I tutor people who want to program, I don't ask anything for it, money wise, if they use my house as a learning space I may ask them to bring cookies or a pizza or something but on the whole I do it to help others learn who want to.

Now this in of itself is perfectly fine, I don't get financially screwed over or anything, but...

Fuck me if some students are horrendous!

To the best of my knowledge I've agreed to work with and help seven individuals, four female three male.

One male student never once began the study work and just repeatedly offered excuses and wanted to talk to me about how he'd screwed his life up. I mean that's unfortunate, but I'm not a people person, I don't really feel emotionally engaged with a relative stranger who quite openly admits they got addicted to porn and wasted two years furiously masturbating. Which is WAY more than I needed to know and made me more than a little uncomfortable. Ultimately lack of actually even starting the basic exercises I blocked him and stopped wasting my time.

The second dude I spoke to for exactly 48 hours before he wanted to smash my face in. Now, he was Indian (the geographical India not native American) and this is important, because he was a friend of a friend and I agreed to tutor however he was more interested in telling me how the Brits owed India reparations, which, being Scottish, I felt if anyone was owed reparations first, it's us, which he didn't take kindly too (something about the phrase "we've been fucked, longer and harder than you ever were and we don't demand reparations" didn't endear me any).

But again likewise, he wanted to talk about politics and proving he was a someone "I've been threatened in very real world ways, by some really bad people" didn't impress me, and I demonstrated my disinterest with "and I was set on fire once cos the college kids didn't like me".

He wouldn't practice, was constantly interested in bigging himself up, he was aggressive, confrontational and condescending, so I told him he was a dick, I wasn't interested in helping him and he can help himself. Last I heard he wasn't in the country anymore.

The third guy... Absolute waste of time... We were in the same computer science college class, I went to university and did more, he dossed around and a few years later went into design and found he wanted to program and got in touch. He completes the code schools courses and understandably doesn't quite know what to do next, so he asks a few questions and declares he wants to learn full stack web development. Quickly. I say it isn't easy especially if it's your first real project but if one is determined, it isn't impossible.

This guy was 30 and wanted to retire at 35 and so time was of the essence. I'm up for the challenge, and so because he only knows JavaScript (including prototypes, callbacks and events) I tell him about nodejs and explain that it's a little more tricky but it does mean he can learn all the basis without learning another language.

About six months of sporadic development where I send him exercises and quizzes to try, more often than not he'd answer with "I don't know" after me repeatedly saying "if you don't know, type the program out and study what it does then try to see why!".

The excuses became predicable, couldn't study, playing soccer, couldn't study watching bake off, couldn't study, couldn't study.

Eventually he buys a book on the mean stack and I agree to go through it chapter by chapter with him, and on one particular chapter where I'm trying to help him, he keeps interrupting with "so could I apply for this job?" "What about this job?" And it's getting frustrating cos I'm trying to hold my code and his in my head and come up with a real world analogy to explain a concept and he finally interrupts with "would your company take me on?"

I'm done.

"Do you want the honest unabridged truth?"

"Yes, I'd really like to know what I need to do!"

"You are learning JavaScript, and trying to also learn computer science techniques and terms all at the same time. Frankly, to the industry, you know nothing. A C developer with a PHD was interviewed and upon leaving the office was made a laughing stock of because he seemed to not know the difference between pass by value and pass by reference. You'd be laughed right out the building because as of right now, you know nothing. You don't. Now how you respond to this critique is your choice, you can either admit what I'm saying is true and put some fucking effort into studying cos I'm putting more effort into teaching than you are studying, or you can take what I'm saying as a full on attack, give up and think of me as the bad guy. Your choice, if you are ready to really study, you can text me in the morning for now I'm going to bed."

The next day I got a text "I was thinking about what you said and... I think I'm not going to bother with this full stack stuff it's just too hard, thought you should know."

!rant

Programming is a huge blessing i believe we all should be thankful to. For me, it literally turned my life around.

11 months ago i was fighting a losing battle with depression, and contemplated suicide constantly. I would use a self remedy of smoking weed and sleeping all day long. I was depressed because i felt my life had no real value. I was doing nothing, and its kind of an infinite loop.

You don't do anything, so you feel bad, so you don't do anything, and so on.

That was until i finally took the step that changed my life. I searched and wanted to learn something. I always liked web pages so i thought id get into web development.

Did some research, found out that the fastest way to go was to learn ruby on rails. I followed a tutorial i found online, and literally pushed myself through it. There were times when there where things i didnt understand, and when it was really bad, but i pushed myself through it and i finished the tutorial.

Just finishing the tutorial and learning something new helped me alot. I had already quit smoking and was feeling way better, but after a while i started feeling bad again since i wasnt doing anything after i had finished learning, so i started working on a personal project, creating it from scratch, and just working on it day and night. I worked 14 hours a day, never really leaving my room ( this was during summer vacation ) for a month.

There were many things i didnt understand, but i never gave up and always searched for the solution and read about it until i understood it better. Looking back, there were things i knew could have been done in a better way, but as a first project, im proud of myself, not because it rocks, but because i did not give up.

In the process of starting a new life, i was really lonely. I cut all ties with everyone i knew, since they were all toxic, all i had in my life was ruby on rails and my web application. I wanted to launch it but couldn't due to personal reasons.

Not being able to launch and see something live, something that you worked so hard on, that you put so much effort into, that was devastating to me. I felt as if all my efforts had gone to waste.

And here is what i love most about programming, NOTHING EVER GOES TO WASTE. All that effort you spent on something ? All these all nighters you pulled ? All that frustration from that bug ? It will pay off later. It always does somehow. You get more knowledge and become a better programmer, and sometimes it even gives way to new opportunities and chances you never even expected.

I included my web application in my resume and it helped land me a job as a junior developer in a really nice company. A job that i wouldn't even have dreamed of several months earlier.

Programming and creating something new and learning something new everyday, creating something that people use, that someone else will benefit from and be grateful for, i think we should never take that for granted !

Tl;dr : learning how to code and web development saved my life

Watching the Dutch government trying to get through the public procurement process for a "corona app" is equal parts hilarious and terrifying.

7 large IT firms screaming that they're going to make the perfect app.

Presentations with happy guitar strumming advertisement videos about how everyone will feel healthy, picnicking on green sunny meadows with laughing families, if only their app is installed on every citizen's phone.

Luckily, also plenty of security and privacy experts completely body-bagging these firms.

"It will connect people to fight this disease together" -- "BUT HOW" -- "The magic of Bluetooth. And maybe... machine learning. Oh! And blockchain!" -- "BUT HOW" -- "Shut up give us money, we promise, our app is going to cure the planet"

You got salesmen, promising their app will be ready in 2 weeks, although they can't even show any screenshots yet.

You got politicians mispronouncing technical terminology, trying hard to look as informed as possible.

You got TV presenters polling population support for "The App" by interviewing the most digitally oblivious people.

One of the app development firms (using some blockchain-based crap) promised transparency about their source code for auditing.... so they committed their source, including a backup file from one of their other apps, containing 200 emails/passwords to Github.

It's kind of entertaining... in the same way as a surgery documentary about the removal of glass shards from a sexually adventurous guy's butthole.

Imma keep watching out of morbid fascination.... from a very safe distance, far away from the blood and shit that's splattering against the walls.

And my phone -- keep your filthy infected bytes away from my sweet baby.

I'll stick with social distancing, regular hand washing, working from home and limited supermarket trips, thank you very much.

So there it fucking goes.

Hi. I'm WillibertXXIV.
I'm not a programmer by trade; I have a more than fulltime job as a cook. As for the last year, I spent pretty much all my free time, overlapping my sleep time, to learn how to code.

All that so I can create a game that I started working on the same day I started my learning process. So far it's shit and it's going to stay that way for a long time. Only I can say this. It's my baby. It's fucking ugly and shit but it's mine.

Yesterday I broke it. I broke my baby. I don't know how it fucking happe. When I went to sleep I had a steady 175fps, nice realtime lightning and player / enemy that flowed like running water. I worked really hard to make that happened. Profiling, writing better code, profiling, etc. It's still not good, it's less shit.

I woke up, beautiful day. Not too warm, not too cold, that sweet spot right in the middle. Girlfriend already made the coffee. Perfect. Woke up, sat down to start my morning time work before going to my realjob and

BAM

Everything is shit, 20fps max. That one thing, gfx.waitforpresent, showing up in the profiler eating everything as the game run. Movements are now of stroboscopic nature. Light is still ok but what good does it do now fucking piece of shit. I'm not qualified enough for this shit.

Fuck,
Fuck this,
Fuck this shit,
Fuck this shit i'm out of here.

Fuck code.org. Fuck code. Not code code, but "code" (the word "code"). I hate it. At least for teaching. Devs can use it as much as they want, they know what it means and know you can't hack facebook with 10 seconds of furiously typing "code" into a terminal. What the fuck are you thinking when you want me to hack facebook? No, when I program, it's not opening terminal, changing to green text and typing "hack <insert website name here, if none is given, this will result to facebook.com>" Can you just shut the fuck up about how you think that because you can change the font in google fucking docs you have the right to tell me what code can and can't do? No, fuck you. Now to my main point, fuck "code" (the string). It's an overused word, and it's nothing but a buzzword (to non devs, you guys know what you're talking about. how many times have you seen someone think they are a genius when they here the word "code"?) People who don't know shit don't call themselves programmers or devs, they call themselves coders. Why? It fucking sounds cool, and I won't deny that, but the way it's talked about in movies, by people, (fucking) code.org, etc, just makes people too much of a bitch for me to handle. I want everyone reading this rant who has friends who respect the fact that YOU know code (I truly believe everyone on devRant does), how it works, and it's/your limitations, AND that it takes hard work and effort, to thank god right now. If you're stuck with some people like me, I feel you. Never say "code" near them again. Say "program." I really hate people who think they know what an HTML tag is and go around calling themselves coders. Now onto my main point, code.org. FUCK IT. CAN YOU STOP RUINING MY FUCKING AP CS CLASS. NO CODE.ORG, I DON'T NEED TO WATCH YOUR TEN GODDAMN VIDEOS ON HOW TECHNOLOGY IS IMPORTANT, <sarcasm>I'VE BEEN LIVING UNDER A ROCK FOR THIRTY YEARS</sarcasm>. DO I REALLY NEED ANOTHER COPY OF SCRATCH? WAIT, NO, SCRATCH WAS BETTER. YOU HAD FUCKING MICROSOFT, GOOGLE, AND OTHER TECHNOLOGICAL GIANTS AND YOU FUCKED UP SO BAD YOU MADE IT WORSE THAT SCRATCH. JUST LETMECODE (yes I said that) AND STOP TALKING ABOUT HOW SOME IRRELEVANT ROBOT ARM DEVELOPED BY MIT IS USING AI AND MACHINE LEARNING TO MAKE SOME ROBOT EVOLVE?! IF YOU SPEND ONE MORE SECOND SAYING "INNOVATION" I'LL SHOVE THAT PRINT STATEMENT YOU HAVE A SYNTAX ERROR UP YOUR ASS. DON'T GET ME FUCKING STARTED ON HOW ITS IMPOSSIBLE TO DO ANYTHING FOR YOURSELF WHEN YOUR GETTING ALL THE ANSWERS WITHOUT DOING ANY WORK AND THE FACT THAT JAVASCRIPT IS YOUR FUCKING LANGUAGE. <sarcasm>GREAT IDEA, LETS GET THESE NEW PROGRAMMERS INTO A PROFESSIONAL ENVOIRMENT BY ADDING A DRAG AND DROP CODE (obviously we can say it) EDITOR</sarcasm> MAYBE IF YOU GOT THIS SHIT UP YOUR ASS AND TO YOUR BRAIN YOU'D ACTUALLY GET TO PRPGRAMMING IN YOUR ADVANCED AP COURSE. ITS CALLED FUCKING CODE.ORG FOR A REASON

Hesitated for a while before posting this, as I don't like to whine in public but this should be therapeutical

Beware, it's a #longread

Years ago, I thought about how cool it'd be to have conversation-based interactive fiction on my phone. I remember showing early prototypes to my ex in 2012. It took me over 2 years to build up the courage to make it my priority and to take time off. FictionBurgers.com was born.

