Im getting a bit tired of programming.

I have been struggling for years regarding programming. I did have some moments of perceived success, but most of the time it has been depressing.

I’m not sure if I dislike programming. But there are some aspects of it that make me feel not as passionate about it.

First of, programs are invisible. No one sees your program or you (assuming we’re talking about a non artistic dev job).

People can’t see lines of code executing, but even if they did it would be gibberish to them.

Users can only become aware of bad software and that kind of breaks my heart a bit.

You could write fast, stable, secure, easy to read, easy to update software. People won’t notice. Hell, even your boss/coworkers might not notice.

In fact, sometimes you try to do the good thing, you try to become a better dev, you try to write tests first, you try to i18n, and what do you get? “Uhh, that’s taking too much time and I don’t see the benefit”.

I know some people will say that people noticing bad service happens on every job.

But programming is the ultimate isolation job. No client has ever told me “hey that code you wrote was pretty good”. They can’t even read code.

I don’t know the users, the users don’t know me, and the users can only judge my program by the result, they can only judge the visual interface.

Let’s say you write a cool project at github. The code is great. Guess what, every language’s ecosystem out there is saturated. Everything is already written. GitHub is saturated. Your best project ends up being a just for yourself enjoyment.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t enjoy code for yourself. That’s how I bet most prolific coders start. I’ve been doing that for many years now. But at some point you want to be part of something with humans.

Imagine I’m stranded on an island with nothing no humans, just food, water and a computer. Would I write code just for myself, just for fun? I think I would off myself 3 months in.

Maybe I should do develop a more social talent...

Watching a play via stream from a relative cringing my fucking ass off.

I honestly do not know what the actual fuck will I say when he asks me if I liked it.

I just started playing terraria and holy shit, it puts minecraft to shame in so many aspects.

It actually makes you feel like the mc devs are some fucking lazy ass morons sitting on piles of cash.

Minecraft is 11 years old and it has 4 bosses and they are all underwhelming pieces of shit, jesus christ.

They can't even make mining fun for fucks sake. Work an half an hour or more to get a full set of diamond only to accidentally lose it to lava in the nether.

They added netherite? Holy shit I can't wait to see the new gear I can craft with it.

Pickaxe, axe, shovel, hoe, sword, helmet, chestplate, leggings, boots. Wow, netherite shovel, that's what the minecraft community needed.

How about an actual battle axe, knives? a baseball bat? Spells? Fucking something minecraft, come on, you can't just have 10 weapons man!

The lack of creative content and variety in minecraft is staggering. Adding a block of a different color and texture is not new content!!!

Also, fuck villagers and the sound they make and their faces. Worse character design ever. Not a single redeeming aspect. And fuck their trading system.

The trade system is horrible!!! One item at a time per character. No text from villagers. They don't have names!!!! They don't feel like villagers!!! They feel like robots!!!! Not a single one of them fights back!!!!! WHAT THE FUCK???? JUST ADD ONE THAT FIGHTS BACK YOU MORONS!!! NOT THAT WEIRD ASS GOLEM!!!

AND NO ONE GIVES TOO FUCKING SHITS ABOUT THE GOSSIP SYSTEM MC DEVS. NO OONEEEEE!!!

Terraria is not a perfect game, but it doesn't just try to be a good rpg, it actually is.

Meanwhile every 3d sandbox after minecraft will either be a filthy clone or not exist at all by fear of being labeled as such. Because of that I will keep on trashing on minecraft, even though I still play it a lot.

My life is basically a loop of:
1) “I’m in a slump and terribly depressed because of my lack of productivity.”
2) “I know! I’ll try using the strategies that proved to make me very productive”.
3) “I’m very productive right now, that’s because I’m so smart and talented, it’s just part of me”
4) Back to step 1

Im an unaccomplished idiot with a big ego. Why do I have an ego if I don’t have any real accomplishments????
Dear god, I will become a fucking egotistical moron the day I actually do something worthwhile.

I’m a goddamn fucking piece of shit.

This is a follow up to my previous rant where I complained about Lenovo firmware update failing and bricking a relative’s computer.

We bought a chip programmer, got the bios from some forum and the thing fucking worked. I’m actually surprised it did, I’m not used to doing shit like this. I was pretty fucking scared of burning something.

The programmer also came with a clamp so we could hook it to the chip without desoldering it. Thank god.

