Me, a 19 year old student at a meeting with a "potential new project" today:

Her: So, we would like a website where people could rent a conference room, and pay for it on the website. After they have paid, we want automated emails to go out to us and the person that rents the room. We basically want an automated rental system.
Me: Sounds fair, what kind of budget do you have in mind?
Her: Well because you are a student and you still live at home, we have a budget of about €200 (~$220). We thought it'd be fair because you don't really need an income yet.

At that point I slowly tried to fade away from the meeting... Please help me 😭

A friend of mine has a PC that was overheating. His solution: Dumping the entire mobo and components in a box with Olive oil.

Pros:
+ Decrease heat by 15℃
+ Low cost solution

Cons:
- Hard to maintain components
- Dust can't be cleaned from the box
- House smells like an Italian kitchen 😂

!rant source: LinkedIn;
Yesterday I met with a potential client who wanted a website. I gave him a quote of X. He said, do this work for X/2 as I have lots of projects and I can keep you engaged for months.

If it was 2 years ago, I'd have happily accepted his proposal. But in the past 2 years I have learned this lesson hard way. Don't work for clients who don't pay well, because when a developer is not paid enough, the quality of work degrades. Hence the portfolio is degraded and so the future projects are also of low budget.

And before you know it, you will be surrounded by low paying clients who see you as a Skilled Labour.

Today, I don't negotiate, not even a single dollar. To justify my cost I make sure that no stones are left unturned while delivery.

It's better to work for 10 hours a week for 40$/hr then to work 40 hours a week for 10$/hr.

So, some time ago, I was working for a complete puckered anus of a cosmetics company on their ecommerce product. Won't name names, but they're shitty and known for MLM. If you're clever, go you ;)

Anyways, over the course of years they brought in a competent firm to implement their service layer. I'd even worked with them in the past and it was designed to handle a frankly ridiculous-scale load. After they got the 1.0 released, the manager was replaced with some absolutely talentless, chauvinist cuntrag from a phone company that is well known for having 99% indian devs and not being able to heard now. He of course brought in his number two, worked on making life miserable and running everyone on the team off; inside of a year the entire team was ex-said-phone-company.

Watching the decay of this product was a sheer joy. They cratered the database numerous times during peak-load periods, caused $20M in redis-cluster cost overrun, ended up submitting hundreds of erroneous and duplicate orders, and mailed almost $40K worth of product to a random guy in outer mongolia who is , we can only hope, now enjoying his new life as an instagram influencer. They even terminally broke the automatic metadata, and hired THIRTY PEOPLE to sit there and do nothing but edit swagger. And it was still both wrong and unusable.

Over the course of two years, I ended up rewriting large portions of their infra surrounding the centralized service cancer to do things like, "implement security," as well as cut memory usage and runtimes down by quite literally 100x in the worst cases.

It was during this time I discovered a rather critical flaw. This is the story of what, how and how can you fucking even be that stupid. The issue relates to users and their reports and their ability to order.

I first found this issue looking at some erroneous data for a low value order and went, "There's no fucking way, they're fucking stupid, but this is borderline criminal." It was easy to miss, but someone in a top down reporting chain had submitted an order for someone else in a different org. Shouldn't be possible, but here was that order staring me in the face.

So I set to work seeing if we'd pwned ourselves as an org. I spend a few hours poring over logs from the log service and dynatrace trying to recreate what happened. I first tested to see if I could get a user, not something that was usually done because auth identity was pervasive. I discover the users are INCREMENTAL int values they used for ids in the database when requesting from the API, so naturally I have a full list of users and their title and relative position, as well as reports and descendants in about 10 minutes.

I try the happy path of setting values for random, known payment methods and org structures similar to the impossible order, and submitting as a normal user, no dice. Several more tries and I'm confident this isn't the vector.

Exhausting that option, I look at the protocol for a type of order in the system that allowed higher level people to impersonate people below them and use their own payment info for descendant report orders. I see that all of the data for this transaction is stored in a cookie. Few tests later, I discover the UI has no forgery checks, hashing, etc, and just fucking trusts whatever is present in that cookie.

An hour of tweaking later, I'm impersonating a director as a bottom rung employee. Score. So I fill a cart with a bunch of test items and proceed to checkout. There, in all its glory are the director's payment options. I select one and am presented with:

"please reenter card number to validate."

Bupkiss. Dead end.

OR SO YOU WOULD THINK.

One unimportant detail I noticed during my log investigations that the shit slinging GUI monkeys who butchered the system didn't was, on a failed attempt to submit payment in the DB, the logs were filled with messages like:

"Failed to submit order for [userid] with credit card id [id], number [FULL CREDIT CARD NUMBER]"

One submit click later and the user's credit card number drops into lnav like a gatcha prize. I dutifully rerun the checkout and got an email send notification in the logs for successful transfer to fulfillment. Order placed. Some continued experimentation later and the truth is evident:

With an authenticated user or any privilege, you could place any order, as anyone, using anyon's payment methods and have it sent anywhere.

