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Git.
The smallest utility made its way to being the largest companies must-have, the most critical part of the whole development landscape.
Using just plain C, Git can shred huge amounts of data insanely fast. It never gets old.
Git is a developer's scalpel.11 -
I recently joined the dark side - an agile consulting company (why and how is a long story). The first client I was assigned to was an international bank. The client wanted a web portal, that was at its core, just a massive web form for their users to perform data entry.
My company pitched and won the project even though they didn't have a single developer on their bench. The entire project team (including myself) was fast tracked through interviews and hired very rapidly so that they could staff the project (a fact I found out months later).
Although I had ~8 years of systems programming experience, my entire web development experience amounted to 12 weeks (a part time web dev course) just before I got hired.
I introduce to you, my team ...
Scrum Master. 12 years experience on paper.
Rote memorised the agile manifesto and scrum textbooks. He constantly went “We should do X instead of (practical thing) Y, because X is the agile way.” Easily pressured by the client to include ridiculous (real time chat in a form filling webpage), and sometimes near impossible features (undo at the keystroke level). He would just nag at the devs until someone mumbled ‘yes' just so that he would stfu and go away.
UX Designer. 3 years experience on paper ... as business analyst.
Zero professional experience in UX. Can’t use design tools like AI / photoshop. All he has is 10 weeks of UX bootcamp and a massive chip on his shoulder. The client wanted a web form, he designed a monstrosity that included several custom components that just HAD to be put in, because UX. When we asked for clarification the reply was a usually condescending “you guys don’t understand UX, just do <insert unhandled edge case>, this is intended."
Developer - PHD in his first job.
Invents programming puzzles to solve where there are none. The user story asked for a upload file button. He implemented a queue system that made use of custom metadata to detect file extensions, file size, and other attributes, so that he could determine which file to synchronously upload first.
Developer - Bootlicker. 5 years experience on paper.
He tried to ingratiate himself with the management from day 1. He also writes code I would fire interns and fail students for. His very first PR corrupted the database. The most recent one didn’t even compile.
Developer - Millennial fratboy with a business degree. 8 years experience on paper.
His entire knowledge of programming amounted to a single data structures class he took on Coursera. Claims that’s all he needs. His PRs was a single 4000+ line files, of which 3500+ failed the linter, had numerous bugs / console warnings / compile warnings, and implemented 60% of functionality requested in the user story. Also forget about getting his attention whenever one of the pretty secretaries walked by. He would leap out of his seat and waltz off to flirt.
Developer - Brooding loner. 6 years experience on paper.
His code works. It runs, in exponential time. Simply ignores you when you attempt to ask.
Developer - Agile fullstack developer extraordinaire. 8 years experience on paper.
Insists on doing the absolute minimum required in the user story, because more would be a waste. Does not believe in thinking ahead for edge conditions because it isn’t in the story. Every single PR is a hack around existing code. Sometimes he hacks a hack that was initially hacked by him. No one understands the components he maintains.
Developer - Team lead. 10 years of programming experience on paper.
Writes spaghetti code with if/else blocks nested 6 levels deep. When asked "how does this work ?”, the answer “I don’t know the details, but hey it works!”. Assigned as the team lead as he had the most experience on paper. Tries organise technical discussions during which he speaks absolute gibberish that either make no sense, or are complete misunderstandings of how our system actually works.
The last 2 guys are actually highly regarded by my company and are several pay grades above me. The rest were hired because my company was desperate to staff the project.
There are a 3 more guys I didn’t mention. The 4 of us literally carried the project. The codebase is ugly as hell because the others merge in each others crap. We have no unit tests, and It’s near impossible to start because of the quality of the code. But this junk works, and was deployed to production. Today is it actually hailed as a success story.
All these 3 guys have quit. 2 of them quit without a job. 1 found a new and better gig.
I’m still here because I need the money. There’s a tsunami of trash code waiting to fail in production, and I’m the only one left holding the fort.
Why am I surrounded by morons?
Why are these retards paid more than me?
Why are they so proud when all they produce is trash?
How on earth are they still hired?
And yeah, FML.8 -
#3 Worst thing I've seen a co-worker do?
A 20-something dev, 'A', back in the early days of twitter+facebook would post all his extracurricular activities (drinking, partying, normal young-buck stuff). The dev mgr, 'J', at the time took offense because he felt 'A' was making the company look bad, so 'A' had a target on his back. Nothing 'A' did was good enough and, for example, 'J' had the source control czars review 'A's code to 'review' (aka = find anything wrong). Not sorting the 'using' statements, and extra line after the closing }, petty things like that. For those curious, orders followed+carried out by+led by 'T' in my previous rant.
As time went on and 'T' finding more and more 'wrong' with A's code, 'J' put A on disciplinary probation. 'A' had 90 days to turn himself around, or else.
A bright spot was 'A' was working on a Delphi -> C# conversion, so a lot of the code would be green-field development and by simply following the "standards", 'A' would be fine...so he thought.
About 2 weeks into the probation, 'A' was called into the J's office and berated because the conversion project was behind schedule, and if he didn't get the project back on track, 'A' wouldn't make it 30 days. I sat behind 'A' and he unloaded on me.
<'A' slams his phone on his desk>
Me: "Whoa...whats up?"
A: "Dude, I fucking hate this place, did you hear what they did?"
<I said no, then I think we spent an hour talking about it>
Me: "That all sucks. Don't worry about the code. Nobody cares what T thinks. Its not even your fault the project is behind, the DBAs are tasked with upgrades and it's not like anyone is waiting on you. It'll get done when it's done. Sounds like a witch hunt, what did you do? Be honest."
A: "Well, um...I kinda called out J, T, and those other assholes on facebook. I was drunk, pissed, and ...well...here we are."
Me: "Geez, what a bunch of whiney snowflakes. Keep your head down and you'll get thru it, or don't. Its not like you couldn't find another job tomorrow."
A: "This is my first job out of college and I don't want to disappoint my dad by quitting. I don't even know what I'm supposed to be doing. All J told me was to get better. What the fuk does that even mean?"
Me: "He didn't give you any goals? Crap, for someone who is a stickler for the rules, that's low, even for J."
Fast forward 2 weeks, I was attending MS TechEd and I was with another dev mgr, R.
R: "Did you hear? We had to let 'A' go today."
Me: "What the hell? Why?"
R: "He couldn't cut it, so we had to let him go."
Me: "Cut what? What did he do, specifically?"
R: "I don't know, 'A' was on probation, I guess he didn't meet the goals."
Me: "You guess? We fire a developer working on a major upgrade and you guess? What were these so-called goals?"
R: "Whoa...you're getting a little fire up. I don't know, maybe not adhering to coding standards, not meeting deadlines?"
Me: "OMG...we fire people for not forming code? Are you serious!?"
R: "Oh...yea...that does sound odd when you put it that way. I wish I'd talk to you before we left on this trip"
Me: "What?! You knew they were firing him *before* we left? How long did you know this was happening?"
R: "Honestly, for a while. 'A' really wasn't a team player."
Me: "That's dirty, the whole thing is dirty. We've done some shitty things to people, but this is low, even for J. The probation process is meant to improve, not be used as a witch hunt. I don't like that you stood around and let it happen. You know better."
R: "Yea, you're right, but doesn't change anything. J wanted to do it while most of us were at the conference in case 'A' caused a scene."
Me: "THAT MAKES IT WORSE! 'A' was blindsided and you knew it. He had no one there that could defend him or anything."
R: "Crap, crap, crap...oh crap...jeez...J had this planned all along...crap....there is nothing I can do no...its too late."
Me: "Yes there is. If 'A' comes to you for a letter of recommendation, you write one. If someone calls for reference, you give him a good one."
R: "Yea..yea...crap...I feel like shit...I need to go back to the room and lie down."
As the sun sets, it rises again. Within a couple of weeks, 'A' had another job at a local university. Within a year, he was the department manager, and now he is a vice president (last time I checked) of a college in Kansas City, MO.10 -
Imagine if a structural engineer whose bridge has collapsed and killed several people calls it a feature.
Imagine if that structural engineer made a mistake in the tensile strength of this or that type of bolt and shoved it under the rug as "won't fix".
Imagine that it's you who's relying on that bridge to commute every day. Would you use it, knowing that its QA might not have been very rigorous and could fail at any point in time?
Seriously, you developers have all kinds of fancy stuff like Continuous Integration, Agile development, pipelines, unit testing and some more buzzwords. So why is it that the bridges don't collapse, yet new critical security vulnerabilities caused by bad design, unfixed bugs etc appear every day?
Your actions have consequences. Maybe not for yourself but likely it will have on someone else who's relying on your software. And good QA instead of that whole stupid "move fast and break things" is imperative.
Software developers call themselves the same engineers as the structural engineer and the electrical engineer whose mistakes can kill people. I can't help but be utterly disappointed with the status quo in software development. Don't you carry the title of the engineer with pride? The pride that comes from the responsibility that your application creates?
I wish I'd taken the blue pill. I didn't want to know that software "engineering" was this bad, this insanity-inducing.
But more than anything, it surprises me that the world that relies so much on software hasn't collapsed in some incredible way yet, despite the quality of what's driving it.44 -
5 Types Of Programmers
1.The duct tape programmer
The code may not be pretty, but damnit, it works!
This guy is the foundation of your company. When something goes wrong he will fix it fast and in a way that won’t break again. Of course he doesn’t care about how it looks, ease of use, or any of those other trivial concerns, but he will make it happen, without a bunch of talk or time-wasting nonsense. The best way to use this person is to point at a problem and walk away.
2.The OCD perfectionist programmer
You want to do what to my code?
This guy doesn’t care about your deadlines or budgets, those are insignificant when compared to the art form that is programming. When you do finally receive the finished product you will have no option but submit to the stunning glory and radiant beauty of perfectly formatted, no, perfectly beautiful code, that is so efficient that anything you would want to do to it would do nothing but defame a masterpiece. He is the only one qualified to work on his code.
3.The anti-programming programmer
I’m a programmer, damnit. I don’t write code.
His world has one simple truth; writing code is bad. If you have to write something then you’re doing it wrong. Someone else has already done the work so just use their code. He will tell you how much faster this development practice is, even though he takes as long or longer than the other programmers. But when you get the project it will only be 20 lines of actual code and will be very easy to read. It may not be very fast, efficient, or forward-compatible, but it will be done with the least effort required.
4.The half-assed programmer
What do you want? It works doesn’t it?
The guy who couldn’t care less about quality, that’s someone elses job. He accomplishes the tasks that he’s asked to do, quickly. You may not like his work, the other programmers hate it, but management and the clients love it. As much pain as he will cause you in the future, he is single-handedly keeping your deadlines so you can’t scoff at it (no matter how much you want to).
5.The theoretical programmer
Well, that’s a possibility, but in practice this might be a better alternative.
This guy is more interested the options than what should be done. He will spend 80% of his time staring blankly at his computer thinking up ways to accomplish a task, 15% of his time complaining about unreasonable deadlines, 4% of his time refining the options, and 1% of his time writing code. When you receive the final work it will always be accompanied by the phrase “if I had more time I could have done this the right way”.
What type of programmer are you?
Source: www.stevebenner.com16 -
I've had my share of incompetent coworkers. In order of appearance:
1. A full stack dev. This one guy never, and I mean NEVER uses relationships in their tables. No indexing, no keys, nada. Couple of months later he was baffled why his page took ten seconds to load.
2. The same dev as (1). Requirement was to create some sort of "theme" feature for a web app. Hacked it by putting !important all over the place.
3. The same dev again. He creates several functions that if the data exists returns a view, and if it doesn't, "echo '0'". No, not return 0 or return false or anything, but fucking echo. This was PHP. If posted a rant about this a few months ago.
4. Same dev, has no idea what clean code is. No, not just reusable functions, he doesn't even get indenting right. Some functions have 4 spaces, some 2 tabs, some 6 tabs! And this is inside the same function. God wait until he tries Python...
5. Same dev now suggests that he become the PM. GM approves (very small company). Assigns me to travel to a client since they needed "technical assistance about the API". Was actually there to lead a UAT session.
Intermezzo, that guy went from fullstack dev to PM to sales (yes, one who calls clients to offer products) to business development, to product analyst in the span of two years.
After a year and a half there, I quit.
6. New company, a "QA engineer" who also assumes the role as the product owner. Does absolutely no tests other than "functional tests" in which he NEVER produces any form of documentation. Not even a set of test cases. He goes by "intuition".
7. Same guy as (6), hands me requirements for a feature. By "hands me" I mean he did that verbally. No spec documents, no slack chat, no Trello card. I ended up writing it as a card in Trello. Fast forward to the due date, he flips out because that wasn't what he wanted. Showed him the card. He walked away, without thinking of a solution how this mess should be handled.
Despite all this, I really don't want him (6&7) to leave the company. The devs get really stressed out at this job and he does make a really good person to laugh with/at. -
About a year ago, I did an e-commerce for a client who wanted to sell electronic goods. It was a custom design, so the team prepared a mock-up and we showed it to the client who absolutely loved it. The specs were that he was going to sell only a few products (like 50 or so) so the website had to showcase the categories and didn't need to put a lot of products on page. Also the design had to be unique as he wanted to be different from his competitors.
A few weeks later, during the dev phase the client checks again the design and starts doubting about it. We redesign it adjusting to his oppinion. A week later he schedules a meeting where he starts complaining that the deadline is late and that the design doesn't accomplish his specs. At that meeting he tells us that he wants to sell thousands of articles since he's doing dropshipping.
We start from scratch and make a third design, which he approves after quite a lot of changes. He also asks for a dropshipping plugin which we install in its free version, when he complains about having to update manually, we answer politely that he has to purchase the paid version.
Fast forward, we deploy the website and the design has a few issues related to responsive development. We fix it quickly and the site starts working.
He also has a physical shop, however, since he's competing with big corporates like Amazon or eBay and he can't offer any difference, neither his phisical address or his on-line shop manages to be profitable.
He decides to close the business but before, he calls my PM saying that the website has "never worked" (There were a couple of people who bought with 0 issues and we tested the site countless times). And that we shouldn't have recommended a custom design because the website never worked. He also implied that we should compensate him because of that.
I've never seen my PM to tell someone to "fuck off" as fast as he did.6 -
*Doing a Peer Code Review of someone senior to me*
Me: This fix doesn't look like it will work, but maybe I don't understand. How does this fix the defect?
Senior Dev: *Blinks* It works on my machine
Me: But how does it work?
Senior Dev: It works when I run it on my machine...
Me: Do you know if this will fix the issue?
*Silence*
Never seen QA punt an issue back to development so fast.7 -
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.21 -
So my wife started learning coding and web development. I am quite impressed how fast someone can learn it (she started from scratch, with No knowledge before)13
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I was a midweight dev acting as a lead dev on the frontend development of a project. I had already built most of it, it was all vanilla JavaScript, had no jQuery, the code was simple, fast, and small. Then I went on holiday and the company put a senior lead on the project to carry out remaining work while I was away.
When I came back, there was a bug in the age gate page and I started to investigate. I then noticed that the asshole added jQuery to the code just to select the country and date of birth input fields. That idiot, a senior lead dev earning more than twice what I earned, didn’t know how to select some elements on a page! I nearly lost my temper when I saw the added bloat.7 -
FUCK WEB DEVELOPMENT.
Seriously, what the hell. Things evolve so goddamn fast and someone new to the field can’t even grab something to start with. Once you start understanding something it fuckin changes and something else takes it’s place.
Fuck this shit, I’m out.18 -
Allright, I'm pissed.
Warning: more than 4k characters written by a non native english speaker ahead.
Legend:
Storytelling
> Short summary of the current situation
> "Something being said"
> (Something being thought)
* Actions *
-- Background --
In an attempt to reorganize my desktop I accidentally deleted a folder I called "development". In there I stored links to all my IDEs (Not sure how you call these in english), but also some workspaces like unity (Not much stuff there, processing (just some hobby stuff) AND Eclipse (FUCKING EVERYTHING RELATED TO SCHOOL WEB DEVELOPMENT). Now 3 days have passed and I realized this important folder was missing. Cleared that windows trash the instant I deleted the trash on my desktop.
> Shit, Regret
Install a file restore programm. Do every possible search. Nothing found.
> Big shit
Deadline was in like 3 days. Week was fucking rough so:
> "Screw this, the teacher nevet corrects the assignments and also fuck JSP"
Fast forward 2 months to last week. Teacher starts checking assignments.
> Fuck
* Sees pattern: Only students with missing or bad marks are checked. *
* Feels save *
Teacher approaching me while working on current projects.
* Doesn't feel save anymore *
> "Well, I'ld like to see your THAT programm"
> Well fuck
* Tells the truth *
> "Well that's unfortunate, but I must write a mark. Do you really have nothing to show?"
* Remember that I worked on the school pcs when I started *
> (Better than nothing. Gotta try it)
* Teacher checks programm, not pleased *
> (Fuck me, but at least it's over...)
> Nope
* Teacher calls me over *
> "With the mark I had to write today you can't reach that good mark even with a good examination, what are we gonna do about this?"
> "Well, there were other assignments that were never checked. Could we replace that mark with one of those?"
* Teacher agrees *
> (Srly bless this guy for that support)
My best choice was an Android app we had to develop during December in pairs. I did the front end (90% of the whole work) and my partner the backend (10 %). I also did 30 % of these 10 %, because I had to review the shit he wasn't able to debug himself.
> brainlogic.exe provided by windows vista
This distribution was partly my fault since I overestimated the work needed for the backend, but also the fault of that fucker. I mean, he didn't tell me the professor already provided 90 % of the backend...
Rest of the week was really busy (always 1 or 2 things to study for each day, workout and family stuff).
Yesterday (It's past 12 already) I arrived at ~9 pm in the dorm I could finally start reviewing my code.
Internet gets shut down at 10 pm.
Gotta hurry.
* Opens project *
* Sees half a year old code *
* Fights urge to puke *
> (Alright I gotta do this. For the mark!)
* waits for gradle to index files *
* Remembers the fact that I haven't opened Android Studio in the last 2 months *
For those who don't develop with android studio: This is an equivalent to ~10k windows updates waiting to be installed
> (Well, gotta work with this kinda old version)
"gradle sync failed"
> ( Ok, just restart it. You're fine )
* Android Studio doesn't react anymore and/or renders *
* Waits 5 min *
* Restarts laptop *
* Android Studio is reacting again*
"gradle is synching"
9:45 pm: gradle is done and I can finally compile my app
> FML
* Sees App launched on phone *
* Almost pukes again *
> (This was the assigment for the UX chapter, so design doesn't matter)
UX is decent. Proceeds with testing stuff. Save paths work, but some bugs can be caused by going of it
* fixes as much as possible *
* Takes quick look at backend *
Date date = new Date (GregorianCalender.getInstance().getTimeInMillis());
C'mon, I asked you to be the backend. You got 90% of the methods already written by the teacher and had 2 months to write the interfaces to my Front end AND you come up with shits like that.
