*client calls in*

Me: good morning, how can I help you?
Client: my ip is blocked, could you unblock it for me?
Me: certainly! What's your ip address? Then I'll have a look.
Client: I'm not giving you my ip?! That's too privacy sensitive.
Me: 😶
Me: 😶
Me: 😶
Me: sir, I'm very keen on my privacy myself but without that information I can't do much for you 😬
Client: ah so you're refusing to help me?
Me: not like that, it's just very hard to lift an ip block for me when I don't know the ip address.
Client: you just don't want to help, fine.

*click*

😶

Friend: Man you're a programmer why aren't you a billionaire already like the others??

Me: It's not that easy believe me.

Friend: I have a great idea for an app something like facebook...can be that hard?

Me: :/

Friend: you could do that instead of your no pay opensource shit...

Me: FUCK YOU AND YOUR STUPID BULLLLLSHIT GO FUCKING DIE YOU PIECE OF SHIT !!!! YOU HAVE NO FUCKING CLUE ..STUPID SON OF A BITCH.

So, since I hear from a lot of people (on here and irl) that Linux has a 'very high learning curve', let me share my experiences with the first time my dad touched Linux (Elementary OS) without me interfering at all! (keep in mind that he is very a-technical)

*le me boots the system* (I already did setup a user account for him and gave him the password).

Dad: *enters password and presses enter*
Me: "Hmm that went faster than expected."
Dad: "Uhm I know how to login son, it's not that hard and pretty obvious".
Me: "Alright, why don't you try to open up the default word documents editor on here! I'll be right back!"
Me: *Goes away and returns after a minute*.
Dad: *already a few test sentences typed in LibreOffice writer* it's going pretty well :)!
Me: "Oo how did you find that?!"
Dad: "Well, there's a thingy that says 'applications' so I clicked in and found it in the "Office" section, do you think I am blind or something?!"
Me: 😐. uhm no but I just didn't think you'd find it that quickly. Now try to install Chromium browser! *thinking: he'll fail this one for sure* I'll be right back :).
Me: *returns again after a minute or so*
Dad: *already searching for stuff through Chromium*
Me: "wait, how the hell did you do that so quickly, it's not the easiest thingy for most people".
Dad: "Jesus, it's not that hard! I went to the application browsing thingy, typed 'software' and then a sorta software store icon showed up so I clicked it and it opened a windows with a search bar saying something like 'search for applications/software'. clicked in it, typed 'chromium', saw it coming up, there was a very clear 'install' button, it asked for my password, I put it in and after a little it gave a notification that it was installed. Then I went to that application browsing thingy again and typed Chromium. Then I hit enter because it selected an icon called chromium...."
Me: O.o. Okay this is going very good, now open an email client and login to your email address!
Dad: *goes to application browsing thingy, types 'email', evolution icon shows up, dad clicks it, email address setup steps show up and dad follows them quickly. After about a minute, everything is setup.

I expected this to be a hard process for someone who dealt with Windows his entire life but damn, I underestimated it.
Asked him if he found it easy/what he liked about it:
"Well, it's very clear where I can find everything, default browser/email/word document editor programs are easy to find and that's about all I need so yeah, great system!"

I am proud of you, dad!

Uncle: "It must be noisy, programming. I've seen a datacenter on TV, and those computers are loud" — "It is noisy, but that's more my coworkers fault"

Sales guy at the office: "So you see patterns in the code, you can read this cryptic mess?" — "Uh this is PHP, Its not the syntax that makes it hard to read, it's the dimwit who wrote it"

Father-in-law: "Could you reprogram my laptop, I got a virus trying to download por... nature documentaries" — "I'm not that kind of doctor"

Mother-in-law: "How will you sustain a family, you just play video games all day" — "I make your monthly teachers salary in four days"

Girlfriend: "I learned some Lua today because I needed a world of warcraft extension for..." — "I love you too"

My boss is technically restricted shall we say.

As the cto I have also been designated office IT guy. Which means apparently fixing the printer. Which is ok I guess. I mean it's bullsh*t but hey.

Anyway, about 6 months ago he said he needed a new laptop. He lives his life in excel and outlook, and even though the whole company uses google docs for everything he still exports everything to excel, makes a copy, then saves it back to drive so everything gets out of sync.

It's a fun problem that I have banned everyone from doing obviously but he continues.

Anyway, anyway, he wanted a new windows laptop naturally. I said to spend about £700 on a decent machine rather than buying something cheap that will frustrate and not last long.

He doesn't listen and gets some old windows 7 machine for £300. It's an alright spec for 2009; he must not have got the memo about it being 2017.

4 months go by and he says he needs a new laptop because this one is too slow (not least because he opens 400 chrome tabs and never reboots his machine). Anyway, I fix the problem of uninstalling all his bloatware and it runs quicker but he has his heart set on a new machine.

He insists.

I suggest he spend the money this time so he literally doesn't buy a new one in 4 months. I suggest the surface book that's £1200. A little overpriced but he will love the touch screen, it's powerful enough and it's windows. Ticks all the boxes for him.

He suddenly decides he wants a Mac.

I tell him it will be a nightmare for everyone if he does that.

He insists.

I suggest the Mac book pro as I've had mine for 6 years now and it's still going strong. It's a little more expensive than the surface but it will last.

He then says he wants the air.

I say they haven't updated them in ages and they aren't actually that powerful.

He insists.

That night he just buys an air from the Apple Store.

WHY THE FU*k ARE YOU ASKING ME FOR ADVICE IF YOURE NOT GOING TO LISTEN YOU MOTHERFUC*er. WASTING MY TIME AND YOURS.

Was very close to rage quitting when he wanted me to back up his old machine but didn't bring in his hard drive and didn't want to put it in the cloud. #whatDoYouWantMeToDoWithYourOldPornCollection

To top it all off I ran some benchmarks and my 6 year old Mac book pro is more powerful than his "brand new" air.

Friend: Hey, can you fix my laptop? The hard drive is almost full.

Me: (Looking through his folders) Maybe it's because of this. Why do you have 3000+ files in your downloads folder? Maybe I should delete some of this.

Friend: No no, please don't touch the downloads folder, I have some very important documents there.

Me: Why don't you move them to a separate folder then? You should organize the ones you actually need and delete the rest. This folder is a complete mess.

Friend: No no, the problem is not the downloads folder, there must be something else. Can't you just uninstall some programs to free up space?

Me: I could, but I don't know which ones you actually use.

Friend: What? You should know!! You studied computer science for this!!

Me: First of all, there is not a single class in the whole 4 years of university called "How to uninstall programs and free up space on 128GB hard drives of shitty €400 computers". Second of all, I don't know why you were expecting me to find a magic button on your laptop that immediately frees up all the space in a hard drive without actually deleting anything. That's not how computers work, you know.

Friend: Hey if you didn't want to help me you could have said so in the first place.

Me: FML

More than half of all support calls and tickets we get are so fucking easily searchable through our own fucking website and search engines, it's really fucking annoying sometimes.

"how do I redirect a site?"
Type the fucking word redirect into our helpdesk page.

"how can i reset my email password?"
Literally fucking type the word EMAIL into fucking search bar?!

"hey the article said to go to yourdomain.com/webmail, I'm not getting anything!!!"
"what domain did you use?"
"yourdomain.com of course!"

😥🔫

"how can I add a domain to my hosting?"
Search for the FUCKING word DOMAIN on our online helpdesk.

IT'S REALLY NOT THAT HARD, PLEASE APPLY COMMON SENSE AND USE YOUR FUCKING BRAIN.

C'mon guys, it's really not that hard

Source: Reddit

Guy: dot net dev (C#) on windows. (desktop + server)
Team(not his team, he just happened to sit next to us): php/frontend devs and Linux (server) people.

Team: starting a new project! We'll have to see what framework to use and what server :D
Guy: i know it's none of my business...... but I'd recommend dot net and windows server!
Me: respectfully, that hardly makes sense, you know our skillset/field... i understand that it works for you but it doesn't really for us :).
Next to that we'd rather not use windows for security reasons.

It's fine if that happens once.

When it happened for the 1748472823'th time, I had a real hard time controlling myself.

My worst dev sin is not throwing people under the bus, even when they deserve it.

Literally or metaphorically? I'll leave that up to the imagination.

------

I believe my second-worst sin is my tendency towards perfectionism. It's hard to finish projects quickly if everything has to be nearly perfect. I still make deadlines, but this is due to overworking, thus leading to burnout.

I could relax more if only I sacrificed my principles...

My current one. When I was chosen for my current job as the final candidate, he went for me partly because we've got the same favourite music and that made us click very well.

Now, a year later, it's still going awesome.

We can be serious but most of the time (when we see eachother) it's (savage) jokes, 'rekking' eachother and we keep eachother up to date on new music releases and festivals.

I remember this convo about music:
Boss: Heyy, this is a track I go hard on: Rejecta - Followed 😉
Me: oh yeah that one is awesome! Have you heard his other tracks?
B: HE HAS OTHER TRACKS?! 😍
M: Yaaaaas! He's got 'deserve to die', ''let my tape rock" and 'move my body'
B: OH MY GOD THIS IS FUCKING AWESOME 😍
M: enjoy man 😘
B: thankies 😊

He's not that much older than me and actually listens to advice.

Just an awesome boss in general!

The best part of being a dev?

You can be a nerd, you can dress lousy, you got all those fancy tech you can work with, it's diverse, it's fun. And on top of that, it's not even remotely hard to find a job and get payed well.

"Arch Linux is actually not that difficult".

I ssh'ed into my home server yesterday.

I was greeted by a message from an ext3 disk about needing fsck. Fine, "I haven't been in here for a while, might as well do some maintenance". fsck /dev/sda6, let's go!

This nicely "repaired" the sshd service (i.e. cleared the sectors), I cursed at myself for pressing enter at "repair (y)" right before the connection broke.

So I connected a display and keyboard... ok so let's just pacman -Sy sshd or whatever. We can do this! Just check the wiki, shouldn't be that hard!

Wait... pacman has not run since 2010? WAIT IT'S ACTUAL UPTIME IS 9 YEARS??? I guess we know why I'm a DB admin and not devops...

Hmm all the mirrors give timeouts? Oh. The i686 processor architecture isn't even supported anymore...?

4 hours, 11 glasses of cognac, 73 Arch32 wiki/forum pages, 2 attempts at compiling glibc, and 4 kernel panics later: "I think I'll buy a new server".

So there it fucking goes.

Hi. I'm WillibertXXIV.
I'm not a programmer by trade; I have a more than fulltime job as a cook. As for the last year, I spent pretty much all my free time, overlapping my sleep time, to learn how to code.

All that so I can create a game that I started working on the same day I started my learning process. So far it's shit and it's going to stay that way for a long time. Only I can say this. It's my baby. It's fucking ugly and shit but it's mine.

Yesterday I broke it. I broke my baby. I don't know how it fucking happe. When I went to sleep I had a steady 175fps, nice realtime lightning and player / enemy that flowed like running water. I worked really hard to make that happened. Profiling, writing better code, profiling, etc. It's still not good, it's less shit.

I woke up, beautiful day. Not too warm, not too cold, that sweet spot right in the middle. Girlfriend already made the coffee. Perfect. Woke up, sat down to start my morning time work before going to my realjob and

BAM

Everything is shit, 20fps max. That one thing, gfx.waitforpresent, showing up in the profiler eating everything as the game run. Movements are now of stroboscopic nature. Light is still ok but what good does it do now fucking piece of shit. I'm not qualified enough for this shit.

Fuck,
Fuck this,
Fuck this shit,
Fuck this shit i'm out of here.

I've got a mini stroke today. My project ended and I got delegated elsewhere.

"It's going to be fine, it's c++, you will find yourself there"

Suspicious, it's a project everybody was staying out of as hard as they can. But hey, it's cool, how bad can it be? what can go wrong with that?

Reality was brutal, project that uses Boost C++ as framework and bjam as builder. Builds with a decent dose of luck, and only under special circumstances, only under one specific version of compiler. No docs, quartet of the code is in Fortran, just to use ancient lisp part which was second qarter. The most senior Dev around does not have idea how it all works. Also everything is inside one enormous try/catch block. Because of the reasons.

That's how people end up with severe alcoholism and meth addiction.

After months of tedious research, I finally feel like I understand machine learning.

All of my programmer buddies are in envy, but I keep trying to explain that what I finally get is that it's not as hard as it's presented to be.

I feel like a lot of the terminology in machine learning is really pretentious and unnecessary, and just keeps new people from the field.

For example: I could say: "Yeah, I'm training a classification model with two input neurons, a hidden activation layer, and an output neuron", and you might think I was hot shit. But that just gets translated into "I'm putting in two inputs, sorting them, and outputting one thing".

I feel like if there was a plain language guide to machine learning, the field would be a lot more attractive to a lot more people. I know that's why it was hard for me to get in. Maybe I'll write one.

It seems like every other day I run into some post/tweet/article about people whining about having the imposter syndrome. It seems like no other profession (except maybe acting) is filled with people like this.

Well lemme answer that question for you lot.

YES YOU ARE A BLOODY IMPOSTER.

There. I said it. BUT.

Know that you're already a step up from those clowns that talk a lot but say nothing of substance.

You're better than the rockstar dev that "understands" the entire codebase because s/he is the freaking moron that created that convoluted nonsensical pile of shit in the first place.

You're better than that person who thinks knowing nothing is fine. It's just a job and a pay cheque.

The main question is, what the flying fuck are you going to do about being an imposter? Whine about it on twtr/fb/medium? HOW ABOUT YOU GO LEARN SOMETHING BEYOND FRAMEWORKS OR MAKING DUMB CRUD WEBSITES WITH COLOR CHANGING BUTTONS.

Computers are hard. Did you expect to spend 1 year studying random things and waltz into the field as a fucking expert? FUCK YOU. How about you let a "doctor" who taught himself medicine for 1 year do your open heart surgery?

Learn how a godamn computer actually works. Do you expect your doctors and surgeons to be ignorant of how the body works? If you aspire to be a professional WHY THE FUCK DO YOU STAY AT THE SURFACE.

Go learn about Compilers, complete projects with low level languages like C / Rust (protip: stay away from C++, Java doesn't count), read up on CPU architecture, to name a few topics.

Then, after learning how your computers work, you can start learning functional programming and appreciate the tradeoffs it makes. Or go learn AI/ML/DS. But preferably not before.

Basically, it's fine if you were never formally taught. Get yourself schooled, quit bitching, and be patient. It's ok to be stupid, but it's not ok to stay stupid forever.

/rant

Anyone else notice this trend:

1. Don't go to uni / drop out (who needs education).
2. Get a job in IT, it pays well (who cares you don't have a structured logic).
3. Learn need-to-know stuff only (I only need to know my code).
4. Tell others they should get into programming, it's not that hard.
5. Get asked about the workings of a computer, but that's not in your domain of work. "I only code".

