Today I needed the scroll lock key.

I was running a super long test suite, one which puts a green dot on the screen every 500ms, so you can't scroll up. I needed to view some output of an earlier command... in other words, I needed to lock the automatic scrolling of the terminal.

That is what the scroll lock key was made for.

A momentous occasion.

Then I found out that a while ago, I used the macro function of my keyboard to rebind the that key... to close the current terminal window. 😡

The stupid stories of how I was able to break my schools network just to get better internet, as well as more ridiculous fun. XD

1st year:
It was my freshman year in college. The internet sucked really, really, really badly! Too many people were clearly using it. I had to find another way to remedy this. Upon some further research through Google I found out that one can in fact turn their computer into a router. Now what’s interesting about this network is that it only works with computers by downloading the necessary software that this network provides for you. Some weird software that actually looks through your computer and makes sure it’s ok to be added to the network. Unfortunately, routers can’t download and install that software, thus no internet… but a PC that can be changed into a router itself is a different story. I found that I can download the software check the PC and then turn on my Router feature. Viola, personal fast internet connected directly into the wall. No more sharing a single shitty router!

2nd year:
This was about the year when bitcoin mining was becoming a thing, and everyone was in on it. My shitty computer couldn’t possibly pull off mining for bitcoins. I needed something faster. How I found out that I could use my schools servers was merely an accident.
I had been installing the software on every possible PC I owned, but alas all my PC’s were just not fast enough. I decided to try it on the RDS server. It worked; the command window was pumping out coins! What I came to find out was that the RDS server had 36 cores. This thing was a beast! And it made sense that it could actually pull off mining for bitcoins. A couple nights later I signed in remotely to the RDS server. I created a macro that would continuously move my mouse around in the Remote desktop screen to keep my session alive at all times, and then I’d start my bitcoin mining operation. The following morning I wake up and my session was gone. How sad I thought. I quickly try to remote back in to see what I had collected. “Error, could not connect”. Weird… this usually never happens, maybe I did the remoting wrong. I went to my schools website to do some research on my remoting problem. It was down. In fact, everything was down… I come to find out that I had accidentally shut down the schools network because of my mining operation. I wasn’t found out, but I haven’t done any mining since then.

3rd year:
As an engineering student I found out that all engineering students get access to the school’s VPN. Cool, it is technically used to get around some wonky issues with remoting into the RDS servers. What I come to find out, after messing around with it frequently, is that I can actually use the VPN against the screwed up security on the network. Remember, how I told you that a program has to be downloaded and then one can be accepted into the network? Well, I was able to bypass all of that, simply by using the school’s VPN against itself… How dense does one have to be to not have patched that one?

4th year:
It was another programming day, and I needed access to my phones memory. Using some specially made apps I could easily connect to my phone from my computer and continue my work. But what I found out was that I could in fact travel around in the network. I discovered that I can, in fact, access my phone through the network from anywhere. What resulted was the discovery that the network scales the entirety of the school. I discovered that if I left my phone down in the engineering building and then went north to the biology building, I could still continue to access it. This seems like a very fatal flaw. My idea is to hook up a webcam to a robot and remotely controlling it from the RDS servers and having this little robot go to my classes for me.

What crazy shit have you done at your University?

Coworker: I wish excel had a dark theme.
Other coworker: it does just use this macro
Ctrl + A, Ctrl + A, Alt + HH + right arrow + enter.

I tried it... it selects every cell in the whole worksheet and changes the background color to black.

Boss comes to me with an idea, we use a spreadsheet to store certain sets of links for clients, sometimes with dozens of links, he wants us to be able to push a button and open all the links in the sheet. I'll admit I'm not exactly proficient in excel but said I'd look into it.

I came up with a macro which seemed to work for a while but there were a few links now and then that didn't want to open due to the way excel apparently checks the links prior to actually opening them. I told my boss that I'd look into a better solution but was slammed in office with scheduled projects.

I ended up taking time at home over the next week learning how to make this happen in Python. After a week I've got a CLI Python app which takes in an excel workbook and asks the user to select a sheet. Well employees don't like CLI so they asked for a GUI. I had never made anything with a GUI before since I'm not a software developer, anything I had previously written was written for me so it didn't need a GUI to be useful.

Spent another two weeks at home developing this thing and finally got a working solution. Now several employees are using my app as part of their daily job, saving them well over an hour of just clicking links in a spreadsheet.

Boss goes on a long rant about how he appreciates me and is thankful I was able to figure this out in my own time and save him money. So I say "If you really wanna show you appreciate me, you could approve that raise I've been asking for."

He replies, "Haha, yeah, but that's not gonna happen."

(I and THE back end developer, and I make less than the copywriting interns, time to start looking)

I am a tester by profession, But I love coding. Sadly my organisation doesn't allow people of my profile to install IDE/ Programming softwares... So I had to work with what I had... VBA, MS Office...

I started to work on few small Ideas, then I and a friend worked on a macro which automates a 5 year old manual process... It became a Hit ! It changed the whole process... My manager started to highlight it everywhere... Other manager started to come to us for helps....

So I learnt MS Excel Vba, then MS Access vba... started to become an expert...
Now the whole onshore and offshore management knows us by name....

This excitement made me explore other programming language band fell in love with Python and JavaScript...

Now I made a virtual bot for my manager....

That small project paved the whole way of my programming passion...

Been reading devrant posts for a month or so, this is my first actual post. I'm hoping it will be therapeutic. ☺️ I need something to keep me from killing my boss when I see him again tomorrow..

Some backstory: Currently working in HR for the last 7 or so years with complete shit for brains boss, even worse when it comes to anything related to technology. For almost two years I've been working to get another bachelor's degree. This time in computer sciences, to make a career switch to systems and software engineer. Last week I roughly had the following wonderful conversation:

Boss: we've needed new Recruitment software for a while now. Can't you make us one as a school project?

Me: 'Make us one?' It's not really that simple.. I'm barely halfway through my education, maybe I could do it, but it would take me quite a long time even if I could work on it fulltime.. Combining a halftime job with a fulltime education is taking up enough of my time as it is and I have more than enough school projects btw..

Boss: it would be a win-win. Work a little harder in your spare time and when you graduate you have a real-life project on your resume.

Me: I'm sorry, i'm failing to see the 'win' for me here.. I work 10 hours a day, 7 days a week on average, trying to combine work and studies. I'm pretty much maxed out..

Boss: Your coworker(also extreme dumbass) told me you wrote some quick code the other day that helped him out. Don't underestimate yourself, I'm sure you can do this.

Me(in complete disbelief by now): I wrote him an Excel-macro! They don't even teach me that at school. It's a very very very long way from actual software development! I'm sorry, it just can't be done.

Boss: Thats too bad. I expected you to welcome an opportunity like this and be more motivated towards this company..

Me: ***more disbelief and silence, just staring at him***
I'm sorry you feel that way.
***walked away***

WTF, I work my ass off for 7 years for this fucking shithead.. Even before I started this bachelors degree I had at least some understanding of the work developers put in their software. It blows my mind, no, it fucking angers me how people think making software is so simple.. Why do you think it's a 3-year education you fucking cunt?

Please, someone tell me how I can keep myself from ramming his fucking head through a wall tomorrow...

After a long time just reading your posts, here's my first post:

Just for clarification: I'm studying electrical engineering in Germany. During your time at university, you have to work half a year as a intern to get some practical experience. So I'm in a position where I mainly have to say "yes" to work that is given to me. Also I'm working with a lot of PLC programmers, so I'm nearly the only one who programs non-PLC stuff at the department.

