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I'm 20, and I consider myself to be as junior as they come. I only started programming seriously in June 2016,and since then, I've been doing mainly Android Work, and making my own servers and backends(using AWS/Firebase nd stuff).
For the first time in life, I was approached by a recruiter for a company on linkedIn. They "stumbled upon" my Github profile and wanted to see if I was interested in an internship opportunity. This company is an early stage start up, by that I mean a dude with an idea calling himself the CEO and a guy who "runs a tech blog" and only knows college level C programming (explaination follows).
So they want me to make the app for their startup. and for that, I ws first asked to solve a couple problems to prove my competence and a "technical interview" followed.
They gave me 3 questions, all textbook, GCD of 2 numbers, binary search and Adding an element to the linked List, code to be written on a piece of paper. As the position was that of an Android Developer, I assumed that Java should be the language of choice. Assumed because when I asked, the 'tech blogger' said, yeah whatever.
But wait, that ain't all, as soon as I was done, Mr. Blogger threw a fit, saying I shouldn't assume and that I must write it in C. I kept my cool (I'm not the most patient person), and wrote the whole thing in C.
He read it, and asked me what I've written and then told me how wrong I was to write 2 extra lines instead of recursion for GCD. I explained that with numbers large enough, we run the risk of getting a stackoverflow and it's best to apply non recursive solution if possible. He just heard stackoverflow and accused me of cheating. I should have left right then, but I don't know why, I apologized and again, in detail explained what was happening to this fucktard. Once this was done, He asked me how, if I had to, I'd use this exact code in my Android App. I told him that Id rather write this in Java/Kotlin since those are the languages native to Android apps. I also said that I'd export these as a Library and use JNI for the task. (I don't actually know how, I figured I can study if I have to).
Here's his reply, "WTF! We don't want to make the app in Java, we will use C (Yeh, not C++, C). and Don't use these fancy TOOLS like JNI or Kotlin in front of me, make a proper application."
By this I was clear that this guy is not fit to be technical lead and that I should leave. I said, "Sir, I don't know how, if even possible, can we make an Android App purely in C. I am sorry, but this job is not for me".
I got up and was about to leave the room, when we said, "Yeah okay, I was just testing you".
Yeah right, the guy's face looked like a howling monkey when I said Library for C, and It has been easier for me to explain code to my 10 year old cousin that this dumbfuck.
He then proceeded to ask me about my availability, and I said that I can at max to 15-20 hours a week since my college schedule is pretty tight. I asked me to get him a prototype in 2 months and also offered me a full time job after I graduate. (That'd be 2 years from now). I said thank you for the offer, but I am still not sure of I am the right person for this job.
He then said, "Oh you will be when I tell you your monthly stipend."
I stopped for a second, because, money.
And then he proceeded to say 2 words which made me walk out without saying a single word.
"One Thousand".
I live in India, 1000 INR translates to roughly $15. I made 25 times that by doing nothing more than add a web view to an activity and render a company's responsive website in it so it looks like an app.
If this wasn't enough, the recruiter later had the audacity to blame me for it and tell me how lucky I am to even get an offer "so good".
Fuck inexperienced assholes trying shit they don't understand and thinking that the other guy is shitsworth.10 -
Hackathons should not be judged by non-technical people.
I went to a Hackathon yesterday, and only two teams (mine included, of course 😉) made projects that I thought sufficiently fulfilled all the judging criteria.
The winning "project"? Literally just a two slide proposal about asking Niantic to turn the summer time free lunch distribution bus into a Pokestop. Because obviously the best way to motivate children who can't afford food to go get free summer lunches is to use a tie-in with a smart phone game. Because Niantic is so famously responsive to community requests. Because you can totally turn a bus into a Pokestop.
It was absurd, and I have no idea how it fulfilled the "impact" and "viability" judging criteria (as for the third criteria, "innovation", I suppose not coding anything at a Hackathon is pretty innovative!)
