Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
Search - "programmer story"
-
I recently met a young fella (14yo) playing League of Legends. He asked:
- What do you do for a living?
- I'm a programmer, do you know anything about programming?
- I don't, actually.
Apparently he was playing from a LAN Gaming center 'cause he didn't have a computer at home (his computer had broken and these Lan centers are pretty affordable).
I figured I could explain to him what was it and what super powers you could get from it. Turns out I recommended a JS course in codecademy and now he goes to the LAN center every day to study programming (he got really into it!).
Now he always pings me with questions about JS and apparently he's learning a ton! He had almost no English skills too (we're Brazilian), and because most of the material in the internet is in English he found himself some free English courses and he's now taking them!
Knowledge is free on the internet and I guess he's just realized that.
Not exactly a rant guys, just figured it was a nice story to tell :)
#TeachAKidHowToCode57 -
A story about how a busy programmer became responsible for training interns.
So I was put in charge of a team of interns and had to teach them to work with Linux, coding (Bash, Python and JS) and networking overall.
None of the interns had any technical experience, skills, knowledge or talent.
Furthermore the task came to me as a surprise and I didn't have any training plan nor the time.
Case 0:
Intern is asked to connect to a VM, see which interfaces there are and bring up the one that's down (eth1). He shuts eth0 down and is immediately disconnected from the machine, being unable to connect remotely.
Case 1:
Intern researches Bash scripting via a weird android app and after a hour or so creates and runs this function: test(){test|test&}
He fork-bombed the VM all other interns used.
Case 2:
All interns used the same VM despite the fact that I created one for each.
They saved the same ssh address in Putty while giving it different names.
Case 3:
After explicitly explaining and demonstrating to the interns how to connect to their own VMs they all connect to the same machine and attempt to create file systems, map them and etc. One intern keeps running "shutdown -r" in order to test the delay flag, which he never even included.
Case 4:
All of the interns still somehow connect to the same VM despite me manually configuring their Putty "favorites". Apparently they copy-paste a dns that one of them sent to the entire team via mail. He also learned about the wall command and keeps scaring his team members with fake warnings. A female intern actually asked me "how does the screen knows what I look like?!". This after she got a wall message telling her to eat less because she gained weight.
Case 5:
The most motivated intern ran "rm -rf" from his /etc directory.
P.S. All other interns got disconnected because they still keep using his VM.
Case 6:
While giving them a presentation about cryptography and explaining how SSH (that they've been using for the past two weeks) works an intern asked "So is this like Gmail?".
I gave him the benefit of the doubt and asked if he meant the authorization process. He replied with a stupid smile "No! I mean that it can send things!".
FML. I have a huge project to finish and have to babysit these art majors who decided to earn "ezy cash many" in hightech.
Adventures will be continued.26 -
29-year veteran here. Began programming professionally in 1990, writing BASIC applications for an 8-bit Apple II+ computer. Learned Pascal, C, Clipper, COBOL. Ironic side-story: back then, my university colleagues and I used to make fun of old COBOL programmers. Fortunately, I never had to actually work with the language, but the knowledge allowed me to qualify for a decent job position, back in '92.
For a while, I worked with an IBM mainframe, using REXX and EXEC2 scripting languages for the VM/SP operating system. Then I began programming for the web, wrote my first dynamic web applications with cgi-bin shell and Perl scripts. Used the little-known IBM Net.Data scripting language. I finally learned PHP and settled with it for many, many years.
I always wanted to be a programmer. As a kid I dreamed of being like Kevin Flynn, of TRON - create world famous videogames and live upstairs my own arcade place! Later on, at some point, I was disappointed, I questioned my skills, I thought I should do more, I let other people's expectations make feel bad. Then I finally realized I actually enjoy a quieter, simpler life. And I made peace with it.
I'm now like the old programmers I used to mock 30 years ago. There's so much shit inside my brain. And everything seems so damn complex these days. Frameworks, package managers, transpilers, layers and more layers of code. I try to keep up. And the more I learn, the more it seems I don't know.
Sometimes I feel tired. Yet, I still enjoy creating things and solving problems with programming. I still have fun learning. And after all these years, I learned to be proud of my work, even if it didn't turn out to be as glamorous as in the movies.30 -
Back in the days...
Parents: get off that computer it will get you nowhere in life!
Me:But im programming not playing games..I want to become a programmer...
Parents:programming or games it's all the same! Take an example of your sister who actually achieved something with her studies (she's a doctor)
Me today asa computer engineer...receiving paycheck higher than my sister who is a doctor and not to mention I got a car of the company and living very comfortably.
Parents can't believe it.
#rekt
Moral of the story: never let anyone tell you what to do. Keep doing what you truly love and get real good at it!😉13 -
So my Girlfriend bought a new iPhone at Verizon today. Cool story, I know, but here's where it's gone from there.
Firstly her debit wouldn't run as credit, so we used mine but that's the least of it (but began it).
So she has 16,000 photos... Alot, sure, but not the issue. Obviously with that amount of data she wasn't about to reasonably use iCloud to back it up (understandable only by me) so she was confronted both by me and the Verizon employee about this issue to where we both (the Verizon employee and I) agreed that an iTunes backup/restore was the only way to preserve her data. She was confused. No worry, told her I had it handled and the Verizon employee agreed. Great. Yet we get home and begin the process. My girlfriend was not on the latest iOS (understandable given the battery scenario and she was on an iPhone 6) and this was ridiculous to her because she had to update in order to do the iTunes back up. Whatever, I brushed it off. Her phone was updated, and backed up... Which took a while but we are talking 30gb (of which she had no understanding of how much that was). After the back up we discovered her new phone wasn't working due to a bad sim, great, no problem we have the old one... But oh no. "I don't want that shitty old sim" she said. Uhmm what... I say, and say let me get an earring (to switch the Sims) and she gave one to me and as soon as I went to pop the tray, she had a fucking heart attack as if I was demolishing her phone. I talk her down, get it switched, get the phone to restore (slow process as she's complaining... 30gb mind you) and it works. She goes to bed. Comes back, texts aren't working. I say imessages or texts (now she has no idea) I troubleshoot, seems nothing's working, and that's okay Verizon must of reinstated the new sim and deactivated the old (fine). I switch them and it works. She proceeds to berate me about the SIM cards because she didn't want the 'old shitty one' (the one that got us to the place of a functioning phone).
Now everything works and she claims a Genius bar employee would of done this in minutes.
I (obviously) lose my shit, now I'm sleeping on the couch.
Im an IT professional / programmer..... this shit really ticked me off.38 -
*Facebook Hackers follow the Rules*
(real story)
TL;DR: sorry, not available, can't do spoilers
One night I was with a group of friends out at a pub. A guy and his girlfriend show up, I didn't know them but they were my friend's friends.
The girl kept bragging the whole time about his boyfriend being a professional programmer, trying to remind it to everybody whenever possible (don't ask me why!).
So, after a while, the discussion moves towards "suspect Facebook activities" and the guy starts saying that he can hack Facebook.
- "What do you mean?", I ask.
- "Hacking into other people's accounts, even with 2 factor authentication. I did it a lot of times"
- "Wait, and they don't notice?"
- "Of course not! ^_^ He's a hacker", the girl replies.
Ok, time to do a coming out.
- "Hey, I'm a developer myself. Can you give me an idea of what you did in technical terms? Did you find a vulnerability? Used a virus? Maybe a keylogger?"
- "No... Uh... Well... The secret is to read the terms of service"
- "What?"
- "Yes... yes it's all in the facebook terms of service..."
- "Uhm, I'm not really sure I'm following. Could you prove it by hacking my Facebook account? I'm giving you the permission".
In less than a minute the discussion flew completely away and they never mentioned computers again.
😂😂8 -
Sad story about refactoring.
Programmer: I cleaned up the codes, extract reusable methods, reduced repetitive code and improve overall readability and maintainability.
Manager: why the page still display the same.
Programmer: ...7 -
Story time:
I was hanging around with my friend:
Me: Gosh, this waiting is killing me!
Friend: You're programmer - aren't you used to waiting?
Me: :|
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
He's right3 -
It's a funny story. When at the gym I usually wear t-shirts with tech companies logos, from companies I've worked at. This guy comes to me and asks if I'm a programmer. Turns out he's also a programmer and we began chatting every time we were at the gym at the same time. Some months later he joined the company I work at and we're now colleagues. He's a pretty cool dude.1
-
True story. During meeting, our manager asked us, how the data flow. Our lead programmer response, "PHP will produce Son of Jay output, and read by Javascript".
Our manager; "Hmm... Interesting"5 -
A programmer once explained Nietzsche like this:
A long time ago, god created the world, but forgot to leave a developer documentation, thus the whole world was like legacy code...
And humans are like the end user of this world, and some among them spent time studying it, using the Moral API, hoping to get a result of "http 200 ok" from our world for the peace of mind. But the true operation of this world is still yet unknown...
As time passes, humans begin to find that in Moral API, good and evil are two base classes, and all the other moral properties (like ethic, justice and stuff) are just other classes based on those two classes through multiple inheritance.
One day, when programmer Nietzsche was observing the world's runtime behavior, he came up with a question:
"Did god really use good and evil as base classes? Could it be that they are actually derived classes?"
Most of the world is currently in the favor of mankind, and god must've wrote individual user cases for it's end users, he thought.
This made Nietzsche thinking: if end users are considered into two cases: the strong and the weak, how would the world be designed base on its user story?
Let's think about the strong, they can bully the weak as they please, and there's nothing the weak can do to stop them. In this case whether the Moral API exists or not doesn't fulfill the need of the strong.
But when it comes to the weak, Nietzsche thinks that because the weak cannot fight the strong, they need to belittle bullying and praise the strong for being nice. When the weak does this, it covers their powerless state to some extent, making them look somehow equal to the strong by being capable of commenting.
God might have coded the Moral API to fit the weak's requirement, also adding some public methods for the weak to comment on the strong. If the strong takes care of the weak, they call him nice and good, if the strong bullies people, they call him bad and evil.
That's when Nietzsche realized, that good and evil are both derived classes from the weak, and the base class should be the strong and the weak.
