Got this from a recruiter:

We are looking for a **Senior Android Developer/Lead** at Philadelphia PA

Hiring Mode: Contract

Must have skills:

· 10-12 years mobile experience in developing Android applications
· Solid understanding of Android SDK on frameworks such as: UIKit, CoreData, CoreFoundation, Network Programming, etc.
· Good Knowledge on REST Ful API and JSON Parsing
· Good knowledge on multi-threaded environment and grand central dispatch
· Advanced object-oriented programming and knowledge of design patterns
· Ability to write clean, well-documented, object-oriented code
· Ability to work independently
· Experience with Agile Driven Development
· Up to date with the latest mobile technology and development trends
· Passion for software development- embracing every challenge with a drive to solve it
· Engaging communication skills

My response:

I am terribly sorry but I am completely not interested in working for anyone who might think that this is a job description for an Android engineer.

1. Android was released in September 2008 so finding anyone with 10 years experience now would have to be a Google engineer.
2. UIKit, CoreData, CoreFoundation are all iOS frameworks
3. Grand Central Dispatch is an iOS mechanism for multithreading and is not in Android
4. There are JSON parsing frameworks, no one does that by hand anymore

Please delete me from your emailing list.

As a long-time iPhone user, I am really sorry to say it but I think Apple has completed their transition to being a company that is incompetent when it comes to software development and software development processes.

I’ve grown tired of hearing some developers tell me about Apple’s scale and how software development is hard and how bugs should be expected. All of those are true, but like most rules of law, incompetence and gross negligence trumps all of that.

I’m writing this because of the telugu “bug”/massive, massive security issue in iOS 11.2.5. I personally think it’s one of the worst security issues in the history of modern devices/software in terms of its ease of exploitation, vast reach, and devastating impact if used strategically. But, as a software developer, I would have been able to see past all of that, but Apple has shown their true incompetence on this issue and this isn’t about a bug.

It’s about a company that has a catastrophic bug in their desktop and mobile platforms and haven’t been able to, or cared to, patch it in the 3 or so days it’s been known about. It’s about a company, who as of a view days ago, hasn’t followed the basic software development process of removing an update (11.2.5) that was found to be flawed and broken. Bugs happen, but that kind of incompetence is cultural and isn’t a mistake and it certainly isn’t something that people should try to justify.

This has also shown Apple’s gross incompetence in terms of software QA. This isn’t the first time a non-standard character has crashed iOS. Why would a competent software company implement a step in their QA, after the previous incident(s), to specifically test for issues like this? While Android has its issues too and I know some here don’t like Google, no one can deny that Google at least has a solid and far superior QA process compared to Apple.

Why am I writing this? Because I’m fed up. Apple has completely lost its way. devRant was inaccessible to iOS users a couple of times because of this bug and I know many, many other apps and websites that feature user-generated content experienced the same thing. It’s catastrophic. Many times we get sidetracked and really into security issues, like meltdown/spectre that are exponentially harder to take advantage of than this one. This issue can be exploited by a 3 year old. I bet no one can produce a case where a security issue was this exploitable yet this ignored on a whole.

Alas, here we are, days later, and the incompetent leadership at Apple has still not patched one of the worst security bugs the world has ever seen.

Finally did it. Quit my job.

The full story:
Just came back from vacation to find out that pretty much all the work I put at place has been either destroyed by "temporary fixes" or wiped clean in favour of buggy older versions. The reason, and this is a direct quote "Ari left the code riddled with bugs prior to leaving".

Oh no. Oh no I did not you fucker.

Some background:

My boss wrote a piece of major software with another coder (over the course of month and a balf). This software was very fragile as its intention was to demo specific features we want to adopt for a version 2 of it.

I was then handed over this software (which was vanilajs with angular) and was told to "clean it up" introduce a typing system, introduce a build system, add webpack for better module and dependency management, learn cordova (because its essential and I had no idea of how it works). As well as fix the billion of issues with data storage in the software. Add a webgui and setup multiple databses for data exports from the app. Ensure that transmission of the data is clean and valid.

What else. This software had ZERO documentation. And I had to sit my boss for a solid 3hrs plus some occasional questions as I was developing to get a clear idea of whats going on.

Took a bit over 3 weeks. But I had the damn thing ported over. Cleaned up. And partially documented.

During this period, I was suppose to work with another 2 other coders "my team". But they were always pulled into other things by my Boss.

During this period, I kept asking for code reviews (as I was handling a very large code base on my own).

During this period, I was asking for help from my boss to make sure that the visual aspect of the software meets the requirements (there are LOTS of windows, screens, panels etc, which I just could not possibly get to checking on my own).

At the end of this period. I went on vacation (booked by my brothers for my bday <3 ).

I come back. My work is null. The Boss only looked at it on the friday night leading up to my return. And decided to go back to v1 and fix whatever he didnt like there.

So this guy calls me. Calls me on a friggin SUNDAY. I like just got off the plane. Was heading to dinner with my family.
He and another coder have basically nuked my work. And in an extremely hacky way tied some things together to sort of work. Moreever, the webguis that I setup for the database viewing. They were EDITED ON THE PRODUCTION SERVER without git tracking!!

So monday. I get bombarded with over 20 emails. Claiming that I left things in an usuable state with no documentation. As well as I get yelled at by my boss for introducing "unnecessary complicated shit".

For fuck sakes. I was the one to bring the word documentation into the vocabulary of this company. There are literally ZERO documentated projects here. While all of mine are at least partially documented (due to lack of time).

For fuck sakes, during my time here I have been basically begging to pull the coder who made the admin views for our software and clean up some of the views so that no one will ever have to touch any database directly.

To say this story is the only reason I am done is so not true.

I dedicated over a year to this company. During this time I saw aspects of this behaviour attacking other coders as well as me. But never to this level.

I am so friggin happy that I quit. Never gonna look back.

The programmer and the interns part 3.

Many of you asked me to keep posting about the interns that I'm responsible for.

I had the intention but never had the time or the energy. Since the interns only kept doing stupid, unthinkable things and just filtering out the good ones is a task of its own.

Time has passed, some interns left us by their choice, others were fired (for obvious reasons). Some stayed loyal and were given permanent positions. New ones joined. I no longer am directly responsible for their wellbeing, yet, somehow I am still their tech-lead and the developer of their tools.

Without further delay,

Case 0:
New guy get's into the internship, has his LinkedIn title set to ‘HTML Technician’.
Didn’t know about the existence of HTML5.
Been building static web pages in the early 2000s. The kind with embedded, inline CSS.
Claims that he is about to finish an engineering degree (sadly I believe him).
Fails the entry level Linux test. Complains about the similarity of the answer options.
Fails the basic web-standars test because "they change so fast, but the foundation is HTML and it's rock-solid!".
Get's caught taking home onions and milk from the kitchen.
Is spotted eating in a restaurant under our offices in his day off. Thrice. He lives a 30 minute drive away and comes here on a bicycle or by bus.
Apparently didn't know that the scrolling wheel on the mouse is clickable.
Said that his PC experience is mostly from his PlayStation (PC = PlayCtation apparently).
Get's fired, says that he'll go to the press. Never does.

Case 1:
Yet another new intern. He seems very eager to learn and work, capable, even charismatic. Has an impressive CV.
Does nothing.
Learns from the "case 0" guy and spends time with him until he is fired.
Comes to work at 8:00 AM and immediately goes to sleep on an office puff. In front of everyone.
Keeps dining alone, without a notice, at different times, for hours. Sometimes brings food into the office and loudly eats it there.
On his evening shifts keeps disappearing for long periods of time. Apparently drinking in the nearby bars and hitting on girls.
Keeps bragging about his success with getting their numbers and rants about those who reject him.
For over a year he fails his final training test and remains a trainee, without the ability to work on a real case.
Not fired yet.

Case 2:
Company retreat. Beautiful, exotic views, warm sun beams, all inclusive package for everyone on a huge half-island.
Simon (he's still with us, now as a true engineer!) brings his MacBook to the beach in order to work and impress all others.
Everybody get's drunk and start throwing huge inflatable balls at each other. One hits his laptop and it immediately is flattened.
Upset Simon is going in circles and ranting about the situation, looking for a solution.
Loses his phone on the beach.
Takes his broken laptop with him while searching for the phone.
Dips the laptop in the river while drunkenly ducking in order to pick a clam.

Case 3:
Still company retreat.
Drunk intern makes out with an employee's drunk wife.
Huge verbal fight. The husband says that he files for a divorce. Intern get's fired.

Case 4:
Still company retreat.
Three interns each take an inflatable swimming mattress and drift with the current. Get found on the other side of the resort three hours later, with red skin and severely dehydrated.

Case 5:
Still company retreat.
The 'informally fired' intern gets drunk again, climbs through a window into a room and makes out with an employee's drunk wife.
Again, gets caught when the husband returns to find a locked door but can see them though the window.

Case 6:
Still company retreat.
We all get ferociously drunk and wander off to the unknown in search of more booze.
Everybody does something stupid and somebody finds Simon's phone.
Simon is lost.
Frenzied horde of drunks is roaming the half-island in search of ethanol and the lost comrade.
Simon's phone get's permanently lost.
Five people step on sea urchins but find that out only hours later and then are unable to walk.
The mob, now including more drunk people who joined voluntarily, finds the sexually active intern making out with the enraged employee's wife yet again.
Surprisingly Simon is found sleeping in a room nearby.

Manager: The thing you working on. We need this now! Like end of the week.

Me: Desirability is not do-ability.

Manager: く( ・◇・)ヾ？

Me: I am still in the middle of figuring out how to do things in the first place, so there are some technologies to research and some problems I yet need to solve. I am in no state to just write down my solution. I don't even have enough information to even estimate how long it is going to take. I am getting there. And yes, I can rush things, but need I remind you that you want solid data as a result that actually means something? As this is *why* this whole project was started. We have some old project doing the exact same thing, but whose output we don't trust. I wonder how that came to be. Additionally, this whole project was on hold for months until I took over. So I neither understand nor accept this sudden sense of urgency. And by the way, you recently added manpower to this project. And adding manpower almost always decreases the productivity in the beginning due to on-boarding and communication overhead. Last Monday, I didn't write a single line of code due to that. So no, this week will not do, as I am also on vacation starting on Thursday that was requested and was approved by you at the beginning of the year. See you in January.

Every day.

I am a PHP developer.

Yeah, "another PHP is awful" rant... no, not really.

It's just unsuitable for some ambitious projects, just like Ruby and Python are.

First of all, DO NOT EVER use Laravel for large enterprise applications. The same goes for RoR, Django, and other ActiveRecord MVCs.

They are all neat frameworks for writing a todo app, as a better-than-wordpress flexible blogging solution, even as a custom webshop.

Beyond 50k daily users, Active Record becomes hell due to it's lazy fat querying habits. At more than a million users... *depressed sigh*.

PHP is also completely unsuitable for projects beyond 5M lines of code in my opinion. At more than 25M lines... *another depressed sigh*.

You can let your devs read Clean Code and books about architecture patterns, you can teach them about SOLID & DRY, you can write thousands of tests... it doesn't matter.

PHP is scaffolding, it's made of bamboo and rope. It's not brick or concrete. You can build quickly, but it only scales up to a certain point before it breaks in multiple places.

Eventually you run into patterns where even 100% test coverage still doesn't guarantee shit, because the real-life edge cases are just too complex and numerous.

When you're working on a multi-party invoicing system with adapters for various tax codes, or an availability/planning system working across timezones, or systems which implement geographical routefinding coupled to traffic, event & weather prediction...

PHP, Python, Ruby, etc are just missing types.

Every day I run into bugs which could have been prevented if you could use ADTs in a generic way in PHP. PHP7 has pretty good typehints, and they prevent a lot of messy behavior, but they aren't composable. There is no way to tell PHP "this method accepts a Collection of Users", or "this methods returns maybe either an Apple or a Pear, and I want to force the caller to handle both Apple/Pear and null".

Well, you could do that, but it requires a lot of custom classes and trickery, and you have to rewrite the same logic if you want to typehint a "Collection of Departments" instead of "Collection of Users" -- i.e., it's not composable.

Probably the biggest issue is that languages with a (mostly) structural type system (Haskell, Rust, even C#/JVM languages to some degree, etc) are much slower to develop in for the "startup" era of a project, so you grab a weak, quick prototyping language to get started.

Then, when you reach a more grown up phase, you wish you had a better type system at your disposal...

Them: Root, you take too long to get tickets out. You only have a few simple ones. You really need to rebuild your reputation.

Also them: Hey, could you revisit this ticket? Could you help ____ with this other ticket? Hey Root, how do you do this? Root, someone had a suggestion on one of your tickets; could you implement that by EoD? Hey Root, i didn't read your ticket notes; how do you test it? Hey, could you revisit this ticket for the fourth time and remove some whitespace? Hey Root, someone has non-blocking code review comments you need to address before we can release the ticket. Hey Root, we want to expand that ticket scope by 5-6 times; still labeled a trivial feature though.

Also them: Super easy ticket for you. Make sure you talk with teams A, B, C, D, E and get their input on the ticket, talk with ____ and ____ and ____ about it, find a solution that makes them all happy and solves the problem too, then be sure to demo it with everyone afterward. Super easy; shouldn't take you more than a couple days. Oh, and half of them are on vacation.

Also them: Hey, that high-priority ticket you finished months ago that we ignored? Yeah, you need to rewrite it by tomorrow. Also, you need to demo it with our guy in India, who's also on vacation. Yes, tomorrow is the last day. (The next day:) You rewrote it, but weren't able to schedule the demo? Now you've missed the release! It's even later! This reflects very poorly on you.

Also them: Perfect is the enemy of good; be more like the seniors who release partially-broken code quickly.

Also them: Here's an non-trivial extreme edgecase you might not have covered. Oh, it would have taken too much time and that's why you didn't do it? Jeez, how can you release such incomplete code?

Also them: Yeah, that ticket sat in code review for five months because we didn't know it was high-priority, despite you telling us. It's still kinda your fault, though.

Also them: You need to analyze traffic data to find patterns and figure out why this problem is happening. I know you pushed the fix for it 8 months ago, and I said it was really solid, but the code is too complex so I won't release it. Yeah I know it's just a debounce with status polling and retrying. Too complex for me to understand. Figure out what the problem is, see if another company has this same problem, and how they fixed it.

-------------

Yep. I'm so terrible for not getting these tickets out, like wow. Worst dev ever. Much shame.

LF work, PST.

I really hate how people see Bachelor of Computer Science as a meme.

I think it's because everyone who has a Computer calls himself a IT-Expert. So today on Xmas family joined for a meal, we talked about work and study and stuff...

Auntie: "So why do you need to study to Operate a Computer, my Son built one by himself without studying, you should study something solid like economics"

First I thought this was a meme, later I found out she was dead serious.

All the math, physics, scientific research, papers, software engineering just to operate a computer 😂

I'm not gonna call her names, because it's Xmas so:

father forgive them, because they don't know what the fuck they're talking about.

Fuck windows 10. I log on to start an interview code assignment that is timed. I'm on my computer getting things ready for a solid 10 minutes before starting the test. AS SOON as I start the test, windows 10 informs me:

Fuck you. There's updates and I'm installing them right now whether you like them or not, fucker. I bet you're doing something important too, so I'm not even going to let you schedule it at another time.

Fuck.

Here's a true story about a "fight" between me and my project manager...

I've been working as a Frontend developer for nearly two years, managed to acquire a decent amount of knowledge, in some cases well above the rest of my coworkers, and one day I got into a bit of a disagreement with my project manager.

Basically he wanted me to copy/paste some feature from another project (needless to say, that... "thing" has more bugs than an ant farm), and against his orders I started doing that feature from scratch, to build a solid foundation from the very start.
I had a lengthy deadline to deliver that feature, they were expecting me to take some time to fix some of the bugs as well, but my idea was to make it bug-free from the moment the feature was released. Both my method and the one I should be copying worked the exact same, but mine was superior in every way, had no bugs, was scalable and upgradeable with little effort, there was no reason not to accept it.

We use scrum as our work methodology, so we have daily meetings. In one of those, the project manager asked me how was the progress on that new feature, and I told him I was just polishing up the code and integrating it with the rest of the project, to make sure everything was working properly. I still had a full day left before the deadline set for that feature, and I was expecting to take about half an hour to finish up a couple lines of code and test everything, no issues so far...

But then he exploded, and demanded to know why wasn't I copying the code from the other project, to which I answered "because this way things will work better".
Right after he said that the feature was working on the other project, copying and pasting it should take a few minutes to do and maybe a couple of extra hours to fix any issues that might have appeared...
The problem here is, the other project was made by trainees, I honestly can't navigate through 3 pages without bumping into an average of 2 errors per page, I was placed into this new project because they know I do quality code, and they wanted this project to be properly made, unlike the previous one, so I was baffled when he said that he preferred me to copy code instead of doing "good" code...
My next reply was "just because something has been made and is working that doesn't mean that it has been properly made nor will work as it should, I could save a few hours copying code (except I wouldn't save any, it would take me more time to adapt the code than to do it from scratch) but then I'll be wasting weeks of work because of new bugs that will be reported over time, because trust me, they will appear... "

I told him this in a very calm manner, but everybody in the meeting room paused and started staring at me, not many dare challenge that specific project manager, and I had just done that...
After a few seconds of silence the PM finally said... "look, if you manage to finish your task inside the set deadline I'll forget we ever had this conversation, but I'll leave a note on my book, just in case..."

I finished that task in about 30 mins, as expected, still had 7 hours till deadline, and I completely forgot about that feature until now because it has never given any issues whatsoever, and is now being used for other projects as well.

It was one of my proudest/rage inducing moments in this project, and honestly, I think I have hit my PM with a very big white glove because some weeks after this event the CEO himself came to the whole team to congratulate us on the outstanding work being made so far, in a project that acted against the PM's orders 90% of the time.

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.

This codebase reminds me of a large, rotting, barely-alive dromedary. Parts of it function quite well, but large swaths of it are necrotic, foul-smelling, and even rotted away. Were it healthy, it would still exude a terrible stench, and its temperament would easily match: If you managed to get near enough, it would spit and try to bite you.

Swaths of code are commented out -- entire classes simply don't exist anymore, and the ghosts of several-year-old methods still linger. Despite this, large and deprecated (yet uncommented) sections of the application depend on those undefined classes/methods. Navigating the codebase is akin to walking through a minefield: if you reference the wrong method on the wrong object... fatal exception. And being very new to this project, I have no idea what's live and what isn't.

The naming scheme doesn't help, either: it's impossible to know what's still functional without asking because nothing's marked. Instead, I've been working backwards from multiple points to try to find code paths between objects/events. I'm rarely successful.

Not only can I not tell what's live code and what's interactive death, the code itself is messy and awful. Don't get me wrong: it's solid. There's virtually no way to break it. But trying to understand it ... I feel like I'm looking at a huge, sprawling MC Escher landscape through a microscope. (No exaggeration: a magnifying glass would show a larger view that included paradoxes / dubious structures, and these are not readily apparent to me.)

It's also rife with bad practices. Terrible naming choices consisting of arbitrarily-placed acronyms, bad word choices, and simply inconsistent naming (hash vs hsh vs hs vs h). The indentation is a mix of spaces and tabs. There's magic numbers galore, and variable re-use -- not just local scope, but public methods on objects as well. I've also seen countless assignments within conditionals, and these are apparently intentional! The reasoning: to ensure the code only runs with non-falsey values. While that would indeed work, an early return/next is much clearer, and reduces indentation. It's just. reading through this makes me cringe or literally throw my hands up in frustration and exasperation.

Honestly though, I know why the code is so terrible, and I understand:

The architect/sole dev was new to coding -- I have 5-7 times his current experience -- and the project scope expanded significantly and extremely quickly, and also broke all of its foundation rules. Non-developers also dictated architecture, creating further mess. It's the stuff of nightmares. Looking at what he was able to accomplish, though, I'm impressed. Horrified at the details, but impressed with the whole.

This project is the epitome of "I wrote it quickly and just made it work."

Fortunately, he and I both agree that a rewrite is in order. but at 76k lines (without styling or configuration), it's quite the undertaking.

------

Amusing: after running the codebase through `wc`, it apparently sums to half the word count of "War and Peace"

Hello there, just couple of words about PHP. I've been develop on PHP more than 10 years, I've seen it all 3,4,5,{6},7. Yes PHP was not good in terms of engineering and patterns, but it was simple, it was the most simple language for web to start those days. It was simple as you put code into file, upload it via FTP and it works. No java servlets, no unix consoles, no nothing, just shared hosting account was enough to host site, or even application with database. As database everybody used to have mysql, again because its simple to start and easy to maintain. So PHP+MySQL became industry standard on Web during 00-2012, and continues in some way.
You can write HTML and logic inside single file, within php code, even more single file may content few pages, or even kind of framework. That simplicity and agility sticks everybody who wants to develop sites with PHP.
This is pretty much about why it is so popular.

