You know what?

Young cocky React devs can suck my old fuckin LAMP and Objective-C balls.

Got a new freelance job and got brought in to triage a React Native iOS/Android app. Lead dev's first comment to me is: "Bro, have you ever used React Native".

To which I had to reply to save my honor publicly, "No, but I have like 8 years with Objective-C and 3 years with Swift, and 3 years with Node, so I maybe I'll still be able help. Sometimes it just helps to have a fresh set of eyes."

"Well, nobody but me can work on this code."

And that, as it turned out was almost true.

After going back and forth with our PM and this dev I finally get his code base.

"Just run "npm install" he says".

Like no fuckin shit junior... lets see if that will actually work.

Node 14... nope whole project dies.

Node 12 LTS... nope whole project dies.

Install all of react native globally because fuck it, try again... still dies.

Node 10 LTS... project installs but still won't run or build complaining about some conflict with React Native libraries and Cocoa pods.

Go back to my PM... "Um, this project won't work on any version of Node newer than about 5 years old... and even if it did it still won't build, and even if it would build it still runs like shit. And even if we fix all of that Apple might still tell us to fuck off because it's React Native.

Spend like a week in npm and node hell just trying to fucking hand install enough dependencies to unfuck this turds project.

All the while the original dev is still trying TO FIX HIS OWN FUCKING CODE while also being a cocky ass the entire time. Now, I can appreciate a cocky dev... I was horrendously cocky in my younger days and have only gotten marginally better with age. But if you're gonna be cocky, you also have to be good at it. And this guy was not.

Lo, we're not done. OG Dev comes down with "Corona Virus"... I put this in quotes because the dude ends up drawing out his "virus" for over 4 months before finally putting us in touch with "another dev team he sometimes uses".

Next, me and my PM get on a MS Teams call with this Indian house. No problems there, I've worked with the Indians before... but... these are guys are not good. They're talking about how they've already built the iOS build... but then I ask them what they did to sort out the ReactNative/Cocoa Pods conflict and they have no idea what I'm talking about.

Why?

Well, one of these suckers sends a link to some repo and I find out why. When he sends the link it exposes his email...

This Indian dude's emails was our-devs-name@gmail.com...

We'd been played.

Company sued the shit out of the OG dev and the Indian company he was selling off his work to.

I rewrote the app in Swift.

So, lets review... the React dev fucked up his own project so bad even he couldn't fix it... had to get a team of Indians to help who also couldn't fix it... was still a dickhead to me when I couldn't fix it... and in the end it was all so broken we had to just do a rewrite.

None of you get npm. None of you get React. None of you get that doing the web the way Mark Zucherberg does it just makes you a choad locked into that ecosystem. None of you can fix your own damn projects when one of the 6,000 dependency developers pushes breaking changes. None of you ever even bother with "npm audit fix" because if security was a concern you'd be using a server side language for fucking server side programming like a grown up.

So, next time a senior dev with 20 years exp. gets brought in to help triage a project that you yourself fucked up... Remember that the new thing you know and think makes you cool? It's not new and it's not cool. It's just JavaScript on the server so you script kiddies never have to learn anything but JavaScript... which makes you inarguably worse programmers.

And, MF, I was literally writing javascript while you were sucking your mommas titties so just chill... this shit ain't new and I've got a dozen of my own Node daemons running right now... difference is?

Mine are still working.

"You mean to tell me that you deleted the class that holds all our labels and spin boxes together?" I said exasperatedly.

~Record scratch.mp3

~Freeze frame.mp4

"You're probably wondering how we got to this stage? Let's wind back a little, shall we?"

~reverseRecordSound.wav

A light tapping was heard at the entrance of my office. 

"Oh hey [Boss] how are you doing?" I said politely

"Do you want to talk here, or do you want to talk in my office? I don't have anyone in my office right now, so..."

"Ok, we can go to your office," I said.

We walked momentarily, my eyes following the newly placed carpeting. 

Some words were shared, but nothing that seemed mildly important. Just necessary things to say. Platitudes, I supposed you could call them.

We get to his office, it was wider now because of some missing furniture. I quickly grab a seat.

"So tell me what you've been working on," I said politely.

"I just finished up on our [project] that required proper saving and restoring."

"Great! How did you pull it off?" I asked excitedly. 

He starts to explain to me what he did, and even opens up the UI to display the changes working correctly.

"That's pretty cool," admiring his work.

"But what's going on here? It looks like you deleted my class." I said, looking at his code.

"Oh, yeah, that. It looked like spaghetti code so I deleted it. It seemed really bulky and unnecessary for what we were doing."

"Wait, hold on," I said wildly surprised that he thought that a class with some simple setters and getters was spaghetti code.

"You mean to tell me that you deleted the class that organizes all our labels and spin boxes together?" I said exasperatedly.

"Yeah! I put everything in a list of lists."

"What, that's not efficient at all!" I exclaimed

"Well, I mean look at what you were doing here,"  he said, as he displays to me my old code. 

"What's confusing about that?" I asked politely, but a little unnerved that he did something like this.

"Well I mean look at this," he said, now showing his "improved" code. 

"We don't have that huge block of code (referring to my class) anymore filling up the file." He said almost a little too joyously. 

"Ok, hold on," I said to him, waving my hand. "Go back to my code and I can show you how it is working. Here we are getting all the labels and spin boxes into their own objects." I said pointing a little further down in the code. "Down here we are returning the spin boxes we want to work with. Here and here, are setters so we can set maximum and minimum values for the spin box."

"Oh... I guess that's not that complicated. but still, that doesn't seem like really good bookkeeping." He said. 

"Well, there are some people that would argue with you on that," I said, thinking about devRant.

He quickly switches back to his code and shows me what he did. "Look, here." He said pointing to his list of lists. "We have our spin boxes and labels all called and accounted for. And further down we can use a for loop to parse through them."

He then drags both our version of the code and shows the differences. I pause him for a moment

"Hold on, you mean you think this" I'm now pointing at my setters "is more spaghetti than this" I'm now pointing at his list of lists.

"I mean yeah, it makes more sense to me to do it this way for the sake of bookkeeping because I don't understand your Object Oriented Programming stuff."

...

After some time of going back and forth on this, he finally said to me.
"It doesn't matter, this is my project."

Honestly, I was a little heart broken, because it may be his project but part of me is still in there. Part of my effort in making it the best it can be is in there.

I'm sorry, but it's just as much my project as it is yours.

Hello {Project}, my old friend. I've come to debug you again
Because the scope is softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was developing
And the misery that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence...

In restless dreams I debugged alone
Narrow file of cobbled code
‘Neath the halo of a desk lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of git checkin
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand bugs and maybe more
People coding without asking
People coding without listening
People writing code that they never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

Fools, said I, you do not know
{Project} like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you
But my words, like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence.

And the people bowed and prayed
To the kludgy app they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sounds of silence

This rant is a confession I had to make, for all of you out there having a bad time (or year), this story is for you.

Last year, I joined devRant and after a month, I was hired at a local company as an IT god (just joking but not far from what they expected from me), developer, web admin, printer configurator (of course) and all that in my country it's just called "the tech guy", as some of you may know.

I wasn't in immediate need for a full-time job, I had already started to work as a freelancer then and I was doing pretty good. But, you know how it goes, you can always aim for more and that's what I did.

The workspace was the usual, two rooms, one for us employees and one for the bosses (there were two bosses).

Let me tell you right now. I don't hate people, even if I get mad or irritated, I never feel hatred inside me or the need to think bad of someone. But, one of the two bosses made me discover that feeling of hate.

He had a snake-shaped face (I don't think that was random), and he always laughed at his jokes. He was always shouting at me because he was a nervous person, more than normal. He had a tone in his voice like he knew everything. Early on, after being yelled for no reason a dozen of times, I decided that this was not a place for me.

After just two months of doing everything, from tech support to Photoshop and to building websites with WordPress, I gave my one month's notice, or so I thought. I was confronted by the bosses, one of which was a cousin of mine and he was really ok with me leaving and said that I just had to find a person to replace me which was an easy task. Now, the other boss, the evil one, looked me on the eye and said "you're not going anywhere".

I was frozen like, "I can't stay here". He smiled like a snake he was and said "come on, you got this we are counting on you and we are really satisfied with how you are performing till now". I couldn't shake him, I was already sweating. He was rolling his eyes constantly like saying "ok, you are wasting my time now" and left to go to some basketball practice or something.

So, I was stuck there, I could have caused a scene but as I told you, one of the bosses was a cousin of mine, I couldn't do anything crazy. So, I went along with it. Until the next downfall.

I decided to focus on the job and not mind for the bad boss situation but things went really wrong. After a month, I realised that the previous "tech guy" had left me with around 20 ancient Joomla - version 1.0 websites, bursting with security holes and infested with malware like a swamp. I had never seen anything like it. Everyday the websites would become defaced or the server (VPN) would start sending tons of spam cause of the malware, and going offline at the end. I was feeling hopeless.

And then the personal destruction began. I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. I was having panick attacks at the office's bathroom. My girlfriend almost broke up with me because I was acting like an asshole due to my anxiety issues (but in the end she was the one to "bring me back"(man, she is a keeper)) and I hadn't put a smile on my face for months. I was on the brink of depression, if not already there. Everyday I would anxiously check if the server is running because I would be the one to blame, even though I was trying to talk to the boss (the bad one was in charge of the IT department) and tell him about the problem.

And then I snapped. I finally realised that I had hit rock bottom. I said "I can't let this happen to me" and I took a deep breath. I still remember that morning, it was a life-changing moment for me. I decided to bite the bullet and stay for one more month, dealing with the stupid old server and the low intelligence business environment. So, I woke up, kissed my girlfriend (now wife), took the bus and went straight to work, and I went into the boss's office. I lied that I had found another job on another city and I had one month in order to be there on time. He was like, "so you are leaving? Is it that good a job the one you found? And when are you going? And are you sure?", and with no hesitation I just said "yup". He didn't expect it and just said "ok then", just find your replacement and you're good to go. I found the guy that would replace me, informing him of every little detail of what's going on (and I recently found out, that he is currently working for some big company nowadays, I'm really glad for him!).

I was surprised that it went so smoothly, one month later I felt the taste of freedom again, away from all the bullshit. Totally one of the best feelings out there.

I don't want to be cliche, but do believe in yourself people! Things are not what the seem.

With all that said, I want to give my special thanks to devRant for making this platform. I was inactive for some time but I was reading rants and jokes. It helped me to get through all that. I'm back now! Bless you devRant!

I'm glad that I shared this story with all of you, have an awesome day!

After months and months of unrealistic deadlines, pulling late night shifts coupled with an insane commute and two very small children at home I had a total burnout. Turned up to work one morning, and stared at the Java code I had been writing for the past couple of days and it might as well have been written in Martian. The more I stared, and the more I tried to keep things together internally the less I was able to make sense of anything - just a random jumble of characters on screen that were as intelligible as the green scrolling lines from The Matrix.

My office manager saw that I was obviously in some distress and took me into a meeting room to have a quick chat - and there I was, a grown man of 35 bawling my eyes out like a two year old. Not the most edifying moment of my life.

However, the company couldn't have been more supportive afterwards; one of my colleagues drove the 100 miles to get me home in my car and took a train back up to the office; my GP signed me off work for six months and treated me for severe depression; the office instituted stricter working policies - not on the developers, but the sales/PM teams that were handing down ridiculous timescales simply so they could get a sale.

For my part, I've learnt to push back and say "NO!" - work is not your life, it's an important part of your life, but my no means everything. Don't feel beholden to a company to meet unrealistic targets that you haven't agreed to. Talk.

TABLE BASED WEB DESIGN

I was surprised there were no rants about this topic before I realized it was more than a decade back 😳

We've never had it better! So to help add a little perspective for all those ranting about what is unarguably the golden age for web developers... let me fill you in on web dev in the late 90's;

JavaScript was a joke. No seriously! - I once got laughed out of the room for suggesting we try use it for more than disabling a button - (I wanted to check out the new XHR request thingy [read AJAX]).

