Best quotes from IT teacher:

- "C# is a language to program your IDE."
- "C# is a language for beginners, and is not really used in production."
- "We won't use Python to learn programming, because Python is a very old, slow and useless language, and is not really used anymore."
- "Yeah, your algorithm is fantastic, but you wrote 'The answer is: ' instead of 'Answer: ', so it's just a B."
- One of my classmates was bored and opened Notepad++, and when the teacher saw it, she said "I have been teaching programming for years, but I've never seen this program, what do you use it for?"

I feel so lucky that I have started learning programming years before at home, I just couldn't start if I had to learn this way.

Holy fucking shit. I just went to my first Java class at uni (3 1/2 hour long one at that) and I havent felt so damn irritated in a while.

Some background:
So first, I only had about an hour of sleep last night and a full day of work before this class so I was more cranky than normal.
Theres only 7 students in the class, 6 others plus me. I am the only one with any resemblence of programming experience. The teacher also claims to be a linux developer.
This is a three part course series. Java 1, 2, and 3. All taught by the same teacher.

The fuckery:
-teacher spends 48 minutes talking about text editors. Not even IDEs. Just talking in depth as fuck about notepad (notepad. Not notepad++ )and atom and textpad. Those three only though, nothing on vim or emacs or ACTUAL IDEs. 48 minutes.
- I briefly mentioned learning node.js on the side and am now the "javascript girl" to my teacher. I'm probably less experienced with js than any other thing i ever practised or studied.
-professor saw linux on laptop and asked what distro. When I said arch he said "oh no you shouldnt be using that Its not really for beginners" ... Uhh what makes you think I'm a beginner to linux? Or does he not think I should be using arch while learning java? Either way its really ridiculous and irritates me that he would discourage anyone from using any software/OS/anything, regardless of what it is or skill level.
-teacher moved a bunch of content out of the course because theyre either "concepts that are never implemented anymore" or "arent critical to know to master the language". These particular topics that were removed? Multi-dimensional arrays, scopes, and exception handling. EXCEPTION HANDLING.
-he writes a hello world program and displays it on the board, proof of it working and everything. He tells the class to write the same program, compile and run it. Never did I guess we would spend the remaining hour and ten minutes of class struggling with fucking hello world programs. Especially when the correct code is on the fucking projector.

And I get it guys, everyone starts somewhere. People have to learn from square one. But these kids have no fucking interest in this. One of them literally admitted to pursuing this degree for the "lavish life" that comes with the salary. Others just picked programming because they didnt know what else to choose to get into the school. It fucking saddens me. I hope that one or some of them end up caring and finding a passion in this field, otherwise I feel fucking sorry for them having to spaghetti code their way through life to get a paycheck cause they couldnt be bothered to put in the effort. I feel even more sorry for any devs they work with in the future too.

The other annoying bit is that I can't test out of this class!! so it looks like for either 7 hours a week ill be bored out of my fucking mind with these beginner concepts or ill be helping others fix really stupid shit in their code (like putting quotes around hello world so it would actually print the string).

Fucking hell. Waste of a semester class.

I'm a self-taught 19-year-old programmer. Coding since 10, dropped out of high-school and got fist job at 15.

In the the early days I was extremely passionate, learning SICP, Algorithms, doing Haskell, C/C++, Rust, Assembly, writing toy compilers/interpreters, tweaking Gentoo/Arch. Even got a lambda tattoo on my arm after learning lambda-calculus and church numerals.

My first job - a company which raised $100,000 on kickstarter. The CEO was a dumb millionaire hippie, who was bored with his money, so he wanted to run a company even though he had no idea what he was doing. He used to talk about how he build our product, even tho he had 0 technical knowledge whatsoever. He was on news a few times which was pretty cringeworthy. The company had only 1 programmer (other than me) who was pretty decent.

We shipped the project, but soon we burned through kickstart money and the sales dried off. Instead of trying to aquire customers (or abandoning the project), boss kept looking for investors, which kept us afloat for an extra year.

Eventually the money dried up, and instead of closing gates, boss decreased our paychecks without our knowledge. He also converted us from full-time employees to "contractors" (also without our knowledge) so he wouldn't have to pay taxes for us. My paycheck decreased by 40% by I still stayed.

One day, I was trying to burn a USB drive, and I did "dd of=/dev/sda" instead of sdb, therefore wiping out our development server. They asked me to stay at company, but I turned in my resignation letter the next day (my highest ever post on reddit was in /r/TIFU).

