Its Friday, you all know what that means! ... Its results day for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

*audience: wwwwwwooooooooo!!!!*

We've had a bewildering array of candidates, lets remind ourselves:

- a psychopath that genuinely scared me a little
- a CEO I would take pleasure seeing in pain
- a pothead who mistook me for his drug dealer
- an unbelievable idiot
- an arrogant idiot obsessed with strings

Tough competition, but there can be only one ... *drum roll* ... the winner is ... none of them!

*audience: GASP!*
*audience member: what?*
*audience member: no way!*
*audience member: your fucking kidding me!*

Sir calm down! this is a day time show, no need for that ... let me explain, there is a winner ... but we've kept him till last and for a good reason

*audience: ooooohhhhh*

You see our final contestant and ultimate winner of this series is our good old friend "C", taking the letters of each of our previous contestants, that spells TRAGIC which is the only word to explain C.

*audience: laughs*

Oh I assure you its no laughing matter. C was with us for 6 whole months ... 6 excruciatingly painful months.

Backstory:

We needed someone with frontend, backend and experience with IoT devices, or raspberry PI's. We didn't think we'd get it all, but in walked an interviewee with web development experience, a tiny bit of Angular and his masters project was building a robot device that would change LED's depending on your facial expressions. PERFECT!!!

... oh to have a time machine

Working with C:

- He never actually did the tutorials I first set him on for Node.js and Angular 2+ because they were "too boring". I didn't find this out until some time later.

- The first project I had him work on was a small dashboard and backend, but he decided to use Angular 1 and a different database than what we were using because "for me, these are easier".

- He called that project done without testing / deploying it in the cloud, despite that being part of the ticket, because he didn't know how. Rather than tell or ask anyone ... he just didn't do it and moved on.

- As part of his first tech review I had to explain to him why he should be using if / else, rather than just if's.

- Despite his past experience building server applications and dashboards (4 years!), he never heard of a websocket, and it took a considerable amount of time to explain.

- When he used a node module to open a server socket, he sat staring at me like a deer caught in headlights completely unaware of how to use / test it was working. I again had to explain it and ultimately test it for him with a command line client.

- He didn't understand the need to leave logging inside an application to report errors. Because he used to ... I shit you not ... drive to his customers, plug into their server and debug their application using a debugger.

... props for using a debugger, but fuck me.

- Once, after an entire 2 days of tapping me on the shoulder every 15 mins for questions / issues, I had to stop and ask:

Me: "Have you googled it?"
C: "... eh, no"
Me: "can I ask why?"
C: "well, for me, I only google for something I don't know"
Me: "... well do you know what this error message means?"
C: "ah good point, i'll try this time"

... maybe he was A's stoner buddy?

- He burned through our free cloud usage allowance for a month, after 1 day, meaning he couldn't test anything else under his account. He left an application running, broadcasting a lot of data. Turns out the on / off button on the dashboard only worked for "on". He had been killing his terminal locally and didn't know how to "ctrl + c a cloud app" ... so left it running. His intention was to restart the app every time you are done using it ... but forgot.

- His issue with the previous one ... not any of his countless mistakes, not the lack of even trying to make the button work, no, no, not for C. C's issue is the cloud is "shit" for giving us such little allowances. (for the record in a month I had never used more than 5%).

- I had to explain environment variables and why they are necessary for passwords and tokens etc. He didn't know it wasn't ok to commit these into GitHub.

- At his project meetups with partners I had to repeatedly ask him to stop googling gifs and pay attention to the talks.

- He complained that we don't have 3 hour lunch breaks like his last place.

- He once copied and pasted the same function 450 times into a file as a load test ... are loops too mainstream nowadays?

You see C is our winner, because after 6 painful months (companies internal process / requirements) he actually achieved nothing. I really mean that, nothing. Every thing was so broken, so insecure / wide open, built without any kind of common sense or standards I had to delete it all and start again ... it took me 2 weeks.

I hope you've all enjoyed this series and will join me in praying for the return of my sanity ... I do miss it a lot.

Yours truly,
practiseSafeHex

I work at a small company that uses very outdated coding approaches for their solutions.

About a year ago I went through our main application to improve performance and found quite a few areas that I could tackle such as using a dictionary data structure in place of (many) foreach loops that required to pull out a single object.

That specific change yielded a lot of improvement (you can only imagine) and the other developers wanted to learn the ways of dictionaries (because it was so revolutionary and new to them). I showed them many examples so that they could better understand this data structure.

Fast forward to a few months later, saw one of my coworker's code and noticed that they were using a dictionary... And iterating through each kvp similar to a foreach..... Wtf?!

P.S. that person's salary is much higher than mine :(

First time rant. Thanks for listening!

So my manager (a 29 y/o, who hardly can use a mac) walks towards me with a hint of panic in his eyes.

Manager: Hey commander keen, do you know how to use vertical look up in excel, I've tried, and looked at tutorials.

Me: yeah I really don't know excel (and not willing to learn, especially on the fly), I don't even have excel installed, I can write I script that does what you want.

Manager: No you have enough on your plate

3 hours later

Manager: hey I still can't figure it out, could you solve it with a script, won't that take to long

Me: no send me the files, Ill do it with a script.

I start writing 2 for loops and wait for the file, 10 ish minutes later its basicly done, just need to put in the column indexes.

I send a message on both slack channels (hey are you going to email or slack me the file)

After a hour I walk to his desk and again ask him for the file.

Manager a good 2 hours later on slack: Hey I just send you the file, I hope its not to much work, it has to happen asap.

So if you have kids, and they are not that bright by some kind of birth defect, don't worry, they can always become a manager.

But you can't get me down today. I hit 2000 upvotes and the employer is unknowingly a proud sponsor for reading and writing all these rants and comments :-) thnx devrant

Brother of my friend came to me and asked me to teach him C as it was most important lesson in high school CS. I agreed and started with data types, conditional statements, loops and others that were mostly exam oriented. He was doing good. Then I thought of teaching him a life lesson and introduced him to pointers(questions about pointers are very rare in exams). As soon as I started the pointers, things got pretty bored and he went off topic and started talking about a girl he has crush on and told he wanted to know when her birthday was so that he could gift her something to be ahead of the crowd trying to impress her. I thought to help him out, afterall he's like my younger brother and told him I can help. Result of his previous exam were out then, providing symbol number on Examination Board's website would do the trick because it would return full data of students result which had birthday in it. I modified my previous script to fetch data of his school's result and pass the data to a file. They're together since last few months. He reminds me time to time that my code is what got them together.

So there is this girl who joined the company as a trainee.

The company developed a 1 year project to train 25 trainees and she joined saying that she already had some experience making websites. (remember this)

They started in the beginning of January and stayed for about 3 months just studying the platform (Salesforce) and receiving some classes from Senior Devs, on subjects like OOP basics, loops, conditions and features of the platform.

After this time they joined the teams, 2 joined my team, a guy with 32 years that worked 10 years in a bank and wanted to go for a IT job and the girl of 22.

We gave her a really small task, just to make a code to copy info from one field to the other on a list of objects.

After 3 days of saying she was working on it we asked her to show us the code, she had written the "code" directly in the class, VS Code was going crazy with errors. When we asked her "But where is the method?", she answered "What is a method?"

After it we had other experiences trying to teach her some things. The team was formed by me (mid level dev), another mid level dev, a senior and a architect (who was self taught and one of the best teachers I've ever seen).

We tried for about 3 months to teach her how to do basic stuff, like a for loop, and every time we learned that she was missing some "foundations" of this basic stuff, so we would come back and explain the foundation, and a couple times she needed to use this knowledge like a week later and didn't remember shit.

So after this the team talked with our leader that we wanted to let her go and focus on the other guy who was going really well and some other junior devs who had joined the team.

But the HR found out that she had sued her last company, we don't know the reason, but HR guys were afraid of firing her without a careful firing process.

So now we're stuck with her in the team, and everything we ask her to do need to be remade, not because the code is bad, but because it NEVER works

And after all this I still ask myself, how did she finish college? Every person that i know that studied CS or CS like courses had a lot of OOP or at least knew what a class and a method were supposed to be.

At an interview, the first round was an online coding round. Two questions, one easy one hard, 90 minutes, easy peasy.

I solved the hard one first.
A bit of good logic, followed MVC pattern, all done. Worked flawlessly.
Submitted code. Online compiler threw up an internal error citing java is an invalid command(jdk not found).
Called the invigilators. What I heard next, I couldn't believe this shit.
"We're not responsible for any errors you may be having. Figure it out yourself"
I was like WTF dude. This is not even a compilation or runtime error!
After a heated discussion, I made him look at the code.
Him - what is all this classes and all? Why haven't you written everything inside the main function?
Me - those are model classes. Those are different helper functions. That is a recursive function to avoid 5 for loops and use divide and conquer. Ever heard of OOP? what kind of person writes a 300 line program inside one function?
Him - no no we write it like that only. Correct this.
Me - I fit everything inside the main function. Still the same error, java not installed. Called the idiot to have a look at it.
Him - yeah your code is wrong.
Me - may I know what's wrong with it? Can you fix it please?
Him - no no we aren't allowed to see the code (he had already read it twice. It was compiling and running perfectly, locally) .
Yeah you solved only 1 problem, you were supposed to solve 2.
Me - yes because the rest of the time I had the pleasure of your company. (It isn't everyday that I see talking buffoons.)

