Our programming teacher had a surgery on his left eye and will not be able to do the lessons with us. Guess what the subject of the email he sent us was.

"I can't C#."
He made a pun about his fucking health status, alright then.

I want to pay respects to my favourite teacher by far.

I turned up at university as a pretty arrogant person. This was because I had about 6 years of self-taught programming experience, and the classes started from the ansolute basics. I turned up to my first classes and everything was extremely easy. I felt like I wouldn't learn anything for at least a year.

Then, I met one of my lecturers for the first time. He was about 50~60 years old and had been programming for all of his career. He was known by everyone to be really strict and we were told by other lecturers that it could be difficult for some people to be his student.

His classes were awesome. He was friendly, but took absolutely no shit, and told everything as it was. He had great stories from his life, which he used to throw out during the more boring computer science topics. He had extremely strict rules for our programming style, and bloody good reasons for all of them. If we didn't follow a clear rule on an assignment, he'd give us 0%. To prove how well this worked, nobody got 0%.

We eventually learned that he was that way because he used to work on real-time systems for the military, where if something didn't work then people could die.

This was exactly what I needed. In around one semester I went from a capable self-taught kid, to writing code that was clear, maintainable and fast, without being hacky.

I learned so much in just that small time, and I owe it all to him. So often when I write code now I think back to his rules. Even if I disagree with some, I learned to be strict and consistent.

Sadly, during the break between our first and second year, he passed away due to illness. There was so many lessons still to be learned from him, and there's now no teachers with enough knowledge to continue his best modules like compiler writing.

He is greatly missed, I've never had greater respect for a teacher than for him.

At university we had lessons in C++.
First lesson: Make a calculator
Second lesson: Make an application that uses sockets to connect to an FTP-server and downloads a file. No FTP-libraries allowed.

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

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

Me: Sure

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

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

Me: ---- (seriously ?!)

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for reading.

Life lessons..

My programming teacher is a freaking degenerate. He spend 7 months teaching us basic stuff like if-clauses, while-loops and stuff like that over and over again - everyone was annoyed but he didn't listen to us because "some people still don't get it". (The reason for this could be their total absence during lessons but who am I to tell.)
Beginning of 2018 he realised we hadn't much time left to prepare for our final exam so he tried self-taught learning. 8 sorting algorithms, recursion, how to write classes and objects in less than a week. And of course there was a classtest about this - needless to say that like nobody passed it. He still has no clue why we are "so lazy and dumb".
One of his favourite code examples is a calculator. I don't know how many i've programmed and they've gotten more and more ridiculous. (Who the hell would want interfaces like IComparer in a calculator?)
He even wanted to convince us that for-loops can't count down (and that things like "i--" doen't exist.)
I could go on and on about this guy and his craziness.

I turned 40 yesterday. Here are some lessons I've learned, without fluff or BS.

1) Stop waiting for exceptional things to just happen. They rarely do, and they can't be counted on. Greatness is cultivated; it's a gradual process and it won't come without effort.

2) Jealousy is a monster that destroys everything in it's path. It's absolutely useless, except to remind us there's a better way. We can't always control how we feel, but we can choose how we react to those feelings.

When I was younger, jealousy in relationships always led to shit turning out worse than it probably would have otherwise. Even when it was justified, even when a relationship was over, jealousy led me to burn bridges that I wished I hadn't.

3) College isn't for everyone, but you'll rarely be put square in the middle of so much potential experience. You'll meet people you probably wouldn't have otherwise, and as you eventually pursue your major, you'll get to know people who share your passions and dreams. Despite all the bullshit ways in which college sucks, it's still a pretty unique path on the way to adulthood. But on that note...

4) Learn to manage your money. It's way too easy to get into unsustainable debt. It only gets worse, and it makes everything harder. We don't always see the consequence of credit cards and loans when we're young, because the future seems so distant and undecided. But that debt isn't going anywhere... Try not to borrow money that you can't imagine yourself paying back now.

5) Floss every day, not just a couple times per week when you remember, or when you've got something stuck in your teeth. It matters, even if you're in your 20s and you've never had a cavity.

6) You'll always hear about living in the moment, seizing the day... It's tough to actually do. But there's something to be said for looking inward, and trying to recognize when too much of our attention is focused elsewhere. Constantly serving the future won't always pay off, at least not in the ways we think it will when we're young.

This sentiment doesn't have much value when it's put in abstract, existential terms, like it usually is. The best you can do is try to be aware of your own willingness and ability to be open to experiences. Think about ways in which you might be rejecting the here and now, even if it's as seemingly-benign as not going out with some friends because you just saw them, or you already went to that place they're going to. We won't recognize the good old days for what they were until they're already gone. The trick is having as many good days as possible.

7) Don't start smoking; you'll never quit as soon as you'll think you can. If you do start, make yourself quit after a couple years, no matter what. Keep your vices in check; drugs and alcohol in moderation. Use condoms, use birth control.

8) Don't make love wait. Tell your friends and family you love them often, and show them when you can. You're going to lose people, so it's important. Statistically, some of you will die young, yourselves.

When it comes to relationships, don't settle if you can't tell yourself you're in love, and totally believe it. Don't let complacency and familiarity get in the way of pursuing love. Don't be afraid to end relationships because they're comfortable, or because you've already invested so much into them.

Being young is a gift, and it won't last forever. You need to use that gift to experience all the love that you can, at least as a means to finding the person you really want to grow old with, if that's what you want. Regardless, you don't want to miss out on loving someone, and being loved, because of fear. Don't be reckless; just be honest with yourself.

9) Take care of your body. Neglecting it makes everything tougher. That doesn't mean you have to work out every day and eat like a nutritionist, but if you're overweight or you have health issues, do what you can to fix it. Losing weight isn't easy, but it's not as hard as people make it out to be. And it's one of the most important things you can do to invest in a healthy adulthood.

Don't put off nagging health issues because you think you'll be fine, or you don't think you'll be able to afford it, or you're scared of the outcome. There will always be options, until there aren't. Most people never get to the no-options part. Or, they get there because all the other options expired.

10) Few things will haunt you like regret. Making the wrong choice, for example, usually won't hurt as much. I guess you can regret making the wrong choice, but my deepest regrets come from inaction, complacency and indifference.

So how can we avoid regret? I don't know, lol. I don't think it's as simple as just commiting to choices... Choosing to do nothing is still a choice, after all. I think it's more about listening to your gut, as cliche as that sounds.

To thine own self be true, I guess. It's worth a shot, even if you fail. Almost anything is better than regret.

Employee of a customer of my company asked if anyone was available for evening lessons of the basics if linux for his son because he needs this to go to the next year.

I'm going to teach the kid the basics tomorrow for as far as possible and will be paid as well 😊

HE:"Hey I improved my code"

ME:
*opens the file*
*Sees random static allocations*
*Code is as verbose as before*
*Down to 2600 lines from 2800ish*
*Still doesn't do shit properly*

"Uuuh what exactly did you do?"

*Starts noticing the lack of namespaces*

HE: "I used this using namespace std to write a bit less"

ME: "Can I pay you yoga lessons so you can taste your own cock and show your parents how good you are at it?"

It's maddening how few people working with the internet don't know anything about the protocols that make it work. Web work, especially, I spend far too much time explaining how status codes, methods, content-types etc work, how they're used and basic fundamental shit about how to do the job of someone building internet applications and consumable services.

