I was so bored and I typed this on Google search "a;sldkfj" and the meaning came...

What a New Year..

I started in 2015 at my current job. The first contract was for a year, very normal in the Netherlands. Also, I had only 6 months of professional experience with programming.
I already knew that I would replace an older colleague who's going to retire and I would get some of his responsibilities.

One year later (6 months ago) I had an evaluation with my boss. He told me he was proud I learned everything so quick and offered me a permanent position and wanted me to take over one of the major products we sell. Even more, he wanted me to decide how to change the framework since it's over 20years old. (Multiple languages combined)

I am currently working on a new design and UX as well, which I presented last year. The love it.

I've never felt so appreciated and valued before.

Best experience: Learned about templates

Worst experience: Had to use templates

Completed a project for my final year CS degree and my professor rejected saying it is of very few lines of code.Hope he learns to evaluate projects on complexity and logic rather than number of lines of code. :/

Best experience: reverse engineering a CMS site to build a mobile app for it

Worst experience: reverse engineering a CMS site to build a mobile app for it

Worst experience: had a verbal fight with pm because his poor management overworked me ( I was working on the same project till 10pm every day for 4 days with no OT pay)

Best experience: I stepped up against an abusive pm and told him to fuck off to his face.

Best experience: being in charge of the backend of the company website

Worst experience: being in charge of the backend of the company website when something was going wrong

Best experience: Downloading devRant
Worst experience: Being on devRant for so long it's making my productivity go down. 😑

While updating a remote production server, accidentally uninstalled a package that was required for openssh to work. That was fun to recover... 😐

I got yelled at from the Testing Guy because I sent him an APK file at 5:30 just when he wanted to leave.

I started watching Silicon Valley. I'm hooked.

Getting hired at my job, I've learned so goddamn much in the past 2 months and my team is amazing

I have to start my best moment last year with a confession: I moved from Dev to Test half a decade ago. Naturally I do a lot of automation. My Best moment was when Dev said my automation code is so well structured that he wants to work on that and not an the production code anymore. Gave me that warm "still got it" feeling 😊

A few months ago I jelled about some crappy code, who the f*ck wrote it?! Then they showed me my name in the file header... crap I wrote it myself A WEEK BEFORE and already forgot about it...

Best: My first app for Windows 10, "devRant unofficial".

Worst: A website for a client using Facebook APIs which don't want to work properly.

When I started programming Batch Files I decided to go big and and make an Batch Program with a fully functional UI system. Just when I had finished the first menu I kept getting a "goto was unexpected at this time" or something like that. I did everything I could to see about debugging until I finally cleared my calender and spent the next week debugging. A week of debugging goes by and I see someone coding in color rather then black and white at my school. I walk up to him and ask. "What language is that?" To which he replies "Batch". I asked him how he got Notepad to be in color and he simply pointed to the top left of the screen and it said Notepad++.
I get home later that day and look up "Notepad++" and download the first thing I see. I install the .msi file and I see a language bar at the top of the screen. Set it to batch, and drag my .bat file into the program to see six of my dividers are red bars. I look this up and see there's another spacing option "echo.", I replace my current spacers with this and the whole thing starts working. Fml, that's a week I'm never gonna get back

Worst: my previous job was hell and...
Best: in May I quit and so far the current job is a a breeze. Also in 2016 I fully switched to Linux and now everything is going to be fine.

My worst experience was at my job where they told me I have to move to a permanent position from 3 years of contracting without a specific offer.
Why is that bad? In my country it means approximatly 40% lower wage.
I came into the job with PHP knowledge when they were looking for Perl on a project one year behind schedule. I learned the language and finished working demo in 6 weeks.
After that, every project that was ever assigned to me was done within 5-15% of the allocated time. I'm not kidding here. My manager loved be, because I was reliable, fast and I even 'accidentaly' solved other problems, like for instance I developed simple syslog search tool and benchmarked zip algos for reading speed, and the fastest had 70% better compression than the algo used before (gzip into plzip on 1-2gb files). That solved anothet problem - syslog servers did not have enough disk space and they didn't have money to upgrade the server.
The number of projects I touched or developed was over 20.
I also lead and developed our team's most successful tool, that every customer was throwing money to buy, while cutting down costs everywhere.
And after three years of that, my manager says that there are no more money for contractors. And the only possibility is going for employment. Without any specific offer! Just 'we cant do this anymore'.
Which I understand, that can happen in corporation, but ffs after all I've done, I expected warmer attitude. Not like 'you may have to leave, since we do not really care'.
I liked the people there, even though the corporation environment was lacking in many respects, but I wanted to help our local branch with everything I could and they gave up on me like that.
So I started looking elsewhere and I found a startup which offered 6 times the money I had in my previous job and promises to relocate me to USA. Which is the best thing that has happened to me that year and second best in my whole life!

