Why are job postings so bad?
Like, really. Why?

Here's four I found today, plus an interview with a trainwreck from last week.
(And these aren't even the worst I've found lately!)

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Ridiculous job posting #1:
* 5 years React and React Native experience -- the initial release of React Native was in May 2013, apparently. ~5.7 years ago.
* Masters degree in computer science.
* Write clean, maintainable code with tests.
* Be social and outgoing.

So: you must have either worked at Facebook or adopted and committed to both React and React Native basically immediately after release. You must also be in academia (with a masters!), and write clean and maintainable code, which... basically doesn't happen in academia. And on top of (and really: despite) all of this, you must also be a social butterfly! Good luck ~

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Ridiculous job posting #2:
* "We use Ruby on Rails"
* A few sentences later... "we love functional programming and write only functional code!"

Cue Inigo Montoya.

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Ridiculous job posting #3:
* 100% remote! Work from anywhere, any time zone!
* and following that: You must have at least 4 work hours overlap with your coworkers per day.
* two company-wide meetups per quarter! In fancy places like Peru and Tibet! ... TWO PER QUARTER!?

Let me paraphrase: "We like the entire team being remote, together."

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Ridiculous job posting #4:
* Actual title: "Developer (noun): Superhero poised to change the world (apply within)"
* Actual excerpt: "We know that headhunters are already beating down your door. All we want is the opportunity to earn our right to keep you every single day."
* Actual excerpt: "But alas. A dark and evil power is upon us. And this… ...is where you enter the story. You will be the Superman who is called upon to hammer the villains back into the abyss from whence they came."

I already applied to this company some time before (...surprisingly...) and found that the founder/boss is both an ex cowboy dev and... more than a bit of a loon. If that last part isn't obvious already? Sheesh. He should go write bad fantasy metal lyrics instead.

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Ridiculous interview:
* Service offered for free to customers
* PHP fanboy angrily asking only PHP questions despite the stack (Node+Vue) not even freaking including PHP! To be fair, he didn't know anything but PHP... so why (and how) is he working there?
* Actual admission: No testing suite, CI, or QA in place
* Actual admission: Testing sometimes happens in production due to tight deadlines
* Actual admission: Company serves ads and sells personally-identifiable customer information (with affiliate royalties!) to cover expenses
* Actual admission: Not looking for other monetization strategies; simply trying to scale their current break-even approach.

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I find more of these every time I look. It's insane.
Why can't people be sane and at least semi-intelligent?

2 Days.
Thousands of lines of code analyzed.
Dozens of log files across 6 servers.
Countless pots of coffee.
Much power metal.
...
One line of code.

Bug fixed.

Help.

I'm a hardware guy. If I do software, it's bare-metal (almost always). I need to fully understand my build system and tweak it exactly to my needs. I'm the sorta guy that needs memory alignment and bitwise operations on a daily basis. I'm always cautious about processor cycles, memory allocation, and power consumption. I think twice if I really need to use a float there and I consider exactly what cost the abstraction layers I build come at.

I had done some web design and development, but that was back in the day when you knew all the workarounds for IE 5-7 by heart and when people were disappointed there wasn't going to be a XHTML 2.0. I didn't build anything large until recently.

Since that time, a lot has happened. Web development has evolved in a way I didn't really fancy, to say the least. Client-side rendering for everything the server could easily do? Of course. Wasting precious energy on mobile devices because it works well enough? Naturally. Solving the simplest problems with a gigantic mess of dependencies you don't even bother to inspect? Well, how else are you going to handle all your sensitive data?

I was going to compare this to the Arduino culture of using modules you don't understand in code you don't understand. But then again, you don't see consumer products or customer-specific electronics powered by an Arduino (at least not that I'm aware of).

I'm just not fit for that shooting-drills-at-walls methodology for getting holes. I'm not against neither easy nor pretty-to-look-at solutions, but it just comes across as wasteful for me nowadays.

So, after my hiatus from web development, I've now been in a sort of internet platform project for a few months. I'm now directly confronted with all that you guys love and hate, frontend frameworks and Node for the backend and whatever. I deliberately didn't voice my opinion when the stack was chosen, because I didn't want to interfere with the modern ways and instead get some experience out of it (and I am).

And now, I'm slowly starting to feel like it was OKAY to work like this.

South Africa Electricity:

This is after I lost my 7th 3000VA online UPS...

