Modern software has gotten so bad that it even gets sluggish at times on late 2018 flagship devices. Slow, cheap hardware like is usually developers' and fanboys' excuse, particularly when it comes to Windows stuff? Like hell it is.

Software "engineering" has become so.. terribly inefficient. I'd dare any developer worth their salt to rewrite their program to make it work on an early 2000's machine. After all, those can run pretty advanced GUI's, have a reasonable amount of hardware (just think about how large a gigabyte of RAM really is) yet should be able to make for a reasonable limitation set.

Hardware limitations are the mother of optimization. Not every person on the planet has a 32-core Xeon workstation with 64GB of DDR4 RAM and a GTX Titan in it. Whether your application performs reasonably well on your machine shouldn't be the metric. Try deploying it on that laptop you tucked into a shelf years ago and reevaluate.. please.

And definitely you Slack!! Slacking off, is that what inspired the name of that pile of junk?! 😡

My first internship was unpaid. "For the experience" and shit. My first task was to clear out an entire office full to the literal ceiling with the phones of people who had been laid off or quit. There were now just three old guys in the entire office. And me. Go figure. I need to find that picture, it's truly unbelievable.
My next task was to sort cables in the store room. Mind you, this was supposed to be a software dev internship.

I consistently had to ASK for work to do. If I didn't, I would just sit in my new office all day doing homework and playing with linux liveCDs and nobody cared.

So the third task they gave me was to try to restore a very old (like XP old) computer that had a broken hard drive, literally broken. Said they wanted to "repurpose it." As busy work I guess.

So I scrounged around the cleptomaniacal cesspool of dated and neglected tech and found a hard drive. Pop it in, chkdsk, fdisk, good to go. Spend hours installing XP while sorting more random cables and doing my homework because honestly writing a history paper is more valuable to my dev career than this complete bullshit. Finally get the thing working and go to report the miracle of rebirth to my higher-up. He says "oh cool," doesn't smile, and hands me a list of software to install.

I come back 20 minutes later - "Hey, most of these require corporate licenses."

Guy says "yup" and goes back to ignoring me. Never gives me a company card to buy licenses, or a list of ones already bought. I've revived the computer equivalent of Moses from the computer equivalent of permadeath just for this asshole to completely disregard that and give me an(other) impossible task, just to get me off his back. Excuse me for imposing with free (then-child) labor, you ass.
I spend maybe another week there doing homework in the office I cleaned and contemplating stealing everything of value. I guarantee they wouldn't have noticed though, which somehow made the idea less appealing.

I quit by texting my boss.

He never replied.

I wish I had stolen their laptop RAM.
It's probably still sitting on boss's shelf collecting dust and being a miserable, outdated fucking waste of space, just like him and his two remaining coworkers.

Sick.
Worst sleep of my life last night.
Freezing cold, weak, sore, can’t think, starving but can’t eat or drink, as low energy as a dead Chinese “heavy duty” battery.

Finished some changes to my feature today anyway; everything should be done now. Refactored some specs, and got them all to pass.

Falling asleep on my closet floor. Heavy winter coat, fuzzy pants, space heater. It’s warm in here and there’s a shelf for my lappy. Floor is uncomfortable but idc. I’m so tired and out of it I don’t even notice.

This sucks.

At least I have the rest of the week off.

1. Being the only single wringable neck to keep 40+ websites afloat, plus 3-5 new ones coming in or being built each month all with an overseas team that uses Google Translate to communicate and who are also in an active war zone.
2. Being fired for being “too old” in my mindset about how to do things. I had just turned 40 and my boss was 24 and distracted by all the shiny frameworks when all the marketing person needed was a simple off-the-shelf CMS-based site to publish company offers.
3. Jumping into the middle of a HUGE clusterfuck of thousands of Slack channels, wikis, and Jiras and an outmoded content management system while trying to learn the ropes from a guy who has no time to teach properly and then who abruptly leaves the company with scant documentation on everything that he held mainly in his own head. And there was no way I.T. was going to allow him to have the ability in Zoom to make a video of his training sessions, for no discernibly good security reason at all.
4. Working for only 9 months at two separate companies for two separate frat dudes who could have been clones of each other and whose egos made them into seagull managers* in every sense.
5. Being told by a new employer that they’re hiring me to be the head of their new web team only to find myself shuttled off to obscure contractor roles at MegaCorp Inc and AcmeCorp Inc.

