a lot of projects thogether)

Well... NOBODY GOT MORE THAN 20% on that exam! WTF!

That POS teacher should die in that win xp IT class with all ethernet cables stuck in his ass!

He didnt teach anything useful about algorithms to anybody! And that was the easiest and the most important part on the exam!

In addition to that people had to do few tasks on pc as well! And one of those tasks could been a picture in gimp BUT THE GIMP DIDNT EVEN WORK ON THOSE PC'S!

Algorithms are easy! That son of a twat didnt even understand it himself! That is why im telling everybody in my town to NOT go to that hight school for IT exam!
I dont want anybody to waste their life trying to learn something useful when that fucking bitch dosent understand anything!

That teacher is lucky. My friend got rejected from studing CS on university (due to the shit score) but he at least got accepted to study math.

I hope he will be able to continiue his dev dream.

So the story is true and this is what we have to deal with now..

My friend and I started to build a Web Application for a Roleplay Community. The project was for a client mainly and they don't mind if we try to sell this project to the public. All goes well except the shitty design, which is the one our client asked for. So after 6 months of work we planned to switch our backend to Nodejs, the switch look quite easy in our brains [PHP => NODEJS] because we already use Nodejs for instant functions without reloading the page.

So during the planning we earn a client which is one of the member of the clan, but he pay for another clan which is 6x bigger then the one we're in. So we continue to develop and think about the switch. We learn a news about a new competitor, this one sucks, we tried their App and it's not worth the money they ask. A few days after another competitor enter the market, this one is a big challenge for us. "Sit down tight, yea you reading this"..

The competitor use BUBBLE to create their shit, they earned 10 clients in one week and just punch us with "THE ROCK" hand, they release a lot of feature each week, they're 6 devs on that (if we can call them devs), we're 2 programmers (True Programmers). What we do in 1 week they do it in 5 hours with Bubble, the switching to Nodejs was a badluck, you couldn't add feature because of this switch during 2 weeks, this made us later and second in the race. My friend (at the same time my employee and back-end programmer) move into another appartment which obligate him to work full-time. At this time I'm f****, I'm only a Front-End Programmer vs 6 Wannabe Devs with a mother**** tool of *** (#Bubble).

This is where I am, in this beautiful opportunity to win this market but with this bad luck occuring = the opportunity is low, but our advantage is we don't have made our project public yet so they're the only good option for the communities to get that kind of web app, the others are not included and only a copy of this (Their Product) or just a big junk made with Wix.

At this time I'm working hard to make this opportunity happen, I have my math which I have to finish to have my High School diploma to do, a part-time job to get if I want to stay with an internet connection and finally I have to find a way to still be able to make my dream come true (Working on my Business at full time & Make money from it) and continue to be a Front-End Programmer/CEO of an enterprise.

I don't understand Laravel...

I'm just a software undergrad in my final year. Coming from JS side of things (Express, NextJS), I find Laravel so complex, and maybe unnessecarily complex?

Like, when I wanna learn Laravel, I understand the MVC structure. However, going deeper into it, there are libraries/names like
1. Vagrant
2. Facade
3. Artisan
4. Guard
5. Gate
6. Policies
ALL OF THESE
WHICH I DON'T UNDERSTAND HOW IT TIES TO THE FUCKING MVC STRUCTURE

I'm seriously giving up... My courses forces us to learn this framework, and I feel more and more inadequate because I have so many things to learn, including things for my FYP, which involves the use of NextJS. And can I mention HOW EASY AND MINIMALISTIC JS FRAMEWORKS ARE?

LIKE, I JUST WANNA MAKE A STUPID FUCKING APP MAN, WHY MUST I KNOW SHIT LIKE ARTISAN MAKE, WHAT THE FUCK VAGRANT IS, HOW GATES ARE RELATED TO POLICIES, HOW POLICIES RELATE TO VIEWS, WHY THE FUCK DOES FACADE EXIST, and other fucking stupid questions I need to ask in order to utilize Laravel correctly?

Don't even get me started on JETSTREAM, FORTIFY, LARAVEL/UI, BREEZE. Like, WHY THE FUCK CAN'T YOU JUST HAVE ONE SINGLE PATTERN, AND THEN HAVE GOOD TUTORIALS RELATED TO THAT ONE SINGLE THING?

