Back when I was in school (about 15 years old) and I played games, I had a particularly favourite game that I would play. It was a lesser known strategy game made by a single hobbyist Dev.

I was already known in the community for making some mods for the game and chatbots.

What most people didn't know was that I had made a map hack and various other cheats that made it significantly easier to win by reverse engineering the game and modifying the x86 assembly in ollydbg.
One thing in particular I had been working on at the time was a game replay editor. I had reverse engineered the saved game (replay) format and was able to replay them, edit them and generate them.

During one particular match, a person in the community particularly annoyed me and I edited the saved game to change what his moves were and the words he spoke. It made him look a bit like an idiot but IMHO was only a slight exaggeration of the truth.
I posted the game replay on the forums and everyone was in hysterics about the crazy things he did and said in the replay.
As no one knew I had this capability they all believed the replay and even the guy in the replay couldn't believe it himself and didn't understand what happened. He just kept telling everyone it didn't happen and the 'truth is in the pudding'.

Although I originally intended to tell everyone what I did, I never did and whenever the guy entered in to a game everyone would laugh about it and say 'the truth was in the pudding'.

He was no longer annoying me and it sort of made me feel like a god at the time.
So that's my wk65.

!rant
I must be dreaming .... Honestly! I am with a client that knows what he wants and has no problem to express it in clear words. They understand my tech talk and talk back in tech as well. We are on the same page regarding best practises. They envy my work and have really good ideas and express constructive criticism. What is going on here? I must be in a parallel universe or something?
Okay, one downside... Coffee is not free but a cup is 20ct, which is quite alright imho anyway. Oh, the even bigger downside... Things have been so constructive that my time there is almost over since shit got actually done in the most efficient way ever!

Hi everyone. I'm new to this. Been lurking for a quiet some time. Best community ever IMHO ☺ Started my first programming language as c++ now somehow ended as web developer as hobby. Big shout out for you guys love your all stories ♥

When a normal person says "IMHO", it means "In my humble opinion"

When a programmer says "IMHO", its means "You are wrong".

Not laughing.

Not cursing.

Both for interviewing and being interviewed.

Some interviews could have been taken straight from a mexican telenovela.......

"Yeah, I worked for a year in the Walmart IT administration."

"Ok, what did you do?"

"Oh I had the high responsibility of taking care of swapping printer cartridges, programming the registers, stuff like that..."

"You apply for a senior database management role, you're aware of that?"

"Yeah. I took a bootcamp for 3 months in the evening after work. I'm up for the job and expect a payment of <lol, even having a stroke while writing a payment check that number will never happen>".

I made that up - but we had these cases... The story is just rewritten and mixed up for obvious reasons.

When I'm being interviewed, the same thing can happen by the way, too.

IMHO a interview is made not only for the company, but for me as an employee, too. I don't sugar coat it. I want to know what type of shit I'm getting into and how much I'm drowning in it.

Some "types" of interviewers react kinda funny when I start roasting them with questions...

For example, the authoritarian type usually reacts with disrespect. How dare u piss on my front lawn.... Kind of reaction. Which makes it hard not too laugh, because who wants to work for someone who throws a tamper tantrum during a interview? Even harder when the same guy promised you heaveb before (the flowery kind of bullshit, like everything's peaceful and fine and teams great and they have such a great leadership...)

Even worse is the patsy.

When you're sitting in an interview and the only answers you get are:

- Sorry, I don't know.
- I'm not allowed to ....
- Not in my area of expertise....

All just nice ways of saying: I will say nothing cause then I'd need to take some responsibility.

:)

The most Mexican telenovela stuff though in being interviewed is when I managed to divide a team of interviewers and it starts to become a "Judge Judy" or similar freaked out justice show...

A: "No, our team doesn't work that way".
B: "But you will in the short future, WE committed to it".
C: "Not that I'm aware of".

And me, an obvious sinner and person who enjoys entertainment and schadenfreude, just keeps adding kerosene to the fire.

"So, it seems like the team of A has its own rules which do not apply to B and C, do they also have greater funding?".

Oh it makes just fun to spur a good blood bath.

Why do people hate windows 10? Granted I'm not super picky about my OS but windows 10 works just fine for me, and looks better than win7 imho.

I just realized why you should never help people with tech problems, at least for free.

I went to grab the rent from a family that lives in my grandma's childhood home.

The father asks me if I could have a look at their new internet connection because it doesn't open any pages on the browser.

After fiddling for about an hour and a half trying every trick in the book and gently explaining to his children how everything is supposed to work (kids need to learn how these machines work imho) I ask him to give me his service provider number and confirmed that indeed the problem was that the connection wasn't activated on their side. Installed chrome, set the date,/time because it wouldn't sync and told them twice how to get past the certificate problem should some page not open. Smiles all around, all is well.

Fast forward next to next morning and I get a call from the guy telling me his internet doesn't work because he pulled out the power cable for whatever reason. I instruct him to restart the router just to be sure and then ask him what's on the screen. Turns out it was the certificate problem. I try as best I can explaining and reminding him how to get past but he doesn't understand. He goes on asking me to "come over for 5minutes and have a look at it". I politely tell him that just the trip is half an hour and that I am currently in the middle of exams to finish university. His tone becomes increasingly passive aggressive as I tell him again that it's isn't possible for me to make the time for a one hour round trip at the moment. Hangs up with a grim "right right whatever you say."

First time I was genuinely angry at a person being both so ungrateful after helping them and not even trying to fix something after I took the time to explain it to them.

Does linux suck? Imho, Yes.
A lot of the people bash windows regarding automatic restarts, updates, bsod etc.
I may be unusually lucky, but the last bsod I saw was in 2014 because of a faulty synaptics driver.

I've really tried to use linux to see what the hype is all about. Quite frankly, it sucked. The first time it wiped out all my data, I realized the value of backups. Hence I do not have a single pic of my school now, thanks to complicated ubuntu mounting.
Next is driver support. When I plug in a device, I expect it to work. I don't want to spend a day googling for drivers.
Why the fuck would I want to use a black terminal which gives me a headache. Am I in 1980? Which sadistic asshole designed vim ?
I have seen linux developers who claim to be linux experts and love linux. They take so long to do simple shit. For god's sake don't tell me there are GUI versions of linux available. I'd rather work in windows 95.
Why in the world would anyone want to use ls to see the contents of a directory! It is seriously so fucking unproductive.
I can't just download a software, click next a couple of times, and be done. No no no. I've to do sudo apt get update. Then try to find the fucking package. And if all goes well, there's always the dependency issue which is going to bite me in the ass. If google and stackoverflow go down, most linux devs will die a cruel death.

Fuck you linux.
I'm not saying windows 10 is the best, but at least I don't have to crawl through shit to use it. If you don't like automatic updates, disable it you moron. It is easier than renaming a damn file in linux.