Each good or wannabe PHP developer in an early days write its own framework or library (like in javascript this days because of nodejs)

Imagine that PHP has hadn't have package manager, developers used to have host packages on their own sites, then various packages catalog sites created, and then finally composer. A gazillions of php code had spread over internet, without any kind of dependency control. To include libraries to your projects you have to just write include, or require. Some developers do it better than others.

So what we have ? A lots of code, no repositories, zip archives with libraries, no dependency control.
Project that uses that kind of code are still alive even today, they are solid hose of cards, and unmaintainable of course.

And main question that I'm trying to answer is Why PHP is not good ?
- First is amount of legacy code which people copy and pasted into their project, spread it even more like a virus.
- Lack of industry standards at the beginning lead to a lots of bad practices among developers. PHP code usually smells.
open source php projects in early days was developed in same conditions so even in phpbb, phpnuke, wordpress, drupal used to have a lot of bad practices in their codebase. So php developers usually not study by another library, instead they write their own frameworks/libraries.
- "It works", - there are no strong business demands, on web development, again because lack of standards, and concerns.
This three things are basically same, they linked to each other and summarize of answer of why PHP have strong smells and everybody yelling against it.

Whats is with PHP nowadays ? Of course PHP today is more influenced by good practice of webdev. Composer, Zend, Laravel, Yii, Symphony and language it self became more adult so to say, but developers...

People who never tried anything except PHP are usually weaker in programming and ecosystem knowledge than people who tried something else, python, perl, ruby, c for instance.

Summary

PHP as any other programming language is a tool. Each tool has its own task. Consider this and your task requirements and PHP can be just good enough solution.
"PHP is shit" - usually you heard that from people who never write strong applications on PHP and haven't used any good tools like Symphony or Laravel.
Cheap developers, - the bigger community, the more chance to hire cheap developers, and more chance to get bad code. That can be applied on any other language.
PHP has professionals developers, usually they have not only php on scope.

That's all folks, this is very brief, I am not covering php usage early days in details, but this is good enough to understand the point.

Enjoy.

Hello everyone, this is my first time here so hi! I want to tell you all a story about my current situation.

At 18 while in the military I was able to get my first computer, it was a small hp pavilion laptop with windows 7. The system would crash constantly, even though I would only use it for googling stuff and using fb to talk to people. 5 months after I got it and continuously hated it decided to find out why and who could I blame (other than myself) for the system making me do the ctrl alt del dance all the time....

Found out that there are people called computer programmers that made software. Decided to give it a go since I had some free time most days. Started out with c++ because it was being recommended in some websites. Had many "oh deeeeer lord" moments. After not getting much traction I decided to move to Java which seemed like an easier step than C++. Had fun, but after some verbosity I decided to move into more dynamic lands. Tried JS and since at the time there was no Node and I was not very into the idea of building websites I decided to move into Python, Ruby, PHP and Perl and had a really great time using and learning all of them. I decided to get good in theoretical aspects of computer programming and since I had a knack for math I decided to get started with basic computer science concepts.

I absolutely frigging loved it. And not only that, but learning new things became an obsession, the kind that would make me go to bed at 02:40 am just to wake up at 04:00 or 06:00 because the military is like that. I really wanted to absorb as much as I could since I wanted to go to college for it and wanted to be prepared since I did not wanted to be a complete newb. Took Harvard CS50, Standford Programming 101 with Java, Rice's Python course and MIT's Python programming class. I had so much fun I don't regret it one bit.
By the time I got to college I had already made the jump to Linux and was an adept Arch user, Its not that it was superior or anything, but it really forced me to learn about Linux and working around a terminal and the internals of the system to get what I want. Now a days I settle for Fedora or Debian based systems since they are easier and time is money.

Uni was a breeze, math was fun and the programming classes seemed like glorified "Hello World" courses. I had fun, but not that much fun, most of my time was spent getting better at actual coding. I am no genius, nor my grades were super amazing(I did graduate with honors though) but I had fun, which never really happened in school before that.

While in school I took my first programming gig! It was in ASP.NET MVC, we were using C#, I got the job through a customer that I met at work, I was working in retail during the time and absolutely hated it. I remember being so excited with the gig, I got to meet other developers! Where I am from there aren't that many and most of them are very specialized, so they only get concerned with certain aspects of coding (e.g VBA developers.....) and that is until I met the lead dev. He was by far one of the biggest assholes I had ever met in my life. Absolutely nothing that I would do or say made hem not be a dick. My code was steady, but I would find bugs of incomplete stuff that he would do, whenever I would fix it he would belittle me and constantly remind me of my position as a "junior dev" in the company saying things as "if you have an issue with my code or standards tell me, but do not touch the code" which was funny considering that I would not be able to advance without those fixes. I quit not even 3 months latter because I could not stand the dick, neither 2 of the other developers since the immediately resigned after they got their own courage.

A year latter I was able to find myself another gig. I was hesitant for a moment since it was another remote position in which I had already had a crappy experience. Boy this one was bad. To be fair, this was on me since I had to get good with Lumen after only having some exposure to Laravel. Which I did mentioned repeatedly even though he did offer to train me in order to help him. Same thing, after a couple of weeks of being told how much I did not know I decided to get out.

That is 2 strikes.

So I waited a little while and took a position inside another company that was using vanilla PHP to build their services. Their system was solid though, the lead engineer remains a friend and I did learn a lot from him. I got contracted because they were looking for a Java developer. The salary was good. But when I got there they mentioned that they wanted a developer in Java...to build Android. At the time I was using Java with Spring so I though "well how hard can this be! I already use Android so the love for the system is there, lets do this!" And it was an intense, fun and really amazing experience.

-- To be continued.

!!office drama

I haven't been around much in recent weeks. Due to family illness, christmas shopping, dealing with estranged parents, and brooding over the foregoing, I haven't had a lot of time or energy left to myself.

tl;dr: The CTO ("API Guy") is ostensibly getting fired, and I might be taking over his job. I don't know if I should accept, try to stave this off, or simply flee.

------

Anyone who has been following my recent rants knows that API Guy is my boss, and he often writes terrible code. It's solid and unbreakable, but reading it is a *nightmare.* One of our applications is half the length of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, and it's difficult to tell what code is live and what amounts to ancient, still-active landmines. This is one application; we have several, most of which I've never even looked at.

Ostensibly the code is so terrible because the company grew extremely quickly, and API Guy needed to cram in lots of unexpected / planned-against features. From what I can see, that seems about right, but I haven't checked timeframes [because that's a lot of work!].

Here's a brief rundown of the situation.
- API Guy co-founded the company with the CEO.
- CEO and API Guy have been friends for a long time.
- CEO belives the company will fail with API Guy as head of tech.
- They could just be testing me; I have zero way of knowing. API Guy seems totally oblivious, and CEO seems sincere, so this feels pretty doubtful.
- CEO likes pushing people around. CEO believes he can push me around. API Guy doesn't budge. (I probably won't, either, except to change task priorities.)
- API Guy's code is huge and awful, but functional.
- API Guy is trying to clean up the mess; CEO doesn't understand (maybe doesn't care).
- Literally nobody else knows how the code works.
- Apart from API Guy and myself, the entire company is extroverted sales people.
- None of these sales people particularly like me.
- Sales people sell and sell and sell without asking development if they can pull enough magic features out of their hat to meet the arbitrary saleslines. (because the answer is usually no)
- If I accept, I would be the sole developer (at first) and responsible for someone else's mountain of nightmarish code, and still responsible for layering on new features at the same pace as he. Pay raise likely, but not guaranteed.
- My getting the position is contingent upon the CEO and the investors, meaning it's by no means guaranteed.
- If I don't accept, likely API Guy will be replaced with someone else of unknown ability, who doesn't know the code, and whom I must answer to regardless. Potentially OK, potentially a monumental disaster.

Honestly, it feels like I'm going to be screwed no matter what course I choose.

Perhaps accepting is slightly better?

The best would be to assume the position of CTO and keep API Guy around -- but that would feel like an insult to him. I doubt he'd be okay with it. But maybe. Who knows? I doubt the CEO would seriously consider that anyway.

I feel like a lamb between a dim, angry rhino, and an oblivious one.

When a Coursera course is way better than the one offered by your university…
A university student's rant...

I study Electrical and Computer Engineering and during the first semester of the second year I selected an optional course: Web Programming. It was believed among students that the course would be really easy, and it was. All the student had to do was build a very simple website using HTML, CSS and a few line of JS. A website containing three or four pages all of which had to be validated using a markup validation service.

Yeah, sure, I passed the course just like everyone else who bothered enough to spend an hour or two working on the project. Oh, I almost forgot! We had an one-hour workshop on Dreamweaver!
So, by that point, everybody was a front-end developer, right?!

That happened over three years ago, and because of that course web-development didn’t impress me…

Thankfully, the last few months I’ve became interested in Web Development, and I’ve been reading some articles, spending time on smashing magazine, making some progress on FreeCodeCamp and taking relevant courses on Coursera!
In fact, a few days ago I completed the Coursera course “HTML, CSS and Javascript for Web Developers”.
Oh boy, the things I didn’t know that I didn’t know…

<sarcasm>Did you know there was a term called “responsive design” and that there are frameworks like bootstrap?</sarcasm>
Well, I d i d n ’ t k n o w ! ! ! (even though I had taken the university’s course).

I understand that bootstrap was introduced in 2011 and I took the university course in late 2012, but by that time, bootstrap was quite popular and also there were other frameworks available before bootstrap that could have been included in the course! (even today, there is no reference in responsive design in the university’s course).
In just five weeks the coursera course managed to teach me more, in a more organized and meaningful way than my university’s course in a whole semester!

When I started the coursera course I shared it with a friend of mine. His response: “yeah, sure, but web development is pretty easy… I didn’t spend much time to complete that project three years ago!”

That course three years ago gave birth to misconceptions in students' minds that web development is easy! Yeah, sure, it can be easy to built a simple, non responsive, non interactive website! But that's not how the world works nowadays , right?!

A few months ago, in the early days of August, I attended Flock, the Fedora community conference. During a break I spent some time speaking with a Red Hat employee about student internships. He told me, and I paraphrase: “We know that students don’t have a solid background and that they haven’t learned in the university what we need them to!”

Currently I’m planning to apply for a front-end developer internship position here in Greece.
Yesterday I wrote my CV, added university courses relevant to that position and listed coursera courses under independent coursework… While writing those I made these thoughts…

What if that course 3 years ago was as good as the coursera course… all the things I’d know by now…

There are 3 types of questions.

Type 1 is a question that can easily be answered and mostly appears as the first result in Google.

Type 2 is a question that can be answered by stitching together various type 1 answers.

Type 3 is a question that has not been answered. It may be a bug you’ll have to find out about by reading an email chain 12 years ago or maybe a reason why epoll() doesn’t work on Linux VMs. There is no solid yes or no. You’ve most likely encountered this when reaching page 3 of your Google results and every link is purple (visited).

This is where depression and isolation hits. This is where you realize that if you can’t help yourself, no one else can (or has the experience and time to do so). This is where you must rely on your knowledge and infer an answer to your question pushing your concepts and theories to the extreme. If you solve this question, you’re solving it for someone else who may trek the same path later in the future. You’re solving it for the world!

If you’re willing to solve, attempting to solve, or even giving a reasonable inference about a type 3, you have a true engineering mindset.

Once, at school, last year, we had to present a C# project that, upon clicking a button, took words from a .txt file and showed them in an alphabetical listBox...

Since the file they gave us was so long that we had to wait a minute or so to get the listBox full, I implemented a progressBar which popped up on the button, and upon clicking it, the progressBar advanced for every word it loaded, until, upon finishing, it would have disappear leaving again the button, and the listBox would have been loaded.

Apparently, this choice alone – even if it had next to nothing to do with the exercise – was enough to give me a solid 9 out of 10, because our professors never explained us about progressBars and I used that completely on my own... I tend to do things like this in class, where I explore what my tools could give me.

So long story short, I ended up having the best vote in class for that, and I was so happy and motivated :D

Moral of the story: if you can, always try to learn something new about your tools and your programming language, on your own, because apparently it gives you advantage towards others, at least in school. Or even if you're not in school, it could still be something cool to learn that might be helpful in the future, for your projects or your job's projects.
The more you know, the better!

The only hacked sites I had to fix were running on ... [prepare your stomach] ... Joomla.
I'm not sure if there is even one single solid developer for Joomla. This shit piece has more vulnerabilities than a crack hobo infested with pest-ebola-hyperAIDS.

The sites were full of hidden viagra and pr0n ads and links so the crawlers would list them.

Luckily for me, I was able to pursuade the clients in all 3 cases to build a new site from scratch on a different CMS.

Hello! A tiny update on the privacy site thingy. (linuxxx here yas).

I've finished the preview page (description of what will be on the site really) and slowly preparing for deployment.
In the mean time, since @ewpratten is very busy at the moment, I'm giving the frontend part a shot myself! Working on the general layout/presentation right now and I will show a preview as soon as I have anything solid enough to show :).

Also working on the custom CMS which is going well!

I am kind of hestitant to publish the preview page because I am not a frontender and I know that I'll get all criticism on here so please, please go easy on me! Also, just in general, if you find any kind of flaws in the web app or wherever, please report them to me! As for frontend, I won't fix anything because I've got bigger priorities (like creating the actual site itself xD) but general feedback would be appreciated :). And as I said, I'm a backender so don't judge me too hard on the frontend!

Alright now let's gather some courage to actually publish this thing 😅

So, after weeks of reading spicy rants from all of you, I finally decided to join your community ; even if I'm only a student, I've encountered some solid crap in my internships.

Let's go back in time bois. Two years ago, I started my first intership at a Fortune 500 company (this doesn't exists in France, but whatever, this is nearly the same category). I was supposed to build some file sharing system for the office. Before getting into it, I briefly thought aboyt what technos I could use to build it and make a sweet interface for my co-workers, in 10 weeks, and not a single another day.

Expectations
> Nice team with devs that I could ask things about and learn solid tricks that would even amaze David Copperfield
> Having a nice dev environment

Reality
> Alone on this project
> No fucking dev environment, I had to build everything on Notepad
> No CI
> No SCM
> And, the worst, Ladies and Gentlemans,

I FUCKING HAD TO WORK IN A SINGLE FILE IN A CLOSED ENVIRONMENT.
NO WEBSERVER, NO DEDICATED SPACE.
I HAD TO REQUEST A SPECIFIC ENVIRONMENT IN A CLOSED CUSTOM CMS THAT WAS SERVING FILES, SO THIS FORMAT COULD BE READ ON FOLDER OPENING IN IE9 (FIREFOX FORBIDDEN).
YOU HAD TO MIX HTML, CSS AND JS IN A SINGLE FILE. NO SERVER-SIDE LANGUAGES, ONLY STATIC LINKS, NO FRAMEWORKS (if we can call jQuery, Bootstrap, Semantic UI and all these thinks "Frameworks").

> mfw at the end of the intership

RANT TIME!

Sorry guys, I know this is devRant and probably not a place to post this but am fucking burning with fury and fatigue! I should probably develop elecRant and post it there instead.

I FUCKING HATE POWER ELECTRONICS!!

I am in my final year of electrical engineering and I can fucking say with confidence that power electronics is the most fucked up unit I have seen in my life. A whole load of useless math from simple RLC circuits just to make students' lives miserable. For those who might not know, power electronics is some unit that involves use of solid state electronics(transistors, diodes etc) for power applications(switching mostly). Basically things like inverters and converters. UPS systems are an example of their applications.
Now don't be fooled by how that sounds cool and so smart, this shit is fucked up. These circuits in the attached picture might just seem like simple RLC networks with some BJTs, but they are devils in their own right. They fucking need some advanced unnecessary calculus and Fourier analysis to even calculate the simplest output current!! Worst still, some of these motherfuckers have more than 1 mode of operation,needing one to analyze some fucking 100+ waveforms. I fucking hate this shiit! I hate it!
You might say that i am just being lazy and don't want to study. Let me tell you something, FUCK YOU TOO!!

For almost twenty years I have sheltered in the protective, safe, warm bosom of Debian. For a long time, it had the largest body of available software of all the distros, and by far when Ubuntu rose to prominence. So I used Ubuntu for years for the depth of package availability, and because if something esoteric was released, it would almost certainly come out first on Ubuntu, and sometimes only on Ubuntu. I was happy. Things were good.

But over time, Ubuntu and even Debian started to lean harder and harder on gnome, which I've always hated, along with all desktop environments, as they obscure the system from the user, and introduce graphical layers of abstraction, so the actual job of getting things done becomes a black art, hidden behind gnome-specific tools. This is my preference, and It's been disheartening in recent years to see the direction the desktop appears to be taking.

Then I joined devrant in 2017, and until then, I had heard peripherally about Arch, but never more than that. I had not heard of Manjaro at all. People started posting success stories and happy screenshots, and I was intrigued.

In 2018 I built a windows machine to use for parsec streaming games that wouldn't run on my linux rig. For not a great deal of money, I built a solid machine that's unequivocally better than any machine I've ever used, and installed windows on it. For a while, I was pleased. I had the best of both worlds: a windows box to stream some games from, and a linux desktop for everything else.

But after a couple months, as proton matured, I found fewer and fewer reasons to use my windows machine. My use of it declined to where I was last week: it had been months since I'd even powered it on. It was the most powerful machine I've ever used, and it was just collecting dust behind the TV in the living room. The full realization came to me while I was fighting a battle in the Gnome Takeover War, and I realized: I don't have to do this.

I pulled the newer machine out from behind the TV and installed Manjaro architect edition on it. The flexibility in the install was staggering. I am using nilfs2 for my /boot and / partitions: an option that Ubuntu has never offered. Normally they just default you into the garbage ext4 filesystem, and if you can dig deep enough, you can install with something else, though you have to really want it, in my opinion.

But Manjaro has been a dream-come-true. Pacman is easily the best package manager I have ever used, and pamac's intuitive and easy commands are a great view into AUR. Booting into the virtual console instead of a display manager has been wonderful too. On Ubuntu, I had to disable systemd's version of runlevel 5 to even get it working. But I just popped my xrandr script into my .xinitrc, and X opens with startx in less than a second. On Ubuntu, it takes about 5-10 seconds.

This has nothing to do with Manjaro, but I also switched to Radeon for this install, and I couldn't be happier about that. No more "installing" nvidia's drivers.

No more gnome. No more PPAs. No more settling. I am a Manjaro user now. Full stop. Thank you, devrant, for bringing it to my attention.

So I've taken the first steps into mobile development this past week, I attached two joysticks to a basic unity app to check if touch input was working and I guess I never got around to uninstalling it. so I go to school and finish some class work early and decide, why not check and see what it would take to get my current main Alpha project working. I open my unity folder and see Joystick_Test and someone walking by asks "what's that?" To which I reply tapping on the app "it's a touch screen test, to see if the phone can detect me touching the screen and dragging my fingers. I hand him the phone and he asks why nothing is happening which I respond with "it's just an input test, it's not ment to be anything fancy I just need to program the joysticks and the scripts are still in development" and he hands the phone back and says "your lazy as shit. I can make the controls work in under a minute" and he walks away. It's lunch now and I manage to catch him in the library. I open Unity, and Mono-develop and call him over. I get out of my seat and say "program the left joystick to move around. I'll give you a hint, vector3". He sits in the chair and stares at the screen for a solid minute until I see him type
Console.writeline("hello world");
And he said it would work and just walked away.

OCR (The exam board for my course) are fucking thick in the head when it comes to anything computing.

- I get a mark or two for saying open source software is worse than thier propritary counterparts
- ALL open source software forks must also be make open source. They spend so much time going over the legal stuff BUT HAVE NEVER HEARD OF OPEN SOURCE LICENCING!
- One exam paper had a not gate picture with 2 inputs...
- I have to differentiate between portable and handheld! YOU MEAN HANDHELD DEVICES ARE NOT PORTABLE!?!!?!?
- In level 2 education, OCR say 1 MB = 1024 KB - In level 3, they say 1 MB = 1000 KB, and 1 MiB = 1024 KiB, and expect you to differentiate. Why do you expect the wrong answer in level 2!?
- INFORMATION FORMATS AND STYLES ARE COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THINGS! If you look up synonyms for "style", "form" is there, and if you look up synonyms for "format", "style" is there.
- When asked for storage devices, I have to say "smartphone", "tablet", "desktop PC" - I mean yeah they store data but when you ask me for storage devices I will say "hard disk drive", "solid state drive", "SD card", etc. >.>

I could probably go on an on about this...
I sure do love being asked to copy-paste existing HTML/JS/CSS and being asked to just tweak it here and there, and then wait for other people's incompetence in copy-pasting... I sure do love being stuck with this sort of "education" ._.

So this post is going to target an irritating aspect of a specific culture based on observational evidence over the last 20 years, and has reared its hideous face yet again. If you're triggered by that, stop reading here.

