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29-year veteran here. Began programming professionally in 1990, writing BASIC applications for an 8-bit Apple II+ computer. Learned Pascal, C, Clipper, COBOL. Ironic side-story: back then, my university colleagues and I used to make fun of old COBOL programmers. Fortunately, I never had to actually work with the language, but the knowledge allowed me to qualify for a decent job position, back in '92.
For a while, I worked with an IBM mainframe, using REXX and EXEC2 scripting languages for the VM/SP operating system. Then I began programming for the web, wrote my first dynamic web applications with cgi-bin shell and Perl scripts. Used the little-known IBM Net.Data scripting language. I finally learned PHP and settled with it for many, many years.
I always wanted to be a programmer. As a kid I dreamed of being like Kevin Flynn, of TRON - create world famous videogames and live upstairs my own arcade place! Later on, at some point, I was disappointed, I questioned my skills, I thought I should do more, I let other people's expectations make feel bad. Then I finally realized I actually enjoy a quieter, simpler life. And I made peace with it.
I'm now like the old programmers I used to mock 30 years ago. There's so much shit inside my brain. And everything seems so damn complex these days. Frameworks, package managers, transpilers, layers and more layers of code. I try to keep up. And the more I learn, the more it seems I don't know.
Sometimes I feel tired. Yet, I still enjoy creating things and solving problems with programming. I still have fun learning. And after all these years, I learned to be proud of my work, even if it didn't turn out to be as glamorous as in the movies.30 -
Wondering if the reason why everyone loves devRant so much is because we can actually get likes here.6
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Yusuke Endoh: This is a Ruby program that generates Rust program that generates Scala program that generates ...(through 128 languages in total)... REXX program that generates the original Ruby code again.
Me: OH MAH GAWWD! WHY!!
https://github.com/mame/quine-relay
5 -
That time when somehow you didn't do a Google search first and spent 6 hours to develop a simple algorithm that someone else already thought of in 1985.2
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devRant is the first time I see so many people announcing to the world how much they like the app. Imagine someone be like "I LOVE Facebook! <3"
Btw, I LOVE devRant! <33 -
I finally fucking made it!
Or well, I had a thorough kick in my behind and things kinda fell into place in the end :-D
I dropped out of my non-tech education way too late and almost a decade ago. While I was busy nagging myself about shit, a friend of mine got me an interview for a tech support position and I nailed it, I've been messing with computers since '95 so it comes easy.
For a while I just went with it, started feeling better about myself, moved up from part time to semi to full time, started getting responsibilities. During my time I have had responsibility for every piece of hardware or software we had to deal with. I brushed up documentation, streamlined processes, handled big projects and then passed it on to 'juniors' - people pass through support departments fast I guess.
Anyway, I picked up rexx, PowerShell and brushed up on bash and windows shell scripting so when it felt like there wasn't much left I wanted to optimize that I could easily do with scripting I asked my boss for a programming course and free hands to use it to optimize workflows.
So after talking to programmer friends, you guys and doing some research I settled on C# for it's broad application spectrum and ease of entry.
Some years have passed since. A colleague and I built an application to act as portal for optimizations and went on to automate AD management, varius ssh/ftp jobs and backend jobs with high manual failure rate, hell, towards the end I turned in a hobby project that earned myself in 10 times in saved hours across the organization. I felt pretty good about my skills and decided I'd start looking for something with some more challenge.
A year passed with not much action, in part because I got comfy and didn't send out many applications. Then budget cuts happened half a year ago and our Branch's IT got cut bad - myself included.
I got an outplacement thing with some consultant firm as part of the goodbye package and that was just hold - got control of my CV, hit LinkedIn and got absolutely swarmed by recruiters and companies looking for developers!
So here I am today, working on an AspX webapp with C# backend, living the hell of a codebase left behind by someone with no wish to document or follow any kind of coding standards and you know what? I absolutely fucking love it!
So if you're out there and in doubt, do some competence mapping, find a nice CV template, update your LinkedIn - lots of sources for that available and go search, the truth is out there! -
-six months ago-
"Yo! Let's learn a web framework and build some sick apps!"
"Fuck yeah!"
-yesterday-
"Yo! Should we start doing that thing we talked about?"
"Fuck yeah!" -
Why is it that whenever I show someone the app I made that they always suggest a bunch of fucking idiotic features. What is bloody wrong with "Wow, cool app you made".10
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A recruiter came to my school last month to (supposedly) tell us what are the hottest skills to have under our belts. The event ended up like a devRant IRL.
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First day as an intern: when I was introduced to everyone, some say they don't even want to know me and stay the fuck away because they don't care.5
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People who think programming is just copy+paste, haven't programmed using COBOL, REXX or JCL (or similar "archaic" languages).
Best of luck finding all the answers on Google/SO. This is the world where RTFM is a daily task.
RTFM = Read The Fucking Manual4 -
When you need to do something in Wordpress:
1. check the codex
2. check the developer handbook
3. check google, stackoverflow, etc
4. give up
5. do it yourself
6. find it on either of the aforementioned websites2 -
Getting better with your colleagues: leave your computer in the office on after work with the Google results of "What to do if everyone at work is smarter than me?"
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i had a project in a networking class where the provided code was meant to act as a proxy (aka just passing bytes around), but because of the implementation, every byte had to be a valid unicode character
anyway lotta people were frustrated so we asked the course staff and their response was basically "we wanted to support python 2 and 3"
...1 -
Rexx scripting language as a junior programmer at a financial company. It was used to massage data scraped from multiple data sources. There scripts that were calling other scripts to the tune of 6 and 7 scripts deep. It was a horrible scriptception.
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