So naturally, I pack the crucifixion-worthy body of evidence up and walk it into the IT director's office. I show him the defect, and he turns sheet fucking white. He knows there's no recovering from it, and there's no way his shitstick service team can handle fixing it. Somewhere in his tiny little grinchly manager's heart he knew they'd caused it, and he was to blame for being a shit captain to the SS Failboat. He replies quietly, "You will never speak of this to anyone, fix this discretely." Straight up hitler's bunker meme rage.

I had an idiot as my boss once. The guy was a principal architect at the time, and thought it would be a good idea to demonstrate his/our project to the entire org in an auditorium. The project inclined turning the User's phone as the entertainment unit in the car. He spoke of all the bells and whistles, about how you can listen to music, watch videos while in the car. A guy expressed his concern about the cost and availability of 3g/4g data in India, our target market. He blatantly dismissed the concern claiming one doesn't use data while watching videos, as you aren't downloading or saving anything. If you save the video offline only then you consume data. I have never seen a group of 200 odd people grow silent that quick. People looking around uncomfortably. And then this ass goes, "My team is sitting back there. Reach out to them if you have any doubts.."

I sunk in my seat as low as I possibly could without falling down

I actually like Microsoft these days. Despite developing on Mac machines, we use VSTS for code repo, build/release pipelines and work item tracking, and Azure for all things cloud. It all works incredibly well together and at low cost.

Microsoft has changed ethos massively in the last few years. In my opinion, the classic dev mantra of “Microsoft is shit and evil, Linux is flawless” is outdated and getting kind of boring.

Soooo I think I have finally come to the point that I may have to create a YouTube channel, to teach software engineering from the ground up... and teach it the way the universities and everyone else should be teaching it, so that they have a solid foundation.... throwing hello world, and loops and variables at folks out of the box without any of the environment context or low level embedded register, even logic gate understanding

That lack of understanding is why, soooo many college students and younger folks, are actually pretty shitty engineers. Everything is high level languages and theoretical concepts to them. Nothing practical, that’s why there’s sooo many python and java developers that can’t for the life of them understand memory management, low level hardware interfacing etc, because the colleges don’t teach it the way it use to be taught.

I seriously fear 30 years from now or sooner when there are few embedded engineers only left till retirement, as without those folks the whole pyramid of electronics falls to pieces.

Java, C#, python, all that shit don’t run on the bare metal... there’s this magical layer of C, and assembler that does all the work just so folks can abstract their thoughts.

Either 1 of two situations will happen.. price of electronics will rise because the embedded guys are few and far between therefore salaries skyrocket... OR everything starts running shit like java on the metal, where there are a over abundance of developers, their salaries will be low because there are soo many but the processing power, space, and energy needed to run java natively causes electronics cost to increase

but regardless 30 years from now if those script kiddies are building everything I fear it cuz there’s gonna be memory leaks, and overflow issues everywhere.. shit be blowing up more than 4th of July.. lol

Soooo in effort to prevent that and keep the embedded engineers up, or atleast properly educate the script kiddies, I’m gonna make that YouTube channel.. 1 maybe 2 videos a week, 1-2 hours sessions each.. starting at the fucken ground and building up.

I've been away, lurking at the shadows (aka too lazy to actually log in) but a post from a new member intrigued me; this is dedicated to @devAstated . It is erratic, and VERY boring.
When I resigned from the Navy, I got a flood of questions from EVERY direction, from the lower rank personnel and the higher ups (for some reason, the higher-ups were very interested on what the resignation procedure was...). A very common question was, of course, why I resigned. This requires a bit of explaining (I'll be quick, I promise):
In my country, being in the Navy (or any public sector) means you have a VERY stable job position; you can't be fired unless you do a colossal fuck-up. Reduced to non-existent productivity? No problem. This was one of the reasons for my resignation, actually.
However, this is also used as a deterrent to keep you in, this fear of lack of stability and certainty. And this is the reason why so many asked me why I left, and what was I going to do, how was I going to be sure about my job security.
I have a simple system. It can be abused, but if you are careful, it may do you and your sanity good.
It all begins with your worth, as an employee (I assume you want to go this way, for now). Your worth is determined by the supply of your produced work, versus the demand for it. I work as a network and security engineer. While network engineers are somewhat more common, security engineers are kind of a rarity, and the "network AND security engineer" thing combined those two paths. This makes the supply of my work (network and security work from the same employee) quite limited, but the demand, to my surprise, is actually high.
Of course, this is not something easy to achieve, to be in the superior bargaining position - usually it requires great effort and many, many sleepless nights. Anyway....
Finding a field that has more demand than there is supply is just one part of the equation. You must also keep up with everything (especially with the tech industry, that changes with every second). The same rules apply when deciding on how to develop your skills: develop skills that are in short supply, but high demand. Usually, such skills tend to be very difficult to learn and master, hence the short supply.
You probably got asleep by now.... WAKE UP THIS IS IMPORTANT!
Now, to job security: if you produce, say, 1000$ of work, then know this:
YOU WILL BE PAID LESS THAN THAT. That is how the company makes profit. However, to maximize YOUR profit, and to have a measure of job security, you have to make sure that the value of your produced work is high. This is done by:
- Producing more work by working harder (hard method)
- Producing more work by working smarter (smart method)
- Making your work more valuable by acquiring high demand - low supply skills (economics method)
The hard method is the simplest, but also the most precarious - I'd advise the other two. Now, if you manage to produce, say, 3000$ worth of work, you can demand for 2000$ (numbers are random).
And here is the thing: any serious company wants employees that produce much more than they cost. The company will strive to pay them with as low a salary as it can get away with - after all, a company seeks to maximize its profit. However, if you have high demand - low supply skills, which means that you are more expensive to be replaced than you are to be paid, then guess what? You have unlocked god mode: the company needs you more than you need the company. Don't get me wrong: this is not an excuse to be unprofessional or unreasonable. However, you can look your boss in the eye. Believe me, most people out there can't.
Even if your company fails, an employee with valuable skills that brings profit tends to be snatched very quickly. If a company fires profitable employees, unless it hires more profitable employees to replace them, it has entered the spiral of death and will go bankrupt with mathematical certainty. Also, said fired employees tend to be absorbed quickly; after all, they bring profit, and companies are all about making the most profit.
It was a long post, and somewhat incoherent - the coffee buzz is almost gone, and the coffee crash is almost upon me. I'd like to hear the insight of the veterans; I estimate that it will be beneficial for the people that start out in this industry.

