We have new scrum master. First meeting together.

Project owner:
- I would give them time to wensday (2 days away) days to do migration
Manager:
- delivery is in Tuesday. can we have two teams to work on it so it will be done twice as fast?
Scrum Master:
- do you really think that if you get 9 women pregnant they would deliver you baby in a month?

How I went from loving my job to wishing i dont wake up tomorrow just to avoid it.

Ive been a backend dev in the company im at for 2 years now.

First year was a blast, i loved my work so much, I used to get so many random features to do, bug fixes, campaigns, analytics, etc..

Second year i started getting familiar with the part of the code that has to do with Search in our music streaming app. Nobody wanted to work on it, so i wanted to take initiative and start doing a few tasks.

A few tasks turned into sprints, and sprints turned into months worth of sprints. And because the code was the definition of tech debt, and because it was so messed up that changing one thing can blow up everything else, working on Search was not too fun.

However, people seemed to be happy search tasks are no longer piling up and someone is handling them so that used to make me feel good about it. They also gave me so much freedom and i felt like my own manager because no one told me what to do (not even my actual manager) they just let me be and were happy i was handling the part they want nothing to do with. I was also given an intern to mentor and have her work on Search tasks with me which turned out amazing.

During the last few months, I completely rewrote search, made it 10 times more performant in such a neat way, made an inhouse dashboard to automate certain tasks so we wont need to waste developers on them (all of which were extra effort on my own time without being asked), all meanwhile still tending to the fixes of the old implementation.

I felt so accomplished, and in a way, i felt like a lead (even tho im not managing any employees, i had so much freedom and I was literally responsible for everything about Search and if i decide to play with the sprint task order i can even do that).

Then 6 or so weeks ago my manager left the company, and while i thought id be a standalone team / person (single person teams are not uncommon in the company) i was instead put under someone else. Someone who likes to micro manage the fuck out of me. I have been happy working on shit code because it was my baby, my project, no one interferes and no one tells me what to do and everyone would call me the search lead (unofficially). now if i dont report to that guy every two hours he calls to see if im working. preplans sprints i no longer have a say in, and im the only dev who knows the code so all tasks go to me. I feel i got demoted so fucking much. I felt like a lead on a project and now im back to being a normal code minion. From deciding everything about a project to blindly following a some irrelevant manager's opinion. (who btw is making Search worse) And after all the extra effort i put in, after actually caring, after actually embracing Search as my responsibility i get rewarded with losing everything i liked about my job...My Independence. From feeling like a lead to feeling demoted. I am so demotivated.

I love the company, but this is hell for me and this made me hate a job i always loved. I am thinking of talking to the CTO asking to work on other stuff because i no longer want this. If i am to be a code minion at least let it be on code i like, let me go back to dealing with PMs, fuck my new manager I dont wanna work with that guy he can take the project along with all its poopoo.

> Root struggles with her ticket
> Boss struggles too
> Also: random thoughts about this job

I've been sick lately, and it's the kind of sick where I'm exhausted all day, every day (infuriatingly, except at night). While tired, I can't think, so I can't really work, but I'm during my probationary period at work, so I've still been doing my best -- which, honestly, is pretty shit right now.

My current project involves legal agreements, and changing agent authorization methods (written, telephone recording, or letting the user click a link). Each of these, and depending on the type of transaction, requires a different legal agreement. And the logic and structure surrounding these is intricate and confusing to follow. I've been struggling through this and the project's ever-expanding scope for weeks, and specifically the agreements logic for the past few days. I've felt embarrassed and guilty for making so little progress, and that (and a bunch of other things) are making me depressed.

Today, I finally gave up and asked my boss for help. We had an hour and a half call where we worked through it together (at 6pm...). Despite having written quite a bit of the code and tests, he was often saying things like "How is this not working? This doesn't make any sense." So I don't feel quite so bad now.

I knew the code was complex and sprawling and unintuitive, but seeing one of its authors struggling too was really cathartic.

On an unrelated note, I asked the most senior dev (a Macintosh Lisa dev) why everything was using strings instead of symbols (in Rails) since symbols are much faster. That got him looking into the benchmarks, and he found that symbols are about twice as fast (for his minimal test, anyway), and he suggested we switch to those. His word is gold; mine is ignorable. kind of annoying. but anyway, he further went into optimizing the lookup of a giant array of strings, and discovered bsearch. (it's a divide-and-conquer lookup). and here I am wondering why they didn't implement it that way to begin with. 🙄

I don't think I'm learning much here, except how to work with a "mature" codebase. To take a page from @Rutee07, I think "mature" here means the same as in porn: not something you ever want ot see or think about.