Next, I found a job at a "finance" company. $50k/year as a 18-year-old. CEO was a good-looking smooth-talker who made few million bucks talking old people into giving him their retirement money.

He claimed he changed his ways, and was now trying to help average folks save money. So far I've been here 8 month and I do not see that happening. He forces me to do sketchy shit, that clearly doesn't have clients best interests in mind.

I am the only developer, and I quickly became a back-end and front-end ninja. 

I switched the company infrastructure from shitty drag+drop website builder, WordPress and shitty Excel macros into a beautiful custom-written python back-end.

Little did I know, this company doesn't need a real programmer. I don't have clear requirements, I get unrealistic deadlines, and boss is too busy to even communicate what he wants from me.

Eventually I sold my soul. I switched parts of it to WordPress, because I was not given enough time to write custom code properly.

For latest project, I switched from using custom React/Material/Sass to using drag+drop TypeForms for surveys.

I used to be an extremist FLOSS Richard Stallman fanboy, but eventually I traded my morals, dreams and ideals for a paycheck. Hey, $50k is not bad, so maybe I shouldn't be complaining? :(

I got addicted to pot for 2 years. Recently I've gotten arrested, and it is honestly one of the best things that ever happened to me. Before I got arrested, I did some freelancing for a mugshot website. In un-related news, my mugshot dissapeared.

I have been sober for 2 month now, and my brain is finally coming back. 

I know average developer hits a wall at around $80k, and then you have to either move into management or have your own business.

After getting sober, I realized that money isn't going to make me happy, and I don't want to manage people. I'm an old-school neck-beard hacker. My true passion is mathematics and physics. I don't want to glue bullshit libraries together. 

I want to write real code, trace kernel bugs, optimize compilers. Albeit, I was boring in the wrong generation.

I've started studying real analysis, brushing up differential equations, and now trying to tackle machine learning and Neural Networks, and understanding the juicy math behind gradient descent.

I don't know what my plan is for the future, but I'll figure it out as long as I have my brain. Maybe I will continue making shitty forms and collect paycheck, while studying mathematics. Maybe I will figure out something else.

But I can't just let my brain rot while chasing money and impressing dumb bosses. If I wait until I get rich to do things I love, my brain will be too far gone at that point. I can't just sell myself out. I'm coming back to my roots.

I still feel like after experiencing industry and pot, I'm a shittier developer than I was at age 15. But my passion is slowly coming back.

Any suggestions from wise ol' neckbeards on how to proceed?

I think the weekly rants just exist because @dfox & @trogus got banned from stackoverflow and they still have questions.

When it comes to learning cutting edge tech... Go build already!

I found Rust intimidating.

I read the first few pages of the official book, got bored, gave up.

Few months later, decided to write a "simple" tool for generating pleasing Jetbrains IDE color schemes using Rust. I half-finished it by continuously looking up stuff, then got stuck at some ungoogleable compiler error.

Few months later I needed to build a microservice for work, and against better judgement gave Rust a try in the weekend. Ended up building an unrelated library instead, uploaded my first package to crates.io.

Got some people screaming at me that my Rust code sucked. Screamed back at them. After lots of screaming, I got some helpful PRs.

Eventually ended up building many services for work in Rust after all. With those services performing well under high load and having very few bugs, coworkers got interested. Started hiring Rust engineers, and educating interested PHP/JS devs.

Now I professionally write Rust code almost full-time.

Moral of the story:

Fuck books, use them for reference. Fuck Udemy (etc), unless you just want to 2x through it while pooping.

Learning is something you do by building a project, failing, building something else, falling again, building some more, sharing what you've made, fighting about what you've built with some entitled toxic nerds, abandoning half your projects and starting twelve new ones.

Reading code is better than reading documentation.

Listening to users of your library/product teaches you more than listening to keynote speakers at conferences.

Don't worry about failures, you don't need to deliver a working product for it to be a valuable experience.

Oh, and trying to teach OTHERS is an excellent method to discover gaps in your knowledge.

Just get your fucking hands dirty!

Story time.

Not sure it counts as data loss, more temporary corruption (and in my own brain).

