I'm at my seat during the regular morning routine of checking emails, planning the things I need to complete/study when my phone rings.

HR: Good Morning, can you come over to the conference room please ?

Me: Sure

I enter the conference room and on the other side of the table, I see a group of 3 HR Managers (not a very nice feeling), especially when it was 10 months into my first job as a Trainee Software Developer.

HR: The company hasn't been performing as expected. For this reason, we've been told to cut down our staff. We're sorry but we have to let you go. You've been doing a great job all along. Thank you.

Me: ---- (seriously ?!)

The security-in-chief 'escorts' me out of the premises and I hand over the badge. I'm not allowed to return to my desk.

This happened about 16 years ago. But it stuck with me throughout my programming career.

A couple of Lessons Learnt which may help some of the developers today :

- You're not as important as you think, no matter what you do and how well you do it.
- Working hard is one thing, working smart is another. You'll understand the difference when your appraisals comes around each year.
- Focus on your work but always keep an eye on your company's health.
- Be patient with your Manager; if you're having a rough time, its likely he/she is suffering more.
- Programming solo is great fun. However it takes other skills that are not so interesting, to earn a living.
- You may think the Clients sounds stupid, talks silly and demands the stars; ever wonder what they think about you.
- When faced with a tough problem, try to 'fix' the Client first, then look for a solution.
- If you hate making code changes, don't curse the Client or your Manager - we coders collectively created a world of infinite possibilities. No point blaming them.
- Sharing your ideas matter.
- Software Development is a really long chain of ever-growing links that you may grok rather late in your career. But its still worth all the effort if you enjoy it.

I like to think of programming as a pursuit that combines mathematical precision and artistic randomness to create some pretty amazing stuff.

Thanks for reading.

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

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

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

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

So THE FUN began.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chinese co-workers visiting in our European office would just loudly fart in the office, no problem.

Then they'd be VERY embarrassed at someone using a toothpick after lunch.

Interesting cultural differences.

The stupid stories of how I was able to break my schools network just to get better internet, as well as more ridiculous fun. XD

1st year:
It was my freshman year in college. The internet sucked really, really, really badly! Too many people were clearly using it. I had to find another way to remedy this. Upon some further research through Google I found out that one can in fact turn their computer into a router. Now what’s interesting about this network is that it only works with computers by downloading the necessary software that this network provides for you. Some weird software that actually looks through your computer and makes sure it’s ok to be added to the network. Unfortunately, routers can’t download and install that software, thus no internet… but a PC that can be changed into a router itself is a different story. I found that I can download the software check the PC and then turn on my Router feature. Viola, personal fast internet connected directly into the wall. No more sharing a single shitty router!

2nd year:
This was about the year when bitcoin mining was becoming a thing, and everyone was in on it. My shitty computer couldn’t possibly pull off mining for bitcoins. I needed something faster. How I found out that I could use my schools servers was merely an accident.
I had been installing the software on every possible PC I owned, but alas all my PC’s were just not fast enough. I decided to try it on the RDS server. It worked; the command window was pumping out coins! What I came to find out was that the RDS server had 36 cores. This thing was a beast! And it made sense that it could actually pull off mining for bitcoins. A couple nights later I signed in remotely to the RDS server. I created a macro that would continuously move my mouse around in the Remote desktop screen to keep my session alive at all times, and then I’d start my bitcoin mining operation. The following morning I wake up and my session was gone. How sad I thought. I quickly try to remote back in to see what I had collected. “Error, could not connect”. Weird… this usually never happens, maybe I did the remoting wrong. I went to my schools website to do some research on my remoting problem. It was down. In fact, everything was down… I come to find out that I had accidentally shut down the schools network because of my mining operation. I wasn’t found out, but I haven’t done any mining since then.

3rd year:
As an engineering student I found out that all engineering students get access to the school’s VPN. Cool, it is technically used to get around some wonky issues with remoting into the RDS servers. What I come to find out, after messing around with it frequently, is that I can actually use the VPN against the screwed up security on the network. Remember, how I told you that a program has to be downloaded and then one can be accepted into the network? Well, I was able to bypass all of that, simply by using the school’s VPN against itself… How dense does one have to be to not have patched that one?

4th year:
It was another programming day, and I needed access to my phones memory. Using some specially made apps I could easily connect to my phone from my computer and continue my work. But what I found out was that I could in fact travel around in the network. I discovered that I can, in fact, access my phone through the network from anywhere. What resulted was the discovery that the network scales the entirety of the school. I discovered that if I left my phone down in the engineering building and then went north to the biology building, I could still continue to access it. This seems like a very fatal flaw. My idea is to hook up a webcam to a robot and remotely controlling it from the RDS servers and having this little robot go to my classes for me.

What crazy shit have you done at your University?

Had an interesting time these past few days. Had a customer who, when I left for vacay, was complaining that he couldn't get access to our private package registry. Get back, this issue is still active.

We'd granted access to his github enterprise, and for some reason he wasn't getting the activation email. We spent about 22 hours of customer support time on his failing to help himself before he finally escalated to the standard 40 person IT enterprise tantrum/come to jesus meeting.

Long story short, he had somehow ignored repeated attempts (35 email replies to the ticket chain, 4 phone calls) to get him to check his spam folder. In which, as it was revealed to all the hollywood squares in attendance, there were no less than 35 activation emails from github granting him access. Of course, none of this was his fault. And while screensharing his big brain to god and everyone he decides the problem is now actually Microsoft because their office 365 spam email filtered his emails incorrectly. We of course agreed with his big brain, smoothed over his bruised ego and went about our day.

I mean, fair enough, it's kind of dumb that Microsoft ever spam lists github, but still. I was just a fly on the wall, and he burned all his paid support tickets on the issue, so hopefully we won't be dealing with him again this year.

Also, this is an edge case with our new product line, most of our customers are painless.

I interviewed a guy with quite a few years of experience, university studies from a first world country, very long CV with stuff that he did, most of it relevant to the job, and 5-6 certifications, 2 of which relevant to the job, which would qualify him as an expert (as he himself declared in the CV), of a higher qualification than mine, but less experience.

Welp, if we're gonna hire someone with a higher salary, from whom I am to learn, I better come up with an interesting, but simple to understand problem, relevant to the position, that I would solve in 30 minutes, and give him 2h (surprise factor, unpreparedness, nervousness should be considered).

40 minutes in and I understand that there is lots of doing, lots of code, but the guy has no idea what he's doing.
I simplify the problem, remove the complicated bit. Turning it into a "business case description" of an entry level problem.
...
Same shit. In 20 minutes, zero progress. At this point the solution should be exactly 4 short lines of code. He gives me 50 that produce a completely wrong result, and he has no idea why.

I simplify further. I explicitly express the problem as the entry-level problem that it is - to count the number of interactions on the website in a specific day. That's it.
10 minutes more pass. I don't know why I'm wasting my time. Maybe I just want to be polite. Maybe I want to eliminate all doubt that it's not something else.
Nope.
He couldn't even react to my explanation of why he got the wrong result, and that all he had to do is move some stuff around.

Certifications, experts, universities.

What the fuck people? Can't we be simpler, and instead be knowledgeable? The time it took him to write that list of certifications, he could've learned how to solve this problem from any introductory course.

I was told there's gonna be:
- good salaries
- informal company setups with benefits
- lots of jobs available
- non-dev people look at you in amazement
- get to work on really interesting stuff

What I'm actually doing:
- carrying a team of people in uni because you're the only one who knows how to code
- deal with shitty uncommented legacy code at work
- be reminded that if you don't do something super-sophisticated you're easily replaceable
- spend unpaid overtime hours because you're the only one at your job that is on the issue (I see a pattern of being alone in a problem here)
- requestion all my career decisions
- cry and be stressed
- hate every minute of work, yet be stuck in it because it's a source of income that is flexible enough for me to be able to study full-time

So dunno man, I'm still waiting on what I've been told, people say there's lotsa money and satisfaction waiting for me after grinding through 5 years of high education, it'd better be worth it

Just started reading this book ..
The first chapter and half are pretty interesting.
Their explication of Optimal Stopping and “The Secretary Problem” made think about scenarios where its possible to use in my life.

Ps: I think that what the books wanted!

I've caught the efficiency bug.

I recently started a minimum wage job to get my life back in order after a failed 2 year project (post mortem: next time bring more cash for a longer runway)

I've noticed this thing I do at every job, where I see inefficiency and I think "how can I use technology to automate myself out of this job?"

My first ever application was in C++ for college (a BASIC interpreter) and it's been so long I've since forgotten the language.

But after a while every language starts to look like every other language, and you start to wonder if maybe the reason you never seriously went anywhere as a programmer was because you never really were cut out for it.

Code monkey, sure. Programmer? Dunno, maybe I just suffer from imposter syndrome.

So a few years back I worked at a retail chain. Nothing as big as walmart, but they have well over 10k store locations. They had two IBM handscanners per store, old grungy ugly things, and one of these machines would inevitably be broken, lost or in need of upgrade/replacement about once a year, per location. District manager, who I hit it off with, and made a point of building report with, told me they were paying something like $1500 a piece.

After a programming dry spell, I picked up 'coding' with MIT app inventor. Built a 'mostly complete' inventory management app over the course of a month, and waited for the right time.

The day of a big store audit, (and the day before a multi-regional meeting), I made sure I was in-store at the same time as my district manager, so he could 'stumble upon' me working, scanning in and pricing items into the app.

Naturally he asked about it, and I had the numbers, the print outs, and the app itself to show him. He seemed impressed by what amounted to a code monkeys 'non-code' solution for a problem they had.

Long story short, he does what I expected, runs it by the other regionals and middle executives at the meeting, and six months later they had invested in a full blown in house app, cutting IBM out of the mix I presume.

From what I understand they now use the app throughout the entire store chain.

So if you work at IBM, sorry, that contract you lost for handscanners at 10k+ stores? Yeah that was my fault (and MIT app inventor).

They say software is 'eating the world' but it really goes to show, for a lot of 'almost coders' and 'code monkeys' half our problem is dealing with setup and platform boilerplate. I think in the future that a lot of jobs are either going to be created or destroyed thanks to better 'low code' solutions, and it seems to be a big potential future market.

In the mean while I've realized, while working on side projects, that maybe I can do this after all, and taken up Kotlin. I want to do a couple of apps for efficiency and store tracking at my current employer to see if I'm capable and not just an mit app-inventor codemonkey after all.

I'm hoping, by demonstrating what I can do, I can use that as a springboard into an internal programming position at my current gig (which seems to be a company thats moving towards a more tech oriented approach to efficiency and management). Also watching money walk out the door due to inefficiency kinda pisses me off, and the thought of fixing those issues sounds really interesting. At the end of the day I just like learning new technologies, and maybe this is all just an excuse to pick up something new after spending so long on less serious work.

I still have a ways to go, but the prospect of working on B2B, and being able to offer technological solutions to common and recurring business needs excites the hell out of me..as cringy and over-repeated as that may sound.

Definitly !rant; btw long post ahead

Soooo not so long ago i joined this community by chance just cuz i installed some app randomly found on google store and what can i say. Best decision ever!

I can say i never met such an interesting and diverse communitiy ever and i kin of ground fond of it (i usually dont get too attached to peoples).

After a while i felt the urge to get myself involved into some disscusion at some random post and i did it. But it felt empty as my image was just a plain green bubble of anonymity. But yeh, i am cool with it, i will customize it after some ++es. No problem!

I got incremented for a while and i got to make a simple generic avatar. I felt again a urge, but this time to customize even more. Sadly, anything cool needs approval by the people. Soo i kind of let it go as i am not really the kind to find myself talking in other businesses and i moved over.

Until i saw it! Not the tiger, not the bird but the dog! Annnd i wanted it so i made a joke that i am a wizard with an invisible dog. What can go wrong, right? Well the thing is.. it did not go wrong, as expected, but it went great, kinda unexpected.

How? Well, some random stranger felt me and gave me a hunble chance to get closer to my dreamy real dog. And so it begin, my crusade to get that damn dog!

But what i have realised fast is .. this is not facebook! Nor Instagram! People doesnot upvote attention whoreing or such lowly acts, but they are actually prone to support people who just.. get involved.

And so i did. I got involved. I actually got involved in a community! For a awkwardly introvert person that's something, but maybe more than few of you people can relate to this.

And today i finally reached that goal! I have a real doggo! Well, real as in not invisible, not as in a great responsability, but now i have both. But this was not such a big deal. The big deal is that i found people whos interests are alike to mine and are prone to help, support and befriend others. I must say, thanks to all! Wonderful time, and while i am not here for a long time, i will surely be!

Cheers and dev on!

The startup life culture is probably killing a lot of talent and taking away peace of mind.

Everything is needed
- too fast
- to work well

Forcing people to compromise on personal life and health.

It also takes away the interest to work on something as an interesting problem and makes it feel like "just another job to get finished".

i'm feeling so sick right now.

