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Search - "learning something new"
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Newbie telling me about the new Linux commands he was learning-
"So there's sudo.. It's like !important in CSS. Whenever something doesn't work normally, use sudo.
Me: 😵14 -
0. Plan before you code. Document everything. You won't remember either your idea or those clever implementations next week (or next month, or next year...).
1. Don't hack your way through, unless that's what you intend to do. Name your variables, functions etc. neatly: autocomplete exists!
Protip: Sometimes you want to check a quick language feature or a piece of code from one of your modules. Resist the urge to quickly hack in the test into your actual project. Maintain a separate file where you can quickly type in and check what you're looking for without hacking on your project (For example, in Python, you can open a new terminal or IDLE window for those quick tests).
2. Keep a quiet environment where you can focus. Recommend listening to something while coding (my latest fad is on asoftmurmur.com). Don't let anything distract you and throw your contextual awareness out of whack.
3. Rubber ducks work. Really. Talking out a complex piece of logic, or that regex or SQL query aids your mind greatly in grasping the concept and clearing the idea. Bounce off code and ideas with a friend or colleague to catch errors and oversights faster. Read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
4. Since everyone else is saying this (and because it merits saying), USE VERSION CONTROL. Singular most important thing to software development aside from planning and documenting.
5. Remember to flout all of the above once in a while and just make a mess of a project where you have fun throwing everything around all over the place. You'll make mistakes that you never thought were possible by someone of your caliber :) That's how you learn.
Have fun, keep learning!3 -
Its that time of the morning again where I get nothing done and moan about the past ... thats right its practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!
Today I'd like to tell you the story of "i". Interesting about "I" is that he was actually a colleague of yesterdays nominee "G" (and was present at the "java interface" video call, and agreed with G!): https://devrant.com/rants/1152317/...
"I" was the spearhead of a project to end all projects in that company. It was suppose to be a cross-platform thing but ended up only working for iOS. It was actually quite similar to this: https://jasonette.com/ (so similar i'm convinced G / I were part of this but I can't find their github ID's in it).
To briefly explain the above + what they built ... this is the worst piece of shit you can imagine ... and thats a pretty strong statement looking back at the rest of this series so far!
"I" thought this would solve all of our problems of having to build similar-ish apps for multiple customers by letting us re-use more code / UI across apps. His main solution, was every developers favourite part of writing code. I mean how often do you sit back and say:
"God damn I wish more of this development revolved around passing strings back and forth. Screw autocomplete, enums and typed classes / variables, I want more code / variables inside strings in this library!"
Yes thats right, the main part of this bullshittery was putting your entire app, into JSON, into a string and downloading it over http ... what could possibly go wrong!
Some of my issues were:
- Everything was a string, meaning we had no autocomplete. Every type and property had to be remembered and spelled perfectly.
- Everything was a string so we had no way to cmd + click / ctrl + click something to see somethings definition.
- Everything was a string so any business logic methods had to be remembered, all possible overloaded versions, no hints at param types no nothing.
- There was no specific tooling for any of this, it was literally open up xcode, create a json file and start writing strings.
- We couldn't use any of the native UI builders ... cause strings!
- We couldn't use any of the native UI layout constructs and we had to use these god awful custom layout managers, with a weird CSS feel to them.
What angered me a lot was their insistence that "You can download a new app over http and it will update instantly" ... except you can't because you can't download new business logic only UI. So its a new app, but must do 100% exactly the same thing as before.
His other achievements include:
- Deciding he didn't like apple's viewController and navigationBar classes and built his own, which was great when iOS 7 was released (changed the UI to allow drawing under the status bar) and we had no access to any of apples new code or methods, meaning everything had to be re-built from scratch.
- On my first week, my manager noticed he fucked up the login error handling on the app I was taking over. He noticed this as I was about to leave for the evening. I stayed so we could call him (he was in an earlier timezone). Rather than deal with his fucked up, he convinced the manager it would be a "great learning experience" for me to do it ... and stay in late ... while he goes home early.
- He once argued with me in front of the CEO, that his frankenstein cross-platform stuff was the right choice and that my way of using apples storyboards (and well thought out code) wasn't appropriate. So I challenged him to prove it, we got 2 clients who needed similar apps, we each did it our own way. He went 8 man weeks over, I came in 2 days under and his got slated in the app store for poor performance / issues. #result.
But rather than let it die he practically sucked off the CEO to let him improve the cross platform tooling instead.
... in that office you couldn't swing a cat without hitting a retard.
Having had to spend a lot more time working with him and more closely than most of the other nominees, at a minimum "I" is on the top of my list for needing a good punch in the face. Not for being an idiot (which he is), not for ruining so much (which he did), but for just being such an arrogant bastard about it all, despite constant failure.
Will "I" make it to most incompetent? Theres some pretty stiff competition so far
Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!7 -
toxic workplace; leaving
I haven't wanted to write this rant. I haven't even wanted to talk to anyone (save my gf, ofc). I've just been silently fuming.
I wrote a much longer rant going into far too much detail, but none of that is relevant, so I deleted it and wrote this shorter (believe it or not) version instead. And then added in more details because details.
------
On Tuesday, as every Tuesday, I had a conference call with the rest of the company. For various, mostly stupid reasons, the boss yelled at and insulted me for twenty minutes straight in front of everyone, telling me how i'm disorganized, forgetful, how can't manage my time, can't manage myself let alone others, how I don't have my priorities straight, etc. He told the sales team to get off the call, and then proceeded to yell and chew at me for another twenty minutes in front of the frontend contractor about basically the same things. The call was 53 minutes, and he spent 40 minutes of it telling me how terrible I've been. No exaggeration, no spin. The issues? I didn't respond to an email (it got lost in my ever-filling inbox), and I didn't push a very minor update last week (untested and straight to prod, ofc). (Side note: he's yelled at me for ~15 minutes before for being horribly disorganized and unable to keep up on Trello -- because I had a single card in the wrong column. One card, out of 60+ over two boards. Never mind that most have time estimates, project tags, details, linked to cards on his boards, columns for project/qa/released, labels for deferred, released to / rejected from qa, finished, in production, are ordered by priority, .... Yep. I'm totes disorganized.)
Anyway, I spent most of conference call writing "Go fuck yourself," "Choke on a cat and die asshole," "Shit code, low pay, and broken promises. what a prize position," etc. or flipping him off under the camera on our conference-turn-video-call (switched due to connection issues, because ofc video is more stable than audio-only in his mind).
I'm just.
so, so done.
I did nothing the rest of the day on Tuesday, and basically just played games on Wednesday. I did one small ticket -- a cert replacement since that was to expire the next day -- but the rest was just playing CrossCode. (fun game, fyi; totally recommend.)
Today? It's 3:30pm and I can't be bothered to do anything. I have an "urgent" project to finish by Monday, literally "to give [random third party sales guy] a small win". Total actual wording. I was to drop all other tasks (even the expiring cert lol) and give this guy his small win. fucking whatever. But the project deals with decent code -- it's a minor extension to the first project I did for the company (see my much earlier rants), back when I was actually applying myself and learning something (everything) new, enjoying myself, and architecting+writing my own code. So I might actually do the project, but It's been two days and I haven't even opened single file yet.
But yeah. This place is total and complete shit. Dealing with the asshole reminds me of dealing with my parents while growing up, and that's a subject I don't want to broach -- far too many toxic memories.
So, I'm quitting as soon as I find something new.
and with luck, this will be before assface hires my replacement-to-be, and who will hopefully quit as soon as s/he sees the abysmal codebase. With even more luck, the asshole king himself will get to watch his company die due to horrible mismanagement. (though ofc he'll never attribute it to himself. whatever.)
I just never want to see or think about him again.
(nor this fetid landfill of a codebase. bleh.)
With luck, this will be one of my last rants about this toxic waste dump and its king of the pile.
Fourty fucking minutes, what the fuck.34 -
I think the weekly rants just exist because @dfox & @trogus got banned from stackoverflow and they still have questions.
When it comes to learning cutting edge tech... Go build already!
I found Rust intimidating.
I read the first few pages of the official book, got bored, gave up.
Few months later, decided to write a "simple" tool for generating pleasing Jetbrains IDE color schemes using Rust. I half-finished it by continuously looking up stuff, then got stuck at some ungoogleable compiler error.
Few months later I needed to build a microservice for work, and against better judgement gave Rust a try in the weekend. Ended up building an unrelated library instead, uploaded my first package to crates.io.
Got some people screaming at me that my Rust code sucked. Screamed back at them. After lots of screaming, I got some helpful PRs.
Eventually ended up building many services for work in Rust after all. With those services performing well under high load and having very few bugs, coworkers got interested. Started hiring Rust engineers, and educating interested PHP/JS devs.
Now I professionally write Rust code almost full-time.
Moral of the story:
Fuck books, use them for reference. Fuck Udemy (etc), unless you just want to 2x through it while pooping.
Learning is something you do by building a project, failing, building something else, falling again, building some more, sharing what you've made, fighting about what you've built with some entitled toxic nerds, abandoning half your projects and starting twelve new ones.
Reading code is better than reading documentation.
Listening to users of your library/product teaches you more than listening to keynote speakers at conferences.
Don't worry about failures, you don't need to deliver a working product for it to be a valuable experience.
Oh, and trying to teach OTHERS is an excellent method to discover gaps in your knowledge.
Just get your fucking hands dirty!12 -
!rant
Programming is a huge blessing i believe we all should be thankful to. For me, it literally turned my life around.
11 months ago i was fighting a losing battle with depression, and contemplated suicide constantly. I would use a self remedy of smoking weed and sleeping all day long. I was depressed because i felt my life had no real value. I was doing nothing, and its kind of an infinite loop.
You don't do anything, so you feel bad, so you don't do anything, and so on.
That was until i finally took the step that changed my life. I searched and wanted to learn something. I always liked web pages so i thought id get into web development.
Did some research, found out that the fastest way to go was to learn ruby on rails. I followed a tutorial i found online, and literally pushed myself through it. There were times when there where things i didnt understand, and when it was really bad, but i pushed myself through it and i finished the tutorial.
Just finishing the tutorial and learning something new helped me alot. I had already quit smoking and was feeling way better, but after a while i started feeling bad again since i wasnt doing anything after i had finished learning, so i started working on a personal project, creating it from scratch, and just working on it day and night. I worked 14 hours a day, never really leaving my room ( this was during summer vacation ) for a month.
There were many things i didnt understand, but i never gave up and always searched for the solution and read about it until i understood it better. Looking back, there were things i knew could have been done in a better way, but as a first project, im proud of myself, not because it rocks, but because i did not give up.
In the process of starting a new life, i was really lonely. I cut all ties with everyone i knew, since they were all toxic, all i had in my life was ruby on rails and my web application. I wanted to launch it but couldn't due to personal reasons.
Not being able to launch and see something live, something that you worked so hard on, that you put so much effort into, that was devastating to me. I felt as if all my efforts had gone to waste.
And here is what i love most about programming, NOTHING EVER GOES TO WASTE. All that effort you spent on something ? All these all nighters you pulled ? All that frustration from that bug ? It will pay off later. It always does somehow. You get more knowledge and become a better programmer, and sometimes it even gives way to new opportunities and chances you never even expected.
I included my web application in my resume and it helped land me a job as a junior developer in a really nice company. A job that i wouldn't even have dreamed of several months earlier.
Programming and creating something new and learning something new everyday, creating something that people use, that someone else will benefit from and be grateful for, i think we should never take that for granted !
Tl;dr : learning how to code and web development saved my life9 -
Things I wish I could tell my 18 year old self.
1) Accept you will make mistakes.
2) Truly learn the language you are using.
3) Write idiomatic code for the language you are using.
4) Be upfront about not knowing something.
5) Don't let not knowing something stop you from learning it.
6) None of us knew X until we learned it.
7) Understand your strengths and weaknesses as a developer, play to them.
8) Be willing to try new things.
9) X language isn't ALWAYS the best choice, X paradigm isn't ALWAYS the best choice. Choose wisely.
10) You won't know everything, but you might know more than others.
11) Your ideas and ego don't matter more than ensuring the product works.
12) "Perfection is the enemy of the good [enough]" - Voltaire
13) "Perfection is not achieved when there's nothing more to add, but when there's nothing more to remove." - Einstein.
14) Conflicts happen, deal with it.
15) Develop a toolset and really learn them.
16) Try new tools, they may prove better than what you were using.
17) Don't manage your own memory unless you absolutely have to, you are probably not smarter than the collective intelligence of the team that built the various garbage collection methods.
18) People can be dicks, especially online.
19) If you are new and people are being dicks to you, did you skip past the irc message about etiquette? If you did, you're the dick in this situation.
20) It can be tough, but it is fun, so have fun!6 -
Smart India Hackathon: Horrible experience
Background:- Our task was to do load forecasting for a given area. Hourly energy consumption data for past 5 years was given to us.
One government official asks the following questions:-
1. Why are you using deep learning for the project? Why are you not doing data analysis?
2. Which neural network "algorithm" you are using? He wanted to ask which model we are using, but he didn't have a single clue about Neural Networks.
3. Why are you using libraries? Why not your own code?
Here comes the biggest one,
4. Why haven't you developed your own "algorithm" (again, he meant model)? All you have done is used sone library. Where is "novelty" in your project?
I just want to say that if you don't know anything about ML/AI, then don't comment anything about it. And worst thing was, he was not ready to accept the fact that for capturing temporal dependencies where underlying probability distribution ia unknown, deep learning performs much better than traditional data analysis techniques.
After hearing his first question, second one was not a surprise for us. We were expecting something like that. For a few moments, we were speechless. Then one of us started by showing neural network architecture. But after some time, he rudely repeated the same question, "where is the algorithm". We told him every fucking thing used in the project, ranging from RMSprop optimizer to Backpropagation through time algorithm to mean squared loss error function.
Then very calmly, he asked third question, why are you using libraries? That moron wanted us to write a whole fucking optimized library. We were speechless at this question. Finally, one of us told him the "obvious" answer. We were completely demotivated. But it didnt end here. The real question was waiting. At the end, after listening to all of us, he dropped the final bomb, WHY HAVE YOU USED A NEURAL NETWORK "ALGORITHM" WHICH HAS ALREADY BEEN IMPLEMENTED? WHY DIDN'T YOU MAKE YOU OWN "ALGORITHM"? We again stated the obvious answer that it takes atleast an year or two of continuous hardwork to develop a state of art algorithm, that too when gou build it on top of some existing "algorithm". After listening to this, he left. His final response was "Try to make a new "algorithm"".
Needless to say, we were completely demotivated after this evaluation. We all had worked too hard for this. And we had ability to explain each and every part of the project intuitively and mathematically, but he was not even ready to listen.
Now, all of us are sitting aimlessly, waiting for Hackathon to end.😢😢😢😢😢25 -
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)20 -
I started my first job with no degree and no real experience. It was a sink or swim kind of place. Six months in, I was working on a bunch of projects independently, then they hired a new junior developer, and told me it was my job to mentor him.
a lot of the time I knew what to do to get the job done, but I didn't know why. He always asked why... Learning something is one thing, teaching it is another. This guy was the best co-worker I've ever had because he pushed me to be much better while we learned together.2 -
How did I learn programming?
When I joined college I was literally the dumbest in the class... I didn't even know what is a char and what is a String.. Our lecturer made fun of and humiliated me in front of the whole class....also my parents barely afforded my college tutotion fed...
So one night I sat with myself and reevaluated myself and decided that no matter how hard it is gonna be, I must become an excellent programmer....spent restless nights and days learning the core of programming in c++ then switched to Java *best day in my life* and also learned Android development.. And later JavaScript "mostly worked with jQuery and AngularJs*
In my final year project I built an Android web browser that even the lecturer that made fun of me was impressed by..and my app was rated the best project of that batch.
Now I'm working as a Java web dev and made a promise to myself that I'd learn something new every day.8 -
KISS.
Keep it simple, stupid.
At the beginning the project is nothing but an idea. If you get it off the ground, that's already a huge success. Rich features and code quality should be the last of your worries in this case.
Throw out any secondary functionality out the window from day 0. Make it work, then add flowers and shit (note to self: need to make way for flowers and shit).
Nevertheless code quality is an important factor, if you can afford it. The top important things I outline in any new non-trivial project:
1. Spend 1-2 days bootstrapping it for best fit to the task, and well designed security, mocking, testing and extensibility.
2. Choose a stack that you'll most likely find good cheap devs for, in that region where you'll look in, but also a stack that will allow you to spend most of your time writing software rather than learning to code in it.
3. Talk to peers. Listen when they tell that your idea is stupid. Listen to why it's stupid, re-assess, because it most probably is stupid in this case.
4. Give yourself a good pep talk every morning, convincing you that the choices you've made starting this project are the right ones and that they'll bring you to success. Because if you started such a project already, the most efficient way to kill it is to doubt your core decisions.
Once it's working badly and with a ton of bugs, you've already succeeded in actually making it work, and then you can tackle the bugs and improvements.
Some dev is going to hate you for creating something horrific, but that horrific thing will work, and it's what will give another developer a maintenance job. Which is FAR, far more than most would get by focusing on quality and features from day 0.9 -
Insecure... My laptop disk is encrypted, but I'm using a fairly weak password. 🤔
Oh, you mean psychological.
Working at a startup in crisis time. Might lose my job if the company goes under.
I'm a Tech lead, Senior Backender, DB admin, Debugger, Solutions Architect, PR reviewer.
In practice, that means zero portfolio. Truth be told, I can sniff out issues with your code, but can't code features for shit. I really just don't have the patience to actually BUILD things.
I'm pretty much the town fool who angrily yells at managers for being dumb, rolls his eyes when he finds hacky code, then disappears into his cave to repair and refactor the mess other people made.
I totally suck at interviews, unless the interviewer really loves comparing Haskell's & Rust's type systems, or something equally useless.
I'm grumpy, hedonistic and brutally straight forward. Some coworkers call me "refreshing" and "direct but reasonable", others "barely tolerable" or even "fundamentally unlikable".
I'm not sure if they actually mean it, or are just messing with me, but by noon I'm either too deep into code, or too much under influence of cognac & LSD, wearing too little clothing, having interesting conversations WITH instead of AT the coffee machine, to still care about what other humans think.
There have been moments where I coded for 72 hours straight to fix a severe issue, and I would take a bullet to save this company from going under... But there have also been days where I called my boss a "A malicious tumor, slowly infecting all departments and draining the life out of the company with his cancerous ideas" — to his face.
I count myself lucky to still have a very well paying job, where many others are struggling to pay bills or have lost their income completely.
But I realize I'm really not that easy to work with... Over time, I've recruited a team of compatible psychopaths and misfits, from a Ukranian ex-military explosives expert & brilliant DB admin to a Nigerian crossfitting gay autist devops weeb, to a tiny alcoholic French machine learning fanatic, to the paranoid "how much keef is there in my beard" architecture lead who is convinced covid-19 is linked to the disappearance of MH370 and looks like he bathes in pig manure.
So... I would really hate to ever have to look for a new employer.
I would really hate to ever lose my protective human meat shield... I mean, my "team".
I feel like, despite having worked to get my Karma deep into the red by calling people all kinds of rude things, things are really quite sweet for me.
I'm fucking terrified that this peak could be temporary, that there's a giant ravine waiting for me, to remind me that life is a ruthless bitch and that all the good things were totally undeserved.
Ah well, might as well stay in character...
*taunts fate with a raised middlefinger*13 -
Being a developer is it still possible to be a gamer?
I feel like with all the new technologies coming in, I am always occupied with learning something and I don't get the time to game at all.
I am coming to a realisation that everything together is not possible anymore :(19 -
Hey guys :(
The rant will be long.
Today was one of the worst day ever.
I'm feeling so shitty right now.
I'm 19 and I started my apprenticeship about a half year ago on a very small company.
From day one I had many things to do, every day is hard and a new experience. But I'm learning a lot.
Two months ago I had my very first presentation for a client. I was really excited and nervous but everything was fine and the client as well as my boss were proud of me.
Today I should present again a prototype for the same client. But this time not directly personal, instead we did it via TeamViewer. After the client finally found out, how to open and start this shit, the disaster tooked its course.
After explaining him the conzept, I wanted to show him in the software. For some reason it suddenly stopped working. I've just made a change recently which leads in all appeareances to an error .
Because of that error I couldn't proceed, so I have to explain and show him the data I created before I made the changes.
With that everything Just worked fine, I could explain and visualize everything. It didn't Matter and didn't changed anything, only the Name was a Name from me.
The client was very relaxed about this error. He said that it is a prototype , it is not serious.
Furthermore I showed and demonstrated him everything.
But my boss wasn't very surprised and Happy about me. He made me responsable for the error, I should have prepared everything better and this all was Shit.
This made me really,really sad. It sounded so hard.
I know that I've made a mistake, but it's human. I'm only 19. I'm not perfect. Sure, I could have prevented it, if I had tested all possibilites right after I had made the changes again. I prepared the whole presentation on the weekend, on my personal freetime. I spent so often so much time in my freetime just for my job, for my apprenticeship. To get what? A fat bite, a kick in the ass. I'm doing so much, but this is not acknowledged. But when I make something wrong - then I'm the shittiest person.
Damn. Don't know how to handle this situation. This has gone to far today.
Yeah, I could have tested More, but I only tested the existing Data. I prepared the presentation very Well. This is so sad.11 -
To those that think they can't make it.
To those that are put down by those that don't understand you.
And to those that have never had a dream come true.
Not a rant, but the story of how I got into programming
I've always been into tech/electronics. I remember being told once that when I was 3, I used to take plug sockets to pieces. When I was 7, I built a computer with my dad.
There isn't a thing in my room that hasn't been dismantled and put back together again. Except for the things that weren't put back together again ;)
When I was 15, I got a phone for Christmas. It was a pretty crappy phone, the LG P350 (optimus ME). But I loved it all the same.
However I knew it could do a lot more. It ran a bloated, slow version of Android 2.2.
So I went searching, how can I make it faster, how to make it do more. And I found a huge community around Android ROMs. Obviously the first thing I did was flashed this ROM. Sure, there were bugs, but I was instantly in love with it. My phone was freed.
From there I went on to exploring what else can be done.
I wanted to learn how to script, so over the weekend I wrote a 1000 line batch (Windows cmd) script that would root the phone and flash a recovery environment onto it. Pretty basic. Lots of switch statements, but I was proud of it. I'd achieved something. It wasn't new to the world, but it was my first experience at programming.
But it wasn't enough, I needed more.
So I set out to actually building the roms. I installed Linux. I wanted to learn how to utilise Linux better, so I rewrote my script in bash.
By this time, I'd joined a team for developing on similar spec'd phones. Without the funds to by new devices, we began working on more radical projects.
Between us, we ported newer kernels to our devices. We rebased much of the chipset drivers onto newer equivalents to add new features.
And then..
Well, it was exam season. I was suffering from personal issues (which I will not detail), and that, with the work on Android, I ended up failing the exams.
I still passed, but not to the level I expected.
So I gave up on school, and went head first into a new kind of development. "continue doing what you love. You'll make it" is what I told myself.
I found python by contributing to an IRC bot. I learnt it by reading the codebase. Anything I didn't understand, I researched. Anything I wanted to do, google was there to help me through it.
Then it was exam season again. Even though I'd given up on school, I was still going. It was easier to stay in than do anything about it.
A few weeks before the exams, I had a panic attack. I was behind on coursework, and I knew I would do poorly on exams.
So I dropped out.
I was disappointed, my family was disappointed.
So I did the only thing I felt I could do. I set out to get a job as a developer.
At this stage, I'd not done anything special. So I started aiming bigger. Contributing to projects maintained by Sony and Google, learning from them. Building my own projects to assist with my old Android friends.
I managed to land a contract, however due to the stresses at home, I had to drop it after a month.
Everything was going well, I felt ready to get a full time job as a developer, after 2 years of experience in the community.
Then I had to wake up.
Unfortunately, my advisors (I was a job seeker at the time) didn't understand the potential of learning to be a developer. With them, it's "university for a skilled job".
They see the word "computer" on a CV, they instantly say "tech support".
I played ball, I did what I could for them. But they'd always put me down, saying I wasn't good enough, that I'd never get a job.
I hated them. I'd row with them every other day.
By God, I would prove them wrong.
And then I found them. Or, to be more precise, they found me. A startup in London got in contact with me. They seemed like decent people. I spoke with their developers, and they knew their stuff, these were people that I can learn from.
I travelled 4 hours to go for an interview, then 4 hours back.
When I got the email saying they'd move me to London, I was over the moon.
I did exactly what everyone was telling me I couldn't do.
1.5 years later, I'm still working with them. We all respect each other, and we all learn from each other.
I'm ever grateful to them for taking a shot with me. I had no professional experience, and I was by no means the most skilled individual they interviewed.
Many people have a dream. I won't lie, I once dreamed of working at Google. But after the journey I've been through, I wouldn't have where I am now any other way. Though, in time, I wish to share this dream with another.
I hope that all of you reach your dreams too.
Sorry for the long post. The details are brief, but there are only 5k characters ;)23 -
I got laid off from my previous position as a Software Engineer at the end of June, and since then it was a struggle to find a new position. I have a good resume, about 4 years of professional dev experience and 5 years of experience in the tech industry all together, and great references.
As soon as I got laid off, I talked to my old manager at my previous company, and he said that he'd love to hire me back, but he just filled his last open spot.
In order to prepare, I had my resume reviewed by a specialist at the Department of Labor, and she said that it was one of the better resumes that she had seen.
There aren't a huge amount of dev jobs in my area, and I got a TON of recruiter emails. But they were all in other states, and I wasn't interested in moving.
I applied to all the remote and local positions I could find (the ones that I was qualified for,) and I just got a bunch of silence and denials from all my applications. I had a few interviews that went great, but of course, those companies decided to put the position on hold so they could use the budget for other things.
The silence and denials were really disconcerting, and make you think that something might be wrong with you or your interviewing abilities.
And then suddenly, as if the floodgates had opened, I started getting a ton of callbacks and interviews for both local and remote opportunities. I don't know if the end-of-year budget surpluses opened up more positions, but I was getting a lot of interest and it felt amazing.
Another dev position opened up at my previous company, and I got a great recommendation for that from my former manager and co-workers. I got a bunch of other interviews, and was moved onto the next rounds in most of them.
And finally, I got reached out to regarding a remote position I applied for a while ago, and the company was great about making the interview process quick and efficient. Within 2 weeks, I went from the screening call, to the tech call, and to the final call with the CTO. The CTO and I just hung out and talked about cars/boats/motorcycles for half the interview, and he was an awesome guy. AND THEN I GOT AN OFFER THE NEXT DAY!
The offer was originally for about the same amount as I made at my previous job, but I counteroffered up a good amount and they accepted my counteroffer!
It's a great company with offices all over the world, and they offer the option to travel to all those offices for visits if you want. So if you're working on a project with the France team and you think that it'd be easier to just work with them face-to-face, then the company will pay to fly you out to Paris for the week. Or you can work completely remotely. They don't mind either way.
I'm super excited to work with them and it feels great to be back in the job world.
Sorry about the long post, but I just wanted to tell my story and help encourage anybody out there who's going through the same thing right now.
Don't get discouraged, because you WILL find an awesome opportunity that's right for you. Get somebody to go over your resume and give you improvement recommendations. Brush up on your interviewing skills. Be sure to talk about all the projects you've worked on and how they positively impacted people and/or companies.
This is what I found interviewers responded the best to: Be sure to emphasize that you love learning new things and that you love passing along that knowledge to other people, and that your goal is to be an approachable and reliable source of knowledge for the company and to be as helpful as possible. It's important to be in a position that encourages both knowledge growth and knowledge sharing, and I think that companies really appreciate that mindset in a team member.
Moral of the story: YOU GOT THIS!10 -
TL;DR: I dont work in IT, but I code at work, and the non-IT higher-ups lack of knowledge shows brutally.
So I work in aviation, not IT. Through coincidences, I was tasked to work on our flight plan distribution logic years ago, which was then written in BRL (Business Rule Language). In lockdown 2020, I finally started to learn "real" programming with Python, but soon shifted to Java. Which was good, since all of a sudden a few months ago the company ditched BRL and the godawful IBM ODM IDE for... Java and IntelliJ. Nice. BUT my teammates have zero clue about Java and no real inclination to learn it by themselves. So I have been appointed their mentor, despite me stating Im still a beginner myself. Its somewhat doable, I get the hard problems, they do basic maintenace, basically renaming variables and stuff. One of my yearly goals is to make sure a completely new guy is able to do everything I do by september. It took a LOT to talk them out of it.
In my last yearly review I got some flak for not "selling" myself to other teams enough, whatever that means. So, as a learning project, I designed a new intranet page for our department in Javascript. Its loved by all. It has links to all the stuff we need woth a nice interface and built in tools to make work easier and more efficient. I did it on my own, in my spare time, simply because I was fed up with the old crap and it was an enormously good learning opportunity. Now they want to give some other guy the responsibility over that page/tool because apparently it is "not in my process team description". They even planned a day for me and him so he can "learn Javascript then". Suuure...
I also did a digital checklist tool as a webapp. All this runs from a local folder, no server at all because reasons. I made it work. Now they want it integrated into some other tool some other guy made. He wrote his tool in PHP entirely so merging the two will take considerable time. Which I told them multiple times. No, it does not take about two hours.
Sometimes, comrades, sometimes....
Im still grateful for the opportunity to code at work but the lack of knowledge really REALLY shows. My goal now is to talk management into paying for a Java course for me (they are very expensive here). That way, they get a better employee and I get more knowledge and an actual certificate thats worth something. Usually in this company, this has higher chances of success than straight up asking for more money.
Sorry for the long story, but it felt good just typing it all out, even if nobody reads this.4 -
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.8 -
From my work -as an IT consultant in one of the big 4- I can now show you my masterpiece
INSIGHTS FROM THE DAILY LIFE OF A FUNCTIONAL ANALIST IN A BIG 4 -I'M NOT A FUNCTIONAL ANALYST BUT THAT'S WHAT THEY DO-
- 10:30, enter the office. By contract you should be there at 9:00 but nobody gives a shit
- First task of the day: prepare the power point for the client. DURATION: 15 minutes to actually make the powerpoint, 45 minutes to search all the possible synonyms of RESILIENCE BIG DATA AGILE INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION MACHINE LEARNING SHIT PISS CUM, 1 hour to actually present the document.
- 12:30: Sniff the powder left by the chalks on the blackboards. Duration: 30 minutes, that's a lot of chalk you need to snort.
13:00, LUNCH TIME. You get back to work not one minute sooner than 15.00
- 15:00, conference with the HR. You need to carefully analyze the quantity and quality of the farts emitted in the office for 2 hours at least
- 17:00 conference call, a project you were assigned to half a day ago has a server down.
The client sent two managers, three senior Java developers, the CEO, 5 employees -they know logs and mails from the last 5 months line by line-, 4 lawyers and a beheading teacher from ISIS.
On your side there are 3 external ucraininans for the maintenance, successors of the 3 (already dead) developers who put the process in place 4 years ago according to God knows which specifications. They don't understand a word of what is being said.
Then there's the assistant of the assistant of a manager from another project that has nothing to do with this one, a feces officer, a sys admin who is going to watch porn for the whole conference call and won't listen a word, two interns to make up a number and look like you're prepared. Current objective: survive. Duration: 2 hours and a half.
- 19:30, snort some more chalk for half an hour, preparing for the mail in which you explain the associate partner how because of the aforementioned conference call we're going to lose a maintenance contract worth 20 grands per month (and a law proceeding worth a number of dollars you can't even read) and you have no idea how could this happen
- 20:00, timesheet! Compile the weekly report, write what you did and how long did it take for each task. You are allowed to compile 8 hours per day, you worked at least 11 but nobody gives a shit. Duration: 30 minutes
- 20:30, update your consultant! Training course, "tasting cum and presenting its organoleptic properties to a client". Bearing with your job: none at all. Duration: 90 minutes, then there's half an hour of evaluating test where you'll copy the answers from a sheet given to you by a colleague who left 6 months ago.
- 22:30, CHANCE CARD! You have a new mail from the HR: you asked for a refund for a 3$ sandwich, but the receipt isn't there and they realized it with a 9 months delay. You need to find that wicked piece of paper. DURATION: 30 minutes. The receipt most likely doesn't even exist anymore and will be taken directly from your next salary.
- 23:00 you receive a message on Teams. It's the intern. It's very late but you're online and have to answer. There's an exception on a process which have been running for 6 years with no problems and nobody ever touches. The intern doesn't know what to do, but you wrote the specifications for the thing, 6 years ago, and everything MUST run tonight. You are not a technician and have no fucking clue about anyhing at all. 30 minutes to make sure it's something on our side and not on the client side, and in all that the intern is as useful as a confetto to wipe your ass. Once you're sure it's something on our side you need to search for the senior dev who received the maintenance of the project, call him and solve the problem.
It turns out a file in a shared folder nobody ever touches was unreachable 'cause one of your libraries left it open during the last run and Excel shown a warning modal while opening it; your project didn't like this last thing one bit. It takes 90 minutes to find the root of the problem, you solve it by rebooting one of your machines. It's 01:00.
You shower, watch yourself on the mirror and search for the line where your forehead ends and your hair starts. It got a little bit back from yesterday; the change can't be seen with the naked eye but you know it's there.
You cry yourself to sleep. Tomorrow is another day, but it's going to be exactly like today.8 -
FLOYD IS HERE 😎
Gather around kids, it's story time.
So my first breakup left me so damaged and I was in darkest phase of my life. I was alone. Physically, mentally, and emotionally. I went for therapy and spearheaded into success and grew in life soooo fucking much.