I'm flatly fed up with two-faced onshore Desi coworkers. They make up 95% of my colleagues and the following sequence of events has played out repeatedly over the course of my career, consistently, though it's slightly more pronounced in other women for whatever reason :

1. Work with them for years, good relationship, teach them all sorts of skills (which I will do freely for anyone, for any reasons as I view it to be a moral imperative), general lifting up and solid teamwork.
2. They move up in the hierarchy, generally to management, usually project
3. The second they view themselves as higher in the pecking order they start treating me like shit as if we have no history. Rude, commanding, unwilling to share details, obligatory exasperated thank yous if any at all, not interested in anything I have to say even if I'm the noted expert on the subject.

I understand a lot of their etiquette culture, specifically the level of "directness" or politeness they employ is based on the estimated risk of loss in the interaction. I find that disgusting, but I understand that academically. I just can't get my mind around how universal this shiftiness is, as it happens over and over again. It's like human decency and respect go out the window the second they don't feel like they have anything to gain from you. In *my* culture that is the lowest form of behavior a human can exhibit, and it causes me to rage because I can't imagine being so utterly devoid of altruism.

Fuck. It's just so sickening. It's fucking debased, and selfish and greedy and fuck. I can't even, this is one of those things that so irrational my mind can't accept it and I just go around and around on it.

Tl;dr you want to get throat punched? Because that's how you get throat punched. It's definitely getting this person doxxed to USCIS

Admin Access

Have you ever been in a position where you become the de-facto person who works with a certain tool, but are denied full admin access to that tool for no real reason?

Two years ago I was put on the Observability squad and quickly discovered it was my thing, implementing tracking and running queries on this third-party tool, building custom stuff to monitor our client-side successes and failures.

About a year ago I hit the point where if you asked anyone "Who is the go-to person for help/questions/queries/etc. for this tool", the answer was just me lol. It was nice to have that solid and clear role, but a year later, that's still the case, and I'm still not an admin on this platform. I've asked, in an extremely professional way armed with some pretty good reasons, but every time I'm given some lame non-answer that amounts to No.

As far as I'm aware, I'm the only dev on our team at all who uses custom/beta features on this site, but every time I want to use them I have to go find an admin and ask for an individual permission. Every time. At the end of 2020 it was happening once a month and it was so demoralizing hitting up people who never even log into this site to ask them to go out of their way to give me a new single permission.

People reach out to me frequently to request things I don't have the permissions to do, assuming I'm one of the 64 admins, but I have to DM someone else to actually do the thing.

At this point it feels very much like having to tug on the sleeve of a person taller than me to get what I need, and I'm out of ways to convince myself this isn't demoralizing. I know this is a pretty common thing in large companies, meaningless permissions protocols, and maybe it's because I came from IT originally that it's especially irritating. In IT you have admin access to everything and somehow nobody gets hurt lol-- It still blows my mind that software devs who make significantly more money and are considered "higher up" the chain (which i think is dumb btw) are given less trust when it comes to permissions.

Has anyone figured out a trick that works to convince someone to grant you access when you're getting stonewalled? Or maybe a story of this happening to you to distract me from my frustration?

If programming languages were countries, which country would each language represent?

Disclaimer: its just a joke

Java: USA -- optimistic, powerful, likes to gloss over inconveniences.

C++: UK -- strong and exacting, but not so good at actually finishing things and tends to get overtaken by Java.

Python: The Netherlands. "Hey no problem, let'sh do it guysh!"

Ruby: France. Powerful, stylish and convinced of its own correctness, but somewhat ignored by everyone else.

Assembly language: India. Massive, deep, vitally important but full of problems.

Cobol: Russia. Once very powerful and written with managers in mind; but has ended up losing out.

SQL and PL/SQL: Germany. A solid, reliable workhorse of a language.

Javascript: Italy. Massively influential and loved by everyone, but breaks down easily.

Scala: Hungary. Technically pure and correct, but suffers from an unworkable obsession with grammar that will limit its future success.

C: Norway. Tough and dynamic, but not very exciting.

PHP: Brazil. A lot of beauty springs from it and it flaunts itself a lot, but it's secretly very conservative.

LISP: Iceland. Incredibly clever and well-organised, but icy and remote.

Perl: China. Able to do apparently almost anything, but rather inscrutable.

Swift: Japan. One minute it's nowhere, the next it's everywhere and your mobile phone relies on it.

C#: Switzerland. Beautiful and well thought-out, but expect to pay a lot if you want to get seriously involved.

R: Liechtenstein. Probably really amazing, especially if you're into big numbers, but no-one knows what it actually does.

Awk: North Korea. Stubbornly resists change, and its users appear to be unnaturally fond of it for reasons we can only speculate on.

Just need to get this off my chest. Started a new job 3 weeks ago at a company that has been around ~18 years, it is only recently that they have started to grow more rapidly. I was brought in under the guise that they wanted to embrace change and better practices and so said I was up for the challenge.

In my 2nd week I was asked to produce a document on tackling the technical debt and an approach to software development in the future for 3 consultants who were coming in to review the development practices of the company on behalf of the private equity firm who has taken a major stake in the company. I wrote the document trying to be factual about the current state and where I wanted to go, key points being:

Currently a tightly coupled monolith with little separation of concerns (73 projects in one solution but you have to build two other solutions to get it to build because there are direct references.).

Little to no adherence to SOLID principles.

No automated testing whatsoever.

Libraries all directly referenced using the file system rather than Nuget.

I set out a plan which said we needed to introduce TDD, breaking dependencies, splitting libraries into separate projects with nuget packages. Start adhering to SOLID principles, looking at breaking the project down into smaller services using the strangler pattern etc. After submitting what I had written to be part of a larger document I was told that it had been tweaked as they felt it was too negative. I asked to see the master document and it turns out they had completely excluded it.

I’ve had open and frank discussions with the dev team who to me have espoused that previously they have tried to do better, tackle technical debt etc but have struggled to get management to allow them. All in all a fairly poor culture. They seem almost resigned to their fate.

In my first 2 weeks I was told to get myself acquainted and to settle myself in. I started looking at the code and was quite shocked at how poorly written a lot of it was and in discussions with my manager have been critical of the code base and quite passionate and opinionated about the changes I want to see.

Then on Friday, the end of my third week, I was invited to a meeting for a catch up. The first thing I was told was that they felt I was being too openly critical in the office and whether I was a good fit for the company, essentially a stay or go ultimatum. I’ve asked for the weekend to think about it.

I’ve been a little rocked by it being so quickly asked if I was a good fit for the company and it got my back up. I told them that I was a good fit but for me to stay I want to see a commitment to changes, they told me that they had commitments to deliver new features and that we might be able to do it at some point in the future but for now I just needed to crack on.

Ordinarily I would just walk but I’ve recently started the process to adopt kids and changing jobs right now would blow that out the water. At the same time I’m passionate about what I do and having a high standards, I’m not going to be silenced for being critical but maybe I will try and tackle it in a different way. I think my biggest issue is that my boss who was previously a Senior Developer (my current position) has worked at the company for 12 years and it is his only job, so when I’m being critical it’s most likely criticising code he wrote. I find it hard to have the respect of a boss who I had to teach what a unit test was and how to write one. It makes it hard to preach good standards when by all accounts they don’t see the problems.

Just wondering if anyone has suggestions or experience that might help me tackle this situation?

I've been working on implementing a fairly large feature on a project at work--

**Sorry. I should rephrase that**

I've been *trying* to work on implementing a fairly large feature on a project at work.

It's slightly complicated because I'm not as "in the know" with the project as I should be. I get tossed around projects a lot as the only designer+developer so I've got my hands in a lot of buckets... Or git repos I should say... My source tree has a lot of tabs open and each project is run by someone with their own ideologies on how stuff should be done and laid out and what not. Basically jumping between these projects leaves you mildly capable on all of them but not amazing at any of individual one them--

--I digress.

There's a bug I've been trying to fix.
--Stupid simple bug, literally just a casting issue or something but there's so much data in this one object that it's taking a few solid minutes of concentration to figure out which variable is busting it all up. It shouldn't take long to fix...

But it has. It has taken 4 days.

FOUR. DAYS.

...To fix what is basically a null reference exception.

Every time I sit down to work on this bug real quick I get pulled away to do a wireframe or change a flow chart or diagram or colour or print styling.

Every. God. Damn. Time.
4 days. Soon to be 5.

My commits are real low at this point guys.

Please boss man, just let me code...

Client had our company build them a site, they refused our hosting suggestions, and did not want any maintenance on their site.

They eventually left us as a client all together(they were getting other services so they occasionally got an edit or two) and sent several rude emails to delete their passwords so we wouldn't have access to their stuff anymore. I gladly gave the site over to the new company with a solid "good luck." I wanted nothing to do with this client anymore anyway.

Now I'm 9 months down the line and my AM sends me an email that the client wants maintenance. I'm already typing up a ranting email to tell them no, when I decide to check the site. There are WordPress php errors all over the site.

Idk what this other company did, but I want nothing to do with cleaning up someone else's screwups. If I were freelance, this would be a HUGE up charge.

In january 2023 i was contacted by a recruiter offering me a job position.

I DID NOT ASK FOR A JOB.

I WAS NOT LOOKING FOR A JOB.

THEY contacted ME.

Ok. So i went along with it and see how it goes. They probably wont hire me nor would i give a shit. Chatted with this recruiter for a while. She forgets to answer my message for 5 fucking days. Twice. Once because she was doing God knows what and the second time because she was on paid vacation. Fine i don't give a shit about you at all anyways.

So this recruiter chatting has been stretched out for several days. I think over a WEEK. So she forwarded me to their lead developer.

I applied to work as a full stack java spring boot backend + angular frontend engineer.

So:
- java backend
- angular frontend
- full stack
- shitload of devops
- shitload of projects i built
- worked with clients
- have CS degree, graduated
- worked a job at their rival company

What could go fucking wrong with all of these stats right?

During technical + hr interview (3 of us on google meets) they asked me what salary I'd be comfortable with.

I said $1500/month straight out.

keep in mind:
- In my country $500 or $600 is a salary for engineers per month
- You get a raise of +$150 which is around $750 after working for 1+ year
- You can earn $1000+ after you work for +2 years
- Rent here is $200-300 a month at minimun. And because of inflation its just getting worse especially with food. So this salary is not for living but for survival.

Their lead engineer gave me a WHOLE ASS FUCKING PROJECT TO BUILD and i had to code it within 10 days. Great so at least 17+ days of my fucking life to waste on these fucktards who contacted ME.

The project was about building a web app coffee shop literally what mcdonalds has when you order via those tablets. I had to build this in java spring boot and angular. I had to integrate:
- docker, devops
- barmen, baristas, orders
- people can order at the table or to go
- each barista can take 5 orders at a time
- each coffee has different types of fields and brewing time
- each barman brews each coffee different period of time
- barista cant take more than 5 orders for to go until barman finishes the previous order
- barista can take more than 5 orders but if those orders were ordered from table, and they have to be put in queue
- had to build CRUD admin functionality coffee's
- had to export them all of the postman routes
- had to design a scalable database infrastructure for all of this alone
- shitload of stuff more

And guess what. After 10 painful days I BUILT THE WHOLE THING MYSELF AND I BUILT EVERYTHING THEY ASKED FOR. IT WAS WORKING.

Submitted it. They told me they'll contact me within 7 days to schedule the final Technical interview after they review what i built. Great so another 17+7 days of my fucking time wasted.

OH and they also told me to send them THE WHOLE GITHUB REPOSITORY AND TRANSFER OWNERSHIP TO THEIR COMPANY'S OWNERSHIP. once you do this you cant have your repository back. WTF? WHY CANT YOU JUST REVIEW THE CODE FROM MY PUBLIC REPOSITORY? That was so weird but what can i fucking do argue with these dickheads?

After a week of them not answering i contacted them via email. They forgot and apologized. Smh. Then they scheduled an interview within 3 days. Great more of my time wasted.

During interview i was on a google meets with their lead engineer, 1 backend java spring boot engineer and 1 angular frontend developer. They were milking me dry for 1 whole fucking hour.

They only pointed out the flaws in what i built, which are miniscule and have not once congratulated me on the rest of the good parts. I explained them i had to rush those parts so the code may not be perfect. I had other shit to do in my life and not work for your shitty project for $0/hour for 10 days you fucking dickriders.

So they quickly ran over to theory. They asked me where is jwt token stored. Who generates it. How the backend knows to authenticate user by it. I explained.

What are solid principles. I said i cant explain what is it but i understand how it works, why its needed and how to implement it (they can clearly see in the project i just build that i applied SOLID principles everywhere) - but i do admit i dont know the theory behind it 100% clearly.

Then they asked me about observables and promises in angular. I explained them how they work and how subscribe method is used (as they can clearly see that i used it in the code). Then they asked me to explain them under the hood of how observables work. The fuck? I dont know and dont care? But i can learn it as i work there?

Etc

Final result: after dragging this for 1 fucking month for miserable $1500/month they told me: we can either hire you now but for a much lower salary which you probably wont be happy with, or you can study more these things we discussed "and know why the car leaks oil" and reapply back to us in 2-3 months!

I'm not enjoying my current experience with the web.

I feel sad, alone most of the time.

Let me disclaim first that I don't have like an apocalyptic view of the world, I actually think it's improving (in very broad terms).

I also understand that the web is a complex thing and everyone being happy with is going to be very unlikely, specially as more and more people use it, since the entropy will naturally increase.

I don't have solid evidence of what I'm saying next and I'm not even entirely what exactly I'm saying, but maybe I'm onto something.

I feel that when the internet first started, businessmen were like "meh, geek stuff".

But slowly, things changed, and every greedy person tried to just fucking unload his greed filled cum onto it

And now it feels like 1984. And I hate when people reeeee 1984. But it does feel like it.

The ads are like "ok, I know you like that other shit, but CHECK THIS SHIT OUT".

It's AI driven to maximize profits, with little care for people happiness.

I miss when youtube had related videos. The algorithm wasn't perfect but at least it was exactly that, related videos.

Now though, youtube likes to be smart. But not smart in a way that enriches your youtube experience.
It's smart in a way that maximizes ad revenue.

"what? did you think we were going to use AI to make you happier? that we were going to enrich your youtube experience?
NO MOTHER FUCKER! OF COURSE NOT. We're gonna use it to show you whatever shit that will make us richer faster."

Controls for customizing the recommended videos behaviour? Pff, no.
They're gonna decide for you what it is that you like
They're going to decide what you should be watching.

Everytime i turn on my samsung tv, the youtube app recomends me watching "BETTER THAN SEX EYE LINER". Jesus christ, what the shitcum, I'm the only motherfucker on the house that uses youtube, and I couldn't care less about this cunt's disguised ad video, let alone fucking eye liners.

Why youtube, why do you promote whatever porn video VEVO uploads?

Why do you ruin every youtube rewind?

Why do you pander to the lowest common denominator?

Why can't you be shining beacon, a moral company considering you're a cultural icon?

Fuck you youtube, and while we're at it, fuck you too samsung, I must have been drunk the day I bought this shitty closed source software piece of shit "smart".

And these are just 2 companies. The internet is FILLED with these greedy bastards. They have no passion for their products, for making people happy. They only have passion for the MUNNNEY.

Thanks a lot business schools, thanks a lot CEOs of the world, thanks for making the world a happier place.

Ok, now that I said that, I want to back up a bit.

Youtube may bot be perfect, but it's ad revenue system enables some youtubers I love to be able to make that their careers.

I appreciate that, so maybe youtube isn't that bad... so sorry for saying those horrible things man!

I've sadly been using an iPhone for the past few weeks 😔

I'm a hard core android fan but,well if I'm honest with you I got super high and got amnesia woke up with a dead screen on my android phone so got myself an iPhone since I needed to test an app I'm building , comes to think of it that women twice my age I kissed to piss her off might of broken it .. so my friends say ...

Anyway the point being iphones ... not that bad I'm aware people praise their software but it's to rigid for my liking there's features android has I believe that makes it superior

Cameras are better ... build quality is solid. Can't complain really. My android was a one plus 3 great phone also

I might get the s8 I'm waiting to see if they hold up or the new one plus phone if I find the specs ...

The point is as devs we get so stuck in our ways I consider us generally the most open Minded people but not when it comes to tech we are generally hard core fan boys of one company or another

But in truth, there's a lot of great products out there worth our money even if they are apple ... money grabbing bitches.

I say this because my hate for apple whilst it's still there I can at least respect them a little for certain things especially their phones

Desperately frustrated since my little brother started studying Software Engineering in college. I was so happy that he wants to do this, but they study 10 types of math and Java.
When he gets home from vacation watches movies for weeks and weeks. Haven't seen him write a single line of code for a year and some. I believe he thinks the outdated stuff and the piece of math they study will get him a solid job with the diploma.
I am a self-taught developer and for the past 11 years I have gaps in top of a week where I wasn't studying/coding/working and by watching him throw his good years ... this is not how I see good dev raise.
I was super pissed, because he started looking for a job last month (for me he has 0 knowledge to lend a job) after 50 applications he got 2 calls (one because of me calling an HR friend of mine and the little brat refused it). I tried giving him a part in project of mine - quick piece of work 2-3 days tops so he can add something to this one page empty CV and yet he refused.
I don't know what to do anymore. For me he has no real future if he relies on the stupid college education and the piece of paper with no real knowledge for the past 2 years of studying.

In the Ruhr area (Germany) we have some very old, very strange words with strange meanings. One of those words is ‚Prutscher‘.
A Prutscher refers to a person who does things but never gets a good result, due to lack of knowledge or simple carelessness. Most of the time, Prutschers are people who are interested in certain subjects and often work in the related jobs, but who lack the motivation to properly train themselves, learn what there is to learn and to always keep up with their technologies .
Here are a few examples I've stumbled upon so far in my career:

- Developers in their 60's who read a book about PHP 25 years ago and decided to become a software developer. Since then haven't read anything about it. Who then now build huge spaghetti monoliths for large companies, in which they prefix every function, every variable and constant with their initials and, of course, use Hungarian notation.

- People who read half a fucking tutorial about <insert any fancy js framework here> and start blogging/tweeting about it

- Senior web developers who need to be told what the fuck CORS is and who can't even recognize CORS related errors in their browser console.

- People who have done nothing else for 18 years than building websites for companies on Wordpress 1.x and writing few lines of PHP and Javascript from time to time. Those who are now applying as a frontend dev due to the difficult economic situation and are surprised that they are not accepted due to a lack of experience.

- Developers who are the only ones working on Windows in the team and ask their Linux colleagues for help when Windows starts bitchin.

- People who have been coding for 30 years, have worked with ~42 languages ​​and don't know the difference between compiled and interpreted languages ​​in the job interview.

- Chief developers at a large newsletter-publisher who think it's a good idea to build your own CMS (due to a lack of good existing ones, of course).

- Developers who have been writing PHP applications for multinational corporations for 25 years and cannot explain how PHP is executed. They don't even know what the fucking OPcache is, let alone fpm. FML

- People who call themselves professional developers but never ever heard of DRY, KISS, boy-scout rule, 12-Factor App, SOLID, Clean Code, Design Patterns, ...

- Senior developers wondering why the bash script won't run on their fucking Windows machine.

- Developers who consider Typescript to be a hindrance and see no value in it.

- Developers using ftp for deployments in 2022

- Senior Javascript Developer applying for a job and for whom Integer is a primitive data type in JS.

- Developers who prefer to code without frameworks and libraries because they are only an unnecessary burden/overhead and you can quickly code everything up yourself.

- Developers who think configuring their server(s) manually is a good idea.

You fucking Prutscher. What you have already cost me in terms of work and nerves. I can't even put it into words how deeply I despise you. I have more respect for the chewing gum that has been stuck in my damn trash can for the past 3 years than I do for you guys. You are the disgrace of our profession. I will haunt you in your dreams and prefix every fucking synapse of your brain with MY initials.

As a well-known german band once sang in a very fitting song: I wouldn't even piss on you if you were on fire.

If you recognized yourself in one of the examples here: FUCK YOU!

Got a CTO at my Unity job that's younger than me, which by itself is fine, but the only reason this guy was put into that position was because the previous CTO left the company at the time where I was relatively new and he is the person most familiar with the codebase of our primary project than I was at the time.

I understood the decision at the time, but still, having a position of power being handed to them just as a matter of inheritance doesn't command my respect. Nevertheless, I withheld my judgement at the time to see how his leadership goes.

Not even 1 year in and this young CTO started making jabs at me, calling my code hard to read and incomprehensible, to my face, in front of everybody else.

Motherfucker, I don't find his code easy to read either but I went out of my way to frequently ask him, the previous CTO and other teammates to clarify what they wrote here and there. He on the other, made no attempt to ask me for clarification and instead waited until company meetings to air these grievances.

Our boss started to ask me to follow SOLID principles (even though he can't recite what that acronym means) due to complaint from the CTO guy, even though the CTO guy doesn't even follow SOLID himself! But I took the higher road and didn't flip it right back on him.