I have 17 more years of this shit ahead of me before I can retire.

*If you haven’t heard of this: Someone who flies in, makes a lot of noise, shits all over everything, and flies out leaving everyone else to clean up the mess.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I'll admit - I come from a WordPress background of almost 9 years in the making. I guess I can justify it because of all of the sites I created using it, it was the best that it could be on WP. Fast, efficient, custom - none of that off-the-shelf themeforest crap. I created everything custom. I actually knew what was going on behind the scenes of WP.

And then a buddy of mine and I had an idea for a new company/software project. I was smart enough to know that WP was not the foundation for this, so I did some NodeJS/Express tutorials. Started learning React, and really getting into the Javascript world.

And now I'm wondering WHY IN THE ABSOLUTE FUCK I ever bothered trying to become an expert in WP. It's the largest use of PHP in the fucking world and it doesn't even have native composer support. And by the time you actually get your project set up using composer you have to add a fucking mirror of the wordpress.org plugin repo to get anything to work. It's 2018 and you'd think that WP and composer would have all of this shit figured out by now.

And don't get me started on git - as soon as you have more than 1 person working on a WP site, I hope you have hourly backups of your DB because someones work will get overwritten. So you all either need to work on the same staging area of work around each other by pushing/pulling the DB and schedule your workflows.

I guess WP CLI and the REST API are a step in the right direction, but the foundation of everything is just so fucked up.

I don't feel like I've wasted my web dev career, but I definitely wish I had started down this path a lot earlier. I guess you don't know what you don't know. Thanks for reading!

I'm an embedded devices dev. As part of my job I take off the shelf devices and write libraries so that our JavaScript team can interface with them. If I have to deal with one more custom implementation of a standard protocol I'm going to freak the fuck out. Like fuck there are only 5 or so major communication protocols at the hardware level there is no fucking reason to reinvent some shittier protocol over a well documented, widely used protocol that has been around for 30 years. (Modbus for anyone who cares)

It’s so great to hear Apple is finally officially making the transition to rolling out their own silicon on everything... fucken fabulous. Sure there may be problems at first but this might just get the ball rolling to get more companies todo the same... we need to eliminate the silicon monopolies... ARM and rolling your own is the future... well it always use to be the standard... back in the day, until the whole modularity and lean manufacturing and order off the shelf shit came about .... but finally we have once again come full circle back to where things use to be.... pairing hardware with software fucken beautiful LOVE IT!!!

Sure this will affect portability but .... guess what folks... means more jobs for us... quit being lazy and complaining about having to work..

Love vertical integration!!!!

Story time:

I worked at a firm that had an infernal off the shelf CRM system that they collaborated with the dev company to customise.

They were seriously behind the competition, and didn’t have any app or web presence for interacting with their system, instead relying on people calling (fine for the nature of the business, but competition was leaving them in the dust).

They decided that they needed to redevelop it in-house, with a focus on supporting the web and apps.

I was hired for this purpose.

It was me and one other dev, who was also the head of IT.

He’d built a small prototype, and was new to the whole WPF / MVVM thing for the in-house app, so with my previous experience it was clear it needed to serve as an example only, and that it would need redeveloping.

I was only there three months.

In that time I singularly (he was pulled away to troubleshoot their VOIP installation - yes, for three months as other companies kept dropping the ball) built:

- A WebAPI with JWT auth
- An MVC skeleton frontend
- A WPF desktop app

It had all sorts of cool shit in it, 2FA, Reactive UI, Reactive extensions, server push to desktop, a custom workflow and permissions system.

It was pretty dang cool.

End of the three months rolled around, and the non-technical managers were concerned about time to market, so they decided to drop me as I’d “not made enough progress”.

I’d also had a bit of absence which they were aware of and were supposedly supporting me through.

But MFW three months is assumed to be enough time to build such a system with one dev.

