Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
Search - "outdated tech"
-
This week I quit the corporate life in favour of a much smaller company (60 people in total) and i never felt so good.
After 3 years in 2 big corporations, I began to hate coding mainly because of:
- internal political games. It's like living inside House of Cards everyday.
- management and non-tech people choosing tech stacks. Angular 4 + Bootstrap 4 alpha version + AG-Grid + IE11. Ohhh yeah. Not.
- overtime (even if it was paid double). I never did a single minute of OT for fixing something that I caused. I spent days fixing things caused by others and implementing promises that other people made.
- meetings. I spend 50-60% of the time in pointless meetings (I tracked them in certain time intervals) but the workload is same like I was working 8 hours / day.
- working in encapsulated environments without access to internet or with limited access to internet (no GitHub, no StackOverflow etc.)
- continuously changing work scope. Everyday the management wants something new introduced in the current sprint/release and nobody accepts that they have to remove other things from the scope in order to proper implement everything.
- designers that think they are working for Apple and are arguing with things like "but it's just a button! why does it take 2 days to implement?"
- 20 apps installed additionally on my phone (Citrix Receiver, RSA Token, Mobile@Work Suite etc.) just to be able to read my email
- working with outdated IDEs and tools because they have to approve every new version of a software.
- making tickets for anything. Do you want a glass of water? Open a ticket and ask for it.
- KPIs. KPIs everywhere. You don't deserve anything because the KPIs were not accomplished.
The bad part of the above things is that they affect your day-to-day personality even if you don't see it. You become more like a rock with almost 0 feelings and interests.
This is my first written "rant". If anyone is interested, I will post different situations that will explain a lot of the above aspects.13 -
OH MY GOD, MY TEACHER DOES NOT TEACH MY FAVORITE LANGUAGE!
I've seen a lot of rants about teachers who use an outdated language, or don't accept the preferred framework or library of the ranter, or even force students to use a technology or even worse an OS they don't prefer.
Whats with that attitude?
I absolutely encourage young people to learn technology in their free time and it absolutely helps at building a career and become good at programming. I don't think being around 18 and never having worked in a real job is the time to select "the most superior language and technology".
Actually, that time is never.
Technology is evolving all the time and different tech evolves in different paths for different purposes. Get rid of the idea, that there is a "best" and get rid of the idea, that you will always be able to work with what you think is best.
If you're really really really awesome, you can chose to do what you like most. Not awesome as in "i learned programming in my free time, now i'm better than my programming-for-beginners-course teacher" but awesome as in "start my own company and can afford to only take the jobs i feel like doing", that awesome. Most likely, you're not (yet).
In the real world, you will very likely sometimes be required to work with technology you don't prefer. Maybe with something you think is really bad. Probably, it's not that bad. More likely, you read it on the internet from someone whose self-image is based on on loving TechA and hating TechB. A lot of much hated technology is at least okay for it's intended use. Maybe not the most pleasant time you will ever have, but no reason to jump out of the window. Hey, and if you get used to it, you may even start to like it. At least, learn to retain some dignity when confronted with things you don't like.
You can still think that one thing is better than another, but if you make a huge drama out of it, you just make it harder for yourself. The best programmer is the one who get's shit done, not the one with the saltiest tears.14 -
Biggest scaling challenge?
The imaginary scaling issues from clients.
Client : How do you cope with data that's a billion times bigger than our current data set? Can you handle that? How much longer will it take to access some data then?
I could then give a speech about optimizing internal data structures and access algorithms that work with O(log n) complexity, but that wouldn't help, non-tech people will not understand that.
And telling someone, the system will be outdated and hopefully been replaced when that amount of data is reached, would be misinterpreted as "Our system can not handle it".
So the usual answer is: "No problem, our algorithms are optimized so they can handle any amount of data"6 -
Wow... this is the perfect week for this topic.
Thursday, is the most fucked off I’ve ever been at work.
I’ll preface this story by saying that I won’t name names in the public domain to avoid anyone having something to use against me in court. But, I’m all for the freedom of information so please DM if you want to know who I’m talking about.
Yesterday I handed in my resignation, to the company that looked after me for my first 5 years out of university.
Thursday was my breaking point but to understand why I resigned you need a little back story.
I’m a developer for a corporate in a team of 10 or so.
The company that I work for is systemically incompetent and have shown me this without fail over the last 6 months.
