Today I learned:

`/usr` stands for “universal system resources” not “user”

`/dev` stands for “device” not “development”

Had no idea.

I don't understand why every non-technical person who comes to do work in my apartment messes up my fucking router.

The cleaning lady - multiple times knocked the antennas partially off. Like fucking clock work. I don't get it, why is the cleaning lady attracted to my router antennas and why does she need to be so hard on them? Whatever.

The most ridiculous episode was today. And it wasn't the cleaning lady. I had a few people here doing some work today and the woman in charge who was here informed me before that they might have to move the furniture "a little."

I come home, and like a bad omen, the plastic parts on BOTH my router antennas are missing. Completely gone. It's just the the wires. Now, the router still works fine in my tiny apartment, but it is a fancy Asus router (I learned the hard way not to buy cheap routers) and I'd like it to not have fucking wires as antennas.

I email the woman (paraphrased):

Me: hey, it seems the antennas got knocked off my router, do you have any idea where they might have went?

Her: Apologies if we didn't put everything back (no shit you didn't, that's why I've had to email you). If we knocked the antennas off the router (fucking "if"???? I literally just told you in my email that they were knocked off) , they are probably somewhere by the window on the floor (they weren't).

And I still haven't found them. Why the fuck do these people seemingly attack my router? I can't figure out what it is about it. You would think people would be more careful around electronics but naaah. Anyway, going to go keep looking for my router antennas.

So I learned something today. Always disable guest sessions in your Linux machine in a work environment.

Walked away from my pc to talk to a fellow Linux engineer.

Came back to a screen with pornhub and porn playing.

"wait how the hell? I locked my pc...?!?"

"ever heard of guest sessions mate? 😆"

😓

*silently disables guest sessions*

Well okay learned that one the hard way 😅

Today I learned: typing "man ascii" into the terminal on Linux will print out the ascii table.
Guess I don't need to go online to find it anymore

Uncle: "It must be noisy, programming. I've seen a datacenter on TV, and those computers are loud" — "It is noisy, but that's more my coworkers fault"

Sales guy at the office: "So you see patterns in the code, you can read this cryptic mess?" — "Uh this is PHP, Its not the syntax that makes it hard to read, it's the dimwit who wrote it"

Father-in-law: "Could you reprogram my laptop, I got a virus trying to download por... nature documentaries" — "I'm not that kind of doctor"

Mother-in-law: "How will you sustain a family, you just play video games all day" — "I make your monthly teachers salary in four days"

Girlfriend: "I learned some Lua today because I needed a world of warcraft extension for..." — "I love you too"

Today I learned.
FACE:B00C is used in the ipv6 address of v6.facebook.com

I'm impressed, well done

Watching normal people use a computer is incredibly painful.
* slow typing
* slow mouse movements
* mouse is used for everything
* instead of hitting the back button, they'll load up a website and go through 6 pages again.
* no shortcuts!

Someone lost their tabs today (Windows crashed), so I said "press ctrl + shift + T". They were so amazed that keys could do something so advanced.
Dhcosncowhtoehwurt hrnxkxxhry he.

Honestly, if people learned how to use keyboards to their full potential, they could shave off 1-2 hours of their normal work PER DAY!

Today, I learned the shortest command which will determine if a ping from your machine can reach the Internet:

ping 1.1

This parses as 1.0.0.1, which thanks to Cloudflare, is now the IP address of an Internet-facing machine which responds to ICMP pings.

Oh, you can also use this trick to parse 10.0.0.x from `10.x` or 127.0.0.1 from `127.1`. It's just like IPv6's :: notation, except less explicit.

Today I learned how to use curly braces in Python for those coming from C style programming languages. I love that this was the accepted answer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Talking to my son today about one of his CS classes, not sure which.

He says: "I missed the lecture yesterday, but I'm not going to bother re-watching it."

Me: "Why? You really should. You're paying for these classes AND you really need to actually learn this stuff."

Son: "Well, because I got 100% on my last assignment without going to class. I just Google'd everything and figured it out on my own from what I found."

My wife out of the blue: "DAMN IT, BUT THAT'S NOT HOW IT WORKS IN THE REAL WORK WORLD!"

Oh, you poor, uninformed summer child. I love her, but she just doesn't know that my son has already learned the key lesson he needed to learn from his schooling in order to get a job and make good money in this field! #ProudTechieDadMoments

Wholesome anti-rant.

There’s this Indian chick at work that I really, really do not get along with. Fortunately she’s on a different team so we have practically zero interactions. Her code was always decent, maybe upper junior level? but I went away fuming almost every time we talked.

However, I did a release security review today (I’m down from five/six per month to one) and read through quite a bit of her code. It was clean and easy to read with good separation, clear naming and intentions, nothing was confusing, etc. It was almost beautiful. Had I any emotions I might have shed a tear. I sent her a message and let her know :) I actually learned a better way of doing a couple of things from it.

She has grown so much as a dev.

Today let me see how much of a better HTML/CSS lecturer I had before. The new guy just does everything from W3Schools while the older one, after telling us the basics, just gave us .psd files and let us figure out what was what and we learned a lot from that.

Today was different at work. It felt as if something was missing. The circle of fun at work that was developed over last two months among few of us was gone overnight..

Two months ago, we ( 7, including our PM ) were shifted from our cabin space to this special room by boss in hopes to keep our ass under fire and increase our productivity. Everyone in the office saw this room like a concentration camp as it was next to boss 's office. Nobody liked the idea of working in that room. We were seen as prisoners as we walked into our work cage.

In the cage, there is a fixed table. We had to adjust our workspace around that table. Everyone was just an arm length away from each other. It didn't take that long to form a bond among us. Some of us would bring snacks and we all shared it and ate it there. We had fights and discussions. The girl in my team and other team would have silly fights about their legspace boundary. The guy who is on a quest to find his life partner would seek for our opinions about his matrimony findings. That time the girls roasted guy about his patriarchal attitude. Instant discussions on current events. Movie reviews and sharing about various life experiences. Lots of such memories were formed and shared over last two months while we worked in there.

For me, it felt like living "The Office" in real life. It was amazing. I was starting to forget my dreams of self employment and plans to resign career because this human connection was addictive. We all learned a little more about each other which otherwise would not have been happened outside the cage.

We didn't realize the bubble and dynamics we had formed in that room until it was gone today when we were shifted back to our cabin space.

It was obvious we were little sad inside having to say bye to our bubble.

😅

Today I realized that I hit a total burnout. Last 3 years were extremely stressful for me (4 jobs in 3 different countries, exhausting and toxic relationship, bad habits). Last 7 months are the worst. I became lonely isolated and miserable. I learned to rely purely on stress, determination and validation to get through my days. Was supressing my emotions for a long time just to focus on making the money. Its time to break the cycle.

Im done with this. Next week Im quitting my fulltime job. Saved enough money for starting capital of my own dev services company. Built three projects that generate stable income to cover my living costs. Now finally I can take a long break to recover from this burnout and to heal myself. That poor persons mentality that I had from my poor family has been shattered. I achieved what I wanted in terms of having the money and gathered enough experience necessary to survive anywhere.

I managed to get through all this shit on my own with barely any support. People around me were draining me more than actually helping me. But I managed to do it and now its time to focus on myself, to heal and restore love for living. Im safe now.

I think I've shown in my past rants and comments that I'm pretty experienced. Looking back though, I was really fucking stupid. Since I haven't posted a rant yet on the weekly topics, I figure I would share this humbling little gem.

Way back in the ancient era known as 2009, I was working my first desk job as a "web designer". Apparently the owner of this company didn't know the difference between "designer", which I'm not, and "developer", which I am, nor the responsibilities of each role.

It was a shitty job paying $12/hour. It was such a nightmare to work at. I guess the silver lining is that this company now no longer exists as it was because of my mistake, but it was definitely a learning experience I hold in high regard even today. Okay, enough filler...

I was told to wipe the Dev server in order to start fresh and set up an entirely new distro of Linux. I was to swap out the drives with whatever was available from the non-production machines, set up the RAID 5 array and route it through the router and firewall, as we needed to bring this Dev server online to allow clients to monitor the work. I had no idea what any of this meant, but I was expected to learn it that day because the next day I would be commencing with the task.

Astonishingly, I managed to set up the server and everything worked great! I got a pat on the back and the boss offered me a 4 day weekend with pay to get some R&R. I decided to take the time to go camping. I let him know I would be out of town and possibly unreachable because of cell service, to which he said no problem.

Tuesday afternoon I walked into work and noticed two of the field techs messing with the Dev server I built. One was holding a drive while the other was holding a clipboard. I was immediately called into the boss's office.

He told me the drives on the production server failed during the weekend, resulting in the loss of the data. He then asked me where I got the drives from for the Dev server upgrade. I told him that they came from one of the inactive systems on the shelf. What he told me next through the deafening screams rendered me speechless.

I had gutted the drives from our backup server that was just set up the week prior. Every Friday at midnight, it would turn on through a remote power switch on a schedule, then the system would boot and proceed to copy over the production server's files into an archive for that night and shutdown when it completed. Well, that last Friday night/Saturday morning, the machine kicked on, but guess what didn't happen? The files weren't copied. Not only were they not copied, but the existing files that got backed up previously we're gone. Why? Because I wiped those drives when I put them into the Dev server.

I would up quitting because the conversation was very hostile and I couldn't deal with it. The next week, I was served with a suit for damages to this company. Long story short, the employer was found in the wrong from emails I saved of him giving me the task and not once stating that machine was excluded in the inactive machines I could salvage drives from. The company sued me because they were being sued by a client, whose entire company presence was hosted by us and we lost the data. In total just shy of 1TB of data was lost, all because of my mistake. The company filed for bankruptcy as a result of the lawsuit against them and someone bought the company name and location, putting my boss and its employees out of a job.

If there's one lesson I have learned that I take with the utmost respect to even this day, it's this: Know your infrastructure front to back before you change it, especially when it comes to data.

Years ago we had a visit from a startup company developing a firewall and I got the chance to talk with one of their devs.

He explained the subtleties of security holes in websites and after I said something about our site being secure thanks to being behind a firewall he gently asked what would happen if he entered a specially crafted test into one of the text fields ... and he gave an example ...

I got a chill, went back to my seat and traced what it would do ...

That was when I learned about sql injection and his example would have killed the DB :/

Before going home I designed a way to secure the input which I then refined over a few days.

We still use that today after 17 years.

That one single sentence really showed to never be to proud of our security and I realized how vulnerable our site was.

TIL: You can actually buy LibreOffice and OpenOffice (inclufing manual, templates and fonts).

When I was in 7th grade, my neighbor (a DoD programmer) challenged me to write a sorting algorithm for a hypothetical super limited environment (he said a satellite). It didn’t have any built-in sorting methods, had very limited memory, slow processor, etc. so I needed to be clever about it.

It took me a few nights before i found a solution he liked. The method I came up with counted the number of occurrences of each number in the array and put them in the appropriate spots in a new array. This way it only required O(2n) running time and 2n memory.

I just learned today that this is called the “counting sort” 😄

I’m proud of little 11 year old me.

I was very troubled as a teenager. I had some pretty intense family issues that led me to smoking cigarettes at 12, marijuana at 13, and drinking everyday at 15. By 17, I was using other "party favors", as we called them, on an every day basis. I left high school at the beginning of my final year, about a week before I turned 18, moved out of my family's home and started working three different part time jobs.
This was the lowest point of my life. I've never felt so much like a fuck-up and loser than back in those days. I hated myself, hated what I had become, hated everything I did. Hate hate hate. I spent a year like this, pitying myself, seeking sympathy from people when I shouldnt have been, basically seeking out someone who would tell me that I wasnt so awful.
That never happened. I only deepened the hole that I had dug for myself.

Then I got angry. I thought it wasn't fair that everyone else was enjoying life except for me. I wanted to find a passion. I wanted to find excitement again. I wanted to look forward to something else besides going back to bed.
When I turned 19, I decided that I was going to take control of my life because I was so angry with my position at the time.
I put myelf into college. I made myself stay awake and focus on schoolwork and internal improvement. I started facing my flaws and defects head-on and conquering them rather than letting them eat me from the inside out.

Now, I am only a couple months away from turning 21.
I rarely drink now. I quit smoking cigarettes after almost 9 years.
I graduate this December, and enroll into my next degree program in January.
Today, I signed employment paperwork with the company I interned at over the summer. I am now a full-time DevOps Engineer with salary, bonuses, 401k, and full health coverage.
My boyfriend and I just moved into our own house that we are renting together. No more needing shitty roommates.
I have most of the debt that my mother left in my name paid off.

A couple of years ago, I couldn't have cared less about my life or how I turned out. I truly expected to get arrested, wind up homeless, or just flat-out end up dead.
I never thought I would see myself where I am today.
I am extremely proud of myself for turning my future around. I know some of you may read this and think I'm an idiot, or that this seems trivial because I am so young. Thats okay.
I have learned that hard work always pays off, and that sometimes you must sacrifice what is expedient to gain what is meaningful.