So a few months ago, I got a half-broken old iPhone (microphone, speaker and cameras not working) for testing purposes and it lays 99.9% of the time on my shelf turned off. Today, I turned it on and after I opened Safari, I surprised in not exactly the most pleasant way.
When I started writing in the address bar a strange suggestion from Siri came up for a website my mom searched a few hours ago on her android tablet. Like what the actual fuck?? There is absolutely 0 connection between these 2 devices, there is PiHole running on local network. The only thing that I can think of is that she is using Google (logged out) and it looks like they are actively sharing their data based on IP addresses. Wow...

My boss has told me he now doesn’t think we can afford the new property management system we desperately need to do most of the projects this year.

He has now suggested that I build a new one for the company to use from scratch. Oh and in the same timeline as buying an off the shelf product.

😒

When someone says:

"<insert_off_the_shelf_product_name> does it out the box"

When your teams lead developer still uses unsecured FTP to deploy websites, does not use git or svn and would rather build their own cms than use an off the shelf product.. I can't help but learn bad practice's as a junior!

There's this tech-wannabe guy who sends me random electronic related questions at the middle of the night. I don't have a gosh darn clue about what's he even up to.
He takes a muzzy photo of his computer screen, not a proper screenshot, and asks for "Will this schematic work if I leave this and that part off of it? Cuz I don't currently have those at my shelf."

Same for sharing a link, take a photo of it.

About a month ago I sorted out some old electronic stuff and found my old laptop from 2011. A 2:nd Gen i7 8gb ram. I replaced it due to several bluescreens a day that later turned out to be caused by a faulty RAM module (was 16Gb back then).
Well, back then it became a backup laptop and went on the shelf and almost forgotten.

I went through all the old files on it and copied them to the NAS, replaced the mechanic drive with cheep SSD.
Used the old Win7 license key to upgrade to win 10 , dust off the fan, and it turned out to be usable.

I have much better computers so I would not use it for anything but today I gave it to my 6 year old nephew so he can start using a computer and build his knowledge. Worse case; If he spills soda on it he'll learn not to do that with the more expensive computers he will use in future.
So win win. I got to get rid of some junk that had been gathering dust for many years by giving my nephew an opportunity to get started with computers.

Finally, the timing: Microsoft announced a few days back that any new upgrade from windows 7&8 to 10 is no longer supported, but that computer still has a valid win 10 license as it was updated a month ago.

What's the most efficient motor driver for a small DC motor that I want to run off a 5V source for aurdino?

I previously had a L293D and it was inefficient as fuck, it got so hot that almost burnt my finger, (ran it from a 12V supply) and it dropped a good 2 volts from power supply to motor.

Is there a good enough off the shelf driver or do I have to make a H-bridge myself using MOFSETs?

Tl;Dr: Client has no idea how much development costs

(Un)potential client has been asking to develop an AV solution for Android phones to sell on the play store. Problem is I know they're cheap fucks and won't pay for a proper development cycle. Just for an exercise I put together the minimum cost they are looking at if they cut back on a lot of things and purchase lots of things off the shelf and gave them a bare minimum cost of £4350. Which is utterly fucking ridiculous to think you could develop something even half decent for that. I mean we all know that AV is a bit of a joke for any serious threat, it just protects from the billions of pests in cyberspace, but I mean come on.

Anyway, they are freaking out because apparently that's a lot. Out of interest, what would be your ballpark figures for this.

Story of my first successful project

Being part of a great team, I've shared in a lot of successes, one I am particularly proud of is my first attempt to use agile methodologies in a deeply waterfall-managment culture.