Then he started a series of studies about the Moral API, and got some thesis that persuaded lots of other end users...7 -
The Absolutely True Story of a Real Programmer Who Never Learned C.
I have a young friend named Sam who is quite a programming prodigy. Sam does know C! I need to make this clear: he’s not the titular programmer.
But a couple years ago Sam told me a story about a different programmer who never learned C, and I liked it so much that right on the spot I asked his permission to repeat it. (I could never just steal such a tale.)
Sam wasn’t always a programmer—actually he started in his later teens, in part because he was more of a jock, and in part because he was related to programmers and wanted to do his own thing. But, like all great programmers, once he was bitten by the bug he immersed himself completely in it.
One day Sam happened to be talking programming with his uncle, who was also a programmer but from way, way back.
“Hey,” said Sam, “I’m learning this language called C. You must know a lot of languages, did you ever study C?”
“No,” said the uncle, to Sam’s surprise. “I am one of the very few programmers who never had to learn C.”
“Because I wrote it.”
Oh, Sam’s last name is Ritchie.
What I love about this story is the idea of Dennis waiting Sam’s entire life to deliver this zinger. Just imagine sitting on a line that good, watching your nephew grow up and waiting, waiting until the one day he finally starts learning to code. Did he work on the line in his head at night? Like, “Hmm, how should I word it so I can deliver the punch line perfectly? Should I say ‘I never took a class on C?’ Nah, too awkward…”
The great thing about geniuses is how much effort they put into everything.
Courtesy : Wil Shiply.5 -
my story so far
Hey guys. i just wantes to share my story becoming something i think is like a dev.
I was always interested in solving problems. my grandfather has a company with a bit over a 100 employees. one day i decided to start working there. he needed someone to build up the erp system (mostly maintenance). about a month after i started he decided to get a new erp system because the one he had would not fill his needs. not knowing how big this got i told him that i want to build it up. from getting the orders over production with machines to billing.
he agreed. after a short time we knew that even this new system does not fullfill our needs. but it was so damn expensive. i told my grandfather: trust me, i am handling this. no further costs. and i started to learn programming. i learned night and day (visual basics.net, sql, c#). since then i wrote about 8 additional modules for the system in coorperation with the users. today, 3 years later we are far ahead our market in terms of transparency and information flow. i worked very hard for this and it is a great feeling to see that the things i do help my colleagues and are used.
i never learned this stuff in school and i know that i cannot tell that i am a professional programmer.
but when someone asks me i tell them i am a programmer because my solutions work and i think i deserve to call me that.
thanks for reading :)4 -
"Hey I am a programmer too! I can code anything, I bet I'm better than you!"
-
"Huh, that sounds cool! What languages do you like to write your programs in?"
-
............ "English"
🤦🏻♂🤦🏻♂
True story by the way, some guy I just met did this. I was not sure how to react. Should I laugh? Should I cry? Should I kill myself? Should I kill him?10 -
Agile in practice.
I finished my story with 3 days left in our 2 week sprint.
Me: What story should I pull in next?
PM: Story <number> to add <new feature>
Me: ok, sounds good
PM: Will you finish it before our sprint ends?
Me: No, probably will take me 5-7 days.
PM: But it can't spill over, it will make our metrics look bad.
Me: I can't finish it in 3 days.
PM: ....
Me: Can't you just explain the spillover as us working ahead?
PM: It will look bad on our <automated-report>
Me: ....
Me: So don't want me to get started on <new feature>?
PM: ....
Me: <internally sighing> What do you want me to do?
PM: Maybe you can pair program with <Overpaid-Idiot-Programmer> to help finish their story
Me: ....
Me: feelsbadman.jpg14 -
Long rant!!!
Let me give you a little back story first
So I was building a mobile app for a client who is to say the least a big PAIN IN THE ASS!
And once I completed the final edits he requests and sent him the app for approval, he calls me and starts asking about some features in the app if it has does or not (which the app does). The main reason for this rant is the feature about the app being able to open the links of the website inside the app without going to the browser first.
But what was happening when the client clicked on the link, since it’s a newspaper type of app, he got asked in which browser he wanted to open the link and after the browser was opened it returned him to the app and asked if he wants that link be opened in the app or browser again. So I can understand his confusion and anger with this problem so I started to debug to see what is happening since I now this featured worked before and had it on video to show it does. After a few minutes I noticed that the links were being added as google.com/url?q={CLIENT_URL}/something_else instead of just www.client_url.com/article
Obviously not my fault as I don’t do content for the website but some other person. But once I called him back and explained the situation to him, he started yelling at me for not being able to create the feature and not notifying him of the mistake his author was making. After about 10mins of him yelling I snapped and just angrily told him “I don’t hear any problems with the app, as far as I’m concerned it can be published as is, as there is not problem on my side”. Then he got even more angry and started talking more shit about how this is all my fault and how I’m a bad programmer and how his users are gonna just delete the app once they see this and I should find a way to fix those links.
And to clarify some more, if there was like 5-10 articles I would do it, just so that I don’t have to listen to him, but there are more than 1 or 2k articles with about 2-5 links per article that were added like that.
After his call I called my boss and told him what happened, and he said he will talk to the client and explain to him how he will be able to communicate with me from now on and in what tone. As I’m not allowed to tell clients anymore to go fuck themselves, since I did it once. But I can call my boss and he does it for me :D
//END RANT !!!4 -
!Story
So I Met this kid (11 or 12) when I was younger
15or so
And he asked me what I wanted to become I said:
Programmer...
He was AMAZED by this job and INSTANTLY wanted to become one too...
So I showed him the Basis of programming with Scratch for EDU, he was pretty good and Made some "good" Games.
Then I wanted to work on my little unity Game...
So I started to Programm on my surface pro 4
He looked at me and asked:
What are you Doing? What is this?
I explained that coding isn't always Scratch and that there are MANY ways to code,
Some are like Scratch and other arent...
He FREAKED THE HELL OUT!
And was Like:
I WANTED TO LEARN CODING NOT SOME OTHER BULLSHIT LIKE SCRATCH!
I WANT TO BECOME LIK,E YOU!
We never met again...7 -
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.5 -
I think the hardest thing about being a programmer in college with a security emphasis is when I approach a business for a penetration test or for a vulnerability analysis (your pick) is that they almost always say, "you are pretty young don't you think?"
Ummmm not sure what that has to do with it. If it would make you feel better I have claimed bug bounties from an antivirus company, a bank, several local businesses in my area and I do this for work at my 9-5.
And this week I got this, "I think I would like someone older so we can define the goals better."
Oh so rules of engagement, yeah of course I understand that and that's something we would discuss and draw up a contract for...
"Well we really need someone more skilled."
---- End of story ----
I don't understand, you haven't asked about certifications or schooling and you glanced at my resume for exactly 5 seconds what the hell do you want? Me to double my age over night?7 -
Can't tell what my most successful project is...
But according to GitHub Stars, my
most successful project is my RandomQuote Bot (@RandomQuote).
The story behind it is pretty boring:
One day little Skayo thought: "Hey there is no bot on DevRant yet, let's make one!".
Then he began to think: "But what should it do? What would be easy to do for an inexperienced programmer like me?".
Suddenly he got an idea: A Bot that posts a random quote everyday!
Yay!
He instantly started making it.
About a day later, it was finished.
"Let's bring this thing to live", he thought.
And there he was, quickly getting a lot of fucking ++'s...
This bot is like my first born child! I am so proud of him!
And that's the story behind the bot.
Very spectacular, isn't it?4 -
I started drinking coffee when I started as a junior dev.
I loved its boost, but after a while being on coffee was exactly how I felt before as normal. I incrementally upped the dosage, while my resistance creeped up too. I reached a moment when I drank a liter daily, so I witched to yerba maté instead, which resulted in more potent brews. Then I got used to its strength too plus it tasted like horseshit. I switched to caffeine tablets, takingg more and more. Soon after I reached a level which was described medically as the top one should be allowed to take.
I no longer felt any boost. In between caffeinated moments of normalty, I felt like a brain-dead zombie. When I was caffeinated, I was jittery, my shoulder and eyebrow was glitching, my stomach was flexing like before taking a huge exam.
After some miserable time like that, I quit caffeine entirely. I was fatigued, dull and my mind was hazy for te next 1-2 weeks.
I then finally, became gradually normal again.
I drink tea and coffee only socially, perhaps a few times in a month, and never after too much later than noon.
Now I can't wear my "Programmer. Converts coffee into code" shirt anymore. Apart from that, I'm much better off :)
What's your coffee story?14 -
When I die, I want the R.I.P on my tombstone mean something different
Recursion Investigator Program
On my computer, there will be a file with that name
and when you decompile it to assembly
it will tell my life story in assembly
this will be a death propper for an assembly programmer6 -
A programmer heads out to the store. His wife says "while you're out, get some milk."
He never came home.
The poor guy is stuck causing serious problems at a grocery store somewhere.
BREAKING NEWS: Man stuck in 'while' loop crashes global milk market. Will authorities resort to ctrl-x? This story, and more, at 7:00.
UPDATE: keyboard interrupts proving ineffective, authorities discussing resorting to kill -9
Aaaand he's broke.
And he has ALL the milk.
Should read as "return home"
Unfortunately, she gave no instructions for terminating the loop.3 -
Our story start like this.
Boss: Hey programmer A, Can you implement {feature X} on this application?
Programmer A: I suggest not implement {feature X} because {negative impact of feature X}
Boss: Ok
Boss asks Programmer B.
Boss: Hey programmer B, Can you implement {feature X} on this application?
Programmer B: Of course, no problem
Programmer B asks Programmer A.
Programmer B: Hey Programmer A, Do you know how to implement {feature X} on this application? I have no idea.
Programmer A: WHAT!!! do you know that {feature X}, Will negatively impact our application?
Programmer B: Well that's our boss want, I can't say no.
