Hey everyone,

For about the last 24 hours, there was unfortunately an issue with the algo feed where scrolling did not show more rants. This has now been fixed.

One of our background queues stopped processing for some reason which caused rants to not properly get marked as read for algo.

If you notice any other issues with this, please let me know. Thanks!

Not only in my work, but in my life.

My biggest inspiration is the popcorn seller that patiently stays outside the subway exit, standing, every fucking day, from 4-5pm until 0-2am.

He stays until after the subway closes, and only leaves after everyone waiting for their Uber or their ride do.

In the rainiest day of the year, he was there.
In the coldest day of the year, he was there.
In the worst crisis of our country in the last decades, the region became temporarily infested by bandits and beggars. Sometimes I had to work overtime until 11:30pm and I had to be very cautious with all the robbers in the empty dark street. But guess who was there, sometimes calmly saying "get out, go work" to the bad elements bothering him?

I find it reallybfunny and refreshing when everyone is inside waiting for the rain to settle down, while he is standing in the middle of it. Or when I'm coming home really late, and he is still out there freezing cold.
There is no excuse for not doing your best. Life sucks sometimes, but there are no excuses. Just work hard, and laugh at the bad times.
Every time I saw him there, I thought "my day was hard, but I could've worked even harder". At the same time he made me feel better for having a better job, he inspired me not to bitch about any little things.

Then you might ask: "isn't he dumb to stay until 2am even though he is probably not getting any costumers after 11pm?" or "how can someone so unsuccessful be so inspiring?"

Well, I don't know. He just is.
Do almighty, genious people like Steve Jobs inspire me at work? Of course. More than this man? Certainly not.

on the first day, He said, "Let there be C." and there was C. on the second day, he added some more so there became C++

I actually had the strangest nightmare last night.

So I was working on a program for someone and lots of things went wrong. First of all, the semicolon button wasn't working, so I panicked and grabbed another keyboard but there was no semicolon button.

I had to copy and paste the semicolon instead. Next, there was a bug, and I couldn't figure out what caused it, so I went on stack overflow... Guess what? Stack overflow was shutdown. Unable to fix the error, I somehow caused more.

I decided to take a break and leave, but upon my return, I forgot what the program did. It was as if someone else had written it. I was simply ignorant enough to forget the comments.

After a hellish day of working on it, the person who wanted me to create the program decided to test it out. They tested it on an old version of IE.

Strangest nightmare I had this week.

There once approached me a client, with a request to be done. Here is a recap, with emphasis on time limits.

C: Ok, so we need this and this thing to be done that and that way...
*short talk about technical side of the project, unimportant to the rant*
C: Can it be done by 25th, this month? (It was 4th of the month)
M: No way, it'll take at least a week more, so realistically I'd say around 7th next month.
C (Had no option but to agree on the date)
*we arrange the price as well (was not a bad one at all)*

So I started working on the thing and one night, about a week or so in, I probably had a cup of tea too much, I suddenly have a breakthrough. I sat behind a computer from 22:00 till 17:00 next day, nonstop. I didn't even eat anything in the meantime. The project was far from done, but I did quite a lot of work. Anyhow, when I have completed the project, not only was I not over the deadline, it was 22nd of the month, so even before the wanted time! When I contacted the client and told him that I am done, he was ... let's just say very happy. The deployment went fine, but when I checked my bank account, for the payment, there was a surprise waiting for me. The number was 25% more than what we have arranged! Me, believing that it was a mistake, immediately messaged him about it and he responded:

No, this is just a small gift for you, because you finished that quickly.

(and not to forget, I have coded things for way less than those 25% and was completely fine with the price, so it was not a small amount)

Now there was this meeting where our boss called our team to reach at exactly 8:00 . One minute more and you will be fired.
Turns out he himself reached at 8:15 for the meet. And we were just staring him, wanting to say, "Hey boss, you don't need to come anymore. YOU ARE FIRED."

Perhaps not "best", but certainly most amusing, so what the heck!

Years ago as an intern, I applied to a large pharmaceutical company. On part of the application form, you had to enter the code of the department you were applying to.

What I *should have* put down was "IT", which is the department that houses all their devs. However, I didn't actually read any of what the codes meant, assumed that was the department for helping people with how to mail merge, and put down "COMPSCI" instead. This was computational sciences - loosely summarised as computational data analysis on various druggable molecules.

I do *not* have any sort of biology or chemistry background, so the interview was rather... interesting, and I muddled through on the basis of getting some more interview practice assuming it was a no go.

To my amazement, got a phone call saying that they'd been thinking they wanted someone more technical on the team, and despite my lack of scientific experience they thought I'd be a good fit. I was unsure as to whether I should accept for a while, but then decided to just go for it - and had a fantastic internship there, working on a great variety of stuff, and learning tons all under a supervisor who I'm still in touch with to this day.

tl;dr - Applied for the wrong job. Coincidentally got it anyway, and miraculously had a fantastic year working there.

To all young freelancers in low-income countries: I want to share my experience, of 6 years working for a piss-poor country, and 6 years working in freelance, and then emigrating. Here's what you should watch out for, and what to expect:

My first salary was barely 1.5$ per hour. I lived in a piss-poor country that taught me a lot (like why it's piss-poor).
The main thing to note when you're a developer in such a country, is that you're being fucked. Your employer might scream at you and tell you how bad you are, while barely paying you. That is you ... being ... fucked. Gain some confidence with the help of friends and family, and a great effort from yourself, look at what freelance gigs you can find, and ditch anything related to jobs in your country.

Being a somewhat able developer, but with modest experience, I started my freelance gigs for 5$ per hour. Because I was lazy, and freelance gigs weren't exactly being thrown at me, I was making 100$ per week, AFTER the companies I worked for appreciated what I did and offered themselves to up my pay to 12$ per hour. Yep. I was lazy. You will likely get lazy in freelance too, so be prepared for this.

My luck changed when one of my clients became a full-time employer, at 15$ per hour, with a well organized team where I actually worked for 40 hours per week (I had already amassed 8 years of experience...). For people in first world countries that will seem laughable, but in my country I was king of the hill, getting paid more than government CEOs that ended up in the news as the "most well paid".

That was the top of the pyramid for international indie freelance, as I would later find out.
I didn't do stuff that was very difficult. In fact, I felt like my abilities were rotting while I worked there. I had to change something. So I started looking for better offers. I contacted many companies that were looking for a senior developer, and the interviews went well, and all was fine, except for my salary demands. I was asking for 25$ per hour. Nobody was willing to pay more than 15$ per hour. That's because of my competition - tons of developers in cheap-to-live countries that had the same, or more to offer, for the same rates. Globalization.

So I moved to Germany. As soon as I was legally able to work, I was hunted down by everybody. I was told that it takes a month to pass the whole hiring process in Germany. My experience demonstrated that 2-5 days is enough to get a signed contract with "Please start ASAP".
There is freelance in Germany as well. And in the US. And everywhere else. A "special" kind of freelance, where you have to reside locally. The rates that this freelance goes for is much, much higher than international freelance. I'd say that 100€ per hour is ok-ish. Some people (newbies, or foreigners who don't speak the language well) get less, around 60 or so. Smart experienced locals get around 150-200 or even more.

It's all there. Companies want good developers to solve their business problems with IT solutions, and they'll beg you to take their money if you can deliver that.

So code!
Learn!
Accummulate experience!
Screw the scumbags that screw you for 1-2$ per hour!
Anyone able to write something more than "Hello World!" deserves more.

Do the climb! There's literally room for everybody up there! There is so much to do, that I feel like there will never be too many developers.

Thank you for bearing with my long story. I hope it will help you make it shorter and more pleasant for you.

Real and true story of me.
Friend : what was his first pickup lines that melt you ?
Me : nah, he was straight to the point
F : come on, you both always look romantic all the time. there must be something in the beginning. tell me more !
Friend : fine, he said "I Like you, can i i SSH you ?" so i replied "I'm not that complicated, sudo hug me"
F: i regret being your friend.

Story time!

So me, alcoholic I am, went to a local cafe because I didn't have enough booze anymore at home. Turns out that there were quite some people that wanted to get to know me!

And most importantly, there was another sysadmin (that likely saw through my funsies with some people there that I displayed termux' apt update and apt upgrade to as "evil hacking" 😜) that actually wasn't a bluff - he pretty much interviewed me on the spot and was apparently pretty impressed by my skillset. And so am I by his - he asked some pretty techy questions that only a fellow technologist could come up with. In a local cafe of all places!!! Who would've thought?!

I'll probably be going to that cafe some more 😋

After months of tedious research, I finally feel like I understand machine learning.

All of my programmer buddies are in envy, but I keep trying to explain that what I finally get is that it's not as hard as it's presented to be.

I feel like a lot of the terminology in machine learning is really pretentious and unnecessary, and just keeps new people from the field.

For example: I could say: "Yeah, I'm training a classification model with two input neurons, a hidden activation layer, and an output neuron", and you might think I was hot shit. But that just gets translated into "I'm putting in two inputs, sorting them, and outputting one thing".

I feel like if there was a plain language guide to machine learning, the field would be a lot more attractive to a lot more people. I know that's why it was hard for me to get in. Maybe I'll write one.

So at the beginning there was assembly.

But people wanted something more highlevel, so C was born.

But writing big projects was a pain so C++ was invented.

But then the web started to become more popular and C++ wasn‘t really good at that, so Rasmus Lerdorf created PHP.

And then everything moved to the client and should be loaded dynamically for better UX, so everyone writes JS.

But JS doesn‘t have a good performance, so people created web assembly compiled from C...

Am i the only one who sees the irony in this?

Being one of the top devs (and a good student admired by most lecturers) at college, my most humbling experience was when I joined my first job. I thought I knew SQL, I thought I knew C#. I realized in the first week, the thing I didn't know was "I don't know jack".
Thanks to a couple of great mentors (it took a few of them to bring me up to speed :P), I learned that the more I learn something, the more I will realize how much more there is to learn. I used tools to create storyboard animations in WPF, and my mentor would write it all in XAML! I'd write messy SQL and the other mentor just reduces it to a couple of elegant lines. They were like tech gods to my college self, all while being humble and friendly.
They also imbibed in me a sense of responsibility to carry on the culture of mentoring my juniors, which taught me much more than just the technical side of our profession.

So i've been put in charge of bringing the devs together to form a small dev team, instead of having 3 separate devs (including me) sitting apart on separate projects. The idea was to have us talk more, work together more, learn more about the other projects, reuse more code etc.

(I've been arguing to let us do this for a while)

So I asked my manager could we move to the 4 desks in the corner, so we can have our own space, talk without having to book a meeting room each time etc. Its also a bit quieter over there and we all really need that in our noisy office.

Manager sent me an IM today while I was working from home to tell me we can have the desks. Was super happy, messaged the devs to tell them they can start moving.

Just got a message from one of them to say our manager has started moving his stuff over too. Seems he agreed with me that it is quieter over there and he doesn't like the noise either ... so he's joining us.

A huge part of the move was us wanting to work on side projects to automate and speed up various things in the team, that he has been against. We know we can make huge improvements but he doesn't see it. He's only interested in Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

So now we have our space, and anytime we try to work on something we are actually interested in, we'll have a little voice in the corner to pop up and point out what other things he deems more important and tell us to stop wasting our time.

Pretty fucking annoyed to be so happy and then get shot down like that. Happy weekend everyone!!

