Programmers: Always use descriptive variable names.

Mathematicians: Single letter variable names always, ideally from obscure/dead alphabets.

Src: Twitter

CTO: "You must write good tests with high coverage, ideally use TDD. We need confidence in our releases."
Also CTO: *Secretly commits code changes directly to master at 3am, breaks tests, skips CI, publishes, tells no-one*

One thing I've learned repeatedly over the last 20 years is that companies are generally not deserving of your loyalty.

By all means, show up, apply yourself, and do your best work, that's just being a professional. But never get emotionally invested in a company you don't own.

There are really only two reasons for staying: earning or learning, ideally both. Once you have exhausted your current employer's limits in this regard, move on, you don't owe them anything.

Open source for the win!

Working on a new awesome project and found an open source android app which does most of what I need. realized that one of its features is very annoying for me so was sitting behind my desk like fuck me.

........ Suddenly remembered that the app was open source.

Cloned the repo, imported into Android studio, rewrote the part (very tiny part, I'm not a Java dev) that needed rewriting and built the app.

Installed it onto my device through adb and bam, works! (Although not ideally yet but I overlooked other features needing adjustment).

😎

The tech stack at my current gig is the worst shit I’ve ever dealt with...

I can’t fucking stand programs, especially browser based programs, to open new windows. New tab, okay sure, ideally I just want the current tab I’m on to update when I click on a link.

Ticketing system: Autotask
Fucking opens up with a crappy piss poor sorting method and no proper filtering for ticket views. Nope you have to go create a fucking dashboard to parse/filter the shit you want to see. So I either have to go create a metric-arse tonne of custom ticket views and switch between them or just use the default turdburger view. Add to that that when I click on a ticket, it opens another fucking window with the ticket information. If I want to do time entry, it just feels some primal need to open another fucking window!!! Then even if I mark the ticket complete it just minimizes the goddamn second ticket window. So my jankbox-supreme PC that my company provided gets to strugglepuff along trying to keep 10 million chrome windows open. Yeah, sure 6GB of ram is great for IT work, especially when using hot steaming piles of trashjuice software!

I have to manually close these windows regularly throughout the day or the system just shits the bed and halts.

RMM tool: Continuum
This fucker takes the goddamn soggy waffle award for being utterly fucking useless. Same problem with the windows as autotask except this special snowflake likes to open a login prompt as a full-fuck-mothering-new window when we need to open a LMI rescue session!!! I need to enter a username and a password. That’s it! I don’t need a full screen window to enter credentials! FUCK!!! Btw the LMI tools only work like 70% of the time and drag ass compared to literally every other remote support tool I’ve ever used. I’ve found that it’s sometimes just faster to walk someone through enabling RDP on their system then remoting in from another system where LMI didn’t decide to be fully suicidal and just kill itself.

Our fucking chief asshat and sergeant fucknuts mcdoogal can’t fucking setup anything so the antivirus software is pushed to all client systems but everything is just set to the default site settings. Absolutely zero care or thought or effort was put forth and these gorilla spunk drinking, rimjob jockey motherfuckers sell this as a managed AntiVirus.

We use a shitty password manager than no one besides I use because there is a fully unencrypted oneNote notebook that everyone uses because fuck security right? “Sometimes it’s just faster to have the passwords at the ready without having to log into the password manager.” Chief Asshat in my first week on the job.

Not to mention that windows server is unlicensed in almost every client environment, the domain admin password is same across multiple client sites, is the same password to log into firewalls, and office 365 environments!!!

I’ve brought up tons of ways to fix these problems, but they have their heads so far up their own asses getting high on undeserved smugness since “they have been in business for almost ten years”. Like, Whoop Dee MotherFucking Doo! You have only been lucky to skate by with this dumpster fire you call a software stack, you could probably fill 10 olympic sized swimming pools to the brim with the logarrhea that flows from your gullets not only to us but also to your customers, and you won’t implement anything that is good for you, your company, or your poor clients because you take ten minutes to try and understand something new.

I’m fucking livid because I’m stuck in a position where I can’t just quit and work on my business full time. I’m married and have a 6m old baby. Between both my wife and I working we barely make ends meet and there’s absolutely zero reason that I couldn’t be providing better service to customers without having to lie through my teeth to them and I could easily support my family and be about 264826290461% happier!

But because we make so little, I can’t scrap together enough money to get Terranimbus (my startup) bootstrapped. We have zero expendable/savable income each month and it’s killing my soul. It’s so fucking frustrating knowing that a little time and some capital is all that stands between a better life for my family and I and being able to provide a better overall service out there over these kinds of shady as fuck knob gobblers.

PM - We are going to launch registration of users in mobile phone. We are going to use blah internal framework as with it we will have same experience in mobile and desktop will be same.
Me - Shouldn't the experience be different on desktop its easy. On mobile following that many steps may seem complicated to the user.
PM - No but the experience should remain same.
Me - face palm(sees the overly complicated framework just for building 4 pages spends time finds bug in the framework fixes them and takes four months of frustration but launches it)
PM - We feel like ideally mobile and desktop should have different experience. This allows us to register faster on mobile. As we have already aligned with the blah framework team and think best path is to build it from scratch.
Me -

Another crappy job advertisement this time courtesy of Glassdoor: get spammed to death by job ads.

So it says graduate software engineer but they want someone with ideally 1 -3 years of B2 experience, seriously how is this fair?

Like with my other job ad rants:

What a fucking joke, lol

Dear external developer dumbass from hell.
We bought your company under the assumption you had a borderline functioning product and/or dev team. Ideally both

For future reference expect "file path" arguments can contain backslashes and perhaps even the '.' character. It ain't that hard. Maybe try using the damn built in path parsing capabilities every halfway decent programming environment has had since before you figured out how to smash your head against the keyboard hard enough for your shitty excuse of a compiler stops arguing and gives in.

I am fixing your shit by completely removing it with one line of code calling the framework and you better not reject this.
This is not a pull request ITS A GOD DAMN PULL COMMAND.

- Is what i would _like_ to say right now... you know if i wouldn't be promptly fired for doing so :p
How's you guys friday going?

Hello, I'm now gonna rant for a bit. I'm usually not a ranty person (wait, why am I on this site again?) , but here we go. I sometimes feel misunderstood about my side projects.

I don't know about you guys, but when I program on my free time, sometimes I just want to grab a glass of wine and explore things I think bout during the day. So, during the start of my CS-education, when I started to get my programming feet a little warm, I wrote this tic-tac-toe game (as you do...), and I thought "Well I know how to play the game. Surely I can program an AI to play against". So I thought hard for an evening or two and came up with something that wasn't too shabby (I can't win).
Then another time when learned about creating GUIs we got to do simple menu based stuff with buttons and pulldown menus following a certain structure, but we also learned that positions of components can be set freely. So I thought "Well, if I can freely change the positions of components, surely I can animate stuff and if I map that to some keys I can create a real time game!". So I wrote a small platformer with two squares that ideally succeed in killing one another. After animation I started fantasising about 3D rendering, so I created a small application which creates the illusion of 3D, which was cool and all, but that got me dreaming of creating a real 3D engine. It became almost like a cause of mine; to understand how it all works and create a 3D engine from scratch.
So now I've written a 3D engine. A simple one, mind you, without all the bells and whistles, but still a 3D engine.

So, after all this rambling, what is this rant about? It's about how people react to all this. The reactions are divided. Some are impressed, mostly people who cannot program, but others are like "hm...". For example, during job interviews, when people ask me if I've done anything on the side and I mention this, people usually go like ".... hm... :| Well that's great. So mostly just done your own stuff?". Well YES! What is that supposed to mean? That I've not created shippable applications? I've explored, which I myself believe is valuable! I believe I've learned something along the way. And most importantly I've enjoyed it. Maybe I'm over interpreting this, but sometimes it feels like people don't even understand the joy in it, like it's illogical. Why create something that in the end won't create any real value?

Am I alone in this? Or perhaps, have I just written far to long and uninteresting a rant for anybody to read this far? I don't know. You tell me.

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

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

had wished for a raspberry pi as christmas present, ideally with a pi cam on top.
now i've got a pi cam😏 ... and no raspberry pi😐🤨😅
that was unexpected

My slacker coworker attached a spoon to his monitor serving as a rear view mirror, so that he knows when somebody is standing behind him and can see his screen, which allows him to better slack off the whole day.
He's sick today (he often is), and I am looking for a nice prank idea, ideally involving this spoon. I thought of rubbing a piece of butter against it to make it murky and greasy, or maybe attach a photo of our boss to it.
But I need a better idea, so please comment! Thank you, much appreciated!

The whole point of having a daily scrum is to let your team know about the progress you've made from last day and what you'd be needing to stick to the sprint plan.