Programmer A: (F**k I hate this guy)4 -
Hi every developer! My name is Allen. English is not my native language so forgive me if I say something that does not make any sense. Let me tell you my story how I become a programmer. (I am still learning) My first computer was a DELL OptiPlex GX 720 desktop. My father bought it for our self-employee job. Before he allow me to use the computer, I used to sit next to him and watching what he do, what he click and what he gets. When he allow me to use the computer, I was slow at typing. One or 2 WPM (word per minute) my father taught me how to use the computer. Very slowly, my typing speed improves. I understand how to use the computer. but one day, I do what make me regret. I was playing with some executables, when I double clicking it, it does not work I used to associate files with apps. I associate music files with every player I want. So, I did what I used to, I associate exe files with windows media center! The computer started to open hundreds of windows media center (WMC for short) whenever an app is clicked, it opens windows media center. Today, I realized that windows were trying to open every app and every process that regularly run. However, since I associate it with WMC, instead of the app itself, it opens WMC some days after the mistake, I wonder how apps work and how I can create my own. My father told me before that a program is simply a binary file that the computer can read. However, it was too advanced to me at the time.I begin my search with google. Everytime I search, it says "learn to code" or something like that. I see some C++ code but, it was disgusting. when I read just a few lines of a hello world code in java. it was too complex
What I seen
#$$#% $%&$%&*#!@
~
(&*%&$ (_(*^% #&&* (^^$(&^$%^( %^*$())
~
^$70^(`*#%`*#&%^)*!" Hello world "#@
~
~
The actual code:
class helloworld
{
public static void main(String args[])
{
System.out.println("Hello World!");
}
}
I look for an easy way but my attempts fail. then. I push
I to learn how to code.I try learning java. but it still
Very complex. i tried LibertyBASIC. from LibertyBASIC to
Java. after learning LibertyBASIC, it was easy!
LibertyBASIC -> Java -> Ruby -> NOW, C# and XAML
Today, I am learning C# and XAML.
My first OS : Windows 7
My first Computer : DELL OptiPlex GX 720
My first successful click : The Start menu
My first used App : Microsoft Encarta 2009
My first created App : Hi-Lo(number-guessing game. written in LibertyBASIC)
Thankyou for reading this Long story.
8 -
Did a bunch more cowboy coding today as I call it (coding in vi on production). Gather 'round kiddies, uncle Logan's got a story fer ya…
First things first, disclaimer: I'm no sysadmin. I respect sysadmins and the work they do, but I'm the first to admit my strengths definitely lie more in writing programs rather than running servers.
Anyhow, I recently inherited someone else's codebase (the story of my profession career, but I digress) and let me tell you this thing has amateur hour written all over it. It's written in PHP and JavaScript by a self-taught programmer who apparently discovered procedural programming and decided there was nothing left to learn and stopped there (no disrespect to self-taught programmers).
I could rant for days about the various problems this codebase has, but today I have a very specific story to tell. A story about errors and logs.
And it all started when I noticed the disk space on our server was gradually decreasing.
So today I logged onto our API server (Ubuntu running Apache/PHP) and did a df -h to check the disk space, and was surprised to see that it had noticeably decreased since the last time I'd checked when everything was running smoothly. But seeing as this server does not store any persistent customer data (we have a separate db server) and purely hosts the stateless API, it should NOT be consuming disk space over time at all.
The only thing I could think of was the logs, but the logs were very quiet, just the odd benign message that was fully expected. Just to be sure I did an ls -Sh to check the size of the logs, and while some of them were a little big, nothing over a few megs. Nothing to account for gigabytes of disk space gradually disappearing.
What could it be? I wondered.
cd ../..
du . | sort --sort=numeric
What's this? 2671132 K in some log folder buried in the api source code? I cd into it and it turns out there are separate PHP log files in there, split up by customer, so that each customer of ours (we have 120) has their own respective error log! (Why??)
Armed with this newfound piece of (still rather unbelievable) evidence I perform a mad scramble to search the codebase for where this extra logging is happening and sure enough I find a custom PHP error handler that is capturing (most) errors and redirecting them to these individualized log files.
Conveniently enough, not ALL errors were being absorbed though, so I still knew the main error_log was working (and any time I explicitly error_logged it would go there, so I was none the wiser that this other error-catching was even happening).
Needless to say I removed the code as quickly as I found it, tail -f'd the error_log and to my dismay it was being absolutely flooded with syntax errors, runtime PHP exceptions, warnings galore, and all sorts of other things.
My jaw almost hit the floor. I've been with this company for 6 months and had no idea these errors were even happening!
The sad thing was how easy to fix all the errors ended up being. Most of them were "undefined index" errors that could have been completely avoided with a simple isset() check, but instead ended up throwing an exception, nullifying any code that came after it.
Anyway kids, the moral of the story is don't split up your log files. It makes absolutely no sense and can end up obscuring easily fixable bugs for half a year or more!
Happy coding.6 -
Someone posted a rant referencing a story out of The Pragmatic Programmer about "duck debugging". I've leveled up with a duck.3
-
A few years ago, a fellow programmer called me to teach him how to use git blame to find out who wrote that piece of code that broke the monetary ecosystem in this game. He was pretty upset about it because they blamed him about it. I gladly helped him just to see my own name there. Sad story.1
-
First Hackathon ends today. Long story short: I was the only programmer of the team, we only had 2 days to develop it (of which we spent the first day doing research, so 1 day of coding), so guess what it's shit.
I basically took a bootstrap theme, hardcoded some data. Put some js on top for interactions and a node js backend, to interface some APIs. Just by looking at the code you'll get cancer, but the others of the team where impressed, how good it looked an worked...
Let's hope the judges aren't familliar with coding as well (our challenge got two judges whereof one works at a bank as some guy whearing a suite and sponsoring stuff... Ao chances should be ok)
Honestly fuck this. Not one team (afaik) has pfoduced anything close to being finished...10 -
This happened with one of our senior profs during the first year of my college. I wouldn't call him a dev if my life depended on calling him a dev but regardless, I narrate the story here.
We were "taught" C++ by some really dumb professors during our first year of college and it was mandatory that everyone cleared the subject regardless of what field of engineering the students chose. Having already done 2 years of C++, it was quite a breeze for me. But during the final lab exam, one of my friends requested my help in solving the quite tough question (for those beginners). Thinking the exam and teaching was unfair, I stupidly wrote the answer on a piece of paper and passed it to him. One of our teachers, who had seen him ask me, was lying low waiting to catch me in the act and she swooped in and busted our asses kicking us out of the exam hall and sending us to the HoDs office like some prize from her war against academic corruption.
In the end, I failed the exam for cheating and had to redo (not only the exam but the entire lab course).
When I returned to college during the summer vacations to redo the course, I first met the antagonist of our story. Having a huge head that looked like a deformed watermelon and an ego the size of a building, he assaulted us first with a verbal diarrhoea of his achievements as a CS professor. I quickly realised that I was in a class of people who had failed to grasp how to make a program that printed "Hello World". To make things shorter, every question the prof gave us, I managed to solve in a mere matter of minutes, several better than his own solutions. Not having expected a student who knew his shit, he was determined to play me down. He hurled tougher question at me and I knocked them over his enormous head piercing his ego. He asked me such questions as how to reverse 1000 and get 0001 and wasn't satisfied with the several ways I gave because none of it were what he had in mind (which turned out to be storing them in a fucking array and printing them in reverse. That's printing not reversing you dung beetle). I kept my calm throughout but on the day of the final exam, he set quite a tough paper for a class of people who had already failed once. To his utter shock and dismay, I aced that too and I produced flawless code. This man who has an MTech from one of the most reputed colleges of my country then proceeded to tell me that he had to cut my marks because I had used more than one function when the question had asked for one function ( it never said only one). I lost my shit and pointed out that since I was the programmer, it was my wish how I coded. I also explained to him how repeating code is a bad practice and one should use functions to reduce redundancy and keep the code clean. Nevertheless, he lost his shit and he threatened me with consequences as apparently "I didn't know who I was messing with". I handed over the paper and stormed out of the class (though he called me back and tried to argue more with me. I apologized for losing my shit and left when he was done talking). I ended up getting a 'C'. Totally worth it.4 -
TLDR: Read the post.
Bare with me here, I am new to all of this jazz. But I wanted to tell a story.
I have been a programmer for a while now, working on various projects with various companies, doing various things. I know that sounds vague, but it's the truth.
I never work on the same thing, ever, I never work with any fancy IDE, because I don't need one. I personally believe no developer works with the massive huge code base all at once, but instead works on it in pieces. That's a story for another day.
I have seen the shittiest of the shittiest and some how survived, I have been beaten down by code bases that were out sourced yet some how managed to stand up and gain my baring and fight back. I have dealt with clients, bosses and idiots from A-Z. Watching them all scramble around for their pennies like greedy rich white men seeking more pennies to swim in.
Some how I survived all this. I started working from home almost 3 years ago, the freedom is exhilarating. The ability to fuck off for most of the day and work at night, or work all morning and fuck off. There's nothing better.
As you work from home you think, this will be amazing. Until the crippling loneliness takes over and even the 6th bottle of beer doesn't quench the thirst of human contact. The pain of being trapped in the four white walls of your office makes that bottle of tequila, to numb out the emptiness inside look more satisfying.
At some point, you crawl out of your space to find people to interact with, refusing to be beaten down by both shit code and loneliness only to find all your friends, family and significant others are working, in offices, where they cant just fuck off for a day with you. The silence of the house, the office, the what ever becomes deafening.
its crawling all over you like bugs that pick away at your mind, breaking you, hating you. So you decide that a coffee shop is the best place, only to sit there and people watch or check Facebook or what ever else people do at coffee shops that isn't actually work.
The point in all of this, is that working from home is both a positive and a negative. It has destroyed me, created a workaholic and, probably, an alcoholic. There isnt a day I dont wish that I could sleep away the deafening silence of the world around me as every one busies off to the office.
One might think: get an office job, but I have become accustomed to my misery, pain and suffering of working from home, isolated and medicated by vaping and alcohol. the freedom, from what I have found, is worth more then the sacrifice of it - to work around people I slowly begin to hate, people that make me want to overdose on anything rather then see their smug faces and be beaten down by their idiotic words, code bases and money grubbing hands...