> be me.
> be clinically depressed
> be recently out of an awful breakup
> recently nearly committed suicide by train
> be bored and lonely one night
> take lsd
> feel fine
> go to McDonald’s
> feel fine
> while eating question the nature of reality
> become convinced I’m an observer of a cosmic story and cannot die
> go outside in only jeans
> run in traffic at 1AM to prove my point
> don’t die
> run around the streets more sure of my new reality than I’d ever been of anything
> feel free and no longer sad
> walk around observing the world
> sit on wall and wonder why the story had the structure I was observing
> fall off wall into grass and mud
> follow cute guy into apartment building
> follow into lift
> ask what everything means
> spend better part of couple hours in lift pressing emergency button asking for help
> get no response
> scare poor Russian lady that gets into lift and finds an overweight topless man on the floor babbling incoherently
> ride to top floor
> get out
> sit on leather chair in corridor
> feelsnice.tiff
> decide I’m actualising my desires and reality
> don’t realise this is just the trip wearing off and consciousness exerting more control
> walk into random apartment (door is unlocked because why wouldn’t it be for the god that I believe I am at this point)
> explore
> gorgeous apartment
> realise it’s a family apartment from clothes in hallway and items
> find bathroom
> decide I want a bubble bath
> run bubble bath
> can’t work out how to drain water. Bath now full of twigs and mud #sorry
> decide that I’d like to go home, or onto my next adventure. Hopefully the seaside as I’m now realising I have more control.
> open bathroom door
> not the seaside. Ah well. Try to walk home
> walk home wrapped in fluffy towel from nice family’s apartment
> get home
> realise what had happened
> throw remaining drugs away
> sit and rock in utter paranoia and guilt for hours until flatmate wakes up.

MFW first bad trip ever.
MFW I wonder whether that family knew I was there and were scared / discovered the mess in the bathroom the next morning and not knowing which is worse.

MFW I still have the towel because it’s fluffy AF.

The moral of the story kids, is that when it comes to the OS rattling around in your brain, installing a virus that is sensitive to what apps you have running is a bad idea when those apps make the virus go to fucking town.

Terrible analogy I know, but fuck it.

Seven months ago:
===============
Project Manager: - "Guys, we need to make this brand new ProjectX, here are the specs. What do you think?"

Bored Old Lead: - "I was going to resign this week but you've convinced me, this is a challenge, I never worked with this stack, I'm staying! I'll gladly play with this framework I never used before, it seems to work with this libA I can use here and this libB that I can use here! Such fun!"

Project Manager: - "Awesome! I'm counting on you!"

Six months ago:
====================
Cprn: - "So this part you asked me to implement is tons of work due to the way you're using libA. I really don't think we need it here. We could use a more common approach."

Bored Old Lead: - "No, I already rewrote parts of libB to work with libA, we're keeping it. Just do what's needed."

Cprn: - "Really? Oh, I see. It solves this one issue I'm having at least. Did you push the changes upstream?"

Bored Old Lead: - "No, nobody uses it like that, people don't need it."

Cprn: - "Wait... What? Then why did you even *think* about using those two libs together? It makes no sense."

Bored Old Lead: - "Come on, it's a challenge! Read it! Understand it! It'll make you a better coder!"

Four months ago:
==============
Cprn: - "That version of the framework you used is loosing support next month. We really should update."

Bored Old Lead: - "Yeah, we can't. I changed some core framework mechanics and the patches won't work with the new version. I'd have to rewrite these."

Cprn: - "Please do?"

Bored Old Lead: - "Nah, it's a waste of time! We're not updating!"

Three months ago:
===============
Bored Old Lead: - "The code you committed doesn't pass the tests."

Cprn: - "I just run it on my working copy and everything passes."

Bored Old Lead: - "Doesn't work on mine."

Cprn: - "Let me take a look... Ah! Here you go! You've misused these two options in the framework config for your dev environment."

Bored Old Lead: - "No, I had to hack them like that to work with libB."

Cprn: - "But the new framework version already brings everything we need from libB. We could just update and drop it."

Bored Old Lead: - "No! Can't update, remember?"

Last Friday:
=========
Bored Old Lead: - "You need to rewrite these tests. They work really slow. Two hours to pass all."

Cprn: - "What..? How come? I just run them on revision from this morning and all passed in a minute."

Bored Old Lead: - "Pull the changes and try again. I changed few input dataset objects and then copied results from error messages to assertions to make the tests pass and now it takes two hours. I've narrowed it to those weird tests here."

Cprn: - "Yeah, all of those use ORM. Maybe it's something with the model?"

Bored Old Lead: - "No, all is fine with the model. I was just there rewriting the way framework maps data types to accommodate for my new type that's really just an enum but I made it into a special custom object that needs special custom handling in the ORM. I haven't noticed any issues."

Cprn: - "What!? This makes *zero* sense! You're rewriting vendor code and expect everything to just work!? You're using libs that aren't designed to work together in production code because you wanted a challenge!?? And when everything blows up you're blaming my test code that you're feeding with incorrect dataset!??? See you on Monday, I'm going home! *door slam*"

Today:
=====
Project Manager: - "Cprn, Bored Old Lead left on Friday. He said he can't work with you. You're responsible for Project X now."

