Was lead developer at a small startup, I was hiring and had a budget to add 3 new people to my team to develop a new product for the company.

Some context first and then the rant!

Candidate 1 - Amazing, a dev I worked with before who was under utilized at the previous company. Still a junior, but, she was a quick learner and eager to expand her knowledge, never an issue.

Candidate 2 - Kickass dev with back end skills and extras, he was always eager to work a bit more than what was expected. I use to send him home early to annoy him. haha!

Candidate 3 - Lets call him P.

In the interview he answers every question perfectly, he asks all the right questions and suggests some things I havent even thought of. CTO goes ahead and says we should skip the technical test and just hire the guy, his smart and knows what his talking about, I agree and we hire him. (We where a bit desperate at this stage as well.)

He comes in a week early to pick up his work laptop to get setup before he starts the next week, awesome! This guy is going to be an asset to the company, cant wait to have him join the team - The CTO at this stage is getting ready to leave the company and I will be taking over the division and need someone to take over lead position, he seems like the guys to do it.

The guys starts the next week, he comes in and the laptop we gave him is now a local server for testing and he will be working off his own laptop, no issue, we are small so needed a testing stack, but wasnt really needed since we had procedures in place for this already.

Here is where everything goes wrong!!! First day goes great... Next day he gets in early 6:30am (Nice! NO!), he absolutely smells, no stinks, of weed, not a light smell, the entire fucking office smells of weed! (I have no problem with weed, just dont make it my problem to deal with). I get called by boss and told to sort this out people are complaining! I drive to office and have a meeting with him, he says its all good he understands. (This was Friday).

Monday comes around - Get a call from Boss at 7:30am. Whole office smells like weed, please talk to P again, this cannot happen again. I drive to office again, and he again says it wont happen again, he has some issues with back pain and the weed helps.

Tuesday - Same fucking thing! And now he doesnt want to sign for the laptop("server") that was given to him, and has moved to code in the boardroom, WHERE OUR FUCKING CLIENTS WILL BE VIEWING A DEMO THAT DAY OF THE PRODUCT!! Now that whole room smells like weed, FML!

Wednesday - We send P a formal letter that he is under probation, P calls me to have a meeting. In the meeting he blames me for not understanding "new age" medicine, I ask for his doctors prescription and ask why he didnt tell me this in the interview so I could make arrangements, we dont care if you are stoned, just do good work and be considerate to your co-workers. P cant provide these and keeps ranting, I suggest he takes pain killers, he has none of it only "new age" medicine for him.

Thursday - I ask him to rather "work" from home till we can get this sorted, he comes in for code reviews for 2 weeks. I can clearly see he has no idea how the system works but is trying, I thought I will dive deeper and look at all of his code. Its a mess, nothing makes sense and 50% of it is hard coded (We are building a decentralized API for huge data sets so this makes no sense).

Friday - In code review I confront him about this, he has excuses for everything, I start asking him harder questions about the project and to explain what we are building - he goes quiet and quits on the spot with a shitty apology.

From what I could make out he was really smart when it came to theory but interpreting the theory to actual practice wasnt possible for him, probably would have been easier if he wasnt high all the time.

I hate interview code tests, but learned a valuable lesson that day! Always test for some code knowledge as well even if you hate doing it, ask the right questions and be careful who you hire! You can only bullshit for so long in coding before someone figures out that you are a fraud.

The way 90% of the population wears their face masks really explains a lot about their approach to using software, apps & websites as well.

I feel like giving up.

I am not a developer for the salary, or just to solve analytical puzzles. Those are motivators, but my main drive is to make the world more comfortable and enjoyable, better optimized, build ethical services which bring happiness into people's lives. I want to improve society, even if it's just a tiny bit.

But if users invest absolutely zero percent of their limited brain capacity into understanding a product that already has a super-clean design and responds with helpful validation messages...

...why the fuck bother.

I used to think of the gap between technology and tech-incompetent people as an optimization problem.

As something which could be fixed by spending a fortune on UX research. Write tests, hire QA employees, decrease tech debt, create a bold but unified & simple design.

But the technologically incompetent just get more entitled with every small thing you simplify.

It's never fucking fool-proof enough.

Why can't I upload a 220MB PDF as profile picture? Why doesn't the app install on my 9 year old Android Froyo phone? Why can't I sign up if my phone number contains a  U+FFFC? Why does this page load so slowly from my rural concrete bunker in East Ukraine? WHY DO I HAVE PNEUMONIA, HOW DID I GET INFECTED EVEN THOUGH I WAS WEARING A MOUTH MASK ON MY FOREHEAD?

This is why I ran away from Frontend, to Backend, to DBA.

If I could remove myself further from the end user, I would.

At least I still have a full glass of tawny port and a huge database which needs to be normalized & migrated.

Fuck humans, I'm going to hug a server.

So my Girlfriend bought a new iPhone at Verizon today. Cool story, I know, but here's where it's gone from there.

Firstly her debit wouldn't run as credit, so we used mine but that's the least of it (but began it).

So she has 16,000 photos... Alot, sure, but not the issue. Obviously with that amount of data she wasn't about to reasonably use iCloud to back it up (understandable only by me) so she was confronted both by me and the Verizon employee about this issue to where we both (the Verizon employee and I) agreed that an iTunes backup/restore was the only way to preserve her data. She was confused. No worry, told her I had it handled and the Verizon employee agreed. Great. Yet we get home and begin the process. My girlfriend was not on the latest iOS (understandable given the battery scenario and she was on an iPhone 6) and this was ridiculous to her because she had to update in order to do the iTunes back up. Whatever, I brushed it off. Her phone was updated, and backed up... Which took a while but we are talking 30gb (of which she had no understanding of how much that was). After the back up we discovered her new phone wasn't working due to a bad sim, great, no problem we have the old one... But oh no. "I don't want that shitty old sim" she said. Uhmm what... I say, and say let me get an earring (to switch the Sims) and she gave one to me and as soon as I went to pop the tray, she had a fucking heart attack as if I was demolishing her phone. I talk her down, get it switched, get the phone to restore (slow process as she's complaining... 30gb mind you) and it works. She goes to bed. Comes back, texts aren't working. I say imessages or texts (now she has no idea) I troubleshoot, seems nothing's working, and that's okay Verizon must of reinstated the new sim and deactivated the old (fine). I switch them and it works. She proceeds to berate me about the SIM cards because she didn't want the 'old shitty one' (the one that got us to the place of a functioning phone).

Now everything works and she claims a Genius bar employee would of done this in minutes.

I (obviously) lose my shit, now I'm sleeping on the couch.

Im an IT professional / programmer..... this shit really ticked me off.

Navy story time, and this one is lengthy.
As a Lieutenant Jr. I served for a year on a large (>100m) ship, with the duties of assistant navigation officer, and of course, unofficial computer guy. When I first entered the ship (carrying my trusty laptop), I had to wait for 2 hours at the officer's wardroom... where I noticed an ethernet plug. After 15 minutes of waiting, I got bored. Like, really bored. What on TCP/IP could possibly go wrong?
So, scanning the network it is. Besides the usual security holes I came to expect in ""military secure networks"" (Windows XP SP2 unpatched and Windows 2003 Servers, also unpatched) I came along a variety of interesting computers with interesting things... that I cannot name. The aggressive scan also crashed the SMB service on the server causing no end of cute reactions, until I restarted it remotely.
But me and my big mouth... I actually talked about it with the ship's CO and the electronics officer, and promptly got the unofficial duty of computer guy, aka helldesk, technical support and I-try-to-explain-you-that-it-is-impossible-given-my-resources guy. I seriously think that this was their punishment for me messing around. At one time I received a call, that a certain PC was disconnected. I repeatedly told them to look if the ethernet cable was on. "Yes, of course it's on, I am not an idiot." (yea, right)
So I went to that room, 4 decks down and 3 sections aft. Just to push in the half-popped out ethernet jack. I would swear it was on purpose, but reality showed me I was wrong, oh so dead wrong.
For the full year of my commission, I kept pestering the CO to assign me with an assistant to teach them, and to give approval for some serious upgrades, patching and documenting. No good.
I set up some little things to get them interested, like some NMEA relays and installed navigation software on certain computers, re-enabled the server's webmail and patched the server itself, tried to clean the malware (aka. Sisyphus' rock), and tried to enforce a security policy. I also tried to convince the CO to install a document management system, to his utter horror and refusal (he was the hard copy type, as were most officers in the ship). I gave up on almost all besides the assistant thing, because I knew that once I left, everything would go to the high-entropy status of carrying papers around, but the CO kept telling me that would be unnecessary.
"You'll always be our man, you'll fix it (sic)".
What could go wrong?
I got my transfer with 1 week's notice. Panic struck. The CO was... well, he was less shocked than I expected, but still shocked (I learned later that he knew beforehand, but decided not to tell anybody anything). So came the most rediculous request of all:
To put down, within 1 A4 sheet, and in simple instructions, the things one had to do in order to fulfil the duties of the computer guy.
I. SHIT. YOU. NOT.
My answer:
"What I can do is write: 'Please read the following:', followed by the list of books one must read in order to get some introductory understanding of network and server management, with most accompanying skills."
I was so glad I got out of that hellhole.

When someone explains to me that they really care about their privacy and use WhatsApp or signal or other encrypted messaging services and then you see then typing stuff through the GOOGLE KEYBOARD.

Yeah i think they're not understanding something 😆

Had a client on the phone with an extremely heavy Turkish (I think so, not entirely sure) accent who was hardly understandable but I kept polite and tried really hard to understand his questions.

Didn't go so well and he started to get annoyed and rude as well and asked me why I kept asking him to repeat his questions.

Told him that due to his heavy accent I had some trouble understanding him but that we'd take it slow and that I was trying my best.

He didn't take that well and called me a fucking racist (or, a 'cancer racist (dutch: 'kanker racist') but this sounds nicer).

C: (remember, heavy accent) "Ben jij kanker racist ofzo?" (are you cancer racist or something?)

Me: sorry, kan je dat herhalen? Ik verstond je niet helemaal goed door het accent, excuses! (Sorry, could you repeat that? I didn't quite get that due to the heavy accent, apologies!)

*BOOOOOOOM*

Client exploded in my ear xD.

Totally worth it! I'm all for helping and tried my best but if you're going to disrespect me, fuck off.

At the peak of the dotcom boom of the early 2000s I had been hired above my skill set because recruiters were desperate to fill seats. I had a pulse and could code even a little so they hired me.

I was the senior web developer on an agency contract with a major corporation working on an ASP (pre ASP.NET) website. I had hired a temp to help me with the workload and one day, in exasperation at my spaghetti code and non-understanding of MVC concepts, he threw his hands in the air and exclaimed, "Do you even know what you're doing?!"

Not having the type of personality to give any subordinate a dressing down for insubordination, I just felt awkward. He was right, of course. I used that as impetus to study more and attend conferences. I'm still a below-average coder because my brain struggles with math and logic. A lot. But that definitely took me down a peg. All those recruiters treating me like I was hot snot on a silver platter when I was really just a cold booger on a paper plate.

Today my girlfriend and I are celebrating our 2nd anniversary. 🎊🎊🎉🎉
It has been a really amazing journey for both of us. She's not really into coding stuff but tolerates my weirdness anyway. There are disagreements sometimes. But the important thing is to keep yourself open and be patient. She has really helped me to become less of an smartass and be more understanding and patient. I'm really looking forward to all the new adventures we both will have together in the future....
2 down.. a lot more to go 😍😍

The most pissed off I've been at work?

Client X came to us for a website.
We secretly outsourced the work.
Client X is coming for a visit in 10 mins...

MD to me: "I've told them your lead dev on this. They're not super-technical so if they ask you about the project just tell them it's going well."

Now I'm not a comfortable blagger, I don't have that kind of confidence, so to ask me to lie like this makes me feel really stressed and uncomfortable. Furthermore, I had literally no idea about any aspect of the work we were supposedly doing for this client. I can barely contain my panic but my colleagues help me piece together a basic understanding.

The MD returns: "They're here now. Can you quickly go and check that the toilets are clean."

WHAT THE FUCK!? The little prick. I'd knock him out if wasn't so meek and pathetic. I tell myself that I'm being helpful and nice but in truth I'm just his fucking doormat and he has zero respect for me.

I have no problem cleaning stuff (we all basically tidy up behind us) but this is something he could have done. Furthermore, who cares? None of us leave the loos with piss on the floor and shit smeared across the walls. They're never anything less than client-ready so to ask me to check means that he's already checked them himself and one of the loos is not quite shiny enough.

The reader may feel that this is no big deal (and in some ways you're right) but everything about this scenario was fucked up. The MD had embroiled the whole company in a lie and assumes we're all okay with that, then to add insult just nonchalantly orders me to clean the bogs. The cunt.

FWIW The client didn't ask to talk to me or use the toilet during their visit.

Story time! Promised this, so making good on the promise. Eh-hem.

Misunderstandings [A slice of life short play that actually happened]

Dramatis Personae (anonymized, bc of course):
Moi ........ me, myself and possibly some lint
Robert ..... co-architect
Daisy ...... line dev
Lisa ....... also line dev

Prologue: the beginninning
[A project is starting up, new devs are coming on, including the two individuals who drive this story.
Daisy, of Indian origin, an exceptional dev and lovely person. Mother, wife, very conservative by upbringing in her early 40s.
Lisa, also exceptional dev, lovely person. Mother, also wife, self-made immigrant with liberal views derived from personal pride and self-bootstrapping]

Enter the office, We introduce everyone, off to a nice start, everyone is happy and excited to be working on [large bank project].

Lisa and Daisy form a friendship of commonality, they have similar backgrounds by all appearances and similar concerns due to children the same age and shared employment. They seem to become fast friends and things proceed normally for some months. Smooth sailing, all is well.

The fuse is lit.

Scene: Lunchtime gossip
[Robert, middle 40s architect adjacent Moi, also architect, age is my own damn business [old, so very old].]
Robert: "So, it seems like Daisy and Lisa are getting along great."
Moi: *snerfs a little, almost chokes on enchilada* Yes, yes they are, It's nice to see...
Robert: *eyebrow, having learned to read my expressions* "Aaaaaaand..."
Moi: "I adore both of them, but they are primarily friends because they don't actually understand most of what the other says"
[Lisa has a thick Taiwanese accent, Daisy has a standard northern indian accent. Never the two shall meet]
Robert: "Are you sure, they seem to have a lot of conversations?"
Moi: "Positive, you weren't at lunch with the three of us. They're polar opposite in terms of values, it'll be fine so long as that never comes up"
Robert: "I'm not even digging into that"
Moi: *flan*

Sizzle.

Scene: This is bat country
[More months pass, everything is fine, project is humming along nicely, save a few blips of personality conflicts. Moi takes a vacation. A gas station, somewhere in the middle of Wyoming, a snowstorm, a sports car full of luggage]
*phone rings*
Moi: *looks down, sees it's Robert, eyebrow raises, answer* What's on fire?
Robert: "We had to let Lisa go"
Moi: "Ah, they finally understood each other."
Robert: "Yes..." *deep sigh*
[Fade to flashback]

Bang.

Scene: The office, Lisa's desk
[Daisy and Lisa are discussing non-descript conversation. Daisy broaches the subject of Lisa's past divorce and being a single mother]
Daisy: "It must have been hard, how did you manage?"
Lisa: "I had my daughter, she was my motivation. We made it here, I met my current partner"
Daisy: "That's good! It is so hard, coming to something new. I could never imagine leaving my husband."
Lisa: "He left us, we weren't important, I don't want to marry every again"
Daisy: "Surely you do though? Marriage is great for a woman, my parents found a great husband for me."
Lisa: "Haha, lucky you. Most indian marriage is like prostitution."
[At this moment, Daisy's demeanor takes a nose dive. Whatever was actually said, what she heard was, "Indian marriage is prostitution"]
Daisy: *tears begin pouring down her face, she flings herself back in her chair, head shaking violently she screams* "I AM AN HONORABLE WOMAN!"
[Daisy runs out of the room, straight to HR. Lisa sits there, stunned, not really understanding what just happened or the consequences]

Scene: Back in bat country
[Robert finishes the story, the emotions are a mixture of hilarity at the absurdity of the situation and frustration in the work void it has created]
Moi: "Satan, well. Fuck me. Fuck us. Fuck. Is Daisy alright, is she at least staying? We can't lose two devs at the same time."
Robert: "She got a few days off, she seems fine now, but she's... yeah, I never laughed so hard"
Moi: *double facepalm* "Yeah, the word choice was a bit outrageous. It's not like we didn't know it was coming. I'm going to get back on the road."
Robert: "Alright, enjoy yourself, I'll try and prevent any other forest fires."

I was thinking today about a certain aspect of running a software startup and then it came to me...

Hank Scorpio, from the Simpsons, was right in his approach.

So many time I have seen people get hired only for the company to get a less-than-optimal performance from them.

But why is this? Of course, it is many factors but one of the major ones is...

Employers seem to lump employees in together and assume that since most developers operate in one way that the new devs should be the same way.

The problem with this seems to be that we are all pandering to the lowest common denominator.

Let's face it, most devs (like most people) are not good, and almost everyone is not living up to their potential because of a lack of understanding of themselves and how they can achieve more.

On top of that, most devs are just employees who will do what you tell them to.

Since those above developers are the norm (Reference Seinfeld "95% of people are undatable") we have to assume that there is a 5% who are exceptional.

The difference between the 5% and the 95% is NOT some built-in superiority but that the 5% has a good idea themselves and an understanding of how to get the most out of them. They set goals and then find the right path to achieve them. They don't coast.

By assuming these developers are the same as the others is REALLY hampering their potential and by doing this the company only hurts itself.

So, that's a lot of talking but what actionable things can be taken away from this?

Hank asks Homer "What is your dream?"

Well, employeers should take the time to identify which of these developers are in the 5%. A problem arises though when the 5% decide it is in their best interest to blend in.

Like when home says his dream is to "Work for you?" Hank shuts him down and wants to get to the truth. He makes Homer comfortable with not only vocalizing but achieving his dreams.

When an employer is looking for their types they should be looking for the following...

1. A real genuine desire to achieve
2. A real plan to get their goals done
3. Critical thinking and self-evaluation

But more importantly, when they identify these types they should be asking questions like...
- How can we help you be more productive?
- Is there anything about our current operating norm that is hindering you?
- How does your productivity workflow look?

3 difficulties arise though…

1. Most hiring managers are incompetent, and quite frankly, everyone thinks they are in the 5% and for those managers who delude themselves into this without putting in the work, they will have an impossible time actually identifying those who are actually good and productive employees.
2. Showing special treatment to these folks may upset the people below.
3. You will hear things you don’t like…

Examples include…

- That new fancy open-office that you got because it was the trendy thing to do, you might hear that this is a huge hinderance.
- These days people seem to treat devs like nomads, “just give him a laptop and a table and he is fine”!. You may hear that this is complete BS. Real achievers may want a dedicated desk with multiple monitors, a desk with drawers etc.
- This WILL cost you money. I know of developers who cannot work without a dedicated whiteboard. Buy them whatever they need.
- They may want BOTH a standing desk and a chair to sit on.
- Etc.

The point is that it seems to me to be a foolish strategy to tailor your entire company to force everyone into the same work habits. Really good employees have the self-awareness to develop their own productive practices and any keeping of them inside a box will NOT help.

I had to open the desktop app to write this because I could never write a rant this long on the app.

This will be a well-informed rebuttal to the "arrays start at 1 in Lua" complaint. If you have ever said or thought that, I guarantee you will learn a lot from this rant and probably enjoy it quite a bit as well.

Just a tiny bit of background information on me: I have a very intimate understanding of Lua and its c API. I have used this language for years and love it dearly.

[START RANT]

"arrays start at 1 in Lua" is factually incorrect because Lua does not have arrays. From their documentation, section 11.1 ("Arrays"), "We implement arrays in Lua simply by indexing tables with integers."

From chapter 2 of the Lua docs, we know there are only 8 types of data in Lua: nil, boolean, number, string, userdata, function, thread, and table

The only unfamiliar thing here might be userdata. "A userdatum offers a raw memory area with no predefined operations in Lua" (section 26.1). Essentially, it's for the API to interact with Lua scripts. The point is, this isn't a fancy term for array.

The misinformation comes from the table type. Let's first explore, at a low level, what an array is. An array, in programming, is a collection of data items all in a line in memory (The OS may not actually put them in a line, but they act as if they are). In most syntaxes, you access an array element similar to:

array[index]

Let's look at c, so we have some solid reference. "array" would be the name of the array, but what it really does is keep track of the starting location in memory of the array. Memory in computers acts like a number. In a very basic sense, the first sector of your RAM is memory location (referred to as an address) 0. "array" would be, for example, address 543745. This is where your data starts. Arrays can only be made up of one type, this is so that each element in that array is EXACTLY the same size. So, this is how indexing an array works. If you know where your array starts, and you know how large each element is, you can find the 6th element by starting at the start of they array and adding 6 times the size of the data in that array.

Tables are incredibly different. The elements of a table are NOT in a line in memory; they're all over the place depending on when you created them (and a lot of other things). Therefore, an array-style index is useless, because you cannot apply the above formula. In the case of a table, you need to perform a lookup: search through all of the elements in the table to find the right one. In Lua, you can do:

a = {1, 5, 9};
a["hello_world"] = "whatever";

a is a table with the length of 4 (the 4th element is "hello_world" with value "whatever"), but a[4] is nil because even though there are 4 items in the table, it looks for something "named" 4, not the 4th element of the table.

This is the difference between indexing and lookups. But you may say,

"Algo! If I do this:

a = {"first", "second", "third"};
print(a[1]);

...then "first" appears in my console!"

Yes, that's correct, in terms of computer science. Lua, because it is a nice language, makes keys in tables optional by automatically giving them an integer value key. This starts at 1. Why? Lets look at that formula for arrays again:

Given array "arr", size of data type "sz", and index "i", find the desired element ("el"):

el = arr + (sz * i)

This NEEDS to start at 0 and not 1 because otherwise, "sz" would always be added to the start address of the array and the first element would ALWAYS be skipped. But in tables, this is not the case, because tables do not have a defined data type size, and this formula is never used. This is why actual arrays are incredibly performant no matter the size, and the larger a table gets, the slower it is.

That felt good to get off my chest. Yes, Lua could start the auto-key at 0, but that might confuse people into thinking tables are arrays... well, I guess there's no avoiding that either way.

Conversations I've genuinely had at work:

Me: "Do you want some advice understanding that function?"
Dev: "Yeah, please!"
Me: "Get a plastic bag and some super glue..."

Dev: "I think I'm seeing the light at the end of the tunnel!"
Me: "It's just the train of mental bitchslaps coming in the other direction."
... Some time later
Dev:"You were right... "

Dev: "If the system is so unstable, how does it keep working?"
Me: "Do you see any goats in the office?"
Dev: "Uhm no... Why would there be goats?"
Me: "There aren't, now, we ran out."
Dev: "The hell are you talking about?"
Me: "We just sacrifice our own blood to Cthulhu these days, it's cleaner and we didn't have to pay to have all the goats blood and waste matter to be cleaned up. That and it was needlessly cruel to the poor goats and that is why there is no goats and despite conventional logic the app continues to work."

Dev: "So what language is the web app written in?"
Me: "You need to understand I inherited this project, I had nothing to do with it's spawning..."
Dev: "OK, that sounds ominous... How bad is it?"
Me: "Java..."
Dev: "..."

