As a developer, sometimes you hammer away on some useless solo side project for a few weeks. Maybe a small game, a web interface for your home-built storage server, or an app to turn your living room lights on an off.

I often see these posts and graphs here about motivation, about a desire to conceive perfection. You want to create a self-hosted Spotify clone "but better", or you set out to make the best todo app for iOS ever written.

These rants and memes often highlight how you start with this incredible drive, how your code is perfectly clean when you begin. Then it all oscillates between states of panic and surprise, sweat, tears and euphoria, an end in a disillusioned stare at the tangled mess you created, to gather dust forever in some private repository.

Writing a physics engine from scratch was harder than you expected. You needed a lot of ugly code to get your admin panel working in Safari. Some other shiny idea came along, and you decided to bite, even though you feel a burning guilt about the ever growing pile of unfinished failures.

All I want to say is:

No time was lost.

This is how senior developers are born. You strengthen your brain, the calluses on your mind provide you with perseverance to solve problems. Even if (no, *especially* if) you gave up on your project.

Eventually, giving up is good, it's a sign of wisdom an flexibility to focus on the broader domain again.

One of the things I love about failures is how varied they tend to be, how they force you to start seeing overarching patterns.

You don't notice the things you take back from your failures, they slip back sticking to you, undetected.

You get intuitions for strengths and weaknesses in patterns. Whenever you're matching two sparse ordered indexed lists, there's this corner of your brain lighting up on how to do it efficiently. You realize it's not the ORMs which suck, it's the fundamental object-relational impedance mismatch existing in all languages which causes problems, and you feel your fingers tingling whenever you encounter its effects in the future, ready to dive in ever so slightly deeper.

You notice you can suddenly solve completely abstract data problems using the pathfinding logic from your failed game. You realize you can use vector calculations from your physics engine to compare similarities in psychological behavior. You never understood trigonometry in high school, but while building a a deficient robotic Arduino abomination it suddenly started making sense.

You're building intuitions, continuously. These intuitions are grooves which become deeper each time you encounter fundamental patterns. The more variation in environments and topics you expose yourself to, the more permanent these associations become.

Failure is inconsequential, failure even deserves respect, failure builds intuition about patterns. Every single epiphany about similarity in patterns is an incredible victory.

Please, for the love of code...

Start and fail as many projects as you can.

Pro tip: If you are a junior, or senior but new at the company, don't start your conversations with:

"We're doing X wrong. At my previous company we did / at school I learned /in this book I read / according to this talk I watched, the right way to do X is ..."

Instead try:

"I'm curious why were doing X this way. I'm used to doing it differently."

I love flat-hierarchy teams, and people who think about flaws in procedures and proactively try to improve the tools we use are awesome, but the next kid walking up to me yelling we use git flow "wrong" will be smacked in the face with a keyboard.

If you come to me with curiosity and an open mind, I'll explain, and even return the favor by behaving the same way when I'm baffled by your seemingly retarded implementations.

Maybe we can learn from each other, maybe discover that "how I learned it" is sometimes good, sometimes bad.

But let's start with some social skills, not kicking off into every debate with a stretched leg and a red face.

We had a Commodore64. My dad used to be an electrical engineer and had programs on it for calculations, but sometimes I was allowed to play games on it.

When my mother passed away (late 80s, I was 7), I closed up completely. I didn't speak, locked myself into my room, skipped school to read in the library. My dad was a lovely caring man, but he was suffering from a mental disease, so he couldn't really handle the situation either.

A few weeks after the funeral, on my birthday, the C64 was set up in my bedroom, with the "programmers reference guide" on my desk. I stayed up late every night to read it and try the examples, thought about those programs while in school. I memorized the addresses of the sound and sprite buffers, learnt how programs were managed in memory and stored on the casette.

I worked on my own games, got lost in the stories I was writing, mostly scifi/fantasy RPGs. I bought 2764 eproms and soldered custom cartridges so I could store my finished work safely.

When I was 12 my dad disappeared, was found, and hospitalized with lost memory. I slipped through the cracks of child protection, felt responsible to take care of the house and pay the bills. After a year I got picked up and placed in foster care in a strict Christian family who disallowed the use of computers.

I ran away when I was 13, rented a student apartment using my orphanage checks (about €800/m), got a bunch of new and recycled computers on which I installed Debian, and learnt many new programming languages (C/C++, Haskell, JS, PHP, etc). My apartment mates joked about the 12 CRT monitors in my room, but I loved playing around with experimental networking setups. I tried to keep a low profile and attended high school, often faking my dad's signatures.

After a little over a year I was picked up by child protection again. My dad was living on his own again, partly recovered, and in front of a judge he agreed to be provisory legal guardian, despite his condition. I was ruled to be legally an adult at the age of 15, and got to keep living in the student flat (nation-wide foster parent shortage played a role).

OK, so this sounds like a sobstory. It isn't. I fondly remember my mom, my dad is doing pretty well, enjoying his old age together with an nice woman in some communal landhouse place.

I had a bit of a downturn from age 18-22 or so, lots of drugs and partying. Maybe I just needed to do that. I never finished any school (not even high school), but managed to build a relatively good career. My mom was a biochemist and left me a lot of books, and I started out as lab analyst for a pharma company, later went into phytogenetics, then aerospace (QA/NDT), and later back to pure programming again.

Computers helped me through a tough childhood.

They awakened a passion for creative writing, for math, for science as a whole. I'm a bit messed up, a bit of a survivalist, but currently quite happy and content with my life.

I try to keep reminding people around me, especially those who have just become parents, that you might feel like your kids need a perfect childhood, worrying about social development, dragging them to soccer matches and expensive schools...

But the most important part is to just love them, even if (or especially when) life is harsh and imperfect. Show them you love them with small gestures, and give their dreams the chance to flourish using any of the little resources you have available.

Me: Alright, let's code!

School: Psst. Hey.

Me: What?

School: Remember that assignment from last week?

Me: Oh god please no.

School: Yeah, it's tomorrow. And you have a Geography exam next Monday. You love geography, right?

Me: Please, no, I want to become a programmer, not a--

School: Shush... It's okay. Programming can wait. You want a to get a job, right? What would they say when they see your poor Geography?

Me: That doesn't even... Okay, fine, I'll do it...

* two days later *

Me: Fuck me! Finally! Let's do some coding now.

School: Psst. Hey.

I'm a self-taught 19-year-old programmer. Coding since 10, dropped out of high-school and got fist job at 15.

In the the early days I was extremely passionate, learning SICP, Algorithms, doing Haskell, C/C++, Rust, Assembly, writing toy compilers/interpreters, tweaking Gentoo/Arch. Even got a lambda tattoo on my arm after learning lambda-calculus and church numerals.

My first job - a company which raised $100,000 on kickstarter. The CEO was a dumb millionaire hippie, who was bored with his money, so he wanted to run a company even though he had no idea what he was doing. He used to talk about how he build our product, even tho he had 0 technical knowledge whatsoever. He was on news a few times which was pretty cringeworthy. The company had only 1 programmer (other than me) who was pretty decent.

We shipped the project, but soon we burned through kickstart money and the sales dried off. Instead of trying to aquire customers (or abandoning the project), boss kept looking for investors, which kept us afloat for an extra year.

Eventually the money dried up, and instead of closing gates, boss decreased our paychecks without our knowledge. He also converted us from full-time employees to "contractors" (also without our knowledge) so he wouldn't have to pay taxes for us. My paycheck decreased by 40% by I still stayed.

One day, I was trying to burn a USB drive, and I did "dd of=/dev/sda" instead of sdb, therefore wiping out our development server. They asked me to stay at company, but I turned in my resignation letter the next day (my highest ever post on reddit was in /r/TIFU).

Next, I found a job at a "finance" company. $50k/year as a 18-year-old. CEO was a good-looking smooth-talker who made few million bucks talking old people into giving him their retirement money.

He claimed he changed his ways, and was now trying to help average folks save money. So far I've been here 8 month and I do not see that happening. He forces me to do sketchy shit, that clearly doesn't have clients best interests in mind.

I am the only developer, and I quickly became a back-end and front-end ninja. 

I switched the company infrastructure from shitty drag+drop website builder, WordPress and shitty Excel macros into a beautiful custom-written python back-end.

Little did I know, this company doesn't need a real programmer. I don't have clear requirements, I get unrealistic deadlines, and boss is too busy to even communicate what he wants from me.

Eventually I sold my soul. I switched parts of it to WordPress, because I was not given enough time to write custom code properly.

For latest project, I switched from using custom React/Material/Sass to using drag+drop TypeForms for surveys.

I used to be an extremist FLOSS Richard Stallman fanboy, but eventually I traded my morals, dreams and ideals for a paycheck. Hey, $50k is not bad, so maybe I shouldn't be complaining? :(

I got addicted to pot for 2 years. Recently I've gotten arrested, and it is honestly one of the best things that ever happened to me. Before I got arrested, I did some freelancing for a mugshot website. In un-related news, my mugshot dissapeared.

I have been sober for 2 month now, and my brain is finally coming back. 

I know average developer hits a wall at around $80k, and then you have to either move into management or have your own business.

After getting sober, I realized that money isn't going to make me happy, and I don't want to manage people. I'm an old-school neck-beard hacker. My true passion is mathematics and physics. I don't want to glue bullshit libraries together. 

I want to write real code, trace kernel bugs, optimize compilers. Albeit, I was boring in the wrong generation.

I've started studying real analysis, brushing up differential equations, and now trying to tackle machine learning and Neural Networks, and understanding the juicy math behind gradient descent.

I don't know what my plan is for the future, but I'll figure it out as long as I have my brain. Maybe I will continue making shitty forms and collect paycheck, while studying mathematics. Maybe I will figure out something else.

But I can't just let my brain rot while chasing money and impressing dumb bosses. If I wait until I get rich to do things I love, my brain will be too far gone at that point. I can't just sell myself out. I'm coming back to my roots.

I still feel like after experiencing industry and pot, I'm a shittier developer than I was at age 15. But my passion is slowly coming back.

Any suggestions from wise ol' neckbeards on how to proceed?

I love listening to music and reading on the train every morning. On my way to the station, I get a text, "DUDE. ***** committed suicide."

He was a good friends of ours from high school. I remember once he got a few of us to go caving on homecoming since none of us had dates. He'd never finish a candy bar; would give half of everything away. He once drove out to California to try to start over; lasted three days and came home, but through a girl he met he was in Hawaii for a year.

He lived a lot of life, and he had a heart of gold.

I didn't get out my ebook on my phone. I didn't even put my headphones in.

I had lost another close friend from University while I was overseas. I remember being in the city art gallery when I got the news. I walked right out to the harbor, fell to my knees and cried. I always thought one day I'd be home and could shoot the shit with my old roommate. Now he was gone, and the only thing I had from him was a text from 10 days before saying, "I haven't been doing too well, but thanks for asking."

I'm back in another software engineering job, on the train to an 8-to-5, shakin it for the money. I couldn't read on the commute. I just looked out that window as the train car descended into the subway, and thought to myself, "What am I even doing anyway?"

I'm in my mid-30s; too young to be losing people like this.

I'm sorry man. I wish we had caught up sooner. I wish you weren't gone, but I know you're at peace.

Never let anyone make you believe that just because you don't have a specific skill which is 'required' for your dream job/a job you really want, you won't be able to reach it.

I've heard countless times that I could never do anything with programming/linux (server) engineering because I'm freaking bad at maths. They always said it was a requirement to understand it in order to become good at those two things.

Except for a few simple tests with 'okay' marks, I never got a good grade for it and failed it entirely at every school.

Guess who's a programmer (free time) and a professional linuxer right now!

It just pisses me off when people tell someone that because they don't possess a skill, they won't be able to make it to what they would love to do.

I was 15 years old and the first year of high school. Everything was new to me and I was such a newbie. At that time I had 2-3 year of programming behind me at an institution where they taught competitive programming. And I knew something about computers. Not much but more than most of my school mates. At that time I wanted to become "super cool hacker".

So we had this very very thought teacher for history which was also our form master. She really knows how to explained everything about history and in an interesting way. But while she was teaching we also had to write down notes from her powerpoints that were on a projector. And occasionally she would wait for us to copy everything and then move on with her lecture. But sometimes she didn't. This was frustrating as hell. The whole class would complain about this because you couldn't take notes down normal, you had to do it at double speed.

But she got one weak spot. She was not very good with computers. Our school computers were locked in some kinda closet so that students didn't have physical access to a computer and were also password protected. So I came up with the plan to plant wireless mouse in her computer so that I could control her mouse. At that time it seemed like SUPER HACKER MASTER PLAN.

So I got an opportunity one time when she left the classroom and let closet where the computer was open. I quickly sneaked the USB of the wireless mouse in the computer and then go back to the seat.

So THE FUN began.

Firstly I would only go back in powerpoint so that all my schoolmates could write down notes including me. And it was hilarious to watch when she didn't know what is happening. So then I would move her mouse when she tried to close some window. I would just move it slightly so she wouldn't notice that somebody else is controlling mouse. And by missing X button just by slight she would click other things and other things would pop up and now she had to close this thing so it became a nightmare for her. And she would become angry at the mouse and start complaining how the computer doesn't work and that mouse doesn't obey her.

One time when she didn't pay attention to her computer and projector I went to paint program and drew a heart and wrote we love you (In Slovenian Imamo vas radi -> See the picture below) and one of my school mates has the picture of it. We were all giggling and she didn't know what is was for. And I managed to close everything before she even noticed.

So it got to the point where she couldn't hand it more so she called our school IT guy so that he would check her computer (2 or 3 weeks passed before she called IT guy). And he didn't find anything. He was really crappy IT guy in general. So one week passed by and I still had messed with her mouse. So she got a replacement computer. Who would guessed all the problems went away (because I didn't have another mouse like that). I guess when our IT guy took the computer to his room and really thoroughly check it he found my USB.

So he told her what was the problem she was so pissed off really I didn't see her pissed off so much in all my 4 years in high school. She demanded the apology from whom did it. And at that moment my mind went through all possible scenarios... And the most likely one was that I was going to be expelled... And I didn't have the balls to say that I did it and I was too afraid... Thanks to God nobody from my school mates didn't tell that it was me.

While she waited that somebody would come forward there was one moment when our looks met and at that moment both of us knew that I was the one that did it.

Next day the whole class wrote the apology letter and she accepted it. But for the rest of 4 years whenever was there a problem with the computer I had to fixed it and she didn't trust anybody not even our IT guy at school. It was our unwritten contract that I would repair her computer to pay off my sin that I did. And she once even trusted me with her personal laptop.

So to end this story I have really high respect for her because she is a great teacher and great persons that guide me through my teen years. And we stayed in contact.

I just feel that I have to get this of my chest, because this have really me and my family really negative.
It have destroyed my will to be happy, sort of.

Well, my father have some kind of control behaviour. My whole life he has been angry on stuff that does not really matter
and I have always been the one that get all the shit - because I am the oldest. I was never allowed (maybee 3-4 times between age 8-15) to have any friends
over or stay with friends over night or after school. Because they "where bad and I would become like them".

I am happy that I meet my wife 6 years ago and moved away from home when I was 20, I kinda fled the situation from home to start my own life.
My father has always hated when boy/men had long hair and alot of beard - but that is something I always wanted to have. So when I moved from home
I start to let everything grow.

Two years ago, things got really fucked up when I did not shave all my beard of and cut down my hair because my mom had birthday. I did it the week after
because my brother graduated from school and we where going to visit, we did not want a repeat the situation from a couple of weeks before. After that I got
another job as a Linux sysadmin and started to grow the hair and beard again.

Last monday, my dad called and said that I am not welcome to visit them anymore. I am a "bad example" for my sibling
and he also said "you brother and sister does not feel so good (my sister fainted a couple of days before, which I did not know) so I have no time to care about you and your family"
I was stunned, I really wish that this was a joke but it is'nt.

I have always been bashed because of the choices I make in my life and for my own family (wife, and two kids + one more kid any day now)

When I choose to work with something that I love, they said that I am stupid because they basically think "that the PC is full of SATAN".
When they realized that I make more money than my parents combined they went silent.

I just wanted to write this shit of my chest, it is really fucked up and I am starting to loose the ability to have feelings - if you know what I mean.

Thank you devrant, for being one of the fun things I do, when I read all the rage, fucked up stories, hate, and so on. I do not feel alone :)

PS: I promise you, that you guys/gals will be the first one to know when my new kiddo arrives

Me: Finally, thanksgiving break. I can't wait to go 127.0.0.1 and read books all week.

Friend: Wait, so you found a phone number in a book? Dude, let's call it!

Me: ...

I'd love to have a friend at school who would understand my references but that's pretty much imposible.

I'm all for geeky, feminine clothing, but surely they could have consulted a real developer before putting Javascript on a BSOD-blue/old-school-console-development-blue blue dress? It's like having a shirt that says "I love tacos" with pictures of sushi. Similar, but just wrong.

Employer: so why do you want to join this organization?

Engineer: well like i said in the first 4 interviews, I love desks. Sitting behind them. Standing behind them.

Employer: are you a standing or sitting man?

Engineer: i like to sit in the morning and then switch up to stand at lunch.

Employer: a man with a plan. Very good. Do you remember anything from school?

Engineer: not a goddamn thing.

Employer: perfect. You don't need math. Just emails. You like emails?

Engineer: love emails.

Employer: there's gonna be a lot of emails.

Engineer: can't get enough emails.

Employer: perfect. Do you like a clear separation between life and work?

Engineer: oh not at all. I like it to muddy together in a never ending hell.

Employer: alright and you're familiar with work culture?

Engineer: oh those hours i work for free?

Employer: yes.

Engineer: I love that bullshit.

Employer: alright terrific. And are you familiar with the hate hierarchy?

Engineer: yeah the tech's hate the engineers, the engineers hate the tech's and the managers hate everyb-

Employer: everybody. Perfect. Alright I- honestly I think we'd like to make an offer.

Engineer: well, first I gotta leverage that with my current employer for a raise. And if they don't budge, I'll jump shut.

Employer: no loyalty at all?

Engineer: not at all.

Employer: you're hired.

Roommate: I thought you aren't into social media...

Me: This is devRant, it's different.

Roommate: How so.

Me: It's for like minds, very well structured and has this fun feature which let's me create myself as a cartoon for my profile pic.

Next Day..........…......……

Me: (walks into the room) Why are you laughing and why are you using my phone.

Roommate: I THINK I LOVE THIS APP. I might actually download it.

Note: Roommate is a musician who studied CS in school.

I ranted about this somewhat in the past, but my biggest hurdle has been my family and friends. Please don't take this as ego or conceit, because I don't feel this way about myself. But they all say because of my exotic appearance (Being Japanese and Norwegian) that I should be a model, dancer, actress, or some other vapid thing.

I love tech. My dad is an engineer, so I've been surrounded by tech since I was very young. So now that I am out of high school, I want to turn my coding hobby into a career. My family and friends are not necessarily discouraging me much anymore, but they still aren't supportive. Doesn't matter though, this is the path I've chosen.

My wife was going to school for a business degree but likes what I do as an engineer. She spent a month or so debating engineering or information security.

Yesterday she changed to a degree in information security.

Today she opens a GitHub and starts learning to program and I'm in love all over again.

Sooooo me and the lead dev got placed in the wrong job classification at work.

Without sounding too mean, we are placed under the same descriptor and pay scale reserved for secretaries, janitors and the people that do maintenance at work(we work for a college as developers) whilst our cowormer who manages the cms got the correct classification.