You can believe or not but it’s just one of those stories. It’s long and crazy and it probably happened.

A few years ago I was interviewed by this big insurance company. They asked me on linkedin and were interested. They didn’t specify who they were so I didn’t specify who I am either.

After they revealed who they are I was just curious how they fuck they want to spend those billions of dollars they claimed in their press notes about this fucking digital transformation everyone is talking about. The numbers were big.

I got into 3 or 4 phone/skype interviews without technical questions and I was invited to see them by person.
I know that it would be funny because they didn’t asked me for CV so they didn’t know anything about me and I was just more curious how far I can get without revealing myself.

They canceled interview at midnight and I was in the middle of Louis de Funès comedies marathon so I didn’t sleep whole night. I assumed they would just reschedule but then they phoned me at 8 am if I can come because they made mistake.

So at first talk I was just interviewed by some manager I knowed after 5 minutes he would be shitty as fuck and demand stupid things in no time because he is not technical. He was trying to explain me that they got so great people and they do everything so fast.

From my experience speed and programming are not the things that match. ( for reference of my thought see three virtues of a GREAT programmer )

So I just pissed them off by asking what they would do with me when I finish this transformation thingy next year. ( Probably get rid off and fire at some point were my thoughts )

Then I got this technical interview on newest gold color MacBook pro - pair programming ( they were showing off how much money they have all the time ).
The person asked me to transform json and get some data in javascript .

Really that was the thing and I was so bored and tired that I just asked in what ES standard I can code.
The problem was despite he told me I can do anything and they are using newest standards ( yeah right ) the “for of” loop didn’t worked and he even didn’t know that syntax existed. So I explained him it’s the newest syntax pointing mozilla page and that he need to adjust his configuration. Because we didn’t have time for that I just did it using var an function by writing bunch of code.
When he was asking me if I want to write some tests probably because my code looked ugly as fuck ( I didn’t sleep for more then 24 hours at that point and wanted to live the building as fast as I can) I told I finished and there is no time for tests because it’s so simple and dumb task. The code worked.

After showing me how awesome their office is ( yeah please I work from home so I don’t care ) I got into the talk with VP of engineering and he was the only person who asked me where is my CV because he didn’t know what to talk about. I just laughed at him and told him that I got here just by talking how awesome I am so we can talk about whatever he wants.
After quick talk about 4 different problems where I introduced 4 different languages and bunch of libraries just because I can and I worked with those he was mine.

He told me about this awesome stack they’re building with kubernetes and micro services and the shitty future where they want to put IOT into peoples ass to sell them insurance and suddenly I got awake and started to want that job but behind that all awesomeness there was just .NET bridge with stack of mainframes running COBOL that they want to get rid off and move company to the cloud.

They needed mostly people who would dump code to different technology stack and get rid of old stack ( and probably those old people ) and I was bored again because I work more in r&d field where you sometimes need to think about something that don’t exist and be creative.

I asked him why it would take so much time so he explained me how they would do the transformation by consolidating bunch of companies and how much money they would make by probably firing people that don’t know about it to this day.

I didn’t met any person working permanently there but only consultants from corporations and people hired in some 3rd party company created by this mother company.

They didn’t responded with any decision after me wasting so much time and they asked me for interview for another position year after.
I just explained HR person how they treat people and I don’t want to work there for any money.

If You reached this point it is the end and if it was entertaining thank YOU I did my best.

Have a nice day.

It's strange what you can learn when you have too much deadtime.

Last week I learned balloon twisting through youtube videos. A co-worker and I decorated the desk of a co-worker for her birthday.

I made her this balloon throne (from Game of Thrones). Notice that I was soooooo bored.

