I’m a senior dev at a small company that does some consulting. This past October, some really heavy personal situation came up and my job suffered for it. I raised the flag and was very open with my boss about it and both him and my team of 3 understood and were pretty cool with me taking on a smaller load of work while I moved on with some stuff in my life. For a week.

    Right after that, I got sent to a client. “One month only, we just want some presence there since it’s such a big client” alright, I guess I can do that. “You’ll be in charge of a team of a few people and help them technically.” Sounds good, I like leading!

    So I get here. Let’s talk technical first: from being in a small but interesting project using Xamarin, I’m now looking at Visual Basic code, using Visual Studio 2010. Windows fucking Forms.

    The project was made by a single dev for this huge company. She did what she could but as the requirements grew this thing became a behemoth of spaghetti code and User Controls. The other two guys working on the project have been here for a few months and they have very basic experience at the job anyways. The woman that worked on the project for 5 years is now leaving because she can’t take it anymore.

    And that’s not the worse of it. It took from October to December for me to get a machine. I literally spent two months reading on my cellphone and just going over my shitty personal situation for 8 hours a day. I complained to everyone I could and nothing really worked.

    Then I got a PC! But wait… no domain user. Queue an extra month in which I could see the Windows 7 (yep) log in screen and nothing else. Then, finally! A domain user! I can log in! Just wait 2 extra weeks for us to give your user access to the subversion rep and you’re good to go!

    While all of this went on, I didn’t get an access card until a week ago. Every day I had to walk to the reception desk, show my ID and request they call my boss so he could grant me access. 5 months of this, both at the start of the day and after lunch. There was one day in particular, between two holidays, in which no one that could grant me access was at the office. I literally stood there until 11am in which I called my company and told them I was going home.

    Now I’ve been actually working for a while, mostly fixing stuff that works like crap and trying to implement functions that should have been finished but aren’t even started. Did I mention this App is in production and being used by the people here? Because it is. Imagine if you will the amount of problems that an application that’s connecting to the production DB can create when it doesn’t even validate if the field should receive numeric values only. Did I mention the DB itself is also a complete mess? Because it is. There’s an “INDEXES” tables in which, I shit you not, the IDs of every other table is stored. There are no Identity fields anywhere, and instead every insert has to go to this INDEXES table, check the last ID of the table we’re working on, then create a new registry in order to give you your new ID. It’s insane.

   

    And, to boot, the new order from above is: We want to split this app in two. You guys will stick with the maintenance of half of it, some other dudes with the other. Still both targeting the same DB and using the same starting point, but each only working on the module that we want them to work in. PostmodernJerk, it’s your job now to prepare the app so that this can work. How? We dunno. Why? Fuck if we care. Kill you? You don’t deserve the swift release of death.

    Also I’m starting to get a bit tired of comments that go  ‘THIS DOESN’T WORK and ‘I DON’T KNOW WHY WE DO THIS BUT IT HELPS and my personal favorite  ‘??????????????????????

Manager: Does anybody having any money saving ideas?

Dev: By switching our supplier from X to Y we could save $10,000/year and they have much better customer service.

Manager: So? I’m looking more for savings opportunities in the +$100k range. That’s a small idea, I’m looking for *BIG* ideas.

Dev: Do you have any big ideas?

Manager: No, but I really really want to save big money like that. I thought you would have something worthwhile.

Dev: $10,000 still a lot of money

Manager: I guess…. Ok we can do it. But don’t bother me with peanuts like this again.

Dev: ??? You asked me buddy

Two weeks ago:
customer - we need a small website, nothing special. Give us your cheapest option
*proceeds and give them the cheapeast offer, the accept and deploy their site*

Today:
I "notice" a spike in trafic, 20k request / second, and many sessions had 60-70 MB (big videos on the site) in size which cause the gateway to die and almost killed the entire hosting platform.

"Nothing special" turns out to be a website for a big campaign that they are currently running on TV, Radio, Paper and AdWord.

*calls grandpa I don't usually talk to that much to congratulate him for his birthday*

*grandpa picks up*

*congratulates*

Him: so, I know that you study CS and I was working on something [Word document at the moment] and my letters keep getting different sizes! Sometimes they're small, sometimes they're big, sometimes they're in between! I have to erase everything everytime because they just get messed up every time!

Me *sighing, but confused because upper-case and lower-case are the same with "big letters" and "small letters", respectively, in my native language: have you checked Caps Lock on your keyboard?

Him: What is that? I have Esc, 1, 2, 3,... (proceeds to read me the keys on the keyboard)

*explains where caps lock is*

Him *gets angry*: no, you don't understand, sometimes they're small, sometimes they're big and sometimes in between! Caps Lock doesn't solve it! *proceeds to read the keys from the keyboard again*

*thinking that maybe it's the font then, asks about the Word version, to know what to point him to*

Him: WHAT? Word? No! I'm using my keyboard! What don't you understand! I explain to you and you have no idea!

Me: well, I'd need then maybe to see the screen

Him: I'm so angry with you, you say you study so much but are not even able to help me with such a small problem. I'll just find someone else. Thanks for your wishes *hangs up*

And this is how I only tried to congratulate my grandfather for his birthday but turned into a "failing" tech support. I just wanted to be a good granddaughter

The last two frontend devs I interviewed.

First:

He had 15 some years of experience, but couldn't answer our most basic of technical questions, we stopped asking after the first couple.

Based on a technical test I got the impression that he couldn't distinguish between backend and frontend.

So, I posed a simple question "Have you interfaced with REST API'S using Javascript before?"

Which lead him to talk about arrays. I shit you not he droned on about arrays for five minutes.

"I have experience using big array, small arrays, breaking big arrays into littler arrays and putting arrays inside other arrays."

Never been in an interview situation where I've had to hold back laughter before. We refer to him as the array expert.

His technical knowledge was lacking, and he was nervous, so he just waffled. I managed to ease his nerves and the interview wasn't terrible after that, but he wasn't what we were looking for.

Second:

This was a phone interview.

It started off OK he was clearly walking somewhere and was half preoccupied. Turns out he was on his way back from the shop after buying rolling papers (we'd heard him in the shop asking for Rizla), and he was preoccupied with rolling a joint.

We started asking some basic technical questions at which point he faked that he'd seen a fight in the street.

We then called him back five minutes later you could hear him smoking "ah, that's better". After that the interview was OK, not what we were looking for, but not bad.

Top tip: If you require a joint to get through a phone interview, roll and smoke it before hand.

Client: Please fix the logo.
Me: Okay, what needs to be fixed exactly?
Client: Put this word next to that word(shows me an example).
Me: Okay, no problem.
*after 5 minutes*
Client: You did not do what I asked for. Please fix the logo. Make it look better. Make it bigger and more outstanding. Dont change my logo
Me: Okay, I will revert the changes.
*Reverts to the old logo, and only does that as I do not fucking know what to do with oudstanding for fucks sake*
Client: I will talk to your boss. No one cares. My web site is not even finished and no one cares.
*It is finished, now the client looks for small things to make a big issue of*
Me: Could you please tell me in detail, what do you need to be fixes?
Client: I want the wording better. Im going to talk to your boss...

well fuuuck fucking fuck Im pissing blood!!!!!!!!!

This might be a little off topic, but I just wanted to talk about this for a bit.

I know that quite a lot of devs aren't the happiest of people, and I've seen many of you discussing depression around here. It's great to have this platform be open about these issues.

Makes you remember that people aren't all that bad, a small conversation with another person could make your day a bit more bearable.

Also, don't forget to have an honest conversation with yourself sometimes. Cut yourself, and others, a bit of slack.

Don't let the big black dog grow too much. It will still be there, but don't let it engulf you in darkness. 💜

After our Head Of Software has terminated.

I started to take control over our development crew. And in this year I did more then the old head in the last 6 years.
- Swapped from plain old SVN to Gitlab.
- Build a complete autonomous deployment with Gitlab.
- Introduced code reviews.
- Started to refactor the legacy product with 500.000 lines of code...
- learned how to use confluent apache kafka and kubernetes to split the legacy project in many small and maintainable one.(not done yet)
- Last 3 weeks I learned how to use elasticstack with kibana and co. That we aren't blind anymore. Big dashboards are now shown in the middle of the room :) and maybe convinced my coworker that we use unity3d for our business application cause of support for all devices and same design on them. And offline capabilities. (Don't know if this was my best idea)
When I look back, I'm proud to did that much in one year alone. And my coworkers are happy too that they have less work with deployments and everything.
But I can't decide what's the title for this. System or Software Architect cause I litterallity did both :/

So today our CFO stepped into IT and angrily proclaimed someone using tech@ e-mail and fake name is defrauding company funds buying themselves... "used female lingerie with extra virgin juice" (sic!).

I work for an IPSP, we handle finance for commercial services (think PayPal but smaller). One of our clients is a big platform where girls can sell items like bath water, used socks and more. CFO demanded our admins found out who and when connected to that website, what URLs and so on.

As mentioned, said platform is pretty big, hence, from time to time we help them with their service when they ask us to, that's why we have a tech@ account. Last month there was a minor issue with one of the banks, someone fixed it and, as per usual, made a small payment of €1 topping up the account wallet to make sure everything works. It was an intern whose will to live is still strong and unencumbered with experience so she jokingly wrote "panties juice, extra virgin" in the payment note. What she *didn't know*, however, is that admins on that platform used the very same account to test new billing system they've implemented and our CFO received an invoice.

Never in my life I was scared as today.
I recently left a big company to work for a small one as the first internal developer.
Had a small issue in the production server. The fix was easy, just remove a single table entry. And... *drum roll*... I forgot to add a where clause. All orders were lost.
No idea if we had backups or anything, I quickly called the one other IT dude in the company.
He had no clue where are the backups and how to find them.
Having some experience with Nmap, I quickly scanned our network and found a Nas device.
There was a backup, whole VHD backup. 300GB of it, the download speed is around 512kb/s. No way I can fix it before management finds out, but then an idea came to mind. Old glorious 7zip. Managed to extract only the database files, sent them to the server and quickly swapped them. Everything was fine... The manager connected 5 minutes later. Scariest 45 minutes of my life...

I have this guy who screams and keeps on slamming the table in a meeting room (there is only the project developer inside), about how important to LTRIM RTRIM in sql, combining multiple insert into 1 stored procedure, making a big deals of small feature since we’re on a tight schedule, bla bla bla

Worse retard ever

I almost punched him

devRant - a reminder that a small team can do something really big. That keeps me motivated, thank you @dfox and @trogus

"Fuck JavaScript, its such a shitty language" seems to be quite a common rant today. It seems as if JS is actually getting more hate than PHP, which is certainly odd, considering the stereotype.

So, as someone who has spent a lot of time in JS and a lot of time elsewhere, here are my views. Please, discuss your opinions with me as well. I am genuinely interested in an intelligent conversation about this topic.

So here's my background: learned HTML/CSS/JS in that order when I was 12 because I liked computers. I was pretty shitty at JS until U was at least 15, but you get the point, Ive had it sploshing about in my brain for a while.

Now, JS certainly has its quirks, no doubt, but theres nothing about the language itself that I would say makes it shitty. Its a very easy leanguage to use, but isn't overdeveloped like VB.net (Or, as I like to call it, TheresAFunctionForThat)

Most of the hate is centered around JS being used for a very broad range of systems. I doubt JS would be in the rant feed so often if it were to stay in its native ecosystem of web browsers. JS can be used in server backend, web frontent, desktop and mobile applications, and even in some system services (Although this isn't very popular as of yet). People seem to be terrified that one very easy to learn language can go so far. And, oh god, its interpreted... How can a system app run off an interpreted language? That's absurd.

My opinion on JSEverything is that it's progress. Thats what we're all about, right? The technologies already in place are unthreatened by JS, it isn't a gamechanger. The only thing JS integration is doing is making tedius and simple tasks easier. Big companies with large systems aren't going to jump ship and migrate to JS. A startup, however, could save a fucking ton of development time by using a JS framework, however. I want to live in a world where startups can become the next Google, because technology will stagnate when youre trying to protect your fortune, (Look at Apple for fucks sake) but innovation is born of small people with big ideas.

I have a feeling the hate for JS is coming from fear of abandoning what you're already doing. You don't have to do that. JS is only another option (And a very good one, which is why it's becoming so popular).

As for my personal opinion from my experiences... I've left this part til the end on purpose. I love programming and learning and creating, so I've never hated a lamguage, really. It all depends on what I want to do. In the times i've played arpund with JS, I've loved it. Very very easy. The idea of having it on both ends of web development makes a lot of sense too, no conversion, just direct communication. I would imagine this really helps with speed, as well. I wouldn't use it in a complicated system, though. Small things, medium size projects: perfect. Running a bank? No.

So what do you think about this JSUniverse?

What is the most ridiculous over-the-top "startup" thing you've been the victim of as a developer?

Alternatively, what kind of weird startup luxury would you absolutely love to have at your company?

For me, at various companies I've worked at/visited:

1. Hammocks & fatboy beanbags. Current employer has a "Netflix & Chill" corner with nice couches, and a small gym. I have encountered isolation/flotation tanks at the office of one of our partners... which is cool, but over the top in my opinion.

2. A fully automated aquaponics garden in the lunchroom. Was awesome, until some fish died and started to rot.

3. One hoverboard per employee, at previous employer. I splashed hot chocolate milk in an arc over three desks. A coworker broke his ankle while watching me spill chocolate milk.

4. Daily scrum standup meetings, on socks, in a big bouncy castle. Not kidding. Fucking ridiculous... (but secretly fun). That employer also had spiral slides between all floors, a tiny half-pipe with tiny skateboards, and someone who rode a unicycle way too much. It was a fucking circus. Stuck in the office of a Fintech company.

5. Soldering bench (at my current company), with drawers full of breadboards, servos and electronics components. Completely unrelated to my work, but it was my idea. It's just great to build a simple kits together with another random coworker while brainstorming platform features & refining specs... much better than meetings with bullshit slides.

6. Unlimited energy drink. Developed a serious caffeine habit (15-20 cans a day), and almost got a stomach ulcer. Not beneficial to employee health.

7. I really do love working from home + unlimited holidays. Just being able to honestly say "fuck you guys, I'm gonna get drunk and play games today", and at other times working until 4am and sleeping in the next day, or taking a week to work in a park in Rome... It makes work truly feel like my favorite hobby. Combined with a good sprints and curious/ambitious people, you can easily track productivity anyway.

Manager: our file IO is slow, any suggestions to make it faster?

Code: multithread writing to a few hundred small (temp) files then single thread combine to one big file and delete the temp files.

Eyes: bleeding

When your boss says "good job, you have developed something big in such a small time" (~2 weeks) but you haven't showed him the bugs and shit (gonna fix it btw)

I did it! I told her. I admitted that I have a crush on her. It was awesome, we were in her room, chilling and having Belgian beer and looking over at the beautiful dome of Les Invalids and the lights of Paris through her window. It was raining a little bit. All perfect.
I told her how I really enjoyed her company and how I found her really cool and interesting and how I had a not so small crush on her. She was very surprised but she was glad I told her. I'm really proud that I did something so big.

Oh, she said no btw.

> In office for first time in awhile
> Run into group of 4 people I don’t recognize in far cubicle corning laughing in hushed voices eating of an impressive spread of food
> See me and immediately look at each other with panicked expressions
> Confused, I put my hands up to indicate I come in peace
> They relax a little and say they thought I was from HR since they didn’t recognize me
> Ask why HR seeing them would be such a big deal
> They say their potluck is not “sanctioned”
> …?

So apparently HR just could resist ruining one of the only good things about coming into the office and one of the coolest things about the company’s culture. At least once a month there would be a giant potluck where everyone would bring some home cooked dish and share it. I can’t tell you how amazing these are in Canada, 50+ plates of authentic food from all over the world.

Unfortunately HR didn’t agree as 1. They didn’t cook so felt bad taking food. 2. Nobody asked them permission to put on these events they just happened organically. 3. Some people were bringing in food that they felt was culturally inappropriate (ie. caucasian guy bringing in homemade sushi).

HR recently banned all “unsanctioned” potlucks and all future potlucks needed to be approved through them with the following stipulations. 1. You could participate without bringing something by donating to HR $10 2. If you brought something you still had to give HR $10. 3. Things you brought in had to be approved by HR

Naturally the first and only potluck under these rules only 4 people brought something in as many couldn’t get their dishes approved because HR didn’t like what they were planning to bring (started out as being because culture and turned into HR just being picky), most just brought $10 so there wasn’t enough food to go around and so after HR took a giant group photo to post on the company’s social media accounts to show off how good the company’s culture is most everyone had to go out for lunch. HR sent out an email later that day exclaiming what a huge success for charity and the company brand the potluck was and they can’t wait for the next one. (I have the HR communications email marked as spam so I never saw the email). Nobody ever organized a sanctioned potluck after that.

However people still missed cooking and sharing their favourite recipes with one another so potlucks still occur but they are now very small, secret, invite-only, hush-hush affairs.

…What in the ever loving fuck

Seriously anyone who doesn't use english names for variables and shit, get the fuck out! I don't care how many dicks you sucked, don't fucking do it!

I'm working on redoing a somewhat big database with a small team and the fuckers who designed the new database decided to use danish names everywhere and misspell shit! What the fuck are you doing!

Who the fuck calls it a birthdate? and misspells the danish equivalent?

And what the fuck is this, using _id and ID like they are the fucking same thing!?!

For the love of all that is holy, stick to english, one naming convention and check your crap spelling!

AARGH!

I’m a .NET desktop fullstack dev these days… Never worked web unless for my own small needs/personal projects.
I started using tech one way or the other by the time windows was version 3.1 and been through quite a bit ground-breaking changes in the industry of software development and the internet but if there’s one thing I cannot understand of it all, no matter how much thought I put into it is: How the fuck did we manage to make it so fucking complicated to develop anything these days?
I remember like it was yesterday that you could stand a website with HTML, CSS and JS, three fucking files and you’ve made yourself a single page site. Then came the word “Responsive”, “Responsive” written everywhere. Fair enough, grid system popped up. All of the sudden jQuery was summoned… and everything that happened after this point has been a fucking circus of high-pitched teens talking on conferences about fucking libraries and frameworks to make integration with real time, highly scalable, eco-friendly, serverless, data driven, genome aware, genderless, quantum technologies to interact with bio dynamically generated organisms, namely fucking users.
Every fucking bit of the process of building a mobile/web application seems to be stopped by yet another incredibly dumb attempt to suicide a developer. Can you go from starting an app and publishing an app without jumping through a thousand VERY specific hoops? No, fuck no.
I fucking hate it… It’s a bit hard to get Desktop dev jobs these days but for as long as I work on IT I will continue to stick to that area, until someone for the love of life comes up with a fucking solution to all this decadent circus of bureaucratic technocracy.
Fuck big industry, fuck tech giants, fuck javascript and webassembly, fuck kids putting ASCII art on console applications that I DON’T FUCKING NEED to install dependencies THAT I DON’T FUCKING NEED to extend functionality on frameworks that I DON’T FUCKING NEED… oh wait, I do need all this because YOU FUCKING MADE IT MANDATORY NOW! FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK YOU!!!

