Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
Search - "it's always the same"
-
Sit down before you read this.
So I interviewed a guy for a "Support Engineer" internship position.
Me and the team lead sit down and are waiting for him to enter, but apparently he's actually making a coffee in the kitchen.
This isn't exactly a strike since the receptionist told him that he can go get a drink, and we did too. It's just always expected for him to get a glass of water, not waste 3 minutes brewing a coffee.
In any case he comes in, puts the coffee on the table, then his phone, then his wallet, then his keys and then sits on our side of the table.
I ask him to sit in front of us so we can see him. He takes a minute to pack and tranfer himself to the other side of the table. He again places all of the objects on the table.
We begin, team lead tells him about the company. Then I ask him whether he got any questions regarding the job, the team or the company . For the next 15 minutes he bombards us with mostly irrelevant and sometimes inappropriate questions, like:
0: Can I choose my own nickname when getting an email address?
1: Does the entire department get same salaries?
2: Are there yoga classes on Sundays only or every morning?
3: Will I get a car?
4: Does the firm support workspace equality? How many chicks are in the team?
5: I want the newest grey Mac.
And then.. Then the questions turn into demands:
6: I need a high salary (asks for 2.5 more than the job pays. Which is still a lot).
I ask him why would he get that at his first job in the industry (remind you, this is an internship and we are a relatively high paying company).
He says he's getting paid more at his current job.
His CV lists no current job and only indicates that he just finished studying.
He says that he's working at his parent's business...
Next he says that he is very talented and has to be promoted very quickly and that we need to teach him a lot and finance his courses.
At this point me and the team lead were barely holding our laughs.
The team lead asks him about his English (English is not our native language).
He replies "It's good, trust me".
Team lead invites him for an English conversation. Team lead acts like a customer with a broken internet and the guy is there to troubleshoot. (btw that's not job related, just a simple scenario)
TL: "Hello, my name is Andrew, I'm calli..."
Guy: *interrupts* "Yes, yes, hi! Hi! What do you want?"
TL: "Well, if you let me fi..."
Guy: "Ok! Talk!"
TL: "...inish... My internet is not working."
Guy: "Ok, *mimics tuning a V engine or cooking a soup* I fixed! *points at TL* now you say 'yes you fixed'".
Important to note that his English was horrible. Disregarding the accent he just genuinely does not know the language well.
Then he continiues with "See? Good English. Told you no need to check!".
After about half a minute of choking on out silent laughter I ask him how much Python experience he has (job lists a requirement of at least 1 year).
He replies "I'm very good at object oriented functional programming".
I ask again "But what is your experience? Did you ever take any courses? Do you have a git repository to show? Any side.."
*he interrupts again* "I only use Matlab!".
Team lead stands up and proceeds to shake his hand while saying "we will get back to you".
At last the guy says with a stupid smile on his face "You better hire me! Call me back tomorrow." Leaves TL hanging and walks away after packing his stuff into the pockets.
I was so shocked that I wasn't even angry.
We both laughed for the rest of the day though. It was probably the weirdest interview I took part at.35 -
Scene: Senior developer left, 3 Junior devs(including me) are now loaded with work.
*Intern asks for help*
JuniorDev1: I have 2 projects of which i'm the lead on one. I don't have time to help anyone.
JD2: 2 projects as well dude, speak to me after work, much easier then.
Me: 3 projects, lead on two. Sure how can i help you.
Took less than 5 minutes to help the intern.
2 hours Later. Check in meeting
PM: Our Junior devs are really busy and can't always help you guys. JD1 are you overloaded?
JD1: Yes, is their anyway we can split the one projects work?
PM: Sure. JD2 are you overloaded?
JD2: Not really, but i agree on splitting the projects between the three of us.
Me: *Are these fuckers serious? i have three projects, they have 2 and they wanna give me more work because they are overloaded and don't know how to manage their time*
PM: Ok cool, i'll update it. CooCooK4Choo, i see you building your own game during lunch time. You definitely not overloaded.
Me: Actually! what i do in my lunch time is my own personal work because it's the only time i have to work on personal projects. I actually do feel overloaded with the 3 projects and now more work from them, could we split the work load evenly please.
PM: I thought you said you could handle the 3 projects?
Me: I can, i have been, but with more work coming my way i don't think i'll be able to.
PM: Unfortunately i need the other Junior Devs on demand, so i won't be able to split the work load evenly.
Me: On demand for what? Why not let the interns help?
PM: In case i need their help. The interns are helping the other Junior Devs with things that don't require too much out of them.
Me: *This FUCKEN BITCH!* Cool, I'm done with the 1 project, expect the business rules at the end of the day. I'll see if i can get the other 2 near done by Friday so i can have time to look over the code of the new projects that i'll be splitting with the other Junior Devs.
PM: Cool, glad we all on the same page.
You know what? FUCK this stupid shit of favoring people in the FUCKEN work place.
This is my first full-time job ever, I've been here for a full year today and i can honestly say these people are just giant children with money. I should know, out of work i am a giant child, but from 8:00 - 16:00 i'm a FUCKEN adult.16 -
Hey everyone,
We have a few pieces of news we're very excited to share with everyone today. Apologies for the long post, but there's a lot to cover!
First, as some of you might have already seen, we just launched the "subscribed" tab in the devRant app on iOS and Android. This feature shows you a feed of the most recent rant posts, likes, and comments from all of the people you subscribe to. This activity feed is updated in real-time (although you have to manually refresh it right now), so you can quickly see the latest activity. Additionally, the feed also shows recommended users (based on your tastes) that you might want to subscribe to. We think both of these aspects of the feed will greatly improve the devRant content discovery experience.
This new feature leads directly into this next announcement. Tim (@trogus) and I just launched a public SaaS API service that powers the features above (and can power many more use-cases across recommendations and activity feeds, with more to come). The service is called Pipeless (https://pipeless.io) and it is currently live (beta), and we encourage everyone to check it out. All feedback is greatly appreciated. It is called Pipeless because it removes the need to create complicated pipelines to power features/algorithms, by instead utilizing the flexibility of graph databases.
Pipeless was born out of the years of experience Tim and I have had working on devRant and from the desire we've seen from the community to have more insight into our technology. One of my favorite (and earliest) devRant memories is from around when we launched, and we instantly had many questions from the community about what tech stack we were using. That interest is what encouraged us to create the "about" page in the app that gives an overview of what technologies we use for devRant.
Since launch, the biggest technology powering devRant has always been our graph database. It's been fun discussing that technology with many of you. Now, we're excited to bring this technology to everyone in the form of a very simple REST API that you can use to quickly build projects that include real-time recommendations and activity feeds. Tim and I are really looking forward to hopefully seeing members of the community make really cool and unique things with the API.
Pipeless has a free plan where you get 75,000 API calls/month and 75,000 items stored. We think this is a solid amount of calls/storage to test out and even build cool projects/features with the API. Additionally, as a thanks for continued support, for devRant++ subscribers who were subscribed before this announcement was posted, we will give some bonus calls/data storage. If you'd like that special bonus, you can just let me know in the comments (as long as your devRant email is the same as Pipeless account email) or feel free to email me (david@hexicallabs.com).
Lastly, and also related, we think Pipeless is going to help us fulfill one of the biggest pieces of feedback we’ve heard from the community. Now, it is going to be our goal to open source the various components of devRant. Although there’s been a few reasons stated in the past for why we haven’t done that, one of the biggest reasons was always the highly proprietary and complicated nature of our backend storage systems. But now, with Pipeless, it will allow us to start moving data there, and then everyone has access to the same system/technology that is powering the devRant backend. The first step for this transition was building the new “subscribed” feed completely on top of Pipeless. We will be following up with more details about this open sourcing effort soon, and we’re very excited for it and we think the community will be too.
Anyway, thank you for reading this and we are really looking forward to everyone’s feedback and seeing what members of the community create with the service. If you’re looking for a very simple way to get started, we have a full sample dataset (1 click to import!) with a tutorial that Tim put together (https://docs.pipeless.io/docs/...) and a full dev portal/documentation (https://docs.pipeless.io).
Let us know if you have any questions and thanks everyone!
- David & Tim (@dfox & @trogus)
53 -
Linux sucks.
Now now, chill. I'm using it as my main OS for a few years now. I know what I'm talking and this title is a bit click-baity, but this just has to go out there:
1. It's usable as a Windows replacement just fine - FALSE. XFCE4 is years old and buggy as hell especially on multi-monitor set-up, Gnome3 gets stuck more often than my Windows 98 machine used to, KDE is like a rich kid on meth. Plug in Bluetooth headphones? Well no, sorry, you have to research that online, since you'll probably need to install some packages for it to work. Did I say "work"? Well no, because after more research you realize that Debian on Gnome3 on gdm3 launches pulseaudio on its own, so you have 2 instances of pulseaudio, and one of them is stealing your headphones sometimes and you either have no sound or shitty sound. How do I know that you ask? The same way I know everything else - every time you try to do something new on any Linux, it involves a ton of research. Exciting research, don't get me wrong, but at this point it looks more like a toy than a reliable desktop computer operating system.
2. And why am I using pulseaudio? Why not alsa? years ago people were discussing on forums that pulseaudio is old and dead, yet here we are with new LTS release of Ubuntu still shining with Pulseaudio. How about several different service management systems being deprecated by new ones, each having different configurations and calling methods? Apparently systemd is old and lame now. It's a mix of 10 year old software that works badly, with a 5 year old replacement that works worse, somehow trying to live under the same roof. Does it work? Ask my headphones who sound like a fucking dial-up modem.
3. Let's talk about displays, shall we? xorg is old and deprecated, right? We got Wayland that's mostly stable. Don't know what that is? That's just basic knowledge for Linux. And when you try to install network-manager, it also tries to install Mir toolkits. Because why the fuck not install 3 display managers when you want a network manager, of which one is old and dying, one is young and stupid, and another is an infant that died of cancer?
4. Want to integrate with Google Drive? Yeah, there's a tool that mounts the drive as a local directory. Yeah only for Ubuntu. Want it on Debian? You need to compile it. Oh wait, it's on Ocaml, because fuck mainstream languages, we're hipsters. How do you compile Ocaml? Well you need to have Ocaml on your system, dummy. How do you do that? Well you need to compile Ocaml. Ok, how do I do that? Well, git clone, download and install some dependencies, configure, make... oh sorry, you're using libssl1.0.2g when you need libssl1.0.1f, nope, sorry, won't work. Want to install libssl1.0.1f? Why? You already have the "g", stupid! Want to remove libssl1.0.2g? Bye-bye literally everything that you have on your PC. But at least you got the "f". Does it work now? Well no, because you need libssl1.0.2g for another dependency to work.
And all I ever wanted was to get a fucking document from google drive (not nudes, I promise).
5. Want to watch a movie? Let me tear that screen in half and make the bottom half late by a couple of frames, because who needs vertical sync, right? Oh you do? Well install the native drivers maybe. Oh you have? Welcome to eternal Boot to Recovery mode, motherfucka!
---------------------------------
Yeah, most of the times things work just fine. But the reason I know what those things are and how they work is not curiosity. The reason that I know the inner workings of Linux much better than the inner workings of Windows, is because in those few years that I've been using it full time, it has caused me 10 times more headache than I have ever experienced with other systems. And it's not the usual annoyances like "OMG it rebooted when I didn't ask it to", but more like "Oh, it won't work and I need 2 days to find out why" kind of stuff, because even if you experience the same thing again, it's always caused by some new shit and the old solution won't work any more.
I still love it, and will continue to use it. I don't know why really. Maybe because I'm not afraid of fucking it up any more? Maybe because I can do what I want in it and recovering will be easier than on Windows?