HTML was simple and purely a markup language (with the exception of the marquee tag). The tags were basically just p,ul,ol,h*,form inputs,img and table and html took 10 minutes to learn. Any style was inline and equally crude - anything that wasn't crude could not be trusted and probably wouldn't render at all in most browsers (never mind render correctly).

There were rumors of a style TAG and something called a cascading style sheet which were received with much skepticism since it went against the old ways and any time saved would be lost writing multiple [IE version specific] style sheets for each browser just to get it to work - so we simply didn't.

No CSS meant the only tags you had to work with to create a structured layout were br, hr and table... so naturally EVERYTHING was in nested tables! JS callback hell can't touch this! - it was not uncommon to have 50+ nested tables all with inline style in a single page which would be edited without any dev tools or linting.

You would spend 30 minutes scanning td tags until your eyes bled to find something, make a change, ftp the file to the server, reload the web page and then spend 10 minutes staring at the devastation on your screen convinced you broke
the internet before spotting an un-closed td tag with your bloodshot eyes.

Tables were not just a silver bullet - they were the ONLY bullet and were in the wild west!

Q: Want an inline form or to align your inputs left?
A: Duh table!

Q: Want a border with round-corners, a shadow or blur?
A: That's easy! Your gonna want to put that table in the center cell of another table then crop a image of the border into 6 smaller images to put in the surrounding cells... oh and then spend 10 minutes fucking with mystical attributes like cell-padding and valign to get them flush.

...But hey at least on the bright-side vertically & horizontally centering stuff was a breeze!

I am amazed. I witnessed (mostly heard) a 14 year old girl calm down a young adult female suffering an anxiety attack before I managed to push through people on the tram. She told her to close her eyes, breath, tell her what she smells, then open her eyes, name first thing that she sees, then look left, name first thing, etc.

This is called sensory grounding and it works. And yeah, what she did was pretty awesome but this isn't what amazed me the most. I asked where she learned that and she said "from a game about apes". And I knew exactly which game she meant. There's a title called Ancestors: The Humankind Odyssey and among many interesting mechanics there's one that puts the player in a state of anxiety when they venture into an unknown territory. The way to win that part is by analyzing surroundings by vision, hearing and the sense of smell before a panic countdown goes to zero. It's called "conquering your fear". Holly fuck, I played that and I didn't connect the dots. Are games nowadays teaching kids how to handle real life crisis? Where were those games when I was a kid??

My company wants to start using Node.JS.

JavaScript.
They wanna use JavaScript.
For everything.

JAVASCRIPT.
FOR EVERYTHING.

Scene;

**Asshat enters break room after meeting**

**Asshat turns to Asshole**

Asshat: “Oh here in a year or two we’ll just be rewriting all of this is Node.JS.”

Asshole: “JavaScript. You’ll be rewriting it in JavaScript. And fucking WHY?”

Asshat: “It’s better”

Asshole: “It’s not really a general use language. Why wouldn’t you guys choose Python if you wanted to write EVERYTHING in a goddamn scripting language?”

Asshat: “Google uses Node.JS”

Asshole: “For back-end web development type stuff. I doubt their accounting systems are written in fucking JavaScript...”

Asshat: “Python is oooooold.”

Asshole (to himself): No you’re old, you stupid, ancient fuck.

**Asshole rolls his eyes and walks away**

**Asshat continues his ignorant chuckling**

End Scene;

Clearly years of fixed format RPG programming has killed too many of Asshat’s brain cells.

I grew up poor. First time I saw a computer face to face was when I was 11 years old. Back then any other references to computers came through media. I genuinely believed that hacking was as seen on TV, didn't even question 2 idiots 1 keyboard and thought it was genius to unplug a computer during "an attack"

Fact is I arrived in this country when I was 11. By the time I had my first laptop I was around 13-14, as you can imagine it went really poorly for someone who was just awarded a machine of never-ending stories and entertainment with absolute fear that a single mistake can cause everything to crash and burn. Heck, I remember when I went to Vodafone and someone recommended Firefox, it was such a novelty back then, heh.

I didn't understand computers. My IT lessons were replaced to work on my dialect, but truth be told it was an awful waste of time. I've learned more from forums than I ever learned from any English teacher. I just sat there twidling my thumbs in agitation.

With no concept of what IT industry entitles (my idea of programming was cubicles and call centres), I never had a slightest clue programming could be for me. I always thought of myself closer to engineering or physics type, but that never really drew my interests. So I dwelled in depression thinking I'm broken. Useless. That there was no calling for me.

I'm 22. For the past year I dipped in and out of programming, it still felt like such black magic.vLast month or so the spell dispelled and I finally feel like my eyes have been opened. I've spent the past 3 days sitting in front of my computer learning or actively programming, with occasional dips into DevRant reading your stories, frustrations and victories and I truly feel at home.

In retrospect I feel like I made the right decision for not chasing any mathematical/physics/engineering degrees, while certainly a goal of mine, I feel like I'd be miserable in those communities. They're closer to hobbies, really.

I guess what I wanted to say is thank you. Thank you DevRant for being the spark in my null future and giving me a sense of purpose and belonging. For the first time I feel like I can make it, like there was hope somewhere over the horizon.

!rant

Boss: ehi I was checking out our latest product (made in vuejs) it's blazing fast and responsive.

Me : shiny eyes "... Can I refactor our biggest project from angular 1.5 to vuejs?"

Boss: "mmh what can you save from the old code base? "

Me: "mmh.. A lot.. Mmh like.. The CSS!"

Boss : "no"

I hoped!

Keep this between us, but I got sexually assaulted in a work party by a very old guy who worked at the venue.

I didn't bring it up because a) I had already resigned from that company and was on my notice period, and b) I was going to leave the country in a few weeks and couldn't be arsed having to think about it on my vacation or even after.

Still pretty awkward with myself because after that, the very drunk me got emotionally unhinged, went outside and cried my eyes out for no reason. 😐
Like, it wasn't even the worst assault that has ever happened to me so what was the hysterical crying and panic about ffs?

Long rant ahead.. so feel free to refill your cup of coffee and have a seat 🙂

It's completely useless. At least in the school I went to, the teachers were worse than useless. It's a bit of an old story that I've told quite a few times already, but I had a dispute with said teachers at some point after which I wasn't able nor willing to fully do the classes anymore.

So, just to set the stage.. le me, die-hard Linux user, and reasonably initiated in networking and security already, to the point that I really only needed half an ear to follow along with the classes, while most of the time I was just working on my own servers to pass the time instead. I noticed that the Moodle website that the school was using to do a big chunk of the course material with, wasn't TLS-secured. So whenever the class begins and everyone logs in to the Moodle website..? Yeah.. it wouldn't be hard for anyone in that class to steal everyone else's credentials, including the teacher's (as they were using the same network).

So I brought it up a few times in the first year, teacher was like "yeah yeah we'll do it at some point". Shortly before summer break I took the security teacher aside after class and mentioned it another time - please please take the opportunity to do it during summer break.

Coming back in September.. nothing happened. Maybe I needed to bring in more evidence that this is a serious issue, so I asked the security teacher: can I make a proper PoC using my machines in my home network to steal the credentials of my own Moodle account and mail a screencast to you as a private disclosure? She said "yeah sure, that's fine".
Pro tip: make the people involved sign a written contract for this!!! It'll cover your ass when they decide to be dicks.. which spoiler alert, these teachers decided they wanted to be.

So I made the PoC, mailed it to them, yada yada yada... Soon after, next class, and I noticed that my VPN server was blocked. Now I used my personal VPN server at the time mostly to access a file server at home to securely fetch documents I needed in class, without having to carry an external hard drive with me all the time. However it was also used for gateway redirection (i.e. the main purpose of commercial VPN's, le new IP for "le onenumity"). I mean for example, if some douche in that class would've decided to ARP poison the network and steal credentials, my VPN connection would've prevented that.. it was a decent workaround. But now it's for some reason causing Moodle to throw some type of 403.

Asked the teacher for routers and switches I had a class from at the time.. why is my VPN server blocked? He replied with the statement that "yeah we blocked it because you can bypass the firewall with that and watch porn in class".
Alright, fair enough. I can indeed bypass the firewall with that. But watch porn.. in class? I mean I'm a bit of an exhibitionist too, but in a fucking class!? And why right after that PoC, while I've been using that VPN connection for over a year?

Not too long after that, I prematurely left that class out of sheer frustration (I remember browsing devRant with the intent to write about it while the teacher was watching 😂), and left while looking that teacher dead in the eyes.. and never have I been that cold to someone while calling them a fucking idiot.

Shortly after I've also received an email from them in which they stated that they wanted compensation for "the disruption of good service". They actually thought that I had hacked into their servers. Security teachers, ostensibly technical people, if I may add. Never seen anyone more incompetent than those 3 motherfuckers that plotted against me to save their own asses for making such a shitty infrastructure. Regarding that mail, I not so friendly replied to them that they could settle it in court if they wanted to.. but that I already knew who would win that case. Haven't heard of them since.

So yeah. That's why I regard those expensive shitty pieces of paper as such. The only thing they prove is that someone somewhere with some unknown degree of competence confirms that you know something. I think there's far too many unknowns in there.

Nowadays I'm putting my bets on a certification from the Linux Professional Institute - a renowned and well-regarded certification body in sysadmin. Last February at FOSDEM I did half of the LPIC-1 certification exam, next year I'll do the other half. With the amount of reputation the LPI has behind it, I believe that's a far better route to go with than some random school somewhere.

My vision has gotten so messed up, my reading glasses are now my distance glasses, and I need to wear them constantly until I get my bifocals.

It's only going to get worse with age in my chosen career... :(

- "no dad! this is my rubber duck. get your own" my daughter said.
okay.. she's 6 months old, so she can't really speak, but i could se it in her eyes.

Hello {Project}, my old friend. I've come to debug you again
Because the scope is softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was developing
And the misery that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence...

In restless dreams I debugged alone
Narrow file of cobbled code
‘Neath the halo of a desk lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of git checkin
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand bugs and maybe more
People coding without asking
People coding without listening
People writing code that they never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

Fools, said I, you do not know
{Project} like a cancer grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you
But my words, like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence.

And the people bowed and prayed
To the kludgy app they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sounds of silence

<-- Found in my documents, no clue where it's from

I helped a homeless man with a really bad foot condition down the stairs to get to the subway platform along with bringing down his wheelchair. Just his luck that the elevator was out of service. The man cried and said that he wished more people like me existed in the world but the world he knew was long gone from his grasp.

My problem with that situation was that people just ignored him and look disgusted at him....since when did we as humans lose faith in each other to the point that we ultimately care about differences, status, and appearance before anything else?

Such a sad fucking world we live in today and I had just learned that he used to be a programmer and worked at IBM back in the days (he had a really old decrepit badge too and we shared some programming woes before we got on separate trains).

Bless him and fuck everyone else who stood by and watched the poor man suffer. Those people are worse than shit, they are the scum of the Earth in my eyes.

!rant

*me trying to add one more field to a SQL request*
*asks coworker* Hey, do you know how I'd get this field? You have to go through 4 tables just to find it because of the way the tables are related.
*coworker looks for a bit* Oh. That's crazy. We should ask the DBA.
*we ask our 60 year old DBA for some help.*
He walks us through a minefield of inner and outer joins and selects and we finally arrive at a solution. Kudos to our DBA, who in the eyes of us young devs is a wizard.

While Apple is putting 12-year-old fingerprint readers into MacBooks, Microsoft is scanning your eyes with Windows Hello. Who's innovative?

My Father is an old bank accountant. So he knows that, behind their mainframe screens there are ugly code stuff and I deal with them.

When I try to talk about my job, Mother's eyes grow in awe. She thinks of me as a sci-fi character.

As my career goes very well, my wife thinks I'm so skillful that I must be like the architect guy at Matrix.

Mother-In-Law and Father-In-Law: A mix of my wife and mother.

They are all proud and happy, so am i.

27 years old, been in 3 jobs. Hired in a new job. Confidence has went up and down like shit. Life has become more real than ever before.

What have I learned through all these bumpy rides?

Life is journey, it goes up and it goes down. But what you may not realize is that everything that happens to you, is for you to learn.

Happy Friday to everyone in this unknown path, just enjoy that you are alive, can breathe and see things with your magical eyes.