Are you a small fish in a big pond, Or a big fish in a small pond? And which one would you rather be?

Me: :-|

I actually wanna RAGE QUIT right about now!!!

I wanna fuck off and go somewhere where my talents are appreciated and I'm actually listened to! I'm reaching the point where I hate my job and don't actually want to be here any more.

I asked to be able to work from home (long story... see previous rants) and that was "shut down" after numerous attempts and even when working from was a prerequisite that somehow got lost in translation.

I was stuck in traffic for almost 3 hours yesterday and it is known that there are currently roadworks on my route, and yet they don't seem to move on the notion of working from home.

When I work it out, I sit in my car on average for over 40 hours per month! That's another fucking work week just so that I can get to and from work everyday. Again, they can say what that want, but I mentioned it several times that I wanted to work from home.

They're story is... "We've never had anyone work from home before so we wouldn't know how to approach it". Ok fine, I guess... FIGURE IT OUT, FFS!!!

The other thing was that I would be the "team leader" of the project. With me speaking to a management, they made me the leader. Big fucking whoop! My next question is the leader of what exactly are you making me? Because at the moment I'm the only fucking person working on the project! The other chap who is on "my team" is so busy with these other small side projects that in the 6 months he's been here, the only time he's actually had anything to do with the project is when he's peeped over my shoulder! Also, there was supposed to be more than just one other developer on the "team", but alas!

I'm not happy here at all anymore and I am actually starting to feel the depression creep in and there's nothing I can seem to do about it! I can't stand the traffic to and from work and they have not tried to make anything worthwhile when I get to work, even after my numerous requests!

Was working in small startup with great people on new projects, but for very low salary and shitty conditions.

Changed job to big company with nice salary and great conditions, but people are assholes and have to work on legacy stuff mostly.

Guess you can't have everything.

Inappropriate experience at work? Here is another one:

After 10 years of service the company gives the employee an anniversary party, complete with cake, drinks, etc.

Preparing for a party, HR set the cake in the break-room and left to get the other supplies, in the mean time the IS department manager 'John' walks in, sees the cake and decides to take a slice.
Not a small corner piece you may not notice by smearing the frosting around, but a big piece from the * middle of the cake *.

'Mary' walks in and catches him.

M: "JOHN! The cake is for Eddie's party! Everyone will be here any minute!"
John: "Oh shit!..sorry, let me put it back..."
M: "NO!, you've already eaten some...the cake is ruined!"
<he had icing all over his hands, so he used the cake knife to cut, but used his hands to dig out the slice, so the cake looked pretty tore up>
J:"How was I supposed to know? All I saw was free cake!"
M: "You are on the invite list for Eddie's party! You have 'Happy Anniversary Eddie' on your plate!"
J: "Party isn't until 2:00...<looks at the breakroom clock> oh shit...it's 2"

About that time, several VPs walk in, notice Mary is upset and after finding out, our IS-VP said "John, I'm not happy about this. I want you in my office after the party. You can leave ...now!"

Our IS-VP is almost always emotionless (mostly just happy and in a good mood), it was the first time anyone had seen him this physically angry in years. We don't know how John kept his job.

!rant

So I have been recently hired at my current job for leading a product team. We're a small team working in a big company which have other teams working on other projects. I like my work and I have been appreciated for my work which I did since my stay here.
So I and my manager were discussing about how more can we automate our workflow to reduce the time to get the final builds. It was late in night. Suddenly someone asked, 'did I hear automation?'. We turned to see our CTO listening to our conversation. He told us that he's having trouble with automation in his project. I was new, so I didn't know what did he work on, so I asked.
Me: So what did you guys work on?
CTO: well, we work on automating stuff for clients and save them money. We earn 100x revenue than your product (In a more humble tone). I am currently looking for someone who can lead a team of developers for handling the automation scripting part. *Provides description of the candidate* Do you guys know someone like that?
Manager: (pointing towards me) It looks like his description.
CTO: I want him in my team then.
Manager: That can't happen, he's required in very important stuff and you're not allowed to poach.
CTO: I think I have the right to poach 😉
Me: OK, so how much raise am I going to get to switch teams (to the manager) and how much am I going to get to stay? Whoever gives me more I am theirs.
CTO: I like this guy

It's day three, I am still awaiting for one of them to tell me who won 🙁

PS: They both are friends with each other.

Good news: my department is great and furnishes the developers with a special dark space to work with big monitors in a small, quiet room.

Bad news: someone from sales is camped out in here and the glare from the all-white word documents they have open is causing my oh-so-perfect screen (in dark mode, of course) to be unreadable.

As an added perk, they brought in a laptop and are using that almost exclusively. There are dedicated laptop chairs away from my workstation they could use instead.

Also, the entire room smells like their body spray. My only salvation is that it's almost five and maybe they'll leave soon.

Bad dev practices:

1. Forgetting to version control some fun project i am doing for a long time and then commit everything at once. And forget about it again..

2. I probably have too much love for abstraction. So i abstract stuff just for the fuck of it to the point my friends dont even understand what the program is for.

3. I have no patience and due to that i lose motivation when i think of some idea that is big.

4. I cant keep my ideas small enough, and i dream too big until problem3 kicks in, and then i drop the entire idea.

If Corona Virus, were to make a CV, it would make an interesting read:

1. Responsible for Global Digital Transformation.
2. Reduction of Global CO2 emission and Greenhouse gasses.
3. Global Hygiene initiatives: Ensured 100% compliance on washing hands and body bath.
4. Made industry shift to WFH - saved exposure and costs.
5. Reduction in noise pollution by making everyone keep their mouth shut (masked).
6. Taught cooking, vegetable shopping, housekeeping to many,
7. Provided ample time to all egoistic and self centered people, to contemplate on their mortal nature.
8. Provided a big boost to the Pharma sector and brought back small utility stores back into the limelight.
9. Highlighted the importance of governance, adaptability and long term planning, by all sectors.

Corona’s CV seems superior to many 😉

Question for the senior front end web developer here:

If you guys got a project (big or small), do you guys usually:
1. Get a template from another website and modify or style it to suits your need, or
2. Build it from scratch?

This applies to website like devrant, or swag store

Please. Hear me out.

I've been doing frontend for six years already. I've been a junior dev, then in was all up to the CTO. I've worked for very small companies. Also, for the very large ones. Then, for huge enterprises. And also for startups. I've been developing for IE5.5, just for fun. I've done all kinds of stuff — accessibility, responsive design (with or without breakpoints), web components, workers, PWA, I've used frameworks from Backbone to React. My favourite language is CSS, and you probably know it. The bottom line is, you name it — I did it.

And, I want to say that Safari is a very good browser.

It's very fast. Especially on M1 Macs. Yes, it lacks customization and flexibility of Firefox, but general people, not developers, like to use it. Also, Safari is very important — Apple is a huge opposing force to Google when it comes to web standards. When Google pushes their BS like banning ad blockers, Apple never moves an inch. If we lose Safari, you'll notice.

As for the Safari-specific bugs situation, well… To me, Safari serves as a very good indicator: if your website breaks in Safari, chances are you used some hacks that are no good. Safari is a good litmus test I use to find the parts of my code that could've been better.

The only Safari-specific BUG I encountered was a blurry black segment in linear gradients that go from opaque to transparent. So, instead of linear-gradient(#f00, transparent), just do linear-gradient(#f00f, #f000).

This is the ONLY bug I encountered. Every single time my website broke in Safari other than that, was for some ugly hack I used.

You don't have to love it. I don't even use it, my browser of choice is Firefox. But, I'm grateful to Safari, just because it exists. Why? Well, if Safari ceases to exist, Google will just leave both W3C and WhatWG, and declare they'll be doing things their way from now on. Obey or die.

Firefox alone is just not big enough. But, together with Safari, they oppose Google's tyranny in web standards game.

Google will declare the victory and will turn the web into an authoritarian dictatorship. No ad blockers will be allowed. You won't be able to block Google's trackers. Google already owns the internet, well, almost, and this will be their final, devastating victory.

But Safari is the atlas that keeps the web from destruction.

!dev && feelsbadman

I don't know what to think.
All I know is that I just went reaaaaal close to a disaster.

Friday morning, my "scariest" manager (as in, if you have to meet with him, it's usally for something serious) told me that he needed to see me on monday (so today) with the lead dev, the project manager and the dude who recruited me.

The meeting was like an arena of 4 vs 1, where they all 4 had problem with the work I do, as in I make a lot of small but stupid mistakes that wastes everyone's time. As an excuse, I suffer from sleep apnea so I wake up as tired I am when I go to sleep, and I snore loud as fuck. I've heard some records, it's not even human. (I'm 1m85-ish for 125 kg, it's BIG but with my morphology it's not like I'm a ball of fat)

Anyway. And since it's not the first time they're reproaching me this kind of stuff, they were all... really angry. Because I'm a nice guy, competent and all but not productive enough and easily distracted.

So, when the manager asked me to meet me, it was to fire me. However, during the lunch break, the lead dev found a solution: I get out of the current project I was in until this morning, and I write all the functional tests for all the projects, because they all lack quality and we sometimes deliver regresses.

They proposed me this in a way I could refuse, and I'd get fired because they had no other options. Obviously, I said yes, I'm not stupid enough to decline a possibilty to avoid a monstruous shitstorm that would have cut me my studies, the money for taxes, and a lot of fun to find a job as fast as possible.

But what surprised me the most is that they were genuinely glad I accepted, like, even though I made my shit ton of mistakes, they weren't pleased at all to get rid of me.

And in a way, I'm the one who won in this story, since I don't have to work with Drupal anymore, excepted to parse the website to write my tests, but my nightmare fuel is finally gone *.*

I don't know where to finish with this rant, but I needed to vent this whole thing, to write it somewhere so I can move forward.

I wish y'all a nice week.

Some time ago I quit my job at a big corporation. Getting treated like a resource, a production line robot, just isn't for me.

My current job is way better. Small company, lots of freedom, getting to work on multiple projects, the result counts. But, as a small company, we also collaborate with big corporations. So I joined a team at one.

Watching my coworkers there, I'm reminded of robots again. Lunch break? 15 minutes tops. Just shovel some edibles into your face hole and back to work. Five minutes break between meetings? Open laptop, work work work. The concept of "needing rest" seems entirely foreign to them.

Yesterday our product owner "relayed some criticism" from other team members to me. Apparently, me going to the toilet in breaks is "suddenly disappearing". Or me not replying within 15 minutes in the chat is outrageous. And then he tried to berate me how I'm "his developer" and his team's tasks have top priority. So, according to the PO the problem is me and I should "get used to their mode of operation".

How about "no". I quit a fucking job because that "mode" is simply inhuman. After that feedback, you bet I'm taking my legally protected 30 minutes lunch break and any other break I can. Because fuck yourself, you're not going to burn me out. The best part, that team has smokers who "suddenly disappear" twice as much as I do, but apparently that's somehow a-ok.

I had to remind him that his project is just one of several I'm working on, so no, not "his dev". While that wasn't exactly a powerful comeback, it did shut him up. Still going to talk to my boss on Monday, at least to ensure that the PO can't talk shit about me behind my back.

A couple of years ago (2015)...

Me: If i'm going to develop iOS Apps i need a Mac, big screen, etc...
Boss: Ok...

A few days go by...

Boss: Ok, we've ordered a Mac already
Me: good.
Boss: It's that small one, will be ok...
Me: <Check mac models and wonder the implications of "small">
Boss: It's the cheapest one plus a 21 inch monitor. Keyboard and Mouse you already have...
Me: <incredulous> At least order a mac keyboard...

Time goes by... Boss comes to discuss something about the app... i change something and check on the emulator (yes no real devices...) and boss complains:

Boss: Incredible, this machine is so slow...
Me: <throws a shrug>

Conclusion... still developing on this machine... damn.. i can read a newspaper every now and then while waiting for the machine to comply...

Fml...

Before I took on my current position (internal transfer), I stated that for what my boss asked for I would need a small team.
He agreed to that and promised I would get 2-3 developers.
6 months after (with countless reminders) he told me I could train some people at one of our providers.
Turns out those guys were Java developers, even though I asked for C# (since our codebase is .net)
After a few training sessions, where concepts as source control were a big topic ("why not just copy the code to a new folder with _good_ naming?"), I gave them a test assignment.
After reviewing their code I just gave up. They cannot program. They don't understand concepts like scoping of variables. Concepts of separation of responsibility.

I told my boss this but I had to make it work with them.

I went to my bosses boss (Head of IT) with my resignation in hand, since I felt my boss didn't want to support me actually getting a team. After a few talks I was asked to "keep it cool" and wait until he presented his new organization.

Now my boss asked me for which skills new developers should have. To which I could just laugh at him and forward countless mails from the last 6-8 months asking for developers.

<Irony>I love my boss</Irony>

A few years ago, I used to work at a very small company. It was a compact team, we all got along quite nicely and work was very good too, but the salary was very low.

Then I got an offer from a big company in the big city for thrice the pay, and I understood how great an opportunity this is, and I knew I would get a lot to learn from this. So, I decided to take it.

So, when I went to my boss to hand in the resignation, he turned red and started tearing into at me and threatening me. And I was taken aback, because, he was usually so nice. He even threatened to have me kidnapped, and I was so dumbstruck, I couldn't even understand what the heck was going on.

I didn't even finish my notice period. I just went home after that, and never went back.

!rant

Sad to make my first post here a depressing one, but I really hope that some of you have some tips to help in this line of work.

If anyone of you suffer from depression, how do you cope with it? How do you keep yourself motivated and don't start this self-loathing that I'm currently in? Other than antidepressants or therapy (already have meds).

Why I'm asking is because I have a very tough time getting motivated these days and right now I really need to be most active. I need to do a lot of small and big stuff at my work and at the same time try to graduate from school. The deadline for my thesis is at the start of May, which surely seems far away now, but it does not feel like enough.

The more I understand the systems that I'm working with, the more I can see how much I may have f*cked everything up and I build this never-ending list of tasks for myself in my head to try and fix everything. Which leads to a complete lockup with anxiety and I can't get anything done.

I don't believe in myself or my code anymore. I'm afraid of pushing anything to production. I also don't have anyone else to help me with my work, as I'm the only developer in the company (we have a service provider where most of the big stuff happens).

To add to all this, I have been sick for the last 4 days.

I truly am in a bad place right now.

So I ve been clinically depressed for about 10 years now. Been really great at hiding it. My illness and loneliness was so severe that i made up imaginary friends and that got so severe i couldn't tell what s real and what s not. Then about 5 years ago, i met a girl. As the cliche goes, everything felt better. Sunshine and stuff. I opened up to her. Shared stuff. I started becoming normal. The pain became bearable and manageable. Turned to entrepreneurship. Had goals and stuff. Had 7 failed startups but kept on going. Raised investment for an 8th. It went better than anyother. Was going to become the next big thing bla bla. She became the reason i turned from being a loner weirdo to someone awesome. Anyway, as nothing tends to last, my best friend who had been through thick and thin in my work, quit last year in October. He messed up some work from big client nd we had a fight. He left. In the meantime i scored a big multinational company. I was gonna propose to my girlfriend in March this year. But instead she decided to leave for someone better who left her in 3 weeks lol. Anyways, we broke up. During that time, my second friend decided to fuck up my work with the big company so hard that they were about to blacklist my company. And then he left too. I had a small team. 4 5 people doing their best. By that time, i was the only one left. On 28th feb i had my breakup, on 1st march i was sitting 700 km away from home in an office trying to talk the company out of blacklisting us. It took me around 20 days to make that happen. All the while dealing with the obvious, my depression getting stronger than ever. My imaginations taking shape and fucking up my reality. The voices in my head getting stronget and stronger. 4 months now since she left. I dont think i miss her anymore. She tried coming back once but i didn't let her. In the 4 months, i m at my worst. I am getting government contracts now. But i have no desire to do anything. The pain is unbearable. So much that on its good days it sucks the life right out of me. So much that when it gets severe the urge to harm myself in any way goes of the charts. My best friend and i, we became friends again after my ex left. He s been helping me as much as he can. I have all the good oppurtunities and chances that any entrepreneur who has been busting his ass for 5 years straight would kill to have. But i cant do anything. I m the only one left on my team. I have to handle the business, dev, marketing etc etc ends on my own. I tried hiring and scaling up but i messed that up because of obvious reasons. And now my company has 2 months of runway left. And i know if i bust my ass i can make it to 8 months more and even raise a round a. But its really hard to do when either you re sleeping 20 hrs a day or you re sleeping 3 4 hrs because you re afraid of the nightmares. Or when even you ve had a good day, the pain becomes so much that you lay on the floor having a breakdown. Yeah, i m trying professional help. I m hoping it helps me. Because right now, i dont care about being happy. I just want my sanity. Something i m clinging to with every fiber of my being. Something that s burning out like a candle burning from both ends. I cant give up my work. I dont want to. That s all i have. That s all what i love doing and now i cant even do that. I just want this to end somehow. Either i get better and the pain and the void and silence and everything else goes away, or i do. I dont know what will happen first. And i dont care. I just want to be normal. But i guess that s too much to ask.

Not a rant about anything in particular. Just a summary of some feelings stored in the hateful part of my heart.

Developing for Android: Add this third-party library to your Gradle build. Use (this) built-in Android class to make the thing work.

*Clicks link

Deprecated since API version SUCKMYDICK-7. Use (this) instead

*Clicks link

Deprecated since API version LICKMYBALLS-32. Use...

Developing for Windows: Please use (this) API call. It was literally already available before Bill Gates was born. Carbon dating has placed this item to older than the universe itself and it is likely the entry point for the big bang. It is also still the best way to accomplish (task).

