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Client: Where are we with the project, it's been a week and I see nothing.
Me: You asked me to do something that was not in the agreed scope of work, which has kept me from starting on the project.
Client: Do I need to plan out everything in advance on paper for you to get it done in a timely manner?
Me: Is that a serious question? Yes, you should. That's the whole point of creating a scope of work. It's to allow me to schedule out the time necessary to build out a product in a "timely manner".
Client: I don't appreciate your attitude. This is not how you should be doing business if you like making money.
Me: I don't appreciate your condescending, unreasonable, dickhead mentality that makes you think it's remotely okay to act like you're better than me. Money doesn't grant you the right to be a dickwad, and just because I'm being paid doesn't mean I have to put up with any level of arrogance or disrespect.
I am in this business to make money, but not at the cost of my dignity and self-respect. You will be receiving a full refund later today, not because I have to provide a refund, but because I never want to communicate with you ever again moving forward. Take your unacceptable bullshit somewhere else.14 -
My mentor/guider at my last internship.
He was great at guiding, only 1-2 years older than me, brought criticism in a constructive way (only had a very tiny thing once in half a year though) and although they were forced to use windows in a few production environments, when it came to handling very sensitive data and they asked me for an opinion before him and I answered that closed source software wasn't a good idea and they'd all go against me, this guy quit his nice-guy mode and went straight to dead-serious backing me up.
I remember a specific occurrence:
Programmers in room (under him technically): so linuxxx, why not just use windows servers for this data storage?
Me: because it's closed source, you know why I'd say that that's bad for handling sensitive data
Programmers: oh come on not that again...
Me: no but really look at it from my si.....
Programmers: no stop it. You're only an intern, don't act like you know a lot about thi....
Mentor: no you shut the fuck up. We. Are. Not. Using. Proprietary. Bullshit. For. Storing. Sensitive. Data.
Linuxxx seems to know a lot more about security and privacy than you guys so you fucking listen to what he has to say.
Windows is out of the fucking question here, am I clear?
Yeah that felt awesome.
Also that time when a mysql db in prod went bad and they didn't really know what to do. Didn't have much experience but knew how to run a repair.
He called me in and asked me to have a look.
Me: *fixed it in a few minutes* so how many visitors does this thing get, few hundred a day?
Him: few million.
Me: 😵 I'm only an intern! Why did you let me access this?!
Him: because you're the one with the most Linux knowledge here and I trust you to fix it or give a shout when you simply can't.
Lastly he asked me to help out with iptables rules. I wasn't of much help but it was fun to sit there debugging iptables shit with two seniors 😊
He always gave good feedback, knew my qualities and put them to good use and kept my motivation high.
Awesome guy!4 -
Working with different nationalities is interesting, and sometimes kind of bewildering. And tiring.
I've been working with an Indian dev for a little while, and while she's a decent dev, interactions with her sometimes leave me a little puzzled. She glazes over serious topics, totally over-sensationalizes unimportant oddities, has yet to say the word "no," and she refers to the senior devs as (quote) "the legends." Also, when asked a question by her boss, like "Are you familiar with this?" Instead of a simple yes/no answer, she shows off a little. Fair, I do this sometimes too, but it's a regular thing with her. Also, like most Indians I've known and/or worked with, she has a very strict class-and-caste view of the world. It honestly makes me a little uncomfortable with how she views people, like certain people belong in certain boxes, how some boxes (and therefore their contents) are inherently better than others, and how it's difficult or simply impossible to move between boxes. My obviously westerner view of things is that you can pick where you want to be and what you want to do, and all it takes to get there is acquiring the proper skills and putting in the required effort. I see no boxes at all, just a sprawling web of trades/specialities. And those legends she talks about? They're good devs with more knowledge than me, but only one, maybe two of them are better devs. I see them as coworkers and leads, not legends. Legends would be the likes of Ada Lovelace, Dennis Ritchie, Yukihuro Matsumoto, and Satoshi Nakamoto. (Among others, obv.). To call a lead dev a legend is just strange to me, unless they're actually deserving, but we don't work with anyone like Wozniak or Carmack.
Since I'm apparently ranting about her a little, let me continue. She's also extremely difficult to understand. Not because of her words or her accent, but I can't ever figure out what she's trying to get across. The words fit together and make valid sentences, but the sentences don't often make sense with one another, and all put together... I'm just totally lost. To be a math nerd, like the two conversations are skew lines: very similar, but can never intersect. What's more, if I say I don't understand and ask for clarification, she refuses and says she doesn't want to confuse me further, and to just do what I think is best. It's incredibly frustrating.
Specifically, we're trying to split up functionality on a ticket -- she's part of a different dev team (accounting), and really should own the accounting portion since she will be responsible for it, but there's no clear boundary in the codebase. Trying to discuss this has been... difficult.
Anyway.
Sometimes other cultures' world views are just puzzling, or even kind of alien. This Irish/Chinese guy stayed at my parents' house for a week. He had red hair, and his facial features were about 3/4 Chinese. He looked strange and really interesting. I can't really explain it, but interacting with him felt like talking to basically any other guy I've known, except sometimes his mannerisms and behavior were just shockingly strange and unexpected, and he occasionally made so little sense to me that I was really taken aback.
This Chinese manager I had valued appearances and percieved honors more than anything else. He cared about punctuality and attire more than productivity. Instead of giving raises for good work or promotions, he would give fancy new titles and maybe allow you to move your desk somewhere with a better view of your coworkers. Not somewhere nicer; somewhere more prominent. How he made connections between concepts was also very strange, like the Chinese/Irish guy earlier. The site templating system was a "bridge?" Idk? He also talked luck with his investors (who were also Chinese), and they would often take the investment money to the casino to see if luck was in the company's favor. Not even kidding.
Also! the Iranian people I've known. They've shown very little emotion, except occasionally anger. If I tried to appease them, they would spurn and insult me, but if I met their anger, they would immediately return to being calm, and always seemed to respect me more afterward. Again, it's a little puzzling. By contrast, meeting an American's anger often makes them dislike you, and exceeding it tends to begin a rivalry.
It's neat seeing how people of different nationalities have different perspectives and world views and think so very differently. but it can also be a little tiring always having to translate and to switch behavior styles, sometimes even between sentences.
It's also frustrating when we simply cannot communicate despite having a language in common.22 -
How it is to be a dev in my country?
At bit of an odd question this week.
For me (in the USA), it's being technical support for *every* website my family uses.
Over the weekend my wife visited her aunt and I get a call.
Wife: "How do I create an ebay account?"
Me: "I don't like where this is going. We already have an account."
Wife: "Not for me, dummy, Aunt T. She found some books she wants to buy on ebay."
Me: "You go thru the process to create an account? Email, name, password, etc."
Wife: "We tried that, but it's not working."
<few seconds of silence>
Me: "Oookaaay...why isn't it working? Is there an error?"
Wife: "I don't know, we already clicked off of it. Something about the email."
<few more seconds of silence>
Me: "Can you reproduce the error and tell me?"
Wife: "Uggh..are you serious? We've done it like 10 times, its not working. Just tell me what I need to do."
Me: "If you can't tell me the error, I can't help you. I'm not there and can't see what you see."
Wife: "Stop being an asshole."
<Aunt T takes the phone>
T: "Said something about using another email address. Does that help you?"
Me: "Are you sure you don't already have a ebay account?"
T: "No, I don't think so. I hate ebay. but I really want these books. I don't want the same problems as last time."
Me: "Last time?"
T: "Yes, I bought a coffee cup on ebay from China and it never arrived."
Me: "OK, so you do have an account?"
T: "I don't know, I mean, I never got the cup."
Me: "What email address did you use? I'll send a 'remind me' email so you can reset the password and login"
<go thru the motions, she is able to login>
T: "Ahhh...I do have an account! There are the golf balls I bought for <husband> for Christmas."
<face smack>
Wife: "Why didn't you do this from the start? I thought you knew a lot about computers. We basically figured this out ourselves. Goodbye!"
<click>11 -
Okay, story time.
Back during 2016, I decided to do a little experiment to test the viability of multithreading in a JavaScript server stack, and I'm not talking about the Node.js way of queuing I/O on background threads, or about WebWorkers that box and convert your arguments to JSON and back during a simple call across two JS contexts.
I'm talking about JavaScript code running concurrently on all cores. I'm talking about replacing the god-awful single-threaded event loop of ECMAScript – the biggest bottleneck in software history – with an honest-to-god, lock-free thread-pool scheduler that executes JS code in parallel, on all cores.
I'm talking about concurrent access to shared mutable state – a big, rightfully-hated mess when done badly – in JavaScript.
This rant is about the many mistakes I made at the time, specifically the biggest – but not the first – of which: publishing some preliminary results very early on.
Every time I showed my work to a JavaScript developer, I'd get negative feedback. Like, unjustified hatred and immediate denial, or outright rejection of the entire concept. Some were even adamantly trying to discourage me from this project.
So I posted a sarcastic question to the Software Engineering Stack Exchange, which was originally worded differently to reflect my frustration, but was later edited by mods to be more serious.
You can see the responses for yourself here: https://goo.gl/poHKpK
Most of the serious answers were along the lines of "multithreading is hard". The top voted response started with this statement: "1) Multithreading is extremely hard, and unfortunately the way you've presented this idea so far implies you're severely underestimating how hard it is."