What I did propose in return though, is that the dev team start using pull requests and have a code review process if the CTO wants to sign off on everything that gets in the codebase. Sounds reasonable enough, right? Not for this guy! He immediately starts complaining that reviewing pull requests would be more work for him. Motherfucker, you refused to go to my table to ask for clarifications about my code yet still want to understand what goes on, then do code review.

It was at this point that I realized that this guy doesn't actually want me to write good, clear code. He wants me to write code HIS way so that he can understand. Yeah okay, I can accept that idea in isolation. Some open-source projects require contributors to follow certain coding convention to make the maintainers' job easier too. One project that immediately came to mind is "In-game Debug Console for Unity 3D" (disclosure: I am a contributor to this project)

But guess what?

THIS COMPANY DOESN'T HAVE A FREAKING CODING CONVENTION. NOT WRITTEN DOWN ANYWHERE. NOT EVEN A VOCAL ONE.

What this CTO guy wants from me is a complete blackbox.

To all fellow devs out there, I hope you don't work with a CTO like this, or become one.

No one fucking knows how to handle/raise errors.

I feel like this is the least talked topic in all fucking programming industry. This shit needs to be tought even more than the fucking SOLID, DRY, KISS, YAGNI and other kinds of buzzwords that fancy devs love tossing left and right.

Basically everyone just does "whatever you dumb error just dont bother me". They will just log/return null/ignore the errors and be in their oblivion with bugs propagating upstream the call stack.

"Throwing errors you say? Ew, why do you want to produce more errors?". Yeah, right, just stick another log/return null/or ignore the fact that the monke calling your function with bullshit arguments.

"But bro it's so difficult and time consuming and it would never happen!" Yes, you fucker! Yes! Programming IS fucking difficult if you want reliable systems! Did you not know that!? Well now you do! Go and fucking learn it!

FUCK!11!1!!

> Last year wrote a unittest - I was asked to delete it
> no design patterns. Not a single one
> no encapsulation
> fucked up inheritance [I had no idea it was possible at all...]
> generics every-fucking-where
> I could go on...

this month the lead dev was not in and I had to make a new feature. Guess what I did :)

tdd [coverage >90%], a couple of builders, a factory or two, two composites, one decorator, only a few generics - only where really needed. Private fields, not a single @Autowired field [they were fucking my tdd], nicely abstracted integrations, and so on. Everything is writen according to clean code: max 10loc methods, <140col lines, reusable constants and utils, SOLID as a rock, etc.

Due date is next week. Took me 3 weeks to craft it.

Guess who's gonna be piiiiiiiiiiiiisssedd 😁

the best part - I don't even work there, our company was hired for xx hours as helping hands 😁

that's not all. They have like 6 envs and their deployment is all-fucking-manual. Will try to learn how to dockerize that app and deploy it on docker. Gosh I wish I could see his face when he's back 😁

p.S. From ethical point of view, he's the only dev who believes his code is perfect. No other dev in the team agrees. AND he once said: 'it's gonna be my way or no way at all'. So I don't think I did wrong... Did I? :)

900k+ deal with a huge customer.

All we need is a spreadsheet printed out

Two senior people could not figure this out for a solid hour

"hey you work with computers"

So I'm here printing spreadsheets...

* A job application followup email I received:

Hi [programmerName],
Thank you for your interest in joining [companyName].

While we appreciate your application, we decided to move forward with other candidates whose skills and experience are a closer match to our requirements for this specific role.
Feel free to check back, as we are always adding new positions.

Best of luck with your career search!
-The [companyName] Team

* My (probably trashed) reply:

Hello

I personally ignore this precompiled stuff you HR people send.
I feel this answer will be probably trashed somewhere but I feel the need to write this.

You know absolutely nothing about my skills because you didn’t even talk with me.

Maybe I am not the best person in writing a resume or an introduction letter, the key skill appreciated in companies doing head hunting instead of building a solid corporate culture and cultivating talent. Or at least HR people in such companies.

Please consider that, maybe you didn’t like my resume or I didn't write a list of words matching your check list, but at least I honestly wrote my experience instead of trying to hack my way to a job interview writing a fake one that triggers usual HR patterns.
Consider that I do a job for a living and I don't live or have the time to make the perfect resume, I don’t even apply for all companies I see, I only apply for the ones I believe I can work well because I like them. I am not a professional job searcher, jumping from a company to another.

You keep posting this very same add since October 2019 and probably even earlier.
This sounds to me like:
- or your selection process does not work well and you end up hiring the wrong people
- or maybe your work place is not that good as you describe it, so that you have zero retainment despite your high salary.
But I cannot be sure because, guess what, I could not check personally.

If you want to talk about my skills and compare me to other people please test me otherwise don’t write (copy/paste) this offensive trash.

Best of luck with your career as a HR person in a tech company!

-A person tired of HR managers that do not give a f**k about the word “human” in their job description.

YOU STUPID APPLICATION MANAGER STOP PROLONGING THIS MEETING FOR THE LOVE OF GOD this is a daily scrum not a status report you solid twat stop asking when something will be done when it hasn't even been worked on yet

Dev: "I'll start working on the thing today, might take a day or two to finish development"
Twat: "Will it be ready for testing tmorrow"
D: "Maybe by late tomorrow? If all goes well"
T: "So it'll be tested by tomorrow"
D: "Uhhhh wait"
T: "It'll be done by tomorrow"
D: "But"

GODDAMNIT MAN HE'LL TELL YOU TOMORROW IF IT'S DONE OR NOT AND IF IT CAN BE TESTED I want to punch you so hard in the face with a spiked mallet covered in wasp stingers and hello kitty juice to excacerbate your diabetes you filthy piece of excrement waiting to be smeared across the pavement with my boot

Recent boot camp grad here with a solid portfolio...holy crap...this industry is so illogical...got a call from a recruiter whose job needs 3 years experience. I demonstrated I know every single one of the requirements, have implemented them, know pros and cons, etc. She says OK I'll run it by my manager and see because we can't fill the spot and it requires 3 years but you meet all the qualifications. I get an email the next day, and she says sorry, we actually need 5 years...fucking face palm...I'll apply again in 5 years because that job will still be open. Really sucks that the only thing holding me back from landing a job is experience, not knowledge. No employer wants to touch me with a 10 foot pole...how long will it take be to find a job...jesus christ.

Who are the people who are pushing for phones, laptops and desktops to be even thinner? Do they actually exist?! Or are that mythical creatures invented by Apple engineers so they can get paid to invent new stuff?

"Yeah, we need to invent a new keyboard design as customers are complaining how fat our pro laptops are."

I don't think I've looked at a laptop built in the last decade and wondered how I'll carry it with my tiny frame.

Just give me a Mac Pro that is a solid chunk of aluminum with a removable drive and access to the RAM. It'll look fine and it's going to sit quietly on my desk. I promise not to move it without hiring at least two men with appropriate safety equipment.

I want someone to stand up at an Apple keynote and say, "We made this thicker---you're welcome."

Hi guys! This is my first rant, please be easy on me.

This is for all who always rant about how horible old codes on existing systems are, compared to what new tech they knew and how better they are as programmers compared to the seniors in the team and how they could have done it better... im getting an impression that it's either your a newbie on a corporate world or a freelancer that has not worked well with a system whos been there for ages... first, most of us devs thinks that they can do better than the previous ones, it is a never ending curse for us proud race but as time goes we would also regret our decision..2nd: cost.. migrating a battle-tested / fully functional system to a new tech would take time and money including training, which the management wont agree unless of course you do it for free.. 3rd: standards.. the company has built a pretty solid standards that changing to a new tech would affect it..there are so many more reasons that the only thing we can do is accept our fate.. coding is fun until the system grows to become an abomination that even its creator regret doing it... it's not our fault, blame the marketting guys! :D
Thank you for reading!

! exactly dev

I'd ditched Windows and spent a while exploring the Linux ecosystem for content creation. And I have to say, it was not a nice experience.

As much as I respect the Linux mantra of "free as in freedom" and "you need to roll up your sleeves and figure out stuff on your own", it just isn't good enough for non-dev work. Sorry guys, but I need software that gets out of my way and at least does what it's supposed to do. I can't stand a horrible UI or delays and random crashes, which is exactly what happens with most things under Linux.

To replace my Windows workflow I used the following:
1. Windows -> elementaryOS (because Debian/Ubuntu repositories seem to have the best software support, and elementaryOS is the least horrible looking thing that supports that) and then Arch, because, well, Arch.
2. Blender + Maya -> Blender + Maya on Linux.
3. Reaper + FL Studio -> Ardour + LMMS.
4. Photoshop -> GIMP + Krita + Inkscape.
5. ZBrush -> nothing :(

As you can see, my use cases are pretty much all over the spectrum.

Firstly, installing and configuring stuff. A pleasure on Windows, an absolute pain on Linux. Everything just worked on Windows, I had to wrestle with library versions and patches and unstable audio layers (Linux audio just sucks, except for JACK) on Linux.

Out of these, Blender and Maya were the best experience. But even then, both would suffer from random crashes that just didn't happen on Windows.
Ardour is actually really nice when it works. Its use of JACK for routing makes it really really flexible, but it just isn't stable enough to depend on. LMMS is utter crap. I'm sorry, but I just hate the UI. Can't stand it.
GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape can't beat Photoshop, even when you consider them together. Adobe software workflow is just so much better and more intuitive.
Blender 3D sculpting is not bad, but it's nowhere as good as ZBrush.

Also, if you're a C++ dev like me, nothing beats Visual Studio 2017. Nothing. That IDE just blows everything else out of the water. Even VSCode. And it's not slow at all, it handled a fairly large project (PBRTv3) just fine on my Windows development VM. Yes, a VM.

So...I ditched Linux and went back to Windows, but I keep Linux as a VM for when I actually want to mess with Blender or Ardour. Or some dev stuff which Windows sucks at (which is becoming less frequent because of WSL).

Out of all the above, the only one I'd consider ready for production use would be Blender. Developers of open source software, please learn from Blender. Kickass UI and user friendly operation is extremely important, you can't make a random window with GTK buttons and text boxes and arcane config files and expect people to use it for serious work.

Also, Windows beats Linux hands down as an everyday OS. It's always been rock solid, if you take care of it properly (and that goes for any OS). Updates hardly take any time because I run it on a SSD. As for all the advertising and marketing bullshit, you can block a large amount of stuff. And for what can't be blocked, well, I just have to live with it, because the alternative is compromising on my creative output, which is too much for me.

I still run Linux on my server, though. And on my embedded devices (Pi, BeagleBone, etc.). It absolutely rocks there.

I realize that Linux software is not going to improve unless we do something about it, so I'll be contributing fixes and code (the joys of being a C++ dev, yay). Still, I feel that the platform and software as a whole is just not mature enough.

Ordered $12 worth of electronic bits and bobs. They came a day ago and tonight I hooked them up to my raspberry pi. Made some lights blink, pressed some buttons. A solid re-introduction to electronics. This time on my own time and not in school, so I don't automatically hate it. I only got a cheap kit so I don't have many toys to play with but I'm excited to get more. Maybe even buy an Arduino. Maybe even make them talk to each other idk. I'm happy.

You may remember a super long time ago I double-buffered the Windows cmd.exe using c++

tl;dr, here it is in c!

Anyways, I was still learning c++ back then. It wasn't my first project in c++ but it was close and I ran into a lot of issues. The thing worked... but only if you didn't touch it.

Here's the same project (With a lot less bells'n'whistles) written in c. I used a different approach this time, and other than my function naming convention (Which, I honestly don't even know if it's bad or not!), I think this is some pretty solid code!

In the image you see the header file (I used as a summary of the code) and then three x's in a terminal. To do this, the code:

-Creates a ConsoleScreenBuffer handle
-Creates two CHAR_INFO buffers for drawing & displaying
-Draws three x's to the draw buffer
-Copies the draw buffer to the display buffer
-Copies the display buffer to the ConsoleScreenBuffer handle

I'm thinking about cutting out the middle man and removing the display buffer (which holds what is currently displayed) but I think it may actually be useful, and I don't know.

Anyways, I have no friends that understand this stuff so that's why it's here. Cheers.

nice, 10k reached before sidtheitclown! (that’s all that actually matters, heh)

so, yes, as promised it’s me… chris from chris’ full stack blog.

I think kiki knew this, as I used to be called fullstackchris… though very briefly... don't know why i was ever worried about the old clowns i used to work for knowing my identity here

i’m a host of react round up, and also an ex-futures trader (that life is / was hidden on Twitter), I’ve recently quit because I’m ALSO still building 4ish SaaS products including The Wheel Screener (wheelscreener.com) and CodeVideo (codevideo.io), over my LLC, Full Stack Craft (fullstackcraft.com)

oh yeah, and on top of that i have a full time job in Switzerland (read: not poor boi 38 or 40 hour work week, 42 minimum)

so yeah, its a fucking lot of shit to do and sometimes it’s too much! glad i have this place to vent

so, don’t be too harsh on me… really, 99% of my bitterness comes from the approximate 5 years of my working life (2018-2023) were taken from me by lying business folk type who actually didn’t know what the FUCK they were doing or talking about, even after promising me they did (at two different companies). Listen, I’m all for people telling me iTs a RiSkY VeNTuRe; i get it. But if you say everything is rock solid (like funding, my future employment, etc.) and it is not, then fuck you; you’re just lying to my face, it has nothing to with management vs employee, engineer vs. non-technical - you’re literally just a *bad person* (sorry, mechanical engineering genes and honesty to the core - sue me) To be sure, I was partially at fault - too optimistic, and too gullible, and I’ve have since learned my lesson. but still working on it. (obviously)

but things are look up - my company is running better than ever, the current job is great with insanely smart people

In the end, it’s always the hardcore engineers who are the most honest, hardworking, respectful, and the best to work with - you people know who you are…

Until then… see you in the next rant!!!! 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬

Dutifully signed,

🤡

Inspired by @Billgates

everyone around is hyped about new tech they get to use, new toys to tinker with, I can see their eyes shining when they hear "let's try and introduce kafka" - they would wiggle their tails all day long if they had ones!

And me? Well, a new potential employer got me so excited I couldn't wash a smile off my face for a few days! You know what they said? "we don't use any frameworks, we focus on clean code, solid, kiss and we write with tdd". Bare java - that's the best position I've heard of in years!

I guess I'm oldschool. But I truly believe their approach is the right one. Not trashing the code with spring [which is turning into smth what systemd is for linux/unix], hibernate and what not.

Just good old java code. Db, multithreading, request-mapping -- all plain, manual and simple.

Amazing!

The stupidest technical question I have ever been asked is actually more of a design question, but I think it'll appeal to DevRant people.

I had thrown together a logo for a new system that my team was making. The logo was basically a flat, solid circle of our corporate shade of blue, with the name of the product overlaid in Helvetica Light. It looked okay. Ish. Good enough, anyway.

Our junior-most senior manager came to have a look. She was the sort of person who always had to give feedback, on EVERYTHING. Everyone had given this little logo the nod, but she had to stare at it for ages, and then eventually asked:

"I like the text, but can you rotate the circle a few degrees?"

.
.
.

After an awkward pause I'm pleased to report that she realised her own mistake and we laughed it off, so I was not forced to stand up, point at her, and yell "DURRRRRRRRRR".

I coded the app so good
I optimized the UX SO GOOD
I made the UI look GOOD
I made the error handling and input validation ROCK HARD SOLID BULLETPROOF

NO FUCKING WAY COULD YOU FUCK THIS UP

NO WAY COULD YOU BE DUMB ENOUGH NOT TO KNOW HOW TO USE IT AND NOT FUCK IT UP

I GAVE IT TO MY DAD AS A NORMAL USER TO TEST THE APP AND HE FUCKED IT UP ON THE FIRST TRY

HE DIDNT UNDERSTAND THE UX.

.

As a pretty solid Angular dev getting thrown a react project over the fence by his PM I can say:

FUCK REACT!

It is nigh impossible to write well structured, readable, well modularized code with it and not twist your mind in recursion from "lift state up" and "rendercycle downwards only"

Try writing a modular modal as a modern function component with interchangeable children (passeable to the component as it should be) that uses portals and returns the result of the passed children components.

Closest I found to it is:
c o d e s a n d b o x.io/s/7w6mq72l2q
(and its a fucking nightmare logic wise and readability wise)

And also I still wouldn't know right of the bat how to get the result from the passed child components with all the oneway binding CLUSTERFUCK.

And even if you manage to there is no chance to do it async as it should be.
You HAVE to write a lot of "HTML" tags in the DOM that practically should not be anywhere but in async functions.

In Angular this is a breeze and works like a charm.
Its not even much gray matter to it...

I can´t comprehend how companies decide to write real big web apps with it.

They must be a MESS to maintain.

For a small "four components that show a counter and fetch user images" - OK.
But fo a big webapp with a big team etc. etc.?

Asking stuff about it on Stackoverflow I got edited unsolicited as fuck and downvoted as fuck in an instant.
Nobody explained anything or even cared to look at my Stackblitz.
Unsolicited edit, downvote, closevote and of they go - no help provided whatsoever.
Its completely fine if you don't have time to help strangers - but then at least do not stomp on beginners like that.
I immediately regretted asking a toxic community like this something that I genuinely seem to not understand. Wasn't SO about helping people?
I deleted my post there and won't be coming back and doing something productive there anytime soon.

Out of respect for my clients budget I'm now doing it the ugly react way and forget about my software architecture standards but as soon as I can I will advise switching to Angular.

If you made it here: WOW
Thank you for giving me a vent to let off some steam :)

Just because YOU can't seem to get a grasp on the language doesn't mean the language inherently sucks and that literally the entire rest of the world is crazy for using it. It won because it's Good Enough(tm) and that's all it ever needed to be (and many of the things you see as flaws are actually big parts of what makes it exactly that).

Like, I'm not gonna go out of my way to defend a damn programming language 'cause that just feels stupid... but your constant bitching about it is tiring as hell, ESPECIALLY when the complaints you constantly state clearly indicate that you just don't have a solid grasp of it.

So, the answer isn't for everyone else to "wake up to how shitty it is", it's for YOU to either expend the calories to understand it, or simply shut the fuck up with your constant whining about it. I'm good either way, but pick one already!

So I'm starting a job at a large company in the early part of next year... it's a total mindfuck because the salary is a m a s s i v e bump up and for the first time I'm experiencing imposter syndrome. I never really fully grasped the feeling that a lot of people here described until after that final interview and an offer was extended. I'm stoked AF to start and it's going to be a huge learning experience while working there.

The company wants me and my family to relocate to another state (US) and it's got my stomach doing somersalts.

It's especially painful because the current place I'm working is amazing; the people are great, the work is solid but fairly low pressure, and there's lateral freedom to work on improving the systems and infrastructure whenever there is free time. And I know that the new gig is going to have certain expectations that need to be met or my head could be on the chopping block.

High risk, high reward I guess 😅

My anxiety is raw dogging my brain and it fucking sucks, but my wife has been doing a great job keeping me level headed and thinking logically about the future and growth this opportunity brings with it.

I'm not trying to gloat or brag, just really needed a place to share some of this since I'm freaking out and don't feel like I have enough experience/skills to take on this job. Those interviews left me worn out. 4 rounds and the final interview was 5 hours long all in one day. 😫

I love my adhd kicks. My webstorm trial ended, I downloaded vscode, hated the bindings, I then used thr intellij extension. Everything ok expect autocomplete, not a fan of tab, couldn't use enter to enter enter as a binding. Hacked that binding.json, idk how i ended up installing a json sorter extension, ow theres a imports sorter. Okay what exactly i wanted to do? Right, do my niche site. Bad idea, i had written it in kotlin js, (missing intellij already) so i searched for almost non-scripting framework. Idk what happened...i ended up being interested in tailwind. Tried it a bit, ow they have tailwind ui. Thinking about buying the sweet shit. Ow i see headless UI... Pause, threw tailwind out. Thinking about react, met Solid, loved it, yarned and npmed it. Extension time, auto tag rename, more emmet like shit, rainbow and fira fonts, theme, scheme, ow colors whaaaw. Okay, its not gonna look like or feel like intellij, more like IDEA community if i had made the ide. What was i making again? Ah my webcrapp. still (idea)less... I went to codepen, grew a beard, came out, still feeling powerfully uncreative. Last stop: awwwards.. ow that awesome 7up nl site, imma see it, they nuked the animations, everything. This is where the rant actually ends, because THANK GOD I DONT FULLSTACK FOR A LIVING!!! Swift, Kotlin, XML and unpredictable Gradle is good enough for me to stop me from going wild. Stay safe. Genetic.🙋‍♂️

http requests

literally the bread and butter of any software engineer building applications, you would ASSUME they know what they are doing...

and you're gonna write a seperate http get and post function for every type you have?

apparently stuff like this that is written by "senior" developers? you don't even have a basic understanding of software...

i'm won't do it that way, becuase i'm an adult, not a child

what i'm going to do is write a HTTP request util function that can be used for any type and HTTP verb. DRY, single responsibility, etc.

imagine making the http request itself a responsibility coupled to the type 😂😂😂😂

get a clue and come back later

i can't tell anymore if my thoughts are so outlandish compared to everyone else that no one understands them, or if i've been doing this so long that i just immediately understand what needs to be done and don't know how to explain it to anyone else anymore (or take the mental effort to)

peace out

oh P.S.: imagine thinking the SOLID principles are only applicable to OOP

stay safe out there folks, its getting more painful every day

How do you deal with massively poorly-performing and unknowledgeable teams?

