Really want to get shit done today.

Lets browse Spotify for 3 hours to find good focus music.

Spend 2 hours designing a new IDE color theme and inspections which should really help me do code reviews faster

Oh, lunch time!

Maybe after lunch I should read some random clickbait blog posts on organizational paradigms.

...

And now I'm stranded on devRant. 😫

Lads, I will be real with you: some of you show absolute contempt to the actual academic study of the field.

In a previous rant from another ranter it was thrown up and about the question for finding a binary search implementation.

Asking a senior in the field of software engineering and computer science such question should be a simple answer, specifically depending on the type of job application in question. Specially if you are applying as a SENIOR.

I am tired of this strange self-learner mentality that those that have a degree or a deep grasp of these fundamental concepts are somewhat beneath you because you learned to push out a website using the New Boston tutorials on youtube. FOR every field THAT MATTERS a license or degree is hold in high regards.
"Oh I didn't go to school, shit is for suckers, but I learned how to chop people up and kinda fix it from some tutorials on youtube" <---- try that for a medical position.

"Nah it's cool, I can fix your breaks, learned how to do it by reading blogs on the internet" <--- maintenance shop

"Sure can write the controller processing code for that boing plane! Just got done with a low level tutorial on some websites! what can go wrong!"

(The same goes for military devices which in the past have actually killed mfkers in the U.S)

Just recently a series of people were sent to jail because of a bug in software. Industries NEED to make sure a mfker has aaaall of the bells and whistles needed for running and creating software.

During my masters degree, it fucking FASCINATED me how many mfkers were absolutely completely NEW to the concept of testing code, some of them with years in the field.

And I know what you are thinking "fuck you, I am fucking awesome" <--- I AM SURE YOU BLOODY WELL ARE but we live in a planet with billions of people and millions of them have fallen through the cracks into software related positions as well as complete degrees, the degree at LEAST has a SPECTACULAR barrier of entry during that intro to Algos and DS that a lot of bitches fail.

NOTE: NOT knowing the ABSTRACTIONS over the tools that we use WILL eventually bite you in the ASS because you do not fucking KNOW how these are implemented internally.

Why do you think compiler designers, kernel designers and embedded developers make the BANK they made? Because they don't know memory efficient ways of deploying a product with minimal overhead without proper data structures and algorithmic thinking? NOT EVERYTHING IS SHITTY WEB DEVELOPMENT

SO, if a mfker talks shit about a so called SENIOR for not knowing that the first mamase mamasa bloody simple as shit algorithm THROWN at you in the first 10 pages of an algo and ds book, then y'all should be offended at the mkfer saying that he is a SENIOR, because these SENIORS are the same mfkers that try to at one point in time teach other people.
These SENIORS are the same mfkers that left me a FUCKING HORRIBLE AND USELESS MESS OF SPAGHETTI CODE

Specially to most PHP developers (my main area) y'all would have been well motherfucking served in learning how not to forLoop the fuck out of tables consisting of over 50k interconnected records, WHAT THE FUCK

"LeaRniNG tHiS iS noT neeDed!!" yes IT fucking IS

being able to code a binary search (in that example) from scratch lets me know fucking EXACTLY how well your thought process is when facing a hard challenge, knowing the basemotherfucking case of a LinkedList will damn well make you understand WHAT is going on with your abstractions as to not fucking violate memory constraints, this-shit-is-important.

So, will your royal majesties at least for the sake of completeness look into a couple of very well made youtube or book tutorials concerning the topic?

You can code an entire website, fine as shit, you will get tested by my ass in terms of security and best practices, run these questions now, and it very motherfucking well be as efficient as I think it should be(I HIRE, NOT YOU, or your fucking blog posts concerning how much MY degree was not needed, oh and btw, MY degree is what made sure I was able to make SUCH decissions)

This will make a loooooooot of mfkers salty, don't worry, I will still accept you as an interview candidate, but if you think you are good enough without a degree, or better than me (has happened, told that to my face by a candidate) then get fucking ready to receive a question concerning: BASIC FUCKING COMPUTER SCIENCE TOPICS

* gays away into the night

Well, here's the OS rant I promised. Also apologies for no blog posts the past few weeks, working on one but I want to have all the information correct and time isn't my best friend right now :/

Anyways, let's talk about operating systems. They serve a purpose which is the goal which the user has.
So, as everyone says (or, loads of people), every system is good for a purpose and you can't call the mainstream systems shit because they all have their use.