I guess I'll get back to work now, in my house, with my cats, my vape and my beer. Here's to freedom and the sacrifices that go along with it.5 -
Read the following in Morgan Freeman’s voice.
Okay everyone sit on down and get ready for story time. There once was a workspace that was a pain in the ass to setup. It often would take an entire day even for the most experienced devs on the team...for it was a workspace perched atop a swamp of shit that would require a whole year to refactor into something that isn’t shit.
It was inherited, passed down, stepped in and scrapped from the boot soles of every programmer that ever touched it. It was an amalgam of old, new, and third party components with a class path a mile long and no package management because the company although physically in the present, somehow maintained a temporal presence in the past. And there was nothing that the team hated more than setting that workspace. In short it was an unholy mess that made Satan cry and Dennis Ritchie spin in his grave so much that the state of California attached magnets and a coil to his body and casket to generate electricity.
Then one day the untalented clowns known as App Group decided that our IDE should be owned and configured strictly through them. They took poor Eclipse and mounted so much silly shit to it that it resembled a riding lawn mower with a fax machine and a blender duct taped to it. Eventually as everything the company touched did, it simply turned into a broken, shitty mess that not even Jesus Titty Fucking Christ could bring back the dead.
And then, every month or so the IDE would break in such a grand way that every developer had to rebuild their workspace...the very same Lovecraftian monster disguised as a code base. It was just too much to bear for old Deus. He was all out of fucks and there wasn’t enough alcohol in the world to quiet his injured soul. So he stood on a chair, carved his name in a rafter and tied a noose to it, put it around his neck and finally kicked the chair out from under himself. I am told he even pooped his pants and the post mortem shit in the seat of his pants was still better than the codebase at work. I’m Morgan Freeman. -
When I just started my software engineering course in college, we had a group project every semester where we would use the skills learned during that semester to make a certain product or program.
For the semester in this story, we were tasked with making a reservation system for a campsite. Visitors would be able to select a free spot, and reserve it.
The spot reservation screen would be a map of the campsite, and visitors would click on the desired site on the map to select it. Sites were neatly laid out in a perfect grid.
My task in the group for this project was my favourite position: yelling at people for poor code quality. And boy did I get to yell.
Any semi competent programmer would probably come up with two simple loops to generate all the buttons (something like 144 buttons), one loop to fill a row, and then another to go down the rows until all were filled. Some other similar functionality in the program was solved this way.
However, my classmate that was responsible for this part of the code wasn't a big fan of concise programming. So instead, he wrote 144 functions aptly called `generateFirstButton()` all the way through `generateHundredFourtyFourthButton()`.
*what*
I called him out on his horribly smelly code, and his retort was "But it works, and now you don't have to think about complicated loop logic".
I rewrote the class and reduced it from ~1150 lines to about 20 lines.
He didn't pass the exam.2 -
Being an apprentice programmer in a Ludum Dare (Create a game in 72h) that knows more than the official programmer, and have an artist in the group who makes THIS PIECES OF ART!
She didn't even had a computer to work with it, neither she asked for one to the event, so eventually she used mine... And I could not do my work.
Did I mentioned that she used PAINT to color the images?
This is a long, looong story, I'll do the complete version soon...
God.12 -
story time
I'm a C++ programmer and they have given me CSS, Javascript, Java, PHP and C# vacancies.. because I'm a programmer and they think I can do the rest.. YES I can.. NO i don't want to
One day I was invited at the recruitment office. had a talk for like 30 minutes.. where after they said yeah we have a game dev company for you.. then they said which one... Yes that Is indeed in this city... their SALES division not their DEV devision!
One day I came to a recruitment office 30min travel time.. and in the conversation it was me who talked about 30 minutes that recruiters don't understand the difference between javascript and C++. .. they asked me If I knew MySql.. for a backend job..
How can recruiters be THIS stupid.1 -
Not a Story about an actual hack, but a story about people being dumb and using hacks as an excuse.
A few weeks ago my little cousin would reach out to me because "his Account was hacked...". Supposedly his League of Legends account was hacked by a guy of his own age (14) and this guy was boasting about it.
So i asked the usual things: "Has the email account been hijacked? Did anyone know about details to your acvount access? Etc..."
Turns out that one if his "friends" knew his password and username, but suppsedly erased these Informationen. And that was the part i didn't buy.
This was the point where he lost. Just because i am a programmer does not mean i can retrieve an account he lost because of a dumb mistake that could have easily been avoided. And that guy who was boasting about hacking LoL Account was coincidentally freinds with the friend who had the user credentials and password.
Moral of the Story? The biggest security weakness is almost always the user or a human in between... -
I met a programmer in an online dating app some months ago. She worked with golang, and things were going nicely with us talking a bit.
Then I mentioned that I currently work with Typescript and NodeJS and she stopped responding 😞
Should have posted this as story, since this is not actually a joke.10 -
So I joined this financial institution back in Nov. Selling themselves as looking for a developer to code micro-services for a Spring based project and deploying on Cloud. I packed my stuff, drove and moved to the big city 3500 km away. New start in life I thought!
Turns out that micro-services code is an old outdated 20 year old JBoss code, that was ported over to Spring 10 years ago, then let to rot and fester into a giant undocumented Spaghetti code. Microservices? Forget about that. And whats worse? This code is responsible for processing thousands of transactions every month and is currently deployed in PROD. Now its your responsibility and now you have to get new features complied on the damn thing. Whats even worse? They made 4 replicas of that project with different functionalities and now you're responsible for all. Ma'am, this project needs serious refactoring, if not a total redesign/build. Nope! Not doing this! Now go work at it.
It took me 2-3 months just to wrap my mind around this thing and implement some form of working unit tests. I have to work on all that code base by myself and deliver all by myself! naturally, I was delayed in my delivery but I finally managed to deliver.
Time for relief I thought! I wont be looking at this for a while. So they assign me the next project: Automate environment sync between PROD and QA server that is manually done so far. Easy beans right? And surely enough, the automation process is simple and straightforward...except it isnt! Why? Because I am not allowed access to the user Ids and 3rd party software used in the sync process. Database and Data WareHouse data manipulation part is same story too. I ask for access and I get denied over and over again. I try to think of workarounds and I managed to do two using jenkins pipeline and local scripts. But those processes that need 3rd party software access? I cannot do anything! How am I supposed to automate job schedule import on autosys when I DONT HAVE ACCESS!! But noo! I must think of plan B! There is no plan B! Rather than thinking of workarounds, how about getting your access privileges right and get it right the first time!!
They pay relatively well but damn, you will lose your sanity as a programmer.
God, oh god, please bless me with a better job soon so I can escape this programming hell hole.
I will never work in finance again. I don't recommend it, unless you're on the tail end of your career and you want something stable & don't give a damn about proper software engineering principles anymore.3 -
First week of work.
Coder comes to me and says: "have you cut your nails?".
The designer says "i think you should paint yours nails" to start programming
... i thought for a while so i c# them. True Story...
i'm a female programmer btw...6 -
Not really a programming story... but a story about how programmers problem solve in real life.
Mods, sort me out if I'm out of line. Anyway, here goes.
So, my wife and I are arguing about whether or not the garage has insulated walls.
"It doesn't have insulated walls", I say, "I've been up in the rafters and their's no insulation there, so there's probably none in the walls."
"Well, why can't you just check", my better half responds, "You could just punch a hole in the wall to see."
Me, taking about 300ms to process this statement. Looks over, and punches a hole in the wall.
"See, no insulation!!!" I say triumphantly.
"What. The. Fuck. Did you just punch a hole in the wall for???"
deerinheadlights.gif
"Um, because you told me to?"
"Well I didn't mean to use your hand, I meant to get a small drill so the hole wouldn't be enormous."
"Well you didn't say "get a small drill", you said "punch"!
And as a laid down to sleep, on the couch, that night I still insist she told me to do it. And while I patched that hole, I still thought it was her fault. And to this day I still think it's her fault.
You cannot give a programmer these vague instructions and expect appropriate results.5 -
So here's is the thing.
For some weird reason I decided to work at a VC funded startup. For 15k year,(I live in a really poor country).
So, let me describe the hell I'm in now, and if for some good grace you happen to be hiring, please consider saving me from the horror that's ahead.
Company got funded 5 months ago, main owners are, an economist and a civil engineer with no programming habilities whatsoever.
They took 1 month to assemble "a killer team", with no hiring expertise they handpicked a CTO that came in 1 month later and took a month of vacation in his first month of work.
He didn't do any specification of the system that needs to be built.
The 2 naive owners hired the rest of this "killer team".
The team is good, but have no appreciation of planning.
They've built and rebuilt the backend system twice, once in graphql and the second with plain http (is not real rest, just a http api), in front of, guess what a mongo database.
This mongo DB is not only one, but 7, because we have 7 microservices, and each has its own database.
After some time, they decided to fire their CTO, and hire one more programmer(that's me), because the CTO wasn't doing anything.
The app has 3 parts, the app per se, a business version, and a help desk, guess what the helpdesk just appeared last week on the radar.
Long story short, we have one month to deliver what couldn't be built in 5.
When I decided to work for these people, I did not imagine the kind of clusterfuck that I was getting into.
It took me 1 month to realize the whole situation, now, I really would like to see some help from the deities of any religion, not for the project, that project is doomed.
It's how I'll pay the bills after that clusterfuck collapses that worries me.
Now in the startup no one is talking about how stupid the whole situation is. Or how far back we are. And at this point there's very little that could be done about it, I have a feeling that it could still be accomplished, but it's fading day after day.
I will do my best to live the best of this experience, and do as the musicians in the Titanic and keep playing the music even after knowing the Titanic is sinking.4 -
True story:
A guy worked at a company as a very important programmer.
No matter the assignment, he would get it done.
It turns out he played Internet games all day and had outsourced his work to a Chinese company for 10% of his pay.
And he had signed up at a second company and did the same thing there.
