Probably the biggest one in my life.
TL:DR at the bottom

A client wanted to create an online retirement calculator, sounds easy enough , i said sure.

Few days later i get an email with an excel file saying the online version has to work exactly like this and they're on a tight deadline

Having a little experience with excel, i thought eh, what could possibly go wrong, if anything i can take off the calculations from the excel file

I WAS WRONG !!!
17 Sheets, Linking each other, Passing data to each sheet to make the calculation
( Sure they had lot of stuff to calculate, like age, gender, financial group etc etc )

First thing i said to my self was, WHAT THE FREAKING FUCK IS THIS ?, WHAT YEAR IS THIS ?

After messing with it for couple of hours just to get one calculation out of it, i gave up

Thought about making a mysql database with the cell data and making the calculations, but NOOOO.
Whoever made it decided to put each cell a excel calculation ( so even if i manage to get it into a database and recode all the calculations it would be wayyy pass the deadline )

Then i had an epiphany

"What if i could just parse the excel file and get the data ?"
Did a bit of research sure enough there's a php project
( But i think it was outdated and takes about 15-25 seconds to parse, and makes a copy of the original file )

But this seemed like the best option at the time.
So downloaded the library, finished the whole thing, wrote a cron job to delete temporary files, and added a loading spinner for that delay, so people know something is happening
( and had few days to spare )

Sent the demo link to client, they were very happy with it, cause it worked same as their cute little excel file and gave the same result,

It's been live on their website for almost a year now, lot of submissions, no complains
I was feeling bit guilty just after finishing it, cause i could've done better, but not anymore

Sorry for making it so long, to understand the whole thing, you need to know the full story

TL:DR - Replicated the functionality of a 17 sheet excel calculator in php hack-ishly.

University logic - Provide outdated curriculum. Drop current relevant stuff from the course. Use a legacy software that has no applications anymore. Expect the student to be a master at a technology without documentation.

Contenders for arseholes this week

- Elasticsearch as their implemented product identification and integration in client libraries like Python to exclude OpenSearch made a lot of things very painful. Yay....

- Microsoft decided to integrate kill switches in Exchange. Yeah.... Great stuff.

- Atlassian has another week of dumbness - after they botch release after release, they killed Slack with DNS

- Adoptium still hasn't managed to provide repositories after fucking up it's transition from AdoptOpenJDK

- No, a project with JDK 8 makes no sense anymore, take that shit and burn it. JDK 11 the same, would be great if we had a Repository working for JDK 17 Adoptium....

- unwanking a TLS setup by integrating an intermediary load balancer to deal with several outdated TLS implementation is a kind of thing that's really scary...
(TLS 1.3 in, TLS 1.1 - TLS 1.3 out... Theoretically all solutions have TLS 1.2… most of them non working. Solutions is a wild bunch from different vendors)

- If you buy a fucking new Apple with an Arm Chipset, ram it up so far up your arse it gets dissolved in stomach acid.
It's an arm. There's tons of compatibility problems of course. No you shouldn't listen to what the marketing says. No I cannot shit rainbows and make it work.

- German election. No politics I know, but still.

- New neighbors decided to move in. Friendly person's. Except I wanted to murder them since they choose 22 o clock for moving time.

- I forgot putting the heater on. Ever woken up frozen like fuck and having a hard week... It's a good combo to break any form of motivation.

The company next to me is renovating. Waking up to the feeling of an earth quake because they demolish their old building is another thing that makes me unhappy.

It's Friday. I survived.

Amdy's story.

Amdy didn't have it easy. He's just a little APU and was already outdated when he was manufactured. But it got even worse! He didn't do anything wrong, but upon assembly, they lasered a different part number on him.

He didn't think much about it, but then they denied him all the goodies his brothers got: a nice printed box, a cooler, a leaflet, and a sticker.

Amdy didn't get any of that and wasn't welcome in the boxed camp. Instead, they stuffed him into a shoddy tray cardboard box with just some ESD foam for the pins.

Amdy was disappointed. That was just not fair! He was capable like his brothers. To add insult to injury, not even the manufacturer wanted to give warranty on the poor ugly duckling. They didn't listen to his complaints and shipped him to an unknown fate.

Then our roads crossed because Amdy was 10 EUR cheaper than the boxed ones at that point. Little Amdy breathed heavily when he finally got out of the mini box and seemed a bit disoriented. Poor little sod, what did they do to you?

Then he spotted the cooler. He had never seen anything like this before, so much better than the coolers his boxed brothers had received! And even top of the line thermal paste!

Amdy decided to be as good and fast a processor as a small Zen+ APU could possibly be. What was that software stuff? Didn't look like Windows. Ooohhh - Amdy rejoiced when he figured out that he was supposed to run Linux!

And that's how a despaired and unhappy APU finally found a life full of goodness.

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

Any firmware developers like me here?? .!! The second class citizens of the world of software development.... People who code in outdated languages, use outdated tools(console print is a luxury) to create cool stuff.

Should’ve posted this after it happened, but it requires a bit of background anyway.

There’s this guy that oversees our OpenStack environment. My team often make jokes and groan about him in private because he’s so overbearing. A few months back, he had to take us to our data center to show us our new racks, and he kept saying stupid stuff like “you break this and it costs me $30,000” as if he owns everything. He’s just... one of THOSE people. Always speaks in such a condescending way. We make jokes that he is our “best friend”.

Our company is shifting most of our products to the cloud in response to the coronavirus (trying to make it an opportunity for “innovation”). This has involved some structural and responsibility changes in our department, and long story short, I’m now heading the OpenStack environment alongside other projects.