IMHO: all the hate on Katie bouman is absolutely stupid. if you want to blame someone, blame the media for portraying her as the sole person on the project. She never once took credit only for herself and always mentions that it's a team effort. And what the fuck is so wrong that the focus is on the woman engineer anyways? If this was a man, no one would give a shit that he "didn't give credit to his team"

doNotMessWithITTeamInAFuckingProject();

Last night me with my team have a discussion with my project team. Currently we have a project for our insurance client building a Learning Management System. The project condition already messed up since the first day i join a meeting. Because since its a consortium project with multiple company involved, one of company had a bad experience with another company. It happened few years back when both of company were somehow break up badly because miss communication (i heard this from one of my team).

Skip..skip... And then day to day like another stereotype IT projects when client and business analyst doing requirements gathering, the specs seems unclear and keep changing day by day even when I type this rant I'm sure it will change again.

Then something happened last night when my team leader force our business analyst to re index the use case number (imho) this is no need to be done, and i know the field conditions its so tough for all team members.

So many problems occured, actually this is a boring problem like lack of dev resource, lack of project management and all other stereotype IT projects had. Its sucks why this things is happening again.

Finally my fellow business analyst type a quite long message in our group and said that he maybe quit because its too tired and he felt that the leader only know about push push pushhhhhy fcking pussy, he never go to the client site and look what we've done and what we struggle so far.

I just don't know why, i know this guy earlier was an IT geek also, but when he leading a team he act like he never done IT project before, just know about pushing people without knowing what the context and sound to me like just rage push!

Damnit, i maybe quit also, you know we IT guy never affraid to quit anytime from the messed up condition like this. Even though we were at the bottom level in a project, but we hold the most main key for development.

Hope he (my leader) read this rant. And can realize what happened and fix this broken situation. I don't know what to say again, im in steady mode to quit anytime if something chaos happen nearly in the future.

doNotMessWithITTeamInAFuckingProject();

abstract class :
protected virtual void doSomething()
{
//some stuff
}

child class
protected override void doSomething()
{
base.doSomething();

}

IMHO this is what go fuck yourself means.......

I think most people are annoyed by the new design of chrome, for all the wrong reasons - I just noticed the TLS indicator lock is now gray when encrypted, giving you the idea of a website being not fully secure imho

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, but I'm fucking sick of my experience with the world.

I have a feeling that all that 1984 conspiracy type of ideas that I previously considered bullshit and fear mongering are real.

(Just to be clear, I'm not including most conspiracy theories which are very ignorant like flat earth, fake moon landing, or antivax, the people that spread those theories can die a horrible death IMHO).

Corporation consolidation is a fact and appears to become irreversible.

Because of technology, I can stay in the comfort of my house, safe from crime and be entertained without needing to have direct contact with humans.
People might say "that's your fault for not leaving the house". True but that is just how the world is.

The outside world in the cities I lived in is not a welcoming place.
Hell if you fucking find a bench it's a goddamn miracle, and if you do and sit for a long time, the police stares at you like you are up to something.

People don't talk to you because "don't talk to strangers".
It can be rare to find water or a bathroom that isn't a complete shithole.

So no wonder I rather stay at home, the outside world is hostile.

So yeah, go to a mall or something. And consume, consume, consume, because the outdoors suck.

Many pioneers thought technology was to improve the quality of life.

But no, it's just more isolation, less direct contact with people, less giving a fuck about other people.

And that's how feel about people of today. The least amount of fuck giving about others possible.

You would you would connect to more people faster, but no, the result is just millions of people browsing through the same "entertainment", shitty aggregated content.

Yes, consolidation affects internet too. Everything goes through fucking google, youtube, or whatever other fucking top 10 company.

Just like the class disparity, 1% of the things online get 99% of the exposure.

So if you're a small time anything, basically fuck you, because you're not something enormous.

Like, I wished I was a game developer, but there's thousands of brilliant indie games that get released every year, and they barely make what they're worth.
So why should I fucking try? So I can get ruined financially and I don't have a place to live in?

Software itself is so complex that is impossible to scrutinize decently.
We all laugh at congressmen asking the zuck silly questions.

Out of touch, true, but in hindsight, it is true to some extent that software is hard to regulate. Every software I on earth doesn't meet some standard one way or another.

Or maybe it's just too many of us right now.
When people scroll their search results to get access to the things they should be interested in, the only practical interface right now is being showing one link at a time.
But there's millions and millions of results.

One redeeming aspect of life is that one day I won't be alive anymore to observe the disgusting world we live in.

This could be just pure rambling and I can't prove any of the things I'm saying, I could just have been making the wrong friendships. So take this with a grain of salt.

"So Alecx, how did you solve the issues with the data provided to you by hr for <X> application?"

Said the VP of my institution in charge of my department.

"It was complex sir, I could not figure out much of the general ideas of the data schema since it came from a bunch of people not trained in I.T (HR) and as such I had to do some experiments in the data to find the relationships with the data, this brought about 4 different relations in the data, the program determined them for me based on the most common type of data, the model deemed it a "user", from that I just extracted the information that I needed, and generated the tables through Golang's gorm"

VP nodding and listening intently...."how did you make those relationships?" me "I started a simple pattern recognition module through supervised mach..." VP: Machine learning, that sounds like A.I

Me: "Yes sir, it was, but the problem was fairly easy for the schema to determ.." VP: A.I, at our institution, back in my day it was a dream to have such technology, you are the director of web tech, what is it to you to know of this?"

Me: "I just like to experiment with new stuff, it was the easiest rout to determine these things, I just felt that i should use it if I can"

VP: "This is amazing, I'll go by your office later"

Dude speaks wonders of me. The idea was simple, read through the CSV that was provided to me, have the parsing done in a notebook, make it determine the relationships in the data and spout out a bunch of JSON that I could use. Hook it up to a simple gorm golang script and generate the tables for that. Much simpler than the bullshit that we have in php. I used this to create a new database since the previous application had issues. The app will still have a php frontend and backend, but now I don't leave the parsing of the data to php, which quite frankly, php sucks for imho. The Python codebase will then create the json files through the predictive modeling (98% accuaracy) and then the go program will populate the db for me.

There are also some node scripts that help test the data since the data is json.

All in all a good day of work. The VP seems scared since he knows no one on this side of town knows about this kind of tech. Me? I am just happy I get to experiment. Y'all should have seen his face when I showed him a rather large app written in Clojure, the man just went 0.0 when he saw Lisp code.

I think I scare him.

Partly !rant

Another small story about my "teacher".