PM invited team for today to present his "vision": "<name of our component>: what it is and what it is not".
but it didn't make sense and showed that he hadn't understood the problem at all. the whole architecture made no sense given the problems that shall be solved. his architecture diagrams missed some essential parts that were actually the giant weak points of his concept. his pseudocode, that should exemplify interactions between components, didn't address the complexity of required interactions at all. it's like he expects some magic to happen and has no fucking clue about the requirements (but acts like it), even though he is the manager of this software project.
and when devs ask really interesting questions that fundamentally question his concept, discussions lead to nowhere and questions are not answered. at some point he literally said "there is no such thing as <name of our component>, i still have to find this out"
really!? after one and a half year, since you sold the idea for this component to upper management, and after half a year of development, you still can't tell what it is what we actually want to build? are you fucking serious?!

at some point in discussion he said that these questions need to be answered but that "there's no time left", and he ended the meeting. although there was still half an hour of meeting time left.

i'm so fucking sick of this, i hate everything right now. i can't listen to this bullshit any longer. in discussions, he contradicts himself all the time, it is so fucking surreal i'm starting to feel like i'm insane.

it makes me really sad and tired. i don't want to care about this shit any longer.

Hey I got reminded of a funny story.

A friend of mine and me were in internships in the same company. The company was specialized in territory resources management (managing water for agriculture, money to build industrial zones...). He got the interesting internship (water predictory modeling) and I got... The repairs of a reference sheet manager that never happened to work. It was in C# and ASP.NET and I was in second year of CS. I expected the code to be nice and clear since it was made by a just graduated engineer with +5years of studies.

I was very wrong.

This guy may never have touched a web server in his life, used static variables to keep sessions instead of... well... sessions, did code everything in the pages event handlers (even LinQ stuff et al) and I was told to make it maintainable, efficient and functional in 2 months. There were files with +32k LoC.

After 1week of immense despair, I decided I will refactor all the code. Make nice classes, mapping layer, something close to a MVC... So I lost time and got scoled for not being able to make all the modifications as fast as in a cleanly designed code...

After 4 weeks, everything was refactored and I got to wait for the design sheets to change some crystal report views.

At this moment I began to understand were was the problem in this company.

My friend next door got asked to stop his modeling stuff for an emergency project. He had to make an XML converter for our clients to be able to send decentralized electrics bills, and if it was not completed within a week, they would no longer be able to pay until it is done.

This XML converter was a project scheduled 5 years before that. Nobody wanted to do it.

At the same time, I was waiting for the Com Department to give me the design views.

I never saw the design views. Spent one month implementing a golden ratio calculator with arbitrary precision because they ain't give me anything to do until the design were implemented.

Ended with a poor grade because "the work wasn't finished".

I feel that I should mention my reason for having joined devRant.

Although I often write computer programs, I do not consider myself to be a computer programmer, for the problems which I solve often do not pertain to the method which I use to solve a problem with a computer program. Rather, I am an intelligence analyst, and this has been my title for approximately sixteen (16) years.

I joined devRant not only because I wished to better the computer programs which I write, although this could be better accomplished by again reading the specifications for the programming languages which I use, but also because I wished to join an on-line community of which the members are interesting and competent. As I read threads, I observe that both of these requirements have been matched, with the emphasis being placed on the latter requirement.

I thank the majority of you for maintaining an on-line community which is not (total) crap. Ha.

Frustrated, tired and a bit lost.

I'm a "Senior PHP Backend Dev", which includes not the greatest tech stack nor the best job title, but it pays fine, and the company is awesome to work for.

I suck at writing features, but I'm great at bitching, and I easily put complex abstract concepts into usable models. So I'm also QA, tester, tech lead, database architect, whatever.

That makes writing PHP less annoying, because I create the rules, and whip devs around when they forget a return type definition or forget to handle an edge case. But I don't write a lot of code anymore, I mostly read (bad) code.

Lately I REALLY feel like doing something else... problem is that I know JS/ES6, but really dislike React/Vue and the whole crappy modern frontend toolchainchootrain of babelifyingwebpackingyarnballs. I know Python/Tensorflow/etc, but don't feel like I want to go into data science or AI. And then I'm awesome at the shit no one uses, like Haskell, Go and Rust (and worse).

I got a job offer which combines a very interesting PHP codebase with a Java infrastructure, where I could learn a lot... and I'm kind of tempted.

Problem is, everyone always shits on Java. I always made a bit of fun of Java myself. Don't even know exactly why, probably some really cruel instinct which causes kids to bully the least popular kid.

I know the basics, I've written the hello world, and a small backend app for a personal project. I know how strict and verbose it can be. I love the strictness in Haskell and Rust.... but those are both also quite terse.

Should I become a Java dev? I'm not talking about Android SDK, but an insane enterprise codebase at a life sciences corporation.

To the pro Java devs: What are the best and worst things about your job, about the weekly processes, about the toolchains? Have you ever considered other languages? Do you unconditionally love and believe in Java, or do you believe Swift, Kotlin, Scala or whatever will eventually make it completely obsolete?

Will Java hasten my decline into the cynical neckbeard I was always destined to be?

There are a lot more fun langauges, but looking at realistic demand and career value...

So for my programming class, we had to make a game using Scratch. No problem, I said. Scratch is easy stuff. Just drag and drop blocks. Like legos. Legos that actually do shit. Cool.

So my game is about a dog underneath a plinko set, dodging balls that come down the plinko thing. Easy enough. I figured I would spice things up a bit. My teacher has to go through 20 of these games, I figured I'd make mine interesting. I add a little heart system.

Now for those of you who don't know Scratch, or don't care enough to look it up, all of Scratch's codes are within the sprite themselves. They can communicate with other sprites with a thing called broadcasting. When other sprites receive a broadcast, it can activate a script. yeah, cool.

So I had a script on the dog, that broadcasts a message to the heart system to remove a heart when the dog is hit. So to keep things short, I call the broadcast "Dog's hit."

For anyone who knows programming, computers have no clue what an apostrophe or a space is. They can't read it unless you have it all letters, maybe a semicolon. So, I removed the space and apostrophe, with my innocent 17 year-old mind not realizing this makes it "Dogshit."

Game's finished. Finally. Due date comes in, I submit it all proud and everything. I just created the best dog-plinko simulator of all time. Later that day, I show it to my friend, who then points out the typo.

At this point, my teacher already graded it. I went down to see him after school, and he must've known why I went down as soon as I walked in the door, and just cracked up. He told me it was fine, and not to do it again.

I left red.

Today I experienced cruelty of C and mercy of Sublime and SublimeLinter.

So yesterday I was programming late at night for my uni homework in C. So I had this struct:

typedef struct {
int borrowed;
int user_id;
int book_id;
unsigned long long date;
} entry;

and I created an array of this entry like this:

entry *arr = (entry*) malloc (sizeof(arr) * n);

and my program compiled. But at the output, there was something strange...

There were some weird hexadecimal characters at the beginning but then there was normal output. So late at night, I thought that something is wrong with printf statement and I went googling... and after 2 hours I didn't found anything. In this 2 hours, I also tried to change scanf statement if maybe I was reading the wrong way. But nothing worked. But then I tried to type input in the console (before I was reading from a file and saving output in a file). And it outputted right answer!!! AT THAT POINT I WAS DONE!!! I SAID FUCK THIS SHIT I AM GOING TO SLEEP.

So this morning I continued to work on homework and tried on my other computer with other distro to see if there is the same problem. And it was..

So then I noticed that my sublime lint has some interesting warning in this line
entry *arr = (entry*) malloc (sizeof(arr) * n);
Before I thought that is just some random indentation or something but then I saw a message: Size of pointer 'arr' is used instead of its data.

AND IT STRUCT ME LIKE LIGHTNING.

I just changed this line to this:
entry *arr = (entry*) malloc (sizeof(entry) * n);

And It all worked fine. At that moment I was so happy and so angry at myself.

Lesson learned for next time: Don't program late at night especially in C and check SublimeLInter messages.

First day of the academic year(CS):

(some uni official) - "And remember to become a good programmer you have to become an excellent mathematician first"

(Me): Oh shit.

Little did I know...

It is a second year now. And the only course I failed is the one that he lectured.

I had no fucking idea that people like this (mad)man exist.

Almost at every lecture he was introducing at leas one topic that was way beyond our program; as he thought they were interesting and "fun".

Many teachers at the University refered to him as a very 'ambitious' man. Then I didn't blame him he truly loved his profession and wanted to share as much knowledge as possible(I thought).

But two months ago he went to far. It was a second exam(for those who failed the first one). And believe me there were a few(60 out of 160 to be exact).

Only ~30 people showed up as the rest failed to many courses and would be kicked out of the uni anyway.

He was handing out the exams when I saw that whoever gets one slowly starts turning white.

I finally got my copy and immediately I realized that the tasks are from his favorite topics, the "fun" ones. 🤦

At this point I knew that it will be extremely hard to pass. But when I was reevaluating my life choices something draw my attention.

One of the tasks had a note below it: "Homework after the exam: It is a very interesting problem just assume x instead of y and try to solve it. PS: it is a lot of fun!"

At this point I lost it.😠 I don't care how much you love math, you should always assume that not everyone loves it as much as you do. So don't push it down the throat of people who clearly don't need a degree in this subject!

Now I'm preparing for the second semester with this guy. And I have a strong feeling that it will be hell of a ride... again.😐

BTW: Sorry that the rant is so long, it's the first one I wrote, and had to share it with someone 😀

Spent 6 hours implementing a feature because my senior didn't want to use a 3rd party plug-in.

After said 6 hours, went to look at the plugin's source code to get some inspiration with a problem I was having.

Guess fucking what? Plug-in was implemented exactly as I had done it to start with. Even better, actually, since it fixed some native bugs I couldn't find a way around.

Went back to my senior, showed him both sources and argued again in favour of the plug-in.

Senior: "Meh, I'm not sure. Don't really like to keep adding plugins"
Me: "Why? Do they cause performance hits? Increase memory usage?"
S: "No, not all. But I don't like plugins"

/flip

We ended up using the plug-in, but I "wasted" a whole day doing something we scrapped. Guess I learned some interesting things about encryption on Android, at least...

* How I solve a problem*

"Okay, it seems to be interesting, OK think solve it generally"

*Solved the problem manually

"Okay pseudo code is /do this and that/ break it and write Algo.
Seems like it will work,
Making all sense
Okay let's code"

*Wrote in IDE

" Hmm compile and execute"

*Expected output : Hey you!
*Actual output : F you!
Me: What the hell

"Uhh! Just gonna apply brute force"

*Somehow got the actual output = expected output

"I knew, it gonna solve it but how it worked?"

*Thinking
*Thinking....
*Thinking and it's 2 am

"Oh! I'm done, I'm going to sleep"

*4 am, while lucid dreaming

"That's how that thing worked, I got it"

*Relieved
*Next day using the logic dreamt of
*No matter how much surreal it is
*It didn't work

Me : F U!!!
..
..
...
(to be continued)

This is a controversial topic and I tell you about this how I perceive it.

There are a lot of women in tech/IT groups with really interesting topics and discussions I'd like to join ... you know ... because I don't want to pay a lot of money to a course or read a book about it and be with the topic myself (or in online forums) ... I want to be in a cool offline community that shares the love about developing.

But I can't. Because they do not allow men. With the reason that women are not respected in tech/IT and therefore men are not allowed to join.

This is just racist and this policy makes no difference between them and those guys who really are just assholes. Even if I tried to discuss this, it was instantly shut down with "this is our rule and we do not discuss this" or "you just don't understand this". That is right. I can't understand it if I never get a reasonable explanation.

I can understand that they want to build a nice community but this is just a stupid limitation and a huge loss to get other perspectives of things.

In my studies and career I had never seen the problem where things escaleted that seperation was needed. If somebody feeled attacked about something, they said it and we stopped doing or changed it. It's not easy but it helps. Communication is key.

What is your opinion about it? Do you see it the way I see or can you help me see this from another perspective?

No one will understand me but you Devs.
I am a self taught developer who works in a digital marketing agency, when I was learning to code I wanted that the code I will produce will help people and make me happy, the only job i got is in digital marketing agency, because no one in my country will recrute a self taught bald ugly mid thirty fucker, then want them young and fresh, anyway, I proved that I can handle the job, so that I became the only dev in the agency.
the problem is that I reached a that checkpoint where I have to choose a path:
- I learned Node and React but I can't use them in my agency
- I work with wordpress and prestashop but I don't code, I use fucking theme forest templates

the only way to work with MERN is through remote, but I am not a senior yet, I only have to keep learning PHP but I can't advance in my current job since the projects don't require coding, and I feel that my agency will close the dev department because they put me in the designers office.

I don't want to reach 40 with nothing in my portfolio but shitty theme forest template rape, the stress from my current situation is killing me, I can't even start working on my portfolio website and blog because I can't think straight, my mind jump from "today I will build an api" to "no I need to build a custom wordpress theme" each 3 minutes, I don't sleep, the futur is dark, I am afraid that if I focus on wordpress and shit I will miss working in interesting projects, and if I focus on MERN I will never gain experience localy to become a full remote later.

many will agree with me that PHP is shitty but gets the work done, and I hate PHP because of prestashop, and we only live once, the only other job I found require wordpress and fucking prestashop, imagine living a live doing something you don't like, then die regretting every decision you make.