God exists for sure.

Adobe is predatory. I bought a subscription to Adobe Premier four months ago. After using it a little, I found Davinci Resolve (it's free) and decided it was just as capable for my needs. Upon trying to cancel Adobe, it offered me 3 more months at a good price and I thought, well, maybe I could still use it for some other things. But that didn't turn out to be true or necessary. I went to cancel today at the end of the 3 months and it said I would have to pay $94 for cancelation. I guess the fine print was too fine for my 49-year-old eyes or I wouldn't have signed up for that 3-month extension. I got on live chat with their AI, figured out how to get a real person, and began negotiating. They tried to sell me a lower cancelation fee. No. I don't want any fee. They tried to sell me other products at a lower price. I didn't need any other products. Finally, I used a little reverse psychology and said "Fine, I'll keep it. You win, I guess. Just tell me when I can cancel something I'm not using and won't be using and without being punished with a fee."

Apparently, that unlocked something in the Indian guy's call flow script and he offered to waive the fee. Just needed a moment to converse with his manager and get approval. That's 20 minutes of my life and billable time I'll never get back.

This morning there was this window cleaner again, that actually made me remember a rant from the old box - my previous account. Repost of that coming in an hour or so :3

Turns out that he came in the morning, and I completely forgot about it. The only appointment that I had today got canceled so I was like, eh fuck it. There's been this family event yesterday that made me so fucking tired... I'll just stay in bed for a little while longer.

Apparently that window cleaner ringed my bell multiple times, haven't heard him do it but anyway.. he and the cleaning lady had the genius idea to ask my landlord whether they can just barge in my home. Way to start the day, isn't it? I thought there were burglars.

In my bathrobe and visibly pissed off (I am NOT a morning person!), I let him do the window cleaning and waited for them to get the fuck out already. Then that cleaning lady, the fucking bitch that called my landlord to break into my home without MY prior permission!!! While the window cleaner was doing his work, she proceeds to ask me this.

Cleaning lady: "I had this technical issue earlier, and since you are good with phones I thought I'd ask you."
Me (thinking): oh, here it comes.. *rolling eyes*
M: "What's the issue?"
CL: "Well my stepson has an iPhone, which he broke and we brought it to a smartphone repair shop. They repaired it twice but an hour after receipt of the fixed phone, it breaks again."
M (t): You went wrong at iPhone, and you went wrong at visiting that incompetent mofo "teknishan" twice.
M: "Well I have no experience whatsoever with iPhones, but continue."
CL: "Well, he replaced the motherboard, and some pin at the bottom.."
M (t): The fucking motherboard of all things. The whole fucking motherboard?! The last thing that I'd look at, he just replaces like that?! Fucking piece of shit. That's even worse than Apple stores. And what's up with that goddamn pin? CAN'T YOU POSSIBLY BE A BIT MORE SPECIFIC?!
M: "Given only this information, I have no idea what's wrong with it."
CL: "But you are good with these things, aren't you?!"
M: "I disassemble my own broken phones, and dick around with their motherboards. That, while I'm fully aware that in the process I can break it beyond repair. That does not make me an expert on every phone out there."
CL: …

Well what did you even expect, fucking bitch. You barge into my home, don't even have the dignity to leave for me to be able to shower and dress myself, and then you go ask shit like that? Go suck my fucking cock, and shove that iPaperweight down your ass!! How about that?!

Two places: At a major NYC firm, I was in charge of social media. I was also involved with an intranet community. Something went bad with the intranet community project politics and I got blamed for it even though I had emails to prove I hadn't said/done what I was accused of. But to assert their dominance, my bosses called me to their office, sat me in literally a corner of the room, and interrogated me for 2 hours. The only thing missing was the bright light in my eyes and the "good cop" part of the routine. I'm ashamed to say they "broke" me and I just gave up and did what they told me to do to "fix" it even though I hadn't done anything wrong. The bosses were old enough to be my parents, so I wonder how much of that worked its way into the psychology of it all.

The second toxic workplace was where each month the boss would come from his home by the beach to tell us plebes what new ideas he wanted us to work on. We would just get done reporting on the results of his delusions of grandeur from the month prior and he'd pull the rug out and start us on some new thing. Never got any consistent traction on anything. He was the ultimate seagull manager: fly in, make a lot of noise, poop all over everything, and leave us cleaning up the mess. Oh, and we had to change the locks because we had to fire a customer service guy who was a little bit on the ragey side of things. Because of high turnover, I had seniority within 4 months of starting there.

Fuck I'm getting old and it's hard for my eyes to tell the diff between ( and {.

A colleague of mine had to debug performance problems in a foreign, proprietary application that is ancient.

To be crystal clear: Only reason that thing exists is because some old geezers fear change.

Asked me for help cause it's an _ancient_ MS SQL server that is luckily running on hardware owned by us.

Finding the credentials was already a funny task.

We had to access the vault (not joking here, we have a physical vault for storing sensitive data and critical backups), grab a folder and find the necessary data cause no one ever dares to touch that thing.

The application is btw for a sort of ERP / inventory system that is used in some ancient shops not yet migrated...

Yeah. Story speaks for itself.

Anyway, after dusting off ourselves, we were able to connect.

Was a bit ... Interesting. Everything's in german. The worst kind of german.

After looking at the first tables, I started giggling.

My colleague knew immediately that this was a sign of danger (insert Simpson meme here), raised his eyebrows and asked "How bad is it....".

Me, still giggling, "lemme take a further look, this is gold".

*long sigh from the colleague*

Well... It ended with me putting my hands in front of my eyes, turning around and saying: "I cannot look at it anymore, it hurts too much...."

To summarize:
- German table names
- When a table exceeded 300 plus columns, they added another table with the same plus suffix "_ddd"… where ddd is an zero filled integer sequence like 001
- To join this mess, they created views... Named "generator" - Sequence Number ... Some had the beginning of table names appended, which doesn't make it less confusing.
- the process list was listing queries running longer than 5 mins.

Which isn't at all surprising when generating carrtesian products of N tables with left join.

I've seen shit.... I've seen a lot of shit.

But that shit scared me.

TL:DR: I'm terminally addicted to Tea.

I have been drinking tea twice every day since 6th grade. I'm almost 30 years old now.

One day I decided to quit tea altogether. And at 6 PM that same day, I started to lose color from my eyes. The whole world turned black and white.

At about 7:30 PM, severe depression kicked in and I started questioning why the hell I wanna keep on living and not end it all.

At that point I ran to the kitchen and made tea and drank it. 2 mins after that I started to see colors again and the depression went away.

It's kind of funny now that I look back at it.

We share a fate, trapped on a page by the author of our world’s demise. In your eyes I see the pain, your targets slain, I will be the whispers in your mind, the demon inside.

Don’t let down your guard, let in the darkness. You will defeat this trial of ancient gods. Take me in spirit, demon adherent. When you’re the last one to survive. Spirit, stay gentle, next monumental. Will you keep the fire alive?

I, with the power inside, set an end to these lies from the deep and the quiet. Sleep, my old enemy, let an end come to me. traveler please let me fade.

Please, don't take this post seriously. I wrote it from anger.

I hate a lot of humans.

I was at a church today because family ties. I'm agnostic. That sums it up.

And now, I'm at a mall, and it's crowded, and I'm bumping into a lot of people with very low common sense. These fucking apes here have ZERO walk awareness. And a lot of them probably drive, which scares me.

When they make a line in a food shop, and the line gets too big, they curve the line so that the line can continue, like an L, but they leave TOO LITTLE GODDAMN SPACE TO WALK THROUGH!

There's a narrow ramp, next to some stairs, that I use to get to the nursery of the mall, but it also leads to the bathrooms. A lot of these disgusting beings use the ramp. Jesus fucking christ, USE THE SHITTIN FUCKING STAIRS.

tiday I was walking with the stroller the 9 month old which was (thank you alpha omega) sleeping.

I see one of those nice comfy couches, and there's a couple hugging in it but there's an empty spot. I come closer and it's occupied by their trash, some cups with ice cream.
I could not believe my eyes.
That shit's expensive. I would never leave shit with ice cream in my couch, and it's also a horrible gesture because it looks like you're denying it from others with your trash.

I just stared the trash down like really disappointed. They took the trash but I moved on because I was very salty at that point.

I find a seat next to a dad and his kid. I sit down, relieved. His daughter comes over, and almost yelling complains about him buying his brother.
I stared this little shit straight in her face because she could wake up my kid. She and her family was totally oblivious.

These are just minor events, but I come across a plethora of situations like this every day, like people turning on their turn lights 1/2 second before turning, or people that I meet on the street giving me fucking advice on raising kids.

That's the average mall experience. It's a place where selfful people thrive.

I shit you not, sometimes I imagine that a meteor strikes earth and while it makes me sad that all the people I consider kind will die, I orgasm at the thought of these filthy parasites just evaporating.

But then I realize that I'm being very cruel and intolerant. And feel guilty.

Sometimes I think that I should live in Japan or a similar place.
Japanese city people are very organized.
But then I remember that Japan has a suicide problem. And that it has a poverty problem. And a lot of outcasts. And that they barely have sex.
i dunno.

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!

So there was that paranoid schizophrenic person, a blonde girl with a buzz cut, and somehow she was a friend of mine. She used a Linux distro called “!!!!!!!!____!!!!!”, and convinced me it was the best distro out there. But the way she used it was… very specific.

She called me. She told me the new distro was out, this time it was called “!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”, and _this_ was the best one. It finally allowed her to observe the area around her neighbourhood right from her PC, through some app, and make pits in the ground. It was done with a touchscreen of a Nintendo DSi connected to her PC with something that looked like an IDE cable. You touch the area of the screen, and the pit will appear outside IRL. This was needed to trap swine-looking creatures in those pits, as they infested the land and were attacking people in packs, turning them into dirty, greyish, half-transparent lumps of gel.

I went to see her, and somehow I knew exactly how it's going to end, as if I decided to replay a game level. She lived in a rotten, mouldy, dark, half-abandoned condo building. She was also a terrible hoarder. I approach the old wooden door of her flat. It was painted over 1000 times and was barely closing. She knew I would come. She rushed outside, looked at me with her moon-sized eyes, grabbed my arm and told me:
“We have to run.”

I felt a sudden crippling rush of anxiety. I woke up. My heart was absolutely racing. My sight became darker and darker. The chest pain was consuming me, and I could barely move. I almost vomited.

That was quite a night.

Fml... you keep getting the weekly discussions right on point.

I started with the last guys right out of university... just out of Hospital.

With a brand new degree and a Crohn’s diagnosis I stepped into the first place I found hiring. They were good guys, after a junior dev... to get stuck in their muck.

I did! I nailed project after project, tricky development after tricky development. I spent 5 years with them and over those years things changed.

They had a mass cull... the original idea was to get rid of the useless middle managers, the ones managing other managers being managed by another manager for no real reason.... the ones that do fuck all with their day.

But the fucking idiots upstairs put the job of working out the cull in the shitty middle managers hands.

So, instead, they cut the titles senior, junior and everything in between. Everyone was just a thing, no senior things, no junior things. Just things.

Once they’d done that they said “we’ll we have this many things, they’re all the same, let’s get rid of the things with the highest pay checks because the other things can do it just as well for less money”...

And that’s how they cut 50% of their senior techs.

I was one of the ones left behind but the damage became obvious quick. The middle managers barked out orders at people who couldn’t complete them, and everything went to shit.

My team was rebranded twice in as many years... an obvious ploy for funding, but the cost of the team fluctuated like hell because contractors had to fill the senior positions at 3 times the cost.

Then the managers started barking out Self contradictory orders. Do this, but this way...

This would work, but not that way... try explaining that to a group of non-technical, useless as fuck middle managers. It took months, and shit flows downstream so we got the bulk of the hassle for it.

Then my boy Morpheus, got a warning... they threatened his contract for saying “this will work, but not that way”.

He kept the contract, and the manager giving him the warning said he didn’t think he should... but he, and all the middle fuckwits don’t have the balls to stand up against nonsense.

That was the breaking point for me, I handed in my notice and told them a month was what they could have.

