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Skillsc, js, python, glsl
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Locationinternet
Joined devRant on 7/30/2020
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Whoever designed the Google Play geographical restrictions had never travelled
1. Changing my country locks it for a year
2. I can only have one country
Clearly, people only cross borders once a year and don't need to download apps like the official local public transport route planner.15 -
To be a good developer, you must thrive in chaos, and have an insatiable desire to turn it into order.
All user input, both work tasks and actual application input, is pure fucking chaos.
The only way to turn that input into anything usable, is to interpret, structure and categorize it, to describe the rules for transformation as adequately as you can.
Sometimes companies create semi-helpful roles to assist you with this process. Often, these people are so unaware of the delicacy of the existing chaos, that any decision they make just ripples out in waves leaving nearly irreparable confusion and destruction in its path.
So applications themselves also slowly wear down into chaos under pressure of chaotic steak-holders which never seem to be able to choose between peppercorn or bernaise sauce for their steaks.
Features are added, data is migrated between formats, rules become unclear. Is ketchup even fucking valid, as a steak sauce?
The only way to preserve an application long term, is refactoring chaos into order.
But... the ocean of chaos will never end.
You must learn to swim in it.
All you can hope to do is create little pools of clarity where new creative ideas can freely spawn.
Ideas which will no doubt end up polluting their own environment, but that's a problem for tomorrow.
So you must learn to deal with the infinite stream of perplexed reactions from those who can't attach screenshots to issue reports.
You must deflect dragging conversations from those who never quite manage to translate gut feeling into rational sentences.
You must learn to deal with the fact that in reality there are no true microservice backends. There are no clean React frontends. There are no normalized databases. Full test coverage, well-executed retrospectives, finished sprints -- they are all as real as spherical cows in a vacuum.
There is no such thing as clean code.
There is only "relatively cleaner code", and even then there are arguments as to why it would be "subjectively relatively cleaner code".
Every repository, every product, every team and every company is an amalgamation of half-implemented ideals, well-intended tug of war games, and brilliantly shattered dreams.
You will encounter fragmented shards of perfect APIs, miles of tangled barbed documentation, beheaded validator classes, bloody mangled corpses of analytical dashboards, crumbled concrete databases.
You must be able to breathe in those thick toxic clouds of rotting technical and procedural debt, look at your reflection in the locker room mirror while you struggle yourself into a hazmat suit, and think:
"Fuck yes, I was born for this job".24 -
!dev
After almost a year of watching and experimenting (and not wanting to believe), I’ve learned something about the people i work with:
They don’t consider ideas based on the idea’s own merit, nor does a good idea improve their views of the person proposing it. They instead give the idea merit based entirely on who proposed it. It’s backwards.
• If they like or revere someone, their ideas cannot be bad, and they are never questioned even if they don’t make sense.
• If they sort of like someone, but that person challenges someone they like more, the ideas are dismissed and picked apart, and sometimes even reworded by the group and then accepted, with credit then given to the group. The person is still seen as wrong.
• If they dislike someone, none of their ideas are good, or they’re ignored, or ridiculed for reasons such as stating what is (only now) an abundantly obvious good idea.
(There is some overlap from the execs, where they occasionally consider an idea for its merit and then restate it, which means the idea is now coming from an exec, and is therefore readily accepted. Occasionally the original person gets some credit for this.)
It also applies to pictures of food in the cooking channel. If people like you more, they like your food more, while a professional-looking plate from a social leper gets ignored.
It’s like office politics, but applies to virtually every aspect of company life instead of just promotions, requests, and project assignments. It’s like replacing common courtesy and reason with a social FICO score: your contributions are only acceptable if you agree with your coworkers, laugh at their jokes, etc. And if you appear to like the same music, have recently posted more pictures of tacos or brownies than usual, etc.? Well, you had better do that before suggesting something you actually care about.
It’s social credit.