I mean, I'm learning other things, too, like how to delegate methods from one model to another, but I have yet to see why you would want to. Every use of it I've explored thus far has just complicated things, like delegating methods on a child of a 1:n relation to the parent. Which child? How does that work? No bloody clue! but it does, somehow, after I copy/pasted a bunch of esoteric legacy bs and fussed with it enough.

I feel like once I get a good grasp of the various payment wrappers, verification/anti-fraud integration, and per-business fraud rules I'll have learned most of what they can offer. Specifically those because I had written a baby version of them at a previous job (Hell), and was trying to architect exactly what this company already has built.

I like a few things about this company. I like my boss. I like the remote work. I like the code reviews. I like the pay. I like the office and some socializing twice a year.

But I don't like the codebase. at all. and I don't have any friends here. My boss is friendly, but he's not a friend. I feel like my last boss (both bosses) were, or could have been if I was more social. But here? I feel alone. I'm assigned work, and my boss is friendly when talking about work, but that's all he's there for. Out of the two female devs I work with, one basically just ignores me, and the other only ever talks about work in ways I can barely understand, and she's a little pushy, and just... really irritating. The "senior" devs (in quotes because they're honestly not amazing) just don't have time, which i understand. but at the same time... i don't have *anyone* to talk to. It really sucks.

I'm not happy here.
I miss my last job.

But the reason I left that one is because this job allows me to move and work remotely. I got a counter-offer from them exactly matching my current job, sans the code reviews. but we haven't moved yet. and if I leave and go back there without having moved, it'll look like i just abandoned them. and that's the last thing I want them to think.

So, I'm stuck here for awhile.
not that it's a bad thing, but i'm feeling overwhelmed and stressed. and it's just not a good fit. but maybe I'll actually start learning things. and I suppose that's also why I took the job.

So, ever onward, I guess.
It would just be nice if I could take some of the happy along with me.

Oh man. Mine are the REASON why people dislike PHP.

Biggest Concern: Intranet application for 3 staff members that allows them to set the admin data for an application that our userbase utilizes. Everything was fucking horrible, 300+ php files of spaghetti that did not escape user input, did not handle proper redirects, bad algo big O shit and then some. My pain point? I was testing some functionality when upon clicking 3 random check boxes you would get an error message that reads something like this "hi <SENSITIVE USERNAME DATA> you are attempting to use <SERVER IP ADDRESS> using <PASSWORD> but something went wrong! Call <OLD DEVELOPER's PHONE NUMBER> to provide him this <ERROR CODE>"

I panicked, closed that shit and rewrote it in an afternoon, that fucking retard had a tendency to use over 400 files of php for the simplest of fucking things.

Another one, that still baffles me and the other dev (an employee that has been there since the dawn of time) we have this massive application that we just can't rewrite due to time constraints. there is one file with (shit you not) a php include function that when you reach the file it is including it is just......a php closing tag. Removing it breaks down the application. This one is over 6000 files (I know) and we cannot understand what in the love of Lerdorf and baby Torvalds is happening.

From a previous job we had this massive in-house Javascript "framework" for ajax shit that for whatever reason unknown to me had a bunch of function and object names prefixed with "hotDog<rest of the function name>", this was used by two applications. One still in classic ASP and the other in php version 4.something

Legacy apps written in Apache Velocity, which in itself is not that bad, but I, even as a PHP developer, do not EVER mix views with logic. I like my shit separated AF thank you very much.

A large mobile application that interfaced with fucking everything via webviews. Shit was absolutley fucking disgusting, and I felt we were cheating our users.

A rails app with 1000 controller methods.

An express app with 1000 router methods with callbacks instead of async await even though async await was already a thing.

ultraFuckingLarge Delphi project with really no consideration for best practices. I, to this day enjoy Object Pascal, but the way in which people do delphi can scare me.

ASP.NET Application in wich there seemed to be a large portion of bolted in self made ioc framework from the lead dev, absolute shitfest, homie refused to use an actual ioc framework for it, they did pay the price after I left.