Best: built an app that helps me with my colorblindness, also i contributed to a game engine ive been using a lot

Worst: had to use c++ for a project

My best experience was going from static HTML and non-preprocessed CSS to having my mind blown by Sass & learning JavaScript and what "API" even means (and starting on ruby and basics in command line). I actually feel like I'm a developer in some sense of the word.

That was a ton of growth in a year where I transitioned from a purely graphic design role to having an influence over development processes and rolled out a number of projects to production that I spearheaded.

Worst. 2 am on campus, js file for a web app project. It didn't work, no exceptions thrown, no errors. I call the assistant teacher. He calls the teacher. Teacher calls the head of department. Four of us staring at the screen for an hour, trying different browsers, environments etc
3 am, switch cases had semicolons rather than colons. Sleepy coding is the worst.

Writing a small project for a small IT company that has no idea how to run an IT company.

Best: being able to look back at the year, from the first site I built to the latest, and seeing major progress. Realising that I can actually make a career out of this.

Finding devRant

WORST: moved from Canada to France and went from a company with agile methods to one without methods.
A 8 months nightmare...

So much useless meeting, for no result
A drupal project... with a junior team with no drupal experience at all.
And a general "i don't give a fuck" feeling from everyone.

BEST: My new job. Building from scratch a Team with agile methods, backed by my hierarchy.

Programme that simulates the rolling of the dice when playing the Risk board game.

No more dice that fall off the table. No more dice that throw the figures into disarray.

Best experience: starting uni, finally wanting to study and teachers who (mostly) understand their subject

Worst experience: starting uni, teachers who don't understand their subject or refuse to explain why something is used.

I might be in a love-hate relation with my uni.

Not really rubber, but he's my duck.
He's literally one year younger than me so it makes it quite special.
I really like him 😄

Best xp : dev on new tech

Worst xp : being pressured to deliver something out of that new tech over a very short period

When my boss acknowledged my effort in creating an in house scripting language. Makes me feel really really proud! 😁

Best: training absolute newbies

Worst : training absolute newbies

Worst: working a job where I wasn't learning anything and had shit management.

Best: got a new job where I'm learning lots and has great management.

Best: Got into game modding and had tons of fun! Learned a lot about Unity engine and became very comfortable with C#.

Worst: Abandoned my social life as a result of my new obsession. Need to find the balance.

Best:
My first 3D engine with a really hacky physics implementation made textured spheres bounce off of each other. Biggest satisfaction ive ever had.

Worst experience was hard bricking my android phone after I've messed with its partitions. I'm still sad about that.

I work on a warehouse dev team. One day this past year, I was trying to deploy a new build to a QA server. Earlier that day I had been looking at the logs on the production server and had left the ssh session open. I had been working for less than a year out of college at this point and shouldn't have had access to deploy to the production server.

Long story short I deployed my QA build to the production server and saw there were problems connection to our production database. Then my heart dropped in my chest as I realized I had just brought down our production server.

I managed to get the server back up by rolling back in about 5 minutes and no one ever knew except some people on my team.

I felt horrible for the longest time. Later in the year another guy that joined my team that has about 20 years of experience under his belt did the exact same thing, but needed help rolling it back. Needless to say, that made me feel a lot better. 😂

Definitely the worst moment of my year.

Rant....!!
When you end up wasting more time setting up company built in tools and environments for your application than coding..

My best dev-memories of 2016??

First in february I won a competition (Jugend - Forscht) in which i had programmed an interpreter. And then, the first time my selfmade compiler actually printed hello world...

Build an app in a new Javascript framework within a month

Worst experience: being laid off when the startup I worked for lost a deal. I loved that project :(

Best experience: my new company sent me to USA for a few days to meet the client. I've gained a lot more of confidence on my spoken English. I've didn't use it in years, so I was worried. Perhaps you wouldn't think it's a "dev" experience, but English is actually a required skill for a developer who has it as a second language.

Best: Writing my first bash script, understanding Object Oriented programming

Worst: Dealing with team members who claim to have work experience but in reality have no clue why they are doing what they are doing

was hired as "Lead developer" of a growing team for an advertising agency. it turned out to be 80% updating contents at some joomla sites

Best: 100% of my contracts have resulted in extensions and permanent roles offered, after worrying I wasn't good enough to try contracting.