But now it's time for my rant (and also my most satisfying optimization ever). In the job interview for the internship, my task at the company was described as C# programmer. I only programmed C and Python before, but C# looked interesting and so I learned C# from ground up in the summer before the internship. I quite liked it and I was really happy on my first day of work. Then I was greeted with this message: "I know you are hired as C# programmer, but could you please look into this VBA program, it takes 55 seconds until it finishes its task and that's to slow". So I (midly angry because I had to do VBA and not C#) started the program and it was really horribly slow (it just created a table with certain contents from a very big imported symbol file). I then opened up the source code and immideately saw bad code. The guy who wrote it basically just clicked on the macro recording button and used the recorded mouse clicks in the source code. The code was like: Click on cell A1 -> copy cell A1 -> move to sheet XY -> click on cell A2 -> paste copied stuff and so on... I never 'programmed' in VBA before, so I used my knowledge of 'real' programming languages to do this task. After using some arrays and for-loops, which did not iterate over all the 1.000.000 unused cells after the last used one, the program took only 3 seconds after it finished the new table! Everybody was quite impressed, which led to much more VBA optimization... That was clearly not my goal haha :)

The worst part about using the computers at my school is that my $200 mechanical rgb programmable keyboard with macro keys is at home.

So I'm back from vacation! It's my first day back, and I'm feeling refreshed and chipper, and motivated to get a bunch of things done quickly so I can slack off a bit later. It's a great plan.

First up: I need to finish up tiny thing from my previous ticket -- I had overlooked it in the description before. (I couldn't test this feature [push notifications] locally so I left it to QA to test while I was gone.)

It amounted to changing how we pull a due date out of the DB; some merchants use X, a couple use Y. Instead of hardcoding them, it would use a setting that admins can update on the fly.

Several methods deep, the current due date gets pulled indirectly from another class, so it's non-trivial to update; I start working through it.

But wait, if we're displaying a due date that differs from the date we're actually using internally, that's legit bad. So I investigate if I need to update the internals, too.

After awhile, I start to make lunch. I ask my boss if it's display-only (best case) and... no response. More investigating.

I start to make a late lunch. A wild sickness appears! Rush to bathroom; lose two turns.

I come back and get distracted by more investigating. I start to make an early dinner... and end up making dinner for my monster instead.

Boss responds, tells me it's just for display (yay!) and that we should use <macro resource feature> instead.

I talk to Mr. Product about which macros I should add; he doesn't respond.

I go back to making lunch-turn-dinner for myself; monster comes back and he's still hungry (as he never asks for more), so I make him dinner.

I check Slack again; Mr. Product still hasn't responded. I go back to making dinner.

Most of the way through cooking, I get a notification! Product says he's talking it through with my boss, who will update me on it. Okay fine. I finish making dinner and go eat.

No response from boss; I start looking through my next ticket.

No response from boss. I ping him and ask for an update, and he says "What are you talking about?" Apparently product never talked to bossmang =/ I ask him about the resources, and he says there's no need to create any more as the one I need already exists! Yay!

So my feature went from a large, complex refactor all the way down to a -1+2 diff. That's freaking amazing, and it only took the entire day!

I run the related specs, which take forever, then commit and push.

Push rejected; pull first! Fair, I have been gone for two weeks. I pull, and git complains about my .gitignore and some local changes. fine, whatever. Except I forgot I had my .gitignore ignored (skipped worktree). Finally figure that out, clean up my tree, and merge.

Time to run the specs again! Gems are out of date. Okay, I go run `bundle install` and ... Ruby is no longer installed? Turns out one of the changes was an upgrade to Ruby 2.5.8.

Alright, I run `rvm use ruby-2.5.8` and.... rvm: command not found. What. I inspect the errors from before and... ah! Someone's brain fell out and they installed rbenv instead of the expected rvm on my mac. Fine, time to figure it out. `rbenv which ruby`; error. `rbenv install --list`; skyscraper-long list that contains bloody everything EXCEPT 2.5.8! Literally 2.5 through 2.5.7 and then 2.6.0-dev. asjdfklasdjf

Then I remember before I left people on Slack made a big deal about upgrading Ruby, so I go looking. Dummy me forgot about the search feature for a painful ten minutes. :( Search found the upgrade instructions right away, ofc. I follow them, and... each step takes freaking forever. Meanwhile my children are having a yelling duet in the immediate background, punctuated with screams and banging toys on furniture.

Eventually (seriously like twenty-five minutes later) I make it through the list. I cd into my project directory and... I get an error message and I'm not in the project directory? what. Oh, it's a zsh thing. k, I work around that, and try to run my specs. Fail.

I need to update my gems; k. `bundle install` and... twenty minutes later... all done.

I go to run my specs and... RubyMine reports I'm using 2.5.4 instead of 2.5.8? That can't be right. `ruby --version` reports 2.5.8; `rbenv version` reports 2.5.8? Fuck it, I've fought with this long enough. Restarting fixes everything, right? So I restart. when my mac comes back to life, I try again; same issue. After fighting for another ten minutes, I find a version toggle in RubyMine's settings, and update it to 2.5.8. It indexes for five minutes. ugh.

Also! After the restart, this company-installed surveillance "security" runs and lags my computer to hell. Highest spec MacBook Pro and it takes 2-5 seconds just to switch between desktops!

I run specs again. Hey look! Missing dependency: no execjs. I can't run the specs.

Fuck. This. I'll just push and let the CI run specs for me.

I just don't care anymore. It's now 8pm and I've spent the past 11 hours on a -1+2 diff!

What a great first day back! Everything is just the way I left it.

I love to teach these boys and girls for basic C. :3

Basically: Shoutout to my dad!

My dad's not an engineer or anything. But he likes building PCs and has a bunch of tech at home.

Well, thanks to him, I had a PC very early on, and of course, I did the typical skiddie stuff it, aka "fake batch virus haha funny" and playing Minecraft.

Well, at some point, after tinkering with mods to enhance the quality of gameplay, I found the ultimate mod: Macro / Keybind Mod.
This mod allows you to bind stuff to keybinds, such as commands or chat messages, or... Macros.

This mod has a custom macro language. (Hint: This is where the fun begins)

Another mod I used was AutoSwitch. However, that mod required a "core mod" (aka library installed in a dumb way). I thought, "why do I install 2 mods to get 1 thing? dumb", and made an ugly macro with lots of nested if-elses, which perfectly emulated AutoSwitch behavior for the Minecraft version I was on.

Yup, I basically got rid of 2 jar files in my mods folder by making my own ugly macro.

The fact that I recreated something in an obscure language, having not even coded any program before, made me grow interest into actual programming languages.

The story of the shittiest, FUCKING WORST day of work.

TLDR: shitty day at work, car crash to end the day.

So, let tell you about what could possibly be the worst day I had since I started working.

This morning, my alarm didn't work, woke up 30 minutes before an appointment I had with a client.

Arrived late at the client, as I start deploying. They don't have any way to transfer the deployment package to the secured server. Lost 45 minutes there.

Deployment goes pretty well. My client asks me to stay while they load some data into the app. Everything's pretty easy to work out. Just need to input 3 CSV with the correct format (which the client defined since the beginning).
I end up watching an Excel Macro called "Brigitte" (I'm not fucking kinding, could'nt have thought of that) work for 4 hours straight. Files are badly formatted and don't work.

