Details
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AboutCo-founder of devRant. Mostly UI/UX, some front-end
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SkillsHTML, CSS, JS
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LocationNYC
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Website
Joined devRant on 1/12/2016
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Just surfed the devRant page on firefox and saw this. After seeing the tag "your website sucks" I wasn't sure, if it is a bug or a pictures posted by someone...
It was not a picture. Three rants overlapped each other.4 -
On the web version, when I open devRant, and even though I am logged in, it prompts me to log in again?11
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!rant
Most programming shirts/hoodies really suck. They fall into two categories:
1. Super lame pun quotes in an ugly font.
2. Memes transfer-printed onto cheap fabric
I'm not against puns, or quotes. I quite like the design from @AlexDeLarge
https://devrant.io/rants/830390/, and I've been looking for a nice shirt with Dijkstra's "simplicity is a prerequisite for reliability" on it.
But many do not put any thought into beautiful design, and shit like "No place like 127.0.0.1", "404 girlfriend not found" or "There are 10 kinds of people" really stopped being funny a decade ago.
Good design, colors & quality are so fucking important.
What are your favorite dev-related clothes?16 -
@dfox You may want to explicitly set the text color on the devRant web app. It's kinda hard to read for those of us who have joined the dark side on Linux (Dark GTK+ theme), at least on Firefox. :)7
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Swag store feature request:
I can't wear any of the shirts at work with current dress code rules. Any chance we could get some polos or golf shirts with a small, embroidered ":/" on it?
I'd buy a week's worth of those.3 -
PM: Can you finish this in four weeks?
Dev: yeah sure, I can finish that in four weeks
Narrator: the dev could not finish it in four weeks10 -
EDIT: devRant April Fools joke (2017)
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@trogus and I have had an absolute blast working on devRant over the last year. However, we're strong believers in only working on a project if you're passionate about it, and over the last few months, we've sadly lost some of that passion so we've to announce, with heavy hearts, that we will both be moving on. We've decided to focus 100% of our energies on our next product, one which we are confident has billion dollar potential: Semicolon JS (http://semicolonjs.com).
We identified this sizable market opportunity as we were building out the new devRant website. Every JavaScript framework we tried left us wanting more. More efficiency. More elegance. More extensibility. That's what Semicolon JS is: more. More than a framework, it's a guiding philosophy. We believe that Semicolon JS will do for front end development what Material Design has done for user interface design. We're calling it Semicolon JS because even though you can still develop JavaScript without it, like a semicolon, we think it will soon become a standard and synonymous with quality JS development.
So comes the obvious question. What will happen to devRant? We wanted to make the announcement today because we will be officially shutting down the product in 30 days. So that gives everyone a full month to take in the last memories, look at those rants they really loved, and hopefully take some time to chat with @trogus and I about Semicolon JS and what we have planned.
With so many thanks and looking towards the future,
- @dfox and @trogus160 -
Interviewer: Welcome, Mr X. Thanks for dropping by. We like to keep our interviews informal. And even though I have all the power here, and you are nothing but a cretin, let’s pretend we are going to have fun here.
Mr X: Sure, man, whatever.
I: Let’s start with the technical stuff, shall we? Do you know what a linked list is?
X: (Tells what it is).
I: Great. Can you tell me where linked lists are used?
X:: Sure. In interview questions.
I: What?
X: The only time linked lists come up is in interview questions.
I:: That’s not true. They have lots of real world applications. Like, like…. (fumbles)
X:: Like to implement memory allocation in operating systems. But you don’t sell operating systems, do you?
I:: Well… moving on. Do you know what the Big O notation is?
X: Sure. It’s another thing used only in interviews.
I: What?! Not true at all. What if you want to sort a billion records a minute, like Google has to?
X: But you are not Google, are you? You are hiring me to work with 5 year old PHP code, and most of the tasks will be hacking HTML/CSS. Why don’t you ask me something I will actually be doing?
I: (Getting a bit frustrated) Fine. How would you do FooBar in version X of PHP?
X: I would, er, Google that.
I: And how do you call library ABC in PHP?
X: Google?
I: (shocked) OMG. You mean you don’t remember all the 97 million PHP functions, and have to actually Google stuff? What if the Internet goes down?
X: Does it? We’re in the 1st world, aren’t we?
I: Tut, tut. Kids these days. Anyway,looking at your resume, we need at least 7 years of ReactJS. You don’t have that.
X: That’s great, because React came out last year.
I: Excuses, excuses. Let’s ask some lateral thinking questions. How would you go about finding how many piano tuners there are in San Francisco?
X: 37.
I: What?!
X: 37. I googled before coming here. Also Googled other puzzle questions. You can fit 7,895,345 balls in a Boeing 747. Manholes covers are round because that is the shape that won’t fall in. You ask the guard what the other guard would say. You then take the fox across the bridge first, and eat the chicken. As for how to move Mount Fuji, you tell it a sad story.
I: Ooooooooookkkkkaaaayyyyyyy. Right, tell me a bit about yourself.
X: Everything is there in the resume.
I: I mean other than that. What sort of a person are you? What are your hobbies?
X: Japanese culture.
I: Interesting. What specifically?
X: Hentai.
I: What’s hentai?
X: It’s an televised art form.
I: Ok. Now, can you give me an example of a time when you were really challenged?
X: Well, just the other day, a few pennies from my pocket fell behind the sofa. Took me an hour to take them out. Boy was it challenging.
I: I meant technical challenge.
X: I once spent 10 hours installing Windows 10 on a Mac.
I: Why did you do that?