I might sound crazy for you, but I don't have many friends and I am an introvert working with designers and community managers ... so this is the only place I can write what I want.

if you reached here, I thank you for your time

One job I picked up was for an IoT Start Up. It was quite interesting work, reporting to the technical director, who was an electronics engineer, who was designing the hardware himself, they had a couple of firmware guys already, and just needed someone to take care of the software.
So they said they needed something in Azure that they could stream their data to and provide analytics for their clients. It had to be Azure, and it had to be Azure Native, and was to be Multi-client, as they had a deal with Microsoft to showcase how well Azure works in the IoT space at an exhibition/conference in 3 months time.
So I worked flat out for 3 months, on a whole variety of technology, from C++ to get the radio packets from their IoT chip, Python to run on the hub to take the data from the C++ and stream it to the cloud, Azure IoT Hubs in every continent to receive the data and store it an a Cosmos DB, and then Power BI analytics wrapped up in an Angular front end that the clients could log into.
Got it finished 2 days before the show, and they were so pleased I got flown business class to Singapore to be on the stand and talk to customers.
The first sign of trouble was when we arrived at the show to find we just had one of those little circular tables with two stools in the middle of the floor, about two feet across and no power.
No problem, I was able to sort that, swapping laptops in and out.
Microsoft were really happy with what we had, and couldn't believe I had thrown it all together in 3 months.
We picked up a potential customer for the system, a major Asian Telecoms company.
Then when we got home, the CEO swooped in. I had never met this guy before. Imagine one of the VC guys from Silicon Valley, or the CEO from the IT Crowd. You get the picture. Could talk the hind leg of a donkey, and real street smart, but no brains. He insisted on "taking it from here" and flew alone to strike the deal with the customer. Came back with an MOU in his pocket and said to me, their guys will be in touch with you.
Then I got a call. Can you send us the source code and tell us how what servers we have to run this on?
Um, its cloud native.
No, we can't use a cloud it has to be on our servers - your CEO told us that was no problem..
He hadn't even taken the trouble to find out what it was we had built, and what he was selling.

tldr:
first year in college we programmed 24 hrs straight to fix somebody's mess before the deadline. Decided not to screw him over, instead he claimed to have done everything and we failed the assignment.

Long version:
var group= new[]{"Mike", "Gavin", "Gus", "I", "Ben" };
var client = "Jack"';

First year of college we had an assignment to make a web program for somebody.
Ben wanted to join our group and he already knew a client so we let him join.

After joining Ben wanted to be project lead, but we already decided Mike based on his experience.
Ben claimed to be much better in every way than Mike at and kept coming with stuff the following weeks why we should make him project lead. He kept pointing out when Mike did something wrong and he even came with an audio file where he clearly made jack say that he wanted Ben to be project lead .
After that we were all a bit pissed and told him that he should get it in his head that he was not going to be project lead and just start working on his part of the assignment.

We also found out that Ben was a documentation addict, what we could write in a small paragraph, he wrote a whole page about it. No joke, I rewrote a page of his in 5-6 rows with the same information in it.
No problem you thing, wrong! Because of this he kept bothering us arguing and claiming that our documentation was wrong because it was to short.

In the week of the deadline we asked Ben if he was also done, and told us that he was done for a while now.

The day before the deadline we came to school thinking we only had to do some merging and finishing up documentation.
Then we found out that Ben has almost nothing, and what he had the IDE was screaming that it was incorrect, spaces in Id's and css class names for instance. A really good programmer, my ass!
We were so pissed off at this point, but we had 24 hrs and needed to come up with a plan to fix it.

We decided that Mike and I were going to fix Ben his shit in the coming 24 hrs and Ben was going to make our last bit of documentation because we would not have the time for that, Especially if we had to argue with him like we had to do for each bit of documentation. Gus did not have time and Gavin could not program on his own yet, he wanted to help, but helping him help us would cost more time than we had.

We all went home after that and Mike and I started to program 24 hours straight while in a Skype call, making what Ben had 2 months for. Shortly before the deadline Mike looked at our finishing up documentation received from Ben and told me it was "Okay" and zipped everything up and uploaded it to school with a few minutes to spare.

After that we thought everything was good, we made Ben's part work and delivered it in time. We also decided not to throw Ben under the bus, because this would hurt all our grades because we did not work good as a group since we should have noticed it earlier.

A few weeks go by till the assessment.
The assessment start with asking if we want individual grades or as a group when you all think you did equal amount. We choose as a group, because if we chose individual not only Ben but also Gavin would get a lower grade and we did not think that was fair because he tried so hard.

We demo the product and the teachers are positive. When the teachers start about the documentation, the first thing they tell is that they found something interesting in the documentation, and they read it to us:

"I, Ben, have made all the documentation because my group did not want to."

That was so far from the truth, we all did make our documentation about the parts we made. Yes he did do overall a little bit more because every single bit of documentation we had to argue with him, so every time he volunteers to make it, we would all agree. And he made Mike's and i's last bit of documentation.

Telling the teachers on that point would not have mattered, it would only have hurt is in another way, so we did not and all failed the assignment. And we all felt like to strangle him.
This is now a few years back, but i still want too.

Been really depressed at work for the last two years. To the point where myself and colleagues would constantly petition our boss to work with us to change our internal process.

After being constantly ignored / seeing no really impact ( he literally renamed a step in our process and said he fixed it forgoing all the recommendations that we suggested and refusing to discuss anything with us );

I decided to resign before I say or do anything to completely burn the bridge.

Two days later one of my colleagues also resigned ( the only other device at the company ) now my boss is frantically looking for our replacements while also trying to maintain that he holds all the cards.. he offered my colleague less than he is on now to freelance for him. And will likely attempt the same with me in my exit interview today.

But I'm working on a web app which I find interesting. Problem is that I'm not as hopeful as the others working on it with me that it will ever make any money. (It seems like a money pit if anything)

I think I may be in for a couple of rough months. But at least I'm not working for a company that made me so depressed that all I would ever think about is how to convince the boss to improve things.

I'm worried but for the first time in 2 years I feel happy.

When I started off working on this particular project under a new technical manager, I used to love working overtime because the work and the problem we were trying to solve was really interesting. My technical lead was also a really awesome dude and I was able to learn a lot of things under his guidance. A couple of times, I didn't even mind working on the weekends too in case we wanted to meet some strict deadlines. I wanted to make sure that my team's brand name does not get spoiled and we deliver on what we promise.

It was all good until all the management started taking our overtime and weekend work for granted. It took me some time to realize this. Now it almost became a part of standard expectations. It was getting irritating. Managers could see this uneasiness but chose to do nothing.

The work increased, so did the team and the communication channels. The newbies in the team now worked overtime and on weekends. And everybody started acting as if it was normal. That's when it stuck me that I am responsible for inculcating this unsustainable and life sucking culture in the team. I stopped working overtime and started questioning the set deadlines, often asking them to postpone things. Management got furious and changed their focus on the newbies who'd work overtime, often rewarding them to reinforce the behavior.

I tried undoing it, asking managers that the team will not work on weekends. There was friction and managers would agree but the old bad habited cultural spore would pop up tume and again and the team would go back to the regular overtime and working weekends thing. As more time passed, the managers would circumvent me and start talking to others in the team, giving them work and deadlines directly because I started to say 'No' when I felt the need to do so. I tried to protect some folks in the team who would not be able to speak up but were frustrated. I started caring less about the team's brand and more about colleagues who were suffering due to such unethical (and illegal?) practices being normalised in the team.

Trying again and again to get back to 'normal', I failed everytime. Unsure of how far I'll be able to go on with this without getting severly burnt in the process and seeing no respite, I decided to move on. I put in my resignation two weeks back and want to start a fresh in another company.

I feel I am responsible for bringing this into the team without realizing the repurcussions of my working overtime. Staying in the team for more than 3.5 years, I could actually feel how managers have no fucks about your personal life and work life balance (despite showing oh so much concern about the well being of my family) and would reward anyone who works as per their whims and fancies. I wish I never get to work for a management such as this.

So, with couple of new people in senior managerial roles, pink slips started flying left and right before the holiday season. That didn't happen before in the company. It's still relatively small and when people left that was for better paid or more interesting work.

While I can understand that from the business perspective and especially for a few who might have been considered dead weight (devs and other roles), I have a serious problem with the way it was handled. It's one of those 5 minute notices. If we weren't remote, I guess escorting out by security would follow.

Most recent person to go is actually one of the most senior devs at the position that became redundant over time, as it clashed in the "pyramid" with another dev. He was involved in many aspects of the product and greatly contributed to the overall success during years of hard work, i'd say maybe more than any of us.

He didn't fuck up anything major as far as I know, his services were just not needed anymore, compared to the other guy. Saving money. I get that.

At T-1 day he prepared a demo of his project. Meetings, Slack, everything as usual. Next thing we got was a "we wish him well in future endeavours" e-mail.

What I find most disturbing is the fact his account was removed immediately, and then we were asked to get any files and anything else we might need, all over personal communication channels (private e-mail, Skype etc.) because he was locked out of all company accounts.

I seem to have have survived this year. One thing they have definitely achieved, based on some off the record chat and some public updates, tweets etc I can see, is for many of us to start networking, polishing CVs and generally stop giving many fucks about the company and the outcome.

I've myself started brushing up on some new skills (stacks) and some old ones (algorithms, etc.) I may need any day now, as it seems.

If they can basically tell "thank you and fuck off" to one person maybe most involved with the company growth, with zero dignity and respect for the person, then fuck them.

Oh boy I got a few. I could tell you stories about very stupid xss vectors like tracking IDs that get properly sanitized when they come through the url but as soon as you go to the next page and the backend returns them they are trusted and put into the Dom unsanitized or an error page for a wrong token / transaction id combo that accidentally set the same auth cookie as the valid combination but I guess the title "dumbest" would go to another one, if only for the management response to it.

Without being to precise let's just say our website contained a service to send a formally correct email or fax to your provider to cancel your mobile contract, nice thing really. You put in all your personal information and then you could hit a button to send your cancelation and get redirected to a page that also allows you to download a pdf with the sent cancelation (including all your personal data). That page was secured by a cancelation id and a (totally save) 16 characters long security token.

Now, a few months ago I tested a small change on the cancelation service and noticed a rather interesting detail : The same email always results in the same (totally save) security token...
So I tried again and sure, the token seemed to be generated from the email, well so much about "totally save". Of course this was a minor problem since our cancelation ids were strong uuids that would be incredibly hard to brute force, right? Well of course they weren't, they counted up. So at that point you could take an email, send a cancelation, get the token and just count down from your id until you hit a 200 and download the pdf with all that juicy user data, nice.

Well, of course now I raised a critical ticket and the issue was fixed as soon as possible, right?
Of course not. Well I raised the ticket, I made it critical and personally went to the ceo to make sure its prioritized. The next day I get an email from jira that the issue now was minor because "its in the code since 2017 and wasn't exploited".

Well, long story short, I argued a lot and in the end it came to the point where I, as QA, wrote a fix to create a proper token because management just "didn't see the need" to secure such a "hard to find problem". Well, before that I sent them a zip file containing 84 pdfs I scrapped in a night and the message that they can be happy I signed an NDA.

Been trying to learn code for almost two years now, started with C++, took a break because I couldn't figure out what to do with the knowledge, started Python 'cause I thought I'd be inspired by scripting and automating stuff, same thing happened, switched to java, same problem, aaaaaand I'm back to C++ and still can't figure out what the fuck I can do, I don't code anything and I'm tired of following tutorial in the hope of getting something interesting done
Long rant I know but fuck I'm so depressed about that...

Not a question per se but an assignment -

Design an application that could find logs between two timestamps where the logs are stored in 10000 files, each with a file size of ~16GB.

For an entry level position this was a really good and interesting problem to solve.

!rant

OK, I have a dilemma and I need some developers helps. I'm going to tell you about myself. I am 19 and have been programming since I was 11. I consider myself a full stack web developer and that is where my passion lies... I love web development. The problem is that I am currently studying comp sci at a top 10 uni and I don't really like it. I kind of enjoy it, however, I am mostly doing it for the degree because my goal is to move to the valley (currently in the UK). I'm not sure whether I should pursue this degree because it's interesting and tbh I might just need time to get used to uni life or should I just go for it in the industry?

Well just blew up a coding interview.

Got an offer to be a Drupal dev and was expecting questions on Drupal API and module dev but got asked how to find the closest Enemy in an array and blah blah blah.

Interesting question but man. My mind got blank and got nervous. It's been a while since I've done a question like that and I've been coding for 10+ years.

I would've love to solve that in another language such as Python or C++ but got stuck on PHP because it was a Drupal position. But I only use PHP for Drupal modules and templates who are highly dependant on Drupal API. Or even WordPress plugins. But I try to avoid WordPress because is shit.

Guess the job market hasn't changed since I graduated back in 2014. So I feel a little bummed down. But I guess I'll just have to practice those type of problems as well. At least the problem solving method.

At least it will be an excuse to do those leetcode problems.

Late night ramble warning.

I like to fix issues. I like to roll up my sleeves and fetch my keyboard or soldering iron on a mission to build a custom solution for whatever real world annoyance that has just triggered my problem solving caveman brain.

I have prided myself in that. I am the kind of guy who doesn't shy away from getting my hands dirty, I tell myself, and it's good because it makes my life easier, I tell myself. But increasingly, I've been wondering if this is really so. Am I really making my life easier? Am I fixing the world or just scratching an itch?

Example 1:
Instead of using conventional backup methods for my personal files like a commercial cloud based service or buying a Synology NAS or something similar, I decided it would be better to build my own linux server and set up a rather obscure configuration in order to address things like parity, ECC, bit-rot and the likes while staying cheap.