The manager went apeshit because the guidelines state that:

Making software products
Administration of dbs
Server maintenance and troubleshooting
Security (network)

And a lot of shit is covered on the exemption list and it is things that we do by a wide fucking margin. The classification would technically prohibit us from developing software and the whole it dptmnt went apeshit over it since he(lead developer) refuses (rightfully so) to touch anything and do basically nothing other than generate reports.

Its a fun situation. While we both got a substantial raise in salary(go figure) we also got demoted at the same time.

There is a department in IT which deals with the databases for other major applications, their title is "programmers" yet for some reason me and the lead end up writing all the sql code that they ever need. They make waaaaay more money than me and the lead do, even in the correct classification.

Resolution: manager is working with the head of the department to correct this blasphemy WHILE asking for a higher pay than even the "programmers"

I love this woman. She has balls man. When the president of the school paraded around the office asking for an update on a high priority app she said that I am being gracious enough to work on it even though i am not supposed to. The fucking prick asked if i could speed it up to where she said that most of my work I do it on my off time, which by law is now something that I cannot do for the school and that she does not expect any of her devs to do jack shit unless shit gets fixed quick. With the correct pay.

Naturally, the president did not like such predicament and thus urged the HR department(which is globally hated now since they fucked up everyone's classification) to fix it.

Dunno if I will get above the pay that she requested. But seeing that royal ammount of LADY BALLS really means something to me. Which is why i would not trade that woman for a job at any of my dream workplaces.

Meanwhile, the level of stress placed my 12 years of service diabetic lead dev at the hospital. Fuck the hr department for real, fuck the vps of the school that fucked this up royally and fuck people in this city in general. I really care for my team, and the lead dev is one of my best friends and a good developer, this shit will not fucking go unnoticed and the HR department is now in low priority level for the software that we build for them

Still. I am amazed to have a manager that actually looks out for us instead of putting a nice face for the pricks that screwed us over.

I have been working since I was 16, went through the Army, am 27 now and it is the first time that I have seen such manager.

She can't read this, but she knows how much I appreciate her.

A lite story about how i was hired at 16 years old.
Me at 11. Modifying HTML templates to create a sign up page for a game. Me at 14. Created some worthless websites in the past (at a training), barely knowing the structure of HTML.
Me at 15. Made my first website for a customer (using WordPress for the first time, didn't know how to use it before). The website was selling apartments, it was looking very good and went on the first place on SEO. Got my first money (100E).
Me at 16. Made some other WordPress websites for other customers (one of them still haven't paid, the website was made way back in 2015), so i shut down the website and replaced it with a text saying "This website is currently down until the customers pays the developer".
Me still at 16. A friend of my mom sent my CV to multiple companies, to work as a intern to learn more, and one of them accepted me for a interview (a well known and one of the best company with 30~ people)
Went to the interview, asked me about what i realized, what i can do, about my knowledges in others languages etc (forgot to mention that i love the computers from young age, so i was very good in them, specially at the age of 11), so they were happy about it and asked called me for another interview with the boss. Went to it, the boss asked me some tricky questions, i answered them immediately, he was very surprised about my knowledge at that age and accepted me immediately. After working for 2 weeks, instead of hiring me as a intern for 4-6 months, they instead hired me as a normal person, as a front end developer, for an undefined date, making 250 E / Month (6 hours per day in summer)
Now, I'm in the 11 grade, working for them about 9 months, making 315 E / Month, working for 4 hours per day after school, the place is cool, my entire team (family) is very funny and very cool, and they asked me many times to help them with different problems they had and i fixed them immediately (they really didn't know some stuff which i knew). Worked on big projects and worked on some from scratch by myself and they were very happy about how it went.

TLDR: was talented in computers (software), I'm a fast learner, barely knew about making websites, hired as a front end developer at 16 yr.

Btw, I'm in love with DevRant, I'm feeling like home everytime i visit this community :').

P.S. Sorry for my bad English and the mistakes i made.

alert("Thanks for reading my first rant!");

So I'm a entry level female Developer and I started a contract to hire position in July. Its my first job as a developer and I love almost everything about it. Except this..., there is a Senior Female Developer on my team who hates me and isn't shy about it. She goes for the throat man! She magnifies any mistake I make, hell she calls me out on things that people would consider positive. In sprint planning this week she got mad at me for pulling tasks from the backlog after finishing mine early. I've tried to do everything I could to make her like me. I patiently listen when she goes on and on about her damn cats, kids, sports, ah everything, and she is a non stop talker.

Her main problem with me, so she tells the head of engineering, is that I bug her too much. I almost laughed when I heard this was her main issue with me! Sure, I asked her the normal amount of newbie questions but it's not like I don't know how to read code or google! In fact I started avoiding talking to her about a month ago because she was so rude to me. Now getting hired on full time comes down to whether or not she can stand me still if I am working on another team. I'm so frustrated because it's impossible to prove my worth to this company with this crazy lady making me look bad. I have no problems with anyone else at work. In fact a lot of us have become good friends. No one understands why she hates me so much. It feels like middle school all over again.

On top of that there is an even newer hire who she is supposed to help bring on to the team, but because of her horrible management skills, I have become his defecto mentor for learning the project, as well as the technologies we use. The stress of being in an uncertain contract to hire position + tyrant coworker + helping the new guy + still learning and having my own work to do has been overwhelming! I don't know what to do other than hope that she doesn't try to sabotage me moving to a new team.

To those that think they can't make it.
To those that are put down by those that don't understand you.
And to those that have never had a dream come true.

Not a rant, but the story of how I got into programming

I've always been into tech/electronics. I remember being told once that when I was 3, I used to take plug sockets to pieces. When I was 7, I built a computer with my dad.
There isn't a thing in my room that hasn't been dismantled and put back together again. Except for the things that weren't put back together again ;)

When I was 15, I got a phone for Christmas. It was a pretty crappy phone, the LG P350 (optimus ME). But I loved it all the same.
However I knew it could do a lot more. It ran a bloated, slow version of Android 2.2.
So I went searching, how can I make it faster, how to make it do more. And I found a huge community around Android ROMs. Obviously the first thing I did was flashed this ROM. Sure, there were bugs, but I was instantly in love with it. My phone was freed.

From there I went on to exploring what else can be done.
I wanted to learn how to script, so over the weekend I wrote a 1000 line batch (Windows cmd) script that would root the phone and flash a recovery environment onto it. Pretty basic. Lots of switch statements, but I was proud of it. I'd achieved something. It wasn't new to the world, but it was my first experience at programming.

But it wasn't enough, I needed more.
So I set out to actually building the roms. I installed Linux. I wanted to learn how to utilise Linux better, so I rewrote my script in bash.
By this time, I'd joined a team for developing on similar spec'd phones. Without the funds to by new devices, we began working on more radical projects.
Between us, we ported newer kernels to our devices. We rebased much of the chipset drivers onto newer equivalents to add new features.

And then..

Well, it was exam season. I was suffering from personal issues (which I will not detail), and that, with the work on Android, I ended up failing the exams.
I still passed, but not to the level I expected.

So I gave up on school, and went head first into a new kind of development. "continue doing what you love. You'll make it" is what I told myself.

I found python by contributing to an IRC bot. I learnt it by reading the codebase. Anything I didn't understand, I researched. Anything I wanted to do, google was there to help me through it.

Then it was exam season again. Even though I'd given up on school, I was still going. It was easier to stay in than do anything about it.
A few weeks before the exams, I had a panic attack. I was behind on coursework, and I knew I would do poorly on exams.
So I dropped out.
I was disappointed, my family was disappointed.
So I did the only thing I felt I could do. I set out to get a job as a developer.

At this stage, I'd not done anything special. So I started aiming bigger. Contributing to projects maintained by Sony and Google, learning from them. Building my own projects to assist with my old Android friends.
I managed to land a contract, however due to the stresses at home, I had to drop it after a month.
Everything was going well, I felt ready to get a full time job as a developer, after 2 years of experience in the community.

Then I had to wake up.
Unfortunately, my advisors (I was a job seeker at the time) didn't understand the potential of learning to be a developer. With them, it's "university for a skilled job".
They see the word "computer" on a CV, they instantly say "tech support".
I played ball, I did what I could for them. But they'd always put me down, saying I wasn't good enough, that I'd never get a job.
I hated them. I'd row with them every other day.

By God, I would prove them wrong.

And then I found them. Or, to be more precise, they found me. A startup in London got in contact with me. They seemed like decent people. I spoke with their developers, and they knew their stuff, these were people that I can learn from.
I travelled 4 hours to go for an interview, then 4 hours back.
When I got the email saying they'd move me to London, I was over the moon.
I did exactly what everyone was telling me I couldn't do.

1.5 years later, I'm still working with them. We all respect each other, and we all learn from each other.

I'm ever grateful to them for taking a shot with me. I had no professional experience, and I was by no means the most skilled individual they interviewed.

Many people have a dream. I won't lie, I once dreamed of working at Google. But after the journey I've been through, I wouldn't have where I am now any other way. Though, in time, I wish to share this dream with another.
I hope that all of you reach your dreams too.

Sorry for the long post. The details are brief, but there are only 5k characters ;)

I love windows, this happened during a class, thats the teacher's computer

Hello everyone, this is my first time here so hi! I want to tell you all a story about my current situation.

At 18 while in the military I was able to get my first computer, it was a small hp pavilion laptop with windows 7. The system would crash constantly, even though I would only use it for googling stuff and using fb to talk to people. 5 months after I got it and continuously hated it decided to find out why and who could I blame (other than myself) for the system making me do the ctrl alt del dance all the time....

Found out that there are people called computer programmers that made software. Decided to give it a go since I had some free time most days. Started out with c++ because it was being recommended in some websites. Had many "oh deeeeer lord" moments. After not getting much traction I decided to move to Java which seemed like an easier step than C++. Had fun, but after some verbosity I decided to move into more dynamic lands. Tried JS and since at the time there was no Node and I was not very into the idea of building websites I decided to move into Python, Ruby, PHP and Perl and had a really great time using and learning all of them. I decided to get good in theoretical aspects of computer programming and since I had a knack for math I decided to get started with basic computer science concepts.

I absolutely frigging loved it. And not only that, but learning new things became an obsession, the kind that would make me go to bed at 02:40 am just to wake up at 04:00 or 06:00 because the military is like that. I really wanted to absorb as much as I could since I wanted to go to college for it and wanted to be prepared since I did not wanted to be a complete newb. Took Harvard CS50, Standford Programming 101 with Java, Rice's Python course and MIT's Python programming class. I had so much fun I don't regret it one bit.
By the time I got to college I had already made the jump to Linux and was an adept Arch user, Its not that it was superior or anything, but it really forced me to learn about Linux and working around a terminal and the internals of the system to get what I want. Now a days I settle for Fedora or Debian based systems since they are easier and time is money.

Uni was a breeze, math was fun and the programming classes seemed like glorified "Hello World" courses. I had fun, but not that much fun, most of my time was spent getting better at actual coding. I am no genius, nor my grades were super amazing(I did graduate with honors though) but I had fun, which never really happened in school before that.

While in school I took my first programming gig! It was in ASP.NET MVC, we were using C#, I got the job through a customer that I met at work, I was working in retail during the time and absolutely hated it. I remember being so excited with the gig, I got to meet other developers! Where I am from there aren't that many and most of them are very specialized, so they only get concerned with certain aspects of coding (e.g VBA developers.....) and that is until I met the lead dev. He was by far one of the biggest assholes I had ever met in my life. Absolutely nothing that I would do or say made hem not be a dick. My code was steady, but I would find bugs of incomplete stuff that he would do, whenever I would fix it he would belittle me and constantly remind me of my position as a "junior dev" in the company saying things as "if you have an issue with my code or standards tell me, but do not touch the code" which was funny considering that I would not be able to advance without those fixes. I quit not even 3 months latter because I could not stand the dick, neither 2 of the other developers since the immediately resigned after they got their own courage.

A year latter I was able to find myself another gig. I was hesitant for a moment since it was another remote position in which I had already had a crappy experience. Boy this one was bad. To be fair, this was on me since I had to get good with Lumen after only having some exposure to Laravel. Which I did mentioned repeatedly even though he did offer to train me in order to help him. Same thing, after a couple of weeks of being told how much I did not know I decided to get out.

That is 2 strikes.

So I waited a little while and took a position inside another company that was using vanilla PHP to build their services. Their system was solid though, the lead engineer remains a friend and I did learn a lot from him. I got contracted because they were looking for a Java developer. The salary was good. But when I got there they mentioned that they wanted a developer in Java...to build Android. At the time I was using Java with Spring so I though "well how hard can this be! I already use Android so the love for the system is there, lets do this!" And it was an intense, fun and really amazing experience.

-- To be continued.

I think I'm doomed when it comes to posting the kinds of rants that get upvotes. The pattern I've noticed is that profanity-laden rants get more love than ones that are more tame. I was raised old-school, so profanity isn't my thing. Guess I'll just sit back and watch.

It is with a heavy heart that I said aufwiedersehen to my mom last night. She passed peacefully in her sleep, and is now resting in the fields and forests of heaven. She was born in 1932 in Hamburg, Germany, and at age 7 the world around her exploded into one of the most horrific wars that Europe or the world had seen up to that time. By the time it was over, she was thirteen, and had spent many of her formative years witnessing how low humanity can get in the treatement of fellow humans. She survived the post-war years, and came to the US in the late 1950's, and met my dad while in nursing school. She had four chidren, Tim, Chris, Tanya, and myself. She was a doting and caring mom, who dedicated herself to raising her children. She loved to cook, loved animals, especially dogs, and love human beings in general, and had a compassionate and kind heart. There is a small, empty space in the world that she filled, but heaven is a little brighter with her smile and her laughter. I miss you mom, but I know I will see you again some day. Aufwiedersehen, lieber Mutti! Wir sehen uns bald.

So my first job is also my current one. I am a computer science student and for my course we had to do a project for an actual client. The client was a consultancy company and after working my ass off, their software development partner decided to hire me and a classmate.

The company is pretty small (we are now with the 6 of us) and the general attitude is very nice. I've only been working there for a few weeks and I feel very welcome. The work isn't too hard (mainly web development with geographic features/data).
In rough lines the stack always consists of a Java Rest API and an Angular frontend that retrieved the data from the API.
So far I have learned a ton and I am really happy that I have this opportunity. Lunch is provided and we always eat together, we crack jokes, have fun, play games in the break. Coffee machine next to my desk. I'd love to work here all my life :d

Since I'm still in school I can't go to the office every day. Instead I am at the office every Monday and on other days I try to work from school or home.

I'm from the UK. My CS teacher took a dislike to me in junior high school, dissuading me from taking the classes I needed to take computer science at college. I ended up starting an economics major and then dropping out.

With the support of my family and friends I started over as a self taught as a developer.

I'm now a Tech Director in New York and love my job.

More than 1.5k lines of code within a function, I love the old school php </3

!rant
Linux vs Microsoft

Well, this war is certainly one of the oldest. IMO,
Linux - great for automating stuff, free, and customisable.
Windows - user friendly, softwares much more easily available, much easier to use.

Frankly, I have tried using Linux a lot of times, but never liked it one bit. I am a GUI fan and hate to type commands for every little thing. Plus installing Ubuntu wiped out my disk once and I lost all my school memories ( this was in 2008, I didn't know much about backups, was quite young) ,so I am quite vary of it. I just don't feel it to be intuitive. Just to do a simple task, I loathe to learn difficult commands, and just read the syntax.

However, I have no bias against people who use Linux.

It is like religion, live and let live, follow whatever suits you.

On devrant, why's there so much hate for Windows? Because it is paid? Because it has updates? So what!
I never had a problem with it, I update once a month, takes 10 mins. If you set up your active hours correctly, it works great, you can disable updates also. Windows 10 is highly stable. It is paid, but in my country almost all laptops come with windows preinstalled. The OS-less laptops are about $10 cheaper, which is not that much to freak about.

Would love to hear your views and logical arguments.
Please be polite.

I'll use this topic to segue into a related (lonely) story befitting my mood these past weeks.

This is entire story going to sound egotistical, especially this next part, but it's really not. (At least I don't think so?)

As I'm almost entirely self-taught, having another dev giving me good advice would have been nice. I've only known / worked with a few people who were better devs than I, and rarely ever received good advice from them.

One of those better devs was my first computer science teacher. Looking back, he was pretty average, but he held us to high standards and gave good advice. The two that really stuck with me were: 1) "save every time you've done something you don't want to redo," and 2) "printf is your best debugging friend; add it everywhere there's something you want to watch." Probably the best and most helpful advice I've ever received 😊

I've seen other people here posting advice like "never hardcode" or "modularity keeps your code clean" -- I had to discover these pretty simple concepts entirely on my own. School (and later college) were filled with terrible teachers and worse students, and so were almost entirely useless for learning anything new.

The only decent dev I knew had brilliant ideas (genetic algorithms, sandboxing, ...) before they were widely used, but could rarely implement them well because he was generally an idiot. (Idiot sevant, I think? Definitely the idiot part.) I couldn't stand him. Completely bypassing a ridiculously long story, I helped him on a project to build his own OS from scratch; we made very impressive progress, even to this day. Custom bootloader, hardware interfacing, memory management, (semi) sandboxed processes, gui, example programs ...; we were in highschool. I'm still surprised and impressed with what we accomplished.

But besides him, almost every other dev I met was mediocre. Even outside of school, I went so many years without having another competent dev to work with. I went through various jobs helping other dev(s) on their projects (or rewriting them), learning new languages/frameworks almost every time: php, pascal, perl, zend, js, vb, rails, node, .... I learned new concepts occasionally (which was wonderful) but overall it was just tedious and never paid well because I was too young to be taken seriously (and female, further exacerbating it). On the bright side, it didn't dwindle my love for coding, and I usually spent my evenings playing with projects of my own.

The second dev (and one one of the best I've ever met) went by Novo. His approach to a game engine reminded me of General Relativity: Everything was modular, had a rich inheritance tree, and could receive user input at any point along said tree. A user could attach their view/control to any object. (Computer control methods could be attached in this way as well.) UI would obviously change depending on how the user could interact and the number of objects; admins could view/monitor any of these. Almost every object / class of object could talk to almost everything else. It was beautiful. I learned so much from his designs. (Honestly, I don't remember the code at all, and that saddens me.) There were other things, too, but that one amazed me the most.

I havent met anyone like him ever again.

Anyway, I don't know if I can really answer this week's question. I definitely received some good advice while initially learning, but past that it's all been through discovering things on my own.

It's been lonely. ☹

Started showing my brother some deep learning tutorials and I have him reading a book.

I really need for him to realize how smart he is. He was never academically inclined. I always told my mother that it had to do with the same dislike of school that I always had and how a couple of really shitty teachers could run one's motivation to the ground.

I always found him brilliant. Had a good standing with common sense amd logical thinking. He was interested in math for a while(same as me) but school made him hate it. He managed to pass all the state exams needed to graduate from H.S and was able to succesfully pass the military ASVAB with a very good grade.

But after H.S he went down the drain with what he wanted to do.

I love my brother and really want him to find out just how smart I think he is and this would probably be one of my biggest experiments with him. Maybe, just maybe if I get him to realize that he can understand these advanced concepts without a teacher his(fear?) Of school might go away enough for him to give it a second go. Fuck man I don't even need for him to go and get a B.S in comp sci, an associate degree would be just fine. It can be on anything, I just want him to do something.

Sometimes I feel as if this was my fault. At one point he told me that he feels shadowed by my grades. And my family was always proud of what I did in H.S and at uni. I feel(sometimes) that I should have paid more attention to him as he was going to school, help out a little more and encourage him more.

He feels as if he is meant for a dead end miserable working life, and I really can't bear the idea of him wasting himself away to something like that.