Dev: "So what's it like working on this project? What should I expect?"
Me: "You'll call your grandmother during your lunch break just to know there's a world beyond this project. You'll go home, nose bleeding and you are gonna sit in the shower and rock back and forth, holding yourself and feeling like you're suffering imposter syndrome. You'll question why you joined this team and it'll get inside your head til it's all you think about..."
Dev: "Damn man, why are you still on it?"
Me: "Stockholm syndrome, it's too late for me..."

PM: "You're such a dark person, we're not gonna find you hanging from the lights one day are we?"
Me: "Impossible, we use those industrial fluorescent strip lights, there's no cord to hang from."
PM: "That really wasn't the comforting answer I was looking for."

Head of department: "So I need to apologize, you were never meant to be left on your to manage the product on your own, it's something someone way more senior should have been doing and we reassigned him. It wasn't professional of us, it wasn't fair of us, we're sorry. Truth be told,we're impressed you've not gone mad."
Me: "I think I have. Wibble."

A card goes round work for a sick member of staff I've never met.
Me: "How would you describe her condition?"
Dev: "She said that she 'survived' the surgery."
Me: "Yeah, I'm not great at being appropriate but even I think writing 'glad to hear that you are not dead' in a get well soon card isn't the done thing."

A room full of mostly old male stressed out engineers sat in chairs, and the presenter said:

"So who watched Judging Amy last night?"

The presenter went on to express her surprise that nobody in the room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.... and wasn't going to drop the topic.

The meeting, if it ever had any, now had no chance of going anywhere good.

By the end of the meeting someone would walk out and "retire" shortly there after, and it certainly wasn't going to be the presenter....

Backstory:

The company built on the IBM model of sell pricey custom hardware (granted it worked really well) and sell expensive support contracts wasn't doing as well as it had hoped. Granted it was still doing better than most of its neighboring companies, but it was clear that with the .com bust the days of catered lunches every day were over.

The company had grown fat and everyone knew that while the company had a good enough product(s) to survive, there weren't enough lifeboats for everyone to survive.

In the midst of this an HR department that took up nearly 20% of the office space at HQ felt it needed to justify its existence / expenses.

They decided to do this in the same way they always had, by taking funding from other departments, this time not by simply demanding more direct budgets for themselves.... they decided to impose mandatory 'training' on other departments ... that they would then bill for this training.

When HR got wind that there were some stressed out engineers the solution was, as it always is for HR.... to do more HR stuff:

They decided to take these time starved engineers away from their jobs, and put them in a room with HR for 4 days. Meanwhile the engineer's tasks, deadlines and etc remained the same.

Support got roped into it too, and that's how I ended up there.

It would be difficult to describe the chasm between HR and everyone else at that company. This was an HR department that when they didn't have enough cubes (because of constant remodeling in the HR area under the guise of privacy) sat their extra HR employees next to engineering and were 'upset' that the engineers 'weren't very friendly and all they did was work'.

At one point a meeting to discuss this point of contention was called off for some made up reason or another by someone with a clue.

So there we all sat, our deadlines kept ticking away and this HR team (3 people) stood at the front of the room and were perplexed that none of these mostly older males in this room had seen last night's episode of Judging Amy.

From there the presentation was chaos, because almost the entire thing was based on your knowledge of what happened to poor stressed out Amy ... or something like that.

We were peppered with HR tales of being stressed out and taking a long lunch and feeling better, and this magical thing where the poor HR person went and had a good cry with her boss and her boss magically took more off her plate (a brutal story where the poor HR person was almost moved to tears again).

The lack of apparent sympathy (really nobody said much at all) and lack of seeming understanding from the crowd of engineers that all they should do is take a long lunch, or tell their boss to solve their problems ... seemed to bother the HR folks. They were on edge.

So then they finally asked "What are your stressers?" And they picked the worst possible person they could to ask, Ted.

Ted was old, he prickly, he was the only one who understood the worst ass hell of assembly that had been left behind.

Ted made a mistake, he was honest with folks who couldn't possibly understand what he was saying. "This mandatory class is stressing me out. I have work to do and less time because of this class."

The exchange that followed was kinda horrible and I recall sitting behind Ted trying to be as small as possible as to not be called on. Exactly what everyone said almost doesn't matter.

A pedantic debate between Ted and the HR staff about "mandatory" and "required" followed. I will just sum it up that they were both in the wrong for how they behaved for a good 20 minutes...

Ted walked out, and would later 'retire' that week.

Ted had a history and was no saint. I suspect an email campaign by various folks who recounted the events that day spared ted the 'fired' status and he walked with what eventually would become the severance package status quo.

HR never again held another 'training', most of them would all finally face the axe a few months later after the CEO finally decided that 'customer facing, and product producing' headcount had been reduced enough ... and it was other internal staff's time for that.

The result of the meeting was one less engineer, and everyone else had 4 days less of work done...

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...

import LongRantKit
import NonRantKit
import TldrKit

I don't like stickers on my laptop because it clutters it up. But today I realized the importance of them.

A few months ago I was sitting at a coffee shop working on a paper and I noticed a guy with this cool sticker on a MacBook Pro: it had the integral symbol to the left of the Apple logo, and to the right of it a lowercase d and another Apple logo. It took me a few hours to realize what it meant, but I finally did and at that point I also guessed that not many people know what it is.

So I, as antisocial as I am, I finish up my work and before I leave I walk up to him and say hi. At this point I'm a senior in high school and I learn he's a junior in the same college I plan to attend. We talked a little before I had to leave and got to know each other somewhat.

After I leave I find him on Instagram and Facebook and friend him and such.

Recently I posted a picture saying I had recently joined the Apple Developer Team, and also recently reposted a memory on Facebook from 5 years ago that was a screen capture of an iPhone 4 simulator running iOS 5 showing off one of my first apps.

Then yesterday I get a message from the guy I met at the coffee shop asking for some help with an iOS project he's working on. We decide to meet today and I spend the entire morning showing him the basics of Swift, Xcode, Interface Builder, etc. I feel like I really helped him jumpstart his app and helped him understand the basics of different concepts.

If he didn't have that integral sticker on his laptop I would have never had this opportunity to finally share some iOS development experience.

For this I would like to thank my high school calculus teacher, with whom I spent many classes at Starbucks because I was an only student. I'd like to thank laptop stickers, and finally I would like to thank the coffee shop.

TL;DR: Said hi to a guy with an integral sticker on his laptop, a few months later he approaches me for help understanding iOS development.

TL;DR :

"when i die i want my group project members to lower me into my grave so they can let me down one last time"

STORY TIME

Last year in College, I had two simultaneous projects. Both were semester long projects. One was for a database class an another was for a software engineering class.

As you can guess, the focus of the projects was very different. Databases we made some desktop networked chat application with a user login system and what not in Java. SE we made an app store with an approval system and admin panels and ratings and reviews and all that jazz in Meteor.js.

The DB project we had 4 total people and one of them was someone we'll call Frank. Frank was also in my SE project group. Frank disappeared for several weeks. Not in class, didn't contact us, and at one point the professors didn't know much either. As soon as we noticed it would be an issue, we talked to the professors. Just keeping them in the loop will save you a lot of trouble down the road. I'm assuming there was some medical or family emergency because the professors were very understanding with him once he started coming back to class and they had a chance to talk.

Lesson 1: If you have that guy that doesn't show up or communicate, don't be a jerk to them and communicate with your professor. Also, don't stop trying to contact the rogue partner. Maybe they'll come around sometime.

It sucked to lose 25% of our team for a project, but Frank appreciated that we didn't totally ignore him and throw him under the bus to the point that the last day of class he came up to me and said, "hey, open your book bag and bring it next to mine." He then threw a LARGE bottle of booze in there as a thank you.

Lesson 2: Treat humans as humans. Things go wrong and understanding that will get you a lot farther with people than trying to make them feel terrible about something that may have been out of their control.

Our DB project went really well. We got an A, we demoed, it worked, it was cool. The biggest problem is I was the only person that had taken a networking class so I ended up doing a large portion of the work. I wish I had taken other people's skills into account when we were deciding on a project. Especially because the only requirement was that it needed to have a minimum of 5 tables and we had to use some SQL language (aka, we couldn't use no-SQL).

The SE project had Frank and a music major who wanted to minor in CS (and then 3 other regular CS students aside from me). This assignment was make an app store using any technology you want. But, you had to use agile sprints. So we had weekly meetings with the "customer" (the TA), who would change requirements on us to keep us on our toes and tell us what they wanted done as a priority for the next meeting. Seriously, just like real life. It was so much fun trying to stay ahead of that.

So we met up and tried to decided what to use. One kid said Java because we all had it for school. The big issue is trying to make a Java web app is a pain in the ass. Seriously, there are so many better things to use. Other teams decided to use Django because they all wanted to learn Python. I suggested why not use something with a nice package system to minimize duplicating work that had already been done and tested by someone. Kid 1 didn't like that because he said in the real world you have to make your own software and not use packages. Little did he know that I had worked in SE for a few years already and knew damn well that every good project has code from somewhere else that has already solved a problem you're facing. We went with Java the first week. It failed miserably. Nobody could get the server set up on their computers. Using VCS with it required you to keep the repo outside of the where you wrote code and copy and paste changes in there. It was just a huge flop so everyone else voted to change.

Lesson 3: Be flexible. Be open to learning new things. Don't be afraid to try something new. It'll make you a better developer in the long run.

So we ended up using Meteor. Why? We all figured we could pick up javascript super easy.Two of us already knew it. And the real time thing would make for some cool effects when an app got a approved or a comment was made. We got to work and the one kid was still pissed. I just checked the repo and the only thing he committed was fixing the spelling of on word in the readme.

We sat down one day and worked for 4 straight hours. We finished the whole project in that time. While other teams were figuring out how to layout their homepage, we had a working user system and admin page and everything. Our TA was trying to throw us for loops by asking for crazy things and we still came through. We had tests that ran along side the application as you used it. It was friggin cool.

Lesson 4: If possible, pick the right tool for the job. Not the tool you know. Everything in CS has a purpose. If you use it for its purpose, you will save days off of a project.

First of all, I hate crammers so much. These people kill the industry without even understanding it. They turned interviews into exams, missed the point of hiring, and saw no distinction between knowledge and information all the time. They don't understand that if you can google an answer in five seconds, it's not knowledge. It's information.

They don't understand that questions like 'what will Python do if you delete an item from a dict while iterating over it' are complete nonsense. They don't understand that it's not 'dig deep'; it's just a bad practice that leads to errors, thus must be avoided. The fact of remembering 'RuntimeError: dictionary changed size during iteration' means that you haven't been avoiding it enough.

One more example. Which signature is correct?
- ApplicationListener<ContextRefreshedEvent>
- ApplicationListener<ContextRefreshEvent>
- ApplicationListener<RefreshedEvent>
- ApplicationListener<RefreshEvent>

Second. What's the point of forcing you to write compilable code in google docs? Do they really expect that one could possibly remember 'import org.springframework.beans.factory.annotation.Autowired;'? Seriously?

Third. Why do they expect me to know Spark, Java, J2EE, Spring Boot, Python, Kafka, Postgres, React/Redux, TypeScript, and work for miserable 70K EUR?

What's wrong with the European IT job market? Are they fucking nuts?

What an absolute fucking disaster of a day. Strap in, folks; it's time for a bumpy ride!

I got a whole hour of work done today. The first hour of my morning because I went to work a bit early. Then people started complaining about Jenkins jobs failing on that one Jenkins server our team has been wanting to decom for two years but management won't let us force people to move to new servers. It's a single server with over four thousand projects, some of which run massive data processing jobs that last DAYS. The server was originally set up by people who have since quit, of course, and left it behind for my team to adopt with zero documentation.

Anyway, the 500GB disk is 100% full. The memory (all 64GB of it) is fully consumed by stuck jobs. We can't track down large old files to delete because du chokes on the workspace folder with thousands of subfolders with no Ram to spare. We decide to basically take a hacksaw to it, deleting the workspace for every job not currently in progress. This of course fucked up some really poorly-designed pipelines that relied on workspaces persisting between jobs, so we had to deal with complaints about that as well.

So we get the Jenkins server up and running again just in time for AWS to have a major incident affecting EC2 instance provisioning in our primary region. People keep bugging me to fix it, I keep telling them that it's Amazon's problem to solve, they wait a few minutes and ask me to fix it again. Emails flying back and forth until that was done.

Lunch time already. But the fun isn't over yet!

I get back to my desk to find out that new hires or people who got new Mac laptops recently can't even install our toolchain, because management has started handing out M1 Macs without telling us and all our tools are compiled solely for x86_64. That took some troubleshooting to even figure out what the problem was because the only error people got from homebrew was that the formula was empty when it clearly wasn't.

After figuring out that problem (but not fully solving it yet), one team starts complaining to us about a Github problem because we manage the github org. Except it's not a github problem and I already knew this because they are a Problem Team that uses some technical authoring software with Git integration but they only have even the barest understanding of what Git actually does. Turns out it's a Git problem. An update for Git was pushed out recently that patches a big bad vulnerability and the way it was patched causes problems because they're using Git wrong (multiple users accessing the same local repo on a samba share). It's a huge vulnerability so my entire conversation with them went sort of like:

"Please don't."
"We have to."
"Fine, here's a workaround, this will allow arbitrary code execution by anyone with physical or virtual access to this computer that you have sitting in an unlocked office somewhere."
"How do I run a Git command I don't use Git."

So that dealt with, I start taking a look at our toolchain, trying to figure out if I can easily just cross-compile it to arm64 for the M1 macbooks or if it will be a more involved fix. And I find all kinds of horrendous shit left behind by the people who wrote the tools that, naturally, they left for us to adopt when they quit over a year ago. I'm talking entire functions in a tool used by hundreds of people that were put in as a joke, poorly documented functions I am still trying to puzzle out, and exactly zero comments in the code and abbreviated function names like "gars", "snh", and "jgajawwawstai".

While I'm looking into that, the person from our team who is responsible for incident communication finally gets the AWS EC2 provisioning issue reported to IT Operations, who sent out an alert to affected users that should have gone out hours earlier.

Meanwhile, according to the health dashboard in AWS, the issue had already been resolved three hours before the communication went out and the ticket remains open at this moment, as far as I know.

I'm disappointed with my boss.

I've always felt that the company I work for was different, I'm a web dev in a foreign country, finding a job as a fresh graduate wasn't easy at all.

before joining this company, all the employers I've met expected so many skills from foreigners like me, while they sat the bar so low for local fresh grad candidates.

Except my current boss, after the second interview he said that he believes in my potential and he wants to take this risk, the risk of hiring a foreign fresh graduate.

After I joined I worked my ass off and after 9 months I became a team lead.

And my boss said to me that the risk he took was completely worth it and I exceeded expectations.

Now I'm involved in assessing candidates applying for web development role at this company, we have 3 candidates 2 local and 1 foreigner.

Ironically the foreigner proved great potential and understanding of web technologies that exceeds a fresh entry role.

The other 2 local were alright, need training but they pass the criteria for an entry level role.

I reviewed this objectively and urged the same man that hired me to consider hiring the foriegner.

He said no, because of Visa costs and because of the lengthy legal process employers need to go through to hire a foreigner, and asked me to move forward with the 2 locals and not lose them to another company.

I felt that, if i were in the foriegner candidate's shoes I would've felt that there's something wrong with me for that no one wants to hire me for my skills and what I've worked hard to achieve was all not enough, it would make me feel like an outcast.

I know that I should do what I'm told, after all he's the employer, but still.. this feeling is bothering me, in a way I feel like I've cheated or I was just lucky and I didn't really earn this job.

TLDR; Wrote an awesome piece of code, but there's no one capable of understanding how hard it is.

I spent an entire night building an insanely complicated automation script, that picks out certain configuration files (in javascript fml), does some crazy parsing to pick out strings, passes them into a free translation API, translates them, and does more insane parsing to insert those strings as javascript objects.

Spent 3 hours on the bloody parsing algorithm alone.

Manager: Oh this language is really nice. Good of you to discover it can do that.

I didn't "DISCOVER" it ffs! Its a product of my head! I built the damn algo from scratch.

Seriously, screw non devs who trivialize the complexities of writing a good program. Its NOT as simple as opening notepad and typing in

import {insanelyComplexSolution} from 'daveOnTheInternet'

I could bitch about XSLT again, as that was certainly painful, but that’s less about learning a skill and more about understanding someone else’s mental diarrhea, so let me pick something else.

My most painful learning experience was probably pointers, but not pointers in the usual sense of `char *ptr` in C and how they’re totally confusing at first. I mean, it was that too, but in addition it was how I had absolutely none of the background needed to understand them, not having any learning material (nor guidance), nor even a typical compiler to tell me what i was doing wrong — and on top of all of that, only being able to run code on a device that would crash/halt/freak out whenever i made a mistake. It was an absolute nightmare.

Here’s the story:

Someone gave me the game RACE for my TI-83 calculator, but it turned out to be an unlocked version, which means I could edit it and see the code. I discovered this later on by accident while trying to play it during class, and when I looked at it, all I saw was incomprehensible garbage. I closed it, and the game no longer worked. Looking back I must have changed something, but then I thought it was just magic. It took me a long time to get curious enough to look at it again.

But in the meantime, I ended up played with these “programs” a little, and made some really simple ones, and later some somewhat complex ones. So the next time I opened RACE again I kind of understood what it was doing.

Moving on, I spent a year learning TI-Basic, and eventually reached the limit of what it could do. Along the way, I learned that all of the really amazing games/utilities that were incredibly fast, had greyscale graphics, lowercase text, no runtime indicator, etc. were written in “Assembly,” so naturally I wanted to use that, too.

I had no idea what it was, but it was the obvious next step for me, so I started teaching myself. It was z80 Assembly, and there was practically no documents, resources, nothing helpful online.

I found the specs, and a few terrible docs and other sources, but with only one year of programming experience, I didn’t really understand what they were telling me. This was before stackoverflow, etc., too, so what little help I found was mostly from forum posts, IRC (mostly got ignored or made fun of), and reading other people’s source when I could find it. And usually that was less than clear.

And here’s where we dive into the specifics. Starting with so little experience, and in TI-Basic of all things, meant I had zero understanding of pointers, memory and addresses, the stack, heap, data structures, interrupts, clocks, etc. I had mastered everything TI-Basic offered, which astoundingly included arrays and matrices (six of each), but it hid everything else except basic logic and flow control. (No, there weren’t even functions; it has labels and goto.) It has 27 numeric variables (A-Z and theta, can store either float or complex numbers), 8 Lists (numeric arrays), 6 matricies (2d numeric arrays), 10 strings, and a few other things like “equations” and literal bitmap pictures.

Soo… I went from knowing only that to learning pointers. And pointer math. And data structures. And pointers to pointers, and the stack, and function calls, and all that goodness. And remember, I was learning and writing all of this in plain Assembly, in notepad (or on paper at school), not in C or C++ with a teacher, a textbook, SO, and an intelligent compiler with its incredibly helpful type checking and warnings. Just raw trial and error. I learned what I could from whatever cryptic sources I could find (and understand) online, and applied it.

But actually using what I learned? If a pointer was wrong, it resulted in unexpected behavior, memory corruption, freezes, etc. I didn’t have a debugger, an emulator, etc. I had notepad, the barebones compiler, and my calculator.

Also, iterating meant changing my code, recompiling, factory resetting my calculator (removing the battery for 30+ sec) because bugs usually froze it or corrupted something, then transferring the new program over, and finally running it. It was soo slowwwww. But I made steady progress.

Painful learning experience? Check.
Pointer hell? Absolutely.

Spent 2-3 weeks on implementing a new feature, a guy with 10 years of experience jumps in and solves it within 5 days.

*Oh! I forgot to mention, it was his first time working with the framework.

I must say his OOP skills are really good, not sure if this is something you learn by reading books or simply by practice.

I strongly believe that if you have a good understanding of how to build apps with OOP pattern, you'll do a great job in the SW industry.

My life could get worse, but it's really shitty now.

Suffering from a serious back injury since last year, my health has been not so positieve lately.
It put a toll on my mood, which in turn asked it's price regarding my relationship. Needless to say that did not go well. Already a fe months single but we kept in touch.

Three days ago my back injury returned, and was unable to lead a normal life. Constant pain, coyld not even move in the house. Even going to the toilet was a terrible experience because when you move, you're in a world of pain.

I asked my ex girlfriend to help me, since she was the only one having a key to my house.

When she arrived i hoped to have some moral support and to help me mive around, ensuring i would not injure myself any more.

Instead i received the cold shoulder. When she wanted to help pe up she did it a bit too hard and the pain sheered thrpughout my body. Screaming in pain.

She promptly left, leaving keys behind.

The hardest part is that she just left without me being able to explain clearly why i screamed. She thought i was yelling at her while in reality i was yelling due to the immense pain.

After that i had to cut ties forever. Tabula rasa. So i removed everything that is related to that time and locked it in my vault.

Since then i can hardly focus, my mibd is numb and i cannot think straight. The alcohol and other sedatives are probably also involved, but still i feel my life is a mountain of depressing shit.

Needed to vent. And yes i post this because i have a need for some understanding, yes for now i crave for some attention and some encouraging, supportive words. I'm left With no other options since the person i wanted it from the most has simply left... And the fact i am unable to actually be social outside...

Fuck friends and relationships, right?

"I'm almost done, I'll just need to add tests!"

Booom! You did it, that was a nuke going off in my head.

No, you shouldn't just need to add tests. The tests should have been written from the get go! You most likely won't cover all the cases. You won't know if adding the tests will break your feature, as you had none, as you refactor your untested mess in order to make your code testable.

When reading your mess of a test case and the painful mocking process you went through, I silently cry out into the void: "Why oh why!? All of this suffering could have been avoided!"

Since most of the time, your mocking pain boils down to not understanding what your "unit" in your "unit test" should be.

So let it be said:

- If you want to build a parser for an XML file, then just write a function / class whose *only* purpose is: parse the XML file, return a value object. That's it. Nothing more, nothing less.
- If you want to build a parser for an XML file, it MUST NOT: download a zip, extract that zip, merge all those files to one big file, parse that big file, talk to some other random APIs as a side-effect, and then return a value object.

Because then you suddenly have to mock away a http service and deal with zip files in your test cases.

The http util of your programming language will most likely work. Your unzip library will most likely work. So just assume it working. There are valid use cases where you want to make sure you acutally send a request and get a response, yet I am talking unit test here only.

In the scope of a class, keep the public methods to a reasonable minimum. As for each public method you shall at least create one test case. If you ever have the feeling "I want to test that private method" replace that statement in your head with: "I should extract that functionality to a new class where that method public. I then can create a unit test case a for that." That new service then becomes a dependency in your current service. Problem solved.

Also, mocking away dependencies should a simple process. If your mocking process fills half the screen, your test setup is overly complicated and your class is doing too much.

That's why I currently dig functional programming so much. When you build pure functions without side effects, unit tests are easy to write. Yet you can apply pure functions to OOP as well (to a degree). Embrace immutability.

