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

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

Instead try:

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

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

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

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

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

Startup: let's improve on our MVP and build an actual website app.

Me: ok.

[go through 2 weeks discovery and planning stage]

Manager1: love working with you. You explain and work in a really professional manner.

[MVP gets built in 2 months, I'm the only dev designer devops throughout]

Manger1: Omg love it! Wait till the other manager sees it. I knew you were right person for the job.

Other users: oo cool. I love features x, y, z.

[two days later shows to Manager2]

Manager2: x doesn't work, feature you is not useful and doesn't work... Hate it. I think we'll move you to another project.

Me: (woah that escalated quickly meme plays in my mind)

Me: [explaining MVP, lean methodology, your internal decision making processes]

...

Manager2: Yeh we want you to not work on any development work (even though those are your skills and extensive knowledge etc) we need you to do admin tasks (that have nothing to do with product or coding etc)

Manager1 and employees: 😲 wtf

Me: I quit

- - -

Now they are struggling in every way possible and don't have enough funds to hire another person close to what they need to help them.

Annual performance peer review

Person who did review me wrote in the section “skills needed to improve”:

“He is introverted...”

Bloody hell!! What a big problem :) and how in earth you can “fix” it? And why everyone expected to be extraverted??

I recalled a seemingly simple task I took on.

We were building a booking system, and I had to figure out how to retrieve bookings by a certain date range.

Upfront, the tasked seemed simple until I realised I had to both figure out the logic and the SQL statements needed to retrieve all bookings within a certain date range in one query.

I ended up drawing a model to help me visualise the various date-range criteria to be satisfied. And used unit tests to help me think through each date range criterion and make sure they were accurate. Some were obviously from paranoia, but better to be safe than sorry...

After that, I had wrote down raw SQL directly into Sequel Pro first to make sure my query logic was accurate too, before translating into something the ORM equivalent. This was when I learned how to define and use variables in SQL. The variables were throw-away code; I just didn't want to have to hard-code the test date-ranges over and over again; minimise chances of spelling errors.

Needless to say, felt my problem-solving skills went up one level after this task. Saw my coding style and unit tests improve. And also the thought processes that go into how to maintain code quality...

* Grow guts to move from windows to Linux
* Spend less time on memes/gaming and more on projects
* Improve UI/UX skills
* Deploy a mobile app
* Learn Python for ML
* Dive into Hacking

FLOYD IS HERE 😎

Gather around kids, it's story time.

So my first breakup left me so damaged and I was in darkest phase of my life. I was alone. Physically, mentally, and emotionally. I went for therapy and spearheaded into success and grew in life soooo fucking much.

31st December 2016, I first joined dR and since the first day this place felt home. Met some of brightest mind and most amazing souls here (sadly many left the place).

I used to shit post and rant a lot. But I loved everyone here. But then I don't quite remember, but I decided to quit this place as community started to grow. Many others left as well.

I came back here in 2019 IIRC and started all over again. Got along well with new members and started having fun.

I used to crib and cry about being underpaid. Lost a kickass Europe job due to pandemic.

I will skip what all happened between me and @Scout but she is a sweetheart, though very rough and brutal with me at times (actually very often), but she is so selfish for me and cares for me that I couldn't resist but listen to her always. A lifelong friend for sure :)

I used to rant about my dumb office colleagues. Definitely not the sharpest minds but good people at heart (which I did not realise).

So in October 2020, I earned a new job and my company retained me with a 100% raise and a promotion making me lead of product innovation and UX.

November end I met a girl in professional context on LinkedIn who was conducting a workshop. Being hungry for learning, meeting new people and kill my lockdown boredom, I singed up.

Now I went for December break and my colleagues sent me a gift hamper when they came to know I got a promotion. I felt bad that I ranted about them so I deleted my account and also wanted a social detox.

Post the workshop, I started conversing casually with the girl I met. She was married. But things hit off. Eventually in February end I confessed that I had feelings for her and in next few days she reciprocated. I told her I was aware of her marital status and it's okay if nothing happens between us. Then she started to open up of how she was with one guy for 17 years and was abused in everyway and wanted to separate but never had the courage and all.

She decided to file for paperwork and then be with me. Things got messy when her family got involved thinking I was causing all of it.

She went back to her partner and I realised I had some emotional and mental issues of a person's past that bothered me. But we were overcoming it. Soon the honeymoon period started phasing out.

Her family started giving me death threats. We went underground even further. More arguments and fights between us.

@Scout kept telling me I was stupid and I disregarded her. I feel like an idiot for not listening to her.

That girl kept gaslighting me, hurting me intentionally, scratching the surface made me realise how broken and damaged she was. She lied to me and created fake persona of herself to make me fall for her. Everything was lie. Literally.

I felt horrible for trusting her. My trauma relapsed and I started having crazy panic attacks leading to self harm and being suicidal. That girl was drugged all the time with psychological medicines and very poor character & personality in general (I don't want to judge anyone but just stating the facts).

Eventually she just disappeared and I was like fuck this. Earlier, after every fight, she used to show fake affection and I used to melt but not this time.

I was like fuck this shit. I have some super amazing friends like @kiki who helped me overcome this. I started going for therapy and realised what all areas I need to improve. My therapist is soooo brilliant, she understands the root cause instantly and also knows how to fix it. And the same day I and both my parents were COVID-19 positive. Last few weeks were dark and haunting.

Further more, the girl comes back after a week and then acts as a 'nice girl'.
Initially fake affection, then drama, followed by making me guilt trip, then threats, and now blaming me.

I kept ignoring her calls (50 to 70 calls in a day), emails, left her unread on Telegram, and everything I could do to ignore her without blocking her. I started gaining my happiness back.

During this mess, I lost 5+ KG of weight. She has no friends in her mid 30s. Knows no life or survival skills. Her family hates her, no career, no emotional or mental maturity, literally nothing. Insanely dumb and toxic manipulative person who is not even worth being called an ex. As per her everyone around her is an asshole except her. Every time something happened, she used to blame and bad mouth the other person. Now she is doing with me. In all her life situations, either she was a hero or a victim. One upped me all the time. Now that I see it, I hate myself for allowing it all of it and now having enough self worth to walk out of it earlier.

Continued in comments...

Suddenly it hits me.
It’s 01:20 here but i get it.
It’s ALL a budget thing.

No dedicated tester means less expenses.

No personal parkspot?
No expenses!

And no good staging or testing environment? Less expenses!

Meanwhile every developer can setup, work on, and maintain about 20 websites on their shitty local Windows machine, that doesn’t even have a proper SSD installed, and we are setting impossible deadlines to figure out who will sink and who will swim.

Ow, here is a SSD.. Figure out the installation yourself because we have no IT knowledge or budget for people that do.

You want a challenge? How about 40 other people that are distracting you all day long.

Meanwhile everybody has to improve their skills in js, react, html5, ccs3, angular, .net and razor so money can made faster.

It would be nice if you could build apps as well.

You had a question? Sorry, no time. Expect some feedback 14 days later.

You finished the site?
Great!

But here are 101 bugs to solve before next week.

All hail their crazy company!

Turns out you can shop and improve your development skills

I've always just done CSS on my own by hand for every project because I thought it would improve my skills over time but now I've discovered Bulma with it's sass variables and responsiveness and things are just so pretty now, I never want to go back

Tl;dr porn is ruining my life.

Today I had a meeting with the project leader and the CTO. They had bad news, which did not come as a surprise.

In short, they said I did not pass the expectations they had, and unfortunately need to find somewhere else to work.

This is my third time being told to find somewhere else to work, and I really can't describe how it feels. I was even told that I maybe I should reconsider my future as a developer, and kids can do programming better than I can do.

It's really difficult when all you've done in the last year is to learn and improve your current skills.

I have good grades, a unique experience, built lots of unique projects, and a GitHub portfolio with high activity. The apps I've built are used by many customers today. I also have a blog with 600 k views where I share dev tips.

The thing with this work if I'm going, to be honest, is that they expected someone with senior experience, and unfortunately, I don't have that thus it takes many years to build it. So I started here with almost scratch experience of the things they needed.

On the other hand, it feels like a relief in that I can finally focus on my personal business. And maybe this wasn't the right place to work, maybe it requires a couple of jobs until I find the right place.

Despite the bumpy ride, and what such people tell you, I'm not going to give up.

10 years ago, my school teacher told me I was going to be a carpenter (nothing against that) but I manage to get an MSc degree in the engineering field.

There's a lot of shit going into your head when you receive such message like "What if they are true, what if I can't handle programming, what if I'll never be anything etc".

I'm not giving up, this is just a great story every successful person has.

What my number one problem is, and I will f*** win is porn addiction. Get rid of that, and the future is bright.