I didn’t have a position or an idea of where to go, a few long-standing offers as back up in a pinch but not the perfect job.

On the Thursday I decided I was done, I let my manager know. Then I boshed the fuck out of my CV and updated my profiles.

My phone started ringing off the hook, a senior NG2/MEAN/Ionic dev on the market is like candy to recruiters. They’re lovely too.

I went to a few interviews that were okay but not great. Then a company got in touch... one that I immediately recognised as an IT book publisher. They said they were looking for NG/NG2 devs, senior. winner! Set up the interview.

So I’d spent the weekend with the missus, about an hour away from mine and 2 from the interview. I hadn’t planned on staying there but at 6ish she looked over at me and said “do you have to go” <- imagine that with puppy dog eyes from a gorgeous Slovenian lass.

I folded quicker than a shitty pancake toss.

We spent the night together but that meant I had to be up at 6, to go back to mine, iron my interview clothes and make it to the train to manage the interview. Fuck. I did it, but I was at the interview wired on caffeine and struggling to be awake and coherent. I still managed, that’s what I do, I make do and try to do well regardless of the situation.

That comes from being ill btw, when you’re dealt a shitty hand you learn to play it well.

They were good guys, the heads all knew what they were on about, not the middle management bs I was used to.

They demoed me live with an ng1 test, which was awesome as hell to play with.

We chatted, friendly and cool guys! I loved the place.

The end of the week they got me in for second round. Ng2 and competence test, again I went for it!

Positive feedback and a “we’ll get back to you ASAP, should be by Tuesday”...

Tuesday was the Tuesday before the Friday I was due to leave the old company... I was cutting it close.

On the Monday the offers started rolling in, a few C# ASP MVC positions, cool but I was holding out for the guys I’d interviewed with.

Then Tuesday comes around, I’m nervous as fuck but it’s okay because I knew regardless I can pay the rent in December with one of the offers.

Then said yes!

The thing that seemed most important in the process was my ability to talk to any fucker. If you’re coming up to interview, talk to everyone, the grocer, your barista, the binmen, anyone. Practice that skill above all others.

I start tomorrow morning! I can’t wait.

Final thought: middle managers are taints.

I really enjoy my old Kindle Touch rather than reading long pdf's on a tablet or desktop. The Kindle is much easier on my eyes plus some of my pdf's are critical documents needed to recover business processes and systems. During a power outage a tablet might only last a couple of days even with backup power supplies, whereas my Kindle is good for at least 2 weeks of strong use.

Ok, to get a pdf on a Kindle is simple - just email the document to your Kindle email address listed in your Amazon –Settings – Digital Content – Devices - Email. It will be <<something>>@kindle.com.

But there is a major usability problem reading pdf's on a Kindle. The font size is super tiny and you do not have font control as you do with a .MOBI (Kindle) file. You can enlarge the document but the formatting will be off the small Kindle screen. Many people just advise to not read pdf's on a Kindle. devRanters never give up and fortunately there are some really cool solutions to make pdf's verrrrry readable and enjoyable on a Kindle

There are a few cloud pdf- to-.MOBI conversion solutions but I had no intention of using a third party site my security sensitive business content. Also, in my testing of sample pdf's the formatting of the .MOBI file was good but certainly not great.

So here are a couple option I discovered that I find useful:

Solution 1) Very easy. Simply email the pdf file to your Kindle and put 'convert' in the subject line. Amazon will convert the pdf to .MOBI and queue it up to synch the next time you are on wireless. The final e-book .MOBI version of the pdf is readable and has all of the .MOBI options available to you including the ability for you to resize fonts and maintain document flow to properly fit the Kindle screen. Unfortunately, for my requirements it did not measure-up to Solution 2 below which I found much more powerful.

Solution 2) Very Powerful. This solution takes under a minute to convert a pdf to .MOBI and the small effort provides incredible benefits to fine tune the final .MOBI book. You can even brand it with your company information and add custom search tags. In addition, it can be used for many additional input and output files including ePub which is used by many other e-reader devices including The Nook.

The free product I use is Calibre. Lots of options and fine control over documents. I download it from calibre-ebook.com. Nice UI. Very easy to import various types of documents and output to many other types of formats such as .MOBI, ePub, DocX, RTF, Zip and many more. It is a very powerful program. I played with various Calibre options and emailed the formatted .MOBI files to my Kindle. The new files automatically synched to the Kindle when I was wireless in seconds. Calibre did a great job!!

The formatting was 99.5% perfect for the great majority of pdf’s I converted and now happily read on my Kindle. Calibre even has a built-in heuristic option you can try that enables it to figure out how to improve the formatting of the raw pdf. By default it is not enabled. A few of the wider tables in my business continuity plans I have to scroll on the limited Kindle screen but I was able to minimize that by sizing the fonts and controlling the source document parameters.

Now any pdf or other types of documents can be enjoyed on a light, cheap, super power efficient e-reader. Let me know if this info helped you in any way.

This scene is an 8-year-old.
My friend(F) got his first mobile. First featured mobile.
Maximum smartness in that mobile was a snake game and Bluetooth.
So I decided to prank him.
M: Bro do you know this particular model need a network to use Bluetooth?
F: I am not stupid to believe you.
M: I can prove that.
F: K prove me, I will give you treat.
M: ok, turn on your Bluetooth paired it with my Bluetooth.
F: Ok
*start sending him the movie. We were on the train, a train was about to enter the tunnel*
M: When the train will enter a tunnel, We will lose network and sending will fail.
F: ok let's see.

*when a train enters in a tunnel, we shift light to black in meantime for 3-4 sec our eyes feel blindness. so I closed eyes before entering a tunnel and once train enter in the tunnel immediately restart Bluetooth *

M: look sending failed
F: Seriously man, I didn't know that.
M: It's ok bro next time inform me before buying any electronics.
F: sure
M: my treat?
F: Yup

*for next few days, he was thinking that Bluetooth need a network to send files until whole group laugh on him*

So ok here it is, as asked in the comments.

Setting: customer (huge electronics chain) wants a huge migration from custom software to SAP erp, hybris commere for b2b and ... azure cloud
Timeframe: ~10 months….

My colleague and me had the glorious task to make the evaluation result of the B2B approval process (like you can only buy up till € 1000, then someone has to approve) available in the cart view, not just the end of the checkout. Well I though, easy, we have the results, just put them in the cart … hmm :-\
The whole thing is that the the storefront - called accelerator (although it should rather be called decelerator) is a 10-year old (looking) buggy interface, that promises to the customers, that it solves all their problems and just needs some minor customization. Fact is, it’s an abomination, which makes us spend 2 months in every project to „ripp it apart“ and fix/repair/rebuild major functionality (which changes every 6 months because of „updates“.

After a week of reading the scarce (aka non-existing) docs and decompiling and debugging hybris code, we found out (besides dozends of bugs) that this is not going to be easy. The domain model is fucked up - both CartModel and OrderModel extend AbstractOrderModel. Though we only need functionality that is in the AbstractOrderModel, the hybris guys decided (for an unknown reason) to use OrderModel in every single fucking method (about 30 nested calls ….). So what shall we do, we don’t have an order yet, only a cart. Fuck lets fake an order, push it through use the results and dismiss the order … good idea!? BAD IDEA (don’t ask …). So after a week or two we changed our strategy: create duplicate interface for nearly all (spring) services with changed method signatures that override the hybris beans and allow to use CartModels (which is possible, because within the super methods, they actually „cast" it to AbstractOrderModel *facepalm*).
After about 2 months (2 people full time) we have a working „prototype“. It works with the default-sample-accelerator data. Unfortunately the customer wanted to have it’s own dateset in the system (what a shock). Well you guess it … everything collapsed. The way the customer wanted to "have it working“ was just incompatible with the way hybris wants it (yeah yeah SAP, hybris is sooo customizable …). Well we basically had to rewrite everything again.
Just in case your wondering … the requirements were clear in the beginning (stick to the standard! [configuration/functinonality]). Well, then the customer found out that this is shit … and well …

So some months later, next big thing. I was appointed technical sublead (is that a word)/sub pm for the topics‚delivery service‘ (cart, delivery time calculation, u name it) and customerregistration - a reward for my great work with the b2b approval process???

Customer's office: 20+ people, mostly SAP related, a few c# guys, and drumrole .... the main (external) overall superhero ‚im the greates and ur shit‘ architect.
Aberage age 45+, me - the ‚hybris guy’ (he really just called me that all the time), age 32.
He powerpoints his „ tables" and other weird out of this world stuff on the wall, talks and talks. Everyone is in awe (or fear?). Everything he says is just bullshit and I see it in the eyes of the others. Finally the hybris guy interrups him, as he explains the overall architecture (which is just wrong) and points out how it should be (according to my docs which very more up to date. From now on he didn't just "not like" me anymore. (good first day)
I remember the looks of the other guys - they were releaved that someone pointed that out - saved the weeks of useless work ...

Instead of talking the customer's tongue he just spoke gibberish SAP … arg (common in SAP land as I had to learn the hard way).
Outcome of about (useless) 5 meetings later: we are going to blow out data from informatica to sap to azure to datahub to hybris ... hmpf needless to say its fucking super slow.
But who cares, I‘ll get my own rest endpoint that‘ll do all I need.

First try: error 500, 2. try: 20 seconds later, error message in html, content type json, a few days later the c# guy manages to deliver a kinda working still slow service, only the results are wrong, customer blames the hybris team, hmm we r just using their fucking results ...
The sap guys (customer service) just don't seem to be able to activate/configure the OOTB odata service, so I was told)
Several email rounds, meetings later, about 2 months, still no working hybris integration (all my emails with detailed checklists for every participent and deadlines were unanswered/ignored or answered with unrelated stuff). Customer pissed at us (god knows why, I tried, I really did!). So I decide to fly up there to handle it all by myself

Fresh internship story (Part 2)

I just realized how dumb my temporary boss really is and how much he loves to command everyone.
I told him that I am going earlier a few days ago and he got pissed lol.
He is someone who thinks he knows everything, but he does not.
He blames everything on everyone else.
He is never wrong, we are always wrong. That is probably what he is always thinking.
Clients who enter the store are precious (makes sense-you have to handle clients well, to get more bucks), but the thing is that he even screams near the clients at us. Besides of that I am new there. Be a little bit more patient, fucking prick.
Imho he is too old for the tech industry.
He loves to use the workers as slaves.
Do you work on a laptop rn? Well... fuck that. He has a new task waiting for you.
He keeps interrupting me every 5 to 10 minutes while I am focused.
Random dialogue from today:
me:"the client did a win10 upgrade and not a regular windows update"
boss:"nope. that is a windows update."
me (internally): should I show him the folder called "Windows10.Upgrade" and the "windows.old" folder both with the same creation date in "c:"? nah, fuck that. he is gonna put himself up again. do not want to have a stronger headache than this one I am having rn. (btw. I usually do not have headaches. I get headaches like once in 5 years, but since 4 days I have it every day.)
I am sick of this.
Today I had the urge to fucking grab his fucking "fuck me please" eyes out and eat them while he hears the explosive sounds his seperated eyes do. I still want to enjoy the rest of my life without going into a prison tho.

So my grandma just called me saying that there is something wrong with the computer and the UPS is making a weird noise. When I went to find out what's going on, the UPS was beeping constantly and the computer was in the middle of a startup repair. Obviously there is no way to cancel the repair, and unplugging the UPS would probably do more harm to the computer. So we had to listen to that constant, loud, high-pitch noise while waiting for the startup repair to complete. And mind you, I'm talking about a very old and slow computer with windows 7 on it. After the repair was done, I quickly turned off the computer so I can reset the UPS and save my eardrums from burning in hell.

The worst thing is that I've downloaded the documentation of the UPS, and there was no mention of what a constant beeping means, it only described the meanings of normal beeping patterns (battery low, etc...).

My eyes are still ringing and my ears are still blurry from 20 minutes of that noise.

! rant

Sorry but I'm really, really angry about this.

I'm an undergrad student in the United States at a small state college. My CS department is kinda small but most of the professors are very passionate about not only CS but education and being caring mentors. All except for one.