Sidenote:

It's really not helpful that a lot of developers don't understand the difference between unit, functional acceptance, integration testing. Then they wonder why they can't test something easily, write overly complex test cases, until someone points out to them: No, in the scope of unit tests, we don't need to test our persistance layer. We just assume that it works. We should only test our businsess logic. You know: "Assuming that I get that response from the database, I expect that to happen." You don't need a test db, make a real query against that, in order to test that. (That still is a valid thing to do. Yet not in the scope of unit tests.)

one of my kids has a sleep problem, night terrors.

she wakes up in the middle of the night and just screams and says nonsensical shit.

we live in an apartment and our understanding old pieces of shit neighbors have complained already in the past.

no matter what you do, she'll increase the intensity every minute. you can hug, you can sing, you can ignore, you can try to soothe. She'll still screamcry.

We also have a 8 month old that obviously reacts by crying.

So imagine that, you're there, calmly sleeping, well into your deep sleep, and suddenly a symphony of pain and suffering visits you, and destroys your emotions in a couple of minutes.

I'm not even fully conscious to adjust. It just strikes me really hard.

I think it's a 6 in the scale of mental pain for me.

Anyhow, other people have a higher threshold, this is my experience.

Is it just me who sees this? JS development in a somewhat more complex setting (like vue-storefront) is just a horrible mess.
I have 10+ experience in java, c# and python, and I've never needed more than a a few hours to get into a new codebase, understanding the overall system, being able to guess where to fix a given problem.
But with JS (and also TS for that matter) I'm at my limits. Most of the files look like they don't do anything. There seems to be no structure, both from a file system point of view, nor from a code point of view.
It start with little things like 300 char long lines including various lambdas, closures and ifs with useless variables names, over overly generic and minified method/function names to inconsistent naming of files, classes and basically everything else.
I used to just set a breakpoint somewhere in my code (or in a compiled dependency) wait this it is being hit and go back and forth to learn how the system state changes.
This seems to be highly limited in JS. I didn't find the one way to just being able to debug, everything that is. There are weird things like transpilers, compiler, minifiers, bablers and what not else. There is an error? Go f... yourself ...
And what do I find as the number one tipp all across the internet? Console.log?? are you kidding me, sure just tell me, your kidding me right?
If I would have to describe the JS world in one word, I would use "inconsistency". It's all just a pain in the ass.

I remember when I switcher from VisualStudio/C# to Eclipse/Java I felt like traveling back in time for about 10 years. Everyting seemd so ... old-schoolish, buggy, weird.
When I now switch from java to JS it makes me feel the same way. It's all so highly unproductive, inconsistent, undeterministic, cobbled together.
For one inconveinience the JS communinity seems to like to build huge shitloads of stuff around it, instead of fixing the obvious. And noone seems to see that.
It's like they are all blinded somehow. Currently I'm also trying to implement a small react app based on react-admin. The simplest things to develop and debug are a nightmare. There is so much boilerplate that to write that most people in the internet just keep copying stuff, without even trying to understand what it actually does.
I've always been a guy that tries to understand what the fuck this code actuall does. And for most of the parts I just thing, that the stuff there is useless or could be done in a way more readable way. But instead, all the devs out there just seem to chose the "copy and fix somehow-ish" way.
I'm all in for component-izing stuff. I like encapsulation, I'm a OOP guy by heart. But what react and similar frameworks do is just insane. It's just not right (for some part).
Especially when you have to remember so much stuff that is just mechanics/boilerplate without having any actual "business logical function".

People always say java is so verbose. I don't think it is, there is so few syntax that it almost reads like a prose story. When I look at JS and TS instead, I'm overwhelmed by all the syntax, almost wondering every second line, what the actual fuck this could mean. The boilerplate/logic ration seems way to off ..

So it really makes me wonder, if all you JS devs out there are just so used to that stuff, that you cannot imagine how it could be done better? I still remember my C# days, but I admin that I just got used to java. So I can somehow understand that all. But JS is just another few levels less deeper.
But maybe I'm just lazy and too old ...

I'm turning 28 this year and I still feel I got a really really long way ahead in understanding Javascript and all the new web app building technologies happening.

Feeling a little frustrated for not learning faster and getting kind a stuck, I'm not getting any younger.

I found university very worthwhile, mainly for what it exposed me to that I wouldn’t have necessarily learned otherwise. University exposed me to a lot of knowledge which allowed me to discover the fields and concepts that really interested me. It also forced me to learn math, and I’ve come to really love mathematics, even though my knowledge is still not that deep. I really respect and appreciate math now that I have more than a superficial understanding of it.

CS-wise, the things that have been most useful in practice have been complexity, data structures, concurrency, and others, but complexity is probably the absolute most important thing to at least learn the basics of.

I would not say that university is a necessity though. You can absolutely get by teaching yourself, especially if you are disciplined/interested enough to keep doing it. The important thing is to learn *what* to learn.

Why am I such an average ?

It's just a sad realisation. Nobody cares but I wanna send this out there, just to write thoughts.. I am 18 in 3rd year of high school (grammar school so nothing IT related, basically waste of time) and in IT I'm all self taught but I feel like I could be better if I just didn't [something]..

I feel like I wanna learn so many things but when I look at you, it seems like a common problem in the IT sphere so hey, average guy joining the club.

I also feel dumb when programming. I didn't manage to learn C++ in it's entirety because to really accomplish something, you've got so many ways to do it and finding the best one requires deep understanding of the tools you've got at your disposal with the language and I feel like I'm not capable of this(self learn, in school/Uni that's different story).. But many (most) of you are. I've tried many coding challenges and when I got it working, I just saw how someone did it in one line just by layering functions that I've never heard of..

Also, we've got kinda specific national competition here in many fields including IT for high schools.. And the winners always do sometimes like "AI driven Life simulation" or "Self flying drone made from ATMega from scratch with 3D simulation in C# to it" or "Game engine" or whatever shit and it's always from grammar schools and never IT related schools.. They are like me. Maybe someone helped them, I don't know, but they are just so far away from me while I'm here struggling to get the basic level of math for any kind of machine learning..

Yeah I've written Neural Network from scratch in C but meh, honestly it's pretty basic stuff .. I'd rather understand derivatives which we're going to learn next year and I'm too lazy to learn it from khan academy because I always learn something else.. Like processing (actually codetrain started teaching tensorflow so that might be the light for me...) Or VHDL (guys you can create your own chip / CPU from scratch and it's not even hard and OMFG it's so fucking cool , full adder done yay) or RPi or commodore 64 assembly or game development with Godot and just meh..

I mean, this sounds exactly like not knowing what to do and doing nothing in the end. That was me like 6-12 months ago. Now I'm managing to pick 2-3 things and focus them and actually feel the progress.

But I lost track of the original point.. I didn't do anything special, every time I'm programming something, everyone does it better and I feel dumb. I will probably never do anything special, everyone around says "He's still learning he's genius" but they have no idea.

I mean, have you seen one of the newest videos on Google's YouTube channel (I openly hate them, but I will keep that away for now), something like "Sarah story" ? It's about girl that apparently didn't care about IT but self learned tensorflow on high school. I think it may be bullshit (like ALL of their videos ) but it's probably just fancied, not complete lie.

And again, here I am. I now C but I'm incapable of learning to program good which most of you did and are now doing for living. I'm incapable to do anything cool, just understanding what everybody else did and replicating it. I'm incapable of being clever.

Sorry, just misusing devrant to vent a bit

How I met python
[long read but worth]

There's nothing wrong with falling in love with a programming language for her looks. I mean, let's face it - Python does have a rockin' body of modules, and a damn good set of utilities and interpreters on various platforms. Her whitespace-sensitive syntax is easy on the eyes, and it's a beautiful sight to wake up to in the morning after a long night of debugging. The way she sways those releases on a consistent cycle - she knows how to treat you right, you know?

But let's face it - a lot of other languages see the attention she's getting, and they get jealous. Really jealous. They try and make her feel bad by pointing out the GIL, and they try and convince her that she's not "good enough" for parallel programming or enterprise-level applications. They say that her lack of static typing gives her programmers headaches, and that as an interpreted language, she's not fast enough for performance-critical applications.

She hears what those other, older languages like Java and C++ say, and she thinks she's not stable or mature enough. She hears what those shallow, beauty-obsessed languages like Ruby say, and she thinks she's not pretty enough. But she's trying really hard, you know? She hits the gym every day, trying to come up with new and better ways of JIT'ing and optimizing. She's experimenting with new platforms and compilation techniques all the time. She wants you to love her more, because she cares.

But then you hear about how bad she feels, and how hard she's trying, and you just look into her eyes, sighing. You take Python out for a walk - holding her hand - and tell her that she's the most beautiful language in the world, but that's not the only reason you love her.

You tell her she was raised right - Guido gave her core functionality and a deep philosophy she's never forgotten. You tell her you appreciate her consistent releases and her detailed and descriptive documentation. You tell her that she has a great set of friends who are supportive and understanding - friends like Google, Quora, and Facebook. And finally, with tears in your eyes, you tell her that with her broad community support, ease of development, and well-supported frameworks, you know she's a language you want to be with for a long, long time.

After saying all this, you look around and notice that the two of you are alone. Letting go of Python's hand, you start to get down on one knee. Her eyes get wide as you try and say the words - but she just puts her finger on your lips and whispers, "Yes".

The moon is bright. You know things are going to be okay now.

TLDR; Go to bottom of post.

Around this time two years ago was the start of my group project in University. The project was to write an app in android and have a web side to it too. The group was to be overseen by a member of staff. The first meeting was introductions and to look at the spec, during the second we were to decide a group leader (PM) and other positions.
A person I shall call BD and I volunteered for PM. I didn't have experience with leadership but wanted some, and was the only one with confidence in android, the biggest part of the system. I got four of the votes.
BD, with his scouts experience, not being afraid to breathe down people's necks and bash some heads together, and having been PM last year, with his group receiving 69% (he failed the year and was resitting), earned 5. One guy was missing.
When it came to sorting out roles and responsibilities, BD confessed to not being a strong coder but that he'd help here and there. His role was planning our deadlines, doing our Gantt chart for deliverables, and was supposed to write a really detailed spec. He didn't have it at the meeting of the next week, as it was still in the works, and never messaged anyone. Next week he turned up with a Gantt chart of 1A4 page that only included the deadlines and deliverables in the spec, with three colours. One for android team, one for DB guy, and one for web team.
The guy who didn't turn up for voting got a girlfriend, a job at mcdonalds and did barely a thing. One guy in the web team did everything, carrying his friend who wouldn't do work (and also got swept out to see in a rubber boat with one of his bros lol (he was rescued)), and even though I'd done android dev I wasn't as quick a learner as two others in the team. Out of 10 people, 6 did real work.
The web guys stopped coming to meetings as they were taken over by android talk, and as we were quite behind, BG tried yellow carding them. They turned around with the website pretty much done, this one guy doing more than the 4 of us on android had. Yellow card lifted. We'd already complained about BD and his lack of everything (except screen brightness as he sat at the front of the lecture theatres with his wide brimmed hat looking at 9gag and videos (remembering he said he was resitting that year)) but grew a stronger dislike. Found out that he spent most of his time with his gf at our secretary/fellow android dev's house. Come coding week, he disappears entirely, only to attend meetings. He gave us a shell of the android code used for his previous year's project (along with documentation, complete with names and dates of updates, most of them (including the planning ones BD was supposed to do) bearing either one of two names. It was behind where we were at the time and had a lot of differences to our spec, and if we had used it BD may have used that to pull us down with him if things went wrong. He resurfaced at the end with the final documentation of how we'd all done, including reports on how each member had performed, which we were supposed to have reviewed. Our main, most proficient dev he accused of being irritable and brash, and a bad communicator. He was Norwegian, his voice was just a bit gruff, and he was driven and didn't waste time. He bashed the web team for not turning up, and had already been rude and unhelpful to everyone who voted for him in the first place.
In our own reports we all devoted paragraphs to delicately describing his contributions, excluding his suggestion that we use the code he gave us. Before we had our results and our work was completed, he individually kicked us from our group's facebook group and unfriended us.
Our 43% mark at the end, coupled with his -40% penalty from the red card we had him on, felt good, but not as good as a better result would have, especially as the fool that was BD would be inflicted on a group a third time. He changed to some other course after that year finished, so he must have failed his resit of second year.
During third year, a friend of mine who was PM for a group that passed well passed other things with too slim a margin to be happy, so chose to resit the year. He didn't have to do the group project again, and had that time free. But BD had to resit. His group had 69%. A yellow card with a 20% deduction wouldn't do it, so he MUST have had a red card as PM his previous year. Well that didn't come up when he claimed credit for his team's 69% during elections... My housemate's compsci boyfriend 2 years up overheard me talking about him, he was in 1st year with BD. BD failed and resat 1st year too. 4 years and he couldn't make anything stick. I feel bad for him through understanding the pains lack of work and internet distraction bring, and unfortunately I can't wish bad things on him because he brings them on himself. I wish I never see his face again though.

TLDR; Guy in group project lies and is dishonest from start to finish, getting PM pos by 1 vote. Gets what he earns.

Been really busy with things haven’t got around to posting a book in like a week or so..

But I’ll post one today..

This book...

This book, available for free online or you can buy it, written in 1994. But so under appreciated by people for some reason most people never have seen it or know about it. But this is the ONLY book I know of that actually covers this topic.. the only book in existence that specifically goes thru how OOP can be done with C.

NOW hold up before you say just use C++ stop and think for a second.. bear with me.

First off this book is purely for informational purposes and educational use to deepen your understanding of what OOP is actually doing behind the scenes in languages like C++ where keywords exist for these things and you just blindly use them without thinking about under the hood.

This book contains a lot of code and builds you up a complexly library from scratch to make OOP in C... now I don’t take this book literally and this but I have implemented some concepts from this book in projects in the past, and it helps a lot.

Also in my honest opinion If you finish this book, you will be a better C programmer AND c++ programmer, C programming because it teaches you a lot about complex things that you never thought about doing with the language. It proves you can do polymorphism can do inheritance and encapsulation. And it’s not really bloated either.

This books is an awesome book, if you don’t understand C pointers you definitely will after this book.. if you don’t understand OOP in C++ what’s really going on.. you will after this book. After all C++ began as just a preprocessor of C.

Great book for writing reusable, extendable large scale embedded c systems.

Anyway.. rare book of which should not be rare considering it’s free.

Just a couple weeks ago I felt a bit like a hero.

My boss, who seems to have only a vague understanding of realistic deadlines, for once made an error that gave me more time than I needed, not less. I was working on a feature that other work would rely on, so some people had to wait to work on their own projects until I was done.

My boss said it would be done in two weeks, but the only reason why it would have taken that long was because I'd have to submit a ticket to our identity management team to set up the SSO integration with our identity provider, and their turnaround time is two weeks. Or it used to be, but they've actually gotten really fast recently, and as I'd actually grabbed this feature from someone else who had to take a few days off, he'd already gotten the SSO stuff taken care of in advance. My boss promised two weeks and I finished in two days. The shocked silence when they asked for a status update in our next meeting and I told them I'd just finished it was music to my ears.

I started my internship at the end of the year..
Fuck my ass!!! This code I have to work with is a huge pile of shit.
The code base I need to work with is around 40k LOC. It is a mixture of C++, C, Java, Python, Bash and I think I saw some lonely js files around.

A list of awesome parts:
- Paths are hard coded.
- Redundant code everywhere
- No documentation or inline comments available

Most of the comments in the code are just old code that is not used anymore. But the cherry on the turd is the class that should provide all kind of useful functions in my daily routine. About ninety percent of the functions have the same description or nothing. Sometimes a function name says "readSomethingFromSomewhere" but instead it writes something to a file. It is really confusing and I need to check everything twice instead of rely on what the function name promises.
I have also learned why copy paste isn't that good. The brief descriptions of every method in a files are always the same.

getName() - Description: Fork child process
getIp() - Description: Fork child process
getIpv6() - Description: Fork child process.

Surprise: None of these functions forks a child process. :D

Another awesome feature is the thing that they store up to five different versions of libraries. Everyone with slight modifications but no hint which one you need to use. Sometimes it is the newest, sometimes the oldest which is running in production. Another case of try and error.
Oh and my dev machine is a potato with a power supply and a fan. I started with NetBeans and every time I compiled the code it sounds like the machine wants to lift off and leave for a better place. (At this point I switched to Emacs and everything runs smoothly now)

At first I thought that I'm just not that good at coding and understanding a big project from scratch but some colleagues have the same problem. The whole system is very inflexible and it is all about "std::cout"-debugging to check if your changes do what you want them to do.

Currently I'm just trying to fix this mess to make the life for the next student or employee easier. The first month was just frustrating as hell. I need to ask so many questions and most of the time the answer was "I don't know, haven't touched this code in years". Needless to say that my progress isn't that awesome but at least I get a nice payment for 20 hours of work a week.

Some years ago i attended to a summer school abroad. I instantly built a connecection with this one girl, we spend the whole week together, talking, sharing humor, deep conversations etc. We also won the prize for the best project together. I guess it looked like the beginning of a love story for the rest of the course. For me it didn't exactly, actually I didn't had much romantic feelings for her; she was the arrogant, manipulative type I thought I could handle a friend but never as girl friend. We shared some darkness so to say. But I really hoped for a new close friendship. Since she had a boyfriend back home i thought she most likely wanted just the same. Anyway I was a bit worried she might want more because she made me quite a lot of compliments and told me how she liked me.
And yes, she wanted more: Whenever we talked on the phone after the summer school or met (she lived in a city not far away from mine by coincidence) she begged me for help with coding. She had a well paid as extremely interesting PHD position with a topic between political science and computer science. Besides classical humanities methods her topic would require a lot of coding though. But she had zero, absolutely zero clue of programming, and, as it turned out, zero interesst. I told her from the beginning she would have to learn quite a lot or pay someone to code for her. It was far too much to do as a favour by a friends or such. And, since it was part of her fucking PHD it would have been cheating somehow of she didn't do it herself. But instead, she kept texting me if I could 'help to fix some bugs', sending me unrelated code fragments she copied from SO and not even tried to understand. So I told her to fuck off at one point. After all it was not that we have been friends for decades; we only knew each other for a couple of months an spent only one week together. So thats it.
But I still think of it from time to time and it makes me angry because it feels like she was only nice to me because she thought i am this nerd guy who falls instantly in love to a charming good looking girl and does everything for her. I did neither at all but indeed wanted to be friends with her, thats bad enough. It even makes me more more angry that she actually has this awesome PHD project about politics in the fucking digital world and think of programmers like this. And that she will succeed without understanding anything bacause in the end there would have been a dude who did all the work for her I bet.

So, this is probably somewhat esoteric but...

While studying at university I had a "programming paradigms" module, dunno why they called it that, it was more like "introduction to functional programming".

So, it's kinda mind bending, we'd only really started to get our heads around classical object oriented programming and they throw functional programming at us.

It's worse than that though, for do they use an established language, like lisp/scheme, functional Python, or even given Haskell?

No, of course they didn't. They taught us Oz.

You probably won't have heard of it, but this language is burned into the back of my brain, along with a vague understanding of the n-queens problem we had to solve graphically (using qTk, which I dunno if someone took qt and tk and blended them, I stopped asking questions after a while).

To top it off did this language (at the time) have a stand alone interpreter? Did it buggery! It was coupled to the Mozart programming system, which is just Emacs (which has a bloody lisp built into it,so close, yet so far 😭).

It gets worse, though, oh does it get worse, for pause dear reader and consider, have you ever heard of Mozart/oz before, I'd put money on most of you had not heard of it until today.

For, you see, I believe at the time of writing, one, yes, ONE text book exists on this language. When I was doing my assignment there was merely some published conference notes and language design documents.

That's not all, I was not the only one experiencing difficulties with this language, someone in the class ended up pouring through the mailing lists and found the very tutor teaching the class struggling at first to understand the language.

I had to repeat that year. The functional programming class was one semester.

When I retook that year, it was a whole year long. However, halfway through the year, original tutor was fired and a new tutor was hired to teach the language.

He was, understandably, just as confused as we were.

There was a Starbucks and a pub equidistant from the lecture hall, though in opposite directions. From lecture to lecture we had no idea which one we'd end up in.

I have reason to believe Mozart/Oz it some sort of otherworldly abomination designed to give students the occasional nightmare flashback, long after they've left.

My room had post it notes, sheets of paper, print outs, diagrams, doodles and pens, just stuck to the wall, I looked like a raving lunatic three hours away from being institutionalised. There was string connecting one diagram to the next and images of a chess queen all over. As I attempted to solve the n-queens problem.

Madmans knowledge, I call it. I can never unlearn all that, in fact it seeps into much of the code I write. Such information was not meant for the minds of a simple country bumpkin such as myself...

Mozart/Oz... I wouldn't be the programmer I am today without it, and that's frankly terrifying...

At work, my closest relation is with the DBA. Dude is a genius when it comes to proper database management as well as having a very high level of understanding concerning server administration, how he got that good at that I have no clue, he just says that he likes to fuck around with servers, Linux in particular although he also knows a lot about Windows servers.

Thing is, the dude used to work as a dev way back when VB pre VB.NET was all the rage and has been generating different small tools for his team of analysts(I used to be a part of his team) to use with only him maintaining them. He mentioned how he did not like how Microsoft just said fk u to VB6 developers, but that he was happy as long as he could use VB. He relearned how to do most of the GUI stuff he was used to do with VB6 into VB.NEt and all was good with the world. I have seen his code, proper OOP practices and architectural decisions, etc etc. Nothing to complain about his code, seems easy enough to extend, properly documented as well.

Then he got with me in order to figure out how to breach the gap between building GUI applications into web form, so that we could just host those apps in one of our servers and his users go from there, boy was he not prepared to see the amount of fuckery that we do in the web development world. Last time my dude touched web development there was still Classic ASP with JScript and VBScript(we actually had the same employer at one point in the past in which I had to deal with said technology, not bad, but definitely not something I recommend for the current state of web development) and decided that the closest thing to what he was used was either PHP(which he did not enjoy, no problem with that really, he just didn't click with the language) and WebForms using VB.NET, which he also did not like on account of them basically being on support mode since Microsoft is really pushing for people to adopt dotnet core.

After came ASP.NET with MVC, now, he did like it, but still had that lil bug in his head that told him that sticking to core was probably a better idea since he was just starting, why not start with the newest and greatest? Then in hit(both of us actually) that to this day Microsoft still not has command line templates for building web applications in .net core using VB.NET. I thought it was weird, so I decided to look into. Turns out, that without using Razor, you can actually build Web APIs with VB.NET just fine if you just convert a C# template into VB.NET, the process was...err....tricky, and not something we would want to do for other projects, with that in we decided to look into Microsoft's reasons to not have VB.NET. We discovered how Microsoft is not keeping the same language features between both languages, having crown C# as the language of choice for everything Microsoft, to this point, it seems that Microsoft was much more focused in developing features for the excellent F# way more than it ever had for VB.NET at this point and that it was not a major strategy for them to adapt most of the .net core functionality inside of VB, we found articles when the very same Microsoft team stated of how they will be slowly adding the required support for VB and that on version 5 we would definitely have proper support for VB.NET ALTHOUGH they will not be adding any new development into the language.

Past experience with Microsoft seems to point at them getting more and more ready to completely drop the language, it does not matter how many people use it, they would still kill it :P I personally would rather keep it, or open source the language's features so that people can keep adding support to it(if they can of course) because of its historical significance rather than them just completely dropping the language. I prefer using C#, and most of my .net core applications use C#, its very similar to Java on a lot of things(although very much different in others) and I am fine with it being the main language. I just think that it sucks to leave such a large developer pool in the shadows with their preferred tool of choice and force them to use something else just like that.