This means going through grueling 1-on-1 meetings with our “best friend”. It’s not too bad, I can be pretty patient with people, so I didn’t mind too much at first. Then a few things happened.

1. He sent a shared folder that he owned containing info related to the environments. Several documents were outdated and incomplete, so I downloaded them, corrected them, and then uploaded the documents to my teams file share, as I was supposed to since we now own the projects.

2. Several files were missing, and when I asked about them, he said “Oh, did you refresh the browser?”. I told him no, that I downloaded them locally and republished them to my teams server, because he was supposed to hand everything off to us at once. He says “Well, silly, how are you going to get updates if you’re looking at them locally?” and kind of chuckles at me like I’m stupid.

3. He insists on training me how to remote into one of the servers to check on cluster space, which in itself is fine. I understand others wanting to make sure things will be done right by the people who come after them. But he tells me to download SuperPutty. I tell him, “oh no, that’s alright. I don’t need putty”. He says “oh cool, what tool do you use for ssh?”. I answer him “Just Git. If I want to I can use a CentOs bash terminal too, because we have WSL installed”. He responds “You can’t ssh through Git”.
I was actually a little shocked. I didn’t know if he was serious or not so I was silent for a few seconds before hesitantly saying “yes you can”. He says “this is news to me” and I so I tell him “every single one of our build jobs fetches code from Git with ssh” and he seemed genuinely shocked and surprised by that.... so then it occurs to me to show him that you can ssh in Powershell and that REALLY blew his mind. He would not shut up about it for several minutes. I was amused until it just got annoying.

Needless to say, my team had been previously teasing me about having to work with him, so they found it hilarious when I told them afterwards.

Today in IT class our teacher said: 'you can only use char and int in a switch statement'

I was confused because I was 100% sure that you could also use string and so when I got out of school I immediately looked it up.

It is true, well it was true until 2011 when Java 7 was released which added the possibility to also use the string data type in switch statements.

In this I see a huge problem with the education system. Teachers (almost) never 'update' their knowledge and then teach outdated stuff to their pupils. While this may not be a problem in some subjects, it definitely is a huge problem in IT.

The development world is always evolving but if the teachers don't follow along the pupils get taught outdated stuff which, in my opinion, is a really big problem when they finish school and go out in the world to find jobs.

So I joined this financial institution back in Nov. Selling themselves as looking for a developer to code micro-services for a Spring based project and deploying on Cloud. I packed my stuff, drove and moved to the big city 3500 km away. New start in life I thought!
Turns out that micro-services code is an old outdated 20 year old JBoss code, that was ported over to Spring 10 years ago, then let to rot and fester into a giant undocumented Spaghetti code. Microservices? Forget about that. And whats worse? This code is responsible for processing thousands of transactions every month and is currently deployed in PROD. Now its your responsibility and now you have to get new features complied on the damn thing. Whats even worse? They made 4 replicas of that project with different functionalities and now you're responsible for all. Ma'am, this project needs serious refactoring, if not a total redesign/build. Nope! Not doing this! Now go work at it.
It took me 2-3 months just to wrap my mind around this thing and implement some form of working unit tests. I have to work on all that code base by myself and deliver all by myself! naturally, I was delayed in my delivery but I finally managed to deliver.
Time for relief I thought! I wont be looking at this for a while. So they assign me the next project: Automate environment sync between PROD and QA server that is manually done so far. Easy beans right? And surely enough, the automation process is simple and straightforward...except it isnt! Why? Because I am not allowed access to the user Ids and 3rd party software used in the sync process. Database and Data WareHouse data manipulation part is same story too. I ask for access and I get denied over and over again. I try to think of workarounds and I managed to do two using jenkins pipeline and local scripts. But those processes that need 3rd party software access? I cannot do anything! How am I supposed to automate job schedule import on autosys when I DONT HAVE ACCESS!! But noo! I must think of plan B! There is no plan B! Rather than thinking of workarounds, how about getting your access privileges right and get it right the first time!!
They pay relatively well but damn, you will lose your sanity as a programmer.
God, oh god, please bless me with a better job soon so I can escape this programming hell hole.
I will never work in finance again. I don't recommend it, unless you're on the tail end of your career and you want something stable & don't give a damn about proper software engineering principles anymore.

Last Monday I bought an iPhone as a little music player, and just to see how iOS works or doesn't work.. which arguments against Apple are valid, which aren't etc. And at a price point of €60 for a secondhand SE I figured, why not. And needless to say I've jailbroken it shortly after.

Initially setting up the iPhone when coming from fairly unrestricted Android ended up being quite a chore. I just wanted to use this thing as a music player, so how would you do it..?

Well you first have to set up the phone, iCloud account and whatnot, yada yada... Asks for an email address and flat out rejects your email address if it's got "apple" in it, catch-all email servers be damned I guess. So I chose ishit at my domain instead, much better. Address information for billing.. just bullshit that, give it some nulls. Phone number.. well I guess I could just give it a secondary SIM card's number.

So now the phone has been set up, more or less. To get music on it was quite a maze solving experience in its own right. There's some stuff about it on the Debian and Arch Wikis but it's fairly outdated. From the iPhone itself you can install VLC and use its app directory, which I'll get back to later. Then from e.g. Safari, download any music file.. which it downloads to iCloud.. Think Different I guess. Go to your iCloud and pull it into the iPhone for real this time. Now you can share the file to your VLC app, at which point it initializes a database for that particular app.

The databases / app storage can be considered equivalent to the /data directories for applications in Android, minus /sdcard. There is little to no shared storage between apps, most stuff works through sharing from one app to another.

