List the top books you consider fundamental to your software engineering knowledge and abilities. A book that really made you improve. Anything, up to you. The point is that without it you would be worse off.
Any topic. Systems design, DSA, security, architecture, doesn’t matter.

Is the android emulator still dogshit? Will I put myself through endless misery until I get a real device? Last I tried was when people were using eclipse.

Open AI Sora. The moment an open source alternative is available, can you imagine the shitshow?
Fake videos of <group X> doing <bad thing> spread everywhere, politician videos, real videos of atrocities being dismissed as AI, AI porno videos of classmates, fake historical videos, etc. the amount of propaganda this will generate is going to overrun the internet even more than GPT trash already does.
Or maybe nothing will change other than news outlets being even less reliable.

Highlights of this year for you?
Besides AI buzzwords.
Tech, games, life events, anything!
Stuff you did well? Things you’d like to improve at?

Are you using ai tools to code? I’ve been having a blast combining copilot with the jetbrains ai assistant. GPT4 with pictures is pretty decent at generating scaffolding as well, provided the images are decent.
Also for unit tests, refactoring, and quick algorithms that I need for random stuff. Saves me a lot of time.

I’m enjoying leetcode nowadays.
To the detriment of my graphql deployment progress.
Ashamed to say, but my DSA are beyond terrible. Better late than never I suppose!
Anyone else enjoys it?

No-code web design tools are made for the sole purpose of lacking features in order to torture a developer after marketing or sales requests something that the tool cannot do, or can but requires a very roundabout way of doing things. Extra points for things that have a JS API instead of letting you inject the damn thing.

Someone wanted me to make a full system from zero with good UI/UX, for 2 different user types (think marketplace style), admin area, and cool features that could only be done through phones because the tech is not available in web. All of this with good security due to the delicate information it would handle. Also of course subscription support as well.

By myself, within a year.

Please disregard. I just need to vent.

Being a manager is so fucking shit. This is not even about devs or tech specific only. Never become a manager.
Why? Because it’s about handling people and all the dumb shit they do. It’s all about knowing what people suck at and preventing that weakness from leaking into other areas. The amount of fucked up people on this earth means that you have to work with at least some of them, and that means putting up with their stupid ass list of super special requirements, that if they do not fulfill, will make them a shit worker. It’s not even an issue of technical skills.

You have the guys that are often late, because “they have depression”, but will complain that “companies don’t treat employees like adults”. Being on time for work is apparently very difficult. Which doesn’t generally matter in general for dev work, but it ends up affecting other things.

You have the completely socially inept idiots that make half the team hate them and try to avoid working with them, increasing problems and work for other people. Just because they’re socially stupid, have low or no empathy, or are incapable of not being insufferable to others.

You have the people that are so bad at estimating that they keep making up numbers instead of waiting to think for a few minutes and say “ not sure, I need to research and estimate that”.

You have the surprise absentee for dumb as fuck reasons like “my phone died lol sorry”. They never do anything to actually improve, it is just “sorry guys! Btw I will do jackshit about this”.

Or the ones whining about virtually everything, all the time. Wtf why do I have to be on scrum at 12 tomorrow?! Wtf why do I have to record the result of that customer call? Wtf why should I talk with XYZ?

And if you leave them alone, everything burns. They actually need someone to tell them “hey mate you need to improve that, shall we plan something to do so?”. I think managers are useless and unneeded when you have adults working, but it seems like most of the population is composed of children. It’s basically another form of daycare.

And you have to prepare shit around all of these constraints.

Then you have the one guy that reads the requirements, has common sense, and is inoffensive and can work like a normal adult human that needs no baby sitting. A ray of light on this shitshow.

I just want to go back to pure dev.

>import ENi18n
>import ZHi18n

en = {…ENi18n, moreStuff}
zh = {…ZHi18n, moreStuffZH}
pt = {…ZHi18n, moreStuffPT}

“Hey man can you fix this? Seems like we are missing the Portuguese i18n. Check this file please (path)”
“I’m sorry I don’t understand, can you call me and explain?”

Why do I need to explain this? What is difficult to grasp here? How can it take more than 20 seconds to know what to do here? It’s not even a file I made, you made it and I just ran into it!

Fuck man, I’m going to blow my brains out.

“We will send you a code challenge :)”

Or if we are being serious, I like it when we discuss projects I or they have worked on and what was interesting and challenging about them, and what was done to overcome obstacles and why. I really like when we discuss potential options and why one was taken over another one.

My first startup. I think we had about 5k usd in sales, in a 2 year period. Good stuff.