Dr. John (fake name, of course) did not study in the US. Most professors in my department didn't. But this man is a complete and utter a****le. His first semester teaching was my first semester at the school. I knew more about basic programming than he did. There were more than one occasion where I went "prof, I was taught that x was actually x because x. Is that wrong?" knowing that what I was posing was actually the right answer. Googled to verify first. He said that my old teachings were all wrong and that everything he said was the correct information. I called BS on that, waited until after class to be polite, and showed him that I was actually correct. Denied it.

His accent was also really problematic. I'm not one of those people who feel that a good teacher needs a native accent by any standard (literally only 1 prof in the whole department doesn't), but his English was *awful*. He couldn't lecture for his life and me, a straight A student in high school, was almost bored to sleep on more than one occasion. Several others actually did fall asleep. This... wasn't a good first impression.

It got worse. Much, much worse.

I got away with not having John for another semester before the bees were buzzing again. Operating systems was the second most poorly taught class I've ever been in. Dr John hadn't gotten any better. He'd gotten worse. In my first semester he was still receptive when you asked for help, was polite about explaining things, and was generally a decent guy. This didn't last. In operating systems, his replies to people asking for help became slightly more hostile. He wouldn't answer questions with much useful information and started saying "it's in chapter x of the textbook, go take a look". I mean, sure, I can read the textbook again and many of us did, but the textbook became a default answer to everything. Sometimes it wasn't worth asking. His homework assignments because more and more confusing, irrelavent to the course material, or just downright strange. We weren't allowed to use muxes. Only semaphores? It just didn't make much sense since we didn't need multiple threads in a critical zone at any time. Lastly for that class, the lectures were absolutely useless. I understood the material more if I didn't pay attention at all and taught myself what I needed to know. Usually the class was nothing more than doing other coursework, and I wasn't alone on this. It was the general consensus. I was so happy to be done with prof John.

Until AI was listed as taught by "staff", I rolled the dice, and it came up snake eyes.

AI was the worst course I've ever been in. Our first project was converting old python 2 code to 3 and replicating the solution the professor wanted. I, no matter how much debugging I did, could never get his answer. Thankfully, he had been lazy and just grabbed some code off stack overflow from an old commit, the output and test data from the repo, and said it was an assignment. Me, being the sneaky piece of garbage I am, knew that py2to3 was a thing, and used that for most of the conversion. Then the edits we needed to make came into play for the assignment, but it wasn't all that bad. Just some CSP and backtracking. Until I couldn't replicate the answer at all. I tried over and over and *over*, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and could find Nothing. Eventually I smartened up, found the source on github, and copy pasted the solution. And... it matched mine? Now I was seriously confused, so I ran the test data on the official solution code from github. Well what do you know? My solution is right.

So now what? Well I went on a scavenger hunt to determine why. Turns out it was a shift in the way streaming happens for some data structures in py2 vs py3, and he never tested the code. He refused to accept my answer, so I made a lovely document proving I was right using the repo. Got a 100. lol.

Lectures were just plain useless. He asked us to solve multivar calculus problems that no one had seen and of course no one did it. He wasted 2 months on MDP. I'd continue but I'm running out of characters.

And now for the kicker. He becomes an a**hole, telling my friends doing research that they are terrible programmers, will never get anywhere doing this, etc. People were *crying* and the guy kept hammering the nail deeper for code that was honestly very good because "his was better". He treats women like delicate objects and its disgusting. YOU MADE MY FRIEND CRY, GAVE HER A BOX OF TISSUES, AND THEN JUST CONTINUED.

Want to know why we have issues with women in CS? People like this a****le. Don't be prof John. Encourage, inspire, and don't suck. I hope he's fired for discrimination.

So I log into a great new site with my development machine. 64G of RAM, and 2 hex core CPU's; GTX 1070 video, SSD, etc. 4K display screen. (Motherboard is 5 years old, not trying to brag, just give context). I regularly put 8 pages of text on the screen side by side. Split ergonomic keyboard.

It wants me to load a mobile app for "full access".

Yea, why look at the world with wide open eyes when you can view everything through a cardboard toilet paper tube and type with your thumbs???

== John ==

My sister's laptop ate shit the other day and she ordered a new one. She got me thinking about my five year old rig, and how it was starting to show its age, so started half-heartedly pricing the stats I would want in a new machine on newegg and Amazon for fully assembled machines, and was always getting gouged or having to make some kind of sacrifice for another feature.

So after my wife responded to me trying to sound offhanded about buying a new computer by only rolling her eyes, but not actually raising any actual objection, I committed to the idea and started searching in earnest.

I realized that a fully assembled machine would always cost more, be underpowered for its price, be basically impossible to upgrade, be made of shitty parts, and always require some kind of compromise on my part.

Normally in the past, i would go to the barebones section on Pricewatch, order the basic stats I wanted, and fill it in myself after that. But it appears that Pricewatch might be dead. So, for the first time since probably 2002 or so, I'm building a computer in its entirety.

I'm really excited. Everything should be here by the middle of next week.

Man wk89 awesome... bringing back a lot of memories. The one thing really stands out to me though is the software.

I see a lot of rants about people shocked that turboC is still in use or other DOS programs are still in production. A lot can of bad be said here but I think often it's a case of we truly don't build things like we did in the good old days.

What those devs accomplished with such limited resources is phenomenal and the fact that we still haven't managed to replicate the feel and usability of it says a lot, not to mention just how fucking stable most of it was.

My favourite games are all DOS based, my most favourite of all time Sherlock is 103kb in size. When I started coding games I made a clone of it and to this day I am still trying to figure out what sorcery is in the algorithm that generates/solves puzzles that makes it so fast and memory efficient. I must have tried 100+ ways and can't even come close. NB! If you know you can hint but don't tell me. Solving this is a matter of personal pride.

Where those games really stand out is when you get into the graphics processing - the solutions they came up with to render sprites, maps and trick your eyes into seeing detail with only 4-16 colours is nothing short of genius. Also take a second to consider that taking a screen shot of the game is larger than the entire game itself and let that sink in...

I think the dramatic increase in storage, processing power and ram over the last decade is making us shit developers - all of us. Just take one look at chrome, skype or anything else mainline really and it's easy to see we no longer give a rats ass about memory anywhere except our monthly AWS/GCE bill.

We don't have to be creative or even mindful about anything but the most significant memory leaks in order to get our software to run now days. We also don't have constraints to distribute it, fast deliver-ability is rewarded over quality software. It's only expected to stay in production 3-4 years anyway.

Those guys were the true "rockstars" and "ninja" developers and if you can't acknowledge that you can take ya React app and shovit.

Mystery of the day: Why do some devs still insist that code looks bad if it exceeds 80 chars/line? These days, nobody prints it anyway and a 15" monitor can easily display 120 chars even with the font scaled up to be visible to my old, lousy eyes.

With .NETish names, lines like "var myVar = ConfigurationManager.OpenMappedExeConfiguration((fileMap, ConfigurationUserLevel.None)" tend to look weird when broken into 80 char lines.

I am scratching my head since 2 days cause a rather large Dockerfile doesn't work as expected.

CMD Execution just leads to "File not found".

Thanks, that's as useless as one ply toilet paper...

Whoever wrote the Dockerfile (not me…) should get an oscar...

Even in diarrhea after eating the good one day old extra hot china takeout from dubious sources I couldn't produce such a dumpster fire of bullshit.

The worst: The author thought layering helps - except it doesn't really, as it's a giant file with roughly 14 layers If I count correctly.

I just found out the problem...

The author thought it would be great to add the source files of the node project that should be built as a volume to docker... Which would work I guess....

Except that the author is a clueless chimp who thought at the same time seemingly that folder organization means to just pour everything into one folder....

Yeah. That fucker just shoved everything into one folder.

Yeeeeeesssssssss.

It looks like this:
source
docker-compose.mounts.yml
docker-compose.services.yml
docker-compose.yml
Dockerfile-development
Dockerfile-production
Dockerfile
several bash scripts
several TS / JS / config files
...

If you read the above.... Yes.
He went so far to copy the large Dockerfile 3 times to add development and production specific overrides.

I can only repeat what I said many times before: If you don't like doing stuff, ask for fucking help you moron.

-.-

*gooozfraba*

Anyways...

He directly mounts this source directory as a volume.

And then executes a shell script from this directory...

And before that shit was copied in the large gooozfraba Dockerfile into the volume.

Yeeeaaah.

We copy stuff inside the container, then we just mount on start the whole folder and overwrite the copied stuff.

*rolls eyes* which is completely obvious in this pit latrine of YML fuckery called Dockerfile.

As soon as I moved the start script outside the folder and don't have it running inside the folder that is mounted via volume, everything works.

Yeah.... Maybe one should seperate deployment from source files, runtime related stuff from build stuff.

*rolls eyes*

I really hate Docker sometimes. This is stuff that breaks easily for reasons, but you cannot see it unless you really grind your teeth and start manually tracing and debugging what the frigging fuck the maniac called author produced.

Hello and welcome, to a presentation in which I will tell you my thoughts on the shortcomings of modern day computers and programming practices.

Computers are based on a very fundamental and old idea, folders, and files, a file is basically a concrete amount of data, whereas a folder is a group of files, and it comes from the real life concept of files and folders, now it might be quite obvious already that using a concept invented in 1898 by a guy called Edwin G. Seibels, might not be the best way for computers to function in the year 2020, but alas, it is.

Unless of course, you step into the world of a programmer.

A programmer’s world is much different, they use this idea of a data structure, or in simpler terms, an object. An Object is just like what you would think of as an object in your head, something with different properties that you can think about in different ways, for example your mobile phone, it has a battery percentage, it has a screen size, it has free space available. Programmers use these data structures to analyse data very quickly, like finding all phones with a screen size bigger than a certain size for example.

The problem is that programmers still use files and folders to create the programs that use these objects.

Consider this example.

Let’s say you want to create a virtual version of a drink bottle, consider what properties it will have, colour, volume, height, width, depth, material, etc..

As a programmer, you can leverage programming features and change the properties of a drink bottle directly, if you wanted to change the colour, you just say, drink bottle “dot” colour, equals blue, or red.

But if the drink bottle was represented as a file, all the drink bottles data would be inside the one file, so you would have to open the whole file, find the line or section of the file that has the colour data of the drink bottle, and select it, highlight it, delete what’s there, and type in your new value.

One way to explain this better is to imagine a folder that now represents the drink bottle, imagine adding a new file into that folder that represents each property I described before, colour, volume, etc.., well now, you could just open that folder, find the file for colour, either by looking with your eyes or you could do a file search in the folder for a file called colour, open it, and edit the value inside. This way of editing objects is the one that more closely represents the way programmers and a program itself interacts with objects inside a running programming language.

But the thing is, programmers don’t use the folder/file way of creating objects and putting them into programs, because it would be too cumbersome, they just create 1 file for an object, or have lots of objects in a file, and create all the objects in 1 file, and then run the program which creates the objects, then when they stop the program, it deletes the objects. So there is no actual link between the object in a file and the object that the program creates by reading the data from that file, if you change the object in your program, it does not get saved to the file.

So programmers created databases to house these objects, but there is still a flaw in databases, they are hard to interface with, and mostly databases are just used to send data or retrieve data from, programmatically, you can’t really browse a database the way you can browse the files on your computer. You can, but database interfaces are not made to be easily navigated the way files and folders are.

As it stands, there is no way to store objects instead of files on your computer and interact with them in complex ways the way programmers can inside the programs they create.

If the idea of an object became standard the way a file and folder is standard, I think it would empower human’s a great deal to express things far more easily and fluidly than they can today.

Thanks for reading.

I am pretty sure my phone started listening to me...

A few days ago I downloaded a app similar to Craigslist but a little more modern. THE ABSOLUTE FIRST THING MY EYES SEE IS A CAR. NOT ANY OLD CAR. BUT THE SAME YEAR, MAKE, AND MODEL OF THE CAR I OWN. May I also mention I’m on vacation on the OPPOSITE SIDE OF THE COUNTRY?!?

Wtf.

Staying up late at night....i wanna go on till morning but my old screen had done enough damage to my eyes

My father had a PC with Win3.11 where young me was allowed to play solitaire and an educational programs for kids, later on, followed Win98. I was fascinated with this big grey boxes which could do so many things, especially connect you to the Internet where you could find knowledge about EVERYTHING. (Someone remember the "Blinde Kuh" search engine?)