It's a toy for me, after all these years. And I also use it for professional reasons.
But whenever someone presents it as a better alternative to Windows, I just want to puke.51 -
Yes Linus Torvalds is an asshole and the world is better because of it.
In short Linus's acid takes on code quality over developer fee fee's might be one of the things that has made the Linux kernel and the GNU/Linux project such a long lasting open source success and in my opinion the risk of him falling for all this "let's be nice and non offensive" bs trend may impact negatively on code quality.
Being an asshole has it's downsides and it's not always the best response, I'll give you that, but personally I think most of us who are viewed as assholes are seen like that because we put quality over convenience, facts before feelings and dedication over mediocrity; it is not because we hate you, it's because we measure ourselves with the same stick.
It depends on one's character, but when you've been toughened up because of bullying(I don't doubt many devs have been since being a nerd has never been hip) or life in general, you learn to stop whining & pick yourself up and you expect everyone to be competitive and competent as you are and it gets frustrating to manage people who don't fulfill your expectations.
Pros: You get shit done and you do it well.
Cons: People won't like you and you don't tolerate failure (much less mediocrity).
Yes Linus is an asshole, my coach was an asshole, some of my best teacher's have been assholes, I had friends who were assholes, heck I'm an asshole!
But I thank them because they made me better than I was, just as people have thanked me for being the right amount of asshole.
A warm thank you and fuck you Linus, keep being the asshole we need.
36 -
!rant
I've always wanted to son to enjoy the the same feeling I get when I'm developing. Today my son pulled up a chair next to me and started asking questions about my code, it's safe to say I got those proud dad feels.
Feels good man, feels real good.
6 -
I. FUCKING. HATE. MOBILE. DEVELOPMENT.
I already manage the data, devops, infra, and most of the backend dev.
We had a mobile guy. He was great. I never had to think about it and kept moving quickly on my work. #SpecializationOfLaborFTW
He left. Why? Because they wouldn't give him a small raise despite being one of the best mobile engineers in the firm. WTF.
I made the mistake of picking up just enough slack on this workflow in the interim such that I'm, apparently, the fucking god-damned release manager, fixer of pipelines, fixer of build configs, fixer of anything where someone just needs to RTFM for a half-hour to not fucking break things.
Now, 8 months later...and, apparently, Fortune 500 companies are too fucking god-damned cheap to pay for someone who actually knows WTF they're doing for a very reasonable thing to have at least one dedicated set of eyes for.
I never wanted to be a mobile dev.
I never will want to be a mobile dev.
And I certainly don't want to manage your HALF-FACE-FUCKED detached expo configs.
There's a reason I never intentionally involved myself in mobile. All the way down, it's just shitty cross-compilation, transpilation, dependency-hell, brittle-as-fuck build processes so we can foot-gun and mouth-gun react-native and expo and babel and whatever the fuck else cargo-culted horseshit into the wild.
And why? What's the actual fucking root cause? The biggest white elephant that ever fucking elephant-ed? It's because Apple and Google decided to never collaborate on a truly-native cross-platform SDK--where engineers could write native code that compiles to native binaries that's simply write-once, run-everywhere. They know they could have done that, and they didn't. So what'd they get back? Expo--a too-cleverly-designed backdoor/hack--more-or-less a way to circumvent the sane release process software has usually followed: code -> executable -> deploy. Or code -> deploy (for interpreted langs). Expo's like "keep your same executable, we're just gonna to do updates by injecting new code into it whenever we want". Didn't we learn anything with web? Shit gets messy real quick? Not to mention: HEY EXPO, WE WERE ALREADY BUILDING NATIVE APPS, YOU SHORT-SIGHTED FUCKS. THANKS FOR LURING OUR CTOs INTO FORCING EXPO DOWN OUR THROATS W/ THE IMPLICIT (BUT INCORRECT) TOO-GOOD-TO-BE-TRUE PROMISE THAT WE CAN HAVE WRITE-ONCE, RUN-ANYWHERE WITHOUT ANY BUY-IN OR COOPERATION FROM THE ACTUAL TARGET PLATFORMS.
And, we just, like, accept this? We all know it's garbage engineering. The principles we learned in the classroom aren't just academic abstractions--they actually yield real-world results--and eschewing them yields real-world failures. Expo is tightly-coupled to high-heaven, with leaky abstractions six-ways-to-christmas, chock-full of foot-guns, and fails the most basic test of quality: does it, "just work?"
Expo is fucking shameful and it should fucking die. Its promises are too bold, its land-mines too many, its future-proof-ness is alway, always, always questionable as fuck and a risk to every project that uses it.
You want a rant? This is my fucking venue, 'tis not? Well, then this is a piss and vinegar rant straight from my blood-red, beating fucking heart:
EXPO FUCKING SUCKS. AND IF YOU'RE A FAN, YOU FUCKING SUCK TOO.25 -
LONG RANT AHEAD!
In my workplace (dev company) I am the only dev using Linux on my workstation. I joined project XX, a senior dev onboarded me. Downloaded the code, built the source, launched the app,.. BAM - an exception in catalina.out. ORM framework failed to map something.
mvn clean && mvn install
same thing happens again. I address this incident to sr dev and response is "well.... it works on my machine and has worked for all other devs. It must be your environment issue. Prolly linux is to blame?" So I spend another hour trying to dig up the bug. Narrowed it down to a single datamodel with ORM mapping annotation looking somewhat off. Fixed it.
mvn clean && mvn install
the app now works perfectly. Apparently this bug has been in the codebase for years and Windows used to mask it somehow w/o throwing an exception. God knows what undefined behaviour was happening in the background...
Months fly by and I'm invited to join another project. Sounds really cool! I get accesses, checkout the code, build it (after crossing the hell of VPNs on Linux). Run component 1/4 -- all goocy. run component 2,3/4 -- looks perfect. Run component 4/4 -- BAM: LinkageError. Turns out there is something wrong with OSGi dependencies as ClassLoader attempts to load the same class twice, from 2 different sources. Coworkers with Windows and MACs have never seen this kind of exception and lead dev replies with "I think you should use a normal environment for work rather than playing with your Linux". Wtf... It's java. Every env is "normal env" for JVM! I do some digging. One day passes by.. second one.. third.. the weekend.. The next Friday comes and I still haven't succeeded to launch component #4. Eventually I give up (since I cannot charge a client for a week I spent trying to set up my env) and walk away from that project. Ever since this LinkageError was always in my mind, for some reason I could not let it go. It was driving me CRAZY! So half a year passes by and one of the project devs gets a new MB pro. 2 days later I get a PM: "umm.. were you the one who used to get LinkageError while starting component #4 up?". You guys have NO IDEA how happy his message made me. I mean... I was frickin HIGH: all smiling, singing, even dancing behind my desk!! Apparently the guy had the same problem I did. Except he was familiar with the project quite well. It took 3 more days for him to figure out what was wrong and fix it. And it indeed was an error in the project -- not my "abnormal Linux env"! And again for some hell knows what reason Windows was masking a mistake in the codebase and not popping an error where it must have popped. Linux on the other hand found the error and crashed the app immediatelly so the product would not be shipped with God knows what bugs...
I do not mean to bring up a flame war or smth, but It's obvious I've kind of saved 2 projects from "undefined magical behaviour" by just using Linux. I guess what I really wanted to say is that no matter how good dev you are, whether you are a sr, lead or chief dev, if your coworker (let it be another sr or a jr dev) says he gets an error and YOU cannot figure out what the heck is wrong, you should not blame the dev or an environment w/o knowing it for a fact. If something is not working - figure out the WHATs and WHYs first. Analyze, compare data to other envs,... Not only you will help a new guy to join your team but also you'll learn something new. And in some cases something crucial, e.g. a serious messup in the codebase.11 -
//
// devRant unofficial UWP update (v2.0.0-beta)
//
After several concepts, about 11 months of development (keep in mind that I released 20 updates for v1 in the meantime, so it wasn't a continous 11 months long development process) and a short closed beta phase, v2 is now available for everyone (as public beta)! :)
I tried to improve the app in every aspect, from finally responsive and good looking UI on Desktop version to backend performance improvements, which means that I almost coded it from scratch.
There are also of course a few new features (like "go to bottom" in rants), and more to come.
It's a very huge update, and unfortunately to move forward, improve the UI (add Fluent Design) and make it at the same level of new UWP apps, I was forced to drop the supported for these old Windows 10 builds:
- Threshold 1 (10240)
- Threshold 2 (10586)
Too many incompatiblity issues with the new UI, and for 1 person with a lot of other commitments outside this project (made for free, just for passion), it's impossible to work at 3 parallel versions of the same app.
I already done something like that during these 11 months (every single of the 20 updates for v1 needed to be implemented a second time for v2).
During the closed beta tests, thanks to the awesome testers who helped me way too much than I ever wished, I found out that there are already incompatiblity issues with Anniversary Update, which means that I will support two versions:
1) One for Creators Update and newer builds.
2) One for Anniversary Update (same features, but missing Fluent Design since it doesn't work on that OS version, and almost completly rewritten XAML styles).
For this reason v2 public beta is out now for Creators Update (and newer) as regular update, and will be out in a near future (can't say when) also for the Anniversary Update.
The users with older OS versions (problem which on PC could be solved in 1-2 days, just download updates) can download only the v1.5.9 (which probably won't be supported with new updates anymore, except for particular critcal bug fixes).
So if you have Windows 10 on PC and want to use v2 today, just be sure you have Creators Update or Fall Creators Update.
If you have Windows 10 PC with Anniversary Update, update it, or if you don't want to do that, wait a few weeks/months for the update with support for your build.
If you have an older version on PC, update it, or enjoy v1.5.9.
If you have Windows 10 Mobile Anniversary Update, update it (if it's possible for your device), or just wait a few weeks/months for the update with support for your build.
If you have Windows 10 Mobile, and because of Microsoft stupid policy, you can't update to Anniversary Update, enjoy v1.5.9, or try the "unofficial" method (registry hack) to update to a newer build.
I hope it's enough clear why not everyone can receive the update today, or at all. :P
Now I would like to thank a few people who made this possible.
As always, @dfox who is always available for help me with API implementations.
@thmnmlist, who helped me a lot during this period with really great UI suggestions (just check out his twitter, it's a really good person, friend, designer and artist: https://twitter.com/thmnmlist).
And of course everyone of the closed beta testers, that reported bugs and precious suggestions (some of them already implemented, others will arrive soon).
The order is random:
@Raamakrishnan
@Telescuffle
@Qaldim
@thmnmlist
@nikola1402
@aayusharyan
@cozyplanes
@Vivaed
@Byte
@RTRMS
@tylerleonhardt
@Seshpengiun
@MEGADROID
@nottoobright
Changelog of v2.0.0-beta:
- New UI with Fluent Design and huge improvements for Desktop;
- Added native support for Fall Creators Update (Build 16299);
- Changed minimum supported version to Creators Update (Build 15063), support for Anniversary Update (Build 14393) will arrive soon;
- Added mouse support for Pull-To-Refresh;
- Added ability to change your username and email;
- Added ability to filter (by 'Day', 'Week', 'Month' and 'All') the top Rants;
- Added ability to open rant links in-app;
- Added ability to zoom GIFs (just tap on them in the Rant View);
- Added 'go to bottom' button in the Rant View (if more than 3 comments);
- Added new theme ('Total Black');
- ...complete changelog in-app and on my website (can't post it here because of the 5000 characters limit)...
What will arrive in future updates:
- 'Active Discussions' screen so you can easily find rants that have recent comments/discussions;
- Support for 'Collabs';
- Push Notifications (it was postponed and announced too many times...);
- More themes and themes options;
- and more...