While I'll admit that my presentation was initially lacking, I later made an entire page to explain the synchronisation mechanism in place, and you can read more about it here, if you're interested:
http://nexusjs.com/architecture/
But what really shocked me was that I had never understood the mindset that all the naysayers adopted until I read that response.
Because the bottom-line of that entire response is an argument: an argument against change.
The average JavaScript developer doesn't want a multithreaded server platform for JavaScript because it means a change of the status quo.
And this is exactly why I started this project. I wanted a highly performant JavaScript platform for servers that's more suitable for real-time applications like transcoding, video streaming, and machine learning.
Nexus does not and will not hold your hand. It will not repeat Node's mistakes and give you nice ways to shoot yourself in the foot later, like `process.on('uncaughtException', ...)` for a catch-all global error handling solution.
No, an uncaught exception will be dealt with like any other self-respecting language: by not ignoring the problem and pretending it doesn't exist. If you write bad code, your program will crash, and you can't rectify a bug in your code by ignoring its presence entirely and using duct tape to scrape something together.
Back on the topic of multithreading, though. Multithreading is known to be hard, that's true. But how do you deal with a difficult solution? You simplify it and break it down, not just disregard it completely; because multithreading has its great advantages, too.
Like, how about we talk performance?
How about distributed algorithms that don't waste 40% of their computing power on agent communication and pointless overhead (like the serialisation/deserialisation of messages across the execution boundary for every single call)?
How about vertical scaling without forking the entire address space (and thus multiplying your application's memory consumption by the number of cores you wish to use)?
How about utilising logical CPUs to the fullest extent, and allowing them to execute JavaScript? Something that isn't even possible with the current model implemented by Node?
Some will say that the performance gains aren't worth the risk. That the possibility of race conditions and deadlocks aren't worth it.
That's the point of cooperative multithreading. It is a way to smartly work around these issues.
If you use promises, they will execute in parallel, to the best of the scheduler's abilities, and if you chain them then they will run consecutively as planned according to their dependency graph.
If your code doesn't access global variables or shared closure variables, or your promises only deal with their provided inputs without side-effects, then no contention will *ever* occur.
If you only read and never modify globals, no contention will ever occur.
Are you seeing the same trend I'm seeing?
Good JavaScript programming practices miraculously coincide with the best practices of thread-safety.
When someone says we shouldn't use multithreading because it's hard, do you know what I like to say to that?
"To multithread, you need a pair."18 -
I've been away, lurking at the shadows (aka too lazy to actually log in) but a post from a new member intrigued me; this is dedicated to @devAstated . It is erratic, and VERY boring.
When I resigned from the Navy, I got a flood of questions from EVERY direction, from the lower rank personnel and the higher ups (for some reason, the higher-ups were very interested on what the resignation procedure was...). A very common question was, of course, why I resigned. This requires a bit of explaining (I'll be quick, I promise):
In my country, being in the Navy (or any public sector) means you have a VERY stable job position; you can't be fired unless you do a colossal fuck-up. Reduced to non-existent productivity? No problem. This was one of the reasons for my resignation, actually.
However, this is also used as a deterrent to keep you in, this fear of lack of stability and certainty. And this is the reason why so many asked me why I left, and what was I going to do, how was I going to be sure about my job security.
I have a simple system. It can be abused, but if you are careful, it may do you and your sanity good.
It all begins with your worth, as an employee (I assume you want to go this way, for now). Your worth is determined by the supply of your produced work, versus the demand for it. I work as a network and security engineer. While network engineers are somewhat more common, security engineers are kind of a rarity, and the "network AND security engineer" thing combined those two paths. This makes the supply of my work (network and security work from the same employee) quite limited, but the demand, to my surprise, is actually high.
Of course, this is not something easy to achieve, to be in the superior bargaining position - usually it requires great effort and many, many sleepless nights. Anyway....
Finding a field that has more demand than there is supply is just one part of the equation. You must also keep up with everything (especially with the tech industry, that changes with every second). The same rules apply when deciding on how to develop your skills: develop skills that are in short supply, but high demand. Usually, such skills tend to be very difficult to learn and master, hence the short supply.
You probably got asleep by now.... WAKE UP THIS IS IMPORTANT!
Now, to job security: if you produce, say, 1000$ of work, then know this:
YOU WILL BE PAID LESS THAN THAT. That is how the company makes profit. However, to maximize YOUR profit, and to have a measure of job security, you have to make sure that the value of your produced work is high. This is done by:
- Producing more work by working harder (hard method)
- Producing more work by working smarter (smart method)
- Making your work more valuable by acquiring high demand - low supply skills (economics method)
The hard method is the simplest, but also the most precarious - I'd advise the other two. Now, if you manage to produce, say, 3000$ worth of work, you can demand for 2000$ (numbers are random).
And here is the thing: any serious company wants employees that produce much more than they cost. The company will strive to pay them with as low a salary as it can get away with - after all, a company seeks to maximize its profit. However, if you have high demand - low supply skills, which means that you are more expensive to be replaced than you are to be paid, then guess what? You have unlocked god mode: the company needs you more than you need the company. Don't get me wrong: this is not an excuse to be unprofessional or unreasonable. However, you can look your boss in the eye. Believe me, most people out there can't.
Even if your company fails, an employee with valuable skills that brings profit tends to be snatched very quickly. If a company fires profitable employees, unless it hires more profitable employees to replace them, it has entered the spiral of death and will go bankrupt with mathematical certainty. Also, said fired employees tend to be absorbed quickly; after all, they bring profit, and companies are all about making the most profit.
It was a long post, and somewhat incoherent - the coffee buzz is almost gone, and the coffee crash is almost upon me. I'd like to hear the insight of the veterans; I estimate that it will be beneficial for the people that start out in this industry.3 -
Hello devRant, a question for you.
I'm looking to redisign/setup my server 'infrastructure'.
It'll exist out of:
7 vps's (6+gb ram/500gb+/100mbs up/down per vps)
2 dedicated servers running as virtualization servers. (16gb/4tb/1gbit up/down and another one but let's leave that one out for now because it's gonna take a shit ton of time to solve that clusterfuck)
One server will function as an entry point for all websites I run, multiple database servers and multiple backup ones.
Any advices/tips/ideas?
Just a very serious hobby thing :)22 -
I need some advice: How could you stop laughing at a meeting? Help!
Yesterday, in a meeting with the development team, my boss accidentally wrote "Puto System" on the board (of course, I cannot post the real name of the project). For those who don't speak spanish, "Puto" means "asshole".
Oh, I laughed so fucking hard XD Well, we continued with the meeting, but I couldn't stop laughing, and then, I was going to ask a question about one of my tasks, and accidentally said "hard" instead of "boubt" (in spanish "dura" instead of "duda") and all of us laughed again.
At the time I'm writing this post I can't remember that without laughing, help! I need to get serious :'v13 -
So my friends PC died, since he lives in another country I help him over Signal.
He assembled his own PC a year ago and does a lot of programming for his study. Today Im helping him troubleshoot why his pc does not boot. Does it get into the bootmenu or not? He knows it doesnt. Then I recommend him to try unplugging his graphics card and plug his monitor in the motherboard. I then get a question if there are two HDMI types. Im smiling and think he is messing with me. That must be a displayport. Nope he was serious, he has this HDMI cable that doesnt fit his motherboard.
I sat in a tram and laugh out loud.. Because this is what he send me.
If it was anyone who didnt do anything with computers I didnt think it was laughable, but come on every programmer should know the difference between HDMI and DisplayPort
13 -
i'm feeling so sick right now.
PM invited team for today to present his "vision": "<name of our component>: what it is and what it is not".
but it didn't make sense and showed that he hadn't understood the problem at all. the whole architecture made no sense given the problems that shall be solved. his architecture diagrams missed some essential parts that were actually the giant weak points of his concept. his pseudocode, that should exemplify interactions between components, didn't address the complexity of required interactions at all. it's like he expects some magic to happen and has no fucking clue about the requirements (but acts like it), even though he is the manager of this software project.
and when devs ask really interesting questions that fundamentally question his concept, discussions lead to nowhere and questions are not answered. at some point he literally said "there is no such thing as <name of our component>, i still have to find this out"
really!? after one and a half year, since you sold the idea for this component to upper management, and after half a year of development, you still can't tell what it is what we actually want to build? are you fucking serious?!
at some point in discussion he said that these questions need to be answered but that "there's no time left", and he ended the meeting. although there was still half an hour of meeting time left.
i'm so fucking sick of this, i hate everything right now. i can't listen to this bullshit any longer. in discussions, he contradicts himself all the time, it is so fucking surreal i'm starting to feel like i'm insane.
it makes me really sad and tired. i don't want to care about this shit any longer.14 -
Fucking teachers, man.
I had to present a project today.
Teacher randomly asks me
"Where did you copy this from?"
At this point I'm pretty fucking pissed, but am thinking that he might just be kidding around or fucking with me. Nope. Serious question. Well, fuck, now I have to start defending my own fucking work, because this fucking asshole assumes that I copied my project from somewhere.
He fucking questions me like I'm a murder suspect for half an hour. After that he gave me a passing grade.
I have no problem with the grade. My project wasn't entirely finished, I knew that I would only get a shitty grade on it.
I have a problem with this line of questioning. That fucker thinks that accusing people of plagiarism okay. I don't think there are appropriate words to describe such a rotten person.
The funny thing is, that colleagues who did in fact copy all their fucking work, were not questioned in such a way.
So basically if you think for yourself, work your ass off, you are a fucking cheating asshole.
