Best: I started a little game project with a coworker for our "8 hours a month" research/fun time.
Worst: I can't get used to be "just a soldier" on my actual team.

My favorite method to study a new tech or framework is to make a little research and try to write an article.

Dear son: when I ask you to stop using Netflix because I need all the network juice for a work-related call, please do close it or play a downloaded movie. Don't just turn the volume off...

The biggest hurdle I overcame on my dev career was coming back to a full time job after a few years spent on a "hippie phase" combining work as an artisan, content developer and editor, and just a few freelance dev jobs. It was all a struggle to start again thinking of myself as "junior again" surrounded by people ten or fifteen years younger than me. But I kept myself over the tidal web and here I am, a Senior again.

Worst advice: "Forget Android, specialize on BB10, that's the future'

My best tool for avoiding procrastination and getting a lot of focus is having a job with a great work culture in which I get to work on a project that challenges me and makes me learn new stuff. When it's not like that, I tend to lose energy and that sends me straight to devRant and other sources of distraction.

My rant today is that all my tasks are lame and I'm bored. Any Java joke for me?

The "language" I hated the most was XSLT 1.0. Some times you ended up with a horrible set of template matches or choose clauses to achieve simple decision trees.

Code didn't change my life because I've been coding since I was a kid. You could say that it shaped my life instead. I don't know life without code. I don't know if that's good or it's not...

Frigging corporate antivirus updated its definitions and decided a class generated by Gradle on my debug builds is an infection risk. And as it's an intermediate output and it's deleted and recreated every time, it sends a new alert every time. And sometimes it can't quarantine it because it's deleted faster than it's processed by the antivirus, so it's getting a higher and higher risk level each time. And I can't add it to the exclusion list because of a permissions issue. Oh well...

My dream dev-power would be to have a prescient warning with a couple years advance on what's the next interesting AND money-raking technology, so I will be already an expert just at start and I could even get a job at the sponsor company.

Most of my team works on a per-hour basis, I work on a fixed, monthly wage. They don't get it. If I work overtime, the customer gets billed, I don't get paid. No, I don't like working overtime.

If all dev job were taken by AI, I'll probably go back to making dolls and fabric jewelry. Is not as good a source of income as being a dev but you can survive off it.

My first work was a paid internship.
My first couple weeks on the job I was supposed to be working on the same machine with another dev to get the gist of the process and everything. Kind of pair programming mixed with mentorship. Sounds cool?
Yeah... Problem is my fellow dev was more interested in spending around 80% of her time chatting around with her boyfriend and friends on Microsoft Chat.
Anyway, I soon got bored of having to look to the other side all the time, and went to our boss and asked for some other stuff to do "because I'm better learning by doing than by example".
Almost 20 years later, I'm still in touch with this dev... But she soon left the job and pursued a career as a translator and interpreter. She was always more interested in talking than programming 😃

I focus on Android development. I worked on several technologies until early 00s, including some WAP stuff --mobile was actually very interesting to me ever since it exists. But then I went on a hippie fase and worked for a few years on content development (professional blogger) and selling stuff on faires. When I went back to full time dev I got a job at Gameloft and that's how I started with Android.

I really hate it when people asks for help on forums and mailing lists by taking a screen capture of code instead of pasting the text or using a gist or pastebin or any other USEFUL way to share code.

On a previous job, my coworkers were jealous because I started going out for lunch some days of the week instead of staying with them at the office kitchen. So every time I went out, I came back to find some kind of small prank, and also a sign reading "Lunch Break Maffia Attacks Again". Once they made garlands by glueing/taping together a lot of sauce packets (mayonnaise, ketchup, and so on) in different patterns and decorated my whole box with them.

Google bought Fabric. Once again... Not sure if rant or !rant.

Somebody programmed a programming game using a programming game. Why I can't have time enough to make fun stuff like this? https://youtu.be/yMnOEgbm2fE

Google Assistant on Allo... It's a dad.

Attlasian bought Trello. Not sure if rant or !Rant yet.

Android Studio, could you please, pretty please, pleaaaasssse update my drawables on the layout preview when I change them? Or, at least, if I change 10 images, update all of them, or none. Don't choose randomly what to do with them. It's really unnerving.

There are not enough humans.txt in the world. (http://humanstxt.org/)

Worst experience: being laid off when the startup I worked for lost a deal. I loved that project :(

Best experience: my new company sent me to USA for a few days to meet the client. I've gained a lot more of confidence on my spoken English. I've didn't use it in years, so I was worried. Perhaps you wouldn't think it's a "dev" experience, but English is actually a required skill for a developer who has it as a second language.

My son just flooded my apartment for the third time. Why a rant here, you would ask? Because he filled the place with water because I can't get my head out of my code, or, in this case, of a debugging session chasing a Crashlytics issue. It is an old apartment, and a previous tenant "fixed" a drainpipe on the bathroom so well that if you take a long bath, it just collapses and starts pouring water all over the place from a mesh strainer. I sent the kid to take a bath, thinking "I'll just take a look to this issue and then take him out in a few minutes". An hour and a half later...

I worked on a company with an open floor plan where you would get a desk assigned depending on the type of project you worked on. All the desks were modular an you would get a desk with a cube with a set of drawers, or with a locker-like cube with a single space and door. When this guy started, he was assigned a drawer set. Around the third day he went around the office asking anyone with a locker to trade cubes. He finally got one. He filled it up with liquor bottles, cans of juice and several types of glasses. He would prepare himself cocktails during the work day. Once he was enjoying a Coca-Cola and whisky mix when the HR boss came around to ask what he was up. He offered the guy a drink.

My dream project is a heavily story-driven game, with plenty of decision-making for the player and a lot of possible endings. With no money or time limits, I would make it with live action scenes. Just a great movie in which you have the final cut.