Learning a lot? Sure. Fun? Sure. Never have to worry about backups again? The opposite, of course.

While I set out to build the perfect bespoke solution to all my personal backup needs - it's as if I, by putting my time and effort into the nitty gritty of technical implementation, placed a vote for my future to contain more of that stuff. In reality this project has burdened my little brain with many new things to consider in regards to storing my files.

Example 2:
Qwerty and the conventional staggered keyboard layout are relics of past technical limitations and both of them inefficient and bad from an ergonomic perspective.

Possible solution: ignore and carry on or possibly transition to Colemak on a somewhat more ergonomic full size keyboard.
My solution: well, let's also hand build a tiny-ass super obscure ergo keyboard and spend two days to come up with my own layout for all special characters, numbers and function keys.

Fun? Somewhat. Learning a lot? I guess. Never have to think about keyboard layouts again? Lol.

I'm living in a world of pain with various key commands in various apps and edge cases. Could I fix it? Probably make it better but not without quite a bit of effort.

Anyways, it'd be interesting to hear if anyone can relate to this feeling of wanting to fix something once and for all only to find yourself deeper in it then ever before. Idk might be a just me thing. Anyways, goodnight lovely people.

This is a long post and if someone comments without reading carefully I don't care about that person's opinion.

I have 3 accounts here, and that is a must have for me. Let me explain:

Let's think of people and who they are in layers.

The innermost layers are made of private and intimate things: fears, dreams, shames, basically things that are mostly shared with very close people, like family, best friends, and specially significant others.

On the other hand, outermost layers are the public persona, who you are as a citizen, who you are in your profesion, and so on.

So, you wouldn't normally tell your boss about your favorite sex positions.

Let's also say there can be layers in the middle, and all the layers sometimes overlap, but let's not get too deep into this as I think I got the point across.

Here on I explain the original thesis.

I am a developer, and as such I want to fulfill my needs on dev communities, one of them being devrant.
I wish to learn from other devs, I expose my (sometimes controversial) points of view. I rant about annoying shit in the workplace.

But also, at some level, I wish to be taken seriously as a developer, I wish to build a reputation, and I wish to be accepted, even in a shallow social level. There is a social factor to what we do and it's totally normal.

Now, the problem is that I also would want to express my inner self.

So what I do is I don't use my main account for that, I use another, in fact 2 other accounts.

There are several reasons for that:

* I want to hide intimate shit from trolls.

Imagine I griefpost about a loved one that died, then later found myself in a heated discussion about some language, and then some troll comments something like "I'm glad your x died". i wouldn't react very well.

* I want to keep my posts consistent.

If people become interested in what I post as a dev, then they are going to expect dev related stuff from me. If I start posting like controversial points of view, that's not very cool because I'd be doing like a bait n switch on them.

* I want to maintain a reputation, and I want to not get banned on the main account

Reputation as a profesional is a real thing, and it shouldn't be affected by your personal shit.
Also sometimes you argue, and things get heated, and sometimes you get suspended or banned.

You try your hardest to be respectful, but in some communities, some mods are trigger happy.

By restricting this on your alt account, you're in a way promising that you'll have the upmost behaviour on your dev account because that means being professional.

Now, I said I had 2 other accounts.

The reason for having 2 is because I separate two layers:

In the 2nd account I am open and direct regarding my points of view, and more argumentative, but still trying to be relatively civil. I would also post things that might be controversial or not popular. I try to be real basically.

You can conclude that the 2nd account is the one posting this, since this post could trigger some people.

In the 3rd account, I talk about intimate shit like traumas, fears, emotional pain, things I know I'll get support for (the same support I give others when in need) and are not controversial in any way.
This way I can vent painful things and avoid trolls.

Cool people appreciate it when you're transparent about your shortcoming and dark thoughts.

But it takes one asshole in a high horse to judge you. And sometimes you need to give that asshole the middle finger without being afraid of ruining your reputation
or getting banned,
or being scared of that asshole laughing about your intimate shit (again, I use this account for that)

I know it sounds like I have multiple personalities but I swear I'm ok, and hopefully what I said makes sense. People might say "don't use alt accounts, go to another site", but I find that devrant has some interesting people.

The obvious downside is that you end up knowing people more than what they assume, because you interact with them through different accounts.

This is kinda shady, but I'm not interested in taking advantage of others anyway so...

Trying to switch my job. Applied for a well known company. Gave an interview today. I don't fucking get the obsession of these developer recruiters so fixated on data structures and algorithms. I know it's a massive part of computer science but guess there is no fucking room left to innovate in there. There are legitimate researcher teams working for implementation of these barebones inside system foundations. No general software developer gives a fuck about this piece of shit discipline of study. You wanna know why they propagate this as the panacea to test people because it's fucking easy. Give a project to somebody as interview procedure, it'll take time to bring out an interesting problem and an interesting solution to that. Sorry to say but all these data structure enthusiasts are nothing better than board game enthusiasts.

Also why can't you refer existing solutions to create your solution. I've seen some good problems which actually require you to think. But again those are heavy and can't be tested so you're left with reversing a fucking linked list with O(1) auxillary space. Fuck me ig.

Moreover, what the fuck is wrong with the moral policing internet crowd. Its so sad. I've hardly seen anybody rant about this piece of shit system put in place to push the absolute dead-end nutcases up the ladder. Every other search for it returns a Quora link with some Indian guy complaining about his interviews and in the comments you have the same scholars sitting in their data structure throne imparting knowledge about how data structure holds the fabric of reality together.

I don't hate data structures and algorithms as a subject. It is cool and quite extensive but once you try to make that as a metric of all the knowledge in the world, you've lost my drift. Maybe I'm just angry with the state of things. Maybe I'm just angry with token Quora crowd.

I've never liked Quora, but today I decided to sign up because I had an interesting question to ask, about my solution for an angular problem and why it could not be applicable.
Five minutes later 6 people followed my post.
Ten minutes later my question disappeared and nobody knows where the hell it went. WTF? My question count passed from 1 to 0, it disappeared from my profile and from the whole website. No notifies, no emails about it. What the hell happened?

I technically joined just after this guy left(fired) but the stories are to good to tell!

The guy was clearly off but It wasn't his fault he had to of had aspergers

He would demand! To write with two pens in one hand he said it was faster and the only way he could write neatly... (Nope)

I don't think it was to weird but he would put on music and play death metal stuff full volume, because he couldn't hear anyone the team used to make paper planes and fire them at him when they wanted his attention.

Another thing he was into furry ... Stuff but was super open about it had. Wolf's and shit like that on his desk and always had a wolf shirt.

But he was fired, he wasn't great at his job.

I came in to help sort out the mess it was the government's setup for servers and nurses and doctors computers for the NHS over in england.

He effectively skull fucked the entire system.

He magically (I to do day can not understand how) did forced updates and installed to a newer version of Windows servers the problem being the programs wouldn't work on newer windows at the time.

Most were on XP at the time and they used windows servers back then.

Luckily not nation wide just in my local area but still thousands of computers affected.

The issue became this ... You see they had this program on their computers that let them get patient documents and update etc

He removed code or added code that made it update all the laptops and desktops to a new service pack which they didn't want... Then he upgraded the servers to a new windows version I don't remember the specifics

But the updates and new version of Windows made it so the laptops etc couldn't communicate with the servers.

... The next day he got fired and I was brought in for a few weeks to help sort out the mess.

But apparently he was a super interesting guy but with way to many quirks.

It costs the tax payers a fortune! Literally a few million to sort his mistake out people were working round the clock for two weeks straight.

So at the beginning of the year I took a new job at a large, stable company. Leaving a failing startup, toxic leadership, and an absolutely stellar development team in the process. Given what's happened in the world since then, I'm overall pretty happy with the decision to have some more stability for me and my family.

That being said, I'm super bummed out (and weirdly burned out) now because I feel like I'm becoming a worse engineer.

I've worked for large organizations before (single digit thousands of employees), but never have I experienced a personification of enterprise memes like this. Leadership too out of touch, lots of bullshit work just to make worthless reports look good, horrific legacy codebases and infrastructure, you name it.

My biggest problem are the expectations are shockingly low. I went from a hyper demanding work environment where the fate of the entire company seemed to hang in the balance each and every week, to an environment where we literally invent arbitrary, bullshit deadlines and requirements so we have something to feel some stress about. And even still, most of the deadlines are laughably far away. The pace of work that's not only accepted, but praised is so slow that I find myself procrastinating more and more. I spend so little time doing any work, and even less time doing things that would pass as "interesting", that I feel like the engineering and problem solving part of my brain is starting to rot.

To make matters worse, the culture is weirdly confrontational despite the pace being so slow. The people here are _incredibly_ pedantic and will launch into 15 minute arguments over the tiniest incorrect details in a story title. Interrupting someone just so you can say what they were going to say is a daily trial. And most ridiculous of all, _repeating_ word for word what someone _just_ finished saying like it was your thought and you didn't even hear them. I don't even know what the motivation for this could be because it makes them look like total clowns.

I've tried to bring up some of the things I find ridiculous, but most everyone has just accepted them at this point and there's virtually no effort to try and make things better. I only get stupid non-answers like "obviously you've never worked at a large enterprise before". Yes I have. Twice. We didn't partake in half the bullshit that happens here.

Honestly this was all just a passing frustration for the first month or two, but 7 months in I'm starting to see myself become complacent. My current output would be absolutely _shameful_ to myself from a year ago, and even my personality has started to shift to the point that I just go with the flow and don't challenge anything.

I've stopped keeping up with tech trends. I've stopped experimenting with new things. I've tried to do more work on personal projects, but the burnout is starting to affect my life outside of work. In general I've just completely stopped trying, and I absolutely fucking hate it.

I also feel like a total tool for complaining about having a cushy, stable job where I barely have to do anything given the current world climate. But I'm more miserable now than I think I've every been in my career. Has anyone else experienced this and found ways to combat it? How do you get your motivation back once it's lost and there isn't even any pressure to regain it?

I totally blame myself for becoming part of this joke. That's totally on me for not continuing to push myself, but I never realized how much of my "drive" from the last job was coming from the high stakes we were operating under. I really just want to get back to being proud of my work and pushing to be better.

Anyway, sorry for the lengthy post. This turned out to be a weirder rant/self-roast than I intended. But I'm hoping this will be the first step to kicking my own ass back into shape.

Ok, first rant, about my struggles getting reliable internet over the past 6 years. It's not too interesting of a topic, but here we go:

I'm living in a more rural part of Germany and internet here is shit. I pay more than 50 bucks a month for 700kb/s downstream (let's just not talk about upstream...), which is meh by itself but it gets worse. Before this I had roughly 230kb/s downstream using DSL. My provider came out with a new oh-so-fucking-fancy solution for giving people faster internet without upgrading their lame ass fucking backbone and POS infrastructure from 70 years ago: they sell you hybrid internet which combines your shit DSL and an LTE connection using TCP Multicast. Not only do I get only 6 of my promised (and payed for) 50 Mbit, no, It's also a fucking piece of nonworking shit!!!

Let me illustrate:
You constantly have problems with web content (or any remote content) not loading because the host server does not support TCP Multicast. It either refuses connection altogether or it takes about 30-50 seconds to establish a connection. Think about your live when it takes two or three fucking minutes to load 5 YouTube thumbnails or load new tweets at the bottom of the Twitter page! Also, you never know if you a) have an error in your implementation of a new API or if b) the remote host doesn't support TCPMC (there's never an error for that! Fuck you!), your SSH sessions ALWAYS drop in the most inopportune fucking moments because the LTE thing lost connection, you always have to turn on a VPN if you want to visit specific websites (for example your school's website) and so on....

Oh and also, my provider started throttling specific services again these days with Netflix and YouTube struggling to display 240p, fucking 240p video without buffering when I get 600kbit down on steam (ofc the steam download is paused when watching videos). When using a VPN, YouTube 720p and Netflix HD work like a charm again. Fucking Telekom bastards

Then there is the problem with VPNs. The good thing about them is that they solve all the TCP Multicast problems. Yay. Now for the bad things:
First of all, as soon as I use a VPN, access times to remote go up by like fucking 500%. A fucking DNS lookup takes 8-15 seconds!!! The bandwidth is there but it takes forever.. because reasons I guess. Then the speed drops to DSL speeds after a while because the router turns off my LTE connection when it is unused and it does not detect VPN traffic as traffic (again because... Reasons?) And also, the VPN just dies after an hour and you have to manually reconnect (with every VPN provider so far)

And as if that wasn't enough, now the lan is dying on me, too, with the router (the fucking expensive hybrid piece of shit, 230 bucks..) not providing DHCP service anymore or completely refusing all wifi connections or randomly dropping 5Ghz devices, or.....

You get the point.

The worst thing is, they recently layed down 400mbit fiber in my neighborhood. Guess where the FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT CABLE ENDS??? YEAH, RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY NEIGHBORS HOUSE. STREET NUMBER 19 IS SERVED WITH 400MBIT AND MY HOME, THE 20, IS NOT IN THEIR FUCKING SERVICE REGION. Even though there is a fucking cable with the cable companies name on it on my property, even leading up to my house! They still refuse to acknowledge it! FUCK YOU!!!!