Sorry for mixing so many things here.

The hardest thing that I've had to overcome in my career is the fact that I dropped out of college and do not have a degree. In addition to the personal shame and stigma I felt around being a 'dropout', it also brought along with it a raging case of imposter syndrome. The one benefit those feelings gave me was an almost obsessive drive to constantly improve my skills, which in many ways has proved to be an advantage in a competitive and rapidly changing industry.

After a decade of development, I feel like I've finally accepted that I'm more than qualified and capable of being in my position, and that I actually deserve the success that I've earned. I'm still mildly embarrassed about my lack of a degree, and I generally avoid bringing it up around my colleagues, but overall these feelings take a backseat to the confidence I've gained with each passing challenge and new role.

"If you wanted to improve your X skills, then the Y video course is exactly what you need"

No, fuck off with your promoted bullshit, if your course needs this kind of advertisement, then I can already hear your fucking heavy accent and lisp throughout a fucking shitty 360p video.

They've literally left me with nothing to do. I'm doing nothing. I can't be happy doing nothing.

To illustrate the chaos: Everyone on the team was trying to figure out some defect. No one knows what is going on in the code. It's unlike anything I've ever seen.

I found an API call with a misspelled endpoint. It was wrong since the code was written two months before. There's no way it ever worked. Obviously no one tested the code because they would have immediately seen that the call returned a 404 every time.

I fixed it. That was my only PR in about a month. It was literally one character.

The next week that PR got reverted. Apparently the app works better if the API call fails. No one said what goes wrong if the request is made, just that it "causes problems."

That's how bad it is. No one knows why anything does or doesn't work. People write code that doesn't work, never test it, and the application works better in some unspecified way if that code never gets executed.

The last straw for me was when an architect told us that if we want to improve our skills we need to learn how to read and debug stuff like this.

1) Not to be immodest, but I'm good at figuring out bad code.
2) Just because I can doesn't mean I want to do it all day instead of actually developing software
3) He trivialized the really important skill, not making a mess like this in the first place. If his idea of skill is to sling crap without tests at the wall and then debug it, how is he an architect?

I tried really hard but I can't keep a good attitude. I don't want to become toxic, but why would I consider working that way? I try my best to be good at this. Writing decent code means a lot to me. It should mean a lot to them. Their code is costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars. Maybe millions.

I can't write good code and add value if all I do is debug bad code.

So I'm out. I'm going to another project. Have a nice life.

Spend 14 hours a week studying more with my free time.

Things to be studied:

-discrete math
-data structures
-algorithms
-coding challenges
-problem defining
-abstraction
-other relevant maths

Other things I want to improve:

-confidence at work
-reaching out to teams with questions
-social skills
-time management
-enjoying the little things
-patience
-consistency (with everything above)

Last big thing would be being more conscious with what type of data/platforms I am digesting everyday. Just like a good diet I want to get in the habit of consuming “good” useful content that’s thought provoking or knowable rather than fast food social media carbs

Wish everyone a productive New Year!

Please disregard. I just need to vent.

Being a manager is so fucking shit. This is not even about devs or tech specific only. Never become a manager.
Why? Because it’s about handling people and all the dumb shit they do. It’s all about knowing what people suck at and preventing that weakness from leaking into other areas. The amount of fucked up people on this earth means that you have to work with at least some of them, and that means putting up with their stupid ass list of super special requirements, that if they do not fulfill, will make them a shit worker. It’s not even an issue of technical skills.

You have the guys that are often late, because “they have depression”, but will complain that “companies don’t treat employees like adults”. Being on time for work is apparently very difficult. Which doesn’t generally matter in general for dev work, but it ends up affecting other things.

You have the completely socially inept idiots that make half the team hate them and try to avoid working with them, increasing problems and work for other people. Just because they’re socially stupid, have low or no empathy, or are incapable of not being insufferable to others.

You have the people that are so bad at estimating that they keep making up numbers instead of waiting to think for a few minutes and say “ not sure, I need to research and estimate that”.

You have the surprise absentee for dumb as fuck reasons like “my phone died lol sorry”. They never do anything to actually improve, it is just “sorry guys! Btw I will do jackshit about this”.

Or the ones whining about virtually everything, all the time. Wtf why do I have to be on scrum at 12 tomorrow?! Wtf why do I have to record the result of that customer call? Wtf why should I talk with XYZ?

And if you leave them alone, everything burns. They actually need someone to tell them “hey mate you need to improve that, shall we plan something to do so?”. I think managers are useless and unneeded when you have adults working, but it seems like most of the population is composed of children. It’s basically another form of daycare.

And you have to prepare shit around all of these constraints.

Then you have the one guy that reads the requirements, has common sense, and is inoffensive and can work like a normal adult human that needs no baby sitting. A ray of light on this shitshow.

I just want to go back to pure dev.

Any bikers around here?

I recently bought my first motor bike ( super cheap ) and I'm excited to add some enhancements to it like GPS logging and collect relevant data about my bike.

Have you don't anything similar to your ride? I would like to put my Dev skills and improve my bike as a hobby.

Gonna read this thing. Hopefully it will improve my debugging-observation skills too 😅

Me 2 days ago :
"I have applied to so many places, and did lots of interview for my internship. Still no result so far. Maybe I need to take some odd jobs to cover my bills while I improve my coding skills. Rent and food need to be paid, you know.
But I will keep applying to at least 40 companies before I change my strategy"

Me today :
"OMFG, they offered me a position despite my very bad interview!!"
🤩

So whoever is still looking for a job out there, don't give up man... We are in this together.👍👍

So here's the deal. I am a team lead of a small company and I have a junior who is an idiot. I mean literally, idiot. We code in Python mostly and as Python is not structured as a default Java or C# project, the developer needs to be very careful so that the structure (or tiers) is maintained properly.

Now this girl, always messes up the tiers. Say one enhancement can be easily implemented in the UI tier, she would do the implementation in the core Db access layer, which may complete this particular enhancement, but breaks all the other functions (sometimes the whole project) connected to that particular module of the Db layer. She doesn't do any integration testing after updating the code, she only checks the current enhancement she is working on. When the enhancement goes to the testing phase, the testers find those broken functions and that results a re-work (most of the times done by me).

I have warned her. Even our manager has warned her. She always tells that she is working to improve herself. But I know, she isn't. She mostly chats with her boyfriends (yes, with an 's') when she has no work to do. She never upgrades herself or works on her skills.

I can easily report about her, and they will fire her without any warning (they did it already with a guy earlier). I don't want to do that again. What should I do? Any suggestions?

Oh, she has a great ego. She thinks that knows and understands everything. She will listen to your suggestions carefully, but will never follow those.

"It is risky to release an app that depends on APIs that you don't control."

Yeah, dude, we also live in the real world.

Better to say: "Your app should handle cases where the third party API is partially or even totally down."

God, some people, they build a wall of rules around themselves and wonder why their skills don't improve.

As a developer, I constantly feel like I'm lagging behind.

Long rant incoming.

Whenever I join a new company or team, I always feel like I'm the worst developer there. No matter how much studying I do, it never seems to be enough.

Feeling inadequate is nothing new for me, I've been struggling with a severe inferiority complex for most of my life. But starting a career as a developer launched that shit into overdrive.

About 10 years ago, I started my college education as a developer. At first things were fine, I felt equal to my peers. It lasted about a day or two, until I saw a guy working on a website in notepad. Nothing too special of course, but back then as a guy whose scripting experience did not go much farther than modifying some .ini files, it blew my mind. It went downhill from there.

What followed were several stressful, yet strangely enjoyable, years in college where I constantly felt like I was lagging behind, even though my grades were acceptable. On top of college stress, I had a number of setbacks, including the fallout of divorcing parents, childhood pets, family and friends dying, little to no money coming in and my mother being in a coma for a few weeks. She's fine now, thankfully.

Through hard work, a bit of luck, and a girlfriend who helped me to study, I managed to graduate college in 2012 and found a starter job as an Asp.Net developer.
My knowledge on the topic was limited, but it was a good learning experience, I had a good mentor and some great colleagues. To teach myself, I launched a programming tutorial channel. All in all, life was good. I had a steady income, a relationship that was already going for a few years, some good friends and I was learning a lot.

Then, 3 months in, I got diagnosed with cancer.

This ruined pretty much everything I had built up so far. I spend the next 6 months in a hospital, going through very rough chemo.

When I got back to working again, my previous Asp.Net position had been (understandably) given to another colleague. While I was grateful to the company that I could come back after such a long absence, the only position available was that of a junior database manager. Not something I studied for and not something I wanted to do each day neither.

Because I was grateful for the company's support, I kept working there for another 12 - 18 months. It didn't go well. The number of times I was able to do C# jobs can be counted on both hands, while new hires got the assignments, I regularly begged my PM for.