So ideally everyone has 30-60 seconds to give a gist of their activities. And a small scrum team would be productive because everybody is on the same page.

Our scrum meetings usually wait for all of us to assemble with our coffees and donuts, sit down, joke, and then agonizingly go over everybody's existential crisis as a developer because of the task they've been assigned to has too many dependencies. And this happens every single fucking day! These "scrum" meetings tend to go for 1 hour. FML!

Anything I (am able to) build myself.
Also, things that are reasonably standardized. So you probably won't see me using a commercial NAS (needing a web browser to navigate and up-/download my files, say what?) nor would I use something like Mega, despite being encrypted. I don't like lock-in into certain clients to speak some proprietary "secure protocol". Same reason why I don't use ProtonMail or that other one.. Tutanota. As a service, use the standards that already exist, implement those well and then come offer it to me.

But yeah. Self-hosted DNS, email (modified iRedMail), Samba file server, a blog where I have unlimited editing capabilities (God I miss that feature here on devRant), ... Don't trust the machines nor the services you don't truly own, or at least make an informed decision about them. That is not to say that any compute task should be kept local such as search engines or AI or whatever that's best suited for centralized use.. but ideally, I do most of my computing locally, in a standardized way, and in a way that I completely control. Most commercial cloud services unfortunately do not offer that.

Edit: Except mail servers. Fuck mail servers. Nastiest things I've ever built, to the point where I'd argue that it was wrong to ever make email in the first place. Such a broken clusterfuck of protocols, add-ons (SPF, DKIM, DMARC etc), reputation to maintain... Fuck mail servers. Bloody soulsuckers those are. If you don't do system administration for a living, by all means do use the likes of ProtonMail and Tutanota, their security features are nonstandard but at least they (claim to) actually respect your privacy.

You guys are cool and all but it's a little strange being in a community centred around releasing negativity when ideally you need good vibes..

I am currently looking for a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), because my music projects are starting to get a little too complex for Audacity.

So I started looking for a good, easy-to-learn, ideally free program, and quickly learned that Avid now has a free version of Pro Tools called First.

So I go to their site and fill out the registration form to get the download. In addition to creating an account with Avid, you also need to create one with iLok, which apparently has something to do with how they manage their licenses. Kinda overkill for a free program, but okay...

I download the program (about 3gigs...), install it and try to start it. It gives me an error message about missing some service. Okay? I'm confused because I notice that an 'Application Manager' service has appeared in my tray, and when I open that I can log into my new account just fine. But it still doesn't work.

There's a link in the error message to the iLok website, and it looks like ai need to dowload and install another component. Why didn't that get installed with the program if it's required?

Hmm...

So I go to the iLok site, download it and install it. Pro Tools First still won't start. I realize that the PTF installer asked me to reboot, which I didn't do because: a) I always have a lot of windows open, and b) How often is a reboot ACTUALLY required? Why would you need to reboot?

So I (begrudgingly) reboot, and now the program seems to start initializing... but then it throws an error message about some plugin that it can't load because it doesn't work for the 64 bit version. Then... why are you even looking for it?
And then it says something like: 'I can't handle that, I'm just gonna shut down'.

What?

I try starting it again. Same error appears, but then it gets past it this time... Only to throw another error message about something else it can't load, and therefore it must shut down.

Deep breath.

Third time is the charm, the program actually made it to the project create/load screen! Huzzah!
So I look around a bit, but don't do much. It doesn't seem too intuitive to me, so I start watching some tutorials on YouTube from Avid themselves. It's a little late by now, so I don't get my hands dirty that day.

Next time I want to try out the program I start it up, still get error messages, but it does seem to initialize okay. But then the 'Create project' button doesn't react when I press it.

It turns out that the program takes a looong time to log in to the avid account, even though the manager service is running and logged in...

When it finally logs on I create a new blank project, but it doesn't ask me where to save it to. I see there is a counter saying 1/3 and looking around I find some info about 'cloud based projects'.

It would seem that this program only supports saving projects to the cloud, and you get only 3 projects total. Three. THREE?

Ahem...

I add an instrument track to my new project and select the one and only plugin, which is a synth. I don't see the plugin window, like in the tutorials I watched. I fiddle around with the windows, but I only manage to get the layout fucked up. There's a handy 'Window' menu, but none of the options resets the view. The main window is now sporting a WINDOWS FUCKING 7 BORDER! And partially blocking the view of the top menu.

Blaaargh!

Frustrated, I shut the program down and restart it. I now select one of the project templates (after waiting for it to LOG IN AGAIN!) in the hope that I might have a bit more luck with that starting point.

But when the template has loaded, out of nowhere, the program goes from maximized to windowed mode! And the fucking Win7 border is back again, still messing with the main menu!

FFS!

I get the sucker maximized again and select one of the synth tracks, and Lo and Behold! The synth plugin window actually shows up! But of course there is no sound produced when I play, neither with the keyboard or my midi keyboard.

Oh no, that would have been too easy.

I see some the meters moving when I play, but no sound is produced. I check the options menu, but find out nothing useful except for the fact that the program only support 48kHz sample rate. That's pretty disappointing when you have a 192kHz/24bit soundcard.

I'm done. This piece of shit software is NOT for me. It's bloated, complicated to sign up for and install, extremely limited and buggy as hell!

The final insult is that it takes 5 minutes to uninstall because there is no uninstall option in the so-called 'Application Manager' (of course fucking not!), and doing it through Programs & Features there are 5 (FIVE!!) different apps and services to uninstall, one by one.

0/10, would not recommend.

Management has been promising we'd leave .NET framework for 2 years now. Never fucking happens. A new ASP.NET project was just started last week and yup, OF COURSE, its .NET Framework 4.8.

I'd even be happy with one of the earlier .NET Core versions at this point for fucks sake. I have no clue why tech leads are so happy to create a brand new project on a deprecated framework version.

And yes, I have checked thoroughly. Our whole infrastructure works with .NET Core onward. People are just too lazy to learn new stuff.

Stuff like switching to .NET 6, actually doing unit testing, improving our CI/CD pipeline, refactoring problematic codebases, etc. -> all this stuff is the kind of things they promise me I can work on later whenever I'm so bogged down with work that I'm looking for a light at the end of the tunnel. All empty promises.

Ideally we should be on .NET 6 since its LTS and just stay on the LTS versions as the year goes on.

If you are a web developer, consider using proper page titles.

Page titles are one of the most basic elements of a web page and yet websites often fail to make proper use of them.

Without a proper page title, your user does not have an accurate idea of what page is in the tab without having to open the tab, which gets tedious if many tabs are open. With a proper page title, an instant glance on the tab does suffice.

Some sites only put in their site name or something like "Search - Site Name" without including the search query in the page title, or "User profile - Site Name".

An example of this is, disappointingly, archive.org. As thankful as I am for the Archive, they could make better use of page titles to make browsing their library more convenient. While they use proper page titles on item pages (including both title and author!), they use non-descriptive titles on their 2023 search feature (downgraded from lightweight static HTML+AJAX to a JavaScript app) and user profile pages.

The user name of a profile or a search query and ideally a page number should be in the page title so a browser tab with a search can be found faster and can also be seen on social media sites that auto-generate preview cards with page titles.

Descriptive page titles also improve your search engine ranking! You surely don't want to miss out on that, do you?

Going out on a limb here... have any of you done any bare-metal phone programming (not counting compiling like AOSP and such, like totally arbitrary code at boot-time, or bootloader coding, ideally) or know someone that has? A friend got bit by a bad iOS app on a jailbroken iPhone 8 (checkra1n, so no unsigned firms or anything) that has installed a bad iCloud lock on the device, and I need checkm8 shellcode to zero most of if not all of the NAND to get rid of it (since an iTunes restore preserves that data) and I can't figure out jack shit about how any of this works, since ARM isn't strict on what goes where in the address space or how to access hardware.

Director: Ideally, it should have been closed yesterday.

Well.. THE WORLD ISN’T FUCKING IDEAL, IS IT?

Not quite a rant, but it'll devolve in heated debate anyway 😂.

So I was discussing deployment methods with a client's CTO today.

He was fervent on using git for deployment (as in, checkout/pull directly on target host).

I was leaning more on, build npm and web bullshit on the runner, rsync to target host.

Ideally, build shit in the runner, publish to an artifact/package manager, pull that in the target host.

Of course, there are many variables and pros/cons on each side, but would like to hear your opinion.

Anybody know any good Linux software to remember window position depending on screen configuration? Ideally I'd like there to always be two terminals on one of my monitors automatically, so if there's only one open it should open another one. Yeah, crazy requirements, sorry!

Question

What server monitoring do you use, both for statistics and security?