Today I learned that "wtf" means "what a terrible failure" in Android development 😂😂

When I was at my lowest, my buddy and me sat in front of the screen, and learned how to code from Bucky Roberts. A few years later, I finally got a proper programming gig, but never stopped freelancing. My buddy on the other hand, studied Computer Science and stopped coding for a while after graduating. 5 years later, today we sat in front of the screen and learned how to code together again. I think he has no idea what he has led me to. If he had not made me code, I would have remained the same boy from the streets. But it is not about me, I have heard so many incredible stories. The more codes you write, the more errors you'll encounter. The more errors you try to solve, the bigger the community grows. It's nice to know, there is a group of people out there, who will spend rest of their lives writing, thinking and interacting. Also, trying to figure out how to centre that piece of shit of a div with CSS! I mean wtf!

"Fuck JavaScript, its such a shitty language" seems to be quite a common rant today. It seems as if JS is actually getting more hate than PHP, which is certainly odd, considering the stereotype.

So, as someone who has spent a lot of time in JS and a lot of time elsewhere, here are my views. Please, discuss your opinions with me as well. I am genuinely interested in an intelligent conversation about this topic.

So here's my background: learned HTML/CSS/JS in that order when I was 12 because I liked computers. I was pretty shitty at JS until U was at least 15, but you get the point, Ive had it sploshing about in my brain for a while.

Now, JS certainly has its quirks, no doubt, but theres nothing about the language itself that I would say makes it shitty. Its a very easy leanguage to use, but isn't overdeveloped like VB.net (Or, as I like to call it, TheresAFunctionForThat)

Most of the hate is centered around JS being used for a very broad range of systems. I doubt JS would be in the rant feed so often if it were to stay in its native ecosystem of web browsers. JS can be used in server backend, web frontent, desktop and mobile applications, and even in some system services (Although this isn't very popular as of yet). People seem to be terrified that one very easy to learn language can go so far. And, oh god, its interpreted... How can a system app run off an interpreted language? That's absurd.

My opinion on JSEverything is that it's progress. Thats what we're all about, right? The technologies already in place are unthreatened by JS, it isn't a gamechanger. The only thing JS integration is doing is making tedius and simple tasks easier. Big companies with large systems aren't going to jump ship and migrate to JS. A startup, however, could save a fucking ton of development time by using a JS framework, however. I want to live in a world where startups can become the next Google, because technology will stagnate when youre trying to protect your fortune, (Look at Apple for fucks sake) but innovation is born of small people with big ideas.

I have a feeling the hate for JS is coming from fear of abandoning what you're already doing. You don't have to do that. JS is only another option (And a very good one, which is why it's becoming so popular).

As for my personal opinion from my experiences... I've left this part til the end on purpose. I love programming and learning and creating, so I've never hated a lamguage, really. It all depends on what I want to do. In the times i've played arpund with JS, I've loved it. Very very easy. The idea of having it on both ends of web development makes a lot of sense too, no conversion, just direct communication. I would imagine this really helps with speed, as well. I wouldn't use it in a complicated system, though. Small things, medium size projects: perfect. Running a bank? No.

So what do you think about this JSUniverse?

!rant source: LinkedIn;
Yesterday I met with a potential client who wanted a website. I gave him a quote of X. He said, do this work for X/2 as I have lots of projects and I can keep you engaged for months.

If it was 2 years ago, I'd have happily accepted his proposal. But in the past 2 years I have learned this lesson hard way. Don't work for clients who don't pay well, because when a developer is not paid enough, the quality of work degrades. Hence the portfolio is degraded and so the future projects are also of low budget.

And before you know it, you will be surrounded by low paying clients who see you as a Skilled Labour.

Today, I don't negotiate, not even a single dollar. To justify my cost I make sure that no stones are left unturned while delivery.

It's better to work for 10 hours a week for 40$/hr then to work 40 hours a week for 10$/hr.

~rant

Today my dumb arse learned that DDR4 is a different shape than DDR3. Guess which one I spent weeks waiting for.

Guess which one my mobo supports.

Fuck.

Bittersweet moment today, the interns last day was today, the improvements they made over the last 4 months, putting up with my “Gordon Ramsey” style attitude... definitely goes down in the books as one of best groups of freshman interns. They all truly thanked me for what they learned I sat them down and did a code review with them... but fooled them and showed them code they wrote 4 months ago.. they totally forgot about.. and couldn’t believe it was their own code.. that’s the level professionalism and improvement they made writing embedded software in 4 months.. they can’t wait to for next summer, neither can I.
Even had some of the electrical interns asking our department manager if they could switch to more software focused during their next rotation. Just so they can be under me.
I may be hard and a dick at time... but they learn! And it says a lot when you have college students impacted enough and see other students benefit so much that the “outsiders” wanna switch majors or focuses.!

Spent 4 hours today working on a monitor that wasn't working. someone had put by their garbage can in the rain. I dried it out for about 2 weeks before plugging it in. It turned on but when I plugged in the DVI, it did nothing.

Today, I pulled the ENTIRE thing apart because either I could find out what was wrong, or all is lost anyways. Who knows what the rain could do to it?

With no luck, I did a quick search online about the model and found that this one just had some defective firmware (Who knew monitors had filmware??) I installed it, ran it, it took about 20 seconds and it worked!

Lesson learned once again: google is your friend

Most memorable coworker? Definitely one of our devs in the first company I worked at. He was around fifty, quirky as fuck but damn knowledgeable about pretty much everything. Think some kind of uncle Iroh who could build his own compiler.
I haven't learned as much from university as I learned from our talks during smoking breaks. He never judged anyone for not knowing something (even really basic stuff) and was actually happy if he could help. Now, a few years later I still find myself applying techniques for conceptualizing software he explained to me on the balcony and I have to say I wouldn't be half the dev I am today if I'd have never met him so I guess that counts as memorable.

> Root struggles with her ticket
> Boss struggles too
> Also: random thoughts about this job

I've been sick lately, and it's the kind of sick where I'm exhausted all day, every day (infuriatingly, except at night). While tired, I can't think, so I can't really work, but I'm during my probationary period at work, so I've still been doing my best -- which, honestly, is pretty shit right now.

My current project involves legal agreements, and changing agent authorization methods (written, telephone recording, or letting the user click a link). Each of these, and depending on the type of transaction, requires a different legal agreement. And the logic and structure surrounding these is intricate and confusing to follow. I've been struggling through this and the project's ever-expanding scope for weeks, and specifically the agreements logic for the past few days. I've felt embarrassed and guilty for making so little progress, and that (and a bunch of other things) are making me depressed.

Today, I finally gave up and asked my boss for help. We had an hour and a half call where we worked through it together (at 6pm...). Despite having written quite a bit of the code and tests, he was often saying things like "How is this not working? This doesn't make any sense." So I don't feel quite so bad now.

I knew the code was complex and sprawling and unintuitive, but seeing one of its authors struggling too was really cathartic.

On an unrelated note, I asked the most senior dev (a Macintosh Lisa dev) why everything was using strings instead of symbols (in Rails) since symbols are much faster. That got him looking into the benchmarks, and he found that symbols are about twice as fast (for his minimal test, anyway), and he suggested we switch to those. His word is gold; mine is ignorable. kind of annoying. but anyway, he further went into optimizing the lookup of a giant array of strings, and discovered bsearch. (it's a divide-and-conquer lookup). and here I am wondering why they didn't implement it that way to begin with. 🙄

I don't think I'm learning much here, except how to work with a "mature" codebase. To take a page from @Rutee07, I think "mature" here means the same as in porn: not something you ever want ot see or think about.

I mean, I'm learning other things, too, like how to delegate methods from one model to another, but I have yet to see why you would want to. Every use of it I've explored thus far has just complicated things, like delegating methods on a child of a 1:n relation to the parent. Which child? How does that work? No bloody clue! but it does, somehow, after I copy/pasted a bunch of esoteric legacy bs and fussed with it enough.

I feel like once I get a good grasp of the various payment wrappers, verification/anti-fraud integration, and per-business fraud rules I'll have learned most of what they can offer. Specifically those because I had written a baby version of them at a previous job (Hell), and was trying to architect exactly what this company already has built.

I like a few things about this company. I like my boss. I like the remote work. I like the code reviews. I like the pay. I like the office and some socializing twice a year.

But I don't like the codebase. at all. and I don't have any friends here. My boss is friendly, but he's not a friend. I feel like my last boss (both bosses) were, or could have been if I was more social. But here? I feel alone. I'm assigned work, and my boss is friendly when talking about work, but that's all he's there for. Out of the two female devs I work with, one basically just ignores me, and the other only ever talks about work in ways I can barely understand, and she's a little pushy, and just... really irritating. The "senior" devs (in quotes because they're honestly not amazing) just don't have time, which i understand. but at the same time... i don't have *anyone* to talk to. It really sucks.

I'm not happy here.
I miss my last job.

But the reason I left that one is because this job allows me to move and work remotely. I got a counter-offer from them exactly matching my current job, sans the code reviews. but we haven't moved yet. and if I leave and go back there without having moved, it'll look like i just abandoned them. and that's the last thing I want them to think.

So, I'm stuck here for awhile.
not that it's a bad thing, but i'm feeling overwhelmed and stressed. and it's just not a good fit. but maybe I'll actually start learning things. and I suppose that's also why I took the job.

So, ever onward, I guess.
It would just be nice if I could take some of the happy along with me.

English is my second language. Today I learned Fedora is not just a Linux distro. It's also a name of a hat.
Guess the old logo made sense.

Today I told my lead developer that I liked star wars episode 8.

I got grilled pretty hard.

Like, I can drop a db and the motherfucker ain't gon give a fuck. But God forbid a mofocka likes episode 8.

That is a big no no to him.

Manager had told me that I should keep that opinion of the movie to myself.

Lesson learned.

Today was fucking awesome!

I always wanted to do a project in C++ since I've been more of a Java guy for years now.
And today, I finally wrote a full console program in C++! (For windows, it's a .exe)

The purpose of that program is to show if a file has a file lock on it (because of copying for example).

It started as simple as that, but got complicated quickly:
- It needs colors! So I added colors.
- Just a single file? Boring. I need wildcards, so I can put a * for anything in the file name! Jup.
- Just one directory? Boring. I need a recursive directory walk! Got it.
- But wait! There has to be an option to switch between recursive and wildcard/single mode! So I checked if the first argument equals "-r"! Hacky but works.
- Oh uh... that spams a lot now! The purpose was to show locked files, so I need another argument to specify that I only want to see locked files! Damn now it get's hard... I need a Linux-like command line argument parser (this -h and -s "hello" stuff). So I took the opportunity to write one myself! Done.
- Refactoring everything to use my new fancy parser...
- Adding more and more arguments, just because I can:
- "-d" hides "access denied" messages
- "-l" shows only locked files
- "-r" activates recursive directory walk
- "-f" formats everything nicely, basically printf("%-150.150s | %s", filename, locked); a maximum width which get's truncated if too long so everything lines up nicely
- "-h" which of course displays the help page
- "-w file" watches a file, if the file is locked it will refresh every 500ms, if it's still locked nothing happens, if it's unlocked, the program prints "unlocked" in green and exits. And yes, it does have a rotating line (something like this: "-" "\" "|" "/" "-" and so forth...)

That project was just awesome to make. I learn languages fastest if I just do a big project in them, and today, I really learned a lot.

Thank you for reading all this!

Almost 3 years ago I contacted an IT company that was looking for developers. The job listing was vague at best but it was a 10 man company with huge international clients for content migration and improvement.

I had basically no prior development experience but got invited to the interview regardless. I took a test in Java, first time I had seen the language but I finished it with some help from Google. At the time I was still a student so I couldn't work full time either.

Disregarding all that, the team lead advised the CEO to hire me regardless, so he did.

Forward to today.

I still proudly work for this company and have been responsible for a complete redesign of their flagship product. I learned a great deal about software development and developed an amazing relationship with most of the employees. The company has quadrupled in size since and we are moving to a bigger office start of next year.

Sometimes life gives you gold, not lemons.

Boss: Hey, you were in that "Pike place fish market session" today. How was it?
Me: well, it was really motivational and inspiring. I learned few new things.
Boss: Great! Also let me tell you that you're again our employee of the week and we're considering you for the employee of the year award. No one got nominated so early in the job here.
Me: Thanks
Boss: So you wanted to talk to me. What was it about?
Me: Oh, I wanted to resign. Already sent the mail to you.

Today I learned Slovakia is in fact a version control system, not country.

Things you find on Wikipedia these days.. 🤔

I learned some fun things today!

Fun fact! A lot of things rely on python!
Fun fact! Python relys on a lot of things!
Fun fact! Updating just python and nothing else causes your entire fucking arch to break! ... Wait that's not fun. Shit!

FML.

Today I Learned that the Hooli logo, from Silicon Valley, exists in the FontAwesome library.

I don't know what to do with this information.

So today I learned i can pay my property taxes online. The way you pay is:

1. Enter address (street #, I live in an apt)
2. It will show all matches **including the owners full name**
3. If you click view, it shows the full account history...

Today I wrote a regex expression that worked on the first try. Today I learned that the hardest code to debug is bugless code.

my story so far

Hey guys. i just wantes to share my story becoming something i think is like a dev.
I was always interested in solving problems. my grandfather has a company with a bit over a 100 employees. one day i decided to start working there. he needed someone to build up the erp system (mostly maintenance). about a month after i started he decided to get a new erp system because the one he had would not fill his needs. not knowing how big this got i told him that i want to build it up. from getting the orders over production with machines to billing.
he agreed. after a short time we knew that even this new system does not fullfill our needs. but it was so damn expensive. i told my grandfather: trust me, i am handling this. no further costs. and i started to learn programming. i learned night and day (visual basics.net, sql, c#). since then i wrote about 8 additional modules for the system in coorperation with the users. today, 3 years later we are far ahead our market in terms of transparency and information flow. i worked very hard for this and it is a great feeling to see that the things i do help my colleagues and are used.

i never learned this stuff in school and i know that i cannot tell that i am a professional programmer.

but when someone asks me i tell them i am a programmer because my solutions work and i think i deserve to call me that.

thanks for reading :)

When a Coursera course is way better than the one offered by your university…
A university student's rant...