Now you can connect the iPhone to your computer and see a mount point for your pictures, and one for your documents. In that documents mount point, there are directories for each app, which you can just drag files into. For some reason the AFC protocol just hangs up when you try to delete files from your computer however... Think Different?

Anyway, the music has been put on it. Such features, what a nugget! It's less bad than I thought, but still pretty fucked up.

At that point I was fairly dejected and that didn't get better with an update from iOS 14.1 to iOS 14.3. Turns out that Apple in its nannying galore now turns down the volume to 50% every half an hour or so, "for hearing safety" and "EU regulations" that don't exist. Saying that I was fuming and wanting to smack this piece of shit into the wall would be an understatement. And even among the iSheep, I found very few people that thought this is fine. Though despite all that, there were still some. I have no idea what it would take to make those people finally reconsider.. maybe Tim Cook himself shoving an iPhone up their ass, or maybe they'd be honored that Tim Cook noticed them even then... But I digress.

And then, then it really started to take off because I finally ended up jailbreaking the thing. Many people think that it's only third-party apps, but that is far from true. It is equivalent to rooting, and you do get access to a Unix root account by doing it. The way you do it is usually a bootkit, which in a desktop's ring model would be a negative ring. The access level is extremely high.

So you can root it, great. What use is that in a locked down system where there's nothing available..? Aha, that's where the next thing comes in, 2 actually. Cydia has an OpenSSH server in it, and it just binds to port 22 and supports all of OpenSSH's known goodness. All of it, I'm using ed25519 keys and a CA to log into my phone! Fuck yea boi, what a nugget! This is better than Android even! And it doesn't end there.. there's a second thing it has up its sleeve. This thing has an apt package manager in it, which is easily equivalent to what Termux offers, at the system level! You can install not just common CLI applications, but even graphical apps from Cydia over the network!

Without a jailbreak, I would say that iOS is pretty fucking terrible and if you care about modding, you shouldn't use it. But jailbroken, fufu.. this thing trades many blows with Android in the modding scene. I've said it before, but what a nugget!

been a couple of years since I was last active here.

Source Engine still has its claws on me today - but Nii broke free and properly got into other engines and made some cool projects! We both study different stuff now.

I tried to get into Unity a couple of times now, even made a small VR grappling hook prototype once (def not nauseating). But it's hell. It's kinda sad that modern engines don't understand the needs of level designers as well as Source's Hammer. Even though Source is outdated af.

Thing is, I am more and more starting to doubt that this is what I wanna do in life. Game industry sucks. Ad industry sucks even more. I might just become a tree and produce oxygen.

Please just let me cancel my 1-year subscription for the end of that one year NOW without only giving me an option to cancel everything right now and still pay 54 € fee, that's not only silly, it's what makes customers shout FUCK YOU Adobe! Long gone the good old times, who needs your outdated stuff in 2022 anyway?

procrastinating by getting drunk since 11:00 AM, and writing specs for my (hypothetical) language/os/platform.

feeling righteous retribution because the client made me be stressed for 3 hours due to an issue that THEY caused but for 3 hours the only info I had was "there's a critical blocker issue and we're convinced YOU caused it"

well... no... i did NOT cause the fact that you UPGRADED PHP DURING THE WEEKEND BEFORE MONDAY'S PRESENTATION TO CLIENT (while waiting for an urgent commit from me).

seriously.

also, germans. i've heard many times from other people that they're... basically racist towards us (slavic nations), thinking of us as untermensch, coal-miner peons, but I didn't realize their passive-aggressive covertly smug demanding attitude is due to this, I just assumed it's a reaction to me being incompetent.

so yesterday when we finished the call (in preparation for which I tried to switch to their "client demonstration" branch since that's where the error was, and I wanted a headstart on fixing it, ended up in a place that my today's whole-day task should be "rebuilding the DB into working condition", because there's about 10 "core" sql scripts in two different folders, which need to be run (in a very specific order, of course, which readme tells you, but what it tells you has been outdated at least for 3 months, of course), and

...THE MAIN CORE SCRIPT THAT IS THE FIRST TO RUN, THAT CREATES THE DB schema, HAS THREE SYNTAX-LEVEL typos which fail it mid-way...

...the joys of continuous deployment via scripts, I guess? I would love to challenge any person from them to screenshare to me, manual deployment of the current version from zero, and I would be willing to give the person 20% of my monthly salary if they would be able to do it within 20 minutes.

but... well...
the point is, i should be doing not entirely bullshit stuff.
but yesterday's 6 hours of being in "at full attention because it seems we fucked up" totally convinced me, that today I'm taking a break.

So I'm gonna go buy another 3 beers and continue writing the specs of my dream language/os/platform.

I am so fucking lost.

I literally have zero expectations from life for now and future.

There was a time when I had so much clarity in my life. Rather, I was known for it.
Folks used to reach me out for guidance and my approaches even worked for others.

I was goal oriented and biased towards action. Failing and learning from it, I used to make things happen and with constant feedback kept progressing.

While none of that has changed, I still feel lost and numb. No, I am not depressed or suffering through any mental illness. I am physical active and able to feel the happiness.

But the recent incident with a narcissistic, left me emotionally handicap. I can no longer feel any kind of love or affection. I overcame the damage done and healed myself.

But now, I am done. Even if I engage with anyone for a relationship it would be mostly for sex. I can care for people around me and be affectionate towards them but when it comes to an intimate relationship, I feel it's not something I can do in this lifetime. I tried multiple times but failed.

These days, all I am doing is putting my heads down and working like crazy. Never in my life I worked more than 10 hours in an entire week. Now, I work 10+ hours everyday. During that time, I am highly productive.

And in my free time, I am busy housekeeping different life problems. Either paying bills, figuring out an insurance, planning some investment, or making some kind of life decision.

