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Interviewer: Welcome, Mr X. Thanks for dropping by. We like to keep our interviews informal. And even though I have all the power here, and you are nothing but a cretin, let’s pretend we are going to have fun here.
Mr X: Sure, man, whatever.
I: Let’s start with the technical stuff, shall we? Do you know what a linked list is?
X: (Tells what it is).
I: Great. Can you tell me where linked lists are used?
X:: Sure. In interview questions.
I: What?
X: The only time linked lists come up is in interview questions.
I:: That’s not true. They have lots of real world applications. Like, like…. (fumbles)
X:: Like to implement memory allocation in operating systems. But you don’t sell operating systems, do you?
I:: Well… moving on. Do you know what the Big O notation is?
X: Sure. It’s another thing used only in interviews.
I: What?! Not true at all. What if you want to sort a billion records a minute, like Google has to?
X: But you are not Google, are you? You are hiring me to work with 5 year old PHP code, and most of the tasks will be hacking HTML/CSS. Why don’t you ask me something I will actually be doing?
I: (Getting a bit frustrated) Fine. How would you do FooBar in version X of PHP?
X: I would, er, Google that.
I: And how do you call library ABC in PHP?
X: Google?
I: (shocked) OMG. You mean you don’t remember all the 97 million PHP functions, and have to actually Google stuff? What if the Internet goes down?
X: Does it? We’re in the 1st world, aren’t we?
I: Tut, tut. Kids these days. Anyway,looking at your resume, we need at least 7 years of ReactJS. You don’t have that.
X: That’s great, because React came out last year.
I: Excuses, excuses. Let’s ask some lateral thinking questions. How would you go about finding how many piano tuners there are in San Francisco?
X: 37.
I: What?!
X: 37. I googled before coming here. Also Googled other puzzle questions. You can fit 7,895,345 balls in a Boeing 747. Manholes covers are round because that is the shape that won’t fall in. You ask the guard what the other guard would say. You then take the fox across the bridge first, and eat the chicken. As for how to move Mount Fuji, you tell it a sad story.
I: Ooooooooookkkkkaaaayyyyyyy. Right, tell me a bit about yourself.
X: Everything is there in the resume.
I: I mean other than that. What sort of a person are you? What are your hobbies?
X: Japanese culture.
I: Interesting. What specifically?
X: Hentai.
I: What’s hentai?
X: It’s an televised art form.
I: Ok. Now, can you give me an example of a time when you were really challenged?
X: Well, just the other day, a few pennies from my pocket fell behind the sofa. Took me an hour to take them out. Boy was it challenging.
I: I meant technical challenge.
X: I once spent 10 hours installing Windows 10 on a Mac.
I: Why did you do that?
X: I had nothing better to do.
I: Why did you decide to apply to us?
X: The voices in my head told me.
I: What?
X: You advertised a job, so I applied.
I: And why do you want to change your job?
X: Money, baby!
I: (shocked)
X: I mean, I am looking for more lateral changes in a fast moving cloud connected social media agile web 2.0 company.
I: Great. That’s the answer we were looking for. What do you feel about constant overtime?
X: I don’t know. What do you feel about overtime pay?
I: What is your biggest weakness?
X: Kryptonite. Also, ice cream.
I: What are your salary expectations?
X: A million dollars a year, three months paid vacation on the beach, stock options, the lot. Failing that, whatever you have.
I: Great. Any questions for me?
X: No.
I: No? You are supposed to ask me a question, to impress me with your knowledge. I’ll ask you one. Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
X: Doing your job, minus the stupid questions.
I: Get out. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.
All Credit to:
http://pythonforengineers.com/the-p...89 -
I recently met a young fella (14yo) playing League of Legends. He asked:
- What do you do for a living?
- I'm a programmer, do you know anything about programming?
- I don't, actually.
Apparently he was playing from a LAN Gaming center 'cause he didn't have a computer at home (his computer had broken and these Lan centers are pretty affordable).
I figured I could explain to him what was it and what super powers you could get from it. Turns out I recommended a JS course in codecademy and now he goes to the LAN center every day to study programming (he got really into it!).
Now he always pings me with questions about JS and apparently he's learning a ton! He had almost no English skills too (we're Brazilian), and because most of the material in the internet is in English he found himself some free English courses and he's now taking them!
Knowledge is free on the internet and I guess he's just realized that.
Not exactly a rant guys, just figured it was a nice story to tell :)
#TeachAKidHowToCode57 -
Sit down before you read this.
So I interviewed a guy for a "Support Engineer" internship position.
Me and the team lead sit down and are waiting for him to enter, but apparently he's actually making a coffee in the kitchen.
This isn't exactly a strike since the receptionist told him that he can go get a drink, and we did too. It's just always expected for him to get a glass of water, not waste 3 minutes brewing a coffee.
In any case he comes in, puts the coffee on the table, then his phone, then his wallet, then his keys and then sits on our side of the table.
I ask him to sit in front of us so we can see him. He takes a minute to pack and tranfer himself to the other side of the table. He again places all of the objects on the table.
We begin, team lead tells him about the company. Then I ask him whether he got any questions regarding the job, the team or the company . For the next 15 minutes he bombards us with mostly irrelevant and sometimes inappropriate questions, like:
0: Can I choose my own nickname when getting an email address?
1: Does the entire department get same salaries?
2: Are there yoga classes on Sundays only or every morning?
3: Will I get a car?
4: Does the firm support workspace equality? How many chicks are in the team?
5: I want the newest grey Mac.
And then.. Then the questions turn into demands:
6: I need a high salary (asks for 2.5 more than the job pays. Which is still a lot).
I ask him why would he get that at his first job in the industry (remind you, this is an internship and we are a relatively high paying company).
He says he's getting paid more at his current job.
His CV lists no current job and only indicates that he just finished studying.
He says that he's working at his parent's business...
Next he says that he is very talented and has to be promoted very quickly and that we need to teach him a lot and finance his courses.
At this point me and the team lead were barely holding our laughs.
The team lead asks him about his English (English is not our native language).
He replies "It's good, trust me".
Team lead invites him for an English conversation. Team lead acts like a customer with a broken internet and the guy is there to troubleshoot. (btw that's not job related, just a simple scenario)
TL: "Hello, my name is Andrew, I'm calli..."
Guy: *interrupts* "Yes, yes, hi! Hi! What do you want?"
TL: "Well, if you let me fi..."
Guy: "Ok! Talk!"
TL: "...inish... My internet is not working."
Guy: "Ok, *mimics tuning a V engine or cooking a soup* I fixed! *points at TL* now you say 'yes you fixed'".
Important to note that his English was horrible. Disregarding the accent he just genuinely does not know the language well.
Then he continiues with "See? Good English. Told you no need to check!".
After about half a minute of choking on out silent laughter I ask him how much Python experience he has (job lists a requirement of at least 1 year).
He replies "I'm very good at object oriented functional programming".
I ask again "But what is your experience? Did you ever take any courses? Do you have a git repository to show? Any side.."
*he interrupts again* "I only use Matlab!".
Team lead stands up and proceeds to shake his hand while saying "we will get back to you".
At last the guy says with a stupid smile on his face "You better hire me! Call me back tomorrow." Leaves TL hanging and walks away after packing his stuff into the pockets.
I was so shocked that I wasn't even angry.
We both laughed for the rest of the day though. It was probably the weirdest interview I took part at.35 -
I’ve been inspired by programming many times, but a few early moments really stand out for me. Some of those most memorable early moments came when I developed Flash games with my friend in high school.
Growing up, at this point in time, around 2005, Flash games were really hot. All the kids in my school played games on addictinggames.com during any classes that took place in the computer lab, and when my friend and I started making games, it was our dream to get a game featured on addictinggames.com.
When one of our early games ended up getting featured, we were absolutely ecstatic and I’ll never forget the feeling of seeing our own work on this game website that we loved for years prior and that so manly people at our school used. It was the coolest thing and I think went a long way to encouraging me to continue to want to create things, after seeing the impact we were able to make with a simple game (as two high school students).
And I think that shows the beauty of the internet today and the power people with few resources have to get stuff out there. I think it’s maybe gotten harder as of late since there’s probably more competition, but I also think the audience is ever-growing and I hope many more people get to experience that awesome feeling of having something you worked hard on become popular.14 -
The moment you realize you're just good at googling and not an expert in programming...
That's when the internet connectivity is down!5 -
*On a programming support forum*
Guy: My compiler keeps throwing null pointer exception at line 128.
Me: Ok. Can you post your code real quick so I could figure out what is null at line 128?
Guy: No I'm not going to show my code to someone on the internet. What if you want to steal my code?
My mind: "Dude wtf why would I steal someone's code on a support forum?"
Me: *Use the next 15 minutes explaining that showing the code is necessary so that others can actually help him, and that no one on a support forum is going to steal his code.*
Guy: "You know what I'm more convinced that you want to copy my code. I might as well just try to fix this on my own."
What?14 -
Clickbait will never change.
It's the most stable and constant source of mild annoyance.
2019 internet:
"These 3 programming languages will net you the highest salary"
"Ten home improvement tips using nothing but recycled underwear"
"How to cut onions like a real chef"
2020 internet:
"3 programming languages to learn while being bored in self-quarantine"
"Ten ways to use underwear as facemasks during the pandemic"
"Onions might cure corona, click here to learn how to cut them"
2030 internet:
"These 3 programming languages will increase your chances of survival in the wastelands"
"Ten ways to patch up your shelter against radioactive ashes using old underpants"
"Hydroponic onions are a good source of nutrients. Here's how you cut them with your camping knife"13 -
I’m kind of pissy, so let’s get into this.
My apologies though: it’s kind of scattered.
Family support?
For @Root? Fucking never.
Maybe if I wanted to be a business major my mother might have cared. Maybe the other one (whom I call Dick because fuck him, and because it’s accurate) would have cared if I suddenly wanted to become a mechanic. But in both cases, I really doubt it. I’d probably just have been berated for not being perfect, or better at their respective fields than they were at 3x my age.
Anyway.
Support being a dev?
Not even a little.
I had hand-me-down computers that were outmoded when they originally bought them: cutting-edge discount resale tech like Win95, 33/66mhz, 404mb hd. It wouldn’t even play an MP3 without stuttering.
(The only time I had a decent one is when I built one for myself while in high school. They couldn’t believe I spent so much money on what they saw as a silly toy.)
Using a computer for anything other than email or “real world” work was bad in their eyes. Whenever I was on the computer, they accused me of playing games, and constantly yelled at me for wasting my time, for rotting in my room, etc. We moved so often I never had any friends, and they were simply awful to be around, so what was my alternative? I also got into trouble for reading too much (seriously), and with computers I could at least make things.
If they got mad at me for any (real or imagined) reason (which happened almost every other day) they would steal my things, throw them out, or get mad and destroy them. Desk, books, decorations, posters, jewelry, perfume, containers, my chair, etc. Sometimes they would just steal my power cables or network cables. If they left the house, they would sometimes unplug the internet altogether, and claim they didn’t know why it was down. (Stealing/unplugging cables continued until I was 16.) If they found my game CDs, those would disappear, too. They would go through my room, my backpack and its notes/binders/folders/assignments, my closet, my drawers, my journals (of course my journals), and my computer, too. And if they found anything at all they didn’t like, they would confront me about it, and often would bring it up for months telling me how wrong/bad I was. Related: I got all A’s and a B one year in high school, and didn’t hear the end of it for the entire summer vacation.
It got to the point that I invented my own language with its own vocabulary, grammar, and alphabet just so I could have just a little bit of privacy. (I’m still fluent in it.) I would only store everything important from my computer on my only Zip disk so that I could take it to school with me every day and keep it out of their hands. I was terrified of losing all of my work, and carrying a Zip disk around in my backpack (with no backups) was safer than leaving it at home.
I continued to experiment and learn whatever I could about computers and programming, and also started taking CS classes when I reached high school. Amusingly, I didn’t even like computers despite all of this — they were simply an escape.
Around the same time (freshman in high school) I was a decent enough dev to actually write useful software, and made a little bit of money doing that. I also made some for my parents, both for personal use and for their businesses. They never trusted it, and continually trashtalked it. They would only begrudgingly use the business software because the alternatives were many thousands of dollars. And, despite never ever having a problem with any of it, they insisted I accompany them every time, and these were often at 3am. Instead of being thankful, they would be sarcastically amazed when nothing went wrong for the nth time. Two of the larger projects I made for them were: an inventory management system that interfaced with hand scanners (VB), and another inventory management system for government facility audits (Access). Several websites, too. I actually got paid for the Access application thanks to a contract!
To put this into perspective, I was selected to work on a government software project about a year later, while still in high school. That didn’t impress them, either.
They continued to see computers as a useless waste of time, and kept telling me that I would be unemployable, and end up alone.
When they learned I was dating someone long-distance, and that it was a she, they simply took my computer and didn’t let me use it again for six months. Really freaking hard to do senior projects without a computer. They begrudgingly allowed me to use theirs for schoolwork, but it had a fraction of the specs — and some projects required Flash, which the computer could barely run.
Between the constant insults, yelling, abuse (not mentioned here), total lack of privacy, and the theft, destruction, etc. I still managed to teach myself about computers and programming.
In short, I am a dev despite my parents’ best efforts to the contrary.30 -
I am done with people, I just want one single room, with good internet, dual monitor setup... And I can spend my whole life like that... Being social, fuck that shit... I have devRant for that... and rest, I just want to code, listen to music, drink coffee and sleep like hell...
Why is it that I can understand some other dev's code faster that understanding someone's feelings. Why is it that I am good with principles of Programming Languages, but not the basic Principles of Humanity... Yes, I agree I don't have feelings, but is it wrong not to have feelings, I am a dev, I am supposed to be good with Codes, not humans... I want to be in my small space of close people. (My family), and that's it... I am no good with others. I hate Facebook, but love devRant, I spend more time on StackOverflow than that on WhatsApp. Why is it so... Why29 -
Recipe for a Great Programmer:
Ingredients:
-Books for a computer science curriculum from a top university
-Computer
-Headphones
-Internet
-Stress ball
-Pillow
-Lighter fluid
-Food
Directions:
1. Cover computer science books with lighter fluid
2. Light books on fire
3. Use flames to cook an energy-rich meal for the thousands of hours ahead
4. Pick an IDE
5. Choose a project beyond current capabilities. Good ways to push boundaries:
- Unfamiliar domain (e.g. large scale data processing, UI programming, high performance computing, games)
- Exotic programming language
- Larger in scope than any project before
6. Shut up about your IDE
7. Attempt to build
8. Stop procrastinating on Hacker News
9. Re-attempt to build
10. Squeeze stress ball and scream into pillow as necessary to keep sanity
When stuck:
- Paste stack traces into Google
- Find appropriate mailing list to get guidance
- Realize that real learning happens when you are stuck, uncomfortable, and/or frustrated
- Seek out books, classes, or other resources AFTER you have a good understanding of your deficiencies
11. Repeat #4 to #10 for at least 10 years
12. Results guaranteed! (to the same extent static types guarantee bug-free programs)
source: nathanmarz.com4 -
When I was 14, I was bad at many things. I sucked at sports cause I was weak and small. School was boring so I did not study. I mostly played games.