I don't know, am I just stupid? Looking at Laravel, I feel like my braincells die more and more looking at the words used, the unusual terms, and the pain that comes with trying to learn it, because I don't have time. I'm going to fucking fail this subject because I have too much other stuff in my life to learn about.

I'm fucking tired man...

Two of em.
The first one was making a project following mvc patterns for my last job in which the structure was so easy to follow that my buddy has been able to move allong with it and do more projects out of it. He had a hard time with web development and the boss would have him do it and learn on the job.
To this day that application remains as a "framework" of sorts.
It was made in an unholy comb of js for the front end and classic asp for the backend with restful endpoints and all that shit. I was drunk when I coded most of it.

The other one was during my time in the u.s army. I was a mechanic, a really shitty one mind you. But i knew how to read manuals. All and every task was accomplished to the point in which they had me basically rebuild a vehicle that was beyond salvation. Got it done in 2 months and command was so impressed they set me up as the brigade commander's personal driver and mechanic. I was also drunk for the most part, but then again so where the rest of my brothers.

I am going to rant about this being the exam week, it being hot as hell, and us having had a messed up semester study-wise... And I still managed to do good-ish in subjects somehow... Good as in, relatively good. I am no 4.0 GPA person by any means and could never be one if I studied only (if that's even realistic at all). Recently I applied to a job at Andersen Lab for a Trainee position. Got turned down because I lack experience. A TRAINEE POSITION. I could retake the interview but I feel weird with how I got rated a whole level lower than my IELTS score and two levels lower than my score at Epam (which is the more recent one!) and the questions were mostly so easy I could answer while half asleep. Just yeah. Also, while I understand the whole knowledge required thing... I don't get the need for THREE whole interviews only to then proceed to turn me down. I am continuously applying and still seeing no results. If I'm "lucky", I guess, I will get training from a bank. And then get employed there... Mentally doing very bad right now, just barely wanting to MOVE. Which is basically me being this close to giving up. Today's exam is in Linux Security and I swear, this was such a waste of a good sounding subject... Imagine, I could have learnt how to set up a server at home and all that but instead we did... The more basic stuff in Linux. And for the whole semester outside of two or three cases I was the only one in attendance. Anyways, I have been feeling like I just can't program anymore and stuff... Even though we did a Python subject this semester. And in that subject I just felt like we were going way too quickly considering a lot of the students there come from non-IT or close to that background...

I may need to put effort into learning 3D Environmental art, I have this feeling I would like doing that as a job in game dev. Oh, and I also wanna design this house that I have in mind for me. It's shaped like an Amanita Muscaria and instead of the white dots it has windows that are round, as well as a spiral staircase connecting the lower and upper floors. Need to figure out how to model that in something like AutoCAD (I have a bit of experience with it and that's why I'd like to try there... But I may have to learn other programs to do it for free), but it will take me a long time to execute since I am not the most organised in how I learn...

Anyways, I will only sporadically be there, so I may not see things here. I am somewhat busy with exams and then this NGO I recently became a founding member of (and I have to say, I kinda don't wanna be there, but there are things that have to be done). Also filling the documents for a Canadian visitor's visa to go finally see the family over there and all that. But the latter will probably not happen until next year...

Finally, I am wishing you all a sound mental health and happiness. I hope you do well in whatever you are doing at the moment or are planning to. Until next time!

I decided to format party my desktop since I'm working at home every day (got a 1TB ssd to replace 150gb OS drive).

First fresh Windows install in 4 years. I had forgotten how much fuckery windows puts you through to do some basic things. I can imagine being a newbie hobbiest programmer and having to go through this stuff?

So I just embarrassingly spent 15 minutes reading and troubleshooting why you can't run a python script inside of powershell. PS just blips for a moment leaving you wondering if the script executed. So I created a test script to use a logging file handler to see if it actually ran. No.

Turns out you have to register the .py extension by appending it to your PATHEXT environment variable. Before that I was going to add it to the PS profile, but realized it takes more than a quick moment to find out which scope of PS profile is appropriate to create, and on top of that, you have to enable script execution in PS (which I recall is easy, but didn't do yet).

Tangentially, I solved an ssh issue days ago. I would tell you what it was, but I seem to have mentally blocked it due to trauma.

For real Microsoft. Yes powershell has some great advancements--my friends say so.