The following has played out at more than one company:

App: "Hey api, I need some data"
API: "200 (plain text response message, content-type application/json, 'internal server error')"
App: *blows the fuck up

*msg service team*

Me: "Getting a 200 with a plaintext response containing an internal server exception"
Team: "Yeah, what's the problem?"
Me: "...200 means success, the message suggests 500. Either way, it should be one of the error codes. We use the status code to determine how the application processes the request. What do the logs say?"
Team: "Log says that the user wasn't signed in. Can you not read the response message and make a decision?"
Me: "That status for that is 401. And no, that would require us to know every message you have verbatim, in this case, it doesn't even deserialize and causes an exception because it's not actually json."
Team: "Why 401?"
Me: "It's the code for unauthorized. It tells us to redirect the user to the sign in experience"
Team: "We can't authorize until the user signs in"
Me: *angermatopoeia* "Just, trust me. If a user isn't logged in, return 401, if they don't have permissions you send 403"
Team: *googles SO* "Internet says we can use 500"
Me: "That's server error, it says something blew up with an unhandled exception on your end. You've already established it was an auth issue in the logs."
Team: "But there's an error, why doesn't that work?"
Me: "It's generic. It's like me messaging you and saying, "your service is broken". It doesn't give us any insight into what went wrong or *how* we should attempt to troubleshoot the error or where it occurred. You already know what's wrong, so just tell me with the status code."
Team: "But it's ok, right, 500? It's an error?"
Me: "It puts all the troubleshooting responsibility on your consumer to investigate the error at every level. A precise error code could potentially prevent us from bothering you at all."
Team: "How so?"
Me: "Send 401, we know that it's a login issue, 403, something is wrong with the request, 404 we're hitting an endpoint that doesn't exist, 503 we know that the service can't be reached for some reason, 504 means the service exists, but timed out at the gateway or service. In the worst case we're able to triage who needs to be involved to solve the issue, make sense?"
Team: "Oh, sounds cool, so how do we do that?"
Me: "That's down to your technology, your team will need to implement it. Most frameworks handle it out of the box for many cases."
Team: "Ah, ok. We'll send a 500, that sound easiest"
Me: *..l.. -__- ..l..* "Ok, let's get into the other 5 problems with this situation..."

Moral of the story: If this is you: learn the protocol you're utilizing, provide metadata, and stop treating your customers like shit.

One of the important lessons I learnt in DevRant.

"You don't choose the free stress ball, the stress ball chooses you."

Going to have to do multiple rants on this one as I've had three awesome teachers.

Number one: Linux teacher.

He was around his 40's to mid 40's I think and he loved talking to people who also had the same passion (linux) about it.

When we had Linux classes which everyone hated, he'd always let me free. He knew I'd be able to finish the 10 weeks' assignments within an hour or so (took me half an hour instead of 10 lessons) so he just said: go do whatever you want.

Aaaaand instead of doing my own thing I ended up saving the whole class.

Yeah he was a very open minded guy who was awesome with linux/the students.

Last teacher rant from me and this one is about: my mentor.

Let's call him Bob.

He was a person who'd always be ready to help you out, did some lessons on bullying and the effects of it, stood by me many times when I'd have hard times with something I'd trouble and one of the most important things, he had a very good sense of humor!

Also, since I always wore a suit (still do), he introduced 'FaF' day, aka, Fancy as Fuck day. Every Wednesday the guys who wanted to would come in suits.

Yup, he got me through loads of stuff, miss that guy :)

On being a woman in tech...

You lads probably have (and my fellow ladies certainly have) heard of "impostor syndrome" and, if you don't experience it, you possibly wonder what living with it is like.

Here's an example from this weekend.

Be me, about 5 years into my career, graduated from a top college, feeling decent but still unsure of skill.

Company gets a 4 week trial of an online learning website. It includes optional assessments, so that you know where in the video lessons to start. Rankings are novice, proficient, expert.

Hear from our QA that he got ranked "proficient." Which is a pretty broad category, but I become super afraid that I'll also be assessed as "proficient" and it will look like I have the same dev skills as a fucking QA (our management overlords can see our scores).

Boyfriend has me do some deep breathing before starting the test, because it's obvious how stressed I am.

Finally take it and get ranked "expert", in the 97th percentile, even though some technical difficulties made me miss four questions in a row. I decide to use my do over, and get ranked "expert" again, this time in the 99th percentile.

You'd think I'd be like, "Lawl, I can't believe I'd get the same score as our QA!" And there is some of that. But there's also the thoughts of, "that test could have been more thorough," "that score wasn't real because I resaw a question and got the right answer the second time," and "99th percentile isn't that great on a platform where new developers are over represented."

And this is all despite the fact that, if you were to ask someone how confident I am, the answer would probably "confident as hell."

Not saying this to start any fights. Figured it could be some interesting insight into a world that some people don't experience! (not that males aren't allowed to have impostor syndrome!)

So yeah, the name change is done. Me making a joke out of being called a code slut clearly backfired and people just started calling me a slut or inferring I was a slut or something unsavory because of an online username. Lesson learned. A few lessons, in fact.

Anyway thanks for allowing the name change @dfox and @trogus. Now, back to ranting.

DevRant rant:

I am on DevRant for quite a while now and I really enjoy it here. The overall atmosphere is great, as well as the community. (Yes, that includes you!)
Since I came here I've learned some very valuable lessons regarding work (conditions), annoying coworkers and programming itself. I like to think of DevRant as a huge ball of experience by very talented people, as well as a great place for discussions about a topic we all love: code. But lately I am seeing more and more memes on here, with titles like "I think everybody know this", "I think everybody can relate" and "Soo true". Those posts have no value at all and are (most of the time) reposted from 9gag or similar networks. Sometimes those "rants" don't even have anything to do with devs anymore, but are only here to farm ++'es. In the beginning I really enjoyed funny "rants", but now the majority of them just annoy me. It becomes especially annoying when you see the same meme three times in 15 minutes.
I'd be in for some kind of DevFun section, where everybody is able to post his or hers jokes/memes/etc, but the current situation just really gets on my nerves.

I hope that I am not the only one who thinks like that, because I really feel uncomfortable ranting about something I actually love.

end rant

I grew up poor. First time I saw a computer face to face was when I was 11 years old. Back then any other references to computers came through media. I genuinely believed that hacking was as seen on TV, didn't even question 2 idiots 1 keyboard and thought it was genius to unplug a computer during "an attack"

Fact is I arrived in this country when I was 11. By the time I had my first laptop I was around 13-14, as you can imagine it went really poorly for someone who was just awarded a machine of never-ending stories and entertainment with absolute fear that a single mistake can cause everything to crash and burn. Heck, I remember when I went to Vodafone and someone recommended Firefox, it was such a novelty back then, heh.

I didn't understand computers. My IT lessons were replaced to work on my dialect, but truth be told it was an awful waste of time. I've learned more from forums than I ever learned from any English teacher. I just sat there twidling my thumbs in agitation.

With no concept of what IT industry entitles (my idea of programming was cubicles and call centres), I never had a slightest clue programming could be for me. I always thought of myself closer to engineering or physics type, but that never really drew my interests. So I dwelled in depression thinking I'm broken. Useless. That there was no calling for me.

I'm 22. For the past year I dipped in and out of programming, it still felt like such black magic.vLast month or so the spell dispelled and I finally feel like my eyes have been opened. I've spent the past 3 days sitting in front of my computer learning or actively programming, with occasional dips into DevRant reading your stories, frustrations and victories and I truly feel at home.

In retrospect I feel like I made the right decision for not chasing any mathematical/physics/engineering degrees, while certainly a goal of mine, I feel like I'd be miserable in those communities. They're closer to hobbies, really.

I guess what I wanted to say is thank you. Thank you DevRant for being the spark in my null future and giving me a sense of purpose and belonging. For the first time I feel like I can make it, like there was hope somewhere over the horizon.

Hesitated for a while before posting this, as I don't like to whine in public but this should be therapeutical

Beware, it's a #longread

Years ago, I thought about how cool it'd be to have conversation-based interactive fiction on my phone. I remember showing early prototypes to my ex in 2012. It took me over 2 years to build up the courage to make it my priority and to take time off. FictionBurgers.com was born.

A few weeks in, a friend of mine forwarded me a link to Lifeline. I was devastated. I literally spent 2 days cursing my past self for not making a move sooner.

I soldiered on, worked 7 months straight on it. Now the tech is 90-95% finished, content is maybe 60% finished and I just... gave up. Every other week now, similar projects are popping up. I'm under-staffed and under-financed compared to them. Beyond the entertainment space, "conversation-based" is hot stuff in 2016, and I still can't seem to know what to do with what I have.

I feel like I had this fantastic opportunity and squandered it, which makes me miserable.

Anyway, just so you get some cheese with my whine, here are a few lessons I learned the hard way:

Lesson #1 : Don't go it alone. I thought I could hack it, and for over 7 months, I did. But sooner or later, shit gets to you, it's just human. That's when you need someone; just so that their highs compensate your lows and vice versa. Most of the actual writing was done by a freelancer (and he did AMAZING WORK, especially considering that I couldn't pay him much) but it's not the same as a partner, who's invested same as you.

