Got assigned an intern to mentor him, with an explicit order not to do any of the legwork for him.

We start out with some fuzzy requirements. Intern starts overengineering a generic solution, so I make out a best architecture that conforms to the business requirements and I explain it to the intern why are we going to use such approach and tell him how we are going to do it in three phases.

I explain the intern the first phase, break it down in small tasks for him and return to my projects...

After a couple of days of no words from the intern, I decide to check up on him to see how is he progressing, only to hear him complaining the task is boring. So, instead of doing the assigned tasks, he decided he should do a "design" for a feature I told him explicitly not to do, since it is going to be designed by the design team later on.

I explain it to the intern that we have to do the boring task first because we can't proceed with the next phase of the implementation without the necessary data from the phase one.

Intern says okay and assures me he got it now. Few days later, I check up on him, and he tells me he feels he is doing all the work and that I don't contribute to the project. I call up my boss and tell him intern wants a meeting. Since I was working from home, I quickly pack my things and head to the office. Boss talks to the intern before I managed to get to the office. Once I got there, I meet the intern, and he tells me everything is okay. I ask what did the boss say to make things okay all of a sudden, and he tells me he said we are a team now. Our company has a flat hierarchy model, so he tells me he doesn't feel he needs a mentor, that we are both equal, and that I have no idea how to work in a team, and then proceeds to comfort me on how human interaction is hard and that I will learn it one day... I was like wtf?

I tell him to finish the phase one of the project and start with the phase two, and I leave home again.

I call up my boss and ask him what did he say to the intern, and he says: "nothing much, just explained the project a little bit and how it fits in the grand scheme of things.". I ask about the equal team members thing, and me not being a mentor any longer, the boss goes wtf, saying he never said anything about that to him.

So the kid can't focus on a single task, over-engineers everything and doesn't feel he can learn anything from developers with more experience, doesn't want to obey commands, and also likes to lie to manipulate others.

Tomorrow we'll decide what to do with him...

Sorry for the long rant, it was a long stressful day.

So I got the job. Here's a story, never let anyone stop you from accomplishing your dreams!

It all started in 2010. Windows just crashed unrecoverably for the 3rd time in two years. Back then I wasn't good with computers yet so we got our tech guy to look at it and he said: "either pay for a windows license again (we nearly spend 1K on licenses already) or try another operating system which is free: Ubuntu. If you don't like it anyways, we can always switch back to Windows!"

Oh well, fair enough, not much to lose, right! So we went with Ubuntu. Within about 2 hours I could find everything. From the software installer to OpenOffice, browsers, email things and so on. Also I already got the basics of the Linux terminal (bash in this case) like ls, cd, mkdir and a few more.

My parents found it very easy to work with as well so we decided to stick with it.

I already started to experiment with some html/css code because the thought of being able to write my own websites was awesome! Within about a week or so I figured out a simple html site.

Then I started to experiment more and more.

After about a year of trial and error (repeat about 1000+ times) I finally got my first Apache server setup on a VirtualBox running Ubuntu server. Damn, it felt awesome to see my own shit working!

From that moment on I continued to try everything I could with Linux because I found the principle that I basically could do everything I wanted (possible with software solutions) without any limitations (like with Windows/Mac) very fucking awesome. I owned the fucking system.

Then, after some years, I got my first shared hosting plan! It was awesome to see my own (with subdomain) website online, functioning very well!

I started to learn stuff like FTP, SSH and so on.

Went on with trial and error for a while and then the thought occured to me: what if I'd have a little server ONLINE which I could use myself to experiment around?

First rented VPS was there! Couldn't get enough of it and kept experimenting with server thingies, linux in general aaand so on.

Started learning about rsa key based login, firewalls (iptables), brute force prevention (fail2ban), vhosts (apache2 still), SSL (damn this was an interesting one, how the fuck do you do this yourself?!), PHP and many other things.

Then, after a while, the thought came to mind: what if I'd have a dedicated server!?!?!?!

I ordered my first fucking dedicated server. Damn, this was awesome! Already knew some stuff about defending myself from brute force bots and so on so it went pretty well.

Finally made the jump to NginX and CentOS!

Made multiple VPS's for shitloads of purposes and just to learn. Started working with reverse proxies (nginx), proxy servers, SSL for everything (because fuck basic http WITHOUT SSL), vhosts and so on.

Started with simple, one screen linux setup with ubuntu 10.04.

Running a five monitor setup now with many distro's, running about 20 servers with proxies/nginx/apache2/multiple db engines, as much security as I can integrate and this fucking passion just got me my first Linux job!

It's not just an operating system for me, it's a way of life. And with that I don't just mean the operating system, but also the idea behind it :).

So I maintain a open source PHP app that wraps youtube-dl, providing an UI for it basically. Some guy on a forum DMd me saying it's not working for him. I asked him what php version he used and if the file permissions are correct (the script makes and switches directories, so the permissions can't be root but need to be www-data).

He answers with PHP 7.2 (the newest that's rare) and says the file permissions are correct.

After 2 weeks the problem still persists and ofc I am doubting my code here. We finally get online together and I can use anydesk to work on his machine.

I discovered 2 things.

1) File permissions were just completely wrong.

2) PHP WASN'T EVEN INSTALLED

So what did I learn?

Never trust the user and I am glad that I work as a dev, not as a tech support.

So my GF's studying C#. Some things they learn are actually true 🙈

My Neural Network can recognise handwritten digits!!!

It's my second try at NN so it's faaaar from perfect (or maybe even good), but hey, it's something and only with High schools, I'm pretty satisfied with the results. If you've not seen my previous post, I'm just trying to learn NNs in C and am doing just really basic things.
Still I'm proud of my progress!

Now I'm looking forward learning some library (OpenNN + OpenCV seems cool) and trying more advanced stuff, wish me luck 😆

About six months ago I decided I wanted to learn to write a neural network from the ground up, using only the C++ standard lib. Had to learn some linear algebra, multivariable calc and a dash of wizardry.

The mathematics of neural networks is still one of the coolest things I've ever learnt. It still marvels me that you can make a specialized mini-brain out of nothing but numbers.

This is dedicated to all Webdevs, especially those WordPress fanboys.

I was reflecting on some things since I do more frequent freelance jobs at the time. And I have to admit: people are fucking crazy.

I had some serious talk with customers and some serious talk for people I work as subsidiary.

The average customer thinks a nice webpage costs I'm 9-50 bucks. They got some shitty Webhosting for 1-5$/month including domain and think they are set.

They have unclear visions about what they actually want, it all boils down to "I like the design". I made a page for someone who just posted images, no text nothing and I told him a trillion times NEEDS some text, even a fucking picture description would be sufficient, else he'll never score anything at google.

Ofc it got denied, now he's bitching how nobody finds the site when they google his name. The other thing is that Wordpress became the solution for everything.

I'm a fucking certified magento developer and I hate magento with a passion. Magento is an overabstracted clusterfuck and believe me, I did the certification I had to learn more than average about the core. But damn, don't slap woocommerce on everything.

Narrowninded fucktards, the cheap out of the box solution isn't always the best.

Don't cry if you got hacked because you were too dumb to upgrade your wordpress. Don't tell me to do some "enhancements" on a server you probably share with 100 other uses. I can't fix your Webserver with your shitty ftp account.

I also hate WordPress with a burning passion. Cum guzzling cavetroll it is. It has it usages, but don't rely on a core So small every kind of extra functionality has to somehow tinkered on it and then expect it to work flawlessly and for 10$ price.

Of course you can buy a theme that, if it would have been special made for you cost 800$ or more, but it wasn't. It just looks like it from the outside. If you want customization you are at the mercy of the option it provides. I can't even tell how many times i spent whole evenings explaining how their shiny template works. Just to do some crazy shit with JavaScript like rearranging domelements because it didn't work as expected.

I still stay to my word. Nothing great has been nor will be created with a Wordpress core. Don't tell me how some great stuff has been achieved. Or wait, please do so. But before you do think about if that wouldn't been faster, cheaper, more reliable , etc... if done with a framework like symphony or laravel... or even zend or cake.

And that brings me back to the point:
Is cheap and "out of the box" really what you need and desire? As customer and as developer?

I'm a lawyer, like a year ago I was home alone (wife and kid went on the trip) and from boringness, I decided that I should learn to program (was thinking about that earlier because of some ideas for apps I had - I was fucking naive then :P).

So I start googling best way to do it and I decided to start CS50 course on edx. And that was a real blast for. Best learning experience ever happened in my life.

Anyway, I was going through CS50 curriculum (at the start I thought I will quit it after few weeks) and every day was like so exciting. This whole programming thing seems like the best thing happens to me in many years. There were so many interesting things to learn, I felt like I discovered whole new word.

So after few months while I was finishing CS50, one day I decided, fuck it, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life (I'm 35+ btw ;)). I chose frontend path as it seems easier for a person without technical education. If everything goes as planned I will start looking for a job at beginning of next year. So where I the rant you could ask?

Well, you should guest what my family thinks about it. My wife was like at first: I'm proud you learning something new, now she hates it, making fights about me always sitting in front of computer (which is not true as I learn most in work in my spare time - I can do it as I work on my own), she even told my parents that I cheat her because she started family with a lawyer, not a programmer (supposed to be joke, but really not fun for me) . WTF - where is the fucking support ? ehhh. My parents on the other side still don't believe I will do it (after more than a year of my learning) and they still think I will quit the idea in the end....

So thats it my rant about what my familly thinks about me become programmer.

(sry for my English)

Manager: Hey how come you left so many comments on my PR?

Dev: Well you’ve just recently learned how to code so there’s going to be a lot of things to learn beyond what you’ve picked up in your online coding tutorials. Don’t worry it’s only minor things like you put everything all in one function, left outdated comments in the code, have if statements 4 levels deep, have a console.log after every line of code some of which log .env variables, skipped error handling, cast to “any” a bunch instead of using more specific types, didn’t write any tests and some unrelated tests are now failing due to a circular dependancy.

Manager: THAT IS SO DISRESPECTFUL!!APPROVE MY PR IMMEDIATELY. IT WASN’T EVEN EASY FOR ME TO CREATE THE PR, NOW I HAVE TO MAKE AN UPDATE!? YOU’RE THE DEV, YOU SHOULD FIX IT NOT ME!! NEVER COMMENT ON ANY OF MY PRS AGAIN.

So apparently I got added to a Python dev group by a random person.
I thought okay cool I might learn new things and connect with some great people in the industry.
Turned out that it was just a bunch of noobs.

When I gave an honest response to a question asked by the admin (who turned out to be a noob as well), he kicked me out.
I honestly don't know if there's any official certification for Python other that the one I said.

For my passionate coders out here, I have some tips I learned over the years in a business/IT environment.

1) Don't let stupid management force you into making decisions that will provide a bad product. Tell them your opinion and why you should do it that way. Never just go with their decision.
2)F@#k hackathons, you're basicly coding software for free, that the company might use. Want to probe yourself? Join a community and participate in their challenges.
3)No matter how good you are, haters are common.
4)Learn to have a good communication, some keywords are important to express yourself to other developers or customers. Try crazy things, don't be shy.
5)Never stand still, go hear at other companies what they offer, compare and choose your best fit. This leads me into point...
6)if you've been working for over a year and feel that you have participated enough in the companies growth, ask a raise, don't be afraid...you're wanted on the market, so either they negotiate a new contract or you find another job.

I'm sharing these with you as I made many mistakes regarding these points, I have coded for free or invested so much time in a company just to prove myself. But at the end I realize that my portfolio is enough to prove that I'm capable of doing the job. They don't like me? Or ask me stupid questions that I can google in 5 minutes. I'll just decline the job and get something better. Companies end up giving me nothing in return compared to the work I have put into it. At the end after some struggles you'll find a good fit and that's so important for your programming career. Burnouts happen quite often if you're just a coding puppy.

If some of you still have additional tips be sure to post them under here

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

I was a good programmer.

My teachers always impressed by work..
I was like coming up on my own solutions not from books. Never remembered any algo but still the one who solve mostly every problems

Well then..

joined companies after college.

I thought I will learn so many new things..

Yes i learned but I'm feeling like I'm losing the spirit of problem solving

I'm just doing same thing, same logic, making similar kind of application with just little difference.

Nothing is like i'm making something new... All I'm doing is using predefined java and android method..

To create some predefined designs and working.

Fucking similar client requirements.

Seems like time to quit job and dedicate myself toward research

I know it's a boring rant... I'm just fucking
*frustrated*

For some
Hope hope = new Hope() ;

I find it super annoying, this trend where no one wants to write learning documentation anymore, but instead put up a bunch of demo videos and video "training courses."

I don't want to spend 5 minutes watching you do something that would take me 10 seconds to read. I can't search for terms in your video, and I can't use them as a general reference manual. I can't go at my own pace, easily keep my place between devices, enter code as you go, the list of cons goes on and on.

I would rather pay you money for a good eBook (and no, PDFs don't count), than to have the only realistic way to learn about your software be a playlist on your YouTube channel.

This, however, this...

Went to check out Ansible again, because I've heard good things lately and it's been a couple years since I've looked at it.

Took me a while to find their docs because there's almost no mention of anything on the home page except trying Tower for free.

Found the docs. The first item there is the Quick Start Video and I think, "Cool. That's a good use of video, showing off the product."

I dig out some headphones, click play:

"Ansible is a powerful" BOOM!

Enter my email to watch the video?!

Ah, forget it. Maybe I'll see you next time, Ansible.

This is my first post on devRant!
Story time:
It was on my first job as a developer, learning a lot but getting paid less than 50% of the minimum monthly wage of my country.
It was settled in the interview that as I gained more experience, I could handle more projects and earn more money.
At the time, I was living with my parents and didn't have to pay rent and some stuff, so I was like "Well, I'm gonna learn a lot and, if I put a lot of effort into it, soon I'll be making more money".
We agreed that I'll only develop, but 4 months into the job, I was already going to clients
and started coding there (having the client on my back every minute, not being able to work properly) and fixing some computer/network issues they had,
because my boss said I should do it.
Things at home started to go south, and suddenly I needed more money, so I kept doing the work and getting paid a little bit more
A year goes by, devs came and go beacuse of the work/payment situation, and I was still there.
From my first "paycheck" to the last day I never got paid on time, and that was the same for everybody else
The last month I was there, I had a job offer with a better salary and weekends free, so I wanted to take it (I worked saturdays there).
We were working at our biggest clients place at the time (a hospital, working in the server room, desk and chair were a total crap),
so I wanted to have a good conversation with my boss and tell him whats up, after all, I was really grateful for the job despite all things.
We headed outside and started talking. He basically begged me to stay, said that he will pay me on time and offered me more money (less than the other company was offering me),
and that he needed me to finish the implementation and "minor issues" with the app.
I thought about it for a couple of days, and decided to stay. I politely rejected the job offer, and even recommended someone else.
As the days passed, regret was building fast inside of me, until the day that I was supposed to get paid.
He never showed up to the client, told me in a call that he will be there sometime in the morning, that he had the money for me.
So I stayed until my day ended, and still no sign of him. I had no money on me, needed some for gas so I could go, and I called him 5 times.
He picked up the last time, talks to me like nothing is happening and I started to shout at him like I never shouted to anybody before,
got all the things of my chest, and when I was done, he said that he will send the money to my account right away.
This happened on a Saturday, so I quit the following Monday, and lost the other job offer.

Four semesters in. As a class we’ve learned Java, SQL, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, C++, C#, and a small amount of PHP

We’ve built databases, websites, apps for phone and desktop, and we’ve toyed with game development in unity

We’ve used multiple IDE’s with differing pros and cons, virtual machines, server development stacks (XAMPP), data structures, and we’ve used multiple sorting algorithms to learn their differences.

Some things on here are immensely more difficult than others. If at 4 semesters in you still don’t know how to AT LEAST google your issues for 10 minutes or even READ THE DAMN BOOK, then please don’t bother asking TA’s for help we have our own assignments to do and can’t afford spend an hour working with you to fix your code while you just ignore our suggestions

Four semesters in you should know where to find help online and if that doesn’t work, how to ask for and accept help. If you can’t then I’m sorry. I’m going to spend my time helping others, before I waste my time trying to help you

I have come to the conclusion that certain people have a tech aura that can fix or break things just by being near them. Apparently I can do both. Have you had a similar experience?

The other day a colleague was trying to play a YouTube video for the class (I work in a primary school) and the page refused to load. After 20m of failed page refreshes they called me. I walked in, sat next to the computer, and before I even touched anything YouTube suddenly appeared on the screen like it was trolling us the whole time. Much to the amazement of the class of kids who bow think I am some kind of tech-witch.

On the flipside - Linux hates me. It always has. Some years ago I decided to force myself upon Linux so I got a friend to install a dual boot on my machine. Knowing the effect I seem to have on Linux he demanded I stay out of the room until he was done. Two hours later and some stability testing later he called me back in to introduce me to my new setup. The moment I walked into the room Linux kernel panicked and never booted again.

If only I could learn to control this mystical power over technological life and death!

My college organised some interview with a company, with the whole demn class. We went there, it was quite far away (50km) and the CEO invites us to a meeting room.

Where he bores me for 2 hours talking about their projects in argiculture and NSA like spying systems at tankstations.

They were caputuring license plates at gas stations and with that information gather data about the person, such as salary (by looking at their car), house adres ect. All without people knowing. And than targeting them with specific ads and offers.