During a summer break, I wanted to change shit in WarCraft 3, as I heard from a friend that heard it from a friend, that you can do that. Many internet searches later I realised that you kind of just tell to the game what you want it to do, just simplified. If (target is enemy) do damage, for (every human player) make sparkly stuff...
After months of "playing" games, the new school year started and I got, for the first time, a proper computer class. Imagine my surprise when we started doing the shit I did all summer. That year I had 100% on all tests.
Many years later programming gave me friends, made my inner nerd and geek come out, gave me a free trip to the USA to represent my country, two TEDx talks, and finally a job that I like with the pay I can live with.11 -
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 -
This was at my first internship (was fired later for other bs reasons).
They got me as a programming intern but very soon I felt very conflicted with multiple things:
1. Got to google translate their internal CRM into five languages. After two weeks (the estimate I gave them) I discovered that I overlooked the second half, apologized and got a whole shitstorm at my face.
2. Was only allowed to use Internet Explorer for everything *cry face*.
3. Saw multiple security flaws in their main product, told my boss (also my internship manager) about it because hey, I'm security oriented and it might help them. Next day he called me into his office and I got a huge speech about who the fuck I am to criticize their product and that I was a security wannabee who doesn't know shit.
4. Boss came home after a product presentation went sideways. The interns didn't have anything to do with that but he called (or, yelled big time) us every dirty word he could think of and blamed us.
Luckily I was fired after like five weeks. I literally cried of happiness when I walked home. I was too shy to stand up for myself by that time (even only 2-3 years ago)14 -
"Hey nephew, why doesn't the FB app work. It shows blank white boxes?"
- It can't connect or something? (I stopped using the FB app since 2013.)
"What is this safe mode that appeared on my phone?!"
- I don't know. I don't hack my smartphone that much. Well, I actually do have a customised ROM. But stop! I'm pecking my keyboard most of the time.
"Which of my files should I delete?"
- Am I supposed to know?
"Where did my Microsoft Word Doc1.docx go?"
- It lets you choose the location before you hit save.
"What is 1MB?"
- Search these concepts on Google. (some of us did not have access to the Internet when we learned to do basic computer operations as curious kids.)
"What should I search?"
- ...
"My computer doesn't work.. My phone has a virus. Do you think this PC they are selling me has a good spec? Is this Video Card and RAM good?"
- I'm a programmer. I write code. I think algorithmically and solve programming problems efficiently. I analyse concepts such as abstraction, algorithms, data structures, encapsulation, resource management, security, software engineering, and web development. No, I will not fix your PC.7 -
The stupid stories of how I was able to break my schools network just to get better internet, as well as more ridiculous fun. XD
1st year:
It was my freshman year in college. The internet sucked really, really, really badly! Too many people were clearly using it. I had to find another way to remedy this. Upon some further research through Google I found out that one can in fact turn their computer into a router. Now what’s interesting about this network is that it only works with computers by downloading the necessary software that this network provides for you. Some weird software that actually looks through your computer and makes sure it’s ok to be added to the network. Unfortunately, routers can’t download and install that software, thus no internet… but a PC that can be changed into a router itself is a different story. I found that I can download the software check the PC and then turn on my Router feature. Viola, personal fast internet connected directly into the wall. No more sharing a single shitty router!
2nd year:
This was about the year when bitcoin mining was becoming a thing, and everyone was in on it. My shitty computer couldn’t possibly pull off mining for bitcoins. I needed something faster. How I found out that I could use my schools servers was merely an accident.
I had been installing the software on every possible PC I owned, but alas all my PC’s were just not fast enough. I decided to try it on the RDS server. It worked; the command window was pumping out coins! What I came to find out was that the RDS server had 36 cores. This thing was a beast! And it made sense that it could actually pull off mining for bitcoins. A couple nights later I signed in remotely to the RDS server. I created a macro that would continuously move my mouse around in the Remote desktop screen to keep my session alive at all times, and then I’d start my bitcoin mining operation. The following morning I wake up and my session was gone. How sad I thought. I quickly try to remote back in to see what I had collected. “Error, could not connect”. Weird… this usually never happens, maybe I did the remoting wrong. I went to my schools website to do some research on my remoting problem. It was down. In fact, everything was down… I come to find out that I had accidentally shut down the schools network because of my mining operation. I wasn’t found out, but I haven’t done any mining since then.
3rd year:
As an engineering student I found out that all engineering students get access to the school’s VPN. Cool, it is technically used to get around some wonky issues with remoting into the RDS servers. What I come to find out, after messing around with it frequently, is that I can actually use the VPN against the screwed up security on the network. Remember, how I told you that a program has to be downloaded and then one can be accepted into the network? Well, I was able to bypass all of that, simply by using the school’s VPN against itself… How dense does one have to be to not have patched that one?
4th year:
It was another programming day, and I needed access to my phones memory. Using some specially made apps I could easily connect to my phone from my computer and continue my work. But what I found out was that I could in fact travel around in the network. I discovered that I can, in fact, access my phone through the network from anywhere. What resulted was the discovery that the network scales the entirety of the school. I discovered that if I left my phone down in the engineering building and then went north to the biology building, I could still continue to access it. This seems like a very fatal flaw. My idea is to hook up a webcam to a robot and remotely controlling it from the RDS servers and having this little robot go to my classes for me.
What crazy shit have you done at your University?9 -
So, I sign up for devrant and read all about the school devops fuckery everyone seems to have.
The only problem is, computers at my school's lab has no internet access and only a pirated copy of.... Visual Studio *6*. Hell, that's 5 years older than I am.
No python, no git, nothing. The best part, you ask? They use VS6 just for teaching 9th graders Visual Basic, and for C and C++, they use TurboC++ in DOSBox. 25-year old software. They teach us Pre-ANSI C++.
No fucking wonder people from here re-learn everything on the job. I jumped the gun and started messing with basic C++ in 7th grade, and then had to go back and remember that 25 years ago, they used <iostream.h> instead of just <iostream>.
Everyone just saves their code in the TC/BIN folder in DOS too, making it more of a chaotic mess than anything ever imaginable.
Bringing your own device? Too bad that's against the school rules.
The fact that they went out of their damn way to make me use TurboC in DOSBox on Windows 7 instead of giving me a sane Linux install with an editor and GCC is just... ugh.
My classmates all think I work magic, while all I really do is simple logic. Schools here in India are almost universally terrible.
Well, it's a good thing I started learning it on my own, because if I thought programming was in any way similar to how they try to teach it to us, I would've given up a long time ago.18 -
If programming languages had honest slogans, what would they be?
-C : Because fuck you.
-C++ : Fuck this.(- Dan Allen )
-Visual Basic : 10 times as big but only 5 times as stupid.
-Lisp : You’re all idiots.
-JavaScript : You guys know I’m holding up the internet, right ?
-Scala : That was a waste of 4 weeks.
-Go : Tell me about it, Scala.
-Python : All we are saying, is give un-typed a chance.
-R : Whoa, I was supposed to be a statistics package!
-Java : Like a Roomba, you guess it’s OK but none of your friends use it.
-PHP : Do Not Resuscitate.
-Perl : PHP, take me with you.
-Swift : Nobody knows.
-HTML : No.
-CSS : I said no.
-XML : Stop.
Source:@Quora: https://quora.com/If-programming-la...6 -
Just released the side project that made me join programming! :) It's been about five months and I learned a lot: PHP, JavaScript, CSS, Handlebars, Jquery, Git (terminal), I even started building a RestAPI. Its been an amazing journey, and I didn't alone! I met other Devs (now good friends) over the Internet and we did it together :) Thanks to everyone on DevRant for being such a great community!
If you want to take a look at the site is: projectgroupie.com
It's a website to find new projects you like and join them! So if you're a developer and you wanna make a blog, you post your project on PG asking for some designer to help you and if someone like it, he can join! :)
I hope you enjoy it and any feedback is welcome!
25 -
Hello there, just couple of words about PHP. I've been develop on PHP more than 10 years, I've seen it all 3,4,5,{6},7. Yes PHP was not good in terms of engineering and patterns, but it was simple, it was the most simple language for web to start those days. It was simple as you put code into file, upload it via FTP and it works. No java servlets, no unix consoles, no nothing, just shared hosting account was enough to host site, or even application with database. As database everybody used to have mysql, again because its simple to start and easy to maintain. So PHP+MySQL became industry standard on Web during 00-2012, and continues in some way.
You can write HTML and logic inside single file, within php code, even more single file may content few pages, or even kind of framework. That simplicity and agility sticks everybody who wants to develop sites with PHP.
This is pretty much about why it is so popular.
Each good or wannabe PHP developer in an early days write its own framework or library (like in javascript this days because of nodejs)
Imagine that PHP has hadn't have package manager, developers used to have host packages on their own sites, then various packages catalog sites created, and then finally composer. A gazillions of php code had spread over internet, without any kind of dependency control. To include libraries to your projects you have to just write include, or require. Some developers do it better than others.
So what we have ? A lots of code, no repositories, zip archives with libraries, no dependency control.
Project that uses that kind of code are still alive even today, they are solid hose of cards, and unmaintainable of course.
And main question that I'm trying to answer is Why PHP is not good ?
- First is amount of legacy code which people copy and pasted into their project, spread it even more like a virus.
- Lack of industry standards at the beginning lead to a lots of bad practices among developers. PHP code usually smells.
open source php projects in early days was developed in same conditions so even in phpbb, phpnuke, wordpress, drupal used to have a lot of bad practices in their codebase. So php developers usually not study by another library, instead they write their own frameworks/libraries.
- "It works", - there are no strong business demands, on web development, again because lack of standards, and concerns.
This three things are basically same, they linked to each other and summarize of answer of why PHP have strong smells and everybody yelling against it.
Whats is with PHP nowadays ? Of course PHP today is more influenced by good practice of webdev. Composer, Zend, Laravel, Yii, Symphony and language it self became more adult so to say, but developers...
People who never tried anything except PHP are usually weaker in programming and ecosystem knowledge than people who tried something else, python, perl, ruby, c for instance.
Summary
PHP as any other programming language is a tool. Each tool has its own task. Consider this and your task requirements and PHP can be just good enough solution.
"PHP is shit" - usually you heard that from people who never write strong applications on PHP and haven't used any good tools like Symphony or Laravel.
Cheap developers, - the bigger community, the more chance to hire cheap developers, and more chance to get bad code. That can be applied on any other language.
PHP has professionals developers, usually they have not only php on scope.
That's all folks, this is very brief, I am not covering php usage early days in details, but this is good enough to understand the point.
Enjoy.8 -
I was once at my uncle's 40th birthday party and bored to hell, so he gave me a book that was supposed to be "Python for kids". I started reading it and soon fell in love with programming.
Since then I've often learned new programming languages by reading books or lately mostly the internet.
My books here should be in chronological order:
6 -
I'm a self taught "code enthusiast" (don't think of myself as a programmer just yet). I love to play around with simple code, but I could never get into a "serious" project cause in my mind, to be a programmer you need to know every single line of code and not rely on the internet.
The fact that I got into programming at 23 doesn't help cause I also feel like a parent learning to use a piece of modern technology(even tho I'm tech savvy).
Anyone got any advice?22 -
Wanted to make a website with some of my friends about whatever kid thing we were into at the time. None of our parents cared, it was the 90s and nobody took the internet seriously.
Copied and pasted bits of html into notepad and FTPed them to some free webhost over dialup. The website lasted three weeks -- my friends got bored, I got hooked.
A few years later I found myself wondering why some websites used ".php" instead of ".html". I discovered this shiny new thing called PHP 4. Built a website for some video game I was into using it. Spent the next two years teaching myself everything there was to know.
Took programming in high school. Chose CS over mechanical engineering because I liked the university better. Got an internship which turned into a job which turned into a career.1 -
Had a skype interview yesterday...
> prepared for interview, checked internet and all
> home internet died literally 1 minute before call
> started interview using phone hotspot
> phone hotspot died in 1/3 interview duration
> used mom's phone's hotspot
> died in 2/3 interview duration
> oh shit
> went out to phone company's office to get more data
> half way to the office, mom calls: home internet is working!
> yaay! goes back home
> nop, internet isn't working (glitch in mom's phone which showed it to be working (wifi symbol))
> goes back to the office
> gets phone recharged (office people were SO slow 😑)
> gets back home
> continues and finishes the interview...
10/10 will do again 😂😂😂😂
The interviewer was quite patient, and waited for me to get back home (he called me 2-3 times to get a heads up)
Lol this was honestly THE most exciting and fun interview experience for me yet!
The interview questions were pretty easy btw (programming)
Waiting for result now...9 -
The education system is a fucking joke. How do you get through all the required courses and get to the capstone course where your one goal is to build a simple prototype of a project(like a simple website) for a real world client and not know HTML or CSS when you spent a whole fuckboy semester on a class dedicated to HTML, css, JavaScript and the teacher gave you the PHP. Not only that but you can't even figure out how to use a simple google search to look up the documentation on any of these topics or even the easy to follow tutorials littering the internet on how to use Bootstrap which is what we're fucking using to make it faster to develop the core logic of our app but all you fucking want to do is take shortcuts and create a PowerPoint presentation in google slides and make an easy project look like shit and make me and yourselves look like shit. But don't fucking worry, I'll code the whole thing in a fucking night because you didn't do your part of taking care of just the front end and planned for your incompetence and lack of questions or help. I know you're busy looking for a job for after you graduate but you can't even answer a simple programming question. Let me give you the solution on how to reverse a string, cuz you don't remember c# but it literally takes 30 seconds to google the solution that is everywhere. My project team is why no one takes a degree from this university seriously.9
-
Computer Science is a mysterious world of three kinds of devs, irrespective of what background/profile/language they had/worked in.
The ones at the top, who keep doing crazy shit in big companies or open-source and keep adding material to the unstoppable code flowing. These constitute 5% of the dev community.
The ones at the bottom are the newbies who try to become masters/ninjas of programming by following the shit on the internet but don't understand logic or how things work. This is like 75% of dev community on the web. If you don't agree to that percentage, you don't know the number of students and non-CS people trying to code. I can see hundreds of classmates/colleagues with no understanding of basic Javascript concepts but introducing themselves as a software developer and ruler of the Web.
The remaining 15% in the middle are the "experienced" fellows who keep building shit to get to the top 5%. They work on enterprise/commercial software until the next upgrade and while the wallets keep getting fatter, they don't actually contribute to the community.
This is the part where I want people to understand the power of a dev.
What sets apart programmers/devs from other engineers:
while everyone else is busy solving the current issues/requirements of the world, we devs are the ones who 'build'.
With a right motive, a developer can solve in-numerous problems of the society, be it education, poverty or unemployment.
An experiment by Lee to put data on the web created a world of unforeseeable opportunities.
