Since I was little I was fascinated by club light shows I saw on TV shows. I just couldn't find out how they made light react to sound, which were two completely unrelated things to me back then. But I wasn't dumb and somehow figured out that if I hooked some low energy fairy lights to my amp and turned the bass up, they would lightup to the beat.
3 fried fairy lights and angry parents for to loud music later I swore to myself that I would someday build something that could light up my whole room and react to the music I was playing.

I started coding about the age 13 (turned 20 a month ago) with some old school bat scripts. But I wanted something that would generate a .exe so I googled and ended up installing Visual Studio Express (again angry parents for installing without asking) and started copying my first VB.Net program together. From there no one could stop me. I wanted to archive something with an application and googled until I found what I needed and learned to code this way.
I learned writing decent vb.net code and itvwas about this time I came into contact with IRC. I lurked arround there and this is were I came into contact with Linix servers, because I wanted to code IRC (eggdrop) bots, so I learned TCL and got used to Linux. Time passed and I ended uo being a Global OP on some network back then.

I did go further, coded Minecraft Mods, thus Java, changed back to C#, learned PHP and started setting things up on my VPS, Mails server, web server, etc.

Nowadays I work as a Systemadmin / Developer Hybrid, earning my first real money doing what I love to do and guess what? In the meantime I proved myself I can accomplish what I wanted as kid. I bought some Club LED DMX capital lights and programmed a controller for them which can control them in C#, but in a way I can run it on my raspi using mono. I also coded a client which runs on windows which uses some native libraries to calculate the dominant color of the shown picture in realtime (Handels 24fps 1080p) and uses the lights as ambient light, like you see them behind TVs sometimes.
The same app uses Bass.NET and an algorithm to dedect a beat in realtime and switches the light colors. Exactly what I wanted as akid, but better.

I can even control the lights via the new Google Assistant and/or Tasker.

Feels fcking good.

Some of my work lies on github among other, mostly trash: https://github.com/Kimmax - didn't updated there in a while tho.

I plan on writing a new free opensource plugin based modular home automatication server and pretty sure could use some helping hands..

I don't know why I wrote all this, just felt like it.
Also: first Rant

Please don't kill me for errors in the text, I'm to lazy to read through it again right now :P

-- How I succeeded turning a PHP/MYSQL app into Android app within a week --

Alright. So I wanted to grab your attention to what I'm about to write. If you are here just to read about the technologies I used, jump to bottom.

This is also a kind of rant; rant against the other fellow devs who demotivated me originally when I asked a question.

I'll not go in the details of my original question. Here's the link for those who are interested:
https://www.devrant.io/rants/366496
It's been days since I achieved what I wanted to but I thought someone might learn from my experience. So here it goes.

Why FREE?
Well, it was an important client. I worked on his website and he asked for an app for the same website and told me he won't be able to pay me anything for the app. I was, somewhat, under the impression that he might be testing me. If not, then I would end up learning something new. It wasn't a bad deal for me so I didn't hesitate to took it.

Within a week, I was able to pull the job and finish it. I felt so much better (and proud of myself) when I finished the app within the week and client approved it. What did I get? I got a GOOD BANK CLIENT in my pocket now. Got a lot more worth of projects from the same client. If I were being paid for the app, I might not have pulled the job so much better.

So the moral of this story is never to give up. NOT EVERY DEVELOPER SELLS SHORT ONLY FOR "MONEY". Some enjoy learning new things. And some like me love to accept new challenges and are not afraid to try something new everyday.

In case, someone is interested in knowing the technologies I used, here they go;

PhoneGap
Framework7
Template7
Apache Cordova

I wrote an API for the interaction between the web services and the app.

Also, Ionic Framework seems promising but it had a learning curve and time was of the essence. But I'm gonna learn it anyhow.

Recap: https://www.devrant.io/rants/878300

I was out Thursday at the Hospital. I'm what the doctors would call "Ill as fuck"

So, Friday I’m back in the office to the usual: "How was that appointment?"
I know people mean well when they ask this. So, I do the polite thing and tell them it went as well as it could.

Realistically it does't matter how well it went... They haven't cured Crohn's because I showed up to the appointment. They know I'm fucked already.

But, push it down, add it to the future aneurism.

I had to go through the usual resignation meetings with managers:
"We"re fucked now you're going"
"yep"
"we need to get a handle on how fucked"
"already done that for you, here"s a trello board, very fucked."
"we need to put a plan together to drop all the junior devs in the shit with the work you’ve been doing"
"You need about 4 devs, please refer to the previous trello board for your plan"

Meanwhile, me and Morpheus are in constant communication because all of this is like a Shakespearean comedy.

So, I overhear a conversation between a Junior Dev and the Solution Architect.

[SA] took over the project because he knows better than two tried and tested senior devs -_- (fuckwit).

JD: "It took me one and a half days to build it out"
SA: "Yeah, it must have taken me twice as long... It must be a problem with the project, you should just be able to check it out and run it."
JD: "I know, it has to be wrong"

All of this is about Morpheus' work of art, of an Ionic 3 hybrid app.

I fumed quietly at my desk because I've been ordered by the Stazi to be hands off.