TL;DR :

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

STORY TIME

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WASM was a mistake. I just wanted to learn C++ and have fast code on the web. Everyone praised it. No one mentioned that it would double or quadruple my development time. That it would cause me to curse repeatedly at the screen until I wanted to harm myself.

The problem was never C++, which was a respectable if long-winded language. No no no. The problem was the lack of support for 'objects' or 'arrays' as parameters or return types. Anything of any complexity lives on one giant Float32Array which must surely bring a look of disgust from every programmer on this muddy rock. That is, one single array variable that you re-use for EVERYTHING.

Have a color? Throw it on the array. 10 floats in an object? Push it on the array - and split off the two bools via dependency injection (why do I have 3-4 line function parameter lists?!). Have an image with 1,000,000 floats? Drop it in the array. Want to return an array? Provide a malloc ptr into the code and write to it, then read from that location in JS after running the function, modifying the array as a side effect.

My- hahaha, my web worker has two images it's working with, calculations for all the planets, sun and moon in the solar system, and bunch of other calculations I wanted offloaded from the main thread... they all live in ONE GIANT ARRAY. LMFAO.If I want to find an element? I have to know exactly where to look or else, good luck finding it among the millions of numbers on that thing.

And of course, if you work with these, you put them in loops. Then you can have the joys of off-by-one errors that not only result in bad results in the returned array, but inexplicable errors in which code you haven't even touched suddenly has bad values. I've had entire functions suddenly explode with random errors because I accidentally overwrote the wrong section of that float array. Not like, the variable the function was using was wrong. No. WASM acted like the function didn't even exist and it didn't know why. Because, somehow, the function ALSO lived on that Float32Array.

And because you're using WASM to be fast, you're typically trying to overwrite things that do O(N) operations or more. NO ONE is going to use this return a + b. One off functions just aren't worth programming in WASM. Worst of all, debugging this is often a matter of writing print and console.log statements everywhere, to try and 'eat' the whole array at once to find out what portion got corrupted or is broke. Or comment out your code line by line to see what in forsaken 9 circles of coding hell caused your problem. It's like debugging blind in a strange and overgrown forest of code that you don't even recognize because most of it is there to satisfy the needs of WASM.

And because it takes so long to debug, it takes a massively long time to create things, and by the time you're done, the dependent package you're building for has 'moved on' and find you suddenly need to update a bunch of crap when you're not even finished. All of this, purely because of a horribly designed technology.

And do they have sympathy for you for forcing you to update all this stuff? No. They don't owe you sympathy, and god forbid they give you any. You are a developer and so it is your duty to suffer - for some kind of karma.

I wanted to love WASM, but screw that thing, it's horrible errors and most of all, the WASM heap32.

So a few years ago when I was getting started with programming, I had this idea to create "Steam but for mods". And just think about it - 13 and a half years old me which knew C# not even for a half of a year wanted to create a fairly sizable project. I wasn't even sure how while () or foreach () loops worked back in the day.

So I've made a post on a polish F1 Challenge '99-'02 game forum about this thing. The guy reached out to me and said: "Hey, I could help you out". This is where all started.
I've got in touch with him via Gadu-Gadu (a polish equivalent of ICQ). So I've sent him the source code... Packed in .ZIP file... By Zippyshare… And just think how BAD this code was. Like for instance, to save games data which you were adding they were stored in text files. The game name was stored in one .txt file. The directory in another. The .exe file name in yet another and so on. Back then I thought that was perfectly fine! I couldn't even make the game to start via this program, because I didn't know about Working Directory).

The guy didn't reply to me anymore.

Of course back then it wasn't embarrassing to me at all, but now when I think about it...

A few years back I worked at a company as their front-end web developer with one other guy who was their "back-end" developer. PHP and MySQL specifically. He was eventually fired and I took over both development roles. When I got around to seeing his source code and the way he had created the databases, I immediately saw why he was fired. This guy did not understand the concept of loops. Instead of separating out tags and categories with a split / loop, he set up database tables for EVERY. SINGLE. TAG.
i.e. tag_1, tag_2, tag_3, etc. And then to top ot off, instead of looping through the tables, he set up huge conditioks for EVER.LY. SINGLE. TAG.
i.e. if(tag_1) else(tag_2) else(tag_3) etc.

That fucking guy...

Soooo I think I have finally come to the point that I may have to create a YouTube channel, to teach software engineering from the ground up... and teach it the way the universities and everyone else should be teaching it, so that they have a solid foundation.... throwing hello world, and loops and variables at folks out of the box without any of the environment context or low level embedded register, even logic gate understanding

That lack of understanding is why, soooo many college students and younger folks, are actually pretty shitty engineers. Everything is high level languages and theoretical concepts to them. Nothing practical, that’s why there’s sooo many python and java developers that can’t for the life of them understand memory management, low level hardware interfacing etc, because the colleges don’t teach it the way it use to be taught.

I seriously fear 30 years from now or sooner when there are few embedded engineers only left till retirement, as without those folks the whole pyramid of electronics falls to pieces.

Java, C#, python, all that shit don’t run on the bare metal... there’s this magical layer of C, and assembler that does all the work just so folks can abstract their thoughts.

Either 1 of two situations will happen.. price of electronics will rise because the embedded guys are few and far between therefore salaries skyrocket... OR everything starts running shit like java on the metal, where there are a over abundance of developers, their salaries will be low because there are soo many but the processing power, space, and energy needed to run java natively causes electronics cost to increase

but regardless 30 years from now if those script kiddies are building everything I fear it cuz there’s gonna be memory leaks, and overflow issues everywhere.. shit be blowing up more than 4th of July.. lol

Soooo in effort to prevent that and keep the embedded engineers up, or atleast properly educate the script kiddies, I’m gonna make that YouTube channel.. 1 maybe 2 videos a week, 1-2 hours sessions each.. starting at the fucken ground and building up.

How can you defend your ugly unstructured mess of a PR, when every spit-droplet infused spray of words from your mouth is full of syntax errors?

How can you call yourself a developer without being aware of basic logic? I ain't got no tolerance for double negations, not not true is just true, you doltish twat.

WHEN YOU TALK THERE IS A CLOUD OF RED SQUIGGLY LINES IN THE AIR FLOATING AROUND YOUR HEAD.

I mean what the fuck is up with eggcetera? Why are you just swapping out letters? What has the little ligature t in & ever done to you? Do I have to fucking replace & with 🥚 so your word diarrhea makes sense again?

NO. JUST PLEASE... STOP TALKING. YOU'RE RAPING LANGUAGE, AND IT WAS ALREADY BEATEN DEAD.

Unlike me, you have a degree in computer science... but how, how the fuck did you pass? How did neither your tongue nor code get stuck in a linter?

AND YOUR RESPONSE IS STILL: "YOU DON'T NEED TO LEARN WHEN YOU'RE FINISHED WITH SCHOOL" ... "WHAT DOES IT MATTER, IT WORKS, RIGHT?"

NO, IT'S NOT RIGHT.

You're lucky I love refactoring.

I'll start with a medical grade steel scalpel and a long sharp hook. Maybe I can clean up this brain a little. See if the tests turn green if I cut some of this gray matter away... plenty of unreachable statements, so many unnecessary loops...

Might have to start from scratch.

FUCK LINUX

now that I have your attention, and you’re probably angry, too, please, even if you don’t read this rant, never use code.org again. now, onto the rant…

god dammit, code.org sucks. I mean, anyone who created it or associates with it should, well, be considered a terrorist. they’re bombing students futures in computer science with false, useless, bullshit information. not to mention, their sponsors like bill gates, mark zuckerburg, and other rich asses, talk in a video about some boring ass shit that is hard to understand for anyone who doesn’t program, and not to mention, they use a fucking five dollar microphone. ear rape. even if you look at a textual version of it, then read the information on it, it’s practically useless because it's so terribly explained, and also useless. ironically enough, they focus on their animations more than their actual explinations, or their students for that matter. the fact that we had to encode a picture in binary, made me about 50% dumber, give or take a 0 or 1. then, we had to do it in hex, which wasn’t really much better, although more realistic I supposed. what's really the most depressing thing about this class is its application in the real world. I've learnt nothing whatsoever that will help me in the real world, or in computer science. I suppose there's two things that may be useful (that I already knew): hex, and that TCP doesn't lose packets. that's it. those two things. five seconds worth of knowledge from the first quarter of the year. the ideas just make me want to throw up. teaching the main ideas of computer science without actually teaching it? one of the teachers (probably a good one) enrolled her students in an online programming course just so they could understand, because the explanations are just so terrible. this is the only [high school] computer science course offered by code.org, and I signed up because it's an AP computer science class (tried to get into AP Java, the day I was supposed to take the test to get into an upper level class, I was told it didn't count as a tech credit). seriously, fuck code.org. it makes you dumber. their 'app lab' environment is pointless, just like everything else. the app lab is basically where you have a set of commands and have to make a dog bark() or a storm trooper miss() [and that's hell when they haven't introduced while loops yet]. the app lab is literally code.org going out of their way to make everything that their students are learning pointless in the real world. seriously, why can't we just use a <canvas> like an ACTUAL PROGRAMMER would do if they were to make a browser game, not use an app engine so slow it would be faster to update windows and android studio each time I run an 'app' in their 'environment'. their excuse is that the skills "transfer over" to the real world. BITCH! IF I DIDN'T KNOW JAVA, AND I WANTED TO MAKE A GAME IN JAVA, I'M NOT GOING TO LEARN PYTHON, THEN "TRANSFER" THE SKILLS I LEARNT, I'M GOING TO LEARN FUCKING JAVA. AND THAT GOES FOR EVER OTHER LANGUAGE, PROJECT, ETC.