Hope to see more of Musks and less of Zuckerbergs in the future.9 -
This week i have been trying out the programming subject.
So we should program a mathematical function which would figure out pi from a circle.
The teacher had chosen javascript and wanted to show us some javascript he had written.
When he tried to run it, it didn't run
Teacher: Hmm, it doesn't work. Let me try to take a look in the code.
Me: (Rip)
Teacher: The problem with javascript is that it is really bad at helping with finding the error, it doesn't tell anything about them.
Me: (WTFFFF)
Teacher: Oh, it's because i haven't accepted the browser to use javascript on the page
Me: (Slowly realising he is using internet explorer.)
God damnit. Amazing, just amazing.1 -
Why the fuck do people care about age so much?
Unlike other activities, you can be 15 years old and be as good as a senior dev, so why the fuck do you need to degrade me because you found out my age?
I still deliver the promised work, so what the fuck?
As for kids who try to get recognition because they're young and program, well, fuck you too!
Programming isn't about age or maturity, since in this age of tech, anyone can pick up a computer and an internet connection and learn, so why do you feel that younger individuals have less capabilities?
I just had to get that out of me since it pisses me off a fuck load.16 -
Learning a new programming language:
1. reading basics
2. creates small programs
3. plan new projects
4. search everything else in the internet
5. output: we have become code gods
*winks at stack overflow and github*5 -
One year for Christmas, my dad got me an old tower and installed Windows 98 on it. He also got two old-school PCI WiFi cards so that my "new" computer could access the Internet via his.
I started learning basic web development. I would convince my mom (an English teacher) to buy me books on programming all the time when she was getting her own books at the store.
Eventually, I got a book on Blitz Basic and started making my own video games.
Then GameMaker, Java, C/C++, and more web development and design happened until all the sudden, out of nowhere, I'm a computer scientist 😁
It's crazy how much we owe to our parents. And neither us nor them even realized what they were doing at the time!1 -
"Why are there so many programming languages? Why don't you guys all just program in binary?" A friend of mine some of you may remember, the same one who decided to select system32 when trying out some encryption software from the internet, and who put a shutdown script in the start up programs3
-
Can someone tell who the fuck lets morons with absolutely 0 knowledge of how the industry works go on and write articles concerning "what programming languages to learn" clickbait articles?
Look, I never looked into them. Not even when starting, I knew (out of spite) that the people that built Windows Vista were developers and then I went ahead to look what a software engineer was. I went down the rabbit hole from that and my next step at the time (I was on the local library) was to go ahead and look for programming books, C++ and Java caught my eye, so I got them two books and went down. Later on I found about JS and Python and similar shit like that and I just continued to learn. I seldom bothered to learn from internet articles because to my opinion if I needed to read documentation then I might as well fucking read it from the people that designed X technology.
some were good, some were shit, etc etc, but I never bothered to look for "what programming languages to learn" articles because I could give close to two shits about some other dickhead telling me what to learn, I have always been rather hesitant to take other people's opinion into consideration when it comes to my own learning.
BUT today I clicked on one of those articles out of curiosity.....
"Many DEVELOPER (notice the lack of proper grammar) choose to leave Visual Basic in favor of more modern frameworks like C#, Java or .NET"
Ok, so, for whatever the fuck reason Java is mentioned along C# and a fucking framework (.NET) rather than just C# for microsoft shit, is this moron talking about VB.NET at all? is he going about VB6? what? what is going on here?
Obj C is not relevant at all and should be immediately replaced by Swift since it is a modern, and stable language (never mind that each release has breaking changes on entire code bases, yeah, fuck it, just jump alltogether and ignore Obj C and the decades of stable code it has)
"Coffeescript has been replaced by the newer features of Java" <--- ok fam, you lost me here, give me your "ITPro" card please and then kick yourself repeatedly in the groin since I won't be bothered touching you, i might get some stOOpid on me.
Fuck, these articles are all over the place, from idiots like the one above, to the moron raving about pharo smalltalk shitting on every tech you use.
Just.....please bring back shit like byte magazine and shit.....please? or Linux Format, make Linux Format more popular across the board, where people who know their shit think twice before spewing their bullshit to the masses? Some fucking kid there might want to know where to start and these fucking idiots are out there just ruining shit for everything.25 -
So I'm in HS CS and some of us know how to code, and the others are struggling with variables (in python).
One of them asks: "Sir, why are doing python? I heard about java and how it changed the internet and stuff"
So naturally my teacher explains the difference (between JS and Java, in case your captain of the USS dumbass), but then described JS in the best way possible:
"JavaScript is basically the California of programming, its a really weird place where people mix everything up and nothing makes sense"4 -
MENTORS - MY STORY (Part I)
I've had several great mentors during my career. This is the story of the three most important.
1.- Professor E.
When I was on my first year (University - Computer Science), all my professors were 'normal' except for this one.
E. was the Programming I - Laboratory professor. And the most important thing he teached us was to think. To be independent, and to look for answers beyond simple solutions.
He was always pushing us beyond what was requested and to try new things, to try to improve our own solutions and to look at them as always improvable.
In a regular class, this would happen:
Student: Hey E. How can I do this X requirement?
E.: Use function xyz with A and B parameters.
S: Ok thanks...
...10 minutes later...
S: Hey E. that function doesn't work very good for my case.
E.: You have a book, you have internet connection. Don't waste 10 minutes trying to abide what I told you. Investigate, find a way or even a better way; use your resources.
Other example, in the first year all projects were requested to be delivered with text based interface (console projects).
What about E.?
"Well, you CAN deliver your project with a text based interface BUT you definitely SHOULD try to make a GUI, something simple but effective. Just so you learn more in the process"
Good E. He gave me strong foundations for this industry.2 -
I'm here to tell you the best way to learn anything about programming:
- Be 17
- Have a lot of projects to do (if it needs to use frameworks, better)
- Have the worse team
- Internet and a lot of free time to check documentation
PD: I hate teams7 -
Be me
>programming since I got up
>don't have much time to program because job sucks up all my time
>dont know the best solution to a problem so decide to take a small break
>open rocket league
>start 1v1 match
>4 minutes later
>dad walks in my room, demanding I go pretend to be a stone age nibba
>pic related
>wants me to dig some dirt for his crops
>wants me to carry multiple buckets of water
>wants me to plow literally fields
>no.jpg
>thisIsRealLifeNotMinecraft.wav
>tells me that I'm addicted
>tells me that he's getting rid of the Internet again
>fuckyou.png
Only my girlfriend and programming bring me joy and you reduce my capacity to interact with both. Fuck you.
14 -
!dev (Please, don't take this very seriously, I'm kind of burnt out)
I'm not having a good time.
I can't even write a post to properly explain how I feel.
I feel disappointed by life and by myself in many levels. Life is disappointing. I am disappointing too.
I'm having issues to focus, can't even write a couple of lines of code.
Time to listen to some emo lofi and write about how much I hate myself.
I wished I didn't feel these feelings.
I wished I didn't regret so many things I did or didn't do.
I wished I could fucking understand everything I read, but I don't, everything I read is gibberish, every paragraph makes me feel like I'm drifting in a storm.
I wished I was happy with my career, with my job. I wished I had a true friend.
I wished I could finish one goddamn fucking project for once.
I wished there was something that made me unique, but I don't think there's any.
I just feel like an ant, and that I don't really matter.
I don't feel like I'm someone at all, I feel like I'm experiencing a dream, and a rather boring one.
Programming used to be challenging and fun for me, but it has become this dull and stressful ordeal.
The internet has shown me that I don't matter really. I remember being a little kid and believing that the internet would not discriminate you, that right from the comfort of your house you could connect to people and be cared for, and collaborate in something.
But every year that passes I see that I was wrong. I have tried to put in time into people, I have asked people how they're doing, I have cared for their projects. But there's no reciprocation.
The internet itself has become a thing where the big fish only matters. The top 1k users will get 99% of the attention.
Fuck nurture, rule competition.
What's the point of creating a github project that you think it's cool? No one will give two shits about it, it won't make a goddamn difference whether you push it or not.
You know what fucking matters? If you're an apple or google developer and have thousands of followers.
Bla, bla, bla, I'm depressed...9 -
So I can see everything thinks CS should be taught differently this week.
Based on all of the ways we could change it, something no one seems to be mentioning much is security.
Everyone has many ways of learning logical processors and understanding how they work with programming, but for every line of code taught, read or otherwise learnt you should also learn, be taught how to make it less vulnerable (as nothing is invulnerable on the internet)
Every language has its exploits and pitfalls and ways of overflowing but how you handle these issues or prevent them occurring should be more important than syntaxually correct code. The tools today are 100000x better then when I started with notepad.exe, CMD and Netscape.
Also CS shouldn’t be focused on tools and languages as such, seeing as new versions and ideals come out quicker then CS courses change, but should be more focused on the means of coming to logical decisions and always questioning why or how something is the way it is, and how to improve it.
Tl;dr
Just my two cents. -
!rant // since learning most of my programming on the internet, I must say I have grown accustomed to Northern European and Indian people trying to describe programming concepts in English with wonderful accents.
Thank you internationals, you sound much more soothing than American teachers.5 -
Call me a child, but I still have a love for Lego. Lately, as I have been sorting my childhood collection into individual sets, I needed a way to track how many of each piece I've found for any given set, and started programming a tool that lets me pull Lego set inventories from the internet and keep track of the parts I've found.
This is the first time I've found a problem and built a program to solve it, and it feels so good! :D
(in case anyone is curious, I'm building it in Java as an Android app.)3 -
*at work*
co-worker: what are u doing?
me: programming and learning
co-worker: but school has just started... u guys havent learnt anything yet
me: thats the great thing about programming, everything is already in the internet waiting to be read and learned. try it next time ;)
co-worker: learning out of school, no thanks4 -
Oh god, I was like 13 and just found out about RPG Maker 2000. I got a pirated copy from a friend because ive got no internet at that time. I remember, my first project was with a friend of mine and dayum, we were so dumb and unknowing.
Once we wanted to implement a counter of how many fights a player had.
The problem was, we only knew about switches (boolean variables) and so we started to implement boolean variables like these:
hadOneFight
hadTwoFights
hadThreeFight
and so on, as something like a counter.
We took this to 50 before I asked my friend if this is the right way of doing this.
He answered: "thats probably the reason, why games are so big nowadays" (he just installed morrowind at home...)
Then at one day, I reached the point I didnt knew what I should do next in this project, so I looked around at all the other functions we never even tried and I found something called "variables".
Those where the "real" variables like string and int and wow, suddenly the possibilities where endless. I told him about variables at telephone and what we could do now, but that just got him somehow frustrated so he told me, that he wants to leave this programming thing4 -
I just started work school doing IT administration and development, I was excited, almost nervously anticipating to see the wondrous things I'd being learning and the kickass programs I'd be creating...
Alas I walked into my first lesson and...
Teacher: Today we're going to be learning how to make a square in Excel using VBR.
I thought, well fuck no - I didn't sign up for this shit. Then today I was on this thing called the internet, have you guys tried it? Amazing stuff, I saw a panda dressed as Chuck Norris... Anyway, I was on the internet and found out about this 73 year old man who makes full-sized artworks made in Excel.
Now I know the meaning to life, to Excel programming... It's official, I'm going to make Picasso in Excel.
*Light sarcasm, actual true story.*
2 -
I like the idea of Machine Learning in JS simply because I think it is way to fascinating to see what people are doing with JS.
Some programming languages tend to a attract very peculiar crowds. Some are even famous for the type of people they attract. Python is highly regarded as a language for scientists and researchers as well as beginners in development due to how simple and expressive it is. So you normally tend to see that kind ok f people in it(and before you bitch about it....no....it is not an all inclusive statement, hold your cock holster)
Whereas JS seems to have people from all backgrounds. It really is the language of the internet and as such the people around the internet have tried hard to make it better. So this can be considered an experiment regarding the way people collaborate with one another and I dig it.
Its all about working together ma ninjas.
Still a pretty funny language sometimes tho
1 + "1" = "11"
1 - "1" = 0
I still love it.27 -
As a final year student it makes me feel proud about things I do now, back in 2014 I was newbie to programming and after the years of study ( I skip collages in order to study by my self at home since my syllabus is too old for me to keep up with new technologies. ) I still feel like shit against brilliant programmers on the internet.
My journey untill now was frustrating and side by side it was fun too, I have spent several days to figure out very minor problems in my programme which made me forced to learn even more in order to avoid silly mistakes in future.
Those four lines of output were really true worth of that forty lines of code.
Every one of us, in their entire life at least once had thought about which programming languages to learn first and yes I was one of those guy who used to search on Google, watched YouTube videos and asked seniors for the same advice but soon I realized it's never enough to completely learn even one language. Each and every programming language is based on similar logical structure. No matter how different it's syntax is it won't make much of a difference.
I am thankful to internet and all of those guys who make video tutorials, help on q&a forum (stack overflow) , publish posts on website and all of IT community guys. I made it this far it's all thanks to you and I know it's just beginning of spectacular journey ahead.2 -
100 weeks is ~ 2 years away.
It will be year 2020 then, the year i thought about in highschool 8 years ago wondering what I'd do then since 2020 sounded like a cool number.
It's time to write a letter to my future self.
Dear holodreamer ( version 2020 ),
This is your old version speaking from 2018. I see that you have upgraded to a better version of myself. I see that you are finally financially independent and preparing to move out to somewhere peaceful and better. According to my calculations, you should be feeling pressure from your family and relatives to get married. Looking from my perspective, it seems you had other plans than to settle for relationship this year, like traveling the world, being in the snow, mountains and living an adventurous lifestyle. I want you to know I'm proud of you if you are following though those goals.
Btw, do you remember that random muslim girl you met on the internet 110 weeks ago? Is she still in contact with you every day?! I hope not. Is she still super religious? She was a good chat buddy for me, a great alternative to a chatbots at my time but I hope you didn't get carried away with her and I hope you don't have to resort to chatbots to cure loneliness.
Did AI replace developers? Is JavaScript still the most popular programming language?
I'm waiting for your response.
Best wishes,
holodreamer (version 2018)2 -
With limited Internet in 92 :P I read magazines and did line by line from the books. From Atari 520 ST, to vb6, then into PHP, C++ and C#, it's fully been a ride of self learning.
I envy the new generation with the massive amount of online learning sites. At age 36, been programming since I was 12. What an advantage young kids have today!1 -
I have a guy sitting next to me in class. We were working on the same project. It's about rewriting a functioning mergesort algorithm in C and doing a presentation about that topic.
Now... the thing is that I was ill on that specific day when we got that project assigned. And he didn't tell me it either. I asked the whole class.
They just said that there was nothing special about that day. These fuckers.
Anyway...
Thé following week we had the same lesson again. Actually there were more than both of us. We were a group of 5 dudes.
3 of them barely have anything to do with programming at all. They just learn for the exams and have bad grades in programming.
Luckily, they already wrote the functioning sorting algorithm.
Since that is the case, I chose to review it to get deeper into that topic.