But this needlessly nuanced bullshit needs a little attention from you guys to save the world a shitload of time. I can only imagine what it's like for non-tech savvy people trying to learn to program and having to face this stuff.

I still haven't solved the color scheme stupidity of powershell. This is 2020 ffs. Yet seems there's no clean or intuitive way to do it.

Other issues omitted for 'brevity'

I think the one of the more common reason for imposter syndrome is that a lot of smart people constantly get told as children the "you're so smart/capable, you can do everything!" too much, and when you hear it enough times, it gets to you, so you think everything is just easy. And then when they start hitting roadblocks, instead of helping or explaining that it's normal for things to be hard and it's normal to fail, usually parents and teachers and whatnot tell them "Oh it's okay, don't worry about it, you're smart, you'll get it" and so they at first it works, maybe it just takes more time but they manage, but as things get harder and they still put little effort because "don't worry, you're so smart, you learn so fast/easy" and as they find out more and more things they don't umderstand or don't know they start to feel a dissonance, which builds anxiety.
And this is where I thinks it actually starts: at some points there comes a situation where they either share this anxiety with someone or someone notices their worry, and(at least from what I've seen from others) usually the response they get is something along the lines of: "Nah, you're just worrying too much, you're smarter than you think, don't be so down on yourself, you need to worry less", which, maybe I'm wrong, but I'm not sure telling someone that thinks he has a problem that he doesn't have a problem, helps their worrying.
And on one hand the amount if things they don't get/know/understand or fail at grows(cuz you can't just be good at EVERYTHING, so the more things you know about, the more things you don't understand) while mentally still being in that "Wait a minute, you're smarter than this, you should be getting this!" mindset that's been drilled into them, and so at some point the illusion shatters, and they start to think "Maybe I'm not so smart after all", and because they think they were wrong about their level, they feel like they have "oversold" themselves in the past and that makes any past accomplishments feel like lucky accidents instead: "If I'm not actually smart, the things I did manage to achieve must've been just accidental", which makes them feel like they've lied to themselves and everyone else when they "took credit for an accidents" and that their life is just a snowball of pretending.

Now, is that actually a cause or is it another one of my crazy 1AM ramblings? I don't know xD
I'm not an expert in any of this and I don't really know any psychology so hell if I know if that's how any of this works but that's just my theory of one of the reasons why. *shrug*. I've had this theory for years, but I don't know.
It at least makes sense to me, but not everything that makes sense is true soooo.

Anyways, wall of text is over.

Oh, and for anyone struggling with imposter syndrome: I just want you to know, it's okay to fail, and it's okay to not know shit, especially in the dev industry where every "insignificant" detail can have an entire rabbit hole of expertise behind it, nobody can expect to know every part of it. And it doesn't make you any less smart no matter how much you fail. Tnis shit is hard, so I hope you stay strong and I hope you succeed in whatever it is you're struggling with.
*Massive virtual hug* <3

About two weeks ago i posted a rant containing an email from the big boss. Today they held a "virtual town hall" where people could ask questions, get answers, and generally just be online. Went fairly well, good info was handed out, and i think people mostly enjoyed themselves (even if it was at the expense of the higher-ups).

Then comes the email. The same person as last time had this quote:

"I’m good at giving advice, so I need to take some of my own.  I intend to take it easy this weekend, watch Netflix, do some household chores, play the piano and maybe even read a book! "

Jesus christ. Remember those memes about zuck being a robot because everything he does it looks and feels like it's an alien trying to blend in? That's what this feels like. On a normal workyear i would hear from this person 10 times TOTAL. I have heard from them this amount in the past 2 WEEKS.

Maybe it's the virus, but this is driving me INSANE. If there's any lesson you can learn from this, it would be:

Dont pretend like you care by not knowing or learning anything about the people you work with.

Jesus they even sent out surveys to see what the telework experience is like... THE RESPONSES ARE RECORDED AND PUBLICLY DISPLAYED!!!

Ugh.

Started to learn java! Loving it so far.. Coming from Python 3 i thought this was not gonna be easy but so far so good.. Can someone give me some advice or tips on what to tackle next after java?

I'm not going to lie, the surge of bootcamps really irks me. Not because I'm afraid of competition, or that I'm an elitest. Mainly because a lot of people who attend these bootcamps have no real interest in software engineering. I sometimes attend a meetup, and it's a beginner meetup. I try to help out. And a lot of people clearly have no patience for learning software engineering. I try to be encouraging, but sometimes I just want to be dick and tell them "Why the hell do you want to be a dev, if you're not interested in how computers work".