Last part is true (that they all have their use) but defining a good system is up to an individual. So, a system which I'd be able to call good, had at least the following 'features':
- it gives the user freedom. If someone just wants to use it for emailing and webbrowsing, fair enough. If someone wants to produce music on it, fair enough. If someone wants to rebuild the entire system to suit their needs, fair enough. If someone wants to check the source code to see what's actually running on their hardware, fair enough. It should be up to the user to decide what they want to/can do and not up to the maker of that system.
- it tries it's best to keep the security/privacy of its users protected. Meaning, by default, no calling home, no integrating users within mass surveillance programs and no unnecessary data collection.
- Open. Especially in an age of mass surveillance, it's very important that one has the option to check the underlying code for vulnerabilities/backdoors. Can everyone do that, nope. But that doesn't mean that the option shouldn't be there because it's also about transparency so you don't HAVE to trust a software vendor on their blue eyes.
- stability. A system should be stable enough for home users to use. For people who like to tweak around? Also, but tweaking *can* lead to instability and crashes, that's not the systems' responsibility.

Especially the security and privacy AND open parts are why I wouldn't ever voluntarily (if my job would depend on it, sure, I kinda need money to stay alive so I'll take that) use windows or macos. Sure, apple seems to care about user privacy way more than other vendors but as long as nobody can verify that through source code, no offense, I won't believe a thing they say about that because no one can technically verify it anyways.

Some people have told me that Linux is hard to use for new/(highly) a-technical people but looking at my own family and friends who adapted fast as hell and don't want to go back to windows now (and mac, for that matter), I highly doubt that. Sure, they'll have to learn something new. But that was also the case when they started to use any other system for the first time. Possibly try a different distro if one doesn't fit?

Problems - sometimes hard to solve on Linux, no doubt about that. But, at least its open. Meaning that someone can dive in as deep as possible/necessary to solve the problem. That's something which is very difficult with closed systems.

The best example in this case for me (don't remember how I did it by the way) was when I mounted a network drive at boot on windows and Linux (two systems using the same webDav drive). I changed the authentication and both systems weren't in for booting anymore. Hours of searching how to unfuck this on windows - I ended up reinstalling it because I just couldn't find a solution.
On linux, i found some article quite quickly telling to remove the entry for the webdav thingy from fstab. Booted into a root recovery shell, chrooted to the harddrive, removed the entry in fstab and rebooted. BAM. Everything worked again.

So yeah, that's my view on this, I guess ;P

The trend of referring to staff you just laid off as “alumni” is fucking stupid.

So is emailing and asking said recently laid off staff to join an “alumni committee” that involves, among other things: going to off sites and community events that the company will almost CERTAINLY be using for recruiting photos and “Best place to work” blog posts.

Just send me my final pay and fuck off already.

Merry Christmas devRanters! Because it's Christmas and I'm pretty much home alone all day I want to do two blog posts today/tomorrow.

Going to do a security one which will be about CSF.

Any ideas on what I could do for a privacy one? (the Firefox add-on thing will come along but not yet)

I'd love to hear ideas!

Preface: i'm pretty... definitely wasted. rum is amazing.

anyway, I spent today fighting with ActionCable. but as per usu, here's the rant's backstory:

I spent two or three days fighting with ActionCable a few weeks ago. idr how long because I had a 102*f fever at the time, but I managed to write a chat client frontend in React that hooked up to API Guy's copypasta backend. (He literally just copy/pasted it from a chat app tutorial. gg). My code wasn't great, but it did most of what it needed to do. It set up a websocket, had listeners for the various events, connected to the ActionCable server and channel, and wrote out updates to the DOM as they came in. It worked pretty well.

Back to the present!

I spent today trying to get the rest to work, which basically amounted to just fetching historical messages from the server. Turns out that's actually really hard to do, especially when THE FKING OFFICIAL DOCUMENTATION'S EXAMPLES ARE WRONG! Seriously, that crap has scoping and (coffeescript) syntax errors; it doesn't even run. but I didn't know that until the end, because seriously, who posts broken code on official docs? ugh! I spent five hours torturing my code in an effort to get it to work (plus however many more back when I had a fever), only to discover that the examples themselves are broken. No wonder I never got it working!

So, I rooted around for more tutorials or blogs or anything else with functional sample code. Basically every example out there is the same goddamn chat app tutorial with their own commentary. Remember that copy/paste? yeah, that's the one. Still pissed off about that. Also: that tutorial doesn't fetch history, or do anything other than the most basic functionality that I had already written. Totally useless to me.

After quite a bit of searching, the only semi-decent resource I was able to find was a blog from 2015 that's entirely written in Japanese. No, I can't read more than a handful of words, but I've been using it as a reference because its code is seriously more helpful than what's on official Rails docs. -_-

Still never got it to work, though. but after those five futile hours of fighting with the same crap, I sort of gave up and did something else.

zzz.

Anyway.
The moral of the story is that if you publish broken code examples beacuse you didn't even fking bother to test them first, some extremely pissed off and vindictive and fashionable developer will totally waterboard the hell out of you for the cumulative total of her wasted development time because screw you and your goddamn laziness.