Since Morpheus and me were pulled from the project [JD] and [JD2] were dropped into it to get it over the line.

It"s unfortunate and I was clear and honest with my advice to them: I personally would not take over the project because I"d be way out of my depth... Oh, and the App works, so uh, there's no work to do.

They have been constantly at our desks. Asking fuckdiculous questions about how to perform basic tasks. So they can get Morpheus" frigging masterpiece to the user.

It"s like watching that touch up of jesus that got borked by an amateur. Shit I have google, it's like watching this happen: http://ti.me/NnNSAb

[JD] came to me Friday evening.
"I can’t get this to build to iOS or install on [Test Analyst]'s phone."

Me: "No worries brother, where are you stuck right now?"

[JD] describes the first steps with clear indication he hasn't googled his problem.

Life lesson: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=lmgtfy

Que an hour of me showing [JD] how to build an Ion3 project for iOS. Fuck it, your man's in a bind and he"s asked politely for help. I can show him quicker than he can read 3 sets of docos.

I took him through 'ionic cordova build ios', the archive and release processes in XCode 9, then the apk bundling process for droid. Finally we have an MAM so the upload process for that too.

All the while cleaning up his AppIDs, Profiles, deployment attempts.
Damn they were a mess.

I did this with a smile on my face, not because I could say "I told you so"... But. because when any developer asks you how to do something. If you know how to do it, you should always be happy to learn them some new tricks!

Dude's alright, he's been dropped in the shit. Now I know how badly so I'll help him learn things that are useful to his role, but aren't project specific.

As a plausi-senior dev (I'll tell you about that later); it's my job to make sure my team have what they need to go home smiling!

I’m not a hateful fucker, the guy asked me an honest question so I am happy to give him the honest answer.

I took him through it a few times and explained a few best practices. Most were how to do his AppID and ProvProfile set up. Good lad, took it all on board.

However! In his frustration, he pointed the finger at Morpheus' "David" (ref: Michelangelo).

He miraculously morphed into a shiny colourful parrot and fed me SA's line:
"you should just be able to build from a clean clone"

My response was calm and clear:
"You can, it took me 20 minutes on Thursday evening. I was bored and curios, so I wanted to validate Morpheus' work. Here it is on my iOS device and my Android device. It would have taken me 5 if my laptop wasn’t so horrifically out of date."

I validated Morpheus' work so I have evidence, I trust that brilliant bastard.
I just need to be able to prove it's good.

[JD] took this on board.
Maybe listening to two tried and trusted senior devs is better than listening to a headstrong Solution Architect.

When JD left for the weekend I was working a late one (https://www.devrant.io/rants/874765).

His sign off was beautiful.
"I think I can happily admit defeat on this one, it can wait until Monday."

To which I replied: "no worries brother, if you need a hand give me a shout."

Rule 1: Don't be a cunt.
Rule 2: If someone needs help and you can give it: Give it!
Rule 3: Don't interrupt James' cigarette time.
Rule 4: goto Rule 3.

Woohoo!!! I made it to 1000++s :) Now I feel less newbie-like around here :)

So... I don't want to shit-post, so in gratitude to all you guys for this awesome community you've built, specially @trogus and @dfox, I'll post here a list of my ideas/projects for the future, so you guys can have something to talk about or at least laugh at.

Here we go!

Current Project: Ensayador.
It's a webapp that intends to ease and help students write essays. I'm making it with history students in mind, but it should also help in other discipline's essay production. It will store the thesis, arguments, keywords and bibliography so students can create a guideline before the moment of writting. It will also let students catalogue their reads with the same fields they'd use for an essay: that is thesis, arguments, keywords and bibliography, for their further use in other essays. The bibliography field will consist on foreign keys to reads catalogued. The idea is to build upon the models natural/logical relations.

Apps: All the apps that will come next could be integrated in just one big app that I would call "ChatPo" ("Po" is a contextual word we use in my country when we end sentences, I think it derived from "Pues"). But I guess it's better to think about them as different apps, just so I don't find myself lost in a neverending side-project.

A subchat(similar to a subreddit)-based chat app:
An app where people can join/create sub-chats where they can talk about things they are interested in. In my country, this is normally done by facebook groups making a whatsapp group and posting the link in the group, but I think that an integrated app would let people find/create/join groups more easily. I'm not sure if this should work with nicknames or real names and phone numbers, but let's save that for the future.

A slack clone:
Yes, you read it right. I want to make a slack clone. You see, in my country, enterprise communications are shitty as hell: everything consists in emails and informal whatsapp groups. Slack solves all these problems, but nobody even knows what it is over here. I think a more localized solution would be perfect to fill this void, and it would be cool to make it myself (with a team of friends of course), and hopefully profit out of it.

A labour chat-app marketplace:
This is a big hybrid I'd like to make based on the premise of contracting services on a reliable manner and paying through the app. "Are you in need of a plumber, but don't know where to find a reliable one? Maybe you want a new look on your wall, but don't want to paint it yourself? Don't worry, we got you covered. In <Insert app name> you can find a professional perfect to suit your needs. Payment? It's just a tap away!". I guess you get the idea. I think wechat made something like this, I wonder how it worked out.