I'm an 100% myself taught developer. Granted I'm 38 and taught myself programming at 14. But it came out of an earnest desire and love for technology in general. So I never shyed away from learning? C and assembler? Bring it on. Theoretical computer science? I can get with that. For me I loved computer so much, that I was willing to learn about anything in the realm of computing.

This is what annoys me with the adult bootcamp crowd. I feel they're only willing to learn as long as it's easy. If something gets complicated or complex, then they check out. And I a lot of their questions is "tell me how to do this/that". But they don't know why they would do it.

To me it feels like they're trying to fast track themselves to a dev job. Yet you would think if they're trying to do this all professionally, they would be open to learning as much as possible, and not closing themselves off.

My semi-friend who runs the meetup is trying to start a bootcamp himself. So I try I severely hold my tongue when I attend those meetups. And I want to be supportive. I certainly don't want to be the reason why people are turned off by programming. But at the same time, I hate how people are abusing this profession because they think it's fast money and an easy way to earn 6 figure salaries.

Had to learn c++ to implement JPEG compression , not an easy way to start if you ask me 🤔

Its good and practical but those who aim to fill gaps in the programming industry by trying to produce "programmers on demand" via a several month long bootcamp are complete idiots. Nobody can learn to develop a well structured application that's easy to maintain in a couple of months, either that is frontend or back end. We are trying to be engineers , not just solve problems.

This story just left me speechless in any way and i want to share it. tl;dr at the end.
Im studying computer science in germany and in the first of the small classes i noticed... no, i was disturbed by a guy who would just say that the thing we're learning atm were so easy and the teacher shouldn't even bother to explain it to the class. I don't understand why you would spoile a class that hard... I'm here to learn and listen to the teacher, not to you little asshole. (We were doing basic stuff like binary system etc. but still, let us learn)
So he became unpopular pretty fast.
Fast forward, a few weeks of studying later there was a coding competition where you had to solve different algorithmic problems in a team as fast as possible.
I came there, without a team because my friends aren't interested but I enjoy such tournaments. This guy and me were the only ones without a team and we had to work together.
After him being a total dick for hours i had to watch him code a simple for-loop, that iterates through a sorted array. Nothing special, at this point anyone could do that task in our class so it shouldn't be a problem for him.

He made a simple for-loop and it worked fine, but we figured we had to iterate through the array the other way around.
'Alright', I think. 'Just let the index decr..' 'Pssshhh', he interrupted me and said he knows exactly how to do this.
I was quite impressed when he started to type in 'public int backsort..' in a new line. He tried to resort the array backwards with a quicksort that he then struggled to implement. (Of course we had to implement a quick runtime and we needed that quicksort badly)
I was kind of annoyed but impressed at the same time. I mumbled 'Java has an internal sorting algorithm already' just to amuse myself.
He then used that implementation.
After a few minutes of my pleasure and multiple tests without hitting the requested runtime, i tried to explain to him why we wouldn't need to sort that array backwards and he just couldn't believe it.
I hope that he stays more humble after that..
Also we became last place but thats ok :)

tl;dr: Guy spoiles whole class, brags with his untouchable knowledge (when we do things like binary system). In a competition has to iterate through a sorted array backwards - tries to implement a sorting algorithm to sort it backwards first. I tell him, we could use a already implemented java method. Then tell him we could simply iterate through decreasing the index. Mind-Blown

Newbie Agile Team: "Hi Scrum Coach, we studied and implemented the Scrum methodology, but we are late as before and our software is buggy and shitty as ever, how is that?"

Agile Coach: "Scrum Methodology is easy to learn, but difficult to master!"

Newbie Agile Team (chorus): "Oh coach, Fuck yourself daily, with your coffe thermos, standing up and once per week retrospectively. If you'll come at the next review meeting, we will gangbang your ass in front of the stakeholders"

(Apprentice dev)
Cut me some slack ;)

Learning JavaScript for a few days To a week to familiarise myself with it and really get to grips with it.

Then have to go on to jQuery which is a lot a fun I must say, very easy structured framework to learn and found myself getting really engrossed into it.