On top of that, the stress and anxiety that going through cancer brings comes AFTER the treatment. During the treatment, the only important things were surviving and spending my potentially last days as best as I could. Those months working was spent mostly living in fear and having to come to terms with the fact that my own body tried to kill me. It caused me severe anger issues which in time cost me my relationship and some friendships.

Keeping up to date was hard in these times. I was not honing my developer skills and studying was not something I'd regularly do. 'Why spend all this time working if tomorrow the cancer might come back?'

After much soul-searching, I quit that job and pursued a career in consultancy. At first things went well. There was not a lot to do so I could do a lot of self-study. A month went by like that. Then another. Then about 4 months into the new job, still no work was there to be done. My motivation quickly dwindled.

To recuperate the costs, the company had me do shit jobs which had little to nothing to do with coding like creating labels or writing blogs. Zero coding experience required. Although I was getting a lot of self-study done, my amount of field experience remained pretty much zip.

My prayers asking for work must have been heard because suddenly the sales department started finding clients for me. Unfortunately, as salespeople do, they looked only at my theoretical years of experience, most of which were spent in a hospital or not doing .Net related tasks.
Ka-ching. Here's a developer with four years of experience. Have fun.

Those jobs never went well. My lack of experience was always an issue, no matter how many times I told the salespeople not to exaggerate my experience. In the end, I ended up resigning there too.

After all the issues a consultancy job brings, I went out to find a job I actually wanted to do. I found a .Net job in an area little traffic. I even warned them during my intake that my experience was limited, and I did my very best every day that I worked here.

It didn't help. I still feel like the worst developer on the team, even superseded by someone who took photography in college. Now on Monday, they want me to come in earlier for a talk.

Should I just quit being a developer? I really want to make this work, but it seems like every turn I take, every choice I make, stuff just won't improve. Any suggestions on how I can get out of this psychological hell?

Should I actually look into getting a dev job..?

*I have a high school diploma (graduated three years early)
*College dropout (3-4 months, Computer Science - Personal Reasons)
*No prior work experience.
*Good textural communication skills, poor verbal communication skills.
*Currentally unemployed. (NEET :P)

*I have extensive personal experience with Java, and Python. Some Lua. Knowledge of data generation, parsing, Linux, Windows, Terminal(cmd & bash), & Encryption(Ciphers).
*Math, but very little algebra/geometry (though, could easily improve these).
*Work best under preasure.

Remote only.

Think anyone would hire me..?

The great thing about coding is, every problem can be solved with logic. And the simplest solution is often the best one.
Often when I don't know what to do, I just keep thinking about what I want to have and break down what I need for that and in the end I always come to a good solution. And it gets easier from time to time.

My mentor at my current internship helped me improve my debugging skills. He's a great dev and has really good debugging skills. He showed me his ways of approaching things and how I should go about solving difficult problems.

I think he never directly helped me when I got stuck. I ask him like 'I have this confusing problem, can you help me out?' and he's like 'well yes, but actually no" and he almost always tells me that I can figure it out myself. And I do figure it out, eventually.

Now, I seldom feel the need to go to him. I guess that's a good improvement. :)

I just decided to take some time off from work, and use my savings to survive next months. I have been dealing with work related problems for a few years now, and since last year I was sure I needed time to recover my health and improve my skills, to get better job opportunities.

I was trying to balance my life and my time, working a bit less, trying to rest, study, and so on. I was hopeful I could achieve my goals just fine with some adjustments. But now... I just don't care.

Last Thursday my mother was diagnosed with cancer.
Two weeks ago, my only brother lost his job.
The same happened with my bf, few months ago, and he needed to move to another state to get a new job.

There is so much going on... Sometimes I just feel like panicking.

It's sad to fear the future, and deal with so much uncertainty.

It's hard to deal with work and money issues. It's even harder to deal with serious health issues.

I hope things will get better somehow, but I needed to vent this. Sometimes life can be a bitch.

End of adventures of the COO and Start of a new beginning

It takes years to improve a company and takes only a few months for a dumbass with shit for brain to take it all down

After four years working ( underpaid ) in a digital advertising agency helping the company grow, getting global exposure and few awards later, last Friday was my last day

To all the future and current CEO's out there, Don't hire someone just cause you know them, hire them for their skills or their brain power

I've seen fucking clay pots with more brains than this COO

tl : "hey dotenv, we have a presentation with VP tomorrow, do you want to present any of your achievements in product?"

me: "umm, what achievements ?"

tl : "you know, something that you added in app which made a good impact to various metrics like DAU, MAU, less bad reviews etc"

me: "umm... i coded the tasks and features created by you folks. they got shipped at some point of your liking, and are now being tracked by you for its success failure. So i am not sure what to take credit for"

TL: "no, no.. i mean like any bugs or issues that you fixed outside of your daily jira tasks which you tracked to be a sucess"

me: "well as far as tracking is concerned, then neither i know how to track them nor i did. but yea, i identified a bug where an outdated payload was generating bad request and giving a silent failure instead of success which recently got shipped. maybe its helping users get actual response instead of "we will get back to you in some time" , so this might get considered?

TL : "oh that? that we have already added as one of the team's achievements (=PM+TL's achievement) and have tracked it to be a succes"

me : "what th- okay. then how about that api failure which was identified by AVP as "something is not right" in which the api was intermittently taking a long time to respond. he tagged me and i set up logs to identify which type of users got that issue and the actual cause of that api failure. that was definitely a good fox for app as we ended up with good reviews on playstore for our new release?"

TL : "oh that? how can you take credit for that fix? it was identified by AVP, you just added similar logs that we were using for tracking errors and implemented a fix when it came to you as a sprint task? its a team achievement"

me : "but you guys didn't identified the cause through your logs!? my log was more granular. and even if that's the case, we aren't allowed to pick any task just as is, without getting it added to sprint , right?"

TL : "nah, that was a team win"

*6 months later, during appraisal time"
TL : "Hey dotenv, you haven't displayed any leadership skills and haven't gone put of the box to improve the product. Here's your peanut appraisal 🗑️"

me : 🥲🔫🤯🪦

------------

fuck this stupid neaurocrst structure. i hate being a selfish prick than a team player, but either give credits as well as punishment to the team or gove credits as well as punishment to the single person. but wtf is thos culture of giving reward to team and punishment to individual? fckin communists

------

So here's my problem. I've been employed at my current company for the last 12 months (next week is my 1 year anniversary) and I've never been as miserable in a development job as this.

I feel so upset and depressed about working in this company that getting out of bed and into the car to come here is soul draining. I used to spend hours in the evenings studying ways to improve my code, and was insanely passionate about the product, but all of this has been exterminated due to the following reasons.

Here's my problems with this place:

1 - Come May 2019 I'm relocating to Edinburgh, Scotland and my current workplace would not allow remote working despite working here for the past year in an office on my own with little interaction with anyone else in the company.

2 - There is zero professionalism in terms of work here, with there being no testing, no planning, no market research of ideas for revenue generation – nothing. This makes life incredibly stressful. This has led to countless situations where product A was expected, but product B was delivered (which then failed to generate revenue) as well as a huge amount of development time being wasted.

3 - I can’t work in a business that lives paycheck to paycheck. I’ve never been somewhere where the salary payment had to be delayed due to someone not paying us on time. My last paycheck was 4 days late.

4 - The management style is far too aggressive and emotion driven for me to be able to express my opinions without some sort of backlash.

5 - My opinions are usually completely smashed down and ignored, and no apology is offered when it turns out that they’re 100% correct in the coming months.

6 - I am due a substantial pay rise due to the increase of my skills, increase of experience, and the time of being in the company, and I think if the business cannot afford to pay £8 per month for email signatures, then I know it cannot afford to give me a pay rise.

7 - Despite having continuously delivered successful web development projects/tasks which have increased revenue, I never receive any form of thanks or recognition. It makes me feel like I am not cared about in this business in the slightest.

8 - The business fails to see potential and growth of its employees, and instead criticises based on past behaviour. 'Josh' (fake name) is a fine example of this. He was always slated by 'Tom' and 'Jerry' as being worthless, and lazy. I trained him in 2 weeks to perform some basic web development tasks using HTML, CSS, Git and SCSS, and he immediately saw his value outside of this company and left achieving a 5k pay rise during. He now works in an environment where he is constantly challenged and has reviews with his line manager monthly to praise him on his excellent work and diverse set of skills. This is not rocket science. This is how you keep employees motivated and happy.

9 - People in the business with the least or zero technical understanding or experience seem to be endlessly defining technical deadlines. This will always result in things going wrong. Before our mobile app development agency agreed on the user stories, they spent DAYS going through the specification with their developers to ensure they’re not going to over promise and under deliver.