Worst: Used the wrong set of monitoring when doing my first deployment at a contract and thought what I had deployed was working fine. It wasn't. For 24 hours. Cost the company a lot of money. (why did they offer me an extension again?)

Best: finishing 20+ tasks in one day... felt like I had no tasks on my list
Worst: I had to deliver twice the size the next day

Best: learnt how to deploy Wildfly application server from scratch on a live environment without messing up.

Worst: could not continue working because my internship was over.

Working on big project during summer paid intership. A lot stuff I have learned there, not just programming, but also model design, team planning etc.

Set up a personalized web front page for the news organization I worked for in the spring. Left it for the editorial staff to be tested and approved.

Didn't hear a word for almost a year when the PO asked for me to deploy it.

After a few days, the editorial staff started asking questions.

I really, really wonder what they did all those months before release...

Happened in December, had devs from "big" companies coming over to our start up and doing a sprint with us. Very humbling 🙂

Created a github open source project for voice recognition for react native Android.

Needed help developing some features and did my research with links to some articles.

Then some guy that showed interest in the specific issue just copied my repo and launched his own npm package with the new features.

Just threw my code in the garbage and just felt so irritated. I did all the research and shared the research links and he just duped me and left me to rot. No credit given.

Fuck that guy. This is not open source.

Rant over

Best: learned to code, started writing smart-home scripts for home automation and developed biologic and quantitative data analysis scripts in Python and R.
Worst: didn't get paid to develop them and haven't got enough experience for it to be more than a hobby.

Worse dev experience: Working for a company that had a monopoly in the market. They have Dinosaurs that didn't want to upgrade the user experience at all because of the company's hold on the market and their lack of forward thinking. It's a privately held company that is hard to get terminated. It was frustrating because they could do more but didn't so I'm looking to compete once my non-compete is up.

Best dev experience : Quitting the aforementioned job and getting another one. 😎

Best : .NET core 1.0 is publicly released

Worst : DI went over my head.

Will try to get it this year.

You must use IE.

Worst part was when I accidentally overwrote my EFI system partition. Recovery was not fun.

I got nothing. Haha

Anyone else work on a project that ends up taking all your time since it is way harder than you thought, but when it comes to talking about it to your supervisor you realize just how easy it really is and you just look stupid in front of the person youre explaining it to?

Wk33:

Best experience of 2016 is probably just realising I'm a pretty good programmer. I have a physics undergraduate degree and a 1 year masters in CS, I'm working on back end algorithm stuff so pretty mathsy at times, but I've found from working with others that I write good quality code. I've still got lots to learn but I've got a solid foundation, am reading, learning and coding outside of work.

Worst experience of 2016 is working with people for whom it's purely a day job, only about the money, get things done in whatever hacky way works.

Best! Starting my 1st year at university to learn all this stuff 😃

Worst: listening to the 4th years freak me out about what is to come 😬

Worst was with ionic and ios. Havent really worked with either and got mac that wasnt updated in ages and also they didnt give charger. Dealing with sudos and not using sudos then trying to work with xcode and free licenses took me a good time until i got first successful build for iPad. Biggest time consuming mistake was that i had to logout of itunes before i could make another account. It only gave me error and said try again later. Made me furious but after i got setup working everything worked quite nicely. Loved the safari developer view.

Best dev experience was coding one of my favorite board games. I started it early on in 2016, and while it isn't completely do finished (AI needs work and tweaks to the UI), it is functional for hot seat play.

I started doing it because I wanted to make a game and learn some things I didn't know, specifically I was interested in making AIs with different strategies. While I set out to learn this, I've learned so much more along the way.

I'm still really happy when I get to work on it, and having something to show people (that they can actually play!) is a great feeling.

The good: dotnet core RTM
The bad: my previous shitty work place, their shitty product, the very shitty TL that had no fucking idea how to lead or manage the team
The ugly: the shit storm I dropped on TL, group leader, CEO/CTO when I left...