Millennial much ?

On my annoying radar today - devs who learn one language and then *insist* on using it for everything, even when it makes absolutely zero sense.

"Ooh I'd like to do some microcontroller development. But I only know Java. How do you run Java on a microcontroller?"

"...You don't."

"...but I heard a talk where someone did it. Look, there's this microjava page. How do I use it?"

"It's an interesting technical demo, but that's it. Dude, just learn C. It's not hard, Java has C style syntax anyway and this way you can...."

"...but I only want to use modern programming languages. C is irrelevant these days, it's pointless me learning it."

"It's definitely still relevant if you want to program a microcontroller."

"...but I want to do that in Java."

🤦‍♂️

I very very rarely drink, but when I do I party hard.

I negotiated an entire piece of complex web architecture (really huge, works at 50k transactions per second), with my boss who's a lead architect, from a bar (he thought I was home), while moderately drunk.

It got me a lotta praise and till date it's one of the best pieces of software I've ever written. It saved the company 500+ hours or something #humblebrag.

To this day I have no recollection of what I said (huge hangover after) or how I managed to come up with that shit. I don't think I'd have been able to do it sober. The sheer size of the problem would've made me go "yea it works, I'm not touching that. Nope."

DAE notice any increase in pattern recognition in their code while drunk?

It was only a while ago that I realized that “firm” was not quite “hard”, but also not “soft”, hence “firmware”, it's in between hardware and software.

I'm not really one for news, but apparently (a while ago) there was some 12 year old who taught himself to code and made his own apps and whatnot. Girlfriend informed me of this.

Just got told that I'm a useless piece of shit because Im 23 and don't develop apps and I'm not rich like this kid. Fuck man. I develop mostly server side software, and I personally fucking wrote half the shit the company uses. No one really knows, so naturally in the silent developer. Don't much care about that. But fuck, being told I'm useless because a 12 year old has more money than me really made me take one straight to the balls. Now I'm sitting here, moping, downloading android studio, and just going to prove a person wrong. I can fucking code an app, it's not that hard.

Should have just said fuck off, but I don't have the strength and effort to face flying cups anymore.

Android sdk, here I come.

When I quit my previous job, they hired 3 guys to replace me. One of them was a swedish guy that was completely useless. He lived in another part of the country, and our manager and a senior dev flew him in and interviewed him at the airport. That was obviously not sufficient.

I got tasked with helping him get started. The code base seen in retrospect sucked really hard, but he got the simplest tasks at first. One time he needed to add a checkbox to a form, and do something different in the BL when that box was checked. I showed him where in the code he needed to do the change, and let him on his own. 1 hour later he asked again. He hadn't even been able to place the if-statement. Omg.

I told our manager that they really should get rid of this guy, since he isn't qualified to be a developer. They didn't listen.

In Norway we have a 6 month test period where it's easier to let someone go. After that, it's quite hard to fire someone.

After a while I talked to a old colleague of mine, and they had finally been able to get rid of him. That had taken months. When he was told that he had to improve, he went to the doctor and got a sick leave. You can't fire someone on sick leave.. Finally he got the option of resigning himself, or being fired. He chose the first option..

He should have been transferred to sales. If he could sell himself as a developer, he could sell anything to anyone... :D

PM: Please get this done by tomorrow. It's just a small change.
Dev: No its not that simple.
PM: Why is it not simple? Please explain so I can understand.
Dev after a hard thought finally explains: blah blah blah
PM: Well, we have promised the client so please do this by tomorrow, thanks.
Dev: *bangwall

It's fine if you're 'not good with computers' and need help. Ask me politely and sure I'll see how I can help and teach you what you need so that you can do it yourself in the future.

It's not fine, however, if you refuse to fucking learn after the millionth time I've taught you how to do the exact same thing because 'It's too hard' and 'I won't understand anyway'. And then proceed to call me a bad and ungrateful friend because I can't come to your rescue the very second you need me and don't seem 1000% enthusiastic to help at 1am in the morning when I'm still doing my own work.

Sure, I'm the 'tech person' amongst our friends. I *do* understand the frustration you experience when something isn't working. But that doesn't mean I'm obligated to be your 24/7 IT support, while listening to your complaints of how I was probably the one who fucked it up in the first place when I helped fixed your phone/laptop last time (for the record, this was *never* the case).

UGHHHHHHHH

ps: I just found this community and I love it already! Thought this mental rant I had earlier would fit right in lol
(Also, sorry English isn't my first language D:

Google sucks!
No, not as e-mail or for privacy reasons. Sure, that too, but it comes with "free" stuff.

It sucks because it's breaking every possible record in the worst, shittiest, most insanely stupid APIs and integrations out there on the entire fucking planet!

It is comically stupid!

Aside from their LOVE of hard-deprecating APIs every few months, requiring constant, time consuming maintenance of every tool that integrates deeply with Google services, some of their APIs, for expensive stuff, look like they've been written by Bobby McFartface from 7th grade.

Take a look at DoubleClick Search (their ad performance reporting tool, that sure does sound like one). To upload custom, additional data, you must pass in a ton of parameter, and they REQUIRE some of them to have a specific, hardcoded value. What's the point in passing that parameter then you dickheads?!
But fine, so you uploaded some stuff using the API. Now you want to delete everything and try again after you fixed a bug - well you fucking CAN'T! You can't delete stuff, you can only mark them as "deleted" using an update call.
Bulk operations? Fuck no!
Can I just add on top? Well of course not! That will raise a ton of exceptions. Same message should be transmitted using the PUT, not POST request, in order to edit.
Can I send everything to PUT? Of course not! You can't edit something that's not there, dummy!

Can I see what's there so that I can update it, and add what's missing?
Well of course not! Why on Earth would you need to see what information is in there after you uploaded it? Who needs that anyway?

Simply send, pray, and hope that everything will be fine (it will not).

Like holy fucking crap, it can't get any more stupid!
Google is a huge pile of idiots who feed on only a single cow - the search engine.

It's times like these when I think that Google right now is the worst thing that exists for everyone in tech. It's dragging everyone down with their monopolies everywhere and complete idiocy in managing them.

So before today, I'd never used GoDaddy before. Not even once. My supervisor walks in and happily informs me that I'm going to be adding photos to a website that she does editing for. Okay, fine, that's stupidly easy. What I did not realize, however, is that this entire website had been built using GoDaddy's site builder, and if you're not familiar with it, thank whatever gods you worship that you've dodged that bullet. I hardly want to go wandering around somebody else's web hosting, so I search about for a bit praying that there's SOME semblance of a normal text editor someplace, because text editors make me happy and all, and find very little on the regular site. Already not thrilled. So I figure, how bad is this site editor? Really, how bad can it possibly be?
Oh, you poor misguided son of a -
Anyway, I go in and look at the site. Slideshows everywhere, nothing is aligned correctly, it's a web designer's nightmare. Thankfully, I'm not a web designer, so I press on and reorganize a little bit. I try slapping a new slideshow on their, and discover that unlike the way it SHOULD work, elements do not move to allow for other elements, they just sit there and let you throw things on top of them. I stare at my neatly-stacked slideshows for a second in utter disbelief, knowing but not really accepting that I'm going to need to take every last one of those slideshow elements and slide those little so-and-so's down by hand. ....why? Who designed this? Who decided that was a good idea? I do some Googling to see if there's anything out there to make this less horrid, and lo and behold I find a GoDaddy page about their FTP file manager! It's under web/classic hosting, which apparently means it's deprecated because I spent the next ten minutes hunting around for the "web hosting" link those chicken-lickers were so proud of and it's nowhere to be found.
Alright, so they want to do this the hard way.
At this point I'm screaming internally and PRAYING that I'm just being stupid and not seeing anything to make it easi-
No, not even easier. Just less stupid. This website builder makes no sense. It's like hiring a contractor to build a bridge and handing him a box of Legos and a banana.
So I do more googling and find instructions on getting to the file manager. FINALLY. The first step is find "Hosting" under "My Products." I rush over to My Products joyfully, hoping I can get this stupid website up and running reasonably quickly, and...!
There's no hosting tab.
No button.
Not even a little hard-to-see link. At this point my brain is screaming. WHY would you give me a website builder but absolutely no way to actually write the website? Do people actually use this thing? I mean, I get it if they want to make it nice and accessible for people to make websites without overwhelming them with HTML but if they know how to edit the website and they don't want your help, why would you force me in to this? Why? Then it occurred to me that maybe the organization just hasn't ever had a web developer in it, ever, or at least not one who was willing to help out with the website, so they purposefully signed up for hosting that deprived them of any kind of HTML editor. Then on top of all of that, I noticed that on the home page, which had been edited by someone else long before I ever looked at it, ALSO had one of these stupid slideshows that I had to reorganize by hand, and some sad, angry little man had put in one of the photos sideways. It was SIDEWAYS. Just sitting there on its side, the photo's occupants staring at me with sad eyes begging me to turn them facing up again. I sat there and stared at a badly-designed website in a questionably-designed editor. And I wondered. I wondered who put this all together, and I wondered why *I* was the one doing it, when I work for a university and the website was for some beach homeowner's association. And I wondered if this job was a task that my supervisor had agreed to do and just passed off onto an office monkey. And I wept bitter tears at the realization that I am that office monkey.

I'm upset. I got banned by StackOverflow because of the questions I've asked recently.

I've worked very hard on my account, getting myself up to 293 points over quite a few months.

And then they just toss me overboard because of the reception of a few questions that I've asked recently.

I deleted the question, re-edited it, and tried so hard to get myself out of the ban. And then I come back and here I am, completely banned. It's so fucking shitty.

What's even the point? I feel that most of the time the community spends more time downvoting instead of upvoting?

How can I even compete? I'm trying to get help, not feel invalidated and smashed by a stupid point system.

I'm just going to go sit in a corner and cry now because clearly, my questions are worth more than the points I've garnered.

You know how it is when all your friends know you as the "computer guy".

Friend: Yo, I need this small script for school, can you do it for me?

Me: I don't really...

Friend: Come on, pretty please.

Me: See I...

Friend: I'll pay you good for this.

Me: Oh... What language does it have to be in, Python? JavaScript? Ruby? Perl? I don't know it but it shouldn't be too hard, I can learn it. Bash? Not a fan but it's quite easy. So what is it?

...

Friend: Visual Basic

Me: oh...

This was last week. 2017. A couple of days before 2018. Some schools still teach VB. Not even VB .NET.

(He had about 200 good reasons so I did it anyway. But boy, has that been a chore)

Making a contest site for a client. It's 2 parts, a static part and then a "hub" where the contest actually takes part. I did most of the static part, and uploaded it to show her. She likes it, but wants to be able to change the content automatically without having to talk to me. Ok, I think. The harder part is the contest site, so she's not gonna run away with my code. I give her access to the ftp and teach her what to do.

To my amazement she takes a liking to html. And starts adding some (super simple) tags. They ruin some of my designs but they look fine. Whatever.

Today she messages me saying that the top picture is off. Hmm, I'll check it out. Turns out almost the entire page is ruined. What's even worse is that she inserted a link to a facebook image she has on top of everything, a picture I don't have access to, and yet she's refusing to admit that it was her mistake. It's not even wrapped in an img tag, it's just pure text!!!

Fine. I'll revert to the version I had. No! cz apparently I can't undo all the changes she's worked hard on. So now I have to go through all the markup and check what's causing this -- and I hate frontend!!!

Worst part of this all? She can't fucking be bothered to type out what her whore infested lying mouth wants to say. She has to send me voicenotes, a few minutes long, filled with uhhh ummm let me think, because that brain who thought learning to write <br/> and <em> is bad ass can't FUCKING formulate a thought before sending it. She has to have me stop my music, and stop my concentration just so she can tell me maybe she pasted it by mistake IN A 5 MINUTE VOICE NOTE. tbh the money isn't even that good. I don't know why I'm still here.

PS: it's not missing an include. I checked.

Hey. This code look broken. What should I do?

It isn't broken. It's doing what it's supposed to.

Well, it's hard to follow, but it certainly doesn't look right. And it isn't doing what I expect. Also, why is it calling method(a_class1_or_class2) with a class3?

It isn't hard to follow, and it works just fine. Let me show you. ... huh. looks like it isn't right. and there's a comment here saying the calls aren't clear. but it works just fine. Just copy it over and do it the same way.

I already did that. and it isn't working.

What are you talking about? Of course it works fine. Did you check your code?

------

Really, dude? It doesn't work fine. but, guess what? It works fine* when I change it to call that method with a class2 like it asks for. (Surprise!) But I can't tell him that. Nope. Bossmang get offended. Still won't admit I was right about anything, either.

Ahh... the continual joy of working with (and for) trash.

* well, more fine; the rest of the feature is still wrong. but nope, i'm not allowed to fix it. because why would they want anything to work properly? Already-accepted wrong behavior is good enough. Can't clean up the code, either, because that "muddies the waters." Bitch, I couldn't see the bottom of this sewer if it was half an inch deep! Which is more important: the last contributor entry beside the code, or that code being readable and maintainable? or it, you know, working?

doot doot.
need to scoot.

It's not motivation that you need, it's dedication.

You see, motivation is temporary thing, that sudden flow of dopamine running through your body that you get after some success or after being admired by someone or simply after good sleep and nice morning shower.

But the problem with motivation is that it's just temporary thing. After a while (hours, days, if you're lucky weeks) it just wears off and you're left pretty much where you started.

But there's one thing that remains and that's persistent. It's called DEDICATION. If you dedicate yourself to something, you are willing to do it no matter what it takes from you. Even if it frustrates you along the way or makes you angry, you wanna be able to say "It's finished. I'm satisfied with it" after you finish it. You are willing to crawl to the finishing line but no matter the obstacle, just knowing that you're getting closer to the finishing line is gonna motivate you. Your dedication is gonna become motivation generator. And that's the key. You need the passion and dedicate yourself to it.

But hey, sound simple but we all know the struggle. Sometimes it's even hard to recognize dedication from motivation. And sometimes you just go "Ok. Fuck it. I'm done" and leave it and that's okay AS LONG AS you get back to it after a while. As long as the inner you, the dedicated you that got you here in the first place, goes "Dude, it's tough. But it's alright, we refreshed a bit and now we're gonna fucking make it" (nope, I don't have schizophrenia) and you listen and get back at it.

Dedication is tough. It's about self control and understanding yourself deeply and balancing your mind. It's nirvana of success. It's the ultimate balance. But you can get there. If you want. Badly.

TL;DR You need dedication, not motivation. Punish yourself and reward yourself. Not too harsh and not too much. Just so that you don't lose track.