TLDR: Small family owned finance business woes as the “you-do-everything-now” network/sysadmin intern

Friday my boss, who is currently traveling in Vegas (hmmm), sends me an email asking me to punch a hole in our firewall so he can access our locally hosted Jira server that we use for time logging/task management.

Because of our lack of proper documentation I have to refer to my half completed network map and rely on some acrobatic cable tracing to discover that we use a SonicWall physical firewall. I then realize asking around that I don’t have access to the management interface because no one knows the password.

Using some lucky guesses and documentation I discover on a file share from four years ago, I piece together the username and password to log in only to discover that the enterprise support subscription is two years expired. The pretty and useful interface that I’m expecting has been deactivated and instead of a nice overview of firewall access rules the only thing I can access is an arcane table of network rules using abbreviated notation and five year old custom made objects representing our internal network.

An hour and a half later I have a solid understanding of SonicWallOS, its firewall rules, and our particular configuration and I’m able to direct external traffic from the right port to our internal server running Jira. I even configure a HIDS on the Jira server and throw up an iptables firewall quickly since the machine is now connected to the outside world.

After seeing how many access rules our firewall has, as a precaution I decide to run a quick nmap scan to see what our network looks like to an attacker.

The output doesn’t stop scrolling for a minute. Final count we have 38 ports wide open with a GOLDMINE of information from every web, DNS, and public server flooding my terminal. Our local domain controller has ports directly connected to the Internet. Several un-updated Windows Server 2008 machines with confidential business information have IIS 7.0 running connected directly to the internet (versions with confirmed remote code execution vulnerabilities). I’ve got my work cut out for me.

It looks like someone’s idea of allowing remote access to the office at some point was “port forward everything” instead of setting up a VPN. I learn the owners close personal friend did all their IT until 4 years ago, when the professional documentation stops. He retired and they’ve only invested in low cost students (like me!) to fill the gap. Some kid who port forwarded his home router for League at some point was like “let’s do that with production servers!”

At this point my boss emails me to see what I’ve done. I spit him back a link to use our Jira server. He sends me a reply “You haven’t logged any work in Jira, what have you been doing?”

Facepalm.

devRant collaboration project - a lot of us are thinking of doing a project or projects in the future. I am sure some valuable partnerships will be forged.

My desire is to do something that can make a positive impact in people's lives. Possibly to help people with special needs.

I am thinking about code that extends into the physical world - an Internet of Things project sort of a devThing.

Brainstorming a bit deeper - maybe a mashup of off the shelf components - maybe using Raspberry Pi or the $5 Raspberry Pi. Keep it low cost so everyone can afford it. As an aside CubeSats powered by RP's are being used in outer space saving a great deal of money and providing value.

The great thing is devRant has great coders, graphic design, ux, Raspberry Pi (or similar miniaturization), public relations to get the word out...

I have some examples we can use for inspiration. Let's keep building on this.

Pathetic third world country salaries. I made around 670$ this month with overtime which funny enough is about 2.6x the avg median salary in my country. We have low wages, europe's taxes (with none of the benefits) and a higher cost of living lmao. there was some weeks where I worked 50 to 60 hours, some people tell me I should be grateful but with night shifts and working 12 hours a day I feel like I should be making much more...

This is my first post. I felt like if I'm wrote this I'll just be a big fat crybaby, but i need to release this pressure from me.

I've been pretty burnt out past 6 month.

So a little bit backstory here, I've come from broken family, and currently on my 7th semester of college. But I've been part of small startup as mobile apps developer for a year and a half now.