My own projects when I have to maintain them.

Biggest challenge I overcame as dev? One of many.

Avoiding a life sentence when the 'powers that be' targeted one of my libraries for the root cause of system performance issues and I didn't correct that accusation with a flame thrower.

What the accusation? What I named the library. Yep. The *name* was causing every single problem in the system.

Panorama (very, very expensive APM system at the time) identified my library in it's analysis, the calls to/from SQLServer was the bottleneck

We had one of Panorama's engineers on-site and he asked what (not the actual name) MyLibrary was and (I'll preface I did not know or involved in any of the so-called 'research') a crack team of developers+managers researched the system thoroughly and found MyLibrary was used in just about every project. I wrote the .Net 1.1 MyLibrary as a mini-ORM to simplify the execution of database code (stored procs, etc) and gracefully handle+log database exceptions (auto-logged details such as the target db, stored procedure name, parameter values, etc, everything you'd need to troubleshoot database errors). This was before Dapper and the other fancy tools used by kids these days.

By the time the news got to me, there was a team cobbled together who's only focus was to remove any/every trace of MyLibrary from the code base. Using Waterfall, they calculated it would take at least a year to remove+replace MyLibrary with the equivalent ADO.Net plumbing.

In a department wide meeting:

DeptMgr: "This day forward, no one is to use MyLibrary to access the database! It's slow, unprofessionally named, and the root cause of all the database issues."
Me: "What about MyLibrary is slow? It's excecuting standard the ADO.Net code. Only extra bit of code is the exception handling to capture the details when the exception is logged."
DeptMgr: "We've spent the last 6 weeks with the Panorama engineer and he's identified MyLibrary as the cause. Company has spent over $100,000 on this software and we have to make fact based decisions. Look at this slide ... "
<DeptMgr shows a histogram of the stacktrace, showing MyLibrary as the slowest>
Me: "You do realize that the execution time is the database call itself, not the code. In that example, the invoice call, it's the stored procedure that taking 5 seconds, not MyLibrary."
<at this point, DeptMgr is getting red-face mad>
AreaMgr: "Yes...yes...but if we stopped using MyLibrary, removing the unnecessary layers, will make the code run faster."
<typical headknodd-ers knod their heads in agreement>
Dev01: "The loading of MyLibrary takes CPU cycles away from code that supports our customers. Every CPU cycle counts."
<headknod-ding continues>
Me: "I'm really confused. Maybe I'm looking at the data wrong. On the slide where you highlighted all the bottlenecks, the histogram shows the latency is the database, I mean...it's right there, in red. Am I looking at it wrong?"
<this was meeting with 20+ other devs, mgrs, a VP, the Panorama engineer>
DeptMgr: "Yes you are! I know MyLibrary is your baby. You need to check your ego at the door and face the facts. Your MyLibrary is a failed experiment and needs to be exterminated from this system!"

Fast forward 9 months, maybe 50% of the projects updated, come across the documentation left from the Panorama. Even after the removal of MyLibrary, there was zero increases in performance. The engineer recommended DBAs start optimizing their indexes and other N+1 problems discovered. I decide to ask the developer who lead the re-write.

Me: "I see that removing MyLibrary did nothing to improve performance."
Dev: "Yes, DeptMgr was pissed. He was ready to throw the Panorama engineer out a window when he said the problems were in the database all along. Didn't you say that?"
Me: "Um, so is this re-write project dead?"
Dev: "No. Removing MyLibrary introduced all kinds of bugs. All the boilerplate ADO.Net code caused a lot of unhandled exceptions, then we had to go back and write exception handling code."
Me: "What a failure. What dipshit would think writing more code leads to less bugs?"
Dev: "I know, I know. We're so far behind schedule. We had to come up with something. I ended up writing a library to make replacing MyLibrary easier. I called it KnightRider. Like the TV show. Everyone is excited to speed up their code with KnightRider. Same method names, same exception handling. All we have to do is replace MyLibrary with KnightRider and we're done."
Me: "Won't the bottlenecks then point to KnightRider?"
Dev: "Meh, not my problem. Panorama meets primarily with the DBAs and the networking team now. I doubt we ever use Panorama to look at our C# code."

Needless to say, I was (still) pissed that they had used MyLibrary as dirty word and a scapegoat for months when they *knew* where the problems were. Pissed enough for a flamethrower? Maybe.