I was asked to help with the website of this one club. Their 'IT head' is a business person. I told them no, but they sent me something anyways.

They sent me a zip file of their code
instead of giving me access to their GitHub repo. I then realized that they were using 3-year-old NodeJS and Express to power their static website and doing blog posts as JavaScript modules.

A second part of their architecture which was related to member sign up was horribly broken and also written in Node. I found out that they hard coded credentials to their Google Apps account, despite having the setup to pass it via environment variables.

And now they are worried that their sign up isn't working. Their developer resigned.

They want me to help them fix it within a very small timeframe. So they can use the code to collect membership fees.

This is what happens when you have business people develop code.

Client: I need a blog with 3 categories.

Designer: cool, let's have every post teaser in the home look diferent depending on the category.

Me (Dev): Ok...

Client: *sees actual design with different looking posts depending on category* I like it! Let's go!

Me: *codes the site*

Client: It's cool but in the home the posts look different... Could we make them look the same?

Me:...

I'm coming off a lengthy staff augmentation assignment awful enough that I feel like I need to be rehabilitated to convince myself that I even want to be a software developer.

They needed someone who does .NET. It turns out what they meant was someone to copy and paste massive amounts of code that their EA calls a "framework." Just copy and paste this entire repo, make a whole ton of tweaks that for whatever reason never make their way back into the "template," and then make a few edits for some specific functionality. And then repeat. And repeat. Over a dozen times.

The code is unbelievable. Everything is stacked into giant classes that inherit from each other. There's no dependency inversion. The classes have default constructors with a comment "for unit testing" and then the "real" code uses a different one.

It's full of projects, classes, and methods with weird names that don't do anything. The class and method names sound like they mean something but don't. So after a dozen times I tried to refactor, and the EA threw a hissy fit. Deleting dead code, reducing three levels of inheritance to a simple class, and renaming stuff to indicate what it does are all violations of "standards." I had to go back to the template and start over.

This guy actually recorded a video of himself giving developers instructions on how to copy and paste his awful code.

Then he randomly invents new "standards." A class that reads messages from a queue and processes them shouldn't process them anymore. It should read them and put them in another queue, and then we add more complication by reading from that queue. The reason? We might want to use the original queue for something else one day. I'm pretty sure rewriting working code to meet requirements no one has is as close as you can get to the opposite of Agile.

I fixed some major bugs during my refactor, and missed one the second time after I started over. So stuff actually broke in production because I took points off the board and "fixed" what worked to add back in dead code, variables that aren't used, etc.

In the process, I asked the EA how he wanted me to do this stuff, because I know that he makes up "standards" on the fly and whatever I do may or may not be what he was imagining. We had a tight deadline and I didn't really have time to guess, read his mind, get it wrong, and start over. So we scheduled an hour for him to show me what he wanted.

He said it would take fifteen minutes. He used the first fifteen insisting that he would not explain what he wanted, and besides he didn't remember how all of the code he wrote worked anyway so I would just have to spend more time studying his masterpiece and stepping through it in the debugger.

Being accountable to my team, I insisted that we needed to spend the scheduled hour on him actually explaining what he wanted. He started yelling and hung up. I had to explain to management that I could figure out how to make his "framework" work, but it would take longer and there was no guarantee that when it was done it would magically converge on whatever he was imagining. We totally blew that deadline.

When the .NET work was done, I got sucked into another part of the same project where they were writing massive 500 line SQL stored procedures that no one could understand. They would write a dozen before sending any to QA, then find out that there was a scenario or two not accounted for, and rewrite them all. And repeat. And repeat. Eventually it consisted of, one again, copying and pasting existing procedures into new ones.

At one point one dev asked me to help him test his procedure. I said sure, tell me the scenarios for which I needed to test. He didn't know. My question was the equivalent of asking, "Tell me what you think your code does," and he couldn't answer it. If the guy who wrote it doesn't know what it does right after he wrote it and you certainly can't tell by reading it, and there's dozens of these procedures, all the same but slightly different, how is anyone ever going to read them in a month or a year? What happens when someone needs to change them? What happens when someone finds another defect, and there are going to be a ton of them?

It's a nightmare. Why interview me with all sorts of questions about my dev skills if the plan is to have me copy and paste stuff and carefully avoid applying anything that I know?

The people are all nice except for their evil XEB (Xenophobe Expert Beginner) EA who has no business writing a line of code, ever, and certainly shouldn't be reviewing it.

I've tried to keep my sanity by answering stackoverflow questions once in a while and sometimes turning evil things I was forced to do into constructive blog posts to which I cannot link to preserve my anonymity. I feel like I've taken a six-month detour from software development to shovel crap. Never again. Lesson learned. Next time they're not interviewing me. I'm interviewing them. I'm a professional.