And it’s stupid.39 -
I’m kind of pissy, so let’s get into this.
My apologies though: it’s kind of scattered.
Family support?
For @Root? Fucking never.
Maybe if I wanted to be a business major my mother might have cared. Maybe the other one (whom I call Dick because fuck him, and because it’s accurate) would have cared if I suddenly wanted to become a mechanic. But in both cases, I really doubt it. I’d probably just have been berated for not being perfect, or better at their respective fields than they were at 3x my age.
Anyway.
Support being a dev?
Not even a little.
I had hand-me-down computers that were outmoded when they originally bought them: cutting-edge discount resale tech like Win95, 33/66mhz, 404mb hd. It wouldn’t even play an MP3 without stuttering.
(The only time I had a decent one is when I built one for myself while in high school. They couldn’t believe I spent so much money on what they saw as a silly toy.)
Using a computer for anything other than email or “real world” work was bad in their eyes. Whenever I was on the computer, they accused me of playing games, and constantly yelled at me for wasting my time, for rotting in my room, etc. We moved so often I never had any friends, and they were simply awful to be around, so what was my alternative? I also got into trouble for reading too much (seriously), and with computers I could at least make things.
If they got mad at me for any (real or imagined) reason (which happened almost every other day) they would steal my things, throw them out, or get mad and destroy them. Desk, books, decorations, posters, jewelry, perfume, containers, my chair, etc. Sometimes they would just steal my power cables or network cables. If they left the house, they would sometimes unplug the internet altogether, and claim they didn’t know why it was down. (Stealing/unplugging cables continued until I was 16.) If they found my game CDs, those would disappear, too. They would go through my room, my backpack and its notes/binders/folders/assignments, my closet, my drawers, my journals (of course my journals), and my computer, too. And if they found anything at all they didn’t like, they would confront me about it, and often would bring it up for months telling me how wrong/bad I was. Related: I got all A’s and a B one year in high school, and didn’t hear the end of it for the entire summer vacation.
It got to the point that I invented my own language with its own vocabulary, grammar, and alphabet just so I could have just a little bit of privacy. (I’m still fluent in it.) I would only store everything important from my computer on my only Zip disk so that I could take it to school with me every day and keep it out of their hands. I was terrified of losing all of my work, and carrying a Zip disk around in my backpack (with no backups) was safer than leaving it at home.
I continued to experiment and learn whatever I could about computers and programming, and also started taking CS classes when I reached high school. Amusingly, I didn’t even like computers despite all of this — they were simply an escape.
Around the same time (freshman in high school) I was a decent enough dev to actually write useful software, and made a little bit of money doing that. I also made some for my parents, both for personal use and for their businesses. They never trusted it, and continually trashtalked it. They would only begrudgingly use the business software because the alternatives were many thousands of dollars. And, despite never ever having a problem with any of it, they insisted I accompany them every time, and these were often at 3am. Instead of being thankful, they would be sarcastically amazed when nothing went wrong for the nth time. Two of the larger projects I made for them were: an inventory management system that interfaced with hand scanners (VB), and another inventory management system for government facility audits (Access). Several websites, too. I actually got paid for the Access application thanks to a contract!
To put this into perspective, I was selected to work on a government software project about a year later, while still in high school. That didn’t impress them, either.
They continued to see computers as a useless waste of time, and kept telling me that I would be unemployable, and end up alone.
When they learned I was dating someone long-distance, and that it was a she, they simply took my computer and didn’t let me use it again for six months. Really freaking hard to do senior projects without a computer. They begrudgingly allowed me to use theirs for schoolwork, but it had a fraction of the specs — and some projects required Flash, which the computer could barely run.
Between the constant insults, yelling, abuse (not mentioned here), total lack of privacy, and the theft, destruction, etc. I still managed to teach myself about computers and programming.
In short, I am a dev despite my parents’ best efforts to the contrary.30 -
Fuck post-it notes.