Troubbleshooting thoses files with a fucking loader that does not tell you anything about why it failed (our fault on that one)

I leave the client at 7:30pm, going back at work, leave at 9pm.

At this point, I just want to buy some food, go home and watch series.

But NO, A FUCKING MORRON OF A BUS DRIVER had to switch lanes as I was overtaking him. Getting me crushed between the bus and the concrete blocks.

Cops were fucking dickheads, being very mean even tho I was still shaking from the adrenaline.

In conclusion, the day could have been worst. The devs at the clients are pretty cool guys and we actually had some fun troubleshooting. At work, there was still one of my colleagues who cheered me up telling me about his day.
And when I think of it, I could have got really hurt (or even worst) in the crash.

A bad day is a bad day, tomorrow morning I'm still going to get up and go to a job I love, with people I love working with.

Very big rant (sorry about that if someone's still reading)

Why the fuck does Arduino use C++ macros for min, max, abs, etc. ???????

---
For those who don't know what a macro is, basic example:
#define abs(x) (x > 0 ? x : -(x))
Which looks like a function, but instead abs() will be replaced by the expression and all x will be replaced literally with what you pass to abs
So
abs(i++)
would evaluate to
(i++ > 0 ? i++ : -(i++))
which would call i++ twice
---

I guess I will have to double check every built in function and rewrite it if it's a macro -_-. Not taking any chances. Btw all Arduino functions are in one big file, so now I have to pollute my code with namespaces.
Macros can be great but what the fuck.

Not exactly dev stuff, but LaTeX low-key makes me nervous.

In writing my thesis it seems that through some keyboard-fuckery I managed to slip in some weird unicode bullshit character somewhere, so that it doesn't compile. Alright, I just do \DeclareUnicodeCharacter{0301}{ASDF} so that it gets replaced by ASDF. Searching for ASDF in the output pdf file does not yield results, so I can't even find the location of the fuckery in the text. It seems that unicode character is somewhere in my .bib-file and I guess my citation style doesn't even render the part of the data that character is in after all. So the above hack works, but still there is some weird-ass character in my bibliography file that I can't find.

On another note: I get that modularity is cool and all, but who thought that it is a good idea to give people zero transparency over what macro stems from which included package? No namespaces etc. I end up including a whole lot of packages that are needed for exactly one macro. That bloats up the file and you have no way to trace back which macro came from which of the quazillion included packages.

...then again maybe I'm just a lazy piece of shit whose google searches end before success and all of the above has some easy fix.

spent 8 months building and customizing a vtiger database for work. tons of fun got it to a point where I have saved a ton of time for all the people that use the program. boss wants to have reports out of it each morning, so I showed him how to run reports and adjust entries. he didn't like the formatting of the report. so I set up the report to export to excel and took another 2 hours building a macro that formats the way he likes and prints the report for him. he used to take a month filling out paper work to get a report, now all he has to do is open a favorite on his web browser, make 3 clicks Then open an excel and type ctrl+r and it's done. he tells me it seems too complicated and is considering going back to the paper method...so frustrating.

This is a story of suffering and despair.

I'm working on a build system for our firmware. Nothing major, just a cmake script to build everything and give me an elf file.

I'm fairly new to cmake at that point, and so it's not abundantly clear to me how the `addDirectory` command works.

Now those of you with experience in cmake will say:
"Hold on there champ, this is not a cmake command, the real thing is add_subdirectory()"

Well, that is not what chatGPT told me. I still trusted the fucking thing at this point, it explained that it was in fact a command, and that it added all subsequent source files from a given folder. When I asked it to provide me with sources, it gave me a dead link in a cmake dot com subdomain.

I spent FUCKING HOURS trying to understand why I couldn't find that shitty command, I looked through that shitty page they call documentation through and through, I fucking checked previous and nightly versions, the command was nowhere to be found.

Until I found an old as time post in stackOverflow...
Someone had made a macro with that name, that did what GPT had described...

On the positive side, I know cmake now. I also don't use this fucking deep Learning piece of shit. Unless you write simple JS or blinking LEDs with Arduino it codes like a Junior, high on every kind of glue on the market.

WHAT THE FUCK?
CMAKE you pathetic collection of loosely bundled scripts written in a shitty macro language!
WHY? WHY? WHY?
WHY DO YOU REFUSE TO OUT OF SOURCE BUILD?
IT WORKED FINE LIKE 2 SECONDS AGO! I HATE YOU WITH THE FIRE OF A THOUSAND STARS!

When that script I wrote for a Minecraft mod to emulate the behaviour of another Minecraft mod behaved exactly like the imitated mod

Back to the fundamentals 😅

Spent yesterday afternoon trying to extract the logic from a VBA macro written by civil engineers so that we can encode the same logic in the applications we're writing.

Sweet Jesus.

500 lines of meaningless variable names and loops reading values from various spreadsheets into a 3 dimensional array(!).

On top of that, now that I kind of understand what it's doing, I don't think it's ever worked properly.

I started accidentally. My (first) boss asked me if I knew MS Access. I bluff and said yes, of course.
Then one time I needed a somewhat more advanced macro and started with VBA. My addiction began to grow.

After that I discovered VB.NET
Began programming with AutoCAD. Switched to C#.
Did some HTML CSS JS on the way.
No I'm a C# AutoCAD developer.

All of this started with a little bluff 8years ago

It was an intern job for 2.5$ /h. I removed a bunch of technical debt, made their modx site localized (with a weird approach though but hey, I was an intern) and wrote a few new pages. I loved every minute of working there until the end, but had it lasted a bit longer than a month I'd have probably burned the place to the ground when I realized that my friends had earned twice as much at McDonalds and I could've earned about the same amount writing one excel macro a day.

As a freelancing student my customer (CEO) asked to build a project management system.
I was like: we can smoothly get to know each other by setting up a simple .xlsm
ENGAGE™.gif

On 2/3 of project, shareholder comes in: make it like office. I want the same as ms office but built by you.

Me: sure. Why not. I'll a have a little chat with friends being experts on this.
FuckThisRage.webm

Who does he think he is. What does he believe one single human is capable of. What a jerkTard

Forced a high expense allowance and gave them some gibberish copy pasta, sealed .xlsm containing 3 languages all but macro

#peaceout

So I'm doing some OpenGL stuff in C++, for debugging I've created a macro that basically injects my error check code after every OpenGL API call. Basically I don't want any of the code in release builds but I want it to be in debug. Also it needs to be usable inline and accept any GL function return type. From what I can tell I've satisfied all requirements by making the macro generate a generic lambda that returns the original function call result but also creates a stack object that uses the scope to force my error check after the return statement by using the destructor.

Basically I can do:
Log(gl(GetString(...));
gl(DeleteShader(...));
Etc where the GL call can be a function parameter or not.

So my question is, is the code shown in the picture the best way to achieve my goals while providing the behaviour im going for?

So I had this internship in highschool for some marketing company creating simple databases for them to help out with their business.

When I came back from college for I think winter break they had asked if I would come in to help with a task that was going to take all day so they wanted me to come early. I agree and show up the next morning.

They had an Excel spreadsheet with about 5000 records in it and one of the fields was the name of the customer. They told me that the records came in as lastName, firstName or as lastName,firstName.
They wanted the field to look like firstName lastName. For a minute or two they had someone show me how they have been doing this which was just by hand. I don't really work with Excel so im not too keen with the macros. But it took me about 1 Google and 30 seconds to find someone with a similar macro to achieve this, I altered it a bit and let it go through all the records.