I knew that some flashy bullshit project would win, even if it was utterly unviable, but I didn't realize just how disgustingly absurd the winning project would be13 -
When a Coursera course is way better than the one offered by your university…
A university student's rant...
I study Electrical and Computer Engineering and during the first semester of the second year I selected an optional course: Web Programming. It was believed among students that the course would be really easy, and it was. All the student had to do was build a very simple website using HTML, CSS and a few line of JS. A website containing three or four pages all of which had to be validated using a markup validation service.
Yeah, sure, I passed the course just like everyone else who bothered enough to spend an hour or two working on the project. Oh, I almost forgot! We had an one-hour workshop on Dreamweaver!
So, by that point, everybody was a front-end developer, right?!
That happened over three years ago, and because of that course web-development didn’t impress me…
Thankfully, the last few months I’ve became interested in Web Development, and I’ve been reading some articles, spending time on smashing magazine, making some progress on FreeCodeCamp and taking relevant courses on Coursera!
In fact, a few days ago I completed the Coursera course “HTML, CSS and Javascript for Web Developers”.
Oh boy, the things I didn’t know that I didn’t know…
<sarcasm>Did you know there was a term called “responsive design” and that there are frameworks like bootstrap?</sarcasm>
Well, I d i d n ’ t k n o w ! ! ! (even though I had taken the university’s course).
I understand that bootstrap was introduced in 2011 and I took the university course in late 2012, but by that time, bootstrap was quite popular and also there were other frameworks available before bootstrap that could have been included in the course! (even today, there is no reference in responsive design in the university’s course).
In just five weeks the coursera course managed to teach me more, in a more organized and meaningful way than my university’s course in a whole semester!
When I started the coursera course I shared it with a friend of mine. His response: “yeah, sure, but web development is pretty easy… I didn’t spend much time to complete that project three years ago!”
That course three years ago gave birth to misconceptions in students' minds that web development is easy! Yeah, sure, it can be easy to built a simple, non responsive, non interactive website! But that's not how the world works nowadays , right?!
A few months ago, in the early days of August, I attended Flock, the Fedora community conference. During a break I spent some time speaking with a Red Hat employee about student internships. He told me, and I paraphrase: “We know that students don’t have a solid background and that they haven’t learned in the university what we need them to!”
Currently I’m planning to apply for a front-end developer internship position here in Greece.
Yesterday I wrote my CV, added university courses relevant to that position and listed coursera courses under independent coursework… While writing those I made these thoughts…
What if that course 3 years ago was as good as the coursera course… all the things I’d know by now…6 -
Old story, and yeah, it's all true, I shit you not!
So here I am at about age 11 (more or less). At the time, I had an almost brand new 333MHz beast, with 8 MB RAM, 2 (!!!) MB video card and (I think) about 300 MB of storage (yeah, I'm old :)) ).
Connected to this monster was sitting a 14" CRT monitor, mechanical keyboard and a 2 button, ball "powered" mouse.
There was no optical tracking tech at the time.
One evening, I notice my mouse starts lagging. Test it to see if Win95 is stuck. Nope, just mouse problems...
Fiddle with it a little, and at some point it stops working at all.
My room was dark now, so I got up to turn on the lights, sat down in front of the PC, and moved the mouse by instinct.
Surprise! It's working again!
My brother comes in and turnes off the lights. Mouse non responsive.
I tell him to turn them on again, mouse works again.
At this point, we were both scratching our heads at this mystery...
I decided to confirm it again using a desc light.
Conclusion: my 2 button, ball tracking, non light sensitive mouse was working only if light was shining directly oh it AND on my 14" crt monitor at the same time!!!
To this day I have no ideea why.
I kept them both for posterity, and they are still there in my parent's attic.
Fin.7 -
How did you break through your own barriers to finally learn programming?
My SO is constantly complaining that we don’t have enough money. I make a decent amount as a full-time dev at a large company, but we live in an expensive city and are currently going through a time of few funds.