She loved it ^_^

OK.
1. So i tindered.
2. I got a really nice girl.
3. We chatted really long and good.
4. We tried to meetup it did not work because of our schedule. New
job on my end, she is a student.
5. I thought its over. Fine whatever.
6. She gives me her number.
7. We continue chat on whatsapp
8. Blablabla 3 days long, she gets bored and tries to friendzone me
9. I revert the shit and state i wanna be serious and there wont be a
friendzone/nice guy comin from me.
10. She happy and continues to chat.
11. I get emtionally invested in her.
12. We exchange thoughts dreams and music.
13 We want to meetup at weekend. I cant. Got a family wedding all
weekend.
14. We want to meetup the second week.
I cant. Im off on a company trip. Again new job here.
15. So we say in the week after I get back.
15a. Before the weekend we need to deliver an rc and go all out to hold
the deadline.
15b. We deliver, but shit happens on the customer side. His fault but we
get the blame.
15c I go onto the company trip.
16. We chat and i send her pictures of the trip over the weekend so she
sees I care.
17. She seems fine. And happy.
18. I come back from the trip late night and need to work the next day
jetlag style.
19. I work jetlag style. And try to fix the shit from last week.
20. I come home really tired and looking forward to date day tomorrow.
21. I cant do anything. My home looks like shit and the bag still
unpacked. I just eat and fall asleep.
I feel bad bcs my home will turn her down instantly if we make it to my
place.
Need to hope that it does not come to this.
22. Date day comes. Today.
23. I wake up at 6 early to plan ahead to make sure my clothes are fine
and i arrive on time in the office to exit early.
24. I expect to check what goes on today in the city and give her the
location to meet and time.
25. I enter office and immeadetly get caught up in meeting planning, dev
questions and the meeting itself because the project is on edge.
26. We have a 5hours long meeting where people go on and on and on.
27. 3h later in the meeting:
my brain was fried and around 12 i go to lunch with some people.
28. Meanwhile the city is turning into a rainy mess of a shitty day. No
way I can have a nice walk with her like that. Bars and coffeshops are
just to boring.
29. So i eat to regain some sense and we go back to the office.
Meanwhile I am thinking all kinds of locations and stuff in my head.
30. Havent given her any update since a good morning in the morning.
31. We reenter the meeting. Things continue like before. The project is
on impossible demands and impossible timelines. Still we try to do our
best.
32 3h later on 3pm I tell her i am in a long meeting and working on a
meetingspot.
33. shes not happy.
34. I get a call from a relative
35. i need to go out and take the call. not good for the collegues.
again new job here.
36. family trouble,  money trouble, goverment demands. I promise to
handle that tomorrow. Before work.
37. i get back into the meeting.
38. still super slow and no results.
39. need to focus but start to check for locations on my phone.
40. she asks me where i am
41. I send her my location.
42. she thinks i am saying she should pick me up!
43 i joke and say no definitly not.
44. shes pissed.
45.  I decide for a coffeeshop. after work. and send her the location
46. She says to call it off.
47. I go all in and go romance style. I say ill wait there even if she
does not come to show her how much i care.
U know to avoid the lets do it some other time fuckery and then it never
happens.
47. She goes quiet.
48. 2h later we finish the meeting. Meanwhile QA foudn a bug we need to
fix because why not.
49. I got 30 minutes to find the bug and fix it before I need to go to
uphold my word.
50. I find out what to do, but it might break a lot of other things
without careful test and implementation. Collegues says he takes it.
51 I feel bad but I need to go. I even leave earlier because otherwise I
would not be on time.
52. I arrive 15 minutes early. I grab two coffee2go and wait outside,
53. Shitty weather, sometimes rain, sometimes sunny, cant decide what it
wants.
54. The weather is just like how I feel.
55. I wait 1 1/2h
56. I think I should feel stupid, For gods sake its tinder. People dont
give a crap, Enough people around why should I Invest so much into this?
But I dont feel stupid. Because this is how I want it. I dont want
appointments, I dont want safety. I decided for her and I went all in.
57. I send her pics from the sceneray as proof that I waited,
58. I think I blew it. She is still quiet.
59. Friends are asking me for plans for the weekend. I wish I could say
I already have some with her.
60. I feel lost right now. But my head says I put too much stress on
her, And i fucked up with the planning. I should have been more precise.
My head also says that i am putting myself into the victim role, which
is wrong always. Should I continue to reach out to her? Is there
something I could do still?

Worst hack/attack I had to deal with?

Worst, or funniest. A partnership with a Canadian company got turned upside down and our company decided to 'part ways' by simply not returning his phone calls/emails, etc. A big 'jerk move' IMO, but all I was responsible for was a web portal into our system (submitting orders, inventory, etc).

