Story of a first-time hackathon.

So, I took part in the COVID-19 Global Hackathon.

Long story short, I got excited at OCR and just went with the most challenging challenge - digitizing forms with handwritten text and checkboxes, ones which say whether you have been in contact with someone who could have Coronavirus.

And, unsurprisingly, it didn't work within 4 days. I joined up with 2 people, who both left halfway through - one announced, one silently - and another guy joined, said he had something working and then dissapeared.

We never settled on a stack - we started with a local docker running Tesseract, then Google Cloud Vision, then we found Amazon Textract. None worked easily.

Timezone differences were annoying too. There was a 15-hour difference across our zones. I spent hours in the Slack channel waiting.

We didn't manage the deadline, and the people who set the challenge needed the solution withing 10 days, a deadline we also missed. We ended up with a basic-bitch Vue app to take pictures with mock Amazon S3 functionality, empty TDD in Python and also some OCR work.

tbh, that stuff would've worked if we had 4 weeks. I understand why everyone left.

I guess the lesson from this is not to be over-ambitious with hackathons. And not to over-estimate computers' detection abilities.

Started reading, is it good?

I have a bunch of contesters fort the worst interview.

#1 The Dishonest Ignorant

Me: *asks question*
#1: *stumbles*
Me: It's okay to say that you don't know.
#1: *continues to ramble on without making sense*
Me: Well, okay. That is all. I don't think that this will be a fit.

#2 The fraud

Me: How would you rate your knowledge in object orientated programming?
#2: Very advanced! I am an expert!
Me: Can you state the difference of an interface and an abstract class?
#2: *surprised pikachu-face* Well not that advanced!

#3 The trickster

During a skype call (without video):

Me: *asks question*
#3: *keyboard sounds aclacking*
Me: Are you googling?
#3: No *click clack click a clack* ... and to answer your question: *starts reading from the first search results*

The real bummer is, that in all of these cases, just saying "I don't know" would have been fine. (The "expert" OOP-guy would still have some explaining to do.)

It's not like that our interview process resolves around trick questions or that you'd get kicked out for getting one answer wrong. Though how can I trust somebody not to lie to me on a daily basis if they fake their interview?

We keep the interview relatively basic and rely on real-word coding exercise anyway and it helps us to get an idea on where we would gain support from them and where we need to support them.

As a developer you spend a lot of time learning new stuff anyways.

It blows my mind.

What a week

On Monday I was promoted to senior and on Friday the other senior in my group was fired for gross incompetence.

FEELS GOOD MAN

Do you wear a wristwatch? For style or confidence? I have a problem wearing one. It gets in the way as I type on my keyboard. Or am I wearing it wrong?

"Do, or do not. There is no 'try'." - Yoda

Forgot my headphones😫😭

How to block productivity:

I am currently a working student at a huge corporation and tasked to write some smallish java applications. Nothing unusual.

To actually be able to write and compile java programs I need a JDK.
Except that the last corporate update for java removed my jdk and left me with only a jre. It so happened that my admin rights ran out.

To be able to install a new jdk, I need elevated rights, which I need to request. The fucking problem is nobody of my department, who I could talk to, is here or online to accept the request.

Guess who is now sitting in front of his dysfunctional dev environment :/

Just duck things

Time is short.

What is in a web name?
thought i would share
ready?
www.gotahoe.com (go tahoe )
www.speedofart.com (speed of art designers)
www.whorepresents.com (who represents celebrity rep lookup site)
and of finally
www.penisland.com ( pen island yup they sell pens)

my desk setup.
I cannot afford (yet) a fancy setup.

Not really a rant (?)

I started my first programming job in January this year. I went there staight after Highschool, so i had no real experience, knew only the basics of software development and my written code was quite a mess. So one of my first real tasks (after 2 months) was to write a business logic for batch handling (for a warehouse management system). I invested quite some time to develop a suitable architecture, talked with some other developers and wanted to cover the whole thing with unit tests (which really nobody at the company uses). So I spent about 3 weeks to write the whole thing, test it and improve it many times. It worked perfectly and I got pretty good feedback from the code-review.

