I know I should not be naming names but WalmartLabs Hackfest 2016 was actually a fuckfest. It was supposed to be a 14 day online hackathon followed by an offline event for top teams. I got in top 6 among the 4350 participants.

In the offline event:

1. They didn't allow us to give live demo of the project. Instead they asked us to present a ppt. The HR idiot even asked me to take screenshots of my cli app and put that in instead.

2. 4 out of the 6 teams actually presented their startup products. It was supposed to be a 14 day hackathon for fucks sake. How can you present some shit that you were working on for the last 1.5 years! This one team literally had "Copyright 2015" mentioned on their product page. This another team had 100,000+ downloads on his app already. Of course Walmart didn't care about it. They didn't listen to my complaint. I wish I had created a scene there :( Another team was boasting on stage about how they got selected in the FB startup accelerator and how they won 3 more hackathon (evidently equally shit) using their shit. This was met with praises from the judges.

3. The results were declared after 3 fucking months! Don't organize this shit next time if you don't have any interest, bitch.

4. The code was supposedly never checked. Other teams kept working on their shit for the 3 months in between. In the live presentation, this guy even had photoshopped a feature which wasn't even present there (and he boasted about it later on).

5. Hackerearth (platform for the hackathon) was equally incompetent in this mishap of a hackathon. One of the teams which won had one the previous hackathon (Pluralsight hackathon) as well on Hackerearth using the same fucking product. What pieces of shit >.<

6. The hackathon was supposed to be tech based and all the categories were like that. Instead the teams presented business models and shit like that and judges focused more on that. They were not concerned about the technical aspects at all. The more noise you made, the more lies you told, the better chance you had to win it.

7. They were supposed to give prizes in 4 categories but silently reduced it to 3 on the event day. They still publicised it as 4 prizes until now.

All of the above is true and I am willing to testify if someone asks for it. I am going to write a nice blog post about it and post it to their idiot HR.

Hackathon: WalmartLabs Hackfest 2016
Team name: psyduck (which is just me)

Sorry for being too salty but it was indeed a fuckfest.

I'm a self-taught 19-year-old programmer. Coding since 10, dropped out of high-school and got fist job at 15.

In the the early days I was extremely passionate, learning SICP, Algorithms, doing Haskell, C/C++, Rust, Assembly, writing toy compilers/interpreters, tweaking Gentoo/Arch. Even got a lambda tattoo on my arm after learning lambda-calculus and church numerals.

My first job - a company which raised $100,000 on kickstarter. The CEO was a dumb millionaire hippie, who was bored with his money, so he wanted to run a company even though he had no idea what he was doing. He used to talk about how he build our product, even tho he had 0 technical knowledge whatsoever. He was on news a few times which was pretty cringeworthy. The company had only 1 programmer (other than me) who was pretty decent.

We shipped the project, but soon we burned through kickstart money and the sales dried off. Instead of trying to aquire customers (or abandoning the project), boss kept looking for investors, which kept us afloat for an extra year.

Eventually the money dried up, and instead of closing gates, boss decreased our paychecks without our knowledge. He also converted us from full-time employees to "contractors" (also without our knowledge) so he wouldn't have to pay taxes for us. My paycheck decreased by 40% by I still stayed.

One day, I was trying to burn a USB drive, and I did "dd of=/dev/sda" instead of sdb, therefore wiping out our development server. They asked me to stay at company, but I turned in my resignation letter the next day (my highest ever post on reddit was in /r/TIFU).

Next, I found a job at a "finance" company. $50k/year as a 18-year-old. CEO was a good-looking smooth-talker who made few million bucks talking old people into giving him their retirement money.

He claimed he changed his ways, and was now trying to help average folks save money. So far I've been here 8 month and I do not see that happening. He forces me to do sketchy shit, that clearly doesn't have clients best interests in mind.

I am the only developer, and I quickly became a back-end and front-end ninja. 

I switched the company infrastructure from shitty drag+drop website builder, WordPress and shitty Excel macros into a beautiful custom-written python back-end.