There were comments in English (we live in Germany) and these comments were written in a different style. My classmates would never comment in such a way.
It was a modified version copied from the internet. The whole source code.
The variables had names like j,k,b,u and so on. It was perfectly obfuscated.
Yesterday, I wasn't at college either.
I had to show up to a given time at a government bureau. They have been working on that project that day. So, I decided to ask them via a messenger, if they can give me the newest presentation files after 1 pm.
They said that they barely have anything to present. They would like to improvise they said.
"Fuck you all" I thought.
I'm done with these fucking illiterate humans.
I hope they all die in hell with satan having a ride on them. Stabbing them from behind right into their assholes and eating their ball sacks (if they have any).
Today is the presentation.
That's when I decided not to drive there during these specific lessons.1 -
So happy right now!
I just finished a project which I started today.
It is a java bytecode class/method/field renamer. You can rename those things inside a jar file. It has a nice dark-themed GUI and it works great :)
I'm just happy because I couldn't find something like this on the Internet and wanted it since I started learning programming. Also I am happy because I did it in 1 Day and learned so much about the Java Bytecode!
It's using ObjectWeb ASM btw.7 -
The ones who use it, what do you like or value about Linux? Why do you use it?
Before I answer, let me say that I am a noob compared to the rest of this community. I run Ubuntu because Arch was too complicated when I tried and bash scripts equal to frustrations for me. That's my knowledge level.
- I don't feel "observed" when using a Linux distro compared to Windows and macOS.
- Feel more connected to the open source thought and the free spirit.
- Feel like I can do anything I want. Learning new programming languages easily, trying out web servers, try and setup own website or mail server etc.
- Everything is accessible. Read something cool about docker? ALT+T to open a terminal and start up a docker container to try out.
- No Internet browsing for software, like googling "Firefox download english".
- Sometimes forces me to learn about the workings of a computer, like networks, servers, routing, firewalls, bootup sequence etc.
- So many great command line tools. Want to find out quickly who owns a website? Want to query a specific DNS server? All possible within 5 seconds!
All in all using Linux feels like watching a documentary while using Windows is more like watching a dumb comedy show where I can turn my brain off, but get more stupid after a while.6 -
I haven't really known what to post. But I've decided not to care about being relevant or care about the like count. I'm a very competitive person so things like like count tend to effect the way I see the quality of a post.
I want devRant to be a place where I can be honest and feel safe even if I don't get the validation I sometimes wish I had. And hey maybe someone will think my opinions or thoughts are interesting.
So let's start with a little about me. I'm a 17 year old kid that loves programming. I work full time as a full stack web developer and I'm really the only web person. The current system is built on WordPress because of fucking course it is. I don't like it but I gotta keep it user friendly for less techy people to manage. No one likes have all minor changes and tweaks having to go through one person when they could do it themselves. So I manage.
I'd say my passion is more backend development but I do love having a pretty UI to display the results.
I've struggled with mental health the past few years but I'm doing much better. Even just last week I had an anxiety attack during a social event. I came here for the community and I do enjoy it, but I'm gonna try to make it an outlet. My best friend went off to university and I don't really have any IRL friends I can just be me around.
I don't have anything special to say. But if you read this thank you for listening to some random kid on the internet. I hope you have a great day.4 -
!rant
I’ve worked at six companies over my 10 years of professional programming. All companies say they track internet usage of the employees. This is the first company I have worked for that sends you a weekly summary of sites that you visit.5 -
Me: Ok time to save money, have a trip to melbourne coming up, save for a house, car and wedding... Brilliant...
Internet: Oh hey you know how you wanted a smartwatch that was not sporty looking and has NFC, heres the Ticwatch C2!
Me: I hate my life...
Internet: also heres some of the programming theory books you wanted on sale!
Me: starts tying noose
Why must saving money be so bloody hard when everything you've wanted just pops up .-.3 -
Becoming an 'almost' decent developer these past few years has made me realize how absolutely undeserved my ego was back in high school when I first joined DevRant and StackOverflow and thought i was 'all that' just because i did some programming thing stupid teenagers found cool in a random school.
At 24 I can say I'm happy for the internet knocking me down a few pegs when my 16-17 year old ego got out of hand. I feel it's really made me better in the long run.
Thank you DevRant2 -
In your opinion what is the best programming rant to ever grace the internet?
My submission === programming sucks:
http://stilldinking.org/programming...
(small) excerpt: "You discover that one day, some idiot decided that since another idiot decided that 1/0 should equal infinity, they could just use that as a shorthand for “Infinity” when simplifying their code. Then a non-idiot rightly decided that this was idiotic, which is what the original idiot should have decided, but since he didn’t, the non-idiot decided to be a dick and make this a failing error in his new compiler. Then he decided he wasn’t going to tell anyone that this was an error, because he’s a dick, and now all your snowflakes are urine and you can’t even find the cat."7 -
It was around 2013, I was working on a project that had a great business idea, a really really bright feature (to this day I state the same) and all I was getting was around 400e/month of salary. (still was a junior dev)
So, I've been going on vacation to Spain for almost 1.5 month, everything was settled, there were no more pending jobs for me as I've finished everything that I could until more things would be done on the application and design that were needed.
It was 2nd week there, I didn't have a laptop with me as it was full vacation mode, no internet connection as it was almost 100e/month at that time, house I've lived in had no internet either. Then, one morning I receive a call that I must be on a skype meeting in any case - it was live or die situation. Me being me - went to a local internet cafe that was around 3km away from the house (on foot) - logged in to the call and proceeded. (I knew something is going to be fishy).
And there it was - I was needed to go back to my laptop and code a huge ass functionality so that we could present it to our testing clients. It was estimated to take around 3 weeks of full working days. No future payment, no compensation was offered but as stupid as I was - I went on with that and worked half of my vacation on full-day schedule... The functionality was delivered... Only after 4 months since the delivery date - the functionality was tested and after total of 9 months - was presented to the testers... I was pissed and asked for compensation as it was my vacation but all I heard was - NO, you took too long of a vacation and therefore it's your own fault. Soon after that I've started to receive every bit of blame if I was even 1 hour off the set deadline that was set by the manager that didn't have a single clue how programming works or even how to use the internet properly....
All in all, I'm still hurt of the 3 weeks that I've missed but since I've left the job 4 years ago (my salary had increased but I've quadrupled it since then) - I tend to see that it's a common practice to require things NOW and only deal with them MONTHS later...
Morale of the story:
Avoid working on your vacation at any means. If that will mean a lost job - then be it, you'll find a new one, presumably a better job.12 -
"damn bro, you made that? how can i get into coding?"
shut the fuck up. you can get into programming like anyone who wants to can. by googling how to code. it's not the question itself that bothers me, it's the fact that if you actually wanted to code so bad, you already would've googled it. stop projecting your lack of passion on me.
this is most common with programming, but it happens so often with so many other things.
if you want to learn about biology and chemistry, there's free courses online and papers from nih.
if you want to learn about forsenics read a book about it and read about cases and how they were solved.
i could go on and on. the internet gives you access to so much that if you actually wanted to learn something, you would've already have.4 -
I kinda started programming back in the day, by breaking 2 school servers using a simple batch "virus"... it effectively opened tons of porn videos, threw the mouse cursor to the top right corner of the screen and shut down the PC after 15 seconds.
I masked the file and made sure it looked like internet explorer (since my school, back in the day, didn't use chrome and didn't allow the installation of chrome)
It was meant to troll my friend but all computers shared files with each other which meant even the private PC's of my teachers got my "virus"
Eventually it landed in the startup folder and messed everything up. I got snitched out, and I had to fix it
(I literally just wrote another batch file to delete my so called virus... because of the 15 seconds time limit I had)1 -
Not much of a haxk, just a stupid thing that works.
In my hs videogame programming class, the teacher has this program called LANSchool (most of you have heard of it) which he used to restrict apps/browsers to the point of uselessness . He didn't (and still doesn't) know anything about the stuff he 'teaches', most is tought by TAs.
Here's the dumb part: he WHITELISTED APPS. A friend, one of the TAs, figured out that if you rename something 'Google Chrome', lanschool wouldn't care. So I got Chromium (for unblocked internet) and switched its blue icons in the exe for original chrome icons, then renamed it 'Google Chrime'. Woo.
LANSchool is such a bad program (you can even unblock a site by spamming the F key for refresh).
The teacher did, and still does, treat the TAs like trash. He's a babysitter while students listen to online vids and the TAs.2 -
On one side I fucking hate waiting for the internet technician. I would've liked to go to work (especially as there is an event right now) and not sit here during "That-5-hour-window-because-scheduling-isn't-a-thing-the-german-Telekom-will-tell-you-about" and nurse my impatience.
On the other side, I have idle time and I like programming when everything's quiet in the house and only the heating and my PC cooling system are whirring quietly, so I've got that going for me which is nice.
Only too bad there's no internet right now.4 -
In a universe where JavaScript was never invented, the world of programming might look vastly different. Perhaps another programming language would have taken its place, or multiple languages would have coexisted in a more harmonious ecosystem.
Without the challenges posed by JavaScript, web development may have been smoother and more streamlined. Websites could have been faster and more responsive, without the need for complex optimization techniques. There might have been fewer security vulnerabilities to worry about, and the web could have been a safer place for users.
In this utopian world, developers would have had more time to focus on building great user experiences and innovative features, rather than battling with cross-browser compatibility issues and JavaScript quirks. The internet would have been a more accessible and inclusive place, with fewer barriers to entry for those who want to build and create.
Overall, a world without the horrors of JavaScript would have been a world with less frustration and more possibilities.
(Fooling around with ChatGPT)15 -
**Day 2 of glaring at the code.😩 The bits are collapsing in front of my eyes into bytes and the glaring dark theme of sublime engraves the code into my retinas. Is it day or is it night? I can no longer tell. Having scoured every corner of the internet and applying every fix I can find the bug persists... was I ever destined to program? For the doubt eclipses my hope of ever seeing the light. I peer over the edge of the world into the abyss and the abyss... **
"Wait 🔎, shouldn't there be apostrophes' in here? MOTHERF-" 😡😠💥☠
**tests**
**works**
*glee* 😄
"God, I love programming!" 😃4 -
I started to get interested in programming at the age of 13. I was started spending a lot time in our school library and read mostly technical books (beginner/hobbyist stuff) about electronics.
Some book was about Quick Basic (hence my username).
On Windoze 95 in a DOS mode IDE I started trying stuff out and soon I had my first tiny console game.
A bit later I started with HTML and CSS stuff, made a website about ongoing jokes in our class and some rants, later I got into VB6 (I hate VB nowadays!) and wrote for a personal school project a learning software (relatively simple one) to learn vocabulary for foreign languages.
At about 15 I started with C++ and later C# .NET, which I liked the most, and started on some new Windows.Forms stuff, created some small websites.
Now I'm working parttime as a professional developer (mostly web, but VR & .NET too) and studying EE at a university.
My parents had no experience with computers at all, so I learned everything myself an with the help of the allmighty internet (the black box with the red dot on top).
That's my story. ;)
Insert your rant about this below this line:
----------------------------------------- -
-- What if JavaScript never existed?
-- What if HTML was a programming language?
-- What if our data online isn't abstract but physical?
-- What if geeks have their own country?
-- What if humans exist and we are the aliens?
-- What if the internet is state-owned?
-- What if we could download food just like every other downloadables?
-- What if my VSCode won't kill me when switched to light theme?
-- What if there was no gender and the word "female" is just an alias for "male"?
-- What if bugs could find and fix themselves?
-- What if there's no need for an account password?
-- What if Linux was owned by Microsoft?
-- **What if I could tell my boss that I'm tired of his fucking job without actually telling my boss? This is the actual what if.**27 -
First exposure to computer?
Back in 2005, I think. Windows PC, I think. The rest is very blur.
All I can remember is it was white and monitor was big like a television. First ever computer of our family. No internet. No game except solatire and craps. Mainly just used it for porn-purpose. Did some programming assignments. Did some poems writing and then printed them out with all-in-1 printer and tried to sell the booklet to girls in public. (Obviously sold zero).2 -
Development tools for embedded projects shouldn't need fucking internet to operate. Every fucking app needing internet to even startup is getting more and more stupid. I do a LOT of development offline. I usually have my dev machine away from internet for weeks at a time. It very nice to not have to deal with update issues and the like during this time. So naturally I choose tools to do offline programming for both desktop and embedded. So I decided that for my embedded work I wanted to have better environment than Arduino IDE. Now enters VSCode with Platform IO. I download all the target platforms for my boards. I get it all working and installed. Then I take my computer to my non internet location. I fire up VSCode, select the platform, create a test project, and compile the code. Everything is working great. Then I go to upload the code to my board:
"Blah blah blah you need internet first time talking to a board blah blah blah." Seriously? WTF? Who does stupid shit like this? Once you install your dev tools they should be fucking installed! Now I have to drag my fucking dev boards to another location and do a test install just to do fucking offline programming.
FUCK YOU PLATFORM IO!
Notice I don't blame VSCode for this. I know this IDE is very internet dependent, but it works once you get your plugins installed regardless of internet. Unless of course you are doing internet based programming.3 -
I read books on programming. The thing I most like about programming books is that they allow you to learn about topics that you would have never have thought to explore. When people look things up online, they tend to search very specific things, most times actual code. The internet is an incredible source for developers, don't get me wrong. But books allow you to learn about programming in a conceptual way which in turn will make learning new languages easier and allow your understanding of the languages you already know to be deeper.
-
- Played with and learned Scratch
- Learned some Python, made some weird little programs
- Learned C, using two good books: K&R C and Zed Shaw's "Learn C the Hard Way" (back when it was still in development and was free to read on the internet)
- Made LOTS of programs in C
- Came back to Python when I wanted to learn network programming
- Learned some Racket/Lisp, Bash scripting along the way
- Now I use all of the above, minus Scratch -
This year has been rough. No programming. 3 great job applications snuffed. Currently unemployed, and all my recent job experience in a field I don't want to continue working in due to not making my 3 career options. (Military and policing sort of thing)
So since I'm off for the holidays, and looking to really get back into computer work, I've come back to devRant. Missed you guys. <3
Now I've got to actually get good at something, and preferably employed in doing it. Any advice or stories are appreciated :D (but my mom said not to listen to strangers on the internet, so...)3 -
Saw lots of regret posts about being in dev field. Then why bother living that way?
Not like engineering, medicine or business management fields, I believe programming needs passion similar to art related careers like acting, music and painting etc. So if you don't have any passion for programming, you won't be successful or satisfy at all.
That doesn't mean it is all good and happy days for every passionate programmers. We sure have ****ed up days (probably more than other fields.) Seriously that's why we have devrants. No? But it doesn't reach to the point of regret to me.
Here our national programming language is probably PHP. The pays are lower than your part-time fast food chain workers. The internet speed is in kbs with 2 digits most of the places. Government doesn't give a crap about IT. No IP copyright laws and so on. I probably would earn more and live better if I were not running this IT business.