In South Africa we have 240V power most of the time which is great, but then there is scheduled power outages (because our electricity companies cannot "handle the load").

When we have a power outage we have automatic generators which brings everything back up although there is still the 1 minute drop which has weird spikes and odd voltages before switching to the generator (as the generators wait until they are stable)

This has being destroying our equipment, we had a $2000 repair bill 3 TIMES for 3 SEPERATE Xerox Machines that have surge protectors although their circuit board somehow fried.

We have lost 7 3000VA UPSes (3 different brands) and 5 voltage regulators we put to protect the UPSes.

The one UPS that fried just had 2 dead fuses, I decided to replace them (unplugged the batteries to avoid 240V) and when plugging the batteries back in there was a huge spark and flame and the metal and plastic melted onto the board and turned black (the metal pins to connect the battery are non existant now)

I am done with electricity...

P.S. 2 of our generators also got hit by lightning as we are high on a hill and ALL the plastic cable coverings inside the generator were melted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've noticed something odd lately.. every time I mention mains electricity in certain EE forums, people tend to go "you are a madman for wanting to use that 🤨".

To which I think in my head, sure it's a dangerous thing, after all the angry pixies that dance back and forth are kind of angry (120V) or actually insane (230V) depending on where you live.. but to mindlessly tell people to not use it at all, as an electronics engineer.. what's up with that?

I mean, it's a matter of respecting its power, right. So whenever I work with it, thick gloves, keeping my exposed lines as tiny as possible, keeping them around for as short as possible, properly insulating anything permanent, and even asking my landlord to install a defibrillator for when things still go horribly wrong (to which she agreed because it'd be useful to the other residents as well, yay 😁) are kinda mandatory.

And that's for the same reason essentially that precautions are taken when climbing a mountain by having climbing shoes, connecting yourself to pikes jammed into the mountain over a strong metal wire in case things go wrong, etc etc. And for the same reason that you don't climb a ladder in high heels and so on. Obvious, right.

Point is, inexperienced people indeed shouldn't be working with mains AC at all and that's the reason that I've avoided it in the first year or 2 of learning about electronics. But mindlessly telling people in EE forums that they're a redneck for working with the imminently lethal AC.. what's up with that?

Maybe I should just go find another electronics forum like the EEVblog forums over some random (kinda dead) electronics chat on Telegram though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yesterday I did some experiments with my lab bench power supply to see if everything was working as it should, and whether my newly acquired laptop (old business laptop from 2004) would still power up. Noticed that it did, and left the thing charging for a while - its battery was completely drained. But after letting it sit for a few hours, one of my switches wouldn't turn off anymore.

The lab bench power supply has a 250V 2.5A (625W) rated switch on the AC side, connected to a 50V 10A (500W) AC-DC power supply. The DC side of that is then connected to 2 DPS5005 units, of which one was driving 50W of power into the laptop.

The experiment went reasonably well, the AC-DC power supply was loud but stayed cool like a cucumber. The switch however wouldn't turn off anymore after a few hours. Today I've desoldered that and put on a new one, and did a failure analysis. Turns out that it was a rocker switch (so there's a little nub in there that moves a piece of metal back and forth) and that the contacts of the switch (the piece of metal and the inside of the connector piece) were welded together.

However, the only thing that I know of that causes this welding is when loads are switched off, and an arc is generated. This wasn't the case here - it was just kept on for a couple of hours, with (accounting for power losses across the circuits) 80W going through it at most. I never expected that to cause a weld. Any clue as to why this happened? It really boggles my mind, and I don't want the switch that's currently in there to face the same fate.

It cost me 6$ to have a big ass keyboard, that weighs a fuck ton thanx to the metal back plate, to have it couried 800km.

It cost 12$ to courier a fucking raspberry pi from the same city... what the actual fucking fuck. And to make it worse i had to pay double shipping cause i had to order the power supply from another site causr site A only had stock of pi's and site B only had stock of power supplies...

fuck my city needs more imported goods vendors

Power metal

I put together my first custom computer, was too cheap to buy a case for it, at the end I realized the "power button" is on the case itself!! Anyone else turn on a computer by manually using a metal object to connect the power pins :/

About slightly more than a year ago I started volunteering at the local general students committee. They desperately searched for someone playing the role of both political head of division as well as the system administrator, for around half a year before I took the job.