The class of sheep were super excited but it pissed me off. Because he told it like it was some awesome advancement in technology that none of us could probably ever do.

He was demeaning us, saying we would do some simple wordpress sites there and other things. We are probably not good enough forc te big stuff.

Asking him some really hard questions about his projects made him so pissed he almost wanted to kick me out.

When it was finally over, there was some test that you have to do if you want to work there. If you were good enough at the test, you could!!!! (YEEY)

Uhm, I said; no thank you I dont want to work here.

Later I talked to my classmate and friend who always thinks he's better then everyone in class even tho he barely understands OOP programming. He was asking me if he should try to get the internship. I told him; dont. They have no value for us and they think they are the greatest company on the planet.

The fucking idiot go so pissed, he stopped talking to me alltogether and blocked me everywere. I AM NOT EVEN JOKING. Just because I gave my FUCKING opinon about a company he likes for no reason.

So this idiot does the test (which was fucking simple btw, I did it too and compared the results and I had 95%) He gets invited for another interview and gets told he will be paid 200 euro's per month 😂. and a free meal everyday!! 😪 hahaha . That doesnt even cover commuting costs!

My "friend" told him that the train costs more every day. You know what the CEO said? "Yeah but you can learn so much here the also brings value and you're just a last year student. But I think you are really brave for asking more"

So in the end, he couldnt take the internship and I was fucking right. Really I hate these kinds of companies thinking they are heaven on earth when they are clearly not.

I am happy I told them no before putting my dignity on thd line.

Still trying to get good.

The requirements are forever shifting, and so do the applied paradigms.

I think the first layer is learning about each paradigm.

You learn 5-10 languages/technologies, get a feeling for procedural/functional/OOP programming. You mess around with some electronics engineering, write a bit of assembly. You write an ugly GTK program, an Android todo app, check how OpenGL works. You learn about relational models, about graph databases, time series storage and key value caches. You learn about networking and protocols. You void the warranty of all the devices in your house at some point. You develop preferences for languages and systems. For certain periods of time, you even become an insufferable fanboy who claims that all databases should be replaced by MongoDB, or all applications should be written in C# -- no exceptions in your mind are possible, because you found the Perfect Thing. Temporarily.

Eventually, you get to the second layer: Instead of being a champion for a single cause, you start to see patterns of applicability.

You might have grown to prefer serverless microservice architectures driven by pub/sub event busses, but realize that some MVC framework is probably more suitable for a 5-employee company. You realize that development is not just about picking the best language and best architecture -- It's about pros and cons for every situation. You start to value consistency over hard rules. You realize that even respected books about computer science can sometimes contain lies -- or represent solutions which are only applicable to "spherical cows in a vacuum".

Then you get to the third layer: Which is about orchestrating migrations between paradigms without creating a bigger mess.

Your company started with a tiny MVC webshop written in PHP. There are now 300 employees and a few million lines of code, the framework more often gets in the way than it helps, the database is terribly strained. Big rewrite? Gradual refactor? Introduce new languages within the company or stick with what people know? Educate people about paradigms which might be more suitable, but which will feel unfamiliar? What leads to a better product, someone who is experienced with PHP, or someone just learning to use Typescript?

All that theoretical knowledge about superior paradigms won't help you now -- No clean slates! You have to build a skyscraper city to replace a swamp village while keeping the economy running, together with builders who have no clue what concrete even looks like. You might think "I'll throw my superior engineering against this, no harm done if it doesn't stick", but 9 out of 10 times that will just end in a mix of concrete rubble, corpses and mud.

I think I'm somewhere between 2 and 3.

I think I have most of the important knowledge about a wide array of languages, technologies and architectures.

I think I know how to come to a conclusion about what to use in which scenario -- most of the time.

But dealing with a giant legacy mess, transforming things into something better, without creating an ugly amalgamation of old and new systems blended together into an even bigger abomination? Nah, I don't think I'm fully there yet.

I was 11 or 12 years old, my dad had this policy that only *nix machines are allowed in our home, so I was rocking a Ubuntu pc at that time. I was messing around with it and tweaking some things here and there, but wanted to learn more. My dad showed me how to open python on the command line and gave me some simple tasks to do. Been hooked ever since.

PS. Still going by the same policy, even though I live on my own.

I had been a "hobby" programmer for well over a decade, with my primary career being in repair or a "technician". I had taught myself dozens of languages because it was fun, but never really accomplished much.

I was laid off from my job as a technician and I found myself listless and without purpose. I started doing development again on random things to pass the time and I ended up volunteering as a developer for a game I had played for years.

At the same time I had an uncle who encouraged me to consider software as a career. These two things gave me the confidence to apply for a local software job I saw on Indeed.

They called me pretty quickly, and I was brutally honest. "No, I don't have a degree. I'm self-taught. I have no professional experience really."

I got a proficiency exam anyway and I took it - apparently doing well enough on it that the CTO called me a week later. We had a long talk and I finally asked him why he called me.

He told me that while a degree means something, the passion to learn this job means more to him. It was a month before I was offered the position, and I graciously accepted it.

We had a call about my compensation before starting. It was rather low, but we both agreed that my skill level was quite an unknown.

A year later and my pay was bumped up a sizable amount. My skills are defined now and growing rapidly as new challenges are sent my way. I went from a naive hobbyist to a professional in a short period of time.

I realized that I was always a professional. I had a desire to learn and a desire to do things the right way. I may not have known what to call things. I didn't know some of the design patterns I had used over the years were standards that had names and meaning.

I basically work two jobs now. My full-time job and also on the game that helped propel my career forward and gave me the confidence to reach for it.

As for my hobby? I turned to electronics and the maker community. It's a nice marriage with my programming skill set, and I never knew how rewarding a blinking LED would be. :)

Recruiter: “can you write your own framework?”

Me, after considering for a good minute: “well, I am kinda starting to automate lots of things so I guess if I wanted I may be able to... for sure I’d learn a lot along the way...”

Recruiter: “very good!”

Me:”wait, why would you want that skill?”

Recruiter: “our customers want custom code”

Me:”so you write a new framework every time?”

Recruiter: “ah you have also experience in [x]!”

Some people scare me 😟

I joined a "multi-national" company in middle-east where 90% of the developers are Indian. And since it's a "multi-national" company with 50+ developers I thought they already figured it out. Most of them have 5-10 years of experience. They should know at least how to use git properly, deployment should be done via CI/CD. database changes should be run via migration script. Agile methodology, Code Review - Pull Request. Unit testing. Design Patterns, Clean Code Principle. etc etc

I thought I'm gonna learn new things here. I have never been so wrong in all my life...

Technical Manager doesn't even know what Pull Request is. They started developing the software 4 years ago but used Yii v1 instead which was released almost a decade ago. They combined it with a VueJS where in some files contains around 4000 lines of code. Some PHP functions contain 500+ of code. No proper indentions as well. The web console is bloody red with javascript errors. In short, it's the worst code I've seen so far.

No wonder why they keep receiving complaints from their 30+ clients.

Today I'm going to work on my side project that I haven't touched in weeks.

I want to utilize Angular 2 which means I'll need to learn TypeScript. I also want to use the new .Net Core and EF Core 1.0. Oh and I want to handle authentication using JWT!

Wow, that's gonna be a lot of effort to get things off the ground... maybe instead I'll use this time to learn some new concepts. Maybe watch this episode of Fun Fun Function, or maybe this video on writing Assembly code for an app on Raspberry Pi, that sounds cool!

Actually, you know I should really teach myself dependency injection and unit testing for once. I'm so behind the times.

Well, really I should finish this book on design patterns first. Ok, where did I leave off? Page 20 I think... ehh... maybe I'll just work on my side project.

Tomorrow... tomorrow, I'll work on my side project.

It's crazy to me how much of a misguided superiority complex some CS college kids have.

"I'd never learn Python, that's just for kids"

"Front end is so easy, it's just HTML and making things look pretty"

Today a colleague of mine asked me to help with some javascript. So I said sure, it will be done in 5 minutes. Im a fullstack developer with a focus on backend in this project.
So I opened the frontend part and was amazed how shit the javascript file was. Yes you read it right FILE...
One big file with a lot of variables in the window scope.
Because she was in “charge” of the frontenders because she works there a bit longer then me I never checked the frontend code.
I said I wont/cant help unless I see better code. I explained to a trainee what could be done to change it and Im impressed that the trainee did a better job then the employee and quick as well.
Got the whole code in seperate files with each part of the code in seperate scopes within 2 hours.

What Im saying here is that even as student, intern or trainee you can know things better thsn someone with experience, dont be afraid to speak up. Because everyone can learn from eachother.

Udemy courses are targeted at ABSOLUTE beginners. It's excruciating to pull through and finish the course "just because". And some of these courses are jam-packed with 30-60 hours just for them to appear legit, but the reality is the value you get could be packed to 3-5 hours.

You're better off just searching for or watching for the things that you need on Google or YouTube.

You'll learn more when building the actual stuff. Yes, it's good to go for the documentation. Just scratch the "Getting Started" section and then start building what you want to build already. Don't read the entire documentation from cover to cover for the sake of reading it. You won't retain everything anyway. Use it as a reference. You'll gain wisdom through tons of real-world experience. You will pick things up along the way.

Don't watch those tutorials with non-native English speakers or those with a bad accent as well. Native speakers explain things really well and deliver the message with clarity because they do what they do best: It's their language.

Trust me, I got caught up in this inefficient style a handful of times. Don't waste your time.

My uncle was a programmer. My whole extended family lived very close together, so I saw him almost every weekend. He would tell me tall tales about the war between corporations and open source. I started hating all things Microsoft and advocating for Linux. For my 12th birthday, he gave me a computer he had recently fixed. Of course, it had Ubuntu Linux.

That's when he started teaching me the basics: Bash, Lisp, and C. I know some of you are tired of the cliche "I started coding at 12 and built my first OS at 16," but of course that's not reality. I really just wrote simple math formulas like chicarronera^[1] for my homework, a super simple text-input videogame, and a button-filled GUI. That's nothing compared to what I do now, so I won't dare put that into my resume. But it did give me an advantage over my peers, and by the time I had to self-learn web development for my job, my uncle had already given me all of these tools.

[1] Spanish slang for the quadratic equation. Literally means "street vendor who sells chicharron". The formula is taught so fierce in school that even street vendors must know it.

From my last job interview (which I got hired btw)

Lead developer: "so we see quite a lot of frameworks that you listed for php, Laravel,cakephp, codeigniter, we really like the idea of them but have not had the opportunity to use them since as you might know by know our pages run over basic and small scripts, you also listed some cool front end frameworks, react looks amazing and I do have somr experience. Tell me, if given the choice, which framework would you use for php?"

Me: Really depends on the project, but the ones that you have described previously seem that they would not really benefit from them, we should not use them if they are overkill or will not expand to anything else on the future"

Him: "But given the choice?"

Me: my own framework, completed it a couple of days ago, it has its own routing system and everything made by yours truly, used it before on some projects in which the developers work with it with no need to ask me about stuff, the documentation is sound and the code rather simple. Php is and can really be all you need depending on what we are talking about."

Him: **stands up, moves closer to me and fist bumps**
"All right now moving on, i was wondering abouy redux, what are the benefits of..."

Walked out of there like a boss, it got interesting when we started talking about Lisp, apparently they are interested in putting some Clojure to test in small things since they want to learn new things and apply them. Yup, this gon b good!!

Ahem ahem.
*clears throat*

Front end bois, listen that carefully.
YOU DONT FUCKIN TELL THE BACKEND HOW TO ACCEPT REQUESTS.

Backend creates the fuckin methods, the parameters and the responses, AND YOU FUCKIN ADAPT TO IT.

This guy at my work, we are both from Uni but i picked backend because i suck at frontend and i like using backend languages, sends me a message and tells me he can't make the project work.

At this time i have almost finished my part, i have made the method, have checked that they work, and i closed the work computer.

And now he tells me he wants to make a GET request instead of POST. LISTEN HERE MOTHERFUCKER. The methods are ready, adapt to them and shut the fuck up.

And before you tell me some methods don't work, make fuckin sure your part is correct because if i boot up the work laptop again to check why the method you have told me doesn't work, and it still does the job it was intented to do but you can't fix your part, i will fuckin cut your throat.

Sucker.
I do my part, and have to study for uni exams, since you don't have to because you have passed them, do your self a favor and fuckin learn to do things.

It's not my fault that i got experience on my own while you were just only doing our uni retarded projects and didn't bother to learn anything on your own.

I don't mean by any needs that i'm better than you but fuckin accept that i have learned something else that you have not and i would like to share the knowledge with you since you didn't bother.

I see all these tools for the past few years claiming...

"build an app without writing code"

Great, if you want to build a prototype and then try to find a technical co-founder who can actually build something.

Otherwise, none of us need another shitty cookie-cutter app.

There is a 0% chance you can build anything that will scale without writing some code. Your best case scenario is you sell it to some sucker who doesn't understand that what they are buying is garbage.

I give those folks 3 options...

1. Find a technical co-founder
2. Learn to build software
3. Fuck off

Thinking you can build a software company without building actual quality software if fucking moronic.

Of course, that won't stop the thousands of business grads each year from trying and saying...

"I have such a great idea, I just need someone to build it"

Let's get things straight. You have nothing. NOTHING! You idea is worthless without execution.

“Don’t learn multiple languages at the same time”

Ignored that. Suddently I understood why he said that. Mixed both languages. In holiday rechecked it and it was ok.

Sometimes mistakes can lead to good things. After relearning I understood it much better.

“Don’t learn things by head” was another one. Because that’s useless. If you want to learn a language, try to understand it.
I fully agree with that. I started that way too learning what x did what y did, ... But after a few I found out this was inutile. Since then, I only have problems with Git

Another one. At release of Swift, my code was written in Obj-C. But I would like to adopt Swift. This was in my first year of iOS development, if I can even call it development. I used these things called “Converters”. But 3/4 was wrong and caused bugs. But the Issues in swift could handle that for me. After some time one told me “Stop doing that. Try to write it yourself.”

One of the last ones: “Try to contribute to open source software, instead of creating your own version of it. You won’t reinvent the wheel right? This could also be usefull for other users.”

Next: “If something doesn’t work the first time, don’t give up. Create Backups” As I did that multiple times and simply deleted the source files. By once I had a problem no iOS project worked. Didn’t found why. I was about to delete my Mac. Because of Apple’s WWDR certificate. Since then I started Git. Git is a new way of living.

Reaching the end: “We are developers. Not designers. We can’t do both. If a client asks for another design because they don’t like the current one tell them to hire one” - Remebers me one of my previous rants about the PDF “design”

Last one: “Clients suck. They will always complain. They need a new function. They don’t need that... And after that they wont bill ya for that. Because they think it’s no work.”

Sorry, forgot this one: “Always add backdoors. Many times clients wont pay and resell it or reuse it. With backdoors you can prohibit that.”

I think these are all things I loved they said to me. Probably forgot some.

Like most people I needed some extra cash during uni, so I proceeded to learn CSS + Photoshop (yeah, I know). Followed by PHP and WordPress.

It can be a very shitty platform until you realize that you can stop combining plug-ins from all over the place with dubious code quality and roll your own.

Anyhow I kept at it until I was able to join a niche company doing a quite popular caching plug-in for WP (yeah, W3 Total) when I suddenly became *very* interested in anything and everything performance.

This landed me a very cozy consulting gig in the Nordics - they were using WP for an elephant-traffic website and had run into a myriad of perf issues.

Fixing them and breaking the monolith awarded me with skills in nodejs, linux, asynchronous caching among others.

I was soon in charge with managing the dev boxes for the entire team, and when the main operations dude left, I was promoted to owning the entire platform. (!) Tinkering with Linux for most of my life really came in handy here. (remember Debian potato?)

Used saltstack + aws cloudformation to achieve full parity between all environments. Learned myself some python and all various tips and tricks which in the end amounted to 90% reduction in time-to-first-byte and considerable cost savings.

By the end of the 2yr contract I had turned myself into a fullstack systems engineer and never looked back.

Lawyers not getting along resulted in us having to abandon NewRelic, so I got to learn and deploy the ELK stack as a homegrown replacement, which was super-fun.

Now I work in the engineering effectiveness department of a Swedish fintech unicorn where all languages under the Sun are an option (tho we prefer Python), so the tech stack is unlimited. Infinite tools and technologies, but with strong governing principles and with performance always in mind so as to pick the right tool for the job.

It's like that childhood feeling when you've just dumped a ton of Lego on the floor and are about to build something massive.

I guess the morale here is however disappointed you feel by your current stack - don't. Always strive to make things better, faster, more decoupled, easier to test, etc. and always challenge yourself to go outside the comfort zone.

So, after weeks of reading spicy rants from all of you, I finally decided to join your community ; even if I'm only a student, I've encountered some solid crap in my internships.

Let's go back in time bois. Two years ago, I started my first intership at a Fortune 500 company (this doesn't exists in France, but whatever, this is nearly the same category). I was supposed to build some file sharing system for the office. Before getting into it, I briefly thought aboyt what technos I could use to build it and make a sweet interface for my co-workers, in 10 weeks, and not a single another day.

