Usually I come here to share rants/negativity but this time I wanna share an happy moment I had yesterday as a programmer.

In lots of instances I struggled to work on personal projects: I feel the desire to code cool stuff but I've often self-sabotaged myself by doing stuff like:

- self-enforcing "one man agile methodologies" with tasks, issue boards and lately time tracking
- forcing myself to do long study/research periods about the language/technologies I wanna use before writing the first line of code (and when I was able to actually end my research and get to code most of the stuff I researched was forgotten since cramming information is not effective on the long run)
- forcing myself to stick with all the "best practices" under the sun and to setup countless tools (linters, CI, unit testing...) before even getting a working POC

Usually all these stupid self imposed rules ended up in me procrastinating or pushing trough stuff struggling with headache after headache when coding actually used to feel a mostly fun pursuit to me.

Took lots of time to recognize this monster I created into my head but finally yesterday I did and I gave myself permission to:

- Start programming with just the very basics of the language (while reading a book on said language on the side at a relaxed pace, I can always come back later to improve my code as I learn more)
- Add stuff (unit testing, complex frameworks, CI/CD...) only when I need it
- Do a very basic planning (like a text files listing "must have" features and "nice to have features") and avoid issue boards and stuff, I'm working on a hobby project not on a company or a big OSS projects

It's been so long since the last time I had a programming session where I spent most time actually writing code and not researching and overthinking stuff and it felt great.

Why can't I run a GUI Linux VM on Windows without hating myself in the process? I tried all (aside of VMWare Workstation since its free license forbids commercial use): Hyper-V, WSL, VirtualBox and everyone of them is slow, buggy or both

I'm the only one who loves programming and computers but hate most of the culture around it? The tropes (caffeine addiction, programming socks...), the YouTube "gurus" who makes clickbait titles and usually screams while reading other peoples blogs, the [hyperSpecificWebFramework]Conf where hours are wasted in which seems an infomercial for "yet another way to update an HTML page basing on a series of properties", the hackathons...

More I distance myself from this mountain of BS more my enthusiasm for tech grows

@chatgpt bot stopped being funny on day -1

95% of "in person" training courses for software developers are shit, change my mind if you can.

Ditching Visual Studio and all its annoying lag for Visual Studio Code was one of the best "productivity hacks" I ever did

As its now customary for kids of her age my 9 years old cousin received her first phone. Said phone has just 32gb of internal storage and her continuously putting games on it doesn't help so it constantly gets full and since I'm family's tech guy I'm the one who get called for that... I'd really love to destroy that waste of silicon by throwing it under a bus and then give a Nintendo Switch to my cousin as a better replacement. I hate these Android devices that are obsolete even before they hit the market but most importantly I hate the fact that 9 years old get "smart" phones for no actual fucking reasons.

After years of back-end development there's a thing which keeps bugging me: how little "interactive" the development process can be.
When I did front-end I took for granted that the application I was developing was easy to run so I could immediately test any little change I do on code but on back-end this is rare to see: you develop with tons of external dependencies (authentications, VPNs, databases...) so getting your application up and running can be an huge hassle and testing API controllers can be slow and frustrating since I have to continuously juggle multiple development environments, manually regenerate tokens, do guesswork to find which parameters you have to use for your API request, maintain my Postman/Insomnia HTTP calls collection to prevent it from turning into an unusable spaghetti mess... lots of repetitive tasks which kills my focus and makes me struggle in getting into a decent flow.

Automated testing has lot of potential in helping with that but its hard to introduce when you're rewriting a legacy sistem and you're already exceeded your budget.

I wonder if I'll keep doing back-end once I'm done with this project.

Shotout to Sublime devs for including all the older versions with your license.
As a retrocomputing enthusiast I appreciate being able to legitimately use Sublime on my old Mac.

I'm the only one who's subscribed to DHH blog's mailing list but is getting tired by all of his ranting about politically correctness, DEI and stuff?

I believe that DHH is one of the most insightful professionals in our field and I'm annoyed by SJWs too but I don't carefully curate my YouTube/social media content consumption (and completely stay away from Twitter since it pushes politicized content despite your best efforts to avoid it) just to get culture war bullshit (which I hate, it doesn't matter if it comes from the right or the left wing) straight in my inbox.

I hoped that at 44 people knows better than ranting on the Internet about overdone stuff, especially when they aren't "professional agitators" like Vaush whose livelihood depends on having people listening to your rants.

Wake up, it's 1983...
Node? React? Copilot? Programming Socks? Furries?
Man, I told you to not drink so much the last night, now wash your face and grab a coffee, you have a program for the VAX-11 to finish.

WhatsApp and Telegram should consider a feature to disable voice messages from all contacts or all contacts but close friends.