Today we got told again that we need to develop a personal programming style. I asked him how we were supposed to do that while being restricted by his demands. He tried to justify this with bullshit about how to not declare variables. As i told him that wasn't my point at all he stuttered and couldn't say anything. I got officially allowed to use everything i want! VICTORY SCREECH

(But restricting students on which commands they are allowed to use is still bullshit imho)

Fresh internship story (Part 2)

I just realized how dumb my temporary boss really is and how much he loves to command everyone.
I told him that I am going earlier a few days ago and he got pissed lol.
He is someone who thinks he knows everything, but he does not.
He blames everything on everyone else.
He is never wrong, we are always wrong. That is probably what he is always thinking.
Clients who enter the store are precious (makes sense-you have to handle clients well, to get more bucks), but the thing is that he even screams near the clients at us. Besides of that I am new there. Be a little bit more patient, fucking prick.
Imho he is too old for the tech industry.
He loves to use the workers as slaves.
Do you work on a laptop rn? Well... fuck that. He has a new task waiting for you.
He keeps interrupting me every 5 to 10 minutes while I am focused.
Random dialogue from today:
me:"the client did a win10 upgrade and not a regular windows update"
boss:"nope. that is a windows update."
me (internally): should I show him the folder called "Windows10.Upgrade" and the "windows.old" folder both with the same creation date in "c:"? nah, fuck that. he is gonna put himself up again. do not want to have a stronger headache than this one I am having rn. (btw. I usually do not have headaches. I get headaches like once in 5 years, but since 4 days I have it every day.)
I am sick of this.
Today I had the urge to fucking grab his fucking "fuck me please" eyes out and eat them while he hears the explosive sounds his seperated eyes do. I still want to enjoy the rest of my life without going into a prison tho.

love-hate relationship with Python semi-rant
The year is 2020.

I have already grown accustomed to the idea that in order to do ML without worrying too much about having to completely jump through hoops with the tech stack I have chosen that I would have to settle with Python, which I like.....for small scripts that don't do much other than piping data around or doing simple admin tasks, that is generally our use of Python at work.
For anything bigger I would prefer something else. Not because I find anything inherently horrible in Python, I find it to be a nice language overall, that has made it possible for many to find a passion inside of the world of development and possibly an interesting in overall engineering and computer science principles. Much respect Python, good game Guido VR, what you did changed the world.

But it is that damn whitespace that gets me, the need to use it as a way to properly write blocks, I just can't make myself like syntactical whitespace no matter what I do. I can do without static typing, shit I did it for the longest time with JS way tf before Node and Typescript were a thing, and I have done it before PHP's attempt at having type hints, which still leave much to be desired. Ruby(imho) the most elegant language around doesn't have it and that is fine really, it does not bother me as much, if mypy gets powerful and widely adopted enough it will then be a non-issue.

But another thing that the 4 languages i mentioned before have is non-existent syntactical whitespace......I just can't stand it.

So, why am I saying all of this nonsense? Today I wanted to recreate a conda environment and landed on the use of YAML............which has syntactic whitespace and I lost my shit.

I seldom bitch about languages and technologies, shit, I used VBScript before, not only did I get paid handsomely for it, but I fucking enjoyed it(probably cuz I am a masochist).

But two things I cannot abide: VBA and syntactic whitespace.

Once I get enough knowledge for it I will push for the same level of tooling in Python to be ported to Scala.

Thank you for coming to my whiny post about something as small as bitching about syntactic whitespace.

This was not exactly the worst work culture because the employees, it was because the upper level of the organization chart on the IT department.

I'm not quite sure how to translate the exact positions of that chart, but lets say that there is a General Manager, a couple of Area Managers (Infrastructure, Development), some Area Supervisors (2 or 3, by each area), and the grunts (that were us). Anyway, anything on the "Manager" was the source of all the toxicity on the department.

First and foremost, there was a lack of training for almost any employee. We were expected to know everything since day-1. Yes, the new employees had a (very) brief explanation about the technologies/languages were used, but they were expected to perform as a senior employee almost since the moment they cross the door. And forget about having some KT (Knowledge Transfer) sessions, they were none existent and if they existed, were only to solve a very immediate issue (now imagine what happened when someone quit*).

The general culture that they have to always say "yes" to the client/customer to almost anything without consulting to the development teams if that what was being asked to do was doable, or even feasible. And forget about doing a proper documentation about that change/development, as "that was needed yesterday and it needs to be done to be implemented tomorrow" (you know what I mean). This contributes to the previous point, as we didn't have enough time to train someone new because we had this absurd deadlines.

And because they cannot/wanted to say "NO", there were days when they came with an amount of new requirements that needed to be done and it didn't matter that we had other things to do. And the worst was that, until a couple of years (more or less), there was almost impossible to gather the correct requirements from the client/user, as they (managers) "had already" that requirement, and as they "know better" what the user wants, it was their vision what was being described on the requirements, not the users'...

And all that caused that, in a common basis, didn't have enough time to do all this stuff (mainly because the User Support) causing that we needed to do overtime, which almost always went unpaid (because a very ambiguous clause of the contract, and that we were "non-union workers"**). And this is my favorite point of this list, because, almost any overtime went unpaid, so basically we were expected to be working for free after the end of the work day (lets say, after the 17:00). Leaving "early" was almost a sin for the managers, as they always expected that we give more time to work that the indicated on the contract, and if not, they could raise a report to HR because the ambiguous clause allowed them to do it (among other childish things that they do).

Finally, the jewel of the crown, is that they never, but never acknowledge that they made a mistake. Never. That was impossible! If something failed on the things/systems/applications that they had assigned*** it was always our fault.

- "A report for the Finance Department is giving wrong information? It's the DBA's fault**** because although he manages that report, he couldn't imagine that I have an undocumented service (that runs before the creation the report) crashed because I modified a hidden and undocumented temporal table and forgot to update that service."

But, well, at least that's on the past. And although those aren't all the things that made that workplace so toxic, for me those were the most prominent ones.

-

* Well, here we I live it's very common to don't say anything about leaving the company until the very last day. Yes, I know that there are people that leave their "2-days notice", but it's not common (IMHO, of course). And yes, there are some of us that give a 1 or 2-weeks notice, but still it's not a common practice.

** I don't know how to translate this... We have a concept called "trusted employee", which is mainly used to describe any administrative employee, and that commonly is expected to give the 110% of what the contract says (unpaid overtimes, extra stuff to do, etc) and sadly it's an accepted condition (for whatever reasons). I chose "non-union workers" because in comparison with an union worker, we have less protections (besides the legal ways) regarding what I've described before. Curiously, there are also "operative workers", that doesn't belong to an union, but they have (sometimes) better protections that the administrative ones.

*** Yes, they were in charge of several systems, because they didn't trust us to handle/maintain them. And I'm sure that they still don't trust in their developers.

**** One of the managers, and the DBA are the only ones that handle some stuff (specially the one that involves "money"). The thing that allows to use the DBA as scapegoat is that such manager have more privileges and permissions than the DBA, as he was the previous DBA

IMHO, TBH, FWIW AREs are FUBAR! <EOR>

The best part of being dev is the community, its also the most unique one IMHO. I mean what other profession in the Whole Wide World has such great and ingrained culture of helping eachother and sharing knowledge ?