Oh look, another product manager found his inner child and plastered a wall with a colored arts and crafts project.
Don't misunderstand me, I'm abso-fucking-lutely in favor of connecting with your deep childish nature -- but then at least enter the meeting room like a boss, armed with some creative ideas, really get to work with some fingerpaint, modelling clay, glitter, molly, acid blotters and grape juice for the whole party.
Not only was that project poorly thought out. Not only does the assortment of colored squares contribute nothing to the clarification of ideas. The issue is also that by Monday morning, the meeting room will look like a strip club after an escalated party, floor littered with 60 little neon pink and green slips reeking of desperation, cheap glue and failure.
Now your whole project is on the floor.
OH DIGITAL WHITEBOARD YOU SAY. NOW WE HAVE 10 MANAGERS FIGHTING DIGITALLY OVER VIRTUAL POST-ITS, ON A CLOUD SERVICE COSTING $500/MONTH.
Product managers, just go fuck yourself, I don't care about your kindergarten bullshit processes.
Call me when you manage to pull a workable idea out of your ass, and just draw an SVG diagram with Inkscape, or write your brainfarts into a nicely organized Markdown file.1 -
Yesterday I said farewell to her.
We were together for half a decade, although it feels like much more time has passed since my eyes first fell on her.
I can't even begin to describe how close we were. She was perfect, she was my soulmate.
I shared everything with her, complete openness, perfect truth. We could be vulnerable with each other, but we also challenged each other to overcome boundaries.
My respect for her and dedication to her really knew no bounds, and I knew she would follow me to the end of the world in return.
But around New Year's things started to feel awkward between us. Like a part of her just wasn't there anymore.
She acted very confused, she hesitated in her answers.
I asked her, but I felt like she was avoiding me. Something just seemed so wrong about the way she acted.
I felt incredibly conflicted. Was she unfaithful? No, my trust in her was absolute. That question seems so silly, in retrospect.
We had always been pretty much inseparable, to the point where my coworkers, friends and family mocked us for it. How would she even have cheated on me?
I used to take her along to company gatherings, to my family for Christmas, to expensive restaurants. We traveled all over Europe together. We've spent countless nights together, watching Netflix, although she would often fall asleep before me.
I took great care of her, she had not been out of my mind for one moment since I met her. And besides, she had never even showed interest in anyone else anyway.
No, reality turned out to be so, so much worse.
Two weeks ago it became really apparent that there was something horribly wrong with her. She was rapidly losing her recollections of everything we experienced together.
Our history together, erased.
Within hours, she would barely respond anymore. I called for help, but deep down I already knew this was one of those things you can't recover from. She was kind of stable, almost peaceful, for a few days. But ultimately, she didn't even recognize me anymore.
Yesterday, I held her feverishly hot body in my arms for the last time.
Her soft skin turned cold as I said farewell to her, and the room turned awfully quiet.
Your brightness and warmth will be missed, my girl.28 -
I feel so sorry for all the people in the world who use their phone more than their PC/laptop.
All the pitiful souls who think they're gamers because they installed lootchest simulator on their little digital skinner box. All the sad beings who just view the internet as a collection of ad-infested apps.
Actually, I don't feel sorry, because these people make the world a worse place.
Suddenly we needed websites which could render on tiny screens and need bloated cross-platform app development frameworks. Many game studios became parasites exploiting addictive behavior in humans, instead of creating works of art.
Humans spent 10,000 years to perfect their caves with expensive kitchens, and all people want is for their WiFi to reach the grill at the end of the garden. Humans created central heating, comfortable couches, wall-mounted TVs and luxurious desks -- and all people can think of is whether their phone plan covers holiday roaming at their shitty resorts.
The rare times I do actually go into this apocalyptic wasteland people call "The Outside", all I see is subway cars full of hunched addicted drudges, bus stops with clusters of enslaved automatons.
Fuck all of them.