I'm begging you code.org, stop, get help.

So Friday afternoon is always deployment time at my company. No sure why, but it always fucks us.

Anyways, last Friday, we had this lovely deployment that was missing a key piece. On Wednesday I had tested it, sent out an email(with screenshots) saying "yo, whoever wrote this, this feature is all fucked up." Management said they would handle it.

The response email. 1(out of 20) defects I sent in were not a defect but my error. No further response, so I assume the rest were being looked into.

In a call with bossman, my manager states that the feature is fixed, so I go to check it quickly before the deployment(on Friday).

THERE IS NO FUCKING CODE CHECK-IN. THE DEV BASTARD JUST SAID THAT MY USECASE WAS WRONG, SO MY ENTIRE EMAIL WAS INVALID.

I am currently working on Saturday, as the other guy refuses to see the problem! It is blatant, and I got 3 other people to reproduce to prove I am not crazy!

On top of that, the code makes me want to vomit! I write bad code. This is like a 3rd grader who doesn't know code copy-pasted from stack overflow! There is literally if(A) then B else if(!A) then B! And a for loop which does some shit, and the line after it closes has a second for loop that iterates over the same unaltered set! Why?! On top of that, the second for loop loops until "i" is equal to length-1, then does something! Why loop???

The smartest part of him ran down his Mama's leg when it saw the DNA dad was contributing!

Don't know who is the culprit, and if you happen to see this, I am pissed. I am working on Saturday because you can't check your code or you lied on your resume to get this job, as you are not qualified! Fuck you!

Oh dear, a scaling problem I solved was replacing some Regex matching with simpler string functions. While I'm a huge fan of Regex, it's unreal how much performance they can suck out of some high-n loops...
I got about 120x out of some critical code thus making a CPU upgrade unnecessary.

[long]
When searching for internship via school I found this small startup with this cute project of building a teaching tool for programming. There were back then 2 programmers: the founder and the co-founder.

Then like 1 week before the internship started, the co-founder had a burnout and had to get off the project, while the company was so low on budget the founder, aka my new b0ss, had to work separate jobs to keep the company alive. (quite metal tbh)

It's funny because I'm a junior developer, 100%. I've been coding as a hobby for around 8 years now but I've never worked in a big company before. (No exception to this workplace either)

First project I get: rewrite the compiler. The Python compiler.
"But wait, why not just embed a real compiler from the first case?"
-nanananana it's never simple, as you probably know from your own projects.

The new compiler, as compared to existing embedded compiler solutions out there, needed these prime features:
- Walk through the code (debugger style), but programmatically.
- Show custom exceptions (ex: "A colon is needed at the end of an if-statement" instead of "Syntax error line 3")
- Have a "Did-you-mean this variable?" error for usage of unassigned variables.
- Be able to be embedded in Unity's WebGL build target

All for the use case of being a friendly compiler.
The last dash in the list is actually the biggest bottleneck which excluded all existing open-source projects (i could find). Compliant with WebAssembly I can't use threads among other things, IL2CPP has lots of restrictions, Unity has some as well...

Oh and it should of course be built using test-driven development.

"Good luck!" - said the founder, first day of work as she then traveled to USA for **3 weeks**, leaving me solo with the to-be-made codebase and humongous list of requirements.

---

I just finished the 6th week of internship, boss has been at "HQ" for 3 weeks now, and I just hit the biggest milestone yet for this project.

Yes I've been succeeding! This project has gone so well, and I'm surprising myself how much code I've been pumping out during these weeks.

I'm up now at almost 40'000 lines of source and 30'000 lines of code. ‼
( Biggest project I've ever worked on previously was at 8'000 lines of code )

The milestone (that I finished today) was for loops! As been trying to showcase in the GIF.

---

It's such a giant project and I can honestly say I've done some good work here. Self-five. Over-performing is a thing.

The things that makes me shiver though is that most that use this application will never know the intricates of it's insides, and the brain work put into it.

The project is probably over-engineered. A lot. Having a home-made compiler gives us a lot of flexibility for our product as we're trying to make more of a "pedagogic IDE". But no matter that I reinvented the wheel for the 105Gth time, it's still the most fun I've had with a project to date.

---

Also btw if anyone wants to see source code, please give me good reasons as I'm actively trying to convince my boss to make the compiler open-source.

Cheers!

When I just started my software engineering course in college, we had a group project every semester where we would use the skills learned during that semester to make a certain product or program.

For the semester in this story, we were tasked with making a reservation system for a campsite. Visitors would be able to select a free spot, and reserve it.

The spot reservation screen would be a map of the campsite, and visitors would click on the desired site on the map to select it. Sites were neatly laid out in a perfect grid.

My task in the group for this project was my favourite position: yelling at people for poor code quality. And boy did I get to yell.

Any semi competent programmer would probably come up with two simple loops to generate all the buttons (something like 144 buttons), one loop to fill a row, and then another to go down the rows until all were filled. Some other similar functionality in the program was solved this way.

However, my classmate that was responsible for this part of the code wasn't a big fan of concise programming. So instead, he wrote 144 functions aptly called `generateFirstButton()` all the way through `generateHundredFourtyFourthButton()`.

*what*

I called him out on his horribly smelly code, and his retort was "But it works, and now you don't have to think about complicated loop logic".

I rewrote the class and reduced it from ~1150 lines to about 20 lines.

He didn't pass the exam.

Why do programmers take so long in the shower?
They read the directions on the shampoo bottle and follow them to the letter:
Lather, rinse, and repeat.
If only shampoo used for-loops in their instructions...
while(hair.isDirty){
hair.wash();
hair.rinse ();
}
while(hair.isDirty() && !shampoo.isEmpty()){
hair.wash();
hair.rinse();
}
Come on man, we should still stop if we run out of shampoo even if the hair isn't 100% clean yet.
while(hair.isDirty() && !shampoo.isEmpty() && tap.waterStillHot()){
hair.wash();
hair.rinse();
}
This could go on forever, I mean the adding of special cases.

try {
while(hair.isDirty() && !shampoo.isEmpty() && tap.waterStillHot()){
hair.wash();
hair.rinse();
}}
catch(sexException) { self.f___(spouse); } // spouse showed in in mid-rinse
catch(deathException) { spouse.arrangeForBurial(self); } // user died while showering
More importantly, you also need to catch a hairNotFoundException in the event that the user is bald. Or more properly, wrap the whole thing in "if(hair != null)". You don't want bald users throwing an exception every time they shower.

-- From a reddit feed a while back.

I taught an intro to programming class today, brought back memories of highschool...

I remember when I started my first IT class in grade 10, it was a 50/50 split between IT theory amd programming. Choices were java or delphi...I made the uninformed choice to do java (thank goodness) and really enjoyed it. For some reason the logic and OOP concepts really made sense to me and i was well ahead of the class. I was always top 5 for maths/physics/chem and english literature but never enjoyed them for a second. On the other hand programming was something i could do for hours and still enjoy. In my final year we had to do a project, most of my class was still struggling with very simple for loops and jframes. The projects were terrible drag and drop NetBeans UIs that would convert meters to feet.

I remember being upset with the quality and ended up writing an entire client/server chat system with file sharing, voice notes, voice streaming, server admin controls, usernames and passwords (plaintext sql of course 😂), admins/mods/guests etc...

Got 100% and a personal recognition from the headmaster...found out yesterday the staff at the college have actually been using it since the time I left.

I don't know why i typed this whole story, something about teaching the kids where i was myself made me feel warm and fuzzy inside

I’m going through the book automate the boring stuff and I’m working on the chapter with web scraping right.

Well I wanted to just count all of the comic links that are in the xkcd archive as a small exercise to help me get used to and better learn web scraping.

I go through hell trying to do this but after more than a few hours later I finally have done it I returned every link of ONLY the comics, so it was time to start counting them.

I implemented the counting. The total number as of today is 2279 and it my code counted 2278, and I started to lose it.

So I go through this motherfucker manually to see where my loops count and the count on the tags start to differ. I found it, whoever made it went from 403 to 405. The euphoria I felt for this incredibly small task was incredible. (Still haven’t pieced it together yet)

I found the email of the guy who I assume owns the site and I started writing an email that basically said “hey the count of your comics is off by one and you made me rethink existence trying to figure out why, you skipped number 404-”

I look at the gap between 403 and 405 Then the words “Error 404 Not Found” popped into my head. I proceeded to scream for a second and stopped writing the email and now I’m trying to come to terms with this.