Lesson #1.5 : Complementary skills. Just like my fiction project failed because I was missing a writer partner, my fallback plan of getting into conversational tech hit the skids for lack of a bizdev partner. It's great to stick among devs when ranting, but you need to mingle with a variety of people. Some of them are actually ok, y'know :)

Lesson #2 : Lean Startup, MVP. Google those terms if you're not familiar with them. My mistake here (after MVPing the shit out of the tech) was to let my content goal run amok : what made my app superior to the competition (or so I reasoned) was that it would allow for conversations with multiple characters! So I started plotting a story... with 9 characters. Not 2 or 3. NINE FREAKING CHARACTERS! Branching conversations with 9 characters is the stuff of nightmare -- and is the main reason I gave up.

Lesson #3 : Know your reasons. I wasted some much time early on, zig-zaging between objectives:
"I'm just indulging myself"
"No, I really want it to be a project that pays off"
"Nah, it's just a learning opportunity"
"Damn, why is it bothering me so much that someone else is doing the same thing ?"
"Doesn't matter, I just mine finished"
"What a waste of time !!"
etc etc
And it's still a problem now that I'm trying to figure out what to do!

So anyway, that's my story, thanks for readin'
Check out chatty.im/player/sugar-wars if you want to test the most advance version.

Also, I've also tagged this #startupfail, if any of you fine people want to share the lessons you've dearly paid to learn!

"Enigma machine kep private the communications done by Nazi. It was a really difficult code to break because it changed each day. There was a man in England, Alan Turing, who broke it. He's nowadays known as one of the fathers of the Computer Science. I will show in the next lessons how you can simulate Enigma coder just with an easy C program of 60-70 lines. In the WW2 this was considered a military-level safe code. Thanks to mathematicians, computer scientist and analyst and thanks to their work in the last 60 year, you have access to a systems of several orders of magnitude more efficient and secure when you buy a videogame online."
That really fucking inspired me.

I once reviewed a Pull Request made by a fairly junior developer. They had joined recently, and this was one of the first times they had to touch a bigger part of the code.

Due to a mix of inexperience, new (to them) coding standards and lack of git knowledge, they ended up with a mess of a PR, with a few thousand lines changed, and no way to split it off.
I ended up spending the best part of a day reviewing the whole thing and requesting changes.

Even with the long list of improvements, however, I wasn't sure they would get the magnitude of their fuckup.
So I decided to use a real-world, palpable way to show them what they had done: I went and printed the github diff for that PR. It rendered the glorious amount of 73 pages.

I'll never forget their face, and those of their teammates, when I barged into the room with a thick wad of paper and deposited them on their desk.

At least it worked. I never saw another big, ill-thought pull request from them again.

I met some guys who were Computer Engineering students who were studying web platform as a hobby aside from IoT lessons at school, they met me at my school's library coding stuff and I noticed one of them messing around with yum

"Is that Fedora?" I said, because I wasn't familiar what are the package managers of every distro.

"No, it's CentOS" the guy replied, he also noticed I was coding in a cloud IDE, so he was amazed. He asked if he can use C# there, can he share his workspace, etc.He also asked what's my course. I replied " i'm jsut a senior high student". And they were out of words.

after that, I always think that my skills are way ahead of my age. I don't know my brain anymore, but I felt badass

Funny story from yesterday at work.
Useful to know for later on, the last sentence of the 'convo' is a sentence from a Dutch movie, it basically translates to 'youre fired, vagina' (we swear with that here but it sounds better in Dutch tbh)

Somehow got to the subject of motorbike lessons:

Colleague (M): so just imagine the motorbike instructor arriving for the first lesson and me doing a wheelie right away 😆
Colleague (B): and then his boss coming around at the same time and seeing that happening
(one of our most silent but always on point colleagues) Colleague (c): je bent ontslagen, kut!

Aaaaaand everyone fucking lost it 😂

My second year of high-school, we started having class in computer science. I was really looking forward to it cause I always wanted to learn programming.

On first sight it appeared that the professor which taught the class knew something, he looked like a genuine geek with those dorky glasses, briefcase and pants like Steve Urkel, but after couple of his lessons you could see he had no real dev experience and just basic understanding of programming in theory. He was more reading stuff from the book than he was trying to explain them to students and give some real world examples.

So it was just one these days, everybody got back from vacation, it's hot outside, the guy is just reading sentences from his book, half of students talk with each other and other half doesn't give a fuck about him or his class. Pretty sure I was the only one trying to listen to him and learn something from his recitals.

All of a sudden he notices the atmosphere in the classroom, slams the book shut, gives out couple of F-s to the loudest students and yells out loud "NONE OF YOU IN THIS ROOM WILL EVER ACCOMPLISH ANYTHING IN YOUR LIFE, BARE ALONE IN PROGRAMMING"

At first I felt like shit, but soon after that I started thinking "who the hell are you to tell me what I could or will accomplish in my life". Couple weeks later I've bought myself a first book in programming and started learning C++ late at night since I understood that I won't learn anything about programming in that school. Two years later I was correcting this same professor with his claims on a whiteboard in front of a whole class.

Today, seven years after his words I'm a developer living in foreign country with what I could say somewhat a solid experience and understanding of how both software and web are build, while that same professor still recites to his pupils difference between assembly and object code, while praying nobody asks him where and how these are used. For maybe a quarter of my paycheck. So much about his psychic powers..

Well, some time in the future, i will have to sit a computer science exam with C#. It can't be that bad, right?

Wrong.

To start off, Visual Studio 2013. Why the fuck someone would use this pile of garbage in 2018. I have no fucking clue why any semi-competent IT department would decide to skip TWO fucking releases of the software and decide, that it's okay to just roll with it. It's okay to not have any updates. It's okay to just no care at all.

I literally brought in my laptop with a VM installed since Visual Studio 2017 is really superior to the crap from 5 years ago just to do my coursework most lessons.

-------

Second issue, you know thoes desks where the monitor is literally under the desk and you get a small little window to see the monitor? Yeah, well I will have to take my proper exam in one of these all over the fucking room. Pic related.

Today we had a mini mock - - it went something like this:
- There was glare from the glsss on the desk because of the lights in the room and literally the monitor itself.
- The glass was beyond fucking pig filthy.
- There was neck pain from my back because i was constantly looking down and bending over the see the screen.
- There was eye strain because the document given to us was a tiny piece of paper with tiny writing and the monitor was far away and the paper was close i couldn't focus my eyes.
- Literally every desk was as bad as the next.
- I did fuck all work because i just couldn't focus because of the things above.
You can tell how great that felt.

If i was in a room with a man (or if it was a woman, let's just pretend she has balls), who was the creator of the room i just described, Hitler, my College's IT staff and other really bad people while having infinite ammo, i would continuously shoot the creator in the balls while not giving a shit about anything else.

Forever.

Until heat death.

Thanks for reading.

Everyone is posting jokes about GitLab recent incident and how the guys responsible for that must be feeling right now.
Shit happens, sometimes it's you accidentally deleting a branch on your repo and turning that into a major crisis, sometimes is a huge mistake that impacts not only the whole company business, but also it's clients work.

This situation reminds me of a famous quote from Thomas J. Watson (ex lBM CEO):

"Recently, I was asked if I was going to fire an employee who made a mistake that cost the company $600,000. No, I replied, I just spent $600,000 training him. Why would I want somebody to hire his experience"

Those guys at GitLab have probably learned one of the most expensive lessons in IT world and I really wish them to come up with a solution that not only fixes this case, but that helps them preventing future occurrences.

I guess tux knows me very well

Let me just delete this symbolic link and leave it copying the folder to the ssd real quick while I go to lunch...

Lessons learned:

1 - don't put a fucking / at the end of `rm -rf /path/to/link`

2 - don't ignore the warning of it being a folder after trying to `rm /path/to/link`

3 - backup your fucking dev database too

4 - don't do stuff hungry

SHIT!! FUCK!!

This spring I was working on a library for an algorithm class at uni with some friends and one of the algorithm was extremely slow, we were using Python to study graphs of roads on a map and a medium example took about 6-7h of commission to finish (I never actually waited for so long, so maybe more).
I got so pissed of for that code that I left the lab and went to eat. Once I got back I rewrote just the god-damned data structure we were using and the time got down to 300ms. Milliseconds!

Lessons learned:
- If you're pissed go take a walk and when you'll come back it will be much easier;
- Don't generalize to much a library, the data structure I write before was optimized for a different kind of usage and complete garbage for that last one;
- Never fucking use frozen sets in Python unless you really need them, they're so fricking slow!

My CTO in the 'good old times', when he still talked to me and shared his wisdom, once told me what I should know about oop and explained me the world of programming and what really matters:

CTO about oop and C#:
"I think this object orientated stuff is overrated and useless. You don't get finished. I write everything in one file. You should do that too. The fastest way is always the best one."