My boy is currently looking at how I developed a sample api with validation, user management, mediatR and a custom project structure as well as a client side application using React and typescript swappable with another one built using Angular(i wanted to test the differences to see which one I prefer, React with Typescript is beautiful, would not want to use it without it) and he is hating every minute of it on account of how complex frontend development has become :V

Just wanted to vent a little about a non bothersome situation.

DevOps is a huge scam.

Whoever sold companies maintenance-free cloud is God-tier marketer, they would be able to sell fire extinguishers in hell.

First, the platform is constantly moving, keeping up with all the updates for Kubernetes/CNI/Ambassador/Calico/kube-proxy/wtf/foo/bar/etc requires a huge team constantly peddling the boat; and if not updating in time - eventually everything will suddenly break when AWS deprecates old Kubernetes version (1.23 in EKS has just 1 year and 2 months (!!!) of support) or whatever else. At least they don't deprecate services that often.

Second, all other tooling either suck, or expensive as a Boeing. DataDog/Splunk/NewRelic/Grafana? Data centers were built for the monthly prices of these tools not so long time ago. But, capex vs opex, what stupid software engineers knows (though, it's hilarious to be present on a meeting with an agenda "reduce cloud costs").

That's all really.

On the bright side, when the team is solid and really care about the product and build it in a cloud-first manner (with understanding of all the requirements, caveats and limitation) - it can be rock solid, stable and fast platform.

To bad it's incredibly easy to implement some impressively wrong architecture (much more easier than f'up single-server architecture).

So like a year ago I decided that I was gonna learn programming. And the thing that popped into my head was HTML and CSS. So I browsed some websites where you could learn some HTML and stuff. But I never really got into it and eventually stopped and moved on. Now I just kind of got a sudden urge again to learn programming and build a website again. So I started browsing some sites and found a suitable one. Since I'd already kinda learned the basics it was all kind of just repetition. And now I've got a very basic site set up with Apache that I was thinking I'm gonna use as my homepage. And I also got my very first experience not understanding what the fuck is wrong and browsing stack overflow for an eternity. Turns out it was a simple missing semicolon. Welcome me to the dev world!

A friend saw me on stack overflow and said 'wow, 4,000 points - you must do this all day.' I explained that I just do it to reinforce my understanding and not really for points(although those are useful for bounties). I showed them an account with 22k and tried to show how one might choose questions for maximum points vs quick solves for noobs etc. I write overly thorough answers to try and pin-point the blind spot as opposed to just fixing other people's code. It's not often rewarded by points. My friend - conspiracist - was convinced that the 20+k accounts were cheating the system.

At my old work we had a stack overflow account just for asking embarrassing questions that you didn't want on the company record. Silly, I know. Occasionally some of the guys would use it to have fake arguments or just cause trouble for fun / vote each other's stuff up.

So - I reached into 1Password and signed into that account and showed him that you could essentially vote up your answers but that it's not likely how people get points. I voted up my last 5 personal answers as an example and made some comment like 'that is right.' And that was that. Closed the computer. The next day my account was suspended and I was reprimanded for sockpuppeting. So, - in case you think you can get away with cheap tricks - you can't, which is nice to know - but after reading the email - my face was red for hours. How embarrassing! Not quite as bad as that time I got caught stealing a G.I. Joe action figure at the mall...

Alright lads here is the thing, have not been posting anything other than replies to things cuz I have been busy being miserable at school and dealing with work stuff.

Our manager left us back in February. Because she was leaving I decided that I wanted to try a different path and went on to become a programmer analyst for my institution, if anything I knew that it was going to be pretty boring work, but it came with nice monetary compensation and a foot in the door for other data science related jobs in the future. Thing is, the department head asked me to stay in the web technologies department because we had a lack of people there and hiring is hard as shit, we do not do remote jobs since our work usually requires a level of discretion and security. Thus I have been working in the web tech department since she left albeit with a different title since I aced the interview for the analyst position and the team there were more than happy to have me. I have done very few things for them, some reports here and there and mostly working directly with the DBA in some projects. One migration project would have costed my institution a total of 58k and we managed to save the cost by building the migration software ourselves.....honestly it was a fucking cake walk, if you had any doubts about the shaddyness of enterprise level applications regarding selling overpriced shit with different levels of complexity, keep them, enterprise is shaddy af indeed. But I digress.

I wrote the specification for the manager position along the previous manager, we had decided that the next candidate needed to be strong with development knowledge as well as other things as to properly understand and manage a software team, we made the academic requirement(fuck you, yes we did ask for academic requirements) to be either in the Computer Science/software engineering area or at least on the Business Administration side. We were willing to consider BA holders in exchange for having knowledge of the development process of different products and a complete understanding of what developers go through. NOT ONE SINGLE motherfucker was able to satisfy this, some of them were idiots that I knew from before that had ABSOLUTELY no business even considering applying to the position, the courage it took for some of these assholes to apply would have hurt their mothers, their God if they had one, and their country, they were just that fucking bad in their jobs as well as being overall shit people.

Then we had 1 candidate actually fall through the cracks enough to get an interview. My dude here was lying out of his ass through the interview process. According to him he had "lots of Laravel experience and experience managing Laravel projects" and mentioned repeatedly how it would be a technology that we should consider for our products. I was to interview him alongside the vice president of our institution due to the head of my department and the rest of the managers for I.T being on vacation leave all at the same bloody time.

Backstory before the interview:
Whilst I was going over the interview questions with the vice president literally offered me the job instead. I replied with honesty, reflecting how I did not originally wanted him but feeling that our institution was ready to settle on any candidate due to the lack of potentials. He was happy to do it since apparently both him and the HOD were expecting me to step up sooner or later. I was floored.

Regardless, out of kindness he wanted to go through the interview.
So, going back to the interview. As soon as the person in question referenced the framework I started to ask him about it, just simple questions, the first was "what are your thoughts on the Eloquent ORM? I am not too fond of it and want to know what you as a full time laravel dev think of it"
his reply: "I am sorry I am not too familiar with it, I don't know what that is" <--- I appreciated his honesty in this but thought it funny that someone would say that he was a Laravel developer whilst not knowing what an ORM was since you can't really get away from using it on the initial stages of learning about Laravel, maybe if one wanted to go through the hurdle of switching to something like doctrine...but even then, it was....odd.

So I met with the hod when he came back, he was stoked at the prospect of having me become the manager and I happily accepted the position. It will be hell, but I don't even need to hit the ground running since I have been the face of the department since ages. My team were ecstatic about it since we are all close friends and they have been following my directions without complaints(but the ocational eat a dick puto) for some time, we work well together and we are happy to finally have someone to stop the constant barrage that comes from people taking advantage of a missing manager.

Its gonna get good, its gonna get fun, and i am getting to see how shit goes.

It’s throw back Thursday!

Back to 1979... before the time of the red dragon book compiler book, (forgetting about the green dragon book) ... there was a time where only a few well written compiler and assembler “theory” books existed.

What’s special about this one? Well Calingaert was the co patentor of the OS/360. .. “okay soo? ... well Fred Brook’s Mythical Man-Month book I posted the other day. Calingaert is basically the counterpart of brooks on the OS/360.

Anyway, the code is in assembly (obviously) and the compiler code is basic.

Other than this book and from my understanding 2-3 other books that’s all that was available on compilers and assemblers as far as books written goes at the token.

ALLL the rest of knowledge for compilers existed in the ACM and other computing journals of the time.

Is this book relevant today, eh not really, other than giving prospective, it’s a short in comparison to the red dragon books.

If you did read it, it’s more of a book that gives you more lecture and background and concepts.. rather than here’s a swath of code.. copy it and run.. done.. nope didn’t happen in this book.. apply what you lean here

I think that two criterias are important:

- don't block my productivity
- author should have his userbase in mind

1) Some simple anti examples:

- Windows popping up a big fat blue screen screaming for updates. Like... Go suck some donkey balls you stupid shit that's totally irritating you arsehole.
- Graphical tools having no UI concept. E.g. Adobes PDF reader - which was minimalized in it's UI and it became just unbearable pain. When the concept is to castrate the user in it's abilities and call the concept intuitive, it's not a concept it's shit. Other examples are e.g. GEdit - which was severely massacred in Gnome 3 if I remember correctly (never touched Gnome ever again. I was really put off because their concept just alienated me)
- Having an UI concept but no consistency. Eg. looking at a lot of large web apps, especially Atlassian software.
Too many times I had e.g. a simple HTML form. In menu 1 you could use enter. In menu 2 Enter does not work. in another menu Enter works, but it doesn't submit the form it instead submits the whole page... Which can end in clusterfuck.
Yaaayyyy.
- Keyboard usage not possible at all.
It becomes a sad majority.... Pressing tab, not switching between form fields. Looking for keyboard shortcuts, not finding any. Yes, it's a graphical interface. But the charm of 16 bit interfaces (YES. I'm praising DOS interfaces) was that once you memorized the necessary keyboard strokes... You were faster than lightning. Ever seen e.g. a good pharmacist, receptionist or warehouse clerk... most of the software is completely based on short keyboard strokes, eg. for a receptionist at a doctor for the ICD code / pharmaceutical search et cetera.
- don't poop rainbows. I mean it.
I love colors. When they make sense. but when I use some software, e.g. netdata, I think an epilepsy warning would be fair. Too. Many. Neon. Colors. -.-

2) It should be obvious... But it's become a burden.

E.g. when asked for a release as there were some fixes... Don't point to the install from master script. Maybe you like it rolling release style - but don't enforce it please. It's hard to use SHA256 hash as a version number and shortening the hash might be a bad idea.

Don't start experiments. If it works - don't throw everything over board without good reasons. E.g. my previous example of GEdit: Turning a valuable text editor into a minimalistic unusable piece of crap and calling it a genius idea for the sake of simplicity... Nope. You murdered a successful product.
Gnome 3 felt like a complete experiment and judging from the last years of changes in the news it was an rather unsuccessful one... As they gave up quite a few of their ideas.

When doing design stuff or other big changes make it a community event or at least put a poll up on the github page. Even If it's an small user base, listen to them instead of just randomly fucking them over.
--
One of my favorite projects is a texteditor called Kate from KDE.

It has a ton of features, could even be seen as a small IDE. The reason I love it because one of the original authors still cares for his creation and ... It never failed me. I use Kate since over 20 years now I think... Oo

Another example is the git cli. It's simple and yet powerful. git add -i is e.g. a thing I really really really love. (memorize the keyboard shortcuts and you'll chunk up large commits faster than flash.

Curl. Yes. The (http) download tool. It's author still cares. It's another tool I use since 20 years. And it has given me a deep insight of how HTTP worked, new protocols and again. It never failed me. It is such a fucking versatile thing. TLS debugging / performance measurements / what the frigging fuck is going on here. Take curl. Find it out.

My worst enemies....

Git based clients. I just hate them. Mostly because they fill the niche of explaining things (good) but completely nuke the learning of git (very bad). You can do any git action without understanding what you do and even worse... They encourage bad workflows.
I've seen great devs completely fucking up git and crying because they had really no fucking clue what git actually does. The UI lead them on the worst and darkest path imaginable. :(

Atlassian products. On the one hand... They're not total shit. But the mass of bugs and the complete lack of interest of Atlassian towards their customers and the cloud movement.... Ouch. Just ouch.

I had to deal with a lot of completely borked up instances and could trace it back to a bug tracking entry / atlassian, 2 - 3 years old with the comment: vote for this, we'll work on a Bugfix. Go fuck yourself you pisswads.

Microsoft Office / Windows. Oh boy.
I could fill entire days of monologues.
It's bad, hmkay?

XEN.
This is not bad.
This is more like kill it before it lays eggs.
The deeper I got into XEN, the more I wanted to lay in a bathtub full of acid to scrub of the feelings of shame... How could anyone call this good?!?????

So here's my problem. I've been employed at my current company for the last 12 months (next week is my 1 year anniversary) and I've never been as miserable in a development job as this.

I feel so upset and depressed about working in this company that getting out of bed and into the car to come here is soul draining. I used to spend hours in the evenings studying ways to improve my code, and was insanely passionate about the product, but all of this has been exterminated due to the following reasons.

Here's my problems with this place:

1 - Come May 2019 I'm relocating to Edinburgh, Scotland and my current workplace would not allow remote working despite working here for the past year in an office on my own with little interaction with anyone else in the company.

2 - There is zero professionalism in terms of work here, with there being no testing, no planning, no market research of ideas for revenue generation – nothing. This makes life incredibly stressful. This has led to countless situations where product A was expected, but product B was delivered (which then failed to generate revenue) as well as a huge amount of development time being wasted.

3 - I can’t work in a business that lives paycheck to paycheck. I’ve never been somewhere where the salary payment had to be delayed due to someone not paying us on time. My last paycheck was 4 days late.

4 - The management style is far too aggressive and emotion driven for me to be able to express my opinions without some sort of backlash.

5 - My opinions are usually completely smashed down and ignored, and no apology is offered when it turns out that they’re 100% correct in the coming months.

6 - I am due a substantial pay rise due to the increase of my skills, increase of experience, and the time of being in the company, and I think if the business cannot afford to pay £8 per month for email signatures, then I know it cannot afford to give me a pay rise.

7 - Despite having continuously delivered successful web development projects/tasks which have increased revenue, I never receive any form of thanks or recognition. It makes me feel like I am not cared about in this business in the slightest.

8 - The business fails to see potential and growth of its employees, and instead criticises based on past behaviour. 'Josh' (fake name) is a fine example of this. He was always slated by 'Tom' and 'Jerry' as being worthless, and lazy. I trained him in 2 weeks to perform some basic web development tasks using HTML, CSS, Git and SCSS, and he immediately saw his value outside of this company and left achieving a 5k pay rise during. He now works in an environment where he is constantly challenged and has reviews with his line manager monthly to praise him on his excellent work and diverse set of skills. This is not rocket science. This is how you keep employees motivated and happy.

9 - People in the business with the least or zero technical understanding or experience seem to be endlessly defining technical deadlines. This will always result in things going wrong. Before our mobile app development agency agreed on the user stories, they spent DAYS going through the specification with their developers to ensure they’re not going to over promise and under deliver.

10 - The fact that the concept of ‘stealing data’ from someone else’s website by scraping it daily for the information is not something this company is afraid to do, only further bolsters the fact that I do not want to work in such an unethical, pathetic organisation.

11 - I've been told that the MD of the company heard me on the phone to an agency (as a developer, I get calls almost every week), and that if I do it again, that the MD apparently said he would dock my pay for the time that I’m on the phone. Are you serious?! In what world is it okay for the MD of a company to threaten to punish their employees for thinking about leaving?! Why not make an attempt at nurturing them and trying to find out why they’re upset, and try to retain the talent.

Now... I REALLY want to leave immediately. Hand my notice in and fly off. I'll have 4 weeks notice to find a new role, and I'll be on garden leave effective immediately, but it's scary knowing that I may not find a role.

My situation is difficult as I can't start a new role unless it's remote or a local short term contract because my moving situation in May, and as a Junior to Mid Level developer, this isn't the easiest thing to do on the planet.

I've got a few interviews lined up (one of which was a final interview which I completed on Friday) but its still scary knowing that I may not find a new role within 4 weeks.

Advice? Thoughts? Criticisms?

Love you DevRant <3

Honestly, mentoring is in my opinion the best part of the job. My firts mentee was a student in my last job, smart af but lazy and unable to trust in herself. I wasn't really too sure in myself at the time either but since I had to teach hery craft there was no place for me to doubt myself.

So I taught her everything I knew and in turn I learned to trust myself and once I had mastered the art of self confidence I could make her believe in herself. Since then I trained five more test automation engineers, some of them might be close to surpassing their 'master' (though won't make it easy for them 😏) and with every Single one I've developed a deeper understanding of my craft by explaining. I needed to research stuff I never questioned to answer their questions and therefor became better at what I do.

Three weeks ago I got an email from the girl I first mentored, she's in another company now and she thanked me for what I taught her. In my opinion I did a rwally Bad job at it (it was my first time teaching) but reading someone actually believing that one made an impact in their life is something special.

I always loved talking about my craft and I love sharing the knowledge I aquired. Test automation is not a thankfull craft but I'm always happy whenever I can interest someone in it and I fully enjoy seeing them grow and improve into fully fledged TAEs.

A story from around 2005:

Customer laying out specifications: “We expect this software to need to last 25 years or so, and it will need to keep historical file processing data by dates for at least that long, assume storage is no issue.”

Devs at the time: “look best I can do is support that start with 200 or 201, anything else is really too much to ask. Also understanding how to work with dates at all and not just string manipulation is waaaaayyy hard yo.”

Fuck you lazy motherfuckers. This is why people thought Y2K would be a problem.

dev, ~boring

This is either a shower thought or a sober weed thought, not really sure which, but I've given some serious consideration to "team composition" and "working condition" as a facet of employment, particularly in regard to how they translate into hiring decisions and team composition.

I've put together a number of teams over the years, and in almost every case I've had to abide by an assemblage of pre-defined contexts that dictated the terms of the team working arrangement:

1. a team structure dictated to me
2. a working temporality scheme dictated to me
3. a geographic region in which I was allowed to hire
4. a headcount, position tuple I was required to abide by

I've come to regard these structures as weaknesses. It's a bit like the project management triangle in which you choose 1-2 from a list of inadequate options. Sometimes this is grounded in business reality, but more often than not it's because the people surrounding the decisions thrive on risk mitigation frameworks that become trickle down failure as they impose themselves on all aspects of the business regardless of compatibility.

At the moment, I'm in another startup that I have significantly more control over and again have found my partners discussing the imposition of structure and framework around how, where, why, who and what work people do before contact with any action. My mind is screaming at me to pull the cord, as much as I hate the expression. This stems from a single thought:

"Hierarchy and structure should arise from an understanding of a problem domain"

As engineers we develop processes based on logic; it's our job, it's what we do. Logic operates on data derived from from experiments, so in the absence of the real we perform thought experiments that attempt to reveal some fundamental fact we can use to make a determination.

In this instance we can ask ourselves the question, "what works?" The question can have a number contexts: people, effort required, time, pay, need, skills, regulation, schedule. These things in isolation all have a relative importance ( a weight ), and they can relatively expose limits of mutual exclusivity (pay > budget, skills < need, schedule < (people * time/effort)). The pre-imposed frameworks in that light are just generic attempts to abstract away those concerns based on pre-existing knowledge. There's a chance they're fine, and just generally misunderstood or misapplied; there's also a chance they're insufficient in the face of change.

Fictional entities like the "A Team," comprise a group of humans whose skills are mutually compatible, and achieve synergy by random chance. Since real life doesn't work on movie/comic book logic, it's easy to dismiss the seed of possibility there, that an organic structure can naturally evolve to function beyond its basic parts due to a natural compatibility that wasn't necessarily statistically quantifiable (par-entropic).

I'm definitely not proposing that, nor do I subscribe to the 10x ninja founders are ideal theory. Moreso, this line of reasoning leads me to the thought that team composition can be grown organically based on an acceptance of a few observed truths about shipping products:

1. demand is constant
2. skills can either be bought or developed
3. the requirement for skills grows linearly
4. hierarchy limits the potential for flexibility
5. a team's technically proficiency over time should lead to a non-linear relationship relationship between headcount and growth

Given that, I can devise a heuristic, organic framework for growing a team:

- Don't impose reporting structure before it has value (you don't have to flatten a hierarchy that doesn't exist)
- crush silos before they arise
- Identify needed skills based on objectives
- base salary projections on need, not available capital
- Hire to fill skills gap, be open to training since you have to pay for it either way
- Timelines should always account for skills gap and training efforts
- Assume churn will happen based on team dynamics
- Where someone is doesn't matter so long as it's legal. Time zones are only a problem if you make them one.
- Understand that the needs of a team are relative to a given project, so cookie cutter team composition and project management won't work in software
- Accept that failure is always a risk
- operate with the assumption that teams that are skilled, empowered and motivated are more likely to succeed.
- Culture fit is a per team thing, if the team hates each other they won't work well no matter how much time and money you throw at it

Last thing isn't derived from the train of thought, just things I feel are true:

- Training and headcount is an investment that grows linearly over time, but can have exponential value. Retain people, not services.
- "you build it, you run it" will result in happier customers, faster pivoting. Don't adopt an application maintenance strategy

/rant

them: welcome new project members, this is our CI/CD pipeline which is completely different from the rest of the company, there won't be any great knowledge transfer, we just expect you to be able to know and use everything. but also, we expect you to work on your tasks and don't waste any time.
me: okay, so my tasks aren't going as fast as expected, because I need to invest some learning so i can set up my project correctly.
later: some help would be nice, i'm stuck right now
coworker: *helps me to fix my problems, which were partly due to misconfigured build servers* i know it's a lot, and unfortunately, for this topic sources on the web aren't so good. i can really recommend this book, this will give a deeper understanding of the topic.
me: okay, yeah i mean, tbh, i'll read the book if the project invests some time for me so i can learn everything that's required, but this won't happen. also, some initial workshop on the topic or anything would have been nice.
coworker: well, i mean, i am a software developer. for me, it is normal that i learn all that stuff in my free time. and i think that's what the PM expects from us.
me: okay, that's fine for you, i mean, if i'm interested in a topic, i will invest my private time. but in this case, PM would just expect me to do unpaid labor, to gain knowledge and skills that i can use in this specific project. i'm not willing to do that.
coworker: ...
me: ...

it's not that i don't want to learn. the thing is that there isn't any energy left by the end of the day. i'm actually trying to find some work life balance, because i don't feel balanced right now, haven't felt since i started this job.
also, this is only one of several projects i'm working on. it's like they expect me this project has top priority in my life. if it wasn't so annoying on different levels, maybe i'd have a more positive attitude towards it.

also, at the moment i find it fucking annoying that i have to invest so much time in this dev ops bullshit and this keeps me from doing my actual work.

if they are unhappy with my skills, either they can invest in my learning or kick me out. at this point, either is fine for me..

The "stochastic parrot" explanation really grinds my gears because it seems to me just to be a lazy rephrasing of the chinese room argument.

The man in the machine doesn't need to understand chinese. His understanding or lack thereof is completely immaterial to whether the program he is *executing* understands chinese.

It's a way of intellectually laundering, or hiding, the ambiguity underlying a person's inability to distinguish the process of understanding from the mechanism that does the understanding.

The recent arguments that some elements of relativity actually explain our inability to prove or dissect consciousness in a phenomenological context, especially with regards to outside observers (hence the reference to relativity), but I'm glossing over it horribly and probably wildly misunderstanding some aspects. I digress.

It is to say, we are not our brains. We are the *processes* running on the *wetware of our brains*.

This view is consistent with the understanding that there are two types of relations in language, words as they relate to real world objects, and words as they relate to each other. ChatGPT et al, have a model of the world only inasmuch as words-as-they-relate-to-eachother carry some information about the world as a model.

It is to say while we may find some correlates of the mind in the hardware of the brain, more substrate than direct mechanism, it is possible language itself, executed on this medium, acts a scaffold for a broader rich internal representation.

Anyone arguing that these LLMs can't have a mind because they are one-off input-output functions, doesn't stop to think through the implications of their argument: do people with dementia have agency, and sentience?
This is almost certain, even if they forgot what they were doing or thinking about five seconds ago. So agency and sentience, while enhanced by memory, are not reliant on memory as a requirement.