A few weeks in, a friend of mine forwarded me a link to Lifeline. I was devastated. I literally spent 2 days cursing my past self for not making a move sooner.

I soldiered on, worked 7 months straight on it. Now the tech is 90-95% finished, content is maybe 60% finished and I just... gave up. Every other week now, similar projects are popping up. I'm under-staffed and under-financed compared to them. Beyond the entertainment space, "conversation-based" is hot stuff in 2016, and I still can't seem to know what to do with what I have.

I feel like I had this fantastic opportunity and squandered it, which makes me miserable.

Anyway, just so you get some cheese with my whine, here are a few lessons I learned the hard way:

Lesson #1 : Don't go it alone. I thought I could hack it, and for over 7 months, I did. But sooner or later, shit gets to you, it's just human. That's when you need someone; just so that their highs compensate your lows and vice versa. Most of the actual writing was done by a freelancer (and he did AMAZING WORK, especially considering that I couldn't pay him much) but it's not the same as a partner, who's invested same as you.

Lesson #1.5 : Complementary skills. Just like my fiction project failed because I was missing a writer partner, my fallback plan of getting into conversational tech hit the skids for lack of a bizdev partner. It's great to stick among devs when ranting, but you need to mingle with a variety of people. Some of them are actually ok, y'know :)

Lesson #2 : Lean Startup, MVP. Google those terms if you're not familiar with them. My mistake here (after MVPing the shit out of the tech) was to let my content goal run amok : what made my app superior to the competition (or so I reasoned) was that it would allow for conversations with multiple characters! So I started plotting a story... with 9 characters. Not 2 or 3. NINE FREAKING CHARACTERS! Branching conversations with 9 characters is the stuff of nightmare -- and is the main reason I gave up.

Lesson #3 : Know your reasons. I wasted some much time early on, zig-zaging between objectives:
"I'm just indulging myself"
"No, I really want it to be a project that pays off"
"Nah, it's just a learning opportunity"
"Damn, why is it bothering me so much that someone else is doing the same thing ?"
"Doesn't matter, I just mine finished"
"What a waste of time !!"
etc etc
And it's still a problem now that I'm trying to figure out what to do!

So anyway, that's my story, thanks for readin'
Check out chatty.im/player/sugar-wars if you want to test the most advance version.

Also, I've also tagged this #startupfail, if any of you fine people want to share the lessons you've dearly paid to learn!

TL;DR: I dont work in IT, but I code at work, and the non-IT higher-ups lack of knowledge shows brutally.

So I work in aviation, not IT. Through coincidences, I was tasked to work on our flight plan distribution logic years ago, which was then written in BRL (Business Rule Language). In lockdown 2020, I finally started to learn "real" programming with Python, but soon shifted to Java. Which was good, since all of a sudden a few months ago the company ditched BRL and the godawful IBM ODM IDE for... Java and IntelliJ. Nice. BUT my teammates have zero clue about Java and no real inclination to learn it by themselves. So I have been appointed their mentor, despite me stating Im still a beginner myself. Its somewhat doable, I get the hard problems, they do basic maintenace, basically renaming variables and stuff. One of my yearly goals is to make sure a completely new guy is able to do everything I do by september. It took a LOT to talk them out of it.

In my last yearly review I got some flak for not "selling" myself to other teams enough, whatever that means. So, as a learning project, I designed a new intranet page for our department in Javascript. Its loved by all. It has links to all the stuff we need woth a nice interface and built in tools to make work easier and more efficient. I did it on my own, in my spare time, simply because I was fed up with the old crap and it was an enormously good learning opportunity. Now they want to give some other guy the responsibility over that page/tool because apparently it is "not in my process team description". They even planned a day for me and him so he can "learn Javascript then". Suuure...

I also did a digital checklist tool as a webapp. All this runs from a local folder, no server at all because reasons. I made it work. Now they want it integrated into some other tool some other guy made. He wrote his tool in PHP entirely so merging the two will take considerable time. Which I told them multiple times. No, it does not take about two hours.

Sometimes, comrades, sometimes....
Im still grateful for the opportunity to code at work but the lack of knowledge really REALLY shows. My goal now is to talk management into paying for a Java course for me (they are very expensive here). That way, they get a better employee and I get more knowledge and an actual certificate thats worth something. Usually in this company, this has higher chances of success than straight up asking for more money.

Sorry for the long story, but it felt good just typing it all out, even if nobody reads this.

Story of every failing tech startup (from personal experience, but a bit exaggerated):

Step 1: Come up with AMAZING idea that blows your mind!

Step 2: Run to investors to do presentation, continue to constantly repeat CLOUD, CLOUD, AI, CLOUD, MACHINE-LEARNING, MUCH WOW, MORE AI until investors are confused but mesmerized as fuck and decide to give you a shit ton of money.

Step 3: Hire all the developers you can find, a JAVA dev, a Python dev, a PHP dev, a Ruby dev, and ask them to get along with each other! I mean hey, they're adults right, they'll figure it out.

Step 4: Ask devs to launch the app, meanwhile, throw a LAUCH PARTY! HELLS YEA WE'RE ABOUT TO BE RICH BITCHES!

Step 5: Find out the hard way that no one needs a product that was launched! :/

Step 6: Pivot, and pivot next month again, and pivot again, and pivot in a middle of a pivot, and pivot pivot pivot pivot... and OH FUCK WE RAN OUT OF MONEY!

Still trying to get good.

The requirements are forever shifting, and so do the applied paradigms.

I think the first layer is learning about each paradigm.

You learn 5-10 languages/technologies, get a feeling for procedural/functional/OOP programming. You mess around with some electronics engineering, write a bit of assembly. You write an ugly GTK program, an Android todo app, check how OpenGL works. You learn about relational models, about graph databases, time series storage and key value caches. You learn about networking and protocols. You void the warranty of all the devices in your house at some point. You develop preferences for languages and systems. For certain periods of time, you even become an insufferable fanboy who claims that all databases should be replaced by MongoDB, or all applications should be written in C# -- no exceptions in your mind are possible, because you found the Perfect Thing. Temporarily.

Eventually, you get to the second layer: Instead of being a champion for a single cause, you start to see patterns of applicability.

You might have grown to prefer serverless microservice architectures driven by pub/sub event busses, but realize that some MVC framework is probably more suitable for a 5-employee company. You realize that development is not just about picking the best language and best architecture -- It's about pros and cons for every situation. You start to value consistency over hard rules. You realize that even respected books about computer science can sometimes contain lies -- or represent solutions which are only applicable to "spherical cows in a vacuum".

Then you get to the third layer: Which is about orchestrating migrations between paradigms without creating a bigger mess.

Your company started with a tiny MVC webshop written in PHP. There are now 300 employees and a few million lines of code, the framework more often gets in the way than it helps, the database is terribly strained. Big rewrite? Gradual refactor? Introduce new languages within the company or stick with what people know? Educate people about paradigms which might be more suitable, but which will feel unfamiliar? What leads to a better product, someone who is experienced with PHP, or someone just learning to use Typescript?

All that theoretical knowledge about superior paradigms won't help you now -- No clean slates! You have to build a skyscraper city to replace a swamp village while keeping the economy running, together with builders who have no clue what concrete even looks like. You might think "I'll throw my superior engineering against this, no harm done if it doesn't stick", but 9 out of 10 times that will just end in a mix of concrete rubble, corpses and mud.

I think I'm somewhere between 2 and 3.

I think I have most of the important knowledge about a wide array of languages, technologies and architectures.

I think I know how to come to a conclusion about what to use in which scenario -- most of the time.

But dealing with a giant legacy mess, transforming things into something better, without creating an ugly amalgamation of old and new systems blended together into an even bigger abomination? Nah, I don't think I'm fully there yet.

Once it really hit me hard. The father of my brothers wife once told me that I'm not fit for IT in general. He thinks that I have pseudo knowledge of IT and Programming.

He just works parttime at home as "computer scientist" and sells routers, pc and such stuff to some private customers. Before he used Filemaker and sayd that he already coded his own CRM with it.

When he said that it really made me sad. But after we talked I looked back what I already achieved:

1. I build for me and friends custom PC's with Case mods and Hard Tube watercooling
2. I can programm in HTML5, CSS3 and PHP
3. I raised a Community with over 60 people in it. We got 2 dedicated Linux Roots (I7-6700K, 64GB RAM, SSD)
4. I manage the Linux Servers on my own with VoIP, Mail-, Web-, MySQL- and Gameservers
5. I built up a complete Community Solution with Game Groups, Forum, Tournament System and a lot of custom scripts.
6. Now Im almost finished learning the C++ Basics to code and manage to learn the beginning of GUI/UX programming.
7. Next thing Im gonna learn is Javascript (Browser) and Java, so I can complete my Web Skills and also can code Java Desktop Apps and Java game plugins (don't rant, Javascript is not the same as Java, I know 😉)

So I thought to myself "maybe in the eyes of others Im not a computer scientist, but then Im on the way to be one at least"

But please dont be a douche (the father) and prejudice me, before you don't know what I already can and achieved.

Just because you're are selling computer parts and installing them doesn't mean, that you are a computer scientist and telling me that I'm not 😉

In IT you're the smith of your own merit!

LONELINESS IS REAL
I am a freshman in a university ( about to complete my first year ) with a girl to boy ratio of around 1:10. During my first semester I was spending a lot of time with friends, chatting up with people and making connections. Due to this my productivity as a dev, if I am even capable of being called that decreased ( I was not a developer before joining , but I had an aim of being one , esp at least the best in my batch ) after 1st year. In retrospect I did nothing productive till 3 months out of 4 in my first sem and the guilt hit me hard . During the last month I had to catch up with my much neglected studies and all I had done was a little bit of html and css, and barely scratched the surface of js( please don't judge me for this :) , I had to start somewhere < although I learned a little bit of C++ > ). BUT I WAS A HAPPY CUNT, and had no sign of lonelines. Now during this sem , I had made progress ( learn js with es6 syntax and still learning, did c++ and extended my knowledge ) . Currently I am working on my Vue full stack app ( along with express and some websocket library , TBD ) < yeh I learnt some backend too > , and increasing my knowledge of dsa using clrs. Although my productivity has increased manifolds but I know feel the need of closure. I am kinda happy with the fact that I know a lot of people around here ( thanks to my extroverted 1st semester ) but sometimes it hits me hard at night when I don't have a monitor to drown my eyes and thoughts in. I have increased my academic performance too but I need someone to share and express my feelings with. I could have made a girlfriend earlier but now most of them are taken and I have lost touch. But believe me, all I want is a companion to spend these lonely days and night ( not talking about as a friend ). Staying away from home isnt easy you know...m :(

KUDOS TO DEVRANT FOR DEVELOPING A COMMUNITY WHERE PEOPLE LIKE ME CAN FEEL SAFE IN OUR NATURAL HABITAT. I COULDN'T HAVE EXPRESSED MY FEELINGS ANYWHERE ELSE EXCEPT IN A PERSONAL BLOG ( where no one would have read it )

PS1: I apologise if I sounded arrogant about any of my skill, I didn't mean that way. I ain't even that good, just kinda proud of myself a little for achieving something I couldn't have thought.

PS2: Any type of suggestions and help is much appreciated ( considering I am a college student who went into some serious development 4 months ago , I am pretty impressionable ;) )

PS3: Please don't confuse this with depression. I am HAPPY BUT LONELY

PS4: Is there a way so that I can change my username?