Time was June/July-ish and we applied for a national quality award where one key element in the application stated how well we handled customer complaint resolution.
While somewhat true (our customer service is the top-shelf good stuff), we did not have a systematic process in resolving customer complaints. Long story short,
the VP lied on her section of the application. Then came the 'emergency', borderline panic meeting (several VPs, managers, etc) to develop a process to better manage
complaints before the in-house inspection in December.
As most top priority projects go, the dev manager allocated 3 developers, 2 DBAs, and any/all network admins we would need (plus all the bureaucratic management that wanted their thumb in the pie).
Fast forward to August, after many, many planning meetings, lost interest, new shiny bouncing balls, I was the only one left on the project. The VP runs into the dev manager in the hallway and asks "Is my program done yet? If its not ready before December with report-able data, we will not win the award."
The <bleep> hit the fan...dev manager comes by...
Frank: "How the application coming along? Almost done?"
Me:"No, haven't really started coding. You moved Jake and Tom over to James's team, Tina quit, and you've had me sidetracked helping other teams because the DBAs are too busy."
Frank: "So, it's excuses. You really think the national quality award auditors care about your excuses? The specification design document has been done for months. This is unacceptable."
Me: "The VP finished up her section yesterday and according to the process, we can't start coding until the document is signed off."
Frank: "Holy f<bleep>ing sh<bleep>t! No one told you *you* couldn't start. You know how to create tables and write code."
Me: "There is no specification to write to. The design document is all about how they plan on reporting the data, not how call agents will be using the application to serve customers."
Frank: "The f<bleep> it isn't. F<bleep>ing monkeys could code against that specification, I helped write it! NO MORE F<bleep>ING EXCUSES! This is your top priority from now on!"

I was 'cleared' to work directly with the call center manager and the VP to develop a fully integrated customer complaint management system before December (by-passing any of the waterfall processes that would get in the way).

I had heard about this 'agile' stuff, attended a few conference tracks on the subject, read the manifesto, and thought "I could do this.".

Over the next month, I had my own 'sprints' and 'scrums' with the manager (at the time, 'agile' was a dirty word so I had to be careful of my words and what info I shared) and by the 2nd iteration had a working prototype.
Feature here, feature there (documenting the 'whys' and 'whats' along the way), and by October, had a full deployed application.

Not thinking I would get a parade or anything, the dev manager came back from a meeting where the VP was showing off the new app to the other VPs (and how she didn't really 'lie' on the application)

Frank: "Everyone is pleased how well the project turned out, except one thing. Erin said you bothered him too much with too many questions."
Me: "Bothered? Did he really say that?"
Frank: "No, not directly, but he said you would stop by his office every day to show him your progress and if he needed you to change anything. You shouldn't have done that."
Me: "Erin really seemed to like the continuous feedback. What we have now is very different than what we started with."
Frank: "Yes, probably because you kept bothering him and not following the specification document. That is why we spend so much time up front in design is so we don't waste management's time, which is exactly what you did."
Me: "We beat the deadline by two months, so I don't think I wasted anyone's time. In fact, this is kind of a big win for us, right?"
Frank: "Not really. There was breakdown in the process. We need better focus on the process, not in these one-hit-wonders."

End the end, the company won the award (mgmt team got to meet the vice president, yes the #2 guy). I know I played a very small, somewhat insignificant role in that victory, I was extremely proud to be part of the team.

So the curriculum director is sad that she can't query lecture objectives that nobody ever entered out of our homegrown database, so she's insisting on buying an expensive off the shelf system, I guess expecting these data to magically be available once it's in place.

This also means I'll have to rewrite the API I've been developing for the past year that powers most of the curriculum resources.

Why can't everyone just know how databases work?

High school, prepping to go to class, I take a book that I needed for class, while picking it up from the book shelf the latin vocabulary fell and landed on my hard drive which was on top of my MacBook, two birds with one stone :(
I now have three different external hard drives and planning to get an off-site solution as well.

I’m really getting fed up with the situation I am in!

I was brought in as a development lead, which in my eyes and from the sound of it leading on the technical delivery, inspiring and leading technical development decisions and generally leading my team (one additional dev) in the delivery of work items and user stories which the PM or Business analyst produces..

Then it “evolved” into what felt more like a development manager where I was reporting to senior management on KPIs and stuff, I sucked it up and did it.

Then they brought in two new people which they call application specialists. These people spend all their time managing existing off the shelf applications, communicating with the vendor, running user groups where they work with our users on moving the product forward and planning the configuration and enablement of new functionality.

Because they are “developing” the application (in the same way a child develops, or the same way a story line develops and evolves) they fall under me..

So now I spend a split amount of time developing software and also managing what I can only explain as project managers, product owners...