A couple of months ago, the father of a friend of mine, asked me if I wanted to help him out with a project.

His late father, whom he inherited a one-person upholstering company from, once created a system in filemaker to do, among others, his financial administration. This system, however, grew organically as time went by, but he passed away before he explained to his son how it worked.

Now this man was running the company, using the parts of the system that he knows, but things were starting to break down. He asked me if I could help him understand what is going on and fix a couple of things.

However, the more I look at it, the more I realize what a monstrosity this has become, because the system has never been cleaned up. For example:

- There is a suppliers table, with the columns "E-MAIL" and "EMAIL". The latter one containing the supplier's website address.
- In order to be able to generate year reports, at the start of a year he copies the previous year's file, removes all records from it and starts using that as the new year's file. (This year, he accidentally created a shortcut instead of copying...)
- Some tables have a misterious column called "#1". It always contains a 1.
- The system consists of about 20 files, each of them containing a single table, although only 10 of them are really used. The other ones are just legacy.
- File, table, column, and layout names are capitalized randomly (all caps, no cap, starting uppercase) and are usually abbreviations, like "st2", "oms3", "off\rek", "b", "VERDBEST6" and "antst".
- One table has 92 columns.
- Of those 92 columns, only about 20, maybe 30, are in use.

Now, my task is finding out what parts are useful and in use, extracting those and create a baby monster out of the giant monster this system has become.

Sidenote: I actually enjoy having to learn a bit about accounting in order to understand this. Planning to use the knowledge I gain to keep track of my own finances.

Apart from having a baby which is the hardest in the world，i think the hardest project is to learn to code.

I studied philosophy and anthropology but gamed a lot. Me and a good mate decided to work together and he told me hed teach me coding.

The guy is a genius but he is a reckless rebel genius who tells everybody to fuck off.

So，after 1 year in a half of intense coding where i had to learn linux， networks， and im not shitting you html and css as well and of course javascript.

He has now put me on， for the last 2 month， in charge of our front end backoffice. I have to design forms that do the right http requests，do the unit testing， play with redux-form， react-redux and he has thrown me into the basic java backend so i can begin working with entites and how i serve the data and link it to the database and even create tables.

Every time i fail hemakes me remake everything.

I actually came on devrant to study the dev community (i always gamed a lot but this is a whole different community). The dev community is pretty awesome and unique.

Anyhow， i remember when i saw him as me to complete an exercise and i didnt event know which words were the reserved language ones and those i could use myself. It was like fucking magic.

Tried mx 17 linux today. Was completely blown away by how fucking good the system is. I am really tempted to nuke my windows installation in one of my computers and just run this baby from it. Nothing is really holding me back from it. I already have two other macs and another ubuntu laptop. Can think of a reason why i would need windows at this time but i am still hesitant.

Plus...i am taking on a big rails project.....might be good to have this thing set up for it as are the other two macs. Mmmmmhmm decissions decissions.

What do y'all think? Yes or nah?

Let's try this.

In the project I'm working there is an strict rule : NO COMMENTS!!!

I mean wth, the times I've spend hours trying to understand the crappy legacy code in VB.Net that has been there almost decades, that wouldn't happen with comments, I know i know there are some supernatural developers that think in binary and their eyes work as compilers, but I'm not like that, so seriously go to hell.

P.S. Of course I follow that rule, after all, my code is so damn perfect that even a baby can understand it.

jk

Well, I posted this rant a few days ago where I was expressing my desires to get a job as a Software Developer... Here I am again re-posting.

________________________________

FFS! Can I get a remote job as soft-dev?? I know a little bit of java, I mean I have a GitHub repo for a project if anyone wants to see what I'm doing.

If anyone knows or feel that can help me, please lend me a hand, I need to start working (to get real experience) and earn a little (prevent from starving in this fucking shithole country).

I'm not asking for money, I'm asking for a freaking job, a task, anything.

Little brief of my situation... I'm from Venezuela... Done!

Now for real, I'm a freelancer IT technician for almost 8 yrs, now I'm studying software engineering (8th Semester), I'm 31 years old, have a family (7 yrs old daughter, newborn baby boy), work is not flowing since the hourly price got high due to the economic crisis and clients are hiring people instead of outsourcing.