Expectations
> Nice team with devs that I could ask things about and learn solid tricks that would even amaze David Copperfield
> Having a nice dev environment

Reality
> Alone on this project
> No fucking dev environment, I had to build everything on Notepad
> No CI
> No SCM
> And, the worst, Ladies and Gentlemans,

I FUCKING HAD TO WORK IN A SINGLE FILE IN A CLOSED ENVIRONMENT.
NO WEBSERVER, NO DEDICATED SPACE.
I HAD TO REQUEST A SPECIFIC ENVIRONMENT IN A CLOSED CUSTOM CMS THAT WAS SERVING FILES, SO THIS FORMAT COULD BE READ ON FOLDER OPENING IN IE9 (FIREFOX FORBIDDEN).
YOU HAD TO MIX HTML, CSS AND JS IN A SINGLE FILE. NO SERVER-SIDE LANGUAGES, ONLY STATIC LINKS, NO FRAMEWORKS (if we can call jQuery, Bootstrap, Semantic UI and all these thinks "Frameworks").

> mfw at the end of the intership

The combination of fun colleagues and trying to learn things (more and more CLI stuff in my case) make my days awesome, also some customer interactions are hilarious, that altogether makes it very much worthwhile!

(although: I'm a Linux engineer, NOT a dev professionally)

Some of these have been mentioned already but here they are, these things make me be a bit better at programming (at least I think so)

• sleep, I love sleep and I think a good night's sleep can do wonders

• music, music theory which is a language in itself and playing an instrument which teaches hand-eye-coordination and also creates patterns in your head, but certainly teaches us that you need to practice a lot to achieve your goals, that it's hard for beginners but gets a bit easier with time

• solving puzzles and riddles, I've been a huge fan of puzzles from an early age, it is something that teaches us solving problems and creating strategies

• other types of games that are helpful are games where you have to find things in a picture or in an environment, this has trained me a bit on finding nasty bugs in my code or at least syntax errors

• googling: sometimes you find out something that is not really related to your problem, but you remember it nevertheless and later on it can help you with something else

• maths, yes, you read correctly, I'm not a big fan of maths either, but what you learn in maths is that there are certain procedures you're often repeating and that you're always building on your knowledge and expanding it, sometimes solving mathematical problems is fun too ;)

• getting fresh air - self explanatory

• listening to other people's life stories, this helps me generally in life, to know that I'm not the only one struggling with something and so on

And I probably could go on with a lot more things, but I think that's enough for now

So just finished the presentation for my internship project. I'm free now!(and can sleep normal times too) But I have a few things I need to get off my mind. Dunno if it'll seem a bit stupid to some of you..but yeahh....
Anyway, during my demo yesterday
Lecturer: So this project of yours uses some open-source stuff?
Me: Yeah.
L: And if the company wants to use if for commercialization they need to pay for the license?
M: Thats basically it. Yes.
L: Well, see..thats the problem with your project. You need to think of all this things. If there's no other options then just code the whole shit yourself. Or maybe discuss with the management on this.
Yeah...see, I doubt the management here cares about us anyway. Oh, you're working on your intern stuff. Not important. Just resize the pictures in my powerpoint will you? Oh and you want to use the company computers for your project? No can do..confidentiality stuff. But make sure the thing will work on our system anyway when you're done with it. And even if you use our computers, they restart everytime you open Word anyway..hahaha. You want access to this thing so you can learn a bit on our company's work. Sorry but no. EVERYTHING is confidential so you can't access it since you're interns, eventhough our company is the one that took you inanyway.
Manager: Oh, the thing you're making is pretty cool. You know,all of you can just give your systems to us later.
Friend: Yeah well, maybe we can ask the company for payment? Haha.
Manager: Hahaha well the company can just take your systems for free since you're doing it on our working hours.
Fuck. You. When we ask to do our stuff you said noooo its the company hours. Do our work. And do your stuff back at home or something. Oh, but then we'll drag you around the state to see the clients, and you'll reach home at 8-9pm or something, but of course you're not tired right? So just code then. Or you're not going anywhere today? You're still not allowed to code here eventhough you don't have any work though...so just sit there and be quiet. Or maybe shred my papers for me. Fuck your working hours.
Lecturer: And well, thats the problem with some students *looks pointedly at me* they want to go to non-technical companies so that they can have it easy. Your friends who go to other companies will learn a lot more.
Do you think I fucking want to be here??? This is the only company I got so fuck that. Even when I get different offers and apply to change companies, you go nope. No can do. Stick with your current company eventhough we know that its shit for IT students because its a big company, see? And we have our university's reputation to upkeep. I came here to learn, not make you the No.1 university or something. And its not like you, or the staffs here, help us with anything.
So fuck all of this. We're gonna tell the other lecturers to stop sending students here. You don't learn anything. I'm done with this shit, not gonna think or worry about it anymore..I'll just, go get cake or something. Yeah.

For some reason the office I work for is paying for a designer to become a front end developer and she gets to take the classes one work time. Any time I want to further my career or pay I have to pay out of pocket and it can't interfere with work. Additionally I have to deal with her asking me every other day why I use Sublime over something else.

Basically I use Sublime because I spent too much time researching new things to try and learn yet another editor. If you wanna use brackets, cool, if you wanna use atom, cool, if you wanna use notepad, cool. I don't give a flying fuck what editor you use, you're writing CSS, I'm writing PHP, if you can count to 4 spaces, and not look at my code, I'm not going to scream at you.

She comes in each day and sits at her desk watching video after video on beginner HTML and CSS asking me mundane questions breaking my concentration at least once an hour.

I know we all started somewhere but Google was my best friend and should be yours as well.

"I keep telling you, I'm not a pilot"
"and I keep telling you, you fly boys crack me up!"

I'm not a developer, but I'm doing some complex things and I need the benefit of computers to work things out, so I know enough programming to get me by. Recently one of the uppers decided that all the amateur spaghetti python programs I'd quickly slapped together should be developed into tools that the clients engineers can use!

"How long do you need!."
" I have no idea how to make something like that",
"but it's all just maths right! you can figure it out",
"probably, given long enough bu.. "
"okay get started and we'll check in in a couple of weeks" "hold o.." "I'll give your pride and joy to the graduate to fuck up while you're working on that" "wai.. " "anyway got take this call, good luck"
┗|｀O′|┛

So here I am.. I have no idea what I'm doing.

So since I have a working knowledge of python, fortran and VBA, someone suggested I learn nim, which was not what he sold it as. Then a software engineer that went to the same uni as me, suggested RUST! you can't mess up rust, and look at this I created (shows me a decent looking desktop application) "I'll help you out". But it wasn't really that easy.

Then I asked some questions... that was my first mistake, that's not acceptable until you know what you're doing apparently. Especially when the answers are in the docs you can't find in a topic you don't understand for a version you're not using solved with a tool you've never heard of for an operating system you forgot existed. Look at this moron asking a question.

Okay to be fair, I went through the rust docs and it was well written, and I do really like this language. But I do not have a degree in computer science, and so many docs for crates are just written with an expectation of a certain level of knowledge. As soon as there's a build error, it's at least 3 -4 days of me faffing about trying to decipher hieroglyphics.

..and the graduate is about to unwittingly commit manslaughter..

I'm sure whoever needs to fix this mess in the future will post a rant about this train wreck.

Windows servers are a joke. A bad joke.

I feel sorry for people who have to work on them and have that as their profession you never used Linux

If someone came up to me and said we should use a windows server for this I'd laugh in his face and fire him. Seriously. I would.

That's how much I hate them. Got it? Ok good ... I'm calm now 😎

**noob alert**
Hi all, I'm new to this community. I found it out couple of days back while downloading some apps on play store. And I don't know how much time have I spent here since then... Damm, I've an interview after 2 days.

My query is, I am stuck/confused. I have so many ToDos. ToDos to learn new things, from UI to other langs to machine learning to database to etc etc. And I keep on postponing it because I can't decide which way to go first. There is so much fuzz about BigData/AI which sounds cool. Sometimes I want to build UI for my imaginary idea, then somebody says a man must learn linux and DB. Top of that I'm preparing for interviews, so I think I should get a job first and then start learning. But when I get a job, I get *busy* with job. It feels like Captain America, all he does is official work. I sometimes feel like trying open source coding, but quit the idea because I get scared or overwhelmed by imagining the big community behind it and I won't be able to make a difference or I might get bashed by others as I get bashed in StackOverFlow :-(
I'm unable to get help from friends/family/colleagues, not because they are bad. It's just they don't get it. People think just because you have a job which pays the bills and save money, everything is fine because there are lots of people who dream to get a job, so be thankful for what you have. I'm thankful... But it's not helping. I really want to do things more than what my job asks me to. The kid inside me is awake since I became adult.

Have you been in this condition or is it just me? Or is it too confusing? Could you please help me out. Thanks a lot. Sorry for serious post. I'm a java programmer by the way.

Me: Dad, what are you doing with my facebook account

Dad: Just seeing your news feed son

Me: you don't know my password

Dad: Yes...you just logged in one of my phishing pages.

Me: But when did you learn these things?...you don't even know how to send a mail

Dad: Go, drink some gelusil son

Take the know-it-all guy you grew up with, that ruins every relationship he's ever had with friends and family, because he gets angry when folks don't deem him as the authority, even for shit he doesn't have a single clue about doing correctly.

Now make him the manager of a fast-food restaurant - so he can command anyone he pleases, making them do anything he wants them to, because he feels it's fun to experiment with co-workers emotions.

Give him an assistant manager that realizes that the only way they can keep their job is to kiss his ass, blowing him every once in a while for a ten cent raise, while the rest of the employees do nothing but smile, say "yes, sir", and go about their business - eventually shit talking about him at the parties he's not invited to.

Watch him jump on every fashion trend, no matter how much it costs, until he eventually decides that the job he's had for the last decade and his fellow employees are beneath him, without saving any money to pay for the things he needs to survive, or taking the proper time to learn all the things that would have made him successful in the long run.

Even though he was an uptight twat and a half, some folks feel that he never got the chance he deserved, as death comes knocking at an earlier age than many would have expected; creating an empty, irrational, and partial dependency in their lives, caused by problems he never cared to correct for their love and admiration, while others are happy as fuck that he's breathed his last breath.

This is the state of our current industry.

*Drops the mic*

Im so frustrated with myself . I've always been afraid of being stupid . Perhaps it was because i was always called the "less intelligent" sibling by my parents . Well i did self-learn java , c++ and android (when i was 15) and made some apps and i did get acknowledged finally but i may have not acknowledged myself . I got into college a couple years ago and i can tell you right out that its like an island filled with stupidity. The teachers , the students. The other day i caught my teacher learning how a transistor works. This is unacceptable for someone who is teaching us advanced op-amps and other circuits . Well , I did get into this college cause it was less tedious and i thought college doesn't matter cause i can self-learn . All i needed was free time . Well college totally destroyed that too and provided no facilities in the process as well . So yeah should i blame my college for my inability to do things the past couple years. I mean i don't think i've learnt a single thing all this while. This is where my frustration begins cause i dont want to blame the college , it's not going to help me and i'll probably end up in a 9 to 5 call center job at this rate . Im also very heavily frustrated with myself , it's like everything i've done so far has been a path of least effort. I have tried a few things which were all just fads like machine learning and crypto and even trading . They felt good and thats what scares me , maybe i don't have the passion and am just looking for a quick buck . This is clearly reflected in the ideas i've been having as well . Well i've never had access to proper funds but now im just trying to justify this layman emotion . I just want to learn and be passionate about learning , researching and i just want enough funds for that . But im afraid , maybe its just that i want to feel superior than my circle . I mean i still don't know why i tried learning rust and wasted even more time setting up fedora and everything around it while i already had a working debian setup and a programming language i'm kind of versed with . i wouldn't say well cause im a self learner and i feel guilty for that . I definitely know i just learnt the surface of the language . Deep down i'm just another stupid fad obsessed guy who feels better by choosing a more complex language that my colleagues look upto . Is this what i am , if so im scared and i don't know what to do . People say that you are what you are and you cant change that . If i cant change this then i dont deserve this wasteful stupid life . I don't know what i should do and it makes me cry . Maybe acknowledging this would've helped but it hasn't , I've felt better playing fortnite rather than learning some basic electronics. Im another one of those aren't I ?

I am 30.

Just now I see that if I rewrite documentation of things I learn online with my own words (aka taking fucking notes) I learn with 5x quality.

For some reason I didn't do this most of my 20s.

what the fuck am I doing with my life?

15 years ago I had a job interview as technical leader. They asked me about the trendy framework in those days, Struts. I didn't know much to be honest. I actually started to study java the month before. I was 30 y.o. and I managed to sell myself well.

I got the job. I never saw Struts, the real job was to migrate a z/OS application written on PL/I for DB2 (all things where new to me, I programmed something in VB when I was younger, before studying a career in statistics). Anyway, somebody else already scaffolded Struts, I implemented some business logic here and there, and mostly tried to make sense of the monster-legacy.

Fast forward now.
Two months ago I was interviewed on the last version of Angular and AWS devops, kubernetes etc. I managed not to look completely idiot, but honestly, I never went beyond an Hello World in Angular, and kubernetes, well, I like the name.

I got the job as Technical Architect.

First project I'm assigned to: migrate a 15 years old Struts application to cloud.
Somebody has containerized everything.
Somebody will scaffold a dotNet application.

I'll watch. Maybe I'll write some nice powerpoint presentation. Maybe I'll fill in some business logic in some methods.

I wanted really to be a technical Architect and do things other modern people do.

I actually wanted to learn something.

Anyway.
For 160K$ a year is not bad, I wouldn't complain.

Introduced git in work about 5 months ago, explained to my coworkers how it works, shared links to tutorials, git pro book and everything imaginable.

Almost every day I learn something new ... they keep struggling to checkout a branch or resolve some simple conflict...

I'm just tired of explaining things...

Now I just go and fix every thing and learn a lot :)

So I had to use office and image editing tools on Linux today.
Holy mother fucking god are these things awful. Gimp, pinta, gnome paint, libre office, open office... they seem like a project some guy threw together a weekend in his bedroom. The UX is shite and makes 0 sense. They crash and lag all over the place. For fuck sake!
Also... Gimp, libre office and open office. If you want to make an alternative to a well known product (Photoshop and MS Office in this example) then just fucking copy the god damn UI as much as you can. No-one is going to go learn your fucking half ass product, people only use this shit because it's free and available on Linux.
I swear, I seriously considered sending the images to my phone and just fucking edit them there because it would have been so much easier than using this pile of shit.
Fuck!!!

Now that I am coding for money, the motivation to learn and build new things is gone. It has become all about money for me now. I get tired after coding all day and I can’t open my personal laptop to learn new things and do some more.. well.. coding.

Will I ever get that motivation back? Because I have some good ideas in my mind. Just can’t seem to start working on those ideas.

TL;DR you suck, I suck and everybody sucks, deal with it....

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

Let me let off some steam, since I've had enough of people hating on languages "just because"

Every language has it's drawbacks and quirks, BUT they have their strengths also. Saying "I hate {language}" is just you being and ignorant prick and probably your head is so far up your ass that you look like an ass hat. With that being said, every language is either good or bad depending on the developer writing in it. Let's give you an example:

If I ware to give you a brick and ask you to put a nail in a plank, can you do it? Yes, it will be easier if you do it with a hammer, but you have a brick, so hammer is out of the question. If you hit your thumb while doing it... well... sorry, but it is not the bricks fault - it is YOU!

JavaScript, yes it has a whole lot of problems, but it works, you can do a ton of stuff and does a good job at that, it is evolving through node and typescript (and others, just a personal pref), BUT if you used js when you ware debugging that jquery (1.0) plugin written in the free time of a 13 yo, who copy pasted a bunch from SO, well, it is not js' problem - deal with it. Same goes for PHP, i've been there where you had a single `index.php` with bazillion lines of code, did a bunch of eval and it was called MVC, but it also is evolving.. thing is all languages allow you to do some dumb stuff so YOU have to be responsible to not fuck it up (which you always DO btw, we all do). Difference is PHP/JS roll with it because the assumption is that you know what you are doing, which again - newsflash - you don't.

More or less I would blame that shit on businesses which decided to go with undergrads to save money instead of investing in their product, hell, I am in a major company that does not invest that doesn't care a whole lot about dev /tech stuff and now everybody's mother is an engineer - they care about money, because investors care about money (ROI) and because clean code does not pay the bills, but money does.

If we get all of the good practices and apply them to each language every one of them has it's place, that is why there is no "The Language", even if there was, we STILL ware going to fuck it up and probably it was going to be even worse than where we are now.

Study, improve, rinse and repeat... There are SENIORS and LEADS out there that are about 25-30 and have no fucking clue about the language, because they have stuck up their heads up the ass of frameworks and refuse to take a breath of clean air and consider something different than their dogmatic framework "way" of doing things.. That is the result you are seeing. Let me give you a fresh example to illustrate where I am at atm:

Le me works with ZendFramework 2.3-2.5 (why not, which is PHP5+ running on PHP7 [fancy, eh]), and little me writes a module for said project, and tries to contain it in its own space, i.e not touching anything outside of the folder of the module so it is SELF-CONTAINED (see, practices), during 2-3-4 iterations of code review, I've had to modify 4 different modules with `if (somthing === self::SOMETHING_TYPE)` as requested by my TL, which resulted in me not covering 3 use-cases after the changes and not adding a new event (the fw is event-driven, cuz.. reasons) so I have to use a bunch of ifs in the code, to check a config value and do shit. That is the way of I am asked to do things I hate what I've done and the fact that because of CR I have lost case-coverage, a week of work and the same TL will be on my ass on monday that things are now "perfect".

The biggest things is "we care about convention and code style"... right.... That is not because of the language, not because of me, not because of the framework - it is some dude's opinion that you hate, not the language.

