Details
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About["Associate Technical Lead", "Gamer", "Designer", "Traveler", "Photographer"]
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SkillsHTML, JS, CSS, PHP
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LocationSri Lanka
Joined devRant on 6/3/2016
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Little bit of background I've been a front end developer for the past eight years not a good one but I get by. Last 4 working with consulting firms for fortune 500 clients. Big projects big plans big structure, following someone else's lead and just knowing the basics of code reviewing, git flow, code deployment and everything else... life happens and i end up as a front end developer for a big company not tech related that wants to depend less from consultants and do more in house dev. Seems a pretty straightforward project front in angular. Back on python doing queries to a database with sql server. I finish the on-boarding and after two weeks finally get access to the repos. Worst spaghetti code I've ever seen. Seems like someone took a vanilla script project from 10 years ago and push it into an angular tutorial project. Commented code, no comments for the code, deprecated functions still there, no use of typescript nested ifs hell. I try to do my job doing new features do comments clean up a bit. Senior developers get annoyed5
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- Cookie warnings
- Autoplay videos
- "It's better on the app!"
- Surprise paywall
- Newsletter popups
- "Sorry, this content is not available in your region!"
- Lazily paraphrasing another website without disclosing the source in an obvious way
- Anti-adblock popups
- "Become a pro-member today: starting at $4.99/month!"
- "Sign up here to get my free e-book! :)"
- "keep reading" button to load the rest of the damn article
- "We have a podcast!"
- ...
I hate the current state of the web.13 -
While exploring matterverse.ai, I looked at the formula for rubber:
C5H8.
its bandgap is 5.803
After a few minutes I discovered a slight modification:
C2H4, with a bandgap of 6.85!
"Holyshit, why aren't linemen using this instead of rubber for electrical insulation?"
*looks up formula*.
C2H4, the formula for:
Ethylene.
It's ethylene, a highly flammable gas.
And now you know why I don't do chemistry.8 -
People keep sharing their Clean Architecture repository. But most of them clearly don't read the book.2
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I created an app that plays background sounds to help people focus/study/relax. It’s free and open source. Feel free to try it.
Download from here: https://apps.microsoft.com/store/....
Source code here: https://github.com/jenius-apps/....6 -
In Soviet Union, people cut x-ray films into circles and used them to make vinyl records of popular Western music that wasn't available because of the iron curtain. Sound quality was atrocious, but that wasn't the point. I have several of such records in my vinyl collection, it was my grandma who was involved in this culture when she was young.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...18 -
A failed programmer!
Back in school the computer screen was my canvas, the keyboard was my brush and i filled it in with the colors of a language. Helping my fellow students debug and find the solution to their codes. Loved to do that its been 10 years thats i have programmed anything I am trying to figure out where is lost it all. Never got into a job working as programmer as in all the interviews I was asked of definition of things I could never remember but give a something to build or debug I could work it as a charm. Even though didn’t work a programmer kept on programming at home making free programs for friends or helping debug codes. But then I stopped and don’t know why and I really wanna get back into it not for others but for myself to see if i still have it, but its been so long new languages new platform and don’t know where to start. Or should I accept myself as a failed programmer!12 -
text-align: center
Designer: “it’s not cantered, it’s 2px too much to the left”
Me: *does nothing* “what about now?”
Designer: “perfect”
Yup. This IS the Truman show.17 -
Ladies and gentlemen, prepare yourselves for a rant with a capital R, this is gonna be a long one.
Our story begins well over a year ago while I was still in university and things such as "professionalism" and "doing your job" are suggestions and not something you do to not get fired. We had multiple courses with large group projects that semester and the amount of reliable people I knew that weren't behind a year and in different courses was getting dangerously low. There were three of us who are friends (the other two henceforth known as Ms Reliable and the Enabler) and these projects were for five people minimum. The Enabler knew a couple of people who we could include, so we trusted her and we let them onto the multiple projects we had.
Oh boy, what a mistake that was. They were friends, a guy and a girl. The girl was a good dev, not someone I'd want to interact with out of work but she was fine, and a literal angel compared to the guy. Holy shit this guy. This guy, henceforth referred to as Mr DDTW, is a motherfucking embarrassment to devs everywhere. Lazy. Arrogant. Standards so low they're six feet under. Just to show you the sheer depth of this man's lack of fucks given, he would later reveal that he picked his thesis topic "because it's easy and I don't want to work too hard". I haven't even gotten into the meat of the rant yet and this dude is already raising my blood pressure.
I'll be focusing on one project in particular, a flying vehicle simulator, as this was the one that I was the most involved in and also the one where shit hit the fan hardest. It was a relatively simple-in-concept development project, but the workload was far too much for one person, meaning that we had to apply some rudimentary project management and coordination skills that we had learned to keep the project on track. I quickly became the de-facto PM as I had the best grasp on the project and was doing a lot of the heavy lifting.