He was fired, but made a lot of money.4 -
When I was in college OOP was emerging. A lot of the professors were against teaching it as the core. Some younger professors were adamant about it, and also Java fanatics. So after the bell rang, they'd sometimes teach people that wanted to learn it. I stayed after and the professor said that object oriented programming treated things like reality.
My first thought to this was hold up, modeling reality is hard and complicated, why would you want to add that to your programming that's utter madness.
Then he started with a ball example and how some balls in reality are blue, and they can have a bounce action we can express with a method.
My first thought was that this seems a very niche example. It has very little to do with any problems I have yet solved and I felt thinking about it this way would complicate my programs rather than make them simpler.
I looked around the at remnants of my classmates and saw several sitting forward, their eyes lit up and I felt like I was in a cult meeting where the head is trying to make everyone enamored of their personality. Except he wasn't selling himself, he was selling an idea.
I patiently waited it out, wanting there to be something of value in the after the bell lesson. Something I could use to better my own programming ability. It never came.
This same professor would tell us all to read and buy gang of four it would change our lives. It was an expensive hard cover book with a ribbon attached for a bookmark. It was made to look important. I didn't have much money in college but I gave it a shot I bought the book. I remember wrinkling my nose often, reading at it. Feeling like I was still being sold something. But where was the proof. It was all an argument from authority and I didn't think the argument was very good.
I left college thinking the whole thing was silly and would surely go away with time. And then it grew, and grew. It started to be impossible to avoid it. So I'd just use it when I had to and that became more and more often.
I began to doubt myself. Perhaps I was wrong, surely all these people using and loving this paradigm could not be wrong. I took on a 3 year project to dive deep into OOP later in my career. I was already intimately aware of OOP having to have done so much of it. But I caught up on all the latest ideas and practiced them for a the first year. I thought if OOP is so good I should be able to be more productive in years 2 and 3.
It was the most miserable I had ever been as a programmer. Everything took forever to do. There was boilerplate code everywhere. You didn't so much solve problems as stuff abstract ideas that had nothing to do with the problem everywhere and THEN code the actual part of the code that does a task. Even though I was working with an interpreted language they had added a need to compile, for dependency injection. What's next taking the benefit of dynamic typing and forcing typing into it? Oh I see they managed to do that too. At this point why not just use C or C++. It's going to do everything you wanted if you add compiling and typing and do it way faster at run time.
I talked to the client extensively about everything. We both agreed the project was untenable. We moved everything over another 3 years. His business is doing better than ever before now by several metrics. And I can be productive again. My self doubt was over. OOP is a complicated mess that drags down the software industry, little better than snake oil and full of empty promises. Unfortunately it is all some people know.
Now there is a functional movement, a data oriented movement, and things are looking a little brighter. However, no one seems to care for procedural. Functional and procedural are not that different. Functional just tries to put more constraints on the developer. Data oriented is also a lot more sensible, and again pretty close to procedural a lot of the time. It's just odd to me this need to separate from procedural at all. Procedural was very honest. If you're a bad programmer you make bad code. If you're a good programmer you make good code. It seems a lot of this was meant to enforce bad programmers to make good code. I'll tell you what I think though. I think that has never worked. It's just hidden it away in some abstraction and made identifying it harder. Much like the code methodologies themselves do to the code.
Now I'm left with a choice, keep my own business going to work on what I love, shift gears and do what I hate for more money, or pivot careers entirely. I decided after all this to go into data science because what you all are doing to the software industry sickens me. And that's my story. It's one that makes a lot of people defensive or even passive aggressive, to those people I say, try more things. At least then you can be less defensive about your opinion.53 -
Do you guys often get upset because of people that ask your job because when somebody asks me what I do for a living and I say "I'm a programmer" this someone says one of these:
1- Oh really, can you tell me HoW tO HaCk NaSa? (It's more often than you think)
2- WOW AWESOME SO I HAVE THIS BiLlIon DolLarS ApP IdeA CaN yOu ProGraM iT?
3- Hm... and... what do you do for a living? (Apparently programming is not a job)
4- Cool! Me too! Bcs once I MaDe ThiS GaMe I prOGraMmed WiTh GaMeMaKer (true story, and it was a flappy bird, but in the place of the bird it was chuck norris with a moustache instead.)(with lasers.)(Also it wasn't really working.)
5- Cool bro, so, can you take a look at my printer?
6- Hm nice * looks away with disgusting face * (that was my own family lol ;-;)9 -
Travelled for some hours today.
While i was on it i remembered a PDF "The Pragmatic Programmer" resting in my phone.
Opened it and read it until the bus reached the destination.
I entered the bus a complete idiot and upon exit i was half Socrates of programming habits.
Had read some chapters though.
Why didn't i know about it before ? -
Fuck these super social media instagram influencer developers telling everyone watching their story that "everyone can be a programmer.". You can't. It's not only about syntax and a run button.16
-
Samsung Smart TV becomes Samsung Dumb TV.
Welcome back dear readers, to the next installment of my Raspberry Pi / Pi Hole / MitM box adventure!
For those of you who are new to this story, I'm a long experience programmer who knows very little about his home network or networking in general and has constantly been going over his 250GB data plan because 'rona, and thus, wants answers to "where is the data going".
So, I got the Pi, codenamed Mini-Beowolf, positioned between the modem and router... worked some fuckin systemd.networkd magic (which was sort of easy... but was hard cause I'm new to it) and viola, this son of a bitch passes through the ethernet and doesn't even show up on the router. Fu-King Beastly, I love it.
Now to static IP all my devices so I fire up my trusty TP-Link admin portal. I should add here... I've visited this admin about a total of 10 minutes prior to this when I set this wifi router up and just let it do DHCP.
So I'm getting to know my admin portal... I've got most of my devices connected to reserved IPs... and I find this one fuckin device reporting as "localhost".
Now, I've got a MAMP install... but it hasn't been running. But still I thought for sure it was just MAMP run a bit amok.
But no... it was my fucking Samsung "Smart" TV. That piece of shit is, and apparently has been reporting its device name as, sure as shit, fucking "localhost"... PROBABLY FOR YEARS.
Now, IDK how that didn't cause me any major problems over the years, and I read quite a few forums about people who it did mess up their network. So I resolved to rename the Samsung TV device.
I found the spot in the network settings of the TV... I changed the name from the pick list of rooms in a house like "Living Room" and "Bed Room", then I tried entering my own device name. But no matter what I picked, or no matter how many times I restarted/reset that TV the network name is ALWAYS "localhost".
Even though somehow my network survived this long... I'm not standing for that shit.
My Samsung TV is now blocked COMPLETELY at the router level. (After I ran one last factory reset and update)
The kicker? That Pi I built has a Samsung SSD... so I'm blocking Samsung WITH FUCKING SAMSUNG.
Needless to say, these are likely among my last Samsung purchases.
Join me next time when I FINALLY try to turn Pi Hole on and then get a tcpdump (or some other lesser output from the tcp stream) going.16 -
Not really a rant and not very random. More like a very short story.
So I didn't write any rant regarding the whole Microsoft GitHub topic. I don't like to judge stuff quickly. I participated in few threads though.
Another thing is I also don't use GitHub very much apart from giving 🌟 to repos as a bookmark. Have one hobby project there. That's all. So I don't worry that much. I'm that selfish and self concerned. :3
I was first introduced to version control system by learning how to use tortoisesvn around 2008. We had a group project and one of the guys was an experienced and amazing programmer unlike the rest of us. He was doing commercial projects while we were at our 1st and 2nd year. Uni had svn repo server. He taught us about tortoisesvn. He also had Basecamp and taught us how to use it as well. So that's how I learned the benefits of using versioning tools and project management tools. On side note, our uni didn't teach any of those in detail :3
After that project, I was hooked to use versioning tools. So until school kicked me out, I was able to use their svn server. When I was on my own, I had to ask Google for help. I found a new world. There are still free svn services that I can use with certain limited functions. That's not the new world; I found people saying how git is better than svn in various ways. It was around 2010,2011.
At first I was a bit reluctant to touch git because of all the commands in terminal approach. But then I found that there is tortoisegit. I still thank tortoisesvn creator for that. I'm a sucker for GUI tools. So then I also have to pick which git servers to use. Hell yeah, self hosted gitlab is the way to go man. Well that's what the internet said. So I listened. I got it up and running after numerous trial and error. I used it briefly. Then I came back to my country on 2012-2013; the land of kilobytes per minute (yes not second, minute).
My country's internet was improved only after 2016. So from 2013 to 2016, I did my best not to rely on internet. I wasn't able to afford a server at my less than 10 people, 12ft*50ft office. So I had to find alternative to gitlab which preferably run on windows. Found bonobo and it was alright. It worked. Well had crazy moments here and there when the PC running Bonobo got virus and stuff. But we managed. We survived. Then finally multi national Telecom corporates came to our country.
We got cheaper and faster mobile data, broadband and fiber plans. Finally I can visit pornhub ... sorry github. Github is good. I like it. But that doesn't mean I should share my ugly mutated projects to the rest of the world. I could keep using Bonobo but it has risks. So I had to think for an alternative. I remembered that gitlab didn't have cloud hosting service when I checked them out in the past. So I just looked into Bitbucket and happy with their free plans of 5 users and unlimited private repos. I am very very cheap and broke.
That's why I said I don't really care that much about the whole M$GitHub topic at the beginning. However due to that topic, I have visited GitLab website again and found out they have cloud hosting now and their free plan is unlimited users and unlimited repos. So hell yeah. Sorry BB. I am gonna move to cheaper and wider land.
TL;DR : I am gonna move to GitLab because of their free plan.4 -
I have this idea for a story, but I lack graphic talent. It's always frustrated me that I can't bring the ideas in my head out in to visual form, but the programmer in me knows how to be descriptive enough.
Thanks to AI I genuinely think I might be able to make my story as a visual novel. Here's one of the first successful renders of a scene.
This might just work. I'm excited...9 -
Hey! This is a followup to my last story.
TL;DR: I thinking of quitting my old job, got an offer at a startup, about the same pay, but much better working conditions.
First of all, the meeting with my lead. It was a performance report on her side to me, and I got 100 to 110% in performance in all points. My lead said "this team without you wouldn't be this team anymore" - which makes me feel a little bit bad for her if I decide to quit. She is a great team lead, but I don't belive the old company is worth my time anymore.