New stuff are better, reinventing the wheel is also good, if it wasn't you would've had a few stone circular things on your car and things ware going to be like that - we need to try and try, that is the only way we actually learn shit.

Until things change in the trade, we will be on the same boat, complaining about the same shit over and over, you and me won't be alive probably but things will not change a bit.

We live in a place where state is considered good, god objects necessary (can you believe it, I've got kudos for using the term 'God Object'... yep, let that sink in). If you really hate something, please, oh god I beg you, show me how you will do it better and I will shake your hand and buy you a beer, but until then, please keep your ass-hurt fanboy opinion to your self, no one gives a shit about what you think, we will die and the world will not notice...

I can you about one really annoying coworker: Me.

The first thing I did as a sysadmim was to break my colleague's rc helicopter. After that I decided to learn Python, pestering him with questions once every two minutes. I developed, using the word loosely, some scripts that I wrote directly on the production servers, with predictable results.

After a while, I broke less things than I fixed. I learned a lot those years. Today I'm still amazed by the patience and knowledge of this guy; I owe most of my career to him.

These days I have a brilliant job stopping morons such as myself from breaking to many things. I try to be as patient and I hope to be as knowledgeable.

It's starting again. I can feel it.

You had a decent job, but you had to think otherwise. Then you had to go to that coffee shop tell some people you're the fucking bee's knees, didn't you?

Well, you know that's how the band plays.

Yeah, but now you'll have to live up to the hype, my friend. And you know pretty well that the pocketknife on your belt won't cut it anymore.

I can always learn as I go...

Sure you can. Except this time stakes are higher. They'll be expecting you to deliver on all your bloody greatness. They'll be relying on you. Not only them, but also the person who chose to be with you. And you know you're not enough, for neither of them. Now you'll fuck it up and let all those people down.

But I could build things little by little, lay out a solid groundwork and build up from that. Just like that other time when...

Of course you can. But can you make beautiful sparkly things? Can you make them sexy?

No... But I can make them resilient. I can follow best practices and intelligent design patterns.

Right. Cause design patterns win contests and prizes. Sure.

Well, it'll make things work better. And then when someone else comes along...

They'll say your work smells and let everybody know how it should've been done, because they need to prove themselves. You know that's what people do.

But that's just not fair! Solid work is solid work!

And a fraud is still a fraud. And that's what you are.

I dive in head first.

Some existing program annoys me, so I get this itch to write a selfhosted Spotify in Go, or a conky with 3D graphics in Rust.

I check the homepage of the language, download the tools, check which IDE is great for it.

Then I just start writing code, following the error corrections thrown by the IDE, doing web searches for all errors. Then when I run into a wall, I might check the reference docs or a udemy course.

Often I don't finish the project, because time is limited and I still have 4 million other things to do and learn, but at least I've learned a new language/tech.

Con: For tech which uses unique paradigms like Rust's memory management or Go's Goroutines, it can be frustrating to bash away at a problem using old assumptions.

Pro: By having a real demand for a product with requirements instead of a hello world or todo app, it's much easier to stay motivated, and you learn beyond what courses would teach you.

Background: Since last 3-4 months, was working with a senior engineer remotely on a project.
Present: Currently, I am Out of Office and yesterday late night, I opened my official mail and after sometime I got an email with subject: GOODBYE!

It was from him. The same senior engineer with whom I was working. I thought it was a joke. But people don't joke when they send such emails to a huge group of people.

I never knew he was going to leave so soon. I wanted to learn so many things working with him. I used to ask him the silliest doubts ever.
I still wonder why he left the company. I have so many questions to ask him.
I am sad. I am feeling left alone.

It's awkward that today, this very moment, I can't ping him anymore forever.

It's obvious to be more professional and such things are normal.
But, I am fresher and my first project was with him. So, it's kind of tough for me too.

I know this will help me to grow up stronger and teach me that time isn't constant and we need to always be ready and use the right time preciously and deal with the "constant change".

And also, wherever he goes, my best wishes to him and I hope I will meet him some day.

Really getting tired of these web design ads. I would turn on Adblock but I want to support YouTubers that are actually interesting to watch. I saw this ad today, Divi. A plugin of some sort for WordPress and the lady in the video is talking about how building a website is like painting a master piece but not​ really. And then goes on about "creating" a website with their tool on the page itself. (Like a Wix or Weebly but on the actual page and live). I watch the video to the end and decide to check the comments and someone said "or you know, learn HTML and stop being lazy" *liked* then one smart ass replied, "or use Wix, or use Weebly, or use any other thing online that lets you design a website without typing code". It annoys me how ignorant people can be about designing, but I don't blame them. People are lazy in general and would want to do things the easy way even though it's not the best way. You know the saying, give a man a CMS or WYSIWYG builder and he'll make a website, but teach a man to code and he'll make more, improved websites.

Tldr; its a long introduction

Hi Ranters,

I've been on this app for quite a while now. As a shy cat watching from a distance and reading all kinds of rants. Anywho I feel comfortable enough to crawl out of my shell and introduce myself. Since I feel you guys together made such a pleasant and safe community, I'm really happy to be a part of it!

Anyway I'm Sam, 24 year old, from the Netherlands. My favorite color is green. Mostly the green you can find in nature. The one that calms you down:). I'm a very introverted person but always very curious and eager to learn new things.

I started to program when I was 12. I did assembly and C++. Because I liked making cheats for online games. Later I learned about C#, Java and Python. Mostly used it for web stuff, scraping, services etc. But also chatbots (for Skype for example).

Currently I'm 2 years in as a data scientist, mostly working in Python.

But on the side as a hobby and with an ambition I have a basic understanding of full stack development.
Mostly Nodejs, express, mongo, and frontend, no frameworks.

(I will later ask you guys some more questions about that! I could really use some advice!)

Anyway enough about me! Tell a bit about yourselves! Happy to get to know you all a little better!

Got fed up with having to use the mouse/trackpad while editing code or using the terminal, so I decided to (finally) learn proper vim keybindings and tmux.

Boooooy oh boy, this certainly changes things.

I think I'm in love with tmux. Damn that piece of software is so sexy. Disabled the mouse, propped up my dotfiles and installed tmux + my conf on all machines I use. It's so useful, so fast and so pretty...

Spent some time with vimtutor too. Finally getting faster with the keybindings. Installed neovim, got some plug-ins (nerdtree, fzf etc), disabled the mouse and arrow keys, and made it pretty. It's actually pretty nice, but I'm not at the "buff gorilla who took speed and pressed 24 keys in a microsecond" typing level yet. One day though.

Also I'm using the Nord color scheme on everything. Overall pretty satisfied with the end result. Still not as productive as I was with VS Code, but I think I'll eventually surpass my previous productivity levels.

If anyone has any tips for vim/nvim or tmux, feel free to share!

Why are people complaining about debugging?
Oooh it’s so hard.
It’s so boring.
Can someone do this for me?

I honestly enjoy debugging and you should too..
if it’s not your code, you’ll get to understand the code better than the actual author. You’ll notice design improvements and that some of the code is not even needed. YOU LEARN!

If it’s your own code (I especially enjoy debugging my own code): it forces you to look at the problem from a different perspective. It makes you aware of potential other bugs your current solution might cause. Again, it makes you aware of flaws in the design. YOU LEARN!

And in either case, if it’s a tricky case, you’ll most likely stop debugging at some point, refactor the shit out of some 50-100 line methods and modulize it because the original code was undebuggable (<- made up a new word there) and continue debugging after that.

So many things I know, I know only because I spend days, sometimes even weeks debugging a piece code to find the fucking problem.

My main language is java and i wouldn’t have believed anyone who told me there’s a memory leak in my code. I mean, it’s java, right? We refactored the code and everything worked fine again. But I debugged the old version anyway and found bugs in Java (java 6.xx I believe?) which made me aware of the fact that languages have flaws as well.. GC has its flaws as well. So does docker and any other software..

Stop complaining, get on your ass and debug the shit out of your bugs instead of just writing it in a different way and being glad that it fixed the issue..

My opinion.

So Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and many others just gave $50mil (each) for CS education in USA. The program is intended to help minorities and kids in highschool learn coding.

That's pretty awesome. Say what you will about these companies but they do some really great things sometimes.

Also, Ivanka Trump was helping this along. I'm not a fan of the trump administration but still, that's awesome!

!rant

Got back into android development recently and while everything was pretty flawless ( I managed to get the basic concepts implemented in a day) something wasn't right.

For some reason I was not happy with the code i wrote, although I took examples from google and tried to adapt their code style. It looked aweful. I hated my code.
But the code itself wasn't the core of the problem. I could easily add new features and replace components with new implementations without breaking the app. All those "good code quality" identifiers were there.

Turn out the problem is Java. Or to be more specific: Java 1.6
Every listener which only calls a single function once a worker has finished needs 6 lines of code. If you implement the inferface in the class it gets messy once there are multiple workers and you have a generic interface. And there are no lambdas!

So I made the switch to Kotlin.
The app was converted to kotlin in 30 Minutes​. Android studio can convert the classes automatically and very little manual work is needed afterwards.
After that I spent 2 hours replacing the old java concepts with Kotlin concepts: lamdas, non-nullable types, getters and setters in kotlin style (which in this case is c# style) and some other great thing.
The code is good looking now. I like it. I like kotlin as it has a lot of cool things.
Its super easy to learn. It took me about 2 hours to get into it. It combines concepts from java, javascript, c# and maybe a few other languages to form a modern jvm 1.6 compatible typesafe language.

Android dev is fun again!

I fucked up.

In my career, colleagues always looked up to me to solve everything. From day 1.
Hell, I have nicknames; « The Dad », « Machine », « The Beard »... when I meet a new group of devs at the bar they use those nicknames even if I have no clue who they are.

Result? I'm not allowed to fail and even if I do and try to take responsibility, no one ever blame me.

They see me as a fucking zen programming monk, all wise, patient and kind.

Oh boy here we go. I screw things up all the time and can never let go the guilt since I'm not allowed to take responsibility of my mistakes.

Once again I wake up after a night of stress working, trying to overcome analysis paralysis. I'm late. Supposed to have meetings with some fucking PHDs, fueling my imposter syndrome.

Can't even learn anything in those conditions.

Fuck they should call me the fraud.

I'm basically an introvert. I've lived most of my childhood with my mother alone with few friends and the ones I had betreyed me real hard at some point. So how come that I'm now founding a startup, speaking in front of a big audience at meetups and have a nearly 60/40 work/social life?

At some point I decided to be more social. Making that decision alone had a huge impact. It took several years though, to implement this decision. Some day I cut off my draining social bounds and found energyzing relationships by simple doing what I wanted to do. I started to reach out and experiment with a lot of hobbies like bow casting and going to board games evenings. I made little steps. E.g bow casting is a sport where you don't necessarily interact with others within the sport, but you have the opportunity to interact about the sport.

A physiologist once told me the neat fact, that being an introvert is just an attribute that does not contradict the skill being socially involved. So it is possible with training and decisions to learn how to be more extroverted. For in introvert this is more exhausting and challanging, but definitely possible.

So today I balance my social life and work by visiting meetups, playing board games and all that stuff that makes me comfortable. There I get to know people with similar interests and similar struggle ;)

At some point the work was just not enough to be happy, I identified my missing social interactions as the root cause so I decided to change that.

On the other hand, don't think you have to be social. Don't think you have to care about everything others expect you to care about. It's bullshit. Don't care about that. Rather ask yourself what you want for yourself. Certainly a social life is part of that, but you alone decide how this will look like. E.g. After I decided hey I just don't give a fuck if you like cuddling your cat and when it's birthday is, several months or years later I started to be interested in these things from my own, not because some dippshit society construct expects me to care about it.

So to wrap up:
Introvert is an attribute, social life is a skill.
Deciding for yourself and giving a fuck about others is key.
It takes a shit load of time. But it works.

Why in the world IT work is so stressful?
I never been like that since I start developing code professionally, 8 years ago.
Since then, I had many health problems due stress, and some were really scaring (heart problem).

I'm trying to adapt to a healthier way of work, but I'm starting to doubt if that is possible.

Work in technology seems cruel and soulless sometimes. The constant pressure to learn new things all the time, to specialize in a lot of skills, simultaneously. The urgency nature of ALL tasks - even a simple form field slightly out of place seems to be an issue of life and death for clients.

Easy and quick communication made some people lost boundaries and respect. Many times I received calls and messages after midnight, about things like elements alignment.

And the worst is when clients blame you about their business problems. If they are not selling well this week, it's fault of the website you did ( which they are using for months now).

This actually happened to me today, first thing in the morning. After I slept just 3h, because I worked until late yesterday (oh yeah many more of these life/death updates).

What happens in this industry? Will this ever be different some day?

TL;DR; windows XP + bat scripts + fascination about being able to make things yourself.

I was born and raised in a village. And the thing about living in a village is that you are free :) Among all the other freedoms you are also free to build your own solutions to various domestic problems, i.e. to build stuff. This is one of the things that fascinates me about living outside the city.

When I finally was old enough (and had the means to, i.e. a computer) to understand that programming is something that allows you to build your own solutions to computer problems, it got to me.

With win 3.1 I was still too fresh and too young. With win 95 I was more interested in playing with neighbours outdoors. With win 98 I was a bit too busy at school. But with win XP the time had come. I started writing automation solutions for windows administration using .bat scripts (.vbs was and still is somewhat repelling to me). I no longer needed to browse Russian forums and torrent sites to find a solution to a problem I had! That was amazing!!! [esp. when my Russian was very weak].

That was the time when I built my first sort-of-malware - a bat script downloading and installing Radmin server, uploading computer's IP and admin credentials to my FTP.

I loved it!

However, I'd stumbled upon may obstacles when writing with batch. I googled a lot and most of the solutions I found were in bash (something related to Linux, which was a spooky mystery to me back then). Eventually, I got my courage together and installed ubuntu. Boy was I sorry... Nothing was working. I was unable to even boot the thing! Not to mention the GUI...

Years later I tried again with ubuntu [7.10 I think.. or 7.04] on my Pavilion. Took me a looooot of attempts but I got there. I could finally boot it. A couple of weeks later I managed to even start the GUI! I could finally learn bash and enjoy the spectacular Compiz effects (that cube was amazing).

I got into bash and Linux for the next several years. And then I thought to myself - wait, I'm writing scripts that automate other programs. Wouldn't it be cool I I could write my own programs that did exactly what I wanted and did not need automation? It definitely would! I could write a program that would make sound work (meaning no more ALSA/PA headaches!), make graphics work on my hardware, make my USB audio card to be set to primary once connected and all the other amazing things! No more automation -- just a single program or all of that!

little did the naive me knew :)

I started with python. I didn't like that syntax from the beginning :/ those indentations...

Then I tried java. Bucky (thenewboston), who likes tuna sandwiches, on my phone all the free time I had. I didn't learn anything :/ Even tried some java 101 e-book. Nothing helped until I decided to write some simple project (nothing fancy - just some calculations for a friend who was studying architecture).

I loved it! It sounds weird, but I found Swing amazing too. With that layout manager where you have to manually position all the components :)

and then things happened and I quit my med studies and switched to programming. Passed my school exams I was missing to enter the IT college and started inhaling every bit of info about IT I could get my hands on (incl outside the college ofc).

A few more stepping stones, a few more irrelevant jobs to pay my bills in the city, and I got to where I am now.

Go to interviews. You always learn stuff in any interview. Either be a technology or design pattern or any freaking thing they use there.

Basically 2 things can happen:
you get the job or ... you don't,
either way you will still leave with some extra knowledge.

Also don't be afraid to tell how much money you want to earn. Getting a job ans feeling pissed about the salary is a horrible feeling.

Despite some of the few bat crazy events that occur, I've got a fairly sweet dev job.

1. I only have a 25 minute drive to work. All interstate, I live close to the highway, and the business is right off the exit.
2. My current position, I have a lot of autonomy. My projects don't have deadlines and help other teams with their projects (system design, testing, etc)
3. I work with several military veterans. I think I could listen to their crazy stories all day (being a dev isn't so bad).
4. Department manager just quit. Probably going to have less and less things to rant about. Along with #2, I plan on having a lot more time for side-projects (stuff *I* want to learn about).

These are the things that finally finally helped me stick to learning programming.

Hello world! This is my first story on devrant and I would like to share how I finally overcame the barriers that had always prevent me from learning programming in a more serious and structured way.

I know my way around linux, had some experience with BASIC many years ago and have more than basic notions of cryptography... however I never got myself to learn programming in such a way that I could write an app or interact with an API. Until now.

I have advanced more than ever before and I believe it might be thanks to these aspects:

1. C#
I have always had struggles with languages that were too compact or used many exotic or cryptic expressions. However I have found C# to be much more readable and easier to understand.

2. Visual Studio
My previous attempts at learning programming were without an IDE. Little did I know what I was missing!

For example when I tried learning python on Debian, I almost went crazy executing programs and trying to find the compile errors in a standard text editor.

Intellisense has been live changing as it allows me to detect errors almost immediately and also to experiment. I'm not afraid to try things out as I know the IDE will point out any errors.

3. .NET library and huge amounts of documentation
It was really really nice to find out how many well documented classes I had available to make my learning process much easier, not having to worry about the little details and instead being able to focus on my program's logic.

4. Strong typing
Call me weird, but I believe that restricting implicit conversions has helped learn more about objects, their types and how they relate to each other.

