Fixing interface with "temporary" solution
PS: please hide it from electricians (even hobbyist). It can scary them to death.

Back when I was in school (about 15 years old) and I played games, I had a particularly favourite game that I would play. It was a lesser known strategy game made by a single hobbyist Dev.

I was already known in the community for making some mods for the game and chatbots.

What most people didn't know was that I had made a map hack and various other cheats that made it significantly easier to win by reverse engineering the game and modifying the x86 assembly in ollydbg.
One thing in particular I had been working on at the time was a game replay editor. I had reverse engineered the saved game (replay) format and was able to replay them, edit them and generate them.

During one particular match, a person in the community particularly annoyed me and I edited the saved game to change what his moves were and the words he spoke. It made him look a bit like an idiot but IMHO was only a slight exaggeration of the truth.
I posted the game replay on the forums and everyone was in hysterics about the crazy things he did and said in the replay.
As no one knew I had this capability they all believed the replay and even the guy in the replay couldn't believe it himself and didn't understand what happened. He just kept telling everyone it didn't happen and the 'truth is in the pudding'.

Although I originally intended to tell everyone what I did, I never did and whenever the guy entered in to a game everyone would laugh about it and say 'the truth was in the pudding'.

He was no longer annoying me and it sort of made me feel like a god at the time.
So that's my wk65.

I know a guy, about 50 years old. He is a self-taught programmer since he was young, and he has always used Visual Basic (never anything newer than VB6).

He once needed to interface with a web application I wrote, so I asked him to send me a POST HTTP request. He didn't know what I was talking about. No notion of REST, sockets, HTTP, nothing.

The he showed me his code. Actually, his codes. He had multiple copies of the project, one for each version, and he even kept multiple variations of the software in different separate folders. He probably doesn't know what "version control" even means.
You think this is messy. You didn't see the actual code (it's a huge application!).

Spaghetti all over the place. Meaningful variable names, what are they? Default names for the controls, like button1, button2, etc, with forms with more than 30 buttons and text fields. This was the most incomprensibile code I have ever seen.

You might think that this guy is just a hobbyist.
No.
He sells his applications. To companies. They are obviously full of errors, but they buy them.

Now, if you're still with me, two questions come into my mind:

- why?? I hate this, because it's impossible to prove to a non-technical person that this is *not* software development.
- how do I know that, to someone else, I am not like him? How can I be sure that I know and will know what needs to be known?

Pet peeves as a programmer and ex hobbyist hacker:

1. People who press F12, change a colour and consider themself a hacker or/and programmer.

2. People who pick up someone's phone, guess their passcode and post shit saying 'hacked' at the end.

These people can kindly fuck off to the hellish dimension they came 👌

I had been a "hobby" programmer for well over a decade, with my primary career being in repair or a "technician". I had taught myself dozens of languages because it was fun, but never really accomplished much.

I was laid off from my job as a technician and I found myself listless and without purpose. I started doing development again on random things to pass the time and I ended up volunteering as a developer for a game I had played for years.

At the same time I had an uncle who encouraged me to consider software as a career. These two things gave me the confidence to apply for a local software job I saw on Indeed.

They called me pretty quickly, and I was brutally honest. "No, I don't have a degree. I'm self-taught. I have no professional experience really."

I got a proficiency exam anyway and I took it - apparently doing well enough on it that the CTO called me a week later. We had a long talk and I finally asked him why he called me.

He told me that while a degree means something, the passion to learn this job means more to him. It was a month before I was offered the position, and I graciously accepted it.

We had a call about my compensation before starting. It was rather low, but we both agreed that my skill level was quite an unknown.

A year later and my pay was bumped up a sizable amount. My skills are defined now and growing rapidly as new challenges are sent my way. I went from a naive hobbyist to a professional in a short period of time.

I realized that I was always a professional. I had a desire to learn and a desire to do things the right way. I may not have known what to call things. I didn't know some of the design patterns I had used over the years were standards that had names and meaning.

I basically work two jobs now. My full-time job and also on the game that helped propel my career forward and gave me the confidence to reach for it.