If you still didn't download devRant unofficial UWP, do it now: https://microsoft.com/store/apps/...
If you find some bugs or you have feature suggestion, post it on the Issue Tracker on GitHub (thanks in advance for your help!): https://github.com/JakubSteplowski/...
I hope you will enjoy it! ;)
52 -
My first job: The Mystery of The Powered-Down Server
I paid my way through college by working every-other-semester in the Cooperative-Education Program my school provided. My first job was with a small company (now defunct) which made some of the very first optical-storage robotic storage systems. I honestly forgot what I was "officially" hired for at first, but I quickly moved up into the kernel device-driver team and was quite happy there.
It was primarily a Solaris shop, with a smattering of IBM AIX RS/6000. It was one of these ill-fated RS/6000 machines which (by no fault of its own) plays a major role in this story.
One day, I came to work to find my team-leader in quite a tizzy -- cursing and ranting about our VAR selling us bad equipment; about how IBM just doesn't make good hardware like they did in the good old days; about how back when _he_ was in charge of buying equipment this wouldn't happen, and on and on and on.
Our primary AIX dev server was powered off when he arrived. He booted it up, checked logs and was running self-diagnostics, but absolutely nothing so far indicated why the machine had shut down. We blew a couple of hours trying to figure out what happened, to no avail. Eventually, with other deadlines looming, we just chalked it up be something we'll look into more later.
Several days went by, with the usual day-to-day comings and goings; no surprises.
Then, next week, it happened again.
My team-leader was LIVID. The same server was hard-down again when he came in; no explanation. He opened a ticket with IBM and put in a call to our VAR rep, demanding answers -- how could they sell us bad equipment -- why isn't there any indication of what's failing -- someone must come out here and fix this NOW, and on and on and on.
(As a quick aside, in case it's not clearly coming through between-the-lines, our team leader was always a little bit "over to top" for me. He was the kind of person who "got things done," and as long as you stayed on his good side, you could just watch the fireworks most days - but it became pretty exhausting sometimes).
Back our story -
An IBM CE comes out and does a full on-site hardware diagnostic -- tears the whole server down, runs through everything one part a time. Absolutely. Nothing. Wrong.
I recall, at some point of all this, making the comment "It's almost like someone just pulls the plug on it -- like the power just, poof, goes away."
My team-leader demands the CE replace the power supply, even though it appeared to be operating normally. He does, at our cost, of course.
Another weeks goes by and all is forgotten in the swamp of work we have to do.
Until one day, the next week... Yes, you guessed it... It happens again. The server is down. Heads are exploding (will at least one head we all know by now). With all the screaming going on, the entire office staff should have comped some Advil.
My team-leader demands the facilities team do a full diagnostic on the UPS system and assure we aren't getting drop-outs on the power system. They do the diagnostic. They also review the logs for the power/load distribution to the entire lab and office spaces. Nothing is amiss.
This would also be a good time draw the picture of where this server is -- this particular server is not in the actual server room, it's out in the office area. That's on purpose, since it is connected to a demo robotics cabinet we use for testing and POC work. And customer demos. This will date me, but these were the days when robotic storage was new and VERY exciting to watch...
So, this is basically a couple of big boxes out on the office floor, with power cables running into a special power-drop near the middle of the room. That information might seem superfluous now, but will come into play shortly in our story.
So, we still have no answer to what's causing the server problems, but we all have work to do, so we keep plugging away, hoping for the best.
The team leader is insisting the VAR swap in a new server.
One night, we (the device-driver team) are working late, burning the midnight oil, right there in the office, and we bear witness to something I will never forget.
The cleaning staff came in.
Anxious for a brief distraction from our marathon of debugging, we stopped to watch them set up and start cleaning the office for a bit.
Then, friends, I Am Not Making This Up(tm)... I watched one of the cleaning staff walk right over to that beautiful RS/6000 dev server, dwarfed in shadow beside that huge robotic disc enclosure... and yank the server power cable right out of the dedicated power drop. And plug in their vacuum cleaner. And vacuum the floor.
We each looked at one-another, slowly, in bewilderment... and then went home, after a brief discussion on the way out the door.
You see, our team-leader wasn't with us that night; so before we left, we all agreed to come in late the next day. Very late indeed.9 -
This rant is devoted to my study friends. You see, I never knew what it was to not have people making fun of you/bullying you until I started my study.
Elementary school + highschool was one big mess of bullying, being made fun of and hardly having any friends.
At highschool I decided I wanted to go into IT. Especially programming. Programming in particular because when I was programming, I, for once, was the one in control. The code listened to me and for that tiny moment I was god.
Never really had much friends though and when I told my parents I wanted to do an MBO study (application development), my mother warned me that although she and my dad supported me with whatever my decision would be, MBO level studies were rough because of the general mindset/atmosphere there.
I thought fuck it, I want to do programming because that seems awesome and maybe I'll even make some friends with the same interests!
Then study arrived. Met a few guys with similar interests and we started hanging out together.
And then it came back just like before. Two guys who loved bullying and I was still a quite easy target because I couldn't stand up for myself.
But, then something happened. I liked a girl, she was in the hallway and two of the bullies (there were about 4-5 in total) got up and started fucking around with me (about her) and I just sat there, not daring to do anything with tears in my eyes.
Then two of my classmates noticed it, quickly came to my desk and started pushing the guys away with 'back the fuck off, what the fuck has he done to you?!'. Then one of those guys (now still about my best friend) came to me to see if I was alright.
We started talking. Then at some point, another bully had a go at me. This would be the final time. He was about 2 meters tall (I was about 160cm or something) and stood there in the door opening with a very nasty smile saying all nasty stuff, trying to intimidate me and probably tried to make me feel like crap again.
Nice guy on my right asked me to step to the left. Gave that guy a huge fucking foot in his chest and he smacked onto the ground. Made a gentleman's sign like 'go ahead, sir!' while gesturing towards the door.
From that moment on the bullying stopped. Throughout my study, some other bad things happened but those guys were always there for me.
Although I've lost touch with most of the guys (they're on social media, I'm not really), we still meet up once in a while and have a lot of beers while talking and laughing and thinking back to the good times we had together.
The study wasn't the best for what we were taught as in studying but it's the best choice I've ever made nonetheless.
Oh and that best friend and I still have loads of contact!12 -
Today was my last day of work, tomorrow i have officially left that place. It's a weird feeling because i'm not certain about the future.
The job was certainly not bad, and after all i read on devrant i'm beginning to believe it was one of the better ones. A nice boss, always something to eat/drink nearby, a relaxed atmosphere, a tolerance for my occasionally odd behaviour and the chance to suggest frameworks. Why i would leave that place, you ask? Because of the thing not on the list, the code, that is the thing i work with all the time.
Most of the time i only had to make things work, testing/refactoring/etc. was cut because we had other things to do. You could argue that we had more time if we did refactor, and i suggested that, but the decision to do so was delayed because we didn't have enough time.
The first project i had to work on had around 100 files with nearly the same code, everything copy-pasted and changed slightly. Half of the files used format a and the other half used the newer format b. B used a function that concatenated strings to produce html. I made some suggestions on how to change this, but they got denied because they would take up too much time. Aat that point i started to understand the position my boss was in and how i had to word things in order to get my point across. This project never got changed and holds hundreds of sql- and xss-injection-vulnerabilities and misses access control up to today. But at least the new project is better, it's tomcat and hibernate on the backend and react in the frontend, communicating via rest. It took a few years to get there, but we made it.
To get back to code quality, it's not there. Some projects had 1000 LOC files that were only touched to add features, we wrote horrible hacks to work with the reactabular-module and duplicate code everywhere. I already ranted about my boss' use of ctrl-c&v and i think it is the biggest threat to code quality. That and the juniors who worked on a real project for the first time. And the fact that i was the only one who really knew git. At some point i had enough of working on those projects and quit.
I don't have much experience, but i'm certain my next job has a better workflow and i hope i don't have to fix that much bugs anymore.
In the end my experience was mostly positive though. I had nice coworkers, was often free to do things my way, got really into linux, all in all a good workplace if there wasn't work.
Now they dont have their js-expert anymore, with that i'm excited to see how the new project evolves. It's still a weird thing to know you won't go back to a place you've been for several years. But i still have my backdoor, but maybe not. :P
16 -
"devRant has changed" "I'm so fed up with this site" "Its a bunch of hate and memes, it was so much better before"
A rebuttal.
devRant is approximately the same as it was when it was just a newborn. Remember the days of semicolon jokes being unironically funny?
Look at the top rants of all time, for fucks sake. #2 ever is:
"A different error message! Finally some progress!"
Posted three years ago. That's the second most upvoted rant in history (Remember, this was a "rant" because the joke/meme category didn't exist back then), it made it's way into the app store screenshots, and was a welcome post.
Now imagine that posted today. It would probably go over okay, in fairness, but it's certainly at risk of any number of pretentious pricks complaining about how this is "devRANT not 4chan" or how they had seen the joke before and it's a shitty repost.
And sure, the repost bullshit is fair. I'm not saying that all the reposts are good content. What I'm saying is devRant has always been full of reposts - they just weren't reposts in the early days. The quality of content is the same.
There's also the common misconception that your posts need to be directly related to tech to post on devRant. This is a myth propagated by 0 IQ heathens that don't read any further than the name of the application. Your posts can be anything that isn't prohibited, like porn, spam, and, importantly, politics (commonly overlooked rule)
"All the memes are just too much". Oh you poor fucking baby, let me pour you a healthy serving of pity juice. First of all, you can turn off the memes category, and while they will still find their way to your feed, the concentration will be much lower and it will once again be bearable for your pitiful, weak little soul. Do you seriously get annoyed that severely by shitty posts that you need to leave the app altogether, or do you just want the attention of being a "cool hipster that hates on xyz"?
"This place is just filled with hate! Why can't you just respect xyz technology, it isn't actually that bad!"
This is probably the most stupid fucking thing you could possibly ejaculate from your fingers into whatever device you are using to type. Welcome to devRant, we hate on shit. That's at our core. No, xyz technology ISN'T actually that bad, you're correct. But we're here to tear it apart because it probably has frustrated us in the past. I fucking hate JS because it was my first language and it confused the shit out of me. JS is a great language. But I still talk shit about it, and that's what we're here to do.
Like seriously, I know a lot of people post stuff they're proud of here, and then they're met with "Would be great if you didn't use xyz tech", and that hurts, but holy shit, this is devRant. If you're sensitive to criticism, or even just straight up being made fun of, don't post shit that you're proud of. You won't have a good time. It's just not what we do here.
Quick interlude before the conclusion, "My girlfriend dumped me after I named a class after her. She felt I treated her like an object." is also on the first page of all-time most popular posts.
In conclusion, devRant has not changed. Reposts have been a nuisance since day 0, and just because reposts look different these days doesn't mean the quality of content has decreased in any manner. The two main sources of your frustration are the volume of low-quality posts (Mind you, not the concentration of them, but the volume of them) and your own prejudices about the platform. You're looking back with rose-tinted glasses.
Here are some tips for a more enjoyable experience:
-Make sure you have the "Hide reposts" setting ENABLED in settings. Any posts marked as repost will be hidden in your feed, pulling down the concentration of low-quality posts.
-Keep to the algo sorting method. Obviously, algo is a bot, and there's still gonna be some shit content in there anyways, but if you're in recent, you are absolutely guaranteed to see low-quality posts. It's unfiltered.
-Keep in mind that what you consider a "quality" post is not what others consider a "quality" post. Just because you don't like memes doesn't mean memes are poor content. There are people here who have never seen the bobby tables comic. And they deserve the same experience we got when discovering dev humor.