1 month ago - the code worked perfectly and was multiple times testet (also by the client) - the client came with some totally new requirements for the batch handling. I tried to impelemt them, but soon found out, that the architecture doesn't supported them, it was not build for the required handling and would soon become a totally mess, if i tried to make it work.

So I was pretty mad, because I had to change the whole fucking thing, but I also wanted to make it better. I hab gained some experience and decided (with some help of a senior dev) to make a completely new try with a different architecture, that can be easily expanded, if needed. I build my concept, wrote and tested the whole new code in 3 days. Fucking 3 days compared to the initial 3 weeks, and it worked, better and even faster.

I was quite pissed to delete the old code, and especially that i had wasted 3 weeks for it and had to struggle with many different things. But I lerarned so much from it and also in the months between, that I was also really glad that I had the opportiunity to write it again.

This whole thing made me now realize that this is, what I really like to do and what I'm good in. I really enjoy learning new things and for me, programming is the best and easiest way to do it. Despite alle the cons and annoying side effects of it, I really found my dream job here.

Why is it that a website thinks that it would be a good idea to completely block a user from using their website if they have an adBlocker? Now don't get me wrong, I can understand them wanting to put up a message maybe saying "hey we make money off the ads that are displayed, please don't block them." But FFS give the user the choice to close the window and continue on if they don't want to disable their adBlocker! I know personally I just choose to leave the site and go elsewhere for content when I encounter those things!

Don't force me to disable and then refresh!

DOCUMENT YOUR MOTHERFUCKING CODE!

I've been fired today and somehow it was an relief :)
As I know that I am pretty much the only one who knows how the infrastructure works and I am the only one who actively tried to get the company to a better level of coding (tests, code reviews, proper deployment / continuous integration,...) It somehow feels like that gif.

So we are a bunch of nerds huh? Without any social life? or friends?

You motherfucker, if it wasn't for the community that developers have built, you would still be living in stone age. Seriously, the way we share our hard work with each other, spending hundreds of hours on a library and making them open source on the internet, I don't think any other community out there does it so selflessly.

So next time you're calling me boring, you can take a big piece of shit and put it up in your arse.

A sound recognition system

Being deaf is one major factor that's kept me from moving out. I can't hear sounds like doorbells, fire alarms, etc

I want to build a client-server solution that can be trained to recognize specific sounds [more details]

*groan*

How it usually goes:
1. Have an idea
2. Do about 3 of those things:
- sketch out a few diagramms of how it would work
- think of a name and buy the url
- estimate what you would have to buy and what it would cost
- make a project folder
- lean back, imagine life after the idea made you rich and famous
- write about 2% of the required code
3. Get distracted or don't have time to work on thr idea
4. Have new idea, repeat from 1

I hate fucking searching for new job! But I hate my company also! And I hate autocomplete trying to suggest ducking! No I am never going to write fucking ducking!fuck!

realWiFi but no Internet.

Help on stack overflow in a nutshell.

I'm about to quit my job this week to start my own software company... I have a meeting this friday with the first potential-client and I feel very anxious about it. I also feel scary because if this doesn't work probably I will stay unemployed with a 30K debt because of my Mac

Scary but anxious... Feel pretty excited, wish me luck guys!

I HATE it when client does not know what he wants. Removed a functionality only to be added back again with all the ripples going through the code¡¡¡¡¡

ARGH¡¡¡¡¡¡ FUCK ME

Where's my exclamation mark u shitty SwiftKey keyboard¿¿¿¿

Because if you fail, you will be executed ...

In light of the recent Yahoo credential leak...

I saw this in a rant a few minutes ago and I had to verify if it was real.
It's real.

not exactly devRant related but this cracked me up so hard, I couldn't help sharing

When a Linux user sees windows users complaining about their OS.