I'm not expecting to earn the minimum wage of UUSS, 150$/month can do the job! This due to the black market price of the USD (10X.000BsF so far), where 1$ represents the 1/8 part of the minimum wage here, to put it in perspective, toothpaste cost 200.000Bsf, 1/4 of the minimum wage.

Perhaps you will be asking yourself "Damn! so how do you do to survive!?" well, at least once a week a client calls and that saves the entire week, this isn't life my people, this is surviving... And if you don't believe me, I can show a receipt from the supermarket, and show you the average salary or my incomings.

Anyway enough drama and whining for today, I'm not doing this again in my life, I'm a person who achieves goals and earns what deserve (even this situation, I know that I deserve it for not thinking properly in the past, but we can't be victims of our past or do we?)

TD;DR: I have school instead of vacation but 5 hours of spare time. I got my laptop with me and I'll work in school.

I didn't want to take part of the course-trip with the 12th graders (my course sucks, there are too many assholes for the neutral people to compensate). After speaking with the director, and the only condition was to tell the course why. I did deliver them a nicely put "fuck you, you bullied my only friend out of this school" and now is the time where I visit the 11-graders while the other 12-ers are on "school vacation".

I got a "new" plan for the courses I should visit. Today, Wednesday, I have 5 FUCKING FREE HOURS IN A ROW. Oh yes, baby, the teacher generating the plan hates me as well. (He really does but it's probably just unlucky not his fault).

So today, I decided, I would take my heavy-ass laptop with me, in a laptop bag, which doesn't fit into the school bag I have and my laptop doesn't fully fit in the laptop bag as well (sticks out), that's the perks of having a laptop!!
— so I can work on my (I wanna say this once in my life without being a professional) "CLIENTS PROJECT" - the funny thing is that the client is a (really fucking good but small) advertising agency and too lazy to design their own website. Since I had my internship, they know how hard I *can* work even without being payed. Now they do wanna pay me but that's another story.

I'm on the bus and I have this monster of a bag which isn't lighter than a freaking huge bag of rice and I'm so fucking excited for this day. The library is my best friend. Hopyfully I'm going to find a socket for power..

Sorry for so many commas, I'm german. :D

!rant

Rant from my previous work as a consultant Data Engineer (wish I had known this site back then).

During my stay at the place, we have a big client whose contact with us was an incompetent stressful fellow.

I single-handedly build a humongous automated data pipeline using Airflow. I am very proud of my baby as my first massive project and check it obsessively for every possible flaw, especially when writing down documentation for the poor soul that would take my place.

Luckily for me, everything is working as intended, until of course on my last day of work, shit hits the fan, and everything breaks down.

After a moment of initial panic: it was Thursday morning, we had a Machine Learning model to run over the weekend, predictions to make and reports to write and a very lovely next week deadline, I calm down.

"I won't be dealing with this shit anymore, starting from 18:00 PM and anyway Fear Is The Mind Killer."

Quite sure that it couldn't have been my code, I start looking at various logs when the culprit was clear. The B(ig) S(tupid) C(lient) changed the whole schema of the data he was feeding to us.

I call him: he has no idea of what was done to the data. Hell, at first he doesn't seem to remember what the deal with schema, data, and SQL is (the guy was supposed to be a big shot in the IT department). It turns out he hired one of our competitors to do his side of the collection pipeline. He tries to get mad at me, but everything he throws bounces back to him. I am calm yet ruthless pointing out how every major hiccup had been his fault and that I could quickly reach to his board of directors explaining why their Machine Learning model was late.

Result: he apologizes, extends our deadline, and I get a round of applause from other juniors who would have to deal with me had I failed.

Never am I happier to not work as an underpaid cannon fodder apprentice in a shitty consultant firm.

Luckily for me, everything is working as intended, until of course on my last day of work, shit hits the fan, and everything breaks down.

After a moment of initial panic: it was Thursday morning, we had a Machine Learning model to run over the weekend, predictions to make and reports to write and a very lovely next week deadline, I calm down.

"I won't be dealing with this shit anymore, starting from 18:00 PM and anyway Fear Is The Mind Killer."

Quite sure that it couldn't have been my code, I start looking at various logs when the culprit was clear. The B(ig) S(tupid) C(lient) changed the whole schema of the data he was feeding to us.