I study Electrical and Computer Engineering and during the first semester of the second year I selected an optional course: Web Programming. It was believed among students that the course would be really easy, and it was. All the student had to do was build a very simple website using HTML, CSS and a few line of JS. A website containing three or four pages all of which had to be validated using a markup validation service.

Yeah, sure, I passed the course just like everyone else who bothered enough to spend an hour or two working on the project. Oh, I almost forgot! We had an one-hour workshop on Dreamweaver!
So, by that point, everybody was a front-end developer, right?!

That happened over three years ago, and because of that course web-development didn’t impress me…

Thankfully, the last few months I’ve became interested in Web Development, and I’ve been reading some articles, spending time on smashing magazine, making some progress on FreeCodeCamp and taking relevant courses on Coursera!
In fact, a few days ago I completed the Coursera course “HTML, CSS and Javascript for Web Developers”.
Oh boy, the things I didn’t know that I didn’t know…

<sarcasm>Did you know there was a term called “responsive design” and that there are frameworks like bootstrap?</sarcasm>
Well, I d i d n ’ t k n o w ! ! ! (even though I had taken the university’s course).

I understand that bootstrap was introduced in 2011 and I took the university course in late 2012, but by that time, bootstrap was quite popular and also there were other frameworks available before bootstrap that could have been included in the course! (even today, there is no reference in responsive design in the university’s course).
In just five weeks the coursera course managed to teach me more, in a more organized and meaningful way than my university’s course in a whole semester!

When I started the coursera course I shared it with a friend of mine. His response: “yeah, sure, but web development is pretty easy… I didn’t spend much time to complete that project three years ago!”

That course three years ago gave birth to misconceptions in students' minds that web development is easy! Yeah, sure, it can be easy to built a simple, non responsive, non interactive website! But that's not how the world works nowadays , right?!

A few months ago, in the early days of August, I attended Flock, the Fedora community conference. During a break I spent some time speaking with a Red Hat employee about student internships. He told me, and I paraphrase: “We know that students don’t have a solid background and that they haven’t learned in the university what we need them to!”

Currently I’m planning to apply for a front-end developer internship position here in Greece.
Yesterday I wrote my CV, added university courses relevant to that position and listed coursera courses under independent coursework… While writing those I made these thoughts…

What if that course 3 years ago was as good as the coursera course… all the things I’d know by now…

Today I learned Mofo.com is an actual website. That is all.

My code review nightmare part 2

Team responsible for code 'quality' dictated in their 18+ page coding standard document that all the references in the 'using' block be sorted alphabetically. Easy enough in Visual Studio with the right-click -> 'Remove and Sort Usings', so I thought.

Called into a conference room with other devs and the area manager (because 'Toby' needed an audience) focusing on my lack of code quality and not adhering to the coding standard.

The numerous files in question were unit tests files

using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
<the rest of the usings>

T: "As you can see, none of these files' usings are in alphabetical order"
Me: "Um, I think they are. M comes before S"
T: "The standards clearly dictate system level references are to be sorted first."
Mgr: "Yes, why didn't you sort before checking this code in? T couldn't have made the standards any easier to follow. All you had to do is right-click and sort."
Me: "I did. M comes before S."
T: "No You Didn't! That is not a system reference!"
Me: "I disagree. MSTest references are considered a system level reference, but whatever, I'll move that one line if it upsets you that much."
Mgr: "OK smartass, that's enough disrespect. Just follow the fucking standard."
T: "And learn to sort. It's easy. You should have learned that in college"
<Mgr and T have a laugh>
Me: "Are all your unit tests up to standard? I mean, are the usings sorted correctly?"
T:"Um..well..of course they are!"
Me: "Lets take a look."

I had no idea, a sorted usings seems like a detail no one cares about that much and something people do when bored. I navigate to project I knew T was working on and found nearly all the file's usings weren't sorted. I pick on one..

using NUnit;
using Microsoft.Something.Other;
using System;
<the rest of the usings>

Me: "These aren't sorted..."
T: "Uh..um...hey...this file is sorted. N comes before M!"
Me: "Say that again. A little louder please."
Mgr: "NUnit is a system level nuget package. It's fine. We're not wasting time fixing some bug in how Visual Studio sorts"
Me: "Bug? What?..wait...and having me update 10 or so files isn't a waste of time?"
Mgr: "No! Coding standards are never a waste of time! We're done here. This meeting is to review your code and not T's. Fix your bugs and re-submit the code for review..today!"

Today I learned....

N e v e r, fucking e v e r chmod/ chown permissions recursive on the linux /etc folder❗

I did yesterday (, because I am fucking dumb and know little about linux systems) and got the result today. My whole mailserver wasn't working.
After fucking tons of googling and searching and log-digging I found that postfix and opendkim require specific permissions on their respective folders and files.

After changing a fucking amount of permissions on those fucking files the fucking mailserver worked and I can send and receive mails, now. 😤😤😤

What a torture. Lesson learned. Never will repeat this mistake.

Dear diary,
I've always thought companies not using any kind of vcs is a myth. Today I learned that one of my friends is working for such a company.

What I learned while developing AI today:

Lots of arrays... too many arrays...

I learned a valuable lesson today about the life of a manager. I’m not a manager, but I am a senior level dev.

Today I was told there wasn’t room on the new team for 1 person, and I had pick that last team member. I had to choose between a friend who really isn’t cut out to be a dev and a non friend who is a better dev.

I talked through my reasoning and ultimately chose to put the friends job in jeopardy. They told me that I had solid leadership traits for being able to separate my emotions from my decision making. But I felt like a piece of shit.

I cried back at my desk. The friend doesn’t know yet and I can’t tell them. Is this what execs feel when they have to let people go?

today i learned bios manuals made ram sticks look fucking massive

Today I learned what GNU acronym stands for:

GNU = GNU's Not Unix!

😂 why doesn't Computer Science have more acronyms like that?

I posted a "Periodic Table of Human Intellect" I created today, and thought it was worth sharing.

Ages:

0-14 = Dumb as fuck.

15-21 = Learning useless shit.

22-28 = Claiming to know everything. *

29-35 = Reality sets in.

36-48 = Fuuuuuuuuu...

48-59 = Deal with it and watch your step.

60+ = ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Of course, I'm still in the process of testing the predicted results of 48+ - but, I'm looking forward to no longer giving even half a shit.

(* Based on everything useless that they've learned.)

So I have been working at the same company for five years, doing pretty much all the IT stuff. Sys admin, help desk, you name it. I've also developed a fair amount of in-house software for the company.

Today, I learned from a trusted source that they are actively interviewing people to replace me. I probably have a week, maybe two until I'm fired. To my knowledge I've done nothing to warrant this.

I've been looking around lately for a new job anyway, but without any sense of urgency. I have put in several applications with very few responses though.

I have 5 years experience doing this professionally and 15 total years of dev experience, but only a GED.

I'm not sure why I'm not getting any responses from my applications, but I'm pretty scared right now. I have a 5 month old baby, a wife and a teenager that all depend on me.

I don't know what to do...

Devs are my closest friends and I have learned so much from you all.

They ask some of the best questions, their skill set is ever evolving, they have the real problem solving mindset, they are critical towards any and everything in a good way, and so much more.

There was this thread asking what a bad Product Manager is and this answer takes the cake.

The point highlighted in red is the ultimate truth.

Devs are most innovative people of our times. Big shout-out to you all and thank you for making me who I am today :)

Today I learned that coding in front of a room full of developers while they watch me code, sends me into anxiety mode and I forget how to type properly. Now all my coworkers think i type at 2 works a minute. yay :/

Another non programming related rant although kinda tech related.
So I work in a distribution center and today I learned box packing.

1. THEIR LEGACY ASS SYSTEM ONLY RUNS ON IE (FUCK ME IN THE ASS SIDEWAYS PLEASE).
2. SYSTEM CONSTANTLY FREEZES.
3. THE HAND SCANNERS RUN ON AN OLD FUCKING LEGACY WINDOWS (PRE 2000 I THINK) SYSTEM AND IS SLOW AS MOTHERFUCKING HELL.

Yes, it is VERY frustrating to have to work with this FUCKING SHIT THE WHOLE MOTHERFUCKING DAY.

Plus side today, the locations I had to pick from today included 200, 403 and 404. Had loads of inside jokes about not being able to find locations and not having permission etc 😆

31st December 2016, I had signed up for devRant.

It's my cake day today. Feels so good to be part of this community, have learned so much, made some of the greatest friends here.

2021 was a mind fuck. Taxing and draining. Very little growth and even less learnings.

I realised that I am in a toxic environment.

Lately, no philosophy, therapy, supplements, activity, work, etc. has been helping me to get back to my original self.

I used to spiral down with a lot of negative self talk and playing the victim card.

Just day before yesterday, I decided to listen to some affirmations on the Tube and that actually helped me bounce back.

I started socialising and stepping out to attend gigs and just be outdoors as much as I could.

My surroundings changed and so did my thought process.

Hence, I made a decision to continue affirmations and slowly change my surroundings, even if that demand domestic relocation.

Things are starting to look positive after a long, loooooong, time.

I also need more sun exposure for my vitamin D3 deficiency and steady dose of serotonin.

I feel lot clear in head and heart. My goals are clearer and I am ready to start working hard and be my original past self again.

I love you all and I really wish you all achive all your wishes and dreams, be happier and healthier in 2022 with ton of success and money.

Hello everyone.
I've seen people doing story/rant to introduce themselves, and I never done that, probably because I'm terrible at doing so, and the more people their is, the more complicated it gets for me. 😥
Usually I try to blend in, and be the same color as the wall. But I want to try something different, so bear with me as I go through this painful process. 😶

So here I am, a lonely dev, who only have friends through a screen, living in a dark room only lit by green leds (tho sometimes it turn red/pink), lost in a small street of Paris. I usually avoid posting on social media, but here on devRant, I feel alright, somehow, it feels like home... 🤗

Started developing at 14 with html and php, then css and js (with the later still being a mystery to me). 🤔
I never really had a real job. Had 3 month as an intern into a human size web agency, and despite the recommandation they gave, I didn't like the job... Dropped from school and self learned everything I know today. Did a certain amount of personal projects, but no publication for lack of confidence. As of today, I'm 28. 🙂

Then a year and half ago, I changed to c# with unity3D, and I had a ton of fun since. 😄
Learned cg effect, texturing, 3d, a bit of animation. I'm working on a project of indi game with two people that are my only social interaction outside of my family, and now devRant. I don't mind being lonely tho. 😯

But this community is awesome, so I'm glad I stumbled across that sad face on the play store. 😄

Also it's 7:30am, I didn't sleep because of this post, I'm tired, and yes I'm an idiot.

I helped a homeless man with a really bad foot condition down the stairs to get to the subway platform along with bringing down his wheelchair. Just his luck that the elevator was out of service. The man cried and said that he wished more people like me existed in the world but the world he knew was long gone from his grasp.

My problem with that situation was that people just ignored him and look disgusted at him....since when did we as humans lose faith in each other to the point that we ultimately care about differences, status, and appearance before anything else?

Such a sad fucking world we live in today and I had just learned that he used to be a programmer and worked at IBM back in the days (he had a really old decrepit badge too and we shared some programming woes before we got on separate trains).

Bless him and fuck everyone else who stood by and watched the poor man suffer. Those people are worse than shit, they are the scum of the Earth in my eyes.

Today I learned the hard way that losing your app's key store means no more updating , bug fixing , performance boosting , features adding ...
The app had like 5k downloads on the play store ..
Lost the key when one of my hard drives burned ..
Lesson of the day : keep your keys safe .
*trying to stay strong*

I learnt to navigate in Vim 🤩.

Ik it's not much. But had heard so much about Vim and Emacs (tho still don't know why are they so popular, or how to use them), but I kept my distance after the first time I could not quit the application.

Today I learned how to break captcha using tensorflow !
Wondering what is the use of captcha while it can be broken so easily?

Today I learned that there is a person who exists, called Logan Paul, who doesn't do anything, but is enormously famous, presumably, for being famous. None of the hundreds of people I follow on twitter follow him, which I find reassuring.

Today I learned a lesson from corporate survival 101.

The difference between get it done vs get it right.

Boss, manager always want to get it done, while developers always want to get it right, most of the time. If you don't listen to your boss, manager and insist get it right, will eventually cost your job. I saw many get it done code, either the dev moves to another team or already left. They avoid their own code forever.

Perhaps be a good student, not the smart student is a good way to survive. Thought????

Bit of an essay. TLDR: come Monday I'm either getting fired or promoted. And the CTO is a dickhead. If you think you work with me or know who I am, no you don't, shut the hell up.