Disclaimer: Long tale of a tech support job. Also the wk29 story is at the bottom.

One time I was working tech support for a website and email hosting firm that was in town. I was hired and worked as the only tech support person there, so all calls came in through me. This also meant that if I was on a call, and another one came through, they would go straight to voice mail. But I couldn't hang up calls either, so, sometimes someone would take up tons of time and I'd have to help them. I was also the "SEO" and "Social Media Marketing" person, as well; managed peoples' social media campaigns. I have tons of stories from this place but a few in particular stick out to me. No particular order to these, I'm just reminiscing as I write this.

I once had to help a man who couldn't find the start button on his computer. When I eventually guided him to allowing me to remote into his computer via Team Viewer, I found he was using Windows XP. I'm not kidding.

I once had to sit on the phone with a man selling Plexus Easy Weight Loss (snake oil, pyramid scheme, but he was a client) and have him yell at me about not getting him more business, simply because we'd built his website. No, I'D not built his website, but his website was fine and it wasn't our job to get him more business. Oh yeah, this is the same guy who said that he didn't want the social media marketing package because he "had people to hide from." Christ.

We had another client who was a conspiracy theorist and wanted the social media marketing package for his blog, all about United States conspiracies. Real nut case. But the best client I've ever had because sometimes he'd come into the office and take up my time talking at me about how Fukushima was the next 911 and that soon it'll spill into the US water supply and everybody was going to die. Hell, better than being on the phone! Doing his social media was great because he wanted me to post clearly fake news stories to his twitter and facebook for him, and I got to look at and manage all the comments calling him out on his bullshit. It was kinda fun. After all, it wasn't _me_ that believed all this. It felt like I was trolling.

[wk29] I was the social media and support techie, not a salesperson. But sometimes I was put in charge _alone_ in front of clients for status meetings about their social media. This one time we had a client who was a custom fashion-type person. I don't really remember. But I was told directly to make them a _new_ facebook page and post to it every day with their hot new deals and stuff. MONTHS pass since I do that and they come in for a face-to-face meeting. Boss is out doing... boss things and that means I have to sit in with her, and for some fucking reason she brought her boyfriend AND HER DAD. Who were both clearly very very angry with me, the company, and probably life. They didn't ever say anything at first, they didn't greet me, they were both just there like British royal guards. It was weird as fuck. I start showing them the page, the progress on their likes goals, etc etc. Marketing shit. They say, "huh, we didn't see any of these posts at home." Turns out they already had a Facebook page, I was working on a completely seperate one, and then the boyfriend finally chimes in with the biggest fucking scowl, "what are you going to do about this?" He was sort of justified, considering this was a payed and semi-expensive service we offered, but holy shit the amount of fire in all three of them. Anyway, it came down to me figuring out how to merge facebook pages, but they eventually left as clients. Is this my fuck up? Is it my company's? Is it theirs? I don't know but that was probably the most awkward meeting ever. Don't know if it comes across through text but the anxiety was pretty real. Fuck.

tl;dr Tech support jobs are a really fun and exciting entry level position I recommend everybody apply for if they're starting out in the tech world! You'll meet tons of cool people and every day is like a new adventure.

Finally got a job I see myself staying in more than 2 years :) A boss that give us time to write / read blog posts.
Flexible work life.
Working with all the new stuff like dotnet core, docker :)

TL;DR: a dude thinks good graphics make a game good.

so every day when the school ends, me, a dude and another girl walk home. as expected we have lots of time to talk about anything. I wanted that day to tell that dude about what I am going to buy on steam summer sales with just 15$.

me: I am going for this summer to play lots of games so I saved some money for this summer sale. do you want to hear what awesome games I am about to buy with just 15$?
dude: yeah, sure thing.

he wasn't expecting much

M: this summer I am going to buy 5 games and maybe keep more for some others. they are so awesome!
D: ok, let's hear those 'awesome' games!
M: the first game is devil daggers, maybe you don't kno...
D: of course I do. is that game
M: I want to get that game just to improve my aim, but maybe I will have some fun.
D: yeah yeah, I know that game
M: *poker face*

I KNEW he doesn't know this game and anything about pc games because of the followings...

M: ok then... I also want to get Half-Life 2 : Episode 1 & 2. they have pretty rich story and I already have both Half-Lives.
D: holy shit but the graphics... ok, one more 'awesome' game of yours.
M: there are 2 episodes, 2 separate games. I really don't care about the graphics, I love the story.
D: continue with your 'awesom' games...

that dude didn't even knew about half-life and said that game is bad.