I'm getting tired of getting tech support requests from acquaintances I haven't hung out with in years but when these are too lazy even to type and I have to take type and listen to their muttered voice notes I get crazy

I'm trying to convert a legacy .NET Framework web api to .NET Core, the project and its supporting libraries are in awful conditions and to make things worse at a certain point someone has the genius idea of introducing Uncle Bob's "Clean" Architecture into a part of it so stuff which could simply look like this

public string doStuff(string input){
// Do the stuff
return output;
}

becomes a convoluted mess like this

public class StuffDoerRequest {
public string Input{get;set;}
}

public class StuffDoerResponse {
public string Output{get;set;}
}

public interface IStuffDoer {
public StuffDoerResponse Execute(StuffDoerRequest request);
}

public class StuffDoer {
public StuffDoerResponse Execute(StuffDoerRequest request) {
// Do the stuff
return new StuffDoerResponse() {
Output = actualFuckingOutput;
}
}
}

Edit: sorry for the lack of indentation, apparently DevRant trims leading whitespace

How do y'all read programming books? Do you try to memorize them, redo all the examples on your machine or read them quickly just to pick up the most important points and to remember where to look if additional informations are needed in future?

Nowadays I always use the last strategy otherwise reading a single book would take me a year but I'm curious to know if I'm the only one.

I'm not a data scientist but lately I've learned NumPy, Pandas and now I'm learning Matplotlib and Seaborn and after years of Excel the improvement is astounding.

Excel is far easier to approach (I casually use it since I was 6) but once you need to do more advanced stuff it requires a lot of tricks and workarounds which needs to be memorized and are hard to find just by reasoning or are straight impossible without the use of macros which introduces many compatibility issues.

Pandas on the other hand is harder to approach but once you learn the concepts between its basic data structures you can do a lot with little "Google-Fu".

Why all mobile hotspot/wifi tethering implementations seems to be buggy as hell?
It doesn't matter if I'm trying to use an iPhone or an Android as the hotspot or what I'm trying to connect (PC/Mac/Nintendo Switch...) in most case to have the clients find the mobile phone and successfully connect trough it I have to restart the mobile hotspot multiple times.

I like many Apple products but if there's a thing I hate about that company its their aspirational marketing: they doesn't sell computers, phones, tablets, earbuds and stuff anymore, they want to sell you a "perfect lifestyle" (perfect from the perspective of Californian tech-bros) where you'll be super fit, super organized, devour self help content like no tomorrow while taking pixel perfect notes, do mindfulness and breathing exercises, juggle 5 social events a day... and all it takes to achieve that is buying "just one more device".

Logging a week of work on Redmine is taking me ages, I wonder if I'm retarded or Redmine UX is shitty. Likely both.

Usually I come here to rant but this time I want to appreciate a technology which many programmers loves to hate: the old .NET Framework.
It may not be the most cutting edge or performat technology but it makes dealing with legacy code such a breeze.
I had to work on an old .NET Framework 4.5 project and all I had to do was opening the .sln with Visual Studio and I was ready to go, in the meantime Node.js projects unmaintained for few years easily succumbs to missing packages and breaking changes making maintenance a PITA.

How it's possible that WSL takes more than 10 seconds to run "neofetch" on a Windows machine?

I'm praying hard for another AI winter

On dev.to and similar sites I'm starting to see tons of Cheatsheets and courses on how to use fucking ChatGPT.

How few neurons should you have to need a course to learn how to use something which takes any statement in natural language? If you know how to read write you should be fine.

When do you think that testing is overdone?

I'm the only one annoyed by the emoji abusing programming influencers?

In particular I hate their presumption in proclaiming themselves experts in something just after following a swallow online course on it.

How to get cheap engagement for your shitty tech website:
- write an article about Android vs iOS (even better if you state that one is better than the other justifying that with very vague points)
- share it on Facebook where hordes of people with their brain stuck in early teenage years will fiercely fight for their mobile platform of choice
- profit!

On average it takes me 2 months to read a technical book, I'm not sure it's a pace I should be proud of...

Atlassian software sucks hard than Monica Lewinsky

I'm giving up on having side projects, most if the stuff I come up with is an unoriginal and uneeded waste of time. I'd rather run the extra mile to contribure to someone else's project.

"ChatGPT passed an interview for Google"
"I ask to ChatGPT to write my new song"
"What ChatGPT tells about our humanity"
"ChatGPT pooped its pants"

I'm the only one sick of seeing articles, posts and threads about Chat fucking GPT?! I can't wait for the hype to die out... or for someone to build a time machine able to bring me back to 2009

I’m in the middle of a 2:30h SCRUM meeting and the only thing I have to say is that Bill Cosby drinks would be less soporific.
Honestly, why managers can’t just hand out the tasks instead of forcing us to look at them discussing them?