31st December 2016, I first joined dR and since the first day this place felt home. Met some of brightest mind and most amazing souls here (sadly many left the place).
I used to shit post and rant a lot. But I loved everyone here. But then I don't quite remember, but I decided to quit this place as community started to grow. Many others left as well.
I came back here in 2019 IIRC and started all over again. Got along well with new members and started having fun.
I used to crib and cry about being underpaid. Lost a kickass Europe job due to pandemic.
I will skip what all happened between me and @Scout but she is a sweetheart, though very rough and brutal with me at times (actually very often), but she is so selfish for me and cares for me that I couldn't resist but listen to her always. A lifelong friend for sure :)
I used to rant about my dumb office colleagues. Definitely not the sharpest minds but good people at heart (which I did not realise).
So in October 2020, I earned a new job and my company retained me with a 100% raise and a promotion making me lead of product innovation and UX.
November end I met a girl in professional context on LinkedIn who was conducting a workshop. Being hungry for learning, meeting new people and kill my lockdown boredom, I singed up.
Now I went for December break and my colleagues sent me a gift hamper when they came to know I got a promotion. I felt bad that I ranted about them so I deleted my account and also wanted a social detox.
Post the workshop, I started conversing casually with the girl I met. She was married. But things hit off. Eventually in February end I confessed that I had feelings for her and in next few days she reciprocated. I told her I was aware of her marital status and it's okay if nothing happens between us. Then she started to open up of how she was with one guy for 17 years and was abused in everyway and wanted to separate but never had the courage and all.
She decided to file for paperwork and then be with me. Things got messy when her family got involved thinking I was causing all of it.
She went back to her partner and I realised I had some emotional and mental issues of a person's past that bothered me. But we were overcoming it. Soon the honeymoon period started phasing out.
Her family started giving me death threats. We went underground even further. More arguments and fights between us.
@Scout kept telling me I was stupid and I disregarded her. I feel like an idiot for not listening to her.
That girl kept gaslighting me, hurting me intentionally, scratching the surface made me realise how broken and damaged she was. She lied to me and created fake persona of herself to make me fall for her. Everything was lie. Literally.
I felt horrible for trusting her. My trauma relapsed and I started having crazy panic attacks leading to self harm and being suicidal. That girl was drugged all the time with psychological medicines and very poor character & personality in general (I don't want to judge anyone but just stating the facts).
Eventually she just disappeared and I was like fuck this. Earlier, after every fight, she used to show fake affection and I used to melt but not this time.
I was like fuck this shit. I have some super amazing friends like @kiki who helped me overcome this. I started going for therapy and realised what all areas I need to improve. My therapist is soooo brilliant, she understands the root cause instantly and also knows how to fix it. And the same day I and both my parents were COVID-19 positive. Last few weeks were dark and haunting.
Further more, the girl comes back after a week and then acts as a 'nice girl'.
Initially fake affection, then drama, followed by making me guilt trip, then threats, and now blaming me.
I kept ignoring her calls (50 to 70 calls in a day), emails, left her unread on Telegram, and everything I could do to ignore her without blocking her. I started gaining my happiness back.
During this mess, I lost 5+ KG of weight. She has no friends in her mid 30s. Knows no life or survival skills. Her family hates her, no career, no emotional or mental maturity, literally nothing. Insanely dumb and toxic manipulative person who is not even worth being called an ex. As per her everyone around her is an asshole except her. Every time something happened, she used to blame and bad mouth the other person. Now she is doing with me. In all her life situations, either she was a hero or a victim. One upped me all the time. Now that I see it, I hate myself for allowing it all of it and now having enough self worth to walk out of it earlier.
Continued in comments...61 -
-- How I succeeded turning a PHP/MYSQL app into Android app within a week --
Alright. So I wanted to grab your attention to what I'm about to write. If you are here just to read about the technologies I used, jump to bottom.
This is also a kind of rant; rant against the other fellow devs who demotivated me originally when I asked a question.
I'll not go in the details of my original question. Here's the link for those who are interested:
https://www.devrant.io/rants/366496
It's been days since I achieved what I wanted to but I thought someone might learn from my experience. So here it goes.
Why FREE?
Well, it was an important client. I worked on his website and he asked for an app for the same website and told me he won't be able to pay me anything for the app. I was, somewhat, under the impression that he might be testing me. If not, then I would end up learning something new. It wasn't a bad deal for me so I didn't hesitate to took it.
Within a week, I was able to pull the job and finish it. I felt so much better (and proud of myself) when I finished the app within the week and client approved it. What did I get? I got a GOOD BANK CLIENT in my pocket now. Got a lot more worth of projects from the same client. If I were being paid for the app, I might not have pulled the job so much better.
So the moral of this story is never to give up. NOT EVERY DEVELOPER SELLS SHORT ONLY FOR "MONEY". Some enjoy learning new things. And some like me love to accept new challenges and are not afraid to try something new everyday.
In case, someone is interested in knowing the technologies I used, here they go;
PhoneGap
Framework7
Template7
Apache Cordova
I wrote an API for the interaction between the web services and the app.
Also, Ionic Framework seems promising but it had a learning curve and time was of the essence. But I'm gonna learn it anyhow.14 -
I have got a new director at work. My previous director had to retire already, the man was already feeling it and he had been on the institution for more than 35 years....I am 30, so this tells you how much the man has been there.
This new dude.....has the presence of a Caterprie (Pokemon) or an Oompa Loompa. In contrast, the previous director felt like a 4 star General (never been in the presence of a 5 star since those occurrences are world war rare) but I had respected that man so much and loved working with him. I really did loved my boss, he was stern and professional, but kind and friendly to his staff, fiercely protective, no one took advantage of I.T while he was there, he would literally fight for us and took our word before anything else. The man was, well, a true man. A true leader.
He took a chance in putting me as the head of my department, but he had faith in me, and coached me and trained me as much as he could. Had the requirement for his position not been a masters he himself told me that he would have loved to make me his successor, even when I would constantly tell him that I was scared shitless of the work he did and the amount of things he did for the institution, to me this is a very laaaaaaaaarge cowboy hat to fill (this is Texas, he wore a hat, the saying is normally "shoes to fill", but fuck it)
This new guys looks away when the other managers are speaking to him. He constantly interrupts us. He constantly tells us about how the other institution in which he was (rival might I add) does X or Y, its fucking annoying to the point that me and the other managers have a drinking game, for every time he references his old institution we drink one beer over the weekend. It is Saturday night and I am 36 in in total (this is my favorite part of it tho) and it is just annoying.
His train of thought makes no sense to me:
"This application, where did you buy it? we tried purchasing one on Y when I was still there but found none"
Me: "Well, since it was a new government mandate and had nowhere to go we had to develop it in house"
Him: "We had tried to purchase what you guys had but found no place that sold it, so why didn't you try purchasing it?"
Me:.....well, because it was brand new, purchase it from where? We also don't like dealing with vendors that manage these sorts of things because every new requirement takes them weeks to produce on very high budgets, historically, my department has only had maintenance fees for the software that we have and even those applications crap themselves all the time and they take weeks to answer back to us.
Him: So you decided to develop it in house instead? we would never do that! back at y we purchased everything our engineers never really developed anything!
Me: Well then, what is the purpose of having engineers if they are not going to actually develop an application?
Him: IF there is something out there that is better then why should you reinvent the wheel?
Me: For this one I did not reinvent the wheel, I am not talking about creating a programming language from scratch, but how does custom solutions that specifically feed the needs of the institution to be produced otherwise? The department has developers for a reason, because they have very specific needs in here that can only come from a team of developers that are in house satisfying those needs.
Him: Well our engineers never had to do that. Sure projects sometimes had to put on holds because the vendor was busy, but such is the nature of development
Me: No it is not, the nature of development is to create things, it is one thing for my team to go through bugs and software considerations, it is another for me to not provide a service because some random company is taking two weeks on a $300 dllr an hour contract to put a simple checkbox on a form. If a project fails the board is not going to care that some vendor is not doing their job, they are just going to blame me, if that is the case then I would much rather the blame be actually mine than some sucky third party "developer" also, your engineers where not even engineers, they were people with a degree that purchased things, that's it, please do not compare them to my guys or refer them as engineers in front of me, they are not.
Him: Well, maybe.
MAYBE?!! motherfucker I did not kill myself learning the ins and outs of architecture and software engineering on my own time after my fucking bachelors in C.S for your codeless background ass to tell me MAYBE. My word IS the fucking WORD here, not yours. Fuck me I really dislike this dude's management practices.
The shitty part? He is not a bad person, he is not a bad dude that is out to get us, just a simple minded moron with no place as a leader.
I know leaders, I know what a leader is, this is not one.10 -
Am I being completely ignorant? I like to think of programming like construction (worked for 9 years in that industry) when I learn a new language I approach it the same way as using a new tool. I don't feel like I'm learning a new "trade", just a new way to do the same things i already know how to do using a different method. I feel like a lot of programmers have trouble picking up new languages/frameworks because the THINK it is completely new...where as learn a new TRADE (devops, database arch, design etc) is something completely new/different6
-
Man, this guy is fking useless.
I'm learning something new and ask him for help; he both mishears and confuses topics, so his explanations only ever make things worse. 😧6 -
TL;DR :
"when i die i want my group project members to lower me into my grave so they can let me down one last time"
STORY TIME
Last year in College, I had two simultaneous projects. Both were semester long projects. One was for a database class an another was for a software engineering class.
As you can guess, the focus of the projects was very different. Databases we made some desktop networked chat application with a user login system and what not in Java. SE we made an app store with an approval system and admin panels and ratings and reviews and all that jazz in Meteor.js.
The DB project we had 4 total people and one of them was someone we'll call Frank. Frank was also in my SE project group. Frank disappeared for several weeks. Not in class, didn't contact us, and at one point the professors didn't know much either. As soon as we noticed it would be an issue, we talked to the professors. Just keeping them in the loop will save you a lot of trouble down the road. I'm assuming there was some medical or family emergency because the professors were very understanding with him once he started coming back to class and they had a chance to talk.
Lesson 1: If you have that guy that doesn't show up or communicate, don't be a jerk to them and communicate with your professor. Also, don't stop trying to contact the rogue partner. Maybe they'll come around sometime.
It sucked to lose 25% of our team for a project, but Frank appreciated that we didn't totally ignore him and throw him under the bus to the point that the last day of class he came up to me and said, "hey, open your book bag and bring it next to mine." He then threw a LARGE bottle of booze in there as a thank you.
Lesson 2: Treat humans as humans. Things go wrong and understanding that will get you a lot farther with people than trying to make them feel terrible about something that may have been out of their control.
Our DB project went really well. We got an A, we demoed, it worked, it was cool. The biggest problem is I was the only person that had taken a networking class so I ended up doing a large portion of the work. I wish I had taken other people's skills into account when we were deciding on a project. Especially because the only requirement was that it needed to have a minimum of 5 tables and we had to use some SQL language (aka, we couldn't use no-SQL).
The SE project had Frank and a music major who wanted to minor in CS (and then 3 other regular CS students aside from me). This assignment was make an app store using any technology you want. But, you had to use agile sprints. So we had weekly meetings with the "customer" (the TA), who would change requirements on us to keep us on our toes and tell us what they wanted done as a priority for the next meeting. Seriously, just like real life. It was so much fun trying to stay ahead of that.
So we met up and tried to decided what to use. One kid said Java because we all had it for school. The big issue is trying to make a Java web app is a pain in the ass. Seriously, there are so many better things to use. Other teams decided to use Django because they all wanted to learn Python. I suggested why not use something with a nice package system to minimize duplicating work that had already been done and tested by someone. Kid 1 didn't like that because he said in the real world you have to make your own software and not use packages. Little did he know that I had worked in SE for a few years already and knew damn well that every good project has code from somewhere else that has already solved a problem you're facing. We went with Java the first week. It failed miserably. Nobody could get the server set up on their computers. Using VCS with it required you to keep the repo outside of the where you wrote code and copy and paste changes in there. It was just a huge flop so everyone else voted to change.
Lesson 3: Be flexible. Be open to learning new things. Don't be afraid to try something new. It'll make you a better developer in the long run.
So we ended up using Meteor. Why? We all figured we could pick up javascript super easy.Two of us already knew it. And the real time thing would make for some cool effects when an app got a approved or a comment was made. We got to work and the one kid was still pissed. I just checked the repo and the only thing he committed was fixing the spelling of on word in the readme.
We sat down one day and worked for 4 straight hours. We finished the whole project in that time. While other teams were figuring out how to layout their homepage, we had a working user system and admin page and everything. Our TA was trying to throw us for loops by asking for crazy things and we still came through. We had tests that ran along side the application as you used it. It was friggin cool.
Lesson 4: If possible, pick the right tool for the job. Not the tool you know. Everything in CS has a purpose. If you use it for its purpose, you will save days off of a project.1 -
I did the thing and stuck it out at my shitty job. Tomorrow, I get to quit the most abusive place I have ever worked. I got a new job at a shop that's a 15 minute drive away vs an hour commute. No more SCRUM with a gun to my head. No more getting yelled at for learning on my own and not working fast enough. No more making Grindr, but for CEOs. I have never been so happy. Thank you for the encouragement to find something else. Thank you for giving me hope. Thank you for being there, and being my sanity, my safe place.9
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The year was 2021 and we have to implement X
Alice, the manager: let's do this and this
Me: actually that won't scale, I did the same in my previous company. Here's an analysis on why it doesn't scale
Alice: nope, we'll have to do it like that. If it doesn't scale we'll fix it. It's a learning opportunity.
The feature was rolled out, and we got tons of alerts after 1 week.
Alice: haha what a ride! At least the team learned something new
Me: I didn't learn anything new. All I got was stress and disrupted sleep because of those midnight incidents...
Then 2022 came, Alice was promoted thanks to the incredible leadership to deliver X, I joined a different project, a part of this project is to implement Y, similar to X.
Bob, the manager: let's do this and this
Me: actually that won't scale, I did the same in my previous project. Here's an analysis on why it doesn't scale, you can ask Alice if you want.
Bob: nope, we'll have to do it like that. If it doesn't scale we'll fix it. It's a learning opportunity.
The feature was rolled out, and we got tons of alerts after 1 week.
Bob: haha what a ride! At least the team learned something new
Me: I didn't learn anything new. All I got was stress and disrupted sleep because of those midnight incidents...
It's 2023 now, Bob got promoted thanks to the awesome leadership to roll out Y, I joined another project, which requires us to develop Z, similar to X and Y.
Chris, the manager: let's do this and this
Me: ah shit here we go again...5 -
“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. -
You wanted to hear more about my "glorious" teacher. I deliver. So get a cup of tea, take a seat and prepare for insanity.
As I already told in a comment my programming teacher is one special snowflake who lives in his personal bubble. We have final exams in less than a month and he spents at least half a lesson talking about vanishing bees and missing plants from his garden. Other topics he likes to talk about (and tries to turn every freaking conversation into at least one of these):
1. Other students and their stupidity
2. Diesel scandal
3. His sick wife
4. "Why does noone read newspapers anymore?"
5. Why he can't teach Java but really really really wants to and everyone hates him and forces him to do C#.
Even if I try to interrupt him he'll go on until he thinks we gained some "common knowledge" - this is how he justifies these topics.
Everytime he introduced us to a new command he compared it to Java and sometimes he even falsely corrects code because he confuses them.
We are only 6 people including me (another story for another time) and he is not able to help everyone during a 90min lesson. He normally sticks with one person for at least one hour and just talks to them or even do their tasks. This is really annoying if you have a simple question. He won't answer you until he's finished whatever he's doing.
Most of the time he doesn't seem to understand what he's talking about/trying to teach us. He's muttering statements from our textbook to himself switching halfway through to another sentence while drawing not decipherable shit on the blackboard.
Another gem are his "guidelines" for classtests. We are allowed to use any command we know. Except the ones we learned not in class. And the ones he doesn't like. And the ones he doesn't want to exist. And of course not the ones which make you're life easier. So basically we are bound to use his favourite commands or we won't get a good grade. Example: use an array. List is not allowed. Never.
He has some weird fetish with arrays.
I once presented him perfectly fine code I wrote in my freetime and asked what some warnings meant. (Was because of different Visual studio versions as I learned later.) He scolded me for using things he didn't taught us yet and ranted about how I'm pressuring him into rushing these things now - I never wanted to show this to my classmates nor was this anything else than a project for fun and learning something new. (FYI the "new stuff" where classes and objects because i was tired of kilometers of spaghetti code). His rant went on a good 20minutes and - obviously - he didn't answer my question. I asked my fiance that evening and he explained it to me.
This should it be for this time. I'm sure I have more stories to tell for another time!
Thank you for reading. ^^5 -
It all started in the year 2013.
I was 13 years old back then. I was a fan of Minecraft and so I learned how to setup a bukkit server and ran it. Installing plugins was fun, because I could be a "hacker" and change the configs.
After a while, (~2014), when I was in the 9th grade of elementary school, I saw Unity. A free game engine. Of course, me being a 14 year old I was intrigued and so I downloaded it, made an account and a new project. I had absolutely ZERO knowledge of programming. Didn't even know what languages existed, so i resorted to presets and poorly put together characters + weapons.
After some time fiddling around with Unity, I've gotten a hang of the basics (not programming related).
My actual programming started when I started High School (year 2016). It's a computer engineering school and for the first part of the year, I've learned from my teacher in C# (Console.WriteLine/ReadLine/Loops/Variables). At the second semester I started to gain interest and motivation to program at home. I did the programs we made in school (random number guessing game) but better. Improved it, added colors.
After that, I started developing in Unity - Actually learning something and having the ability to develop something all by myself. It keeps driving me on. In the second year (the year I'm visiting right now) I tought myself HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, PHP. I'm very happy and also can't wait to discover and learn new things in these languages!
My latest project was an Android application for my father that he asked for (it calculated the price of the 3D print he would make).
// Sorry for the long post!
EDIT: Forgot to add a fun little detail. All my classmates make fun of me because I program so much !
Also: Tabs > Spaces8 -
I've caught the efficiency bug.
I recently started a minimum wage job to get my life back in order after a failed 2 year project (post mortem: next time bring more cash for a longer runway)
I've noticed this thing I do at every job, where I see inefficiency and I think "how can I use technology to automate myself out of this job?"
My first ever application was in C++ for college (a BASIC interpreter) and it's been so long I've since forgotten the language.
But after a while every language starts to look like every other language, and you start to wonder if maybe the reason you never seriously went anywhere as a programmer was because you never really were cut out for it.
Code monkey, sure. Programmer? Dunno, maybe I just suffer from imposter syndrome.
So a few years back I worked at a retail chain. Nothing as big as walmart, but they have well over 10k store locations. They had two IBM handscanners per store, old grungy ugly things, and one of these machines would inevitably be broken, lost or in need of upgrade/replacement about once a year, per location. District manager, who I hit it off with, and made a point of building report with, told me they were paying something like $1500 a piece.
After a programming dry spell, I picked up 'coding' with MIT app inventor. Built a 'mostly complete' inventory management app over the course of a month, and waited for the right time.
The day of a big store audit, (and the day before a multi-regional meeting), I made sure I was in-store at the same time as my district manager, so he could 'stumble upon' me working, scanning in and pricing items into the app.
Naturally he asked about it, and I had the numbers, the print outs, and the app itself to show him. He seemed impressed by what amounted to a code monkeys 'non-code' solution for a problem they had.
Long story short, he does what I expected, runs it by the other regionals and middle executives at the meeting, and six months later they had invested in a full blown in house app, cutting IBM out of the mix I presume.
From what I understand they now use the app throughout the entire store chain.
So if you work at IBM, sorry, that contract you lost for handscanners at 10k+ stores? Yeah that was my fault (and MIT app inventor).
They say software is 'eating the world' but it really goes to show, for a lot of 'almost coders' and 'code monkeys' half our problem is dealing with setup and platform boilerplate. I think in the future that a lot of jobs are either going to be created or destroyed thanks to better 'low code' solutions, and it seems to be a big potential future market.
In the mean while I've realized, while working on side projects, that maybe I can do this after all, and taken up Kotlin. I want to do a couple of apps for efficiency and store tracking at my current employer to see if I'm capable and not just an mit app-inventor codemonkey after all.
I'm hoping, by demonstrating what I can do, I can use that as a springboard into an internal programming position at my current gig (which seems to be a company thats moving towards a more tech oriented approach to efficiency and management). Also watching money walk out the door due to inefficiency kinda pisses me off, and the thought of fixing those issues sounds really interesting. At the end of the day I just like learning new technologies, and maybe this is all just an excuse to pick up something new after spending so long on less serious work.
I still have a ways to go, but the prospect of working on B2B, and being able to offer technological solutions to common and recurring business needs excites the hell out of me..as cringy and over-repeated as that may sound.5 -
I love coming back to old code from when I was learning a new language and cleaning it up/making it better. It confirms that’s I’ve learned something :)4
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I'll use this topic to segue into a related (lonely) story befitting my mood these past weeks.
This is entire story going to sound egotistical, especially this next part, but it's really not. (At least I don't think so?)
As I'm almost entirely self-taught, having another dev giving me good advice would have been nice. I've only known / worked with a few people who were better devs than I, and rarely ever received good advice from them.
One of those better devs was my first computer science teacher. Looking back, he was pretty average, but he held us to high standards and gave good advice. The two that really stuck with me were: 1) "save every time you've done something you don't want to redo," and 2) "printf is your best debugging friend; add it everywhere there's something you want to watch." Probably the best and most helpful advice I've ever received 😊
I've seen other people here posting advice like "never hardcode" or "modularity keeps your code clean" -- I had to discover these pretty simple concepts entirely on my own. School (and later college) were filled with terrible teachers and worse students, and so were almost entirely useless for learning anything new.
The only decent dev I knew had brilliant ideas (genetic algorithms, sandboxing, ...) before they were widely used, but could rarely implement them well because he was generally an idiot. (Idiot sevant, I think? Definitely the idiot part.) I couldn't stand him. Completely bypassing a ridiculously long story, I helped him on a project to build his own OS from scratch; we made very impressive progress, even to this day. Custom bootloader, hardware interfacing, memory management, (semi) sandboxed processes, gui, example programs ...; we were in highschool. I'm still surprised and impressed with what we accomplished.
But besides him, almost every other dev I met was mediocre. Even outside of school, I went so many years without having another competent dev to work with. I went through various jobs helping other dev(s) on their projects (or rewriting them), learning new languages/frameworks almost every time: php, pascal, perl, zend, js, vb, rails, node, .... I learned new concepts occasionally (which was wonderful) but overall it was just tedious and never paid well because I was too young to be taken seriously (and female, further exacerbating it). On the bright side, it didn't dwindle my love for coding, and I usually spent my evenings playing with projects of my own.
The second dev (and one one of the best I've ever met) went by Novo. His approach to a game engine reminded me of General Relativity: Everything was modular, had a rich inheritance tree, and could receive user input at any point along said tree. A user could attach their view/control to any object. (Computer control methods could be attached in this way as well.) UI would obviously change depending on how the user could interact and the number of objects; admins could view/monitor any of these. Almost every object / class of object could talk to almost everything else. It was beautiful. I learned so much from his designs. (Honestly, I don't remember the code at all, and that saddens me.) There were other things, too, but that one amazed me the most.
I havent met anyone like him ever again.
Anyway, I don't know if I can really answer this week's question. I definitely received some good advice while initially learning, but past that it's all been through discovering things on my own.
It's been lonely. ☹2 -
Hey guys,
this rant will be long again. I'm sorry for any grammar errors or something like that, english isn't my native language. Furthermore I'm actually very sad and not in a good mood.
Why? What happened? Some of you may already know - I'm doing my apprenticeship / education in a smal company.
There I'm learning a lot, I'm developing awesome features directly for the clients, experience of which other in my age (I'm only 19 years old) can only dream.
Working in such a small company is very exhausting, but I love my job, I love programming. I turned my hobby into a profession and I'm very proud of it.
But then there are moments like the last time, when I had to present something for a client - the first presentation was good, the last was a disaster, nothing worked - but I learned from it.
But this time everything is worse than bad - I mean really, really worse than bad.
I've worked the whole week on a cool new feature - I've done everything that it works yesterday, that everything gets done before the deadline of yesterday.
To achieve this I've coded thursday till 10pm ! At home! Friday I tested the whole day everything to ensure that everything is working properly. I fixed several bugs and then at the end of the day everything seems to be working. Even my boss said that it looks good and he thinks that the rollout to all clients will become good and without any issues.
But unfortunately deceived.
Yesterday evening I wrote a long mail to my boss - with a "manual". He was very proud and said that he is confident that everything will work fine. He trusts me completly.
Then, this morning I received a mail from him - nothing works anymore - all clients have issues, everything stays blank - because I've forgotten to ensure that the new feature (a plugin) and its functionality is supported by the device (needs a installation).
First - I was very shoked - but in the same moment I thought - one moment - you've written an if statement, if the plugin is installed - so why the fuck should it broken everything?!
I looked instant to the code via git. This has to be a very bad joke from my boss I thought. But then I saw the fucking bug - I've written:
if(plugin) { // do shit }
but it has to be if(typeof plugin !== 'undefined')
I fucked up everything - due to this fucking mistake. This little piece of shit I've forgotten on one single line fucked up everything. I'm sorry for this mode of expression but I thought - no this can not be true - it must be a bad bad nightmare.
I've tested this so long, every scenario, everything. Worked till the night so it gets finished. No one, no one from my classmates would ever think of working so long. But I did it, because I love my job. I've implemented a check to ensure that the plugin is installed - but implemented it wrong - exactly this line which caused all the errors should prevent exactly this - what an irony of fate.
I've instantly called my boss and apologized for this mistake. The mistake can't be undone. My boss now has to go to all clients to fix it. This will be very expensive...
Oh my goodnes, I just cried.
I'm only working about half a year in this company - they trust me so much - but I'm not perfect - I make mistakes - like everyone else. This time my boss didn't looked over my code, didn't review it, because he trusted me completly - now this happens. I think this destroyed the trust :( I'm so sad.
He only said that we will talk on monday, how we can prevent such things in the feature..
Oh guys, I don't know - I've fucked up everything, we were so overhelmed that everything would work :(
Now I'm the looser who fucked up - because not testing enough - even when I tested it for days, even at home - worked at home - till the night - for free, for nothing - voluntary.
This is the thanks for that.
Thousand good things - but one mistake and you're the little asshole. You - a 19 year old guy, which works since 6 months in a company. A boss which trusts you and don't look over your code. One line which should prevent crashing, crashed everything.
I'm sorry that this rant is so long, I just need to talk to you guys because I'm so sad. Again. This has happend to frequently lately.16 -
I could bitch about XSLT again, as that was certainly painful, but that’s less about learning a skill and more about understanding someone else’s mental diarrhea, so let me pick something else.
My most painful learning experience was probably pointers, but not pointers in the usual sense of `char *ptr` in C and how they’re totally confusing at first. I mean, it was that too, but in addition it was how I had absolutely none of the background needed to understand them, not having any learning material (nor guidance), nor even a typical compiler to tell me what i was doing wrong — and on top of all of that, only being able to run code on a device that would crash/halt/freak out whenever i made a mistake. It was an absolute nightmare.
Here’s the story:
Someone gave me the game RACE for my TI-83 calculator, but it turned out to be an unlocked version, which means I could edit it and see the code. I discovered this later on by accident while trying to play it during class, and when I looked at it, all I saw was incomprehensible garbage. I closed it, and the game no longer worked. Looking back I must have changed something, but then I thought it was just magic. It took me a long time to get curious enough to look at it again.
But in the meantime, I ended up played with these “programs” a little, and made some really simple ones, and later some somewhat complex ones. So the next time I opened RACE again I kind of understood what it was doing.
Moving on, I spent a year learning TI-Basic, and eventually reached the limit of what it could do. Along the way, I learned that all of the really amazing games/utilities that were incredibly fast, had greyscale graphics, lowercase text, no runtime indicator, etc. were written in “Assembly,” so naturally I wanted to use that, too.
I had no idea what it was, but it was the obvious next step for me, so I started teaching myself. It was z80 Assembly, and there was practically no documents, resources, nothing helpful online.
I found the specs, and a few terrible docs and other sources, but with only one year of programming experience, I didn’t really understand what they were telling me. This was before stackoverflow, etc., too, so what little help I found was mostly from forum posts, IRC (mostly got ignored or made fun of), and reading other people’s source when I could find it. And usually that was less than clear.
And here’s where we dive into the specifics. Starting with so little experience, and in TI-Basic of all things, meant I had zero understanding of pointers, memory and addresses, the stack, heap, data structures, interrupts, clocks, etc. I had mastered everything TI-Basic offered, which astoundingly included arrays and matrices (six of each), but it hid everything else except basic logic and flow control. (No, there weren’t even functions; it has labels and goto.) It has 27 numeric variables (A-Z and theta, can store either float or complex numbers), 8 Lists (numeric arrays), 6 matricies (2d numeric arrays), 10 strings, and a few other things like “equations” and literal bitmap pictures.
Soo… I went from knowing only that to learning pointers. And pointer math. And data structures. And pointers to pointers, and the stack, and function calls, and all that goodness. And remember, I was learning and writing all of this in plain Assembly, in notepad (or on paper at school), not in C or C++ with a teacher, a textbook, SO, and an intelligent compiler with its incredibly helpful type checking and warnings. Just raw trial and error. I learned what I could from whatever cryptic sources I could find (and understand) online, and applied it.
But actually using what I learned? If a pointer was wrong, it resulted in unexpected behavior, memory corruption, freezes, etc. I didn’t have a debugger, an emulator, etc. I had notepad, the barebones compiler, and my calculator.
Also, iterating meant changing my code, recompiling, factory resetting my calculator (removing the battery for 30+ sec) because bugs usually froze it or corrupted something, then transferring the new program over, and finally running it. It was soo slowwwww. But I made steady progress.
Painful learning experience? Check.
Pointer hell? Absolutely.4 -
It was our first computer. probably it was 2008. I was super stupid back then. One day I saw a text file in our desktop, which says, "Hey $username, how are you? Message me here I-forgot-his-email@yahoo.com"
No matter how much we delete the text file, it kept on recreating and keep on adding same texts with multiple lines. I was really annoyed!
Yahoo messenger was popular back then. So I messaged the person using Yahoo messenger and he replied. Our conversation went this way:
Me: (after explaining a bit about the text file) what is this?
Him: it is a virus
Me: how do I delete this?
Him: if I teach you how to delete it, the whole purpose of creating it would be in vain
Me: okay, how do I create something like this?
Him: just Google
That day I was swearing at him from the bottom of my heart, not through messenger, but from my mind, because he didn't teach me how he made that virus.
I was like, "I will show you ***** that even I can make a virus better than that". So, I started googling & started learning how to make these scripts. The more I learned, the more it blew my mind. I was creating simple stuffs like, opening/closing CD rom every 5 seconds. It was so fun back then. Cause, my friends had no clue why their CD roms kept opening every 5 seconds.
After a few days, I started to thank the virus creator from the bottom of my heart. Cause, if he taught me how to create THAT virus that day, I probably would've just learned THAT one thing and stopped. But because he didn't teach me that, to learn one thing, I got to learn more than that one thing, which I'm really thankful for.
And then the journey started. Learned Batch, VBscript, C, C++, Java and so on. And still learning new things everyday...4 -
Best time to learn something new?
-Now
Best way to learn something new?
-By doing it. Practice makes perfect.
I wasted so much time and never got anywhere because I wanted to get it right. Fucking up is part of the learning process.2 -
fuck Pokemon GO developers I wasted my entire day catching those fictional pricks rather than learning something new fml1
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It was my first time in Berlin. I came as a tourist but started looking for a workplace, with hopes of getting a blue card and continuing work.
I searched online, going through some hiring platforms, and sent out a few messages around. I felt a special connection (I thought I was exactly who they needed), and wrote them a carefully crafted letter of intention alongside my lavish CV.
They got back to me, and I was given this task, to do while at home. I completed it, had a phone interview, and was invited on-site for a face to face interview. Everybody felt warm, I felt a connection. We already talked salary expectations, and all was going great.
They told me they'd get back to me for the next stage. ...
and they actually DID. Yes, they did!
They invited me for a second interview, but this time to prepare a technical topic to present. So I did. I picked one of the 3 topics they offered, which was about performance optimization. I had recently read materials about that, so I felt really empowered.
So far nobody told me what I was supposed to be doing at the new job, I only knew the technologies required, and what the company did for money.
I prepared a thorough presentation, with practical demos of why some things are bad for performance. While I was showing it, many people in the room were learning about this for the first time, which means I did good. The team lead had some extra questions that I wasn't able to answer in full (needed some research), but otherwise it was great.
The CTO then asked me out to lunch, to talk over some more stuff, and we had a general discussion about what drives us, our life story, etc. He said that he'd really like me to be part of the team, and that he's looking forward to working with me.
So I've been at it for almost a month. I've met everyone, got acquainted with the team, knew the biography of some of them, proven my worth, etc. I was ensured with body language, and verbal language that everything was going great. As careful as I was with this kind of stuff, I was positive that I'd get the job. I even started planning my trips, to get the documents ready.
And then I got a message stating the usual stuff "Thank you bla bla bla we don't think we'll need your services". I was shocked, but in good faith I wanted to reply something along the lines "I'm sorry it didn't work out, all the best in finding what you're looking for", but I found out that I was blocked from contacting them.
That's right. Rejected + blocked. After a month of fucking foreplay. I get rejection, even though it hurts. But being blocked?! That's just insane!8 -
Branch Manager without actual credentials (just a manager no real business decisions are made by him).
