Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
-
I want to pay respects to my favourite teacher by far.
I turned up at university as a pretty arrogant person. This was because I had about 6 years of self-taught programming experience, and the classes started from the ansolute basics. I turned up to my first classes and everything was extremely easy. I felt like I wouldn't learn anything for at least a year.
Then, I met one of my lecturers for the first time. He was about 50~60 years old and had been programming for all of his career. He was known by everyone to be really strict and we were told by other lecturers that it could be difficult for some people to be his student.
His classes were awesome. He was friendly, but took absolutely no shit, and told everything as it was. He had great stories from his life, which he used to throw out during the more boring computer science topics. He had extremely strict rules for our programming style, and bloody good reasons for all of them. If we didn't follow a clear rule on an assignment, he'd give us 0%. To prove how well this worked, nobody got 0%.
We eventually learned that he was that way because he used to work on real-time systems for the military, where if something didn't work then people could die.
This was exactly what I needed. In around one semester I went from a capable self-taught kid, to writing code that was clear, maintainable and fast, without being hacky.
I learned so much in just that small time, and I owe it all to him. So often when I write code now I think back to his rules. Even if I disagree with some, I learned to be strict and consistent.
Sadly, during the break between our first and second year, he passed away due to illness. There was so many lessons still to be learned from him, and there's now no teachers with enough knowledge to continue his best modules like compiler writing.
He is greatly missed, I've never had greater respect for a teacher than for him.21 -
My company just fired 20 people, and the next day instuted a program so salaried employees have to clock in and out. Of course not to effect our pay, just to keep their paranoid asses breathing down our necks. Also, no clocking in remotely so all the work I do from home won't be taken into account. Fucking micromanaging, ball-licking, scum-fuck, MBA, morons couldn't run a company if their lives depended on it. When will these soul-less, suit-wearing, shit-scarffers learn that treating your employees with respect and valueing actual work over bullshit metrics, is a better business strategy than treating them like fucking sheep to the slaughter. Fml, I gotta find a new job...33
-
Tldr :
Office Building : 1
Population: 5000
Number of PC users: 5000
No of Spare mice: 0
Day 1:
Training period commences.
My mouse laser sensor doesn't work.
Solution: Use this mouse to log in to your system.
Open the company portal.
Connect to vpn.
Enter username password.
Create a ticket for mouse replacement.
Done.
Day 3
I bring my own mouse.
Confiscated at security.
Becomes a security violation.
Day 9
I get a call from helpdesk.
Agent- what is the problem?
Me- my mouse is not working.
Agent- why?
Me- what do you mean? Something is wrong with the sensor.
Agent- clean the sensor.
Disconnects call.
Marks ticket as resolved.
Me- WTF just happened!
Naturally, I escalate the issue.
Day 15
Level 2 Agent- what happened? Why have you escalated the issue?
Me- I need a mouse, waiting since 2 weeks.
Him- No mouse is available
Me- you don't have a single spare mouse available in an office with 5000 PC users?
Him- no they're out of stock.
Me- when will it be back in stock?
Him- we will 'soon' launch a tender for quotations from sellers.
Me- time?
Him- 1 week.
Day 34
I email the head of supplies for the city office. Next day I get a used super small mouse, which doesn't have a left button. Anyways, I've given up hope now.
Day 45
I become a master at keyboard shortcuts.
Finish my training.
Get transferred to another city.
No mouse till date.
Surprisingly, this was one of the top recruiters in my country. Never knew, MNCs can be so so inefficient for such simple tasks.
Start-ups are way better in this regard. Latest tech, small community, minimal bureaucracy and a lot of respect and things to learn.15 -
I think I've shown in my past rants and comments that I'm pretty experienced. Looking back though, I was really fucking stupid. Since I haven't posted a rant yet on the weekly topics, I figure I would share this humbling little gem.
Way back in the ancient era known as 2009, I was working my first desk job as a "web designer". Apparently the owner of this company didn't know the difference between "designer", which I'm not, and "developer", which I am, nor the responsibilities of each role.
It was a shitty job paying $12/hour. It was such a nightmare to work at. I guess the silver lining is that this company now no longer exists as it was because of my mistake, but it was definitely a learning experience I hold in high regard even today. Okay, enough filler...
I was told to wipe the Dev server in order to start fresh and set up an entirely new distro of Linux. I was to swap out the drives with whatever was available from the non-production machines, set up the RAID 5 array and route it through the router and firewall, as we needed to bring this Dev server online to allow clients to monitor the work. I had no idea what any of this meant, but I was expected to learn it that day because the next day I would be commencing with the task.
Astonishingly, I managed to set up the server and everything worked great! I got a pat on the back and the boss offered me a 4 day weekend with pay to get some R&R. I decided to take the time to go camping. I let him know I would be out of town and possibly unreachable because of cell service, to which he said no problem.
Tuesday afternoon I walked into work and noticed two of the field techs messing with the Dev server I built. One was holding a drive while the other was holding a clipboard. I was immediately called into the boss's office.
He told me the drives on the production server failed during the weekend, resulting in the loss of the data. He then asked me where I got the drives from for the Dev server upgrade. I told him that they came from one of the inactive systems on the shelf. What he told me next through the deafening screams rendered me speechless.
I had gutted the drives from our backup server that was just set up the week prior. Every Friday at midnight, it would turn on through a remote power switch on a schedule, then the system would boot and proceed to copy over the production server's files into an archive for that night and shutdown when it completed. Well, that last Friday night/Saturday morning, the machine kicked on, but guess what didn't happen? The files weren't copied. Not only were they not copied, but the existing files that got backed up previously we're gone. Why? Because I wiped those drives when I put them into the Dev server.
I would up quitting because the conversation was very hostile and I couldn't deal with it. The next week, I was served with a suit for damages to this company. Long story short, the employer was found in the wrong from emails I saved of him giving me the task and not once stating that machine was excluded in the inactive machines I could salvage drives from. The company sued me because they were being sued by a client, whose entire company presence was hosted by us and we lost the data. In total just shy of 1TB of data was lost, all because of my mistake. The company filed for bankruptcy as a result of the lawsuit against them and someone bought the company name and location, putting my boss and its employees out of a job.
If there's one lesson I have learned that I take with the utmost respect to even this day, it's this: Know your infrastructure front to back before you change it, especially when it comes to data.8 -
Disclaimer: kinda non dev related. Just working to pay the bills right now.
The other day I ran for the train to work, don't want to be fucking late, right?
Arrived and this guy asked me this: (I have a sweating/transpiration problem but I'm fully aware of that)
"hey man, ever heard of fucking showers or deodorant?!"
Yes, I was sweating my ass off and you could smell me but I can't FUCKING help that.
It was very embarrassing and humiliating to get that kinda comment in front of like 30 people but I just swallowed it and went to work.
After the first break, a woman from management came to me and pulled me aside. A few people had complained about how that guy from before said some pretty humiliating stuff to me and she said that the guy received a warning and was told to fucking learn to treat people with respect, regardless of their (health) issues/appearance. I also got an apology and a sorry and if I could keep my eyes open for such behaviour in the future.
I'm very glad that she apologized although it wasn't her fault because I know I've got this health issue and I can't do anything about it yet but it can MOTHERFUCKING hurt when someone talks shit about me when I smell and I CAN'T FUCKING HELP IT BECAUSE THIS IS THE WAY MY BODY WORKS TOO BADLY.
I felt protected and safe about my issue for the first time in my life.
Thanks management!14 -
Impostor vs Kenner syndrome
We got a new kid which does his internship from school. We talked and he asked me what stuff I had done with 14 - 16. I remembered with 14 I was really into reverse engineering, assembler and c/c++ but never managed to actually build something.
So he started to say stuff like he could replace me in an instant and he should get paid for this internship at least as much as I did, because he made some websites and games already.
I really was down. Kids today get a lot of shit done and I was a disappointing lazy little shit just playing games and try to reverse engineer stuff and learn assembler and c++.
It's been month and shit hit me when I've seen his stuff was copy pasted from a tutorial/ YouTube video.
Today's ressources, languages, frameworks make it really easy to build something but I still got respect for everyone every age who is interested and get into programming and stuff.