For the last year we’ve had a brilliant contracted, AWS Certified developer who writes clean as hell hybrid mobile apps in Ion3, node, couch and a tonne of other up to the minute technologies. Shout out to Morpheus you legend, I know you’re here.
At its core my job as a developer is to develop and get a product into the end users hands.
Morpheus was taking some shit, and coming back to his desk angry as fuck over the last few months... as one of the more experienced devs and someone who gives a fuck I asked him what was up.
He told me, company want their mobile app that he’s developed on internal infrastructure... and that that wasn’t going to work.
Que a week of me validating his opinion, looking through his work and bringing myself up to speed.
I came to the conclusion that he’d done exactly what he was asked to, brilliant Work, clean code, great consideration to performance and UX in his design. He did really well. Crucially, the infrastructure proposed was self-contradicting, it wouldn’t work and if they tried to fudge it in it would barely fucking run.
So I told everyone I had the same opinion as him.
4 months of fucking arguing with internal PMs, managers and the project team go by... me and morpheus are told we’re not on the project.
The breaking point for me came last Wednesday, given no knowledge of the tech, some project fannies said Morpheus should be removed and his contract terminated.
I was up in fucking arms. He’d done everything really well, to see a fellow developer take shit for doing his job better than anyone else in [company] could was soul destroying.
That was the straw on the camels back. We don’t come to work to take shit for doing a good job. We don’t allow our superiors to give people shit in our team when they’re doing nothing but a good job. And you know what: the opinion of the person that knows what they’re talking about is worth 10 times that of the fools who don’t.
My manager told me to hold off, the person supposed to be supporting us told me to stand down. I told him I was going to get the app to the business lead because he fucking loves it and can tell us if there’s anything to change whilst architecture sorts out their outdated fucking ideas.
Stand down James. Do nothing. Don’t do your job. Don’t back Morpheus with his skills and abilities well beyond any of ours. Do nothing.
That was the deciding point for me, I said if Morpheus goes... I go... but then they continued their nonsense, so I’m going anyway.
I made the decision Thursday, and Friday had recruiters chomping at the bit to put the proper “senior” back in my title, and pay me what I’m worth.
The other issues that caused me to see this company in it’s true form:
- I raised a key security issue, documented it, and passed it over to the security team.
- they understood, and told the business users “we cannot use ArcGIS’ mobile apps, they don’t even pretend to be secure”
- the business users are still using the apps going into the GDPR because they don’t understand the ramifications of the decisions they’re making.
I noticed recently that [company] is completely unable to finish a project to time or budget... and that it’s always the developers put to blame.
I also noticed that middle management is in a constant state of flux with reorganisations because in truth the upper managers know they need to sack them.
For me though, it was that developers in [company], the people that know what they’re talking about; are never listened to.
Fuck being resigned to doing a shit job.
Fuck this company. On to one that can do it right.
Morpheus you beautiful bastard I know you’ll be off soon too but I also feel I’ve made a friend for life. “Private cloud” my arse.
Since making the decision Thursday I feel a lot more free, I have open job offers at places that do this well. I have a position of power in the company to demand what I need and get it. And I have the CEO and CTO’s ears perking up because their department is absolutely shocking.
Freedom is a wonderful feeling.13 -
My first internship was unpaid. "For the experience" and shit. My first task was to clear out an entire office full to the literal ceiling with the phones of people who had been laid off or quit. There were now just three old guys in the entire office. And me. Go figure. I need to find that picture, it's truly unbelievable.
My next task was to sort cables in the store room. Mind you, this was supposed to be a software dev internship.
I consistently had to ASK for work to do. If I didn't, I would just sit in my new office all day doing homework and playing with linux liveCDs and nobody cared.
So the third task they gave me was to try to restore a very old (like XP old) computer that had a broken hard drive, literally broken. Said they wanted to "repurpose it." As busy work I guess.
So I scrounged around the cleptomaniacal cesspool of dated and neglected tech and found a hard drive. Pop it in, chkdsk, fdisk, good to go. Spend hours installing XP while sorting more random cables and doing my homework because honestly writing a history paper is more valuable to my dev career than this complete bullshit. Finally get the thing working and go to report the miracle of rebirth to my higher-up. He says "oh cool," doesn't smile, and hands me a list of software to install.
I come back 20 minutes later - "Hey, most of these require corporate licenses."