After the separation, I removed the login permissions, but the ex-partner system was set up to 'ping' our site for various updates and we were logging the failed login attempts, maybe 5 a day or so. Our network admin got tired of seeing that error in his logs and reached out to the VP (responsible for the 'break up') and requested he tell the partner their system is still trying to login and stop it. Couple of days later, we were getting random 300, 500, 1000 failed login attempts (causing automated emails to notify that there was a problem). The partner knew that we were likely getting alerted, and kept up the barage. When alerts get high enough, they are sent to the IT-VP, which gets a whole bunch of people involved.
VP-Marketing: "Why are you allowing them into our system?! Cut them off, NOW!"
Me: "I'm not letting them in, I'm stopping them, hence the login error."
VP-Marketing: "That jackass said he will keep trying to get into our system unless we pay him $10,000. Just turn those machines off!"
VP-IT : "We can't. They serve our other international partners."
<slams hand on table>
VP-Marketing: "I don't fucking believe this! How the fuck did you let this happen!?"
VP-IT: "Yes, you shouldn't have allowed the partner into our system to begin with. What are you going to do to fix this situation?"
Me: "Um, we've been testing for months already went live some time ago. I didn't know you defaulted on the contract until last week. 'Jake' is likely running a script. He'll get bored of doing that and in a couple of weeks, he'll stop. I say lets ignore him. This really a network problem, not a coding problem."
IT-MGR: "Now..now...lets not make excuses and point fingers. It's time to fix your code."
IT-VP: "I agree. We're not going to let anyone blackmail us. Make it happen."

So I figure out the partner's IP address, and hard-code the value in my service so it doesn't log the login failure (if IP = '10.50.etc and so on' major hack job). That worked for a couple of days, then (I suspect) the ISP re-assigned a new IP and the errors started up again.

After a few angry emails from the 'powers-that-be', our network admin stops by my desk.
D: "Dude, I'm sorry, I've been so busy. I just heard and I wished they had told me what was going on. I'm going to block his entire domain and send a request to the ISP to shut him down. This was my problem to fix, you should have never been involved."

After 'D' worked his mojo, the errors stopped.

Month later, 'D' gave me an update. He was still logging the traffic from the partner's system (the ISP wanted extensive logs to prove the customer was abusing their service) and like magic one day, it all stopped. ~2 weeks after the 'break up'.

Taking IT classes in college. The school bought us all lynda and office365 accounts but we can't use them because the classroom's network has been severed from the Active Directory server that holds our credentials. Because "hackers." (The non-IT classrooms don't have this problem, but they also don't need lynda accounts. What gives?)

So, I got bored, and irritated, so I decided to see just how secure the classroom really was.

It wasn't.

So I created a text file with the following rant and put it on the desktop of the "locked" admin account. Cheers. :)

1. don't make a show of "beefing up security" because that only makes people curious.
I'm referring of course to isolating the network. This wouldn't be a problem except:

2. don't restrict the good guys. only the bad guys.
I can't access resources for THIS CLASS that I use in THIS CLASS. That's a hassle.
It also gives me legitimate motivation to try to break your security.

3. don't secure it if you don't care. that is ALSO a hassle.
I know you don't care because you left secure boot off, no BIOS password, and nothing
stopping someone from using a different OS with fewer restrictions, or USB tethering,
or some sort malware, probably, in addition to security practices that are
wildly inconsistent, which leads me to the final and largest grievance:

4. don't give admin priveledges to an account without a password.

seriously. why would you do this? I don't understand.
you at least bothered to secure the accounts that don't even matter,
albeit with weak and publicly known passwords (that are the same on all machines),
but then you went and left the LEAST secure account with the MOST priveledges?
I could understand if it were just a single-user machine. Auto login as admin.
Lots of people do that and have a reason for it. But... no. I just... why?

anyway, don't worry, all I did was install python so I could play with scripting
during class. if that bothers you, trust me, you have much bigger problems.

I mean you no malice. just trying to help.

For real. Don't kick me out of school for being helpful. That would be unproductive.
Plus, maybe I'd be a good candidate for your cybersec track. haven't decided yet.

-- a guy who isn't very good at this and didn't have to be
have a nice day <3

oh, and I fixed the clock. you're welcome.

I have a project at work that involves learning a bunch of AWS stuff and rewriting a couple credential-generating scripts. I don't even know what the ask is, apart from some high-level "make this SSO" so ... idfk.

I am so incredibly bored of it (and burned out in general) that I can't even look at it.

I would rather see how many times it takes to beat my head against the wall to make a hole than think about this ticket again.

"Oh, I thought you would find that fun" No. No I do not. I can't even bring myself to look at it anymore. "Well, try to push through it and get it outta here!" Ughhhhh

I hope Russia nukes the bloody company.

The best mentors I had were the people at the company where I started working.

I was doing my master thesis, bored like hell writing about someone else's idea. I decided to drop out and do a 10 week apprenticeship at this company. They had been my mentors in a university project and thought it would be nice to see what I could learn from them. I wasn't wrong.