X: I had nothing better to do.
I: Why did you decide to apply to us?
X: The voices in my head told me.
I: What?
X: You advertised a job, so I applied.
I: And why do you want to change your job?
X: Money, baby!
I: (shocked)
X: I mean, I am looking for more lateral changes in a fast moving cloud connected social media agile web 2.0 company.
I: Great. That’s the answer we were looking for. What do you feel about constant overtime?
X: I don’t know. What do you feel about overtime pay?
I: What is your biggest weakness?
X: Kryptonite. Also, ice cream.
I: What are your salary expectations?
X: A million dollars a year, three months paid vacation on the beach, stock options, the lot. Failing that, whatever you have.
I: Great. Any questions for me?
X: No.
I: No? You are supposed to ask me a question, to impress me with your knowledge. I’ll ask you one. Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
X: Doing your job, minus the stupid questions.
I: Get out. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.
All Credit to:
http://pythonforengineers.com/the-p...89 -
The programmer who killed people: Not so talented programmer named John, made a mistake in his code. because of this mistake the program users spent 15 minutes to do a workaround. this program had 10 million users. In general the users spent 150 million minutes because of john's mistake, which is 2.5 million hours. if a person sleeps about 8 hours a day, he have 16 active hours. which means john wasted 156,250 human days that equals to 427.8 human years. people leave approx. until the age of 64, that means John just killed 6.68 people because of his bug. So john, how do you sleep at night?10
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Just taking the temperature - how many people would be interested in a devRant podcast? We'd probably start with it being every other week.
It would feature things like inside devRant updates, guest interviews, rant readings, and anything else fun we could think of.
Any thoughts?60 -
One of our web developers reported a bug with my image api that shrunk large images to a thumbnail size. Basically looked like this img = ResizeImage(largeImage, 50); // shrink the image by 50%
The 'bug' was when he was passed in the thumbnail image and requesting a 300% increase, and the image was too pixelated.
I tried to explain that if you need the larger image, use the image from disk (since the images were already sized optimally for display) and the api was just for resizing downward.
Thinking I was done, the next day I was called into a large conference room with the company vice-president, two of the web-dev managers, and several of the web developers.
VP: "I received an alarming email saying you refused to fix that bug in your code. Is that correct?"
Me: "Bug? No, there is no bug. The image api is executing just as it is supposed to."
MGR1: "Uh...no it isn't. Images using *your* code is pixelated and unfit for our site and our customers."
MGR2: "Yes, I looked at your code and don't understand what the big deal is. Looks like a simple fix."
<web developers nodding their heads>
Me: "OK, I'll bite. What is the simple fix?"
<MGR2 looks over at one of the devs>
Dev1: "Well, for example, if we request an image resize of 300, and the image is only 50x50, only increase the size by 10. Maybe 15."
Me: "Wow..OK. So what if the image is, for example, 640x480?"
MGR1: "75. Maybe 80 if it's a picture of boots."
VP: "Oh yes, boots. We need good pictures of boots."
Me: "I'm not exactly sure how to break this to you, but my code doesn't do 'maybe'. I mean, you have the image from disk.
You obviously used the api to create the thumbnail, but are trying to use the thumbnail to go back to the regular size. Why not use the original image?"
<Web-Dev managers look awkwardly towards the web devs>
Dev3: "Yea, well uh...um...that would require us to create a variable or something to store the original image. The place in the code where we need the regular image, it's easier to call your method."
Me: "Um, not really. You still have to resolve the product name from the URL path. Deriving the original file name is what you are doing already. Just do the same thing in your part of the code."
Dev2: "But we'd have to change our code"
Mgr2: "I know..I know. How about if we, for example, send you 12345.jpg and request a resize greater than 100, you go to disk and look for that image?"
<VP, mgrs, and devs nod happily>
Me: "Um, no that won't work. All I see is the image stream. I have no idea what file is and the api shouldn't be guessing, going to disk or anything like that."
Dev1: "What if we pass you the file name?"
<VP, mgrs, and devs nod happily again>
Me: "No, that would break the API contract and ...uh..wait...I'm familiar with your code. How about I make the change? I'm pretty sure I'll only have to change one method"
VP: "What! No...it’s gotta be more than that. Our site is huge."
<Mgrs and devs grumble and shift around in their chairs>
Me: "I'm done talking about this. I can change your code for you or you can do it. There is no bug and I'm not changing the api because you can't use it correctly."
Later I discovered they stopped using the resize api and wrote dynamic html to 'resize' the images on the client (download the 5+ meg images, and use the length and width properties)22 -
worst interview was about 2 years ago. I found this job as on a famous website, I applied for a desktop dev. position...the job seemed really easy, after 10 minutes the so-called CTO asked me:" how much do you know C hash?" me:"what?" him:"C hash...the Microsoft programming language" I thanked him for his time and went home crying ( he meant c# )...after a month I found out the company had gone bankrupt...I think I know why..8
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To all product managers: either give us a set of features and ask for a time frame, or give us a time frame and ask what can be developed. You can't dictate both!4
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18 commits later, the unofficial documentation has been ported over to GitBook.
The documentation now lives in a private repo on GitHub which is hooked up to a CI tool to build the book when a commit is pushed.
This will make maintaining the documentation much easier and also allow for collaboration which was previously not possible.
Because this documentation contains some endpoints some of you might not even know about, access is provided on a invite-only basis which is controlled by @dfox.
For new requests, contact @dfox with your name and what you are planning to build.
If you have already created something with the API email me at support@nblackburn.uk with your name and a link and I will send you a invite.