M: another game I want to get is Battlefront 2, the one from 2005 and...
D: 2005!?
M: yeah, the new one sucks, and the gameplay in the original is way better and...
D: *starts laughing* 2005!? I thought you were getting the new one. I imagine the graphics being like this car. *points to a fucking car, yeah that kind of comparasion, I know*

after this I was so fucking pissed off. he doesn't even know about some cult classics that are meant to be played. he doesn't even have a pc nor console and he is stating his opinion on fine air for fucks sake!

M: ok, what about getting the facts and then make an opinon.
D: yeah yeah *making fun of me at that point*

I didn't tell him that I wanted to buy the binding of isaac, cause it was enough for me. I told him to watch some reviews on these games and blog posts about them and I am sure tomorrow he will say that he 'wathced' the reviews and that those games are garbage. it's his style to underestimate things. I fucking hate him, not becuase of the games, but because he underestimates everything that is not on his list of 'good games'. that list consists of new games with great graphics(3D only).

sorry if I exaggerate saying that those games are cult classics but I really look forward into buying them.

if you have another indie game to run on this potato machine(2gb ram, pentium dual-core 2.1ghz, gtx 525m) that I should or at least try comment, I am open to suggestions!

Thought to start a programming blog.
Registered domain and hosting.
Created some posts.
Didn't get new idea/content to post.
Disconnected domain from hosting out of shame.

NO. NO. A THOUSAND TIMES: NO.

I clicked on this out of genuine curiosity to see if someone was finally trying to discourage people from annoying the shit out of website visitors. A summary of the suggestions in their article as to what to use popups for:

1. Announce new products/services, features, policy updates, new blog posts
2. Promote your sales or coupons (including countdowns)
3. Encourage people to input their e-mail address / subscribe, perhaps also offering some vague thing they will get as a reward for doing so
4. Contact forms (e.g. support etc.)
5. Prompt visitors to confirm their age before showing content
6. Login/register forms
7. Display social media "share" buttons when a visitor has scrolled a certain way through the page content.
8. Display cookie consent prompt.
9. Help guide visitors to the part of the website they want to go to.

Of these: 1, 2, 3, and 7 need to die for sure. If a website does any of these things I'm inclined to immediately leave and never return. 8 is a little annoying but seems a necessity.

Someone even replied to the Tweet saying that popups are annoying, the company responded with "let's change that!"

Blank portions of the screenshot are to avoid promoting the company unintentionally as a result of the rant ;)

You know you've been on devRant too long when you double tap the features on their blog posts 😂

I like js and node in general.
But there's this thing I hate about NodeJs...

The blogs. The goddamn blogs.

Every goddamn blog post. Is code. Dozens of lines of code.

Oh, so you want X feature? Just copy paste this shit.

I swear to god, blog posts are the source versioning system to these people.

What they should instead is
a) Create a package.
b) Add tests to it.
c) Present the package to the reader with some minimal code.

But I'm a getting a huge impression that node blog writers want you to copy the code in their post, paste it in your project, and be happy with it.

Now, I'm not assuming that every person posting in medium.com is a software engineer (and by engineer I mean an engineer, not some fuckwad who begs for github stars on dev communities).

The problem to me is that they fucking SATURATE the goddamn search results.

The same goes for finding an npm package for your need, because there are so many low quality packages it's saturated too, you have too plow this stinking pile of projects that have very low quality,
and there's not a really good npm finder out there. Half of them are dead, some look and load like shit, and npm search has a low barrier for good code.

Me on rails, OTOH "ok, I need this thing", I google that and I swear to [-∞,+∞] I find GOOD packages, well designed, no cookie cutter bullshit, no obscure marketing shit on the README.md, it is very clear what this shit does, and the api is designed for HUMANS.
and it actually takes very little time to know if there's no such package.

I don't have to read dozens of fucking my-fuck-blog.io (jesus christ, the io domain has become such a fucking joke, it got fucking abused to death, there are some cool sites out there using it, but my god, James H. Marketing likes to just absorb everything he can, and the internet was not going to be a fucking exception)

does all of this make sense?

These mfers writing blog posts about basic shit are always the ones to drop gifs of people having their mind blown.

How fucking simple can you get?

Qt vs HTML5 everywhere, but not a single line of code in these blog posts about it.

Good job pseudo-tech-bloggers.🙄

And that comparsion. Qt vs Angular. What the fuck. Nobody uses fucken Angular.

Receive several documents of blog posts from a client, each one titled "Blog $n - $category - $title." Cool, the client gave them to me in order and I just have to plug them in.

Enter blogs on site starting with Blog 1.

Client sees the blogs on the site and loses their shit. "I specifically numbered the blogs so you knew what order to put them in! How hard is it to put them in numerical order? Blog 1 is the newest blog and should be first on the page."

The site displays the newest post first, but because any normal person would have named the oldest blog "blog 1" and counted up from there the blogs are in the reverse order the client expected.