- Constantly is sick
- at home a lot doing „home office“ and not being responsive in company chat or emails
- is in home office 3-4 days a week while company policy clearly states one day a week
- watches YouTube a lot at work and calls out other people when they check their emails or quickly order something on amazon or maybe just listen to a podcast at work
- is a scrum master but rarely acts like it as in softens up rules as he sees fit
- backstabs employees in front of ceo when he actually entrusts them beforehand and says he is definitely in the employees side
- actually tried to physically intimidate me and another employee
- has no real technological background but chimes in on technical discussions and thinks it’s a new round of bullshit bingo
- does personal errands during work and books the time for it as work time
- claims people cheat on their time management entries and gets them warned and fired for it, while doing the exact thing himself
- knows he is trusted by the ceo but actually takes 0 interest in the future of the company
- tirades and gossips about other employees that just aren’t around at that moment
- is sexist at times
- very untrustworthy
- is responsible for a very toxic environment around the office
So that are his attributes - he got me warned and sacked because I supposedly committed fraud with my time management and caused the company financial harm - I had no projects or todos and was keeping myself busy with learning JS and python stuff instead of sitting around waiting for a ticket to come around.
Needless to say I’m glad I don’t see that guy any more. I’d break his jaw if I’d have to see him again.3 -
As a developer, I constantly feel like I'm lagging behind.
Long rant incoming.
Whenever I join a new company or team, I always feel like I'm the worst developer there. No matter how much studying I do, it never seems to be enough.
Feeling inadequate is nothing new for me, I've been struggling with a severe inferiority complex for most of my life. But starting a career as a developer launched that shit into overdrive.
About 10 years ago, I started my college education as a developer. At first things were fine, I felt equal to my peers. It lasted about a day or two, until I saw a guy working on a website in notepad. Nothing too special of course, but back then as a guy whose scripting experience did not go much farther than modifying some .ini files, it blew my mind. It went downhill from there.
What followed were several stressful, yet strangely enjoyable, years in college where I constantly felt like I was lagging behind, even though my grades were acceptable. On top of college stress, I had a number of setbacks, including the fallout of divorcing parents, childhood pets, family and friends dying, little to no money coming in and my mother being in a coma for a few weeks. She's fine now, thankfully.
Through hard work, a bit of luck, and a girlfriend who helped me to study, I managed to graduate college in 2012 and found a starter job as an Asp.Net developer.
My knowledge on the topic was limited, but it was a good learning experience, I had a good mentor and some great colleagues. To teach myself, I launched a programming tutorial channel. All in all, life was good. I had a steady income, a relationship that was already going for a few years, some good friends and I was learning a lot.
Then, 3 months in, I got diagnosed with cancer.
This ruined pretty much everything I had built up so far. I spend the next 6 months in a hospital, going through very rough chemo.
When I got back to working again, my previous Asp.Net position had been (understandably) given to another colleague. While I was grateful to the company that I could come back after such a long absence, the only position available was that of a junior database manager. Not something I studied for and not something I wanted to do each day neither.
Because I was grateful for the company's support, I kept working there for another 12 - 18 months. It didn't go well. The number of times I was able to do C# jobs can be counted on both hands, while new hires got the assignments, I regularly begged my PM for.
On top of that, the stress and anxiety that going through cancer brings comes AFTER the treatment. During the treatment, the only important things were surviving and spending my potentially last days as best as I could. Those months working was spent mostly living in fear and having to come to terms with the fact that my own body tried to kill me. It caused me severe anger issues which in time cost me my relationship and some friendships.
Keeping up to date was hard in these times. I was not honing my developer skills and studying was not something I'd regularly do. 'Why spend all this time working if tomorrow the cancer might come back?'
After much soul-searching, I quit that job and pursued a career in consultancy. At first things went well. There was not a lot to do so I could do a lot of self-study. A month went by like that. Then another. Then about 4 months into the new job, still no work was there to be done. My motivation quickly dwindled.
To recuperate the costs, the company had me do shit jobs which had little to nothing to do with coding like creating labels or writing blogs. Zero coding experience required. Although I was getting a lot of self-study done, my amount of field experience remained pretty much zip.
My prayers asking for work must have been heard because suddenly the sales department started finding clients for me. Unfortunately, as salespeople do, they looked only at my theoretical years of experience, most of which were spent in a hospital or not doing .Net related tasks.
Ka-ching. Here's a developer with four years of experience. Have fun.
Those jobs never went well. My lack of experience was always an issue, no matter how many times I told the salespeople not to exaggerate my experience. In the end, I ended up resigning there too.
After all the issues a consultancy job brings, I went out to find a job I actually wanted to do. I found a .Net job in an area little traffic. I even warned them during my intake that my experience was limited, and I did my very best every day that I worked here.
It didn't help. I still feel like the worst developer on the team, even superseded by someone who took photography in college. Now on Monday, they want me to come in earlier for a talk.
Should I just quit being a developer? I really want to make this work, but it seems like every turn I take, every choice I make, stuff just won't improve. Any suggestions on how I can get out of this psychological hell?6 -
I once worked at a small dev shop with a team of about 5. I was the lead but I was also the only backend developer. Since it was such a small company I also managed the Datacenter... which we had in our building. It was messy, but impressive. Although I seemed to be always stressed and felt like my job was always on the line... I do miss how excited I got when I learned something new. I was then able to talk to my boss about how excited I was to learn it and I can't wait to learn something new. I'm sad because I don't get that excited anymore. Now, I'm not really learning anything new, I'm just posting my skills as a developer. It really bums me out. I only wish that I had a degree in computer science so I can become a teacher and see my students get as excited as I was.4
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Anyone else work in a codebase that is so deeply convoluted, that the only way to make new features work is to write new code in a similarly convoluted way?
Everyone wants to refactor our system, but we're a small shop with an insane amount of technical debt, so it likely won't happen for a long time. Any suggestions in the meantime? I feel like I'm spending more time figuring out how to make something work in our system then learning actual good practices.6 -
Today, I planned on getting started with something different.
I've been thinking of learning some new stuff in Java, which I'm totally unfamiliar with.
So, I thought of creating a widget for devRant.
It is basically a small web browser which only opens up devRant.8 -
So I can see everything thinks CS should be taught differently this week.
Based on all of the ways we could change it, something no one seems to be mentioning much is security.
Everyone has many ways of learning logical processors and understanding how they work with programming, but for every line of code taught, read or otherwise learnt you should also learn, be taught how to make it less vulnerable (as nothing is invulnerable on the internet)
Every language has its exploits and pitfalls and ways of overflowing but how you handle these issues or prevent them occurring should be more important than syntaxually correct code. The tools today are 100000x better then when I started with notepad.exe, CMD and Netscape.
Also CS shouldn’t be focused on tools and languages as such, seeing as new versions and ideals come out quicker then CS courses change, but should be more focused on the means of coming to logical decisions and always questioning why or how something is the way it is, and how to improve it.
Tl;dr
Just my two cents. -
Hello DevRant! Time for my first rant. As the saying goes: Everyone should put his own house in order first. So why not rant about myself before i rant about others...
Dear past self next time be less an idiot and enter a database into the persistence.xml wich actually exisist so i don't waste a fucking hour or something like that, for looking what's wrong with my JDBC driver....
Learning something new can suck sometimes if you realize that you made a dumb mistake which prevents you from progress. -
Software Devs are less supportive than the community tries to convey. They're also part of the most self-deluded and obnoxious crowd that exists on earth.
Someone saying they don't enjoy coding 24/7 outside of work? You actually enjoy totally different hobbies that have next to nothing to do with coding?
- Shitty developer, you should probably work elsewhere. Maybe flipping burgers.
"Coding in <Framework X> is SO friggin' easy. You're basically subhuman garbage if you can't learn it within a month!"
Watch some YouTube Videos with the "Freelancer Success Stories" of dudes that haven't - apparently coded, ever - and started to code late in life and tell you how perseverance and learning brings the success and yet you never see any repos of those guys. You see those guys mostly go on for up to half an hour to regurgitate some hot garbage you can read up within two minutes yourself from ANY coding blog.
You're not using a macbook to develop?
- "Oooof, man! How can you?"
You don't really like "Popular Framework X"?
- Especially when it comes to Frontend Frameworks prepare to either die on the hill of your beliefs or die a futile and slow death when people - more or less - snarkily try to dissect your opinion in order to try - again, more or less - to hide their own bias. Because don't forget, your opinion is OBJECTIVELY wrong and you simply happen to a garbage developer for (dis-)liking something.
You DO like "Popular Framework X"?
- Well, rinse and repeat basically.
You struggle to get a new job?
- All your fault. You clearly didn't spend enough time coding; you should have at least 12 Open-Source Projects with at least 100k downloads the week.
There is actually a whole lot more, but I feel I'm basically done with software dev. Software development is neither creative nor terribly fun. I'm just angry at myself that I switched careers for the money.20 -
So, the uni hires a new CS lecturer. He is teaching 230, the second CS class in the CS major. Two weeks into the semester, he walks in and proceeds to do his usual fumbling around on the computer (with the projector on).
Then, he goes to his Google Drive, which is empty mostly, and tells us that he accidentally wrote a program that erased his entire hard drive and his internet storage drives (Google, box, etc.)...
I mean, way to build credibility, guy... Then he tells us that he has a backup of everything 500 miles away, where he moved from. He also says that he only knows C (we only had formally learned Java so far), but hasn't actually coded (correction: typed!) in 20+ years, because he had someone do that for him and he has been learning Java over the past two weeks.
The rest of the semester followed as expected: he never had any lecture material and would ramble for an hour. Every class, he would pull up a new .java file and type code that rarely ran and he had no debugging skills. We would spend 15 minutes trying to help him with syntax issues—namely (), ;— to get his program running and then there would be a logic issue, in data structures.
He knew nothing of our sequence and what we knew up until this point and would lecture about how we will be terrible programmers because we did not do something the way he wanted—though he failed to give us expectations or spend the five minutes to teach us basic things (run-time complexity, binary, pseudocode etc). His assignments were not related to the material and if they were, they were a couple of weeks off. Also, he never knew which class we were and would ask if we were 230 or 330 at the end of a lecture...
I learned relatively nothing from him (though I ended up with a B+) but thankful to be taking advanced data structures from someone who knows their stuff. He was awful. It was strange. Also, why did the uni not tell him what he needed to be teaching?
End rant.undefined worst teacher worst professor awful communication awful code worst cs teacher disorganization1 -
Well on my last full-time job, that ware using cookies for authentication (not something new, eh?). The thing is, you see, the cookies had the 'accountId' which if you change to another number, kaboom you're that account, oh but that was not all, there was an option to mark the account type in there 'accountType', which was kind of obvious in VLE (virtual learning environment), 'Teacher', 'Student', 'Manager' put what of those values and boom you are that role for the session
Thing was open of SQL injection from the login form, from said cookies and form every part you can pass input to it, when I raised the question to my TL he said 'no one is going to know about thatt, I don't see what is the problem', then escalated to higher management 'oh well speak to *tl_guy*'
Oh and bonus points for it being written in ASP CLASSIC in 2014+ (I was supposed to rewrite, but ended up patching ASP code and writing components in PHP)
In 2015-2016, in a private college, charging kind-of big money per year1 -
When I start #100daysofcoding ! In which you at least daily code for an hour. It can be your side project or learning something new. Just search on Twitter if you want to know more
I am sure many of you already know this ! -
The GitHub graphql API is pretty neat, mostly because it's a great example of a product where graphql has advantages over REST. As a code reviewer for repos with hundreds of simultaneous PRs, I use it to filter through branches for stuff that needs my attention the most.
NewRelic's NRQL API is also quite nice, as it provides an unusual but very direct interface into the underlying application metrics.
I'm also a big fan of launchlibrary, purely because I love spaceflight, and their API is an extremely rich and actively maintained resource. This makes it a great data source for playing around with plotting & statistics libraries — when I'm learning new languages or tools, I prefer to make something "real" rather than following a tutorial, and I often use launchlibrary as a fun and useful data backend. -
Is it just me or what. I had begun learning web development (but prefer C, shell scripting, Linux... ).
One thing that amazes me - besides having to learn 1356367626785576 technologies to get something done and the fact we get a fresh new amazing framework every 0.00000000000234 seconds - is CSS.
Amazing, I made a navigation bar where I wanted the items to be displayed in the horizontal position, so I
.navbar li, a {display:inline-block}
Works fine.
Next day I'm doing the same from scratch, doesn't fucking work. I look the previous design, HTML structure looks identical, I only use a different font face and colors.
After a while I randomly decided to put a <div> around the a element in order to do something else, update the page and... Voilá, text is in line.
Like... Wtf.
I'm like fuck it. No way I want to work with this shit, let's go back to shell.6 -
For those struggling with imposter syndrome, keep a record of your progress.
Break it down into
* used
* learning
* dont need a manual or cheat sheet
* use every day
You can also break it down per project:.
"Project xyz (python: 2 years)"
"Project ijk (js:6 months)".
Etc.
Critically, keep these in something physical, like a notebook or whatever you use *regularly and frequently* to keep notes. That's important because you should be glancing over your progress as a remainder.
Each time you want to add a new line, rewrite your existing progress on a new page, before adding the new line.
So as you flip through the pages you get a large and larger chronological list of your progress, and improvement, and experience.
Add a date to the title for each and a brief note about something that you did or happened on that day or week.
You wont second guess yourself so much once you can see how far you came.
Like at one time I was actually competent at js! (Before I stopped the flash cards anyway).3 -
Holy fuck is learning new frameworks frustrating.
I'm trying to setup a simple fucking flutter app and all their tutorials are basic shit with no auth/complex routing.
Any feature of flutter that's not in a tutorial has absolute shit documentation with 0 examples on how to use it.
Material app has like 20 properties and if you click on something like on generate there is shit for knowing what the fuck it's expecting.
Stackoverflow has a ton a code but that's just it, code. I have absolutely no idea how they generate the code they have from the documentation on the site. They must have been following flutter from the start.
Ahhhhh! 😠13 -
So I'm on vacation right now to visit family. I received an email from the head of department that, due to our department getting 7 new hires in one day, the seating arrangement has been changed.
My new seat is next to this one developer who's old enough to be my dad. He's a very nice guy and all, but the problem is he burps ALL. THE. TIME. I've never met anybody more gassy. His burps don't stink, thank God, but they're loud enough that it's seriously jarring.
You know how us devs can be completely in the zone until some marketing dickbag taps you on the shoulder and asks you to check your email or help with something that is absolutely not your job and you completely lose all focus and have to start over? Its exactly like that, except it happens every 10 minutes.
Another thing is, my back is now facing away from the wall, towards the rest of the office. The nearest section to mine is management. That means that anybody, including the CEO, can walk up right behind me and see what I'm doing at all times.
I really hate that. Id much rather be next to the wall to have some sort of privacy. Somehow sitting next to burpy guy is still the thing I'm most annoyed about though.
I tried to ask for a different seat, but my manager effectively said that I have no choice but to sit there because that guy is part of my team, and teammates should sit together. He forgot about the fact that, while the work him and I do is indeed related, I've been working on a solo project for the past few months and I don't need to be next to anybody in particular because I'm the only one working on this thing. Theoretically, I could sit in the toilet with my laptop and get my work done just fine. Maybe when I talk to him face to face in the office I can convince him to have some mercy on me.
The bright side is I'm very excited about meeting those 7 new hires I mentioned. They seem to be smart, capable people so I look forward to working with them and learning from them. Every cloud has a silver lining. 😊7 -
> Advice to new coders
Don't worry over picking language A or B.
Just pick A, use it for a month, then move on to B.
In a normal 3 year college degree you'll try multiple languages, some of which you'll never use again, and they'll each teach you something.
I had classes in Java, C, C++, C#, Prolog, Assembler, F#, JS.
Never used F# again and no one uses Prolog. But they were great for learning recursion and logic.
It's not like you take "a step down a bad path" if you pick a language you're never gonna use again.
You'll also learn new stuff on the job. We have one team that uses Go and one that uses Rust. None of the devs ever studied those languages. They were mostly former Java devs who leaned on the job.2 -
Running a fucking conda environment on windows (an update environment from the previous one that I normally use) gets to be a fucking pain in the fucking ass for no fucking reason.
First: Generate a new conda environment, for FUCKING SHITS AND GIGGLES, DO NOT SPECIFY THE PYTHON VERSION, just to see compatibility, this was an experiment, expected to fail.
Install tensorflow on said environment: It does not fucking work, not detecting cuda, the only requirement? To have the cuda dependencies installed, modified, and inside of the system path, check done, it works on 4 other fucking environments, so why not this one.
Still doesn't work, google around and found some thread on github (the errors) that has a way to fix it, do it that way, fucking magic, shit is fixed.
Very well, tensorflow is installed and detecting cuda, no biggie. HAD TO SWITCH TO PYHTHON 3,8 BECAUSE 3.9 WAS GIVING ISSUES FOR SOME UNKNOWN FUCKING REASON
Ok no problem, done.
Install jupyter lab, for which the first in all other 4 environments it works. Guess what a fuckload of errors upon executing the import of tensorflow. They go on a loop that does not fucking end.
The error: imPoRT eRrOr thE Dll waS noT loAdeD
Ok, fucking which one? who fucking knows.
I FUCKING HATE that the main language for this fucking bullshit is python. I guess the benefits of the repl, I do, but the python repl is fucking HORSESHIT compared to the one you get on: Lisp, Ruby and fucking even NODE in which error messages are still more fucking intelligent than those of fucking bullshit ass Python.
Personally? I am betting on Julia devising a smarter environment, it is a better language already, on a second note: If you are worried about A.I taking your job, don't, it requires a team of fucktards working around common basic system administration tasks to get this bullshit running in the first place.
My dream? Julia or Scala (fuck you) for a primary language in machine learning and AI, in which entire environments, with aaaaaaaaaall of the required dlls and dependencies can be downloaded and installed upon can just fucking run. A single directory structure in which shit just fucking works (reason why I like live environments like Smalltalk, but fuck you on that too) and just run your projects from there, without setting a bunch of bullshit from environment variables, cuda dlls installation phases and what not. Something that JUST FUCKING WORKS.
I.....fucking.....HATE the level of system administration required to run fucking anything nowadays, the reason why we had to create shit like devops jobs, for the sad fuckers that have to figure out environment configurations on a box just to run software.
Fuck me man development turned to shit, this is why go mod, node npm, php composer strict folder structure pipelines were created. Bitch all you want about npm, but if I can create a node_modules setting with all of the required dlls to run a project, even if this bitch weights 2.5GB for a project structure you bet your fucking ass that I would.
"YOU JUST DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING" YES I FUCKING DO and I will get this bullshit fixed, I will get it running just like I did the other 4 environments that I fucking use, for different versions of cuda and python and the dependency circle jerk BULLSHIT that I have to manage. But this "follow the guide and it will work, except when it does not and you are looking into obscure github errors" bullshit just takes away from valuable project time when you have a small dedicated group of developers and no sys admin or devops mastermind to resort to.
I have successfully deployed:
Java
Golang
Clojure
Python
Node
PHP
VB/C# .NET
C++
Rails
Django
Projects, and every single fucking time (save for .net, that shit just fucking works on a dedicated windows IIS server) the shit will not work with x..nT reasons. It fucking obliterates me how fucking annoying this bullshit is. And the reason why the ENTIRE FUCKING FIELD of computer science and software engineering is so fucking flawed.
But we can't all just run to simple windows bs in which we have documentation for everything. We have to spend countless hours on fucking Linux figuring shit out (fuck you also, I have been using Linux since I was 18, I am 30 now) for which graphical drivers for machine learning, cuda and whatTheFuckNot require all sorts of sys admin gymnasts to be used.
Y'all fucked up a long time ago. Smalltalk provided an all in one, easily rollable back to previous images, easily administered interfaces for this fileFuckery bullshit, and even though the JVM and the .NET environments did their best to hold shit down, and even though we had npm packages pulling the universe inside, or gomod compiling shit into one place NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO we had to do whatever the fuck we wanted to feel l337 and wanted.
Fuck all of you, fuck this field, fuck setting boxes for ML/AI and fuck every single OS in existence2 -
TL;DR - Developers, do not buy HP Stream models laptop unless they are selling at $1.
Cannot even handle Sublime + Firefox + LAMP use case well. On lubuntu OS with literally nothing else on it. Sublime crashes every hour.
Now I am learning how to code using other tools before I can buy a better replacement for it. Failure with gedit; very slow and sluggish. Currently trying Geany.
It's a pain in the ass to learn new tool especially when you are so accustomed to something. 😣12 -
I'm out of my mind bored. I'm an unemployed person with a great job. You'd think this would be awesome. It's torture.
I work for a consulting company. I get paid whether or not they have work for me. They haven't for several months. I'm not hearing anything. I don't know when it will change.
I'm a skilled developer in a few very popular languages - nothing remotely in the ballpark of old or obsolete. I hear that's in demand. I spend most of my time answering questions on Stack Overflow. I really like to help people, but it boggles my mind that the people struggling with the stuff I help them with all have actual work to do and I don't.
I like to learn about new stuff, but I'm just not interested in learning another framework or anything else to add to the giant pile of stuff I'm already not using. It's not fun anymore.
I don't want to do another side project, either. I have a job as a software developer. That should, at some point, involve developing some software.
This is sucking the life out of me. It's harder and harder to get out of bed and come to work. I've held off looking for another job because I'm hoping this will change. The people here are great. I could go somewhere else and it could suck for completely different reasons.
Ironically, this is close to the reason why I left my last job. Ten years ago I went through a spell where I just gave up and stopped coming to work for over a month. No one noticed. Other people were stressed about getting laid off. Some of them were. Not me.
Am I part of some weird experiment to see how insane someone can go in this totally screwed-up circumstance? Are people following me around with cameras?
I'd love to find something else, but by all outward appearances I had already found an awesome place to work. There's only one thing missing - the work.
Thanks for listening. I'm just going to put my head on my desk for a while and despair. What is wrong with this industry? We're a mess on so many levels.12 -
Question to all you web developers out there: how do you survive long term in this job without going nuts? I have been working in this industry for almost 7 years and feelings of frustration have accumulated, to the point where I honestly feel like laying g bricks as a job would be more rewarding. Here are the main reasons why:
1) The fact that your job is never "finished" and it looks like and endless stream of tasks. Either the project has money being rolled in or is pretty much dead. Ever changing requirements ensure that most of what you do will be rewritten in 6 months or so. This is ok for the most part, but overtime it does give you the feeling that most of your effort was wasted, and you have the same website/app to show for it, slightly different...
2) The never ending churn of tech, particularly in the Javascript/node ecosystem. Sure, there is a good side of learning new approaches of doing things and it brings variety, but there is the dark side that you never feel you are getting better at doing your job, as every new project does not look anything like the previous. Even if all the stack pieces are the same (never happens), everyone sets it up and organises the project differently enough that you have to spend loads of time solving things you have done before. This makes it difficult to get a sense that you are mastering something...
So, if autonomy, purpose, and mastery are the keys to fulfilling work, I find this career lacking in mastery and purpose...does anyone feels/felt the same? How did you counter it?3 -
As time goes on.. I see my friends, whom I studied programming with, just stop learning new things.
They think, or just behave, like they know everything worth knowing.
You can't talk to them about programming outside of work anymore. They just say that programming is "something you do at work".
I used to look-up to those people, and learn a lot from them. Now, they don't care enough to Google "what's this Rust thing people talk about?".
That really saddens me.2 -
!rant, TL;DR at the bottom
Holy fuck, Yesterday, I got absolutely schooled by a literal newbie.
And I mean, NEWBIE newbie, the dude just started a Computer Science degree, and has been learning Java only for a MONTH. He has 0 prior experience with code or anything of the like, and he's somewhat of an Ars(Israel's version of a Gopnik).
So I was helping him with some stuff he didn't understand, and lo and behold his code was probably the most aesthetically pleasing and organized code I have seen in my 8 years of programming(I know 8 is not much, but It's at least above beginner level). The dude's a perfectionist, so I was like, "Okay, very impressive, but makes sense for perfectionism"(I straight up told him: "Damn, I've seen people with years of programming experience who can't learn to write this well, and you do this by default? I envy whoever's going to work with you"), and then I saw the way he writes checks(as in, methods that return a boolean) and I think I came.
The code was:
[First method in the picture]
And I know, it doesn't look as ✨ WOW✨ as I make it sound, but in my personal opinion this both looks much better and is much more readable than what I normally write:
[Second method in the picture]
and whenever there are longer or more complicated checks it makes it look like a simple puzzle that just fits in all the pieces nicely, for example in a rectangle class we had to write an 'isIn' method, this is how I wrote it:
[Third method in the picture]
His way of writing the same thing was:
[Fourth method in the picture]
Which I think is soooooo much better and readable and organized,
It's enough just looking at the short return statement to immediately understand everything that's going on.
"Oh, so it just checks if the SW(South West, i.e. Bottom Left) corner is above and to the right, and if the NE(North East, i.e. Top Right) corner is bellow and to the left"
Point of the story? Some people are just fucking awesome. And sometimes the youngest/most inexperienced people can teach you new tricks.
And to all of you dinosaurs here with like, 20+ years of experience, y'all can still learn even from us stupid ones. If 8 years can get schooled by a 1 month, 20 years can get schooled by a 1 year.
Listen to everyone everybody, never know where you might learn something new.
TL;DR: Got schooled by a local "Gopnik" who only started learning programming a month ago with 0 prior experience with his insane level of organization and readability.30 -
Ok Storytime.
Yesterday I applied for a summerjob as a Software/Webdeveloper at some companies. Today I got a call and they tell me I have the job. When I asked what kind of things I will have to do there the Recruiter didn't really know, so I accepted because fuck it.
Later I got told that somebody from the team will be calling me. So i ask that guy what I'm going to be doing and he tells me they have a old sharepoint application that they need to migrate to a new sharepoint version.
So I read up on sharepoint and find out about the languages ASP.NET supports aaaaaand it's about my least favorite language C#. (Well actually that would be Visual Basic but nevermind) We did some C# in school but I never got fond of it.
But hey learning something new ain't so bad or is it?
What are your thoughts on Sharepoint, ASP.NET and C#?21 -
The reason I stick around at my current job is thanks to a mentor who has helped me reach greater potential.
He's our senior architect.
It began with him simply bouncing ideas off me. I was a rubber duck basically. After a while I began to understand these ideas. All sorts of design patterns, cache invalidation problems and solutions, and so much more.
It was almost as if through osmosis that I began to research things and learn more and more about topics I had only barely seen in high-level articles and papers.
Once I began to contribute to the discussion, he helped foster that. I went from being a rubber duck to a protege.
My pay here isn't what it should be. The problems we're faced with are stressful and often times wear me out. I stay because I'm self-taught and I yearn for learning as I always have.
This isn't just my job, but my passion. I love what I do, and I get up happy to come here every day knowing I'll learn something new while doing what I love.1 -
Why the fuck is this apple stuff so fucking expensive?
I want to dig into IOS app development but I am seriously considering not to do it because it's fucking expensive...
Backstory:
I am a young dev (in apprenticeship) and my company offered me a phone. That's great because I can save the money that I would have payed for my phone bill.
But sadly it's an iPhone... I thought why not make something cool out of it and start learning IOS development.
But so far all I saw from IOS development are extreme high costs...
Is there some kind of student plan or anything that makes it cheaper to learn?
Can you guys give me any advice on this?
I own an old MacBook but I need a new OS on it... (long story)
Are there anymore hidden costs? Any tips where to start?
Thanks for your help fellow ranters and sorry for the half rant half question12 -
Oh boy, finally something to rant about.
I got hired in a "small" company (not even 2000 people in it), then got "shipped" to a way bigger company. Basically, I work for this company (the french biggest internet / phone service provider) but in the name of my own. And this since last wednesday.
First off, I'm fucking stupid. After leaving the big company that I was in before, I swore to myself that from now on, I would work for smaller companies, mainly because I couldn't stand the inertia that big company have. You ask for something, you get it a month and a half after. The old company has about 6000 employees... This company has 98k people in it. Fuck. My. Life.
Now, to the rant: Orange (the company) decided that they had to move their office somewhere else. They set up a lot of things so that all we needed to do was to put things in boxes, to work somewhere else until next monday, then we could go to the new office on tuesday morning.
Keep in mind that I have been there for 8 days: I keep learning how they do their stuff. For example, if I need a specific docker image, I can't get it from the Docker Hub, the download will fail. However, if I hit an Orange subdomain's registry, I will get this image from a mirror. Because fuck logic.
When we join the company, they give us a Windows laptop ("yeaah we have useless but required Orange softwares that don't run on Linux" "Yeeaaah fuck you") that have a specific VPN allowing us to use the Orange network and, in theory, you can download docker images or clone orange repositories from that network.
In practice, you can simply just go fuck yourself. Why? Because whenever you want to curl, wget or pull anything (or even pip install), your connection keeps being shut down while it waits for the response's header.
The worst part? According to my (new) boss's evasive answers, the way to fix that works with glue, sticks and the power of the Force.
WHY THE FUCK DO YOU ENFORCE US A SHITTY OS FOR DEVELOPMENT, WHEN THE TOOLS YOU SHOVE IN IT WITH A FAKE SMILE DON'T EVEN WORK, AND WE HAVE TO HACK OUR WAY TO FUCKING WORK?6 -
The ones who use it, what do you like or value about Linux? Why do you use it?
Before I answer, let me say that I am a noob compared to the rest of this community. I run Ubuntu because Arch was too complicated when I tried and bash scripts equal to frustrations for me. That's my knowledge level.
- I don't feel "observed" when using a Linux distro compared to Windows and macOS.
- Feel more connected to the open source thought and the free spirit.
- Feel like I can do anything I want. Learning new programming languages easily, trying out web servers, try and setup own website or mail server etc.
- Everything is accessible. Read something cool about docker? ALT+T to open a terminal and start up a docker container to try out.
- No Internet browsing for software, like googling "Firefox download english".
- Sometimes forces me to learn about the workings of a computer, like networks, servers, routing, firewalls, bootup sequence etc.
- So many great command line tools. Want to find out quickly who owns a website? Want to query a specific DNS server? All possible within 5 seconds!
All in all using Linux feels like watching a documentary while using Windows is more like watching a dumb comedy show where I can turn my brain off, but get more stupid after a while.6 -
Hey guys, I created this application for Linux users that lets you download and install multiple essential softwares/tools at once. It's something like Ninite (in Windows) but for Linux. So I called it Linite! It's still new, so it doesn't support many distros yet.
Now, I know there are many package managers and stuff, but I just wanted to make something really simple/basic and user friendly that can help even new Linux users. I was learning Python so I just thought it'd be nice to do some project.
Please do check it out and I'd love to get some feedback. Link's below!
https://github.com/shahlin/Linite11 -
!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!10 -
!rant !notrant !confession_maybe? Bit of a read.
Last year, around September (around 8 months into my first job in the industry), I started loosing motivation to be a developer. By then I had consistently dropped out of 3 or 4 courses for my degree (no penalties as it was pretty much within the starting weeks of the each course). I was think that I do not want to do this. It got so bad that I was looking for other jobs and even trade apprenticeships (I am old-ish so chances of that are so bloody low).
I had my mind set. Including not wanting to finish the degree I had started, which only had 1 year as full time to complete.
My missus supported me in my decision making, but she insisted that I finish the degree as the years I spent on it would have been a waste if I don't. So I agreed, with the idea that I will do this part time when I find another job.
Fast forward to New Years and a very spontaneous decisions was made. I resigned from my dev job and we ended up moving away to another city, two weeks later. By this point on I was so certain that I did not want to be in the IT industry. I had not done any dev work (personal projects or learning new technology etc) outside of the job for months. It had been months since I've visited devrant (to be honest it was not even installed on my phone, mainly because I broke my phone and after having it replaced I had not reinstalled a large portion of the apps I used). I had sold my custom built pc thinking that we do not need two PC's (we kind of don't, she's fine with her laptop) which meant no more dev stuff as none of this stuff was set up on my missus pc. I was looking for all kinds of jobs outside of the IT industry, anything really.
But then something happened. And this is that something. I mean this, deverant. I was flicking through the apps list on google play store, and I saw devrant, and I choose to reinstall it. I began reading rants and comments and I am certain that this made me realise why I want to be a developer. Within about 2 weeks of redownloading deverant I was enrolled full time as a uni student fully motivated to earn my degree.
There are bits and pieces left out of the story. I don't regret leaving my first ever dev job and moving away, it does seem drastic but it changed me for the better I believe. I have the experience from that role and I new fresh start so to speak. I think my missus new this was just a phase, although it felt so certain about it.
I am more of a lurker than a ranter or a commenter on this social platform but I felt that I need to share this. Thanks for reading this. Not really sure what to tag this. Has anyone else experienced this before?5 -
So I was writing docs for my project the hard way. Manually. Every time I added something new, I had to find the right place for it to be alphabetically in the reference. And god forbid I want to have the same information in two pages: I would need to copy/ paste and pray that I not forget to update the information EVERYWHERE.
I didn't feel like installing and learning some new markdown generating bullshit so I just made my own system. It's very simple and intuitive and I love it.
I made sure it can cover two use case: reading partial documents from the disk, and rendering in-memory objects to markdown too (like rendering a collection of tuples into a table)
I didn't care much for templating, so there's no templating capability.2 -
I wanna learn something new but everytime I take one course I stop at the first video u.u
It's like I can't keep on the learning curve of anything unless I have the real need to do it :/
In addition, everytime I want to retake the course, a new/unknown technology is in front of me and well... everything starts again2 -
!rant, but some kind of story
I work as a lead dev on a gmod server of a pretty big german community. With the fun stuff, there come the duty‘s to help Jr. Devs or even help people get into Developing. The part, where you help junior devs is always fun, but what I find interesting is the part where you help people learn coding. It’s not easy work, but you learn more every “lesson”. I catch myself exploring and learning something new, even if I know the topic. For me it’s a new journey every time.