6 month ago, it just a year of recovery from a toxic relationship that basically ruins my college life. I have really bad GPA (bad score for being absent from classes), basically no friends, and a barely passable (or even bad) skill in Android Dev. Then I got new girlfriend that really supportive for me. But after 2 months, her parents ask me if I would marry her or not. because if not, I have to broke up with her (We're in Indonesia and both of us is Muslim, so outside marriage relationship is kinda in "grey area" depend on who you ask). So I have to choose to marry her or not, and I choose the marriage. I think I have enough saving and just enough income to support both of us.

Then it's been a downward spiral from there.

The startup that I've been working on were in a pretty bad shape. I've been underpaid since the beginning (and that's not really a problem for me at that time, that's my choice and I blame no one) but abysmal growth and some miss management force us to scale back and makes me basically in a non-paying jobs.

So I take college break for a semester and been trying to find projects here and there for marriage savings, but because the weak employee protection here, lots of the projects I have completed have yet to pay the fee (even until today). And even if they paid me, most of it were really low paying jobs (we're talking $200 per 3 weeks project here, to be fair, for our average GDP, it's not bottom-low).

And the deadline is approaching, our marriage date is settled in (very) early January 2019, and i've been in this "not yet graduated but needs job" limbo. Most of employer here still has the old "Degree Based" Job specs, and not "Skill Based" one. so because de-jure I've still a "College Student" no Job listing is willing to take me in. I've apply to almost 30 Job Listing and just get interview once, and still failed because I can't move to the company area, too far and have too expensive living cost vs the salary ($300 living cost vs $450 salary, while i need to give money to my girlfriend back home for a living).

So I switch my direction to Competitions with Extra Job offering as a Bonus, and I've been pretty close to winning one, held by CIMB Bank, but still failed. It's little bit better now because CIMB came interested with me but there is red flag which I need to graduate with decent GPA before July 2019, and in current GPA? it's practically impossible.

Can it getting worse? oh it can. Remember I come from broken home family? it's inherently hard to keeps communication with both of my parents that to this day still despise each other. And while my mother is still supportive to my marriage, my father isn't. He even basically disowned me last week because my one-sided decision to marry my girlfriend, and blame my mother for being the "bad influence" for me.

And now, today, December 16th, and I'm still in this weird Limbo and have nowhere to go. with $0 in my pocket (have spent all of my savings for marriage preparation) And our marriage is approaching. I almost given up.

Need to go old school again, go back to hosting their own servers and peer to peer mesh networks. Eliminate the shackles of big tech... Eliminate the control and power they have over you. The only reason they are used is the idea of simplicity and low entry cost. But you pay for that later, when they deem you to be a competition, or don’t align with their goals.

So I bought a gaming laptop a while back, and Cyberpunk 2077 binaries got leaked a few days ago... So I wanted to play it, kinda. It looks really good from the screenshots. Friend asks me "what CPU / GPU do you have"?

My gaming laptop is a Y700 so an i7-6700HQ and a GTX 960M. Turns out that even at low settings this thing probably won't pull even 30 FPS.

So even with a gaming laptop, you don't get to do any gaming. 10/10 would buy again! I'll enjoy Super Mario because imagine caring about gameplay rather than stunning graphics that you need tomorrow's hardware for, and buy it yesterday! And have it already obsolete today.

Long story short, I kinda hate the gaming scene. I'm not a gamer either by any means. Even this laptop just runs Linux and I bought it mostly because some of its hardware is better than my x220's. Are gamers expected to spring the money for the latest and greatest nugget every other month? When such a CPU and GPU alone would already cost most people's entire monthly wage?

What's the point of having a game that nobody can play? Even my friends' desktop hardware which is quite a bit better still - it only pulls 45 FPS according to him. Seriously, what's the point?

When friends ask you how much a complicated app cost. 20 to 50k on the low end. The mouths drop to the flow and give up on their great idea

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!

It is the year 2451 ad and mankind rules the galaxy with a lazy iron fist. There are roughly 14,000 civilizations, comprised of just over
17,000 intelligent species on a quarter of a million earth-like
worlds. And all of them call themselves 'the galactic empire'.
No one told them that twenty planets doesn't qualify them for the title "galactic."

Well, we could rule, if we wanted to. Most of its just backwaters that no one wants anyway. It turned out that the reason no one invaded earth before was because they were too busy fighting themselves. Stupidity it appears, is not a unique human quality.That and the sex robots. Theres more of them in the galaxy than actual meatbags. Many species had taken to artificial wombs and 'vatbabies', which is exactly what they are called. Those poor bastards will carry that label for life.

We never did break light speed, but most of the rich exist in hypersleep anyway. Most of them only wake up once a year or so. There are some that only creek out of bed to check their stock portfolio. I hear there is even one trillionaire thats up and about once a century to ask if we have broken light speed yet.

Despite all the progress over the last 400 years, historians all agree about the most significant event in modern history.
The lobster went extinct two hundred years ago on earth.
Theres been riots ever since.

* * *

In other news I'm still working on the game I guess. It's like totally the most okay indie game you'll ever play--if I ever finish it.