Now for the past few days I've been learning angular1 which is a really cool framework, can be a little bit complicated at times but it is learnable

Moral of the story is you never stop learning! Which isn't a bad thing by the way I'm finding web developing a lot of fun!

Do any of you know of a good lightweight cross platform GUI system that doesn't use C++, .NET or Node.js? I'm kinda tired of those three.
Bonus points if it's easy to learn.
Should be stand alone on the desktop.

How many of you guys use vim?
How many hate it? Why?
How many haven't tried it yet?

I've been using it for a month and it feels great. Everything is fast and customisation is great and fairly easy (just vim ~/.vimrc). With a little bit of searching abilities, you can do pretty much anything you want by configuring the vimrc. And besides the initial learning courve of having no UI, it feels much more intuitive to just use the keyboard.

I used it by a necessity to edit stuff from the wls, but fuck, now I'm fucking addicted to it. Every new command I learn is a fucking drug for my hands.

I totally recommend it and personally feel a tad sad when vim gets hate. I understand jokes though. I also struggled at first to use "i" to start typing, "hjkl" to move around, and got stuck with the good ol' ":q". But it's worth it.

Me: After i learn objective-c i'll be a ninja!

Next day....

Friend: ....you will also need a graph database for your app. Cypher is easy to learn...

Me: ...ohhh cypher you say

Last week me and my friend have been changed from a legacy PHP project to new Ruby on Rails-based setup. What, in first instance, looked like a great improvement, now becomes a nightmare.

All this convention-over-configuration is awesome - but only if you already know the conventions, or if somebody told'em to you.

And everything is going even more out of control because the damn project is based upon Spree gem and several other extensions, that MUST be changed to meet out company needs.

I'm getting really mad with all this pressure. Ruby seems to be a great language, but I'd rather be working with Laravel. Its overall organization, the centralization of CLI commands in artisan, and the astoundingly clear, eloquent, direct and well-designed documentation made my adoption curve there a little more pleasant.

I mean, legacy PHP systems are awful, but Laravel framework sounds way more easy-to-learn and well-constructed when compared to rails.

But given all this nightmare, I really want to be proved the opposite.

"learning" html and css

So, there are these courses in my school, "ÜK" ("Überbetriebliche Kurse") we call them.
It's 5 days, a Tuesday to Thursday, next week Tuesday and Wednesday, last day in the afternoon we have a test.

Today is that Wednesday

I know html and css pretty well, so if was pretty easy, I didn't even bother to do some of the tasks we had
I did look through the book over the weekend to make sure I knew my stuff right

Now, the theoretical part of the test had stuff like "colspan" witch was nowhere to be seen in the book and PowerPoints, and some stuff was just unclear as fuck, seriously...

*looks up colspan*

Apparently it's a table cell that spans two columns, or more, if you want to

I never needed something like that, and we never looked at it, that's why I didn't know about it.

There where other unclear questions as well, so I went to the teacher after the test and told him.

He gave me an empty test where I made an X for stuff that wasn't in the book or the PowerPoints and wrote a bit for the stuff that was unclear.

I did know some more then some in the class, so I generally xed the stuff that we didn't learn
The teacher will correct it accordingly, and cut out the questions that we couldn't have known.
So that's at least something
For the next class, he's going to have some "theoretical learning" or whatever he called it

I mean, in the end it's fair, but it annoys me that these courses aren't as well thought out as they should be...

So after this course I can say:
I DIDN'T LEARN A FUCKING THING

Btw, the second part was changing a website up the way its telling you to, that was easier the the theoretical part, witch was ticking the right fucking box...

Co-workers with low commitment to a project are the worst to have. I am willing to trade technical depth for commitment in a team member any fucking day! Tech is easy to learn, work ethics not so much!

Do you agree with me that once you understand and mastered one programming language, when you want to learn other languages or library is very easy. At least you know what to Google search.

I once wanted to make easy money by becoming a professional poker player. I did this by programming a poker simulator and calculate chances with certain cards and stuff. To assure you have 6.**% winning (mathematical chance calculated) of a hand takes around 3k simulations to cancel out the luck. So don't trust to much on your math.