Not sure if there are many people who can relate but I just wanted to tell my side on it.1 -
I have been learning / developing JavaScript (nodejs and the whole world around it) and I have to say that I love JavaScript 😍 but I would like to learn something new. Something completely different from web-development. I also have some experience in Java / Python so also something different than that.
Any ideas? :)14 -
So I've been working on automating a project's regression tests for several months.
I'm not even experienced as a tester but as a developer it's more satisfying to script than to do everything manually.
Someone had been working on the project before but their test object repository was a mess. The senior that picked up the project while I was learning asked to be moved out two months later because it was too frustrating for him.
So there I am trying to fix the whole thing by myself. My boss notices a lot of the tests were failing and asked me to fix it before scripting new ones. I spend like a month doing that and then I hear rumours about cancelling the automation project.
Later I get told that I'm going to be rolled off the project due to low productivity. A few weeks later a new manager steps in and while I'm giving the knowledge transfer to my boss and manager they come to the realization that this clusterfuck isn't something a single person should be doing.
The manager talks with the client asking to keep me working on the project and asks for two more resources to speed things up.
Now I'm coaching three people.2 -
!rant
Need some opinions. Joined a new company recently (yippee!!!). Just getting to grips with everything at the minute. I'm working on mobile and I will be setting up a new team to take over a project from a remote team. Looking at their iOS and Android code and they are using RxSwift and RxJava in them.
Don't know a whole lot about the Android space yet, but on iOS I did look into Reactive Cocoa at one point, and really didn't like it. Does anyone here use Rx, or have an opinion about them, good or bad? I can learn them myself, i'm not looking for help with that, i'm more interested in opinions on the tools themselves.
My initial view (with a lack of experience in the area):
- I'm not a huge fan of frameworks like this that attempt to change the entire flow or structure of a language / platform. I like using third party libraries, but to me, its excessive to include something like this rather than just learning the in's / out's of the platform. I think the reactive approach has its use cases and i'm not knocking the it all together. I just feel like this is a little bit of forcing a square peg into a round hole. Swift wasn't designed to work like that and a big layer will need to be added in, in order to change it. I would want to see tremendous gains in order to justify it, and frankly I don't see it compared to other approaches.
- I do like the MVVM approach included with it, but i've easily managed to do similar with a handful of protocols that didn't require a new architecture and approach.
- Not sure if this is an RxSwift thing, or just how its implemented here. But all ViewControllers need to be created by using a coordinator first. This really bugs me because it means changing everything again. When I first opened this app, login was being skipped, trying to add it back in by selecting the default storyboard gave me "unwrapping a nil optional" errors, which took a little while to figure out what was going on. This, to me, again is changing too much in the platform that even the basic launching of a screen now needs to be changed. It will be confusing while trying to build a new team who may or may not know the tech.
- I'm concerned about hiring new staff and having to make sure that they know this, can learn it or are even happy to do so.
- I'm concerned about having a decrease in the community size to debug issues. Had horrible experiences with this in the past with hybrid tech.
- I'm concerned with bugs being introduced or patterns being changed in the tool itself. Because it changes and touches everything, it will be a nightmare to rip it out or use something else and we'll be stuck with the issue. This seems to have happened with ReactiveCocoa where they made a change to their approach that seems to have caused a divide in the community, with people splitting off into other tech.
- In this app we have base Swift, with RxSwift and RxCocoa on top, with AlamoFire on top of that, with Moya on that and RxMoya on top again. This to me is too much when only looking at basic screens and networking. I would be concerned that moving to something more complex that we might end up with a tonne of dependencies.
- There seems to be issues with the server (nothing to do with RxSwift) but the errors seem to be getting caught by RxSwift and turned into very vague and difficult to debug console logs. "RxSwift.RxError error 4" is not great. Now again this could be a "way its being used" issue as oppose to an issue with RxSwift itself. But again were back to a big middle layer sitting between me and what I want to access. I've already had issues with login seeming to have 2 states, success or wrong password, meaning its not telling the user whats actually wrong. Now i'm not sure if this is bad dev or bad tools, but I get a sense RxSwift is contributing to it in some fashion, at least in this specific use of it.
I'll leave it there for now, any opinions or advice would be appreciated.question functional programming reactivex java library reactive ios functional swift android rxswift rxjava16 -
For all my friends here who have known me for years can easily notice there has been a drastic change in me.
I used to be confident. That shit was hollow but I used to laugh in the face of fear. I was ignorant and that ignorance fueled a lot of the much needed confidence.
Over the years, I learned a lot. The more I know, the more I realised how much I don't know. And for all that I know, I have to use the brain power to retain and implement it, else it rusts.
This image is of my 2021 goals that I drafted last December. Wasn't able to achieve the first, the last and the art one. But surely got myself surrounded by some of the smartest people I have ever worked with.
Now they have rightly said, be careful with what you wish for.
MY CONFIDENCE IS SHATTERED.
I feel dumb. Constant imposter syndrome. While I am learning every moment and there is no measure to it, I feel incompetent to an extent that I have started questioning how did I even reach this far?!
While, yet again I am the youngest in my team, my manager is bit micromanaging and agressive with OKRs/KPIs and tech team isn't very supportive creating constant friction (something I never faced with developers in my life because devs are my best friends), I fear how much more time will I take to ramp up in this new job and feel confident enough to tackle things on my own without constant nudge from leadership or different teams?
Or is it just that I have burnt out firefighting and lost the motivation I had?
After all, what does this all even mean?10 -
Me: *starts learning new tech stack*
Boss: you do this project right now(will have no relation with the tech stack I'm learning)
Me: boss you told me to learn something else
Boss: I need the project by this week.12 -
I am so fucking lost.
I literally have zero expectations from life for now and future.
There was a time when I had so much clarity in my life. Rather, I was known for it.
Folks used to reach me out for guidance and my approaches even worked for others.
I was goal oriented and biased towards action. Failing and learning from it, I used to make things happen and with constant feedback kept progressing.
While none of that has changed, I still feel lost and numb. No, I am not depressed or suffering through any mental illness. I am physical active and able to feel the happiness.
But the recent incident with a narcissistic, left me emotionally handicap. I can no longer feel any kind of love or affection. I overcame the damage done and healed myself.
But now, I am done. Even if I engage with anyone for a relationship it would be mostly for sex. I can care for people around me and be affectionate towards them but when it comes to an intimate relationship, I feel it's not something I can do in this lifetime. I tried multiple times but failed.
These days, all I am doing is putting my heads down and working like crazy. Never in my life I worked more than 10 hours in an entire week. Now, I work 10+ hours everyday. During that time, I am highly productive.
And in my free time, I am busy housekeeping different life problems. Either paying bills, figuring out an insurance, planning some investment, or making some kind of life decision.
It's draining me. I feel as if I am losing sanity. But that's the only thing I am able to do.
Maybe it's the lockdown effect. Maybe some damage is yet to be healed.
But I got nothing better to do. I have some good ideas. Not those hipster-ish disruptive Million dollar ideas, but decent enough to solve a problem for a strong use case.
However, all of this is becoming overwhelming these days. Because decision making is complex and difficult task. It can make or break the future.
As of now I am confused how should I go about pursuing two of the important projects that I want to accomplish.
1. Migrating out of Google ecosystem. Is it even practically possible for my use case? What are the alternatives? Planning to opt in for a paid cloud storage so have to factor in that aspect as well.
I want to keep this new setup only for official use like bank and government stuff. Maybe family and close friends. Then have current ids for public logins and sharing it with retards whom I can block or ignore if they harass me. The research is overwhelming but having a structured setup gives insane amount of efficiency when life is spam free.
2. Migrating my Pihole and OpenVPN setup out of Digital Ocean to GCP. Primarily because $5 is a lot of amount for my computational requirements and Google has used my data enough, for me to use the free tier.
However, there isn't a simple script for a tech noob like me, to go ahead and setup something. I did find a Github repository but the documentation is kind of outdated so RTFM failed for me.
I don't know whether to pursue my start-up or let it go and focus on moving to Europe.
It's just so fucking stupid to even exist. And let's not forget taxes. Bloody taxes.21 -
This is definitely a total first world problem but I am so frustrated.
I am stuck in a team that embodies the Japanese proverb "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down".
The management are there because it is convenient and flexible and have no interest in managing or keeping up with tech.
The lead developers are extremely anti-social and are not approachable and the this stems down to the devs (not all but really most) - all there just to do the bare minimum and spend most of their energies in trying to avoid work or having learn something.
Unfortunately I am passionate about what I do and want to build high-quality products and this has put me at odds with the way things work.
I could fill up alot of time talking about how I was ordered to "cut" images/icons out of PDFs rather just getting them from the branding team, or how I was scolded for having set up logging, detected a problem caused by another developer and fixed it before it cost a big client a massive amount of money... But really the point is that I have never worked somewhere with such an awful attitude to enthusiasm and quite frankly it boggles my mind trying to understand how they rationalise these things but the answer is always laziness.
Obviously there are worse problems in the world than working in a job where you are encouraged to do nothing... But it actually really depresses me and causes anxiety that I am working with people who don't care about testing or monitoring or learning new things or even collaboration.
...sigh...
Hopefully the job market will start opening again soon4 -
Recently I receive a ton of mails from cool/hip/rockstar startups. They all run like this:
"We are a innovative Startup based on a [insert some random stuff or buzzword] blockchain! If you're a student with skills and experience in blockchain, machine learning and AI willing to change the world with our sick technology and make it a better place..."
The best thing about this: since they are a innovative Startup they expect you to work for free.
But who am I to judge something so brand-new and innovative. I contacted them to find out what these dank innovations are about.
They can't even explain what a blockchain is or the basics of ML and AI, they basically just want someone do it for free...
It's still ok since no one is gonna fall for this bait... this morning a friend of mine told me he got a new job... and he even can work from home...
I'm not even mad, I just feel sadness and sorrow specially for him, because he is a good dev and accepts big times underpay and now free work, because he thinks a day off in his CV will lead him to be unemployed 😭
Fucking hate it how people successfuly manipulate kids and youth to them to work 24/7 for minimum wage or even for free and some other douchebags trying to take advantage of this 😡1 -
Why is it that you guys are not seeing the big picture and reading between the fucken lines... why is it that people always have to run to legislation to fix their problems .... THIS IS WHY.. the other generation accomplished so much more because when there’s a problem they came up with a solution many times better than the status quo.
Those people are few and far between now.. those folks are the innovators. You know whom I’m referring to... those people didn’t whine to create laws to fix or protect their industry from competitors.
We need to stop looking toward our government to fix our issues... especially regarding this issue.. WHY because the people in government ARE NOT TECH PEOPLE!!! THEY DONT EVEN KNOW HOW COMPUTERS WORK! for Pete’s sake folks we had a lady in there who thought the term whip the server ment to literally clean it with a rag... come-on guys, do what they did years ago you don’t like something FIX IT.. by creating something new!
There’s a reason our grandparents generation made it to the fucken moon with less technology than a calculator, BECAUSE THEY PROBLEM SOLVED!
What have we achieved in the last 5 years that is really “big”... fucken apps
Unite together build the next internet learning from the issues we’ve seen with the internet over the last 30 years.. No it won’t be quick no it won’t be easy but nothing revolutionary is easy.
It took 6 years to land a man on the moon, I think we can rebuild the network infrastructure in that time OR FAR LESS if we unite together! Without the government interference we can eliminate the ISPs from the equation and screw them over for screwing us for so long
My group is has the solution, the vision and need, to get this done be we can’t do it alone I will make the official public statement within 24 hours of the vote results...
explaining everything, the plan, the work, EVERYTHING.
We need more people.
For reference the plan can be summarized like this.. nonprofit CoOp Tier 1 ISP.. members being the end users from both sides of the equation ...
TILL THEN
Contact me here,
Or SnapChat: theqsolution
Until I release all the contact info.4 -
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!8 -
Late night ramble warning.
I like to fix issues. I like to roll up my sleeves and fetch my keyboard or soldering iron on a mission to build a custom solution for whatever real world annoyance that has just triggered my problem solving caveman brain.
I have prided myself in that. I am the kind of guy who doesn't shy away from getting my hands dirty, I tell myself, and it's good because it makes my life easier, I tell myself. But increasingly, I've been wondering if this is really so. Am I really making my life easier? Am I fixing the world or just scratching an itch?
Example 1:
Instead of using conventional backup methods for my personal files like a commercial cloud based service or buying a Synology NAS or something similar, I decided it would be better to build my own linux server and set up a rather obscure configuration in order to address things like parity, ECC, bit-rot and the likes while staying cheap.
Learning a lot? Sure. Fun? Sure. Never have to worry about backups again? The opposite, of course.
While I set out to build the perfect bespoke solution to all my personal backup needs - it's as if I, by putting my time and effort into the nitty gritty of technical implementation, placed a vote for my future to contain more of that stuff. In reality this project has burdened my little brain with many new things to consider in regards to storing my files.
Example 2:
Qwerty and the conventional staggered keyboard layout are relics of past technical limitations and both of them inefficient and bad from an ergonomic perspective.
Possible solution: ignore and carry on or possibly transition to Colemak on a somewhat more ergonomic full size keyboard.
My solution: well, let's also hand build a tiny-ass super obscure ergo keyboard and spend two days to come up with my own layout for all special characters, numbers and function keys.
Fun? Somewhat. Learning a lot? I guess. Never have to think about keyboard layouts again? Lol.
I'm living in a world of pain with various key commands in various apps and edge cases. Could I fix it? Probably make it better but not without quite a bit of effort.
Anyways, it'd be interesting to hear if anyone can relate to this feeling of wanting to fix something once and for all only to find yourself deeper in it then ever before. Idk might be a just me thing. Anyways, goodnight lovely people.5 -
I have been working on this software for 3 years now. The code base was a working prototype made by my boss before I came, not more, not less. Php + Angular. Have been refactoring a lot, backend is backed with hundreds of tests now, frontend still lacks a lot. Still a lot of programm structures are still the same weird ones my boss once created in a rush between two meetings while learning Angular to get the prototype finished. Now it's used in production which makes hard to refactor, because we have to maintain backwards compatibility. Neither the parts I added or refactored completely are satisfying, because they are built on this structures, because i never got any feedback for anything I decided and because I changed my own paradigms over time.
So I am all alone on this project. All genuinly new projects are assigned to the new team members (i was the first one, no we are five plus my boss) because I wont have time, have to maintain the old one. So I never can do something new which is quite frustrating.
I did a little side tool, the only thing I invented and did completely by myself in our repertoire - and now some stakeholder shows big interest onto this. Instead of giving me the task to make a real project from this my boss wants to give it to them to develop it. Why? Because I need more time for the main application.
Also the more the software is used the more bug tickets and feature requests come. I was crying for help for months but the others had appareantly more important stuff to do.
This might be true to some extend. Yesterday we had some kind of crisis meeting and my boss wanted again to assing pur junior to help me, who has a shit load of other things to do and is a student. I insisted that this would not be enough, and one of the fulltime devs has to get involved because the thing is our core application and I am only part time btw. So my boss said we wont decide today but one of them should do it. They should have some time to figure out who which is understandable but it's not that I didn't keep saying this for months. Now they are all like whimp whimp when I have to do php i will quit. The new projects are all typescript, with node backend if any. But alas, one of them even said yesterday he doesn't want to do js anymore. Okay... but... this is our tech stack then get another job allready?
And I should do the same probably. But then again I feel very sorry for my boss who helped me in very dark times of corona and more. If both of us leave, the project he worked on for decade (including convincing poeole, collect money..) might be suddenly at it's end while he is so exited about it's access today...
I also get insecure if it's really that they hate php so much or that they don't want to work with me personally because maybe I am a bad team Player or what?
I experienced the same at my old workplace, got left alone with big parts of the project because they didn't want to do php and js in this case and it ended up five devs doing the python backend and me doing the frontend and the php cms part all alone. Then I quit and now everything seems to happen again.
And then again I think I am only fucked up so hard by this stuff because I do not really like being a developer at all. I only do it for the money and because I am good at it (at least i think so. Nobody ever bothers to ever to read my code and give me feedback, because you know, php and js). So I guess I would hate any other job in the field maybe likewise?
This job *is* convinient, salary, office
position, flexibility could not be better. At the end of the day it's not that stressfull. And i don't have any second of freetime (due to family) or energy i could offer a new and more demanding employer, can't work over time or even take a fulltime position, can't home office, can't earn less, can't travel very long to the office and especially can't go back to school to learn something completely new. Some of these constraints are softwe then other naturally but still my posibilities at the Moment are very limited. That might change in about five years if the family situation changed. So it would most likely be reasonable to stay until then at my current job? And bear being alone with this app, don't getting involved on any new project, don't learn anything new, don't invent anything.
There was one potential way out, they considered offering me PHD position to the upcoming ml part of the project... But I learned that I would attend to a bunch of classes at university first, which i would like to, but I don't think i have the time.
I feel trapped somehow. I also feel very lonely in the Office because those fucktards keep saying in home office.
Man, I don't want to go to work today.6 -
MENTORS - MY STORY (Part III)
The next mentor is my former boss in the previous company I worked.
3.- Manager DJ.
Soon after I joined the company, Manager E.A. left and it was crushing. The next in line joined as a temporal replacement; he was no good.
Like a year later, they hired Manager DJ, a bit older than EA, huge experience with international companies and a a very smart person.
His most valuable characteristic? His ability to listen. He would let you speak and explain everything and he would be there, listening and learning from you.
That humility was impressive for me, because this guy had a lot of experience, yes, but he understood that he was the new guy and he needed to learn what was the current scenario before he could twist anything. Impressive.
We bonded because I was technical lead of one of the dev teams, and he trusted me which I value a lot. He'd ask me my opinion from time to time regarding important decisions. Even if he wouldn't take my advice, he valued the opinion of the developers and that made me trust him a lot.
From him I learned that, no matter how much experience you have in one field, you can always learn from others and if you're new, the best you can do is sit silently and listen, waiting for your moment to step up when necessary, and that could take weeks or months.
The other thing I learned from him was courage.
See, we were a company A formed of the join of three other companies (a, b, c) and we were part of a major group of companies (P)
(a, b and c) used the enterprise system we developed, but internally the system was a bit chaotic, lots of bad practices and very unstable. But it was like that because those were the rules set by company P.
DJ talked to me
- DJ: Hey, what do you think we should do to fix all the problems we have?
- Me: Well, if it were up to me, we'd apply a complete refactoring of the system. Re-engineering the core and reconstruct all modules using a modular structure. It's A LOT of work, A LOT, but it'd be the way.
- DJ: ...
- DJ: What about the guidelines of P?
- Me: Those guidelines are obsolete, and we'd probably go against them. I know it's crazy but you asked me.
Some time later, we talked about it again, and again, and again until one day.
- DJ: Let's do it. Take these 4 developers with you, I rented other office away from here so nobody will bother you with anything else, this will be a semi-secret project. Present me a methodology plan, and a rough estimation. Let's work with weekly advances, and if in three months we have something good, we continue that road, tear everything apart and implement the solution you guys develop.
- Me: Really? That's impressive! What about P?
- DJ: I'll handle them.
The guy would battle to defend us and our work. And we were extremely motivated. We did revolutionize the development processes we had. We reconstructed the entire system and the results were excellent.
I left the company when we were in the last quarter of the development but I'm proud because they're still using our solution and even P took our approach.
Having the courage of going against everyone in order to do the right thing and to do things right was an impressive demonstration of self confidence, intelligence and balls.
DJ and I talk every now and then. I appreciate him a lot.
Thank you DJ for your lessons and your trust.
Part I:
https://devrant.com/rants/1483428/...
Part II:
https://devrant.com/rants/1483875/...1 -
Why is it that virtually all new languages in the last 25 years or so have a C-like syntax?
- Java wanted to sort-of knock off C++.
- C# wanted to be Java but on Microsoft's proprietary stack instead of SUN's (now Oracle's).
- Several other languages such as Vala, Scala, Swift, etc. do only careful evolution, seemingly so as to not alienate the devs used to previous C-like languages.
- Not to speak of everyone's favourite enemy, JavaScript…
- Then there is ReasonML which is basically an alternate, more C-like, syntax for OCaml, and is then compiled to JavaScript.
Now we're slowly arriving at the meat of this rant: back when I started university, the first semester programming lecture used Scheme, and provided a fine introduction to (functional) programming. Scheme, like other variants of Lisp, is a fine language, very flexible, code is data, data is code, but you get somewhat lost in a sea of parentheses, probably worse than the C-like languages' salad of curly braces. But it was a refreshing change from the likes of C, C++, and Java in terms of approach.
But the real enlightenment came when I read through Okasaki's paper on purely functional data structures. The author uses Standard ML in the paper, and after the initial shock (because it's different than most everything else I had seen), and getting used to the notation, I loved the crisp clarity it brings with almost no ceremony at all!
After looking around a bit, I found that nobody seems to use SML anymore, but there are viable alternatives, depending on your taste:
- Pragmatic programmers can use OCaml, which has immutability by default, and tries to guide the programmer to a functional programming mindset, but can accommodate imperative constructs easily when necessary.
- F# was born as OCaml on .NET but has now evolved into its own great thing with many upsides and very few downsides; I recommend every C# developer should give it a try.
- Somewhat more extreme is Haskell, with its ideology of pure functions and lazy evaluation that makes introducing side effects, I/O, and other imperative constructs rather a pain in the arse, and not quite my piece of cake, but learning it can still help you be a better programmer in whatever language you use on a day-to-day basis.
Anyway, the point is that after working with several of these languages developed out of the original Meta Language, it baffles me how anyone can be happy being a curly-braces-language developer without craving something more succinct and to-the-point. Especially when it comes to JavaScript: all the above mentioned ML-like languages can be compiled to JavaScript, so developing directly in JavaScript should hardly be a necessity.
Obviously these curly-braces languages will still be needed for a long time coming, legacy systems and all—just look at COBOL—, but my point stands.7 -
After drilling yourself with links and resources, documentation and cant execute what you want. You leave it.
Some time later you go back and you are like why the hell didnt I understand this it's so simple :/ and it literally says what to do.
This is when I became a calm developer. Don't rush yourself. If you want to quickly do something. READ dont just look 🙃
Also, don't persist with understand the official docs. The third party explanations will show you flames 80% of the times if you are learning something new.2 -
Seriously, at what point did the good, kind, selfless souls who write tutorials and guides online turn into fucking food bloggers?
I've been an engineer about 15 years, so I still have to google most of the code I write as I write it, and this week I've been learning a new framework.
Ten years ago it'd be "here's how to..." then the thing you want to do.
Now it's "For the longest time, I didn't want to use Gradle..." followed by a summary of the last week in their life.
I really don't care about your Journey with Rust, I want to know how to define an optional parameter. I don't give a rat's fucking dick how much faster this is than that, my hands are tied by whoever started this mess - just tell me how to make it work.
I guess there's something to be said for remembering things between sessions.4 -
I need to rant about life decisions, and choosing a dev career probably too early. Not extremely development related, but it's the life of a developer.
TL;DR: I tried a new thing and that thing is now my thing. The new thing is way more work than my old thing but way more rewarding & exciting. Try new things.
I taught myself to program when I was a kid (11 or 12 years old), and since then I have always been absolutely sure that I wanted to be a games programmer. I took classes in high school and college with that aim, and chose a games programming degree. Everything was so simple, nail the degree, get a job programming something, and take the first games job that I could and go from there.
I have always had random side hobbies that I liked to teach myself, just like programming. And in uni I decided that I wanted to learn another language (natural, not programming) because growing up in England meant that I only learned English and was rarely exposed to anything else. The idea of knowing another fascinated me.
So I dabbled in a few different languages, tried to find a culture that seemed to fit my style and attitude to life and others, and eventually found myself learning Korean. That quickly became something I was doing every single day, and I decided I needed to go to Korea and see what life there could be like.
I found out that my university offered a free summer school program for a couple of weeks, all I had to pay for was the flights. So a few months later I was there and it was literally the best thing I'd done in my life to that point. I'd found two things that made me feel even better than the idea of becoming the games programmer I'd always wanted to be. Travelling and using my other language to communicate with people that I couldn't in English. At that point I was still just a beginner, but even the simple conversations with people who couldn't speak English felt awesome.
So when I returned home, I found that that trip had completely thrown a spanner into my life plan. All I could think about after that was improving my language skills and going back there for as long as possible. Who knows what to do.
I did exactly that. I studied harder than I'd ever studied for anything and left the next year to go and study in Korea, now with intermediate language skills, everyday conversations no longer being a problem at all.
Now I live here, I will be here for the next year and I have to return to England for one year to finish my degree. Then instead of having my simple plan of becoming a developer, I can think of nothing I want to do less than just stay in England doing the same job every day, nothing to do with language. I need to be at least travelling to Korea, and using my language skills in at least some way.
The current WIP plan is to take intensive language classes here (from next week, every single weekday), build awesome dev side projects and contribute to open source stuff. Then try to build a life of freelance translation/interpreting/language teaching and software development (maybe here, maybe Korea).
So the point of this rant is that before, I had a solid plan. Now I am sat in my bed in Korea writing this, thinking about how I have almost no idea how I'm going to build the life that I want. And yet somehow, the uncertainty makes this so much more exciting and fulfilling. There's a lot more worrying, planning and deciding to do. But I think the fact that I completely changed my life goals just through a small decision one day to satisfy a curiosity is a huge life lesson for me. And maybe reading this will help other people decide to just try doing something different for once, and see if your life plan holds up.
If it does, never stop trying new things. If it doesn't (like mine), then you now know that you've found something that you love as much as or even more that your plan before. Something that you might have lived your whole life never finding.
I don't expect many people to read this all, but writing it here has been very cathartic for me, and it's still a rant because now I have so much more work and planning to do. But it's the good kind of work.
Things aren't so simple now, but they're way more worth it.3 -
YEARS of practice. I had my ups and downs. I learned myself, left it myself early on, came back to it half a year later, continued since. Figured out that web development is not the hell I wanted and quickly fell in love with iOS development in Swift. Been riding on the wind ever since, learning something new every single day.
Today I made something that some time ago took me about 3 weeks in less than an hour. If that’s not an improvement, I don’t know what that is.
Practice makes perfect, don’t forget that. Although it sounds ridiculously cheesy and shit, this is how it goes.
I’m getting drafted tomorrow. Well, this is not exactly a full on draft and joining the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) right NAO, it’s what we call a rough draft: I am having a psychotechnical examination so the military can understand how much I need to go to a cybersecurity unit instead of going to Gaza LMAO.2 -
So many new developers I know complain about not having the latest gadgets to learn to code. What I loved about learning to code was all you really need is something like Notepad and a few ideas, it's amazing how far you can go!6
-
What time do you get up on work days? I'm starting to think I should have me time in morning (reading, learning, coding my own things) before going to work.
I've think I've come the the conclusion that this job/team is sorta chaotic and tedious and there's no skill growth. Not learning anything new. Usually just something broken, integrate some new feature, build something that I've already built before but differently for this specific case. Nothing fun or challenging, or new.
And also tired of trying to be a "role model", make things right. I tend to like to keep things orderly, documented, well tested and clean but everyone else seems to just bulldoze their way to get whatever they need, leaving a mess behind... It's been like 2yrs already but the technical debt seems to be growing not shrinking...17 -
This is real rant, not one of these funny stories!
So, I spent 4 years to get a Computer Science degree, and did two specializations, 3.5 years more in Uni. I have 6 years of experience working in IT, from support to programming. I also speak 3 languages.
I'm from a South America country, and now I'm living in EU.
I'm 30 now and earning a little more than a MacDonald's cashier earns in the US. I have to live in a shared apartment like a fucking Uni student. I have nothing, no car, no house, no girlfriend. WTF!
IT is a fucking lie! Profession of the future my ass!
In Uni they said that finding a good job was easy, that companies would literally grab us by the neck to work for them. LIE!
I did found a low paying job though, where at least I could learn a lot more.
People were really satisfied with my work and I even received a proposal of one of our clients to work for them, but the offer wasn't good enough.
I tried entering some big companies as a Trainee, but it was so ridiculous, they said they were looking for an IT person, but they asked things related to economy and other stuff that had nothing to do with IT. I always failed in the group work/interview, it was so ridiculous, I remember one candidate saying her dream was to work for the company since she was a child, SERIOUSLY!
When the opportunity came, I moved to EU and now I'm working as a dev. But as I said, I'm not satisfied with it! In the US the yearly average software engineer salary is about 100K, I earn less than 1/4 of it. And don't come saying that US pays more because of the cost of life, here the cost of life is the same or even more expensive, a super small apartment/loft is at least 180K, a simple new car 18K and a Big Mac costs 4€.
In the US, the average salary of someone that just graduated from uni is 60K to 70K! LOL
In EU, it's super hard for someone to earn 100K, that's why many companies are creating offices here, good workforce, 2 to 3 times smaller salary!
IT also sucks because it's too volatile, there's new stuff all the time. Someone always has to come with a new language, new framework, new library, etc etc. And you have to keep learning new stuff all the time.
Also job openings always ask for experienced people, like you must have at least two years of experience with VUE.js, or something.
Do you remember the last time you went to a doctor for a checkup, did they use a new tool, or did something different during the checkup? Probably not, the medic don't have to learn new stuff all the time, he is still using a stethoscope, he is still placing a wooden stick in your mouth to check your throat...
But in IT, almost no one nowadays is going to create code using CoffeeScript, they instead will use TypeScript.
I read an article saying that an IT professional must study 20 hours a week to keep up with new trends. So I must work 40 hours and study another 20? LOL
It's not that I don't like learning new stuff, but this sucks, I want to maybe learn something different or have a hobby.
Today I regret going to uni, I feel it was a waste of time and money. They taught things like calculus and physics that I never had to use professionally, and even programming stuff like linked lists I never had to use.
If instead I had studied dentistry or studied to be a ophthalmologist I think I would be earning more, would be working more independently and wouldn't need to keep up learning new things so much.
Also to work in IT you don't need a diploma, I read an article by a dude that learned programming by his own, did some software for his portfolio and got a job at Google.
When I read these kinds of story I regret even more going to uni, It really feels I wasted my time.
For these reasons I can't recommend going to uni to study IT, if you want to go to uni go study something else!
If you want to study programming do it on your own, there's everything you must know online for free, create a portfolio, and look for a job or even try working for yourself!
Living the life I have now, there's just no incentive to keep going.
Should I keep learning new stuff so maybe I can get a better job that will still pay low, or quit and try creating something on my own?
Or even ditch IT all together and go back to uni? LOL NO!5 -
I left class early today
I understand me and this kid are both students and both of us are still learning. But when he asks me to help him solve an issue I fucking expect him to listen then try what I’m saying unless he knows for certain that my idea won’t work
I don’t expect him to start ignoring the person HE asked for help to try things on his own and end up DELETING THE FUCKING GRADLE FOLDER because the 1.5.1 version of Android studio my teacher makes us use told him gradle was corrupt
I also didn’t expect him to tell the professor I didn’t tell him not to And them end up with the professor fucking assigning me to help him fix everything even though the kid won’t listen to me anyway refusing to just copy he java and XML to a new project so I grabbed my stuff and left Fuck that bullshit
I understand we’re both students and in the grand scheme of things we’re both idiots. But when I’m asked for help I expect the person to at least listen and not do something absolutely stupid like delete something we don’t understand how to fix
Now I’m making common sense a requirement to ask me for help I don’t need any extra stress I’ll deal with the consequences of walking out tomorrow But I can’t say I regret it1 -
The most amazing thing about my new company. Is that they let me watch courses of my choice (unless they want me to learn something they need)
So I subscribed to pluralisght and I'm watching 30-60 minutes a day and I'm learning .NET core and entity frame work. Now this sh** is amazing!
In a few months I'll reach the master level!12 -
> Wants to learn something new (pref not JavaScript)
> Can't find anything that's as dope as Spring boot (java framework).
> C# sucks
> Python ain't going anywhere
> PHP is dated
> Go sounds like a good choice but so damn non-useful if you don't do ultra concurrent stuff at google
Ends up getting more used to JavaScript
Suggestions? For summer learning... Freshman year.17 -
!rant
Does anyone else derive great pleasure from creating quality of life/small utility programs?
So I'm learning python in between projects at work (plan on slowly moving new projects to it) and damn, my coding buddy and I have found a package/import for almost anything we can imagine. Heck, we canned ourselves laughing when we started googling random things and still found python packages that do it. I plan to use the language to automate a ton of things when I get a new PC.
Aside from that, I recently in 2 days (1 day building, 1 day bug fixing) made a tiny utility that shaves a good 5 minutes off a certain task for my colleagues at work, and in bulk use will save even more time. It's a textbox and a button only but it felt so nice to make something useful like that so quickly.5 -
How the Common Lisp Community will eventually die soon:
Clojure is the only main Lisp dialect having some sort of heavy presence in today's modern development world. Yes, I am aware of other(if not all) environments in which Lisp or a dialect of it is being used for multiple things, CADLisp, Guile Scheme, Racket, etc etc whatever. I know.
Not only is Clojure present in the JVM(I give 0 fucks about whether you like it or not also) but also has compilation targets for Javascript via Clojurescript. This means that i can effectively target backend server operations, damn near everything inside of the JVM and also the browser.
Yet, there is no real point in using Lisp or Clojure other than for pure academic endeavours, for which it is not even a pure functional programming language, you would be better served learning something else if you want true functional purity. But also because examples for one of the major areas in software development, mainly web, are really lacking, like, lacking bad, as in, so bad most examples are few in between and there is no interest in making it target complete beginners or anything of the like.