--------------------
tl;dr ends here

Ideally I would like to have one clean dashboard that shows me all the nodes I have, proxmox already offers a great range of stats - but it is a page per container etc. so not ideal, I thought of having datadoghq, but their per host pricing is huge, since I have more than 5 hosts to track.

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

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

Well maybe it's for good.

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

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

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

What on earth could possibly go wrong?

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

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

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

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

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

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

short minded idiots.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What in the actual fuck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I just finished designing an entire asset management pipeline and christ on a fucking pogo stick, if it isn't convoluted.

Theres a lot of game engines out there, but all of them do it a little different. They all tackle a slightly different problem, without even realizing it.

1. asset management

2. asset change management

3. behavior change management

4. data management

5. combinatorial design management.

6. Combinatorial Behavior management

7. Feature completion

ASSET MANAGEMENT is exactly what it says on the tin.

ASSET CHANGE management can be thought of handling the import, export, formatting, platform specific packing, and versioning (including forking) of an asset.

BEHAVIORAL CHANGE management is a subset of asset management, because code is a subset of assets (depending on how you define 'assets'). The oldest known example of this is commenting and uncommenting code.
Or worse, printf debugging.

This can be file versioning, basic undo services, graph management of forks and mergers, toggles for features or modules, etc.

DATA management is about anything that doesn't fall into the other categories, everything from mission text to npc dialogues, quests, location names, item stats, the works. Anything you'd be tempted to put in a database, falls under this category. Haven't yet seen many engines offer this as an explicit built in tool as of yet, because the other problems are non-trivial as is, so this is a bit of low hanging fruit that gets handled by external tools, or loaded from formats as simple as json.

COMBINATORIAL DESIGN management is the idea of prefabbing, blueprints of broader object design using nested prototypes of existing game objects, to create more complex, reusable set pieces. Unity did this well. GM does this in part.

COMBINATORIAL BEHAVIOR management is entity-component systems, plus tooling to make it easy to add, remove, and configure components and their values on entity blueprints, also not uncommon. Both stencyl and unity do this. GM has a precursor to this in the form of configurable fields, but these fields are not based on component scripts attached to objects.

FEATURE COMPLETION is that set of gameplay mechanics or styles of design that an engine naturally makes easier to include or build in a game.

I don't think I'm aiming for all that, but I think at minimum a good engine has to do asset management, behavioral change management, prefabs, and entity-component systems with management tools for that. And ideally, asset change management.

Friday afternoon, the week's work is finished, and I'm ahead of schedule.
An email arrives for another project.. "URGENT yaddayadda". The dickheads where it came from have taken weeks to react, and now it's urgent. Yeah, fuck you assholes, ideally with a smoothing iron.
On the upside, I'm not addressed directly, and that project isn't my task. But boss could make it mine in no time, and I think he would.
I don't even open the email, nobody has seen it anyway yet, AND I GO HOME! :-)

Okay so I jumped on this app because I would ideally want to make friends interested in the stuff I am.
Using this app has really made me realise how much of a noob I am though. I feel like I'm doomed to never find the kinda people I wanna know.

Well... I can think of several bugs that I found on a previous project, but one of the worst (if not the worst, because the damage scope) it's one bug that only appears for a couple of days at the end of every month.

What happens is the following: this bug occurs in a submodule designed (heh) to control the monthly production according the client requirements (client says "I want 1000 thoot picks", that submodule calculates the daily production requirements in order to full fill the order).

Ideally, that programming need to be done once a week (for the current month), because the quantities are updated by client on the same schedule, and one of the edge cases is that when the current date is >= 16th of the month, the user can start programming the production of the following month.

So, according to this specific case, there's an unidentified, elusive, and nasty bug that only shows up on the two last days of every month, when it doesn't allow to modify/create anything for the following month. I mean, normally, whenever you try to edit/create new data, the application shows either an estimated of the quantities to produce, or the previous saved data. But on those specific days it doesn't show any information at all, disregarding of there's something saved or not.

The worst thing is that such process involves both a very overcomplicated stored procedure, and an overcomplicated functionality on the client side (did I mentioned that it dynamically generates a pseudo-spreadsheet with the procedure dataset? Cell by cell), that absolutely no one really fully understands, and the dude that made those artifacts is no longer available (and by now, I'm not so sure that he even remember what he done there).

One of the worst thing is that at this point, it's easier to handle with that error rather to redesign all of that (not because technical limitations, but for bureaucratic and management issues).

The another worst thing (the most important none) is that this specific bug can create a HUGE mess as it prevents the programming of the production to be done the next day (you know, people tends to procrastinate and start doing things at the very end of the day/week/month)... And considering that the company could lose a huge amount of money by every minute without production, you can guess the damage scope of this single bug.

Anyway, this bug has existed since, I don't know, 2015 (Q4?) and we have tried so many things trying to solve it, but that spaghettis refuse to be understood (specially the stored procedure, as it has dynamically generated queries). During my tenure (that ended last year) I spent a good amount of time (considering what I mentioned on the last rant, about the toxic environment) trying to solve that, just giving up after the first couple of weeks.

Anyway... I'm guessing that this particular bug will survive another 4-ish years, or even outlive the current full development team... But, who knows ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ?

Fellow Deviants, I need your help in understanding the importance of C++

Okay, I need to clarify a few things:

I am not a beginner or a newbie who has just entered this community...

I have been using C++ for some time and in fact, it was the language which introduced me to the world of programming... Before, I switched to Java, since I found it much better for application development...

I already know about the obvious arguments given in favour of C/C++ like how it is a much more faster and memory efficient than other languages...

But, at the same time, C/C++ exposes us and doesn't protect us from ourselves.. I hope that you understand what I mean to say..

And, I guess that it is a fair tradeoff for the kind of power and control that these languages (C/C++) provide us..

And, I also agree with the fact that it is an language that ideally suits our need, if we wish to deal with compilers, graphics, OS, etc, in the future...

But, what I really want to ask here is:

In this age and times, when hardware has advanced so much, where technically, memory efficiency or execution speeds no longer is the topmost priority... These were the reasons for which C/C++ was initially created...

In today's time, human concept of time matters more and hence, syntactical less complicated languages like Java or Python are much more preferred, especially for domains like application development or data sciences...

So, is continuing with C++, an endeavour worth sticking with in the future or is it not required...

I am talking about this issue since I am in a dilemma about the use of C++ in the future...

I would be grateful if we could talk about keeping AI, Machine Learning or Algorithms Optimisation in mind... Since, these are the fields in which I am interested in...

I know that my question could have been posted in a better way.. But, considering the chaos that is present in my mind, regarding this question doesn't allow me to do so...

Any kind of suggestion or thoughts would be welcome and much appreciated...

P.S: I currently use C++ only for competitive programming or challenges...

I love a number of the little slack "all clean" icons when you catch up on threads. They're adorable. My personal favorite is the floptopus.

Anyone else have fave examples of adorable, ideally platform mascot-related pieces of task-accomplishment-reward-bait (octocat, go gopher, etc etc?

It's a rant bc fuck anyone who's too cool for cute shit :p

** this means words are muted **

Friday:
I send a mail the client a Google doc with elaborate details about evaluation of an Android tablet from a Chinese manufacturer.

Monday:

The client is upset, he says "You say there is no GPS chip on the tablet while the manufacturer says otherwise"

Me- "I have clearly mentioned that it has a GPS chip"

Client- Opens the Google doc, points to a sentence. Looks at me like I did something horrible.

Me - **This guys is either word blind or something else is wrong with him, the line reads 'GPS chip available'**

Me- "Look, it says 'GPS chip available'.

Client- **Blinks n blinks again** "Alright, but why did you share a Google document, why not PDF, docx"

Me-**Politely** "You can download the document in any format, look I will show you..."

Client- "It should have been in the mail itself ideally"

Me- **WTH** "We normally maintain a document for such things to keep everything organised, but if you want I will put everything in mail itself"

Client- "Hmm.. do both from next time"

Me- "Alright" **BS**

Client- "Why is the new feature taking so much time"

Me- "As planned earlier, we going to deliver it tomorrow"

Client- "Why not today??" **Gives a strange look.**

Me thinking - **Enough**

Me- "See, I am trying to integrate a smarten with a socket connection, reading it's data via exposed APIs that are hardly documented, we need faster performance so I need to implement caching, multi threading, offline handling, multiple processes to avoid memory fluctuations, sync adapter to sync data...."

Client- "Ok ok ok, it's fine if you give working build tomorrow"

Me- "Ok, fine"

#limit

!devrant.

More like 'relationship' rant.

The following is gonna be kinda crude and not work appropriate just fyi.