It was an awesome feeling when I went to the boss to let them know I was done (it had only been 10 mins), they almost didnt believe me.

Funny how one line of code can turn a day's work into a matter of minutes.

I just managed to configure a second keyboard to map its keys to separate keycodes. Basically, I should be able to use it as a complete macro deck 😏 Thank god for Linux

Development world is always changing and evolving... It changes before you know it...

So, having the ability to quickly adapt and learn is a must for any Developer... And, this is the one thing that I am sure that everyone knows about or heard about..

But, my advice is quite simple:

"Don't rush into participating in a race, just because everyone else is doing so.

The trick is not to move quickly.. But, to move one step at a time, at the pace in which you are at your most comfortable...

It might seem counterintuitive and a contradiction to what I have said earlier.. But, I hope that by the end of this rant, you will be able to understand my perspective..

This advice is especially useful for people still finding and searching for their place in our world..

Charles Darwin, very wisely understood the philosophy behind 'Survival of the Fittest'..

By 'fittest', he didn't refer to the ones considered to be the strongest or having the most intelligence, but the ones that had mastered the ability to adapt to changing circumstances..

Adaptability is important, but not at the cost of understanding and learning about the fundamental pillars on which this world stands..

Don't rush because when you run, your visions starts to become more narrow.. In your pursuit to reach your goal, you lose the ability to look at the macro details surrounding your goal..

Learning new technology is important, but that doesn't mean that you don't learn about various approaches or how to design a more logical or efficient solution...

Refactoring the code, developing good Testing procedures, learning to interact with your fellow developers are as crucial as learning about the changing trends...

Even, in this ever-changing world, understand that some things will always remain the same, like the adrenaline that course through your veins when you finally solve a long-standing problem...

Curiosity, Discovery and Exploration are the key pillars and hence, when we rush in, we might stop exploring and lose curiosity to discover new and exciting ways to reach our goal..

Or, we might also end up losing the drive that grips us and motivates to continue moving forward inspite of the challenges standing between us and our destination..

And, believe me, once you lose this quality, you might still succeed but the contentment and the satisfaction that you feel will be lost..

And, then, you will remain a developer only through your designation... And, that in my personal opinion, the worst punishment.

Made a custom RGB macro keypad for development. Combined it with my scripts for controlling my Android dev device

I have quite a few of these so I'm doing a series.
(2 of 3) Flexi Lexi

A backend developer was tired of building data for the templates. So he created a macro/filter for our in house template lexer. This filter allowed the web designers (didn't really call them frond end devs yet back then) could just at an SQL statement in the templates.

The macro had no safe argument parsing and the designers knew basic SQL but did not know about SQL Injection and used string concatination to insert all kinds of user and request data in the queries.
Two months after this novel feature was introduced we had SQL injections all over the place when some piece of input was missing but worse the whole product was riddled with SQLi vulnerabilities.

Rage!!!

Coworker checks in not working major changes and goes home for the weekend yesteday. When I ask him politely in an email to just check in a feature branch he says he has no time for that and it doesn't matter since the program is shit anyway.

Meanwhile I'm working overtime to get the program ready for a demo next week and another developer has already starting using his changes so I can't just roll it back. Spent my whole morning fixing it, and now can finally start my work in the afternoon.

Arghhhhhhhhhh!

Worst part is... He's the solution architect so anything I bust my ass to get done he'll take credit for and anything that goes wrong he'll blame on me. Can't wait for this contract to end!

Tried to reply to @Fast-Nop who had replied to someone wondering if C would be a good first language.

IMHO C should have been put to sleep ages ago. A few years ago I downloaded the latest, greatest C Standard. For a language billed as small and simple (by many) it was over 800 pages long. Still there's a lot that's unspecified like order of evaluation of function arguments. Int etc is implementation dependent. And error handling, let's not go there. The macro assembler throws away all the semantics leaving behind a cryptic value. It's a complex language due to the innumerable interactions possible.

It's been called assembly language for the PDP-11 minicomputer. Recently learned that even the VAX-1 was built from SSI chips like the 4-bit 74181 ALU. The VAX.

Anyway I had several excellent books on programming style written by Henry Ledgard. He despaired of making C look readable. I commend his books which are so old that the code is UPPERCASE A lot of he wrote had to do with program design, naming things, writing good comments and that the visual shape of a program assists mental clarity.

Years ago, one of my friends in college was taking an intro to CS class. He asked me for help on one of his assignments. It was a simple Python program, but it wasn't running as expected. I go in figuring it will be easy to fix. But everything looks exactly right. An hour later I'm tearing my hair out! It isn't even entering the function although it's clearly called. I'm beginning to feel very self conscious, as a CS major who can't even debug a 15 line program for a friend.

Then it hit me. This is Python. I used an editor macro to convert all indentation to tabs, lined them up, and it ran on the first try. Turns out, he had somehow ended up with a mixture of tabs and spaces.

I'm not sure what the takeaway is, but I think he got a surprisingly honest introduction to the life of a developer...

God! I hate doing macro. VBA scares me

Somewhere in my early teens, I started playing with macro scripts in Microsoft Word or Excel. After that I tried my hand at creating a full-on VB app. After creating several of those I tried Python, C++, then HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Short story: My first distributed program was what I used to get my first girlfriend: A program that told her all the things I was too shy to say and ask the things I was too afraid to ask... Including "will you be my girlfriend?" Fun times 😄

At the time I had been squatting, arrested, driven 300 miles across country only to be released - mistaken identity with just the clothes on my back. Decided to stay and lined up a couple of interviews. I got offered both but took the one which meant 2 busses and a ferry and 2 hours each way for a data entry position.

They were migrating to a new database and my job was to type it in to a screen so from print outs. Didn’t take long for me to work through that and they were struggling to find stuff for me to do, I mean at one point I was filing paper files. So I saw the 2 it guys doing the same thing with loads of excel files , hours and hours a month just wasted. I wrote a vba excel macro to do it for them at the click of a button and suddenly a position opened up as a junior programmer. Still at the same place 16 years later and were still using software I wrote 15 years ago (.net 1.1) quite happily on win10 surprisingly.

Micro vs Macro Tasks

In the beginning, computers used relays on a macro scale instead of micro electronics

In the 40's admiral grace hopper found a moth in one of the relays and the term "debugging" was born

I swear to god "old school" C++ devs are menace to humanity

Why yes let's make this one line long function, that could even be constexpr, and make it a macro.
Why the fuck not, let's make compiler errors worse by foregoing any type checking. Let's throw away namespacing as well, great.

Fuck you.
I shouldn't have to dig through 4 levels of nested macros just cause "muh performance" and "we've always done it like that".
Shit yourself.

Coding chalenge.
So... Spent almost two hours to put this little device to work with the keypad.
The device is a arduino micro, special one that can work as mouse /keyboard or any kind of input on most devices (pc, Android phone,...)
The objective is to make a macro keypad to:
- Fast insert text
- Play sounds in games over voice chat.

Think of it like this, you start a new html file, press one key and all the base code is inserted.

So... Why so long? Tought was the hardware, tought the keypad could be set differently that most, code mistakes...

My error was all here, masked from the debugger by a if:

char keys[ROWS][COLS] = {
{'1','2','3','4'},
{'5','6','7','8'},
{'9','10','11','12'},
{'13','14','15','16'}
};

Easy to figure right? Only saw it after reading all the code twice.