I’m terribly depressed so good timing with that I guess.

Thank you windows update and Lenovo for trying to update my bios and failing in the process.

Now this computer that doesn’t even show bios. Fucking bitch ass pieces of shit.

Stay the fuck away from my bios windows, you shit eating trash of an os.

I think I figured where to draw the line when trying to learn cybersecurity.

Learning ActiveDirectory.

No fucking thanks, I’d rather eat a big steaming pile of dog shit.

!dev

I'm stuck in another country because of coronavirus, living in my mother in law's house, which is a church.

this church has two levels. while we are in the higher level, the lower level is being rented to some women that I hadn't seen since I've been here.

there is a library at the lower level next to their rooms and I'm using it to work because I can't focus with all the chatter in the upper level.

second day of work and 2 hours into coding, I get my balls held onto my legs. Trust me, I had just taken a proper shower, and I don't sweat a lot, it's just my balls being balls.

Naturally I try to separate said balls from my legs with my balls. Guess who the fuck I see passing through. One of these women.

Jesus fucking christ. What a good first fucking impression. Me with my hand in my fucking crotch.

coronavirus

Ok, I'm actually raging at vuejs right now, and this is coming from my second year using it.

the fucking shit is weird.
functional components cannot use v-model.
functional components also cannot reference other components via components property, that child component needs either to be global or be injected (an ugly hack).

v-model behaves differently on checkboxes. checkboxes are fucking shit on vue. things update or do not update.

functional components with checkboxes? hahahahahaha.

vue 3 is taking an ungodly shitload of fucking amount of time.

fuck react, but im actually considering giving vue the middle finger as well.

started this product migration 2 months ago and regretting it, looking at svelte with curious eyes.

Many times in life I experienced situations that are depressing to me yet I'm not partially or totally conscious about it.

I have a very good example that I'm actually experiencing right now: me reporting the progress of a task to my boss and getting no response from him.

He has gone on these "ignoring sprees" in the past already and for the current one, it's been like four consecutive ignores.

I guess it's depressing for two reasons:

1) I feel like my work has no importance or value, which drags me down.
2) Sometimes he also tries to rush which I consider pretty hypocritical of him. because I have to basically not complain about it to not endanger this job relationship my family dearly depends on, I have to shut up and feel frustrated. (keep in mind i'm a south am person working for a us company and I was very lucky to get this job).

For some reason I just don't notice as easily how awful it makes me feel, but I wished I could fucking tell this straight into his fucking face:

You wanna be a boss? Be a fucking boss and check on my fucking progress.

I'm considering getting into security and going for bug bounties online.

you know how every film awards ceremony has a dead people section where they play a video showing the pictures of the newly deceased but stylized like as if they perished in battle, like sepia+zoom out?

anyhow someone should edit a video like that for devrant users that deleted their accounts.

i browsed my posts yesterday and noticed several users that aren’t among us anymore.
(cue gregorian chant) may you rest from idiot managers and idiot client.

temp commits are generally more useful than git stash.

instead of stashing, do a commit with a message like "THIS IS NOT A COMMIT, DON'T INCLUDE THIS". with some discipline you can then go back to your branch, `git reset --soft HEAD~1` and voila, it's similar to a `git stash pop`.

but it's better because you can do this in multiple branches at the same time and there's no fear of accidentally dropping some stashed commit.

filesystem gents, this one’s for you:

There’s something that bugs me about ext4 that I miss from ntfs, knowing the size of a directory

in ext4 every dir is a kB or so, while in ntfs it’s the sum of all descendants.

Is there a way to have that with ext4 or another fs in Linux?

I understand there could be extra writes to have that.

I halfway remade a 2d radar in shadertoy (original in description).
https://shadertoy.com/view/wt3SR7/
(watch it in 640x360 by zooming in or out until you get that res, I tried to main aspect ratio, but I hardcoded one value because I'm lazy)

shaders are tough to get started with:
no breakpoints.
logging doesn't make sense so it's avoided.
if's are replaced with step statements.
if you suck at math, you suck at shaders.
if you suck at trig, you suck at shaders.

hardcoding values is viable debugging.
hail hsb2rgb for pretty colors (I have no fucking idea how does it work though).

I tried writing here the challenges I found while making it, but most of them are heuristics and are hard to follow/explain in just text.