Developing for Linux: "Hmm, I wonder how to use this"

> > > Some shitty mailing list in small blue monospace font tells you to reference a man page that is three versions behind but the only version available.

What? Those three sentences didn't explain it enough? Well, maybe you aren't cut out for this type of thing.

JavaScript: you know how it is.

SQL: You expect a decent-quality answer from stack overflow but you always get an outdated and hacky response and it's using syntax from Microsoft SQL. You need MySQL.

C#: A surprising number of Microsoft forum results ranking high on Google. You click on one in hopes that it will be of any sort of quality. You quickly close the tab and wonder why you ever even had hope.

Literally any REST API: Is it "query" or "q"? "UserID" or "user_id"? Oh, fuck, where's the docs again?

You thought you escaped JavaScript, but it was a trick!: Some bullshit library you downloaded to make your other library work redefined one of the global variables in the project you inherited. Now you get 347 "<x> is not a function" errors in your console. Good luck, asshole.

FontAwesome/ Material fonts/ Any icon font pack: You search "Close" for a close button icon. No results. You search "Simplified railroad crossing sign without the railroad". You get a close icon.

I think that's all of my pent up rage. Each of them were too small for an individual rant so I had to do this essay.

Right after high school, I was looking for an internship. I mailed my cv to a bunch of local companies and got quite a few responses. Two of the companies invited me for an interview.

The first one was a somewhat big company and they would have had me working on some angular web app. The other one on the other hand was a small team of 6 people, 2 of which were the bosses.

It was one of the nicest interviews I could have ever imagined. We just sat down and talked about what kind of programming experience I already had and what I wanted to learn.

They hired me right away. The internship was just 6 weeks and after that my studies in computer science were gonna start. They offered me a part time position with flexible hours and I gladly agreed.

I've been working at that company for over a year now and it couldn't be going better.

TLDR; My 2TB HDD got wiped in one fell swoop by a 9-year old child.

You know... I've never been too great about keeping backups. Even to this day, I only keep one or two local backups and nothing on the "cloud".

So this was about 5 years ago. At the time, I was living together with my girlfriend - who would later become my wife. She had a son from a previous relationship, who at the time was 9 years old.

I had a small desk in the living room of our one-bedroom apartment, that I used for my computer, which has been a laptop for a long time now. One unfortunate thing about the layout of the apartment was that the wall plug near my desk was attached to a light switch.

I had a 2TB external hard drive - with its own power cable - plugged into my laptop. Then, things started to move in slow motion... The GF's son comes inside from playing, my GF asks him to turn off the light. He reaches over, and shuts off power to my laptop - and the external hard drive.

He must have hit that switch at JUST the right fucking time. The laptop ran on battery, no big deal. The hard drive, when I powered it back up - was wiped clean. I tried data recovery on it, but the HDD was encrypted, which makes things more complicated.

Needless to say, I was not happy. I never got that data back, but I did learn not to expose my hard drives to 9 year olds. Very dangerous little creatures.

You want to know the best part? He destroyed another hard drive of mine, a few years later. Should I tell that story?

and what a merry christmas it was...
thanks devRant for the small app size!

#!/a/rant
why are apps so big/bloated these days!!?

Back in the day, I joined a little agency in Cape Town, small team small office with big projects, projects they weren’t really supposed to take on but hey when the owner of a tech business is not a tech person they do weird things.
A month had passed and it was all good, then came a project from Europe, Poland to be specific. The manager introduced me to the project, it was a big brand - a segment of Lego, built on Umbraco (they should change the name to slowbraco or uhmmm..braco somewhere there) the manager was like so this one is gonna be quite a challenge and I remember you said you are keen on that, I was like hell yeah bring it on (genuinely I got excited) now the challenge was not even about complexity of the problem or code or algorithms etc you get my point… the challenge was that the fucking site was in polish - face palm 1 - so I am like okay code is code, its just content, and I already speak/familiar with 13 human languages so I can’t fail here ill get around it somehow. So I spin up IIS, do the things and boom dev environment is ready for some kick ass McCoding. I start to run through the project to dig into the previous dev’s soul. I could not relate, I could not understand. I could not read, I could not, I could not. - face palm 2 - This dude straight up coded this project in polish variable names in polish, class names in polish, comments in freaking polish. Look, I have no beef with the initial guy, its his language so why not right? sure. But not hey this is my life and now I should learn polish, so screw it, new tab - google translate, new notes, I create a dictionary of variables and class etc 
3 days go by and I am fucking polish bro. Come at me. I get to read the previous devs soul through his comments, what a cool dude, his code wasn’t shit either - huge relief. So I rock on and make the required changes and further functionality. 

The project manager is like really, you did it? I am like yeah dude, there it is. Then I realise I wasn’t the first on this, this dude done tried others and it didn’t go down well, they refused. - face palm 3 -

Anyway, now I am a rock star in the office, and to project managers this win means okay throw him in the deep - they move me to huge project that is already late of course and apparently since I am able to use google translate, I can now defeat time, let the travelling begin. - face palm 4 - I start on the project and they love me on it as they can see major progress however poland was knocking on the door again, they need a whole chunk of work done. I can’t leave the bigger project, so it was decided that the new guy on Monday will start his polish lessons - he has no idea, probably excited to start a new job, meanwhile a shit storm is being prepared for him.

Monday comes, hello x - meet the team, team meets x

Manager - please join our meeting.

I join the meeting, the manager tells me to assist the new dev to get set up.

Me: Sure, did you tell him about he site?

Manager: Yes, I told him you knocked it out the park and now we just need to keep going

Me: in my head (hmm… that’s not what I was asking but cool I guess he will see soon enough -internal face palm 5 - )

New dev is setup, he looks at the project, I am ask him if he is good after like an hour he is like yeah all good. But his face is pink so I figured, no brother man is not okay. But I let him be and give him space.

Lunch time comes, he heads out for lunch. 

1hr 15mins later, project manager is like, is the new dude still at lunch.

We are all like yeah probably. 

2hrs pass 

3hrs pass

Now we are like okay maybe something happened to him, hit by a car? Emergency? Something… 

So I am legit worried now, I ask the manager to maybe give him a ring. 

Manager tries to call. NOTHING, no response. nada.

Next day, 8am, 9am, 10am no sign of the dude. 

I go to the manager, ask him what’s up. 

Manager: he is okay. However he said he is not coming back. 


Wow my job sucks right now. Un fuckin believable.
I got hired a month ago as a programmer. Everything went fine at first, then my Boss asked if I could do 3D modeling, and I could, I used Maya for 4 years, but I told him I only can do simple low poly models. A partner company of ours needed some help in their 3D department and I had to help.
Well, I thought, a small 3D project from time to time would be nice and refreshing, especially since it was very easy geometry, my Boss even showed me some previous projects and That was totally doable even for me.

So i started out making the first few models in blender, because we dont have anything else. After a day of getting used to blender i sent off the first models and it all began.

They wanted detailed, high poly models of some mechanical parts, my Boss originally told me it was just an abstract visualisation... fuck me...

Well I agreed to it so had to do it. The partnering Company started to change things, seemingly at random. Had a model completely modelled, textured and animated, now they want to change the model so I have to redo the UVs, the texture and the Animation god fucking damnit.

But still I thought ok, its only for a bit. Now my boss accepted even more work. Because of endless reworks I couldnt finish even one model and have to already make the new ones.

Now my boss is pissed because that company is pissed that i cant know what they want.

Big pile of misscommunication.
I hope this is over soon but I overheard that more is coming...

A big part of the code of my project is done in French

all but one small part, which is English. But uses also some French methods and names.

So when you have an error because you put "Objet" instead of "Object" because it's in French

A lot of engineering fads go in circle.

Architecture in the 80s: Mainframe and clients.

Architecture in the 90s: Software systems connected by an ESB.

Architecture in the 2000s: Big central service and everyone connects to it for everything

Architecture in the 2010s: Decentralized microservices that communicate with queues.

Current: RabbitMQ and Kafka.

... Can't we just go back to the 90s?

I hate fads.
I hate when I have to get some data, and it's scattered on 20 different servers, and to load a fucking account page, a convoluted network of 40 apps have to be activated, some in PHP, others in JS, others on Java, that are developed by different teams, connected to different tiny ass DBs, all on huge clusters of tiny ass virtual machines that get 30% load at peak hours, 90% of which comes from serializing and parsing messages. 40 people maintaining this nightmare, that could've been just 7 people making a small monolithic system that easily handles this workload on a 4-core server with 32GB of RAM.
Tripple it, put it behind a load balancer, proper DB replication (use fucking CockroachDB if you really want survivability), and you've got zero downtime at a fraction of the cost.

Just because something's cool now, doesn't mean that everybody has to blindly follow it for fucks sake!

Same rant goes for functional vs OOP and all that crap. Going blindly with any of these is just a stupid fad, and the main reason why companies need refactoring of legacy code.

Using AI to draw me a table that will look good in my small kitchen corner, just wanted to see some ideas slightly different from basic ones:

"a small table, big enough for only 2 chairs. The table sits in the corner of a room."
.....
*sigh...edit
"the table has only 4 legs!"
...
*sigh...edit
"the chairs are not physically attached to the table"
...
...
...edit
"The table legs do not go through the table and in to the ceiling"

...fuck it.. I'm off to ikea

The newest IPhone (Which specwise is good) is more expensive than the newest graphics cards that are coming out... h.o.l.y. s.h.i.t
and you know what? THE BEST MODEL IS 400 BUCKS MORE EXPENSIVE THAN A FUCKING 2080TI!
And you know what?
WHATS UP WITH STORAGE!
you go from 64Gb to 256 and 512 GIGABYTES OF DATA!!
Its like, Midrange storage to a Ton of Storage to HOLY SHIT WHO NEEDS THIS MUCH?!
and you know WHY they are doing this?
Because most of the people will buy the 256 or 512 model GUARANTEED! People behave like this! you dont believe me?
What if you gave a Big Popcorn box for 15 Bucks and the smallest one for 5 bucks, which one would you buy? The smaller one. (Most of the time) and why? because you only have 2 choices! If I gave you 3 choices: 5 for small, 10 for medium and 15 for large?
You wont buy the smallest one, because it doesnt make sense! THATS WHY AND NOW FUCK OFF AND YOU TOO APPLE GO SUCK COCKS OF YOUR FUCKING FANBOYS WHICH WILL PAY MORE!

What you see in that screenshot, that was earned.

I'm on the plane and I want an hour of free Gogo (read: crappy) WiFi on my laptop (so I can push the code I'm probably the most proud of, more on that another time). The problem is that the free T-Mobile WiFi is apparently only available on mobile.

So after trying to just use responsive mode, and that still (almost obviously) not working. I realize it's time to bring in the big guns: A User Agent switcher. Small catch: I don't have an add-on for FF that can do that.

So on my phone I find an add-on that can and download the file. To send it to my computer, I initially thought to go through KDEConnect, but Gogo's network also isolates each system, so that doesn't work. So I try to send it over Bluetooth, except I can't. Why? Because Android's Bluetooth share "doesn't support" the .xpi extension, so I dump it in a zip (in retrospect, I should have just renamed it), and now I can share.

After a few tries, I successfully get the file over, extract the zip, and install the extension. Whew! Now I open up Gogo's page and proceed to try again, but this time I change the user-agent. Doesn't work... Ah! Cookies! I delete the cookies for Gogo (I had a cookie editor add-on already), but I had to try a few times because Gogo's scripts keep trying to, but I got it in the end.

Finally that stupid error saying it's for phones only went away, and I could write this rant for you.

Let me tell you a crazy story

A friend of mine got the idea to make a charity gala for the Swedish event Musikhjälpen. It's a charity event that involves a small group of celebrities being locked up in a glass cage for a week, broadcasting on radio 24/7. During the event anyone can wish a song by donating $5 or more, and it will get played on radio.

So this friend of mine books a huge arena two months before the gala that hasn't even been planned yet, and it all came down to this big thing yesterday evening. With over a thousand people in the audience we managed to collect almost 200 000 SEK, about 22 000 USD. Oh, and did I mention it was all done voluntarily - even the scene and video coverage was donated.

So here we are, having collected a total of over 400 000 SEK (44 000 USD) for the cause of this year's theme; everyones right to be they way they are, regardless if you've got Downs Syndrome or any other disability. You see, this was done together with the Swedish Scouts, and during this week that's the crazy amount of money we've been able to collect for this great cause. Damn it's been great!

Just had to share it. You won't be able to believe what a great feeling this is 😊

I started a hobby software project producing TV graphics for eSports racing events.

At first it really only was a hobby without getting paid at all. After a few years we got our first customer for whom we build a fully functional TV graphics package for their broadcasting network for about 350€ for roughly 80-100 hours of work total.

This was the first time I was getting paid for my own software and since it was just a hobby, it was nice at that time.

After a few more years in the business, we are lucky enough that our software is used by the game developers themselves and big car companies for their eSports events and we are able to make a decent profit from our small hobby.

Took only about 5 years. So never give up, I guess. :)

“I Pay $900 A Month for student loans.”

Not sure why there’s a video about this but let’s watch it...

*Sad music is playing*

“My name is _____ and I pay $900 a month for student loans..”

Yeah so what?

*Sad music continues*

??

*Woman makes a call and asks about when they’re going to make a student loan reform aggressively*

????

Then I realized my family was eligible for low income and I received Cal and Pell grants to pay for my tuition and living.

Then I realized that the salary for my computer science degree has numbed me to a point where $900 a month doesn’t seem too bad. Or awful. I mean I just leased a new car for my mom! And didn’t hesitate (only when having fun negotiating though).

Back then, I would be shocked. But it’s a surreal feeling to see now that I don’t. I was literally confused at the basis of this video. And now I’m surprised at my disconnect from it.

I also realized that they make videos based on how society should react to it. Am I an outcast to society because of this? Why am I not reacting the same way?

Maybe society (nowadays) would disdain me because I’ve come into high income like we all will because of our passion (and the demand for it).

But fuck society. It’s full of the very same people who use technology each and every day. Protesting for things they found trending on Twitter. The ones who refused to learn even though it’s a huge part of their lives. They’re the ones holding us back for an Engel’s Technological Utopia (idk if I’m even correct about the philosopher but anyways..)

We’re above them. We make things they’ll use and in massive numbers.

Don’t let them dictate what you should like. How you should act. Whether or not you should feel lonely while they’re posting pictures of fun times on Facebook.

We should be the ones doing that. Because we are the ones doing that.

That’s why we’re given the best to perform what we love most.

So devs, continue what you’re doing. Small or big, you’re still driving the world forward. Opening pull requests and contributing to open source projects. Answering questions on Stack Overflow not only for the person intended but for the beginner or even experienced professional who may stumble upon it later in a Google search.

And be highly rewarded for it. How society feels doesn’t matter any more when it comes to your passion. You’re important. Your work helps others in ways you can’t even imagine. We’re like one big fucking hivemind of engineers with the accessibility of the internet.

I love drinking on a Sunday!

What would you do?

2 job offers...

Job #1 a big sports betting company as a junior software developer with a salary of 22k plus a yearly bonus of 10%

Also uncapped holidays

Or

Job #2
A small IT company with 2 other developers with a salary of 19.5k working on multiple projects and being instantly promoted to mid level developer, also a signing bonus after 3 months of a high end surface laptop.

So I persuaded my boss to buy me 2 extra wide monitors (2560x1080).

They're way to big and my neck hurts. After few months, I stopped using edges, and keep all my editors and browsers in the center of my viewpoint, leaving edges empty.

My desk is also too small, and I don't have space for anything else other than monitors.

We programmers have it rough :(

Newly hired developer who calls himself ”senior” on linkedin has not contributed for 6 months. At least. I have been very helpful on many pair programming sessions. Directing him. Being extremely precise how things works and are working together. Small and big picture. He calls me and ask questions and I answer. Explain. Again and again. But it does not stick.

Nothing.

Extremely precise tasks. Written specifically for him.

Nothing.

He has like 10 commits in one year. It’s the worst I’ve seen in a developer role.

The other day in a zoom meeting he failed to declare a variable correctly. He copy/pasted a line instead and renamed the variable.

I saw this early. But I need not to work with him for a long time. It is now very clear that he will never contribute but in fact decrease the velocity of the team.

One year is a long time.

He is stupid. He can’t learn. Did he not tell the truth about himself when management hired him?

It so sad they hired him.

Context:
PM is not an IT professional but somehow leads IT operations ... (yes... I know)
---

PM: "Hey xxzero0, do you remember about the XYZ project?"

xxzero0: "Yes, tell me"

PM: "I told the big boss we can use it to make starships and explore the universe, I also said we can cut the developing time because we are already at 70% with it".

xxzero0: "....... Do you understand we planned to use this project to deploy a small ship in the sea?"

PM: "Yes, but you clearly inexperienced developer, don't know it needs only some refactoring to explore the universe"

xxzero0: "It is more complicated. There is no logic at all. It is just displaying data without doing anything and..."

*Get interrupted*

PM: "Yes, we need some refactoring, I'm such a genius."

New job on the horizon after being unemployed for a couple of months. Moving away from full-stack a bit to focus in on front-end stuff. Cool. Cool, cool, cool. Expect rage-filled rants in the near future 👌

Taking some time off was beneficial in all kinds of ways: got out of long term toxic relationship, got in betterer shape, learned stuff I'm actually interested in, mental health improved massively along with self-esteem, and I reconnected with friends and family. I'm actually enjoying life again. Don't get me wrong though, I had to claw my way out of a pretty dark hole... But I'm starting to think I fucking made it. This is a new start and I'm excited.

Fuck being in a toxic relationship.
Fuck working a job that is killing you.

If you're reading this and feel stuck: you deserve better. Listen to your gut, only you know what kind of life is good for you. It doesn't matter if it's a good job by every possible standard if it's making you miserable! A relationship exists to help you grow, to give you energy, to cultivate love. Sure, you'll go through bad times but if it's pathologically bad it won't get better on it's own. Trust me, I waited years for things to get better.

Anyways, good luck with whatever is challenging you right now, big or small. 😘

So, today for my SO's father who is already over 70 and wants to try Linux. However, he doesn't want Linux on his main PC for now, rather on the old one so that he can take his time to get familiar, which is a reasonable plan.