For background, I've been in my current position for ~7 months now.

A new manager joined recently and he's just floored at the reality of the team.

I mean, a large portion of my interview (and his) was the existing manager explicitly warning about how much of a dumpster fire everything is.

But still, nothing prepares you for it.

We're talking things like:
- Sequential integer user ids that are passable as query string args to anonymous endpoints, thus enabling you to view the data read by that view *for any* user.
- God-like lookup tables that all manner of pieces of data are shoved into as a catch-all
- A continued focus on unnecessary stored procedures despite us being a Linq shop
- Complete lack of awareness of SOLID principles
- Actual FUD around the simplest of things like interfaces, inversion of control, dependency injection (and the list goes on).

I've been elevated into this sort of quasi-senior position (in all but title - and salary), and I find myself having to navigate a daily struggle of trying to not have an absolute shit fit every time I have to dive into the depths of some of the code.

Compounded onto that is the knowledge that most of the team are on comparable salaries (within a couple thousand) of mine, purely owing to length of service.

We're talking salaries for mid-senior level devs, for people that at market rates would command no more (if even close) than a junior rate.

The problem is that I'm aware of how bad things are, but then somehow I'm constantly surprised and confronted with ever more insane levels of shitfuckery, and... I'm getting tired.

It's been 7 months, I love the job, I'm working in the charity sector and I love the fact that the things I'm working on are directly improving people's lives, rather than lining some fintech fatcat's pockets.

I guess this was more a rant than a question, and also long time no see...

So my question is this:

- How do you deal with this?
- How do you go on without just dying inside every single day?

(first post/rant on here)
So I recently started at a new company. I was kinda aware that the project I'm working on would be rather old school (to put it in a nice way :-)).

Part of my job is to 'industrialize' and update/clean up the existing code so there is less time spent on fixing bugs due to bad design.

One of the first things I had to do was to write a new interface to integrate with external software.

I already noticed some rather nasty habits, like prefixing every variable with m (don't know why), private fields for every property (all simple properties) and a whole lot of other stuff that either is obsolete or just bad practice.

Started writing clean code (simple classes with properties only, no m prefixing, making sure everything is single responsibility, unit tests, ...).

So I check in the code, don't hear much from it again besides the original dev/architect that started the project using my code to further work on that integration.

Now recently I started converting everything from TFVC to Git (which is the company standard but wasn't used by our team yet). And I quickly skimmed through my code to check if everything was there before pushing it to the remote repo.

To my surprise, all the code I had written was replaced by m prefixed private variables used in simple properties. BL classes were thrown in together, creating giant monstrosities that did everything. And last but not least, all unit tests were commented out.

Not sure what I got myself into ... but the facepalming has commenced.

I feel fucked, I feel fucked right up in the ass.

Remember that app I had to do to get the job? I found out the other candidates weren't even able to install Android Studio and that their deadline was postponed. And that they weren't able to complete the app.

I did everything with a really good design, solid programming, even added animations and made it so the recyclerview loads 15 items at a time while you scroll down smoothly. I. DID. EVERYTHING IN ONE DAY. I missed a good night of sleep.

I didn't get the job. They gave it to a fucker that was a web developer. I saw his app. It was really crappy (I'm not being petty or malicious, it was really bad from a dev point of view and a user point of view).

I feel. Disappointed. in this unfair world. And honestly I feel disappointed to the point that I don't even know if I should be a developer anymore. I feel betrayed by the hopes and the good feeling I got from the oportunity.

The worst question was asked by me once. At least I guess it must have been the worst question for an applicant. She applied for a job as Ruby dev and gave her knowledge of the language a solid 5 Star rating. Something I wouldn't give myself unless my name is Mats. So I prepared some really nice questions about metaprogramming and the object model and stuff. As a warm-up I decided to go easy on her and asked her something simple: "how do you define getters and setters in Ruby?" Which is like one of the first things you learn but not too simple. She got a really red face and told me she didn't know. In the end I had to learn that she never even really programmed Ruby but only wrote some method calls in a file she named .rb and she didn't even know what an object was m(

I’m so sick and tired of the cattle-minded people in the software world. I love coding and improving myself; I've got over 18 years of experience. I enjoy what I do, and I like being good at it. I know my way around a variety of different technologies, and I could easily outperform most engineers with similar experience. If I don’t know something, I get excited to learn and I ask questions. I don’t enjoy standing in the spotlight about what I know; I prefer supporting, helping, solving problems, improving solutions, and simplifying everything.

From my experience, the best solution is the simplest, shortest, fastest, and leanest one. But unfortunately, there are people in the workplace who think the opposite of me and blindly follow this so-called prophet named Uncle Bob, zealously writing all his SOLID principles and dogmatic code, turning their work environments into a toxic mess. I’m so done with it. You have no idea how harmful a person can be when they cling to the teachings of a guy like Uncle Bob—someone who probably hasn't even written the "s" in software himself and is just trying to sell his book. In almost every job or team I join, there’s one of these people who drags junior developers into writing dogmatic code by chanting about SOLID principles, Uncle Bob, and object-oriented programming.

Software engineering isn’t something you can learn from a book written by people like Uncle Bob, who haven’t coded a decent product in a real development process. Experience is something entirely different, and from my experience, everything taken to extremes turns out badly. Wherever I see an Uncle Bob disciple, the work inevitably slides into the extremes. For someone writing in C and C++, it’s disheartening to hear about object-oriented programming, SOLID principles, and agile nonsense. I’m tired of seeing people cluttering their code with interfaces for every little thing, over-engineering patterns, and stuffing every piece of code with interfaces to make it “testable.” They run around claiming they’re writing SOLID code, doing TDD, following “best practices,” yet they can't solve any real problems or algorithms. They take a week-long task and drag it out to six, making simple things complex and distancing themselves from real solutions. I’m sick of these types.

If you’re a junior developer, please ignore the fools trying to lead you down this path, and don’t become dogmatic about what you learn, especially if you’re writing C++.

I’ve never seen any real engineer who takes this SOLID, object-oriented nonsense seriously. Believe me, once you reach a certain threshold, you won’t hear these words anymore. Software isn’t just about that. Object-oriented programming, especially if you’re not writing Java or C#, and especially if you’re working in C++ (thankfully, C doesn’t even have it), is something you should definitely steer clear of. Robert C. Martin, aka Uncle Bob—if only you had written your book with a focus on Java or C#. These dogmatic code writers with 7-8 years of experience crying at the sight of free functions in C++ really give me a headache. Because of you, these people exist, and I don’t have the energy to deal with this nonsense at my age.

Everyone's saying "oh my, I'm so ashamed of my code I wrote 4 days ago, it's so horrible"

Well... At least you can relate to someone. When I look at my project's code I wrote half a year ago (or sometime before that) I'm genuinely surprised to see I'm not browsing some library's codebase - the abstraction layers, the generics, the structure... it's brilliant! It's as SOLID as it gets.

Hired by large prestigious company to do web development. Understanding at the outset, I was not a web developer, just wanted my foot in the door with the company. 2 days after orientation, I am placed on a $20 million contract expansion with 3 other developers. All new to this contract. So: new language, new technologies, new team, no leadership, no mentorship. 2 months later after a month of asking for help, I'm asked why I'm not delivering solid code by the project exec and moved to the testing team. Testing team lead introduces me to people on the contract and answers questions or tells me vaguely where to loom. Spend last 4 months building a professional fuck you by making myself a yes man to everyone and their mother. Left the contract and have been getting regular hours with them since (including developing for them). New contract loves me and despite the project execs attempt to torpedo me, I have an excellent reputation and am positioned for career advancement already.

I couldn't give him the finger, but I made him regret lettimg me go. Original team lead has since been released for unrelated HR complaint.

So recently I installed Windows 7 on my thiccpad to get Hyperdimension Neptunia to run (yes 50GB wasted just to run a game)... And boy did I love the experience.

ThinkPads are business hardware, remember that. And it's been booting Debian rock solid since.. pretty much forever. There are no hardware issues here. Just saying.

With that out of the way I flashed Windows 7 Ultimate on a USB stick and attempted to boot it... Oh yay, first hurdle to overcome. It can't boot in UEFI mode. Move on Debian, you too shall boot in BIOS mode now! But okay, whatever right. So I set it to BIOS mode and shuffled Debian's partitions around a bit to be left with 3 partitions where Windows could stick in one more.

Installed, it asks for activation. Now my ThinkPad comes with a Windows 7 Pro license key, so fuck it let's just use that and Windows will be able to disable the features that are only available for Ultimate users, right? How convenient would that be, to have one ISO for all the half a dozen editions that each Windows release has? And have the system just disable (or since we're in the installer anyway, not install them in the first place) features depending on what key you used? Haha no, this is Microsoft! Developers developers developers DEVELOPERS!!! Oh and Zune, if anyone remembers that clusterfuck. Crackhead Microsoft.

But okay whatever, no activation then and I'll just fetch Windows Loader from my webserver afterwards to keygen my way through. Too bad you didn't accept that key Microsoft! Wouldn't that have been nice.

So finally booted into the installed system now, and behold finally we find something nice! Apparently Windows 7 Enterprise and Ultimate offer a native NFS driver. That's awesome! That way I don't have to adjust my file server at all. Just some fuckery with registry keys to get the UID and GID correct, but I'll forgive it for that. It's not exactly "native" to Windows after all. The fact that it even has a built-in driver for it is something I found pretty neat already.

Fast-forward a few hours and it's time to Re Boot.. drivers from Lenovo that required reboots and whatnot. Fire the system back up, and low and behold the network drive doesn't mount anymore. I've read that this is apparently due to Windows (not always but often) mounting the network drive before the network comes up. Absolutely brilliant! Move out shitstaind, have you seen this beauty of an init Mr. Poet?

But fuck it we can mount that manually after every single boot.. you know, convenient like that. C O P E.

With it now manually mounted, let's watch a movie! I've recently seen Pyro's review on The Platform and I absolutely loved it. The movie itself is quite good too. Open the directory on my file server and.. oh. Windows.. you just put db.thumb on it and db.thumb:encryptable. I shit you not, with the colon and everything. I thought that file names couldn't contain colons Windows! I thought that was illegal in NTFS. Why you doing this in NFS mate? And "encryptable", am I already infected with ransomware??? If it wasn't for the fact that that could also be disabled with something as easy as a registry key, I would've thought I contracted ransomware!

Oh and sound to go with that video, let's pair up some Bluetooth headphones with that Bluetooth driver I installed earlier! Except.. haha nope. Apparently you don't get that either.

Right so let's just navigate the system in its Aero glory... Gonna need to flick the mouse for that. Except it's excruciatingly slow, even the fastest speed is slower than what I'm used to on Linux.. and it's jerky as hell (Linux doesn't have any of that at higher speed). But hey it can compensate for that! Except that slows down the mouse even more. And occasionally the mouse driver gets fucked up too. Wanna scroll on Telegram messages in a chat where you're admin? Well fuck you mate, let me select all these messages for you and auto scroll at supersonic speeds! And God forbid that you press delete with that admin access of yours. Oh maybe I'll do it for you, helpful OS I am!

And the most saddening part of it all? I'd argue that Windows 7 is the best operating system that Microsoft ever released. Yeah. That's the best they could come up with. But at least it plays le games!

I need to rant about life decisions, and choosing a dev career probably too early. Not extremely development related, but it's the life of a developer.

TL;DR: I tried a new thing and that thing is now my thing. The new thing is way more work than my old thing but way more rewarding & exciting. Try new things.

I taught myself to program when I was a kid (11 or 12 years old), and since then I have always been absolutely sure that I wanted to be a games programmer. I took classes in high school and college with that aim, and chose a games programming degree. Everything was so simple, nail the degree, get a job programming something, and take the first games job that I could and go from there.

I have always had random side hobbies that I liked to teach myself, just like programming. And in uni I decided that I wanted to learn another language (natural, not programming) because growing up in England meant that I only learned English and was rarely exposed to anything else. The idea of knowing another fascinated me.

So I dabbled in a few different languages, tried to find a culture that seemed to fit my style and attitude to life and others, and eventually found myself learning Korean. That quickly became something I was doing every single day, and I decided I needed to go to Korea and see what life there could be like.

I found out that my university offered a free summer school program for a couple of weeks, all I had to pay for was the flights. So a few months later I was there and it was literally the best thing I'd done in my life to that point. I'd found two things that made me feel even better than the idea of becoming the games programmer I'd always wanted to be. Travelling and using my other language to communicate with people that I couldn't in English. At that point I was still just a beginner, but even the simple conversations with people who couldn't speak English felt awesome.

So when I returned home, I found that that trip had completely thrown a spanner into my life plan. All I could think about after that was improving my language skills and going back there for as long as possible. Who knows what to do.

I did exactly that. I studied harder than I'd ever studied for anything and left the next year to go and study in Korea, now with intermediate language skills, everyday conversations no longer being a problem at all.

Now I live here, I will be here for the next year and I have to return to England for one year to finish my degree. Then instead of having my simple plan of becoming a developer, I can think of nothing I want to do less than just stay in England doing the same job every day, nothing to do with language. I need to be at least travelling to Korea, and using my language skills in at least some way.

The current WIP plan is to take intensive language classes here (from next week, every single weekday), build awesome dev side projects and contribute to open source stuff. Then try to build a life of freelance translation/interpreting/language teaching and software development (maybe here, maybe Korea).

So the point of this rant is that before, I had a solid plan. Now I am sat in my bed in Korea writing this, thinking about how I have almost no idea how I'm going to build the life that I want. And yet somehow, the uncertainty makes this so much more exciting and fulfilling. There's a lot more worrying, planning and deciding to do. But I think the fact that I completely changed my life goals just through a small decision one day to satisfy a curiosity is a huge life lesson for me. And maybe reading this will help other people decide to just try doing something different for once, and see if your life plan holds up.

If it does, never stop trying new things. If it doesn't (like mine), then you now know that you've found something that you love as much as or even more that your plan before. Something that you might have lived your whole life never finding.

I don't expect many people to read this all, but writing it here has been very cathartic for me, and it's still a rant because now I have so much more work and planning to do. But it's the good kind of work.

Things aren't so simple now, but they're way more worth it.

Started new job almost two moths ago..

For almost 3 years I was developing custom themes, plugins, and widget for WordPress using PHP, jQuery/AJAX, and MySQL.

The new company that hired me brought me on as a backend developer to help rebuild their custom PHP Framework, and other web based software/products as their moving toward Google Cloud Platform.

When I started, MVC and OOP was new to me... took a couple weeks to get the hang of things, and understand their system.

Just when I was getting comfortable, I had a task assigned to me that was all NodeJS...

Had a 30 check-in the week I started the Node task, and was feeling pretty beat down because it was all new to me and I wasn’t making a lot of progress, and still not comfortable with Promises yet, and some other ES6 features but finding my way around slowly but surely.

Manager reassured me that I wasn’t going to be fired and it wasn’t unique to myself. Very encouraging to hear, but I’m my own worst critic so it’s frustrating not being able to make progress like I would with PHP projects.

Fast forward to this week, I started to review another task for a feed and found it’s all Ruby! Another language I have no familiarity with... and started to question if I’ll every get the hang of all these languages and be a solid team member...

Not only do I have to get a grasp on NodeJS and Ruby now, but then I’ll also have to get familiar with GCP and whatever else comes along with it...

Oh and I’m using Linux now instead of Windows/ OSX... so there’s that too.. plus the other command line tools the company built, and uses..

I was comfortable developing in PHP and know I needed to take a step and accept this job to move my career forward but it seems like I’m always behind the 8 ball...

Some days I wonder if it was worth staying a Wordpress developer and just focused on learning ReactJS and stay more Front-end than Backend..

I enjoy working with talented people but I don’t like being the low man on the totem pole knowing I don’t have the experience yet.

Does it feel like this for all devs?!?!

Fuck I wish I knew what to do about low motivation!!! I have some ideas I think are really great, some that might be profitable, and fuck I just don’t do any of them. I spend more time panicking about what to do than anything else. But damn so much time wasted when I just needed a little guidance or a little planning or a little like less than $100 more money. That frustrates me to no end.

There’s so much bullshit to everything. This does follow up to my wk106 rant, where I’m trying to rationalize the tons of code that are behind the smallest features. How many thousands of builds go into a deploy. Just swallowing how much rite in software.

I feel like a failure at my job at times but what sucks is I’m just in the middle. Not the most experienced dev, not the least. I’ve got my feet wet in a number of things, but not a solid enough stack for a lot.

BUT SOMEHOW I GOTTA BE MOTIVATED TO LEARN. FFS I CAN DO BETTER BUT MY INSIDE IS BROKEN SOMETIMES AND I JUST WANK OFF FUCK GET IT TOGETHER.

Yea, I fight with myself a lot. I have a big ego and I’m a piece of shit at the same time. Idk. That is annoying too. If only I could get really motivated and focused on some of these projects I could do amazing things. I’ve never struggled with a subject I applied myself to. I just wasn’t motivated. I don’t know how to fix it and I wish I did. I also don’t know what the end game for me holds.

This whole complex really scares me for later life. I will have regrets because my mind builds impossible plans for good, but if I achieve any of it I WILL THINK damn I should have not dealt with this and done x. Like I could make world peace but be like damn coulda rebuilt cars or some stupid shit.

So I’ll conclude with that I’ve done a lot of jobs around the house, and yes working with drywall sucks. So sometimes I’ll think about that. But damn. That doesn’t last because I know I can do it well if I apply myself.

All this leads to getting overextended which is another huge motivation killer. I’m trying to learn self control and focus. But also I need small victories along the way. Very annoying.

Well at least I was motivated to finish this rant. I have a few weekly rants I wanted to participate in but couldn’t even find the motivation for that. There was a toxic person in my life then and I’m slowly getting back to normal but I know that even normal me struggles with motivation. Plus that toxic person was my friend and I’ve lost a lot of (long term) friends recently and that is a real drag. But they needed to go. But I wish they had just shut up sometimes then they wouldn’t have been so toxic. But I digress.

I know I have so many ideas I can’t do them all even if I am motivated and for some time is of the essence.

So look out for some collabs. And grab that motivation wherever you can find it.

I've been inspired by cpg grey (I think that's the name), mainly his 10 tips on how to be miserable, to write a blog or some kind of post explaining the 8 things you need to do if you hate your coworkers and want your codebase to go to shit.

So it'll be like a anti-SOLID, anti-pattern type of blog promoting every code smell imaginable

I feel like 8 tips to fuck up your codebase (php perhaps) might he more memorable than actual helpful advise. I'm sure that this has been done before, but I was wondering:

Do you think this would be effective? Would it help people understand why not to do the 8 tips? Does this reverse psychology work?

The state of digital comic book metadata is a mess. There is not really a standard format if the metadata even exists at all. All digital comic books consist of is a zip or rar with ordered images and potentially some type of file to store metadata. The closest thing to a standard is the Comic Rack format of metadata and even that is not very widespread. There exists a project called comictagger(on github) that attempts to assign metadata in Comic Rack format but it is somewhat unpolished yet provides a solid feature set.

I am planning on making a program to organize comics based on metadata attributes and am frustrated with the lack of consistency in this department. This isn't really a problem because of any developers but I would argue more so due to the organization of comic books themselves. For example, the term volume can have a different meaning based on who is asked or what context is used. The redundancy between issues and trade paperbacks can also lead to confusion and logistical problems. I just wish we already had a widespread schema in place for comic books metadata already.

Just had a customer into my shop. A regular chap but we've never really spoken before. Turns out he's a system architect for British Aerospace Engineering, a huge company up here in the north of England. So we were chatting about what I study and what he does and I said, if I come out with a first or solid/high 2:1 in my software engineering degree, would that qualify me for an entry level at your place, and he said no. Hrs part of the interviewing panel, and he wouldn't even consider people my age (23 at time of qualification) without at least having another job in the field, and said most places would be the same. So let's say I decided to not go in for anything Web development and focused on C++, is there any sort of way you guys know of gaining experience in the field without first having another job? As mentioned I do freelance Web development, but do you think having a large Github portfolio and such would help me stand a chance? I know I'll need to take a lower tier job straight out of uni in the field, but as something to help speed the process along...

Here comes lots of random pieces of advice...

Ain't no shortcuts.

Be prepared, becoming a good programmer (there are lots of shitty programmers, not so many good ones) takes lots of pain, frustration, and failure. It's going to suck for awhile. There will be false starts. At some point you will question whether you are cut out for it or not. Embrace the struggle -- if you aren't failing, you aren't learning.