I call him: he has no idea of what was done to the data. Hell, at first he doesn't seem to remember what the deal with schema, data, and SQL is (the guy was supposed to be a big shot in the IT department). It turns out he hired one of our competitors to do his side of the collection pipeline. He tries to get mad at me, but everything he throws bounces back to him. I am calm yet ruthless pointing out how every major hiccup had been his fault and that I could quickly reach to his board of directors explaining why their Machine Learning model was late.

Result: he apologizes, extends our deadline, and I get a round of applause from other juniors who would have to deal with me had I failed.

Never am I happier to not work as an underpaid cannon fodder apprentice in a shitty consultant firm.

I hate group project so much.

I yet again successfully stirred up a big drama in my project group. For project, I proposed a CDN cache system for a post only database server. Super simple. I wanted to see what ideas other people come up with. So I said I am not good at the content and the idea is dumb. Oh man, what a horrible mistake. One group member wants to build a chat app with distributed storage. We implemented get/put for a terribly designed key value store and now they want to build a freaking chat app on top of a more stupid kV store using golang standard lib. I don't think any of those fools understand the challenges that comes with the distributed storage.

I sent a video explaining part of crdt. "That's way too complicated. Why are you making everything complicated."

Those fools leave too much details for course stuff's interpretation and says

"course stuff will only grade the project according to the proposal. It's in the project description".

I asked why don't they just take baby steps and just go with their underlying terribly designed kV store.

"Messaging app is more interesting and designing kV store with generic API is just as difficult"

😂 Fucking egos

Then I successfully pissed off all group members with relatively respectful words then pissed off myself and joined another group.

Close to delivering a project on time. Nothing spectacular or particularly big. But it's been my baby and I could introduce other devs to the codebase without having any "negative" feedback on the design; only minor improvements that made total sense.

We've had one technical disagreement where I very unjustly had to pick my suggested solution. The discussion didn't lead to an agreement and we couldn't stay blocked. Old me would have chosen the design that did not (in my not-so-humble opinion) make any sense, just not to step on any toes. Probably imagined toes and steps and whathaveyous as well.

We're making good progress. We're learning from each other. I like this.

This team lead thing is very temporary, but I haven't grown this much in ages. It's just a regular old job where I help someone else get rich, but it's a great tool for self development. I guess I could be spending my time worse... huh, I like the sound of that.

Hey fellow devs,

i finally did it! i applied as a junior dev in a software company for inHouse projects. the job interview is today in one week.

little background story for those of you who are just procastinating at this time:

i have started coding when i was in school. just little stuff - nothing special. after i finished school i edjucated in the business field (did not found the english word. something like office person or in our words "user").
after that my company changed the ERP System and i wanted to do that so badly. and i got that job. i worked my ass of to get that baby running. from entering the orders to production to shipping and billing, i made that all happen by myself. as we had some very specific requirements i also wrote applications myself. after about three quarters of a year we switched to the new system and it ran smoothly (company is producing windows and doors). i was so proud when the first windows were finished.

BUT there was one problem. I was alone. no second it person i could talk to. no one i could learn from and no one who could learn from me. i then decided to change the company. same product, same job - but within a team. It was a whole other experience. i really enjoy the exchange with my colleagues. we learn from each other and we solve problems together. we can rely on each other. As i worked there i also wrote applications for inHouse usage and i even launched my own first app (not related to company - private commercial project)

BUT there is one problem. I am still the only dev. so i try to code the lease i can at my current job so that the team still works and the whole system stays maintainable for everyone. I do not feel good holding back the desire to code something. so after two years (and with a lot of talks with my cousin) i finally applied for a job as a "real" developer.

I have no bachelor, so the invitation for the job interview made me so damn happy. i really hope that i can transmit my passion for this job and if everything fits that they take me.

The next rant will then be about the result of my job interview :)

PS: even if i do not get the job. i am proud of myself that i applied!

Thanks for reading, potato potato

Hey guys, so i'm just about to complete my android application project which I started a year ago.

You can say it's sort of my baby. I've put all my efforts into it. The backend is almost done. The problem which i'm struggling with is the front end.

The front end of my app looks like shit. I tried to do everything to make it look elegant and classy, but all in vain.

And I can't afford to hire a front end developer or graphic designer. Can someone suggest me what to do.

I'm open to any suggestions as it's the first app i'll upload on the play store, I just want it to be perfect.