But I hope you'll read this you little shit and realise that you can use a simple physics engine by copy and pasting code. So don't talk disrespectful to people in general especially when they can create a whole game and physics engine.14 -
To those that think they can't make it.
To those that are put down by those that don't understand you.
And to those that have never had a dream come true.
Not a rant, but the story of how I got into programming
I've always been into tech/electronics. I remember being told once that when I was 3, I used to take plug sockets to pieces. When I was 7, I built a computer with my dad.
There isn't a thing in my room that hasn't been dismantled and put back together again. Except for the things that weren't put back together again ;)
When I was 15, I got a phone for Christmas. It was a pretty crappy phone, the LG P350 (optimus ME). But I loved it all the same.
However I knew it could do a lot more. It ran a bloated, slow version of Android 2.2.
So I went searching, how can I make it faster, how to make it do more. And I found a huge community around Android ROMs. Obviously the first thing I did was flashed this ROM. Sure, there were bugs, but I was instantly in love with it. My phone was freed.
From there I went on to exploring what else can be done.
I wanted to learn how to script, so over the weekend I wrote a 1000 line batch (Windows cmd) script that would root the phone and flash a recovery environment onto it. Pretty basic. Lots of switch statements, but I was proud of it. I'd achieved something. It wasn't new to the world, but it was my first experience at programming.
But it wasn't enough, I needed more.
So I set out to actually building the roms. I installed Linux. I wanted to learn how to utilise Linux better, so I rewrote my script in bash.
By this time, I'd joined a team for developing on similar spec'd phones. Without the funds to by new devices, we began working on more radical projects.
Between us, we ported newer kernels to our devices. We rebased much of the chipset drivers onto newer equivalents to add new features.
And then..
Well, it was exam season. I was suffering from personal issues (which I will not detail), and that, with the work on Android, I ended up failing the exams.
I still passed, but not to the level I expected.
So I gave up on school, and went head first into a new kind of development. "continue doing what you love. You'll make it" is what I told myself.
I found python by contributing to an IRC bot. I learnt it by reading the codebase. Anything I didn't understand, I researched. Anything I wanted to do, google was there to help me through it.
Then it was exam season again. Even though I'd given up on school, I was still going. It was easier to stay in than do anything about it.
A few weeks before the exams, I had a panic attack. I was behind on coursework, and I knew I would do poorly on exams.
So I dropped out.
I was disappointed, my family was disappointed.
So I did the only thing I felt I could do. I set out to get a job as a developer.
At this stage, I'd not done anything special. So I started aiming bigger. Contributing to projects maintained by Sony and Google, learning from them. Building my own projects to assist with my old Android friends.
I managed to land a contract, however due to the stresses at home, I had to drop it after a month.
Everything was going well, I felt ready to get a full time job as a developer, after 2 years of experience in the community.
Then I had to wake up.
Unfortunately, my advisors (I was a job seeker at the time) didn't understand the potential of learning to be a developer. With them, it's "university for a skilled job".
They see the word "computer" on a CV, they instantly say "tech support".
I played ball, I did what I could for them. But they'd always put me down, saying I wasn't good enough, that I'd never get a job.
I hated them. I'd row with them every other day.
By God, I would prove them wrong.
And then I found them. Or, to be more precise, they found me. A startup in London got in contact with me. They seemed like decent people. I spoke with their developers, and they knew their stuff, these were people that I can learn from.
I travelled 4 hours to go for an interview, then 4 hours back.
When I got the email saying they'd move me to London, I was over the moon.
I did exactly what everyone was telling me I couldn't do.
1.5 years later, I'm still working with them. We all respect each other, and we all learn from each other.
I'm ever grateful to them for taking a shot with me. I had no professional experience, and I was by no means the most skilled individual they interviewed.
Many people have a dream. I won't lie, I once dreamed of working at Google. But after the journey I've been through, I wouldn't have where I am now any other way. Though, in time, I wish to share this dream with another.
I hope that all of you reach your dreams too.
Sorry for the long post. The details are brief, but there are only 5k characters ;)23 -
Had a PM in my programming class say "I want to understand what my team is going through, so I want to learn to code and the like, really to be a jack of all trades to better myself and my team" 👏 I respect that.2
-
We have a group slack chat for my class which was intended to be a space for asking questions about assignments and getting help from your peers. Instead it has become a dick measuring contest in there where guys who know very little can act all high and mighty about their (plain wrong, in some instances) facts they're distributing without care. It pisses me off so much seeing how toxic it has become in there. It's the same 5 guys using it to bully each other and God forbid anyone else asks a question, they'll be mocked for not being confident handing in a solution they aren't sure is right. Why can't people treat each other with respect? We're in school to LEARN. Not impress other students with how much (read: little) we know. GJ, guys. You created a smaller version of stack overflow.4
-
I started to get super pissed off to people saying you don’t need a college, masters degree to get an IT job. Instead go and gain practical knowledge, showing your practical certificates projects is much better than a having a degree that doesn’t prove if you can do the job or not.
Is a degree absolutely necessary to get a job? No, I agree on that. You can tear yourself apart to be known make projects loads of people contribute in GitHub spend maybe years on practicing and creating stuff for your portfolio..
But excuse me what do you think people do in college studying degrees? Are we getting it from the shop in the corner on a Saturday?
Respect people’s achievements and titles. Especially Masters degrees push you hard, make you sweat apart from loads of courses you work at least a year on a practical project, dissertation, thesis and only pass if it is your own opinion and findings. It is not like a multiple choice exam certificate or you study watch videos for few months and create a web page.
Don’t throw shit on people’s efforts and accomplishments without knowing how it is achieved just because you don’t have it.
Yes it is not necessary. Does it make you learn? Yes! Is it practical? Yes! Does it help you get a job? Hell yes! Why most companies look for degrees? Do you think they might know what it takes to get it and the skills and knowledge you gain?
Don’t come and say in IT degrees not worth it without even knowing how to draw UML. Without knowing IT management you go and be a leader later on, no clue on how to manage projects, people and soft skills sweeping the floor.
It doesn’t matter if you are a YouTube celebrity or a president. What does the title say? “Master” now go, respect and digest it! Don’t be a sour loser.
Ooh I am fierce today and not done yet12 -
'Sup mates.
First rant...
So Here's a story of how I severely messed up my mental health trying to fit in university.
But the bonus: Found my passion.
Her we go,
Went to university thinking it'll be awesome to learn new stuff.
1st sem was pure shock - Programming was taught at the speed of V2 rockets.
Everything was centred around marks.
Wanted to get a good run in 2nd sem, started to learn Vector design, but RIP- Hospitalized for Staph infection, missed the whole sem and was in recovery for 3 months.
So asked uni for financial assistance as I had to re-register the courses the next semester. They flat out refused, not even in this serious of a case.
So, time to register courses for third semester, turns out most of the 2nd year courses are full, I had to take 3rd year courses like:
Social and Informational Networks
Human Computer Interaction
Image processing
And
Parallel and Distributed Computing (They had no prerequisites listed, for the cucks they are: BIG MISTAKE)
Turns out the first day of classes that I attend, the Image proc. teacher tells me that it's gonna be difficult for 2nd years so I drop it, as the PDC prof. also seconds that advice.
Time travel 2 months in: The PDC prof is a bitch, doesn't upload any notes at all and teaches like she's on Velocity-9 while treating this subject like a competition on who learns the most rather than helping everyone understand.
Doesn't let students talk to each other in lab even if one wants to clear their friend's doubt, "Do it on your own!" What the actual fuck?
Time for term end exams and project submission: Me and 3 seniors implement a Distributed File System in python and show it to her, she looks satisfied.
Project Results: Everyone else got 95/100
I got 76.
She's so prejudiced that she thinks that 2nd years must have been freeloaders while I put my ass on turbo for the whole sem, learning to code while tackling advanced concepts to the point that I hated to code.
I passed the course with a D grade.
People with zero consideration for others get absolutely zero respect from me.
Well it's safe to say that I went Nuclear(heh.. pun..) at this point, Mentally I was in such a bad place that I broke down.... Went into depression but didn't realise it.