It's draining me. I feel as if I am losing sanity. But that's the only thing I am able to do.

Maybe it's the lockdown effect. Maybe some damage is yet to be healed.

But I got nothing better to do. I have some good ideas. Not those hipster-ish disruptive Million dollar ideas, but decent enough to solve a problem for a strong use case.

However, all of this is becoming overwhelming these days. Because decision making is complex and difficult task. It can make or break the future.

As of now I am confused how should I go about pursuing two of the important projects that I want to accomplish.

1. Migrating out of Google ecosystem. Is it even practically possible for my use case? What are the alternatives? Planning to opt in for a paid cloud storage so have to factor in that aspect as well.

I want to keep this new setup only for official use like bank and government stuff. Maybe family and close friends. Then have current ids for public logins and sharing it with retards whom I can block or ignore if they harass me. The research is overwhelming but having a structured setup gives insane amount of efficiency when life is spam free.

2. Migrating my Pihole and OpenVPN setup out of Digital Ocean to GCP. Primarily because $5 is a lot of amount for my computational requirements and Google has used my data enough, for me to use the free tier.
However, there isn't a simple script for a tech noob like me, to go ahead and setup something. I did find a Github repository but the documentation is kind of outdated so RTFM failed for me.

I don't know whether to pursue my start-up or let it go and focus on moving to Europe.

It's just so fucking stupid to even exist. And let's not forget taxes. Bloody taxes.

Oh my gosh. Windows is...eh..

I mean, it is outdated and slow, has bugs and many other stuff, but do you know why I use it? It is widely supported.

Compare application support on Mac or Linux! It is nothing compared to Windows.

However, I will still have to deal with it for a very very long time...

WHAT THE FUCKING SHIT DO YOU WANT FROM ME??! I LITERALLY GET SPAM MAILS EVERY 5 MINUTES (i know I know, some of you get more than that) ABOUT BITCOIN. I NEVER DID ANYTHING FUCKING RELATED TO CRYPTO CURRENCY! HOW DO YOU KNOW MY EMAIL?? LIKE WTF. I'm sitting here doing my stuff and every few minutes my phone starts ringing and I'm like "hey maybe person x answered or something else important happened" but when I actually look at it to see whats up it's just a fucking email about bitcoin being outdated and it tells me to maybe invest into other crypto currencies. After actually reading one of the spam mails because I was interested in what they actually want from me I had to find out that they do not even mention any other currency or website. WTF INTERNET?? WHAT DO YOU WANT?

When you're looking for that really peculiar problem on Google with mandatory generic words, but the results are everything except what you fucking wanted :
- <the main page of that language>
- <"how to" useless videos with no relation to what you're​ looking​ for whatsoever>
- <some more unrelated stuff>
- <outdated forbidden techniques>
- <Chinese gibberish>
- <something that looks like what you looking for, with no answers>
- "how to summon a demon (not clickbait!)"

At this point you either explore the unexplored lands (aka page 2 and beyond, or using Bing or Yahoo), or accept your fate.

FUCK YOU SYNOLOGY

Fuck you for breaking all my custom shit.
Fuck you for wiping almost everything (but leaving random stuff) every major update.
Fuck you for switching from upstart to systemd 219 (RELEASED MARCH 2015!).
Fuck you for using an outdated kernel.
Fuck you for having the weirdest shittiest preconfigured settings.
Fuck you for using your own custom package format.
Fuck you for being so utterly broken.
Fuck you for making me work 10 hours just to get everything back up and running the way it was.

Fuck you from the bottom of my heart

Joined a new startup as a remote dev, feeling a bit micromanaged. So this week I joined an established startup as a senior mobile dev where I work remotely.

Previous two devs got fired and two new guys got hired (me as a senior dev and another senior dev as a teamlead, also third senior dev will join next week).

Situation is that codebase is really crappy (they invested 4 years developing the android app which hasn't even been released yet). It seems that previous devs were piggybacking on old architecture and didn't bother to update anything, looking at their GIT output I could tell that they were working at 20-30% capacity and just accepting each other MR's usually with no comments meaning no actual code reviews. So codebase already is outdated and has lots of technical debt. Anyways, I like the challenges so a crappy codebase is not really a problem.

Problem is that management seems to be shitting bricks now and because they got burned by devs who treated this as a freelance gig (Im talking taking 8-10 weeks pto in a given year, lots of questionable sick leaves and skipping half of the meetings) now after management fired them it seems that they are changing their strategy into micro managament and want to roll this app out into production in the next 3 months or so lol. I started seeing redflags, for example:

1. Saw VP's slack announcement where he is urging devs to push code everyday. I'm a senior dev and I push code only when I'm ready and I have at least a proof of concept that's working. Not a big fan of pushing draft work daily that is in in progress and have to deal with nitpicky comments on stuff that is not ready yet. This was never a problem in 4-5 other jobs I worked in over the years.

2. Senior dev who's assigned as the teamlead on my team has been working for 1 month and I can already see that he hates the codebase, doesn't plan on coding too much himself and seems like he plans on just sitting in meetings and micromanaging me and other dev who will join soon. For example everyday he is asking me on how I am doing and I have to report this to him + in a separate daily meeting with him and product. Feels weird.

3. Same senior dev/teamlead had a child born yesterday. While his wife was in hospital the guy rushed home to join all work meetings and to work on the project. Even today he seems to be working. That screams to me like a major redflag, how will he be able to balance his teamlead position and his family life? Why management didn't tell him to just take a few days off? He told me himself he is a senior dev who helped other devs out, but never was in an actual lead position. I'm starting to doubt if he will be able to handle this properly and set proper boundaries so that management wouldn't impact mental health.