I really hope this shit works man...i really need for this to work, he doesn't even need to like it, just realize that it is possible.

Friend of mine at college is struggling with his cpp class.

Have been helping this guy since forever with it, he is not a coder by any means nor does he display any sort of affinity or "talent" for it. But he does make up with intense dedication. Still he knows that he will not be pursuing a career in software engineering, this is just a class.

The thing is, he showed me a video of his class. The instructor is middle eastern with a thick accent. Accent so thick I need subtitles for this motherfucker.

He has learned more from me that he has at uni. And at my day job the interns say the same thing. I love teaching and far prefer it over working on projects.

This week we have a meeting with the head of the i.t dptmtn at school as nd I will try to pitch myself in as a faculty member by popular demand.

I would love to teach, i have experience in the field and learn a lot from going over shit as an instructor. I can make one go from wtf is JS used for to handling promises and writing Angular in days.

I really want to teach man.

So, I love scribbling ideas on a whiteboard, like I'm sure most developers here do!

It's a release of creativity and a starting point for many sources of software I've developed in the past. And something that doesn't happen all too often where I get an overflow of ideas and put them on a board.

This week was one such rare week where the ideas just came streaming in and the floodgates weren't able to hold them back...

Then came the dam wall down river... MANAGEMENT!

They had already sold a product to the customer that didn't exist yet and tasked a junior developer (I'm talking fresh out of school) to deliver. Of course, this was promised last year already and now the customer had paid and is waiting for the goods!

Along I come with this design which will enable the product to grow, allow the junior development to learn, me to mentor and for us all to let the creative juices flow, all while I get to flex my web dev muscles.

But management wants something now! A temporary solution for the customer to keep them happy, seeing as they've paid some money, which is to be developed by the junior dev on his lonesome.

Meanwhile my beautiful design has been snuffed out and are mere streaks and smears on a whiteboard, and the creative juices seem to have dried up since.

I am feeling somewhat despondent at the moment...

I work for healthcare client project in a start up, worked two years straight without a break.

Client is very inconsiderate about developers work-life balance, he always wants to release every features yesterday.

Never had a reasonable deadline, worked late nights most of the time. No one had backbone to control this client from our side.

Its only developers team, no project management, scrum masters or anything, everything has to be taken care by Dev's.

I decided to take a week break from work.

The first day of my leave he pinged me 3 times to change an "from email" address for notification email which no one give a damn about.

I never replied or did anything. But the part of myself is dying of guilt.

Now I can't relax myself completely.

Re-thinking of my life choices atm.

I loved programming since high school, I can work on computers 24/7 without tired. That's how much I love it. Now I'm just tired of it.

If anyone who read this till here. Thank you.

So we're hiring for a new junior dev and for the most part it's been going great! We have some promising candidates and I am so glad to finally have a new dev on the team!

However, I would like to take a moment and offer a few suggestions to the people who wish to work for this great and illustrious company:

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE APPLY FOR THE JOB USING THE METHOD INDICATED IN THE AD. Please use our fancy, top-of-the-line, whiz-bang, cloud-based "talent acquisition" system that we paid way too much money for. I promise you, it's easy! Please don't send in your application by email, mail, telephone, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, telegram or carrier pigeon. But most importantly...

FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS BEAUTIFUL IN THIS WORLD DO NOT SHOW UP AT OUR OFFICE UNANNOUNCED RESUME-IN-HAND. Believe it or not I do have an actual job that I spend my day doing! If I'm not in a meeting or at lunch or working from home, the best possible scenario is that you'll get 30 seconds of awkward small talk and be pointed to our whiz-bang, top-of-the-line "talent acquisition" system which you should have used in the first place (you did read the ad, right?). And at this point whatever you do...

DO NOT DEMAND AN ON-THE-SPOT INTERVIEW WHEN YOU SHOW UP UNANNOUNCED TO OUR OFFICE! Like, really? Do you think that you've wowed me so with your 30 seconds of awkward small talk that clearly I cannot wait to see what you will do with an entire hour? Look, I prepare for my interviews. I research you, your previous employers, your school and the hobbies you list on your resume. I check out your GitHub and LinkedIn. I may even Google your name! If that is all in order, I try to hassle some people into sitting in with me, find a time that works for everyone, and hope that there is a meeting room available. I'm not going to interview you at reception at 4pm on a Friday afternoon.

Please submit your application through our whiz-bang, top-of-the-line online "talent acquisition" system. Once I figure out how to log in, I promise I will spend an evening and read through all your cover letters with the utmost care. If you seem OK, you'll get an interview. There aren't that many developers in this town.

!rant

I just wanted to say how much I freaking love this place. I come here every day, and what I find is a magical community of people who are accepting of everyone, supportive of each others hopes and dreams and sympathize with those struggling with jobs or school or just life in general. DevRant honestly makes the world a better place, at least for me. Thank you @dfox and @trogus for this beautiful Eden!

Okay so this is just a rant about my personal life because if I post it any where else no one will really care.

So I graduated from a vocational high school where I learned about basic IT and networking skills but I mostly focused on my programming. and I LOVED that school honestly the environment was so amazing and everyone and everything about it was amazing. then I started college recently hoping for the same thing and its just depressing me, and my depression is coming back and I cant stop it because I cant distract myself from it. My friends are always off playing Monster Hunter Ultimate and Im just wishing theyd hop back on Warframe so we can play again.. They say they will but they really wont so im usually just playing alone or going online which is sometimes fun if you have people that talk back.

so i took myself to the official warframe discord to find people that would help but everytime I ask I just get ignored. So Im stuck playing alone.

while thats happening Im not really getting any messages from anyone besides my girlfriend which is nice but she isnt able to really keep up a conversation and shes often busy with school as well. when I try to talk to any of my friends they arent really interested to talk or just send short replies that obviously tell me to go away. one friend in particular she and I used to talk everyday not even in a romantic way just straight up besties for life, but after one of my relationships ended she basically took her side and never talks to me now. Ive just been really lonely and wanting to just have my friends talk to me again or just have some programming friends I can chill in a discord server while we code but I cant bring myself to ask anyone on the specific server im in for programming..

Honestly idk if anyone on devrant really looks at my posts and thinks "oh look Bubbles posted again". I feel like im not good enough to be here because Im not nearly as good as all of you, Im mostly just here asking questions or posting extremely fucking long posts no one wants to read. and yet this is still where most of my interactions are and I love that this devRant community makes me laugh or feel better about myself sometimes. and I thank all of you for that and I remember your @ 's all the time.

honestly the only real highlight of my week was when my teacher of my vocational class asked me to come back as an unpaid intern to help teach his new programming class and It made me happy but other than that I havent been too happy.

if anyone actually got through this holy shit youre awesome and thank you a lot its appreciated.

How can you defend your ugly unstructured mess of a PR, when every spit-droplet infused spray of words from your mouth is full of syntax errors?

How can you call yourself a developer without being aware of basic logic? I ain't got no tolerance for double negations, not not true is just true, you doltish twat.

WHEN YOU TALK THERE IS A CLOUD OF RED SQUIGGLY LINES IN THE AIR FLOATING AROUND YOUR HEAD.

I mean what the fuck is up with eggcetera? Why are you just swapping out letters? What has the little ligature t in & ever done to you? Do I have to fucking replace & with 🥚 so your word diarrhea makes sense again?

NO. JUST PLEASE... STOP TALKING. YOU'RE RAPING LANGUAGE, AND IT WAS ALREADY BEATEN DEAD.

Unlike me, you have a degree in computer science... but how, how the fuck did you pass? How did neither your tongue nor code get stuck in a linter?

AND YOUR RESPONSE IS STILL: "YOU DON'T NEED TO LEARN WHEN YOU'RE FINISHED WITH SCHOOL" ... "WHAT DOES IT MATTER, IT WORKS, RIGHT?"

NO, IT'S NOT RIGHT.

You're lucky I love refactoring.

I'll start with a medical grade steel scalpel and a long sharp hook. Maybe I can clean up this brain a little. See if the tests turn green if I cut some of this gray matter away... plenty of unreachable statements, so many unnecessary loops...

Might have to start from scratch.

I had a coworker that was an Air Force pilot (99% certain he was telling the truth as I was working for a government contractor and he had security clearance so I'd be a little surprised if he fooled HR and our whole team). Thing is... He genuinely believed the earth is flat. Whenever anybody would ask "haven't you seen the curvature of the earth? Like... More than once?" He'd respond with "yes I have, what's your point?". Uh.... Okay.

Didn't help that he also was convinced cpp is the only language you ever need for any project. Like, "what if instead of building a web API and two separate native mobile app frontends (Swift/Java)... We instead build our own proprietary C++ framework that somehow runs on IOS and Android and we can also use it for our Backend instead of .Net?"

I'm not saying I love Java or Swift or that at some point I haven't thought about why we can't just use cpp in both, but you're supposed to grow out of that kind of thinking. I think every noobie or college students thinks "oh there's got to be a way". But at some point in your career you realize even if you could, it wouldn't be any easier to use and the performance gain would crazy small compared to amount of effort and you'd be playing catch up with both IOS/Android forever.

But no matter how many times we'd shoot it down, he'd keep bringing it up. And he wasn't straight out of school or something. He had like 20 years of programming experience.

I don't have a lot of memorable co-workers that were positive but honestly I think that's because usually if they're good at what they do I don't have to interact with them a bunch or spend time thinking "Jesus what am I going to have to fix next from this guy". I definitely have worked with good/great programmers, they just don't stand out as much as the shitty ones.

Am I the only one to notice the coincidence that wk143 is about dating.

When I in school, we use to write 143 in place of "I love you" (letter count) within a heart with a aroow going across the heart.

"we" excludes me.

Does linux suck? Imho, Yes.
A lot of the people bash windows regarding automatic restarts, updates, bsod etc.
I may be unusually lucky, but the last bsod I saw was in 2014 because of a faulty synaptics driver.

I've really tried to use linux to see what the hype is all about. Quite frankly, it sucked. The first time it wiped out all my data, I realized the value of backups. Hence I do not have a single pic of my school now, thanks to complicated ubuntu mounting.
Next is driver support. When I plug in a device, I expect it to work. I don't want to spend a day googling for drivers.
Why the fuck would I want to use a black terminal which gives me a headache. Am I in 1980? Which sadistic asshole designed vim ?
I have seen linux developers who claim to be linux experts and love linux. They take so long to do simple shit. For god's sake don't tell me there are GUI versions of linux available. I'd rather work in windows 95.
Why in the world would anyone want to use ls to see the contents of a directory! It is seriously so fucking unproductive.
I can't just download a software, click next a couple of times, and be done. No no no. I've to do sudo apt get update. Then try to find the fucking package. And if all goes well, there's always the dependency issue which is going to bite me in the ass. If google and stackoverflow go down, most linux devs will die a cruel death.

Fuck you linux.
I'm not saying windows 10 is the best, but at least I don't have to crawl through shit to use it. If you don't like automatic updates, disable it you moron. It is easier than renaming a damn file in linux.

Young love is so heartbreaking...

"---if you see a beautiful flower on road trying to grow, would you water it or just pluck it out because you find it nice?"

"--I will take it from the roots, go to my home, plant it in my garden, and water it till the day either of us die"

And today after 6 years of school-life, the flower has decided to get plucked by some asshole Garland maker, so stop comparing yourself with the flower you think yourself to be and enjoy your life with the biggest shitbag you liked...
;__;

When you're at school following a Java course and someone says: "So now we can add Java to our websites to make them more interactive".
Me: " *sigh* You mean Javascript not Ja... oh well nevermind. I would love to see you implement Java."

This one is more...puzzling than anything else.

We had a consultant come in, a young guy recently out of school. He completed his basic onboarding stuff, got along okay with everyone, etc., but was quiet and kept to himself.

At the end of his first week, we were heading out the door on Friday afternoon, and someone offhandedly said to him “see you next week” or something benign like that. He responded with “yeah we’ll see,” which was...odd.

And then he completely disappeared – we never saw him again.

Okay, so he just decided the job wasn’t for him and quit, right? What’s so strange about that?

Well, for one, the company technically owed him a paycheck for the week, but they couldn’t reach him despite multiple attempts. They eventually left a message and said if you want to get paid, come in and pick up your check. He never did.

But not only that, he *abandoned his car* at the office! On the Friday that he left, he apparently got a ride or a taxi home, and then he just never came back in to get his car. The company eventually had to tow it.

I just would love to know the backstory here. Why would someone go through the trouble to apply for a job, interview, accept the position, work for a week – and then quit without getting paid and leave their car behind??

I was fresh out of college, love Java and looking for a job.

Well, after exact 1 month I sucked the reality. I found an Ad for a designer and got selected. Point is I mention my qualification in high school because I was feeling bad to disclose my higher degree for such a job.

I worked for 6 months there and every day was like working as the covert operative. I always knew I can write an automated script for all that daily shit. But for the sake of the landlord rent, I kept quiet. (I literally care for his children, I was the only source of income)

Then, my friend that day 16-Sep-2012 I wrote a program to do all the repetitive thing I used to do.
My boss found out and I expose my self as Spiderman do to Jen, Sir! I am a Programmer.

Sadly it was, no surprise to him. He said, on your first day I found out that you are not high school. Because with such accuracy only a graduate can do such level of the job.

He praised me and motivated me, my first non-technical master.

I started attending this IoT class in some computer training school. During my first class, I was early because I had the raspberry pi class earlier in the day. A guy came up to me and started chatting to me, he was bragging about how he created some big projects, how he works in his dad's company which develops IoT products (he codes it). Later on in class he talked about how he hacked his school's server or something and changed his marks. Whenever he brags, he has a tendency to use a deeper voice (which is pretty annoying).

Anyways so I thought he is pretty good and maybe I can learn a thing or two from him. A few class later, I started having my doubts, why? Because he doesn't know how to debug code, he copies the lecturer's code and still copies it wrong, and he doesn't know what variables and constants are. He uses IE and doesn't know about GitHub.

Now he asks me or the guy in front for help in class. He makes the class more fun, it's funny listening to him brag. Love it.

When I was 17 years old. I had difficulties in understanding math problem “Calculus” (I can’t remember which one was it). This one day when we were in a Computer Lab, our teacher was showing us how really software’s are made. During my time, it was vb6. I paid close attention. When I went home, I started to think things that I can make using that software so one day I went to my teacher and asked if I can have a copy of the vb6. He gave vb6 and told me that inside are few eBooks that will help in learning.

Fuck School, from that day I started to concentrate on programming only. Made a small calculator which will help me to understand a Calculus problem and double check my answer. From that day, I love programming.

I’ m 26 now and a full stack software developer. All I want to do it build cool shit, something that will blow the eyeball of my friends and that eyeball should pop out from their asshole.

Joke: The person who scored highest in the computer class was afraid to switch on the PC.

All the time while I'm programming I hate Java.... Don't hate me now :D I'm learning Java in high school. I very love very fast programming languages such as C and C++, so this is why I don't like Java, but there are some reasons why I like Java. I just started learning how to create own window. What the hack is this? This is so simple. I tried to create window in C/C++ with OpenGL, just blank window with color. Complicated..... But with java it's fairy tale.
You can add me now to Java familly, but remember I also love C++.

So here your are, Hello World Java FX app :D

Final goal:
Create window application similar scratch.

Did I ever say I love my PM? He's fucking awesome.

In the summer I got an internship at this company and the PM had plans to turn me into a permanent employee, junior position I assume. I told him I'd need a month after school started to see how things went with school and the job at the same time. In the end I decided I couldn't work full-time because I don't have time for it. Also, I want to explore a bit the CS field and see if there's anything else I like (quantum computing and low level programming are at the top of my list), so I decided I won't be renewing my contract as an intern either.

Last week I went into a call with my PM to tell him about all of this and I did not expect the response I got. He actually thinks I'm doing right and supported me in my decision to learn other things. I didn't expect this kind of response at all and it made me feel much, much better (I was pretty nervous to tell him). He also told me that if I want to work on something else in order to learn I just have to ask (I currently do web dev).

But that's not all. He gives us, developers, space to work and doesn't micromanage us. He has technical understanding, doesn't force deadlines on us and understands that sometimes things take longer than expected. He is just great and I'm kind of sad I'll be leaving this job because he's awesome and (from what I read here on devrant) that seems to be pretty rare.

Anyways, that's it, no anger or anything today, I just wanted to say I like my PM very much.

I really appreciate all the discourse around imposter syndrome even though I feel like I’m ACTUALLY an imposter you’re all... imposter imposters! I’m the only one who REALLY isn’t capable of doing this work.

I love programming so much but I cannot force myself to believe in myself????? I cannot imagine being able to do this as a career. I’m afraid I’m gonna have to drop out of school or even if I don’t drop out I won’t be able to find a job cause I just suck at this. Ugh

That's it. I've had enough.

I lost my job yesterday (again) and the Irish cumstain who lives in the room next to me got pissed last night and kicked my door in because he thought I had his phone(?) and was ignoring him, when I was at work.

Long story short, he ripped my friends back door apart, tried to fight me (which ended with me chasing him down the street with a plank).

Police came and did a wonderful job as always by making us shake hands and 'promise' to leave each other alone.

THIS ISN'T FUCKING PRIMARY SCHOOL. DRAG HIM AWAY BEFORE I DO, YOU IGNORANT FUCKING PIGS.

Oh, and my 'friend' then had a schizophrenic episode and blamed it all on me(?!?). I then went to buy 2 bottles of vodka and decided to get pissed before trying to kill myself.

Ah, I love humans. Dirty, ignorant, blood sucking bags of sweaty meat and delicate bone. I really want to turn this Irish cunt into a skinsack of blood and guts, but I'm waiting patiently. He's going to wake up one night tied up and gagged, with me dragging him to a forest somewhere far far away...

Is it weird that I want to make him scream, cry, and shit himself at the same time?

So I finished my first semester in NYU as a CD master. During the first semester I took a class called heuristic problem solving. Every week a competitive game will be introduced to us, and will be played in two weeks. And trust me, the games aren't easy. I teamed up with another guy who I had no idea was and named our team as we don't know. At the end of the semester we won seven out of nine games, and by won I meant that we beat the whole class in the match. And my teammate became a really good friend.

By telling this story, I want to make a point. I love problem solving, and not problems in a algorithm book where you apply an algorithm and do some trick to solve it, but real world problem where you hope for the best and anticipate, predict your opponent's move. However, American's school system doesn't teach that.

When I applied to graduate school, no school wanted me because I have an average GPA of 3.6, and no outstanding achievements. I can solve problems in my dream becaus I have an active mind, I can propose solution to a project one month before my teammates realized they essentially were doing what I told them the solution should be. But so what, I can't write those on my application.

One of the professor told me that my professor shared the story of my team during a faculty dinner, and they were very impressed by our achievement. So I guess I'm not dumb. But after all, companies and schools will look at your transcript and decide who you are.

I love myself for having random thoughts all the time that can lead to innovative problem solving. But I also hate myself for not able to study like the good kids are.

Well, I was Always into Computers and Games and stuff and at some point, I started wondering: "why does Computer Go brrr when I Hit this Button?".

It was WinAPI C++ and I was amazed by the tons of work the programmers must have put into all this.

13 year old me was Like: "I can make a Game, cant be too hard."

It was hard.
Turns out I grabbed a Unity Version and tried Things, followed a tutorial and Made a funny jet Fighter Game (which I sadly lost).

Then an article got me into checking out Linux based systems and pentesting.
*Promptly Burns persistent Kali Live to USB Stick"
"Wow zhis koohl".
Had Lots of fun with Metasploit.