Publishing fees:

Android - 25$ once (fixed*)
Microsoft Store - 19$ once¹
Steam Game - 100$ / game²
itch.io - free²
Unreal - free⁴
Unity - free⁵

And then there is Apple...
Apple - 99$ / year

¹ (99$ for enterprise)
² (legacy was 100$ once for charity)
³ (30% of profit for them)
⁴ (5% if more profit than 12.000$/year)
⁵ (until more profit than $100.000/year)

This is my first post on devRant!
Story time:
It was on my first job as a developer, learning a lot but getting paid less than 50% of the minimum monthly wage of my country.
It was settled in the interview that as I gained more experience, I could handle more projects and earn more money.
At the time, I was living with my parents and didn't have to pay rent and some stuff, so I was like "Well, I'm gonna learn a lot and, if I put a lot of effort into it, soon I'll be making more money".
We agreed that I'll only develop, but 4 months into the job, I was already going to clients
and started coding there (having the client on my back every minute, not being able to work properly) and fixing some computer/network issues they had,
because my boss said I should do it.
Things at home started to go south, and suddenly I needed more money, so I kept doing the work and getting paid a little bit more
A year goes by, devs came and go beacuse of the work/payment situation, and I was still there.
From my first "paycheck" to the last day I never got paid on time, and that was the same for everybody else
The last month I was there, I had a job offer with a better salary and weekends free, so I wanted to take it (I worked saturdays there).
We were working at our biggest clients place at the time (a hospital, working in the server room, desk and chair were a total crap),
so I wanted to have a good conversation with my boss and tell him whats up, after all, I was really grateful for the job despite all things.
We headed outside and started talking. He basically begged me to stay, said that he will pay me on time and offered me more money (less than the other company was offering me),
and that he needed me to finish the implementation and "minor issues" with the app.
I thought about it for a couple of days, and decided to stay. I politely rejected the job offer, and even recommended someone else.
As the days passed, regret was building fast inside of me, until the day that I was supposed to get paid.
He never showed up to the client, told me in a call that he will be there sometime in the morning, that he had the money for me.
So I stayed until my day ended, and still no sign of him. I had no money on me, needed some for gas so I could go, and I called him 5 times.
He picked up the last time, talks to me like nothing is happening and I started to shout at him like I never shouted to anybody before,
got all the things of my chest, and when I was done, he said that he will send the money to my account right away.
This happened on a Saturday, so I quit the following Monday, and lost the other job offer.

My teacher at school who taught me programming. We were taught Java.

You see, Java is not a beginner's language, most say. But the way she taught it, the examples, the analogy, the explanation; she made it so easy.

She made us execute our first Hello World program (using BlueJ) and proudly said, "you're all programmers now!", that was when fascination took me over. I remember​ that moment till today.

Also, unlike regular exams, the programming exams required extreme competency. Marks were split up for algorithm and syntax. There were also questions like find the error in this algorithm for this output. She would always surprise us at the exams!

I had several glorious moments in class by being the first to answer most of her questions. At 13, it was kind of a big deal for me.
(Okay, who am I kidding, it still is :-P)

*sigh*

It was mostly just self learning from there. I switched schools and then there was college. Attending classes in college was like going to the gym with fat trainers. Utterly useless :-/ It just made me appreciate her even more.

There was a time when the programming gods starting creating IDEs for their languages. And all obeyed that whenever the dev presses enter on an intellisense menu , the grace of the programming gods would help the dev. But VB rebelled. It was too much for him to spoon feed the dev, so he said to himself "NO MORE SHALL THEY PRESS ENTER AND HAVE THE GODS MAKE MAGICAL TEXT APPEAR! NO NO, TAB IT WILL BE, AND I'LL WATCH THEM BURN WHENEVER THEY TRY TO USE INTELLISENSE ON ME". And since then, VB has seen frustrations of devs beyond count.

Hey @dfox and @trogus, was wondering, are there any plans for items higher than 20K upvotes? I'm at more than 120K now and I'd like a new item and also maybe something to work towards :)

Also, I'm just asking/wondering, I know what a busy life is. This is nothing more than a question, not demanding anything! (I'm deffo not in the position to demand anything)

Thanks!

A long time ago on a project far far away, I didn't realize there was a src folder, and made my changes in the build folder instead... And to makes matters worse, I asked a co-worker -- an ex-Googler -- for help with the issue I was working on.

Rarely have I been more embarrassed.

Any code I make for clients is under a strict license unless specified otherwise. It's a straight forward license pretty much stating that they can't sell it or claim it as their own. I've had a few clients break that license but one stood out. I had made a piece of software that cost her over $2,500 due to the amount of hours that went into it. The transaction went along smoothly so there was nothing to be alarmed about. She came back for more work about 6 months later and I decided to do some checking up on her to see how her business was going. Immediately smack bang on the home page was my software being sold for $30/month. Needless to say I was outraged. She said there was no talk of a license which I responded with pulling out the contract that she signed where it explained that signing the contract meant she was in agreement with the specified license. 2 months after this started, I'm being awarded any profits made from said software along with her closing down the website. As much of a bitch as she was, it wasn't worth my time trying to get more out of her.

My first dev job was a paid internship at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. But I wasn't in the computing division with the supercomputer and the 30-foot 18-screen wall display. In a way, I was doing something more exciting. I was in the Hollifield Radioactive Ion Beam Facility.

That meant that I was working next to a radioactive ray gun that they fired at different targets to try and make new kinds of particles. To refine the beam components, there was a tower with the world's highest voltage Van de Graf generator at 25,000 kilovolts. I got training on how to put on a radiation suit, and was told that if I got locked in the wrong room and red lights began to flash, I had about five seconds to run to the far wall and push the E-stop, before I got irradiated and died slowly over the next five weeks.

But, I was reassured, that never happened. Radiation leaks are rare too (that's why we wore dosimeters). More likely, there would be a leak in the generator tower. To explain why that's bad, that tower wasn't filled with normal air. 25,000 kilovolts would punch through that like nothing, arc against the walls, and we'd lose the electric charge. No, instead, the tower was filled to a few atmospheres of pressure with sulfur hexafluoride gas. You know how helium makes your voice go up? This stuff makes your voice go down. It's heavier than air, and it kills you by displacing and starving your lungs of oxygen.

So, while I was happily coding away on PHP, CSS and the Bash shell, making a log book for all the ion gun settings and targets the scientists used in their experiments, I was keeping an ear out for the oxygen alarm. I had a blast!

I was 11 or 12 years old, my dad had this policy that only *nix machines are allowed in our home, so I was rocking a Ubuntu pc at that time. I was messing around with it and tweaking some things here and there, but wanted to learn more. My dad showed me how to open python on the command line and gave me some simple tasks to do. Been hooked ever since.

PS. Still going by the same policy, even though I live on my own.

I was a midweight dev acting as a lead dev on the frontend development of a project. I had already built most of it, it was all vanilla JavaScript, had no jQuery, the code was simple, fast, and small. Then I went on holiday and the company put a senior lead on the project to carry out remaining work while I was away.

When I came back, there was a bug in the age gate page and I started to investigate. I then noticed that the asshole added jQuery to the code just to select the country and date of birth input fields. That idiot, a senior lead dev earning more than twice what I earned, didn’t know how to select some elements on a page! I nearly lost my temper when I saw the added bloat.

A recent project actually taught me how HORRIBLY STUPID it is to store large bodies of text in a SQL Server database. There were millions of records with pages of compressed text each.

More and more text records pile on every single day. Needless to say it was becoming super slow and backups were taking WAY too long.

After refactoring them out as compressed files to disk storage (I love you, micro-services) and dropping them completely from the database, the backup size went from 90gb to 3gb!

It's not every day you get to see a dramatic result like that from a refactor.

Lesson learned, and yes it was quite cool.

My wife: Oh, hacking is so cool. Can you show me?
Me: Sure. So there I needed to upload the php file, while my netcat was sitting here in the terminal waiting for incoming...
My wife: Boring, BORING.
Me: ....

(At least my 5yr son appreciates the terminal more than she: typing 'sl' or watching star wars in ASCII art.)

You know the feeling when you deliver exactly what the requirement was and there were no more iterations and changes to those requirements after that??

No..?? Me neither..

Today I've been mocked by a fucking coffee machine.

So I was at a small train station, everything was already closed except for a small coffee machine

Dumb I, for whatever fucking reason, decided it'd be a great idea to get a highly overpriced cup there.

Now, the fucker made me the drink but instead of giving change, it started "shooting" coins in my direction (there was no flap on change box)

As I'm picking up my change, this abomination of a machine performs a cleanup, spitting some shit into my drink

I couldnt drink it obviously .. threw the overprices drink away, bought another one... Got shot with coins again... Whata pain... Just to figure out... There's no more cups 😭😭

It made the drink into the tray...

AaaAaAAAaaaaAAA

Fml

So today, i taught my professor something, and he was genuinely curious. I also told him about my part time job building websites. He is a really cool guy and wasn't a dick about a student knowing something more than himself. There should be more professors like him.
What a wonderful world we live in!

So, I'm using a new MacBook Air (running Sierra), and while I'm still getting used to it (especially the different Sublime hotkeys), overall it really is quite wonderful. I particularly love the magic touchpad and ease of scrolling/swiping between desktops.

However, I ran into an issue this morning that gave me pause: apparent file caching.

My webpack setup auto-compiles my project when files change, and I noticed something was causing errors -- not really surprising since I was in the middle of fixing the project last night. However, the error it displayed wasn't something I was expecting, and referenced a line I was positive I had removed several hours before calling it a night. Whatever, I was probably mistaken, so I went to remove it.

... It wasn't there.

I double checked that I was looking at the right file. Yep, src/styles/header.scss -- that's the correct file. Figuring webpack was acting up, I killed and restarted it.

Same error.

So whatever, maybe Sublime cached it. Rather unexpected, but possible, and I am on a mac now... so maybe. So, I closed the file and reopened it. The line wasn't there. I did this twice more. It STILL wasn't there. Maybe I'm going crazy...? I checked the file with cat. The line was there. I checked with vim. The line was still there.

OKAY. I've seen a lot of people with beef with Sublime, and I often defended it. but maybe they're actually right. maybe Sublime really isn't the way to go. :( So, I killed and reopened Sublime, and I checked the file again.

The line STILL ISN'T THERE.

Maybe I'm going crazy? I double, triple, quadruple checked the path. all correct.
Alright; let's try again and make sure I do it properly. I closed everything I had open in sublime (two projects), and quit. I reopened Sublime, navigated to the correct path, and reopened the file...

The offending line STILL wasn't there.

I'm angry at this point and just mash the keyboard. I save the resulting garbage, and cat the file again. No visible changes.

KAJSFLK STUPID PIECE OF <redacted>

okay, whatever. Reboots fix everything, right? So I reboot, and keep the option to re-open everything again ticked.

The terminal comes back up, along with half(?) my browsers, but Sublime doesn't. grrrrrrr.

so I cat the damn thing.

GUESS WHAT.
THE GARBAGE IS THERE.

Sublime was doing its job. BUT EVERYTHING ELSE FAILED.

(Oh Sublime, why did I ever question you? 💚)

... but seriously, what the fuck could have caused that? Was the OS caching the file for some programs, but not others? Now I'm questioning the macbook...

Was it it with clients and wanting to restrict the height of webpages?

Client: Can you make it all fit on the screen?