I can say though, that sometimes you come up with a solution, but it doesn't look really good, so you have to use something else.

or sometimes you come up with a solution but it also creates unwanted coloring that you have to erase.

or sometimes you have no fucking idea what your operations results are, or you get dizzy by the math. Hardcoding helps wonders.

I am 30.

Just now I see that if I rewrite documentation of things I learn online with my own words (aka taking fucking notes) I learn with 5x quality.

For some reason I didn't do this most of my 20s.

what the fuck am I doing with my life?

!dev

I just woke up from a fun adrenaline packed film dream.
It started like an movie, leaning a bit into the funny side, but also a bit serious.

We were 3 guys going top speed on the highway, dodging traffic, trying to prevent a bomb from detonating on the other side of the city.

We were all famous actors, but the only one I remember was Jackie Chan. I remember thinking why would they cast Jackie Chan and give him so few lines.

I wished I remember more about this part. The only thing I remember is that when we get to the end of the island, we’re in the wrong place: we’re at a huge OBGYN center.

My sidekicks are bothering the desk women, eating all of the “waiting candy”. I feel bad and offer to pay those, which they pretend to not care about but then end up charging me down to the penny. Cunts.

The sidekicks leave and (without explanation because dreams) disappear of the story.

Defeated, I go outside and start walking.
And I don’t remember exactly what the fuck happened in between, but somehow I’m now in the house of a cartel druglord and he’s pissed and I need to run now.

So I do. I remembered that there was a very thick forest east to the house. So I go there.

And what follows is a very intense montage of me escaping.

At some point that forest ended, so I continue through some high weed, and then another forest, and so on. While I had to pass through parts with no vegetation, I had to avoid these as much as possible.

I saw dozens of types of trees and shrubs.

Then I started seeing families, kids, playing, relaxing on what seemed a Sunday afternoon.

The adventure was so fun, the landscape was so beautiful I felt happy and thought “this is how it feels to be alive”. And I actually felt happy in real life as well.

At some point the vegetation I encounter decreased, and I have to go through more urbanized areas, with more people.

“Uh oh” I think, “I hope no one snitches me”. But miraculously, no one does.

Throughout all the journey I had glimpses of the drug lord nearby presence.

His face on the distance, the sound of his car engine.

But now he was closer than ever. And I’m closer to this house which is the escape point (can’t really remember why).

So I reach for the handle and fade to white, and fade back again, it’s me, older, and I’m not in an escaping mood.

My wife is waiting, our car is outside (on the non drug lord side).

And guess what, we were waiting for our daughter, who comes with a smile and a child on her hands.

So apparently, my daughter married someone from the drug lord villa that almost murders me.

Reading this sounds like a bad script, but that’s what I dreamed today.

The taboo of not finishing.

(As I prefaced to many posts I made, don't take this too seriously)

It is very normal in the programming world to get recommended to finish projects.

But I was wondering "what if you don't?".
Of course, we can agree that having little patience or persistence is not good for any endeavor.

But what if this recurrent focus on finishing is also bad?

Granted, I have started dozens of things and only finished one or two of them and none have become popular.
So there's not a lot of support to back my take.

But I definitely learned a lot from these projects. And I definitely had a lot of fun at some points.

In fact, I think if I had switched more often early on I would have been less miserable, and maybe I would have learned more by the virtue of not getting stuck with some project.

Of course this applies as long as you stay within the same field; it doesn't help learning gardening one day but karate the following.

But even then, there are so many hobbies in life that the chance of finding the one that you love and are the best at are very slim. So switching out of the least pleasant ones might bring you to a favorite one.

But, let's go back to programming.

Here, people recommend finishing things as means to become profitable. If you want to live as a gamedev, then you need to sell games, and to do that, you need to finish games.

That is understandable.

But if gamedev isn't your main profit, why is finishing games a requirement?

What's the point of publishing a game that you know looks like shit?

Why? Why should you put time and energy, pain and stress, all the way through the end only to finish or even publish a game that you can feel ashamed of how awful it looks? (because most 1st games look awful).

Why would you ever want to finish something that looks horrible?

First tries are always terrible, and that's fine, nothing wrong with that.

What's wrong is this sheepthought that you should publish to the public every turd that you can produce in your early learning stages.

I've been a programmer for almost 8 years now. I'm not the best out there, but I consider myself ok.

And considering I had some pretty deep depression pits thanks to this mentality, here's my advice to folk having stress with unfinished projects: don't give a single fuck.