But my biggest fucking gripe with Lisp as a whole, specifically Common Lisp, is how monstrously outdated the documentation you can find available for it is.
Say for example, aesthetics, these play a large role, a developer(web mostly) used to the attention to detail placed by the Rails community, the Laravel community, django, etc etc would find on documentation that came straight from the 90s. There is no passion for design, no attention to detail, it makes it look hacky and abandoned. Everything in Lisp looks so severely abandoned for which the most abundant pool of resources are not even made present on a fully general purpose language constrained as a scripting environment for a text editor: Emacs with Emacs Lisp which I reckon is about the most used Lisp dialect in the planet, even more so than Clojure or Common Lisp.
I just want the language to be made popular again y'know? To have a killer app or framework for it much like there is Rails for Ruby, Phoenix for Elixir, etc etc. But unless I get some serious hacking done to bring about the level of maturity of those frameworks(which I won't nor I believe I can) then it will always remain a niche language with funny syntax.
To be honest I am phasing away my use of Clojure in place of Pharo. I just hate seeing how much the Lisp community does in an effort to keep shit as obscure and far away from the reach of new developers as possible. I also DESPISE reading other Lisp developer's code. Far too fucking dense and clever for anyone other than the original developer to read and add to. The idea that Lisp allows for read only code is far too real man.
Lisp has been DED for a while, and the zombies that remain will soon disappear because the community was too busy playing circle jerks for anything real to be done with it. Even as the original language of AI it has been severely outshined by the likes of Python, R and Scala, shit, even Javascript has more presence in AI than Lisp does now a days.9 -
Im learning kotlin but heres what i dont get..
is it a completely new language that uses jvm concept like java or is it a template over java with extra stuff like C++ and C.
when i import a library in kotlin that exists in the java sdk does it use that or all the libraries are made for kotlin.
is kotlin java++ basically or is it something completely different
sorry if its a dumb question still nee at this7 -
!rant
So I've been using Linux as my desktop and server environment for a solid month now, and I think the biggest benefit it's been for me is the digitial detoxification. I no longer worry about having the biggest/most high spec computer anymore and instead my OS is built around getting as much clutter and distractions out of the way so I can focus on programming as much as possible. It's very much akin to my mediatation sessions where you cut out everything around you to regain your focus.
It's the same feeling I got when I lost interest in video games. it was a huge time sink that was entertaining yes, but it no longer gives me the same feeling of accomplishment as getting over the mountain of a project goal and reaching the summit. Linux is a more challenging environment but with that challeng comes the excitement of learning something new, and your environment is in your own hands.
It's been a while but I should go back to my buddist meditation group again. I've been a workaholic for the past couple months and I need to afford myself time again to decompress. -
An intern made a very bad impression on the first day.
This was before I become a developer. I was working in commercial art sales. One day, I had an appointment to onboard two new interns together.
Intern 1 shows up and I ask her for her signed confidentiality agreement. The boss had sent it out a week before and told me the interns were bringing the signed paperwork on their first day. I see the surprised look on her face and she says she forgot. She’s lucky I had access to another copy. If I didn’t, things could have gotten pretty awkward if I had to contact my boss, who was out of office. If there’s no signed agreement, I can’t onboard her and I’d have to send her home. The appointment was made with intern 1’s availability in mind, so intern 1 could have spent her time coming to the office for nothing and being turned away because of a stupid mistake she made.
While we wait for intern 2 to arrive, I try to engage in small talk with intern 1. I try to get to know her a little better and I ask “are you still in college/university?” She word vomits that she thought she had graduated, but six months later she hadn’t received her diploma and she called the school and they told her her pre-college credits had not transferred, so she’s finishing those credits now.
Oh, intern, you should have just simplified all this to “I’m finishing up my degree” or “yes, I’m still in college.” This is TMI. You don’t want to give out information about yourself that could put you in a bad light. You need to know to be discreet about yourself. You’re 22 years old. It’s really bad judgement to say this to your supervisor (me) and we’ve only known each other for ten minutes. I’m not your friend, I’m your supervisor. Honestly, I thought the explanation didn’t make sense because she would have found out about the credits when she tried to transfer them and when she applied for graduation. I didn’t prod for more details.
I did have to tell my boss about intern 1 forgetting the paperwork. It’s not something the intern would be reprimanded for, but it is something that’s not a good sign. The paperwork had been sent by the boss a week prior. It’s troublesome that an intern would forget to complete an important task that was sent by the boss. This was never a problem with prior interns.
Boss did freak out because boss thought I onboarded intern 1 without intern agreeing to the confidentiality agreement. Boss hadn’t considered an intern would forget the paperwork and didn’t tell me what to do if this did happen. I reassured boss that I had printed a new copy and had intern 1 sign the agreement.
I didn’t say anything about the word vomit. The content was troubling, but I was concerned this would be gossip and I wasn’t out to sabotage the intern.
Forgetting the paperwork and the word vomit were signs the intern wasn’t reliable. Intern had trouble taking direction even when it was written down. She’d do stupid things like invite her boyfriend to the office for hours and let BF sit at the boss’s desk—boss caught her and boss’s office is visible from our public viewing floor, so visitor did see this too. I suspected she might have an diagnosed learning disability.
In the end, intern didn’t ask for a reference letter. Boss said that if intern asked for one in the future, the answer would be no.
Intern 1 is the reason why I don’t want to be in change of interns ever again even though I’m not in art sales anymore.16 -
Apparently my learning style is more rote memorization than learn-by-doing and I've been trying to learn by doing for years as a hobbyist.
It took a fucking *national quarantine* to get me to try something different and I'm blown away.
What would have taken me many months to learn I've all but grasped in detail in a matter of 20 hours of study over the course of a week.
Fuck you javascript. I WIN THIS ROUND. No more looking at the documentation for stupid shit like how to write a regex, or why everything is wrapped in fucking parenthesis (IIFE), or why
I keep getting a uncaught reference exception.
The important thing to realize about learning is NEVER be obstinate about it. Try many things, and don't get stuck in one way of learning unless you know thats what works for you.
This is why having study partners and mentors are important.
I think experience/practice and rote learning work in tandem. Rote learning lets you skip the much longer step of grasping the fundamentals, bootstrapping the process of learning the abstractions that are composed of those fundamentals.
I'm still adding cards to my anki flash card deck, but if anyone wants it I'm willing to share. It's mostly just 1. practice questions, 2. detail questions (what are the types? What does this regex do?, etc), 3. implication questions (heres this bit of code. It's XYZ, why did it fail? Correct it.), combining core details to memorize, and the application of the facts learned.
It helped me to learn and I'm apparently retarded, so if you're new to programming and want to learn JS, it can probably help you too. Unless you're more of a tard than me lol.1 -
I can't decide on a linux distro because all I've tried are great. Seriously.
I'd call myself a novice-to-intermediate linux user (heavy on the novice part) and since I work as a web developer it's been a great learning experience to use the same OS on my workstation as the webservers my projects run on. (Ie I started out with Ubuntu and a LAMP setup).
The thing is I distrohop ad infinitum... Feels like I've tried out every desktop environment known to mankind (I just can't stop myself when I see a new one or a new take on an old one) and I've dipped my toes in Arch territory to. Loved Antergos when that still was a thing. Found EndeavourOS this weekend, kernel panic ensued. I'm a noob with sudo and that's never a good thing. 😆 (Try out in a virtual machine first you say? Bah. Where's the fun in that?!)
So now I'm on Linux Mint w Cinnamon because why not. (Because it's sluggish and boring, that's why...) I had to just get something up and running quickly so I could get back to work. 😬
But one day in and I'm realising I actually miss GNOME. And Ubuntu feels like home. I would feel much cooler using Arch but honestly I don't think I can be trusted with it. I love tinkering with settings, look and feel and whatnot but I can honestly do that just as well in an Ubuntu/GNOME environment.
Maybe Pop!_OS... could be something for me. 😏20 -
[DISCLAIMER : Potential Troll Topic here] I am self taught python and js (not considering myself as a real developer as I don't push much on github and work in a complete other field than anything related to CS right now) and would be interested to learn another language, with another paradigm. So, as I love you all, I would be interested In your highlights as I am currently considering either C, C++, Rust or Go.
with C, I know I could interface it with python. With C++ (despite Linus considering it evil) I know I could interface it with Node. I don't know currently what to do with Go, but some people seem really enthusiastic about it (not really relevant I know) and Rust seems like the C of today, with a bunch of new cool kid stuff. My main goal, after all, is to learn something new, to have another sight on programming. Either understanding more about hardware or learning another way of coding (like different from oop).
I know it sounds like a troll, but I promise it's not, just a serious genuine question (hopefully it won't be closed here like on SO)
So what do you think devranters ?
Being eternally grateful to all of you, I wish you a good night.10 -
Hi friends.
I'm 19 years old programmer and working already. My father is 47 years old. He don't know anything about programming yet. When he was young he was good in math.
Today when I came home he said that he would like to learn programming too and help me to do some projects in the future. I know it's kind of late for him to start learning something new, but what do you think, what can I do to help him start programming? What's the startpoint for 47 years old man in the world of programming.
P.S. He tried to learn Java watching online tutorials but couldn't understand anything.10 -
I'm getting beat up pretty bad by Rust. I like it so far but man is it hard. Imposter-syndrome is almost making me lose motivation. Almost, but I won't quit, one day I'll get there.
I think the primary reason I think I'm having such a hard time is that I'm trying to learn stuff that prevents me from making some mistakes that I have never run into. I know a bit of the theory but no hand's on experience on double-free errors, memory leaks and weird low-level stuff. I read the documentation, mostly understand what stuff is for but when I go write code I'm just like "now what?". I don't have enough experience to know when and where to use some concepts and I'm super lost. I don't know where to start and the feeling of being completely overwhelmed by all sorts of new stuff is at the same time exciting and frightening.
I have never, as a programmer, thought something was hard. All of my past knowledge required dedication, work and patience, but I wouldn't say I ever felt something was *hard*. But Rust... damn. Rust is hard.
Hopefully at the end of this super steep learning curve I'll know a lot more stuff and have stronger "dev powers" and be one step closer to being as knowledgeable as some of you guys around here to whom I look up to.2 -
How are Coding Bootcamps and what are they like?
A little background:
I’ve been going to a University (have a year left for a CS degree) and I am so EXTREMELY frustrated. I thought I would get an education but it’s so underwhelming. 95% of it doesn’t involve programming and the classes that do are so elementary that I know more than the professors. By the end of my web design course we had been taught to center text, insert images, insert links, and how to use tables with a single day on CSS using colors.
The OOP courses are all the same, learn variables, types, conditionals, loops, classes, functions, and so forth. Python, C++, and Java. I taught all this to myself when I was 15, I’m 29 now.
I’ve recently gotten extremely interested into full stack web development. .NET Core, React, Typescript. I’m also working with Electron. I’m basically 100% self taught and spend almost every waking moment trying to learn more and apply it.
There’s only one person at my school who has the same passion as me and he’s the president at the coding club but is going into machine learning and big data (I’m the Secretary) and I just wish I could interact with more people who have the same passion. I would love to be challenged. I feel as if I spend more time trying to learn and diagnose problems then applying my knowledge because web development is so complicated when it comes to connecting everything together and I’m still relatively new to it (started like 4 months ago). I’m an extremely fast learner and extremely dedicated so I’m not worried about that being an issue.
I just really want to be a part of a community where I have people who can answer my questions and I don’t have to spend hours or days on google finding a solution to integrating Webpack or using typescript with react, and more. I want to feel challenged.
Can I get this from a boot camp? I recently listened to a podcast from Syntax and it really excited me but I don’t want to be let down again. Either way I’m finishing my degree to get that bullshit $60000 piece of paper but I wouldn’t mind taking a couple months off for something like this if it’s worth it.
I live in CO so if you have any Bootcamps in CO that you recommend, I’d love to hear it and take a trip to check it out in person.
Thanks a bunch!10 -
It's was the forth year of my college, in the corner of the world in south India, I wanted to something to combine both medicine and the coding that I learnt, I started learning about heart murmurs, it's basically a skill based diagnosis that only 1 in 20 heart specialists can make by hearing the heart beat and listening to a small murmur that happens during the systolic cycle or the diastolic cycle. I wrote a program to learn a lot of sample murmurs and try to find (very bad hand made logic) the similarities between two wave patterns, the problem started with noise so I went out and built a new stethoscope with a carbon mic inside a normal stethoscope head and try filtering the sound at source (worked well enough at that time) I then tried to find people to test it on, but alas I was not able to find patients as doctors are not supposed to reveal them etc. I wanted to show them visually how a murmur pattern would look like and I stole some code and made a plotter for the wav file and presented everything. By that time I got a lot of close amazing friends involved and they helped me solidify the project and we won the best project award and I got my first gold medal of my life at the end of my academic life :) it was one of the best moments of my life. Second only to the joy of getting married to wife. May be third if I put getting a job in Microsoft India Development Center.
I still wish I could dig that code up and write it properly with what I have learnt today but work is never ending and I find great problems to solve everyday which I know I can make a difference, may be when I get retired I will dust out that CD with the decades old c++ code and write one last program...3 -
TLDR;
I remissness about Yahoo site builder and talk about finding the record of the Google search that changed my life a long time ago and I think it's fucking great.
Earlier I re-installed google chrome but unlike every other time, this time I forgot to turn off the auto-sync feature. I only realized this when I opened gmail and it pre-populated my login info with the info of my very first, long forgotten gmail account.
So naturally I went exploring... after going through the mails I decided to check out the actual Google account to see if there was anything of interest there and lo and behold I found around 7 years of browsing history that I had no idea Google stored at the time.
As scary as it was to see I'm kinda glad about it now because aside from finding out that I was going through an Asian porn phase in 2008 I also found the one Google search record that changed my life.
It was a search to download Yahoo site builder followed by a bunch more on how to use it.
I had stumbled across a random article about it and it caught my eye because I needed a website for the grocery store I was a manager of back then.
Thankfully it was a fucking horrible WYSIWYG editor. I recall it acting almost identical to Word at the time - I would save and back up my site constantly because moving something 1px would fuck the layout up and burn everything to the ground, cntrl+z would try and do something, reversing only my last action while leaving the rest of the site in tatters and I didn't have the skills to understand or fix it...
Ultimately my frustration led me learn a bit of html & css and a week or so later It became apparent it would be easier to scratch code the damn thing so I uninstalled Yahoo site builder and started all over again.
Learning & building that site in notepad ignited my passion for coding and less than a year later I left my shitty dead end job to join a brand new tech company created with the help of a like minded investor officially employed as a developer. Let help you understand just how big this achievement was for me - I had been trying to find a job, ANY job in I.T even at a call center level without success for 6 years because I dropped out of school.
In 6 years as an active job seeker I only received one phone call about a job opportunity which ended very quickly once they realised they had misread my CV. In all those years I never even got a single job interview.
After that I spent the next 3 years rolling out and improving the cloud based loyalty card system I had written for my store out on a national scale and the rest is history. Since then I have never been judged by a crappy piece of paper, hated my job or struggled to find a new one.
What a beautiful search result that was to find.
I dedicate this rant to Yahoo, with my sincere gratitude for making a shitty WYSIWYG editor that was so bad it pissed me off enough to make me actually learn something.2 -
TAP - The Art Project.
Started in my college, been working on it for nearly a decade now and during the pandemic I was able to find co-founders and we built an amazing MVP.
But now I got busy with my new job, which is super fun, tech guy got married lol and design guy is little lost.
But over the years, experimenting with people, ideas, and everything around, my idea evolved into something which is loved by everyone I shared it and I can see a huge potential in it.
But meh! Fuck it. Because I am too bored and would rather order a practice pad and start learning to play drums (my childhood dreams), attend more gigs, and live a happier life.
Because the heart wants what the heart wants :)
For the curious ones, you can test the MVP at https://www.tap.prismo.net
And there are few other side projects that I completed which can be found on my portfolio page
https://www.floydimus.prismo.net
I am just wondering shall I redirect my main URL to my portfolio page or keep it pointed to TAP?7 -
An OSS library made me learn a new language and I am so happy it did!
I came across a well implemented System Verilog parser written in Rust. It was so good to see someone putting in the effort to write that library, I wanted to contribute to it. I had zero knowledge in Rust but I thought, what the heck, let me learn it.
And man it was a steep learning curve. After a 2 weeks or so, now I have very basic understanding of the language. What better way to learn something than just diving into an actual project?
So, today I raised an issue to the developer for a possible improvement to the library. I hope he accepts 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.2 -
I’m one of those who learned in adulthood. I had lost track of my life and tried to find something to grasp on to. I found inspiration from two friends I have. One who’s been a very gifted software engineer since his early years, and the other who one day unexpectedly turned to university and computer science and started a good work life right away after the studies. After failing miserably at my previous attempt at university I decided to jump ship and give CS a try. It was the best decision of my life. To my surprise programming very much matched many of my personality traits and how I think and make desicions in games and everyday life. After my first few lectures It all came very intuitively to me. Then thruout most of my education (and this is one of my less ”grown up” thoughts) it felt as though I could as well have been a student at Hogwarts and my professors were witches and wizards. Anything was possible and each day we learned new tricks to create the unimaginable. That aside, I now work as a software engineer, but I feel as though the list of things left to learn is endless. I don’t think I’ll ever stop learning.
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How do I help my colleague in fighting harrassment?
This is the story of a helpless employee facing everyday harassment. Im trying to help. Seeking for your thoughts
Backstory fast forwarded: My company acquired another company. So we handle all their projects and clients now, but its a completely new domain. So we needed new people. Hired 4 employees + 1 team lead to start with. But the project process got delayed and they were free for a month. So i took 2 of them in my project and gave them some small tasks to help us over. They loved working with my team and were learning new stuff apart from what they usually did. And we were also happy of their contribution. We became good friends. All of this was in March 2020 before covid-19 was taken seriously.
About my company: I love this company. I have been in this company for more than 4 years now. People are really nice. Parties and fun events. Lot of smart and ambitious people. So company and people are awesome.
Coming back to the story. Lets call the team the 4 and team lead T. The 4 were happy that someone like T was in their team. This T had all the best knowledge about stuff and life was going to be awesome for the 4. Or was it?
Story starts: So I talk to one of these 4 on daily basis. Lets call this friend F. F is a real gentle person. Intelligent and dedicated to work. F is awesome to work with. And always enjoyed working. F is a team player and very very soft person. F is fking workoholic. So few days after project starts, F tells me work was not going well. F is getting real frustrated at work and not able to deal with it or find solution.
What happened:
This person T, who was supposed to help these 4, is real piece of shit. He is impatient, arrogant and MFing dick head. Aaaarggggg.
All the good qualities of a leader like supporting the team, boosting confidence, guiding team when they make mistakes, teaching them, were all missing from this person. T was a machine with no emotion and only clock working jerk. I have no idea how T cleared interview process, because one of the interview round is also about cultural fit into company. I know this because i take interviews for other domains. We have rejected lot of such well qualified but arrogant candidates.
So whats the problem now: this team of 4 are learning new tools and taking over the clients requests from old company. Most of the stuff is new for them. So in tat case people need lot of time to understand and figure out shit. people make mistakes while learning and you know have to deal with it. Person T abuses these 4 when something goes wrong. That's one.
Second, the T definitely knows more than these 4. So if these guys dont understand certain stuff they ask T. But T does not help them learn. T will either say busy or run away by saying thats simple and ull know when time comes. REALLY MF???
Third, T does not talk nice. T is rude and does not listen to team members. For eg, If F says some task cannot be done for some reason T will say, "y cant u do it? U r capable of doing it. Tats y u r in this job". And then point number one and two happens. Never responds to emails and messages. But if someone else does the same will not tolerate that and abuses them. List goes on.
So y not escalate and deal with that T:
This person F and other 3 are still under probation and they think complaint or escalation will back fire. These people do not want to lose job in between all this pandemic shit. They are scared.
So this was happening for a while. And i was giving lot of tips on how to handle certain situations. And how one should communicate these.
But being a gentle, soft and workoholic person, F focussed on work and assumed things will get in place as time goes by.
Today, F could not meet a requirement. So T told some shit which got F all sad. and F called up me late night and started crying explaining what happened. I felt real bad. I asked F to file harrassment case. F refused saying it was F's mistake on not completing requirement. WHO THE FK CARES. PEOPLE CANNOT TALK SHIT. I told ill file harrassment case against T. (We have a policy where others can also file if person is not courageous enough). But F did not allow me.
Then after calming down, I told F that telling the problems to me wont solve them. You have to talk to T directly and tell him on face not to talk like this. Or tell the manager about whats happening. Or tell the the HR about this. F said tat cant be done. I was like Y THE FK NOT.
Because the other 3 are not ready to talk about this to anyone as they fear they'll lose job. So if F talks and people question other 3 they might bail out. WAT THE HOLY SPIRIT.
so after lot of convincing F is still not going to
Talk to anyone about this.
So i have decided ill write an anonymous email to HR, the manager and other senior people in the organisation about whats happening.
I really dont know how itll go. Ill keep updating you guys. Feel free to share ur thoughts.3 -
Hi there fellow Devranters,
I am new here but my problem is pretty old. You see i stumbled into coding totally by accident. That was about 5 years ago. I have been learning ever since.
But the problem is that each day I just feel less and less of a programmer, more of a failure. I started with python, from sololearn to various ebooks.Then C++ and finally Ruby. But I still feeal weak.Despite the projects that I have worked on I still don't feel good enough. Most especially in Ruby.
I have a friend who is also into coding and coincidentally started about the same time as I did.The difference is that he learnt at university and I am self-taught.We used to talk a lot but we don't anymore,I feel too ashamed, an impostor even. I am scared he'll ask me something and I won't know anything about it.And I once taigjt him OOP. Right now I can't even code a hello world program without reading a whole ebook on python just to be confident.
We had dreams with my friend on a dozen or so projects that would have put us on the software dev map, but I keep avoiding him so much we have barely started any. I am afraid he'll find me too amateurish to work with.
I learn everyday to expand my knowledge,I have subscribed to a gazillion software related stuff on all social media platforms I happen to be in.But deep down I feel insufficient. I have been going through rants since the few hours I joined and it doesn't sound gibberish to me.Neither does other people's code when I go through it.But I am ashamed of mine I end up deleted after it runs successfully.
I just don't feel like a software developer, I don't even know what it takes to be one even. I learned 10 languages focused on 3, laughed at memes only devs get, used linux and loved it too but still I feel like an impostor. I used to be happy about all the things I taught myself, I onced dreamed of working at Google and later having my own startup back home.Now my friend and a couple of his friends have a small start-up and I feel ashamed of myself.
I don't feel like what I know is enough and learning only makes me feel worse, so bad I am scared of coding again now.Yet I just can't stop learning, I feel incomplete when I don't do anything dev related,but I don't even feel my speed is fast enough when I type on my keyboard.
😥😥6 -
The source engine is interesting, because it has reached that stage of life where it's old enough to be remarkable-- in the sense that it could be called 'legacy', a sort of milestone in development practices and thinking, both in software, and design.
That said, a better look at it might be from the lense of *uses today*.
A lot of former source engine (SE) devs are now going to unity or unreal, I don't blame them.
But it's interesting to examine examples of games that haven't.
One such game is the freeware "No More Room In Hell". A couple online play throughs shows a wealth of well designed maps (and an even greater horde of shovelware maps, but hey, you take the good with the bad).
The age of the engine itself shows. Even in games like Left 4 Dead the engine's age can be seen. This, in some respects has been a drag, but also a blessing. Where other games could rely on their effects, shaders, and other tech, modders, map makers, and designers have had to rely on wit and creativity.
Enter "situated environments."
In an age where many people desire to travel, to go places, and have grown up doing the exact OPPOSITE, there is a great desire for variety of locations in games: not merely 'environmental' in the shallow sense of a 'theme' such as 'lava', 'tundra', etc. But in the sense of setting in general.
We want places that are both out of reach and yet familiar. Fire-fights happen in city streets. Apocalypses happen in neighborhoods where the skyline is both broken and at once something we know by sight. Open air markets, grocery stores, neighborhoods, all of these provide the back drops of popular games and series such as COD, Battlefield, The Last of Us, and yes, the example game, NMRIH.
I call this idea of 'familiar but out-of-reach level design', "situated environments", because familiarity with them, but *lack of real life experience* with them, on a day to day basis, allows people's expectations to fill in the gaps.
No one for example would argue the layouts of 7 Days To Die are familiar, but most of us don't spend all day in a junkyard or a high rise hotel.
So they *feel* familiar. Likewise with Skyrim, the villages and towns, both iconic and strange, our expectations formed by cultural inheritance, hollywood films, television shows, stories, childrens books, and yes, other games.
In a way, familiarity-without-real-in-person-experience is a shortcut for designers, one that lets them play with the player's head-space, the players subconscious idea of how a space and setting *should* work, what to *expect* out of the area, how to *operate* within the area. And the more it conforms to expectations, the more surprising an overdesigned element appears to be, rather than immersion breaking. A real life example of this is people's idea of chernobyl. When they discover the amusement park and ferris wheel they're blown away by the juxtaposition of the wasteland that surrounds them and the associations ('nostalgia' as it were) that such a carnival ride carries for many of us. It simultaneously *doesn't belong* and is yet all at once *perfectly situated in the environment*.
It is to say 'surreal', which is adjacent to the idea of *being real*, in terms of our "perception of what is and isn't plausible, if not possible."
This is at the heart of suspension of disbelief, because in essence, virtual worlds are a lie, like fiction, and good fiction violates expectations in order to tell us truths about reality. As part of our ability to differentiate bullshit from reality, there is to say an element in our bullshit detectors (doubtless evolved over many 10's of thousands of years), that is designed to not merely detect what is absurd in our limited experience, but to incorporate absurdity into everyday experience. In that sense part of our rationality is the acceptance of irrational experiences, learning from it, and discovering 'a proper place for each thing' in the "models of the world" we all carry around in our heads. Eventually we normalize the absurd, it becomes the new reality, and what remains unassimilated becomes superstition (real or otherwise), a figment, or an anomaly.
One of the best examples I've encountered is The Last of Us: Left Behind, a good chunk of which is spent in a mall. And they nailed the environment perfectly I would say.
Or for those who don't own a PS4, a more accessible example is a map in NMRIH aptly called "the museum", and few words better do it justice than to go play it yourself--that is, if you really want to know what I mean by a 'situated environment'.
What better way, during this pandemic, to get out of the news cycle and into your own head? Sometimes the best way to escape isn't outside, it's within.3 -
So i informed my intent to leave the job in few months in pursuit of learning something new in tech. Boss is trying to convince me to not leave and said i should consider learning it after work hours. In fact, in his opinion, the best way to learn is just going ahead and learning it while doing it in the project ( which usually has impossible deadline and fugly code by colleagues who never thinks of good coding practices when typing their shit ).
Well guess what boss, I don't want to just live a life staring at monitor all day. I don't want to kill my eyes either.
Following his advise and not quitting would mean living a slave life.
I have other plans actually. Like being self employed and traveling the world which would be impossible if i follow the routine life.
Fun fact: he claimed he made an AI car back in 90s!
He also thinks I can't sense BS!😏2 -
I need to convert lots and lots of lengthy hard-coded entities into backend objects, as I'm tired of pushing new commits every time something superficial needs to change.
Also, I need to figure out continuous integration. The guy who was going to help with that just left the company, and I was using his eventual forthcoming help as an excuse not to take responsibility for learning about it myself.
I need to learn golang and start converting some code to it, to see if the performance compares to the perl that's currently in place. Perl is brilliant, but aside from me, only old people know it, at my office. That definitely creates a longterm supportability issue.2 -
The feeling, when you learn about a new feature of the language, you've used for over 6 months.
The joy of learning something new,cool and useful mixed the pain, of knowing, you could have written your previous projects easier.2 -
Considering most IDEs can autocomplete basic things like function names, would it be beneficial (for learning purposes at least) that a language avoids ENTIRELY any abbreviations?
For example, let's take some of C's printf family.
Instead of fprintf, printf and sprintf, the new function names would be something like print_formatted_to_filestream, print_formatted and print_formatted_to_string respectively.15 -
!rant
just a poll i'm looking for from all the linux based dev's
What distro would you recommend for a front end dev? Tried ubuntu but the wifi driver wasnt supported I guess in my dev machine. Currently looking at Elementary OS, but still undecided. I would primarily like it to be Debian based or something close as I'm very familiar with apt-get debain based stuff, and dont really feel like learning an entirely new distro at them moment.
Thanks all :D
PS. I have a Lenovo Ideapad 110
Specs include quad-core AMD A-8, 8gb ram, 1TB HDD, can give more if necessary13 -
I was working with my embedded systems friend a few days ago on a website, and since we work with electronics, it was something new.
I then went home and started learning web development.
Holy shit I love it
I will continue to until it’s time to know about JavaScript1 -
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.5 -
ok, fuck people. i mean the people who talk about things that are a big deal. you don't need to take a course in html/css to build a website, you need documentation.
people act like programming languages are a whole separate literacy. they're not. it is not a big deal, nor an accomplishment of any significance, to learn any language to a basic extent. variables, control flow, functions and scope should not be considered challenging topics, and people should stop bragging about them. i'm pretty sure this is because programming is new. as people, i think when something is new we tend to think of it as more complex and harder to understand. basic programming is not that.
ok that was a tangent from my real point. college is a scam. anyone can learn anything from books and the internet. any time you want to learn about something, go to google, and search "${my topic} site:*.github.io" and you'll have a page about that topic written by someone who is knowledgeable and passionate of the topic. colleges don't teach people how to think like these books/websites do. and i'm fucking sick of people who'd rather see a degree then a portfolio. fuck them shits bro. i can distinct my smart friends because my smart friends speak logically and enjoy becoming smarter. i would take the kid who watches aerodynamics videos on youtube and then built a plane over a kid who studied and got a five on his ap physics exam. watching then doing is better learning than watching and repeating. after all, creativity is not at all measured in our grades, and i'd like to argue that sometimes intelligence isn't even measured. i mean, people can say they're good at math, but the kids who talk about fibinnoci numbers and why there can never be two primes more than 7 (i if i remember properly) integers apart or the ones who prove cryptographic algorithms. i guess what i'm trying to say is the dumb kids aren't dumb and the smart kids aren't smart (well not that) but kids who are passionate and just do something instead of waiting for their degree to do the same thing are the best and brightest. i forgot what i was talking about. sorry it is almost 2 am and i am intoxicated , and i don't believe i got my point across very well either.9 -
I really need to get out of this clusterfuck of a mess I got into, A.K.A. our website projects. Now, it feels more and more like all these problems and issues we're having are all my fault.
Here's the thing: I had 0 experience on web development before I got this job. I started as an intern, expecting to learn all the right practices and techniques on building websites. Nope. What happened was I was thrown in this big project, responsible for almost every functionality that it was supposed to have.
A junior-level guy. Doing a huge project on his own. Hell, I'm probably even lower than a junior. But here I am, pigeonholed in this shittard. My boss even said to me, "you know more about the website than I do." Fucking hell. He's not even aware of the clusterfucks I've done on the codebase because, fuck, what did I know? I don't even get feedbacks about my code. I don't fucking know if I'm doing all of these shit right. I don't know if this function is supposed to be here, or if it's supposed to behave that way, and, shit, the concept of test-driven development is probably something my boss has never heard of before.
So right now, I'm a bit obsessed with web development best practices, and how to write clean, maintainable code. I would probably get more learning from going to meetups than I will ever have from this place.
This has been a very shitty start of my career. I hope a much better learning experience will be plentiful at my next job (if anyone's willing to hire me). It would be like starting all over again. Sorry for the long post. I would like to put this as a blog post, but it's probably not a good idea, specially since I'm looking for a new job. Thank God for devRant.2 -
I can't recall one single person I can call a mentor, however...
When I first started as a developer I had a senior to work with... I knew close to anything but I was always good at research and learning on my own... But we used an asp.net framework, it was new and there was little to no useful information, only basics... When I asked the senior (let's call him Joe) for help he gave me a quick answer:
Joe: Go to file xx, there's an example of what you need there...
Me: Well, been there and that's great but it doesn't help...
Everytime I was stucked during my first week it was always some sort of the same, so I insisted this time...
Me: so, Joe... I'm really stuck on this one, can you give it a look?
Joe: I know, I've been researching a way to do it for an hour now and can't get it either...
Me: wow! Thanks... But I thought you were an expert on this...
Joe: not really, never used it before. It's as new to me as it is to you! :)
So, that switched me from "this fucking weasel won't help me for shit" to "well, let's help each other"
We became good friends, always challenging each other and from that day on I stopped asking for help, and asking where can I help others...
I had great and greatly bad colleague and seniors. Each one thought me something either what to do or what not to do, how to act or not, how to tackle problems, how to teach...
Everyone I have worked with, worked for or trained is a mentor of mine. Even those I feel like I failed training thought me how to do better next time...
Thank you guys for being grate... Thank you assholes for teaching me how to send a guy go fuck himself! Good luck for those who get stucked with me -
If any of you have been following my last few rants, you'll know I've been working on a project with a particularly difficult client, trying to meet wholly unrealistic deadlines with only one other developer.
The situation has reached the climax. The client had a call with our project manager and boss on Monday to discuss things. Despite them still not having paid a single bill since October, they've demanded the release date be moved to the 6th April. Apparently we'd agreed to release on this date, despite making no such promises, the (optimistic) deadline we were working towards has always been, since it was set about 2 weeks ago, the 16th April.
Apparently AWS migration won't take as long as we think it will, because the designers that do the CSS for this project say so, despite knowing nothing about the architecture of the requirements of the system once live (like if backups are required and what of).