Right now this is only my 1st week. They didn't even have a proper backend documentation. Not a problem. I installed their iOS app which is released and intercepted the traffic so I know how backend works so I can implement it in android app now.

My point is that I'm not a child who needs hand holding. I already took on 2 tickets and gonna push an MR with fixes. This is my first week guys. In more corporate companies people sit 2 months just reading documentation and are not expected to be useful for first few months. All I want is for management to fuckoff and let me do my thing. I already join daily standup, respond to my teamlead daily and I ping people if I need something. I take on responsibility and I deliver.

How to handle this situation? I think maybe I came off as too humble in the interview or something, but basically I feel like I'm being treated like a junior or something. I think I need to deliver a few times and establish some firm boundaries here.

In all workplaces where I worked I was trusted and given freedom. I feel like if they continue treating me like a junior/mid workhorse who needs to be micromanaged I will just start interviewing for other places soon.

"Most electronics work better while turned *on*. The rest are made by HP"

Fucking printer will not only *not* print my stuff but will also make hellish noises, print the same "hello world!" page six times in a row, jam paper in the seventh and spit expensive ink on its own mechanism while there is not even paper in it.
Fucking outdated cellulose-based bureaucracy. Govt' websites are far from perfect but yet are closer to it than presenting fucking tree-meat slabs unecessary covered in colourful liquid gold.

I Feel very happy being in quarantine. Going to college and wasting 6-7 hours of time in learning that stupid old stuff and working all night totally sucks. Now, i have my whole 24 hours to work. Stupid outdated indian colleges.

Started my summer internship at a company working on their codebase about two weeks ago. I expected a lot of differences from school, but not this much. I still have no clue what I'm doing. Don't get me wrong, I'm getting stuff done, and it's helping out, but I still have no idea what is going on.

Oh, also, we use outdated Javascript frameworks... I don't actually know Javascript yet but we're just gonna roll with it

Alright, let's talk about Scrum Masters. Honestly, I just can't wrap my head around why they're even a thing. It's like someone decided to invent a job title for a role that's already covered by other folks on the team.

I mean, think about it. Who's usually sorting out the team's issues, making sure everyone's on the same page, and keeping the project on track? That's right, it's the project manager or the lead dev. They're already in the trenches, dealing with the nitty-gritty, so why do we need this extra layer?

And don't even get me started on this "servant-leader" nonsense. It's like they're trying to be the team's buddy, but they've got no real power to make things happen. It's like being a king without a crown. Who's going to respect that?

Plus, having a Scrum Master often just leads to more red tape. Instead of getting stuff done, we're stuck in endless meetings, talking about process this and methodology that. It's like we're more focused on how we work instead of actually working.

The best teams I've seen don't need a Scrum Master to babysit them. They need a real leader, someone who's not afraid to make the tough calls and who can give them the tools they need to kick ass and take names.

So, in a nutshell, I think Scrum Masters are about as useful as a chocolate teapot. It's high time we ditched this outdated role and got back to doing what we do best: building awesome stuff.

Legacy code that has a really long and convoluted way of integrating Dropbox authorisation to save files etc.

This happened in a meeting discussing where I’m at with the upgrade.

Me: This upgrade is going to take a while because of how outdated the app is. Also for assets uploaded by the user why don’t we just use active storage for this now as we have rails 6 now. Plus it will reduce a lot of code.

Other Dev: why would we do that? It’s a big change and will need testing.

Me: A lot of stuff is broken after the upgrade anyway and if we have a more built in simple way to do it why wouldn’t we? Also simplifying the code base is always good. The PR is already 1000+ files and we’re going to have to retest the app anyways.

Other Dev: *crickets*

I’m trying to make the app more smooth and streamlined and overall a better codebase as currently it’s shocking there and security holes galore, its like they don’t trust me with changing anything big haha honestly I think I’m the only one who wants to actually improve the application.

So working for a company and the dev team I’m apart of works on a legacy rails app. Technical debt is high, no automated tests, no proper routing and also running unsupported versions of the language.

I joined seven months ago and got the current team doing automated testing so that’s a plus, they bought this app four years ago and there’s been no language updates, testing, cleanup, security updates, nothing, just adding to bad code.

Now we’re looking to actually upgrade language versions, the language and the framework now this will cause a lot of stuff to break naturally due to how outdated it is.

So I started putting proper routes into place how things should of been when things were being built as we have some spare time I decided to go out of my way to clear up some of the technical debt to get ahead of the curb. Re-done an entire section of the app, massive speed improvements, better views, controller, model, comment clean up and everything exactly how it should be.

I push the PR,
*other dev* - “why are we doing all of these other changes”
*me* - “well to implement routes properly, we have to use the new routes I just did some extra cleanup along the way”
*today, me* - “can you lend me a hand with one of the routes the ID isn’t getting passed”
*today, other dev* - “this wouldn’t of happened if you didn’t redo all these files, let’s just scrap the changes”
…

Sooo, I’ve spend three weeks improving one section in the app, because I’m having issues with one route according to this dev I should scrap it? Wait come again, am I the only one in this team who cares about making this app better all round?

Frustrating…

When I was studying web integrator.
At first I didn't even know html, yet alone what a php tag or extension meant.

I quickly caught onto it though and started to grasp that the procedural stuff they taught was really outdated.

So I researched intensely and eventually whipped up my very own php framework.
- if you're interested, it lives on github.com:sasin91/php-framework

Obviously it's a pile of fungal infested dung.

but ey, I was light years ahead of the rest of the class.
Besides, we all gotta stackoverflow somewhere :)

Let me start this off by stating I'm a Java dev, and a noob with C++.