As for my hobby? I turned to electronics and the maker community. It's a nice marriage with my programming skill set, and I never knew how rewarding a blinking LED would be. :)

The DE life cycle of every Linux hobbyist:

1. Let's work with Unity.... it's so blah
2. Let's check out XFCE.... it does its job, but it needs more zing
3. Let's check out KDE...aah, my poor battery.
4. Let's check out LXDE.... Can you be any more boring?
5. Let's check out Pantheon.... This is perfect, but I'm tired of using a tweak tool to even enable minimize and maximize
6. Let's go to Gnome 3...Ah never mind
7. Let's go to Cinnamon... Blurgh, It reminds me of Windows
8. Let's go to MATE....Hmm, Mutiny layout?!! It reminds me of Unity. Wonder if Unity 8 has made any progress!
9. Go back to Step 1.

Me at school: Erh I make programs and I guess it is sort of a hobby
The other kids: SO YOU CAN HACK PEOPLES COMPUTERS AND PHONES??? :0
Me: Not exactly, I actually program websites and some games...
The other kids: WOAH CAN YOU PLEASE MAKE ME A CUSTOM GTA???
Me:

Just wanted to deaign a typography for each popular programming language. Ideally the font matches the language itself. Initial ideas are: a playful candy font for JavaScript cuz it's so easy and fun to use, n a gothic C++ cuz it's like this epic, powerful (maybe sometimes terrifying) language.

Wouldn't it be cool if there's a set of these? Any professional designers here (cuz I'm just a hobbyist)? Or any thoughts? What should your favorite language look like?

So, I'm living in a completely computer illiterate family and I was called to help my father with something on a Laptop where he wanted to stream his favorite Soccer-Club.

So I walk up to him, ask what's wrong, and he says (roughly translated from German) "That thing doesn't work!"

And I'm just like ((Wat u mean))
So I ask him to explain the problem in detail.
Apparently his streaming service wasn't loading his stream.

Well damn I say, try searching for the problem on Google and find a solution.
((But no no no imma just call my son for everything that's freaking wrong with tech, he sure knows what to do))

As I'm not that experienced with Webservices as of yet, I had no idea what to do.

He was fucking furious!

"You always act like you know everything about tech and programs and stuff and can't even help me with fixing this Stream-Thing?!"

I responded simply by saying "It's not my area of work!"

Seems like he didn't know the difference between TECH-JESUS and hobbyist software engineer.

So I stand there and he just goes on one of these typical boomer tech illiterate rants, of which I'm sure you can imagine enough being on this platform.

tl;Dr; It pisses me of big time how people are not even trying to understand technology, nor attempting to help themselves by eG. Googling some simple problem, but rather just ask around and then being pissed off if the asked person just doesn't know the answer or can't help!

Not really a rant and I'm only a beginner/hobbyist, but for a few months I've been active in a local gamedev club where I recently managed the courage to approach a much more experienced (5+ years) programmer.

We managed to have a good 30 minute chat (despite not using the same programming languages) and he told me "I really appreciate talking to someone who actually understands programming and what they're talking about!"

It felt like a pretty big milestone on my path to game development, at least it feels like I know more than I care to admit to myself.

I started to get interested in programming at the age of 13. I was started spending a lot time in our school library and read mostly technical books (beginner/hobbyist stuff) about electronics.
Some book was about Quick Basic (hence my username).
On Windoze 95 in a DOS mode IDE I started trying stuff out and soon I had my first tiny console game.
A bit later I started with HTML and CSS stuff, made a website about ongoing jokes in our class and some rants, later I got into VB6 (I hate VB nowadays!) and wrote for a personal school project a learning software (relatively simple one) to learn vocabulary for foreign languages.

At about 15 I started with C++ and later C# .NET, which I liked the most, and started on some new Windows.Forms stuff, created some small websites.

Now I'm working parttime as a professional developer (mostly web, but VR & .NET too) and studying EE at a university.