But,
I met a senior in my HCI class that I did a project with, after which I discovered we had lots of similar interests.
We became good friends and started collaborating on design projects and video game prototyping.
Enter the 4th sem and holy mother of God did I got some bad bad profs....
Then it hit me
I have been here for two years, put myself through the meat grinder and tore my soul into shreds.
This Is Not Me
This Wont Be The End Of Me
I called up my sister in London and just vented all my emotions in front of her.
Relief.
Been a long time since I felt that.
I decided to go for what I truly feel passionate about: Game Design
So I am now trying to apply for Universities which have specialised courses for game design.
I've got my groove again, learnt to live again.
Learning C# now.
:)
It's been a long hello, and If you've reached till here somehow, then damn, you the MVP.
Peace.9 -
My apprentice quit!
Posted the other day about him quitting ...
He did ( he could of read the old post )
Just took him two days to do it
Worst fucking thing he fell asleep this morning on his way to work , so he's late anyway 9 start time actually arrives 9:40 .... ! Normally today it was 10:50 till he arrived... On a day he quits
Now he expects me to pay him extra money .... Holiday days etc ...
I want an apprentice who wants to be good at software 😐
Thing is he said it's not what he wants , I think development is something you learn to love.. because of the challenges. You always when starting out facing huge brick walls you have to get through.
Some people just don't have the capacity to get through them. I think. Developer has to love the difficulty .. you fail multiple times before the finished product ... All the errors. Little fixes no one sees.
It takes dedication.... Hard work to be the best. He didn't get that.
I now have more respect for other devs ( I had a lot already ) knowing that we all went through all of that and now. We are people with true talents.3 -
Continuation from :
https://devrant.io/rants/835693/...
Hi everybody! I am sorry that as a first time poster I am building 2 long stories, but I really like the idea of connecting with other people here!
Well, as I was mentioning before, I got a job in Android development and had a blast with it. Me and the developer clicked and would spend our time discussing PHP, the move to other stacks (I was making him love the idea of Django or Spring Java) games, bands and cool stuff like that. This dude was my hero, his own stack was developed in a similar MVC fashion that he had implemented from scratch before for many projects. It was through him that I learned how to use my own code (rather than frameworks and other libraries) to build what I wanted. I seriously thought that I had it made with a position that respected me and placed me in the lead mobile development position of the company. Then it happened. He had taken 2 weeks of unauthorized leave, which was ok since he was best friends with the owner of the company, those 2 along another asshole started it so they could do whatever they wanted. And I could not make much progress without him being there since there were things that he needed to do, that I was not allowed, for me to continue. When he came back I was quickly rushed to the owner of the company's office to discuss my lack of progress. The lead developer was livid, as if he knew that he had fucked up. He blamed the whole thing on me (literally told the owner that it was my fault before I was summoned) and that we lost 2 weeks of business time because I did not had the initiative to make progress on my own. I felt absolutely horrible, someone that I had trusted and befriended doing something like that, I really felt like shit. I had mad respect and love for this guy. It got heated, I showed the owner the text messages in which I showed him my pleas to led me finish the parts that were needed while he was away. Funny enough, he acted betrayed. After that it was 3 months of barely talking to one another except for work related stuff. He got cold and would barely let me touch the internal code that he was developing. It was painful. The owner kept complaining about progress and demanded that I do a document scanner for the company, which was to be attached to their mobile application. Not only that but it had to be done with OpenCV. Now, CV is great, but it is its own area, it takes a while to be able to develop something nice with it that is efficient and not a shitstorm.
I had two weeks.
Finished in one. After burning my brain and ensuring that the c++ code was not giving issues and the project was steady I turned it in...to their dismay. And I say so because I felt that they gave me such a huge project with the intention of firing me if it was not done. After that it was constant shit from the owner and the lead developer. I was asked then to port the code to the IOS version. I had some knowledge of it already so I started working on it. Progress was fast since the initial idea was already there and I really love working on Apple devices. And when I was 70% done the owner decided to cut me loose. At first he cited things such as lack of funding and him being unable to pay my salary. I was fine with that even though I knew it was not true. So at the time I just nodded and thanked the company for my time there. Before I left, he decided to blame it on me, stating that if they were not producing money that it was perhaps my fault. I lost my shit, and started using my military voice to explain to him how a software company is normally ran. Then I stormed out.
It was known to me, that the lead developer had actually argued against me being laid off. And that he was upset about it, we made amends, but the fact remains that I was laid off because the owner did not think of me as an asset, regardless of how many times I worked alongside the lead developer or how valuable I was actually to the company, their infrastructure did get better while we worked together, so I just assumed that he never actually did any mention of my value.
I lasted 2 months without a job, feeling horribly shitty because my wife had to work harder to ensure our stability whilst I was without any sort of salary. At this time I had already my degree, so all I had to do was look better. In the meantime I decided to study more about other technologies. I learn React, and got way better at JS and Node that I thought I could and was finally able to get another job as a full stack developer for another company.
I have been here since 2 months. It has been weird, we do classic ASP, which is completely pointless at this time, but meh. At this time though, I just don't really have the same motivation. Its really hard for me to trust the people that I work with and would like to connect with more developers.21 -
- My task is dependent on a senior's.
- I wait for him to finish it for couple of days.
- Once done I went to test it, the value doesn't get updated, it turns out the value is static ... WTFFFFF!
- I assign him a bug task to fix it.
- My task is still pending.
- After couple of days, he assigns me the task of fixing it, with the excuse that he's busy.
Are you fucking serious !!?? What have I done in my life to deserve such senior? all I want is someone I respect and learn from .·´¯`(>▂<)´¯`·. .·´¯`(>▂<)´¯`·.5 -
In the Ruhr area (Germany) we have some very old, very strange words with strange meanings. One of those words is ‚Prutscher‘.
A Prutscher refers to a person who does things but never gets a good result, due to lack of knowledge or simple carelessness. Most of the time, Prutschers are people who are interested in certain subjects and often work in the related jobs, but who lack the motivation to properly train themselves, learn what there is to learn and to always keep up with their technologies .
Here are a few examples I've stumbled upon so far in my career:
- Developers in their 60's who read a book about PHP 25 years ago and decided to become a software developer. Since then haven't read anything about it. Who then now build huge spaghetti monoliths for large companies, in which they prefix every function, every variable and constant with their initials and, of course, use Hungarian notation.
- People who read half a fucking tutorial about <insert any fancy js framework here> and start blogging/tweeting about it
- Senior web developers who need to be told what the fuck CORS is and who can't even recognize CORS related errors in their browser console.
- People who have done nothing else for 18 years than building websites for companies on Wordpress 1.x and writing few lines of PHP and Javascript from time to time. Those who are now applying as a frontend dev due to the difficult economic situation and are surprised that they are not accepted due to a lack of experience.
- Developers who are the only ones working on Windows in the team and ask their Linux colleagues for help when Windows starts bitchin.
- People who have been coding for 30 years, have worked with ~42 languages and don't know the difference between compiled and interpreted languages in the job interview.
- Chief developers at a large newsletter-publisher who think it's a good idea to build your own CMS (due to a lack of good existing ones, of course).
- Developers who have been writing PHP applications for multinational corporations for 25 years and cannot explain how PHP is executed. They don't even know what the fucking OPcache is, let alone fpm. FML
- People who call themselves professional developers but never ever heard of DRY, KISS, boy-scout rule, 12-Factor App, SOLID, Clean Code, Design Patterns, ...
- Senior developers wondering why the bash script won't run on their fucking Windows machine.
- Developers who consider Typescript to be a hindrance and see no value in it.
- Developers using ftp for deployments in 2022
- Senior Javascript Developer applying for a job and for whom Integer is a primitive data type in JS.
- Developers who prefer to code without frameworks and libraries because they are only an unnecessary burden/overhead and you can quickly code everything up yourself.
- Developers who think configuring their server(s) manually is a good idea.
You fucking Prutscher. What you have already cost me in terms of work and nerves. I can't even put it into words how deeply I despise you. I have more respect for the chewing gum that has been stuck in my damn trash can for the past 3 years than I do for you guys. You are the disgrace of our profession. I will haunt you in your dreams and prefix every fucking synapse of your brain with MY initials.