The bottom line is that client is ending development with us the day after the project goes live to give it to their own in-house team. If they want us to work more after the date, they have to buy blocks of days.
To make things better, a large part of new functionality relies on an external API we can't even begin to do learning tests with, let alone integrate due to back-office errors on their end. They've had since Friday to give us our token, yet here we are.
Something tells me my holidays booked for for the first week of April are going by the wayside.4 -
!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.5 -
I see several post about linux, that made me remember the worst day of learning about linux installation many years ago.
I actually just want to know about linux, then suddenly install it without any knowledge about formatting harddisk and something like that.
And the first choice which come up is "install on entire harddisk" i think its like on windows installer and i go through next and next.
Then i got my whole data erased after that. At that time i feel regret.wanna burn my linux cd installer.
But the thirst for trying new is so high.its like wanna pay for the mistake.
After that i like to install many linux distro to choose which one suit my need.
I love linux!!3 -
Rock, meet hard place. I’m losing my employment again. I’m tired of web development, which I’ve never been super great at, and want to switch to something else. But how do I do that and what do I switch to if this is what I’ve been doing for over 20 years and I have to get a new job soon without time or money to get a whole new education and career path? Getting older also means this old dog is having a harder time learning new tricks. Wish I could just retire early.2
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Rant && SPAM alert!
I'm learning QML, to create plasma widgets and I wasted all the fucking day fighting with layouts and trying to understand why the settings window was not rendered (now it's rendered but I still don't understand why it wasn't before, the code is the same!)
so at the end of the day I ried to apply what i learnt in a fresh new widget that shows (some) PiHole statistics from its API.
on first run:
it runs fine, no errors... ok let's do some tests... turn off network, whole DE freeze WTF!?! one widget error (network error in this case) can freeze the whole DE.
restarted plasma, FIXED the bug (debugging process basically is:
try something - freeze - restart plasma - repeat
),
No more freeze!
if you're a KDE and pihole user and you want try my widget:
https://github.com/ShellAddicted/...
P.S: I'm adding right now a switch to quickly enable/disable pi hole over API directly from your desktop. i will push tomorrow.4 -
I used to love my job, the guy that looked forward to mondays, there was always something new to learn, I was passionate about clean code and learning new languages like Elixir. As a software engineer I thought my occupation had a special significance in this world, I saw possibility and potential of creating something so impactful on the world that it would become my legacy.
Now after 5 years I’m realising that none of this stuff really matters to the world, software engineers aren’t special and it’s evident from our salaries how valuable we are compared to other professions in sales, medicine or law. My friend who works as in customer success management makes more than me.
While some of us will be in the lucky few whose work will change the world, most of us will just be another cog in the wheel, all that matters is how many product/features you ship out, nobody gives a shit about code quality, concurrency and architecture design other than us5 -
We are starting a new project where we decieded to use node.js with express.js. It is quite exciting because we have previoisly use node.js only a little and me and my colleagues are eager to learn something new. As I was doing some research I came upon TypeScript. Do you guys think that it is worth spending more time learning TypeScript and use it in upcoming project?6
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Yesterday my friend called me programming Jesus for getting her code to work properly
She's started learning python. All I did was fix the indentation issues and explain that whitespace is finicky in python and send her a couple of article links about it. pretty boring of an issue
I'm kinda bored I wish someone had a more substantial issue for me to look at and have to actually learn something new to fix it
Considering finding a project on github to try and contribute to as a side project when I need a brake from my projects. But as a worse-than-mediocre college coder I'm intimidated to even try5 -
Def not dev oriented.
I am a huge fan of trading card games. It started with Yu Gi Oh, moved on to Magic, even tried, LoTR when it was a thing, tried algo Star Wars the original CCG (loved it), Duel Masters (when it was still in the U.S) Pokemon (of fucking course) and other more uncommon ones like Cardfight Vanguard, tried latino only games (Mitos y leyendas, Myths & Legends, this one is king on my list) and Flesh & Blood. But as a mexican kid, I was always a fan of fucking dragon ball, like most mexican kids.
SO I bought some cards from the newest game expansion. the owner of the TCG/anime store told me that if I was willing to play that I should hang out on tuesdays.
So, learning the rules of the game, and wanting to play with other people, I went there on a tuesday.
The MTG people were there fighting amongst themselves for some reason. the Pokemon people were there also, just opening packs without playing. A rather large table was there with a bunch of people playing a game that I did not recognize. And then there was me. I was chilling on my phone thinking that the DB dudes would show up eventually. nothing, so I just sat there waiting.
Suddenly a dude comes to the large table and starts pairing people for a "tournament" and once they are all sited he notices that 1 is missing, he walks up to me holding a store app and asks me "sorry bro, are you here to play with us by any chance?" to which I say "I do not think so, I came here for DB but I don't know what you guys are playing"
The dude looks down on his app, somehow actually sad and says "man I do play DB, but I don't think I have my cards with me, maybe, let me see" and he goes on to see if he brought something.
This was green flag n 1. the dude wanted to just play something with someone. And was doing something to not LEAVE someone behind. then quick as hell another says "well, why don't we give him a deck and he can play with us! we can teach him!" and I say "well what are you lads playing?" and he says "digimon man you like the anime? a new release came about! it's sick man it would be awesome if you play!"
Second green flag, another member of that community was happy for the idea of increasing the membership and actively did something to increase the population.
So, I hanged out with them. Close knit group, all friends from a long time, but willing to take an unfamiliar (and rather handsome) face with them.
My face when (MFW) the DB dudes where not there, so the digimon group adopted me.
I know have over.....2000 cards, most of them were gifted to me by them after they saw my chops and tough me how to play, by graciously lending me their decks.
This my lads, is what humanity is about. We got close fast, it has been 2 weeks of just chilling with them at the game lounge, just nice people, all of them really. Not a single angry moment or anything, you pull a crazy combo on them and they legit sheeeeeeeesh and applaud them, they don't care about loosing, they just want to have a good time, and this, this is a good crowd to be at.
Strive to make people feel welcomed. Being nice to others, taking a chance on people you deem to be ok, is fine really. It is rather cool. Anyone can be a salty asshole, but it takes a real king to be nice to others just for the sake of having a good time.
These dudes, they are gold. And I finally have something to take my mind away from work and other things that increase my anxiety and stress. I would much rather be there shooting the shit with the lads and playing games than at home, drinking the night away to relieve stress.
Kings3 -
I've only been working for a about 6 months, so this is the best I got.
I'm working with a software/programming language I've never worked with before this, so sometimes I have to go ask my co-worker if what I did is correct, or ask him where some information is stored.
So sometimes I do someting, and then go ask him if it's ok and I can continue. He looks at my code, starts asking questions and (sometimes, not always) says something like "this is not it, let's do it together". Alright, I understand that, I know I still make a lot of mistakes and I'm still learning how to work with this. It's all still very new to me.
We start looking for stuff, making queries, programming, etc. and then we end up with the exact same code that I had made... But, somehow, now it's correct...
This happens so much, I hate asking him things now!8 -
Tabs, or No Tabs? I did the same as this commentor 2 years ago. I can code so quick now because of this simple switch. Here's why:
(source, Laracasts.com)
Ben Smith
"I think the most beneficial tip was to do away with tabs. Although it took a while to get used to and on many occasions in the first few days I almost switched them back on, it has done wonders for my workflow.
I find it keeps my brain more engaged with the task at hand due to keeping the editor (and my mind) clutter free. Before when I had to refer to a class, I would have opened it in a new tab and then I might have left it open to make it easier to get to again. This would quickly result in a bar full of tabs and navigation around the editor would become slow and my brain would get bogged down keeping track of what was open and which tab it was in. With the removal of the tab bar I'm now able to keep only the key information in my mind and with the ability to quickly switch between recently opened files, I find I haven't lost any of the speed which I initially thought I might.
In fact this is something I have noticed in all areas of writing code, the more proficient I have become with an editor the better the code I have been writing. Any time spent actually writing your code is time in which your brain is disconnected from the problem you are trying to solve. The quicker you are able to implement your ideas in code, the smaller the disconnect becomes. For example, I have recently been learning how to do unit testing and to do so I have been rewriting an old project with tests included. The ability to so quickly refactor has meant that whereas before I might have taken 30 seconds shuffling code around, now I can spend maybe 5 seconds allowing my mind to focus much better on how best to refactor, not on the actual process of doing so."
jeff_way Mod
"Yeah - it takes a little while to get used to the idea of having no tabs. But, I wouldn't go back at this point. It's all about forcing yourself into a faster workflow. If you keep the tabs and the sidebar open, you won't use the keyboard."2 -
I recently finished high-school and got a job in PHP Development. My employer told me to make a simple app wich OAuths you to your Discogs account and receive your library list. I got hired afterwards and now i work on a huge project which launches in less than 2 weeks. The day i got my job i havent worked with Laravel but ~ 3 days.
When you need to learn something due to the pressure, you'll learn faster. It's the same as learning a new language - I'd rather go to live in a country where it's mainly spoken that language and learn it due to the necessity than buy courses online. -
!rant
For all of youse that ever wanted to try out Common Lisp and do not know where to start (but are interested in getting some knowledge of Common Lisp) I recommend two things:
As an introductory tutorial:
https://lisperati.com/casting.html/
And as your dev environment:
https://portacle.github.io/
Notice that the dev environment in question is Emacs, regardless of how you might feel about it as a text editor, i can recommend just going through the portacle help that gives you some basic starting points regarding editing. Learn about splitting buffers, evaluating the code you are typing in order for it to appear in the Common Lisp REPL (this one comes with an environment known as SLIME which is very popular in the Lisp world) as well as saving and editing your files.
Portacle is self contained inside of one single directory, so if you by any chance already have an Emacs environment then do not worry, Portacle will not touch any of that. I will admit that as far as I am concerned, Emacs will probably be the biggest hurdle for most people not used to it.
Can I use VS Code? Yes, yes you can, but I am not familiar with setting up a VSCode dev environment for Emacs, or any other environment hat comes close to the live environment that emacs provides for this?
Why the fuck should I try Common Lisp or any Lisp for that matter? You do not have to, I happen to like it a lot and have built applications at work with a different dialect of Lisp known as Clojure which runs in the JVM, do I recommend it? Yeah I do, I love functional programming, Clojure is pretty pure on that (not haskell level imo though, but I am not using Haskell for anything other than academic purposes) and with clojure you get the entire repertoire of Java libraries at your disposal. Moving to Clojure was cake coming from Common Lisp.
Why Common Lisp then if you used Clojure in prod? Mostly historical reasons, I want to just let people know that ANSI Common Lisp has a lot of good things going for it, I selected Clojure since I already knew what I needed from the JVM, and parallelism and concurrency are baked into Clojure, which was a priority. While I could have done the same thing in Common Lisp, I wanted to turn in a deliverable as quickly as possible rather than building the entire thing by myself which would have taken longer (had one week)
Am I getting something out of learning Common Lisp? Depends on you, I am not bringing about the whole "it opens your mind" deal with Lisp dialects as most other people do inside of the community, although I did experience new perspectives as to what programming and a programming language could do, and had fun doing it, maybe you will as well.
Does Lisp stands for Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses or Los in stupid parentheses? Yes, also for Lost of Insidious Silly Parentheses and Lisp is Perfect, use paredit (comes with Portacle) also, Lisp stands for Lisp Is Perfect. None of that List Processing bs, any other definition will do.
Are there any other books? Yes, the famous online text Practical Common Lisp can be easily read online for free, I would recommend the Lisperati tutorial first to get a feel for it since PCL demands more tedious study. There is also Common Lisp a gentle introduction. If you want to go the Clojure route try Clojure for the brave and true.
What about Scheme and the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs? Too academic for my taste, and if in Common Lisp you have to do a lot of things on your own, Scheme is a whole other beast. Simple and beautiful really, but I go for practical in terms of Lisp, thus I prefer Common Lisp.
how did you start with Lisp?
I was stupid and thought I should start with it after a failed attempt at learning C++, then Java, and then Javascript when I started programming years ago. I was overwhelmed, but I continued. Then I moved to other things. But always kept Common Lisp close to heart. I am also heavy into A.I, Lisp has a history there and it is used in a lot of new and sort of unknown projects dealing with Knowledge Reasoning and representation. It is also Alien tech that contains many things that just seem super interesting to me such as treating code as data and data as code (back-quoting, macros etc)
I need some inspiration man......show me something? Sure, look for a game called Kandria in youtube, the creator, Shimera (Nicolas Hafner) is an absolute genius in the world of Lisp and a true inspiration. He coded the game in Common Lisp, he is also the person behind portacle. If that were not enough, he might very well also be Shirakumo, another prominent member of the Common Lisp Community.
Ok, you got me, what is the first thing in common lisp that I should try after I install the portacle environment? go to the repl and evaluate this:
(+ 0.1 0.2)
Watch in awe at what you get.
In the truest and original sense of the phrase (MIT based) "happy hacking!"10 -
You don't deal with low motivation..
Low motivation deals with you.
(try learning something new online, it'll certainly make you feel powerful)2 -
My first software.. Okay. So first time I ever attempted was with my father, i was around 8 or so, i remember very little from it, but in nutshell, i somehow ended up at his job having day off school or something, no idea.
Apparently he was bored, so he decided yo show me... Basic. Yep, thats right. Frking basic. Anyway, he shown me some really basic stuff in basic, and pushed the envelope really hard, just trying to force into me more and more in these 8hrs. I started with filling screen with "o" characters. Most of times he was telling me what to write with elaborate explanation why. At the end of the day, we finished with simple maze game where player was "o" and maze walls was #. Without any goal, or anything.
Next day i was at point 0, understood nothing from it except how to handle keystrokes (and belive me, that for me was huge mindblow, and even bigger mindblow that it actually made prefect sense).
I dont remember much, but later i started with father-assisted c++ and some pascal. I immidietly loved c++ but dropped learning it for (NullPointer) reason.
Thats not really project imho, so now time for my actual first project.
It was about time when ARK survival evolved was a fresh thing, i was playing it a lot. Server admin became buddy. We all complained about max level cap, but to change it in config you needed to input whole new xp curve.
At that time i had great familiarity with google and computers, some thought i was some kind of PC god (seriously I heard someone saying so about me lol) just becouse I could ressurect most cases of broken windows. And I had next to zero programming expirience. It was about to change. I made first c++ actual program, that was making xp curve for you. It took me just bearly 2 days and was series of cin, cout, one file open, some maths in loop, and done. Maths was very bad. But i pushed it into steam forums, and one guy responded how.bad my math was, so we colabed on making 2 iteration. Took around week. Than half a year passed and we wanted go big. Go gui. I had no freaking idea how making gui looks like. Community liked my cli tool, we had quite a lot of downloads, why not go GUI. And thats when I discovered QT framework. And we had few features in mind... It took us half a year to make it. From 60 lines of code i jumped into 1k lines of code. We pushed it and immidietly started working on 4th version with much greater customizability etc.
Than i finished 18 and found a job. Job in php. I got it becouse I made this project.
Now project is abandon. This project also gave me a lesson that donations will not feed you.
Edit: and before you think about my father that he was nice person to show me code, trust me, i dont know bigger dick than him. -
I love learning by doing.
Building MVPs and prototypes is the best way. Even better if you have a chance to show and share them in front of an audience (peer pressure can be good!).
Share the lessons you've learned and what you've done wrong, it will help many more people than just yourself.
I've been working for an eLearning company for the last 4 years (CloudAcademy.com) and I'm in love with the idea of learning something new every day. And not just coding. Code is "only" a tool to solve problems, and learning something about those problems and fields will make you a better developer. -
Every. Single. Time. I've tried to learn and implement proper Unit/Instrumentation testing, the main Android devs decide to go for something else or introduce some feature or Gradle plugin that breaks every tutorial out there. I find it way easier to just test everything manually than learning the new yearly trend. Am I the only one?1
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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.8 -
After much consideration I've decided to learn and use react native over ionic/cordova as I'm going to rewrite most of my views from an existing Web project anyways (if I wanted to make it work with ionic)
I feel anxious and excited at the same time. Hopefully I made the right call.
Anyone here have good experiences switching from ionic to react native?2 -
Felt like helping out a local brewery with a website due to the pandemic for free beer.
OMG feel like an idiot on how long it takes to set up static site from scratch.
Using the static site generator Hugo is easy but customizing the templates, content writing and the graphics are becoming such a fucking bitch! Especially the fucking graphics and not using photoshop but gimp. Is there something else do not want to learn anything else.
Not even to the hosting yet, I hope AWS for hosting static sites is as cheap as eveyone says. I know there is a learning curve but that is why I took this on so I would have experience with it and can out it on my resume.
New respect for free-lancers that do it all.9 -
I want to rant about tech YouTubers. As one myself, I feel like I do an even exchange with my viewers.
I want your attention, I don't feel like I deserve it, so I teach you something coding related. You get something of value, I get your attention.
But that's not the case with most in this space. Idiots feel like they can spout whatever bullshit they think about.
They're all stupid with their stupid fucking titles and ideas. Let's review some.
Video Title: How much Javascript you should know to get in tech??
Anyone with > 2 braincells: WTF !!!!!
Video Title: How would I start over to learn coding if I could?
My Reaction: Nope, I wouldn't. The things that I did and didn't is exactly what my journey is and I would do it all over again.
And I get the intent, you're trying to put a roadmap for beginners but they're not going to follow exactly how you lay it out. And why are you trying to establish that there is a correct way of learning coding? Everyone learns at different paces at different times. It's a journey not a race.
Video Title: A day in the life of {COMPANY} engineer.
My Reaction: What do you want to show everyone? Your fancy office? Your perks? The job perks which 99% of other devs won't have?
Video Title: How to crack FAANG interviews.
My Reaction: Well, only the top 1% is going to get an interview anyway. You're not acknowledging the fact that the acceptance rate is < 1% in these companies. Creating a video like this creates false expectations in beginner's heads. And they only see these companies as their only shots of making careers. They dont consider startups or starting their own companies.
Video Title: Top 4 dying programming languages.
My Reaction: WTF !!! COBOL was invented in 1959 and there still is demand for it. And my blood started boiling when Tiff in Tech said PHP is a dying language. Like seriously????
Video Title: Top paying programming languages in 2023.
My Reaction: Please, come on. We know it's Java. And 99% of the viewers ain't getting that job. You're just wasting time listing out languages. By the time someone starts from scratch and gets to a position of getting a job, something else will be the new fad.
Video Title: What advice would I give myself when I was starting?
My Reaction: Really? You couldn't think about saying what advice you'd give to your viewers? Are you really that full of narcissism?
There are good techies though, it's just that I get angrier and angrier the more YouTube recommends me these stupid videos. Ah, my chest feels lighter now.6 -
How do you guys get better at programming?
I'm very new to this sphere and currently I'm learning C++ (think strings, bools and early stages of if/else) due to university course and I have fun with it during labs, but when I have to do something by myself from scratch, I reach a certain point and then I get stuck. I try re-reading the lectures but I can't find appropriate solution for the issues I face.
Do I keep doing simple tasks or do I just watch/read guides or tutorials? What is your input on the matter, fellows? :)4 -
There was a rant earlier of someone working a 9 to 5 job now which i can't seem to find, wanted to answer in regards to wk26
They were complaining about it being a boring job with boring processes and not learning anything new..
you can't say that you haven't learned something new, i bet you haven't learned a new language or technology but there are plenty of other skills to be picked up from a company that have worked for this all their lives..
I mean, these kind of companies have either seen it all already and had tons of bad experiences they are trying to avoid, or then never experienced any of them but are still trying to avoid them.
I once worked for a Japanese company in Europe. All decisions (big or small) were taken by answering with the phrase : If it isn't broken, don't fix it. As a result they had an excel with over 64k complaints in them (1 row per complaint) and their website was running on 19 Sun servers, load balanced, using php 4.2 because the technology was just too old.
Point being, plenty of things to learn, getting new experiences, even if they are bad, at least now you know, how not to do things in a certain way, but all in all, working at different places, even bad ones, gives you perspective..
And perspective is important.
Perspective is experience.
It's the bit that glues the knowledge together.
Go out and explore, don't be afraid, everyone needs bad experiences, even if it was only so we can identify the good ones. -
"We've got a new opportunity for you."
I'm a fucking rookie. I didn't know the meaning of this sentence. Suddenly, I become the "IP PBX expert" of the society.
"-Okay, it's some networking shit, I thing I'm good at networking shit. Piece of cake.
-Okay great, you have one month to learn how this thing works, because we WILL provide this kind of service."
Damn.
I spent one month learning this shit on my free time, printing RFCs and living in the fucking MATRIX to not fuck up on the very first day doing that, just in case something on the customers' network fucks with the PABX or something like that.
Oh yeah, I forgot: I'm paid 80% of the minimum wage because I am actually not qualified to do my job and I'm spending one week a month to learn how to IT (some french weirdness I think, if not, maybe it's the germans' fault. Also yes, 100% legal).
Today, they announced me that they "changed their mind".
I'm pissed.1 -
Pills. Failing that, everything everyone else has said... if you find yourself procrastinating too much, get medicated.
On top of that, routine, regiment and willpower.
I started learning Russian recently, trying for the second time. This time around, I found that the small positive reward gamification elements of Dualingo to be a great help (Streaks and daily bonus BS currency).
I've also found myself using Trello to list out things I need or want to do to stop from overwhelming myself. If I have a new task or thing I need to do whilst I'm already getting something else done, I note it down and then forget about it until it's time to find something new to get done.
If all else fails, then look at yourself. Take a long, hard look at yourself in the mirror. I became good at this through necessity, after illness and injury I realised that there's no time for chronic procrastination. If your life expectancy halved what would you change and how quickly?
If you still can't fix it, I'm guessing it's not as big a problem as you think it is... enjoy yourself! -
Is it a good idea to start learning Python? I'm a PHP dev but I really want to get out of my comfort zone and try something new. Moreover, I think as a PHP dev, I don't really have a future.4
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Guys help me grow my small collaboration group. If you're interested in learning new things,collaborating new ideas or just wanna talk to some cool cats then join us. My goal is to grow it as much as possible so anyone can find the help they need on their next/current idea. If interested drop your email and ill send you an invite to our slack. I don't care what your skill set is. You might learn something new. You might not . if anything youll make new friends:)9
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Hey DevRant Fam! , i really hope everyone is doing very well as always! :D <3 I'm currently now learning c# MVC5 which is incredibly new to me and something I've personally never seen and or done, but i love a challenge!.
Now onto something bit more 'somewhat' personal :D, for about 5 years I've been undergoing Immunotherapy Treatment because i suffered from serve chronic eczema and last week was my last ever consultation! I'm incredibly happy to be done with it, another stress lifted off my shoulders :D.
Anyways guys and gals, i really hope everyone is having an amazing day and or night wherever you may be in this world :D
Best wishes <3
Milo10 -
I work at company that uses Drupal for everything. And i mean EVERYTHING. Our dumb CTO once even wanted us to join tender for flight data collection system... of course it would run on fucking drupal...
Yeah i can see its advantages but it has learning curve the shape of the snail shell and if you want it to do something new you either find module for it or drupal will start crying, shits itself and tell you to go fuck yourself.. also it is full of surprises to make your day as miserable as possible, like you send variable as $content['varname'] to user template and it returns as $user_profile['varname']['value']... and yes user template has $content array for content but why use it for storing content that i want to render.. it is used for other content to render... because in drupal content != content...
I started using laravel for my freelance projects and it took my less than 2 week to get up to speed and start working and is incredible fast to work in... You know.. its fun when you want to just add feature you just code that feature into your app.. and not spend 2 fucking years crawling through retarded preprocess functions...
Whenever i try to suggest we use other frameworks.. "Muh drupal has MODULES".. yeah because drupal is the only thing in universe that has modules.. When client has only need for simple site with simple template why use wordpress and have it done in 2 days when you can use drupal have 10 000 unnecessary DB queries that drupal does on every page load to load page title and make that site in a week.. or why use laravel for e-shop with specific functionality requested by client that would take 2 weeks to add in laravel when you can spend 2 months modifing uber-cart or drupal commerce modules only to hit some Drupal core surprise that wont allow for that feature to be implemented...3 -
Am I the only one that is very neutral while learning a new language or framework or whatever it may be? Like cause you have to go through the basics and you’re basically stuck copying what the tutorial, book, video, whatever source tells you to do and the best you can FUCKING do is change a few things. I love learning new stuff don’t get me wrong I love adding tools to my arsenal.
I just don’t know what else I could try to do because it’s new ground but I want to acknowledge I’m learning it by making my own small basic program with what I’ve been showed but there’s not enough to do different stuff and I have to go back to the tutorials and copying and I feel like I’m learning NOTHING it’s just a annoying feeling for me personally idk if anyone feels the same. Am I crazy? Or am I just doing something wrong?
Also to clarify the all caps “FUCKING” was because my phone changed it to ducking and I wanted to make sure autocorrect knew I meant what I meant.5 -
A bit late.. and not much about how to learn to code..but more of a figuring out if the kid has a right mind set to do so..
If the kid is not the type to question everything, not resourceful, not a logical/critical thinker, gives up easily and especially if not interested in how things work then being a dev is most probably not for them.. they can still persue coding, but it will end badly..
From my experience, people who have a better education than me, but lack those skills turned out to be a crappy dev.. not interested in the best tool to complete the tasks, just making 'something', adding more shit to the already shitty stack.. and being happy with that.. which of course is not the best way to do things around here..or in life!!
Soo.. if the kid shows all that and most importantly shows interest in learning to code.. throw him the java ultimate edition book and see what happens.. joke!
There are plenty of apps thath can get you started (tried mimo, but being devs yourself it's probably not so hard to check some out and weed out the bad ones) that explain simple logic and syntax.. there is w3schools that explains basics quite well and lets you tinker online with js and python..
so maybe show them these and see what happens.. If it will pick their interest, they will soon start to ask the right questions.. and you can go from there..
If the kids are not the 'evil spawns' of already dev parents or don't have crazy dev aunties and uncles, then they will have to work things out themselves or ask friends... or seek help online (the resourceful part comes here).. so google or any flavour of search engines is their friend..
Just hope they don't venture to stack overflow too soon or they will want to kill themselves /* a little joke, but also a bit true.. */
Anyhow, if the kid is exhibiting 'dev traits' it is not even a question how to introduce it to the coding.. they will find a way.. if not, do not force them to learn coding "because it's in and makes you a lot of moneyz"..
As with other things in life, do not force kids to do anything that you think will be best for them.. Point them in direction, show them how it might be fun and usefull, a little nudge in the right direction.. but do not force.. ever!!!
And also another thing to consider.. most of the documentation and code is written in english.. If they are not proficient, they will have a hard time learning, checking docs, finding answers.. so make sure they learn english first!!
Not just for coding, knowing english will help them in life in general. So maaaaybe force them to learn this a bit..
One day my husband came to me and asked me how he can learn.. and if it's too late for him to learn coding.. that he found some app and if I can take a look and tell him what I think, if it is an ok app to learn..
I was both flattered and stumped at the same time..
Explained to him that in my view, he is a bit old to start now, at least to be competitive on the market and to do this for a living, but if it interests him for som personal projects, why not.. you're never too old to start learning and finding a new hobby..
Anyhow, I've pointed out to him that he will have to better his english in order to be able to find the answers to questions and potential problems.. and that I'm happy to help where and when I can, but most of the job will be on him.
So yeah, showed him some tutorials, explained things a bit.. he soon lost interest after a week and was mindblown how I can do this every day..
And I think this is really how you should introduce coding to kids.. show them some easy tutorials, explain simple logic to them.. see how they react.. if they pick it up easily, show them something more advanced.. if they lose interest, let them be.
To sum up:
- check first if they really want to learn this or this is something they're forced to do (if latter everything you say is a waste of everybodys time)
- english is important
- asking questions (& questioning the code) is mandatory so don't be afraid to ask for help
- admitting not knowing something is the first step to learning
- learn to 'google' & weed out the crap
- documentation is your friend
- comments & docs sometimes lie, so use the force (go check the source)
- once you learn the basics its just a matter of language flavour..adjust some logic here, some sintax there..
- if you're stuck with a problem, try to see it from a different angle
- debugging is part of coder life, learn to 'love' it4 -
I've got a decent developer job with decent people. It pays well enough. I work from home. There's a lot to be grateful for, and I am grateful. That being said...
I work for a consulting company with Agile in the name. It's the sort where they hire you and tell you that you'll work with an Agile team on exciting stuff and that they want to make sure you're learning and doing what interests you.
The reality is starting yet another engagement which is really just staff augmentation, joining another organization that's made a mess of what they're building. It works, but the code is all over the place. They've got tons of defects and work is slowing.
The idea is always that if we show them what great work we can do they'll let us do more. That sounds like an okay plan for the company but not so much for me.
My motivation is drained. I'm not going to fix your machine. I'm just going to become part of it. Show me what you want me to work on and I'll write the code. Then I'll spend several days trying to get a local environment to work so I can test what I did through the UI because you don't have enough tests. I'll spend more time debugging the environment than anything else. I won't really know if it works and it doesn't matter because without tests the next change someone commits will break it anyway. The next person can't manually test every scenario any more than I can.
While I'm doing this, someone somewhere is building the next application that I'll work on after they're done screwing it up.
If you're about to start building some new application, pretend it's done but it doesn't work very well, it's slow, it's buggy, and every new feature you want takes months. Pretend that you need to hire someone to fix it for you. And then hire them to build it for you in the first place.
I thought I found a place where I could work for 5-10 years. Maybe I have. Maybe when I explain (in the most positive way possible - this isn't how I normally talk) how utterly depressing this is they'll put me on something else.
Once I'm out of this depression I'll go back to trying to make this better for myself and everyone else. We can do better. It doesn't have to suck like this.4 -
"bro why bother with <project> when 10 of <project> already exist?"
learning is fun and suffering builds character and oh boy there's about to be a lot of both
anyways something something new linux distro from 100% source that isn't LFS idk if you can have it there's 50 licenses bouncing around in there2 -
Being victim of an arbitrary worplace's culture on dev experience and documentation makes me a very frustrated dev.
Often I do want to document, and by that, I don't mean laying an inline comment that is exactly the function's name, I mean going full technical writer on steroids. I can and WILL get very verbose, yes, explaining every single way you can use a service - no matter how self explanatory the code might look.
I know developers (and me included) can, and sometimes will, write the best variable and function names at the time, wondering if they reached the peak of clean, DRY code that would make Robert Martin have a seizure and piss himself, only to find weeks later after working on something else that their work is unreadable. Of course.
I know the doc's public, it's me, and I've done this.
But then again explain for the people in the back how the FUUUUCK are we meant to suggest improvements, when we are not the ones who are prioritising features and shit WITH the business?
Just email me when the fucking team recycles, and no new team member knows how to even setup the IDEs because this huge piece of monumental shit called CompanyTM is also run by VPN. Fuck, no one wants to access that garbage, you have no docs.
I once tried setting up a culture for documentation. I did an herculean amount of work studying what solutions were internally homologated, how steep the learning curve would be from what we had at the moment (NOTHING, WE HAD FUCKING NOTHING, jesus christ, I even interviewed SEVENTEEN other squads to PROVE they FUCKING NEED
DOCS
TO WORK
You know what happened to that effort?
It had a few "clap" reactions on a Teams meeting and it never reached the kanban.
It didn't even made it to backlog.
I honestly hope that, someday, an alien fenomenon affects the whole company, making their memories completely reset, only to have the first one - after the whole public ordeal on why our brains became milkshake -, to say: "oh, boy, I wish we had documented this".
Then I will bring them to the back and shoot them. -
I think instead of being lazy today and sleeping in until 3, I'm gonna spend my Sunday morning early afternoon learning something new or building something short and sweet. Not sure what I wanna go after though! I started getting into openCV but I'm not good enough quite yet for it to be somewhat enjoyable. I am a swiss army knife so I work a lot of stuff but I'm open to anything.6
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It's been a little bit over two weeks since I quit my first job, thought I would share some stories 😁
I started my very first job in the middle of August (last year) and my duties were to fix some issues on front-end files. You can see my previous rants to see how long were these files 😐
So after 2/3 months I managed to get my shit done, started learning Vue on my own to implement it to new projects (and done it successfully) and learn something about shitty clients who don't know how to live and don't know what do they want.
When I quit the job on the last day of April, I was so happy to end it mostly due to this one specific client who were able to turn happy innocent coding of a great project into hellish shit. Plus there were some issues I noticed with some people I worked with (like they were sending these sexist memes which weren't funny at all 🙄)
TL;DR if you feel that your job post is not for you or that is doesn't make you feel happy or comfortable, don't be afraid to walk away. I did and I don't regret it 😉 -
The nice thing about being a developer? Learning something new every day. The worst thing about being a developer? Going back to the code you wrote before learning these new things.2
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Question for you desktop guys. I was thinking of making a desktop app with a GUI as a side project. It's mostly going to be business-like CRUD, no fancy stuff. I was thinking of using electron (since I'm a web developer) but I read that it's slow and bloated. On the other hand I would like learning something new. I don't want to spend too much time on the GUI so I would prefer a framework/language that already has some nice open source gui packs available. I have only ever used JavaFX before for a tutorial, is that a good choice? Also, I would like it to work on both linux and windows.10
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Because of the amount of complaining I do at work concerning legacy php applications the HOD is trying to push for different technologies to use for backend services. We have met multiple times to discuss the proper way of handling the situation since there are a lot of very obvious things to consider regarding the push for a new tech stack. The typical names have come about, but my biggest issue will be training people for these stacks.
Testing environments with docker and so forth, push for CERTAIN applications to be more API centric and the use of better frontend frameworks that will remain standard for years to come(hard to bet on this one but I tend to orefer React) among other things are the topics of conversation.