During that time they taught me Ruby, JavaScript, Angular, Node and Git. They taught me about coding standards and how to write better, more maintainable code. They inspired me to keep learning and also to share my knowledge. In the end I didn't stay there, but they helped me get my first real job.

If it weren't for those 10 weeks my career would have been a lot different. I wouldn't be the developer I am today without them and I'm forever grateful.

Oh wow, so many memorable co-workers, though typically not in a positive way. I guess the most memorable was this project manager who got his job solely through nepotism. He was a fucking moron, putting it lightly. He would rattle off buzzwords and jargon that he had randomly picked up in a completely nonsensical way, which made him sound even more ridiculous. He didn't seem to notice our blank stares.

Anyway, since he loved to show everyone just how awesome he was, he had to have the latest and greatest laptop. He had some top-of-the-line model which cost an insane amount of cash back in the day, but of course he got bored of it when something better came out six months later. So he decided to sell his old laptop.

Now, this was his personal laptop he was selling but we were about three months away from launching a top-secret project which had a seven figure budget and a lot riding on it. So what did this absolute goose do? He sold his laptop unformatted with a metric shit ton of confidential files and documents on it. As fate would have it... he sold it to someone who just so happened to work for a competing company.

Cut to about two and a half months later, around two weeks before the launch of this massive project, our competition comes out with something incredibly similar and beat us to market. Aghast, senior management then found out that they had obtained a treasure trove of confidential information from this numpty's laptop, handed to them on a silver platter.

The following Monday, with a sombre mood in the office, this guy cheerfully comes in through the door and is immediately yanked into the boardroom by management. What followed was around thirty minutes of brutal, relentless, non-stop shouting, table- banging and obscenities. When it finally stopped, the door quietly opened, this guy walks out as white as a sheet, turns towards the exit and left the building.

We never saw him again.

To long to read. So don’t do it.

I feel disappointed. It’s not about job or stuff. I’m disappointed about world in general. I don’t see my future on this planet anymore.

The world more or less looks like that :

Politics are trying to help you by stealing more money from you. The more you’re lucky the more money you will pay for it.

Media punch you with some family stuff from everywhere, give you young rich and far away, beautiful picture photos of places, people and food that you at most could visit once or twice per year during holidays that are break from work concentration camps.

If you’re lucky you’re rich or got rich or wealthy and infamous so you can walk wherever you want and don’t give a fuck what you wear but again your old friends are not so lucky bastards so you need to find new friends that are probably assholes. At the end most of the days you you’re doing nothing except killing time to meet with people you like during weekends or evenings.

Then there are families and everyone want to tell you that’s important. Family is like herd of assholes, if you’re weak they will sacrifice you and tell that you’re looser behind your back but when you get wealthy they will come back to tell you that when you were young and stupid they played with you so now you have to buy them some stuff or get them a job.

At the end there are people with “I wrote that book” certificate of excellence try to sell you opinions on everything starting from sexual positions ending on how to take a good dump. The problem is that the moment they wrote that book it becomes obsolete. Teachers of useless knowledge from last century that forgot about google or wikipedia.

All of them are playing your emotions, cause impulses and hormones are what makes you weak and people are looking for your weaknesses to take advantage of you. Get your money or get your attention and maybe even both at the same time. Cause views matter you know it. So like and subscribe dumb fucks.

If you’re lucky you find couple of them who aren’t doing that. Who the fuck knows why but this shit happens. It doesn’t matter if they’re family or you met them month ago. Those are only to keep and hardest to find. Unluckily those also can change by other people they meet or when they’re young.

If you can’t find a friend get a dog or cat or whatever animal you like. Their love is unconditional and obvious to read.

Well that’s most of the “I want to be spotted” culture that is all boring as fuck. Personalized ass and glamorous pictures and short movies of everything you don’t need but looks awesome. And as you see it’s still growing with more specialized portals like onlyfans, twitch and tiktok. We all need to look at what everyone else have or want to have cause 99% of time 99% of us are boring and is bored as fuck. Most of us can repeat same small amount set of stories all their life cause we’re not created to entertain.

I don’t feel joy looking at this shit fucked full of shit people arguing who’s dick is bigger. Who can post most dumb thing. I think I need a break but how to break from everything ? How to break from culture of money where to live on your country land you need to pay property tax ?

That’s all fucked up. Life’s fucked up.

This is a story of me trying out maintaining a game server and eventually making a mistake, although I do not regret experiencing it.

