Okay guys, this is it!

Today was my final day at my current employer. I am on vacation next week, and will return to my previous employer on January the 2nd.

So I am going back to full time C/C++ coding on Linux. My machines will, once again, all have Gentoo Linux on them, while the servers run Debian. (Or Devuan if I can help it.)

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So what have I learned in my 15 months stint as a C++ Qt5 developer on Windows 10 using Visual Studio 2017?

1. VS2017 is the best ever.
Although I am a Linux guy, I have owned all Visual C++/Studio versions since Visual C++ 6 (1999) - if only to use for cross-platform projects in a Windows VM.

2. I love Qt5, even on Windows!
And QtDesigner is a far better tool than I thought. On Linux I rarely had to design GUIs, so I was happily surprised.

3. GUI apps are always inferior to CLI.
Whenever a collegue of mine and me had worked on the same parts in the same libraries, and hit the inevitable merge conflict resolving session, we played a game: Who would push first? Him, with TortoiseGit and BeyondCompare? Or me, with MinTTY and kdiff3?
Surprise! I always won! 😁

4. Only shortly into Application Development for Windows with Visual Studio, I started to miss the fun it is to code on Linux for Linux.
No matter how much I like VS2017, I really miss Code::Blocks!

5. Big software suites (2,792 files) are interesting, but I prefer libraries and frameworks to work on.

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For future reference, I'll answer a possible question I may have in the future about Windows 10: What did I use to mod/pimp it?

1. 7+ Taskbar Tweaker
https://rammichael.com/7-taskbar-tw...

2. AeroGlass
http://www.glass8.eu/

3. Classic Start (Now: Open-Shell-Menu)
https://github.com/Open-Shell/...

4. f.lux
https://justgetflux.com/

5. ImDisk
https://sourceforge.net/projects/...

6. Kate
Enhanced text editor I like a lot more than notepad++. Aaaand it has a "vim-mode". 👍
https://kate-editor.org/

7. kdiff3
Three way diff viewer, that can resolve most merge conflicts on its own. Its keyboard shortcuts (ctrl-1|2|3 ; ctrl-PgDn) let you fly through your files.
http://kdiff3.sourceforge.net/

8. Link Shell Extensions
Support hard links, symbolic links, junctions and much more right from the explorer via right-click-menu.
http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/...

9. Rainmeter
Neither as beautiful as Conky, nor as easy to configure or flexible. But it does its job.
https://www.rainmeter.net/

10 WinAeroTweaker
https://winaero.com/comment.php/...

Of course this wasn't everything. I also pimped Visual Studio quite heavily. Sam question from my future self: What did I do?

1 AStyle Extension
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...

2 Better Comments
Simple patche to make different comment styles look different. Like obsolete ones being showed striked through, or important ones in bold red and such stuff.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...

3 CodeMaid
Open Source AddOn to clean up source code. Supports C#, C++, F#, VB, PHP, PowerShell, R, JSON, XAML, XML, ASP, HTML, CSS, LESS, SCSS, JavaScript and TypeScript.
http://www.codemaid.net/

4 Atomineer Pro Documentation
Alright, it is commercial. But there is not another tool that can keep doxygen style comments updated. Without this, you have to do it by hand.
https://www.atomineerutils.com/

5 Highlight all occurrences of selected word++
Select a word, and all similar get highlighted. VS could do this on its own, but is restricted to keywords.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...

6 Hot Commands for Visual Studio
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/...

7 Viasfora
This ingenious invention colorizes brackets (aka "Rainbow brackets") and makes their inner space visible on demand. Very useful if you have to deal with complex flows.
https://viasfora.com/

8 VSColorOutput
Come on! 2018 and Visual Studio still outputs monochromatically?
http://mike-ward.net/vscoloroutput/

That's it, folks.

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No matter how much fun it will be to do full time Linux C/C++ coding, and reverse engineering of WORM file systems and proprietary containers and databases, the thing I am most looking forward to is quite mundane: I can do what the fuck I want!
Being stuck in a project? No problem, any of my own projects is just a 'git clone' away. (Or fetch/pull more likely... 😜)
Here I am leaving a place where gitlab.com, github.com and sourceforge.net are blocked.

But I will also miss my collegues here. I know it.
Well, part of the game I guess?

Times are tough when there is only one question on StackOverflow regarding the problem you're having, and it was you who asked it, six months ago...

Got unicode? Check ✓ XD

Bittersweet made it to germanys biggest imageboard. Satisfying 280'th upvote

As a developer, sometimes you hammer away on some useless solo side project for a few weeks. Maybe a small game, a web interface for your home-built storage server, or an app to turn your living room lights on an off.

I often see these posts and graphs here about motivation, about a desire to conceive perfection. You want to create a self-hosted Spotify clone "but better", or you set out to make the best todo app for iOS ever written.

These rants and memes often highlight how you start with this incredible drive, how your code is perfectly clean when you begin. Then it all oscillates between states of panic and surprise, sweat, tears and euphoria, an end in a disillusioned stare at the tangled mess you created, to gather dust forever in some private repository.

Writing a physics engine from scratch was harder than you expected. You needed a lot of ugly code to get your admin panel working in Safari. Some other shiny idea came along, and you decided to bite, even though you feel a burning guilt about the ever growing pile of unfinished failures.

All I want to say is:

No time was lost.

This is how senior developers are born. You strengthen your brain, the calluses on your mind provide you with perseverance to solve problems. Even if (no, *especially* if) you gave up on your project.

Eventually, giving up is good, it's a sign of wisdom an flexibility to focus on the broader domain again.

One of the things I love about failures is how varied they tend to be, how they force you to start seeing overarching patterns.

You don't notice the things you take back from your failures, they slip back sticking to you, undetected.

You get intuitions for strengths and weaknesses in patterns. Whenever you're matching two sparse ordered indexed lists, there's this corner of your brain lighting up on how to do it efficiently. You realize it's not the ORMs which suck, it's the fundamental object-relational impedance mismatch existing in all languages which causes problems, and you feel your fingers tingling whenever you encounter its effects in the future, ready to dive in ever so slightly deeper.

You notice you can suddenly solve completely abstract data problems using the pathfinding logic from your failed game. You realize you can use vector calculations from your physics engine to compare similarities in psychological behavior. You never understood trigonometry in high school, but while building a a deficient robotic Arduino abomination it suddenly started making sense.

You're building intuitions, continuously. These intuitions are grooves which become deeper each time you encounter fundamental patterns. The more variation in environments and topics you expose yourself to, the more permanent these associations become.

Failure is inconsequential, failure even deserves respect, failure builds intuition about patterns. Every single epiphany about similarity in patterns is an incredible victory.

Please, for the love of code...

Start and fail as many projects as you can.

Need review about design

Oh the irony..