Well anyways thanks for reading. Any of you got the same problems? :/

The convo between my friend and me back then
He: dude I heard you can code can you help me with this coding challenge on codechef
Me: bro, I try to let's check the problem
After 15-30 min we solve the question together
Then after 3 days or so he again meets me
He: do you know about Kali Linux
Me: no man not heard of Linux but what is Kali seems interesting
He: trying to hack WiFi
Me: *getting excited* bro teach me
He: I'm learning too
That day he got to know he can't hack WiFi and I got to know that my friend doesn't know jack shit about Linux, also Linux is awesome
But that moment changed my whole engineering life, I got to learn about Linux and I'm getting good at it every single day since then.
It's been 3 year since I met that fucker.
Tagging my amigo @ashwini0529

Idea for weekly if you need some:

What's the most interesting problem you encountered/solved?

❤ @dfox

So new job started.
Just for context- old company was shit.
Promised the world but.
No benefits.
Terrible project management.
High pressure.
But green field interesting work (except by now it’s a few years in so it’s a ‘browning’ field but I was on it from the start).

New company first impressions..
Seems a fantastic company.
True to their word they have money for tools.
Making time for personal development.
Much bigger development community/department.
Seems like the term are under far less pressure so far at least.

But a MASSIVE amount of tech debt.
People seem to want to do the right thing and they’re making time to try and deal with it.
But one or two are very opinionated as to how to deal with it.

So this could go either way and only time will tell I guess.
Trying not to over analyse every little thing they say but I’m hyper sensitive to it at the minute while in the early days.

As always the real challenge in IT is the people not the tech. I count myself as part of the problem, sure I will form some opinions and sharing them too.

Ibwish I had remembered this when the weekly theme was office pranks.

In the first or second year of high school we covered basic internet security. Stuff like don't follow suspicious urls, don't open suspicious emails and such.

Our teacher let us play around with some sort of simulated desktop environment, where we could execute some hacks like ad popups and such on each other's environment, if we fell for the trap.

Anyways, one hack I found interesting was a hack, that lockes a user out of their virual desktop, until he enters a password, that will be displayed on his environment.

Yes, a very interesting hack, because it contains two obvious yet major design flaws, which I could exploit 😈

1. It's case sensitive
In itself not a problem, but combined with #2, it's fatal.
2. "IlIlllIlI"
Depending on your font, you probably have no idea what exactly I just typed.

Let's just say, the font displayed uppercase i and lowercase L completely undifferentiable.

Guess whom I let suffer.

It was our teacher, who had to demonstrate us some things and who was connected to the same network.

I swear, nothing beats that feeling when your tearcher has go come to you and embarrassingly ask you to "unhack" them, because they can't type it 😂

!rant
After a long time, finally I got an opportunity to participate in a Machine Learning competition.

Brushing up my memory.
And also teamed up with another colleague.
Hope, we both get to learn a lot even if we don't win.

(Warning: This rant includes nonsense, nightposting, unstructured thoughts, a dissenting opinion, and a purposeless, stupid joke in the beginning. Reader discretion is advised.)

honestly the whole "ARM solves every x86 problem!" thing doesn't seem to work out in my head:

- Not all ARM chips are the same, nor are they perfectly compatible with each other. This could lead to issues for consumers, for developers or both. There are toolchains that work with almost all of them... though endianness is still an issue, and you KNOW there's not gonna be an enforced standard. (These toolchains also don't do the best job on optimization.)

- ARM has a lot of interesting features. Not a lot of them have been rigorously checked for security, as they aren't as common as x86 CPUs. That's a nightmare on its own.

- ARM or Thumb? I can already see some large company is going to INSIST AND ENFORCE everything used internally to 100% be a specific mode for some bullshit reason. That's already not fun on a higher level, i.e. what software can be used for dev work, etc.

- Backwards compatibility. Most companies either over-embrace change and nothing is guaranteed to work at any given time, or become so set in their ways they're still pulling Amigas and 386 machines out of their teeth to this day. The latter seems to be a larger portion of companies from what I see when people have issues working with said company, so x86 carryover is going to be required that is both relatively flawless AND fairly fast, which isn't really doable.

- The awkward adjustment period. Dear fuck, if you thought early UEFI and GPT implementations were rough, how do you think changing the hardware model will go? We don't even have a standard for the new model yet! What will we keep? What will we replace? What ARM version will we use? All the hardware we use is so dependent on knowing exactly what other hardware will do that changing out the processor has a high likelihood of not being enough.

I'm just waiting for another clusterfuck of multiple non-standard branching sets of PCs to happen over this. I know it has a decent chance of happening, we can't follow standards very well even now, and it's been 30+ years since they were widely accepted.

In my opinion, russian nation's chronic inability to fight oppressive regimes is partly attributed to one interesting quirk the russian language has.
When talking about injustice committed against someone, or making threats to commit said injustice, the actor is completely omitted.
Here's an example:
“Надо будет — найдут”, roughly translated to “they could find you if they wanted to”, is a common phrase to use when talking about proxies, VPNs and other online privacy measures. But the word “they” in English translation is nowhere to be found in the original text! Let's examine the literal translation:
- “надо будет” — “the need will arise”
- “найдут” — “will find you”
The English phrase “they could find you if they wanted to” can be easily challenged with a simple question: “Who's they?” The government? The corporates? The regime? The CIA? Who exactly?

English language can mimic that with passive voice: “you are being watched”, “you are an easy target”, etc. But in active voice, you can't avoid using “they” or some other actor.
In russian, you can. And you will. Indeed, this is how russian people converse. It's a very specific, very common pattern that never really changed.

It's a very powerful thought-terminating cliché built straight into the language. You can't fight an enemy that has no name and no word to describe it, not even a euphemism. The very language you THINK in prevents you from analyzing the entities that oppress you.

In a Tom Scott Plus video where he tried tightrope walking, he learned that they don't say the “F-word” — “fall”. You can't say “I'm afraid I'll fall”. You have to find more specific alternatives like “I'm afraid I'll lose balance”. The word “fall” in this context is a thought-terminating cliché. There is no going back after you “fall”. But if you “lose balance”, you can “regain balance” — the lack of a thought-terminating cliché promotes problem-solving.

Russian language is the same, but in soviet russia, language terminates you, I guess.

You know when people here complain about idiots in stackoverflow downvoting without providing explanation?

Yet the same is being done here.

I made a post here about a recent porn game, and such game is relevant because it's top 3 in earnings in patreon.

if you don't think top 3 patreon making 50k a month is interesting for a post, then you're a prejudiced moron.

What rule am I breaking? I didn't post any pornographic image. I didn't even share a link to the game.

Do people here have a fucking problem with sex?

Is sex, the very cause of our existenxe in first place, so problematic that we need to downvote it?

If you've ever tried using Go plugins raise your hand.
If you've ever tried doing plugins in Go, raise your hand.
If you think that the following rant will be interesting, raise your hand.
If you raised your hand, press [Read More]:

This is a tale of pain and sorrow, the sorrow of discovering that what could be a wonderful feature is woefully incomplete, and won't be for a very long time...

Go plugins are a cool feature: dynamically load pre-compiled code, and interact with it in a useful and relatively performant way (e.g. for dynamically extending the capabilities of your program). So far it sounds great, I know right?

Now let me list off some issues (in order of me remembering them):
1. You can't unload them (due to some bs about dlopen), so you need to restart the application...
2. They bundle the stdlib like a regular Go binary, despite the fact that they're meant to be dynamic!
3. #2 wouldn't be so bad if they didn't also require identical versions of all dependencies in both binaries (meaning you'd need to vendor the dependencies, and also hope you are using the right Go version).
4. You need to use -trimpath or everything dies...

All in all, they are broken and no one is rushing to fix it (literally, the Go team said they aren't really supporting it currently...).

So what other options are there for making plugins in Go?

There's the Hashicorp method of using RPC, where you have two separate applications one the plugin, one the plugin server, and they communicate over RPC. I don't like it. Why? Because it feels like a hack, it's not really efficient and it carries a fear of a limitation that I don't like...

Then we come to a somewhat more clever approach: using Lua (or any other scripting language), it's well known, it's what everyone uses (at least in games...). But, it simply is too hard to use, all the Go Lua VMs I could find were simply too hard to set up...

Now we come to the most creative option I've seen yet: WASM. Now you ask "WASM!? But that's a web thing, how are you gonna make that work?" Indeed, my son, it is a web thing, but that doesn't mean I can't use it! Someone made a WASM VM for Go, and the pros are that you can use any WASM supporting language (i.e. any/all of them). Problem inefficient, PITA to use, and also suffers from the same issues that were preventing me from using Lua.

Enter Yaegi, a Go interpreter created by the same guys who made (and named) Traefik. Yes, you heard me right, an INTERPRETER (i.e. like python) so while it's not super performant (and possibly suffering from large inefficiency issues), it's very easy to set up, and it means that my plugins can still be written in Go (yay)! However, don't think this method doesn't have its own issues, there's still the problem of effectively abstracting different types of plugins without requiring too much boilerplate (a hard problem that I'm actively working on, commits coming soon). However, this still feels to be the best option.

As you can see, doing plugins in Go is a very hard problem. In the coming weeks (hopefully), I'm going to (attempt to at least) benchmark all the different options, as well as publish a library that should help make using Yaegi based plugins easier. All of this stuff will go (see what I did there 😉) in a nice blog post that better explains the issues and solutions. But until then I have some coding to do...

Have a good night(/day)!

so i am on notice period and suddenly my manager has realised that there are a lot of tasks that i have to pickup. well fuck this guy.

i was initially dumb enough to think that i leaving is a bad thing,and i should be doing everything to make the transition easier. the task was also interesting enough , as we were trying to add a new and complex feature and i was the main dev there.

so i started at full pace. i would work on my tasks for hours , even missing on my personal projects. but since last week he would keep adding new tickets in my jira boards every few days , followed by a quick huddle telling how this is a very small and high priority ticlet and i should look at that first.

and me being me, i would not only just finish those small tickets in time, but have a progress on my major feature, as well as answer doubts of other team mates and attend meetings.

--------

i always forget how hypnotising this work culture usually get. the above scenario that i explained? i have no problem with that in a general day. i love to work, solve problems and help others. but these are no normal days, this is my fuckin notice period.

And i am here coz of a reason. if they rely on me so much, why did they forced me to relocate when i just can't? why don't they gove me a lucrative salary + worthy relocation benefits ? fuck them. i even have to serve for a fucking 60 days coz they are not willing to reduce my notice period .

fake promises everytime.
"you don't worry about different office mentioned in your offer letter. we will always keep the environment remote" ~ lie

"even if we go wfo, our company will open an office in your city too, your city is the capital and we had an office there before" ~ lie

"your notice period will get reduced, dont worry about the 60 days" - another fucking lie

______

notice period experts, i need some devil advice to not get exploited by a lier corp. how to utilise my notice period and what should he the excuses to not attend any nloody meetings?

Loosing faith...

Interesting question.

I don't think skills have something to do with faith.

If you don't know something, ask someone who does.

Even If I cannot solve a problem or deem a problem unsolvable, I usually don't doubt myself.

There are rare moments where I throw a fit, but that's not loosing faith, thats just being angry because my stubborn thick skull cannot make sense of it, which annoys me.

Might sound cocky, but in my opinion dev skills are not "do or die". Problem could be solved at a later time, maybe never. Who cares?

Loosing faith would mean to me that I define myself in some way on the ability to solve sth that doesn't have to be solved at all.

XD

After all, if it doesn't work, I don't give a fuck.

*Cheers*.

Hi guys! I need your help.

I'm currently facing a big decision.
I've got a job offer a couple of days ago. The new job would involve an 80% raise to my current salary, and I would make another step on the hierarchy ladder.
BUT
The new place is not a software development company. They have a small team working on internal stuff, but they are basically maintaining a 12 years old garbage.
My job would be, to design the new system from the ground up. At the moment, the new system has to do the same things as the old one, just faster and better. Then they'd like to extend it further.
The first part is not challenging, but the things that they planned in the future sound interesting.

The problem is, that my current company just got a new contract and I'm supposed to conduct the deploy (speaking with their managers, prepare their sites for installation, and install). And since it is a small startup, the deploy depends highly on me.
If I take the new job, then I have to start in February which ultimately means that I screw my current company real bad. They'll probably survive, but they might lose this contract and/or lose money.

If I do what makes economic sense, then I take the job. (fuck it's almost 2x as much!!) But I have mixed feelings about it.
I've got 48 hours to decide.

What do you guys think?

Ok, bug 2.
Another iOS one. I was handed an app that was built half-assedly by another team in a couple of days for a demo, And I had to maintain it and get it into a release-able state.
Someone had implemented deep linking in the app, so you could open a record by using a url from Safari/email etc. Worked fine. Problem was, the app had a login/pin screen, and if you werent authenticated and you tried to link from a url, it would just bring you to the login screen and once you logged in it would take you to the main menu rather than where you wanted to go.
So I added some logic to the linking code that if the app wasnt authenticated it would save the link in a kind of global variable. Then once you logged in and the app entered the authenticated state, it would check for a saved link and execute it if present, then clear it so that it wouldnt try to open every time you log in.
That was an interesting one to try and solve.

Interviewing with three companies. First one extended an offer. I'm expecting an offer from at least one, possibly both, of the others (On-site with Second was yesterday and expecting an offer tomorrow or Mon, phone tech interview (they also had a tech screen) with Three was today and I /rocked/ it, expecting an onsite invite for next week).

