In Germany we call it a Mechatroniker. This was my career choice before I found out that I like writing web/desktop apps.

Start working as a dev and maintain an old application with very much bad code.

Good quality is more important than fast delivery.

Why does this blog hate his visitors?

If you like developing apps, then it may be a nice idea to work as a developer. In my case, developing was my hobby while I was in school. And after school, I started working as a dev.

My first job and the amount of bad code I had to work with influenced my coding style a lot.
One thing is reading about bad examples. Another thing is it to maintain these bad examples.

GitLab, why do you don't want to have my money? I just wanted to pay for GitLab Bronze to enable Pull Mirroring. The problem is that I cannot register for billing without having a company. GitLab, I am a single private person. I am not a company! Why do I have to fill out these form fields? So if you don't want to have my money, then you will not get it.

These are my desk decorations.

My computer science teacher said that I have to work in this area. Before this, I didn't realize that I am good at programming.

Our company is remote-controlled by one or two customer companies. Our CTO is remote-controlled by them also. And if that wasn't enough it feels like he has no competence in the development of normal software (not customer projects).
Officially the management in our company doesn't have the right to give direct orders to the development teams. In reality, they just ignore this rule and play dictator.
It feels that the management thinks that all developers in the company are just asses and idiots who screw up everything.

This was just a „you had one job“ moment. I double tapped a rant to give it a ++ and immediately this message appeared. devRant, why do you give me such unnecessary notifications?

I just saw this picture on the product page of a Thunderbolt dock. I'm not sure what this guy is doing, but no programmer of the world would mirror his laptop screen on two full size screens. Just no!

I hate it when recruiters write something like "I now that you don’t like recruiters, but maybe you like this offer."

WHEN YOU KNOW I DON'T LIKE YOU THEN JUST STOP TALKING TO ME!

A question to all web devs here: Do you think that the <noscript> tag is necessary nowadays?

Impossible deadlines are ubiquitous in our company. Our CTO has the opinion that development is a lightning-fast process that doesn’t require testing and deployment because every developer is a God.
It is normal to hear something like ”just develop it tomorrow morning, it is easy” from him, but in reality, it is never that easy.

What tool do you use for API documentation, and why? OpenApi (Swagger) or RAML or anything else?

I think that most people complaining about JavaScript didn’t write any line of JavaScript in there life.

Slowly I am strongly considering changing the company. Somehow our management is losing its focus on reality. On the one hand, the management doesn't care one bit about what problems we have, especially when we have issues with other teams, which makes it impossible to finish our (necessary) features. But when the management wants something, everything has to be completed immediately and preferably yesterday.
We work in our team (and in almost the entire development) according to Scrum, so we are organized in sprints. However, our CTO thinks that none of this matters and that the whole planning has to be thrown out just because he wants a small (absolutely stupid) feature.
And then, our supervisor thinks he has to force us to do things that are entirely irrelevant for the team. We wouldn't have any advantage and would just be the henchmen of others.
And then there's a neighboring team that refuses to make any progress and keeps blocking everything. But somehow it's management's favorite team and can simply (unofficially) decide about other teams.
Honestly, I'm pretty pissed off now, and I'm not in the mood for that crap anymore.

My favorite code editor/IDE are the IntelliJ based IDEs (GoLand, Rider, WebStorm, ...)
There are nice to use, have many features that help developing

It doesn’t matter how long it takes to learn to program. You just have to have fun with it.

markdown4documentation is a tool that can either convert a single markdown file, a complete directory or a complex structure to HTML or PDF. You can choose between several build-in themes (called templates) or define a custom theme.

Why the hack does the devRant app on iOS crashes nearly every time I want to open the notifications or a rant? The app does this since weeks now. This is very annoying!

I'm currently developing a Node.js tool. Now I want to write some unit tests, but I never wrote unit tests for a node app before and I don't know which framework I should use. Do any of you have any experience with the available unit testing frameworks? In the past I only used Karma and Jasmine for Angular unit testing.

I‘ve now my first smart home device. It is only a power outlet, but the story behind it is a bit special.
Because Apple trapped me in there ecosystem I wanted to have a HomeKit compatible outlet. The problem with that: Either to expensive or to big. So my ne mission: Connect a non HomeKit device to HomeKit, but without a too expensive proprietary gateway/bridge.
After a bit of googling I found a software called "Homebridge", build to run on a Raspberry Pi. Fortunately I had one old RasbPi 1 B. So I installed a new Raspbian and installed Homebridge. I forgot how slow it was.
Then I bought a cheap (but good) ZigBee outlet and a ZigBee USB Dongle. With a plugin for Homebridge it was very easy to connect the ZigBee Dongle.
Then I tried to connect the outlet, but the log said "Unrecognized device". After a bit of research I found out that the outlet is not supported by the homebridge-zigbee plugin. As a software engineer I tried to find a solution for it, so I reverse engineered the device recognition (very easy because Homebridge is a node application). After a while I managed to add the configuration for the outlet to the plugin.
And see, it became light.

Stackoverflow is down, this is the end of the world!

I don’t even know the word epiphany

Found this in production code.

For those who doesn’t understand Delphi:
switch (some boolean) {
case false:
// some code
default:
// some code
}

Our company often carry outs hackathons for customers and partners (for apps for our cloud system). One time they carried out an hackathon for us employees. My team won the price, a 40€ Amazon gift card 😄

And the award for the best API documentation goes to...

Microsoft!

I was the last three days alone at work (at least in my sub-team). I don’t know when I was so productive the last time.