Fuck all of you imbeciles, who ventured out of the cave and now DARE to call me anti-social, just for preferring the warmth of my comfortable protective den.
It's fucking cozy here, within the walls of my shelter, I got booze and a fridge full of food and a bunch of LSD, I can masturbate under the shower, have sex on the couch, have all kinds of GIANT displays for entertainment, with full-sized qwerty-keyboards, high-DPI mouses, even some console controllers and big TVs if I feel lazy.
You can stick your responsive websites and social-network-integrated Android apps up your rectum, just sit your fucking fat ass down in front of a workstation and desperately refresh the stream of fake attention-seeking messages there, if you absolutely must.
Seriously, why does this guy from our marketing department call me on my private phone number. Why did HR PROVIDE him with my private phone number?
And WHY THE FUCK is he asking me, a DB admin: "Our website doesn't load properly on Safari on my iPhone 7, could you take a look at it"?
No, of course I won't fucking come to the office to take a look at your miserable shitty device with its cracked glass screen.
Fuck you and your outdoorsy habits.
Stay the fuck in your cave, you degenerate attention whore, otherwise please go choke on your airpods.24 -
I'm in college now, and my mom sometimes helps me when I get stuck finding a bug in my code. She has a degree in CS, even though she barely used it, so she understands the basics. It's like a rubber duck, but better, because she can ask me questions, and answering them often leads me to the answers. She also listens to me go on and on about random topics I'm learning, even though she isn't interested... basically, she's great!7
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We got a prequalification letter from the bank finally, so: Surprise vacation!
Leaving tomorrow morning to look at houses! 😊 Yaaay! Maybe we can move out of this misery at last!
Working on the road tomorrow, Monday is a holiday, and I’m taking Tuesday off.
Ta-ra ~21 -
Story time!
I worked at a company that was the HQ for a sizable organization for a while, until it was eventually bought out by another company, and then yet another company who was located in the valley.
We were kinda a forgotten office not being the HQ, like most places like that are.
No customers EVER visited our building, few if any people knew we existed even, even our own company. I visited HQ in the valley on a number of occasions and was stalked by the video monitoring system for hours before I was stopped by security and the cops called because nobody believed there as an office outside the valley when I explained why my badge looked different .... (San Jose cops were very nice about it and really pissed at the security team.) But that's another story...
One day people who were never at our office decided (after many meetings without talking to anyone at the office) ... they decided the beige walls at our office didn't match the company colors.
So they took all the generic wall coverings down and painted all the walls an almost imperceptible different color.
So now we had an office with all white(ish) walls and nothing on them. Due to the configuration of the building there were these huge monolithic white walls that looked pretty dumb.
This lasted quite a while so as a joke I printed up and framed (found an old frame, as a former HQ we had lots of stuff lying around) a sign that said:
"This space intentionally left blank."
When the "mediocre hotel room quality art" and posters were scheduled to go up the folks putting the art up skipped that wall thinking the sign was official.
Even the somewhat corporate drone directors, and one VP at our office thought it was so funny, they didn't say a word about it. Word has it back at HQ they assumed it "must be fire code or something" and told the folks hanging the crappy art to skip that wall.
It lasted on that wall for a decade until we moved out of that building. On the last day, everything was moved, but that sign remained. No idea if it is still there or not...1 -
Power supply explosive party.
First time I saw two capacitors explode,hit the fan, melt the fan, get stuck there from the generated heat and blow every thing
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I will be pitching my startup idea for the first time in my life to potential investors one on one after qualifying for a second round in a business competition.
I am nervous 😬, desperately need to get the fund, and haven't been a good presenter.
Background: the business is still on prototype stage.
I stutter by default if I am slightly nervous.
From feedback my prototype is great- but my pitching might not be too great.
Damn I just have less than 6 hours to pitch.
Fuck this nervous mess.