FUCK LINUX

now that I have your attention, and you’re probably angry, too, please, even if you don’t read this rant, never use code.org again. now, onto the rant…

god dammit, code.org sucks. I mean, anyone who created it or associates with it should, well, be considered a terrorist. they’re bombing students futures in computer science with false, useless, bullshit information. not to mention, their sponsors like bill gates, mark zuckerburg, and other rich asses, talk in a video about some boring ass shit that is hard to understand for anyone who doesn’t program, and not to mention, they use a fucking five dollar microphone. ear rape. even if you look at a textual version of it, then read the information on it, it’s practically useless because it's so terribly explained, and also useless. ironically enough, they focus on their animations more than their actual explinations, or their students for that matter. the fact that we had to encode a picture in binary, made me about 50% dumber, give or take a 0 or 1. then, we had to do it in hex, which wasn’t really much better, although more realistic I supposed. what's really the most depressing thing about this class is its application in the real world. I've learnt nothing whatsoever that will help me in the real world, or in computer science. I suppose there's two things that may be useful (that I already knew): hex, and that TCP doesn't lose packets. that's it. those two things. five seconds worth of knowledge from the first quarter of the year. the ideas just make me want to throw up. teaching the main ideas of computer science without actually teaching it? one of the teachers (probably a good one) enrolled her students in an online programming course just so they could understand, because the explanations are just so terrible. this is the only [high school] computer science course offered by code.org, and I signed up because it's an AP computer science class (tried to get into AP Java, the day I was supposed to take the test to get into an upper level class, I was told it didn't count as a tech credit). seriously, fuck code.org. it makes you dumber. their 'app lab' environment is pointless, just like everything else. the app lab is basically where you have a set of commands and have to make a dog bark() or a storm trooper miss() [and that's hell when they haven't introduced while loops yet]. the app lab is literally code.org going out of their way to make everything that their students are learning pointless in the real world. seriously, why can't we just use a <canvas> like an ACTUAL PROGRAMMER would do if they were to make a browser game, not use an app engine so slow it would be faster to update windows and android studio each time I run an 'app' in their 'environment'. their excuse is that the skills "transfer over" to the real world. BITCH! IF I DIDN'T KNOW JAVA, AND I WANTED TO MAKE A GAME IN JAVA, I'M NOT GOING TO LEARN PYTHON, THEN "TRANSFER" THE SKILLS I LEARNT, I'M GOING TO LEARN FUCKING JAVA. AND THAT GOES FOR EVER OTHER LANGUAGE, PROJECT, ETC.

I'm begging you code.org, stop, get help.

If you're planning to be a new entrepreneur (like me) here's a few things to keep in mind:

1) it'll keep getting harder but it's all worth it. Do not quit mid way no matter how hard it gets.

2) stop asking everyone for advice, they'll either be assholes or you'll end up getting confused by too much contradicting advice.

3) regardless of point 2, people will still advise you on everything (ikr). Listen to them, and if you don't agree with it... Do not bother to correct them, never helps... Just ignore it

4) if some one is an asshole to you or someone shoots your idea down, don't get discouraged. Reflect on it and if it's irrelevant, forget it all. Do not try to be an asshole back, always take the higher road.

P.S I'm also still learning... Hope you all very best for your endeavours :)

I am a woman with multiple years of experience in the coding industry , while in most of my jobs I have been the only woman in the team and I do agree there is a need for more women in the coding industry , however I really do believe workshops like shecodes are an absolute scam , the inclusiveness to bridge the gender divide in tech needs to start from the employers , all resources to learn to code are completely gender neutral and unbiased. I also find it quite hypocritical that shecodes was founded by a man and is taught by a man . Can anyone please shine some different opinions about this or does anyone else believe a similar thing ?

One of the first attempts to use machine learning in chess computing yielded interesting results. The AI that was fed hundreds of thousands of historic grandmaster matches immediately sacrificed the queen, smashing it over a random pawn. The reason? When a grandmaster sacrifices the queen, it is usually a hard, calculated decision that leads to winning. So, AI assumed that the best way to win is to sacrifice the queen as quick as possible.

Well, I just learned how much of a pain it is to learn the math for learning neural networks. I really should have paid more attention in high school.

I will learn, the hard way I guess...

So, the uni hires a new CS lecturer. He is teaching 230, the second CS class in the CS major. Two weeks into the semester, he walks in and proceeds to do his usual fumbling around on the computer (with the projector on).

Then, he goes to his Google Drive, which is empty mostly, and tells us that he accidentally wrote a program that erased his entire hard drive and his internet storage drives (Google, box, etc.)...

I mean, way to build credibility, guy... Then he tells us that he has a backup of everything 500 miles away, where he moved from. He also says that he only knows C (we only had formally learned Java so far), but hasn't actually coded (correction: typed!) in 20+ years, because he had someone do that for him and he has been learning Java over the past two weeks.

The rest of the semester followed as expected: he never had any lecture material and would ramble for an hour. Every class, he would pull up a new .java file and type code that rarely ran and he had no debugging skills. We would spend 15 minutes trying to help him with syntax issues—namely (), ;— to get his program running and then there would be a logic issue, in data structures.

He knew nothing of our sequence and what we knew up until this point and would lecture about how we will be terrible programmers because we did not do something the way he wanted—though he failed to give us expectations or spend the five minutes to teach us basic things (run-time complexity, binary, pseudocode etc). His assignments were not related to the material and if they were, they were a couple of weeks off. Also, he never knew which class we were and would ask if we were 230 or 330 at the end of a lecture...

I learned relatively nothing from him (though I ended up with a B+) but thankful to be taking advanced data structures from someone who knows their stuff. He was awful. It was strange. Also, why did the uni not tell him what he needed to be teaching?

End rant.

fuck code.org.

here are a few things that my teacher said last class.

"public keys are used because they are computationally hard to crack"

"when you connect to a website, your credit card number is encrypted with the public key"

"digital certificates contain all the keys"

"imagine you have a clock with x numbers on it. now, wrap a rope with the length of y around the clock until you run out of rope. where the rope runs out is x mod y"

bonus:

"crack the code" is a legitimate vocabulary words

we had to learn modulus in an extremely weird way before she told the class that is was just the remainder, but more importantly, we werent even told why we were learning mod. the only explanation is that "its used in cryptography"

i honestly doubt she knows what aes is.

to sum it up:

she thinks everything we send to a server is encrypted via the public key.

she thinks *every* public key is inherently hard to crack.

she doesnt know https uses symmetric encryption.

i think that she doesnt know that the authenticity of certificates must be checked.

That feeling when lead dev hid a couple of really secret bugs for you, and then left for vacation... *cough* @BinaryProvider 😉

I just told my director that the solution for a particular problem that we have involves Machine Learning. For which I had already applied a VERY small app to make sense of an old database to make a NEW one since the old one broke every notion of how a db is supposed to be set (meaning that I recreated the project from scratch)

And on the same message I told him that I was not willing to do it using M.L since I was not paid enough to bring this level of heat to the institution.

Normalize telling mfkers that your skills are worth more.

I am paid well, but not enough to out of the blue tell mfkers that my ml based algo can save them./

Fuck em, fuck em hard, fuck em good, fuck em without even using spit.

I don't do this shit because I am paSSiOnate, since there lies the trap: "I mean, I love it so I guess I can do it, I do this on my free time either way" <---- no bitch, shit is expensive on the real world, don't do that wtf is the matter with you? *slaps* companies don't see it as a: "oh shit, employee X can do this! value!" they see it as "greaaaaat, I can save money on this", so fuck em.

Normalize it, y'all are wizards, advisors of kings, no company today survives without I.T. About motherfucking time y'all bitches take this shit by the horns and do with it what you want.

People form third world countries that need work: shit don't apply to you, currently, but we will make it apply to you on the rising, my kings, stay strong.

I like the idea of Machine Learning in JS simply because I think it is way to fascinating to see what people are doing with JS.

Some programming languages tend to a attract very peculiar crowds. Some are even famous for the type of people they attract. Python is highly regarded as a language for scientists and researchers as well as beginners in development due to how simple and expressive it is. So you normally tend to see that kind ok f people in it(and before you bitch about it....no....it is not an all inclusive statement, hold your cock holster)

Whereas JS seems to have people from all backgrounds. It really is the language of the internet and as such the people around the internet have tried hard to make it better. So this can be considered an experiment regarding the way people collaborate with one another and I dig it.

Its all about working together ma ninjas.

Still a pretty funny language sometimes tho

1 + "1" = "11"
1 - "1" = 0

I still love it.

It's rant time!

So, as a broke electrical engineering student, I got this job in a local company. They used JSF and my skills in java were, at the very least, small (former PHP developer). But as a self taught developer this didn't stopped me and I went full on java learning (very bad year for my EE studies).

I became the 'guy in charge' for several of their projects (yeah, they did exploited broke students, I realized this far too late). I was very proud of myself, I worked hard, showed my true value, and they became impressed.

One nice thursday night, my "handler" emailed me with a urgent request. They needed an entire jsf application done by monday and the requirements were fairly complex.

Oh boy, I had a total of 10h of sleep from thursday to monday. I didn't even slept before going to my monday class, but I delivered the system. Got an pat in the back... "you're awesome"... I was happy.

6 months later: I received an email asking to fix a bug in the system. No problem with that. Oddly, this bug was a MAJOR bug. There's no way the system worked properly for six months with it. I fixed it in no time and commited the changes.

Turns out that this was the first time the system was going to be deployed. They made me go in an insane weekend dev project, and didn't even used the system for SIX MONTHS!!! I started to work my way out the company after this, aiming to open my own software company.

I still remember some other rants from the time I worked there. But these are for later.

Nice week for you all, may the sprint go gently and the clients be kind.

I used to work with a teacher in my last uni year.

The job consisted on doing a kinda-like management system for a business. It all began kinda "right", we agreed upon a price for 6 months of my work (a very lowball price, but it was just right because I was learning stuff that we were going to be using).

Fast-forward first six months, all I do is code frontend, mockup screens and whatsoever because this "business" hadn't give us proper requirements (Yeah, I told him to ask for them, but nothing came through).

So I was like well, I'll keep working in this project because I really want to finish it. Sidenote: I was doing all the "hard work", he didn't know how to code, and he calls himself a teacher... wtf).

Months go by, and a year goes round, in between these months, he spoke to me, that he wanted me that we kept working together, that we could renegotiate the payment (I asked him to give me my payment once the job was done). I agreed, but my uni residence period was coming along and I got an oportunity to go abroad to another country.

So there I was, in the need of money to buy my passport, plane tickets and other stuff, so I asked him for the payment.

Needs to be noted, that the last 6 months work was me doing tutorials on how to fucking use Linux, how to use PostgreSQL, how to fucking use CSS! He told me he would pay me extra for it.

The day came, and I received my payment... the exact amount we talked a year ago, I was like "Seriously dude?", but well, I needed the money and I didn't have time to argue, so we talked a little bit about me helping him and I told him "As long as I have time, I'll help, but remember that I'm going abroad to work for a small startup, so maybe I'll be up to my head with work" he agreed, we nod and then I left.

First week abroad came in and I was doing a shit-ton of stuff, then his first message comes around "Hey, I need more tutorials! ASAP! Before 6PM"

What.The.Fuck. I told you, son of a bitch, that I wouldn't be able to do them until weekend.. and it was monday!

So I ignored it, weeks went throught and my "angry mood" was fading away so I said to myself "Well, it's time to pick up that stuff again", I open Slack and I find a week old message with a document attached, it was a "letter", I just skimmed by it and read some keywords "deceptioned... failed me.."

Sure dude? Was I the failure? Becase, as far as I remember, you were the fucktard that didn't know how to fucking install a VM!

A week went by, and then randomly a friend of mine talks to me through Facebook:

E: Hey, how are you?
M: I'm fine, what's up?
E: What did you do to TEACHER?
M: Nothing, <explains all situation>
E: Well, It seems weird, that's why I wanted to talk with you, I believe in you, because I know you well, but TEACHER it's thrashing shit about you with all his students on all of his classes
M: Seriously?
E: Yeah, he's saying that you are a failure, irresponsible, that you scammed him

That moment, I for sure, lost all moral responsibility with him and thought to myself "He can go fuck himself with my master branch on his ass"

So when I got back to my country, I had to go around in school, avoiding him, not because I was ashamed nor anything by the way, just because I knew that If i ever had the disgrace to meet him face to face, my fists would be deep into his nose before he could say "Hey".