Remember that in 2021 being a programmer is just as much (maybe even moreso) about picking up new things on the fly as it is about your crystalized knowledge. I don't want someone who has all the core features of some language memorized, I want someone who can learn new things quickly. Everything is open book all the time. I have to look up pretty basic stuff all the time, it's just that it takes me like twelve seconds to look it up and digest it.

Build, build, build, build, build. At least while you are learning, you should always be working on a project. Don't worry about how big the project is, small is fine.

Remember that programming is a tool, not the end goal in and of itself. Nobody gives a shit how good a carpenter is at using some specialized saw, they care about what the carpenter can build with that specialized saw.

Plan your build. This is a VERY important part of the process that newer devs/programmers like to skip. You are always free to change the plan, but you should have a plan going on. Don't store your plan in your head. If you plan exists only in your head you are doing it wrong. Write that shit down! If you create a solid development process, the cognitive overhead for any project goes way down.

Don't fall into the trap of comparing yourself to others, especially to the experts you are learning from. They are good because they have done the thing that you are struggling with at least a thousand times.

Don't fall into the trap of comparing yourself today to yourself yesterday. This will make it seem like you haven't learned anything and aren't on the move. Compare yourself to yourself last week, last month, last year.

Have experienced programmers review your code. Don't be afraid to ask, most of us really really enjoy this (if it makes you feel any better about the "inconvenience", it will take a mid-level waaaaay less time to review your code that it took for you to write it, and a senior dev even less time than that). You will hate it, it will suck having someone seem like they are just ripping your code apart, but it will make you so much better so much faster than just relying on your own internal knowledge.

When you start to be able to put the pieces together, stay humble. I've seen countless devs with a year of experience start to get a big head and talk like they know shit. Don't keep your mouth closed, but as a newer dev if you are talking noise instead of asking questions there is no way I will think you are ready to have the Jr./Associate/Whatever removed from your title.

Don't ever. Ever. Ever. Criticize someone else's preferred tools. Tooling is so far down the list of what makes a good programmer. This is another thing newer devs have a tendency to do, thinking that their tool chain is the only way to do it. Definitely recommend to people alternatives to check out. A senior dev using Notepad++, a terminal window, and a compiler from 1977 is probably better than you are with the newest shiniest IDE.

Don't be a dick about terminology/vocabulary. Different words mean different things to different people in different organizations. If what you call GNU/Linux somebody else just calls Linux, let it go man! You understand what they mean, and if you don't it's your job to figure out what they mean, not tell them the right way to say it.

One analogy I like to make is that becoming a programmer is a lot like becoming a chef. You don't become a chef by following recipes (i.e. just following tutorials and walk-throughs). You become a chef by learning about different ingredients, learning about different cooking techniques, learning about different styles of cuisine, and (this is the important part), learning how to put together ingredients, techniques, and cuisines in ways that no one has ever showed you about before.

Writing a feature critical for production in 2 hours of solid focus during the morning.

6 hours later it's still not in the build because:
* tech lead wants the code to move to a partial class instead of an extension method, delaying the UX review. No guidelines for this ever existed.

* after seeing the result, the UX team wants some element to be dynamic. A line. A friggin horizontal line.

* after adding the dynamic shiny frigggggin line, I try to test the feature with the server. It is still not deployed because the server guy went home. "The PR was not merged so I assumed we'll add it tomorrow".

Another day at the meat grinder.

C# has become shit.

I work since 2013 with C# (and the whole .NET stack) and I was so happy with it.
Compared to Java it was much lean, compared to all shitty new edge framework that looked like a unfinished midschool project, it was solid and mature.

It had his problems,. but compared to everything else that I tried, it was the quickes and most robust solution.

All went in a downhill leading to a rotten shit lake when all this javascript frenzy began to pop up and everyone wanted to get on the trendy bandwagon.

First they introduced MVC, then .NET Core, now .NET 5-6-7-8.

Now I'm literally engulfed with all these tiny bits of terror javascript provoked and they've implemented in all the parts of their framework.

Everything has to be null checked at compilation time, everything pops up errors "this might be nulll heyyyyy it's important put a ! or a ? you silly!!!" everywhere.

There are JS-ish constructs and syntax shit everywhere.

It's unbearable.
I avoid js like a plague whenever I can (and you know it's not a luxury you get often in the current state of a developer life) and they're slowly turning in some shit js hybrid deformed creature

I miss 2013-2018, when it wass all up to me to decide what to do with code and I did some big projects for big companies (200-300k lines of code without unit tests and yes for me it's a lot) without all this hassle.

I literally feel the need c# had to have some compiler rule you can quickly switch called "Senior developer mode" that doesn't trigger alarms and bells for every little stupid thing.

I'm sure you can' turn on/off these craps by some hidden settings somewhere, but heck I feel the need to be an option, so whoever keeps it on should see a big red label on top of the IDE saying "YOU HAVE RETARDED DEV MODE ON"

So they get a reminder that if they use it they are either some fresh junior dev or they are mentally challenged.

Hey. Can I borrow your ears for 5 minutes?

Since I've been out of school, I've often felt that even though I've learned how to code, the education went into a totally direction than the one I want to go. Of course a school can't teach you everything perfectly, but having almost no experience in frontend (mind you we learned the BAREST basics) just makes me feel entirely empty in that regard stepping up to a company. I've been pretty loaded during school, since I was struggling with a lot of things so I couldn't really find myself pursueing the direction of coding frontend apps being fun. I needed the little time I had to blow off steam playing games etc.

So the few things I know are all self taught, but I was never given a hand been shown best practices or solid advice where to look. Sitting down now at my pc trying to learn ReactJS for example feels incredibly draining and difficult, since we've never done JS in school ONCE. All the C# experience barely helps, since with ES6 being rolled out parallel to "normal" JS it's even harder to me to connect the lego blocks that is frontend development. Since many best practices are applied to ES6, I can barely even tell what previous practice they are replacing, making the entire picture even more spongy. In one sentence it's very overwhelming.

I've thought I'd apply maybe as a UX/UI Designer since I've got a great visual sense (confirmed countlessly by many, friends and strangers alike) maybe contributing to the frontend part that way. But as I was applying I've noticed that chances are seemingly pretty low to get accepted since it seems you've got zero reputition if you don't have a degree in Design.

It breaks me apart. I could probably apply as a frontend developer, but I am not sure if I would be happy doing that on the long run. Since just fucking around in Photoshop creating things seems like no effort and brings me joy, as compared to coding out lines for example.

I wanted to make money after school, improve on myself and my quality of life since I've drained that entirely for the sake of my education. Not spiral into another couple years just to eventually maybe get in the direction I want to.

On the flipside going into frontend dev with 0 skills, 0 experience, but being expected to have 2 years of hands on experience with the newest frameworks makes me feel empty and worthless.

I often hand out advice to other people on devRant, but this is the one time where I need some. Desperately. I feel shattered inside, getting out of bed in the morning has no incentive to me since I'll just feel like shit all day, watching YouTube to cheer me up temporarily, only to feel immense remorse not spending the day learning or improving on myself. Barely anything brings me joy. I don't wanna call myself depressive, but maybe I am just dodging the term and I am exactly that.

Thanks If you've read through this monstrosity of a rant/story. I'd be glad if you'd be so kind to give me a different take on my situation or a new perspective.

I am stepping on the spot and I am slowly dying inside because of it.

It dreads me to say it, but I need help.

I haven't felt an urge to post on here in a while just because things have been going so well. But this month, is just not that kind of month anymore.

I'm upset. I'm upset by how I've been uprooted from my routine. I know I shouldn't be that bothered by it and things always change. But what the fuck is this company thinking to be using it's own fucking home baked ticketing system!

WHAT THE EVER LIVING FUCK IS THIS SHIT!

Let's go over the issues it has
1. I can't fucking email my clients through it
2. all emails are not recognized automatically. In other words each new email creates a new ticket if it does not have the tracking number attached to it.
3. I have to fucking hunt around in my inbox that is now bombarded by every email that is created for this ticketing system. Slap on a fucking tracking number. And then HOPE TO FUCKING GOD that the person on the other end doesn't erase the subject and cause the system to create a new ticket just for it.

Let's go over Zendesk which they've decided to decomission.
1. I. DON'T. HAVE. TO. DO. ANY. OF. THAT. FUCKING. SHIT.
2. That's it. It's fucking simple

Seriously. They forced me off of my original platform because this company already had a "ticketing system", if you can even fucking call it that, working.

And just if you weren't aware, all of this change happened because my company got bought out. It got bought out by this behemoth company that isn't willing to let me continue using a system; that has been very efficient, mind you, and instead make me use their system.

I. FUCKING. HATE. THIS.

Every fucking day! I have to do this stupid bullshit of emailing clients from my personal work email instead of on the direct ticketing system.

When I first started using this thing I actually thought I could use it to email the clients. For a solid two weeks I was "communicating" to clients through their ticketing system. Only to find out that the entire time those clients were not getting my actual fucking email! WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?

Then these guys tell me after the fact. "Oh that's strange... We never noticed that you can't send emails through it... We always just had used our work emails."

Are you fucking jerking my chain! You guys have literally been sitting in this slimy pit of hell for so long that you don't even know there are better options out there!

You don't have to fucking live this life!!

I don't think I'm going to make it. Something needs to change. And I know upper management isn't going to do it, because I fought hard to try and keep Zendesk. They are not keeping it. After this next quarter it is officially gone.

I'm trying to think of coding solutions to make my situation better... But I shouldn't have to fucking do that! There are perfectly good working solutions out there, and this company doesn't want to budge because "that's the way we've always been doing it"

I'm going to fucking rip out my hair.

I don't like when

you have a couple of years of experience with some language and you're like "I should read a good book about it, and have some proper solid foundation instead of playing by ear".

So you get a book and what follows is a very jarring experience.

Because for the first 8 chapters they get into the basics of the language.

You're occasionally like "interesting, I did not know that".

But for the most part you're like "yes, for fucking christ I know that, everybody knows that",

or you complain about the author being redundant,

or about the outdatedness of the book, since most documentation is now in the interwebs

or you reach flawed conclusions out of frustration like "this isn't making me any money, I could get on upwork, or do some bounties instead of wasting time on this"

then you start to skim through the pages like "I know this, and this, and this" until you realize you're in some page you have no fucking idea what it's talking about, as if you ended up on the wrong side of town

so you start backtracking (frustration is going critical at this point)

but backtracking is annoying because it's not well defined where you stopped getting it, as if in page 33 you were getting it 100%, but 0% on page 34, it's more like a gradual, irregular decrease,

so you have no idea where to start re reading from.

you just shove that shit into the wall at that point.

Some of these are learning discipline problems.

I guess there are ways to mitigate them, such as writing down questions of things not understood, co reading, etc.

But the one thing I don't think I can't get past is when authors write like shit,

like being redundant, using different words to say the same shit

or using confusing sentences that can mean different things at the same time,

or using the incorrect terminology, eg: if I were teaching OOP, saying shit like "classes create objects" but later on saying something like "classes create instances".
They usually nail the definitions the first time, but then use different terms for the same thing. It's shit.

And I think that's a writing culture that I hate.
From school you are taught to bot repeat words.

To say the same shit in different ways.

To be descritive, but vague.

That's absolutely shitty for programming in my opinion.

So this might be a very long post , but i am sure most of you can relate to it .

So , the year end . Time of joy and appraisals right?You have slogged your ass off the entire year and are expecting amazing ratings.Then boom , your piece of shit sadist manager starts of his review by saying 'there are worrysome things to discuss' after not saying shit for the entire year . I am pretty new to corporate , in fact 1 year old , still managed to handle devops for a team of 130+ , majority of whom have no work apart from playing a blame game and indulging in cheap politics. I mean , bro , I am literally your son's age , i dont see the point in playing this cheap shit with me.On top of that this sadist and borderline piece of shit manager has the audacity to say that I did not raise any blockers , while I have CCed him in every fucking mail possible.How big of an a****** can you be bro?
I counter his points for 40 45 mins straight ,leaving him stuck without words for solid 10 to 15 seconds many times during the 'review meet'. This guy is in the same place working on the same shit code , which 90% of this community can't even think of. Every thing is bloody manual and apparently ' I should have tried to streamline the entire f**** process' . Cool bro , why not open a startup while I am at it ?

Then this piece of poop gives me a rating which is just above the inconsistent performer bracket :) .

I just dont get the points what do these people get by giving shit ratings and not even having valid points to back up their fuck all arguments.This guy , throughout the duration of the call did not say 1 (bloody 1 ) good thing about my efforts. Past context is majority of the smart people who were literally running their pods single handedly , were under him and were fed up with not getting hikes and appraisals.Apart from me ,everyone resigned and left with hikes as high as 50% (LOL right).

But I have a year of experience and its really difficult to perform well in 4 rounds of bs compititive coding rounds, after which I get the generic ' oh you did well bro but we are moving on with other candidates' (FFS) .

I pray that even my worst enemies don't get such managers and I hope he rots in hell.

Amen and sorry for the cussing :)

Made a comparison of a rather large codebase that I did for a client before in flask to perl dancer2 and ror. Obviously the rails codebase is larger. The flask version remains as minimal as it once did, even considering blueprints and the dancer version is small but really expandable and powerfull. It has some great things, it was inspired by sinatra so it has that magical approach to doing things but the code is solid and easy to understand imho. They really make it towards perl code is not the unreadable codebase as it once was and the syntax just clicks. Even for its api capabilities it works amazing with the front end (Vue.js) and I can honestly say that I really enjoy it.

Today I was told that full stack is another name for a shit developer who wont be able to develop anything good because they aren't focused on one skill.

But it was by a person who claims to like OOP but doesn't know the 4 principles, SOLID, GoF, or DDD. So I take it with salt. But he claims his entire company follows this philosophy.

I think that some developers just decide that they're hot shit and refuse to talk about any other skills they don't know about since they must not be needed if they don't know them. Code is code.

So my worst experience with a project manager was this:

New changes to the system came in, and i was the developer of android frontend back then
So he's shouting at me like 'why is dis so slow, why deez delayed, why those render misaligned on the orbitrary tablet, etc.'
So we finish in like an hour, he walk away back to his office, I went to smoke, came back, oh hey, I wanna go to the toilet
And back then at that place we had a small one person WC, so when someone was there, anyone else would have to stand outside the cabin
So I come next to it, oh, fuck, occupied, and I hear ridiculously loud and echo-y splashes of pure solid shit hitting the water surface)
A min later the thunderstorm was over, the door opens, and my PM rushes out, sees me, stops (I was in his way) and gives me a deathstare for a quick second. Awkward moment's over, he walks around me, but I just could not keep my mouth shut, so I said aloud

"Well, no wonder"

I`m new to coding. So i`m also new at ranting.

I know i have something to rant about. But my nerd culture is just not yet at the level.

I have been taught by a mate to used linux and started vanilla javascript. We use intellj as IDE.

So i have to speak to this client whose previous IT provider was gonna code his thing with ASP and visual studio!!!
Right?! WTF?!!! But that`s all i got!!!!

Im pretty sure its a wtf?! But i don`t have the rock solid reasons why.

Please ranters help me become better at rantong and tell me i`m not wrong and why ;)

I've been creating my Typescript/C# projects using SOLID principles. Whenever someone randomly joins me in my projects at work, i feel they need a lot of help. Specially since they know programming, but are not familiar with SOLID.

Like ohhh ok you created a base class for that, or ohhh that method already exists in the base class sorry i've implemented it again, or ohhhh ok you already implemented this method in that class.

The more classes i create the more complicated it becomes, sometimes for me too!
I feel I have to write a documentation for the code I write just to keep up with the different, but code changes/augments so writing a doc is really time consuming.

However if i didnt create base classes or interfaces it would be less complicated to browse through method definitions.

I am happy with the code like that though, but in some specific times it's a pain in the ass.
Comments?

Alright dev's, I have pretty much given up on ChromeOS and Chromebooks, my Samsung Chromebook Plus is far from the rock solid stable and battery sipping champion it used to be, constantly crashing, sluggish, 4 hours of battery at most, terrible android performance and the list goes on (Plus fucking bullshit Pixel device exclusive features can fuck off)

I use my Macbook Pro more than ever but the lack of being able to install Linux is a massive blow, so I'm looking for some laptop recommendations and here are the criteria.

1. Don't want a tablet
2. Prefer a clamshell but will deal with a convertibal
3. Max price of $1000 AUD (~$4.25 USD)
4. If it has dedicated graphics, prefer AMD
5. Prefer windows to not be pre-installed but can deal with it if it is

Was previously looking at the XPS line but um... Base model 13 inch is ~$1600 AUD so nope .-.

Fire away people!

Good code is a lie imho.

When you see a project as code, there are 3 variables in most cases:

- time
- people / human resources
- rules

Every variable plays a certain role in how the code (project) evolves.

Time - two different forms: when certain parts of code are either changed in a high frequency or a very low frequency, it's a bad omen.

Too high - somehow this area seems to be relentless. Be it features, regressions or bugs - it takes usually in larger code bases 3 - 4 weeks till all code pathes were triggered.

Too low - it can be a good sign. But it should be on the radar imho. Code that never changes should be reviewed at an - depending on size of codebase - max. yearly audit. Git / VCS is very helpful here.
Why? Mostly because the chances are very high that the code was once written for a completely different requirement set. Hence the audit - check if this code still is doing the right job or if you have a ticking time bomb that needs to be defused.

People
If a project has only person working on it, it most certainly isn't verified by another person. Meaning that only one person worked on it - I'd say it's pretty bad to bad, as no discussion / review / verification was done. The author did the best he / she could do, but maybe another person would have had an better idea?

Too many people working on one thing is only bad when there are no rules ;)

Rules. There are two different kind of rules.

Styling / Organisation / Dokumentation - everything that has not much to do with coding itself. These should be enforced at a certain point, otherwise the code will become a hot glued mess noone wants to work on.

Coding itself. This is a very critical thing.

Do: Forbid things that are known to be problematic in the programming language itself. Eg. usage of variables in variables, reflection, deprecated features.

Do: Define a feature set for each language. Feature set not meaning every feature you want to use! Rather a fixed minimum version every developer must use and - in case of library / module / plugin support - which additional extras are supported.

Every extra costs. Most developers don't want to realize this... And a code base that evolves over time should have minimal dependencies. Every new version of an extra can have bugs, breakages, incompabilties and so on.

Don't: don't specify a way of coding. Most coding guidelines are horrific copy pastures from some books some smart people wrote who have no fucking clue what you're doing and why.

If you don't know how to operate on people, standing in an OR and doing what a book told you to do would end in dead person pretty sure. Same for code.

Learn from mistakes and experience, respect knowledge from other persons, but always reflect on wether this makes sense at this specific area of code.

There are very few things which are applicable to a large codebase on a global level. Even DRY / SOLID and what ever you can come up with can be at a certain point completely wrong.

Good code is a lie - because it can only exist at a certain point of time.

A codebase should be a living thing - when certain parts rot, other parts will be affected too.

The reason for the length of the comment was to give some hints on what my principles are that code stays in an "okayish" state, but good is a very rare state

Totally not dev related but had to ait this somewhere... Yesterday my parents came to me and asked what the best way would be for them to have some space cake...

Totally caught me by surprise! Was so surprised I couldn't utter actual sentences for a solid 5 minutes...

So, I decided over the weekend that I would move my entire dev environment to Linux. No Windows on the laptop and only as a backup boot system for my home PC. I wanted to wean myself off of Linux as only being a VM and move to the full blown desktop.

I can only describe my experience to that of having your first kid: lot's of crying and joy at the same time.

Things I've learned:
1. The install is amazingly painless. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth work straight out of the box no configuring needed.
2. OH MY GOD THE CUSTOMIZATION. Rocking Arc Dark theme on Gnome3 = EVERYTHING IS
ALWAYS DARK MICROSOFT WHY IS THIS NOT A THING.
3. Getting Java servlets to work has been hell. I gave up trying to get them to work in eclipse and moved over to IntelliJ. More trial and error before I can figure out why tomcat won't fucking work in eclipse but it's fine in IntelliJ.
4. The UI and overall work flow has been improved after getting past the learning curve. Gnome3 is way better from when I tried it out 4 years ago.
5. Vim has a steep learning curve but I am starting to understand the net benefits of it. It'll probably be a solid month before I get good with it.
6. Loosing Microsoft Office has been a little bit of a challenge but their suite is online so....meh. I do miss Visual Studio though, and am still looking for an adequate replacement for C++ and C# development.

Overall it's been a challenge but I think it's been a net gain. Now if only I could get the whole sys-admin team to use it. ;)

A lot of this might be an assumption based on not enough research on both NestJS and TypeScript, so if something here is not well put or incorrect then please feel free to provide the necessary info to correct me since I care far more about getting dat booty than I do being right on the internet :D

Sooo, a year or so ago I got a hold on the Nest JS framework. A TypeScript based stack used to build microservices for node. Sounded good enough in terms of structure, it is based on the same format that Angular uses, so if you use Angular then the module system that the application has will make sense.