-Don't be a prick. And if you cannot help yourself, leave. Ironically, you're making the site worse by complaining about how bad the site is. You can always come back if you aren't a prick anymore. And you can leave permanently if you choose as well.
-Downvote and move on. You're not doing anything but making yourself more aggravated by leaving a shitty comment about how shitty the shitty post is.
-Think critically. Obviously optional, and I know not many people like to use their brain when a phone is suspended between their hands, but if you want a better experience, remember to use your head and not to lose it.21 -
Second semester
Java - OOP Course
We had to write a game, an arkanoid clone
Neat shit
And a fun course, mad respect to the Prof.
BUT
Most students, including me had this ONE bug where the ball would randomly go out of the wall boundaries for no clear reason.
A month passed, sleepless nights, no traces.
Two months later. Same shit. Grades going down (HW grades) because it became more and more common, yet impossible to track down.
3 months later, we had to submit the HW for the last time which included features like custom level sets, custom blocks and custom layouts.
So before we submit the game for review, they had pre-defined level sets that we had to include for testing sake.
I loaded that.
The bug is back.
But
REPRODUCIBLE.
OMG.
So I started setting up breakpoints.
And guess what the issue was.
FLOATING FUCKING POINT NUMBERS
(Basically the calculations were not as expected)
Changing to Ints did it's job and the bug was officially terminated.
Most satisfying night yet.
Always check your float number calculations as it's never always what you expect.
Lesson learned, use Ints whenever possible.18 -
I am bloody sick of being on my own.
I was the sole dev at the last few jobs I've held, with the exception of API Guy -- who didn't really help much, and who got fired / quit six months after I started. Every other job I've either been the only dev, or the only web dev. (Exception:My boss at my previous job was a Rails dev, but he has zero time to code, and was significantly less experiened so he could only rarely help anyway.)
But now I'm in a company with a bunch of other devs, and they're all ostensibly senior devs, so you'd think I should be able to ask questions, right? And get answers? that actually help? like "Hey, you built this; how does it work?" No bloody way.
So far every time I've asked someone for help, they've been incompetent. I asked about what a few flags did, and got an answer that basically said "you just gotta know. oh, and the labels aren't up to date, so don't trust what they say." I asked the head of the "product team" about a ticket that he wrote, and he changed what it meant four times within two days. I asked about another, and he said "oh, that isn't reproduceable." Thanks. I asked about mailers, and got two very different, very incompete walkthroughs from the more senior devs (9+ years on this codebase) that didn't help. I asked two people about how users and roles work, and still have no idea what kind of user (there are like twelve?) is what, what roles even exist, or how to check for permissions. `@current_user` is a thing, but idfk what it holds since that can change considerably, and there's an impersonation feature that changes how it works, too. I ask the product guy again about where to link something, and he has no idea. I ask said product guy about what this feature needs to do, and he doesn't know. I ask what the legal team needs, and i get nothing. I ask the designer where the goddamn CSS lives, and he doesn't know; he apparently just puts it wherever he feels like, even if it's a completely unrelated stylesheet. As long as it works, right?
I ask very simple and straighforward questions, and it takes them forever to get back to me saying what amounts to "idk, ask someone else."
This feels like the same crap all over again, except now there are a bunch of devs I can ask that give me basically the same answers as the sales people always did. Always "idk" or a confusing mess of an 'answer' that skips most/all of the important bits. At least these people don't [usually] contradict themselves.
So, @Root is all alone, again.
And currounded by incompetence.
Again.
For fuck's sake.
Can't I catch a break?19 -
Sometimes I wish I was allowed to just strangle my colleagues...
Example from the 'code base':
try:
do_something()
except Exception as e:
log(e)
do_something()
When I asked why they would redo the same call right after it failed I was told that 'It works the second time because it takes time to raise the Exception '.
Bitch, you've got a race condition in your sensitive banking software. You know it's there. Do you really want to trust the time needed to raise your exception will always be enough to synch that dumpster fire you call code?
Show some fucking respect for your craft and fix that shit. But of course they won't, because it will work flawlessly until it suddenly stops working. Taking down who knows what in this damn, undocumenred monolith with it....
Sometimes I'm honestly afraid to trust banks with my money.7 -
I was a good programmer.
My teachers always impressed by work..
I was like coming up on my own solutions not from books. Never remembered any algo but still the one who solve mostly every problems
Well then..
joined companies after college.
I thought I will learn so many new things..
Yes i learned but I'm feeling like I'm losing the spirit of problem solving
I'm just doing same thing, same logic, making similar kind of application with just little difference.
Nothing is like i'm making something new... All I'm doing is using predefined java and android method..
To create some predefined designs and working.
Fucking similar client requirements.
Seems like time to quit job and dedicate myself toward research
I know it's a boring rant... I'm just fucking
*frustrated*
For some
Hope hope = new Hope() ;15 -
Timezones. So, general rules are:
1. If you don't store timezone, always use and assume UTC. Databases, backends, whatever you use, all time must be kept be in UTC.
2. If you store timezones, ensure you store them everywhere and don't drop them anywhere.
3. It's always better to ignore backend server time in favor of database's `now().` Having a single source of truth makes time consistent (if it's the same database, obviously). If you combine backend time and database time, you likely get a violation of causality.
I've just spent a couple of hours investigating "weird random one-hour time drifts on updates." Guys violated all three rules above:
- they didn't store the timezone;
- their servers had inconsistent timezones. Java was in +XX., while the server itself in UTC. On one host, they forgot to put JVM in the same timezone;
- they dropped the timezone because they thought it was the same everywhere, so there was no point in serializing it.
13 -
I feel the need to take a different approach to this week's rant. I think someone needs to defend teachers, for a number of reasons. Obviously this is probably out of place on devRant but it is a kind of rant against those who think they know everything and have nothing to learn.
1) Teachers are not industry specialists. They do not spend their lives keeping on top of the latest framework or project management methodology or code management tool. They are educators and that brings its own set of out of hours challenges and training exercises.
2) They have a course to teach and have probably used the same one for quite some time. Years probably. They (should) teach the fundamentals of programming not a particular language or syntax or quirk. Those fundamentals don't really change. Logic, problem solving, precision, structures, etc.
3) They need to provide a course which will cater for different skill levels. There are always class members who are bored because it's too easy and others who struggle in any subject.
4) Teaching is like any profession - there are really, really good ones, OK ones and there are shit ones.
5) They have probably never developed a detailed project or solution in their lives. They don't know the pitfalls and challenges that teams face in this kind of environment. Should they - maybe. But the probably don't.
I think that's all... I'm not a teacher (although I did fancy the idea at a time) but just feel they get a rough ride sometimes (particularly on here).4 -
FUCKING HELL
My sister has that Vaio laptop from 2012 and she wanted me to "clean it up"... You get the deal. I ran the bios and booted it up from my external SSD setup so I don't have to bother with her bloody Windows fucking 7. When I'm finished deleting some garbage she managed to accumulate on her disk I wanted to switch back to Windows to properly uninstall bloatware she had. AND THEN OT FUCKING STRUCK ME. Can't load bios. F keys don't do shit. Delete doesn't either. The bloody "ASSIST" button is as useless as always. Since the computer is so slow I'm gonna waste a whole day trying to fix it and in the end she will be like: "oh, it took you so long!". Why Vaio, why can't you just get over the fact that some people actually use BIOS and make it somehow ACCESSIBLE? It's the same shit every time I try to do anything with that laptop. I'm always getting shit on from Sony as if I paid them to fuck me. One last time. VAIO, FUCK YOU.4 -
I had to open the desktop app to write this because I could never write a rant this long on the app.
This will be a well-informed rebuttal to the "arrays start at 1 in Lua" complaint. If you have ever said or thought that, I guarantee you will learn a lot from this rant and probably enjoy it quite a bit as well.
Just a tiny bit of background information on me: I have a very intimate understanding of Lua and its c API. I have used this language for years and love it dearly.
[START RANT]
"arrays start at 1 in Lua" is factually incorrect because Lua does not have arrays. From their documentation, section 11.1 ("Arrays"), "We implement arrays in Lua simply by indexing tables with integers."
From chapter 2 of the Lua docs, we know there are only 8 types of data in Lua: nil, boolean, number, string, userdata, function, thread, and table
The only unfamiliar thing here might be userdata. "A userdatum offers a raw memory area with no predefined operations in Lua" (section 26.1). Essentially, it's for the API to interact with Lua scripts. The point is, this isn't a fancy term for array.
The misinformation comes from the table type. Let's first explore, at a low level, what an array is. An array, in programming, is a collection of data items all in a line in memory (The OS may not actually put them in a line, but they act as if they are). In most syntaxes, you access an array element similar to:
array[index]
Let's look at c, so we have some solid reference. "array" would be the name of the array, but what it really does is keep track of the starting location in memory of the array. Memory in computers acts like a number. In a very basic sense, the first sector of your RAM is memory location (referred to as an address) 0. "array" would be, for example, address 543745. This is where your data starts. Arrays can only be made up of one type, this is so that each element in that array is EXACTLY the same size. So, this is how indexing an array works. If you know where your array starts, and you know how large each element is, you can find the 6th element by starting at the start of they array and adding 6 times the size of the data in that array.
Tables are incredibly different. The elements of a table are NOT in a line in memory; they're all over the place depending on when you created them (and a lot of other things). Therefore, an array-style index is useless, because you cannot apply the above formula. In the case of a table, you need to perform a lookup: search through all of the elements in the table to find the right one. In Lua, you can do:
a = {1, 5, 9};
a["hello_world"] = "whatever";
a is a table with the length of 4 (the 4th element is "hello_world" with value "whatever"), but a[4] is nil because even though there are 4 items in the table, it looks for something "named" 4, not the 4th element of the table.
This is the difference between indexing and lookups. But you may say,
"Algo! If I do this:
a = {"first", "second", "third"};
print(a[1]);
...then "first" appears in my console!"
Yes, that's correct, in terms of computer science. Lua, because it is a nice language, makes keys in tables optional by automatically giving them an integer value key. This starts at 1. Why? Lets look at that formula for arrays again:
Given array "arr", size of data type "sz", and index "i", find the desired element ("el"):
el = arr + (sz * i)
This NEEDS to start at 0 and not 1 because otherwise, "sz" would always be added to the start address of the array and the first element would ALWAYS be skipped. But in tables, this is not the case, because tables do not have a defined data type size, and this formula is never used. This is why actual arrays are incredibly performant no matter the size, and the larger a table gets, the slower it is.
That felt good to get off my chest. Yes, Lua could start the auto-key at 0, but that might confuse people into thinking tables are arrays... well, I guess there's no avoiding that either way.13 -
Always the same story:
Marketing: hey I'm gonna do a demo to a customer. They were asking for feature XYZ. That's ready on thr staging server right? Do you think I could use the staging server for the demo?
Devs: well feature XYZ is not 100% done. Basically just feature X is done, and it still has a few bugs. The deadline ain't for another month, since we gotta finish ABC first. I guess you could use the staging, but it has a lot of bugs.
Marketing: perfect!
*after presentation*
Marketing: the staging had so many bugs! Why didn't you tell me?! It was so embarrassing showing it to new customers! Anyway, they loved the new feature. We need it to be ready ASAP.
Devs: What?! That's gonna mess up with our schedule. You know what? Fine, but feature ABC will have to wait another month.
Marketing: Well, it'd be ideal if we could do both...
Devs: Pay for more devs or dor extra hours.
Marketing: Just do XYZ. It's a pity that you'll have to push back ABC but it's fine, XYZ is more important.
(I might ask, if it was so important, why didn't you notice so in the meeting where we had decided that ABC would be prioritized?)