But holy crap, what a machine! Intel Core2 Duo 4400, 2 GB DDR2(!) RAM, 250 GB IDE(!) HDD, DVD RW drive. Graphics, sound and LAN integrated on the mobo chipset. It's half a miracle that it doesn't run on steam. The machine had been delivered with Vista and has always been painfully slow.

It doesn't even support booting from USB, but I had prepared a DVD just in case. Surprise: it booted from DVD without issues and with full HW support!

Partitioned and installed, deleted Vista in the process (felt good). I went with the full blown Mint 20 Cinnamon edition because XFCE isn't as beautiful. Also, having XFCE now and then Cinnamon looking different on the other PC would be confusing.

Installation took some time, but worked. Cinnamon's RAM usage is at 750 MB idle, and at 1.1 GB with Firefox started. Once the PC is booted, it runs pretty OK with reduced swappiness and noatime on all file systems, plus unnecessary startup applications disabled. Updates took long, but ran through successfully. Installed LibreOffice and some small games, Firefox got uBlock Origin, Youtube worked OOTB.

That PC somehow had escaped disposal several times - and now has a proper OS for the first time in its miserable existence. It runs so much better than it ever has. Just wow, a "big" Linux desktop from 2020 blows a contemporary Vista out of the water on such an old machine!

When my poor spatial skills and extremely random associations meet.
Colleague: How big is the sensor?
Me: Well, it's...ugh..about this...hmmm, bigger than the other one, but like...I don't know, like a small bible?

So new PM is forcing everyone to use Google sheets as our main project management tool as it's free and does what she likes... Was so close to just quitting.

More rage: how the fudge does she think it's acceptable for every 'to-do' no matter how big or small needs to be recorded in a sheet with roughly 30 columns @#&#&£ work is going to grind to a halt whilst we fill it in. So many better tools to use! Oh it gets worse it's 1 sheet per a person so the longer you work there the bigger the sheet gets the more time you need to spend to find, record and even open the freaking document up.

I am beyond speechless. My Bank forces me to use a password that consists of EXACTLY 8 characters, and at least one small character, one big and one number. Oh, and it should not be identical to the last 5 passwords.

What's the best part about this?
THEY HAVE A FUCKING METER TO MEASURE YOUR PASSWORD STRENGTH. FUCKING HYPOCRITES!

Not even a 2 factor makes via sms can make me feel save when you have such a big pile of shit behind it

VB3.

In my last rant I mentioned I used to convert VB3 code to .Net. Before that, I used to work on the VB3 product itself. This software emulated something from the real world, and as such complied with a bunch of regulations that changed on a regular basis, and always had additions and removals that were to be done on a strict schedule (e.g. "we're adding a new product next month, so we have to be able to sell it by the first of the month"). As such, it was a huge sprawling mess.

One day, I was given a task to change some feature slightly. The task was simple enough and really only required adding one line of code. I added that line and clicked "Run".

Error: Too Much Code

What? What do you mean too much code? I asked a colleague for help. "Oh, don't worry, it happens when a function is too long. Just remove one or two of the comments and try again." The comments were, naturally, old deleted code that was quite meaningless so I had no qualms about removing some. It worked, and I went on with my life.

This started happening on a regular basis on our larger functions. But there were always comments to remove so it wasn't a big issue.

One day, though, it happened on a five-line function. This was puzzling - the error had always happened when a function was too big but this one clearly wasn't. What could the error mean? I went to the same colleague.

Apparently, there's also a limit to how big the entire code base can be. "Just find a function that isn't used any more and delete it." And so I did. There were many such functions, responsible for calculating things which no longer existed so they were never called. For months, I'd find functions and remove them. Until there weren't any more. I checked every function and subroutine in our codebase, and they were all used; I checked every possible code path and they were all needed.

What do I do now, I asked? The colleague, who was an expert on VB3 but worked on another project, came and take a look.

"Look at all these small functions you made! No wonder you're running out of space!" Apparently each function created a lot of overhead in the compiled executable. The solution was clear. Combine small functions into large monolithic ones, possibly passing flags in them to do completely unrelated things. Oh, and don't comment on the different parts because we have no room for comments in our code base.

Ah, the good old days.

Last year, we had to do a big university project in randomly selected groups (5-6 students in every group).Three of the five guys were completely useless, I mean, both the other competent guy and me wrote around 20,000 lines of code each, the other ones wrote around 500 lines of code (combined).
After our first few meetings we quickly knew that we have to give them a small task which was so trivial that not even they can fuck it up. But we were wrong. Oh boy, so wrong.
They simply had to code the excel export of the data, which means they had to use two functions from a library and pass the correct data. But their solution was so bad, I lost faith in humanity and was fascinated by it at the same time.
For example, there was this simple class "Room", which had a few properties like size or number of seats and a few getter/setter etc. That was a core class and written by the other qualified guy. So how did the others fuck up the excel export? They somehow rewrote that class in German (although the other code was completely in English), implemented a function for each property that would write its value to a hardcoded cell in a hardcoded excel file.
And this was just the tip of the iceberg. Needlessly to say that I had to rewrite the whole export in the night before we had to present the project.

Hiring process is fucking broken ok?
We all do have something else to do, nobody wants to do "homework" for 4 fucking hours. Which let's be real, isn't 4 hours. It's always more. I try to squeeze it in a least amount of time which means mistakes will be made. I always try to show my knowledge of the language and it's features. But, you didn't do X. That's it, that is a no from us.
Dude, I just wrote a high production grade small project with 90%+ test coverage and you are telling me that those 2 small shit I made is a big deal? Fuck off

Most companies I worked with have a code full of shit and here I present to you, with a poetry and it's a no because of X?

My bet is that if I ever started to work there I would find a code that isn't tested and is in shit state

\rant

Today, for the first time in my life I quit my job

I feel very happy (refer to any of my older rants), yet i also feel very sad because in spite of all the quirks, it’s a great place to work with super nice people whom I feel like have become a big part of my life in such a small period of time

I very much doubt I’ll ever find a company like this again with such a relaxing atmosphere but I have to think about myself and my career ..

I’m especially incredibly sad about leaving one of my colleagues as he has become one of my best friends these past few months..

Let’s just hope I made the right decision ..

The best decision I ever made was moving from a big company to a very small one.

I used to work for a large international consulting firm in the model development team. Everything moved so slowly, there were huge amounts of pointless meetings and other time-sinks, we were surrounded by people who were being paid a lot of money but added little or no value, and the general atmosphere of the company was quite depressing. We spent more time having to make PowerPoint presentations for senior management trying to explain why you can't just hire 100 devs and have a product 100 times faster than we actually did developing a product.

I took a bit of a risk and moved to become the fourth person (and second developer) at a niche software producer to take over product innovation and lead product development. Immediately I felt so much happier and realised how much the previous company had worn me down. Everyone works hard and efficiently because your individual output is so much more important to the success of the company and the work you put in comes back to you financially without being syphoned by layers of valueless management levels or time-wasters.

Having responsibility, seeing the impact of your own work and being rewarded accordingly is so important for your sense of well-being. I urge you all to try it if you're stuck in a big company that's wearing you down. And if you're considering moving from a small company to a big one: don't.

This is a somewhat old story. I joined a project in making a 2.5d platformer in Unity. A couple months in, the project manager had decided that this game would have two sequels, an MMORPG, a live-action movie and a web series. He informed the whole team of this decision. One week later, every member of the dev team had left. This scope crept forth from the depths of hell and ruined a simple project. Lesson learned: Keep the scope small and don't bite over more than you can chew.

Edit: I know that you should dream big, but don't make 4 games, a web series and a movie simultaneously.

My dev colleagues, the ceo, a external designer and me (dev) are sitting in the meeting room
and we discuss the result from the designer. He designed a complete relaunch of a
small CRM for the logistics sector.

The designer is a designer as you know him, big beart, small macbook, chai late
and he designed nothing, he hired a freelancer from romania.

My boss studied software development in the 80s but didn't really developed a software
for about 20 years, but he thinks he knows all and everything.

My boss is constantly complaining about the colors in the design and he would like
a iOS approach. Our system should complete copy the styles from iOS.

The really funny thing happend in just 1 minute. My boss is complaining again about the
colors and told the blue color is way to dark and the designer meant thats not possible the
blue color very bright. My boss sat next to the designer and looked not on the wall where
the picture was thrown from a projector, instead he looks from the side in the macbook screen
of the macbook which was in front of the designer. Then the designer says "Oh my god, the color
changes if I look from the side or from the top of the macbook." The Designer was blown away. My
boss couldn't believe it and did the same movements with his head and said. "Wow, you are right
the color changes".

We all other people couldn't believe that they are so dumb and thought this must be a joke. But
that wasn't a joke. After the meetin my boss told everyone in our company his results regarding the screen.

I wrote every story in a document, and I'm planning to create a book with dumb shit like this.

About browsers and whole SSL CERT thing...

Most likely everyone here noticed, that https site with broken certificate will throw these big red warnings, in your face and there is so much wording like "ITS NOT SECUREEEE" or "ITS HACKEDDD" almost like it was written by passionate fanatic.

But when you are on plaintext http browsers reaction is like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Even if you have plaintext with password, it will for example in chromium put small little red thingy that almost no one notices.

I believe that broken cert with some error like invalid date is MORE secure than plaintext password, yet still there is this hypocracy with browsers...

I dont say that broken SSL cert is good, or something, Im just pointing out contrast of "broken" https vs plain http.... One looks for casual Joe like end of the world is coming and second is bearly noticable. Da fuck?

I disagree with this approach

Do you know this?
You are the small guy, you are dancing the whole evening with a girl and then a big asshole comes around, h
Judges you and want to be better that you?
Than je comes and insult you?

Damn that's the moment, when self defense save your life. :)
He tried to punch me, but then underrated my skills 😌

Ohhh man I love karma😌🤗

Trying to explain functions to my coworker and why they should be used even if powershell scrips don't 'need' functions
I've explained it 5 different ways across multiple meetings when they've gotten stuck on something.

At this point I've decided 1. I don't have the patience or brains to be a teacher..., 2. I'm going to have to review every script they ever fucking write, 3. I'm never letting them work on anything critical or time sensitive for big clients. (Small clients ehhh) I'll fight my boss to avoid that headache lol

Dealing with other technical professionals who cannot think outside their respective boxes.

Here is an example.

A QA (who is very good at her job) said this...

Her:
“We need to get one customer who is willing to pay us a lot of money to make the features they want!”

Me:
“But you realize we are a SaaS company and that means we need lots of customers and constant growth”

Her:
“No, we need to find a customer who is willing to pay us, like a million, to make the features they want. Then we make them for that customer. Then we do that again.”

Me:
“We sell software to small businesses, none of them have a million dollars to pay us, and even if they did then why wouldn’t they build it themselves?

Her:
“Well, when I worked for my last company this is what we did...”

Me:
“So you worked for a contracting company who built software for individual companies. We are not that type of company. We are a SaaS company.”

Her:
“It’s the same thing”

Me:
~Facepalm~

As a software developer and entrepreneur it frustrates me when everyone think everything is the same.

You’ll here things like...

“All we need is to get lucky with one big hit and then we will ride that wave to success, just like Facebook or Amazon!”

Holy fucking shit balls, how stupid can you be!

FB and AZ run thousands of tests a day to see what works. They do not get “lucky”. They dark launched FB messenger with thousands of messages and then rolled it out to their internal team first, they did not get lucky!

Honestly though, I can’t blame them. Most people just want a good job that pays. They aren’t looking to challenge their assumptions.

Personally I know I will be in situations again where my pride, my assumption, my fears are realized and crushed by the market place and I do not want to live in a world of willful ignorance.

I’d rather get it right than feel good.

Not exactly a dev related rant.

Do you ever get the feeling when you're not working, like today, that you're kinda wasting time (can't find a better way to describe)? I usually work on Sunday at home, running behind insane deadlines, trying to anticipate tasks. Today was different, I woke up to a fresh VS 2017 install, updated my .net core api to 2.0, learnt how to deploy to Azure, made a CI/CD pipeline and then spend some fun time with my 5 month baby. Argued with him when Azure didn't let me make a new subscription. Sat on the sidewalk with him doing absolutely nothing for a solid half hour, only looking the way he admired everything around him and stuff. Took the trash out, did the dishes, helped with the laundry. But yet I feel like tomorrow gonna be a rough day, where everything will blow up 'cause I didn't did anything work related.

I'm starting to think I lost the taste of enjoying myself, enjoying the people around me, my family, parents, friends. I've been spending too much time on autopilot. Wake up, smoke, work, eat, work, smoke, sleep. Repeat.

I do enjoy my job, a little less when it's not dev related, but I do anyway. We are a small company with big contracts and tight deadlines. Always struggling to give our best and advance further, but I can see I'm loosing something while giving 120% of attention to my job.

Anyway, just wanted to get this thing out of my chest. Thank you if you read this far.

We were in a c class learning about pointers, the teacher was doing small stars on the board to explain the basics of them.

After a short while we all understood, or so we taught.

Someone asked about double pointers, so the teacher put 2 stars on the board to explain. THEN THE IDIOT OF THE CLASS GOES AND BLOODY ASKS IF WE COULD REPLACE THE 2 STARS BY A BIG ONE.

I MEAN OF COURSE JUST PUT A STAR EMOJI TO MAKE A DOUBLE POINTER.

The legend still lives on as he got kicked for an unknown reason🤔.

There's nothing like sitting on the edge of your seat when you see a monster batch of records get sent updates.

This system was built 5 years ago and it's "peak" batch size has been < 400 records in a day, it usually sits around < 100.

It's not a big system and just runs in the background. So yea small numbers for this guy.

today though, I thought something fell down and shit its self, someone decided to add a a few thousand records to this thing and update a fuck tonne of data (for this system anyway)😬

The damn thing is standing it's ground and churning, but fuck, the scale of things is beyond what we ever thought it would have to deal with at any one time.

Build for the insane benchmarks kids, one day... someone's going to drop an elephant on it.

Had an idea for an app. I started writing the prototype in Node since I just had a simple API in mind. Wanted to have some very basoc crud functionality going and then hook up a nice interface to it. It has to do with logistics and analytics so I just wanted to start sketching something small, and being that i have been successful in doing an API like this in the pass with node and mongo for a local company I said why not.

I have finished a good chunk of it. Gotta love that js productivity. But what tripped me out about it was:

Check how big the folder size is: 387mb

EXCUSE ME??!!

I tripped, there was no way in hell this shit was that heavy. I am basically using Koi(to give it a whirl instead of express, gotta start testing koi sometimes right?) And some joi with morgan and winston. That is it. I am using mongo since legit its the only one i know, even with that there really can't be that much right?

Check node_modules size.....10mb....wtf? What
Wait
Did it?

Sure as shit....forgot that i was storing the mongo data folder inside the app's root folder.

This would have been nothing if it would have taken me 30 seconds to figure it out.

I was losing my mind for 30 mins before i decided to properly verify

I need some sleep

Working on a small little video game, but myself.

I need an artist eventually.

But for now, I've got my little dude running and jumping. It's shit but at least I made it myself.

Also got a big project at work that might get me promoted but don't really care about that.

> Worst work culture you've experienced?

It's a tie between my first to employers.

First: A career's dead end.
Bosses hardly ever said the truth, suger-coated everything and told you just about anything to get what they wanted. E.g. a coworker of mine was sent on a business trip to another company. They had told him this is his big chance! He'd attend a project kick-off meeting, maybe become its lead permanently. When he got there, the other company was like "So you're the temporary first-level supporter? Great! Here's your headset".

And well, devs were worth nothing anyway. For every dev there were 2-3 "consultants" that wrote detailed specifications, including SQL statements and pseudocode. The dev's job was just to translate that to working code. Except for the two highest senior devs, who had perfect job security. They had cooked up a custom Ant-based build system, had forked several high-profile Java projects (e.g. Hibernate) and their code was purposely cryptic and convoluted.
You had no chance to make changes to their projects without involuntarily breaking half of it. And then you'd have to beg for a bit of their time. And doing something they didn't like? Forget it. After I suggested to introduce automated testing I was treated like a heretic. Well of course, that would have threatened their job security. Even managers had no power against them. If these two would quit half a dozen projects would simply be dead.

And finally, the pecking order. Juniors, like me back then, didn't get taught shit. We were just there for the work the seniors didn't want to do. When one of the senior devs had implemented a patch on the master branch, it was the junior's job to apply it to the other branches.

Second: A massive sweatshop, almost like a real-life caricature.
It was a big corporation. Managers acted like kings, always taking the best for themselves while leaving crumbs for the plebs (=devs, operators, etc). They had the spacious single offices, we had the open plan (so awesome for communication and teamwork! synergy effects!). When they got bored, they left meetings just like that. We... well don't even think about being late.
And of course most managers followed the "kiss up, kick down" principle. Boy, was I getting kicked because I dared to question a decision of my boss. He made my life so hard I got sick for a month, being close to burnout. The best part? I gave notice a month later, and _he_still_was_surprised_!
Plebs weren't allowed anything below perfection, bosses on the other hand... so, I got yelled at by some manager. Twice. For essentially nothing, things just bruised his fragile ego. My bosses response? "Oh he's just human". No, the plebs was expected to obey the powers that be. Something you didn't like? That just means your attitude needs adjustment. Like with the open plan offices: I criticized the noise and distraction. Well that's just my _opinion_, right? Anyone else is happily enjoying it! Why can't I just be like the others? And most people really had given up, working like on a production line.

The company itself, while big, was a big ball of small, isolated groups, sticking together by office politics. In your software you'd need to call a service made by a different team, sooner or later. Not documented, noone was ever willing to help. To actually get help, you needed to get your boss to talk to their boss. Then you'd have a chance at all.

Oh, and the red tape. Say you needed a simple cable. You know, like those for $2 on Amazon. You'd open a support ticket and a week later everyone involved had signed it off. Probably. Like your boss, the support's boss, the internal IT services' boss, and maybe some other poor sap who felt important. Or maybe not, because the justification for needing that cable wasn't specific enough. I mean, just imagine the potential damage if our employees owned a cable they shouldn't!

You know, after these two employers I actually needed therapy. Looking back now, hooooly shit... that's why I can't repeat often enough that we devs put up with way too much bullshit.

Have you encountered projects that were beyond saving?

Been freelancing for a client via agency for the past year. In the beginning the deal was to maintain identity verification sdk for android maybe 10-15 hours a month or so. Their flow consisted of around 25-30 screens, so I took it thinking it was easy. Boy I was wrong.