TL:DR the guy who runs xkcd comics trolled me with a simple error 404 joke

A rather happy/neutral post this time for a change. Lol

Firstly the good news: I have successfully recovered from the emotional/mental abuse and have been doing really well. My faith in myself has been slowly restored.

Secondly, I have started to pursue my hobbies again and find joy in them. I spend more and more time listening to music and play video games (CS:GO and AoM).

I have started getting more sun and also spend time outside socialising.

I can sense my happiness and joy get restored in my life.

Now on career front, I have started job hunting again as you all know. The interview process for Product Management is absolutely broken and taxing to go through all the loops.

During all my previous job hunts (three times), I was able to nail down at least one offer in a quarter.

This time, I started in October 2021 and still no success. I have much more experience and skill-set this time yet failures.

Fear not. My optimism is back this time. I am aware of where I am going wrong and sometimes I feel the situation is truly out of my control. The two major reasons I forsee are:

1. Relocation: it can take few months for me to relocate to UK/EU and hence, companies are preferring local candidates.

2. My duration with current employer is just 8 months which could be a potential turn off for many HMs. They might think I am a job hopper and maybe one of the reasons why I got so many calls and opportunities at my previous employer (I was stable with them for 7.5 years).

I feel it's just the matter of time for me now where I must hold my horses and keep the momentum without losing hope.

I will win.

Need to rant. I am doing programming 2 at university with java and the assessment is to make a card game. The subject is shit and is basically going over loops, variables, conditionals ect which we learned in introduction to programming and programming 1.

This leaves little time for oop principles, design patterns inherentance and all other useful stuff.

I am dedicated to making a career in programming and want to do my assessment the correct oop way. Although the lecturer doesn't care and is instructing the class to do it procedurally and shit.

I could do the program really quickly the shit procedural way and still get full marks but I feel dirty as hell coding like a scrub. So I'm 60 hours in on this assessment and there are so many classes and even more because of unit testing (we don't have to unit test) and I am spending way too much time.

My code is beautiful, my classes are tiny and maintainable, easy to modify and I'm learning so much about how to code oop the correct way with the help of a mentor and someone I look up to. But god does it take forever to code this way. And soo many iterations and redesigns because I'm still learning.

It's almost done but now I have another programming assessment for another class I'll have to do the dirty way because of time restraints and other assessments.

Sorry for wall of text but this is stressing me out 😛

It was my thesis defense and I've made a pretty complex algorithm of sorting out data to their respective tables. One panelist told me that it is not an algorithm but just a collection of for loops and if statements. An algorithm should contain mathematical equations he said. I facepalmed during the course of interrogation.

So now Microsoft is suddenly deciding devices that "weren't" compatible are now perfectly compatible with Windows 11, and they're rolling this out in bunches at a time.

I still get "This device can not support Windows 11" but my coworkers are starting to see "Upgrade NOW!" and it's honestly gotten a bit sour seeing as I may be next. They're bypassing those who're editing the registry to stop this, too.

If I have to start diving into the deep ends of Windows and find out what IP Windows gets it's updates just to slap it into my HOSTS file, we're already in the apocalypse.

This upgrade is not bad for common people, but upon seeing that the Start menu GUI and taskbar got butchered horribly (I place my taskbar on top of the screen, Windows 11 doesn't allow for that) I myself absolutely want as much distance between me and that shit as possible.

In college, I've been hearing my fellow classmates having issues with Windows 11 left and right, including with how hard it is to get another browser to even work, to the Windows Store not even downloading Microsoft's own apps, to endless update loops, to the infamous "Update of Death"

Keep in mind, they got computers with better specs than mine, and they're having a worse experience. A lot of them just got refunds to the very last issue I just mentioned, all within August, day of purchase to day of return.

Microsoft, I am begging you for mercy, I'm so close to just getting up, finding out where you are, and blocking you from my network at all network and device levels.

i was hired to join a team of old devs (40+) in an unnamed European country "yay goodbye 3rd world it's time to enjoy the quality of life" assist with enhancing already existing software and creating new solutions.
prior to my arrival most things were slow and super buggy, looking at the code base it shouldn't be a surprise, amateur hour everyone, logic implemented that is not needed, comment driven development, last time code review was done back in 1996. lots of anti patterns.
i swear there is a for loop that does nothing but it loops through a 100+ elements list, trunk based development with tfs since git is "not really needed"
test projects are not there.
>enter me an educated fool, with genuine passion for the craft and somehow a decent amount of knowledge.
>spent the last year fixing stuff educating people on principles and qualities.
> countless hours of training and explaining. team is showing cooperation, a new requirement comes in to develop with react.
> tear my ass creating reusable shit and self explanatory code with proper naming etc using git with feature branching, monday is first deployment day.
> today a colleague was working on an item submit a pull request and self approve it
> look at the code..... WTF the dumb fuck copied and pasted the whole code from different kendo components but somehow managed to refractor the name to test component, commented out all the code that he didn't use did the api call directly from the component, has 2 useeffects that depends on the a fucking text box changes for no reason, no redux implementation, the acceptance criteria is not achieved, and it doesn't work it just look right.
> first world country shit cannot scold, cannot complain, lead by example.
>asked him why you did this, the response was yeah probably i shouldn't have done that, i really didn't understand anything in the training but didn't want to waste time!!!!
> rest of the team created a different styled disaster with different flavors they don't even name their shit the same way.

fellow developers I'm stuck in a spaceship with a bunch of imposters, seriously i never cried in my entire life now I'm teary and on the verge of a break down.
talk with management "improving needs time" and offers me to join a yoga session to release the stress as if reaching nirvana would deliver shit on monday.
i really don't know what do is this a rant, is this a cry for help, I'm not sure, any advice is welcomed.

A long long time ago ( 2007 I think ) I worked for a company that made landing sites, so basically an email campaign would go out, users would be sent to a 1 page website with a form to capture their data, ready to be spammed even more. You know how it was back then.

So I worked with a guy who we had just hired, I didn't do the hiring but his CV checked out, so I gave him one of my tasks. Now most pages were made with js and html, with a PHP backend ( called with Ajax). Now this guy didn't know PHP so I was like all good, ASP works too at the end of the day we don't judge, we do like 2 or 3 of these a day and never look at them again. So he goes of and does is thing.

3 weeks later, the customer calls up to me they still haven't received their landing page. Ok so he probably forgot to email the customer np, I tell him to double check he has emailed the customer. Another week goes by end the customer calls back, same problem. At this point I'm getting worried, because we're days away from the deadline and it was originally my task.

So I go back to the guy and I tell him I want that landing page so I can send it myself, half thinking to myself that we had a freeloader, that guy that comes in to companies for 3 weeks, doesn't work, but still cashes his pay. But no, this was much worse.

So he tells me he has finished yet. I ask him why, what's the blocker ? You had 4 weeks to tell me you were blocked and couldn't progress. And his answer was simply, because I wasn't blocked I have been working on it this whole time. So I tell him to zip his project up and email it to me. We didn't do SVN or git back then, simply wasn't worth it. So he comes back to me and says the email server is telling him attachments can't be bigger then 50mb. At this point I'm thinking he didn't properly sized the art or something, so I give him a flash drive to put it on.

When I then open the flash drive, the archive is 300mb, thinking to myself, the images weren't even that big to begin with.
So I open it up, and I don't even find any images, just a single asp page. About 500mb. When I opened that up and it finally loaded, I saw the most horrendous things ever.

The first 500 lines was just initializing empty vars. Then there was some code that created an empty form with an onChange event that submits the form. After that.. it was just non stop nested if's. No loops, no while, for, foreach, NO elseif's, just nested if's, for every possible combination of the state the form could be in. Abou 5000 of them, in a single file. To make matters worse, all the form ( and page ) layout was hardcoded in the if's. Includes inline css, base64 encoded images, nothing but as dynamic, based on the length of the form he changes the layout, added more background etc. He cut the images up for every possible size of the page and included them in the code.

I showed it to my boss, he fired the guy on the spot. I redid the work from scratch, in under 4 hours. Send it to the client. they had no ammends to make, happy as Larry. Whish I kept the code somewhere.

Morale of the story, allways do a coding test on interviews, even if small things just to sanity check.