*tons of working hours later*
Devs: There, we finished XYZ.
Marketing: Yay! Wow, this month we'll have two major features done: ABC and XYZ!
Devs: No, ABC is not done yet.
Marketing: What? But the deadline was this week.
Devs: It was, but then you decided to prioritize XYZ and we said we had to push back ABC to get XYZ ready, and you agreed.
Marketing: Did we? Fine. But do it quick.
Marketing and their mood swings.6 -
To those that think they can't make it.
To those that are put down by those that don't understand you.
And to those that have never had a dream come true.
Not a rant, but the story of how I got into programming
I've always been into tech/electronics. I remember being told once that when I was 3, I used to take plug sockets to pieces. When I was 7, I built a computer with my dad.
There isn't a thing in my room that hasn't been dismantled and put back together again. Except for the things that weren't put back together again ;)
When I was 15, I got a phone for Christmas. It was a pretty crappy phone, the LG P350 (optimus ME). But I loved it all the same.
However I knew it could do a lot more. It ran a bloated, slow version of Android 2.2.
So I went searching, how can I make it faster, how to make it do more. And I found a huge community around Android ROMs. Obviously the first thing I did was flashed this ROM. Sure, there were bugs, but I was instantly in love with it. My phone was freed.
From there I went on to exploring what else can be done.
I wanted to learn how to script, so over the weekend I wrote a 1000 line batch (Windows cmd) script that would root the phone and flash a recovery environment onto it. Pretty basic. Lots of switch statements, but I was proud of it. I'd achieved something. It wasn't new to the world, but it was my first experience at programming.
But it wasn't enough, I needed more.
So I set out to actually building the roms. I installed Linux. I wanted to learn how to utilise Linux better, so I rewrote my script in bash.
By this time, I'd joined a team for developing on similar spec'd phones. Without the funds to by new devices, we began working on more radical projects.
Between us, we ported newer kernels to our devices. We rebased much of the chipset drivers onto newer equivalents to add new features.
And then..
Well, it was exam season. I was suffering from personal issues (which I will not detail), and that, with the work on Android, I ended up failing the exams.
I still passed, but not to the level I expected.
So I gave up on school, and went head first into a new kind of development. "continue doing what you love. You'll make it" is what I told myself.
I found python by contributing to an IRC bot. I learnt it by reading the codebase. Anything I didn't understand, I researched. Anything I wanted to do, google was there to help me through it.
Then it was exam season again. Even though I'd given up on school, I was still going. It was easier to stay in than do anything about it.
A few weeks before the exams, I had a panic attack. I was behind on coursework, and I knew I would do poorly on exams.
So I dropped out.
I was disappointed, my family was disappointed.
So I did the only thing I felt I could do. I set out to get a job as a developer.
At this stage, I'd not done anything special. So I started aiming bigger. Contributing to projects maintained by Sony and Google, learning from them. Building my own projects to assist with my old Android friends.
I managed to land a contract, however due to the stresses at home, I had to drop it after a month.
Everything was going well, I felt ready to get a full time job as a developer, after 2 years of experience in the community.
Then I had to wake up.
Unfortunately, my advisors (I was a job seeker at the time) didn't understand the potential of learning to be a developer. With them, it's "university for a skilled job".
They see the word "computer" on a CV, they instantly say "tech support".
I played ball, I did what I could for them. But they'd always put me down, saying I wasn't good enough, that I'd never get a job.
I hated them. I'd row with them every other day.
By God, I would prove them wrong.
And then I found them. Or, to be more precise, they found me. A startup in London got in contact with me. They seemed like decent people. I spoke with their developers, and they knew their stuff, these were people that I can learn from.
I travelled 4 hours to go for an interview, then 4 hours back.
When I got the email saying they'd move me to London, I was over the moon.
I did exactly what everyone was telling me I couldn't do.
1.5 years later, I'm still working with them. We all respect each other, and we all learn from each other.
I'm ever grateful to them for taking a shot with me. I had no professional experience, and I was by no means the most skilled individual they interviewed.
Many people have a dream. I won't lie, I once dreamed of working at Google. But after the journey I've been through, I wouldn't have where I am now any other way. Though, in time, I wish to share this dream with another.
I hope that all of you reach your dreams too.
Sorry for the long post. The details are brief, but there are only 5k characters ;)23 -
I had been a "hobby" programmer for well over a decade, with my primary career being in repair or a "technician". I had taught myself dozens of languages because it was fun, but never really accomplished much.
I was laid off from my job as a technician and I found myself listless and without purpose. I started doing development again on random things to pass the time and I ended up volunteering as a developer for a game I had played for years.
At the same time I had an uncle who encouraged me to consider software as a career. These two things gave me the confidence to apply for a local software job I saw on Indeed.
They called me pretty quickly, and I was brutally honest. "No, I don't have a degree. I'm self-taught. I have no professional experience really."
I got a proficiency exam anyway and I took it - apparently doing well enough on it that the CTO called me a week later. We had a long talk and I finally asked him why he called me.
He told me that while a degree means something, the passion to learn this job means more to him. It was a month before I was offered the position, and I graciously accepted it.
We had a call about my compensation before starting. It was rather low, but we both agreed that my skill level was quite an unknown.
A year later and my pay was bumped up a sizable amount. My skills are defined now and growing rapidly as new challenges are sent my way. I went from a naive hobbyist to a professional in a short period of time.
I realized that I was always a professional. I had a desire to learn and a desire to do things the right way. I may not have known what to call things. I didn't know some of the design patterns I had used over the years were standards that had names and meaning.
I basically work two jobs now. My full-time job and also on the game that helped propel my career forward and gave me the confidence to reach for it.
As for my hobby? I turned to electronics and the maker community. It's a nice marriage with my programming skill set, and I never knew how rewarding a blinking LED would be. :)4 -
Welp, time to ditch devRant
I don't mind green dots posting the same things over and over (and let's be honest, everyone had some of those complaints when we started coding), but what's been happening lately with spam and bots is just too much.
Thanks for the ride @dfox, it's been good while it lasted. Too bad I never got a dev duck tho, they were always out of stock :(18 -
My second year of high-school, we started having class in computer science. I was really looking forward to it cause I always wanted to learn programming.
On first sight it appeared that the professor which taught the class knew something, he looked like a genuine geek with those dorky glasses, briefcase and pants like Steve Urkel, but after couple of his lessons you could see he had no real dev experience and just basic understanding of programming in theory. He was more reading stuff from the book than he was trying to explain them to students and give some real world examples.
So it was just one these days, everybody got back from vacation, it's hot outside, the guy is just reading sentences from his book, half of students talk with each other and other half doesn't give a fuck about him or his class. Pretty sure I was the only one trying to listen to him and learn something from his recitals.
All of a sudden he notices the atmosphere in the classroom, slams the book shut, gives out couple of F-s to the loudest students and yells out loud "NONE OF YOU IN THIS ROOM WILL EVER ACCOMPLISH ANYTHING IN YOUR LIFE, BARE ALONE IN PROGRAMMING"
At first I felt like shit, but soon after that I started thinking "who the hell are you to tell me what I could or will accomplish in my life". Couple weeks later I've bought myself a first book in programming and started learning C++ late at night since I understood that I won't learn anything about programming in that school. Two years later I was correcting this same professor with his claims on a whiteboard in front of a whole class.
Today, seven years after his words I'm a developer living in foreign country with what I could say somewhat a solid experience and understanding of how both software and web are build, while that same professor still recites to his pupils difference between assembly and object code, while praying nobody asks him where and how these are used. For maybe a quarter of my paycheck. So much about his psychic powers..4 -
POSTMORTEM
"4096 bit ~ 96 hours is what he said.
IDK why, but when he took the challenge, he posted that it'd take 36 hours"
As @cbsa wrote, and nitwhiz wrote "but the statement was that op's i3 did it in 11 hours. So there must be a result already, which can be verified?"
I added time because I was in the middle of a port involving ArbFloat so I could get arbitrary precision. I had a crude desmos graph doing projections on what I'd already factored in order to get an idea of how long it'd take to do larger
bit lengths
@p100sch speculated on the walked back time, and overstating the rig capabilities. Instead I spent a lot of time trying to get it 'just-so'.
Worse, because I had to resort to "Decimal" in python (and am currently experimenting with the same in Julia), both of which are immutable types, the GC was taking > 25% of the cpu time.
Performancewise, the numbers I cited in the actual thread, as of this time:
largest product factored was 32bit, 1855526741 * 2163967087, took 1116.111s in python.
Julia build used a slightly different method, & managed to factor a 27 bit number, 103147223 * 88789957 in 20.9s,
but this wasn't typical.
What surprised me was the variability. One bit length could take 100s or a couple thousand seconds even, and a product that was 1-2 bits longer could return a result in under a minute, sometimes in seconds.
This started cropping up, ironically, right after I posted the thread, whats a man to do?
So I started trying a bunch of things, some of which worked. Shameless as I am, I accepted the challenge. Things weren't perfect but it was going well enough. At that point I hadn't slept in 30~ hours so when I thought I had it I let it run and went to bed. 5 AM comes, I check the program. Still calculating, and way overshot. Fuuuuuuccc...
So here we are now and it's say to safe the worlds not gonna burn if I explain it seeing as it doesn't work, or at least only some of the time.
Others people, much smarter than me, mentioned it may be a means of finding more secure pairs, and maybe so, I'm not familiar enough to know.
For everyone that followed, commented, those who contributed, even the doubters who kept a sanity check on this without whom this would have been an even bigger embarassement, and the people with their pins and tactical dots, thanks.
So here it is.
A few assumptions first.
Assuming p = the product,
a = some prime,
b = another prime,
and r = a/b (where a is smaller than b)
w = 1/sqrt(p)
(also experimented with w = 1/sqrt(p)*2 but I kept overshooting my a very small margin)
x = a/p
y = b/p
1. for every two numbers, there is a ratio (r) that you can search for among the decimals, starting at 1.0, counting down. You can use this to find the original factors e.x. p*r=n, p/n=m (assuming the product has only two factors), instead of having to do a sieve.
2. You don't need the first number you find to be the precise value of a factor (we're doing floating point math), a large subset of decimal values for the value of a or b will naturally 'fall' into the value of a (or b) + some fractional number, which is lost. Some of you will object, "But if thats wrong, your result will be wrong!" but hear me out.
3. You round for the first factor 'found', and from there, you take the result and do p/a to get b. If 'a' is actually a factor of p, then mod(b, 1) == 0, and then naturally, a*b SHOULD equal p.
If not, you throw out both numbers, rinse and repeat.
Now I knew this this could be faster. Realized the finer the representation, the less important the fractional digits further right in the number were, it was just a matter of how much precision I could AFFORD to lose and still get an accurate result for r*p=a.
Fast forward, lot of experimentation, was hitting a lot of worst case time complexities, where the most significant digits had a bunch of zeroes in front of them so starting at 1.0 was a no go in many situations. Started looking and realized
I didn't NEED the ratio of a/b, I just needed the ratio of a to p.
Intuitively it made sense, but starting at 1.0 was blowing up the calculation time, and this made it so much worse.
I realized if I could start at r=1/sqrt(p) instead, and that because of certain properties, the fractional result of this, r, would ALWAYS be 1. close to one of the factors fractional value of n/p, and 2. it looked like it was guaranteed that r=1/sqrt(p) would ALWAYS be less than at least one of the primes, putting a bound on worst case.
The final result in executable pseudo code (python lol) looks something like the above variables plus
while w >= 0.0:
if (p / round(w*p)) % 1 == 0:
x = round(w*p)
y = p / round(w*p)
if x*y == p:
print("factors found!")
print(x)
print(y)
break
w = w + i
Still working but if anyone sees obvious problems I'd LOVE to hear about it.36 -
Story Time. Inspired by another rant.
