Went to the O’Reilly conference on architecture last week. Will say there were some good points made (really liked the elephant in architecture and tech debt talks). But wow developers love to circlejerk. If you don’t deploy microservices on the cloud with serverless actions for everything then they’ll talk down to you like what you do isn’t important. Like so many talks memed monoliths were annoying. Like I get we love the new and shiny things but it’s kinda ridiculous.

7 months into first job and half my department (so essentially about 10 people) have left. Kinda sucks emotionally especially when you try befriend those people or get close to them like your manager. Genuinely never felt this lost and without guidance as when my manager left...

When you haven’t coded in 3mths in your first job of 5mths. Feel like my future employment abilities are going to suffer...

I just want to thank Windows 10. Because of 3 updates in a week I got to do almost no work, spend 4hrs understanding why I was in a recovery mode loop, and make me lose a days worth of work by hiding the only folder I stupidly left on my C drive post update.
Without this I’d actually have to do work to get paid, and that’s just gross.

It’s funny that spongebob “sailor mouth” was based on the fact that sailors were disgruntled and swore a lot. Feel like a remake a few years from now would base it on developers.

Never knew how many accounts I had on different websites until GDPR kicked in

Steps to writing more readable and cleaner code:
1) write shitty code that gets the job done
2) take a screenshot of set code
3) post it on devRant and blame it on a coworker
4) someone will reply with a clean solution within a couple hours
5) copy and paste that solution then push to repo

Not usually a person to rant about spacing and conventions but this is great.

4 devs, all using IntelliJ. Now IntelliJ auto-changes tabs to spaces which is nice, and GitHub doesn’t really care as long as the spacing is consistent. Now here is the fun part: 2 devs have 4 spaces per tab, 1 has 3 spaces, 1 has 5 spaces.
GitHub merge conflicts everyWHERE.

And yes it isn’t the old 2 vs 4 spaces. It’s 3 vs 4 vs 5 somehow

Need advice.

So the class I TA is learning how to use heroku for website testing. It is going up on fire because of a shit tonne of errors everywhere. The professor is adamant heroku is what is used nowadays for testing (over using FTP) so we will have to help 200+ people troubleshoot without knowing much ourselves.

My question is what are some other modern website testing mechanisms? Preferably some that have retard proofing in them.

After all this time I’m still confused, why was Cambridge Analytica such a huge deal? I feel like a lot of people knew this in years prior, that Facebook/Google were scraping user data and activities to use for personal profiles and hence more directed as placement. Stuff like Ghostery, Privacy Badger, Disconnect, Ad Nauseum (rip it’s Chrome plug-in) etc. all focused on not allowing these same trackers to get information, so not like this case just magically busted the doors wide open screaming that all those websites you visited are now in Facebook’s database and no one knew.

I just can’t quite understand why everyone got up in arms after this.

How to know if your machine learning data is valid:
http://dilbert.com/strip/2018-04-03

!rant per se

It’s funny, until junior year of uni I was a strong advocate of Java and was willing to argue the case for it. One thing that I definitely was taught in uni that a language is just a tool (for the most part). It’s the theory that matters, and that can be applied pretty well to most languages. Have come to the point that I actually get frustrated when people get into arguments of language X being shit or inferior to language Y.
Like many people perceive college as a place to just learn programming and stuff like discrete structures and theory as being time wasting, but i have come to realise that it’s quite the opposite, if you know the concept of something, applying it to a language is easier than learning how to do something in a certain language and then bitch and moan that “it can’t be done” in another language you are forced to work with.

Because blockchain is a merkle tree-like data structure that isn’t synonymous with a cryptocoin. I feel like blockchain fell into that buzz word pit, with machine learning, that execs use to try sound innovative and smart in front of superiors.

Today while livecoding in lecture, my prof got a call that got shown on his Mac. His response to that was very interesting:
“Has anyone else noticed that phones have gotten so advanced that when we receive a phone call we treat it almost like a DOS attack? It impairs is from doing everything that’s secondary to making and taking phone calls and that pisses us off”

API changes. Customer downloads newest version of dependency, and breaks my software. Why? Because the devs making the dependency don’t phase anything out with deprecation, just poof. So then I’m up all night making a patch so I don’t have to deal with set client.