What the hell kind of dense motherfucker numbers their blog files in a manner which requires them to rename every file each time they write a new blog post?

This is the first time where people stumbled upon my blog posts on each day of A WHOLE WEEK! Amazing 🥳

"Well, I used Jekyll, but then switched to Hugo - but then that wasn't cool anymore so, I went with Nuxt, but switched to React, then Gatsby, then Next - and Now I just redid it in 11nty."

"So, did you ever write any blog posts? I thought it was a blog? The only thing you've done for the past 3 years is to update your basic website? That really could have just been HTML?"

(I'm not sure we can trust this guy to work on a legacy project...)

I finally finished my Bachelors Degree that I was studying for while working 40-60h a week with 2 children.
During this whole time (3.5 years) I was totally into learning everything. Not just for my studies but I read many books about programming and architecture read thousands of blog posts and loved it to be a software developer.

And now suddenly I lost every interest in reading even one tiny post.
Software Development got boring and I just don't care about it anymore.

Probably just a down period, but who knows.

At least I finally can build my unfinished guitars that had to wait for so long. working on them makes me really feel happy 😊

I'm tired of meth. I mean math. MATH.
I'm sick and tired of everything.

"First!" numerous blog comments shout to no-one, from the colorful abyss of the internet.

And for me, this is a first. But lets rewind.

It's 2 AM, about a month ago, spring in Akron Ohio. Someone reading this is no doubt shocked "You just revealed where you live, ON THE INTERNET! The weirdos will find you." Anyway, it's a dark and stormy night, as the cliche goes. Like most people up after midnight, I'm browsing facebook posts and useless productivity sites. (lifehacker)
I yearn for something more out of life, somewhere deep down inside..maybe in my colon?

All the articles are saying "10 tips to supercharge your life", "how to discover your life purpose in three easy steps", mixed with an ad about ron jeremys one secret tip to grow a massive cock, and exhortations to buy such-and-such's "new ebook!"
I am not moved by any of this.

Scrolling, and tabbing, and intermittently dropping f-bombs because of js ads locking up my browser, I stop and lean back. In the blue afterglow of my shitty compaqs screen, a thought appears, like a cheesy genie, popping out of a brass toilet. "Start a blog! A youtube channel! A podcast" the ad proclaims. "Yes. Thats what I have to do" I whispered (I'm embarrassed to admit I really did say this).

Then I Control+W'd out of it, and flopped onto my mattress. This was the wasteland of my life. I couldn't help but think The whole internet was like some seedy back alley 2.0, where boxcar willie with his train of needle marks had been replaced by more upstart, greasy-haired gurus. Each peddling 'ebooks' of 'advice', stuffed in between ads to buy 'this one hot stock you have to own' and porn. And that alley was really the 'blogosphere' and 'youtubers'. As I drifted off, the last thought was 'We're all just bottom feeders,leeching and whoring on the attention of faceless anonymous users, hoping for another quick fix.'

I fell asleep, these racing thoughts fading into sweet oblivion, but never too far away.

Welcome to My Back Alley

That title is only twice as dirty, and half as thought-out as I planned. As you imagine, the lure of being the electronic equivalent of a conman never quite faded. And the more I read, the stronger the message "Start a youtube channel!" grew. As if everyone and their grandmother having a youtube channel would somehow make the world right, cure cancer, and save kittens from animal shelter gas chambers. Everyones an expert, everyones an agent of change. Maximizing productivity, Evangelizing Technology, ninjas collaborating to socialfy your community diversification benchmark for target traffic
through user-engagement and authentic grass-roots, blah, blah, blah, blah, money. Thrusting, moaning, screaming. Money. Pumping at the center of it all.

Wake up and smell the bullshit.

This blog is not a blog. This blog is the anti-blog, and we are the anti-streamers. 'We' (read "I") resist your bullshit lingo bingo, call out the Truth (Tm) and refuse to be satisfied with any standards of decency, journalistic integrity, or common sense.

Every blog, every channel, every podcast is Starbucks And I'm tyler durden, pissing in your coffee, and calling it a 'latte'.

Freaks, and anarchists, laymen and losers. If you feel as I do, then this is the place for you. Welcome to devrant.

My blog has a massive build up of posts that have a start but not released yet. It's like a guilt list every time I log in. Anyone else go through this?

Given how precise developers have to be with their code to get it to run, you'd think they'd be better spellers when they write blog posts. 🤔

Learnt C++ from Bucky, New Boston as my first.

Then went crazy afterwards on YouTube blog posts and Books

If there's Twitter for short blog posts, and Dwitter for short JavaScript visualizations, we should invent Zwitter for people that say that nobody uses Linux. >:D

!dev

Decided to spend more time on LinkedIn to familiarise myself and start looking for potential employment opportunities.

