One day when I was about 8 years old my friend and I were in the library. We decided we wanted to try to make a baseball website because we both likes baseball (this was around 1998). We picked up a book on HTML and my dad took it out for us. My dad was also a programmer so he said he would help us learn. We went home that afternoon and made a little website!

I knew right then that I really enjoyed programming and creating things with code, but I realized I wanted to be a programmer in middle school and high school. One of my friends and I started building Flash games. To see if people were playing them, I added in a call to each game that hit a PHP script on our server. I'll never forget the days/weeks that one of our most popular games caused our sever to get hammered and our shared host said they were going to boot us.

It was an awesome feeling knowing people were enjoying these games that we worked really hard on, and that's one of the main reasons I always wanted to be coding/creating things that people enjoy using.

Father bought a PC in 1997. Back then very few had it. I learned doing things like accessing the internet and sending emails, among others. I remember having added age on websites to be allowed to sign up at times :P My sisters used to play games on it sometimes. The first few ones we had were Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, Tomb Raider Chronicles, American McGee's Alice(Which caused us to upgrade the PC xD)... And some others.

I have a memory of this pseudo-3D-looking game where you move in a maze and try answering questions. I want to remember its name, but I cannot :(

We literally have video evidence of me liking the computer as a child, yet my parents either say I'm addicted or deny I've ever liked it before. Not only that, but continuously limiting my time with the PC hasn't been a literal obstacle in my way of trying to do things in their opinion. Funny how my parents think the last few years I've been my worst when they've hurt me in those years so much that our relationship is guaranteed not working out. There were doubts in my head before, but now it's cemented and there is no way of going back. Father, for example, tells me it's too late to do anything with a PC now(As well as how I've been unable to use the PC. He looks at these pro players' footage in some TV show and he's like, „You've been unable to use your hobbies“, as if they have never ever screamed at me for perceived gaming and not actually cared to check), and I need to look for a „real“ job.

Sorry. I went to bed at 2:00 in the morning. Feel like a zombie because of ongoing weirdly insufficient sleep, even though I sleep kinda more than normal. Even when I took Melatonine for that it didn't help at all.

Childhood was where beating began. I was about 6/7. Right when I entered school. The first school that I attended was a private one and supposedly for „Wunderkinds“, while in reality I haven't seen a SINGLE teacher or psychologist approve of it, their argument being that children were basically drowned in work that wasn't age-appropriate(I don't mean anything bad. Just that teaching about Galaxies and all in first grade isn't the brightest idea). There was always a mountain of homework to do and as opposed to some other countries, we had to do it on a day to day basis. We didn't have a week-long deadline. I was predictably not keeping up with it as I could have, had it been a normal amount, so my parents decided I didn't want to study and began their methods of getting me to „study“. I have yet to see a person able to keep up with that school's tempo, no matter the age.

This place was also where I got bullied. I felt I had nowhere to be: At home, the parents' situation, at school, the bully. I never really went outside to play with other children, so I missed that part of childhood.

After the second year of school I was transferred to an advanced German school, called like that because they taught German and not English there. I also got to learn a bit of Russian before they removed it from school. In that period I used to attend ballet. But for less than a year. And piano, which I remember having attended for quite a long while, some years, if my memory isn't fried. I quit it because of it having been forced on me. Last piece I ever played fully was Beethoven's Marmotte.

In this school I was once again the outcast of the class. I had some people to interact with. All of those interactions lasted a few years at most. Then, because of a part of my class choosing me as a laughing-stock N2 and another girl as the N1, I found my best friend, who I still have today. She's the only friend I have nearby.

Most of the time I hated myself. Even today I struggle with that sometimes.

After that came university. This us where I got something like a friend circle at last. But it still didn't last. I got in a relationship with one of the guys, but I was just attracted. There was another I couldn't dare getting close to. Turns out he also had something for me. Then he disappeared from our lives and a year after, I still cannot forget the person. If I want to, I have to deprive myself of my own personality. Not a thing I'm willing to give up. Then I broke up with the guy I was in a relationship with and completely disappeared from the friendship circle. To be honest, I had reasons to. They refused to even try to look for the guy and they called him a friend for years. Sometimes parents hitting me can occur even today, but if I REALLY piss them off.

Now I'm here and oh, my God, I'm officially am aunt now! My sister gave birth to a daughter this morning... She's in Berlin with mother and both she and the child are doing great. I just hope she manages to be a good mother.

My mom died when I was 7, after which my dad bought me a Commodore 64 so I had something to lose myself in during the mourning process.

I learned everything about that system, from my first GOTO statement to sprite buffers, to soldering my own EPROM cartridges. My dad didn't deal with the loss so well, and became a missing person 5 years later when I was 12.

I got into foster care with a bunch of strict religious cultists who wouldn't allow electronics in the house.

So I ran away at 14, sub-rented a closet in a student apartment using my orphan benefits and bought a secondhand IBM computer. I spent about 16 hours a day learning about BSD and Linux, C, C++, Fortran, ADA, Haskell, Livescript and even more awful things like Visual Basic, ASP, Windows NT, and Active Directory.

I faked my ID (back then it was just a laminated sheet of paper), and got a job at 15-pretending-to-be-17 at one of the first ISPs in my country. I wrote the firmware and admin panel for their router, full of shitty CGI-bin ASP code and vulnerabilities.

That somehow got me into a job at Microsoft, building the MS Office language pack for my country, and as an official "conflict resolver" for their shitty version control system. Yes, they had fulltime people employed just to resolve VCS conflicts.

After that I worked at Arianespace (X-ray NDT, visualizing/tagging dicom scans, image recognition of faulty propellant tank welds), and after that I switched to biotech, first phytogenetics, then immunology, then pharmacokynetics.

In between I have grown & synthesized and sold large quantities of recreational drugs, taken care of some big felines, got a pilot license, taught IT at an elementary school, renovated a house, and procreated.

A lot of it was to prove myself to the world -- prove that a nearly-broke-orphan-high-school-dropout could succeed at life.

But hey, now I work for a "startup", so I guess I failed after all.

Friend: What's that?

Me: DuckDuckGo. It's my default search engine.

Friend: Try using Google instead, it's better.

Me: But Google spies on you.

Friend: So?

Me: Don't you care about your privacy?

Friend: It's not like they are going to kill me. It doesn't matter.

Me: *mumbles* typical muggle...

I'm surprised that people could care less for their privacy. I would ban all things google, but I need google docs.

Also, my idiotic school requires gmail and google classroom. Oh, and did I forget to mention we have to use chromebooks!

I’ve been inspired by programming many times, but a few early moments really stand out for me. Some of those most memorable early moments came when I developed Flash games with my friend in high school.

Growing up, at this point in time, around 2005, Flash games were really hot. All the kids in my school played games on addictinggames.com during any classes that took place in the computer lab, and when my friend and I started making games, it was our dream to get a game featured on addictinggames.com.

When one of our early games ended up getting featured, we were absolutely ecstatic and I’ll never forget the feeling of seeing our own work on this game website that we loved for years prior and that so manly people at our school used. It was the coolest thing and I think went a long way to encouraging me to continue to want to create things, after seeing the impact we were able to make with a simple game (as two high school students).

And I think that shows the beauty of the internet today and the power people with few resources have to get stuff out there. I think it’s maybe gotten harder as of late since there’s probably more competition, but I also think the audience is ever-growing and I hope many more people get to experience that awesome feeling of having something you worked hard on become popular.

When you work for school IT you find these kinds of things sometimes when cleaning the office. And yes it's fully functional

Never let anyone make you believe that just because you don't have a specific skill which is 'required' for your dream job/a job you really want, you won't be able to reach it.

I've heard countless times that I could never do anything with programming/linux (server) engineering because I'm freaking bad at maths. They always said it was a requirement to understand it in order to become good at those two things.

Except for a few simple tests with 'okay' marks, I never got a good grade for it and failed it entirely at every school.

Guess who's a programmer (free time) and a professional linuxer right now!

It just pisses me off when people tell someone that because they don't possess a skill, they won't be able to make it to what they would love to do.

A friend of mine is heavily into java. Like seriously... programming teachers at our school ask him for help.
Everytime he gets drunk he starts saying the weirdest things like "DUDE what's your alpha value I can hardly see you".
He greets me with "What's up socket boy" and after throwing up he thinks about the best ways to sort the data. (his vomit)

Has anyone else had such experiences? I want to hear some funny stories! :D

Family reaction story to me being a dev?

- My dad still refers to my profession as 'something in computers'.
- My older sister goes to her weirdo friends for technical advice because she thinks all I do is fill paper in printers (that's a long TL;DR story about a phone upgrade)
- My brother, a car mechanical genius thinks what I do is near God-like. He also races cars and can blabber on about the physics, aero-dynamics, weight ratios, etc and says "Oh, no way. I'm too stupid to do what you do." Then I'm like, "Dude, shut up, I can barely change my oil and you could replace an engine blindfolded", then he just laughs "Yea, probably."
- Baby sister just wants me to fix her phone. "Can you make <insert some random app> do <insert a random behavior the app was never designed to do>?". I'm like "Uh no, I didn't write Instagram", then she's like "I thought you went to school for computers?".
- My mom passed way (long battle with cancer). I'm sure she'd be proud, but still asking me to how to switch the channel so she could watch a movie on the VCR.
I can clearly see having this conversation with my mom.
Me: "Mom, why are you still using a VCR? I bought you a subscription to Netflix"
Mom: "Net what? Do I turn the dial to channel 2 or 3?"
Me: "No, its the Netflix button on the remote."
Mom: "Can't you come over and do this? I just want to watch my shows. Didn't you go to school to learn these things?"
Me: "No mom, that's not...um...never mind. I'll be right over."

I was 15 years old and the first year of high school. Everything was new to me and I was such a newbie. At that time I had 2-3 year of programming behind me at an institution where they taught competitive programming. And I knew something about computers. Not much but more than most of my school mates. At that time I wanted to become "super cool hacker".

So we had this very very thought teacher for history which was also our form master. She really knows how to explained everything about history and in an interesting way. But while she was teaching we also had to write down notes from her powerpoints that were on a projector. And occasionally she would wait for us to copy everything and then move on with her lecture. But sometimes she didn't. This was frustrating as hell. The whole class would complain about this because you couldn't take notes down normal, you had to do it at double speed.

But she got one weak spot. She was not very good with computers. Our school computers were locked in some kinda closet so that students didn't have physical access to a computer and were also password protected. So I came up with the plan to plant wireless mouse in her computer so that I could control her mouse. At that time it seemed like SUPER HACKER MASTER PLAN.

So I got an opportunity one time when she left the classroom and let closet where the computer was open. I quickly sneaked the USB of the wireless mouse in the computer and then go back to the seat.

So THE FUN began.

Firstly I would only go back in powerpoint so that all my schoolmates could write down notes including me. And it was hilarious to watch when she didn't know what is happening. So then I would move her mouse when she tried to close some window. I would just move it slightly so she wouldn't notice that somebody else is controlling mouse. And by missing X button just by slight she would click other things and other things would pop up and now she had to close this thing so it became a nightmare for her. And she would become angry at the mouse and start complaining how the computer doesn't work and that mouse doesn't obey her.

One time when she didn't pay attention to her computer and projector I went to paint program and drew a heart and wrote we love you (In Slovenian Imamo vas radi -> See the picture below) and one of my school mates has the picture of it. We were all giggling and she didn't know what is was for. And I managed to close everything before she even noticed.

So it got to the point where she couldn't hand it more so she called our school IT guy so that he would check her computer (2 or 3 weeks passed before she called IT guy). And he didn't find anything. He was really crappy IT guy in general. So one week passed by and I still had messed with her mouse. So she got a replacement computer. Who would guessed all the problems went away (because I didn't have another mouse like that). I guess when our IT guy took the computer to his room and really thoroughly check it he found my USB.

So he told her what was the problem she was so pissed off really I didn't see her pissed off so much in all my 4 years in high school. She demanded the apology from whom did it. And at that moment my mind went through all possible scenarios... And the most likely one was that I was going to be expelled... And I didn't have the balls to say that I did it and I was too afraid... Thanks to God nobody from my school mates didn't tell that it was me.

While she waited that somebody would come forward there was one moment when our looks met and at that moment both of us knew that I was the one that did it.

Next day the whole class wrote the apology letter and she accepted it. But for the rest of 4 years whenever was there a problem with the computer I had to fixed it and she didn't trust anybody not even our IT guy at school. It was our unwritten contract that I would repair her computer to pay off my sin that I did. And she once even trusted me with her personal laptop.

So to end this story I have really high respect for her because she is a great teacher and great persons that guide me through my teen years. And we stayed in contact.

I believe this is why companies look for Junior Developers who actually know enough to be a mid or senior developer.

One day, a company that doesn't have the technical chops to know the difference between python and ruby hire a developer who is still in school. That developer doesn't know what he's worth, so the company gets him for pretty cheap. He does amazing things, takes last minute requests, learns some along the way, but eventually leaves because he just got contacted by a recruiter telling him how much he's really worth. He leaves, but the company needs to fill his spot. The company asks the former rockstar all the technologies he used to accomplish his job and throw that into a job description. The company could only really afford the junior so they keep all the stuff about being a junior, but because they need to maintain all the hodge podge stuff the previous developer put in, they need someone with experience enough to jump in.

I’m kind of pissy, so let’s get into this.
My apologies though: it’s kind of scattered.

Family support?
For @Root? Fucking never.

Maybe if I wanted to be a business major my mother might have cared. Maybe the other one (whom I call Dick because fuck him, and because it’s accurate) would have cared if I suddenly wanted to become a mechanic. But in both cases, I really doubt it. I’d probably just have been berated for not being perfect, or better at their respective fields than they were at 3x my age.

Anyway.
Support being a dev?
Not even a little.

I had hand-me-down computers that were outmoded when they originally bought them: cutting-edge discount resale tech like Win95, 33/66mhz, 404mb hd. It wouldn’t even play an MP3 without stuttering.

(The only time I had a decent one is when I built one for myself while in high school. They couldn’t believe I spent so much money on what they saw as a silly toy.)

Using a computer for anything other than email or “real world” work was bad in their eyes. Whenever I was on the computer, they accused me of playing games, and constantly yelled at me for wasting my time, for rotting in my room, etc. We moved so often I never had any friends, and they were simply awful to be around, so what was my alternative? I also got into trouble for reading too much (seriously), and with computers I could at least make things.

If they got mad at me for any (real or imagined) reason (which happened almost every other day) they would steal my things, throw them out, or get mad and destroy them. Desk, books, decorations, posters, jewelry, perfume, containers, my chair, etc. Sometimes they would just steal my power cables or network cables. If they left the house, they would sometimes unplug the internet altogether, and claim they didn’t know why it was down. (Stealing/unplugging cables continued until I was 16.) If they found my game CDs, those would disappear, too. They would go through my room, my backpack and its notes/binders/folders/assignments, my closet, my drawers, my journals (of course my journals), and my computer, too. And if they found anything at all they didn’t like, they would confront me about it, and often would bring it up for months telling me how wrong/bad I was. Related: I got all A’s and a B one year in high school, and didn’t hear the end of it for the entire summer vacation.

It got to the point that I invented my own language with its own vocabulary, grammar, and alphabet just so I could have just a little bit of privacy. (I’m still fluent in it.) I would only store everything important from my computer on my only Zip disk so that I could take it to school with me every day and keep it out of their hands. I was terrified of losing all of my work, and carrying a Zip disk around in my backpack (with no backups) was safer than leaving it at home.

I continued to experiment and learn whatever I could about computers and programming, and also started taking CS classes when I reached high school. Amusingly, I didn’t even like computers despite all of this — they were simply an escape.

Around the same time (freshman in high school) I was a decent enough dev to actually write useful software, and made a little bit of money doing that. I also made some for my parents, both for personal use and for their businesses. They never trusted it, and continually trashtalked it. They would only begrudgingly use the business software because the alternatives were many thousands of dollars. And, despite never ever having a problem with any of it, they insisted I accompany them every time, and these were often at 3am. Instead of being thankful, they would be sarcastically amazed when nothing went wrong for the nth time. Two of the larger projects I made for them were: an inventory management system that interfaced with hand scanners (VB), and another inventory management system for government facility audits (Access). Several websites, too. I actually got paid for the Access application thanks to a contract!

To put this into perspective, I was selected to work on a government software project about a year later, while still in high school. That didn’t impress them, either.

They continued to see computers as a useless waste of time, and kept telling me that I would be unemployable, and end up alone.