My parents had no experience with computers at all, so I learned everything myself an with the help of the allmighty internet (the black box with the red dot on top).

That's my story. ;)

Insert your rant about this below this line:
-----------------------------------------

!dev
I'm a hobbyist photographer but lately I've been getting offers to work on major gigs. Apparently people have started liking my photography.
However, just like some programmers are hardliners when it comes to particular stacks, the camera world is riddled with brand loyalists that can't accept that anything other than their camera gear is better. You have Canon/Nikon users who can't wrap their minds around the fact that Sony is making better cameras for the price.
I ask a question about what lens people recommend and a flame war starts about why X camera is better than Y camera.
Guess what, it ultimately comes down to the skill of the photographer and not the camera. All I wanted was a lens recommendation for a particular style of shooting.
Thing is, all modern cameras are more than capable of doing their jobs.

Apparently my learning style is more rote memorization than learn-by-doing and I've been trying to learn by doing for years as a hobbyist.

It took a fucking *national quarantine* to get me to try something different and I'm blown away.

What would have taken me many months to learn I've all but grasped in detail in a matter of 20 hours of study over the course of a week.

Fuck you javascript. I WIN THIS ROUND. No more looking at the documentation for stupid shit like how to write a regex, or why everything is wrapped in fucking parenthesis (IIFE), or why
I keep getting a uncaught reference exception.

The important thing to realize about learning is NEVER be obstinate about it. Try many things, and don't get stuck in one way of learning unless you know thats what works for you.

This is why having study partners and mentors are important.

I think experience/practice and rote learning work in tandem. Rote learning lets you skip the much longer step of grasping the fundamentals, bootstrapping the process of learning the abstractions that are composed of those fundamentals.

I'm still adding cards to my anki flash card deck, but if anyone wants it I'm willing to share. It's mostly just 1. practice questions, 2. detail questions (what are the types? What does this regex do?, etc), 3. implication questions (heres this bit of code. It's XYZ, why did it fail? Correct it.), combining core details to memorize, and the application of the facts learned.

It helped me to learn and I'm apparently retarded, so if you're new to programming and want to learn JS, it can probably help you too. Unless you're more of a tard than me lol.

Hey devRant,
Newbie dev here starting my first full time professional gig in two weeks as a .Net developer. Any advice or tips on making the transition from student and hobbyist to professional dev?
Cheers!

I'm a history nut - ancient civilizations, drunken poets, how many times we fucked up and almost nuclear bombed the shit out of ourselves is my other hobbyist love. Documentaries are also my shit.

Tech history is my nerdiest niche out of those two - I highly recommend watching "Silicon Cowboys", about how Compac took down IBM. 😍

I've been editing sound effects, animations, image assets, creating things from scratch if I don't have what I need, all while I am hired as a software engineer.

We are supposedly an interactive contents company, while we have only two designers (none of which specializes in software design) for half a dozen projects, no sound engineer, and no animator.

I've been using Krita and Audacity as much as VS Code these days - my hobby skills I never thought would use in a professional environment. I wonder how did my predecessors work, surely not every software engineer also happens to be a hobbyist artist.

been thinking about buying a server to host little personal projects and just experiment and stuff. any suggestions on affordable hobbyist servers?

From now on, if I'm gonna have to deal with emojis fucking everywhere, I opt to use them to best describe the two greatest diseases of the modern age:

Apple and google.

Anytime they make their products worse, or do something stupid the response should be

#shitapple

Or

#💩🍏

This sign, brothers, shall be our banner! our labarum against the forces of the corporacracy and mediocracy. and with it we will go forth and conquer!

Unite against the forces of stupidity. Our weapons will be humiliation, degradation and hobbyist projects like arts and crafts, freestyle poetry aka slander, and casual arson (actually dont do that last one).