But most of all, GOOD LUCK YOU AMAZING FUCKS!

Me: Taking online course for programming. Think it's not that hard.

PC: Coded programm runs good like in the tutorial.

Me: Wow I can code now.

Just printed "Hello World"

Am I the only one who is triggered by seeing all of the stupid articles claiming Java is bad introduction language? Just becuase Standford decided to change it to JavaScript? What the actual fuck? How students should learn the fundamentals concept of OOP in scripting language?
Don't get me wrong, I hate using Java for real life projects. But there is a reason why almost every university use it as introduciton language. It's great start to learn programming. Saying that the 'Hello World' in Java is complex and can scare people away, it's complete nonsens. For fuck sake, yes programming should be fun, but it is also hard. People can understand that they are going to learn what 'public static voiď means later. It's the structure of many Computer Science classes. It's the assigments that are not designed in engaging and fun way for newcomers. That's the problem, not the language.

Microsoft motherfucking Windows. (even though its an OS, it's software)

It's always brought me tons of issues and I'm starting to think that Microsoft built in some AI system which identifies when a Windows disliker uses it and starts acting weird/producing issues since (I have to use windows for some stuff at work) I'm always getting issues that nobody else gets in my team, and I've had this since I started using it at all.

And the fact that it has a frontdoor (I don't even think this is a backdoor anymore) built in... I mean, I definitely did NOT give consent to reinstall Microsoft Edge and I don't want it either (it appeared without any updates).
Then, you cannot fully disable telemetry anymore which is kind of a hard requirement for my job, most of the time.

Yes, Microsoft (and) Windows can go die in a fucking fire.

Mom: "What's this thing?" *hands me her phone*
Me: *sees dialog saying something about com.google.gms or so draining battery with obvious okay button*
Me: "...just press Okay."

The keycap of the control key of my keyboard just popped of and fell under the table.
My colleague then said while I was looking for it: I think you've lost control!
And we both laughed way to hard and so loud that our boss came over to ask why we where laughing. xD
it's not even that funny but we couldn't pull ourselfs together xD

!dev

So a colleage of mine died a little more then a month ago. His brother in law who also works at the company, and has known him for 20 something years (as long as he has worked for the company), had a really hard time dealing with that. My colleage was sick/hospitalized and in and out of coma for half a year+ so this was the apex of an emotional rollercoaster. When my colleage died he was not in a state to work. He actually went to a physisian and now he's seeing a shrink.

He took one week of to deal with everything, including his own mental well being, and you know what the human thing was my employers did. Subtract that week from his vacation days without telling him.

WOW, just fucking wow... I mean - yeah it's sort of legal to do that, but seriously

Shopping for computers is so fun and relaxing than shopping for makeup.

So here's the scenario...
I walked into a makeup store and I was looking for lipstick. I was wearing my devRant shirt, jeans, and a laptop backpack. A sales lady approached me and just stared. She didn't even ask what I was looking for. The way she looked at me made me feel that I don't belong there. She should've just left me alone than giving a judgemental look. I got intimidated so I looked at her and gave the biggest smile, then fleed. I panicked. I salute those female developers who doesn't have problems shopping for girly stuff!

For the record, my sister encouraged me to wear a little makeup so that I don't look stressed. That made me decide to go to that makeup store. I'd rather order online now.

It's so hard to not be girly by nature.

I had this meeting with this new client and where talking about the possibility to exchange data.

And he told how his company now has everything in the cloud and if we also have it in the cloud it should already be connected since it's both in the cloud.

I tried to explain that because its both in the cloud that does not mean it's connected to each other. We still need to develop a way to exchange data.

On wich I got the answer that our data probably is not in the real cloud.

In the end I just said that we can probably exchange data but it the easiest way to accomplish this is talking to someone who maintain the data in your cloud. And we could adapt our system to theirs.

Sometimes it's hard to communicate with less tech savvy people about tech stuff. Explaining things in a way they understand but also is technical correct.

So a few months ago I started dating. I love my girlfriend with all my heart, but something has been bothering me a bit. I can no longer easily do my day-to-day work. Whereas previously I would be productive at any time I want, now it's more of a "I can work whenever she wants to work". It's hard to balance and even harder to actually get to it.

Previously I would stay with her during the day, and then wake up in the night to do all the household chores, learn her language and if I can get to it, even improve some of my shitty code. Needless to say, she didn't like that I didn't sleep with her and it's not exactly healthy either - I barely slept at all.

How do you balance work/relationship without throwing sleep time in the mix? Both work and girlfriend are at home for me.

FOR FUCKS SAKE, CLEAN YOUR KEYBOARD!

Today we had some presentations on a class, I was near the projector, so I volunteered to control the presentation flow.

Fast forward three teams, arrives this guy, lets his laptop and and I open it... SMELLS, FUCKING SMELLS BAD. Add to that grease and dirt all over the keyboard... I just pressed the right arrow key with the bare tip of my finger...

It's not that hard to keep your workstation clean. Most of all, odourless.

I see many people being irritated when it comes to StackOverflow and If I were to be honest I thought the same a while ago. But I noticed that I was misjudging the main point of Stackoverflow. It's not a forum to help people with their programming problems. It's a huge self writing document to gather every programming related questions and answers under a single platform if possible. That's why they won't down vote you even if you ask a question that was obvious in a language's official document as long as it wasn't in Stackoverflow. That's why questions should also be formatted accordingly which is clear and also informative in itself. I understand why stackoverflow is such a harsh place to ask questions and most of the time I prefer looking things for my self instead of asking a question. And I edit and review most questions on stackoverflow because I enjoy it. That also made me realize that stackoverflow needs to be elitist to preserve it's current quality. Who would want to see unclear duplicate questions that veteran stackoverflow users need to answer over and over again right ?

Asking the right question is hard because we humans most of the time don't know what we don't know. And it makes it really tiring to format your question the way that is fitting for a document. In those times I prefer to ask my questions on a more relaxed and chat focused platform before writing my main question on stackoverflow.

So that was my opinion on stackoverflow and it's harsh environment. It's definetly a hard to get into community which I can't even say I'm really a part of it. But looking at stackoverflow as a document that's being written by ut's users, it's easier to understand it's elitist approach. I hope you had some enjoyment from reading it.

Why does CSS never work the way you'd expect? All I want to do is align something to the bottom of a div. No. Will not happen. You'd think it might be something simple as 'v-align' or 'align: bottom' or 'fucking put it at the bottom: now;'

No, it's never that simple. I try every result I can find from googling. Nothing. Simply does not work.

How about trying to keep a div to a square when you resize the page? That should be simple? height = width right? Fuck you. Ha hahah, no you have to implement some horrendous arcane hack involving fake elements and other bullshit.

You finally fix one thing and everything else you had working is now broken.

...and then some fuckwit comes along and goes "Oh, CSS isn't hard..." and it takes everything you have not to beat them to death with your rubber duck.

What the hell is wrong with CSS? It's not even programming! It's just pure, sadistic hell! FUCK CSS!!!!

It's 2017.

Why is vertically centering a div still so stinkin hard?

Yeah yeah ik what you will tell me, "use flexbox".
Well guess what,. I HAVE BEEN TRYING TO FOR THE PAST 6 FUCKING HOURS!

I've gone as far as to copy code from 20+ different websites advertising working solutions. My tab bar looks like the fucking rockey mountains!

My main problem is that flexbox on chrome is not accepting ANY % values.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go kill myself. YAY! 🤗

Lecturer I am a TA for said AT LEAST twice that the summaries should be executive summaries. With introduction, supporting paragraphs, and a conclusion while explaining the assignment in class.

Notice the plural form of paragraphs. WHY THE HOLY HELL am I grading papers that are a paragraph, or don't progress fluidly. Or look like a 4th grader wrote them instead of a college student about to graduate????

It's not that hard.
And if i have to send one more email repeating the requirements one more time including "yes, i will deduct points for bad grammar" the class is getting DDoSed. Idgaf. This is university, people. You should know this. Can confirm i write executive summaries regularly. Bosses want updates.

Windows file properties:

Created: 22 October 2016
Modified: 12 September 2016

Yesterday I completed a transactions module that used an external payment processor, similar to PayPal. It was hard, but after few hours of trying out different options I finally managed to get it to work.

I decided to create a simple prototype UI without any styling just to show my progress to the manager and let him know that it's working.

His response? "yeah, that seems to work, but that UI is terrible and not appealing at all. Change that immediately and try to add more thought into your design"

I guess I won't be making prototypes any time soon

This one crazy:
We made an app for our client to scan some parcels via barcode.

They just created a ticket, for complaining that it's hard to scan in the storage room, because it's so dark. They are like sometimes we need to use a torge to scan. Can you increase the contrast of the app or something to scan better in darker place.

Did not know what to answer, but my thoughts were like: why the fuck you don't put enough light in that room?! 🤔🤷🏽‍♂️

I've seen a job vacancy that asks for the following characteristics in a developer:

- extraverted, do'er (as opposed to thinker), out-of-the-box, curious, sees solutions and not problems, structural thinking vs. theoretical thinking, loves change, acts immediately, makes choices under stress, critically questions themselves if things go wrong

What the [censored] kind of programmer is that? Sounds more like a wannabe brogrammer type.

A typical, real programmer is introverted (for he is introspective, detail-minded and is therefore good at inspecting problems and finding solutions for them).

Seeing problems is not a bad thing, it's in fact necessary to be able to identify issues and not act like your typical manager who only wants to rush to solutions. He thinks deeply and theoretically before he takes action. Theory is the foundation of identifying a problem.

What programmer is stress-resistant? It's not normal for the human brain to be able to deal with stress; this is why switch-tasking is so hard.

Question yourself if things go wrong? Perhaps, but this sounds more like trying to shove the blame around.

Since we live in a rigid computer world with rigidly-defined protocols (say, HTTP), it is often useful to think in a conventional way. Out-of-the-box? Sure, if you're being innovative, or sure, as a tangential characteristic.

In my professional opinion, this vacancy reeks of bad corporate culture.. and the biggest alarm bell I find is: "There is free beer!" Err.. yeah. Anyway.

I've sadly been using an iPhone for the past few weeks 😔

I'm a hard core android fan but,well if I'm honest with you I got super high and got amnesia woke up with a dead screen on my android phone so got myself an iPhone since I needed to test an app I'm building , comes to think of it that women twice my age I kissed to piss her off might of broken it .. so my friends say ...

Anyway the point being iphones ... not that bad I'm aware people praise their software but it's to rigid for my liking there's features android has I believe that makes it superior

Cameras are better ... build quality is solid. Can't complain really. My android was a one plus 3 great phone also

I might get the s8 I'm waiting to see if they hold up or the new one plus phone if I find the specs ...

The point is as devs we get so stuck in our ways I consider us generally the most open Minded people but not when it comes to tech we are generally hard core fan boys of one company or another

But in truth, there's a lot of great products out there worth our money even if they are apple ... money grabbing bitches.

I say this because my hate for apple whilst it's still there I can at least respect them a little for certain things especially their phones

More of a question than a rant. What to do regarding programming.

I'm self taught, php, c, c#, and I make stupid little programs that make my life easier as a sys admin.

I want to ask, how do I take things further? Where I'm from, it's really hard to get a job as a programmer without 5 years experience and knowledge in 5 other languages.

Do I try and make bigger apps to showcase myself and hope someone finds me, or what do I do in this instance. I'm not a fully fledged coder, but I'm comfortable and if I don't know something i learn it pretty quickly.

Is there a way that you get a job, even as a junior? Or is it pure luck?

Finally after one year I understood how to carry out my job. I should do exactly NOTHING. I stopped completely organizing the team, solving bugs, helping the team developing and solving problems, explore and try stupid things said by CEO, PM and consultants.
I stopped for 2 months now and nothing happened.
I work remotely, nobody knows if I'm working or not, because nobody cares really about priorities, bugs, customers or products development.

I gain 10K$ (ten thousand) per month.

I attend skype meeting once per week or less. I say yes to everything, nobody gives a shit to what I say, even if they consider me the technical director. Actually in the meetings I only take care of being considered the technical director.
I achieved the mythical 4 hours working week.

I keep skype open in all my devices in order to answer promptly in case of problem, wherever I'm am, that's the most important thing right now.

I attended some meeting from the toilet or from the bedroom.

It was hard. To understand that the board is only after the next funding and not looking to develop a real product. It's hard to pretend helping people while thinking inside you "fuck you".
You have to let go the "guilt": if you can't login, I KNOW that is my fault, that there is a bug, that is possible to solve it, that resources and planning are needed etc. That's guilt. Just let go and say "next release" and never include it in the next release.
In this way I discovered that some users are paying the application even if they can't login.

The company is not going to disappear in the next 5 years. On the contrary, it's going to receive more money.

So the only "bad" thing is, what will I write in my CV in 5 years?

Hey Google, maybe I'd subscribe to YouTube Premium if you weren't throwing midroll ads into my tutorials every 3:45.

It's stupid, because they're trying so hard to annoy me into subscribing that they've done the opposite and annoyed me into NOT subscribing. I'd have considered it before, but ever since their recent changes it's so frickin' annoying that I refuse to subscribe just on principle because I won't financially support those pieces of trash anymore than absolutely necessary.

My kid has a toy car he can sit on, ride and play some music by pressing a huge button. He loves it! And he loves that music.

I don't mind the music, but I do mind how loud it is. When it's playing it's VERY hard to understand what other people in the same room are saying. Now imagine that car starts playing while you're still asleep....

It can scare the shit out of someone! Not to mention it is annoying af.

So today I dug up my never-used kit of eclectronics compoents and some tools. Spent an hour or so and installed a potentiometer in that car from hell! Now I can alter its volume.

I know it's not much, but I feel as if I were an engineer :) That's a nice feeling. I like it.

Just wanted to share

GOD FUCKING DAMMIT MICROSOFT IT'S NOT THAT FUCKING HARD TO REMEMBER WHAT TIME ZONE I SET

My colleague is what you would call a cowboy coder. He solves problems with really complex solutions that only he understands and does not seem to care about that the team doesn't understand it. He's super fast and very skilled, but it leaves the rest of the team hanging. He sometimes works at his spare time so things we worked on the previous day can be totally changed the next day without any notice. He has also removed code written by someone else because he did not like it, in secret. I found this while browsing through commits that were committed directly to master without a PR.

We have tried talking to me about this but it doesn't seem to work. He seems to value speed over anything else and doesn't seem to have any respect for other team member's opinions.

What the hell do I do? Has anyone else worked with a similar typed person? He's really making my life hard and I think it's very frustrating. Please help.

For fucks sake, how many times can you get the same error before giving up?