Personally I would love to move the shop to something geared towards Golang, thing is, the lead dev is complaining about it saying that the training for a new language would just take time. After a couple of examples he is still not convinced.
I think its wrong of him to center himself on just PHP and JQUERY as the main development stack he uses and learning new things should be part of the job, I also have a case against the spaghetti code that results from just using vanilla php with no proper development practices(composer based systems, oop etc etc you get the gist)
In the end I am starting to think that it will become one of those "fuck off I am the boss" type of deal since I am going to be here after a long time and he has about 2 years before he medically retire.1 -
Si I live in México, and a big university is giving this 8 day course on machine Learning and automated robotics and I was accepted!! And I'm super pumped, because I really want to work in the industry and love taking any posible oportunity to learn something new.
This also is a perfect excuse to travel to Guadalajara and get all of my questions about the university answerd
There it is, I just wanted to be excited somewhere else xd6 -
Just realized that I didn't used stackoverflow.com for a month (+- a week or so). Mhhh I should start learning something new I miss it!1
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Dev: Now that I finally know PHP and JS it must be really easy to find a good framework and use to build my beautiful website.
The options are limited: AngularJS, ReactJS, Ember, ActivateJS, BackboneJS, ExpressJS, Laravel, RactiveJS, Node.JS, Meteor, Knockout, Symphony, Codeignitor
And yes, you thought if you don't like AngularJS you can easily switch to ReactJS. But guess what, every framework will use their own scripting languages like Jade, Blade, Typescript making it learning something new extremely smooth.
The documentation will be part of another rant3 -
I want to make a "game" on learning spoken languages so people can study while not stressing out on the learning.
The disadvantages:
-Vocab
-Method to memorize is different with every person
-Stress and frustration
-Motivation killer
Advantages:
-Can be interesting, depends on user's interest and willingness
-Explore vocab by exploring or reading in-game texts
-Grammar is heavily broken down to help relate meanings and thorough understanding of a sentence as well as slang
--
Why I put disadvantages first was to see how the software will impact a person's negativity/postivity when using it. As in for example, when you see something that is difficult to understand, users tend to procrastinate or drop it due to it being "difficult"/alienated.
-- onto the rant--
Many apps have really awful way of teaching, its just 3-4 apps chucked into 1 aka all-in-one and expects people to pay just because of the all-in-one app containing flash cards, sentences, audio etc. I use my phone (android) and normally during my intern or my way to school, I would do my reading in the other languages, (separate apps, all free). Also apart from that, students sometimes take 2 years to learn but drop because it's difficult.
TL:DR; apps and classes give shitty lessons, I want to outdo them and let students have a better chance at studying new spoken languages.2 -
Is this just me every dev have this problem, while learning something new sometimes I loose track and learn something else completely without any intention of learning it.
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I think I finally, really, comprehend why secret societies have historically been created... I mean the potentially logical ones. This train of thought is logically terrifying.
I want a logic check.
I've been jokingly mentioning some of my totally true, practically useless in most scenarios, skills/specific fields of knowledge/ability under a moniker of 'extremely useful, assuming apocalyptic event' for years. Things like advanced knowledge of Coefficients of glass expansion, Fortran, various things that have caused friends to refer to me as MacGyver after the reboot came out.
In recent years, I've personally encountered several varieties of the ones defined by helplessness, self-victimisation, some version of a real disability... that theyve expounded into a personified personal nemesis-- to flashily battle yet never overcome, etc... the vast majority perplexing me as to why that's a valid form of life to them... it's not that they never consider some other way; the ball is just quickly dropped and never picked back up.
College?(not that I'm a big fan) they wish they could but so expensive... aide? The form was hard/confusing/past-due...
Lookup/learn something more indepth than a tiktok? *some self-deprecating bs*
Yet it's "I always wanted to do/be/learn X"
Shows like 'How It's Made' fascinate, but don't inspire enough for a 5min google query.
In the dev world its a clear, inverted pyramid-- one of the first posts I saw when I rejoined here was ostream's rant on Apple sucking because after they stop support/updates you "can't" load a different OS... ofc you can. But several comments down... no mention of that... i think it was @LensFlare who was the only one in ~15 respondents to point out the core logical fallacy.
Basic shit is totally forgotten... try asking some random adults what plastic is made from... or pay attention to how many people declare they have a gluten "allergy".
I get people frequently telling me that things im pointing out as differences don't matter because "it's just semantics"... semantics is literally the epitome of "significance", with roots in 'meaning' and 'truth'
Back to the main issue... We are in a world where DIY is typically something you pay more to do as a catered experience than actually learning anything, people destroy their own arguments hopes of validity unwittingly often by stating the arguement, get 'offended' or 'triggered' by factual statements, propagate misinformation and bastardise words until MW needs money enough to print a new version, likely adding the misuse as an actual definition and basic knowledge and the thought to actually learn is vetoed by the existence of google translate, the wisdom of tiktok and the pure brillance of troubleshooting every random linux issue you have from not knowing basic CLI and thinking linux makes you cool, with chmod 777 because so many other dumbasses on forums keep propagating misinformation. Ask them what 777 means, most have no clue... as they didnt consider googling that one before putting it in a terminal several times.
The number of humans that actually know the basic shit that the infrastructure of the world is built on keeps decreasing... and we aren't even keeping a running tally.
The structure of the internet has the right idea... dns- 13 active master root servers, with multiple redundancies if they start dropping... hell ICANN is like a secret society but publicly known/obfuscated... the modern internet hasnt had a global meltdown... aside from the lack of censorship and global availability changing the social definition of a valid use of braincells to essentially propagating spam as if it's factual and educational.
So many 'devs' so few understanding what a driver is, much less how to write one... irl network techs that don't know what dhcp is or that their equiptment has logs... professionals in deducated fields like Autism research/coping... no clue why it was called "autism", obesity and malnutrition simultaneously existing in the same humans... it's like we need to prepare a subterranean life-supporting vault and stock it like Noah's ark... just including the basic knowledge of things that used to be common/obvious. I've literally had 2 different, early 20s, female, certified medical assistants taking my medical history legitimately ask if not having a uterus made it harder to get pregnant...i wish i was joking.
Any ideas better than a subterranean human vault system? It's not like we can simply store detailed explanations, guides, media... unless we find a way to make them into obfuscated tiktok videos apparently on nonsense or makeup tutorials.11 -
Have a curious mind. Yes, the kind that allegedly killed the cat.
When your natural instinct is to spend every idle moment learning something new, to plateau is not likely.2 -
May's last week was very hectic. I had just finished my final exams and there were going to be semester project evaluations in that whole week.
@safiullah and me had decided to make a whole Social Network with all features in it, for the DB course project.
All other classmates were making small management systems like ticket booking and etc.
We thought that if we really wanted to learn DB concepts then we should come up with something different than a management panel.
Hence we did it. This was the first time we used a framework. Well, I had written that PHP framework while i was learning about how frameworks work and the way they are made. So it wasn't a big thing but it was something which could be used as a base for clean and organized code.
It took about a month of commits and pushes and it resulted in a very good social network. It had all the features and algorithms present in a starter social network.
For us students, we were happy to see what a fine job we had done. We learnt a lot and used new concepts.
When we went to the instructor, she asked us to sit down and show the project. @safiullah placed the laptop, and logged out from the social network so that he could show her a demo.
She exclaimed,"Why did you do it (Log out) ?"
He replied: "To show you how it works🤷🏻♂️"
She:"Get to the previous state and leave it"
Then she asked different questions like what was a post request in php and how it differed from get? what library for DB connection was used... etc.
We explained each and every step.
She saw the frontend design and said "You've just added text to the elements" as If we were showing her a theme demo with hard coded text accomplished by inspect element.
She did not take a look at any other page than the one we had shown her at start. She navigated to no other page and asked nothing about what total features were implemented and how they were done?
Then she said Thank You and we left.
After some days marks were uploaded in LMS and we were just two points above the average.
She took no look and gave us the least when our project was the best.
I'm 100 percent sure she thought that we were showing her a project copied from somewhere else. 🤣4 -
I just started a new job last week. Old-school sysadmin role for a pretty old-school company, but the pay is nice and the kids've gotta eat.
They gave me a windows laptop. I haven't used windows for work or as a daily driver since 2016, and now, a week into trying to make this machine work for me, I have the following observations to report.
WSL is nice. It's nice to have it installed(though actually installing it was an adventure unto itself), and to set alacritty to open my default user prompt straight into that is very nice. As terminal emulators are by far my most used piece of software, that's nice to have.
Command-line software management through powershell, winget, and chocolatey are also very nice.
I like the accessibility offered by autohotkey, though there is something of a learning curve on it. Once I get better with it, I suspect that what follows will be largely mitigated.
The Bad:
In general, Windows is janky. It feels like it's all kinda taped together without any particular cohesion in mind. As a desktop, it feels decidedly amateur, compared to the feature-mountain polish of MacOS, and especially compared to the flexibility and infinite possibilities of Linux.
Lots of screen real estate is wasted, with window decorations, and fonts that look terrible at smaller sizes, because the antialiasing of fonts is just terrible. Almost all the features I depend on in other desktops: ad-hoc searches and launches(alfred, rofi) are-- again --janky. They work, but they typically require more typing than alfred or rofi. I admit I haven't spent weeks on this problem yet, but I haven't found a workable solution yet with wox, hain, and keypirinha. Quick searches like what you get with alfred, alfred workflows, and the swiss army knife that is rofi, just aren't possible or reliable with the tools I've used so far, and most require some kind of indexing agent to fully function.
It beggars imagination that a desktop in which users are subjected to "default apps" that is purported to be acceptable for enterprise, professional use, does not have a default entry for text editor. I installed nvim-qt, and I want to use it to edit anything and everything I ever edit with text, but all too often, apps have hard-coded instructions to open text files with notepad.
I want to open certain URLs with firefox, certain ones with firefox developer edition, and others with vivaldi, and yet there is not an app available that I have seen yet in my searches that allows me to set this kind of configuration. I found one that's supposed to, but it just ignores everything I put into its config, and just opens MS Edge for everything. Jank.
Simple things take too long. Like the delay between when I laboriously hit ctrl-alt-del to bring up the login and when the actual text field appears, and the delay between that and when I want to start using the computer.
Changing some settings requires a reboot. Updating some software requires a reboot. Updating permissions on something sometimes requires a reboot. And those are all on top of the frequent requests to reboot for updates.
I would have thought Windows would have overcome most of the issues that create these problems, but it's just, as I said, amateur.1 -
When learning something new, say a new language or framework, do you go through the docs or tutorials, or do you just learn by doing and figure it out as you go?
I like to learn by doing and getting a finished project and start modding and changing stuff. what do you guys do?17 -
Day 9 of devWholesome...
Dedicate some time to learning something new or pick up a new hobby! Software development may be fun, but sometimes it can be frustrating and time consuming. Take some time off to do something else as well. Maybe learn an instrument or learn how to draw. I have decided to pick up drawing and am practicing to have nice looking art (might even post in a later devWholesome post). Learning something new can broaden your interests and opportunities. And as always, make the most out of your day!random wholesome positive happy hobby learn devwholesome i slightly broke the embed generator good day4 -
I'm not gonna lie when im learning new modules or OOP or get errors or something I get intimidated and feel stupid for asking for help
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On the learning new stuff before applying some horrid shit everywhere:
Read the fucking guide/documentation/whatever, few times and if not clear, ffs ask someone - it will make you look less stupid now then later when you fuck it up for everyone!
Dude started doing something new when I was on long holidays, and I got noticed the day I was back.
Said ok, let's dive in and spent all day reading docs and guides, good practices and saw examples of what to apply and what to avoid cause shitstorm will happen etc.
I asked that dude to show me his work on this up until now, and that dude used every antipattern available!
Invest some fucking time in educating yourself a bit and pay attention to, you know, important fucking things from docs/guides! -
After I finished the university, I felt like I didn't know anything. I'm learning everyday something new in my work (I'm working 8 years as a dev), but I can't say comfortably that I'm good at programming. After work I'm going home, where I learn and practice new things and deepen my understanding of the core concepts, but again, I feel like I don't know anything. Will I ever feel that I'm a good programmer?2
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Intellij / vim
I primarily use intellij(-based ides) or vim.
Jetbrains is doing an awesome job with the intellij platform.
If its GoLand, IDEA, Pycharm, Webstorm, Rider or DataGrip.
Once you have indexed your project it works flawless. The autocomplete is EXTREME fast and very good. You got quick actions, refactoring and barely need to use your mouse.
Everything works fine. And if there is something missing there is an plugin for it. And if there even doesnt exist a plugin already, you can code one!
The price is relatively high, but its worth every damn cent!
For light editing and ansible stuff i primarily use vim.
Its good to go and i am pretty sure i am using not even 1 percent of the features. Although i am learning new stuff about it every day.
Its cool if i just want to code distraction free and dont want to leave my sweet $HOME. Yeah i am a linux & bash fetishist, although sometimes its driving me crazy.4 -
I've been wondering for a while about something...why do so many devs complain sooo much when they have to to stuff not related to their main area of expertise.
I like learning and trying everything if I have the opportunity...backend, fronted, database, dev-ops, crypto, networking, virtualization...I stuck my nose in everything...but I see a lot of people moaning and despairing when they are thrown out of their comfort zone.
Like why...it's interesting... it's not always sunshine and rainbows but knowing something new in IT is never gonna hurt you...who knows maybe someday it's gonna help you get out a tight spot or land that awesome job you wanted.
Ok I'm done 😁11 -
My new employer is giving me the option to learn whatever I want. I’m doing procurement and Sharepoint and some other things, covering on the help desk, and some graphic design work. I have a bit of free time though and want to try something new!
We have the following teams: networks, development, security, and help desk. What should I ask to do next?
I’m learning SQL and have also been given the opportunity to do some of that work once I am ready.
Note: I know that it’s my preference what I do, I just don’t even know where to begin!3 -
So I started my new job yesterday. My manager seems like a nice person & co-workers too.
Meanwhile I found out they use Eclipse and SVN. I've been learning and using git. Now gotta learn subversion. Oh and all Java development I did was on Netbeans.
I'm learning Swift (3) and I saw few projects in objective-C.
Man they must really be seeing something in me.
I'm hoping Eclipse and SVN isn't as bad. Reading rants here makes it seem pretty bad lol.
I'm excited to learn though, gotta dive right in.3 -
I have never been this serious with my life as a whole as I have since I started learning computer programming. I struggled to read one book a year (I mean non programming book like self improvement books e.t.c). Now I have finished two books in a little over a month and started reading a third book this month all while still studying programming. I started out with python and was honestly terrified of Java because of the semicolons, curly braces, parenthesis in front of if/else if/else statements but one day I decided to take a peek into a few Java programming books and found one "Learn Java the Easy Way" by Bryson Payne and it changed my life, quite literally. I read more now, I look forward to getting out of bed and any day I don't read, I just don't feel right. I need to read something and learn at least one new thing a day. If I feel awful at night, I just remind myself of the one new thing I learnt that day and that puts a smile on my face.
Side note, I am self-taught and started studying programming last year around November/December. Spent about two months on python and in January or February, I started Java. Been on Java since. Almost done with the Java book and looking forward to reading a more advanced book when I'm done.3 -
So at work I still haven't gotten enough time to try/learn Docker/Openshift...
Should I just login on weekends to play with it, create some small projects to see how it all works?
One part of me says it my boss really want me to learn it, then he should clear the time for me.
The other part is like "I'm learning this for my own good and it might be fun since I'll finally be doing something new... And then I'll be the smartass on this too"5 -
Is it normal to find yourself spending days sifting through documentation, often outdated, when learning new tools/frameworks as a developer? Sometimes finding myself doing this just to write 2 lines of code to interface something/configuration and I’m not sure if I’m better off just forcefully coding my own fix while knowing there’s a solution out there in the haystack.2
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Feeling over stressed, over worked and highly underpaid for all this effort. Worst of all I feel the passion leaving me for this work.
I graduated a boot camp last April and was blessed to contract part time at a startup learning how to work in the unity game engine. The team is two other guys, both super smart snd been working in this field for a long time. Since then I’ve added personal projects, finished a data structures and algorithms course and started the Leet code grind. I told this startup that I’d start looking for full time employee positions soon and they understand. They couldn’t offer me much money, or stock options, just experience they said. I feel like I’ve basically been grinding 24/7 since May. I’m going to run out of money soon and it’s all starting to take a toll on my body and mind. I never really sit on the couch or watch something anymore because I feel I should be doing something productive. This just makes me feel like everything I’m doing is meaningless and without impact. I feel like a wheel turning endlessly in sand and not moving forward. I even feel it zapping my passion for developing.
I just can’t help but feel that I’m burning out here. I have a new experimental feature to do for the startup and the amount of things to learn seems overwhelming. Especially with Leet code and interviews coming up. The two other devs on the team are extremely busy as this is a part time endeavor for everyone. I’m also in a relationship I started to feel detached from which causes it’s own stress. I love VR and AR which is why I chose this startup to learn Unity. Now I just feel like I’m dividing my efforts too much. I’m shitty at unity and also less good at web dev than I would have been if I focused on it purely after boot camp grad. On the plus side I will say I’m doing what I want. I just can’t help but feel like that damn tire in the sand turning without traction. And I feel the patience in me for self learning the basics and iteration over a complex project is waning. Without patience the learning is rushed and I don’t learn shit. I also make dumb mistake and “hope” I don’t run into errors. I feel I’m just trying to bang it out for the startup instead of use it learn cool shit. Anyways it feels good to rant. I can’t wait for a full time job, established work hours, and decent pay so I can live life and have off time.
I assume wherever I go I’ll always be in a spot where I need to figure how to get xyz done with minimal help or oversight. I just would like to be paid for it.8 -
What do you think of Elixir + Phoenix to build API’s? Is it a better choice than a more established language like Python or something more new like Scala or Clojure?
At my company we're going through a watershed moment where we're starting to discuss and think about re-building our digital foundations and nothing is off limits. I'm leading the discussion about our architecture where everyone can have their say into what the future looks like for our applications. We're currently on a Drupal (CMS) + PHP7/Symfony (Backend Content Repository) + Symfony Twig templates (Frontend)
Even though I have been developing in PHP most of my career, I personally love Elixir and spend a lot of my time away from work learning it but many of my reasons feels subjective like pattern matching, it's actor concurrency model, immutable data and not having to deal with classes/objects, and I'm not entirely sure how that translates to business value, advocating successfully for a tech stack change requires solid reasoning and good answers to challenges like how do we find Elixir developers when existing devs leave, how easy is it to build a CI/CD pipeline for Elixir/Phoenix, etc.4 -
Hey DevRanters.
I'm currently a PHP Developer and I want to learn a new language soon.
I have thought about learning .Net or C# or something third?
At the moment I'm also working with NodeJS and have a basic knowledge about that, should I just continue mastering that?
What should I go with? I don't really care much about how much money it can give and so on, just wanting to learn more :D15 -
Is it wrong that I hate Java?
I tried learning it before, couldn't get myself to, I thought there was something wrong with me, maybe im not open to learning new languages
Then I got introduced to F#, Loved it! Even moved portions of pet projects to it
Looked at Java again
Still hate it.
Advice?2 -
Ive repeatedly posted this over and over and i will continue to because i really want this collaboration network to grow! If you're not interested then share this with anyone who might be:
"Guys help me grow my small collaboration group. If you're interested in learning new things,collaborating new ideas or just wanna talk to some cool cats then join us. My goal is to grow it as much as possible so anyone can find the help they need on their next/current idea. If interested drop your email and ill send you an invite to our slack. I don't care what your skill set is. You might learn something new. You might not. If anything youll make new friends :)"6 -
!rant but sometime you need to share some positive vibes.
Found out I could get $50 credit for digital ocean from github because I am a student.
So now I can learn a lot for free, and if I mess something up I can just create a new machine.
So now I am first learning how to work with docker and the communication between containers.
Good to see people want to encourage devs :)2 -
It's the 5th day of my holiday, circa 10.20 AM. So far I've spent around 30h programming, and learned React (already having experience with the other 2 major ME*N stacks I decided it was time to give it a go), made a small 2D platformer with Unity and realised I really like writing unit tests. Maybe next I refactor the app I just made to use GraphQL and TypeScript next, since I'm in the mood of trying something new.
Funny how my significant other thought being on holiday actually would mean a break from programming - no, it means more time to spend learning and trying things you don't have the time or energy to after a working day of Vue/C#!
(To clarify, I would not spend this much time programming on my holiday, if my better half wasn't away from home for this week - won't probably spend nearly as much time on it for the remaining 4 weeks...)2 -
Hey guys, first time writing here.
Around 8 months ago I joined a local company, developing enterprise web apps. First time for me working in a "real" programming job: I've been making a living from little freelance projects, personal apps and private programming lessons for the past 10 years, while on the side I chased the indie game dev dream, with little success. Then, one day, realized I needed to confront myself with the reality of 'standard' business, where the majority of people work, or risk growing too old to find a stable job.
I was kinda excited at first, looking forward to learning from experienced professionals in a long-standing company that has been around for decades. In the past years I coded almost 100% solo, so I really wanted to learn some solid team practices, refine my automated testing skills, and so on. Also, good pay, flexible hours and team is cool.
Then... I actually went there.
At first, I thought it was me. I thought I couldn't understand the code because I was used reading only mine.
I thought that it was me, not knowing well enough the quirks of web development to understand how things worked.
I though I was too lazy - it was shocking to see how hard those guys worked: I saw one guy once who was basically coding with one hand, answering a mail with another, all while doing some technical assistance on the phone.
Then I started to realize.
All projects are a disorganized mess, not only the legacy ones - actually the "green" products are quite worse.
Dependency injection hell: it seems like half of the code has been written by a DI fanatic and the other half by an assembly nostalgic who doesn't really like this new hippy thing called "functions".
Architecture is so messed up there are methods several THOUSANDS of lines long, and for the love of god most people on the team don't really even know WHAT those methods are for, but they're so intertwined with the rest of the codebase no one ever dares to touch them.
No automated test whatsoever, and because of the aforementioned DI hell, it's freaking hard to configure a testing environment (I've been trying for two days during my days off, with almost no success).
Of course documentation is completely absent, specifications are spread around hundreds of mails and opaquely named files thrown around personal shared folders, remote archives, etc.
So I rolled my sleeves up and started crunching as the rest of the team. I tried to follow the boy-scout rule, when the time and scope allowed. But god, it's hard. I'm tired as fuck, I miss working on my projects, or at least something that's not a complete madness. And it's unbearable to manually validate everything (hundreds of edge cases) by hand.
And the rest of the team acts like it's all normal. They look so at ease in this mess. It's like seeing someone quietly sitting inside a house on fire doing their stuff like nothing special is going on.
Please tell me it's not this way everywhere. I want out of this. I also feel like I'm "spoiled", and I should just do like the others and accept the depressing reality of working with all of this. But inside me I don't want to. I developed a taste for clean, easy maintainable code and I don't want to give it up.3 -
I've been programming for 15 years now or more if I count my years I programmed as a hobby. I'm mostly self learned. I'm working in an environment of a few developers and at least the same amount of other people (managers, sales, etc). We are creating Magento stores for middle sized businesses. The dev team is pretty good, I think.
But I'm struggling with management a lot. They are deciding on issues without asking us or even if I was asked about something and the answer was not what they expect, they ask the next developer below me. They do this all the way to Junior. A small example would be "lets create a testing site outside of deployment process on the server". Now if I do this, that site will never be updated and pose a security risk on the server for eternity because they would forget about it in a week. Adding it to our deployment process would take the same time and the testing site would benefit from security patches, quick deployment without logging in to the server, etc. Then the manager just disappears after hearing this from me. On slack, I get a question in 30 minutes from a remote developer about how to create an SSH user for a new site outside of deployment. I tell him the same. Then the junior gets called upstairs and ending up doing the job: no deployment, just plain SSH (SFTP) and manually creating the database. I end up doing it but He is "learning" how to do it.
An other example would be a day I was asked what is my opinion about Wordpress. We don't have any experience with Wordpress, I worked with Drupal before and when I look at a Wordpress codebase, I'm getting brain damage. They said Ok. The next day, comes the announcement that the boss decided to use Wordpress for our new agency website. For his own health and safety, I took the day off. At the end, the manager ended up hiring an indian developer who did a moderately fair job. No HiDPI sprites, no fancy SASS, just plain old CSS and a simple template. Lightyears worse than the site it was about to replace. But it did replace the old site, so now I have to look at it and identify myself part of the team. Best thing? We are now offering Wordpress development.
An other example is "lets do a quick order grid". This meant to be a table where the customer can enter SKU and quantity and they can theoretically order faster if they know the SKU already. It's a B2B solution. No one uses it. We have it for 2 sites now and in analytics, we have 5 page hits within 3 years on a site that's receiving 1000 users daily... Mostly our testing and the client looked at it. And no orders. I mean none, 0. I presented a well formatted study with screenshots from Analytics when I saw a proposal to a client to do this again. Guess what happened? Someone else from the team got the job to implement it. Happy client? No. They are questioning why no one is using it.
What would you do as a senior developer?
- Just serve notice and quit
- Try to talk to the boss (I don't see how it would work)
- Just don't give a shit1 -
Started a new job recently. Super cool place, awesome people and I get to do something that actually matters.
But I did get caught up in some organizational changes and have been in a bit of a weird situation. I'm employed in one department, but hired to participate in a project owned by another department. The project is sort of ongoing, but currently in a bit of a twilight zone because a new project team is being put together, and it'll be a few weeks before we're all ready.
Until that time, I am learning tons of new stuff. About the project, the technologies currently used and also exploring new tech and other ways we could go with it.
There's a lot of freedom granted to me, and I've had some good experiences and successes. But it's also a LOT to take in; starting a new job, learning multiple new technology stacks, and waiting for everything to really kick off for good. At which point things might get really hectic.1 -
Programmer lesson #3
- We can either spend our free time learning about new technologies or building something new out of technologies we already know.
- There is no right or wrong choice between this two and sometimes we even end up doing a mix of both
- Personally I feel it's better to strike a good balance between the two approaches to advance in our field 😄4 -
So when i was playing saxophone, I realized that music and coding are just the same. When you get a new score to play you need to start over by learning how to play it. When you code and start a new project you need to start from zero. When you play the score over and over you learn from your mistakes. When you code you debug your faults when there is something wrong in your code. At the exam you need to make no faults when you play music. When you’re at the deadline. There shouldn't be no faults in your code
-
Im implementing kafka with little to no theory understanding. Now that i have finally managed to implement it Perfrctly, even started kafka, zookeeper and kafka-ui through docker compose and it works perfectly in the backend app, i can finally now see the power this technology withholds, and now i have even more understanding of how it (approximately) works, and Now I'm more willing to learn the theory to understand it under the hood.
Does someone else find it much easier to fuck around and find out when learning something new before being overbloated with boring dry theory?
I fucking hate theory. Any kind of theory. Its boring as shit. But now that i have gone through practical implementation of this and can understand how powerful backend i can build with it, Now I'd have no problems learning theory9 -
God, these people...
Little backstory. I'm making an training application and we have a MySQL database set up where some elements of the training are configured. This is so learning experts can easily change some aspects of the training without programmer's help.
Meanwhile, I'm also in the middle of a server migration, because our current server is running a lot of deprecated software and is in dire need of replacement.
This is going pretty slowly, though, because of other, high-priority, work that keeps being shoved my way.
Now, someone accidentally deletes a bunch of data from one of the schemas. No big deal in my book, the training is still in development and we have nightly backups of the database.
So I shoot a support ticket to the hosting provider and ask them to restore a specific schema, telling them to restore the image to some other machine and dump the tables in an MySQL file so I can restore it that way.
I also told them to get the backup of the OLD server, not the NEW one we're still migrating to.
About an hour later, I get a message that they dumped the schema's files in a Temp folder on the D drive. So I RDP to the server to check and... The files aren't there. Just before writing a response asking where the file is, I remembered the server I was migrating to and checked that server, and there were the files.
I had already migrated part of our databases and was testing compatibility before I moved to something else.
The hosting provider just dumped the files of the wrong server, despite me telling them exactly which server to use.
This is not the first time this hosting provider has let me down...
I'm really considering jumping to another if they keep doing this... -
Just need a bit of advice here.
Background: I'm good with backend web development. Won't say I'm really good, but yeah, I've done it quite a bit and built few sites locally.
At this point, I wanna know if I should continue learning and get really good with PHP (maybe get certifications). Or, start learning Python and try frameworks like Django or Flask. Also, this coming summer, I wanna do some kinda internship but before that I need to be good with something.
Some advice would help :D
Thanks and happy new year!3 -
Incoming rant.
I have 4 years professional experience at a small shop working on a web application for property and liability insurance. The application is ASP.NET with C# as the code-behind. I have a BCS and will finish my MSIS fall 2017. I have no idea why I have the degrees. I know that when I enrolled, it seemed like they would be a nice addition to an otherwise empty resume. I was lucky enough to land my first and only development job during my sophomore year of my undergraduate program. Is this enough experience to land a new job?
I feel like I'm learning nothing at my current job. The specs that come in seem very vague to me. When asked for clarification, there is often push back, and I don't know whether that's because I don't have enough experience to parse what the client means in the two sentence spec I got or if it's because the client does not actually know what they want.
I hate my current job. My productivity is low because I spend more time trying to figure out what the client wants and analyzing an 8 year old system that has 0 documentation. I know some of you will just say, "Suck it up" at this point, but I really want another job. The only thing I like about this job is that it's 100% remote. It also pays $60k a year, so a replacement should be at least that salary.
Most postings I see require professional experience of 5 years or more, and knowledge of other frameworks. I can work on getting knowledge of the other frameworks, but will have no professional experience with them. I don't live in an area with a lot of software development jobs, and the ones I see are for non-IT organizations that want 1 person to run a distributed system from 10 or more locations. A hospital system out here wants to pay $30k a year for a guy to be both software developer for new tools as well as the helpdesk and IT support guy that's on-call for four locations in the county. I made more than that before I got into the development industry, for less work, and would rather leave than settle for something like that.
I've thought about moving to somewhere near San Francisco or San Jose, but I have my daughter to think about. I have joint custody of her, and would have to give that up in order to move out of the county.
I like programming and using it to solve problems. I like designing architectures and how all the components will interface. I like designing and normalizing databases. I like taking part in coding competitions for employers that are well-known (Amazon, Facebook, Uber, Twitch, etc.), even though I often just place middle of the pack. When that happens, I feel like I'm an imposter in this industry.
I think I have the most fun just working on small projects for personal use. My latest is an assistant calculator for the game Transport Fever to figure out cargo throughputs per annum based on the in-game timing information. Past projects have also been small. Ones I could use in a portfolio are a sudoku solver desktop application, PC/Web game in Unity that is a 3D FPS remake of Duck Hunt that allows open world exploration but locks the camera's viewpoint for shooting events, and a building assistant for Rome II: Total War that maps out all the bonuses/perks of user-specified building combinations in provinces so users can record their long term building plans without using all their turns to see the final results.
I seem to be an unproductive, average developer who dabbles in projects here and there.
This is what I want from other Ranters. Just say something. I don't care if it is, "Suck it up and get better." It could be your tips for finding and securing a new position. It could even be empathy, if such a thing exists on the Internet. Whatever you want, just say something that will help get me thinking of what the next steps in my career should be.1 -
So at work we use ASP.NET web forms. Since the .NET Core exists now, and that uses ASP.NET MVC, is it worth looking into that and learning about it? My boss is hesitant to move over for our next project because web forms will go faster because we don't have to learn something new.6
-
Junior Dev about 18months in my current job and I've got a problem
Started to feel not wanting to code at work, despite working on a greenfield project thats critical and using new tech. I get a little defensive about PR's over stupid small things (PR was once rejected due to auto indentation "not to standard").
Talked with boss (who I get on well with and like) and thinks my problem is I've lost confidence coding. Trys to get more senior Dev to on side to help me out more.
Same senior Dev is really close with other junior on my team - pair on alot of stuff all the time, have lunch and spend free time together, and will work way past working hours just to try and finish something that day (even though it's not due that day).
(Probs working ~60h weeks, where as I'm ~42h and contracted for 37h. I'll work on if I need to but tries to have balance)
Senior and other junior tend to ignore tickets on the board, do the work and then when I pick it up they say "I did that last night". No docs, no PR for me to ask about how it was done (as they merged it themselves). (They have previously completely refactored my branch in the past overnight then not told me atall)
I'm not saying its favouritism here, but I'm not happy with the situation. I feel I can't ask questions as they are always together or they discuss the problem themselves and just give me the answer (not really acknowledging my points). I dont tend to ask for help from this senior Dev now as I don't feel it's worthwhile learning wise for me.
Other people in the team are great but working on other aspects so not a direct one-to-one alignment (others are DB Dev & principal senior dev)
Furthermore I'm wanting to possibly work on full stack web or more architecture stuff, both which are not in my current teams remit (backend up to API).
So - what do I do? Try and remedy the situation in the current team as best as or look for a new teams as cut my losses.
I'm torn between the 2 and I'm unsure how to get out this rut. I feel I need to find a solution to this soon though
(Sorry for the long rant folks)4 -
!dev, !sponsored
It takes a fair bit for me to enjoy an online course, let alone want to recommend it.
if anyone is looking at using their "free" time learning something new during these troubling times, i would go look at the Packt Courses.
@whocares suckered me in the other day, and i have to admit, i dont regret it.
https://devrant.com/rants/2441665/...