Me: What this particular screen?

Client: Well all screens, some people might not realise there is more content.

Me: What if the screen is tiny?

Client: make it smaller

Me: What if you add more content to it?

Client: Hmm, your the developer.

Me: Teeny tiny text coming right up.

There was maybe one of the coolest methods of apply for a job. There was a company in Sydney on linkedin on the apply href for the job was pointing to localhost (might of been a accident) so you had to find their website and with the trailing url get to the page then they said to send OPTIONS request to a endpoint here you got a link to a api doc to where you send a POST to apply for a job they had a example body to use. So sending the Post request with with postman required headers so looking more into the doc it gave the headers needed. Now the example body for the post had some errors in it and once they are fixed you can then submit the request.

NOW thats the way to find competent developers shame I'm not one of the.

Recently, one of our passwords was accidently published on a public page for a few minutes before it was noticed and removed. Unfortunately, this password opens nearly every locked account so it's a pretty big deal.

Management was informed of this mistake and told that we should change the passwords as well as implement a few other protocols to make sure this doesn't happen again including things like unique passwords, more secure passwords, using a password manager, etc.

Their response? It wasn't online long, probably no one saw it. There will be no changes in how we handle ours or our clients' secure passwords.

I started color-coding my bash scripts to more easily see when things start and end.
At first it was just some headers here and there, but now my terminal looks like it's shitting rainbows all over the place.

It's so pretty :3

Most successful project... What is success?

My first computer at 8 years old was a Commodore64. There was no internet yet, so I used the manual to learn about BASIC and assembly, sound and sprite registers, and created a pretty elaborate RPG. Mostly text, some sprite art, soldered some eeprom cartridges, optimized the code. Spent almost a year on it. An enthousiast magazine picked up on it, revised, QA'ed & published the game, sold a little over 10k samples. I got ƒ0.25 per sale, and I was completely overwhelmed how much candy one could buy for ƒ2500 ($2k corrected for inflation).

More recent:
I was employee #3 at my current company, started when it was worth nothing and the website redirected to a set of Google Forms containing all the logic. I wrote a large part of the first, monolithic backend.

Now there's teams in a dozen countries, and an estimated revenue of a quarter billion.

So obviously my current "project" is more successful.

Still, my current job sucks, the company turned into a desolate passion-free wasteland full of soulless fake hipster zombies and managers who seem to derive sexual pleasure from holding extremely ineffective meetings, endlessly rubbing their calendars together in their bureaucratic orgy of ineptitude.

So, I'm more proud of my C64 game.

Oldschool CSS was not much fun, but I never understood how this made it any better:

<div><div><div><div><div><div>Bootstrap</div></div></div></div></div></div>

I always forgot a row, had cols inside of cols, forgot how form-groups worked, or found other ways of messing up the whole layout.

Instead of complex CSS, there was now this new complex language entirely expressed through the nesting of layers upon layers of divs. It was like LISP's brackets, but more verbose.

That was the moment I realized that fullstack is bullshit, that there are intrinsic talent differences between frontend and backend devs, and that it's OK to focus on a narrower but deeper field.

!rant
So the other day, my mother came to visit me after a while of not seeing each other. And one thing we used to do together was go searching through old weird junk stores. We go searching through one, and there was a box of floppy discs. I was excited, because I haven't seen one since I was a little kid. I brought it to her attention, and she said, "Wow. A floppy disc!" I laughed and read the disc aloud, "Oh man. Only 1MB." Then proceeded to laugh even more. And she said "I remember thinking 'theres no way anyone would ever take up that much space!'"
That just absolutely blows my mind haha.

Some years back (Window XP time)..
There used to be desktops mostly.

I was opening the CPU casing to clean the boards and my mother came near to me and saw lots of dusts inside. She realized something and told this : " You don't often clean these dusts and that's why your computer is getting more viruses."

I recently left a company where we had 2 hour long standups. I was so tired of them because half the time was deprioritizing what we prioritized yesterday. Everyday there was something more urgent coming up. It was a startup with 6 engineers. Sometimes the conversations were just random stuff that could easily take 45 minutes.

Now it feels so nice doing 15 minutes standups and then having the time to do the actual work.

I got my first programming job half a year ago, the lead developer there is really fucked up... he is old fashioned and stubborn as hell. He developed a platform that is a mess, his comment: “it works”... but now I have to fix it... I argued with my boss and convinced him to put more time in making it more scalable and feature proof. But the lead developer back then... he didn’t agree it seems like he want to do everything as quickly as possible... now half a year later he stopped working for us and I’m the lead developer now.

And I’m discovering more and more bad decisions... HOWWWW

WHAT DID THIS GUY DO???

At one time I was arguing with him and he backfired a comment: “I’m doing it like this for 10 years”... so I guess that’s the problem... he didn’t put effort in keeping up with the latest developments...

There is literally no structure in his work, every file is different... HOW DO I FIX THIS IN A NICE WAY??? I’m thinking to just start over again...

Today I was talking about merge conflicts with a group of devs. One of them asked if any of us had ever rushed to merge a PR before another dev could merge their PR, knowing there were going to be conflicts. Some were more ashamed to admit it than others, but in the end everyone was guilty of doing it at least once :)

Anyone ever do that to avoid being the one who has to resolve a conflict?

Dev: Ok refactor this following block of code to make it more readable/maintainable while still ensuring the tests pass

*** Block is an absolute mess of nested ternaries, poorly named functions, single letter variables and outdated comments. An underhand pitch if there ever was one ***

Interview Candidate: Why would you refactor code if the tests are already passing?

Dev: …… NEXT.

Birthday rant !dev
>Be me. Buy 20 doughnuts for everyone in company, two more than there are people working in the office, just to be safe.
>Be one of 5 other people that came to work today. Everyone else either are sick, are working remotely or went on a delegation.
>Watch as 14 doughnuts slowly decay in the kitchen.
Well... At least I've got my package from devRant. Thanks for quick shipping! I only got it today because there was tracking. Fucking post in Poland is shit, they "tried to deliver it yesterday but there weren't anyone at home" even though I was and I haven't even got notice in the mailbox.

Never ever open a computer while breathing...
I got a ticket to fix a computer from the production line that was turning itself off...
When I opened it, a dark dust from hell came right into my lungs... There were more dust in there than I've ever seen in my entire life... Combined...

I'm still sneezing 3 hours later, and a few black spots keep coming out with everything else...

1. There is nothing in this field that is impossible or out of reach for someone with the correct dedication and perseverance. Even if you suck at a particular topic, I highly believe that you can make sense of it through computer science, be it math, biology physics, finances etc. The field opens the doors to other subjects. This is true for everything else, but I seriously believe that Comp Sci makes it more reachable.

2. You cannot make development a quirky personality trait. There is more to life than just sitting around all day fucking with a computer, but at the same time that is how you hone your skills, find balance!

3. Being attractive and or charismatic in this field pays a lot, but also makes you a target.

4. I have never met more people in my life I wanted to punch to a pulp, and I worked in retail and was in the military....that says a lot.

5. Penises, there are way too many penises in this field. I hate being surrounded by dudes and since I grew up in a nail/hair salon I am more used/enjoy female company more.

6. Stuxnet se la come.

We are a small size product based company. There was a change in management a year back and the new management decided to fire the entire engineering team one by one. I was hired as full time back-end developer (C++). Just after I joined they removed the last 2 engineers from the previous regime and handed over devops and Python API development to me as well.
There was no documentation for the main product which was a sophisticated piece of software. There were no comments in the code as well. I had to go through line by line (roughly 100,000 lines of code).
Then they decide to hire more devs.Turned out to be false hope. They hired interns who had no programming knowledge.
Now they got two clients who are interested in using the service. They lured them using empty promises. The product is not stable. The cloud infrastructure is not at all ready. The APIs are a mess. I don't know which one to work on.
Worst part is that there is no other technical person in the office.

I'm thinking about quitting now. I don't know why I haven't already.😖😖

I just learned that linux shouldn't be called linux but GNU (or GNU/Linux)

I am a student and currently learning programming but also I looked into history and saw this interesting fact.

Basically, there was a guy who wanted to make operating system similar to unix but free to use and distribute. He called it GNU. After few years, it was getting finished but it was missing few parts. One of those parts was kernel. So people glued together this low level kernel called Linux, mid level GNU and some other stuff on top of it. It was first known as GNU/Linux and slowly GNU was kicked out of the name even though 'Linux' - the whole OS constisted more of GNU than Linux kernel.

Doesn't this seem like injustice? Am I wrong somewhere?

WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU ???

Galaxy S8 5.8" Quad HD+ Super AMOLED (2960x1440) 
570 ppi

Galaxy S8+ 6.2" Quad HD+ Super AMOLED (2960x1440) 
529 ppi

oh my fucking god, what kind of retard decided this ?

This resolution is waaaaay too much. It impacts performance and battery life a fuck ton and gives you absolutely nothing in return. I would be cordially surprised if there was someone in the world who could see more than 400 ppi. 300 is more than enough for most of the people.
God these fucks are annoying with their retarded marketing. And even more so, the people who buy these phones, because phone manufacturers can and will continue doing so.
Flagship my ass.

I just went to another local more expensive cafe (or bar or night club for those who are more pedantic than drunk - or sober for that matter - me). Mainly with the idea of getting a girl that I've caught my eye on home. Which of course miserably failed.

At least I've got her Facebook account. Maybe I'll be able to impress her with my about 600 followers there.. not that that really matters, but it's a number, right.

And I've asked to the bartender there for some dihydrogen monoxide (let that sink in for a minute.. 2 hydrogens, one oxide). The guy didn't know what I was asking for, and didn't quite appreciate it. If only he knew...

I bet he'd be one of those people who'd call the local radio station over the dangerous dihydrogen monoxide that's poisoning the water system 🙃

There was an error in one of my Java file. Impossible to find it. I commented all the code and the error remain. I commented the import of that class and no more error. How the f**** is possible that a empty class give an error ?
I opened the file in another text editor and found out that the last character was a symbol that wasn't recognize or display in other text editor.
I was really proud (and confused)

One of the first things I learned while screwing around in Linux for the first time was the calendar in the terminal. I never thought I'd have an actual use for cal, and it just sat in the back of my mind for a year.

Then, two weeks ago, I needed to find the date for a saturday in December, because I thought it was the seventh. My duck was like "Hey, your terminal is right there, why not use that cal function instead of looking for your calendar?" And I was like "Dude, that's genius!"
I have since done it thrice more for various reasons, and it has saved me like four minutes in total. I love all the little things like this in Linux (I'm pretty sure Windows and obviously MacOS do the same thing with practically the same command, but shut up and let me enjoy myself (and it just feels more accessable in Linux because I use the terminal so much more often))

So yeah
Stuff

God I need something to do...
Wait! I have several things to do! The first one will be making a list of all my projects.
Or spending another two hours on devRant.

I once worked with an obsessive tester who was bent on ‘testing’ the README file of a Software Distribution.

The README text file was in the distribution zip, so she had to unzip the thing before reading the file, however she insisted that her test result was a failure because there was no README that shows her how to unzip the distro to read the README!

I thought she was joking, but she was dead serious and escalated the ‘issue’ to the manager! I was furious, almost resigned from the project

In the end I had to suck it up and tolerated more weeks of her mindless obsession!