Thought it'd be cool to learn some OpenCL, since I want to do some maths stuff and why not learn something new.

So I sat down, installed Nvidia proprietary drivers, broke my x-org server, purged, reinstalled, rebooted and after a while I got stuff sorted out.

Then on to my IDE. I use CLion and it uses Cmake. C++ noob knows shit about Cmake, so struggle for two hours trying to figure out wtf is going on with the OpenCL libs and why they're only partially detected. Fml.

Finally, everything is configured and I'm set. I start working on a Hello World program using OpenCL. Finish it in 20 mins, all good. No output. Do some googling, check my program a million times. Nothing wrong here. Check the kernel, everything as in the tutorial.

I start checking error codes after a while reported by OpenCL (which I had no clue was a thing) and I get some code saying the program was not created properly (to run the kernel). No fucking clue what's up with that. Google around, find another tutorial, rewrite my code in case I'm using outdated code or something. Nothing.

Fast forward an hour, I find out that OpenCL has logs! So I grab some code from the website I found it on, and voila, I finally get some info on what's going on.

Get a load of this bs.

In the kernel file, so that OpenCL knows that it's a function to run, you have to put __kernel. But in all the places I read, it said to put it as _kernel.

Add the underscore, compile, run and everything is perfect.

Then I tried just putting 'kernel'. Also compiles and runs fine.

Two hours hours and my program was fixed by adding an underscore. IF ONLY C++ GAVE AN INDICATION OF WHAT BLEW UP INSTEAD OF SITTING BACK AND BEING LIKE "oh wow man feels bad, work some magic and try again" THEN THIS WOULD NOT HAVE TAKEN SO LONG.

Then again, it was OpenCL that was being shitty with its styling enforcement or whatever the hell the underscore business is. But screw it. C++ eats shit too for this. Sure, maybe Java babies you by giving you the exact error and position that the error took place at. But at least that way you don't waste hours of your life chasing invisible bugs 😠😠

I'm going to eat some food... Too much energy was consumed fighting the system... Then I'll get back to OpenCL because 😇 but that doesn't make it less bs.

<<prev. #wk235 advices>>

~ Study the Error log deeply, Google each line if needed. Don't give up.
~ Learn by doing. Don't just read/watch.
~ Practice breaking down the problem statement first in different components and hierarchies. Don't jump into coding right away.
~ Write some, review some. Don't put off review for later.
~ Even if you don't exactly follow the best security practices - always ensure that your program is safe for use. Especially for user-inputs, etc, pay attention.
~ Never distribute code with passwords/keys written in it.
~ Don't hard code stuff, use Config file, environment variables, etc.
~ Try to automate repetitive stuff like build and deploy etc
~ Save and backup you code.
~ No one knows everything, also, today's knowledge gets outdated tomorrow. Continuous learning is synonymous with this field.

<<next #wk235 advices>>

I have a bookshelf full of tech books. What should I do with outdated ones? What approach should I take to buying new ones? A lot of them are probably irrelevant now. Things that don't change significantly are fine (I have old C++ and Make books whose content is still relevant even if some new stuff is missing) but web development has evolved significantly and I'm reluctant to get anything framework related due to needing to replace books frequently.

I could get ebooks, but having tried a few, I much prefer a physical book.

In the case of old books I no longer need, I can recycle them (as waste paper, or at a book recycling place) or donate them to a charity shop. It seems silly to recycle them as waste paper, but on the other hand I doubt the content will be that useful to others nor will it be that useful in a charity shop!

So instead they just sit on my shelf and remain unused...

What do you folks do with your books when you don't need them any more?

Not really documentation, but actually the user manual for a corporate online ebanking system for dealing with EPF/ETF. The instructions were very very vague, and when we called the bank for clarification, they said that some of the stuff in the manual was outdated/not relevant anymore. Like what the fuck man?

Well, I thought "hey, I need to urgently update my own infra for a change, been neglecting this way too long, but should not be longer then a day."

I spent the whole weekend dependency resolving, modulesyncing and ensure deps are met ... And every single goddamn time it's stdlib causing a whoupsie on another module...

Oh at least I am having fun. Sort of.

!rant, but not sure if it's a question either.

I've kind of run into a wall when it comes to programming lately. I'm following this course on Udemy for Python, but the next section (that I need to do to be able to continue) uses (outdated) bokeh stuff, and I don't know enough to be able to figure out how to get the same output without much hair-tearing and frustration.

To clarify, the videos uses bokeh.charts, but then there's a note added that says to use bkcharts, which is still outdated, so it doesn't help at all. I did contact the course tutor about it, and he is aware of it but he's got a lot of stuff going on, so I don't know when he'll have time to fix it. In the meantime, I'm stuck and severely lacking in the intellectual stimulation that is programming. :(

I -have- been trying to work on independent projects, but my problem is mostly that I just don't seem to be a frontend kinda guy, so I end up with only halfway-finished stuff. Does any poor soul here have advice on where to look, or (less likely) even have time to explain some stuff?

Give up trying to change CS education since current formal education systems used since the prehistoric times are unable to teach CS properly. Instead, tell the students from day 1: "What you'll learn is either already outdated or will be outdated by the time you graduate. Be ready to learn stuff by yourselves or switch your major."

Is anyone familiar with Bitwig? It's a pretty good DAW and you can write your own controller scripts in JS. I bought two controllers (Launchpad Mini and Launch Control), one of which has a really outdated factory script and the other one doesn't have anything, so I decided to update the existing one and port it over to the other controller. They do similar stuff.