Does it compile?
Holy shit IT COMPILES

IT COMPILES
IT RUNS

IT'S ALIIIIIVEE!!!

So at work, there is this class/model thing that's for storing translated strings. It also supports n-level nested macros, cascading lookup (e->d->c->b->a->blank), and I've added transforms too. The code is a bloody mess and very inefficient (legendary dev's code), but it's useful.

You call methods with a symbol representing one of the strings, and it does... whatever you ask, like return text, booleans, expand macros and submacros, pass in data to interpolate, etc.

But I just learned something today.
Its `.html` method... doesn't support html. In fact, calling it strips out all html, takes whatever is left, and attempts to convert that back into html. Because that makes so much sense. So, if you have an html string? Don't call html on it.

Also, macros use the same <angle brackets> as html tags, and macro expansion eats unknown macros, so... you can't mix html and macros, meaning you cannot inject values into your markup. That's a freaking joy to work around. (You end up writing a parser every time.)

So no, if you have an html string, you need to get the raw data out and handle it yourself. Don't reach for that shiny .html method; it'll just ruin your day.

It's the little things that make my day so terribly long.

Anyone know a good android keyboard for people who don't want any autocorrect?

Gboard has an empty top row wasting screen space if you disable suggestions. AnySoftKeyboard seems pretty slow. At the moment I'm using Chrooma, but its backspace has really annoying bugs.

What I'd really love would be a keyboard with macro functionality and where you could configure your own layout. But I guess that doesn't exist :/

I'm delirious so here's your daily dose of fuck:

```fasm
; --- * --- * ---
; 64-bit byte-by-byte mash

macro clamp_u8 {
mov cl,$08;
mov rdx,rax;
rept 8 \{
rol rdx,cl;
xor al,dl;
\};
};

; --- * --- * ---
; give 8-bit random seed

macro prng_u8 {
rdtsc;
shl rdx,32;
or rax,rdx;
clamp_u8;
};

; --- * --- * ---
; roll dice

d20: prng_u8;

; x%20, according to gcc ;>
mov edi,eax;
mov eax,-51;
mul dil;
shr ax,12;
lea eax,[rax+rax*4];
lea edx,[0+rax*4];
mov eax,edi;
sub eax,edx;

; discard high and give
and rax,$FF;
ret;
```

I guess `d20` could be inlined too but I thought it'd be too much.

Is it faster than straight C? Probably not. But it's way lighter, so it loads faster. Below five hundred bytes mother fucker.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'll go sit in the darkness repeteadly typing roll 1d20 on the terminal. For reasons.

Finally got outside in T-shirt and shorts, also took a macro photo!

Is there anything that sucks more ass than working with a Word VBA macro?

When to log into an encrypted vm that I set up for finances, and realized I had forgotten my password, to decrypt it. Well after a few min I gave up and wrote a short program with all my sees, and rules for altering the seeds and combinations there of.

Got back a few thousand and plugged it into a macro script and went to do chores for my wife. Came back and was in.

To be honest I check on it somewhere in the middle and thought oh crap did I use my dogs name? I didn't but now I am switching to a password manager.

Maybe you guys could help me...
My father just sent me a .xlsxm file (excel + macro file), it's all about horse races and stuff a 60+ years old dude would do :D

The file is pretty neat, but some minors changes needs to be done, but I have no clue where the code is. I found the "macro" part but it's empty, and I'm not surprised since the file itself seems to be generated from C# (Maybe not, I'm not the expert)

Sooo... Can anyone tell me how do I get to this code?

Other peoples' code... (in C++)
I am finding what some people consider good code is not as described. I found a class that provides strings. Great it gives me paths and stuff. I incorporated it in a new project.

segfaults

Hmmm, it must have an init function... It does, but not in the class. It has a friended init function:
friend init_function(). If this function is not created and called external to the class then the class will segfault...

okay...

I implement this. I use code from another project that implements this correctly. The friend class allows the private constructor to be called to create the main instance of the class. So its a fucking cryptic ass singleton. I look at this class. It uses a macro to decide what to function call in the class. The class already has function names for each call it needs to make. The class is literally a string lookup table. I vow to redo this shitty code, someday...

I start to wonder what other fragile code I will find. Not long later I keep getting errors on malloc. Like any malloc that is called results in a segfault. The malloc is not at fault though. I run valgrind and find a websocket library is returning an object a different size than the header file describes.

WTF...

Somebody has left an old ass highly modified definition of the websocket header in a location in that I include headers (partly my fault). I eliminate that from my include path. All is well, everything behaves. I will be making sure this fucking header is not used and it is going to die. Wasted a bunch of time.

Lessons learned: some code is just fucked and don't leave old ass shit you tried laying around.

I learned how to use the MacOS and Linux command lines first, so it's been a constant pet peeve of mine that I had to use dir for the purpose of ls on Windows. Today I tried to make ls an alias for dir, but noooooo... Windows uses the doskey command instead. I can't even make alias a macro for doskey either so I'm stuck at least with that shortcut that only Windows uses. #FuckWindows

Started learning SML
I don't know why.
So far it's like only being able to use macro-defined functions in C, except it's really anal about type use.
What twisted, saddistic SOB invented this?!
I miss C

I started out as a data entry guy. I learned VBA because dealing with thousands of products in excel by hand was a pain in the ass. Among other things, I wrote a macro to combine multiple products into an importable Magento custom product. From there I learned HTML, CSS, JS, and PHP and never looked back.

On This Episode of Ghetto Medium..

Posted after midnight for extra spooky effects. Read in the dark at your own risk. You've been warned.

So my mother has been on a binge watching shows like long island medium (apparently the taller your hair the closer you are to god or something), and every time we talk she begins at length to talk about, you guessed it.. 'ghosts.'

Now don't get me wrong, I've had some 'spooby' shit occur in my lifetime, the sort that will tighten your sphincter faster than bill cosby asking you if you want some koolaid or grape drank, but I digress.

The ghost talk is tiring. Lately theres been a *flood* of these new shows, purportedly showing mediums and people who can 'look into the other side' and I realize just how vapid and ridiculous it's all become, as if they all are being personally haunted by the ghost of John Edwards burnt out husk of a career. Theres long island beehive big-hair medium, celebrity medium, allison DuBois (the inspiration for that one sappy show *medium*) whos red hair and vacant stare speak of glimpses into centuries past like an intimate unseen horizon. or maybe she forgot to unplug her curling iron in a hotel one time and has been rendered permanently catatonic. And who can forget *Beyond With James Van Praagh* (everyone) whos face, as measured by the width of his mustache, appears to be expanding at a constant rate like a bad image macro edit thats been memed and repasted a thousand times. Then theres Chip Coffee, whos name is about as believable as his teaching degree on the show *Psychic Kids* where he mentored, again, you guessed it, *psychic kids*. Of course theres Tyler Henry, a youthful, uh, "flamboyant" medium for celebrities with ghost problems. Never trust a man with two names, this ones no exception, he looks so clean cut hes either secretly mormon, or secretly gay, maybe both. I'm not judging, but I am saying if I ever saw his clean cut, smooth, wrinkless (seriously, how tyler? how?), all american face, say smiling that subtle smile outside my kitchen sliding glass door at 3 am, his face watching me from the pitch dark outside, I wouldn't at all be surprised, except for the hospital bill I'd have to pay after shitting a brick and needing anal surgery.