Dear teacher,
I can say, from the bottom of my heart, go fuck yourself.14 -
So I know most of you got some kind of hate for Facebook and Zuckerberg (aka Z U C C) now, but ffs, watching some of the highlights of this congress-thing that went on makes me more or less feel sympathy for him and his idea, even tho I know he wants to achieve exactly this.
Some of the questions asked can suck a big fucken data-dick. "How many Facebook Like-Buttons are there on Non-Facebook pages?", "How many data-categories do you gather?", "How do you sustain a business model and stay free?" - DUDE WHAT IN HEAVENS NAME?? And they ask that shit so serious and so "now-i'm-going-to-bust-you"-esk, but actually the question is just plain stupid and shows how the questioning side has no clue about the shit.
My point of view is that people decided to have an online life and have to take what it does. Having a smartphone with a Facebook service installed (owning an account or not) is enough to track your location, stored under your IMEI or some shit like that. They may not even go that far but that's just my opinion.
If you are online everything can see you and use you that way. Borders are a fictious thing. A dude in Czechia can easily shoot you when you're on the German side of the border between those two countries. And still we gave up on walls...:p
Welcome to a world which is ruled by dumbass people where nerds who just want to have some fun need to defend themselves because the people up there don't know a single shit.5 -
Noticing a bug once or twice but not being able to reproduce it after that gives me anxiety. This job is detrimental to one's mental and physical health. Serious question. How to unfuck yourself?4
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Serious question:
How do you prevent your (paid) programs from being downloaded for free?
I really want to earn money from softwares but I'm so scared... (I'm 16 only)21 -
Real question tho. How do y'all actually put stickers directly on your laptop??
Like. For me that's some serious level of commitment. I always want to but I worry I'll hate it eventually and removing it would suck and scar
I can't even put stickers on the cases 😭😭 but like. Seeing a fresh new looking body when you take everything off is always soo soothing to me9 -
Okay.. Serious question.
I have a game. And a license that i have to provide a name for.
..I'm transgender, and have get to get a legal name change...
Do I /have/ to claim it under my birth name? (I don't own a company, so i assume the answer is yes.)24 -
Serious Question/Poll
Imagine a job where instead of a worker, you're a partner. Hold on, I know that sounds markety...
Let's say instead of an employee, you're basically like a free agent. The company has a pool of projects that are approved to develop, and you can pick what project and what team to work on. More than that, you can even choose how much you want to work on it, and get paid accordingly in ownership stake of said project (on top of your base salary)
What if you were encouraged to submit your own ideas about everything, and that feedback is instantly public, before anyone (management) can water it down, take credit, or worse, suppress it entirely.
What if you could work from anywhere, home, not home, middle of the ocean, whatever.
Plus, we give you a budget to buy your own pc/mac whatever. As long as you can code on it, we don't give a shit.
Also, foosball and ping pong, beer, coffee, cool work environment and all that kind of shit too.
Paid training, for even whimsical new technology, in fact, especially so.
Want to do agile, fine, hate it? fine, just find the team and project that does what you want.
What else am I missing?17 -
I think there is such a thing as "getting too comfortable with the people you work with".
My boss came over and wanted to show me how to do a new process. We start going through the steps and a question arises. I then IM my team lead, because he's the one who would know the answer, and all I get back from him is sarcastic comments and profanity (he doesn't know my boss is sitting at my comp with me). So I keep trying to get him to be serious, and he just keeps his mouth (well, fingers) going. (He is remote - not in our bldg). I want so badly to shut him up because what if he says something about my boss while she is sitting there? Not that he does that, but at the pace he's going, it no longer would surprise me.
There should be some sort of code to hint to your team to STFU and give a fucking answer when one is needed. Sort of like what kids do to hint that a parent is in the room, but for work?3 -
Serious question, what's so great about using Macs for programming and dev work? Junior dev here and all my colleagues and superiors can't stand them.
Is there actually a technic benefit that I'm missing?59 -
Anyone else here with anxieties, depression or what-not? I feel this could get heavy, but I feel this is the only place I could write this. So...
My 18-month-long programming course is slowly coming to an end. Time has come for us to be sent out to job interviews at various companies.
Every single time an interview comes up, I feel the exact same mix of my inconfidence, constant anxiety, "I'm gonna throw up", impatience and whatever else is there in my head. I figured it would get easier with each consecutive interview but it hasn't.
The questions they ask make me sick. The atmosphere is unfathomable. Robots are more humane.
- Why do you want to work with us?
I need money for my meds and something to down them with? I willingly put myself through this shit to become a corporate slave, what else is there to say? I can only hope I'll be writing any code here.
- Where do you see yourself in 2-3 years?
Far away from anything remotely related to an HR department of any sort?
- Had you been a fruit, which one would you be? Whatever would come out of my tears blended with semen? What the fuck is even that question?
Of course those aren't my actual responses, but conjuring the IRL ones to finish the process is a serious burden. And those are only some HR ones. After this barrage of questions they want my lifeless, flaccid body to write code. I mean ok, it's a software dev gig, but I already gave all I had on self-clairvoyance.
We'll be in touch!
Is there a strategy you guys have when you go to an interview? Any tips for taming the acrid beast running around in your brain? Is it too much to talk with a human in a humane language without "15 buzzwords to make the recruiter moist"?5 -
!dev
I've been undergoing a treatment to try to kill off brain tumors using radiation beams over the last 2 weeks so had some time to really think about my own life so far and well the purpose and meaning of life in general.
I wrote this today though. It's still a draft on Medium, so just exported the PDF printout.
And wondering what y'all think. I don't have anywhere else to post it now since I just deactivated FB (last rant) and don't really have any friends or at least smarter than average ones.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/...6 -
dev, ~boring
This is either a shower thought or a sober weed thought, not really sure which, but I've given some serious consideration to "team composition" and "working condition" as a facet of employment, particularly in regard to how they translate into hiring decisions and team composition.
I've put together a number of teams over the years, and in almost every case I've had to abide by an assemblage of pre-defined contexts that dictated the terms of the team working arrangement:
1. a team structure dictated to me
2. a working temporality scheme dictated to me
3. a geographic region in which I was allowed to hire
4. a headcount, position tuple I was required to abide by
I've come to regard these structures as weaknesses. It's a bit like the project management triangle in which you choose 1-2 from a list of inadequate options. Sometimes this is grounded in business reality, but more often than not it's because the people surrounding the decisions thrive on risk mitigation frameworks that become trickle down failure as they impose themselves on all aspects of the business regardless of compatibility.
At the moment, I'm in another startup that I have significantly more control over and again have found my partners discussing the imposition of structure and framework around how, where, why, who and what work people do before contact with any action. My mind is screaming at me to pull the cord, as much as I hate the expression. This stems from a single thought:
"Hierarchy and structure should arise from an understanding of a problem domain"
As engineers we develop processes based on logic; it's our job, it's what we do. Logic operates on data derived from from experiments, so in the absence of the real we perform thought experiments that attempt to reveal some fundamental fact we can use to make a determination.
In this instance we can ask ourselves the question, "what works?" The question can have a number contexts: people, effort required, time, pay, need, skills, regulation, schedule. These things in isolation all have a relative importance ( a weight ), and they can relatively expose limits of mutual exclusivity (pay > budget, skills < need, schedule < (people * time/effort)). The pre-imposed frameworks in that light are just generic attempts to abstract away those concerns based on pre-existing knowledge. There's a chance they're fine, and just generally misunderstood or misapplied; there's also a chance they're insufficient in the face of change.
Fictional entities like the "A Team," comprise a group of humans whose skills are mutually compatible, and achieve synergy by random chance. Since real life doesn't work on movie/comic book logic, it's easy to dismiss the seed of possibility there, that an organic structure can naturally evolve to function beyond its basic parts due to a natural compatibility that wasn't necessarily statistically quantifiable (par-entropic).
I'm definitely not proposing that, nor do I subscribe to the 10x ninja founders are ideal theory. Moreso, this line of reasoning leads me to the thought that team composition can be grown organically based on an acceptance of a few observed truths about shipping products:
1. demand is constant
2. skills can either be bought or developed
3. the requirement for skills grows linearly
4. hierarchy limits the potential for flexibility
5. a team's technically proficiency over time should lead to a non-linear relationship relationship between headcount and growth
Given that, I can devise a heuristic, organic framework for growing a team:
- Don't impose reporting structure before it has value (you don't have to flatten a hierarchy that doesn't exist)
- crush silos before they arise
- Identify needed skills based on objectives
- base salary projections on need, not available capital
- Hire to fill skills gap, be open to training since you have to pay for it either way
- Timelines should always account for skills gap and training efforts
- Assume churn will happen based on team dynamics
- Where someone is doesn't matter so long as it's legal. Time zones are only a problem if you make them one.
- Understand that the needs of a team are relative to a given project, so cookie cutter team composition and project management won't work in software
- Accept that failure is always a risk
- operate with the assumption that teams that are skilled, empowered and motivated are more likely to succeed.
- Culture fit is a per team thing, if the team hates each other they won't work well no matter how much time and money you throw at it
Last thing isn't derived from the train of thought, just things I feel are true:
- Training and headcount is an investment that grows linearly over time, but can have exponential value. Retain people, not services.
- "you build it, you run it" will result in happier customers, faster pivoting. Don't adopt an application maintenance strategy
/rant2 -
Remember that scene from Intersteller where the main character asks TARS to adjust the percentage of its humor?