10 - The fact that the concept of ‘stealing data’ from someone else’s website by scraping it daily for the information is not something this company is afraid to do, only further bolsters the fact that I do not want to work in such an unethical, pathetic organisation.

11 - I've been told that the MD of the company heard me on the phone to an agency (as a developer, I get calls almost every week), and that if I do it again, that the MD apparently said he would dock my pay for the time that I’m on the phone. Are you serious?! In what world is it okay for the MD of a company to threaten to punish their employees for thinking about leaving?! Why not make an attempt at nurturing them and trying to find out why they’re upset, and try to retain the talent.

Now... I REALLY want to leave immediately. Hand my notice in and fly off. I'll have 4 weeks notice to find a new role, and I'll be on garden leave effective immediately, but it's scary knowing that I may not find a role.

My situation is difficult as I can't start a new role unless it's remote or a local short term contract because my moving situation in May, and as a Junior to Mid Level developer, this isn't the easiest thing to do on the planet.

I've got a few interviews lined up (one of which was a final interview which I completed on Friday) but its still scary knowing that I may not find a new role within 4 weeks.

Advice? Thoughts? Criticisms?

Love you DevRant <3

Write a piece of code that works just fine and it's fairly extensible in 20 minutes.

Then proceed to spend the rest of your night rethinking and replacing said piece of code numerous times, with slightly more elegant code.

7 hours later and I'm still not done. Although a fine way to improve your skills, I seriously need to stop doing that for every single thing I write and start managing my time better. Got lots of other stuff I need to be working on...

Surely I can't be the only one doing this

As soon as my own projects income stabilize and outweigh my salary I’ll quit.

I haven’t even read sicp and continued to improve my dev knowledge just because I already can make something that can make me some money. So why spend health and energy polishing interview-passing skills for suits if I personally don’t need them?

World doesn’t revolve around software development.

Every day I am reminded that some people just refuse to be helped. Today I saw an article in a prominent Facebook WordPress group I belong to. The author was sharing tips on how to improve presentation skills at WordPress conferences. One tip was to ensure no spelling errors exist in your slides. But the article itself, and the author’s bio, had five spelling errors. I pointed that out in the comments. Aaaaaand now I’ve been kicked out of the group.

Lately I'm running into quite some negative atmosphere in meetings. Raise your hand if you think we all should improve our soft skills.

For example, we had a meeting with our client the other day. It was supposed to be only with the two most senior guys in the team and a couple of the less senior (just because one of us knows better the maths of it and the other one knows better about the limitations of the hardware), but in the end some other team members also joined.

In this meeting, we wanted to discuss an issue that had to be fixed. Quite a complex one. The main speaker from the clients, even though also technical, was having a hard time trying to explain properly to us what the issue was about. He was doing quite well, but it was complex enough. Well, one of the guys in my team kept interrupting him to ask very detailed questions (that would not help us understand it better, not until we got first the big picture). When I say "interrupting" I mean that the guy would half shout a question in the middle of a word from the client.

The client was patient and tried to answer, but our nice guy would keep answering back in a "gosh you really don't have a clue" tone.

We muted our microphone and one of the senior Devs asked the guy to please let them conduct the meeting, and that if he had such questions, he could mute the micro and ask them to us, so we knew we might have to ask about that.

Good. We unmute the microphone and 2 minutes after, our star guy goes in again and he even directs his question to someone else than who was talking (from the client).

Client gets pissed - I mean, I taught 12-16 year old teenagers for years and I don't think I would have hold it together for as long as the client did - and from then on all the meeting went in a really negative tone. Ending up with a call from the client to our senior guy to finish explaining in private the thing.

Well, our friend the interrupting guy not only got amazingly mad at the senior guy that (in private and constructively) gave him some advice on this kind of meetings. No, he also ended up spiraling into a close to insulting chain of emails towards the client -with his and our colleagues in copy- when he needed some specification.

Interrupting guy is 35yo and has been working with clients quite long. Our HR department still doesn't think we all should get communication workshops or something

All this started around an year back. In college we had this subject of web programming where we were given a mini project to do. The topics were given related to college stuff. Mine was an attendance system. Made a simple website using all i knew about bootstrap, jquery, etc since i had some previous experience with web. The professor liked it and asked me to further improve it so that it can actually be implemented. This was six months back.

Since that day, to this date, that guy asks me to add a new feature or just modify something every two weeks. These guys just want free work and think everyone is just free. Neither does he help a bit... just demands... god knows when this forever loop would end! It has become frustrating now...it just feels as though why i showed my skills in the first place 😐😖

Interviewed for a Mid/Senior developer role and finally got feedback. The company feels I'm not experience enough for the senior role but think I'm a good fit for the company. Bad thing is they don't have any entry level positions available. I honestly feel like I am ready for a mid level role and maybe even a senior role. They say to keep considering them while they try to get approval for entry level position, but this is a massive company and who knows how long that will take. Recruiter said it's not a no, just not a right now. /:

Oh and going off my last rant, I found out that the senior dev was wrong about set interception being '|' in python, I found out that it's actually a method called interception(set). So even the senior dev didn't know off the top of his head. /:

Have some projects in GitHub but my biggest one is a private repo I'm doing the entire backend and even frontend. Can't share that repo or share details because it's a project a friend (his idea) and I are planning on releasing. (:

Overall feeling pretty bummed because I was looking forward to steady work that'll improve my skills even further... I'm self taught so it's a bit tougher to land interviews because of the automated process most companies have with resume filtering. ):

Going to keep doing small contracted projects until I land another interview. In the meantime trying to keep my spirit up. (:

Remote work (for the software industry, at least) is PERFECT and I still haven't heard a single argument against it that could not be derived into one of the following explanations:
- the complainer is/has a terrible manager
- the complainer has a shitty house
- the complainer has a shitty family
- the complainer is a shitty person
Naturally I mean only real-adult healthy people who work in the software industry.

I will now list the complaints I have heard more often. All fit neatly in the categories above:
- "my family interrupts me a lot, require lots of attention and/or creates an environment I cannot work in" - in this case it is very irresponsible of the complainer to try and escape to an office. If the adults you live with cannot get by without you, how going to an office will help them? If you can't teach your children to behave, who will?

- "my house is noisy and/or uncomfortable" - move out! if you can go to the office, you can look for another place to live.

- "I need in person conversations to understand people / zoom meetings are a waste of time" - why? do you need the smell of other people to properly organize your thoughts? Yes, meetings are extra-shitty during the pandemic. But pandemics come and go and your terrible time management skills won't simply improve themselves. Learn to lead better meetings instead of blaming the medium.

- "I miss face-to-face interactions at work" - Those do not miss you. If you want to have personal conversations, do it *out of working hours* with consenting adults. If you want to have personal touch in work contexts, it is called "sexual harassment" and is a crime.

- "my employees / colleagues are not as effective without me breathing at their necks" - you are a terrible manager and leader if you can't inspire people in words only. Maybe even video.

My main point is, there is no argument against WFH. When people try to argue against it, they often actually mean "I don't like the pandemic". No shit. Life will be better after people stop dieing for breathing close to their friends and family. In the mean time, learn to organize your life instead of running away from it every day.

Have you ever been to love theatre? How many times? Have you ever seen a movie? How many?
Why so many more movies than live theatre? You think you would have liked the movies, and their price, more if it was live theatre? Would you have seen as many?
WFH is not perfect for everybody in the planet. But it sure is for the software industry.

Had annual appraisal meeting today. Been in this company for 2yrs now, after being hired outta college. It happens first after 2 years, then yearly.

I have long since known that my boss is a scumbag. My lucky college mates got assigned to great managers, leaders I must say, while I got the typical, know it all boss.

Now this racist, motherfucker, for reasons unknown to me, has mostly disliked me. But hey, the feelings mutual but I don't ever go busting his ass.

Previous employees eventually transferred locations or departments. But I stuck coz I respected some colleagues and learnt a lot from them.

Now this nutjob gave me a 2/5 rating. Says I need to improve my communication. I need to talk more. WTF you goatfucking cunt! I decide how much I wanna talk. I don't waste my time, and even if I did, I don't have any right to waste someone elses time. And talking about communication skills - BITCH! Everytime you speak something, I need like 2 mins to compile your jumbled fucking words in my mind to be able to comprehend what it is you wanted to convey. And you cunt! YOU are going to tell me I need to improve my communication. Dumbfuck I ain't no Shakespeare, but I can convey my message through.

Fucking peasant!

Hmm. The lemon tea sure is good today.

Stop procrastinating and try to really improve my soft skills

@Android Question

Does all android devs use Async Task for their Json calls or you prefer to do them on Main Thread ?