>work as a team lead in a tiny startup that lives off of investment money due to a strained business team that should stop sucking
>everyone is underpaid
>make do with what I can, manage to push for raises to keep the team going
>one dev, Timmy, is a pretty nice fella
>with 1 very annoying flaw
“Why can’t we get all of our utilities paid?” “Why can’t we have unlimited paid time off?” “Why can’t we be like Biilionare Company XYZ?” “Company T gives everyone the latest laptop models” “we should be getting paid twice as much” “why do we have to work 8 hours?”
Constantly, to everyone.

I agree with Timmy in most points. He is not saying something I do not know. Sometimes I want to strangle Timmy, feed him his own nutsack, and kick him out to apply to billionaire company XYZ. He can have all those sweet sweet benefits.

Gonna start my AI journey, thinking of tensor flow then PyTorch. Any suggestions, warnings, advice?
I’m just interested in learning more about it and figure out what to use it for later.

When business people are so fucking shit at their job, you need the damn devs to do their job for them and ask about KPIs and alternative business models

Dev team: This part of the app has a shitty ux. We want to fix it after we finish this feature.
Business: hey guys we think we lack data so we got some users to check our page with shitty ux and see if they think it is shit
User: yeah it’s shit

Great use of resources you chucklefucks

Go to meeting
About 1 hour and a half
“Yeah we really need that thing you’re developing, the faster we can release it the better“

Me: Can you tell me how to do X?
ChatGPT: yes, you can do xwz!
Me: I researched your suggestion and every source I find mentions that you should not do it because it would mess with the UI thread, amongst other side effects.
ChatGPT: Yes, you should not do xwz.

I’m kinda liking this thing, it’s full of noob traps.

Santa was generous this year

Business guy: hmmm, what do you think about getting the programmers to come to the office more often?
Me: uhhhh explain?
BG: feels like when working from home they might only give it their 90%, but in the office they'd do 100%.
Me: let's not talk about how you reached that conclusion for now. If you force them to come more often they will quit.
BG: what about the new people we want to hire?
Me: most jobs have full remote available, why would anyone pick us?
BG: hmmm. Btw next week we'll talk with some stakeholders about trying to get some outsource help. You know, for repetitive stuff that doesn't require in-house engineers.
Me: like what?
BG: you know, repetitive stuff

This is suffering. Is my only choice to tell the guy that he has no clue what he is talking about, should STFU, and let the technically capable people to handle themselves? As in, we already do but for some reason he still thinks he knows better than the people doing the god damn job? But if I do so, the salinity in his blood will bring other problems upon us.

Thinking of coding an interview question generator. Could be a good way to study AI by training it to make asinine sentences.
If Jimmy has 2 arms and 2 legs, what is the maiden name of his mom?

That nice feeling in a cold morning of booting up your code editor / ide of choice and making a brand spanking new prototype project with a language you love. All accompanied by your hot beverage of choice, a warm blanket, and a pet or two.

"Why are these guys faster than us at development?"
"The company that has received millions in investment and has a bigger development team? Yeah no clue man, I guess they are just better than us."

Tell me the classics you never get tired of. I'll start.

User message / report: "there is an error". With absolutely nothing else written or attached.

Me: So you have no work experience, and majored in liberal arts, but you did go through a 6 months bootcamp, right?
Candidate: Yeah.
Me: sounds good, we will have to work together with you for a long while until you become independent, but I think you can definitely do this. What are you salary expectations?
Candidate: I'm thinking of 5000.
Me: Aight, thanks for your time! We'll send you more details later

Around here, 5000 (arbitrary made up number) is what you pay someone with around 3 years of experience at least. It's always these pampered fucks from rich countries that want to earn a shitton of money for the grand effort of going to a goddamn bootcamp for some months. That is their definition of effort and hard work, because it seems they've never once in their lives had any sort of hardship or struggle beyond crying that dad got them an Android instead of an iPhone. If you leave them alone they can't do jack shit because they've never worked in real, big projects, so you gotta invest a lot of time in them. Which is fine, everyone starts from somewhere. But what kinda balls do you have to demand a mid level salary when you have done basically nothing so far, and your knowledge is superficial at best?

I know that a lot of jobs and recruiters give bottom of the barrel shit, but I swear some candidates are insane. Unpopular rant I assume but I just needed to scream a bit.

I am now sorry for managers. Management is a miserable, horrible job where you have to deal with unending amounts of bullshit from all sides, and run a kindergarten where every other employee will give you their super special list of things that they don't like, or triggers them. No wonder all managers are terrible, who would ever want to do this shit job?

10 new JS frameworks, all in the next year.

Do you do overtime? How much? Do you think it "works"? I had 1 month of overtime a while ago, and I only noticed a stressed team for a tiny gain in speed. I know that if it went on for even longer I would've quit.

Business: how long would this pile of vague tasks that are not fully defined, and whose requirements we don't even know, take to finish?

How do I find all of the AWS resources' arn identifiers? I'm trying write shit in terraform but making granular IAM policies is a nightmare.