I started going through the code and I think it gave me cancer. It has many gems, but so far this is my favourite. The second is a function that takes two parameters and returns false.

This is a continuation of my previous rant about admob being not very informative when it comes to invalid traffic and the resulting restriction in ad delivery.

I then wanted to use admob mediation to hang in facebook ads. My app is written with Xamarin.Forms.

So first I needed to make some facebook configuration - create an account, let my app review, create some ad placements and other shit. I came to the point where I had to put in a link to my privacy policy and the link could not be accepted due to some SSL fuckup -.-'

I then found out that there is an issue with my SSL Chain. With the help of whatsmychaincert.com I solved that issue. Little side note here: I have limited knowledge of that stuff and my cousin helped me set up my homepage so I had no idea what I was doing. Did a snapshot and luckily I did not needed that as everything worked :)
This took me around half an hour just so I can paste the fucking link to activate my app in facebook developer portal.

After that I made the whole mediation configuration shit - not an issue as google documented this quite well but it took some time.

Now comes the shitty part. To use admob mediation you need adapters to the other ad network. I found a nuget package with exactly what I needed just to find out that it is outdated. So I pulled the repo and saw that this thing is an aar binding library. Never did that stuff so I read some docs again. Updated the package and consumed it in my app.

The google docs then said "Use this mediation test shit to check if you did everything correct before going prod" - aar binding nr. 2 (but I am now familiar with that :P). This thing then told me that facebook ads could not be loaded because the SDK version is outdated -.-' SDK version comes from another nuget package which is referenced by the first aar thingie. I tracked that thing back to a repo where I found out that they are indeed totally behind. So I downloaded the aar, made a binding lib and bound that to my first aar binding lib as that depends on this.

Put that all back in my app - tested mediation and fucking finally after 6 hours everything comes together! all lights are green and things work.

Sorry if this is not quite a rant but it was quite a journey and I just had to share it.

I've just finshed a cours about service-oriented architecture in my uni and a lot of people are "complaining" about SOA becasue it's not used so much these days and it's a waste of time to learn it. What's your take on this? Do you use or have SOA in your company or use it in some way? Any rants about stuff you learned in school that were completely outdated? A friends friend finished uni about two years ago and they had a big course in Flash...

What should I use to build cross-platform desktop programs?

I'm thinking of learning Java and using JavaFX. I'm staying away from swing since it's a bit old and I've seen people say it's outdated for today's standards.

Flutter desktop would be cool but there's nothing stable for that stuff yet. I've also looked a bit into Haxe but I'm not sure if it's any good.

What's your opinion?

!rant
I sometimes thank the education system for teaching me really outdated stuff. Here's why...

With new programing languages with all the jazz and cool tricks, it's not impossible to develop concepts and get in the flow of visualizing problem solution. Like for eg, plython3 had inbuilt method to swap variables but I know how to swap variables without a third variable because I had to do it without python. Now that I have the ability to build algorithms, I can leverage functionalities provided by languages in better way.

Maybe you people will like this story.
The past semester I studied Java in class. First time doing object oriented programming, I had an annoying teacher but got the hang of it. I still miss C from the last year.
As a final project we had to do any program and apply some stuff we saw in class (The program should have an array list, use interfaces, bla bla bla bery simple stuff). It also must have a complete documentation, a manual and a diary explaining what was developed every week. Bonus points if it was in a repository like GitLab.
I wanted to do an RPG game in a matrix, like a rougelike or an old FF game, that should be a map or two, a few monsters and items and that's it. Enough to show what can I do and to have enough excuses to apply everything that the teacher asked. I had a team with two friends who wanted to do the same.
After making accounts in three different pages that apparently would help us to be more organized (One to make charts and two task trackers) I lost all patience and made an account in GitLab, made the basic classes that we had defined in a chart, divided the tasks and put them in to do on GitLab and we started to work.
One of my companions caused a lot of problems. First, he didin't wanted to learn how to use GitLab (I simply asked them to do merge requests) and he insisted to use GitHub. Then he started to say that using the console version was even better (Pretty sure he said thet he never used Git, but maybe was gas poisoning). The GitLab repository never had a single commit to his name.
BUT WAIT IT GETS BETTER all the entire time, he was complaining about the graphical interface of the game, wanting to use some SDK for RPGs that he found. I told him that we will see that at the end, that first we should have all the mechanics done, test it in ASCII in the console and then, if we have time, we will put the visual interface, separated and optional from the main program to avoid problems.
After two weeks where he gave me very simple standard stuff late, half done and through Google Drive, I discovered he was most of the time working on... the graphical interface SDK! He took the job already done by me and the other guy and making a pretty hardcoded integration with the graphical interface and making everything that he tought it would be necesary. Soon enough the GitLab repository was totally outdated and completly useless. He had the totallity of the project in his half broken laptop, and sometimes he gave us a zip with all the code, outdated after a few minutes. Most of the stuff that I made was modified, a lot of the code was totally unknown to what it was and I had no idea even of how the folders were organised.
We had a month to finish it. I got totally disconected from the project and just hoped for the best, sometimes doing a handful of generic and adaptable lines of code for a specific thing (Funny enough, many core mechanics were nonexistent). The other guy managed to work more on the project, mostly fixing the mess that the guy did: apparently he didin't read the documentation of the SDK and just experimented and saw tutorials and tried to figure out how to do what he wanted.
Talking about documentation: we dont had yet. The code wasn't even commented propely. We did all that the last week and some stuff was finished the last night. The program apparently worked but I had no idea.
Thank God, the teacher just looked over everything and was very impressed by the working camera and the FF tiles. I don't think he saw the code or read too much of the documentation, much less when I directly wrote how I lost all access to the project.
I had a 10/10. I didin't complained. Most easy and annoying ten I ever had. I will never do a project with that guy.