Am just asking to improve my skills and get some senior programmers opinion

My dev Goals:
- Write better code commenting more.
- Create my first Open Source Project and publish it on GitHub.
- Improve my design skills.

Should is start competitive programming? Does it improve your coding and algorithm skills? Which websites would you recommend for a beginner?

All i want to do is write code. Give me time, space, and stop bothering me so often and I can fix the shitty outsourced code. I can do it, really. I can write a ton of resdesign docs and improve so much shit. But I can't do ANY OF IT BECAUSE THESE FUCKS ARE ALWAYS PAWNING OFF WORK ONTO ME AND REFUSING TO LET ME GET MY HANDS DIRTY.

Stop asking me to email people. Stop asking me to update documentation that isn't for my features. Stop bothering me. Stop. Fucking. Bothering. Me. All. The. Goddamn. Damn.

Stop it stop it stop it fucking stop. I don't care about the PM's dumbfuck braindead statements and always wanting to pick a fight with me. I don't care that x environment is down. I don't care that your shitty overseas programmers can't tell their own ass from their head. I do care that I have the skills to fix it if you would give me the fucking time and space.

Instead of having me do all the mundane tasks that your shitty ape programmers could do overseas, let me have some fucking room to breath and I can fix this shitty fuck of a project and Maybe I can save it before it collapses on itself you dumb fucks

Holy shit im pissy today

I hate my current work with this piece of bad written legacy $hit. As 2 year old 'junior' without any code review and mentor I feel depressed. I should improve my skills at home and run away from it.

F#$ck you, corpo.

It's been two months since I've left my previous job, after 1.5 years. I never had the feeling my boss trusted his dev team, since he was checking up on us regularly, even though we had planned out a sprint and work for us was "clear". I say "clear", because every single feature on this project was pretty much half-baked, since they were just ideas our boss/PO (same person) on the spot and were labeled as "the next big thing" without every properly writing them out as user stories. Every demo came with a bunch of criticism, because features weren't implemented "as he imagined", because what do you know, the user stories weren't properly described anyway. Bringing that up as counter-argument also made him angry every time, so that didn't help much either. The launch of the platform was also postponed every time because of vague reasons, so that didn't make the project any more interesting either.
It took a while before I got sick of this of this pretty hopeless situation and toxic environment. Mind you, it was my first job since I graduated, so I was a bit naive thinking the working environment would improve and aforementioned company issues would be resolved over time. Eventually, I ran out of patience and motivation, so I finally bit the bullet and handed in my resignation letter.
From that moment, I at least had an end in sight, since I was still obliged to do my four-week notice period, which felt like an eternity. The borderline childish and sociopathic behaviour of my boss didn't make it any better (e.g. checking up on me even more, more mistrust, randomly accusing me of ruining the working atmosphere because I shared a meme with a colleague of mine and didn't involve him, going lunching with all of my colleagues but explicitly asking me to stay at work, ...). Being forced to work from home the last 2 weeks as part of the country's lockdown measures at least helped my sanity a bit, since I had the comfort of my home office and not the frequent "looking over your shoulders to check if you're still working".
By the last day of my notice period, I was bitter, exhausted, lost confidence in my skills and had completely lost my joy of being a developer. I had to physically meet with my boss one more time to hand in the company laptop. He thanked me for my service and said that we'd keep in touch. I hope I won't keep that promise (he made a lot of false promises before, too), because I'd rather never encounter him ever again. It felt like a huge relief to finally close the door of this bad experience behind me for good.

Now, 2 months later, I've got a new job and rediscovered my joy for coding, mostly thanks to the complete opposite of a toxic environment here, management which actually has respect and faith in me and a challenging but fun project. My mental state has made a complete turnaround compared to two months ago. I have absolutely no regrets of switching jobs. If only I had made that decision sooner.

Had a tech interview earlier today.

👨‍💻: What mocking framework do you use the most?
🧔: Smoking framework???
👨‍💻: ...

I guess either he needs to improve his skills or I have to polish my English 😂

Whoever programmed ATMA's roomba-style device… you really really need to improve your skills!
Yes… my room is L-shaped, but that doesn't mean one of the arms of the L doesn't need cleaning!! 😒

Competitive programming should be encouraged that is the best way to develope and improve logical skills

Is it just me or is it really fuckin amazing when ur teacher tells you after a year that you are a better programmer than he is 😒 even tho ur just a beginner?

I just started learning to code and i was already better at it than the person who is supposed to teach me... which is great if you ask me #sarcasm

And when we finish a simple task on if statements - which he thought was gonna take us a whole hour - in like 5 minutes, he doesnt let us work on our own programs: "Can you close that? Its not related to the lesson"
Ffs man! 😤 Am i supposed to sit here for an hour just staring into the void, doing fuck all, while i could actually improve my skills?

Then you go home and learn more in two hours than you'll ever do throughout the following 3 years in school.... 😧

If this is not a complete waste of time then i have no fucking clue what is.

GCSE Computer Science sucks (at least in my school). Is there anyone out there with similar issues or is it just our lucky bunch?

My advice to young/beginner programmers:
If you really want to learn, please just google what ur interested in and use stackoverflow

have a couple friends now who have gotten dev jobs at microsoft. I've since turned down their offers to apply and have them vouch for me twice now - not sure if their recommendations would mean anything to begin with at such a place.

this has gotten me a lot of criticism from peers and mentors who have chided me for "throwing away a golden ticket" on my resume.

at first I declined because I sure as fuck did not believe I had the skills to last very long there - and truth is I probably still don't.

but now I see it as a case of the cliche "corporate devil" that everything I believe in in terms of software freedom is squarely against.

I mean, I don't really think I have the chops to make it far with the open source and free software communities either, but if I had to pick a dream or a goal to move towards, that would be it. I don't want money or reputation. I just want to be free to tinker with the world as I please.

maybe I'll have the courage next hacktober... but until then, I'm just gonna focus on learning and self-improvement. no one can ridicule me for being a dumbass if I'm actually putting in the effort to learn and improve, right?

would welcome any advice for aspiring open source contributors, as I'm not really sure where to begin that wouldn't make me look like a total hack (pun not intended)

Realising that my skills were stagnating and there was no opportunity to improve them or grow my career.

After 5 years in the same job (longest I've held) I started looking for a new one.

I'm now in a new job, doing much better work (even if it's a little chaotic right now) with the potential for growth in the future.

Whilst I loved the old job in terms of the staff and the atmosphere, I now couldn't be happier I made the decision.

Why is so hard to find engineers that actually care? It feels like the majority of people always want to do the bear minimum, no one wants to fix their shitty code even when it clearly violates the project or company standards. Everyone constantly comes up with shit about why they can't do things properly or how they'll fix it later and then get their mates to push their shit through review. The majority of lower management usually care equally as little so there's no point explaining the situation to them and the lack of care probably goes much higher. It seems like so many people go from job to job getting bump after bump in salary, which granted is absolutely fine and probably advised, but have nothing to show for it. Usually very little skills but alleged mountains of experience and a lazy piece of shit attitude. I hear all the time people saying you'll never change anything so why try and it feels like that most of the time but more because everyone keeps saying it. If everyone pulled their fingers out their arse, maybe we would stand a chance. I'm sure a lot of people on here have a real passion for computer science, whichever division you're in and love to learn and improve and reflect. What I really want to know is how you deal with people who are just taking their paycheck and enjoying the ride but don't actually care and how you discover these people as early on as possible to get shot of them.

If you are a developer and you are proud of the work you contribute whilst remaining open minded, I applaud you. If you are a developer and you are overly proud of what you do, and you believe the work you contribute to a software project caries more value than the work another developer contributes, then go fuck yourself.

I am sick and tired of working on teams with people who are self-righteous. What you bring to the table is important, but it isn't the only thing brought to the table, so stop acting like what you brought to the table is the best thing on the fucking table.

What makes it worse is when someone disagrees with your work and you aren't willing to take any of it. You deny their opinion as if yours is vastly superior. YOU need to improve your teamwork skills, YOU need to stop being so arrogant and self-righteous, YOU are the problem.