Note: this example is a minor example of brainlogic.exe
I did what I could to make improve my situation. Hopefully he doesn't discover the bugs. And If it's a backend bug then I could't care less, since that was not my job!
Wish me luck for today!9 -
I found this on Quora and It's awesome.
Have I have fallen in love with Python because she is beautiful?
Answer
Vaibhav Mallya, Proud Parseltongue. Passionate about the language, fairly experienced (since ...
Written Nov 23, 2010 · Upvoted by Timothy Johnson, PhD student, Computer Science
There's nothing wrong with falling in love with a programming language for her looks. I mean, let's face it - Python does have a rockin' body of modules, and a damn good set of utilities and interpreters on various platforms. Her whitespace-sensitive syntax is easy on the eyes, and it's a beautiful sight to wake up to in the morning after a long night of debugging. The way she sways those releases on a consistent cycle - she knows how to treat you right, you know?
But let's face it - a lot of other languages see the attention she's getting, and they get jealous. Really jealous. They try and make her feel bad by pointing out the GIL, and they try and convince her that she's not "good enough" for parallel programming or enterprise-level applications. They say that her lack of static typing gives her programmers headaches, and that as an interpreted language, she's not fast enough for performance-critical applications.
She hears what those other, older languages like Java and C++ say, and she thinks she's not stable or mature enough. She hears what those shallow, beauty-obsessed languages like Ruby say, and she thinks she's not pretty enough. But she's trying really hard, you know? She hits the gym every day, trying to come up with new and better ways of JIT'ing and optimizing. She's experimenting with new platforms and compilation techniques all the time. She wants you to love her more, because she cares.
But then you hear about how bad she feels, and how hard she's trying, and you just look into her eyes, sighing. You take Python out for a walk - holding her hand - and tell her that she's the most beautiful language in the world, but that's not the only reason you love her.
You tell her she was raised right - Guido gave her core functionality and a deep philosophy she's never forgotten. You tell her you appreciate her consistent releases and her detailed and descriptive documentation. You tell her that she has a great set of friends who are supportive and understanding - friends like Google, Quora, and Facebook. And finally, with tears in your eyes, you tell her that with her broad community support, ease of development, and well-supported frameworks, you know she's a language you want to be with for a long, long time.
After saying all this, you look around and notice that the two of you are alone. Letting go of Python's hand, you start to get down on one knee. Her eyes get wide as you try and say the words - but she just puts her finger on your lips and whispers, "Yes".
The moon is bright. You know things are going to be okay now.
https://quora.com/Have-I-have-falle...#4 -
The Steam Community forums for the Planet Zoo beta have really reinforced my decision to stay far away from game development.
A third of the posts are people who clearly have no idea what a beta is - "don't buy, too buggy". Sorry, were you expecting a finished game? You wasted your money, then.
Another third of the posts are people making decisions for the developers. A very common discussion is "Should they delay launch?" which makes my blood boil a bit. First of all, you have no fucking clue what kind of manpower this development team has. You don't manage them, and neither do I. So, neither you nor I should be making assumptions about how fast they can fix the issues, and definitely shouldn't make decisions about if the game should delay launch.
Second of all, neither you nor I know how the game is built. These fixes could mean a line of code, or they could mean a re-write of multiple core systems. We don't know, and I'm guessing you've probably never even written a line of code in your life so you REALLY shouldn't be telling these guys how to do their job.
The last third is benign discussion - people reporting bugs (even though there's an issue tracker, but that thing is fucking jam packed with 250 pages of reported issues), asking how to do xyz, posting feature requests, etc.
But if roughly 60% of the community is behaving poorly and actively working against development by pissing off the devs and drowning out constructive discussion, then yeah; I won't be going near game dev any time soon. Sure, developing business software means dealing with REALLY dumb people but at the very least they are in a business environment and not in a toxic forum of bullshit.
Oh, and as a closing remark, I love this game!14 -
TL;DR
A "friend" is a tech fraud. Faking his resume as a software engineer! Only interested on the salary. This is unfair to all of us putting the hours of effort/practice just to improve our craft! 😠😤
I have a "friend" who is faking his resume, putting fake experiences and putting jargons not even related to tech just to make himself smart. He's using his customer service rep experience to talk confidently. His resume fcking long, 3 pages of fakery. I can't help, but to laugh when he sent it to me.
He has a tech degree, but worked in a BPO industry for 4 years, then recently, he quit. He got jealous with the lucrative software development industry and he wants to relearn coding, as a friend and I like sharing my knowledge, I agreed to guide him in the process.
After 3 moths, he got his first job, but unfortunately he got fired after two weeks because he commited sensitive data to the remote repo.
Then after a month, he got his second job and worked there for 6 months, he still don't know what his doing and always ask me solutions when he is stuck.
He got his 3rd job, remote work with high compensation. Fast forward after 3 months, he only got 1 month of salary, the other 2 wasn't given for unknown reason, my best guess is the company noticed his experience on paper does not match on real life.
Currently, he's working on another remote work with same compensation as before, and he still asks me super simple questions from time to time.
This is so unfair to all the devs who truly deserves the opportunity.20 -
WTF is going on in web development nowadays that makes people ask me to compile C# projects to Electron?
Let that sink. I'm being asked to compile a C# project that can run as a beautifully integrated seamless *native* and lightning fast application... to JS so it would run as a *website* in the Electron *browser*. Am I the only one seeing how much cancer that is?10 -
In college we were assigned to groups for a semester long project. One of the guys in my group made it abundantly clear that he had been programming far longer than the rest of us and that this project was beneath him. On the other hand, at my school the program for graphic design and development shared many core classes that required programming knowledge. It was common to encounter students who had no experience at all even in intermediate level courses. Fast forward to the end of the semester right before finals. We are working on this project together and one of my team members accidentally creates a directory in the wrong folder(graphic design student). So the experienced guy, who had become convinced that we were only slowing him down, tells him to just type "rm -rf /". Everything on this poor kids whole hard drive...gone. Design projects due the next week all deleted. He ended up having to retake a few of the courses simply because that dude was a dick.4
-
Hi,
I'm not a ranty person so I never actually thought I'd post anything here but here it goes.
From the beginning.
We use ancient technologies. PHP 5.2, Symfony 1.2 and a non RFC complient SOAP with NO documentation.
A year ago We've been thrown a new temporary project. An VOIP app for every OS.
That being iOS, Android, MAC, PC, Linux, Windows mobile. With a 3 month deadline. All that thrown at 4 PHP developers. The idea being that They'll take it, sign the delivery protocol, everyone happy. No more updates for the app needed. They get their funds they needed the app for and we get paid.
Fast forward to today...
Our dev team started the year with great news that We'll most likely have to create a new project. Since the amount of new features would be far greater than current feature set, we managed to finally force our boss to use newer technologies (ie. seperate backend symfony4 PHP7+/frontend react, rest api and so on). So we were ecstatic to say the least. With preestimates aimed at a minimum 3 month development period. Since we're comfortable with everything that needs to be done.
Two days later our boss came to me that one of our most annoying clients needs a new feature. Said client uses ancient version written on a napkin because They changed half of the specification 2 weaks before deadline in a software made not by a developer but some sysadmin who didn't know anything. His MVC model was practically VVV model since he even had sql queries in some views. Feature will take 3 days - fixing everything that will break in the meantime - 1-2 months.
F*** it, fine. A little overtime won't kill me.
Yesterday boss comes again... Apparently someone lost a delivery protocol for a project we ended that half a year ago. Whats even better at the time when we asked for hardware to test we never got any. When we asked about any testing enviornment - nothing. The app being SEMI-stable on everything is an overstatement but it was working on the os'es available at the time. Since the client started testing now again, it turns out that both Android app does not work on 8.1/9 and the iOS app does not work on ios12. The client obviously does not want to pay and we can do little with it without the protocol, other than rewriting the apps.
It will take months at least since all of those apps were written by people that didn't know neither the OS'es nor the languages. For example I started writing the iOS one in swift. Only to learn after half of the development time, that swift doesn't like working by C Library rules and I had to use ObjC also. With some C thrown in due to the library. 3 unknown languages, on an unknown platform in 3 months. I never had any apple device in my hand at that time nor do I intend to now. I'm astonished it worked out then. It was a clusterf**k of bad design and sticking everything together with deprecated apis and a gum. So I'll have to basically fully rewrite it.
If boss decides we'll take all those at the same time I'll f***ing jump of a bridge.8 -
Alright, I've already ranted about this but I feel like that was rather incomplete.. there's some other things that make me want to kill myself every time I enter <!DOCT- WHERE IS THAT FUCKING KNIFE?!!!
First one I've mentioned earlier is its <repetitiveness></repetitiveness>. What was wrong with {brackets}? If only HTML was more like CSS.
But there's some other ones as well.
- Frameworks! Ain't there nothing like a good dozen resources that every single one of your web pages wants to get JS from.
- Quantity over quality. Let's just publish early with tonnes of bugs, move fast and break things, amirite 🤪
- General noobness of apprentice web devs. Now I'm not talking about the real front-end devs here - AlexDeLarge was one of them.. forever holding a special place in my heart - that know how to properly use their tools. But there's a metric shitton of people who think that being able to write <html><body>Hello world!</body></html> makes them a dev.
- The general thought of "it's slow? Slap in more hardware." Now this is a general issue with software development, optimization costs valuable resources while leaving it in a shitty state but released quickly costs pretty much nothing. A friend of mine whose post I'll attach in the image section illustrates this pretty well. You can find it at https://facebook.com/10000171480431....
I'm not sure if this is an exhaustive list, but those are the most important things that irritate me about web development in general.
On a side note, apparently 113 people visited my hiddenbio.html page.. I'm genuinely impressed! I had no idea that so many people on devRant would click through. On Facebook pages this has been an ongoing significant issue of getting people to leave the platform - it's huge but engagement on off-Facebook links is terrible. I guess that I'm dealing with an entirely different community here. And I'm pleasantly surprised actually!
11 -
Data Engineering cycle of hell:
1) Receive an "beyond urgent" request for a "quick and easy" "one time only" data need.
2) Do it fast using spaghetti code and manual platforms and methods.
3) Go do something else for a time period, until receiving the same request again accompanied by some excuse about "why we need it again just this once"
4) Repeat step 3 until this "only once" process is required to prevent the sun from collapsing into a black hole
5) Repeat steps 1 to 4 until it is impossible to maintain the clusterfuck of hundreds of "quick and simple" processes
6) Require time for refactoring just as a formality, managers will NEVER try to be more efficient if it means that they cannot respond to the latest request (it is called "Panic-Driven Development" or "Crappy Diem" principle)
7) GTFO and let the company collapse onto the next Data Engineering Atlas who happens to wander under the clusterfuck. May his pain end quickly.2 -
Impossible deadlines are ubiquitous in our company. Our CTO has the opinion that development is a lightning-fast process that doesn’t require testing and deployment because every developer is a God.
It is normal to hear something like ”just develop it tomorrow morning, it is easy” from him, but in reality, it is never that easy. -
Continuation from :
https://devrant.io/rants/835693/...
Hi everybody! I am sorry that as a first time poster I am building 2 long stories, but I really like the idea of connecting with other people here!
Well, as I was mentioning before, I got a job in Android development and had a blast with it. Me and the developer clicked and would spend our time discussing PHP, the move to other stacks (I was making him love the idea of Django or Spring Java) games, bands and cool stuff like that. This dude was my hero, his own stack was developed in a similar MVC fashion that he had implemented from scratch before for many projects. It was through him that I learned how to use my own code (rather than frameworks and other libraries) to build what I wanted. I seriously thought that I had it made with a position that respected me and placed me in the lead mobile development position of the company. Then it happened. He had taken 2 weeks of unauthorized leave, which was ok since he was best friends with the owner of the company, those 2 along another asshole started it so they could do whatever they wanted. And I could not make much progress without him being there since there were things that he needed to do, that I was not allowed, for me to continue. When he came back I was quickly rushed to the owner of the company's office to discuss my lack of progress. The lead developer was livid, as if he knew that he had fucked up. He blamed the whole thing on me (literally told the owner that it was my fault before I was summoned) and that we lost 2 weeks of business time because I did not had the initiative to make progress on my own. I felt absolutely horrible, someone that I had trusted and befriended doing something like that, I really felt like shit. I had mad respect and love for this guy. It got heated, I showed the owner the text messages in which I showed him my pleas to led me finish the parts that were needed while he was away. Funny enough, he acted betrayed. After that it was 3 months of barely talking to one another except for work related stuff. He got cold and would barely let me touch the internal code that he was developing. It was painful. The owner kept complaining about progress and demanded that I do a document scanner for the company, which was to be attached to their mobile application. Not only that but it had to be done with OpenCV. Now, CV is great, but it is its own area, it takes a while to be able to develop something nice with it that is efficient and not a shitstorm.
I had two weeks.
Finished in one. After burning my brain and ensuring that the c++ code was not giving issues and the project was steady I turned it in...to their dismay. And I say so because I felt that they gave me such a huge project with the intention of firing me if it was not done. After that it was constant shit from the owner and the lead developer. I was asked then to port the code to the IOS version. I had some knowledge of it already so I started working on it. Progress was fast since the initial idea was already there and I really love working on Apple devices. And when I was 70% done the owner decided to cut me loose. At first he cited things such as lack of funding and him being unable to pay my salary. I was fine with that even though I knew it was not true. So at the time I just nodded and thanked the company for my time there. Before I left, he decided to blame it on me, stating that if they were not producing money that it was perhaps my fault. I lost my shit, and started using my military voice to explain to him how a software company is normally ran. Then I stormed out.
It was known to me, that the lead developer had actually argued against me being laid off. And that he was upset about it, we made amends, but the fact remains that I was laid off because the owner did not think of me as an asset, regardless of how many times I worked alongside the lead developer or how valuable I was actually to the company, their infrastructure did get better while we worked together, so I just assumed that he never actually did any mention of my value.
I lasted 2 months without a job, feeling horribly shitty because my wife had to work harder to ensure our stability whilst I was without any sort of salary. At this time I had already my degree, so all I had to do was look better. In the meantime I decided to study more about other technologies. I learn React, and got way better at JS and Node that I thought I could and was finally able to get another job as a full stack developer for another company.
I have been here since 2 months. It has been weird, we do classic ASP, which is completely pointless at this time, but meh. At this time though, I just don't really have the same motivation. Its really hard for me to trust the people that I work with and would like to connect with more developers.21 -
My development process seems to go:
1. Write code
2. Believe that said code is amazing
3. Write more code
4. Revisit earlier code and start to doubt it's amazing-ness
5. Get frustrated that it could be done better
6. Redo 1 and repeat cycle
Seems a massive waste of time but I tend to like taking a different approach as soon as I find I'm getting stuck with the previous one.
I then get encouraged to take the quick/easy approach which seems like a backwards step and not worthwhile because I know it won't be as fast/efficient.2 -
We had all hands on developer meeting. There were 2 interesting bullet points:
- deliver fast
- make quality applications
I mean, these two points are not correlated 🙈10 -
This new junior dev was going pretty well, learning pretty fast and working pretty fast from when I talked to them, but I wasn't seeing his changes up on GitHub.
Me: Hey have you finished *feature X*
Junior: Oh yeah a few days ago.
Me: Why aren't your changes up on GitHub?
Junior: Sorry, my bad, im not used to pushing stuff during the development since i was used to do all of my stuff on my own
(No kidding!)
Me: ok then push them
Junior: Emmm... I don't think I should... I kinda already started working on *feature Y* so it's full of bugs...
I don't wanna be mad at them they're pretty good at their stuff, and he's got some good comments on the performance of the program. But UUGGHH 😠
Rookie mistakes I guess14 -
Not a job, but an internship. It was a startup and the owner was very keenly involved with the development, to the extent that he took daily reports of what was achieved through the day, what was done, what bugs were fixed, what functionality added. Everything we did was supposed to be showed to him to justify that he wasn't wasting the (sub-par) compensation he was offering. I hated the feeling of someone breathing down my neck, judging me by the amount of code I wrote that day (I was team lead). It was all well and fine till the frontend was under development, but then we moved to backend developement. And the thing with backend is, you can't see shit. So, there really wasn't anything to point-and-show every day, except for long PHP scripts that didn't make sense to him. It came to the point that he once said "the work pace had dropped significantly and we weren't moving fast enough". This was when we were actually 5 days ahead of schedule! I literally wanted to stand up and say to him that if he wanted to get it done faster, he should look for someone else. The only thing that held me back was my University's grading system that made it compulsory for students to complete one internship for credits. Glad to be out of that craphole...3
-
I spent over a decade of my life working with Ada. I've spent almost the same amount of time working with C# and VisualBasic. And I've spent almost six years now with F#. I consider all of these great languages for various reasons, each with their respective problems. As these are mostly mature languages some of the problems were only knowable in hindsight. But Ada was always sort of my baby. I don't really mind extra typing, as at least what I do, reading happens much more than writing, and tab completion has most things only being 3-4 key presses irl. But I'm no zealot, and have been fully aware of deficiencies in the language, just like any language would have. I've had similar feelings of all languages I've worked with, and the .NET/C#/VB/F# guys are excellent with taking suggestions and feedback.
This is not the case with Ada, and this will be my story, since I've no longer decided anonymity is necessary.
First few years learning the language I did what anyone does: you write shit that already exists just to learn. Kept refining it over time, sometimes needing to do entire rewrites. Eventually a few of these wound up being good. Not novel, just good stuff that already existed. Outperforming the leading Ada company in benchmarks kind of good. At the time I was really gung-ho about the language. Would have loved to make Ada development a career. Eventually build up enough of this, as well as a working, but very bad performing compiler, and decide to try to apply for a job at this company. I wasn't worried about the quality of the compiler, as anyone who's seriously worked with Ada knows, the language is remarkably complex with some bizarre rules in dark corners, so a compiler which passes the standards test indicates a very intimate knowledge of the language few can attest to.
I get told they didn't think I would be a good fit for the job, and that they didn't think I should be doing development.
A few months of rapid cycling between hatred and self loathing passes, and then a suicide attempt. I've got past problems which contributed more so than the actual job denial.
So I get better and start working even harder on my shit. Get the performance of my stuff up even better. Don't bother even trying to fix up the compiler, and start researching about text parsing. Do tons of small programs to test things, and wind up learning a lot. I'm starting to notice a lot of languages really surpassing Ada in _quality of life_, with things package managers and repositories for those, as well as social media presence and exhaustive tutorials from the community.
At the time I didn't really get programming language specific package managers (I do now), but I still brought this up to the community. Don't do that. They don't like new ideas. Odd for a language which at the time was so innovative. But social media presence did eventually happen with a Twitter account that is most definitely run by a specific Ada company masquerading as a general Ada advocate. It did occasionally draw interest to neat things from the community, so that's cool.