Was having a discussion with my team, went on for a bit, at one point my manager mentioned that the CTO wanted me to go into the office occasionally, same thing I've had since I joined when they literally wanted me to move hundreds of miles to be close to the office mid covid when the office was closed. I give a nondescript answer. He's a bit more persistent, I snap a little but the conversation moves on. Discussion of company and team dynamics, at one point he makes a comment about people at another company being told if they don't go into the office they won't be eligible for promotion.

I ask everyone else on the call to leave.

I point out that 2 years ago me and him were interviewing candidates. He on a few occasions introduces me to candidates as a _senior_ engineer. My job title does not contain the word senior. I let it slide the first time, not worth it for a slip of the toung. Happens a couple more times, I take him aside and privately point out my job title does not contain the word senior. He says he didn't realise and thought I was.

My take away then: I'm expected to do the work of a senior without being paid for it and without being given the acknowledgement of the appropriate job title. I remind him of this. My job title hasn't changed. Fuck, I took a low ball offer when I joined and have had a minimal pay rise in like, 3 years. My tone is "not happy".

His response? He discussed promoting me with CTO however budged constraints. I somewhat understand, however.

We have promoted several people in the last few years. We have grown by hiring new people in the last few years (5 in a company of 30). There are ways to compensate someone in ways that do not impact day to day budget (shares, TC, total compensation, is normal terminology in the tech field for this). I ask why the hell should I travel a few hundred miles to the office to get get to know people, put effort in to a company that demonstrably doesn't value me? Particularly as all levels of management have completely failed at developing a social atmosphere during covid? My first month, I had 3 5 minute meetings with my manager a week. That was all of the communication I had with people. I literally complained and laid out what they should do instead, they adopted most of it.

I also ask him if he genuinely thinks being here is in my professional interest? My tone has well passed pissed off.

I will say, I actually quite like my manager, we have a good working relationship and I've learned a lot from him.

He makes some mediocre points, tries to give advice about value of shares. To me, the value of shares is zero until they are money. The value to the company, however, is that it's a sizeable chunk on their balance sheet and shares sheet that they have to be willing to justify. If I wanted money, I'd go work at a high frequency trading bank and make 5x what I'm on now. No joke, that's what they pay, I could get a job, came close in the past but went to amazon. He understands.

He says will discuss with CTO. They were on a call for like an hour. His tone has changed to "you will be promoted ASAP, comp may be structured as discussed". Point made.

I'm in this job because it's convenient, is easy for me. Was originally lower challenge than previous, has a range of chances to learn and _that's_ the value to me. He's suitably nervous.

Point made I think.

So given I swore a few times, at least once about the CTO. Interesting to see how it goes.

Message from him to the effect that he spoke to CTO, has been told to write a proposal for promotion (kinda standard), will discuss with HR on Monday as they're on holiday.

So, maybe not getting fired today?

Blood pressure still very high.

Last week my company thought it would be a great idea to introduce a new sh*tty internal web portal that gives federated access to aws (instead of using our own accounts to assume dev roles like we used to do).

This broke a lot of sh*t that simply used to ask for an MFA token and used our practically permissionless accounts to assume a proper dev role. An MFA token that we'd enter directly into the terminal/tool. It was very seamless. But nooooooo we now have to go a webpage, login with sso (which also requires mfa), click "generate credentials," copy-paste those into terminal/creds file and _then_ continue our aws cli call. Every. Single. Day.

BUT TODAY I HAD ENOUGH.

I spent the entire day rewriting the auth part of our tools so they would basically read the cookie that's set by the web portal, and use it to call the internal api that generates the credentials, and just automatically save those. Now all we need to do is log into the portal, then return to the tool and voilà, the tool's also got access! Sure, it's not as passive as just entering an MFA token directly, but it's as passive as it gets. Still annoyed by this sh*tty and unnecessary portal, but I learned a thing or two about cookies.

Some time ago I went for a job interview (Unity3D Dev). I have little experience in this field and never thought that I would get this job but wanted to gain some and thought that it would be a great opportunity.
So after the interview, which was great and I really enjoyed it, I've been tasked with making a simple minigame. Only requirements were that there have to be player controls, character must avoid obstacles and camera must be moving with player's progress. I've made a little spin on those. In 2d minigame I've created you are piloting simple (made out of 3d primitives) rocket. You have to avoid randomly spawned platforms. If you hit one, you explode. You also die, if you hit a wall or fall out of camera and hit Destroyer. Camera is constantly moving as long as you are moving. The spin is that you have very limited fuel. To regain it you have to land on said platforms with your thrusters. It took me around 12h to make this game. The only reason I know it is because they wanted this info. I've learned a bit while working on this minigame and had a lot of fun. It was a great impuls to start learning gamedev again and stop stagnation I fell in when I started my studies and work.
Today I've got response. Obviously I didn't get the job. They took more experienced person and I totally understand that. But there's more. They were so great to give me pretty extensive review of what was done good, what could be done better and how to gather more experience. They said that the game met their expectations and was written well. That's great, because I was worried that it would be bad since I haven't worked on graphics at all.
So, at least I got an impulse to start learning and maybe I'll even go for some game jam!

Today I Learned that "null" it's an object in JS.

AAAAARGH!

Sometimes I am so motivated .Today I tried coding in car .(I was in backseat)
20 min: Damn,my eyes hurt😞
40 min: Why do I feel dizzy😵
50 min : Oooh...I feel like puking.🤢
51 min : Dad......Stop the caaa....
Nothing I'm done
Lesson learned

Today I learned that someone wrote a Python interpreter in JavaScript called Brython. So now you can include a framework to write shitty code in a buggy framework and tell your users to throw more hardware at it.

The guy I heard this from also believed that his code would somehow be "compiled" rather than what's essentially a framework be loaded and then execute code in a language not native to the browser...

So now you can write JavaScript where it doesn't belong in Node and write Python where it doesn't belong through a framework. Frontend and backend are so passé, we might as well start calling it fluid instead.

FULLSCHTAK!!!

🙂🔫

Until today, I haven’t worked on a react app or front end project in about 5 months.

Hoooo boy. What a fucking rollercoaster ride. One minute you’re doing some slick shit you learned how to do from working on backend projects, the next you’re screaming at your linter and pissing on your keyboard.

2/5 stars do not recommend.

I’m out.

*ascends into the cloud*

Today I learned in a cafe why (some) users think that Facebook doesn't allow them data control. Due to drunkness I'm paraphrasing here, but it went something like this:

- I don't trust Facebook, because my posts that I make are visible to people that I didn't want to have it be seen to.

> Audience controls. Use them.

- This guy in town sent me a friend request, why would he be able to??1!1

> He and you share hometown. So probably friend suggestions based on you both explicitly sharing location, or he just visited your profile on name and wanted to get in touch with you. Socializing on the internet, it exists.

That's the kind of user that's roaming the facebooks on the internets and the googles I guess? The type of user that's surprised that their Facebook games and nametests expose information that they explicitly consent to? Give me a break. I care deeply about privacy, but this is just ridiculous.

On a different note, why the fuck is not a single one of those very same fucking Facebook users worried about 25-ish% of websites running their JavaScript (which you can check and block using NoScript and co.), which is the *actual* privacy threat? But muh nametests!!!

Fuck ignorant users!!!

being told to lead a team of junior developers for a project when i was 18

i never had any formal CS education so i thought the management was joking, but a week after, i was called into a meeting with the junior developers and we were tasked with a project that needs to be completed within 4 months, with me as the lead

the project was successful and after that im occasionally given the task to lead a project every now and then

this happened a few years ago and its still the most confidence-boosting experience ever happened to me, the things i learned during those 4 months are still applicable to my career today

Today I Learned: Firefox CAN NOT open a 31MB XML file.

Greatest lesson I learned from myself. Work for yourself. Create your own business while you are working. Be your own boss. Don't rely in employment alone.

I got laid off today. My boss business is a digital agency. Our client stopped working with several agencies including us because of an order from their mother company to only use 1 agency. My boss has no choice but to let me go.

Even if you got the skills and you're doing good in your work, these things can happen. It is beyond our control. I like my company and my boss but reality hits hard. I thought I will be with this company for a very very long time. I want to settle here and build my business but still work together with my boss. I have so many plans that instantly disappeared.

Oh well just be strong and move on. Happy job hunting to me again. Maybe this is God's plan to teach me some things. For me to create my own business seriously while working.

Hey guys!
Been away for some time. Didn't have anything to tell tbh - until today.

As you may remember I started a new apprenticeship at big (and super cool) company. We develop software for various platforms.
I'm currently working on a plugin displaying some weatherdata. This plugin is supposed to be in 2 of our products. One is pretty nice but a pain in the ass to compile. The second one is a pure WTF. It's a web app with approximately half the functionality but 5x loading time (without demo data!) of the other product.
Well, today I learned why we have this loading time. They use I don't know how much different js frameworks and libraries for every single simple task. "It's easy and Facebook does it too. Besides that why are there frameworks if you could do it native?" HMMM LET ME GUESS BECAUSE SOME PEOPLE ARE FUCKING LAZY!?
Why do you need MULTIPLE frameworks for a simple web display!?

Today I learned that there are people that disable javascript...

Quote: "It's both insecure and resource intensive"

Then he went that only if the script is free he would see what it is to run it.

He also said that he would never allow any js file that comes from google even jquery...

I wonder, how does a man like this live today when most of the websites are heavily dependant on javascript?

I wouldn't live in an isolated world just to be 100% secure, I want my good user experience xD

Big rant.
Just finished my first year of uni. I took an extra course on c# (mvc, entity framework) and android development in java. We learned a lot of stuff and at the end of the semester they held a contest. We had to develop an app respecting their specifications and add something from ourselves for extra points. Problem was that we were supposed to work on the project during our finals, which we didn't, finishing uni is on the first place. But we had a week after finals to work on it. I, like many others, slept very littlre during that week, only to work on that app, I worked for more than 13 hours a day to finish it (it was a pretty big app) and I was pretty happy with the end result. Today they were supposed to announce the apps that made it to the final. They just announced that no app deserves to be in the final. They know that we had finals, but that we could still do better. They just peed on our work, probably threw our code away, fucking +13 hours a day, 5-6 hours of sleep everyday, almost no fun for a whole week after finals, and they think no one deserves to win. Fuck them, fuck their shit contest. Fuck you essensys, I hope your devs read this, fuck you bell ends.

When I was a graduate I often had to do proof of concepts and one had to be done by the weekend, I'd only been given it on the Wednesday. After a few sleepless nights I had it working or so I thought. On the Friday afternoon the CTO had a look at it and spotted a bug, he told me about it and I stayed in the office until about 10 when I finally managed to get some kind of fix in place. I emailed him told him I thought but was working and shouldn't happen again.

A few hours later no response I get a phone call from him screaming, shouting and swearing calling me useless and a waste of space etc. Etc. To the point I logged in desperately trying to fix the issue in a very hastily written integration and ended up having quite a major panic attack woke up on the floor and immediately went back to work. On the Saturday morning one of the senior Devs logged in and managed to fix it in the database and everything went fine in the end.

I went into work on Monday fully expecting to be fired from the way the CTO was speaking to me, I went to my line manager at the time and he just said don't worry. I left it in his
hands and things went back to normal. That call put a pretty serious dent in my confidence for years, but I learned a few valuable lessons which I stick to today.

Never work on serious shit after 6, use a second mobile for work which is turned off at 5 o'clock, properly test all fixes and always ALWAYS have someone in between graduates and senior management because honestly they can't handle the shit that's flung from above.

Today I learned that in Unix/Linux or most command lines, when user is asked to choose an option as [Y/n], the uppercase one signifies the default.

I thought they made it a little harder as a security feature to prevent accidental keypress, and I’m shift+Y ing this for the last eight freaking years!!!!! Every time!

Today I learned that mobile development is a lot more difficult than web development and I’m never going to scoff at a badly designed mobile app ever again.

I'M BACK TO MY WEBDEV ADVENTURES GUYS! IT TOOK ME LIKE 4 MONTHS TO STOP BEING SO FUCKING DEPRESSED SO I CAN ACTUALLY STAND TO WORK ON IT AGAIN

I learned that the linear gradient looks cool as FUCK. Honestly not too fond of the colors I have right now, but I just wanted to have something there cause I can change it later. The page has evolved a bunch from my original concept.

My original concept was the bar in the middle just being a URL bar and having links on the sides. If I had kept that, it would have taken me a few hours to get done. But as time went on when I was working on it, my idea kept changing. Added the weather (had a forecast for a while but the code was gross and I never looked at the next days anyways, so I got rid of it and kept the current data). I wanted to attempt an RSS reader, but yesterday I was about to start writing the JavaScript to parse the feeds, then decided "nah", ended up making the space into a todo list.

The URL bar changed into a full command bar (writing the functions for the commands now, also used to config smaller things, such as the user@hostname part, maybe colors, weather data for city and API key, etc)....also it can open URLs and subreddits (that part works flawlessly). The bar uses a regex to detect if it's a legit URL (even added shit so I don't need http:// or https://), and if it's not, just search using duckduckgo (maybe I'll add a config option there too for search engines).

At this very moment it doesn't even take a second to fully load. It fetches weather data from openweathermap, parses it, and displays it, then displays the "user" name grabbing a localstorage value.

I'm considering adding a sidebar with links (configurable obviously, I want everything to be dynamic, so someone else could use my page if they wanted), but I'm not too sure about it.

It's not on git yet because I was waiting until I get some shit finished today before I commit. From the picture, I want to know if anyone has any suggestions for it. Also note that I am NOT a designer. I can't design for shit.