I work at a research institute (part of probably the largest research body in whole Europe). And it's driving me nuts. Forget about the lack of interest to improve yourself in terms of software skills or basic digital hygiene so that others don't have to pick up the mop and clean after you. The ancient mindset is what is making me curse everyday. Only a few years ago we switched to GitLab. Before that versioning, if at all a known term, was done explicitly via email messages - code snippets in the message's body, versions in the subject of message attachments...A freaking nightmare. Constantly broken links to files and folders on our NAS since some people have never heard of relative paths or writing even the tiniest bit of support for configuration files in their software so that a tool does not completely brake the moment you transfer it onto another system or - God forbid - the person leaves and there is no information whatsoever what's where. Everyone is complaining about the clutter on our servers but no one is willing to actually clean their own (not someone else's) crap. If you mention to someone something like "Can you please pack your stuff in this GitLab repo with this folder structure, so that I have an easier time integrating it into the main software that we need to ship to our customers in a few days?" all you get as a response is a blank facial expression and the occasional "I have my own processes. Don't bother me with this!". I have been trying for almost 4 years now and its budging a little bit but the lack of support is abysmal. My boss, as enthusiastic as it is, is incapable of putting his foot down. The fact that I have two heads of my team (one not really but acting like it) does not improve the situation at all especially since both are pulling in a completely different direction. We are literally wasting hundreds of thousands of euros of taxpayers' money to buy new hardware that people are either inadequate to use to its fullest potential (think buying the latest GPU to play Minesweeper) or not having even the smallest clue on what they need it for. And we are always complaining about our budget! You don't invest a couple of hours to investigate how PyTorch can work in a distributed manner on multiple CPUs, GPUs and even systems, yet demand you get a new server for 80K with a more powerful GPU and CPU to run your crap models on so that you can publish a half-ass paper that nobody cares for let alone will ever bother reading (beside the AI reviewers).

Hey. Can I borrow your ears for 5 minutes?

Since I've been out of school, I've often felt that even though I've learned how to code, the education went into a totally direction than the one I want to go. Of course a school can't teach you everything perfectly, but having almost no experience in frontend (mind you we learned the BAREST basics) just makes me feel entirely empty in that regard stepping up to a company. I've been pretty loaded during school, since I was struggling with a lot of things so I couldn't really find myself pursueing the direction of coding frontend apps being fun. I needed the little time I had to blow off steam playing games etc.

So the few things I know are all self taught, but I was never given a hand been shown best practices or solid advice where to look. Sitting down now at my pc trying to learn ReactJS for example feels incredibly draining and difficult, since we've never done JS in school ONCE. All the C# experience barely helps, since with ES6 being rolled out parallel to "normal" JS it's even harder to me to connect the lego blocks that is frontend development. Since many best practices are applied to ES6, I can barely even tell what previous practice they are replacing, making the entire picture even more spongy. In one sentence it's very overwhelming.

I've thought I'd apply maybe as a UX/UI Designer since I've got a great visual sense (confirmed countlessly by many, friends and strangers alike) maybe contributing to the frontend part that way. But as I was applying I've noticed that chances are seemingly pretty low to get accepted since it seems you've got zero reputition if you don't have a degree in Design.

It breaks me apart. I could probably apply as a frontend developer, but I am not sure if I would be happy doing that on the long run. Since just fucking around in Photoshop creating things seems like no effort and brings me joy, as compared to coding out lines for example.

I wanted to make money after school, improve on myself and my quality of life since I've drained that entirely for the sake of my education. Not spiral into another couple years just to eventually maybe get in the direction I want to.

On the flipside going into frontend dev with 0 skills, 0 experience, but being expected to have 2 years of hands on experience with the newest frameworks makes me feel empty and worthless.

I often hand out advice to other people on devRant, but this is the one time where I need some. Desperately. I feel shattered inside, getting out of bed in the morning has no incentive to me since I'll just feel like shit all day, watching YouTube to cheer me up temporarily, only to feel immense remorse not spending the day learning or improving on myself. Barely anything brings me joy. I don't wanna call myself depressive, but maybe I am just dodging the term and I am exactly that.

Thanks If you've read through this monstrosity of a rant/story. I'd be glad if you'd be so kind to give me a different take on my situation or a new perspective.

I am stepping on the spot and I am slowly dying inside because of it.

It dreads me to say it, but I need help.

I give software support to Rugged handhelds in a company and everyday some IT support moron comes to me with a crazy request. The day just started and...

IT Tech: "Hello, C, can you improve the touchscreen sensibility? It's not so responsive and sometimes we have to click more than one time to something work"

**breath in**

Me: "That's ok, the rugged ones that you have are very old, besides they have resistive screen, so your fingers won't do a good job"

IT Tech: "THERE'S NO WAY TO FIX IT? I guess I'll open a ticket for you to study more calmly about the issue"

**NGGGGGGGGGHHHH**

Me: "If it's not a software thing, I can't do that, I don't have hardware skills, I guess you'll have to call our provider about that, but, before you do something, try to recalibrate your handhelds, the majority of the users don't do that at the system's start and the touch experience really can become a mess"

IT Tech: "Hmmm, I'll try that, otherwise I'll back to you, thanks!"

OMFGGGGG

I am open to suggestions of a magic batch file/ .NET CF 2.0 software that will turn their handhelds into a Galaxy S6 touch experience. THANKS!

That feeling when you’re working on writing a program to take differently based numbers, parse the input character by character, and return the value in different bases (dec, binary, hex, etc), get stuck, ask your partner to take a look at it and their response is along the lines of “What are you even DOING?! That doesn’t even make sense.”

I'm a self taught android/Java developer, I have never been to any boot camps. But I have worked with someone who been to one.

It is good for developers who already know the concept of programming and want to improve their skills.

- finish my project's backend, make a proto frontend
- throw the proto away and hire someone to do it for me. Or at least make the design...
- learn that freaking k8s ffs...
- if there will be spare time left - move from on-prem to aws/gcp, maybe launch an alpha

- improve my people skills
- bump my salary significantly

In programming world there is lot of stuff to learn and there is lot to great developers in the world after seeing code and project's of these developers I feel I am very weak in coding currently my confident is quite low cause I cannot make a simple project by my self without seeing a project tutorial video and I don't know how do I improve my dev skills and I feel stuck any suggestions?

Complete the project I am working on (which I am hoping will become a product for the company I am planning to start )

Spend more time with my family.

Improve on my tech skills

Code what you enjoy. Don't code what people say will "improve your skills." If something interests you, learn about it. Also, try broadening your interests. Learn new things that you may not have thought about before. It might be fun.

For the new/aspiring developers:
1. If you are still looking to learn more, but you don't know where to go, start brainstorming. Make a list of projects you could make and sort them by difficulty. Put the ones you could do now at the top of the list, and the ones you aren't sure how to do yet, at the bottom of the list. As you go through them, if you want to do something but aren't sure how, just hop onto an irc chat and everyone will be glad to help. As you go through the projects, your logic and program design skills should improve, as well as your knowledge of programming.
2. Put comments in your code. Seriously. If you are working on a project and suddenly stop working on it for a week or more, you will go back to look at that code and be extremely confused. If you are making something open source, its even more important. If people can understand the code, they are more likely to contribute to it.
3. Try not to focus on code for too long. The longer you work, the more tired your brain gets. Eventually you get tired and make really stupid decisions in your code.
4. Don't code while tired (look at #3)
5. If you are writing code as an assignment, make sure to rename all variables to proper names before submitting it. The instructor will likely not be pleased to see variable names with the f-bomb in them.

Sometimes I feel like I don't improve as a developer. I'm referring to the net amount of information that must be flowing into my head on any given day just to keep up with it all. As soon as I focus on, say, upgrading my CSS skills, I lose track of new developments in, say, jQuery, or any of dozens of other things I need to stay on top of. I don't improve. I just stay afloat.

Will those days in which we used to play the same levels multiple times inorder to improve skills come back?
:/

Long time reader, first time poster 🙊

2020: I'll complete semesters 2, 3 & 4 out of 6 for my part time MSc computer science while maintaining my current development job.

I want to improve my front end skills and pick up a JavaScript framework as well as getting into Raspberry pi projects to get back in touch with my robotics background prior to development.

Good luck in your own goals everyone!

Simply something where I could work on new technologies, learn and improve my skills.

Yo vim what the fuckin fuck.

I like vim, i try to use it as much as possible since i feel more confident with just using a keyboard BUT WHAT THE FUCK.

I am developing an application to improve my python skills and I chose vim to do so. I made some “big” changes today to it using vim. Every time i made a change that i had to test, i was saving it with :w and then running it on my second screen. All good until now.

Then i wanted to make a minor change using vscode because i thought it will be easier there. Anyway, i used :x, opened vscode AND MY CHANGES WERE REVERTED to the first condition my file was when I opened it today.

Vim is awesome, maybe it was all my bad, but how the hell did that even happen?

Took an extremely hard 3d course during my exchange. We started 40. 6 finished the course. The workload was big , but not difficult.

But I lost my virginity and then personal projects made me improve the skills 😊

I can't help it sounding bitter..
If you work some amount of time in tech it's unavoidable that you automatically pick up skills that help you to deal with a lot of shit. Some stuff you pick up is useful beyond those problems that shouldn't even exist in the first place but lots of things you pick up over time are about fixing or at least somehow dealing or enduring stuff that shouldn't be like that in the first place.
Fine. Let's be honest, it's just reality that this is quite helpful.