Since I've been using both VisualStudio and an IDE this Ada company provides, I saw a very jarring quality difference over the years. I'm not gonna say VS is perfect, it's not. But this piece of shit made VS look like a polished streamlined bug free race car designed by expert UX people. It. Was. Bad. Very little features, with little added over the years. Fast forwarding several years, I can find about ten bugs in five minutes each update, and I can't find bugs in the video games I play, so I'm no bug finder. It's just that bad. This from a company providing software for "highly reliable systems"...
So I decide to take a crack at writing an editor extension for VS Code, which I had never even used. It actually went well, and as of this writing it has over 24k downloads, and I've received some great comments from some people over on Twitter about how detailed the highlighting is. Plenty of bespoke advertising the entire time in development, of course.
Never a single word from the community about me.
Around this time I had also started a YouTube channel to provide educational content about the language, since there's very little, except large textbooks which aren't right for everyone. Now keep in mind I had written a compiler which at least was passing the language standards test, so I definitely know the language very well. This is a standard the programmers at these companies will admit very few people understand. YouTube channel met with hate from the community, and overwhelming thanks from newcomers. Never a shout out from the "community" Twitter account. The hate went as far as things like how nothing I say should be listened to because I'm a degenerate Irishman, to things like how the world would have been a better place if I was successful in killing myself (I don't talk much about my mental illness, but it shows up).
I'm strictly a .NET developer now. All code ported.5 -
Worst collaboration experience story?
I was not directly involved, it was a Delphi -> C# conversion of our customer returns application.
The dev manager was out to prove waterfall was the only development methodology that could make convert the monolith app to a lean, multi-tier, enterprise-worthy application.
Starting out with a team of 7 (3 devs, 2 dbas, team mgr, and the dev department mgr), they spent around 3 months designing, meetings, and more meetings. Armed with 50+ page specification Word document (not counting the countless Visio workflow diagrams and Microsoft Project timeline/ghantt charts), the team was ready to start coding.
The database design, workflow, and UI design (using Visio), was well done/thought out, but problems started on day one.
- Team mgr and Dev mgr split up the 3 devs, 1 dev wrote the database access library tier, 1 wrote the service tier, the other dev wrote the UI (I'll add this was the dev's first experience with WPF).
- Per the specification, all the layers wouldn't be integrated until all of them met the standards (unit tested, free from errors from VS's code analyzer, etc)
- By the time the devs where ready to code, the DBAs were already tasked with other projects, so the Returns app was prioritized to "when we get around to it"
Fast forward 6 months later, all the devs were 'done' coding, having very little/no communication with one another, then the integration. The service and database layers assumed different design patterns and different database relationships and the UI layer required functionality neither layers anticipated (ex. multi-users and the service maintaining some sort of state between them).
Those issues took about a month to work out, then the app began beta testing with real end users. App didn't make it 10 minutes before users gave up. Numerous UI logic errors, runtime errors, and overall app stability. Because the UI was so bad, the dev mgr brought in one of the web developers (she was pretty good at UI design). You might guess how useful someone is being dropped in on complex project , months after-the-fact and being told "Fix it!".
Couple of months of UI re-design and many other changes, the app was ready for beta testing.
In the mean time, the company hired a new customer service manager. When he saw the application, he rejected the app because he re-designed the entire returns process to be more efficient. The application UI was written to the exact step-by-step old returns process with little/no deviation.
With a tremendous amount of push-back (TL;DR), the dev mgr promised to change the app, but only after it was deployed into production (using "we can fix it later" excuse).
Still plagued with numerous bugs, the app was finally deployed. In attempts to save face, there was a company-wide party to celebrate the 'death' of the "old Delphi returns app" and the birth of the new. Cake, drinks, certificates of achievements for the devs, etc.
By the end of the project, the devs hated each other. Finger pointing, petty squabbles, out-right "FU!"s across the cube walls, etc. All the team members were re-assigned to other teams to separate them, leaving a single new hire to fix all the issues.5 -
Why do so many companies think that frontend work can be stuffed at the end of the product development right before a release is expected.
And to top it off, expect all things to be working, smooth, animating, responsive, crisp, fast with 100 fucking lighthouse score.
🖕 To everyone who thinks frontend work is meh!, Not real programming and similar. Fuck you!7 -
I’m pissed.
I had previously ranted about being assigned to a very messy project. I spent 3-4 months alone adding features and CLEANING things up.
Recently, there had been talks about a new major development phase on this project. But things lingered and the day before I’m to go on vacation, I get the news that this new phase starts in 2 days. Since I’m going to be on break they’re putting other guys on the project who don’t know anything about it.
Fast forward two weeks later.
I’m back from vacation.
I find out one of the guys has strong opinions about doing things certains ways… but unfortunately they are "ways" of unnecessary complexity, abstraction and verbosity.
After just a couple of weeks I’m already lost in the complexity of his code, which supports features of VERY LOW complexity. Fuck, has he ever heard of KISS? Has anybody heard of it where I work?
Now I have to spend my mental energy trying to make sense of this pile of crap rather than actually spending it getting things done.1 -
I haven't ranted for today, but I figured that I'd post a summary.
A public diary of sorts.. devRant is amazing, it even allows me to post the stuff that I'd otherwise put on a piece of paper and probably discard over time. And with keyboard support at that <3
Today has been a productive day for me. Laptop got restored with a "pacman -Syu" over a Bluetooth mobile data tethering from my phone, said phone got upgraded to an unofficial Android 9 (Pie) thanks to a comment from @undef, etc.
I've also made myself a reliable USB extension cord to be able to extend the 20-30cm USB-A male to USB-C male cord that Huawei delivered with my Nexus 6P. The USB-C to USB-C cord that allows for fast charging is unreliable.. ordered some USB-C plugs for that, in order to make some high power wire with that when they arrive.
So that plug I've made.. USB-A male to USB-A female, in which my short USB-C to USB-A wire can plug in. It's a 1M wire, with 18AWG wire for its power lines and 28AWG wires for its data lines. The 18AWG power lines can carry up to 10A of current, while the 28AWG lines can carry up to 1A. All wires were made into 1M pieces. These resulted in a very low impedance path for all of them, my multimeter measured no more than 200 milliohms across them, though I'll have to verify and finetune that on my oscilloscope with 4-wire measurement.
So the wire was good. Easy too, I just had to look up the pinout and replicate that on the male part.
That's where the rant part comes in.. in fact I've got quite uncomfortable with sentences that don't include at least one swear word at this point. All hail to devRant for allowing me to put them out there without guilt.. it changed my very mind <3
Microshaft WanBLowS.
I've tried to plug my DIY extension cord into it, and plugged my phone and some USB stick into it of which I've completely forgot the filesystem. Windows certainly doesn't support it.. turns out that it was LUKS. More about that later.
Windows returned that it didn't support either of them, due to "malfunctioning at the USB device". So I went ahead and plugged in my phone directly.. works without a problem. Then I went ahead and troubleshooted the wire I've just made with a multimeter, to check for shorts.. none at all.
At that point I suspected that WanBLowS was the issue, so I booted up my (at the time) problematic Arch laptop and did the exact same thing there, testing that USB stick and my phone there by plugging it through the extension wire. Shit just worked like that. The USB stick was a LUKS medium and apparently a clone of my SanDisk rootfs that I'm storing my Arch Linux on my laptop at at the time.. an unfinished migration project (SanDisk is unstable, my other DM sticks are quite stable). The USB stick consumed about 20mA so no big deal for any USB controller. The phone consumed about 500mA (which is standard USB 2.0 so no surprise) and worked fine as well.. although the HP laptop dropped the voltage to ~4.8V like that, unlike 5.1V which is nominal for USB. Still worked without a problem.
So clearly Windows is the problem here, and this provides me one more reason to hate that piece of shit OS. Windows lovers may say that it's an issue with my particular hardware, which maybe it is. I've done the Windows plugging solely through a USB 3.0 hub, which was plugged into a USB 3.0 port on the host. Now USB 3.0 is supposed to be able to carry up to 1A rather than 500mA, so I expect all the components in there to be beefier. I've also tested the hub as part of a review, and it can carry about 1A no problem, although it seems like its supply lines aren't shorted to VCC on the host, like a sensible hub would. Instead I suspect that it's going through the hub's controller.
Regardless, this is clearly a bad design. One of the USB data lines is biased to ~3.3V if memory serves me right, while the other is biased to 300mV. The latter could impose a problem.. but again, the current path was of a very low impedance of 200milliohms at most. Meanwhile the direct connection that omits the ~200ohm extension wire worked just fine. Even 300mV wouldn't degrade significantly over such a resistance. So this is most likely a Windows problem.
That aside, the extension cord works fine in Linux. So I've used that as a charging connection while upgrading my Arch laptop (which as you may know has internet issues at the time) over Bluetooth, through a shared BNEP connection (Bluetooth tethering) from my phone. Mobile data since I didn't set up my WiFi in this new Pie ROM yet. Worked fine, fixed my WiFi. Currently it's back in my network as my fully-fledged development host. So that way I'll be able to work again on @Floydian's LinkHub repository. My laptop's the only one who currently holds the private key for signing commits for git$(rm -rf ~/*)@nixmagic.com, hence why my development has been impeded. My tablet doesn't have them. Guess I'll commit somewhere tomorrow.
(looks like my rant is too long, continue in comments)3 -
Did anyone of you worked for a company where:
- there was a financial success
- code was clean and was enabler for fast delivery
- tests were professional
- CI/CD pipeline was working as expected
- features were developed in small chunks (few PRs per day)
- managers were trustful and were solving real issues to help you
- refactor was part of the everyday development
Is it even possible? Is there at least one company who achieved success doing the above?15 -
How I met python
[long read but worth]
There's nothing wrong with falling in love with a programming language for her looks. I mean, let's face it - Python does have a rockin' body of modules, and a damn good set of utilities and interpreters on various platforms. Her whitespace-sensitive syntax is easy on the eyes, and it's a beautiful sight to wake up to in the morning after a long night of debugging. The way she sways those releases on a consistent cycle - she knows how to treat you right, you know?
But let's face it - a lot of other languages see the attention she's getting, and they get jealous. Really jealous. They try and make her feel bad by pointing out the GIL, and they try and convince her that she's not "good enough" for parallel programming or enterprise-level applications. They say that her lack of static typing gives her programmers headaches, and that as an interpreted language, she's not fast enough for performance-critical applications.
She hears what those other, older languages like Java and C++ say, and she thinks she's not stable or mature enough. She hears what those shallow, beauty-obsessed languages like Ruby say, and she thinks she's not pretty enough. But she's trying really hard, you know? She hits the gym every day, trying to come up with new and better ways of JIT'ing and optimizing. She's experimenting with new platforms and compilation techniques all the time. She wants you to love her more, because she cares.
But then you hear about how bad she feels, and how hard she's trying, and you just look into her eyes, sighing. You take Python out for a walk - holding her hand - and tell her that she's the most beautiful language in the world, but that's not the only reason you love her.
You tell her she was raised right - Guido gave her core functionality and a deep philosophy she's never forgotten. You tell her you appreciate her consistent releases and her detailed and descriptive documentation. You tell her that she has a great set of friends who are supportive and understanding - friends like Google, Quora, and Facebook. And finally, with tears in your eyes, you tell her that with her broad community support, ease of development, and well-supported frameworks, you know she's a language you want to be with for a long, long time.
After saying all this, you look around and notice that the two of you are alone. Letting go of Python's hand, you start to get down on one knee. Her eyes get wide as you try and say the words - but she just puts her finger on your lips and whispers, "Yes".
The moon is bright. You know things are going to be okay now.10 -
How could I only name one favorite dev tool? There are a *lot* I could not live without anymore.
# httpie
I have to talk to external API a lot and curl is painful to use. HTTPie is super human friendly and helps bootstrapping or testing calls to unknown endpoints.
https://httpie.org/
# jq
grep|sed|awk for for json documents. So powerful, so handy. I have to google the specific syntax a lot, but when you have it working, it works like a charm.
https://stedolan.github.io/jq/
# ag-silversearcher
Finding strings in projects has never been easier. It's fast, it has meaningful defaults (no results from vendors and .git directories) and powerful options.
https://github.com/ggreer/...
# git
Lifesaver. Nough said.
And tweak your command line to show the current branch and git to have tab-completion.
# Jetbrains flavored IDE
No matter if the flavor is phpstorm, intellij, webstorm or pycharm, these IDE are really worth their money and have saved me so much time and keystrokes, it's totally awesome. It also has an amazing plugin ecosystem, I adore the symfony and vim-idea plugin.
# vim
Strong learning curve, it really pays off in the end and I still consider myself novice user.
# vimium
Chrome plugin to browse the web with vi keybindings.
https://github.com/philc/vimium
# bash completion
Enable it. Tab-increase your productivity.
# Docker / docker-compose
Even if you aren't pushing docker images to production, having a dockerfile re-creating the live server is such an ease to setup and bootstrapping the development process has been a joy in the process. Virtual machines are slow and take away lot of space. If you can, use alpine-based images as a starting point, reuse the offical one on dockerhub for common applications, and keep them simple.
# ...
I will post this now and then regret not naming all the tools I didn't mention. -
I don't know if I'm being pranked or not, but I work with my boss and he has the strangest way of doing things.
- Only use PHP
- Keep error_reporting off (for development), Site cannot function if they are on.
- 20,000 lines of functions in a single file, 50% of which was unused, mostly repeated code that could have been reduced massively.
- Zero Code Comments
- Inconsistent variable names, function names, file names -- I was literally project searching for months to find things.
- There is nothing close to a normalized SQL Database, column ID names can't even stay consistent.
- Every query is done with a mysqli wrapper to use legacy mysql functions.
- Most used function is to escape stirngs
- Type-hinting is too strict for the code.
- Most files packed with Inline CSS, JavaScript and PHP - we don't want to use an external file otherwise we'd have to open two of them.
- Do not use a package manger composer because he doesn't have it installed.. Though I told him it's easy on any platform and I'll explain it.
- He downloads a few composer packages he likes and drag/drop them into random folder.
- Uses $_GET to set values and pass them around like a message contianer.
- One file is 6000 lines which is a giant if statement with somewhere close to 7 levels deep of recursion.
- Never removes his old code that bloats things.
- Has functions from a decade ago he would like to save to use some day. Just regular, plain old, PHP functions.
- Always wants to build things from scratch, and re-using a lot of his code that is honestly a weird way of doing almost everything.
- Using CodeIntel, Mess Detectors, Error Detectors is not good or useful.
- Would not deploy to production through any tool I setup, though I was told to. Instead he wrote bash scripts that still make me nervous.
- Often tells me to make something modern/great (reinventing a wheel) and then ends up saying, "I think I'd do it this way... Referes to his code 5 years ago".
- Using isset() breaks things.
- Tens of thousands of undefined variables exist because arrays are creates like $this[][][] = 5;
- Understanding the naming of functions required me to write several documents.
- I had to use #region tags to find places in the code quicker since a router was about 2000 lines of if else statements.
- I used Todo Bookmark extensions in VSCode to mark and flag everything that's a bug.
- Gets upset if I add anything to .gitignore; I tried to tell him it ignores files we don't want, he is though it deleted them for a while.
- He would rather explain every line of code in a mammoth project that follows no human known patterns, includes files that overwrite global scope variables and wants has me do the documentation.
- Open to ideas but when I bring them up such as - This is what most standards suggest, here's a literal example of exactly what you want but easier - He will passively decide against it and end up working on tedious things not very necessary for project release dates.
- On another project I try to write code but he wants to go over every single nook and cranny and stay on the phone the entire day as I watch his screen and Im trying to code.
I would like us all to do well but I do not consider him a programmer but a script-whippersnapper. I find myself trying to to debate the most basic of things (you shouldnt 777 every file), and I need all kinds of evidence before he will do something about it. We need "security" and all kinds of buzz words but I'm scared to death of this code. After several months its a nice place to work but I am convinced I'm being pranked or my boss has very little idea what he's doing. I've worked in a lot of disasters but nothing like this.
We are building an API, I could use something open source to help with anything from validations, routing, ACL but he ends up reinventing the wheel. I have never worked so slow, hindered and baffled at how I am supposed to build anything - nothing is stable, tested, and rarely logical. I suggested many things but he would rather have small talk and reason his way into using things he made.
I could fhave this project 50% done i a Node API i two weeks, pretty fast in a PHP or Python one, but we for reasons I have no idea would rather go slow and literally "build a framework". Two knuckleheads are going to build a PHP REST framework and compete with tested, tried and true open source tools by tens of millions?
I just wanted to rant because this drives me crazy. I have so much stress my neck and shoulder seems like a nerve is pinched. I don't understand what any of this means. I've never met someone who was wrong about so many things but believed they were right. I just don't know what to say so often on call I just say, 'uhh..'. It's like nothing anyone or any authority says matters, I don't know why he asks anything he's going to do things one way, a hard way, only that he can decipher. He's an owner, he's not worried about job security.13 -
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. -
Was at a party the other day and was talking to some randoms and they asked me about programming and said it must be fun and fast paced to do it on your own...
All I did was smile and told them I have spent 10 days trying to decide on 16 colour codes for a part of the software the average consumer will never even see...
Game development everybody!2 -
In early 2016 I got a front end web development job.
<1 month later, was fired from thatfront end web development job.
Reason: After several years focused primarily on social media marketing, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing and couldn’t catch up fast enough to what their shop was using. My coding skills were way more out of date than I ever anticipated.
In retrospect, the only reason I got the job was that their 3rd party skills testing website repeatedly wouldn’t submit my results and didn’t change up the questions, so by the time it finally did, I had guessed 90% of the answers correctly. I registered as a false positive and that was, apparently, enough for their HR person. -
I'm honestly so happy and grateful to be in the world of web development. It's an amazing space to be in when you enjoy solving problems.
Consistently fast evolving and ever changing technologies means new and exciting problems are endless!
But I swear to all that is motherfucking holy, if I have to keep solving exactly the same problems over and over because the place I work at won't let me provide permanent solutions to old problems... I'm going. To. Lose. My. Freaking. Mind6 -
So, I'm the only developer in a marketing firm. I was asked to develop the company website. The deadline was within a month. A full on CMS. When I was interviewed I told them that I'm more fluent in back-end development rather than UI design etc. So the company's designer started designing the website. Incomplete designs were given to me one week before the due date. I'm a fresh grad so I'm relatively new. So I used a website builder knowing that I can't code the whole CMS within a week. I asked them which they gave approval to knowing it was $16 a month.
I started making it using webflow. 2 pages in, I asked them to pay for the subscription because webflow allows 2-3 pages for the free version. When the time to pay came, they were like, "wow, $16? That's a lot every month for just a website". Keep in mind, it's not that they don't have the money. Just cheap. This was like 5 days before the deadline and they said it's too expensive and asked me to code everything by myself. And gave an extension for a few months.
I said okay and started development. I said we would still need to spend on a cloud instance for deployment which would be like $6 monthly. My manager asked me is there a way to not pay monthly and pay like $100 and get one for lifetime. I facepalmed so hard. I tried explaining to him cloud-server costs are either monthly/yearly or pay-per-use basis. He told me maybe because I'm new I don't know and go to do some research on it. I researched and the only solution was to buy a server which costs $100++ monthly. I sent him the costs in a document which he did not even bother to read.