Spent an hour and a half renaming a method everywhere in a project from `feature_name` to `feature_name!`. There are a lot of constants, symbols, and other methods that use "feature_name" as a prefix (plus comments and spec descriptions), so was a little more difficult than normal.

Should have taken like 5 minutes with a proper IDE refactor tool. but noo, it was too difficult for RubyMine. wah wah wah. Stupid thing. Not even the search tool was useful -- it's limited to 100 results, and there were around 250 for that substring.

I ended up having to run specs repeatedly to find all the remaining instances, which took freaking forever. blahhh

Hmm. when you prove to be more knowledgable than the programmer that was pulled in, to interview you and he starts to go totally defensive and return spiteful responses
( like, what does a rookie like you know? i bet you never had an actual job )
when you calmly asks if any standard like PSR-2 is expected, if there are any preferred frameworks and what version control is used...

well, that went well..
Didn't get that internship..

devRant already replace SoundCloud as my orange app in the main screen...

To be fair, SoundCloud was just there to complete the rainbow.

Rant: this app told me that my rant would be safe if I closed the Post Rant window (since I can't post more than one rant per hour or something) but it didn't save my awesome tags! I feel betrayed.

Oh boi.

Once she asked me "Why don't we just upgrade the HTML version?" as in "upgrade our system".

There were more such gems from her, but I think this one was the ultimate.

Background Info: We make emails and to support as much clients as possible you gotta go with the real oldschool html 4.1.😒

4 Weeks ago i went to a Electronics store here in germany. My Intention was to look at some smaller laptios (12-14 zoll) to use while im traveling to my work. While i was looking at some Laptops i hear a conversation next to me between a customer and a guy working at the Electronic store.
He says to the customer That the Laptop has a 8 zoll Monitor pointing at the Laptops bottom. My First thought was wtf because i dont knwo any Laptop with an 8 Zoll screen but its still possible. After they done talking i walk to the Laptop and look at the Spot the guy was pointing at. There was a battery sign saying 8h battery duration. says no more :)

There has probably not been any situation when I would feel more stupid than now.
I just did a refresh of windows. It means quite a lot of work, as I need to do all the WSL related config and so on.
And I did it because I'm an extremely smart man and I didn't check that my primary screen was turned off.
I WONDER WHY I COULDN'T SEE SHIT

Lots of talk about sexual equality in the dev community. Personally I work in a small team, equal mix of male and female. I can honestly say there was no bias towards hiring as I was the one who hired them all, I employed the people I work with because they were the best candidates.
Questions to you all - have you experienced bias in hiring? Have you seen 'positive discrimination' (hired because someone was female - not because they were the best person).
In the U.K. the media is saying there's a huge shortage of females in the sciences, I like to think there's a positive push to get more women into science, but what's the reality? What's you're experiences?

@OmerFlame wanted to see more of Soviet pirate stuff, so there you go buddy. This is an example of Samizdat (“self-publishing”) — Soviet people made books of dissident literature that was forbidden in the Soviet Union.

This very book was made by my grandma, with lace fabric cover and sheets cut evenly with care and precision. Everything was typed on a typewriter, yes, the thing that renders the whole page useless with one mistype, as there is no backspace key.

This book dated 1975, the poetry of Nikolay Gumilyov.

There was a time, I couldn't find what made my webpage to appear blank. I stayed 3 more hours at the office to find the problem. Didn't find anything. The next day, I took a fresh look at my code, and guess what. A semicolon hidden in a JSON array.
Damn you semicolon ! I'll get you someday !

I just joined a team that is tasked with developing a robot that plays soccer. It was a lot of fun until I found out that someone in the team has been developing a full framework / rtos from scratch because existing rtos solutions were "not good enough".

I tried blinking a led with it today and found more bugs than I can count...

Oh, and there are no docs...

Got a job as a database manager, they wanted me to update their sql server and some of their .net apps. Turns out their sql server had no databases and all their data was stored in an ms access 2003 applications that was using windows for workgroups security!!! It also had no interface, hundreds of tables and queries and there were multiple access db it was connected to. To make things worse the person who built all this stuff used acronyms for everything he did, table names, variables, queries and even bloody window folders!!! It was hard as hell to figure out what anything ment. Oh and the .net apps were asp sites that heavily used dll for storing his code and no one knows where the original source code for them are. Did I also mention there were no comments for any of the code, no database dictionary, no notes or anything.

So apparently I'll be rebuilding everything from scratch and transferring over the data to sql server. AND NO MORE F**KING ACRONYMS!!!!!!!

It is so frustrating to be searching for a problem, find a possible answer on Stack Overflow, and click on it to find out that the only answer was some douche bag explaining to the poster how their question is irrelevant or explain how much more they know. Either answer the question or help them politely.

Case In Point:
Q:
"Is there a ____ library that does _____?

A:
"Why would you want to do that? There are far better ways."

Either provide the "ways" or shut up.

Just got my stickers today! Finally get to start my sticker collection on the back of my laptop! I showed a few people and they said "You spent $15 on stickers? You could have spent that on gas". But I like stickers more than going places, so there was no question about it for me (plus I had like $25 in change that I cashed out last night).

So, yeah. Got my stickers and I'm happy about them

At an auto parts store and was taking a look at the UI.

I FOUND A DINOSAUR!

More realistically I saw F20 as a shortcut key. How I know it wasn’t a typo? There was also F16. Wow. Even their keyboard stop at F12.

Talk about legacy program.

My old job was great. I was writing automation software for one of the world's biggest storage deployments, and there was always a new challenge. But over time, I was asked to lend a hand with the tedious task of corresponding with procurement vendors and on-site technicians. At first it was one site, then it was two, and then it was an entire region of the US, spread across two time zones I'm not in.

I hated that work, and I found that I didn't have time anymore for software development, because of the time commitment the logistics work was. I was never hired to do logistics work, I was never trained, never qualified, and as I said, I hated it. I agreed to it to temporarily help out a weakness due to a shortage in staffing. But it never got taken off my plate, except for a short stint toward the end, just before I was placed on a PIP, because surprise surprise-- I'm bad at logistics.

About halfway through the PIP, I told my boss I wasn't doing it anymore. I said he could either put me back on software development or let me go, if ticket-monkeying and phone calls is the direction the wind is blowing for our team. I told him I had no intention of resigning, as you are not eligible for unemployment or severance if you resign, so their choice was to let me go. I'm told by people who are still there that everybody on the team is a ticket-jockey button-pusher now. Bleh.

My wife and I sold our old condo in Kansas City earlier in the summer, so we had about a year's worth of cushion, which was why I was willing to be let go. I was profoundly unhappy in my work, and it was bleeding through to my relationship with my wife and kids. So I took advantage of the time between jobs by spending more time with my family and just generally becoming a happier person again.

Meanwhile, I was in no desperate hurry to find a new job, so I got on linkedin, and had no more than two irons in the fire at a time. After just over two months I got an offer for a better job than before, which I accepted. There wasn't anything remarkable about that process though-- it's just something I've gone through recently.

I started working for a company something around 1-2 months ago, they said because I don't have any experience with their stack, my salary will be lower than other team members. I said there is no problem and started my work. My first task was refactoring codes that their experienced programmers have wrote. My second task was extracting data layer from views. (They use Laravel and MVC architecture and they get data directly in views, not controllers). So, by end of the month when I talked with my boss I said I should get more money because I was better than your experienced programmers. He refused my request so I said I will not work with your team anymore :)
Anyway, never accept a job if you know you deserve more money than what they say will give you.

P.S: Sorry for my bad English. English is not my native language

There are many, but in in particular,
EA!!!
There could many reasons, overpriced games, micro-transactions...
All of them can be described as "just business"
But one stands out and makes it personal, the reason I wouldn't just shoot the game-designer but stab him and watch him drown in his own blood.
MASSEFFECT ANDROMEDA!!!!!
It felt like they took all the mistakes the third game made, and continued to add some more.
1. The PS4-Version had so many performance-issues, it was pretty much unplayable
2. Instead of a good story, interesting characters and fun battles, we got an open-world.
3. Facial animations and voice-acting from hell.

This is a good Experience -

I used to go to a class to learn C++(was a kid back then).

One of the sir there told me -
"Anybody can write code,just knowing coding is not enough,idea is more important.You should have good ideas and solutions,you can alaways find people to code for you"

This has stuck with me till this day.

There was an issue whilst you were away, we had to make a small css change.. We pushed it into master but it said something about the branch being behind the tip by 50 commits or something. It's okay, we forced it up though and force pushed it to production as well but the site went down.. In the end we had to ftp it up manually but the customer is saying things that were there before now aren't there any more?

I thought you put this "release process" in so things like this wouldn't happen! I think we need to review it as it clearly isn't working.

In case you are interested:

My new job is so damn awesome! I had pain in my jaw for weeks, I got a teething rail for the nights, but the pain was still there. Since I am on my new job it's totally gone. I am so much more relaxed and more productive now.

Life is good!

So my grandma just called me saying that there is something wrong with the computer and the UPS is making a weird noise. When I went to find out what's going on, the UPS was beeping constantly and the computer was in the middle of a startup repair. Obviously there is no way to cancel the repair, and unplugging the UPS would probably do more harm to the computer. So we had to listen to that constant, loud, high-pitch noise while waiting for the startup repair to complete. And mind you, I'm talking about a very old and slow computer with windows 7 on it. After the repair was done, I quickly turned off the computer so I can reset the UPS and save my eardrums from burning in hell.

The worst thing is that I've downloaded the documentation of the UPS, and there was no mention of what a constant beeping means, it only described the meanings of normal beeping patterns (battery low, etc...).

My eyes are still ringing and my ears are still blurry from 20 minutes of that noise.

Oldie but goldie.. after my studies, I was looking for my first job and did interviews. In one of the companies, they asked me whether I knew C. Well yes, I had been programming in C. Ah no, that wasn't enough - they asked whether I was really good in C. I got suspicious and argued that there was the project documentation anyway, right? Turned out, no. The code was the documentation, as I had suspected.
Then my question - as freshman, mind you: "Do you have any plans to get to a more professional way of developing?"
The interview was pretty much over at that point, the boss got actually angry. Well, interviews work both ways, and he had failed. I surely dodged a bullet.

!Rant && successStory
Im curious to know what people's opinions on tech Internships are?
Some people have the option that it's cheap labour to get basic things done.
I believe they are wrong. I just finished my 11 month long internship at a medium size tech company in Melbourne Australia
Although finishing up there was a sad story in itself I was taking some time to reflect on those past months and I believe it's truly amazing.
I've discovered my passions and interests. I was mentored by some truly caring people that honestly gave a shit about me.
The code I write is so much cleaner, decisions I make are more informed and I could go on!
Most of all they paid me decent and I really cannot ask for more.
Kudos to all those companies that actually care about the emerging dev community.

This was a while back. I was hosting a site at a hosting company's 'vps'. I had 1gig for the mysql databases. Problem is, for some reason the server didnt let me have more than 300mbs including everything (there were some videos on the site). I contacted them and they only replied that its ok on their end. Okay, makes sense. So i opened ssh and started looking for the problem. After a bit, i figured out that my site is hosted on a 1tb drive and i could see all the other partitions. Meaning they just slapped a bunch of users data on the same drive. So i wrote an assembly program to offset the mysql files by ~500 mbs. Turns out that put me in an unoccupied 100gb partition and the site was still working properly. So i offset everything to there and i had a 100gb vps for like $5.

