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AboutJust a developer.
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SkillsJava, Python, Spring, Angular, React, Javascript
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LocationAtlanta, GA
Joined devRant on 4/26/2017
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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.30 -
Tech Industry: “We need more developers!”
NewDev: “Hire me”
Tech Industry: “only experienced developers please! We don’t have time to train juniors ”
Older Dev: “Hire me”
Tech Industry: “no, you want too much money and too much time off“
Mid dev: “Hire me”
Tech Industry: “only experienced devs who are a culture fit!”
Robot dev: “Hire me”
Tech Industry: “You are Hired”10 -
My previous job I got by winning an Xbox Kinect hackathon. Not because the game I made was really good or anything. But because I was the only one who actually built something. (Apart from a guy who’s application would cheer louder as you raised your arms.) So that evening I left the hackathon with an Xbox one and a job.
My job was to build advert games, games whose primary goal is to advertise a company or event. This is the job where I learned I DO NOT like game development. So after about half a year I quit.
Because I still needed money I did some freelance work as a game developer (I developed 3 advert games for 3 startups).
I was still looking around for dev jobs but because I was a student I had no luck, they were all looking for full timers.
At some point I called this one (Dutch) company and spoke to a very odd French person on the phone. He invited me to come over for an interview. I had very little information about the job so I started researching the company. They are a small company specialized in complex content migrations. I wasn’t that into migrations but hell, I’m always up for something new.
Upon arrival I was greeted by the familiar French voice and saw a collection 6 diverse developers sharing a space. We did the usual interview dance and practices and that’s where I figured out this is a java job. They developed tools for the professional services team to perform these complex migrations I mentioned earlier. With me never having touched java before I was quite sure I wouldn’t get the job. But I took the test anyway.
About halfway through the test I was stopped and they started to ask me some conceptual questions, I did okay there but nothing special. That same day the architect took me to their CEO and told him I had:
- very little experience
- no migration experience
- was still a student so could only work 20 hours a week
- he saw some potential they could work with
Quite unexpectedly, they still hired my 20 year old ass.
Now the company has grown to a good 20+ developers with a nicely sized professional services team and we are launching our first out-of-the-box product in a couple of weeks.
So that’s how I got my job. If you read to this very end, my hat is off to you!8 -
Alright, I just wanna start off by saying that I'm a huge privacy guy. I hate all kinds of data collection companies like Google/Facebook/Amazon and all that. Yet I'm forced to have a Google account for certain reasons.
But the thing that I want to say is that I often talk to people to express my concerns about privacy. And most people agree and say that "yeah sure that's some scary shit" but don't actually do much about it.
And the thing is. If you just browse through all of the options in your Google account. You can turn off and remove almost all data collection/ad serving and identification options entirely.
And yet purple complain about that Google sees what you buy and shit. Turn everything off. Get and adblocker and get noscript. The single best browser add-on out there. It's almost that easy to get at least acceptable amounts of Internet privacy.
Please, don't ever ignore the significance of in Internet privacy. And the potential issue of net neutrality. Don't be ignorant. Don't be the client.24 -
I put a lot of work into trying to explain to you muggles what I do all day in a way you can understand (it's hard, trust me) and you still reject it as boring nerd crap. I'm sick of it! What if you told me working at that restaurant is "putting water on plates, wiping it off, and putting meat and cheese between slices of bread" and I said "wtf is that, and who cares?" Wouldn't that hurt your feelings, that I didn't even attempt to make a connection with you, friend? That I didn't even attempt to step outside my experience to meet yours? Isn't it equally insulting how far you have to dumb it down, just for me to lose interest entirely? And yes, I know that's not your specific task. That only proves my point further.
And why, exactly? Conceptually, you handle pre-digested poop all day.
_I teach plastic to think._ Sometimes it even thinks better than you do.
How is my job less interesting?
And what's more, why does EVERYONE seem to think so?
How do you expect people like me to keep your iPhones, bank accounts, and self-driving cars working if you alienate us like an alternate species for building those things? I mean really. You people treat us with a disinterest harmonious with homophobia. "Don't ask, don't tell." Except you do ask. And then you condescend as if working with my brain makes me less worthy of your attention than your exciting minimum-wage restaurant job.
Have fun with that, by the way.
Oh, and you're welcome for <object I fixed that wasn't really broken>. Maybe next time, just google it.
I know you won't.24 -
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 -
Dear people who complain about spending a whole night to find a tiny syntax error; Every time I read one of your rants, I feel like a part of me dies.