I guess I should be called a C# fanboy at this point, but I owe it to that language to be where I'm now, writing my first apps.

I also know very very little about other languages and would love to hear if you know about languages that provide a similar experience.

Also, what has helped you when you first started out?

Thanks!!

Time to learn as mush as i can, Just Made Hello world Programs in 9 languages.
C#
C++
HTML
JavaScript
NodeJS
Perl
PHP
Python2
Ruby

If you Have some other things Tell me And i will try to learn it to

Hey guys,

I think the topic of this week is very important.

Older, experienced devs are giving their skills and advices to the younger one.

Some of you maybe know it, I'm a young developer, who started his apprenticeship at september.

I'm feeling good there, the others are friendly. I learn a Lot there. I had experience before I started there. It's my Hobby to code so I started coding when I was 14.

You can't know anything, everyone makes mistakes, this is what I've learned and this is important to remember.
There are these days like today, when your Boss isn't there and you have to work alone. You have to do many things, and you are desperated because nothing Works, you can't ask anyone, you are completly alone. There are these days, when nothing seems to work. But there are also these days when everything Just Works fine and you are happy with yourself.
This is important to remember.
For me its very hard. Days like today are driving me crazy and I'm very sad, even when I know, that this is Kind of normal not to know everything and have Problems, especially when you are young as me and started your first apprenticeship 3 months ago.

Tomorrow I'm also alone, I'm a Little Bit feared of tomorrow (you say that in that Way? :P) When I think of tomorrow and that I don't know How to proceed and sitting there, I'm getting frustrated and Kind of sad. But I know that this will Make you even better some day, because you learn and gets better - day for day.

At least there was something good today. My stickers finally arrived! To Germany! That was fast! Thanks everyone, Thanks! And Thank you @dfox for building this great community!

What are you advices? And how you handle these situations? I hope tomorrow everything Works fine :/

PM: this is our super fancy new CI/CD pipeline, it's the greatest. i expect you to learn and understand all this in no time.
devs: so i have to spend some more time on this topic because it's completely new to me and requires some learning...
PM: nooo, that's a super easy task with zero effort, my braindead hamster can do that in no time, so can i, and so can you! let's assign 1 story point for that.

~ 3 months latèr ~

also PM, after he has started developing as well: so i'm realizing there are many things that i have to learn, and it takes me some time. i haven't developed with C++ and <other tool stack> for a longer time. by the way, you guys don't need to check for any quality right now, we need to deliver fast. it's okay, when you have memory overflows, your code is completely crappy, poor architecture or memory overflows, it doesn't matter.

he even has a subtask for migrating his code from VS project to our new project structure, since he refused to learn our pipeline right from the beginning and created VS project instead. シ why is this a subtask? this job can be done in no time, my left vanishing twin named Klaus who has dislexia and hates vim can solve this task in 20 seconds!!!!11

(and still no PR, not even a feature branch in our repo)

Things I wish people had said at my first job (in light of lots of the people I see starting their first dev gig on here). Please add yours.

Congrats!
Take a breath, you will be fine.
If you get frustrated, take a moment to collect your thoughts.
Don't be afraid to say you don't know, you are not expected to know everything.
Your workday needs to end at a decent time. Don't overdo it or you will be useless for more of your hours.
Always take whatever length of time you think something will take and double it. If you think it will take 15 minutes, it'll probably take your 4 hours.
Concentrate on networking and personal relationships.
Pick the smartest people who have moved the most vertically and pay attention to what they say, they might know a lot.
When management makes an "unwise" or "crazy" decision, ask them why or what the context or motive is that made then arrive at that course of action. Some of them might surprise you in their bigger picture motives or dumbassedness.
Six sigma may be in your future, learn what it is.
Automate as much of your own job as possible.

Um, that's all I've got for now. Hopefully that's helpful to people just starting out. Feel free to add yours.

!rant I need job advice. Please reason with me.

I am 26, got 2 years of experience in c# and unity3d.
I did some research and it turns out that the minimal paying average with my job/experience over the whole country is at least 300€ a month more than what i get payed currently.
I made a list of pros and cons, and am just not sure what would be smartest to do in the long run. Here is a list for both options, please chime in on me if you can!

Points for current job:
Permanent contract (hard to fire me etc.)
Get to make mostly mobile games but nothing really big
Fun small team whom i get along with (i am on the spectrum and can be hard to deal with social or costumer related things)
Rarely any overtime (i like to know my hours)
Easy but slow jobs (badly organized, drag on forever)
Rarely challenged and thus boring me
I get to shoot nerf guns at colleagues whenever
Low chance of a 300€/m pay increase (not worth it to boss, financials aren't that great but the company is promising)

Points for any other job:
Unknown working condittions
I am probably bad and uknowledgeable about any tool they give me to work with because my experience is so monotone
Start on short term contract again all over
At the least a 300€ net increase a month
Prob closer to home then 1h drive away
I get to learn new things but give up on games/apps as i know them
Probably get knowledgeable seniors
Probably end up in a bigger more serious company where i am just a number
I am bad in new social envirnoments, oh the angst is real

And a few things besides it are that i personally only have as goal to own my own house with my fiance as soon as i can. And this means i will need to take out a 200k loan or something along those lines, to be paid off over 30 years max.
This means that the permanent contract is very valuable in my eyes, but so is monthly pay increase.
I want to have fun in my job, i want to learn new things and better ways. But i also want to be able to say "enough" to something if it overwhelms me. I just know some things are not for me and i would mess up if i were made to do them. I fear that to not be an option in a big company. I would be forced out of my comfort zone without any regard for me or my learning curve.

Any advice is welcome. Please keep it general if you can so others can learn from this as well. Seniors advice will probably be helpfull to all starting programmers!

Finally installed Linux(Mint) on my laptop.

I guess I'll need to install some essential things that I need to really make use of it. I'm just exploring right now and so far, I'm loving it.

Got really tired of the BSOD that Windows kept giving me.
I've tried a few solutions, but it seems like it has made its comfortable nest inside and shows its sad face whenever it feels like it and ruins my important work (not really, but it really pisses me off)
Can't get rid of Windows completely because I need it for various reasons.

I've used Linux(Red Hat) before and also my university computers have Red Hat installed.
I would've also installed it on my PC, but it doesn't work right now.

Thanks,guys!
(For making me want to use Linux)
I really have a lot to learn.

PS - I can barely see what I'm typing here. Is it just me or is it really just bright as shit? (On web, of course)

Hey guys it's not a rant, but i feel this place might help...
I am a 20 yr old, second year guy ...have got some experience in core Java and after that, i have been doing android for 8months... Yeah , i coded some basic apps got my hands dirty on firebase, sql libraries and some connectivity...
Even got landed in an internship.

Today i feel myself to be an intermediate android dev , nd i know their are many things that can be learnt in android that i don't know..
But what after that?development as a carrier interests me, but i fear for a job security ... I could learn more of Android,maybe learn ios after that but their are always articles coming out that react is future, webapps will replace android and stuff like that...
I Have also heard stuff like companies today want to squeeze more out of their techs, so they want less and complete developers having experience in both web and mobile app designing and other stuff like that
Are you freakin kidding me? Android and ios alone are like drinking Pacific and indian ocean and to add web developing, its like drinking out every drop of ocean in the world.
I guess their are guys which exist with knowledge of all three, maybe I can cover them all too(someday) but that would take my whole clg life of 4 years..(I guess)
And no ,I don't have problems with that too.. I actually like developing but again i hear big words like cloud computing, AR,VR AI, data sciences, automation, graphics designing, game dev, and many more...

Basically i hear too much and i fear too much 😅 and i don't think closing my ears would be a good choice...
So, which ocean of carrier should i aim to go for?nd are my fears real? Do companies really prefer some web guy designing Amazon like apps over android-only guys like me?is automation nd templates really gonna take all we, developers jobs?should i look into ai/data sciences?

Well , i am a simple guy, who got his first pc at 17 so naturally, i am fascinated even by the working of a calculator app and anything relates to tech so am open to pursue my interests in any fields

Had a job interview today as a Junior Python dev. The hardest part: they asked things, that I used to learn in some time in the past, but got rusty in my memory because I don't use em much. Like "to write func that sorts array". Last time I was writing sorting without standard library at least half a year ago. Same with the regular expressions (need em the most once in several months) or sql expressions (last time - 7 month ago). How to remember these things?

Childish thing really, and slightly related to my current job

Was working on a small pet project (it was a website really) back in college, and collaborating with another friend on it who lived in a different city. Had to show him my progress but he wasn't a programmer, just had to show him how much front end part is done and the functionalities till that time. Of course hosting it online was the best solution, but I was a student and broke.

So I got this python script caller pagekite which would make my laptop into a server for the duration I run the script. It ran but I couldn't manage to show him the site for days since I didn't know where it was connecting to. (No one had any docs on it back then)

Did some tinkering and saw that it connects to localhost, so I fired up my xampp server and it worked as I wanted it to :')

Since that day, I decided that I want to be a developer and learn and implement more of such things.
Moral: the smallest, insignificant things can sometimes give you the most happiness.

I'm so done with flutter.

I wanted to give it a little try by rewriting a small android project I wrote a few years back. It brings some nice concepts especially when it comes to UI related programming but that's all I can really compliment it for. It's nothing more than something to play with as it is right now.

Also I think this text will be hidden behind the read more. Did I successfully bait you with that cat?

The things I truly hate about it:

The ide integration makes me wanna use eclipse again. At least most nonsensical error messages disappear after saving the document on eclipse.
.
Wanna generate a new function? Yeah, let me just place it RIGHT INSIDE THIS FUCKING IMPORT STATEMENT

Over at Google: Let's just rename everything from java slightly different and put it in nonsensical context so that you have to learn all of it again. Also why don't we make it so that the code suggestions only suggest things you already imported, so that you have to look up every little piece shit feature.

When it comes to databases, I must say, I had more fun working with PHP and mysql than with sqFUCKlite. Throwing away the Room components for that? What a joke...

I already said what i think about the syntax here an devrant but I'm more than happy to repeat it here:
The syntax looks like someone looked at C#, Java and JavaScript and then decided to vomit the worst parts of it into a programming language. I can't really classify anything original about it. There are clear inspirations, but they are confusingly mashed together with the other languages making this one nuts of a language.

Android SDK documentation is a blessing in comparison to whatever the fuck flutter tries to do.

I don't think I'll want top touch that Google side project again within the next few years, if it hasn't been replaced with a new side project like billiard by then.

Client A

At the first few meetings, told us they are giving sponsors to World Cup 2018 and we should totally talk about it loudly on media.

Then when we submitted our plan, they said things have changed and they no longer can mention about World Cup. We had to redo everything.

Now, they blame us that our service quality is so bad that we should learn from *some refernce* company. Said company is only talking about their sponsorship for World Cup.

---

Client B

Bought smallest package from us. Demand services greater than our largest package.

Gave us an information of a name spelled in "Barbu". We used that spelling and used it for various tasks in past few weeks. All approved by client.

Blamed us we are giving such a poor service that we cannot even spell "Babu" correctly this morning.

Invest more into stocks.
Started trading a bit at the end of last year ,made some solid returns. Have quite a bit of cash laying around so I think I'll just invest and spread over companies I believe in as I only plan on using the cash in the next year or 2. Work on some of my personal projects, because I didnt last year - at all. Also work out a bit. Got a bit of a chub going on during the pandemic. Learn GO. Upskill and maybe look into switching companies.

Buy some shit. Been saving around 80% of my paycheck for almost 2 years now... I've bought a roof over my head so it's time to spend some of the cash to get a few things to enjoy myself. Sell some unused stuff. Vomited some thoughts.

Wish everyone to achieve their goals!

The worst question was asked by me once. At least I guess it must have been the worst question for an applicant. She applied for a job as Ruby dev and gave her knowledge of the language a solid 5 Star rating. Something I wouldn't give myself unless my name is Mats. So I prepared some really nice questions about metaprogramming and the object model and stuff. As a warm-up I decided to go easy on her and asked her something simple: "how do you define getters and setters in Ruby?" Which is like one of the first things you learn but not too simple. She got a really red face and told me she didn't know. In the end I had to learn that she never even really programmed Ruby but only wrote some method calls in a file she named .rb and she didn't even know what an object was m(

On New Year's Eve a few years back I was around 21/22 and my friends were anywhere between 20/25.

My best friend has a big house so he offered to host it there (as every year pretty much), so we all agreed to do dinner and party after.

We decided to go with barbecue, and we all brought a few things.

Without my knowledge, they are all pretty much gamers and also decided to bring their laptops and even towers to play during the whole day and night.

The result was me "alone" cooking with the dad of a female friend (whose wife died a few years back and offered to help since he would be pretty much alone or with some other family members, not sure).

Once we finished cooking and went on to calling them, no one came to eat because "they were finishing just one more game", and eventually the dad yelled at them and left, I just went eating by myself, and they all showed up a few minutes later looking like 5 year olds when dads scream at them.

I can pretty much say that was the weirdest thing ever, but they did learn because never again they did the same!

As I am not that advanced (started off as a 'jack of all trades' - huge mistake) in programming (about a bit below average), I'm just overwhelmed by knowledge of someone here, yet I am happy to know how much I can learn in next couple of years. 😀 I feel kinda stupid when I see everyone posting what programming horror or stuff they are going through and I am there be like (sometimes) - I know some of these words 😂
I am a newbie in this community (but soph. student in uni) thus I'd like to just say hi and wish everyone a good day even if things are not good at the time🤗😃💪

I have just started working in this industry, and so annoyed by the fact that managers are insensitive to the efforts put in by the developers.
1. They ask for estimates, and sometimes consider it to be the hard line for everything and then they make you feel guilty if you are not able to live up to them.

-- I am not asking to be always lenient but they need to understand that this is problem solving and one might not be able to gage the problem at first sight. A problem might have several sub problems or a solution to one issue might raise compatibility issues with other which were tough to foresee .

2. Why do they always want an instant response to their email or query, a developer being online isn't just there to answer your damn obvious and sometimes stupid questions which can be understood just be glancing at the logs once.

-- How annoying would it be if the manager himself is being poked every other minute for trivial things. Does he have the same patience with his/her developers?

3. In tough times the manager easily delegates the responsibility to the developer and instead of standing by his/her side, interrogates them as if we have done some crime.

-- Wasn't this approved by you. Weren't you the one who had these stupid demands before and didn't let me do things the correct or optimized way. I am not saying I am always right, but you can be atleast open for feedback or discussion.

Why are you the first to take credit for the success and yet hold us responsible for any mishaps.

It's sad to see that some of these people have been tech developers.
I can go on ranting for many more things.
I am not saying all those people out there are like this. But trust me many are.

Note: I am not seasoned as you guys out there. I may even be biased by my own experiences. But this is in complete contrast to what I was expecting when I graduated from college and was excited to finally learn by working.

Oh I've had loads (and still have) of projects that got me to learn cool stuff! To keep them separate, I'll post some in different rants.

The thing that has helped me most over time (it didn't teach me cool things but it's very useful in general) is that, when api's have rare limits and you need/want to use them more often than is really allowed: you write your own alternatives.

I've especially had this with a geoip api's. Needed one for nearly every project but hit the rate limits with every goddamn service.

Wrote my own in a weekend and no rate limit hitting since then!

what kind of dumb fuck you have to be to get the react js dev job in company that has agile processes if you hate the JS all the way along with refusing to invest your time to learn about shit you are supposed to do and let's add total lack of understanding how things work, specifically giving zero fucks about agile and mocking it on every occasion and asking stupid questions that are answered in first 5 minutes of reading any blog post about intro to agile processes? Is it to annoy the shit out of others?

On top of that trying to reinvent the wheels for every friggin task with some totally unrelated tech or stack that is not used in the company you work for?

and solution is always half-assed and I always find flaw in it by just looking at it as there are tons of battle-tested solutions or patterns that are better by 100 miles regarding ease of use, security and optimization.

classic php/mysql backend issues - "ooh, the java has garbage collector" - i don't give a fuck about java at this company, give me friggin php solution - 'ooh, that issue in python/haskel/C#/LUA/basically any other prog language is resolved totally different and it looks better!' - well it seems that he knows everything besides php!

Yeah we will change all the fucking tech we use in this huge ass app because your inability to learn to focus on the friggin problem in the friggin language you got the job for.

Guy works with react, asked about thoughts on react - 'i hope it cease to exists along with whole JS ecosystem as soon as possible, because JS is weird'. Great, why did you fucking applied for the job in the first place if it pushes all of your wrong buttons!

Fucking rockstar/ninja developers! (and I don't mean on actual 'rockstar' language devs).

Also constantly talks about game development and we are developing web-related suite of apps, so why the fuck did you even applied? why?

I just hate that attitude of mocking everything and everyone along with the 'god complex' without really contributing with any constructive feedback combined with half-assed doing something that someone before him already mastered and on top of that pretending that is on the same level, but mainly acting as at least 2 levels above, alas in reality just produces bolognese that everybody has to clean up later.

When someone gives constructive feedback with lenghty argument why and how that solution is wrong on so many levels, pulls the 'well, i'm still learning that' card.

If I as code monkey can learn something in 2 friggin days including good practices and most of crazy intricacies about that new thing, you as a programmer god should be able to learn it in 2 fucking hours!

Fucking arrogant pricks!

I hate react so much. I hate it with the fiery rage of an old testament god. I tried to like it. I wanted to like it.