2 years ago(jan-oct 2020) i was a college student giving his final exams. some of my personal stats were:

- current knowledge of Android Framework and associated stuff(android, java, kotlin, making and deploying apps , best practises, etc) : 30%
- current knowledge of Web tech (html/css/js/php): 5%
- current knowledge of creating backend/frontend apps:2%
also
- free time: somewhat
- Personal health: barely caring about

====

Same year i got my first job (oct 2020) which i switched in next year (oct 2021). before joining the next(my current) job, my personal stats were:
- current knowledge of Java : 30%
- current knowledge of Kotlin : 70-80%
- current knowledge of Android and Android Stuff(the framework, making production ready apps, deploying, best practises , etc) : 70-80%
- current knowledge of Web tech (html/css/js/php): 3-5%
- current knowledge of creating backend/frontend apps:1%
also:
- Free time: lol, i was working at 1 am too
- Personal health: even lesser caring about, body fats and thick muscles at various places

====

it will be almost a year of me working for these guys in November and this has been an interesting year so far. the stats are:
- current knowledge of Java : 35%
- current knowledge of Kotlin : 20-30%
- current knowledge of Android and Android Stuff(the framework, making production ready apps, deploying, best practises , etc) : 20-30%
- current knowledge of Web tech (html/css/js/node/react): 20-25%
- current knowledge of new stuff* (cordova,unity,flutter, react native, ios) : 5-10%
- current knowledge of creating backend/frontend apps:10-15%
also:
- Free time: a good amount of free time, like in addition to weekends and festivals, i take 2-4 leaves every month
- Personal health: improving a lot. loosing weight, gaining muscles, getting better stamina at running and other activities

====

So i am currently at a weird place. As from my stats, you can see that previously i was in a android heavy role in a company that put a lot of pressure, but i was able to become a better sellable dev through it.

My current role is also of an android dev here, but we maintain b2b products and i am sometimes asked to fix bugs in hybrid apps like unity, react native and cordova, so gained a few knowledge there too. and since i have a lot of free time in my hand, i explored a bit of web technologies too (apart from enjoying a relaxing life and focusing on personal health)

However my main concern is that am becoming a less sellable Dev. The lack of exposure/will to work on android tech has made me outdated from a framework that was once my stronghold. remember that i joined my first company purely because of my passion and knowledge of android os.

When i got offer from this company, i also had another, $5000/year lesser offer in hand. both of these offers were very generous , but i went with the greed and took the offer from this company despite knowing that they are looking for someone who will act as a developer-maintainer kind of person, while the other company giving lesser pay had a need of a pure android engineer.

So i am currently 24. should i keep on doing this relaxing but slowly killing job, or go into a painful, pressurizing but probably making me a better "android" engineer job ?

Some really motivated guy.

He apparently wants to monitore his opensource application on his spare time.
His application is likely to have no users though.
But well, that guy looks like kinda montivated.

For professional purpose, guy already did monitore with newrelic.
Seems like he was not satisfied and switched to datadog 3 years ago.
But liking digging dirt, he migrated to self hosted telegraf/influx/grafana (which he likes to about)

Today that guy is not in his company but on his potatoe machine in the cloud. So he wants to be minimalistic, datadog should do.

Now you got it, random ff*** is me, on a weekend, a shinny saturday for that matter.
Actually now it is night.

Now let's start the fight.

I have datadog scripts!
But datadog be sneaky as well. datadog upgraded to v6 8=)
-> scripts ain't working. outdated.

I check the logs. Too bad!
-> datadog removed dogstatsD.log in v6!

Well I have nothing to do in my life it is too cold outside as they say. I read the (sluggy) datadoc and tries some shell command (given in doc) to upload some events to dogstatsd (via udp).
-> Nothing happens, neither in local nor in remote.

ok maybe command not up to date, so let me try some official library. datadog from python. Feels like a nice try!
-> only available for python >= 3.5. 3.4 on my good ol' jessie. Upgrading os for datadog not acceptable.

Maybe dogstatsD not started... doc says it is by default, but well, not the first time doc is wrong... I put datadog as log verbose. Guess what: as per standard: shitload of error.

Digging... kubexx, docker and whatsoever apparently preventing collector to do its normal stuff
np, I am gonna check that on github! Goog, people have the same errors. They seem to fix it by trying some settings, with. or without luck
-> I am not that warrior to check every stuff

Ok, let's stop the datadog events, it works. It does not anymore. You know that sentence. We all know it.

Still not enough!

How about testing that uber super nice feature of v6. The logs. After all I want to make events out of my applicative logs.
How about reading the log again. Configure the yaml log as they say. Done. Make some pattern. Read the best practive. Done. Configures the yaml. Done. Now testing.
-> remote datadog interface be like: no logs for you dude you need to pay

ff***f*f*f

Fuck datadog, fuck that v6 version, good old tail -Fxx | someaggreate.js|sendmail will do...

There is a University in Karnataka, India called VTU, whose exam paper re-evaluation fee costs more than the exam fees, moreover they'll fail you to make money.
Syllabus remains outdated from a decade or two. You'll be considered great if you managed to mugup the stuff for exams to take ranks.
If anyone relies on it's syllabus, then it's decided that they're gonna be the donkey among whom it produces every year.
You'll only become a true engineer if you realise this truth and seek the real educational resources online.
I saved myself by dropping off the college an year ago, which was the best thing I've ever done. I can make as many projects I can (fullstack web).
I'm here to find out, are there any successful VTU drop-outs out there? or am I alone (maybe successful in future).....