Years pass and I wrap my head around Javascript, Node, HTML and CSS, I tried making a Website, worked Out to some extent.

More years pass, we annoy our teacher so long until he opens up an arduino course at school.
He does.

We built weather stations with an ESP32 and C++ via Arduino Software, literally build 3 quadrocopter drones with remote Control and RGB lighting.
Then, Cherry on the top of everything, we win the drone flying Contest everyone gets some nice stuff.

A couple weeks later my class teacher requests me and two of my friends to come along on one of their annual teacher meetings where there are a bunch of teachers from other schools and where they discuss new technology and stuff.

We are allowed to present 3D printing, some of our past programming and some of the tech we've built.

Teachers were amazed, I had huge amounts of fun answering their questions and explaining stuff to them.

Finally done with Realschulabschluss (Middle-grade-graduation) and High school Starts.
It's great, we finally have actual CS lessons, we lesen Java now.
It's fuckton of fun and I ace all of it.
Probably the best grades I ever had in any class.

Then, in my free time, I started writing some simple programs, firstvI extended our crappy Greenfoot Marsrover Project and gave it procedural Landscape Generation (sort of), added a Power system, reactors, Iron and uranium or, refineries, all kinds of cool stuff.

After teaching myself more Java, I start making some actual projects such as "Ranchu's bag of useful and not so useful stuff", namely my OnyxLib library on my GitHub.

More time passes, more Projects are finished, I get addicted to coding, literally.
My days were literally Eat, Code, sleep, repeat.

After breaking that unhealthy cycle I fixed it with Long Breaks and Others activities in between.

In conclusion I Always wanted to know what goes on beneath the beautiful front end of the computer, found out, and it was the most amazing thing ever.
I always had constant fun while coding (except for when you don't have fun) and really enjoyed it at most times.
I Just really love it.

About a year back now I noticed that I was really quite good at what I was doing and I wanted to continue learning and using my programming.
That's when I knew that shit was made for me.

...fuck that's a long read.

Legit considering quitting my job and going back to my old workplace.

Fucking getting real tired of fucking around with html and css on the daily.

The school is fucking crashing down on our shitty as web services. But my manager (as much as we love her) is forcing everyone to double time on a rather stupid project that keeps constantly changing on the daily.

I am so fucking tired of it

Hey there! -first rant-

I need your advice mighty ranters.. I'm an introverted gal studying Computer Science at uni, and i love this field. Wanna be a web or app developer..

I need your help about 2 things:

1. Literally ANY advice, or things you wish you knew, when you were a rookie

2. I'm currently living in solitude, because of hard times in the past and i find making friends much more difficult at uni than in high school. It even starts to affect my productivity in a bad way. I have a hard time trusting people.
So any advice about this? How do you cope with too much solitude? Is there maybe a group for girl programmers? I don't know..

All advice are welcomed! (and IT jokes too, to make my day :D )
Thanks a lot !

Ps.: You are great! Awesome community.

TL;DR: a dude thinks good graphics make a game good.

so every day when the school ends, me, a dude and another girl walk home. as expected we have lots of time to talk about anything. I wanted that day to tell that dude about what I am going to buy on steam summer sales with just 15$.

me: I am going for this summer to play lots of games so I saved some money for this summer sale. do you want to hear what awesome games I am about to buy with just 15$?
dude: yeah, sure thing.

he wasn't expecting much

M: this summer I am going to buy 5 games and maybe keep more for some others. they are so awesome!
D: ok, let's hear those 'awesome' games!
M: the first game is devil daggers, maybe you don't kno...
D: of course I do. is that game
M: I want to get that game just to improve my aim, but maybe I will have some fun.
D: yeah yeah, I know that game
M: *poker face*

I KNEW he doesn't know this game and anything about pc games because of the followings...

M: ok then... I also want to get Half-Life 2 : Episode 1 & 2. they have pretty rich story and I already have both Half-Lives.
D: holy shit but the graphics... ok, one more 'awesome' game of yours.
M: there are 2 episodes, 2 separate games. I really don't care about the graphics, I love the story.
D: continue with your 'awesom' games...

that dude didn't even knew about half-life and said that game is bad.

M: another game I want to get is Battlefront 2, the one from 2005 and...
D: 2005!?
M: yeah, the new one sucks, and the gameplay in the original is way better and...
D: *starts laughing* 2005!? I thought you were getting the new one. I imagine the graphics being like this car. *points to a fucking car, yeah that kind of comparasion, I know*

after this I was so fucking pissed off. he doesn't even know about some cult classics that are meant to be played. he doesn't even have a pc nor console and he is stating his opinion on fine air for fucks sake!

M: ok, what about getting the facts and then make an opinon.
D: yeah yeah *making fun of me at that point*

I didn't tell him that I wanted to buy the binding of isaac, cause it was enough for me. I told him to watch some reviews on these games and blog posts about them and I am sure tomorrow he will say that he 'wathced' the reviews and that those games are garbage. it's his style to underestimate things. I fucking hate him, not becuase of the games, but because he underestimates everything that is not on his list of 'good games'. that list consists of new games with great graphics(3D only).

sorry if I exaggerate saying that those games are cult classics but I really look forward into buying them.

if you have another indie game to run on this potato machine(2gb ram, pentium dual-core 2.1ghz, gtx 525m) that I should or at least try comment, I am open to suggestions!

Not an actual teacher but definitely the guy who thought me the most: @java9

@java9 is a friend of mine who started the apprenticeship with me, but had serval years more of experience than I did.

At first he helped me get through the first complex tasks.

Luckily we are in the same class at professional school, and he helped me studying a lot.

Because of him I was able to develop my skills rather quickly.

Over the years our relationship developed into a close friendship.

Now we are working together as a team on more than side project and I've learned to love his perfectionism when it comes to code.

It's a pleasure to work with you @java9

Thanks for reading fellow ranter, here is a picture of us sharing a beer as a bonus

Hey DevRant fam! Hope you are all doing very well wherever you may be. This is not a dev related post but just something i wanted to get off my chest , 20 minutes ago I watched the movie “night school” along side my brother. I was sat down along side two girls on my left and i thought “hey they seem nice” in my mind.

Well i was wrong - throughout parts of the movie she would randomly turn to give me a weird look, as if i was something else? Unfortunately i suffer from eczema and really cant help it and have to undergo treatment monthly and with that comes bullying and judgement from randoms.

What really broke me was that she had the nerves to comment loudly to her friend right next to her about me, say things like “ damn is he ugly “ and many things along those lines, and also about how i ate my pringles? Like hey i love my pringle chips!.

At the end, movie done, my brother is happy I’m happy(not really) we both got up the two random girls walked in front and just gave me this weird stare and had to judge me by the way i walked, thats a whole other issue but i just wish they would have the thought- how would you feel if you put yourself in my position and have to go through my emotions you put me through because you wouldn’t think before you speak ? :-( well thats not everything but some of what i have to deal with unfortunately - sorry this is so long.

Hope all is good for everyone- thank you ☺️

Milo

Some years ago i attended to a summer school abroad. I instantly built a connecection with this one girl, we spend the whole week together, talking, sharing humor, deep conversations etc. We also won the prize for the best project together. I guess it looked like the beginning of a love story for the rest of the course. For me it didn't exactly, actually I didn't had much romantic feelings for her; she was the arrogant, manipulative type I thought I could handle a friend but never as girl friend. We shared some darkness so to say. But I really hoped for a new close friendship. Since she had a boyfriend back home i thought she most likely wanted just the same. Anyway I was a bit worried she might want more because she made me quite a lot of compliments and told me how she liked me.
And yes, she wanted more: Whenever we talked on the phone after the summer school or met (she lived in a city not far away from mine by coincidence) she begged me for help with coding. She had a well paid as extremely interesting PHD position with a topic between political science and computer science. Besides classical humanities methods her topic would require a lot of coding though. But she had zero, absolutely zero clue of programming, and, as it turned out, zero interesst. I told her from the beginning she would have to learn quite a lot or pay someone to code for her. It was far too much to do as a favour by a friends or such. And, since it was part of her fucking PHD it would have been cheating somehow of she didn't do it herself. But instead, she kept texting me if I could 'help to fix some bugs', sending me unrelated code fragments she copied from SO and not even tried to understand. So I told her to fuck off at one point. After all it was not that we have been friends for decades; we only knew each other for a couple of months an spent only one week together. So thats it.
But I still think of it from time to time and it makes me angry because it feels like she was only nice to me because she thought i am this nerd guy who falls instantly in love to a charming good looking girl and does everything for her. I did neither at all but indeed wanted to be friends with her, thats bad enough. It even makes me more more angry that she actually has this awesome PHD project about politics in the fucking digital world and think of programmers like this. And that she will succeed without understanding anything bacause in the end there would have been a dude who did all the work for her I bet.

I am the manager of a customer service team of about 10-12 members. Most of the team members are right out of school and this is their first professional job and their ages range from 22-24. I am about 10 years older than all of my employees. We have a great team and great working relationships. They all do great work and we have established a great team culture.

Well, a couple of months ago, I noticed something odd that my team (and other employees in the building) started doing. They would see each other in the hallways or break room and say “quack quack” like a duck. I assumed this was an inside joke and thought nothing of it and wrote it off as playful silliness or thought I perhaps missed a moment in a recent movie or TV show to which the quacks were referring.

Fast forward a few months. I needed to do some printing and our printer is in a room that can be locked by anyone when it is in use (our team often has large volumes of printing they need to do and it helps to be able to sort things in there by yourself, as multiple people can get their pages mixed up and it turns into a mess). The door had been locked the entire day and this was around noon, and the manager I have the key to the door in case someone forgot to unlock it when they left. I walked in, and there were two of my employees on the couch in the copier room having sex. I immediately closed the door and left.

This was last week and as you can imagine things are very awkward between the three of us. I haven’t addressed the situation yet because of a few factors: This was during both of their lunch hours. They were not doing this on the clock (they had both clocked out, I immediately checked). We have an understanding that you can go or do anything on your lunch that you want, as long as you’re back after an hour. Also, as you mentioned in your answer last week to the person who overheard their coworker involved in “adult activities,” these people are adults and old enough to make their own choices.

But that’s not the end of the story. That same day, after my team had left, I was wrapping up and putting a meeting agenda on each of their desks for our meeting the next day. Out in broad daylight on the guys desk (one of the employees I had caught in the printing room) was a piece of paper at the top that said “Duck Club.” Underneath it, it had a list of locations of places in and around the office followed by “points.” 25 points – president’s desk, 10 points – car in the parking lot, 20 points – copier room, etc.

So here is my theory about what is going on (and I think I am right). This “Duck Club” is a club people at work where people get “points” for having sex in these locations around the office. I think that is also where the quacking comes into play. Perhaps this is some weird mating call between members to let them know they want to get some “points” with the other person, and if they quack back, they meet up somewhere to “score.” The two I caught in the copier room I have heard “quacking” before.

I know this is all extremely weird. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to write you because of how weird this seems (plus I was a little embarrassed). I have no idea what to do. As I mentioned above, they weren’t on the clock when this happened, they’re all adults, and technically I broke a rule by entering the copier room when it was locked, and would have never caught them if I had obeyed that rule. The only company rule I can think of that these two broke is using the copier room for other purposes, preventing someone else from using it.

I would love to know your opinion on this. I tend to want to sweep it under the rug because I’m kind of a shy person and would be extremely embarrassed to bring it up.

I’m new to programming. I first learned G-Code and M-Code for CNC machines and being a machinist got boring, so now I’m in School for computer science. But I swear, the amount of motherfuckers that act like they are the programming gods and they know everything there is to know just because they’ve been a programmer for so and so amount of years just grinds my gears. They act like some knowledge is important while other knowledge is useless, and generalize it and push that belief on everyone. But fail to realize that some people, such as myself, just love computers in every facet. I don’t give a damn how many years of programming experience you have and how many people you’ve taught. If you act like a stuck up know it all and walk around like your shit don’t stink, I wouldn’t work with you even if I had the same amount of experience as you.

!(dev || rant)

Dudes and dudettes, i shall ask you all one question: what is the thing/hobby (or things/hobbies) that you always wanted to get into and never gor the chance?

For me i thing first would be brewing, as i would love to refer to myself as a "Brewmaster" like in Warcraft (bonus points if i wear a panda costume) more then an "Engineer" (a trust worthy one even), but i think i might have the chance to as soon as i will have the chance (and means) to move alone as i already know a few things from my dad. The second would be something really cool i saw on reddut and made me remember the old times when i will watch timelapses in this topic on you tube: Crystal growing! Like, middle school chemistry, not meth! At least for now.. 🤔 Anyway, here is a nice pic with some dude's work, looking forward to hear abiut yours!!

PS: Bonus Points for a pic related to the thingie!

I was writing some super basic following ai on paper during another prolifically stagnant physics class, and my teacher walks over to me...

She looks over my shoulder at the paper and continues to stare...

“Programming stuff,” I replied when she prompted me as to what it is that I was writing.

Then she continued to stare...

And stare...

Pointing at the word “energy”, she made a most enlightening and endearing comment: “Looks like physics.”

Then she walked away

And that was that

Up until last year I was pre-med. I graduated college with a bachelors in Biology. Took my MCAT, prepped my med school applications for submission, and then realized I didn’t wanna pursue this pseudo-dream I had for so long. I realized the reality of the sacrifice and the lifestyle I was gonna make and began to regret not studying what I truly liked to be doing on my off time which is computers and programming. Long story short, here I am back in school getting a degree in CS, and can whole heartily admit, I’m happy doing/learning what I love.

It’s amazing how life works. Never would I have imagined that I’d make a switch like that, but I know it’s the best decision I’ve made so far.

The Last Rodeo

Hi dear ranters. I've been a dev since I was 12, that makes 18 freakin years. Although I love my job and being someone who not only consumes but also produces, I am a bit grown tired of the industry.

About 6 years ago I cut ties from the last agency I worked with to become a freelancer. I ignited many projects, helped many of my customers (still helping most of them) to realize their goals. But I've come to realize that my country doesn't like old school laborers like myself (for some reasons I would explain if asked).

So I've been thinking: what would I do if I wasn't doing this job? What would you do for living if you were to stop being a developer? Let's have a chat.

Just got accepted as a volunteer (teacher assistant) in a non-profit organization, funded by Microsoft.
They teach high school students CS twice a week.
I know it might not be much, because I will not be payed, but I will be trained and teach alongside Google and Microsoft engineers.
The organization is called TEALS.

I hope it is a good experience and build a good network.
I do not have any friends, nor any engineer friend since I moved in USA, so I think this is a good opportunity.

P.S. Please for the love of god do not bash here Microsoft. Everyone, even the people who rant about hating Microsoft, will accept a job there if they got the chance. So please stop the hypocrisy if you intend to do some "sarcastic" comment about this organization funded by Microsoft.

I used to love Linux.
Now I hate it. I'm moving back to windows.

6th fixing time it's done this to me. When I try to login it just sends me right back to the login screen.
CTRL +ALT +F2 let's me login?!

Ugg I have a school paper to write.

So.. I moving back to the dark side.

This is what I get for trying out arch I guess.

It was not until 20 that I had access to regular computing. In school I had to take up Finance as my Maths was weak. I couldn't take Sciences including computers and how could I , my childhood wasn't as fortunate as my peers.

When I entered college I got my brothers old gaming pc as we had a couple of work laptops at home. I was always the inquisitive one. I got interested in web development just because of curiosity while I was on my first job and I hated it. I used to write article and freelanced and ran a website for friends where I learned a lot by trial and error. I single handedly learned mySQL, PHP and basic web development.

The main job was a core night from 11pm -8 am . Drained me and my social life drowned. I lost my brother in an accident. Silver Lining: I quit my job.

I understood I was interested in computers like nothing else. I single handedly learned a programming language. After leaving the job I took up classes to learn from root level in a structured manner: Web design and Development.

Now though I am jobless and I am searching for my second job it is for something I love. :)

I swear I almost had a nervous breakdown today.

Advisor at college has told me I won't be graduating until Feb 2019, I'll be 29 with a degree in IT and my minor in software engineering. I feel like I'm just playing catch up to the younger crowd who got there sooner.

On top of that all the entry level programming jobs I applied to have rejected me on the basis of not having my degree yet. They're impressed with my work but they want me out of school. I have to wait it out until I'm closer to graduating.

On good days when I code Java web applets love what I do and I wouldn't have it different, but on days like today I feel like shit and wonder if my degree was worth it, especially when I factor in that my degree only went up to pre-calc on the math end. (I'm thinking of majoring in a masters in CS as a way to makeup, maybe)

I'm frustrated and I feel the same kind of loneliness when I graduated HS. I know there's a light at the end but some days it's just hell.

I'm sure a lot of you have gone through this. Any ideas to destress?

!rant
For the first time in my life I've had a use-case where I got to use UNION in SQL.

I love it when I get to use these rare bits of knowledge I picked up in school

I’m developing a fairly sophisticated desktop app in Python with PyQt5 as the widget set. Because my partner insists that all the kids these days love Python.

Piss on Python. And that goes double for PyQt5.

I’m on the absolute hardest section of the app. It’s a fairly complex import of data from PDF reports. There are so many different parts that I decided to go with a wizard.

So, I built a QWizard in Qt Designer. It generates a C++ .ui file, but you just truck it over to the command line and run this pyuic5 command, and it converts to a handy dandy Python class. Woo. You can subclass it and consume it from your Python script.

Sounded SO MUCH EASIER than writing the wizard from scratch. But OH NO. I need to do custom validation on my custom text control at every stage to control when the Next and Finish buttons are enabled, which means I gotta overwrite some damn event.

But I can’t. Because I can’t subclass the individual pages. Because they’re part of the same damn file and the wizard offers no access to them.

I’m almost certain that I’m going to have to completely redesign the wizard so that it’s pages are in separate files, which means I have to recode the bitch as well.

The cherry on top is that there’s zero documentation for this specific thing. None. No QWizard documentation exists for PyQt5 (if there is, they’re doing a damn good job of hiding it), so I have to read the documentation for PyQt4. Not the same animal. Close, but different. Even with the differences aside, this documentation is minimal and useless. “We’re going to tell you in very general terms what you should do, but we’ll give you zero idea how to do it. And we know the very common code method you’ll want to try first won’t work.”

And getting at this stuff when you do it in Qt Designer is WAY different. And all that documentation is in C++. Because apparently you HAVE to speak C++ if you want any real info about PyQt. Because that’s perfectly reasonable, right?

So, now I’ve lowered myself and posted a question on Stack. Because, hey, once you get past the power-tripping, mouth-breathing, basement-dwelling, neck-bearded high school punching bags picking apart your question rather than, I dunno..., BEING HELPFUL, sometimes you can get good info there. Sometimes. They seriously saved my ass at least one time.

But yeah. Fuck Python. Fuck everything Qt.

I started programing when I almost failed at some IT class 7 years ago when I was 16 in high school. So I started googling how to do basic stuff in java (if, for, while,... ) and I just fall in love with it 😊 I still remember how I wanted to make a button in Java so I googled: how to button in java 😂
Here I am still in love with it and I think I will always have this need to learn new programming languages, technologies, frameworks,... 😊🤓

I've now for months been lurking on this awesome app and I love the community. I've been trying to self learn coding but kept hitting a wall. But now i'm starting in school to learn coding and i'm so exited to learn it and be a part of this awesome community.

Teacher

I love teaching but I hated school so the thought of going back...

Still teach people stuff when I get the chance. Taught my brother to drive, teaching a friend to drive, bridge knowledge gaps with colleagues, volunteer with the children's programs at my church

I love to program — I discovered that about myself a few years ago. Beforehand, I only KNEW how to program. But then I discovered the power programming gives you to create things, and even help your surroundings. So now, I can surely say, that I love programming. Heck, I am even dating a very talented programmer.