Unfortunately I picked up Angular (2). I'm now used to a framework that has you covered for most things. That has logical methods of laying out your app. A router that's actually built in and makes sense.

I'm used to writing HTML in the templates, not some horrible abomination of XML that's pretending to be HTML and just waiting to pull off its mask and smack you across the face with its penis while telling you what an idiot you are.

React apps all seem to be cobbled together in a different way. You have to go hunting for the logical stuff you expect to be there.

Let's not even get started on the tome of dependencies it needs to get itself off the ground, all written by vastly different developers from different planets with completely different life goals.

I hate it. The more I learn about it the more I find myself yelling "WTF!" while shaking a fist at the wall, hot tears of rage steaming down my pudgy cheeks until my wife comes running into the room and consoles me with my head on her bosom.

...and I just started a project that will have to be seen through to the end, using.. react.

Seriously, fuck you react, I hope you die of herpes.

So I met this person via a social platform.

They were absolutely silly and weren't able to hold a conversation. So I, like a normal person, just stopped trying to keep things alive.

Over the years, I have realised and learnt that if a person is interested in being friends, they'd put in efforts and I alone will not have to drag things on my shoulder.

I started cutting out people right, left, and center who I felt were taking advantage of me or using me in some way or another.

I ended up saving a lot of time and energy. I no longer feel drained or anxious about something not working out. Not dragging saved me from draining.

Anyway, they reach out to me again after few weeks and I was like let's give it a try to establish a friendship, because befriending people is my weak point.

The cycle repeats. At first I thought it must be because of the asynchronous nature of the platform so I drop my Telegram Id in case they preferred an IM approach.

I swear in the name of sweet lord, the retard does the same behaviour. So, I stopped communication.

And one fine day, the person tells me that they lack social skills and want to learn how to make friends and stuff.

Very fair point. So, me being me, gave them a few tips and critically pointed out their behaviour on how they reply with a one liner after every 2 or 3 business days.

Absolutely no change in their behaviour. They kept texting me the same.

At this point, I was like why am I doing it? I could find better people easily. Because for me, communication is everything. I cannot function without a good communication between two living beings.

So, I asked them why are they even trying to learn social skills when they barely implement it and don't want to change to which they reply saying that so they can use it to befriend people and network to getter better job opportunities.

I fuck them off.

And fuck such people who have intentions, are not clear enough about it, and play people for their own selfish gains.

And this where another learning I got from @scout is have boundaries.

Why do all good people in my life leave? Damn it! I need those good people back and be friends with them and not retards who cannot even communicate beyond one liner.

Hey, does anyone have some tips to learn programming faster? I have the problem that I often forget little things; /

Interns' first day:
"Here is some documentation I found really handy, got me up and running quick"
"Here's a video series on the some of the stuff we work with and maintain. Found it super useful!"

Several months later:
They didn't use any of it, and I answer questions constantly. WHY!?

I started less than a year ago, and I'm the most senior on my team in this country. So it's all falling to me and I don't know how to hold their hands so they'll be able to learn and figure out what to do? Do I just start being rude and telling them to google things?

Hey peeps,
I got a question that is bothering me for a while now. I am from Germany and I quit my CS studies a few months ago in favor of a "Berufsausbildung". I don't know if other countries have a comparable equal to our Berufsausbildung, so I gonna give you a quick overview:

In the Berufsausbildung you stay 30% of your time in school where you have to learn the basics and theory parts of your chosen profession. 70% of your time you are in the company ("Ausbildungsbetrieb") that is training you to learn the practical parts your profession and gain work experience. At the end of the Berufsausbildung, you have to work on a project and present it in front of a committee and write some exams.

So the Berufsausbildung is more about learning by doing instead of learning all the little things in the field of your profession.

Now to my actual question. One of my biggest dreams is to work in Japan as a freelance for a few years or more. Working on projects for companies in my home country while traveling through Japan. I know that it is hard to be allowed into the country for a longer time and even working there without a good education. I always have the feeling that I am inferior to people who have a college degree and I am afraid that my "inferior education" might be a huge disadvantage in the future for me. I already gained 3 years of work experience as a dev and in February 2020 I will have finished my Berufsausbildung. What is your experience with working as a dev without any college degree? Are you treated differently than other people that got a degree? And has anyone experience with working abroad with or without a degree?

Thank you very much!

At the age of 10 I got interest in ''changing computer'' things. I started to watch over the shoulder (I don't know if you can say that in English ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) of my dad. He programmed I2C and other microcontroller.
I started with little batch files and Visual Basic. I think we all know the ''Virus'' with shutdown 😂
At school in the computer lesson we learned a few other languages. I was the only one who learned these languages at home too. The biggest problem is that you think ''I learn at school and at home I can play games''.
Some day I started to learn PHP and Java at home. I came to Java with Minecraft. Yes, Minecraft. You can learn so many things (like the structure of a network packages from the server) and you can visualize everything with blocks.
Since the professional colleague we learn C# and Python which I use in some projects at home too, for example for the rasperrypi.
Now I'm 17 and I can C#, Visual Basic, PHP, JS, Python, JS and HTML

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here on I explain the original thesis.

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

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

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

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

There are several reasons for that:

* I want to hide intimate shit from trolls.

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

* I want to keep my posts consistent.

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

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

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

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

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

Now, I said I had 2 other accounts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Age 8 - Gets first computer and struggles with dial up Internet and my parents yelling at that they ended to use the phone

Ages 12 to 18 - Gets first laptop, starts messing around and interested in websites, gets involved with SMF, and open source message board system written in Php, and starts helping people out, eventually getting paid work for setting up websites etc.. which lead onto learning html/CSS and picking up bits and pieces of Php (and also Photoshop/Illustrator etc..)

Age 18 - Goes to college to study Multimedia, refreshes knowledge of HTML/CSS, learns a bit of Actionscript and some PHP

Age 20 - finishes Multimedia degree, ends up working as an IT consultant for a small business, which leads me to pick up a bit of bash scripting, small hit more PHP. Leaves this after 3months and decides to do a small Software Dev course. Get my first taste of Java and Visual Basic there

21 - Enter into a Software Dev degree. Dive deep into Java and a small bit of Javascript.

23 - After 2nd year of college get taken on an internship with a large multinational where I learn and get hands on experience with Angular, JS, Coffeescript and C#

Present Day - currently coming up to the end of my degree and can switch between Java, C#, Python, Coffeescript/Javascript (front-end or Node) , C and Golang, C and Python introductions from college modules which I kept playing with in my spare time, Golang I just heard of and decided to write a few things in it because why not, I've picked up various frameworks (spring, echo, express etc.) at some point. I basically learn by doing, if something interests me and I enjoy it, I seem to pick it up quickly by diving in and trying to use it.

It’s actually been quite a fun day, after some ranting on one of our slack communities flutter channel, myself and my team realized we were in a really good place to give back.

We have been working on a large scale flutter application for about a year, phase 1 is about done and we at 11k LOC.

We have been doing a big push for testing over the last 2 months and are at about 50% coverage. The thing we realized is that is the 1 place flutter has fallen short with documentation.

Very little about what we learned for testing our code came out of a google search, or it came out of cobbling bits together from numerous searches and sources.

So we decided we are going to plan and host a virtual meetup to discuss what we have learned and hopefully teach a few people some useful things and hopefully also learn a few new things too.

In addition, and as it has a longer shelf life, we going to setup a medium publication for the company and start a series to cover small specific topics, specific use cases or scenarios that we had trouble with and solved.

Today I had my first thing to type out, had worked out how to test that a function that was passed into a widget was called. So the parent passes the child and onTap function but you are testing the child not the parent as the child is reusable...

Anyway, so with that idea I got hold of marketing for some assets, setup the publication and proceeded to type out 3 articles today, all nice short ones under 2 min reading time.

It really is nice to give back, it’s not like I am Remi smart and can go and write BLoC, but I am smart enough to figure shit out and type it up so that the next guy hopefully benefits from my brain bashing.

Sooooo...

why does everyone use a million and 2 modules when working with node? I understand the speed of development goes up pretty quickly by not having to reinvent the wheel by retyping code that already exists, but...

the worst case tradeoff I've personally seen to date is someone who doens't know the difference between a string and an array but they "coded a web app" and it runs like soupy diarrhea.

maybe there's something I'm missing about node development, but I personally like writting code that does some task or function for myself to learn/understand how to do it and implement it. Usually, that also helps me figure out how and where to speed things up.

I'm just postulating that maybe reinventing the wheel can be a good thing, that's probably why we don't see formula1 cars using pennyfarthing wheels. 🧐

So… I prefer nano over other terminal editors (Mainly because I don’t understand how to use others properly) and I wasn’t really aware of the VISUAL and EDITOR environment variables. So on my Arch machine most things would default to vi. Vi to me is like an annoying pop-up that really doesn’t want you to close it (Tho, one thing I did learn eventually was how to close it ). So at some point I quickly wanted to edit crontab as root and I just couldn't manage to get crontab to use nano. So what did I do?

sudo pacman -R vi

ln -s /usr/bin/nano /usr/bin/vi

I symlinked nano to vi and it finally worked. I know that there are probably countless ways this could’ve been done better but in that case I wouldn't have posted it here under wk81 ;)

My productivity has gone fucking low.
I have hundreds of things ti do , Prepare for exams, write code for my internship project,write code for my game, learn new things about ML,etc.
But all I fuckin do is play games all day instead of making mine!

Plz help, give me some words of encouragement or tell me something that you do to boost your productivity and keep away from distractions !

Well I wish I could abandon jQuery and bootstrap all together and just use some vuejs admin template with my Laravel app. But things are not that easy and I am a lvl 1.0 vuejs user.

So sorry V girl, you gotta learn how to live with Mr.J for a few more months.

A few years ago I worked at company specialized in Magento(eCommerce) and Magento was changing their licensing model. At the time they had 3 Versions. Community(free), Pro and Enterprise.

They decided to ditch Pro and either make all migrate to Enterprise(with a discount) or go community which wasn’t really compatible. So some shops were in need of a more or less complete rewrite.

My hdd crashed literally the day before but hey no big deal everything is 99% done and on staging. So I had a Trainee at that Time and thought the last few crappy things could be done in pair programming so he can learn a few things.

But fuck him! That motherfucker! He managed to WIPE the staging server and no that was at a time without gut and no SVN. That dipshit just deleted 2 months of work because he thought it was a good idea to SYNC his empty project to the staging system.

Oh god I nearly stabbed him. He did that shit out of his own mind even though I told him a dozen times what would happen... we had to do the whole thing again with me sitting next to him watching every stroke he made.

Guess he learned something while inward silently raging the next weeks.

Well, I've been reading 'rants' in this community, and I'm amazed at how people discuss various softwares, languages, and sometimes even hardware!
I'd say I'm a noob. Can't even compare my 'coding knowledge' with what people know in this community, and I don't want to. I like that I'm now a part of this community. But I feel intimidated at times by the amount of things there are to learn! And I don't know how to start. I mean, we had a course on C for a semester, and I tried to build up on that myself. Other than that, I've been trying to learn web-dev, made a browser based game and tried to learn some back end. But I don't know exactly how to build up my proficiency with code, and solving problems, from here on out. So I would really appreciate if this golden community could help me out.(Not trying to flatter anyone. I don't express much, but all this is what I genuinely feel, and am grateful about.) I want to know how to go on about learning knew things in the realm of programming, and how I can apply it to solve actual problems. What language should I learn first? What will be valuable in this rapid-paced time? And some courses to help out?

I stumbled upon devRant one day out of nowhere, and I'm glad I did.

many many times in the past I had this impostor syndrome in various situations but I never lost faith in my dev skills!

you have to be humble to realise that this situations are fine and that you will learn something from it (not necessarily tech things, but also how life works). Also you have to realise that development as everything else in life is just never ending learning endeavour! When you accept all of that, impostor syndrome goes away forever.

It's been around 3 years since I felt like impostor for the last time because I accepted who I am as a person.

It crawled up on me last week in a different way - I was thinking of myself - what if I am just really good at googling things and understanding how those things work but I am also very capable problem solver so I can understand the principle and apply it to my code.

Then I realised - ok, that's what programmers do! So that's the story of how the impostor syndrome actually become confirmation syndrome!

Folks, believe in yourself, be forgiving to yourself as we all were there, give yourself some time as people don't become good developers overnight - and this is OK.

Some of yall really need to learn git and learn how to communicate with other people and fucking be considerate human beings who are not fucking all leaches off society but goddamnit we can’t have nice things. All it’s gotta be is ruthless assholes in this industry I’m fucking so done I hate everyone in dev and I want out I FUCKING WANT OUT PLEASE GOD KILL ME

No brain. Half 11 at night is not a good time to learn a new programming language. Please be quiet so I can get some sleep and go back to working on really boring things tomorrow without being grumpy about it

!!!rant

Most exited I've been about some code? Probably for some random "build a twitter clone with Rails" tutorial I found online.

I've been working on my CS degree for a while (theoretical CS) but I really wanted to mess with something a bit more practical. I had almost none web dev experience, since I've been programming mostly OS-related stuff till then (C). I started looking around, trying to find a stack that's easy to learn since my time was limited- I still had to finish with my degree.

I played around with many languages and frameworks for a week or two. Decided to go with Ruby/Rails and built a small twitter clone blindly following a tutorial I found online and WAS I FUCKING EXITED for my small but handmade twitter clone had come to life. Coming from a C background, Ruby was weird and felt like a toy language but I fell in love.

My excitement didn't fade. I bought some books, studied hard for about a month, learned Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, SQL (w/ pg) and some HTML/CSS. Only playing with todo apps wasn't fun. I had a project idea I believed might be somewhat successful so I started working on it.

The next few months were spent studying and working on my project. It was hard. I had no experience on any web dev technology so I had learn so many new things all at once. Picked up React, ditched it and rewrote the front end with Vue. Read about TDD, worked with PostgreSQL, Redis and a dozen third party APIs, bought a vps and deployed everything from scratch. Played it with node and some machine learning with python.

Long story short, one year and about 30 books later, my project is up and running, has about 4k active monthly users, is making a profit and is steadily growing. If everything goes well, next week I'll close a deal with a pretty big client and I CANT BE FKING HAPPIER AND MORE EXCITED :D Towards the end of the month I'll also be interviewed for a web dev position.

That stupid twitter clone tutorial made me excited enough to start messing with web technologies. Thank you stupid twitter clone tutorial, a part of my heart will be yours forever.

I absolutely hate software to the point where I started converting from sysadmin to becoming more like a dev. That way I could just write my own implementations at will. Easier said than done, that's for sure. And it goes both ways.

I think that in order to be a good dev, you need these skills the most:
- Problem solving skills
- Creativity, you're making stuff
- Logical reasoning
- Connecting the dots
- Reading complex documentation
- Breaking down said documentation
- A strong desire to create order and patterns
- ...

If you don't have the above, you may still be able to become a dev.. but it would be harder for sure, and in some cases acceptance will be lower (seriously, learn to Google!)

One thing I don't think you need in development is mathematics. Sure there's a correlation between it and logic reasoning, but you're not solving big mathematical monsters here. At most you'd probably be dealing with arrays and loops (well.. program logic).

Also, written and spoken English! The language of the internet must be known. If it's not your first language, learn it. All the good (and crucial) documentation out there is in English after all.

One final thing would be security in my opinion, since you're releasing your application to the internet and may even run certain services, and deal with a lot of user data. Making those things secure takes some effort and knowledge on security, but it's so worth it. At the most basic level, it requires a certain mindset: "how would I break this thing I just made?"

I want to learn C++. I know C#, Java and Ruby. Should I go Directly, or there is some sort of path?

How long it takes to master it? I am a quick learner, I catch things a lot faster.

What impact it has on my skills?

Is it really a nightmare to learn?

I am new to open source, so i was trying to solve some issues on an organisation. At first it seemed like what the hack is happening, i was not able to understand the codebase that well but slowly and eventually i get to learn some stuff.

Now, i got stuck at a small problem and to solve that problem it took me a whole complete week. During that phase, i realized some things that i want to share.
As a beginner it was too hectic to find the solution to that problem so i entered that problem on every platform from where there is some chances for reply, and i realized that no one is going to help you out completely and this is the best part, i mean if someone is going to spoon feed you than you won't learn anything. I know that feeling when you are scratching your head and you just want to get out of that mess but you are stuck and there is no one to help you out, believe me just hang in there, there will be some moments when you will realize that there is no more options left and you are done than for sure you will find something which you can try.
So you should also not ask for spoon feed, if you want to learn than fall into many problems as you can.
Best of luck.

Fuck I wish I knew what to do about low motivation!!! I have some ideas I think are really great, some that might be profitable, and fuck I just don’t do any of them. I spend more time panicking about what to do than anything else. But damn so much time wasted when I just needed a little guidance or a little planning or a little like less than $100 more money. That frustrates me to no end.

There’s so much bullshit to everything. This does follow up to my wk106 rant, where I’m trying to rationalize the tons of code that are behind the smallest features. How many thousands of builds go into a deploy. Just swallowing how much rite in software.

I feel like a failure at my job at times but what sucks is I’m just in the middle. Not the most experienced dev, not the least. I’ve got my feet wet in a number of things, but not a solid enough stack for a lot.

BUT SOMEHOW I GOTTA BE MOTIVATED TO LEARN. FFS I CAN DO BETTER BUT MY INSIDE IS BROKEN SOMETIMES AND I JUST WANK OFF FUCK GET IT TOGETHER.