Moral of the story:
If you overheard that a teacher has a bad rep, not by one, nor two, but more than +100 people, maybe it's true.

Good thing my friends and others know me well and I didn't have repercutions on my social status, I'm just the guy that "fucked up TEACHER because I had the right and way to do it"

I have a VP constantly harassing my people about some reports that we need to do as per federal law.

The thing is, these live inside of such system that I get to see exactly how many "hits" they get on a yearly basis. The only traffic we have on those sections is of people going ahead and putting the information from our reports there.

That's it, literally. Our user base does not go there. Federal agencies do not go there. No one gives two blips of shit about those sections. Yet she continuously acts like they are the most important thing in the fucking world. To make it better, I was told not to generate actual analytical data from said reports, since people with PHDs will come down on me to ask me who the fuck do I think I am from gauging them with such systems. So shit is a mute point on all fucking accounts.

I told my VP I can generate traffic information to let them know that shit is not really the most important thing in the fucking universe. His eyes glowed.

I don't want to see head rolls, but from staying till the next morning awake trying to give the best to our userbase, and just to be called out on shit like this as if I did not do enough for our people just.....well....it fucking hits man.

The worse part was me literally getting 30 minutes of sitting down after an all nighter, doing something for my users, to get to a meeting the next morning (I should not have driven there honestly) to hear this bitch complain about us not doing enough or not caring or whatever other bullshit she would spew.

I was livid, lack of sleep makes me dangerous. I turned to say something when my boss stopped me and took care of business. I seriously love this man. By all accounts and generational gaps a boomer, but one of the few good golden ones.

I just hate how unappreciated the realm of software development is by people that think that our shit is as simple as making a fucking powerpoint presentation.

Consolidate that with a director from another department taking all fucking glory during a major event of an application that I built by myself with 2 fucking weeks of no sleeping. And shit just gets glorious.

I have considered moving to other places, and heck, have gotten amazing offers, what with having a degree with a big fucking GPA and having the credentials of a senior, lead, full stack and manager role, the sky is the limit. But i know that if I leave then my users suffer, and I just can't fucking have that.

I have heard them speaking about doing something with X app that I built (with my department) I have even heard one of them saying "how is this made?" and a part of me hoped that it would be a good time to grab them and tell them of the field and the things that they can do. But I don't like announcing myself that way, always seemed to presumptuous, so I just smile, fuck yeah, my users are doing their thing with what I built to better their lives, what more can I have?

I have gotten criticisms from them, one recognized me, told me about his pain points and how it makes it hard for him to do what he must. Getting the data from the user base in an effort to make shit better for them drives me, my challenge being "how about this? better eh?"

But fucking execs man, think only of themselves, not the users, they forget about the users. Much like a shitty rock band forgetting about the music, about the fans.

I can't let that slide. But this fucking field. I sometimes fucking hate it, and I hate it because of the normies that don't understand and do not want to understand.

I do way too much, my guys do way too much and all I want is for the recognition to go to them. They do not need the ego boost, but to see my guys sitting in a meeting in which some dumb fuck is trying to drill us for taking to long, not doing something and what not, it fucking pisses me off. As their boss I always stand up and tell bitches off, but instead of learning, the bitches just keep pressing on their already defeated points.

Everything in human life gets fucking erradicated by: humans. People really do fucking suck.

I sometimes wish to go back, redo my diesel tech license and just work there, where I think one would be better of talking to an engine. But no, even then you get people, you have to interact with people, deal with people, and I am so far up my game and in my field that starting from scratch is a fucking mute point.

Maybe I need to keep fucking with stocks, get rich and just keep investing on bullshit. Whatever the fuck it takes me from having to feel the urge to choke a motherfucker in public.

I can agree to shit when presented with hardcore data, data that proves me otherwise. But when people go by opinions and then hold is a truth because of "many feel the same way" I cannot help but to giggle a bit.

Most issues I have found with programming stacks come from opinions rather than hard presented data, if a bunch of people dislike a tool, but it delivers, I get to differ two things: (1) it is bad but it performs as needed, but it is bad because of design problems etc, (2) some dude made a post concerning why he things is bad and sheep mentality follows.

If technologies were without merit, then we would have all discarded C++ a long time ago cuz Linus disliked it, a powerful programmer indeed, but a FOCUSED one, meaning, one that deals with 1 domain (kernel development)

Do I care about what Linus things about web development? No, lol, he is a better kernel developer than I am, but I highly, grossly doubt that he knows enough about web development to give me something to think about.

all languages have faults, regardless of what point of view we look at them, but completely disregarding a tech stack because of shit that you saw some fucktard wrote about, benefits and otherwise, just seems....well...sheepish, there might very well be a tech stack out there that covers everything, to me it is a mixture of things, and I use them as I please and feel like, but this is because after years of learning I have read about quirks and pitfalls and how to avoid them. I would suggest you all do the same, by you all I mean those of high opinions that can't be deflected.

This field is far too wide and concentrated to go head and think about absolutes when even the fundamental mathematical theory concerning computer science is not absolute whatsoever, it is akin to magic, shit works, but it might not, the incantation might be right, but circuits and electricity have a way of telling us to go fuck ourselves, so do architectures, specifically ones based on physics.

So I was writing docs for my project the hard way. Manually. Every time I added something new, I had to find the right place for it to be alphabetically in the reference. And god forbid I want to have the same information in two pages: I would need to copy/ paste and pray that I not forget to update the information EVERYWHERE.

I didn't feel like installing and learning some new markdown generating bullshit so I just made my own system. It's very simple and intuitive and I love it.

I made sure it can cover two use case: reading partial documents from the disk, and rendering in-memory objects to markdown too (like rendering a collection of tuples into a table)

I didn't care much for templating, so there's no templating capability.

Haven't been here for a long time, kinda amazed I still had an account to be honest. There used to be a bunch of people I chatted with regularly on here, but my mentally ill self decided at some point to self sabotage (surprise surprise) and cut contact with almost everyone.

That said I've gone through quite a bit of therapy, which has definitely improved my outlook on life and allowed me to do some much needed self reflection. Has that made life better? Hard to say, but I like to think I've got a grasp on my mental health now, with the occasional relapse, because shit's a 🌈process🌈.

I'd like to apologize for the hurt I've caused some people here, you know who you are. My behaviour at times has been inexcusable. There's no sugarcoating it.

The past years have been a rollercoaster to say the least. Switched jobs multiple times. Went from doing frontend exclusively, to fullstack, then backend, and now engineering lead responsible for all architecture and infrastructure, learning a lot about myself and people around me along the way. Somehow I managed to get into a somewhat stable relationship, which is still a big WTF from time to time. The company I currently work for has had a metric fuckton of layoffs, just like the company I worked for before that. I can tell the lack of stability in work still affects my mental health a lot, but seeing how I've been growing a lot personally while the market seemingly has gone to shit gives me some level of confidence. I'll be alright.

This is mostly a sign of life to whom it may concern. I'm alive, existence is dreadful but manageable, shit's hard, but it's all gonna be okay in the end. I may or may not post a rant from time to time, as management loves unrealistic deadlines, and the PM can't say no to the CEO for some reason so her work ends up on my plate most of the time as well. Oh and of course the primary product of the company had a codebase which made me want to gorge my eyes out. So yeah, plenty to rant about.

endor's first magical adventures with PostgreSQL

"Alright, got the docker image up and running, and I'm connected to the db, both from console and from Datagrip! Cool, let's get started with the tutorial!"
*cue montage of me using Datagrip to create my first schema, then the first table, then insert a bunch of data to try things out*

"Cool, now let's see if I can view my data from the console"
db1-# select * from my_schema.table1
db1-# [nothing]

"*Ahem*, I said:"
db1-# select * from my_schema.table1
db1-# [nothing]

db1-# select * from my_schema.table1
db1-# [cricket noises]

"Wut, why can't I see the data that I inserted? Wtf is going on?"

*30 minutes later*
"Alright, I have no idea what's going on, so let's try inserting the data from console and see if Datagrip can see it"

db1-# insert into my_schema.table1(id, name, field2, field3) values (1, 'Mike', null, 123), (2, 'Jake', 0, 456);
ERROR: syntax error at or near "SELECT"
LINE 2: SELECT
^

"Wait, what?"

db1-# insert into my_schema.table1(id, name, field2, field3) values (1, 'Mike', null, 123), (2, 'Jake', 0, 456);
INSERT 0 2

"Wtf? Haaang on... "

db1-# select * from my_schema.table1;
id | name | field2 | field3
----+------+--------+--------
1 | Mike | | 123
2 | Jake | 0 | 456
1 | Mike | | 123
2 | Jake | 0 | 456
(4 rows)

*eye twitches*

Frustration Rant!

Because old hardware means learning the hard way sometimes, I've had to purchase more goodies.

On my last update, I installed the rs232 shield which may have inadvertently been wired backwards for Tx/Rx from what im used to. I assume it is backwards to most db9 serial ports because most Arduino or other projects you would do with a pi have serial "in" connections like old routers and devices that would be "controlled" rather than the other way around. Anyway, according to a video on youtube showing a guy turning an old machine into an IRC client via raspberry pi, this shield may be swapped. That means that instead of interfacing with the old machine via a null modem crossover cable, I need a straight cable with male db9 on both ends. I unfortunately tried using the null modem crossover cable which was reversing the reversed pins all over again. I hope these next few days are more fruitful now that I've bought a straight cable and db9/25 adapter.

The good thing is that I managed to get the pi to recognize its new serial port. I also dusted off my DOS skills and my serial card in the 5150 seems to work.

I literally banged my head after nothing worked. Im hoping that the tx/ Rx is solved soon.

Oh and that AT to PS/2 adapter will allow me to use by IBM original Model M Keyboarf rather than the fun model F.

I am so much stunned i cannot form a sentence on what to say. Lost 3 days trying to fix a bug on why socket.io was connecting to backend TWICE per user. I cannot fucking comprehend this. Backend works fine because via postman it doesnt connect twice. Everything works fine. 72 fucking hours waste d of my life just to find out i had to change

<React.StrictMode>
<App />
</React.StrictMode>

Into

<App />

When i tell you my jaw fucking dropped it fucking did. And it does not drop often or that easily for me. What the FUCK is react strict mode???? FUCK react. I fucking hate this piece of garbage framework. I even like nextjs better. React💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩motberfucker WHY is strict mode fucking my code what use does it have who gives a shit why does it have anything to do with websocket connection FUCK react 💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩💩 how does this piece of camel turd have anything to do with duplicate connection 💩💩💩💩MFKKCER this garbage doesnt exist in my beautiful angular or nextjs PLS why this cancer has to be so headaching i knew I'll get FUCKED if i dont go over a detailed course learning react from scratch. Now im suffering. Learning this garbage the hard way FUCK off

I was working as a software dev contractor at this company providing specific e-learning services for a specific industry X.

One day the CEO posts on Linkedin about an interview discussing the potential of gaining $100k per year working in industry X after getting specialized training for 6 months (using our e-learning platform of course) .

My gross income at the time was $65k. My experience was about 7-8 years. Now the thing is you might say "gee that's pretty low for a dev, especially a contractor", and yes I agree, but you have to understand a few facts:

1. I am from eastern Europe (cheapish labor - which btw for all of you out there from the West, including Germany and whatnot, it is xenophobic to consider easterners cheap and it personally insults me and my ability - but that's another story)

2. I was happy to accept the offer since it was the best I had up to that point :))

Now, by the time the LinkedIn post I was heavily invested in the product development. I personally had written 30% of the code (frontend and backend) compared to the whole development team (about 15 devs)... and yes you might argue that performance is not measured by number of lines of code... but trust me when I am saying I did the most on that product, and I am not saying this to brag, I actually care about the stuff that I work on.