When they learned I was dating someone long-distance, and that it was a she, they simply took my computer and didn’t let me use it again for six months. Really freaking hard to do senior projects without a computer. They begrudgingly allowed me to use theirs for schoolwork, but it had a fraction of the specs — and some projects required Flash, which the computer could barely run.

Between the constant insults, yelling, abuse (not mentioned here), total lack of privacy, and the theft, destruction, etc. I still managed to teach myself about computers and programming.

In short, I am a dev despite my parents’ best efforts to the contrary.

I just feel that I have to get this of my chest, because this have really me and my family really negative.
It have destroyed my will to be happy, sort of.

Well, my father have some kind of control behaviour. My whole life he has been angry on stuff that does not really matter
and I have always been the one that get all the shit - because I am the oldest. I was never allowed (maybee 3-4 times between age 8-15) to have any friends
over or stay with friends over night or after school. Because they "where bad and I would become like them".

I am happy that I meet my wife 6 years ago and moved away from home when I was 20, I kinda fled the situation from home to start my own life.
My father has always hated when boy/men had long hair and alot of beard - but that is something I always wanted to have. So when I moved from home
I start to let everything grow.

Two years ago, things got really fucked up when I did not shave all my beard of and cut down my hair because my mom had birthday. I did it the week after
because my brother graduated from school and we where going to visit, we did not want a repeat the situation from a couple of weeks before. After that I got
another job as a Linux sysadmin and started to grow the hair and beard again.

Last monday, my dad called and said that I am not welcome to visit them anymore. I am a "bad example" for my sibling
and he also said "you brother and sister does not feel so good (my sister fainted a couple of days before, which I did not know) so I have no time to care about you and your family"
I was stunned, I really wish that this was a joke but it is'nt.

I have always been bashed because of the choices I make in my life and for my own family (wife, and two kids + one more kid any day now)

When I choose to work with something that I love, they said that I am stupid because they basically think "that the PC is full of SATAN".
When they realized that I make more money than my parents combined they went silent.

I just wanted to write this shit of my chest, it is really fucked up and I am starting to loose the ability to have feelings - if you know what I mean.

Thank you devrant, for being one of the fun things I do, when I read all the rage, fucked up stories, hate, and so on. I do not feel alone :)

PS: I promise you, that you guys/gals will be the first one to know when my new kiddo arrives

School principal : P / Me : M / Interviewer over Skype : S

P. I recently heard you run a software club in our school.
M. Yes. (started from March)
P. Well, one software community seems that he found you somewhere, and asked me if we can do a quick interview.
M. Sure. What is it?
P. So he will connect to skype.
M. Let's start then...

*A few moments later...*
M. Wwwwhhhhaaaaattttttt?
P. Calm down! What's the problem?
M. How can I have more than 5 years of android development?
S. Ok. Recorded. Next question.
M. (uhhh)
*A few moments later...*
M. What? Why in the heck do I use subversion?........
Yes... Ah... Ummm....
No! Why should i make a gui client for subversion?
*A few moments later...*
S. Do you have hacking experience?
M. Of what? I know hacking is illegal here..
S. Like... Anything!
M. Do YOU have an experience?
S. Yup.
M. What?
S. Google.
M. How?
S. (silence) Ok. Let's move on.
M. (wtf is this guy)
*A few moments later...*
S. Okay. We were about to hire you but you didnt met our job requirements.
M. ......What? What was the job?
S. Web developer Intern
M. I got no questions regarding "web".
S. I know devs should be great at all things.
M. Shut the hell up. What company are you?
S. (says something)
M. (Searches in google) Doesnt come in search results.
S. Where did you searched it? (trembling voice)
M. (Searches in naver, search engine of korea) Nothing. Are you sure you are a company?
S. (ends call)

Hate these fake interviews. And i have no idea how they found my school
I never wrote my school anywhere.

When I was 14, I was bad at many things. I sucked at sports cause I was weak and small. School was boring so I did not study. I mostly played games.
During a summer break, I wanted to change shit in WarCraft 3, as I heard from a friend that heard it from a friend, that you can do that. Many internet searches later I realised that you kind of just tell to the game what you want it to do, just simplified. If (target is enemy) do damage, for (every human player) make sparkly stuff...
After months of "playing" games, the new school year started and I got, for the first time, a proper computer class. Imagine my surprise when we started doing the shit I did all summer. That year I had 100% on all tests.
Many years later programming gave me friends, made my inner nerd and geek come out, gave me a free trip to the USA to represent my country, two TEDx talks, and finally a job that I like with the pay I can live with.

Software engineering is doomed.

The next generation of developers is going to suck as fuck

I've come across a lot of situation that made me think this way.

The most notable examples are right here on devrant.

I've seen a shit ton of rants blaming languages for "bugs" when in fact those "bugs" wouldn't have happened if those fuckers would have read the specifications of said languages.

This new generation doesn't read, when they've got a problem they just fucking go to Google for answers, they don't bother reading specifications, language books, rfc, etc, they don't bother reading where the true source of information are. The documentation ? What's that ? Let's go to stackoverflow first, let's think second.

Same back in school I've seen people in the highest grades that couldn't fucking decompress a tar archive.

In the coming decades we will loose the high skilled people, the people that made the software world as it is today we will be left with fuckers only able to blame things for stuff they don't understand.

This is my first true rant. This is me being pissed off.

I was an intern - as a high school student. They had no idea what to do with an intern, let alone a high school student that was only there around three hours a day.

They tried to saddle me with a massive "how to use Perforce" manual, but I flat refused and told them to give me some real work.

In the end I wound up writing a text parser in Python to get some specific info from some files. They decided it wasn't actually needed after I finished it (I don't think they expected me to), on my last week there. I just played solitaire the rest of the time. I learned a few things:

1. I never want to work at Adtran.
2. Perforce should die in a fire.
3. Experience != Expertise.
4. Don't be afraid to put yourself on the line if it means potentially accomplishing something.

In the school we were using slow PCs for learning MS Office things. Every single step we did took ages. There were one guy who was an informatics antitalent: he never were able to work fluently with any electric machine from a microwave to anything smarter. In addition he was a semi-pro athlete and he had some kind of anger management issues, sometimes yelled to the teacher after a bad mark or with us when we lost a in-school soccer match. You know, he was that competitive guy.
One time on computer science class he was very focused. He tried to follow every steps precisly and his machine seemed faster than as usual. He felt like he broke some kind of wall which was between he and the machine.
When we had a break and he went out we tought that we should make a prank. We made a fullscreen screenshot from the desktop and set it as the wallpaper, then killed explorer.exe. As a result the icons and the start menu was only on the screen by the wallpaper.
When he came back he said that there were some bad news from some of the sport event he wanted to go, so he was angry. But then... You know the gif when the guy first hit the side of the screen multiple times then throws out the machine? Yeah, we saw that in real life, but not in that office. First he was just clicking everywhere, we just watched how his face just transforming. Then he started to talk just in himself as the machine could understand. After two minutes he just yelled to the machine why did it freeze, but the last drop was when the teacher said: You'll have to send me your work and it will be marked. In this moment he was just roard a huge and droped the CRT out of the window from the second floor. Luckily the window was facing to a brushy part of the garden so no one was there. He just standed there, looked out to the CRT sitting in a brush for a while, then he turned to the teacher as "Mr, I think something is wrong with my machine"

Getting annoyed by the framework made by school which we had to use. We werent allowed to use Laravel or other frameworks.

What did I do with a classmate, we expanded on the schools framework. Added a templating engine, improved routing, made a query builder and a few other things before startimg the real project. 4 weeks of building the framework to build the application in a day.
Where others were still using the schools framework were strugglimg and not able to make it.

Alias coworker = high school classmate

This kid wore a trench coat to school every single day and I guess he had a chronic masturbation problem because the guy was caught 3 different times IN CLASS jerking off.
Most people would catch a sexual harassment / indecent exposure / public masturbation charge, but this kid was breaking all these national math competition records and was working with a local university doing research and had a 4.5+ GPA (in high school in U.S. that's possible) so the school decided to do 2 things.

1. Not punish the kid, and in fact nothing of this was ever put on any record at all.
2. Write him a note from school administrators saying that this student can leave class whenever he would like no questions asked, and that the teacher must notify the office so they could send a security guard in order for this masturbation obsessed student to literally occupy a bathroom as his jerk off chamber uninterrupted.

So if in the past 6-7 years you've been in a high caliber university studying computer science and there was a kid in a trench coat "feeding some geese" near you, you can thank my high school.

Brother of my friend came to me and asked me to teach him C as it was most important lesson in high school CS. I agreed and started with data types, conditional statements, loops and others that were mostly exam oriented. He was doing good. Then I thought of teaching him a life lesson and introduced him to pointers(questions about pointers are very rare in exams). As soon as I started the pointers, things got pretty bored and he went off topic and started talking about a girl he has crush on and told he wanted to know when her birthday was so that he could gift her something to be ahead of the crowd trying to impress her. I thought to help him out, afterall he's like my younger brother and told him I can help. Result of his previous exam were out then, providing symbol number on Examination Board's website would do the trick because it would return full data of students result which had birthday in it. I modified my previous script to fetch data of his school's result and pass the data to a file. They're together since last few months. He reminds me time to time that my code is what got them together.

Rant && story time

When I was in first grade of high school (age of 15) we had a class of informatics. Nothing unusuall, you say, but this teacher was ummm ... Let's just say special. Most of his classes looked like this:

TEACHER: Ok, class, today we are going to learn/work with <insert a name of a software here>. # And then he sat behind his desk, falling silent for the rest of the lesson. We had to look up the software ourselves, and learn to use it. Or not.

Next lesson, he just said:

TEACHER: Continue your work from the last time.

And on the third lesson of each cycle, there was grading in place. He walked through the class and if he saw you working with the software, you got a 5 (that is A for our western friends), but if you were doing something completely different, you got a 1 (that is F). That just ment that you had to open the program and wave the mouse around while he was looking at your screen, and you got a guaranteed 5.

And then the cycle repeated.

However, this is not the story about the teacher in general, it's a story about one specific event involving him.

Around the beginning of the year (calendar one, not school one; that is middle of the school year) a programming competition took place.

The first stage (school competition), was easy; I got 45 points out of 50 (I was second-best on the whole school, of all years (students from 15 to 20 years of age).

A few weeks later, second stage (national competition) took place. However, when I got to the registration dosk, things got weird.

I patiently waited in line, but when I got to the front, the assistant asked me for year and school.

ME: I come from SCHOOL_NAME and go to first year.
ASSISTANT1: All students who go to SCHOOL_NAME need to go to that separate line.

It seemed strange, but I walked over anyhow. Maybe there was enough students from our school so that new line opened for us.

ME: I go to first year. # I assumed I don't have to tell the name as the line was only for our school.
ASSISTANT2: Ok, but you need to go to that row. *points to the row wherexI just came from* # WTF is going on now?
ME: Ummm, I just came from there, and they told me to come here.
ASSISTANH2: Oh, you go to SCHOOL_NAME?
ME: Yeah
ASSISTANT2: Ok then. What is your name? # Thank Knuth, one mistery less
ME: My name is SELF.NAME
After a short search through the envelopes:
ASSISTANT2: Here you go # Both the fact that my name was completely misspeled and the procedure it took us to finally get to the correct envelope are a story for a different time.

Skip forward some 10 minutes, to the lecture hall where they just told us all the instructions and started to divide us into classrooms

ASSISTANT3:
for CLASSROOM, STUDENT_LIST in STUDENT_DIVISION:
for STUDENT in STUDENT_LIST:
STUDENT.invite(CLASSROOM)

At the end, only a few people, including me, remained.

ASSISTANT3: Is there anyone not from SCHOOL_NAME? # Umm, yeah, WTF is going on now?
Noone replied.
ASSISTANT3: OK, you all, come with me now, we will find you a classroom.

From there on, competition went fine, I came in second, got a new phone as a prize, no complaints.

However, later on, I realized what was the reason for all that weird behaviour.

Signup date for the second part was on LAST_SIGNUP_DATE, which was at least two weeks before the competition, and signups had to be done untill 1600 that day.

Our teacher signed us up at 2200. ON THE FUCKING DAY BEFORE THE COMPETITION. OF COURSE THEY HAD NOTHING PLANNED FOR US, NO ENVELOPES, NO COMPUTERS, NOTHING, IF WE WERE SIGNED UP LESS THAN FUCKING 12 HOURS BEFORE THE COMPETITION INSTEAD OF 2 WEEKS EARLIER. THE ONLY REASON WE GOT TO COMPETE WAS BECAUSE SOME PEOPLE DIDN'T SHOW UP AND WE USED THE PC'S MENT FOR THEM. IF EVERYONE SHOWED UP WE FUCKING COULDN'T COMPETE.

And from that moment on, I always signed myself up for all of the competitions; better safe than sorry.

- Take a course called "Mobile Application Development"
- Teacher is new and is thus lost on how things work because there is no formal training for them
- Teacher only knows Objective-C so that's all we're allowed to use
- Nobody owns a Mac and I think one or two people had an iPhone/iPad
- Only 4 public Mac computers are available to the school
- One to two people are on them frequently, limiting our time on them as well
- Not a part of the schools normal imaging and updating system, so we get to do it ourselves, which takes up like a week or two of classes (4 classes)
- This includes installing XCode and getting Apple IDs
- No real instructions are given besides "implement the APIs for Facebook, Twitter, and Google Maps into an app"
- Being an ass, for the final day instead of showing off the app we made I made a PowerPoint of my dislike of Objective-C and various struggles I ran into and how I decided not to make the app at all.
- shrug emoji

!dev, more about social media
(and suicide)

ugh. social media.

recently a girl from a nearby high school committed suicide. it's sad, and i know what i'm about to say is going to be controversial, but i think it shouldn't be on social media. maybe her close friends posting it on instagram, to remember her, but that's it.

of course, that's not what happened. people started posting "❤️" on their snapchat stories, and theyre saying they are raising awareness. (they don't know this girl or why she did it or anything, they're just doing it because their friends did it.)

this awareness, is well, temporary.

the point of snapchat is that all the pictures go away, so why would they talk about suicide prevention on there? do they want suicide prevention to go away? this is most prevelent on snapchat, but on others, too.

trend after trend after trend.

thats what people turned her death into. a trend.

just like #prayforparis, and others, but on a local scale.

the problem with social media is that things go away. in a day or two it'll be like this never happened. she won't be remembered like she would if she weren't on social media.

i know what you're thinking. they're just "raising awareness." but for how long?

well, until another trend comes.

people disagreeing with me are extremely welcome to comment.

and any ideas on how this problem can be fixed?

I was 12 years old and it was my first freelance.

I was taking a Web Designer course and my teacher offered me an “opportunity”. He asked me to develop a search engine for a real estate website.

I did it pretty quickly with PHP and MySQL. The amount offered was U$ 20.00 (yeah, I know, it sucks, but it was a good chance to earn experience).

3 months went by, it was the last week of the course and he still hadn’t payed me yet!

End of story: my dad and a couple friends went to the school and had a conversation with him. They said things like: man, you shouldn’t ruin a kid’s dream for twenty dollars. I’m sure he only payed me because he was scared haha

I have come to the conclusion that certain people have a tech aura that can fix or break things just by being near them. Apparently I can do both. Have you had a similar experience?

The other day a colleague was trying to play a YouTube video for the class (I work in a primary school) and the page refused to load. After 20m of failed page refreshes they called me. I walked in, sat next to the computer, and before I even touched anything YouTube suddenly appeared on the screen like it was trolling us the whole time. Much to the amazement of the class of kids who bow think I am some kind of tech-witch.

On the flipside - Linux hates me. It always has. Some years ago I decided to force myself upon Linux so I got a friend to install a dual boot on my machine. Knowing the effect I seem to have on Linux he demanded I stay out of the room until he was done. Two hours later and some stability testing later he called me back in to introduce me to my new setup. The moment I walked into the room Linux kernel panicked and never booted again.

If only I could learn to control this mystical power over technological life and death!

Ok, I get it, stickers are "cool". However, every time I see a laptop full of them I can't help but think three things.

1) Why on earth would your ruin a perfectly nice, clean, design.
2) I see the stickers and think "wow, (s)he must really be a fan of a lot of tech companies
3) I think your were one of those kids in school that glued stickers of skateboard apparel manufacturers to your backpack because it was the "cool" thing to do.

But mainly the ruined design thing bothers me. Just..... WHY!?!

Me reviewing some high school level exams after an Excel course.

"hmmm the next question is 'what does the symbol $ mean when found inside a FORMULA in Excel' ... Let's see what they answered..."