Yea, I fight with myself a lot. I have a big ego and I’m a piece of shit at the same time. Idk. That is annoying too. If only I could get really motivated and focused on some of these projects I could do amazing things. I’ve never struggled with a subject I applied myself to. I just wasn’t motivated. I don’t know how to fix it and I wish I did. I also don’t know what the end game for me holds.

This whole complex really scares me for later life. I will have regrets because my mind builds impossible plans for good, but if I achieve any of it I WILL THINK damn I should have not dealt with this and done x. Like I could make world peace but be like damn coulda rebuilt cars or some stupid shit.

So I’ll conclude with that I’ve done a lot of jobs around the house, and yes working with drywall sucks. So sometimes I’ll think about that. But damn. That doesn’t last because I know I can do it well if I apply myself.

All this leads to getting overextended which is another huge motivation killer. I’m trying to learn self control and focus. But also I need small victories along the way. Very annoying.

Well at least I was motivated to finish this rant. I have a few weekly rants I wanted to participate in but couldn’t even find the motivation for that. There was a toxic person in my life then and I’m slowly getting back to normal but I know that even normal me struggles with motivation. Plus that toxic person was my friend and I’ve lost a lot of (long term) friends recently and that is a real drag. But they needed to go. But I wish they had just shut up sometimes then they wouldn’t have been so toxic. But I digress.

I know I have so many ideas I can’t do them all even if I am motivated and for some time is of the essence.

So look out for some collabs. And grab that motivation wherever you can find it.

I think the one of the more common reason for imposter syndrome is that a lot of smart people constantly get told as children the "you're so smart/capable, you can do everything!" too much, and when you hear it enough times, it gets to you, so you think everything is just easy. And then when they start hitting roadblocks, instead of helping or explaining that it's normal for things to be hard and it's normal to fail, usually parents and teachers and whatnot tell them "Oh it's okay, don't worry about it, you're smart, you'll get it" and so they at first it works, maybe it just takes more time but they manage, but as things get harder and they still put little effort because "don't worry, you're so smart, you learn so fast/easy" and as they find out more and more things they don't umderstand or don't know they start to feel a dissonance, which builds anxiety.
And this is where I thinks it actually starts: at some points there comes a situation where they either share this anxiety with someone or someone notices their worry, and(at least from what I've seen from others) usually the response they get is something along the lines of: "Nah, you're just worrying too much, you're smarter than you think, don't be so down on yourself, you need to worry less", which, maybe I'm wrong, but I'm not sure telling someone that thinks he has a problem that he doesn't have a problem, helps their worrying.
And on one hand the amount if things they don't get/know/understand or fail at grows(cuz you can't just be good at EVERYTHING, so the more things you know about, the more things you don't understand) while mentally still being in that "Wait a minute, you're smarter than this, you should be getting this!" mindset that's been drilled into them, and so at some point the illusion shatters, and they start to think "Maybe I'm not so smart after all", and because they think they were wrong about their level, they feel like they have "oversold" themselves in the past and that makes any past accomplishments feel like lucky accidents instead: "If I'm not actually smart, the things I did manage to achieve must've been just accidental", which makes them feel like they've lied to themselves and everyone else when they "took credit for an accidents" and that their life is just a snowball of pretending.

Now, is that actually a cause or is it another one of my crazy 1AM ramblings? I don't know xD
I'm not an expert in any of this and I don't really know any psychology so hell if I know if that's how any of this works but that's just my theory of one of the reasons why. *shrug*. I've had this theory for years, but I don't know.
It at least makes sense to me, but not everything that makes sense is true soooo.

Anyways, wall of text is over.

Oh, and for anyone struggling with imposter syndrome: I just want you to know, it's okay to fail, and it's okay to not know shit, especially in the dev industry where every "insignificant" detail can have an entire rabbit hole of expertise behind it, nobody can expect to know every part of it. And it doesn't make you any less smart no matter how much you fail. Tnis shit is hard, so I hope you stay strong and I hope you succeed in whatever it is you're struggling with.
*Massive virtual hug* <3

For me side projects have been things I'll make to do something that others will use. Some people call it innovation, some call it side business. But that's how i look at side projects. So the points below are more to do with entrepreneurial experiences.

1. If there are more people involved, ensure that there is work for everybody (also level of commitment is tested by how much they put in). Also have as varied set of skills as possible. So that areas are well defined in terms of scope of work and areas of expertise.
2. Put in some money. Money is super glue. It will ensure that you're committed to the thing. Things change when decent amount of money is involved. You're invested, as may be others.
3. Learn something as an intention. This has nothing to do with the learnings you'll get on the way. This one seems obvious, but nevertheless needs to be said.
4. Set timelines and deadlines. Ask someone else to check on whether you're keeping on to your deadlines or not.
5. Don't go live without proper testing.
6. Make something you feel strongly about. The path will be exciting and clear.
7. Talk to people to get their feedback on everything. You may not like what's told to you. Listen dispassionately. Absorb everything. Feel miserable. But listen and think about it after sleeping over it.
8. Continuation of above point. Talk to varied set of people in terms of backgrounds. You would be surprised as to how differently people think.
9. Ask for help when stuck. Kill your ego and be vulnerable.
10. Check out what's already available. What value are you adding. And make it!

Best dev experience was coding one of my favorite board games. I started it early on in 2016, and while it isn't completely do finished (AI needs work and tweaks to the UI), it is functional for hot seat play.

I started doing it because I wanted to make a game and learn some things I didn't know, specifically I was interested in making AIs with different strategies. While I set out to learn this, I've learned so much more along the way.

I'm still really happy when I get to work on it, and having something to show people (that they can actually play!) is a great feeling.

That shitty moment when you are reverse engineering an app (LINE), but can't find any useful hints.
Web analysis didn't help. Decompiling the windows executable also didn't help. Testing the app on different behaviour with python scripts didn't help. Analysing the android app on windows with the jadx decompiler and other decompiler didn't help that much.
BUT today it worked. I did use a paid "Dex dump" android application. I found some methods that the app receives from the servers with a thrift protocol.
Now I just need to find the right parameters to be finally able to make a bot. Hehehe.

That was a hard way, but it paid out. I did learn so many things. It took me like a whole year.

I watch a lot of coding content these days just to get a feel for what's the message given to freshers or non tech people about the IT industry.

One of the things I immensely disagree with, is the idea that software engineers learn throughout their career. I disagree with the word 'throughout'.

They completely ignore stagnation on the job and also this fact that learning new technology at some point in ur career just wouldn't make sense, effort wise and financially.

Here's something I'll never do - Learn Ruby and then proceed to Ruby on Rails. Because the system wouldn't consider my past experience with NodeJS and Laravel, as a result I would be considered a fresher. So it wouldn't make sense for me to put this much effort and start all over again.

Also, your learning curve does plateau at some point in ur career for a certain amount of time. You may learn new things but sometimes you're only concerned with maintaining pre-built stuff so you don't learn new things.

I know some engineers are motivated enough to learn new things outside of a job. But I just wanted to say this.

Sooooo... I've felt a bit lost during my years as a student and maybe this is a nice place to finally talk about it.
I've had my first programming experiences in school (back then it was delphi, a Pascal variant), then decided after graduating I want to study computer science. I've stuck with it and will finish my masters degree in a few months. (Took me a year longer than the university plans but will likely have a very good grade)

Since i have little programming experience and never coded anything useful (mostly study projects or simple programming tasks) I've always been struggling with depressions, worries of being not good enough and never finding a job etc pp, but in the last few months it got worse since I NEED to apply for jobs now as i graduate next may. I'd really like to improve and found some "learn how to code" websites but the progress seems still slow and meaningless when I compare myself to all those guys out there:
- those comparing several hardware/software pieces casually since they know all the (dis)advantages and specs off by heart
- those who have fierce discussions about languages, libraries, runtimes etc
- those who solve the problems in coding websites with 3 lines and incredibly mathematicsl proofs for why this shortcut works (fastest)
- basically the guys who discuss so many things i've never even heard of

I just feel so lost, useless and like i missed years of learning things everybody else just obviously knows now. Is there any way to catch up? I thought about trying to join a local Chaos Computer Club but they sound like they wouldn't be fond of a noob like me.

(a question)
so in my city there's an opportunity for some
tech university students to attend extra programming classes for a year (12 hours/week). they'll teach many things: (advanced) data structures, databases, oses, computer networks, compilers, making games, data analytics etc. is it worth attending or i should just write down those topics in a to-do list and learn them by myself? i've never attended such courses so i don't know if they are useful or not. thanks for taking the time to read this :)

#just a thought
The child that is the most curious will grow up to be most boring person.

Why?
Since most other children of his age would be doing random and a lot of things without questioning , he would be struck in his simple world of 'why this happens' , therby limiting him to one but deep knowledge of a field.

And even if not , being curious leads to answers of little mysteries ignored by ususal ppl. Therefore, this boy with lots of knowledge will be "boring, coz he always have some right things to say".

Thus a child can either don't care and do whatever his authority wants from him without questioning, and grow into a likeable, social adult, or be curious , learn in deep and grow out to be a specially awkward person

Assumptions are a terrible idea, yet I find myself making them all the time about other people. I am finding the very sobering reality about people who use technology vs people who create technology. The users have zero intellectual interest in how the technology accomplishes a task. While the creators get absorbed into the details and often relish in being able to maximize capability.

A point of frustration for me is users who are in a semi technical field yet take zero time to learn how to configure a piece of tech. They get a plug and play attitude and seek in panic when things don't work. The work is semi technical because they need to understand some of the fundamental physics involved to assess things using instrumentation. Yet when asked about a system they actively modify as to how it is normally setup they are clueless. Me, who helps write the software to control these devices, is stumped that they have zero interest (or capacity?) to understand how the system is normally configured. This is not the first time I have made assumption about what they know in technical contexts. I have run into this before with managers, but not with technicians.

How do you manage your expectations with people who won't invest any time into how their equipment actually works? How does someone operate that way to begin with? Where is their curiosity about how things work?

On the flip side, I swear at my fucking phone because I don't care how it works, but I just want it to stop doing everything besides being a phone... Fuck you, we are not the same, I think...

Hey everyone!

This is really two things in one:
1). Asking about a good gaming laptop.
2). Follow up on a post I made a while back asking for suggestions for new programming languages to learn

So right now I have a surface pro 3 i7 256gb, it's great for development, but not so great for gaming (Overwatch).
Saw the Razer Blade Stealth and thought it looked pretty nifty. Suggestions?

Also I would like to say a big thank you to all the people who told me about some really cool new languages, like Crystal, Elixir..etc.
Thanks everyone!

saw this girl's post LinkedIn. a typical influencer like format post which had nothing of value and instead was a post asking for help with a question (basically it consisted of a android doc link for an android component followed by some hashtags like #6969daysofcode #day69 #xyz and "has anyone used it before?share resources")

then i noticed 2 things:
1. she works in my previous company in the same position that i did , and started a month after i left. so basically she is my replacement.
2. i and my senior (who also has left that org) had created the exact same component that she mentioned in the post, and we had created that component as an awesome plug and play component that would handle multiple usecases with decent documentation

now am having this urge to dm her the exact classname in the code to see and learn 😂😂

or i can play this uno reverse card and write a blog on that component writing another influencer like post: "in my previous company, we created this awesome component and here is how it works..." her boss (our TL) also follows me and what i know of him, he will be tagging her, pinging on slack, and discussing it in the DSA the next morning 😂

Learn the hard way:
Episode 1:
Struggled 4 hours building my package. Some dependent package was failing build. Tried everything and atlast, contacted that package developer. He checked and said: "It seems it's broken. You can use v1.1 instead."
Lesson learnt: Sometimes, it's better to ask instead of banging your head and debugging things out.

Got some detailed feedback from Booking.com, upon asking.

I answered all the questions right. But they said I am not ready for a Sr PM role (which might be true).

Here are three points that I captured from the feedback:

1. Focus on details
2. Clear and better reasoning for WHY
3. Realistic over idealistic scenarios

While it makes me feel low that I didn't make it but this feedback will surely help me overcome the challenges and clear interviews in future.

On to the next one now. Let's see what comes my way..

One thing for sure, there is lots and lots to learn for me yet.

One thing I surely lack is articulating my thoughts and keeping things crisp while conveying the information aptly.

Anyone has any tips/resources on how to improve in this area?

You so are fucking stupid!!! You don't fit in this team because of your stupidity! For one get a fucking grip on life will ya and stop with the money thing the only thing you say is money this money that.
Second fucking learn the view the world with logic in mind, if some things don't work on websites that you designed than your knowledge of websites and the web in general is to low to begin with!!

I decided to format party my desktop since I'm working at home every day (got a 1TB ssd to replace 150gb OS drive).

First fresh Windows install in 4 years. I had forgotten how much fuckery windows puts you through to do some basic things. I can imagine being a newbie hobbiest programmer and having to go through this stuff?

So I just embarrassingly spent 15 minutes reading and troubleshooting why you can't run a python script inside of powershell. PS just blips for a moment leaving you wondering if the script executed. So I created a test script to use a logging file handler to see if it actually ran. No.

Turns out you have to register the .py extension by appending it to your PATHEXT environment variable. Before that I was going to add it to the PS profile, but realized it takes more than a quick moment to find out which scope of PS profile is appropriate to create, and on top of that, you have to enable script execution in PS (which I recall is easy, but didn't do yet).

Tangentially, I solved an ssh issue days ago. I would tell you what it was, but I seem to have mentally blocked it due to trauma.

For real Microsoft. Yes powershell has some great advancements--my friends say so.

But this needlessly nuanced bullshit needs a little attention from you guys to save the world a shitload of time. I can only imagine what it's like for non-tech savvy people trying to learn to program and having to face this stuff.

I still haven't solved the color scheme stupidity of powershell. This is 2020 ffs. Yet seems there's no clean or intuitive way to do it.

Other issues omitted for 'brevity'

Honestly, school is useless for me as of right now. I know I should be well rounded and stuff, but do I honestly need to know the symptoms of cervix cancer while going into a tech career? My eyes have been set on tech for my whole life, ever since I left the womb, and I know that if I do switch careers, it'll be from comp sci to cyber security not from IT to med school...

I feel like I could really be devoting my time towards something better than writing a 5 page essay on a healthy food choice.

Every night I think to myself, "You know what, I'm going to lock myself in a room and write bash scripts all day" but then I wake up in the morning, and remember I have to take a quiz on reproductive systems, learn about the procedure of organ donations for driver's ed, write 2 paragraph definitions of vocab words, and read a book about communism.

The most useful thing I learned last year, was how to efficiently navigate the java API, and that's something you don't even learn, you just encounter it. Schools need to start having more specific specialties and stop enforcing knowledge of pointless topics.

I'm not saying to remove all core classes and stuff, I'm saying why waste space in our brains with something we won't use ever again? I get it, some people don't know what career they're looking for yet so you can't make them choose, but it honestly sucks some serious ass that I can't learn what I want to at school, and as a matter of fact, I can't even learn at home, because they're filling my schedule with pointless work because they feel that they have to fill our time somehow.

Point of this long ass rant is: Why lock yourself in a room and learn about something if it isn't something you want to learn about? The space in our brain is finite enough, why can't it be filled with things we're interested in rather than things that will only be used to get good grades in the future then overwritten with useful knowledge. Same thing with time. We have a very finite amount of time in a day, and now that I think of it, a lifetime. Why spend it on something that doesn't, and never will, make your life enjoyable?

How do you define a seniority in a corporate is beyond me.
This guy is supposed to be Tier3, literally "advanced technical support". Taking care of network boxes, which are more or less linux servers. The most knowledgable person on the topic, when Tier1 screws something and it's not BAU/Tier2 can't fix it.
In the past hour he:
- attempted to 'cd' to a file and wondered why he got an error
- has no idea how to spell 'md5sum'
- syntax for 'cp' command had to be spelled out to him letter by letter
- has only vague idea how SSH key setup works (can do it only if sombody prepares him the commands)
- was confused how to 'grep' a string from a logfile

This is not something new and fancy he had no time to learn yet. These things are the same past 20-30 years. I used to feel sorry for US guys getting fired due to their work being outsourced to us but that is no longer the case. Our average IT college drop-out could handle maintenance better than some of these people.

Set some dev goals..

TLDR: spend less time at work coding

No, really..for what I do at work, I am happy. Would like to learn more recent stuff (partially stuck with vb.net), but I don't even know where to start googling.. sooo... get more free time I guess to figure this out..which is a dev goal on it's own too, come to think of it, this translates as don't spend so much time at work coding.. and spend some of it learning new (dev related) things outside of work..new/different js frameworks, python (been fixing/adding some code here & there, but never learned it properly & to check it's full potential, I heard it is awesome btw), read up on algorithm time costs (learn how to fuckin spell this!!)...

And kinda dev related as I will have to spend less time at work is to get back in 'sort of' shape and climb (more)..and spend more quality time with my husband, who is too good, totally supports me & my work, so I never get to hear him nag I was working late, which leads to 'stop working so long' goal I rly need to get in order or I'll burn out again, and I'm bitchy and horrible whe BO..and we don't wanna see that again..

Sum up: work less, learn new things, climb more, be happy/content.

Ok, so I need some clarity from you good folk, please.

My lead developer is also my main mentor, as I am still very much a junior. He carved out most of his career in PHP, but due to his curious/hands-on personality, he has become proficient with Golang, Docker, Javascript, HTML/CSS.