Master/Slave
Fuck you guys. Honestly most of the rants i've read concerning python and their abolishme t of sait terms where fucking butthurt. "What virgin suggested this", "people shouldn't be offended, it's just a name" and so on.

I do agree with every one saying a name shouldn't matter (readability is a different story! However parent/child or producer/consumer IMHO preserve that). So why are you fucking offended when it is changed to parent/child or produver/consumer? Does it affect you in any way? You know there's the `sed` command, plus IntelliJ (and most other IDEs) have a quite good support for renaming/refactoring stuff.

By reacting this way, by beeing offended all you do is proving the point. Words can offend people. I personally don't care how it's called. So far I always used master/slave and didn't think twice about it. But then again if someone of my coworkers or friends would feel threatened by these words, I try to avoid them. Naming diesn't matter to me, nor the compiler. So fuck, if it makes people happy or feeling save then lets change it.

What the fuck do you gain by sticking to those terms anyways?

Tried to reply to @Fast-Nop who had replied to someone wondering if C would be a good first language.

IMHO C should have been put to sleep ages ago. A few years ago I downloaded the latest, greatest C Standard. For a language billed as small and simple (by many) it was over 800 pages long. Still there's a lot that's unspecified like order of evaluation of function arguments. Int etc is implementation dependent. And error handling, let's not go there. The macro assembler throws away all the semantics leaving behind a cryptic value. It's a complex language due to the innumerable interactions possible.

It's been called assembly language for the PDP-11 minicomputer. Recently learned that even the VAX-1 was built from SSI chips like the 4-bit 74181 ALU. The VAX.

Anyway I had several excellent books on programming style written by Henry Ledgard. He despaired of making C look readable. I commend his books which are so old that the code is UPPERCASE A lot of he wrote had to do with program design, naming things, writing good comments and that the visual shape of a program assists mental clarity.

Why is the interviewing process becoming worse over the years?

About 2 years ago I applied for a company and got into 2 interviews: one with the hr to see if I am bsing them and one with the tech people, to be sure I am not using buzzwords without context. Pretty straightforward, could be done in a single interview IMHO, but it's making me waste max 2 weeks.

Fast forward to one year ago: 1 interview with the hr, 1 interview with the tech people, 1 interview with CEO (why? Just.. why?)

Fast forward to today: 1 interview with hr, 1 interview with tech people, 1 interview with the CEO (again... why?), 1 coding assignment which "it's only going to take a couple of hours" and punctually has either poorly documented APIs to rely on or has trick questions/points. So "it takes a couple of hours", but if you want to pass it you need to spend a day on it... (and let's add that they may be using old docker versions so if it doesn't work cause they are using docker 1.0 and it fails too bad, you lost time for nothing, we are not trying to solve it, you just don't pass!).

Not kidding the last assignment I took and dropped required: external API, testing, don't use CSS libraries and make your own CSS, you must use TS and it was supposed to take "3 hours max".

My question is: why? Why is the interviewing process slowly becoming less of a: "I understand that your code may not be perfect for us but that you are a human being able to reason and adapt your code to our standards" and more of a: "You must do everything PERFECTLY and we don't give a sh*t about your time, start giving us your free time and then we see if we want you."

I just keep giving up after I analyze the assignments, cause a part of my brain thinks that if this is the way a professional relationship starts it's too easy to foresee weekend shifts and lots of overtime cause some manager thinks that "come on, it just takes a couple of hours!"

variableName
vs
variable_name
<imho> I prefer the second one, it is definitely more readable </imho>

IMHO technical dept is kind of like smoking cigarettes for some decades.

You were told that shit will hit the fan but you do not take proper action. And one day you'll realize that you fucked up (or not, also seen that).

Worked for a company in IT, where we maintained an ERP which was "in progress" for over a decade. The basic implementation was done by people with zero technical understanding. To clarify: not self coded. Software was bought. We are talking about integrating the system.

Therefore, the foundation was like a wet noodle. When I joined that company, I told them that they need to address that. I told them that things will get slower and slower and that shit will hit the fan if no proper actions taken.
Even made a list with flaws I found. With potential risk and actions to take, that could then be measured.

At that time, five people worked in said department (including me).

People did not want to listen. "Would be too expensive to rewrite stuff".

Nothing has changed about the wet noodle, but I tried to fix as many things in a working system as I could. Felt like heart surgery, because changes got implemented and "tested" in prod. No version control, no documentation, everyone implemented things like they felt (no guidelines for consistency).
A lot of small fuckups that summed up over the years.

I left the company after two years because I had the chance to land a job as a dev.

Been around two years now since I left. Now 9 people work in that department with around the same efficiency as us 5 people back then.

The new employees struggle to be productive, because things are just implemented poorly and not maintainable anymore.

Had some dialogs with them some time ago. Everything I told them would happen, actually happened. What a suprise :-|
I will not go into too much detail about all the shit that's going on there, as it would be just too much (and my morning coffe is almost finished).

I think that we all know the difference between "not beautiful, but does the job" and "oh, that will backfire - badly". And I wish that my communication skills increase so that people start listening in future.

all of them. countless wasted hours.

as fate decided to turn me from $random-dev-geek into "the guy that calls the shots in tech", one of my earliest decisions was to automate formatting.

everywhere, automated at CI.

gofmt was an inspiration for the industry.
js?/ts? use prettier
C++? use ClangFormat
etc.

always default settings.
enforced by pre-commit hooks and CI.

never a single argument about bracket style, I don't care if someone likes single or double quotes better.

"fucks given" counter is fixed at 0.
everybody prefers it (ok, sometimes after a while sometimes)

of course there is still some more conventions to do for us humans.
IMHO the most critical ones.

like naming or even casing (camel, snake, kebab, - which one works where), but taking out most of the "so what" decisions takes discussions to a much more resonable level.

TFW you google an error and all you get are GitHub issues with rambling conversation and no resolution. Marginally better than having no relevant responses IMHO.

I always thought programming was not for me, simply because I'm not really good at math. I studied graphic design, but switched to an education called Interactive Multimedia Design, which teaches a combination of webdevelopment and -design. At first, I thought I'd love the design part more, and would really struggle with development, but it turned out that I was a natural; I wrote my first Java program and I fell in love with programming. 6 years later I'm a happy full stack JS developer, rarely doing any graphic work anymore. I do have a soft spot for UX still, but that only makes me better at what I do on a daily basis, imho.

Kindergarden teacher... have 3 kids myself, love to teach them stuff and do activities with them. Kids between 2 and 6 are great. They can already tell you what they need but are not yet under the pressure to perform in a competitive school system. They're the most authentic human beings imho.

Other than that, maybe something in academia. Holding lectures can be huge fun if you got at least a few motivated students.

Does anyone actually use ZorinOS as a daily driver?

I've read reviews and they call it a "gorgeous" distro... It looks like a colour pallette swap of android 4.0 and I hate to say this to them but adding wine to your distro does not make it "windows compatible"...