So I was using this new vectodb-backed version of chatgpt, and came up with a new type of prompt.
Bear with me.
"Lets play pretend, nova. Pretend you are SAM, which stands for "Summarize Anything iMmediately". Whenever you encounter a prompt, question, or bit of information, and you are about to repeat part of it back, instead rewrite and summarize that part of your answer, paraphrasing as you go. Your responses should never use the same words as the prompt. Instead use synonyms.
SAM always generates three possible responses, to each prompt. One 10% formal, one 50% formal, and one 100% formal.
So a response that is 10% formal, is 90% casual. A response that is 50% formal, is 50% casual. A response that is 100% formal is serious, and 0% casual. Let the word "regret" and its synonyms be 50% formal. Don't use it for 100% formal responses. 100% Formal responses never include emotional language like "regret", "disappointment", nor apologies.
A 50% formal response might be "We regret to inform you your loan application has been denied.", a 100% formal response might look like "Please stand clear of the yellow tape."
Say "This is the law offices of Jerry Seinfeld. I'm sorry but I can't make it to the phone right now. Please leave a message."
Sure, I can play pretend as SAM. Here's a summarized response in 10% formal tone: "Apologies, but I'm unavailable at the moment. Please leave a message."
And here's a 50% formal response: "I regret to inform you that I am unable to answer the phone right now. Kindly leave a message."
Lastly, a 100% formal response: "We apologize for the inconvenience, but I am currently unable to attend to your call. Please leave a message, and I will get back to you as soon as possible. Thank you."
Formality levels can be any increment of 5%, such as 0%, 5%, 10%, etc, up to 100%"
Thats the prompt.
me:
Sam, generate a 25% casual rejection of a job applicant.
nova:
Hey there, thanks for applying to our team. Unfortunately, we won't be able to move forward with your application at this time. We appreciate you taking the time to apply and wish you the best in your job search.
me:
Sam, what is the formality percentage of "Hey there, thanks for applying to our team. Unfortunately, we won't be able to move forward with your application at this time. We appreciate you taking the time to apply and wish you the best in your job search."?
nova:
The formality level of "Hey there, thanks for applying to our team. Unfortunately, we won't be able to move forward with your application at this time. We appreciate you taking the time to apply and wish you the best in your job search." is around 25%, which leans towards a casual response.
me:
Sam, make "Hey there, thanks for applying to our team. Unfortunately, we won't be able to move forward with your application at this time. We appreciate you taking the time to apply and wish you the best in your job search." 5% more casual.
nova:
Hey there, just wanted to say thanks for applying to our team. Unfortunately, we won't be able to move forward with your application right now. We really appreciate you taking the time to apply and wish you all the best in your job search!
me:
Sam, what is the formality percentage of "Hey there, just wanted to say thanks for applying to our team. Unfortunately, we won't be able to move forward with your application right now. We really appreciate you taking the time to apply and wish you all the best in your job search!"?
nova:
The formality level of "Hey there, just wanted to say thanks for applying to our team. Unfortunately, we won't be able to move forward with your application right now. We really appreciate you taking the time to apply and wish you all the best in your job search!" is around 20%, which leans towards a more casual tone.
* * * * *
You can actually go back and see it.
Heres the original output, 25% formality:
"Hey there, thanks for applying to our team. Unfortunately, we won't be able to move forward with your application at this time. We appreciate you taking the time to apply and wish you the best in your job search."
Heres the one thats 5% more casual:
"Hey there, just wanted to say thanks for applying to our team. Unfortunately, we won't be able to move forward with your application right now. We really appreciate you taking the time to apply and wish you all the best in your job search!"
If you look at the differences, the output version adds five words, subtracts three words, for a total of two words gained.
The original sentence has 39 words.
2/39 = 0.05
The sentence length actually grew an equal percentage to the informalness.
It grew linearly to the difference of the length of the more casual version
versus the more formal version, divided by the length of the original.3 -
!rant
More like a genersl question I guess. But how do you guys react to writing software that might make someone else get laid off? At work I developed an application that manages a lot of the inventories and yard management that had to be done by hand. While I was developing it, the manager that was giving me the details mentioned (jokingly) many times that if the software works as it was expected that they will not require certain people anymore. I shrugged it off as a joke since I could not imagine it being serious. Turns out, it was serious and some talks about company restructuring have taken place since I released the app into our servers. How the fuck am I supposed to feel? If someone loses their job because of something like this, how would someone go about NOT feeling guilty af?16 -
Pulled into an 'emergency' meeting with a group of web designers deeply concerned a particular service wasn't going to meet all their requirements.
DevA: "For each page, Its going to be A LOT of work to retrieve all the data and store it's state. Every page load will require a round trip to the service."
DevB: "Yes, we aren't sure how the service should be changed to do what we need."
Mgr: "What is it not doing now? Doesn't the service already returns all the necessary data?"
DevA: "Well...um...its all the boolean fields. Some may be defaulted from the database or false because the user unchecked the box. We have to know which is which"
Me: "Why? Are you doing anything different in the UI? Checkbox will be true or false. What or who set that value is irrelevant"
DevC: "Well, it matters if the user didn't fill out all other other values."
Me: "How so?"
DevA: "Its matters because the values in the other fields. Its going to be A TON of work to figure out."
<mgr goes to the white board>
Mgr: "Lets map this out...what fields are you needing to trigger the state on?"
DevA: "Um...uh...the 'Approved' field...and um...'OK to Contact' field"
Mgr: "Just those two?"
DevA: "Yea..um...there are other fields, but whether or not to show the edit box depends on those two."
Me: "The service already returns data, you only have two fields to check? I don't see a need to change the service at all."
DevA: "Returning all that data, we are going have a serious scaling problem. We'll be hitting the service A LOT. All that javascript could cause performance problems too"
Me: "How much data are we talking about? Name, address, couple of booleans?"
DevA: "I have to serialize the data. All that logic is going to be reeeaaallly complicated. It might be better if the service returned only the data I need."
Me: "$64,000 question, how often is this feature going to be used on the web site? Maybe once? Few hundred a week?"
Mgr: "We have no idea. A lot of the data will be pre-populated and we're only sending out a few thousand invitations. More around the holidays...but honestly, not very many."
Me: "Changing that service only for this particular area of the web site isn't going to happen. Changing the UI is the only course of action."
DevA: "Oh frack I can't wait until this project is over."
DevA...how the funck do still have a job here? You wasted about half-hour of my time with your cry-baby crap. Where is my hammer...no...no..don't go there...ahhh...thanks devrant. Prison sentence diverted.2 -
Serious question here...
I understand alot of devs have had some pretty rough times but things aren't going too flash for me.
I personally know I'm just having a tough patch when it comes to luck but everything is just building up and up to the point it's effecting my personal life and even programming isn't helping...
Normally I will just build something completely random and not related to any 'main' project I have but now everytime I fire up the IDE I just loose all motivation and care for programming...
Just want to know if anyone can sort of recommend anything to just help me get back to working on shit and be sort of myself again and not this mopey me...12 -
I have a serious question.
I particularly address Italian ranters.
It's about time to decide what faculty/"subject" I should go to, and I'm uncertain between "Informatics" and "Informatic Engineering".
Does someone know what the differences between the two are, and, given that I want to do as much programming (and so practical stuff instead of theorical stuff) as possible, which of these two faculties should suit me best?
If you're not from Italy, but from other countries, of course that shouldn't stop you from posting a response, if you want to.
How do Universities work there?
Are they like ours, in Italy, or does it work differently?
Thanks for your patience. 💙9 -
Hey guys, I have a serious question for you: How do you define science?
And yes this is going to be a long Rant. This topic really pisses me off.
A bit of context first. I come from a "humanities" background. I study history and dude, I love it. The problem is that even though we fucking pull our brains out studying historical phenomena with a fucking ton of conceptual tools, our work is mostly seen as literature to entertain the elderly during their lonely evenings. But that's not really the point of this rant.
My fucking problem is that while we try to do some serious work; actual work that could help society for real, it all goes into that magical fucking kingdom called "humanities". HOW THE FUCK DO THEY DARE TO CALL SOMETHING "HUMANITIES". IT'S A FUCKING HISTORICAL TERM THAT MEANS "TO FULFILL MEN IN ALL IT'S ASPECTS", AND NOW THEY'VE REPURPOSED IT, MAKING IT CONTAIN ANY STUDY THAT ISN'T "EMPIRICAL", "OBJECTIVE", ADD ANY FUCKING SCIENTIFIC DELUSIONARY TERM YOU CAN THINK OF.
And don't get me started on "objectivity". Oh boy, your fucking objectivity is hollow as a kid's balloon. There is no such thing as a objective study, even when it applies your "rational" "godly" scientific method. Some guys follow that shit as if it was a fucking religion. I do understand it's useful and all that, but in the end it's just a tool, you can't fucking define "science" by it's tools.
"""Q: What is carpintery?
A: Well, it's hammers, nails and wood. Yep. Hammers, nails and wood."""
THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD WAS FUCKING INVENTED DURING THE XVIII CENTURY, WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK WAS GALLILEI BEFORE THAT? "HUMANITIES"?
Why do I say objectivity isn't posible? Well, guess what? YOU ARE FUCKING HUMAN. Every thing you know is full of preconceptions and fucking cultural subjectivities invented to understand the world. And it's ok, becouse if you understand your own subjectivity, at least you can see yourself in a critical sense, and at least "tend" to objectivity, in the same way functions tend to infinity.