But hell yeah I never regret at all.1 -
Dev industry develop so fast. This is because information available anywhere in the internet and people try to learn any programming language they want . But only few know whether they following secure coding practice or not
But the thing is most of Dev people dosent care about security. They focus just to develop a application but not to secure it?2 -
My job. Working in a small IT department. Web programming most of the day and being able to help people with their phones, software, internet connection, and so on...
The only thing I sometimes wished for were some other devs in my company that would understand me and my problems and with whom I could discuss new technologies.
But now I got devrant. I'll be fine from now on.1 -
WTF if you want to program stuff learn how to use your programming language. Why is it so hard for that many people to learn how stuff works and stop copying blindly from the internet?
I have two colleagues who are doing nothing else that to just google their problems going to the first answer and cooping it then trying to run the program and if it doesn’t work ether give up completely or starting a loop of inserting the error message to google and copy the first result?3 -
I learned C with a K&R copy a friend gave me years ago. Now at University we in CompSci get taught in Python the first year and Java next while the engineers start with C and (I'm guessing) move on to assembly later on.
This friend comes to me all worried because he has to submit the next day a working Reversi game for the console written in C. Turns out the game was divided among two labs and he failed to submit the first one.
The guy is smart but once a week or so, when we met to smoke a joint and relax with some other friends, he was always talking about how he would prefer something like law but that would be bad business back in Egypt.
Back to the game, I get completely into it. First hour checking all the instructions he was given, then reviewing the code he wrote and copied from Internet. We decide start from scratch since he doesn't really get what the code he copied do. It took us 10 hours only stopping to eat but we get all the specifications of both labs perfectly.
A week after that he comes to me: "my TA said your code is the ugliest shit he's ever seen but he gave me a perfect score because it passed all the tests". I'm getting better (the courses I'm taking help me a lot) but what really made me happy is that he solved the next lab by himself (Reversi wasn't the first time I helped him, only the first time he was absolutely lost). Now he actually gets excited about coding and even felt confident for his programming final.
No more talking about being a lawyer after those 10 hours, totally worth it.1 -
Yes this is kind of a rant and will probably open a can of worms (Although I would hope people are civil with this)
Why the hell is the gaming community so volatile when it comes to discussing someone personal gaming platform whether it be a gaming PC, Xbox, play station or switch, I myself own a gaming pc yet I will choose to play a game on my xbox one any day of the week, I use my pc for mainly media consumption when programming and just generally for internet use.
Just curious if there are any developers on here who share my view that a platform is just a platform?5 -
I have been using Windows for decades. Recently got a Macbook Pro. In just a week, I realise that I have been working in such a slow paced environment. Constant updates, background tasks, internet chewing, more load and build times. I don't know about other stuff, but for programming and development, I have completely replaced Windows with this new machine.
Btw, this PC has better hardware than the Macbook Pro.8 -
My uncle has definitely been my biggest influence. My parents never understood computers and refused to buy one. Eventually my uncle gave me an old Win95 box with an 8GB HDD, and 512 MB of RAM(most other people in the world were running XP at this point). The thing was completely useless as a computer to do work on when I received it.
The internet wasn't really a thing yet back then, but I managed to figure out how to clean up the OS, as well as taking it a part and figuring out the parts.
He was the one who taught me that with computers, all things are possible.
From there he was always buying me books about programming, and pointing me in the right direction. He was never one to give me the answer, but always told me where to look or what to ask.
Now I'm the main web developer at my company and I love what I do. -
ok, fuck people. i mean the people who talk about things that are a big deal. you don't need to take a course in html/css to build a website, you need documentation.
people act like programming languages are a whole separate literacy. they're not. it is not a big deal, nor an accomplishment of any significance, to learn any language to a basic extent. variables, control flow, functions and scope should not be considered challenging topics, and people should stop bragging about them. i'm pretty sure this is because programming is new. as people, i think when something is new we tend to think of it as more complex and harder to understand. basic programming is not that.
ok that was a tangent from my real point. college is a scam. anyone can learn anything from books and the internet. any time you want to learn about something, go to google, and search "${my topic} site:*.github.io" and you'll have a page about that topic written by someone who is knowledgeable and passionate of the topic. colleges don't teach people how to think like these books/websites do. and i'm fucking sick of people who'd rather see a degree then a portfolio. fuck them shits bro. i can distinct my smart friends because my smart friends speak logically and enjoy becoming smarter. i would take the kid who watches aerodynamics videos on youtube and then built a plane over a kid who studied and got a five on his ap physics exam. watching then doing is better learning than watching and repeating. after all, creativity is not at all measured in our grades, and i'd like to argue that sometimes intelligence isn't even measured. i mean, people can say they're good at math, but the kids who talk about fibinnoci numbers and why there can never be two primes more than 7 (i if i remember properly) integers apart or the ones who prove cryptographic algorithms. i guess what i'm trying to say is the dumb kids aren't dumb and the smart kids aren't smart (well not that) but kids who are passionate and just do something instead of waiting for their degree to do the same thing are the best and brightest. i forgot what i was talking about. sorry it is almost 2 am and i am intoxicated , and i don't believe i got my point across very well either.7 -
Finally back at the HQ and away from Offsite Hell after 18 months!!!!!!!!!!!! Real internet! Coffee on tap! Community of practice meetings! COOODDDEEEE!!!! Also back to devrant. Goodbye Indian devs from hell, j/k they still suck life out of my day with their deprecated ways.
Side note:
Switched to Unreal Engine from Unity recently and my god it is amazing! I definitely prefer being able to use C# with unity vs c++ with unreal but the blueprint system is a great visual programming system.
Unit testing is my new side chick. She wants me to leave my wife; I'm considering it.
Unrelated: Read Dead Redemption 2 is amazing.1 -
USE F🤬 GNU/LINUX!!! After, make technology really available (there’s cheap but functional options like ltsp). Teach the f🤬 bases of programming! Use open source softwares! How Internet works and privacy thing! Learn to read f🤬 terms of contract and privacy things, teach that ie is fucking shit and also, the most important thing! Use dark theme, don’t hurt others like I was!
And also, use vim -
Apparently, a lot of people here are complaining about the fact cs classes (and I'm talking about uni here) are way too much theory and far too less teaching practical things. And don't get me wrong, I don't like viewing cs only from a theoretic point of view either, BUT I think cs education is made to teach you how solve complex cs problems by yourself and give you the tools on how to learn about these things in the future. And this is very much theory.
CS is the science part, so don't wonder if there's a lot of theory in it. If you only want to learn how to program, maybe you should take programming courses instead.
In school though, cs education should be less theory and more doing practical (funny) things, programming, "how does the internet work", "why I should not give my credit card details to random strangers on the internet", things like that.2 -
When I started, in the early 80's, there was no internet, and books related to programming were hard to come by, so everything had to be learned by going to the library, or reading the manual that came with the compiler. Finally, in the early 90's, I got to attend programmer training in the Air Force. My first successful program was a D&D character generator.5
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I remember that my granddad and I built a computer with old crappy hardware that we disassembled from other computers.
I mostly used it for playing games like Age of Empires or Rollercoaster Tycoon.
I really don't remember a lot about but I remember I also had internet. Never got any Malware tho haha.
Then sometime my friend came over and he showed me a website named "Scratch". We made a lot of crappy games and a cat that farts when you press a button.
So yeah I instantly fell in love and did a lot of "Scratch"-ing with my brother.
That's was the time I found my love for programming.
I think about 2 years later I got a MacBook (the old from my father) and finally started with real programming!
Now, after 6 years I have an awesome little ZenBook and am programming everyday.
Love it! -
So, the internet is over. Just in case you didn’t notice. If you post a link to anything that involves you: an article, a podcast, a thing you built, a video you made - then mods and admins and trolls get their pitchforks and ban you or roast you or delete you.
This is not the way.
Not only are the walled gardens of apple, Twitter, Facebook/Instagram, breaking the web into little areas - and marketing is buying your time - but we’re doing it to ourselves too.
I can’t post a video about some of my favorite programming books in
/learnprogramming or I’m immediately banned!? Every link that takes people away from your ad dollars is ‘spam?’ Without any useful discourse and content - then why would anyone be there in the first place.
One time I posted a link HERE about how people could get CSS help in the CSS discord and I got fire-stormed for self-promotion. Really? Hundreds of hours helping people learn programming - for free... is my self promotion? Is everyone so insecure that they can’t allow anyone else to talk about their work? It’s super scary.
This is how you control people. This is Nazi shit. It’s a slippery Slope. Watch out.
And whatever you do... don’t share links to your things. That is NOT what the internet was made for.4 -
This shit is long story of my computer experience over my lifetime.
When I was young I got my first PC with windows it was not so bad. It required safe shut down of it’s fat32 partition. From time to time I needed to reinstall it cause of slow down but I got used to it I was only a gamer.
Time passes and I got more curious about computers and about this linux. Everything worked there but installation of anything was complete madness and none of windows programs worked well, and I wanted to play games and be productive so I sticked with windows.
I bought hp laptop once with nvidia card, it was overheating and got broken. So I bought toshiba and all I told to the seller was I want ATI card. Took me 5 minutes to do it and I was faster then my friend buying pack of cigarettes because I was earning money using computer.
Then I grown up running my small one person programming businesses and I wanted to run and compile every fucking program on this world. I wanted linux shell commands. I wanted package manager, and I wanted my os to be simple because I wasn’t earning money by using my os but by programming. So after getting my paycheck I bought mac. I can run windows and linux on vm if I need it. I try not to steal someones work so I didn’t want to run hackintosh. I am using this mac for some time.
Also I use playstation for gaming. Because I only want to run and play game I am not excited about graphics but gameplay. I think I am pragmatic person.
I can tell you something about my mac.
When I close lid it go sleep when I open it wakes up instantly. I never need to wonder if I want to hibernate or shut down or sleep and drain battery. It is fucking simple.
When I want to run or open something it doesn’t want me to wait but it gives me my intellij or terminal or another browser or whatever I search for. Yeah search is something that works.
Despite it got 8 gigs of ram I can run whatever number of programs I want at the same speed. The speed is not very fast sometimes but it’s constant fast.
I have a keychain so my passwords are in one place I can slow down shared internet speed, I can put my wifi in monitor mode and I don’t need to install some 3rd party software.
And now I updated my mac to high sierra, cause it’s free and I want to play with ios compilation. Before I did it I didn’t even backup whole work. I just used time machine and regular backups. And guess what, it still works at the same speed and all I did was click to run update and cook something to eat.
When I got bored I close the lid, when got idea open lid and code shit, not waiting for fucking wakeup or fucking updates.
I wanted to rant apple products I use but they work, they got fucking updates all along at the same time. And all of updates are optional.
I cannot tell that about all apple products but about products I use.
I think I just got old and started to praise my limited time on this world. Not being excited about new crap. When I buy something I choose wisely. I bought iPhone. I can buy latest iPhone x but I bought iPhone 7 cause it’s from fucking metal. And I know that metal is harder then glass, why the fucking apple forgot about it? I don’t know.
I know that I am clumsy and drop stuff. Dropped my phone at least 100 times and nothing.
I am not a apple fan boy I won’t buy mac with this glowing shit above keyboard that would got me blind at night.
I buy something when I know that it can save my time on this world. I try to buy things that make me productive and don’t break after a year.
So now piece of advise, stop wasting your time, buy and update wisely, wait a week or a month or a year when more people buy shit and buy what’s not broken. And if something’s broken rant this shit so next customer can be smarter.
Cheers1 -
the current power outage is an additional reminder why i will always decide for a notebook. no internet though, so that is the ending for my spare programming time :(
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Hmm... My first experience with computers was in 1991 or so, when my then best friend had C64. And I was 7. My first PC arrived in 1993. Prince of Persia is the first game I remember from that time. I started programming in 1995 or '96, writing useless things in Pascal. Using PHP since 2000. Still that’s my main programming language. And sadly, my kids have different hobbies than me, so they aren’t even trying to program.
I remember the sound of modem connecting thru phone line to some BBS systems and later to the first public and free internet service in Poland. I remember simple, really „computer-like” voice of my dad’s speech synthesizer (he’s blind person). I remember, when our time to „play on PC” was limited to max 1hr a day... What will our kids remember? -
At this point of my side project I wanted to check out openresty for dynamic proxy creation in nginx.
Happy to check it out I installed centos 7 as guest using new command I just learned virt-builder that would automate vm creation.
Spend 10 hours debugging why I can ping and ssh but cannot get to application port from any network.
Checked iptables, restarted network, reinstalled vm again 3 times with different methods.
Scrolled trough whole internet and it’s mostly outdated problems.
Learned bunch of new commands without new results.
Results were always the same:
No route to host.
Turned out firewalld is fucking thing now.
systemctl firewalld stop helped
Now I know that systemd would kill me at some point for sure.
What I can add at this point ?
Please add more distros, differences, standards and programming languages so world definitely would be better place.
I need a short break now to actually start making shit that I wanted to start at 4-5pm on Saturday.
It’s Sunday 3:30am and time for breakfast.
At least I am happy it started working.2 -
TL;DR: Computers and I go way back, but I don't know how I ended up as a dev - and am still not certain that's what I want to do for the rest of my life.
Rewind to the early 80's. My friends at the time got the Comodore 64 one after the other. I never got one. Heck, we didn't even have a color TV back then. Only a 12/14" small B&W TV. It's easy to conclude that I spent a lot of time at my friends'.
Back then it mostly was about the games. And, living in the rural countryside, the only way to aquire games was to pirate them. Pirating was big. Cassette tape swapping and floppy disk swapping was a big deal, and gamers contacted eachother via classifieds sections in newspapers and magazines. It was crazy.
Anyways. The thing about pirated games back then is that they often got a cracktro, trainer, intro or whatever you want to call them - made by the people who pirated the game. And I found them awesome. Sinus scrollers, 3D text, cool SID-tunes and whatnot. I was hooked.
My best friend and I eventually got tired of just gaming. We found Shoot'Em-Up Construction Kit, which was an easy point-and-click way to create our first little game. We looked into BASIC a bit. And we found a book at the library about C64 programming. It contained source code to create your own assembler, so we started on that. I never completed it, but my friend did.
Fast forward through some epic failure using an Amstrad CPC, an old 486 and hello mid 90's. My first Pentium, my first modem and hello Internet! I instantly fell in love with the Internet and the web. I was still in school, and had planned to enter the creative advertising business. Little did I know about the impact the web would have on the world.
I coded web pages for fun for some years. My first job was as a multimedia designer, and I eventually had to learn Lingo (Macromedia Director, anyone?) And Actionscript.
Now I haven't touched Flash for about 7 years. My experience has evolved back to pure web development. I'm not sure if that's where I will be in the future. I've learned that I certainly don't know how to do everything I want to do - but I have aquired the mindset to identify the tasks and find solutions to the problem.
I never had any affiliation with the pirate scene or the demo scene. But I still get a little tingling whenever I see one of those sinus scrollers. -
Here’s Today’s book, a little late in the day but we had a storm here and lost power. Powers back
Anyway Programming Pearls, this books isn’t so much a tutorial book, or like “how to program book” it’s more an influential book and thought book. Similar to the mythical man month book.