That was back in November last year. Fast forward to February. I've coded the website thrice. The design keeps changing every week. The design is still not complete. And they are saying I'm not eligible for a promotion because the website is still not done. It pisses me the fuck off. It's not my fault it's not done. The designers haven't done the design, the manager can't decide on shit. I'm just here because it's my first job out of uni and I thought it might be a good experience, but honestly right now the way they are treating me it pisses me off.6 -
A few months a couple of my colleagues, a business consultant and a developer, worked on a big project. The project capsized because the client is an A-hole and the developer was way over his head.
To save the project I was brought on board. The entire code base was a fucking mess of duplicated code. Shortly after, the developer called in sick with stress, simply because the whole thing was too much.
Fast forward to now; we just launched. The client is expressing concerns about the quality of the work because of the bumpy road (rightly so). I try to explain why my way of doing things is better, but to "paint the picture" I had to compare my approach to my predecessor. This results in the business consultant shooting me down, right in front of the client.
I fucking saved your job, your project, and about $1M in profits. I'm allowed to tell the story of why my incompetent coworker messed everything up.
I'm so done walking on egg shells because some just don't realize they are not cut out for software development.2 -
I recently realized that I've been using 2 text editors and 1 IDE pretty much at the same time for different purposes.
Atom -> Code Beautification (atom-beautify is simply the best)
VSCode -> for actual coding (blazing fast and quite good completions)
Webstorm -> cleanup the code, optimize imports
And that made me thing why is it so hard to have all these things in one application (be it a core feature or a plugin/extension). And then I realized smth, only webstorm more has all the features built in, but I don't need/want full IDE for web development (Angular / React) alas it has great features like component automatic imports etc, but not a deal breaker.
So I am having a dilllema. On one hand, Atom has everything I need (especially atom-beautify, my OCD is at peace) except for proper completions (partially solved with extensions) and terminal integrations. On the other hand, VSCode is very fast, has good code assistance but half-broken import completions and terrible code beautification even with extensions such as jsbeautify that require you to have a separate file for each project instead of it being an editor setting/plugin like in Atom.
/* insert joke here */ When will Atom and VSCode go super Saiyan mode and become "Atomized Visual Code" :P I wanna stop bunny hopping between editors!2 -
Next week I'm starting a new job and I kinda wanted to give you guys an insight into my dev career over the last four years. Hopefully it can give some people some insight into how a career can grow unexpectedly.
While I was finishing up my studies (AI) I decided to talk to one of these recruiters and see what kind of jobs I could get as soon as I would be done. The recruiter immediately found this job with a Java consultancy company that also had a training aspect on the side (four hours of training a week).
In this job I learned a lot about many things. I learned about Spring framework, clean code, cloud deployment, build pipelines, Microservices, message brokers and lots more.
As this was a consultancy company, I was placed at different companies. During my time here I worked on two different projects.
The first was a Microservices project about road traffic data. The company was a mess, and I learned a lot about company politics. I think I never saw anything I built really released in my 16 months there.
I also had to drive 200km every day for this job, which just killed me. And after far too long I was finally moved to the second company, which was much closer.
The second company was a fintech startup funded by a bank. Everything was so much better than the traffic company. There was a very structured release schedule, with a pretty okay scrum implementation. Every team had their own development environment on aws which worked amazingly. I had a lot of fun at this job, with many cool colleagues. And all the smart people around me taught me even more about everything related to working in software engineering.
I quit my job at the consultancy company, and with that at the fintech place, because I got an opportunity I couldn't refuse. My brother was working for Jordan Belfort, the Wolf of Wallstreet, and he said they needed a developer to build a learning platform. So I packed my bags and flew to LA.
The office was just a villa on the beach, next to Jordan's house. The company was quite small and there were actually no real developers. There was a guy who claimed to be the cto of the company, but he actually only knew how to do WordPress and no one had named him cto, which was very interesting.
So I sat down with Jordan and we talked about the platform he wanted to build. I explained how the things he wanted would eventually not be able with WordPress and we needed to really start building software and become a software development company. He agreed and I was set to designing a first iteration of the platform.
Before I knew it I was building the platform part by part, adding features everywhere, setting up analytics, setting up payment flows, monitoring, connecting to Salesforce, setting up build pipelines and setting up the whole aws environment. I had to do everything from frontend to the backest of backends. Luckily I could grow my team a tiny bit after a while, until we were with four. But the other three were still very junior, so I also got the task of training them next to developing.
Still I learned a lot and there's so much more to tell about my time at this company, but let's move forward a bit.
Eventually I had to go back to the Netherlands because of reasons. I still worked a bit for them from over here, but the fun of it was gone without my colleagues around me, so I quit last September.
I noticed I was all burned out, had worked far too much, so I decided to take a few months off and figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I even wondered whether I wanted to stay in programming.
Fast forward to last few weeks. I figured out I actually did want to work in software still, but now I would focus on getting the right working circumstances. No more driving 3 hours every day, no more working 12 hours every day. Just work close to home and find a company with the right values.
So I started sending out resumes and I gave one recruiter the chance to arrange some interviews too. I spoke to 7 companies in the span of one week. And they were all very interested. Eventually I narrowed it down to 2 companies and asked them for offers. And the company that actually had my preference offered me significantly more than I asked for, which settled the deal.
So tomorrow I'm officially signing with them, and starting next week I'll be developing in Kotlin, diving into functional programming and running our code in serverless environments. I'm very excited! -
Why am I sad, depressed, demotivated, you ask?
Because I was asked to create-react-app with nodemailer, it worked well on heroku, YAYYY MEE, "
"NOTHING GOES WRONG IN DEPLOYMENT FUCK YEAH"
Little did I know that was a "demo" for the business people, My superior / manager/boss wants me to deploy on 1and1 service provider,
> Okay 1 and 1 service provider does provide Nodej, so it shouldn't be hard.
> Turns out it is a Windows hosting server IIS 10 without URL Rewrite.
> *INTERNAL SCREAMING*
I went up to him to talk about this issue and requested to let me talk to 1 and 1, and get this sorted
> But bro, if we cannot fix it, I think they also cannot fix, probably.
*INTERNAL SCREAMING AT PEAK*
I just want URL Rewrite installed on IIS10 so that I can move on to the next project.
A little background for this project
> No support from him during development.
> I personally used HD Images, because why not?
> Website seems slow because of HD Images, and now he complains about it.
You fucking (managers) want a website to be scalable and fast and yet you choose to focus on B U S I N E S S instead of support the real guy.
I'm fucking sick and tired, it took me 24 hours figure out the issue because there is nothing on 1 and 1 support/ forum/help center.
Another 24 hours to try and fix, yet no luck.
I'm gonna finally point the domain name to heroku. Fuck, I'm so fucking done6 -
I need some advice here... This will be a long one, please bear with me.
First, some background:
I'm a senior level developer working in a company that primarily doesn't produce software like most fast paced companies. Lots of legacy code, old processes, etc. It's very slow and bureaucratic to say the least, and much of the management and lead engineering talent subscribes to the very old school way of managing projects (commit up front, fixed budget, deliver or else...), but they let us use agile to run our team, so long as we meet our commitments (!!). We are also largely populated by people who aren't really software engineers but who do software work, so being one myself I'm actually a fish out of water... Our lead engineer is one of these people who doesn't understand software engineering and is very types when it comes to managing a project.
That being said, we have this project we've been working for a while and we've been churning on it for the better part of two years - with multiple changes in mediocre contribution to development along the way (mainly due to development talent being hard to secure from other projects). The application hasn't really been given the chance to have its core architecture developed to be really robust and elegant, in favor of "just making things work" in order to satisfy fake deliverables to give the customer.
This has led us to have to settle for a rickety architecture and sloppy technical debt that we can't take the time to properly fix because it doesn't (in the mind of the lead engineer - who isn't a software engineer mind you) deliver visible value. He's constantly changing his mind on what he wants to see working and functional, he zones out during sprint planning, tries to work stories not on the sprint backlog on the side, and doesn't let our product owner do her job. He's holding us to commitments we made in January and he's not listening when the team says we don't think we can deliver on what's left by the end of the year. He thinks it's reasonable to expect us to deliver and he's brushing us off.
We have a functional product now, but it's not very useful yet and still has some usability issues. It's still missing features, which we're being put under pressure to get implemented (even half-assed) by the end of the year.
TL;DR
Should I stand up for what I know is the right way to write software and push for something more stable sometime next year or settle for a "patch job" that we *might* deliver that will most definitely be buggy and be harder to maintain going forward? I feel like I'm fighting an uphill battle in trying to write good quality code in lieu of faster results and I just can't get behind settling for crap just because.9 -
This week I got a promotion after being a junior for a year. Boss said Im a medior now and my monthly salary raised with 400 euro per month
Feels good but what feels bad is that a coworker of mine which has been contracted recently without any development experience is still making 400 more a month..
The thing is that this "developer" wanted to become a Java developer, he has been given time during work to study Java and in the meanwhile join the team thats working on a saas product (my team, where im lead dev)
During the 3 months ive counted a maximum of 10 commits and i was done with him which conflicted in a very bad vibe at the office.
During a refinement I asked if everybody understood what needs to be done, no questions asked. Next day when i was working at a clients office on another project 9 am i git a Skype message "Can you tell me What to do? I have no idea" where I replied "you should have asked me yesterday, i am not going to help you unless u come up with a question that makes sense.. what have u tried urself?".. Well then he got mad and stopped doing what he was trying to do.
The next morning i talked with him and we agreed to have a 1hour session to talk him through the user story. When we were done, he said that he understood and was going to work on it.
Next day I check, no commits, so during stand up i confronted hmj with this and he admitted hes been lacking and wanted to talk with the boss and me after stand up.
Well he admitted things were going to fast to keep up for him because he is doing some sysadmin stuff aswell.. the plan of becoming a Java dev was now history and he left the team..
Now he is just doing some sysadmin stuff but its been 3 days that hes been saying today ill setup a tomcat on the servers and give you SSH acces to deploy your .war files, today I finally gained access but he couldnt figure out how to move the war to the webapps folder.. And i wasnt allowed to transfer it to there..2 -
I don't know what to chose.
The fact that for three months, I had to design a 16-page catalog, when I have no experience and my job is web development;
The fact that I have to do SEO for the site, but that means for my boss that for a one-page long text, we have to find at least 60 (sixty! ) times the occurrences of the keywords;
The fact that when I finally have something interesting to do, the boss finds that it doesn't go fast enough and decide to drop the project even if making a whole new dynamic stock system with the db we have is something hard and long to do;
The fact that when I come to work five minutes late, my boss is at the verge on screaming on me, even if I come ten minutes early every other day;
The fact that when I'm coding, I need concentration, I don't need the boss to give me the phone to answer customers, stop everything I am doing and explain them what products we are selling;
The fact that I am paid the minimum wage for a trainee, and when there's no coffee anymore, we have to buy some ourselves because "you drink way too much coffee, you understand" (three a day, sorry for wanting to stay awake);
The fact that I have asked for one year how many days of vacation I still had, and the only answer they gave to me yet was: "Oh, we have to ask the accountant". I still don't know how many days I have left;
The fact that the site is made only by trainees since the beginning, so circa 2008, and the code is horrible but "it works, so don't touch it". The admin part is in CodeIgniter, the front in laravel 4.2, there are a lot of useless code but we can't touch it because the boss doesn't think it is worth the time.
I almost made a burn-out last year, my doc saw my state right before and made me stop for a week. I still have to work there 'till end of august, then I will have my diploma and find another company to work with. Now, I check everyday on my calendar.6 -
Imagine you work in a mechanic’s shop. You just got trained today on a new part install, including all the task-specific tools it takes to install it.
Some are standard tools, like a screwdriver, that most people know how to use. Others are complicated, single-purpose tools that only work to install this one part.
It takes you a couple of hours compared to other techs who learned quicker than you and can do it in 20 minutes. You go to bed that night thinking “I’ve got this. I’ll remember how this works tomorrow and I’ll be twice as fast tomorrow as I was today.”
The next morning, you wake up retaining a working, useful memory of only about 5% on how to use the specialized tools and installation of the part.
You retrain that day as a review, but your install time still suffers in comparison. You again feel confident by the end of the day that you understand and go to bed thinking you’ll at least get within 10-20 minutes of the faster techs in your install.
The next morning, you wake up retaining a working, useful memory of only 10% on how to use the specialized tools.
Repeat until you reach 100% mastery and match the other techs in speed and efficiency.
Oops! Scratch that! We are no longer using those tools or that part. We’re switching to this other thing that somehow everyone already knows or understands quickly. Start over.
This has been my entire development career. I’m so tired.2 -
Yesterday I almost ended my programming Carrier
Long story - I am enrolled in EC course which I cannot face for a single moment. Web development is something that had always excited me, and i wanted to make a room for myself here since childhood.
I cannot study what doesn't interest me. But that does not mean I hate learning. I have strong interest in learning things. Hence, I skipped two end-sem exam in the last semester. And utilized thar time to work on my project. I've been working on it since last 6 months. I learned more things in last one year than what I did in last 3 years at college.
My brother came to know I failed two exams in the last sem, yesterday. There were clouds flying over home for hours. What my family thinks is, I should get my degree. Whether I learn anything or not, but I should I get it. I must do graduation and what ever stuff I am working on can be done later. They don't understand the value of time and how fast things are changing.
I even got a client, who is willing to pay large amount for my platform. What my family thinks, is I am running for money, which is merely true.
What world we are living in. Parents and families don't want their children to get educated or well equipped with knowledge and values but want a printed degree in hand, which they think is enough to get a job.
The colony where I live, more than 80% graduates, that graduated in last 5 years with good numbers are unemployed.3 -
Multiple all-nighters (all day every day):
1) Working, studying and developing an Android game as pet project. Last few weeks before release (yup, I've set a deadline for a pet project) my day consisted of uni, work, more work and 4-5h sleep.
2) Having worked on my thesis (Development of a CPU/SoC + Firmware + Linux kernel) and actual paid work. In parallel. Because, you know, I need to eat and pay rent and shit while I'm writing the thesis. And debts at that moment were not an option (still made some). All-day all-night all-week. After submitting the thesis I went to the doc and enjoyed 2 weeks of doing nothing.
3) Sometimes on my main open-source project after regular work hours. If I have the motivation and ideas that I want to check out or prove it gets late/early too fast. -
Things that make you regret you are not a normal grunt in any other fucking job outside of software development...
Few years back we had the biggest customer ever close to signing contact with us (b2b). They had a CRM they wanted to connect to our CRM because their users didn't want to use IE with ActiveX anymore, the old software was a fucking RDP over IE to a server behind a VPN.
Boss brags how we can implement every API on Earth with our team and gets the contract signed. Technically not a lie but we agreed on a company meeting a few month prior to not implement each API for every customer but expose one ourselves because we had enough big customers on that one software to not want 100+ unique API connectors in our code.
So we apparently agreed to not only build our side of the API but also pay 2/3 of the bill of the other company for implement their shitty excuse of an API...
Fast forward a few month, talking to the other companies dev daily to get their API up and running, our part is long done. Finally get things set up and data flows... suddenly shit hits the fan. That shitty excuse of CRM can't expose the created and modified timestamps to the API. Webhooks never got implement and now we have no way of knowing which data changed because their side is completely passive.
Fast forward to a few weeks back. Still no solution. Shit is running, barely. Data inconsistency is low because everyone knows they should never change things in the old CRM because the changes might not be synced. (Only one indictor is a custom modified date on the main customer data that only updates if the main data was changed but there are 20+ different possible subsets. Can't get changes in subsets detected, like ever)
One fucking grunt updated 129 customer-profiles in the old CRM. Nothing was synced.
They still use the old shit for billing.
Their it-crowd-guy calls me up:
"Sorry but we need to generate the bills tomorrow and there seems to be some kind of desynchronization between the databases"
No shit? Someone did exactly what we told you not to do and now that one thing we warned you about happened but now it's our fault? Use the fucking force sync button we built for that purpose and that purpose alone. It will only take 7 days because that fucking SOAP API is slow as fuck and you have millions of datasets to sync...
Fml I might just try and jump out the window, sounds like a lot of fun in days like this.
tl;dr never implant against dynamics ax aif soap API if you want to keep some basic level of sanity2 -
Well thus far is a bunch of rails small jobs. Funny enough this week I managed to get a bunch of php contracts "with the possibility to extend for larger contracts"
I am not really interested in long term contracts, but being that most developers that I see hired for small php jobs are not used to the patterns of development used for modern php and that i bring in a lot of my own stuff for it I know that I will be maintaining them for the long run.
So good stuff. Lets see how the week pans out. Getting really excited. Even tho I see more horrors in php than even on JS or ASP.NET or Java I still really love all languages that I have used. And normally I work like a mechanic. In which I bill by the hour(i am an expensice hooker...I mean developer) and finish everything as fast as possible to let me lazy around the house. So for example, if something takes 10 hours I will do it i 5 or less and charge all 10 hours, or I would charge per build(custom login and registration that kind of deal) and yeah. Pretty basic.
Good shit man!1 -
Many years ago, when I moved from a semi-experienced developer to an absolute beginner project manager at another company, my very first project was an absolute clusterfuck.
The customer basically wanted to scrape signups to their EventBrite events into their CRM system. The fuckery began before the project even started, when I was told my management that we HAD to use BizTalk. It didn't matter that we had zero experience with BizTalk, or that using BizTalk for this particular project was like using a stealth bomber to go down to the shops for a bottle of tequila (that's one for fans of Last Man on Earth). It's designed to be used by an experienced team of developers, not a small inexperienced 1-person dev team I had. The reason was for bullshit political reasons which I wasn't really made clear on (I suspect that our sales team sold it to them for a bazillion pounds, and they weren't using it for anything, so we had to justify us selling it to them by doing SOMETHING with it). And because this was literally my first project, I was young and not confident at all, and I wanted to be the guy who just got shit done, I didn't argue.
Inevitably, the project was a turd. It went waaay over budget and time, and didn't work very well. I remember one morning on my way to work seriously considering ploughing my car into a ditch, so that I had a good excuse not to go into work and face that bullshit project.
The good thing is that I learned a lot from that. I decided that kind of fuckery was never going to happen again.
A few months later I had an initial meeting with a potential customer (who I was told would be a great customer to have for bullshit political reasons) - I forget the details but they essentially wanted to build a platform for academic researchers to store data, process it using data processing plugins which they could buy, and commersialise it somehow. There were so many reasons why this was a terrible idea, but when they said that they were dead set on using SharePoint (SharePoint!!!) as the base of the platform, I remembered my first project and what happened.