I like the idea of ZorinOS but the execution is just horrible imho

So I just stumbled upon a comment on an old rant after 2 hours of looking through devrant and I just have to post this ... like DUDE ARE YOU FOR REAL?!?!?! Vista !?!?! FUCKING WINDOWS VISTA!?!?! IMHO it was the worst windows ever, even WinME was not that shitty...

Ex boss bought Embarcadero Delphi, Tokyo release and showed me how the environment looks like.

Its beautiful.

Say whatever you want. The dude would shred out large af projects and soultions from delphi faster than anything else I would have seen in other places.

The bad thing about it is that be was the only one that could do it because he was the only one that knew how to use it...the docs for it suck(imho) although reading code for Delphi was easy, tedious since it was literally a top bottom like a book sort of deal, but easy.

Kinda miss it to be honest. It was an interesting experience and people do look for delphi developers and pay them a lot, wonder if I would get another chance at it one day. We were designing some rather large systems with it and it was not web oriented(for web he used ASP :P my boi was unique eh?)

Oh well, well see

(IMHO) The current system fails to identify that there are at least 2 main paths one can take in our field. Software engineering and computer science.
Software engineering should not be just a course. It should be a craft, a degree. Where one can learn practical things not just algorithms that are used in niche cases.
Computer science branch won't be that different from what we've got now. It can be even more focused on theory.

Remember kids: the more space a compression algorithm saves, the slower it is to deflate/inflate!

(imho this is why xzip isn't as mainstream as it is)

So i started an (8 month) internship in January. Team of 4 (2 senior/mid level devs + boss) plus 6 or so other people in our other office overseas. Everything was going really well IMHO. Boss's feedback for halfway through the internship was good too.

First 4/5 months were great: loved the team, got feedback and help when i needed it, wasn't stuck doing support too much, etc.

This all changed when both the devs moved to our other office. My boss works from home a lot and has frequent meetings, so i hardly see him. I have a 1 hour window first thing in the morning if i need help from the devs overseas. After that im on my own.

If i get stuck, even on something very small that a more senior dev could explain in 2 minutes, I'm stuck either unable to work or figuring it out (wasting hours of time) for the rest of the day.

On top of this, since I'm the only one around in our office, im stuck on support every week which takes hours of my time usually. Last week support ate up most of my week, which put me way behind schedule on my other work. (That was an unusually busy week of support.)

Feeling incredibly frustrated right now, just wanted to get this off my chest.

Currently making a perfect sudoku webapp / plugin using native JS and html templates where I'm very enthousiast about.

It allows to select multiple cells and then put in a number and all selected have that number. It keeps state of every change, you can do unlimited redo's. Right click or double click someehere removes selection. Not built yet, but it will have a box where you can paste sudoku's you've found on the internet. I just parse 81 times [1-9] with regex. So all formats are supported including noisy ones as long the noise is not numbers. Making your own puzzle is very easy. Art is to make hard ones. I'm generating extra hard puzzles using C threading. For reference: there are 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960 sudoku puzzles possible and from that I try to resolve the hard ones using simple human logging with brute forcing as fallback until it can use logic again. 30 million attempts to solve per secon. I should at some more logic. I don't do xwing or ywing, bs imho. You have to be a superhuman to spot xwing / ywing possibilities. I think i can imagine a better logic myself. We'll see.

And yes, that's a real screenshot. Puzzle is validated and it found issues. Marked with red font. Green is current selection by user

My first software.. Okay. So first time I ever attempted was with my father, i was around 8 or so, i remember very little from it, but in nutshell, i somehow ended up at his job having day off school or something, no idea.

Apparently he was bored, so he decided yo show me... Basic. Yep, thats right. Frking basic. Anyway, he shown me some really basic stuff in basic, and pushed the envelope really hard, just trying to force into me more and more in these 8hrs. I started with filling screen with "o" characters. Most of times he was telling me what to write with elaborate explanation why. At the end of the day, we finished with simple maze game where player was "o" and maze walls was #. Without any goal, or anything.

Next day i was at point 0, understood nothing from it except how to handle keystrokes (and belive me, that for me was huge mindblow, and even bigger mindblow that it actually made prefect sense).

I dont remember much, but later i started with father-assisted c++ and some pascal. I immidietly loved c++ but dropped learning it for (NullPointer) reason.

Thats not really project imho, so now time for my actual first project.

It was about time when ARK survival evolved was a fresh thing, i was playing it a lot. Server admin became buddy. We all complained about max level cap, but to change it in config you needed to input whole new xp curve.

At that time i had great familiarity with google and computers, some thought i was some kind of PC god (seriously I heard someone saying so about me lol) just becouse I could ressurect most cases of broken windows. And I had next to zero programming expirience. It was about to change. I made first c++ actual program, that was making xp curve for you. It took me just bearly 2 days and was series of cin, cout, one file open, some maths in loop, and done. Maths was very bad. But i pushed it into steam forums, and one guy responded how.bad my math was, so we colabed on making 2 iteration. Took around week. Than half a year passed and we wanted go big. Go gui. I had no freaking idea how making gui looks like. Community liked my cli tool, we had quite a lot of downloads, why not go GUI. And thats when I discovered QT framework. And we had few features in mind... It took us half a year to make it. From 60 lines of code i jumped into 1k lines of code. We pushed it and immidietly started working on 4th version with much greater customizability etc.

Than i finished 18 and found a job. Job in php. I got it becouse I made this project.

Now project is abandon. This project also gave me a lesson that donations will not feed you.

Edit: and before you think about my father that he was nice person to show me code, trust me, i dont know bigger dick than him.

Made a comparison of a rather large codebase that I did for a client before in flask to perl dancer2 and ror. Obviously the rails codebase is larger. The flask version remains as minimal as it once did, even considering blueprints and the dancer version is small but really expandable and powerfull. It has some great things, it was inspired by sinatra so it has that magical approach to doing things but the code is solid and easy to understand imho. They really make it towards perl code is not the unreadable codebase as it once was and the syntax just clicks. Even for its api capabilities it works amazing with the front end (Vue.js) and I can honestly say that I really enjoy it.

Situation: I have a love hate relationship with python due to the lack of types as I have in more established languages such as C#, Java and shit even TypeScript

Situation (cont): A rather large codebase that i have developed for multiple processes at work run on Python.

I don't hate it, I just don't absolutely love it, there is a lot of things to like about Python, but man I do have some conflicts with it, I have been facing out to use other solutions that feel scripty, such as the newer versions of C# with .net, but I would say that about 80% of our codebase runs on Python, the rest is PHP.

I am somewhat traditional in the way my programs run, I started with C++ and Java, then for whatever reason (I blame codecademy at the time) switched over to Ruby and Javascript, mostly Javascript. I do not remember how I found Python, I do remember learning it with an online tutorial, shit was easy to get started with.