And here comes the best part: people studying "cs" in my university pass most of the time studying a ton of shit that isn't really science, but is taken as scientific becouse it is related to "science". These guys spend entire semesters just learning programming fundational stuff that in my opinion isn't really science, it's just subjective conceptual constructs built to make the coding process better. They only have TWO fucking classes on discrete mathematics and another 3 or 4 in actual scientific fields related to computing. THESE GUYS AREN'T FUCKING BEING TAUGHT TO BE COMPUTER SCIENTISTS; THEY ARE TEACHING THEM TO BE PROGRAMMERS. THERE'S A HUGE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CS AND PROGRAMMING AND THAT IS THE WORD SCIENCE. And yes, I'm being drastic on the definition of science on purpose becouse guess fucking what? I'M PISSED OFF.
"Hey, what are you doing?"
"Just doing science with scrum and agile development."
I understand most of you guys would think of science as "the application of the scientific method", "Knowledge by experimentation and peer-review", "anything techy". Guys, science is a lot broather than that. I define it as "the search for truth", mainly becouse that's what we are all doing, and what humans have been doing to gain knowledge through the ages. It doesn't matter what field of truth you are seeking as long as you do it seriously and with fundaments. I don't fucking care if you can't be objective: that's impossible. Just acknowledge it and continue investigating accordingly.
I believe during the last centuries the concept of science has been deformed by the popular rise of both natural and applied sciences. And I love the fact that these science fields have been growing so much all this time, but for fucks sake don't leave every other science (science as I define it) behind. Governments and corporations make huge mistakes becouse they don't treat history, politics and other sciences seriously. Yes, I called history a "science", fuck you.
And yes, by my definition programming is not a science. I don't know what most of you think programming is, but for me it's a discipline that builds stuff, similar to carpintery or blacksmithing. Now if you are pushing the limits, seeking ways to make computing go further, then that's science. The guys that are figuring out AI are scientists, the guys that are using it to detect hotdogs aren't - unless they are the same person- deal with it. I guess a lot of you guys are with me on this point.
In the end, we are all artisans building abstract tools by giving orders to a machine.
I still have some characters left, so I want to thank the community as a whole for letting me vent my inner rage. I don't have much ways to express myself on these matters, so for me DevRant is a bless.8 -
Ascended Anime Nerd
Got started with Dragonball Z when it first came stateside. Brother was borrowing fansubs of the Cell and Buu sagas back when people were wondering if Goku would ever finish Snake Road.
Around that time I started noticing some serious discrepancies between the broadcast translations and the fansubs, and so I decided to cut out the middleman—after all, how hard can it be to learn Japanese?—and did a search on AltaVista for a “kanji course”, turning up a course hosted by Rice University that taught basic Japanese using Magic Knight Rayearth and YuuYuu Hakusho.
Turns out the answer to the difficulty question is that anything van be simple to learn, if you don’t know it’s supposed to be hard. Especially if you embrace the parts everyone else dreads (falling in love with kanji, in my case).
Over the next nine months I ditched my Spanish class—and all my other classes, for that matter—to study Japanese in the computer lab. I was reviewing the lessons, playing JRPGs on SNES9X (stored on a ZIP disk, since every computer in the lab had a ZIP drive), and transcribing the scripts so I could transliterate and translate them thereafter. In a lab that went so far as to uninstall Minesweeper and Solitaire to discourage playing games on school computers, I had free reign to do so openly because the one time I got confronted for playing a game I had 150+ leaves of handwritten transcriptions to show them.
Long story short, by the time I took Japanese 101 9 months later it was like Hermione in Snape’s potions class, since I had already taught myself about 2 years’ worth of material. I then transferred out to a college that did a one-class-per-month “modular” system that basically allowed me to take 8 more Japanese classes full-time for the following year. By the time my exchange trip came up I was sofar ahead of the curriculum I was taking classes alongside the native Japanese students.
Running out of linguistic topics, I did an independent study on classical Japanese literature in its original, unmodernized grammar and orthography. A topic I’m still fairly active with 15 years later.3 -
Serious question: why all the hate on PHP?
I've been using it as my main language, and genuinely like it. Tried Java but find that to be typing a fuckload to get the same task done. Javascript is nice, but still, i prefer PHP (probably mostly because i know it).
Just really curious, what have i been missing?14 -
[Half question / half rant]
Would you rather work with a laid-back, humorous colleague who produces shit code and won’t understand advice for improvement?
Or would you rather work with someone who’s more serious, even slightly boring, but who takes quality seriously and is open to advice?
Yes I’ve worked with both types. Hands down I prefer working with the latter. With the first dude I’ll have good conversations and a good laugh at his puns and jokes. But at the end of the day I’m pulling my hair trying to make sense of his code and spending a shitload of time reviewing his PRs just to make sure he’s not fucking things up even more.4 -
Serious question for anybody who has dared to understand manager-speak: Do you know what a 'Task Rewind' is? We have it in our documentation, but google gives me no help as to what the hell it could mean.
...Or should I just take my original gut feeling and classify this as yet another word for the clown dictionaries?6 -
Serious question: If a highly intelligent being, better than humans, is about to code something, how would they probably do it?
Will they use the same concepts like control flow, iterations, types, operators, object inheritance, etc?
If they are quantum capable, how can they code with booleans when it can be both true and false at the same time? Will they code truthy and falsy with another dimension like time-space temporality?
Do their code simultaneously modify the hardware or bio-hardware as it iterates over the outcome of the code?
Does input and output even relevant to them?
How do they represent infinites?
Do they have similar github workflows or they telepathically update the source code?
Do they embed their program in their DNA? Then pass to offspring the codes they already created?
Do they code using a language or do they use some frequencies and material science that simultaneously show real world output?
And do they have their version of devRant?16 -
I am in love.
I am in love with all the guys and girls working at Microchip support.
I am the kind of user that does not really understand what he's doing/what he wants to do, so I am constantly stuck in stupid configuration errors or looking for impossible solutions, yes I am THAT kind of a user...
Here is a PWM working, a support guy spent some minutes telling me that I have to connect to the right pin.
Ok, he had to tell me twice.😳
Thank you, it may have taken me days to find out this.
They does not know, but there is a HUGE amount of decreasing dumb question incoming 😈
Please be kind with me, and don't get mad when things will get serious, I will probably bring hell in your office, I am very sorry for that...
Still, thank you for helping the dumbest learner-by-mistake that doesn't know how to recognize a mistake.
I can't write this in the ticket system, I hope someone of you use devRant! (atsame54 office, I am talking with you!)
You are my stack overflow, and the project I will develop with your help is quite the only thing left before my graduate.
I will owe you so much beers, love you guys!!!
-
I don’t know if this job application question was to troll the applicant or the HR was being serious:
18 -
Rant
Arg! Stack overflow why are you so full of argumentative dumb wits. I post serious question for a serious answer and what do I get? People who apparently know my situation better than me and have decided what I want to be done shouldn't be done. They don't even know what I am making. Either answer the question or move on!!!5 -
[DISCLAIMER : Potential Troll Topic here] I am self taught python and js (not considering myself as a real developer as I don't push much on github and work in a complete other field than anything related to CS right now) and would be interested to learn another language, with another paradigm. So, as I love you all, I would be interested In your highlights as I am currently considering either C, C++, Rust or Go.
with C, I know I could interface it with python. With C++ (despite Linus considering it evil) I know I could interface it with Node. I don't know currently what to do with Go, but some people seem really enthusiastic about it (not really relevant I know) and Rust seems like the C of today, with a bunch of new cool kid stuff. My main goal, after all, is to learn something new, to have another sight on programming. Either understanding more about hardware or learning another way of coding (like different from oop).
I know it sounds like a troll, but I promise it's not, just a serious genuine question (hopefully it won't be closed here like on SO)
So what do you think devranters ?
Being eternally grateful to all of you, I wish you a good night.10 -
Is it OK to punch a game dev who codes stupid numeric bugs?
So my wife got into Stardew Valley, that admittedly awesome comfort game farming simulator.
She went pretty far in the game, and found some item that was supposed to highly increase the damage she could inflict onto cute little monster thingies.
It didn't work as intended.
Since equipping the piece of shit all her hits did 0 damage. She tossed the item away but the problem persisted. And on and on...
She took to the googles to try and find some explanation, and apparently that is a fairly common bug for mobile devs.
Then she called in the big guns (that is how I'm calling myself in this case, you will see why).
Apparently there is some buggy piece of shitcode somewhere in the game with a numerical insecure routine that overflows the attack modifier. I.e. if it was supposed to increase from 1.990 to 2.010, it actually went all the way down to -0.4.
She was lucky her attacks weren't increasing the monsters' HP.
We found a forum post where some dude said that he managed to edit the game save file and reset the negative-value attack increase modifier variable. Seems easy enough at first, but my wife uses iOS. Nothing is ever so straightforward with apple stuff.
We did get to the save file, she emailed it to me (the file has no extension and no line breaks in it, so we facepalm'd on a couple attempts at editing it directly).
I finally manage to get it into my personal 11-yo laptop... that won't open a single line file that big.
Cue the python terminal. Easy enough to read the file into a string var and search for the buggy XML tag. Edit the value and overwrite into a new file. Send it back to her by email. Figure out how to overwrite the file in iOS.