The problem with being a badass is that the choice paralysis is SO OVERWHELMING. All three have features that I like and how do I choose.

I think I'm being overly influenced by the weekly massage, onsite barista, free nice breakfast/lunch, and ideal location of Second (the domain is finance, they have $$$). Oh and fucking 25 vacation days and amazing 401k matching. I mean how would I say no to an offer? But what if the work is actually beyond me? But they have seriously cranked their benefits package up to 11.

First is an in house product with external clients. The domain I don't find super interesting, but it has amazing Glassdoor reviews, seems like a decent environment, and really seems like a place to progress and grow as a professional. It is also the lowest salary of the three (both others are through Hired, so I know what they are offering).

Third is a consultancy where I'd really get to keep my skills relevant. Seems mad fast paced, which is a bit intimidating, and I don't know how well I'd handle the context switching of being on multiple projects at a time.

I mean, all of this is counting my chickens before they hatch. But I have a really good feeling about my chsnces with Second, though I suppose I still have a chance to botch my onsite with Third.

Ahhhh. Dev Rant, how did you go about choosing between offers that can't be evaluated on a single axis?

so I started a side project a while ago.
the only thing it could do was to create some files with desired names and extensions. so this was basically a pretty simple editor.

I left this project with no future plans for a month or so until I started working on it again this week. I added comments to the editor, a console user interface.

the ui isn't futuristic. the program runs in the console. it just lists all the files and folders where the program is currently located in. in the beginning it could take user input and that input was the location where the files created in the editor would be saved. then I thought: it would be more interesting if I created a folder in which I saved the files from the editor. so I did this thing.

then I thought, again: hey, this console is pretty boring and stuff. why should I add some special commands? and so I did.
now you can create an empty folder, before you created a folder and saved at the same time the files created in the editor. now you can open another folder in which you can do the same stuff as before. you can get the current location of the folder you are currently in, so you don't get lost in your fancy computer. you can delete a folder completely, set color, reset color.

but one thing that I lost almost ONE FREAKING HOUR ON IT TO MAKE THE USER EXPERIENCE BETTER was the following: when creating a folder, either empty or with the files from the editor, the program automatically opens the folder, not in the console(hey, I didn't thought of that) but in the file explorer from the os. now it only works for windows and windows explorer because I used system(const char*). I know it's not portable or efficient but I just wanted things to work, I will optimise it later.

the thing that made me lose that one hour debugging was figuring out how to open that file.

ok, so I used windows api with GetCurrentDirectory, I knew how to use system, I knew how to form the path that would match up with the folder, I almost knew how to open the folder with system().

the problem was that I had the path complete, but if the folder had white spaces system() wouldn't recognise the freaking command!

so the string with the path would also contain the command used in system() and I would just .c_str() the string so it could work. as an example my wrong way to make the path was this:

"start C:\\path"

can you figure out what is the problem?
you don't?
it's just so trivial.
how cannot you figure it out?
of course you NEED to put "explorer" between the start command and the actual path!
pffft, you idiot! so easy to figure it out.

so yeah, the right way to open a folder is like this:

"start explorer C:\\path to heLL!!"

p.s.: I still don't understand why putting explorer works and without it doesn't. without explorer it just just says that path with the first word before the white space doesn't exist.

How much zucchini is too much zucchini?

I know I have WAY too much...

I knew at least when 1st considering D20 zucchini breads.

then when i began to wonder if the remaining batter would work with my death star waffle iron...ill know tomorrow!

....ran out of typical pans, incl foil ones(normal and mini for easy gifting)

- gave 1 away (similar sized as in pic)

- approx. 2 lg zucchini bread loaves in fridge (gave away 2, ate a ½)

- cut up\froze enough onions\peppers\pak choi to a min. acceptable zucchini : everything else stir fry ratio... x20 servings

- similarly, green onions, pak choi, marinated sesame fried tofu bits, zucchini and miso (quick miso soup) x16

- thinly sliced enough to layer it into ~20 lg servings of lasagna.

... zucchini in pic is slightly larger than the one that made the many aforementioned and pictured loaves of zucchini bread

apparently, in a week tops, I'm gonna have at least another 3 more THAT size needing to be picked

anyone in the continental US want some zucchini bread? or, if in michigan, zucchinis?

i didnt even plant much... actually only about ½ of other years.

i am also having some serious overflows coming of (at least) grapes and watermelons.

grapes...
when i bought this place, this odd, square, surrounded by cement walkways, area, with an increasingly problematic tree (risking cable\electric lines, foundation, etc) and so dense with weeds that I learned, dandelions have a giant, bush-like form, with heights beyond 8ft tall.

i grew up hanging out in the nearby woods, noticing that weeds lost the fight vs raspberry\blackberry plants. being handicapped\lazy\experimental, w\ev, i figured id just kill it all then fill it with random berries... knew nothing about grapes so just got 4+ random types... apparently they are all fancy\expensive grapes... and reeeeeaally produce. i already had to pick ~10lbs.

watermelons-
idr if i planted normal ones and little ones or just little ones... idk how to tell without cutting them open or maybe just watching a long time to see if they stopped growing?
anyone with advice (or seeking watermelons) is welcome.

assuming (hoping) they are mini ones there's at least 2dz that are at least ping pong ball size.... and around 100 little yellow flowers still.

i totally get that my frustrating problem with produce here would be beyond welcomed by most people... but seriously... wtf do i do with a few dozen to over a hundred (hopefully mini) watermelons, so many zucchini that, despite personal daily consumption and at least a half dozen friends that love zucchini bread and\or my secretly healthy lasagna(my friends tend to be guys), but have their limits capping out, plus mine, at less than ½ whats rapidly being produced and, apparently, thousands of dollars worth of hundreds of pounds of fancy grapes???

there's an interesting old lady across the street who'll take at least what her and husband can possibly consume,.. even makes grape jam, but thats still only a few dz lbs tops.

it seems wrong to kill the plants (or even to remove a large amount of blossoms and feed them all to JSON (lil tortoise)... pretty sure he's already getting tired of them just from the few that fell off in the wind or something.

i wish i knew some farmers that do farmers market things... but that kinda seems super suspicious... 'hey mr farmer... want a large supply of expensive grapes, watermelon and zucchini, for free? you can sell them to random people, or just give them away. i dont want money or anything...' idk... seems like the beginning of one of those movies that either has evil alien plants assimilating all land mammals, or where there's some crazed medical researcher convinced that there's a massive, underrated threat without enough attention for vaccination production funds-- so they are gonna release some deadly virus supposedly to save the world.

ive been cooking too long.

ideas pl0x?

proxying youtube

today I thought writing a quick project, a youtube proxy server, as in, you browse localhost:<PORT> and youtube comes in the response.

this is not rocket science as proxy servers have around for a long time.

I thought it'd be interesting to code it in userland, as opposed to "systemland".

And 50 lines of code and some minor hurdles later I see youtube "running" in localhost.

Although youtube didn't just work as usual since the videos don't actually come from youtube.com, but from googlevideo.com instead. And my browser, expectably, enforces CORS and forbids any requests to it.

At that point I started to think of ways to somehow proxy googlevideo.com too. But the solutions are not at all trivial.

Then I thought what was the payoff of all this. I tried to proxy serve youtube out of curiosity, and sure thing, you can do it.

But what problem would proxying youtube solve? Maybe I should think in a fuller way what are the problems I have with youtube.

One issue I have is the exposure, discoverability. To explain it, let's say I have been watching a very, very big amount of videos as of today.

Personally I would expect youtube to understand very well by now what my tastes are, what do I want to watch and what I do NOT want to watch.

Notice that I am very black and white, and I do not have much interest in watching certain types of videos.

It could be true that if my expectations of how youtube should work became reality then youtube recommendations would become polarizing or echo chambering.

But that is my decision though, and the problem with youtube is that it's seemingly forcing a single recommendations algorithm onto everyone.

Some people are more open minded and want to watch EVERYTHING, and a lot of people don't.

But users aren't deciding what they should get recommended. Youtube is making that decision for them. And it sure feels like it's trying to maximize ad revenue.

I for one don't give two flying fucks about pranks or diva youtubers. Yet youtube is adamant in presenting some of these to me.

Now, trying to come up with a solution for this is really non trivial. It would definitely require some youtube mining, or some kind of network so as to not get rate limited when mining, and even then you still have to think of how a good recommendation system would work.

I think the implementation of all that would be too much for me (time and skill wise). But I think it's fun to at least try to outline how recommendations could work.

I would very much prefer that when youtube recommended something, at least it has some number of confidence meaning how much would I like that video, so at least I know what to expect.

It should also have some indicators like what is the mood of the video. As in, sometimes I watch youtube in the mood of learning, like programming videos, but most of the time I watch to get entertained.

These ideas are just brainstorms and could be terrible on reproduction, but I'd like to hear what ideas can some of the people here can come up with.

I may have accidentally found a legit factorization method that converts factoring to a combinatorics problem over a graph, with a time complexity that is the factorial of the logarithm of the semi prime being factored.

I don't know if this is supposed to be good or not, and I don't want to post it prematurely like I almost always do. Not at least until I study its properties better, but it's still a pretty interesting find I think.

I love coding so much that I end up re-inventing the wheel more often than not. Like, I'll see an interesting problem and I'll prefer coding it myself than just google it. That's definitely a form of masochism. 🥺

Wouldn't be so bad if I didn't have a 100 other things to do...

I think I just came up with my next app idea while writing a blog post:

--Sometimes Ignorance Can Really Be Bliss?--
I like to be in know so I read a lot. My reading list will never end as there’s always more I can know.

Part of the problem is lack of clear priorities but all these articles and books are just so interesting….

I probably spend 4-5 hours every weekend reading… mostly from my Inbox. Yes I try to clear some daily but again, I keep a lot just because they look interesting.

I also use Boxbe and recently setup some Automatic Cleanup… but sort of hurts when I see an email I want to read but then it’s gone tomorrow…

**An App Idea!**
What if I never see these actual emails. But my computer does?
What if I can use it to generate a list of articles from all my emails and just show a few in a Weekly Digest?

Thoughts? anyone else have this problem?

But the key is still, never actually knowing what you missed!

Me vs Myself

I lack of consistency in my life.

Except job, I work on single project for more then four years now.

Besides that I struggle so much to finish things I started or do one thing everyday or even every week for more then one month.

Trying to improve myself but it’s so hard and I don’t know when and how I lost this whole consistency I had that made me good self thought developer. Some people said best they’ve seen but I think I have a lot to learn.

It’s not that I don’t want to continue doing things I started previous day but my narrative self is harassing me so much that I don’t have vital power left.

Whenever I try to fight back it makes me weak and I can’t get up from bed so I lay and wait.

Sometimes I lay whole day and just wait.

When I do nothing my narrative inner voice find me instantly 100 other interesting things to do that make me excited, like:

- let’s check mail - oh new <picks technology> framework let’s try it,
- let’s check news
- let’s see how much <picks something> cost because you want it, buy this thing or you’re gonna die
- go out with this <picks a girl> or you’re gonna die alone
- hey <picks something> is cool let’s see how it works
- hey this <picks some problem> is cooler then the one you’re working on,
- how about to call <picks someone>
- how about go out it’s nice outside
- let’s cook this thing today you need to go to grocery

I don’t know how I figured out I need do nothing and wait to fight myself and do what I started not what my narrative voice want me but I see whole slightly improving now and doing nothing helps a lot.

It makes me focus on things I really want to do not things that are just waste of time.

Anyway thanks if anyone got to the end of this stupid story.

Have a nice day. Keep dreaming.
Peace ✌🏽

I was told by my aunt that my niece (who also lives in Colombia) would call me (I live in the Netherlands). When I asked why she would call my aunt responded saying that she did not know. I was happy, it is not very often that my Colombian family calls me.

So I waited.... and waited... and waited... finally she called very late. Turns out she wanted to ask me which Smartphone was better.... :-(.

That was a disappointment... Normally if I go visit my familly there in Colombia they bring all there devices and ask me if I can fix them or install a certain program on it. I dont mind doing that. It can be very interesting. For example: a few months ago another aunt asked me to look at her computer to find out why it was so slow... turned out she had a very old PC with Windows XP installed on it. I fixed the problem by installing light linux distro on the computer. (she only used the browser so that was not a big problem). But yeah... I played for a while with good old Windows XP.

Okay back to the beginning. It is awful if family just calls you to ask witch phone is better.