First, whats with this trend of 'shave your pussy", and small tits? Shit just a few years ago it was the opposite! Who wants to fuck a women who looks like an undeveloped boy. Give me a good medium pair of knockers and a (slightly) hairy pussy anyday and I'm in heaven.

On that note, all these guys whining and fucking whinging about "fat" women. Like I'm not chasing deathfat women or anything, but come on dudes. If you're gonna demand 'thin beautiful women' put in the fucking work! Just saying it now. Kinda pudgy, not a deal breaker for me. She have a pretty face, looks good in make up? Fuck it, I'll give her the time of day. Don't come at me with "hurrr...fat is unhealthy! Wheres your standards?"

Wheres YOUR fucking standards? Shit, I could take a 'heavy' girl and in a few months time have her trim. Its about the WORK you put in. All these fucking guys, all these fucking guys man, they all want something for nothing and chicks for free. No one wants to put in the fucking EFFORT anymore. I can't name on one hand the number of 'fat ugly chicks' everyone ignored from school (well except for me), who are now bombshells. If I stayed connected with people maybe I'd be with one of em right now, but I just get tired of this attitude that no one invests any time in others any more. It's all about 'me me me'.

Shes fat, maybe only a few extra pounds? Fat and 'not beautiful'? Fucking DO THE WORK and make her beautiful you bitch! Be her coach, like those fucking instagram couples you see sweating it out. Make her sexy. Become sexy, together.
Get her a fucking treadmill. Get her two. And jog together. Make her *feel* sexy.

More importantly get to *know* her. Why does she get out of bed in the morning? What drive her NOT to get out of bed? When does she feel lousy? What makes her feel that way? In addition to all the other shit men should know how to do, you should learn to play doctor phil, because every girl needs one. Women bond by talking, men bond by doing things together. Relationships should involve both.

Jesus fucking christ, this is basic bitch advice, and it annoys me I keep on coming across these spergs that don't fucking get it. Women are not cars you can stick your key in and just go 'vroom'.

They require maintenance, same as anything, any 'relationship' (because really, what are relationships in 2020, with instagram and fucking tinder and antisocial distancing?). You're a *team*, and i don't mean that in an inspirational way. You're a literal team. And far too many people prioritize the well being and success and concern of 'I' over' 'us'.

In short, if she ain't coming, you shouldn't be either. And if you expect her to on-the-regular put sharp objects on her fucking nether regions, don't expect any blowjobs unless you're doing the same thing for yourself!

Ideally you should be doing it to each other.
After all, you're partners. You trust her to put sharp objects near your groin, right?
Aren't relationships supposed to be about mutual trust?

Just imagination but, if infinite money and resource was present (and if this was hypothetically possible)...

A machine that is able to replicate ONLY one portion of the brain thinking activity and produce a version of a robot with that thinking capacity. This would be unique per person, and licensed in a way so that the owner of the robot is only able to use and control it. (I'm saying only one thinking capability should be allowed as a robot should never replace a person ideally.)

This would mean that the person is able to increase efficiency as the robot could be set to resume activities in the period that the person can't (i.e. sleeping).

One example of using this scenario could be that the person chooses to create a robot by replicating their coding thinking capabilities. This would mean the robot doesn't do much but has the same thinking ability to code as the owner. The robot could be used when the owner is sleeping or on holiday. As the thinking capacity is the same, the code logic would be the same as when the owner would have wrote it.

This would be a DREAM project to work on.

But alas... This isn't happening anytime soon in my lifetime (or ever realistically).

I know I’ll get mixed views for this one...

So I’ll state my claim. I agree with the philosophy of uncle bob, I also feel like he is the high level language - older version of myself personality wise.. (when I learned about uncle bob I was like this guy is just like me but not low level haha).

Anyway.. I don’t agree with everything because I think he thinks or atleast I get the vibe he thinks everything can be solved by OOP, and high level languages. This is probably where Bob and I disagree. Personally I don’t touch ruby, python and java and “those” with a 10 foot pole.

Does he make valid arguments, yes, is agile the solve all solution no.. but agile ideas do come natural and respond faster the feedback loop of product development is much smaller and the managers and clients and customers can “see things” sooner than purly waterfall.. I mean agile is the natural approach of disciplined engineers....waterfall is and was developed because the market was flooded with undisciplined engineers and continues to flood, agile is great for them but only if they are skilled in what they are doing and see the bigger picture of the forest thru the trees.. which is the entire point of waterfall, to see the forest.. the end goal... now I’m not saying agile you only see a branch of a single tree of the forest.. but too often young engineers, and beginners jump on agile because it’s “trendy” or “everyone’s doing it” or whatever the fuck reason. The point is they do it but only focus on the immediate use case, needs and deliverables due next week.

What’s wrong with that?? Well an undisciplined engineer doing agile (no I’m not talking damn scrum shit and all that marketing bullshit).. pure true agile.
They will write code for the need due next week, but they won’t realize that hmm I will have the need 3 months from now for some feature that needs to connect to this, so I better design this code with that future feature in mind...

The disciplined engineer would do that. That is why waterfall exists so ideally the big picture is painted before hand.

The undisciplined engineer will then be frustrated in the future when he has to act like the cool aid man thru the hard pre mature architectural boundaries he created and now needs links or connections that are now needed.

Does moving to agile fix that hell no.. because the undisciplined engineer is still undisciplined.

One could argue the project manager or scrum secretary... (yes scrum secretary I said that right).. is suppose to organize and create and order the features with the future in mind etc...

Bullshit ..soo basically your saying the scrum kid is suppose to be the disciplined engineer to have foresight into realizing future features and making requirements and task now that cover those things? No!
1 scrum bitch focuses too much on pleasing “stake holders” especially taken literally in start ups where the non technical idiots are too involved with the engineering team and the scrum bastard tries to ass kiss and get everything organized and tasks working so the non technical person can see pretty things work.

Scrum master is a gate keeper and is not needed and actually hinders the whole process of making a undisciplined engineer into a disciplined engineer, makes the undisciplined engineer into a “forever” code grunt... filling weekly orders of story points unable to see the forest until it’s over because the forest isn’t show to the grunt only the scrum keeper knows the big picture..... this is bad this is why waterfall is needed.

Waterfall has its own problems, But that’s another story for another day..

ANYWAY... soooo where were we ....

Ahh yess....

Clean code..

Is it a good book, yes.. does uncle bobs personality show thru the book .. yes lol.
If you know uncle bob you will understand what I just did with this post lol. I had to tangent ( at least mine was related to the topic) ...

I agree with the principles of the book, I don’t agree with the extreme view point. It’s like religion there’s the modest folks and then there are the extremists. Well he’s the preacher of the cult and he’s on the extreme side.. but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.. many things he nails... he just hits the nail thru the wall just a bit.

OOP languages are not the solution... high level languages do not solve everything.. pininciples and concepts can be used across the board and prove valuable.. just don’t hold everything up like the 10 commandments of which you cannot deviate from.. that’s the difference here I think..

Good book, just don’t take it as the Bible as a beginner, actually infact DONT read this book as a beginner. Wait a bit learn then reflect by reading this.

Wrote this on another thread but wanted to do a full post on it.

What is a game?

I like to distinguish between 1. entertainment, 2. games, 3. fun.

both ideally are 'fun' (conveying a sense of immersion, flow, or pleasure).

a game is distinct (usually) from entertainment by the presence of interaction, but certain minimalists games have so little decision making, practice, or interaction-learning that in practice they're closer to entertainment.

theres also the issue of "interesting" interaction vs uninteresting ones. While in broad terms, it really comes down to the individual, in aggregate we can (usefully) say some things, by the utility, are either games or not. For example if having interaction were sufficient to make something a game, then light switches could become a game.

now supposed you added multiple switches and you had to hit a sequence to open a door. Now thats a sort of "game". So we see games are toys with goals.

Now what is a toy?

There are two varieties of toy: impromptu toys and intentional toys.

An impromptu toy is anything NOT intended primarily, by design, to induce pleasure or entertainment when interacted with. We'll call these "devices" or "toys" with a lowercase t.

"Toys", made with the intent of entertainment (primarily or secondarily) we'll label with an uppercase T.

Now whether something is used with the intent behind its own design (witness people using dildos, sex toys, as slapstick and gag items lol), or whether the designer achieves their intent with the toy or item is another matter entirely.

But what about more atmospheric games? What about idle games? Or clickers?

Take clickers. In the degenerate case of a single button and a number that increases, whats the difference between a clicker and a calculator? One is a device (calculator) turned into an impromptu toy and then a game by the user's intent and goal (larger number). The second, is a game proper, by the designers intent. In the degenerate case of a badly designed game it devolves into a really shitty calculator.