So, there's this form, and it's used quite frequently without fail, and there's this 1 user receiving an error that some data is incorrect, so... they submit the form again, and again, and again, and 6 more times with the same bloody error all because changing 1 fucking field is obviously to hard to recognise as the problem when the error says "you can not have 'x' in field 'y'"

Fuck it, do I need to replace 'x' with a blank, just because you can't read a fucking error message?

Just wanted to leave a little encouragement that can be hard to find on a 'rant' board: As a 40 year old dev doing this for 16 or more years... I'm not jaded, I still have a burning enthusiasm for software dev, I'm lucky to be able to pursue this career. Have I been in some shitty situations and health damaging levels of stress? Yes at times, and I've ranted about them here. This career isn't an easy ride, ultimately there's a reason it's well paid - for all of its physical ease it's mentally and often emotionally hard. But, I still find the highs match the lows, there's still thrill in the chase to make the project and product work right. Only advice I would give is be prepared to shift down a career gear for a while when you have kids. That shit is hard. Keep having fun people, we work with machines that extend and force-multiply our minds, what a time to be alive!

I hate white boarding sessions. They feel unnatural to me. I simply don't work well when put on the spot and I have 3 ogres staring at me waiting for me to fuck up in front of them. Fight or flight engages, the adrenaline rush, my mind freezes. Suddenly it's like I forget how to code at all and I'm expected to solve a problem at once, correctly the right time, or I'm out.

I can't work like that. I need time to process a problem on my own, with my coffee in my one hand and a pencil and scratch paper in the other, not with some demanding employer standing over my shoulder the whole time scrutinizing my every key stroke. I get things wrong the first time sometimes, and more often than not have to google things I can't recall spontaneously. But I always figure it out, test it, make sure it's right before putting it into use.

I've been through several "probationary" periods when first starting a job. They just tell you, they're giving you a month to see if you can handle the job. If not, sayonara. I don't see what's so hard about evaluating candidates in a real world scenario.

So many employers have totally unrealistic expectations.

A discussion about writing tests for frontend applications.

Context: my frontend coworkers don't write tests, at all. Yeah, really. Our testing process is very manual. We test manually when developing. We test manually when reviewing code. After merging, the application is deployed to a staging server and the design team does a QA Sprint. Lots of manual testing and some bugs still crawl by.

So I decided to start pushing my coworkers to start writing tests. One of the reasons I constantly hear them say to not write tests in the frontend is: "It's not worth the time, because design keeps changing, which means we have to take time to fix the tests. Time that we usually don't have."

I've been thinking about this a lot and it seems to me that this is more related to bad tests than to tests in general.

Tests should not break with design changes (small changes at least). They should test funcionality, not how things look. A form should not break if the submit button's style changes, so why should its tests fail? I also think that tests help save time, as they prevent some back and forth because of bugs.

Writing good tests is the hard part. Tests that cover what's really important and aren't frail and break with things that shouldn't break them. What (and how) should we test? And what shouldn't be tested?

Writing them fast is another hard thing. Are you doing it right if they take more time to write than the actual code?

What do you think about this? Do you write tests for your frontend applications? What do you test? How much time do you spend writing tests? What are your testing tools/frameworks?

People telling me what to do. I am 19 yo. I havent got into university, i have passed the bachelor's degree exam with 83.5% in computer science, i am employed in web development and i like it. Im not even thinking about going to university for now, not even getting a driving license, the stress is too big for now. I love traveling by bike. I enjoy listening to heavy metal and hard rock and I love peace more and i enjoy talking with people.
The biggest hurdle is people who tell me "do that because everyone does". And I'm not talking about my mom. She supported me everytime. I'm talking about people who doesn't belive in someone's knowledge and bothers the others. It's good if you give me advice and talk with me about it, but never be strict about that advice.

Recent experience (#2)
- a cousin wanted to reinstall Windows on his laptop
- gave it to a tech shop
- they couldn't, said hard disk faulty
- I took the laptop hoping that it's just a partition table issue
- I tried changing partition table from MBR to GPT, but failed
- removed his hard disk from his laptop and plugged into mine
- tried and failed
- so I thought I would give it a chance with Ubuntu
- tried and ... 👍
- reinstalled his hard disk in his laptop
- works like a charm
- want to see what complaints he comes up with
- he is not a tech guy
- let's see how he manages to use it for his daily tasks

Hey! You there!
Are you sick of windows 10 sending you intrusive reminders about updates? Are you tired of random unscheduled restarts? Tired of feeling like you have no control over your own computer?

Take back control!
DO THE FUCKING UPDATE, YOU FUCKING INCOMPETENT, USELESS, LAZY, PIECE OF DRY WANK!

Seriously guys: pick a time convenient to you, and take 5 or 10 minutes (when you're likely spending hours at your computer), and do them. Not only will you get rid of the annoying notifications, but you'll also keep your pc safe and secure by keeping up with security patches. C'mon people, it's really not that difficult.

And can we please, for the love of all things holy, stop the circlejerking? You're developers, you are the computer proficient. The only things a PC will do are the things you tell it to do. Dig deep, dig into the registry, dig into the services manager, dig into the fucking settings cos a good number of the most common complaints can be fixed in the basic options menu. Tell your computer to stop doing the things you don't like and it will stop.

It's really not hard!

Why is it so hard to just build machines that work without all this ideological bullshit? Code doesn't care if politics==true. The world is scary enough without you assholes making modern life a data minefield for even the most educated experts, and taking advantage of the ignorance of everyone else. Fuck you.
I just wanna <look at web pages> without having to consider, counteract, or silently assist some fucking regime. Why is EVERYTHING this way? Everything is a back door or a data mine or a political statement? This isn't a fucking art piece! It's not your espionage tool, fucking codes in invisible ink and tiny cameras and shit everywhere! It's a <web browser>, and if it does ANYTHING besides <browse the web> that I didn't explicitly tell it to do, you better better not be the one who made it. Because if you did, you are what's wrong with the world.

When you work hard for something and you are sure that you gonna get it, but some ass licking guy who doesn't even know how to code gets it. Yes, it happened to me. I was working for an open source organization called PROBOT. I was working my ass off to get into GSoC with that organization. I created PR(pull request) after PR and solved most of their issues. But later on, I came to know they didn't even saw my single PR. Life surely teaches you some hard lessons but it's you who should not give up I would say. I do not regret working my ass off and writing those code and not getting into GSoC but I cherish those moments where I learnt many new things. And as for that organization, I would say they don't even know how to manage. This was my exact reaction when the result came

Dear web developers, whenever there is more than ONE LINE OF TEXT make sure the line-height is 1.4em.

I thought I'd always be a die-hard proponent of working from home; it can be great for the right person: and I thought that would be me; but with the family I have? It's turning into a disaster. They're too used to having me around, my wife is becoming too used to making arrangements that involve me taking an hour or two out of the day here and there; she doesn't know the impact of context switching in the middle of the day. If I refuse to help her out, that makes me the asshole. Then I get ratty because I feel the stress of being unproductive, and guess whose fault it is again? Mine. The kids rush in and out of my work area, or get upset when I come out for a coffee and don't want to spend time with them, but it's not their fault, at 2 and 4 they don't understand. Take me back to the fucking office, I'm done.

I just want to work. How hard is the concept of being left the fuck alone.

I starting to think, that I may actually be addicted to learning 😅 sound completely stupid, but I'm kinda stressed lately, so I wanted to take a day off, and not do anything.

But my mind kept being like "how does this work, how does that work, how do they fit together". I've never really tried before, to not research something, when I wanted to know how it worked, but Damn it's actually been hard not to...

After 10 years of thinking of getting into gamedev, I just joined a team game jam and it's going somewhere.

4 months ago I wrote a rant about how difficult it was for me to get into gamedev.

I guess I finally started because:
a) I'm not doing this alone
b) Another person takes care of the art

Regarding "a", computing, programming can be a very lonely task. I realized how much I missed the college years where I was paired up with other people to do something

There's something magical about being in a team.
You may not be a fan of your mates personalities. You may even hate their guts.

But working on something together, when everyone does the thing they should do, when things just flow... it's just magical.

When that happens, "all the bullshit goes away"™, and it's just you and your team sharing the same hope.

As for "b", I think I realized that, at least for my way of thinking, art (even in an initial, rudimentary state) is what ends up creating a game.

While I always tried to do it the other way around, first the game, then the art.

Maybe now I could dabble into pixel art and then use that as the thing that would define the game.

I was also an emotional mess for most of my 20s (and still kinda am, but not that much), so I guess that made getting into gamedev hard too.

Now, here's the negative part: the guy that does the art (and also codes) sucks balls at communicating and at git.

He takes a shitload of time to respond, doesn't address the things I state are important, doesn't join the damn trello, sometimes gives me some sass on his comments.
And he accidentally overwrote my changes on git three times.

The good thing is that he acknowledges his fuckups and fixes them.

I'm not really mad though. I'm almost 30, he's 20 or so.

When I was 20 I was a goddamn mess.
And it's just a week, and the pleasure of working with someone is far greater.

I'm not sure *why*, but I increasingly see the following pattern:

Challenge a primarily OO / imperative dev by saying OO or imperative styles aren't always a good fit, and that a stateless functional approach can offer advantages, and you often get something akin to:

"Yeah, it's new to me so I'm still working my way around it, but I get that. Makes a lot of sense."

Challenge a functional dev by saying the functional style isn't always best, and in some cases functional isn't a good fit, and you tend to get:

"YOU IMBECILE! YOU ARE SIMPLY CONSTRAINED BY YOUR YEARS OF MINDLESSLY FOLLOWING THE OO HERD! FUNCTIONAL IS ALWAYS SUPERIOR!! ALWAYS, I TELL YOU!!"

I mean geez guys, calm down and learn it's just another tool in the toolbox. I get that popular paradigms emerge and have their die-hard supporters, but I didn't even see this kind of thing when OO became the "new thing everyone needs to use for everything" in the 90's.

!rant
Neighbouring nursing student asked me to recommend her a good laptop. I take a look at her existing one and it's an ultra book in pretty much decent condition. I ask her what her issue with this one is and turns out there's not enough space on the hard disk (30 GB SSD). I advice her to consider upgrading instead of buying a new laptop and she agrees. She also asks me if I can fix the track par of the laptop as it's not working. I take a look at the system tray and then work my computer science magic (press the fn+F9 to activate the trackpad) and boom! It's a miracle and she's squealing with delight. I even ran a disk cleanup and wiped 3Gigs of space so that she could continue downloading the episode from Netflix.
I hear a lot of you people complain about being asked to do outrageous tech shit because you're a computer person but man, I sure love being the "tech guy". :D

It's not that my work is hard. Basically, all the work I do these days is something I've done before with a slight twist on it.

I just feel underappreciated.

"bUt u mAkE sO mUcH mOnEy dO uR jObBbb!!"

How much money I make should not suppress how I feel at a company. Two years without a raise, every company meeting is a circle jerk for the sales team, and whenever our work is mentioned it's "Great job to the PMs for getting this to our clients."

Fuck you guys. Lol. This is a team effort from all sides, but to put engineers last on the "kudos" ladder is just so shitty.

It's the 21st century. We have this amazing thing called the Internet. It's literally at our finger tips. Any information you want can be found with the tap of a phone screen, and the information will be presented to you in less than a second.

Why is this concept so fucking hard for people to comprehend? Instead of asking me "How do I write a resignation letter?", search the damn internet for resignation letter guides. Like Jesus Christ, it's not that hard of a concept to comprehend. Especially when you've basically grown up with the internet in our lives.

A Gentoo installation might be fun, but it sure as hell isn't worth it, both in time and effort. Broken audio, broken video, broken stability. A broken kernel that doesn't recognize the hard drive or the network interface. And half a week to compile the fucking thing and it's still not done. This is not the right distribution for me.

ŁEŊ@#fmęgwjnfčuÆ®ŊÆŁEŊ3ŋ4ħ€3łæŋ€4æł4ħæ4€ħ9æŋ98ł3ħŋ98↓łħ€9“→↓ŋħł93ŋ@38ŁŊ89ÆŁ4ĦŊ08ÆŁĦ093Đ3@09ŋæłęb„guwahęgawęgÆŁ$ĦÆEı$Ŋ(ÆŁ#Ŋ↑(łæ49↓ŋw

AAAAAAAAAAARRGGHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm gonna break this laptop in half if I will not get a break from Windows!

I'm running it in a VM and STILL this fucker gets on my nerves SO FUCKING HARD!!!

1. CPU% 100%. Laptop fans are spinning so hard it's ready to take off
2. My hands are on the laptop. THey are HOT from the heat from inside. Hell that's uncomfortable!
3. ctrl+shift+esc to see why is cpu% 100%. It's something called WMI Host something. Kill that mthrfckr!
4. Process respawns immediately and goes up to 100% again. I have already increased handles limitation for that service a few weeks ago. Like 20x more than it was before!
5. website in IE
6. does not seem to be responding
7. hit f5. Nothing happens
8. Hit refrech buttong on the toolbar. Nothing happens
9. Place cursor at the address bar and hit ENTER. Nothing happens.

Meanwhile my hands are burning.
WHAT THE FUCK!!!

What kind of idiotic system is that!! My asshole is a better OS than this piece of SHIT!

AAAARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH#@ŦŊæ¶đ@#ĸogęq j

I'm super pissed. Better keep a 30-40 meters distance from me so the things I throw at you would not hit your ballz!

Now that I come to think of it, the only times I am THAT pissed is the times I am using windows. Srsly.

Dual Boot Linux & Windows.

I hardly ever see anyone do it right. And there is just two tricks that make a completely new experience out of it. I am not sharing it with you to be nice, I am sharing because I am curious if you're already doing it.

1. Install on a second hard drive, not a different partition. Learn which button to hold on the boot screen to select the boot drive. You can still chain-load via Grub, but the major advantage, updates of neither OS will fuck up your boot loader. You can update it abso-fucking-lutely risk free. Second advantage, advice 2. becomes trivially easy.

2. Set up a virtual machine. Select as its hard drive the raw disk volume where you have installed your Windows. You can do this with VirtualBox, but QEMU with virtual machine manager make is far easier to set this up in. You can now start Windows under Linux as a virtual machine. You can always start a small application, but the big deal is installing. Start a Steam download, have it installed and ready without switching over. Running windows updates. And when you then have time to play the game, just reboot and you have it already installed.

I feel like many are not aware that you can start a virtual machine of a real hard drive. It's one of those things that improve usability of it enormously. It's something where many will just not think about it because they keep dual booting and virtual machines in two different categories in their brains, but immediately will think it is obvious as soon as they hear about it.