As a well-known german band once sang in a very fitting song: I wouldn't even piss on you if you were on fire.
If you recognized yourself in one of the examples here: FUCK YOU!29 -
Did a bunch more cowboy coding today as I call it (coding in vi on production). Gather 'round kiddies, uncle Logan's got a story fer ya…
First things first, disclaimer: I'm no sysadmin. I respect sysadmins and the work they do, but I'm the first to admit my strengths definitely lie more in writing programs rather than running servers.
Anyhow, I recently inherited someone else's codebase (the story of my profession career, but I digress) and let me tell you this thing has amateur hour written all over it. It's written in PHP and JavaScript by a self-taught programmer who apparently discovered procedural programming and decided there was nothing left to learn and stopped there (no disrespect to self-taught programmers).
I could rant for days about the various problems this codebase has, but today I have a very specific story to tell. A story about errors and logs.
And it all started when I noticed the disk space on our server was gradually decreasing.
So today I logged onto our API server (Ubuntu running Apache/PHP) and did a df -h to check the disk space, and was surprised to see that it had noticeably decreased since the last time I'd checked when everything was running smoothly. But seeing as this server does not store any persistent customer data (we have a separate db server) and purely hosts the stateless API, it should NOT be consuming disk space over time at all.
The only thing I could think of was the logs, but the logs were very quiet, just the odd benign message that was fully expected. Just to be sure I did an ls -Sh to check the size of the logs, and while some of them were a little big, nothing over a few megs. Nothing to account for gigabytes of disk space gradually disappearing.
What could it be? I wondered.
cd ../..
du . | sort --sort=numeric
What's this? 2671132 K in some log folder buried in the api source code? I cd into it and it turns out there are separate PHP log files in there, split up by customer, so that each customer of ours (we have 120) has their own respective error log! (Why??)
Armed with this newfound piece of (still rather unbelievable) evidence I perform a mad scramble to search the codebase for where this extra logging is happening and sure enough I find a custom PHP error handler that is capturing (most) errors and redirecting them to these individualized log files.
Conveniently enough, not ALL errors were being absorbed though, so I still knew the main error_log was working (and any time I explicitly error_logged it would go there, so I was none the wiser that this other error-catching was even happening).
Needless to say I removed the code as quickly as I found it, tail -f'd the error_log and to my dismay it was being absolutely flooded with syntax errors, runtime PHP exceptions, warnings galore, and all sorts of other things.
My jaw almost hit the floor. I've been with this company for 6 months and had no idea these errors were even happening!
The sad thing was how easy to fix all the errors ended up being. Most of them were "undefined index" errors that could have been completely avoided with a simple isset() check, but instead ended up throwing an exception, nullifying any code that came after it.
Anyway kids, the moral of the story is don't split up your log files. It makes absolutely no sense and can end up obscuring easily fixable bugs for half a year or more!
Happy coding.6 -
Not necessarily on here, but Devs tend to bitch about designers and their lack of basic dev skills/understanding (talking about webdev). But when devs try to design it usually ends with a horrendous piece of visual garbage. Respect each others profession and the outcomes will be better. That's why Apple is now one of the most envied companies on the planet.8
-
Complete and total rant:
You know what fucking confuses the holy fucking shit out of me? DESIGN
I have MAD respect for motherfuckers that spend their days tailoring shit away in CSS, writing custom animations and toggles in JS and ensuring that their HTML is pristine as fuck. I really do and in my opinion they should b getting mad props from everyone, because if they so decide to learn GOOD server side scripting then they are most definitely on their way to create some awesome functional and beautiful shit.
But...
I am not a designer by any means of it. And I know that shit is supposed to look good and work across a multitude of devices. Doing something like that takes me a couple of lines of code (granted, after hours of work that is) that may take a designer way less.
But why oh why do I see THOUSANDS of lines of CSS code for shit that does not take me half the amount of work that it takes other people?
Like seriously. I am trying to emulate the menu that university of Chicago uses(as an example for a lil design practice cuz i suck at it) and looking into their CSS I see thooooousands of lines of code to do something that I did in about two hundred.
So wtf man, do I suck so hard that I am missing some serious shit? wtf is happening? This confuses me, because in my mind it should take me just about as much work as it takes them right?
AGAIN MAD RESPECT FOR DESIGNERS -- If you are a designer reading this please tell me wtf is happening14 -
I found university very worthwhile, mainly for what it exposed me to that I wouldn’t have necessarily learned otherwise. University exposed me to a lot of knowledge which allowed me to discover the fields and concepts that really interested me. It also forced me to learn math, and I’ve come to really love mathematics, even though my knowledge is still not that deep. I really respect and appreciate math now that I have more than a superficial understanding of it.
CS-wise, the things that have been most useful in practice have been complexity, data structures, concurrency, and others, but complexity is probably the absolute most important thing to at least learn the basics of.
I would not say that university is a necessity though. You can absolutely get by teaching yourself, especially if you are disciplined/interested enough to keep doing it. The important thing is to learn *what* to learn.2 -
After I spent 4 years in a startup company (it was literally just me and a guy who started it).
Being web dev in this company meant you did everything from A-Z. Mostly though it was shitty hacky "websites/webapps" on one of the 3 shitty CMSs.
At some point we had 2 other devs and 2 designers (thank god he hired some cause previously he tried designing them on his own and every site looked like a dead puppy soaked in ass juice).
My title changed from a peasant web dev to technical lead which meant shit. I was doing normal dev work + managing all projects. This basically meant that I had to show all junior devs (mostly interns) how to do their jobs. Client meetings, first point of contact for them, caring an "out of hours" support phone 24/7, new staff interviews, hiring, training and much more.
Unrealistic deadlines, stress and pulling hair were a norm as was taking the blame anytime something went wrong (which happened very often).
All of that would be fine with me if I was paid accordingly, treated with respect as a loyal part of the team but that of course wasn't the case.
But that wasn't the worst part about this job. The worst thing was the constant feeling that I'm falling behind, so far behind that I'll never be able to catch up. Being passionate about web development since I was a kid this was scaring the shit out of me. Said company of course didn't provide any training, time to learn or opportunities to progress.
After these 4 years I felt burnt out. Programming, once exciting became boring and stale. At this point I have started looking for a new job but looking at the requirements I was sure I ain't going anywhere. You see when I was busy hacking PHP CMSs, OOPHP became a thing and javascript exploded. In the little spare time I had I tried online courses but everyone knows it's not the same, doing a course and actually using certain technology in practice. Not going to mention that recruiters usually expect a number of years of experience using the technology/framework/language.
That was the moment I lost faith in my web dev future.
Happy to say though about a month later I did get a job in a great agency as a front end developer (it felt amazing to focus on one thing after all these years of "full-stack bullshit), got a decent salary (way more than I expected) and work with really amazing and creative people. I get almost too much time to learn new stuff and I got up to speed with the latest tech in a few weeks. I'm happy.
Advice? I don't really have any, but I guess never lose faith in yourself.3 -
! exactly dev
I'd ditched Windows and spent a while exploring the Linux ecosystem for content creation. And I have to say, it was not a nice experience.
As much as I respect the Linux mantra of "free as in freedom" and "you need to roll up your sleeves and figure out stuff on your own", it just isn't good enough for non-dev work. Sorry guys, but I need software that gets out of my way and at least does what it's supposed to do. I can't stand a horrible UI or delays and random crashes, which is exactly what happens with most things under Linux.
To replace my Windows workflow I used the following:
1. Windows -> elementaryOS (because Debian/Ubuntu repositories seem to have the best software support, and elementaryOS is the least horrible looking thing that supports that) and then Arch, because, well, Arch.
2. Blender + Maya -> Blender + Maya on Linux.
3. Reaper + FL Studio -> Ardour + LMMS.
4. Photoshop -> GIMP + Krita + Inkscape.
5. ZBrush -> nothing :(
As you can see, my use cases are pretty much all over the spectrum.
