How many times will you say hi to me when we're passing on the stairs for nth time? How many 👋 will you send me in one day at almost regular intervals? I'm not a fucking rest api. You don't have to generate a fucking oauth token every time you pass me some information. I have a fucking state and it's getting distracted by too much human interaction

"If flowers could grow on the moon. I'd plant you a garden of stars. So you could see in the dark,
that you're not alone."

I have a poetry book coming out (eventually) called "Steal this poem."

To date, my poetry has gotten one guy laid. Thats good enough for me.

And if you ever wanted to know what it feels like to be a poet, now you too can be one.

Steal this poem.

I did a simple bar graph to show the status of a db migration. Each bar is a computer with a db file. As I was bored waiting, I added a King Kong hanging from the longest bar.

This is more just a note for younger and less experienced devs out there...

I've been doing this for around 25 years professionally, and about 15 years more generally beyond that. I've seen a lot and done a lot, many things most developers never will: built my own OS (nothing especially amazing, but still), created my own language and compiler for it, created multiple web frameworks and UI toolkits from scratch before those things were common like they are today. I've had eleven technical books published, along with some articles. I've done interviews and speaking engagements at various user groups, meetups and conferences. I've taught classes on programming. On the job, I'm the guy that others often come to when they have a difficult problem they are having trouble solving because I seem to them to usually have the answer, or at least a gut feel that gets them on the right track. To be blunt, I've probably forgotten more about CS than a lot of devs will ever know and it's all just a natural consequence of doing this for so long.

I don't say any of this to try and impress anyone, I really don't... I say it only so that there's some weight behind what I say next:

Almost every day I feel like I'm not good enough. Sometimes, I face a challenge that feels like it might be the one that finally breaks me. I often feel like I don't have a clue what to do next. My head bangs against the wall as much as anyone and I do my fair share of yelling and screaming out of frustration. I beat myself up for every little mistake, and I make plenty.

Imposter syndrome is very real and it never truly goes away no matter what successes you've had and you have to fight the urge to feel shame when things aren't going well because you're not alone in those feelings and they can destroy even the best of us. I suppose the Torvald's and Carmack's of the world possibly don't experience it, but us mere mortals do and we probably always will - at least, I'm still waiting for it to go away!

Remember that what we do is intrinsically hard. What we do is something not everyone can do, contrary to all the "anyone can code" things people do. In some ways, it's unnatural even! Therefore, we shouldn't expect to not face tough days, and being human, the stress of those days gets to us all and causes us to doubt ourselves in a very insidious way.

But, it's okay. You're not alone. Hang in there and go easy on yourself! You'll only ever truly fail if you give up.

Staring at cursed blinking cursors.
Repairing work of worst thinking workers
Reverse merges or it'll murder the servers, it nurtures despair
Amateur managers, dimwitted savages interrupt all of us janitors
Cleaning up damages, spills and experiments using skills in embarrassment
Explicit foulness, in a minute it's straight to the bowels with weapons of limitless vowels
A bittersweet hateful machete, eviscerates stateful spaghetti
The slow disease flowing from keys knowing it's going to please
The growing unease, no one agrees, there's no guarantees with your useless degrees
Need more drugs, keyboard's crawling with bugs, falling as I chug
A bottle of cognac gotta love all the hacks, no poise for code that lacks
All the noise, gotta relax, before I destroy the syntax.

Excuse me for not making sense.
Too gloomy, aching and tense.

I kid you not, it's been impossible to find a rubber duck, so I had to make my own. Yes, his head is wonky, it's intentional, I wanted him to match me 😁

Okay guys, this is it!

Today was my final day at my current employer. I am on vacation next week, and will return to my previous employer on January the 2nd.

So I am going back to full time C/C++ coding on Linux. My machines will, once again, all have Gentoo Linux on them, while the servers run Debian. (Or Devuan if I can help it.)

----------------------------------------------------------------

So what have I learned in my 15 months stint as a C++ Qt5 developer on Windows 10 using Visual Studio 2017?

1. VS2017 is the best ever.
Although I am a Linux guy, I have owned all Visual C++/Studio versions since Visual C++ 6 (1999) - if only to use for cross-platform projects in a Windows VM.

2. I love Qt5, even on Windows!
And QtDesigner is a far better tool than I thought. On Linux I rarely had to design GUIs, so I was happily surprised.

3. GUI apps are always inferior to CLI.
Whenever a collegue of mine and me had worked on the same parts in the same libraries, and hit the inevitable merge conflict resolving session, we played a game: Who would push first? Him, with TortoiseGit and BeyondCompare? Or me, with MinTTY and kdiff3?
Surprise! I always won! 😁

4. Only shortly into Application Development for Windows with Visual Studio, I started to miss the fun it is to code on Linux for Linux.
No matter how much I like VS2017, I really miss Code::Blocks!

5. Big software suites (2,792 files) are interesting, but I prefer libraries and frameworks to work on.

----------------------------------------------------------------

For future reference, I'll answer a possible question I may have in the future about Windows 10: What did I use to mod/pimp it?