It’s short book little over 200 pages, of short essays on problems that have irritated programmers over the years. Hence the amage to pearls as a pearl is developed from grains of sand that irritate oysters. This book is a collection of irritants of programmers. (No not the social or business side of things) but technical problems we all face.
These articles are compiled from the original postings that occurred in the Communications of ACM journal, back in the late 90s.
This books offers workable solutions to these “pearls”.
Think of this like one of the precursors to what we have now as stack overflow .. information was shared via journals since the internet wasn’t available but not so much question then respond like we do more of hey I had this problem here’s the solution sort of system.
It’s the type of book, when your bored and you don’t want to read some “how to book” you read this, just like mythical man month and others.
This book references items from knuths books. As well as references to others.
So here’s to the pearls the plague us all.
1 -
I had a project partner that was clueless at programming even though she wanted to specialise in programming. So when I suggested that she use the internet to get suggestions for a game UI, she ended up copying everything off a forum.
The code wasn't even working, it had a different set of lib from ours and she spent 2 hours on that code wondering what was wrong.
I almost killed her for having a higher gpa than mine4 -
WHITEPAPERS.
Not exactly a programming problem, but one of my many task (as i am apparently a multi headed hydra) is it to find Software for tasks. I made the experience, as more marketing experts are on it, and as more SEO is poured in as more information about a topic degrade.
Two examples:
i wanted to find out if there is anything that speaks AGAINST "the cloud" as a concept for Data Procesessing and Storage. (Beside that the company internet connection is crap). There are tons of documents that in a semi "scientific" way show that having a data centre with a constant staff of experts is superios to everything. And it goes on, every company has a different version of basically the same document, and they all subtley show that THIS company is the best.
Example 2:
ERP Software, the most infested pool of filth i have entered yet, be it just a tiny CRM System or a full blown SAP clone, they all have those "Whitepapers" that first look somewhat scientific or informative. Like "the top8 common pitfalls when introducing an ERP system". 7 of them read logically and were what i expected, the 8th was "dont get your IT involved".
Yeah sure, IT doesnt understand economical processes, fair enough, but not getting it involved at all sounds like selfdefense. A further look showed me that this particular vendor has a web-based solution but doesnt provide any further informations (srsly, the website is starved of actual hard informations). The screenshots let the software look a bit oldschool but what really threw red flags for me was the sentence "we are ready for Win10, we did significant adjustment to perform excellent with Windows 10"
So, either they have some system interwoven stuff (so why bother with Webbase then?) or its just another marketing bullshit sentence.
Either way, i found it to be really hard to get ANY reliable information about this particular topic which adds to the overall world experience of missinformations and the all-being "fakenews". But for many things one can usually filter through a lot of different informations that can be pieced together, with this..its all outright propaganda camouflaged as "useful information", some even try to let it look scientific. In the end its all biased..
ultimativly, this rant is about all the people that write those missleading whitepapers, fill the world with biased informations and make the whole planet a worse place.2 -
I met @miau in England at University, through the only course we shared, Games for the Internet. I really wanted to be her friend because I thought she was pretty cool.
@miau looks incredibly confident. She has humor, imagination and is a really talented programmer.
She, on the other hand, did not want to have anything to do with other German-speaking students to improve her English skills and learn as much about England as possible.
Fortunately, I can be very stubborn. I helped her with her programming tasks whenever she let me and told her what our professor values. A few tests and beers later we were friends.3 -
First and foremost, students should be carefully taught the logic and mentality behind programming. Most of the time I see that the introductory programming courses waste so much energy in teaching the language itself. So students kinda just get fucked cause many people end up ending the course without having actually gained the "programming perspective".
Stop teaching pointers and lambdas and even leave the object oriented stiff till later. If a student doesn't know why we use a For loop then how can they learn anything else.
I believe once that thing in your brain clicks about programming, everything goes smooth from there... kinda :P
Second of all, and this pertains mainly to the engineering and science disciplines.
We need a fundamental and strong mathematical foundation. And no I don't mean taking fucking double integrals. Teach us Linear Algebra, Graph theory, the properties of matrices, and Probability theory.
One of the things I suffered from most and regret in university is having a weak foundation in math and having to spend more time catching myself up to speed.
It's so annoying reading a paper on a new algorithm or method and feeling like an idiot because I can't understand what magic these people did.
Numerical Methods...
Ok this is more deeper, maybe a 2nd year course.
But this is something we take for granted.
Computers don't magically add and subtract and multiply.
They fuck up.
And it'll bite you in the ass if you're not even aware that the computer we all love so much isn't as perfect as we think
Some hardware knowledge.
Probably a basic embedded systems course with arduinos
just so you can get a feel for how our beautiful software actually makes those electrons go weeeeeeeee
And finally
Practice practice
Projects projects
like honestly
just give me the internet and some projects
Ill learn everything else
Projects are the best motivation
I hate this purely theoretical approach
where we memorize or read code and write these stupid exams
Test what we are capable off
make us do projects that take sleepless nights and litres of coffee
And judge our methods, documentation, team work, and output
Team work skills and tools (VCS, communicating, project management, etc.)
Documentation and Reporting
Properly
:)
maybe even with LaTeX :D
Yeah that's the gist of whats on my mind at the moment regarding an ideal computer science education
At least the foundations
The rest I leave it to the next dude. -
This is more of an essay than a rant. TLDR at the end. I simply can't choose from all the shitty lecturers I've had, so I'm going to have to go through them one by one. But of background. I'm currently in 7th year of college, I did a multimedia degree in 2 years, a intro course to Software Dev and I'm currently in my final year of my Software Dev degree. So let's start.
Intro Software Course
- we had a database module, which was thought by, I shit you not, the head of the psychology course in the college, she attempted to teach us Databases using access. And not even using SQL, using access GUI components and it's query builder. Need I say more?
1st year software dev
- We had a networking module, the guy that taught the labs, he literally didn't say more than 12 words the entire 12 week semester, his answer to any question you asked him was a grunt and "research it"
- We had a psychology module, I have no fucking idea why, but instead of learning something useful we were told to read this and get in touch with your feelings...
- database module. Yes we actually did SQL here, 12 weeks of select statements and normal form, talked about by a guy in a monotone voice, who sounded like he was contemplating bringing in an assault riffle some day. Also instead of using MySQL he decided to use Ingres. Why I will never know.
2nd Year Software Dev
- We had a module called Algorithms and Data Structures. The lecturer gave us problems she couldn't solve. Simple problems. She was also crazy. Absolutely nuts.
- Object Orientated Programming. I had this lecturer for 3 semesters up until 3rd year. This guy did COBOLT in college, graduated in the 70s or something and went straight into teaching, he taught us Java for nearly 2 years. He literally copied and pasted texts from PDFs and read through them in class. He told myself and another guy at one stage he really didn't care, and was just counting down the days to his retirement.
- Databases again, different lecturer from 1st year, taught us for 2 semesters (24 weeks) and somehow managed to teach us nothing.
3rd Year Software Dev
- software engineering.. This is where the biggest cunt I've ever met was introduced. He arrives into class 15 minutes late every time without fail, talks shit about stuff that has no relevancy to the topic at all, tries to turn everything into a rugby metaphor and every time you ask a question he somehow dodges it and swiftly changes topic. This cunts past profession? A Project Manager. Fucking typical. This dickhead has also thought me 2 other modules.
4th yr Software Dev
- El cunto mentioned above for 2 more modules. Need I say more.
- real time systems, this module took the piss, the module was written by the lecturer which is what earns his space here. Assignments given to us, which required more time to do than we had in labs so we had to work at home, the problem we that is we were using an obscure RTOS called OS9 which would only work on the college computers. When brought to the lecturers attention he just said "figure it out"
Internet of Things - There was 2 lecturers, each lecturer seemingly working off a different plan, one week you'd have one lecturer, the next would be the other one going on about something completely different and unrelated to anything else we'd done.
Some lecturers didn't even make this list as I couldn't be bothered trying to think back about how shit other ones were. These were the ones that always stood out in my mind.
My main take away point from this is that you go to college for the paper which says you have a degree. Learning things that are going to benefit you in a career is up to yourself.
TLDR; 90% of my college lectures were shit. You need to learn useful stuff yourself.1 -
Every time somone who i have nearly forgott about calls me. I know im gonne get a stupid IT or Tech question...
- Why is my internet slow?
- Can you make a better {xyz}.... for free?
- How can i make my computer faster
- Why does office/spotify/chrome crash?
- Can you teache me programming so i can get rich?
FUCK THEM!
Really, i've got more relevant stuff to do. If you wouldnt have killed all your braincells with smoking and drinking and did something with your life you wouldnt have to ask such stupid questions in the first place. And thanks for never contacting me in the past X years! -
Thats so bad. Since about One week our Internet is broken. We don't have access anymore. You feel useless, because you can't do anything. No Phone (because its also with the Router) , No Internet, No real programming. You can't Look something Up, you can't Log into your Server, Database and so on.
And the shittest Thing about that is that the #Telekom is sorry to say that but absolutely Shit. We have made an appointement on friday. They should come to fix the issue. We have waited the whole day. He didn't came.. Now He wants to come again tomorrow...
I hope everything is right then and We have Internet again.. thats uncool.1 -
It really sucks when you realize that you're gonna end up despising a programming language just from having an extremely shitty first experience with it.
About ten weeks ago I was forced to, despite that I was SUPPOSED to be able to choose the language myself, to learn C++ for this course when having literally not a single fucking bit of experience with it whatsoever. And that's pretty soon after already having a beyond shitty experience with the very same school AND the same teacher. (The school I study at "rent" courses from other schools, this is one of them.)
I have the final exam on Monday and I'm allowed to have a book on C++ with me to use as reference, as (I'm pretty sure) I won't have internet access on the computer I'll be doing the test on. I ordered a book with express shipping to be here during this week, Friday at the latest. Never arrived. Called customer service at the book store and apparently it was supposed to have shipped yesterday but hadn't and they didn't know why (fucking awesome girl at the customer service btw, 11/10 quality service). So we cancelled the order, sure, we get the money back, but I still won't have a reference for a language I barely know at all. (No need to mention libraries, did that, dead end.)
Oh, and about that school and that earlier experience I spoke of, because if their inability to do their motherfucking jobs, earlier this year I ended up struggling with money for a couple of months. I really want to fucking strangle these assholes and have them pay my fucking bills to cover the shit that THEY caused.
TLDR; I'm gonna end up hating C++ because of shitty fucking teachers at an even shittier school.6 -
Hello there, long time no see.
Back in the day I asked you for a book that goes deep in the C programming language, now I'm asking the same but for Nodejs, especially a book that explains the event loop down to the line of code.
There are some articles on the internet but they are all copy/paste of one another and don't even scratch the surface of what the event loop does2 -
I remember playing games like wolfenstein3D, supaplex, sokoban etc. on our family computer 486 which had as I remember around 100mhz processor. (120mhz in TURBO mode)
Yeah and I did created a few levels in wolfenstein, there was a simple editor.
From programming view I did code my first website only using html and inline css in early 2000s. However internet was a thing of a rich people back then (in my country), so my brother downloaded the whole website with docs and basics of html/css/js for me in collage. My first website was coded on 300mhz pentium2 (or 3?) with no internet connection, took me about a two months to complete and was total mess. But was graphically satisfying with nice gifs which took tens od seconds to download. Main container had 600px width and looked pretty good on my 800x600 resolution.
I still remember messing with BOM signature because of notepad could not save a file without BOM. Leaving all utf8 chars as mess after saving.
Good old times. -
Back in 2004-2005 when I was 2-3 years old, (I guess that, from this statement, the fact that I'm 15 rn can be inferred), I would sit on my dad's dinosaur computer. I don't remember brands and stuff, just Windows XP, Dial-up internet and the heap of CD-ROMs I had my parents buy me. They had all kinds of games, software, etc. It was a time when sharing that kind of stuff over the internet was, to say the least, impractical. It kind of makes me feel older than I am, looking at the cases full of those CDs, remnants of a past era. But what I consider my first actual exposure was in 2007, when I got my first laptop (netbook) and started diving in, exploring. It was the computer through which I learnt programming (My first lang was cpp), and the one that got me interested to dive deeper into the matter.
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I'm currently having a problems sleeping my inner philosopher just keeps thinking about various things. I wanna try to write some of them down as an simply to see what will happen.
I'll write my opinion down as honest as possible so feel free to disagree, but point out what I should rethink, if you want me to consider it.
To me respect has to be earned. I think especially on the internet many people try to skip this crucial step when they try to get respect. Most often when they want an opinion or their ideals to be respected. Most of the time it doesn't even feel like they want to be respected, but rather accepted.
There's nothing wrong with accepted in my opinion, but there are several approaches to get to this point and I despise some of them.
Earning acceptance by earning respect is one of the right ways to do it. Working hard towards your goals, showing your individual strength, standing behind your ideals. These are things I can respect.
I should also mention that these Ideals should be concrete, based on rational thought and a general good will or you will just twist my words to say that I support e.g. IS, Stalin's politics ect.
On a side node, I think it'd be wrong to disrespect everything Stalin did, since, from an economical point of view, he pushed Russia forward by quite a bit.
Then on the other side I see crybabies. People who want to be accepted, without putting effort in their ideals. Most of the time not even aiming for acceptance through respect, but through pity. Honestly, that's all they're going to get from me.
Pity, for their petty ideals.
Basically all I ever see these people doing is attention whoring and practicing multiple deadly sins at once.
Wrath, jealousy, sloth, pride, greed and optionally also gluttony.
Lust is rather a separate package. When I think about it, I link it mostly to horny teens and "send bob and vegane" type of stuff.
Gluttony being powered by sloth or vice versa, enhancing it.
The clear image I have in mind, while I write about this packages of deadly sins however, is that of a jealous person, complaining / getting angry about something they could change change themselves, but want them to be changed for them. Mostly through social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and whatever the fuck Tumblr is supposed to be.
"I wanna be rich, why is <person> richt but I'm not? This world is so unfair 😡". Have you tried working towards becoming rich?
"I don't don't feel pretty. Accept me". Accept yourself. Done.
"I don't like <person or organization>'s doing". If that's the whole message, all you probably did so far is complaining or crying. Sweet tears.
Stuff like that can happen to any person, just like any person makes mistakes.
Mistakes are made to learn from them. If you realize realize and accept your mistakes others may do so as well and forgive you.
But we are he towards this idiotic trend where people just can swallow their pride even for microscopic things. They instead push their pride to higher levels of ignorance, blaming other people, l(ying)mfao, creating black holes of density in the process. Makes me wonder whether their real motive is an inside bet on who can get the most people to kill them selves by face palming.
Most of my life I have been fairly protected against these people, besides some spikes of incompetence, but recently the have invaded 2 areas in my world that make the world somewhat less of a pain. Programming and the internet culture.