So with that i would actually say to anyone wanting to get into:
- Java
- Python
- Go(lang)
- Data Science
- C++
- Ruby
- Clojure
- PHP
- webDev (html, css, javascript)
then checkout these workshops.
https://courses.packtpub.com/pages/...
or
https://courses.packtpub.com/enroll...
you can actually enroll into all of them using the free coupon, so theres that ☺
one down side is the lack of dark mode, but im sure we all have browser extensions for that.random i usually hate online courses @whocares covid-19 free time learn something new free courses i dont normally do this no dark mode2 -
Change of technology. There's one time that the team can't decide what tech to use. So after 2 years of production suddenly we moved from Nodejs to Elixir for server side and MySql to Cassandra for database ... It is crazy that time...
So learning a new language it was so difficult as elixir is functional ... (And I was sucks back then) , and Cassandra is something new to me , which is difficult.
(Hey bit now it is ok ) -
Any backend devs here working with TypeScript? What are the best framework choices right now? I've been looking at Nest.js, but there seems to be a steep learning curve that might hamper onboarding of my (literally fresh graduate) new hires. There's also Ts.ED, which seems like the fat has been trimmed from it.
I know people will recommend something like, just using express / koa / hapi but I don't think we have the time to work with something super lightweight 😬😬😬. And besides, opinionated frameworks will speed things up for now (we have a lot of crap we want to do this incoming 2022)12 -
!rant
In case you're struggling to learn something new, read this article to feel better. Else just read it anyway to feel better.
https://khanacademy.org/talks-and-i...
always keep learning ;) -
How can I avoid coding in trial/error when learning a new framework (recompiling and testing)? I’m learning Unity and find myself constantly recompiling just to test if a single line works. This adds up to a lot of wasted time - am I missing something or not doing something properly?2
-
Gotta question about the job market,
I'm having a very tough time getting a job, still jobless from when I quit my job awhile back, anyway all the jobs I look up that contain the words software/android/app/java developer seem to include web development skills.
Something of which I don't know much of, I wouldn't mind learning sure but for things like android development I can use Java just fine to create apps, yet the moment I start reading they want developers that know react.
Is this a normal thing? I can get to learning new languages and all but it'd be sad if my skills in Java for both software and app development are never used once I join that company.
Forgot to add this is for New Zealand job market, not sure it's normal for other countries.3 -
!rank
Hi fellow devs and sysadmin's I'm currently working on building a portfolio of applications I build and servers I have setup as I'm planning on working freelance I'm already MTA certified and if I had the money also N3 certified if anyone needs a server setup or something like that feel free to contact me on my website https://haazen.xyz.
Feel free to ask me anything to test me or to send me fun assignments to test me or let me learn new things to as I love learning more.3 -
There's quite often the case where friends tell me they're sitting at home, bored, not knowing what to do, and I am like lol I always have something to do. Continue project x or y, trying out that fancy library I found, learning a new language and so forth. I never get bored.
-
Still as a scholar who has had his intership I decided that I was finally confident enough in my ability to apply for a small part-time programming job. I had an internship at a cool exhausting place with tons of expertise and I've proven myselve over there. So now I wanted a job on the side. Nothing special, just something that would make a little money with programming instead of washing dishes at the restaurant.
So I started at this small internet based startup (2 or 3 progammers) as a backend-oriented programmer. The working hours were amazingly compatible with my school schedule.
The lead dev also sounded like a smart guy. He had worked as a backend guy for years and had code running on verry critical public infrastructure that if it were to fail we'd be evacuated from our homes.
As a first asignment I got an isolated task to make an importer for some kind of file format that needed integration. So I asked for access to the code. I didn't get it since they were going to re-do the entire backend based on the code I wrote. I just needed to parse the file in a usable object structure. So I found out that the file format was horrible and made a quite nice set of objects that were nice. At the end of the first week or so I asked if I could get access to the code again, so I could integrate it. Answer was no. The lead dev would do that. I could however get access to my private repository.
Next week a new intern was taken to build a multiplatform responsive app. Only downside was that all the stuff he had ever done was php based websites. It wasn't going anywhere anytime soon, but I figured that that was where internships were for. So I ended up helping him a lot and taught him some concepts of OOP and S.O.L.I.D. and the occasional 30 minute rants of IndexOutOfRangeException, ArgumentException and such.
So one day he asked me how to parse a json string and retrieve a specific field out of it.
I gave him something like the following to start with:
"
JObject json;
if(!JObject.TryParse(jsonString, out json))
{
//handle error
}
string value;
if(!json.tryget("foo", out value).../// code continues
"
but then the main dev stepped in and proposed the following since it wouldn't crash on an API change:
"
dynamic json = new JObject(jsonString);
string value = json.myJsonValue;
"
After me trying to explain to him that this was a bad choise for about 15 minutes because of all kinds of reasons I just gave up. I was verry mad that this young boy was forced to use bad programming pracises while he was clearly still learning. I know I shouldn't pick up certain practises. But that boy didn't.
Almost everytime the main dev was at the office I had such a mindboggling experience.
After that I got a new assignment.
I had to write another xml file format parser.
Of course I couldn't have any access to our current code because... it was unnecesary. We were going to use my code as a total replacement for the backend again.
And for some reason classes generated from XSD weren't clear enough so after carefull research I literally wrapped xsd generated code in equivalent classes.
At that moment, I realized I made some code that was totally useless since it wasn't compatible with any form of their API or any of the other backend code. (I haven't seen their API. I didn't have access to the source.) And since I could've just pushed them generated XSD's that would've produced thesame datastructure I felt like I was a cheat. I also didn't like that I wasn't allowed to install even the most basic tooling. (git client or, Ide refactoring plugins, spelling checker etc...)
Now I was also told that I couldn't discuss issues with the new guy anymore since it was a waste of my valuable time, and they were afraid that I taught him wrong concepts.
This was the time that my first paycheck came in so I quitted my job.
I haven't seen any of the features that I've worked on. :) -
!rant
Experienced devs please tell help me.
Learning software development has been a challenge. Many times it's frustrating.
I also learn languages and I find them to share one trait with software development, which is complexity.
At first I looked at languages the way I'm currently doing with software. I'd look in a new language and after decided it's cool to learn it, I would stare at it for a few weeks trying to realize what the heck I was going to do. I wouldn't even know how to get started.
Eventually this stage goes away and I think that is about to happen with me with software.
But then a new challenge would come, which is me not making progress as I wanted. That's sort of happening with me by learning software as well, bit in language I now know how to deal with it.
That's because I work full time with something that isn't in my interests and when I arrive home Im tired and want to relax. So I decided my language learning had to go slower as long as I have this job, meaning no hours spent in front of books or a pc studying - that's what I could do with English, I was a teenager and had 12 hours a day to do whatever I wanted.
So I usually spent 5 minutes here and there learning something in my target language when I can, no frustration needed, my only rule is: practice everyday, even if I don't learn anything new.
With software, that doesn't apply though.
So, what I mean by tracing a parallel between these to fields is that I have a strong conviction is that once you get the principles on how a certain kind of learning works, you can apply it everywhere in the field. But with software it's been harder.
Anyways, I see that are some principles that apply, cause trying to learn software is changinge and teaching a lot of things like:
*you have to read a lot (of documentation) . At first I thought all documentation was painful to read and understand, but I found out some software are well documented and one can use those only to get used with it.
*immersion / discipline are important. I'm not very disciplined, I'm better with immersion but both are important if you need to acquire complex subjects/skills
*how to deal with complexity. I installed Arch Linux a few days ago. Just to install it I ended up reading more than 20 pages of documentation (install guide, Wpa supplicant, systemd, networkd, xorg, etc etc). Gradually I'm realizing that when you have to install/tweak something in that distro you necessarily spend a bunch of time trying to understand how it works, otherwise you don't get too far like in Ubuntu or Debian.
*and lastly the one that bothers me. Constantly getting frustrated and feeling crap about my poor skills. No matter how much I progress, it still seems like I'm stuck.
(that's when I ask your help/opinion :) )4 -
In reply to this:
https://devrant.com/rants/260590/...
As a senior dev for over 13 years, I will break you point by point in the most realistic way, so you don't get in troubles for following internet boring paternal advices.
1) False. Being go-ahead, pro active and prone to learn is a good thing in most places.
This doesn't mean being an entitled asshole, but standing for yourself (don't get put down and used to do shit for others, or it will become the routine) and show good learning and exploration skills will definitely put you under a good light.
2)False. 2 things to check:
a) if the guy over you is an entitled asshole who thinkg you're going to steal his job and will try to sabotage you or not answer acting annoyed, or if it's a cool guy.
Choose wisely your questions and put them all togheter. Don't be that guy that fires questions in crumbles, one every 2 minutes.
Put them togheter and try to work out the obvious and what can be done through google or chatgpt by yourself. Then collect the hard ones for the experienced guy and ask them all at once. He's been put over you to help you.
3) Idiotic. NO.
Working code = good code. It's always been like this.
If you follow this idiotic advice you will annoy everyone.
The thing about renaming variables and crap it's called a standard. Most company will have a document with one if there is a need to follow it.
What remains are common programming conventions that everyone mostly follows.
Else you'll end up getting crazy at all the rules and small conventions and will start to do messy hot spaghetti code filled with syntactic sugar that no one likes, included yourself.
4)LMAO.
This mostly never happens (seniors send to juniors) in real life.
But it happens on the other side (junior code gets reviewed).
He must either be a crap programmer or stopped learning years ago(?)
5) This is absolutely true.
Programming is not a forgiving job if you're not honest.
Covering up mess in programming is mostly impossible, expecially when git and all that stuff with your name on it came out.
Be honest, admit your faults, ask if not sure.
Code is code, if it's wrong it won't work magically and sooner or later it will fire back.
6)Somewhat true, but it all depends on the deadline you're given and the complexity of the logic to be implemented.
If very complex you have to divide an conquer (usually)
7)LMAO, this one might be true for multi billionaire companies with thousand of employees.
Normal companies rarely do that because it's a waste of time. They pass knowledge by word or with concise documentation that later gets explained by seniors or TL's to the devs.
Try following this and as a junior:
1) you will have written shit docs and wasted time
2) you will come up to the devs at the deadline with half of the code done and them saying wtf who told you to do that
8) See? What an oxymoron ahahah
Look at point 3 of this guy than re-read this.
This alone should prove you that I'm right for everything else.
9) Half true.
Watch your ass. You need to understand what you're going to put yourself into.
If it's some unknown deep sea shit, with no documentations whatsoever you will end up with a sore ass and pulling your hair finding crumbles of code that make that unknown thing work.
Believe me and not him.
I have been there. To say one, I've been doing some high level project for using powerful RFID reading antennas for doing large warehouse inventory with high speed (instead of counting manually or scanning pieces, the put rfid tags inside the boxes and pass a scanner between shelves, reading all the inventory).
I had to deal with all the RFID protocol, the math behind radio waves (yes, knowing it will let you configure them more efficently and avoid conflicts), know a whole new SDK from them I've never used again (useless knowledge = time wasted and no resume worthy material for your next job) and so on.
It was a grueling, hair pulling, horrible experience that brought me nothing in return execpt the skill of accepting and embracing the pain of such experiences.
And I can go on with other stories. Horror Stories.
If it's something that is doable but it's complex, hard or just interesting, go for it. Expecially if the tech involved is something marketable.
10) Yes, and you can't stop learning, expecially now that AI will start to cover more and more of our work.4 -
I am a student with a full time job in React/React Native. I am thinking of learning something new. What should I learn Deep Learning or Web Assembly with Rust?1
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The stages of new thing:
1. I don't see what this thing is supposed to do.
2. Ok, I see what it's supposed to do but I don't understand it.
3. I sort of understand it but learning it is too much work for very little benefit.
4. I am bored so I will learn new thing so I look busy.
5. I will rewrite my current project with new thing.
6. My current project is now bigger, slower and harder to understand.
7. I am now enthusiastic advocate of new thing and I feel more of a pro.
8. Need to code something in a hurry and revert to writing code like I copied it from w3schools.
9. Discover new thing is actually obsolete.
10. Remind myself that none of it is remotely relevant to my actual job and resume hunting for CSS bug.3 -
I mean, seriously, people joke about this, but does a new version of angular get released every week or something? How is anyone supposed to keep up? Let alone find the right version of the documentation to reference?
I’m sure learning angular will be worth it in the end... maybe.2 -
I have to implement DSP using Convolution, FFT. And for the past 2 days I have like a million tabs open in Chrome and half of the titles end with ".... for dummies" :D
At least I'm learning something new and when I understand what the math behind those terms does I feel awesome :D -
So I'm in my last year of university. The GPA is high. Did one internship the summer after second year in one of the best companies in my country. Third year in my department we do a semester long internship for 5 months, I joined a company and worked on back-end using Go. This was the spring semester and I wanted to continue working in the summer. The internsip company didn't tell me anything so I looked for a job. Found one that paid great, I was getting the salary a new graduate was getting. I worked as a full-stack there. Mostly prototyping, the company was new and I was in the R&D side. After 2 months the company had some budgetary problems and we parted ways. I was in the market again for part-time job in my senior year and because of my prior experience with Go, a friend mentioned me to a company executive he met and I had an interview and got in as a full-stack part-time dev. This was for some background information.
My story is;
The work is actually great in terms of what I do. I'm learning a lot here. The problem is that I'm having imposter syndrome for the first time ever. The projects are demanding and because that I'm part-time they take time to finish. There are no due dates or anything but sometimes the CEO is coming to me and saying "Aren't you finished with it?" or "Are you going to finish it soon?". Because that I'm more qualified in Javascript and React when they gave me my current frontend project I told them that its better if they give javascript/frontend projects from now on so that I can do a better job finishing them. What the CEO told me after that was, "Then hopefully you'll finish them sooner.". The people are nice and stuff like this only happened 2-3 times and the lead that I'm working with acknowledges my pros and cons and we have a good relationship, when I do something wrong he tells me why and how I can improve my code. But I just can't get over the syndrome and for some time I actually thought they would fire me when they get a full time dev.
Everything is great for some time. It's my fourth month and I think I felt this way because this is the most demanding job I have with senior year and also I didn't know people that well because I was the new guy. Although I still have concerns, have you ever felt this way? If you share tips or any recommendations I would feel great.
Thank you for reading.2 -
I have a problem. I can't do anything.
I can't really get started with the new path of software development. I have lots of stuff (like *tidying the room* or *exercise* or something good for my life) do but in the end all the things I have to do are tangled up. So learning usually gets in the pile of tangled up shit.
I try to use organisational tools. But my focus is zero.
Mental health issues don't help.
I think I would put at good use a few coding buddies, mentors, whatever... Self paced courses dont work for me. Bonus point of notgettingshitdone if online course.
I have low self esteem and I'm not trying to hide it.
I hate myself to the fucking core.7 -
So, I have been offered two jobs at the same company (big, global corp)
1. RPA coordinator or operator or business analyst. Completely new to me, they're happy with my background enough so that I could learn on the job. RPA is new in this place and they're creating team from scratch.
2. Member of IT security team where most of my work would be split between things that interest me greatly - vulnerabilities, fixing them and pen testing.
I'm not sure what to pick, really.
Option 1 seems to be way more future proof and seems like a lifetime opportunity to get into something relatively new, potentially more ££ down the road.
Option 2 is what I already spent some time learning and I have quite a big interest in. I've always been less of a programmer and more of an admin/sec guy.
Tbh before option 1 called me yesterday I thought that option 2 is a dream job for me. Now I'm all in doubt.12 -
Just now I was talking to this young girl on her employment in the corporates. I asked her if she learned anything that allows her to deliver value to her organization. She said 'not much'. And she was actually learning the wrong things, and didn't get exposed to the proper tools to get the job done, and the fact that she wanted to take the offer to work overseas.
I was telling her that if she has the adequate skills and the drive to deliver, she can be anywhere she want, but not now, and then I offered her a part time or full time freelance position that she can really learn up a lot under my supervision and deliver with satisfaction. She's not budging.
It also made me thought of myself on why I'm always hesitant to get out of Malaysia and just start a new career along with my peers overseas. I honestly want to get out of here. Seriously. I could have just gone out there. Do you know how much that I envied people who went out and had a good life being employed elsewhere?
But I still haven't been satisfied with myself, of not being able to deliver the best that I can, the best of my work throughout the 7 years of my career, and I intend to stay and prove that I can produce something great and potentially have really good gains before I make my ultimate move. I still have work to do. Unfinished business.
There are several more things that I need to cover such as server deployment on AWS, doing DevOps for web backend apps, and more architecting work. It takes time to learn. That's why I want to delegate some Android work to that young fella, so that I can move on to the more hardcore stuff. -
I need some advice to avoid stressing myself out. I'm in a situation where I feel stuck between a rock and a hard place at work, and it feels like there's no one to turn to. This is a long one, because context is needed.
I've been working on a fairly big CMS based website for a few years that's turned into multiple solutions that I'm more or less responsible for. During that time I've been optimizing the code base with proper design patterns, setting up continuous delivery, updating packaging etc. because I care that the next developer can quickly grasp what's going on, should they take over the project in the future. During that time I've been accused of over-engineering, which to an extent is true. It's something I've gotten a lot better at over the years, but I'm only human and error prone, so sometimes that's just how it is.
Anyways, after a few years of working on the project I get a new colleague that's going to help me on my CMS projects. It doesn't take long for me to realize that their code style is a mess. Inconsistent line breaks and naming conventions, really god awful anti-pattern code. There's no attempt to mimic the code style I've been using throughout the project, it's just complete chaos. The code "works", although it's not something I'd call production code. But they're new and learning, so I just sort of deal with it and remain patient, pointing out where they could optimize their code, teaching them basic object oriented design patterns like... just using freaking objects once in a while.
Fast forward a few years until now. They've learned nothing. Every time I read their code it's the same mess it's always been.
Concrete example: a part of the project uses Vue to render some common components in the frontend. Looking through the code, there is currently *no* attempt to include any air between functions, or any part of the code for that matter. Everything gets transpiled and minified so there's absolutely NO REASON to "compress" the code like this. Furthermore, they have often directly manipulated the DOM from the JavaScript code rather than rendering the component based on the model state. Completely rendering the use of Vue pointless.
And this is just the frontend part of the code. The backend is often orders of magnitude worse. They will - COMPLETELY RANDOMLY - sometimes leave in 5-10 lines of whitespace for no discernable reason. It frustrates me to no end. I keep asking them to verify their staged changes before every commit, but nothing changes. They also blatantly copy/paste bits of my code to other components without thinking about what they do. So I'll have this random bit of backend code that injects 3-5 dependencies there's simply no reason for and aren't being used. When I ask why they put them there I simply get a “I don't know, I just did it like you did it”.
I simply cannot trust this person to write production code, and the more I let them take over things, the more the technical debt we accumulate. I have talked to my boss about this, and things have improved, but nowhere near where I need it to be.
On the other side of this are my project manager and my boss. They, of course, both want me to implement solutions with low estimates, and as fast and simply as possible. Which would be fine if I wasn't the only person fighting against this technical debt on my team. Add in the fact that specs are oftentimes VERY implicit, so I'm stuck guessing what we actually need and having to constantly ask if this or that feature should exist.
And then, out of nowhere, I get assigned a another project after some colleague quits, during a time I’m already overbooked. The project is very complex and I'm expected to give estimates on tasks that would take me several hours just to research.
I'm super stressed and have no one I can turn to for help, hence this post. I haven't put the people in this post in the best light, but they're honestly good people that I genuinely like. I just want to write good code, but it's like I have to fight for my right to do it.1 -
What keeps you motivated about learning new coding language / technology? I learn something but then get distracted by either some movies or anime or something else. What's your driving force?9
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Has anyone maybe a link to HTTP security topics in general?
I find often breadcrumbs, like in several different attack possibilities, but nothing comprehensive.
Mostly regarding HTTP 1.1 / HTTP 2 (h2c) and proxying.
I'm currently unclogging an whole ecosystem of proxies, endpoints, edge nodes and so on...
My knowledge is limited and it's frustrating to Google cause seemingly I get always just pieces of the puzzles but not a collection -.-
(Looking for specific information, e.g. regarding attacks like H2C Smuggling, HPACK attacks, stuff regarding Cookies / Headers / Encoding... But please not spread over several dozen pages where it becomes frustrating to read the same shit over and over again without learning something new :( )3 -
I don't know how it works with my team but almost always I'm the one who is at the frontier when there is a need to migrate to new technology or to do something that nobody in my team knows how to do including me. So usually when we have planning and nobody wants to take the task I take it because someone has to do it. I think it's not my job to only do the things that I know but I'm expected to work outside my comfort zone and I wish others did the same. What happens after I'm done reading docs, testing and learning new thing is that I have to deliver training about it. The funny thing is that I also have to train experts and I'm below expert6
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People, help me out.
(first some abstract thoughts)
I am a final year undergrad yet to take steps in the world and i am trying to figure out what to do with my time, what my end goal and next steps should be.
As of now I think my end goal is "relaxation , peace and happiness of me and my loved ones", and to reach there , i need money.
My younger self chose engineering for a particular reason(that i vaguely remember) and weather it was a right or wrong/illogical decision, i guess i am stuck with it and have to use this only to reach my end goal.
Maybe i am regretting this and want to change. Maybe i am just a lazy ass who is bad in his assigned role of an engineer and is running towards glitter in other fields, whatever it is , i am not going against the decision of my past and accepting my identity as an engineer.
I believe once i am able to achieve my goal( that am still not sure about but overall is a good one from general perspective), i guess i will be satisfied
------------------------------------------------
(enough with the deep stuff)
I want to learn how to "learn" . like i am always conflicted about what to do next once the tutor leaves my hand.
for eg, let's say i goto a site abc.
1. They got 1 course each for android , web dev and ai. I choose the web dev course and give my hardworking attention to it
( At this point my choice is usually based on the fact that <A> i should not be stupid to buy all 3 course even if i have money/desire to buy all of em because riding 2 horses is only going to break my ass and <B> some pseudo stats like whichever got more opportunity, which i "like", etc(Point B is usually useless in the long run i guess) )
2. From what i have experienced, these courses usually have a particular list of topic that they cover and apply them to 1 or 2 projects. For eg, say that my web dev course taught me 20 something concepts of basic html/css/js/server and the instructor applied it to blog website
BUT WHAT IS NEXT ?
2.1.
>> Should I make more projects using only those particular list of concepts?
I usually have a ton of ideas that i want to implement now that i know how to build a blog site.
say i got a similar idea to make say url shortner. I start with full enthusiasm but in the middle way there is some new thing that i don't know and when i search the internet, i realize that there are 5 ways to implement such concept, making me wander off towards a whole list of concepts that were not covered in my original 20 concept course. This makes the choice 2. 2
2.2
>> Should I just leave everything , go to docs and start learning concepts from the scratch ??
Usually when i start a project, i soon realize that the original 20 concepts were just the tip of iceberg and there are a ton of things one should know, like how os works, how a particular component interacts with another, how the language is working, how the compiler is executing, etc .
At that point i feel like tearing all my notes away, and learning every associated thing from the scratch. No matter how much my project suffers, i want to know how the things are working from the bottom , like how the requests are being mad, how the routes are working, etc which might not even be relevent for the project.
Why i want to follow approach 2? because of the Goal from abstract thoughts. in theory, having deep knowledge is going to clear my interview thereby getting me a good job.
I will get good money, make projects faster and that will be a happily ever after story.
But in practical this approach is bringing me losses and confusion. every layer of a particular thing i uncover, turns out there is another layer below that. The learning never stops. Plus my original project remained incomplete.
What is your opinon, how do you figure out what to do next?8 -
You know how the machine learning systems are in the news (and Ted talks, tech blogs, etc.) lately over how they're becoming blackbox logic machines, creating feedback loops that amply things like racism on YouTube, for example. Well, what might the ML/AI systems be doing with our code repositories? Maybe not so much yet, I don't know. But let's imagine. Do you think it's probably less worrisome? At first I didn't see as much harm potential, there's not really racist code, terrorist code, or code that makes people violence prone (okay, not entirely true...), but if you imagine the possibility that someone might use code repositories to create applications that modify code, or is capable of making new programs, or just finding and squishing bugs in code algorithmically, well then you have a system that could arguably start to get a little out of control! What if in squashing code bugs it decides the most prevalent bugs are from code that takes user input (just one of potentially infinite examples). Remember though, it's a blackbox of sorts and this is just one of possibly millions of code patterns it's finding troublesome, and most importantly it's happening slowly (at first). Just like how these ML forces are changing Google and YouTube algorithms so slowly that many don't notice the changes; this would presumably be similar and so it may not be as obvious as one would think. So anyways, 'it' starts refactoring code that takes user input into something 'safer'. Great! But what does this mean? Not for this specific example really, but this concept of blackbox ML/AI solutions to problems we didn't realize we had, what does a future with this stuff look like (Matrix jokes aside)? Well, I could go on all day with imaginative ideas... But talking to myself isn't so productive, let's start a fun community discussion here! Join in if you find this topic as interesting as I do! :)
Note: if you decide to post something like "SNN have made this problem...", or other technical jargan please explain it as clearly as possible. As the great Richard Feynman once said, the best way to show you understand a thing is to be able to explain it clearly to others who don't understand it... Or something like that ;)3 -
!rant
So I decided to collab with a website's maker (who i wont name here) to create something like r/place. (not an exact copy.)
I decided to start by learning their API, and customizing the server later.
I asked the guy for some help, and HOLY SHIT.
Let's start off by this: I had to request a chunk. The response data was in binary. 4 bits meant 1 pixel, so right away, I had to deal with that in my code.
No problem, just decided to use C# instead of JS. (see https://www.devrant.io/rants/547013)
I was finally done after a couple of mental breakdowns, and decided to implement updates.
I needed to use webhooks, and that was completely fine. But when I got "C1FFFF0000CA06" as response (in hex), I seeked some help.
C1 is the operation type: it means that a pixel was updated.
FFFF and 0000 were the chunk coordinates. But remeber: it's a signed integer. Guess what, I had to use Two's compliment. I decided to be a lazy asshole and only check for "00000000" because I was only displaying chunk 0,0.
CA06: This is a weird one. It's 2 bytes, and CA0 contains the X and Y coordinate of the pixel (in the chunk), and 6 contains the new color of the pixel.
I was sent the following code to work with 0xCA06:
color = 0xF & buffer
x = buffer >> 10
y = (buffer >> 4) & 0x3F
So I tried to do it, and it didn't work. I'm not blaming the developer of the server (original dev is reddit) because maybe I screwed up, but which guy will have a night of frustration and debugging?
Me.
P.S.: Dev, if you see this, I'm sorry. This API is way too complicated. I know we need to save bandwith and stuff, but damn.1 -
I'd like to finish the web app I'm doing so my wife can finally use it. And I'd also like to start a new one while learning something new. Maybe an Android app or another web app using Angular 4? 🤔2
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!dev
devRant help me decide on something...
I feel like learning a new language but can't decide, I'm torn between Swedish (because I love Sabaton) and German (I have a character in my book who is german)...10 -
So I'm receiving messages from recruiters weekly (no flex intended), half of which are not even close to what my profile describes. And I got really sick of it so sometimes it takes at least a week for me to respond if I decide you're actually worth a reply (looking at you, automated half-assed messages that didn't even notice I know nothing about Javascript).
The thing is that some of the more useful messages are actually quite interesting and match my ambitions and desires quite well. But I like my current job and love the project I'm working on... Am I the only one who wants to stay "loyal" to their employer and their project, at least for as long as the contract is valid?? I really want to be there when delivering the final product and test it myself but it sometimes means declining very interesting job offers.
How do people decide its the right moment you have to leave for a new job if you're satisfied with what you have currently? I'm graciously rejecting interesting offers in the hope that they respect my "loyalty" towards my current project and stay reachable to me when I need them later on (I've already had some that would hit me up after a year asking me how it went and if everything was still okay). Is this something that happens often or am I just lucky with those specific recruiters??
Like yes, I can surely use the money I'd receive from a better job. But I am still learning a lot on my current job and I am positive this kind of job offers will keep coming over the years (and hopefully even more so because I keep getting more experienced). I'm also not the top candidate for some of these offers if I may say so myself, so is it important to take what you can get or is it better to stick to what you're comfortable with? -
Rant !
I seriously do have a love-hate relationship with programming.
About a couple of hours ago ,I was so happy learning new things and already planned I can make something so awsum with this stuff and then when I sat down to code it didn't work .Damn it , going through just about 10 lines of code for a couple of hours . Googling it ,no luck .3 -
I feel like I’m putting a lot of pressure on myself because I haven’t done much developing lately. I started a ASP.NET Core tutorial/book (that I already made a rant about) I’m enjoying it and the imposter syndrome that accompanies learning something new. But I’m scared I won’t be able to grasp anything from the project I’m building with the tut and won’t be able to actually do anything with it. But we will see hopefully when it’s complete I’ll understand it better. And I also have college to worry about so fuck that and my teacher that never likes my answers no matter how accurate they are4
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When are you guys learning new things? Learning on the job doesn't do it for me, i feel incredibly bored but most positions im interested require knowledge in AWS/Azure.
I thought about quitting to spend a few months on aquiring new skills and maybe work on some open source things. Anyone done something similar?5 -
How do you pick a new language to learn?
I am a C# developer and at work I work on desktop apps and legacy web services etc.
I fancy learning something else so I can have a bit of variety when working on personal projects etc.
I am doing a distance learning degree which has used Java and Python so far, with some PHP and JS etc to come later.
I’m drawn to Ruby as I already have experience there, but I was also thinking about looking at Node as that covers back end and front end all using JS which is definitely useful in general as I look at moving to a more web based role.7 -
Looking for a recommendation on what I should use to code on my phone.
I own an iPhone and usually spend a lot of time on public transit. I thought that it would be better to spend that time coding or learning something new. I am semi experienced in programming and this would help me get better as well.
Any recommendations on any app (possibly free) that I could download to kinda allow me to code and learn at the same time?5 -
Question.
TL;DR: Best C# and .NET accreditation courses (UK)?
I've started a new job as a .NET Software Developer. Now I have never done C# before but they want to send me on some courses to learn.
First I have to recommend what courses though. Price isn't an issue but they want me to give them a variety of courses available. Ones that are crash courses and online learning courses. I want it to be accredited so I can come away with something to show on my CV/LinkedIn.
What C# and .NET courses would you guys recommend or what course providers would you recommend (in the UK).
Thank you in advance!3 -
this happens when i am learning something new and however much i try, i cannot solve a problem, i go home and cook. Clean the kitchen in best possible way. Eat with peace and voila.. things start making sense. :)
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How do you guys stay motivated to keep learning? I used to get existed every time I tried a new challenge, but now I just feel incredibly tired when I have to learn something to progress.1
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hey, so i have recently started learning about node js and express based backend development.
can you suggest some good github repositories that showcase real life backend systems which i can use as inspiration to learn about the tech?
like for eg, i want to create a general case solution for authentication and profile management : a piece of db+api end points + models to :
- authenticate user : login/signup , session expire, o auth 2 based login/signup, multi account login, role based access, forgot password , reset password, otp login , etc
- authorise user : jwt token authentication, ip whitelisting, ssl pinning , cors, certificate based authentication , etc (
- manage user : update user profile, delete user, map services , subscriptions and transactions to user , dynamic meta properties ( which can be added/removed for a single user and not exactly part of main user profile) , etc
followed by deployment and the assoc concepts involved : deployment, clusters, load balancers, sharding ,... etc
----
these are all the buzzwords that i have heard that goes into consideration when designing a secure authentication system for a particular large scale website like linkedin or youtube. am not even sure how many of these concepts would require actual codelines and how many would require something else.
so wanted inspiration from open source content to learn about it in depth, replicate and create new better stuff if possible .
apart from that, other backend architectures like video/images storage system, or just some server for movie, social media, blog website etc would also help.2 -
Any gift recommendations. My birthday comes up in a few days and he asked what I wanted as a birthday gift(gifts are supposed to suprises but being able to choose is good still).
However I cannot ask for electronic gadgets. That knocks a lot of stuff of. The exception is that if something does not make me spend more time on the computer that is allowed. Kinda weird. For example I can ask for a printer or medical equipment like oximeters since that wont make me spend more time on the computer. Both of these examples were given by my father. I could ask for a new printer however we still have a printer but it is currently in the shop since it is not being used and the shops printer broke and is hell to replace since they need chips to verify toners and you need to get those chips separately from what my father told me and the shops printer should be repaired in a few months since lockdown was lifted a few days ago and I won't need to print something since everything is online and they don't need to show student projects yet.
Thia knocks a lot of hardware off since by definition if I am using hardware I still need to code it to do something which is more time on computer which is not allowed. So no fiddling with aurdino or rasberry pie or whatever is the most used hardware kit.
I can buy some course or a book to learn something but I already have problems with consistently learning c# with a good book which will lose value in November and that most topics I would like to learn like computer networking or some new language are practical which is more time on computer which is not allowed.
So the only thing I can buy are some books to enjoy reading for fun or some school books like a science digest book like Together with or the ultra popular maths reference book RD Sharma
So what things should I ask which comply with the rules my father has laid or just skip this thing1 -
So I have a MEAN app that is super simple just basic CRUD operations.
Everything works fine. Decide to extend it by bringing values over into fields on an Edit page. More work than I thought it would be but got it working, just passed values through an array in the URL. Pretty simple. So then I click save and it's broken. _id is apparently now undefined. Oh I posted it on the Javascript chat on SO and got nothing, instead everyone is talking about porn folders, a tweet, a random picture that looks like either a woman doing oral to a guy or a guy reading a book, and now Obamacare. FFS just answer my damn question >.< So I post it on SO itself and still crickets there. Worst part is I know its something simple I just don't know what it is because I'm still new to programming in general only been a few months in a bootcamp just learning the basics of MEAN stack (which I do like a lot tbh)
Man SO is so frustrating.