Details
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AboutFull Stack Developer and Research Assistant at CHAOSS
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Skillspython, Git, OSS
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LocationColumbia, MO
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Github
Joined devRant on 11/1/2017
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**My Resume** : Worked with JavaScript and .NET for the last 3 years ... have an Associates degree...more things
**Recruiter**
You look like you'd be a great fit for this position. We require a Bachelors degree, but we're willing to take 4 years progressive experience in lieu of each year of schooling.
**First**
4 YEARS of experience for EACH YEAR of school?
**Me**
I guess basic reading and math aren't required to be a job recruiter? Man...Only 5 more years and I'll be able to see how my skills as a developer with 8 years of professional experience will go over as an Entry level developer!1 -
So since I’m in managers meetings I get a lot of info that I probably shouldn’t have. For example, I know before everyone else when we’re considering going to a new software, and I’m in the vendor discussions and pilot groups for said software.
Today a user came down and asked me to build a feature that will be included ootb in the new software we’re considering. I wanted to say no because I know we’re going to this other thing, but couldn’t because it’s not for sure. So I said I’d take care of it and ushered him on his way and now I have to build some crap that will be obsolete in eight months.
I prefer the good old days of blindly pushing buttons at the request of the evil overlords... it was so much simpler...2 -
"I was wondering why Monitors sleep and Keyboards don't.
Then it occurred to me that Keyboards have two SHIFTS. 😆😆" -some guy17 -
A boy asked his bitcoin-investing dad for 1 bitcoin for his birthday.
Dad: What? $15,554??? $14,354 is a lot of money! What do you need $16,782 for anyway?
Source: Twitter @cryptomanran23 -
I don't understand why so many people fight this war of tabs vs spaces. My colleagues elegantly solved the problem just not using indentation at all36
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Me: GET /sleep
Baby: 307 Temporary Redirect
Baby: 204 No Content
Me: 200 OK
Me: GET /sleep
Baby: 307 Temporary Redirect
Baby: 413 Payload Too Large
Me: 102 Processing
Me: 200 OK
Me: GET /sleep
Baby: 307 Temporary Redirect
Baby: 444 Connection Closed Without Response
Me: 200 OK
Me: GET /sleep
Baby: 307 Temporary Redirect
Baby: 444 Connection Closed Without Response
Me: 429 Too Many Requests
Me: GET /sleep
Baby: 307 Temporary Redirect
Me: 101 Switching Protocols
Me: 408 Request Timeout
GF: 102 Processing
Me: GET /sleep
Sleep: 404 Not Found
Me: 406 Not Acceptable
(Morning)
Me: 501 Not Implemented19 -
Sit down before you read this.
So I interviewed a guy for a "Support Engineer" internship position.
Me and the team lead sit down and are waiting for him to enter, but apparently he's actually making a coffee in the kitchen.
This isn't exactly a strike since the receptionist told him that he can go get a drink, and we did too. It's just always expected for him to get a glass of water, not waste 3 minutes brewing a coffee.
In any case he comes in, puts the coffee on the table, then his phone, then his wallet, then his keys and then sits on our side of the table.
I ask him to sit in front of us so we can see him. He takes a minute to pack and tranfer himself to the other side of the table. He again places all of the objects on the table.
We begin, team lead tells him about the company. Then I ask him whether he got any questions regarding the job, the team or the company . For the next 15 minutes he bombards us with mostly irrelevant and sometimes inappropriate questions, like:
0: Can I choose my own nickname when getting an email address?
1: Does the entire department get same salaries?
2: Are there yoga classes on Sundays only or every morning?
3: Will I get a car?
4: Does the firm support workspace equality? How many chicks are in the team?
5: I want the newest grey Mac.
And then.. Then the questions turn into demands:
6: I need a high salary (asks for 2.5 more than the job pays. Which is still a lot).
I ask him why would he get that at his first job in the industry (remind you, this is an internship and we are a relatively high paying company).
He says he's getting paid more at his current job.
His CV lists no current job and only indicates that he just finished studying.
He says that he's working at his parent's business...
Next he says that he is very talented and has to be promoted very quickly and that we need to teach him a lot and finance his courses.
At this point me and the team lead were barely holding our laughs.
The team lead asks him about his English (English is not our native language).
He replies "It's good, trust me".
Team lead invites him for an English conversation. Team lead acts like a customer with a broken internet and the guy is there to troubleshoot. (btw that's not job related, just a simple scenario)
TL: "Hello, my name is Andrew, I'm calli..."
Guy: *interrupts* "Yes, yes, hi! Hi! What do you want?"
TL: "Well, if you let me fi..."
Guy: "Ok! Talk!"