Context: I'm In a coding camp years ago, it's the first day.
We're doing introductions (name, why you're here, etc). Always fun to do that....
The folks running the camp are excited to introduce a student who also at one point was a teacher for some sort of girl power coding organization. So this raises questions, why would someone who teaches be a student in this camp?? And even a bigger question is raised when this person introduces themselves for a long time, and as an aside puts down the girls she taught in this program they taught ... like who does that?
horribleLady does that ...
A few hours later horribleLady asks her 12th question of the day (we haven't even started talking about code). Before she asks her question actually says:
“I know, I’m going to be a problem.” -laugh-
🚨🚨🚨 ヽ ( ꒪д꒪ )ノ 🚨🚨🚨
Fast forward to group projects and she's this sort of emotional storm, tears, and a sort of angry shouting that isn't angry enough for some folks to say she's yelling at people ... but she is. Fortunately I'm not in the first group project with her, but because we're all working in the same room we all get to see the train-wreck unfold.
The moment she doesn't get something (all the time) everyone in her group has to STOP and figure out what they're going to do about it, then again STOP because she thinks someone is doing something different than what was planned. STOP STOP STOP STOP STOP.
In a way, everything had to go through her, she didn’t declare it that way, she didn't present herself as any sort of authority, she would just stop everyone the moment she thought anything was wrong, or she didn't understand it (all the time), and either inject herself or demand help from her team. Everyone around her had to be drawn into whatever problem she had. It was horrific to watch.
Private slack channels would light up like crazy with "OMG", "WTF", "I DON'T UNDERSTAND HER", "FUCK" and "SHE"S HOW OLD!?!?"
So finally it happens to me and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly (capable guy, nice dude, pretty sure he was high all the time).... we're teamed up to work with horribleLady. Thankfully for just one day. I accept this because I figure one day with her is enough penance to try to avoid any further contact later on.
My approach is straight stone face. I refuse to respond to her sulking, or sighing, or general emotional bait she throws out constantly. I saw other students unwittingly take her bait (they were trying to be helpful) only to have her crap all over them with her frustrations or whatever it is is going on.
Still we're teamed up with her her for the day so I'm going to be a good team member and I explain what guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I are doing / trying.... and so forth. But she's just too upset that she's even assigned to work with us, and tells me I'm just not doing it right, and her explanations about how we're not doing it right makes less than 0 sense. I ask her to show me what she means but she won't type anything on her keyboard, she'd just talk about how she’s thinking conceptually in circles and sulk about it rather than listen. I don't respond to any of her shit and say "I'm going to try this." and guyWhoDoesPotConstantly and I just keep working.
She would later call the instructor over and complain to him for a while and say: "These guys just get it, they're not helping me, I want to be assigned to another group." She doesn't get her way so she just moves to another table in front of us.
After that day I figured it was a great time to ask .... to NEVER be assigned to anything with her because "If I told her what I thought it would just get a lot worse." I got my way ;)
Other students weren't so lucky. Tears, sulking, her special way of yelling at people that somehow never got her in trouble (she should have been kicked out of the program) just kept going on. She refused to even present one group project she deemed not good enough despite the fact that she contributed nothing functional to the project that the TA's didn't write for her...
Amidst the stories she would tell to students was one of how she sued her totally sexist/racist/evil former employer. She never said what came of it, but that combined with her inability to do things reminded me of a rant I read on here.
I sometimes fear being hired someplace and walking in my first day to find I'm assigned to work with .... horribleLady. In this scenario she managed to get hired and they're too afraid to fire her so they assign the new guy to work with horribleLady...
I've no idea what happened to her after the camp.
(I rewrote this rant a few times because it kept circling back to a larger story about the coding camp I wrote about a few years ago, so if this seemed sort of broken up and wonky, yeah it was / is / yeah)4 -
$work: Ey @Root, make this super simple thing.
$work: No, not like that.
$work: It also needs to do A, B, and C.
$work: No, not there. You should build it somewhere else, but I won't tell you where.
$work: You need to build out F and G, too.
$work: What do you mean you don't have the data? Just ask support drone #3. (who directs me to #2, and that one to #8 who doesn't know, and that one to #12 who won't answer)
$work: Why can't I do K, Y, or S? You should be able to infer these from the mind of whoever wrote the ticket by its wording, despite no mention of them whatsoever.
$work: Are you done yet? It's a super simple ask!7 -
For fucks sake, just because you don't know anything besides JS, you don't have to constantly complain how it's "so fucked up"!
Yeah there's a lot of frameworks. So what? Python has 50+ wsgi frameworks just for server-side apps, Linux has literary hundreds of desktop environments, C++ has over 30 actively-developed UI frameworks, and let's not even get started on CMSs or game engines. And each language comes with its own dependency management or two, NPM discourages static linking & bundling dependencies until the very end, while some others only recommend dynamically linking widely-available dependencies & always bundling the remaining ones.
Software development is constantly evolving, and for most time there's no right or wrong approach. And when one approach is chosen over another, there's a reason for that. Imagine you just found a perfect library for your use case, but some idiot decided to only offer minified code with bundled jQuery? Or a different idiot made it impossible to have multiple versions of a dependency on your system without resorting to one of various third-party hacks?
Every language has a ton of various frameworks & libraries that ultimately do the same thing, every language has a bunch of design choices you probably don't understand at first, and every language was made with a purpose and the fact that you're using it proves it achieved that.
Last but not least, all devs had to learn about quirks in various languages, and they're fucking tired when someone who barely knows a language tries to act smart going "ahaha how the fuck 0.1 + 0.2 isn't 0.3".10 -
FLOYD IS HERE 😎
Gather around kids, it's story time.
So my first breakup left me so damaged and I was in darkest phase of my life. I was alone. Physically, mentally, and emotionally. I went for therapy and spearheaded into success and grew in life soooo fucking much.
31st December 2016, I first joined dR and since the first day this place felt home. Met some of brightest mind and most amazing souls here (sadly many left the place).
I used to shit post and rant a lot. But I loved everyone here. But then I don't quite remember, but I decided to quit this place as community started to grow. Many others left as well.
I came back here in 2019 IIRC and started all over again. Got along well with new members and started having fun.
I used to crib and cry about being underpaid. Lost a kickass Europe job due to pandemic.
I will skip what all happened between me and @Scout but she is a sweetheart, though very rough and brutal with me at times (actually very often), but she is so selfish for me and cares for me that I couldn't resist but listen to her always. A lifelong friend for sure :)
I used to rant about my dumb office colleagues. Definitely not the sharpest minds but good people at heart (which I did not realise).
So in October 2020, I earned a new job and my company retained me with a 100% raise and a promotion making me lead of product innovation and UX.
November end I met a girl in professional context on LinkedIn who was conducting a workshop. Being hungry for learning, meeting new people and kill my lockdown boredom, I singed up.
Now I went for December break and my colleagues sent me a gift hamper when they came to know I got a promotion. I felt bad that I ranted about them so I deleted my account and also wanted a social detox.
Post the workshop, I started conversing casually with the girl I met. She was married. But things hit off. Eventually in February end I confessed that I had feelings for her and in next few days she reciprocated. I told her I was aware of her marital status and it's okay if nothing happens between us. Then she started to open up of how she was with one guy for 17 years and was abused in everyway and wanted to separate but never had the courage and all.
She decided to file for paperwork and then be with me. Things got messy when her family got involved thinking I was causing all of it.
She went back to her partner and I realised I had some emotional and mental issues of a person's past that bothered me. But we were overcoming it. Soon the honeymoon period started phasing out.
Her family started giving me death threats. We went underground even further. More arguments and fights between us.
@Scout kept telling me I was stupid and I disregarded her. I feel like an idiot for not listening to her.
That girl kept gaslighting me, hurting me intentionally, scratching the surface made me realise how broken and damaged she was. She lied to me and created fake persona of herself to make me fall for her. Everything was lie. Literally.
I felt horrible for trusting her. My trauma relapsed and I started having crazy panic attacks leading to self harm and being suicidal. That girl was drugged all the time with psychological medicines and very poor character & personality in general (I don't want to judge anyone but just stating the facts).
Eventually she just disappeared and I was like fuck this. Earlier, after every fight, she used to show fake affection and I used to melt but not this time.
I was like fuck this shit. I have some super amazing friends like @kiki who helped me overcome this. I started going for therapy and realised what all areas I need to improve. My therapist is soooo brilliant, she understands the root cause instantly and also knows how to fix it. And the same day I and both my parents were COVID-19 positive. Last few weeks were dark and haunting.
Further more, the girl comes back after a week and then acts as a 'nice girl'.
Initially fake affection, then drama, followed by making me guilt trip, then threats, and now blaming me.
I kept ignoring her calls (50 to 70 calls in a day), emails, left her unread on Telegram, and everything I could do to ignore her without blocking her. I started gaining my happiness back.
During this mess, I lost 5+ KG of weight. She has no friends in her mid 30s. Knows no life or survival skills. Her family hates her, no career, no emotional or mental maturity, literally nothing. Insanely dumb and toxic manipulative person who is not even worth being called an ex. As per her everyone around her is an asshole except her. Every time something happened, she used to blame and bad mouth the other person. Now she is doing with me. In all her life situations, either she was a hero or a victim. One upped me all the time. Now that I see it, I hate myself for allowing it all of it and now having enough self worth to walk out of it earlier.
Continued in comments...56 -
Yesterday (or the day before that depending on your timezone and day-night schedule - this Friday) my OnePlus 6T arrived. After only 2 days of time between placing the order and actually getting the phone, quite impressive!
The DHL guy asked me upon receipt - is it the OnePlus 6T? - Yes it is!! - "An amazing device it is!", he said. And honestly.. he couldn't be more right.
I might be a bit biased on this because after all I did just spend €630 on this phone. But it feels so snappy, high quality, the 8GB of RAM is just.. it blows my mind. But I'm sure that the other reviews did this sort of jazz already.
The things that set this phone apart for me though were the following.
When I get a new phone or tablet, usually the first thing I do is rooting it. This one was no different, about an hour after receipt it was successfully rooted and loaded with Magisk. Currently I'm still in the phase of "getting to know the phone", wherein fuckups are usual. This time again being no different - I removed some apps and apparently did something to it that the search engines - both Google and DuckDuckGo - didn't quite like, as both of them would crash upon application launch. Me in full panic mode of course, desperately trying to find the stock ROM (which doesn't seem to be present in its usual form) or a new set of GApps (which didn't resolve the issue). OnePlus does seem to offer its OTA updates in zip archives though. So I downloaded its latest update (same as what was on the device) and applied it.
That's when the nerdgasm happened.
The "update" was simply a matter of going into the settings, tapping this and that and applying the update. No recovery, no unrooting, no nothing. The update just went like that despite the phone being rooted and just having had TWRP flashed to it. I always wanted this sort of thing, which even the Nexus couldn't offer - having the cake and eating it too. Being able to root the device and muck around with it while still being able to update the device timely without too many hurdles. This fucking thing does it!!!
That is to say, after my initial nerdgasm I did find that it bulldozed over my su binary (effectively unrooting the thing), custom emoji I've set (iOS 12 because fuck Google's most recent emoji set) and some other things. But those are easy to install back, much more so than it would've been to download a whole Android release and dirty flash it, as it was on the Nexus.
Other than that, battery life, dash charging (edit: on that topic, it does remain cool like a cucumber despite getting 15-20W of power jammed into it, quite impressive!), snappiness, the usual jazz.. eh, as I said earlier that's the usual reviewer stuff. But this feature of being able to upgrade the phone while it's modified, that's something which seems to be severely underrated by those.