1. 7+ Taskbar Tweaker
https://rammichael.com/7-taskbar-tw...

2. AeroGlass
http://www.glass8.eu/

3. Classic Start (Now: Open-Shell-Menu)
https://github.com/Open-Shell/...

4. f.lux
https://justgetflux.com/

5. ImDisk
https://sourceforge.net/projects/...

6. Kate
Enhanced text editor I like a lot more than notepad++. Aaaand it has a "vim-mode". 👍
https://kate-editor.org/

7. kdiff3
Three way diff viewer, that can resolve most merge conflicts on its own. Its keyboard shortcuts (ctrl-1|2|3 ; ctrl-PgDn) let you fly through your files.
http://kdiff3.sourceforge.net/

8. Link Shell Extensions
Support hard links, symbolic links, junctions and much more right from the explorer via right-click-menu.
http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/...

9. Rainmeter
Neither as beautiful as Conky, nor as easy to configure or flexible. But it does its job.
https://www.rainmeter.net/

10 WinAeroTweaker
https://winaero.com/comment.php/...

Of course this wasn't everything. I also pimped Visual Studio quite heavily. Sam question from my future self: What did I do?

1 AStyle Extension
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...

2 Better Comments
Simple patche to make different comment styles look different. Like obsolete ones being showed striked through, or important ones in bold red and such stuff.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...

3 CodeMaid
Open Source AddOn to clean up source code. Supports C#, C++, F#, VB, PHP, PowerShell, R, JSON, XAML, XML, ASP, HTML, CSS, LESS, SCSS, JavaScript and TypeScript.
http://www.codemaid.net/

4 Atomineer Pro Documentation
Alright, it is commercial. But there is not another tool that can keep doxygen style comments updated. Without this, you have to do it by hand.
https://www.atomineerutils.com/

5 Highlight all occurrences of selected word++
Select a word, and all similar get highlighted. VS could do this on its own, but is restricted to keywords.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...

6 Hot Commands for Visual Studio
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...

7 Viasfora
This ingenious invention colorizes brackets (aka "Rainbow brackets") and makes their inner space visible on demand. Very useful if you have to deal with complex flows.
https://viasfora.com/

8 VSColorOutput
Come on! 2018 and Visual Studio still outputs monochromatically?
http://mike-ward.net/vscoloroutput/

That's it, folks.

----------------------------------------------------------------

No matter how much fun it will be to do full time Linux C/C++ coding, and reverse engineering of WORM file systems and proprietary containers and databases, the thing I am most looking forward to is quite mundane: I can do what the fuck I want!
Being stuck in a project? No problem, any of my own projects is just a 'git clone' away. (Or fetch/pull more likely... 😜)
Here I am leaving a place where gitlab.com, github.com and sourceforge.net are blocked.

But I will also miss my collegues here. I know it.
Well, part of the game I guess?

I ALWAYS THOUGHT YOU CAN DO THIS BUT NEVER TRIED IT

THIS IS MAGIC

I'm bored. Anybody know some cool Wikipedia articles or GitHub repos?

I'll just leave this here:

https://google.com/search/...

I stare through the blueish black backgrounds and blurry colorful syntax into a somewhat familiar office within a mirrored world. That damned reflective glass layer covering these meaningless pixels is certainly not on my side.

The rushing sound of transactions flowing through cables is silenced today. Some blood cloth in the invoicing system is zeroing out everything after the currency mark.

While sighing I spin a one-and-a-half pirouette on my desk chair — even when desperate, you shouldn't give up on style — I take three steps away from my screen and try to harmonize my thoughts.

So much noise, everywhere... Noise from within?

I have been stuck at the apogee of an inhale for a while now. Locked into some masochistic constriction, self-punishment for the blindness which stings my ego.

Just fucking take a deep breath you asshole...

I freeze in place, and fall backwards.

Patterns on the creamy drywall rapidly vibrate and synchronize on vivid rhythms of respiration and resonating basslines. Deep indigo rainbows ripple through tiny veins, in-between chalky grains, raining as fine magenta dust through the ceiling frames.

My bare feet slide over soft oscillating concrete, fine flows of unsievable sand surrounded by toes, toes surrounded by streaming variables veiled in obscure vile abstractions.

A jadegreen field of vectored compressions resiliently rumbles and bounces through the clearances and corners of the vibrant concrete office cave, whispering in tongues. I try to voice my woes in little blips and bleeps but I seem to be missing an asymmetric key to their shrouded sequenced speech.

Suddenly, a wild turbulence breaks up all signals.

Joanna floats by in her tipsy effervescent cloud of disordered black hair and alcohol perfume, one hand grasping grapes, her other waving at me.

With every finger she moves a thousand tensors propagating paradoxically flawed but perfect pieces of an intricate surreal picture, sketching whole constellations of possible paths throughout the leafs of the giant Ficus next to her desk.

She stops dead in her tracks, and asks somewhat hypocritically: "Are you high?"