Codebase was and still is a complete spaghetti, backend weird and overcomplicated and impossible to talk with someone in backend. Had to reverse engineer their complicated flows many times just to make a small change on the app. There also are lots of issues with capturing/sending camera recordings especially on older devices. The fact that Im the only dev maintaining this doesnt help either.

First few months it was just maintenance, later some small features and soon it become a 40 hour a month gig. I was able to deal with it but then management changed, they started micromanaging me heavily and now they want me to do 60-70 hours a month. Also they asked to implement some unnecessarily complicated features and to be honest without refactoring most of the codebase I cant even begin to think of how to implement them.

Also workload in my main job increased. Started sacrificing my evenings, weekends and basically my wellbeing to work on their product. Tried to relax but then I realized Im just spending my freetime thinking about their project all of the time. Best part is that last few updates fucked up the whole flow and I dont even understand where the problem is anymore: backend, 3rd party integration issues or something else that I did.

Last friday told them that my availability changed and Im quitting. Told them that Im gonna provide support till the end of the month but no big features. Just spent a full shift in my main job and another full shift working on their product, trying to untagle their spaghetti.. Im totally lost and burned out. Meanwhile stupid manager is asking why "simple" stuff according to him is taking too long.

I should receive my last payment from agency this week, also asked them to send it to me earlier but no answer so far. At this point Im so burned out that I dont care anymore about the last payment, even if client complains that everything is broken and doesnt want to pay me. Project is beyond fucked and that SDK as well as their backend is a ticking time bomb. Im done.

The difference between small and large companies is astounding when applying for jobs.

Small: "What can you do?"
Big: "What do you look like and speak like?"

Ever since i was a little boy, i was fascinated by the stars in the sky and what made them shine. I used to wonder how our universe came in to being. What made it what it is today. What will happen to it long after we re gone. Will it die? Will it live forever? How big is it? Why is it big if it s big and why is it small if it s small. "God did it" was never a satisfying answer for me. God does not play dice as Albert Einstein said. So many questions went through my 10 12 year old mind. Until someone recommended to me the book, "A brief history of time". The book answered a lot of my questions and gave birth to more. Computer science is like my crush. I love it as a friend. But Astrophysics, its the true love of my life. It not only quenches my thirst, but it satisfies my curiosity, while making me more curious. Its an endless cycle. It teaches us that we came from the stars, we go back in the dirt, and only to be returned to the stars again.
Stephen Hawking, his work, his books, taught me so much. Inspired me. Made me more curious. And today the world has truly lost, one of its greatest people.
You will be missed Sir Hawking. RIP.

Semi rant/ opinion
I have been wondering a bit about what my fellow devs think about adblockers

I have been using an adblocker for years.
I am guessing we got a good mix of both people who are pro and against them

I do get the site's owner point of view wanting to get a little bit of cash out of their site buts its the ad publisher that come in and royally screw things up with their garish flashy shit.

I wouldn't really mind 2-3 small static adverts on a page, little ones that don't disrupt the flow of the page or clash with the page colour scheme (i know that one is a bit far fetched but anyone who loaded up a dark page in the comfort of a darkened room only to have a big bright ad turn up in the middle of the page force them to squint ). Sadly publishers don't give a damn, their only concern is to
GRAB YOUR ATTENTION...

FLASHY FLASH FLASH MOFO!

OH AND HERE IS AN AUDIO ENABLED ONE FOR YA, GOOD LUCK MUTING IT YOU POOR SHMUCK , ONE CLICK ON THE DAMN THING WILL TAKE YOU TO THE LAND OF POP-UPS

AH YOU WANNA DOWNLOAD SOMETHING BUDDY ? AH WELL I HOPE YOU LIKE INDIANA JONES' SCENE WITH HOLY GRAIL
CUZ HERE ARE 10 DOWNLOAD BUTTONS, ONE IS THE REAL THING THE REST WILL ARE TOOLBARS

They are the biggest culprit here yet moan the loudest about adblockers.
Sort yourselves out then complain to us about ad blocking

This is the craziest shit... MY FUCKING SERVER JUST SET ON FIRE!!!

Like seriously its hot news (can't resist the puns), it's actually really bad news and I'm just in shock (it's not everyday you find out your running the hottest stack in the country :-P)... I thought it slow as fuck this morning but the office internet was also on the fritz so I carried on with my life until EVERYTHING went down (completely down - poof gone) and within 2 minutes I had a technician from the data centre telling me that something to do with fans had failed and they caught fire, melted and have become one with the hardware. WTF? The last time I went to the data centre it was so cold I pissed sitting down for 2 days because my dick vanished.

I'm just so fucking torn right now because initially I was absolutely fucking ecstatic - 1 week ago after a year of doomsday bitching about having a single point of failure and me not being a sysadmin only to have them look at me like I'm some kind of techie flat earther I finally got approval to spend around 5x more per month and migrate all our software to containerized micro services.

I'll admit this is a bit worse than I expected but thanks to last week at least I have recent off site images of the drives - because big surprise I have to set this monolithic beast back up (No small feat - its gonna be a long night) on a fresh VPS, I also have to do it on premises or the data will only finish uploading sometime next week.

Pro Tip: If your also pleading for more resources/better production environment only to be stone walled the second you mention there's a cost attached be like me - I gave them an ultimatum, either I deploy the software on a stack that's manageable or they man the fuck up and pay a sys admin (This idea got them really amped up until they checked how much decent sys admins cost).

Now I have very flexible pockets because even if I go rambo the max server costs would only be 15-20% of a sys admins paycheck even though that is 13 x more than our current costs.

Today was the first time I was able to develop a full stack by my self!!!!
(I mean not by myself, StackOverflow was my Bible)

It's a small project with three modules , and while I've worked front end, back end and machine learning separately, I used to develop on a single component.

Today I built all the components on my own.

The hardest part was linking the nodejs file with the python script. Which seemed easy at first but then I needed to go through the documentation to understand the working behind the scenes.

Just looking how to deploy it now

This is a victory rant.
While it is not something big I feel so proud of myself 🥰

Our boss did always the same thing. When there was a BIG potential customer who indicates a small interest in our software, then he lied constantly about features. After the customer bought our software we got a deadline and should develop the missing features. I could remember two features: The first one was a quote tool for a car transport company. The tool should estimate a price for a transportation from an email with no structure and the other one was an API which should be possible to write dynamicly to MySQL, MariaDB, Postgres, MSSQL, DB2, Mongo or better said any possible dbms. The API should guess the structure of the dbs and offer CRUD actions. The funny thing is must write the api with go. Yeah dynamic and GO.

At some time, we told him we wont make any overtime and if the deadline is not possible we told that immediatly the customers, so that they call him. Thank god I don't work anymore in this company.

!rant

Cursee Station : The Keyboard

Prologue : I found /r/battlestations first and then the famous devdesk campaign came. I have been surviving with two potatoes laptops for years. One potato is big and one is small. Nevertheless both are 🥔. All in all, I made up my mind to own a proper dev desk. (even if not perfect)

And I'm starting with having a good Keyboard.

Requirements:
- mechanical
- minimal
- space saving
- wired
- backlit
- maintainable
- durable
- less than $90

Chosen One:
Drevo Tyrfing V2 Ten-keyless RGB Mechanical Keyboard

I have asked my gf who is temporarily at Japan to buy it from amazon.co.jp for me.

May I hear reviews and feedbacks from anyone who have used it?

The world is talking about AI, self-driving cars, big data, IOT and there are roboter driving around on Mars.
And here I stand, trying to figure out why a small change in a silly batch-script works on Windows7 and raises an error on Windows XP.
In 2020.

Just had one of the most cringiest HR interview ever. I'm looking for a new job, and yesterday applied for several med/senior backend developer positions and immediately got response from a well known software company.

We schedule a call today 9:00am, so I take homeoffice and wake-up half an hour earlier than usual.

First thing I notice, lady is 5mins late, but okay its morning, we're all humans, so I don't mind it even though some other person might call it a classical sign of disrespect and hangup right away.

First question: Why did you apply for our company?
- Euhhmm cause I'm looking for a new job and I saw your job ad yesterday?

Second question: Why would you like to work at our company?
- Left speechless.. Well I honestly don't know, not really following your company, I know that you exist but that's about it, shouldn't you be telling me this? (*heavy breathing on the other side*)

The rest of interview left me quite uninterested due to initial questions, like what the hell, I can imagine these being alright for interns and junior developers who might be fascinated by opportunity to work for a big and well known company to build their CV, but c'mon I've went through shit already and honestly don't care for who I work for as long as they have interesting projects, are paying me right and have couple small benefits I'm looking for such as homeoffice, gym card etc..

I got my new Oryx Pro today, from System76. It came with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. I opted not to get Pop!_OS or Ubuntu 18.10, as I would prefer to leave the OS on it for the longterm.

Even at 15.6", it's a BIG laptop. It measures 18" from corner to corner, when it's closed. It comfortably fits in my backpack, which is a bit on the small side, but it's probably about 30-50% heavier than a MacBook Pro.

But that size and weight are vindicated by the most thuggish hardware I have ever seen in a laptop. As configured, this machine has a 4.1GHz 8th gen i7, 32GB of DDR4 at 2666MHz, an 8GB GTX 1070, a 250GB nvme system disk, and a 1TB SSD for data.

The display is set by default to 4K resolution, but I cranked that down to FHD for the sake of my eyes and the battery. I will try some games at higher resolution at some point, but for desktop navigation, I get more use out of multiple virtual desktops than in massive resolution.

I will comment tomorrow or the day after with the steps I've taken to bend this beast to my will, and it's also important to say that I have not finished yet. This is just a summary, but I should have been in bed an hour ago, so I'm gonna go do that.

School gave me 3 DigitalOcean droplets to try out Kubernetes in the cloud, awesome!

Wrote an Ansible script to not only simply install docker and add users but also add kubernetes, nice!

Oh wait, error?! Well I should've known this wasn't going to be easy... ah well no problem. Let's see... Ansible is cryptic as always, it can't connect to the API server? Is it even running?

Let's ssh to the master, ah nothing is running, great. Let's try out kubeadm init and see what happens, oh gosh, my Docker version has not been validated! No problem, let's just downgrade!

How do I do that? Oh I know, change the version in the role! Wait that version doesn't exit? Let's travel to Docker's website and see what versions exist of docker-ce, oh I see, it needs a subversion, no problem.

Oh that errors too? Wait then what... Oh I need a ~ and a ubuntu and a 0 somewhere, my mistake!

Let's run it again! Fails!

Same ssh process, oh wait...

Oh god no...

Kubernetes requires 2 cores and these things only have 1...

Welp, time to ask the teachers to resize my droplet by a small amount tomorrow, hopefully I'll get a new error!

----------------------------------------------

My adventure so far with Kubernetes. I'm not installing it for any serious/prod reason, just for educational purposes. K8s seems like 'endgame' to me, like one of the 'big guys' that big enterprises use so I'm eager to throw stuff at a droplet and see what happens.

Going further down the rabbit hole tomorrow!

Wish me luck :3

(And yes, I could've figured this all out beforehand with documentation, but this is more fun in my opinion)

I received 2 job offers:

1: c++ / c# / unity developer for a VR studio, tons of vr visors and shit to use

2: python / Java/somethingelse developer for machine learning, iot, big data

Offer n1 is from a small business 35 employees - casual outfit
Offer n2 is from medium/big business with 100-200 employees - suit and tie for all.

Same economic offer, 2 different and divergent paths on different but trending topics.

What do you choose and why

Similar to other countries if you work in international projects and companies.

If you work for big government related / small domestic company projects you can meet with comments and variables named in native language instead of english.

Just because there are probably only 2-3 companies who win every government project, they take all money and pay shit to developers.
To meet requirements they mostly hire fresh graduates to do the job.
CEO of one of those most famous quote is: You can replace every developer with finite number of students.

I used to love small 12 pt fonts but recently I've really liked coding with medium sized 16-18pt fonts and it's a big difference. As long as the characters are thin (like first code light) I really quite prefer it.

Am... Am I getting old...?

Long story short: University fucked up single sign on.

For every online service I have, I set a different password, randomly generated ~ 20 characters long. At our university we have multiple systems but they offer a single sign on service which is quite nice because it is so non-transparent which service now uses which authorization. I changed my password a while ago and around the same time they also updated our mail client. Since then I am not able to log in which is not a big deal for me because I have mail forwarding.

Yesterday however I needed another service and also got rejected with my password. I knew from a friend that the passwords are fucked up and that some services have different restrictions (only 12 chars max.), so I decided to search how to reset my password. What the fuck was wrong with these people? It takes you five different pages to get the tiniest bit of information how to reset the password. Then on one page you can login with your single sign on and change the password. On that page you can also set the single sign on password, but if you enter an invalid password (in respect of the the other services) guess what? No feedback that you just locked yourself out of half the systems. Nice job. Also the password requirements are not next to the input fields where you change the password. Noo. That would be way to easy, remember the little small one line on the wall of text three pages ago? There you go.

Ok step one done. Now it should work, shouldn't it? Ohh no not so fast. One needs to activate the seperate service. Where you ask? Perfectly fine question. On the top of page four is a fucking one line table which looks like some five year old had some fun in excel. The button which takes you to the activation page is nearly invisible because of the non existing contrast. Also it is not a button but some arrow pointer thingy. Behind set arrow you have a page listing all differnt kinds of services, the description which you find on page two btw. No padding to decipher this shit what so ever. Nearly on the bottom is your needed button. Yes finally.

Finally I want to login, no good. Try again. Still no good. Go back to the fucked up excel table look at my username and think to myself what's the difference here? The table is so small and again no margin or padding. Apparently they cut of the last character of my normal username which i have which is fucking ridiculous.

What is wrong with you people, we are a TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY, is it so hard for you to find someone decend to unify this shit?

It began when I was tasked with creating a better and more engaging experience for our new Facebook page. This was in Facebook's early days, so there were not really any "best practices". We were making it up as we went along. I decided one way would be to game-ify things, since gaming, at the time, was a Big Deal on Facebook and people were starting to use it to build customer funnels.

Grasping for low-hanging fruit, I decided a Tetris variant around our topic would be fun. I had to hire a dev because at the time I was a static HTML web developer just getting into social media management. I knew nothing about game development or how to use Facebook's API for such things.

Long story short, we got about $10,000 (FB app devs came at a premium then) into the project when I came across a very recent article about the history of Tetris games. It said that even though Tetris had once been considered for all intents to be public domain due to it being created by a Russian coder during the Cold War, it had just been acquired by an IP protection entity that was charging royalties for any variant of Tetris created from a specific date onward and paying the original developer. So, even though I thought I had been thorough in my initial permissions checking, it turned out we were gonna be in deep doo-doo with licensing fees and restrictions if we released this game to the public.

I had to call my boss and admit my error. She was FURIOUS and really gave me an ass-chewing over it. I then had to call the marketing person whose budget I'd been slaving away at wasting. She was a bit more forgiving (her budget was in the millions). Then I had to call the corporate legal department and explain what was going on. They told me to immediately pay any outstanding hours, then fire the dev but not before getting him to send me all code and assets, deleting his copy, and then, upon my receipt of those assets, deleting MY copy so that nothing of it ever existed. And I was supposed to say _nothing_ to the dev about why he was being let go, so that there would be no "trail" leading back to this fiasco. (The dev hounded me for weeks asking what he'd done wrong. It killed me that I was bound and gagged by corporate legal and couldn't tell him.)

I was in so much trouble. I was literally in tears over it. I'd never wasted that much money in my life. That incident pretty much sealed my fate as far as any trust my bosses ever put in me again (not much at all). I was a bit of a pariah in a lot of ways for the next 5 years whereas I had come onto the team as a young social media rockstar at first.

After that, and a couple of other bad scenarios that were less my fault and more due to a completely dysfunctional management and reporting structure, they eventually "transferred" me to another team. Which was really just a way of getting rid of me by sending me to a department that was already starting to outsource overseas and lay people off. It was less messy that way. I was in the first set of layoffs.

Since then, I've had a BIG fear of EVER joining a large corporation EVER again. I prefer to work for small businesses now, even if I get paid less. Much less stressful from an office politics and impact of mistakes standpoint.

Oh boy, finally something to rant about.

I got hired in a "small" company (not even 2000 people in it), then got "shipped" to a way bigger company. Basically, I work for this company (the french biggest internet / phone service provider) but in the name of my own. And this since last wednesday.

First off, I'm fucking stupid. After leaving the big company that I was in before, I swore to myself that from now on, I would work for smaller companies, mainly because I couldn't stand the inertia that big company have. You ask for something, you get it a month and a half after. The old company has about 6000 employees... This company has 98k people in it. Fuck. My. Life.

Now, to the rant: Orange (the company) decided that they had to move their office somewhere else. They set up a lot of things so that all we needed to do was to put things in boxes, to work somewhere else until next monday, then we could go to the new office on tuesday morning.

Keep in mind that I have been there for 8 days: I keep learning how they do their stuff. For example, if I need a specific docker image, I can't get it from the Docker Hub, the download will fail. However, if I hit an Orange subdomain's registry, I will get this image from a mirror. Because fuck logic.

When we join the company, they give us a Windows laptop ("yeaah we have useless but required Orange softwares that don't run on Linux" "Yeeaaah fuck you") that have a specific VPN allowing us to use the Orange network and, in theory, you can download docker images or clone orange repositories from that network.

In practice, you can simply just go fuck yourself. Why? Because whenever you want to curl, wget or pull anything (or even pip install), your connection keeps being shut down while it waits for the response's header.

The worst part? According to my (new) boss's evasive answers, the way to fix that works with glue, sticks and the power of the Force.

WHY THE FUCK DO YOU ENFORCE US A SHITTY OS FOR DEVELOPMENT, WHEN THE TOOLS YOU SHOVE IN IT WITH A FAKE SMILE DON'T EVEN WORK, AND WE HAVE TO HACK OUR WAY TO FUCKING WORK?

Our CEO had a virtual town hall using Zoom and now have a sign language interpreter box as a regular feature... To go along with all the Inclusion stuff...

The most immediate problem though is they didn't turn on auto-captions...

I don't know sign but am deaf so needed the captions which it turns out you can get using the Google Recorder app on Pixels. (This is literally like a fuck you to non-Pixel users and Zoom which disables Live Captions in conferences and recording full transcripts).