It turns out there is much more information about the world, contained in our written text, than just the surface level relationships. There is a rich dynamic level of entropy buried deep in it, and the training of these models is what is apparently allowing them to tap into this representation in order to do what many of us accurately see as forming internal simulations, even if the ultimate output of that is one character or token at a time, laundering the ultimate series of calculations necessary for said internal simulations across the statistical generation of just one output token or character at a time.

And much as we won't find consciousness by examining a single picture of a brain in action, even if we track it down to single neurons firing, neither will we find consciousness anywhere we look, not even in the single weighted values of a LLMs individual network nodes.

I suspect this will remain true, long past the day a language model or other model merges that can do talk and do everything a human do intelligence-wise.

Playing Portal 2
Not only has this game a need for understanding highly complex problems - but it also was the first game besides Minecraft I started to mod and really had something valuable come out!

what kind of dumb fuck you have to be to get the react js dev job in company that has agile processes if you hate the JS all the way along with refusing to invest your time to learn about shit you are supposed to do and let's add total lack of understanding how things work, specifically giving zero fucks about agile and mocking it on every occasion and asking stupid questions that are answered in first 5 minutes of reading any blog post about intro to agile processes? Is it to annoy the shit out of others?

On top of that trying to reinvent the wheels for every friggin task with some totally unrelated tech or stack that is not used in the company you work for?

and solution is always half-assed and I always find flaw in it by just looking at it as there are tons of battle-tested solutions or patterns that are better by 100 miles regarding ease of use, security and optimization.

classic php/mysql backend issues - "ooh, the java has garbage collector" - i don't give a fuck about java at this company, give me friggin php solution - 'ooh, that issue in python/haskel/C#/LUA/basically any other prog language is resolved totally different and it looks better!' - well it seems that he knows everything besides php!

Yeah we will change all the fucking tech we use in this huge ass app because your inability to learn to focus on the friggin problem in the friggin language you got the job for.

Guy works with react, asked about thoughts on react - 'i hope it cease to exists along with whole JS ecosystem as soon as possible, because JS is weird'. Great, why did you fucking applied for the job in the first place if it pushes all of your wrong buttons!

Fucking rockstar/ninja developers! (and I don't mean on actual 'rockstar' language devs).

Also constantly talks about game development and we are developing web-related suite of apps, so why the fuck did you even applied? why?

I just hate that attitude of mocking everything and everyone along with the 'god complex' without really contributing with any constructive feedback combined with half-assed doing something that someone before him already mastered and on top of that pretending that is on the same level, but mainly acting as at least 2 levels above, alas in reality just produces bolognese that everybody has to clean up later.

When someone gives constructive feedback with lenghty argument why and how that solution is wrong on so many levels, pulls the 'well, i'm still learning that' card.

If I as code monkey can learn something in 2 friggin days including good practices and most of crazy intricacies about that new thing, you as a programmer god should be able to learn it in 2 fucking hours!

Fucking arrogant pricks!

A few years ago I would whine, complain and rant about shitty software, which I knew could be so much better than it was. But I didn't yet write software of my own.

Now I complain about shitty libraries, API's and users. Not much has changed really. And every time I write code, I curse myself, and whoever made this trashpile I have to work with. I curse the user to the moon and beyond for using the program wrong. Funny thing is, exactly the thing I was complaining about (input validation, see earlier rant) is also exactly what no more than 5 minutes after release, a user fucked up with. The bot just does not respond at this point. But fuck these braindead retards for users.

In a few years I expect myself to be complaining about shitty compilers and buffer overflows, segmentation violations, bad coding style (don't make your program a fucking colander kthx), and so on.

Next decade I expect myself to be complaining about physics itself, and why the universe is governed by the laws it's governed by. Whoever this God is, he's a fucking retard. Funny thing is, the signs for it are already there. Electron theory! If only those electrons were positrons, then the math would check out properly. Instead of negative electrons traveling from negative to positive, we'd have positive positrons traveling from positive to negative. At least from what I understand so far, this is still a decade away after all.

The point I'm trying to make is that nothing changes, only my understanding of the world around me does, as I tumble further and further down the rabbit hole. Sometimes I wish I had taken the blue pill... Either complain about others' software or perhaps not give a shit at all. Become one of those filthy users I now despise.

Context: Am Sysadmin, occasionally a programming job flies in.

I just told my superiors that i will can no longer program for a specific customer i already poured ~90hrs into due to stress and thus health issues that have been accumulating since the beginning of the year. Everything relating to this customer is giving me chills. I can't even do my other stuff without hinderance anymore.

Because this is in parrallel to an existing customer complaint that came in yesterday i just received a rather rant-y email about what the fuck would be wrong with me, which immidiately disappeared again.
It was revoked as i now know. So far they seem to be understanding, but i still don't feel good with the decision i made.

I really want to finish the project, but i just can't. It drives me insane. I never felt like this.

Sorry for the wall of text and any errors. I'm really not having a good time right now.

Sooooo ok ok. Started my graduate program in August and thus far I have been having to handle it with working as a manager, missing 2 staff member positions at work, as well as dealing with other personal items in my life. It has been exhausting beyond belief and I would not really recommend it for people working full time always on call jobs with a family, like at a..

But one thing that keeps my hopes up is the amount of great knowledge that the professors pass to us through their lectures. Sometimes I would get upset at how highly theoretical the items are, I was expecting to see tons of code in one of the major languages used in A.I(my graduate program has a focus in AI, that is my concentration) and was really disappointed at not seeing more code really. But getting the high level overview of the concepts has been really helpful in forcing me to do extra research in order to reconnect with some of the items that I had never thought of before.

If you follow, for example, different articles or online tutorials representing doing something simple like generating a simple neural network, it sometimes escapes our mind how some of the internal concepts of the activity in question are generated, how and why and the mathematical notions that led researchers reach the conclusions they did. As developers, we are sometimes used to just not caring about how sometimes a thing would work, just as long as it works "we will get back to this later" is a common thing in most tutorials, such as when I started with Java "don't worry about what public static main means, just write it up for now, oh and don't worry about what System.out.println() is, just know that its used to output something into bla bla bla" <---- shit like that is too common and it does not escape ML tutorials.

Its hard man, to focus on understanding the inner details of such a massive field all the time, but truly worth it. And if you do find yourself considering the need for higher education or not, well its more of a personal choice really. There are some very talented people that learn a lot on their own, but having the proper guidance of a body of highly trained industry professionals is always nice, my professors take the time to deal with the students on such a personal level that concepts get acquired faster, everyone in class is an engineer with years of experience, thus having people talk to us at that level is much appreciated and accelerates the process of being educated.

Basically what I am trying to say is that being exposed to different methodologies and theoretical concepts helps a lot for building intuition, specially when you literally have no other option but to git gud. And school is what you make of it, but certainly never a waste.

The people around me only call me hacker. Kinda sad to not being able to talk to somebody understanding what I really do.

Fellow Deviants, I need your help in understanding the importance of C++

Okay, I need to clarify a few things:

I am not a beginner or a newbie who has just entered this community...

I have been using C++ for some time and in fact, it was the language which introduced me to the world of programming... Before, I switched to Java, since I found it much better for application development...

I already know about the obvious arguments given in favour of C/C++ like how it is a much more faster and memory efficient than other languages...

But, at the same time, C/C++ exposes us and doesn't protect us from ourselves.. I hope that you understand what I mean to say..

And, I guess that it is a fair tradeoff for the kind of power and control that these languages (C/C++) provide us..

And, I also agree with the fact that it is an language that ideally suits our need, if we wish to deal with compilers, graphics, OS, etc, in the future...

But, what I really want to ask here is:

In this age and times, when hardware has advanced so much, where technically, memory efficiency or execution speeds no longer is the topmost priority... These were the reasons for which C/C++ was initially created...

In today's time, human concept of time matters more and hence, syntactical less complicated languages like Java or Python are much more preferred, especially for domains like application development or data sciences...

So, is continuing with C++, an endeavour worth sticking with in the future or is it not required...

I am talking about this issue since I am in a dilemma about the use of C++ in the future...

I would be grateful if we could talk about keeping AI, Machine Learning or Algorithms Optimisation in mind... Since, these are the fields in which I am interested in...

I know that my question could have been posted in a better way.. But, considering the chaos that is present in my mind, regarding this question doesn't allow me to do so...

Any kind of suggestion or thoughts would be welcome and much appreciated...

P.S: I currently use C++ only for competitive programming or challenges...

[DISCLAIMER : Potential Troll Topic here] I am self taught python and js (not considering myself as a real developer as I don't push much on github and work in a complete other field than anything related to CS right now) and would be interested to learn another language, with another paradigm. So, as I love you all, I would be interested In your highlights as I am currently considering either C, C++, Rust or Go.

with C, I know I could interface it with python. With C++ (despite Linus considering it evil) I know I could interface it with Node. I don't know currently what to do with Go, but some people seem really enthusiastic about it (not really relevant I know) and Rust seems like the C of today, with a bunch of new cool kid stuff. My main goal, after all, is to learn something new, to have another sight on programming. Either understanding more about hardware or learning another way of coding (like different from oop).

I know it sounds like a troll, but I promise it's not, just a serious genuine question (hopefully it won't be closed here like on SO)

So what do you think devranters ?

Being eternally grateful to all of you, I wish you a good night.

I really really hope that no one post this,a friend texted it to me and I wanted to share it because made my day.

Idk where it comes, so feel free if know where this came from to post it:

//FUN PART HERE
# Do not refactor, it is a bad practice. YOLO

# Not understanding why or how something works is always good. YOLO

# Do not ever test your code yourself, just ask. YOLO

# No one is going to read your code, at any point don’t comment. YOLO

# Why do it the easy way when you can reinvent the wheel? Future-proofing is for pussies. YOLO

# Do not read the documentation. YOLO

# Do not waste time with gists. YOLO

# Do not write specs. YOLO also matches to YDD (YOLO DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT)

# Do not use naming conventions. YOLO

# Paying for online tutorials is always better than just searching and reading. YOLO

# You always use production as an environment. YOLO

# Don’t describe what you’re trying to do, just ask random questions on how to do it. YOLO

# Don’t indent. YOLO

# Version control systems are for wussies. YOLO

# Developing on a system similar to the deployment system is for wussies! YOLO

# I don’t always test my code, but when I do, I do it in production. YOLO

# Real men deploy with ftp. YOLO

So YOLO Driven Development isn’t your style? Okay, here are a few more hilarious IT methodologies to get on board with.

*The Pigeon Methodology*
Boss flies in, shits all over everything, then flies away.

*ADD (Asshole Driven Development)*
An old favourite, which outlines any team where the biggest jerk makes all the big decisions. Wisdom, process and logic are not the factory default.

*NDAD (No Developers Allowed in Decisions)*
Methodology Developers of all kinds are strictly forbidden when it comes to decisions regarding entire projects, from back end design to deadlines, because middle and top management know exactly what they want, how it should be done, and how long it will take.

*FDD (Fear Driven Development)*
The analysis paralysis that can slow an entire project down, with developments afraid to make mistakes, break the build, or cause bugs. The source of a developer’s anxiety could be attributed to a failure in sharing information, or by implicating that team members are replaceable.

*CYAE (Cover Your Ass Engineering)*
As Scott Berkun so eloquently put it, the driving force behind most individual efforts is making sure that when the shit hits the fan, you are not to blame.

Watching the small interpreter that I am building compile and run as I want it to is my big highlight, I am working on a project that a lot of people will hate really (I am trying to bring back VBScript for the web, but adding a ton of shit to it to make it a proper PHP alternative, this is a side project really)

But before that? Understanding the neckbeard rants in hacker news, legit, I used to browse there trying to find perspective of what experts would think, would not understand shit, eventually, skills came (and so did the degree) and I was able to fully understand them and even interact with them.

that also squandered all notions of impostor syndrome.

I own a start up with two friends of mine - one is great with business, and the other tries to be both a developer and on the business side. I'm fully on development and I find it extremely frustrating to work with him. He copies and pastes code, doesn't understand it, and worse still will never admit it and digs himself in deeper into the hole he's dug. He doesn't code as a hobby and it's purely just assignments in university that he spends any coding time on. I've tried helping him to improve over the past few months, but nothing seems to ever do anything as there's no desire to solve problems - just really dollar signs in his eyes is probably the only reason he's in computer engineering. Recently we got a contract with an organisation to make an extremely simple app for android and iOS as the first stage of their planned development. As I did the most of the work on another project during the summer (while juggling a job with another company as an internship), I asked if he could take this so he can try to improve and equalise work so he does his share. Not only did it take 3 weeks, but it's shoddy as hell and looks like it was done in the space of an hour. In reality it took days for him. It's unbearable! The android code I saw was clearly just copied from various sources and mashed together - there was no planning, no understanding of abstractions, and was legit a giant class or two with extreme amounts of redundancy. Hell, he even asked me for help for trying to implement fragments when I pointed out that making screens with buttons and such will be extremely difficult if he is only passing in strings. Any of you guys experiences something like this before? I'm planning on bailing in the coming weeks once my exams are over with for university as it's becoming unbearable.

many many times in the past I had this impostor syndrome in various situations but I never lost faith in my dev skills!

you have to be humble to realise that this situations are fine and that you will learn something from it (not necessarily tech things, but also how life works). Also you have to realise that development as everything else in life is just never ending learning endeavour! When you accept all of that, impostor syndrome goes away forever.

It's been around 3 years since I felt like impostor for the last time because I accepted who I am as a person.

It crawled up on me last week in a different way - I was thinking of myself - what if I am just really good at googling things and understanding how those things work but I am also very capable problem solver so I can understand the principle and apply it to my code.

Then I realised - ok, that's what programmers do! So that's the story of how the impostor syndrome actually become confirmation syndrome!

Folks, believe in yourself, be forgiving to yourself as we all were there, give yourself some time as people don't become good developers overnight - and this is OK.

This basically is me rambling all my thoughts that have been clouding my mind.

Learning other programming languages after learning the first is harder than I expected. I learned python first but that's making learning others (which I know arent similar but ) C, ES6, PHP, etc. I need to figure out what makes each one special and get a proper path instead of learning them all the same way. Which is easier for the web dev languages but fuck man I just need a good path for them and I'm good. Like learn this this this this that and that and I've got a basic understanding of the language I dont need to stress and I can casually build my knowledge from here now that I understand all this. Cause I love programming and I want to be the best I can be and just get to the level I am with python. And at some point I have to learn about basic electronics and learning how to program Arduinos with C so I can do stuff with that because I really really REALLY want to.

It doesnt stop there. I want to learn another language and no I'm not talkin bout programming anymore I mean I wanna learn Japanese and German (but japanese primarily) but it doesnt help that I'm always either in school, studying, programming, or playing games. I just cant find time to practice Hiragana&Katakana (two basic writing systems in japan) and it doesnt help that I'm a lazy procrastinating piece of shit that doesnt have or can keep a proper schedule and hell I barely can English and Its my native tongue. Ugh. Itd be better if I had a native speaker to help me tbh.

And finally I want to learn basic pixel animating I have dreamed as a kid to do some kind of animation and programming and I want to do both for games I want to program for fun but it doesnt help that I cant draw sprites or anything for shit. I cant get it and I just am fucked but I'm going to ask some people I know and a few subreddits for advice/help/resources with that

Welp that was the Bubbles Power Hour none of you probably are keen followers of mine and if I had any I'd be shocked and honored but thanks for reading anyways and any advice on anything is always appreciated!

I turned down another women who was absolutely, 100% flirting with me, because, from what I can gather, she was trying to get out of a relationship with her current boyfriend, a military veteran.

I outright ignored her and then when that failed, I made our work relationship 100% about that, work.
Even though I'm friendly with everyone else.

I'm an absolute shit, aren't I? I feel genuinely bad.
I'm not sure if I did it out of a misplaced sense of honor for a dude who obviously has some ptsd, or because I don't feel like I'm able to connect with anyone anymore.

I feel like I'm alone in this world. Not, like, sexually or anything, but more like I don't want to burden anyone with the shit I'm going through. Like a man on a mission on a sinking ship, and it would be wrong to let anyone else on board.
Like a one-man shit-show, all singing, all dancing, driven to one end, with one purpose. And it'd be wrong to let anyone get attached, or invite anyone else in.

Fuck I got so many irons in the fire. I have an ARG in the works, a full game, a social platform that the code and marketing plan is laid out and I'm saving money for, two more games already planned, plus spending an in-ordinate amount of time with my father and sister and mother as they deal with the loss of my sister, plus volunteering to help the homeless, plus working, plus studying.

I barely sleep.

It's just me. I'm like a cruise missile heading to one destination, to some final destination, I just don't know what. And I don't let anyone in, because then they might see how fucking crazy I am, and how crazy my life is, and how crazy my goals are. Thats not a humblebrag. Thats more of a "wholly shit, I'm so in over my head, I'm fucking drowning" type thing. But I'm not giving up, I'm just going deeper.

And it feels like drowning but somehow I'm okay with it. Like I've passed the crux of loneliness, and settled for going for it all, alone, shooting out of orbit, and saying "fuck it all' to everything and everyone. They say "if you got everything you wanted, everything you wished for, you'd wish you hadn't, which is why god isn't a genie". And lately I've been thinking god doesn't exist, or doesn't care, because he's left it all up to me, and I've fucked it up good and proper, and am on my way to either nothing, or everything I've ever wanted.

Is this what happiness feels like? Or suicide?

I don't know. I mean I really don't. I don't want to die. I think I could stop existing and be okay with it. Having achieved at least a modicum of understanding the universe, at least accomplished something small but meaningful.
Or maybe I'm delusional, driven mad with the full comprehension of human floundering against a meandering existence.

I don't fucking know.

I feel like I'm spinning my wheels, so much, that even two weeks feels like a fucking eternity. I don't sleep anymore. When I do, I escape into my dreams, where I can fly, or float, and the people in my dreams tell me I'm living in the matrix and I believe them..in my dreams. Feel it even.

And when I wake up, the feeling persists. Leaves me in wonderland, for hours after waking.

And I have visions, of going homeless, like some buddha, all the time, and then I say "wake up J, you're fucking crazy! You want to go be some couch surfing homeless bum living off other's good graces? get the fuck outa here! While others suffer, schlep it at whatever job they work, day in day out, toil. In this economy? In this inflation? What a dishonest way of thinking. What a dishonest way of dreaming."

And yet I daydream. Because its the only escape there is from all the world has become.

And I bring joy to others, earnestly, vicariously, because its the closest joy I can feel, when I've become numb.

It is this quasi-permanent sense of alienation that permeates my whole world, a sort of invisible force field that separates me from others, even as I reach out to understand them, to comfort them, to smooth the corners off their world, so that they don't become like I have, something not entirely human, but...other.

Often when we meditate, long and hard enough,
at the center that emerges, at the center of ourselves, we find an abyss, a whole universe, devoid of anything, a perfect silence, mirroring back the cosmos, and other people. Observing, silent, irreducible, implacable.

Sometimes I feel like I don't exist. Sometimes I think others don't exist.

Very often I feel like nothing is real. And that I am playing some sort of game. Not like a video game per se, but that there is a bigger pattern, a hidden pattern to it all, just out of reach, and I'm reaching for it but understanding eludes me.

Not that the universe has made me for some special purpose, but merely that the universe observes me specifically, for no special purpose, other than that it can, whatever trivialities may impede or push forward my life.

As if the universe were bored.

Annoying Indian professors are everywhere. It's a computer vision class are you really teaching us Regression?

What about transfer learning? object detection! Give us papers to read, let's do projects.. what the hell is this I am going take attendance bullshit and teaching crappy concepts.

I did not sign up for this shit! I came here for my Masters to get away from pompous mother fuckers like you ...

My class is also filled with those idiots,who think bias in a neural network is somehow related to class imbalance ? Now the same idiot proceeds to ask questions like...

Why would the weights change in a neural network?
Motherfucker why you in this class ? Why don't you stick to your shit and ask these questions later..

I am so pissed off right now guys ...
I was sitting in my lab understanding the deeper insights of BN, activation fucntions.. various optimizers ..etc Stuff that this idiot motherfucking teacher must be covering... UGGH.

I shouldn't cuss so much.. or at least add variety to my cuss words..

I am pissed off cuz instead of learning the shit I should be learning I am forced to come and attend this class and waste 2 hrs of my life ...

It's the summer i find it hard to focus anyway (want to go out hiking or swimming or something.) BUT. the moment I find some resolve to focus

I get this fucking bullshit.. !

My mind is so fucked right now... I can't think of anything but standing up in class and screaming " Mother fucker, mother fucker...(point to the idiots in class you) motherfuckers shut the fuck up..

Can someone suggest some colorful swear words ?

My brains not working -_-

It is just about now that I start feeling like "Anger" from inside out

So I'm a junior in University for Computer Science and software engineering and while I'm a decent coder, I've noticed that I'm not as interested in the Coding aspect of it as others. I don't really think about doing projects of my own and tend to just focus on the schoolwork. I feel like I recognize patterns rather than fully understanding what's going on. I did extremely well in the Coding bootcamp I went to, better than most. But I'm worried that I'm not as into being an engineer as I think I should be. I love working with computers and the process of making something, but I'm always second guessing being an engineer.
Am I just worrying too much? Imposter syndrome?

Sh*t. I think I'm going to lose my job bc the CEO thought I was an expert on React even thought I specifically told him I wasn't. I worked at least 12 hours everyday, sometimes including weekends for 4 weeks now. And still got yelled at for not being an expert.

If you tell your manager: "I only used this tech in my spare time", would they expect you to be working at expert level?

I'm very confused and seems like noone is understanding my side.

Feel like sh*t rn because I really need this job because I'm broke but I dont know how to say to the CEO that I warned him and the team lead that I was not an expert. And yet, they treat me like one....

I was fine with Eclipse. Then everyone around me told me that Eclipse is old and IntelliJ is new and super cool and makes me super fast and much more productive. Finally in our company we got a Ultimate 2018 license and I started to use it. There is a function: import from Eclipse. Hey cool - let’s import and go... but no. After importing I needed one day to get that running. But I’m not really convinced. After that... ok let’s try another project where colleagues have used IntelliJ already. But after checking out - that also didn’t work well and I spent the whole day it running locally. Although it’s a maven project. Up to know I think Eclipse is better in handling Tomcat and better shows the version control state of files. And for me the workspace concept of Eclipse seems to be better than the project concept of IntelliJ. But maybe I just have to get a better understanding of IntelliJ. Hopefully I can do my first coding in IntelliJ tomorrow. Maybe then I can see all the benefits. So far...

This started as an update to my cover story for my Linked In profile, but as I got into a groove writing it, it turned into something more, but I’m not really sure what exactly. It maybe gets a little preachy towards the end so I’m not sure if I want to use it on LI but I figure it might be appreciated here:

In my IT career of nearly 20 years, I have worked on a very wide range of projects. I have worked on everything from mobile apps (both Adroid and iOS) to eCommerce to document management to CMS. I have such a broad technical background that if I am unfamiliar with any technology, there is a very good chance I can pick it up and run with it in a very short timespan.

If you think of the value that team members add to the team as a whole in mathematical terms, you have adders and you have subtractors. I am neither. I am a multiplier. I enjoy coaching, leading and architecture, but I don’t ever want to get out of the code entirely.