Guy says "yup" and goes back to ignoring me. Never gives me a company card to buy licenses, or a list of ones already bought. I've revived the computer equivalent of Moses from the computer equivalent of permadeath just for this asshole to completely disregard that and give me an(other) impossible task, just to get me off his back. Excuse me for imposing with free (then-child) labor, you ass.
I spend maybe another week there doing homework in the office I cleaned and contemplating stealing everything of value. I guarantee they wouldn't have noticed though, which somehow made the idea less appealing.
I quit by texting my boss.
He never replied.
I wish I had stolen their laptop RAM.
It's probably still sitting on boss's shelf collecting dust and being a miserable, outdated fucking waste of space, just like him and his two remaining coworkers.4 -
My GF is a non-tech-savvy linguistics bachelor who uses elementaryOS as her only operating system on her only laptop. I'm not responsible for this, I only helped her install it instead of Windows when she asked me to do so.
She's a living proof that the stereotype of Linux being "too hard" or "exclusively for geeks" is outdated to say the least. Yes, Ubuntu and elementaryOS are not as kewl as Arch and Gentoo, but they are still better than a popular blue-colored American operating system that sends unencrypted screenshots of your desktop to some unknown IP addresses every 10 minutes.32 -
"We use WSDL and SOAP to provide data APIs"
- Old-fashioned but ok, gimme the service def file
(The WSDL services definition file describes like 20 services)
- Cool, I see several services. In need those X data entities.
"Those will all be available through the Data service endpoint"
- What you mean "all entities in the same endpoint"? It is a WSDL, the whole point is having self-documented APIs for each entity format!
"No, you have a parameter to set the name of the data entity you want, and each entity will have its own format when the service return it"
- WTF you need the WSDL for if you will have a single service for everything?!?
"It is the way we have always done things"
Certain companies are some outdated-ass backwater tech wannabees.
Usually those that have dominated the market of an entire country since the fucking Perestroika.
The moment I turn on the data pipeline, those fuckers are gonna be overloaded into oblivion. I brought popcorn.7 -
Bethesda is full of shit. Starfield somehow needs a super new PC because it alledgedly uses modern SW tech.
Strange point: while a high-end PC with 7800X3D and 4090 makes the performance bearable (though not great), the graphics don't look spectacular. In fact, they look outdated.
No Bethesda, you don't use modern tech. You require modern HW tech to make up somewhat for your shitty engine and incompetent devs.15 -
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.21 -
Planned on installing Linux, for the first time, on a old computer today. Turns out you need a usb-stick to install it from. Minimum 2gb. - No problem, I thought, because I have a old stick in a drawer. Turns out it was on 128mb. Outdated technology. Time to go shopping.4
-
Hey seniors:
Let's make a rant and name some old technologies that have been frequently used and now they are obsolete12 -
Had to create a quick server side script. Created a quick function that returns an array, and tried to access a value from the function call like this:
$val = func()[0]
Apparently php didn’t include that feature until PHP 5.4
Wtf PHP.
Log into my webhost to update the the PHP version; only to discover that the highest PHP is PHP 5.5. PHP 7 is the current revision.
Wtf a2hosting.8 -
Do you ever feel so down that you realize you've been writing shit code which does nothing productive and you've been just reinventing the wheel? Like, being in a confused state of being doubtful and afraid of being outdated coz you don't know any future proof tech? I'm in the final year of CS undergrad and this feeling sucks.3
-
Everytime i buy any electronics , my brother would suggest me to buy latest ones with the newest configuration . His logic was " If you buy a not-so new tech now.. It will outdate fast and you will end up with an outdated one soon.. So the extra 10K is worth considering that " .
Considering the development trend i personally think it is useless to invest in electronics unless necessary . Everytime i buy an electronic product , within 2 or 3 months i find the same good at almost 75% of the price.. So with tech prices falling like this.. i think it is worth saving that money instead of the cutting edge tech which i wont need for another 2 years .
Thoughts ?