Thats all... :-)

Very Long, random and pretentiously philosphical, beware:

Imagine you have an all-powerful computer, a lot of spare time and infinite curiosity.
You decide to develop an evolutionary simulation, out of pure interest and to see where things will go. You start writing your foundation, basic rules for your own "universe" which each and every thing of this simulation has to obey. You implement all kinds of object, with different attributes and behaviour, but without any clear goal. To make things more interesting you give this newly created world a spoonful of coincidence, which can randomely alter objects at any given time, at least to some degree. To speed things up you tell some of these objects to form bonds and define an end goal for these bonds:
Make as many copies of yourself as possible.
Unlike the normal objects, these bonds now have purpose and can actively use and alter their enviroment. Since these bonds can change randomely, their variety is kept high enough to not end in a single type multiplying endlessly. After setting up all these rules, you hit run, sit back in your comfy chair and watch.
You see your creation struggle, a lot of the formed bonds die and desintegrate into their individual parts. Others seem to do fine. They adapt to the rules imposed on them by your universe, they consume the inanimate objects around them, as well as the leftovers of bonds which didn't make it. They grow, split and create dublicates of themselves. Content, you watch your simulation develop. Everything seems stable for now, your newly created life won't collapse anytime soon, so you speed up the time and get yourself a cup of coffee.
A few minutes later you check back in and are happy with the results. The bonds are thriving, much more active than before and some of them even joined together, creating even larger bonds. These new bonds, let's just call them animals (because that's obviously where we're going), consist of multiple different types of bonds, sometimes even dozens, which work together, help each other and seem to grow as a whole. Intrigued what will happen in the future, you speed the simulation up again and binge-watch the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Nine hours passed and your world became a truly mesmerizing place. The animals grew to an insane size, consisting of millions and billions of bonds, their original makeup became opaque and confusing. Apparently the rules you set up for this universe encourage working together more than fighting each other, although fights between animals do happen.
The initial tools you created to observe this world are no longer sufficiant to study the inner workings of these animals. They have become a blackbox to you, but that's not a problem; One of the species has caught your attention. They behave unlike any other animal. While most of the species adapt their behaviour to fit their enviroment, or travel to another enviroment which fits their behaviour, these special animals started to alter the existing enviroment to help their survival. They even began to use other animals in such a way that benefits themselves, which was different from the usual bonds, since this newly created symbiosis was not permanent. You watch these strange, yet fascinating animals develop, without even changing the general composition of their bonds, and are amazed at the complexity of the changes they made to their enviroment and their behaviour towards each other.
As you observe them build unique structures to protect them from their enviroment and listen to their complex way of communication (at least compared to other animals in your simulation), you start to wonder:
This might be a pretty basic simulation, these "animals" are nothing more than a few blobs on a screen, obeying to their programming and sometimes getting lucky. All this complexity you created is actually nothing compared to a single insect in the real world, but at what point do you draw the line? At what point does a program become an organism?
At what point is it morally wrong to pull the plug?

What's better for finding candidates for a development role: having the candidate solve a complex whiteboard problem or have the candidate refactor some code (maybe a couple of small modules) while explaining as he/she goes through each step?

I personally feel both are good, but I think refactoring is a very much needed skill when you're dealing with the complexity of millions and millions lines of code, so being able to change your inital design to make it more readable and flexible later on is crucial. And refactoring usually goes hand and hand with having tests in place.

An interesting exercise would be to give the candidate a test suite with the corresponding code that's tested in a working state and let the candidate decide how much refactoring needs to be done. In the process the candidate would need to break and fix tests of course while changing things... it'll give a good measure of their ability to take code and change it to a "better" state of design and flexiblity.

On the other hand I do think there is a place for cliche white boarding problems because it really shows one willingness to tackle complex problems which do arise in most development jobs. Asking the questions and being persistent goes along way and can really help when you're collaborating with other developers to solve an issue at hand.

Overall I think there should be a white board problem, but I don't think that should be the deciding factor. Rather couple it with other very practical skills you should have as a developer already; among those being refactoring.

Client: I put a signed copy of my contract on my website, like someone told me to do, so that people can click a button, download it and sign it. I'm having the problem of people changing the contract before they send it back to me. Can you fix that?

Me: Yes. Take your contact off of your website.

Client: ok, my next question is: can you make it so that I can use the phone and the internet at the same time? Someone told me that I couldn't. I have cable internet I think. (She was remembering dial-up)

Every topic began with "someone told me ..."

This client is going to be .... interesting.

Today a colleague received a weird Excel message, it reads:

Unexpected error
Unfortunately a problem has occurred. Restart Excel, in case the problem persists.
Copy details

The action buttons are awesome!

Send frowns / Close :D

It'd be interesting to see what kind of frowns are being sent there... :D

Figure I can simplify the code if I have the compiler handle *some* of the register allocation.

Eh? What do you mean "NP-hard"? Dafuq's an ENN-PEE?

**frantically reads wiki**

I can proudly say that I understood absolutely nothing; CS stands for cocksucker or rather abysmal failure at the most basic forms of communication, I don't just sit here all day expecting you to flawlessly prove my point with every swallow of breath you draw, yet here we are.

Perhaps one factor involved in producing the generalized cluelessness of my colleagues, I mean their "imposter s*ndrome", has a bit to do with how fucking thick you've formulated this glorified bollocks you call theory. Were not for your incompetence, arcane crackheads like me would simply __not__ be capable of rising to the top of this field entirely via determination and a big salami, therefore I owe you both a debt of gratitude as well as every last word and sign of total disrespect.

As interesting as the study of computational complexity can be, if done correctly that is, you idiots are stuck in a mathematician's abstract mindset in a field entirely devoted to application of ideas rather than *just* the ideas themselves.

To answer my own question, it means there's no known efficient solution. That's it. The part about nondeterministic polynomial convolution of an irreductible rectosigmoid junction can apparently be skipped altogether. Anyway, I solved the problem with the computational equivalent of pizza sticks while you were out in the field mentally jacking off to λ.

Lecture is over, now go clean up the ethereal masturbatory residue if you will, I have mystical el Khwarizmi type-shit to solve via further clubbing of abstraction through liverwurst bologna of immense proportions. ^D

I am teaching my brother about web development. He has never programmed before, doesn't know html and css and is struggling a bit. I think?

I went through basic control flows with him tonight and got him on the fizzbuzz problem just to see what would happen. An hour later I did it for him and explained it as I went.

I need an idea to get him started on. Some project that might actually be interesting or useful. Any ideas?

TLDR: Need for easy to use VR headsets for mobile phones...
Complete story:
There are so many interesting places to explore in this world but sadly the current pandemic situation has brought travel plans to a complete halt. Today I tried watching virtual tours of various cities on YouTube and it felt a bit relaxing.
I was planning to use VR to enhance the experience but it's quite a lot of trouble adjusting my phone in VR headset, controlling playback from my hands when the phone is in the headset.
I wish someone, somewhere would find a way to simplify this problem... Like making mobile-based VR headsets bit easier to use and control while keeping it at affordable to use and allow addition of mobile phones of any sizes...
If someone could actually do this...I think we might have the next groundbreaking startup in the next few years...😄
P.S. Google cardboard VR does not fit this criterion...

It's interesting when I go back to old code that I haven't touched in awhile that calls an external library, I have new questions like "why can't it ..." then discover that it can... Just that the original usage was incorrect.

Sometimes generalising to interfaces is the problem...

Was running personal laptop on 4.10 kernel (running Manjaro).

Was having problems for some reason with an audio program I'm using and so needed to run some older kernel that is real time for better latency.

Installed that kernel and booted with it.

Attempted to remove kernel 4.10, I don't need it anymore.

Rebooted, some kernel modules aren't loading. Xorg not creating a session.

I have no input working.
Not even wifi.

I can't detect USB devices.

Tried to fix it all night.. going through a ton of forums online...

Finally I give up. I didn't have access to anther computer to get a bootable USB image to. FUCK. IM NOT SMART ENOUFG FOR THIS SHIT.

I have 3 USB drive that I carry around all the time. Why don't I have a live image in one of them?

I went to sleep.

Next day I download Lubuntu (just to boot and backup some stuff before downloading and reinstalling Manjaro).

When I was burning the ISO to the USB, turns out I actually had a bootable Ubuntu on it the whole time.

I feel so stupid.

Last week I don't remember why, but I did sudo chmod 770 /

Which also broke my system.

Took me 3 hours to realize that this was the problem and make it work.

I love Linux. It keeps things interesting..

I first started off with a pentium 3 machine in 2004, started gaming on warcraft 3 and maplestory and eventually got addicted to it because nothing else was interesting in my life. Okay extending this story, i eventually got banned, dad smashed 1000 bucks of his money by kicking and throwing it. Years later (i think it was 2011), i got hold of my first Android device. This time round, things were different and I spent 6 months with it problem free and then it started lagging. Google search led me to XDA, started modding the device, eventually startedgetting interested about how people do it and voila, C prog, write some management drivers for malloc and etc. Eventually i dropped kernel development 3 years later and now im in .NET Core.

Hey guys, who has experience with JPA/hibernate RESTful performance numbers.
Interesting would be:
* persistence operations per second, and the response times
* proportion between read/write for a typical rest service

Rightnow i get ~300ms read, 900ms write at 350 concurrent requests. 75% write operations

I more or less ruled out my custom code, problem seems to be hibernate (of course ...😋)

Stack: jetty, jackson, hibernate, mysql

What do you do it you have an interesting/challenging work problem you can't seem to get out of your head?

I'm kinda tempted to spend my own time on it but that feels like doing paid work for free...

So... My Nexus 5X died few hours ago, i have no clue what happened. Tried to google it, found a lot of people have same problem, most of it said it was Samsung eMMC problem that need to blow with heat air. I just realized, how the fcuk Samsung's things screwed up my LG Nexus 5X from inside! Very Interesting Weekend 😵

My start up job got to spark. Problem I face is, completing things as soon as possible, problems are simple but even taking 2 days on something is a big thing. So, I'm just stuck doing lots of urgent tasks and I'm tired every other day because of this.
I don't want to meet people from my workplace as everyone is kind of workaholic and that also makes me not to do anything, I mean yeah, I can't handle stress, it's hell. Rather I want to work for a big company having interesting problems to solve and people who are professional and there to help you. Professionalism is not present here, managers are using bad words for their reportees, and that's a norm. My manager pinged me and literally said that I'm slow. WTH!!!

So I'm about to get a job offer

For some context, I live in a low tax country and my gross salary is 56k (incl bonus). I take home about 3600 per month. And there's a 10% bonus
Next month I have a raise to 61k and will take home 4000.

I just finished a few interviews with a very interesting company in another country and the recruiter says they are offering max 66k.

Problem is, it's in a high tax country (Sweden) . So that 66k means take home pay of 3600... That's a 9% pay cut over what I will make starting next month.

Now I'm not sure how to approach this. I calculated what I want (10-15% raise over my current - next month's - salary and the number is *way* higher: 90k.. This means take home 4600 (15% increase)
I also calculated what it would take to match my employer and even that is much higher at 77k.

The recruiter asked me what they would need to offer me for me to accept and says max budget is 66k. This is of course after I told him 66k would net me less than I make now...

There's also the possibility of working remotely (as a contractor I am guessing) from where I am, and I think in that case the 66k would net me roughly the same as my employer, but I'm not sure as there might be additional costs.
But being a contractor means the employer doesn't pay any tax contributions for me, right? I calculated they would be paying 22k tax (on top of 66k salary) which as I understand is freed up. If that's the case maybe I should be asking for more (as contractor)?

How do I approach this? Anyone been in a similar situation?

Okay, so not eating has become a major problem now. This morning when i got out of bed and stood up, i fell backwards in to my bed again. I couldn't see anything, all black. A few minutes went past and i got back on my feet, got dressed and headed to school.

The thing is, a day can go past and i won't feel hungry at all. But i have to eat, but i don't.

Am i the only one with this problem?

Another thing that is happening is that when i get home from school i sit down in front of my computer and start to write some code, hours fly by and there goes that day, no homework done either.

No food, no homework. Only coding. I think i have a serious problem 😂.

On a side note, a few days ago i tasted coffee for the first time, and now i can't resist buying a cappuccino/latte when i walk past espresso house in the morning.

Here's a interesting question, why the fuck did you waste your time reading this? 😂

I write code as part of my job but also tend to have a lot of pet projects I think about in my spare time. A lot of those projects are not specifically targeted at solving an actual real problem but are just a curiosity (like my Duktape/ECMAScript thing that could import and call DLL routines.) I often find it difficult to choose which one to continue working on and end up not working on any of them because I can't decide which one is more interesting at the time! Or I get stuck and struggle to find a way around whatever roadblock I've hit.

In javascript, is there a difference between separate function calls that mimic a "chain pattern" or state changes using if/else if/else and using the chain or state pattern directly? The internet gave me no real/helpful response to that.

Suppose that:
if(isThingA(thing)) {
makeThingB();
else if(isThingB(thing)){
makeThingC();
else {
makeThingA();
}

That code is always executed e.g. after a user mouse click. "thing" gets defined in some other code.
It can be seen as a state machine that goes back to its starting point.
Is a pattern with objects/classes/prototypes even needed/preferred instead?
It's partly a problem I'm facing in my code but it's also interesting to know ideas/thoughts on this.

You know how the machine learning systems are in the news (and Ted talks, tech blogs, etc.) lately over how they're becoming blackbox logic machines, creating feedback loops that amply things like racism on YouTube, for example. Well, what might the ML/AI systems be doing with our code repositories? Maybe not so much yet, I don't know. But let's imagine. Do you think it's probably less worrisome? At first I didn't see as much harm potential, there's not really racist code, terrorist code, or code that makes people violence prone (okay, not entirely true...), but if you imagine the possibility that someone might use code repositories to create applications that modify code, or is capable of making new programs, or just finding and squishing bugs in code algorithmically, well then you have a system that could arguably start to get a little out of control! What if in squashing code bugs it decides the most prevalent bugs are from code that takes user input (just one of potentially infinite examples). Remember though, it's a blackbox of sorts and this is just one of possibly millions of code patterns it's finding troublesome, and most importantly it's happening slowly (at first). Just like how these ML forces are changing Google and YouTube algorithms so slowly that many don't notice the changes; this would presumably be similar and so it may not be as obvious as one would think. So anyways, 'it' starts refactoring code that takes user input into something 'safer'. Great! But what does this mean? Not for this specific example really, but this concept of blackbox ML/AI solutions to problems we didn't realize we had, what does a future with this stuff look like (Matrix jokes aside)? Well, I could go on all day with imaginative ideas... But talking to myself isn't so productive, let's start a fun community discussion here! Join in if you find this topic as interesting as I do! :)

Note: if you decide to post something like "SNN have made this problem...", or other technical jargan please explain it as clearly as possible. As the great Richard Feynman once said, the best way to show you understand a thing is to be able to explain it clearly to others who don't understand it... Or something like that ;)

Warning - Not IT related.