Likewise in the case of atmospheric games, in the degenerate case, they become mere cinematic entertainment with a glorified pause/play button.

Now while we could get into the definition of *play*, I'll only briefly get into it because there are a number of broad definitions. "Play" is loosely: freely structured (or structured) interaction with some sort of pleasure as either the primary or secondary object, with or without a goal, thats it. And by this definition you can play with a toy, you can play a game, you can play with a lightswitch, hell you can play with yourself.

This of course leaves out goals, the idea of "interesting decisions" or decision making, and a variety of other important elements.

But what makes a good game?

A lot of elements go into making a good game, and it's not a stretch to say that a good game is a totality of factors. At the core of all "good" games is a focus on mechanics, aesthetics, story, and technology. So we can already see that what makes a good game is less of an either-or-categorization and more like a rating or scale across categories of design elements.
Broadly, while aesthetics and atmosphere might be more important in games like Journey (2012) by Thatonegamecompany, for players of games like Rimworld the mechanics and interactions are going to be more important.

In fact going a little deeper, mechanics are usually (but not always) equivalent to interactions. And we see this dichtonomy arise when looking at games like Journey vs say, Dwarf Fortress. But, as an aside, is it possible to have atmospheric games that are also highly interactive or have a strong focus on mechanics? This is often what "realistic" (as opposed to *immersive*) games try to accomplish in design. Done poorly they instead lead to player frusteration, which depending on player type may or may not be pleasureable (witness 'hardcore' games whos difficulty and focus on do-overs is the fun the game is designed for, like roguelikes, and we'll get to that in a moment), but without the proper player base, leads to breaking player flow and immersion. One example of a badly designed game in the roguelike genre would be Early Access Stoneshard, where difficulty was more related to luck and chance than player skill or planning. A large part of this was because of a poorly designed stealth system, where picking off a single enemy alerted *all enemies* nearbye, who would then *stay* alerted until you changed maps, negating tactics that roguelike players enjoy and are used to resorting to. This is an important case worth examining because it shows how minor designer choices in mechanical design can radically alter the final quality of the game. Some games instead chose the cheaper route of managing player *perceptions* with a pregame note: Darkest Dungeons and Amnesia TDD are just two I can think of.

Ideally

UX designer:
User oriented, design stuff that fullfill actual needs of user
Engineer:
Focus on utility, how to execute designer's desin

Reality
UX designer:
Personal oriented, design stuff that "they" think user will prefer. End up design some unrealistic functions.
Engineer:
Working overtime to fullfil designers' fantasy thought

Not a rant, but maybe someone can help me on this one.

I am currently working on an app that will hopefully go live by the end of the year. Up to now, the webserver and database (for the REST API) is running on an old linux machine. However, as my ISP is not really reliable I want to move this stuff somewhere else. Has someone experience with the varios hosting providers? Currently I am a little bit overwhelmed by all the different solutions out there.

Ideally I would want something that doesn't cost very much now, but also scales with more users.

To make it more concrete, it's basically about neo4j + REST API in Python

Can somehow recommend anything? I really appreciate it, as I am currently a little bit lost on this.

Thanks for reading this!

How do you stay positive?

[Boring monologue following, keep scrolling.]

I seem to always focus on the negative things and it's miserable not only for myself but also the people around me. I think about doing things more than doing them. I'm in my own head a lot. It's difficult to let go. I mask a lot (i.e. try to act normal, to not be [or rather feel] judged).

I'm trying to change - from today - by not complaining anymore about things out of my control, spending less time online / more outside and doing more sports. It would probably do me good to find an outdoors hobby, ideally a social/cooperative activity with some physical activity.

I just needed to let this out. To write it down and commit it to the void.

Today, my manager received a brand new Macbook pro with all its cool features while I am still stuck using an old Macbook pro (mid 2012 model). I always complained him about performance issues and all he did was to approve an OS upgrade (to Sierra). How does that even enable me to be productive? I am already running applications at the peak of the machine limits. Sometimes, the JVM crashes and other time Node.js runs out of heap space.

The manager is not a programmer. All he really does is attend online meetings, track and report to management, and write emails. Ideally, he would need a Mac Air or perhaps a Windows machine. I still wonder how did the company management allowed this. He is simply misusing his privileges as a manager and I can do nothing about it.

When the monthly scrum retrospective reaches the 90 minute mark...

You know when people are being stress tested and they break by getting up, run around screaming and ultimately knock themselves unconscious by running into a wall?

That. I felt like doing that.

I swear someone activates some sort of gravity well when these meetings begin because time beings to stretch on and o........n....... while they meetings happen.

I began to list things I think I'd rather be doing than be in that meeting.

1) Tax returns.
2) Prostate exam (not old enough to need one yet but at least I'd be out the meeting).
3) Visiting the dentist.
4) Assembling IKEA furniture.
5) Watching soccer at least they have the decency to give you a break in the middle and I find sports as engaging as a dog turd on the sidewalk.

So bored was I that I began to notice notches and holes in the ceiling tiles and when I remarked upon them others became engrossed in them and began to speculate upon their origins.

I don't know who a speaker is, what department they are from, what product they're working on or what's so important about the algorithm they're working on. There is no context, no explanation and half way through a show and tell I had to check we were still in a show and tell.

I was bored shitless. I actually felt physical pain from boredom, I've not felt that way since I was a child.

I really, really hate that scrum is implemented in this way.

It left me with only half an hour of coding time left and really it sapped my energy and motivation to the point where I just went home early.

Excuse my language, but:

Fucking bloody cunting waste of time, I've had more productive moments in the restroom. They need to piss off or committed seppuku, ideally both. Dante got it wrong the seventh level of hell is this. I'm usually a very calm and balanced individual but yesterday, yesterday I just... Fuck! Argh! Fuck you meeting, fuck you.

If you are the type that schedules meetings like this:

May a thousand Jabberwockies plague your nightmares and be it that the next seventy seven times you lay with a human shall ye experience bitter failure! I hope Cthulhu himself visits his "enlightenment" upon you and you fear sleep henceforth.

I'm bringing a rubix cube or juggling balls into the next meeting so that I can say at least I learned something and it wasn't time wasted.

(Questions below.) At this point I probably just whine about job search in IT w/o much commitment. It's because I don't learn stuff from interviews and have no willingness to prepare for primitive questions from HR's book. You know, stuff like: "What was your experience on previous jobs and why you quited them?" and "What are your advantages and cons?"
Even though I see them a bit discriminatory. I barely find words and make them audible alrite, and so rush to the stack questions. I answer 50% of them in average, 20% ideally. As a result, I get no conclusive offer. Fair... probably not. Doesn't matter.

All of a sudden, idea chimed in to make a personal website with all of the frequent questions answered in advance. At last, I've got some time to make the decent replacement of the CV into a landing page that communicates my professional and emotional ability to headhunters.

TL;DR: I wanna make my personal website portfolio and I need your word about the following.
1) Can I make up for the absence of my own live projects with OSS commitments or other smooth talk?
2) Is there a merit in answering the common interview questions right off the bat in written form?
3) So, I already prepared 4 conclusive theses with thoughtput choice of words, that I wanna place as a grid in first scrolling section. I call it "Principles", but perhaps there is a synonym to this one or it's good as it is?
4) I don't want to represent myself as a blunt set of "features". How do I transite into explaining the usage of my stack in these circumstances? Less text better, right?

Ugh. Sending data to a 3rd Party API and for a small subsection of these requests getting error response "A system error occurred". PM: "Who's fault is it? Ours or them?" ... Agh come on, fault is something you can make up, they can make up and entirely irrelevant and unhelpful to anybody. Client: "Why is broken, ideally it would never fail" ... everyone is in goo goo gaa gaa land

Ideally, there would be 3 engineers and 2 sales people. The engineers would pair with the sales folks on calls to figure out what customers need and hire designers to design just want needs to be built. Everyone would be responsible, not over commit, not oversell, and figure out creative ways to make the company money and achieve technological superiority.

Quite a blurry one. Currently going to uni to dip my toes in some of the subfields of CS. Until now, I found more things that I wouldn't want to do than I'd enjoy.
Ultimately I just wish to sit at a desk and program all day, preferably for a public transportation company (read/hope: railway company), ideally on the route scheduling side

However, it would be nice to know what I wish to do dev-wise on the shorter run besides uni and side-projects :D

Random Recruiter - "I am currently working with an exciting client based in Amsterdam/Eindhoven, to secure a Frontend React Developer (ideally who has affinity with backend technologies) on a freelance basis. Would you be open to discussing this in greater detail?"
- Thank you for reaching me out, but unfortunately, I rather chop off my hands than work with react.

I've received new instructions at work and I would like to know your opinion. We are two at work, my boss and I..