* "it's the symbol for DOLLARS" <-- well, he tried
* "I don't know" <-- mmh ok, he doesn't know
* "it can be either a plus or a minus" <-- mmmh maybe the interpreter will just figure out the correct one
* "it's used to keep an index fixed when you copy/drag the formula" <-- nice, someone who actually followed the lesson or at least knows how to google things when the teacher doesn't see
* "it's the symbol for POUNDS" <-- WTF!! Wait a moment: POUNDS???? Have you ever lived a single moment in this world?

My family. Mom was the first person to be proud of the things I was interested in. Then my girlfriend pushed me to finish school(she is my wife and the mother of my child now) but mostly my daughters.

I want them to grow up knowing what their dad does.

I am pretty motivated most of the time though, even for shit that i do not like.

Also...money.....i really fucking like money.

Guidance counselor at school: so what field do you want to go into?

Me: computer science

GC: what does that entail?

Me: programming

GC: that's like super repetitive, right? You're a smart kid don't do that

In my head: no you mf dingle-dong. That's the job that will take your job away from you in the next 5 years

Ffs, why do people think coding and entering data into Excel are the same things?

Things happened this year so far in chronological order:

Applied to PhD and got all rejected

Graduated without a job because I thought the last event wouldn’t happen

Decided to take more shots at universities in Europe and Canada

Paper got published and got best paper honorable mention

Interviewed by couple professors and the one in Canada seems to be interested in me

School in Canada, which rejected me before, reopened my case for review

Bank account got closed because my parents transferred me some money to support my unemployment ass and bank thought it was a fraud

The review process took so long I got hopeless and thought, if I end up writing webpages for other people, why not doing it now? And did two webpages which are in my previous rant, pretty good and highly recommended imo

Canada school promised a date but didn’t follow that date, depression attack

Finally sent them an email and got an answer saying the admission approved my application and they are working on paper work. But I still don’t believe it because I’m paranoid

Got an email from a professor today confirming they are doing paper work and I should receive official paper soon.

You can see the dramatic ups and downs, but in the end, guess I’m going to Toronto for phd

I need a break.

A break from stress of endless expectations
From school
From work
From being made fun of
From criticism
From criticizing myself
From not being able to do fun things
From vague instructions
From a lack of sleep
from inconsistency.
From unclear objectives
From financial/medical/emotional stress
From life
From hatred
From destruction of my emotional stability
From a lack of confidence
From unfulfilled decisions
From trying to hide under a mask
From jealousy
From lists
From repetitive obliteration of any hope I have
From me crap talking myself
From pleasing people

Oh well, at least after tomorrow, I’m on full-time break...

!dev

I quit.
+5 years of working with violent autistic teens. I've seen, heard, and been a victim of some pretty fucked up things. Today however, I watched the cutest little hamster (her name was brownie) stabbed to death for no reason. Time to reevaluate my life, I quit & I'm going back to school.

Spent 6 hours today trying to figure out why the CSS got all jacked up on a site right before launch.

Turns out, the new college grad who went to school for front end development doesn't know how to specify elements at all.

They made all their edits using the broadest selectors possible, sometimes at the tag level.

Having never looked at the site or mock-ups I had no idea what it was supposed to look like so I spent a lot of time waiting for people to tell me whether things were fixed, and telling what else was broke.

Good thing their college degree means they make 20% more than me.

Update on UWP File explorer! Exciting stuff first!

Reveal style was applied to the home page grid (That thing in WinX where the borders change color in proximity to the mouse)

Clickable buttons in the title bar! This is the first step to tabs!

Converted a lot of things that were generated dynamically in C# to UserControls in XAML, for easier reading and even improved code-behind options.

Pulled my hair out getting rid of System.IO - System.IO is not made for UWP and stops working in certain situations. Now using Windows.Storage, which is a lot more async. I have gotten much friendlier with the dispatcher.

Pain from the operation is really fading and school doesn't start for a couple days, so I hope to get a beta out before school starts, and more realistically, get the tab system done before school starts.

Once, at school, last year, we had to present a C# project that, upon clicking a button, took words from a .txt file and showed them in an alphabetical listBox...

Since the file they gave us was so long that we had to wait a minute or so to get the listBox full, I implemented a progressBar which popped up on the button, and upon clicking it, the progressBar advanced for every word it loaded, until, upon finishing, it would have disappear leaving again the button, and the listBox would have been loaded.

Apparently, this choice alone – even if it had next to nothing to do with the exercise – was enough to give me a solid 9 out of 10, because our professors never explained us about progressBars and I used that completely on my own... I tend to do things like this in class, where I explore what my tools could give me.

So long story short, I ended up having the best vote in class for that, and I was so happy and motivated :D

Moral of the story: if you can, always try to learn something new about your tools and your programming language, on your own, because apparently it gives you advantage towards others, at least in school. Or even if you're not in school, it could still be something cool to learn that might be helpful in the future, for your projects or your job's projects.
The more you know, the better!

Don't you just wish you can delete things from the internet forever?

I used to be a host on this show, not telling the name tho. It aired every Thursdays at 10 pm. And in case anyone missed it, the television station would post it on their youtube channel.

I was so desperate to remove it that I flagged it a bunch of times, but I knew it wouldn't work.

I'm dying of embarassment because everyone is finding it. It doesn't air on TV anymore, so that youtube channel is the bane of my existance.

I even got the idea to search myself up and delete any social media accounts, because I want to be nearly invisible on the internet.

That worked out. Except for that damn youtube channel.

I was a fucking 14 year old. I looked weird, acted weird, my mom made me dress weirdly. I was so nervous, I licked my freaking lips ON CAMERA. Not to mention, I had acne, and my skin was dark at the time because I was fresh out of middle school, and I did cross country in middle school.

Now I'm curious. Does anyone else have something embarassing on the internet that they can't get rid of?

The PCs in our school have a software called "Dr. Kaiser" which purpose is to prevent changes to the disk. I thought it's working like DeepFreeze for OSX devices; having a copy-on-write feature or something like that. One day a friend of mine (kinda newbie in hacking) said he wanted to create a backdoor in the system so you can login as the local administrator of the device. He replaced the "sethc.exe" in the windows directory with cmd.exe on a live distro and claimed it was working perfectly. It turned out that "Dr. Kaiser" is indeed loading the default image on startup, but doesn't verify checksums for system files (and also doesn't include the files in the default image). Long story short: You now can open a cmd with System permissions on every PC in the building.

This. Is. Stupid. It should be forbidden to sell this software 😖

My uncle was a programmer. My whole extended family lived very close together, so I saw him almost every weekend. He would tell me tall tales about the war between corporations and open source. I started hating all things Microsoft and advocating for Linux. For my 12th birthday, he gave me a computer he had recently fixed. Of course, it had Ubuntu Linux.

That's when he started teaching me the basics: Bash, Lisp, and C. I know some of you are tired of the cliche "I started coding at 12 and built my first OS at 16," but of course that's not reality. I really just wrote simple math formulas like chicarronera^[1] for my homework, a super simple text-input videogame, and a button-filled GUI. That's nothing compared to what I do now, so I won't dare put that into my resume. But it did give me an advantage over my peers, and by the time I had to self-learn web development for my job, my uncle had already given me all of these tools.

[1] Spanish slang for the quadratic equation. Literally means "street vendor who sells chicharron". The formula is taught so fierce in school that even street vendors must know it.

Let me explain a tiny corner of some awful code I read earlier today, in layman’s terms.

It’s a method to see if the user is in a secure session — not to set up the session, just to see if it exists. The method ends with a question mark, so it’s basically a question. It should look up the info (without changing anything) and should always give a clear yes/no answer. Makes sense, right?

Let’s say the question is “am I in school right now?”

The code… well.

If there isn’t a student, the answer it gives is null, not yes or no. Null is a fancy word for no, pretty much, so that’s kinda fine, but it really should be a simple no.

It then checks to see if the school is open today. If it is open, it then checks to see if I made my lunch, if I took my backpack, and if I rode the bus — and makes these things happen if they didn’t. Forgot my backpack? Just ask “am I in school today?” And poof! There’s my backpack! … but only if the school is open.

It then, finally, checks to see if I’m actually in the school, and gives that answer.

It could just see if I’m in the school — I mean, I could be in school without a backpack, or walked there on the weekend, right? Ha! You and your silly logic have no place here.

So, by asking if the user is in a secure session, we change the answer: they weren’t before, but the act of asking makes it so. This isn’t profound or anything: I don’t work with Schrödinger. My coworkers are just idiots.

And no, the rest of the code isn’t any better…

I feel like at some point it'll become more shit than it's ever been. Partially due to the fact that it seems like EVERY school is trying to get the students into computer science at this point.

NOT EVERYBODY BELONGS IN COMPUTER SCIENCE. PLAIN AND SIMPLE. IT'S NOT FOR EVERYONE.

I feel like some kids that are being forced to do computer science will basically be like "huh there's money in this, maybe I could do this" but they're completely shit at it, when they would have been MUCH better off doing something else.

Side rant, somewhat related actually:

I had a teacher last semester that has to teach one of the computer science classes starting this year (I was not taking her computer science class, it was an unrelated class). From what I've seen, she does not seem fit to teach the class at all.

She's supposed to be teaching some simple programming (no clue what languages, I didn't bother to take the comp sci class). And she knows that I know the stuff, so she would ask me about the simplest things. Which is 100% fine...if she wasn't teaching a computer science class.

She just does not seem fit to teach a computer science class. I'm sure that the school basically just threw her in there because they needed SOMEONE.

I'm honestly kinda scared for the students in the class that might want to go further into computer science, only having taken that class and having met the requirement for a more advanced class, but then being thrown into a class where they don't know a fucking thing.

Interviewer: So which university are you from?

Me: I am from "foo" university.

Interviewer: So why did you not go to "bar" university?

Inner Me: Wtf kind of a question is that. Why the fuck aren't you a unicorn with pigs flying out of your ass and a globally reknowned researcher at Stanford?
We all end up where destiny takes us. Some of us try very hard but things don't magically happen for us. We keep trying but at the end of the day you end up where you end up.

Real Me: I just finished my High School and had the entry test the next day. I was not prepared at all.

I’m so sick of the programming industry. It’s no longer fun. After 26 years, I’m utterly unable to keep up with all the new BS I’m supposed to know. I’m currently unemployed and every job description I see has a kilometer-long list of dozens of languages and protocols and technologies I’m supposed to have 10 or more years with. Utter bollocks. I’m completely unemployable according to these expectations. Nobody will even consider me for hire. Do these candidates actually exist?

Sure, I could do what everyone suggests and “go back to school”. But with what money? And only to find out that the tech bros have invented 20 new things I should have been learning during my 2-4 years getting on the new stuff. Not to mention all the time I will have lost in not being employed for going to school. And then STILL not having the “10 or more years experience”.

My wife is tapping her foot wondering when we’re gonna be able to stop eating through our savings while I dither around and try to find ways to make money. I’m starting to feel like I’ll never be employed or employable again.

It all started in the year 2013.
I was 13 years old back then. I was a fan of Minecraft and so I learned how to setup a bukkit server and ran it. Installing plugins was fun, because I could be a "hacker" and change the configs.
After a while, (~2014), when I was in the 9th grade of elementary school, I saw Unity. A free game engine. Of course, me being a 14 year old I was intrigued and so I downloaded it, made an account and a new project. I had absolutely ZERO knowledge of programming. Didn't even know what languages existed, so i resorted to presets and poorly put together characters + weapons.
After some time fiddling around with Unity, I've gotten a hang of the basics (not programming related).
My actual programming started when I started High School (year 2016). It's a computer engineering school and for the first part of the year, I've learned from my teacher in C# (Console.WriteLine/ReadLine/Loops/Variables). At the second semester I started to gain interest and motivation to program at home. I did the programs we made in school (random number guessing game) but better. Improved it, added colors.
After that, I started developing in Unity - Actually learning something and having the ability to develop something all by myself. It keeps driving me on. In the second year (the year I'm visiting right now) I tought myself HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, PHP. I'm very happy and also can't wait to discover and learn new things in these languages!
My latest project was an Android application for my father that he asked for (it calculated the price of the 3D print he would make).

// Sorry for the long post!

EDIT: Forgot to add a fun little detail. All my classmates make fun of me because I program so much !
Also: Tabs > Spaces

Robots done, for now! Well, the basics are done. Just fueling up at the moment :)
Tomorrow I'll put up a little gif of it moving around, but I wanted to get this out as soon as possible, because making physical things isn't my strong point, and I ran into a lot of problems
Shoutout to my school for having a free to use laser cutter

These influencers man.. I just can't.

Today I was watching a video on how the education industry is a total scam. The video was quite nice, pointing to issues like, school doesn't sell us knowledge, instead it sells us Hopes And Dreams, and other things.

But at the end, the guy goes "By the way guys check out the link in description to get 15% off on this course that teaches you coding and principles of software engineering."

Sneaky Bastards.

Hey there! I am pretty new but old to the community xD. Let me explain and introduce myself.

The post might be a little longer, depending on my inspiration, read it at your own risk ;)

I am here on devRant for almost a year now but, this is my first post. I wasn't active until a week ago or so. Why? Well, at the time, I didn't find posts interesting enough to keep me from work or school. I must addmit I was either stupid or confused (not uncommon for me).

Well, I am high school student who, when not prepearing for an entrance exam for faculty, is learning and doing indie game developent with my cousin's support.

Even though I was intermediate gamer whan I was younger, passionate but not addicted, I didn't even think about getting into game development until my cousin showed me one secific game and told me a story about it. Let's stop here and let me tell you why I tagged this rant with wk88.

I've already mentioned my cousin, he's my wk88 trouble. Why? I'll tell you only one thing. He studies CS at University of Cambridge, UK. He earned the scholarship by competing and earning multiple medals in programming in International Olympiad in Informatics. And here I am struggling with ******* trigonometric identities. But nvm, let's move on.

I told you about the game but didn't actually tell you the title and who developed it. So, my inspiration for getting into game development was Alexander Bruce , guy who designed Antichamber. If you haven't heard of it before/tried it yet, give it a shot, you probably won't be disappointed of you like fucking with your brain.

Here're some facts:
- Started learning programming at the age of 12, thought by my brother using Free Pascal in Lazarus.
- Have been learning C++ for 4 years and C# for 3, both at the same time.
- While learning these two, started building .NET based back-end and doing SQL stuff; failed to finish it, gave up after I realised I needed some advanced front-end skills, which I didn't want to learn, to implement a lot of things I wanted.
- Played a piano since I was 11 and been playing around with music production recently.

Here I am now, learning Blender and hoping that one day I will publish the game I've been developing for past year and a half.

Hope you didn't waste your time reading this. I will try to keep you up with things I experience durning future development.

Cheers! 🍻

One of the biggest reality checks you will run into when starting your first dev related job - and which they don't teach you about in school - is that a lot of the time will be spent working with other people's code, and rewriting it into "your own" is rarely an option.

You might be super into making things, but not everyone manages to maintain that same spark while taking over a 15 year old project with fundamental issues that have to be triaged "for now" because you need a hotfix on this other specific thing out in prod before lunch.

There are no gods now. They left the company years ago and nobody knows why they used the windows registry as a user repo.

So I was preparing for my project assessment at school when some business guy walks up to me asking if we were students here and if we were interested in doing "internet things" for his new business..

"Colleague" (he's there for day-time spending, he doesn't actually have a job) of mine keeps telling me I should F off with pushing for Docker, Git and CakePHP because they add an additional amount of learning for interns that they might not need to learn for school.

He wants us to keep working with the following:
- Google Drive for codebase sharing
- FileZilla (or atleast an FTP) for deployment
- "from scatch" PHP code where business logic and front-end code are all slapped into one big file and where functions are also slapped into one big file. also, opening and closing the database connection for each query made

Guy basically wants us to deliver a crappy products that we might not be able to maintain and are prone to a wide-variety of issues.

Yes, let's limit our company to *only* the things that interns need to learn for school, what could *possibly* go wrong :^)

!dev but actual long rant - about the students in my grade.

TL;DR: 1 asshole in 10 people can ruin everything. Mobbing sucks. I dislike parties.

There's the word "Jahrgang" in Germany which means the people in the same school year as you. I'll refer to it as "my (collective) classmates" although we don't have classes anymore, rather courses and I also mean those I do not have courses with.

With that out of the way, let the rant begin.

It's often the case that people with high logical and intellectual skills (no being arrogant, other people categorize me like that) have a lack of social skills - or empathy.