@MissDirection today I learned what it truly means to be a "codeslut". I understand the decision you made to change your username due to the circumstances but I want you know that I'm now seriously considering prepending 'CodeSlut' to my username.

To be a code slut, in my definition, is to fuck with all things code.
I don't remember the idiot(s) that murked the name with shame, I remember being scornful towards them for their immaturity...But now I know whole the truth, and that what they were also unknowingly shaming was any engineer who has had an interest in anything related to code. Fuck them, in a sense they've fucked themselves, because I personally believe that as developers there's a little (code)slut in each and every one of you. Those who are willing to fuck with all of it and have a damn good time doing it. To dabble in a little bit of this and a little bit of that from time to time. Whether or not we stick with it is irrelevant, it's the experience we gain from it that makes us better people. To shame a code slut is to shame the pursuit of knowledge. And to shame the pursuit of knowledge is to shame my purpose in life. I stand by my pursuit to fuck with it all, no tech is sacred - I will fuck with it!

Please @MissDirection don't let my new username stop you from ever changing yours back to what it was or take this as some form of a personal insult/joke. I'm serious - I understand now. I'm not even sure if you realised it, but QueenCodeSlut held such beauty and truth to it that many(including myself) couldn't even begin to fathom. That is enlightenment of the utmost pulchritude, please accept this username change as a gesture of honor and respect towards you and any other fellow humans with their own endeavors of truth and knowledge.

Today I learned that the my new teams choice to use a mostly undocumented/unused framework over a well known/documented one was decided by a coin toss.

I can you about one really annoying coworker: Me.

The first thing I did as a sysadmim was to break my colleague's rc helicopter. After that I decided to learn Python, pestering him with questions once every two minutes. I developed, using the word loosely, some scripts that I wrote directly on the production servers, with predictable results.

After a while, I broke less things than I fixed. I learned a lot those years. Today I'm still amazed by the patience and knowledge of this guy; I owe most of my career to him.

These days I have a brilliant job stopping morons such as myself from breaking to many things. I try to be as patient and I hope to be as knowledgeable.

Today I learned that a user is a monkey with a baseball bat sitting in front of a pc.

Today I experienced cruelty of C and mercy of Sublime and SublimeLinter.

So yesterday I was programming late at night for my uni homework in C. So I had this struct:

typedef struct {
int borrowed;
int user_id;
int book_id;
unsigned long long date;
} entry;

and I created an array of this entry like this:

entry *arr = (entry*) malloc (sizeof(arr) * n);

and my program compiled. But at the output, there was something strange...

There were some weird hexadecimal characters at the beginning but then there was normal output. So late at night, I thought that something is wrong with printf statement and I went googling... and after 2 hours I didn't found anything. In this 2 hours, I also tried to change scanf statement if maybe I was reading the wrong way. But nothing worked. But then I tried to type input in the console (before I was reading from a file and saving output in a file). And it outputted right answer!!! AT THAT POINT I WAS DONE!!! I SAID FUCK THIS SHIT I AM GOING TO SLEEP.

So this morning I continued to work on homework and tried on my other computer with other distro to see if there is the same problem. And it was..

So then I noticed that my sublime lint has some interesting warning in this line
entry *arr = (entry*) malloc (sizeof(arr) * n);
Before I thought that is just some random indentation or something but then I saw a message: Size of pointer 'arr' is used instead of its data.

AND IT STRUCT ME LIKE LIGHTNING.

I just changed this line to this:
entry *arr = (entry*) malloc (sizeof(entry) * n);

And It all worked fine. At that moment I was so happy and so angry at myself.

Lesson learned for next time: Don't program late at night especially in C and check SublimeLInter messages.

Story time.....

I only had one mentor. I am a self-learned guy.

He was my mentor in a company where I was interning. He was a Senior Android Developer and I was just a rookie Android Developer working under him.

He never taught me directly but at times he used to send me links of a source for the problem I was having.

At the end of my first working day, I asked him-"Do you think I was useful to you today? "

He bluntly replied-"Nope, none at all"

Those words hit me so hard. My eyes became moist. When I thought about It I did realize that day I was overwhelmed by so many topics I was new to. I was determined to work my ass off from the next day. And I did.

Fast forward to the last day at the company. It was 31'st December, we were having New Years Eve's party. Everyone was a little drunk except for the interns. In front of everyone, my mentor said-"You were the best intern I have ever had such a good intern that I did not have to work last few days", everyone agreed and then he hugged me.

I was on the seventh heaven that day. Throughout my journey back home, I had a broad smile on my face.

After using Linux every day for 3 years, today I learned that the first parameter to ln is relative to the second one and not to the current location.

After using Linux every day for 3 years today I learned that listing directories requires the execute permission.

In a misdirected attempt to solve my problems I also learned the basic concepts of SELinux before realising that SELinux is disabled on the host and not present on the guest.

Someone I know quite well just told me that they have a hard drive with a S.M.A.R.T warning and "the internet says" that he can fix the problem by running this amazing built in windows tool called "chkdsk" (he literally learned about this today, as a long-term windows user) or by reformatting the drive.
I've told him that neither of those methods will work, since it is a hardware fault that is being reported by S.M.A.R.T.
He said that there is hope that it'll work, since someone on the internet said so.

ಠ_ಠ

You know how, sometimes, you start being tooooo proactive and implement stuff even though your boss never told you to do it? Well, that happened at my previous job, and apparently almost everyone at the team questioned the changes and made me look like the fool I was. That day, I learned that you should never implement stuff that wasn't asked... And it was humbling, since I was an arrogant fuck and basically I was speaking loudly and denied the criticism... But today, I'm better, I know how and when to shut up, and I accept criticism now.

Fuuuuck!!!

In 2017 I had a reeeeally sweet offer for a Java-gig. Equity, quarterly evaluations with potential raises, exciting products, world class experts as colleagues and all. The catch was relocating across the entire country, and due to some family health stuff, I was forced to decline.

Today I learned that the company is valued at about $150M. The equity alone would have been worth around 1.5M today, and thats not all. One of the founders are giving away about 15% of the shares to the employees, landing them about 100K in equity each.

And here I sit, wondering about what the next electric bill will be...

!rant
TODAY WAS A SUCCESS!
-learned how to forward ports
-hosting a minecraft server
-made that stupid HP stream USEFUL
-i actually feel good about myself

note: modded server. You'll need Mantle (1.7.10), Tinker's Construct (1.7.10) and Ultra Block Compression (1.7.10).

pretty sure whitelist is disabled. the max is 50 players, not sure how good the connection will be. be nice to the ops, YoungWolves and Mehrsun

ip: 66.243.225.51
(default port)

again please be polite, the two OPs are not techy at all, but very nice gals

The story of how I got my dream job.

I was working for a company with a job I got just after graduating university. It was ok, not very exciting tech but I learned a lot by just surrounding myself with professional code monkeys. I was there for about a year when my company bought parts of another company and there was talk about people getting fired. This made me worried since I was the last one to get hired, so I started looking around for other jobs. I received this e-mail from a company saying they were looking for interns, what a coincidence! I adjusted my CV and sent it in.

--A few weeks pass--

It's Friday and I'm at a dinner party, it's 10pm and someone is calling me. I pick up and it's a recruiter from this company. I get very nervous but the alcohol helps me keep my cool, I pass the initial idiot test and they invite me for an interview. Yay!

I go to work on Monday and in a 1-on-1 and I tell my boss about the upcoming interview, he gives me a high-five :)

The interview is approaching and I'm feeling that I'm about to get sick, I refuse to believe this so I start taking a lot of medicine (painkillers, cough medicine etc.). I feel a bit better and thank the gods for medication.

--D-day--

I wake up, put on my nicest clothes and get on the train. I had one hour to spare just in case, which was well needed because the fucking train is late by 30 minutes. I'm still heavily medicated because of my ongoing fever. When I arrive I basically have to run there and somehow I manage to pick up a coffee on the way there which I devour in two seconds. I'm ready for the interview!

Some guy meets me in reception and the first thing he says is "My colleague doesn't speak our language so we'll have to speak english". This is fine, I speak good english but I was not prepared for this so it caught me off-guard and made me even more nervous. We get in and start talking. Things are going OK despite my numbed brain. I try to make eye-contact to make a good impression with the foreign engineer but he keeps staring somewhere which is making me nervous.

We get to the technical part on a whiteboard and this is where my brain decides to stop communicating. I'm presented a simple task which I'm struggling with finishing, and I feel the embarrassment coming over me. "NOOOOO THIS IS MY DREAM JOB, THIS CANNOT BE HAPPENING!" I'm thinking to myself. After making myself look like a complete arsehole for some time we wrap it up and just before I step out the door I say to the engineer "You should checkout my Github page, I have lots of interesting stuff there" and he says "I'll be sure to do that" but I don't believe him.

I leave the office in fury (of myself) and make my way to the train station and even though it's the middle of the day I quickly devour two beers to calm my nerves and make me feel a bit better. I was so damn disappointed in myself, I wasted the opportunity of a lifetime! I go back home to my regular (now shitty) job.

--Two days later--

I get a call from an unknown number. I pick up the phone and it's the same recruiter guy. "So how did you think it went?" he says. "To be honest, I think it went really bad", I replied. "What? Really? Because they loved you, you got the job". (this was an obvious recruiter lie) "... wat, are you sure you called the correct person?" I said and he just laughed. The day after I quit my old job the whole department gets fired - such impeccable timing.

--A few months later--

I finish my internship and they want to keep me. I'm so happy. The engineer that was in the interview works on my team. I ask him "Why did you hire me? You know as well as I do that my interview was horrible". It turns out he _did_ look at my Github profile and that's how he knew I could write code. I also heard later that for my position there was about 2000 applicants and somehow I made the interviews.

I still work there today and I couldn't be happier (Sorry for the long text).

Today I learned that the big-endian and little-endian naming comes from Gulliver's Travels, where Lilliputs argue over whether to break eggs on the little-end or big-end!

My boss just called me and asked to write a email informing our clients to not to download the update we pushed this very evening because Application is crashing when you will open that particular page.

What went wrong? One of our senior Developer, let's call him Mr. X, is totally against of testing the app before deploying it to clients. He believes that as i have created the application, i know exactly what to change to accomplish a requested feature or bug in application.

When a ticket assigned to him about a bug in the application, he simply make some changes in code, create the package and send it to test department. How do I know? He even boast it in front of us.

Most of the time it works but not every time like today. And I am pretty sure my boss is not going to ask a explanation about this to him.

I have great respect for him. It's okay to have confidence but testing before sending it to anybody will not make you junior. Will it? Being a senior You are making others to be careless about his job.

That's what happen today. Mr. X failed so does the testing department. So am I. I am the head of testing department as well.

I am not blaming him. I just cant. It was our job to test app thoroughly. I am feeling pretty bad now. His confidence made me vulnerable. Say his confidence made me clearly a fool. Lesson has been learned though.

So today I attended FB developers circle F8 meet-up. It was awesome, made some new friends and even learned about new trends in technology field. And yes got this awesome stickers too....

Today I learned why it’s so important to have life outside engineering (better put, I remembered this).

For the last couple of weeks, we’ve been working hard to catch some deadlines, contributing to a large oss project. Getting up at 4am, working with the team in my timezone, having some time with family then working with people with 6-9 hour difference was extremelly challenging and I was so tired I literaly was a fucking pain to bear with.

Today, on Saturday, my wife started cleaning the bathroom sink drain. You know, started... “won’t fix” was not an option. First, the dirt and the smell, mmmmmm, you just have to love it. And then the thing collapses (yes, I was optimistic, trying to clean it just partly - I learned not to fix if it aint’t broken, I wonder where).

It’s of course built of trivial parts, but the water just finds its way. Needless to say, I am afraid of it :). In the end, it got resolved. Just as any bug we squash - with some anger and plenty of dirty words.

During the whole thing, I thought to myself, that all that stress at work is quite bearable; it put everything back into a perspective. Great feeling!

Help. I'm drowning in spaghetti code

I've been working at a working student (15 hours/ week) at a local software company for about a month now... and with everything I learned at college I'm kind of getting eye cancer here.
We still use SVN
We don't have any coding guidelines. No checkstyle, no overview over the program. When I started there I was just giving a ticket and they said good luck.
We just have some basic RCPTT Tests inside Eclipse and most of Themen don't work in the trunk because the gui got changed...
At least we have a ticket system but it doesn't get used by most of the working students.
I found 10 other bugs while reproducing and trying to fix 1 bug.
And I've never seen Java raped so badly. Today I saw a line that started with 6 brackets because whoever wrote it wanted to cast like there was no tomorrow. I see more instanceof in one day than in my whole devlife before.
The only thing we have is two normal employees that review our code before we are allowed to commit it into the trunk.
So yeah... I'm drowning in spaghetti-code.

[!dev]
Today I learned that although the frequency unit Hertz is named after a person, the German name for heart - the most human example of a periodic system - is also Herz, pronounced the same.

Upon reflection, I think that the amount of math I learned in school pales in comparison to the amount I learned about LaTeX. I could pretty reliably recreate the textbook rendition of the problem. Maybe it's just me but just knowing the solution felt too abstract. I want a solid looking execution of it.

I'm graduating today so I don't know how relatable this is for everyone else. I'm just reflecting.