Firstly, installing and configuring stuff. A pleasure on Windows, an absolute pain on Linux. Everything just worked on Windows, I had to wrestle with library versions and patches and unstable audio layers (Linux audio just sucks, except for JACK) on Linux.
Out of these, Blender and Maya were the best experience. But even then, both would suffer from random crashes that just didn't happen on Windows.
Ardour is actually really nice when it works. Its use of JACK for routing makes it really really flexible, but it just isn't stable enough to depend on. LMMS is utter crap. I'm sorry, but I just hate the UI. Can't stand it.
GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape can't beat Photoshop, even when you consider them together. Adobe software workflow is just so much better and more intuitive.
Blender 3D sculpting is not bad, but it's nowhere as good as ZBrush.
Also, if you're a C++ dev like me, nothing beats Visual Studio 2017. Nothing. That IDE just blows everything else out of the water. Even VSCode. And it's not slow at all, it handled a fairly large project (PBRTv3) just fine on my Windows development VM. Yes, a VM.
So...I ditched Linux and went back to Windows, but I keep Linux as a VM for when I actually want to mess with Blender or Ardour. Or some dev stuff which Windows sucks at (which is becoming less frequent because of WSL).
Out of all the above, the only one I'd consider ready for production use would be Blender. Developers of open source software, please learn from Blender. Kickass UI and user friendly operation is extremely important, you can't make a random window with GTK buttons and text boxes and arcane config files and expect people to use it for serious work.
Also, Windows beats Linux hands down as an everyday OS. It's always been rock solid, if you take care of it properly (and that goes for any OS). Updates hardly take any time because I run it on a SSD. As for all the advertising and marketing bullshit, you can block a large amount of stuff. And for what can't be blocked, well, I just have to live with it, because the alternative is compromising on my creative output, which is too much for me.
I still run Linux on my server, though. And on my embedded devices (Pi, BeagleBone, etc.). It absolutely rocks there.
I realize that Linux software is not going to improve unless we do something about it, so I'll be contributing fixes and code (the joys of being a C++ dev, yay). Still, I feel that the platform and software as a whole is just not mature enough.18 -
Why in the world IT work is so stressful?
I never been like that since I start developing code professionally, 8 years ago.
Since then, I had many health problems due stress, and some were really scaring (heart problem).
I'm trying to adapt to a healthier way of work, but I'm starting to doubt if that is possible.
Work in technology seems cruel and soulless sometimes. The constant pressure to learn new things all the time, to specialize in a lot of skills, simultaneously. The urgency nature of ALL tasks - even a simple form field slightly out of place seems to be an issue of life and death for clients.
Easy and quick communication made some people lost boundaries and respect. Many times I received calls and messages after midnight, about things like elements alignment.
And the worst is when clients blame you about their business problems. If they are not selling well this week, it's fault of the website you did ( which they are using for months now).
This actually happened to me today, first thing in the morning. After I slept just 3h, because I worked until late yesterday (oh yeah many more of these life/death updates).
What happens in this industry? Will this ever be different some day?6 -
For the last week or so I've been writing a userbot for Telegram. Completely from scratch, plus Telethon to not reinvent the wheel entirely. I'm coming from the codebase of an existing userbot.
That userbot is written by a good friend of mine, who makes 6 figures, and whom I respect greatly. However the code is a steaming pile of shit. Now that is not his fault, he largely inherited that code too, tried to fix it, failed, gave up.
I am reimplementing it entirely. I'm only looking at the modules, trying to understand them, and copying over the necessary bits and changing them where necessary. But I've come across some nasty shit.
Userbots often edit existing messages from real Telegram clients. They're kind of like a login to your account, but with a program rather than a regular client. You send a message from a real client, it sees it and does whatever it needs to, and edits your message to give you feedback. Which is great.
However, there's no need to do simple string edits by importing "re". So why do you? Because you're an idiot, that's why. The old bot is based on Paperplane, which in turn is based on Telethon. Why do I see function calls to Telethon in some places and Paperplane in others? Because you're an idiot, that's why. Why does the dig module fail to even give correct answers? Because you know nothing about the DNS, that's why. And you didn't learn about RRs before implementing it.
And don't you tell me that this code is shit, and this bot is slow only when I run it on a fucking Pentium. I run this shit on an i7 and CPU isn't even the issue - memory, disk and such are. If you had any clue whatsoever about efficiency, you would've known because it's blatantly obvious. There's a reason why my machines rarely go past 5% CPU utilization. It's the fastest component in the entire fucking system.
When users come and say.. hmm this application of yours, it consumes a lot of memory. It takes a long time to do X and Y and I don't quite understand why, it seems illogical. Then maybe you should go look at your code, like you would look at yourself in the mirror. And then you fucking go fix it so that I don't have to. You're an engineer just like I am. And I am not even a dev proper - I'm a sysadmin by trade. Why should I have to fix your shit for you?1 -
Recently i had a small talk with someone working in the banking sector . When that person acknowledged what i do for a living , she started to be a little bit passive-agressive .
Her:"You know someday , sooner than later , a guy like you is going to create something like artificial intelligence to replace all the devs in the world . Ha ha ha ! And your golden age is going to end . "
Me:"So you think this guy is going to create a smart program , software or platform , that will create software from what ? "
Her:" We will write the specs directly in the program and we will get the software after !"
Me:"And what if the specs are impossible, from logical point of view. "
Her:" Well there will be some rules and you will need to respect them !"
Me: "And people need to learn the logic of these rules?"
Her: " Yes a little bit of training!"
Me:" We already have that !"
Her: " We have ?! "
Me: " Is called .... CODING !"
Her: **silence **
(I remembered the burn from a comic -- forgot the name-- but GOD it felt good !)
Why some people hate us ?4 -
After years of my own dodgy javascript codes, I've started to throw away everything I know about javascript and learn it from scratch.
Learning that functions are objects really helped in restructuring a pile of my code. Eg passing it as a parameter to be executed.
Suddenly callback functions make a lot of sense now, and I've got a new found respect for the language. -
My internship is about to end in two months. I was under the impression that I'll start looking for a job towards mid August and then decide what to do. I didn't expect my company to offer me a position so early before my internship ended.
Initially I had liked the place. The work was pretty relaxed and I had quite a bit of freedom. Soon enough, I proved my worth and my team started respecting my opinions and suggestions. They even consulted me on multiple occasions.
The first thing I noticed on the downside was the company, despite being resourceful enough and having a decent turnover and important clients, was quite stingy in terms of employee welfare. There was no coffee. There was machine but you had to buy the capsule for yourself. And that sucks. I know I don't need to say more but the other problems were there was no enterprise subscription (or any subscription) to PhpStorm even though our team handled so many PHP projects. I know IDEs are personal preferences but not having any professional IDEs is not something to let slide. The lead dev uses NetBeans (and not because he loved it or anything). Even though I worked on WebDev and front end, I had no option to ask for a second screen. I had one display apart from my laptop. Usually most companies in Paris provides food tickets for internships and this company did not even give me that. And worst of all, there wasn't really anyone I looked up to. As much as I enjoy responsibilities and all, I don't think I should be in an environment where I have nothing much to learn from my seniors. For some fucked sense of security and certainty, I was willing to overlook all this when they offered me a position. But I recently had my interview and the regional manager, a fuck face who still makes me wonder how he reached his position, made a proposal for some quite a small amount of salary. What infuriated more than his justifications was his attitude itself. There was absolutely no respect whatsoever. It was more like "We'll give you this, I think this is more than enough for you. Take it or do whatever you want". I asked for more and he didn't even bother negotiating. I declined the offer.
Now this would have solved all the issues. But my manager and my lead dev like me a lot. Both of them are pretty nice people. They both were bothered with the fact that I had turned down the offer. My manager even agreed that the offer was too low and had already given me tips to help me negotiate. But after I turned down the offer, she went and discussed the issue with the regional manager and he offered me a new proposal. This time it was decent but still under my expectations. I'm pretty sure I can do better elsewhere. I said I need time to think about it. I get multiple advises from people to take it atleast so that I get my visa converted to a work permit. For some reason, I want to take the risk and say no. And find something else. But today my lead dev called me aside and asked me if was going to say no. He really tried to influence me by telling me a lot of good things about me and telling me about the number of different projects we're going to start next month and all that. Even though I'm fully convinced that I don't want to work here, just the sheer act of saying no to these two people I respect is sooo fucking difficult for me that I can already imagine me working here for the next one year. The worst part is I can clearly classify their words and sentences into stuff they say to canvass me, stuff they're bullshitting about and flattery just to make me stay. Despite knowing I'm being taken advantage of, some fucked up module in my head wouldn't stop guilt tripping me. I don't know what to do. If I only I could find a really better job.