But despite all the pleasure I derive from it, I feel lonely sometimes. True, there are millions of programmers all over the world. I also know I am not the only one who prefers coding over going to the movies, taking a walk, eating or sleeping.

Why do I feel this way?

My loneliness is a gendered loneliness, as there are not many women in my field. For sure, there are women who study computer science in high school or at the university, and some even work as programmers. But they are very, very few!

I often underestimate my abilities and feel intimated for no apparent reason

#random thoughts

Fuck my country's universities, fucking greedy assholes that ruin lives, suck wallets and sucks life from the young.

I'm currently studying something completely non related to programming: History. And I really love it. I love reading 1000 pages for each test and essay and talking about the problem of naming the Cold War a war and cold and etc. The problem is that I won't make as much money as I would make even as a self taught developer.

After considering my possibilities, I thought I could enter the computer science carreer. I don't know how this works in other countries but here you would have to study 3 years of an engineering common plan and then specialise in some sort of industrial engineering while getting an specialisation also in computer science. After some counting, I got to the conclusion that I would be studying 6 years (or more), and wasting half of those years learning stuff that I would never use nor care about.

But that's not all. This semester I took the introductory class for programming. It's pretty basic stuff but at least they teach a little bit about algorithms and problem solving. It turns out that a friend of mine that's about to graduate from computer science applied as a helper for the prof. I was so excited I could finally talk with someone about code!

Since the start of the semester I have been passing a lot of time with him and talking about the future. Turns out he doesn't understand shit about code but somehow he learns everything by hard and has passed every computer science course without having any practical abilities. I don't blame him, he's studying hard and playing by the rules, and turns out that he has wasted precious time of his life also learning biology, chemistry, structural engineering, hidraulic engineering, transportation engineering and a ton of engineerings that he won't use.

If the university would instead take that time to teach better courses of practical programming or leave him some time to try out the stuff he learns by hard, he wouldn't have to hear me talking about stuff he doesn't comprehend but feels that should, and wouldn't be utterly depressed, he wouldn't take SIX years to learn less than what he could learn in less than THREE years. And this isn't just a random university, it is one of the 2 best universities we have here and was in 2014 the best of all Latin America.

And wait, here comes the best part. In my country, levels of education are heavily stratified. After school, superior studies give different titles according to the time you've been studying. Yes just the time. And these titles are what your employers will see to give you different work positions. So for studying a 2 year carreer you get a technic job which pays well but not too well, then at 4 years you get a license title which only proves that you know stuff, then at 5 or more (depending on what you are studying) you get a professional degree and will get payed as a full fledged professional. So here, even though in other countries it takes 6 years to have a masters in engineering, they give you just the engineering degree, and it would take 2 (or more) more years to have a master. Even though you can totally teach engineering in 4 years, here they take BY LAW 2 years more, while paying what a fucking full stack of pairs of kidneys would cost in the black market.

So fuck that shit, I won't be throwing my money at any university. I hope they get reformed soon becouse this is fucking dumb, really really dumb. Like 2 year old shit dumb. I'll just learn a bit more, make some projects until I have a decent portfolio and apply to some company that cares for real knowledge and not just a piece of paper with letters and a shitty logo on it.

I was just commiting some code on GitHub for school tomorrow and I kinda got lost in the commit description..

Ah, it just hit me so hard I had the urge to get it out.. Helped, tho, love you Git

I'm back. I'm the old itsnameless. I left programming because high school stuff. It was just overwhelming. I, slowly, left programming until the point I forgot everything. A lot of evaluations, high school stuff just for remembering NOTHING. The only thing I did this year on high school was losing a really big part of my time remembering weird stuff.

After all this stuff, I would love to spend my 2 months vacations mostly in the place that I've met lovely, awesome people. That place is called devRant.

So, yeah, hello there.

P.S: Of course after the vacations I'll still be here. lol

Let's talk about the cargo cult of N-factor authentication. It's not some magic security dust you can just sprinkle onto your app "for security purposes".

I once had a client who had a client who I did server maintenance for. Every month I was scheduled to go to the site, stick my fingerprint in their scanner, which would then display my recorded face prominently on their screens, have my name and purpose verified by the contact person, and only then would the guards let me in.

HAHA no of course not. On top of all of that, they ask for a company ID and will not let me in without one.

Because after all, I can easily forge my face, fingerprints, on-site client contact, appointment, and approval. But printing out and laminating a company ID is impossible.

---

With apologies to my "first best friend" in High School, I've forgotten which of the dozens of canonicalisations of which of your nicknames I've put in as my answer to your security question. I've also forgotten if I actually listed you as my first best friend, or my dog - which would actually be more accurate - and actually which dog, as there are times in my High School life that there were more tails than humans in the house.

I have not forgotten these out of spite, but simply because I have also forgotten which of the dozen services of this prominent bullshit computer company I actually signed up for way back in college, which itself has been more than a decade ago. That I actually apparently already signed up for the service before actually eludes me, because in fact, I have no love for their myriad products.

What I have NOT forgotten is my "end of the universe"-grade password, or email, or full legal name and the ability to demonstrate a clear line of continuity of my identity from wherever that was to now.

Because of previous security screwups in the past, this prominent bullshit company has forced its users to activate its second, third, and Nth factors. A possibly decade-old security question; a phone number long lost; whatever - before you can use your account.

Note: not "view sensitive data" about the account, like full name, billing address, and contact info. Not "change settings" of the account, such as changing account info, email, etc. Apparently all those are the lowest tier of security meant to be protected by mere "end of the universe"-grade passwords and a second factor such as email, which itself is likely to be sold by a company that also cargo cults N-factor auth. For REAL hard info, let's ask the guy who we just showed the address to "What street he lived in" and a couple others.

Explaining this to the company's support hotline is an exercise in...

"It's for your security."

"It's not. You're just locking me out of my account. I can show you a government ID corroborating all the other account info."

"But we can't, for security."

"It's not security. Get me your boss."

...

"It's for security."

Ascended Anime Nerd

Got started with Dragonball Z when it first came stateside. Brother was borrowing fansubs of the Cell and Buu sagas back when people were wondering if Goku would ever finish Snake Road.

Around that time I started noticing some serious discrepancies between the broadcast translations and the fansubs, and so I decided to cut out the middleman—after all, how hard can it be to learn Japanese?—and did a search on AltaVista for a “kanji course”, turning up a course hosted by Rice University that taught basic Japanese using Magic Knight Rayearth and YuuYuu Hakusho.

Turns out the answer to the difficulty question is that anything van be simple to learn, if you don’t know it’s supposed to be hard. Especially if you embrace the parts everyone else dreads (falling in love with kanji, in my case).

Over the next nine months I ditched my Spanish class—and all my other classes, for that matter—to study Japanese in the computer lab. I was reviewing the lessons, playing JRPGs on SNES9X (stored on a ZIP disk, since every computer in the lab had a ZIP drive), and transcribing the scripts so I could transliterate and translate them thereafter. In a lab that went so far as to uninstall Minesweeper and Solitaire to discourage playing games on school computers, I had free reign to do so openly because the one time I got confronted for playing a game I had 150+ leaves of handwritten transcriptions to show them.

Long story short, by the time I took Japanese 101 9 months later it was like Hermione in Snape’s potions class, since I had already taught myself about 2 years’ worth of material. I then transferred out to a college that did a one-class-per-month “modular” system that basically allowed me to take 8 more Japanese classes full-time for the following year. By the time my exchange trip came up I was sofar ahead of the curriculum I was taking classes alongside the native Japanese students.

Running out of linguistic topics, I did an independent study on classical Japanese literature in its original, unmodernized grammar and orthography. A topic I’m still fairly active with 15 years later.

a very polite recruiter in linkedin after our connection asked me why i choose this kind of career. I answered this and i hope i did not ranted a lot :)

i was trying to figure out what profession would make me more happy than others. I was always felt comfortable with computers, i was installing cracked games, exploring folders to paste the cracks etc. later in school when i learned the first algorithms like bubblesort i was knowing that i liked it. I also like working in silence while searching for solutions. That is the first part, the second is that i made a search about what industries would give me a safer future and international opportunities without having to be stuck in my country only. By working and getting more experience i felt in love with my job and trying to learn everything i missed and give to my boss or customers professional results with quality. I like it as a lifestyle, it combines a magic feeling of spells with the logical procedures of science. So why not? it combines all my loves together: creative thinking, technology, mental work, internet, music at the workflow, job demand, opportunities, and money! I hope i helped you my friend i am at your service for every question you have :)

I was good at school, I was and I'm still loving video games. I wanted to create my video games. Now I like robots and I'm learning how to create robots. I could say : programming allowed me to build and personnalize the things I liked in my life. And I found who I am. I love to create.

In an art school. 3 years into our artistic degree. They decided to teach us web development. Me coming from a background of web though that this was going to be easy.

Little did I know that I'll see a new perspective of web design. These people, many of whom do not know of flat design, are actually making real shit that looks gorgeous! I love my classmates!

8 years ago,
I studied in a small school and every year we had computer classes, but most of the times, it gets cancelled or we just sit and browse and sometimes few of us don't even get a computer.
In that time, the only reason I was attached with the computer was due to games.
Our curriculum mentioned HTML, CSS, Access and Excel, which none of the teachers taught us for past 2 years. I wanted to learn all does, but gave up since no one cared about it.(please note that time, I didn't know even to use YouTube or W3schools to learn stuffs)
Then, a new student joined in our class and also a new computer ma'am joined our school. Both of them turned out to be really fun when it comes to learning computers.
She was active during last sessions and teach us HTML, CSS. I even started writing blogs which she taught. The most surprising part was she was super frank. She went beyond her duty, and taught me what Facebook is, how to use it, and opened an account for me which I am still using it, and she sent a friend request to herself. (In lab, past teachers would shout to students trying to open fb. All of them were super strict.)
She was kind and friendly, and during theory classes, the new student in our class would answer every single question. Then, somehow we both started sharing sits in computer class, and he will tell me answers and we both raise hands to answer the question. My teacher will also keep asking interesting questions which made me more inclined to computer science.

My story isn't related to learning a programming language or an algorithm, but it was the wave that brought me closer towards CS and after 2 years, I joined CS in University and till now, haven't look back and always thanked both of them, my respected ma'am and my dear friend, who inspired me and brought out my curiosity towards computers.
Note: My friend is doing Medical currently and when I teased him that I did CS and now, I know more than you and this time, I am gonna whisper in your ears if someone asks any question, to which he replied, I accept I am doing Medical, but I still love computers and know a hell lot about it.
My teacher got married and she also got a cute baby. We talk occasionally in fb and she is going great too.
I hope to meet both of them someday soon.

Because I didn't start coding until 21 I constantly feel behind, but the pure satisfaction from finally getting something to work or to see a project grow iteratively over time keeps the gears turning. The bad part is I feel like I am constantly stressed because of my feelings of always being inadequate. The thing is I didn't only have to learn how to code but I basically had to start from scratch tech wise. i had a decent acer laptop in high school and basically just web browsed and gamed with it. So needless to say most of my life has been away from a computer. Now I feel at a constant rush to compensate for my ignorance. I have slowly become more introverted because I feel like if I don't work on my skill set everyday I stray further away from making myself marketable; this has caused me to become more irritable and to close myself inside more. I want to make a career doing this and I also have the added pressure of not having a degree, so projects and skills are even more mandatory. I truly love programming to the fullest extend, but not having local friends to express code with and to bounce concepts and ideas off of is torture. But I try to keep my head up and make progress out of the day- if the will is there- so I can land my first job as a developer and actually make a living doing something that brings me a little piece of meaning. So overall there is a tradeoff of having added pressure, stress, anxiety and sometimes depression to build a craft that still has ages to go to reach a stage of maturity.

My first experience with any kind of development was in a web mastering class in high school. I got super into it and started going really far ahead in the course materials.

During the second semester most students in the class were not interested at all so I decided to start a business of selling custom tailored assignments to about half the class. It didn't make me rich of course, but it felt good being the HTML / CSS god in the class.

The best part honestly was getting caught. The principal was so impressed at the amount of extra work I'd been doing that he just gave me a detention. Thanks Mr. Murray, for being so cool and not putting me down for doing what I love.

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

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

Sorry for long rant, no potato.

I need to rant about life decisions, and choosing a dev career probably too early. Not extremely development related, but it's the life of a developer.

TL;DR: I tried a new thing and that thing is now my thing. The new thing is way more work than my old thing but way more rewarding & exciting. Try new things.

I taught myself to program when I was a kid (11 or 12 years old), and since then I have always been absolutely sure that I wanted to be a games programmer. I took classes in high school and college with that aim, and chose a games programming degree. Everything was so simple, nail the degree, get a job programming something, and take the first games job that I could and go from there.

I have always had random side hobbies that I liked to teach myself, just like programming. And in uni I decided that I wanted to learn another language (natural, not programming) because growing up in England meant that I only learned English and was rarely exposed to anything else. The idea of knowing another fascinated me.

So I dabbled in a few different languages, tried to find a culture that seemed to fit my style and attitude to life and others, and eventually found myself learning Korean. That quickly became something I was doing every single day, and I decided I needed to go to Korea and see what life there could be like.

I found out that my university offered a free summer school program for a couple of weeks, all I had to pay for was the flights. So a few months later I was there and it was literally the best thing I'd done in my life to that point. I'd found two things that made me feel even better than the idea of becoming the games programmer I'd always wanted to be. Travelling and using my other language to communicate with people that I couldn't in English. At that point I was still just a beginner, but even the simple conversations with people who couldn't speak English felt awesome.

So when I returned home, I found that that trip had completely thrown a spanner into my life plan. All I could think about after that was improving my language skills and going back there for as long as possible. Who knows what to do.

I did exactly that. I studied harder than I'd ever studied for anything and left the next year to go and study in Korea, now with intermediate language skills, everyday conversations no longer being a problem at all.

Now I live here, I will be here for the next year and I have to return to England for one year to finish my degree. Then instead of having my simple plan of becoming a developer, I can think of nothing I want to do less than just stay in England doing the same job every day, nothing to do with language. I need to be at least travelling to Korea, and using my language skills in at least some way.

The current WIP plan is to take intensive language classes here (from next week, every single weekday), build awesome dev side projects and contribute to open source stuff. Then try to build a life of freelance translation/interpreting/language teaching and software development (maybe here, maybe Korea).

So the point of this rant is that before, I had a solid plan. Now I am sat in my bed in Korea writing this, thinking about how I have almost no idea how I'm going to build the life that I want. And yet somehow, the uncertainty makes this so much more exciting and fulfilling. There's a lot more worrying, planning and deciding to do. But I think the fact that I completely changed my life goals just through a small decision one day to satisfy a curiosity is a huge life lesson for me. And maybe reading this will help other people decide to just try doing something different for once, and see if your life plan holds up.

If it does, never stop trying new things. If it doesn't (like mine), then you now know that you've found something that you love as much as or even more that your plan before. Something that you might have lived your whole life never finding.

I don't expect many people to read this all, but writing it here has been very cathartic for me, and it's still a rant because now I have so much more work and planning to do. But it's the good kind of work.

Things aren't so simple now, but they're way more worth it.

I will be there at the same time I don't have a car so I can get a ride to the airport on Friday and I will be there at the same time I don't have a car so I can get a ride to the airport on Friday and I will be there at the same time I don't have a car so I can get my car out the time to do it again and I look forward to hearing from you in awhile I have a few questions about the other I have a few questions about the same as the other day I will have a talk at you and I hope to see everyone again and again I apologise I didn't get a response to your advertisement for a while but it is a little chilly here is a copy to the store to buy the car is in a good way to start a little more time with the family for a while but it is a little chilly here is a copy to the time of the year for the first time in a long time and I don't want it for a couple days so I'm just trying for you guys I just want a ride with us to get a few things done and I will be there at the end if this works out well for you and your family a very happy and excited about this weekend so I'm just going to go to the store and get back with me and my family is going to be a little late today but I'm still in my car and I will be there at like midnight so much and have to be at work at the moment but I'll try again later in life I have been trying to get a hold of the guy that I have a meeting with you to discuss the details of the job and I have been working in my room so I can get a ride to the airport on Sunday so we are all on my own and I will be there at noon so I'll just be me my money back and I will get it done this weekend but I will be there at the same time and where would we have been in the hospital for a week or two to see you soon and have a great day today love it and it will not work for me to come in and get a new phone or in person and I am not sure how long it would have taken it off and on again and again I apologise I didn't know you were going to be a little late to the game and it will not work on it this morning I was wondering if you had a choice but I don't know if you have any questions please feel free to contact me at any rate is higher up for it and the other is a good time to come in for an appointment with the surgeon on my phone and I don't want to be a good friend to come in at all and the other is a good time to call and talk about what we can do to help you feel better I can come by to pick up the kids from school today so I'm not going anywhere for the next few days and I have a few more days before we get into my car to go out for lunch at home and I will be there at the same time as you can imagine how hard is it to late to get a new car is a lot more done with the interview and the kids will have a good day at school today so I'm not going anywhere for the next two days so we are all on my way home from the gym and then I will be able to make it today because I'm a very nice person who can do it for you if you want to come by and see you soon and have to go back in the office tomorrow morning at work today but I'm going back and I will be there at the same time and where would we have been trying all of us and the rest are you still interested I can send you a picture of the front and back of the house and the kids are going well with the family for a while but it is a little chilly here is a picture of the front and back of the house is in my prayers as a friend but it will have a great weekend and I will be there at the end if this works out well and that your mom and dad are going to be a bit of an emergency at least you have a good day at school today so I'm going to be in the office tomorrow and will be back to the hotel now I'm in bed with a friend and then I will be able to make it to the meeting tonight but I will be there at the same time I was in a hurry and come to the office and I will send the other side and a little about me and you will see that you sent it out and get a good deal and you have the address of where I can get a ride to work on it this week but will have a good day at school today so I'm not going anywhere for the next two days so we are going to be in the office tomorrow and I have been working in the morning and I will get it done this weekend but will be back in the office on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday are going well for you and your wife is not the case then you have the address of your day goes on and I have been working in the morning and I will be there at the same time I am in need and I'll see what the status is on the way to the airport and then we will have a great day at school today so I'm trying to get a hold of the guy who was the guy who was the guy who is going well and I am going to be out by then but if I can find a way to get the car out the door to go to the store and I have to be in a relationship with a friend and then I will be able to make it to the meeting and will get the info for the guy who was the guys are doing the meeting at the church

!rant
How to earn a lot of money as a programmer?

So this question might sound a little naive and too simple, but earning a lot of money is what we all want after all right? Collecting experiences from people in the business should be a good idea.

So this is the position I am in:
I am a German student in my 13th year of school (which means I will graduate this summer) and I am very interested in information technology. I know C++ pretty well by now and I have built a rendering engine for a game I want to make using openGL already, which I am very proud of.
I would love to turn this passion into my profession and thats why I plan to attend a dual course of computer science next year (dual means that I will be employed at a company (or similar) in parallel to the studying course).

But what direction should I be going in if I want to make big money later on? I am ready to spend a lot of time and work on this life project but I don't know which directions are the most promising. I hate being a tiny gear in a huge machine that just has to keep spinning to keep the machine alive, I want to be part of a real project (like most people probably) and possibly sell a product (because I think that is how you really make money).

Now I know there is no magic answer to this, but I bet many people here have made experiences they can share and this could help a lot of people directing their path in a more success oriented way.