When I saw that post on Linkedin I thought to myself "what kind of BS is this? I am a dev and devs are supposedly the best paid workers out there, and a guy from industry X that just got trained for 6 months would get more than me?! WTF?!"

So I messaged the CEO ...

Me: I noticed the post from linkedin about $100k by working in industry X, I am curious how does one get to that revenue per year? What is your advice?

CEO: The best way to obtain value is by creating value which you maximize continuously.

Me: and how does one maximize value?

CEO: it does not matter how hard your work but how large of an impact you make!

Me: ... and how do you measure impact? (me thinking about performance reviews for contract negotiations - and because performance reviews should be SMART -> meaning it should be measurable somehow)

CEO: Simon Sinek says ... << insert motivational quote here because I don't remember and don't care >>

I just lost if after reading the name "Simon Sinek" ...

So you see my dear friends ? It is all fairy dust, smoke and mirrors, in the end it is about maximizing profits, lowering costs and maintaining the illusion of opportunity... when there is none.

Lord is my witness... I hate hypocrisy and quackery ...

You can imagine that my contribution on that product immediately lowered, doing the bare minimum to meet the contract demands AND I FEEL NO REGRET.

%&#$ YOU SIMON SINEK.

I'm just frustrated. I wanted a simple, statically-typed language that doesn't get in your way and offers GC. I can't find anything "just perfect".

- Go: enforces a style on you, nono.
- Rust: ownership system. I love it, but it's too low level for what I want.
- Scala: seems to have a bunch of useless and bug-prone features.
- Java: I hate how you have to declare and catch exceptions. Good practice, yes, but the code gets bloated with try-catch statements.
- C and C++: Too low level, no GC.
- C#: maybe? idk

I want to make a back-end for an app but I want it to be easy and fast. I need something with a gentle learning curve, not keep fighting the language. I'm between Java and Rust. Java's easier to use. Rust is rust <3, but it's hard, I haven't learned it properly and I just keep fighting the fucking compiler.

This story just left me speechless in any way and i want to share it. tl;dr at the end.
Im studying computer science in germany and in the first of the small classes i noticed... no, i was disturbed by a guy who would just say that the thing we're learning atm were so easy and the teacher shouldn't even bother to explain it to the class. I don't understand why you would spoile a class that hard... I'm here to learn and listen to the teacher, not to you little asshole. (We were doing basic stuff like binary system etc. but still, let us learn)
So he became unpopular pretty fast.
Fast forward, a few weeks of studying later there was a coding competition where you had to solve different algorithmic problems in a team as fast as possible.
I came there, without a team because my friends aren't interested but I enjoy such tournaments. This guy and me were the only ones without a team and we had to work together.
After him being a total dick for hours i had to watch him code a simple for-loop, that iterates through a sorted array. Nothing special, at this point anyone could do that task in our class so it shouldn't be a problem for him.

He made a simple for-loop and it worked fine, but we figured we had to iterate through the array the other way around.
'Alright', I think. 'Just let the index decr..' 'Pssshhh', he interrupted me and said he knows exactly how to do this.
I was quite impressed when he started to type in 'public int backsort..' in a new line. He tried to resort the array backwards with a quicksort that he then struggled to implement. (Of course we had to implement a quick runtime and we needed that quicksort badly)
I was kind of annoyed but impressed at the same time. I mumbled 'Java has an internal sorting algorithm already' just to amuse myself.
He then used that implementation.
After a few minutes of my pleasure and multiple tests without hitting the requested runtime, i tried to explain to him why we wouldn't need to sort that array backwards and he just couldn't believe it.
I hope that he stays more humble after that..
Also we became last place but thats ok :)

tl;dr: Guy spoiles whole class, brags with his untouchable knowledge (when we do things like binary system). In a competition has to iterate through a sorted array backwards - tries to implement a sorting algorithm to sort it backwards first. I tell him, we could use a already implemented java method. Then tell him we could simply iterate through decreasing the index. Mind-Blown

FUCK YOU MICROSOFT

Visual studio shouldn't be allowed to fucking exist in its current form, it takes FOREVER TO FUCKING LOAD unresponsive lagging piece of fucking shit. I'd expect such loading times for a modern AAA game but not a fucking so called functional application, holy fucking shit...

Why must everything be so fucking hard using this thing? I need to change default intellisense settings as not to get in my fucking way while learning, after getting more stressed trying to find out how to edit the settings which are listed under TOOLS, WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK? It should be under edit not fucking tools, editing settings is not a fucking tool you fucking dense cunts. I spend the next 10 minutes looking for intellisense settings only to find you have options for enabled, disabled and default how the fuck does that help anyone?

Firstly it should have its own fucking section since its such a massive bloaty intrusive feature. I should not have to first click C# and then be presented with limited controls.

FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, ALT + F4 UNINSTALLED THAT PIECE OF FUCKING SHITE , MILTI BILLION DOLLAR COMPANY WANTS FUCKING MONEY FOR THIS PILE OF SHIT.

Go fuck yourselves.

"The culture here is one of success based upon academic excellence, studying, learning, practising and having a good job and a great life. For upper India, not the lower. I see two Indias. That's a lot like Singapore study, study, work hard and you get an MBA, you will have a Mercedes but where is the creativity? The creativity gets left out when your behaviour is too predictable and structured, everyone is similar."
Steve Wozniak on Indian Talent.

As an Indian, I agree with him. In this day and age, where education is so easy to come by, We live in a country where from the beginning we're told that education is about getting marks and writing stuff down 10 times. We live in a country where we're asked to cram up answers to questions which start with "what are your thoughts on..". How can we expect to be creative?
Can marks be a metric for good candidate in a country where the thought is, "first complete your engineering with good marks, then think what you wanna do in life".
Should academic excellence really be about the amount of shit a guy could cram up?

Sure it's easier to filter out people on the basis of marks in a country with 1.3 billion people, but is it justified?
Can we justify "success" as a good job for a guy who's life's only achievement has been getting into a good engineering college?
Can we really consider a guy successful, if his only "effort" has been reading and rereading books twice, thrice, a million times. Is this person, who has literally crammed his way into life, and has no practical experience, really successful?

This is the very reason Woz giving such a statement is justified. As long as we as a country gives up the stupid thought that patriotism is all about abusing the guy who says something negative about the country, and we actually start taking an action and change our thoughts on education, we won't succeed.

doomsday out 🤟

Well this is the thing. I have been starting to replace a lot of my shit with Golang. I think it is a great language because of one small fact: it is a boring language.

With this I don't mean that it is not incredibly fun to use. It is and honestly I feel that a lot of the concepts that I had from C passed quite nicely with some additions. The language does not do anything special and there is no elegant code. It works in a very procedural fashion without taking into consideration any of the snazzy things found in JS, Python, c# etc etc. Interfaces and struct make sense to me, way more than oop does in other languages. I don't need generics with the use of interface parameters and I have hadly found a situation in which I have to strive too far away from the way things are done with Go to be happy with it, then again my projects are not hard or by any means groundbreaking (most of them deal with logistics or content management and a couple of financial apps that I am rewriting in Go from work)

The outcome is fast and easy to read since idiomatic go is for the most part very readable(no people...single letter variable names are by no means a standard and they should feel ashamed from it)

I miss the idea of a framework, but not so much and the docs and internal code for Go is just way top inviting. I believe the code to be readable enough than anyone that has gotten used to the syntax and ideas of the language can just jump in and start learning. This is the first language that I have learnt from studying the code as it is inside of the standard lib, the same I cannot say for any other language or framework.

Also, it play beautifully nice with vs code.

I dunno man, I feel that I am doing something wrong. I have projects built in Node, php, python, ruby and spring java as well as .net core and I still find Golang way more appealing simply because it goes harder than Python with "one preferred way" to do things.

The lang does not make me feel like a pro, i certainly develop in it at pro speeds, but it was made with beginners in mind to built fast and concurrent apps, with the most minimal syntax possible.

I guess my gripe with it is that it gets shunned from this, saying that it ignored years of lang research to make it as dumbed down as possible. Which it did, lack of generics amongst other things certainly make it seem like, but I will not say that it was poorly designed. Not at all, I believe it is a testament of amazing engineering. To be able to create such a simple yet amazingly powerful language.

Wish there were more to it. Wish there was a nice gui lib or a ml framework comparable to the ones offered by python and java. But I guess such things will come with time.

I feel stupid with this language.

And that is fine.

android development is shitty af, it will make you super zombie computer nerd that sit on his chair for fking several hours just to find the where the fk is null pointer exception is coming from not only this but for all kind of errors,logcat looks like someone just hacking nasa, you know what im the one who is shitty af i would have opt web dev instead of android dev , this retarded studio and emulator takes too much time to just load a simple fking thing & if i make some change in it i've to install that application again ,it's so pathetic and horse shit thing i've ever encountered , kotlin is fun it's actually great language most of the features are so helpful in it,but the google codelabs,it's all documentation , adding dependencies whole concepts are trash imo, why can't we install the dependencies using terminal what's problem in that ,but no they chose the hard way for no fuking reason, i've successfully wasted a year learning this shitty tech stack, hopefully this NY i will choose different stack , will work till ass off .gonna build some cool projects and will eventually try for internships and all. done with android dev, idk how senior dev's are alive in this field

I did not think that making a serverless Discord bot would be such a learning experience. The code itself was easy. The hard part was the infrastructure, because I decided to automate it all with Terraform and deploy it on AWS.

Before this project, I had no idea how API Gateways worked. Now I still have very little idea how they work but I managed to build one anyway. Eventually. And then I had to figure out how to automate the deployment of a lambda layer and function that would both still be managed in the Terraform state, with any code changes triggering a rebuild and update for the resource.

And then I had to untangle a dependency mess because API Gateways have some weird issues where two resources that have no explicit dependencies on each other will throw an error if they don't deploy in the right order.

And then I went the wrong way with Github actions trying to conditionally chain multiple workflows together before I realized I could just put multiple jobs with conditions in a single workflow.

And now after all that work over the course of 2 days, I have a bot that does this:

Is a BS in CS even worth it? I’m struggling so much right now with many different aspects of “online learning”, to the point where I spend the entire day shaking in misery. I was fine until I realized how close we are to finals this semester. The worst part is, this semester isn’t my last hard semester. Taking two miserable CS courses in the Spring as well, so it isn’t as easy as just keeping my head up and making it through this semester.

I finished my AA in CS from a local Community College, and I’m wondering if it’s worth the stress of the next two years in this degree track?

I’ve never tested well, but these CS and Math courses hit differently when online. I pass every single coding project with ease, but fail exams (literally). I realize my AA doesn’t mean much, but I do have lots of experience coding (Way beyond what I’ve learned in school).

Truth be told, I think I just want to hear you guys say it’s not worth it. Most companies that I see requires either a BS or equivalent experience, how do I get that experience, especially with COVID?

I feel like a failure, and I can’t deal with this pressure on me daily. My mental health has taken a giant hit recently. I know for a fact that I cannot endure another two years of this.

Someone, guidance. Please.

May's last week was very hectic. I had just finished my final exams and there were going to be semester project evaluations in that whole week.

@safiullah and me had decided to make a whole Social Network with all features in it, for the DB course project.
All other classmates were making small management systems like ticket booking and etc.
We thought that if we really wanted to learn DB concepts then we should come up with something different than a management panel.
Hence we did it. This was the first time we used a framework. Well, I had written that PHP framework while i was learning about how frameworks work and the way they are made. So it wasn't a big thing but it was something which could be used as a base for clean and organized code.

It took about a month of commits and pushes and it resulted in a very good social network. It had all the features and algorithms present in a starter social network.

For us students, we were happy to see what a fine job we had done. We learnt a lot and used new concepts.