Now to the new company. Shortly after that performance report meeting, I had a call with the ceo, and what do I have to say besides: What a cool dude. He listened to me, asked me questions about my previous jobs (not just as programmer) and so on. But because first looks are deceiving, I went to their office last thursday. And wow. Their are exactly what I imagined them to be. Cool, young folks, 100% tech enthusiasts, and open minded.
One of the new hires in the new company wanted a 6 months internship between his studies. Instead they offered him a full time job - for the 6 months. They even offered me to pay back my scholarship that I will own my old company for leaving early. This is awesome.
The only things that will be worse than my old job are, that I have to negotiate payment instead of yearly increases, 4 days less paid vacation, so only 26 days, and 40h weeks. And they have no workers council, which isn't good, but it's not the worst either.
I got them fixed on 57.000€, not including an up to 10.000€ annual bonus. The way you achieve your bonus seems good to. It's split in two parts, internal and external bonus. Internal bonus is when you engage with internal events like tech calls, sharing your knowledge on your main IT topics, etc. External Bonus is a bit more complicated, but also straight forward. You work on projects for customers, and if you have less than 3 weeks a year that you dont participate in an project, you get the full bonus.
Last friday, I filed a request for a certificate of employment from my current team lead, this is odd for her because I have never done it before, and she asked why I requested it. I said to her that we can talk about it, and she agreed but didn't call me, yet.
Lastly, another good friend of mine will be employed by my team soon, but for a fraction of the payment that I currently receive! He is doing the exact same work, and even worse, he is doing project managment for his main developer project too! And is getting less paid... I just cant...
Yesterday we needed to update a few cloud instances, the only other person who knows about setting up CICD and our OpenShift Containers than me is only in part time and works two days a week, his trainee didn't know anything, so it's up to me. This isn't hard or anything, but it shows that this system our mangement maintains will fail soon, maybe even with me going? I sure hope so tbh.
One of you guys said, I should go to my team lead and negotiate a higher pay, but the truth is, that because we are a big ISP we have an collective agreement for payment and are grouped by tasks (which is bull shit btw, because I'm doing tasks much higher paid than currently). This also means that I cannot simply jump in another group, and can only increase my current pay to about 115%, which is done automatically every year by 5% up to 115%. Anything above is considered extra, but I don't think they will go with it.
I will decide this week about my future at the old company, but I really don't know what to do...2 -
Experienced programmer:
Code works in head; code almost works in computer; code never works with client.
Beginner programmer:
Code almost works in head; code never works in computer; code will never work with client.
Long story short: it's hard to begin but when you let the code flow, you became a programmer -
I have a co-worker who won’t stop “refactoring” our codebase. He will go on a long tangent — under the guise of working on a proper story — and then reveal proudly after a few days that he now introduced a new middle-layer into the code which will help us such and such.
I have never seen any benefit from this. I think sometimes cleaning up variable names is nice, but a lot of the things just add noise and complexity. He’s a junior dev, I’m a senior dev. My progressional opinion is that he is doing a bad job. Management doesn’t know the full extent and the lead programmer scolds him every now and then but in the end let’s the code changes pass code review. “It has already been implemented so what’s the harm”.
Then the rest of us are stuck with horrible merge conflicts. I recently noticed that some new business-important unit tests that I wrote were mysteriously gone. Oops — lost in some misguided refactoring I guess. I’m assuming they were failing after the refactor, so clearly they had to go... Fortunately the underlying logic still works I think.
His main tactic in all of this seems to be to just use argumentative stamina. He will lose discussion after discussion but doesn’t seem to care. He’ll just talk and talk. And the in the end the lead tech gives in. And/or doesn’t have the energy to catch the error introduced.
I swear, the company would be better off without him. Maybe even better if we keep paying him but he just cleans the toilets instead. Sometimes I almost believes he gets up in the morning to come to work and just fuck with people all day.2 -
So the story is true and this is what we have to deal with now..
My friend and I started to build a Web Application for a Roleplay Community. The project was for a client mainly and they don't mind if we try to sell this project to the public. All goes well except the shitty design, which is the one our client asked for. So after 6 months of work we planned to switch our backend to Nodejs, the switch look quite easy in our brains [PHP => NODEJS] because we already use Nodejs for instant functions without reloading the page.
So during the planning we earn a client which is one of the member of the clan, but he pay for another clan which is 6x bigger then the one we're in. So we continue to develop and think about the switch. We learn a news about a new competitor, this one sucks, we tried their App and it's not worth the money they ask. A few days after another competitor enter the market, this one is a big challenge for us. "Sit down tight, yea you reading this"..
The competitor use BUBBLE to create their shit, they earned 10 clients in one week and just punch us with "THE ROCK" hand, they release a lot of feature each week, they're 6 devs on that (if we can call them devs), we're 2 programmers (True Programmers). What we do in 1 week they do it in 5 hours with Bubble, the switching to Nodejs was a badluck, you couldn't add feature because of this switch during 2 weeks, this made us later and second in the race. My friend (at the same time my employee and back-end programmer) move into another appartment which obligate him to work full-time. At this time I'm f****, I'm only a Front-End Programmer vs 6 Wannabe Devs with a mother**** tool of *** (#Bubble).
This is where I am, in this beautiful opportunity to win this market but with this bad luck occuring = the opportunity is low, but our advantage is we don't have made our project public yet so they're the only good option for the communities to get that kind of web app, the others are not included and only a copy of this (Their Product) or just a big junk made with Wix.
At this time I'm working hard to make this opportunity happen, I have my math which I have to finish to have my High School diploma to do, a part-time job to get if I want to stay with an internet connection and finally I have to find a way to still be able to make my dream come true (Working on my Business at full time & Make money from it) and continue to be a Front-End Programmer/CEO of an enterprise.4 -
This started as an update to my cover story for my Linked In profile, but as I got into a groove writing it, it turned into something more, but I’m not really sure what exactly. It maybe gets a little preachy towards the end so I’m not sure if I want to use it on LI but I figure it might be appreciated here:
In my IT career of nearly 20 years, I have worked on a very wide range of projects. I have worked on everything from mobile apps (both Adroid and iOS) to eCommerce to document management to CMS. I have such a broad technical background that if I am unfamiliar with any technology, there is a very good chance I can pick it up and run with it in a very short timespan.
If you think of the value that team members add to the team as a whole in mathematical terms, you have adders and you have subtractors. I am neither. I am a multiplier. I enjoy coaching, leading and architecture, but I don’t ever want to get out of the code entirely.
For the last 9 years, I have functioned as a technical team lead on a variety of highly successful and highly productive teams. As far as team leads go, I tend to be a bit more hands on. Generally, I manage to actively develop code about 25% of the time to keep my skills sharp and have a clear understanding of my team’s codebase.
Beyond that I also like to review as much of the code coming into the codebase as practical. I do this for 3 reasons. I do this because as a team lead, I am ultimately the one responsible for the quality and stability of the codebase. This also allows me to keep a finger on the pulse of the team, so that I have a better idea of who is struggling and who is outperforming. Finally, I recognize that my way may not necessarily be the best way to do something and I am perfectly willing to admit the same. I have learned just as much if not more by reviewing the work of others than having someone else review my own.
It has been said that if you find a job you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. This describes my relationship with software development perfectly. I have known that I would be writing software in some capacity for a living since I wrote my first “hello world” program in BASIC in the third grade.
I don’t like the term programmer because it has a sense of impersonality to it. I tolerate the title Software Developer, because it’s the industry standard. Personally, I prefer Software Craftsman to any other current vernacular for those that sling code for a living.
All too often is our work compiled into binary form, both literally and figuratively. Our users take for granted the fact that an app “just works”, without thinking about the proper use of layers of abstraction and separation of concerns, Gang of Four design patterns or why an abstract class was used instead of an interface. Take a look at any mediocre app’s review distribution in the App Store. You will inevitably see an inverse bell curve. Lot’s of 4’s and 5’s and lots of (but hopefully not as many) 1’s and not much in the middle. This leads one to believe that even given the subjective nature of a 5 star scale, users still look at things in terms of either “this app works for me” or “this one doesn’t”. It’s all still 1’s and 0’s.
Even as a contributor to many open source projects myself, I’ll be the first to admit that have never sat down and cracked open the Spring Framework to truly appreciate the work that has been poured into it. Yet, when I’m in backend mode, I’m working with Spring nearly every single day.
The moniker Software Craftsman helps to convey the fact that I put my heart and soul into every line of code that I or a member of my team write. An API contract isn’t just well designed or not. Some are better designed than others. Some are better documented than others. Despite the fact that the end result of our work is literally just a bunch of 1’s and 0’s, computer science is not an exact science at all. Anyone who has ever taken 200 lines of Java code and reduced it to less than 50 lines of reactive Kotlin, anyone who has ever hit that Utopia of 100% unit test coverage in a class, or anyone who can actually read that 2-line Perl implementation of the RSA algorithm understands this simple truth. Software development is an art form. I am a Software Craftsman.
#wk171 -
I need to stop treating an OO language as if it were a procedural language.
I have the tendency to turn my code into GOTO spaghetti even though I'm semi-aware that objects exist and that they are distinct.
I still have to get used to this paradigm.
My Java professor always swore by the Plato paradigm, i.e.:
""Platonism" and its theory of Forms (or theory of Ideas) denies the reality of the material world, considering it only an image or copy of the real world.
According to this theory of Forms there are at least two worlds: the apparent world of concrete objects, grasped by the senses, which constantly changes, and an unchanging and unseen world of Forms or abstract objects, grasped by pure reason (λογική). which ground what is apparent." (wikipedia)
Thinking in objects, abstractions and metaphysics is not something I haven't done before (I've practiced it during Sociology and Ethics with the whole Pascal Leibniz, Newton and DesCartes approach) but it's certainly not easy.
Then there was my cool Programming 201 professor who said: "Don't worry man, just read those great UML, Program Design and GOF books and it will all become easy, like a story. It'll all make sense.