TL: "...inish... My internet is not working."
Guy: "Ok, *mimics tuning a V engine or cooking a soup* I fixed! *points at TL* now you say 'yes you fixed'".
Important to note that his English was horrible. Disregarding the accent he just genuinely does not know the language well.
Then he continiues with "See? Good English. Told you no need to check!".
After about half a minute of choking on out silent laughter I ask him how much Python experience he has (job lists a requirement of at least 1 year).
He replies "I'm very good at object oriented functional programming".
I ask again "But what is your experience? Did you ever take any courses? Do you have a git repository to show? Any side.."
*he interrupts again* "I only use Matlab!".
Team lead stands up and proceeds to shake his hand while saying "we will get back to you".
At last the guy says with a stupid smile on his face "You better hire me! Call me back tomorrow." Leaves TL hanging and walks away after packing his stuff into the pockets.
I was so shocked that I wasn't even angry.
We both laughed for the rest of the day though. It was probably the weirdest interview I took part at.35 -
Well that was a fun call I just had.
Owner of the company I freelance for: Hey I forgot to tell you something.
Me: What?
Owner: I bought you a plane ticket to fly to Puerto Rico. You're heading out in a month.
Me: What?! Why????
Owner: To set up cryptocurency mining rigs.
Me: Just because I know a bit about mining doesn't make me an expert.
Owner: We have $80k in our pocket in investments from outside parties, with another $20-30k on the way. You get 20% of the coins mined for as long as you manage it.
Me: So we're gonna set up several rigs, utilizing a b250 motherboard, g4400 CPU, 8GB of RAM and 10 GPUs each. We'll have AMD rigs for monero and Nvidia rigs for Ethereum and others. We'll use awesome miner for profitability switching on the fly. Each machine is probably going to be $5k each, possibly $4k with bulk discounts. We'll need at least 1500W per rig for power, 2000W to be safe, so we need to make sure we have ample power delivery to the mining warehouse.
Owner: I thought you weren't an expert?
Me: I'm not, but when there's money involved my motivation to Google goes into overdrive.28 -
`xdg-open` on Linux is fucked up. The thing never works properly for me.
In the attached screenshot below, you can see that `feh` is the default application for opening jpg files, however, it always opens the file in the browser. It doesn't work for any other filetypes as well. It's just messed up.
By the way, I tried to do some debugging on the line number xdg-open reports. It calls this bash line: `"$command_exec" "$@"`, however, when I echo the command, it prints nothing. So this means it can't find the program to open the file with and, at the same time, it reports that the program is set as you can see in the screenshot!!3 -
Sales employee Bob wants a clickable blue button.
Bob tells product owner Karen about his unstoppable desire for clickable blue buttons.
Karen assigns points for potential and impact (how much does a blue button improve Bob's life, how many people like Bob desire blue buttons)
Karen asks the button team how hard it is to build a button. The button team compares the request to a reference button they've built before, and gives an ease score, with higher score being easier (inverse of scrum points).
These three scores are combined to give a priority score. The global buttonbacklog is sorted by priority.
Once every two weeks (a "sprint") the button team convenes, uses the ease scores to assign scrum points. Difficult tasks are broken up into smaller tasks, because there is a scrum point upper limit. They use the average of the last 5 sprints to calculate each developer's "velocity".
The sprint is filled with tasks, from the top of the global button backlog, up to the team's capacity as determined by velocity. Approximate due dates are assigned, Bob is a happy Bob.
What if boss Peter runs into the office screaming "OUR IMPORTANT CLIENT WANTS A FUCKING PINK BUTTON WHICH MAKES HEARTS APPEAR"?
Devs tell boss to shut the fuck up and talk to Karen. Karen has a carefully curated list of button building tasks sorted by priority, can sedate boss with valium so he calms the fuck down until he can make a case for the impact and potential of his pink button.
Karen might agree that Peter's pink button gets a higher priority than Bob's blue button.
But devs are nocturnal creatures, easily disturbed when approached by humans, their natural rhythms thrown out of balance.
So the sprint is "locked", and Peter's pink button appears at the top of the global backlog, from where it flows into the next sprint.
On rare occasions a sprint is broken open, for example when Karen realizes that all of the end users will commit suicide if they don't have a pink heart-spawning button.
In such an event, Peter must make Bob happy (because Bob is crying that his blue button is delayed). And Peter must make the button team of devs happy.
This usually leads to a ritual involving chocolate or even hardware gift certificates to restore balance to the dev ecosystem.23 -
Manager (walking in in the morning): ey linuxxx, looking good today!
Me: w-what? I'm not wearing much special, what's so great about my outfit? But than....
Boss: April fools motherfucker!