I put about a year of work into the NPC system, and then chatGPT came out.

After everything thats happened, at this point I may just make a game about an indie dev making a survival game, being stuck in the actual apocalypse or some weird political dysopia.

Put it on rewind, it was originally a zombie game. But at the time the market got flooded and steam sales for zombie games cratered. So I pivoted to something more along the lines of fallout. Then the flash market crashed, bunch of publishers folded, and adobe stopped support for flash (probably for the best). Then newgrounds, which I was gonna launch on for promotion (because actual marketing is expensive), ended support for flash.
Was going the route of kickstarter, and that year the KS market got flooded and the bar rose almost over night so you needed super high production quality out the gate, and a network of support you already built for months.

We had a brief nuclear war scare, and I watched the articles come out about market saturation for post-apocalypse games, so I pivoted back to zombies. Then covid happened and the entire topic was really fucked. So I went back to fallout meets rimworld. Then we had a flood of games doing that exact premise pretty much out of the fucking blue, so I went for a more single-survivor type game. Then ukraine happened and the threat of nuclear war has been slowly sapping the genre of its steam, on well, steam.
Then I was told to get a cancer screening which I can't afford. Then I broke a tooth and spent a month in agony.

Then a family member died. Then I made no money from the sale of a business I did everything to help get off the ground, then I helped renovate an entire house on short notice and sell it, then I lost two months living in a hotel
while looking for a new place to live. Then I spent two and a half years suffering low-level alcoholism, insomnia, and drifting between jobs.
Then I wrote amazing poetry. And then I rediscovered my love of math. And then I made out for the first time in over a year. And then I rediscovered my love of piano and guitar. And then I fell into severe depression for the last year. Then I made actual discoveries in math. And I learned to love my hobbies again, and jog, and not drink so much, and sing, and go on long drives, and occasional hikes, and talk to people again, and even start designing games and UIs again. And then I learned that doing amazing things without a lot of money is still possible, and then I discovered the sunk cost fallacy, and run on sentences, and how inside me there was a part of me that refused to quit because of circumstances I couldn't control, and then I learned that life goes on even when others lives have ended, even when everything and everyone never had an once of faith in you, and you've become the avatar of the bad luck brian meme..still, life goes on.

And we try to pick up the pieces, try, one more time, because the climb, and the fall, and the getting back up, is all there is.

What I would recommend, if you're thinking of making a game, or becoming an independent game developer, is, unless you have a *lot* of money upfront (think 50-100k saved, minimum, like one years income *bare* minimum), and unless you already have a full decade in the industry--don't make a game.

Just don't.

Very much! My internship during school turned into a full-time job over the summer! I don’t make crazy money, but I LOVE the work and cost of living in my area is pretty low compared to the rest of the country. So, I’m great! 😁😁

My first freelance project.
My wallet was almost empty, but I got a 1 week project (YAY!), but paid after completion. Obviously, it didn't work out well. Feature creep followed me into the second week, I didn't get paid, I was out of money. When I asked for payment, their accountant was on vacation, and they told me they would pay me when everything is completed.

Went to stackoverflow (one of the sites that relates to freelancing) and asked about this dilemma. Was advised to move on unless they pay me. When I told them that I want out, because of money, they quickly found that accountant.

But even after that, ODesk (now upwork) was only pain. I was too fast for it. I demanded like 30$ per hour, which nobody wanted to pay, but when someone did risk it, they got too much for it. I ended up living paycheck to paycheck because it's so hard to convince people that you're good enough.

That site is only good for people in countries with very low living cost, that are OK with spending 4 hours per day trying to convince people of something.

If you look at the "lightweight business laptops" or business netbooks section of the market you'll notice almost all of them seem to have 4gb

Bitch, thats barely enough to run windows 10.

Looks like a market opening. If I were still doing upgrades and repairs I'd blame everything on low memory (well, a lot of slowness can loosely be attributed to lack of memory) and upsell new machines with more and better ram. Target 6gb, which is cheaper than 8 and offers a minor but noticeable boost, just enough to passably justify the increased cost to whoever is responsible for authorizing the upgrade.

I don't understand whats so hard to grasp about this. It's like companies trip over dollars to pick up dimes.

I remember my colleague who was DevOps guy (15+ years exp) in our one very good project about kids' edutainment.

He always breaks things & blames others when only he had admin access of the tool.

When client was very much interested in Android app, our that DevOps focusing totally on REST API & ignored Android app related DevOps tasks.

Our Android CI/CD was not complete till project ended. Due to his stubborn nature we couldn't take benifit of automation testing.

You can't tell him how to do any task, if you tell then it will be taken by him as an insult to his intelligence.

He would waste his 2 business weeks to find a way to do that task, then he would do some frugal trick half heartedly then he will leave it. Still he wouldn't accept your help due to his ego & he would work on tasks which he likes even though they are of low priority.

He was hellbent on cost cutting so he reduced caching availability to save extra billing, now we couldn't had enough speed for even 10 users to show recommendation feed by API.