Pardon the grammatical errors if any. I'm just venting out and my thoughts branch in 500 different ways simultaneously.5 -
"try harder and smarter, we will do a training if needed"... A coworker replying to another coworker (non dev tech support guy who never used postman in his life) in public chat... And I can't help but think that he is implying that the tech support guy is stupid.
KNOWING POSTMAN DOESN'T MAKE YOU SMART!!! AND YOU NEED TO SHOW SOME RESPECT AND LEARN HOW TO SPEAK!!9 -
There was a time when backend engineers used to make fun of frontenders and tell them 'you arent a real software engineer', nowadays frontend is getting so complex and cool that even backenders are now starting to learn frontend. I am so happy that because of new tech and frameworks frontend has gained such a massive respect.26
-
Funny topic. I normally am very understanding of incompetence when it comes from nothing more than lack of experience. Happens to all who at one point is a junior dev.
As long as people have the willingess to learn I find myself being very understanding.
I take a lot of effort in helping others, I don't mind at all, and I would rather take them extra 10 mins to explain how to do something than to slap people with rtfm and then blame them completely when their lack of experience messes up stuff. I also take care of providing isolated environments and giving explanations. Even when they screw up, it is isolated from the rest and I can teach them what was wrong, most of the time they figure it out themselves. It has made my coworkers respect me more, rather than being a total dick that believes that what I do is sacred and should be spared from newbs (like all the idiots in S.O) i take the approach of a very patient mentor.
But I am a hippie, shit works for me.
But I do not excuse shitty attitudes and arrogance. I find that not knowing is fine, but acting as if one knows all and then fucking shit up makes it bad.
Which is when I change, I am a hippie but can get violent pretty quickly.
I have been screwed over shitty attitudes more than incompetence. -
These ignorant comments about arch are starting to get on my nerves.
You ranted or asked help about something exclusive to windows and someone pointed out they don't have that problem in arch and now you're annoyed?
Well maybe it's for good.
Next comes a very rough analogy, but imagine if someone posts "hey guys, I did a kg of coke and feeling bad, how do I detox?"
It takes one honest asshole to be like "well what if you didn't do coke?".
Replace the coke with windows.
Windows is a (mostly) closed source operating system owned by a for profit company with a very shady legal and ethical history.
What on earth could possibly go wrong?
Oh you get bsod's?
The system takes hours to update whenever the hell it wants, forces reboot and you can't stop it?
oh you got hacked because it has thousands of vulnerabilities?
wannacry on outdated windows versions paralyzed the uk health system?
oh no one can truly scrutinize it because it's closed source?
yet you wonder why people are assholes when you mention it? This thing is fucking cancer, it's hundreds of steps backwards in terms of human progress.
and one of the causes for its widespread usage are the savage marketing tactics they practiced early on. just google that shit up.
but no, linux users are assholes out to get you.
and how do people react to these honest comments? "let's make a meme out of it. let's deligitimize linux, linux users and devs are a bunch of neckbeards, end of story, watch this video of rms eating skin off his foot on a live conference"
short minded idiots.
I'm not gonna deny the challenges or limitations linux represents for the end user.
It does take time to learn how to use it properly.
Nvidia sometimes works like shit.
Tweaking is almost universally required.
A huge amount of games, or Adobe/Office/X products are not compatible.
The docs can be very obscure sometimes (I for one hate a couple of manpages)
But you get a system that:
* Boots way faster
* Is way more stable
* Is way way way more secure.
* Is accountable, as in, no chance to being forced to get exploited by some evil marketing shit.
In other words, you're fucking free.
You can even create your own version of the system, with total control of it, even profit with it.
I'm not sure the average end user cares about this, but this is a developer forum, so I think in all honesty every developer owes open source OS' (linux, freebsd, etc) major respect for being free and not being corporate horseshit.
Doctors have a hippocratic oath? Well maybe devs should have some form of oath too, some sworn commitment that they will try to improve society.
I do have some sympathy for the people that are forced to use windows, even though they know ideally isn't the ideal moral choice.
As in, their job forces it, or they don't have time or energy to learn an alternative.
At the very least, if you don't know what you're talking about, just stfu and read.
But I don't have one bit of sympathy for the rest.
I didn't even talk about arch itself.
Holy fucking shit, these people that think arch is too complicated.
What in the actual fuck.
I know what the problem is, the arch install instructions aren't copy paste commands.
Or they medium tutorial they found is outdated.
So yeah, the majority of the dev community is either too dumb or has very strong ADD to CAREFULLY and PATIENTLY read through the instructions.
I'll be honest, I wouldn't expect a freshman to follow the arch install guide and not get confused several times.
But this is an intermediate level (not megaexpert like some retards out there imply).
Yet arch is just too much. That's like saying "omg building a small airplane is sooooo complicated". Yeah well it's a fucking aerial vehicle. It's going to be a bit tough. But it's nowhere near as difficult as building a 747.
So because some devs are too dumb and talk shit, they just set the bar too low.
Or "if you try to learn how to build a plane you'll grow an aviator neckbeard". I'll grow a fucking beard if I want too.
I'm so thankful for arch because it has a great compromise between control and ease of install and use.
When I have a fresh install I only get *just* what I fucking need, no extra bullshit, no extra programs I know nothing about or need running on boot time, and that's how I boot way faster that ubuntu (which is way faster than windows already).
Configuring nvidia optimus was a major pain in the ass? Sure was, but I got it work the way I wanted to after some time.
Upgrading is also easy as pie, so really scratching my brain here trying to understand the real difficult of using arch.22 -
I recently started studing on universty of technology. One of the classes is called "introduction to programming" where students learn how to code in C/C++. Of course it would be extremly useless for me so i told my lecturer about it. He told me that i can skip all lectures and come only to take tests. And i have to make a simple C program for the labs as well.
When I saw him for the first time i noticed that he has a apple laptop...
(so i thought he was a apple fanboy)
But when i approached him at the end of the lecture i saw that he had installed WINDOWS ON IT.
Fucking respect.2 -
Any individual project that made me learn cool stuff...
Maybe the kernelcheck project? It's a shell script that I wrote 2 years ago (it's still on my GitHub but the code looks kinda horrible tbh), and it really made me respect the stability of package managers, and the effort that package maintainers must put into it. Even a single package (the kernel) that you have to maintain the integrity of the .config for (the configuration file that tells you what options to compile in, as a module, or not at all) while on every new minor release, the config changes ever so slightly.. at some point I figured that I'd really need to do those compilations manually, to be able to supervise (and if necessary adjust) it in real-time. The ability for distribution maintainers to do this for thousands of packages.. it boggles my mind. Respect! -
Windows users be like "Oh, it's fine. Our tent comfortably fits all my family and it's cold there for only half a year, but not too cold, just wear a coat while you're inside and you'll be fine. Clean water is only two miles away, walking is healthy after all. Yes, agents come every week and rape my wife but it only happens to newbs and honestly I respect that ritual, this is how life works. You only have to send three papers to them to ask them please not to rape us this week and they don't come for a whole week! I ain't stupid, I always carry my gun with me to shoot thugs"
Living with MacOS is just living. You pay the fee and they let you in.
Living with Linux can be just living too, but it can be much more, your skill and willingness to learn are always rewarded. I've been there, I used Arch.
But living with windows is always survival.18 -
Felt like helping out a local brewery with a website due to the pandemic for free beer.
OMG feel like an idiot on how long it takes to set up static site from scratch.
Using the static site generator Hugo is easy but customizing the templates, content writing and the graphics are becoming such a fucking bitch! Especially the fucking graphics and not using photoshop but gimp. Is there something else do not want to learn anything else.