That went well, but that wasn't all that there was to learn, you could even consider a small start. Long story short, I became quite a good player and won a lot with Appeak Poker (Great app! No adverts!). Now, I opened a while ago an account at the Holland Casino to make some money. But they were playing on such low wages that it was just not interesting and I quitted. Today I realized I had still an account with money on it and thought "let's get over wit it" so i did aggressive betting on red (1:st 40% all in, lost, 2nd 100% all in won) in a roulette game. In the end I had a few euro profit so the gambling adventure never costed me money.

Another reason the poker carreer ended is because I realized it's not a quick way to make money at all and the gambling factor was too high. I expected poker a bit to be more strategy.

I even consider the best poker spelers maybe to just be lucky bastards in some cases. Poker stars is fun to see on youtube tough, they're bullshitting a lot.

I consider gambling for losers. Poker, you can become really good in it, but still some luck is required. Not bad luck at least. You can lose with a multiple of quite good hands.

Fact: one of the best poker players is actually a software developer

Did I get old or did I just finish plucking all the low hanging fruit?

When I started on a programming journey about a decade ago everything feel exciting and I learn a lot of things per day (variable,loop,method,class,---etc)

Now a decade later I am more concern with the overall system design,algorithms usage (Big O Notation),how reliable the system it,and how the configurations are set up and how easy is it to change them.

I now notice that I don't really learn anything learn new.Everything feel the same.

Want redundancy? Use more server

Want faster performance? Make a parallel system.

Want program to run on low end device? Think about how memory and storage will be used in system.

Is this a stage everyone went through like puberty? or I am just having a mid life crisis?

PS : I haven't even reach 30 yet but I feel too old.

I need help with learning .NET (C#) i need a project that is easy and that I can learn from. What did you guys do to learn .NET

Here's an incomplete list of things my mother did to me:
- She insulted my body when I was 13. She told me it was weak and feminine. I identified as a boy back then, and I was going to the gym.
- She told me my face was ugly because of acne.
- She shamed me for having better vision than her.
- She shamed me for having longer eyelashes than her, the told me I looked like a girl.
- She always wanted me to learn everything and have all A's. When I got B+, she destroyed me mentally every time. When I got C, this was a catastrophe. Yet, if I told her she was wrong about mundane things like how many volts there are in an outlet, it was me who's in the wrong, despite me having an A for physics. There was no contradiction here in her eyes.
- She forced me to carry heavy things as a punishment. At the age of fifteen, I had an inguinal hernia. The surgery was needed. After that, doctors told me (and her) that I should go easy on carrying heavy things for a month. She didn't listen and forced me to carry heavy things again after two weeks. I had another inguinal hernia. Now, I needed a much more invasive laparoscopy to implant nylon webbing. Because of all of that, now I have messy, ugly scars all over my belly. Guess what happened next? She shamed me for having them!
- Since I was 18, even though I was studying in the uni, she demanded money for rent, for me living in my parents' house I grew up in. The sum she demanded was 27x my scholarship money.
- When I broke my toe, it was obvious that I broke it. It was swollen, twice the size of a normal toe, for two weeks straight. She told me to quit whining and go to PE/Taekwon-do lessons she forced me to attend.

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.

So I have some XSDs for integrating with a third party supplier, which I need to convert to java classes. Easy, jaxb to the rescue!

Now when it comes to checking into source control, do I either a) check in generated files (bad) , or b) check in the XSDs and have maven generate my classes each time the project is packaged using its jaxb plugin (good).

Of course the senior dev picks option a), purely because some people in charge of support may not understand maven.

Why do I have to do things the wrong way because people don't want to learn/are incompetent? Why are there people in charge of support who don't understand simple tools?

To all the masochists who spent hours debugging misspellings:

1. Learn your tools
2. Learn good practice

Every IDE should point out when you're not using a variable you've initiated or using an uninitiated variable as well as at least highlight, if not simply list, every occurrence of the variable under your cursor and let you find all references or even display the number of references next to a variable at all times, and finally, every IDE should autocomplete for you so when it doesn't you know you've messed up. Good IDE makes all the easy mistakes hard and all of the hard tasks easy. Including running tests. If you don't know how to configure your IDE to do all these things take time and learn it. If you still can't figure it out, replace your IDE maybe...?

Also use the debugger. Preferably one that nicely integrates with your IDE. If you don't, check point 1.

Also write tests and *run them*.

Also if your misspellings tend to consist of a missing `s` at the end of a plural noun just call it `entityCollection` instead of `entities`. And read up on more good programming practices and naming conventions.