I personally am especially interested in fields which are relatively low-level and close to memory (C++), go hand in hand with physics and 3D simulation and are somewhat creative and allow new solutions. (These are no hard lines, I just thought I should give a little direction to what I know already and what I am interested in)

But really, I am interested in any work you are likely to earn a lot of money with.

So, first: I'm a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to code and love to think I know everything.

We had a group project at university and me being laid back but unknown to the other people, the "rest" of them was together with me in a group. We got to know each other and actually we were a pretty cool group. I guess "the rest" in a computer science course means you get the cool guys.^^

1/6 of us did ever code in C# and 2/6 even knows what an engine is and how unity works. I was in both sixths, got group leader somehow (if you'd know me from school. Omg. I was that one guy not knowing what went on, saying my two sentences at the presentation and took the B-.:D), so what to do to have a nice 2 weeks with them?
We did a crash course, I taught them some basics and everything.

The point is, i was hella nervous and i really get anxious if something is expected from me.

Long story short, I talked a whole week for 5-7 hours straight without real pauses and eating wayyy less a man should. Dude I was literally dead on my way home on friday evening. I felt like I would fall over any fucken second, i was all shakey, dizzy as hell, weird vision, everything. It felt like I was about to die on the spot.

I got home though, ate like 1/2 kilograms of pasta and felt myself coming back to life.:D

What to learn from this:
Keep the fuck calm, do pauses, drink and eat enough and don't rush all in for a fucken week without real rest..^^
It fucks you up and doesn't do anything good for your productivity.

We got an A btw, so in the end, all went good.(:

A brilliant letter Richard Feynman wrote to Stephen Wolfram:

CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
CHARLES C. LAURITSEN LABORATORY OF HIGH ENERGY PHYSICS

October 14, 1985

Dr. Stephen Wolfram
School of Natural Sciences
The Institute for Advanced Study
Princeton, NJ 08540

Dear Wolfram:

1. It is not my opinion that the present organizational structure of science
inhibits "complexity research" - I do not believe such an institution is
necessary.

2. You say you want to create your own environment - but you will not be doing
that: you will create (perhaps!) an environment that you might like to work in
- but you will not be working in this environment - you will be administering
it - and the administration environment is not what you seek - is it? You won't
enjoy administrating people because you won’t succeed in it.

You don’t understand "ordinary people." To you they are "stupid fools" - so you
will not tolerate them or treat their foibles with tolerance or patience - but
will drive yourself wild (or they will drive you wild) trying to deal with them
in an effective way.

Find a way to do your research with as little contact with non-technical people
as possible, with one exception, fall madly in love! That is my advice, my
friend.

Sincerely,

(Signed, 'Richard P. Feynman')

A little and sweet rant about RANTS! What the hell guys, I can finally think about a social network happily, but I have the feeling that I'm not a part of this awesome community :'( I mean, everyone is getting problem with some clients or whatever. But I'm currently unemployed, and never really get through that kind of problems. Ok they lied to me on the job, ok I paid 15000 euros 2 years of school where there were still people who doesn't care about the work, ok I left my girlfriend, ok I have a fucking hard time to go back to work with that... But all of this is not really juicy, my life is simple and mostly happy :'(
Maybe I should hope that my next job will be with stupid people :o
I love you guys <3

Storytime!

(I just posted this in a shorter form as a comment but wanted to write it as a post too)

TL;DR, smarts are important, but so is how you work.

My first 'real' job was a lucky break in the .com era working tech support. This was pretty high end / professional / well respected and really well paid work.

I've never been a super fast learner, I was HORRIBLE in school. I was not a good student until I was ~40 (and then I loved it, but no longer have the time :( )

At work I really felt like so many folks around me did a better job / knew more than me. And straight up I know that was true. I was competent, but I was not the best by far.

However .... when things got ugly, I got assigned to the big cases. Particularly when I transferred to a group that dealt with some fancy smancy networking equipment.

The reason I was assigned? Engineering (another department) asked I be assigned. Even when it would take me a while to pickup the case and catch up on what was going on, they wanted the super smart tech support guys off the case, and me on it.

At first this was a bit perplexing as this engineering team were some ultra smart guys, custom chip designers, great education, and guys you could almost see were running a mental simulation of the chip as you described what you observed on the network...

What was also amusing was how ego-less these guys seemed to be (I don't pretend to know if they really were). I knew for a fact that recruiting teams tried to recruit some of these guys for years from other companies before they'd jump ship from one company to the next ... and yet when I met them in person it was like some random meeting on the street (there's a whole other story there that I wish I understood more about Indian Americans (many of them) and American engineers treat status / behave).

I eventually figured out that the reason I was assigned / requested was simple:

1. Support management couldn't refuse, in fact several valley managers very much didn't like me / did not want to give me those cases .... but nobody could refuse the almighty ASIC engineers. No joke, ASIC engineers requests were all but handed down on stone tablets and smote any idols you might have.

2. The engineers trusted me. It was that simple.

They liked to read my notes before going into a meeting / high pressure conference call. I could tell from talking to them on the phone (I was remote) if their mental model was seizing up, or if they just wanted more data, and we could have quick and effective conversations before meetings ;)

I always qualified my answers. If I didn't know I said so (this was HUGE) and I would go find out. In fact my notes often included a list of unknowns (I knew they'd ask), and a list of questions I had sent to / pending for the customer.

The super smart tech support guys, they had egos, didn't want to say they didn't know, and they'd send eng down the rabbit hole. Truth be told most of what the smarter than me tech support guy's knew was memorization. I don't want to sound like I'm knocking that because for the most part memorization would quickly solve a good chunk of tech support calls for sure... no question those guys solved problems. I wish I was able to memorize like those guys.

But memorization did NOT help anyone solve off the wall bugs, sort of emergent behavior, recognize patterns (network traffic and bugs all have patterns / smells). Memorization also wouldn't lead you to the right path to finding ANYTHING new / new methods to find things that you don't anticipate.

In fact relying on memorization like some support folks did meant that they often assumed that if bit 1 was on... they couldn't imagine what would happen if that didn't work, even if they saw a problem where ... bro obviously bit 1 is on but that thing ain't happening, that means A, B, C.

Being careful, asking questions, making lists of what you know / don't know, iterating LOGICALLY (for the love of god change one thing at a time). That's how you solved big problems I found.

Sometimes your skills aren't super smarts, super flashy code, sometimes, knowing every method off the top of your head, sometimes you can excel just being more careful, thinking different.

C(++) macros will be the death of me

I sure do love working with code that was written when I was in elementary school, with all the glory of nested macros and ## to deduct type names

Love that

I thought I was never going to be anything in life because there was nothing that I was good at. Then I started "web school" and it just clicked. I was good at it and I understood it. Finished with an A :) now I love my job as a front-end developer.

Very much! My internship during school turned into a full-time job over the summer! I don’t make crazy money, but I LOVE the work and cost of living in my area is pretty low compared to the rest of the country. So, I’m great! 😁😁

This pic is from my class messenger group.
Translation:

Dear teacher! Our group have chosen another web builder for the project, we hope it's not a problem...

Yeah, I use templates which I can copy code from to my group's site, but for the love of *!#* life I consider myself a noob beginner even tough I've been in this field for a year or two now but I can code with more confidence now. What the hell are these people going to do if they only willing to rely on school and wix...

But I can always be wrong, these are just my thoughts.

I seriously feel like I'm learning more hands on stuff here than at school
So many precious advices and tips
I love this community

# Honestly, no intention of starting a holy war;

Been a Linux guy for over 9 years spanning school, college and my previous job years;

Now I have to use Windows at my new job. I know very little abt this os and it has never been among my strong skills (only used it for gaming);

What's more intriguing is that my current company's entire infrastructure is Windows based - which I had no idea that it could be possible at such a large scale;

I don't know about what I feel about this whole thing. But what I know is that I don't wanna shy away from it. I love the job and the role (only just if it was Linux, it'd be perfect).

Just need this for a future reflection:
Can anyone confirm if it's the same with other investment banks/financial services institutions etc. infrastructure?

Finally switching to single boot linux. I had to keep my double boot windows because I needed it for few classes in school.
I passed all of them (at least I think so)

I love the purity of clean install after chaotic setup.

I'm really not sure. When I was 7-8 years old, I liked to view source in IE, then I somehow managed to use Javascript in the browser. First only some dumb opening of windows. And I liked Batch, so I made some files for copying, backup and stuff.

Then I got to PHP during the years from some online tutorial about making dynamic websites. My website was more static than stone, but yeah, I did page loading with PHP! Awful experience anyway, because I had to install Xampp, get it work and other stuff. 11 years old or so. (and I used Xampp only as a fileserver between laptop and desktop later, because.. PHP4... just no.)

As 12 years old or so I experienced my first World of Warcraft (vanilla) on a custom server in an internet cafe and I thought it's a singleplayer game. When I found out that no, I googled how to make my own server (hated multiplayer back then and loved good games with huge storylines). Failed miserably with ManGOS, got something to work with ArcEMU. There I learned some C++ basic stuff, which I hoped would helped me to fix some bugs. When I opened the code I was like: "Suuure." and left it like that. I learned what a MySQL database is, broke it like four times when I forgot WHERE and still rather played with websites i.e. html, css, js and optionally php when I wanted to repair a webpage for the server. With a friend we managed to get the server work via Hamachi, was fun, the server died too soon. Then I got ManGOS to work, but there wasn't really any interest to make a server anymore, just singleplayer for the lore. (big warcraft fan, don't kick me :D )

I think it was when I was 13y.o. I went to Delphi/Pascal course, which I liked a lot from the beginning, even managed to use my code on old Knoppix via Lazarus(Pascal). At this age I really liked thoae Flash games which were still common to see everywhere. So I downloaded .swfs, opened and tried to understand it. Managed to pull some stuff from it and rewrite in Pascal. Nope, never again that crap.

About the same time I got to Flash files I discovered Java. It was kind of popular back then, so I thought let's give it a try. I liked Flash more. Seriously. I've never seen so much repetitiveness and stupid styling of a code. I had either IDE for compiling C++ or Pascal or notepad! You think I wanted my code kicked all over the place in multiple folders and files? No.

So back to Pascal. I made some apps for my old hobby, was quite satisfied with the result (quiz like app), but it still wasn't the thing. And I really thought I'd like to study CS.

I started to love PHP because of phpBB forums I worked on as 15 y.o. I guess. At the same time I think there was an optional subject at school, again with Pascal. I hated the subject, teacher spoke some kind of gibberish I didn't really understand back then at all and now I find it only as a really stupid explanation of loops and strings.

So I started to hate Pascal subject, but not really the lang itself. Still I wanted something simpler and more portable. Then I got to Python as hm, 17y.o. I think and at the same time to C++ with DevC++. That was time when I was still deciding which lang to choose as my main one (still playing with website, database and js).

Then I decided that learning language from some teacher in a class seriously pisses me off and I don't want to experience it again. I choose Python, but still made some little scripts in C++, which is funny, because Python was considered only as a scripting lang back then.

I haven't really find a cross-platform framework for C++, which would: a) be easy to install b) not require VisualStudio PayForMe 20xy c) have nice license if I managed to make something nice and distribute it. I found Unity3D though, so I played with Blender for models, Audacity for music and C# for code. Only beautiful memories with Unity. I still haven't thought I'm a programmer back then.

For Python however I found Kivy and I was playing with it on a phone for about a year. Still I haven't really know what to do back then, so I thought... I like math, numbers, coding, but I want to avoid studying physics. Economics here I go!

Now I'm in my third year at Uni, should be writing thesis, study hard and what I do? Code like never before, contribute, work on a 3D tutorial and play with Blender. Still I don't really think about myself as a programmer, rather hobby-coder.

So, to answer the question: how did I learn to program? Bashing to shit until it behaved like I desired i.e. try-fail learning. I wouldn't choose a different path.

I remeber being classified as the nerd at school. Picked on because i wasnt socially normal or part of the croud. Programming became my love and a few years later. Im doing very well and now those that use to think it was fun picking on me see me as the guy they need inspiration ideas and help from because im doing well for myself and im considering helping them.

It sucks being a good guy.. I cant get myself to turn others away that needs help

I love old school design. 1990's and 2000's website has their charm.

Negative side of this: I want to be frontend dev and I can only design these, so I can't make modern website without proper designer

This basically is me rambling all my thoughts that have been clouding my mind.

Learning other programming languages after learning the first is harder than I expected. I learned python first but that's making learning others (which I know arent similar but ) C, ES6, PHP, etc. I need to figure out what makes each one special and get a proper path instead of learning them all the same way. Which is easier for the web dev languages but fuck man I just need a good path for them and I'm good. Like learn this this this this that and that and I've got a basic understanding of the language I dont need to stress and I can casually build my knowledge from here now that I understand all this. Cause I love programming and I want to be the best I can be and just get to the level I am with python. And at some point I have to learn about basic electronics and learning how to program Arduinos with C so I can do stuff with that because I really really REALLY want to.

It doesnt stop there. I want to learn another language and no I'm not talkin bout programming anymore I mean I wanna learn Japanese and German (but japanese primarily) but it doesnt help that I'm always either in school, studying, programming, or playing games. I just cant find time to practice Hiragana&Katakana (two basic writing systems in japan) and it doesnt help that I'm a lazy procrastinating piece of shit that doesnt have or can keep a proper schedule and hell I barely can English and Its my native tongue. Ugh. Itd be better if I had a native speaker to help me tbh.

And finally I want to learn basic pixel animating I have dreamed as a kid to do some kind of animation and programming and I want to do both for games I want to program for fun but it doesnt help that I cant draw sprites or anything for shit. I cant get it and I just am fucked but I'm going to ask some people I know and a few subreddits for advice/help/resources with that

Welp that was the Bubbles Power Hour none of you probably are keen followers of mine and if I had any I'd be shocked and honored but thanks for reading anyways and any advice on anything is always appreciated!

Wrote my first programs on my Commodore C64.
First program was a number guessing game where you needed to guess a number between 1 and 100. Shit had 300+ lines because I only new the if clause and the equals comparison.
I was 9.

Later a friend showed me Modula 2 and I was instantly in love with that language.

Real programming then in school (C, C++, µC assembler).

Reasons I am a bad girlfriend:
- I always want hugs and kisses
- I would love you so much
- International High School Visit at Ho Chi Minh City at March 19
- I would give you gifts all the time

I was reminded today why I love programming, starting out HTML 5, MVC in asp.net

Created my display table, was about to look into searching, sorting etc then found MVC Grid.

Everyday is a school day.

Forgot to logout my usb stick, i was stuck at school for two!!! Hours!!! I love linux

I am a manager of an entry-level employee who share with another manager. Our shared employee, let’s call her “Jane,” is terrific — a hard worker, very smart, quick, and organized. Jane has been with us over two years and we would like to promote her, something she’s clearly earned, but our progress has been stalled by the pandemic. And though we’re working to push the promotion forward as quickly as possible, with budget cuts to contend with, this has been slower and more difficult than expected.

Meanwhile, Jane has shared with our team (including my boss, her grandboss) that she’s interested in returning to school for graduate study but was not sure when she’d want to attend. However, later Jane confidentially asked me to write her a recommendation letter to include in an application for study beginning this fall. I happily agreed and we discussed that she didn’t want this shared more widely, so I wrote the letter and kept it to myself. A few weeks ago, Jane texted me that she’d been accepted to grad school. I was thrilled for her but concerned about her departure. She stated that it was her intention to defer until 2021 due to the pandemic. We love Jane and I’m happy to have her as long as she’d like to stay, and again kept it to myself per her wishes.

Today, to my surprise, my boss called my attention to a tweet that Jane had shared, publicly on her personal account, announcing that she’d been accepted to grad school. My boss was blindsided since she didn’t think of this as an immediate plan and was particularly upset because HER boss (my grandboss and Jane’s great-grandboss, our president) was the one who saw it and alerted her of it. What’s worse is that my boss’s boss has been the one doing the hard work in negotiating Jane’s promotion with HR. Worse worse, after sharing this development, my co-manager (who shares management of Jane with me) revealed that she too had learned of Jane’s acceptance on Twitter. For the record, this tweet is about 10 days old at this point — time for Jane to have made a plan to speak directly and openly about it at work if she chose to.

I’m all for private use of social media and the right to have an online presence that is separate from your work. However, this puts me in an embarrassing position. I was honest with my boss when confronted, confessing that I did know about her acceptance and had provided a reference, but I can’t help but feel a little taken advantage of after Jane had asked me to keep it confidential. Additionally, her other boss heard of this news on social media and so did people above her who are gunning for her promotion — valued coworkers of mine and superiors of Jane who now feel disrespected for being out of the loop. I do not believe that Jane’s attendance at or deferment from grad school should affect her eligibility for a promotion, but it will surely be another hurdle to overcome among many other pandemic-related ones now that the news is out in this manner.

Extra notes: 1) Jane has previously announced 10-day vacations on Instagram (plane tickets booked) before asking for the time off. 2) Jane runs our company social media channels, so people look at her personal ones with scrutiny.

I feel compelled to speak with Jane in a friendly but direct way to explain that it’s her choice how or with whom she’d like to share her news, but that social media is not the place for bosses, grandbosses, or great-grandbosses should discover employment-altering news. Ever, really, but particularly when we’re working hard for her promotion. How can I do this without overstepping? Am I overstepping?

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!

started programming in high school, realized during a hardware lab in my computer science class that I wanted to be a developer.

we hade to set up a network of 5 routers, and I was the last to finish because of a typo in one config. spent an hour debugging, the frustration and eventual feeling of success made me love working with computers!

I just started a new job today and I fucking love it. I've learned more in a day than I do on a weekly basis in school. It's difficult but exciting as fuck to actually be able to use the technologies you've learned in a professional context.

How do I convince a dev department to take source control, peer code review and unit tests seriously?

I'm a recent software grad with internships that recently started at a smallish company (less than 20 employees but has been around for 10 years, with most senior non-mgmt employee around 6 years). I've been working here for less than a year (approx 5 months) and I love the company - lots of talented and passionate people.

We are a creative industry with a handful of devs and one of the issues I'm seeing is that often devs are working in silos. I'm trying to make suggestions to upper management like encourage more usage of source control, documentation, etc and most of the senior devs are pushing back - saying that they don't feel that it is necessary and due to the fast moving nature of our projects that all this would be a total waste (they were so fast on the idea of not having PR's because it would be "too much of a blocker").

I understand that a large part of this has more to do with shifting the culture in the department and that can be very hard to do, especially since i'm fresh out of school, but I see these devs have so much potential but it seems that they think having these implementations in place would mean more rigid rules and bureaucracy.

I've been speaking to some of my engineering friends and they're pretty much all just telling me that I am shooting myself in the foot if I continue to stay at this company because I'll be behind skill wise, but part of me isn't ready to just give up yet.

looking for some advice

it's been a while since my last rant and coming back after so long made me realize how much I missed here.

at some point i realized that the career I wanted and my current situation wouldn't match, I decided to go in real hard, I moved into the dreaded backend development (you can guess, node and mongodb),

I isolated myself from almost everyone and everything, cleared out my mobile games, social media and for almost two months I wanted something stable(might not be job ready but it had to be reasonable). I have come to love backend development so much, the joy of not having anything to do with css.

dad fought me, mum cried, probably thought I was slipping into some deep end, quitting school in my second year of studying food science(still dont know how I accepted that course lol) to start afresh didn't help matters. really hard decisions, made money on some little freelancing gigs, wasnt constant, I needed something stable and that was a job and a degree to get me one.

nothing special, just some regular hustler hoping his passion will pay him, I have always loved what i do but I need something to keep me going.