So, dear readers, you might think, he maybe understood, what oop means. I have to disappoint you. He is as FUCKING STUPID as he sounds.
He didn't understand the whole concept of the language C# or oop.
He doesn't use properties, every single method is static void and there is nothing like an object.

Since there is more from where that came from, this will be continued...

Throwback to my first assignment in MATLAB.
Still gives me the heebie-jeebies!

Hey guys and ladys. I've got another little rant about my teacher.
As some of you may know, i finished my final exams last week, so basically every relevant grade is done. Every teacher except of my special snowflake programming teacher spends the lessons casually talking with us (some even say we dont need to show up anymore).
Little backstory: Grades need to be done on 18th, June and i get my certificate on 22nd.

Back to my rant. Special Snowflake is different. He wants ANOTHER project. This is totally his idea and is nowhere mentioned in our curriculum. It has to be done until next friday, it has to be C# and we need a detailed documentation. This wouldn't be a problem normally - if I wouldn't be moving at the moment. Special Snowflake knows this but doesn't care.
Except from the criteria above he wants it to be:
- fancy
- loved by everyone. Literally we need to make something EVERYBODY wants in their daily life
- good looking
- everyone should want to pay money for this

How am I supposed to come up with an idea and program the shit out of it in less than 2 weeks, which i need to paint my new office and pack some more stuff.

A College Friend of mine has offered last year a free C++ course for everyone who is interested, this year he is doing the same in Rust. This guy can explain and gives a big part of his freetime for this.
He is just amazing.

Thanks to everyone who shares his/her knowledge!

Okay so here are a few lessons that I have learned from being an intern to a junior developer (who’s just 2 years out of college).
- every ninja engineer starts off as a noob. There’s nothing to be ashamed of if you don’t know “everything” about coding
- Respect everyone’s opinion (including the one that shouts your design is crap in a meeting). Don’t process them too much.
- leave things that happen at work, in the workplace
- Keep yourself up to date even after you’ve bagged the 100,000$ offer. Never.stop.learning.
- Be polite to your interns (been there). They look up to you and treat their juniors the way you treat them.
- Be honest. Including your tiny scrum updates. If you need more time, tell it. If you’ve screwed up something , own it up.
- Never blame or point fingers.
- Nothing is irreversible.(except things like sudo rm -rf/)
- There’s always a way out(of any mess).
- Respect what came before.
- Respect what comes after (before you push badly written code)
- It’s ok to point out mistakes but Be kind. (Else you’ll end up in someone else’s rant ;-) )

What is with the +1 chasing in here? Votes should be given for good rants and comments, not to climb the count-ladder if that somehow would make you elite community member. Posting a picture you found elsewhere just to earn free stickers or a stress ball, and pollute the incentive the swag were meant for originally.

Stop mass +1'ing some random guys every comment, and earn the votes by contributing with stories, lessons learned, proper rants and supportive comments.

I did some grave and irreversible mistakes in my life

- Never gathered enough courage to mingle with women when I was younger and now the hope is lost

- Compromised my values and mental wellness when I met a narcissistic bitch

- Did not invest money wisely when markets were sailing low and allowed that good sum to sit in bank

- Did not plan health and term insurance at early age when premiums could have been low

- Out of fear, did not follow my gut to purchase gold because my father was acting crazy (or else my money would have been doubled)

- Did not plan my taxation well (or until now would have paid almost zero tax)

- Did not define strict boundaries and allowed people to overstep (or else I would have better friends and family relationships)

- Did not quit my job early and stuck with low paying shit with negative learning, for years (or else I would have grown exponentially)

Thankfully few things I did right are, spending more time with my mom and learning from my mistakes.

I hope I don't make such stupid life choices again.

While working on my one of the first project in java i ended up using deprecated Calendar API for the date. Since deadline was near i thought it would be a good idea to use the JCalendar API for as date picker (which is a third party API).BAD IDEA. It was the night before the submission round about 11pm when i realized that there is no way to convert JCal object into Calendar and it turned out it is not working as expected you have to subtract a particular number from the year to get date right.

To convert JCal into Calendar i used the toString function to get the date in string sliced it using substring into year,month,day then had to assign date to Calendar object via constructor.
Had to write 70 lines of code just to convert JCal into Calendar...

And then there were other complications related to this problem. Had tu pull an all nighter just to solve date related problems
LESSONS LEARNED :
NEVER USE A DEPRECATED API
NEVER USE THIRD PARTY APIs WITHOUT RESEARCH

You know what really, really sucks about my school? Rant#00

I'm in my last year now and they removed one CS/IT lesson. Now I have two fucking 45min lessons (instead of three) of learning what I'm actually interested in.

Even worse: They don't provide and LK ("Leistungskurs" == advanced course) for CS/IT. Not like for Maths, English, German - okay but LATIN AND SPORT? Wtf
And this school calls themselves a MINT-school (Maths, IT, Natural Sciences, Technology).

EVEN WORSE: The 12th graders now don't even have a basic course CS/IT.

Fuck you school.

School sucks.
Paying quiet a lot of money(not having that much) to a private school that used to impress me two years ago.
Now I can see all the hidden crap:
- Project work is graded after written lines

- "Do this project with scrum" Got two hours in the room with scrum board in a whole semester

- Exams are pushed if the teacher is to lazy to deal with bad results. A 3 ( or C ) became best grade.

- They could not find a teacher for OS & Networks. So instead of 1 semester Server architecture we got 5 days.. 1 of them for exam (exam = final grade)

- Guy took part with us during the 5 days. "How did you do that?!? Doesn't work on my PC I think" - half year later he is the new Network teacher

- Surpassingly he sucks at that, being half a week ahead of his lessons by googling shit together. Can't answer a single question beyond that..

Once he created a multiple choice exam. Questions in a word document online, answers on paper. Not just that he never blocked the internet during the exam, he also publicly uploaded the document a week ahead. Securing it with a 5 letter password... Somehow we all passed that one with a pretty good average.

Besides there a some teachers who are actually really good.

- hold yourself accountable for your mistakes
- keep track your mistakes and learn from them
- put thought in what you do
- be organised
- become comfortable asking for and offering help
- realise that some problems have no universal solution
- don't just copy what others do, but also think for yourself
- learn to be patient

The alternative.io to WebStorm

Ladies and gentlemen!

The tour provided with Golang is really nice for learning the basics..
Just doing

go get golang.org/x/tour/gotour
go tool tour

starts a local webserver with the tour. The lessons and the exercises at the end of certain chapters are really easily understandable.

I think it might also be a good tool to refresh the knowledge about Golang for those that haven't used it in a while.

!dev

The school I went to didn't have PCs when I first joined (had some RISC OS machines instead). They got Windows 95 PCs eventually and networked them. I had no experience with networking before this, but had a PC at home. We all had mapped drives to resources on the server. The PCs were pretty locked down - no "Run" command etc.

Anyway, one day the head of IT came in to one of the lessons and asked me "how I did it".

What had I done? Well, clearly he had seen something I'd taught one of my friends. I wrote it down for him.

1. Right-click the desktop
2. New shortcut
3. \\nameofserver
4. OK

Such hax, being able to see the file shares on the server.

Shortly after this, all computer areas had signs saying "no shortcuts allowed"...

Recent life lessons:
◆ Do not buy a domain name without obfuscating your contact information, lest you want to be harried by people offering to provide their services to “grow your business”

◆ Do not change descriptions on your most recent experience that’s set to be ongoing on LinkedIn without making note of the “notify your followers” toggle, lest you wish LinkedIn to post on your behalf a message urging people to congratulate you on your new position. A post which you cannae delete. And lo, if you comment upon it urging well-wishers to not comment upon it or offer congratulations as it is not what it appears, witness the lack of good that doth do. Resort to canned response to DMs explaining the situation and urging the well-wisher to learn from your misfortune. (I find it really difficult to not politely respond to folk. It was a good two days of like 50+ messages.)

◆ If you have a career coach that tells you to connect to as many people as possible on LinkedIn and accept connection requests, perhaps just don’t follow that advice. My second career coach was like “That doesn’t even make sense” “I KNOW!” ... I have so many LinkedIn connections. But I cannae just prune the list because it would take for freaking ever to figure out who was who and who I really still wanted to connect with. *sigh* 900+ is too many. And I have over 100 requests I haven’t even gotten around to looking at.