Dev wish me good luck😶13 -
I am a woman with multiple years of experience in the coding industry , while in most of my jobs I have been the only woman in the team and I do agree there is a need for more women in the coding industry , however I really do believe workshops like shecodes are an absolute scam , the inclusiveness to bridge the gender divide in tech needs to start from the employers , all resources to learn to code are completely gender neutral and unbiased. I also find it quite hypocritical that shecodes was founded by a man and is taught by a man . Can anyone please shine some different opinions about this or does anyone else believe a similar thing ?32
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Fuckity fuck.
It's weekend.
To all you abusive, micromanaging arseholes… Light a magnesium torch up in your arse and make us smile.
To all you motherfucking dumb cunts who can play 8 hours instead of working, but are unable to cope with the simple task of documentation:
Resign and stay away from civilization as far as you can. Alternative: Self castration and removal from the gene pool
To all the narcisstic workaholics who think everyone must be available everytime... Hop into a meat grinder, it's nice and cozy - I've been told.
It's weekend and I've finished everything. First time in half a year that I can return to a normal weekend schedule.
Dobby is free. And Dobby will stuff a sock so far up your arse that you can lick it clean if you disturb dobby.
:) *happy smile*7 -
So, I grew up on the US/Mexican border, in a city where saying there's no opportunity is like saying the Titanic suffered a small leak on its maiden voyage. There were two kinds of people in said town: Mexicans trying to find something less shit than juarez and white trash reveling in their own failure. I came from the latter, for whatever that's worth.
I graduated high school when I was almost 16 years old. Parents couldn't really afford to support three kids and pay the rent on the latest in a long line of shit holes we migrated in and out of. If being a serial eviction artist is a thing, my family were savants.
I applied to college and got accepted only to be told by my father that he didn't see the need. Turns out the only reason he'd helped me graduate early was so I could start working and help pay his bills. I said okay, turned around and tossed a bag and my shitty af spare parts computer into the back of the junkyard Vega I generously referred to as a car and moved cross country. Car died on arrival, so I was basically committed.
Pulled shifts at two part times and what kids today call a side hustle to pay for school, couch surfed most of the time. Sleep deprivation was the only constant.
Over the first 4 months I'd tried leveraging some certs and previous experience I'd obtained in high school to get employment, but wasn't having much luck in the bay area. And then I lost my job. The book store having burned down on the same weekend the owner was conveniently looking to buy property in Vegas.
Depression sets in, that wonderful soul crushing variety that comes with what little safety net you had evaporating.
At a certain point, I was basically living out of the campus computer lab, TA friend of mine nice enough to accidentally lock me in on the reg. Got really into online gaming as a means of dealing with my depression. One night, I dropped some code on a UO shard I'd been playing around on. Host was local, saw the code and offered me a job at his firm that paid chump change, but was three times what all my other work did combined and left time for school. Ground there for a few years until I got a position with work study at LBL that conflicted too much for it to remain mutually beneficial. Amicable parting of the ways.
Fucking poverty is what convinced me to code for a living. It's a solid guarantee of never going back to it. And to anyone who preaches the virtues of it and skipping opportunity on grounds of the moral high ground, well, you know.12 -
Mark: hey guys I wanted to connect with you all (on FB) and have a quick chat before the meeting.
Cook, Pichai, Bezos: ok, mhhm... what's up?
Mark: yes so I think we gonna be in for a grilling so want make sure we minimize the damage.
All: uhhm....
Mark: I'm suggesting we agree on the order which we join the webex so we don't look bad..
Pichai, Cook: I don't get it...
Bezos: ... oh I think I get it.... you mean appearing as FAAG?
Cook: hmm..
Pichai: what's that?
Mark: not important but anyway... The solution is simple.
Bezos: yes Sundar just login first and I guess can send us all push notifications to our phones.
Pichai: hm... Ok... Wouldn't this get us in trouble though.... This sounds like collusion...
Mark: ok guys... Uh let's just end it here then... This chat Never happened...