As a developer, your job is to create elegant optimized rivers of data, to puzzle with interesting algorithmic problems, to craft beautiful mappings from user input to computer storage and back.
You should strive to write code like a Michelangelo, not like a house painter.
You're arguing about indentation or getting annoyed by a project with braces on the same line as the method name. You're struggling with semicolons, misplaced braces or wrongly spelled keywords.
You're bitching about the medium of your paint, about the hardness of the marble -- when you should be lamenting the absence of your muse or the struggle to capture the essence of elegance in your work.
In other words:
Fix your fucking mindset, and fix your fucking tools. Don't fucking rant about your tabs and spaces. Stop fucking screaming how your bloated swiss-army-knife text editor is soooo much better than a purpose-built IDE, if it fails to draw something red and obnoxious around your fuck ups.
Thanks.62 -
*Stages of debugging*
1. That can't happen.
2. That doesn't happen on my machine
3. That shouldn't happen.
4. Why does that happen?
5. Oh, I see.
6. How did that ever work?3 -
The three most dangerous things in the world are a programmer with a soldering iron, a hardware engineer with a software patch, and a user with an idea 😐6
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Telling someone you don't like the way they format their code is like... Telling them their girlfriend is ugly.4
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Does anyone else hates when people use a phone to take a picture of their screen instead of taking a screenshot?8
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A man goes inside a pet shop and starts to move around the cages to scout the pets. He sees a monkey with a price of 5000$ and goes to the merchant to ask for details. Hey mister, the monkey…what does it know to worth that much money? Well, it knows Windows 95, 98, 2000, and also knows Word, C++, Visual Basic and last but not least, it knows how to play computer games. - Good monkey, it's worth the money. He goes and finds another monkey with a price of 10000$ and again he will ask the merchant. "What does this monkey know?" "It knows Linux, Unix, Corel and Autocad." "Nice, even I don't know those things." On a last scout run he finds another monkey just sitting there with a price 20000$. The story repeats, and he goes with a lack of confidence to ask the merchant for details. "And what does this monkey do for that ridiculous amount of money?" "I never saw her doing anything, but the other two call her Project Manager!"4
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A note on devRant community etiquette. I've seen some behavior lately that I want to just mention since it goes against the rules of our community. We've specifically built moderation tools into upvoting and downvoting, and that is how all content should be moderated.
Commenting on rants that you don't think should be posted only gives them more exposure and unfortunately at times people trying to moderate content via comments and rants have gotten abusive towards other members. On the contrary, I've yet to see any of the people these select few members accuse of "ruining the community" act hostile towards anyone.
So with that said, I wanted to make sure this policy is visible, because commenting on other people's rants, especially in a hostile way to stop them from posting, is bannable and we really don't want to see it. Like mentioned before, that's what downvoting is for and it's much more effective since it doesn't boost the content like adding a comment does.
We take content quality seriously and while we haven't been able to eliminate reposts completely, we've made a lot of progress. For directly reposted content, we added the repost detector (https://devrant.io/rants/425054/...) and are still working to improve that and appreciate any feedback/ideas for it.
Like any community on the internet, devRant will always have some reposts and it will always have some content you really don't like. That's what comes along with being an open platform with very little moderation. We get requests to moderate more heavily, but we don't like censoring recent rants and don't plan to do that.
Most of the times people who repost content or an image didn't realize it was already posted. Not everyone uses recent sort and almost always they have no ill intent.
Anyway, feel free to let me know if you have any questions and feedback is always welcome.45 -
Excuse me boss!
During increment time
Boss : There are 50 bricks on an Plane. If u drop 1 outside. How many
are left?
Employee : That's easy, 49.
Boss : What are the three steps to put an elephant into a fridge?
Employee : Open the fridge. Put the elephant in. Close the fridge
Boss : What are the four steps to put a deer into the fridge?
Employee : Open the fridge. Take the elephant out. Put the deer in. Close the fridge.
Boss : It's lion's birthday, all animals are there except one, why?
Employee : Because the deer is in the fridge.
Boss : How does an old woman cross a swamp filled with crocodiles?
Employee : She crosses it because the crocodiles are at the lion's birthday
Boss : Last question. In the end the old lady still died. Why?
Employee : Er....I guess she drowned....err...
Boss : No! She was hit by the brick fallen from the Plane that's the problem, you are not focused on your job....You may leave now!!!
Moral: If your boss has decided to screw u, no matter How much u prepare u will be screwed.19