!rant
I am continuously transforming from being terrified to being sad to being tensed at the moment.Don't know what depression is , but i guess this is not a right phase .
Am just an average guy trying to get my confidences up as a good person/student/professional/whatever. last to last semester when I joined college for a cse degree, i had entered with the brightest face and the biggest smile because of just one thought: "this is where i belong, this is what i want" . i always got excited when i saw little things jumping around in my mobile , calculations being performed instantly, and the day i got my laptop, i knew i want to know every thing of how virtuality works.
I never cared about social life tho, i was a universally lonely introvert single child. Had 2-3 friends in school, who i don't care about much,a lost crush , a great group of home buddies and some friends here and there.
So when i started college i went there with multiple goals: making my career there, finding gud buddies, love again and many more..
But recently, everything is changing: realised that college is a piece of shit, people are always selfish and exploiting, a race is always going on where people are secretly running and you gotta learn by yourself.
So here is the current me: college attendance 37%, not went to gym past 1 week, human interaction last 2 days :2(mum nd dad), whatsapp last message: 4 days ago,sleep timings 10am to 6pm(daytimes lol), currently working on: this project that I took as "my last project that on completing means i know Android,and could code every fucked up app in the market)", which isn't yet completed bcz every-time i learn something in it, i realise their is one more part of the course am following , but i should know because this is useful.
And that makes me more sad :/

The moment I knew that I was meant to be a dev was when I was 14 years old and it was computer class during high school. Basic HTML was the lesson and I was hooked by it. My favorite tags were the blink and marquee tags. I was fascinated by it! But learn to love web development when I knew what backend developing was about ;)

How I see Love Live: School Idol Festival (In hell)

I visited my college school today and my friends from lower years are still afraid of coding , i mean coding doesnt bite it just take time to understand , i think people want the easy way of understanding things rather than building up from nothing, thats why i love to code because i can literally make something out of nothing.

Background:
I graduated high school from a technical school. And my teacher asked me to come in a few times a week and assist (which I LOVE doing)

So they’re working with circuits and raspberry pi’s and when I can in they pointed out that there was a project they couldn’t get to work. So I had to look at it. Now I was not given the original it was one a student tried to copy in (like they were supposed to) but it was awful. All the indentation was even more off than the original and on top of that. The original and what I was given wouldn’t give an error code.. and so I had no idea what was happening so I just decided to try to fix the indentation and take out stuff that didn’t look right (what else was I supposed to do when I didn’t know where to start?) and while I was doing it another student started to try to fix it and it legit barely took 5 minutes and now my spirit and confidence is broken. I wasn’t petty I observed the result and congratulated him cause he deserved it. After I took the code and put it on my laptop and figured out it was an “inconsistent use of tabs and spaces” error which is fucking stupid and I’ve never seen that in python before so after I debugged that there wasn’t really anything left to debug. So I guess I somewhat redeemed myself but I still feel like shit

!story

I finally joined uni. With all of its fucking bureaucracy. But I love the feel I get being there with people I know wants same stuff as mine. I picked Math.
It's equally ambitious and crazy as 1) My previous school didn't prepare me at all, (not even limits for fuck's sake) 2) it has given me an antidepressant boost, but I'm also a person that yes goes on anyway but at the first difficulty I second guess my own ability in first place to overcome what's ahead (so, depressive rebound). 3) I have dyscalculia and adhd. Lucky me, not the kind of dyscalculia that makes you unable to grasp logic, it's more like I can't do calculations in my head and 8x7 is HARDER to me than explain graph theory or some stuff about riemannian geometry.
What did you all feel when you went to university? Because I'm feeling a lot ignorant, but worse, stupid, very stupid.
Any advice?

Hello guys, I really need some advice today...

I'm currently 18. I got accepted in two pretty equivalent colleges. One is in my city, 1h with the bus, and the other one is in another city.

Both are somewhat equivalent schools, the one in another big city is much nearer to other colleges I'd like to go to later (this one will last 2 years, then I'll have to go to engineering school for 3 years).

I have to decide monday where I'll go. It's horrible.. here, in my city, I have the person I love and the comfort of living by the parents (even tho it's a discomfort too). But the other city attracts me a lot too, independance does too.. it's horrible, I can't decide, I don't know if it's a good idea to leave, and I fear having regrets if I stay.

Have you some experience to tell me about? Some regrets you have? Or basically some advice?

It would help me so much, thank you!!

My parents on the one side love my passion to programming (it’s actually because of my dad who introduced me to computers), but on the flip side they think that I should focus more on school - which is true, but you know... It’s hard to stop with something you like, isn’t it?

Hello DevRant,
I need your help
I'm currently studying Game design and development first year in The Netherlands and I love programming but I hate designing. I was thinking about changing the course to something like Ethical Hacking or Computer science. The reason why I want to do this is that they teach us openfl until second year and I feel like I learn nothing until now.
Do you think would be better to change the course or to stay but start programming in something else? And what programming language would you recommend?
P.s. I also want to apply for a part time job/summer school to gain experience but I had no luck at all.
P.s.s. You are the best community for me!
Return 0;

[Fairly existential career question] How fulfilling would you say your career in development has been?

[Long rant] for years I had been planning on becoming a rabbi, majored in religious studies etc, until I realized there would be no way out of my rapidly growing debt if I chose to continue on that path. i had to drop out 3 years into my undergrad due to financial issues, and as it is now working full time im barely holding my head above water. I spent a lot of time being sad about it until i decided to change things and started getting into accounting before I discovered coding. I am SO GLAD I discovered coding cause accounting was so boring...Now I'm excited to be going back to school for software development and I'm in a bit of a pink cloud having discovered something thats both exciting/fun/challenging AND lucrative... But i do worry about 5, 10 years in the future, will i still be as stoked about it? Religious leadership was and is something I know i would feel ~fulfilled~ over a lifetime, and while my newly discovered passion for coding literally keeps me up at night getting fired up on solving problems and writing my little newb programs, i think I'm afraid of burnout?

[Tl;dr] I'm making an education+career switch to software development and i wanna know how folks feel about their career years into it, do you still love it just as much? Feel jaded? Regretful? Happy?

Tomorrow i have school starting.
Which inspires me to rant about how school fails. Ill omit the "arguments" - feel free to append arguments for my words in the comments. Lol

Dont get be wrong. I LOVE acquiring knowledge. And this is where my first point starts : PACE. My class is basically an assortiment of dumbfucks who dont understand anything without "learning by heart over the course of several weeks"

Ill give you a concrete example.
Our maths teacher wanted to make us think scientifically. So he invented a new type of numbers "root 6 numbers" that are formed like so:
a + b * sqrt(6)
Now he wants us to find out wether the sum of two root 6 numbers is also a root six number. this is all dandy, BUT CLASSMATES STILL DIDNT GET WHAT ROOT 6 NUMBERS ARE, EVEN AFTER SEVERAL EXPRANATIONS. Worse: they went to the main teacher to blacken the math teacher.
Another example would be the time our class needed to understand functions(x) : 4 weeks. Ik, as a programmer i have some ease, but four weeks is a bit too much.

Because of this slow pace, i am irreversibly bored of and in school.
And this leads to another problem: homework. Since i know most of the stuff (the few things i dont get at school, i research at home) the homework are useless to me and since the others dont get much, the homeworks are often more than abundant {in a negative way}.
So i dont do them - but that makes teachers disregard me. Which im sickened of.
Worse: often i dont get overly good grades (i honestly have no clue why. I know everything and go over most of the stuff with my menthor),which empowers teacher of the argument of "you are not good enuff, so you cant read in class".

It would be JUST FINE if the only problem were teachers - but my peers are horrible too.

I know our brains are growing, but thats no reason for being stupid.

I literally get told that i need to stop wearing shorts because they look horrible.

Yep. Also, most people think they are empowered of teaching me and talking about my defaillance - because they do their homework. Even though they know i know stuff better than them.

Now to one of the worst issues: a group work where we had to de a Radio report. The guy (the one who thinks he is intelligent BECAUSE he has good grades) invited himself and his gf to me, he wanted me to translate 22 pages from german to english (because he was too lazy to write in german), wanted me to do audiorecording, audioediting and writing of a report. When i left the group because i was called "weakest link" he spread the word that i he had done everythinh and that because i left his group had failed (noticed the flow in logic?)

NOW everybody thinks of me as stupid weirdo. And honestly - i think i will stop listening to them. Ive always hated people, i dont need a significant other.

Even though this will come with the secondary effect of me being gossiped at.

But honestly its fine.

You might have noticed my elojquent way of expressing myseld. I did that in order to show that i am, despite my grades, overly proficient in english

Ok. So now comes the conclusion. What should i do? Do you Think that i am like that because im pubescent myself? How can i stop having nightmares of every possible social situotion that could occur?
Does this have to do with me being a dev?

Well. ありがとう for reading.

Post BA Phil degree pre CS degree
My parents - oh cool
My extended family - 'I thought you were going to go to law school, wow how many times are you going to change your mind?' 'who is going to pay for another degree, oh yeah your parents, kids these days' 'so what are you going to do with that Philosophy degree?' 'What are you going to do when mommy stops supporting you?'

Post CS Degree, employed doing what I love, paying off my loans
My parents - yay
My extended family - sweet f*cking silence, and the occasional 'oh so you are working on computers now?'

HA

Damn. I am so blessed to have friends that i have. 90% of them don't even care if you live or die (60% of them would be the first to throw me in fire if that's benefitting to them) remaining 10% would be someone that slightly care, but will move on pretty quickly.

But the best thing about 1 of them is that he is bluntly honest , and willing to share his opinion.
Today we were just talking about stuff when i see this placement offer in my mail.

I have been recently feeling bad about my grades, my choice of persuing android , my choice of leaving out many other techs (like web dev or data sciences , whose jobs are coming in so much number in our college) and data structures, and my fear of not getting a good career start.

This guy is also like me in some aspects. He is also not doing any extreme level competitive programming. He doesn't even know android , web dev, ai/ml or other buzz words. He is just good in college subjects. But the fascinating thing about him,is that he is so calm about all of this! I am losing my nuts everyday my month of graduation , aug2020 is coming . And he is so peaceful about this??

So i tried discussing this issue with him .Let me share a few of his points. Note that we both are lower middle class family children in an awful, no opportunity college.

He : "You know i feel myself to be better than most of our classmates. When i see around , i don't see even 10 of them taking studies seriously. Everyone is here because of the opportunity. I... Love computer science. I never keep myself free at home. I like to learn about how stuff works, these networking, the router, i really like to learn."

"That's why i dont fear. Whatever the worst happens , i have a believe that i will get some job. Maybe later, maybe later than all of you , but i will. Its not a problem."

me: "but you are not doing anything bro! I am not doing anything ! So what if our college mates suck , Everyone out there is pulling their hairs out learning data structures, Blockchain, ai ml , hell of shit. But we are not! Why aren't you scared bro? Remember the goldman sach test you gave ? You were never able to solve beyond one question. How did you feel man? And didn't you thought maybe if i gave a year to that , i will be good enough? Don't you too want a good package bro? Everyone's getting placed at good numbers."

Him : "Again, its your thoughts that i am not doing things. I am happy learning at my own pace. Its my belief that i should be learning about networking and how hardware works first , then only its okay to learn about programming and ai ml stuff. I am not going to feel scared and start learning multiple things that i don't even wanna learn now."

"My point is whatever i am doing now, if its related to computers , then someday its gonna help me.
And i am learning ds too , very less at a time. Ds algo are things for people with extreme knowledge. We could have cleared goldman sachs if we had started learning all this stuff from 1st year, spend 2-3 years in it and then maybe we could have solved 2 -3 questions. I regret that a little, but no one told us that we should be doing this."

"And if i tell you my honest thoughts now, you ar better off without it. You are the only guy among us with good knowledge of android , you have been doing that for last 2 years. Maybe you will get better opportunity with android then with ds/algo."

"You know when i felt happy? When we gave our first placement test at sopra. I was thinking of going there all dumb. But at 11 am in night i casually told my brother about this ,and he said that its a good company. So i started studying a little and next day i sat for placement. And i could not believe myself when they told me that am selected. I was shit scared that night, when my dad came and said " you don't even want that job. Be happy that you passed it on your own". And then i slept peacefully that night and gave the most awesome interview the next day."

"Thus now i am confident that wherever my level of skills are, it is enough to get into a job . Maybe not the goldman sachs ,but i will do well enough with a smaller job too."

"Bro you don't even know... All my school mates are getting packages of 8LPA, 15LPA, 35LPA. You see they are getting that because they already won a race. They are all in better colleges and companies which come there, they will take them no matter what (because those companies want to associate themselves with their college tags). But if worst comes to worst, i won't be worried even if i have to go take 4lpa as job offer in sopra"

Damn you Aman Gupta. Love you from all my heart. Thanks for calming me down and making me realise that its okay to be average

Soooo
I'm a fresh out-of-college CS grad (in his early twenties) working at a small scale startup and the people in my Engineering team are at least 10 years elder to me. (this is my first job out of school -- ignoring the internships and such)
I have a tough time making friends with them and an even tougher time making conversation which I think is hurting my communication skills in a harmful way.
Don't get me wrong.. because they are so highly experienced engineers, I get to learn a lot more a lot faster and I love that part but I just feel like I don't laugh or talk enough at my office (otherwise, people have to tell me to shut up).
I mean when everyone is not plugged in with headphones and cranking the keyboards, they talk about their wives, kids, and stuff that I have no relation to. Like I know a lot about childbirth and car seats but except being shocked etc., I often don't have much to add to the conversation.
Also, on top of this, after looking at the sorry condition of people throughout my undergrad and my internships, I had decided to not get into the habit of drinking coffee. So, when they go on coffee breaks etc. they don't ask me if I want to come along and the times that I kind of forced myself to come along turned out to be kind of awkward and not something I'd wanna experience again.
What do you recommend? Understand that I absolutely love my job and I love learning so much around such intelligent people but I don't have fun at work. Is this Dev life or am I missing something?
Do you have any recommendations or similar stories of how you overcame this problem?

i booked my first ever car and am having so many emotions... from scary to excited to anxious and mostly feeling super dumb.

i booked a very basic hatchback with minimal features and the lowest price. i was so not sure about the various terms that guy was using: mudflags, foglamps, tilt adjustment wheel ...

like, i read about them just a minute ago on google and next moment, this guy was asking me if i should pay this much amount to get it included in my car or not. i asked him many times and for things that i felt were useful, i got them included.

biggest things about this very first purchase is

1. i have learnt car driving from training school for 30 days. i got my license via some bribe money and did not gave the real test. I am basically a guy with no experience of handling cars. i was doing okay when learning tho

2. i am a single child from a very small, conservative and super anxious family. everytime i am gonna take this car, am sure my mom is gonna start praying to god for my safety. i too have this inherited anxiety and would probably be praying to god everytime i would travel alone.. the responsibility to keep myself safe, and the car safe, while not even knowing how to release clutch properly will be super scary

3. my friends are gonna love this but i want to become a trustful driver for them first. basically among 5 of us, only 1 had his father's car on which we have taken a lot of trips. that boy has my huge respect, and he is one of the best and most reliable safe driving person i know. he even enjoy the songs and pur conversations. i want to be like him, but currently my friends don't even trust sitting on the back of my scooty and feel scared.

4. our neighbours are probably gonna dug up their graves and roll in it. they are already very jelous and angry people, i hope they don't cause any damage to my new car.

5. i am super scared about this new car... how can i protect this precious baby... how to make sure that someone is not stealing parts off this..

so.many.fucking.scary.and exciting.thoughts!!!

In school i had to do a simple HTML site(i was 13 back then). And i started writting it in guess what... Notepad
Thats how i felt in love with bare code

Curiosity killed the cat.. or was it Opportunity?! 🤔

You get to learn new stuff daily.

Not one assignment is the same, and if it's similar, you can hijack the old code, improve it & turn in the better version of it.. or don't improve..totally how you feel that day..if you're not a crappy developer no improvement should still also be ok..

I love mostly adjustable schedule, so there's no biggie of I have a day or two of coders block & can't produce much of value..I can switch tasks & do some simple ones on those days..or just refactor.. all's good..

I love solving puzzles, every bug is a new puzzle I can play with..

So basically, I love being a dev, because it's like being back in school, but only with the subjects you like!

Alright, fellow coders, I need your help this time <3

I was thinking about getting a full stack developer position after school, with mean/mern stack. (Yes, I love js, but you can hate me for that later)
So, I just got an offer for a front-end developer position that I didn't apply to but was recommended for by my full stack prof.
Everything is great about that company, but! I'm not sure I'm good for that!
My question is: does being a front-end developer mean being good at putting together nice looking website?
I'm good with angular, but suck at material or just CSS in general.
I can implement business logic, but anything more complex than grids causes my eye to twitch.
So, is front-end developer supposed to be good at design part of it or not?
Google says yes, but I got other opinions from my friends, but they are still students too!
All hope on you guys! Thank you

The most fun I've ever had coding was creating a hidden object game in school (with Flash/ActionScript3). I even had a dude do voiceovers, it was dope! I would love to learn more gaming development but no time. :(

I was around 12. My mother just took a new position as Algorithmic and programming teacher (Mathematics before) for high school seniors. (Around 16-17 in Russia back in a day).

So sometimes, I waited for her after school, listening (just a bit) what she was teaching.

Then one day I was waiting while she was giving an exam of 2 hours to seniors (End of year exam). In 20 minutes, I doodled a thing on a piece of paper and showed my mother. I was correct on all questions and all flow diagrams (Was not called like this back in a day).

From this moment, I knew, programming and logic are for me.

At the end of high school (So I was 17), I received the collective message from most girls in my class saying : “ You felt in love with computers and ignored us”. They were right ☹, I realised it way later.

I don't know if I can be developer anymore. After I went to high school (one of the best in Poland) everything seems to collapse. My grades are poor. Especially on math and physics, but surprisingly everything Computer Science related is better than average. I also know how to code and I don't struggle with math used while programming. Heck, I even made my first game at the age of 10 in Visual Basic. I just love programming, computer science, etc, but after I went to high school I just don't know anymore...

!rant

I love to work on my machine, and being it
my work-horse for school and side-projects, I have a neat dualboot of Windows 10 and (driver-related) Ubuntu Mate.

Ditched Mate because screen tearing, got Cinnamon, but I have to say, that W10 UI appeals a lot for me, so... what kind of Windows is this?

In high school I absolutely hated business and science subjects(phy, chem, bio) as well.
Not to forget fucking maths. Calculas and all that shit I never paid attention to.
I chose CS hoping it would rid me of maths.
Fell in love with programming the very first semester.
Now I'm in my last semester and a freelance Web Dev.

The moment I knew I wanted to be a dev was very early in life, but I didn't realize it until I had gotten out of high school. My parents gave me my first computer when I was like 8 and it was my grandfather's old Windows 95 PC. I loved to play the Army Men game with the plastic figures like from Toy Story. I also tinkered around and found out how Word and some of the other programs worked. About two years later, I got his old Windows 98 PC. I continued to play around in Windows and discover some nuances of the operating system. My parents had a Windows XP machine at the time and they called me in every time they needed help. I got on their computer from time to time to use the Internet, where I discovered so many cool things. In junior high, we were forced to take a typing course where I honed my typing skills through playing games. I soon was able to easily complete all of the challenges. To understand my persona, you must know that I was bullied throughout elementary and high school. I was "the nerd" of our class and I wore that badge even with all of the negative energy that it came with. I received constant criticism, ridiculed for being intelligent (my paycheck isn't too funny now, is it losers?). I didn't care, though, my mission has and always will be to show them their wrong doing. I actually can't wait to have a reunion just to see how UNSUCCESSFUL they are. My parents didn't like my interest in gaming and technology either, but that's a rant for another day. After junior high, I wasn't exposed to much else until I got to college four years ago, where I took Fundamentals Of Computing. My professor was a true nerd (major Zelda fanatic), and he taught us how to program in Python. I began to love being able to create something literally out of nothing. He opened my eyes to a world where there was order and I could have control in a world where I've never had any control in before. Since then, I've only began to love my profession more and more. This is truly what I was born to do.

