Of course, its self-perceived incompetence, not actual incompetence. Its a quirk of human nature whereby the more you learn, the more you realize how much you have left to learn.

Greg Utas wrote:

he's among the apparently not-so-small group that are high performers yet secretly believe that they're actually incompetent

This sentiment deeply resonates with me. I have no college degrees, have no published books, and have little recognized public domain work. Being surrounded by brilliant, acclaimed engineers my entire career has always been a source of great anxiety. Even today, 25 years into my software development journey, I still fear I could be discarded at any time for my lack of credentials and/or incompetence.

While I don't visit often these days, I consider this site instrumental to my professional success. In my late 20's and early 30's I basically learned industry programming by religiously reading all the latest CodeProject articles. I don't know that I could have transitioned from VB to C# without all the knowledge I assimilated from this site over that decade. I was so grateful that I even wrote a dozen or so articles myself, hoping to give something back to the community.

You think the default web app web.config files are bad in their vanilla form, just wait until you have to deploy into a secure environment. The Web.config is just one link in an inheritance chain that flows down from %WinDir%\System32\intetsrv\config\Applicationhost.config through each application directory to your web site's directory. You haven't lived until you've had to walk every config file in this chain to find the one that has a duplicate ISAPIRestriction or Authentication tag definition (this breaks the entire IIS worker process).

Bernhard Hiller wrote:

So he translates an enum with a Flags attribute to a string, ignoring the fact that they are flags, in order to store that value in a database eventually.

I learned decades ago that its a fool errand to insult the previous developer(s), especially if one was not there participating in the decision making process. There are a multitude of factors and/or external forces that impact decisions like this and arrogantly criticizing these choices accomplishes little.

Jeremy Falcon wrote:

And yet, we do this because we're creators.

You nailed it. I started in software development in the late 90's because I was striving for a means of fullfilling creative expression. I've made it a point over the years ensure the products I engineer are clean, visually unique, and expressive of my personality. A few years ago I really felt like I had arrived. 15+ years of experiences in a very diverse product environment gave me great satisfaction and gratitude. Since that time I've watched the technologies I'd devoted so many late nights studying and mastering basically die (GDI/WinForms, ASPNET WebForms, etc) and be completely replaced by newer (presumably better) frameworks (WPF, MVC, Store Apps, etc). Its a crushing feeling having to endure the thought of starting all over again every 5-10 years having to learn the latest framework (or hotness). Sometimes I just wish I had gone into pure engineering or some other industry. After all math doesn't change often, nor do most of the principles and tools in use in most other industries. I seem to spend most of my times these days porting code for problems I solved years ago in one platform over to whatever the newest platform is since the youngsters demand everything be written in whatever is the flavor of the month happens to be.

Hmm... I don't use the Windows Store, and don't imagine I ever will but here is an Open Source ad-blocker https://www.edgeadblock.com/ I may give Edge another try. I liked it back when I first tried it but back then there was no ad-blocker and I just can't surf the web without an ad-blocker.

Until there's an ad-blocker available for Edge it's useless to me.

This is going to sound positively Jurassic, but I still prefer ASPNET WebForms over MVC. Sure MVC works great with all these flashy frontend Javascript frameworks but losing all those canned WebControls that come built into WebForms makes everything so much more tedious and cumbersome. I understand everyone wants Ajax and asynchronous partial POSTs and all that but there's something empowering about being able to roll up a web solution just as quickly as a desktop solution when using WebForms that is very hard for some of us ASPNET old timers to let go of.

I went through the OR/M craze for a few years too before switching back to standard DataLayer models. The biggest issue for us is that ORMs have direct access to tables and generate Non-optimized SQL code that can be difficult to monitor and tune and as soon as you want to do something out of the ordinary, the complexity skyrockets. We have since moved back to the model where all access to data routes through Stored Procedures, which restrict access, creates audit trails, and santitizes input.

And I have no doubt that your hard work, dedication, and diligence contributed (if not led entirely) to your current success. I'm no social justice warrior myself, but I have a hard time reconciling the fact that many of my peers, who work long hours framing houses or laying brick or wiring commercial real estate earn a tiny fraction of my salary. Ive happened upon great opportunities in the IT industry and I'm grateful for that fact, but I bear no illusion that because my industry pays a substantially better wage that it somehow makes me a better citizen, friend, or human being.

No, I didn't say any of those things; you are inferring. I'm merely stating the fact that hard work very rarely translates into high compensation and the idea that hard work leads to success is a myth. Wealth and success have much more to do with who you know and what opportunities you had available to you than all your hard work, effort, and technical skill combined.

It might make you feel good to say that the top 20% of individuals work the hardest and therefor make the most money but that doesn't make it true http://www.forbes.com/sites/moneywisewomen/2012/03/21/average-america-vs-the-one-percent/[^] The fact is that hard work doesn't always translate into compensation. While it certainly is true that 20% of the workers produce 80% of the output, let's not fantasize that this productivity translates into high compensation.

LinkedIn is the new monster.com. I remember what it was like it the roaring 1990s/2000s when you had to beat job offers away with a stick there were so many. You could expect a dozen offers within hours of flipping the switch on your monster.com profile. LinkedIn is not necessarily on that level, but if you are in the market and you're serious about considering offers, LinkedIn is a fantastic resource.

charlieg wrote:

Wall -> cable coax -> Cable modem (mine btw) -> router -> every other device in the house.

I fought a similar battle with Cox a few years ago and I implemented a SmoothWall as my single access path from my LAN to the Cox WAN network

Wall -> Cable Model -> SmoothWall PC -> Linksys Router -> Every other device in the house

In my case, I discovered that the Cox usage figures were accurate. Before I stood up the Smoothwall router/firewall PC between my LAN and WAN I had my Linksys Router connected directly to the cable modem and quickly determined the Linksys bandwidth monitoring was way off, by an enormous amount (like 50 GB of usage or so during my first month of analysis). Like others mentioned, a Squid proxy server or a firewall PC (SmoothWall, PfSense, etc) sitting between your LAN and WAN is the only accurate way to measure bandwidth utilization.

Nothing like a little arrogance to fuel a new startup! Unfortunately, literally everyone thinks they have the next big thing; yet they never actually do. Good luck to the poor sap that gets suckered by this non-sense!

I open the binaries in ILSpy and if ILSpy doesn't throw an exception then the obfuscation is not good enough

I can't read the article either but good luck developing a desktop application that doesn't hard lock and go into a 'not responding' state every time someone triggers an event handler without implementing asynchronous multi threading.

Regardless of what others might imply, I don't think there's any substitute for working with a mature, experienced team. I spent my first 5 years as a programmer reading forums and volunteering on open source products and even writing CodeProject articles! I thought I was hot stuff, until I joined a new organization and got paired up with some highly experienced engineers. They spent hours sharing their desktops and explaining in great detail why they wanted certain patterns and how to write enterprise grade code. In summary, I learned more from this group of experts in a few months time than I had learned in total, on my own, over the previous five years. The moral of the story, get yourself on an experienced development team or find a great mentor. Going it alone with nothing but Google and StackOverflow.com on your side can only result in a poor outcome.

tgrt wrote:

I'll use CS6 until it stops working.

I heard that! Unfortunately that time may arrive sooner than later. I have seen the world utterly transformed from the one I started my career in and I've got a persistent suspicion that not that long from now, no binary assembly will be able to execute on any retail computational device without first phoning home to a license server and passing/authenticating digital signatures and other verification gates. This is not a brave new world that I want to live in!