So, who already did this? Raise your hands!

so there was a tik tok (yes i'm a 17 year old american, so i use tik tok) about making an iphone app: "how to make an iphone app, step one open your mac and download xcode..."

i commented, "if you're not rich and can't afford a mac, learn flutter..." and a bunch of people go "just get a job it's only like $1k"

there's so many rich people out there who just don't understand the concept of debt, how there's not enough jobs, there's so many problems.

there's nothing even political about it. when the amount of unemployed people is more than the amount of job openings, not everyone can have a job, that's just a fact. how even if you have a job, you might be spending most of your money paying off student loans.

some people are just so stupid. they start off in a position where their parents have loads of money that gets them into great schools and internships and programs and they still want to claim it was "hard work" that got them there.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

Okay, I'm feeling a bit better now.
How to stop being a lil bitch? Why does it seem like everyone got the "don't give a shit" patch except me? I'm working hard on getting my shit together, I've made MASSIVE progress, but everytime I'm feeling good and confident and ready to take the world head-on, I just kinda crumble again with the slightest mishap. This needs to stop. I'm really trying SO hard not to snap. Fucking hell, being aware of all this makes it even worse! It's like I'm two people, one is a downer and REALLY good in draining my brain power, the other is the guy who's typing this and knows that life shouldn't be taken this seriously, but doesn't stay in the cockpit for too long. I'm extremely tired and mad. I just fucking hate this.

Bring the fun and curiosity back.

School education? Mostly rinse and repeat, learn from heart and do as you are told.

First job? Take these bread crumbs, shit out gold ingots, please.

There are few who had either very kind and gifted teachers / persons in their life or had a strong will / desire to learn by / for themselves - but it's hard to combine fun and curiosity with the - most of the time - very harsh reality and environment we live in.

I'd really wish that it would get back to fun and curiosity and not the endless myriad of bitching, hissing and fighting it usually is.

What I find most tiresome in education is the overflow of information with no value - most content is outdated, wrong, harmful, not precise and especially not helpful.

Thinking about good education I've got very fond memories of hanging out in IRC chats, talking with people who were "ancient" (la me 15-20, them 40 plus ;) ) and not being "shood" away, but rather getting fed by book recommendations, hints, appointments when they had more spare time to explain in private IRC sessions etc.

The atmosphere was always a "we might not have time for it, but we'll try and don't worry if you don't understand it".

When I'm trying to find information today... It's really 90 - 95 % filtering, 4 % try and error, 1 % finding what I need.

Oh look. The monitoring channel is in flames, smartphone is vibrating so hard it's having a seizure.

Hm. Nah it's fine. Not my...

Damn it. Incoming call. -.-

I'm actually on vacation (more like you need to trim down overtime before management get's angry).

They decided to test the new hardware / os stack I set up in the last weeks. I'd actually be happy about it If I wasn't on vacation and would be part in something that I invested a lot of time...

Well now I am. Guess what. It's running too good.

And that's not a joke. It's partly due to an upgrade in infrastructure (got rid of some last remaining 1 Gbps networks)… but also because I changed quite a lot on the OS / VM side plus we changed from XEN to Proxmox... With major tweaks, too.

The whole stack can now handle peak traffic where it would choke before, and even go beyond the old peak traffic.

Enough of introduction, the simple reason why shit burned down was because they tried out the current development branch and let it ran.

The development branch had an currently unfinished ratelimiter framework, since I didn't had time for an full burn in and didn't knew what the maxima / limits were. And since I hadn't finished that, I didn't finish the traffic shaping either.

Hm. Guess it's not good when you let a bunch of heavy parallelized data generators / analyzers run for free....

In the end, we simply shotgunned the docker development machines, because thanks to network congestion / retransmissions and feedback, they were not really cooperative via network / REST.

But hey: To infinity and beyond. XD

App crashed during a live demo. Hard not to feel bad especially since it's friday and i have to go into the weekend with that thought. Am i overreacting?

‪Many years ago I was told by a senior dev that caching is one of the hardest things I'll ever come across. At the time I didn't know what he meant, but these past few days I'm starting to understand‬ what he meant. It's not using the cache itself, it's the cache management that is hard. Determining what needs to be cached, when a cache should be invalidated, how long should something be cached etc. It's pretty insane when you start having to compare it with the requirements.

I now know why I'm a developer and not a designer, it's so fucking hard like it's goddamn bootstrap that shit is basically built for me but it still looks like an egg took a shit on a toaster

!dev

I have a couple of thoughts about social justice controversies from these last years.

I think it's hard to have a good opinion about these events for several reasons.

One reason is that finding good information in 2019 is very hard.

Revenue based sites (thus unneutral) dominate the search results. You search about something and you find thousands of sites basically saying the same thing (because they copy each other).

That's why the existence of a free and open search engine is so important, so it's easier to find neutral hence good information on which to base your opinions, but they are prohibitively big for small groups to build.

Another reason is that controversies generate shock and shock curtails rational thinking. Maybe that's how the primitive brain works?

I'm not much of a scholar to feel confident to say that, but it's so recurrent that it's not too much of a wild guess.

When a controversy happens, a natural reaction is to pick a side. This means that:
a) we assume that there are only 2 sides, and
b) we must pick one of them

So, maybe the human is a bad politician by nature?

Also, because of the shock controversies generate, peaceful dialogue is very rare.

I have yet to see peaceful dialogue online about what patriarchy means to feminists and a lot of other terms they use.

I don't care much about feminists that vandalize or interrupt talks (yelling over someone else is abuse in my opinion).

But for the rest of them, I think discussing their ideas would be good.

I say this because most feminist discourse I see online is not open. Or maybe there are such instances but the web is so big that it's hard to find such instances.

I think some part of the modern feminist doctrine is bullshit, and some part is true.

I for one hate when some men I know in life expect their wives to be their cooks+cleaners (unless they want to do that, willingly). Personally, I'd encourage my wife to get a job (rightfully so, not just to meet some minority quota in some company).

I don't mind either calling a trans person the pronoun she wants.

But other ideas are awful, like the idea that meritocracy is patriarchy, so you need to force minorities to meet a proportionate quota. That's terrible reasoning.

Or the excessive self appreciation culture, like saying to yourself "you are pretty, you are beautiful, you are perfect". I think that grows arrogance and black-or-white thinking.

And some other ideas as well.

I guess the same you can say about any doctrine with different degrees. Some part is bullshit, some part isn't.

Some right wing people hate everyone who isn't white by default, but some want to have more immigration control.

I sure don't like the experiment of separating children from families like the current us govt did, but I wouldn't be happy either to know that by '99 50% of gangs members in the us were hispanic.

With this, I'm not going to say "embrace everyone's ideas" like an idiot. I hate when people do that. It's a stupid and weak reaction to radicalism.

In fact I think the way you fight radicalism and bad doctrines is that you listen to them and maintain good dialogue and counterargue in a respectful but insightful manner.

Making snide remarks, insulting or trolling won't change anyone's mind. That is just throwing fire to the fire.

In fact, when someone gets harassed because of something they believe in, usually it results in even more adherence to their beliefs, because of the usual assumption that success or goodness is full of strife.

So by telling a "sjw" or kkk member that they are idiots over twitter, you are in fact making them stronger believers in their doctrine.

Think of Daryl Davis, a black guy that made 200 members leave the kkk. How? He didn't tell them they were assholes, he somehow made friends with them.

I feel bad now because I've been trolling new devrant users a lot because of how they worsen the quality of the site, but maybe I should tell them that they are ruining the site somehow in a nice way and maybe they'll listen? I dunno...

I'm a contractor at a product company and today I had the pleasure of working with some jQuery.

A function needed to be called before another function, hard work right?

So I moved the call to the function 3 rows higher, checked it in, set the task as ready for test and started to look for other tasks.
Within a couple of minutes I get a direct message from another dev, let's call him Steve.
Steve wanted me to set the task to ready for code review instead of test, so I did just that and tried to move on.

Some minute or two later Steve contacts me again:
"It would be great if you'd move the comment so it'd be over the call to the function"

Well, I'm not one of those who likes comments... If you need a comment, it's probably not good/readable code. In some cases sure, it might be a complex block coming up.
Sorry, lost my train of thought.

I answered Steve : "Are you sure, I could just remove it instead?"

(for readability S will be Steve and M will be me)

S: Well, it's always good to have comments
M: In this case I think it will be alright.
S: But it's nice to see what the function is doing.
M: I'll do it if you really want me to.
S: It's better to have the comment than to not have it and needing it.
M: Okay then

The name of the function : LoadOrganizationTree()

And this is the comment :
//Load organization tree

Discovered yesterday that my boss does tests with production database... and I'm responsible for the fucking backups and he doesn't even care to let me now when so I can at least schedule one at slave. Come on... it's not that hard to let others know or test on your own machine...

Why is whatsapp just AIDS?!

The privacy thing is big but let's take a look at the app.

It's the only messenger app I've ever used that forces you to save incoming images to your gallery if you want to see them, like wtf?

The UI looks like shit and it's kinda hard to understand from a UX perspective, for example read receipts which Messenger does beautifully. Facebook owns WhatsApp so A it's not really a better choice than fb messenger and B it basically has a shit quality application compared to Messenger. The messaging experience in sketchy Chinese dating apps is better.

Also it basically hacks your phone. It turns on notifications and permissions by itself even when I explicitly turned them off, and sends me notifications for muted conversations.

Speaking of notificatikns. Every time I get 1 notification, notifications from every single chat even an unread messages from 3 years ago gets sent to my phone.

It guzzles battery like a monster.

And they have basically formed a cult in the indian community, so now everyone thinks its the best and no one uses anything else because "it's so convenient" which it's NOT. It has a terrible interface, and the only thing I like about it is the fact that it being so shit gives me an excuse to uninstall it and ignore all the fucking spam on there.

Honestly, the app needs to die ASAP because it is frankly the shittiest of shittiest messaging applications.

Yeah. Kinda late to the WK 227 party.

Thing is: I've read a lot of rants and honestly, some of the rants were ... touchy.

Like that weird emotional thingy you don't like but that just kind of happens cause I'm human too.... And have that shitty emotional feature integrated, which feels most of the time like a heisenbug.

Me and my parents. Specifically mom. Are like ... Matter and antimatter.

You don't want them in a room. Bad things happen TM. My mom is responsible for ... Let's say severe psychological trauma starting with age 4 to age 17.

In 17 I moved out and lived on "my own" (truth: on heavy support, cause I wasn't what you'd called "psychologically stable" at that time).

I fucked up university and - as shared before - thanks to an math teacher who made my life an even more living hell and my parents, I'd started in IT mostly out of "resisting" certain assertations being made over my life.

The support I got from my family can be put together in one sentence:
"I survived, I tolerated - but will never forgive".

Thing is: Be it IT support or anything else. If your gut feeling tells you that family / coworkers / friends are not good for you.

Stay the fuck away from them till you've sorted yourself out.

I can tolerate my parents nowadays. Took > 10 years and a lot of hardships to "achieve" that.

It's not peachy. It's not loving. It's tolerance. (Yeah. That bit is muey importante to me).

The thing is: I cannot deny the fact that my parents tried to support me by money. That's what they still do _nowadays_ even though my income is like 60 % of the income my father and mother has combined... It's a bothersome detail.

There's a certain thing in this rant that I would like "to pass on": Emotional support matters.

When you let someone feel like an empty shell, you cannot fix it with money.

It will - severely - destroy the person.

TLDR: We all have rough edges, can be hard to deal with and be a pain in the arse, but all of us need emotional support sometimes. That's what matters the most. ;)

Liferay. Fucking Liferay.
I'm mostly C#, Java Dev with only a year of experience and as Kruger-Dunning effect says, I thought I'm not that bad. At the beginning of my job I've got tasked with creating an portlet for Liferay CMS which is written in Java. Can't be that bad, right? WRONG.
Liferay is real shit. Not only there is little to none community life but also documentation and tutorials are outdated! Many methods are doing the same functionality but are in different packages. JSP make coding a big fucking mess if you won't make shit ton of classes to clean it up. Also it has this incredible ability to crash whole portlet after a small change in classes structure.
I have to mention that no one could help me because company that I'm working for is a rather small one and there's no other Java developer beside me. This also means that it's hard to really get gut when no one is oversying my progress.
Also I really dislike web development. And Liferay made it even worse. I hope it will burn in hell.

So in Germany we have something like 'cooperative study'. You are employed in a company and study 'normal' at a university. This is in 3 month phases, i.e. 3 months working, 3 months studying.

At the moment I'm working and there is a colleauge, that seems to have no high confidence in my programming skills.
Today I saw parts of his NodeJS code and I thought I'm going crazy.
No comments, no real usage of callbacks or at least promises and I dont want to talk about naming of the variables.
I caught myself arguing with this guy too often and always thought I'm the stupid one, that doesn't understand him.
But I'm starting to think, He is the one that is hard to understand.

How ever, I stay confident and also keep a nice tone (also help as much as I can) and sometimes we also have the same thoughts in some topicd. It's not that bad, but sometimes I feel underestimated.

But hey, so it's a bigger surprise if I'm presenting my results and show them what I'm able to do 👍🏻

👏IT'S👏NOT👏THAT👏HARD👏TO👏MAKE👏A👏GOOD👏CLI

(semi-rant)

The new MacBook Pro's front is NOT metal. It's made out of some plastic despite looking like brush metal.

I learnt this the hard way when i accidentally ran my keys across it and gave it a nasty scratch.

Every time i see it, i feel an irritable itch that i can't scratch.

Luckily, i have the perfect bandage.

Regarding Article 13 (or 17 or wherever it moved to now)… Let's say that the UK politicians decide to be dicks and approve the law. After that, we need to get it engineered in, right? Let's talk a bit about how.. well, I'd maybe go over it. Been thinking about it a bit in the shower earlier, so.. yeah.

So, fancy image recognition or text recognition from articles scattered all over the internet, I think we can all agree.. that's infeasible. Even more so, during this lobby with GitHub and OpenForum Europe, guy from GitHub actually made a very valid point. Now for starters, copyright infringement isn't an issue on the platform GitHub that pretty much breathes collaboration. But in the case of I-Boot for example, that thing from Apple that got leaked earlier. If that would get preemptively blocked.. well there's no public source code for it to get compared against to begin with, right? So it's not just "scattered all over the internet, good luck crawling it", it's nowhere to be found *at all*.

So content filtering.. yeah. Nope, ain't gonna happen. Keep trying with that, EU politicians.

But let's say that I am a content creator who hates the cancer of joke/meme because more often than not it manifests itself as a clone of r/programmerhumor.. someone decides to freeboot my content. So I go out, look for it, find it. Facebook and the likes, make it easier to find it in the first place, you dicks. It's extremely hard to find your content there.