Fell in love with it in high school but I had a strong bond with computers and technology early on. Done some C programming there. Had a project in ASP, Access and JavaScript. Old times 😃

I love this wk108 tag. Have a lot of stories related to it.
For me , my mentors are the reason i am what i am today. In this crazy selfish world where people only want to run faster than the others, having nice helping people around is great.
(Val titanLannister=xx)

(1)class 6-10th, xx is a curious, but poor boy with no desktop/mobile , but still loves cs classes due to various ,caring teachers.
(2) class 11th end,programming for the first time that year, hates programming, one day when everybody goes out for lunch, xx tears down while talking to his cs teacher "why can't i score good marks when i was the best till 10th? Is programming so tough?" . I remember him giving me a little but greatest motivational lecture followed by 40 minutes of the most basic concepts in which i might had asked him a 1000 questions. "You are my chaempion", he used to say😂 (bad accent) . But god, if he hadn't motivated me that day, i swear i would have left all this and go for business. Thank-you, lokesh sir💗💗

First year : tried to go for a competitive learning course. Mann, am not cool in that stuff. Again was about to break (i was among the top scorers in school boards and had designed many small games back then. I should have been good here too, but nah... the other guys were like bullets .)
Oh my, my deepest bow to this amazing teacher SUMEET MALIK (oh sir, you were so good) .
How this guy taught? Well, he first explained the concept. Fo those who understood, he gave them question 'A', for those who didn't, he repated . For those who understood , can do question a again, and those eho did A already gets an even advance question B. And this cycle went on until the weakest student(usually me) understood the concept.
And no, it never happened even once that class finished with even a single child not doing all questions he gave.he used to teach very less concepts each class and would go to everybody's desk to check they understood the concept, the question, its working, weather we implemented or not and weather our implementation is correct or not +our doubts. Hell , i even took doubts with him for hours after the class and he always just smiled💗(oh sir, am so sorry for being so dumb)
Real Doubt classes, doubts on whatsApp, revision assignments , tests , competitions,... damn, i haven't seen a teacher with this much dedication. At one point of time, that institution was famous for our Sumeet sir's classes 😂

Then last year, i got another mentor . Harshit bhiya. The guy is awesome, and a little extra swaggy 😂. He got a lot of chill, with his big AAD badge, a bag full of stickers and his every day association with people at udacity and google. As always i tried to overwhelm him with my ton of doubts in class, but he use to just give me a few pointers/links, after which i was like quiet for the complete session😂. He gave me a lot to think/work upon and i got a kind of career to work on.

I also think of mentioning a fucked up depressing-bot assholic friend of mine, but he don't deserve to be in this list of my best people. Just fuck you mann with a blockchain of dicks, if you are reading this.

At my school we use iPads (I don't know why) and the teachers can see what's on your screen, lock you inside an app, block apps/basically everything, lock/shut down your iPad, uninstall apps and they can even see what's your location. It sucks ass, but with my "professional" hacking skills I figured out a way to hack the system. If I use a VPN, for some reason they can't do anything to my iPad. I'm still waiting for the day my school is going to ditch iPad's an buy us laptops, but at least I can sleep good at night without having my teacher doing stuff to my iPad.

(I have a ton of other things I don't like about my school, and would love to rant about, but I don't want this rant to be 5000 pages long)

Thinking really hard about starting my own retro pc collection starting with the NEC pc-98 ......hmmmmmm wondee how my wife would feel about me spending money in this shit

Recently I have taken to all things retro tech, always liked it really, specially since my mom showed me pics of me playing with an old commodore 64 when i was younger as well as another of a family friend showing me the sharp 68k this shit fuels my appetite for knowing more about the programming ways of the old school coders. Some pretty interesting stuff, I feel that the newer generations would benefit greatly by knowing the things we had to do in order to build efficient programs back in the day. Not to say that I was part of that at all. I was born in 1991, how I came to see these systems is unknown and forgotten by me, but something that none the less os part of my story in computing.

Because of the industry that surrounds me I have been dealing with working with web development, but shit is really not that much of a passion of mine, had I the skills more than the academic knowledge I would love to work with low level C code all day, I just feel that the things that developers do there are so much more interesting than handilg web development, web development is tedious and a current shitstorm, not to say that shit was not like that for the programmers that i am referencing, but i just want more.

Web development has made me a successful man, at 28 i am the head of my department, I might sound like a Disney princess but I want more, I want more knowledge and more experience in different areas of Computer Science. I want to know it all and it seems like time continuously goes against me.

Oh well, here is to a new year lads, see what i can do.

How do you deal with low motivation and procrastination caused by burnouts? I've worked on a project almost non-stop for 3 weeks, now I can't think of touching a computer nor going to the gym. All I do is sleeping.

Not directly related but also I have uni entrance exam in the next June but I didn't start studying yet, despite the fact that how much this projects kills me, I can't convince myself to get on that desk and open some books. I've never been in love with school or even things slightly related to school. I know how much I need a CompSci degree but I just can't get my mind straight and do what I need to do for achieving what I want.

Mine was at my school when I was 13 or 15. I didn't have a computer at home because my parents could not offered a one. Back then I didn't know any thing about computers but always knew that I wanted to do something related to computers.

So, when I went to the computer lab in my school I was so dumb, I couldn't even click on a button using the mouse. We were partnered up two students per computer and me try so hard use a computer and my partner take over and show off his talent how he can use a computer.

I was sad and devastated even though I love computer I couldn't use a computer but my willingness to learn about computers science never faded a away!

Few years fast forward; I'm a web developer and I'm happy with what I do. The fellow student who showed off still contact me for his trouble shootings regarding computers.

Never give up on you dreams

MORE WEBDEV ADVENTURES

Took a break for a while due to personal stuff. Just got a job (have to get a stupid work permit from school first to actually be able to work tho), had some shit happen with two close friends that now hate me. Right now I'm upset about something that another really good friend did. So I've been doing some webdev to distract myself for a bit.

So I'm turning my URL bar that I had into a little command bar. It'll be what I use to configure stuff along with URLS and shit. I was building a little config menu that I really hated doing, was just becoming too much of a mess. Currently changing the look of it just a bit, then I'm gonna work on the functionality of it later.

Made my weather divs dynamically generated. Turned like 65 lines in the HTML file to ~20 lines of JavaScript that makes that ~65 lines. And it turns out that it doesn't really affect the loading time at all, which was my original worry. My next task for that is to save the weather predictions so the script doesn't have to grab a whole 14kb file every reload (I know, that part's a little bad). The entire page with the icons and all comes out to ~30kb so far. The icons make up about half of that, but they'll never all be in use because only 5 are on screen at any time and there are 7 total. Plus the fact that one may be in use multiple times (like this very moment actually).

Then I want to have an RSS reader which I've been putting off for a while now. Trying to get everything else done before I do that.

At this very moment, the page takes about 1.4 seconds to load. I'm trying to avoid putting anything I don't need in it. Like I'm using vanilla everything. No frameworks or anything. But that's just my personal preference.

I'll make sure to share it with you guys when I have everything built and functional. I've had a lot of interruptions while doing this. My personal life tends to get in the way of shit I try to do, because I let it get to me.

Anyways I'm just rambling at this point. I fucking love you guys

Just got asked to be a tutor for the new 1. Semester students when school starts, in a couple of weeks (I'm starting 3. Semester) 😁

I love to teach, so for me this is really awesome 😀

What should I do to practice being a "good coder" vs a "code Googler" who slaps other people's code into the site just because "it's enough to get the damn thing working"?

I feel really overwhelmed with all that Ive learned thus far. At this point I feel width with know depth when it comes to my knowledge of websites.

I've been messing around with html/css/js for a while and played with plenty of other languages,pre-processors, frameworks, etc. I never went to school for programming and have done work for small businesses independently for some time. Most of what I know comes from codecademy treehouse and similar sites. I can refer to Google on a lot of things but I feel like there are habits that I should be implementing so I don't have to re-do things later. I love the book apart series but I still feel like it's missing the foundational knowledge that I'm looking for.

After all of the time I've spent going through courses I feel like my experiences have given me solutions to build a few things and now I'm just jamming those solutions onto whatever I can until something I like comes on to the browser.

It's really easy to sit down and bang my head against the keyboard until something comes out that looks the way I want it to. However, I know there is way more going on that could help me make better decisions. I just feel like I'm missing something. Maybe it's experience, or maybe it's just the lack of commroddery from working alone and not being able to approach problems with a team.

I hate pulling up my css file and feeling like it's rubbish, and feeling like I don't completely understand things like flex, or display, or position. I've been pushing at this for a while but I don't think I've found a resource that has really made me feel like I'm anywhere close to being a competent coder.

There are tons of watch and learn and do type classes that show you how to make stuff, but I guess what I want to know now is why we make it that way.

At some point do you just sit down and read the MSN start to finish?

I wonder sometimes if my brain has been reprogrammed because I grew up in Google world and don't actually have to solve anything for myself. I read about a guy who locked himself away for hours with books on code and he just sat there and wrote his code on paper until he was confident that he was getting it right.

I feel so lost all the time Everytime I think about the future. How are you all going forward?

- What should i be doing ? I used to like computer science when it was taught with lots of simplification and abstraction (in the school level). Now i know there are a 100+ research areas/work areas/branches in it, and i am an average in all of them.

I like most of them more or less, and won't mind giving away my years of life working/learning them. But for what and why?

-- Money? Every profile turns into a decent salary after a certain time. This means i can ride any boat i want.

-- Passion/interest? Now what exactly is this?as i said everything feels doable, given enough time to get a hang of it.

-- Fame? Its rare the developes, testers or other individuals in computer science ever gets a solo credit. Most of the time its either the ceos, the researchers or the company itself. So i guess getting a fame is equal to burning your neighbors by flaunting your cash for most ppl

-- Happy life? Meh, this point is affected by a lot of other factors. Would come back to this point later

- everyday in my feed, there are people showing 6, 7 sometimes even 8 figure salaries. Other people would get inspired with those, but i feel very weird about these.

I never see myself earning those, idk why. Why would someone give me those huge amounts?

How do you find yourself deserving for ythat big ass money? At what point you hit that realisation? Here is a small story :

I did an Android dev course around 2.5 years ago. There was a guy there an year older than me. He was very bad in this, i tell you. Most of the time, i was explaining the concepts to him after class.so last year he graduated, and took a job, We both used to expect a decent salary amount, say x (with me having a little ego that i expect certainly more than him, say x+20% ), but he took a job for half that number , say x/2.

After 1 increment and 1 job shift in 1.5 years, he has now successfully achieved package greater than x. I on the other hand, being still at college and with a lot of bad internship experiences now feel that i won't be getting even x/3 at my start no matter what.

- There is also this thing about people going into more of a management and other non tech roles once they start growing in this field. Why? What did they realized? I am sure not everyone of them would have hit this realization that tech is not what they want to do (which i can't understand why). Maybe its the money and/or happy life expectations?

i have started to feel dumb for not being able to think innovative new ideas and being an average mind :/

And about the happy life, so far its not much happiness for me, and am confused.

I am grateful about the usual things i have (healthy middle class parents, working body, roof , food,etc) , unhappy about the things i don't and see with others (more money, materialistic assets, confidence, siblings, social life, love life, etc) and that's it.

From what i understood of 21 years on this earth is that everyone is running to achieve that list of their desires and wants to move them from todo to done, like trello task. If you can't then keep fighting to achieve or grudgingly accept the fact that you couldn't and be happy about it.

So is that it? That's your happy life goals?

Can anyone help me with this theory about microprocessor, cpu and computers in general?

( I used to love programming when during school days when it was just basic searching/sorting and oop. Even in college , when it advanced to language details , compilers and data structures, i was fine. But subjects like coa and microprocessors, which kind of explains the working of hardware behind the brain that is a computer is so difficult to understand for me 😭😭😭)

How a computer works? All i knew was that when a bulb gets connected to a battery via wires, some metal inside it starts glowing and we see light. No magics involved till now.

Then came the von Neumann architecture which says a computer consists of 4 things : i/o devices, system bus ,memory and cpu. I/0 and memory interact with system bus, which is controlled by cpu . Thus cpu controls everything and that's how computer works.

Wait, what?
Let's take an easy example of calc. i pressed 1+2= on keyboard, it showed me '1+2=' and then '3'. How the hell that hapenned ?

Then some video told me this : every key in your keyboard is connected to a multiplexer which gives a special "code" to the processer regarding the key press.
The "control unit" of cpu commands the ram to store every character until '=' is pressed (which is a kind of interrupt telling the cpu to start processing) . RAM is simply a bunch of storage circuits (which can store some 1s) along with another bunch of circuits which can retrieve these data.

Up till now, the control unit knows that memory has (for eg):
Value 1 stored as 0001 at some address 34A
Value + stored as 11001101 at some address 34B
Value 2 stored as 0010 at some Address 23B

On recieving code for '=' press, the "control unit" commands the "alu" unit of cpu to fectch data from memory , understand it and calculate the result(i e the "fetch, decode and execute" cycle)

Alu fetches the "codes" from the memory, which translates to ADD 34A,23B i.e add the data stored at addresses 34a , 23b. The alu retrieves values present at given addresses, passes them through its adder circuit and puts the result at some new address 21H.

The control unit then fetches this result from new address and via, system busses, sends this new value to display's memory loaded at some memory port 4044.
The display picks it up and instantly shows it.

My problems:
1. Is this all correct? Does this only happens?

2. Please expand this more.
How is this system bus, alu, cpu , working?
What are the registers, accumulators , flip flops in the memory?
What are the machine cycles?
What are instructions cycles , opcodes, instruction codes ?
Where does assembly language comes in?
How does cpu manipulates memory?
This data bus , control bus, what are they?
I have come across so many weird words i dont understand dma, interrupts , memory mapped i/o devices, etc. Somebody please explain.

Ps : am learning about the fucking 8085 microprocessor in class and i can't even relate to basic computer architecture. I had flunked the coa paper which i now realise why, coz its so confusing. :'''(

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.

TLDR: I didn't & still not sure if it is..

I love bug hunting & fixing & figuring out how stuff works, but many will argue this is not even real programming..

Long version how I ended up programming:
Back in highschool, I was deciding between english and mathematics & computer science.. I filled in the form for the latter. Got a change of hearts but I already gave the extra/backup empty form to schoolmate..

Figured it's for the better because it's a hell to get a job as an english teacher/prof anyways + I dislike comunications with people + documentation (if any) is in english etc..

At the end of first year, I didn't even apply for all the exams because you had to have both programming 1&2 to pass or even be eligible to take the year again.. I figured I'd fail them, so once I actually passed both (& actually not with bad grades), I was fucked.. had to retake the year, which means I lost time + still had to pay the rent etc.. decided to drop out and return home and do the IT engineer course instead to at least have some formal education to help me find a job. Finished that without problems, I 'specialised' in network administration.
I got a job straight out of school as a web developer.. the irony.. got some conflicts with the boss and was terminated (material for another rant).

Later I sought out admin jobs, but got declined because I was overqualified and had programming experince. FML, right?

Ended up sending out mandatory job applications for IT administration & programming to not lose the bonuses & got called up to a meeting in the company I work for since then.

No qualifications for .net & MS technologies, but they liked my CV so the ended up setting up the interview anyway. I didn't know half of the technologies and concepts by proper name, but they figured I understand enough of the content to give me a try. A few years later, I got the most fucked up project they have because of my love for new thigs and trying to understand everything. It's aaaalmost bearable now.. still needs a lot of work, but I'm happy where I am. Saddly, I'm still second guessing if I'm doing a proper job as a dev, but they seem to be very ok with my work. (:

So I'm not much for Linux, but I'll admit. It's a pretty damn solid environment, especially for programmers.
Since my main computer can't afford to have Linux on it, I decided to start working on making the Raspberry Pi handheld notebook. But after I added up the price for all of the components, it's almost three hundred dollars.
Personally, I would love to have a mini computer everywhere I go. A Chromebook is ok. But I guess you need to take into consideration that it is NOT ment for programming. I have found several IDE's and found none of them have a debugger or a way to execute my code.
I did some thinking and I'm starting to wonder if it is worth it.
It's a hand held computer with ubuntu on it. What's the worse that can happen? I don't solder the battery correctly and the whole thing explodes in my hands? Yeah that's pretty likely. Another reason I look at getting it is because there is so much fucking theft at my school it's hard to believe we don't have armed gunmen at every corner since everyone is always sober or high as shit.
Having an 11.6 inch Chromebook also puts me at risk of getting mugged, because who the fuck wouldn't want to try and pawn a laptop for drug money? At least with a handheld I could keep it in my pocket where I know it'll be safe.
What do you guys think?
Should I build this little thing or keep my current Chromebook but try to keep it safe?

I felt inspired when I found out about Minecraft mods when I was in elementary school. I thought they looked so cool. I then went and actually bought a Java reference book but I never made any mods. Because Counter Strike came into my life and well I wasn't too proud of myself. But now I've quit CS:GO and I'm now committed to learning programing and I love it!

Man i fucking love my current living situation. The people are so fucking nice here, my neighbours almost all go into the same school as me and are therefore technical versed/share the same interests. My School is super awesome due to some of the teachers, where you can learn so much. Really starting to have a passion fo programming although it takes up so much of my freetime, i nearly don't do anything else anymore but I want to learn as much as possible.

It's a super nice day even though I have to study maths all day but fuck it! That doesn't stress me!

And all it really boils down to is how you perceive problems and the like. Either you let it get to you or you don't. Now everyone have a nice day :)

I was always somewhere in the range of not athletic enough to be a jock and not smart enough to be a geek during high school so it left me in a fun little purgatory between social groups. Ever since I was a kid though I saw my cousin make flash games for fun and thats where my interest in programming started but I never really did anything with it.

It wasn’t until I broke a bone during a football game and couldn’t play or workout for 8 months that I started jumping head first into programming and IT WENT DEEP. After tearing through and intro to java book I started reading and watching courses about data structures and learning how to make mediocre apps and games. It was terrible as any beginner usually is but god was it fun.

Then college came around and I decided to major in computer science, got myself a nice starting job at a typical big tech company with an actually decent team to work with and I still have the same love for it all since I started with it.

I don’t know if this is a rant or not. I just wake up with a crazy idea that I have to wake up and try to write code to make it happen. I guess we all do that or else we wouldn’t be on this platform now would we? Anyway, I’m trying to write a word jumble. I am an old school person that still gets a physical newspaper and I love working the word jumbles! Sometimes I’m like Rain Man. I could just look at every word and get them right away, and I wanted to write my own program and slap it on my website - but I am stuck right now! I’m stuck at a point where I can get all the letters from my answer, but how do I get that down to 3 to 4 words to scramble? I tend to go to sleep, thinking about these things trying to figure them out and will usually wake up in the middle of the night get to my computer and finish it, but this one has me spinning! Who else has driven crazy bystuff like this and does anybody know how I might achieve this? It’s in PHP & MySQL. Glad I accidentally found this place!

I am in love with Electron JS.
Started Programming with Desktop development(Visual Basic),in my high school.
After a detour of trying Gamedev,Webdev,several frameworks, feels good to comeback and try Desktop dev.
Gonna dive deep...........