The first incident happened while developing a navigation feature. Another teammate had done the basics, all he had to do was use the already-defined interfaces to check where the best place to land would be, taking into account if we had enough power to do so. Mr DDTW's code:
-Wasn't actually an algorithm, just 90 lines of if statements sandwiched between the other teammate's code.
-The if statements were so long that I had to horizontal scroll to see the end, approx 200 characters long per line.
-Could've probably been 20 normal-length lines MAX if he knew what a fucking for loop was.
-Checked about a third of the tiles that it should have because, once again, it's a series of concatenated if statements instead of an actual goddamn algorithm.
-IT DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!
My response was along the lines of "what the fuck is this?". This dipshit is in his final year and I've seen people write better code in their second semester. The rest of the team, his friend included, agreed that this was bad code and that it should be redone properly. The plan was for Mr DDTW to move his code into a new function and then fix it in another branch. Then we could merge it back when it was done. Well, he kept on saying it was done but:
-It still wasn't an algorithm.
-It was still 90 lines.
-They were still 200 characters wide.
-It still only checked a third of the tiles.
-IT STILL DIDN'T FUCKING WORK!
He also had one more task, an infinite loop detection system. He watched while Ms Reliable did the fucking work.
We hit our first of two deadlines successfully. We still didn't have a decent landing function but everything else was nice and polished, and we got graded incredibly well. The other projects had been going alright although the same issue of him not doing shit applied. Ms Reliable and I, seeing the shitstorm that would come if this dude didn't get his act together, lodged a complaint with the professor as a precautionary measure. Little did I know how much that advanced warning would save my ass later on.
Second sprint begins and I'm voted in as the actual PM this time. We have four main tasks, so we assign one person to each and me as a generalist who would take care of the minor tasks as well as help out whoever needed it. This ended up being a lot of reworking and re-abstracting, a lot of helping and, for reasons that nobody ever could have predicted, one of the main tasks.
These main tasks were new features that would need to be integrated, most of which had at least some mutual dependencies. Part of this project involved running our code, which would connect to the professor's test server and solve a server-side navigation problem. The more of these we solved, the better the grade, so understandably we needed an MVP to see if our shit worked on the basic problems and then fix whatever was causing the more advanced ones to fail. We decided to set an internal deadline for this MVP. Guess who didn't reach it?
Hitting the character limit, expect part 2 SOON7 -
Interesting fact: Dogecoin is popular because of a Reddit bot that stole everyone's money.
DogeTipBot, a Reddit bot that was designed as a 3rd party resource for tipping Reddit users for good content was a bot that used Dogecoin as a micro-tipping service, giving many users their first crypto experience and popularizing the coin.
The creator of DogeTipBot went bankrupt, sold all of his coins, AND all of the coins of his users, and shut down the bot.
A currency born as a joke, made intentionally as backwards as possible, and popularized by a scam, is now worth $50 billion USD... now that's a meme.18 -
TIL the best way to “win” an argument on Twitter is to simply abandon the thread when people think you should answer for your “crime” of having a difference of opinion and they start bringing social justice nonsense into it as a replacement for logic. They’re going on and on about how you are obligated to reply to them to answer for your alleged “privilege” and your silence just makes them sputter with rage.8
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Ever apply for a dev job in an industry you really wanna be jn even though you know you aren’t very qualified for the job? How’d that go for you?8
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Bossman kept giving me a new “high priority” every month. Which would’ve been fine except for the fact that the prior month’s “high priority” was always a type that needed several months to come to full fruition. So he was constantly pulling the rug out from under me just as I was starting to gather steam and make progress. Also, he was begrudgingly paying me only half of the market salary for my job title in my locale. Would have loved to have paid me less and worked me twice as hard. I endured about 9 months of that and then I quit. Now my job is the exact opposite. Paid nearly twice as much with no micromanaging and plenty of time to work on my projects.1
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I think if a FAANG company accidentally hired me, I'd last all of 15 seconds before they'd be showing me the door. https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/02/...4
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Well, this’ll get me a downrant and probably a pile of abusive and hateful comments, but I chose WordPress as my dev specialty. It’s in that sweet spot between my own uselessness as a full stack and front-end coder and my clients’ inability to comprehend how to click an “Update plugin” button. So they pay me to do that, plus the occasional “design”, and are seemingly happy to do so.
I think I won something. Not sure what. But my stress levels in my career are consistently at an all-time low. I have lots of flexible time in my day to do work, go outside, get exercise, work on hobbies, network with other people, and be with family. I guess being a WordPress “expert” isn’t all that bad.7 -
How to Develop Your Talent Stack https://elmghari.com/talent-stack/
TL;DR
"Building your talent stack will give you a unique edge for particular roles or tasks. In doing so, you won’t be competing with everyone else anymore. You won’t be playing a zero sum game.
Instead, you’ll be focusing on yourself, playing positive sum games, and building your own path." -
Kid brings me an ancient Chromebook with non-functioning "t" key.