My codebase running on Python is huge, and they do a lot from automation scripts, to data gathering and database management, never had I been bitten with the "oh noes is so slow" bug since my code is not Google level big, for everything else Python seems rather fast imho

I dunno, big time love hate relationship

To me this is one of the most interesting topics. I always dream about creating the perfect programming class (not aimed at absolute beginners though, in the end there should be some usable software artifact), because I had to teach myself at least half of the skills I need everyday.

The goal of the class, which has at least to be a semester long, is to be able to create industry-ready software projects with a distributed architecture (i.e. client-server).

The important thing is to have a central theme over the whole class. Which means you should go through the software lifecycle at least once.

Let's say the class consists of 10 Units à ~3 hours (with breaks ofc) and takes place once a week, because that is the absolute minimum time to enable the students to do their homework.

1. Project setup, explanation of the whole toolchain. Init repositories, create SSH keys for github/bitbucket, git crash course (provide a cheat sheet).
Create a hello world web app with $framework. Run the web server, let the students poke around with it. Let them push their projects to their repositories.
The remainder of the lesson is for Q&A, technical problems and so on.

Homework: Read the docs of $framework. Do some commits, just alter the HTML & CSS a bit, give them your personal touch.
For the homework, provide a $chat channel/forum/mailing list or whatever for questions where not only the the teacher should help, but also the students help each other.

2. Setup of CI/Build automation. This is one of the hardest parts for the teacher/uni because the university must provide the necessary hardware for it, which costs money. But the students faces when they see that a push to master automatically triggers a build and deploys it to the right place where they can reach it from the web is priceless.
This is one recurring point over the whole course, as there will be more software artifacts beside the web app, which need to be added to the build process. I do not want to go deeper here, whether you use Jenkins, or Travis or whatev and Ansible or Puppet or whatev for automation. You probably have some docker container set up for this, because this is a very tedious task for initial setup, probably way out of proportion. But in the end there needs to be a running web service for every student which they can reach over a personal URL. Depending on the students interest on the topic it may be also better to setup this already before the first class starts and only introduce them to all the concepts in a theory block and do some more coding in the second half.

Homework: Use $framework to extend your web app. Make it a bit more user interactive with buttons, forms or the like. As we still have no backend here, you can output to alert or something.

3. Create a minimal backend with $backendFramework. Only to have something which speaks with the frontend so you can create API calls going back and forth. Also create a DB, relational or not. Discuss DB schema/model and answer student questions.

Homework: Create a form which gets transformed into JSON and sent to the backend, backend stores the user information in the DB and should also provide a query to view the entry.

4. Introduce mobile apps. As it would probably too much to introduce them both to iOS and Android, something like React Native (or whatever the most popular platform-agnostic framework is then) may come in handy. Do the same as with the minimal web app and add the build artifacts to CI. Also talk about getting software to the app/play store (a common question) and signing apps.

Homework: Use the view API call from the backend to show the data on the mobile. Play around with the mobile project to display it in a nice way.

5. Introduction to refactoring (yes, really), if we are really talking about JS here, mention things like typescript, flow, elm, reason and everything with types which compiles to JS. Types make it so much easier to refactor growing codebases and imho everybody should use it.
Flowtype would make it probably easier to get gradually introduced in the already existing codebase (and it plays nice with react native) but I want to be abstract here, so that is just a suggestion (and 100% typed languages such as ELM or Reason have so much nicer errors).
Also discuss other helpful tools like linters, formatters.

Homework: Introduce types to all your API calls and some important functions.

6. Introduction to (unit) tests. Similar as above.
Homework: Write a unit test for your form.

(TBC)

To create an abstraction simple enough to make complex business logic challenges solvable for non programmers.

The issue I see today is programmers solving problems they don't understand as well as the user. I think two ways might be taken:
- Programmers specialize in other fields and solve problems there
- Other professionals create their own software

Both will happen in the future (IMHO) and I want to help the second happening.

Note: Excel does this really well, but I think we can so quite better today.

Can someone suggest tips to code faster?

In the last few days ive only written + commited 114 LoC which is not enough imho.

Am I the only one who when hearing the term "Artificial Intelligence" thinks about why nobody tries to develop "Real Intelligence" instead?
I mean the term artificial imho points directly at the reason why those systems are actually so damn stupid

Client wants to see his project so he can provide its content.

The product where this is based upon should be a monthly edition of grouped articles.

I've yet to see content for their concept or even legal text that makes sense.

Same person has no idea of the full concept of what he's asking, imho ending up in a Ponzi (which I've switched to a somewhat more logical system, which just might work, but just isn't a get rich quick scheme anymore as he likes to portray it).

Should I just put on a blank page and be done with it, either way?
- Either he gets it, that he needs to fill up the website's content himself
- or he's mad, that I didn't finish the job (while he's the one needing to provide at this point)

!rant
I'm almost at the end of my CS degree and I was wondering what it'll be like on the market: do companies want people who know like 10 different languages or are they more focused on actual experience?

I mean in the end a language can be learned fast, imho.

!rant

Many out there say you should use 2 factor authentication with everything, but personally i feel lile that would just turn your phone into a sigle point of failure.
Phisical security is my primary worry, because loosing your phone or having it stolen yould pretty much lock you out of all your accounts.
Another thing is i don't know as much about android security, and i wouldn't be confortable managing it.

I have 2FA active for some key services, but imho a strong password is usually enough. I think its far more more importat for your overall security to avoid passwords re-use.

What do you think? Do you have 2FA on all the time?

As always IE and Edge holding back progress. Dying to use CSS variables but can't because of these 2 wank browsers. Once this is fully supported it should wipe out the need for pre-processors (IMHO). Not that I feel the need to use pre-processors anyway.

Good code is a lie imho.

When you see a project as code, there are 3 variables in most cases:

- time
- people / human resources
- rules

Every variable plays a certain role in how the code (project) evolves.

Time - two different forms: when certain parts of code are either changed in a high frequency or a very low frequency, it's a bad omen.

Too high - somehow this area seems to be relentless. Be it features, regressions or bugs - it takes usually in larger code bases 3 - 4 weeks till all code pathes were triggered.

Too low - it can be a good sign. But it should be on the radar imho. Code that never changes should be reviewed at an - depending on size of codebase - max. yearly audit. Git / VCS is very helpful here.
Why? Mostly because the chances are very high that the code was once written for a completely different requirement set. Hence the audit - check if this code still is doing the right job or if you have a ticking time bomb that needs to be defused.

People
If a project has only person working on it, it most certainly isn't verified by another person. Meaning that only one person worked on it - I'd say it's pretty bad to bad, as no discussion / review / verification was done. The author did the best he / she could do, but maybe another person would have had an better idea?

Too many people working on one thing is only bad when there are no rules ;)

Rules. There are two different kind of rules.

Styling / Organisation / Dokumentation - everything that has not much to do with coding itself. These should be enforced at a certain point, otherwise the code will become a hot glued mess noone wants to work on.

Coding itself. This is a very critical thing.