Not even to the hosting yet, I hope AWS for hosting static sites is as cheap as eveyone says. I know there is a learning curve but that is why I took this on so I would have experience with it and can out it on my resume.
New respect for free-lancers that do it all.9 -
[Background]
Back in September I joined a startup after my first job in MNC for about 1.8 yrs as a fresher. I always wanted to learn, but the experience in that MNC was not at all fruitful. So ai decided to join a small/mid size company or a startup. To my luck, I got in this small startup in a week after my resignation as a front-end dev (always wanted to be).
It's an automation company, so you can find software, electronics, even mechanical engineer.
The team was almost a year younger than me. It was a team of around 12 people, in which 5 of them were from Business development.
The tech team was too driven and knowledgeable. Always trying new stuffs and motivating to do the same. I was highly motivated by them in my initial days, watching them working on new stuffs.
So I started with revamping their website completely in Angular 4, and did it in around a month or so, being new to Angular. Outcome was pretty satisfactory. I wanted to work on new projects, but just to get the cashflow in they started getting in WordPress projects. It was frustrating, I wanted to work more on new technologies like Angular, React, etc...but just for the survival of the company I had to work on WordPress, so to respect their urge to get going I kept working on 3-4 projects in parallel, and mind you the clients were from hell !!
Fast-forward 4 months, I am still working on few WordPress websites, and one internal GPS based project in React. And I haven't received my salary for past 3.5 months, since the company is still struggling with the issue of funding and getting money from clients. I kinda liked working there because there was lot to learn even though they are so young, but I had bills to pay too.
And I am in dilemma to leave the company or not, because I already stretched 3 months out of good will and guilt of leaving the company in high time. So i finally let the CEO know that I cannot stick for any longer. And i was done with the false promises of getting the salary "next month" everytime. All the money getting inside of company was invested heavily on the product we were building and no one was getting the salaries. Others were fine since they were founding members too.
Long story short : I finally left immediately and now working in a good company as a React dev. I hope they do well and I would love to see them grow, but please *STOP* making false promises and hold on to employees on a lie.1 -
So what exactly does "Learning" mean in a tech industry?
From my experience,
"learning" from college's pov
"Welcome to the class. your parents has paid us already for this. Now we are supposed to stand here for next 6 months, study very slowly and learn about the topics of our curriculum and give a test on it. we might as well make a good nice project to check our knowledge"
(worst college will also add "Sorry the above message was just fiction, i am here to drink tea & enjoy my day,while you guys are here to enjoy,mark attendance and get a degree because we only care about our reputation and we are gonna pass you anyway")
"learning" from startups pov:
"Here is an idea, here is a design, here is your months salary and here is your deadline.
Make a 100% polished,working product out of it before the deadline. You are solely responsible for this project and you have to figure out on your own how to make our fantasy idea into reality before deadline hits( else you are shit).
This way you learn.
We will also provide you with a free all time learning course on how to be fine without getting any respect for your hardwork and tolerate our insults, which will help you in the life long journey of dealing assholes.
Our company is great and providing you an amazing learning opportunity, kiss our feet."
(worst startups will also add "We don't have/ wont provide you any seniors to help you with this stuff, the internet is your source of truth"/ "if you don't hit the deadline, your salary will get deducted"/ "work on weekends to hit the deadline")
"Learning" from an MNC pov (never really experienced those but from what i have heard):
"Welcome to our company. we here provide you with a similar experience as that of your shitty college during training period and then put you in low brain-ish low paying repetitive job for life until you leave us or we find a replacement for your work or salary"5 -
My university had a Programming Fundamentals course in the first semester and we got assigned this grumpy lady who demanded respect and would always claim she was the best at programming among her colleagues, had an obnoxiously snobbish tone and had a habit of forcing unneeded nonsensical sarcasm everytime one of us stepped up to ask her a question.
She taught C++ and I'm not saying she didn't know her stuff or anything; I respected her regardless (because she was my teacher), but she would mix up C classes in and insist that that was the right way to do it and had no consistent programming style.
Once she got so fed up with our class that just to prove her point that we're all dumb and worthless (she hated us a lot, yeah) that she started explaining binary trees and recursion out of the blue and gave us assignments for them... even though they weren't going to be covered that week. It soon became a shitfest, to be honest.
But on the plus side, because I didn't wanna listen to her lectures I pulled two all-nighters and covered the semester's worth of C++ and started napping in a corner in her class. She never had personal beef with me so I was thankful for that but her being the way she was helped me learn C++ with more motivation and vigor than I normally would have and also let me earn some change because my classmates couldn't understand her classes and wanted me to explain whatever she covered. -
Good code is a lie imho.
When you see a project as code, there are 3 variables in most cases:
- time
- people / human resources
- rules
Every variable plays a certain role in how the code (project) evolves.
Time - two different forms: when certain parts of code are either changed in a high frequency or a very low frequency, it's a bad omen.
Too high - somehow this area seems to be relentless. Be it features, regressions or bugs - it takes usually in larger code bases 3 - 4 weeks till all code pathes were triggered.
Too low - it can be a good sign. But it should be on the radar imho. Code that never changes should be reviewed at an - depending on size of codebase - max. yearly audit. Git / VCS is very helpful here.
Why? Mostly because the chances are very high that the code was once written for a completely different requirement set. Hence the audit - check if this code still is doing the right job or if you have a ticking time bomb that needs to be defused.
People
If a project has only person working on it, it most certainly isn't verified by another person. Meaning that only one person worked on it - I'd say it's pretty bad to bad, as no discussion / review / verification was done. The author did the best he / she could do, but maybe another person would have had an better idea?
Too many people working on one thing is only bad when there are no rules ;)
Rules. There are two different kind of rules.
Styling / Organisation / Dokumentation - everything that has not much to do with coding itself. These should be enforced at a certain point, otherwise the code will become a hot glued mess noone wants to work on.
Coding itself. This is a very critical thing.
Do: Forbid things that are known to be problematic in the programming language itself. Eg. usage of variables in variables, reflection, deprecated features.
Do: Define a feature set for each language. Feature set not meaning every feature you want to use! Rather a fixed minimum version every developer must use and - in case of library / module / plugin support - which additional extras are supported.
Every extra costs. Most developers don't want to realize this... And a code base that evolves over time should have minimal dependencies. Every new version of an extra can have bugs, breakages, incompabilties and so on.
Don't: don't specify a way of coding. Most coding guidelines are horrific copy pastures from some books some smart people wrote who have no fucking clue what you're doing and why.
If you don't know how to operate on people, standing in an OR and doing what a book told you to do would end in dead person pretty sure. Same for code.
Learn from mistakes and experience, respect knowledge from other persons, but always reflect on wether this makes sense at this specific area of code.
There are very few things which are applicable to a large codebase on a global level. Even DRY / SOLID and what ever you can come up with can be at a certain point completely wrong.
Good code is a lie - because it can only exist at a certain point of time.
A codebase should be a living thing - when certain parts rot, other parts will be affected too.
The reason for the length of the comment was to give some hints on what my principles are that code stays in an "okayish" state, but good is a very rare state -
Whether you want to make friends at Annenerbe’s underground ice cities in Antarctica, or chill with Irene Roomberg on world govt. superblimp, remember that they only speak Sanskrit or Ithkuil. They respect Latin though, and for me that was enough, as it’s way easier to learn.
2 -
Gonna rant about graphic design 'cos it's where I started this journey.
The hardest people to design for are creative people, photographers, musicians, artists etc.. because they think graphic design is just a small extension to their existing skills. Please Fuck Off! Also same goes for developers, graphic design is a discipline you have to study and takes years to perfect the art. I find it examples of non designed 'design' every day and it sickens me. Just look around at all the shite van livery, bad logos, shit menus, fucking junk mail etc... sometimes it can be torture....