I'm a kind of an outsider in a way that since 10th grade I stopped trying to attach myself to certain groups since I do not fit in there. I'm fine with that now. Nowadays I can at least socialize with other nerds.

Here's why I dislike the collective of my classmates. This year is my last school year and as always, a big group forms a spirit. They have a theme (superheroes - super boring). I didn't go to any party they threw and I don't plan to go to the graduation ceremony as well since it's an unofficial party and not a school event. I hate parties. I hate alc and drunken teenagers. I didn't attend the "Kursfahrt" - a kind of excursion that's like holidays with your course - mainly because I dislike my "Stammkurs" (main course).

Why? I had a friend in this course. She was short, geeky and I could actually talk to her. Yet some jerks (not intensely) bullied her because "she was awkward" and in the end, she switched school - also because of other reasons.
When she was gone, even those who didn't bully her and who are considered "nice" made fun of her and talked badly about her - and me hanging around with her. So since then, I avoid anything with them that's not 100% school related.

Now they're planning what we call "Abigag" - it's a joke/prank the graduates pull on the school and younger students, something funny like an entrance room full of balloons and many other things. Also, the "Abizeitung", the yearbook the graduates put out with articles about their courses, teacher ranking and quotes etc. Also, a cabaret evening from the graduates to collect money for the graduation party. Cool stuff actually. I thought about taking part.

I'd say my talents are creativity and computer stuff. So a friend chatted with me about nerdy pranks like a school-wide wallpaper change. Or releasing a fake password list of the teachers - claiming we hacked them - with puns and insiders about the teaches. He said he gotta invite me into the WhatsApp group of the Abi prank. Disclaimer: He's one of those people who are socialized but still able to talk with me. He's fine.

Well guess what he told me later:

They don't want me on the team since I distance myself from my classmates. I should either be fully one of them or not at all.

That's enough. Who distances whom? I thought they were happy to have me on board but horse shit! Stuck with ideologies from the 19th century.
They can lick my ***. I don't have anything against most of them in person but as a collective, they're just fucking stupid. I guess it wasn't even the majority saying they don't want me to help. It was probably just the small crew of leading and loud jerks. And no one would disagree with them saying "Why not? He wants to help?" (even if it was their opinion) - they don't have the brain or balls to say anything against the strong idiot leaders. They'll do great later in politics as an adult - they wouldn't criticize Hitler if they were under his "protection".

So I won't take part in making Abi pranks, - but also not the Paper and cabaret eve. They can go jerk off to being part of a huge collection of assholes - which I, in all my pride, am not part of other than on paper.

(Disclaimer: No critics to other outsiders but those who were engaged and responsible for the choice of not letting me help)

If anyone actually read this:
Who were/are you in school times?
A proud outsider like me? Party boi/girl? Engaged striver?

"I have nothing to hide."

I admit, I did utter these disgraceful words once. But I now take privacy seriously.

What is really sad and potentially dangerous is the fact that younger people do not give a fuck about privacy. Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram - these people use these apps and do not pay ANY attention to what might be the consequences of their actions.

The more data they own, the more they own you. We should start a privacy basics course in high school. Things could get out of hand in the future, as if they already aren't.

So, I'm studying computer engineering in school, so a lot of people have decided I'm the tech one in the group and come to me with all there computer problems.

I'm constantly explaining basic things about their computers, how to exit vim, why using git is a lot easier then having 100 versions of files, how to change directories from the terminal. Simple things like that and while I normally don't mind, all these people are also in computer engineering and should really know all this stuff too.

Recently started using Linux for software development and it is waay easier to get things done than on windows. As a beginner in CS and a total Windows person, I am beginning to really enjoy Linux. I will definitely install a dualboot on my Laptop for the new semester in school.

One of the biggest things that grinds me gears is when I'm tutoring CS at my school as a student tutor is that I get those students who obviously aren't studying or even trying, in fact hoping their tutor will tell them exactly what to type to get that A in the class.

Me: "OK so here's the idea of..." *explains the idea on what they need to accomplish in a more simplistic, visual idea*

Student': *blank stares*

Me: *Blank stares back, thinking of how to make it simpler...*

I then explain I in even more layman terms till they get through their head I'm not going to tell them what to do. I'll guide, but I won't tell what to do.

Please don't waste my time, or I'll waste your time explaing the very fundamental basics of how a variable works instead of helping with your homework.

!rant
After a years of struggle with the administration office I managed to create a coding club in my school! Things are finally changing

"What we can do to get all on time? ", manager asks
"Can we have 4 more developers on the project?", dev asks
"No, that's not gonna happen. Let's be realistic", manager says
"Is it realistic to ask 3 devs to ship 20 features in a week, reviewed and tested?" dev asks
"Actually 2 of you, because our contractor goes into a vacation. But you can do overtimes, can't you?"
"I prefer not to but even in that case I can't guarantee that as it's not realistic. But at least can I leave earlier and work more from home more because there are severe delays on the train lines and if I have to commute 4 hours a day it won't help", dev says
"Well, I'm not sure if that's a good idea. You have to communicate with people, you know. We have to ship things. But we can discuss this tomorrow as I have to leave early today. I have to take my kids from school"

Really? Wtf?

My IT teacher REQUIRES to write down our Office365 password into the notebook... It’s funny to me because I got one generated through LastPass and he doesn’t allow me to use it...

For two weeks I am paid 50$ an hour 6 hours a day / 5 days per week as someone called "Web deployment supervisor". The work is based on checking if the website throws an error and fixing it (devops) and staying in touc with the customer and helping him. The wevsite i wrote is just a small PHP site, well tested, almost no user input, if you dont drop whole DB it cannot basically crash. So for past week I am just copypasting documentation for the client what/how to do things. Today I already sent him same info 4 times. For me as a student and a freelance web dev it's a gold mine. I am having vacations for 14 days (thanks to damaged school water supply), getting paid 50$/hour for playing PUBG and using Ctrl+F in my Firefox, but god hell, it's so fucking psychically hard. Sometimes I have an urge to scream on that retard "I'VE SENT YOU THAT SAME SHIT 4 MINUTES AGO RETARD USE YOUR FUCKING SCROLL WHEEL IN OUR CHAT FOR FUCK SAKE".

A good friend of mine turned 38 yesterday. It will be his last birthday. Last month was his last Christmas and New Years. He entered hospice care this month. His doctors have said he's only got a few weeks left, so he's come off the treatment for his brain tumour. His kids are old enough to understand he won't be here much longer. A bunch of us, friends from high school, flew up to see him in the fall. It's hard to believe someone our age won't be with us to see another year. It puts things in perspective.

WHY AM I SO FUCKING AWKWARD OH MY LORD! LITERALLY ALL I HAD TO DO WAS WATCH A SCHOOL PLAY AND THEN GET A PICTURE WITH A CAST MEMBER AND IT WAS PROBABLY ONE OF THE FEELINGS I'VE HAD IN THE PAST WEEK! GOD FUCKING DAMMIT I AM SO DONE WITH THIS! I'M TIRED OF BEING SO AWKWARD AND ANXIOUS! I DON'T GET HOW PEOPLE CAN DO ANYTHING LIKE THAT WITHOUT FEELING UNCOMFORTABLE. THIS HAS LITERALLY RUINED MY FUCKING LIFE AND I'M SO TIRED OF IT. I KNOW PEOPLE LIKE ME BUT I JUST CAN'T GET MYSELF TO TALK TO ANYONE! THE SIMPLEST THINGS TAKE SO MUCH OUT OF ME AND I'M SICK OF IT! I'M JUST TIRED OF IT! I'm just, tired.

When I was 17 years old. I had difficulties in understanding math problem “Calculus” (I can’t remember which one was it). This one day when we were in a Computer Lab, our teacher was showing us how really software’s are made. During my time, it was vb6. I paid close attention. When I went home, I started to think things that I can make using that software so one day I went to my teacher and asked if I can have a copy of the vb6. He gave vb6 and told me that inside are few eBooks that will help in learning.

Fuck School, from that day I started to concentrate on programming only. Made a small calculator which will help me to understand a Calculus problem and double check my answer. From that day, I love programming.

I’ m 26 now and a full stack software developer. All I want to do it build cool shit, something that will blow the eyeball of my friends and that eyeball should pop out from their asshole.

Joke: The person who scored highest in the computer class was afraid to switch on the PC.

Tldr; make sure what you study is relevant to the field and you enjoy it otherwise don't waste your time.

BTW: devrant is awesome it gets me through the day.

So I am almost 3/4ths through a master's in cs and I am contemplating why I went to school in the first place/dropping out.

My program is basically an extension of the bs I got from the same school meaning we learn very general cs topics. There is only one ai class for example.

I had a junior developer position before I even got my bs so now that I am this far along and looking at job openings I'm wondering what why and how my school is able to get away with teaching us this shit.

After all my schooling I learnt more on my own and through Google. I have little to show for my school work other than a degree that says I did a bunch of busy work. And the specific things that I did learn I will never ever remember. Seriously. Who here knows what a MIB and OID are and have actually used them?

I wish I tried harder to get into a school like Berkeley but just looking at their applications is depressing. I always had issues with school and they expect my to have the grades, extra curriculars and other shit. I'll build you a robot or make you a website but I'm not doing that nonsense.

And then there's Google and apple and all these big tech companies expecting me to have written full Enterprise software and know every single algorithm and programming language because everyone uses something different. Sure I wish I had experience in all 50 languages that are popular right now but I don't. And I'm not gonna learn it from school that's for damn sure.

Who here actually went to a good school and can say it helped them in the real world? How many employers actually care about school over actual experience?

Who knows how to burn a school down and get away with it? Or at least make teachers with Phds stop reading off slides all lecture. I know how to fucking read for fucks sake. Not too mention they use shitty software made in 2003 that's no longer supported. And I could go on about the teacher last quarter who graded the midterm on final day while he flirted with the 3 girls in class. And I could go on and on and on but I feel like I need to start being productive so I don't waste away.

Just so done.

Volunteered at a hospital and made some kind of intranet for other volunteers because they wanted to use a facebook group for internal communication which I found stupid.

Made a reactjs/slimphp app and learned a variety of things while coding, unfortunately it had to support internet explorer which sucks balls.

Quit after a year because of school and a paid job, someone else is maintaining it now :)

College rant:

I have finals next week. I am sitting here learning about things which have no benefit to my career. My college requires me to take Calculus based physics 2, which makes no sense to me at all! I do appreciate physics however I would much rather be coding. In my CS courses you learn theory which is fine, however very impractical. I last October I realized how much more you need to do and a degree just won't cut it. I spend about 50 hours a week learning TDD, git, hashes all this stuff that is not taught in school. Then on top of this I'm learning pointless crap that if I ever needed in a real world situation I would go to Kahn Academy or simply Google it. I'm upset because I have to stop coding for the week to study information I will forget 2 weeks from now, and most likely never use again. I have a job someone offered me which will be extremely beneficial to my career however I have to wait a week to even look at it. I'm just bitter.

Did I ever say I love my PM? He's fucking awesome.

In the summer I got an internship at this company and the PM had plans to turn me into a permanent employee, junior position I assume. I told him I'd need a month after school started to see how things went with school and the job at the same time. In the end I decided I couldn't work full-time because I don't have time for it. Also, I want to explore a bit the CS field and see if there's anything else I like (quantum computing and low level programming are at the top of my list), so I decided I won't be renewing my contract as an intern either.

Last week I went into a call with my PM to tell him about all of this and I did not expect the response I got. He actually thinks I'm doing right and supported me in my decision to learn other things. I didn't expect this kind of response at all and it made me feel much, much better (I was pretty nervous to tell him). He also told me that if I want to work on something else in order to learn I just have to ask (I currently do web dev).

But that's not all. He gives us, developers, space to work and doesn't micromanage us. He has technical understanding, doesn't force deadlines on us and understands that sometimes things take longer than expected. He is just great and I'm kind of sad I'll be leaving this job because he's awesome and (from what I read here on devrant) that seems to be pretty rare.

Anyways, that's it, no anger or anything today, I just wanted to say I like my PM very much.

I hired 2 fresh out of school junior devs to work with me on my old web app.
They were brilliant, knew a lot of things, and were motivated.
They started complaining about how the code was shit, the db was shit, there were no best practices, the technology was old, bug fixing was boring, no comments in code.

I felt bad, very bad during 3 years, because they were absolutely right. I tried to work with them through better coding practices, rewriting, documenting etc.

Now they both have left.
I'm alone maintaining and evolving the application.
And I start to come across the code THEY developed.

What a bunch of shit. SQL queries bringing down the server. Duplicate code, because they didn't want even read the old one. Useless comments.
Performance killing functions. Exceptions swallowed without mercy. I have to clean up they poop.

I feel somewhat better, though. The application is still growing and holding the ground after many years and generating at least 800K$ per year in revenues.

Maybe better, but sad. I really wanted to share the project with somebody else but I failed, and I'm left alone....

Just want to share that in August I'll be starting my career as a developer, something which I'm super nervous and excited about.

I just finished my bachelor degree, and will be starting mid-August. I've been moderately interested in the concept of programming since I was 14, but I initially didn't think I had what it took to make it my profession ("Programmers need to be good at math and that sort of stuff, right?") So I studied electronics and started at the same place where I finished my apprenticeship, working IT support. Eventually, I found myself not fully pleased with how things had turned out and quit my job to get a bachelor degree. And now, having graduated a few days ago, I'm very excited to see what my future as a developer will bring. I'm stoked and nervous at the same time, and I just wanted to share this with someone.

During my time as a student, I've been so lucky as to have discovered the world of JavaScript/Node.js/React in addition to all the standard Java-centric curriculum they taught at school, and I think that's an area I hope to explore more in the coming future.

So for my programming class, we had to make a game using Scratch. No problem, I said. Scratch is easy stuff. Just drag and drop blocks. Like legos. Legos that actually do shit. Cool.

So my game is about a dog underneath a plinko set, dodging balls that come down the plinko thing. Easy enough. I figured I would spice things up a bit. My teacher has to go through 20 of these games, I figured I'd make mine interesting. I add a little heart system.

Now for those of you who don't know Scratch, or don't care enough to look it up, all of Scratch's codes are within the sprite themselves. They can communicate with other sprites with a thing called broadcasting. When other sprites receive a broadcast, it can activate a script. yeah, cool.

So I had a script on the dog, that broadcasts a message to the heart system to remove a heart when the dog is hit. So to keep things short, I call the broadcast "Dog's hit."

For anyone who knows programming, computers have no clue what an apostrophe or a space is. They can't read it unless you have it all letters, maybe a semicolon. So, I removed the space and apostrophe, with my innocent 17 year-old mind not realizing this makes it "Dogshit."

Game's finished. Finally. Due date comes in, I submit it all proud and everything. I just created the best dog-plinko simulator of all time. Later that day, I show it to my friend, who then points out the typo.

At this point, my teacher already graded it. I went down to see him after school, and he must've known why I went down as soon as I walked in the door, and just cracked up. He told me it was fine, and not to do it again.

I left red.

Why am I such an average ?

It's just a sad realisation. Nobody cares but I wanna send this out there, just to write thoughts.. I am 18 in 3rd year of high school (grammar school so nothing IT related, basically waste of time) and in IT I'm all self taught but I feel like I could be better if I just didn't [something]..

I feel like I wanna learn so many things but when I look at you, it seems like a common problem in the IT sphere so hey, average guy joining the club.

I also feel dumb when programming. I didn't manage to learn C++ in it's entirety because to really accomplish something, you've got so many ways to do it and finding the best one requires deep understanding of the tools you've got at your disposal with the language and I feel like I'm not capable of this(self learn, in school/Uni that's different story).. But many (most) of you are. I've tried many coding challenges and when I got it working, I just saw how someone did it in one line just by layering functions that I've never heard of..

Also, we've got kinda specific national competition here in many fields including IT for high schools.. And the winners always do sometimes like "AI driven Life simulation" or "Self flying drone made from ATMega from scratch with 3D simulation in C# to it" or "Game engine" or whatever shit and it's always from grammar schools and never IT related schools.. They are like me. Maybe someone helped them, I don't know, but they are just so far away from me while I'm here struggling to get the basic level of math for any kind of machine learning..

Yeah I've written Neural Network from scratch in C but meh, honestly it's pretty basic stuff .. I'd rather understand derivatives which we're going to learn next year and I'm too lazy to learn it from khan academy because I always learn something else.. Like processing (actually codetrain started teaching tensorflow so that might be the light for me...) Or VHDL (guys you can create your own chip / CPU from scratch and it's not even hard and OMFG it's so fucking cool , full adder done yay) or RPi or commodore 64 assembly or game development with Godot and just meh..