Oh but then it gets better!! Now they want me(as well as our info sec lead and our infrastructure lead) to be a kind of all round delivery lead, gauging the requirements of a project, reporting in its risks to senior management, resource planning, everything a PM does! And also be the technical person delivering these projects!

Honestly, it’s seriously starting to take the fucking piss!

I am a technical programmer, a pretty good one if I say so myself, the developer reporting to me is good but needs hand holding which I am ok with! But would never be able to deliver an element of a product by himself in line with what we expect in quality of code..

Why would anyone think you take a person built and only interested in doing a technical role and make then a generic all round manager of a project??

I know why they did it! It’s because there are other managers in our department paid the same “level” as me, but because of their management responsibility’s , I however feel I am paid this much for my technical experience and abilities, thy are just blanket covering everyone the same at this level.

You would never get a manager at this salary scale with the technical skills they need, and you would never get a technical person with the skills interested in doing that type of management at this salary scale!

I’m just a mug and they know it!

So fucking angry!

Random question to everyone out there:
Do you guys use a specific keyboard?
As in a mechanical or just the off the shelf keyboard? Do you invest in ergonomic ones or not?

I ask because I've been looking at ortholinear keyboards and was wondering if they work or if they're even worth it.

Went to order a new laptop for work today, so I can stop using my own. The one we usually get is no longer configurable, and instead is just "buy it off the shelf". Thanks Lenovo. Always wanted 4gb of ram.

Know the basics of the tech, don't just dive in with some off the shelf blackbox buzzword then find yourself crippled when you need to debug it going wrong

- I love blowing my mind. Even if it is the most confusing thing. Things like security mechanisms, neurons' behaviors, mathematics (even tho I hate it when I fail lol), electronics, medical terminology and chemistry.
- I love collecting rare coins, personally never-seen stones and put them into my collection. I love to be a designer. Not only on my laptop. I have a book shelf and within that book shelf I put stones that create the yin yang sign while pushing the books to two sides. That makes them look like they are levitating. I have stones (including obsidian) that create a triangle and a knife hanging down the wall of my room.
- I love visiting touristic, historic, naturally-beautiful but also non-touristic (non-touristic? yes. by that I mean visiting e.g. the areas of touristic cities which are dangerous, because you can easily fall down off of a slippery ground and take serious injuries) places around the globe, talk to complete strangers in public (I am trying to be an extrovert), take pictures with my camera and collecting antiquities.
- I love taking risks (no. I don't play any poker games etc on the internet) without trying to put other people in risk. Driving insanely with whatever I have. Car, bike, you name it.
- I love reading books. Books that are about human psychology, fantasy novels and books about programming languages.
- I love to cook (I am at the beginning).
- I love to use the konMari method of tidying up my room.
- I love plants.
- I love having everything in my room tidied up (even if I am too busy with other stuff and skip this cleaning process for a week upto a month sometimes. Sorry, room.).
- I love doing sports. But mostly sport that I have never tried before. This can be, because of my greedy wish for an adrenaline kick. That led me into taking a balloon flight at 4 am (sunrise) and to paragliding at sunset above Mediterranean sea btw. (I am normally afraid of flying, but paragliding was awesome).
- I love swimming. Like, you cannot pull me out of the sea for a minimum of 2 hours, if it is not important.
- I love laying above the sea water and let the sea carry me to somewhere else.
- I love being alone. I love the silence. I love to be free in my thoughts.
- I love watching the sunset, the light that shines through the forest, the moonlight and the stars at night.
- I love dreaming. No, like, lucid dreaming for example.
- I love being open to any opinions.
- I love to learn about other people's views about the world and their religion.
- I love pets and would do anything to keep them alive when they are ill. It hurts my heart seeing them like this.
- I love watching demonic "A: Holy shit! Did you see this thing, too?! B: Yes!" YouTube videos just for the fun of it, but I hate horror movies and games.
- I love trying out new things. The creation of music and video for example.
- I love to give my hair and beard a shape, if I am too lazy to go to the barbershop lol. By that I don't mean just going to the barbershop, but taking an electric razor and cutting my hair myself even if I get bad results from time to time that can be corrected by letting any family member tell me in which area of of my head the hair problem is.
- I don't like disco clubs.
- I don't like toxic people even though I can be a quite toxic person myself without realizing it. If I appear toxic to you, inform me about it. Having so much testosterone in that moment, can make me do things that I don't want to do.
- I don't like drugs even tho I have to admit that I am trying a few from time to time (maybe 6 months in-between) to have a dopamine kick. I am not an addict.
- I hate myself for things that I did in the past.
- I used to watch MMA videos etc.
- I used to use a telescope, but I can't find it anymore.
- I used to have a microscope, but I can't find it anywhere and besides of that the seller did literally piss in it before selling it to me many years ago. Don't want to touch it tbh.
- I used to play games, but I don't enjoy games anymore. That makes me feel sad.
- I miss the old moments of my life.