Not a whole lot. But when I was 9 I started trying to fix an old Compaq computer that my parents replaced. I never actually got it to work but I did tear it apart and put it back together. Eventually a friend's parent gave me a a Dell that didn't work. Figured out it just needed a new HDD. Around that time my dad (who is literally the textbook definition of technically challenged) got a old textbook about computer hardware from a friend of his that was a bit of a hobbyist. This was in maybe 2006. The book was from 1988. I don't remember the name but it's somewhere in my parents house still. I didn't get much out of the book. Time passed and I started building computers. For myself, the local library, my friends. I ended up going to college for business while building computers on the side. I was making pretty good money for the amount of time I put into it. Eventually I ended up switching careers. My parents didn't really help me get into software but they offered encouragement. And a book from 1988 about computer hardware... So that's something.

I got asked to teach a bit 3D printing to a physics class at my old high school. But I consider myself an amateur at 3D printing at best and don’t think these kids are going to learn as much as their teacher thinks they will.
Especially if the printer is above the hobbyist level and doesn’t require user added upgrades and improvements

Sometimes I think of applying for a dev job as 'pick your poison', since the chance of landing a job with fun languages and few headaches is slim these days.

Satisfying my own curiosity #3:
Who here dabbles in electronics?

As professional or amateur/hobbyist, doesn't matter.

I'd appreciate straining from discussions, ideally 1 comment per person starting with "I do" or "I don't" (it'd make counting easier).

Hi All, I used to be a user on devrant while I was in middle/highschool. I kinda forgot about it for a long time but I rediscovered the app when I saw a sticker on a retired laptop.

Quick Intro
CS Student at Drexel, 4th year out of 5

I want a career in software and want to reserve
hardware related things for hobbyist endeavors.
I made a 3x3 macropad with a pi pico including designing and printing the pcb, soldering all the components, and then writing the firmware (micropython blegh). My goal is to daily drive a 75% keyboard of my own making

Currently my main keyboard when I'm using my desktop is a Keychron v1 with Haimou Hearbeat silents and sugarplum keycaps (lmk if you want pics)

I like martial arts, while I practice BJJ, I am interested in Judo and Muay Thai as well.

I like History and Linguistics

The above point got me into power metal, mainly sabaton and then bands similar to it

Ill finish off with some nerdshit
I use a framework with fedora as my daily driver, I am a neovim enjoyer, my steam deck is gathering dust, and I have more Pi's than I know what to do with.

Lenovo IdeaPad Y700 (and possibly (m)any other NVidia GPU laptops)

framerate fluctuations in any game - runs silky smooth for few minutes, then drops to borderline unplayable framerates for a few minutes.

Thousands of people across dozens, maybe hundreds of internet forums having this problem for years, since the thing was released.

I personally lost at least 20 hours trying to solve it, and had the laptop in gaming-unusable state because of it for the past half a year.

...yesterday I FOUND A SOLUTION!
1. Download NVidia Inspector by Orbmu2k
(some hobbyist hacker type)

2. use its "profile inspector" to flip an internal setting in nvidia driver.

3. flip "Enable application for Optimus" to SHIM_RENDERING_MODE_ENABLE to basically tell the "Optimus" crap to fuck off.
(not sure why the value is called this, because it's clearly disabling the thing)

4. the thing works flawlessly silky smooth again.

...thousands of people across dozens, maybe hundreds of forums...
...i could be their Lord and Savior...
...if only I weren't too lazy to hike across all of them and register just to post the solution.
(tech forums really should have some "I HAVE A SOLUTION but if i have to register I won't bother")

also...
WHY
DO
WE
KEEP
LETTING
HW
MANUFACTURERS
WRITE
SOFTWARE?!?

Want to upgrade computer for better programming resources in side projects, need $600

Want to start making side projects for dat sweet sweet ad revenue, need stronger computer

Freelance hobbyist catch-22 :(

There needs to be a new (MOOC) class for people like me.

Hi, I'm William. I can't get my head around designing systems. I've read GoF and a few breakdowns of it as well. I find some patterns obvious for my field of interest (game dev, woot!) while I'm reading through the stuff, but have a pretty hard time retaining much of it. I'm aware of the danger of over using patterns, so I don't worry that much about it. I'll look something up when I'm sure I need it.