I remember my father connecting the modem with a long cable all the way through several rooms to the TAE-outlet and the weird sounds the device made.

I often heard "Get away from the PC or your eyes will become rectangular!" when I was sitting there for hours over hours reading and playing.

When I was ten, I got my first own computer, a trusty 486er (386 with logical coprocessor! 8MB RAM if I remember correctly. Weeee! :D) which was my uncle's old PC with Win95.
I started writing on the PC and got into several online communities ... it went downhill from there. :D

I wrote a parody of Sound of Silence based on the struggles of cleaning up people's shit in the shop

============

Hello problems, my old friends
I've come to talk with you again
Because a driver softly creeping
Left its seeds while RAM was leaking
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of crashing

In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow bands of networking
'Neath the halo of a burned-out fan
I turned my collar to the hot and spinning
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of an LED light
That split the night
And touched the sound of crashing

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand tasks, maybe more
Programs malloc with no swap
Programs writing with no space
Programs writing bits that voices never play
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of crashing

"Fools, " said I, "You do not know
Malware, like a plague, it grows
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my tools that I might help you"
But my words, like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells, of crashing

And the programs bowed and prayed
To the malware god they made
And Windows flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And Windows said, "The words of the prophets are written in the event log
And dumped over COM"
And whispered in the sounds of crashing

So, I need to search for a new job again. The thing killed my project.

15 years of Java experience in my resume, I look a like a sterotypical 35 years old programmer, I’m applying for expert roles. But every remote technical interview starts with:
- what is the difference between ArrayList and LinkedList?
- what is a hash map?
The hardest part is to keep smiling to the camera, pretending I don’t have the answer memorized by repeating it for the last 15 years of interviewing, and not rolling my eyes.
And before you ask, I do know what garbage collector is.

Now that my math posts have failed to garner the anger they formerly did, we here at Wisecrack Studios, like all teams of people completely out of ideas, have come up with a brilliant never-before-tried concept to bring fresh shitposts to your pocket-telescreen this fine year of 2020.

We present to you the DevRant shitposter census!

Yes we pride ourselves in our quality bait and bullshit here at WS. Founded in [previous year a long long time ago], we focus on craftmanship, tradition, and doing it right. Our bait is loved the world over for "it's fresh flavor", "so good, it's like you're abusing heroin right along with the company employees!'

And now, you too get to participate and choose your very own bullshit!
You could say we may have invented a totally new word just to describe it: crowdsourcing!
Isn't it just *brilliant*.

Here is Wisecrack's "Private Select" census, of only the most choice *premium* finely-aged shitpost ideas for this [current year].

Please, please, one vote per customer!

* Moar javascript shitposts (no we won't be doing any more, even WE are tired of js rants).

* Overly pixelated memes (obviously not) blatantly ripped and automatically uploaded via shitty selenium scripts

* Real life hijinxs, trolling shitty companies hiring processes for fun at their expense!

* DevRantCon now with 100% more orgies. Reserve your kickstarter ticket today.

* Disappointing vaporware announcements that take ten minutes to read and build your excitement up only to crush it before your very eyes like a child's first lego build in the hands of an angry nd merciless andre the giant disappointed by the craftmanship of a five year old.

* A livestream of a monkey on an actual typewriter, with a btc betting pool each time an actual word is typed, along with a $5 "shock the monkey" button to spice things up a bit
(our lawyers are informing us this may or may not be illegal in some or all nations. We'll get back to you when sealand responds with our request about their laws on unnecessary animal cruelty. )

* Video conference with devrants creators where we all play "I've never" that doesn't end until at least one person passes out black drunk.

* Weekly comedy write ups with jokes (not obviously) blatantly stolen from cards against humanity

* HipsterRants: why your favorite [thing - game, music, movie, book] sucks, and why I hate you for liking it.

* Did we mention javascript rants?

* Cool new projects by devranters and our merciless breakdown of why each one is pure, unadulterated shit, everything that was done wrong, and why you should personally be ashamed for using it.

* SadRants: cancer, meth abuse, homelessness, how we'll all die at the end, and how the sun will one day turn into a giant ball of fire that will consume the earth and leave no trace that anyone ever existed, and nothing we do will ultimately matter.

* HappyRants: ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) oh yeah, you feeling it now mr krabs?

* Technical breakdowns that are completely wrong, utterly incompetent, intentionally misleading, and wildly upvoted by people who are unfamiliar.

Vote for your favorite topic/idea today! or even submit your own for our 'consideration'!

Clickbait, now in technicolor!

!dev-related

My sister-in-law is a real fucking piece of work. My wife and I pay her to watch our daughter, who is 1.5 years old. She lives with us practically rent free (less than 0.5 of what she was having to pay in rent at her previous living situation). And as of late, my wife and I have been going through rough marital issues. Our marriage counsellor advised as ‘homework’ to write down a few things that would make us happy; individually of our partner, in our relationship.

Something I put down was, ‘that I want our daughter to be more mentally stimulated’ since she’s curious and inquisitive as fucking hell right now. And that I wanted us to find child care that would nurture her more than my sister-in-law does.

(She sits our daughter and one other little girl she watches down in the front room to watch the disney channel all day long. Sometimes she’ll talk to her friends for a few hours throughout the day on the phone. And makes them lunch and snacks when they are hungry.)

I’ve been looking into a daycare center that specializes in teaching kids early reading and writing along with a program that starts at 2 to focus on dancing or on music. They only want like $75 more per week and food and snacks are included in the weekly cost.

That being said I had written down my things for my ‘homework’ assignment. My daughter ended up getting a hold of it and brought it to my sister-in-law who now has a major attitude about this whole thing...

:side note:
My wife and I were struggling financially a bit earlier in the year and she helped us with gas money a few times and helped with some basic groceries and stuff. But today she just threw all of that ‘help’ back into my face.

If I had fucking known that you were going to hold that shit over my head and weaponize it against me because you feel hurt by the fact that you are a shit child care provider in my eyes then you can go smoke a fucking tailpipe you cum guzzling gutter slut!

TLDR; WINE+me=system binaries gone. (HOWTHEFUCKDIDIDOTHAT) Kernel panic. Core program files gone. I'll never have it fixed right. Will backup, then install fedora tomorrow.

I really like games and I'm sure there are many of you who can relate. Imagine my perpetual pain, being on the job hunt, no money, and only my Linux laptop for games. (It's only Linux because of a stupid accident and a missing windows installation disk, partly explained in a previous rant). My stack of games my dad and I have played over the years, going back to populous and before, looked light enough for my laptop to run them smoothly. I wanted to see if I could get one to work. My eyes settled on simcity 4 and Sid Meier's railroad tycoon, 13 and 10 years old, respectively. Simcity didn't work as many times as I tried following online instructions. Disk 1 went fine. Disk 2 showed up as Disk 1. Didn't think much of it, so long as the computer could read the contents. I downloaded playonlinux as that could apparently do the complex stuff for me. Didn't work. I gave up with it after an hour and a half.

Next was railroads. Put the disk in aaaand it says SimCity disk 1 is in the tray. Fuck right off, thank you very much. Eject, put back, reject, eject, fiddle in wineconfig, eject, more of this, and voilà it read as railroads :) Ran autoplay.exe with wine, followed instructions, installed it, and it worked! Chose single player, then the map and setting, pressed play, and all the models of the buildings and track were floating in the air over a green plane, the UI is weird and the map doesn't represent anything but trains. All the fkin land is gone, laying track is gonna be a ballache.

I quit it and decided bedtime.
Ctrl+alt+t
sudo shutdown -h now
shutdown not found.
sudo reboot
reboot not found
Que?
Nope, I don't like this.
Force choked my laptop by the power button. Turned it on again.
Lines of text appear.
Saw a phrase I've only ever seen on Mr Robot.
Kernel panic.
Nooooo thanks, not today, this is fiction.
I turned it off and on. Same thing. I read the logs and some init files couldn't be found. I got the memory stick I used to install mint in the first place and booted from that. I checked the difference between my stick's bin and sbin and the laptop's, and it was indeed missing binaries. Fuck knows what else has happened, I only wanted to play games but now I don't know what is or isn't in my computer. How can I trust what's on it now?
I go downstairs and tell my dad. He says something about rpm, but this is Linux so it won't work. I learn that binaries can be copied over, so maybe I can fix it.
Go upstairs again, decide not to fix it. Fedora is light, has a good rep for security, and is even more difficult to get games on, which is my vice. There are more reasons, but the overriding one is that I'm spooked by the fact that something I did went into and removed system binaries, maybe even altered others, so I want something I'm less likely to do that with. Also my fellow cs students used to hate on it but my dad uses and recommended it so I want to try it.

Also, seriously, fuck wine/PlayOnLinux/my inability to follow instructions(?)/whatever demons haunt me. Take your pick, at least one if not more is to blame and I can't tell which, but it's prooooobably the third one.

It's going to be 16 hours before I touch my laptop again, comments before I backup then install fedora are welcome, especially if they persuade me to do differently.

P.S thanks for reading this mind dump of a post, I'm writing while it's fresh but I'm tired AF.

i had an epiphany today, in a discussion with the software architect of our new project.

i'm having the epic job to design & implement a prototype for a C++ library in a new software project and collected some inspiration in our "old" software, where i'm maintaining the module that fulfills the same functionality (i thought). i've been maintaining this module for around a year now. i analyzed the different features and stuff to consider and created a partial model of the new library.

when i showed it to the architect today, he was like "oh my god, no no no, you don't need all this functionality, this shall not be part of the new library!"

this was the moment when i realized how deeply fucked up the code base of the old module is.

imagine it like this:
you want to automate the process of making yourself a good ol' cup of coffee.
the reasonable thing would be to have

- a smart water boiler where you set parameters water temperature and amount of water to be fetched from the water supply
- a smart coffee bean grinder where you can set type of beans, amount of beans and grinding fineness
- a component where water and ground coffee are joined to brew the coffee, where parameters like duration, pressure etc. are set
- a milk tank where amount of milk, desired temperature and duration / speed of foaming can be set
- a sugar dispenser where amount of applied sugar can be set
- optionally, additional modules with spices, syrup, ice cubes, whatever for your very personal coffee experience

on requesting a coffee, you would then configure and orchestrate all components to your wishes to make you a fine cup of coffee. you can also add routines like "makeCappucchino()", "makeEspresso()", or whatever.

our software is not like this.
it is like this:
- a smart water boiler consisting of submodules that know how to cook water for e.g. "cappucchino with sugar" or for "espresso without sugar, but with milk and ice cubes"
- 5 smart bean grinders that know how to grind beans for e.g. cappucchino, espresso, latte macchiato and for 73ml of water preheated to 82°C
- a very smart sugar dispenser that knows how to add sugar to 95, 98 and 100°C coffee and to coffee made of BOTH coffee arabica AND coffee robusta beans.

etc. etc., i think you're getting the gist.

when i realized this, it was like, right in front of my eyes, this terrible pattern emerged like a foul, corrupted caleidoscope of chaos, through the whole code base of this module.
i've already known how rotten from the core this code base is, but today i've actually identified a really bad pattern that i hadn't realized before. the whole architecture is so bloated that it is hard to have an overview of the whole thing. and it would require a LOT of refactoring to repair this pattern.
but i guess it would also be infinitely satisfying because i could probably reduce the code base for 30% or something...

but unfortunately, this is never going to happen, because screw refactoring.

it's a great feeling to start this new library from scratch, tho...

I'm in several FB groups for selling/buying IT material, and from time to time I see someone trying to scam other people by selling those "GAMING PC L33TL4z0rz" with 4GB RAM and an GeForce 700GT GPU, attaching some LED action photos and League of Legends / CS:GO prints.

One of the most recent posts, was a guy who was trying to sell his (really old) macBook.
He said it was great for gaming, had an i5 CPU and 4GB of RAM.