Due to this our client couldn't show demo to angel investors properly & didn't get funding.

I don't how with such a bad attitude, he could survive so long.

He had plenty of training certificates (Salesforce etc.) with very little practical knowledge.

God save people of his current & future projects.

Whose fucking idea was it to still consider assembly (with C being optional) as the most relevant language in electrical engineering school?
Also teaching like 74HC and Op-Amp IC's are still the most common thing in todays electronis is really grinding my gears!!! Is it still an argument that your 8 NAND gates are essentially the same price as a low cost Microcontroller?
But one can be modified within second and the other you potentially need to redesign the entire board.

Psu >> cheap, low running cost power supply

So... Gonna turn my first psu in a low cost power supply for my projects.
Found this beauty, only 250W and has the description of all wires with Amps...
Nice :D

Do you guys take your main laptop with you on vacation / travel abroad?

I can't afford to lose my laptop. Every work is saved in it. Some important files have been backed up to cloud. But that's it.

Can't risk getting it damaged or stolen or taken in custody when abroad.

But, if something in my server fucks up when I'm abroad, i want to be able attend it and get it addressed.

I'm thinking of buying a low cost portable laptop to use incase an emergency situation happens.

How do you guys manage such situation?

Just had my reasoning for not doing technical projects for interviews proven.

Pass the first 2 stages of interview (including showing some personal portfolio projects) then after a week of hearing nothing get sent a technical project to complete.

Spend every spare moment for a week polishing this thing, decent front end, quick and efficient back end, low traffic between fe, be, persistence etc.

Submit the code at midday ready for the interview the following day, only for the company to phone at 5pm and say all is fine and the code is great for the final interview (walkthrough) the next day, then phone 5:10pm phone and pull the position.

That company has just had free work done which should have cost 1 weeks worth of fees, using the premise of a job at the end of it, only to take the code that they are super happy with and run with no payout.

Eggs cost now 6$... WTF??

I just paid 2 coffees, 1 mineral water and 1 water for 5.36$. ALL OF THAT IS CHEAPER THAN 1 FUCKING EGG??

Serbia is the biggest dogshit country you could ever imagine

The most expensive bullshit that has became is food now.

Why?

Even eating out in restaurants is much fucking cheaper than buying food in stores and cooking at home! This is absolutely fucking ridiculous.

1 egg = 0.01% of my salary (if i accepted such salary). It should be so unbelievably low that i shouldnt worry about buying food. Now i have to be very picky what food i buy and not eat too often

Fuck odff

Xiaomi

they crack the market of mid and low range mobile devices and nowdays they are just showing freaking ad too frequent.

like normally when you pause video you get to choose play button but in xiaomi they show you a big ad on screen. they even show ad on every operation of file, multimedia etc.. and also because they provide regular update at cost of useless app which consumes lot of storage.

Ugh! I feel so low and less motivated because I am unable to solve the interview practice questions really well.

This is fucking annoying. I am not sure what is that that I am lacking.

I got the framework. I have problem statements. I am practicing mocks. I got the feedback and I implemented it.

I have spent ~30 hours on this till now. Solved around ~20 cases, 10 of each category.

Should I now purely bet on luck? Maybe I'll take a break and submit the other companies case assignment to divert my mind.

I need to crack the interview and land the offer at all cost. There is no chance or scope for failure.

is being a tech/dev person, a dead end job?

i have been thinking about this for sometime. as a dev, we can progress into senior dev, then tech lead, then staff engineer probably. but that is that. for a tech person :

1. their salary levels are defined. for eg, a junior may earn $10k pm , and the highest tech guy (say staff engineer) will earn $100k pm, but everyone's salary will be spread over this range only, in different slots.

2. some companies give stocks and bonuses , but most of the time that too is fixed to say 30% of the annual salary at max.

3. its a low risk job as a min of x number of tech folks are always required for their tech product to work properly. plus these folks are majorly with similar skills, so 2 react guys can be reduced to 1 but not because of incompetency .

4. even if people are incompetent, our domain is friendly and more like a community learning stuff. we share our knowledge in public domain and try to make things easy to learn for other folks inside and outside the office. this is probably a bad thing too

compare this to businesses , management and sales they have different:
1. thier career progression : saleman > sales team manager> branch manager > multiple branch manager(director) > multiple zones/state manager (president) > multiple countries/ company manager (cxo)

2. their salaries are comission based. they get a commission in the number of sales they get, later theybget comission in the sales of their team> their branch > their zone and finally in company's total revenue. this leads to very meagre number in salaries, but a very major and mostly consistent and handsome number in commission. that is why their salaries ranges from $2k pm to $2-$3millions per month.

3. in sales/management , their is a always a room for optimisation . if a guy is selling less products, than another guy, he could be fired and leads could be given to other/new person. managers can optimise the cost/expenses chain and help company generate wider profits. overall everyone is running for (a) to get an incentive and (b) to dodge their boss's axe.