At this rate we have mediums popping out left and right, like clowns at one of them R.L Stein nightmare carnivals, or beggers outside a methodone clinic. Geez, they're coming out the wood work, like those painting you see with hidden faces in them, or wheres-waldo posters, only you're trying to find the non-waldo guy amongst all the characters because they're ALL waldo: goofy acting, goofy dressing, and just all around goofy looking.

At this rate I'm fully expecting "pet medium" (starring a character named Stephen King and his marital problems, played by johnny depp eating way to much corn), and "haunted objects medium", and "car medium" (it's just seinfeld in a car, talking to psychics instead of other people), and "ghetto medium."

Today on this episode of "Ghetto Medium"..

Medium: Teneesha, aw yeah girl, u *definitely* ded gurl, uh huh! You WAY to white too be alive, you done passed over gurl!

And in the next episode of Ghetto Medium, one man claims "every time I bend over I can hear "wOoOoOoOoO!, Is my asshole possessed? Find out is it real or fake, and what our verdict is in Ghost Medium, episode 3: A Haunting In My Nether-regions."

Cut commercial break.

"Jerry Springer: One women asks, 'jerry, is my unborn child's foreskin haunted? And later today we ask the crowd, would you have sex with a ghost?"

Welcome to American television 'programming' in 2019.

Yes, it's all brainwashing.

When I first started down the path to becoming a developer, I was a "business analyst" where I managed our departments reports and ended up migrating all the reports from daily query run in MS Access with Task manager and emailed out to all the managers including the VP of the entire business unit, I created
Views in the database and sent out the same spreadsheet with the view in excel daily since management didn't want "change". Granted this was at a large health care company in the US and didn't want to invest in a real dashboard for their reports. The only thing that was changed in the email and file was the file name with the current date. I left the company a while ago and recently applied for a similar position for the shits and gigs. Interviewed with the It manager and they're still using the same excel macro I wrote 3 years later.

My first job was being a sales clerk. I exel macroed my way to my coworkers hearts. Today im just a simple developer, and I love my job!

Amateurs that think access is a proper enterprise database and everything should be done as a macro.

Fucking coding in fucking VBA for a fucking macro... I Hate it. Worst IDE ever

!rant
Julia's mutlithreading macro is soooo awesome and clean for when you want to do computation work :3

Fuck these big ass companies being “affected” with macro economic bullshit and what-aboutery and laying off innocent people every goddamn day. I feel like some of these are not even affected and just doing it in order to just make more money for the billionaire CEOs.

Our client supposedly managed our Jira board yesterday in preparation for the release to live.

It was a mess. We have two people on this project - so our effective maximum workload is 10 days worth of tickets.

The current sprint plus the next have over 60 tickets in them, with the other "light" sprints having about 15 days worth in them.

I know you shouldn't get caught up over estimates too much, but they're in place for a reason.

The client really needs a reality check, and to be reasonable. When looking from a macro perspective he loses sight of all reason and scope, trying to grossly overfill what the two of us can handle.

A junior and student placement dev can only do so much.

I guess time will tell how realistic 16th April is..

My brother proudly told me how he scanned 150 pictures and made a mouse-pointer macro to photoshop light and crop the pictures.

Didn't have it in my hear to tell him I have digital copies of all those images.

Reviewing VBA code with least comments possible and out of nowhere there is an Application.Undo which crashes the macro
*Write comments as if the next dev is a psychopath who knows where you leave*

YGGG IM SO CLOSE I CAN ALMOST TASTE IT.

Register allocation pretty much done: you can still juggle registers manually if you want, but you don't have to -- declaring a variable and using it as operand instead of a register is implicitly telling the compiler to handle it for you.

Whats more, spilling to stack is done automatically, keeping track of whether a value is or isnt required so its only done when absolutely necessary. And variables are handled differently depending on wheter they are input, output, or both, so we can eliminate making redundant copies in some cases.

Its a thing of beauty, defenestrating the difficult aspects of assembly, while still writting pure assembly... well, for the most part. There's some C-like sugar that's just too convenient for me not to include.

(x,y)=*F arg0,argN. This piece of shit is the distillation of my very profound meditations on fuckerous thoughtlessness, so let me break it down:

- (x,y)=; fuck you in the ass I can return as many values as I want. You dont need the parens if theres only a single return.
- *F args; some may have thought I was dereferencing a pointer but Im calling F and passing it arguments; the asterisk indicates I want to jump to a symbol rather than read its address or the value stored at it.

To the virtual machine, this is three instructions:

- bind x,y; overwrite these values with Fs output.
- pass arg0,argN; setup the damn parameters.
- call F; you know this one, so perform the deed.

Everything else is generated; these are macro-instructions with some logic attached to them, and theres a step in the compilation dedicated to walking the stupid program for the seventh fucking time that handles the expansion and optimization.

So whats left? Ah shit, classes. Disinfect and open wide mother fucker we're doing OOP without a condom.

Now, obviously, we have to sanitize a lot of what OOP stands for. In general, you can consider every textbook shit, so much so that wiping your ass with their pages would defeat the point of wiping your ass.

Lets say, for simplicity, that every program is a data transform (see: computation) broken down into a multitude of classes that represent the layout and quantity of memory required at different steps, plus the operations performed on said memory.

That is most if not all of the paradigm's merit right there. Everything else that I thought to have found use for was in the end nothing but deranged ways of deriving one thing from another. Telling you I want the size of this worth of space is such an act, and is indeed useful; telling you I want to utilize this as base for that when this itself cannot be directly used is theoretically a poorly worded and overly verbose bitch slap.

Plainly, fucktoys and abstract classes are a mistake, autocorrect these fucking misspelled testicle sax.

None of the remaining deeper lore, or rather sleazy fanfiction, that forms the larger cannon of object oriented as taught by my colleagues makes sufficient sense at this level for me to even consider dumping a steaming fat shit down it's execrable throat, and so I will spare you bearing witness to the inevitable forced coprophagia.

This is what we're left with: structures and procedures. Easy as gobblin pie.

Any F taking pointer-to-struc as it's first argument that is declared within the same namespace can be fetched by an instance of the structure in question. The sugar: x ->* F arg0,argN

Where ->* stands for failed abortion. No, the arrow by itself means fetch me a symbol; the asterisk wants to jump there. So fetch and do. We make it work for all symbols just to be dicks about it.

Anyway, invoking anything like this passes the caller to the callee. If you use the name of the struc rather than a pointer, you get it as a string. Because fuck you, I like Perl.

What else is there to discuss? My mind seems blank, but it is truly blank.

Allocating multitudes of structures, with same or different types, should be done in one go whenever possible. I know I want to do this, and I know whichever way we settle for has to be intuitive, else this entire project has failed.

So my version of new always takes an argument, dont you just love slurping diarrhea. If zero it means call malloc for this one, else it's an address where this instance is to be stored.

What's the big idea? Only the topmost instance in any given hierarchy will trigger an allocation. My compiler could easily perform this analysis because I am unemployed.

So where do you want it on the stack on the heap yyou want to reutilize any piece of ass, where buttocks stands for some adequately sized space in memory -- entirely within the realm of possibility. Furthermore, evicting shit you don't need and replacing it with something else.

Let me tell you, I will give your every object an allocator if you give the chance. I will -- nevermind. This is not for your orifices, porridges, oranges, morpheousness.

Walruses.

When you rewrite a macro 15 times before you realise that you never needed a macro in the first place

During my readings of Nim I found a technique known as stropping.

This gives devs the ability to use keywords as identifiers.