Oh and during kernel builds, I couldn't quite get the source to work - probably due to my lack of experience with builds of Android kernels - but I did find that this phone actually exposes its kernel config through /proc/config.gz as it should. None of my MediaTek devices do this, so that's something that I found really appealing. Always nice to see when a manufacturer exposes this information to give you a stock sort of config that you can be rest assured will work configuration-wise. And it allows you to see what the stock kernel is actually built with, which again is really nice. I quite like this! It really encourages further development.11 -
If programming languages had honest slogans, what would they be?
C: If you want a horse, make sure you feed it, clean it and secure it yourself. No warranties.
C++: If you want a horse, you need to buy a circus along with it.
Java: Before you buy a horse - buy a piece of land, build a house in that land, build a barn beside the house & if you are not bankrupt yet, buy the horse and then put the horse in the barn.
C#: You don’t want a horse, but Microsoft wants you to have a horse. Now it’s up to you if you want Microsoft or not.
Swift: Don’t buy an overpriced Unicorn if all you wanted was a horse.
JavaScript: If you want to buy a horse & confidently ride it, make sure you read a book named "You don't know horse".
PHP: After enough optimization, your horse can compete the top most horses in the world; but deep down, you'll always know it's an ass.
Hack: Let's face it, even if you take the ass from the ass lovers and give them back a horse in exchange, not many will ride it.
Ruby: If you want a horse, make sure you ride it on top of rail roads, even if the horse can't run fast on rails.
Python: Don't ride your horse and eat your sandwich on the same line, until you indent it on the next line.
Bash: Your horse may shit everywhere, but at least it gets the job done.
R: You are the horse. R will ride you.
Got this from Quora.
https://quora.com/If-programming-la...7 -
So, there is this guy whose arguments on "How Apple is bad" are
1) "while copying files in Finder, you don't see a speed graph (like in Windows)"
2) "MacBooks don't have a Touchscreen"
3) "it's slow"
4) "you can't play games (like GTA V)"
5) "having app menus always on the top of the screen instead of in every window makes no sense"
Arguments on "why Linux is bad":
1) "it's ugly"
2) no gaming (same as point 4 above)
3)... And other biased irrelevant shit
Yet his amazing old Windows 10 computer with the most recent Insider build has only a 65% chance of booting on the first attempt. Almost nothing works properly on his hardware yet he always blames something unrelated to him.
Recently I was having trouble with the workplace wifi (for few minutes I wasn't having full speed like he on the other side of the room had), and his reaction "aha, it's your macOS, never working".
Like wtf. I don't hate Windows or I don't love Linux, but I night hate him for being an arrogant cunt and I want to punch his face.8 -
rant, but not an IT kind... okay, maybe not even a rant, more like depressive rambling:
in 3 days, I'll turn 29.
i'm living with my mom, in the apartment where I was born, in the room i've been living since I was born (with the exception of 2 attempts to move out which together lasted 9 months).
my theoretical monthly income should/could be around 4000€, based on my skills and experience.
but I'm a (manic)-depressive, chronically lonely idiot loser (and the manic phases come more and more rarely in recent years), so
my practical average monthly income fluctuates from 0 to about 200.
i am unable to keep a job for more than 4 months, so after being fired from about 20 or so of them since I was 18, it takes immense amounts of mental and emotional energy to even start looking for one now... so I usually don't.
i've been about 12000€ in debt for the past 8 or so years, half of which is just debt collector fees.
it's kinda funny, for years, i've been unable to solve a debt which theoretically amounts to 3 months of my theoretical achievable salary.
my father, who just left without a word of explanation when I was 18, has decided this is not viable anymore, so I'm supposed to move out by 10th of next month, "either to some cheap rooming house, or under the bridge, I don't care", as he put it.
I can't remember how it feels to exist a single hour without feeling existential dread and dreading each next day, not knowing what to do or if i'll even be able to try and do something, because this feeling is so strong that it often blocks me from being able to do anything. i just shiver most of the time that i'm awake, feeling like you feel few minutes before puking and crying at the same time. and that feeling is my "how are you?", "you know... normal".
i can't remember what it feels to feel any other way and can't even imagine it, and can't imagine that I'll ever achieve any less shit feeling.
literally all of my social contact consists of going out once to twice a month with the only 2 friends and 2 aquaintances I have who have the time and will to spend it with me.
oh, and hiding in my room, avoiding talking to my mom, because each time we talk she just reminds me what a piece of shit failure I am, and tells me how it's not that hard to change it, I just have to stop being lazy and start working for it.
she's... kind and caring about it, which somehow maybe makes it even worse.
i have about 10 almost complete game designs, each of them at least 50% more original and interesting (at least to me) than the things that are coming out for the past 10 years, being lauded as "the most original and unique".
I have been trying to make them, ANY of them, since I was 18, but I always lose all the drive and resolve and energy in like 4 months, because it's like trying to build a city on my own on a deserted island. too big for one person, but there was never anyone to help me. closest I ever got was one of my friends telling me "i've been thinking many times that i'd love to work on some project with you, if I had the time".
and second time, when I actually found an artist I was going to pay, and he was awesome, and after two weeks of me telling him how awesome what he does is and how it fits the project and my ideas perfectly, he backed out saying "i'm afraid I can't do the quality you require from me".
never ever in my life did I get actual help with something I actually wanted or tried to do.
i have no idea how it feels to have someone working with me on something I actually consider interesting and meaningful, on any of the things which I wanted to make, which made me learn programming.
I've learned graphics and animation and everything going into game making pipeline on my own because I realized nobody will ever help me, so I'll have to do all of it on my own.
I've tried to make a kickstarter once, but I started crying hysterically in the middle of writing it, because I felt like a begging piece of failure shit, even more than usual, so I deleted it.
most of people treat me like shit failure unworthy and undeserving of living, precisely as I myself know I deserve to be treated, because that's what I am, but when I ask for permission to kill myself, since I see no other solution to stop being a burden, they get angry at me that I'm just emotionally blackmailing them. when I afterwards ask them "so help me in any way to do any of the projects i want/need to do", they respond they've got no time for that.
when I talk about all of this, I get told to stop whining.
happy 29th birthday, me, a piece of shit who should've never survived this long, who should've never been born in the first place.
yay.
also, I know this is not the kind of crap that's supposed to be posted here, but i've got nowhere else. sorry.47 -
Hey Root, we have a high priority ticket for you! It's adding some columns to a report. Should be simple. Details are in the ticket.
First: reports are some of the most boring, drool-inducing drudgery i have ever worked on.
Second: Specs for these reports are a nightmare since everything is ... very indirectly tested, and the specs are everywhere but where you'd expect them to be, so it's a lot of spelunking and trial/error. It's also slow as beans.
Anyway. The ticket's details are in ... not the worst engrish i've ever seen, but it's bad enough that i have no idea what they're asking despite (thus far) five attempts at deciphering it. There's also a numbered list of "fields" to add, so you'd think it would be straightforward. It is not. Half the list is crossed out, and half of the remaining items are feature requests (in yet more engrish), not columns to add. Also, one of the actual fields is impossible as the data it's asking for is not recorded anywhere.
yeah...
I cringe every time I see this person's name as the reporter because it's always the same. and honestly, there are more of these engrish people every month, and believe me: it isn't just a language barrier...2 -
The more I work here the clearer it gets:
I just fucking can't make websites anymore.
I totally can't work on graphics, I can't transform a PSD into responsive HTML.
I fucking despise CSS, computers having different resolutions, having different browsers, doing mobile, doing iOS/safari which is always something extra.
I'm tired of not getting the appropriate resources and then people asking me why it just doesn't look the same.
BECAUSE IT'S NOT MY FUCKING JOB! I MAKE STUFF WORK, I DON'T MAKE IT LOOK PRETTY, I HATE PRETTY THINGS10 -
Ok, so when I inherit a Wordpress site I've really stopped expecting anything sane. Examples: evidence that the Wordpress "developer" (that term is used in the loosest sense possible) has thought about his/her code or even evidence that they're not complete idiots who wish to make my life hell going forwards.
Have a look at the screen shot below - this is from the theme footer, so loaded on every page. The screenshot only shows a small part of the file. IT LITERALLY HAS 3696 lines.
Firstly, lets excuse the frankly eye watering if statement to check for the post ID. That made me face palm myself immediately.
The insanity comes for the thousands of lines of JQuery code, duplicated to hell and back that changes the color of various dividers - that are scattered throughout the site.
To make things thousands of times worse, they are ALL HANDED CODED.
Even if JavaScript was the only way I could format these particular elements I certainly wouldn't duplicate the same code for every element. After copy and pasting that JQuery a couple of times and normal developer would think one word, pretty quickly - repetition.
When a good developer notes repetition ways to abstract crap away is the first thought that comes to mind.
Hell, when I was first learning to code god knows how long ago I always used functions to avoid repetition.
In this case, with a few seconds though this "developer" could have created a single JQuery handler and use data attributes within the HTML. Hell, as bad as that is, it's better than the monstrosity I'm looking at now.
I'm aware Wordpress is associated with bad developers due to it's low barrier to entry, but this site is something else.
The scary thing is that I know the agency that produced this. They are very large, use Wordpress exclusively and have some stupidly huge clients that would be know nationally.
Wordpress truly does attract some of the most awful "developers" and deserves it's reputation.
If you're a good developer and use Wordpress I feel sorry for you, as you're in small numbers from my experience.
Rant over, have vented a bit and feel better. Thanks Devrant.
6 -
!rant
Is it just me or does being a programmer sometimes feel like being a magician. It's such a weird profession. You're living in a bubble, nothing you create is physically tangible, yet anything is possible, and there is always more learn.
Most of the time it's art. Commenting out dead or obsolete code instead of removing it just because it feels like you put a little bit of yourself into it, even though it has no use anymore.
I sometimes wonder if there is any other profession out there that makes you ride the same rollercoaster of satisfaction, frustration, glory and defeat we've all been on.3 -
!dev but actual long rant - about the students in my grade.
TL;DR: 1 asshole in 10 people can ruin everything. Mobbing sucks. I dislike parties.
There's the word "Jahrgang" in Germany which means the people in the same school year as you. I'll refer to it as "my (collective) classmates" although we don't have classes anymore, rather courses and I also mean those I do not have courses with.
With that out of the way, let the rant begin.
It's often the case that people with high logical and intellectual skills (no being arrogant, other people categorize me like that) have a lack of social skills - or empathy.
I'm a kind of an outsider in a way that since 10th grade I stopped trying to attach myself to certain groups since I do not fit in there. I'm fine with that now. Nowadays I can at least socialize with other nerds.
Here's why I dislike the collective of my classmates. This year is my last school year and as always, a big group forms a spirit. They have a theme (superheroes - super boring). I didn't go to any party they threw and I don't plan to go to the graduation ceremony as well since it's an unofficial party and not a school event. I hate parties. I hate alc and drunken teenagers. I didn't attend the "Kursfahrt" - a kind of excursion that's like holidays with your course - mainly because I dislike my "Stammkurs" (main course).
Why? I had a friend in this course. She was short, geeky and I could actually talk to her. Yet some jerks (not intensely) bullied her because "she was awkward" and in the end, she switched school - also because of other reasons.
When she was gone, even those who didn't bully her and who are considered "nice" made fun of her and talked badly about her - and me hanging around with her. So since then, I avoid anything with them that's not 100% school related.
Now they're planning what we call "Abigag" - it's a joke/prank the graduates pull on the school and younger students, something funny like an entrance room full of balloons and many other things. Also, the "Abizeitung", the yearbook the graduates put out with articles about their courses, teacher ranking and quotes etc. Also, a cabaret evening from the graduates to collect money for the graduation party. Cool stuff actually. I thought about taking part.
