My home set up, tower is on the floor but also have a decent few laptops laying around.

Not the best way a co worker has quit and not dev related. From a job I had for only a month the summer before I got my first position with the company I'm currently with. It was factory work, pretty crappy, no air conditioning, this guy started just after me hardly ever did his job and was just generally annoying as hell. One day I'm brought into HR and asked if I fucking shower. :| I do and did every day. Deoderent and all. I explained it's a hot work environment. They said I should just shower more. I've never heard such a dumb complaint filed against anyone. Of course I wasn't going to smell like daisies, it was hot as fuck in there. Anyway a week later got offered a new job, I didn't give any notice just walked to HR at the end of the day the day before I started my new job, said I'm out. They asked if they could get 2 weeks notice, with out hesitating I stated no, I start my new job tomorrow, here's my badge, bye. And walked out. :| This wasn't the only thing that made me quit but it was kind of a tipping point. Like ok don't like sweat smell? Then don't be on top of me or find a job with air conditioning.

Before getting my dev job, I taught myself some java and made a program to assist myself in the position I was working. It was borderline a keyloger, but it helped me with a lot of repetive tasks. Long story short, our security didn't dig that I installed something they didn't approve (I probably could have just not made it an exe and gotten away with it but my boss wanted it as an exe to run on other computers) they didn't know exactly what it was. I totally understood the security concerns though but they sure gave me a fucking heart attack right before my interview for my first dev job! Was seriously worried I was going to be fired and miss my big chance to make it in with out a degree.

Machine learning becoming easier to use and more accessable. I know it's been around a while it's just getting way easier to use with out having to get too nitty gritty in things. I really like the idea off assisting human jobs with automation when possible if it's not practical to completely automate them. That's specifically what I'd one day love to work on.

Break a leg tattoo I got a few weeks back for shits and giggles.

My first exposure to computers was when I was about 5 at least that's what I remember. My dad and his friend built custom rigs for people in their spare time back then (late 90s) I remember playing some racing game. Other than that o eventual got one of their old computers and used it for a really long time, replacing it with a gateway until high school then hitting PC gaming and programming I built my first custom rig with my dad.

.Net Dev here with a degree in graphic design. Almost 9 months into my first dev job, 85% of it has been dealing with god damn webforms. Unfortunately, sometimes it doesn't play too nice with a bootstrap / jQuery especially with code behind and when you have post backs. I never thought I would say this but fuck the front end lol at least when it come to this dumpster fire. At least I'm learning a lot but damn I can't wait to get back into an MVC project or service work.

I'd probably say the activity that's made me a better dev is going to school for graphic design. Though it would help more if I was a front end developer, it helps me think more about the end user seeing as that's what my schooling focused on. Outside of schooling, probably painting and drawing just due to thinking creatively in my free time I think helps me approach dev problems in different ways than some of my non visual co workers.

"TDD is a waste of time" well so is making QA do way way more manual testing than needed.

So how does dead code from 2007 still exist in this codebase, better yet why were there three of the exact same page literally no differences lmfao. Spent a moment having confused QA guys talk to me getting me confused because they couldn't replicate the solution that had been applied to all three versions of the page.

!nonRant
First few days as a professional software engineer (c# .net) have gone decent. Made my first bigger commit today started working on a small new feature that requires more work.
CoWorkers are really nice, boss is cool, super chill over all. #feelsgood

My process was pretty much, find something I found annoying at work, looked at a similar paid solution, and worked from there. I mainly was learning Java from a subpar class that wasn't very hands on, but in my free time just googled a lot and used Microsoft's documentation on C# to learn that. My process is just finding something I can actually use and googling how to solve specific parts. Other than that reading lots of books and using treehouse.

Hey devRant,
Newbie dev here starting my first full time professional gig in two weeks as a .Net developer. Any advice or tips on making the transition from student and hobbyist to professional dev?
Cheers!

finally picking up React JS. When setting up webpack I fucked up on the last step in the tutorial I was using which wasn't even needed it just made requiring CSS modules not need style!CSS! Infront of the file name.. everything prior was working beautifully and I was ready to start setting up React. after attempting to be more efficient I couldn't even get webpack to run and thus the test project failed to run on local host. Now to re watch bad tutorials that assume you know everything because they're still more detailed than the others I've found. :| ugh

When I was a student, I'd have non tech studying friends ask me for help with their computers assuming I knew what was wrong with their hardware / how to get rid of their viruses without wiping everything out. I'd have to reject everyone like " it could be this or this, but go to X shop they should know how to fix it, this isn't my job or what my education is in". One time someone asked me about a Mac and it literally sounded they they got a virus from porn.. directed them to the Mac Guys. Friend keeps asking me more questions rather than just reaching out to the Mac Guys. like what search has you worried dude? lol

tldr; I failed a web class once, then practically taught people actionscript. Now i love JavaScript/Node.js because flash is icky.
-full story more or less-
I failed my first web design class in college due to not having enough time to actually study(I worked 2 jobs and took 6 classes like a moron). Anyway took a flash class prior to retaking my web class, I picked up on action script really quickly. As in I ended up helping other students better than the instructor was(she hadn't touched flash in like 5 years and was just an adjunct instructor). I got hooked with action script so I started teaching myself JavaScript, knocked the web class out like nothing after that and loved it.

had my boss ask me to automate reports on our emails... he wanted me to use google script. the 6min limit was killing me. we needed up sacrificing accuracy and going another route with VBA done by my co worker. I have a meeting next week with my boss's boss about how we did it and I don't know VBA.