Software development lessons are so boring and the teacher is so stupid. He can't swap two variables without a temporary var. He said that he never saw this kind of swaping before. I pay attention sometimes, but I'm just drawing in my exercise book.

!rant
... so... maybe not that much of a thing, but i think it is:

a gal (27 years old) i started teaching programming two weeks ago, who had literally no previous experience with programming, algoritmization nor c#...
... just now, after 3 lessons of 6 hours altogether, and after yesterday when i explained to her what arrays are and reminded her what loops do...

... invented bubble sort. on her own. no googling. on paper. no "trial and error code typing and running".

i'm actually pretty proud of her :)

... putting the algo concept into actual code will still be a bit of a struggle, but yeah, hell, can't help thinking that she's actually pretty smart :)

(p. s. fist lesson was i drew uml of a fibonacci algo and forced her to understand what it does, second lesson was i explained the minimum required c# syntax for her to be able to implement it and forced her to write it (with as little help as i could), third lesson was the concept of array and "okay, now here's array of numbers, make a function that will sort them")

looking forward to what will happen when i explain recursion and nudge her towards quicksort O:-)

"404 self esteem not found"

Life lessons.

When I was a graduate I often had to do proof of concepts and one had to be done by the weekend, I'd only been given it on the Wednesday. After a few sleepless nights I had it working or so I thought. On the Friday afternoon the CTO had a look at it and spotted a bug, he told me about it and I stayed in the office until about 10 when I finally managed to get some kind of fix in place. I emailed him told him I thought but was working and shouldn't happen again.

A few hours later no response I get a phone call from him screaming, shouting and swearing calling me useless and a waste of space etc. Etc. To the point I logged in desperately trying to fix the issue in a very hastily written integration and ended up having quite a major panic attack woke up on the floor and immediately went back to work. On the Saturday morning one of the senior Devs logged in and managed to fix it in the database and everything went fine in the end.

I went into work on Monday fully expecting to be fired from the way the CTO was speaking to me, I went to my line manager at the time and he just said don't worry. I left it in his
hands and things went back to normal. That call put a pretty serious dent in my confidence for years, but I learned a few valuable lessons which I stick to today.

Never work on serious shit after 6, use a second mobile for work which is turned off at 5 o'clock, properly test all fixes and always ALWAYS have someone in between graduates and senior management because honestly they can't handle the shit that's flung from above.

!Rant

Lessons from this picture:
1. Not all opportunities are to be taken. Some are traps.
2. A person can become so determined to destroy another person that they become blind and end up destroying themselves.
3. You fight best in your natural element and environment. Here the bird has advatange in his natural element.
4. Know your limits, we all have them.
5. Sometimes the best response to provocation is not to fight.
6. Sometimes to accomplish something you need team work, you will not always win alone.
7. Stick to what you do best and don't pursue what will kill you.

👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻

BLESS YOU
- @Root, for everything
- @SortOfTested, for “grass is greener / grass is alive” and everything, too
- @Floydimus, for being so nice to me
- @theabbie, for not cracking under pressure. I admire you and you’re an example to me
- Anonymous members I chatted with over Telegram, for valuable lessons and helping me cope

FUCK YOU
- girl who raped me
- ex who gaslighted me when I was weak
- sadistic psychiatrist who knowingly prescribed wrongful pills
- ex who abused me when I was on a devastating wrongful therapy
- boss guy who touched me without my consent
- each and every cop and military guy I’ve ever talked to, except WWII veterans
- whatever filled my life with nothing but guilt

Something I ranted about 1 year and 2 days ago just saved my life today. Those lost hours that day saved me a few hours today.

I wonder though: if I hadn't written about it on devRant, would I still remember it today?

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

Not sure if this technically counts as all nighter, but when Udacity released their basics Android nanodegree they had a contest where the first 100 worldwide to finish got a scholarship for the advanced Android nanodegree. I followed the uberman sleepy schedule, 20 min nap every 4 hours, around the clock for 6 days. Finished #17. They didn't even have the videos or lessons for the last 3 sections, just a description and a project for each, so they set up a slack channel to let us talk with staff and collaborate with others trying to get it done.

Coding lessons 101, it shouldn't be that fucking hard to understand what a pointer is but that's where we currently stand

So, during my Java lessons we had a teacher who had a very special relationship with the language.
During the introduction he used to tell us that interfaces in Java are really poorly designed and that they would not reflect how an interface normally should be implemented. The possibility for a developer to add default methods to an interface or that a class could inherit from multiple interfaces was unacceptable to him.

Due to those reasons, he would hate on Java 8 and tell us to not use it and instead stay with Java 7 - dafuq!

I worked two months for free, 15h per day, including weekends, due a contract trap. On top of that, client was emotionally blackmailing me and I was feeling threatened and helpless.

I even lost weight, skipping meals to save time and money. One day, my body collapsed. I ended up in bed for 10 days, feeling stiffness, pain, weakness, and shakiness. I even had to ask for help to brush my teeth.

I abandoned the project, and didn't receive any payment. The client went crazy and made me feel the worst person in the world for being sick and unable to work. But didn't put his menaces in execution.

I still remember the joy I felt when I was able to walk again.

That was the worst burnout I had, and also one of the biggest lessons about limits and evil people.

I'm not going to have a lot of new friends here but I am fed up with all those guys complaining about CSS on devRant.

CSS is damn easy. Get over it. Take some lessons, learn it the right way and shut your mouth.

I'd prefer you share your enlighten opinion on CSS in JS with React Native or CSS compositing with ReactJS which are both huge pain in the ass.

Plain CSS isn't the cause of all your pain. You are.

My patience limits are huge but our product manager seems that likes to stretch them.

You piece of fuckin shit. You ask for feature A and we agree on the way we will do it. Good. Half way you want to change it's behavior.
Fine, i accept that. Let's move on.
I'm close to finish it and you come and say let's add more on that feature and make it more complicated. I can't say anything, just fine and let me work on it.
Then you and the senior dev that "helps" us don't come to 2 meetings and just communicate via emails.
And then, then you fuckin scums tell me that is unacceptable that i haven't finished it and it doesn't work?
I used my uni time and missed lessons to work on your shitty feature and that you just yell at me?
What about comming to the fuckin meetings so we can discuss what problems occured and how i can overcome them, you sucker?

Just because our boss complained to you that the product is late because of you, that doesn't give you the right to yell at me, you piece of shit.

And the next time you tell me that you pulled the repository and it doesn't work while it does on everyone else i will come and shove your laptop up to your ass.

I need lessons on how to be a developer and have a girlfriend

I give math lessons to high school people in my "free" time. One of my guys needs to use calculator to compute sums with 0 and yet he wants to become a programmer 🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️🤦🏻‍♂️

To long to read. So don’t do it.

I feel disappointed. It’s not about job or stuff. I’m disappointed about world in general. I don’t see my future on this planet anymore.

The world more or less looks like that :

Politics are trying to help you by stealing more money from you. The more you’re lucky the more money you will pay for it.

Media punch you with some family stuff from everywhere, give you young rich and far away, beautiful picture photos of places, people and food that you at most could visit once or twice per year during holidays that are break from work concentration camps.

If you’re lucky you’re rich or got rich or wealthy and infamous so you can walk wherever you want and don’t give a fuck what you wear but again your old friends are not so lucky bastards so you need to find new friends that are probably assholes. At the end most of the days you you’re doing nothing except killing time to meet with people you like during weekends or evenings.

Then there are families and everyone want to tell you that’s important. Family is like herd of assholes, if you’re weak they will sacrifice you and tell that you’re looser behind your back but when you get wealthy they will come back to tell you that when you were young and stupid they played with you so now you have to buy them some stuff or get them a job.

At the end there are people with “I wrote that book” certificate of excellence try to sell you opinions on everything starting from sexual positions ending on how to take a good dump. The problem is that the moment they wrote that book it becomes obsolete. Teachers of useless knowledge from last century that forgot about google or wikipedia.

All of them are playing your emotions, cause impulses and hormones are what makes you weak and people are looking for your weaknesses to take advantage of you. Get your money or get your attention and maybe even both at the same time. Cause views matter you know it. So like and subscribe dumb fucks.

If you’re lucky you find couple of them who aren’t doing that. Who the fuck knows why but this shit happens. It doesn’t matter if they’re family or you met them month ago. Those are only to keep and hardest to find. Unluckily those also can change by other people they meet or when they’re young.

If you can’t find a friend get a dog or cat or whatever animal you like. Their love is unconditional and obvious to read.