Still, I'm tired of the tutorial blues. I can watch a few different people write entire games, usually not in the language of choice, but that only helps me so much.

How do I fight scope creep? In the meantime, how can I make things extensible? Scope does need to creep some, after all.

People joke about starting with (visual) BASIC ruining you forever. I don't believe in that crap, but is this just denial? Am I too dumb for this? Not that I'd ever seriously blame a language for that.

I've been a hobbyist for well over 10 years, please don't make me count exactly how long I've been unsuccessful.

I'm baffled by Löve. I think it's the coolest shit I've seen, maybe ever (unless we're counting IPFS).

I think what really prompted this rant, apart from the obvious degradation of my mental health, was my search for an entity component system for Löve/Lua. Hold your replies. I know there's a few of them, and I'm positive that they're fantastic. I'd roll my own, but that requires actual Lua specific knowledge that I just haven't dug all that deep into yet. I can't wrap my head around the ones that exist, even though I can tell their complexity is next to none really.

I have severe tool anxiety, I'm shocked that I've stuck with ZeroBrane Studio as long as I have. It feels good though.

Sorry to use this as "Devs Anonymous", but I think that's how this community helps (me) best.

I feel like I should stop now and just say: Advice? before this gets much deeper/less readable.

using System;
using System.Text;
using System.Text.Encodings;
//Bitwise XOR operator is represented by ^. It performs bitwise XOR operation on the corresponding bits of two operands. If the corresponding bits are same, the result is 0. If the corresponding bits are different, the result is 1.
//If the operands are of type bool, the bitwise XOR operation is equivalent to logical XOR operation between them.
using System.Text.Unicode;
using System.Windows;
using System.IO;
namespace Encryption2plzWOrk
{
class Program
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
//random is basically a second sepret key for RSA exhanges I know there probaley is a better way to do this please tell me in github comments.//
Random r = new Random();
int random = r.Next(2000000,500000000);
int privatekey = 0;
int publickey = 0;
string privateKeyString = Console.ReadLine();
byte[] bytes3 = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(privateKeyString);
foreach(byte b in bytes3)
{
privatekey = b + privatekey;
}
int permutations = random/ 10000;
if(privatekey < 256)
{
while(permutations > 0)
{
foreach (byte b in bytes3)
{
privatekey = privatekey + (privatekey ^ permutations)*20;
}
}
}
publickey = privatekey*random;
Console.WriteLine("your public key is {0}",publickey);
}
}
}
would this be considerd ok HOBBYIST encryption and if not how would I do a slow improvment I used bitwise to edit bits so thats a check :D

So here is a mini rant from an amateur/hobbyist developer (me).

Over the past week, I've taken on a project that is much larger than any other projects i've attempted to handle (steam trading bot). This meant that there would be logic flaws, weird bugs due to unexpected behavior from shitty web apis (and their poor documentation hmmmm).

Anyhow, fast forward a few days and the code is complete. It's mostly functional, apart from a few glitches and unexpected behavior here and there...or so i thought. Apparently if someone trades and item to me that isnt in my pricegrid, the bot freaks out and kills itself, relaunches, and repeats this cycle (pm2). And i only found out about this on my way to school

So in desperation to fix such a critical flaw in my code (if my bot breaks a lot and doesnt accept trades, i can get banned from backpack.tf), i bust out my only device which is my phone, and start editing away (JuiceSSH and turbo client is godsend ty). 30 minutes later, after toiling through code with no indentation or syntax highlights (mobile pls), ive fixed it. So i push to live and alls well.

Then I arrive at school, pull out my laptop and decided to check up on my code to see if anything needs fixing.

Oh look in one line i used '||' instead of '&&'.

ok lets fix it.

ok lets push to live again.

I launched WinSCP to move the files onto the server, and just as the loading bar finishes and the file is overwritten, i realized; FUCK the code i had on my laptop wasnt the latest version i just worked on on my phone.

So that's that. 30 minutes of typing code without indentation and syntax highlighting on a 5 inch screen and it's all gone.

TLDR:
Version control is a must.