When we went to the instructor, she asked us to sit down and show the project. @safiullah placed the laptop, and logged out from the social network so that he could show her a demo.
She exclaimed,"Why did you do it (Log out) ?"
He replied: "To show you how it works🤷🏻‍♂️"
She:"Get to the previous state and leave it"
Then she asked different questions like what was a post request in php and how it differed from get? what library for DB connection was used... etc.
We explained each and every step.

She saw the frontend design and said "You've just added text to the elements" as If we were showing her a theme demo with hard coded text accomplished by inspect element.

She did not take a look at any other page than the one we had shown her at start. She navigated to no other page and asked nothing about what total features were implemented and how they were done?

Then she said Thank You and we left.

After some days marks were uploaded in LMS and we were just two points above the average.

She took no look and gave us the least when our project was the best.
I'm 100 percent sure she thought that we were showing her a project copied from somewhere else. 🤣

I am so close to crying it is just not funny, every time i close my eyes I picture Superman's Scream after snapping Zod's neck in man of steel i.e. filled with pain, anguish and not being able to accept what you have become... I am not a dev but I have been glued to a computer screen since 7 years old.

I work for a company as the I.T. Administrator that does quite a bit of specialized work in the regulatory industry and has there own in-house software. This was built by one developer after another, hired straight out of university/college and you cannot believe how big of a monster this became being built with direction from someone who cant code and a bunch of "drunk children" who do not know good principles (swear to god thousands of lines with no comments and no OOP)

Now I am validating and testing a system, i keep being asked if we will be ready by the end of the week and due to my lack of qualifications after dropping out of school I keep thinking yes, but every time i test something I find another problem, I may not be able to code but understanding quickly is my strength and I know this shit is not simple.

I am under constant pressure to deliver something quickly.

Any concerns I raise are almost brushed off because I am an idiot with no qualifications who should be greatful for the work I am doing and the low as balls salary

The problems I solve are commended by the 10+ years of experience senior developer writing the application for us, yet I get shit for taking an hour to find the problem that existed in our network setup because it is the devs job (OMFG HE WOULD NEVER HAVE REALIZED WITHOUT COMING HERE AND LOOKING AT OUR INFRASTRUCTURE... WE WOULD HAVE BEEN STUCK FOR A FUCKING MONTH!!!!)

I see only 2 courses ahead for my life. The easy way and the hard way.

Easy way, buy a gun and end it all.

Suffer for 3 more years in the place that is causing constant breathing difficulty and the occasional pain in my left arm, finish my matric, continue learning to code and leave.

But right now I just want cry scream like Superman!!!

A bit late.. and not much about how to learn to code..but more of a figuring out if the kid has a right mind set to do so..

If the kid is not the type to question everything, not resourceful, not a logical/critical thinker, gives up easily and especially if not interested in how things work then being a dev is most probably not for them.. they can still persue coding, but it will end badly..

From my experience, people who have a better education than me, but lack those skills turned out to be a crappy dev.. not interested in the best tool to complete the tasks, just making 'something', adding more shit to the already shitty stack.. and being happy with that.. which of course is not the best way to do things around here..or in life!!

Soo.. if the kid shows all that and most importantly shows interest in learning to code.. throw him the java ultimate edition book and see what happens.. joke!

There are plenty of apps thath can get you started (tried mimo, but being devs yourself it's probably not so hard to check some out and weed out the bad ones) that explain simple logic and syntax.. there is w3schools that explains basics quite well and lets you tinker online with js and python..
so maybe show them these and see what happens.. If it will pick their interest, they will soon start to ask the right questions.. and you can go from there..

If the kids are not the 'evil spawns' of already dev parents or don't have crazy dev aunties and uncles, then they will have to work things out themselves or ask friends... or seek help online (the resourceful part comes here).. so google or any flavour of search engines is their friend..

Just hope they don't venture to stack overflow too soon or they will want to kill themselves /* a little joke, but also a bit true.. */

Anyhow, if the kid is exhibiting 'dev traits' it is not even a question how to introduce it to the coding.. they will find a way.. if not, do not force them to learn coding "because it's in and makes you a lot of moneyz"..
As with other things in life, do not force kids to do anything that you think will be best for them.. Point them in direction, show them how it might be fun and usefull, a little nudge in the right direction.. but do not force.. ever!!!

And also another thing to consider.. most of the documentation and code is written in english.. If they are not proficient, they will have a hard time learning, checking docs, finding answers.. so make sure they learn english first!!
Not just for coding, knowing english will help them in life in general. So maaaaybe force them to learn this a bit..

One day my husband came to me and asked me how he can learn.. and if it's too late for him to learn coding.. that he found some app and if I can take a look and tell him what I think, if it is an ok app to learn..
I was both flattered and stumped at the same time..
Explained to him that in my view, he is a bit old to start now, at least to be competitive on the market and to do this for a living, but if it interests him for som personal projects, why not.. you're never too old to start learning and finding a new hobby..

Anyhow, I've pointed out to him that he will have to better his english in order to be able to find the answers to questions and potential problems.. and that I'm happy to help where and when I can, but most of the job will be on him.

So yeah, showed him some tutorials, explained things a bit.. he soon lost interest after a week and was mindblown how I can do this every day..

And I think this is really how you should introduce coding to kids.. show them some easy tutorials, explain simple logic to them.. see how they react.. if they pick it up easily, show them something more advanced.. if they lose interest, let them be.

To sum up:
- check first if they really want to learn this or this is something they're forced to do (if latter everything you say is a waste of everybodys time)
- english is important
- asking questions (& questioning the code) is mandatory so don't be afraid to ask for help
- admitting not knowing something is the first step to learning
- learn to 'google' & weed out the crap
- documentation is your friend
- comments & docs sometimes lie, so use the force (go check the source)
- once you learn the basics its just a matter of language flavour..adjust some logic here, some sintax there..
- if you're stuck with a problem, try to see it from a different angle
- debugging is part of coder life, learn to 'love' it

!rant

27 days ago I asked here for advice on how to mentor software engineer student that was terrible at coding.

So, we are in the middle of the mentoring, my approach is for her to get used to normal engineering tools, in this occasion she is learning Git and "kanban" (basically we are using Clubhouse for this one) and Github PR submission and approval (I'm the one who approves them, naturally) by doing.

With git, things are hard because we cannot share a terminal session (via upterm) due to her using Windows on her laptop (WSL is an option for using upterm but her internet is so damn slow doing the configuration takes way too long), otherwise teaching her use git would be smoother than it is currently, with the other tools she is gaining a good grasp of them, it pleases me that the bottleneck is with Git itself.

She is working on a hangman game with Python, nothing fancy just the terminal. I made the stories with the requirements in Clubhouse for her to work on each as a unit removing some "thought process" of reading requirements and implementing solutions (at Uni it seems the professor writes a document of several pages detailing the background of the project and the requirements, I can see how it can become confusing for some students like her).

She will start Uni again this August 10th, there is a chance that our first "session" at this will end by then, my fear is that she forgets how to use the tools she learned, so I need to find a way to encourage her to keep using them somehow.

## Learning k8s

Sooo yeah, 2 days have been wasted only because I did not reset my cluster correctly the first time. Prolly some iptables rules were left that prevented me from using DNS. Nothing worked...

2 fucking days..

2 FUCKING DAYS!!! F!!!

I have been spending all day optimizing a wordpess site for pagespeed, looking into how can I optimize the custom scripts which block rendering and I was learning some new things, it was hard but I was making progress. Then comes the senior engineer who installs a plugin and pagespeed went from 60 to 90 on mobile, I was pretty shocked. Then it hit me. IT DELAYS THE LOADING OF EVERY SCRIPT AND IMAGE UNTIL USER INPUT TRICKING THE SCORING SYSTEM. U GET A WHITE SCREEN IF YOU DON'T DO ANYTHING. I told him it's not really faster this way, and he agreed it is not "ethical" but the score is good.
Am I still an idiot naive kid? There is a line between scamming people and quality work, but it keeps getting more blurry.

I can't help it sounding bitter..
If you work some amount of time in tech it's unavoidable that you automatically pick up skills that help you to deal with a lot of shit. Some stuff you pick up is useful beyond those problems that shouldn't even exist in the first place but lots of things you pick up over time are about fixing or at least somehow dealing or enduring stuff that shouldn't be like that in the first place.
Fine. Let's be honest, it's just reality that this is quite helpful.

But why are there, especially in the frontend, so many devs, that confuse this with progress or actual advancement in their craft. It's not. It's something that's probably useful but you get that for free once you manage to somehow get into the industry. Those skills accumulate over time, no matter what, as long as you manage to somehow constantly keep a job.
But improving in the craft you chose isn't about somehow being able to deal with things despite everything. That's fine but I feel like the huge costs of keeping things going despite some all the atrocities that arose form not even considering there could be anything to improve on as soon as your code runs. If you receive critic in a code review, the first thing coming back is some lame excuse or even a counter attack, when you just should say thank you and if you don't agree at all, maybe you need to invest more time to understand and if there's some critic that's actually not useful or base don wrong assumptions, still keep in mind it's coming from somebody that invested time to read your code gather some thoughts about it and write them down for you review. So be aware of the investment behind every review of your code.
Especially for the frontend getting something to run is a incredibly low bar and not at all where you can tell yourself you did code.
Some hard truth from frontend developer to frontend developer:
Everybody with two months of experience is able to build mostly anything expected on the job. No matter if junior or senior.
So why aren't you looking for ways to find where your code is isn't as good as it could be.

Whatever money you earn on top of your junior colleagues should make you feel obligated to understand that you need to invest time and the necessary humbleness and awareness of your own weaknesses or knowledge gaps.
Looking at code, that compiles, runs and even provides the complete functionality of the user story and still feeling the needs do be stuff you don't know how to do it at the moment.

I feel like we've gotten to a point, where there are so few skilled developer, that have worked at a place that told them certain things matter a lot Whatever makes a Senior a Senior is to a big part about the questions you ask yourself about the code you wrote if if's running without any problems at all.
It's quite easy to implement whatever functionality for everybody across all experience levels but one of your most important responsibilities. Wherever you are considered/payed above junior level, the work that makes you a senior is about learning where you have been wrong looking back at your code matters (like everything).

Sorry but I just didn't finde a way to write this down in a more positive and optimistic manner.

And while it might be easy to think I'm just enjoying to attack (former) colleaues thing that makes me sad the most is that this is not only about us, it's also about the countless juniors, that struggle to get a food in the door.
To me it's not about talent nor do I believe that people wouldn't be able to change.
Sometimes I'm incredibly disappointed in many frontend colleagues. It's not about your skill or anything. It's a matter of having the right attitude.
It's about Looking for things you need to work in (in your code). And investing time while always staying humble enough to learn and iterate on things. It's about looking at you
Ar code and looking for things you didn't solve properly.

Never forget, whenever there's a job listing that's fording those crazy amount of work experience in years, or somebody giving up after repeatedly getting rejected it might also be on the code you write and the attitude that 's keeping you looking for things that show how awesome you are instead of investing work into understanding where you lack certain skills, invest into getting to know about the things you currently don't know yet.
If you, like me, work in a European country and gathered some years of industry experience in your CV you will be payed a good amount of money compared to many hard working professions in other industries. And don't forget, you're also getting payed significantly more than the colleagues that just started at their first job.
No reason to feel guilty but maybe you should feel like forcing yourself to look for whatever aspect of your work is the weakest.

There's so many colleagues, especially in the frontend that just suck while they could be better just by gaining awareness that there code isn't perfect.

Because of the amount of complaining I do at work concerning legacy php applications the HOD is trying to push for different technologies to use for backend services. We have met multiple times to discuss the proper way of handling the situation since there are a lot of very obvious things to consider regarding the push for a new tech stack. The typical names have come about, but my biggest issue will be training people for these stacks.

Testing environments with docker and so forth, push for CERTAIN applications to be more API centric and the use of better frontend frameworks that will remain standard for years to come(hard to bet on this one but I tend to orefer React) among other things are the topics of conversation.