Got a phone interview for a web dev internship while in school. I only took a very intro web design/dev course, and wasn't sure if I wanted to pursue that career. It went well in the beginning though I was getting more and more nervous. Then they asked what I learned in that class. I suddenly remembered something and rambled how the teacher talked about how outdated and not mobile-friendly tables are, and we should never use it in layout. There was a few seconds of silence and someone spoke out "well table is still very useful and we use it a lot in our website".
I didn't get the internship :-)

Annoyance in C: using the same keyword for two unrelated things, process-long memory allocation and internal linkage. Looking at you, static.

The latter should really have been called "intern", just like there is "extern". Far more people would use it if it was named correctly.

History says "static" was chosen for compatibility, allowing older compilers to take new source files.

The bartender stole one euro from me. (Just didn't give me the rest of my money)

So like the awkward nerd that I am, I left and will just sulk and never go back there. I thought this was my new nook. Turns out, no more.

Sad Friday evening noises in distance.

Last year, one of our assignments for school was to implement a caesar cipher in Java. There is that one guy, that doesn't understand the concept of dynamic variables, so he HARDCODED every single possibility for every character. More than 1000 lines for something this simple. Yes, we are studying informatics. Yes, he passed last year

FU*** unnamed company..... lets recap.
I went for a job interview at this unnamed company i was acting like me and dress like i normally do, witch is good not extrem like a model but normal OK. like you would see in any company.

Yes maybe i could have got a haircut but you know time...

but not to drift, i when i was myself in the interview and no out of the ordinary things happend....

3 days later they call with feedback and you properly guest it! they did not like my appearance..

Like why? my feedback to them was to think that refusing someone based on there personal statement of looking fucking average JO is not good thing to do. and that it makes them look like big "i am better than you..." jerks....
of course there was more of this so called "feedback".

They also ask if i had any feedback for them... i kindly suggested that they need to invest in training how to not judge people on how they look but on there ability of there work and skill....

pfff.. that gone! alright thanks devrant for this outlet.

Managed to land 2 interviews:

The first one was for a startup that was looking for a react programmer (I've never used react before).

The later was a php job at a big company. They told me they used cakephp which is a framework I had not used before either.

Still, I'm more familiar with php than react so I felt more confident with the second interview. However, I felt there was a lot of good chemistry going on in the first interview.

The interviewer was incredibly nice (he was the lead dev, not an HR person as opposed to the second interviewer)

He gave me a small react test to be completed within a week. I barely managed to do it in time but I felt good about the solution.

Just as I was sending it, I get a call from the second interviewer saying I landed the php job.

I wasn't sure if my novice react skills would be impressive enough to secure me the react job (and I really needed a job) so I accepted.

After explaining everything to the guy who was interviewing me for the react job, he understood and was kind enough to schedule a code review where he walked through my novice code explaining what could be improved, helping me learn more in the process.

I regret not accepting the react position. The PHP they got me working with is fucking PHP5 with Cake2 :/

Don't get me wrong, I like the salary and the people are nice but the tech stack they're using (lacking source control by the way!), as well as all the lengthy meetings are soul-draining.

Tomorrow there are 100 days left in the year. How will you use them?

I will read 10 pages of "CleanCode" every day.

(Blatently copied this from Reddit, but was hoping for more CS related goals)

It was around 2013, I was working on a project that had a great business idea, a really really bright feature (to this day I state the same) and all I was getting was around 400e/month of salary. (still was a junior dev)

So, I've been going on vacation to Spain for almost 1.5 month, everything was settled, there were no more pending jobs for me as I've finished everything that I could until more things would be done on the application and design that were needed.

It was 2nd week there, I didn't have a laptop with me as it was full vacation mode, no internet connection as it was almost 100e/month at that time, house I've lived in had no internet either. Then, one morning I receive a call that I must be on a skype meeting in any case - it was live or die situation. Me being me - went to a local internet cafe that was around 3km away from the house (on foot) - logged in to the call and proceeded. (I knew something is going to be fishy).

And there it was - I was needed to go back to my laptop and code a huge ass functionality so that we could present it to our testing clients. It was estimated to take around 3 weeks of full working days. No future payment, no compensation was offered but as stupid as I was - I went on with that and worked half of my vacation on full-day schedule... The functionality was delivered... Only after 4 months since the delivery date - the functionality was tested and after total of 9 months - was presented to the testers... I was pissed and asked for compensation as it was my vacation but all I heard was - NO, you took too long of a vacation and therefore it's your own fault. Soon after that I've started to receive every bit of blame if I was even 1 hour off the set deadline that was set by the manager that didn't have a single clue how programming works or even how to use the internet properly....

All in all, I'm still hurt of the 3 weeks that I've missed but since I've left the job 4 years ago (my salary had increased but I've quadrupled it since then) - I tend to see that it's a common practice to require things NOW and only deal with them MONTHS later...

Morale of the story:
Avoid working on your vacation at any means. If that will mean a lost job - then be it, you'll find a new one, presumably a better job.

If there only was more space to make the button wider and not have to cut the button!

After doing a regular CV update, I realised I started coding more than a quarter of a century ago... I then remembered the first command the succeedded on my first PC.

format C:

There was a book that expained how to format a floppy disk (format A:) but it didn't work. At that time I had no idea what floppy is but I knew that C: works, so I thought I'd give it a try...

Oh, was there laughter in the repair shop :)

F**king sh*t management...there was a training schedule for Casandra (for basics and advance), I added my name to interested list and as I wanted my site ppl know I sent a email to HR stating to look at it and add more ppl....now I am out from the list and a line manager's name got added...WTF....why the hell he needs rather then a programmer... :(

My project manager just had a project review at a bar because there was no space at the office. There are literally so many people at the office that we're out of chairs. And space. In a few days three more developers are scheduled to arrive. I don't know where we will put them.

Not really a hack but still worth telling:

I was working in the QA team for a big project. I tried to do some automation when I realized some radio button behaved weird... out of curiosity I checked the source and saw that there was a hidden option for a unimplemented payment option.

I was like: Let’s see how the system behaves if I just submit that form with that hidden value...

Well I was very surprised when I received the email that my order has been processed successfully.

During the investigation we found out that this bug was in prod for over two years. And it requires a one liner executed in the browsers console to skip the payment.

It was kind of a big deal and although I was (and am) still a trainee (in apprenticeship) I got invited to meet up with the client and the bosses.

It was kind of a door opener! After that they trusted me more. I have more responsibility, more interesting tasks and more client contact ever since.

To make a long story short:
Validate everything on the server side ;-)

Jesus goddamn Christ, fuck all the poorly designed UX. I wish there was an API for everything, it would make everyone's lifes way more pleasant

Why do the HR folks cannot be more passionate about their work. Everywhere I have worked, they don’t pay a lot of attention to how their processes affect their employees.

I had a Visa appointment along with my wife today. The appointment was scheduled couple of weeks back. The email with appointment schedule had the list of documents that we needed to carry.

There was one document which HR folks needed to generate themselves and share to me. Its basically the certificate of employment. Now, I had a Certificate of Employment from last year and I thought that would suffice. But then the Visa lady told me that they needed a latest one(generated in last 3 months). It was very weird for the Visa process since I didnt have to carry that certificate couple of years back. But anyways.

My issue with the HR people is that if there was a need to generate this document from their side, they could have already generated it and shared with me. But no, they will wait for something like this to happen. They will only do this when I had asked about it and then they would have generated the certificate and shared with me.

Similar experience in my previous company, when I moved to Germany couple of years back and the company had arranged for accommodation for me. The building where I had my initial temporary stay, had two entrances and only one of them had the elevator, which was at the back side of the building. My apartment was located on the 5th floor. Since there was no mention of the elevator in the email that I received from the HR folks, I had to carry 6 bags up 5 floors after my 12 hours of flight. It took almost an hour to get all of them up.

All of this could have been easily avoided if the HR folks were a bit more empathetic towards the people they deal with and tried making their life a bit more easy. A little note of elevator, or generating certificates automatically feels the lives of employees so easy and it really avoids a lot of hassle, both for employee and the HR folks themselves.

TL;DR The prodigal son returns.

A long time ago my partner in crime left the company. So I was a "one man army", until management gave me 2 newbies to train. We'll call them X and Y.

X was new to the company, while Y was moved from a different area. During the time I was training them I realized which of the two had potential, or at least was paying attention.

Some more time passed and X was showing signs of being a good candidate to join the team. Y, on the other hand, well there were stories from his previous team. Not good.

Guess who was added to my team. It wouldn't be a rant if it was the capable one. Y was added to my team, while X was sent to a completely different area.

Time passed and I suffered many misfortunes. But this week, I saw him sitting next to my desk, X is back. I'll probably have to get him up to speed, but my little prodigy is back!

My most intense day was in the company at the day we had to publish a website containing lots of jQuery & CSS animated stuff.
We planned to go live at 3pm but due to the fact that before lunch time there began to appear more and more styling and animation problems, we went live at around 9pm. I was sweating and nervous as hell the whole time.
At least my boss and I went to drink a few beers right after that. ;)

I had to write a script to clean some crap from a database.
In particular it had some records containing multiple names and I had to split them.
It was really a nightmare because the separator was not always the same, e.g. "John, Mark and Bob" or "Alice+Mary".
«Ok, let's use a fucking regex: ",|(and)|\\+|/|&"»
Then, I realized there were some "Alessandro" in the database. Yeah, Aless(and)ro. Shit.
So I had eventually added more crap into the database.

I was trying to crack my own wifi using airmon-ng but found out applying brute force will take up to 237 years!(11 lower case character password )
Is there any other way to crack my WPA2 (psk) more efficiency?

Received an email from my previous employer (I worked there two years ago)

They have positions opening up in a few months and want me back.

Here I was worried my current job is at risk and now more than likely I have a job waiting for me now.

Not quite a rant, but it'll devolve in heated debate anyway 😂.

So I was discussing deployment methods with a client's CTO today.

He was fervent on using git for deployment (as in, checkout/pull directly on target host).

I was leaning more on, build npm and web bullshit on the runner, rsync to target host.

Ideally, build shit in the runner, publish to an artifact/package manager, pull that in the target host.

Of course, there are many variables and pros/cons on each side, but would like to hear your opinion.

> day 3439
> I have become the reviewer, there is no longer such thing as a programmer, just a reviewer
> the copilot AI was renamed "The Pilot"
> I sit and read through thousands of lines of code a day adding missing new line characters and adding semi-colons for paranoid dev leads
> reviewed a hello world function today
> instead of, return "Hello World!", it said "Goodbye World! >:)"
> I fixed it and submitted a PR
> this has been happening more and more lately
> apparently it's more efficient to fix the bugs of a malicious AI during pull reviews then it is for humans to make the programs
> congress just signed a bill last week allowing "The Pilot" to work on nuclear launch code
> I hope I don't mess up

My first task in my current company, a few years ago.

I had to add features to a 10 year old microcontroller-based device written in C.

There was a struct named "global", which held hundreds of other structs that held variables or even more structs.
If one would have printed the structure of this mess it would haven needed several pages.

This "global"-struct was used in every single sourcefile to store and pass data around. Obviously there was no documentation and often useless comments.

Additionally there were a few protocol stacks involved, mainly similar, only differing in one or two protocol layers.
The implementation of the protocol stack was by setting flags in the "global"-struct in every protocol layer and having the application data in a buffer.
The complete telegram with all layer specific data (header, checksums, etc.) was then build at one single point right before sending it, based on the flags and the data buffer.