I attempted (last night) to play with the framework (which I normally don't since I am not that much of a big fan of frameworks and prefer a library based approach) and found a couple of things that weird me out about their selling points, mainly, how it deals with inversion of control.

My issue: This is dependency injection for people that don't really understand the concept of dependency injection. SOLID principles seem to be thrown out of the window completely due to how coupled with one another items are. Literally, you cannot change one dependency coming from one portion to the other(i.e a service into a controller) without changing all references to it, so if you were using a service specification for a particular database, and change the database, you would have to manually edit that very same service, or define another one....AND change the hardwire of the code from the providers section all the way into the controllers that use it....this was a short example, but you get the gist. This is more of a service locator type of deal than well....actual dependency injection. Oh, and the documentation uses classes rather than interfaces WHICH is where I started noticing that the whole intention of dependency injection was weird. Then I came to realize that TypeScript interfaces are meeheed out during transpilation.

Digging into the documentation I found about custom providers that could somehowemaybekinda work through. But in the end it requires far too much and items that well, they just don't feel as natural as if I was writing this in C# or Java, or PHP (actually where I use it the most)

I still think it is a framework worth learning, but I believe that this might be a bias of mine of deriving from the norm to which I was and have been used to doing the most.

I feel like writing or telling people about the time I jumped from Windows 7 Ultimate and jumping to Windows 10. (I'm not against 10, but I'm never updating after what had happened to me)
It all starts when none of my games will play due to a possible issue with my graphics card. I look up "3D source game bug" and not many results pop up. I go on Microsoft's Qna areas and ask this question but to my surprise nothing they say would make sense. "Clean the pins of your graphics card, make sure you verify the games on Steam". I verified the games and they checked out as perfectly fine. I don't have access to my graphics card because this is a laptop, sadly not a tower.
Two months pass and my computer is already showing signs of stress, like it didn't want to live in a sense. It was three times slower than when I was on Windows 7 and it was unallocating areas of my main hard drive where I could make virtual hard drives.
Instantly I start looking up Linux distros and find Linux Mint. 17.3 was the current version at the time. I downloaded it and burned it onto a DVD-rom and rebooted my computer. I loaded into the disc and to my surprise it seemed almost like Windows 7 apart from the Linux part. I grab my external hard drive and partition it to hold the Linux distro and leave it plugged in incase Windows 10 does actually fail.
On December 19, a few months after Windows 10 had released. I start my laptop to try and continue my studies in video game development. But to my surprise, Windows 10 had finally crashed permanently. The screen flickered blue and black, and an error box saying Loginui.exe failed to start. I look at it for a solid minute as my computer had just committed suicide in a sense.
I reboot thinking it would fix the error but it didn't. I couldn't log in anymore.
I force shutdown the laptop and turn it back on putting it into safe mode.
To my surprise loginui.exe works and I sign in. I look at my desktop, the space wallpaper I always admired, the sound files, screen shots I had saved.
I go into file explorer and grab everything out of my default hard drive Windows was installed on. Nothing but 400gb got left behind and that was mainly garbage prototypes I had made and Windows itself. I formatted my external hard drive and placed everything on it. Escaping Windows 10 with around 100GB of useful data I looked at the final shutdown button I would look at.
I click it and try to boot into normal Windows 10. But it doesn't work. It flickers and the error pops up once more.
I force it to shutdown and insert the previous Linux Mint disc I made and format the default hard drive through Linux. I was done. 10 gave me a lot of shit. Java wouldn't work, my games has a functional UI but no screen popped up except a black abyss and it wouldn't even let me try to update my graphics card, apparently my AMD Radeon 5450 was up to date at the AMD Radeon 5000's.
I installed Linux Mint and thinking the games would actually play I open steam and Launch Half-Life 2 to check if Linux would be nicer to me than Windows 10 had been.
To my surprise the game ran. The scene from Highway 17 popped on screen and the UI was fully functional. But it was playing at 10-15fps rather than the usual 60-70fps. Keep look at my drivers and see my graphics card isn't in use. I do some research and it turns out I have a Hybrid Laptop.
Intel HD Graphics and an AMD Radeon 5450 and it was using the Intel and not the AMD. Months of testing and attempts of getting the games to work at high frame rates pass and the Damn thing still functions at a low terrible fps. Finally I give up. I ask my mom for a Windows 7 disc and she says we can't afford it. A few months pass and I finally get a Windows 7 installation disc through money I've saved up. Proudly I put it into my optical disc drive and install it to my main hard drive deleting Linux completely. I announced to all my friends my computer was back in working order and I install everything I needed, Steam, Skype, Blender, and Unity as well as all my games. I test Half-Life 2 and it's running exceptionally smoothly, I test Minecraft at max settings and it's working beautifully. The computer was functioning properly once again and my life as a developer started as I modeled things and blender, learned beginners C# and learned a lot of Batch. Today the computer still runs at a great speed and I warn others of what happened to me after I installed Windows 10 to my machine if they are thinking of switching from 7 or 8 on an older machine.
Truly the damage to my data cannot be undone. But the memory of the maintenance, work, tests, all are a memory of how Windows 10 ruined me and every night before the one year anniversary of Windows 10's release, I took out the battery of my laptop and unplugged it from the a.c. power, just so Windows 10 doesn't show it's DLLs, batch scripts, vbs scripts, anything on my computer. But now, after this has happened and I have recovered, I now only have a story to tell

Although iv only been developing in android for around 7 months yet I fail to see the appeal of Kotlin.

It has no real advantage over Java. In my opinion its fucking lazy code. It might look pretty but that's about it. So I don't see why employers are opening their arseholes for people with Kotlin experience.

Im pretty sure they are doing it because its "the next big thing". If you can write solid Java I dont know what the big deal is.. Maybe someone can shed some light on this..

Android studio can convert Java to Kotlin with one click. So No Mr employer I do not see your reason why you employed someone over me because he has Kotlin experience. Its fucked!! So that project I handed you... the one where I had pride in my ability to apply solid Java... Yes remember fucking Java everyone?!... well it works exactly the fucking same and in my opinion is much more verified and readable. SOOOO FUCK YOUUUU MR EMPLOYER!!!!! Go FuckYourStupidLittleKotlinBumChumsRightInTheirShitRiddenFuckHoles!!!!!!

Rant over...

Microsoft is always at it.

Hello, I recently discovered this eye candy of a looking website and how good the CSS looks (Kudos to whoever made this) , and I decided to post a rant of my own. And its about MS Edge and other applications.

So I built my own ATX tower a while back (Loving it) , and I found that it was WONDERFUL to have a computer that was brand new, that didnt have candy crush preinstalled on it when I got it.

Windows 10 users, do this:

Press WIN+I to open the settings menu.
Go to "Apps"
Scroll down the list....

How many applications do you see there that are actually useful , or that you have downloaded?

I never downloaded a Realtek Driver... and I never need it for anything to work. This is the case for 90% of the things you may see in the applications.

Why is HULU installed?
Why is NETFLIX installed?
Why is MINECRAFT BETA INSTALLED? THE BETA HASNT BEEN OUT IN YEARS?

But I digress, this is the case when I work on a computer such as my grandmothers who, bless her soul, isnt very adept at basic file management. Heck , she uses free Norton Antivirus against my recommendation to use the PAID active firewall application on her computer (VIPRE)

So needless to say she needs help. All the time.

So here comes microsoft recently, reinstalling like 15 different programs on her computer , including MS edge. Who else is tired of bloating? I know I am.

I recently found this program on Git!
Its the Sycnex Windows 10 DeBloater
But guess what? DONT USE IT.

Wanna know why?

Because if you do, it works, and if it works, it disables:

- Cortana (basic search engine for your OS, good luck finding candy crush).
- Microsoft Store (That means no XBOX games pass either)
- It breaks part of the file explorer

Wanna know why? BeCaUsE it geTs riD oF Ms EdGe

And believe it or not, apparently MS edges source code is Mandatory for certain functions on your computer. So even If you try to uninstall the browser, it stays behind in some form.

So there you have it. They hard coded it into windows.
Enjoy!

So its not even the author of the GITHUB programs fault, its just a real techincal limitation of the platform.

I hate that stuff man. I really do. There should be 20 things installed on my computer and thats it. Everything else is just, space for games on a solid state. Or Eclipse Photon, etc.

I would post links to show you guys a few things but. Unfortunately I cant post URLs yet!

However, thats my first rant. Hope you liked it.

So this is the story of myself getting from hating vim to find it pretty good.

When i started fiddling around with linux i was literally overrun by vim. I mean how the fuck should i remember all these stupid commands.
So there we go ... nano was my favourite (and only) editor i used.

Everything was fine in my little nano world. I saw some colleague editing every damn thing in vim. I asked him "man what the fuck are you damn crazy"? And thats where till that moment the deepest conversation about an editor in my life began. He told me he could do that much with vim, its almost everywhere nowadays and a must for any admin.

So after letting him tell me about every thing you can do he promised me he is going to help me getting started quicker. And i must say boi vim is really awesome. But for "real" development i still use a ide. Although i find myself programming go, python or bash scripts entirely in vim and its not that bad.

So if you find your way through the deep shit of that single damn command input down there you can get a pretty decent editor.

Dont get me wrong i am forced to use nano sometimes, when i help some of friends with their servers or so and they litterally uninstalled vim because they were to frustrated.

So as i am started to go into the devops area you get more and more towards you have to edit a file on a server, or just tweak around before automating the shit out of it.

And i must say vim has become a solid alternative for me to a full blown ide, or any other text editor.

So yeah i am gone from freaking hating vim to using it almost everyday. But why some people out their treat vim like a religion is not understandable to me in any way.

So whats your story why do you hate/love vim? Or are you just like me a "happy user" that would switch to another editor anytime it would be a better fit?

At first i was told to go to college BY PEOPLE WITH NO COLLEGE because i wouldnt be able to find a job without degree

Like a sucker i fell for it and believed in those LIES so i sacrificed my life for school

Then later i found out PEOPLE WHO FINISHED COLLEGE told me i just need knowledge in order to be hired, and turns out degree is unimportant

Like a sucker i fell for it and believed in those LIES so i studied and worked on practical projects and gained knowledge

Now when I try to get hired, they admitted that i am able to complete complex projects and i know how to solve the problems even if i see them for the first time. But they rejected me because "im not sure why the car leaks oil".

I have to understand and know what the whole framework is doing under the hood, how everything works, how dependency injection works under the hood, SOLID principles under the hood, decorators how they work under the hood etc.

So now it turns out
- sacrificing life for school is not enough
- sacrificing life for degree is not enough
- sacrificing life for learning and gaining knowledge is not enough
- now the new trend is i have to know not only how to drive a car like a professional formula F1 driver, i also have to be a mechanic and know how to fix the car if it breaks.

MATRIX IS A BIG FAT BULLSHIT AND A LIE.

I feel like they're looking for a senior developer knowledge to pay him junior developer salary

WTF IS THIS BULLSHIT?

I sacrificed 10 days of my life for their bullshit to build this project from scratch as a technical interview. They never said congrats on all the parts that were built right, but only complained about the small portion of bugs i didnt have time to fix.

ALL OF THIS FOR A SALARY OF $1500/MONTH THAT I ASKED. THATS LESS THAN 20,000$ A YEAR. THEY EITHER GAVE ME AN OPTION TO WORK FOR WAY LESS (500-600$/month) OR CALL THEM BACK IN A FEW MONTHS.

I JUST FINISHED COLLEGE AND THEY EXPECT ME TO HAVE 20 YEARS OF SENIOR DEVELOPER EXPERIENCE.

WTF IS THIS SLAVERY BULLSHIT?

HAVING A 500$/MONTH AS ENGINEERING SALARY WITH A DEGREE IS BELITTLING OF THIS JOB.

NO I DONT LIVE IN INDIA I LIVE IN SERBIA. MY DOG IS SICK AND IT COSTS 100$ A DAY JUST FOR HIS TREATMENT. HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO SURVIVE WITH A SLAVE SALARY IN THIS ECONOMIC CRISIS.

I DON'T UNDERSTAND

So I'm not much for Linux, but I'll admit. It's a pretty damn solid environment, especially for programmers.
Since my main computer can't afford to have Linux on it, I decided to start working on making the Raspberry Pi handheld notebook. But after I added up the price for all of the components, it's almost three hundred dollars.
Personally, I would love to have a mini computer everywhere I go. A Chromebook is ok. But I guess you need to take into consideration that it is NOT ment for programming. I have found several IDE's and found none of them have a debugger or a way to execute my code.
I did some thinking and I'm starting to wonder if it is worth it.
It's a hand held computer with ubuntu on it. What's the worse that can happen? I don't solder the battery correctly and the whole thing explodes in my hands? Yeah that's pretty likely. Another reason I look at getting it is because there is so much fucking theft at my school it's hard to believe we don't have armed gunmen at every corner since everyone is always sober or high as shit.
Having an 11.6 inch Chromebook also puts me at risk of getting mugged, because who the fuck wouldn't want to try and pawn a laptop for drug money? At least with a handheld I could keep it in my pocket where I know it'll be safe.
What do you guys think?
Should I build this little thing or keep my current Chromebook but try to keep it safe?

So here's what I'm putting up with for the last 6 months, clients..

A client proposed to me a project he had in mind. Project is pretty solid, could have a bright future. Since they didn't have the money to spend, we agreed on a % of the income they will earn from the project. So, let's say I get 20% of the income in exchange for building the application. I didn't receive any down payment or payment of any kind.

Just for info, project is a Web application/portal and it is ~80% done at the moment. Client provided a logo and a wireframe/ideas/pictures how he sees the project. I built everything, from DB to Frontend. Also, project is completely custom made, no CMS or anything. Project will make profit by subscription base, every user of the project pays.

For various reasons, we did not yet sign a contract. So, what is my issue...

Client sent me his proposal of the contract, said it's solid stuff, just sign it. In the contract, it stated that he owns the application in full, can sell it, etc. and I get % of the price. There were also other sneaky parts about me having all the responsibility but owning nothing. I naturally declined and took a lawyer to construct a normal contract.

My proposal was/is, I own the application(source code) in full. They are obligated to pay the monthly percentage and can use the application normally and make profit. At any time, application can be bought by the client if they pay for the development. So, basically, they are getting the application to use "for free" with no initial payment/investment. And this is a long term deal, they can use is as this as long as they want. Also, if they go bankrupt at any time, no penalty or payment is needed, the risk is mine.

The client refused and what he claims is the following...

His share in the project is 80%, mine is 20%. If project is to be sold, I get 20% of the price. So, meaning, if we go to production tomorrow, if I want to buy his share, I have to buy 80% of the application I built entirely. Also he is convinced that by "telling me" what to built he's owning everything. In his words, he dictated me the notes and I'm just playing the violin.

I am having trouble explaining to him that he is getting the application to use and make profit basically for free and cannot and does not own the source code unless he buys it off. We are going in circles, I send him the contract to review, he changes it and returns it back. Also, he removes the parts where it is clearly states what he provided and what was done by me.

So, we kind off agreed on the authorship but in the case we break the contract he wants to be able to use the application for 3 more years.

Was anyone here in a similar situation? How do you handle this kind of situations?

Sydochen has posted a rant where he is nt really sure why people hate Java, and I decided to publicly post my explanation of this phenomenon, please, from my point of view.
So there is this quite large domain, on which one or two academical studies are built, such as business informatics and applied system engineering which I find extremely interesting and fun, that is called, ironically, SAD. And then there are videos on youtube, by programmers who just can't settle the fuck down. Those videos I am talking about are rants about OOP in general, which, as we all know, is a huge part of studies in the aforementioned domain. What these people are even talking about?
Absolutely obvious, there is no sense in making a software in a linear pattern. Since Bikelsoft has conveniently patched consumers up with GUI based software, the core concept of which is EDP (event driven programming or alternatively, at least OS events queue-ing), the completely functional, linear approach in such environment does not make much sense in terms of the maintainability of the software. Uhm, raise your hand if you ever tried to linearly build a complex GUI system in a single function call on GTK, which does allow you to disregard any responsibility separation pattern of SAD, such as long loved MVC...
Additionally, OOP is mandatory in business because it does allow us to mount abstraction levels and encapsulate actual dataflow behind them, which, of course, lowers the costs of the development.
What happy programmers are talking about usually is the complexity of the task of doing the OOP right in the sense of an overflow of straight composition classes (that do nothing but forward data from lower to upper abstraction levels and vice versa) and the situation of responsibility chain break (this is when a class from lower level directly!! notifies a class of a higher level about something ignoring the fact that there is a chain of other classes between them). And that's it. These guys also do vouch for functional programming, and it's a completely different argument, and there is no reason not to do it in algorithmical, implementational part of the project, of course, but yeah...
So where does Java kick in you think?
Well, guess what language popularized programming in general and OOP in particular. Java is doing a lot of things in a modern way. Of course, if it's 1995 outside *lenny face*. Yeah, fuck AOT, fuck memory management responsibility, all to the maximum towards solving the real applicative tasks.
Have you ever tried to learn to apply Text Watchers in Android with Java? Then you know about inline overloading and inline abstract class implementation. This is not right. This reduces readability and reusability.
Have you ever used Volley on Android? Newbies to Android programming surely should have. Quite verbose boilerplate in google docs, huh?
Have you seen intents? The Android API is, little said, messy with all the support libs and Context class ancestors. Remember how many times the language has helped you to properly orient in all of this hierarchy, when overloading method declaration requires you to use 2 lines instead of 1. Too verbose, too hesitant, distracting - that's what the lang and the api is. Fucking toString() is hilarious. Reference comparison is unintuitive. Obviously poor practices are not banned. Ancient tools. Import hell. Slow evolution.
C# has ripped Java off like an utter cunt, yet it's a piece of cake to maintain a solid patternization and structure, and keep your code clean and readable. Yet, Cs6 already was okay featuring optionally nullable fields and safe optional dereferencing, while we get finally get lambda expressions in J8, in 20-fucking-14.
Java did good back then, but when we joke about dumb indian developers, they are coding it in Java. So yeah.
To sum up, it's easy to make code unreadable with Java, and Java is a tool with which developers usually disregard the patterns of SAD.

!rant

My ecig mod (or box how some call it) started to missbehave, it started at random not liking more and more batteries and generally it was good time for replacment. Fast forward, im at shop, and I have few options, i dont want to cheap out becouse I know how it ends, and I want reaible box for longer and I can pay a little more for that.

So there was few quite competetive options, but most of them had build quality i wasnt fan of, some even plastic outter shell, magnets which tend to break off, but their feature list was quite competetive, and there most expensive of all (400 pln +-90ish $) that seller presented me had (seemingly) no features. No menu even. But build quality is solid buttons feel are just better, and it looks like it could survive longer than half a year. Fine, i shell out what it looked missing features for solid build quality.

I go home, rtfm, and wtf? "Before use update firmware with XYZ software". Okay, done. But hmmm what is that?

It has plethoria, absolute TON of customization but from PC program. Hell yeah, that was fucking good choice and seller missed whole selling point of this box. Like literally, he didnt know its best feature. I can go as far as customize entire GUI on that small screen. Its been awhile since I did my last pixelart thingy but monochromatic so not too bad :)

!tech

I am yet to start the phase of life where i am more than just a student but i often see things around and have some thoughts. Recently i was feeling that the 2 biggest crimes a person could commit is being repetitively irresponsible or being always dependent.

Like, if i am a father , a husband , a sole earner or have someone dependent on me, i could not afford to make simple everyday mistakes that i often do in my current youth age and people ignore. These days i sleep at 5 am after watching movies, wake up at 3pm , knowing that mom has already made me food, my college mates have already made assignment, and there's nothing better that i could do . Life is relaxing.

But my dad cannot afford mu luxurious lifestyle. He cannot waltz on the bike at 90, he can't sleep till 3 , he can't afford to watch long webseries. Heck, he can't even afford to have a platform like this and rant or post stuff. He has to run at 6 am in morning to get groceries for our restaurant. I wonder how he or any other mature person relaxes their mind.

Similarly everyone has to show some boss characters in life. You can't rely on a stick forever, you got to have your own spine. Dad used to have a biz partner who took most of our restaurant decisions, but then business went low and he ran away. So at the end dad himself had to take up all the things in his hand.

I on the other hand am totally spinless. Clg has taken the decision for me that i gotta give papers that's why am studying. Later company will take decision to fuck me up and work infinitely and i might just do that . I usually never come up with a good innovative app idea with a solid vision and therefore end up following other people's ideas , visions, etc and that too rather incompetently.
I wish i had more courage.

'Responsible' people of devrant (bread earners, family runners, etc you know if you are one) , would you like to share your life tips or let me know if my thoughts are wrong?