4. this makes it a cut-throat and a network-first domain. people are arrogant and selfish, and have their own special tricks and tactics to ensure their value.

as a manager , you don't go around sharing the stories on how you got apple to partner with foxconn for every iphone manufacturing, you just enjoy the big fat bonus check and awe of inspiration that your junior interns make.

this sound a little bad , but on the contrary , this involves being a people person and a social animal. i remember one example from the office web series, where different sales people would have different strategies for getting a business: Michael would go wild, Stanley would connect with people of his race, and Phyllis would dress up like a client's wife.
in real life too, i have seen people using various social cues to get business. the guy from whom we bought our car, he was so friendly with my dad, i once thought that they are some long lost brothers.

this makes me wonder : are sales/mgmt people being better at being entrepreneur and human beings than we devs?

in terms of ethics, i don't think that people who are defining their life around comissions and cut throat races to be friendly or supportive beings. but at the same time, they would be connecting with people and their real problems, so they might become more helpful than their friends/relatives and other "good people" ?

Additionally, the skills of sales/mgmt translate directly to entrepreneurship, so every good salesman/manager is a billionaire in making. whereas we devs are just being peas in a pod , debating on next big npm package and trying to manage taxes on our already meagre , "consistent" income :/

mann i want some people skills like these guys

Why the fuck is everyone behind this whole privacy thing . I mean what did you expect , servers do cost... you know . No one wants to provide you a service to chat with your shit collecting butler in the adjacent room unless it's going to benefit them .

Stick your face on the internet and want people to date you ?

Understand that your virtual social needs need to be supported by a ridiculous amount of electricity and man power which wouldn't be required if you could just throw out your rotting willie nilles in the open .

All this isn't fucking free .. wait were you shocked ? Oh so you just thought there were a few thousand servers powering buckets of pictures of horse poop that you for some reason thought your girlfriend was interested in . NO!

IT'S PRIVACY you are paying with your gaddamn privacy !! Information pays just like the time you paid a 100 bucks to the boyfriend of your girlfriend to find out more details .

Ridiculous . You people don't like ads . You don't like paying . You don't like providing information . THEN DON'T USE THE DAMN INTERNET .

IF YOU'RE REALLY THAT CONCERNED ABOUT YOUR PRIVACY THEN SPEND SOME VALUABLE TIME TO ACQUIRE ENOUGH OF A SKILLSET TO SETUP A VPN AND STOP POSTING YOUR PHONE NUMBER ON YOUR EX'S WALL ASKING HER TO CALL YOU.

One more honest thing to rant about is ads . As much as you hate them they're an easy way out . I'm not sure why a 20 second ad would bother you on mobile and not on television and I'm not sure why you wouldn't buy the ad company and shut it down if 20 seconds were so costly to you .

I want to rant even more on uninstalling services like Windows and Google for stupid reasons but I'll take a break here . My frustration has touched low levels.

Hello wonderful people out there, I need some career advice and would really appreciate your help in deciding. I am sure you have perspectives and opinions that may not even have crossed my mind.

I am a Full Stack Dev with 9 years of experience. I got two overseas opportunities, one in Bucharest, Romania and the other one in Mississauga, Canada.
Now according to my research:

+ives in Romania:
> Role is good
> Low cost of living
> Money is good and company also provides 2 bed accommodation
> Access to Europe
> Is approx 8 hours far away from my country of origin

-ives in Romania (just as per my internet research when compared to Canada)
> Healthcare is not the great
> Scores low on standard of life and quality index
> Not sure I can think of settling down there

+ives in Canada
> No Language barriers
> Ample amount of opportunities in the long run
> Can strongly think of settling down there
> Scores really high in standard of life and quality index
> Strong healthcare and education system

-ives in Canada
> Living expenses are fuckin high
> Money initially is not that great and won't be able to save enough for my future goals
> Is approx 28 Hours far from my country of origin

Which one would you choose and if you can please mention why?

Question for friends in Europe,

How much salary should I ask for?

Context: been applying and interviewing with companies in Europe (London, Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin). Basically tier 1 cities.

I have done some Glassdoor research. But how much shall I ask for given that I have 7.5 years of industry experience and working as a Senior Product Manager.

Given the taxation, cost of living, and other factors. What would be a good amount to not overshoot but also not get low balled?

My unidirectional type-c cable. Essentially is a Type C to Type A-female adapter with a Type A to Type C cable plugged in, but with the plugs bypassed with a soldered joint.

Useful for devices that have Type C but refuse to implement protocols, just using 5v bus. They only work with Type A to Type C cables. Usually, they’re vapes and other low-cost devices.

I made this cable to charge my heated tobacco device. Now, since I quit smoking, I don’t need it anymore, but I’ll keep it nonetheless because it’s kinda neat.

is sometimes the training data and low learning rate just meant to pull the outputs in a direction without ever reaching them ?

like a cost function, economic, which in reality you ideally want to equal 0 for all quantities, but that you'll never ever get to ?

I'm trying to figure out uses for deep learning beyond perceptual.

Building a click/link insight tool. Might leverage geobytes.com. Nice API's, geolocation data and free/low cost pricing.

When you go to "Oh they do it cheap", don't expect results...