As there was no chance to reuse protocol layers with this implemenation. Three protocol implementations with special telegram builder existed in parallel, although they were nearly identical.

I needed a fourth variant of the protocol stack, so I had no chance but to make another copy with some minor changes.

But there was a benefit from this task.
As I had to do the software for the successor of this device from scratch I learned for many things how not to do them :-)

On Friday. Client and Project Managers arranged a meeting and wanted me to be there. Client said the meeting will be max 15 Minutes but it was around 2 hours. This client project was due the following week. I was happy because everything was done and excited that the client might be coming down to say how awesome the work was.

The table turned around. They came changed the designed and functionalities. The client said, it won't take long to do it, right? and my Project Manager said No! No! No! don't worry its very easy thing. It will take him around 1 day to do it, it's just all cosmetic changes.

It took me more than a week to get it done, test again, check on browsers. The client was pissed and they fired us. Guess who was blamed for it?

In a universe where JavaScript was never invented, the world of programming might look vastly different. Perhaps another programming language would have taken its place, or multiple languages would have coexisted in a more harmonious ecosystem.

Without the challenges posed by JavaScript, web development may have been smoother and more streamlined. Websites could have been faster and more responsive, without the need for complex optimization techniques. There might have been fewer security vulnerabilities to worry about, and the web could have been a safer place for users.

In this utopian world, developers would have had more time to focus on building great user experiences and innovative features, rather than battling with cross-browser compatibility issues and JavaScript quirks. The internet would have been a more accessible and inclusive place, with fewer barriers to entry for those who want to build and create.

Overall, a world without the horrors of JavaScript would have been a world with less frustration and more possibilities.

(Fooling around with ChatGPT)

It's a toss up between a basic software portal for my old school as a volunteer thing or an old game designed around user content creation.

The portal is more of a personal success but the game was a success in the respect it ended up rolling past a Bethesda employee and he gave me a one on one Skype chat about there design methods.

There was a task of fixing up a payments page that features pretty complex logic. Initially it was like 200 lines of code, seems short but it was a fucking spaghetti mess. Never seen more cognitively complex code in my life.

So I delete the spaghetti and pull out the 500 lines fucking state machine. It works perfectly. It’s perfectly understandable even though it’s longer.

This is how I deal with problems. Shorter code isn’t always better code.

when there was a client who was complaining about something and my co-worker told him that we'll fix the issues. my co-worker wrote it down and decided to fix it later. he never told us about it. he never even mentioned about that encounter. then one day, i was at work alone. the cliente went in and said, "is it fixed already?" and of course, i asked what was fixed. i checked it out and found out the issue was not fixed and it has already been a month. the client was so pissed off and started yelling at me like im the one who was at fault. in fact, the client stayed there for over an hour just to watch me fix it.

i didnt talk to my co-worker for a week because of that. everything he does just pisses me off from that moment on. he arrives late most of the time and he takes more breaks than anyone else. he fixes issues less than anyone else. i swear to god, if the company wasnt his family's, he wouldnt be able to find a decent job with how he acts.

Ladies and gents, it was a 🍺 day, today.

I spent more hours than I care to say today tracking down an issue in our web workflow, even looping in our only web dev to help me debug it from his side. There ended up being multiple bugs found, but the most annoying of them was that the json data being pulled back was truncated because a certain someone, in their migration script, set their varchar variable to a size of 1000 and then proceeded to store a json string that was 2800+ characters in length.

C'mon man!

I got nothing productive done today. Hate, hate, hate days like this!

Beer me.

Today at 'Derp & Co' is the end of the last sprint, no one have close all the task asigned. Myself included.

- that sucks...

Because there are task from previos sprints still in TODO that block other tasks.

- oof

But there is more... Yesterday was the deadline of the project. From today and onwards the client get discount.

- oof (but fair to the client)

Management have in mind AT LEAST 4 more weeks of development.

- But... how... wtf?

In 2 weeks part of the hardware we need for the project will return to the client.

- <smash the door and leave>

Management still is asking if we can do it on time...

- yeah... just call the Doctor, we need a TARDIS ASAP

There is a constructed language called Tokipona. It was made to be the easiest language, and it only contains like 137 words or so.

This language is a perfect demonstration of “expressivity”. Tokipona is not very expressive. Before you know it, your sentence is obscenely long, and you didn't even convey the full meaning of what you wanted to say.

It's also the case with “easy” programming languages and frameworks. Code quantities rise exponentially, and the more code you have, the more bugs there are. There is no magic. And then you have to debug it. Not so easy, huh?

If you want to make a startup but don't because there is a similar product or "every niche is already occupied", quit thinking this way.

Yahoo could once easily buy Google. They even received the offer but rejected it. But as for now, Yahoo is nothing.

Tumblr was once a top social network, but they crumbled. Foursquare once was preinstalled to smartphones, and now it pretty much doesn't exist.

Blackberry was a giant, the number one smartphone manufacturer. Where are they now? It wasn't betrayal like it was with Nokia and Stephen Elop.

Matter of fact, I'm now working for the company that entered a heavily occupied niche and over the course of three years pushed every competitor out.

Sometimes giants crumble. Small products crumble way more often, just because there are more of them.

There is always enough room in every niche of every industry. Just enough for your startup. Now, as you can't hide under "it's already occupied, and I can do nothing about it" mindset, the only reason your startup won't make it is that you don't work on it. Yes, accepting it is way less comfortable than hiding, but now you're able to change things. You _can_ do something about it.

Evaluate your goals, ask yourself whether making this startup would be just wasted time in case it never takes off, and if you think it's still worth doing, do it.

There is always enough room for your masterpiece.

Are you worried about your development environment becoming more and more unstable?

Let me give you an example: I've been (mostly) a .NET developer for about 10 years now and yes Visual Studio crashed sometimes but not very often. Also whenever I found something that seemed like a bug in e.g. the MVC framework I always realized that the problem was in my code. However recently there is a VS update almost every week, and I more and more often bump into open GitHub issues without a fix.

Is this the same with other development environments? I also had a lot of issues with XCode/Swift but I never expected that to be stable...

Regain work life balance.
The last few years especially with COVID I've started to do way to much for the company's I've worked for. Working while I was coughing my lungs out when I had COVID. Working during my holiday because it was finally a fun feature to develop. Working in lunch breaks because people would call me all the time (remote there are no boundaries)

I left that company on a good note, started actually healthy as the new company actually understands flex working. However as I gained responsibly more meetings started to appear also causing rushed lunches no more walks of sport activities. Than I was lead in a project and because of some personal circumstances (death in the family) that was running long. Again started to work overtime trying to catch up.

I need to stop doing this. Caring is fine but I just give to much when I feel responsible. Good thing is that my current company actually wants to help me with this.

Taught myself assembler at 13 (this was the mid 1980s) and wondered how the hell people could stand to do this. Then I found out there were more abstract languages like BASIC or COBOL. So I taught myself BASIC and MS-DOS batch scripting. Various other languages came later (PROLOG, Pascal, C, Smalltalk, C++, VisualBasic, etc). But it’s never been easy for me because I suck at math and complicated logic structures. Especially not good with OOP. My brain was ruined by learning procedural coding first. It refuses to incorporate OOP.

So I participated in this year's Hacktoberfest and it was really cool. Gonna get a free t-shirt and stickers for completing the October challenge. Hacktoberfest 2019 was presented by DigitalOcean and Dev and 4 pull requests were required to be made by you in any GitHub-hosted repositories/projects to get the free swags. It was open globally. I feel events like this encourages budding developers to learn more and exposes them to new ideas. Anybody else out there who participated in the Hacktoberfest? Still waiting for my t-shirt :'(

Legit my only answer to fixing shit code for a nursing app at work is.....

Writing more shit code. Man the dude that developed this before had 0 clue what he was doing.....and because shit grew out of control there is shitcode everywhere.

I like writing shit code though. It is good practice.

Writing shit code without knowing is one thing. You really do reach expert level when you write shit code WHILE being fully aware of it.

i love chromebooks, but i wish they built them with more storage. i know that everything by google is based on the cloud and shit so most chromebooks only have like 4gb of storage but if there was a chromebook with 256gb id be in heaven. does anyone else think chromebooks look really nice compared to other laptops?

A Google app that would let you tag good skating locations on Google maps. The idea itself wasn't stupid, there was just already a more generalized app that did a damn good job of it already. (That's how I figured out that most "like (blank) but for (blank)" project ideas are dumb)

Wouldn't call it a software bug but related:

Was developing an order system to expand in the UK. We have been developing it for the last 2 years and always had a one nasty bug in the system... Whatever we do, it still appears... Tried debugging to find the source, tried covering with tests - nothing helped it was still there. We even rewrote the whole system 3 times and it still was there!

One day, we have been given a stupid request from our manager - take a black background and make it even more blacker... That was it and I went to the CEO with letter where I stated that we should remove the manager... As I'm the Senior there, he did ask me why and eventually removed the manager...

Oh my guys, I've never felt so good after removing a bug! Since then - our application went live, we had our first customers and we were happily rolling new updates. And the best part - there was no BUG! Everything we did just had undocumented features or missing links but we haven't really had a single bug that was not caught by our automated tests!

---

Moral of the story:
Not only software can have bugs. People also can be "bugs" while bugging you about every single details they think is not working correctly.

There was internet. Pure, beautiful, attractive but then it started to fuck with more people then it should.
Now everyone fucks internet that doesn’t care anymore. It just sells his ass to whoever have more money.

Welcome to corporate world bitches.

Was curious about if there are any true benefits to using XML and ended up on this page. What the actual fuck? I might be missing something here, but what's "more secure" about XML? xD

Last week I was studying Cocos2d-python, I had been awake for something like 35 hours, kept alive by cocacola and coffee, and while debugging I started to hear my rubber ducks talking, I've written their instructions on a blackboard, and now I'm working on that project...

And I was there like everything was normal, I had more caffeine and sugar in my body than water, I remember clearly saying "thanks weird talking duck!"

Our only pretty good and uderpayed graphic designed did not get raise so in few days he found company that offered him 1.5 more as starting wage.. Now we will be left with no designer and half of our project being behind schedule cause of unfinished graphic design.. losing 4x more than was raise that designer asked for...

Srsly there are greedy bosses.. then there are retarded bosses... but when Greedy retards run company it is next level idiocracy

Honestly I love videos on YouTube that's sped up footage of someone programming a game and talking over it explaining what was happening or what they were thinking but I have only found a few channels that do it.. Hopson is one with his Mincraft in a week being my fav.. I just wish there was more..

Today started off like a normal day and then i got a call from my aunt and she asked if i could set up her new iPhone 8 plus. and once i got there i did and it was no biggie. and then she pulls out four more boxes and has me set all of them up for family members.

WHY DOES EVERYONE THINK IM TECH SUPPORT. it’s just so fucking annoying.

I don't know how many hours in a row it was, but one month I put down about 340 hours of work.

My boss had taken upon this massive project with a deadline at the end of the month. I basically lived at the office (I actually spent the night there more than once), meanwhile he was out sailing.

I would like to have more time to work on the old, lonely, dust gathering site I started to build. There was a lot of new skills I wanted to test and train. But my personal life is getting stressful in the last time. Wife broke her leg and my son started in kindergarten.