I mean, this sounds exactly like not knowing what to do and doing nothing in the end. That was me like 6-12 months ago. Now I'm managing to pick 2-3 things and focus them and actually feel the progress.

But I lost track of the original point.. I didn't do anything special, every time I'm programming something, everyone does it better and I feel dumb. I will probably never do anything special, everyone around says "He's still learning he's genius" but they have no idea.

I mean, have you seen one of the newest videos on Google's YouTube channel (I openly hate them, but I will keep that away for now), something like "Sarah story" ? It's about girl that apparently didn't care about IT but self learned tensorflow on high school. I think it may be bullshit (like ALL of their videos ) but it's probably just fancied, not complete lie.

And again, here I am. I now C but I'm incapable of learning to program good which most of you did and are now doing for living. I'm incapable to do anything cool, just understanding what everybody else did and replicating it. I'm incapable of being clever.

Sorry, just misusing devrant to vent a bit

I've been taking a bunch of boot camp 'entry' type tests to do some research for the school I'm building - and these things are strange. To qualify, some of them want to make sure you can do basic algebra and others want you to be very comfortable with higher-order JS function type stuff - and then you get questions like this : /

Hey there! -first rant-

I need your advice mighty ranters.. I'm an introverted gal studying Computer Science at uni, and i love this field. Wanna be a web or app developer..

I need your help about 2 things:

1. Literally ANY advice, or things you wish you knew, when you were a rookie

2. I'm currently living in solitude, because of hard times in the past and i find making friends much more difficult at uni than in high school. It even starts to affect my productivity in a bad way. I have a hard time trusting people.
So any advice about this? How do you cope with too much solitude? Is there maybe a group for girl programmers? I don't know..

All advice are welcomed! (and IT jokes too, to make my day :D )
Thanks a lot !

Ps.: You are great! Awesome community.

Some of these things have been probably mentioned already in some way, but I'd like to add my two cents nevertheless
I grew up in Germany and have been in the German school system for my whole "school career" and what I always missed was a computer/programming related subject. (A real one, not this thing where they teach how to use MS Office) Something that would have pushed me a bit more into this world of technology and programming way earlier, because I didn't know which possibilities I had. It doesn't happen often that I think that something is better in Slovakia but I have to say that in Slovakia they are teaching CS in standard schools from the age of 11or 12 I think. I don't exactly know what they teach there, maybe it's shit, but it's something at least. I know that most people swear on teaching themselves programming and all but there are people like me who struggle with that.
Then of course I'd like to see the teaching get better. They should teach the useful stuff and focus on practical experience.

Hey DevRant fam! Hope you are all doing very well wherever you may be. This is not a dev related post but just something i wanted to get off my chest , 20 minutes ago I watched the movie “night school” along side my brother. I was sat down along side two girls on my left and i thought “hey they seem nice” in my mind.

Well i was wrong - throughout parts of the movie she would randomly turn to give me a weird look, as if i was something else? Unfortunately i suffer from eczema and really cant help it and have to undergo treatment monthly and with that comes bullying and judgement from randoms.

What really broke me was that she had the nerves to comment loudly to her friend right next to her about me, say things like “ damn is he ugly “ and many things along those lines, and also about how i ate my pringles? Like hey i love my pringle chips!.

At the end, movie done, my brother is happy I’m happy(not really) we both got up the two random girls walked in front and just gave me this weird stare and had to judge me by the way i walked, thats a whole other issue but i just wish they would have the thought- how would you feel if you put yourself in my position and have to go through my emotions you put me through because you wouldn’t think before you speak ? :-( well thats not everything but some of what i have to deal with unfortunately - sorry this is so long.

Hope all is good for everyone- thank you ☺️

Milo

So I was wondering, what is you guys' 'goal' in the long run? What do you really want to be able to do or what do you really want to achieve in 5 to 10 years? Are you working primarily for an income or are there more prominent reasons for doing what you do?

I'm in my last years of university and have a job at a software development company, not because I need the money but because of all the amazing technologies I come in touch with and the amazing things I learn, mostly about servers and devops tools.

I currently have 2 goals in mind: Creating an .io game together with a frontend developer and setting up a kubernetes cluster and using it. I personally consider kubernetes an end-game thing when it comes to running apps and am experimenting with it on three servers that I got from school.

So I was wondering, what ahout you? 😀

**My Resume** : Worked with JavaScript and .NET for the last 3 years ... have an Associates degree...more things

**Recruiter**
You look like you'd be a great fit for this position. We require a Bachelors degree, but we're willing to take 4 years progressive experience in lieu of each year of schooling.

**First**
4 YEARS of experience for EACH YEAR of school?

**Me**
I guess basic reading and math aren't required to be a job recruiter? Man...Only 5 more years and I'll be able to see how my skills as a developer with 8 years of professional experience will go over as an Entry level developer!

It would have been back in the 90s 🤫
I was about 8 years old I guess when I had a friend who had a Commodore64 and he loaded up the good old floppy, typed some things in and the screen started doing things, my mind was instantly triggered for “how did you do that?”.

Moving forward after that I was into gaming on consoles (sega, snes, Atari ect) and always wondered how the games were made (being pre-internet) that was not easy to find info for, otherwise I think inprobably would have ended up in the game dev world.

It wasn’t until I was about 10-11 that I finally got a PC in the house ( good old IBM 386 with 10mb HDD.. yes MB not GB for you young folk) and I was addicted from day one, MS paint, changing settings left right and Center in windows 3.11 and then when we upgraded to W95 and then W98 things got more and more interesting.

God the memories, and games (MAME32 was the best)😆
Shit now I want to find some old school games for a trip up memory lane 😂

When I was 15, I made my first website in front page (don’t judge), was a nice big walkthrough with photos and map locations for GTA 3, and since then I’ve never looked back.

!rant but help?

I currently have Kali (for labs I'm working on to teach myself the things I didn't learn in school), Ubuntu (downloaded for school), and Fedora (downloaded for my database class)... other than Kali already having Metasploit in it, I don't see a difference between these and I know there are more versions of Linux.

What would be a good starting place for every day use, that'll support Citrix receiver (required for work no idea what its requirements are but I can find out, if i can't use it in Linux, I'll dual boot) and virtual box (or other virtual software, don't mind learning new systems), and that i can also have room to grow for security learning?

I have been on Reddit...
I have been lurking in ProgrammerHumor...

I am not proud of these things...

I got called a "Big Shot" because I didn't think the concept of pointers in C/C++ was ever particularly hard.

If I remember right. I learned in high school how pointers worked when they explained how arrays worked in Pascal. When I taught myself C it didn't ever seem like it was a difficult thing to understand.

Is the concept of pointers really that hard to understand for devs?

Sooooooo since a few days im feeling more and more depressed.

There are some things that might cause it :
- school
-My last frienhship broke (not like i care about sociality. lol)
-my parents being so strict.

What can i do except for going through this, eyes shut?
I alceady had a depression i dont wanna get back there :/

A few years ago I was in high school and used to have a small reputation of hacking things. I could hack, just would never hack any school networks or systems (reputation + notice that there was a breach is a bad combo since everyone would immediately suspect you).

Anyways one day the networks internet connection went down in the school district and I was the only one who used a laptop to take notes. So I quickly opened the terminal and ran Wireshark and said to the person to my right "see that button there? yeah I programmed this last night. anytime I press it I can shut down the network so the teacher can't reach her files (she famously only saved them online). *Long dramatic press* Wireshark started scanning the network so all the numbers and lines were going crazy as it viewed the packet info "Now just wait", soon the whole class knew what I had done through whispers and lo and behold a few minutes later and the teacher couldn't reach her files.

Everyone loved me for the rest of the year for saving them from the homework for the week the wifi network was out since it also ended up having to cancel two tests in the class, and a lot more homework and tests in all their other classes. Solidified my reputation and no one fucked with me from that day on.

This is going to take a second to get dev related, please bear with me.

So, I'm from a pretty small (and poor) town. Like most small towns, not many give a damn about computer science/IT (that shows by the fact I'm the only CS major. And there's one IT major).

Now, my high school offers a few "career prep" classes. There's (no exaggeration) almost 5 or 6 classes for medical majors to prepare themselves; like 4 different agriculture based classes; 2 business major classes; and surprise surprise...not a damn Computer Science or IT class.

Yes, we have a computer class. But can you even call a "How to Use Microscoft Products" class an computer class? Finally by my senior year, I got pissed off by this.

I had/have relatives that have worked/are working in the school system, so it wasn't hard to get a meeting with the superintendent and the assistant superintendent to discuss my thoughts. They were both open to and even supported my ideas. But due to funding, it wasn't a feasible idea at the time. (Especially since not many care about CS or IT.)

This is where I get really really pissed off. Being that the town is small, the people with money/a name tend to control things. So, a former principal retired with the expectations to work in another county. However, this job fail through. But there was a "magical" opening for a job that didn't exist before this job fail through.

This pisses me off. We can create a job for someone and afford a full time salary for them, but we cant get an actual CS class. (And this isn't the first time a job was created for someone.)

TL;DR; windows XP + bat scripts + fascination about being able to make things yourself.

I was born and raised in a village. And the thing about living in a village is that you are free :) Among all the other freedoms you are also free to build your own solutions to various domestic problems, i.e. to build stuff. This is one of the things that fascinates me about living outside the city.

When I finally was old enough (and had the means to, i.e. a computer) to understand that programming is something that allows you to build your own solutions to computer problems, it got to me.

With win 3.1 I was still too fresh and too young. With win 95 I was more interested in playing with neighbours outdoors. With win 98 I was a bit too busy at school. But with win XP the time had come. I started writing automation solutions for windows administration using .bat scripts (.vbs was and still is somewhat repelling to me). I no longer needed to browse Russian forums and torrent sites to find a solution to a problem I had! That was amazing!!! [esp. when my Russian was very weak].

That was the time when I built my first sort-of-malware - a bat script downloading and installing Radmin server, uploading computer's IP and admin credentials to my FTP.

I loved it!

However, I'd stumbled upon may obstacles when writing with batch. I googled a lot and most of the solutions I found were in bash (something related to Linux, which was a spooky mystery to me back then). Eventually, I got my courage together and installed ubuntu. Boy was I sorry... Nothing was working. I was unable to even boot the thing! Not to mention the GUI...

Years later I tried again with ubuntu [7.10 I think.. or 7.04] on my Pavilion. Took me a looooot of attempts but I got there. I could finally boot it. A couple of weeks later I managed to even start the GUI! I could finally learn bash and enjoy the spectacular Compiz effects (that cube was amazing).

I got into bash and Linux for the next several years. And then I thought to myself - wait, I'm writing scripts that automate other programs. Wouldn't it be cool I I could write my own programs that did exactly what I wanted and did not need automation? It definitely would! I could write a program that would make sound work (meaning no more ALSA/PA headaches!), make graphics work on my hardware, make my USB audio card to be set to primary once connected and all the other amazing things! No more automation -- just a single program or all of that!

little did the naive me knew :)

I started with python. I didn't like that syntax from the beginning :/ those indentations...

Then I tried java. Bucky (thenewboston), who likes tuna sandwiches, on my phone all the free time I had. I didn't learn anything :/ Even tried some java 101 e-book. Nothing helped until I decided to write some simple project (nothing fancy - just some calculations for a friend who was studying architecture).

I loved it! It sounds weird, but I found Swing amazing too. With that layout manager where you have to manually position all the components :)

and then things happened and I quit my med studies and switched to programming. Passed my school exams I was missing to enter the IT college and started inhaling every bit of info about IT I could get my hands on (incl outside the college ofc).

A few more stepping stones, a few more irrelevant jobs to pay my bills in the city, and I got to where I am now.

!(dev || rant)

Dudes and dudettes, i shall ask you all one question: what is the thing/hobby (or things/hobbies) that you always wanted to get into and never gor the chance?

For me i thing first would be brewing, as i would love to refer to myself as a "Brewmaster" like in Warcraft (bonus points if i wear a panda costume) more then an "Engineer" (a trust worthy one even), but i think i might have the chance to as soon as i will have the chance (and means) to move alone as i already know a few things from my dad. The second would be something really cool i saw on reddut and made me remember the old times when i will watch timelapses in this topic on you tube: Crystal growing! Like, middle school chemistry, not meth! At least for now.. 🤔 Anyway, here is a nice pic with some dude's work, looking forward to hear abiut yours!!

PS: Bonus Points for a pic related to the thingie!

PSA to /[devs who things it's a good idea|management who thinks it's a good idea to force your devs]+/g:

There currently exists 1543 (and counting) top level domains. My email addresses follow the pattern: /^[a-z]+@panduro\.guru$/ and I die a little inside whenever I get told my email addresses aren't valid because you thought it was a good idea (to force your devs) to hardcode "valid" top level domains. There is a reason why the filter for input type email does not include top level domains.

And you can't even begin to comprehend how mildly annoyed I get when I message their support and tell them what the problem is (because I'm nice enough to do that) they instead of telling me "thanks for informing us we'll look into it" they tell me "well just get a gmail or something". I should not have to order social status reducing items with my school mail (especially not since I'll loose that email ¾ pairs of years)

I just started work school doing IT administration and development, I was excited, almost nervously anticipating to see the wondrous things I'd being learning and the kickass programs I'd be creating...

Alas I walked into my first lesson and...

Teacher: Today we're going to be learning how to make a square in Excel using VBR.

I thought, well fuck no - I didn't sign up for this shit. Then today I was on this thing called the internet, have you guys tried it? Amazing stuff, I saw a panda dressed as Chuck Norris... Anyway, I was on the internet and found out about this 73 year old man who makes full-sized artworks made in Excel.

Now I know the meaning to life, to Excel programming... It's official, I'm going to make Picasso in Excel.

*Light sarcasm, actual true story.*

I freaking hate school curriculums, I have only 5 classes this semester, only two of them are career related and one is about QA, I want to focus on my code, projects, things that really matter but instead I have to do Socials homework, learn how to do research papers, learn about marketing. I really hate this. Besides the classes I have on development are extremely light. And I have to pay for this crap

Network Security at it's best at my school.
So firstly our school has only one wifi AP in the whole building and you can only access Internet from there or their PCs which have just like the AP restricted internet with mc afee Webgateway even though they didn't even restrict shuting down computers remotely with shutdown -i.
The next stupid thing is cmd is disabled but powershell isn't and you can execute cmd commands with batch files.
But back to internet access: the proxy with Mcafee is permanently added in these PCs and you don't havs admin rights to change them.
Although this can be bypassed by basically everone because everyone knows one or two teacher accounts, its still restricted right.
So I thought I could try to get around. My first first few tries failed until I found out that they apparently have a mac adress wthitelist for their lan.
Then I just copied a mac adress of one of their ARM terminals pc and set up a raspberry pi with a mac change at startup.
Finally I got an Ip with normal DHCP and internet but port 80 was blocked in contrast to others like 443. So I set up an tcp openvpn server on port 443 elsewhere on a server to mimic ssl traffic.
Then I set up my raspberry pi to change mac, connect to this vpn at startup and provide a wifi ap with an own ip address range and internet over vpn.
As a little extra feature I also added a script for it to act as Spotify connect speaker.
So basically I now have a raspberry pi which I can plugin into power and Ethernet and an aux cable of the always-on-speakers in every room.
My own portable 10mbit/s unrestricted AP with spotify connect speaker.
Last but not least I learnt very many things about networks, vpns and so on while exploiting my schools security as a 16 year old.

What's this erogant world?

Someone asked a question in Stack Exchange, he put his design of a school management database and asked for suggestions.
Well, there are many things to improve, relations and data types etc..

BUT, he got 10 very long answers about why every student has exactly a father and a mother, why not 2 mothers and 3 fathers and all some off topic talks that could be said in 1 line..
Like what the... ok we know you're gay but answer the question without being an attention greedy

I am starting to think of creating my own company when I finish school.
If all these rejections keep on continuing, I honestly think of doing that.
I just took a look at local "PC docs" and software companies. Like the ones in the same city.
Their websites are looking like those from the 90s.
And most of the things they do... I can do them myself, as well, without needing an apprenticeship. I already own these skills.

A bit different than wk93, but still connected and a fun story.

Back in high school when it began to digitalize everything, so began our teachers journey with technology. We, as IT class were into these things, but as far as I can say, others in the school including both teachers and students were like cave mans when it came to IT.