I can not discern the meaning of her words, and respond stoically.

"Joanna! Check out those branches!".

"Pun intended?", she giggles.

I'm focused on her grapeless hand, her fingers stretching to reach the lush little tree.

On touch, the plant shivers, grappled in the tight net of the puppet master. She pulls her strings, applying measured weights, all nodes normalize, and Joanna speaks in an oddly soft tone:

"Isn't it beautiful, how so many models emulate nature"

Her cheek buried in foliage she babbles on about unbalanced search trees and machine learning models... but from the tips of her fingers tables and indexes flow into the plant. Users, payments, tariffs, invoices and taxes crawl over the bark, joining at thicker branches, joining at the stem....

Joining. JOINING. A JOIN.

"IF THERE'S NO FUCKING TAX MULTIPLIER IN THIS LEFT JOIN, EVERYTHING COALESCES TO ZERO" I shout at a perplexed Joanna who squeezes grape juice over her desk. I hop on the beat to my keyboard. She looks puzzled, hugs her Ficus tightly, and reaches for the whiskey bottle behind her monitor.

Attracted by my exclamation, Tom from finance swings open the door, while I push my branch.

I look at Joanna still half hiding between the leaves, and I laugh at her: "Branches! Oh, lame, I finally got it!"

Tom's heavy voice interrupts me: "Does this mean... does this mean that the invoicing bug is resolved?".

I smile at Tom with his tailored suit and waxed hair. "The money is flowing once more. All debts are being settled."

He releases his breath in relief, which he seems to have held since that morning as well.

Joanna adds: "Although I think he is forever indebted to my Ficus".

I nod.

Not all those who wander are lost

Just finished this great book! It was really entertaining and interesting 🙂
And it explained the advantages of DevOps and CI/CD in a very understandable way 😁

Do you have any other good recommendations for IT novels?

Aardwolf is very fun and i suggest y'all play it a bit if you're looking for better ways to slack off at work

$ telnet aardwolf.org 4000
*port 23 also works

It's impressive how much root can actually get you, that's debian running xfce on my lg g3 and chromium.

It's always nice to know that you can have a portable server etc. straight from your phone. I even used that kind of setup as a portable laptop some time ago and it worked quite well.

What things did you do via chrooted linux on android devices? would be interesting to know if somebody maybe is still using it as some kind of laptop as I did.

!rant

You know those dudes that dress up spiffy and try to sell you cable providers for tv and shit. Well, i normally stream everything from my computers and do not really have any need for actual tv, my flatscreen is mostly used for my ps4 or switch and das it.

So these guys stop me at walmart and start trying to sell me this provider, i normally listen and give everyone a chance since they b only doing their job. Afterwards I tell them that i use one of those roku or amazon sticks and that I am fine with it. Well one of them insists in that those are not good since **fake made up technical shit** and that unless I am a programmer I would not know how to work around them.

I smile. Hehe.....hehe.....muahahahaha and tell them that I do not worry about such things since I am a software engineer. My wife passes by and confirms "yup, computer scientist, spends his days thinkering with shit"

One of them looks at the other and says "fuck it dude we lost"

Lol, gracious in the face of defeat.

People're surprised Linux isn't popular on desktop, and here am I setting my screen brightness from the terminal using xbacklight, simply because there's no other way 😠

Cheap alternatives to Digital Ocean? Needing a VPS server that will run Algo VPN and/or nginx.

De-google your life

Search:
-qwant
-startpage
-searx
-duck duck go look up the founder
-yandex (putin botnet)

Mail
-cock.li
-ProtonMail
-Posteo
-Tutanota
-your own

Browsers
-https://kek.gg/i/3g2z6d.png (superior list)
-https://kek.gg/i/67YQQx.jpg (for furfags)
-https://wiki.installgentoo.com/inde...
/Web_browsers

Collaborative documents
-quip
-turtl
-ether pad (eg: notes.typo3.org or etherpad.net)
-microsoft office online (lol)

Image Upload/Edit
-kek.gg

Video sharing
-hooktube
-bitchute.com
-vid.me
-dtube.video

Social
-gnu social (for freedom loving patriots)
-mastodon (for proprietary loving gook pedos and sjws)
-gab.ai
-minds
-diaspora

Image Upload/Edit
-kek.gg

Google CDN avoidance
-Decentraleyes

Ad and script blocking
-uBlock Origin

Share links without gibbing clicks
-archive.is

Android
-droid-break.info

How to hosts file (lol, just block google bro):
-https://archive.is/gBJ8i

Reading:
-https://wiki.installgentoo.com/inde...
/Anonymizing_yourself#Fingerprinting
-https://wiki.installgentoo.com/inde...
/Firefox#Notable_add-ons
-https://panopticlick.eff.org

Can anyone suggest any good computer science/IT/development/coding/computery based podcasts to listen to?
I'm getting awfully bored of listening to idiots jabber away about nonsense each night.

Customizing my arch linux desktop 🙂

High resolution picture:
https://imgur.com/a/aEeZR

What do you guys think?