Anyway I left it own and near the end, a speaker was like "we're getting a lot of likes and positive feedback about the interpreter box! See how small changes make such a big difference?!"

And well of course in my mind I'm going "uh.... No."

I'll just go back to not caring about anything that isn't related to how much I make.

So, a few words about this setup :
- I am not Portuguese, my girlfriend got this poster while on a trip
- The second monitor is very old and uses fluorescent tubes. It's shitty and not stylish, but useful at times
- Yes, I use a standalone scanner. Every multifunction printer I've had ended up suiciding itself, and suicided the built in scanner with it. A standalone scanner should be indestructible.
- The case is open because I haven't paid much attention to fans and stuff, so it gets pretty hot when gaming
- Talk about gaming : I dual boot W10/Ubuntu but use the original Gnome DE with Adwaita Dark (I love it). However, W10 is only useful for Lightroom and games. When Steam released proton, I decided to start using Darktable for photo editing in order to ditch Windows once and for all. That will probably happen in the coming months.
- I have not wired my home yet, so I use a router as Wi-Fi receiver.
- The top of the desk is not the original one. It used to be a glass one, but I didn't like the feel and it was too small. So I made a wooden one and painted it with paint my father had left over. However, it ended up looking hideous and sticks to the skin when resting on it for a long time. It has to be changed/fixed.
- The headphones hanger is just a big ass screw, and the headphones jack has been fixed at least a dozen times. I even changed the cable two times.
- The mic is shitty but cost only 8€ on eBay.

As a pretty solid Angular dev getting thrown a react project over the fence by his PM I can say:

FUCK REACT!

It is nigh impossible to write well structured, readable, well modularized code with it and not twist your mind in recursion from "lift state up" and "rendercycle downwards only"

Try writing a modular modal as a modern function component with interchangeable children (passeable to the component as it should be) that uses portals and returns the result of the passed children components.

Closest I found to it is:
c o d e s a n d b o x.io/s/7w6mq72l2q
(and its a fucking nightmare logic wise and readability wise)

And also I still wouldn't know right of the bat how to get the result from the passed child components with all the oneway binding CLUSTERFUCK.

And even if you manage to there is no chance to do it async as it should be.
You HAVE to write a lot of "HTML" tags in the DOM that practically should not be anywhere but in async functions.

In Angular this is a breeze and works like a charm.
Its not even much gray matter to it...

I can´t comprehend how companies decide to write real big web apps with it.

They must be a MESS to maintain.

For a small "four components that show a counter and fetch user images" - OK.
But fo a big webapp with a big team etc. etc.?

Asking stuff about it on Stackoverflow I got edited unsolicited as fuck and downvoted as fuck in an instant.
Nobody explained anything or even cared to look at my Stackblitz.
Unsolicited edit, downvote, closevote and of they go - no help provided whatsoever.
Its completely fine if you don't have time to help strangers - but then at least do not stomp on beginners like that.
I immediately regretted asking a toxic community like this something that I genuinely seem to not understand. Wasn't SO about helping people?
I deleted my post there and won't be coming back and doing something productive there anytime soon.

Out of respect for my clients budget I'm now doing it the ugly react way and forget about my software architecture standards but as soon as I can I will advise switching to Angular.

If you made it here: WOW
Thank you for giving me a vent to let off some steam :)

Ok i post it a bit late but what the hell.

This is my monster now! I now shall conquer the world!

MSI GL62 7RD
with that configuration:
CPU: i5 7300HQ
RAM: 8GB DDR4
GPU: gtx1050
HDD: WB blue (small laptop one) 1TB

Ok i already had that configuration for a while... but it was sloooowwwww D:

That is why for my birthday/chrismas i bought myself additional 8GB of ram and a tiny nvme ssd to make everything 1000x faster! 😎

1 ++ for a person who reads how big the ssd is...

We actually had a small "code on paper" test (more like a recap test) yesterday, but we didn't have to write much rather than just have a basic understanding how classes and instances of those work. It was like 6 small lines of code to insert. I don't mind coding on paper as long as you don't have to write a big program with it as a 1-hour test.

!rant I need job advice. Please reason with me.

I am 26, got 2 years of experience in c# and unity3d.
I did some research and it turns out that the minimal paying average with my job/experience over the whole country is at least 300€ a month more than what i get payed currently.
I made a list of pros and cons, and am just not sure what would be smartest to do in the long run. Here is a list for both options, please chime in on me if you can!

Points for current job:
Permanent contract (hard to fire me etc.)
Get to make mostly mobile games but nothing really big
Fun small team whom i get along with (i am on the spectrum and can be hard to deal with social or costumer related things)
Rarely any overtime (i like to know my hours)
Easy but slow jobs (badly organized, drag on forever)
Rarely challenged and thus boring me
I get to shoot nerf guns at colleagues whenever
Low chance of a 300€/m pay increase (not worth it to boss, financials aren't that great but the company is promising)

Points for any other job:
Unknown working condittions
I am probably bad and uknowledgeable about any tool they give me to work with because my experience is so monotone
Start on short term contract again all over
At the least a 300€ net increase a month
Prob closer to home then 1h drive away
I get to learn new things but give up on games/apps as i know them
Probably get knowledgeable seniors
Probably end up in a bigger more serious company where i am just a number
I am bad in new social envirnoments, oh the angst is real

And a few things besides it are that i personally only have as goal to own my own house with my fiance as soon as i can. And this means i will need to take out a 200k loan or something along those lines, to be paid off over 30 years max.
This means that the permanent contract is very valuable in my eyes, but so is monthly pay increase.
I want to have fun in my job, i want to learn new things and better ways. But i also want to be able to say "enough" to something if it overwhelms me. I just know some things are not for me and i would mess up if i were made to do them. I fear that to not be an option in a big company. I would be forced out of my comfort zone without any regard for me or my learning curve.

Any advice is welcome. Please keep it general if you can so others can learn from this as well. Seniors advice will probably be helpfull to all starting programmers!

Managed to land 2 interviews:

The first one was for a startup that was looking for a react programmer (I've never used react before).

The later was a php job at a big company. They told me they used cakephp which is a framework I had not used before either.

Still, I'm more familiar with php than react so I felt more confident with the second interview. However, I felt there was a lot of good chemistry going on in the first interview.

The interviewer was incredibly nice (he was the lead dev, not an HR person as opposed to the second interviewer)

He gave me a small react test to be completed within a week. I barely managed to do it in time but I felt good about the solution.

Just as I was sending it, I get a call from the second interviewer saying I landed the php job.

I wasn't sure if my novice react skills would be impressive enough to secure me the react job (and I really needed a job) so I accepted.

After explaining everything to the guy who was interviewing me for the react job, he understood and was kind enough to schedule a code review where he walked through my novice code explaining what could be improved, helping me learn more in the process.

I regret not accepting the react position. The PHP they got me working with is fucking PHP5 with Cake2 :/

Don't get me wrong, I like the salary and the people are nice but the tech stack they're using (lacking source control by the way!), as well as all the lengthy meetings are soul-draining.

This “Auto save” feature in the latest app version is buggy..
-> new rant
-> prefilled with previous rant..

Anyway, here my actual rant begins.

Apple, go fuck yourself, seriously.. put your trillion dollars way up your arse...

Moved to Ireland, want to switch country..
“If you want to switch countries, cancel your Apple Music subscription first”..
so be it. Cancelled it..
“Your subscription will be cancelled in 28 days”.

FUCK YOU, YOU COCK SUCKING BASTARDS!!
I NEED TO SWITCH THE STORE TO BE ABLE TO DOWNLOAD BANKING APPS AND STUFF LIKE THAT..

But ok, I’m screwed in this regard..

Suddenly iMessage stopped working. This is kind of a big deal because I have unlimited data but only unlimited sms to Irish numbers and I need to communicate with people in Switzerland and Germany..
Internet works so I try to turn iMessage off and in again. But that doesn’t work.. i can only reactivate iMessage via WiFi.

So I go back to the hotel, reactivate iMessage..
“Verifying imessage” >> google..
Leads me to an Apple forum: “the verification of iMessage can take up to 24h”.

Are you fucking kidding me? I’m in a new country and rely on this overpriced shit..

Fun but sad fact, I have a second phone with me. IPhone 4 with iOS 7 and that thing WORKS!!

If this is where the future is going we’re all gonna die very soon.. plains crash, power plants explode but hey, at least they have data about it and it looks shiny. That’s all that matters..

Another reason to switch to android..

MacOs fucked me up so I already switched to windows + Linux. Next one will be getting rid of iOS, they don’t build small phones anymore anyway..

Liferay. Fucking Liferay.
I'm mostly C#, Java Dev with only a year of experience and as Kruger-Dunning effect says, I thought I'm not that bad. At the beginning of my job I've got tasked with creating an portlet for Liferay CMS which is written in Java. Can't be that bad, right? WRONG.
Liferay is real shit. Not only there is little to none community life but also documentation and tutorials are outdated! Many methods are doing the same functionality but are in different packages. JSP make coding a big fucking mess if you won't make shit ton of classes to clean it up. Also it has this incredible ability to crash whole portlet after a small change in classes structure.
I have to mention that no one could help me because company that I'm working for is a rather small one and there's no other Java developer beside me. This also means that it's hard to really get gut when no one is oversying my progress.
Also I really dislike web development. And Liferay made it even worse. I hope it will burn in hell.

Big IT consulting company ask us (small web agency) to develop the "html" code for a web app for their client. (They'll want the front-end to implement it in Cordova or other shit tools they use).

I had to use some "includes" in php, for header and footer, because for 50 pages it'll be tedious to edit a thing (the design is not definitive yet) without open all the .html files individually and replicate the edits in all the pages.

We've delivered the package containing all the pages and a "inc" folder for the header and the footer. The pages have the extension *.php

Their pm ask us why we didn't do it in html, since they expected that.

What the fuck is wrong with you?

I have nothing to play recently so I started playing old games.

Today I launched gta vice city on my old pc. Got more than 200 hours in that game during my childhood. Game from 2002 and I laughed when driving a car. It was so natural and fun. Michael Jackson singing Billy Jean and police chasing my ass when I’m trying to find a bribe in the city. That was fun.

For me most of today’s games can’t compete in gameplay mechanics with that game from 20 years ago.
Maybe we have better graphics but gaming fun got worse.

I think it’s cause most of games are made on commercial engines to save money and game studios focus on graphics cause it’s cheaper than paying software developer.

They focus on games to be competitive between players so ai got worse.

Big studio games became generic like movies, they don’t want you to have fun but they want to give you a story around by delivering lots of content in game, achievements, stars but the gameplay itself is bugged and meh.

They don’t focus on things people want to do but they focus on target groups. Most today’s big title games are meh cause they’re made by people who don’t play them.

They don’t play them cause they don’t have time cause of management that changes requirements cause they asked target groups and that would sell. Well if I play a game I’m not interested in story despite some basic stuff to keep the progress forward, if I wanted a big story I would watch a movie or tv show. I play games to explore, feel the world and have fun. I don’t need a linear deep story for that cause I’m in game so give me good gameplay so I can feel the world.

Most of classic game hits didn’t had tons of text and tons of stuff to do but they somehow wanted you to play more. Cause they were competitive between player and computer, the controls felt natural and while progressing you was eaten by the game mechanics more and more not by the story but by amount of stuff you could do as you progress or difficulty increase or enemies behavior change.

Now we’re getting all at once, mostly pointed and with detailed tutorial what you can do. There’s no explanation there’s no discovery what you can and what you can’t do at start. You get all and you decide to throw game away because the moment you launched it you got everything so you spent money just to get stuff you won’t play cause it’s meh and you go back to cs or other looter shooter to kill people cause you’re pissed off that the game was meh.

Well I’m glad I was a kid in 90s and 2000s cause I could enjoy gaming before it was targeted to broader public and become another shallow mass media industry that don’t give a fuck about gameplay cause they want to tell you so many things, they want you to know them cause they’re so important that they forgot that I can read a book and I came to play game to get a different feeling then reading book.

Modern games are like books filled with small stories and nice graphics where you can open it on every page and read a little piece of shitty crap.

Just take this piece and go to toilet so you can wipe your ass with that story and begin other one, look around, puke and go to toilet to take a dump again. I lost my hope to get something fresh or filled with nice gameplay from gaming industry. It’s dead.

Ever had that frustrating moment that the customer overreacts a small issue into a big issue? Just happened to me today.

Client: "Hey can you check why we are not getting any software update/patches to our firewall?"
Me: "OK. Lemme check"
** Checking **
Me: "I found that its not getting the latest updates because the license file registered has a product serial # mismatch with their support site. You can see it clearly here..."
Client: "THAT'S TERRIBLE!! QUICK!! MAKE IT A PRIORITY 1 ISSUE AND HAVE IT RESOLVE ASAP!!!"
Me: *Facepalm*

I promised a friend to have a look over his dads website to add a small blog. No big deal, I've got it on my drive, can reuse it just need to adapt it to the environment.

I take a look at what I'm working with and I see the most terrifying piece of "Please, take my data" code I could possibly imagine (And I've seen passwords, in plain text in a script tag). I quote "function queryDB(mode, val) {
var query=" ";
if(mode==="findProd")
query="Select * from Products where ProdNam=" +val;
... (same shit for different cases)
sendQuery(query) ;
}

He literally built the query on the client side sent it to a php script (without validation) and inserted it into the database.
You could literally call window.sendQuery with any sql query and get the result printed into the console.
And other than the plain text passwords guy that wasn't some kid someone knew, this was a "Webdesign" Agency.
Now I took the entire thing offline, called my friends dad, explained it to him and try to sort this out. I would not charge a good friends father but that hack will get a quite hefty bill since my hourly rate just tripled.

And the worst thing : If I publicly name that asshole or warn the people in his portfolio I can, according to Google, be sued. (But, and I assume thats vague enough not to count as bad mouthing, if anyone of you has a customer from Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany with a preexisting page, please have a look at the database interface)
I will call that agency tomorrow, ask for a detailed explanation for why they apparently let trained monkeys write their code and anonymously warn everyone in their portfolio about those flaws...

I don't know if I'm cursed or if there are just that many bad devs but it seems that once a year I have to stumble over some "mistakes" that make me question my sanity.

Absolutely not dev-related.

Blah, blah, weird conversation and shit. I'm too tired and lazy to write this crap again, but let's do it.

The guy is a dev I randomly found on some chatting service, he was interesting to talk with until this conversation. I'll write this out of memory, so yeah.

Him: So by the way I wrote an app that you give your penis size to to get measurements and stuff about it.
Me, thinking it was dev humor: That's hilarious. Tell me more, I'm interested.
Him: So the idea behind all of this was to gather some big data style info about people's penis size and habits and all that stuff.
Me: Man that's awesome. Can I see the source?
Him: No, it's proprietary. You can buy a license though.
Me: You went that far for a joke?
Him: What joke?
Me: The whole software you just told me about.
Him: That's not a joke, I'm being very serious about it.
Me: Oh well. What did you get from the stats?
Him: I got some tips from people's habits! I never thought that shaving it could make it look bigger, but that's awesome!
Me: Do you really care about it that much?
Him: Studies have proven that size correlated with confidence. Since I started doing it, I've been more confident than ever!
Me: Great.
Him: I'm a bit disappointed to see that I'm in the lower percentiles though.
Me: Well of course you are.
Him: Why would you say that?
Me: Well since people with a big dick tend to go more willingly into the subject and might even buy a fucking app for it, of course you'd have the higher average in your stats.
Him: You're only saying that because you have a small cock.
Me: Why the fuck would you say that? You're the one that's concerned about it, not me.
Him: Go on, what's your size?
Me, because I don't care about discussing that stuff: *Tells him*
Him: [stats, comparisons and stuff]
Me: Well I never gave a fuck and your stats won't make me change my mind.
[ ... Some other shit about my size compared to his ... ]
Him: Would you want to work with me for the database maintenance?
Me: You must be joking?
Him: I'm serious.
Me: *Deletes account*

Seriously, fuck that guy. I rewrote that quickly so you only had the best, but it was a whole fucking conversation.

Finally completed filing a claim for my laptop today. Been putting it off for months because it requires a call from a SquareTrade "specialist" to help diagnose your problem before a claim is finalized...

Me: "Hey I've received a box from you guys that was far too small for my [gaming] laptop both times I've sent this in and wanted to be sure I get the right size this time"

Specialist: "Oh, we've made some pretty big changes since you last filed a claim, we now base the size of the box we send you on the model of the device"

Me: .... what were they basing the size on before..?

Rant considering the latest Cyber attack and the news around it.

(A recap: a lot of Windows computers were infected with ransomware (due to security hole on Windows), which demanded 300$ in bitcoins to unlock data. After 3 days the price would double, and after 7 days the data was to be deleted)
1) In our country, one of the biggest companies was attacked (car factory). The production stopped and they got for around 1 000 000€ damage in less than 24h (1300 people without work). The news said that they were attacked because they are such a big company and were charged more, as the hackers "knew who they were dealing with" - another reason being the fact that the text was in croatian (which is our neighbor country), but noone realized that it is just a simple google translate of english text - which is obviously not true. The hackers neither know nor care who is hacked, and will charge everyone the same. They only care about the payment.
2) In UK whole (or large part) of medical infrastructure went down. The main thing everyone was saying was: "Nobody's data is stolen". Which, again, is obvious. But noone said anything about data being deleted after a week, which includes pretty much whole electronic medical record of everyone and is pretty serious.
And by the way, the base of the ransomware is code which was stolen from NSA.
All that millions and millions of dollars of damage could be avoided by simply paying the small fee.
The only thing that is good is that (hopefully) the people will learn the importance of backups. And opening weird emails.
P.S. I fucking hate all that 'hacky thingys' they have all over the news.

Most memorable co-worker was a daft idiot.
this was 10 years ago - I was working as a junior in my very first job, fresh out of uni, for a very small startup. It was me, and the 3 founders, for a very long time. Then this old (45, from my perspective then..) dev was hired.
This guy had no idea how to do the job. no common sense. the code confused him. the founders confused him. I was focusing on my work - and was unable to help him much with his. His only saving grace? He was a nice guy. Really nice.
But why was he so memorable, out of all the people I ever worked with? simple. He had a short term memory problem. Could not, even if he really tried, remember what he did yesterday.... when I asked him what his issue was, he decribed his life is like a car going in reverse in a heavy fog. "I can only see a short distance backwards, with no idea where I'm going".