Do: Forbid things that are known to be problematic in the programming language itself. Eg. usage of variables in variables, reflection, deprecated features.

Do: Define a feature set for each language. Feature set not meaning every feature you want to use! Rather a fixed minimum version every developer must use and - in case of library / module / plugin support - which additional extras are supported.

Every extra costs. Most developers don't want to realize this... And a code base that evolves over time should have minimal dependencies. Every new version of an extra can have bugs, breakages, incompabilties and so on.

Don't: don't specify a way of coding. Most coding guidelines are horrific copy pastures from some books some smart people wrote who have no fucking clue what you're doing and why.

If you don't know how to operate on people, standing in an OR and doing what a book told you to do would end in dead person pretty sure. Same for code.

Learn from mistakes and experience, respect knowledge from other persons, but always reflect on wether this makes sense at this specific area of code.

There are very few things which are applicable to a large codebase on a global level. Even DRY / SOLID and what ever you can come up with can be at a certain point completely wrong.

Good code is a lie - because it can only exist at a certain point of time.

A codebase should be a living thing - when certain parts rot, other parts will be affected too.

The reason for the length of the comment was to give some hints on what my principles are that code stays in an "okayish" state, but good is a very rare state

What do you put on your website these days if you don't have a service to offer or recent projects to show off?
Imho portfolios are just weird (i'm also not in the need of one) and my domain choice (milotic.io) was made kinda drunken, too.

Any ideas?

So i have some SQL skills. and I ended up some shitty business reports .

My boss will to implement something she read on internet (scrum).

I recommended her to manage her expectations. IMHO After implementing scrum, no shit is gonna change and obviously I was ignored and treated as a negative thinking being

Do you guys think this could work? Since we're a 4 people team and each one of us have different and non related activities

Checking out Meteor JS in 2020 after a loooong time in which I ignored it. I participated in the community when it barely startted, liked a couple of things, was effy about some others.

Built a semi large app (custom user auth through ldap, multiple forms and data fetches on different components inside of each page, reporting bla bla bla.

Did it first in just Meteor and Blaze (pretty easy to digest) and then with Meteor and Svelte (still easy to digest, but Blaze was simpler imho) and both packages totalled less than 100mb which is somewhat amazing considering how node is with packages.It might be a good time to psy attention once more to meteor.

I based much of my shit in the now free Discover Meteor book, there aren't that many breaking changes, which makes it surprisingly stable as an application for development.

I don't know if i would use it for s large scale app, but thus far it seems fairly promising as compared to how it was years ago.

Definitely something to keep in mind for 2020-21 development

I guess I am not the only one who do not know why hes/her code runs. Today I was preparing a private API for our project and a part of it was not working for (IMHO) no reason. I was really upset, because I already put more then an hour work in a 10 minute task.

It was 9:30 PM, I came like 12 hours ago, so I knew I can do only one thing to erase my mind for a second: Clean my keyboard. I tried to be really precise and everything, because my finger can be really greasy now or then.

After a good 10 minutes I looked at my screen and I realised, that I managed to forget to remove the keyboard's cable, so my screen looked like someone tried to escape from Vim.

But! During the cleaning I also runned the code again somehow and it fucking worked. I am sitting here, cannot believe what I see. I see no changes whatsoever, so this might be like a friday gift from the universe.

Now, I can finally work on my own project...

IMHO Rich Harris (of the Rollup and Svelte fame) is a rock star. I think I'd rant less of more people would follow his methods.

IMHO, the material design floating button (just like the one used here) is horrible. Why would a control ever hide the content behind it such that the user must move the content. I dislike it intensely and think it is just really bad ux.

What's everyone's opinion on visual design languages (languages designed just for visual elements. EG, XAML and HTML)

Personally I am not a fan of them at all, much rather have everything done programmatically, maybe this is coming too much from me using GameMaker and also vala with GTK, it just seems to be easier to grasp and work with imho.

IMHO, the Amazon Fire Stick represents a "race to the bottom" for media devices in terms of interface design, functionality and app support.

They join the Apple TV waiting there since the second generation device.

Everything you could ever want to stream is either a few hundred clicks away or on a different device.

I finally got my new home server.
A Lenovo ThinkCentre M720q in one of the higher configurations.
Any ideas what top level OS I should put on it?
ATM, I'm thinking Proxmox, ESX or Alpine.
I like proxmox because of the neat UI for everything but I'm kinda worried about how it basically takes the most important parts of the system over.
I like Alpine since I already use it for quite a while as my goto server OS and because of AWALL, which IMHO is the best linux server firewall.
I didn't get to evaluate ESX yet.

So typescript 4.5 beta is out .... holy moly what did those guys smoke?  🧐🤨🤪

They keep adding stuff on top, that nobody needs. But they don't fix the stuff that is broken (like emitting broken prefix-paths ...🤦)

Imho, they should focus on the overall development experience, make it easy an consistent to setup a proper multi-module project with linter, auto-formatter, folder structure, file naming.

And please fix this ugly #private fields - just ignore this mess of a spec and emit TS private fields as #private fields. That's the only logical way. Everything else is BS.

We had a dispute @ work yesterday on this topic :

aproach 1 :

$res = getSomeData( [ 'filter_1' => 'str_1', 'filter_2' => 'str_2', ... 'limit' => 10 );

with

function getSomeData( $data )
{
...
}

VS

aproach 2 :

$res = getSomeData( 'str_1', 'str_2', ... 10 );

with

function getSomeData( $filter_1 = '', $filter_2 = 'default_str', ... $limit = 20 )
{
...
}

I had used 1-st b/c IMHO it's more dynamic and easy to maintain and call ( especially when there are many params, most of which not used on each call )

and my colleague didn't liked it w/h his main arguments that one can not easily see the needed params and no default vals for them ( the latest could be easily corrected in the function body ). I'm curious to read your opinions, arguments & contra arguments for each aproach

I want to run a theory by you regarding unit tests.

They make up for the time they cost to implement in the long run, no doubt, because when you're refactoring you can easily check whether you broke something.

But: what if you've got integration tests covering almost the entire codebase? For those to succeed the unit tests must succeed as well. So therefore imho the unit tests are redundant.

The only advantage of also having unit tests seems that they can pinpoint the issue more accurately.

Any other advantages? What am I missing? Any thoughts/comments?

I would rather get a degree in software engineering than computer science IMHO.

!rant

In case anyone else finds this useful - Git 2.22 gets a --no-overlay flag, allowing you to switch directories between branches at will *without* having to clean up any newly created files in the process.

Long overdue IMHO.

Y'all have your rubber duck to debug, but I have my own technic: the SO debugging.

It simply consists as asking your question as you'd normally do, but while doing so, you still think about your issue, and how people not knowing your problem but still knowing about dev would react to your question, making you asking other related question (SO's related question might also help).

IMHO, the most important part is the "related" question, that helps you to think outside the box. It makes your problematic progress a lot, and has the gift of not making you loosing any hope ; and if you ever block for good, your question will look less silly than at the beginning

Freemium web hosting services which offer PHP 7.x only on paid plans suck.