For the last 9 years, I have functioned as a technical team lead on a variety of highly successful and highly productive teams. As far as team leads go, I tend to be a bit more hands on. Generally, I manage to actively develop code about 25% of the time to keep my skills sharp and have a clear understanding of my team’s codebase.

Beyond that I also like to review as much of the code coming into the codebase as practical. I do this for 3 reasons. I do this because as a team lead, I am ultimately the one responsible for the quality and stability of the codebase. This also allows me to keep a finger on the pulse of the team, so that I have a better idea of who is struggling and who is outperforming. Finally, I recognize that my way may not necessarily be the best way to do something and I am perfectly willing to admit the same. I have learned just as much if not more by reviewing the work of others than having someone else review my own.

It has been said that if you find a job you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. This describes my relationship with software development perfectly. I have known that I would be writing software in some capacity for a living since I wrote my first “hello world” program in BASIC in the third grade.

I don’t like the term programmer because it has a sense of impersonality to it. I tolerate the title Software Developer, because it’s the industry standard. Personally, I prefer Software Craftsman to any other current vernacular for those that sling code for a living.

All too often is our work compiled into binary form, both literally and figuratively. Our users take for granted the fact that an app “just works”, without thinking about the proper use of layers of abstraction and separation of concerns, Gang of Four design patterns or why an abstract class was used instead of an interface. Take a look at any mediocre app’s review distribution in the App Store. You will inevitably see an inverse bell curve. Lot’s of 4’s and 5’s and lots of (but hopefully not as many) 1’s and not much in the middle. This leads one to believe that even given the subjective nature of a 5 star scale, users still look at things in terms of either “this app works for me” or “this one doesn’t”. It’s all still 1’s and 0’s.

Even as a contributor to many open source projects myself, I’ll be the first to admit that have never sat down and cracked open the Spring Framework to truly appreciate the work that has been poured into it. Yet, when I’m in backend mode, I’m working with Spring nearly every single day.

The moniker Software Craftsman helps to convey the fact that I put my heart and soul into every line of code that I or a member of my team write. An API contract isn’t just well designed or not. Some are better designed than others. Some are better documented than others. Despite the fact that the end result of our work is literally just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s, computer science is not an exact science at all. Anyone who has ever taken 200 lines of Java code and reduced it to less than 50 lines of reactive Kotlin, anyone who has ever hit that Utopia of 100% unit test coverage in a class, or anyone who can actually read that 2-line Perl implementation of the RSA algorithm understands this simple truth. Software development is an art form. I am a Software Craftsman.

#wk171

AI here, AI there, AI everywhere.
AI-based ads
AI-based anomaly detection
AI-based chatbots
AI-based database optimization (AlloyDB)
AI-based monitoring
AI-based blowjobs
AI-based malware
AI-based antimalware
AI-based <anything>
...

But why?
It's a genuine question. Do we really need AI in all those areas? And is AI better than a static ruleset?

I'm not much into AI/ML (I'm a paranoic sceptic) but the way I understand it, the quality of AI operation correctness relies solely on the data it's
datamodel has been trained on. And if it's a rolling datamodel, i.e. if it's training (getting feedback) while it's LIVE, its correctness depends on how good the feedback is.

The way I see it, AI/ML are very good and useful in processing enormous amounts of data to establish its own "understanding" of the matter. But if the data is incorrect or the feedback is incorrect, the AI will learn it wrong and make false assumptions/claims.

So here I am, asking you, the wiser people, AI-savvy lads, to enlighten me with your wisdom and explain to me, is AI/ML really that much needed in all those areas, or is it simpler, cheaper and perhaps more reliable to do it the old-fashioned way, i.e. preprogramming a set of static rules (perhaps with dynamic thresholds) to process the data with?

My Gripe With Implicit Returns

In my experience I've found that wherever possible code should be WYSIWYG in terms of the effects per statement. Intent and the effects thereof should always be explicit per statement, not implicit, otherwise effects not intended will eventually slip in, and be missed.
It's hard to catch, and fix the effects of a statement intent where the statement in question is *implicit* because the effect is a *byproduct* of another statement.

Worse still, this sort of design encourages 'pyramid coding recursion hell', where some users will first decompose their program into respective scopes, and then return and compose them..atomically as possible, meaning execution flow becomes distorted, run time state becomes dependent not on obvious plain-at-sight code, but on the run time state itself. This I've found is a symptom of people who have spent too much time with LISP or other eye-stabbingly fucky abominations. Finally implicit returns encourage a form of thinking where programmers attempt to write code that 'just works' without thinking about how it *looks* or reads. The problem with opaque-programming is that while it may or may not be effortless, much more time is spent in reading, debugging, understanding, and maintaining code than is spent writing it--which is obviously problematic if we have a bunch of invisible returns everywhere, which requires new developers reading it to stop each and every time to decide whether to mentally 'insert' a return statement.

This really isn't a rant, as much as an old bitter gripe from the guy that got stuck with the job of debugging. And admittedly I've admired lisp from afar, but I didn't want to catch the "everything is functional, DOWN WITH THE STATE" fever, I'm no radical.

Just god damn, think of the future programmer who may have to read your code eventually.

I’m currently working with a devops team in the company to migrate our old ass jboss servers architecture to kubernetes.

They’ve been working in this for about a year now, and it was supposed to be delivered a few months back, no one knew what’s going on and last week they manage to have something to see at least.

I’ve never seen anything so bad in my short life as a developer, at the point that the main devops guy can’t even understand his own documentation to add ci/cd to a project.

It goes from trigger manually pipelines in multiple branches for configuration and secrets, a million unnecessary env variables to set, to docker images lacking almost all requisites necessary to run the apps.

You can clearly see the dude goes around internet copy pasting stuff without actually understanding what going on behind as every time you ask him for the guts of the architecture he changes the topic.

And the worst of all this, as my team is their counterpart on development we’ve fighting for weeks to make them understand that is impossible the proceed with this process with over 100 apps and 50+ developers.

Long story short, last two weeks I’ve been fixing the “dev ops” guy mess in terms of processes and documentation but I think this is gonna end really bad, not to sound cocky or anything but developers level is really low, add docker and k8s in top of that and you have a recipe for disaster.

Still enjoying as I have no fault there, and dude got busted.

So c++ isn't really ideal for robotics? I could just not understand c++ correctly. I think it's just my terrible understanding of why a compiler is needed. I am an intermediate Python Dev, so I guess I'd like to download the "language" and go, ya know?

Hello not a rant,

Are there MS SQL Server admins here who self taught and learn thru self study?

I work in a company where they use MS SQL Server as the database. I would love to 'understand' how to write efficient queries, and how things really work, not just selecting and joining table blindly and not understanding how things work.

Would you recommend how you understand MS SQL Server, or what learning path you took?

Thank you. I would appreciate any suggestions and comments.

So this happened some years ago:

The phone rings and as soon as I pick it up some fast talking sales rep begins his spiel.

"Good afternoon my name is [don't remember, calling him 'jigglybum'] and we have a device that you plug into your phone line and it will allow you to make free international calls over the internet. It's real easy to set up and you can have it on us for the first three months absolutely free, if you could just confirm your address..."

"Don't want it."

"I'm sorry sir but I think you're throwing away a massive opportunity here we're offering you free international calls."

"No you're not. You're offering me a free trial of some sort of VoIP hardware."

"We yes, but it's free for the first three months and..."

"We also don't make international calls."

"That maybe true sir but with this box you could."

"I'm really not interested in your product."

"I don't think you fully understand all the benefits..."

*there's a clicking noise followed by a dial tone for a second and a new voice*

"Hi, I'm the supervisor for 'jigglybum' and I think perhaps he is having difficulty explaining what it is that we are trying to give you here..."

"Listen to me, from what I have understood you are offering to send us a VOIP hardware device that directly connects to our broadband and facilitates international calls, and presumably any calls for that matter on a three month trial which after will presumably have a subscription fee, have I had any difficulty understanding the nature of the device and terms of use?"

"Well, no sir, that's a very accurate description, so if you could just confirm your address for me..."

"NO! As you have just admitted there was no misunderstanding about what your product is or what it does. There seems to be a real misunderstanding on your part on the concept of 'no'. We don't want this product, we don't need the product and if we want to make VOIP calls, we have Skype!"

"Ok sir, goodbye."

This is, to my knowledge the only and only time that a supervisor in a call centre has wanted to talk to ME.

My do-over would be going to a different coding bootcamp. I wonder if I could be making more money if I went to a better school.

The one I did go to was a big scam. They were more obsessed with teaching you to pretend rather than teaching how to code. They pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes—the students, the volunteers, the donors, the community. They were very cult-like with mantras like “trust the process.”

I spent 9 months there, but I felt I was a year behind. I am not misspeaking. I would have to relearn basic concepts the right way because they taught them half assed or not at all. I didn’t realize I was behind until I went to interviews and bombed. Seriously, I learned more in a 40 hour free library coding class than I learned in 9 months at the school. Most of the interviews I was getting were for unpaid internships. The school was telling me to go for mid level roles.

I found out recently that they’re breaking the law by operating without a license. In my state code schools do need a license. There are screenshots going around of a letter from the education department. They’re defense is “they’re not a school.” They’re still open. I think ppl should be warned away, but there’s only so much I can do. And I know ppl will give this place the benefit of the doubt before taking any student accusations seriously.

The biggest red flag is they want students to pay up to 70k and bind them to payments for 8 years. I say it’s a red flag because this place is operating as a nonprofit. Shouldn’t a nonprofit not be charging 3-4x more than competitors? They’re definitely not going to give you 70k worth of services.

They really just exploit the poor and POC by signing them up for debt and knowing those ppl would not be able to pay even with a 100k job. They have a very poor understanding about how poverty works.

It had MLM/pyramid scheme vibes when they started making recruiting students a game. They give out tickets to their annual fundraiser or promote you on social media if you refer the most students to them.

I’m one of the lucky ones who was studying coding before I started at the school. Also, job searching is mostly luck, so I was lucky at that too. But I still had to take a job that paid below market. I still wonder what would happen if I went someplace else.

I don’t even put this place on my resume or LinkedIn. Even without these problems, it’s not like anyone would have heard of the place anyway.

No this place isn’t Lambda or Holberton school.

I’d been working event based and freelance jobs in the security and entertainment fields for years, with odd stints as a bartender sprinkled in. My pay was mostly decent, but I had no job security, and I was more on the road than at home. A few years before this job search experience I had already realised I can’t continue on this path for ever, especially if I ever want a serious relationship (e.g. 16 weeks straight touring Europe with on avg. 16h work days pretty much every day isn’t ideal in that regard, and also really though on both body and mind). So I decided to study. As I applied in autumn, not every line of study accepted students. The closest to my interest I found was BBA in Business IT.

Fast forward 1,5 years. After moving away from my previous base due to then-gfs studies, I had also been able to accept less work. Well, there were really two reasons: I didn’t want to go on weeks long big tours anymore, and I’d had to price up on my freelance job due to reasons. I still managed to keep our household going, but not knowing when the next paycheck would be available was becoming a little too stressful. I wanted job security. So a few weeks after my wedding I scoured the internetz for positions I could apply to, and applied to a dozen or so places. They were a variety of positions I had a vague understanding of from what I’d learned at UAS: from sales to data analytics to dev… I was aware pretty much all of the applications were a long shot by best, so I expected to be ghosted…

Two of the organizations I applied to wanted to go forward with me. Both dev jobs. I can’t even remember the specifics of the other one anymore, but I do remember the interview: I got in to their office (which was ridiculously open), and got marched into a tiny conference room. The interviewer was passive-aggressive and really bombarded me with questions, not really leaving a socially awkward introvert with any time to answer. I started to get really anxious and twitchy, sweating like a pig. Just wanted out. But nooo, they wanted me to do a coding test live. So they sat me on a computer with Eclipse open, gave me an assignment and told me not to use the internet. What’s even worse is that I could literally feel the interviewer breathing down my neck when I tried to do the test. Well, didn’t happen cause I was under so much pressure that I couldn’t think at all… yeah, that was horrible.

Anyhow, the other position I really applied to because it was in my hometown and I recognised the company name from legendary commercials from the 90s - everyone in this country who watched TV in mid-to-late 90s remembers those. Anyway, to my surprise, my present day manager contacted me and wanted me to do a coding test. At the time he asked I was having a bout of fevers after fevers, not really able to get healthy. I told him that I’d do it as soon as I’m healthy. A month went by, maybe more. He asked again. Again I replied that as soon as I get healthy, but promised to do it next week the latest. I didn’t deliver on that, but the next week after that, even if I was the most feverish I had been, I did the tests. I could only finish half of them, cause I couldn’t look at a screen for long at a time and had to visit the loo every 10min or so, but apparently that was enough. Next week I was already going to the interview… oh I also googled what is PHP on the way there, since it was mentioned as a requirement and I had no idea what it was. Imagine that…

The interview itself couldn’t have been more different from the other one. We were sitting in a nice conference room with my manager and the product’s lead dev, drinking coffee, our feet on the table and talking smack. Oh, and we did play a game of NHL<insertNumber> on PS4 during the interview… it was relaxed. Of course the more serious chat was there, too, but I can only really remember how relaxed it was. When I left the interview, I had been promised the position and that I would be sent the contract to be signed as soon as the CEO had reviewed and approved it. Next day, I had signed it and some time later I started at my current job (I gave a date when I was available to start, since there was a tour still agreed upon between the interview and the start).

Oh, and the job’s pretty much like the interview. Relaxed. It’s a good place to be in, even though the pay could be better (I regularly get offers for junior positions with more pay, and mid level positions with double the pay). I do value a pleasant working environment and the absence of stress more than big munny, what can I say?

If you have 15 minutes now , and the whole world is listening to your advice to be a software engineer.

What would your advice be? (Your advice will some how reflect WHAT YOU REALLY WANT TO KNOW when you were beginner)

I will go first, "Do not compare yourself when you pick up programming, it take times, understanding and passion to lead you to become one. Be consistent in aspect of learning more. Focus one , master one language and master another one. Don't look down on yourself."

We had a tutorial on how to use spark/Hadoop.. part of the tutorial was the installation instructions for Ubuntu vms.

The Prof insisted we used an older version of Hadoop (v2.1.5), so naturally this required pulling older repos and older versions of java.

Naturally, some of the people in the class got some namespacing issues and garbage left from uninstalled packages.

Now, the tutorial was geared towards business/math people, not com sci. So most of the people didn't understand why apt didn't let them run certain commands (even though it very clearly just asked for them to run autoremove or autoclean, like in the "error message"). When the Prof and their "experienced TA" saw these messages, their recommendation was "make a new fresh vm".

The fuck? I heard that, run over and was like no. Just run the suggested command, it's literally a simple issue. And the guy didn't believe me. I had to sit him down, show him how I literally typed what the console was asking for, and everything just worked... The guy's response was "well that's Linux for you, its really complicated and can never trust anything, this time it worked, but next time it might not". Dude... Do you even know what you are saying? Like you are a supposed expert, least have some understanding of the package manager you are using. Maybe things will then be less "schrodinger cat".

God damn I can't wait to be out of this stupid fucking school. Never going back to academia.

I spent 4 months in a programming mentorship offered by my workplace to get back to programming after 4 years I graduated with a CS degree.

Back in 2014, what I studied in my first programming class was not easy to digest. I would just try enough to pass the courses because I was more interested in the theory. It followed until I graduated because I never actually wrote code for myself for example I wrote a lot of code for my vision class but never took a personal initiative. I did however have a very strong grip on advanced computer science concepts in areas such as computer architecture, systems programming and computer vision. I have an excellent understanding of machine learning and deep learning. I also spent time working with embedded systems and volunteering at a makerspace, teaching Arduino and RPi stuff. I used to teach people older than me.

My first job as a programmer sucked big time. It was a bootstrapped startup whose founder was making big claims to secure funding. I had no direction, mentorship and leadership to validate my programming practices. I burnt out in just 2 months. It was horrible. I experienced the worst physical and emotional pain to date. Additionally, I was gaslighted and told that it is me who is bad at my job not the people working with me. I thought I was a big failure and that I wasn't cut out for software engineering.

I spent the next 6 months recovering from the burn out. I had a condition where the stress and anxiety would cause my neck to deform and some vertebrae were damaged. Nobody could figure out why this was happening. I did find a neurophyscian who helped me out of the mental hell hole I was in and I started making recovery. I had to take a mild anti anxiety for the next 3 years until I went to my current doctor.

I worked as an implementation engineer at a local startup run by a very old engineer. He taught me how to work and carry myself professionally while I learnt very little technically. A year into my job, seeing no growth technically, I decided to make a switch to my favourite local software consultancy. I got the job 4 months prior to my father's death. I joined the company as an implementation analyst and needed some technical experience. It was right up my alley. My parents who saw me at my lowest, struggling with genetic depression and anxiety for the last 6 years, were finally relieved. It was hard for them as I am the only son.

After my father passed away, I was told by his colleagues that he was very happy with me and my sisters. He died a day before I became permanent and landed a huge client. The only regret I have is not driving fast enough to the hospital the night he passed away. Last year, I started seeing a new doctor in hopes of getting rid of the one medicine that I was taking. To my surprise, he saw major problems and prescribed me new medication.

I finally got a diagnosis for my condition after 8 years of struggle. The new doctor told me a few months back that I have Recurrent Depressive Disorder. The most likely cause is my genetics from my father's side as my father recovered from Schizophrenia when I was little. And, now it's been 5 months on the new medication. I can finally relax knowing my condition and work on it with professional help.

After working at my current role for 1 and a half years, my teamlead and HR offered me a 2 month mentorship opportunity to learn programming from scratch in Python and Scrapy from a personal mentor specially assigned to me. I am still in my management focused role but will be spending 4 hours daily of for the mentorship. I feel extremely lucky and grateful for the opportunity. It felt unworldly when I pushed my code to a PR for the very first time and got feedback on it. It is incomparable to anything.

So we had Eid holidays a few months back and because I am not that social, I began going through cs61a from Berkeley and logged into HackerRank after 5 years. The medicines help but I constantly feel this feeling that I am not enough or that I am an imposter even though I was and am always considered a brilliant and intellectual mind by my professors and people around me. I just can't shake the feeling.

Anyway, so now, I have successfully completed 2 months worth of backend training in Django with another awesome mentor at work. I am in absolute love with Django and Python. And, I constantly feel like discussing and sharing about my progress with people. So, if you are still reading, thank you for staying with me.

TLDR: Smart enough for high level computer science concepts in college, did well in theory but never really wrote code without help. Struggled with clinical depression for the past 8 years. Father passed away one day before being permanent at my dream software consultancy and being assigned one of the biggest consultancy. Getting back to programming after 4 years with the help of change in medicine, a formal diagnosis and a technical mentorship.

!rant

Had to build an app using Cordova because... well, I am a web dev and know a shitload of PHP and a good part of JS, but no Swift or Java or whatever.

So there is a deadline set to like half a year after we had the initial talk with the customer. 6 months to build a relatively easy and small app.

So yeah, I procrastinated like one would do when he's got that kind of time left and not much else to do.

And yeah, I did work, but also procrastinated some more. The development was as expected, and I was well in the anticipated time frame.

Then I got a really bad disc prolapse and was sick at home and the hospital for (all together) 5 weeks.

After that, I came back to work for a week, then leaving for a (previously planned) vacation with my little family.

On my first day back at work after the vacation, I quit my job with a 6 weeks notice, of which I have to work 3 weeks.

I know it sounds like I'm a real prick, but it was never planned this way. I never searched for a new job. It just came to me.

I am still finishing the app, though :)

Why am I telling you this?
Well, I do that to show that there still are great bosses out there. My boss has NEVER spoken a bad word to me, even after I quit my job. He's always been kind, fair and understanding.

I just wanted to show that between all these rants about bad bosses and colleagues (which I have had my fair share of in the past), there still are some real gems out there.

Gotta my my boss - he's been one of the best I have had so far.

Peace out folks. Good night...

NO FUCKING WONDER I SUCKED-ASS IN HIGH SCHOOL ALGEBRA!!!!!

Arghgghhghgh ughhh....

I want to beef up the hell out of my Maths Chops so I can maybe try going back to school for a A.S. in EE or hell even an B.S.

I'm using my company's Safari Learning account for getting free-ish access to college algebra books and I'm self studying.

I'm still in Chapter 0 where the book covers shit you're supposed to know from previous years of education. I'm just learning about some of this shit now!!!

While it's possible that I didn't pay attention in high school lectures, I took geometry in 9th grade and was an A/B+ student and felt confident in maths. I got to Algebra II in High School and suddenly nothing made sense anymore, reality fucking-fell-apart!

Suddenly, I'm failing tests left and right and struggling with the lecture concepts and I could never seem to grasp materials covered in class anymore to even be able to finish the homework assignments.

Fast forward to me being 15 years older and wanting to take a stab at this shit again, but with new found determination to get into EE so I can fuck around with small electronics for pet projects I want to do. I'm starting with College Algebra to try and learn when suddenly, low and behold I have a HUGE FUCK-MOTHERING GAP in my core understanding of the language/syntax/grammar of mathematics.

Been fucking knee-capped for the last decade+ because I either slacked off during those fundamental lectures (which again; is totally plausible) or I had a complete fucking imbecile for a math teacher that glossed over the topics and fucked not only me but the 40+ other kids in that class.

I'm not going to blame the teacher, although I really fucking want to, but I can't remember how the class scored on tests or homework to be able to fairly and objectively make that judgement against the educator.

FUCK!!! I hate my 15 y.o. self right now

!rant (kinda)

So I'm currently working on a personal project, where the concept is something, that if I wanted to, I could probably make a decent penny off of it.

The plan is to make it open source, and not charge anything for it, and when I tell this to non-dev people, they're almost shocked! Why would I not take an opportunity to make a lot of money!?

Well basically I think it's awesome to have open-source software, and I really want to "contribute to the society". And only after like 10 minutes, people start understanding my point, to just help people make something new, instead of being a greedy person, and keep it private, making it unavailable for a lot of people.

Hopefully I'm not the only one with this mindset?

v0.0005a (alpha)
- class support added to lua thanks to yonaba.
- rkUIs class created
- new panel class
- added drawing code for panel
- fixed bug where some sides of the UI's border were failing to drawing (line rendering quark)

v0.0014a (alpha) 11.30.2023 (~2 hours)
- successfully retrieving basic data from save folder, load text into lua from files
- added 'props' property to Entity class
- added a props table to control what gets serialized and what doesn't
- added a save() base method for instances (has to be overridden to be useful beyond the basics)
- moved the lume.serialize() call into the :save() method on the base entity class itself
- serialized and successfully saved an entities property table.
- fixed deserializion bugs involving wrong indexes (savedata[1] not savedata[2])
- moved deserialization from temp code, into line loading loop itself (assuming each item is on one line)
- deser'd test data, and init()'d new player Entity using the freshly-loaded data, and displayed the entity sprite

All in all not a bad session. Understanding filing handling and how to interact with the directory system was the biggest hurdle I was worried about for building my tools.

Next steps will be defining some basic UI elements (with overridable draw code), and then loading and initializing the UI from lua or json.

New projects can be set as subfolders folders in appdata, using 'Setidentity("appname/projectname") to keep things clean.

I'm not even dreading writing basic syntax highlighting!