Most of them kept the different wifi networks password on the windows desktop, in a file 'wifipassword.txt'. When we were on robotics seminar, we had to use a teacher's laptop. The wifi network was incredibly fast and powerful,, yet so poorly configured that even the configuration page user/pass was the default admin/admin, because the IT admin wasn't the most skilled one.

We got the idea to sell the password of the wifi network to other students. Not much, for about 1 dollar a week. The customer came to us, we took the phone, took note of the MAC address, entered the password, and if the guy were to stop paying every week, we just blacklisted that MAC on the next robotics course.

Went well for months, until a new sysadmin came and immediately found it out, we were almost fired from the school, but my principal realized how awesome this idea was. You may say that we were assholes, and partially that is true, I'd rather say we made use of our knowledge.

Ok Storytime.
Yesterday I applied for a summerjob as a Software/Webdeveloper at some companies. Today I got a call and they tell me I have the job. When I asked what kind of things I will have to do there the Recruiter didn't really know, so I accepted because fuck it.
Later I got told that somebody from the team will be calling me. So i ask that guy what I'm going to be doing and he tells me they have a old sharepoint application that they need to migrate to a new sharepoint version.

So I read up on sharepoint and find out about the languages ASP.NET supports aaaaaand it's about my least favorite language C#. (Well actually that would be Visual Basic but nevermind) We did some C# in school but I never got fond of it.
But hey learning something new ain't so bad or is it?

What are your thoughts on Sharepoint, ASP.NET and C#?

So today is my last day at my current job. I've been here for 4 years and started working here even before I'd even graduated high school. It's really bittersweet. On the one hand I'm so excited for my new job (and vacation), but on the other hand I'll miss this place so damn much. Some say you shouldn't get too attached to your employer, and while that might be true for many cases, I feel that I've gained nothing but positive things from these last 4 years.

Having gone from just having colleagues to having actual friends has been an awesome journey, and I think a good indication of our good relationship is the fact that one of them even wrote me a goodbye song for our little goodbye breakfast this morning.

Idk, just thoughts...

Anyways, away I go. Let's hope my new job will be somewhat good as well.

I like to go do a bit of manual labor to remind me I'm not trying to end up with a dead end job making just a hair above minimum wage.

Good motivation for me to try harder in school so I'll actually learn things and not to cheatmy way through like a lot of people I know.

That's what we call "conf" in school. Normally we have to lock our computer everytime we leave the table. If we don't, anybody can reach your computer and make kind little bad things to your computer :
setxkbmap ru
alias ls="reboot"
alias firefox="firefox youporn.com"
alias emacs=" ls"
Changing keyboard sensibility and many things !

!devButAlsoKindaIsDev

Alright, time to do some explanation.

TL;DR: JavaScript is a fucking nightmare. May god help every web developer out there. Essentially, I was gone because of JavaScript.

Q: where tf are you bruh
A: in your mo-uhhhhh alright, so I was chosen to be the main developer for an interactive promotional video for my school (every year the school holds something called an open day, where kids from 8th grade can come to the school and have a tour in the school first hand. Because of the coronavirus (just gonna call it “the rona” from here) this is now impossible so we are losing the interest and the first impressions so the school decided to make an interactive virtual one). They asked me if I want to do it and I said yes.

Boy, was that ever a mistake... (hint: it was a huge mistake)

So the guy who talked to me and asked if I wanted to do this was my grade’s manager, and he gave me the phone number of my PM. So we talked and stuff, and then this happened: (bruh = PM)

bruh: I’ll send you the API and documentation for the thing that we are working with! They have lots of examples and stuff and they’re Israeli too!

Me: Okay! What language are we talking about here?

bruh: JavaScript.

Me: (questioning life choices) Okay!

I didn’t write any JavaScript for the last 3 years or so. It had to be done because I promised and I can’t let down people who count at me and ask me to show where I shine.

So, what was the objective for me? Build a Firebase client that sends the user’s score and choices to Firestore after he chooses something in the interactive video (for example, go to chemistry or go to physics) while learning JavaScmeme (ECMEMEScript) as I go.

Deadline? A week and a half.

After working almost 12 hours a fucking day, I made it work. Sorta. In order to reconcile with small exceptions and edge cases in the interactive video, I had to hard-code some IDs in the code. I had no choice, since I couldn’t allow myself to spend more and more time to make my code more dynamic than it was because I simply didn’t have time. The code absolutely STINKS but it works.

Today is the day where we (aim) to finish all of the cosmetic things that we need to fix. All of them are non-essential for everything to work, but we want to make this thing presentable because we want to put this on the school’s website.

CONCLUSION:

JavaScript is literal shit. Dynamic weakly-typed languages are cursed AF and need to die in a fire.

I got VB script blocked from all the computes in high school

I had a laptop to do my work in class on (my handwriting is terrible, dyslexia and other things) and I was playing around with VB script making a little text adventure game with dialog boxes because I was bored, it got quite long and I was happy with it but then one day when I tried to open the file it said the network administrator had blocked this type of file from being opened... Spoilsports

I wonder what "eligible" means. "The few people who learn anything in this program..." I can't wait to write the copy for my school. "100% of students who turn out to be good at things - will do things well." haha.

My first dev project was making a small 3D engine in GameMaker 7 when I was 14. I had been using gamemaker for two years then but I never got past the "platformer movement and collisions" and "top down movement and collisions"

It was the first thing I made myself without following a tutorial and spend quite a few afternoons at school to ask my Math teacher to explain things like sin cos and tan. Words I saw on the internet but did not understand.

When I was in school, I could walk as long as I wanted. Only my unwillingness to do so could stop me.

Now I don't even care about my unwillingness, but I can't walk as long as I want anymore – my legs hurt and just stops moving. The spasm won't go away easily and I have to wait for it to stop.

When I was in school, I could learn as much as I wanted. Only my unwillingness to do so could stop me.

Now I don't even care about my unwillingness, but I can't learn as much as I want anymore – my brain just stops absorbing information. I can see letters but I can't read words.

My body slowly decay. By the age of 21, I have two abdominal surgeries, joint and bone issues, clinically diagnosed depression, the food I eat won't digest without pills and much more to handle. If the pain is what stops me now I could only imagine the next step when I don't even care about pain just like I don't care now about my unwillingness.

On the other hand the realization of my own mortality was extremely liberating. Yes, my body slowly decomposes and needs to be fixed here and there but at least I know that my personality heavily depends on some fluids inside my body. I know that I have limited amount of fucks to be given.

I slowly lose my health over time but I gain something more and I gain faster than I lose. I don't care about things like indents or JS trailing semicolons anymore – I just build and ship viable products over weekends. I almost never argue and enforce my vision inside the team I manage as a teamlead.

Yes, I'm depressed and not productive but depression would go away and my confidence is here to stay. I'm here to earn just enough money to buy a house and launch my own small projects that wouldn't require that much time to provide me with basic needs.

Everyone I see is fighting a hard battle. I'm here to end mine.

Today I got corrected in the difference between to and too. Another dev told me I made a typo in the documentation where I tripple checked. Then he told me that "too"means "also" and is also used in things like "too much". In high school I got told by my teacher it was "to much".

I've been using the word "to" wrong for fourteen years now...

A lot of things dev say are true, but this one I don't believe as much:
Many devs say that it's important for everybody to learn a bit of a basic programming language, to learn about computers and how programs are made. I disagree, I think that instead people should learn *how* things work. Ex, in my school people always use a VPN to get around the proxy. I don't care if they know basic statements, I think it's more important to learn how a VPN works. Most of them don't even know what VPN stands for. Am I the only one?

At school...
Antivirus protects you from all the bad things on the internet. If you download an antivirus, your computer is safe. I recommend one like McAfee or FreeAntivirus. Also, there aren't virus for Mac.
(Then they ask how things like The Podesta Emails happen)

*packing for a school-hosted graduation celebration with friends*
let's see, first rule of packing for a trip, count on every slim chance happening...

List of things now in backpack:
3 changes of clothes (1-night trip for an all night party in <100-MILE-AWAY MAJOR CITY>)
Laptop
3DS
3x 4-port USB Hubs
10-port power strip (not fully in bag, but mostly so.)
Extra pair of shoes
3.5" external floppy drive
First aid kit
SAK
precision driver set
soldering set
multitool
pliers (1x farmer's, 1x bent needlenose)
multimeter
empty laptop HDD (250GB)
magnet in Altoids tin (can't have it trashing the HDD!)
VGA to RGB (Composite ends) adapter
Composite/S-VIDEO USB capture card
Portable USB chargers (1x 30k mAh 2-port, 1x superslim 3k mAh 1-port)
Enough phone chargers to replace all chargers within 30 miles
Smelling salts
2x 16GB thumbdrives
Boot disc set
$200
School IDs (for bag's ID slot)
3 pairs of decent earbuds (no el cheapo $1 ones because they break trying to get them out of the package)
Serial to USB adapter
Rehydration salts
Magnesium fire striker
Plenty of pens and pencils
Emergency radio locator beacon
Emergency cellular locator beacon
SD/eMMC/CF/TF/MCP(D) USB reader
external HDD reader (2.5" IDE/3.5" IDE/SATA, external power)

am i missing anything?

Cannot understand those who are frustrated with it.
Sure, one can feel frustration when some project is not going as they were supposed to go, but that is life for ya, boi.

Without wanting to offend anyone it feels like devs who complain so much either do not actively search for a solution and learn shit properly and cry their soul out afterwards or they do search, but cannot find anything.
Patience is the solution. Do not let yourself fall down and stay strong.
Even if it takes a lot of willpower, retries, inner pain, patience and non-sleepy nights, you will and can do it. I believe in you.

My whole life was basically a psychological disaster.
I have had and still have depression and a lot of short frustrations from time to time, too, but I do not cry it out loud.
My high school is fucked up. In every single aspect. I am doing all-nighters almost every day. With maybe half an hour of sleep to get school projects done on time.
I cannot just say "fuck you. I am not gonna do this shit" to school, because that would affect my grades in a negative way. Same thing applies to you, as an employee, too. But at least you do not need to be afraid of getting bad grades.
Bad grades->not getting the desired degree->bad chance of finding a job
In your case:
Bad communication with boss->bad connection->bad chance of finding a job

But is that really so?
I do not think so. Nonetheless, you still can have a good chance of finding a job, if you have proven yourself to others in a great way. Everyone has bad times. Even with their bosses. That's normal. Being bad with someone does not make yourself bad in general.

The job world will still accept you, but school won't accept you again. Whenever I feel like the burnout is about to catch me, I take an immediate break and go outside. Take a walk in the sunset. Go to the forest. Run with music playing loudly. Swim. And other things like watching the stars in the silence of the night.

To finally come to an end here...
Do not make yourself feel bad that quickly and try to endure the pain. This is going to make you a better and stronger person.
If you cannot do it anymore (hitting the borders of burnout), take your time and do whatever makes you happy and treat yourself.
Life is not all about work. Were you born to be a worker? No. Were you born to be a slave of others? No.
What is holding you then? Let go of all the stress (for a minute). You are free.

You are a great person.
Do not forget that.

I've never been hacked - not that I know of :D - and never "hacked" someone else.
(Sure, I did some things in high school to circumvent certain restrictions but nothing worth mentioning whatsoever.)

But all these rants that I read so far have me wondering if I shouldn't simply setup a honeypot sometime when I'm about to be really bored just to have some fun. Then again, I don't have time to be bored. :/

How I knew this was for me.... I didn't.
It kind of just happened in the natural order of things.

I was once a wii young lad who had a dream, and that dream became a smashing pile of being broke, jobless and unemployable, not a great way to start off that early life but hey, it was what it was.

So I looked at my computer one day, lousy dusty Pentium 4 with a massive 80GB HDD, in the corner, and went... fuck it, this thing is going to make me money.

So from there I picked up my old high school book on VB6 and on with it I went, forcing my self to make that calculator I couldn't do in school and a few other things, from there I got into a course for webDev, not uni, and after being dropped from that course ... that's a story for another time, I basically said fuck the system and my journey into webDev took on a life of its own.

Starting with frontend (back when layouts where tables and css was font colours) and IE5 was still a thing, and progressing into JS for a fucktonne of "onClick" events, then backend... I went down the .PHP3, PHP4 hadn't been released yet, but at the time .ASP was a thing too although it was complicated as fuck.

For many years it was just 1 thing after another, picking up MySQL, screwing around with databases, setting up linux servers, gobbling up Python a couple years later and started automating different things, just building site after site, until one day I landed a professional gig - not just casual freelance stuff, and from there when you think you know a lot, what I thought I knew got blown out the window and imposter syndrome sunk in, but I kept pushing ahead.

That saying "you don't know what you don't know", it has meaning here, you don't know what you don't know... but the moment you know you don't know enough, you either crumble or you keep waterboarding yourself in knowledge to reduce the unknown.

And somewhere along the line I accepted this path.
It may have taken me a few years to get off my feet but I'm glad I took that first step.

Okay, I knew one of my colleagues was actually a work freak, but to this point...

He's been working for most of the day yesterday on a school project, and so was I. Satisfied with my progress, I push the code with TODOs on things we had to agree on tomorrow as well as mentioning it in the issue associated with it on Git, with my last commit a bit before 11PM.

I wake up, with a ping on Discord asking me what was that "bug" I just pushed, wondering what editor I use and asking me if I even use the console debugger. Said "bug" was the point of discussion I said we wanted to talk about tomorrow, I replied in the morning. But he decided of the fix on his own and committed it, as well as other things until... 3AM...

Honestly, I don't blame him for choosing at our stead, he's the leader of our branch and the Gitmaster on top of that. I just reproach him to call it a bug, not see the issue, and all that while he could, you know, sleep. And get some rest overall.
This dude has been working himself madly these last weeks, where he did about 80% of what each of the team member was supposed to do in a whole semester (which amounts to 150 hours of work) for this project (we're nine folks on it).
Now I'm pretty sure it's how he works and that he still gets a decent amount of sleep (like I dunno, until 9AM or so), so I don't expect a response beforehand.

And indeed, as he woke up, he replied to me.

At 7:50AM.

A failed programmer!

Back in school the computer screen was my canvas, the keyboard was my brush and i filled it in with the colors of a language. Helping my fellow students debug and find the solution to their codes. Loved to do that its been 10 years thats i have programmed anything I am trying to figure out where is lost it all. Never got into a job working as programmer as in all the interviews I was asked of definition of things I could never remember but give a something to build or debug I could work it as a charm. Even though didn’t work a programmer kept on programming at home making free programs for friends or helping debug codes. But then I stopped and don’t know why and I really wanna get back into it not for others but for myself to see if i still have it, but its been so long new languages new platform and don’t know where to start. Or should I accept myself as a failed programmer!

I love to program — I discovered that about myself a few years ago. Beforehand, I only KNEW how to program. But then I discovered the power programming gives you to create things, and even help your surroundings. So now, I can surely say, that I love programming. Heck, I am even dating a very talented programmer.

But despite all the pleasure I derive from it, I feel lonely sometimes. True, there are millions of programmers all over the world. I also know I am not the only one who prefers coding over going to the movies, taking a walk, eating or sleeping.

Why do I feel this way?

My loneliness is a gendered loneliness, as there are not many women in my field. For sure, there are women who study computer science in high school or at the university, and some even work as programmers. But they are very, very few!

I often underestimate my abilities and feel intimated for no apparent reason

#random thoughts

Hello, my name is Adam, I'm from Poland.
As a 16 year old dude I thought it would be a great idea to go to an IT focused highschool so I'd get my degree after finishing school but guess what- I completely fucked up.
First, there were the little things, like the teachers favoring other students that already knew stuff, which was okay and all- the problem began when Poziomka appreared (one of our PC service teachers). That motherfucker almost fluked me because of dumb shit like the PC's we worked on took forever to boot, so he's just go and give people F's, "Why?" you may ask- well because "It was obviously the student that made the PC run so slowely".
There were a few more incidents like when we were disassembling and assembling those dumb HP Compaq's PC's on time- and that fucker gave me an F because it took about 10 minutes to boot by itself.

That shit got me so demotivated its unreal, soon I found myself in a pretty dark spot, with my parents divorcing, my whore mother taking all the money- me not finding any reason to do anything in school and the cycle looped.
I'm not gonna pull the depression card here, but what I'm generally trying to say is that although I'm not "awful" at IT in general, so PC assembly, networking, programming (fuck that, I'm fucking awful at it), HTML, I still find it difficult to do anything right.

I have a question, how do I get myself back up? Any ideas?
There's so much material I've gone through in the last three years- and I just wanna make sure to get good- somehow.