From now on, projects are estimated, we own the responsability of delivering our tasks to the date each individual. We will work with estimates + error margin of 30%, meaning we do the estimate and add 30% to the hours. We also set a deadline date, ideally a week or two later - this date will be given to clients. If we have not met our estimates including the error margin, we do overtime. We have to own each task our selves, and personally take the responsability for our assignments.

Got a scammer on my hook. Ideas welcome to fuck him/her over.

He/she confused me with someone else and messaged me acting as a support person of an exchange. I acted along and s/he is insisting on sharing account details.

Played along like a dumb internet noob and I think I got him to share his fake email id.

Now I'm thinking of ways to extract more details about him via email.

From top of my mind, these are some ideas I have:
- get his IP address
- zip bomb or something like that? But g mail is probably gonna detect that.

Ideally, If I could social engineer him to give his phone number, I could easily report him to police and find his identity.

Have you busted some scammers? Would appreciate some tips.

Long post, TLDR: Given a large team building large enterprise apps with many parts (mini-projects/processes), how do you reduce the bus-factor and the # of Brent's (Phoenix Project)?

# The detailed version #

We have a lot of people making changes, building in new processes to support new flows or changes in the requirements and data.

But we also have to support these except when it gets into Production there is little information to quickly understand:
- how it works
- what it does/supposed to do
- what the inputs and dependencies are

So often times, if there's an issue, I have to reverse engineer whatever logic I can find out of a huge mess.

I guess the saying goes: the only people that know how it works is whoever wrote it and God.

I'm a senior dev but i spend a lot of time digging thru source code and PROD issues to figure out why ... is broken and how to maybe fix it.

I think in Agile there's supposed to be artifacts during development but never seen em.

Personally whenever i work on a new project, I write down notes and create design diagrams so i can confirm things and have easy to use references while working.

I don't think anyone else does that. And afterwards, I don't have anywhere to put it/share it. There is no central repo for this stuff other than our Wiki but for the most part, is like a dumping ground. You have to dig for information and hoping there's something useful.

And when people leave, information is lost forever and well... we hire a lot of monkeys... so again I feel a lot of times i m trying to recover information from a corrupted hard drive...

The only way real information is transferred is thru word of mouth, special knowledge transfer sessions.

Ideally I would like anything that goes into PROD to have design docs as well as usage instructions in order for anyone to be able to quickly pick it up as needed but I'm not sure if that's realistic.

Even unit tests don't seem to help much as they just test specific functions but don't give much detail about how a whole process is supposed to work.

Front-end web development is like a fucking cancer to me right now

I need the following behavior from my development environment if I don't want the webdev experience to destroy my sanity and tempt me into suicide by making me waste my valuable lifetime configuring shit that is ultimately meaningless to the software I'm trying to create:

- I should be able to open the webpage in the browser at localhost:<some-port>
- the page should refresh immediately as I save my files
- I should be able to import node modules installed with npm without using a script tag linking to some CDN (for instance, I want to do a get request with axios instead of the fetch API)
- I should be able to do this without spending more than two minutes reading the documentation for a tool that would enable me to do it, ideally without ever coming even close to touching a configuration file

Right now I know about browser-sync and webpack, or webpack-dev-server or some such fucking shit fuck fucking fuck.

browser-sync seems to fulfill most of these needs, except that I can't seem to bring npm modules into my application and import them. Webpack seems to be able to do this, but at the cost of slowly throwing my life away reading documentation for over-complicated configuration files that do not aid me in actual software creation and therefore do not interest me and never will, all in the hope that I *may* at some point dig out enough shit to find how to do such a use case (i.e. seamless, smooth web development) that to me feels reasonably common and expected.

Is there some tool that enables me to do *seamless*, pleasurable web development without the hassles of over-complication and over-engineering? Is there some hidden command for webpack that allows me to run such simple shit without ever needing to edit some pointless configuration file?

Please, I beg of you, let me know.

So, I'm about to be up shit's Creek. I need a new source of income, ideally either a new job or becoming a freelancer. I have been making intranet sites with ASP.NET for a while now, and I can tell two things:
1. It's too corporate minded, so I'll need a fucking degree
2. It's too corporate minded, so I'll be stuck with people like my boss, who still use tables to align content despite the project having bootstrap.

I need to do something more fulfilling, but I probably will have to leave my job by December anyway due to some major fuck ups in my life, do I need to get something lined up. I have been brushing up on my HTML, CSS, and JavaScript skills, but when it comes down to it, I suck at design so my "portfolio" is blatant clones to learn CSS and shitty Spartan things.

Basically, I'm anxious, terrified, and unable to figure out what comes next. Do I keep sending job applications and praying to whatever deity will listen, it do I start figuring out this freelance thing? If freelance, then how do I get into it? I'm terrified and desperate.

Max password length of 100 😍

That ideally could take 353,108,814,528,039,200 QUINQUAGINTILLION YEARS to guess.

Searching for a good PHP, webdev IDE... Suggestions?
Ideally free software with debugging and code syntax checks.

Weekly Out-Of-Context Thread

I'm looking for comments on rants. Not just any comments people, but comments that are non-sequiters, comments that are hilarious, or make no sense when taken from their original rant.

Anyone participating should link back to the original post to give credit. It would be great to get some regulars in here, but ideally we can prod some people into action that aren't on as much.

POST for our AMUSEMENT SLAVES! POST FASTER I SAY! FASTER!

Any browser (+plugin) recommendations for viewing JSON and XML? Ideally for Mac OS, but have a Windows 7 VM I can use instead if there's a much better option. Currently I'm copying from Safari and pasting into Notepad++ and formatting with a plugin, but that feels pretty sub-optimal. Suggestions much appreciated.

Today after a second interview I was asked to complete a code challenge. They didn't say when they would want it completed by, only just as soon as I was able I guess. Anyways, they said ideally they'd like it to only take me 4-5 hours to complete. What should I use to track time? I was thinking just giving them some WakaTime data or maybe screen record the challenge while I do it. What would you do?

Before learning new language, ideally people search "best IDE for ..." . :-)

How is the quality of life for the average web developer?

I've been doing a bit of research and it seems quite common for people in the field to have no life outside of work. This is not what I want. I work/study 7 days a week and I would ideally like to work for a web dev company, not freelance.

Is it naive to think that a standard 9-5 is realistic for me when I graduate?

So some other dev in team changed something, and it broke the tests that I wrote. Ideally the dev should be responsible for fixing the tests too when I communicated this in the team channel my manager pinged me and asked me to fix it urgently. I'm already on PIP and wth is this? am I suppose to fix these tests too?

So I ran into a perplexing "issue" today at work and I'm hoping some of you here have had experience with this. I got a story-time from my coworker about the early days of my company's product that I work on and heard about why I was running into so much code that appeared to be written hastily (cause it was). Turns out during the hardware bring-up phase, they were moving so fast they had to turn on all sorts of low level drivers and get them working in the system within a matter of days, just to keep up with the hardware team. Now keep in mind, these aren't "trivial" peripherals like a UART. Apparently the Ethernet driver had a grand total of a week to go from nothing to something communicating. Now, I'm a completely self-taught embedded systems focused software engineer and got to where I am simply cause I freaking love embedded systems. It's the best. BUT, the path I took involved focusing on quality over quantity, simply because I learned very quickly that if I did not take the time to think about what I was doing, I would screw myself over. My entire motto in life is something to the effect of "If I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it to the best of my abilities." As such, I tend to be one of the more forward thinking engineers on my team despite relative to my very small amount of professional experience (essentially I screwed myself over on my projects waaaay too often in the past years and learned from it). But what I learned today slightly terrifies me and took me aback. I know full well that there is going to come a point in my career where I do not have the time to produce quality code and really think about what I am designing....and yet it STILL has to work. I'm even in the aerospace field where safety is critical! I had not even considered that to be a possibility. Ideally I would like to prepare now so that I can be effective when that time does come...Have any of you been on the other side of this? What was it like? How can I grow now to be better prepared and provide value to my company when those situations come about? I know this is going to be extremely uncomfortable for me, but c'est la vie.

TLDR: I'm personally driven to produce quality code, but heard a horror story today about having to produce tons of safety-critical code in a short time without time for design. Ensue existential crisis. Help! Suggestions for growth?!

Edit: Just so I'm clear, the code base is good. We do extensive testing (for lots of reasons), but it just wasn't up to my "personal standards".

So, what are your most favorite methods of saving interesting articles about algorithms, functions or simply news so you can read them later when you have time? I find myself storing links to interesting web pages without really going back to them or remembering which link was what. I shifted to storing the links in evernote but it's still not what I'd ideally like to have...

If there are any recommended routines, apps or tools that make stored links insightful (like allowing me to add a quick description or automatically adding a sort of preview of the link), I would appreciate it!