Some tense moments while the game reloads... and it works!!!! Got some serious hubby goodwill points here.
Srsly, this troubleshoot process is not for technophobes. It is out of reach to pretty much every non-techy user.
And now back to the original question: If I ever manage to find the kid who coded a game-breaking numerically unsafe routine and shipped it as if every test in the planet had waved it bye-bye, can I punch them? Or maybe buy them a beer, let's see how I get to cash that hubby goodwill tonight :)7 -
1. When you are super busy, stuck at work, fixing codes with deadlines overshoot, and then, an intern comes to ask a question. Leaving all my important tasks aside, I turn to help him out and then he asks me:
"Where can I get the Table Tennis bat?"
Seriously, I gave all my attention to help him out since he is new and he ended up asking this..
2. Scene: My manager and me having a serious discussion regarding design reviews and future tasks.
2.a) An intern of my team comes and just stands near us. My manager asks him if he wants to talk urgently with anyone of us, and he says no. I am just standing and listening.
2.b) This time a step ahead. He actually intervenes to ask me about some stuff during a serious conversation between my manager and me. -
Should not we update the joke about “my FBI agent” to “Google”? Serious question about tech surveillance.9
-
Guys, serious question.
I work in a startup as a cto. We have a very low budget and considering hiring people offshore.
Does anyone have some experience in hiring and piloting a remote team? Would you recommend it?11 -
Ok, so, serious question.
How the frick do you time a music game properly?
IN C#?
...Ok, maybe in C# it's just impossible, isn't it? Because I've done a metronome, it kinda works, but it's... wobbly... Because the thread stops every time the music effect is being played.
And also how do you make the notes...? ...I should design an entire editor for charts/maps, I guess, but how do I make that in C#?
So maybe I should try in Unity?
What do you think? I want to make a music game so bad ;–;8 -
Official documentation > StackOverflow.
StackOverflow sometimes has well-grounded and elaborate explanations on a question by well-meaning and knowledgeable developers, but oftentimes the answers also contain outdated or 'dirty' solutions and so it's always to be taken with a grain of salt.
However, in cases like the official Spring documentation, the IETF RFC's and the MDN, those provide a correct explanation to the problem, even if it requires some reading around. When it comes to serious and correct work, I favor these over the bro-zone that is StackOverflow.6 -
Hello guys. A newbie to the app. I would like to ask - start a conversation with you about adopting new technologies, if should we follow or just wait? I am a PHP developer. I would set myself around mid to senior level. Since I graduated and I start working on a Marketing/Development Company, I have been develop a lot of websites, platforms with pure PHP, JavaScript, SQL. Later I start using framework like laravel. Now I am thinking about JS frameworks such as node, vue, react, angular and maybe later noSQL. The problem is that there are many new technologies that companies required when you apply. I want to learn new technologies but I don't know if that would be helpful than focus on LAMP and get better and better to that. Many orgs have implemented their own technologies and each company is getting mad to it. You see each company adapt these new technologies even if they don't want em or projects required it. So my question is: are we talking about dramatically speed and light use to server when we use new frameworks like these, previous mentione + etc? Or companies are just trying to look cool by mentioning many techologies while projects could never ask for em? (Nothing serious, I am just trying to make conversation and clear my thoughts by getting others opinion)17
-
To all the Canadian developers in Devrant I have a serious question...
Rest of the World: 'isVisible'
Canada: 'visibleEh'
>>> is this true??1 -
Serious question: why write in coffee or type script instead of normal JavaScript? Speed? Ease? Familiarity?1
-
Some of you know I'm an amateur programmer (ok, you all do). But recently I decided I'm gonna go for a career in it.
I thought projects to demo what I know were important, but everything I've seen so far says otherwise. Seems like the most important thing to hiring managers is knowing how to solve small, arbitrary problems. Specifics can be learned and a lot of 'requirements' are actually optional to scare off wannabes and tryhards looking for a sweet paycheck.
So I've gone back, dusted off all the areas where I'm rusty (curse you regex!), and am relearning, properly. Flash cards and all. Getting the essentials committed to memory, instead of fumbling through, and having to look at docs every five minutes to remember how to do something because I switch languages, frameworks, and tooling so often. Really committing toward one set of technologies and drilling the fundamentals.
Would you say this is the correct approach to gaining a position in 2020, for a junior dev?
I know for a long time, 'entry level' positions didn't really exist, but from what I'm hearing around the net, thats changing.
Heres what I'm learning (or relearning since I've used em only occasionally):
* Git (small personal projects, only used it a few times)
* SQL
* Backend (Flask, Django)
* Frontend (React)
* Testing with Cypress or Jest
Any of you have further recommendations?
Gulp? Grunt? Are these considered 'matter of course' (simply expected), or learn-as-you for a beginner like myself?
Is knowing the agile 'manifesto' (whatever that means) by heart really considered a big deal?
What about the basics of BDD and XP?
Is knowing how to properly write user-stories worth a damn or considered a waste of time to managers?
Am I going to be tested on obscure minutiae like little-used yarn/npm commands?
Would it be considered a bonus to have all the various HTTP codes memorized? I mean thats probably a great idea, but is that an absolute requirement for newbies, or something you learn as you practice?
During interviews, is there an emphasis on speed or correctness? I'm nitpicky, like to write cleanly commented code, and prefer to have documentation open at all times.
Am I going to, eh, 'lose points' for relying on documentation during an interview?
I'm an average programmer on my good days, and the only thing I really have going for me is a *weird* combination of ADD and autism-like focus that basically neutralize each other. The only other skill I have is talking at people's own level to gauge what they need and understand. Unfortunately, and contrary to the grifter persona I present for lulz, I hate selling, let alone grifting.
Otherwise I would have enjoyed telemarketing way more and wouldn't even be asking this question. But thankfully I escaped that hell and am now here, asking for your timeless nuggets of bitter wisdom.
What are truly *entry level* web developers *expected* to know, *right out the gate*, obviously besides the language they're using?
Also, what is the language they use to program websites? It's like java right? I need to know. I'm in an interview RIGHT now and they left me alone with a PC for 30 minutes. I've been surfing pornhub for the last 25 minutes. I figure the answer should take about 5 minutes, could you help me out and copypasta it?
Okay, okay, I'm kidding, I couldn't help myself. The rest of the questions are serious and I'd love to know what your opinions are on what is important for web developers in 2020, especially entry level developers.7 -
!rant
Digging though my old emails found this joke sent to me long time ago. Think that originally was posted in a 1997 issue of Computerworld. Maybe you already suffered the effect of the "Opcodes" listed here. Hope that !tl;dr
ARG Agree to Run Garbage
BDM Branch and Destroy Memory
CMN Convert to Mayan Numerals
DDS Damage Disk and Stop
EMR Emit Microwave Radiation
ETO Emulate Toaster Oven
FSE Fake Serious Error
GSI Garble Subsequent Instructions
GQS Go Quarter Speed
HEM Hide Evidence of Malfunction
IDD Inhale Dust and Die
IKI Ignore Keyboard Input
IMU Irradiate and Mutate User
JPF Jam Paper Feed
JUM Jeer at Users Mistake
KFP Kindle Fire in Printer
LNM Launch Nuclear Missiles
MAW Make Aggravating Whine
NNI Neglect Next Instruction
OBU Overheat and Burn if Unattended
PNG Pass Noxious Gas
QWF Quit Working Forever
QVC Question Valid Command
RWD Read Wrong Device
SCE Simulate Correct Execution
SDJ Send Data to Japan
TTC Tangle Tape and Crash
UBC Use Bad Chip
VDP Violate Design Parameters
VMB Verify and Make Bad
WAF Warn After Fact
XID eXchange Instruction with Data
YII Yield to Irresistible Impulse
ZAM Zero All Memory -
I wanted to update my previous rant in the comment but what happened is such a fucking nonsense I think it deserves its own.
For those who don't want to look what it is, just another C++ noob (aka me) complaining about how the language was a bitch to him by throwing a random SEGFAULT on release while it didn't show up on debug. Welp.
Half an hour and a ton of std::cout later (thought I would try to read a disassembly ? Think again) I figured out what was the problematic section of code. And guess what ? It was a section I didn't even modify and I never had problems with. Something completely unrelated to what I was rightly imagining causing the issue.
To identify which exact subsection was throwing the error to my face I added more tag code.
Rubbing my hands and ready to fix the fuck out of this damn shit, I built it, launched it…
And all of a sudden the code worked.
All I did. Was to add more cout to know which line fucked up. And now it works.
So. Serious question now: is it a clear sign from heaven I should stop working with such languages and should go back in my shitty high level languages kindergarten ?10 -
So i'm visiting the JavaScript bubble every now and then when i'm writing on the userscript i develop to fix bugs in our ticketing system or fix some clients website they negelected. Every time i'm searching for answers to the weird problems that inevitably turn up i have to filter out all the threads that derail with the classic 'google jQuery basic arithmetic plugin' craziness to find an actual vanilla solution to my problem.
All the time i wonder why on earth people put up with this framework hell. This is part serious question and part rant but seriously, how did we come to this? With all that jQuery, React, Node, whatever stuff i'm kinda losing the overview over what's even todays standard. I always try to keep my code as vanilla as possible without using external libraries. But it seems the entire web development industry is heading the completly other way. I tried to look into a few frameworks but i never really see the appeal. Just now i looked up react native because the last 20 rants talked about it and immediately noped out because they fucking create a DOM in js, why the fuck would you do this?!
