There's nothing quite as sweet as seeing someone in public for the first time in years and you both decide, without saying a word, that you're both just going to move along and not do the whole smalltalk thing.

I gave up on learning math as a young person because no one was ever interested in teaching it in a way that made sense to me.

But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve started working on a pet projects that require understanding of (what I would consider) fairly advanced geometry, which as it turns out is called computational geometry. And it’s fun.

I just look back at the time I was afraid of this stuff with regret. All because my teachers weren’t terribly interested in teaching, but more interested in fulfilling useless metrics that only make it look like students are learning when they’re actually not.

Great googly moogly is Kotlin an ugly language.

If you are just starting out with Android or Java development in general, I highly recommend sticking with Java and avoid Kotlin like the plague. It feels like a meme language that was taken a little too seriously.

Full of little flowery nonsense that aims to make the language more human, but only serves to make it look like a child designed it.

I absolutely hate when a language doesn't require type declarations.

The "it" keyword rankles my underwear beyond belief.

Trying to build a dictionary/hashmap/hash felt like I was writing out an essay for school. In other languages it's straightforward and makes sense. Even PHP makes more sense.

I am obviously missing something here, because there is no way something so common and done the same way across different languages has such a wildly different approach in Kotlin.

I have as much experience with Java as I do Kotlin but it immediately makes more sense as a language and doesn't have all this flowery nonsense. It is verbose, which means I don't have to decipher what the code is actually doing when I read it.

I'm familiar with the enterprise Java meme, but I'm not writing enterprise Java, and that's not my style anyway so it doesn't affect me. But even so, that would be a million times easier to handle that Kotlin.

I upgraded a Linux server one time and data that was serialized in yaml stopped being parsed properly.

It turns out the libyaml people decided to change how hashes were handled, which made any previous hashes come back as blank.

A whole database of valid data in dev was coming back invalid in prod. It was maddening.

It took a day to figure out the problem and how to update the data to the new format in rails.

I now serialize in json.

Got myself a new work computer. Aside from setting everything back up, it's been an absolute treat. I didn't even have to move to Windows 11.

Why Dell feels the need to put 7TB of garbage, including literal adware that spews notifications, escapes me. All it does is hurt their reputation.

I would have been allowed to build my own from scratch, but I didn't even ask since it's been so long since I built my last machine and I don't even know where to start hardware wise these days.

12th gen i7

GTX1080 that has all the video memory I could need

RAM just pouring out of the thing

I'm living the life.

I wrote a Blender plugin that uses vector math, matrices, calculus, trigonometry, and likely other types of math. There's recursion, filesystem access, image processing, interface logic, and on and on.

And worst of all - other people are expected to use it, so there's added pressure to do a good job.

Oh, the hours I spent trying to figure out why the imported geometry looked like an exploded mess. Fumbling around with mathematics I didn't fully understand was exhausting. Finding help was impossible at times because I didn't have the vocabulary to even describe the problems I was having. And getting it to complete an import before the heat death of the universe was not easy.

Every time I made progress and thought I was done, I would discover a bug that other importers didn't have, leaving me to sift through languages that definitely aren't Python to see if I could reverse engineer the logic they used.

I almost gave up a few times, but didn't.

Now I have something that, while not used by many people, works very well, is very efficient, and doubles as a palette cleanser when I need to do something for fun or for a challenge. Plus I learned a lot along the way.

I have worked with a handful of very green devs in the last 10 years. A common theme has emerged.

They don't heed any of my advice.

An exercise to the reader:

If you have a Windows machine, but need to work in a Linux environment, what would be your first instinct how to proceed?

In this exercise, you are as green as it gets. You have very little professional development experience, let alone server admin experience. And your lead dev has suggested setting up a VM.

1. Set up a Linux VM
2. Use a live CD or set up a dual boot system
3. Pay for a cloud server and set it up from scratch

I have no idea how this person intends to get any work done on a remote, terminal only, Linux server. That is if I can even get their environment into a sane configuration.

I’m trying to learn piano, but keep zero indexing my thumb. When I see I’m supposed to use my 5th finger, for a moment I wonder what species they think I am.

What is the more common word?

abs
Ava
ABC
ABC's
and's <- this one is real
and

iOS seems to think the word "and" ranks last in priority when compared to the other words in the list.

I have had this hyperexpensive irritant for almost a year now, and I still cycle through this list in 90% of anything I type. I love posting to forums and this brick-in-three-years has tainted that. I even bought a mini bluetooth keyboard but it's awkward to use while relaxing.

Don't even get me started on how autocomplete deletes existing parts of the sentence if I don't choose whatever nonsense iOS has decided upon this time.

Protip: Don't use Rider's winform designer. It will glitch out and destroy your work.

And don't use Visual Studio because it will freeze every time you close the application you are debugging.

Actually, just go be a beet farmer.

Just lost hours of work because the winforms designer decided to send half my elements to (11, -8000) and resize others to (0,0). No matter what I did, there was no moving them back. And every change I made was reverted by some unknown mechanism.

Thankfully, I still have the user controls I built. But I still have to rewire 3k lines worth of form events.

I'm building a script parser to make mods for a game I like. The first step is to write an importer.

The documentation is nonexistent and I'm delving into byte manipulation, which I'm not familiar with - at all. I'm porting existing code from Java to C#, and everything is similar but different enough that I can't always just to a 1:1 transfer.

I get everything working, cleaned up and split into classes so I can write the exporter.

I do an import and the file won't parse. I try all previously know working files and still no good. I clean, rebuild, clean rebuild, run, debug, restart my computer, clear my cache, clean, rebuild. No good.

IT WAS WORKING 5 MINUTES AGO

Proceed to revert to every version from the last hour. No dice.

I was in the wrong folder the whole time.

Navigate to the proper folder, open the filename I know to be good and bingo, works like a charm.

The same project caused me headaches because I had a "== -1", when it should have been "== 1". Between my inexperience with byte manipulation and my untreated astigmatism, I was nearly sent to the shadow realm fixing that.

I was troubleshooting an asyncio websocket project for two hours that was working the previous day with minimal changes.

I am new to asyncio so I was getting very frustrated thinking I wasn't understanding something.

As it turns out, I had replaced a continue with a return, killing the broadcast function completely.