Yes, I'm talking about that master / slave BS renaming and article 11 and 13.
The remaking itself isn't really the problem, but rather the context. This was basically a show of power for the self proclaimed "social justice warriors" or SJW for short.
The fact that this madness has spread. That's what worries me. To me it feels like the first zombie has spawned.
Then we have this corrupted piece of incompetent shit, called Axel Voss, and other old farts.
They live in a galaxy far away from reality, somewhere in the European Parlament, making laws they don't know shit about, regulating things they know shit about.
All in the name of the people of the EU of course. And by people we obviously talk about the money.
I can honestly not think of another reason, after reading the replies Voss and his party gave on Twitter regarding the shit they pulled off.
Well, at least none that doesn't involve some firm of brain death.
For now I'll show them as much as possible how much I despise / reject them. Currently playing with the thought of some kind (social media?) website were posts from other sites or actions in general can be rated only with "Fuck you"s.
Given these articles, I should not have them hosted in an European country though 😅.
Almost hitting that 5k character limit 😰1 -
For my final project of first year at middle school (that's before university), I had to make a experiment and measured it using a circuit connected to the computer. At the end I couldn't finish but I made a program for explain what the circuit (expected) did using one of the Microsoft Office's assistant (Merlin the wizard), Merlin moved around the screen talking about the experiment and what the circuit measured it over and over, almost forgotten to tell I had to show it in a science festival to anybody who came at school, none asked about the experiment or the circuit, all the questions was about how I made the program, how the program could speech in spanish and explain the experiment.
At the begining of that day I was so nervous, but at the end I could say fuck yeah.
And the program was a macro in Basic with text to speech of a Loquendo like voice, I only record the movements and put the text.
That's one of the reason of I like programming, it save it my ass.
That was more than ten years ago, I didn't have a computer only at the school, internet not was so common.4 -
Craziest prep for interview :
Step 1 : Given sufficient time for the scheduled interview by any company, start by searching "How to prepare for Google interviews". Awe at the information before you and get all pumped up to jump in.
Step 2 : Starting with Algorithms, study each one and try not to mix any of them in confusion. In case you are stuck in whiteboard coding, close your eyes, take deep breath and visualize Don Kunth. If that doesn't help, well you are ruined anyway.
Step 3: Practice coding without internet connection, till you are able to write code while you talk about how the weather is really great today. Libraries and methods should flow like poetry. SO is sin.
Step 4: The X programming language which you added to your resume because you can write Hello World, head over to Wikipedia and read more about it just in case.
Step 5: Read some xkcd comics so you can impress the interviewer with some humor. You can try Dilbert too. -
Incoming rant.
I have 4 years professional experience at a small shop working on a web application for property and liability insurance. The application is ASP.NET with C# as the code-behind. I have a BCS and will finish my MSIS fall 2017. I have no idea why I have the degrees. I know that when I enrolled, it seemed like they would be a nice addition to an otherwise empty resume. I was lucky enough to land my first and only development job during my sophomore year of my undergraduate program. Is this enough experience to land a new job?
I feel like I'm learning nothing at my current job. The specs that come in seem very vague to me. When asked for clarification, there is often push back, and I don't know whether that's because I don't have enough experience to parse what the client means in the two sentence spec I got or if it's because the client does not actually know what they want.
I hate my current job. My productivity is low because I spend more time trying to figure out what the client wants and analyzing an 8 year old system that has 0 documentation. I know some of you will just say, "Suck it up" at this point, but I really want another job. The only thing I like about this job is that it's 100% remote. It also pays $60k a year, so a replacement should be at least that salary.
Most postings I see require professional experience of 5 years or more, and knowledge of other frameworks. I can work on getting knowledge of the other frameworks, but will have no professional experience with them. I don't live in an area with a lot of software development jobs, and the ones I see are for non-IT organizations that want 1 person to run a distributed system from 10 or more locations. A hospital system out here wants to pay $30k a year for a guy to be both software developer for new tools as well as the helpdesk and IT support guy that's on-call for four locations in the county. I made more than that before I got into the development industry, for less work, and would rather leave than settle for something like that.
I've thought about moving to somewhere near San Francisco or San Jose, but I have my daughter to think about. I have joint custody of her, and would have to give that up in order to move out of the county.
I like programming and using it to solve problems. I like designing architectures and how all the components will interface. I like designing and normalizing databases. I like taking part in coding competitions for employers that are well-known (Amazon, Facebook, Uber, Twitch, etc.), even though I often just place middle of the pack. When that happens, I feel like I'm an imposter in this industry.
I think I have the most fun just working on small projects for personal use. My latest is an assistant calculator for the game Transport Fever to figure out cargo throughputs per annum based on the in-game timing information. Past projects have also been small. Ones I could use in a portfolio are a sudoku solver desktop application, PC/Web game in Unity that is a 3D FPS remake of Duck Hunt that allows open world exploration but locks the camera's viewpoint for shooting events, and a building assistant for Rome II: Total War that maps out all the bonuses/perks of user-specified building combinations in provinces so users can record their long term building plans without using all their turns to see the final results.
I seem to be an unproductive, average developer who dabbles in projects here and there.
This is what I want from other Ranters. Just say something. I don't care if it is, "Suck it up and get better." It could be your tips for finding and securing a new position. It could even be empathy, if such a thing exists on the Internet. Whatever you want, just say something that will help get me thinking of what the next steps in my career should be.1 -
I just watched an elaborate Rube Goldberg device video and realized that programming, indeed the entirety of the Internet, is very similar.1
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When I was 15, I started learning Python solely from the Internet, directly from Python's own tutorial in their documentation actually. Never had actual "formal" programming lessons till I was in university, which tbh, sucks. I'd learn more at a faster pace if I went to the Internet... If only I'm not lazy... 😅
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In my school we had a CS lab and we were supposed to do lab assignments.
I had a book which gave a basic introduction on event driven programming, and introduced me to two new functions which I couldn't have ever known(I got internet in 2013) if I had gone with just the curriculum, kbhit() and gotoxy(). With this new knowledge I created my first 2d game. And that feeling of creating something no one expects and something fun, which also gets you attention of the whole room(Nothing like that was ever created in that lab, it was a shitty school), made me realize that this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. 😃 -
Started learning Python yesterday and with the help of the mighty internet I wrote a script that tells me how many lines of Java code I have written in a project. Just 9 lines of python and it works like a charm. Was so excited that I tried to tell my non Dev friends about it, but they where like "yeah, what ever"... I am always kinda sad that so many people aren't interested in programming, not even a tiny bit :/
But anyways... Python my love, where have you been all my life?2 -
In reply to this:
https://devrant.com/rants/260590/...
As a senior dev for over 13 years, I will break you point by point in the most realistic way, so you don't get in troubles for following internet boring paternal advices.
1) False. Being go-ahead, pro active and prone to learn is a good thing in most places.
This doesn't mean being an entitled asshole, but standing for yourself (don't get put down and used to do shit for others, or it will become the routine) and show good learning and exploration skills will definitely put you under a good light.
2)False. 2 things to check:
a) if the guy over you is an entitled asshole who thinkg you're going to steal his job and will try to sabotage you or not answer acting annoyed, or if it's a cool guy.
Choose wisely your questions and put them all togheter. Don't be that guy that fires questions in crumbles, one every 2 minutes.
Put them togheter and try to work out the obvious and what can be done through google or chatgpt by yourself. Then collect the hard ones for the experienced guy and ask them all at once. He's been put over you to help you.
3) Idiotic. NO.
Working code = good code. It's always been like this.
If you follow this idiotic advice you will annoy everyone.
The thing about renaming variables and crap it's called a standard. Most company will have a document with one if there is a need to follow it.
What remains are common programming conventions that everyone mostly follows.
Else you'll end up getting crazy at all the rules and small conventions and will start to do messy hot spaghetti code filled with syntactic sugar that no one likes, included yourself.
4)LMAO.
This mostly never happens (seniors send to juniors) in real life.
But it happens on the other side (junior code gets reviewed).
He must either be a crap programmer or stopped learning years ago(?)
5) This is absolutely true.
Programming is not a forgiving job if you're not honest.
Covering up mess in programming is mostly impossible, expecially when git and all that stuff with your name on it came out.
Be honest, admit your faults, ask if not sure.
Code is code, if it's wrong it won't work magically and sooner or later it will fire back.
6)Somewhat true, but it all depends on the deadline you're given and the complexity of the logic to be implemented.
If very complex you have to divide an conquer (usually)
7)LMAO, this one might be true for multi billionaire companies with thousand of employees.
Normal companies rarely do that because it's a waste of time. They pass knowledge by word or with concise documentation that later gets explained by seniors or TL's to the devs.
Try following this and as a junior:
1) you will have written shit docs and wasted time
2) you will come up to the devs at the deadline with half of the code done and them saying wtf who told you to do that
8) See? What an oxymoron ahahah
Look at point 3 of this guy than re-read this.
This alone should prove you that I'm right for everything else.
9) Half true.
Watch your ass. You need to understand what you're going to put yourself into.
If it's some unknown deep sea shit, with no documentations whatsoever you will end up with a sore ass and pulling your hair finding crumbles of code that make that unknown thing work.
Believe me and not him.
I have been there. To say one, I've been doing some high level project for using powerful RFID reading antennas for doing large warehouse inventory with high speed (instead of counting manually or scanning pieces, the put rfid tags inside the boxes and pass a scanner between shelves, reading all the inventory).
I had to deal with all the RFID protocol, the math behind radio waves (yes, knowing it will let you configure them more efficently and avoid conflicts), know a whole new SDK from them I've never used again (useless knowledge = time wasted and no resume worthy material for your next job) and so on.
It was a grueling, hair pulling, horrible experience that brought me nothing in return execpt the skill of accepting and embracing the pain of such experiences.
And I can go on with other stories. Horror Stories.
If it's something that is doable but it's complex, hard or just interesting, go for it. Expecially if the tech involved is something marketable.
10) Yes, and you can't stop learning, expecially now that AI will start to cover more and more of our work.4 -
That feeling when you're applying for your first programming job.
And the knife stabs of nerves in your gut fearfully remind the coiled muscles in your sweaty brow of the singular possibility: what if I bullshit my way by the HR filter into this job and it turns out I was completely wrong, and I encounter a bug that my meager coding abilities really can't fix?
"Writing an interpreter in some community college you dropped out of ten years ago" doesn't mean you're a programmer.
"Figuring out where the bug was in a broken bat file that was pages long, for a language and framework you've never used, for a library nobody uses anymore", doesn't count as debugging.
"Writing a tweening library in an obscure tool" doesn't mean you're an expert. This is childs play.
What if they ask about big O? Do you admit that logarithms confuse the fuck out of you because you dropped out in 8th grade and got your GED later on due to being kicked out by your meth head dad?
What if being able to write a few measly cobbled together half-arsed estimate tools in python doesn't really mean you're qualified to do anything?
What if being able to look at code in languages you've never seen and grok it doesn't mean shit?
What if you've used more languages than you can remember?
What if you once lost a job offer casually given because the guy you built rapport with over months made a joke about browsers, and you joked about using internet explorer?
What if you got a job offer from a consultant friend one time and he asked you to write validation and testing code in javascript for amazon's cloud, and you completely screwed the pooch because you spent the entire time thinking you had to make it *work* and not just *look* correct, when all along he just wanted what amounted to *correct looking* code, and your gut had told you the same, but you ignored it, because the world can't possibly work like that, where people give anyone a chance or the benefit of the doubt, and any slip up or shortcoming means you were never really worthy to begin with.
What if you thought you could, but you'd been raised your entire life to *believe* you couldn't?3 -
TLDR: Read the post.
Part of me watches the day fly by as I work through the various stories and issues my company has as we walk through the various phases and clean up of their own stupidity of outsourcing. I guess it would be unfair to say “stupidity” It was really a money thing. Excuses aside, the alcohol today tastes amazing as I work through the issues, nothing is ever the same, nothing is ever redundant or boring. There are times where you want to pull your hair out, jump off a building and question why the hell any one would write code, specifically Laravel this way.
I watch the internet from now and then and see the cry babies whine and complain about GitHub and Microsoft jumping into bed and their favourite, and mine too, editor falling into Microsoft’s hands.
It’s disgusting and completely childish, but I digress. The last time I was here the alcoholism and the loneliness had begun pushing me towards the Nicotine and suicide. I have managed to obviously push through and watch the money come in only for adult life to take it away, I guess that’s life. Complaining about it will do nothing other then show others how much control you lack in your own life. You quiet your complaints and bury them deep inside your mind where they fester and stir and become drowned in alcohol.
Dating is even harder, especially when you work from home, so much so that I have completely given up there, any semblance of social life is buried in Final Fantasy 14 online, where pixels and text other people write have become my friend, at least for a moment or two before the work takes over and I sit in a room blaring music and watching the code I write, appear on screen like some savant who has high functioning autism but can create amazing works of art. I don’t think I am autistic though.
The truth is I don’t mind my job, I love the money and the freedom as I stated before.
Code for me is like a seed of anger that starts deep in my core, festering, eating away at me, killing me slowly and branding me a fool. The problem is the best feeling, when there is a problem I can solve it with code, when there is a problem that cannot be solved by code I take solace in the problems that can be. I don’t like people, I hate offices and I despise dealing with my own personal issues, I would rather drink and vape until the nicotine and the alcohol has made me sufficiently numb.
Code is a place I can escape, a place I have control, a place where I don’t feel like blowing my brains out at the stupidity of other people. Have I mentioned that I hate people?
The internet is full of idiots, people ranting and raving about this and that and how it affects them oh so much, when they don’t even let their own code, there own programming problems, and in most cases shitty solutions, affect them. Look at this GitHub thing, the idiots are running around with their heads cut off, waiting for the world to end or in most cases acting like it has. Companies get bought, bill get paid, people leave each other – Shut the fuck up and deal with it.
I guess if you look back at what I have written you could say the same thing to me, boo-fucking-hoo working from home sucks sometimes, grow up and deal with it like an adult. Fair enough, I’ll take my lumps. Excuse me as I continue to drink this post away and watch the downvotes come in. I guess honesty comes with a double edge sword.
And yes I would rather use alcohol as a solution then deal with the issues.16 -
Getting my own island where the weather is always good, the beaches are white, the water is blue, the food is plenty and good, the internet is fast and I have a lot of servants to do all my chores. My wife and kids can also come and I'm free to invite whoever I want, whenever I want.
What? Nobody said it had to be about programming! 😱1 -
Like a lot of school kids in the UK, I learned BASIC on a BBC Model B and later BASIC/COMAL on my Archimedes A3000.
It taught almost nothing relevant to real programming. A terrible and inefficient way to learn! But there were no better resources then. No Internet access. -
1000 lines of css is still smaller then most images optimized for modern displays (aka everything that isn't a thumbnail). Either our designers don't come up with stuff complex enough to validate adding a compilation step to interpreted code or I'm missing something,
I've been looking into CSS preprocessors. Can anyone give me an example of why you'd use one that isn't some lame programming platitude like "pushing technology forward"? Like an actual design element that can't be done in straight up CSS?