I mean, I've graduated, I've passed my Software Engineering I, II and III (hard as hell) but since I haven't focused on those theories and practices anymore, I've lost my touch.
It's definitely not easy for a novice programmer to transition between paradigms..10 -
By this month, I have been in business for three years. How much pressure have I suffered in three years? I am a programmer. I used to think that writing code is too youthful. I started to know that when I started a business, when a programmer might lose my hair, I would be bald if I started my own business.
In order to develop my own products, I invested most of the funds in the early stage. Later, when the product came online, I struggled with promotion, but promotion was not as easy as expected, especially when you had no money. Those successful people always like to share the story of "without spending a penny to promote and make one million users from zero." I have nothing more to say about this except Ha ha. I am very confident in my product, but if I have no money to promote it, it means that no one knows how good your product is. So I always wanted to get a financing. But if promotion is difficult, is financing easy? The chicken soup said again: "All the money floating on Zhongguancun Chuangye Street is money, and as long as you come, it is yours." Ha ha, I laughed and said nothing.3 -
The story of how I knew I did the right thing leaving the start up I was an employee of.
It was a great place to work when I started, we had a plan and we were are working hard to make it. But pretty soon I realised that things weren't 100%. We kept altering the product and focusing on the wrong things. Our backlog grew faster than it was completed.
Pretty soon a launch planned in April was pushed back over and over again, until we finally released in November, and instead of being first on the market we were last.
We pivoted hard and I didn't believe in the new product so I quit.
The last week on the job I was finishing up some stuff and when our PO (who also was a programmer)was deploying the things I had done to production something went wrong. Now I had just integrated *his* new authorization service and I had a hunch it wasn't deployed. But he sent a message over slack with a bunch of code alterations that was the "problem". Along with some passive aggressive words about how I wasn't professional and didn't take ownership of the product.
I only added an error log that asked if the authorization service was deployed, and 10 minutes later he came up and said good job, no mention of what was fixed between now and then.
I have no regrets leaving that place. -
when a web agency contacts an other web agency to outsource between 10% and 100% of the work (asking for estimates), and that web agency then asks you how complex it would be...
and you're the only programmer in the story...
and you're a freelancer. -
Quick question, is it bad to quit from a job when the project is not finished yet, especially in a startup company?
My reasoning for quitting, boss doesn’t really understand how game development usually works and mostly assuming every project will be same.
Following is my rant of background story for my question.
The incident triggered me wanting to leave is as below.
G = another guy from incubating center
B = boss
G: hey B, do u know this game studio is releasing this title soon. It’s a local company. Sounds cool.
Then they went to check the company profile. Found that the company has abt 40 staffs in total.
B: hey lunadev, do u know them? They have 40 people to make 2 titles. I think we’re the smallest company in the world that developing mobile games. Ha ha ha.
Me: oh, may be their project scope is complex. But I don’t think ours is the smallest company in the world making game. (We have 5 in total including him) there are others with only 2 ppl making games. (My sarcastic side took over me and said) I think we’re the only company in the world that has such small manpower with shortest deadline.
B: then how long do u think our timeline should be?
Me: abt 2 yrs? (Me considering all the artworks, features, testing time that we have to do)
B: urmmm I don’t think it’s that long. May be abt 6 months or a year at most?
G: ya, abt 6 months. Mobile games are not like desktop games or others so should be abt 6 months. Shouldn’t take that long.
Me: ... :)
Then I packed up my stuffs and left for the day. As for side note, boss designed the game himself and it took him 5 years to add complex features. And sometimes he will still come up to us and ask us to add that feature just cuz he was just inspired by another game he just played. Now can they tell us, this game can finish in 6 months? On what ground?
And another thing that he does gets on my nerve is that he plays game during office hours while the rest of us rushing for his project and campaign.
So, if I quit now, they’d still be in the middle of development. Oh and I’m the main programmer developing the game. So, erm.. Is it wrong?7 -
Like age 8?
As a kid I really liked flash games and animations and wanted to get into it. I couldn't do flash, it looked too complicated but I found a little software by the name od KoolMoves that was just a simpler flash animation tool.
I did a bunch of shitty stick figure animations in it (hello to everyone from stick figure death theatre) but eventually I realized that I can make it do things (interactive menus, choose your story kinda things, move the player around, shoot...!)
I fell in love with AS1 and later AS2.0 and made bunch of demos and proof of concepts for systems and games. Most are lost to time and datarot by now)
Age 12
Eventually I found out I can make the entire Windows machine do what I want using first Batch files and later Visual Basic script (made a skype bot!) At this point I was also really into graphics and logo/web design
Age 15 - 20 or so
Then it was pretty natural to move to actual Visual Basic, then C# and finally I to C++. And I had the C family in my heart forever. I managed to get a but into 3D graphics too and got a part-time in archviz
Even by this point I never believed I could be a programmer as a profession. I thought of it just as something I love, but have no chance getting into compared to some of the names out there. I half expected to be either doing graphics (cause I found it simple at the time) or some shitty random job in an office.
20+
Finally I decided to go to uni and study software development, see if I can touch the future I always dreamed of! And... Well... I found out more than 80% of the people there never touch a language up until now and most people are just as retarded as I thought..
For a while I also worked as a game designer (still not being comfortable calling myself a programmer, so I chose a non programming position) but I ended up going into the code and improving and fixing game designer tools (it was unity and C#)
After seeing actual programmers at work in a company, and talking to a bunch of them I realized I already have everything I need to do this seriously and with that experience out of the way I breezed through uni, learned to love Linux and landed a proper job :)
I kinda hope my experience with long lasting self doubt will be useful for someone -
Did an assignment where we had to emulate deadlock using C and openMPI, I wanted to make a generalised resource manager process and create deadlock by locking some resources using the other processes, but my teammate said that would be too hard and instead the resource manager was hardcode with for loops for the number of transactions we were gonna make cause it was just a proof of concept.
Then my marker literally leads with, let me tell you the story of a good programmer, and a better programmer. The good programmer writes a function called destroy_earth(), but the better programmer writes a function called destroy_planet(earth) and passes in earth. I sighed so fuckin hard, I should have spoken up. -
I’m really getting fed up with the situation I am in!
I was brought in as a development lead, which in my eyes and from the sound of it leading on the technical delivery, inspiring and leading technical development decisions and generally leading my team (one additional dev) in the delivery of work items and user stories which the PM or Business analyst produces..
Then it “evolved” into what felt more like a development manager where I was reporting to senior management on KPIs and stuff, I sucked it up and did it.
Then they brought in two new people which they call application specialists. These people spend all their time managing existing off the shelf applications, communicating with the vendor, running user groups where they work with our users on moving the product forward and planning the configuration and enablement of new functionality.
Because they are “developing” the application (in the same way a child develops, or the same way a story line develops and evolves) they fall under me..
So now I spend a split amount of time developing software and also managing what I can only explain as project managers, product owners...
Oh but then it gets better!! Now they want me(as well as our info sec lead and our infrastructure lead) to be a kind of all round delivery lead, gauging the requirements of a project, reporting in its risks to senior management, resource planning, everything a PM does! And also be the technical person delivering these projects!
Honestly, it’s seriously starting to take the fucking piss!
I am a technical programmer, a pretty good one if I say so myself, the developer reporting to me is good but needs hand holding which I am ok with! But would never be able to deliver an element of a product by himself in line with what we expect in quality of code..
Why would anyone think you take a person built and only interested in doing a technical role and make then a generic all round manager of a project??
I know why they did it! It’s because there are other managers in our department paid the same “level” as me, but because of their management responsibility’s , I however feel I am paid this much for my technical experience and abilities, thy are just blanket covering everyone the same at this level.
You would never get a manager at this salary scale with the technical skills they need, and you would never get a technical person with the skills interested in doing that type of management at this salary scale!
I’m just a mug and they know it!
So fucking angry!3 -
This is a story of a lovely lady.
she had several clips of bills stuffed in her dress
and a frustrated programmer
found that they were there where I had pressed.. them.
now heres a story of a crap economy that gave quite more than a hunch that to hang on to your well paying shit job, gets their panties in a great big bunch
a great big bunch a great big bunch
keep your job and in their nuts
they feel a punch :P
now dont you chase no, brand new techy, most of it for complete suckers. by the time that its usuable, the company that made it gave up :P
it gave up
it just gave up
if it was real in the first place at all it just gave up :P34 -
I started because the first PC I owned ran on Windows NT and, even though I can't recall for the life of me what, something always broke but was fixable with some command lines. After finding out about Batch scripts my exploration instinct kicked in and I started to make a script for nearly anything (at one point I even had a script to start Firefox). From there on I stumbled over C++ and what can I say, I quit programmin four times before I found Python and fell in love with this beautiful, pointerless snake which led me on the way of becoming a programmer. So, long story short, a broken OS and all that free time you have during school if you always copy your Honework in breaks^^.
-
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. -
So at the HS I go to, there are 4~5 programmers (only 3 real "experienced" ones though including me).
So coming from JS & Python, I hate Java (especially for robotics) and prefer C++ (through some basic tutorials).
Programmer Nº2 is great at everything, loves Objective-C, Swift, Python, and to a certain extent Java.
Programmer Nº3 loves Python and used to do lots of C#, dislikes Java and appreciates Go (not much experience).
So naturally I get shit on (playfully) because of my JS background, because they don't understand many aspects of it. They hate the DOM manipulation (which is dislike too tbh), but especially OOP in JS, string/int manipulation, certain methods and HOISTING.
So, IDK if Java or C++ (super limited in them) have hoisting, but if you don't know what hoisting is, it means that you can define a variable, use it before assigning a value, and the code will still run. It also means that you can use a variable before defining it and assigning a value to it.
So in JS you can define a variable, assign no value to it, use it in a function for instance, and then assign a value after calling the function, like so:
var y;
function hi(x) {
console.log(y + " " + x);
y = "hi";
}
hi("bob");
output: undefined bob
And, as said before, you can use a variable before defining it - without causing any errors.