I was moved from a team I loved where I felt my tech leads were competent, where my tech leads valued my skills and my manager was fabulous and excelled at making sure everyone had the resources they needed and was rewarded for good work, to a team where my tech leads are inconpetent and constantly treat all the junior devs with condescension. Additonally, although my new manager seems nice and has good intentions, she is focused too much on the results of work and not the morale of her team. Consequently, she consistently ignores the negative feedback that is given about the tech leads because "the tech lead gets the results"

Working with the Intel Edison. My god that thing sucked. So the thing ships with this tiny custom yocto Linux with almost no common packages the default repositories. Getting basic tools like Git and Vim were a task on its own, let alone getting the latest version of Node running. Another company Emutex made a Debian distro for it called Ubilinux but they never planned support or updates and officially took it down a few months ago. Both the Yocto build and the Debian build shipped with the 3.10 Linux kernel and upgrading it without breaking it was nearly impossible because they monkey patched device support into it rather than making a patcher. The team at Linux responsible for the Edison released 3 broken versions of the MRAA library in a row, crippling my code for weeks before I realized what they had done. The hardware hasn't received a refresh since it came out and only 1.4 GB of the 4 GB on the device is actually available.

It may be fine for hobby projects but please don't ever try to prototype a commercial product on it. Fuck the Edison and fuck Intel

Fucking project lead!!! I was told to make a configuration script i have no experience in scripting yet he expects me to deliver it the following day!!!

Worst experience of 2016 was dd /dev/sdb with some random image. sdb contained my home part on my build machine.

Without a doubt it has to be the internal company search engine/file finding tool @thewamz and I wrote.

The company has a wide UNC network with files scattered all over the place and they need a way to keep track of where the files get moved to (they can and do get moved). The original tool was written in Java/Tomcat and didn't use any frameworks or utilities beyond custom written ones, no orms, and the SQL was just raw strings. The program didn't take into account that files might be moved or deleted so it never removed anything from the database, it just kept adding files and never removing them.

It however never stores files itself, just links to files elsewhere on the UNC network.

It took six months to get it into what might be a stable beta or release candidate state. The user interface is good, very simple and intuitive, the whole thing was rewritten in python/django, there were issues with utf 8 (and mysql not fully supporting utf 8 in its own utf 8 mode), we added a regex search mode (which was sorely lacking), the search used to take up to fifteen minutes however we sped it up to less than a minute (worst case when a user simply puts "^$" as the regex search). It has a multi threaded design which does some checks to ensure it doesn't spawn too many threads and get stuck in constant Gil switching. Still some bugs to fix, like moving the processing of results returned by the server in a web worker so that the content widget doesn't lock up processing millions of search results and moving the back end to use asynchronous python might gain a performance boost. But on the whole I think the system is ready to replace the older system that all the users are frustrated with and constantly complain about.

However the annoying bit is... How to actually get the new system online, while I am responsible for the development of tools and their maintenance, I am not responsible for their initial deployment and that means I have no idea when (or even if) my new tool will even ever be released :/

Worst: Seeing the huge list of stuff I need to learn to land a job in WebDev knowing I kept on trying to get unfinished project as close as possible to a usable stage.

Best: Learning and using some tools and better OSs than before

Working for unappreciative fucktard clients who believe they know more about dev than a seasoned professional and try to give me advise on how to approach my work and or solve programming issues. FUCK Sake if you know it then don't hire me you fucktard client.

My best experience is working for a small company and bridging their disconnected systems together using an array of programming languages such as Go, PHP, VB, Batch Script, Javascript and C

Best experience: Sitting gleefully sipping coffee and typing away in VIM.

Worst experience: The constant stream of interruptions that refuse to be banished to another buffer.

Best: Hiring and Training Interns
Worst: Working for a neurotic client who later cancelled project.

Best: getting hired for my first job at a digital marketing agency.
Worst: watching everyone else quit around me, culminating in my team leader, the last team member besides me

Rebuilding a whole disintegrating legacy plain-PHP project from zero in my favourite framework alone with data importers and stuff in 6 weeks.
Gave me some dreamless nights, but it was a great adventure.

Best experience: Getting my first contract for a major project, and landing a new job with a web agency for the first time!

Worst experience: Underestimating the contracted project, and having to learn while working on the project.

In the end it's all great experience, and reminds you that your always learning on the job.

I had an idea: My work need a system to register our guests. I'm developing this system alone since February.