Startup was sold to a big company. I became a teamlead/architect. He? someone decided he should be a PM.

When small things get big and don't work and you wonder for hours what is wrong with your code ... only to find out the problem is in the framework you use.

This happened a couple months ago, but I wanted to share this one, since it still baffles me.

We were hiring and had this weird candidate. The team said no to the guy after the interview, management still hired him and pressured us to train him, which cost us tons of hours we had to somehow squeeze in during a hot phase of our project.

After almost 3.5 weeks training he had to hand in a small component. What he handed in was brainlessly duplicated, half of the stuff in there wasn't even used, the other half wasn't working properly. At the review we asked questions about the code he handed in - he could not answer one of them.
We then had a big argument with management to let the guy go, which they eventually unhappily agreed to.
The icing on that cake of a story: Turns out, the guy was hired as a senior dev with a way higher paycheck than most of the devs on the team. Wtf?!

Our team - if ever existed - is falling apart. Pressure raising. Release deadline probably failing. No release ready for Big Sur.

Almost seemed we were getting somewhere: More focus on code quality, unit tests, proper design, smaller classes. But somehow we now ended up in "microservice" hell; a gazillion classes, mostly tested in isolation, but together they just fail to do their job. A cheap and dirty proof of concept from March is still more capable than this pile. I really start to doubt all that "Clean code", TDD, Agility rhetorics. What does it help you, if nobody cares for the end result? It's like a month I try to hammer down that message: we have to have testable artifacts, we have to ensure code signing works, our artifact is packaged and installable, we have to give QA something they can test - but time just passes and this piece of shit software is still being killed or does nothing.

Now my knee is broken and can do no sports and are tied to my chair even more. To top it all my coffee machine broke and my internet connection was abysmal this week. Not the usual small disconnects, after which it would recover, but more annoying and enduring: often being throttled to 1.7 MB/s (ranking my connection in the slowest 7% even in Germany). My RDP sessions had compression artifacts all over the screen and a mouse click would only take effect 5 sec later.

But my Esspresso machine was just repaired. Not all hope is lost.

I got an extremely hard task in the morning, I asked for some clarification and I got them at 13.23.
Boss ask for updates at 13.45 (during lunch pause).
I work on it 2 hours like never before, he calls me and I said I can manage to finish in half an hour + testing.

I work more 10-15 minutes, time is around 16.15.

2 other enormous bugs shows up on the same project, boss ask me to take care of them, and I manage in only 2h to look up something like 40 web pages and correct each of them, write reports and inform the affected people. After it I work more 15 minutes to report and finish small tasks. Ended up working almost 1h more on a non paid extra time working contract.

In the morning, while my boss was aware I spent that time

In the morning boss ask "everything went fine with the big project, right?"

Because
The
Client
Is
Angry.

I already got a burnout from this job, I really can't go on like this.

All my tasks was development, last week our boss gave me a testing task, and I completed it.
He said that the developers will hate me if I keep reporting every expected/unexpected, small/big, normal/critical bugs , so that he sent me back to the development team.
I just wondering if I misunderstand the word "testing"!!?

This is a guide for technology noobies who wants to buy a laptop but have no idea what the SPECS are meaning.

1. Brand
If you like Apple, and love their !sleek design, go to the nearest Apple store and tell them "I want to buy one. Recommendations?"
If you don't like Apple, well, buy anything that fits you. Read more below.

2. Size
There are 11~15 inches, weight is 850g ~ 2+kg. Very many options. Buy whatever you like.

//Fun part coming

3. CPU
This is the power of the brain.
For example,
Pentium is Elementary Schoolers
i3 is Middle Schoolers
i5 is High Schoolers
i7 is University People

Dual-core is 2 people
Quad-core is 4 people

Quiz! What is i5 Dual-core?
A) 2 High Schoolers.

Easy peasy, right?

Now if you have a smartphone and ONLY use Messaging, Phone, and Whatsapp (lol), you can buy Pentium laptops.
If not, I recommend at least i3

Also, there are numbers behind those CPU, like i3-6100
6 means 6th generaton.
If the numbers are bigger, it is the most recent generation.

Think of 6xxx as Stone age people
7xxx as Bronze age people
8xxx as Iron age people
and so one.

4. RAM
This is the size of the desk.
There are 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, and so one.
Think of 4GB as small desk to only put one book on it.
8GB as a desk to put a laptop with a keyboard and a mouse.
16GB as a normal sized desk to put some books, laptop, and food.
32GB as a boss sized desk.
And so one.

When you do multitasking, and the desk is too small...
You don't feel comfortable right?
It is good when there are spacious space.
Same with RAM.

But when the desk becomes larger, it gets expensive, so buy the one with the affordable price.

If you watch some YouTube videos in Chrome and do some document words with Office, buy at least 8GB. 16GB is recommended.

5. HDD/SSD
You take out the stuffs such as books and laptop from the basket (HDD/SSD), and put in your desk (RAM).

There are two kinds of baskets.
The super big ones, but because it is so big, it is bulky and hard to get stuffs out of the basket. But it is cheap. (HDD)
There are a bit smaller ones but expensive compared to the HDD, it is called SSD. This basket is right next to you, and it is super easy to get stuffs out of this basket. The opening time is faster as well.

SSDs were expensive, but as times go, it gets bigger as well, and cheaper. So most laptops are SSD these days.
There are 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1024GB(=1TB), and so one. You can buy what you want. Recommend 256GB for normal use.
Game guy? At least 512GB.

6. Graphics
It is the eyesight.
Most computers doesn't have dedicated graphics card, it comes with the CPU. Intel CPUs has CPU + graphics, but the graphics powered by Intel isn't that good.
But NVIDIA graphics cards are great. Recommended for gamers. But it is a bit more expensive.

So TL;DR

Buying a laptop is
- Pick the person and the person's clothes (brand and design)
- Pick the space for the person to stay (RAM, SSD/HDD)
- Pick how smart they are (CPU)
- Pick how many (Core)
- Pick the generation (6xxx, 7xxx ....)
- Pick their eyesight (graphics)

And that's pretty much it.
Super easy to buy a laptop right?

If you have suggestions or questions, make sure to leave a comment, upvote this rant, and share to your friends!

I just can't stress enough how fascinated I am by biology and biochemistry.

I mean, we, who call ourselves engineers, are no more but a gang of toddlers having a blast with jumbo legos on Aunt Lucy's dining room carpet on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Our solutions using "modern tools" and "modern engineering" are mere attempts to *very* remotely mimic what beautiful and elegant solutions are around us and inside of each of us.

IC/EC engines, solar batteries, computers and quantum computers, spaceships and ISSes, AI/ML, ... What are they? just the means to leverage what's been created all around us to create something that either entertains us, encourages our laziness or helps us to look at the other absolutely fascinating engineering solutions surrounding us so we could try and "replicate" their working principles to further embrace our laziness and entertain us.

Just look at the humble muscle - a myofibril made out of actin and myosin. The design is soooo simple and spot on, so elegant and efficient, the "battery" and signalling system are so universal and efficient.

Look at all those engineering miracles, small and big. Look how they work, how they leverage both big and small to create holistic, simplistic and absolutely efficient mechanisms. And then come back to me, and tell me again that all these brilliant solutions came out of nothing just by an accident we call "evolution".

How blinded by our narcissism are we to claim that there can't be a grand designer of any kind, that there's nothing smarter than us and that the next best thing than us is an incomprehensible series of accidental mutations over an unimaginable amount of time?

I mean.. could it be that someone/something greater than us created us and everything around us? naaaah.. we are the crown jewel of this universe. Everything else must be either magic or an accident. /s

Don't read this as yet another crazy-about-God person's ramblings. I'm not into religion fwiw. But science has taught me enough critical thinking to question its merit. Look at it all as engineers. Which is more probable: that everything around us happened by an accident or that someone/something preceding us had a say in the design?

that moment when I browse the Internet via mobile phone and have to request the desktop version (chrome) because that fucking mobile view sucks AF

What a big fail if I choose the desktop view over the "responsive" one on my small device

I had spent about 3 months working on a feature for a CAD software in a company where I was an intern.
The day it was ready I commited everything to the main branch and asked a senior dev to check it.
It didn't work… we spent 30 minutes, tried almost eveything, but the software kept crashing (even if "it worked on my machine").
At that point he said "ok, we won't include this feature, it's ok"... even if I worked really hard for months to make it work, I felt so bad.

A few hours later I found out that for all this time I was trying it in debug mode, and a few types of errors were ignored, something which of course wasn't happening in release mode. Worst day in that company.

P.S.
The reason I wasn't testing it on release mode was the fact the solution was so big it took about 45 minutes to compile it (using IncrediBuild, compiling it using more than 10 machines at the same time), so I always used the debug mode to compile every small change in less than 2 minutes.

Okay, one after another. They like to piss me off, apparently.

Coleague knows something isn't possible with current state of some api and pushes phone to me so I can maybe figure out what to reply to client. I dry-typed in "Its not possible" gave him phone and said "boom done, you know it aint possible"

Okay, TL;DR she got pissed that I am pissed that this BS is thrown at me and I dont want to participate in promissing something I know is undeliverable.

So she told me to go to PM/PO *kind of guy but not rly* with that problem. He aint technical by any mean. We are small company and for some reason this guy has more bearoucratic approach than I thought is possible to fit in one human.

Anyway. Well, apparently we will have meeting what are our options.
It all beginned that one guy promissed other guy undeliverable feature....

And becouse someone couldn't use his fucking brain it's pushed onto me, or I need to figure out how to do it. You cant without introducing safety flaw, period, it's that fuckin' simple.

But nooo, we will have god-knows-how-long meeting, that will bring exacly 0 value, as fking allways, and all I want now is just fucking focus on my fucking code becouse, ya know, I have timeline to follow, I dont have time to all that BS.

And to give you context, while keeping the stuff I cant share secret, imagine you have an API, that is just 'facade' of backend API, and layer of security. And they want to add authoritative endpoint to the facade API. Kind of endpoint "yes, you got paid".

Bravo, big brain, it will not work without like huge-as-fuck vunrability...

IDIOTS

How to not get pissed? Any protips?

1. Nothing lasts forever and you always need to be prepared for change.

That might be technology acquired by other company and dropped completely by all of people or new technology take over the market for a year and is gone after that and no one remember about it.

2. If you go opposite way then all of people around you that might be actually the best way.

That learned me to always look around for new stuff cause this small stuff that people make today can be big company next day just cause they got annoyed by things and start something new.

3. Trust nothing that you see.

Bugs are everywhere

4. Quality and speed doesn’t matter when you start doing something but consistency matters a lot.

When you start doing something you suck and you need to be ok with fact that you’re going to make lots of stupid mistakes and learn from them.
When you start new prototype you don’t need dozen tools to finish it, you don’t need performance or perfection, you need consistency to finish it.

Good luck

Here's to @Wisecrack:

Some time ago I pitched an idea to my boss about a platform we implement to optimize some fucked-up processes and in fact a whole project and I boasted some 20-30% increase in productivity. Yeah, I know ... what a fucking big mouth.

Truth be told they (almost all project members) went all for it so we started working on that software.

A small step for me, a GIANT LEAP IN A FUCKING CESSPOOL.

And of course it's just the two of us - me and my colleague - as always.
And we don't have requirements - as always.
And now there are deadlines too!
And people be like: IS IT READY YET?

So between playing a consultant, a product owner, systems architect, product manager, designer, front-end/back-end developer, DBA, DevOps engineer, YOU-NAME-IT-ROLE, and dealing with my everyday work-related bullshit (because yes, I do that too) I lost all appetite for it.
I actually loved this idea and what it can be born out of it, now I'm frustrated. It's still relevant and it will still benefit them, but I am already FUCKING SICK AND TIRED OF IT.

So my "oh, how I'd love to help them" personality is fighting my "let them sink in their own shit" personality and I'll see which will come on top. :)

Truth is if I had the "5-years-ago me" energy a good chunk of that project would be done by now. 😁

Also yesterday my daughter had shouted at old people and had thrown stuff at them while at kindergarten. I sure hope they deserved it LOL.

FML?

A fun story on how I lost my end of year project :

Last year was my first year of college in computer science. To get to my school, I need to take two different buses with a kilometer distance between them.
The day that I had to send my end of year project, which was worth 25% of my final grade, I thought that it would be fun to use my skateboard to get to the second bus instead of walking. So, I got out of the bus, started skateboarding towards the second bus and, about 20 meters later, my wheel got stuck on a small rock which was big enough to make me do a front flip. I landed on my back and broke my left arm.
An hour later, at the hospital, I tried to send my project to my computer science teacher but I quickly realised that my spectacular fall destroyed my laptop's HDD and my end of year project.
And this is how I learned how important it is to back up my files in the cloud.

I am a big fan of the Go programming language. I really am. From syntax to the purpose and everything in between, I dig the language. I normally use it as a hobby language. My escape from my daily dosis of php, js and Java.....or when my workplace insists on believing that I am a designer instead of a developer........I am definitely not a designer....I am super slow at design.

But back at my main topic! Go. The language is cool, the environment is cool and it is booming here in the states.......can we PLEASE PRETTY PLEASE WITH CHERRIES ON TOP change the stupid mascot logo? I swear that thing looks absolutely fucking retarded. Much like the Perl 6 Mascot......I know this is a small thing but looking at that stupid "gopher" really irritates the fuck out of me. Coolest logo ever? Rust or Python really.

Worst:

Juggling two jobs, both being 100miles (~160km). apart from each other: one working for a big VFX studio as a render wrangler getting paid peanuts, and one as Junior SDET for an electronics company. I lasted 6 months on the former as I couldn't handle the insane drive anymore, and stayed on the latter for three more years due to the higher pay and comfy environment. I was really hoping to make connections with the former, too, since I wanted to get into Game Development or into programming cool VFX shit for Hollywood at least. Alas, I digress.

Best:

After I got laid off, I took an offer from a small company as a Graphics SWE that happened to have a terrible reputation. Upon reading glassdoor reviews and a few days deliberating, I just told myself: 'fuck it, I need a job so bad,' and took the offer. Turns out that was the perfect time to get hired (all the previous engineers are gone). Hell, those guys did not even practice proper version control, there was no git/svn repo to be found, and all their projects were in hard drives scattered somewhere in their office. I was a bit astounded. All the knowledge the devs had of the framework the company used were salvaged from tons of uncommented, spaghetti code. It was like the entire future of the company was riding on me and the other new guy that got hired 1 week before for the same position. A year later, CEO promoted both of us, which tripled my salary compared to my QA job.

Worst experience with managers.

Joined new company.

My work experience, knowledge and everything else was upto the mark(exceeded at some places) with their requirements. I was handling full technology stack for previous company.

But while negotiating he declined me salary I asked for because previous company was small (startup with no big name, it shut down after few years) also previous company payscale was low so they offered me increment based on that payscale( which was low compared to salary they offer for same experienced person).

He also hired one more guy who was from big company with same experience, but he got more salary than me. Later I came to know that he knows little compared to me and most of the time manager asked him to take help from me for coding.

Now at the time of increment he is offering me increment with which my salary is still less that the other guy.

I think its time to leave.

It’s actually been quite a fun day, after some ranting on one of our slack communities flutter channel, myself and my team realized we were in a really good place to give back.

We have been working on a large scale flutter application for about a year, phase 1 is about done and we at 11k LOC.

We have been doing a big push for testing over the last 2 months and are at about 50% coverage. The thing we realized is that is the 1 place flutter has fallen short with documentation.

Very little about what we learned for testing our code came out of a google search, or it came out of cobbling bits together from numerous searches and sources.

So we decided we are going to plan and host a virtual meetup to discuss what we have learned and hopefully teach a few people some useful things and hopefully also learn a few new things too.

In addition, and as it has a longer shelf life, we going to setup a medium publication for the company and start a series to cover small specific topics, specific use cases or scenarios that we had trouble with and solved.

Today I had my first thing to type out, had worked out how to test that a function that was passed into a widget was called. So the parent passes the child and onTap function but you are testing the child not the parent as the child is reusable...

Anyway, so with that idea I got hold of marketing for some assets, setup the publication and proceeded to type out 3 articles today, all nice short ones under 2 min reading time.

It really is nice to give back, it’s not like I am Remi smart and can go and write BLoC, but I am smart enough to figure shit out and type it up so that the next guy hopefully benefits from my brain bashing.

High paying unstable job at a startup vs. Low paying stable job at a huge company.

I'm currently at the latter and I'm expecting a job offer (hopefully!) from the other one today.

Low paying job:

Pros:
1) big name. (their stock has recently gone down tho)
2) insurance and stuff.
3) quite stable.
4) can re-skill and move to another team.
5) work from home.

Cons:
1) shit technologies.
2) lots of fake "we are a family" kinda crap.
3) shit pay for a huge company.
4) boring. I feel very unmotivated.
5) obsolete systems and management processes.
6) it would take years to save for a car even with my upcoming promotion pay raise.

High paying job:

Pros:
1) awesome salary. Like 6x my current.
2) up-to-date technologies. Something I'm passionate about.
3) team lead position.
4) I can buy a car in a couple of months.
5) might get a visa sponsorship in the future.
6) small team, my voice will be heard.

Cons:
1) it's a startup so it can go down anytime.
2) no insurance or any kinda benefits.
3) no work laptop.

I'm kinda in the beginning of my career, so my gut is telling me to risk it and go for the unstable job.
It will be my first time to be an "official" team lead and honestly idk how I'll go about it yet.

Which one would you go for?
And wish me luck! The interview went pretty well but I'm dreading for some reason.

To finish my photography portfolio website and get it online. I've been putting this off for YEARS. Just started again (and from scratch) and I've been making some progress for the last couple of days. I don't want to even look at that old project I scrapped, or maybe I will once I finish (read: publish) this one.

My problem before was that I was always looking at the big picture and was trying to figure everything out in one go.

In contrast with that, I now figured out a relatively simple and straightforward way to start off with no back end at all and just use static resources instead (with some logic to parse them every time I "upload" new stuff), which should be fine even in the long run if I end up being too lazy and/or busy to do the back end. In general, I now try to tackle small tasks one by one (even if I don't always write them down and/or track them) and realise that it's better to be done (even not in the best way I imagine it) than to not be done at all. It's as if I learn how to do stuff properly for the first time. Oh, well...

In highschool we went through something like a malware/phishing prevention course.