Please note that this is primarily about saving a resource while I'm on the go or simply can't/don't want to spend too much time on the actions.

Would love to share my experience with tutorial hell.

A year ago, if there is no tutorial teaching me how to do something, I am totally lost and stuck for days. Then, I decided to see how people got out of it.

The answer turned to be simple, get comfortable reading documentation AFTER you determine what you are trying to accomplish.

In other words:
1- Determine the problem and the desired end result.
2- Break the problem down into multiple smaller ones.
3- Determine the end result of the solution of each of those problems.
4- Read the documentation concerning what you need to use to solve each problem.
5- Execute.

Over time, you would find the need for a tutorial much less in order to solve a problem. Plus, documentation would ideally give the optimal solution for your problem.

Would still be cool if you find a tutorial explaining something hard to grasp, but never depend on finding one.

Questions more then a rant...

I've moved from being a lead on imploring DevOps and Agile practices in a large Telco to now working for a security consultancy... The team I'm with are s*** hot when it comes to SecOps (which is why I changed jobs) and I've been hired to he the automation and working practice expert on the team. Already got some of them learning Ansible which is a great start!

I've got delivery now being pushed to Git and all client work being tracked in Jira and properly documented and collaborated through HipChat and other CI tools on the way....

My question is this... Does anyone have some awesome resources to teach people Git, Jira, Jenkins, etc. quickly without forking or branching out on expensive training? Focus on being a technical but consultative team. Ideally just wanna pull some awesome guides and make. My own commits on them for the team... Please fire a story or epic away!

I'm planning a trip that involves hitting multiple cities in 2 countries.

Home -- Japan (maybe Kyoto or Tokyo, or some other place but only 1 City) -- China (multiple cities, ideally enter in one exit from another) -- Home

Is there a service to find the cheapest route?

I want to intall a bare bones Linux set up with i3-wm. I'm looking at a Base antergos installation and continue to configure from there. Do you thing that this is a good place to start after using i3-wm on Ubuntu or would you recommend another distribution?

To add to it, the laptop ideally uses Nvidia Optimus

I work in a small office (about five people) and probably once or twice a week, we will do a group order of delivery/take-out for lunch. I’m the most junior at the company, and often I end up asked to place the lunch order, so I put it on my personal card and have everyone pay me back. All of my other colleagues are quick to ask how much they owe and reimburse me, but on the occasions where my CEO joins the lunch order, he has never paid for his food or even offered to do so. I honestly don’t think it crosses his mind to wonder who paid for the meal, and I have a sneaking suspicion it’s often because my other colleagues simply pay for him. (I have another sneaking suspicion it’s because he’s a white man who has had a great deal of wealth his entire life.)

After the meal there’s always a conversation, initiated by my colleagues, in which everyone ask me how much they owe. We are in an open office space with our CEO, but he seems to be entirely oblivious to these conversations. I would love to be able to simply Venmo charge him, but alas he has made it clear that he is “anti-Venmo” (what?).

I’m feeling very bitter that he is in a position where he doesn’t have to think about the cost of a $14 salad, and frustrated that my other (wealthier) colleagues are all willing to eat the cost to avoid asking him to pay. He knows how much I make, but how do I gracefully make it clear that he should be expected to reimburse me like everyone else (and ideally, should do so without being prompted)?

is sometimes the training data and low learning rate just meant to pull the outputs in a direction without ever reaching them ?

like a cost function, economic, which in reality you ideally want to equal 0 for all quantities, but that you'll never ever get to ?

I'm trying to figure out uses for deep learning beyond perceptual.

I wish devRant had some cache thingy for comments,posts that has been visited or even post in timeline so it didn't make new request to load the post that has been already in timeline rather show the post when I click on it and load the comments separately. Same case with opening anything on notification ideally it should show the post without making request to the server and load comments or whatever in background. Or just download the whole content of the notification when it arrives

I'm seeking opinions and thoughts on my predicament.

I have 2ish paths before me.
Next year I resume my studies in Science Communication and Computer Science in particiliar a bachelor of science, I have considered then doing master in managent or computer science.

1) I am able to have a income of about 800 AUD a fortnight (this is to support me during study without requiring work) plus extra from a part time job whilst I study for about 2 years. Throughout this time I would like to skill up in a variety of fields as immensley as possible.

2) I can accept a full time junior web developer job while I study, this job is with a great government research organisation which as a first FT job looks great on a resume, it is is project based work where I get given a project and code and pretty much complete it. The job is flexible, I can mostly work where-ever I want, at home, at a cafe, travelling. With maybe a meeting once a week. The pay is about 65kAUD a year.

Both options are very attractive options with each containing there own pros and cons. With the extra money I could learn more or use it to grow a business or do more.

However without the FT job I could still earn about 1-1.5k a fortnight for alot less time.

I am still discovering what to do in life, I'm very good at public speaking and would like to experience and learn more about lots of different things. My current knowledge is very broad from engineering to CS, graphic design, authoring, trade skills, Digitial design and more.

Ideally I would like to learn how to lead people, to make the world a better place and help people. Figuring out where my strengths lay and where to apply them is difficult as I am fascinated by so many things.

I worry about taking the FT job as it might detract from my studies and lead me to pursueing mostly only web development work as well as take up time that might be better spent on extra study or in a leadership position in a uni club.

The PT job is a IT Systems Technician in the Australian Defence Force.

Which is a interesting experience within itself, different from civilian life and also I would be learning about systems that I might have less experience with.

I have such broad interests in alot of fields that I don't seem to be focussed on select things or areas like other devs I've met, Science Communication is a versitile field, one of my professors expertise is on doctor who and it's role in science engagement, she has written books on it. Others are in public policy or directed podcasts or even made games. Despite my broad interests computer science was always a gield I did well in.

Any thoughts, opinions or questions are welcome.
I have a blog/portfolio I put my work and projects up if it helps people know more about me, you can find it at curiosityplace.wordpress.com

!rant

Tablet recommendations? I know this isn't really the place to ask but I trust you devs.

I'm just about to start back college and I'd like to have a light carry around for days I don't need my laptop. I love my 17" Dell, it's a beast and that's why I bought it but damn it's overkill for taking notes and running little things through a bash terminal. A tablet and keyboard seems like a nice idea.

Ideally, I wanna run Linux. But I'm not sure if there's a commercial tablet that facilitates OS changes easily out of the box.

No iPad. Not an apple fan, and it's just not what I'm after.

The MS surface seems pretty good, but I haven't looked too deeply into replacing the OS.

I just want a nice Linux tablet. I dunno.

Thanks!

!rant

Does anyone know of any software I can use to monitor a RAID 1 array health. Ideally ild like an email if one of the drives has failed/removed.

On a side note thank god for RAID 😅

Stop putting your interfaces all inside a folder called "Interfaces"! If I'm looking for the interface for CheckoutService, I don't want to browse through every interface in the application to find it.

I also shouldn't have to import a namespace solely for an interface. Ideally, the interface will be in another project, but under the same namespace as its implementation, in most cases.

Do you see Microsoft putting their interfaces in a folder called "Interfaces"? There's probably a reason they don't.

I just want to get a job to learn a bunch, make something cool (ideally, but prob won't be all that great in the beginning), to make a decent salary, to get my own little apartment, and support myself financially on my own. Anything more than that is a huge bonus!

Im creating a "settings" functionality of sorts, unique per "account"

Ideally I'd create a new table, FK it with the Accs table with each Setting variable being a column

But im also inclined to just turn it into a JSON and not bother with N columns for it specially since arrays are involved in the settings

Could version it to ensure that if Settings change on code-level, old accs with old settings dont get fucked up

Now this is a pet project so im free to experiment, not bound by high level design documents

What do y'all prefer/recommend? JSON<->Settings Obj or plain old Table/column with FKs

Genuine question
You're given a server with the latest Ubuntu. You can't install any deps, and you can't use docker. Your goal is to write a REST API backend that can store/retrieve data persistently, ideally with a SQL-like language. Bonus points if you can figure out a reverse-proxy.
What would you do?
I'm obsessed with an idea of having some kind of codebase that doesn't include binary files and that I can just ssh over to a fresh server, and it would work instantly

all this talk of australian crypto laws got me thinking. here's a hypothetical (this might get a little complicated):

for the sake of the security facade, the government decides to not ban encryption outright. BUT they decide that all crypto will use the same key. therefore you can not directly read encrypted things, but it's not really encrypted anymore is it?

part two: there's a concept called chicken sexing, named after people who determine the sex of baby chicks. male chicks are pretty useless and expensive to keep alive, so they are eaten. female chicks go on to lay eggs, so ideally, from a financial standpoint, you only raise hens to maturity. this is nearly impossible to discern early on so at first you're just straight up guessing. is this one female? sure? that one? no? really 50/50. BUT if you have a skilled chicken sexer looking over your shoulder, saying right or wrong, then eventually you get better. why? nobody knows. they can't explain it. nobody can. you just sort of "know" when it's female or not. some people can do 1000s of chicks/hr with success up to 98% but nobody can explain how to tell them apart.

part three. final part:

after years, even decades of using this encryption with only one key, I wonder if people (even if only people who are regularly exposed to crypto like NSA analysts or cryptographers) can ever learn to understand it. in the same way as above. you don't know exactly what it says. or how you know it. you didn't run an algorithm in your head or decrypt it. but somehow you get the gist.