I'd say my talents are creativity and computer stuff. So a friend chatted with me about nerdy pranks like a school-wide wallpaper change. Or releasing a fake password list of the teachers - claiming we hacked them - with puns and insiders about the teaches. He said he gotta invite me into the WhatsApp group of the Abi prank. Disclaimer: He's one of those people who are socialized but still able to talk with me. He's fine.
Well guess what he told me later:
They don't want me on the team since I distance myself from my classmates. I should either be fully one of them or not at all.
That's enough. Who distances whom? I thought they were happy to have me on board but horse shit! Stuck with ideologies from the 19th century.
They can lick my ***. I don't have anything against most of them in person but as a collective, they're just fucking stupid. I guess it wasn't even the majority saying they don't want me to help. It was probably just the small crew of leading and loud jerks. And no one would disagree with them saying "Why not? He wants to help?" (even if it was their opinion) - they don't have the brain or balls to say anything against the strong idiot leaders. They'll do great later in politics as an adult - they wouldn't criticize Hitler if they were under his "protection".
So I won't take part in making Abi pranks, - but also not the Paper and cabaret eve. They can go jerk off to being part of a huge collection of assholes - which I, in all my pride, am not part of other than on paper.
(Disclaimer: No critics to other outsiders but those who were engaged and responsible for the choice of not letting me help)
If anyone actually read this:
Who were/are you in school times?
A proud outsider like me? Party boi/girl? Engaged striver?25 -
My new fitbit reminds me take 250 steps each hour. When I do stop and take a walk, I find it helps my productivity, and I feel better. However, I'm not good at keeping to it.
It's always the same story.
"Quiet you, I'll get up and walk once I finish this one thing".
...
Another hour goes by.
If only I could keep to my own convictions.4 -
TLDR: SAP sucks. Don't ever work with it. Run away from it. Delete it from your memory. If your company works with it, quit. It's the best you can do.
A couple of weeks ago the group rant was "Story of your best/worst career choice" and I talked about the contract I signed. Even tho that is still true and I still feel like that, I think I got a new worst choice:
WORKING WITH SAP.
When I got this job I knew it would be SAP, but I didn't know what SAP was. I just thought "it's programming, how bad can it be?" OH BOII.
If only I would have done some FUCKING RESEARCH I would know this would be a mistake!!
And I knew I didn't want to work with this, I knew I wanted to be a web developer, but I STILL ACCEPTED THE JOB OH MAN WHAT WAS I THINKING I'M SO MAD.
Were I live we all have the same mentality when looking for the first job, which is to just accept anything you can get, because it's your first job, you need to work and to get experience, even if it's a bad job or if you know you won't like it. When my intership was ending, I told my parents I didn't want to stay there because they treat their employes like shit, and the salary is terrible. They told me to still accept it if they offered because I still need a job (this one was web tho) and experience.
So, of course, since I was looking for my first job, was told this my entire live, always thought like that and they were the first to contact me, I accepted it.
BIGGEST FUCKING MISTAKE!! DON'T THINK LIKE THIS!! AND STOP TELLING KIDS THIS!! IT'S NOT A GOOD MENTALITY!!!
ALSO DON'T WORK WITH SAP! EVER!24 -
People like this guy commentating are the main reason why evolution is still just a theory.
Let's take for example someone having a problem with their car not starting up.
Already seeing this guy's response would be:
"Personally I hate cars. Seems like its always they're broken. Have you just tried using your legs and run 40 kilometers to work every day?"
No I didn't you fucker, and you know why? Because it's not convenient. The same way how it's not convenient for me or any sane developer to drop to a command line and run custom query (which can be automated) every time I want to quickly check some values in development.
And no, the OP didn't ask for setup of this on production, the conversation kept on in comments below and this guy was still defending his productive idea.
26 -
I just tried to sign up to Instagram. I made a big mistake.
First up with Facebook related stuff is data. Data, data and more data. Initially when you sign up (with a new account, not login with Facebook) you're asked your real name, email address and phone number. And finally the username you'd like to have on the service. I gave them a phone number that I actually own, that is in my iPhone, my daily driver right now (and yes I have 3 Androids which all run custom ROMs, hold your keyboards). The email address is a usual for me, instagram at my domain. I am a postmaster after all, and my mail server is a catch-all one. For a setup like that, this is perfectly reasonable. And here it's no different, devrant at my domain. On Facebook even, I use fb at my domain. I'm sure you're starting to see a pattern here. And on Facebook the username, real name and email domain are actually the same.
So I signed up, with - as far as I'm aware - perfectly valid data. I submitted the data and was told that someone at Instagram will review the data within 24 hours. That's already pretty dystopian to me. It is now how you block bots. It is not how Facebook does it either, at least since last time I checked. But whatever. You'd imagine that regardless of the result, they'd let you know. Cool, you're in, or sorry, you're rejected and here's why. Nope.
Fast-forward to today when I recalled that I wanted to sign up to Instagram to see my girlfriend's pictures. So I opened Chromium again that I already use only for the rancid Facebook shit.. and it was rejected. Apparently the mere act of signing up is a Terms of Service violation. I have read them. I do not know which section I have violated with the heinous act of signing up. But I do have a hunch.
Many times now have I been told by ignorant organizations that I would be "stealing" their intellectual property, or business assets or whatever, just because I sent them an email from their name on my domain. It is fucking retarded. That is MY domain, not yours. Learn how email works before you go educate a postmaster. Always funny to tell them how that works. But I think that in this case, that is what happened.
So I appealed it, using a random link to something on Instagram's help section from a third-party blog. You know it's good when the third-party random blog is better. But I found the form and filled it in. Same shit all over again for info, prefilling be damned I guess. Minor convenience though, whatever.
I get sent an email in German, because apparently browsing through a VPS in Germany acting as a VPN means you're German. Whatever... After translating it, I found that it asks me to upload a picture of myself, holding a paper in my hands, on which I would have a confirmation code, my username, and my email address.. all hand-written. It must not be too dark, it must be clear, it must be in JPEG.. look, I just wanted to fucking sign up.
I sent them an email back asking them to fix all of this. While I was writing it and this rant, I thought to myself that they can shove that piece of paper up their ass. In fact I would gladly do it for them.
Long story short, do not use Instagram. And one final thing I have gripes with every time. You are not being told all the data you'll have to present from the get-go. You're not being told the process. Initially I thought it'd just be email, phone, username, and real name. Once signed up (instantly, not within 24 hours!) I would start setting up my account and adding a profile picture. The right way to ask for a picture of me! And just do it at my own pace, as I please.
And for God's sake, tackle abuse when it actually happens. You'll find out who's a bot and who isn't by their usage patterns soon enough. Do not do any of this at sign-up. Or hell, use a CAPTCHA or whatever, I don't fucking care. There's so many millions of ways to skin this cat.
Facebook and especially Instagram. Both of them are fucking retarded.6 -
Reasons 1 and 2 arent that important to me. The main reason I code is #3.
1) Brain exercise. I always feel sharp after a coding session, even if it ended in disaster.
2) Lots to do! There's never a full day in code. Make your own universe, if you so desire.
3) Pride. I have a pride problem. I never felt proud of myself no matter what I do. I graduated with a melancholy feeling, same deal when getting my license, same deal when passing a test (God, glad that's over!)... But code makes me proud. I love what I make. I want to show everyone. I want to show it to everyone before it's even finished because I just can't wait. I want everyone to use it and to love it. Because I sure do, and it's the best thing ever.
I could make a viral video, produce a triple platinum record, or build a billion dollar business and still not feel the same level of genuine satisfaction and happiness that I may get from writing good code.
It always keeps me coming back. -
Is it just me who sees this? JS development in a somewhat more complex setting (like vue-storefront) is just a horrible mess.
I have 10+ experience in java, c# and python, and I've never needed more than a a few hours to get into a new codebase, understanding the overall system, being able to guess where to fix a given problem.
But with JS (and also TS for that matter) I'm at my limits. Most of the files look like they don't do anything. There seems to be no structure, both from a file system point of view, nor from a code point of view.
It start with little things like 300 char long lines including various lambdas, closures and ifs with useless variables names, over overly generic and minified method/function names to inconsistent naming of files, classes and basically everything else.
I used to just set a breakpoint somewhere in my code (or in a compiled dependency) wait this it is being hit and go back and forth to learn how the system state changes.
This seems to be highly limited in JS. I didn't find the one way to just being able to debug, everything that is. There are weird things like transpilers, compiler, minifiers, bablers and what not else. There is an error? Go f... yourself ...
And what do I find as the number one tipp all across the internet? Console.log?? are you kidding me, sure just tell me, your kidding me right?
If I would have to describe the JS world in one word, I would use "inconsistency". It's all just a pain in the ass.
I remember when I switcher from VisualStudio/C# to Eclipse/Java I felt like traveling back in time for about 10 years. Everyting seemd so ... old-schoolish, buggy, weird.
When I now switch from java to JS it makes me feel the same way. It's all so highly unproductive, inconsistent, undeterministic, cobbled together.
For one inconveinience the JS communinity seems to like to build huge shitloads of stuff around it, instead of fixing the obvious. And noone seems to see that.
It's like they are all blinded somehow. Currently I'm also trying to implement a small react app based on react-admin. The simplest things to develop and debug are a nightmare. There is so much boilerplate that to write that most people in the internet just keep copying stuff, without even trying to understand what it actually does.
I've always been a guy that tries to understand what the fuck this code actuall does. And for most of the parts I just thing, that the stuff there is useless or could be done in a way more readable way. But instead, all the devs out there just seem to chose the "copy and fix somehow-ish" way.
I'm all in for component-izing stuff. I like encapsulation, I'm a OOP guy by heart. But what react and similar frameworks do is just insane. It's just not right (for some part).
Especially when you have to remember so much stuff that is just mechanics/boilerplate without having any actual "business logical function".
People always say java is so verbose. I don't think it is, there is so few syntax that it almost reads like a prose story. When I look at JS and TS instead, I'm overwhelmed by all the syntax, almost wondering every second line, what the actual fuck this could mean. The boilerplate/logic ration seems way to off ..
So it really makes me wonder, if all you JS devs out there are just so used to that stuff, that you cannot imagine how it could be done better? I still remember my C# days, but I admin that I just got used to java. So I can somehow understand that all. But JS is just another few levels less deeper.
But maybe I'm just lazy and too old ...4 -
Adventures Of The New COO
So when that new COO joined our company ( read my previous rant to know that story ) he brought a graphic designer with him
as a designer he's ok, more of a old school package designer type, but as a person one of the most annoying one I've ever met, always want to be included with our conversations, talk about rain and stuff
so few days ago, i was working on a website, headphones plugged in, music playing, he comes near my seat
Designer: Are you busy ?
Me: yeah, I've this website to finish
Designer: So i have this idea for an app
Me: *taking off headphones while thinking doesn't this dumbass know the meaning of busy*
Designer: what if we create an app for super markets, like this isle has this stuff, that isle has soap or something and how it'll be easy to find what you want to buy and keeps going on and on for about 5 minutes
Me: *making my voice as polite and sarcastic as possible*
It wouldn't work, every market has a different layout even among same market chain it's different
Me: have you ever been to a super market, they have a board saying what the isle is above the isle, all you have to do is just look up
Designer: hmm yeah i guess
*walks away*
everyone wants to make apps and make money, but doesn't have the fucking brain capacity to think about the idea for a bit and do some research, instead they come and waste our time2 -
My school's servers can only support 100 connections at the same time. So they are always down. It's so lame10