Well, I had it coming .______.8 -
Got call from extremely angry customer, our product is shit and doesn't work. At all. Important customer so I went to visit.
He had the perfect setup, our product to the left, our competitor's to the right.
He connected the Ethernet cable to their product, it worked. He plugged it out and connected to ours... Nothing. Shit.
I started to debug on the premises, took logs, everything. It seemed like our product didn't receive any data at all. What the fuck? Tried everything, debugged low level, still nothing. Sweating as hell.
After two hours I got a strange feeling. So I swapped place, our product to the right, competitor's to the left. Now OUR product worked, competitor's zilch.
THE FUCKING ETHERNET CABLE HAD A GLITCH. IF YOU BENT IT TO THE RIGHT IT WORKED, IF YOU BENT IT TO THE LEFT IT WAS BROKEN.
I had never seen a customer be this embarrassed in my life. He apologized to me, my boss, his boss, the Queen, everyone.
We got the contract.20 -
Me: 1 is something, 0 is nothing, NULL is the absence of things
JuniorDev: wut
Me: You've got pizza in a box, that's 1. If there's no pizza in the box, that's 0. If there's no pizza and no box, that's NULL.
JuniorDev: OOH so there's no object to reference if I ask for a slice!
Me: *small tear*
Always explain things in terms of pizza. Always.25 -
Today we interviewed a _very_ good Angular1 Dev, by chance we showed him the forked ngRouter module we use, after some debate he explained that we were using it incorrectly.. I asked if he'd used it before to which he responded:
"Yeah, I'm the guy who built it"
😅27 -
A group of wolves is called a pack.
A group of crows is called a murder.
A group of developers is called a merge conflict.28 -
!rant
After over 20 years as a Software Engineer, Architect, and Manager, I want to pass along some unsolicited advice to junior developers either because I grew through it, or I've had to deal with developers who behaved poorly:
1) Your ego will hurt you FAR more than your junior coding skills. Nobody expects you to be the best early in your career, so don't act like you are.
2) Working independently is a must. It's okay to ask questions, but ask sparingly. Remember, mid and senior level guys need to focus just as much as you do, so before interrupting them, exhaust your resources (Google, Stack Overflow, books, etc..)
3) Working code != good code. You are an author. Write your code so that it can be read. Accept criticism that may seem trivial such as renaming a variable or method. If someone is suggesting it, it's because they didn't know what it did without further investigation.
4) Ask for peer reviews and LISTEN to the critique. Even after 20+ years, I send my code to more junior developers and often get good corrections sent back. (remember the ego thing from tip #1?) Even if they have no critiques for me, sometimes they will see a technique I used and learn from that. Peer reviews are win-win-win.
5) When in doubt, do NOT BS your way out. Refer to someone who knows, or offer to get back to them. Often times, persons other than engineers will take what you said as gospel. If that later turns out to be wrong, a bunch of people will have to get involved to clean up the expectations.
6) Slow down in order to speed up. Always start a task by thinking about the very high level use cases, then slowly work through your logic to achieve that. Rushing to complete, even for senior engineers, usually means less-than-ideal code that somebody will have to maintain.
7) Write documentation, always! Even if your company doesn't take documentation seriously, other engineers will remember how well documented your code is, and they will appreciate you for it/think of you next time that sweet job opens up.
8) Good code is important, but good impressions are better. I have code that is the most embarrassing crap ever still in production to this day. People don't think of me as "that shitty developer who wrote that ugly ass code that one time a decade ago," They think of me as "that developer who was fun to work with and busted his ass." Because of that, I've never been unemployed for more than a day. It's critical to have a good network and good references.
9) Don't shy away from the unknown. It's easy to hope somebody else picks up that task that you don't understand, but you wont learn it if they do. The daunting, unknown tasks are the most rewarding to complete (and trust me, other devs will notice.)
10) Learning is up to you. I can't tell you the number of engineers I passed on hiring because their answer to what they know about PHP7 was: "Nothing. I haven't learned it yet because my current company is still using PHP5." This is YOUR craft. It's not up to your employer to keep you relevant in the job market, it's up to YOU. You don't always need to be a pro at the latest and greatest, but at least read the changelog. Stay abreast of current technology, security threats, etc...
These are just a few quick tips from my experience. Others may chime in with theirs, and some may dispute mine. I wish you all fruitful careers!221 -
Just accidentally found out that double tapping a comment/post ++s it.
I feel like this feature has been a thing for a long time but I forgot about it2 -
MY SISTER (the LibrOffice OS one) GOT ME A MUDAFUCKING RASPBERRY PI 3 😍😍😍😍
Now what to do with it 🤔13 -
Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.
P.S. happy chrismahannukwanzika!!1