He started driving delivery food orders, he likes it okay, but it pays very little. He still complains about money.
I want him to learn JavaScript.
He was once asked to make a website for a company he’s involved in. He only used SquareSpace, but he was never satisfied with their stock code. He went digging for JavaScript snippets he could use, and he made one of the most beautiful and responsive websites I’ve seen.
Since then, I’ve been encouraging him to learn JavaScript. I’m trying to convince him it will be a great source of additional income, he can make his own schedule while doing contract work, and he can ask me anything he wants while he’s learning. How many beginners have someone they can ask anything of, at any time?
He doesn’t want to learn. He doesn’t think he is capable. I remember this feeling before I learned to code. A chunk of someone else’s JS does look genuinely terrifying if you don’t know what it means. I want him to give it one honest try before he decides it’s “not for him,” but he isn’t open to it enough to try.
What can I do to help him understand he is capable? He’s in his mid-30s and insists he’s too old to catch up. He’s smart, detail-oriented, and I know he would write code that’s a million times cleaner than mine. He absolutely has a programmer inside of him, and I want to encourage him to simply try.
Is there something I can to do introduce JS in a non-threatening way? Or should I just accept his refusal and let it go? Thanks for any advice.18 -
Few months back, one of my good but non-dev friend came to visit me.
He: I've done a website in HTML. Can you help me make it responsive.
Without a second thought, I agreed.
*Opened the file in editor*
<tables> <tables> <tables> <tables>
I kicked him out of my house without a second thought.3 -
Updated a website for an older client today. Realized I originally wrote their website in 2002.
That web site is a fucking non-responsive piece of shit... but it is still running normally after 18 years.
Just HTML/CSS and some light JS/PHP for form processing. It's not fancy but it still performs and works perfect on Desktop and OK on mobile. Mobile devices which DID NOT EXIST when I wrote it.
Let this be a lesson to the entire new class of developers who seems to think you need some framework to develop. You don't. And I GUARANTEE if that site used any framework that framework would have been retired or updated to un-useability 10 years ago.
Meanwhile my LAMP ass "web native" shit spaghetti with ZERO DEPENDENCIES is still just chugging the fuck along.4 -
When the marketing exec rings to tell you that they are making a new site for the company...in Wix and that they need to use flash for the "animations".3
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Each time I try firefox after somebody mentions it again or it's in my rss feed, it still seems to never actually advance
It's stuck and either gets worse or goes back to its stable non improving level again, how come do they still not have a proper mobile responsive tester, why are even the upgraded addons still suffering the same container and rendering bugs
how is it more important getting bad image by implementing mr robot malware, than getting on an actual competitive level
why is it default bloated with random pocket addon bullshit, why did it begin to lag, ..
I remember when I was using firefox for a good portion of my life and laughed at how google chrome is laggy, but nowadays theres simply no competition to chrome, its stability and developer tools
I wish there was competition, the grid tools were a great start, but then nothing followed and they just went back to their never improving flatline16 -
TL;DR Calendar services sucks.
Imagine yourself as startup. You don't want to spend fortune on paying $5 per user per month for Google Services. Also you don't want to pay that to Microsoft for O365. You want to run it itself because you already have droplet running with your other services (ERP for example. Funny story too btw.) Ok, decision has been made, let install something.
I have pretty good experience with OwnCloud from past as Cloud file sharing service. Calendar is not bad for single user purpose (understand it as personal calendar, no invitations to others, sharing is maximum I tried) What can possibly go wrong when I deploy that and use its Calendar?
Well, lot. OwnCloud itself runs well (no rant here) but Calendar is such pain in ass. Trouble is with CalDav under hood and its fragmented standards. So, you want to send invitation to your team for recurrent meeting. Nothing weird. It sends as one invitation to each one, good. Now you realize you have a conflict, so you need to change time of one occurence. Move it, send update. And here comes shitstorm. It is not able to bisect one occurence from series. So it splits it to separate events and send invitation for every single one. 30 INVITATIONS IN 2 SECONDS! Holy sh*t! You want to revert that. Nope, won't do. So you accept your destiny and manually erase every single one with memo in head about planning recurring events.