If a side project has become stressful, shelf that shit, maybe tell someone about your issues with it. But don't care much about it.

In fact, if you manage to finish a project but it has costed you a great deal of stress, maybe that should be the shameful thing.

Life is too short to waste it considering suicide because you're not a prolific programmer.

And i would argue that iterating 100 times on different things is far more productive (and fun) than fetting stuck or spending shitloads of time on the first one, even if you don't finish any of them.

!dev

I fucking hate with all the strength in my body this meme format:

nobody:
someone: wacky unpredictible quote

fuck that bitch ass, lazy, unfunny, uncreative format. It fucking sucks dick. It's not funny!

Jesus fucking christ, it was funny the first month.
But month after month after month, this fucking thing won't die. It's way way below the average meme format, and that's saying a lot considering what the average is.

I check youtube comments and for every funny and thoughtful comment there's one from these fucking idiots that shouldn't be alive parrotting this unfunny shit.

Just include the goddamn fucking quote, that's it.

Even less points to the motherfuckers that write:
nobody
not one on person on earth
not even a single person on the universe
person: <quote>
those deserve the worst type of cancers or torture forms described in wikipedia.

This is a stuxnet level post, I need to get a life.

excellent job google!
very related to my search query, and very related to my personal interests (which you are very good at keeping track of).

i wish nothing but the worst ruin to the perverse execs running this perverse company!

I'm writing all the dev things I know in a docs site as a means to be hireable should I need to switch jobs.

I'm not gonna go too deep on how I'm doing it. One style I'm enjoying is making every article take only one page long, and if they take longer, maybe consider breaking it into another article.
Fuck long articles. Yes, that's a bit autistic.

But I will describe the challenges I'm finding (which are quite many) in further detail.

One of them is that words can be ambiguous. Production can mean the production environment but it can also mean production in plain english.
And there are tons of cases like this.

Because of this, I felt a lot of confusion in my beginner days. So it my objective to write this as to prevent as much confusion as possible.

Granted, I don't want to write "development for dummies". Software is complex. But because it's complex on its own, I don't want to add complexity to the learning process through obscure language usage.

"Fine", I say, "I'll disambiguate". But this means I find myself branching out very often into fundamental or commonly used software terms like "framework", "model", "scaffold", "algorithm", "viewport", "breakpoint", etc.

Another challenge is reaching good levels of completitude.
This means I have to explain that obscure CLI flag I never used in my life.

If I don't do this, then what makes my docs different than these superficial dev.to or medium posts? Nothing.
But trying to explain EVERYTHING about a software can generate a lot of frustration: I never finish.

It also makes me wonder "do I even know shit?". I think some amount of insecurity is healthy and pushes myself forward.
But at some point it's kind of making me feel like shit. Maybe I just need to keep learning.

I'm writing a couple of tutorials on web development, nothing really professional, just my perspective on explaining things from scratch.

It's funny how quickly things get hard to explain.
You try to explain web frameworks and you have to differentiate between client side and server side frameworks.

But some people don't know what client or server means.

So you try to explain what the client-server model is.

But then the word model is not clear to some people, it's like a jargon word in software, so you have to give some kind of explanation for the word.

And so on.

This complexity and layering of terms is normal on every science, but I feel terms deserve proper explanation and disambiguation, which isn't usually done.

So far I don't feel a lot of things are as complex as they are considered in an atomical sense, they are complex in the sense of requiring understanding of layers that are very simple in themselves.

It is quite a challenge to be the least obscure, to give explanations with the least number of possible interpretations.

I get anxious when I try to learn new things.

I'm not even sure how to describe it. Low self esteem? Low confidence? I dunno.

It feels like stage freight, but there's no audience or stage, it's just me and my computer.

No one really ever watches me, or judges me or anything.

I guess I'm a bit self emasculating because I don't really have a reason for feeling ashamed for trying out something in private.

But I feel that the fear, the stress is very distracting and it's limiting my progress.

Now, there's this project I'm rewriting in my company that I'm taking pride in and think that it has the potential to actually increase profits.

The stack is way better, it's visually better, the load times are better, the product is easier to access and try out, bla bla bla.

I guess I never felt truly proud of anything I've ever done in any company, most of what I did felt like grunt work.

But this one is actually a very well designed improvement.

So I'm hoping that this will be the excuse for not needing to prove myself anymore so that my mindset will be something like:

so what if I abandon another side project?
so what if I publish a game that looks like shit?