Little did I know, this company doesn't need a real programmer. I don't have clear requirements, I get unrealistic deadlines, and boss is too busy to even communicate what he wants from me.

Eventually I sold my soul. I switched parts of it to WordPress, because I was not given enough time to write custom code properly.

For latest project, I switched from using custom React/Material/Sass to using drag+drop TypeForms for surveys.

I used to be an extremist FLOSS Richard Stallman fanboy, but eventually I traded my morals, dreams and ideals for a paycheck. Hey, $50k is not bad, so maybe I shouldn't be complaining? :(

I got addicted to pot for 2 years. Recently I've gotten arrested, and it is honestly one of the best things that ever happened to me. Before I got arrested, I did some freelancing for a mugshot website. In un-related news, my mugshot dissapeared.

I have been sober for 2 month now, and my brain is finally coming back. 

I know average developer hits a wall at around $80k, and then you have to either move into management or have your own business.

After getting sober, I realized that money isn't going to make me happy, and I don't want to manage people. I'm an old-school neck-beard hacker. My true passion is mathematics and physics. I don't want to glue bullshit libraries together. 

I want to write real code, trace kernel bugs, optimize compilers. Albeit, I was boring in the wrong generation.

I've started studying real analysis, brushing up differential equations, and now trying to tackle machine learning and Neural Networks, and understanding the juicy math behind gradient descent.

I don't know what my plan is for the future, but I'll figure it out as long as I have my brain. Maybe I will continue making shitty forms and collect paycheck, while studying mathematics. Maybe I will figure out something else.

But I can't just let my brain rot while chasing money and impressing dumb bosses. If I wait until I get rich to do things I love, my brain will be too far gone at that point. I can't just sell myself out. I'm coming back to my roots.

I still feel like after experiencing industry and pot, I'm a shittier developer than I was at age 15. But my passion is slowly coming back.

Any suggestions from wise ol' neckbeards on how to proceed?

Just before you, my fellow system programmer, scroll past this, let me say this:

🍬 The web is actiually simple. 🍬

Both HTML and CSS is declarative. It's all easy when you understand the concepts, learn how to be idiomatic and quit trying to do that imperative bullshit in languages that aren't imperative.

HTML is simple. You know the boilerplate: doctype, head, body, that's all. Just mark it up and do NOT look at it before you end, mark it up as it were article or something. The appearance is up to css.

CSS is simple. You may even forget bem or rscss, you're already a skilled software developer. Use common sense and your code-splitting and naming skills you gained reading The Code Complete or doing software development for years.

Forget mockups. Forget absolute positioning, forget setting width and height in pixels. Go to awwwards, find some inspiration. Draw some buttons and fields on paper with your good old pencil. Then go and write some css. Feel free to steal some shadows and transitions from codepen.

Read about 8-pixel grid system. Let every element push away from others by setting something like margin: 16px; and whoops! You've just got fully responsive and got great vertical rhythm without even using media queries!

Oh my god, do NEVER set width and height explicitly! Type something like button { width: 120px; } and bang! The entire web page is broken. Quit that shit. Let it resize as it should. It will resize itself to fit its contents.

HTML is by default ready for your template engine. That's how you receive data from server — as server-side rendered, plain old HTML page. On the other hand, the form element is the most axiomatic and simple way to send the data to server. That's how you send it — as plain old GET or POST that every webserver can handle.

All of there are true:
1. It's easy to get great 100% responsiveness without media queries.
2. It's easy to align items in row, it's just one line of css. Maybe two, if you still want elements to wrap, but want to use flexbox:
.parent {
display: flex;
flex-wrap: wrap;
}
3. HTML and CSS are fast by default.
4. You don't need mockups to achieve great visual experience. Mockups is imperative, web is declarative.
5. You may not even need JavaScript to make great website.

Go on, ask me a question about web! I'll ready to answer everything.

It's enough. I have to quit my job.

December last year I've started working for a company doing finance. Since it was a serious-sounding field, I tought I'd be better off than with my previous employer. Which was kinda the family-agency where you can do pretty much anything you want without any real concequences, nor structures. I liked it, but the professionalism was missing.