*Not a rant, but a very long vent*
I'm 20 and facing the worst dilemma I ever experienced.
Been working at a company for more than half a year, got the job thru a friend and started as an intern to take care of customer problems, crap they do to PC's, printers that wouldn't work, answer emails and phone calls about our point-of-sale software.
Soon everything started to change, on one day my boss asked my what I knew about coding, all I could answer was about some really basic stuff that I learnt on a previous semester at college, just some very basic coding stuff we got for C, how for loops works, conditions, that kind of thing. Soon I was being asked to code a client management software for our company, I was starting to grasp a little of this wonderful world, soon I could write some more complex code in C#, even did a program that in 30 seconds did a 3 day's worth of work, and then I got assigned to develop a mobile POS application, earned a raise, and man, is this wonderful.
I feel that I really found my place in life, found something that makes me jump out of bed every morning.
But here comes the dilemma part: I'm enrolled in a mechanical engineering school for two years now, and it's my second place already (been enrolled at a agronomy school before that) and I'm starting to feel out of place, in all the classes I'm taking, I cant help but feel that this isn't for me, I don't see myself doing that for a future, but I don't know if jumping to another boat would make it any better or just worse, I don't know how good are my odds at a tech oriented course are, I don't really know what to do with the rest of my life.
Guess I'm just afraid of doing something stupid and regret it later, don't know if I should listen to the voice that shouts to me to do whatever I want to with my life or the one that assures me of a stable path... Don't know if anyone will read this much, but if so, thanks a lot, just wanted to put it out of my shoulders and maybe get to know anyone that has been here. I'm new here, but I feel already at home. ☺

Not sure if it's the worst code review but it's a recent one.

We don't really do code reviews where I work unfortunately but my coworker used my framework for the first time (build some nice composer libraries for cmdline projects) and asked if I could make them do autoloading.
He never used namespaces before so I was glad to help him out.

What I saw was a dreadful mess. His project was called "scripts" so good luck picking a namespace...

Than it was all lose functions in the executable file. All those functions are however called by a class in another file (if they where not calling eachother as a cascading mess). That class was extending an abstract class from my library as instructed. However I never imagined my lib being raped like that.

The functions themselves are a horrible mess. Nothing uniform completely different style (our documentation states PSR's should be used).
Parameters counts higher than 5.
Variable names like Object and Dobject (in calling function Dobject is Object but it needs a fresh one.

If statements on parameters that need basically split it in two (should simply be to functions)
If else statement with return of same variable as a single line (sane people use ternary for that)

Note that I said functions. All of it should have been OO and methods. Would have saved at least some of the parameter hell.

I could go on and on. Do I think the programmer is bad yes (does not even grasp interfaces, dep injection, foreach loops). Is this his best work no. He said that for a one of script like this it just has to work. Not going to be used elsewhere. I disagree as it is a few thousand lines of code that others have to read too.

I'm really not sure. When I was 7-8 years old, I liked to view source in IE, then I somehow managed to use Javascript in the browser. First only some dumb opening of windows. And I liked Batch, so I made some files for copying, backup and stuff.

Then I got to PHP during the years from some online tutorial about making dynamic websites. My website was more static than stone, but yeah, I did page loading with PHP! Awful experience anyway, because I had to install Xampp, get it work and other stuff. 11 years old or so. (and I used Xampp only as a fileserver between laptop and desktop later, because.. PHP4... just no.)

As 12 years old or so I experienced my first World of Warcraft (vanilla) on a custom server in an internet cafe and I thought it's a singleplayer game. When I found out that no, I googled how to make my own server (hated multiplayer back then and loved good games with huge storylines). Failed miserably with ManGOS, got something to work with ArcEMU. There I learned some C++ basic stuff, which I hoped would helped me to fix some bugs. When I opened the code I was like: "Suuure." and left it like that. I learned what a MySQL database is, broke it like four times when I forgot WHERE and still rather played with websites i.e. html, css, js and optionally php when I wanted to repair a webpage for the server. With a friend we managed to get the server work via Hamachi, was fun, the server died too soon. Then I got ManGOS to work, but there wasn't really any interest to make a server anymore, just singleplayer for the lore. (big warcraft fan, don't kick me :D )

I think it was when I was 13y.o. I went to Delphi/Pascal course, which I liked a lot from the beginning, even managed to use my code on old Knoppix via Lazarus(Pascal). At this age I really liked thoae Flash games which were still common to see everywhere. So I downloaded .swfs, opened and tried to understand it. Managed to pull some stuff from it and rewrite in Pascal. Nope, never again that crap.

About the same time I got to Flash files I discovered Java. It was kind of popular back then, so I thought let's give it a try. I liked Flash more. Seriously. I've never seen so much repetitiveness and stupid styling of a code. I had either IDE for compiling C++ or Pascal or notepad! You think I wanted my code kicked all over the place in multiple folders and files? No.

So back to Pascal. I made some apps for my old hobby, was quite satisfied with the result (quiz like app), but it still wasn't the thing. And I really thought I'd like to study CS.

I started to love PHP because of phpBB forums I worked on as 15 y.o. I guess. At the same time I think there was an optional subject at school, again with Pascal. I hated the subject, teacher spoke some kind of gibberish I didn't really understand back then at all and now I find it only as a really stupid explanation of loops and strings.

So I started to hate Pascal subject, but not really the lang itself. Still I wanted something simpler and more portable. Then I got to Python as hm, 17y.o. I think and at the same time to C++ with DevC++. That was time when I was still deciding which lang to choose as my main one (still playing with website, database and js).

Then I decided that learning language from some teacher in a class seriously pisses me off and I don't want to experience it again. I choose Python, but still made some little scripts in C++, which is funny, because Python was considered only as a scripting lang back then.

I haven't really find a cross-platform framework for C++, which would: a) be easy to install b) not require VisualStudio PayForMe 20xy c) have nice license if I managed to make something nice and distribute it. I found Unity3D though, so I played with Blender for models, Audacity for music and C# for code. Only beautiful memories with Unity. I still haven't thought I'm a programmer back then.

For Python however I found Kivy and I was playing with it on a phone for about a year. Still I haven't really know what to do back then, so I thought... I like math, numbers, coding, but I want to avoid studying physics. Economics here I go!

Now I'm in my third year at Uni, should be writing thesis, study hard and what I do? Code like never before, contribute, work on a 3D tutorial and play with Blender. Still I don't really think about myself as a programmer, rather hobby-coder.

So, to answer the question: how did I learn to program? Bashing to shit until it behaved like I desired i.e. try-fail learning. I wouldn't choose a different path.

I've spent many years in a bubble of 1 backend lang.. but when i started checking out other langs, I got very annoyed that each one has same basic stuff but with different syntax... Can we just agree on something? Ffs!
We really couldnt come up with unified syntax for -
false, False FALSE
OR or ||
def func function
And dont get me started on all the variations of for loops... Its like we are trying make our life hard

Looking at new versions of some langs, looks like they are copying new stuff from one another.. with different syntax.. thanks!
Nodejs trying to look more like she doesnt have callbacks.. while other langs adding callback functionality... Why why why?!

Somebody ranted about his teacher showing windows presentation and teaching nothing. I wanted to comment that post but i have enough material to make the whole rant out of it.

Well at least you have those presentations! In my school we have 2 IT classrooms one with win xp, 1ghz cpu, 0,5gb ram computers and one with win vista, 2 core 2ghz cpu and 2gb of ram PCs.

Guess what room our teacher is using... of course the worse one! The second one is fine, few years ago another theacher had been using it!

I tried to convince him to change rooms but he is coming up with silly exciuses! (like "server is not working here!", well i fixed it with my friend but why are you even talking about it when you are not using yours in old class!)

PS. That server is useless anyway, every pc is connected to router that is connected to internet so supervisor pc is not mandatory, only acces restriction is enforced by win accounts.

I heard from students from my class (that picked that optional IT course) (i'm in high school) that gimp is not working because pc's are so bad!
Sometimes even notepad frezzes.🤔

Not only class is shite but teacher clearly has no idea what is he doing. (in order to pass the final from IT you need to learn simple C++, up to simple foo objects) and of course he isn not even talking about that! On one lesson about sorting algorithms he gave everybody 10 small pieces of paper with numbers on them and told everybody to sort them manualy, because he didnt know how to do it himself! So there is no doubt they wont be able code it.

I need to mention that i volontered to "clean, fix" that classroom (in order to convince teacher to move). And in that class i saw programms written in c++ on every computer! That means somebody was teaching propely before! 😣

I feel sorry for those guys, they are just waisting time. I would fall for it as well but i decided i can learn coding in home ;).
Well, results are shocking, after 1 month of coding i learned C# and i can basicly make any algorithm i ever wish. I learned about computer operation so well that i can nearly teach computer science. (i helped my friend in usa that is a electronic student with that and i'm very proud of it 😁) and it class still can't even use all 3 loops correctly... 😥 Ok i must admit i have been coding for a looooong while so i had time to learn basic c,c++ and pc operations before, but point still stands.

Why the hell are you wasting life of those studends? Why are you giving them a choice to learn coding WHEN YOU CANT EVEN USE PC YOURSELF?! (that it course is optional so you can apply if you want so)

I dont regret not bothering about it.

I absolutely hate software to the point where I started converting from sysadmin to becoming more like a dev. That way I could just write my own implementations at will. Easier said than done, that's for sure. And it goes both ways.

I think that in order to be a good dev, you need these skills the most:
- Problem solving skills
- Creativity, you're making stuff
- Logical reasoning
- Connecting the dots
- Reading complex documentation
- Breaking down said documentation
- A strong desire to create order and patterns
- ...

If you don't have the above, you may still be able to become a dev.. but it would be harder for sure, and in some cases acceptance will be lower (seriously, learn to Google!)