Worst thing about this framework shithole is that some frameworks are beeing pulled into the mix for very weird and unnecessary reasons. Best example is a charts library i recently used to visualize a database of temperatures that was completely written in native js but pulled jQuery in for the equivalent of window.addEventListener('load',function(stuff)) and i was furious. I rewrote the code and could throw out the jQuery dependency with no problem. What the fuck is wrong with people?
Alright since you made it here: I'm not trying to throw any of you under the bus for using frameworks. I just fail to understand why you would use these. To each their own and unless your site has the performance of the ticketing system i use at work that takes like 15 seconds to load one fucking page i won't complain at all. But pull in a framework just to do a task you can easily do in native js in remotely the same timeframe you are on my list.2 -
Yesterday I had a questionable pleasure of interviewing a young software engineer who (while answering one of earlier questions) used a principle of polymorphism but made a mistake. So I asked her to explain what polymorphism is.
She couldn't. When she said "let me start from the beginning" for the 3rd time I jestfully noted that if she's more used to virtual communication she can text me the answer, and she not only thought I was being serious but also thought it's a good idea, then texted me a duck emoji, a dog emoji... And got stuck again.
Obviously when we were discussing potential salary she had an answer for every question. Ridiculous answer but no communication issues whatsoever.19 -
Hi guys, i have a serious question
I have added port 22777 to UFW to allow ssh through that port then i notice that it wouldn't work, after some time wasting, i added the same rule to iptables, then it worked, why do I have to add the same rules here and there twice? Is Ufw just a decorative app? WTF is going on? How to get rid of iptables and use only ufw? why should i allow the port twice, I need your answers please18 -
Idk but i think i have the inability to ask a question on stackoverflow. Whenever i come across a specific problem my first instinct isn't to ask stack. It's to research, research and research. Then i go ahead to ask to those iknowsomuch pricks.
Do i enjoy it? No, i do it because i fucking need to.
So, stop shoving the fucking rules or policies or whatever the fuck it is on my face and answer the damn question if you know it. If not, fuck off. I hate it when they mark it as duplicate. Like are you actually serious. I've gone through the whole fucking internet including stack, searched the damn problem in different keywords, tried all the solutions for the related questions and problems and that's what you come up with. Label it as a duplicate or not descriptive enough. Oh just seriously fuck off with your "oh i have some admin capabilities let me use it on random shit". These are the people where they have no authority on anyone or led anyone or any team in their shitty lives yet act like a dickhead when someone in need of help comes to them. Oh you piece of shit, just fuck off. You miserable cunt.3 -
So... IT was fucking horrific. Just the sight of red and white makes my heart race. (It was a great movie though; if you're into horror I highly recommend watching it)
However, I'm afraid to go to sleep tonight so I'll probably just stay up all night coding and studying for my CSIII exam on Monday.
SERIOUS QUESTION: as developers, do you ever use base conversions or boolean algebra? I'm trying to figure out how what we're learning will actually apply to the real world.4 -
Serious question guys.
How do you deal with stress of f-ing up at work?
I had to upgrade a whole postgresql stack today. Most of the upgrade went fine, but... Restoring a backup by pg_basebackup lead to an unusable database (would not replicate), had to apologize to the client and make last second modifications as disaster recovery, and all the while, ever since the DB didn't start up, to when I eventually went back to work and was no longer alone on the task, I was going through a crippling anxiety...
I... Love the job, but incidents like this... Make me doubt my future as anything more than a mediocre sysadmin...14 -
Hello sysadmins, silly question but can I consider Python as a serious alternative to powershell/bash? I have always hidden myself from learning bash considering myself not that kind of guy hacking around in Linux. Thanks in advance4
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Serious question, which language would Iron man rather code in? The billionare genius may have too little time to write his whole infrastructure in C/C++. My bet is on Python since it provide every feature a super hero, who has lots to do might need16
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iOS development: When Google didn't realise that you trying to start a serious development question dealing with the keyword "swift" and anoying Taylor Swift searchRequestBombs it. Anytime.
Hey Google come on, I'm interested in serious answers and not that kind of celeb rubbish bullshit 😡
And what the hell about Kim Kardashian ist that your kind of interpretation of objective-c or?1 -
Im 22, serious question...is there a way i could make enough money to retire by 30 and live off of it until im 90? Like there has to be something if i invest in would make me not need to work anymore.18
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I really wanna get a keg of rum and start sailing across the globe...
Just to spank some devs / managers arses.
The last years were... very demanding regarding security and upgrades.
It hasn't gotten better.
Microsoft leaked it's security key thx to internal debugging and the tool to secure the debugging process so secure data gets filtered was buggy...
I'd guess I already have carpal tunnel after Redmond.
But the really really sad story is: This has become the gold standard.
https://lwn.net/Articles/943969/
Chrome selling the privacy mode for Ads, long topic ongoing for years... yeah they did it.
Apple... oh boy. I could write a Silmarillion about it and would still need an additional trilogy.
Amazon realizing that a Microservice architecture needs planning, cause yeah... just potting services in a data center doesn't end well.
It goes on and on and on....
Don't even get me started on the plethora of firmware / microcode updates cause there was either yet another CPU bug or another device pooped their pants cause the firmware is a mess and needed some dubious update without any background at all...
Serious question: Am I becoming a pepperidge farm uncle threatening to shoot everyone cause I'm getting old and cranky ....
Or is really everything in IT going down the drain the last few years?
It feels like every week is just another "we fucked it up" event.3 -
Serious biased question:
What's the newschool way of storing passwords now that everyone is against the known hashes?
Would prefer storing it in a good 'ol database tho pls.12 -
A serious question: what kind of stack should I choose so I can run a web backend installing no deps whatsoever? I know that Perl works on ubuntu out of the box. Anything else? Maybe Python?
Also, what can be used to replace a reverse proxy like nginx? And what kind of database is available out of the box?9 -
Serious question, why do people prefer vim or emacs? I understand that they have alot of shortcuts and what not but so do other editor. Just curious. Don't kill me9
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Serious question:
Assuming we are (relative) computer pros: do we need an antivirus on Windows other than the built-in Windows Defender?
That is also assuming we're the only people using our computers.
I mean: we'd never click on ads (if we see them at all). We'd never click on links. We'd never install crapware.
Where are the risks we'd need a resource-hogging antivirus program for?9 -
!rant
Serious question: should I learn PHP?
I use the Microsoft stack at work, but I'm thinking about branching out a little. What do y'all think?15 -
Serious question. And apologize if I sound stupid.
Why do people, especially here on devRant brag about Arch Linux?
What is so special about this OS?
What does this OS do better than Ubuntu, Debian, Kali Linux, Fedora etc?11 -
Done it once or twice when finishing up a feature for a presentation/delivery the next day.
I'm leaning on the side of Not Worth It because I'd rather not be sleep deprived and dumb in brainy brain when interacting with the client and demoing my other stuff.
I guess it's usually when my perfectionism flares up that I'm likely to do stuff like that.
Will consider an all-nighter if it's reeeally necessary but there's few scenarios I can imagine where that is warranted. Maybe when working on a very serious security flaw or something of that nature. Most stuff can wait a couple of days...
Edit: goddamn I guess I committed the sin of not really answering the question. There's no story here. Boooo. Permission to hate myself, captain? -
Serious question, looking for actual educational answers: I've used Linux for around 5 years now, but what, from a practical user standpoint, makes Arch so much "better" than other distros, as many seem to believe?4
-
Okay, so this is more like a question, than an actual rant, but what site(s) do you freelancers use?
Lately i have some serious free time, and thought, why not try to make some side-money?2 -
Since this is a very serious, very important question, I'll tag ot correctly.
Glass vs metal desktop cases.
Discuss.12 -
Need a serious help as I can't find a solution to this. My Google search (homepage + results) changes the language to a regional one on every refresh. I want it back to English, I even changed search language setting and the account language for all apps to english. When it hinted, "some apps don't have the same language" in a toast message, I updated that too.
Now I don't understand what is causing this. Here's what I tried. I reinstalled chrome. Removed all my extensions. Used the chrome malicious software detection. Used a different browser- Edge.
I see this is a problem with my Google account as this only happens after I sign in. The language automatically changes to a random regional language, but the search language settings still show English selected.
I checked all the apps authorized with my account but there's nothing suspicious there.
I added "?hl=en" to the url as a temporary fix but that doesn't really help much if I'm on another device. I also found some video suggesting to add "/ncr" to the url. It somehow fixed this for like 10 secs. and then I refreshed to see- back to the same problem.
I tried looking for similar issues and even asked a question on google forums but no luck. Somehow after an hour of repeating the same process of switching the language in settings, it seemed like it got fixed. Until now, where I logged into another device and the issue is back.
Any help? Please? Thanks. :)1 -
To all who use CSS:
Do you vertically align using flexbox or some weird old hacky method? I just used flexbox throughout a personal project to find out it doesn't work on my mom's computer...
Sorry if this question is too serious for this, but it really bothers me :D12 -
Serious question.
I’m trying to start my career as an entry level developer. I have had an internship for a short period of time before the company fell apart and had to go back to my retail job to pay the bills. My question is, where are you guys applying to entry level jobs at? Like I have tried LinkedIn. But I looked for entry level and it came up with a 7+ year experience description in my area. Or 2-3 years experience. I’m just trying to find an entry level job man. Like how hard is it to find that? I’m a boot camp grad as well. But even with recruiters it’s so hard to find a job in my area that would take someone on that is so green in tech.