But why are there, especially in the frontend, so many devs, that confuse this with progress or actual advancement in their craft. It's not. It's something that's probably useful but you get that for free once you manage to somehow get into the industry. Those skills accumulate over time, no matter what, as long as you manage to somehow constantly keep a job.
But improving in the craft you chose isn't about somehow being able to deal with things despite everything. That's fine but I feel like the huge costs of keeping things going despite some all the atrocities that arose form not even considering there could be anything to improve on as soon as your code runs. If you receive critic in a code review, the first thing coming back is some lame excuse or even a counter attack, when you just should say thank you and if you don't agree at all, maybe you need to invest more time to understand and if there's some critic that's actually not useful or base don wrong assumptions, still keep in mind it's coming from somebody that invested time to read your code gather some thoughts about it and write them down for you review. So be aware of the investment behind every review of your code.
Especially for the frontend getting something to run is a incredibly low bar and not at all where you can tell yourself you did code.
Some hard truth from frontend developer to frontend developer:
Everybody with two months of experience is able to build mostly anything expected on the job. No matter if junior or senior.
So why aren't you looking for ways to find where your code is isn't as good as it could be.

Whatever money you earn on top of your junior colleagues should make you feel obligated to understand that you need to invest time and the necessary humbleness and awareness of your own weaknesses or knowledge gaps.
Looking at code, that compiles, runs and even provides the complete functionality of the user story and still feeling the needs do be stuff you don't know how to do it at the moment.

I feel like we've gotten to a point, where there are so few skilled developer, that have worked at a place that told them certain things matter a lot Whatever makes a Senior a Senior is to a big part about the questions you ask yourself about the code you wrote if if's running without any problems at all.
It's quite easy to implement whatever functionality for everybody across all experience levels but one of your most important responsibilities. Wherever you are considered/payed above junior level, the work that makes you a senior is about learning where you have been wrong looking back at your code matters (like everything).

Sorry but I just didn't finde a way to write this down in a more positive and optimistic manner.

And while it might be easy to think I'm just enjoying to attack (former) colleaues thing that makes me sad the most is that this is not only about us, it's also about the countless juniors, that struggle to get a food in the door.
To me it's not about talent nor do I believe that people wouldn't be able to change.
Sometimes I'm incredibly disappointed in many frontend colleagues. It's not about your skill or anything. It's a matter of having the right attitude.
It's about Looking for things you need to work in (in your code). And investing time while always staying humble enough to learn and iterate on things. It's about looking at you
Ar code and looking for things you didn't solve properly.

Never forget, whenever there's a job listing that's fording those crazy amount of work experience in years, or somebody giving up after repeatedly getting rejected it might also be on the code you write and the attitude that 's keeping you looking for things that show how awesome you are instead of investing work into understanding where you lack certain skills, invest into getting to know about the things you currently don't know yet.
If you, like me, work in a European country and gathered some years of industry experience in your CV you will be payed a good amount of money compared to many hard working professions in other industries. And don't forget, you're also getting payed significantly more than the colleagues that just started at their first job.
No reason to feel guilty but maybe you should feel like forcing yourself to look for whatever aspect of your work is the weakest.

There's so many colleagues, especially in the frontend that just suck while they could be better just by gaining awareness that there code isn't perfect.

Dear Web developers,
I'm looking to boost my skills and improve work flow. I was wondering what sort of tools, editors or platforms would you recommend? I currently use wordpress, php, jquery, sass, react, node and laravel.

I've heard about awesome ways where you can monitor project changes, something like github but with gui for design drafts and stuff.

Also I heard about good online platform for Web development, something like online sublime text where all your files are saved within cloud platform. I'm looking for something that will unify my work throughout different work places.

Lastly, are there any good sites or new technologies that are fairly popular and good to learn or research?

I met @miau in England at University, through the only course we shared, Games for the Internet. I really wanted to be her friend because I thought she was pretty cool.

@miau looks incredibly confident. She has humor, imagination and is a really talented programmer.

She, on the other hand, did not want to have anything to do with other German-speaking students to improve her English skills and learn as much about England as possible.

Fortunately, I can be very stubborn. I helped her with her programming tasks whenever she let me and told her what our professor values. A few tests and beers later we were friends.

So I'm a young lad with a career in Front end development I love coding in HTML (yes I know it's not a coding language to some, but to a computer illiterate person it's wizardry so I've got that going for me) I've got skills in responsive design with css and skills in javascript, jQuery and a little bit of skill in PHP But I'm not sure what to go for next? I'm not much of a back end developer..got nothing against it, just never was my cuppa tea. I want to improve my skills but I'm not sure what to look into.. Any advice?

Working on a project in which the work is planned around what I'm already good at, isn't much use.

Yes, the person who is paying for the project, would want only someone with experience (good experience) to work on the project.

But really I'd like to work on stuff which will be challenging (in terms of learning new stuff). So yes, I'd like to get paid for learning!

Is there any tool/library to improve the developers communication skills !!😋😋

I need to improve my C skills to become a kernel developer, so that I can do that full-time at some point. And since it would be 100% remote I could live wherever I want and wouldn't need to PAY STUPID AMOUNTS OF RENT JUST TO LIVE IN A """CITY"""

I recently joined DevRants, and with me joining any new site or media where you can share I am usually the guy who is shy and likes to sit back and watch/read. However I wanted to post a question as I am trying to get a job within the Cyber Security field. I have a computer science degree and honestly I feel like I can't even code at a level I should be able to. I am also currently working/studying for my CompTIA Security+. It has been going good but, I always second guess myself and doubt my abilities. I guess this a a slight rant and question so far.

My question is how can I better improve both my skills (coding, linux, and security) and also my mental. I would say its imposter syndrome but I don't have a job so I don't think it would be fair to say it is. I just want to break into the job field and show people that if given the help and resources I can excel at the task given. I do learn fast and pick things up pretty good. Any help/recommendations is much appreciated, and I look forward to more talks.

 my primary goals are:

Continue to learn and improve my developer skills.
Learn and be better at system analysis (through dealing with customers) and system designTo move towards a team lead position.
Learn project management
Learning about the company to find where I can make a contribution from a business perspective rather than just an IT perspective

I made my first app after 3 years of learning Android studio in my free times and experimenting on codes.
I will be glad if you guys check my app and send me your suggestions and ideas to help me improve my skills .
Google play:
bit.ly/cful-play
Amazon app store:
bit.ly/cful-amzn
It's a random color scheme generator named Colorful.
Thanks for your attention.

So i was given two issues to be fixed, and upon analysis i found out that those issues were no longer there..😅 btw can anyone tell me some resources to follow to improve your debugging skills (I am currently working on spring technology).Would be really helpful 😀

Today I (/ later together with some colleagues) spent almost 4 hours trying to improve a Entity Framework LINQ to SQL query.
The initial problem was, that one of our List API endpoints took longer the more you "page" (besides the long response time it had anyways).
So after
- brainstorming in the team
- brainstorming alone
- hacking around and
- shouting at screens
- googling
we
- got nothing optimized
- got confused about what EF does
- lost the believe in our development skills

So Entity Framework is really a nice thing. But as soon as you look deeper, trying to figure out what it really does between ToList() and "yeah my data arrived" it is just....demonic.

How do I help a software engineer student be better at developing software?

Background: I have this friend that started university with my young brother, two-or-so years ago my brother finished the career and got his degree while she is still there trying to finish the same career (!), we were looking the chance of changing careers but due to her low grades this is not possible and according to her U's counselor is better that she just finishes the career and gets her degree.

We scheduled a Zoom meeting for Sunday next week, to talk about her pain-points and see what improvement we can chase; issue is that I've never mentored anyone ever in my professional life (my brother from time to time drops a question to me or so, but that's different).

My plan is to either see if she suffers from lack of practice (meaning: she does not write software more often in order to improve her skills) or if it's hard for her to think in abstracts, either way, I believe that the latter improves if you do the former (just correct me if I'm wrong), thus the plan would be to assign her a bunch of programming exercises and have meetings at least once a week during her vacations.

My plan would be for her to actually learn game development with Godot, since the final result is always a game my hope is that having something to show encourages her to do the thing, but, who knows.

Have you ever done something like this for someone with the same issues? What was your experience and what nuggets of knowledge can you lend me?

P.S.: We don't live in the States but in Costa Rica, she does not have to deal with crippling student loans.

That moment when you fcked up in a technical interview and realize oh I need to sharpen my skills, I need to improve my skills! I am not a worthy programmer now 💔

Then you go to work next day and have a busy day working as a project manager!