28464e294af01d1845bcd21 roughly translates to "just bought a PS5! WOOT!" or even just pick out details. PS5. excited. bought.

but how do you know that? idk. just do.

oh what a creepy future it has become.

In 2018 I hope to upgrade Machine Learning skills and put them to good use, ideally landing a job in the field

Hello Devrant! It’s ya boi!

Update. Currently back in school in the Netherlands. Studying law and technology. Yeet.

But yeahhhh so stressed omfg. Finals already in October. This school is a mess.

And I’m the middle of that my thesis got rejected so here I am. Crying. Asking y’all for ideas. Anything you can think of please say.

It’s gotta be tech but a legal question. Ethical is fine too tbh. So if there is anything you’ve wondered or think is of please tell me the question. 😭

all I’ll say is that the last one they said was too vague and not specific enough. And ideally it should be AI or data science but anything tech would do.

Not sure if this is the place to ask but thank youuu.

Do y'all rock with mentors anymore?

I literally think I need one to get to the promised land. Ideally, someone with Startup experience and/or Software experience.

I need some advice on how to separate workstations. Currently I'm working with 6 projects at the moment and sometimes I use my PC, sometimes win laptop, sometimes macbook and it has become a mess.

Ideally I would like to have separate windows/mac instances where I could have project specific stuff installed. Having different windows accounts is not an option since I'm not sure if I will be able to multitask between projects effectively. Separate windows desktops also is not good enough for me. Buying multiple PC's as well. Maybe some cloud solution would be the way?

Can anyone advice on this?

My workflow pet peeve is the length of time my PRs get merged into master
I have to create new features, but sometimes I have to work off current HEAD, which is technically old since I need stuff off a new branch.

Ideally we merge into master, then create a new branch off that. It's nothing major and there's loads of ways to get around it, but I'm used to the flow!

Can anyone recommend cheap Windows-based hosting, ideally to run a couple of Umbraco instances for personal projects? I'm currently looking at the Cloud One Tier of asphostportal.com which has some good reviews, but if anyone knows of a better/cheaper hosting provider that'd be super helpful 😁

Ubuntu 🤬

only releasing amd64 image !! , supporting an instruction set architecture does not mean code is optimised for other microarchitecture
i thought linux distributions are do less and do way better than others, so why so much bloatware!!!.

ideally best way is to compile your own kernel and add minimal gui support as required, too much work !!!

also just a heads-up if you are using Catalina use virtual-box 6.0.22
also vivado 2019.2 is suable with ubuntu 18.04 + lightdm , remove that gnome shit

I'm having problems understanding ngrx (or simply rxjs...), once again.

I have a feature state called "World".
This state has three Actions: Init, InitSuccess and InitFailure.

Also I have other isolated feature states like "Mountains", "Streets", "Rivers".
They have actions like this and corresponding effects to fetch data: Load, LoadSuccess, LoadFailure.

Now I would like to add an effect to WorldActions.Init, which will dispatch Mountains.Load, Streets.Load, Rivers.Load one after another. So ideally an action log would look like this:

1. World.Init
2. Mountains.Load
3. Streets.Load
4. Rivers.Load
5. Mountains.LoadSuccess
6. Streets.LoadSuccess
7. Rivers.LoadSuccess
8. World.InitSuccess

Or when an error occurs:

1. World.Init
2. Mountains.Load
3. Mountains.LoadFailure
4. World.InitFailure

How could an effect pipeline for that look?
How can I dispatch World.InitSuccess only after all LoadSuccess-Actions have happened?
Or am I still trying to implement ngrx in a wrong/bad way?

PS: The reason I am putting everything into separate feature states is because "Mountains" etc. are standalone features on their own. Only in the context of a "World" they belong together. For this reason I can't create a monstrous effect "World.Load", without producing redundant code.

Any good Java course to recommend? In video ideally?

Is there some sort of Query Builder for ElasticSearch?

I have ELK setup and in Kibana can generate all the aggregation visualizations but now I want the data to be usable in a program so it can generate reports like who are our top users.

But the aggregation queries seem to be very verbose... not sure how anyone can generate or understand it by hand vs telling Kibana I want a chart with X and Y axes using these terms.

IDeally I'd like to have Kibana then tell me what's the actual JSON/Elastic query it used to generate that but can't seem to find something like that.

Hey guys,

I need some help with reviewing a service agreement contract from a french startup where I am the service provider/freelancer living in my own country in Europe where they will open an office. Ideally a french person who knows about freelancing contracts in France.

I’m trying to document a library I work on, and I need to figure out where to host it. Ideally it would be free so if I ever move on I don’t have recurring costs. I would mostly be hosting tutorials there.

Any suggestions?

Being a quant developer based in the UK, do you think it's possible to find a job in US? Ideally I was thinking to approach a fintech.. What are the real obstacles in doing this?

If you were to start making a lightweight, fast, multiplatform client app, architecturally clean and simple, with as little of the JS(style) libraries and packages and transpilers and weird convoluted and/or unpleasant syntax trends like JS or flutter...

ideally (or at least minimally) something at least as straightforward as making a WinForms app in C#

...what language/tool/platform/tech stack would you choose?

...asking for a friend with totally not an absolutely cool idea that needs to exist.

What are your stories of project delays(ideally that you caused) and how did you manage to get through the stakeholders with thise stories.
Please share some wisdom to handle these situations.

Guys I am having a question for a long time....
Say you want to work while traveling. How do you handle monitors? I ideally want two big (not the small ones) monitors while working, however it's impossible to bring two monitors, one is heavy enough...
If one day some company invents some very very thin and foldable monitors I'll be very very happy.

So, I did the silly and tried Freelancer.com. The chat is really fucking buggy, my client has paid me but I can't see the payment in my account, and their live chat system has a timestamping problem that means you can't actually ask for help. What do I do? The money in there was ideally supposed to pay my bills this month...

Can anyone recommend a good password manager that is 'in the cloud', can be used on my mobile and makes life easy for logging into apps on my phone that aren't logged in via a browser. Ideally something free but I'm willing to pay for something that is worth it

Is there a testing library of source code snippets for testing babel plugins?

Ideally a pack of like all possible javascript snippets? Otherwise how do you know if your plugin may ever fail or cause bad code?

I keep having this recurring idea that I can fill in the gaps in my education by writing video games that allow me to explore those topics. This would force me to learn the subject well enough to share it with other people. So it would not be just surface level.

I keep thinking of a program that explores and visualizes math topics and programming topics. I would really like to have a program that allows me to visualize memory cells for algorithm exploration. Or a really nice graphing calculator in the computer that allows me to view multiple graphs to compare and contrast equations.

What holds me back is both math and CS are huge topics. I feel like any kind of playground would only cover a small subset. Ideally whatever I make should be extendable over time to add content and topics. It would need to be somewhat fun as well.

I can imagine an AI training program where you help your character navigate a room of hazards or die. This could be one such fun challenge.

I want to run a simulation like rolling a dice N times and find out what's the distribution/probability of getting certain SUMs after the rolls.

However the dice is more likely to land on a lower number, and/or depends on what the number it landed on previously.

Stats wise I think ideally I want to be able to just input the avg, standard deviation, and skewness into a Random class constructor, and then ask it for N "random" numbers.

Question for audiophiles: I have a bunch of music on old original media (CDs, cassettes, and vinyl). It’s getting increasingly hard and inconvenient to listen to these whenever and wherever I am like I can do with Spotify. Tape players are disappearing along with CD players and turntables. And it’s just not as available everywhere like streaming services.

While I’m in the process of making playlists in Spotify to represent each CD, cassette, and record, I’m finding lots of tracks and even whole albums and artists are not found.

So now I’m trying to figure out how I’m gonna be able to listen to them once I individually digitize each missing track/album. I want to stream rather than download files to individual devices. Ideally I’d have a media server in my house with a gateway to the public Internet and an app on my phone to tap into it.

Is there (still) something like this out there? Some kind of open source streaming solution? What do you do/recommend?