Well that’s most of the “I want to be spotted” culture that is all boring as fuck. Personalized ass and glamorous pictures and short movies of everything you don’t need but looks awesome. And as you see it’s still growing with more specialized portals like onlyfans, twitch and tiktok. We all need to look at what everyone else have or want to have cause 99% of time 99% of us are boring and is bored as fuck. Most of us can repeat same small amount set of stories all their life cause we’re not created to entertain.

I don’t feel joy looking at this shit fucked full of shit people arguing who’s dick is bigger. Who can post most dumb thing. I think I need a break but how to break from everything ? How to break from culture of money where to live on your country land you need to pay property tax ?

That’s all fucked up. Life’s fucked up.

Bugs in code are like heartbreaks in humans. They suck, but they also teach you some important lessons 🤷‍♂️

#1 Take French language lessons to revive my long time ago knowledge.

#2 Read as many as I can books on dev topics

#3 Do more outdoor activities (sports)

#4 Liquidate my fucking bank loan

#5 Buy some nice wheels for my car

#6 Try to socialize more

#7 Be part of aiding childrens in need / abandoned ones

We should start with demystifying tech...
For most people, modern phones, tablets and pcs are magical rectangles...
The law of Clarke says, that every sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
And we have to tackle that.
In geography, we should talk about gps and glosnas
In English or foreign language lessons, we should speak about translator bots and language patters/abstractions
In physics, we have to understand the measurement devices
In politics, we have to speak about licenses of use, we have to speak about netneutrality as a political concept, we have to speak about snowden, shadow brokers, the vault, all the laws some shady imperial beauroticians pipe into our life.
Trojans used by the government and so on...
In cs concepts of operating systems, abstractions and networking should be taught, instead of using excel.
That could be done in math...
Well... No one should have to work with excel.
In maths they could use Wolfram alpha, rlang and gnupolt for example

Lessons I've learnt so far on programming

-- Your best written code today can be your worst tomorrow (Focus more on optimisation than style).
-- Having zero knowledge of a language then watching video tutorials is like purchasing an arsenal before knowing what a gun is (Read the docs instead).
-- It's works on my machine! Yes, because you built on Lenovo G-force but never considered the testers running on Intel Pentium 0.001 (Always consider low end devices).
-- "Programming" is you telling a story and without adding "comments" you just wrote a whole novel having no punctuation marks (Always add comments, you will thank yourself later for it I promise).
-- In programming there is nothing like "done"! You only have "in progress" or "abandoned" (Deploy progressively).
-- If at this point you still don't know how to make an asynchronous call in your favourite language, then you are still a rookie! take that from me. (Asynchronous operation is a key feature in programming that every coder should know).
-- If it's more than two conditions use "Switch... case" else stick with "If... else" (Readability should never be under-rated).
-- Code editors can MAKE YOU and BREAK YOU. They have great impact on your coding style and delivery time (Choose editors wisely).
-- Always resist the temptation of writing the whole project from scratch unless needs be (Favor patching to re-creation).
-- Helper methods reduces code redundancy by a large chunk (Always have a class in your project with helper methods).
-- There is something called git (Always make backups).
-- If you don't feel the soothing joy that comes in fixing a bug then "programming" is a no-no (Coding is fun only when it works).
-- Get angry with the bugs not the testers they're only noble messengers (Bugs are your true enemy).
-- You would learn more than a lot reading the codes of others and I mean a lot! (Code review promotes optimisation and let's you know when you are writing macaroni).
-- If you can do it without a framework you have yourself a big fat plus (Frameworks make you entirely dependent).
-- Treat your code like your pet, stop taking care of it and it dies! (Codes are fragile and needs regular updates to stay relevant).

Programming is nothing but fun and I've learnt that a long time ago.

Today in development: discovered that it's possible via combination of keys to rename a database in SQL Server Management Studio without as much as a dialog box to confirm.

Shout out to the 2000ish users in production that discovered this delightful nugget of info with me.

Lessons learned:

A) Don't trust Microsoft to create software that makes you confirm potentially catastrophic actions

B) Make sure your user hasn't been granted ALTER DATABASE permissions without your knowledge before you start using it.

Most Incompetent co-worker. It was me during my first job. Not humble bragging or some shit. I was straight out fucking incompetent during my first job.
Hear me out.
I graduated my diploma course specialising in networks(from computer to cellular/telecom networks) but I did a few programming courses and my internship was at a lab - did iOT stuffs with raspi and arduinos. I am a A+ student so was giving priority to choose a better internship place. Fun time. So I fell in love with programming. As soon as i graduated I applied for a Java job. Got a job at a domain name reseller/hosting company using java EE. Remember my programming = very basic/OOP concepts/basic SQL knowledge. That's it.
I am that little childish fucker who thought he knew everything and I kept interrupting my coworkers with stupid questions.
Same time, I was under the darkest moments of my life with some family drama/tension headaches.
2 months into the job, one coworker really got pissed off with my interruptions and bluntly told me "*my name,you are stupid aren't you"
The manager was a really nice guy. I will forever thanks him for his advices. He knew I was struggling with family shits and gave me another 3 months probation period to redeem myself. But I gave up. That was back in 2015.
It was a great place I fucked it up. But I learnt precious life lessons. I was young,stupid and didn't know how to handle stress.
I thanks myself for not quitting programming after that experience.

Don't start with Java but something simple like Python or Ruby or anything that doesn't need that much blob too run a Hello World! program. That was what confused me the most. And by 'start' I mean like the first few lessons, just to get started.

Blue Robotics

This company makes underwater thrusters for submarine applications. With their first thruster they made it easy to make a homemade submarine. The motor was powerful, the thruster just worked. They even had a promotional where they created an automated surfboard that made it from hawaii to somewhere in california with one of their thrusters pushing it there the entire way. It was a great product.

Then they created the next version. This was the same thruster, but it had an ESC(Electronic Speed Controller) sealed in an aluminum puck on top of the motor. This ESC could be controlled by servo controls, or by plugging it into an i2c bus. You could pull different stats off of the motor over i2c it sounded great. So my robotics team trusted this company and bought 8 motors at $220 - $250 bucks each. We lightly tested them since we had not even finished the robot yet. One week before the competition our robot got completely put together and we did our first few tests.

Long story short, Us and 22 other teams did roughly the same thing. We bought these motors expecting them to work, but instead the potted aluminum ESCs were found defective. Water somehow got into the completely resin sealed aluminum puck and destroyed the ESC. We didn't qualify that year due to trusting a competition sponsor to deliver a good product. I will admit that it was our fault for not testing them before going to the competition. Lessons were learned and an inherent distrust of every product I come across was developed.

I have a guy sitting next to me in class. We were working on the same project. It's about rewriting a functioning mergesort algorithm in C and doing a presentation about that topic.

Now... the thing is that I was ill on that specific day when we got that project assigned. And he didn't tell me it either. I asked the whole class.
They just said that there was nothing special about that day. These fuckers.

Anyway...
Thé following week we had the same lesson again. Actually there were more than both of us. We were a group of 5 dudes.
3 of them barely have anything to do with programming at all. They just learn for the exams and have bad grades in programming.

Luckily, they already wrote the functioning sorting algorithm.
Since that is the case, I chose to review it to get deeper into that topic.

There were comments in English (we live in Germany) and these comments were written in a different style. My classmates would never comment in such a way.
It was a modified version copied from the internet. The whole source code.
The variables had names like j,k,b,u and so on. It was perfectly obfuscated.

Yesterday, I wasn't at college either.
I had to show up to a given time at a government bureau. They have been working on that project that day. So, I decided to ask them via a messenger, if they can give me the newest presentation files after 1 pm.

They said that they barely have anything to present. They would like to improvise they said.

"Fuck you all" I thought.
I'm done with these fucking illiterate humans.
I hope they all die in hell with satan having a ride on them. Stabbing them from behind right into their assholes and eating their ball sacks (if they have any).

Today is the presentation.
That's when I decided not to drive there during these specific lessons.

Boss wanted me to make changes in company's website which was based on wordpres s.

I knew it could be done by tweaking some JS code, but I have very less experience with wordpress

But wordpress is easy man(Internet told me).

Give me 5 minutes, you will see the changes in production.
Being lazy af I directly logged in to ftp, checked out some files, updated some code, I was good to go.

Before pushing it, I opened the website and it was GONE ٩(๑´0`๑)۶

Now there was no public_html in the root.
I was fucked. I have accidentally deleted the website that had no backup.