I honestly maintain a positive opinion that almost (again read almost) all devs are not inherently evil. Those who are made do those autoplay vids were probably asked by management, the game devs at EA are forced to use Frostbite which isn’t suitable for everything, like RPGs, and Apple devs aren’t trying to maximise profits by limiting so much to the consumer world (e.g the bloody XCode license), but are forced in by this corporate model.

A lot of shit is given to devs and sometimes I think it’s undeserved. In their shoes most people would too go against their moral compass if it meant that they won’t lose their jobs. I’m sure when battlefront was in the works it wasn’t the devs that came up with that whole shitstorm model.

Not really hacking, but my roommate says otherwise. So we share a router in the apartment and I’m the only one that really knows how to access it, so of course I change the password and tell no one (not like they’ll try to get in anyway).
Occasionally set roommate likes to get blackout and play music very loud at 2am. To be petty, on those occasions I set up an RPi Zero to connect to the WiFi, restart it, and sleep for a minute, and repeat. He’s still convinced we are getting DDOSd, and suspects nothing.

Reason I don’t just set parental controls - he gets more frustrated when the WiFi appears for 10secs, the music is just about to start and shuts off again. So he gives up quicker. Otherwise, he resets the router and I have to set up everything from the start.

Person I am grading labelled “not having bugs” as their website feature... if it wasn’t 2018, I probably would say that’s a standard part of any website or software. Now... at least they’re not passing it off as early access.

!rant

So got into a small debate (actually a civil one, surprise surprise) about the final project for a class. Basically the final project involves a team of 3-4 coders making a website for an actual client that either they find or provided by the professor.
The exact point of conflict was that the work is pro bono. The student argued that the work should be paid since after all, real work, real client. My argument is that because the clients don’t exactly choose the designers (or have little to no knowledge of most of their work) there will be high variance in quality and contract work would cause more conflict if done in class.

So just wondering, what do people think about this? Logistical issues aside (earning money for technically school property/ownership and money for learning essentially)

I feel like 75% of stories here are about high schools. Maybe it’s because of the younger user base but also I think school security is beyond woeful.

I can’t even tell if my school just botched the setup or if the vendor thought it’d be a sick joke but we had software that the teacher would use to remotely look at everyone doing work but we found that if you press the help button it opens the same window where you see everyone’s desktops and can mess with them (how trivial, I know).

Well it’s Sunday so last day to leave my thoughts on probably the only topic that’s current to me.

I think you should pay teachers a competitive salary.
The problem with teaching CS at high school level especially (in university there are grants, actually competitive salaries between unis and other perks) is if a person is versed in programming/cs theory why would they settle for a $40k job? When the alternative is finding a job in the field where salaries are around $80k+ (this figure came from my head, can’t remember the source) it’s hard to justify going into teaching even if you would enjoy it more than a desk job.

If the salary difference was smaller then one could maybe justify liking work over pay but here it’s basically double difference... Kinda makes you understand why some comp sci teachers seem incompetent in even using their own computer. Yes there will always be that odd person out who will teach (or go to a private school and negotiate a workable salary) but until education becomes a priority for government salaries there will be very limited progress, if any.

You can do anything to the syllabus, make it more verbose, make it appeal to the lowest common denominator, but if you can’t find people to teach it (and know it themselves) you are really screwed.

I used to think decrappifying my own CSS was hard... trying to help someone else is a whole other monster.
PHP, JS all have some method to their madness but CSS: “oh you center aligned your heading? Well guess everything else needs to be pushed wherever the fuck I feel like on the page”

Professor essentially doing a dance to show data visualisation:
“Hey pay attention! I’m trading my dignity for your education”

CS Professor: “What M word is the black hole to all productivity?”

Student: “Management”

CS Professor: “Was going to say meetings but that’s better”

Actually be encouraged to test code and play with it to understand the inner workings and gain some experience.

Teach people how to google properly.

May sound a bit sarcastic but I think an important part is how to look for errors on your own rather than going to the professor/TA. I’ve seen people paste in whole error logs or more often “code throws error, what do?”

At least teach in classes what to look out for like what error type in java and understanding how to look at stackoverflow questions to apply their solution to your issue.

Moral of the story: teach people how to use existing knowledge rather than just depend on someone to help their exact issue.

We should get rid of loop invariants. They are cumbersome and counter-intuitive (hopefully someone gets the inside joke).