As someone who compiled AS3 for the web back in the day the "new wave" of internet technology (with all it's compilation steps) seems super dodgy.4 -
I discovered programming around the age of 12, when my parents bought their first computer:
A Pentium II, 233 MHz monster with Windoozle 95 and even 2 USB ports. Additionally we had an internet connection on crazy fast 56k. The machine was as slow as a snail on heroin, but I soon started to dig around in the file explorer and system control panel.
Searching the interwebs by what the obscure file endings meant, I found some mailing lists about quickbasic and one about C.
QuickBasic was pretty easy and it didnt take long to get some beep abuse script running and a basic text "game". Later on I got into HTML and PHP.
Being still somewhat of a child at that time, QuickBasic really opened my mind to imagine what else could be possible by using just a computer, your brain and lots of willpower.
It was the moment I realized, I wanted to really get into programming or electronics after school.
Hey baby, wanna go to my place and do some QuickBasic and chill? 😏💦 -
I knew programming was for me, MUCH later in life.
I loved playing with computers growing up but it wasn't until college that I tried programming ... and failed...
At the college I was at the first class you took was a class about C. It was taught by someone who 'just gets it', read from a old dusty book about C, that assumes you already know C... programming concepts and a ton more. It was horrible. He read from the book, then gave you your assignment and off you went.
This was before the age when the internet had a lot of good data available on programming. And it didn't help that I was a terrible student. I wasn't mature enough, I had no attention span.
So I decide programming is not for me and i drop out of school and through some lucky events I went on to make a good career in the tech world in networking. Good income and working with good people and all that.
Then after age 40... I'm at a company who is acquired (approved by the Trump administration ... who said there would be lots of great jobs) and they laid most people off.
I wasn't too sad about the layoffs that we knew were comming, it was a good career but I was tiring on the network / tech support world. If you think tech debt is bad, try working in networking land where every protocols shortcomings are 40+ years in the making and they can't be fixed ... without another layer of 20 year old bad ideas... and there's just no way out.
It was also an area where at most companies even where those staff are valued, eventually they decide you're just 'maintenance'.
I had worked really closely with the developers at this company, and I found they got along with me, and I got along with them to the point that they asked some issues be assigned to me. I could spot patterns in bugs and provide engineering data they wanted (accurate / logical troubleshooting, clear documentation, no guessing, tell them "i don't know" when I really don't ... surprising how few people do that).
We had such a good relationship that the directors in my department couldn't get a hold of engineering resources when they wanted ... but engineering would always answer my "Bro, you're going to want to be ready for this one, here's the details..." calls.
I hadn't seen their code ever (it was closely guarded) ... but I felt like I 'knew' it.
But no matter how valuable I was to the engineering teams I was in support... not engineering and thus I was expendable / our department was seen / treated as a cost center.
So as layoff time drew near I knew I liked working with the engineering team and I wondered what to do and I thought maybe I'd take a shot at programming while I had time at work. I read a bunch on the internet and played with some JavaScript as it was super accessible and ... found a whole community that was a hell of a lot more helpful than in my college years and all sorts of info on the internet.
So I do a bunch of stuff online and I'm enjoying it, but I also want a classroom experience to get questions answered and etc.
Unfortunately, as far as in person options are it felt like me it was:
- Go back to college for years ---- un no I've got fam and kids.
- Bootcamps, who have pretty mixed (i'm being nice) reputations.
So layoff time comes, I was really fortunate to get a good severance so I've got time ... but not go back to college time.
So I sign up for the canned bootcamp at my local university.
I could go on for ages about how everyone who hates boot camps is wrong ... and right about them. But I'll skip that for now and say that ... I actually had a great time.
I (and the handful of capable folks in the class) found that while we weren't great students in the past ... we were suddenly super excited about going to class every day and having someone drop knowledge on us each day was ultra motivating.
After that I picked up my first job and it has been fun since then. I like fixing stuff, I like making it 'better' and easier to use (for me, coworkers, and the customer) and it's fun learning / trying new things all the time. -
- I love blowing my mind. Even if it is the most confusing thing. Things like security mechanisms, neurons' behaviors, mathematics (even tho I hate it when I fail lol), electronics, medical terminology and chemistry.
- I love collecting rare coins, personally never-seen stones and put them into my collection. I love to be a designer. Not only on my laptop. I have a book shelf and within that book shelf I put stones that create the yin yang sign while pushing the books to two sides. That makes them look like they are levitating. I have stones (including obsidian) that create a triangle and a knife hanging down the wall of my room.
- I love visiting touristic, historic, naturally-beautiful but also non-touristic (non-touristic? yes. by that I mean visiting e.g. the areas of touristic cities which are dangerous, because you can easily fall down off of a slippery ground and take serious injuries) places around the globe, talk to complete strangers in public (I am trying to be an extrovert), take pictures with my camera and collecting antiquities.
- I love taking risks (no. I don't play any poker games etc on the internet) without trying to put other people in risk. Driving insanely with whatever I have. Car, bike, you name it.
- I love reading books. Books that are about human psychology, fantasy novels and books about programming languages.
- I love to cook (I am at the beginning).
- I love to use the konMari method of tidying up my room.
- I love plants.
- I love having everything in my room tidied up (even if I am too busy with other stuff and skip this cleaning process for a week upto a month sometimes. Sorry, room.).
- I love doing sports. But mostly sport that I have never tried before. This can be, because of my greedy wish for an adrenaline kick. That led me into taking a balloon flight at 4 am (sunrise) and to paragliding at sunset above Mediterranean sea btw. (I am normally afraid of flying, but paragliding was awesome).
- I love swimming. Like, you cannot pull me out of the sea for a minimum of 2 hours, if it is not important.
- I love laying above the sea water and let the sea carry me to somewhere else.
- I love being alone. I love the silence. I love to be free in my thoughts.
- I love watching the sunset, the light that shines through the forest, the moonlight and the stars at night.
- I love dreaming. No, like, lucid dreaming for example.
- I love being open to any opinions.
- I love to learn about other people's views about the world and their religion.
- I love pets and would do anything to keep them alive when they are ill. It hurts my heart seeing them like this.
- I love watching demonic "A: Holy shit! Did you see this thing, too?! B: Yes!" YouTube videos just for the fun of it, but I hate horror movies and games.
- I love trying out new things. The creation of music and video for example.
- I love to give my hair and beard a shape, if I am too lazy to go to the barbershop lol. By that I don't mean just going to the barbershop, but taking an electric razor and cutting my hair myself even if I get bad results from time to time that can be corrected by letting any family member tell me in which area of of my head the hair problem is.
- I don't like disco clubs.
- I don't like toxic people even though I can be a quite toxic person myself without realizing it. If I appear toxic to you, inform me about it. Having so much testosterone in that moment, can make me do things that I don't want to do.
- I don't like drugs even tho I have to admit that I am trying a few from time to time (maybe 6 months in-between) to have a dopamine kick. I am not an addict.
- I hate myself for things that I did in the past.
- I used to watch MMA videos etc.
- I used to use a telescope, but I can't find it anymore.
- I used to have a microscope, but I can't find it anywhere and besides of that the seller did literally piss in it before selling it to me many years ago. Don't want to touch it tbh.
- I used to play games, but I don't enjoy games anymore. That makes me feel sad.
- I miss the old moments of my life.
In conclusion:
I like how things went and go so far. It changed me so much. It made me a good and a bad person. I became more open and confident, but it also particularly made me a leader who can say "fuck off" in a bad way to his family. I would like to undo this particular part of me.5 -
As a student, am I the only one that surfs the internet for a significant amount of time to find out the best IDE for a specific programming language, only to then install multiple of them and test them out myself? The ones I don't stick with are still collecting dust in my laptop... dunno why I don't uninstall them.1
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TL;DR I just recently started my apprenticeship, it's horrible so far, I want to quit, but don't know what to do next...
Okay, first of all, hey there! My name is Cave and I haven't been on here for a while, so I hope the majority of you is doing rather okay. I'm programming for 6 years now, have some work experience already, since I used to volunteer for a company for half a year, in which I discovered my love for integrations and stuff. These background information will probably be necessary to understand my agony in full extend.
So, okay, this is about my apprenticeship. Generally speaking, I was expecting to work, and to learn something, gaining experience. So far, it only involved me, reading through horrible code, fixing and replacing stuff for them, I didn't learn a thing yet, and we are already a month in.
When I said the code is horrible, well, it is the worst I have ever seen since I started programming. Little documentation - if any -, everywhere you look there is deprecated code, which may or may not been commented out, often loops or simply methods seem to be foreign for them, as the code is cluttered with copy paste code everywhere and on top of that all, the code is slow as heck, like wtf.
I spent my past month with reading their code, trying to understand what most of this nonsense is for, and then just deleting and rewriting it entirely. My code suddenly is only 5% or their size and about 1000 times faster. Did I mention I am new to this programming language yet? That I have absolutely no experience in that programming language? Because well I am new and don't have any experience, yet, I have little to no struggle doing it better.
Okay, so, imagine, you started programming like 20 years ago, you were able to found your own business, you are getting paid a decent amount of money, sounds alright, right? Here comes the twist: you have been neglecting every advancement made in developing software for the past 20 years, yup, that's what it feels like to work here.
At this point I don't even know, like is this normal? Did git, VSCode and co. spoil me? Am I supposed to use ancient software with ancient programming languages to make my life hell? Is programming supposed to be like this? I have no clue, you tell me, I always thought I was doing stuff right.
Well, this company is not using git, infact, they have every of their project in a single folder and deleting it by accident is not that hard, I almost did once, that was scary. I started out working locally, just copying files, so shit like that won't happen, they told me to work directly in the source. They said it's fine, that's why you can see 20 copies of the folder, in the same folder... Yes, right, whatever.
I work using a remote desktop, the server I work on is Windows server 2008, you want to make icons using gimp? Too bad, Gimp doesn't support windows server 2008, I don't think anything does anymore, at least I haven't found anything, lol.
They asked me to integrate Google Maps into their projects, I thought it is gonna be fun, well, turns out their software uses internet explorer 9.. and Google maps api does not support internet explorer 9... I ended up somehow installing CEF3 on that shit and wrote an API for it in JS. Writing the API was actually kind of fun, but integrating it in their software sucked and they told me I will never integrate stuff ever again, since they usually don't do that. I mean, they don't have a Backend as far as I can tell, it looks like stuff directly connects with their database, so I believe them, but you know... I love integrating stuff..
So at this point you might be thinking, then why don't you just quit? Well I would, definitely. I'm lucky that till December I can quit without prior notice, just need a resignation as far as I can tell, but when I quit, what do I do next? Like, I volunteered for a company for half a year and I'd argue I did a good job, but with this apprenticeship it only adds up to about 7 months of actual work experience. Would anybody hire somebody with this much actual work experience? I also consider doing freelancing, making a living out of just integrating stuff, but would people pay for that? And then again, would they hire somebody with this much experience? I don't want to quit without a plan on what to do next, but I have no clue.
Am I just spoiled, is programming really just like that, using ancient tools and stuff? Let me know. Advice is welcomed as well, because I'm at a loss. Thanks for reading.10 -
Not really a programming rant, but still very annoying. It is almost 2017 and so I will need to get my health insurance sort out. You would think that it isn't that big of a deal, but almost everything can only be done by calling the insurance company. Even when you can log in with digID (a dutch digital identification system), you still can't change the insurance on the internet.
Come on guys we live in 2016! Something simple like insurances should you be able to fix online!4 -
At 7, I found the ZX-81 of my dad in the attic, then learn BASIC with books. I got some LOGO lessons at school, then we got internet at home around '96, and discover web programming... many years and langages later, I am freelance web developer and teach code in High School. :)
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can anyone educate me more about computer networking as a career?
Routers , protocols , network towers, 4g/5g , internet, firewalls, wired/wireless etc , these must be part of some kind of decent job i guess? (I mean there are those guys who just know how to install these in people's systems and then there are guys who are researching and learning about these systems).
- What is the job opportunity? how and when can we start a career there?
- How difficult it is to reach telecom giants like cisco, at&t , airtel, google fiber etc ?
- How interesting is the work there?
- what programming knowledge should we know or we will be learning about?
- How stable is the career there?4 -
At the beginning of a master course at my university the students need to do a little task to ensure they know fundamentals about programming. 70% fails the test. They had no Internet access but a reference card for c, c++, Java & python. Is this really that hard?
16 -
Business Manager loses internet connection, panics and everyone calls over the two programmers to sort it out all of this while we're converting 7 pages written during the caveman days under direct command of the CEO... We call the head of IT (who had never been in IT before) who couldn't know much less about programming and he bitches to us about the importance of his work, which is basically sitting on his ass doing inventory1
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Okay so , I asked something about my supervisor about a certain thing in programming. And they were like " do search about it"..... 🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂If I find that on internet I would never ask you. You are on the least priority, to ask. Like? Can you be just tell ? You are experienced and I'm industry for years and me who just join 4 days ago....
Tsk tsk5 -
I started learning programming in community college, starting with Visual Basic, Java, and C++. Because of life stuff getting in the way, though, my learning progress has been very sporadic. Fast forward to today, it's like I'm learning all over again, but this time, with more support from meetup groups and resources on the Internet.
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THIS is powering the internet:
"[...] was a protocol number, similar to the third argument to socket today. Specifying this structure was the only way to specify the protocol family. Therefore, in this early system the PF_ values were used as structure tags to specify the protocol family in the sockproto structure, and the AF values were used as structure tags to specify the address family in the socket address structures. The sockproto structure is still in 44BSD (pp. 626-627 of TCPv2) but is only used internally by the kernel. The original definition had the comment "protocol family" for the sp_family member, but this has been changed to "address family" in the 4.4BSD source code. To confuse this difference between the AF_ and PF_ constants even more, the Berkeley kernel data structure that contains the value that is compared to the first argument to socket (the dom family member of the domain structure, p. 187 of TCPv2) has the comment that it contains an AF_ value. But some of the domain structures within the kernel are initialized to the corresponding AF value (p. 192 of TCPv2) while others are initialized to the PF value." Richard Stevens 'Unix network programming' -
So, to keep a long story short, I am for the second time in my life the proud owner of a Macintosh Performa 6115CD in working order. The original Descent is just as fun as I remember it being—after taking a day to remember the best control configuration for keyboard.
I've got some ideas on how to get it online* so that I can transfer things to it.
Just for fun, however, I've been thinking it might be an interesting project to try and do some programming for it. I got my start on this setup, though not in Objective-C. Anyone happen to know of any free/abandonware coding setups for classic Mac? Running 7.5.3 at the moment.
* Link: https://metalbabble.wordpress.com/2... -
1. What do you think about this kind of companies that "teach programming" and students pay when they get a job ? Given the amount of information available on the internet, I don't think they worth it.
2. Have you heard about this one? Someone asked me, but after googling I didn't like it. Their curriculum looks like a collage.
https://www.holbertonschool.com/3
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