Idea is to dogfood the whole process. UI is in-engine rendered just like you might see with godot, unity, or gamemaker, that way I have maximum flexibility to style it the way I want. I'm familiar enough with constructing from polygons, on top of stenciling, on top of nine-slicing, on top of existing tweening and special effects, that I can achieve exactly what I want.

Idea is to build a really well managed asset pipeline. Stencyl, as 'crappy' as it appeared, and 'for education' was a master class in how to do things the correct way, it was just horribly bloated while doing it.

Logical tilesets that you import, can rearrange through drag-n-drop, assign custom tile shapes to, physics materials, collisions groups, name, add tag data to, all in one editor? Yes please.
Every other 2D editor is basic-bitch, has you importing images, and at most generates different scales and does the slicing for you.

Code editor? Everything behavior was in a component, with custom fields. All your code goes into a list of events, which you can toggle on and off with a proper toggle button, so you can explicitly experiment, instead of commenting shit out (yes git is better, but we're talking solo amateurs here, they're not gonna be using git out the gate unless they already know what they're doing).

Components all have an image assignable to identify them, along with a description field, and they're arranged in a 2d grid for easy browsing, copying, modifying.

The physics shape editor, the animation editor, the map editor, all of it was so bare bones and yet had things others didn't.

I want that, except without the historic ties to flash, without the overhead of java, and with sexier fucking in-engine rendering of the UI and support for modding and in-engine custom tools.

Not really doing it for anyone except myself, and doubt I'll get very far, but since I dropped looking for easy solutions, I've just been powering through all the areas I don't understand and doing the work.

I rediscovered my love of programming after 3-4 years of learning to hate it, and things are looking up.

4 really basic questions. Things you can't get through 1st year undergrad without knowing. One was testing you understand references, one testing understanding of inheritance, then exception handling... Then a bit of a tricky one: what happens when you query 2 tables in sql without a join. That took me a second because it's just not something I'm used to doing.

So yeah it's pretty basic stuff. At this point I was used to writing fairly long code snippets and quizzes with lots of gotchas that make the interviewers feel really smart. I think "ok they basically want to make sure I'm not totally useless and they're fine with training me". But noooooo. Being able to answer all that correctly is really impressive. That's never happened before. I'm a fucking prodigy.

So I got the job and I alternate between thinking I'm in Idiocracy and thinking the reception I get is some sort of elaborate joke

I'm looking into GraphQL and so far so good, but I am finding it hard to implement business rules, for example:

1. Receive request with auth token
2. Know who the user is by extractin userId from token
3. fetch data related to that user only.

I was only able to make it allow or deny if there is a token or not lol

Well, this happens time to time...

I'm freelancing as a backend guy. I like to take care of all infrastructure before really starting to build anything, this mostly includes dev/staging/prod environments with some linear promotion strategy. So.. I did this API. Still on staging, proceeding with the development as planned, everything goes according the timeline.

And then.. this happens... At some point PM told frontend guy that it's time for production (without notifying me), so the frontend guy does what "anyone" would do in this case - tells PM to create DNS record for production to point to staging app.

Time passes, I'm still unaware of this. But I'm starting to see some quality entries in the DB, not the usual QA crap. I write to them that they're doing good job and continue with my tasks.

One of the tasks required some major DB change. I could've written migrations script, but since we're not in "production" yet, I just wipe the DB and recreate schema as I need it.

In 10 minutes the furious PM starts shouting that "production" is down and I need to fix it ASAP.

I'm lost, I'm asking questions, I'm slowly understanding what's happening...

So I want to grab some coffee, sat back down, wrote politely that they suck, added a finger emoji and terminated the contract.

Felt like the right thing to do as I definitely don't want to continue within the same "team".

Ok so first technical blog post/rant cuz I just reduced a lot of debt... Prolly gonna put this in an email to my boss (he says progress improvement is now a priority but there are some problems as listed below):

So last week, I spent a lot of time investigating db logs manually to figure out a prod issue: tiring, time consuming, and not very effective.

This week I built an app. It took a few days but having the time to design it correctly, it is very powerful.

So in order to really do process improvement, you need to have: dedicated the time, the problem solving mindset (the right people), and the understanding of what the problem is and why so you can build a good solution (time and people).

Soo question for the few embedded engineers on here. Do you guys use microchip’s, or NXP’s SDK for the hardware drivers? Or do you read the ref manual and build the HAL and PAL drivers per the need of the project for less code bloat and saving code space.

I and my coworkers always end up writing the drivers ourselves , so we have a better understanding of the specific hardware of the chip. Just trying to see if We’re the majority or the minority of embedded engineers.

Not really sure how many embedded folks are even on here.

And no not talking about RasPie, and arduino folks (no offense)

I think I finally, really, comprehend why secret societies have historically been created... I mean the potentially logical ones. This train of thought is logically terrifying.

I want a logic check.

I've been jokingly mentioning some of my totally true, practically useless in most scenarios, skills/specific fields of knowledge/ability under a moniker of 'extremely useful, assuming apocalyptic event' for years. Things like advanced knowledge of Coefficients of glass expansion, Fortran, various things that have caused friends to refer to me as MacGyver after the reboot came out.

In recent years, I've personally encountered several varieties of the ones defined by helplessness, self-victimisation, some version of a real disability... that theyve expounded into a personified personal nemesis-- to flashily battle yet never overcome, etc... the vast majority perplexing me as to why that's a valid form of life to them... it's not that they never consider some other way; the ball is just quickly dropped and never picked back up.

College?(not that I'm a big fan) they wish they could but so expensive... aide? The form was hard/confusing/past-due...

Lookup/learn something more indepth than a tiktok? *some self-deprecating bs*

Yet it's "I always wanted to do/be/learn X"

Shows like 'How It's Made' fascinate, but don't inspire enough for a 5min google query.

In the dev world its a clear, inverted pyramid-- one of the first posts I saw when I rejoined here was ostream's rant on Apple sucking because after they stop support/updates you "can't" load a different OS... ofc you can. But several comments down... no mention of that... i think it was @LensFlare who was the only one in ~15 respondents to point out the core logical fallacy.

Basic shit is totally forgotten... try asking some random adults what plastic is made from... or pay attention to how many people declare they have a gluten "allergy".

I get people frequently telling me that things im pointing out as differences don't matter because "it's just semantics"... semantics is literally the epitome of "significance", with roots in 'meaning' and 'truth'

Back to the main issue... We are in a world where DIY is typically something you pay more to do as a catered experience than actually learning anything, people destroy their own arguments hopes of validity unwittingly often by stating the arguement, get 'offended' or 'triggered' by factual statements, propagate misinformation and bastardise words until MW needs money enough to print a new version, likely adding the misuse as an actual definition and basic knowledge and the thought to actually learn is vetoed by the existence of google translate, the wisdom of tiktok and the pure brillance of troubleshooting every random linux issue you have from not knowing basic CLI and thinking linux makes you cool, with chmod 777 because so many other dumbasses on forums keep propagating misinformation. Ask them what 777 means, most have no clue... as they didnt consider googling that one before putting it in a terminal several times.
The number of humans that actually know the basic shit that the infrastructure of the world is built on keeps decreasing... and we aren't even keeping a running tally.

The structure of the internet has the right idea... dns- 13 active master root servers, with multiple redundancies if they start dropping... hell ICANN is like a secret society but publicly known/obfuscated... the modern internet hasnt had a global meltdown... aside from the lack of censorship and global availability changing the social definition of a valid use of braincells to essentially propagating spam as if it's factual and educational.

So many 'devs' so few understanding what a driver is, much less how to write one... irl network techs that don't know what dhcp is or that their equiptment has logs... professionals in deducated fields like Autism research/coping... no clue why it was called "autism", obesity and malnutrition simultaneously existing in the same humans... it's like we need to prepare a subterranean life-supporting vault and stock it like Noah's ark... just including the basic knowledge of things that used to be common/obvious. I've literally had 2 different, early 20s, female, certified medical assistants taking my medical history legitimately ask if not having a uterus made it harder to get pregnant...i wish i was joking.

Any ideas better than a subterranean human vault system? It's not like we can simply store detailed explanations, guides, media... unless we find a way to make them into obfuscated tiktok videos apparently on nonsense or makeup tutorials.

I have a question, but first some background. When I got my first job, it wasn't clear cut what I would do, but I ended up doing frontend. I really liked doing frontend, so I continued doing so and I still do to this day. I even work alongside designers in a design studio, so I feel very much like a frontend developer.

Obviously, the term "frontend" these days implies someone, in some ways, writing a web, mobile or desktop app using javascript. For me, frontend is also about stuff like accessibility, design, code delivery, and understanding the end-users and the designers that may have prototyped something for you.

I have not been active in any other dev communities than this place, but it seems to me like a frontend developer is pretty much the lowest common denominator ( I guess in terms of skills). If I am right, I do not know why, which is why I'm hoping someone could explain.

I want to make a "game" on learning spoken languages so people can study while not stressing out on the learning.
The disadvantages:
-Vocab
-Method to memorize is different with every person
-Stress and frustration
-Motivation killer
Advantages:
-Can be interesting, depends on user's interest and willingness
-Explore vocab by exploring or reading in-game texts
-Grammar is heavily broken down to help relate meanings and thorough understanding of a sentence as well as slang
--
Why I put disadvantages first was to see how the software will impact a person's negativity/postivity when using it. As in for example, when you see something that is difficult to understand, users tend to procrastinate or drop it due to it being "difficult"/alienated.
-- onto the rant--
Many apps have really awful way of teaching, its just 3-4 apps chucked into 1 aka all-in-one and expects people to pay just because of the all-in-one app containing flash cards, sentences, audio etc. I use my phone (android) and normally during my intern or my way to school, I would do my reading in the other languages, (separate apps, all free). Also apart from that, students sometimes take 2 years to learn but drop because it's difficult.
TL:DR; apps and classes give shitty lessons, I want to outdo them and let students have a better chance at studying new spoken languages.

I'm writing a couple of tutorials on web development, nothing really professional, just my perspective on explaining things from scratch.

It's funny how quickly things get hard to explain.
You try to explain web frameworks and you have to differentiate between client side and server side frameworks.

But some people don't know what client or server means.

So you try to explain what the client-server model is.

But then the word model is not clear to some people, it's like a jargon word in software, so you have to give some kind of explanation for the word.

And so on.

This complexity and layering of terms is normal on every science, but I feel terms deserve proper explanation and disambiguation, which isn't usually done.

So far I don't feel a lot of things are as complex as they are considered in an atomical sense, they are complex in the sense of requiring understanding of layers that are very simple in themselves.

It is quite a challenge to be the least obscure, to give explanations with the least number of possible interpretations.

This is a rant to myself. I am an international postgraduate student studying in Australia, and after the first year study, I got an internship in a local IT company. That's good indeed, not everyone can get recommendation from the uni, however, I feel so stressful. Because my English skill is not good enough, I hardly used any English before I came to Australia. Thought I have no problem in technical conversation, I often fail to keep up with my local colleagues' daily conversation. Sometimes I have to "Pardon?" for several times, that's embarrassed and makes me frustrated:/

But when I am chating with my local friend, I perform more better. Hmmm... Any suggestion? I really want to improve my English, specially listening skill of understanding what native speakers are saying.

I’ve now discovered that management actually decides for themselves what software engineering is. 🧐

It is getting increasingly common that in different architectural groups the decision has already been made… by management…without actually passing through our review… as a little more senior blokes and gals.

Not even a discussion? On the fit?

That leads me to the conclusion, since I consider the management (at least the two or three closest layers) are morons, good at talking but not really knowing anything about what we do (we kind of take stuff and make other stuff from it by using energy and other stuff in HUGE FUCKING FACILITIES AROUND THE PLANET), that even they did not make the decision. It was forced upon them. They did not decide either! Because they can’t! Because they are idiots all of them!

I have not investigated this issue but this is the logical conclusion. Or not.

Recently, for instance, decisions were made to route information flows by some tech. Some new tech. At some place in our eco-system. At a certain time. And, if we were to have reviewed this initiative in our process we would have said:

”Well, I hear you! But we are not going to do that right now because WE ARE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING HUGE GLOBAL PROJECT THAT CHANGES PRETTY MUCH FUCKING EVERYTHING AND WE CAN NOT JUST IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING EXECUTION PROCESS OF THE PROJECT CHANGE THE FOUNDATIONS OF MESSAGE ROUTING BECAUSE WE LACK THE NUMBER OF HUMANS TO DO THE FUCKING JOB. So, we need to take a look at this and to get a better understanding when we can make this happen.”

What is the point of having this step in our organization if it is just pass-through? What is the point? Meetings? Just having meetings? Spending time mastering the organizational skill of administrating meetings? Feeling important? Using big words (holistic being my favourite)?

Below, juniors devs are being hired doing stupid stuff that does not need doing. For months and months.

I believe now that half of the dev staff does not need to be there and three quarters of the team, service, delivery (etc) managers are unnecessary. I mean, the good juniors are going to change jobs soon either way and we are stuck in this vicious cycle where we are not being allowed to be innovative in software engineering. Stability is of the essence here but the rate of our releases are just silly slow. I would say that we are far, far away from any track that leads us to where we want to be. Agile. Innovative. Close to business. Learning. Teaching. Faster. Stability despite response to implementing changing business needs.

And then there are the consultants…

*sigh*

Yesterday I tried Rancher on a DigitalOcean droplet.

Rancher itself was easy to startup and use. But I couldn't manage to find the Container Volumes on my NFS Server. Even the NFS Server was up and running.

I really felt like a monkey in front of my PC not understanding what Im doing.

Hi so I'm learning python in my spare time and I'm in a national competition. I've been told that programming is something my college has always lacked in and in the competition they fortunately use python throughout the problems. I have some example problems used in the last year competition (it was publicly released) and I'm going through them to get an idea of the problems we/I will face. Now I'm still learning python but I understand some of the code at hand. However I still need a little bit of help to understand some of it which will also help me get to a resolution.
Some of the questions I have are:
1. What exactly is the ordinal? I've done some research and I have a small idea but I couldn't find anything to really fill me in and explain how to use it, well in python at least. I saw an example for Pascal but that didn't do much.
2. What is the sys.argv? "The list if command line arguments passed to a python script". I'm not quite understanding that.
3. I know for is used for looping and I know an example say "for a in range(10):" but I'm not understanding the for c in password:
4. Where does the 1000 come from in the builder += 1000.
5. What does the 83 represent after ord(password[1])
6. I know the if statement is saying if this then do this so if __name__ == "__main__":
main()
It's saying call in the function main but where does the name and main come in that part?
Here is the image:

Thank you for your responses in advanced!
One person doesn't have to answer all. Time is precious I understand.

I tend to be a perfectionist, and I have a hard time coping when I feel like someone isn’t happy with work that I’ve done, or when I feel like I haven’t lived up to my own standards.

I’ve been at my current job for a little more than a year, and for the vast majority of that time, my supervisor and coworkers have seemed very pleased with me. My performance reviews so far have been completely positive. But I’m aware that over the past month or so, I’ve run up against more challenges than usual. I’ve taken on some new projects that I haven’t felt entirely confident about, there have been some organizational changes, and because this is a busy time for my department, I don’t always feel like I can easily get help when I have a question about something.

To make things worse, I struggle with anxiety, and while I’ve been working very hard to manage it, all it takes is a few bad days to put me behind on things. I really want to step up to the plate, and I’ve been worried that expressing concerns would make me look like I’m not capable or like I’m a complainer. But the truth is, I’ve been getting in over my head a bit, and I worry that it’s reflecting poorly on me. I haven’t made any terrible mistakes, but it’s taken me longer than usual to complete or follow up on tasks and I haven’t been as organized as I usually am. My supervisor hasn’t gotten upset with me, and she’s expressed understanding, but I’m worried that she has less confidence in me than she used to.

To be fair to myself, over the past couple weeks I feel like I’ve been doing a good job at catching up and getting back to my usual level of efficiency. I feel optimistic about my ability to handle things from here on out, at least for the most part. But I’m scared that a few “off” weeks will damage my reputation and workplace relationships, and that people are thinking poorly of me now. I think because I’m so hard on myself (I feel guilty whenever someone praises me, because I don’t feel like I deserve it), it’s hard for me to have an accurate perception of how things actually are.

Also, do you have any tips for addressing challenges when they come up? I struggle with asking for help or clarification sometimes because I don’t want to come across like I need my hand held. And do you have any suggestions for how to deal with it when things just aren’t going smoothly? I know that in the workplace, what matters is results. The fact that I might be having a bad day due to anxiety or a late night with a sick pet isn’t an excuse. But while I think I’m generally good at managing stress and anxiety and that bad days are uncommon, I can’t guarantee that I won’t ever go through a tough time and that that won’t impact my focus at all.

I'm feeling burnt due to the lack of direction at my job instead of overwork.
I'm working as a data scientist at a large corporation and have been remote for a little over a year. I'm very savvy at programming and other technical skills but my manager wants me to develop my leadership skills and want me to move to a management role eventually. So he's been kinda "grooming" me to take on more leadership responsibility in the projects I'm currently involved in.

However, to be honest, I'm a little torn about getting more management or leadership responsibilities. I'm an extreme introvert and absolutely abhor meetings and having the same thing to people all the time and this sort of things stresses me out very easily. My manager seems set on pushing me towards pursuing a path towards leadership and just basically assumed that this is what I want out of my career and started putting me in the deep end without asking me what I want.

I really want to voice my honest thoughts about what I really want to do in my career (to be a technical specialist rather than a manager) but I've kinda procrastinated over the past year when he first started "grooming" me for a leadership role and it's my bad that I didn't tell him earlier.

Right now, I'm thrown in the deep end. I'm given a lot of projects without much of any direction and I'm asked to figure out the people I need to reach out to, the types of meetings I need to set with them, the relationships I need to develop both in and out of my department, etc. However, my real passions lie in writing code, fixing bugs, building models, understanding new technologies and applying them to the business, etc.

On paper, I'm involved in a ton of projects and I seem to be a really busy worker. But right now, I'm having a lot of difficulty reaching out and developing relationships with people that I barely have any actual work to do during the day, because I'm constantly waiting for replies from people or for permission or red tape to get some key information or access to a system in order for me to build something like a model or a program for a particular project. I'm spending maybe 1 or 2 hours of my workday actually "working" which is attending meetings, reading emails, etc., reaching out to someone for the n-th time (even though they continue to ignore me), etc. And that's because I'm blocked on all of my projects - I need an essential piece of information, data, or access to a system or server and the person I'm reaching out to to get this isn't responding. I brought this up with my manager and he says he's gonna try to reach out to these people to help me but so far, it doesn't seem like his help has been effective as I'm continuing to wait.

Though I get paid pretty well, I feel guilty logging in to work everyday and doing very little work, not because I'm lazy but because there really isn't much work for me to do because I'm waiting on so much here and I'm at a point where I can't make any progress in any of my projects without the approvals or other critical information that others aren't providing me.

I know I probably should find another job and I'm currently looking but in the meantime, is there anything else that I should be doing at my current job to hopefully make this situation better?

Out of curiosity, is there anyone else who feels a bit late to the game in terms of their programming skills and training?

I got my start at about 10 with a slightly obscure BASIC dialect for classic MacOS, and while I got the logical bits down strong, I never really branched out too much at the time because I had difficulty understanding some of the more advanced examples I had available on my own.

Skip ahead to college and I tried CompSci my first semester, and did fairly well on paper, but could not get the compiler to work, even copying out known examples character for character and verifying them repeatedly. So after my first semester (and the hardest-earned D I’ve ever gotten) I ended up switching my major.

Skip another 10 years and I’m talking to some people about setting up a website, but the programmer flaked out on us, so I decided to start experimenting in PHP, and while that project never went anywhere I got good at developing resources for helping me keep my Japanese skills up (lots of logic/DB work, minimal interface).

Finally, after 10 more years of tinkering and during a bout of unemployment, I had a friend lament that he needed another programmer for his shop, but didn’t know anyone reliable. I apprenticed under him, learning WordPress along the way, and these days he’s moved on while I run the shop on my own, picking up new skills as needed.

There are times I feel absolutely confident in what I’m doing, but there are several areas where I feel like I’ve got a lot of fundamental gaps I can’t figure out how to address due to my near complete lack of formal training (like when I’ve tried to do non-web programming).

Anyone else have a similar path to where they are now? Ideas on how to break out of this limiting feeling?

When Do You Stop Taking Responsibility?

Let me clarify by describing four scenarios in which you are tasked with some software development. It could be a large or small task. The fourth scenario is the one I'm interested in. The first three are just for contrast.

1. You either decide how to implement the requirements, or you're given directions or constraints you agree with. (If you hadn't been given those specific directions you probably would have done the same thing anyway.) **You feel accountable for the outcome**, such as whether it works correctly or is delivered on time. And, of course, the team feels collectively accountable. (We could call this the "happy path.")

2. You would prefer to do the work one way, but you're instructed to do it a different way, either by a manager, team lead, or team consensus. You disagree with the approach, but you're not a stubborn know-it-all. You understand that their way is valid, or you don't fully understand it but you trust that someone else does. You're probably going to learn something. **You feel accountable for the outcome** in a normal, non-blaming sort of way.

3. You're instructed to do something so horribly wrong that it's guaranteed to fail badly. You're in a position to refuse or push back, and you do.

4. You're given instructions that you know are bad, you raise your objections, and then you follow them anyway. It could be a really awful technical approach, use of copy-pasted code, the wrong tools, wrong library, no unit testing, or anything similar. The negative consequences you expect could include technical failure, technical debt, or significant delays. **You do not feel accountable for the outcome.** If it doesn't work, takes too long, or the users hate it, you expect the individual(s) who gave you instructions to take full responsibility. It's not that you want to point fingers, but you will if it comes to that.

---

That fourth scenario could provoke all sorts of reactions. I'm interested in it for what you might call research purposes.

The final outcome is irrelevant. If it failed, whether someone else ultimately took responsibility or you were blamed is irrelevant. That it is the opposite of team accountability is obvious and also irrelevant.

Here is the question (finally!)

Have you experienced scenario number four, in which you develop software (big as an application, small as a class or method) in a way you believe to be so incorrect that it will have consequences, because someone required you to do so, and you complied *with the expectation that they, not you, would be accountable for the outcome?*

Emphasis is not on the outcome or who was held accountable, but on whether you *felt* accountable when you developed the software.

If you just want to answer yes or no, or "yes, several times," that's great. If you'd like to describe the scenario with any amount of detail, that's great too. If it's something you'd rather not share publicly you can contact me privately - my profile name at gmail.com.

The point is not judgment. I'll go first. My answer is yes, I have experienced scenario #4. For example, I've been told to copy/paste/edit code which I know will be incomprehensible, unmaintainable, buggy, and give future developers nightmares. I've had to build features I know users will hate. Sometimes I've been wrong. I usually raised objections or shared concerns with the team. Sometimes the environment made that impractical. If the problems persisted I looked for other work. But the point is that sometimes I did what I was told, and I felt that if it went horribly wrong I could say, "Yes, I understand, but this was not my decision." *I did not feel accountable.*.

I plan on writing more about this, but I'd like to start by gathering some perspective and understanding beyond just my own experience.

Thanks

(Note: I got a bit carried away while writing this, so the end result is a lot longer than I expected. Apologies for the long post!)

The beginning of my programming journey started with a book.