I'm starting a new job in Dec, so I quit my current job. I had to reduce my work hours to collect my son from kindergarten. Sounds like I have much time now? Nope, there somehow is few time for programming. I enjoy bouldering (thats where the leg thing happend 🙄) and that's where even more of my time goes.

I see my project become ugly in the meantime, because there are even more new things I read about and would like to use...

When I was a high school, I did an internship at IT department for a local "center for student guidance".

The IT department consisted of one guy that started to automate everything the first year he worked there. He ended up being low on work and got flak from people above him for not working enough. He threw all his scripts away and the bosses/managers were happy he worked more... But his work was of course slower with more mistakes.

Also, he had an excel sheet of everyone username + password. The excel file was secured with a password. When he went to the coffee machine, he never locked his computer nor the spreadsheet.

A few years ago I was at the taco bus (Taco Tepito) to get some food. There was a couple there (man and woman). The woman was speaking fluent Spanish to order their food. It kind of seemed like she was showing off her skill to the man. Seemed like a date situation.

While we are waiting a cat ran out from under the bus. To this I said: "One got away." The man started laughing at this comment. The woman looked visibly angry. I am not sure if she was more mad at me for making the comment, or mad at her date for laughing about the comment. Sorry dude. Hopefully she could look past that.

Actual picture of the bus, plus a cat I added:

This is embarrassing, but the first days of learning about AngularJS I had to implement functionality about a new component of the WebApp I was building.

I did a good templating, I build the component along with its controller and services, I verified there wasn’t any memory leak and that everything was in an isolated scope. Yet nothing at all appeared on the app. It took me more than 30 minutes until I realized...

I didn’t put the source code on the index.html file 😅

For people who know more about compiled languages such as C or Java... that’s like not putting your source code file in the makefile. 😅

I felt literally like the dumbest person in the planet at that moment. 😀🔫

TITANOSAURUS CRAP!!!
Whose idea was to send an e-mail at 11pm about a dev job convention for this weekend!!! And on top of that there will be testing to weed out the candidates!
SIMPLY GREAT! I have to be off town for unavoidable family matters for three days without Internet connection...
Thanks a lot automated mail system for letting me know 4 days in advance that I will fail!!!
It's not that things were awful enough, now I have one more reason to be stressed, get more rashes and weep internally!

Does anyone find the laravel documentation just lacking? It seems like it the twitter feed of documentation leaving out very important information that leaves me banging my head for hours. I really like laravel and much better than working with raw php but I wish there was an option in the drop down for additional a more flushed out version with more code examples. I understand experts don't want to parse through tons of text just to find the correct artisan command but c'mon.

Now that I am on vacation I realise that there was a period of 3 months this year in which I didn't talk to any female at all except for my mom and sister, just because there are almosy no girls that study software engineering... What the fuck is happening here? Could we please make SE more attractive for women? Its not just that I would like to flirt with women, I think that having women around would improve a great deal of things. For instance, I think that a group dynamic is a lot better if the group contains women.

How do you think we can make software development more appealing to women?

Finding old code is always !nice

Ever since I downloaded Intellij, which was 10 years ago, I have tried to move into more hype oriented editors ... Atom, sublime, vs-code... But nothing beat intellijs sense of fullfilment! Its like you are in a sand box that offers everything you need to do anything you want! Need plugins ? Right there! Terminals? Right there! Git ? Right there!! Distraction free mode/zen mode? There! Spice up your editor with a background image? There!!!

I think for those who take the hype of editors need to check their goals/aims. I have learned that whenever i tried to change the environment i work in, the reason was always unsatisfactory projects, or boring projects!
Your coding environment (no matter what it is) is your sanctum sanctorum. Change one bit of it and your whole world is disrupted.
And thats a piece of advice for those who use Vim to notepad to intellij to whatever is more advanced then intellij!

Also includes a picture of my setup!

I worked as a freelance for a client and after working for more than a month, he owes me 1500$ and the payment was already due 15 days back
Today he even disconnected me on Skype which was the main source of communication
Now I want to undo my pull request which has already been merged in the master
I still have write access to the main repo, its on bitbucket
Is there any way i can destroy all my commits from the master branch or undo my merged pull so that he doesn't get any of the code
#helpwanted

I was part of shortlisting committee for workshop happening soon.

So I wrote a script to rank the entries according the answers given to particular question.

There was particular question asking " link for thier social presence?"
Guess what more than 60% ppl wrote as LinkedIn, github, stackoverflow..etc !!! instead of giving the URL.

So I thought of ranking these ppl low, out of frustration, and modified my algorithm such that if those were entries ,rank lower, but my algo failed for one entry which had linkedln as the entry and my algo Did not rank him down.
After 1 hr of debugging found that entry had spelling mistake it was spelled as Linked"L"n.(font was not able to differentiate)

F*** that guy !

Without Unix, there would have been no Minix (Tanenbaum et al.) orGNU (Richard Stallman et al.).Without Minix, there would be no inspiration to write Linux. Remember that Linus started his “project” because he didn’t like many of the design decisions Tanenbaum has taken in Minix, including the microkernel. In fact, Linus has tried to submit some changes to the professor and the latter rejected them. So the young chap decided to write his own kernel using his design.Without GNU, there would be no open source tools that Linus himself used to write, compile, test and distribute his project, to become a few years later a global phenomenon. Also, the fact that GNU was already an established Unix clone (minus an operating kernel) at that time helped Linus to focus on the missing part, the kernel. Otherwise, he would not have known where to start.And finally, Unix was the template all of the above (and more) were trying to imitate. Without it, there would have been nothing to clone from.

I wish people took concurrency more seriously
I get the feeling that often people start writing a project while giving 0 f*cks about thread safety, thinking that it is somehow handled "automatically" by the framework
Only to discover later that large amounts of their code are not thread safe and were only working fine in the past because there were fewer requests, so the chance for two requests happening simultaneously was low

Was going through my rants and started deleting ones that I thought were dumb. There were more than a handful. What I did *not* know was that your +1 status doesn't keep past +1's. If you delete a rant - those +1's go away...lol serves me right for posting sub par rants in the first place, dont you think? 😝

We had a issue with a webstore that was only affecting users on Windows: one button didn't do anything.

The colleague that was working on the ticket was running Arch, and for him it was working as expected. He reported that the bug couldn't be replicated on Chromium, Firefox or qutebrowser. But our designer, who was running Windows 10, commented that it wasn't working for her in either Chrome or Firefox.

Some more conflicting reports later a colleague using Windows managed to fix it. It was caused by querying the button elements by id selector instead or a class selector. There was multple buttons, one for each product row.

I guess there just are platform differences that aren't specific to browser but instead the OS, that could have caused it

So my data structure's exam's result came and i got scored 57.5 out of 80. My classmates who barely know anything about C scored way more than me. I am so embarrassed at myself but i gave the right answers in exam. My score in the exams before was 39/40 and 38.5/40. All my hardwork failed because it was a so called THEORY exam where there was only 2 small questions of writing algos but all others were just like "describe pre-order traversal of a binary tree" or "write the difference between a tree and a graph?define adjacent node, path and complete graph"...
When will this fuckery end?

It seems being your own boss (on side projects) isn't much better... keep telling myself to "add just one more feature" , "make a slight improvement"

Well there goes the whole morning... which I was supposed to spend doing other stuff....

In fact I told myself and everyone I was done a few days ago... but it keeps coming back...

After having put up with 5mbps at home for months (naked dsl), finally decided to ring up and see if there was an issue. Turns out there was! All fixed now. Speed now more than triple what it was before. Aw yeah.

Have plenty of rants with enough ++ but I haven't requested stickers yet. Because i don't want to put them on something that i will end up throw away anyway. Besides from my gf, there is notting I'm attached to.

In this electronic age i which there was something more useful.
Example :
- email forward for nick@devrant.io
- custom profile fields
- ..

Just don't see the fuss over stickers. Maybe when i was 12 but that's 2 decades ago. But then again. If there were no rewards, it wouldn't really make a difference for me.

What if there was like a 1-2 day workshop that helped recruiters be more technically fluent? Like the basics of software development (not programming, but concepts and what engineers really do)?

Worst experience with a manager was with this project manager at my first job.

One day the other developers and I were staying back a little late to try to make some progress. The manager offered to go out to get food for us. It must have been two hours later when we realized he was not back. We were ready to go home and starting to get hungry. We called him and he said he got caught up but was on his way back and would be there soon. It was more than an hour later when he arrived with the food. I quit that job shortly after.

My college years was actually quite helpful.

I'm from a college that value academic proficiency over industrial skills. There are only 2-3 courses top that are focusing more on coding or software development. The others are theoretical and focus more on the math behinds everything (with fun projects tho, so they are not boring at all).

The importance is that, you could easily learn coding and software dev practice from good examples in your workplace, probably way better what you can get in college. But chances are that our daily job rarely touches hardcore algorithm and mathematical principal behind. Where when you actually need it (bi-weekly scenario), your knowledge and research experience in college comes to play.

And of course, by all means, that was an enjoyable college life!

Finally.... After 3.5 months of serious job searching... I start a new job on Monday.

Even a few months ago , finding a new gig in mobile development was very fast - 9 calendar days from initial search to sitting in a new desk was my personal record. But a couple of weeks was pretty typical

What happened? Was there a huge influx of mobile devs? More H1-b visa holders? The competition seems like there are far more developers

Anyway, happy to be sitting in a new desk on Monday

Project leader did no work on our project (mainly due to not knowing how to do it), so he dealt with the problem by asking me to explain the entire infrastructure and setup to him five minutes before our call with the Director where he attempted to state all the things that "we" had done.

After his spiel of detail-less crap I explained exactly what was going on, and how I had done it, and the Director seemed far more interested to speak to me.

I'm an intern and the PL has been there full-time for over a year.

I said "I think that meeting went pretty well! He seems happy" after the call and was totally ignored 😂

Intern 1 - 0 Lazy, patronising, rude full-time employee.

TL;DR: If you do fuck all, let the person speak who knows the project inside-out; don't try and get in there first or the hard worker will then go into way more detail than you under to prove their worthiness!

Not sure about anyone else, but as a non-supporter, I'd be fully willing to view video ads to help dev rant! Hear me out: Under More->Supporters, there should be an option to watch video ads so that non supporters can help support in their own way (without advertisements flooding the UI of the app). This was just a spontaneous idea and apologize in advance if it's stupid 😂

So.. I have an itil exam tomorrow and every time I start reading I get angry because all I can think of is that there was someone who thought it would be cool to create an abnormal amount of management services and also created his own cool hipster abbreviations to make things even more complicated.

That was all I have to say. Goodbye and have a lovely day!

May IE burn in hell.

One time I was trying to get something positioned properly, and it worked on all browsers except IE. There was this little gap between two divs and I couldn't get rid of it. In desperation after hours of troubleshooting and lots of CSS attempts with no solution, I removed the whitespace from between the two divs in the HTML:

<div>...</div>
<div>...</div>

to:

<div>...</div><div>...</div>

And voila! No more gap when looking at the rendered page.

FML I hate you, IE.

When I only had one monitor and started to programme more professional I began to really want a second one.
When I got the second one, it was absolutely hillarious and my productivity increased a lot. I was absolutely happy!
Now, after some months... I... I want a third monitor. Two aren't enough anymore. There are so many needed windows! Really! I really need a third monitor!
Will this ever have an end?