So Facebook implements a way to find that content a bit easier maybe. Me being the content creator finds it.. oh blimey! It can't be.. it's the king of freebooting on Facebook, SoFlo! Who would've thought?! So at that point.. I'd like to get it removed of course. Report it as copyright infringement? Of course. Again Facebook you dicks, don't make it so tedious to fill in that bloody report. And look into it quickly! The videos those SoFlo dicks post is only relevant in the first 48h or so. That's where they make the most money. So act more quickly.

So the report is filled, video's taken down.. what else? Maybe temporarily make them unable to post as a bit of a punishment so that they won't do it again? And put in a limit to the amount of reports they can receive. Finally, maybe reroute the revenue stream to the original content creator instead. That way stolen content suddenly becomes free exposure! Awesome!

*suddenly realizes that I've been talking about the YouTube copyright strike system all along*

… Well.. maybe something like that then? That shouldn't be too hard to implement, and on YouTube at least it seems to be quite effective. Just imagine SoFlo and the likes that are repeat offenders, every 3 posts they get their account and page shut down. Good luck growing an audience that way. And good luck making new accounts all the time to start with.. account verification technology is pretty good these days. Speaking of experience here, tried bypassing Facebook's signup hoops a fair bit and learned a bit about some of the things they have red flags on, hehe.

But yeah, something like that maybe for social media in general. And.. let's face it, the biggest one that would get hurt by something like this would be Facebook. And personally I think it's about time for that bastard company to get a couple of blows already.

What are your thoughts on this?

Vertical alignment, it's not that hard!!!

Customer: I need a one page website, which must have an administration panel , so I can change and add new sections. I will also have designed a unique logo and a unique web design. I think you can do it in 5-10 hours , so I'll give you $ 50 and $ 100

Me: ehmmm... I need more time if it is to be unique , and one hour cost of $ 5- $ 10 is not enough.

Customer: fuck it. I do it my self. it can not be that hard , and I think it's too expensive.

Me:

So before the Age of JavaScript, when programming was trying to be an engineering discipline, I felt like we were getting close to figuring out what worked and what didn't. We had rules of thumb (more general than Patterns) and code smells.
Then JavaScript came in and no one had time to think about "engineering" anymore. I'm fine with MVP and small iterations, but the disdain I see for making code clean and extendable and improvable is baffling (and annoying). First-time coders might never have had to fix someone else's code, but two weeks in a chair should have fixed that.
It's not that understanding code is so hard (although it can be); understanding the _intent_ is hard. This MVP is great, but when no one had time to document what is actually supposed to happen, programmers have to reverse-engineer the *design*.

Making an MVP is hard as hell. It's not even coding that makes it hard, it's knowing when to stop that's so damn difficult. By the time you're ready with something, your brain says "Hey...wouldnt it be great if you added this!" Then you add it, "whoa add this too!"...several days later:
Brain: "The fuck is this, all you needed was that"
😭😭😭

So, I'm the only developer in a marketing firm. I was asked to develop the company website. The deadline was within a month. A full on CMS. When I was interviewed I told them that I'm more fluent in back-end development rather than UI design etc. So the company's designer started designing the website. Incomplete designs were given to me one week before the due date. I'm a fresh grad so I'm relatively new. So I used a website builder knowing that I can't code the whole CMS within a week. I asked them which they gave approval to knowing it was $16 a month.
I started making it using webflow. 2 pages in, I asked them to pay for the subscription because webflow allows 2-3 pages for the free version. When the time to pay came, they were like, "wow, $16? That's a lot every month for just a website". Keep in mind, it's not that they don't have the money. Just cheap. This was like 5 days before the deadline and they said it's too expensive and asked me to code everything by myself. And gave an extension for a few months.
I said okay and started development. I said we would still need to spend on a cloud instance for deployment which would be like $6 monthly. My manager asked me is there a way to not pay monthly and pay like $100 and get one for lifetime. I facepalmed so hard. I tried explaining to him cloud-server costs are either monthly/yearly or pay-per-use basis. He told me maybe because I'm new I don't know and go to do some research on it. I researched and the only solution was to buy a server which costs $100++ monthly. I sent him the costs in a document which he did not even bother to read.

That was back in November last year. Fast forward to February. I've coded the website thrice. The design keeps changing every week. The design is still not complete. And they are saying I'm not eligible for a promotion because the website is still not done. It pisses me the fuck off. It's not my fault it's not done. The designers haven't done the design, the manager can't decide on shit. I'm just here because it's my first job out of uni and I thought it might be a good experience, but honestly right now the way they are treating me it pisses me off.

Is it so hard to comment your code?

I work on collab projects here and there and both the comments and documentation are both awful, nearly always, there are some exceptions.

This is a plea to all those who teach anyone to program. "This performs a loop" is not a helpful comment, nor is "This sets variable x to 1" where the line below is "let x = 1".

The last piece of code brings me on to my next point meaningful variable names. If x is a variable that stores the age of a machine call it ageOfMachine or age_of_machine. Not aom, not x but what it actually is, modern IDEs and text editors will fill this out for you.

Finally documentation, a good friend of mine sent me this quote a while back, I can't find the image but "Documentation is like sex, when it's good, it's great. But when it's bad it's better than nothing." Your documentation should be good, a good pattern to follow is the Node.js documentation, it tells the function, what it does and what parameters it takes.

Anyway rant over; and I'm sure that this applies to people outside of this community only.

I see this in code:

bool status;
status = true;

It makes me want to hit things. INLINE THAT SHIT! bool status = true; It's not hard. JFC. And of course I don't have the authority to change it.

C'mon bill, it's not that hard.

My social life consists of spending much of my free time with my girlfriend, seeing my close family on weekends and meeting with a few friends from time to time.

It's enough for me and since there's not much of it, it isn't hard to "balance". Whatever that means.

Seriously tho, "social/work life balance" is subjective. It depends on what you need to feel good and happy. What works for some will not work for others. Don't try to push others into being social when they don't want to. Don't give me that "you need to go out more" crap. I don't. I'm fine just like this. I prefer to stay home and see a movie with my girlfriend.

That "people need to be social" mindset made me feel bad about myself for too long because I'm just not like that and people keep pushing that idea into my head. I'll go out with you when I feel like it, don't push it. Stop asking me every fucking weekend ffs.

I've been using devRantron recently to try it out. It's hard enough to be productive when I just get notifications on my phone, but getting desktop notifications that pop up over my code... how can I not immediately go look who commented on what??

So thanks guys, the app is great, but I have a love/hate relationship with the desktop notifs due to my lack of self-control.

Hey Spectrum! It'd be pretty wicked if you could email me or shoot me a text the next time you decide to do maintenance that will result in service outages!

It's not that hard to shoot a text that says "Hey Stuxnet! We gonna be doing some maintenance, so ya internet's probably gonna be down for a bit. We'll get that shit up and running asap tho my man."

Here's an advice to you guys:

Ever look at your mailbox and think it's so full of junk?

Archive all your current emails.

Then next time you get any spam emails take the time to unsubscribe or block the sender.

Trust me, life is so much better after you've got rid of those craps. And it's not that hard like it seems. In a week you'll probably get rid if 90% of those.

So there is the webapp that the national post is using in Hungary. When you want to search a street in the given city you have to wait until the whole fucking list is populated and the street names are filtered afterwards. (I've got it he only wanted one request per street). But if that won't be enough the drop down menu is offset in some resolutions and the console is full of errors.

I can live with that even with the duplicate street name, but how dare you to publish an app with a search function that is unable to work with the special characters of the specific language? It's not even hard to make it work. You just a lazy ass dumbfuck who copy pasted something from stack overflow and didn't make the effort of testing it.

I mean I would probably jump off of a brifge if I would make such a huge mistake.

Subject: a rant for devRant

Hello,

Not entirely sure why or when exactly it happened, but after I joined mailing lists I have a pet peeve for people who don't use a proper subject line, or don't use email when I literally made a mail server for that purpose (some organizations really prefer calling apparently). Is it really that hard to summarize a message in one sentence? Hell half the time even the message itself is just a few sentences.

Also the greeting and salutation at the beginning and end of email messages. I find them so redundant. Has anyone ever gotten any meaningful information out of "Hello", "Greetings", "Dear", or something like that? Or "Best regards" or whatever. I get that it's just being polite but it's so meaningless! I really don't like using them anymore. Just a message block and who it came from, that's all it needs to me. Instead pour some effort into the damn subject, the title of whatever drivel you're putting out there! Or replying to an email *only* when the subject matter is still related! Or actually replying to the damn email if it's still that subject matter...

I probably sound like an old man, but seriously.. email isn't a hard concept once you "get it". Anyone can write a halfway decent letter, why isn't that the case for email?

Best regards,
Condor

Ok, so I REALLY HATE ChromeOS. MY story is this: I'm using Chrome, and I want to get a file from my computer to my phone. Simple enough, I just plug my phone in, and... oh, wait! First it has to open two new windows for my phone's two storage areas. Ok, fine. I close the windows, get my file prepared, and I click/drag it over to the folder I want. Except, the computer doesn't FUCKING see it as a device anymore. It knows it's attached, but it doesn't fucking communicate with it. Ok, maybe it's a cord problem. Nope! Same issue. Maybe I need to update? Nuh-uh! That doesn't work either, since my computer's not supported anymore! And, the cherry on the top of the fucking shitcake that this whole situation is, the Files app, the one that you use to view the stuff on your hard disk? OH, IT JUST GOES AND CRASHES. I can open it! Nothing shows up. No devices work. It's just stuck like that until I reboot my machine.

God... FUCKING damnit, chromeOS.

So, here is the worst experience, not one.. but recent two of many of the encounters I had with my OOP teacher... (I am in Second Year of Engineering). Lets Call him T.
To give a background of T... He knows nothing but acts like he is the master... you'll get to know this...

Incident #0:
*me developing a website for a client and T just bumps in*
T: Hey, what are you upto.
M:Nothing sir, just some Web-dev stuff.
T: What languages do you use?
M: I am currently using embedded ruby.
T: No no, I meant, what languages do you use for web-dev?
*inner* M: Ok, try to act stupid... He is not worth of all the knowledge.
M: Sorry sir, I just use simple HTML-CSS.
T: Ohh, I use Wordpress... It's a great language to build websites.
*inner* M: He has no idea what WP really is, he is a fuckshit.
T: It's so simple and easy, that you code for Desktop view, press Ctrl-M and then it automatically makes it for mobile view.
*inner* M: Bursts out into laughter
M: OK sir, will look over it.

Incident #1:
*He is teaching, suddenly topic comes of Oracle Certification for Java*
T: I know many of you have idea about java, but do you have what it takes to be an OCJP..
*inner* M: LOL...
T: It is a really hard thing, and I can bet... I can bet *he did repeat that twice* that no one from you can even qualify OCJP.
*inner* M: It's time... It's time
M: Excuse me sir, first of all it's OCA... OCJP does not exist anymore... And secondly, I am an OCA...
*inner* M: Yeah... Fuck you bitch!
*assucimg inner* T:Fuck, asshole..$#@#%@!@$@%#

And whole class was like -> o.O

I really despise solving competitive programming problems.

I truly believe it's okay to struggle with them and that people have different abilities. But these kind of problems are an easy way to make you hate yourself and think of yourself less.

I can't solve this problem --> I'm not a good programmer --> I'm not smart enough --> I'm not good enough like my peers who work at FA*G companies, ...

I know these interview problems are a filter and that recruiting is hard and the demand is always high and that they are nothing like the real work but, the reality is, you need to prepare if you want to get into one of the big companies with better perks and maybe better projects.

I work with a designer who provides me with the mockups of the websites we do where I work. We use Figma, which is a tool similar to Sketch. I do design myself and with this tool is quite easy to mockup sites.

This designer is the worst person I've ever met in terms of document organization. He never organizes the layers of the documents, or even cares to assign names to each layer. It's not that hard with simple designs but when it comes to develop a full website it becomes awful.

I've been asking him politely to organice those documents into layers and groups for almost three years to which he never does.

I'm not able to find the proper words to ask again politely and when I do, he just puts the layers without order into a bunch of groups and calls the job done.

How hard is to be a bit emphatic to your coworkers and spend 5 minutes of your time making their life easier?

Don't reuse your fixtures!

Each test case should be isolated. Don't ever think just because some function requires a similar input, it's safe to reuse it ALL OVER THE PLACE.

Why? Because someday, you want to change one functionality of one unit.

And you adapt your tests, fix your code, and suddenly, by changing one fixture, you break dozens if not hundreds of unrelated tests and now you have to clean up that mess.

It's even worse for functional tests with all those interwoven parts so that it becomes hard to reason about the scope of your tests when lacking proper documentation.

How I know? BECAUSE I AM CLEANING UP YOUR MESS RIGHT NOW!

>Why is chrome making my computer turn off all of a sudden?
<Boss, you have a quite old iMac with fully updated chrome, which is known to eat RAM. PLus, you've been using that computer as a donkey to do video editing, even tho it's not made for that (looking at the stats), and you have your home folder on an external hard drive, plus like 10 other apps always active, including premiere, illustrator, airmail (with 12k emails always loaded smh), slack on 2 workspaces and at LEAST 12 chrome tabs on some of the heaviest websites
>Mmh... yeah you're right, I'm kinda asking for it

For fuck sake!
Fuck locatefamily.com, just searched out on google my name and surname, both foreign and hard to even spell out for many, and it's the first time that I saw my data(where did I live, my current work phone number, name and surname) open wide as the second link of my search, fuck!

But there's a clue, at that address I lived for a not so long period, so I did search my emails in that period and other than my employers and government emails(in which I don't trust either), here's a list of companies that had my info(partial or full):
Only address(with name and surname):

Amazon.it with 14 other companies(for shipping)
eBay with 4 other companies(for shipping)
voxelfarm.com
trenord.it
DUMA (LIGHT) di Adel
decathlon.com
gruppoargenta.it
paypal.it

All info:
gearbest.com
glistockisti.com
oculus.com
Banggood.com

Overall there are 33(including government, employers and national main mail service) potential leaks of that data, with 7 in full exposure.

After this, I'm thinking how it's even avoidable to not leak personal data, because from any of those businesses I got goods or services that otherwise I couldn't without exposing such informations... fuck.

What the fuck is so hard about vim? Press i for insert mode, esc for visual mode. How is that so hard to remember? There's like 2 commands at most that you need to know

I've just got in from bar* work, a little drunk*!

My last dev employer actually offered me my old job back, but as HR are so awful I said the situation was past that and demanded compensation. A nice payout agreed for me, for not taking it to tribunal 👍

Now for the new job! I thought working the night scene would be fun, but it's not well paid and the freelance I have is but it's hard to juggle the two.

I might have a break or a month or so doing this, then look for another job.