Personally I would love to move the shop to something geared towards Golang, thing is, the lead dev is complaining about it saying that the training for a new language would just take time. After a couple of examples he is still not convinced.

I think its wrong of him to center himself on just PHP and JQUERY as the main development stack he uses and learning new things should be part of the job, I also have a case against the spaghetti code that results from just using vanilla php with no proper development practices(composer based systems, oop etc etc you get the gist)

In the end I am starting to think that it will become one of those "fuck off I am the boss" type of deal since I am going to be here after a long time and he has about 2 years before he medically retire.

I think I finally, really, comprehend why secret societies have historically been created... I mean the potentially logical ones. This train of thought is logically terrifying.

I want a logic check.

I've been jokingly mentioning some of my totally true, practically useless in most scenarios, skills/specific fields of knowledge/ability under a moniker of 'extremely useful, assuming apocalyptic event' for years. Things like advanced knowledge of Coefficients of glass expansion, Fortran, various things that have caused friends to refer to me as MacGyver after the reboot came out.

In recent years, I've personally encountered several varieties of the ones defined by helplessness, self-victimisation, some version of a real disability... that theyve expounded into a personified personal nemesis-- to flashily battle yet never overcome, etc... the vast majority perplexing me as to why that's a valid form of life to them... it's not that they never consider some other way; the ball is just quickly dropped and never picked back up.

College?(not that I'm a big fan) they wish they could but so expensive... aide? The form was hard/confusing/past-due...

Lookup/learn something more indepth than a tiktok? *some self-deprecating bs*

Yet it's "I always wanted to do/be/learn X"

Shows like 'How It's Made' fascinate, but don't inspire enough for a 5min google query.

In the dev world its a clear, inverted pyramid-- one of the first posts I saw when I rejoined here was ostream's rant on Apple sucking because after they stop support/updates you "can't" load a different OS... ofc you can. But several comments down... no mention of that... i think it was @LensFlare who was the only one in ~15 respondents to point out the core logical fallacy.

Basic shit is totally forgotten... try asking some random adults what plastic is made from... or pay attention to how many people declare they have a gluten "allergy".

I get people frequently telling me that things im pointing out as differences don't matter because "it's just semantics"... semantics is literally the epitome of "significance", with roots in 'meaning' and 'truth'

Back to the main issue... We are in a world where DIY is typically something you pay more to do as a catered experience than actually learning anything, people destroy their own arguments hopes of validity unwittingly often by stating the arguement, get 'offended' or 'triggered' by factual statements, propagate misinformation and bastardise words until MW needs money enough to print a new version, likely adding the misuse as an actual definition and basic knowledge and the thought to actually learn is vetoed by the existence of google translate, the wisdom of tiktok and the pure brillance of troubleshooting every random linux issue you have from not knowing basic CLI and thinking linux makes you cool, with chmod 777 because so many other dumbasses on forums keep propagating misinformation. Ask them what 777 means, most have no clue... as they didnt consider googling that one before putting it in a terminal several times.
The number of humans that actually know the basic shit that the infrastructure of the world is built on keeps decreasing... and we aren't even keeping a running tally.

The structure of the internet has the right idea... dns- 13 active master root servers, with multiple redundancies if they start dropping... hell ICANN is like a secret society but publicly known/obfuscated... the modern internet hasnt had a global meltdown... aside from the lack of censorship and global availability changing the social definition of a valid use of braincells to essentially propagating spam as if it's factual and educational.

So many 'devs' so few understanding what a driver is, much less how to write one... irl network techs that don't know what dhcp is or that their equiptment has logs... professionals in deducated fields like Autism research/coping... no clue why it was called "autism", obesity and malnutrition simultaneously existing in the same humans... it's like we need to prepare a subterranean life-supporting vault and stock it like Noah's ark... just including the basic knowledge of things that used to be common/obvious. I've literally had 2 different, early 20s, female, certified medical assistants taking my medical history legitimately ask if not having a uterus made it harder to get pregnant...i wish i was joking.

Any ideas better than a subterranean human vault system? It's not like we can simply store detailed explanations, guides, media... unless we find a way to make them into obfuscated tiktok videos apparently on nonsense or makeup tutorials.

I’ve become so indecisive in terms of knowing what I want from my career.
All I know is what I don’t want (to end up a in management)

I’m definitely getting a new job and right now it looks like I’ve got 3 offers on the table

Option 1, a previous company I worked for. Still the same problems with the company there as before but the work was interesting and unusual. and my line manager was a good guy.
They have practically no legacy code.
Not much in the way of company benefits but they’re local and it would be nice to see friends again.
So feels like the pull to this is strong.

Option 2, a fully remote company that I’ve been referred to by an ex-workmate.
They’ve not even tech tested me because they’ve read my blogs and GitHub repos instead and said they’re impress. So just had a conversation with them. I feel honoured that they took the time to look at what I’ve done in my own time and use that in their decision.
Benefits are slightly better than option 1 (more hols)
But they’re using .net 6 and get a lot of heavy use on their system and have some big customers. I think the work is integrations to start with and moving services into docker and azure.

Option 3, even though I’ve got an offer from this one but they can’t actually explain the work until We can arrange a call next week (they recruit and then work out what team your in, but Christmas got in the way of me having a call with them straight away)
It’s working on government systems and .net is their least used stack so probably end up switching to Java. Maybe other tech stacks too.
This place has much better benefits than option 1 and 2 (more hols and more pension), but 2 days a week in office.

All of the above pay the same salary.

Having choice feels almost as bad as having no choice.
It’s doing my head in thinking about it , (even tho I might as well not think about it at all until the call with option 3 happens).

On the one hand with option 3, using a tech stack that’s new to me might be refreshing, as I’ve done .net for 10 years.

On the other hand I really like c# and I’m very good at it. So it feels a bit like I should be capitalising on that and using my experience to shape how the dev is done. Not sure I and I can do that with option 3, at least for a while.
C# feels like it’s moving forward nicely and I’m not sure I can say the same for Java or other languages.

I love programming and learning new stuff but so unable to let things go. It’s like I have a fear that c# will move on without me and I’ll end up turning into one of those devs whose skills are a decade out of date.

Maybe the early years of my career formed me in this way.
Early on I worked at a company where there was a high number of Cobol devs who thought they had a job for life.
But then redundancies came and many left. Of those who stayed they had to cross train to Java and they just couldn’t do it.

I don’t think the tech was hard for them, I think they were just so used to not learning that they could no longer adapt.
Think most of them ended up retiring after trying to learn Java for a few years.

There is so much confusion in the world of programming right now, at least for me. I bet there’s only so many concepts going on and that these concepts are realized in certain ways. E.g. programming following certain paradigms and practices, also different workflows, containerization, agile, devops etc.

When searching for tutorials in different subjects it’s horribly aggravating to learn to use the tools. Not because they are inherently hard or bad in any way. There’s just so many different tutorials, some badly given, some that are great but which bring up to many foundations you already know so you find yourself getting bored to the point that you just stop listening. Many tools are used for so many use cases, sometimes overlapping each other, they use concepts to that you’ve heard hundreds of times before. Many times they want to do things in a special way so even if the concepts are the same you still need to fucking listen to the same old thing while learning how to write a command a slightly different way or how some tool is supposedly better than another.

I’m realizing that what I’m so sick of is the lack of TLDR information about new tools with some short description of how to use. Where you didn’t have to re-hear stuff you already knew or had heard so many times unless for a very good purpose, such as to show exactly how it’s done differently than another relevant tool. In a dream world the TLDR information could also remember my skills and remove the parts I didn’t need to know about any new tool.

!rant
Learning iOS/Swift Programmer here.

I feel like Apple’s Developer Documentation is extremely hard to parse.
For one problem, it feels like there are 50 similar ways to deal with it; but only one way will actually work.

There also aren’t enough examples in the docs for me either, they just seem to go: “Here’s some code, figure out what it’s purpose is.” for most things.

I also feel stupid, because I’m using the Hacking with Swift tutorials to learn iOS Development(Great Tutorials Though); and I don’t know how to just build an app from scratch. (i.e. creating swift files and assets and compiling from the terminal.)

And using StackOverflow feels like cheating.

Lastly, I feel awful inside when other people see my work and think I’m a genius, when really, I feel like I barely know anything at all.

I’m I alone in this observation?
Or just dumb?

Hey guys, first time writing here.
Around 8 months ago I joined a local company, developing enterprise web apps. First time for me working in a "real" programming job: I've been making a living from little freelance projects, personal apps and private programming lessons for the past 10 years, while on the side I chased the indie game dev dream, with little success. Then, one day, realized I needed to confront myself with the reality of 'standard' business, where the majority of people work, or risk growing too old to find a stable job.
I was kinda excited at first, looking forward to learning from experienced professionals in a long-standing company that has been around for decades. In the past years I coded almost 100% solo, so I really wanted to learn some solid team practices, refine my automated testing skills, and so on. Also, good pay, flexible hours and team is cool.

Then... I actually went there.

At first, I thought it was me. I thought I couldn't understand the code because I was used reading only mine.
I thought that it was me, not knowing well enough the quirks of web development to understand how things worked.
I though I was too lazy - it was shocking to see how hard those guys worked: I saw one guy once who was basically coding with one hand, answering a mail with another, all while doing some technical assistance on the phone.

Then I started to realize.

All projects are a disorganized mess, not only the legacy ones - actually the "green" products are quite worse.
Dependency injection hell: it seems like half of the code has been written by a DI fanatic and the other half by an assembly nostalgic who doesn't really like this new hippy thing called "functions".
Architecture is so messed up there are methods several THOUSANDS of lines long, and for the love of god most people on the team don't really even know WHAT those methods are for, but they're so intertwined with the rest of the codebase no one ever dares to touch them.
No automated test whatsoever, and because of the aforementioned DI hell, it's freaking hard to configure a testing environment (I've been trying for two days during my days off, with almost no success).
Of course documentation is completely absent, specifications are spread around hundreds of mails and opaquely named files thrown around personal shared folders, remote archives, etc.

So I rolled my sleeves up and started crunching as the rest of the team. I tried to follow the boy-scout rule, when the time and scope allowed. But god, it's hard. I'm tired as fuck, I miss working on my projects, or at least something that's not a complete madness. And it's unbearable to manually validate everything (hundreds of edge cases) by hand.

And the rest of the team acts like it's all normal. They look so at ease in this mess. It's like seeing someone quietly sitting inside a house on fire doing their stuff like nothing special is going on.

Please tell me it's not this way everywhere. I want out of this. I also feel like I'm "spoiled", and I should just do like the others and accept the depressing reality of working with all of this. But inside me I don't want to. I developed a taste for clean, easy maintainable code and I don't want to give it up.

A beginner in learning java. I was beating around the bushes on internet from past a decade . As per my understanding upto now. Let us suppose a bottle of water. Here the bottle may be considered as CLASS and water in it be objects(atoms), obejcts may be of same kind and other may differ in some properties. Other way of understanding would be human being is CLASS and MALE Female be objects of Class Human Being. Here again in this Scenario objects may differ in properties such as gender, age, body parts. Zoo might be a class and animals(object), elephants(objects), tigers(objects) and others too, Above human contents too can be added for properties such as in in Zoo class male, female, body parts, age, eating habits, crawlers, four legged, two legged, flying, water animals, mammals, herbivores, Carnivores.. Whatever.. This is upto my understanding. If any corrections always welcome. Will be happy if my answer modified, comment below.

And for basic level.

Learn from input, output devices

Then memory wise cache(quick access), RAM(runtime access temporary memory), Hard disk (permanent memory) all will be in CPU machine. Suppose to express above memory clearly as per my knowledge now am writing this answer with mobile net on. If a suddenly switch off my phone during this time and switch on.Cache runs for instant access of navigation,network etc.RAM-temporary My quora answer will be lost as it was storing in RAM before switch off . But my quora app, my gallery and others will be on permanent internal storage(in PC hard disks generally) won't be affected. This all happens in CPU right. Okay now one question, who manages all these commands, input, outputs. That's Software may be Windows, Mac ios, Android for mobiles. These are all the managers for computer componential setup for different OS's.