Long ago, I had a chemist professor who told us a story. She worked in a laboratory where they have studied cristal formations, so basically made a liquid highly capable to form cristals, and they watched them forming, doing tests and so on. In the meantime new building of the campus opened and they had to move the lab to the new location, which was a fourth floor of newly made building. Few of them started to work there even before they moved the old materials and equipment and they started few cristalisation studies, the interesting part is that the cristals didn't formed. She said that at the end they had many cups with prepared liquid and apsolutely no cristals for weeks, but one day the lead researcher arrived with the old, already formed cristals, from the old lab, and toon those inside of the room with prepared cups all the cristals started to form at the same time. After telling us a story she asked us not to tell this to anyone because the science currently doesn't accept this phenomenon and we will be demonised and looked fools it the scientific community.

This story made a hole in my brain...
It was like 10 years ago, and as a problem solver I still have sometimes some weird ideas about it, and strange explanations comming from nothing, and without any deep understanding of quantum physics or even cristalisation. :D

Probably acting. I loved to go to the acting course at school. Played a bigger role in a theatre play in that same school. I was more of a quiet guy, but had no problem turning into (most) roles and playing scenes.
Had a good friend who was part of a theatre club and passionate too, so working with him was even more fun.
My role-play seemed to be so impressive/surprising, that it was praised in the final year book by several anonymous comments inside my profile page.
Today I'm a CS grad and acting is still interesting, although it's unlikely that I will pursue this path.

Hi fellow ranters, I humbly request your opinion on a matter.

I am a CS student in his last year of college, and currently developing a Node.js app as his final year project with a partner. The project has potential, and we've been at it for about three weeks, but the problem is that the more I code, the less I see myself doing Node in the future.

I was a total noob in CSS before starting the project, and I have learnt a ton in just 3 short weeks, but that has taken a toll on me, because I fell pretty far behind our schedule. However, for as much time and effort ad I have put in, my partner has put in a lot more (and he knows way more than me), thus increasing the gap.

My partner and I have (for the moment) different views on the amount of effort that we want to put in the project, since I see it as "slightly more than just another subject" (9-hr a week), and he sees it as a real passion project (endless hours). This could be due to the burnout of the first weeks, but I'm really not that excited about the project anymore, and I find myself thinking that I am wasting both of our time (I don't want to be dead weight), and that if I worked on a project that really made me passionate, such a compiler or a runtime environment, or a new programming language, I wouldn't mind putting in the hours that he does. Just to give more context, this whole project was his idea, and although I find it a great idea, and I know he is capable of building an amazing product, I am not sure whether I would be useful, or even if I want to be useful. Again, this could all be because of burnout.

Anyone has had such an experience?

TL;DR: I am working on a final project with a partner (it was his idea, and I found it interesting), but I think I would be happier switching to a project of my own.

Nix vs. Win
Dual boot vs. virtualization (VirtBox vs Xen)

(TLDR at the end)
- gaming laptop ("when you student but gamer")
- "Nix nono like gaming laptops"
- currently dual boot Win10/Debian
- Debian almost breaking apart
- only xfce because nVidia
- intel-virtual-output^2
- Atheros drivers sometimes freeze whole sys
- MiXeD SoUrCeS
- **Stretch Buster Kali enters the chat**

As you can see after 2 years I have come to the point of redoing everything, wanted to ask any tips on how to setup win and any nix enviroment, win just to play some games and sometimes to reverse win specific CTFs.

Main plan was to have my lovely debian as the only system and run win10 in virtualbox - problem: windows don't like virtuals(?) and it's probably going to be unusable for games.
Also running Kali as separate virtual (why the hell I didn't do that in first place ?)

Xen is the other interesting way but I am not experienced with hypervisors.

TLDR: Would running Win10 as virtual in or alongside(hypervisor) Debian be better/same as having them separated - dual booting?

Managed to apply Particle.js to my personal website today. It's a lot of fun to play with and you can make some pretty interesting effects. Recommend it to everybody.

Only problem is that Chrome doesn't seem to like this library very much. It doesn't start on Chrome unless your website is on a server (you can always use Live Server or something like that from your code editor). Or you can always try a different browser. It seems to be only a Chrome problem.

Can't wait to get my site live and hear what you guys think. Though, don't expect too much please.

Random learnings/realisations/hypothesis:

i have found a sense of happiness in weird symbiotic environment : being rich in a poor environment and live with a poor-but-secretely-rich lifestyle.

i call it the "sheep-hoodie" lifestyle: being a wolf in a herd of sheeps but not with a sheep's skin glued to your body. rather a hoodie so you can be a friendly wolf , ferocious wolf and a friendly sheep whenever you want to.

my 1 group of friends are in a sheep phase : struggling in their life , crunched on money, not saving a lot or focused on savings and stuff. At least that's what shows up from their discussions. however when we are together, i see that we are always supporting each other, and sharing resources/helping each other while having fun

my another group of friends have a wolf lifestyle:
they are insanely rich, if you want to party/do something with them at 'their' level, you gotta have a lot of cash to burn . they are wolves because they know how to sell their stuff, whom to sell and how to retain the info for success. i don't enjoy much with them as their solutions to life problems end up with something that involves a lot of money than effort.

So my lifestyle is to earn like them, but live like my broke friends. they think that am earning 20% of what i earn now, and am also in lots of debts and family crisis. someday my lie is gonna burst when i buy expensive stuff lol

--------
#2
i have realised that i have an OCD for silence and psychotic reaction to noise . for me ,
Silent Environment >> sex >> any relationship.
I might react so aggressively to noise while trying to focus that i may end up breaking the closest of relations with anyone

--------------
#3
thinking of having 3 twitter accounts just to fix the problem of devrant not saving content of dormant accounts :
- professional : an id where i will share my professionally stupid questions, achievements, debates etc
- personal/partial-anon : an id where i will share my personal thoughts and stuff. it might also include devrant screenshots / embarrising content that i make here
- true-anon : a full anonymous account for my(some) extreme thoughts, trigger content and explicit researches

my current twitter feed is a mix of first 2, but making 2 seperate accounts might give me more freedom(the level of devrant) to express myself than what i do now (as my followers are also interesting people but mostly related to tech)
guess i should move my tech content there than my personal content.

------------------------------
#4
making an early opinion about something should only be done to research for truth/content/conversion/hype . final opinion should always be made after you trust something with a research. for eg, initial opinion of Elon Musk was he being a bad guy, but now after seeing his crazy ideas and approach towards twitter, he looks like someone who can truly make it a money minting machine.

------------------------------
#5
A simple perception towards making money as not being a bad thing does wonders at a management level and life .
liberal opinion of twitter layoff and later changes were emotional and blaming, but thinking from a business approach, his company partners(and whoever he likes) now have special golden badges to feel like VVIP and have an orgasm, while he gave a dummy melon to every person on earth to pay for feeling like a VIP and have an orgasm.
a brilliant tactic to make money without anyone calling the minting of money as BAD. genius

------------------------------
#6
was randomly checkin Insta, saw an ex-collegue share a random deep thought quote, and i realised that i might have known her for just a week or 2 in college, but she had a very nice nature.

However, she was the daughter of a very rich ass dad and had almost everything in life. she gave a bit spoilt(for me) look, like someone who did ciggs or drink, but her talks then and our chats later just on chat gave me a very nice hustler vibe (the type of people i like: hustling and professional)

I indirectly asked her on a date and she agreed. so, this is something very interesting for me, as i am hopelessly single and full of judgemental opinions/ strict rules. share your tips and notes on how to have a successful date, and stuff that one must NOT do . much grateful if you do not come under rule 29 of internet and share your POV

I spent half a day trying to figure out why the app on the staging server does not log in the app log file while it does on the dev server.
Server log said log config file found but could not find the root logger.

Problem was that the directory was readable for the app, but not the logfile configuration file.

Dear devs, when a file is not readable that might be some interesting information one could write into a log. AT LEAST MORE INTERESTING THAN "APPLICATION STARTING..."

Am I missing something? I'm a software developer and I like to sove design problems but when I search for something like 'effective problem solving by programmer or software engineer' it always comes down to data structures etc.
I am more interested in design part of it? How can I search for the system designers who are not web designers etc.
What to search for when I want to see how someone has solve interesting system design problem?

I am in my final year of CSE degree, and it's that time of the year when I have to prepare for placements. I need motivation. I need to work hard. I need to push hard. I am not sure if I can practice hundreds of coding problem. I do not find every other question interesting. Please motivate me to work hard.

Hey guys,
I have to Select my Bachelor thesis/topic in the next few days. I would like to do something with Crypto Currencies especially with the Blockchain System. There is a wide range of usage for that and i Think it could be very interesting.
The Problem is that am Not Really Sure what Topic or challenge my Project could contain. There is much to say about it but i dont Think it would be enough to just describe it.
There should be a Problem or anything like that I can solve..
Or Is it possible to just Analyse the blockchain and the affect it have These Days and the Future?
I would appreciate a few ideas or suggestions :)

Regards
Birdy513

Nothing interesting to work on. Weird problems from others trying to force a bad solution to a problem. I just want to go home and finish Westworld!

Gonna start a tech blog next month. My problem is that I can't think of an interesting subject that can get me followers in the middle of this huge number of tech blogs. Any ideas would be very very appreciated. Thank you

"Design is an art of situations. Designers respond to a need, a problem, a circumstance, that arises in the world. The best work is produced in relation to interesting situations – an open-minded client, a good cause, or great content. " - Ellen Lupton

Here is an interesting idea
You could collect a whole bunch of peoples programming related search history and find out when they started searching for a problem on stackoverflow or other such evil sites

And you could migrate the answers that seemed to fix their problem to another site and combine these things in a nice centralized tailored to the use case form

hey uh, this is a rant about phantom forces, if you don't know what it is, look it up, anyways, that's really it.

so, i've been playing this game very actively called phantom forces and its a good game but its been ruined and the fun has pretty much been taken away. the community is dead and terrible, the developers don't care and the game is just falling off.

what i consider community is the youtube scene, and now as of january 1st, 2022, there's nothing left that's actually interesting besides godstatus and moons fps studio. honestly, its so dry and i'm sick of it.

i'm tired of seeing shitty best setup videos and gun reviews. i hate somesteven and strider and then, there's nothing to actually watch so i just watch brain-numbing shitty videos about stuff.

and then theres the developers, stylis studios is a great development team, i'll give you that but the sheer ignorance of their team is so fucking much.

its kinda obvious they don't really care about adding new features or anything new that isn't guns and its fucking sickening. just to see the same old updates, every fucking month man, its annoying and tiring.

i'm fucking tired of just seeing ape shit guns that are too high for regular players to actually unlock. like i know they're trying to please the growing number of 200+ rank users but its terrible, they haven't done a gun below rank 200 or 100 in forever. the last time they did it was like 6 months ago or something.

we've been asking for shit for years and they haven't given it to us and its fucking tiring. asking for daily quests, new features, more grips, vehicles and shit like that is obviously never gonna happen and thats the fucking problem. they don't care about their community.

but anyways, thats really all i want to say, might make a follow up post later. if you want to add your 2 cents down in the comments, you can do that. bye

I got my first developer job three years ago. I’ve always had a great eye for detail, and getting things done while following best practices. I learned that a few years ago from typography, which I think is a fascinating subject, which has a lot of shared ideas with software development.

In my first job, I immediately took a lot more responsibility than what I was assigned to. This job was as a React Developer, but I quickly got into backend development and set up kubernetes clusters, CI/CD.

Looking back, this was to me quite an achievement, considering I had never done anything even remotely close to it.

I did however, work my ass off. 18 hours work days without telling my boss, so only getting paid for 8. Plus I worked weekends.

I did love it. After a while, I got promotes to Senior Developer, and got responsibility for everything technical. I tried asking for help, but everybody else was either a student, or working purely front-end or app-development. Meanwhile, I was Devops, API-design, backend, Ci/CD, handling remote installations (all our customers are Airgapped), customer support, front-end and occasionally app-development when the app-developers could not handle their shit. Basically, I was the goto-guy for every problem, every feature, every fix. I don’t say this to brag.

I recently quit my job, started working as a consultant, because I almost doubled my pay. However the new job is boring as shit. I’m now an overpaid React Developer. And I really hate React. Not because it is shit, but simply because it is boring.

I’m thinking of going back to my old job. It was a lot of work, but it was really interesting. However, after I quit, they have changed their whole stack. No more Golang, Containers, Kubernetes, webRTC and other fun new technologies. Now, it is just plain, PHP without any dependecies. It is both boring, and idiotic. So I’m thinking of just quitting. Either doing some personal projects like game-development. I dont know.