Now I know why my skills got rusty, and am not able to code as I used to be 😭😭😢

2007, I worked in a small company that develops a web platform, and we began to discover the benefits of MVC and that helped that rookie work team improve our skills to get a better job

- Dealing only with your own code
- Having enough time to improve and refactor your code whenever you want
- Bug reports are detailed af and not just like "doesn't work"
- Choosing the IDE (and OS maybe, too) by yourself
- Having enough time for bugfixes, implementations
- Software is ready, when you want it, not anyone else.
- Visiting trainings or seminars to improve your skills whenever you want

Yeah, that would be pretty awesome.

Today I fucked up seeing that I bought a ddr3 ram registered to improve my computer :( senior hardware skills

Doing hobby projects is a great way to improve new skills, helping people with their projects helps me to explain what I'm doing and reading stackoverflow posts!

I'm starting from today a bootcamp for improve my skills as developer.

Wish me luck, or time for the tasks...

Any tips on staying motivated to improve one's own programming skills? (Self-taught and lacks guidance)

I'm a back-end developer trying to improve my front-end skills, is there any good website that I can replicate/remake so I can improve my skills?

I've been learning android app development using kotlin/java for about 4 months, and i think i'm pretty good with kotlin/java, i've learned a lot of things related to android development, i've cloned netflix,spotify and made streaming apps with firebase as the backend, and I think I understand using firebase quite well because firebase itself is not difficult to use. Is it for my current skills that I deserve to work as a freelancer or do I still have to improve my skills?if it yes,give me an example of what kind of application I should do to improve my skills again!,I've read the android studio docs what to know and I've studied everything even though I sometimes forget how to make this/make that but I understand the logic quite well ok, please help

To build a company to develop products designed to improve people's lives. I have interests in video games, mind plasticity, and rpgs. I am not sure if those interests would intersect well, but I hope to make something fun and useful to people. Instead of sucking someone's life away it would be awesome to give it back to them in some fashion.

I think a good example of this is modded minecraft. People have learned programming, and learned some basic problem solving skills playing the game. Stuff that is useful outside the game.

I suggest at our retro that other teams have skills in languages and frameworks that we have only just started using, and that we practically just make it up as we go along and then keep making changes as we realise things suck. Why not bring a real expert in from another team for 1 or 2 days to rapidly improve our knowledge?

15 people in the room, every single one of them: "no that's stupid. Why would you even do that?"

Really? Am I the retarded one?

New year resolution.......
Focus on career and improve technical skills.

I wish I could get our technical lead fired for incompetence. No transparency about deadlines (it's always "Oh and we need it today"), always overpromises to business ("I told them you can deliver this in two days" - we estimated a week's worth of work), and she never documents anything except through email (she never uses Jira, which we use for our task logging - we end up creating the tickets ourselves, which she never reads or updates either when there are blockers she needs to address).

Dozens of retrospectives later trying to find a solution to her poor organizational skills have failed to produce anything remotely close to an answer. She just stubbornly refuses to change or improve. I'm at my wits' end just dealing with this on a daily basis to the point I can't wait to clock out and go home.

It's a Friday tomorrow. I intend to slack off and just put in a couple hours of work because fuck her and fuck this company and its inability to fix itself.

I found a 10 inch rubber duck. Will my dev skills improve if i get one?

Just learn more stuff, improve, be able to apply my skills in my life and serve others, too.

Get rid of Facebook, and use devRant instead. The only way to improve your skills is by getting out of the comfort zone.

Hi dear developers. I have just started learning Java and I need some projects to join and some advices to improve my skills. Please leave ur comments if you can help me.

Currently a front end dev but I want to move to back end development eventually. Any ideas on the best ways to improve my c# skills or places with the best tutorials?

CSS, I particularly don't hate it but i don't love it either. As a React developer I love JS but I don't really like CSS based UI development i mean it's not bad but just level of satisfaction i get with a running logical thing in JS vs creating some UI stuff with CSS does varies. So I want to improve my CSS skills. Anyway can anyone suggest in what topic order I should learn CSS, I can do some basic stuff with flexbox and sometimes with grid but I think I lack some essential concepts.

I want to know what you do to improve yourself. Hard skills and soft skills.
And because I think it's important to always try to get better, do you have tips to be a better lead dev?

🤔 Question for Middle/Senior developers:

What news do you consume to keep up to date and improve skills?

What topics interest you most?

Whatever it costs to improve myself and my coding skills, to be honest.

So guys suggest your favorite way to improve and enhance your code quality.

Hi everyone !!
I'm new to coding community and but I learnt​ c++ in school. But I don't know how to improve on my skills. And what all should I learn to get an intern.
I tried codechef but I don't get it how to improve algos n data structures or any of it... N so much going like learn python or java ..make apps or build web pages .... It gets too much on my plate ...need suggestions how I pursue my self in improving competitive coding and alas build a career in web and Android with backend and front end to be precise a full stack developer .... Griefs apart "happy coding"

Hi.
I know python and javascript and I'm interested in solving algorithms. But I have a problem, that is I don't the algorithm that I have designed is optimum. I mean it has lower order complexity. I want to know if I want to improve my skills, I should solve programming challenges or, start to read data structures and algorithm design?
I should add my ultimate goal is machine learning.

What can I build on a weekend which I can add in my portfolio and also learn golang. I am a web developer with sound knowledge of react, vue, node, django. I am learning golang.

PS - please suggest the project even if the project is not is golang. I want to improve my current skills also.

i wanted some advice on career progression. I am a CS graduate from 2020, have been a decent mobile dev for last 3 years and switched 2 companies so far. i currently have an average ctc (considering i reside in the world's most populated country) as a junior dev.

i want to grow but don't know the next steps. here are my options:

1. stay in the same company . role growth: senior in 2 years , more senior in 4 years . comp growth : avg 10% every year

>> this feels okay-ish path but 10% growth seems very less

2. switch every x years . role growth : unpredictable. comp growth min 30-50%

>> this has been my approach. as i grow bore of a company, i switch . the first time i got a 200% hike, but at that time, i was already earning very less. however companies do not usually take you for a senior role unles you were a senior before, so i think i am losing something here

3. do a masters in tech . comp growth : ? role growth :0
>> this is an unknown territory for me. i haven't heard of anyone bragging about how they did a masters in some tech field and got a better job/position. most people prefer masters in business or do a masters in tech only if they had a poor bachelors degree

4. do a masters in business. comp growth ? role growth?
>> another unknown territory for me. i really wanna consider a managerial position, just because i want to be leading the action , but that's probably because of being a beta guy in all my life and not just the tech/work.

1. managers have a great comp but they also get fired more often than techies. how do you become a good manager/vp/director etc?

2. what are your goals, how do you improve/work upon the goals as a manager?

3. how do you grow as a manager?

honestly i put a lot of tasks and capabilities into one category : the skills of a manager. but i think there might be different roles for such categories. let me know which one is which and if they are worth going into:

1. an x is a person that researches on market trends, other companies, amtheir audience etc and come up with new ideas to implement and improve growth/business of the company

2. an x is a person that makes sure that devs , qa, designers etc are aligned , knows what to do , clears their doubts and ensure the proper functioni5 of the team and timely releases of new features.

3. an x is an ambitious and curious person who can think of new , original ideas.

4. an x is a person with all knowledge of product features.

-----
in all above statements, is x== junior manager? then what are senior manager, vp, directors, president, tech lead, qa,etc?

also how can one start to become x?

Can somebody suggest me backend heavy opensource projects which I can contribute to improve my engineering skills?

To the new devs out there: code everyday. Practice each day and your skills will improve dramatically.

So I'm a beginner Android Developer and I am planning to pursue some side projects to improve my skills. But the problem is Since my design skills are very poor , all of my applications look super ugly. I want them to look a little better so they are presentable. Can anybody guide me in which direction should I head ?

When you want to improve your life but time isn't enough because you have to earn for a living. To pay bills,l and necessity. It's far easier to find low wage job than pursuing to become a software engineer. Sometimes I eat once in a day and 6 hrs of sleep because I have to improve my programming skills.

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sometimes I wonder ,how could I improve my Android app development skills

Currently, I am pursuing a master's in MSc I.C.T.
Next year in June there is a company placement in our college. currently, I am Improving my communication skills and English for improve my English I am reading think and grow rich. How do I prepare for the tech interview for Java and javascript any suggestions or any personal tips to remember when I sit in the placement?

I started solving codechief but I cN only solve beginner level that to some problem. Can any one help me to improve my skills and knowledge.

devRanters! I really could do with brushing up my front-end skills, is there a website out there with small but difficult front-end challenges to improve my CSS and JavaScript chops?