Turns out, they do operate more professionally, but the intern mood and commitment is awful. They all pretty much bash on eachother. And the root cause of this and why it will stay like this is simply the Project Lead.

The plan was that I was positioned as glue between Design/UX and Backend to then make the best Frontend for the situation. Since that is somewhat new and has the most potential to get better. Beside, this is what the customer sees everyday.

After just two months, an retrospective and a hell lot of communication with co-workers, I've decided that there is no other way other than to leave.

I had a weekly productivity of 60h+ (work and private, sometimes up to 80h). I had no problems with that, I was happy to work, but since working in this company, my weekly productivity dropped to 25~30h. Not only can I not work for a whole proper work-week, this time still includes private projects. So in hindsight, I efficiently work less than 20h for my actual job.

The Product lead just wants feature on top of feature, our customers don't want to pay concepts, but also won't give us exact specifications on what they want.
Refactoring is forbidden since we get to many issues/bugs on a daily basis so we won't get time.
An re-design is forbidden because that would mean that all Screens have to be re-designed.
The product should be responsive, but none of the components feel finished on Desktop - don't talk about mobile, it doesn't exist.
The Designer next to me has to make 200+ Screens for Desktop and Mobile JUST so we can change the primary colors for an potential new customer, nothing more. Remember that we don't have responsiveness? Guess what, that should be purposely included on the Designs (and it looks awful).
I may hate PHP, but I can still work with it. But not here, this is worse then any ecommerce. I have to fix legacy backend code that has no test coverage. But I haven't touched php for 4 years, letalone wrote sql (I hate it). There should be no reason whatsoever to let me do this kind of work, as FRONTEND ARCHITECT.

After an (short) analysis of the Frontend, I conclude that it is required to be rewritten to 90%. There have been no performance checks for the Client/UI, therefor not only the components behave badly, but the whole system is slow as FUCK! Back in my days I wrote jQuery, but even that shit was faster than the architecuture of this React Multi-instance app. Nothing is shared, most of the AppState correlate to other instances.

The Backend. Oh boy. Not only do we use an shitty outated open-source project with tons of XSS possibillities as base, no we clone that shit and COPY OUR SOURCES ON TOP. But since these people also don't want to write SQL, they tought using Symfony as base on top of the base would be an good idea.
Generally speaking (and done right), this is true. but not then there will be no time and not properly checked. As I said I'm working on Legacy code. And the more I look into it, the more Bugs I find. Nothing too bad, but it's still a bad sign why the webservices are buggy in general. And therefor, the buggyness has to travel into the frontend.

And now the last goodies:
- Composer itself is commited to the repo (the fucking .phar!)
- Deployments never work and every release is done manually
- We commit an "_TRASH" folder
- There is an secret ongoing refactoring in the root of the Project called "_REFACTORING" (right, no branches)
- I cannot test locally, nor have just the Frontend locally connected to the Staging webservices
- I am required to upload my sources I write to an in-house server that get's shared with the other coworkers
- This is the only Linux server here and all of the permissions are fucked up
- We don't have versions, nor builds, we use the current Date as build number, but nothing simple to read, nonono. It's has to be an german Date, with only numbers and has always to end with "00"
- They take security "super serious" but disable the abillity to unlock your device with your fingerprint sensor ON PURPOSE

My brain hurts, maybe I'll post more on this shit fucking cuntfuck company. Sorry to be rude, but this triggers me sooo much!

So, I decided to post this based on @Morningstar's conundrum.

I'm dissatisfied with the laptop market.

Why THE FUCK should I have to buy a gaming laptop with a GTX 1070 or 1080 to get a decent amount of RAM and a fucking great processor?

I don't game. I program. I don't even own a fucking Steam library, for clarification. Never have I ever bought a game on Steam. Disproving the notion that I might have a games library out of the way, I run Linux. Antergos (Arch-based) is my daily driver.

So, in 2017 I went on a laptop hunt. I wanted something with decent specs. Ultimately ended up going with the system76 Galago Pro (which I love the form factor of, it's nice as hell and people recognize the brand for some fucking reason). Matter of fact, one of my profs wanted to know how I accessed our LMS (Blackboard) and I showed him Chromium....his mind was blown: "Ir's not just text!"