Java is high level language, where as computers understand only binary or low level language or binary code such as 0’s and 1’s. It understand only 00101,1110000101,0010,1100(let these be ABCD in binary). For numbers code in 0 and 1’s, small case will be in 0 and 1s and other symbols too. These will be coverted in byte code by JVM java virtual machine. The program we write will be given to JVM it acts as interpreter. But not in C'.

Let us C…

Do comment. Thank you

Having a lot of bad experiences while working as intern in startups and about to join a MNC, i wanted to share my work life balance and technical demands that i expect from a company. These are going to be my list of checkpoints that i look forward , let me know which of them are way too unrealistic. also add some of yours if i missed anything :

Work life balance demands ( As a fresher, i am just looking forward for 1a, 2a and 8, but as my experience and expertise grows, i am looking forward for all 10. Would i be right to expect them? ):

1a 8 hr/day. 1b 9h/day
2a 5days/week. 2b 6 days/week
3 work from home (if am not working on something that requires my office presence)
4 get out of office whenever i feel like i am done for the day
5 near to home/ office cab service
6 office food/gym service
7 mac book for working
8 2-4 paid leaves/month
9 paid overtime/work on a holiday
10.. visa sponsorship if outside india

Tech Demands (most of them would be gone when i am ready to loose my "fresher " tag, but during my time in internship, training i always wished if things happened this way):

1. I want to work as a fresher first, and fresher means a guy who will be doing more non tech works at first than going straight for code. For eg, if someone hires me in the app dev team, my first week task should be documenting the whole app code / piece of it and making the test cases, so that i can understand the environment/ the knowledge needed to work on it

2. Again before coding the real meaningful stuff for the main product, i feel i should be made to prepare for the libraries ,frameworks,etc used in the product. For eg if i don't know how a particular library ( say data binding) used in the app, i should be asked to make a mini project in 1-2 days using all the important aspects of data binding used in the project, to learn about it. The number of mini tasks and time to complete them should be given adequately , as it is only going to benefit the company once am proficient in that tech

3. Be specific in your tasks for the fresher. You don't want a half knowledgeable fresher/intern think on its own diverging from your main vision and coding it wrong. And the fresher is definitely not wrong for doing so , if you were vague on the first place.

4. most important. even when am saying am proficient , don't just take my word for it. FUCKIN REVIEW MY CODE!! Personally, I am a person who does a lot of testing on his code. Once i gave it to you, i believe that it has no possible issues and it would work in all possible cases. But if it isn't working then you should sit with me and we 2 should be looking, disccussing and debugging code, and not just me looking at the code repeatedly.

4. Don't be too hard on fresher for not doing it right. Sometimes the fresher might haven't researched so much , or you didn't told him the exact instructions but that doesn't mean you have the right to humiliate him or pressurize him

5. Let multiple people work on a same project. Sometimes its just not possible but whenever it is, as a senior one must let multiple freshers work on the same project. This gives a sense of mutual understanding and responsibility to them, they learn how to collaborate. Plus it reduces the burden/stress on a single guy and you will be eventually getting a better product faster

Am i wrong to demand those things? Would any company ever provide a learning and working environment the way i fantasize?

I went to an interview a few days ago, just out of curiousity, even though i was sure that i won't be getting any "android developer jobs" there . it was a mega job fair. in one company, me and my friend neil(fake name) went. the interviewer guy was willing to give neil a package upto 10LPA (its a great offer for freshers in my country) based on his current skills of php js, react,angular, ... web stuff .
I had this assumption( and neil did too , we both kind off had the same mindset) that a company teaches us things, we just have to be a little famous/accomplished. So i thought why not? i am accomplished. i got 2 apps on playstore, i am an AAD certified Android dev and know a lot of android stuff, i am quite famous. i am equally as deserving as neil.

But what happenned was something different. When my turn came, the interviewer said " If you have no knowledge of phy/js/node/angular, why are you sitting here?" to which i said " i presumed company would teach me, since i bring some level of expertise from other fields"

so he told me some hard truths **"Companies are fast paced. they don't have time to train you in everything. we seek for candidates having some level of knowledge in the domain, so that we could brush up your skills, increase your knowledge to current requirement and push you to production engineer asap, so that you could be worthy of your salary"**

This is completely correct. i have stuck myself in such a career that its very difficult to sell myself for other job profiles. And from what i have seen, companies seek a very high level of proficiency in this field and rarely recruit freshers( or even if they do, salaries will be aweful)

. Now i am so unsure about what to do next:

A.) keep learning more and more of android and look for job in it. And even if am getting an aweful job offer, just sulk and take it
B.) do open source work/gsoc work?( its a good way to earn more recognition/stipend/knowledge and sometimes even job offers)
C.) learn web dev, data sciences, blockchain, cloud or other stuff that i don't yet know
D.) go back to ds algo / competitive? (because having good competitive knowledge is a safe zone. you are assumed as apure fresher with 0 level of practical knowledge but good level of mathemetics)

I know i am going suck in all of the above except maybe (A) or (B) because (C) is something that am unsure would grab my interest (and even if it did, i am sure i need another 1-2 years to be somewhat good at it) and (D) is something i myself know am uncapable of , i am an average shit in maths(but might mug it all up if i pull all nighters for 1 year)

I am thinking to make a SoundCloud clone as per project for learning purpose. Can you suggest the better way to proceed.what is the best stack and how music uploading and streaming should be handled. I want to do it hard way.

Not learning how to study and focus on something at High Schools. I'm learning the hard way, i often don't have time to plan a thing as i wish, i just have to do a quick plan, hope for the best, and eventually learn something in the end.

!rant "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."

I'm learning Java/Android Development with the Udacity Nanodegree (hey we all gotta start somewhere). Got to one project that was intended just to demonstrate use of basic form elements in a static quiz. Predicted time was about 20m I think.

Three days, much hair pulling, and many SO pages later I've built a little app that displays any number and type of question, dynamically generating the views.

I may do things the hard way, but I learn a heck of a lot more for doing so.

I finished a coding bootcamp, but I still feel like a total beginner. I was hand held throughout the whole god damn thing! Sure, it's my fault for not studying the way I was supposed to, BUT GOD DAMN!!! I mean it's so hard not to copy code if it's right in front of you.. Oh well, a learning experience nonetheless.. Going for the Odin Project now with a different approach! Fingers crossed

Damn lots of you knew this shit before turning of age.
I didn't code a single line until I went to college.
I tried to, but it was just too fucking complicated and I didn't understand a thing. Tried to grasp how to use some tools like Unity or an Adventure Maker of sorts and something called Flix for Flash games. Didn't understand shit.
I decided to study systems engineering due to a career aptitude test I took hoping somehow that way I could learn sthg.
First thing I was taught was bash.
When I realised I already knew enough to code a whole text adventure from scratch with such a simple language I felt really hyped.
Always loved text and graphic adventures.
Afterwards I was taught the Z80 assembly language and how CPU registers worked and it blew my fucking mind.
That was the first half-year.
Then I was taught C. And boy was it hard. Didn't get how memory was being handled until the very end.
I happened to be one of the few passing a stupidly complicated semifinal test with triple indirection pointers.
That felt goood.
Learning other languages afterwards was a piece of cake. C#, Java, X86 assembly, C++...
It was a hard door to open. Fucking heavy. But now nothing seems black magic anymore and boy isn't that something to be proud of! :D

A year ago I built my first todo, not from a tutorial, but using basic libraries and nw.js, and doing basic dom manipulations.

It had drag n drop, icons, and basic saving and loading. And I was satisfied.

Since then I've been working odd jobs.

And today I've decided to stretch out a bit, and build a basic airtable clone, because I think I can.
And also because I hate anything without an offline option.

First thing I realized was I wasn't about to duplicate all the features of a spreadsheet from scratch. I'd need a base to work from.

I spent about an hour looking.
Core features needed would be trivial serialization or saving/loading.

Proper event support for when a cell, row, or column changed, or was selected. Necessary for triggering validation and serialization/saving.

Custom column types.

Embedding html in cells.

Reorderable columns

Optional but nice to have:

Changeable column width and row height.

Drag and drop on rows and columns.

Right click menu support out of the box.

After that hour I had a few I wanted to test.

And started looking at frameworks to support the SPA aspects.

Both mithril and riot have minimal router support. But theres also a ton of other leightweight frameworks and libraries worthy of prototyping in, solid, marko, svelte, etc.
I didn't want to futz with lots of overhead, babeling/gulping/grunting/webpacking or any complex configuration-over-convention.

Didn't care for dom vs shadow dom. Its a prototype not a startup.

And I didn't care to do it the "right way". Learning curve here was antithesis to experimenting. I was trying to get away from plugin, configuration-over-convention, astronaut architecture, monolithic frameworks, the works.

Could I import the library without five dozen dependancies and learning four different tools before getting to hello world?
"But if you know IJK then its quick to get started!", except I don't, so it won't. I didn't want that.

Could I get cheap component-oriented designs?

Was I managing complex state embedded in a monolith that took over the entire layout and conventions of my code, like the world balanced on the back of a turtle?

Did it obscure the dom and state, and the standard way of doing things or *compliment* those?

As for validation, theres a number of vanilla libraries, one of which treats validation similar to unit testing, which seems kinda novel.

For presentation and backend I could do NW.JS, which would remove some of the complications, by putting everything in one script. Or if I wanted to make it a web backend, and avoid writing it in something that ran like a potato strapped to a nuclear rocket (visual studio), I could skip TS and go with python and quart, an async variation of flask.
This has the advantage that using something thats *not* JS, namely python, for interacting with a proper database, and would allow self-hosting or putting it online so people can share data and access in real time with others.

And because I'm horrible, and do things the wrong way for convenience, I could use tailwind.
Because it pisses people off.

How easy (or hard) would it be to recreate a basic functional clone of the core of airtable?

I don't know, but I have feeling I'm going to find out!

Feel like shit, can't focus on work, exam coming up in about 2 weeks...
These stupid numerical algorithms are easy, and yet I manage to get stuck on every shitty little detail, I panic, and I completely lose focus.

This shit has been destroying my academic career... Can't focus properly anymore, cannot study even the simplest things - things that I used to do off the top of my head just a year ago.

My sleep schedule is FUBAR, it's a miracle if I manage to stick to the same timezone for three nights in a row.

Yet I'm still learning new things, trying out stuff and solving problems. Just not the ones that I need to pass my exams.
And before anyone says that university is useless and whatnot: I'm studying aerospace engineering.
I love it, I'm having great fun, learning amazing things, and I've met a lot of amazing people thanks to it. It's one of the few choices in life that I am certain of, and would gladly repeat over and over again.

I've burned myself out from stress, far harder and longer than I've ever done before, and I cannot figure out a way to recover from it.
I've been doing better in the last month or so, but I still cannot get any proper work done, and this is gonna bite me in the ass really hard, once again.

Funny story: I had 3 days of break between the end of the previous semester and the beginning of this one. 3 days of pure freedom.
In those 3 days, I spontaneously reverted to a normal sleep schedule (didn't even need an alarm clock) and felt like a mountain had been lifted off my shoulders.

A year ago I had no idea what truly panicking in the middle of an exam felt like.
My mind had never gone completely blank.
I had no idea what impaired cognitive ability felt like.
This shit is scary.

Why do our minds have to make things so complicated?

!rant;

In uni I took an experimental physics course which was hard af but a lot of fun, and it was the 1st time I really appreciated science as it’s own perspective, like a completely different way of looking at the world. It was a great experience. I feel the same way about coding, like i see and think and interact with things differently thru the perspective of development and it feels really good to be learning such an honestly world-expanding skill and art 😊😊😊