Changed my PC build around 2 years ago.

Went from Core i7 / Nvidia to Ryzen 9 / AMD

Welp, AMD is totaly unstable.

I've invested 5k $ so I'm gonna ride it, but NEVER, EVER EVER again I'm buying AMD CPU or GPU.

Shit is unstable as fuck. I have latency issues, CPU issues, Video issues almost every week.

With Intel/nVidia cvombo I had before, I had issues maybe once every 3-4 months.

So yeah, buy low cost AMD, you pay the price later in usability. Fuck them.

Anyone else get told their rates are too high (by potential clients)? Too low (by fellow freelancers)? How does one put a value to their time and still stay market competitive?

Details: USA only. Not on any platforms such as freelancer, upwork, or fiver. Cost of living is Portland Oregon standards. Ask for any other details.

Looking for thoughts, recommended readings, any helpful input would be awesome.

I wish I could invite the me of 3-4 years ago to my room and prove him wrong.

Basically, the me of 3-4 years ago thought: "What do I need a home PC for? I got a laptop."; hell, he always forgot to put the laptop with the plural 's', because understandably, for his study life, he took low-cost PCs that would only last like one year.

But my boy, laptops are cool and all, but have you ever experienced the complete comfort of a proper desktop? In addition to the bonuses of a home PC in terms of performance, it leaves a much better space for work than just a portable terminal in front of you and pretty up close to compose. The accessories didn't even cost me much. And it feels great to have everything in its own, right place: the screen at the bottom, the phone standing on its holder, the earphones on your head, your left hand on a mat with papers potentially on it, your right hand on the mouse, which is on the mousepad and also on that mousepad, that character you adore so much, when both said hands are not on the keyboard, beneath the whole table, or on it when no papers are on the way.

Seriously, that pleasure I longed for was something you could have started, me of 3-4 years ago, right when I began with my studies.
But I have no rancor over you, I'm still onto my studies, so this is still something I can take profit of, during my student life, thankfully ;)

I'll just take note at your stead, of not being too stubborn over things that can do oneself a greater good, objectively. :)

I m a 1st year student of Engineering and I m willing to learn coding. Which app should I prefer for online learning where I can get certificate of completing that course with good teaching at low cost???
Plss ans...
I belong to a middle class family bt I have to learn it.

Hi!
Need to get some of your opinions about computer. I have always been using IBM/Lenovo or HP with Windows as operating system, due to work needs and policies. But, this weekend I purchased a new apple MacBook Air, and I want to know what you think about my choice. It is just for personal use, so I will continue to use my hp with win10 at work (needed for the erp system I'm consulting).
I choose MacBook Air as my personal computer because I think the hardware and chassi is a bit more premium to a pretty low cost, looking on hp or Lenovo with the same class of chassi and build is at least 150% more expensive. Let me know your comment :)

Why does snapchat on android suck so badly?
Lemme get this out of me.
They admitted to focusing on the iOS variant more from now on. Why? Becuase it has a larger user base.
That means they will not give many fucks about the ONE BILLION ANDROID USERS.

But about the app itself...
With quite normal usage (let's say around 30 minutes opened in total, daily) snapchat uses more battery than my screen. What the fuck?
It is literally at the very top.
It might go up to 800mAh calculated drain. I don't know how they did it.

Anyways, it doesn't even work well.
It has a lot of lag, crahses, and makes my phone as hot as a cup of tea.
I suspect that's becuase it keeps using the camera. That is, keeps it on even when you are on a different screen. This is bullshit. I do sometimes chat with people on SC but I try to minimise it for this reason.

The UI itself is okayish but still lags beyond comprehension in comparison to other apps (wow, I love the android discord client, it has full functionality at low resource cost).
As far as I'm concerned it uses some sort of web technology mix. It does use chromium so I suspect HTML, CSS and JS is also present in the source code.

Also, let's make this a terrible mobile apps rant - feel free to contribute.

I would definitely recommend EzPrint to anyone who is looking for good service, good quality namecards at super great discounted price ! The person-in-charge was very patient, and asked for relevant information to ensure the best quality printout to our best input contribution. Looking at the incredible, extremely unbelievable LOW price quoted, I felt there must be hidden cost here and there.

EY and ConsenSys announced the formation of the Baseline Protocol with Microsoft which is an open source initiative that combines cryptography, messaging and blockchain to deliver secure and private business processes at low cost via the public Ethereum Mainnet. The protocol will enable confidential and complex collaboration between enterprises without leaving any sensitive data on-chain. The work will be governed by the Ethereum-Oasis Project.

Past approaches to blockchain technology have had difficulty meeting the highest standards of privacy, security and performance required by corporate IT departments. Overcoming these issues is the goal of the Baseline Protocol.

John Wolpert, ConsenSys’ Group Executive for Enterprise Mainnet added, “A lot of people think of blockchains as the place to record transactions. But what if we thought of the Mainnet as middleware? This approach takes advantage of what the Mainnet is good at while avoiding what it’s not good at.”

Source : ConsenSys