Another funny issue is when SwiftMailer library (which is responsive for sending e-mails from OwnCloud) goes to spamming mayhem. It is pretty easy to do. When e-mail doesn't comply to RFC, it is rejected, right? So if because of some error CalDav client passes non-compliant e-mail (space as last character is non-compliant btw) and SwiftMailer tries to send it to multiple recepients (one of them is broken, rest is fine), it results in repetitive sending same invitation over and over in 30 minute interval. Sweet.
So now I am sitting in front of browser, looking for alternatives. Not much to choose from. I guess I'll try SOGO. It looks nice. For now.5 -
When you realize that the non-native web-based Spotify App for macOS is faster, prettier, more responsive, more robust and more useful than the native Apple Music app... Good job, Apple.3
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Holy fucking shit are email clients bullshit.
I don't know what happened there but if you thought the chrome-firefox-ie-egde gaps back in the days were sick - let me tell you.. email clients are made by the devil himself. All of them. All of them? Yup. Because he made some of them being owned by apple, working beatuiful and no weird stuff.
But on the same end he made some of them owned by microsoft and their office Studios. They use the word engine to render html emails. Read this again. Read it without starting to cry in agony.
But thats not enough. Let's make some of them use an ie-engine and the mac os variants going to use some webkit based renderer. This way there will be no valid ruleset to make it look good on all of them, isn't this great??
Now this might be hell already. But lets pour more salt into these wide opened wounds.
Let there be Germany and United Internet, owning trash like Web.de and GMX, whose android clients going to work completely different across Android and app-versions!
Once you've mastered these, let me introduce you to gmail. Lets take only the body node of your email and do some fuck up with it, so you have to display a non-responsive variant on mobile.
Now you might be thinking "but there are web-based clients, they'll do good ain't they?" Long story short: fuck you.
Not enough.
Let's go back to ms.
Hey dude lets make it possible to scale up your whole system. So old people can read shit better. And now the funny part: let's make it so that the word rendering engine, rendering emails goes completely mayhem on your mail, so it looks like a completely different thing! (:
If you ever receive a newsletter in your inbox and that shit looks like it's planned to look like.. appreciate that shit. Sacrifice a virgin as thanksgiving for it.
TL;DR:
E-Mail needs to die. I'm doing this for over 2 years now and this shit needs to stop asap.4 -
ffs there needs to be a tool to find that one non-flexible container which keeps your website from being responsive..
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This is stupid, how am I supposed to show my work projects in my portfolio if my boss insists on using a fucking non responsive css library.1
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Working on a project for myself and to put in my portfolio. Talking about it with a (non coding) co-worker and discussing where I am in the project as I've been really excited about my progress since I'm working from scratches with no frameworks for the back-end(the only side I've worked on so far). I was talking about the registration page and getting ideas as to what I should let users put on their profiles and she chimes in, "This would actually be better as a mobile app. That would be much easier to use." Well yeah, probably, but I'm a web developer, not a mobile app developer. Plus making it a web app means users will be able to utilize it through any medium rather than just their mobile phone. I can (probably) make it responsive enough that users don't mind it being a web page rather than an app.
I'm still learning, I know PHP, Python and a little JavaScript, not really enough to build a mobile app. Yeah I'd love to make this an app, but then I gotta support multiple products across several hundred different devices in multiple languages and I'm just not ready for that. Let's get the back end finished and we can go from there.1 -
Lost my password to my hostmaze login because LastPass didn't save it properly. Now I can't reset it because their mailing server is not working (found out after emails failed to send to their support email with an error on their end). Their chat is also non-responsive.... What do I do now...
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