Went for a job interview today, and learned something very important about myself...

...that I should be permanently banned from writing code on whiteboards, for any reason. I have never seen such ugly code in my entire life. Ugh...

Currently working as student part timer on a company that I really like.
When I'll finish my bachelor's degree, I will have been there for about 2-3 Years, additional to my 5 years working prior to that as a developer.

Today I learned, that our company doesn't usually pay the market price for devs (not a huge company, 150 employees, so it's understandable).
So now I don't know what to shoot for when discussing a raise after my degree. Should I still aim for market price? Should I argue with that and hope for the best?
I'm really unsure about that stuff...

Today I learned you shouldn’t keep your laptop plugged in all the time.

No one will understand me but you Devs.
I am a self taught developer who works in a digital marketing agency, when I was learning to code I wanted that the code I will produce will help people and make me happy, the only job i got is in digital marketing agency, because no one in my country will recrute a self taught bald ugly mid thirty fucker, then want them young and fresh, anyway, I proved that I can handle the job, so that I became the only dev in the agency.
the problem is that I reached a that checkpoint where I have to choose a path:
- I learned Node and React but I can't use them in my agency
- I work with wordpress and prestashop but I don't code, I use fucking theme forest templates

the only way to work with MERN is through remote, but I am not a senior yet, I only have to keep learning PHP but I can't advance in my current job since the projects don't require coding, and I feel that my agency will close the dev department because they put me in the designers office.

I don't want to reach 40 with nothing in my portfolio but shitty theme forest template rape, the stress from my current situation is killing me, I can't even start working on my portfolio website and blog because I can't think straight, my mind jump from "today I will build an api" to "no I need to build a custom wordpress theme" each 3 minutes, I don't sleep, the futur is dark, I am afraid that if I focus on wordpress and shit I will miss working in interesting projects, and if I focus on MERN I will never gain experience localy to become a full remote later.

many will agree with me that PHP is shitty but gets the work done, and I hate PHP because of prestashop, and we only live once, the only other job I found require wordpress and fucking prestashop, imagine living a live doing something you don't like, then die regretting every decision you make.

I might sound crazy for you, but I don't have many friends and I am an introvert working with designers and community managers ... so this is the only place I can write what I want.

if you reached here, I thank you for your time

So happy right now!

I just finished a project which I started today.
It is a java bytecode class/method/field renamer. You can rename those things inside a jar file. It has a nice dark-themed GUI and it works great :)

I'm just happy because I couldn't find something like this on the Internet and wanted it since I started learning programming. Also I am happy because I did it in 1 Day and learned so much about the Java Bytecode!

It's using ObjectWeb ASM btw.

Today I learned, that Firefox Devtools allows you to copy requests as a cURL commands. Guess how many times I "had to" write them by myself...

Today I learned that there are 26.9 million software developers in the world as of 2020.

That's only 0.35% of the World Population. We're special guys!

I am a Windows person. I always argue how great it is.

Well, not today.

I was today years old when I learned that you CANNOT uninstall store app via store ;p You need to go to settings / apps and functionality / your app / uninstall

The photo app (Yes the one bundled with win10) doesn't work if you use Hard drive compression AND it is a symlink for OneDrive (So you don't need to keep all photos on the drive). Fucking Paint works without problems.

Email client : If you alt+tab too fast after hitting 'Send email", there is 50% chances that email won't be send. Basiclly you need to hit "send" and wait until you see it in "sent" folder.

Well, as i'm ranting, here for Linux too :
I have a small ubuntu server VM, worked very well for last 6 months. Now "System in read only mode". Fucking apt-get upgrade fucked with something. I don't want to look, so I'll just rebuild a fresh vm.

And macOS should take sometyhing too : Who the fuck decided "enter" is for editing the name of file ?! really !

Well, ALL os are shit, all have downsides, I need my own OS. But I still want AA games... So windows for me.

Hey guys,

I think the topic of this week is very important.

Older, experienced devs are giving their skills and advices to the younger one.

Some of you maybe know it, I'm a young developer, who started his apprenticeship at september.

I'm feeling good there, the others are friendly. I learn a Lot there. I had experience before I started there. It's my Hobby to code so I started coding when I was 14.

You can't know anything, everyone makes mistakes, this is what I've learned and this is important to remember.
There are these days like today, when your Boss isn't there and you have to work alone. You have to do many things, and you are desperated because nothing Works, you can't ask anyone, you are completly alone. There are these days, when nothing seems to work. But there are also these days when everything Just Works fine and you are happy with yourself.
This is important to remember.
For me its very hard. Days like today are driving me crazy and I'm very sad, even when I know, that this is Kind of normal not to know everything and have Problems, especially when you are young as me and started your first apprenticeship 3 months ago.

Tomorrow I'm also alone, I'm a Little Bit feared of tomorrow (you say that in that Way? :P) When I think of tomorrow and that I don't know How to proceed and sitting there, I'm getting frustrated and Kind of sad. But I know that this will Make you even better some day, because you learn and gets better - day for day.

At least there was something good today. My stickers finally arrived! To Germany! That was fast! Thanks everyone, Thanks! And Thank you @dfox for building this great community!

What are you advices? And how you handle these situations? I hope tomorrow everything Works fine :/

I started working at a software company two weeks ago. Today I learned that their web app only runs so smoothly because of a single JS function called specialSnowflakeHandler()

Never had full time mentors, just some great examples from great people:

Some years ago, I was new on the job. They sent me to see a colleague for the "transfer of knowledge" as he was leaving and I had to take over his projects.

He greeted me with a big smile and said:
"Oh, look, I just spilled very accidentally a cup of coffee on my pc so I've lost all information. Only thing I remember is that you have a call with this project today at 14 o'clock. I'll be gone by then but don't worry, just say we are late with delivery and it will be fine. I hope you all the best with your new job!"

I'll always remember him. I learned the value of improvisation, the utility of a cup of coffee and how to take things easy.

I always dream of doing what I learned from him sooner or later.

I learned recently that you can inject SQL lines in some fields like Passwords or usernames on some websites. (Hacky hacky)

At work there is this intra website that is used to manage the parts of the radios and computers we repair.
Each piece has a specific number, and there is a tree with every pieces for each radio/computer.

When we get to repair one, we gotta change the pieces virtualy on the website. Sadly sometimes, the virtual pieces aren't marked like they followed the whole Radio from the place they come to the place we repair (we need it to replace the piece). People are just not doing their job, so we have to send emails and call for them do it so we can repair it. (This is already fucked up.)

Today, I had to replace a piece, but it was marked like it's not there. I called the guy, and it seems like he is on a vacation for weeks. My superior was super annoyed due to the urge of this task.

Guess who managed to change the _mainlocation_ of the _piece_ in the _radiopieces_ table. (Not actual names, you malicious cunt)

I spent 3 hours looking for the name of the fields and table. I don't know how many times I had to refresh the dam page to see I failed once again.
Hopefully I didn't have to guess all of them. Also the joy when I realised I succeed !!!

No one bats a eyes, and I'm here, feeling infinitely superior, as I might get punished for wanting to do my job.
I know it's basic moves to some of you, but dam it felt good.

Conclusion: Do what you have to, specially when it takes 5 minutes and people need it.

*knock knock*

Race condition!

Who's there ?

And thaaaat's the lesson i learned today after I spent two hours staring at code, to find out that the solution was just moving an unlock_mutex() a few lines down.

after beginning to learn numpy , i believe these packages were really created by some clown of a circus xD.
Everything is sooooo entertaining!!!

i learned java 3 years ago, but today if i had to crap out some crazy java or c++ expert , i would tell him about numpy's arrays...
Like , "hey dude python has this cool data structure in the numpy library called arrays, which can hold any datatypes in a kind of arraylist like fashion, and you can convert them from 1 dimensional to 1000 dimensional in just 1 line , and also do you know we can select any column with just array[position]? and even this position does not needs to be an integer, you can use a list , like array[[1,2,3]] will give you elements at array[1],array[2],array[3], and...."
wait, why is my friend dead ? xD
HAhahahaha

Today I had a problem with a JS framework. The only person who was available who could help me was the one I avoid, because he always knows everything better.
Well, after I asked if he had time for me, he sits next to me and I started to explain.
After looking around, he started blaming my backend code.
(I belong to the kind of dev that tries to write small and simple code. But I also often use the more complex features of the languages.) He suddenly started accusing everyday things in the backend like inheriting a class or using objects and basic data types together as parameters of a method (WTF???) Hell, all I could say at that moment was that I had a problem with this JS framework and not with the backend that worked well. He probably tried for over an hour to find the bug in the backend and just wouldn't listen, after that he gave up. I wonder what this bitch has learned over the years. Can it really be that he forgot the basics of a programming language? Or has the fool never worked with an inheritance before? I think he's an incapable piece of shit, he hasn't even patched my reported vulnerability in his project in the last half year, which allows to inject own code onto the server.
Because of such fucking morons I get a headache when I think about it. How can it be that he's got a higher degree and earns about 50% more. I should leave this company!

Well today is my last day at my current job. I have enjoyed the last 4 and a half years here and learned a lot.

This last week of my notice period has been surreal though and quiet a stark contrast to how things have been.

Before I was the "go to" person for pretty much the entire dev team even though I am hired as a front end dev (so my remit was the companies website). This included the backend devs who worked on the internal business software.

The last few days have felt like I was a "persona non-grata". Conversations that would end up being held at my desk are now held elsewhere and what few tickets I do have have been given over to others.

I knew on some level this would happen but living through it is a different story.

Anyhow, I am looking forward to the new role I am starting Monday but will certainly miss the old team very much!

guess what i learned today?

i have no creativity whatsoever.
or at least in a design sense.

i bought a website my first website a few weeks ago and the main page looks, well, barfable.

orange on blue? i have no where near enough css experience to pull that off. i ended up trying to make it like a linux distro (zorin os), which is neon blue on black.

i asked for advice on the ux stackechange network, and of course, two people with a low reputation both answered, and of course of course, both their answers contradicted each other.

welp, fuck me.

If you are more interested in “being right” (aka winning an argument) than learning from experiences (both your own and others), then I will not waste my time on you.

Story time:

As a member of a startup accelerator I had the privilege to run into many types of people.

There were 2 entrepreneurs who liked to argue a lot. They would argue not just with other members but with advisors, investors, EIRs, everyone. They were much more interested in “being right” than learning from the experiences of those around them.

They flustered many people, but sometime we would have REALLY seasoned investors or entrepreneurs speak to us. Those folks never got flustered.

I needed to know why...

So I pulled aside one of the bigger investors and asked him why. This was his response.

“I’ve invested and advised on every type of company you can imaging, with every type of entrepreneur. There is a lot to be learned from that experience. But if you are more interested in winning and argument than learning from experiences and creating a good business then you are not worth my time.”

He would give his advice and then go right back to his email for those folks.

Smart

1 of the 2 entrepreneur I mentioned actually turned it around. Once he found out that the investor had invested in and almost identical company in the same space and that they had sold for 100M+ he finally started to listen. You could see him really fighting the urge to argue, but he did it. That guy ended up being successful and is on track growing a company today.

The other guy had no success and is still on the Slack group of the co-working space arguing with anyone who will engage him.

I know which one of those I would want to be.

PS. If this hurts your feeling and you feel like commenting. Feel free. You’ll look very cute.

Back then, I was just about a "computer guru" and friends would often ask me stuff about hardware.

One of them came to me and asked if I could make a website. I accepted despite knowing nothing about html, css, js or PHP.

I then hopped on a tutorial about html and css, and pretty much learned the basics of html in a day, then added some css and got introduced to PHP "as a way to prevent yourself from copy pasting the same bits of html everywhere".

Turned out the client wanted a CMS, which I couldn't do, then I decided I would go to a design/it school. Before finishing my 'studies' (accelerated apprenticeship), I already landed my today's job. As I'm not a "real dev" (more a self taught guy), I'm learning stuff everyday, and today I am comfortable with back end and front end web development

Code is addicting, even more than gaming!

I started my part time job as a tutor today. Yesterday (while preparing) I learned how a browser actually renders a page and bunch of other stuff. Don't get me wrong, I kind of knew it. But not in such detail that I could ever explain it... even though I work in web development since 2011

This will be fun, I wonder what I will learn next

today on the first day of the last year of college we learned about terminator

then we learned about biology

then i realized this is a course about AI

I have the same problem as @linuxxx does. Buying things when I really don't need to.

I went to a mall with a friend today because his headset was literally falling apart. We both bought new headsets. Great.

Lesson learned: Don't leave your house unless necessary.

GOD DAMN THE STUPID IPTABLES, aaaaah!

Today I learned that
iptables -I INPUT -i !lo -j DROP
and
iptables -I INPUT ! -i lo -j DROP

are two completely different rules, the first of which doesn't work (in ~99.9% of cases)

yet both pass and get added to the firewall. And both rules show exactly the same in the state listing (iptables -L -n -v).

And I was wondering why the hell the firewall wasn't working...

Made my first Node.js Todo list today! Got myself a new front end design tool, Bootstrap Studio (50% off). Learned about REST, using Node as an API and MongoDB and Angular! Had a lot of fun learning and I would recommend it to anyone that's a Node.js beginner. I want to do a video tutorial series on Node.js, is that a good idea?

Imagine you work in a mechanic’s shop. You just got trained today on a new part install, including all the task-specific tools it takes to install it.