I politely explained my technical and business concerns over the idea, and reasons why SharePoint was not a good fit (with diagrams and everything), suggested a completely different technology stack, and scheduled another meeting so they could absorb what I had said and revisit. I went to my sales and head of development and basically told them to run. Run fast, and run far, because it won't work, these guys are having some kind of fever dream, it's a clusterfuck in the making, and for some reason they won't consider not using SP.
I never heard from them again, so I assume we dropped them as a potential client. It felt amazing. I think that was the single best thing I did for that company.
Moral of the story: when technology decisions are made which you know are wrong, don't be afraid to stand up and explain why.
3 -
Back when I was still in school for comp sci we had an advanced software engineering and design class with c++. At this time, everyone was expected to be proficient enough with cpp to go ahead and properly work with whatever the instructor would throw at us. And pretty much everyone was since past classes included a lot of c++ development. Of course, efficient at least related to academic studies rather than actual real world development.
Our teacher would mix in a lot pf phyisics and mathematics into what we were doing, something that I greatly enjoyed, while at the same time putting real world value concerning cpp best practices to avoid common pitfalls in the development of said language. Since most bugs seemed to be memory based he would be particularly strict about that.
One classmate, good friend and an actual proper developer now a days would ALWAYS forget to free his resources...ALWAYS for whatever fucking reason he would just ignore that shit, regardless of how much the instructor would make a point on it.
At one point during class on a virtual lecture the dude literally addressed a couple of students but when he got to my boy in particular he said: "you are the reason why people are praying to Mozilla and Hoare to release Rust as fast as possible into a suitable alternative to high performant code in C++, WHY won't you pay attention to how you deal with memory management?"
And it stuck with me. I merely a recreational cpp dev, most of my profesional work is done on web development, so I cannot attest to all the additional unsafe code that people encounter in the wild when dealing with cpp on a professional level.
But in terms of them common criticisms of C and C++ for which memory is so important to work with, wouldn't you guys say that it comes more from the side of people just not knowing what they are doing rather than a fault on the language itself?
I see the merits and beauty of Rust, I truly do, it is a fantastic language, with a standardized build system and a lot of good design put into it. But I can't really fathom it being the cpp killer, if anything, the real cpp killers are bad devs that just don't know what they are doing or miss shit.
What do y'all ninjas think?8 -
We were a small startup with only 5-6 developers. I had to design the UI and develop most of the Android frontend, It was quite an easy and fun job for me because I don't get to see people rant about the design that needed to be implemented so, usually I design something that can be easily implemented.
We got 2 projects with a tight deadline and I took care of both project's design part and after completing the design I took the entire frontend of one project and rest of em started working with the other one. Usually we were a strong team and was able to deliver things real quick because we were expert in our intrested fields, I had a fast start in my project where the other project lagged a lot because of the desifn which was hard to implement by them, and the frontend was bo where near to get completed by the deadline and I couldn't help them out because it was all messed up shit handling both projects together.
Finally we were in a situation where none of our project are ready and the deadline was about to hit within a week, so we halted the other project and asked them to join me to complete the project am Working on, I had built most of the Android part and these fellows had a hard time figuring out stuff I made up (yeah, documentation was shit while you go agile), and finally things messed up and I had to work 2 continuous day and night without any sleep just to get the app ready 10 minutes before the official proto presentation.
The best part is I couldn't even get up from my chair and had a headache, fainted instantly when I took a few steps, but the product launch went good.
We fucked uo the code and both the projects just because we weren't available for each other considering the size of the team. Anyway we completed the project but It was a huge failure for us being first time to manage a startup.
Learned a lot of lessons,
Always make a team with people who are good at each of the aspect of development and never divide it to get shit done faster. -
This always gets me:
Developers complaining that their 4 year old / cheap ass computer is slow.
Get. A. New. One.
It's not that hard.
Here, let me do one for you:
https://computeruniverse.net/en/...
I just went to a site that delivers across Europe, and selected a cheap laptop with a decent CPU and SSD. Short on RAM, sure, and without a Windows License. But you can buy RAM for an additional 50$, and that brings you to a total of 550€, delivery included. And it will WORK. And it will be fast.
It's too expensive?
No, not exactly. Wherever you are in the world, if you can code decently, good enough to have the right to complain about development tools, you are eligible to at least 10$ per hour income as a freelancer across the globe. I've had such opportunities offered to me by many organizations, especially non-profit ones that need cheap employees. I actually was offered more but let's stick to 10$ per hour.
So that's 1600$ per month. Enough to buy 3 such laptops. Oh, taxes, I forgot. So you get 2 laptops. Wait! You need food and everything else. Well if you're in a country where that offer actually makes sense, then it's likely that you can live off of 400$ per month quite well. Maybe 800$ if you need to pay rent.
So that's roughly 1 month of work for a laptop that will make you not waste time on waiting for stuff.
Sweet! 1 Month! What does it get me?
Well assuming that you have no laptop, it gets you A JOB that pays you 1600$ per month.
But if you DO have a laptop, you can sell it for cheap, and benefit from the following:
1. Boot-up time from 30-60 seconds to 10 seconds.
2. Installing software - from 1 minute to 10 seconds.
3. Opening a browser - from 10 seconds to 1 second.
4. Opening an advanced text editor (Atom, VS.Code) - from 10 seconds to 1 second.
5. Searching for a file on your entire hard drive - from 1 hour to 2 minutes.
....
You get the point. Waiting is reduced by several times.
So how much do you really wait when coding?
Well are you compiling? Are you opening a new project and the IDE needs to re-index the files? Are you opening programs like a terminal emulator, browser and such? Are you using virtual machines for dev environments?
Well all of these processes become several times faster. Depending on how often you do it, you'll be saving yourself from 1 hour per day to upto 4 hours per day (my case, where a HDD would be just out of the question).
How much is that time worth? At least 10$ per day. If you're working for 20 days per month, 240 days per year, that's a total of 2400$. And for the life time of that crappy laptop of 2 years, that's 4800$ saved. And that's with hugely conservative numbers. Nobody pays 10$ per hour any more, except if you've just started in the industry. I know because I've been there.
Please, for all that's sacred to you, justify right here, right now, HOW THE FUCK can you not afford to get that 8GB of RAM, that cheap ass SSD for 100$, or even a brand new laptop (hey! it's even portable and has FHD graphics on it!) for 550$.
That's why every time I hear someone who is a professional developer complain that they don't have money for a decent machine, I have to ask: why the fuck are you wasting yours and everyone else's time?!10 -
The more I'm on here the more I remember all the shit I have had to deal with in the past.
Anyway, lets rant! I just moved cities after college to be closer to my family, I didnt have any work lined up at that stage but started job hunting the moment I was settled in, I did some freelance for smaller companies to stay afloat.
Eventually I got a job at this agency startup where "SEO" was there main focus, still very inexperienced they put me on frontend and data capturing but will teach me how to code using their systems in due time. At this stage I was getting paid minimum wage, but I was doing minimum work and it wasnt that bad.
A new investor bought 49% of the company and immediately moved into the office space to focus more on marketing (He was one of those scaly marketing guys that will sell you babies if he could get his hands on enough to make a profit).
This is where everything starts going to shit. He hires a bunch of "SEO Gurus", fills up the small office with people like sardines squished together. Development was still our main money maker at this stage, so there where 3 new more senior developers at this stage and I started learning a lot really fast.
Here are some of the issues we had to deal with:
1. Incentives - Great more money, haha! No, No, you where 5 minutes late so you only get half of the promised amount.
2. For every minute you are late we will deduct it from you paycheck (Did I mention I was getting paid minimum wage).
3. If you take a smoke break we will dock it from your pay.
4. Free gym membership to the gym downstairs, but you can only go once a week during your lunch.
5. No pay raises if you cant prove your worth on paper.
He on purposely made up shitty rules and regulations to keep us down and make as much profit as he could.
Here are some shitty stuff he has done:
1. We arent getting a 13th check this year because the company didnt make a big profit - while standing next to his brand new BMW.
2. Made changes over FTP on clients work because we where too slow to get to it, than blames me for it because its broken the next day and wants to give me a written warning for not resolving the issue Immediately. They went as far as wanting to fire me for this, gave me 1 day notice for meeting and that I can bring a lawyer to represent me (1 day notice is illegal, you need 5 days where I am from), so I brought a lawyer since my mom was a lawyer. They freaked the fuck out and started harassing me about this a week later.
3. Would have meetings all the time about how much money the company is making, but wont be raising our pay since no one has proven they are worth it yet.
4. Would full on yell at employees infront of the entire office if they accidentally made an mistake on a clients project.
One one occasion I took a week off for holiday, my coworker contacted me to ask a question and I answered that I will handle it when I am back the following week. Withing 2 hours my other boss phones me in a rage, "he is coming to fetch the company laptop from my house in 5 minutes, he will let me know when he arrives. Gives me no time to talk at all and hangs up - I have figured out what has happened by now so when he showed up he has this long speech about abandonment, and trust and loyalty to the company. So I pass him my laptop once he shut up and said: "You do know I am on holiday leave which you approved, right?", he goes even more silent and passes me back my laptop without saying anything, and drives off.
While the above was happening Douche manager back at the office has a rage as well and calls the whole office (25 people) to a meeting talking about how I abandoned the company and how disgraceful that is.
Those are the shitty experiences I can remember, there where many more like this. All of the above eventually led to me going into a deep depression and having panic attacks weekly, from being overworked or scared to step out of line. Its also the reason I almost stopped coding forever at that stage. I worked there for 2.5 years with the abuse.
I left 2 weeks after the last shit show, I am ok now and have my anxiety and depression well under control if not almost gone completely.
Ran into Douche Manager a few months ago after 9 years, the company got bought out and the first person they fired was him. LOL! He now has his own agency and is looking for Developers (They are hard to find he says), little does he know I spread his name far and wide to all and every Dev I knew and didnt know to avoid working for him at all costs. Seems like word of mouth still works in this digital age.
Thanks for reading this far!5 -
Hello guys im observing since some time your rants.
Here are people which are quite experienced.
I want to start as Freelancer in Germany, mostly for Web development.
All of my Customers are looking for a neat looking, responsive and fast Website.
What should I use and what Templates/framework I could take as a blueprint for the future websites.
Any suggest are welcome!8 -
The Project Management Triangle "fast-cheap-good (pick two, you can't have all three)" is something I've never agreed with.
How would you promise to build something good & cheap?
Doing it slowly will not really make it cheaper. The cost is usually development hours. If it takes 40 hours to make a good product - doing it 2 hours per day isn't going to make it cheaper.13 -
TL;DR
Got Salesforce customised by an external company, took over the code and wanted to cry.
So my company decided to get a new crm for sales with contract generation and a whole lot of fluff. Specs included an easy to implement API to connect to our in-house software and an easy to adjust contract Wizard.
After month of checking various companies the CEO finally settled on...
Drumroll
The cheapest German based company.
Turns out the only part that is based in Germany is the sales department, development is based in Poland which made for interesting times during implementation because of the language barrier that comes with non native english speakers.
We as in our development department for told that we wouldn't need to worry about the solution because it would all be developed and maintained by the new company. As we are fairly small that was more then welcome.
Fast forward to integration day. No docs for the API available, contract Wizard is hardcoded, bunch of errors and inconsistencies. Get tickets for them.
Ok we can deal with this. Just tell the ticket writer he needs to address the problems with the external. Yep, doesn't work. External fixes bugs and introduces then elsewhere.
Fml. Ok I'll take a look into the code. Ugh, Java, I hate that shit but at least I don't need to worry about all the fluff, just the code, so it's ok.
No repository present, code is developed in the Dev environment and pushed to prod. Ugly but works. Code comes with a lot of functions but only one real class called "CommonUtilities" ... even the web API is defined in there. Meanwhile my colleague throws out the need for the API because we will just directly tie to SOQL. I'll let's check what's going on here, nice you reused Lead/Account/Contact for the branch offices of companies as well...
Is not like Salesforce has a bunch of logic tied to these objects...
Nice the required implementation of an automatic holiday import is not even there, just a custom object populated with this year's data...
Tell CEO how badly all of this was handled. Nice note this dumpster fire is our new in-house project because CEO cancelled the contract with the external.
Ok we can deal with this, let's set up a repo, define the CI/CD and get the extensions for vscode. Nice now this all makes sense. Fix all bugs and reimplement the contract Wizard using custom objects that sales can change so the contract is actually easily customizable by a non dev. Implement branches as their own object to avoid opportunities, triggers and the likes to be executed for them.
Took a whole day. Why did these 2000 lines of code that was shipped to us take 3 month to implement?
Lesson learned: never trust an external to just do a good job.
New rule implemented by company to always have a Dev check in regular intervals on projects handled by externals for standards and overall logic
10k down the drain for what amounted to 2 weeks tops (one dev) if we had handled the implementation of Salesforce and all the requirements in-house6 -
Product owner and scrum master prioritized a not important user story. We are just new to the assigned team without proper turn over, KT, vague user story(one sentence) and no time to prepare our local environments. Then after sprint 1 the client wants a demo by next month but the PO and SM had prioritized the wrong user story so now they are pressuring the developers on finishing fast the other correct important user story. They mismanaged it and now they say the development was slow thus blaming us?! WTF. We hit the deadline of the first user story with unpaid overtimes.
The other PO was always asking us on how to fast track the development lol.
I'll tell them all their faults in the next meeting. As usual we are just high paid corporate slaves with golden hand cuffs trying to escape the rat race.5 -
I've been offline from devrant for a while now but damn, I need to vent this shit
One of my colleagues can't describe tickets well enough, so I often have to speak to my colleague about it what he/she ments with their description (usually the ticket description is one line… that's all)
But yesterday the ticket was quite ok, I got were he/she was going for
Conveniently my colleague walked by at the end of yesterday and asked me how it was going
I responded quite energetic 'quite well, ticket is almost done'
And when I showed my colleague the result he/she said, well I got some feedback this morning, and we need to move X to Y with Z data
But you don't get the full story, this project exists of a very old abandoned framework (2013). Hacked together to work for more than one customer (but still copied over to run standalone) with the last year of development being focused on fast results (no time given to workout bugs or refactoring for cleaner/readable code)
So now I have to (on a feature that already took me 3 days to build) remove roughly 25% of the code and hacks, and hack a solution together..
This shit is demotivating as fuck...1 -
Rant against a new religion: the Agile Religion, started by the Agile Manifesto: https://agilemanifesto.org
This manifesto is as ambiguous and open to interpretation as any religious text. You might as well get advice from a psychic. If you succeed, you'll start believing in them more. If you don't, then they'll say you misinterpreted them. The whole manifesto just re-states the obvious with grandiloquent words.
For example: "Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale." What does this say REALLY? To me, it just says "deliver software, try to be fast." Great, thanks for re-writing my job description. Of course, some features take "a couple of weeks", while others "a couple of months". Again, thanks for re-stating the obvious.
"Value *working software* over _comprehensive documentation_"
Result => PHP
"Welcome changing requirements, even late in development."
I'm okay with this one as long as the managers also `welcome the devs changing deadlines, even the night before the release date`. We're not slaves; we're more like architects. If you change the plans for the building, we're gonna have to demolish part of what we've already built and re-construct. I'm not gonna spring just because you change your mind like a girl changes clothes.
"Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project."
Daily? Fine. ONCE a day, sure. But this doesn't give you the right to breathe down my neck or break my concentration by calling me every couple of mintues.
"The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation."
- Not if you could've summed up that meeting in an email.
- Whereas that might be true for clarity, write that down.
"Working software is the primary measure of progress."
... is how you get a tech debt the size of the US's.
"The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely."
Have you heard of vacations?
"Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility."
So you're telling us "do good". Again, thank you for re-writing my job description.
It's just a bunch of fancy babble, more suitable in poetry than in the dev world. It doesn't provide any scientific evidence for any of its supposed suggestions, so I just won't use it3 -
Just my luck that I get the best wk76 story ever on wk77. Either way:
So some of you may know that the current project I am on has some shared code components with one of the other projects in the product line. And we have some differences in our processes. This leads to a lot of fun.
So, I was working on converting one of our shared components into a more modern language. It would save us time, money, and sanity by allowing us to more easily maintain our product. Sounds like a win-win right? That's what I thought. Until I had a meeting with the other team. THEN THE QUESTIONS ROLLED IN. Well who is going to integrate our product with yours? (You?) Are you changing the interface? (Not really.) Are you going to generate a design document? (Absolutely not especially since the interface isn't changing for the most part.) Well you are changing the type of one parameter in one method from an undocumented unmanaged type to a well documented managed type that we control. Shouldn't you generate a document to document that change? (Again absolutely not.)
So first they basically browbeat my lead into putting me in charge of their integration effort. Its fine though, as they gave me an account to charge. However, when I was finally able to get a machine with their build environment on it (at least two months later), they then told me that that account was closing and I had to wait until next quarter. So fuck me right. And because of their process I would break them if I were to check my changes in.
So fast forward to today. They are translating some shared components for the same reason that we are. However, they are changing code that while shared is technically "ours" and that will DEFINITELY break us if they do this work since this is the code that controls our algorithms. And while we have a fault tolerant process, or at least more fault tolerant than the other group's, we are currently doing a huge amount of development in the part they want to change. And when we ask them "who is going to do this work to integrate our product with your changes?" they stare at us slack jawed. Like "um, you right? it doesn't affect us." Like MOTHERFUCKERS!!! YOU LITERALLY JUST FOIST ALL THIS WORK ON US TO INTEGRATE WITH YOU BECAUSE YOU DIDN'T HAVE THE PEOPLE TO SUPPORT IT!!! BUT YOU CAN PAY THIS GUY FOR SIX MONTHS TO DO ALL THIS WORK THAT WILL BREAK US BUT CAN'T SPARE HIM TO INTEGRATE WITH US!?!?!? EVEN IF WE'RE PAYING HIM AND NOT YOU!?!?!
I will let you know how this goes when we have the discussion. I am drinking right now because it it easier and better for my emotional and physical health than bum fights. -
How are Coding Bootcamps and what are they like?
A little background:
I’ve been going to a University (have a year left for a CS degree) and I am so EXTREMELY frustrated. I thought I would get an education but it’s so underwhelming. 95% of it doesn’t involve programming and the classes that do are so elementary that I know more than the professors. By the end of my web design course we had been taught to center text, insert images, insert links, and how to use tables with a single day on CSS using colors.
The OOP courses are all the same, learn variables, types, conditionals, loops, classes, functions, and so forth. Python, C++, and Java. I taught all this to myself when I was 15, I’m 29 now.
I’ve recently gotten extremely interested into full stack web development. .NET Core, React, Typescript. I’m also working with Electron. I’m basically 100% self taught and spend almost every waking moment trying to learn more and apply it.
There’s only one person at my school who has the same passion as me and he’s the president at the coding club but is going into machine learning and big data (I’m the Secretary) and I just wish I could interact with more people who have the same passion. I would love to be challenged. I feel as if I spend more time trying to learn and diagnose problems then applying my knowledge because web development is so complicated when it comes to connecting everything together and I’m still relatively new to it (started like 4 months ago). I’m an extremely fast learner and extremely dedicated so I’m not worried about that being an issue.