In conclusion:
I like how things went and go so far. It changed me so much. It made me a good and a bad person. I became more open and confident, but it also particularly made me a leader who can say "fuck off" in a bad way to his family. I would like to undo this particular part of me.

Which is better, creating a platform from scratch or extending an off the shelf base product?

I was tasked with reviving this mobile app purchased off the shelf. Initially, I was impressed with what I was seeing while perusing the codebase. I'm used to editing laravel projects written by handpicked amateurs. So this felt like a breath of fresh air. Coupled with the fact that I'd recently enquired on this very platform whether anyone has chanced upon an impressive code. All is going well, until

I start finding the multi layers of abstraction and indirection cryptic and obfuscatory; and that is coming from an idealist like me who advocates for "clean" patterns such as event emission. I wonder whether it would have helped if the emission or events were typed for easy listener tracking, instead of a black hole like vm.notifyListeners() (DOESN'T EVEN HAVE AN EVENT NAME!)

With time, I become disgusted by the tons of custom elements with so many parents

My take on production level user of the view model pattern: amazing in theory

One of the architectural decisions made on this project that had me foaming in the mouth, pulling my hair and cursing out the author's generations, past, present and future: can you believe these guys are APPENDING IMAGE DOMAINS TO THE RESOURCE? Ie the domain names are tightly coupled to the images and dictated by the api, instead of the client

If this isn't bad enough, the field names of returned entities/models don't exist on the database, of course because the stupid laravel framework abets this sort of madness by combining eloquent "scopes, attributes, and appends". A trifecta of horrors.

I eventual scaled through the horrors, but not without losing my admiration for the team behind it. App has returned to the shelves, because my company lost patience with my resuscitating it. They have the regular api authentication in place, but that's not good enough. They just had to integrate firebase as well, just because. Meanwhile, this isn't documented anywhere. I stumbled into it during my scuffle with app setup, gradle ish. Eventually got banned by firebase for "sending unusual requests". My company's last straw

The timelines at my workplace are too short that it's impossible to actually build anything or observe procedures like testing, software techniques for maintaining oop code, telemetry and other things I may have learnt along the way

So application templates are the order of the day. They pull solutions off the shelf, edit the interface, hand over to clients at an alarming rate (sometimes, within a matter of days!). So yesterday, the cto asked for ways I can recommend that the team is made more efficient. He takes what I say very seriously, owing to Suphle's appendix chapter as well as the issues its blueprint set out to solve

Like I said, those do not apply here. I mean, the developers I've met are making do and winging it. I'm the one struggling to adapt to rummaging through templates and customise shit

Maybe I'm over thinking it cuz there's no sense in fixing something that's not broken. So far, only flaw I've observed (because the product designer has complained to me bitterly that the devs hardly ever translates his prototypes verbatim), is the need for a dedicated mobile developer (not that multifunctional, confused portfolio called "fullstack). But I didn't raise this since the time frames hardly even afford time for writing apis or writing mobile code. You'd be surprised to realise that everything a client can possibly ask for is already somewhere, built at a higher standard than you can replicate

My question now is, what other positive novelty can I bring aboard? How can this process be further optimised? If it can't, what suggestions outside regular software development or this work flow can I bring to the table?

Personally, I'm considering asking him to tell me bottlenecks if he has identified any. But it's very likely that he would already have begun working towards it if he knew them. I suspect he needs someone outside the system to see what is lacking or a new addition that could even be a distant, outlandish branch of the tech market, but drive the company towards more profit