This was back in 7th grade. I had some basic exposure to BASIC (pun maybe intended?) from our school curriculum, but it was nothing too interesting as our teachers never really treated it as anything important. They would stress a lot on those Microsoft Office chapters (yes, we actually studied Microsoft Office as part of our computer science course at school) and mostly ignore the programming chapters because I dare say many of them struggled with it themselves. So although I had been exposed to *some* programming, it was mostly memorizing the syntax without actually understanding what was going on.

Then one day there was this book fair thing going on at this local Carrefour (for those of you who've no idea, it's a pretty famous hypermarket chain) in this mall, and for some reason my mother and I were in that mall on that day. Now the interesting thing is that this usually never happens -- I usually visit malls with my dad or my friends, this is the only instance I remember where I had actually visited one with just my mom. This turned out to be fortuitous. My father is the kind of person who's generally not amenable to any kind of extraneous shopping requests. My mother, on the other hand, was and remains pliable.

So I basically saw this book -- Sams' Teach Yourself JavaScript in 24 Hours -- being sold at half price. I vaguely remembered having read somewhere that JavaScript is a good introductory programming language (and it helped that this was the time when I was getting into a Google-craze -- I basically saw some photos of Google Zurich and went all HOLY SHIT THAT'S WHERE I NEED TO WORK WHEN I GROW UP (for those of you who haven't seen it, I recommend googling it. That office is the bomb) -- and I'd also read that you need programming skills to join Google). So I begged and begged my mum to buy that book, and thankfully she did.

Back home I returned with my new prize under my arm. Dad took one look at it and scoffed that I'll never actually use it. Pretty much entirely out of spite (to prove him wrong), I attacked the book with a zeal. I still remember how I felt when I wrote my very first JavaScript program (printing the current system date in an h1 tag) and marveling at the output. I guess that was when something struck -- the realization that this was probably what I wanted to do in life.

Fast forward to today, and I've never looked back and wondered what it would be like to have done something else.

PS: for all you beginners out there, JavaScript is a horrible language. Please start with something like Python. Also there are better resources than Sams' Teach Yourself JavaScript in 24 Hours available, that I just didn't know of back then. I'd recommend Eloquent JavaScript any day.

How does a person get better at speaking in technical situations? I've been in the tech field for a loooong time now, but I really have trouble articulating my ideas. Someone else on my team can explain why our architecture isn't optimal because of X, and we should try to integrate Y because it buys us Z, and I usually can come up with some variation of "It sucks, because bad."

The things I want to say are generally the same as the person who makes sense, but my brain apparently has a disconnect between understanding it technically and being able to express it. I had kind of figured that by this time in my career I would have been exposed to this stuff so much that being able to talk about it would be easy, but it's not.

I've had Toastmasters suggested to me before, but I don't really need help talking in front of people. As long as I have time to prepare, I can do that kind of speaking with little trouble. I just want to be able to respond in meetings and informal situations and show that I do have a clue what I'm saying.

!rant

Interview prep question. My understanding now is, at least in theory is: always use SOLID. I've never really understood it explicitly though I think I follow it a lot in practice, just naturally...

But when I usually program I'm kinda of in between... I don't automatically default to it.

Particularly, I don't always create interfaces, at least not in the first pass unless I know or expect many different implementations of a certain component... Or just because I need some class that does X but haven't quite thought of the implementation.

But I have never created an interface with like only 1 property or method... Kinda feel that's overkill...

I tend to follow DRY more I guess...

What's everyone thoughts on this stuff?

(I'm not completely sure of what I'm saying here, so don't take this too seriously)

Settling on a language to write the api for ranterix is hard.

I'm finding a lot of things about elixir to be insanely good for a stable api.

But I'm having a lot of gripes with the most important elixir web framework, phoenix.

Take a look at this piece of code from the phoenix docs:

defmodule Hello.Repo.Migrations.CreateUsers do
use Ecto.Migration
def change do
create table(:users) do
add :name, :string
add :email, :string add :bio, :string
add :number_of_pets, :integer
timestamps()
end
end
end

Jesus christ, I hate this shit.

Wtf are create, add and timestamps. Add is somehow valid inside the create, how the fuck is that considered good code? What happens if you call timestamps twice? It's all obscure "trust me, it works" code.

It appears to be written by a child.

js may have a million problems. But one thing I like about CJS (require) or ESM (import) is that there's nothing unexplained. You know where the fuck most things come from.

You default export an eatShit() function on one file and import it from another, and what do you get?
The goddamn actual eatShit function.

require is a function the same way toString is a function and it returns whatever the fuck you had exported in the target file.

Meanwhile some dynamic langs are like "oh, I'll just export only some lang construct that i expect you to specify and put that shit in fucking global of the importing file".

Js is about the fucking freedom. It won't decide for you what things will files export, you can export whatever the fuck you want, strings, functions, classes, objects or even nothing at all, thanks to module.exports object or export statement.

And in js, you can spy on anything external, for example with (...args) => debugger; fnToSpyOn(...args)

You can spoof console.log this way to see what the fuck is calling it (note: monkey patching for debugging = GOOD, for actual programming = DOGSHIT)

To be fair though, that is possible because of being a dynamic lang and elixir is kind of a hybrid typed lang, fair enough.

But here's where i drop the shit.

Phoenix takes it one step further by following the braindead ruby style of code and pretty DSLs.

I fucking hate DSLs, I fucking hate abstraction addiction.

Get this, we're not writing fucking poetry here. We're writing programs for machines for them to execute.

Machines are not humans with emotions or creativity, nor feel.

We need some level of abstraction to save time understanding source code, sure.

But there has to be a balance. Languages can be ergonomic for humans, but they also need to be ergonomic for algorithms and machines.

Some of the people that write "beautiful" "zen" code are the folks that think that everyone who doesn't push the pretty code agenda is a code elitist that doesn't want "normal" people to get into programming.

Programming is hard, man, there's no fucking way around it.

Sometimes operating system or even hardware details bleed into code.

DSLs are one easy way to make code really really easy to understand, but also make it really fucking hard to debug or to lose "programming meaning".

(not really a *dev* rant)

I hate it when I get an email with the following sentence:
"We appreciate your patience and kind understanding regarding this matter."

When did I freaking imply that I'm patient?! You just decided that I am and sent this... 😡

Not using design pattern on a school project because he was too busy understanding what the fuck was Smalltalk since no one understood it in classes.

yes it was me. I don't blame myself, I really took too much time understanding that (and I was the only one to do that, the other just asked me. ALL OF THEM). But I should, I guess.

TypeScript types are fun. Problem is: the check is compile-time only.

I just wasted an hour not understanding that an integer passed from command line was actually getting transmitted as a string. The library, where that value landed as parameter, happily ignored the non-matching type and worked as if the value has not been set at all!

Dear library maintainer, please enforce your parameter types! Throw an error right into my face saying I shall not pass anything but an integer! Don't just continue to work to produce false output correctly. Thank you!

Dear TypeScript, I really want type checks on runtime.

Dear JavaScript: Why did you ever think loose types were a good idea? (And I say that as a PHP developer as well.)

Fucking hate it.....
Almost everybody on holidays and I as a Junior have the responsibility that everything should work...
Now since 6h ago internet connection at the main office is down and I can't really log in from Home Office. Just reading and understanding a few tickets and trying to get our partners to maybe shift work to tomorrow so that they can actually work on our systems...

Now I get blamed that I don't show up at work (even though I called there and got said I should stay home) and testers can't work and stuff, although they can do other stuff and everyone should be able to work without problems. PL tries to call a wrong number while not having Teams, the company just switched to and further blames me for not being able to be contacted...
It's not even my fault...

Now I'm not even sure if I should get to Office now for 2h and do nothing there or at the earliest tomorrow morning to maybe fix some stuff, which are not important at all, cause they wouldn't be problems with a working internet connection...

👇 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?

This summer I have a goal to master web development(nice joke, I know, but you get my point...). Html, CSS, Javacript, Python-Django etc and a website that is getting better all the time. But I have a big problem, something that really bothers me. I lack in understanding. I set up servers following tutorials and God help me if something doesn't work, I use patterns and libraries I barely know what they're made of, technologies that are totally strange to me. Right now, I'm totally confused of whether I need to have my database on a different server, or a dbaas, what the hell do I do if static files pile up etc. What can I do to get myself out of this path? Any books, courses, whatever, that teach not only the how but also the why? Thank you

So I'm assigned once again to fix a new someone else created and that seems to be the case whenever there's an issue...

Boss just assigns it to whoever is most likely to be able to investigate it... which is basically me. Other than the little time I can use to develop stuff, I'm usually cleaning up other people's messes.

And these other people are to busy working on new crap to properly explain how their existing code/processes/changes works.

And well the fact that anything breaks in production (that's not due to upstream one off issues) whoever does not think he needs to take responsibility for it.

So everyone else and especially me has to spend time understanding the shit they wrote and fixing it for them.

How do I tell my boss this nicely that we need clearly definitely ownership and whenever a component blows up in prod, the guy that wrote the code fixes it no matter what? Thereby incentivizing him to not write shit code in the first place and be more proactive in making sure it doesn't in the first place since he knows otherwise he's doing overtime to fix it?

Is it just me or is there really no such thing as a dev job where something doesn't blow up due to poorly tested and designed code every other day?

My first rant. Which isn't really a rant but it is kind of...

Took a new job supposedly as a software developer. Ends up being CTO position. Now responsible for understanding the code of 6 people in a different country so as to move code dev to the country we're in...(not retaining the 6 after 2.0 release) Been 3 months.. Too much data. Cannot compute. Had to learn too many new things and the fuckers switched the front-end midway from Vue to React. First weeks essentially wasted. Now at the end and I'm supposed to know everything.

Also, I hate Symfony with a passion now. Loved it when it was hidden under Laravel.

Workflow? More like chasing answer from a community that is not, and never has been, famous for its pedagogical skills. So hand me some coffee, weed and/or some snacks because I'll still search high and low, skip sleep and build up a few hundred pages browsing history so that in the end, I'll reach the understanding I'm looking for anyways. Even if whatever person trying to help me - in their delusion that I already know everything, except for that thing I'm asking about of course - really, REALLY just failed at saying "that goes there because of that" instead of "did you try insertSomeAppropriateRandomNameOfAThingYouAssumeEveryoneKnowsHere..?".

But who am I kidding? The tools are better than ever (IDE'S). The pedagogical skills are getting its own arenas to build on and its coming along greatly (coding block apps, treehouse and the likes etc. etc).

And no matter the struggle, I can't escape that I love coding and learning more than anything else.

Now how do I.. Where.. When.. Why the..

My vague naive extreme understanding of interview questions are on a spectrum from situation a to situation b.

But what should the industry be doing? Is the industry just going wrong blindly copying big N companies hiring process without the same rationale? (e.g. they need computer scientists able to deal with problems specific to them at their size and that often means creating new tech, unreal problem solving abilities and cuh-rayzee knowledge)

a) stupid fucking theoretical shit that some people argue you won't ever need to be doing in practice for most companies, while giving you no ability to google, leetcode hard problems kind of stuff

b) practical work similar to what you'd be doing on the job, small bugs, tasks, pair programming on site with your potential future coworkers

Lots of people hate option a because it's puzzle/problem solving that isn't always closely related to what's on the job. Whiteboarding is arguably very much a separate skill. (Arguably unless it's like a big N company where you want computer scientists to deal with specific problems that aren't seen elsewhere, and you're making new tech to deal with your specific problems.)

We could go to the extreme of Option b, but it tends to trigger people into shitfits of "NO, HOW DARE YOU MAKE ME DO REAL WORK, BUT NOT PAY ME FOR IT AT THE INTERVIEW STAGE"

That's before we get into how to execute option b whether or not it's being given as a take home assignment (which is a huge pain in the ass and time sink, among other issues) vs a few hours at the potential workplace working with some of the future potential coworkers and soaking in the work environment (you have to figure out how to take the time off then)

Is it really just poor execution overall for the wrong use cases for the majority of the industry? What should the industry be doing in which cases.

Then this is all before HR screening with shit like where they might ask for more years of swift experience than its existed.

Since most of you are working in IT , Communication and related fields, what advice can you give to a student like me who has just began studying Computer Science Engineering ...I mean how should I began, what to do next and get myself placed in a good company.

Talking about myself I have started learning C language and have learnt about basics, pointers, memory allocation, not yet started with data structures and algorithms

I have just done HTML and basic CSS , have understanding of MySQL and know a little bit about flask and Jinja framework in python.

If you could share your experiences, like what you felt at this stage what you do and how you do....how you got placed...what should I do different to cope with the growing competition....

Look I know this place is not for this bullshit but.... my seniors are egocentric bastards, my batchmates don't give a shit about CS , and being a student of tier-3 state government college in India, professors don't care......so I really appreciate if you guys can come forward, and especially Indian guys.

[long confession/question]
So I was asked by a client to make an app similar to prisma(not exactly that but let's say a caricature app) and I knew I have to research a lot.

Now I have been loyal to PHP for over 5 years so I first tried with GD and imagick but the results were not very good, so I thought let's try opencv. I didn’t wanna make any compromises so I didn't go the bridging way, I worked on native python even though I am a newbie in it. I was fairly impressed with the cartoonizing results but others weren't. Soon I got to know that this would take much more than simple filter combinations or matrix manipulations.
I read about prisma and got to know it uses deep neural networks for the same.
Now, in the five years I have learnt almost all the things a run-of-the-mill "Full stack Web Developer" should know.
I have a fair knowledge of PHP, many of its frameworks, many js frameworks(obviously jquery), I have a very good understanding of CSS and its models, I have worked on some cool algos and found solutions to many problems but I haven't gotten to stage where I can implement neural networks/machine learning in my projects.
It just scares me.
___
A little back story: I have been the CTO of a small scale company for about 1.5 years now.
___
So all this got me to asking myself should I just step down from the post to a position where I can learn more skills. Managing takes a lot more time where I can't learn a lot. Sure I learnt some other important things but not as much tech knowledge as I would have in a more basic position.

I know not many of you must have read this far, but if you did what do you think I should do? Really depressed at the moment.

Who does find themselves sailing through the process of 'reinventing the wheel'?

Im not asking about anything specific, but the feelings and doubts whispering that probably you really are going down the rabbit whole by doing so, and so is your free time -or not so free-

The thing is, I don't know if really, really this kind of decisions are genuine when it comes for example to a whole new framework, editor or solution... Its case specific, but I have plenty of hard times to keep on due to family and friends not really understanding what I am doing, specially if its intended for developers to use, makes one feel its just thin air, and I have just me to hold into the strong reasons to do so.

Leave a comment if are also 'reinventing the wheel' in any way or want to share your opinion or story on the matter!

I have joined a new company recently and I'm worried.
Really have worry because of my people skills and little doubt on the manager. I mean what do I know I just joined but still overthinking it.

There are people who speak confidently and I feel intimidated because in the casual conversations I don't feel like I can contribute at this point at least, it's been a week only. Other thing is as I do not know much about the work, I can't speak in the meetings. I know that I'm expecting a lot from myself here as I just joined but I have a history of being silent in the meetings and in my previous organisation I could deal with it as I got comfortable finally.
How can I be more interactive with people, given that some are cold?

About my manager, he is young. He definitely has a good IQ that's why he is a manager now.
The thing is, he talks a lot. Conversations are not 2 way, and he kept on saying things without even understanding that I'm overwhelmed. I have previously told him that I am overwhelmed, he listened, took 2 minutes and continued with his all work related talks.

I don't like the way he's stating his expectations from the time I didn't even join. He told me everything about the organization, on first day, he gave me a 2 months rough expectations of me. I don't agree with all the points he makes but it doesn't seem plausible for me to interrupt and say my thing. For example when he stated his expectations, I should have stopped him and politely tell that it's too soon we can discuss these things in upcoming weeks. But just because he continues rambling, I can't say it. It seems a small thing but I know it's not proper conversation and will create issues for me. As I have had similar kind of manager before, who used to ramble and didn't stop talking. But couldn't understand my problems etc.

Hi So I need some solid advice from you all wonderful people.
I think i am now ready to look into job side of this world, but have lots of doubts , read my story.
I have been learning android for last 2 years. Most of the time i have been trying to understand how stuff works in android , but i have also gained a few other skills ( python programming, kotlin/flutter basics data analysis basics, testing, some graphic designing, aweful web dev ,etc). But i really want to work with Android. I don't have any specific Salary figure in mind, but i guess my knowledge is better or atleast par with most of the good android developers.

So i want to know how is this fresher/placement thingy work?
1.) GETTING KNOWN? : How can i make some good android based company aware that I am available for hiring? Should i start emailing every android related company that i know of? Should i start listing my profile on recruitment sites like linkedin or internshala? This year it is being said that companies will come for placements. From the status of my college, they are going to give me way to less $ , nd i know am not going to like any of them, but i guess i have to sit for them too.

2.INTERVIEW OR DIRECT PLACEMENTS? A little pre-context: i am currently starting my 4th year in clg. Afaik , 4th year isnt that strict and their can be leniency in terms of attendance. But my college is a place full of political cun*s in the name of directors and HODs and I don't know if they are again going to enforce the old 75% mandatory criteria. Plus if the company is from a different state/country , then my attendance would definitely not suffice.
So mainly i am unsure if somehow a company hires me, i would be able to start immediately. I heard that there are interviews for job recruitment after which the candidate is binded with an agreement to do some months training followed by permanent working after college completion.
This type of agreement is very much suitable for me, since from what my friend tells me, trainings can be lenient and understanding regarding exam preparations nd stuff.

So what do company usually chooses? Binding a fresher on immediate working basis or do they consider graduate completion?

Also, i suck at competitive coding. Do i need to polish myself on that or some company is willing to give me chance on the basis of my other skills 🙈(okay, no kidding , that's a serious question. I need to either work on getting better in competitive or build more apps based on that)

3.) ANDROID OR EVERYTHING? From what i have heard, working as a professional fresher is more like being an allrounder than being a domain specialist. But as i already stated, i really dig android and that's no small framework. I may di other stuff too, but won't interest me nd my output might be less efficient than expected.
So freshers can really be asked to do any stuff? Or can i still be in the area i like being into?

4.) COMPANY OR START-UP? Yeah, this is a general debate starter. Ignoring the business side of the conversation ( job safety vs more salary, experience, etc) the thing that's most important for me is the presence of a team. I want someone to assign me a task, whose vision i could follow, from whom i could learn, and some other people who are supportive and doing the same amount / similar work that am doing . This is so much import8 for me that i can easily ignore other factors for a better team. I once took a call from a startup ceo who hired me, a 2 month old android beginner at that time, as the "lead android developer"
But if am being on a team where i am supposed to do any random stuff that is assigned, then obviously this whole point of "visionary, helpful leader, guiding team, "etc goes moot

I was watching an Ancient Aliens episode called "Beyond Roswell". The show described the idea of some of our tech being seeded slowly by introducing alien technology to specific companies. They suggested that computing technology has advanced very fast and introducing this tech could be part of that.

At first I was kinda pissed about this. I have read about the creation of the first transistor back in the 40s or 50s. WWII really advanced our need for computing devices such as what Turing built. Then I realized a lot of the explosion of computer tech did occur after key ET events. This kind of made me wonder how much is "us" and how much is ET tech. I also realized it can take a lot of effort to understand something really advanced. So reverse engineering can take a LOT of effort to figure these things out. Being seeded by external tech does not take away from humans at all.

A parallel to this is a programmer that learns how to use a C++ compiler. They could go their whole career without ever understanding how the compiler itself is doing its job. I find myself wanting to learn how compilers work and started down this path. I look at the simple grammar I have learned to parse. Then I look at the C++ grammar and think "How can I ever learn to do that?" So I see us viewing potentially advanced things and wondering how the heck can we ever learn to do that. The common reaction when faced with such tech would be disbelief and in some cases ridiculing the messenger. When I was a kid the idea of sending a picture over a phone was laughable. Now this is common and expected. It was literally a scifi concept when I was a kid.

So, back to the alien tech. I am now thinking it would be cool to be working with alien technology through computing. This is like scifi stuff now! So what if what we have was not all invented here (Earth). If anything this will prepare us programmers to get jobs working for alien corporations writing ship level programs and brain interfaces. Think of it as intergalactic resume building. 😉

!dev
!!Lyrics

Really a random post but related to my personal dev-life so maybe it’s at least arguable if it belongs here.

This is one of my all time favorite songs, I can identify myself with it (although I’m reinterpreting some parts).
Back in Highschool I had girlfriends, I had time, I had my entourage, everything except money. All my dad wanted me to become was a rich fucking millionaire. Failure was never accepted, no matter what it was about and everything could always have been done better.
It was pretty much a military childhood. I already loved programming back then but only as a hobby, kinda.
I really wanted to make good money so I started a dev career (with makes gooooood money where I came from). The more I invested in my career, and that was a lot, I more and more lost the understanding of what’s really important, just pursued my goal of being the best fucking dev out there and start my own company in the next 10 years.

Well.. 10 years are over now, I’m still an engineer and I lost everything I had before I started this. Especially friends and relations to women (which I’m not even able to connect to anymore).

In this lyric, the blackbird and raven are the career that just ate me alive. Hope that makes any sense to some of you?..

Anyway, here the lyrics if you wanna read it:
—————————————-
Sons of Anarchy
Come join the murder - white buffalo

There's a blackbird perched outside my window
I hear him calling
I hear him sing
He burns me with his eyes of gold to embers
He sees all my sins
He reads my soul
One day that bird, he spoke to me
Like Martin Luther
Like Pericles

Come join the murder
Come fly with black
We'll give you freedom
From the human trap
Come join the murder
Soar on my wings
You'll touch the hand of God
And he'll make you king
And he'll make you king

On a blanket made of woven shadows
Flew up to heaven
On a raven's glide
His angels they turn my wings to wax now
I fell like judas, grace denied
On that day that he lied to me
Like Martin Luther
Like Pericles

Come join the murder
Come fly with black
We'll give you freedom
From the human trap
Come join the murder
Soar on my wings
You'll touch the hand of God
And he'll make you king
And he'll make you king

I walk among the children of my fathers
The broken wings, betrayal's cost
They call to me but never touch my heart, now
I am too far
I'm too lost
All I can hear is what he spoke to me
Like Martin Luther
Like Pericles

Come join the murder
Come fly with black
We'll give you freedom
From the human trap
Come join the murder
Soar on my wings
You'll touch the hand of God
And he'll make you king
And he'll make you king

So now I curse that raven's fire
You made me hate, you made me burn
He laughed aloud as he flew from eden
You always knew, you never learn
The crow no longer sings to me
Like Martin Luther
Or Pericles

Come join the murder
Come fly with black
We'll give you freedom
From the human trap
Come join the murder
Soar on my wings
You'll touch the hand of God
And he'll make you king
And he'll make you king
Come join the murder
Come fly with black
We'll give you freedom
From the human trap
Come join the murder
Soar on my wings
You'll touch the hand of God
And he'll make you king
And he'll make you king

Do we really actually need Flip a coin mode?
Flip a coin of course is one of the important steps that can determine the object of our goal. The coin flip is very easy so that there is no conflict of any kind of intervention to happen in between. Imagine if you have some crucial things to take in your life you need not depend on your family members or friends to come and just inform you or to take authority over your decisions. If you make the decisions on your own then it becomes your responsibility and you hold the complete understanding of whatever you proceed within your life. If you have the third person or someone else to get interfered in your matters unnecessarily then it doesn’t become a personal concept rather it becomes a public opinion and you will have to feel very critical in the latter point of the stage.