I just really want to be a part of a community where I have people who can answer my questions and I don’t have to spend hours or days on google finding a solution to integrating Webpack or using typescript with react, and more. I want to feel challenged.
Can I get this from a boot camp? I recently listened to a podcast from Syntax and it really excited me but I don’t want to be let down again. Either way I’m finishing my degree to get that bullshit $60000 piece of paper but I wouldn’t mind taking a couple months off for something like this if it’s worth it.
I live in CO so if you have any Bootcamps in CO that you recommend, I’d love to hear it and take a trip to check it out in person.
Thanks a bunch!10 -
After creating my own PHP MVC framework with Twig as templating engine, everything is now so simple and so fast, I juat cant belive how much I understand now. The development is just so smooth, you know exactly what to do all the time... And for my simple project, it does not even hurt that much to use PHP (and its even strictly typed 7.2, so not that bad). I think that I am in love. ❤6
-
It's over.
I've been working on you for months, and thinking about you for near a year.
I built you with a shitty language first and some crappy ideas. I obviously got bad results, but I didn't lose courage and I continued you.
Got near the obsession to improve you. Every time. Switched to a fast but hard language. Got into my first low-level fuss. All for you.
Now I reached the end with no more improvements and tweaks I could imagine, I can tell that:
I had a lot of expectations from you.
But turns out you were nothing more than a nasty brain fart pretending to be a good idea.
The core of the concept was rotten. Blinded by my lust for success (perhaps cupidity ?) I didn't see you just couldn't work.
I'm utterly disgusted, of course. Who wouldn't, after working so hard on something that looks right but is completely useless ?
But even though this was all in vain, you taught me some great lessons down the road.
Efficiency matters over facility.
Get sure you're using the right tools, and stay open for changes of such.
But some others were harsher, though just as important.
There's times you just have to admit defeat.
Putting a lot of efforts into something doesn't always bring a reward.
If after a long time you can't get the thing right, then stop. Your time is precious. Don't waste your time or time will waste you (Thanks Muse, I love this sentence).
And the most important: next time I got some "grand" idea that is not about improving some random software, I'll bang my head to my desk enough times to forget about it.
So now the time has come.
Goodbye, project "hpym". You put me in grief, but I know I matured a lot in my concepts of development because of you.
Now take place into the project graveyard among the other clunky half-assed shit I got rid off.6 -
This is gonna be a long post, and inevitably DR will mutilate my line breaks, so bear with me.
Also I cut out a bunch because the length was overlimit, so I'll post the second half later.
I'm annoyed because it appears the current stablediffusion trend has thrown the baby out with the bath water. I'll explain that in a moment.
As you all know I like to make extraordinary claims with little proof, sometimes
for shits and giggles, and sometimes because I'm just delusional apparently.
One of my legit 'claims to fame' is, on the theoretical level, I predicted
most of the developments in AI over the last 10+ years, down to key insights.
I've never had the math background for it, but I understood the ideas I
was working with at a conceptual level. Part of this flowed from powering
through literal (god I hate that word) hundreds of research papers a year, because I'm an obsessive like that. And I had to power through them, because
a lot of the technical low-level details were beyond my reach, but architecturally
I started to see a lot of patterns, and begin to grasp the general thrust
of where research and development *needed* to go.
In any case, I'm looking at stablediffusion and what occurs to me is that we've almost entirely thrown out GANs. As some or most of you may know, a GAN is
where networks compete, one to generate outputs that look real, another
to discern which is real, and by the process of competition, improve the ability
to generate a convincing fake, and to discern one. Imagine a self-sharpening knife and you get the idea.
Well, when we went to the diffusion method, upscaling noise (essentially a form of controlled pareidolia using autoencoders over seq2seq models) we threw out
GANs.
We also threw out online learning. The models only grow on the backend.
This doesn't help anyone but those corporations that have massive funding
to create and train models. They get to decide how the models 'think', what their
biases are, and what topics or subjects they cover. This is no good long run,
but thats more of an ideological argument. Thats not the real problem.
The problem is they've once again gimped the research, chosen a suboptimal
trap for the direction of development.
What interested me early on in the lottery ticket theory was the implications.
The lottery ticket theory says that, part of the reason *some* RANDOM initializations of a network train/predict better than others, is essentially
down to a small pool of subgraphs that happened, by pure luck, to chance on
initialization that just so happened to be the right 'lottery numbers' as it were, for training quickly.
The first implication of this, is that the bigger a network therefore, the greater the chance of these lucky subgraphs occurring. Whether the density grows
faster than the density of the 'unlucky' or average subgraphs, is another matter.
From this though, they realized what they could do was search out these subgraphs, and prune many of the worst or average performing neighbor graphs, without meaningful loss in model performance. Essentially they could *shrink down* things like chatGPT and BERT.
The second implication was more sublte and overlooked, and still is.
The existence of lucky subnetworks might suggest nothing additional--In which case the implication is that *any* subnet could *technically*, by transfer learning, be 'lucky' and train fast or be particularly good for some unknown task.
INSTEAD however, what has happened is we haven't really seen that. What this means is actually pretty startling. It has two possible implications, either of which will have significant outcomes on the research sooner or later:
1. there is an 'island' of network size, beyond what we've currently achieved,
where networks that are currently state of the3 art at some things, rapidly converge to state-of-the-art *generalists* in nearly *all* task, regardless of input. What this would look like at first, is a gradual drop off in gains of the current approach, characterized as a potential new "ai winter", or a "limit to the current approach", which wouldn't actually be the limit, but a saddle point in its utility across domains and its intelligence (for some measure and definition of 'intelligence').4 -
!rant
So this has probably been asked loads of times but I've never seen it. When working on solo projects for yourself do you still use source control like git or mercurial?
I usually don't because when I do personal projects its usually filthy and fast development to prototype quickly.
However, this current project I'm working on I am using git and I'm finding that slowing myself down just to follow good practice is actually improving my code quality and my understanding of my own project.14 -
Teacher asks me to join him for a web app development.
First stages, I have to dig deep into a framework I don't know (He doesn't know it too, and I know that learning is the only way to step through)
Month goes by, began developing some mock-ups, he says he didn't like it, sends me a website made in fucking Wix. Seriously?
Fast forward another month, tonight I'm coding some stuff, he stills doesn't know how to fucking use Yii. fml4 -
Why is it that the tech Youtubers of this world (and tech reviewers in general) tend to completely skip development as a use case, and instead (if they do ever move off gaming) focus on things like Rendering & Modelling / CAD work? I'm sure there's *way* more devs in the world than CAD guys, surely?!
And if they *do* give it the light of day, it's always a quick benchmark based on "Firefox compile time", "Linux kernel compile time" or similar. Dude, it's 2020. Much as some would like to believe otherwise, most guys stopped compiling swathes of heavy C & C++ as part of their normal workflow over a decade ago.
Real-world tests I want to know about are things like docker performance, common IDE startup performance, compile performance of different sized applications on a bunch of langs like Kotlin, C#, Java, Clojure - or node.js performance, Tensorflow performance on NVidia's vs AMDs latest GPUs, etc. I care about how many IntelliJ instances & VMs I can have open way more than how many Chrome tabs I can forget to close.
But noooo - forget that, here's how fast Blender can render a BMW! 😬5 -
What do you think about my language choice set for the future (knowing I want to work as a software and app developer) ? Anything to add / remove ?
- C++: Fast and well-documented, so I think it's a standard even in the next decades to come
- Java: Although I think that this language will more likely die in the next decade, I'll maybe keep this language because some dinosaurs enterprises still rely on it. Ah and mainly because it's still widely used in Android apps programming. For now.
Talking about Android, does learning Kotlin worth it ?
- Python: Will mainly use it for automation and prototyping, but nothing more, as it seems not to be widely use in the software development field (or it is ?). I'll also keep it for hobbies, however.
- Rust: This language seems to be a rising star in the industry since it is very clean, classic, as fast as C / C++ while introducing more safety. However I'll wait a bit for this one since it requires more complicated and abstract knowledge I do not have yet.
- Javascript (or more particularly JSX): Hurts to say I'll keep it, even more than Java. I'd let it in the web development hell I won't step in if it was not used in webapps / cross-platform mobile applications. And since this kind of stuff looks trendy, I don't think I can avoid it. Plus, I liked working with React Native. Sorry.
- C#: Seems to be a must when working on Windows software interfaces, so guess I'll have to learn this one. Will do so gladly, it looks better than Java17 -
So good to see flash finally be put to pastor. Am I sad no flash sucked from a developer standpoint but even more from a business standpoint! Why? Here’s why!
....Yes it was fast in the sense of quickly getting content out and functioning BUT this ment you are at the mercy of Adobe / Macromedia (depending on the timeframe) for support AND mercy of the company whom create the browsers for support.
Meaning your product is fully reliant on others for existence and can easily not exist if one of two other beings choose.
For developers shame on you for accepting this you should never have supported this.. if you did it was just for a job you are suppose to be experts in your field and when management came to you for guidence you allowed this technology to be used rather than saying no this isn’t good! It’s too risky...
Fuck... how many people choose a career path that made them flash only developers.. well guess what becuase you niched yourself now your out of a job... rethinking now?
CAN ANY OF YOU TELL ME WHAT OTHER WIDLY USED TECHNOLOGY IS RELIANT ON A SEPARATE ENTITY?!
geee it would be a shame if one day that technology was phased out or no longer supported and then a date was picked and boom shutdown... geee that would suck...
I remember for years before it was announced it would be ending ... I said development around flash should be avoided at all costs because of it’s reliance on someone else for your product to function and exist...
Let this be a foreshadowing/ warning... learning experience/ AMAGE.. to those who use similarly situated technologies...
Developers you were warned.
Businesses you were warned.15 -
Windows 10 updating, decides it would be cool to install gigabytes of sdk, edge, and other bloatware without asking first, on a metered connection i use for work.
Guys, between you there and those fanboy demons in cupertino, one wants to just shut it all off and return to monke.
Sidenote this, because all of this nonsense started on that crap called Windows 8, which was in the end caused to copy that Unholy crap (sold as gold) that is Apple's range of products. It's a company that sells designs nowadays, like Prada, to say, Jobs era is long gone. Everything related to Apple, Mac, Safari, Development, Gaming, UI/UX, productivity and whatever is a
f***ing Nightmare.
We alreay have a global plague, and Apple exists, we dont' need you too making another catastrophe.
All this said,
Use your goddamn trillions to create your own customizable environment that is stable, fast, and WITHOUT BULLSHIT.
I don't give a mindflying F**k of the blurs, i know how to place them with a shell, if i need those. I want control, the shit i decide is going to happen, to happen fast.
This is of Critical importance, because it defines my productivity. And considering we're all sealed indoors since 2019, i want to get away from my pc asap and live my life, instead of spending time(and money, in this moment of emergency) fixing your F**kfests, or else seeing my pc slowing down to death.
First: IF i want stuff on my pc, I know how to install something, thank you.
Second: You can take it, all your Useless - Bugged as Hell - Nonsensical - and of no practical use Bloatware, and shove it deep in your Backdoor.
I'll debloat my pc with batches again, and there's nothing you can do to stop me doing that at every update you force me into.
So please, stop wasting my time, and yours.4 -
[linux distro stuff]
Hey guys!
Im considerig switching to linux because:
My macbook does not support mojave and the new ones are expensive af.
Windows 10 is bloated and not a great user experience(removing stuff from the control panel and adding it to the very stripped down settings app, privacy etc..).
I love open source software
However i did not used linux for a long time, back then i used ubuntu and SUSE.
My considerations:
Debian - because .deb on them haters
OpenSUSE - because i used it in the past and it seemed very stable and fast
Arch - i heard from a lot of sources that it’s “da best”
My use case is game development and 3D modeling. I use gimp, blender vscode and unity (the game engine) at work i sometimes use autodesk stuff (motionbuilder, 3ds max) because of fbx.
For audio stuff i use audacity
So overall i’m looking for a distro that is fast, lightweight, i can develop on it (mostly 3D stuff) and occasionally play some games
Anyone has experience with the mentioned distros? What distro would you use for this?7 -
Everytime i buy any electronics , my brother would suggest me to buy latest ones with the newest configuration . His logic was " If you buy a not-so new tech now.. It will outdate fast and you will end up with an outdated one soon.. So the extra 10K is worth considering that " .
Considering the development trend i personally think it is useless to invest in electronics unless necessary . Everytime i buy an electronic product , within 2 or 3 months i find the same good at almost 75% of the price.. So with tech prices falling like this.. i think it is worth saving that money instead of the cutting edge tech which i wont need for another 2 years .
Thoughts ?
(The cousin brother i mentioned does this everytime he buys a phone and ends up changing the phone 4 times faster than me.. and the use case is similar to mine if not worse..)1 -
In my early days of web development I was on the lookout for a good PHP IDE and stumbled upon Komodo IDE. Never in my life have I asked for a refund so fast. Crashed at the most random times, such as when opening files and folders. Even accessing the settings could cause it to crash. Besides that I found it slow af.3
-
Just started an android O development course on Udemy and decided to use my Arch installation (surprisingly Linux was the easiest one to set up) even though the course said Mac or windows only..
But holy fuck does android studio fly on Linux, it's so fast compared to being run on the same machine under windows...3 -
After learning a bit about alife I was able to write
another one. It took some false starts
to understand the problem, but afterward I was able to refactor the problem into a sort of alife that measured and carefully tweaked various variables in the simulator, as the algorithm
explored the paramater space. After a few hours of letting the thing run, it successfully returned a remainder of zero on 41.4% of semiprimes tested.
This is the bad boy right here:
tracks[14]
[15, 2731, 52, 144, 41.4]
As they say, "he ain't there yet, but he got the spirit."
A 'track' here is just a collection of critical values and a fitness score that was found given a few million runs. These variables are used as input to a factoring algorithm, attempting to factor
any number you give it. These parameters tune or configure the algorithm to try slightly different things. After some trial runs, the results are stored in the last entry in the list, and the whole process is repeated with slightly different numbers, ones that have been modified
and mutated so we can explore the space of possible parameters.
Naturally this is a bit of a hodgepodge, but the critical thing is that for each configuration of numbers representing a track (and its results), I chose the lowest fitness of three runs.
Meaning hypothetically theres room for improvement with a tweak of the core algorithm, or even modifications or mutations to the
track variables. I have no clue if this scales up to very large semiprime products, so that would be one of the next steps to test.
Fitness also doesn't account for return speed. Some of these may have a lower overall fitness, but might in fact have a lower basis
(the value of 'i' that needs to be found in order for the algorithm to return rem%a == 0) for correctly factoring a semiprime.
The key thing here is that because all the entries generated here are dependent on in an outer loop that specifies [i] must never be greater than a/4 (for whatever the lowest factor generated in this run is), we can potentially push down the value of i further with some modification.
The entire exercise took 2.1735 billion iterations (3-4 hours, wasn't paying attention) to find this particular configuration of variables for the current algorithm, but as before, I suspect I can probably push the fitness value (percentage of semiprimes covered) higher, either with a few
additional parameters, or a modification of the algorithm itself (with a necessary rerun to find another track of equivalent or greater fitness).
I'm starting to bump up to the limit of my resources, I keep hitting the ceiling in my RAD-style write->test->repeat development loop.
I'm primarily using the limited number of identities I know, my gut intuition, combine with looking at the numbers themselves, to deduce relationships as I improve these and other algorithms, instead of relying strictly on memorizing identities like most mathematicians do.
I'm thinking if I want to keep that rapid write->eval loop I'm gonna have to upgrade, or go to a server environment to keep things snappy.
I did find that "jiggling" the parameters after each trial helped to explore the parameter
space better, so I wrote some methods to do just that. But what I wouldn't mind doing
is taking this a bit of a step further, and writing some code to optimize the variables
of the jiggle method itself, by automating the observation of real-time track fitness,
and discarding those changes that lead to the system tending to find tracks with lower fitness.
I'd also like to break up the entire regime into a training vs test set, but for now
the results are pretty promising.
I knew if I kept researching I'd likely find extensions like this. Of course tested on
billions of semiprimes, instead of simply millions, or tested on very large semiprimes, the
effect might disappear, though the more i've tested, and the larger the numbers I've given it,
the more the effect has become prevalent.
Hitko suggested in the earlier thread, based on a simplification, that the original algorithm
was a tautology, but something told me for a change that I got one correct. Without that initial challenge I might have chalked this up to another false start instead of pushing through and making further breakthroughs.
I'd also like to thank all those who followed along, helped, or cheered on the madness:
In no particular order ,demolishun, scor, root, iiii, karlisk, netikras, fast-nop, hazarth, chonky-quiche, Midnight-shcode, nanobot, c0d4, jilano, kescherrant, electrineer, nomad,
vintprox, sariel, lensflare, jeeper.
The original write up for the ideas behind the concept can be found at:
https://devrant.com/rants/7650612/...
If I left your name out, you better speak up, theres only so many invitations to the orgy.
Firecode already says we're past max capacity!5 -
Finally.... After 3.5 months of serious job searching... I start a new job on Monday.
Even a few months ago , finding a new gig in mobile development was very fast - 9 calendar days from initial search to sitting in a new desk was my personal record. But a couple of weeks was pretty typical
What happened? Was there a huge influx of mobile devs? More H1-b visa holders? The competition seems like there are far more developers
Anyway, happy to be sitting in a new desk on Monday2 -
TL;DR: working too fast is as worse as working too slow
3 months ago the team leader left.
Sincee then, me and another dev are sharing his responsibillities.
Me and him used to do a lot of testing.
(In our team, the devs test and CR each other)
Now that he left, I often find myself sitting without anything to do - because I did all the available tasks and no one tested them or gave feedback.
Sitting with nothing to do feels aweful.
My manager sits behind me, so i cant sit on devRant or Twitter without feeling bad about it.4 -
FUCK
Anyone here who graduated in industrial sector engineering fields but managed to switch their careers towards IT/development? Considering that I do have related competences and solid foundations on 2/3 languages.
My job fucking sucks. The pay is good but I'm not doing shit since 2 weeks. Everyone works superslow because there is no shit to do and boredom kills us slowly. My family says that I just need to be assigned to a project and be patient. I don't want a super fast no free time environment, but if there are no challenges any single day what is even the point of getting up in the morning.
It's FUCKING depressing :(3 -
A colleague went on vacation, as the lead mobile engineer I had to cover his work. Switching between iOS dev and Android dev usually is fun. Integrated and deployed a dozen tickets for each platform within 12hrs.
-
First job as a web dev (promoted within my company from helpdesk!!!!). I made it explicitly clear that my php experience is rudimentary and that I was still learning and our CIO was fine with that, just said I need to fast track learning.
In my first website support meeting today they dropped all kinds of fun stuff about Wordpress development that I only know the basics on and is now my responsibility to learn, so:
How the hell do I learn php/scss/sass/docker for Wordpress really fucking fast? Lol4 -
What is the "best" framework to develop mobile apps?