//Week 33 - Worst Part
$worst = "";
$worst .= "Not knowing the project start date";
$worst .= "Not knowing the deadline";
$worst .= "Not getting the design and sitemap on time";
$worst .= "Teaching juniors developers coding where as they have Degree in Computer Science and me didn't went to college";
$worst .= "After junior developers learn coding, they move to another big company for more pay then me";

//Week 33 - Best Part
$best = "";
$best .= "I learnt a lot last year";
$best .= "I also learnt how to motivate myself for side projects (Not Working)";
$best .= "I learnt how to put myself upto challenge on any development work";
$best .= "I don't have yell at my General Manager or Project Manager because I got devRant now (Fuck Them)";

Eclipse deleting my entire project, roughly few thousand LOC and a lot of assets. (Probably my silly mistake, though I don't know what I did)

Good thing I had a half a week old back up

Worst was so bad im ashamed of mentioning it here...

Best was switching from ubuntu to fedora i guess, at least that's the best i remember

Best experience: My supervisor was upset to see me leave my internship this summer because I had become more competent with the program I was working with than anyone else in the company

Worst: It took 5 weeks of sitting and doing nothing to get to that point because the program was so broken and the creators of the program failed to allow any access or backdoor to make any changes, so we had to wait for them to get back to us about any and every problem. Even worse, they were based in Germany and never got back to us at a reasonable time...

Worst experience: Learning how data is stored in segments in a middleware application called PMS on mainframe and how to manipulate that data.

Best Experience: Building a app that lets you pull down any set of segment data from mainframe and figuring out a way to automatically annotate the data so you could just hover over it and you know what the data is exactly. This way I didn't have to constantly refer back to a reference manual to see what a field name is in a segment, or having to go talk to a mainframe developer to go look at their code. Btw, did I mention I made it searchable by field name??

Best: Getting really close to my team and having good times with them as well as having a client love their website so much they sent me gifts and a really nice note.

Worst: Rude client who treated me like shit, made my job 103837xs harder and made me want to cry, scream and not want to come in to work ever again.

This one time last year a colleague found out that some data went missing and suggested to recover the data from a backup. When trying to create a new database instance in the Google Cloud Platform (if everything works it's amazing!) it failed.
Not knowing why this happened, I tried to revert that backup to the production database, after creating a backup using the GCP. Needless to say that failed as well, resulting in a corrupted database instance where I couldn't access the created backups anymore.
This all went at around 10pm and the only users of our product are currently in the same timezone and use it from around 7.30AM until 6PM so no one besides our team knew the server was down.
After a long night chatting Google's support team the database was successfully recovered and the only harm done was sleep depravation for me and a colleague.

Apparently there was a bug in the GCP. It was resolved in two hours and the last time a breaking bug was in that piece was more than seventy days earlier.

I did at least learn to create local backups as well, instead of relying on the tools of the same product...

Best: the moment I saw the corrupted database spin up again and not losing my job because of it.

Best: Started my first real job as a software developer

Worst: wrote off my 2l turbo megane coupe and scraped the poop off my replacement car

Best: Using version control for my Mac.

Best experience? My homie @lordbarnhill and I stumbled onto the solution for installing OpenSocial #Drupal8 properly on Pantheon hosting.

Worst experience? Creating a website for a radiology group only to get fired with 3 days left until launch. The "new" developer turned out to be their IT guy in house took 2 months to launch. The experience up to the point of getting fired was excruciatingly detailed and filled with ope creep.

In terms of developing:
Best: made a responsive web app that connects to a desktop software and allows to make orders for providers.
Worst: the company for wich it was developed shows no signs of implementing that app now.

Best experience: Graduated, got a job

Worst experience: The project assigned to me was built on fucking CodeIgniter

Tried (and still trying) to do an LFS build. I already worked with Ubuntu, Debian, and Arch, but somehow a successful build eludes me. Each time I follow the book as closely and possible, but each time I got different issues. I've had to format the partition I'm working on at least 20 times now. Its fun, but I have no idea how I manage to mess up in so many ways.

Best: Built an awesome web app and received much.

Worst: For some reason Christmas brings out the worst in boss. Possibly Krampus in disguise. Will investigate further.

It was quite a rough begining of 2016... having to give the context of a 7 team members project to 5 new team members, that replaced 5 teammates that left the company...

Worst dev experience of 2016: compiling and including SDL and SDL2 into C projects, never got it to run all the functions, sometimes wouldnt compile, etc... Never got it to work properly in the end...

Best : creating a fully customizable, performance-oriented ETL service from ground up.
Bad : developing in xamarin forms in Android .
Worse : porting said xamarin forms app to ios.

Best: The absolute feeling of glee when I finally twigged what polymorphism is!

Worst: spending a fully night working out what polymorphism is....

Best experience: Writing code for 2 hours straight, running for first time and it works perfectly. The feeling is euphoric