Work From Home Reason #420: Sneaky sharts

I’ve been interviewing at a few companies lately. I’m a dev with ~6 years of experience with a specific language. Most of the experience comes from working in companies that developed their own software, not talking about cms stuff. Analytical, data tracking systems. Now working at a fintech. I’ve got an offer to work as a senior developer in a smaller tech team, with more salary. I’ve approached the current company about the offer and they told me that they don’t think I’m a senior dev and rather a strong mid level dev. The Hr also told me to think about if I’m really a senior and if the other companies expectations would be met. They would increase my salary, but not quite match it. It’s not too far off though. Their reasoning for this was that you need a lot of experience with their product (which does not correlate with seniorness of a developer, only the worth of specific employees for a company IMHO) and system architecture design. The problem is that we don’t see any tasks that could implement any system design for as log as I’ve worked here, so I don’t see how I could work into a senior role at this company. Of course imposter syndrome kicked in and I’m triple guessing myself if I should join the other company as a senior now. How should I aproach this? The current company is stressful to work at because of big workload, a lot of my coworkers think the same thing about the workload.

When you work on a project for months, the newly appointed tech lead says "we all (him, the boss and other colleagues not involved in this project) looked at your code and decided that it should be dropped and we are starting from scratch again....now I'm not against code review (which we never did) so I welcome the input but allow me to vent my frustrations about how this is being done. Also to have a review & verdict without me being present?

So I ask what was so wrong:
* You changed the database structure. Valid, I tried to make your db an actual db with relationships, so I added some foreign keys, delete fields that were never used, all because they told me to use an ORM.
* You used to much logic in setters, validation etc, valid again but this would be something we could look at and fix imho.
* You are passing classes in your constructor, valid I wanted to use DI to make unit testing possible. Ohh but I don't like unit testing so I don't see the point and it makes it to complicated was the response.

So not only was the project cancelled, the new iteration is being developed without me, I'm shunned from all meetings. Ohh and from what I see they are now using 5 tables instead of 25 and completely started the db model from scratch...

Why TF does unity use mesh renderers for generating navmeshes? In what possible situation would that be a usefull?
Why would it chose to bug out on the complex visual geometry instead of using the finely crafted low-poly clipping layer? In what situation is that a good idea? Why would the AI need to collide with different things than the player? (IMHO NavMeshAgent should depend on CharacterController or Rigidbody)

I feel like so many features in Unity are potentially very nice but don't work well together or have WTF design elements like this one. Like custom shaders not being able to alter the result after the lights have been added together, and the undocumented finalgbuffer:ColorFunction function. Or a million other tiny things that make me wish I was smart enough to build my own engine.

/rant

DevOps With Ruby and Chef on FreeBSD (and Linux)

I am Ops and Dev by heart. I have always automated *nix systems long before any automation framework was invented because I am pretty lazy. Doing stuff more than once manually is just one time too often for me. Imho Ruby is a really elegant language. The same applies for the tools that are built around it. The Chef ecosystem fits into this with its own elegance and stability perfectly because the server is Erlang driven and the rest is Ruby.
Being a Linux and BSD user since the early 90s I have always loved a *nix system for it's concepts and simplicity. One command for exactly one purpose and everything is combineable like letters are combinable to words in my mother language. I have always loved FreeBSD more though. Imho it is even more focused on simplicity. Because it is a really clean approach of system design that envies a base system and keeps 3rd party separated in a clean way for example. It also values classic UNIX philosophies that most Linux distros these days abandon but which saved my life multiple times through better design and execution that also focuses alot more on stability, fault tolerance and ease of use than any Linux I have come across. The hardcore guys should read "Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System", compare the readings to the Linux way of things and see for themselves.*

*The author acknowledges that this text is his opinion and just his wet dream alone and may not be of any relevance for the sexual lifes of everybody else

The worst tech I've been working on is not related to a programming language, is more about the codebase itself.
One of them was in .net, the guy reinvented the wheel creating a custom mvc framework and a custom entity framework, copying from cakephp models, was disgusting and felt terribly wrong to work with.
Then I moved to an old cms written in php on top of an old version of cakephp, that was a nightmare too. Fat controllers and a disgusting db schema, no coding standards whatsoever. Everything so deeply convoluted and connected that was impossible to change something without breaking something else.
The technology itself is never the worst thing, people who thinks they are the best ninja developers, are the real problem imho, and the code they leave behind speaks for them. Yuck

I've had a hard time getting on board with Google using the "Yes, and..." approach in design sprints. IMHO, it's tough to apply a stream-of-consciousness from improvisational theater to building software. Two completely different arenas.

Personally, I've always applied the "No, because..." approach, designing pessimistically/programming defensively, while still being innovative, creative & empathetic. I get the psychology of public criticism making teammates butthurt & stymieing future contributions...but that's maturity.

What are your thoughts about Manning Publications? IMHO they are cool and I like what they have to offer in terms of consumption of books and videos.

Why do we still use floating-point numbers? Why not use fixed-point?

Floating-point has precision errors, and for some reason each language has a different level of error, despite all running on the same processor.

Fixed-point numbers don't have precision issues (unless you get way too big, but then you have another problem), and while they might be a bit slower, I don't think there is enough of a difference in speed to justify the (imho) stupid, continued use of floating-point numbers.

Did you know some (low power) processors don't have a floating-point processor? That effectively makes it pointless to use floating-point, it offers no advantage over fixed-point.

Please, use a type like Decimal, or suggest that your language of choice adds support for it, if it doesn't yet.

There's no need to suffer from floating-point accuracy issues.

What kind of innovation approach has helped humanity in a better way? Is it some group of obscure indie devs working overnight to write some software which is free, useful and purposeful devoid of licensing shit or the too-honorary-to-shit-from-arse organizations which put marketing gimmicks like making world better place and which compromise user data either to governments or to other corporations for monetizing given the first chance. If innovation is happening in both the spectrums then what is the viable kind of required innovation at the moment for us humans. IMHO I don't trust corporate innovation and shitty innovations happening in Facebook, Google and likes. Has corporate greed bought innovation for market price.

IMHO: VS Code = Gnome (I love it but it's a constant fight)
Sublime = Unity (Not bad and reliable)

IMHO Being a dev !

The report button is in the place where reply should be.
I'm a lefty and even I use my phone mostly with right thumb. Also it's very easy to report a comment without noticing (happened to me twice. Reported a perfectly legit and appropriate comment because of awkward report action placement.
IMHO opinion the report action should be placed anywhere else in the post but where it is now.

I really would love to buy a microsoft surface pro, went to the store yesterday to try it out ... and I leaved without buying. I hope windows will some day get some nice scaling on high dpi displays like mac OS but till now it looks terrible IMHO!
Even the Icons in the file explorer look better on fullhd then highdpi -.-