That aside, why the fuck are Dell and system76 the only ones with decent portables geared towards developers? I hate the prospect of having to buy some clunky-ass Republic of Gamers piece of shit just to have some sort of decent development machine...

This is a notice to OEMs: yall need to quit making shit hardware and gaming hardware with no mid-range compromise. Shit hardware is defined as the "It runs Excel and that's all the consumer needs" and gaming hardware is "Let's put fucking everything in there - including a decent processor, RAM, and a GTX/Radeon card."

Mid-range that is true - good hardware that handles video editing and other CPU/RAM-intensive tasks and compiling and whatnot but NOT graphics-intensive shit like gaming - is hard to come by. Dell offers my definition of "mid-range" through Sputnik's Ubuntu-powered XPS models and what have you, and system76 has a couple of models that I more or less wish I had money for but don't.

TBH I don't give two fucks about the desktop market. That's a non-issue because I can apply the logic that if you want something done right, do it yourself: I can build a desktop. But not a laptop - at least not in a feasible way.

Not a dev!rant,/but certainly a rant. Long post ahead.

First of all I MISSED YOU ALL

Had my fair issues of shit these months. And for that, FUCK EVERYTHING. End of rant for now. I am still managing somehow to do - slowly as fuck, but who cares at this point - like finally going to uni, finding a psychologist and not a psycho, unraveling a fuckton of previous trauma (hi abuse) and ~drums~ buying my new desktop! Not exactly a nasa server but a middish level workstation/gaming place. I am shopping right now. The previous days have been shaky with all the flashback business and emotional rollercoaster of death, but I feel like going the right way somehow. Is it true? Who knows! But after enduring several issues of suicide planning and luckily only one serious-bugged attempt epically hilariously failed, the slightest hope is a victory. I like p2p, so feel free to torrent and seed this little joy. If it is mine it can be yours. Take it!

Also, you know how much autistic I am, but I'd really like to make some friends. I make attempts but honestly I am awkward errrr.... I don't know how many dude/ttes I can count on. For friend I mean simply someone that honestly likes me somehow, is loyal, and has interest in sharing they like to do or think! (And if they want to give me tips on security/sysadmin/dev stuff, even better, but not required obviously).

Also, I may have some projects in mind. Will publish in the projects section when the roughest idea is finished.

Maybe I deserve an updoot. In real life.
(Which is also here....)

🎶🎶🎶🎶

I know I’ll get mixed views for this one...

So I’ll state my claim. I agree with the philosophy of uncle bob, I also feel like he is the high level language - older version of myself personality wise.. (when I learned about uncle bob I was like this guy is just like me but not low level haha).

Anyway.. I don’t agree with everything because I think he thinks or atleast I get the vibe he thinks everything can be solved by OOP, and high level languages. This is probably where Bob and I disagree. Personally I don’t touch ruby, python and java and “those” with a 10 foot pole.

Does he make valid arguments, yes, is agile the solve all solution no.. but agile ideas do come natural and respond faster the feedback loop of product development is much smaller and the managers and clients and customers can “see things” sooner than purly waterfall.. I mean agile is the natural approach of disciplined engineers....waterfall is and was developed because the market was flooded with undisciplined engineers and continues to flood, agile is great for them but only if they are skilled in what they are doing and see the bigger picture of the forest thru the trees.. which is the entire point of waterfall, to see the forest.. the end goal... now I’m not saying agile you only see a branch of a single tree of the forest.. but too often young engineers, and beginners jump on agile because it’s “trendy” or “everyone’s doing it” or whatever the fuck reason. The point is they do it but only focus on the immediate use case, needs and deliverables due next week.

What’s wrong with that?? Well an undisciplined engineer doing agile (no I’m not talking damn scrum shit and all that marketing bullshit).. pure true agile.
They will write code for the need due next week, but they won’t realize that hmm I will have the need 3 months from now for some feature that needs to connect to this, so I better design this code with that future feature in mind...