For past month or so, I've seen few decent opportunities, which is a nice start. However, for every decent post, I've come across:

- About a hundred of posts by self-proclaimed crypto experts who spout absolute gibberish and somehow get thousands of likes. 5 min google search and absolute minimum knowledge of economic theory discards 99% of their claims and statements
- Handful of idiotic "career advice" blog posts
- Numerous posts, both bashing and helplessly supporting shitty recruiter practices
- more crypto nonsense
- People jerking themselves off for running a profitable business (company launched a 1-5months ago)

Really starting to hate the platform, seems like all the integrity it had before becoming fully mainstream, has gone down the drain and it's become a straight up corporate circle jerk

Any good resource for dev related news/blog posts?
It would be nice if you can filter dor specific languages or topics.

I got good by trial and error, documentation and blog posts.
Anyone resembling my experience?

half of these YC companies don't even show up on the first page of google when you search them by name...

my company & all my products do, with a _very_ basic set of meta tags and a few blog posts 🤷‍♂️

it's officially a 🤡's world, and we're just living it in

Why the fuck is gradle so horrible.

I literally have no idea why anyone would ever use this thing (other than being forced too because somehow the rest of the world is using it).

Every plugin has an arbitrary DSL that you have to magically know by piecing together enough snippets. At that point, no one is actually intuiting anything based on the beauty of the DSL, every build is a frankenstein of different snippets that were pasted from different versions of gradle blog posts or SO posts.

And if you do get it o work then the DSL changes, or it isn't compatible with another plugin.

I just want to write a fucking integration test in Kotlin. Can I just add an `integrationTest` task in `tasks` right next to `tasks.test`? No, obviously it goes in the `kotlin jvm() compilations` section, DUH.

The first thing anyone in the universe should have asked is "how is this better than literally hand writing a makefile"? At least then I would be able to see the commands that it ran.

Now I'm googling how to make the new jvm-test-suite plugin work when you're using the Kotlin plugin but every single result on Google for `jvm-test-suite kotlin` just returns the docs for jvm-test-suite (whose snippets obviously didn't work in my project) because those doc pages have "Kotlin" written above each of the gradle snippets.

Please just end this.

Oh and dev rant sucks too. It thinks anything separated by dots in a url.

I've just started writing tech blog posts this weekend. Two posts baked by today, another one should be completed by tomorow eod :)

oh man... Apparently I like blogging :)

I was away for a few months and this place has turned from a witty little corner I loved to a whole bunch of blog posts of rambling lunatics!

For some reason I find reading tech books a repelling activity. I'd rather spend longer hours googling SO issues, GH/GL tickets, reading blogs than reading a well recommended book on the topic.

But then again.. What is the difference between a series of blog posts and a book...? Not much of it. At least I cannot come up with how blog posts would be superior to a structured and many times reviewed book :) Many posts are lame or just skim through the topic. The same holds true with books too. So maybe it's worth getting that 200pages thin book instead..

Good people of devRant, hear me! Today is a proud day, a day of happiness, peace, and prosperity!

Theatrical opening lines aside, I need your help. I have finally completed the setup for one of my long ongoing projects and need some input from experienced developers of any kind. I've recently started a blog focused around building a community for people who want to learn more about all engineering disciplines or want to see if they would like being an engineer. The majority of the content will be posts about various topics that relate to either specific disciplines or engineering as a whole, and cool projects you can do to work out what is fun to you.

HackTheWorld.io is the URL and I'd welcome any feedback you can give, from design to development. I used the hexo framework, which is a static html blog generator that I then upload to a web host via FTP. Let me know what you think and if you have any ideas form posts on the site, feel free to leave those as well. I've got a few I'm writing now that will hopefully help some people out there.

I have another issue 😬 with one of my Ubuntu laptops. The wifi chip somehow has connection issues. It nearly has no signal. I have to be beside the router to get a connection.

I changed the chip to a new Qualcomm Atheros chip already, but there was no change. I tried a few "speed up your WiFi connection" blog posts. But that also changed nothing.

Do you guys have any advice? :-\

Exercise and sports are good ways of relax and get some discipline. Writting, either blog posts or simply for yourself improves your communication skills. On the communication side, I've specially noticed that I improved by doing talks (dev and no-dev) even if it wasn't for and audiance of more than 30. Games also helped me with problem solving and management. There's a lot a stuff 😅

It’s like my boss is trying to purposely make my life difficult.

He forces me to make two barely started and very complex websites live months early and then spends the rest of the day complaining that things don’t work properly yet.

What the actual fuck, what do you expect?!

But no, people are desperate to read your poorly formatted blog posts about how amazing Gary V is.

Answering on Stack Overflow and writing blog posts in free time, teaching courses and working on new projects in work time. I am forced to keep my theoretical knowledge fresh, and every day I try to answer a new kind of problem on stack. I didn't know the answer to a lot of my SO answers, I test and find out my answers. It's mutually beneficial.