Upon leaving my comment on the pieace of shit he was selling and that 4GB was barely enough to run Chrome, I got a shitload of replies saying that 4GB on a mac are not the same as 4GB on windows... So I immediately forgot everything I knew about computers and just left most (if not all) sales groups because I felt that a tumor of sorts started growing in me, a tumor of rage and awe in human stupidity.

Slowly, I started feeling superior to other people, and would immediately regard them as idiot simpletons. And I don't want to be THAT guy, who rolls his eyes every time someone asks a stupid question...

Now, if any of you could please inform me... What is the RAM conversion rate between a windows and a mac ?

If you use exceptions for your data validation, I hate you. I hate you so much, in fact, that I will become famous. Then I can say to you that a famous person hates you. I will become president and the first executive order I sign will be to make the official policy of the United States that I hate you. I will invent a time machine so that I can go back in time and on every one of your birthdays, past present, and future, look you in the eyes and tell you I hate you. Then I will travel to your death bed and in your final breath I will tell you I hate you. I will change the timeline so that you will celebrate Christmas and believe in Santa and then tell your four year old self that Santa isn't real. I hope your kids never learn how to read, and if they already know how to read I hope they forget how to read and never learn how to read. I hope all of your friends become vegan, atheist, flat earth, crossfitters and insist on regailing you with their life style on your every meeting.

I guess what I'm saying is that I'm having a bad day.

Sooo cobol eeeh...?
Old legacy system still running ehh?
Eyes closed and hope for the best from management eh?
And now everybody needs them all, while simple ppl dont get their money managers just say sorry ?

Twas a timebomb and it will still be. Its hugely pathetic of those responsible to disregard their old systems and dont test them for the worst case.

Why am i trying here to deliver proper working systems with long term update schedules when ppl in charge suck with their responsibilities?

The moment I knew I wanted to be a dev was very early in life, but I didn't realize it until I had gotten out of high school. My parents gave me my first computer when I was like 8 and it was my grandfather's old Windows 95 PC. I loved to play the Army Men game with the plastic figures like from Toy Story. I also tinkered around and found out how Word and some of the other programs worked. About two years later, I got his old Windows 98 PC. I continued to play around in Windows and discover some nuances of the operating system. My parents had a Windows XP machine at the time and they called me in every time they needed help. I got on their computer from time to time to use the Internet, where I discovered so many cool things. In junior high, we were forced to take a typing course where I honed my typing skills through playing games. I soon was able to easily complete all of the challenges. To understand my persona, you must know that I was bullied throughout elementary and high school. I was "the nerd" of our class and I wore that badge even with all of the negative energy that it came with. I received constant criticism, ridiculed for being intelligent (my paycheck isn't too funny now, is it losers?). I didn't care, though, my mission has and always will be to show them their wrong doing. I actually can't wait to have a reunion just to see how UNSUCCESSFUL they are. My parents didn't like my interest in gaming and technology either, but that's a rant for another day. After junior high, I wasn't exposed to much else until I got to college four years ago, where I took Fundamentals Of Computing. My professor was a true nerd (major Zelda fanatic), and he taught us how to program in Python. I began to love being able to create something literally out of nothing. He opened my eyes to a world where there was order and I could have control in a world where I've never had any control in before. Since then, I've only began to love my profession more and more. This is truly what I was born to do.

Well, my first project was to replicate something I saw somewhere: connect a pen to a potentiometer and to the serial port of an Apple II in such a way that you could replicate the movement of the pen on screen and also draw.

Apple II . Mouse, touch screens, tablet, etc didn't exist.
It worked.

However, a part from feeling old, I feel also stupid now, because I didn't understand at all the potentiality of such a tool nor what was going to happen in few years.

I could have invented a mouse. Or the concept of GUI. It was just in front of me.

Instead, I think I just draw some tits an some dick.

So I'm here.
Wondering, what is there now in front of my eyes, that I don't see?

My first internship.
The webdev department for a engineering company is in the basement. I was given a cubicle near the middle by the wall. The ceiling light was broken so I had to work in the dark... It was a 7-4 with no pay nor do they cover any expenses. I did manage to use the experience and got a job offer at a 'proper' software company in the end.

I am so close to crying it is just not funny, every time i close my eyes I picture Superman's Scream after snapping Zod's neck in man of steel i.e. filled with pain, anguish and not being able to accept what you have become... I am not a dev but I have been glued to a computer screen since 7 years old.

I work for a company as the I.T. Administrator that does quite a bit of specialized work in the regulatory industry and has there own in-house software. This was built by one developer after another, hired straight out of university/college and you cannot believe how big of a monster this became being built with direction from someone who cant code and a bunch of "drunk children" who do not know good principles (swear to god thousands of lines with no comments and no OOP)

Now I am validating and testing a system, i keep being asked if we will be ready by the end of the week and due to my lack of qualifications after dropping out of school I keep thinking yes, but every time i test something I find another problem, I may not be able to code but understanding quickly is my strength and I know this shit is not simple.

I am under constant pressure to deliver something quickly.

Any concerns I raise are almost brushed off because I am an idiot with no qualifications who should be greatful for the work I am doing and the low as balls salary

The problems I solve are commended by the 10+ years of experience senior developer writing the application for us, yet I get shit for taking an hour to find the problem that existed in our network setup because it is the devs job (OMFG HE WOULD NEVER HAVE REALIZED WITHOUT COMING HERE AND LOOKING AT OUR INFRASTRUCTURE... WE WOULD HAVE BEEN STUCK FOR A FUCKING MONTH!!!!)

I see only 2 courses ahead for my life. The easy way and the hard way.

Easy way, buy a gun and end it all.

Suffer for 3 more years in the place that is causing constant breathing difficulty and the occasional pain in my left arm, finish my matric, continue learning to code and leave.

But right now I just want cry scream like Superman!!!

You know that moment when you are siting in train or bus and around you there are old people but you have work on laptop so you open it but then their eyes stick up on that strange thing on your knees and you feel like human from future xD

I really don't like this trend of building command line applications for controlling some <buzzword> cloud app or <buzzword> framework.

Why should I need or want to learn the exact wording of your gcloud command, or the path to your Ng cli, or some ass-backwards AWS search syntax when I can get the same functionality from your web app, where I can use my FUCKING EYES to work out where the "Create Instance" button is and how to click it!!!??

Stop pushing your shitty python monolith of a client where possibilities for the above task range from:
- google-cloud instances --add "subfjfechye thiq"
To
- gcloud /create /type=INSTANCE "rogdhyuffhue"

"BuT iT mAkEs iT MoRe aUtomaTaBLe"
I DON'T CARE. What is the point when I can use a proper programming language instead of bash, with actual code-completion and syntax rather than the horrendous excuse for a suggestion system that is the Tab key where it probably doesn't even work in the first place and I have to copy and paste some mysterious dbus command buried in an old documentation page on the Wayback Machine using a utility I don't have installed and a broken URL?

Go away.

I been looking over my profile and god it's been a while, programming as still been going on in the background but more for game mods and alikes, kind of been lazy but same time dealing with life.

I really had forgotten my passion for tech and programming it's just become a tool I know and use and I kind of feel bad for doing that. I got in to computers when I was 6 years old built my own PC our of random spare parts at 7, was teaching family members how to repair there own pcs by 9 at the age of 11 was helping with the schools computer department repair and fixing networking problems and my ideas and comments mattered.

Now I am an adult ... Sadly it seems the enjoyment of any idea is shot down with some rude remarks from another Dev, but isn't the point we all see a problem different so we all can contribute?

Like I said I never worked away from computers or programming but now I more like your little side computer repair shop I can do it, I get the job done but the passion isn't there and the end result reflects it.

I believe it's the human part what put me off not just others but myself, I used to put my heart in to my projects and when someone comes alone and rips them apart for let's say a spelling mistake what I state everywhere I am dyslexic but seems to be over looks alot. I became more stale in what I was willing to take on. My own websites now reflect this I am using crappy reinstalled software over me doing it myself.

But the passion for the idea what tech and programming never left I just hope one day soon I am enjoy it again, the wow factor is still there, god there is some talent out there and some of them people I meet before they became big but my aim was never to be come big I would be happy to be on a small project what only as a few eyes on it as long as it makes a difference and that's my problem tech like everything as become so commercial.

Even small projects are ran like a company and the wow factor is gone or the risk factor of trying a unknown way is dismissed for trying to keep face.

If I was born 20 years before right now I would be glad to slow down but I am 30+ and seen the world change so much in this last 10 years where I can do it but .... Why would I do it, when most cases it goes out of my moral ideals

I still mess around with teck, I still have Pi's kicking about and you bet your bottom Dollar I will be trying to get a Pi 5 lol

The love of tech hasn't gone but the communities I enjoyed have, I know this is a me not adapting but I don't need to adapted, I want what we do to matter to someone to make a difference, and I mean with there life's and wellbeing not there bottom line.

If you have any communities to look in to please comment below and of you was able to read this then OMG I am so sorry, I didn't proof read this or anything it was just a little rant about how I become disconnected from the world I have always found enjoyment.

I slipped away to game at late but this last few months I seen myself wanting to be apart of a project or community for tech/programming and even just be a voice helping even someone else get the answer.

I do still have hope for the geeky nerds of yester years even if we are now just a relic of the past lol

Well sorry to put anyone's eyes though this lol enjoy your rants guys and keep up what ever projects your working on.

Not dev related so don't shoot me. If you like writing I figure you maybe might enjoy this and thought I'd share.

This is a section from an unfinished novel about 2050s America, set in a corporate subsidized mega-fevela sprawling across washington state, ruled by gangs and patrolled by the officers of a bankrupt nation suffering through austerity and on-and-off again spasms of mass civil conflict.

"Averice - Sex, drugs, and vice, in the downfall and dying days of america."

we lived in a smoke government, where everything was bullshit they blew up your ass so you could continue make believe while
you were bent over with your head in the hole in the ground you mistook for your ass to start with. And if you questioned it all, one bit, the mouth organ of the state would command
hate upon you, like an old latin curse, with a lexicon armada of phrases like "terrorist", and "troubled individual" to character assassinate you by drowning you in the humbling river of societies mass delusion giver, those two sweet letters "TV."

No, we were on the industry edge here, inventing better bait to catch what the state politiburo labelled 'bandits', all for what?

It had, in later years become fashionable to call those who didn't want to be stolen from any more, projected as it were, "thieves", in the same fashion as those in the middle east, defending
their homeland from foreigners, were labelled "insurgents." Tyranny had not so long ago grown a sense of irony it would seem.

And if you became enemy number one of the state, as thousands were, you would spend your days on the run, always looking over your
shoulder for the states vanish vans--black escalades with men in dark suits and mirrored glasses, like bugmen with shiny inhuman, and inscrutable eyes full of alien malice.

These were sordid summers, full of plastic playhouses where the cost of a days wages you could lay with a synthetic lover and pay away the days tense tax for a good lay, and forget your toils and troubles. And so many were kept in poverty because of easy habit and routine that they forget they were not living.

But for me, I had none of it. I preferred the troubled thing on the corner when I could coax one into my state issued sedan. She was sulky, with bright blonde curls, 19, maybe 20, with empty eyes, as if watching some invisible horizon. And in the glow of the blue neon, among the wet sidewalks, and trash, she leaned into my car. No words were exchanged. I nodded, and
she got into the car, a miniskirt, and slinky little handbag.

This was no more than state business with a bureau guy like me, and for her, little more than the prison trade taken public.

She huffed some powder and climbed spraddle leg onto my lap, grabbing me along my jawline, eyes locked onto the depths of my soul, and
for the next ten minutes as she moved on top of me, I was motionless property while my lusts became animal, and she, my cream cup.

After, I arrested her to the standard protests, but she new the game and quickly hushed. This was the verdant arithmetic of the state. I was awarded x amount of pension points for every criminal, no matter how, and it was no gentle hand, not the judge, not the jury, or the executioner of their will. It was the rigid touch of a long arm, dislocated from the law, and now, like frankenstein's monster, cobbled onto the mechanism of the state not unlike the manner of a combine harvester.

We were the owners of all by virtue of all we could take, and we took all we could get. The serial romeos of state police power, romancing
the unwilling citizenry with televised patriotism and five minute power talks at the beginning of the corporate day.

It could be paradise or a wasteland if we wanted it to be. And for a time it was.