Since I can barely express myself, here is an example:
JS code:
function hi(x) {
console.log(y + " " + x);
var y = "hi";
}
hi("bob");
output: undefined bob
So my friends are like: WTF?? Doesn't that produce an Error of some sort?
- Well no kiddo, it might not make sense to you, and you can trash talk JS and its architecture all you want, but this somehow, sometimes IS useful.
No real point/punchline to this story, but it makes me laugh (internally), and since I really want to say it and my family is shit with computers, I posted it here.
I know many of you hate JS BTW, so I'm prepared to get trashed/downvoted back to the Earth's crust like a StackOverflow question.6 -
So, the story starts with me getting a job. Full-time job for the first time in my 21 years old life. After short conversation about how amazing this company is, after countless lies and stood questions they decided to hire me. I had to get come on Monday a week later with everything prepared.
So of course I did that and got to my workplace on designated time. Turned out nobody was expecting me, nothing was prepared for a new programmer and everyone seemed angry at me for no apparent reason.
After long talk with my new boss I got some less than 100$ pc with CPU that couldn't handle virtualization and expected me to work on software that needed extensive use of virtual machine.
PC is of course filled with all kinds of spying software that uses most of the resources. IT teams only job is to check if programmers are working their assess off for at least 8 hours a day.
I've filled a ticket about granting me access to Debian machine on the mainframe so I could work. No response for two weeks. I've lost hope already.
I have to work on open space with more than 30 engineers. Screams, phone calls, alarms, all at once, all the time. My colleagues seem to not care and I can't understand how.
I was tasked with rewriting major application because old developer did some half assed piece of burning shit. It took him more than one year, I'm finishing it in less than two weeks.
Of course nobody except for me is preparing any kinds of documentation. I had to reverse-engineer whole API for alarm system.
Salary is less than a junior programmer should earn.
But I'm stuck here for at least a year because nobody's here wants a guy whose only experience is as a freelancer. -
#bonfiretalk
Why did you want to become a programmer? Spending alot of my Teenage years on online games I always had a fascination for those 1337 haxxors that just appeared, did some awesome neverseen stuff and sometimes suddenly disappeared, never came back and became urban legends ("I heard h4xor1337 got caught by the FBI"..."I heard he was a CIA Hacker".."He was from Russia").. I started universe, picked some C/C++ Tutorials and 3 years later I am a freelancing Android developer . Today I am Downloading the source code of that old mmorpg (which is still played by alot of people , especially in the private Server scene) to practice my C++ -
What is challenging of becoming freelance programmer, is that not only have to deal with stupid requirements from the client, and attitude of certain client. We also need to face the challenges of other freelancer defaming you , bombard you with a bunch of negativity.
So here's the story, there is this guy knowing that I give the service for creating mobile app for 50USD and client happy with the price. While he get NONE of the business as the price is 80USD. -
I'll have to make some tough choices over the next 6 months. With my tech career beginning and my college education ramping up, time is of the essence, and the skills I develop now will be at the forefront of my future. So what does this have to do with Microsoft?
Well, the story begins in the Spring of 2016. Social Forums was about to turn a year old, Trump's campaign was ramping up, and I had just found my love for technology. With all my friends having phones, I had to get a phone and get working on development. The year before, Windows 10 was launched, and I was psyched. I found Microsoft's products to be underrated with potential. That day, I purchased a Lumia 640, upgraded it to Windows 10, and immediately began working. After another year-and-a-half gone by, I went from loving Microsoft, to defending Microsoft, to tolerating Microsoft. I could go on and on about the lousy structure, the privacy issues, the forced upgrades, the redundant developer platform, and other such issues that is leading me away from them. But if there is one thing they have proven over the years, is that the they are completely out of touch with its developers and its customers. They spent years ramping up their phones. They failed. They spend years ramping up their phones. They failed. They spend years ramping up their semi-annual OS updates. They failed. So why did they fail? It's not that they made the wrong prediction out of chance. They legitimately don't care about feedback. It's their way or the highway. This sounds vaguely familiar. They have been spending a decade ignoring feedback from the community because they want to become just like Apple. Right now, Apple LIVES off of brand loyalty and its stable, useful ecosystem. This cannot work for Microsoft as they don't have a lot of brand loyalty. But most of all, they don't have a working ecosystem. They have Windows Insiders, which provides them with hundreds of feedback messages per day. These include suggestions, bug reports, and constructive criticism. The feedback is public. You can have several pages of the same complaint, and they still won't do anything about it. They say they have a good relationship with their community, and that this Beta program helps Windows become better for all. But in the end, we are nothing more than a glorified unpaid labor force. They fired hundreds of professional debuggers just before the Insider Program took off. We are only here to provide bug reports for free. Now that their phones, AR headsets, browser, online services, and VR headsets are failing for all these reasons, I see little reason to develop for Windows anymore. I don't just mean their UWP and App Store platforms, I mean Windows as a whole. I'm definitely not a Mac guy either. I never see myself going to Mac either, as they are really no different in terms of how they treat their Developers and PC users. If things continue down this route, I will leave the platform all together. I've always wanted to be a Systems Programmer, so I don't really need an established paid platform to be successful. Even now, I'm not certain about leaving Windows altogether but as a developer, I need to find my place. Time is of the essence in my life, and I need to find out my place in the software world. Now I think it isn't on the Windows platform like I had dreamed it would be. But where do I go?10 -
the red haired girl and the blue haired girl.
there was this story about a programmer who spent years studying computer science before finally getting a job.
the dev studied only computer science and was put on blue team after a few days.
a few hours into one of the constant coding sessions, the boss told the devs that red team members and blue team members would be working in pairs.
the person from red team transferred the devs work to their data base without the dev knowing, then locked down the devs computer. the dev could not do anything. later, the dev got fired for not doing any work. after that, the company got millions of dollars, and the dev did not see any of it.
both the dev and the managers made a note not to hire any programmer who cannot secure their work.
it is not ethical to teach people programming without also teaching them cyber security.
computer networking, programming and security should all be the same major.
it is a bad idea to teach people how to build anything without telling them how to secure it.
the story above was just a scenario, but it probably happens way more often than people think.
Schools should teach both things in the same major.5 -
Hosted my very first project, developed back in Aug18.
It has been a wonderful journey as a programmer.
Link to my first web development project(I should say web designing cuz it doesn't have any db XD):
https://nitinsautomobilewebsite.herokuapp.com/...
More projects developed by me:
www.github.com/globefire -
In a country, a long time ago there was a programmer by the name of Alex. He was a programming genius and apart from a few hours of sleep, he was busy developing unique programs for new generation technology firms. Alex was a bachelor and he happily and proudly lived the way he wanted to. He did not have duties, authority over him, bosses to report to, children to take care of, and distractions. He could sit and code for the entire day without getting any break or feeling a bit tired. However, he had no idea that everything in his life was soon going to turn around. Before Marriage: The Bachelor’s Life Alex was the epitome of a modern ‘Play Boy ‘ or every man’s dream. He was fairly dressed, had a classy house, a snazzy car, and a good-paying job. He was in the habit of spending his mornings drinking coffee while browsing through the different coding topics. He comes in the afternoon and spends the evening part of the day with his friends. Life has never been this good. Alex was able to work hard and the more he was innovative, he enjoyed it. It illustrates how a young person would sit for many hours coding at night and not bother about other people around him. He was alone as a bird and as per him, that’s what he wanted to be. He had no peer to tell the truth to, no wife to prepare meals for, no maids to babysit his mess. A man could chow down a pizza for breakfast, lunch, and supper with not even a raised eyebrow from onlookers. He was profiting from living the best life he possibly could. After Marriage: Married Life: Alex & Sarah The climax for Alex is when he marries Sarah on a sunny morning on a fine day. Young people met, and after becoming enamored, started a family and got married to find a new home. Sarah was friendly with people and it was very easy for her to make friends; however, she had little knowledge of technology. Alex had it in his mind that marriage does not change the life you lead and how wrong he was. It was a fairy-tale to have such a perfect life for several days after the marriage. Their nights would be spent in front of the television set with their arms wrapped around each other, eating takeout. Despite this, when the number of days stretched into weeks, and the weeks into months, Alex felt the beginning of a shift in his behavior. The Coding Cave That Transformed into A Home Office Due to the pandemic the coding cave Alex used to have became a home office. Sarah had made up her mind to open her business from home, therefore, she required a home office. Thus, she moved inside the cubicle that Alex had created as his coding cave and left him with no space to code. He now had to code in the living room, because Sarah would incessantly request him to either lower the auditory input of the keys he was typing or to switch off the LCD screen. The Once-Clean Apartment Turns into a Mess Alex was a neat freak, and he adored tidiness, especially in his apartment. But after marriage, his once clean and neat-looking apartment was changed into a dirty one. Although Sarah was not very neat, she used to litter her things anywhere she felt like without being conscious of it. Alex was a programmer and his coding notes were mixed with Sarah's business papers, it irritated him so much. Alex’s to-do list before marriage The to-do list before marriage only comprised coding-related tasks. At marriage, however, he seemed to have developed a longer list of things to do than ever before. Instead of just going to the grocery store to buy some food, Alex seemed to have endless tasks to do mostly around the house. He had to cook for himself, sweep the house, and wash the dishes among other things. This was a new world as far as he was concerned. The Pizza Days Are Over Gone there is no more time for Alex could eat pizza in the morning, afternoon as well and evening. Sarah was very conscious of what she took as food or what her family took as food and therefore ensured that Alex took healthy home-cooked foods. He could not have the pizza anymore but the meals prepared by Sarah were really tasty. Conclusion Therefore from a life before marriage to the life after marriage, it was evident that Alex led two different lives. He went from a playful man with not much responsibility to a man with more responsibilities as a husband and a father. Still, he wouldn’t have it any other way, despite these changes. Later he cherished Sarah and the life they had, and nothing in this world could make him exchange what he had now. Essentially, it was a tricky business being married, but a blessing, and an addition of love, company, and much hilarity too. Therefore, if you are a bachelor reading this, embrace your coding cave and your pizza days because once you utter the words ‘I do,’ all those will be things of the past.But trust me, it's all worth it.