I'm just a talentless dumbass kid who just wants to know how to do linux, programming and such, but I don't know where or how to start anymore.
If anyone has any stories where they turned their life around and managed to do IT right- please, tell me how you did it, I just wanna know is there a proper way of doing it.

- Adam

Usually developers start in a team where there are senior and you are a junior who do things and ask things.
Then there's me that starts alone in a company to develop a software in a machine that you've never seen before (POS) with only 15 hours of preparation class, no documentation and with a apprenticeship contract.
I still didn't start but I brought the POS in my home to familiarize with it and in a week I still haven't be able to execute the sample application.
And you could ask, why did you accept if you aren't able? Well, I need money, he searched me through the high school (I had an high score so a lot of people search me) and he required only C, that I know. FML

Here we go, classes are starting again tommorow, tried to do most of the things on holiday, delegated school project stuff to the project members and made a planning with them...
and still nothing happend on their part in a timespan of 2 weeks and the deadline is in 5 days and A FUCK LOAD OF STUFF STILL HAS TO BE DONE AKA I guess I have to do their part too in 5 days..
*going into caffeine induced rage insane mode for 5 days*

Rant rant = new Rant();
rant.type = Rant.REVELATION;
rant.content = "

Being depressed with recent stuff about my ex, I've been going out a lot more than I use to, thus engaging in conversation with people I've never talked to before, and it made me realize something. Maybe it's because the world it's more connected nowadays, but I think it's more about our career (be it CS Engineer, Software Dev, Web-Dev, etc...) and correct me if I'm wrong but I think we are the kind of people that knows about everything (maybe not everything, but know basic stuff that can't be considered general knowledge) because that's what we do, we spend our days updating ourselves, growing in knowledge.

What's my point? That, thanks to this ability, we can work, cooperate or even socialize in a rather easy way. For example, I learned bit of color theory and design principles for a school project. Fast forward some months, I meet this girl that had a degree in Digital Design and I could talk to her about her field, and even knew things she forgot.

I don't know, for me, it's amazing how we can shape shift and mold to the situation, easier than any other career.

Am I wrong or missing something? Let me know
";
rant.publish();

I start shaking and getting nervous when there is something I really, really want to say.

Today in school we started talking about Amazon Alexa and privacy.
This topic concerns me a lot and I started talking in front of the whole class about Google and things they do to spy on you. After about 30 seconds of me talking I started shaking because there was so much I wanted to say and with so much enthusiasm and also a bit of anger.

It's not that big of a deal, but it's kinda embarrassing since I was one of the best students in the class.

Took a web design (HTML, CSS & a tiny bit of JS) class. I never really struggled; more like polished everything I already knew to become a bit better.

In class working on an assignment. So we have a folder dedicated on a server just for this class. The folder is accessible as long as you're on the school internet or using the VPN. So I have an assignment there. I drop it onto my desktop, because i had worked on it since the last time I was at this computer.

I opened the project in VSCode and begin making changing things. I opened the HTML file wasn't updating. "That's odd" I thought. Cleared the cache, opened and closed the browser. Still nothing. I called the professor over to see if had any clue what was going on.

My dumbass self was editing the file that was on my desktop, but I had opened the HTML file from the server. I felt so stupid but we both just laughed it off and went on.

When I was in 11th class, my school got a new setup for the school PCs. Instead of just resetting them every time they are shut down (to a state in which it contained a virus, great) and having shared files on a network drive (where everyone could delete anything), they used iServ. Apparently many schools started using that around that time, I heard many bad things about it, not only from my school.
Since school is sh*t and I had nothing better to do in computer class (they never taught us anything new anyway), I experimented with it. My main target was the storage limit. Logins on the school PCs were made with domain accounts, which also logged you in with the iServ account, then the user folder was synchronised with the iServ server. The storage limit there was given as 200MB or something of that order. To have some dummy files, I downloaded every program from portableapps.com, that was an easy way to get a lot of data without much manual effort. Then I copied that folder, which was located on the desktop, and pasted it onto the desktop. Then I took all of that and duplicated it again. And again and again and again... I watched the amount increate, 170MB, 180, 190, 200, I got a mail saying that my storage is full, 210, 220, 230, ... It just kept filling up with absolutely zero consequences.
At some point I started using the web interface to copy the files, which had even more interesting side effects: Apparently, while the server was copying huge amounts of files to itself, nobody in the entire iServ system could log in, neither on the web interface, nor on the PCs. But I didn't notice that at first, I thought just my account was busy and of course I didn't expect it to be this badly programmed that a single copy operation could lock the entire system. I was told later, but at that point the headmaster had already called in someone from the actual police, because they thought I had hacked into whatever. He basically said "don't do again pls" and left again. In the meantime, a teacher had told me to delete the files until a certain date, but he locked my account way earlier so that I couldn't even do it.
Btw, I now own a Minecraft account of which I can never change the security questions or reset the password, because the mail address doesn't exist anymore and I have no more contact to the person who gave it to me. I got that account as a price because I made the best program in a project week about Java, which greatly showed how much the computer classes helped the students learn programming: Of the ~20 students, only one other person actually had a program at the end of the challenge and it was something like hello world. I had translated a TI Basic program for approximating fractions from decimal numbers to Java.
The big irony about sending the police to me as the 1337_h4x0r: A classmate actually tried to hack into the server. He even managed to make it send a mail from someone else's account, as far as I know. And he found a way to put a file into any account, which he shortly considered to use to put a shutdown command into autostart. But of course, I must be the great hacker.

I like developing on windows. Like many people here I got into development at home starting as a hobby when I was in school so there were things I still did on my computer that Linux wasn't really appropriate for.

I've made the jump to Linux in the past but found that it was awkward and annoying when I needed to do something on my windows. And I hate doing Dev out of a VM. So I've just got used to using windows at home.

And honestly, I don't know what's happening to everyone who keeps getting broken Windows updates. I think I've had 2 in living memory.

It's in no way perfect but what is? I don't use Windows servers, just for when I'm at home.

We're having a mini-hackathon at our school last Saturday as a final exam of our Web Engineering course, showcasing what we learned throughout. The theme is all about helping university students gain their productivity and improve their interaction with technology.

Me and my team tried to create a note-sharing platform for students. We loved the idea and we're so excited to create it. But excitement turned into shit hole during development.

A fuckton of merge conflicts, divisive code conventions, and usage of god-awful Bootstrap for front-end came in. 😱😬😣

Despite these things, we are able to win the hackathon (i still can't believe we won). but he worst part of winning is that the prize is not cash nor the internship (the judges are from the company who somehow looks for interns), but fucking useless GIFT CARDS!!

But in the end, we're proud of it. I thought that it will be just a concept but in the end, it became real and it turned out to be great. ☺

I was good at school, I was and I'm still loving video games. I wanted to create my video games. Now I like robots and I'm learning how to create robots. I could say : programming allowed me to build and personnalize the things I liked in my life. And I found who I am. I love to create.

working on a crappy legacy site written by an invalid. The job was to replicate an existing site for a school with the original's permission. I fix a shit ton of bugs and update the original.

For the first time ever I got a phone call from the original's owner to complain that I had fixed their site -.-

leave things broken from now on!

#justdevthings
That moment when you're so engrossed in your project that you lose track of time. You begin to SEE code irl, not just on screens. Things like hunger, environment and a sense of time fade away. That feeling when the code just works, but better when it doesn't and you figure out a smart fix. Oh gosh ill pay to feel like that all day.

I wrote a shitty layout for an android side project. It haunted me. I could still SEE the shitty xml long after the pc was shut down. I had a nightmare about it and woke up sweating, and all I could see was xml. Fkin xml man. I redid the layout at 3am and boy was i so satisfied.
I think that was just the tetrix effect taking its toll on me.

I always got screwed by parents for being on that machine all day, back in school. But none of that matters now. I can now feel the code running in my veins and flowing into the machine. I can now feel my heart throbbing at the sight of such beauty. They ask how i manage my social life. I say everything goes well until i start a side project, that's when social life gets fucked hard. I think I'm gonna die one day after performing the final commit.

Why is it that if you are not able to remember every single detail about something you've heard, that you as a person are deemed worthless?

Everything you do and need in life is bound to your memory.
Can't remember a name?
That's rude.
Can't remember what a technology does?
You won't get that job.
Can't remember the topics you learned about in school?
You won't get that education.

I can't remember things, my mind is constantly drifting. This, together with my inability to articulate myself clearly, makes me a complete nobody.
I hope that someday I'm just able to do something creative and not have these issues. Until then I'll just try not to jump in front of a train.

Things that make me mad in school: when "ap computer science" is a class that literally just teaches you Java syntax and nothing about any theory and algorithms. Like c'mon

Best: I’ve learned A LOT during this year. Some things from devRant, stackoverflow, even the school

Worst: I lost source code of my April Fools game (Super Fernando Bros, I posted a link on devRant about it) 😭

Once mentored a high school student for a science fair relating to robotics. It was definetely interesting having to relearn many things so I could teach them well but it was definetely worthwhile! I couldn't be prouder of the work my student (mentee, pupil, ??? Idk how else to say it lmao) achieved. He won several awards for the project, even some scholarships!!

At the age of 10 I got interest in ''changing computer'' things. I started to watch over the shoulder (I don't know if you can say that in English ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ) of my dad. He programmed I2C and other microcontroller.
I started with little batch files and Visual Basic. I think we all know the ''Virus'' with shutdown 😂
At school in the computer lesson we learned a few other languages. I was the only one who learned these languages at home too. The biggest problem is that you think ''I learn at school and at home I can play games''.
Some day I started to learn PHP and Java at home. I came to Java with Minecraft. Yes, Minecraft. You can learn so many things (like the structure of a network packages from the server) and you can visualize everything with blocks.
Since the professional colleague we learn C# and Python which I use in some projects at home too, for example for the rasperrypi.
Now I'm 17 and I can C#, Visual Basic, PHP, JS, Python, JS and HTML

One of my favorite things to do in Secondary School was to go around telling people I had written a program that uses the 'Doomsday Algorithm' which sounded really cool and always scared those who didn't understand it.

Truth is, the 'Doomsday Algorithm' is just an Algorithm that used to determine the Day of the Week of a given date.

I wrote this when I was 13/14 years old and I'm still super proud of it today.... well I mean I probably would be if I could read my own code.

So this is what a test looks like here in my school...
I really like my teacher but his test are... uhh... fucking awful.

I mean the code isn't even indented ffs! Like wtf?!? How should one be able to read this bullshit?
The questions are shitty too.
Also please add line numbers so it is easier to describe how things work in the code.
AND USE FUCKING A4 PAPERS FFS!!!

Thanks,
an experienced student

Going old school, but...
Does anyone else want to literally reach over and strangle people who move your desk items, including swinging your monitor around, using your pen and paper, moving your fan or bottles, or other things?

Ideal dev job would be teaching kids code. Probably a side-gig at a local school.

Main gig would be writing code to exploit the "push to prod" Internet of Things things. Security on that is garbage. 🚮

Our school had for an open source way of dealing with home schooling and managing the school network and so on.

Now the government forced a "proprietary" system on our school and everyone hates it. The teachers didn't want it the pupils didn't want it but who cares "what we do is the best".

Btw the proprietary system costs a fuck load of money even though they just mixed many open source projects and made it their own proprietary thing.
And this company now get's loads of money for their shitty system that never really worked once since we got it.

They blocked so many ip's that we can't even access google and it's services on the school wifi and the bandwith dropped severely with the new system.

Oh and many random ip's e.g. one of my vps is accessible but the other one not.
Discord is blocked.
Web whatsapp.
And so on...

Now....

I need to learn for tests next week and need to access that stuff on the portal but...

Now they decided to switch the LDAP server to the new system and since a few hours i can't access this fucking thing.

It seems like the platform now contacts the new server which isn't even up and running....

Never change a fucking running system....

Oh and we got smart boards and it runs on android and they didn't block adb. Now i installed clash of clans on one of those things. Haha whoops.
These boards cost 7000€ and have security patches from 2 years ago....and Android 8

Ibwish I had remembered this when the weekly theme was office pranks.

In the first or second year of high school we covered basic internet security. Stuff like don't follow suspicious urls, don't open suspicious emails and such.

Our teacher let us play around with some sort of simulated desktop environment, where we could execute some hacks like ad popups and such on each other's environment, if we fell for the trap.

Anyways, one hack I found interesting was a hack, that lockes a user out of their virual desktop, until he enters a password, that will be displayed on his environment.

Yes, a very interesting hack, because it contains two obvious yet major design flaws, which I could exploit 😈

1. It's case sensitive
In itself not a problem, but combined with #2, it's fatal.
2. "IlIlllIlI"
Depending on your font, you probably have no idea what exactly I just typed.

Let's just say, the font displayed uppercase i and lowercase L completely undifferentiable.

Guess whom I let suffer.

It was our teacher, who had to demonstrate us some things and who was connected to the same network.

I swear, nothing beats that feeling when your tearcher has go come to you and embarrassingly ask you to "unhack" them, because they can't type it 😂

!rant
Linux experts, please read if you have time

Seeing all the posts ranting about Ubuntu, I'm starting to wondering : I have a laptop on Ubuntu that I set for my courses at school, I took Ubuntu because I could try at school with VMs, liked it and because between this and Linux Mint, I wasn't aware of all those distributions.

So my reflexion is : Since I've started my internship, which would be the final semester (I'm in last year of studying), I use this computer mostly for personal coding projects, which aren't ambitious and I sometimes use my Windows too, so my computer is a kind of switch-not-so-often.
Should I keep it to Ubuntu or should I try to install something else ?

I've heard of Solus, which got my curiosity, and Arch Linux, but this one is not want I think I need. But seeing all those distributions here made me confuse, I dunno if I should upgrade something that's a kind of placeholder for coding and do stuff when the Windows (which is my main laptop) is busy doing things.

Have any suggestions ?

Back in grammar school we started programming in TI-Basic on a TI89 Titanium as it was part of math class (calculus and geometry). I didn't really understand much because the teacher thought it was a great idea to start with recursively calculating GCD (and we were in a sort of "linguist profile", nobody had ever touched a line of code in their lives before). I still liked it though and by some coincidence I got an old Win95 compaq notebook to play with from a friend.

I started playing around with the CMD prompt and batch files and could apply some of the things I had learned on the TI, like GOTO or If statements. I still didn't know what I was doing of course, and so it happened that I used the > file pipe when trying to compare two values. Suddenly there was a file with some code fragments and I started to get what I had done. I put the file pipe into an endless GOTO loop and was amused how those few lines filled up the whole desktop with nonsense files. I went on to refine this a little so I could control it with another file that acted as a kill switch when present. Over the next weeks I played some more with it and made it write out and start another batch file that would check whether the original script was still there and recreate it if not.

That notebook was so large and heavy I could not bring it to school, so I wrote all code by hand on paper and typed it in when I got home, that way I could still code in class when I was bored and no one would notice.

So my first ever "program" that I wrote myself was some lousy malware.

I previously said I had no issues with dev teachers, but in fact I DO have them..
I want to get two things off my chest..

First: Last year I waited like 6 MONTHS to get my grades!! 6 FUCKING MONTHS!! And I wasn't even the only one who didn't get their grades!!
Second: Those dev teachers in high school are actually teachers who normally teach about physics, math and we even have a teacher who normally teaches history!! HOW THE FUCK AM I GOING TO GET A PROPER EXPLANATION ABOUT THE STUFF I SHOULD LEARN IF YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW IT YOURSELF!!

In defense for my teachers:
After 6 months of long waiting, I got my grades and they all were (and still are) an A!! Happy as fuck!!
My teachers at least TRY their very best to teach me something I don't know about the basic stuff.. And that's worth something right..

!dev
My rough assumptions on wtf is going on with covid changing our lives - maybe leading to some business ideas.
In theory we are indoctrinated from little child that to do something we need to go to special place to do things in community.
Name it :
- school,
- university,
- job,
- college
As a result we build world around communities:
- public transportation
- sidewalks
- 4 seated cars
- parks
- sports
- shopping malls
Now due to pandemic we’re unable to do so and from some time we start indoctrinating people to do lots of things remotely and stay at home:
- remote job
...
- shopping
etc.
Depending on how strong is our character we react to this inception differently but future generations won’t have this indoctrination of commutation deep in their minds.

Interesting 🤔

My first assumption is that robotics market will start growing exponentially.

Do anybody remember when i wrote a rant about the IT teacher in my high school?