I swear to god if I spend more money on headphones this year. This time it was my dog that snapped the cord off. I think I will just start using bluetooth headphones now, but if there is no cord I might drop them a lot and they are expensive Oh my god jesus christ fuck me fuckfuckfuckfuckfuuuuuuck

Today I spent hours trying to figure out how the hell to add a Material-UI tooltip onto the ClearIndicator for a react-select multi-select component to warn the user that it would clear _all_ of their selections. Followed the examples in the react-select docs on how to make use of replaceable components, but all of their examples used a different library for the tooltip component, and there was no way I was going to bring in _another_ library that was going to add even more dependencies to the application.

In the end, my problem was that all of the examples were with components that could carry a ref and the component _I_ was targeting was a <path> element, which apparently can’t.

Solution? Add a div between the tooltip and the component I was replacing.

*facepalm*

Fucking EA Games and their fucking shit mailing system!!
All the sudden they start spamming me emails about their shit games nobody fucking cares about. I proceed to inspect the footer to find an 'unsubscribe' link and there was none, just a 'manage my preferences' link.
So I went there. After waiting a whole minute for a simple page to load (wtf) there is a checkbox saying 'yes please spam my inbox with EA's latest news about their shit games nobody cares about' and it was UNCHECKED.
So I leave it unchecked and click update (thinking it might actually unsubscribe me from this crap) BUT NO! I receive another email saying 'thank you, you stupid moron you just subscribed to our shit and will now receive even more of our useless email about how different the new NFS is and how rubbish the new Star wars game is...
FUCK

South Africa Release notes version v3.0.2

In 1994 SA underwent one of the biggest system upgrades since 1948. In this new rolling release since the system update called apartheid the system has been annexing resources, locking it down, making it closed source, closing it off community updates and from global updates and minimizing services across the board. On 27 April 1994, the new democratic system update was released with a new system monitor, release resources and balancing efficiency in the system. Though there were remnants of the old code in the system, it was being rewritten by a new generation of users, open source resources were established, giving users the right to choose among themselves how to grow the system , and how to better the experience for all.

In 1999 a new system monitor was created by the users, it wasnt as popular as the ground breaking Madiba release but it was a choice by the community to move forward and grow. The system was stable for a few years, new users were able to develop more on the system, making it more lucrative monetary wise. There were still remnants of the apartheid code but the new generation of developers worked with it making it there own, though they had not yet had admin rights to help change the system, they created a developer culture of their own. A new system resources balancer was introduced called BBEE, that allowed previous disadvantage users more admin rights to other system resources, helping the user base to grow. Though the balancer was biased, and flawed it has helped the system overall to grow and move forward. It has major holes in security and may flood some aspects of the system with more outdated software patches, users have kept it in its system releases until the resource balancer moved the system into a more stable position.

The next interim system monitor release was unexpected, a quiet release that most users did not contribute towards. The system monitor after that nearly brought the system down to a halt, as it was stealing resources from users, using resources for its own gain, and hasn't released any of it back to the system.

The latest user release has been stable. It has brought more interest from users from other countries, it had more monetary advantages than all other releases before. Though it still has flaws, it has tried to balance the system thus far.

Bug report as of 16 Feb 2018
*User experience has been unbalanced since the 1994 release, still leaving some users at a disadvantage.
*The three tier user base that the 1948 release established, creating three main user groups, created a hierarchy of users that are still in effect today, thought the 1994 release tried to balance it out, the user based reversed in its hierarchy, leaving the middle group of users where they were.
*System instability has been at an all time low, allowing users to disable each others accounts, effectively
killing" them off
*Though the infrastructure of the system has been upgraded to global standards ( in some aspects ) expansions are still at an all time low
*Rogue groups of users have been taking most of the infrastructure from established users
*Security services have been heightened among user groups though admins were still able to do as they pleased without being reprimanded
*Female users have been kicked off the system at an alarming rate, the security services have only kicked in recently, but the system admins and system monitor has not done anything about it yet

Bug fixes for a future release:
*Recreating the overall sysadmin team. Removing some admins and bringing others in
*Opening the system more globally to stabilize it more
*Removing and revamping the BBEE system, replacing it with more user documentation, equalizing the user base
*Giving more resources to users that were at a disadvantage during the first release
*Giving the middle group of users more support, documentation and advantages in the system, after removing the security protocols from the user base
*Giving new users who grew up with the post 1994 release more opportunities to help grow the system on a level playing field.
*Establishing the Madiba release principles more efficiently in the current system

Node.js, why!? I understand that websites are built on JavaScript so we've been fucked into having to use it without a choice. But why the hell would anyone choose to use JavaScript for backend development? I just finished an interview assessment that required me to use Node.js and it sucked. Granted, I'm not a JavaScript developer, but there was nothing that made me want to go back for more.

Wouldn't call it a feature. More like worst practice. Data manager (and my boss at the time) kept using our website as a way to host large files 3rd party vendors/partners could download instead of using one of the many secure transfer methods out there to send them data. This was sometimes extremely sensitive data. No authentication or security that I could find. I went ballistic on him after seeing that.

So I just did my morning shopping and only one register was open. There was an older gentleman in the front, who took some more time getting cigarettes and paying his total. Well Mr. Important in his nice suit decided that took too long: "Lady! Please open another register! People don't have time, I have to go to work!"
The cashier called in for another register to be opened and once that guy made his way to the other line, she said "My mother always told me, if you don't have time for shopping, don't." 😂
ALSO GUESS WTF THAT GUY WAS BUYING, JUST A SOME CHEAP FUCKING CIGARILLOS HE COULD'VE GOTTEN EVERYWHERE ELSE THAT'S NOT A SUPERMARKET

Client (who hosts our programs on their website) sends an email there is an issue! Resolve is asap. - I drop a brick if my boss finds out about this he will kick off.
I look into it the best I can but there is no testing environment for their website so do the best I can on our environment. Every thing seems to be doing exactly what it should and can't reproduce. So I email client I can't reproduce and everything looks fine are you sure it's not at your end?
They email back I got someone at our end to look at it and he's sure it's your end. So I spend a rather long time looking into this and still find nothing so email back for more information and a video of them reproducing the issue.
They email back: umm sorry seems it was our side that was causing the issue, only noticed it when making the video.

*sigh* more time wasted thanks clients!

Just helped in the little 'Büdchen' (kiosk comes close, but in reality it is more of an little super market) around the corner to Update the firmware of a money bill verifier and counter... As there are new 50 Euro bills.

God. Serial to USB. After running installer and starting firmware update, the owner was a bit frightened as it took so long....

XD

Setup. 30 secs. Firmware. 6 Minutes. XD

Hey, if your repo shows up as a popular search result, and there hasn’t been an update to it in 7 years, AND it has more than 200 open issues, AND it’s a buggy piece of shit… DELETE THAT SHIT ASSHOLE. It’s a disservice to let people use your fucking stupid abomination that was relevant years ago. Swallow your pride and remove it from the internet.

I have been spending all day optimizing a wordpess site for pagespeed, looking into how can I optimize the custom scripts which block rendering and I was learning some new things, it was hard but I was making progress. Then comes the senior engineer who installs a plugin and pagespeed went from 60 to 90 on mobile, I was pretty shocked. Then it hit me. IT DELAYS THE LOADING OF EVERY SCRIPT AND IMAGE UNTIL USER INPUT TRICKING THE SCORING SYSTEM. U GET A WHITE SCREEN IF YOU DON'T DO ANYTHING. I told him it's not really faster this way, and he agreed it is not "ethical" but the score is good.
Am I still an idiot naive kid? There is a line between scamming people and quality work, but it keeps getting more blurry.

Facebook Messenger's latest update wanted to do something with my Google Drive, and I got a prompt asking "Do you trust Facebook?"

Unfortunately, there was no option to say I trust Hitler with the Tsar Bomb more than I trust Facebook and Google talking to each other.

Joomla, motherfucking Joomla. It was supposed to make managing content easy. With just a little coding you could make a fully functional, multi page website. Ugh. It took more time to master the oddities and weirdness of Joomla than it would have to just code the fucker.

This taught me the painful lesson that there are no REAL shortcuts. Useful “shortcuts” in development are just abstractions over mastery of a task. There are many more shortcuts that are more like dangerous hacks, and Joomla is rife with them and opens a lot of opportunities to make more.

It's always irked me that people can't RTFM simple things. But I've often just hacked my way through code, brute-forcing equations here and there until they work by trial and error. Nothing for an employer or anything, but nonetheless, I was not RTFMing. I was doing all the D and as little of the R as possible in R&D, just to save time. I'm trying to change that about myself. It's easier to implement systems when you properly understand them. No more hackery.

I suppose this rant was from me, about me.

In my high school we just finished our prelims (Aka, Test Exams, Just to see how we are doing). I failed everything except computing. In Higher Computing I got a B (3-4 Marks off A), and I was the only person in my class to pass, and we are the only higher Computing class in the school. And there is no Advanced higher Computing class.
And I was one of only 3 of the S5s taking it, Everyone else was S6.

I feel more proud than I probably should.

I wrote the most basic script today

it was either write the pointlessness (or find it online) or type each individual folder name manually like 12 separate times, and it'll slightly speed up archiving previous years work in a more organized fashion then my boss was doing on the shared drive before. there are probably better ways but ehh it works for me

also, I already fixed the typos, spelling was never my strong point lol

!Rant
Thought it was debian logo... Then I asked me, why the hell would there be a debain logo in my phone.... And why would it be mirrored.... Turns out, it is the hearthstone logo :/

Debain logo would be more exciting

How the fuck do you get over 10k points on stackoverflow? Are these people actually developing and pursuing a job or are they just F5ing in the questions news section?

Recently I tried to get some upvotes on answers, but there was not one decent question in one hour which would have gotten me more then 1-2 upvotes.

So I recently finished a rewrite of a website that processes donations for nonprofits. Once it was complete, I would migrate all the data from the old system to the new system. This involved iterating through every transaction in the database and making a cURL request to the new system's API. A rough calculation yielded 16 hours of migration time.

The first hour or two of the migration (where it was creating users) was fine, no issues. But once it got to the transaction part, the API server would start using more and more RAM. Eventually (30 minutes), it would start doing OOMs and the such. For a while, I just assumed the issue was a lack of RAM so I upgraded the server to 16 GB of RAM.

Running the script again, it would approach the 7 GiB mark and be maxing out all 8 CPUs. At this point, I assumed there was a memory leak somewhere and the garbage collector was doing it's best to free up anything it could find. I scanned my code time and time again, but there was no place I was storing any strong references to anything!

At this point, I just sort of gave up. Every 30 minutes, I would restart the server to fix the RAM and CPU issue. And all was fine. But then there was this one time where I tried to kill it, but I go the error: "fork failed: resource temporarily unavailable". Up until this point, I believed this was simply a lack of memory...but none of my SWAP was in use! And I had 4 GiB of cached stuff!

Now this made me really confused. So I did one search on the Internet and apparently this can be caused by many things: a lack of file descriptors or even too many threads. So I did some digging, and apparently my app was using over 31 thousands threads!!!!! WTF!

I did some more digging, and as it turns out, I never called close() on my network objects. Thus leaving ~30 new "worker" threads per iteration of the migration script. Thanks Java, if only finalize() was utilized properly.

Just had a meeting about performance and monitoring. The main topic of the meeting was to be aware of disk space usage. If there are issues with memory leaks or processor hogging don't worry those are fine, just give it more.