I crack open the case and remove a bunch of screws trying to get to the keyboard.
No can do. This thing is built to basically self-destruct upon user tampering (Dammit, China!!!)
Put it all back together with the intent of trying to wipe it and recycle it.
The "t" key is suddenly working fine.3 -
On a non-Dev forum about a hobby topic, someone felt the need to go all woke about certain famous creators in said hobby. Particularly that those creators have ideas and philosophies antithetical to the (ever shifting) ideals of wokeness. And that everything those creators made should be destroyed and never allowed to be portrayed or discussed in public again. In the name of tolerance, of course.
If this starts to happen to the dev world to the point that I can no longer earn a living because it has become known that I have possibly committed or might commit Thoughtcrime because of who I associate with, I will be glad to see that asteroid, polar flip, or worldwide EMP reset. Because humanity can’t progress if no one can write, sing, play, or make something simply because they are not woke enough.5 -
When you’re eager to convert Joomla websites into WordPress websites because Joomla is that bad. I mean, it’s just awful.8
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Taught myself assembler at 13 (this was the mid 1980s) and wondered how the hell people could stand to do this. Then I found out there were more abstract languages like BASIC or COBOL. So I taught myself BASIC and MS-DOS batch scripting. Various other languages came later (PROLOG, Pascal, C, Smalltalk, C++, VisualBasic, etc). But it’s never been easy for me because I suck at math and complicated logic structures. Especially not good with OOP. My brain was ruined by learning procedural coding first. It refuses to incorporate OOP.
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!rant, a success story.
I made a tool for a live streamer I like, for free. Something to find highlights in a VOD based on the chatlog.
It took me around 15h to make. It is a very simple electron app, the "valuable" code is ~70 lines.
I wasn't sure he would even bother to try it.
Anyways, I send it to him. 10 minutes later, the guy tells me that "this is amazing! You just saved me hours of derushing my streams ❤️"
That's great already, but it does not end there. A few minutes later he asks me "I know other streamers that would love it, can I share? And can I add you in our private discord?"
I have now a direct access to some of the best youtubers/streamers in my country 🤩.4 -
A while back, I had a lot of telemarketers were calling me daily, and I mean A LOT of them.
I got so frustrated with he calls that I decided I had to figure out a better way to handle those calls.
At the time, I was working with a PBX software called Asterisk, which is used to handle hardware interfaces and network applications for phone calls.
I needed a suitable side project and there was a version of Asterisk designed for Raspberry Pi, so I made a fun little answering service for myself.
Whenever a telemarketer called, I asked them to call back later, but to "my personal number", and gave them the number to my phone robot. (which had a pre-paid SIM card in a GSM dongle mounted)
When it received a call, it would play a pre-recorded phrase, wait for 1000 ms of silence and then play the next phrase.
After all 16 phrases had been played, it would start from phrase 7 again and repeat until the caller gave up.
I had this set up running for a while, and then added another robot for english speaking callers.
The calls stopped after a few months.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!13 -
Any ReactJS developer here? Just wanted to ask, how do you handle SEO with ReactJS SPA? Do you follow any tutorial to convert it to SSR? Or do you just use NextJS instead?
Thanks3 -
**Ahem**
https://google.com/search/...
"Never assume that data useless to your application is useless to all others - we are asking it different questions"
Privacy is dead because we could disseminate valuable data from crap if our lives depended on it, discarding simple key values for over analysed crap metrics every time.
Oh, and it's also screwing us over... if your keen know more about getting fucked go take a look at @linux 's rant about the matrix.org hack
- https://devrant.com/rants/2061177/...15 -
For Windows driver update, found a great (open source) tool to update or install missing drivers.
https://sdi-tool.org/
My dell laptop (Windows 10) screen used to go blank or some bubble used to appear may times a day. Used Dell driver update tool, no update, says all driver up to date.
Then used Snappy Driver Installer tool, which detected my laptop details correctly.
Then it showed that my display driver was almost a year old and there were couple of updates, latest being just last month. In addition to that, there were 30+ updates on disk drivers, networking, sensors, bluetooth, audio etc.
First updated my display driver, upon success, slowly updated the rest of it. Now, the system worked entire day without any issue. Also, my laptop fan used to run full speed seems to have slowed down.
Also, my external monitor clarity has improved.
ps: worked for me, but be careful. Check it thoroughly before updating, update only those drivers which are giving trouble and there are no updated drivers available from windows or manufacturers.8 -
Linux.Pizza will join a cooperative called Librehosters that basically is a network of hosters that offer services that is free (as in libre) for either 0 cost, or a small cost.
Feel free to check it out!
https://libreho.st/
https://linux.pizza14 -
Yet another commercial seminar upset I won't give up a day of my time to fly to the UK to speak at the event for no payment or reimbursement for my travel.
But of course I should think about the exposure and networking opportunities! 😕8