One thing I don't think you need in development is mathematics. Sure there's a correlation between it and logic reasoning, but you're not solving big mathematical monsters here. At most you'd probably be dealing with arrays and loops (well.. program logic).

Also, written and spoken English! The language of the internet must be known. If it's not your first language, learn it. All the good (and crucial) documentation out there is in English after all.

One final thing would be security in my opinion, since you're releasing your application to the internet and may even run certain services, and deal with a lot of user data. Making those things secure takes some effort and knowledge on security, but it's so worth it. At the most basic level, it requires a certain mindset: "how would I break this thing I just made?"

I've worked with few incompetent people till now, but one guy who stands out is my peer who is a "Lead Developer".

First of all he knows nothing!! Even Jon Snow knows something, but this guy knows absolutely nothing. And on top of that he has a hard ass attitude. Never sticks to coding standards, pushes unwanted configuration files to Git, uses too many nested loops even when not even a single one is required.

And when I suggest him something, he starts giving these lame ass reasons and tries to avoid my comments. Then I say, "good luck with that buddy" and move on!!

How are Coding Bootcamps and what are they like?

A little background:

I’ve been going to a University (have a year left for a CS degree) and I am so EXTREMELY frustrated. I thought I would get an education but it’s so underwhelming. 95% of it doesn’t involve programming and the classes that do are so elementary that I know more than the professors. By the end of my web design course we had been taught to center text, insert images, insert links, and how to use tables with a single day on CSS using colors.
The OOP courses are all the same, learn variables, types, conditionals, loops, classes, functions, and so forth. Python, C++, and Java. I taught all this to myself when I was 15, I’m 29 now.

I’ve recently gotten extremely interested into full stack web development. .NET Core, React, Typescript. I’m also working with Electron. I’m basically 100% self taught and spend almost every waking moment trying to learn more and apply it.

There’s only one person at my school who has the same passion as me and he’s the president at the coding club but is going into machine learning and big data (I’m the Secretary) and I just wish I could interact with more people who have the same passion. I would love to be challenged. I feel as if I spend more time trying to learn and diagnose problems then applying my knowledge because web development is so complicated when it comes to connecting everything together and I’m still relatively new to it (started like 4 months ago). I’m an extremely fast learner and extremely dedicated so I’m not worried about that being an issue.

I just really want to be a part of a community where I have people who can answer my questions and I don’t have to spend hours or days on google finding a solution to integrating Webpack or using typescript with react, and more. I want to feel challenged.

Can I get this from a boot camp? I recently listened to a podcast from Syntax and it really excited me but I don’t want to be let down again. Either way I’m finishing my degree to get that bullshit $60000 piece of paper but I wouldn’t mind taking a couple months off for something like this if it’s worth it.

I live in CO so if you have any Bootcamps in CO that you recommend, I’d love to hear it and take a trip to check it out in person.

Thanks a bunch!

I went down a rabbit hole of code changes to try and delete a stupid for loop with a break in it.

It was super stupid and I gave up and submitted to the fact that some battles are not worth the time and stress.

OK... But seriously, It was returning multiple entities from the database, but we only always want the first one. My logic is that we should just go in there and fix the LINQ so we are explicitly getting one entity out.

But fuck that logic. No I'll have to change fucking everything that's tied to that method and expects a list from it. Every fucking thing. That includes error handling, parsing, for loops..... Nevermind...

You can have your foreach and your break. I'm taking mine, now.

Colleague (Lead Engineer): Hey, check my code. I'm trying to group a list of Request objects by their id. Something is not working here

Me: * saw his code, had a lot of shitty loops, called all for a quick meet, changed his shitty mess to one liner

list.stream()
.collect(Collectors.groupingBy(Request::getId))

Walked out like a boss*
😎

Turns out my colleagues don't understand how useMemo works. They would try to memoize a value and then, in the dependency array, use an object that gets rebuilt on every rerender.
Good job, guys. I wonder how many silent infinite loops we have because of that shit.

My love for you I can't describe it,
so I dont't even try and hide it.
Dev. you are my one true passion
you are always there to teach me a new lesson.
Some missing semicolon;
I have searched for you soo long.
Or was it a wrong indent,
ah f**k it was the missing increment.
Thinking through endless loops
in while, for and even do form,
just that my programs do a little better perform.
You give me the possibility to express myself as who I am and who I want to be,
in so many languages, from java, JS, GO, python and even C.
You give me bugs and issues that I track,
from motivation for you I never lack.
There are projects out there, where I contribute to
oh what a beauty are you.
And now you even bring fun into my life
with devrant, I now know how to survive.
How to survive client meetings and non devs around me,
oh how much stupidity I there see.
Let's exit this small programm of mine, this so called rime,
where I an immutable statement define:

I think about you even when we are not together,
My dearest DEV I will love you forever.

Started out with python, while meaning to learn javascript.

I am now competent in python. Im still not sure how it happened.

Started python because I got tired with doing repetative calculations by hand. I think I had like a phobia of problem solving with nested loops. any time I thought a problem would require nesting, especially more than one nested loop, I would just avoid doing it, or end up doing it by hand.

Wrote so many goddamn loops though in the process of exploring graphs, doing things by hand seems like a nuisance. Thinking in loops has its own zen or something.

Now I just need to get over my fear of json-based CLI-enabled configuration-over-convention.

So I promised a post after work last night, discussing the new factorization technique.

As before, I use a method called decon() that takes any number, like 697 for example, and first breaks it down into the respective digits and magnitudes.

697 becomes -> 600, 90, and 7.

It then factors *those* to give a decomposition matrix that looks something like the following when printed out:

offset: 3, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('3')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('2')]]

offset: 2, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('2')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('1')]]

offset: 1, exp: [[Decimal('7'), Decimal('1')]]

Each entry is a pair of numbers representing a prime base and an exponent.

Now the idea was that, in theory, at each magnitude of a product, we could actually search through the *range* of the product of these exponents.

So for offset three (600) here, we're looking at

2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 2.

But actually we're searching

2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 2.
2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 1
2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 0
2^3 * 3 ^ 0 * 5 ^ 2.
2^3 * 3 ^ 1 * 5 ^ 1

etc..

On the basis that whatever it generates may be the digits of another magnitude in one of our target product's factors.

And the first optimization or filter we can apply is to notice that assuming our factors pq=n,
and where p <= q, it will always be more efficient to search for the digits of p (because its under n^0.5 or the square root), than the larger factor q.

So by implication we can filter out any product of this exponent search that is greater than the square root of n.

Writing this code was a bit of a headache because I had to deal with potentially very large lists of bases and exponents, so I couldn't just use loops within loops.

Instead I resorted to writing a three state state machine that 'counted down' across these exponents, and it just works.

And now, in practice this doesn't immediately give us anything useful. And I had hoped this would at least give us *upperbounds* to start our search from, for any particular digit of a product's factors at a given magnitude. So the 12 digit (or pick a magnitude out of a hat) of an example product might give us an upperbound on the 2's exponent for that same digit in our lowest factor q of n.

It didn't work out that way. Sometimes there would be 'inversions', where the exponent of a factor on a magnitude of n, would be *lower* than the exponent of that factor on the same digit of q.

But when I started tearing into examples and generating test data I started to see certain patterns emerge, and immediately I found a way to not just pin down these inversions, but get *tight* bounds on the 2's exponents in the corresponding digit for our product's factor itself. It was like the complications I initially saw actually became a means to *tighten* the bounds.

For example, for one particular semiprime n=pq, this was some of the data:

n - offset: 6, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('5')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('5')]]

q - offset: 6, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('6')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('1')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('5')]]

It's almost like the base 3 exponent in [n:7] gives away the presence of 3^1 in [q:6], even
though theres no subsequent presence of 3^n in [n:6] itself.

And I found this rule held each time I tested it.

Other rules, not so much, and other rules still would fail in the presence of yet other rules, almost like a giant switchboard.

I immediately realized the implications: rules had precedence, acted predictable when in isolated instances, and changed in specific instances in combination with other rules.

This was ripe for a decision tree generated through random search.

Another product n=pq, with mroe data
q(4)
offset: 4, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('4')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('3')]]

n(4)
offset: 4, exp: [[Decimal('2'), Decimal('3')], [Decimal('3'), Decimal('2')], [Decimal('5'), Decimal('3')]]

Suggesting that a nontrivial base 3 exponent (**2 rather than **1) suggests the exponent on the 2 in the relevant
digit of [n], is one less than the same base 2 digital exponent at the same digit on [q]

And so it was clear from the get go that this approach held promise.

From there I discovered a bunch more rules and made some observations.
The bulk of the patterns, regardless of how large the product grows, should be present in the smaller bases (some bound of primes, say the first dozen), because the bulk of exponents for the factorization of any magnitude of a number, overwhelming lean heavily in the lower prime bases.

It was if the entire vulnerability was hiding in plain sight for four+ years, and we'd been approaching factorization all wrong from the beginning, by trying to factor a number, and all its digits at all its magnitudes, all at once, when like addition or multiplication, factorization could be done piecemeal if we knew the patterns to look for.