(The cousin brother i mentioned does this everytime he buys a phone and ends up changing the phone 4 times faster than me.. and the use case is similar to mine if not worse..)1 -
From such a healthy environment this job turned into an extremely toxic one. Now i finally understand how a toxic environment looks like. It's extremely disgusting. Putting 5 tasks on my name to work in parallel and as i work they put 2 more. All High priority tasks. It is physically impossible. The scrum master whore told me to just check the code how to do something to users and understand this for monday so i can help QA guy to test it. I went over the code with a colleague and understood it. Today she screamed at me angry i didnt do the task. What the fuck are you talking about? I checked the code and im ready to do help the QA guy test it whenever necessary. Then she talked shit changing the task that i was supposed to not only understand the code but also do the task on Monday and now its the end of tuesday and its not done. Fuck you. That was not what she said initially. Its very Fucking confusing. Then she said to QA guy i give up i cant handle it with this guy sorry but ill have to report this to product owner. So be it. I dont give a fuck. I am ALONE working on a GIANT, unmaintainable, spaghetti, caveman technology codebase with broken outdated or nonexistent docs, nobody to help me, the colleague whos supposed to guide me is a good guy but overloaded with tasks himself so he doesnt have time, i him and many of us requested another person to join to work with me on same role but they dont have the budget which is a Fucking lie, a client worth trillions of dollars does not have a budget, yeah get fucked retards. This suffering and downfall of your project is mostly their fault. Theyre too arrogant and proud to understand or admit that it's not possible physically for 1 person to manage and keep knowledge and code on 7 tasks per day. All that for Fucking $8 an hour?????????? I hope cancer eats all of u. Every single one to the very fucking bones till ur bones break. This is fucking disgusting and sickening. Right when i was supposed to get paid $17 an hour (and thats gross income not even net.....) I am now fucking forced to quit this shithole toxic job. Because i realized no amount of fucking money, not even before-tax-$17-an-hour money is worth the weight of stress that i get punched with every fucking day. No fucking job is worth more than health. This is saddening and depressing extremely. All of my fucking plans are ruined. The car to buy on leasing--ruined by a whore. The 2 day vacation this week--ruined by a whore. Going out with my hot blonde gf during this miserable 2 day vacation--ruined by a whore. Meeting with 2 american clients I've been in touch with for several years to work on a side project--ruined by a whore, meeting canceled and delayed due to my overtime work. I am literally fucking treated like the Moscow Crocus Hall terrorist. They have no fucking sympathy or understanding for how fucking HARD this fucking DevOps job is where i work on a 30 year old legacy codebase with no fucking help. It is simply not possible. Now its a race between who's gonna fuck who: either i quit first or they fire me first. At this point its not a matter of if but when. Surely soon enough. Cant wait to get the FUCK away from these pieces of shitheads. I either have option to cry and go mentally insane by giving it my all until i fix the task on time but the stress i would get for that would need them to pay me at least 9 mill $ a year. Fuck with someone else you fucking retards. You're using slave labor to work for basically free just so u can profit a lot. Literally on the meeting one of their bosses said they get 50% of margin which is a lot in biz world for tech field. This is absolutely sickening and saddening that im treated like a fucking terrorist. Fucking Disgusting. Cant wait to not Ever fucking work in this toxic fucking place. Quitting by max 1st of april.3
-
Oh btw, i forgot to tell you guys, our college still teaches us to code, using turbo c++ emulators. 😶. WHAT THE FUCK 😑😤🤬. 😣. Makes me sick🤮.
P. S. I was going to censor the vulgar words but we don't need to on devrant. Yesh😌!!!!2 -
Most of us have scary stories about professors that think that they know about what they are talking about when it comes to teaching comp sci subjects. Shit is so backwards in most parts of the world with teachers showing outdated or completely pointless tech.
A friend called me the other day asking for classic ASP help because it was being used in his web class. Another was asking me about flipping c cgi web scripting. Wtf are schools teaching? Having the drive to LEARN actuall useful topics that are relevant on the market is hard enough as it is...shouldn't schools help at least a little bit? I was lucky, we were thaught Java, Python, cpp, js, sql, html5, css3, php, ruby and we had classes for node (for those interested) and asp.net mvc. Those were RELEVANT and good classes and while some outdated tech was good the rest is just bullshit. Specially since most teachers have 0 market value as develpers...but hey!! Wtf do I know! Of course my word is shit against all them doctorate and master degrees.