The disciplined engineer would do that. That is why waterfall exists so ideally the big picture is painted before hand.

The undisciplined engineer will then be frustrated in the future when he has to act like the cool aid man thru the hard pre mature architectural boundaries he created and now needs links or connections that are now needed.

Does moving to agile fix that hell no.. because the undisciplined engineer is still undisciplined.

One could argue the project manager or scrum secretary... (yes scrum secretary I said that right).. is suppose to organize and create and order the features with the future in mind etc...

Bullshit ..soo basically your saying the scrum kid is suppose to be the disciplined engineer to have foresight into realizing future features and making requirements and task now that cover those things? No!
1 scrum bitch focuses too much on pleasing “stake holders” especially taken literally in start ups where the non technical idiots are too involved with the engineering team and the scrum bastard tries to ass kiss and get everything organized and tasks working so the non technical person can see pretty things work.

Scrum master is a gate keeper and is not needed and actually hinders the whole process of making a undisciplined engineer into a disciplined engineer, makes the undisciplined engineer into a “forever” code grunt... filling weekly orders of story points unable to see the forest until it’s over because the forest isn’t show to the grunt only the scrum keeper knows the big picture..... this is bad this is why waterfall is needed.

Waterfall has its own problems, But that’s another story for another day..

ANYWAY... soooo where were we ....

Ahh yess....

Clean code..

Is it a good book, yes.. does uncle bobs personality show thru the book .. yes lol.
If you know uncle bob you will understand what I just did with this post lol. I had to tangent ( at least mine was related to the topic) ...

I agree with the principles of the book, I don’t agree with the extreme view point. It’s like religion there’s the modest folks and then there are the extremists. Well he’s the preacher of the cult and he’s on the extreme side.. but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.. many things he nails... he just hits the nail thru the wall just a bit.

OOP languages are not the solution... high level languages do not solve everything.. pininciples and concepts can be used across the board and prove valuable.. just don’t hold everything up like the 10 commandments of which you cannot deviate from.. that’s the difference here I think..

Good book, just don’t take it as the Bible as a beginner, actually infact DONT read this book as a beginner. Wait a bit learn then reflect by reading this.

Sometimes I get in a mode where everyone is a potential enemy. So my mind will be say, "The fuck you say!?" in a reactionary way. When this happens I sometimes respond badly online. I am noticing this pattern before I respond. It can take great effort to not post shit online at times.

My general goals when conversing online these days:
1. Spread joy through humor. (it isn't my problem if you don't think it is funny)
2. Care for people by telling the truth. (it isn't my problem if you don't think its true. I do like exchanging ideas.)
3. Try to listen and help people if they exhibit a perceptible need. (sometimes a lone voice reaching out can make a huge difference)
4. Restrain myself when someone aggressively challenges my beliefs. (work in progress, the fuck you say?!)
5. Sharing common interests with people. (games, programming, staying sane, etc)
6. Shitting on Javascript. (not because it is true, but because it is funny. see goal 1)

Welcome to my new series "shit I have to deal with as a developer hat was forced to become an TYPO3 integrator". I don't know how often I will post or how many parts there will be. To be true, I just need this series to vent about this shit.

10 months ago I started my training as a developer. Before that point I worked as an PHP developer in a student job. I was already experienced as a dev so I was looking forward to deal with great and interesting topics in the agency where my training would take place.
After a few weeks I was introduced to TYPO3 due to a support project that needed some tickets to be done. Also a new client bought many websites for most of his brands. So for the next 10 months or so until this day I mostly (around 95% of the time) worked on TYPO3 Projects and most of the time for this one client. I quickly became the "TYPO3 dude" and got tasks to integrate Fluid Templates, fix errors in templates, edit templates, sometimes even work on some smaller businesses logic.

We currently have 3 sites live, one waiting for a final customer approval and one WIP. The whole client project is setup on a single(!) TYPO3 instance with reusability of templates and other things in mind. Spoiler warning: it absolutely didn't work!

So be prepared for the next rant in this series where I vent about this piece of shit.