Few months ago we got the results from final exams! (we have precentage based grades)

Another thing to remember:
You can pick basic or extended version of the every test you take.
Everybody has to get at least 30% on basic exams (they are nessesary for everybody) to graduate from the school. The extended exams give you more points at university and they are not mandatory.
In addition to that extended ones dont have the lower limit

The IT exam has only the extended version (because its not mandator, you pick it yourself). It is pretty easy: just basic algorithms, basic C++ programs and general PC things.

I didnt take the IT class because i thougt i can learn much more at home. My friend took it. He is very good. He uses linux he wants to become a pen tester. I know he is worth getting 100% on that extended IT exam. (We did a lot of projects thogether)

Well... NOBODY GOT MORE THAN 20% on that exam! WTF!

That POS teacher should die in that win xp IT class with all ethernet cables stuck in his ass!

He didnt teach anything useful about algorithms to anybody! And that was the easiest and the most important part on the exam!

In addition to that people had to do few tasks on pc as well! And one of those tasks could been a picture in gimp BUT THE GIMP DIDNT EVEN WORK ON THOSE PC'S!

Algorithms are easy! That son of a twat didnt even understand it himself! That is why im telling everybody in my town to NOT go to that hight school for IT exam!
I dont want anybody to waste their life trying to learn something useful when that fucking bitch dosent understand anything!

That teacher is lucky. My friend got rejected from studing CS on university (due to the shit score) but he at least got accepted to study math.

I hope he will be able to continiue his dev dream.

Oh man, its been forever since I've had an actual rant.

so my work ethic is to the point where it's all last minute. My eduction is all last minute. Personal problem, and don't know how to fix that. but it's just getting out of hand.

tbh, I'm at the point of considering dropping uni like this is no joke. maybe transfer to a cheaper because the financials are no good either.

I also need a new job because the place I'm at is no good. here a few things about it:
1) Its Industrial, not really tech related
2) the dudes expect ME to GO TO THEM and ask for help. Not how I roll
3) not the best atmosphere -- I don't really like the 4 total employees, including myself
4) nearly minimum wage

the pros?
1) I learn about my car
2) I can use the shop to fix my car
3) Free stuff (for example, a projector and lunch everyday
4) We're getting a server (soon?)
5) I buy computers for them, they pay me

But seriously, my grades in school are slipping (nowhere dangerous yet) and I am too stressed. At least I'll be getting in more dev work

Moreover, I want to get in some actual learning with Swift, but I can never manage to make time. Plus, games are a thing that I do, also family and friends, also religion is a thing, also work and school, also sleep. No time? Me neither.

Like the organization of this rant? Me too.

WRITING CODE ON PAPER...smh

I know many people wrote about this already, but writing code on paper is one of the worst things of a CS class. I’d rather get a computer with no internet access and use a notes app to write code instead of having to write everything by hand. It takes so much more time that you could spend thinking about the problem. Not only that but also my hand gets tired of writing...ughhhh

I need to convince my teacher and the school to switch to writing code on computers! I will not loose this battle ahah

Random thoughts that I need to put somewhere. that I’ve been holding in and have to get out.

I feel like I’m more welcomed and wanted here than in real life. My friends don’t really think about me when making plans anymore, no one really thinks of me in general.

In school I was the awkward kid that was nice to everyone and I’m not taking the whole graduation well. I miss high-school and my vocational school, I miss my friends and I’ve just felt like things ended too soon and I just kinda feel alone

I wish I could just sit down and program and not procrastinate the only time I seem to be able to get stuff done is when I force myself. I feel like I’m such a shitty developer for not fighting it better. I need to be better.

I’ve not had a good few weeks. Since I’m taken a semester off from college no one in my family besides me is able to stay with a family member that’s in the hospital. I volunteered because I care for them deeply and want to help them. but it takes a huge toll on me since I have to be the one that listens to the doctors tells the rest of my family what’s happening. While Im kinda freaking out because I’m scared and nervous and NOT READY and I’ve had to stay a week there and I’ve been having to stay on and off and I haven’t really told anyone how I really am feeling about it all because I don’t like to be vulnerable in front of people and it’s been really hard and taking a toll and not helping the procrastination.

!dev but is somewhat tech related

So I was like 7. I was hanging out after school with a friend who's mom worked there. We were in her office. So there was a song l really liked are the time (Song of the South by Alabama) and it was on a CD.

So I put that CD in the computer and play my favorite song. Well literally 15 seconds after a line in the song, which was "Sweet potato pie and I shut my mouth," played, my cousin who was in another teacher's office decided to
prank call us.

What did they say when I picked the phone up and said hey? "Sir your order for 1,000 pounds of sweet potatoes is ready to be delivered."

I nearly shit a brick as I slammed the phone down and started freaking out. I ran to where he was and bust in there to see themn laughing really hard

Now I look back and laugh, but I genuinely
thought that by somehow playing that song ordered a lot of potatoes.

And the wild part of the story is that of literally all the things they could say, they chose sweet potatoes. Like it still blows our minds that that's the choice he made.

!rant

I know this may not be the typical post on Devrant and it may be a little off topic, but I could really use some advice from fellow colleagues here.

The thing is, I just finished engineering school and I got my first job as a software engineer. So far so good. I've never been a natural talent in this field, and I suck at writing code. I find things like architecture, system design, innovation, requirementsspecification, management and business development much more interesting.

These past weeks as a software engineer has been really challenging for me. I seem to be totally "in over my head", and fuck everything up. I can't understand how the code I'm supposed to write works, and can't solve even the simplest of tasks that are assigned to me if they involve any implementation of code, or fiddling with Github or build servers.

Is it normal to feel like this as an engineer with zero experience? Will things get better, or should I just resign or wait to be fired?

What would a natural next step for a software engineer who'd like to move more into business and management be? A MBA? Project management courses?

I hope to get some advice from you guys. Maybe you've felt like this when you started out as well? Anyway, any constructive feedback would be really much appreciated.

I don't want to use Visual Basic!

I'm a 17 year old boy and I have a couple of years of experience with coding. At school we had to choose between a couple of things to do 2 hours every week. One of them was about computers and programming. Sounds fun, right?

The teacher is letting us code in Visual Basic in MS Excel. I tried to explain him that I know how to code, but he still wants me to listen to him.

He doesn't even use any indentation! I can't look at it and I don't want to use VB it sucks just let me use js or anything else but not VB! Why won't you just accept I'm 10 times better than you! Just let me do my thing!

Now he thinks he can challenge me with a password strength checker. I want to use js, some regex to make it very short and efficient and a nicely styled web page. But now I'll be forced to use a horrible programming language (VB) I never used before!

What are the things in computer science do I need to learn?

So yeah, I'm still in high school and will be entering IT in a few years, but I am willing to learn now. I already have a good grasp of programming and can create good desktop apps and basic web apps, so teaching basic concepts such as variables, loops, functions is done for me.. But what computer science concepts should I learn next?

Shit swizzler in school group project doesn't delete ANY code. Just comments out everything, everywhere.

Some of the files is scrolling through 30 lines of comments, 2 actual lines of code, 20 lines of comments, 5 lines of actual code, ...

Somewhere, in between all of his shit code, I just want to add: "Fucking stop with the comments, you wheezing bag of dicktits"

Oh and this afternoon, he asked me where he could find the Bootstrap code I'd written. He couldn't find 'the file'. I had to explain to him that it's kinda everywhere, throughout the HTML.. As a novice in many many things I fully understand not knowing everything. But the little shitstick told me he 'uses bootstrap all the time' just two hours before he asked me this.

I swear everything this guy touches turns to shit. One more day of this and I'll slap the bitch out of him.

P.S. Free virtual advocado for the first person to guess what movie inspired my insults (easy, I know)

What will happen if every school starts teaching with binary numbers before the easy decimal number system?

I think it would be challenging initially but it can have a much greater impact on how we think and it can open a completely new possibility of faster algorithms that can directly be understood by computers.

The reason people hate binary systems is that all their life they make the decimal system a habit which makes them reluctant to learn binary systems into that much depth later on.

Just a thought. But I really believe if I would have learned the binary system before the decimal system than my brain would see things in a totally different way than it does now.

It sounds a little geeky yet thoughtful

I never seen my high school friends about a year because of my project and community (with same topic). Then when I met them, I just realized that I never have social life. Still, I'm just a listener. I don't know how I tell about what I did last year, because I'm too afraid they don't understand.

Then I keep my mouth, just smiling, listen their awesome story about their jobs, family or their friends in college ....

I'm come back home, so lonely in here. I opened my laptop, then realised another things. I'm just communicated with scripts, with millions line of codes, with many library, with many issues about my projects, with those compiler ...

How you guys talk with non-IT friends? I don't even remember how I used to be their friends and laugh together

What a saddest night in my life ...

So I'm making an app with a classmate at school, but there's one huge problem. All the PC's and laptops at school are shit. The ICT departement at my school blocks almost everything on them. I can't install any program, open any file and I can't even open the command prompt! So I can't install Visual studio or any other IDE and basically can't do anything besides browse websites that aren't blocked. And they expect me and my classmate to make an app. Fortunately, my classmate has a spare laptop we can use, but it's really difficult for two guys to code on just one laptop. I asked my school if they could buy new laptops or if they could remove they restrictions on two laptops, but they don't want to do any of those things and now we're stuck with just one laptop. I don't know what to do. I fucking hate this!

(This doesn't have anything to do with the topic of the rant, but I just want to complain.)
There are a couple more things I hate about my school. At my school, everyone is forced to use iPads. I don't know why they don't just give us laptops instead of iPads (maybe just because there lazy). So my iPad's headphonejack and homebutton where broken for no reason and I had to get it repaired. But instead of going to an apple store or a repair shop, you need to go to the school's ICT department and get it fixed there. If you don't do that and go to a apple store or something, they will take your iPad and keep it forever! Even though you pay €200 for it every year! Also, the ICT department at my school is lazy as hell! You expect them to repair the iPad themselves, but they just send it to a repair shop. So it wouldn't even matter if I would go to the store myself! 😠 And they even do a really bad job at checking if the device even works after the repair, because I needed to get it repaired three times in a row! And don't even get me started on the bad WiFi connection.

Sooooo... I've felt a bit lost during my years as a student and maybe this is a nice place to finally talk about it.
I've had my first programming experiences in school (back then it was delphi, a Pascal variant), then decided after graduating I want to study computer science. I've stuck with it and will finish my masters degree in a few months. (Took me a year longer than the university plans but will likely have a very good grade)

Since i have little programming experience and never coded anything useful (mostly study projects or simple programming tasks) I've always been struggling with depressions, worries of being not good enough and never finding a job etc pp, but in the last few months it got worse since I NEED to apply for jobs now as i graduate next may. I'd really like to improve and found some "learn how to code" websites but the progress seems still slow and meaningless when I compare myself to all those guys out there:
- those comparing several hardware/software pieces casually since they know all the (dis)advantages and specs off by heart
- those who have fierce discussions about languages, libraries, runtimes etc
- those who solve the problems in coding websites with 3 lines and incredibly mathematicsl proofs for why this shortcut works (fastest)
- basically the guys who discuss so many things i've never even heard of

I just feel so lost, useless and like i missed years of learning things everybody else just obviously knows now. Is there any way to catch up? I thought about trying to join a local Chaos Computer Club but they sound like they wouldn't be fond of a noob like me.

So I am young 14 year old programmer that just started high school yesterday. What are some good things to try and do for a future job? Should I stop coding until hs is over, do I code casually with free time and then after High-school I will know a lot more? Not sure how it all works

My high school programming teacher! He was the one who originally inspired me to do create awesome things with code, and I always think about where I might be if I never took that programming course in grade 11. Thanks Mr. Wong :D

Honestly, school is useless for me as of right now. I know I should be well rounded and stuff, but do I honestly need to know the symptoms of cervix cancer while going into a tech career? My eyes have been set on tech for my whole life, ever since I left the womb, and I know that if I do switch careers, it'll be from comp sci to cyber security not from IT to med school...

I feel like I could really be devoting my time towards something better than writing a 5 page essay on a healthy food choice.

Every night I think to myself, "You know what, I'm going to lock myself in a room and write bash scripts all day" but then I wake up in the morning, and remember I have to take a quiz on reproductive systems, learn about the procedure of organ donations for driver's ed, write 2 paragraph definitions of vocab words, and read a book about communism.

The most useful thing I learned last year, was how to efficiently navigate the java API, and that's something you don't even learn, you just encounter it. Schools need to start having more specific specialties and stop enforcing knowledge of pointless topics.

I'm not saying to remove all core classes and stuff, I'm saying why waste space in our brains with something we won't use ever again? I get it, some people don't know what career they're looking for yet so you can't make them choose, but it honestly sucks some serious ass that I can't learn what I want to at school, and as a matter of fact, I can't even learn at home, because they're filling my schedule with pointless work because they feel that they have to fill our time somehow.

Point of this long ass rant is: Why lock yourself in a room and learn about something if it isn't something you want to learn about? The space in our brain is finite enough, why can't it be filled with things we're interested in rather than things that will only be used to get good grades in the future then overwritten with useful knowledge. Same thing with time. We have a very finite amount of time in a day, and now that I think of it, a lifetime. Why spend it on something that doesn't, and never will, make your life enjoyable?

First thought about programming was in forth class in school, I was 10, and together with a friend we where planing on building a robot.

When we had a basic Idea on how the mechanics would work (theoretically but maybe not really practically sound) we started to consider how to control it. We had heard about computers but had never seen one but we figured out you could not just say, “go shopping” but rather had to break the problem down and doing that we came to the conclusion we would have to start with getting it to take a step.

We never got further as my family moved and I switched schools.

Later the same year I got to play with an actual computer, the Sinclair ZX80, 80 for the year.

A monster with 512 bytes of internal memory ... yes bytes, not kbyte.

And then things got going, after a few curses in Basic I finally got my own Spectra video 128, 14 years old and 2 years later I was teaching basic in ravening classes and I have been working with computers and programming ever since.

Not a rant, just another story about me and the man I'm gonna wife.

We both have an upcoming job interview, and I was just talking about how at our previous internship I was using python to automate some tedious tasks for me.
Me: it's like a general thing, right, to just automate things you don't really want to do
...
Me: like breathing, and waking up, ya know? I don't wanna do that shit
Him: it kind of already is automated.
Me: *three years of wasted time at med school come tumbling back in to my brain, suddenly recalling the brainstem*
Me: oh, yeah.

I already forgot what are the different sorting algorithms I learned last week. I already forgot sin, cos, tan, log, and some Math concepts in school. How not to forget these things easily? I could recall them once I see a sample and a brief explanation.

Reasons to NOT be a dev sounds rather negative so I'd like to propose 3 things that you need to BE a dev as to frame it in a positive light:

- When a problem peaks your interest you want to solve it, you may even be obsessed by it.
- You enjoy learning, not necessarily enjoy school, just enjoy learning new things (even better if it's by your own means)
- Failure may get you down, but you learn and don't give up until you have exhausted all paths to success.

You may need other skills like math, logic and reasoning abilities, being able to handle deadlines, attention to detail, and cope with stress. I've seen people being crap at all of those and if they have the former 3 they, in time, will hone the others enough to make them a productive dev.

No need to be a 9-9-6 code monkey willing to be squeezed by Big Corp for massive profits and a low salary or a 1337 purist coder that only focuses on the crafting side of developing software. That may make you a great coder but not a well rounded developer or individual. Remember, you program machines but you are NOT one.

Today's accomplishments:
- Actually got the fuck out of bed this morning

- Fixed the RCA connector on the CRT I got from a friend (I got scared while discharging it but it turned out fine). Basically the metal piece that carries the signal through the connector was bent to hell and sticking out, so I desoldered it, bent it right again, put it in, and resoldered it.

- Went to taco bell twice within 8 hours

- Sat and talked with a couple friends for like 2 hours after school

- Met and briefly talked to a very cute girl that my friend introduced me to. She has colored hair (I REALLY like colored hair) and she vapes. So perfect girl for me.

- FINALLY FUCKING STARTED LAUNDRY

Things I didn't accomplish today:

- Working on the web page I posted about this morning

- Getting to school on time (ONE DAY I WILL)

- Staying in school once I was actually there (left during my 6th period to go to taco bell the second time, first time today was in the morning after I was already late to school cause they won't let me into class if I'm late)

- Fixing the boot errors on my laptop (sometimes when I boot it fucking freezes after flushing the journal, I've been trying to figure it out for a while but I have no fucking clue)

- Figuring out why my PS2 doesn't want to recognize controllers or memory cards (got a new motherboard and now it just isn't recognizing the controller/memory card, I feel like some of the traces broke at some point while it was apart??)