Gimme a break. School can be great. But a lot of the leadership there is toxic af for our industry. And while I appreciate the effort in me being thaught modern languages (and thaught is a hard word since I already knew how to program way before going to school) i still remember a teacher taking points away from an assignment for not using switch statements in Python...despite my explaining that there was no such thing (you can go around it by using a lil technique using functions, its pretty cool..pero no mames)
Or what about the time I mentioned to a fellow student how he could use markup for having more control with his windows forms while the very same teacher contradicted me saying that shit was not possible. Or the guy at the school in which I work teaching intro to programming using fucking vba...fk man if you are going the BASIC route at least teach them b4j or something fuuuuck.
I had good teachers, but they were always cast asside by dptmnt heads as if they knew better. I just hate pendejo teachers I really do.
Chinguen a su madre, bola de babosos.rant remembering uni yes asshole gnu linux is a viable alternative i still love coding fuck bad teachers fk the system11 -
The industry is sometimes sad and hilarious at the same time. There was a townhall at my workplace and our country head was talking about all the new tech we were working on. Now he is a good business person but I doubt him as a tech guy. And then he went on ranting about AI and ML and how they are to going change the software landscape and how developer as a profession will become obsolete. He said the technology will reach up to a point where we no longer need to write code to build software. Obviously, I couldn't digest it and confronted him the moment after the event.
Me: so why do you think writing code will become outdated?
Him: it's just that we will be able to create a technology through which we can simply command a machine to build a software.
Me: oh. But someone needs to tell the machine how to do it right?
Him: yes. We have to train the machine to act on these commands.
Me: and do you know how you "train" these machines?
Him: umm...
Me: by writing code.2 -
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?3 -
Do these stupid tech writers even research what they talk about, if it's not the same 5 points as every other article on the topic then it's an article written this week on '5 Open Source HTML and CSS Editors and they mention Brackets.
Fair enough... but they link to the adobe Gitub, saying it ""isn’t super actively maintained"" which I guess is accurate since it has been dead for 2 years. Rather than the more recently updated 'brackets-cont' project that had a release back in October 2022.
Like fuck it's like these tech writers just pump out content years after it's relevant without any research or editing.
Pointless complaining I know but it bothers me how mindless mainstream tech writing is, it's all the same regurgitated ideas, or outdated information. Not saying I could fix it, but I'm sure someone out there can do something.1 -
As this weeks rant is about how to improve CS education I want to share one new university in Berlin called CODE that does many things quite differently:
From the beginning students are working together in small interdisciplinary teams on projects. Meaning software developers, interaction designers and product managers are all already working together. The projects are developed in collaboration with companies and usually last a couple of weeks to multiple months. The students are supposed to learn more if they are faced with an actually problem instead of learning with frontal teaching (“Frontalunterricht”) in a lecture hall.
The founder himself started programming in his teens but studied business administration because he found that the CS courses had an outdated didactic.
PS: And if you are in Germany and between 15 and 21 years old have a look at the “Code+Design Camps”. They are basically longer Hackathons (4 days) with professional mentoring from programmers, designers, … from the industry. I attended four in total (all over Germany) and they were a lot of fun!!!
What do you all think about this?
Website: https://code.berlin/en/
English Article: https://global.handelsblatt.com/com...
Some Articles in German:
http://faz.net/aktuell/finanzen/...
http://sueddeutsche.de/wirtschaft/...2 -
Being pretty much the only one who has some knowledge of how to code and get my way around tech (even if minimal, I'm too lazy for my own good) in my familiar household - and by extension, my family (Family extends FamiliarHousehold - LoL I'm sorry) - (my brother is on his first grade of a programming course in high school, I'm a 2nd grade uni student aiming to become a game dev) sometimes I wish I knew nothing of it.
Don't get me wrong, I do like working on code (if in Java. C is making me wanna tear my eyes out) but sometimes ignorant family members push me through the edge.
I worked on a business thing my family started this summer and one of the "jobs" was managing everything via a website.
Fair enough, I knew nothing of it when I started but I learn fast and just like that I knew my way around it. The problem came when I had to teach the person who started the project how it worked. This doesn't sound all that bad except he is kinda in the stone age regarding informatics.
He got a computer a few years ago and he pretty much only played poker in it, and he still had one of those old nokias you could throw to a wall and get a hole into it. The computer is like 9y and runs like crap.