And the best part I was on leave from
next day.

I was looking everywhere for backups, looked into google cache to get the contents. I have to recreate the complete site now.

Just when I was asking questions on choice of my profession and simultaneously looking here and there in FTP for backups,
I found the jewel "public_html".

It happens out that I have accidentally moved the folder to some other directory.

Phewww.

Moved it back to root. Site was up and running.

Reassured myself that I deserve to be a dev.

Backed up complete site, made the changes.

Uploaded it.

And the best part, amount of wordpress I learned in those three hours was way more than I could have learnt in many weeks.

Lessons Learnt :

A) ALWAYS keep backups.
B) You SHOULD NOT make changes on prod directly
C) You become superhuman when your brain know you are going to be fucked 😂

So I finally got around to rewriting the Java course that my school has. It took me 6 lessons to get "Hello, World!" into the course. Well it looks like its going to be a long course.

Shortlisted hackathon apps:
1. Transmit strings between two phones using sound.
Why the fuck? Why are we reinventing the wheel?
2. Offline payment services app. Sounds cool but is no way feasible in the real world.

The judge of the hackathon was some old PhD college professor who was yawning at the begining of the presentation who didn't understand what was heroku and didn't even bother to listen.
Lessons learnt:
1. Stick to corporate hacakathons
2. Query regarding the judges of the hackathon

PC survival lessons
1. Tape acts as a protection from extreme animals like humans bashing you up and falling apart into pieces
2. Repeat lesson 1 for eternity

My first dev job is my current job, but I'm leaving it tomorrow to go on on an internship overseas, then return my focus to completing my Computer Science bachelor's degree and getting into a Master's program.

Before this job, I was an office assistant at a small company that sold cosmetics products and fragrances. I had just returned to college after a 1.5 year hiatus and was tired of that job. I wanted to get into the field, even though my experience was limited to freelance web design and a few personal programming projects of which I no longer had any proof, and I still didn't have a degree, but I wasn't confident that someone would contact me. Yet I decided to update my resume and upload it to Indeed.com. I was already getting interviewed at a call center when this local tech startup called, and 2 weeks later, I had the job. We were 3 employees and I was, not only the first woman in the team, but also the first person to ever get hired by the directors without a college degree. Today​, I still hold those two titles and the team is 3 times bigger.

It was a very bumpy ride, and tomorrow I move on to other adventures, but I'll always be grateful for the opportunity, all the lessons, and the best team mates I could ever have. Without their wisdom and guidance, I wouldn't have half the blessings I have today. I will miss them dearly, but I know we'll stay friends.

Here's to better things and to a college degree! <3

So last week I really fucked up

I had this new implementation that was supposedly to be integrating smoothly into the rest of the service. It depended on a serialized model made by a data scientist. I test it in local, in QA environment: no problem.

So, Friday, 4pm, I decide to deploy to production. I check once from the app: the service throw an error. Panic attack, my chief is at my desk, we triy to understand what went wrong. I make calls with cUrls: no problem. Everything seems fine. I recheck from the app again: no problem.
We dedice to let it in prod, as the feature work. I go get some beers with the guys, to celebrate the deploy.

Fast-forward the next morning, 11am, my phone ring: it's a colleague of my chief. "Please check Slack, a client is trying to use the feature, it's broken"

FUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!

Panic attack again. I go to the computer, check the errors: two types of errors. One I can fix, the other from a missing package on the machine that the data guy used.

Needless to say, I had a fairly good weekend.

Lessons learned:
- make sure Dev, QA and Prod are exactly the same (use Ansible or Container)
- never deploy on a Friday afternoon if you don't have a quick way to revert

When I was studying computer science at university (second year). There was a girl, I'm not sure if she was crying or angry after this, but I didn't expect that.

Just to put some context, this girl was still asking "what's the meaning of i++?" in second year. And during a re-sit exam, the teacher who was asked the previous question, was the one who monitored the students.

And the girl made a mistake (it was something usual though) . She asked the teacher something that she didn't understand. Which means that she wanted the teacher to help her with the exam, but I'm not even sure that she realised that. And the teacher said : "You still can't do that? I gave you this exact problem during lessons and also at the first exam! Well don't worry... I'll give you the same next year :) "

Not really nice for the girl, but hopefully I didn't hear it directly or I would have laugh a little too much x)

Hello DevRant community! It’s been a while, almost 5 years to be exact. The last time I posted here, I was a newbie, grappling with the challenges of a new job in a completely new country. Oh, how time flies!

Fast forward to today, and it’s been quite the journey. The codebase that once seemed like an indecipherable maze is now my playground. The bugs that used to keep me up at night are now my morning coffee puzzles. And the team, oh the team! We’ve moved from awkward nods to inside jokes and shared victories.

But let’s talk about the real hero here - the coffee machine. The unsung hero that has fueled late-night coding sessions and early morning stand-ups. It’s seen more heated debates than the PR comments section. If only it could talk, it would probably write its own rant about the indecisiveness of developers choosing between cappuccino and latte.

And then there are the unforgettable ‘learning opportunities’ - moments like accidentally shutting down the production server or dropping the customer database. Yes, they were panic-inducing crises of apocalyptic proportions at that time, but in hindsight, they were valuable lessons. Lessons about the importance of thorough testing, proper version control, reliable backup systems, and most importantly, owning up to our mistakes.

So here’s to the victories and failures, the bugs and fixes, the refactorings and 'wontfix’s. Here’s to the incredible journey of growth and learning. And most importantly, here’s to this amazing community that’s always been there with advice, sympathy, humor, and support.

Can’t wait to see what the next 5 years bring! 🥂

Jared wtf were you thinking! He is a wild man 😊 Final 5 minutes thru rolling credits was very cool.
Lot of communication and usability lessons to be learned during the episode.

Season finale next week. Can't wait!

Built my own IoC container for C#. This taught me way too much about SOLID principles and dependency injection that i could give lessons now 😂

I'm still using my own IoC in my projects... It's great 🤘

I gotta say, I actually admire the work that content creators must go thru to make quality content.

So as I stated before I’m working on YouTube channel, under the name “TheSoftwareSage” ... to create tutorials and a way of me teaching software the way I believe it should be taught, not how the mainstream methods of today are.

Bottom up approach rather than top down

(Must start with a firm understanding of the foundation.. and build upon the knowledge as we go thru the layers of abstraction but the key concepts must be understood first)

Anyway, I’m working on this in my spare time and I was not aware of how much effort I would actually need todo this right haha. At first I figured I’d just screencast a monitor and have a ppt or text editor or terminal open and that stuff and just do it.

As In person with my interns I never have “planned” lessons or content is all impromptu based on the need at the time and I just go with it, with their computers and a whiteboard lol.

I was wrong for video recording lol... maybe it’s OCD... or perfectionism, I’ll make a video, review it like 5times and then be like shit I forgot to mention this or that or I didn’t like how I explained this or that
OR
I keep worrying too much about colors, and sound levels and quality and transitions and video angles and all this other shit.
And then post editing fuck.... I’m about ready to say fuck it and “do it live .. one shot” and just upload the end result.

I guess this would be in the content world similar to our “paralysis analysis” notion.

My lessons both come from my current side project (I will share it with you in a week or two, the website isn't finished yet):
1. Every project comes to the point where it hurts to continue. Keep pushing, the result is worth it.
2. You aren't as good as you thought you were when you started, but you'll be better than you ever were when you finish.
3. Sometimes, there's more points to a list than you'd expect.
4. One hour per day is easier than five hours a week.

How?
Well. I started out my project knowing some C#, but Jack shit about unity. I know most of what I might build will end up being shit I'm gonna regret, refactor and recycle later. But I don't give a fuck. Doing it is better than planning it.

It sometimes hurts to get rid of a carefully planned algorithm that took hours to build because it fails in practice. But it's the right thing to do.

Never plan too much. If I'd have planned this project out, I wouldn't even have started with what I'm good at: write code, break shit and experiment.

It's easier to progress slowly but steady. Look at some awesome games that have been worked on for ages while the public had their say (RimWorld, Project Zomboid, Dwarf Fortress...) as opposed to those that are developed behind closed doors and rushed to the market before Christmas or some other major event (Mafia 3, Fallout 76, Fallout 4 VR...). Progress slowly, deploy early, push often. And the one hour per day approach is a good way to do this.