We have had a number of chats about what I am best focusing on, both personally and related to work, and he makes quite a compelling case for the "learn as many things as possible; this is what makes you truly valuable" school of thought. Trouble is, this is in direct contrast to what I was taught by my previously esteemed mentor, Gordon Zhu from watchandcode.com. "Watch and Code is about the core skills that all great developers possess. These skills are incredibly important but sound boring and forgettable. They’re things like reading code, consistency and style, debugging, refactoring, and test-driven development. If I could distill Watch and Code to one skill, it would be the ability to take any codebase and rip it apart. And the most important component of that ability is being able to read code."

As you can see, Gordon always emphasised language neutrality, mastering the fundamentals, and going deep rather than wide. He has a ruthlessly high barrier of entry for learning new skills, which is basically "learn something when you have no other option but to learn it".

His approach served me well for my deep dive into Javascript, my first language. It is still the one I know the best and enjoy using the most, despite having written programs in PHP, Ruby, Golang and C# since then. I have picked up quite a lot about different build pipelines, development environments and general web development as a result of exposure to these other things, so it isn't a waste of time.

But I am starting to go a bit mad. I focus almost exclusively on quite data intensive UI development with Vue.js in my day job, although there is an expectation I will help with porting an app to .NET Core 3 in a few months. .NET is rather huge from what I have seen so far, and I am seriously craving a sense of focus. My intuition says I am happiest on the front end, and that focusing on becoming a skilled Javascript engineer is where I will get the biggest returns in mastery, pay and also LIFE BALANCE/WELLBEING...

Any thoughts, people? I would be interested to hear peoples experiences regarding depth vs breadth when it comes to the real world.

I'm going through my Udemy courses for the hell of it and see if I might even learn some things, started a course I knew would start of way too basic but Jesus Christ, 7 lectures for doing basic player movement and animation... Strap in boys, it's going to be a long ride

I’m struggling in studying and that’s seriously holding me back, regardless of the type of technical book I’m reading I’m always in a fight with my brain. Even if I enjoy the topic and then I’ll enjoy using what I read while I study I struggle to learn more than 1-2 chapters (sometimes even less) at time then my head starts to hurt, my focus drifts away and if I force myself to go ahead my brain just refuses to store the new informations, it feels like filling a full tank.

At this point I should have learned C++ and Swift and started to contribute to projects which aren’t overdone web apps but all I have are two half read books which silently “judges” me anytime I open my eBook library and I dread returning to having associated them to headache and frustration and the only things I read this year are design patterns (which haven’t found a single real life use since then) and F# (which I never used with the exception of some little demos and is now slowly fading away in my memory).

Have you got any study advice to help me dealing with this frustrating situation?

Always Stick to One Task at a Time

Whenever I’m trying to learn how to do new stuff, or if I have a project where I’d have to figure out how to do a lot of things, I try to just pick a particular task and attack that.

Often times in programming, you’ll hold a lot of context in your head depending on what you’re working on, so it’s best to focus on one thing and try to get it done. There are a lot of ways you can tackle a single problem, so a lot of things will depend on what solution you end up choosing. For example, if you’re trying to build a CMS website that build websites where it will deploy things to each user, you could organize a site where it’s a big giant app where everyone has a specific subdomain, or you can make it so that each individual subdomain is a separate instance of your app with configuration changes. There are pros and cons to each approach, so this is where the judgment comes in and why some people say programming is an art, since you constantly have to weigh different tradeoffs.

So, the internet is over. Just in case you didn’t notice. If you post a link to anything that involves you: an article, a podcast, a thing you built, a video you made - then mods and admins and trolls get their pitchforks and ban you or roast you or delete you.

This is not the way.

Not only are the walled gardens of apple, Twitter, Facebook/Instagram, breaking the web into little areas - and marketing is buying your time - but we’re doing it to ourselves too.

I can’t post a video about some of my favorite programming books in
/learnprogramming or I’m immediately banned!? Every link that takes people away from your ad dollars is ‘spam?’ Without any useful discourse and content - then why would anyone be there in the first place.

One time I posted a link HERE about how people could get CSS help in the CSS discord and I got fire-stormed for self-promotion. Really? Hundreds of hours helping people learn programming - for free... is my self promotion? Is everyone so insecure that they can’t allow anyone else to talk about their work? It’s super scary.

This is how you control people. This is Nazi shit. It’s a slippery Slope. Watch out.

And whatever you do... don’t share links to your things. That is NOT what the internet was made for.

Hi, sorry to bother anyone but I'm a high school junior looking for advice on learning computer programming and related topics
I just want to ask what kind of resources I should look for and some things I should try to learn before I graduate high school (a school with no programming courses. :( sadly)

Any advice or help is appreciated. Thank you for your time

After 2 interviews and a complex case study made to apply for Javascript Architect I was asked to travel from Brazil to Germany for final interview. First question:
Interviewer: what are things that you want to learn next.
Me (dumb): Maybe some functional language like Erlang
Interviewer: why not Javascript?
Me (dumber): Javascript is not that good for functional

Man, I WAS nervous that day 😭

!rant just a question. Sorry in advance for the long post.

I've been working in IT in Windows infrastructure and networking side of things for my entire career (5years) and recently was hired for a role working with AWS.

We use Macs and we use *nix distros for days. I've only ever dabbled for 'funsies' before with Linux because every previous job I held was a Windows house and f*** all else.

I'm just wondering if anyone here might have some insights as to a great way to learn the Linux environment and to learn it the right way. I'm not the best Windows admin ever and will never claim to be, but I have seen stuff that other people have done that makes me want to swing a brick at someone's head. And I feel that with all of the setup wizards and the "We'll just do it for you." approach that Windows has used since forever it allowed enough wiggle room for people that didn't know what they were doing to f*** sh*t up royally. I'm not familiar enough with Linux to know if this is also a common problem. I know that having literal full-access to every file in your OS can cause a n00b like myself to mess up royal, thus the question about learning Linux the right way.

I vaguely understand the organization of the folders and file structure within Linux, and I know some very basic commands.

sudo rm -rf /*
Just kidding

But All of my co-workers at my new job are like mighty oaks of knowledge while I'm a tiny sapling. And at times I've been intimidated by how little I know, but equally motivated to try and play catch-up.

In addition to all of this, I really want to start learning how to program. I've tried learning multiple times from places like codecademy.com, YouTube tutorials, and codeschool.com but I feel like I'm missing the lesson that explains why to use a certain operation instead of another. Example: if/else in lieu of a switch.

I'm also failing to get the concept of syntax in certain languages I've tried before. Java comes to mind real fast.

The first language I tried teaching myself was C++ from YouTube. I ended up having a fever dream that night about coding and woke up in a cold sweat. Literally, like brain overload or something. I was watching tutorials for like 9 hours straight.

Does anyone know of a training resource that will explain, in terms a 5 year old would understand, what the code is doing and why? I really want to learn but I'm starting to lose steam cause I'm just not getting it.

Thank you in advance for any tips guys and gals. I really appreciate it. Sorry for the ridiculously long questions.

Just a small discussion topic, if you could look through the source code ad have full access to 1 project/application/game/moon base forever, what would you choose and why?

For me, I would love to go through the source code for the game Hyper Light Drifter, would love to see some of the inner workings and just learn new methods of doing things.

Why things are fucking hard when you're not too good and not too bad at work. I'm like normal dev just throw things at me give me any task any framework I will learn it, I will solve production issues, I will help my co-workers to get their shit done even my JIRA is clean but it feels like I'm going nowhere. I'm like an average guy who knows many things other than normal guys or devs (by considering I'm junior and the people who are working with me).

I'm feeling like I'm in a fucking loop, where every day is same.
Is there anything I can do? which will make me feel little better?
I think every guy on earth have some innovative ideas even I have some(of course some of them are implemented already even they are kinda same, even some ideas are totally new, some are not possible, some requires much knowledge of certain field). But by just having an awesome idea doesn't change anything.

Maybe I'm not trying hard, there are several other reasons which are coming in my way but of course, I shouldn't tell any reasons.

Please don't get triggered by stupid little things on the internet, just shutdown your internet device and go outside and get some fresh air

I've read some answers on forums on the internet and some people that answer ends up making another problem, because the user said something or whatever

If you want to help, then follow these rules:

1) Read the problem that the user has
2) Read what they have tried to fix it
3) If you know about that problem then answer it
4) If you don't know... just move on

Just learn to shut the fuck up!

Nothing feels better than seeing yourself doing better as a self taught web developer compare to some jsackass with a CS degree who talks about what he learnt in school couple years ago. Who cares? You can't do shit at work and I don't even know why you work here if you have no desire to learn new things. If he graduated in late 90s he would still be coding in PHP 3.0.

Hey guys, I need some junior advice. I work at a small startup in a team with 2 other backend developers.

The "new" guy studied at a university for a few years. He writes beautiful code. I try to learn from it and use his short hands a lot. I came from highschool and don't have a degree in it (yet).

I recently wrote a piece of code which handles some timeslot logic. I was really proud of it.

New guy needs to fix a bug and add a few things. He completely refactors my code and makes it more structured and partly better. The logic stayed the same.

It sort of bothers me that he touches my (precious) code. How do you guys handle these things?

!rant
I am continuously transforming from being terrified to being sad to being tensed at the moment.Don't know what depression is , but i guess this is not a right phase .
Am just an average guy trying to get my confidences up as a good person/student/professional/whatever. last to last semester when I joined college for a cse degree, i had entered with the brightest face and the biggest smile because of just one thought: "this is where i belong, this is what i want" . i always got excited when i saw little things jumping around in my mobile , calculations being performed instantly, and the day i got my laptop, i knew i want to know every thing of how virtuality works.
I never cared about social life tho, i was a universally lonely introvert single child. Had 2-3 friends in school, who i don't care about much,a lost crush , a great group of home buddies and some friends here and there.
So when i started college i went there with multiple goals: making my career there, finding gud buddies, love again and many more..
But recently, everything is changing: realised that college is a piece of shit, people are always selfish and exploiting, a race is always going on where people are secretly running and you gotta learn by yourself.
So here is the current me: college attendance 37%, not went to gym past 1 week, human interaction last 2 days :2(mum nd dad), whatsapp last message: 4 days ago,sleep timings 10am to 6pm(daytimes lol), currently working on: this project that I took as "my last project that on completing means i know Android,and could code every fucked up app in the market)", which isn't yet completed bcz every-time i learn something in it, i realise their is one more part of the course am following , but i should know because this is useful.
And that makes me more sad :/

Wow, just have to share a story:
A photographer friend of mine asked me to make a program for him to manage shootings and models etc. and since I'm still a cs student and have the time I agreed. To spice things up I decided to learn something new and voilà I used JavaScript (that I never used before) and HTML (which I only know a liiiitle bit) and some CSS (also little experience) and with Electron.js and the help of YouTube and Udemy I created 40% of the program today!
That's exactly what amazes me about programming... You can learn the basic skills in no time and create working things!
I <3 Programming

Haven't been on here for quite a while.. mostly worked as a graphic designer from home the past year. End of 2021, I'll transfer to the RnD department at my job to become a developer and help out with the front end part (because you know.. I do design stuff). Ok No probs, I have done some basic stuff, jQuery and (god forbid) wordpress stuff, should work out. New boss tells me to learn VUE so that I become a Vue frontend developer aaaand.. I'm shitting my pants with imposter syndrom dribbled all over things.. sigh.. luckily it's the weekend so I can take a beer and think about my future. 🍻

So I have some XSDs for integrating with a third party supplier, which I need to convert to java classes. Easy, jaxb to the rescue!

Now when it comes to checking into source control, do I either a) check in generated files (bad) , or b) check in the XSDs and have maven generate my classes each time the project is packaged using its jaxb plugin (good).

Of course the senior dev picks option a), purely because some people in charge of support may not understand maven.

Why do I have to do things the wrong way because people don't want to learn/are incompetent? Why are there people in charge of support who don't understand simple tools?

So I taught git to my colleagues. They were happy to learn new things.

I asked them to commit things that they have done with proper message in every projects from now on. I find 50-80 commits to pull in every 10mins. Ughhh. They were committing every single changes they were making. 😂😂😂

Sometimes simple things can overwhelms some people

procrastinative coding is a bad habit of mine. I've been using php for 10+ years and just recently got into laravel. I have to say I love it but at times I wish I could have learned the entire framework before starting my project some time ago. as I am coding I learn new tricks with laravel on how to do things and have to waste time and go back and change existing code... or tell myself "I'll come back to this after the launch".
I'm just wondering how other people handle taking on new frameworks

!rant && story

tl;dr I lost my path, learned to a lot about linux and found true love.

So because of the recent news about wpa2, I thought about learning to do some things network penetration with kali. My roommate and I took an old 8gb usb and turned it into a bootable usb with persistent storage. Maybe not the best choice, but atleast we know how to do that now.

Anyway, we started with a kali.iso from 2015, because we thought it would be faster than downloading it with a 150kpbs connection. Learned a lot from that mistake while waiting apt-get update/upgrade.

Next day I got access to some faster connection, downloaded a new release build and put the 2015 version out it's misery. Finally some signs of progress. But that was not enough. We wanted more. We (well atleast I) wanted to try i3, because one of my friends showed me to /r/unixporn (btw, pornhub is deprecated now). So after researching what i3 is, what a wm is AND what a dm is, we replaced gdm3 with lightdm and set i3 as standard wm. With the user guide on an other screen we started playing with i3. Apparently heaven is written with two characters only. Now I want to free myself from windows and have linux (Maybe arch) as my main system, but for now we continue to use thus kali usb to learn about how to set uo a nice desktop environment. Wait, why did we choose to install kali? 😂

I feel kinda sorry for that, but I want to experiment on there before until I feel confident. (Please hit me up with tips about i3)

Still gotta use Windows as a subsystem for gaming. 😥

This goddamn obtuse motherfucker at this discord of this framework I'm trying to learn, who happens to be a mod.

I'm trying to explain my scenario to this guy (a very reasonable one in my opinion) but this motherfucker is giving me some sass saying I'm confused at very basic things or saying shit like "it's literally that simple", well ain't that a bitch.

He's doing half assed reading, and apparently he's alt tabbing to a videogame (as displayed by discord), so I guess he's not paying attention and reducing me to an idiot.

What am I supposed to do? Call him out and get banned?

No, I have to fucking shut up and stomach this idiot because I need to learn.

If you don't have much patience, you just can't be a mod and also respond to people. Just pick one.

Because people can't fucking call you out when you're being a douche.

Fuck this guy.

I'm really trying my best to improve but the work I'm doing (both the code and the business theme) is so god damn boring that I feel like I'm torturing myself just trying to keep up. How am I supposed to learn and build myself when everything is so dull and gray? I can't even talk semi-passionately about the work I do, its all just picking up user stories with lengthy business specs on them updating old code or writing up some new code to fit some business / API standard I know nothing about. Occasionally I'll review other code from a developer doing the same thing and sift through trying to find some way to improve a project I don't care about. Hold down the nausea that comes from fighting off the mental fatigue as I struggle to find the words to explain how a component I made works in terms I don't understand too people that know and care much more than I do...

I'm exhausted, I'm burnt out. This isn't me, and every day I wake up and tell myself that my salary makes me happy because it gives me the ability to do the things I enjoy and live on my own and provide for loved ones, and then struggle to swallow the lump in my throat as I drive in the cold to a giant corporate office with a thousand other Me's doing the same shit but better and improving.

I honestly love what my company offers me as compensation, I'll likely not find any better. But once I have some experience under my belt and some debt paid off I have GOT to find a jobs somewhere that doesn't drain the will to live out of me

// Pretty long rant.

Already made some rants some months ago about coding experience in Smalltalk for a school project, but to sum it up :
Because of administrative things, Smalltalk change from option to obligatory course to everyone (we were told that "we had 3 choices out of 3" for options. Not even kidding)

So whole prom got to do a Smalltalk project, a basic shapes editor with Drag'n'Drop and keyboard shortcuts implemented.

But literally everyone didn't get a grasp of the language nor VisualWorks, the IDE. So we got projected in a "Do-it yourself, learn by yourself" project with a language that nobody understood.

Took me 1 week of browsing on Google to find books explaining more than the teacher did. Took me another week to notice that the teacher actually provided VisualWorks's manual. (No one would have noticed if I didn't tell them, and the teacher went silent on it.)

And then the coding started. My teacher thought this project would require something like 20-30 hours of coding. Took me 2 whole months and a half to do moist of the features he asked (only the Keyboard shortcuts weren't implemented, explanation below), and I was the most advanced of whole prom, so I had to answer every single question of fellows. Not complaining, but this took me a lot of time.

But why didn't you ask the teacher ?
- If I ask him every question I had in mind, I would actually harass him since I had too many of them, and I wasn't the only one.
- I actually went twice to his office to ask him question. First question, that was pretty straightforward, I forgot something, blablabla all done. Second time, that was for the keyboard. And then, things are getting even funnier. The teacher didn't have VisualWorks installed on his Mac, so he tried to install it while I was waiting. And he took too long time to actually launch it, because VisualWorks asked for him to log in, to provide an email, the download is a little long thanks to the network and the size, etc. When he finally was able to launch it, I had some classes to attend, so he couldn't answer. And since then, I had no time because last year, flooded with work, exams, classes ,etc.

All of that to have only 13 out of 20. I kinda shrugged, knowing that I wouldn't get more, and said that Smalltalk will only be a line of my resume.

Pretty long rant, sorry about that, but had to explain so you can see how bad it was to me.