Hi there fellas,

I'm new to devrant and I'll like to share with you my first story.

It was my first payed job. A good friend of mine (media designer in print) called me "My customer needs a website, do you think you can do that?"
At this time I've never build a single page, so my answer was "Of course, easy-peasy".
She told me it was a family business and a nationwide player in finance sector.

I met the CEO, did my research and build a prototype. Well, the CEO and his staff liked it so I finished the website and prepared for the first review.

I booted the laptop and tried to connect to their network. There was none. They just never had a wireless connection not a single cable in the entire office. That was the time I realized that I work for a family business.
The CEO was an ancient guy who probably saw Jesus Christ hanging on the cross in personal and internet is weird thing controlled by the devil himself.

I took the laptop and went over to the CEOs personal office, plugged the network cable out of his Computer and into the laptop. Finally I could show them what I've done.

He took a look at it and called for his assistant. "Might you print that website for us?" That was my second wtf moment.

The assistant returned with a half chopped down and bleached rainforest that contained an image of their new website.

I tried to tell him that a website on paper can't show him the functions n shit, but he looked at me like I was talking two foreign languages at once.

So we reviewed the website on paper and his one and only problem was the size of the letters. "I can't read it well, please make the text bigger" At this moment I wanted to hit my forehead on the table and tell him that it is normal to have readings difficulties when you are walking the shores of Styx.

At the end everything went well, but I realized that dealing with customers is a lot more difficult than developing something for them. The future should prove me right.

That's it.
My first story about my first job.

Thank you for reading 😊

When someone doesn't check what printer they are printing to

I've caught the efficiency bug.

I recently started a minimum wage job to get my life back in order after a failed 2 year project (post mortem: next time bring more cash for a longer runway)

I've noticed this thing I do at every job, where I see inefficiency and I think "how can I use technology to automate myself out of this job?"

My first ever application was in C++ for college (a BASIC interpreter) and it's been so long I've since forgotten the language.

But after a while every language starts to look like every other language, and you start to wonder if maybe the reason you never seriously went anywhere as a programmer was because you never really were cut out for it.

Code monkey, sure. Programmer? Dunno, maybe I just suffer from imposter syndrome.

So a few years back I worked at a retail chain. Nothing as big as walmart, but they have well over 10k store locations. They had two IBM handscanners per store, old grungy ugly things, and one of these machines would inevitably be broken, lost or in need of upgrade/replacement about once a year, per location. District manager, who I hit it off with, and made a point of building report with, told me they were paying something like $1500 a piece.

After a programming dry spell, I picked up 'coding' with MIT app inventor. Built a 'mostly complete' inventory management app over the course of a month, and waited for the right time.

The day of a big store audit, (and the day before a multi-regional meeting), I made sure I was in-store at the same time as my district manager, so he could 'stumble upon' me working, scanning in and pricing items into the app.

Naturally he asked about it, and I had the numbers, the print outs, and the app itself to show him. He seemed impressed by what amounted to a code monkeys 'non-code' solution for a problem they had.

Long story short, he does what I expected, runs it by the other regionals and middle executives at the meeting, and six months later they had invested in a full blown in house app, cutting IBM out of the mix I presume.

From what I understand they now use the app throughout the entire store chain.

So if you work at IBM, sorry, that contract you lost for handscanners at 10k+ stores? Yeah that was my fault (and MIT app inventor).

They say software is 'eating the world' but it really goes to show, for a lot of 'almost coders' and 'code monkeys' half our problem is dealing with setup and platform boilerplate. I think in the future that a lot of jobs are either going to be created or destroyed thanks to better 'low code' solutions, and it seems to be a big potential future market.

In the mean while I've realized, while working on side projects, that maybe I can do this after all, and taken up Kotlin. I want to do a couple of apps for efficiency and store tracking at my current employer to see if I'm capable and not just an mit app-inventor codemonkey after all.

I'm hoping, by demonstrating what I can do, I can use that as a springboard into an internal programming position at my current gig (which seems to be a company thats moving towards a more tech oriented approach to efficiency and management). Also watching money walk out the door due to inefficiency kinda pisses me off, and the thought of fixing those issues sounds really interesting. At the end of the day I just like learning new technologies, and maybe this is all just an excuse to pick up something new after spending so long on less serious work.

I still have a ways to go, but the prospect of working on B2B, and being able to offer technological solutions to common and recurring business needs excites the hell out of me..as cringy and over-repeated as that may sound.

The things we take for granted... I was laughing my tits off at my mate taking a screenshot this is how it transcribed :)

My mate:
morning!

Me:
morning mate 🙂

My mate:
how are you getting on?

Me:
not bad thanks, bit knackered but good 🙂

My mate:
the band was good then lol. how do i take a screen shot buddy?

Me:
there's print screen button on the top right of the keyboard
My mate:
what will it be under?

Me:
it's a button
on the keyboard
print screen
prt scr or something

My mate:
no when i want to use it

Me:
??

My mate:
what file/folder

Me:
you have to open something like paint
paste it in
save it 🙂

My mate:
urghh
fuck doing all that
you do it

Me:
hahaha
My mate:
haha

Me:
I'm all good 😀
just open paint
ctrl+v
save
that's it

My mate:
i just got a killer score on wows lol i want to post it to the group
so i go to the game screen take a shot by pressing that button then go to paint and do what?
i dont even have paint lol

Me:
don't know what it's called in Windows 10

My mate:
ahh fuck it

Me:
burger nipples

My mate:
why doesnt it just pop up on your downloads or pictures ffs

Me:
it might do in Windows 10 I don't know 😀
doubtful though

My mate:
it has done for other ones
for other games it has

Me:
sometimes the game has it built in
depends on so many things haha

My mate:
nailed it!!
i just hit the right click then hit paste and it came on to the post haha
no fucking about

Me:
Congrats ;)

The gnome-screenshot tool has a white flashing effect. Every single pixel of the screen is at the brightest colour for the fraction of a second.

Did the developers of gnome-screenshot really think users want a camera flash in their face whenever they hit the "print screen" button?

That flashing effect hurts users' eyes, especially if a white flash appears on a dark-theme user interface.

Formerly, gnome-screenshot had a short black-out, which was tolerable. Thankfully, mate-screenshot has no shutter effect at all. These flashing effects are not helpful in the slightest, just purely annoying.

Pardon the rant; some of it can probably attributed to me, but please indulge me of you could.

I'm tasked with creating a report that pulls data from some sql tables in c#and presents it using javascript. My manager was nice enough to lend me his old sql query, so I run with that using sql connections. Now I find out AFTER I get my sql query string working and retrieving data properly that my manager wanted it done using linq and entity framework, so now I have to start over, a process made only more "fun" by the confusing and unintuitive column names of our sql tables.

Moral of the story: don't take the easy way out.

After I spend some time fixing that up, I have to print out the data using javascript and html, which my manager was kind enough to lend me. Cue me shutting off my brain and thinking that I should have the program open and display this stuff itself. Let me tell you that converting a console application to a Windows form application is not a fun experience, especially when entity framework makes classes named "application" and "form" from your database tables. After finally getting the WebBrowser form to work, I'm hit with a javascript error from the library my manager referenced (he is a programmer himself). I tell him about the error and he just tells me to write the html code to a .html on disk like he did, but never explicitly said he did until just now.

Fixed moral of the story: don't take the easy way out, unless you should.

I should clarify I was given the whole raw sql query and html with some embedded javascript and a reference to chart.js.