Stack Overflow people have profound buffallo bullcrap on their skulls, they are some software engineers who have fucked COBOL and BASIC, probably somewhere like NASA, just pondering out where someone post a question. They're probably some etilist cult banging a prostitute while delivering that awful downvote imitating the slap they give the chick during sex. They desire questions such as

"RANDOM_fuck_module_Abdul.method() not working in python" or "how to dock the dock by undocking" (tagged: AWS). Not things like "why does the audio tag not work in a PC but works in w3school tester?" or a genuine programming question. Fuck.

We don't tail recurse or loop abc for k in godfuck loops, huh? We make simple things as: a form, a http request to dell.

I hope there penises get rotten in the hell. Period.
this is just a part of SO.

Some Java code I looked through to figure out how to accurately rework a mapping of value intervals to status colors:

• 16 levels of indentation
• Calls an instance method one line before a null-check
• Assigns that same value to a new variable and null-checks it again
• Insistently loops over existing HashMaps' entry sets to find a value by key
• Stringifies a Gson object, parses back the string and then null-checks the result.
• Mixes up the 'leq' and 'geq' comparison operators twice, which is why I went to check the implementation in the first place.

And this wasn't even legacy code. It's from last year.

Fucking hashtables...I forgot that removals can screw with the probing sequence, causing later lookups to "randomly" fail after hundreds of operations and elements.

Spent 4 hours staring at 3 while loops and data sets of hundreds of key value pairs trying to figure out why one giant data set worked fine but the other failed on some lookups.

This is probably a standard pattern/algorithm, but I feel pretty good about myself figuring this out.

I was doing a programming challenge and found myself with 2 lists of integer points (x,y). I needed to see where the points converged and identify those locations. Of course I started with a brute force approach and did nested loops to find these locations. This was taking WAY TOO LONG. These lists were 200K each. So checking with naive looping is 200K * 200K operations. Which is a lot.

Then I thought, well I am checking equality, so I will create a third map. The index to the map will be the point, and the data will be an integer. I then go through each list once incrementing the integer for each point that exists in each respective list. Any point with a value greater than 1 is a point convergence.

Like I said, this has got to be a standard thing, so can someone tell me what algorithm this is? I am not sure how to search for this.
I am fuzzy on complexity notation but I think the complexity started at n^2 and was reduced to n. Each list is cycled over once.

So I'm writing a function in Unity3D that walks a rectangular grid. At one place in the code, I got the x+y coordinates backwards, which caused the function to infinitely loop between two coordinates.

Not seeing a way to kill the loop, I looked it up on Google. The suggestions I get are. . .

1. You need to kill the Unity3D task and lose your edits because the environment and the player run on the same thread.
2. You can pay ten bucks for an extension that lets you break out of infinite loops.
3. You should really avoid writing infinite loops. That's just bad form.

SERIOUSLY?

Exercise do the pyramid of * and I looked up how to do it but so many people are able to do it without looking it up I dont know why shit to do with nested for loops makes me feel so dumb.

I know it's not a big deal to not know how to do every single thing but I'm always even stuck on the smallest exercises that apparently more people can do than not. Like how am I supposed to have thought about that or figured that out. How am I supposed to learn all this shit. Like for example just look up a list of basic exercises and I cant do any of them. I'm not good at this and its stressing me out because how will I get better or hell even a job if I cant solve these simple problems? How am I supposed to get better at solving these simple problems? I cant just keep looking at the fucking solution because that wont stick or teach me anything

Most stupid thing to rant about by far

I'm still a beginner for programming, I got the basics (for JavaScript) down but I don't really know how or where to use it, like loops(for, do while), return, and stuff like that.

Going through the books and online exercises they just make you do the basics like loop a number 10 times to print out 0-9 or something like that. And the return keyword I usually forget about because I've never been told how I can actually use it for something.

I want to learn how I can use all of these and when I can use them, is there any books, videos, or courses I can look into? I'm sorry, this is probably a Sinbad question but I am just trying to get as much help as I can

That moment you find out that python is very sloppy when it comes to scopes. It seems that variables declared in loops are callable in function scopes. So this code actually does not give any errors:

for i in range(6):
print i

print(“out of loop scope”, i)

Now I’m just like: WTF! That can cause some serious errors when you’re not aware of this thing. I don’t know any other language that has this property...

I have no specific story to tell (for now. Will post ke if i remember one) but i have had tons of CS teachers that are shit. From ones who don't know shit to ones who are so bad as a human being i am sure thrte are hundreds of people out there to kill them. I have had multiple teachers where all they did was read out a book and we'd have o site everything they read. Whole fucking semester. And not just one person or once. M-U-L-T-I-P-L-E TIMES AND TEACHERS. then I ve had ones who would rejection my code even if it's better, is right, can andle more edge cases, most likely magnitfrs of times faster and isn an eye sore with just effig if-else on op of if-else nested within if-else with many for loops. Then there are those who want you to do just what they want and expect you to not have a life of your own. Those who blatantly abuse their powers. Those who couldn't care less. Those who are not that bad a teacher but their attitude and style just makes you want to leave. There's one currently who wants a group of 4 people in second year to develop a full blown industry level application in mere 3 weeks. AND WE ARE HAVING OUR THEORY PAPRRS INBETWEEN FOR 2 EFFING WEEKS. So that's just like a month. Fortunately I have a group that's good enough that I can have them do the testing and filling up the documentation​ (did I mention that he needs full documentatiin for software plus a report on how our development process) and have them work on presentation (yup. We need to present this thing) all for just 50 marks. 1 uni credit. Our system still gives 80% weightage to pure theory. Plus the practical part is somewhat theory too.

Our HOD wants us *insists*forces** to stay back at college and work on projects (which is nice but what he ments is use the shitty outdated books from early 2000s to study something). Now I'd be happy to stay back if college provided decent internet (I am not asking for gigabit speeds. Even 1-2Mbps would work) and place to sit. But nope, our college non-teaching staff is eager to send us out of their department and by extention college building. There is literally nowhere you can sit. Plus yup, there is no internet and nowhere for you to plug your laptop in. That's a moot point anyway because they don't want you to use your laptop in college library or anywhere anyways. Plus you don't get much of mobile data too because of the building design. Those work only near windows. Why would I be at college if I can get a 50+Mbps down, area to sit, snacks, port to charge all at home. And you'd say we should talk with him about this – well it's not his issue is all he has to say.

Well, such is life in Indian colleges. And my college/uni is one of the better ones.

Let's start by saying that I fucken know nothing.
Not even how to fucken start this rant.

I have to build a simple game for a university project.
In Java.
Since everyone in my team chose plain swing/awt, and for many other reasons, I jumped on that band wagon.

Knowing myself and that I quit the project last year, I chose an extremely simple type of game with very simple goals and Use-cases.

So far so good.

Logic, layer, and nearly everything else is nearly finished.
Since about 3 month.

Friends helped me restructure my game for better layer separation and I couldn't be happier with how that turned out.

But all those 3 month, my main problem has persisted.

I can't get it to draw a thing on the jframe.
For 3 month.
3 fucken month.

And now I don't even get a jFrame anymore.
WHAT THE FUCK

Git, tell me, what have I changed?

...
Nothing related to construction of the frame?
Ok, I removed a call to repaint there.
Let's putt it back.

NOPE, no JFrame.

What the actual fucken hell?

This is where you can stop reading, after this there will only be me crying about everything.
Sweet tears. 😭

In-between I got a frame, and something was drawn onto it.
But only on construction.

I couldn't get the paint chain to run a single time after that.

I have a nice thread with some loops that is supposed to update the logic and make a call to repaint/ update/ refresh the frame so that the game runs nicely with 60fps.

Logic works fine, but no call to what ever does anything related to painting.

This morning I had the idea that it might be because of the thread.

Refactored that the game loop runs in the main thread and here I now am without a jFrame.

And still 3255 letters to go.

I don't even even even even even..,...

I saw some game maker software (Klik & Play for the nerds), in a super market budget section and pestered my mum to buy it for weeks, got it, after a year of playing about started to read and found out about for loops & functions..... My software didn't have these as it was just creating actions for game events, very limited... Realised my games (if you could call them that) could be so much better with more control and started to look into languages like BASIC, the rest is my history :)

I’m fucked off tonight.

I’m having to pull a very complex data set out of dB and loop through results in a table.

Easy, done, but one of the Columns I’m pulling out needs further broken down. It’s a comma delimited string.

I can’t get the data, and inside the same loop explode that string so that the contents can be handled independently.

Raging! I have foreach loops inside foreach loops and arrays inside objects that are inside arrays.

I’m going to bed furious.

Ok. I GIVE UP! ...for at least a couple hours...

I'm not a big believer in... well anything suitable to the literal definition of believe. But there's only so much 'wtf? How is this even possible?' and any answer u can come up with is nearly statistically impossible...

I am a neuro-atypical (and just extremely atypical even if i somehkw was neurotypical) being, based on logic, finely calculated statistical probability and the most raw data and as unbiased as realistically possible, algorithms and interpretation (usually recursive pattern recognition with several highly detailed historical sources.

...but at some point statistical improbability and a collation of separate, yet relatively closely occuring events/circumstances makes logic, itself a primary suspect of corruption.