It was pretty cool tbh, we spend the whole hour in a virtual environment where you'd see common malware and phishing attempts, but the really fun you could also "hack" other students.

Hacking them means you could cause some things to happen on their "PC". One of those was showing in a captcha on their screen and they had to type a the string of your choosing, before they could access the rest of the "virtual computer" again.

You can probably guess where this is going.
I was the first who had the idea to mix big i and small L and tested it on our teacher, who was also part of this environment and screenshared to the projector.

Thanks to sitting next projection I could see the pixels and I can confirm: same character, Pixel perfect!

I will forever cherish the memory of my the teacher begging me to undo the "hack" and the chaos that followed amongst my peers 😈

Also one of the excersizes was stupid. Click on a phishing mail and enter your credentials in the form. I asked the teacher WTF kind of credentials they even want me to enter to microsooft.cum and they just said "the credentials obviously" so I think they got their karma🖕

Why do CEOs and higher ups always think development is just some easy quick thing you can spit out in a week? {
"I need a web app that can do X and I want to sell it to make more money!"
} or {
"I want something that can automate this thing here and then I can re-sell it!"
}

Usually, the project is something that already exists and has taken a whole team years to iron out and perfect and to compete with it would be insane or it exists and it's actually FOSS. We're a small MSP, we don't have the resources to make big ticket SELLABLE software.

It's so nice when kindness is retributed...
When on a flash shopping for wood, to fix my chair. Found out that the shop was way cheaper than a big chain I went a few days ago... Like up to 2/3 and 3/4 cheaper... Well, spent 1-hour shopping in such a small shop.
Meanwhile, started talking, telling what I'm doing with the wood and the tools... and eventually asked if she had any leftovers because I would use them.
A little more shopping, a little more talk and she asked, what will you do with the leftovers??
I've started talking about my new hobby, then the why I started this hobby (burn out), and that I'm making machines and tools with the stuff I'm buying...
Left with a big box full of leftovers, even a catalog with fine wood, all the same size...
It's nice when people reward kindness with kindness.
Also, gained a new costumer, never shopping anywhere else again if they have it.

Does anyone else here have coding-fatigue?
Like if someone gives me a problem (BIG or small), I can chalk out an architecture or "oh you can use this-n-this-n-this"

But if you ask me to code it, though it's easy as fuck, I dont want to and will drag it until I gush 2 coffees to force myself to do it.
You give me a junior dev who knows NOTHING and does the typing and I can guide him and make him do it all, but by myself? nah

PS: this only applies to work-code that isnt "fun" per-se. My own projects? no issues at all

Management: "Let's hire some folks and expand the team in this region. And then we will think about what they will exactly do. And then get more work or create more work with our own vision"

Hired developers *mind*: "Why the fuck is this small work done by such a big team? Why the fuck is this work done by a my team (different team) and not by the same team that built the product? Oh, they don't have bandwidth? They want to parallelize? And all decisions still have to go through the product team? They have months of experience and context? Right"

Well it's a bit long but worth reading, two crazy stories in one rant:

So there are 2 things to consider as being my first job. If entrepreneurship counts, when I was 16 my developer friend and I created a small local music magazine website. We had 2 editors and 12 writers, all music enthusiasts of more or less our age. We used a CMS to let them add the content. We used a non-profit organization mentorship and got us a mentor which already had his exit, and was close to his next one. The guy was purely a genius, he taught us all about business plans, advertising, SEO, no-pay model for the young journalists (we promised to give formal journalist certificates and salary when the site grows up)
We hired a designer, we hired a flash expert to make some advertising campaigns and started filling the site with content.

Due to our programming enthusiasm we added to the raw CMS some really cool automation: We scanned our country's radio charts each week using a cron job and the charts' RSS, made a bot to search the songs on youtube and posted the first search result as an embedded video using some reg-exps. This was one of the most fun coding times I've had. Doing these crazy stuff with none to little prior knowledge really proved me I can do anything with the power of will.

Then my partner travelled to work in an internship in the Netherlands and I was too lazy to continue it on my own and it closed, not so surprisingly for a 16 years old slacker boy.

Then the mentor offered my real first job. He had a huge forum (14GB of historical SQL) but it was dying, the CMS version was very old and he wanted me to upgrade it to the latest. It didn't seem hard at first, because there were very clear instructions in the CMS website on how to do that. However, the automation upgrade scripts didn't work well because the forum owners added some raw code (not MVC plugins but bad undocumented code) and some columns to the SQL tables. I didn't give up and decided to migrate between the versions without the scripts. I opened a new CMS and started learning by heart all of the database columns so I can make a script to migrate between the versions. The first tests ran forever because processing 14GB of data on a single home computer is not a task meant to be done. I didn't give up. I made an old forum and compared the table structures and code with my mentor's. I think I didn't exhaustively finish this solution, the task was too big on my shoulders and eventually I gave up. I still owe thanks for that mentor for teaching me how to bare with seemingly (and practically) impossible tasks, for learning not to fear from being a leader and an entrepreneur and also for paying me in time even though I didn't deliver anything 😂

Working on small scale games to working on a full blown VR 4 person MO game, the scale from one to another is pretty big, I seem to manage somehow though :D takong it all one step at a time, making sure I don't use any repeated code in places that could need it, cleaning up classes so it's easier to access for debugging, building nice inspector things so people that create art/particles and such don't have a hard time understanding my weird naming conventions.

I could go on and on really xD i've learnt so much and i'm still learning, and I really have nothing to rant about thesw days so i've gone back to lurk mode lol

After all those years, I finally understood what makes Half-Life 2 so immersive.

From the very beginning, as the game teaches you things about itself, you discover that every model is made with you in mind. The barrel is just tall enough to jump on it, but not taller. The big crate's size is calculated precisely for you to jump onto it from a small crate. Ladders are comfortable for you to climb on. Everything in this game world designed around you, the human.

…except for combine constructions.

They're awkward to walk around. You keep lowkey clipping into them. Half-transparent armor fence looks like you can jump over it, but you can't. It's just a bit taller than that, on purpose. Combine towers are hard to climb onto. You keep bumping into things. Once you locate the ladder and climb all the way up, you bump your head into the ceiling. You don't have much room for movement on top. Combine walls have an inconclusive, uncomfortable physics model that is very annoying to interact with. If you run into it and jump, you clip into it just enough to stop your movement instantly.

This hammers in the message — combines aren't human. Their constructions aren't meant for humans. This was my biggest discovery the last time I played Half-Life 2.

HL2 is a strong contender to be my favorite game of all time.

TLDR;

When governments started printing money to cure new pandemic and crash current market with great inflation I took all my savings, got a loan and bought biggest property I could afford. Every major news station was talking about end of world, but this was not I was scared of. I was scared of the helicopter money that would wipe my 5 years old savings.

When I was about to sign loan papers to buy my first apartment I got an email that my contract will end in 3 months. I said ok, the contractor company will find me something else.

I asked and they assured me they will do it. After my contract end just before summer holidays there was silence from contracting company and then after 5 years of me earning them piles of money, after finished project and congratulations from customer they offered me most shitty job they had where people resign after a week. I said I don’t want to land in another shit hole bring it back to life for another 2-5 years and kill myself when they offer me same shit afterwards so I resigned.

It was so fucked up that even the boss from the client I was contracting asked me if I lost my job cause I finished all that they wanted. I said it’s not your fault man. I will be ok, but I wasn’t.

I had apartment I couldn’t move in cause I needed to renovate. Loan I needed to pay. Rented apartment, accountant and business that was loosing money cause I was without contract, the world was locked down and everyone was depressed.

I said ok, I still have some savings left so I I started looking for something new but market was dead. Everyone was gone for holidays after winter lockdown. I was burning money and trying to figure out what to do.

After 2 months of nothing, when I started thinking about finding some temporary job to not loose everything I worked for, things moved. I started attending hiring meetings and solving tests everyday, also from big four gang but I didn’t passed trough hr due to how they say I’m to independent and I need to look for consulting business or do something on my own.

People asked why I don’t do something on my own and I politely answered that I want to work there.

I was about to run out of money when I got a call that company is looking for me cause I was doing similar things they want to do. During interviews it was pleasant small talk about what id did over those years and what they want to do, 2 days later I joined small team. I barely managed to survive a month for a first paycheck.

Since then we created new product for a company. Now the person who hired me is leaving and I think I should also leave the ship and find other things to do.

!rant

TL;DR one year on as a react dev, I want to go at it self employed, humbly seeking advice as this community seems to have its fair share of knowledgeable freelancers.

I have 1 year professional experience now as a Meteor, React and Apollo developer

The dream is to become self employed. I figure a good market would be small businesses that want a website that are more featureful than a diy wix site.

Only I am more of a developer than a designer, so rely heavily on things like Bootstrap or Material ui. So I wonder if Upwork, Fiverr or simply my own freelance website would be better.

As you guessed javascript is my biggest strength, not sure if nodejs is the best backend for small businesses as hosting prices are more than eqv php stack.

Also want to build own projects on the side to monetize. Bigger dream would be to be client-less and develop and sell personal projects.

Seeking advice from those who are self employed. Am I dreaming too big?

Shall I keep the office job for a bit longer then take the plunge? Or do you think I can just go for it. Are there lucrative areas I am missing?

Thanks in advanced

I'm about to get my MSc and I've been getting a lot of interesting offers as a software engineer at small and big companies.
But I'm a fucking chemical engineer, and I don't know if I should be honoured or I should be mad. What the fuck is wrong with people?

Microsoft buys npm
Am I the only one seeing a tendency of a few big companies (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Yandex, Tencent and 10-15 more) slowly (or not so slowly) acquiring more and more small companies? I hope however that it stays as transparent to the end user; I also hope it even helps, because I hate getting used to a product/service and then the company dropping it because they have no resource and/or interest in supporting it (Google Inbox anyone?)

Being a front end developer and working in a team of motivated "full stack" developers sucks big time.
So, recently joined this new company with a very small project which just started, basically a cloud version of a really old desktop app. Few people from the team completely from the asp dotnet background decided the architecture few months before I joined in.
So, they did it something like this -

- mono repo dotnet project with VueJs app served within it (because that would be maintainable 😑)
- vue app served by pointing the built files through dotnet index file (simply because they didn't care about the gift to the front end world which is webpack or even had any knowledge about it 😑)
- added typescript because, u know it's cool 😑, without even knowing that they don't possess that team which know how to write the types (f***ers write classes for every payload object coz they don't know what interfaces are)
- no loader to load typescript, they are running tsc in watch mode and we have .js and .js.map for every .ts file in our project which some teammates are even pushing to repo

Recently, I added eslint with git hooks to the project so that everyone will at least stick to the coding standards. Now, to avoid the errors they are bypassing the git hooks by uninstalling the library and then installing it after the commit😂😂
Then we have a girl who uses document.getElementById to programmatically change styles in a Vue project😑😑😑😂
Then we have dotnet people using dotnet coding conventions all over the front end app.

People, how do I deal with these so called "full stack" people?

Anyone here making big bucks working for a small company? I've interned at startups and worked full time for fortune 500's, but I'm considering looking at smaller companies in the future just because the corporate environment kind of burns me out. What's it like being a senior level developer for a smaller company? Is the money typically there? And in your experience, what about quality and expectation of work? I would love to have some more say and passion into what I'm building and take home a big chunk of what a business earns but I don't know how realistic that is.

I'd also like to start my own e-commerce company but as a web developer with 0 business / marketing experience that seems far off lol

One of the big ISP/entertainment companies dug up the roads a few months back and laid fibre optic cables (cutting through a power cable in the process but that's another story).

Recently had someone turn up at my door to chat about their services. All sounded very good, I took a card and gave it some thought and did some research.

So, it'd be a little cheaper than my current provider (FTTC setup). It'd be faster for downloads, slightly slower for uploads (I want fast upload). IPv6 is only on their business packages. I use IPv6 a lot. I also have several static IPv4 addresses.

It would involve getting a cable in to where my equipment rack is, and one to where the TV is (which I spent ages building a TV unit with power, network etc.)

To record/watch TV in another room with their service, I'd need to pay extra. The service just provides HD channels that I can already get, unless I pay more. At the moment I have MythTV handling all the recording of TV shows I want, and Kodi to play them back on different TVs, via CAT6 I spent ages installing into the walls.

Then there's the uncertainty of how nicely their equipment will play with my relatively complicated setup.

I decided, it isn't worth it really for me. I would have to change a load of stuff just to end up with what I already have... But with more limitations.

Anyway, the guy turned up again a few days later, I told him of my decision and away he went.

Since then I have been visited by 2 other employees of this company to try to sell me the service.

It is probably great and convenient if you are not like me and DIY all your home network and media distribution setup...

Also the ISP I'm with is quite small. They are very knowledgeable and friendly and I can get through to someone quickly if i phone. What I use meets my needs, so I prefer to support the smaller company in this case.

I have been working with git for years now, and I could never work on a project (regardless if big or small) without it. Its great.
However, just a couple of days ago I learned about the git flow branching model.
Even tho I also worked with branching on a daily basis for years, I did not know about this model. And I have to admit: Its awesome.
If you don't know it, I highly recommend you to look it up. It really improves the already organized workflow with git even more. :)

What’s one thing (big or small) you still don’t know or understand in software development and still don’t give a fuck.

Mine: Bitwise operation

Adobe's ExtendScript toolkit is abyssmal. I find posts from 2008 referring to issues that have not changed even in CC2017. Do you think they are small issues I'm bitching about? I'll list 2. First, the toolkit only colours "var, return, for, foreach" and a bit more keywords and the strings, of course you can set up color schemes but those are limited and not colouring stuff. The second issue is auto-complete, it rarely kicks in and suggestions have 0 connection to what are you doing and are always the same. It doesn't recognize anything of what are you doing.

Probably in 2008 you had to program with the manual near you like writing assembler, now there's an improvement in 2017, they got a window named object browser or something like that that actually is a summarised portable manual that could've been easily transformed in auto-complete suggestions.

Adobe writes about this and I quote: "a complete integrated development environment". Although I will not write much scripts in it, I need to write a big one and thought about extracting that object data and putting it in a more capable javascript editor. LO and Behold what I discovered, the ExtendScript Toolkit that's supposed to edit Extended javascript and save it as jsx or jsxbin is almost completely (it has some dlls too) built using around 100 jsx files. It's the equivalent of building a js IDE to edit js.

Sorry for formatting, I'm on mobile, I tried.

I need to get this out there because you guys and gals are honestly the only people I can vent this to.

I’m working on a program for fun that’ll transfer files over sockets. Nothing too special. But this project is just boring me. I’m not getting any motivation even when I’m getting started. Which didn’t happen last project.

I have a general idea how I’m going to do it but I just can’t sit down and do it because I start overthinking about everything. Like how am I going to do this or that. How am I going to handle feature a, feature b, etc. And I’m just getting a headache and I’m not writing code and I’m JUST FUCKING STARING LIKE AN IDIOT. I don’t even know why it’s not inspiring me because I’ve always wanted to program a file transferring application of some kind and I still do.

I keep doing a bunch of small patches when I work on it and they work and improve it but I am hard on myself because it’s not one big feature or I didn’t work on it for hours. I’m always so fucking hard on myself fuck.

I want to do so much other stuff but I just wanna tough it on through and finish but it’s so uninspired because I don’t even feel like what the final product will feel like others. Like any service that involves transferring files I feel like they don’t function like how I’m thinking they do like I’m trying to make this function.

I feel like everything I’m making is just subpar and not good and I’m trying and I’m trying to improve but I feel like I’m not getting anywhere. And I want to learn a lot of stuff I have shit planned but I can’t get to it because I have to go through uninspired bullshit hell.

Idk

!!!rant

Most exited I've been about some code? Probably for some random "build a twitter clone with Rails" tutorial I found online.

I've been working on my CS degree for a while (theoretical CS) but I really wanted to mess with something a bit more practical. I had almost none web dev experience, since I've been programming mostly OS-related stuff till then (C). I started looking around, trying to find a stack that's easy to learn since my time was limited- I still had to finish with my degree.

I played around with many languages and frameworks for a week or two. Decided to go with Ruby/Rails and built a small twitter clone blindly following a tutorial I found online and WAS I FUCKING EXITED for my small but handmade twitter clone had come to life. Coming from a C background, Ruby was weird and felt like a toy language but I fell in love.

My excitement didn't fade. I bought some books, studied hard for about a month, learned Ruby, Rails, JavaScript, SQL (w/ pg) and some HTML/CSS. Only playing with todo apps wasn't fun. I had a project idea I believed might be somewhat successful so I started working on it.

The next few months were spent studying and working on my project. It was hard. I had no experience on any web dev technology so I had learn so many new things all at once. Picked up React, ditched it and rewrote the front end with Vue. Read about TDD, worked with PostgreSQL, Redis and a dozen third party APIs, bought a vps and deployed everything from scratch. Played it with node and some machine learning with python.

Long story short, one year and about 30 books later, my project is up and running, has about 4k active monthly users, is making a profit and is steadily growing. If everything goes well, next week I'll close a deal with a pretty big client and I CANT BE FKING HAPPIER AND MORE EXCITED :D Towards the end of the month I'll also be interviewed for a web dev position.

That stupid twitter clone tutorial made me excited enough to start messing with web technologies. Thank you stupid twitter clone tutorial, a part of my heart will be yours forever.

Big company vs small company pros and cons?

Ever since i joined my company, things are getting worse.

from small details like them abandoning team lunches to big ones like the fact no one or at least i didnt get any bonus this year.

I know for a fact bonuses were a thing before i joined and i was really looking forward to it...

And now by the end of the month we will recieve word about whether we are getting acquired or not...

After reading this rant one would think the company is getting bankrupt, and this worries me because this job was best i could ever ask for, i dont wanna abandon ship :/

Inspired by a programming is a constant/continuous thing. Every small and big achievements, from squishing a bug, finding a workaround, pressing the "Build" button and the programme runs. Each time the brain feels expanded like when a baby discovers new things, a tiny creature in a gigantic Universe of endless possibilities.

Joined a big corporate for the first time in my life a few months ago, after years and years in small companies and startups.

Went from designing new creative solutions and finding challenging problems to working on small stupid tasks and obeying a fucking idiotic company culture, that is nothing but words that are not applied in reality. Creativity and enthusiasm are discouraged for the sake of maintaining the status quo.

Probably the worst decision in my life. I don't think I can do this for long.