Some are standard tools, like a screwdriver, that most people know how to use. Others are complicated, single-purpose tools that only work to install this one part.

It takes you a couple of hours compared to other techs who learned quicker than you and can do it in 20 minutes. You go to bed that night thinking “I’ve got this. I’ll remember how this works tomorrow and I’ll be twice as fast tomorrow as I was today.”

The next morning, you wake up retaining a working, useful memory of only about 5% on how to use the specialized tools and installation of the part.

You retrain that day as a review, but your install time still suffers in comparison. You again feel confident by the end of the day that you understand and go to bed thinking you’ll at least get within 10-20 minutes of the faster techs in your install.

The next morning, you wake up retaining a working, useful memory of only 10% on how to use the specialized tools.

Repeat until you reach 100% mastery and match the other techs in speed and efficiency.

Oops! Scratch that! We are no longer using those tools or that part. We’re switching to this other thing that somehow everyone already knows or understands quickly. Start over.

This has been my entire development career. I’m so tired.

So it looks like my 80+ yr old grandma finally managed to get hang of her touch screen smartphone. She was recently set up with WhatsApp.

She has called me quite a few times today and when i ask what's up, she says she is just testing it out. It's so cute *-* and makes me happy to know she has learned to use it and called me.

I wonder how it must feel for her to be able to use this technology which was probably never even imagined during her young age.

Today we learned:

Don't run a backup integrity check on terabytes of data in multiple jobs your cpu can't handle.

And i cannot abort the process...

Guess i have to go outside, in the cold, brrrr.

A while ago I stumbled upon this cheap vps provider called dedistation (lowest was $15/year), so I end up buying a one year subscription and transferred all of my personal sites to it. Fast forward six month later, uptime robot notified me that my vps is down. No problem, I'll just submit a ticket. Few days go by and I yet to receive a response. Not a problem, I'll just try and login via the serial interface and get my shit, no luck there either.
Seems like these motherfuckers just packed up and went offline without a shit given.
No response, no notification untill today! How more twat a company could be?
Lessons learned the hard way
- always backup regularly
- check and transfer nameserver or no emails for days.
- you get what u pay for (haven't learned this fully yet. Went again with a cheap legit-ish provider (arubacloud)

Today's GDPR-Bullshittery.

So we are using an open source remote update system for updating our embedded devices.
And today we learned that, that system logs ip-adress'. And low and behold mr.GDPR says that is a no no.

So either we completely drops it, finds a new update system and implements it..
Sift through all the source code of the update system "fix" it and recompile it.
Or we setup a Man in the middle attack on ourselves. To mask the ip-adress'.

GDPR encouraging hacking ourselves I fucking love it!

A girl I know is a Economics major with a minor in CS. Today she told me and a friend how hard their Java course is. I asked her about the topics that get covered in that course and when I asked her about JavaFX.
"No we will not cover JavaFX, only Java an GUI programmig in it. "

Today I learned that JavaFX is not a part of Java :D

Today I learned about binary encoding formats alternative to JSON such as Google Protocol Butter.
I like these binary formats.
Just thought I would share this here so others would benefit as well (and please share your experience if it is relevant)

Today the struggle was real.

But damn if it isn't days like this where you learn real shit.

Fighting with a debian VM for half the day to make a local development environment. I'm tired, but everything works, the project looks good, and I'm just sorta angry/tired/proud now.

I learned so much, and now want pie. I am going to go eat some pie.

today I learned, OP means 'original poster' in stackoverflow

I just learned today that GitHub is used for stuff other than programming

Today I learned: there's a license called WTF.

Wtf.

Had an interview today with someone who made me feel like I knew nothing. Best experience I have ever had in an interview. I know it sounds weird, but I actually felt like I learned a lot from that man and would like to work with people who make me feel that way.

Unfortunately, that will probably not happen after that interview.

Today I learned that -Infinity >> 0 = 0

About slightly more than a year ago I started volunteering at the local general students committee. They desperately searched for someone playing the role of both political head of division as well as the system administrator, for around half a year before I took the job.

When I started the data center was mostly abandoned with most of the computational power and resources just laying around unused. They already ran some kvm-hosts with around 6 virtual machines, including a cloud service, internally used shared storage, a user directory and also 10 workstations and a WiFi-Network. Everything except one virtual machine ran on GNU/Linux-systems and was built on open source technology. The administration was done through shared passwords, bash-scripts and instructions in an extensive MediaWiki instance.

My introduction into this whole eco-system was basically this:
"Ever did something with linux before? Here you have the logins - have fun. Oh, and please don't break stuff. Thank you!"

Since I had only managed a small personal server before and learned stuff about networking, it-sec and administration only from courses in university I quickly shaped a small team eager to build great things which would bring in the knowledge necessary to create something awesome. We had a lot of fun diving into modern technologies, discussing the future of this infrastructure and simply try out and fail hard while implementing those ideas.

Today, a year and a half later, we look at around 40 virtual machines spiced with a lot of magic. We host several internal and external services like cloud, chat, ticket-system, websites, blog, notepad, DNS, DHCP, VPN, firewall, confluence, freifunk (free network mesh), ubuntu mirror etc. Everything is managed through a central puppet-configuration infrastructure. Changes in configuration are deployed in minutes across all servers. We utilize docker for application deployment and gitlab for code management. We provide incremental, distributed backups, a central database and a distributed network across the campus. We created a desktop workstation environment based on Ubuntu Server for deployment on bare-metal machines through the foreman project. Almost everything free and open source.

The whole system now is easily configurable, allows updating, maintenance and deployment of old and new services. We reached our main goal for this year which was the creation of a documented environment which is maintainable by one administrator.

Although we did this in our free-time without any payment it was a great year with a lot of experience which pays off now.

YEARS of practice. I had my ups and downs. I learned myself, left it myself early on, came back to it half a year later, continued since. Figured out that web development is not the hell I wanted and quickly fell in love with iOS development in Swift. Been riding on the wind ever since, learning something new every single day.

Today I made something that some time ago took me about 3 weeks in less than an hour. If that’s not an improvement, I don’t know what that is.

Practice makes perfect, don’t forget that. Although it sounds ridiculously cheesy and shit, this is how it goes.

I’m getting drafted tomorrow. Well, this is not exactly a full on draft and joining the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) right NAO, it’s what we call a rough draft: I am having a psychotechnical examination so the military can understand how much I need to go to a cybersecurity unit instead of going to Gaza LMAO.

I just learned that you can use Android Device Monitor in Android Studio to take screenshots.
Until today I was using adb screencap -p /sdcard/filename, totally forgetting the filename, go through all the commands and see what fucking file name I used and do an adb pull. It was a lot of fucking work.

So today when I was testing my new website I learned that IE/Edge does not support smooth scrolling with JavaScript.

I get why it doesn't work in IE but Edge... like what? Edge is supposed to be a modern browser... No?

A /thread.

I have to say something important. As the story progresses, the rage will keep fueling up and get more spicy. You should also feel your blood boil more. If not, that's because you're happy to be a slave.

This is a clusterfuck story. I'll come back and forth to some paragraphs to talk about more details and why everything, INCLUDING OUR DEVELOPER JOBS ARE A SCAM. we're getting USED as SLAVES because it's standardized AS NORMAL. IT IS EVERYTHING *BUT* NORMAL.

START:

As im watching the 2022 world cup i noticed something that has enraged me as a software engineer.

The camera has pointed to the crowd where there were old football players such as Rondinho, Kaka, old (fat) Ronaldo and other assholes i dont give a shit about.

These men are old (old for football) and therefore they dont play sports anymore.

These men don't do SHIT in their lives. They have retired at like 39 years old with MULTI MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN THEIR BANK ACCOUNT.

And thats not all. despite of them not doing anything in life anymore, THEY ARE STILL EARNING MILLIONS AND MILLIONS OF DOLLARS PER MONTH. FOR WHAT?????

While i as a backend software engineer get used as a slave to do extreme and hard as SHIT jobs for slave salary.

500-600$ MAX PER MONTH is for junior BACKEND engineers! By the law of my country software businesses are not allowed to pay less than $500 for IT jobs. If thats for backend, imagine how much lower is for frontend? I'll tell you cause i used to be a frontend dev in 2016: $200-400 PER MONTH IS FOR FRONTEND DEVELOPERS.

A BACKEND SOFTWARE ENGINEER with at least 7-9 years of professional experience, is allowed to have $1000-2000 PER MONTH

In my country, if you want to have a salary of MORE THAN $3000/Month as SOFTWARE ENGINEER, you have to have a minimum of Master's Degree and in some cases a required PhD!!!!!!

Are you fucking kidding me?

Also. (Btw i have a BSc comp. sci. Degree from a valuable university) I have taken a SHIT ton of interviews. NOT ONE OF THEM HAVE ASKED ME IF I HAVE A DEGREE. NO ONE. All HRs and lead Devs have asked me about myself, what i want to learn and about my past dev experience, projects i worked on etc so they can approximate my knowledge complexity.

EVEN TOPTAL! Their HR NEVER asked me about my fycking degree because no one gives a SHIT about your fucking degree. Do you know how can you tell if someone has a degree? THEY'LL FUCKING TELL YOU THEY HAVE A DEGREE! LMAO! It was all a Fucking scam designed by the Matrix to enslave you and mentally break you. Besides wasting your Fucking time.

This means that companies put degree requirement in job post just to follow formal procedures, but in reality NO ONE GIVES A SHIT ABOUT IT. NOOBOODYYY.

ALSO: I GRADUATED AND I STILL DID NOT RECEIVE MY DEGREE PAPER BECAUSE THEY NEED AT LEAST 6 MONTHS TO MAKE IT. SOME PEOPLE EVEN WAITED 2 YEARS. A FRIEND OF MINE WHO GRADUATED IN FEBRUARY 2022, STILL DIDNT RECEIVE HIS DEGREE TODAY IN DECEMBER 2022. ALL THEY CAN DO IS PRINT YOU A PAPER TO CONFIRM THAT I DO HAVE A DEGREE AS PROOF TO COMPANIES WHO HIRE ME. WHAT THE FUCK ARE THEY MAKING FOR SO LONG, DIAMONDS???

are you fucking kidding me? You fucking bitch. The sole paper i can use to wipe my asshole with that they call a DEGREE, at the end I CANT EVEN HAVE IT???

Fuck You.

This system that values how much BULLSHIT you can memorize for short term, is called "EDUCATION", NOT "MEMORIZATION" System.

Think about it. Don't believe be? Are you one of those nerds with A+ grades who loves school and defends this education system? Here I'll fuck you with a single question: if i gave you a task to solve from linear algebra, or math analysis, probabilistics and statistics, physics, or theory, or a task to write ASM code, would you know how to do it? No you won't. Because you "learned" that months or years ago. You don't know shit. CHECK MATE. You can answer those questions by googling. Even the most experienced software engineers still use google. ALL of friends with A+ grades always answered "i dont know" or "i dont remember". HOW IF YOU PASSED IT WITH A+ 6 DAYS AGO? If so, WHY THE FUCK ARE WE WASTING YEARS OF AN ALREADY SHORT HUMAN LIFE TO TEMPORARILY MEMORIZE GARBAGE? WHY DONT WE LEARN THAT PROCESS THROUGH WORKING ON PRACTICAL PROJECTS??? WOULDNT YOU AGREE THATS A BETTER SOLUTION, YOU MOTHERFUCKER BITCH ASS SLAVE SUCKA???

Im can't even afford to buy my First fuckinf Car with this slave salary. Inflation is up so much that 1 bag of BASIC groceries from Walmart costs $100. IF BASIC GROCERIES ARE $100, HOW DO I LIVE WITH $500-600/MONTH IF I HAVE OTHER EXPENSES?

Now, back to slavery. Here's what i learned.

1800s: slaves are directly forced to work in exchange for food to survive.

2000s: slaves are indirectly forced to work in exchange for money as a MIDDLEMAN that can be used to buy food to survive.

????

This means: slavery has not gone anywhere. Slavery has just evolved. And you're fine with it.

Will post part 2 later.

This is real rant, not one of these funny stories!

So, I spent 4 years to get a Computer Science degree, and did two specializations, 3.5 years more in Uni. I have 6 years of experience working in IT, from support to programming. I also speak 3 languages.

I'm from a South America country, and now I'm living in EU.

I'm 30 now and earning a little more than a MacDonald's cashier earns in the US. I have to live in a shared apartment like a fucking Uni student. I have nothing, no car, no house, no girlfriend. WTF!

IT is a fucking lie! Profession of the future my ass!

In Uni they said that finding a good job was easy, that companies would literally grab us by the neck to work for them. LIE!
I did found a low paying job though, where at least I could learn a lot more.
People were really satisfied with my work and I even received a proposal of one of our clients to work for them, but the offer wasn't good enough.

I tried entering some big companies as a Trainee, but it was so ridiculous, they said they were looking for an IT person, but they asked things related to economy and other stuff that had nothing to do with IT. I always failed in the group work/interview, it was so ridiculous, I remember one candidate saying her dream was to work for the company since she was a child, SERIOUSLY!

When the opportunity came, I moved to EU and now I'm working as a dev. But as I said, I'm not satisfied with it! In the US the yearly average software engineer salary is about 100K, I earn less than 1/4 of it. And don't come saying that US pays more because of the cost of life, here the cost of life is the same or even more expensive, a super small apartment/loft is at least 180K, a simple new car 18K and a Big Mac costs 4€.