Example:

var `var` = "fucking why?"
echo(`var`)

Can anyone tell me WHY would someone subject themselves to such confusion notion? Mind you Nim has large features for macro programming and the creation of dsls, i have not gotten far enough to assess this, but what other use could you highly knowledgeable lads and lasses think of?

How many layers of increasingly verbose macros generating calls to each other is acceptable in Rust? I have to choose between 2 and 3 but IMO the 3 macro setup is nicer because it allows shit like walking a list, windowing the items and skipping the last to be separated from the actual things that are being generated.

Do you guys do any sort of meal planning / prepping (based on caloric intake / macro nutrients)? If so how much time is usually spent on the plan itself, and how long in the kitchen? Also how did you come up with said plan?

life is so complicated when
#define TRUE FALSE
😂😂

So far I've been pretty lucky... except for the code some of my professors at uni used in their assignments. A couple of them had this horrid habit of giving you a horribly-written, out-of-date (we're talking these chuckle heads used the same code for years on end and wondered why it didn't work on new versions of Java), messy source file with "fill in the blanks" sections like it was some kind of Java Mad Libs book. One of them had an entire jarchive of data structures we were required to use that he'd written in the '90s and NEVER UPDATED. Another one had a script he'd written for his own specialized assembly macro preprocessor that he'd been using without update for who even knows how long. Now, we were using one of those goofy virtual machines with its own simplified assembly language, and we were on the fourth version of the program. This guy'd written his macro processor in Java for the second version, never updated his Java source, only provided a barely-working .bat script for running it, even though the department's official preference was a *nix environment, and implemented this horrid "pretty-printer" that had a regrettable little habit of eating code. You heard that right. You'd run build.bat and it'd expand your macros then send it over to the pretty-printer which would very infrequently just replace the existing program file with an empty file. When we brought it to his attention, he goes "...huh. never happened to me." and proceeded to use the very same set of programs for the next three semesters, even when the assembly simulator was updated again. I heard wails of anguish from the poor sad souls that came after me as their macro processor created program files with deprecated operations, their pretty printer printed out beautiful, perfectly-organized empty files, and the professor responded to every second of a student begging for an updated version with "...huh. never happened to me." I never saw a single bug reported to either of those professors even acknowledged, let alone fixed. Some of the Java Mad Libs were the same ones they'd started using when they first switched the curriculum from Ada to Java. Thankfully after my first year I escaped into the bliss of the next three years, which were full of *nix and C and beauty.

I feel like such an idiot every time I use windows just slightly beyond clicking buttons. I'm trying to write a very simple macro to simply send an email out when I receive an email with a particular header. and no, outlook doesnt support that with rules. so now I have to use this garbage IDE, writing a script in a 25 year old language, with every bell and whistle button you could possibly think of and no way of figuring out how to do anything without being balls deep in a decade old forum post. I hate microsoft more and more every time I use it. I thought maybe if I got good and started "dev"ing with it more, I'd hate it less, but no... its always some super clunky application with shit tons of buttons and you dont know what they do, and when the app breaks, it gives you some hex number and nothing else, and sends all the good stuff to microsoft so they can fix it in the next "big update" thatll fuck up youre entire days worth of work and kill an hour of your precious time. Ugh.

The LOOP macro

#define someError ( -1)

int func(params *param)
{
//some code
if(condition)
{
someError ;
}
}

Spent like half and hour on debugger thinking why the fuck does it skip my statement. My manager who was passing by saw me puzzled and asked if he could help, so we spent another 10 minutes without success(tho my manager is technical guy but he had an unlucky moment I guess). Eventually senior manager saw our wtf faces and asked what is going on, it took one question for me to light the bulb "someError is a macro right?"

I guess you can imagine my embarrassment at that moment..

PS: Forgot return keyword before the error code.

My computer has gone to repair so for the meantime I'm computer-less. Which sucks big time because I have projects and tests coming up (not to mention personal projects and other stuff I've been asked to do) and I kinda have to leech off my friends and I don't like doing that, but, for now, it's what I'm doing. My old toshiba couldn't handle whatever I have to do, damn thing should be going through menopause or something. I wasn't a good owner LoL
I never really know if it'll boot during the first minute after I turn it on or if'll take it hours to do so, so I don't wanna risk it taking it with me to uni 😬 Not to mention it's still running Vista 😅
So my brother left to go to a friend's house until sunday so for the today and tomorrow I have access to the beast that is his computer ☺
I don't mean beast as a bad thing, it's a good computer, but it has an almost full SSD and I need to install a couple things so I can work on it :') (I'll uninstall them later and try to leave it as I found it LoL)
I can finally take a bit to play as well 😥 as I haven't been able to do so, as not only my PC is on repair, but I've been leaving uni late (after midnight - I valour my sleep OK). Luckily one of my house mates lets me use her PC after she goes to bed or her bf arrives to our house. The other day I managed to install steam and play a bit (she gave me permission to do so and I uninstalled them later) 😂 her computer almost died on me, it only has 4GB of RAM :') poor thing was over working to keep up LoL
Now, my brother's computer has a mechanical keyboard and besides the macro keys (they're on the far end of the keyboard, where you'd expect the shift/ctrl/caps lock/etc keys to be), I'm loving it tbh. It's a cheap keyboard, my mom didn't want to buy anything too fancy for him, but I like the sounds it makes 😅 may get one for myself (a mechanical keyboard I mean LoL. I really liked one I saw here on devRant that looked like a typewriter but it's WAY out of my league for now HaHa)

Ok bois it's IDE / Text Editor time again.

I have had my fair share of usage with VSCode and i have been using VIM for over a year now.

With Vim i miss intellisense, class lookups etc.

VSCode doesn't provide the macro abilities i like in VIM and also doesn't support every edge case of file (giant files for instance).

Now i am at a certain dilemma. Do i use VSCode? Vim?

I am seriously considering trying emacs, but i don't know much about it.

What is your take on this?
Please respect each others choice, i don't want another fucking IDE religion war

Debug a VBA macro that generates a json file for more than an hour. It always fail, but why? Print json file block by block, debug line by line, all validates. I just discovered that perforce bloqued the output file. Can I go home now please?

For my final project of first year at middle school (that's before university), I had to make a experiment and measured it using a circuit connected to the computer. At the end I couldn't finish but I made a program for explain what the circuit (expected) did using one of the Microsoft Office's assistant (Merlin the wizard), Merlin moved around the screen talking about the experiment and what the circuit measured it over and over, almost forgotten to tell I had to show it in a science festival to anybody who came at school, none asked about the experiment or the circuit, all the questions was about how I made the program, how the program could speech in spanish and explain the experiment.
At the begining of that day I was so nervous, but at the end I could say fuck yeah.
And the program was a macro in Basic with text to speech of a Loquendo like voice, I only record the movements and put the text.
That's one of the reason of I like programming, it save it my ass.
That was more than ten years ago, I didn't have a computer only at the school, internet not was so common.

So fun fact! The Rust macro error

"Macro expansion ignores <token> and everything after it"

does NOT mean that macro expansion on general ignores this token. What it DOES mean is that the macro expanded to something, then the parser was invoked, and the parser stopped consuming tokens at the specified point.

In normal human speak, this means
"This token is invalid in its context after macro expansion. Refer to the generated code for concrete error."

I spent hours moving intermediate results into macro parameters because I thought the error meant that your macro cannot expand to the second half of a comma-separated list or whatever, until I got the same message about '(' which is very obviously permitted macro output and doesn't even really make sense given that it's not a token.