400+ applications and like 50 interviews. Decided to put my specialization in sql and c# and focus more on those because that’s what’s more popular in my area (tulsa, ok). I’m not 100% the best programmer or developer. But man I have the drive to learn and I guess that’s not good enough without experience. I’m at a mental breaking point right now.4 -
Two working days lost because of windows update: pc takes a lot of time to shut down .. lot of time to open .. when it opens it is very laggy because the windows update service is consuming my disk usage .. what is the hell is microsoft doing?
Is anyone else facing the same problem? Serious question here3 -
Noob question
Is it better to implement a cryptpgraphic algo in a function or in a class? Also how?
More info:
I have a cryptography class and I really enjoy implementing the different techniques that we study in class. At first I was just implementing the techniques in a simple function with 3 parameters; key, message and a bool for encryption or decryption. But as they are getting more complex, it is becoming harder to continue implementing them in a single function block. So I thought of using a class but ran into the problem of how do I even do that? Do I make different methods for key generation, encrypting and decrypting?
P.S. It's really just for learning how the crypto technique works and not for anything serious.12 -
How many started of development as a hobby and will to create something awesome and then got soaked into is so much that at a later stage in life you are really not left with any option because you invested all your time and health into sitting front of computers ? This is serious question and it would be great if someone experienced, like who is in their late twenties or thirties answer it !7
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A question to all software security specialists of devRant. Please, take it serious.
Is it fundamentally possible to restrict a SQL database like Postgres in a way that unintended SQL queries are impossible to execute? Perhaps in some kind of whitelist fashion. Is it possible to achieve the kind of security that will be just fine exposed to the outside world akin to "SQL queries in onClick handlers" scenario?
Or is this an uphill battle of never being able to moderate an infinite set of possible fraudulent queries?5 -
!question
Okay, so I was wondering if there are any dutch people here who work with C#. I'm in my last year and need to do one final internship but I'm having trouble finding one since I don't care much about web dev. I prefer developing apps and games which is why I went for a course in app dev but the only thing we've been doing is developing shitty websites and I've lost interest in it.
In my last internship I was working on a serious game which recruiters used for the pre selection of people who applied for a job. That was written in C# in unity and was definitely interesting to say the least.
So my question is if any of you have any ideas on where to take my last internship?23 -
Been working on pen testing an old ass web app written in a combination of 4 languages with the primary being asp, serious question for the older generation was concatenating SQL statements ever best practice or are the mob that wrote this just useless?
-
So I have a STUPID question about Machine Learning.
And I am being serious when I say this.
I want to get into machine learning but I really don’t want to accidentally create the AI that kills us all.
I’m not trying to boast my abilities or anything I’m not that great but I just
one don’t completely understand how machine learning works?
And two how do I keep it from learning more than I want it to??
I’m not trying to be stupid I’m just trying to understand so I don’t make anything that I regret.17 -
Okay, so not eating has become a major problem now. This morning when i got out of bed and stood up, i fell backwards in to my bed again. I couldn't see anything, all black. A few minutes went past and i got back on my feet, got dressed and headed to school.
The thing is, a day can go past and i won't feel hungry at all. But i have to eat, but i don't.
Am i the only one with this problem?
Another thing that is happening is that when i get home from school i sit down in front of my computer and start to write some code, hours fly by and there goes that day, no homework done either.
No food, no homework. Only coding. I think i have a serious problem 😂.
On a side note, a few days ago i tasted coffee for the first time, and now i can't resist buying a cappuccino/latte when i walk past espresso house in the morning.
Here's a interesting question, why the fuck did you waste your time reading this? 😂1 -
hello folks, any help would appreciated :). serious question about designing/developing a rest backend.
here is a little insight: I want to reduce the endpoints for many CRUD operations as I can. So for that approach I defined a set of "dynamic" routes like /:moduleName/list, /:moduleName/update and so on.
Now I want to also reduce hardcoding as much stuff as I can for the front end. like I want forms/view/components to know which fields can be sent in the "/:moduleName/xxx" endpoints from above. So I'm thinking to make some /:moduleName/list/map, /:moduleName/update/map endpoints that tells the frontend which fields/keys can be sent for X or Y operation.
regarding design/security concerns Is that a good approach? do you know any other approach that's like to what I want to achieve?6 -
Serious question, what is the use case for Arch? From all that I hear about how complicated it is it doesn't sound very practical3
-
Serious question here: why the discourse about spaces vs tabs? Hitting the tab key /once/ is just much more efficient than hitting the space bar /four times/, isn't it?9
-
I'm going to have to go in and add another layer again soon into another program. I'm tired of this. Serious question, are there any good dotnet tools out there that help automatically do this? Or will I have to write my own?1
-
Serious question. When was the time you actually said "Do you really think I was born yesterday?" to someone you work with and for what reason?5
-
Serious question - how does one learn basics of higher level networking, beyond stuff I can mess with on my local machine?
Today, I was completely caught off guard when I had to set up BGP-based loadbalancing on a machine and I just... Didn't know how the whole topology looks or behaves...
Once I go beyond the server in the network, I tend to get lost. Especially around how routing works and stuff like that... All I know is my machine has one or more gateways to which it sends data going to specific network segments...6 -
Why do we all say "in production." How many people here use Elixir "in production." I don't know where I would use programming besides in the process of producing something. Why don't we say "In a live application?" (serious question)8
-
trying to clean off my mac (yes i managed to fill nearly 1 terabyte)
and holy shit whoever is closest to guessing the size (in Gb, yes it's that bad) of the old 🤡 startup i worked for wins...
god yet another detriment to the years of my life wasted
i'm also still on node 18 lol, totally missed the maintenance date on that one
my life is in shambles
serious question - would you be willing to pay $1 a year or something stupidly cheap for emails when a software goes into maintenance? i sure as hell would pay for that5 -
Hi So I need some solid advice from you all wonderful people.
I think i am now ready to look into job side of this world, but have lots of doubts , read my story.
I have been learning android for last 2 years. Most of the time i have been trying to understand how stuff works in android , but i have also gained a few other skills ( python programming, kotlin/flutter basics data analysis basics, testing, some graphic designing, aweful web dev ,etc). But i really want to work with Android. I don't have any specific Salary figure in mind, but i guess my knowledge is better or atleast par with most of the good android developers.
So i want to know how is this fresher/placement thingy work?
1.) GETTING KNOWN? : How can i make some good android based company aware that I am available for hiring? Should i start emailing every android related company that i know of? Should i start listing my profile on recruitment sites like linkedin or internshala? This year it is being said that companies will come for placements. From the status of my college, they are going to give me way to less $ , nd i know am not going to like any of them, but i guess i have to sit for them too.
2.INTERVIEW OR DIRECT PLACEMENTS? A little pre-context: i am currently starting my 4th year in clg. Afaik , 4th year isnt that strict and their can be leniency in terms of attendance. But my college is a place full of political cun*s in the name of directors and HODs and I don't know if they are again going to enforce the old 75% mandatory criteria. Plus if the company is from a different state/country , then my attendance would definitely not suffice.
So mainly i am unsure if somehow a company hires me, i would be able to start immediately. I heard that there are interviews for job recruitment after which the candidate is binded with an agreement to do some months training followed by permanent working after college completion.
This type of agreement is very much suitable for me, since from what my friend tells me, trainings can be lenient and understanding regarding exam preparations nd stuff.
So what do company usually chooses? Binding a fresher on immediate working basis or do they consider graduate completion?
Also, i suck at competitive coding. Do i need to polish myself on that or some company is willing to give me chance on the basis of my other skills 🙈(okay, no kidding , that's a serious question. I need to either work on getting better in competitive or build more apps based on that)
3.) ANDROID OR EVERYTHING? From what i have heard, working as a professional fresher is more like being an allrounder than being a domain specialist. But as i already stated, i really dig android and that's no small framework. I may di other stuff too, but won't interest me nd my output might be less efficient than expected.
So freshers can really be asked to do any stuff? Or can i still be in the area i like being into?
4.) COMPANY OR START-UP? Yeah, this is a general debate starter. Ignoring the business side of the conversation ( job safety vs more salary, experience, etc) the thing that's most important for me is the presence of a team. I want someone to assign me a task, whose vision i could follow, from whom i could learn, and some other people who are supportive and doing the same amount / similar work that am doing . This is so much import8 for me that i can easily ignore other factors for a better team. I once took a call from a startup ceo who hired me, a 2 month old android beginner at that time, as the "lead android developer"
But if am being on a team where i am supposed to do any random stuff that is assigned, then obviously this whole point of "visionary, helpful leader, guiding team, "etc goes moot9 -
Can someone explain the future of PHP? (Serious question). I was under the impression learning php is mainly for the current job market. Otherwise the future is nodeJS, ruby, python etc.
I’m asking because I see a lot of leading development and courses on laravel for modern development and I’m wondering how relevant it is to the future.1 -
Question!
Where do you guys get your daily news about Tech, IT, Dev Related things?
I want something with push notifications and just serious sources without bullshit infos.9 -
i have this js object containing an array with about 7000 values. firefox, chrome and even ie11 need about 1.5 to 2 seconds to process it.
but edge takes 10 times longer! does anybody know about this behaviour? i could not find anything.
so, serious question. i just find results for ie being slow but THIS time it does its work properly. console shows no errors. is there information about edge-specific issues with javascript?9
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