It's important to have a little fun with what you do. You can work on and on like it's a chore and get along with it just fine, but right below the surface of the tools you use lies something truly interesting. Reading code, documentation, blog posts, what have you, all of it is just as helpful in learning as writing code.

And also, be kind. We all write crap code from time to time. As a beginner, I know I do. It's important to take it all as a learning experience.

Personal favourite quote that puts it very well: 'I guess you could call it a “ failure,” but I prefer the term “learning experience".'

I can't count how many times I've hated other people for writing MY blog posts.

If you come up with something you think is clever, write a short post about it, and don't hate yourself for not getting feedback.

Fully upgraded wordpress for my blog (just not interested writing my own ) with security patches and got hacked... all index files in first level directories replaced. Will find the time to make my own and migrate all posts because "wordpress is awesome"

Best: Completing the first year of my professional career doing what I like and learning from my team mates, which have been awesome. Wrote a couple of blog posts, they were my first, that helped me learn more and improve my communication.

Worst: On the last months of the year some work just got too repetitive which I think will lead me to some stagnation.

As a senior developer with a couple of years under the belt, do you think having an active Instagram, YouTube and Facebook account is necessary? Does It help professionally at all? or am I just wasting time that I can use elsewhere?
I am thinking about launching my own SaaS in the future. But as a developer, does social media presence impact in any significant way in your professional life?

I am kinda getting addicted to posting setup videos and reels on Instagram. I don't have an end goal in mind. I just find it a way to express myself. But sometimes even I get cringe seeing my own posts. I was thinking about ditching IG and Facebook and twitter and go back to writing blog posts or something.

I listen to podcast during commute to work. Read blog posts. Sometimes i bought courses, only If something i really want to learn and if get a good discount on udemy (10-15$).
Also keep track of conferences and watch the videos on youtube.

If you have a blog, How do you decide what to write and publish on it? And, How do I motivate myself to write posts?

Context: I created my blog/website on 29 September 2017. I had a few ideas on writing blog posts(Condition variables in Go, Serverless related stuff and a whole bunch of posts related to wireguard) but every time I have tried write a post, I learn there is someone else who has already written a post on it and probably better than what I could have done, So what is really the point of writing it? And, I feel very insecure about writing posts, I feel like, If I do write a post, every one will know, I don't know anything about **anything**. :( I know about imposter syndrome, But I don't think I have that. I work with a lot of realllly smart people and I don't know as much as them. So, I am actually an imposter.

edit: I am usually active on Telegram, IRC and I try to help out people. It's easier for me to help people in communities like that but doing the same thing with a blog makes me very uncomfortable.

I wish impostor syndrome wouldn't be a thing. After reading some blog posts I feel like I lucked out and I should just quit this and become a delivery man or something.

Anyone know of any companies/agencies that are looking for freelance technical writers, for blog posts and such?

Mainly within the areas of DevOps, CI/CD, Kubernetes, bash etc.

Quora seems to be using version control to keep track of changes to user content like question, answers, blog posts etc. Thats so frigging cool !

So I created simple blog for family member. She only writes three posts within a six month time frame, and then this morning she sends me an email asking for some changes. In it says if it's to time consuming that she can create a blogspot...

Old man wants to update site/blog. What can I set up that would be (very) easy for him to use (add posts). Currently on WordPress and it's a nightmare!

What are some books that are a must read or blog posts about OOP and concepts of programming? Should I also pick up some CS books too? I want to learn more to be able to pick up different languages better, I guess understanding the principles of programming would help me achieve that? Thanks in advance!

VS2017 fast load, breaks our project in 7 different ways AND compiles much much slower. Which idiot gave the green light for public release especially with multiple ms blog posts promoting it

I'm planning to do an app with some personal data for a small community (Verein). I want to save the data somehow encrypted so not all people can just access them. There will be just 4 persons who need to access this data. I'm think about PGP/GPG, with encrypting the data for these 4 people with their different keys, but I am not sure about that. So every person would have its own keypair. This is just the first idea. So if you have any hints/links on some ideas/blog posts how to do this or do it another way, I'd be glad about a comment. Thanks ;)

Tech stack: I'm planning to create a Webapp, using Python and Flask...

Been trying to learn component-oriented programming to develop front ends for a year but still can't get beyond a simple app or game. Specifically, I have been learning Vue on YouTube, Vue Mastery, and multiple other blog posts.

Any recommendations or maybe new methods of learning?

Do you ever feel like you're not deserving of any kind of following on social media? I have a very small following and I don't know why. I did publish some open source software and wrote a few blog posts but I don't think I should be followed or have followers. I keep thinking I should remove the followers and hide myself or make my accounts private.