When I started the data center was mostly abandoned with most of the computational power and resources just laying around unused. They already ran some kvm-hosts with around 6 virtual machines, including a cloud service, internally used shared storage, a user directory and also 10 workstations and a WiFi-Network. Everything except one virtual machine ran on GNU/Linux-systems and was built on open source technology. The administration was done through shared passwords, bash-scripts and instructions in an extensive MediaWiki instance.

My introduction into this whole eco-system was basically this:
"Ever did something with linux before? Here you have the logins - have fun. Oh, and please don't break stuff. Thank you!"

Since I had only managed a small personal server before and learned stuff about networking, it-sec and administration only from courses in university I quickly shaped a small team eager to build great things which would bring in the knowledge necessary to create something awesome. We had a lot of fun diving into modern technologies, discussing the future of this infrastructure and simply try out and fail hard while implementing those ideas.

Today, a year and a half later, we look at around 40 virtual machines spiced with a lot of magic. We host several internal and external services like cloud, chat, ticket-system, websites, blog, notepad, DNS, DHCP, VPN, firewall, confluence, freifunk (free network mesh), ubuntu mirror etc. Everything is managed through a central puppet-configuration infrastructure. Changes in configuration are deployed in minutes across all servers. We utilize docker for application deployment and gitlab for code management. We provide incremental, distributed backups, a central database and a distributed network across the campus. We created a desktop workstation environment based on Ubuntu Server for deployment on bare-metal machines through the foreman project. Almost everything free and open source.

The whole system now is easily configurable, allows updating, maintenance and deployment of old and new services. We reached our main goal for this year which was the creation of a documented environment which is maintainable by one administrator.

Although we did this in our free-time without any payment it was a great year with a lot of experience which pays off now.

What the hell has happened to Hewlett Packard?
They used to make the best notebooks around. 10-15 Years ago, basically all notebooks my family bought were from HP. These devices lasted for at least 6-8 years each.
Now I have a fucking expensive OMEN series notebook failing after 2 years with the most embarrasing hardware problems: Once a shielded piece of plastic from the bottom broke off and made a short on the mainboard, next time the way too thin power line that goes from the power plug to the PCB was placed alongside a sharp metal piece that damaged the isolation and again produced a short. When the display is moved, the webcam disconnects, which is also a hint at the production quality.
From my daughter's HP notebook the Display just broke off after like 18 months of use. When we brought it to service I asked the guy whether this happens a lot, he was like "I have 6 other notebooks of that type with the same problem in repair right now". After a repair that took forever because they couldn't get the proper replacement parts, the integrated webcam has died.
Never ever going to buy anything from this shitbrand again.

Such a dark start for this year...

I hate those "simple DIY" instructables. Just had to build something I had to get. Found out one "simple DIY". It requires owning a power drill with a table mount. And a pipe threading machine. Yes, I surely have a drill mount for drilling thru some steel, I know how to use a CNC machine, and maybe have a little metal foundry in my flat. But hey, it's a DIY not 'go to nearest store and buy that friggin piece you need' so you should have prepared yourself for some difficulties.
It's not supposed to be easy!
I still wonder why the author not assumed everyone own a metal foundry, after all. It would be much easier for all of us.

And I ended using PCV, glue, and a spare bottle. Had to buy drill for glass, less than $3. Wasted few bottles to cut out what I wanted. Beer was quite good, thou.

What songs gets you in the zone?
I listened to witcher soundtracks, celtic music , irish pub music , metal, power metal ( all of the popular bands ) , folk rock but I started to get bored of them . I’m opened to everything that sounds good

Hi All, I used to be a user on devrant while I was in middle/highschool. I kinda forgot about it for a long time but I rediscovered the app when I saw a sticker on a retired laptop.

Quick Intro
CS Student at Drexel, 4th year out of 5

I want a career in software and want to reserve
hardware related things for hobbyist endeavors.
I made a 3x3 macropad with a pi pico including designing and printing the pcb, soldering all the components, and then writing the firmware (micropython blegh). My goal is to daily drive a 75% keyboard of my own making

Currently my main keyboard when I'm using my desktop is a Keychron v1 with Haimou Hearbeat silents and sugarplum keycaps (lmk if you want pics)

I like martial arts, while I practice BJJ, I am interested in Judo and Muay Thai as well.

I like History and Linguistics

The above point got me into power metal, mainly sabaton and then bands similar to it

Ill finish off with some nerdshit
I use a framework with fedora as my daily driver, I am a neovim enjoyer, my steam deck is gathering dust, and I have more Pi's than I know what to do with.