Anyone recommend good companies LGBT friendly in London?

just need to say this: It's GNU/Linux folks. I know, I know, it's not as easy to say when you want to talk about it, but every once in a while give the damn GNU a little credit. Without it we might not have Linux as we know it, so show some love from time to time, it's not that hard to say GNU/Linux.

I don't get all the "Can't exit vim" jokes.
IT'S NOT THAT HARD!
Its (esc) : wq to save and exit
And
(esc) : q! to exit without saving.

Just read vimtutor.

Gosh

Quick rant, I dont have time.

I have no idea how the fuck but I managed my IDE to show me that it's confused if my class "PackModel" is "PackModel" or "PackModel" (I have only one definition if you are hands first to ask).

its few years and first time when I see shit like that.

Fun fact, it was working OK until I used getter that was returning another object and than IDE got absolutely lost.

I had to use workaround in middle of nowhere as shown on image and suddenly its back fine with it. Not like it's returned by function hard typed and PHPDoc typed to return instance of this very object and in other scopes it just works...

It's Jetbrains so Im confused, it's robust IDE ;-;...

At first my dad was against it, I'm studying electronics engineering and he didn't want me to code because he is a software developer and he know that in my country it's really hard to make a living out of it. But since he realized that there is not much he can do about it he became really supportive and always review my code to help me improve it.

Not so much in my work but more my career.
My dad has been a great role model, still is and always will be.

He was an hard working metalworker. He loved his job. It's not a 50k job but he could easily manage his life.

My dad showed me that doing what you love, working with passion, makes your life easier and more fun. You deliver high quality products, because you care.

Since I found out that I love programming, I made it my life goal to do it as my career.

I've never been happier before. After all, I make money with my hobby.

Vape bloggers be telling people that it's impossible to quit vaping salt nicotine but I quit successfully. Here's how it went:
1. I took my addiction to the point when I vaped three cartridges a day (that's a lot). I remembered that feeling and recalled that dizziness and urge to vomit instead of "pleasure" when I wanted to vape again
2. It's hard to quit on your own. Instead of nicorette and other shit that doesn't work (because it's also nicotine), I took Cytisine. It removed that URGE and the only thing left to tackle was a psychological addiction
3. Vaping and smoking in my head was tied to a cool moments that I experienced, like smoking with the boys after a hackaton, etc. I analyzed them and realized that they're cool not because of the fact of smoking, they are cool per se. So smoking was not necessary

In my last days of cytisine therapy I not only forgot that I vaped, I sometimes forgot to take cytisine. That means the therapy was successful. My average running distance already improved from 1.5 to 3 km.

There is a research that quitting consuming nicotine can help cure depression. I'll check on that

Dear developers, I know it's hard but try to understand that devRant is not your product. So let's just stop the feature requests and keep ranting.

Some years ago but it's funny.
The company give to me a new laptop with windows Home Edition,
After few months I have installed Pro Version.
1 month later the laptop didn't work anymore, nothing on display, no beeps, zero.
Tried to replace ram and check but nothing works.
The CTO asked the supplier and they asked about SO, and they said it's not turning ON because i have installed Windows Pro.
Than the CTO had a brilliant idea: try put the hard disk in another laptop and install Windows Home, and put back in the defective one. I refused to to that, it's stupid and he insisted, then I put the laptop in his desk and I said: if you want do this you can do, im not stupid enough to do this.
He got really mad, 1 week later i got a brand new one 😅

Separation of concerns is a beautiful thing.

JSX is fucking ugly. Fuck that shit. I hate JSX with a passion.

Here is one. Did you know that the digestive system works really hard to digest the food eaten?

How about we blend all the food before consuming it? Take a blender and add a cup of coffee, add some salad, add a piece of cake, a few slices of pizza, hot sauce and for good measure add some juice, or whatever-you-eat-for-lunch.

After all, all that food is going to get mixed anyway. This is more efficient!

No? Why not? Because it's ugly, highly unappetizing, disgusting even, and it takes away the pleasure of eating, the enjoyment of a good meal.

That in a nutshell is JSX: mashing up everything together under the pretext of efficiency.

Web development not only is an art, but above all must be enjoyable to those who devote their lives to it. And ugly ain't gonna cut it.

Why is the internet such a toxic place... You voice your personal opinion and instantly have people who believe they are 'better' than you call you a stupid consumer because they use something that others may not care for.

Fuck me people, why can't we just have opinions and respect each other, it's not that fucking hard!

Some caffeine fueled morning passion...

Social media platforms getting away with suspensions and all other manner of 'social punishment' has to be the highest level authoritarianism has ever reached in its entire history. Social Media platforms, have it seems, become a side gig for tyrants and the excuses don't cut it with people anymore.
It's hard to believe that "we the people" allow companies to govern over entire populations of people, much larger than some of the most democratic and free countries on the planet with an iron fist.

The enforcement of community standards for breaking arbitrary rules that wouldn't make it to a solicitors desk is extraordinary in the extreme. If it's not a credible threat or illegal, then it's obvious an intention behind the punishment is conditioning.

And this is what authoritarian regimes have done throughout history.

Holy shit seriously: Fuck MSOffice. Fuck it right in the eyehole.

As desktop software, it's just brutally terrible. On my work mac, it's just sweaty garbage. The latest insult is that on the most recent update, msword stole the default file association from preview.

Libre isn't terrific, but at least it's closed when you close it. For that reason alone, it's orgasmic by comparison.

Because there's justice in the world, my job is not a document-centered one, so I have no real use at all for an office app, let alone the specific macros and formulae that the msoffice versions of these apps provide, so I couldn't give less of a shit about losing functionality.

The headline and main thrust of this rant is "fuck msoffice so hard that it dies of eye-fucking."

We had today a meeting in management that ended in a discussion about prevention instead of crisis and risk management.

Or to make it bit simpler: prevention instead of treatment.

In IT / management / government, treatment is usually the way - you let the crisis happen, despite knowing it could have been prevented, and treat the damage / crisis.

Needless to say, the discussion escalated like usual.

It's funny how managers are able to put sentences like: "it's important to have quality assurance like prevention but staying within budget should be priority" (loosely translated from German, it's hard - sorry)...

You mean the budget that exploded and quadrupled in size because you dumb fuckers pay no attention to quality assurance? Or the additional cost of hardware, maintenance etc. to compensate for the fuckups regarding performance evaluation and regression testing?

"We cannot prevent everything nor anticipate everything, it's safer to deal with an estimated risk than with the unknown"...

"But we'd need to invest in ..., which reduces value"

I could give more details, but I think the point is clear... the discussion became quite heated and the longer it went on, the more I wanted to have an morphine drop with suicide option...

Why do people hate prevention so much?

Is the concept that hard to understand? You prevent things to not deal with crisis.

You invest to prevent loss.

It's just one of these weeks where the only happiness consists of tipping the delivery guy with 20 % plus and getting an honest smile.

:(

I don't get it.
I tried Kotlin on Android just for fun, and it doesn't support binary data handling, not even unsigned types until the newest version. Java suffers from the same disease.
How does one parse and process binary data streams on such a high end system? Not everything is highlevel XML or JSON today.

And it's not only an Android issue.
Python has some support for binary data, and it's powerful, but not comfortable.
I tried Ruby, Groovy, TCL, Perl and Lua, and only Lua let's you access data directly without unnecessary overhead.
C# is also akward when it comes to data types less than the processer register width.

How hard can it be to access and manipulate data in its natural and purest form?
Why do the so called modern programming language ignore this simple aspect that is needed on an everyday basis?

I'm struggling at work. I hate senior mgmt at this company so much it's actually affecting my ability to produce work.

Fuckers high up have been delaying performance reviews for like a year, but they get their fucking bonuses with no delay. I can't afford not to have a job, so I'm trying to work, but it's hard. I try to keep things in perspective that they're still paying me so I should just do my job.. but how do you do it if you hate those cunts at the top so much. I became so toxic because of all the resentment too.

How on earth are there people in their second year of a computer science course who are unable to understand how to read build errors. It's honestly not that hard, just look at the fucking build log and see where the error is and what type of error it is, but yet they don't bother reading the log and say that their "compiler is broken" when their 5 line code won't work.

If this was still first year I'd understand since many of the class didn't have much programming knowledge, but if you're in your second year and you struggle with this (that too for a Hello World script) it looks like you aren't even bothered and just expect the computer to magically understand what you mean.

Oh Arch head
Oh Raven head
Oh Linux fanbase
I want to confess. Please here me!
Today my windows FINALLY successfully update. I was happy that when in an accident I'll require to boot in Windows I'll have less fear of random and sudden restart and applying of updates. But oh great men, I fouled this fearlessness to a greater extend. I was just checking the change logs and, this 01:57 hrs, 3 hrs later, I find myself hearing music on groove music, liking the integration of cortana with edge, groove music, settings and just all....

It's not that I'm loving 'it' more than GNU/Linux but my current installation of GNU/Linux has been fucked so hard by me already that it needs nothing but a reinstall... I'd like to spend a few more time with Windows before I go to bed(I'm sitting on my bed already tho) and promise to never see Windows this way ever again.
I promise

Will I be forgiven?

I fucking give up. Typescript is not meant for complex projects. It's meant for simple projects that are big. There's no way forwards, no matter how much I try to simplify my types I simply can not get the typescript server to stop lagging out the moment I do anything complex. It can't fucking do it, it just can't. And that sucks really, really hard.

I'm so tired of finding the ceiling on everything. I had a bad smell for typescript when it came out... and I never should have expected any more than this.

The battery of my good old Huawei Y300 is slowly dying. So I thought it was time to cut the battery consumption a little. What a delusion. A new battery costs < $5 btw, but I'm too lazy to order :)

I've tested 16 highly acclaimed (of about 20,000, didn't count all of them) battery apps - they're all!, and I mean all!, total crap. There is not a single app that does what it promises. And all totally fucked up with advertising - including some of the paid apps. Most apps consume more power than they actually save.

The winner of all this shit was the app "Battery Repair", which supposedly repairs broken cells. Well, well.

All that junk should be thrown out of the store. But, no, these crap apps have ratings of 4.5 - 4.8 with millions of downloads. I don't get it.

The only app that actually works is, hard to believe, Kaspersky Battery Saver.

So if someone else wants to "optimize" their battery - forget it, it's not even worth looking for it.

Ugh power's out.

Luckily it's pretty warm out so we're not suffering. I'd normally have a fire going but my fireplace is out of order.

I hauled in my portable generator in the hopes that if I was well prepared the power would come back on and it would have been wasted effort but I may end up running it later to cool down the refrigerator and maybe charge a few batteries.

Hopefully I have power by morning or I'll have a hard time getting our services deployed...

What a coincidence. JQuery gets an update to 3.4.0 - and I removed the JQuery dependency that a mid-sized widget (15 kB minified) needed.

Rewriting the selector, css and trim stuff was easy. Each, children, append, empty, remove and extend were not too hard. Animations gave me more headache, but in the end, JS triggered CSS transitions worked nicely.

I was able to shave off the usual 30 kB over the wire for JQuery, and the whole thing seems snappier. Finally, I'm at vanilla everything!

Of course, it's largely due to JQuery's merits that vanilla JS is where it is today. So, thank you JQuery, and farewell.

My dream project is something very simple but not yet done in Pakistan.

I want to create a marketplace for musical instruments and related equipment. Currently it's very hard for amateur musicians in Pakistan to find the gear they're looking for, and being one of these musicians myself, I know how frustrating it can be. So it'd be great if I can solve that problem in a country where the government does very little to help independent artists grow.

So for those of you keeping track, I've become a bit of a data munger of late, something that is both interesting and somewhat frustrating.

I work with a variety of enterprise data sources. Those of you who have done enterprise work will know what I mean. Forget lovely Web APIs with proper authentication and JSON fed by well-known open source libraries. No, I've got the output from an AS/400 to deal with (For the youngsters amongst you, AS/400 is a 1980s IBM mainframe-ish operating system that oriiganlly ran on 48-bit computers). I've got EDIFACT to deal with (for the youngsters amongst you: EDIFACT is the 1980s precursor to XML. It's all cryptic codes, + delimited fields and ' delimited lines) and I've got legacy databases to massage into newer formats, all for what is laughably called my "data warehouse".

But of course, the one system that actually gives me serious problems is the most modern one. It's web-based, on internal servers. It's got all the late-naughties buzzowrds in web development, such as AJAX and JQuery. And it now has a "Web Service" interface at the request of the bosses, that I have to use.

The programmers of this system have based it on that very well-known database: Intersystems Caché. This is an Object Database, and doesn't have an SQL driver by default, so I'm basically required to use this "Web Service".

Let's put aside the poor security. I basically pass a hard-coded human readable string as password in a password field in the GET parameters. This is a step up from no security, to be fair, though not much.

It's the fact that the thing lies. All the files it spits out start with that fateful string: '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>' and it lies.

It's all UTF-8, which has made some of my parsers choke, when they're expecting latin-1.

But no, the real lie is the fact that IT IS NOT WELL-FORMED XML. Let alone Valid.

THERE IS NO ROOT ELEMENT!

So now, I have to waste my time writing a proxy for this "web service" that rewrites the XML encoding string on these files, and adds a root element, just so I can spit it at an XML parser. This means added infrastructure for my data munging, and more potential bugs introduced or points of failure.

Let's just say that the developers of this system don't really cope with people wanting to integrate with them. It's amazing that they manage to integrate with third parties at all...

// first rant

So this isn't really a "dev" rant but I'm a developer taking my first ever design class. It's a senior level, group based class where we design a mobile OS from the ground up, using any inspiration we like. I love it because I'm the developer and designer for all of the Android apps I've worked on so far. I get to practice my design skills and have a portfolio addition. Neat! It's a pretty easy class too.

But my group. Oh God my group.

I spent a week and a half designing the style guide and it was jam packed with anything we'd need. Typography, icons, rationales, you name it!

But noooo, they can't use it because it's not in sketch. As a Windows user, this is infuriating. So three weeks go by and all this work is done that's SUPER INCONSISTENT. Bad colors, elements off by 3px... I mean even the font sizes are just 1 or 2 off. Seriously, I wish I could just be frank with them and tell them to put in the 1% effort to make it right. It's really not that hard. I just don't want to screw up the peace in my group..

A few days after the vacation, daddy (me) finally finished copying all the photos from the digital camera to the big external hard drive. Left it lying in the living room, in the corner where all the tech stuff frequently lies. In come my boys, and I'm not sure why, they start plugging power supplies around. Unfortunately the one from the laptop fit into the hole on the external disk, but had a different (higher) voltage. Result: 1 fried hard drive, containing all the baby photos and videos of said boys up that time.
I still believe that it's only the circuit board that is fried, and the data is still all there. I still have the hope to find a used disk, replace the board and all will be back.