Hey guys, first time writing here.
Around 8 months ago I joined a local company, developing enterprise web apps. First time for me working in a "real" programming job: I've been making a living from little freelance projects, personal apps and private programming lessons for the past 10 years, while on the side I chased the indie game dev dream, with little success. Then, one day, realized I needed to confront myself with the reality of 'standard' business, where the majority of people work, or risk growing too old to find a stable job.
I was kinda excited at first, looking forward to learning from experienced professionals in a long-standing company that has been around for decades. In the past years I coded almost 100% solo, so I really wanted to learn some solid team practices, refine my automated testing skills, and so on. Also, good pay, flexible hours and team is cool.

Then... I actually went there.

At first, I thought it was me. I thought I couldn't understand the code because I was used reading only mine.
I thought that it was me, not knowing well enough the quirks of web development to understand how things worked.
I though I was too lazy - it was shocking to see how hard those guys worked: I saw one guy once who was basically coding with one hand, answering a mail with another, all while doing some technical assistance on the phone.

Then I started to realize.

All projects are a disorganized mess, not only the legacy ones - actually the "green" products are quite worse.
Dependency injection hell: it seems like half of the code has been written by a DI fanatic and the other half by an assembly nostalgic who doesn't really like this new hippy thing called "functions".
Architecture is so messed up there are methods several THOUSANDS of lines long, and for the love of god most people on the team don't really even know WHAT those methods are for, but they're so intertwined with the rest of the codebase no one ever dares to touch them.
No automated test whatsoever, and because of the aforementioned DI hell, it's freaking hard to configure a testing environment (I've been trying for two days during my days off, with almost no success).
Of course documentation is completely absent, specifications are spread around hundreds of mails and opaquely named files thrown around personal shared folders, remote archives, etc.

So I rolled my sleeves up and started crunching as the rest of the team. I tried to follow the boy-scout rule, when the time and scope allowed. But god, it's hard. I'm tired as fuck, I miss working on my projects, or at least something that's not a complete madness. And it's unbearable to manually validate everything (hundreds of edge cases) by hand.

And the rest of the team acts like it's all normal. They look so at ease in this mess. It's like seeing someone quietly sitting inside a house on fire doing their stuff like nothing special is going on.

Please tell me it's not this way everywhere. I want out of this. I also feel like I'm "spoiled", and I should just do like the others and accept the depressing reality of working with all of this. But inside me I don't want to. I developed a taste for clean, easy maintainable code and I don't want to give it up.

After spending the year after graduation trying to do a business with some school friends, that didn't make a dime for a year, I decided to look for a real paying job.

My first step was to go to a hackathon and hack for the week-end. I got involved in not one, but 2 projects: the second was because someone I met and won with at a previous hackathon asked me to, and I finished the first project early. Let's call her "S"

Then comes the end of the hackathon, and after it concludes I muster the courage to go on stage and say that I'm looking for a job, so feel free to chat me up.

No one really came to me for a job, but S came to talk to me about the startup she wants to launch, and how she is looking for a tech guy. I was close to dismiss it, because I was looking for a job paying $$$, but agreed to met so that she could show me her business plan and try to convince me.

Turns out she did convince me, because the business plan was solid, she was very motivated, and had already started validating the idea: there was a real need.

Now there we are, 5 years later, about 10 employees and paying ourselves real salary.

A very long rant.. but I'm looking to share some experiences, maybe a different perspective.. huge changes at the company.

So my company is starting our microservices journey (we have a 359 retail websites at this moment)

First question was: What to build first?

The first thing we had to do was to decide what we wanted to build as our first microservice. We went looking for a microservice that can be used read only, consumers could easily implement without overhauling production software and is isolated from other processes.

We’ve ended up with building a catalog service as our first microservice. That catalog service provides consumers of the microservice information of our catalog and its most essential information about items in the catalog.

By starting with building the catalog service the team could focus on building the microservice without any time pressure. The initial functionalities of the catalog service were being created to replace existing functionality which were working fine.

Because we choose such an isolated functionality we were able to introduce the new catalog service into production step by step. Instead of replacing the search functionality of the webshops using a big-bang approach, we choose A/B split testing to measure our changes and gradually increase the load of the microservice.

Next step: Choosing a datastore

The search engine that was in production when we started this project was making user of Solr. Due to the use of Lucene it was performing very well as a search engine, but from engineering perspective it lacked some functionalities. It came short if you wanted to run it in a cluster environment, configuring it was hard and not user friendly and last but not least, development of Solr seemed to be grinded to a halt.

Elasticsearch started entering the scene as a competitor for Solr and brought interesting features. Still using Lucene, which we were happy with, it was build with clustering in mind and being provided out of the box. Managing Elasticsearch was easy since there are REST APIs for configuration and as a fallback there are YAML configurations available.

We decided to use Elasticsearch since it provides us the strengths and capabilities of Lucene with the added joy of easy configuration, clustering and a lively community driving the project.

Even bigger challenge? Which programming language will we use

The team responsible for developing this first microservice consists out of a group web developers. So when looking for a programming language for the microservice, we went searching for a language close to their hearts and expertise. At that time a typical web developer at least had knowledge of PHP and Javascript.

What we’ve noticed during researching various languages is that almost all actions done by the catalog service will boil down to the following paradigm:

- Execute a HTTP call to fetch some JSON

- Transform JSON to a desired output

- Respond with the transformed JSON

Actions that easily can be done in a parallel and asynchronous manner and mainly consists out of transforming JSON from the source to a desired output. The programming language used for the catalog service should hold strong qualifications for those kind of actions.

Another thing to notice is that some functionalities that will be built using the catalog service will result into a high level of concurrent requests. For example the type-ahead functionality will trigger several requests to the catalog service per usage of a user.

To us, PHP and .NET at that time weren’t sufficient enough to us for building the catalog service based on the requirements we’ve set. Eventually we’ve decided to use Node.js which is better suited for the things we are looking for as described earlier. Node.js provides a non-blocking I/O model and being event driven helps us developing a high performance microservice.

The leap to start programming Node.js is relatively small since it basically is Javascript. A language that is familiar for the developers around that time. While Node.js is displaying some new concepts it is relatively easy for a developer to start using it.

The beauty of microservices and the isolation it provides, is that you can choose the best tool for that particular microservice. Not all microservices will be developed using Node.js and Elasticsearch. All kinds of combinations might arise and this is what makes the microservices architecture so flexible.

Even when Node.js or Elasticsearch turns out to be a bad choice for the catalog service it is relatively easy to switch that choice for magic ‘X’ or component ‘Z’. By focussing on creating a solid API the components that are driving that API don’t matter that much. It should do what you ask of it and when it is lacking you just replace it.

Many more headaches to come later this year ;)

I was always into computers, ever since I was a kid. Played a lot of videogames on Windows 98 and XP, and a lot of my earliest drawings were level ideas for those games. My first encounters with code were with game creation software like GameMaker, but I barely touched the code proper outside of editing a few variables from other people's code. After that I basically forgot all about it and spent most of my teen years being a shutin.

Skip ahead to my last year of high school without much idea on what to do. I was good at math when I wasn't being a lazy shit, so between that and what my parents expected of me, I was prepared to go to university for civil engineering. However, two things changed that decision, the first being a great IT professor, when me and a friend were so far ahead, he started assigning us some harder work, and suggested we study computer science at university. The second was a super jank and obscure open-source early 2000's game that somehow still has a thriving community and is actively being developed. I stumbled upon it by chance, and after playing for a while, I submitted a balance change on the GitHub repo. Even though it was just a single variable change, that time I got it. That time I saw how powerful programming could be and what could be done with it. I submitted PR after PR of new features, changes and bugfixes, by the time I left there I had a somewhat solid grasp of the fundamentals of programming, and decided to enrol in the computer science degree.

Enrolling was possibly the best decision I ever made (not america; debt isn't an issue), as well as giving me actual social skills, every course I took just clicked. The knowledge I already somewhat intuitively had a vague grasp on from videogames, general computer use and collaborating with russian coders who produced the jankiest shit that was still somehow functional was expanded upon and consolidated with a high-quality formal education. Four years later and I'm fresh out of uni, it was a long road between when the seed was first planted in my mind and now, but I've finally found out what I want to do with my life.

won't know for sure until i find a job though ffs

on a pleasant note,

Seriously, fuck myPhpAdmin. Fuck c9 and fuck MySql. My connection is solid i can do mini crap. my ajax call is good too. so idk why.

Ive spent over a week on a bug and now “occasionally working” is the best I can get and im not even sure why.

This assignment is due today.

I cant even try to do it locally cause for some reason myphpadmin and mysql dont wanna work on my laptop so yay fuck me.

git isn't as solid as people believe.

Yes, it's used by million of companies. But it's not so solid

Sonuva bitch thought he's so smart. He made a mod of a game, and a launcher for it, APK while bullshitting that "Games shouldn't have IAPs because it's just a game". I got ticked off, I called him out for bullshitting, he got ticked off, I asked for proof of the mods, this is what he gave me. It's on an iPhone mind you, and he said he made an APK. My fucking god. I sworn at him with another programmer friend for a solid 10 minutes, breaking the community's rules 20 times over non-stop (I'm Moderator so.... (not Reddit, Discord (Yes mom I use Discord (Yes I moderator)))). My fucking god. AT LEAST MAKE SOME FILES INSIDE WHILE YOU'RE BULLSHITTING US! OH WAIT! YOU CAN'T! YOU'RE NOT JAILBROKEN YOU PIECE OF SHIT! (more in the comment)

A year ago I built my first todo, not from a tutorial, but using basic libraries and nw.js, and doing basic dom manipulations.

It had drag n drop, icons, and basic saving and loading. And I was satisfied.

Since then I've been working odd jobs.

And today I've decided to stretch out a bit, and build a basic airtable clone, because I think I can.
And also because I hate anything without an offline option.

First thing I realized was I wasn't about to duplicate all the features of a spreadsheet from scratch. I'd need a base to work from.

I spent about an hour looking.
Core features needed would be trivial serialization or saving/loading.

Proper event support for when a cell, row, or column changed, or was selected. Necessary for triggering validation and serialization/saving.

Custom column types.

Embedding html in cells.

Reorderable columns

Optional but nice to have:

Changeable column width and row height.

Drag and drop on rows and columns.

Right click menu support out of the box.

After that hour I had a few I wanted to test.

And started looking at frameworks to support the SPA aspects.

Both mithril and riot have minimal router support. But theres also a ton of other leightweight frameworks and libraries worthy of prototyping in, solid, marko, svelte, etc.
I didn't want to futz with lots of overhead, babeling/gulping/grunting/webpacking or any complex configuration-over-convention.

Didn't care for dom vs shadow dom. Its a prototype not a startup.

And I didn't care to do it the "right way". Learning curve here was antithesis to experimenting. I was trying to get away from plugin, configuration-over-convention, astronaut architecture, monolithic frameworks, the works.

Could I import the library without five dozen dependancies and learning four different tools before getting to hello world?
"But if you know IJK then its quick to get started!", except I don't, so it won't. I didn't want that.

Could I get cheap component-oriented designs?

Was I managing complex state embedded in a monolith that took over the entire layout and conventions of my code, like the world balanced on the back of a turtle?

Did it obscure the dom and state, and the standard way of doing things or *compliment* those?

As for validation, theres a number of vanilla libraries, one of which treats validation similar to unit testing, which seems kinda novel.

For presentation and backend I could do NW.JS, which would remove some of the complications, by putting everything in one script. Or if I wanted to make it a web backend, and avoid writing it in something that ran like a potato strapped to a nuclear rocket (visual studio), I could skip TS and go with python and quart, an async variation of flask.
This has the advantage that using something thats *not* JS, namely python, for interacting with a proper database, and would allow self-hosting or putting it online so people can share data and access in real time with others.

And because I'm horrible, and do things the wrong way for convenience, I could use tailwind.
Because it pisses people off.

How easy (or hard) would it be to recreate a basic functional clone of the core of airtable?

I don't know, but I have feeling I'm going to find out!

!rant
So i have not yet graduated as of yet and when i do i want to have a good job and all.I have been hearing this about internships and all and i have no prior experience whatsoever.I wanted to know if i should first of start of as an intern and then pace it up becz i am still in a learning stage and i want to have a solid foundation before taking a full time job.Any advices gentlemen(and ladies).

A philosophical question about maintenance/updating.

There is no need to repeat the reasons we need to update our dependencies and our code. We know them/ especially regarding the security issues.
The real question is , "is that indicates a failure of automation"?

When i started thinking about code, and when also was a kid and saw all these sci fi universes with robots etc, the obvious thing was that you build an automation to do the job without having to work with it anymore. There is no meaning on automate something that need constant work above it.

When you have a car, you usually do not upgrade it all the time, you do some things of maintance (oil, tires) but it keeps your work on it in a logical amount.
A better example is the abacus, a calculating device which you know it works as it works.

A promise of functional programming is that because you are based on algebraic principles you do not have to worry so much about your code, you know it will doing the logical thing it supposed to do.
Unix philosophy made software that has been "updated" so little compared to all these modern apps.
Coding, because of its changeable nature is the first victim of the humans nature unsatisfying.

Modern software industry has so much of techniques and principles (solid, liquid, patterns, testing that that the air is air) and still needs so many developers to work on a project.
I know that you will blame the market needs (you cannot understand the need from the start, you have to do it agile) but i think that this is also a part of a problem .
Old devices evolved at much more slow pace. Radio was radio, and still a radio do its basic functionality the same war (the upgrades were only some memory functionalities like save your beloved frequencies and screen messages).

Although all answers are valid, i still feel, that we have failed. We have failed so much. The dream of being a programmer is to build something, bring you money or satisfaction, and you are bored so you build something completely new.

So for awhile now I’ve been preparing myself for my first dev job as a .NET dev, and I’ve mostly just been polishing my C# knowledge with OOP, Entity Framework, ASP.NET and it’s been going really well.

So my self assigned time limit (end of August-beginning of September) is coming up and that’s when I’m gonna apply, so I decided today to take some time from programming to actually make my resume.

I did not use a template so it looks boring and I don’t have a lot to put on it but what I did put on it was important and I feel is solid (for not having worked before).

I’m having a few people I know look at it from a professional stand point and gave me feed back I implemented and it is better now.

I already linked my github, should I link my LinkedIn?

will people actually care if I don’t use a template to make it visually pop because I’d honestly rather keep it how it looks as is if I can.

I really do not understand why people do not use the defaults, I see a PHP code and I see all the PSR's violated, SOLID violated, and as it is something of years, unfortunately we did not get more rapporteur in a timely manner. I didn't go to college, but I must say, what the hell do you guys do in college?

Then many (the good obviously) programmers do not understand why they take so much the fun of PHP, if they see the codes that I see lately...

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

Following some new nextjs tutorial to learn how to efficiently build a web chat app, the guy built it very solid, but is it efficient?

Im having mixed feelings about this approach. The way he did it is, for example when you click on a user (imagine it as a list of users from your contacts), it actually calls a route, which stores that in database, and once its done Then the route triggers lets say socket.io event to notify the frontend to update the UI.

Not only that but each new message that gets sent it actually calls a route which stores that message in database and once that's successful Then it emits a socket.io event to the frontend to fetch that message.

As you can imagine constantly calling routes like this Does induce small delays. Creating conversations, navigating, opening someones profile and especially sending messages, is NOT instantaneous. When you do it theres a small delay, giving the impression as if the app is SO large that it lags

But it doesnt lag, it just needs a few ms to store that in db so it can return the socket.io bidirectional message event. Which does make sense because what if the internet broke and the user immediately gets sent a message, but the message fails to get stored in database? Or db storage gets fucked or something else fails but socket.io works while db doesnt? The data then may be inconsistent. This approach fulfulls the single source of truth principle

So thats why im having mixed feelings about this approach particularly because of small delays. It is not instantaneous like whatsapp discord telegram signal viber etc the input UI freezes until the message is successfully sent

---

Of course this can be a UI/UX decision and can be handled differently even if the backend works like that.

My concern is is this approach valid?

My question is... I had an idea what if i emit socket.io event to send the message while in the background also call the route to store that message in db? This way not only would it work asynchronously but the message gets sent instantaneously, and if the backend fucks up to store it in db then the UI gets updated with message failed to get delivered, switching the socket.io into polling state. Is this a good (proper, efficient, better) way to do it or not?

Question directed to devs who know a bit about setting up middle sized architecture.

Prestory: Joined into development of a middle sized online game. Figured they created a monolith over the last 6 years up to a point where nothing works properly and nothing can be changed without wrecking the whole system. Figured a monolithic approach isn't such a great idea.

Current Situation: In a different, same scale online game development team, game itself working but team is struggling with architecture.
My job is to come up with an approach on how to set up masterserver/matchmaking/database etc. Reading through various articles about common principles (SOLID etc.), i figured that a microservice+event-/servicebus architecture may work for that kind of project.

The idea would be to have a global interface in which microservices can be hooked. So a client registers to a client handler on startup, then starts to queue for a game, the client handler throws an event on the bus to register the user to matchmaking. The matchmaker happens to listen to those events (Observer Pattern) and adds him to matchmaking, when a match is found it throws an event on the bus to connect the user to the server, etc. One can easily imagine a banhandler throwing in a veto to cancel such an action, metrics and logging is fairly simple to add (just another service listening to all events), additionally Continuous Delivery, FRP and such are also beneficial advantages and it is said to scale well.

The question is, would you do the same, is there maybe something i might be overlooking? Do you have better ideas?
Keep in mind that we are not too experienced and are bound to different languages (python, C++ and java mostly) and are a small (4 Devs) Team with different strengths.

Thank you for your feedback and criticism!

I've been an android/anti-ios person for around a decade and im now seriously considering switching to ios when the new iphones land. My mother is an apple nut and my brother is on android and everytime i bring up even the slightest nitpick about ios or macos (such as the fact that the "always use this application" checkbox on macos does not work or that you have to upload music through itunes) they jump on the "wtf then why would even consider it??????" train. In short its because ios seems at least a little bit more stable overall (havent had much experience with ios in general this is really more of a first impression). Well I got a replacement LG V20 just over a year ago and it has not aged well, had to replace the battery because i barely got 4 hours with minimal usage, even when i got the thing it was rather jittery, and its just now getting oreo (and surely wont be getting pie). Hell i was removing several apps earlier and it took a solid 4 MINUTES to uninstall an icon pack. After some investigation into the ios ecosystem i found that all the apps that i would need are on there so that was great. What im really hoping for though is some stability/longevity, im ok with paying around 1000 for a phone if it lasts a while and stays in decent shape. Finally the fact that the updates are sparing at best (with the exception of pixel phones) is a great annoyance whereas my mothers (around 4 years old) ipad is rocking ios 11. Could someone who has made the leap make a recommendation? I love android but i feel like all i would accomplish is buying another phone that craps out after less than a year.

How To Make Sure That A Construction Cradle Is Perfect For Safe Use?

Construction and maintenance cradles are used by millions of construction workers who need to work in inaccessible or elevated areas. The OSHA (Occupational Health and Safety Administration) has laid down a few standards that can help safeguard workers who operate on cradles. In many cases, workers suffer injuries in accidents involving cradles – as the support or planking gives way, or there is slippage of the worker on being struck by an object falling. Poor cradles are also a major reason for accidents. Read and know how you can ensure that a construction cradle is ideal to be used in a safe and proper way.

Check the base

You have to ensure that the scaffold’s base area is completely stable. In case the base lies on items such as blocks of concrete, loose bricks, boxes or barrels, it is not possible to raise a safe cradle. Such types of things are not stable, and cannot offer a level foundation. The footing has to be able to support the cradle that is loaded, without moving or settling. The cradle needs to be set on items that offer a solid foundation, such as mud sills or base plates.

Safe rails and platforms

In case the temporary cradles are 10-inch or more in height over a lower level, it is a good idea to install toeboards, midrails and top rails. These have to be set up on every open side of a cradle platform, so that workers do not fall off from the platform even if they slip.

For more information about finding the best portable work platform, visit this website.

I am fully dedicated in using Quicken for maintaining the financial tasks in the proper ways. Quicken is very simple and trouble-free in using, so millions of users select this accounting tool for managing the accounting entries. I am working on Quicken to complete my accounting tasks from a long period. But from a few days, my Quicken will not open properly. When I try to open it, I get Quicken won’t open error. I don’t have the solid reasons to happen this error. So now I want to resolve this error. So please anyone can assist me the suitable ways to fix this error.

I am so fucking done with Webstekker. This is one bad fucked up webhosting company in The Netherlands. In the past we had so many issues: managed hosting websites getting hacked (you can brute force.ftp etc they don't monitor anything), not restoring db views after they migrate a db server, week down time because they fucked something up etc. Last 2 years were ok but today I discovered that one of my money making adsense websites is running on a cms database from another website!! What the fuck?!! I haven't touched that site for at least 2 years and it was running fine.

No Webstekker I don't want to check all of ny websites every day to see if everything works properly. I want to trust you to do a proper managed hosting job. But you retards have proven to be incapable over and over again.

That said, anyone here can recommend a good, solid, trustable Dutch webhosting company for asp.net hosting on Windows?

I do run other sites on VPS but that is much more work for me and don't want to manage all (small) websites myself but unstead rely on a solid company with competent people to do that for me.