In the US, the average salary of someone that just graduated from uni is 60K to 70K! LOL

In EU, it's super hard for someone to earn 100K, that's why many companies are creating offices here, good workforce, 2 to 3 times smaller salary!

IT also sucks because it's too volatile, there's new stuff all the time. Someone always has to come with a new language, new framework, new library, etc etc. And you have to keep learning new stuff all the time.
Also job openings always ask for experienced people, like you must have at least two years of experience with VUE.js, or something.

Do you remember the last time you went to a doctor for a checkup, did they use a new tool, or did something different during the checkup? Probably not, the medic don't have to learn new stuff all the time, he is still using a stethoscope, he is still placing a wooden stick in your mouth to check your throat...
But in IT, almost no one nowadays is going to create code using CoffeeScript, they instead will use TypeScript.

I read an article saying that an IT professional must study 20 hours a week to keep up with new trends. So I must work 40 hours and study another 20? LOL
It's not that I don't like learning new stuff, but this sucks, I want to maybe learn something different or have a hobby.

Today I regret going to uni, I feel it was a waste of time and money. They taught things like calculus and physics that I never had to use professionally, and even programming stuff like linked lists I never had to use.

If instead I had studied dentistry or studied to be a ophthalmologist I think I would be earning more, would be working more independently and wouldn't need to keep up learning new things so much.

Also to work in IT you don't need a diploma, I read an article by a dude that learned programming by his own, did some software for his portfolio and got a job at Google.
When I read these kinds of story I regret even more going to uni, It really feels I wasted my time.

For these reasons I can't recommend going to uni to study IT, if you want to go to uni go study something else!
If you want to study programming do it on your own, there's everything you must know online for free, create a portfolio, and look for a job or even try working for yourself!

Living the life I have now, there's just no incentive to keep going.
Should I keep learning new stuff so maybe I can get a better job that will still pay low, or quit and try creating something on my own?
Or even ditch IT all together and go back to uni? LOL NO!

WTH, TIL there's a "friend" keyword in C++

Today I learned:

My computing teacher has never thought about having the front end and back end as different apps. He always just connects to the database from the client and calls the clients non-gui parts the backend.

I now understand why he was so confused when I said I was thinking about the backend accepting web-based and desktop-based clients.

Today I learned that right-shifting (a >> b) is just floor(a/2^b) and left shifting (a << b) is just (a * 2^b).

Hey everyone!
Today I learned that true is not boolean and my functions typed for bool can actually return bool OR true!

!rant (all ranters should read)

Today I was at university, doing some C low-level stuff. Then I looked my Professor.

Holy fucking shit, this man (and obviously the others) learned programming without google, stackoverflow, youtube and online doc/forum/examples/explanation.
I also believe that some of them could not compile and run at home their software.

MASSIVE RESPECT FOR YOU ALL !

It took me like 3 hours to install stupid mariadb on my fucking arch. From the service not beeing able to start over not finding the correct base dir to permission problems in the data dir.
Well, after reading the wiki it was actually pretty easy (only minor problems) ...

Today I learned two things:
- I must be fucking dumb
- Reading the manual instead of guessing helps a lot when installing stuff on linux

It’s actually been quite a fun day, after some ranting on one of our slack communities flutter channel, myself and my team realized we were in a really good place to give back.

We have been working on a large scale flutter application for about a year, phase 1 is about done and we at 11k LOC.

We have been doing a big push for testing over the last 2 months and are at about 50% coverage. The thing we realized is that is the 1 place flutter has fallen short with documentation.

Very little about what we learned for testing our code came out of a google search, or it came out of cobbling bits together from numerous searches and sources.

So we decided we are going to plan and host a virtual meetup to discuss what we have learned and hopefully teach a few people some useful things and hopefully also learn a few new things too.

In addition, and as it has a longer shelf life, we going to setup a medium publication for the company and start a series to cover small specific topics, specific use cases or scenarios that we had trouble with and solved.

Today I had my first thing to type out, had worked out how to test that a function that was passed into a widget was called. So the parent passes the child and onTap function but you are testing the child not the parent as the child is reusable...

Anyway, so with that idea I got hold of marketing for some assets, setup the publication and proceeded to type out 3 articles today, all nice short ones under 2 min reading time.

It really is nice to give back, it’s not like I am Remi smart and can go and write BLoC, but I am smart enough to figure shit out and type it up so that the next guy hopefully benefits from my brain bashing.

Today I learned that some external devs one of our projects is working with have DB tables where they store references to specific dates, and not only that, but every minute of those dates, and the day of the week, and what season its in. Im not joking.
Hmm should I use the local datetime libs or should I go through a firewall, load balancer and DB cluster just to find out what day it is?

Newer Dev here. Just recently started in a position as a developer. I'm tasked with consolidating our monitoring systems into one cohesive display. After lumping together all the indexes and helping build a custom API I'm now working on front end. Front end is easy, I've done it before. Should be no problem. I was wrong. I spent a whole day fiddling with a React dynamic table and the CSS to format it. Today, I stumble upon the react-table component. Got the results I was looking for in less than 2 hours. I'm convinced that this was a lesson better learned early on.

"I hate this in javascript, because I never know what it is referring to."

Read this joke here some months ago. Today i learned why it's so funny

Today I learned that for boolean HTML attributes, they are considered true if they're present on the element at all, regardless of their value. And that as a rule, you should specify the empty string("") in value.

This wounds me on a logic level since everywhere else in JS, "" is false.

What.

The.

Fuck.

Seriously. Why?

Before I learned software development, API sounded like a kind of beer.
Today I used the term so often that I have in fact recently tried to order an API at a bar.

Here comes lots of random pieces of advice...

Ain't no shortcuts.

Be prepared, becoming a good programmer (there are lots of shitty programmers, not so many good ones) takes lots of pain, frustration, and failure. It's going to suck for awhile. There will be false starts. At some point you will question whether you are cut out for it or not. Embrace the struggle -- if you aren't failing, you aren't learning.

Remember that in 2021 being a programmer is just as much (maybe even moreso) about picking up new things on the fly as it is about your crystalized knowledge. I don't want someone who has all the core features of some language memorized, I want someone who can learn new things quickly. Everything is open book all the time. I have to look up pretty basic stuff all the time, it's just that it takes me like twelve seconds to look it up and digest it.

Build, build, build, build, build. At least while you are learning, you should always be working on a project. Don't worry about how big the project is, small is fine.

Remember that programming is a tool, not the end goal in and of itself. Nobody gives a shit how good a carpenter is at using some specialized saw, they care about what the carpenter can build with that specialized saw.

Plan your build. This is a VERY important part of the process that newer devs/programmers like to skip. You are always free to change the plan, but you should have a plan going on. Don't store your plan in your head. If you plan exists only in your head you are doing it wrong. Write that shit down! If you create a solid development process, the cognitive overhead for any project goes way down.

Don't fall into the trap of comparing yourself to others, especially to the experts you are learning from. They are good because they have done the thing that you are struggling with at least a thousand times.

Don't fall into the trap of comparing yourself today to yourself yesterday. This will make it seem like you haven't learned anything and aren't on the move. Compare yourself to yourself last week, last month, last year.

Have experienced programmers review your code. Don't be afraid to ask, most of us really really enjoy this (if it makes you feel any better about the "inconvenience", it will take a mid-level waaaaay less time to review your code that it took for you to write it, and a senior dev even less time than that). You will hate it, it will suck having someone seem like they are just ripping your code apart, but it will make you so much better so much faster than just relying on your own internal knowledge.

When you start to be able to put the pieces together, stay humble. I've seen countless devs with a year of experience start to get a big head and talk like they know shit. Don't keep your mouth closed, but as a newer dev if you are talking noise instead of asking questions there is no way I will think you are ready to have the Jr./Associate/Whatever removed from your title.

Don't ever. Ever. Ever. Criticize someone else's preferred tools. Tooling is so far down the list of what makes a good programmer. This is another thing newer devs have a tendency to do, thinking that their tool chain is the only way to do it. Definitely recommend to people alternatives to check out. A senior dev using Notepad++, a terminal window, and a compiler from 1977 is probably better than you are with the newest shiniest IDE.

Don't be a dick about terminology/vocabulary. Different words mean different things to different people in different organizations. If what you call GNU/Linux somebody else just calls Linux, let it go man! You understand what they mean, and if you don't it's your job to figure out what they mean, not tell them the right way to say it.

One analogy I like to make is that becoming a programmer is a lot like becoming a chef. You don't become a chef by following recipes (i.e. just following tutorials and walk-throughs). You become a chef by learning about different ingredients, learning about different cooking techniques, learning about different styles of cuisine, and (this is the important part), learning how to put together ingredients, techniques, and cuisines in ways that no one has ever showed you about before.

So it turns out I was interviewing for a senior role, when in fact I'm looking for a junior-mid role.

Two days ago I had a bad feeling creep up on me when the HR interviewer mentioned to me that they were looking to fill a senior role. I should have interjected. Instead, I stupidly asked the recruiter after passing the HR interview. He answered that the company would also take a mid-level developer and he thinks that I have a good chance. In retrospective, I'm not sure on what basis he made the judgement call.

I had the technical interview today and didn't get the job as I expected. But the same recruiter told me that the company said they'd take me for an intermediate role in the future, but I didn't make it for the senior role.

Can I take that as "you're not technically sound enough" put in a nicer way to soften the blow? But by the company or the recruiter? Or would they actually consider me for a mid-level role in the future? Who is lying or not lying?

Steam off my head now. Thanks for reading my rant.

Context: I'm still transitioning from another field and barely had one year of web development experience so far, half of which was from where I just learned to hack stuff together. I'm now going to focus on landing an internship or a junior role, without going through recruiters since I'd be waste of their time.

So at work, there is this class/model thing that's for storing translated strings. It also supports n-level nested macros, cascading lookup (e->d->c->b->a->blank), and I've added transforms too. The code is a bloody mess and very inefficient (legendary dev's code), but it's useful.

You call methods with a symbol representing one of the strings, and it does... whatever you ask, like return text, booleans, expand macros and submacros, pass in data to interpolate, etc.

But I just learned something today.
Its `.html` method... doesn't support html. In fact, calling it strips out all html, takes whatever is left, and attempts to convert that back into html. Because that makes so much sense. So, if you have an html string? Don't call html on it.

Also, macros use the same <angle brackets> as html tags, and macro expansion eats unknown macros, so... you can't mix html and macros, meaning you cannot inject values into your markup. That's a freaking joy to work around. (You end up writing a parser every time.)

So no, if you have an html string, you need to get the raw data out and handle it yourself. Don't reach for that shiny .html method; it'll just ruin your day.

It's the little things that make my day so terribly long.

Today I finally experienced the power of something I learned in university: propositional and predicate logic.

Many developers I know think that such education is useless. Well, today I have proven that it is very useful. On a day to day basis, working on banking software, complexity in purely logic is very low. However, we have a screen that must show or hide elements based on some input values and conditions associated with certain elements. How hard can that be, right? Well, there are many variables to take into account and as such it's absolutely not trivial.

This screen didn't work properly and maintaining the code is hard as there is a lot of logic to show/hide, enable/disable things and so on. After quite some time and attempts by fellow developers, I decided to refactor the whole thing. I'm responsible for the quality of the software and it was quite degrading, so I had to do something.

In order to get things working properly, I defined collections of constants (ui elements) and predicates. Then, I defined for which element what predicates must be true, in order to hide/show, disable/enable etc. I then translated these predicates into code. And guess what? It works! Of course it works. It's logic. But I'm very pleased I finally could actually use some of all the math I studied!

Last year I wrote a sudoku program which did solve easy sudokus but messed up on harder ones. I had got bored after a bit and forgot about it until today I thought I'd rewrite it using new stuff I've learned since and make it work properly.

So I opened it up and look and I'm like 'WHAT!?' because I don't understand what I wrote. After a bit I start to get the idea and see that it was kind of smart even if long and complicated.

If anything, it shows how much my documentation skills have improved.

Now I just have to work out how to redo it in a way I understand.

We're rebuilding out company's platform from the bottom up, and throughout this process I've learned a lot. However, the stuff I've done lately has fascinated me the most. We're implementing OpenOffice for converting files to PDF. Since I started with this task I've had to implement secure running of OpenOffice by sandboxing and queues, but by far the coolest thing was what I did today. I was trying to implement IPC, and damn was it fun. I actually ended up writing a full parser for raw byte streams, since we had to include some special information. It was fun 😁

Startup: We are looking for interns. Do this project that we know will take you a week. But your chances mostly depend on this project.

Me looking for my first internship: Takes complete 2 days to submit the project which had so many open-ended questions. They review and say I aced the project and would like to interview.

Interviewer 1: From the beginning starts asking me if I myself have done this or that, gets thrown some questions that I answer immediately and then suddenly get accused that I must have copied from a tutorial on an open-ended question. I used what I learned from my previous projects, what do you want from me. You never specified all the cases. Then he said is done.

Interviewer 2: Hello, we are a new startup. We will make you work 40 hours a week. Then he lied. Are you allowed to lie?? He said we are unpaid (I read it wasn't) to ask what motivates me. The other interviewer on being asked did say that it wasn't unpaid. By this point, I was done.

Got rejected today. Wasted almost 3 days on their stupid project. I am so salty!!!