Edit: devrant always breaks my formatting. sigh.

!dev

Nothing is a dream.

My very first step, as I left the staircase, was on a plate. A loud click made my instincts tick, pushing me to blindly roll forwards.

Before I even had the time to process, that I had just evaded being burnt alive by a wall of flames, the rumblings of another mechanism made my heart accelerate yet again.

Five iron spikes descended uppon me, scratching my cloak, but no more. Twice I was lucky...

But three doors: one behind me, two to my left and right. The ones at my sides spring open with a loud crack, and four terrors pour out, seeking to flay me alive and wear my skin.

I slash at them with my bloody falchion, walking backwards, seeking to escape through the remaining door. Primal fear runs through my spine as I realize: it's barred from the other side!

Burning through my mana, I manage to unlock the door, and quickly close it behind me... but the terrors do not abandon the chase. With inhuman strength, they pound on the door, while desperately crying out for my blood.

I try to escape to the next room... another locked door. There must be another way! There has to, or I'm as well as dead...

What's this, in the corner, among cobwebs? A handle... and a secret passageway, that I can close from the other side! Magnificent!

Another flight of stairs takes me deeper into the tomb. I find an oil lamp, suspiciously well-maintained. Someone has been here recently...

I marvel at the macabre carvings on the wall, depicting scenes from when immortal tyrants ruled the earth. Haven't I seen these before... ?

No matter, I must focus. I was instructed to find an artefact hidden within this acursed place, that I may use for the purification ritual -- there is only one way, so onwards.

An old wooden gate, with a broken bronze knob. Soon as I put my hand on it, it opens inwards...

Eyes black like diamonds, she awaited me inside.

I had never been, simultaneously, just as terrified as enraptured. Day and night, her voice still reverberates inside my mind. And even as I lay dead, her inescapable gaze still clutches the very bottom of my heart.

"Did you come for me?" she asked, smiling, opening up her arms, so that I may fall into her sweet, loving embrace.

"Yes" I whispered as I walked towards her, enthralled.

In a bout of deranged ecstasy, she drank every last drop of my blood. But then... she cried, cuddling my remains.

"No... no, no, NO!" her screams tore apart her very soul "I killed my son... I KILLED MY SON!"

Oh, mother...
Don't cry mother
it hurts no more.

Now I live again.
And I forgive you.

Because I loved you,
as ashamed as I am to admit,
the very moment I saw your eyes,
I loved you.

"I was imprisoned here, so that I may not harm anyone else" she muttered, tears in her eyes "I cannot stop myself -- I am cursed"

Do not ask of me, that I end your suffering.
How could I?
If there is no cure...

"Please, my love... " she begged "kill me... "

No... I can't...
I can't bear either weight
for the rest of this wretched eternity!

How could I take your life?
But how could I leave you to suffer?!

"Now we'll be together... " she smiled, as I raised the falchion.

"Forevermore" I wept, before bringing it down.

***

Nothing is a dream.

Somber, I returned to the Santuary, having fulfilled my mission.

But looking uppon the bone mask I donned, obscuring my eyes, the Matriarch knew that I had been... changed.

I felt no remorse as I slaughtered the witch that doomed my beloved, right on her own altar to heresy. She earned as much.

Her guards, however, I could not defeat.

But that doesn't matter;
deep inside, I was already dead.
And behind the mask,
the whole way through,
I had shed tears without pause.

"Now we'll be together... " I prayed to the nightsky, as silver blades punctured my thorax.

"Forevermore" her sweet voice replied.

***

So I'm having this return to the 70s mood. Not for the 70s themselves but for the pack of tech in everyday life.

Like besides email or worldwide message exchange and wikipedia, what have been the last true innovations?

Media streaming just killed and monopolized other industries. Sure, everything is cheaper, but let's be honest, how much music do we consume? Pretty sure like 80% of people listen to the same 100 songs in their whole lifetime. Do we need limitless streaming? Did it help us somehow beyond giving some dopamine shots?

Social media are and have always been crap for posers, advertising and bots. Small communities make sense, when properly taken care of. The actual issue with social media is the replacement of the so called "Third place". The place you go after work that is not your home. We don't know each other anymore, loneliness is apparently becoming pandemic and people are struggling with this. How is this innovative? For the real time news that are making people freak out?

And then, as I ranted before, AI. It's just... Statistics. Well applied statistics. Is it an actual innovation? No. Serves nothing beyond taking someone's job.
And before some retarded dickhead starts no, it will never create the same amount of jobs as a factory would've done 100 years ago, and prompt engineering is a lie told by the very guys who SELL those products to convince you that their crap is harmless.

Maybe it's about time to hit the brakes for a second and think if the simpler things (NOT the times!) were better, if maybe if we're getting lonely is actually our fault, it's our fault for not calling that old friend for a drink, it's our fault if we keep getting some dopamine shot every minute and are barely able to look people in the eyes, it's our fault for not behaving like human beings?

I hope any engineer will understand how this rant is about consumer-oriented tech and not tech in general.

Being pretty much the only one who has some knowledge of how to code and get my way around tech (even if minimal, I'm too lazy for my own good) in my familiar household - and by extension, my family (Family extends FamiliarHousehold - LoL I'm sorry) - (my brother is on his first grade of a programming course in high school, I'm a 2nd grade uni student aiming to become a game dev) sometimes I wish I knew nothing of it.

Don't get me wrong, I do like working on code (if in Java. C is making me wanna tear my eyes out) but sometimes ignorant family members push me through the edge.

I worked on a business thing my family started this summer and one of the "jobs" was managing everything via a website.
Fair enough, I knew nothing of it when I started but I learn fast and just like that I knew my way around it. The problem came when I had to teach the person who started the project how it worked. This doesn't sound all that bad except he is kinda in the stone age regarding informatics.
He got a computer a few years ago and he pretty much only played poker in it, and he still had one of those old nokias you could throw to a wall and get a hole into it. The computer is like 9y and runs like crap.
To make things worse he bought a new phone, a smartphone, and pestered me to teach him. I swear trying to teach him is like repeating the same thing 1000x and pray he keeps it in his head. Spoiler: he doesn't. ( sanity--; )
So to try and easy my suffering I decided to make a manual for the website (which is outdated by now because the team behind the website did a 180 and some things looks different), but it acted as if I'd done nothing. ( sanity--; )
To top this off he keeps on saying I don't wanna help him. ( sanity--; )
This kept going for the whole damn summer, and meanwhile I had to go back to uni and in the first days I still got like 4-5 calls/day, half of those might about the smallest things because he's so panicky.
Like (both examples happened while I was still there but it kinda goes along those lines sometimes):
- (During the period they changed the website the first time since we're there; they were mostly doing changes back and forth and testing because it had a new layout for a day or 2 before going back; also the site was totally functional, except for a thing or 2)
Him: "They're changing the website, why are they doing that?"
Me: "Because it's their website and they can?"
Him: "WHY DIDN'T THEY LET US KNOW"
Me: "They don't have to, they don't work for you." ( sanity--; )
Or (during the same period; the pages have a menu on the left; one of the submenus has a counter that resets every time the session ends; during that maintenance time they must've "disabled" the function because the number kept growing even after the session ended):
Him: "WHY IS THE NUMBER GROWING?"
Me: "They're working on the code, relax, it's nothing."
Him: "But why." ( sanity--; )

The only quesion he pretty much hasn't asked me yet is why "Is the website's colour this one and not that one?".

That rabbit in my grandpa's left table drawer, in the home I grew at. I wanted to finally catch it, and kill it. I was bad with animals all along, especially this one. My grandpa died the year before I was born, and my grandma said we would've got along really well. So much to talk about, a scientist to an engineer. So, I travelled back, but my home somehow turned from a city stone-walled house into a half-soaked, decaying wooden one. I caught that rabbit though, but while I was holding it at its neck and twisting it, it somehow disappeared, distributed evenly as if I were twisting a crayon. I was trying to find it, but in that left drawer, among century-old pencils and that red liquid thermometer I played with as a kid, only a faded out, dusty duckling resided. I picked it up, and unlike the rabbit, it was paper, no, cigarette paper thin. It wasn't hostile. It wasn't trying to run away. It just turned from yellow to grey, feathers leaving my fingers covered in fine dust. I realized it will never die, dwelling and decaying there forever, happy.

I did my calculations, and I knew for a fact when and where the rabbit should've appeared. It was the middle drawer, not the left one. I opened it and looked in anticipation how something chewed through the bottom. I caught it, but it was no rabbit, it was an alive, rubber rat. The rubber was white turned grey, old, aged, dusty, probably Soviet. I poked the rat's eye with a pen rod, but the rat's body inflated a bit, leaving it invincible. It was mocking me.

Of the same white rubber, a ball appeared. I knew for a fact it was alive too, I felt the bones inside holding it. I found its lips, and was prying it open. The massive, dry mouth emerged, with a full set of human teeth, albeit wider and nastier ones. Huge eyes looked at me. It was alive, it was intelligent. It was my grandpa's personal financial assistant all along. It told me to leave the rat and the rabbit alone. He told me not to worry about the ducking, as it was in safe hands.

It made friends with my brother during the "blue age", when he was wearing thin, worn out rugs instead of clothes, tiny faded blue flowers on them, screaming and annoying my grandma he lived with in that room, not a single person other than the two in sight. The house was slowly submerging. The water was rising.

#justathought

What do people need? What will be the requirements of future?
App development, webdev, blockchain,.. snapchat, tiktok, insta... These are all just careers and apps whose sole purpose is to engage people with their phones... Every new app/website in the market wants to make the youngest of the young and oldest of the old to keep their eyes fixed on this glass screen for as long as they can... For the current decade, this has been the most successful market and profitable scheme of business in the world, leaving other careers like medical, astronomy, mechanics., Etc far behind.

So is this the future? In the next generation too we will be having users who are addicted to smaller and smaller and larger and larger screens, with their spectacle width thickening ... Or are we going to shift to some other form of business?

If you guys are ever looking for a chance to shine in the eyes of people you don't respect, may I humbly suggest multithreading a 20 year old project that uses COM and global variables?

I didn't need that hair anyway.

Need advice:

So I’m 20 years old. Got a decent job as software engineer with a really good pay and really want to break into machine learning.

Mastered NodeJS (my stack has always had node for the past 5-6 years) and I’m finding it difficult to switch to python for machine learning since things are so engraved in my head in javascript.

Aside from the syntax when I’m watching tutorials or reading books, I see data scientists and mathematicians make design mistakes in their code and it hurts my eyes and triggers my ocd.

I need tips on how to put my mindset in a moldable state so I can judge less and learn more and absorb data. Like you know that philosophy that when u get old your brain can’t learn things as fast anymore? I feel like that’s already happening to me rn at the age of 20.

!dev

So, few people who know what shitstorm I've been through, considering that I've cut off all social media except Reddit and devRant.

I am one of those hotheads who will rebel against anything which is even slightly wrong or unacceptable so after my twitter incident, I've been thinking to change my behavior and attitude, which has caused me and my best friend problems and I let him down and embarrassed and I think he also gave up on me but more to that later (or maybe I've covered it up in my last rant). The point is I want to improve myself, grow myself and for the sake of that I've quit free-lancing, and took a mildly great opportunity in a meteor js based company, I like their office, I join within 2 months (2 months till my support period ends), also I've become quite a twitter addict so I had to shut down my old account.

But I have an idea to learn about the corporate environment and raise voice against them, which in my eyes is an action that should be needed.

Somewhere down the line, I wanted to achieve my dream i.e. to get my doctorate degree, I was so obsessed about it. But frankly speaking, I've given up on that too.

So. yeah, cheers to a new life

var life = new Life();

Newbie question

Any good free resources for full stack web development. Also if a resource teaches mainly frontend but also teaches some backend it is a full stack web development resource in my eyes. I was looking at freecodecamp but it is a bit too vast for me. I am also looking at the cokplete intro to web development v2 course by Brian holt for free on frontend masters but it is 2 years old and has not been updated. Also it does not teach that much bakcend hust node and express.

Also another question is frontend masters good for web development. I did not find many threads about it. I got a discount for it which gives me a one year subscription for 195 dollars