A while ago I stumbled upon this cheap vps provider called dedistation (lowest was $15/year), so I end up buying a one year subscription and transferred all of my personal sites to it. Fast forward six month later, uptime robot notified me that my vps is down. No problem, I'll just submit a ticket. Few days go by and I yet to receive a response. Not a problem, I'll just try and login via the serial interface and get my shit, no luck there either.
Seems like these motherfuckers just packed up and went offline without a shit given.
No response, no notification untill today! How more twat a company could be?
Lessons learned the hard way
- always backup regularly
- check and transfer nameserver or no emails for days.
- you get what u pay for (haven't learned this fully yet. Went again with a cheap legit-ish provider (arubacloud)

I can’t say it’s the most painful but it’s one of my recent painful lessons.

So I’m learning C and in my project I was trying to make a copy of a 2D array and I kept getting seg faults up the ass every time I tried to allocate one of the inner arrays and after a long day of debugging I realized that I was trying to allocate memory within an array that doesn’t exist so I had to create the first array then allocate memory for each inner array after.

How to program in 4 easy steps

Hi everyone, long time no see. Hope you're all doing fine! 💙

Here's an actual rant: I don't know if I chose the right university course, anymore.
I chose "Informatics", but there are so many subjects that aren't even related to Informatics, and still I have to do them because that's how it is. I just wanna do programming, because I like the creative aspect of it.
I'm getting sick of this to be honest... I'm at my second year, now, and I feel like maybe... I should've just studied programming on my own, and seek a job without going through university.
Though, that being said, I may just be temporarily having a bad time. I don't know, ok?

It seemed I did okay, in my first year, I completed 4 exams out of 7, but now I don't know anymore.
The exams for this semester's subjects are coming up in a couple months, and I haven't exactly learned much, y'know...? I couldn't follow most of what the professors said in the lessons, for whatever reason (some professors talk too quietly, some don't explain well, etc.).

What was your experience with university, if you ever went there? Did you find it helpful, or was it a waste of your time?

Thank you for reading. I hope my next post will be more joyful, sorry for being like this. Love you all! 💙

In the first two years at my school, I'm gonna do much stuff in the programming lessons that I already know. That's going to be boring. Very boring.

Ascended Anime Nerd

Got started with Dragonball Z when it first came stateside. Brother was borrowing fansubs of the Cell and Buu sagas back when people were wondering if Goku would ever finish Snake Road.

Around that time I started noticing some serious discrepancies between the broadcast translations and the fansubs, and so I decided to cut out the middleman—after all, how hard can it be to learn Japanese?—and did a search on AltaVista for a “kanji course”, turning up a course hosted by Rice University that taught basic Japanese using Magic Knight Rayearth and YuuYuu Hakusho.

Turns out the answer to the difficulty question is that anything van be simple to learn, if you don’t know it’s supposed to be hard. Especially if you embrace the parts everyone else dreads (falling in love with kanji, in my case).

Over the next nine months I ditched my Spanish class—and all my other classes, for that matter—to study Japanese in the computer lab. I was reviewing the lessons, playing JRPGs on SNES9X (stored on a ZIP disk, since every computer in the lab had a ZIP drive), and transcribing the scripts so I could transliterate and translate them thereafter. In a lab that went so far as to uninstall Minesweeper and Solitaire to discourage playing games on school computers, I had free reign to do so openly because the one time I got confronted for playing a game I had 150+ leaves of handwritten transcriptions to show them.

Long story short, by the time I took Japanese 101 9 months later it was like Hermione in Snape’s potions class, since I had already taught myself about 2 years’ worth of material. I then transferred out to a college that did a one-class-per-month “modular” system that basically allowed me to take 8 more Japanese classes full-time for the following year. By the time my exchange trip came up I was sofar ahead of the curriculum I was taking classes alongside the native Japanese students.

Running out of linguistic topics, I did an independent study on classical Japanese literature in its original, unmodernized grammar and orthography. A topic I’m still fairly active with 15 years later.

Don't be a dumbass and use your 2.4Ghz WiFi and airpods at the same time.

Lessons stux learns at 4am.

People should have mandatory lessons in vector processing.

In canteen, after lunch, there were 4 places you could place your trays. But only small, one-way corridor, for one person at a time to get there.

Every person picked the first place and while they were placing the tray, people behind them had to wait. Huge line started to form. If they, instead, always picked the last empty place, all tray places would be occupied for longer and the processing speed could increase almost 4 times.
Textbook vector processing example.

Finally getting my first certificate in Udacity , which is a website where you can have courses in coding 🚶🏻‍♀️💕...
In order to get it I had to first learn the lessons there and then do a final project which involves all the things I learned which was HTML and CSS in making and designing websites in browsers 🍃

Today was my last piano lesson with my jazzy teacher. I'll miss him. He teached me a lot and I nearly always looked forward to piano lessons.

I brought wine (Mosel life) and 5 songs - 3 jazz classics (It don't mean a Thing, Take Five and Fly me to the Moon), his favorite from the Daft Punk album I borrowed him and one of his own songs (surprise) and we improvised on these songs. I was a little nervous.. or sad but I didn't play as good as yesterday eve. He asked me why I never did that before. He'd love to practice improvising with me because I suck at reading sheet music (I said that and I'm a lazy learner with sheets).

R.I.P. Monday afternoon.

One thing that @scout taught me is to wear the oxygen mask myself before helping others. Oh she is a sweetheart.

This advice has stuck with me since and slowly & steadily, I am regaining my lost confidence and self love.

Remember, how I was struggling for clarity a couple of months ago? But now, I feel more clear in head.

During the start of the pandemic, I joined a community of corporate normies. I used to live happier until that decision.

That place made me ultra competitive and I subconsciously became a rat trying to win the race. I damaged myself more than I benefited.

I joined at the time of inception. Every core member is a good friend.

Now the fun thing is, they moved to Slack. Many of the core members run the community as admins.

While I don't engage much, but talk to some of them occasionally.

One key area is, running a job board to help people get jobs. And another is mentorship to help the members overcome challenges and grow in their career.

In DMs, literally every core member who is doing this for others is struggling themselves for the same. How fucking ironic!

They seek help and advice from me and vent out their failure frustrations.

Imagine, someone who isn't able to solve their problem, let alone solving it first before helping others, is guiding the community of few thousands to excel in their careers.

Fucking brilliant.

One of the biggest life lessons @scout taught me, wear your oxygen mask first before helping others.

Best: discovering devRant and meeting lots of cool people, switching to Linux as well

Worst: the programming lessons in school

!rant

I think that one of the most useful things programming has taught me is how to use Google.

RDBMS class: I have to fucking attend every class even though our lecturer just reads slides from Oracle to us.

In order to pass that module, we have to take the exams on their shitty website full of stupid questions, I.e. "Oracle academy is beautiful? a) true b) false" (I put false and they obviously marked it as wrong, ffs).

Multi-user operative systems: I was the one teaching our lecturer stuff on Linux.

WHY THE FUCK I CANNOT STAY AT HOME AND BE FUCKIN PRODUCTIVE INSTEAD?!

The only fucking interesting class is Data Structures & Algorithms and they pretend that we also attend every other useless class. FUCK YOU!

PS: I know the 90% of the stuff they are trying to teach us because I actually want to learn something and I know how to use Google, but no, I have to waste 2 hours on the bus every single day I have lessons.

We were a small startup with only 5-6 developers. I had to design the UI and develop most of the Android frontend, It was quite an easy and fun job for me because I don't get to see people rant about the design that needed to be implemented so, usually I design something that can be easily implemented.
We got 2 projects with a tight deadline and I took care of both project's design part and after completing the design I took the entire frontend of one project and rest of em started working with the other one. Usually we were a strong team and was able to deliver things real quick because we were expert in our intrested fields, I had a fast start in my project where the other project lagged a lot because of the desifn which was hard to implement by them, and the frontend was bo where near to get completed by the deadline and I couldn't help them out because it was all messed up shit handling both projects together.

Finally we were in a situation where none of our project are ready and the deadline was about to hit within a week, so we halted the other project and asked them to join me to complete the project am Working on, I had built most of the Android part and these fellows had a hard time figuring out stuff I made up (yeah, documentation was shit while you go agile), and finally things messed up and I had to work 2 continuous day and night without any sleep just to get the app ready 10 minutes before the official proto presentation.

The best part is I couldn't even get up from my chair and had a headache, fainted instantly when I took a few steps, but the product launch went good.

We fucked uo the code and both the projects just because we weren't available for each other considering the size of the team. Anyway we completed the project but It was