I may fail at newer projects, but I did win at that project I did in my company, and it wasn't a victory just because I say so, but also because my coworkers and bosses do too.

I don't know what else could help at this point.

lol nvidia-bug-report.sh

it collected an xorg log that is not the current one.

For some reason, my arch openbox logs to $HOME/.local/share/xorg/Xorg.0.log.

What a goddamn trainwreck. I'm not necessarily saying it's nvidia's fault. But it is a trainwreck.

!dev

my problem with gaming in linux is not really inherent to linux.

my problem is that there are no linux game torrents.

and torrenting for me is a way to know if I'll be playing a certain game for a while, and eventually buy it.

I can watch all the trailers in the world for a game, but I truly make up my mind after the first few hours of direct playtime.

so I'm not interested in spending money on a game that I might like because it looked nice on the trailer only to find out I hate playing it.

the problem with torrents is that once users get the game, and the game works, they're probably like
"why bother buying it? the game works right? why risk losing the progress i achieved so far by moving save files?"

on top of that on linux, you need to check protondb to see how compatible the game you found is, so an extra layer of difficulty.

I guess I would like to have legal demo versions of games, but I see very little devs doing that so maybe that commercial model failed? I don't know really.

!dev

I so badly want to fuck right now.

I promise I'll post more dev related posts later.

!dev

holy fuck, I just browsed instagram and guess what? there's a lot of ho's and retarded morons! what in the actual fuck? I am honestly surprised!

I was so mad about it that I went for a walk in town and stumbled upon a KKK gathering. Jesus christ, can you believe these people are racists?

I had to storm out there of there to my favorite extremist church and I just found out that they are homophobes. I am shocked!

then it started to rain, and I was wondering what would happen if I walked into the open. Can you believe I got drenched? I was not aware that water had this effect on regular clothing.

!dev

fucking great, I come to parent's meeting at school, what a waste of fucking time this is.

the cherry on top: a fucking fake einsten quote on my kid's report, the one that says "there are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is."

!dev (Please, don't take this very seriously, I'm kind of burnt out)

I'm not having a good time.

I can't even write a post to properly explain how I feel.

I feel disappointed by life and by myself in many levels. Life is disappointing. I am disappointing too.

I'm having issues to focus, can't even write a couple of lines of code.

Time to listen to some emo lofi and write about how much I hate myself.

I wished I didn't feel these feelings.
I wished I didn't regret so many things I did or didn't do.
I wished I could fucking understand everything I read, but I don't, everything I read is gibberish, every paragraph makes me feel like I'm drifting in a storm.

I wished I was happy with my career, with my job. I wished I had a true friend.
I wished I could finish one goddamn fucking project for once.

I wished there was something that made me unique, but I don't think there's any.
I just feel like an ant, and that I don't really matter.

I don't feel like I'm someone at all, I feel like I'm experiencing a dream, and a rather boring one.

Programming used to be challenging and fun for me, but it has become this dull and stressful ordeal.

The internet has shown me that I don't matter really. I remember being a little kid and believing that the internet would not discriminate you, that right from the comfort of your house you could connect to people and be cared for, and collaborate in something.

But every year that passes I see that I was wrong. I have tried to put in time into people, I have asked people how they're doing, I have cared for their projects. But there's no reciprocation.

The internet itself has become a thing where the big fish only matters. The top 1k users will get 99% of the attention.

Fuck nurture, rule competition.

What's the point of creating a github project that you think it's cool? No one will give two shits about it, it won't make a goddamn difference whether you push it or not.

You know what fucking matters? If you're an apple or google developer and have thousands of followers.

Bla, bla, bla, I'm depressed...

Forgot to drink water? Focus loss.
Forgot to write microtasks? Focus loss.
Didn't wear trousers when it's cold? Focus loss.
Forgot to meditate? Focus loss.
Forgot to think about how I feel? Focus loss.
Forgot to eat? Focus loss.
Didn't exercise? Focus loss.
Assumed that little pain in my ribs is cancer? Focus loss.
Got annoyed by something my boss said? Focus loss.
Did I forget to listen to instrumental music instead of stand up comedy? Focus loss.
Can't find instrumental music that I like and didn't listen too many times? Focus loss.
Did I sleep too little? Focus loss.

Everything is a pitfall. I am a goddamn house of cards.