To make things worse he bought a new phone, a smartphone, and pestered me to teach him. I swear trying to teach him is like repeating the same thing 1000x and pray he keeps it in his head. Spoiler: he doesn't. ( sanity--; )
So to try and easy my suffering I decided to make a manual for the website (which is outdated by now because the team behind the website did a 180 and some things looks different), but it acted as if I'd done nothing. ( sanity--; )
To top this off he keeps on saying I don't wanna help him. ( sanity--; )
This kept going for the whole damn summer, and meanwhile I had to go back to uni and in the first days I still got like 4-5 calls/day, half of those might about the smallest things because he's so panicky.
Like (both examples happened while I was still there but it kinda goes along those lines sometimes):
- (During the period they changed the website the first time since we're there; they were mostly doing changes back and forth and testing because it had a new layout for a day or 2 before going back; also the site was totally functional, except for a thing or 2)
Him: "They're changing the website, why are they doing that?"
Me: "Because it's their website and they can?"
Him: "WHY DIDN'T THEY LET US KNOW"
Me: "They don't have to, they don't work for you." ( sanity--; )
Or (during the same period; the pages have a menu on the left; one of the submenus has a counter that resets every time the session ends; during that maintenance time they must've "disabled" the function because the number kept growing even after the session ended):
Him: "WHY IS THE NUMBER GROWING?"
Me: "They're working on the code, relax, it's nothing."
Him: "But why." ( sanity--; )
The only quesion he pretty much hasn't asked me yet is why "Is the website's colour this one and not that one?".2 -
Me at 3 front-end tech screenings of candidates with +3y of exp last year: "can you name a few npm commands you have used?"
Candidate:
- "Ehh.. npm start?" (npm start is a shortcut to a user-defined run-script)
- "npm version, it publishes the package" (wrong)
- "not going to pretend I know and sound stupid"
Mind you these candidates were not necessarily bad, but come on? You never used npm info, outdated, audit, install, remove, update, why, link, init?10 -
Legacy code: the digital equivalent of a haunted house. Each line of code holds the ghostly whispers of past developers, and every bug fix feels like exorcising demons. Welcome to the developer's graveyard, where the skeletons of outdated tech lurk in every commit. 💀👻
-
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, $5000/year lesser offer in hand. both of these offers were very generous , but i went with the greed and took the offer from this company despite knowing that they are looking for someone who will act as a developer-maintainer kind of person, while the other company giving lesser pay had a need of a pure android engineer.
So i am currently 24. should i keep on doing this relaxing but slowly killing job, or go into a painful, pressurizing but probably making me a better "android" engineer job ?2 -
Not a rant, but seeking advice...
Should I abandon 2 years' worth of work on migrating a personal project from SQL (M$) to a Graph database, and just stick to SQL? And only consider migrating when/if I need graph capabilities?
The project is a small social media platform. Has around ~50 monthly active users.
Why I started the migration in the first place:
• When researching databases, I read that for social media, graph is more suitable. It was, at least in terms of query structure. It was more natural, there were no "joins", and queries were much simpler than their SQL counterparts.
• In case the project got big, I didn't want to have to panic-deal with database issues that come with growth. I had some indexing issues with MSSQL, and it got me worried that at 50MAU I'm having these issues, what would happen if I get more?
• It's a personal project, and the Gremlin language and graph databases looked cool and I was motivated to learn something new.
----
Why I'm considering aborting the migration:
• It's taking too damn long. I'm unable to work on other features because this migration is taking up all my free time. Sunk cost fallacy is hitting me hard with this one.
• In local testing within docker, it's extremely slow. I tried various graph engines (janusgraph, official tinkerpop, orientdb), and the fastest one takes 4-6minutes to complete my server tests. SQL finishes the same tests in under 2 minutes, same docker environment. I also tried running my tests on a remote server (AWS neptune) and it was just as slow. Maybe my queries are bad, but can I afford to spend even more time fine tuning all queries?
• I now realise that "graph = no scalability issues" was naïve of me, and 100% wishful thinking. Scalability issues don't care what database I use, but about how well tuned and configured the whole system is.
• I really want to move on. My tech stack is falling behind and becoming outdated. I'm unable to maintain dependencies.
• I'm worried about losing those 50 MAU because they're essential to gaining traction once I release the platform. I keep telling them about the migration but at some point (2 years later) they're going to get bored I feel.
I guess partially it's a rant because I feel like I shouldn't stop now having spent 2 years on this, but at the same time I feel like I'm heading towards a dead end.
If you made it this far, thank you for reading:)10