I tried android studio (native java etc)
And Fuse (XML/js framework for native iOS and android)
Since android studio isn't a fast development and Fuse doesn't had a big community with support, I thought about angular and native script. Any experience? Any advice?2 -
I just started on a Laravel project for a customer. Damn I’ve got a hate/love relationship with that thing.
I fucking love how fucking fast development is it in, even for fairly complex tasks, amazing.
I fucking hate how goddamn fucking slow development is when you get an error, as that shit is near impossible to debug, and you keep getting weird exceptions that you just need to know what means. -
[Background]
Back in September I joined a startup after my first job in MNC for about 1.8 yrs as a fresher. I always wanted to learn, but the experience in that MNC was not at all fruitful. So ai decided to join a small/mid size company or a startup. To my luck, I got in this small startup in a week after my resignation as a front-end dev (always wanted to be).
It's an automation company, so you can find software, electronics, even mechanical engineer.
The team was almost a year younger than me. It was a team of around 12 people, in which 5 of them were from Business development.
The tech team was too driven and knowledgeable. Always trying new stuffs and motivating to do the same. I was highly motivated by them in my initial days, watching them working on new stuffs.
So I started with revamping their website completely in Angular 4, and did it in around a month or so, being new to Angular. Outcome was pretty satisfactory. I wanted to work on new projects, but just to get the cashflow in they started getting in WordPress projects. It was frustrating, I wanted to work more on new technologies like Angular, React, etc...but just for the survival of the company I had to work on WordPress, so to respect their urge to get going I kept working on 3-4 projects in parallel, and mind you the clients were from hell !!
Fast-forward 4 months, I am still working on few WordPress websites, and one internal GPS based project in React. And I haven't received my salary for past 3.5 months, since the company is still struggling with the issue of funding and getting money from clients. I kinda liked working there because there was lot to learn even though they are so young, but I had bills to pay too.
And I am in dilemma to leave the company or not, because I already stretched 3 months out of good will and guilt of leaving the company in high time. So i finally let the CEO know that I cannot stick for any longer. And i was done with the false promises of getting the salary "next month" everytime. All the money getting inside of company was invested heavily on the product we were building and no one was getting the salaries. Others were fine since they were founding members too.
Long story short : I finally left immediately and now working in a good company as a React dev. I hope they do well and I would love to see them grow, but please *STOP* making false promises and hold on to employees on a lie.1 -
Im having a sort of dilema. I recently started taking freelance work for web developement (and design ack) and Im uncomfortable with the state of the industry. Ill explain: Say if I bid a client for a simple 1-3 page site w contact form (a new page, not migration) My suggestion is to use djangocms, django, or just static html/css/js (ie bootstrap), which produces clean, fairly secure, and fast sites. Of course I can throw a templated unoriginal wordpress site together in a few hours 2 days latest, so I offer that option as a sidenote on the bid, charging almost 2x more. For some reason I dont understand they choose the wp shitshow. I explain all the reasons that not the way to go( which I wont list, if u dont know, u never used it. google up) but they dont care abt the details, they rather pay more for shit job. OFC I reluctantly deliver what they want, but as a result my portfolio is full of unoriginal shit Im not happy showing off. I have a few sites Ive done on the side my prefered way, but they not deployed and sit in my github for all intents n purposes unviewable to potential clients.
I want to be proud of my portfolio, and it to be a representation of what Im capable of. BUT, I gotta eat, and work is better than no work.
There are so many "wordpress designers" oversaturaring the field and it lowering the overall standard of what we are capable of. I just begining my dev journey, but if I cant have a body of work Im proud of, theres no way I can see doing this the rest of my life, and that makes me really sad. My love of developing, coding, and IT/computers in general drove me to change careers from audio engineering to web development, and the fact that this fucking mr. potatoe head of a CMS is slowly turning that love into hate really pisses me off. So Im ending this !rant looking for hope.
Your thoughts?1 -
Fuck FE development. Tweaking or adding some stuff is OK, but making the whole FE from zero is a pain for me. Vanilla JS is OK, but I need to use Angular, which I don't know how to use properly. Generally, right now I find FE as a big confusing mess... Why Angular? Because fuck React - it is even more confusing. I just can't keep all these things in my head... You want to add something? Fine, add a dependency, import, export it, import again, that shit does not work alone, so you import another shit... IDE says it's all good, look it's up and running! But you open the app and it's not even loading because of errors. Another module missed, ffs. IDE can't really save you here, sigh...
I am a BE dev, I am straight out bad at FE. I don't hate FE, but I hate that I am forced to do it and I need to do it fast, without having time for learning it.
Ughh... I feel somewhat better now :\ Now back to making there modules work...13 -
Oh the joys of working with an Enterprise customer.
Background:
Discussion about service architecture with me, development architect (ArchDev) and integration architect (ArchInt). The topic arises of needing to access int. segment systems for a public facing cloud application.
Me: so we'll just need a s2s vpn and then we can just create a route and call the services normally.
ArchDev: sounds good to me, it will take a few months to get that set up
ArchInt: we done need that, we can just use the gateway and then route all the requests through the ESB.
Me: 😕 do you mean the service gateway?
ArchInt: (drops bomb) no, we decide that all API should be implement in ESB, so ESB will handle traffic
Me: *pauses, steps up to the whiteboard, does latency math* setting aside the fact that isn't how ESB's work, that will add at least 700ms latency to each request.
ArchInt: well that is fine for enterprise, things not usually as fast in enterprise you must expect slowdown to be safe
ArchDev: *starts updating resume on the ladders
Me: 💀🔫 -
Have you ever found a infinite task? Well, I did.
So, the software that I'm working now was under responsibility of another company for development and maintenance (I'll call them X) from 2014 to last month , and the company I work for was handling only with the business part. Now we took all the development for us as well.
This software has a lot of reports , so it has a lot of templates for this reports.
When X was handling the software, they asked the client and the old project manager if they wanted the templates to have the client's products dynamic (no need to change the template when adding a new product) or hardcoded for some products they already had, they choose hardcoded because it would be faster. Butterfly effect.
Fast forward to this week, the team leader designated a task for me, It looked easy at first, just fix 2 templates, easy.
Oh boy, I was so wrong.
I fixed the first template, discovering in the process the hardcoded things, had to add the product reference in a lot of places.
So i went to the second item, a super template that they use to put together some smaller templates.
It was really weird, I couldn't find all the templates that it was supposed to use, and I didn't really know the exact problem, the only thing I knew was that it was not being generated, the reason could be the super template itself or one of the 15 smaller templates, that could happen to have sub templates.
So I called the team leader and explained to him wtf was happening, he called the senior business analyst, that called the PM, we agreed that it would be infinite because of those fucking hardcoded things, they prepared a excel sheet with this and a lot of other problems and will send this to the client, explaining that we'll need a lot of time to put this new product up and running.
Now I'm in the middle of this shit storm seeing a time of darkness in the future.
Ps: This new product was supposed to be inserted in the software since last November, when it was under X responsability, and they analyzed it and said that it would take 190 hours to be completely done, the client refused. It was the first rain drop of what would become a shit storm. -
emacs, git and a decent shell like bash with at least gnutools
emacs, because I was searching for the right editor for years
- multi-platform
- extensible
- ready to type (no fucking mode change for typing like vim)
- programming functions like auto indenting, syntax highlight, auto complete, etc.)
- multiple windows in any arrangement
Additionally
- it is completely programmable to do anything you want
- you can find a solution to most common development needs on the web
git, because
- it is usable from small personal projects to heavy duty development
- fast branching and checking out, switching between different workpaths within seconds
- basic version control offline, you only need to be online for remote consolidation
- you don't have to think much about structure from the beginning, if in doubt just commit and your work is saved, then arrange the result when you're ready
sh/bash-like shell with gnutools, because
- simple tools do their job and try not to be smarter than the user
- tools can be combined in any possible and impossible variants
- powerfull scripting (although sh-syntax is often annyoing)
- open as many shells as needed, no single-instance problem as with some GUI-tools
- extensible with gazillions of other tools
And best of all, all these tools are available on all widely used desktop OS. -
TL;DR: Computers and I go way back, but I don't know how I ended up as a dev - and am still not certain that's what I want to do for the rest of my life.
Rewind to the early 80's. My friends at the time got the Comodore 64 one after the other. I never got one. Heck, we didn't even have a color TV back then. Only a 12/14" small B&W TV. It's easy to conclude that I spent a lot of time at my friends'.
Back then it mostly was about the games. And, living in the rural countryside, the only way to aquire games was to pirate them. Pirating was big. Cassette tape swapping and floppy disk swapping was a big deal, and gamers contacted eachother via classifieds sections in newspapers and magazines. It was crazy.
Anyways. The thing about pirated games back then is that they often got a cracktro, trainer, intro or whatever you want to call them - made by the people who pirated the game. And I found them awesome. Sinus scrollers, 3D text, cool SID-tunes and whatnot. I was hooked.
My best friend and I eventually got tired of just gaming. We found Shoot'Em-Up Construction Kit, which was an easy point-and-click way to create our first little game. We looked into BASIC a bit. And we found a book at the library about C64 programming. It contained source code to create your own assembler, so we started on that. I never completed it, but my friend did.
Fast forward through some epic failure using an Amstrad CPC, an old 486 and hello mid 90's. My first Pentium, my first modem and hello Internet! I instantly fell in love with the Internet and the web. I was still in school, and had planned to enter the creative advertising business. Little did I know about the impact the web would have on the world.
I coded web pages for fun for some years. My first job was as a multimedia designer, and I eventually had to learn Lingo (Macromedia Director, anyone?) And Actionscript.
Now I haven't touched Flash for about 7 years. My experience has evolved back to pure web development. I'm not sure if that's where I will be in the future. I've learned that I certainly don't know how to do everything I want to do - but I have aquired the mindset to identify the tasks and find solutions to the problem.
I never had any affiliation with the pirate scene or the demo scene. But I still get a little tingling whenever I see one of those sinus scrollers. -
#! usr/bin/rant
Our Entreprise CMS at work (obviously):
- inconsistent UI : check (misplaced buttons, some pages are more developed than others)
- slow: check (average 6 seconds of waiting, with cache)
- loading screen as page transitions covering the whole page, making it impossible to click somewhere else if mistaken, adding +3 seconds to loading : check
- time-based session, inlined in HTML and wildly disconnects you, making you lose all changes : check
- sometimes objects are inaccessible and can't do anything about it : check
- "delete" button next to "edit", delete is bigger and I have already clicked the delete button by accident : check
- can't have local development environment, need to work with integrated editor which has no helping features: check
- first TTFB: adds +2-6 seconds to loading time
TL;DR : a pleasant, developer-friendly, frustration- and rantless CMS to work with, reliable and fast. -
Since day 0, I have been fond of computers. One of my first plush was called "DataDog" and looked like a CRT screen with dog ears around. According to my mum I was "addicted" to it.
At year 2, my dad was arranging some music on some software while I was watching him on his lap. Quick jump to the present: nowadays and since 10 years I run my own home studio with three guitars, two keyboards, one bass, three monitors, a microphone, an amp and a cabinet... coincidence? I think not!
Fast forward 5 years later (so I'm 6-7 years old), and I was playing with the legendary pinball game on Win95, as well as Flight Simulator. Then I was hogging mum's laptop to play settlers II (<3 that game), I eventually got my computer, and got into Quake III Arena being aged 10 (and had to tell my mum that game was safe for my age haha - I eventually removed the blood effects).
The Quake 3 Arena chapter is interesting: it got me into router configuration as I wanted to open a port through the router to host my own dedicated games with friends, it got me into DNS configuration (I was running a no-DNS client that allowed friends to join me through a DNS while having a dynamic IP) and eventually... to modifying .cfg files to tune my server as I wanted it. No programming here but a nice intro into :)
Then I hated the fact everybody would point their finger at me and say "geek" - I was only 13, fragile, sensitive, and I wanted everything but a bad image on me.
Meanwhile I continued on getting interested in hardware and configure my own computers, and investing myself into music production.
Then, university. "What do you want to study?" I thought of everything but IT, fleeing the image of a "geek". Turns out it was a waste of time, and at 21 yo I got into web development (well, just html and css), then learned a bit of PHP, finally got a specialized 2-year training and now here I am!
I was bound to be in IT either way since day 0, and funny fact, I've used every windows edition since Win95. -
I'm currently switching off some of applications as the company I work for is being sold.
Our latest flagship product has only been in development for the past year and was showing some real promise, but all things must come to an end.
Live fast, die young leave a good looking code base.
You will forever be remembered by the git repo in the cloud. -
So, I have to begin with saying that I was 19 and my first real job. I was assigned to ongoing project for big german web company who outsourced project for german government. I am fast learner so I quickly ended up as a only developer who works on this project, because company had another important projects. And since I studied outside of my native country and I can speak Polish and English so I was also responsible for explaining everything to customer during meetings. I worked for around 4 months on the project and was heading up to the end. 3 weeks before production deadline client wanted show the results to the german government but I was still working on the functionality. My boss decided to put the web team leader to my project around 8 hours before this presentation to speed up the development. around 30 minutes before the pitch I realised that some of the latest functionalities stopped working. I was trying to figure out what I did I asked my team leader, he said that he have refactored some parts of my code. When we found the right commit it was around 3 min to presentation and after the checkout some of the .htaccess file was broken so I fixed it quickly but Germans started the meeting a bit earlier. The website was crashed almost half of the presentation. After 5 minutes my boss come to my desk and he says that he just talked with our customer and they are so freaking mad and pissed that they will not pay us. At this point I was certain I'm fired...
Suddenly the web team leader joined the conversation protecting me that it was the fault of the project menager because he should assign someone else to this project because even though I am good it is always good to have someone more experienced to work with you and review your code.
Project manager was fired about 3 months later. I was saved 😀 -
Microsoft owed a lot of its product development to the VB language. VB6 made an acute impact in the dev world. With a RAD environment, a proper language that executes to the machine level. A good IDE etc etc.
VB.NET broke a lot of balls due to the fact that the .NET framework came to the world and C# became a special name in the .NET arsenal. for years, both languages were hand on hand. With a bunch of neckbeards hating on VB.NET and another group of neckbeards advocating for VB.NET to step in to their roots concerning the VB6 standard.
Fast forward and Microsoft is complete hating on VB.NET regarding the .net core environment.
This is for me the biggest hurdle with Microsoft technologies, while I love C#, I am very hesitant to trust in their technology stacks since they have a thing about ignoring things they developed. Remember Visual Fox Pro? ded, remember classic ASP with VBScript and JScript? dead
Shit like that makes me not trust Microsoft, F# is a fascinating language, but nothing stops me from believing they will discard it at one point or another.
Honestly, there is nothing wrong with VB.NET, I feel that the language is fucking easy to get, a glimpse of a VB.NET project and I know what is happening, the syntax, as verbose as it is, really makes it easy for anyone to follow along with it.
The problem? Because it is so easy to work with, most devs in that realm never bothered to move forward, which is why there are no big projects build with this language, as such, people coming forward as maintainers are rare, and few in between.
I just want to go back to the good ol days of RAD and for Embarcadero to get their heads out their ass and release Delphi for everyone. Object pascal is dummy easy.3 -
After reading mostly sad (and astonishing!) stories, I didn't really want to share my story.. but still, here I am, trying to contribute a wholesome story.
For me, this whole story started very early. I can't tell how old I was but I'm going to guess I was about 5 or 6, when my mom did websites for a small company, which basically consisted of her and.. that's it. She did pretty impressive stuff (for back then) and I was allowed to watch her do stuff sometimes.
Being also allowed to watch her play Sims and other games, my interest in computer science grew more and more and the wish to create "something that draws some windows on the screen and did stuff" became more real every day.
I started to read books about HTML, CSS and JS when I was around 10 or something. And I remember as it was yesterday: After finishing the HTML book I thought "Well that's easy. Why is this something people pay for?" - Then I started reading about CSS. I did not understand a single thing. Nothing made sense for me. I read the pages over and over again and I couldn't really make any sense of it (Mind you, I didn't have a computer back then, I just had a few hours a week on MOM-PC ^^)
But I really wanted to know how all this pretty-looking stuff worked and I tried to read it again around 1 year later. And I kid you not, it was a whole different book. It all made sense now. And I wrote my first markups with stylings and my dream became more and more reality. But there was one thing lacking. Back in the days, when there was no fancy CSS3. It was JavaScript. Long story short: It - again - made no fucken sense to me what the books told me.
Fast forward a few years, I was about 14. JavaScript was my fucken passion, I loved it. When I had no clue about CSS, I'd always ask my mom for tips. (Side story: These days it's the other way around, she asks me for tips. And it makes me unbelievably proud!)
But there was something missing. All this newschool canvas-stuff wasn't done back then and I wanted more. More possibilities, more performance, more everything.
Stuff begun to become wild. My stepdad (we didn't have the best connection) studied engineering back then, so he had to learn C. With him having this immensely thick book for C, I began to read it and got to know the language. I fell in love again. C was/is fucken awesome.
I made myself some calculators for physics and some other basic stuff and I had much fun using and learning it. I even did some game development, when I heard about people making C-coded games for PSP. Oh boy, the nights I spent in IRCs chatting with people about C, PSP-programming and all that good stuff, I'll never forget it - greatest time of my life!
But I got back to JS more and more and today I do it for money and I love it. I'll never forget my roots and my excurse into the C/C++ world and I'm proud to say, that I was able to more or less grow up with coding and the mindset that comes with it.1 -
you know what annoys me about this situation the most ?
noone is living an ideal life
in any sense
except a few
but that being said, living less than ideal life if people had not wasted so much time, would have led to certain things becoming better.
example.
if i was out of development work, and had to take a crap job.
and lets say that ended up putting me in a financially unstable situation.
if i had rotten teeth, i could work part time, go to a sliding scale place and fix them one by one
while either educating myself further or looking for a better job because in truth, if i'm accepting a part time job, i must be fucked.
i don't see any longevity in an intensely physical job, I see an early death.
there are not enough paying people to ensure everyone has a skilled job, and truthfully not everyone can, but we have more people than we need to do the unskilled and skilled jobs both so why are we not running with that ?
the best time to do unskilled labor or just labor jobs period is when a person is young and there body is new.
and then not for long or with accommodation considering throwing your back out or fucking up your knees stays with you for life.
everything is so backwards in this country.
people think in terms so frequently these days in 'how can i make someone else suffer for my amusement and see their potential diminished so i feel better about my fucked up pathetic life ?'
or
'how can i get revenge against a person that doesn't deserve it'
or
'how can i ensure other people are totally boned so my charmed life i don't deserve seems satisfying'
its pretty gross as are these people
well fast forward years later and life appears fairly repetitive for alot of people
took a very large of detours here, had some fun, experienced some fucked up horros, saw a few wonders which were mostly based off my ideas, and some that were not.
still i return to what is to be done about our unfair, wasteful system ?