I'm gifting a custom macro pad built using a Raspberry Pico to my brother. I don't want him having to reprogram the pico every time he wants to change macros. Do you know of any program that allow him to change it easily or do I have to create my own?

Thanks!

when your microservices go macro.....

Have been looking for a new keyboard but have not been able to find one, so which keyboard do you use for your daily work / programming. attach an image as well as model name and reasoning.
Im using Logitech G105 (due to macro keys)

What keyboard macros do you guys use when you have programmable function keys?

Also a funny little story that I just remembered. My brother used to have a key that would type his password cause he was THAT fucking lazy. He was writing an NPC for a private Ragnarok Online server that I was testing with a couple people. Apparently he had hit that function key in the middle of an announcement command.

So basically, everything went as planned, but then while announcing an event, it would announce his password to THE ENTIRE SERVER. Lucky for him, there were only three of us online at the time, and we told him as soon as it happened.

Best part of being a dev?
Knowing that given enough time, you could essentially get your computer to do anything you want; and if it doesn't, it's because you made a mistake somewhere and not because it just didn't want to!

Before my dev days (when I wasn't allowed to install any software) wrote an excel macro that would email a colleague with a coffee request after someone challenged me saying I couldn't get the computer to make me coffee, hehe...

👇 Many people argue whether software engineers need to be good at concepts like data structures, algorithms, and system design.

Also, they think that companies should stop making their hiring decisions based on testing these concepts.

I think a basic understanding of all of the above is really necessary if you want to be a good engineer.

There can be a discussion on whether an engineer needs a mastery of the advanced topics or not.

However, a basic understanding of data structures, algorithms, and system design is essential for engineers.

Why is that?

I think overall; every software application has two parts:

◉ Data (Micro-level)
◉ Design (Macro-level)

Almost every engineer deals with both of these, depending on their role in the team.

If you're a junior engineer, you may not do that much on the design side. However, your most work would be on the micro-level, i.e., dealing with data.

If you're a senior engineer, you may work more on the macro-level, like designing the architecture, structure, arrangement of different parts, and other related stuff.

A good understanding of data structures and algorithms enables you to be good at manipulating data. So it will help you to deal with data efficiently, and you'd be able to make good decisions at the micro-level.

However, to be good at designing the architecture, you'd need to be good at dealing with different parts of the system on the macro-level. This is where system design principles help you.

This is why you need to understand the basics of both.

👉 Do you think engineers need to be good at data structures and algorithms alongside system design?

So... I had to create a VBA macro, ok, it is very simple and it will be necessary during some DOC files reviewing. Ok, not a problem.

I created the functions, added some quick launch buttons and saved it as a .DOTM file. I even included an autoload form with an Install button, so the file copy itself to the Word Startup folder. Nice, everything working just fine.

But... there are two Mac users in the company. I do not have a Mac, but the first thing I thought was I hardcoded the "\" to check if the file already exists and to copy the file. Using the system separator would do the trick. The macro would be copied and everything is done. But...

1. The quick launch buttons do not appear on Mac;

2. The "Application.PathSeparator" returns an ":"

3. The "application.StartupPath" returns an invalid path (something like "Mac's Name:Application:etc")

4. The copy command is not working, the Dir command appears to be not identifying the path etc

5. I need to have it working by Monday morning.

Got a massive deadline coming up and thought why not add to the pressure and install VsVim as well.
Have to say I was pleasantly surprised, with that and the navigate to feature you don’t need a mouse at all and I barely know vim. :q is so much easier on the hands than ctrl+f4 now if only I could work out a macro to automatically add async modifiers

Bought a stream deck on prime day with the intention of using them for macros. Now it has arrived, and I realized that I don't have a clue what macros to make.

yo so wtf opengl doing over there

all I can find on "APIENTRYP" is that it's "macro magic that makes everything work" but it's breaking fucking everything. I remove it and it works again (well, kinda, i still gotta fix some typing horseshit)

why is opengl in shambles i just wanna compile gdi

Today I got my login credentials for our Task Delivery Tool (called WMS TI)...

It is by far the most ugliest and user unfriendly program on the planet!! It looks like you made an macro for Excel 2000. It's bloated with features only 0.1% of the company needs them! (Biggest telecommunication provider Germany's) and it's lame! Even worse: we still use Windows 7 32bit.... Why the fuck is a company which develops smart home, self driving cars and cyber defense systems such an oldie!

Did someone already thought about how color highlight can be better? It's been 4-5 years now that I'm coding on a virtual console that run on iPad with a monochrome code editor. Despite the fact that's remind me the old days when I was 8 years old, that doesn't stop me for coding with it.

I mean, is it really important to know that strings are red and numbers are yellow? How does that help me? They are both literal and behave to the user-content categories.

I was talking with my friend, and he says he likes to know if something is a keyword or an identifier. In C++, a lot of common keywords to define stuff and control the flow are often the first word and easy to spot.

A couple of months ago, I tried Flutter, and the editor can highlight ident blocks and give them different colors, but with Flutter, it's easy to get 10 or more ident levels, Does the color help? Splitting the code does.

I think, there is so much stuff that is more important than coloring the grammar of a language. For instance: knowing if an identifier belongs to which Rust Crate because, It's easy to stack 10 or more dependencies in one file that as better chances of names collisions.

Knowing if an identifier was recognized, if it used, if it's a local, a member, a global, a compiled value or a macro seems more important.

I would like to color block of code that is important or sensible. That will help my coworker about the severity of a particular place in the code.

What do you think?

Have an object that uses a macro to define its function bodies. I needed to interface to that object in a different way. So I wrote and object that calls functions on that object and presents a different interface. I used macros to define the function bodies...

WTF why does Visual C++ show an error in some system include BUT NOT THE FUCKING INCLUDE CHAIN DESPITE /showincludes GIVEN???

How the fuck are you supposed to find a wrongly defined macro that way? Go through all 20 layers of includes and map out what could POSSIBLY be the include chain? Seriously WHY??

when i found out on how to import modules instantly being able to deploy bugfixes and changes to multiple macro-dependent documents without copy-pasting the code to every single file manually.

Question: what's your opinion on Julia? It seems promising, the macro syntax is neat. But would you use it for data analysis/management or general purpose development?

Learning regex, getting more familiar with C and building a shortcut macro tool for various IDEs

Does anyone have a handy macro sort of quick automation windows desktop tool they use / like?

Scenario: I fix a rando thing on a rando web app. Now I need to go through 4 clicks in a browser and enter some text to make the thing happen and see the result....I'd rather not do that 8 times as I iterate / try stuff.

I've been playing with some more automated testing stuff but I'm not there yet and the granularity of those tends not to be in the area of "make quick task and watch it happen" kinda thing.

It might be time to find a new job. Why? Because I just wrote an Excel macro.

Dim code As :P

want to dispatch an action from clicking a button, but dispatch() doesn't exist

add @connect to make dispatch() exist

other stuff crashes because @connect is actually a macro for a wrapper instead of the decorator it pretends to be

get locked in stalemate because both features kind of need to not crash

Seeing as I will be scorned for asking this on SO, and there's a ton of devs here that probably had this conundrum: how have you solved horizontal scrolling when working? I know shift + mw+/- works but what's the use having a mouse with macro functionality if not to simplify that? My current software supports lua scripting (but I don't know how to write it). I see some people requesting this while googling I but cannot find anyone that has a solution. The closest I get is a user requesting it from Logitech as they apparently have the same but for ctrl+mw in their products.