But I don't think coding is easy, I respect the art and learn constantly, it amazes me how typing some shit can make awesome things happen. Devs rock!1 -
i don't understand what would be termed as "relaxing" for me.
when i was in college , i watched a lot of movies on romance, bromance and friendship. being from a very angry , isolated family with bitter relationships from relatives, we had almost 0 people to interact with.
i personnally was also very different from society and struggled making friends.
as of now i did have somewhat come over this problem and have a good number of "known people" (atleast 500+) that i can categorise into'
- A just people with whom i shared a situation( college, office, tutions)
-B people with whom i have spent my free times in those situations (aka friends, and free time = lunch breaks, seat sharing, projects with them, etc)
-C people with whom i spent some time willingly( aka close friends from college, tutions and home, with whom i played cricket, went on partying/touring places , etc)
-D people whom i liked but never got a love back( aka girls to whom i told i like them. they mostly belonged to category C but eventually went to category A)
previously the category C people were special for me and i would weave my life around them. like all those bromance and friendship movies? these are the guys with whom i would do that. world tours and awesome weird shit? these people will be their in the pic... i would wish them on birthdays, i will call them every few days, go meet with them , have a bite, plan trips, movies , etc...
but today i feel am so done with everyone. i feel like everyone is so fake and forgetful, no one is worth my attention. i can easily forget wishing them birthdays or calling/meeting them every few weeks, because i don't want to or care about it.
friendship , from what i have realised, is just a means of dealing with a task in a group. it just provides a herd immunity and herd advantage . and once you learn how to survive alone, you don't really see a point in it. after coming out of college i was alone in the world, as my friends were from different fields. before college, i thought these were the guys with whom we will be living as F.R.I.E.N.D.S, not just in terms of relation, but rather in a symbiotic way: each one helping each other.
today, i feel criingy just thinking about it.
no friend will remember you for more than a year if you die now. everyone will move on. and in the struggling phase that me and my friends are right now (20-30s), we don't even need to die to forget our friendships.
my so called friends have wished me less on my birthdays than the lifeless apps i have on my phone.
so neither i am expecting someone to do something for me, nor do i think i want to do anything with anyone
------
so back to the problem, i don't know how will i find some relax or meaningful time anymore.
i am always up for trips and one of the first person to say yes to plans.
once upon a time i had this realisation that in a trip, we can enjoy 3 things:
1. the people with whom we are
2. the place we are visiting : the locals, the foods, the nature
3. the mode of travel : car on highways, bikes or flights above the clouds , or some memorable train journeys, etc.
but lately so even that seems to be not working out.
- the people are shit
- places feel like somewhat same everywhere . it's either : rocks/mountains or snow or water or buildings and population. it's just a temporary change of scenary and doesn't really gives a feeling of peace. same for mode of transport.
if i rule the going out part, the things that remains is to enjoying your job, home family and daily life. that i do , but that's the thing that creates an environment of "bored-out"-ism in my mind.
i don't know what i am looking for. the only thing i have not experienced is that class D of people. to have a token of faith/respect/appreciation/love from a non blood related person. to have someone with home i will not feel "bored out" when am planning a journey with them.
mathematically , it seems so far fetched and crazily impossible. like if get bored out and loose trust on people whom i shared most of my life after 50-60 meets, how can i be not bored, and be unhappy with a person to whom i have to see each day?
but since this happens for most of the couples, i will say the mind is the biggest and the most fantasizing mystery of human body ❤️ 💔6 -
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 -
So there is this one teacher/dev where I just had a lecture. And I easily can say he is one of the best programming teachers I had so far. Not that what he says is a hundred percent correct (heavily influenced by his opinion, ex. Singleton being a good pattern), but he motivates you to think about what you do and the lecture. He saw that no one was following and said that no one could probably remember the start of the lecture and he was damn right.
He's just so open about it and said that it doesn't matter and you have to go home and practice. At the start he said that we all are programmers and not software developers. Explaining the difference and showing funny pictures. A fucking spoon build out of a fork and a plastic cup. But not reusable at all and might break when overheated by the soup. Genius explanation of the difference. On the other side was a spoon which could be hung up on the edge of the bowl without overhearing the end so you don't burn your hand. That is software developing.
Now the point is that I got a bit mad when he said no one here could develop software and when he asked if someone can explain what a pattern is it was my time to shine. Boom, on point explanation and a complement from him following in the question where I got the knowledge from and why I could explain specific patterns. The answer was a simple 'I learn about software developing and engineering in my free time' and then he just said that I'm a nerd. I was so proud and ashamed at the same time.
Long story short: be proud of us. Geeks and nerds are nice persons and I might just have earned some respect among my friends.
I just realized this is a rather long and unstructured rant but I really felt like sharing that little achievement of being recognized. -
a lion in captivity forgets to hunt. a man loosing everyday forget about winning.
I am feeling so sad and worthless right now. Like, so worthless that if I am walking down the street tomorrow and if some car hits me and i die, i wouldn't mind.
I find it questionable about what I am living for? why am i selling myself in front of keyboard till 12 am every day to earn some bucks when all this money is being / will be used to give happiness to a bunch of people that don't give 2 shits about me.
why can't i get some love? why can't i get some respect? i feel like a disabled 5 year old boy trapped in an abled 25 year old body. I can feel my legs, but I don't have the permission to use them. its like i am tied by ropes. and this rope has been on me for so long, that i can feel my legs, but i can also feel that those are having cuts so deep that i won't be able to use them even once the rope is taken out.
being a single child, loneliness has always been my shadow at home. and The middle class poor income, fighting parents, sickness and lack of culture ensured that loneliness remained my friend in school, college and other areas too.
the only goal of becoming an ideal son has shadowed every other thing in life. I can't drink, i can't go outside after 10pm, I can't take a jobbin different city. I can't fucking have female friends or think about relatiion-shits with people. i can't drive the car that was bought by my salary money. the list goes on and on.. i think every Indian (girls more than boys ig) have gone through at least 1 such restrictions at some point of their life. but me? a GUY in his fucking 25 , is going through ALL OF THEM, from day 1.
Plus i haven't started to discuss the weird eccentricities that i have to deal with, which are not so common. we follow a special religion where they have lots of philosophy and additional rules ( like no onion garlic mushroom in foods, mediation + pray for 1 hour twice a day ,... etc)
But i didn't complain, until now. I got sadder and sadder with time, but I cooperated. Whome else to live for , if not for the folks who made you in their womb amd sack? yeah I will fucking stay celibate until you find some willing "cultured" girl from your "religion" and arrange a lifelong existence. yes, i will fucking keep paying the car emis and see it in the parking lot everyday , while traveling via a metro. yes i will stay in your house in front of you all the times and never learn to exist independently coz fuck maturity. yes i will be a static atm machine waiting to die as you please.
but i am still not your ideal son? I say one little thing, and you start shouting at me for being selfish? why is religious superstition and those crime storemies so much deep into your head that you folks are micro managing and criticising every single thing in my life?
why is there a need for repetitive arguments, fights and shouting before evry action? why can't we just be happy for once!
I am shattered looking for happiness. I can't live like this anymore. There are no more than 2 people in my life that i care about and if those 2 are always having an upside down , angered face the what is the point of waking up every day?
wish i could just leave them. But can they live without me? or even can i live without them? and no , not talking about emotionally. I am very strong at the emotional side and i can throw word daggers to even 10+ years of companionships and ruin them. this will be just another long term relationship that i will sour.
BUT I CAN'T LITERALLY LIVE WITHOUT THEM. i am a useless guy who don't have any social intelligence outside his computer screen. i don't know how to live alone, and exist, or what my goals will be. I never saw a future without thinking about securing their future first, and them being in my future at all times.
aagh fuck. another painful night to survive and exist until i rise again to live like a corpse coz i can't do anything about it6 -
Well not like friends as such but kinda of get people respect when you are good at it.
It was during 12th Grade while working on our project for the year , everyone had some kind of doubt and you know the Teacher is not always free to help every one so after looking at what me and my friends were creating she said approach them for your doubts.
Well I can be a prick sometime if I want to be mostly because you are writing bad code or your facts are wrong hence not a lot of them used to like , like me.
But after that they had no option hence felt pretty badass after that.
And like not that I was criticizing them but it you don't want to learn then please solve your own doubts yourself.
Maybe I was wrong to you know to teach everyone. but well that's me do it right else don't do it.
Top Tags
Weekly Rant
View