I've always been a fan of removing people's 'excuses' to neglect their children for example.
and definitely blocking all avenues of abuse.
even unintended, or pretended to be unintended.
i also hate people who smell because they don't clean themselves, and use excuses for that
I also hate people who make other people live in a situation where they can't take care of themselves and then try to dominate places they seek refuge because our fucking system sucks.
I also hate that there is more food than people can eat and restaurants closing when there are hungry people.
i also despise that we have more vacant houses in this country than we have family units.
some are just rotting away from neglect.
and i most especially hate people who get off on watching whole landscapes decay.
there is tons of work for the proper people
some of it is hard
some of it is tedious
its these kind of tasks that are necessary
the right spirit and the RIGHT COMPENSATION and the work gets done.. hopefully.
starting out with placing everyone in means to eat and sleep and clean themselves seems the most important.
everything else is icing on the cake, because by and large many people get sick of doing the same exact things, and people hate staring at the wall.
the problem is, there are alot of people who are, due to extreme damages from our modified culture, extremely abnormal, sadistic and untrustworthy around... anyone.
so with more time on their hands, they get bored and turn destructive and antisocial and breed people to be worse.
years I've been preaching this.
same people fly past in man places.
here and there some new fool marches in, eyes sparkling with malevolence, only to get caught in the same eternal loop and be absorbed into it.
i haven't seen one such as myself that I know of, that showed up with every intention of changing their life, becoming friendly with people, finding the things they enjoyed, and improving themselves intellectually, emotionally and socially; searching for an environment filled with more people who would be helpful to this extent, getting a rude awakening and realizing how horrible their country was becoming.
don't know if I should be happy being alone as the only sane person. heh.
I really don't want to be. I just want us to be happy. this is deserved after so much hardship. after seeing how people in general have become.
oh we all have lusts and vices and shortcomings, but the gulf that had grown between ordinary folk and the general population is astoundingly wide.8 -
About 3 years ago, we had 4 different WordPress sites for various clients.
My colleagues thought it'd be a genius idea to keep them all in one repo. Even more genius, for local development, a single installation which implements a switcher for the wp-config.php files so we can switch between sites. Not bad in theory.
Fast-forward to present day. 1 client left; another site got converted to using Laravel because they always asked us to update their content so no point using a CMS; whereas the remaining 2 sites use differing versions of WordPress on their live sites, no less than 18 months out of date, have no dev sites, different collection of plugins and themes and both modified to the deepest darkest depths of fucking hell that's barely recognisable as WordPress anymore and next to no documentation or comments around the changes.
The functions.php file of one of these themes is over 4000 lines long!!!
We're keen to upgrade our servers to use Ubuntu 16.04 which defaults to PHP7, so all the already deprecated WordPress functions will then fail to work completely as will have been removed.
Both of these clients have agreed that they wish to convert Laravel as well so there's not really much point in going through the clean up process of their WordPress sites. Just copy the database nuke it all and start a fresh with Laravel FFS!
They also wish to completely redesign and discuss what features to keep/add/remove. With no date for these redesign meetings in sight, we won't be converting to Laravel any time soon, nor upgrading our servers in the foreseeable future either!
This is all because of one dev in the office and his history of failing to keep on top of breaking changes!
Fuck you! Seriously, fuck you!!!
If I was your superior, then you'd have been fired long ago!3 -
Iwas exposed to the world of computers when Iwas 6 years old. My dad bought a used C64 and me and my sisters were allowed to play some times. Later my father bought a PC with incredible 166MHz and I was allowed to play on it some times too. Started with tomb raider and when my parents weren't home Delta Force One. Later my father bought a newer model with 450 MHz and I got the old one. At this time he bought a 20GB HDD for me so I can get some more games on my computer. Then the internet came. My father booked ISDN and it was super fast. Since then I loved the world of IT and never stopped to. Later I played around 20000h of Counterstrike Source and came in contact with web development. I started to program with my first love: Java.
Now I love ruby, ts (js), Delphi and sometimes c#
next up is Clojure -
More of a moaning than ranting.
I feel like I care a bit too much.
I'm not a great programmer - I may be decent, but nothing more. I know Java and C# enough to write production code that works but as I gather more experience it's getting more and more annoying that I have no one to teach me in work. All I know is what I have learned by myself, from courses online, books and just writing code.
And what drives me crazy is how I'm being pushed from one project and technology to another! It's been a week since I've returned from my exams and I've already worked in C# (ASP.Net Core, MS Office AddIn, WPF, .Net console app), Java (Spring, some legacy project with JBoss, Android) and to top it all, I had to come back to the worst project I've ever been in, where I'm implementing some third party system to county administration, just to finish it off.
I'm happy to gather experience - invaluable with only two years of real, production experience, but I can't focus on one thing because I'm immediately forced to work on another. For some reason I'm seen as Jack-of-all-trades but I really don't feel like that. It makes me anxious as fuck. Not to mention that my personal development as a Dev is held off because of working all alone with no supervisor.
Post Scriptum
Fuck my boss. He won't let me refractor our biggest project yet (console, C#) because "he can listen to my moaning all day but when clients start complaining he has to act fast". Yeah, right. Wish me luck with fixing sluggish performance without reworking base of the app. -
During my small tenure as the lead mobile developer for a logistics company I had to manage my stacks between native Android applications in Java and native apps in IOS.
Back then, swift was barely coming into version 3 and as such the transition was not trustworthy enough for me to discard Obj C. So I went with Obj C and kept my knowledge of Swift in the back. It was not difficult since I had always liked Obj C for some reason. The language was what made me click with pointers and understand them well enough to feel more comfortable with C as it was a strict superset from said language. It was enjoyable really and making apps for IOS made me appreciate the ecosystem that much better and realize the level of dedication that the engineering team at Apple used for their compilation protocols. It was my first exposure to ARC(Automatic Reference Counting) as a "form" of garbage collection per se. The tooling in particular was nice, normally with xcode you have a 50/50 chance of it being great or shit. For me it was a mixture of both really, but the number of crashes or unexpected behavior was FAR lesser than what I had in Android back when we still used eclipse and even when we started to use Android Studio.
Developing IOS apps was also what made me see why IOS apps have that distinctive shine and why their phones required less memory(RAM). It was a pleasant experience.
The whole ordeal also left me with a bad taste for Android development. Don't get me wrong, I love my Android phones. But I firmly believe that unless you pay top dollar for an android manufacturer such as Samsung, motorla or lg then you will have lag galore. And man.....everyone that would try to prove me wrong always had to make excuses later on(no, your $200_$300 dllr android device just didn't cut it my dude)
It really sucks sometimes for Android development. I want to know what Google got so wrong that they made the decisions they made in order to make people design other tools such as React Native, Cordova, Ionic, phonegapp, titanium, xamarin(which is shit imo) codename one and many others. With IOS i never considered going for something different than Native since the API just seemed so well designed and far superior to me from an architectural point of view.
Fast forward to 2018(almost 2019) adn Google had talks about flutter for a while and how they make it seem that they are fixing how they want people to design apps.
You see. I firmly believe that tech stacks work in 2 ways:
1 people love a stack so much they start to develop cool ADDITIONS to it(see the awesomeios repo) to expand on the standard libraries
2 people start to FIX a stack because the implementation is broken, lacking in functionality, hard to use by itself: see okhttp, legit all the Square libs, butterknife etc etc etc and etc
From this I can conclude 2 things: people love developing for IOS because the ecosystem is nice and dev friendly, and people like to develop for Android in spite of how Google manages their API. Seriously Android is a great OS and having apps that work awesomely in spite of how hard it is to create applications for said platform just shows a level of love and dedication that is unmatched.
This is why I find it hard, and even mean to call out on one product over the other. Despite the morals behind the 2 leading companies inferred from my post, the develpers are what makes the situation better or worse.
So just fuck it and develop and use for what you want.
Honorific mention to PHP and the php developer community which is a mixture of fixing and adding in spite of the ammount of hatred that such coolness gets from a lot of peeps :P
Oh and I got a couple of mobile contracts in the way, this is why I made this post.
And I still hate developing for Android even though I love Java.3 -
Front-end development leaves me slightly in awe of the developers. How do you do it?
I come from a background in scientific computing. I can write boundary element code that's fast, performant and safe. I can build Monte Carlo simulations that work well. I'm even decent with backend development in Flask somehow. But ask me to build a simple web form and... argh!3 -
If somebody wants to become famous for the work they do fast. Join DIY projects such as React-Native.
You can become so famous for developing a highly demanded component, since there arent many well maintained this days.
I guess it is the case for many new and fresh projects.
React is awesome and react-native is the beast for cross platform development! You gonna love it guys! Jump in! -
I’ve been looking for a job recently since I am a student and starting my career.
I have a bunch of experience and I like to think I have pretty broad knowledge of programming concepts (web dev, ML, AI, software development).
I see these job postings for jobs that I know I am qualified for.
- I got my research published (which is related to the jobs I’ve been applying for)
- I have great grades
- I have a clear track record of doing well in teams (life long athlete)
- I am a complete geek for new tech and libraries so I always learn them super fast
- I have side projects that aren’t just shit I’ve done in school
- my past jobs show that I am an efficient worker who has real experience
However, I always fucking fail the coding challenges.
I’m never asked questions like “how to reverse a linked list”, just obscure questions that I don’t know how to study for.
What the fuck am I supposed to do? It’s not even like I get close to the answers. I usually get a couple test cases and then fail the rest of them, or I can’t figure out a solution to solve them.
This is all really disheartening and I fucking hate it I absolutely fucking hate it and when I am trying to hire people in the future, I’m never going to make them do coding challenges bc they’re fucking stupid3 -
took me 3 nights (i spent my daytime working out) to refactor our whole system cause i made a huge change to the class that we are using to all of our stuffs, no regrets.
I'm the one who made the class, and I made that when i'm not that really exposed to web development, but when I learned lots of stuffs, I saw that the class I made that we are using is not really that fast and there's a much easier way to implement such thing.
i want to punch myself every night, but then i care for our project and of course our first big project that can be seen and used by many.
//been too busy to rant, but not too busy to check devRant every time when I find myself on a break. -
Opinions
Hello, I’m considering building a web framework.
My ideal features would be:
Customizable authentication system(considering using a jwt lib)
Embedded DB(bolt db)
ORM( writing my own)
REST api to DB (via code generator)
Code generator(generation of models and views via cli)
GUI to db(some admin dashboard)
CORS(web service right?)
Why?
Ease of development
Fast prototyping of small-medium web services.
Fun.
My question is, do i have to many things on my platter? Should i narrow it down into less featured framework? What feature should I focus on? How should i benchmark it? Should i write tests for absolutely everything or just for exported methods? What should i take into consideration when developing ORM API, Auth API...
The language is Go
Thank you for your input10 -
# This isn't THAT bad, but since I never had any collab before this one, this is the worst so far
I'm in a web development school where we need to do a yearly project. At the beginning, we started with the idea of doing an online wallet that would handle crypto-currencied (#blockchains), and other currencies too.
On the paper that sounds good, but the dude decided to create a NodeJS server api, and let's be honest, this was a gas factory. I couldn't help him because he was too fast in his ideas, and the third member was a bit more useful because he was the one creating the mobile app, so all he needed was an url that the dude couln't manage to create.
After a few weeks he started over the project, then over again a few weeks later, before coming to us and saying it was too difficult. We said "yeah, I mean you're own your own since the beginning, no wonders!" "Uh do you guys care if we change the whole project to do something else? Like a CV library"
Went a moment where he tried to over sell some incredible (read "overly common") features that already existed 10 years ago on some famous websites (ie. Monster), and he then eventually told me that this idea came from his new job, and that they needed this library. So we would have to work for his company for free. Nice.
The third guy and me came with a new idea (image recognition with IA and stuff), and we saw the dude maybe 5 times the whole week while we're supposed to work together -
I think that "agile development" paradigm is really bad for programmers when it is directed by incapable people... I mean: "move fast and break things" is not a good philosophy, it is only an excuse for doing incomplete, buggy and "documentless" features that only helps the PM "visibility" (look at all the things that I did, I've been releasing 1 version per week, we have included 3 new features... we are burning 25 scrum points per capita per week)... we have to stand against this stupid way of doing things... Scrum makes that all the responsability is on us, as developers, and PMs can wash their hands freely...2
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I decided to go for it, and build this chat GPT web-app. I built an authentication system for it crazy fast. While I’ve built several e-commerce websites, I’ve never actually owned one. What should I expect?2
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So worked myself into stupor for a react-native app(first -time). It is the client part for large system ecosystem. Was rough at first but after initail field test and refactor to the code base it is in 95% stable form. This all happend in 2 months. During this time co-workers build rest of system in node and other backend magic sauce 👩💻 .
My app has sibling app to collab with. I make a note (early in the development of this sibling app) that the ui is not working for the use case and get in a heated debate with co-workers. Concede 🙌 that it is not my part of the system and leave it to them, they blame the fact that no design was given. Fast forward to yesterday I get munched by client that wants to showcase the system to large company and has to struggle with sibling app. I tell him it is something "we" would look at in the next cycle ( covering for my coworkers) .
I feel shit and year now starts off with crappy feeling that all my hard work to get my app to decent version of itself is lost☠️ . -
When I was 7, I got my hands on an Amstrad CPC-464. This was my first exposure to code, copying examples out of the handbook. Shortly after that my school got their first IT suite, with thirty machines running Windows 98. I remember lunchtimes spent playing ZipZaps, a game that shamelessly capitalised on the first Fast and Furious films. I learned how to create macros in Office, and after getting a machine at home with Windows 3.1 I also learned some basic DOS. When I was 12 we got our first XP machine, which I spent hours on with MSN messenger and mucking around with scripts. That machine eventually succumbed to my brother repeatedly powering it on/off, something I still kind of hold against my mother to this day.
After going into care, I bought an old XP laptop from a friend, a machine that I used extensively. I mined my first bitcoin on that machine, bitcoin that could have made me a rich man today if I had only taken backups seriously.
My next machine came with Vista, which was upgraded to 7 shortly afterwards. This is when I got a bit more seriously into code, contributing to a game written in C++ (Armagetron Advanced, if you're interested). I also learned a great deal about automation using this machine, and when I got my second desktop machine at 18 (which at the time was still extremely out of date), I built my first working web server with IIS. I've been through four desktops since then, one of which just about survived a house fire.
Now I run a company of my own, doing development work at a lower cost for social enterprises, and developing a SaaS platform that will eventually make me a living all on its own. This year I hope to finally stop having to worry about debt, income, where I'm getting my next meal from and when I can finally be self sufficient, almost seven years since the care system spit me out after conveniently forgetting to tell me I could have stayed there until after Uni.
I am proud, though, of coming so far with no college or university degree. I'm by no means an expert, but I'd call myself proficient enough in a couple of languages to be capable of making a career of it. -
Hey guys, I'm planning to install a Linux in my machine. I have used Ubuntu, debian and fedora before. Which Linux distro would be best to use? I'll be using the environment for development. Looking for lightweight, fast Linux distro. Please suggest.17
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I started to learn backend development for help a friend with his idea for an startup. i learn the basics in one week. then we put the hands on the project.
the first week everything was ok, we make progress fast and get things done, second week my productivity go to the floor. i found my self trying to do hacky stuff every day. never reach solutions. i was a mess.
Today i just broke, inclusive with my main Data Science projects im feeling bad. i quit everything a start watching Mr. Robot.
Right now i feels truly bad, but i have no option, tomorrow i will pit my hands again on all this shit, what more i can do? this is what i want to do.
The suffering and stress seems to be part of this job. We can only keep going.6 -
I don't know man if it's inferiority superiority complex or I'm actually bit slow in development but the guy who works with me is quite fast at making stuff. I don't want be a person who left out by his co-worker. The constant thing going on my mind these days is how can i become faster at making stuff.4
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Why can we deprecate a regular language like Python 2 (26 months can't come by fast enough) but yet it seems web development is impervious to the idea? If you want to make a website, you must use HTML, CSS, AND JS (or a transpiled language).
I get we use it for backwards compatibility but this combo makes web development so messy and weird, it's hard to understand from a newcomers perspective.
Maybe I'm just too stubborn to understand 🤔3 -
How difficult is it to decide for your own future?
It's a month that I'm in total panic 'cause of a difficult choice I have to make about my job.
I really need some external opinions and points of view from other developers, maybe more experienced than me (I'm a medium-junior JS developer).
The situation is as follows:
1) I work as a Frontend Web Developer for a wonderful enterprise-like company with 100+ employees, where the individual rights are fully respected, there are no whatsoever pressures and there is a peaceful paradise-like atmosphere most of the days. I also love my teammates, which is something rare because I often dislike other humans.
2) I received a proposal from a Fintech startup, which required me a long time to complete a complex programming test they gave me. They look all very young, modern, fast and passioned about their job. But they are only living with bank's investments and are not producing any money at the moment. Also, I don't know if Fintech will be a successful field in the future.
3) I received another proposal, from a Healthtec startup this time, which has a lovely mission in the medical field, has received millions of investments, it's gaining some KK net each month but has a team of only 2 developers (3 with me if I accept). I know one of the developers and I remember he had issues of not getting paid months ago.
What's the problem with the first company? I totally dislike the product we are building, the development stack (fully Microsoft-based), the company's view (they still sell and think about software like in the 90's) and how the repository is managed. Everyday there are huge problems that end up blocking the frontend work and the final product is super ugly and works only if you know all the quirks behind it.
It's an old-fashioned desktop app with inside Chromium which should execute some components like graphs, tables, forms and shit like this. Every component is configurable through a property editor which is an utter giant mess of collapsed menus. I also suspect that the company's main business model is based on the difficulty to use this software (because they sell licenses and courses to use it).
There are no modern UX/UI concepts applied at all, nor they seem to care about it.
Each time I propose something there is a huge chain of approval-waiting that end up in a stale mate.
Also, it's useless to show my frustration about all these issues because I count very little in a so populated office.
------------------------------------------------
TLDR: I need to choice if staying in a Enterprise Microsoft-based and old-fashioned company, but in which the atmosphere is paradisiac or accept the risk to work for a Fintech or a Healthtec startup.
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What would you do if you were in my situation? What's for you the most stable field in the future?
Many thanks for the attention!6 -
Started my design/development agency in Jan. I work both direct to client and also on a whitelabel basis for other agencies and developers.
My 2nd biggest client is one of the said whitelabel clients. Unfortunately he has been unwell for a few weeks and is now taking another 3 weeks off. This week I have had to take over the running of his business (from a client and development standpoint) to ensure projects don't fall behind...they're already 2 weeks overdue with new RFQs coming in thick and fast. All this whilst running my own business.
Yesterday was a 16hr day and it doesn't look like it is going to let up :|
At least it's billable I guess?1 -
Would like to share an open Source production-ready NestJS Boilerplate for fast development of REST API with most of the popular features included of the box: SignIn/SignUp, Seeds, TypeORM, FileUpload, Mailing, I18N, and others
https://github.com/brocoders/...3
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