It's funny how you start feeling bad for the next dev taking over your project because it turned into a total spaghetti code shit show that will be impossible to maintain in the future with new features coming in.

Honestly... if a projects starts out with a certain scope which then gets extended EVERY FUCKING WEEK with requirements that can't even be met in the initial timeframe it's no wonder the code quality will decrease over time.

This just reminds me daily how important good project management (and I'm not talking about suit wearing pain-in-the-ass-managers) and the inclusion of devs in the planning process really is.

It's so fucking crazy that companies run like that with people up front that have NO FUCKING CLUE what they are doing, nor do they understand the mechanics, tech and effort that go into certain features. They're like "beep, boop, it's done by Friday you fuck!".

The funniest part of this stupid charade is that the closer we get to a new "deadline" (we will not meet the deadline anyways) the more nervous the "managers" get. WHY didn't you properly plan this shit in the first place? WHY didn't you care for the last six months where all this fucking bullshit could still have been prevented?

Meanwhile I'm just so sick and tired of this shitty project and this sucky company that I just don't have any motivation left to keep on working. It's so fucking hard and painful to work on projects that suck ass, are poorly designed. I just got to the point where coding is no fun any more. Thank god I'm out of here soon... fml

!Dev

I dislike the idea of therapists. I mean, not the people who study human behaviour to help understand it but the people who try to "fix" another person's problems.

My reason for this is that they're human themselves and I'd say it's pretty obvious that we don't know exactly how the mind works so it's basically like trying to fix an airplane with only half or even less of the blueprints.

The reason I don't like them being human themselves is because we are fallible, you can't guarantee or at least have a extremely high probability of the same prevention or treatment rate as you maybe could with a computer. It's not repeatable. Then again, we don't have the "blueprints" so to speak so it's kind of hard to say.

Your thoughts?

For awhile now, my hopes for humanity just being in a rut, soon to receive some motivational kick in the rear or the helicopter parent trend, skyrocketing over the past ~20yrs giving rise to snowflakes and seemingly imminent social\financial doom, keep going steeper downhill.

The overuse and\or reliance on, both term and tech, AI has been particularly disturbing and painfully ironic...

Seems it's overwhelmed my, typically instant, reslisations of severe head-scratchers that have nothing to do with AI and even, apparently, denote actual honesty and effort employed.

today, within moments, quickly scrolling on eBay i found 2, new to me... which is quite rare, perplexing 'wtf's.

1. a laptop clearly stating, multiple times, reiterated, not copy\paste... that not only was it lacking a hard drive... but "no hard drive cable"...
my mind briefly tried to figure that one out
... even considered searching yheir several other lots to see if they typically included the "hard drive cable" or if they were often denying customers of this clearly standard component.

2- see pic
it was so soon after the 1st find that i briefly considered that i was missing something... aside from faith in humanity, nope.

that said, i do respect their blunt, bold\capslock committee to transparent honesty.

Fuck...
I'm not getting that job then.

So I just had one of those interview coding tests on hacker rank and screwed it up big time.

I'm a C# guy and it was a Java position. I worked with Java, like 10 years ago, and they're pretty similar so I brushed up over the last week when I had free time.

Absolutely blew it. It's not like it was hard, I just got into one question (of 6) and it ate up all of my time. The task was simple, make a JSON call, read the data, check if you need more calls, pull out a data field from all the concatenated results and return it in a sorted list. ONE HOUR it took me. A combination of not knowing the API well enough, simple syntax errors and relatively slow compilation.

Godammit.

The next question was implement an Object hierarchy but since I'd run out of time, all I got was the class declarations before the timer ran out.

fuck, fuck, fuck.

I guess the test did it's job and weeded out someone who can't contribute to the team...

Why don't people respond to emails? Everyone complains that things could be handled in an email instead of having a meeting. Well maybe you should start replying to my simple fucking questions so I don't have to send meeting notices. You always accept the meeting notices but you NEVER reply to emails! What the fuck people? Now I'm arranging a meeting for 15 minutes just to get a simple is yes or no question answered, are you kidding me here? You're part of the problem! You are THE ENTIRE problem!! You know how much of my time I've wasted getting no answers in IMs and emails?! Should I try smoke signals? It's not even a hard question! Will someone be at the site on the day we need them to be?! How hard is that question to answer!? Evidently im-fucking-possible!

Fun fact: banks won't let me take loans. Any kind of loans.

Why? It's not because I have a history of missing payment schedules. It's because I NEVER had a credit card or loans — I paid for everything with cold hard cash my whole life. But it all changed when I fried a charging controller on my laptop, so I needed a new one fast. I was in between jobs then. So, I took a loan for a new laptop, one thousand dollars, a large sum for me back then. I found a job and covered that loan ahead of schedule, in three months instead of one year. In total, my bank made a mere $5 off of me.

Banks now know I won't bring any kind of interest in whatsoever, as I never miss my payments. So, they decided to quit on me completely.

That's a proof that banks don't want you to pay on time — they want you to delay your payments and let your interest build up, so you're forced to take new loans to cover old ones. They want you to pay interest forever, having barely enough money to cover interest, but not the loan itself.

"But using XYX is better and it's not hard to set up!"
No, fuck you and your recommendations.

It's too time consuming to set up that blazing-fast minimalistic modular shit, because I know I'll want to configure it to perfection until I bang my head against my tiny keyboard when I have finally realised that all the config I went througu only achieved the same outcome as the 'bloated' software I was originally using.

So, fuck you.
I'd rather get on with my life and get some work done.

It's not like I wasn't aware of XYZ in the first place; I'm not using it because I know what's more important to get my shit done.

Problems. We get them frequently, to me it feels like life is not about being happy and all, it's about how you handle your problems. Any kind of problem, be it work related, you personal life anything.
Developing the skill to deal with different kinds of problem is what makes your life better and better.
What world taught me till now, to run away from the discomfort, a lot people talk about how environment is bad, and you should not take shit from anyone. But few things tell us what's actually lack inside us. Maybe, on social media we don't boast a self awareness based thinking because is makes people uncomfortable to think about their own behaviour. Self awareness is becoming more and more important for me now. I am trying to keep my self love intact, it's hard though. But knowing your own shortcomings and taking actions to understand and do something about them makes me feel in more control. Makes me happy. :)

I'm writing this, because I just got a work problem and I snapped and closed my laptop very impatiently. Then in few seconds I realised, it's a kind of a problem that I should try to 'deal' with and not go into a loop of self hatred. Even though my heart ja racing fast, and all the hormones which are making me wanna feel sad, I feel aware and more in control that hey, you are feeling this because this problem has these consequences but let's try to solve it. :)

Them: You have 6 days to build this frontend page for our wordpress site.
Me: Ok...
*proceeds to spend 4 days trying to arse my way towards a semi reasonable bootstrapped website based on the existing website's styling.*
Me: *Presents website*, so... uh... yeah, I don't usually do frontend stuff, I'm more of a backend dev, but here's what I could do.
Them: This looks like absolute horseshit.
Me: So what do you not like about it?
Them: All of it. It doesn't look anything like the wireframe that I gave you.
Me: Ok... So let me get this straight, you want it to look exactly like how you designed it in your wireframe? *wireframe looks like a child drew it*
Them: Yes! Is that so hard?
Me: I mean, it's a little hard. I'm not exactly a front end developer. Aside from that, I think this design is not very user-friendly.
Them: we don't care about your opinions, OP. Get back in there and make it look exactly like the wireframe.
Me: Ok.
*proceeds to go to fiverr, and contract someone else to do it for me while I get to do fun stuff in the back end.* 😂

----

We'll see what they think of the project when it gets back to me. Wish me luck guys.

Merry Christmas to everyone celebrating it. I sincerely hope each of you has someone to cozy up this festive season. Remember and share all the good stories that happened this year, all the sores that hurt you back then but turned out well in the end. Share your plans, hopes and dreams to achieve next year.

Be it a friend, a family, a significant other or your neighbour. Cozy up and enjoy. After all this hard year you've all deserved it.

[don't try to trick yourself that you're better off alone. We both know it's not true]

After a long break I'm having a white Christmas this year. That and my kiddo stepping his first steps, apartment nearly done and a huge christmas tree in one of the rooms, and the fact that I've finaly 100% nailed my gift for my wife [never ever has this happened bfore! Can't wait to see her face in the morning :) ] -- I'm full of Christmas spirit this year!

I wish you all have a great holiday!

I'm in my first internship, they gave me their only company owned product. They always made interns work on that, and it's something I really appreciate (I like when people give to others any possible chance of learning)... But apparently they made a mistake: for the first year they never reviewed interns' code. And now that software is huge and full of bugs.

After two weeks working on that I said to the tech leader and to the PM that we should spent a couple of months rewriting more than half of the code, and surprisingly they listened and agreed (the TL already knew that, and the PM is not a dev and he listened to the TL).

After two days of code rewriting ("refactor" is a too weak word) the boss calls me and orders to stop, telling me basically "I agree on this decision, but not now; let's first make it work and then we make it great!".
Okay I respect that, but what he didn't understand is that the two things are strictly related!

Result: last week we had a first official release (with some client's testers, so they were expecting a few bugs) and nothing was working, so me and the tl started a really hard rewriting work (that didn't finish) and managed to release a very bade made software that works by chance.

After easter we'll keep working on this, and I think at the end it will be great.

First working experience, in two months I learned a lot (not only about code/tech).

my covid is still not recovered. Today marks the two weeks. I got fever the first day and then fever was gone but body pain and weakness was there. In 2 days, body pain was gone too. Now I couldn't only eat well. So tried light food but after sometime it was harder to eat properly.
Now I'm having the same diet I used to have before covid, but I'm still not feeling well. I feel pain in my shoulders. My heart races almost all the time and that gives restlessness to my days and it's very hard to focus because of that. Family issues, work, excitement of switching companies, even small bit of sound makes me more restless. If someone has the same symptoms when did they last?

It's hard to teach git to a beginner! There's just so many bits of info that you have to know before it clicks into place. Not to mention git's "reuse" of certain commands with files and refs.

Been thinking about how to detect sounds for weeks and finally got enough time and motivation to do a Google search... and find an entire example....

All that thinking and worrying for nothing.... now i just gotta figure out how to install PyAudio.... hope it's not hard.... or maybe I already have it installed....

So it's not just through reading your own code later that you can realize how stupid you are. All the great card house of the belief in your own superiority collapsing instantly.
Currently intense time with my son. Can be hard being around one another 24h non-stop... And then realizing that a lot of the stubbornness and quirks of his that drive me crazy: is actually me! (Be it that it's in my character as well or he was reacting to a stupidness of mine)

So you are running ads and people who click your ads land on a blog post? What is the goal? How are you measuring conversions? How do you know if an ad or post actually helped?

Am: "When can you get this up?"

Me: "I don't have any of the information I need to make a page."

Am: "skip all the seo crap and tell me how long to get the content online"

Me: "you're missing the whole point of a blog post. But ok it's online"

Am: "was that so hard?"

No, putting garbage on a site is not hard. Creating useful web pages with content that is easy to find and read is a time consuming process and it would go smoother and faster if you followed the checklist I gave you which lays out what I want, in a single, cohesive document, all of the necessary pieces to a web page or blog post or content edit. We have templates for you to follow to help eliminate back and forth emails which causes things to get lost or fall through the cracks.

Becoming member of a political party.

I met a lot of smart people, had many great debates about different issues, yet most of all: I learned how dangerous group dynamics can be. (It's insane how fast Us-vs-Them-group-thinking can manifest itself.) I learned to reflect myself (the hard way) and that if I want to convince someone, rational arguments is not enough if you are a dick about it and that sometimes the how you say things is so much more powerful than the what.

Basically, I learned a valuable lesson on how (not) to communicate. I still profit from that on a daily basis in my work as a developer.

(On the other hand, the whole experience made me rather cynical about the state of the world at large.)

Today I finally experienced the power of something I learned in university: propositional and predicate logic.

Many developers I know think that such education is useless. Well, today I have proven that it is very useful. On a day to day basis, working on banking software, complexity in purely logic is very low. However, we have a screen that must show or hide elements based on some input values and conditions associated with certain elements. How hard can that be, right? Well, there are many variables to take into account and as such it's absolutely not trivial.

This screen didn't work properly and maintaining the code is hard as there is a lot of logic to show/hide, enable/disable things and so on. After quite some time and attempts by fellow developers, I decided to refactor the whole thing. I'm responsible for the quality of the software and it was quite degrading, so I had to do something.

In order to get things working properly, I defined collections of constants (ui elements) and predicates. Then, I defined for which element what predicates must be true, in order to hide/show, disable/enable etc. I then translated these predicates into code. And guess what? It works! Of course it works. It's logic. But I'm very pleased I finally could actually use some of all the math I studied!

It's rather surreal to go from months of momentum, hard work, feeling proud of everything we're doing... to walking into work one day and finding out that it's your last. It's everyone's last.

Startups, I get it. They come and go, but I've never been so blindsided by it when everything seemed great and everyone was proud. Oh well.

Not skipping a beat. My first day at a new opportunity begins in the morning. I hope it isn't too long before I once again find that place where I'm doing my best work, building something I genuinely believe in, and feel great about it all.

I can't say how rare that groove actually is. I hope it isn't. We should all be able to find it.

hey guys yesterday I got roasted cuz I was using a pc instead of Mac for development work and this was my reply. For me I don't gonna spend 2000+ $ only for 1 sec faster app loading and only for writing codes if someone willing to spend lot of money then they have completely command on there system Mac is very overpriced and overprotective it doest allow dual boot tell u what Mac sucks in 4k video editing,games,it don't even support maya or 3ds max rendering on Mac is gonna hit you hard , and there is same for linux but because it's free I don't much care about it but it is extremely crash and error prone I've installed Ubuntu nearly 20+ computer and after few days some kind of internal error occurred if u cancelled any ongoing installation it's going to hijack your system not let order program to install unless you manually clean that shit out ,yea Unix systems have bit faster app opening time and I appreciate that .
For nerds like me it's not only about coding stuff I like to do crazy stuffs

I'm just frustrated. I wanted a simple, statically-typed language that doesn't get in your way and offers GC. I can't find anything "just perfect".

- Go: enforces a style on you, nono.
- Rust: ownership system. I love it, but it's too low level for what I want.
- Scala: seems to have a bunch of useless and bug-prone features.
- Java: I hate how you have to declare and catch exceptions. Good practice, yes, but the code gets bloated with try-catch statements.
- C and C++: Too low level, no GC.
- C#: maybe? idk

I want to make a back-end for an app but I want it to be easy and fast. I need something with a gentle learning curve, not keep fighting the language. I'm between Java and Rust. Java's easier to use. Rust is rust <3, but it's hard, I haven't learned it properly and I just keep fighting the fucking compiler.