What was the breaking point that caused me to (temporarily) give up and tell logic to f off for a bit cuz maybe the illogical and mythical is the real logic, leaving me in a losing battle with 'the' fates?

Trying to get all my sourcing/purchase orders in/paid for/on the literal boats b4 end of the workday/week in china...
1st, had to drop a supplier cuz they have limited reps. When the one ive had 7+ years left, i got the aloof blonde girl societal trope of a rep... who for the 2nd time (despite the several very blunt complaints above her, incl me) she sent out a promotional update to the entire client list (ie, inherently competitors) as CC not BCC... over 200 business email accounts with tailored info of their sourcing.

2- totally diff company/ industry a former rep i was glad be rid of apparently just sfarted back for "awhile" as i needrf to restock/scale...apparently she forgot everything we discussed at length... lke if you want a chance on my business im not gonna be wasting time looking through your gui "mini store to then inquire about everything individually insead of a simple spreadsheet(which i print and put in a 3-ring binder rotating current catalogues in the same format i require everywhere)

3.dog was an ahole, my packed schedule got delayed and morphed.. a bunch of little bs thatd normally have no extra thought impact, hyperfocused forgetting one of my alarms til i realised my idiopathic fever was back and i didnt take/apply meds (pain/muscle relaxers mainly so despite this odd free time and needing to shower. I gotta sit on my rear, leg elevated/non-productive far 40min b4 i can shower (as functional legs and lack of syncope is almost a req to shower)

4. A new-ish rep of a company/factory i like/respect enough to not mention in relation... he makes invoice 1.. slight error thst was easily resolved...#2 was flawless... he goes to officially generate the contract(alibaba... verrrry simple with lots of extra explanation buttons). Price and all items match, its near workweek end so i was waiting for it so i could quickly pay/have it on the boat b4 it left and few fdav days are behind...

I put in card info, get to the 2 cbeck boxes (imo should be only 1 but whatever) asking if billing address is same ss delivery(its always default yes)... then i see a few lines in chinese (i can read enough for business negotiations... typical words/sentences innately look different than things like individual letters/address and postal indicators.) After a few loops of double checking, mentally trying to dismiss my i Intial judgement cuz it'd be too ridiculous... even resorted to google .... nope... initial wtf was spot on... recipient name/address was indeed the company(multi factory producer)i was purchasing a wholesale, via sea freight, bulk of products from.

Im pretty sure the system would've flagged it as an invalid contract within an hr... but seriously... ive been handling alibaba (and other) international sourcing since before high school(mainly small businesses i made sites/little tools for that found anything with a light up screen intimidating) and a purchase then shipment to the originating company/factory actually entered into a contract(the form is sooo simple)... im faced with ridiculously improbable obstacles actually existing and changing in such nonsensical statistically improbable ways so often that 1. I wouldn't trust a dr (or most humans) that didnt 1st assume i was crazy of some form...unfortunately im not, despite hkw much simpler and probable itd be 2. Id be super suspicious/converned if statistic norms were my norm for over a day.

But seriously wtf???

Someone give me some wisps of a frame of ref here... where's a typical 'fuck this, im out!' Breaking point?

TL;DR I just recently started my apprenticeship, it's horrible so far, I want to quit, but don't know what to do next...

Okay, first of all, hey there! My name is Cave and I haven't been on here for a while, so I hope the majority of you is doing rather okay. I'm programming for 6 years now, have some work experience already, since I used to volunteer for a company for half a year, in which I discovered my love for integrations and stuff. These background information will probably be necessary to understand my agony in full extend.

So, okay, this is about my apprenticeship. Generally speaking, I was expecting to work, and to learn something, gaining experience. So far, it only involved me, reading through horrible code, fixing and replacing stuff for them, I didn't learn a thing yet, and we are already a month in.

When I said the code is horrible, well, it is the worst I have ever seen since I started programming. Little documentation - if any -, everywhere you look there is deprecated code, which may or may not been commented out, often loops or simply methods seem to be foreign for them, as the code is cluttered with copy paste code everywhere and on top of that all, the code is slow as heck, like wtf.

I spent my past month with reading their code, trying to understand what most of this nonsense is for, and then just deleting and rewriting it entirely. My code suddenly is only 5% or their size and about 1000 times faster. Did I mention I am new to this programming language yet? That I have absolutely no experience in that programming language? Because well I am new and don't have any experience, yet, I have little to no struggle doing it better.

Okay, so, imagine, you started programming like 20 years ago, you were able to found your own business, you are getting paid a decent amount of money, sounds alright, right? Here comes the twist: you have been neglecting every advancement made in developing software for the past 20 years, yup, that's what it feels like to work here.

At this point I don't even know, like is this normal? Did git, VSCode and co. spoil me? Am I supposed to use ancient software with ancient programming languages to make my life hell? Is programming supposed to be like this? I have no clue, you tell me, I always thought I was doing stuff right.

Well, this company is not using git, infact, they have every of their project in a single folder and deleting it by accident is not that hard, I almost did once, that was scary. I started out working locally, just copying files, so shit like that won't happen, they told me to work directly in the source. They said it's fine, that's why you can see 20 copies of the folder, in the same folder... Yes, right, whatever.

I work using a remote desktop, the server I work on is Windows server 2008, you want to make icons using gimp? Too bad, Gimp doesn't support windows server 2008, I don't think anything does anymore, at least I haven't found anything, lol.

They asked me to integrate Google Maps into their projects, I thought it is gonna be fun, well, turns out their software uses internet explorer 9.. and Google maps api does not support internet explorer 9... I ended up somehow installing CEF3 on that shit and wrote an API for it in JS. Writing the API was actually kind of fun, but integrating it in their software sucked and they told me I will never integrate stuff ever again, since they usually don't do that. I mean, they don't have a Backend as far as I can tell, it looks like stuff directly connects with their database, so I believe them, but you know... I love integrating stuff..

So at this point you might be thinking, then why don't you just quit? Well I would, definitely. I'm lucky that till December I can quit without prior notice, just need a resignation as far as I can tell, but when I quit, what do I do next? Like, I volunteered for a company for half a year and I'd argue I did a good job, but with this apprenticeship it only adds up to about 7 months of actual work experience. Would anybody hire somebody with this much actual work experience? I also consider doing freelancing, making a living out of just integrating stuff, but would people pay for that? And then again, would they hire somebody with this much experience? I don't want to quit without a plan on what to do next, but I have no clue.

Am I just spoiled, is programming really just like that, using ancient tools and stuff? Let me know. Advice is welcomed as well, because I'm at a loss. Thanks for reading.

You know how the machine learning systems are in the news (and Ted talks, tech blogs, etc.) lately over how they're becoming blackbox logic machines, creating feedback loops that amply things like racism on YouTube, for example. Well, what might the ML/AI systems be doing with our code repositories? Maybe not so much yet, I don't know. But let's imagine. Do you think it's probably less worrisome? At first I didn't see as much harm potential, there's not really racist code, terrorist code, or code that makes people violence prone (okay, not entirely true...), but if you imagine the possibility that someone might use code repositories to create applications that modify code, or is capable of making new programs, or just finding and squishing bugs in code algorithmically, well then you have a system that could arguably start to get a little out of control! What if in squashing code bugs it decides the most prevalent bugs are from code that takes user input (just one of potentially infinite examples). Remember though, it's a blackbox of sorts and this is just one of possibly millions of code patterns it's finding troublesome, and most importantly it's happening slowly (at first). Just like how these ML forces are changing Google and YouTube algorithms so slowly that many don't notice the changes; this would presumably be similar and so it may not be as obvious as one would think. So anyways, 'it' starts refactoring code that takes user input into something 'safer'. Great! But what does this mean? Not for this specific example really, but this concept of blackbox ML/AI solutions to problems we didn't realize we had, what does a future with this stuff look like (Matrix jokes aside)? Well, I could go on all day with imaginative ideas... But talking to myself isn't so productive, let's start a fun community discussion here! Join in if you find this topic as interesting as I do! :)

Note: if you decide to post something like "SNN have made this problem...", or other technical jargan please explain it as clearly as possible. As the great Richard Feynman once said, the best way to show you understand a thing is to be able to explain it clearly to others who don't understand it... Or something like that ;)

so.
i had a stupid idea that'd let me do a project i had planned and abandoned a while back after getting experience with the new project.
problem: detect and manage empty space in a massive file, allow adding data to those empty spaces from files, and fill in a table in a designated empty space with where dynamically-loaded things are. In Python.

I tried JUST detecting empty space, and Python would break out of loops for no reason at all just at random. "run bottom to top through this file until a non-00h byte is found" would either break out of the loop way earlier than should be possible (8 or 9 bytes into a 32KB empty file) or run way into non-zerofill areas before breaking the loop.

Am I just retarded? Is this more Python conditional fuckery? i'm so lost that it's just on hold for now (and i think i lost that script too)

I want to follow Ruby-related news/resources like Twitter, blogs, Medium etc so I can keep up with latest stuff or simply adding to my knowledge. The problem is I just don't have any idea who to follow and what good blogs or website are there. Anyone?