* Why so many chat apps? Well... I want to learn Erlang, it is something close to mythical to me, and it's perfect for the backend of a comms app. So I want to learn it and put it in practice in any of these ideas.*

Videogames:

Flat-land arena: A top down arena game based on the book "flat land". Different symmetrical shapes will fight on a 2d plane of existence, having different rotating and moving speeds, and attack mechanics. For example, the triangle could have a "lance" on the front, making it agressive but leaving the rest defenseless. The field of view will be small, but there'll be a 2d POV all around the screen, which will consist on a line that fills with the colors of surrounding objects, scaling from dark colors to lighter colors to give a sense of distance.
This read could help understand the concept better:
http://eldritchpress.org/eaa/...

A 2D darksouls-like class based adventure: I've thought very little about this, but it's a project I'm considering to build with my brothers. I hope we can make it.

Imposible/distant future projects:

History-reading AI: History is best teached when you start from a linguistic approach. That is, you first teach both the disciplinar vocabulary and the propper keywords, and from that you build on causality's logic. It would be cool to make an AI recognize keywords and disciplinary vocabulary to make sense of historical texts and maybe reformat them into another text/platform/database. (this is very close to the next idea)

Extensive Historical DB: A database containing the most historical phenomena posible, which is crazy, I know. It would be a neverending iterative software in which, through historical documents, it would store historical process, events, dates, figures, etc. All this would then be presented in a webapp in which you could query historical data and it would return it in a wikipedia like manner, but much more concize and prioritized, with links to documents about the data requested. This could be automated to an extent by History-reading AI.

I'm out of characters, but this was fun. Plus, I don't want this to be any more cringy than it already is.

How can I secure firebase api keys in a hybrid app? There's chrome://inspect...

i am feeling angry and frustrated. not sure if it's a person ,or codebase or this bloody job. i have been into the company for 8 months and i feel like someone taking a lot of load while not getting enough team support to do it or any appreciation if i do it right.

i am not a senior by designation, but i do think my manager and my seniors have got their work easy when they see my work . like for eg, if on first release, they told me that i have to update unit tests and documentation, then on every subsequent release i did them by default and mentioning that with a small tick .

but they sure as hell don't make my work easy for me. their codebase is shitty and they don't give me KT, rather expect me to read everything on my own, understand on my own and then do everything on my own, then raise a pr , then merge that pr (once reviewed) , then create a release, then update the docs and finally publish the release and send the notification to the team
well fine, as a beginner dev, i think that's a good exercise, but if not in the coding step, their intervention would be needed in other steps like reviewing merging and releasing. but for those steps they again cause unnecessary delay. my senior is so shitty guy, he will just reply to any of my message after 2-3 hours

and his pr review process is also frustrating. he will keep me on call while reviewing each and every file of my pr and then suggest changes. that's good i guess, but why tf do you need to suggest something every fucking time? if i am doing such a shitty coding that you want me to redo some approach that i thought was correct , why don't you intervene beforehand? when i was messaging you for advice and when you ignored me for 3 hours? another eg : check my comment on root's rant https://devrant.com/rants/5845126/ (am talking about my tl there but he's also similar)

the tasks they give are also very frustrating. i am an android dev by profession, my previous company was a b2c edtech app that used kotlin, java11, a proper hierarchy and other latest Android advancements.

this company's main Android product is a java sdk that other android apps uses. the java code is verbose , repetitive and with a messed up architecture. for one api, the client is able to attach a listener to some service that is 4 layers down the hierarchy , while got other api, the client provides a listener which is kept as a weak reference while internal listeners come back with the values and update this weak reference . neither my team lead nor my seniors have been able to answer about logic for seperation among various files/classes/internal classes and unnecessary division of code makes me puke.

so by now you might have an idea of my situation: ugly codebase, unavailable/ignorant codeowners (my sr and TL) and tight deadlines.
but i haven't told you about the tasks, coz they get even more shittier

- in addition to adding features/ maintaining this horrible codebase , i would sometimes get task to fix queries by client . note that we have tons of customer representatives that would easily get those stupid queries resolced if they did their job correctly

- we also have hybrid and 3rd party sdks like react, flutter etc in total 7 hybrid sdks which uses this Android library as a dependency and have a wrapper written on its public facing apis in an equally horrible code style. that i have to maintain. i did not got much time/kt to learn these techs, but once my sr. half heartedly explained the code and now every thing about those awful sdls is my responsibility. thank god they don't give me the ios and web SDK too

- the worst is the shitty user side docs. I don't know what shit is going there, but we got like 4 people in the docs team and they are supposed to maintain the documentation of sdk, client side. however they have rasied 20 tickets about 20 pages for me to add more stuff there. like what are you guys supposed to do? we create the changelog, release notes , comments in pr , comments in codebase , test cases, test scenarios, fucking working sample apps and their code bases... then why tf are we supposed to do the documentation on an html based website too?? can't you just have a basic knowledge of running the sample, reading the docs and understand what is going around? do i need to be a master of english too in addition to being a frustrated coder?

just.... fml