A month ago I set up a small modded minecraft server because I wanted to experience a fun modpack together with some people from reddit. Besides this, I also wanted to see if I was capable of setting up a server with systemd and screen running in the background. This went great and I learned a lot.

The very next day I was playing with $annoyingKid on the server and everything was well. However the second day, $annoyingKid started pushing the idea to start up a normal minecraft server to build a playerbase.

I asked $annoyingKid 'What about financing, staff management and marketing?'

$annoyingKid: "I don't know much about that, but you can do that while I build a spawn!"

He also didn't want to reveal his age, which alerted me that he's young and inexperienced. He also considered Discord 'scary' because there were haxors and they would get his location and kidnap him, or something. So if he was supposed to become owner (which he desired), he had no way of communicating with a community outside of the game.

He also considered himself owner, while I was the one who paid for the server. 'Owners should be people who own the server', no matter how many times I told him that.

$annoyingKid also asked if he could install plugins on his own, I asked him if he knew anything about ssh, wget or bash because I used ssh to set up the server (I know rcon exists, but didn't want to deal with that at the time), he had no idea what any of those terms meant and he couldn't give proper arguments as to why he should get console access.

In the end, he did jack shit, he had no chance of becoming co-owner or even head-admin because he had no sense of responsibility or hard work. I kept him around as an admin because he was the one who came up with the idea. I banned him on day one after he started abusing his power when someone tipped him of. Even after me ordering him to ignore an annoying player he kept going, of course I could have prevented all this by kicking him earlier since all the red flags around him had already formed a beacon of light. He tried coming back, complaining that he should at least have his moderator rank back, but he never got in again.

A week later I got bored, I had had enough fun with ssh and the server processes to know that I didn't want to continue the small project, so I shut it down and went on to do stuff on GitHub.

Lesson learned: Don't let annoying kids with no sense of responsibility talk you into doing things you aren't sure you want to be doing. And only give people power after they've proved to you that they are capable of handling it.

These postings on angel.co

I swear to God it's like I've uncovered a conspiracy theory.

I had been searching for a side project now that holidays are coming and I really don't wanna get bored.

Applied to a few companies. About 5 of them "responded" with an acceptance. I write them my interview timings and all that's required.

Nothing. Nothing for like a solid week and a half.

Meanwhile I applied to more companies and still the same thing.

I decided to manually mail their companies regarding the process, so that I can, preferably, move on to other ones if they have rejected the application (which they obviously hadn't)

I get mails from almost all the companies with some or the other variant of "We were waiting for your reply to proceed"

I tell them I had replied over the conversations and they said they never got a message.

Now feeling that this might be angel.co at fault. I wrote a request to look into the issue. Meanwhile I tested the system using a friend's account as a recruiter and testing myself.

Unsurprisingly it was working flawlessly.

Narrowing it down to the companies then.

I sent a document with my findings to each of the companies and pretty much 50% of them stopped with replying.

The rest confirmed that they hadn't received any mails regarding the same and they saw no mail resembling the one I tested with my friend.

Kinda confusing but I asked them to look into it.

Meanwhile mail from Angel returns saying that their system is working perfectly fine even around my region. So idk what was the problem

I got a mail 3 weeks after the first mail to the company. They had been using a utility to auto-accept/reject profile applications. This util sent a lot of mails, even for rejections, to their mailboxes, filling them.

So they decided to remove these emails automatically by marking them spam. Apparently, the interview confirmation messages also count as these emails and were automatically archived. Thus removing my responses to those companies.

Idk if this is widespread issue because only one company has responded to me yet.

I'm still livid with this shit.

Good question, what wasn't bad about 2020?

As far as good things go.. well, COVID-19 actually. Back in February the lockdown began in Belgium, and while many people got bored out of their minds, I actually became a lot more productive. So many projects started back then, and I got a lot better at programming because of it. Now I can confidently write most bash stuff without ever looking anything up. And the code is maintainable, on account of putting everything into functions. You can literally navigate the code just by looking at it. On older code I always had issues with that.

I'm very glad that essential travel even back then wasn't really restricted. Because my bank is retarded about online banking, I have to go to the bank every so often to check my balance. At the time I tended to do that late in the evening, when nobody else was outside and I had the entire town to myself. That was one of the travels considered essential. So I kept doing it and made that my biweekly walk. I really enjoyed that. Gets your mind off things.

Bad things would be the utter stupidity that the general public had shown me during that pandemic. Burning down 5G antennas and not even getting the right ones, toilet paper, 5G death beams in street lamps?! They even sent death threats to telco workers over sensationalist bullshit from what IIRC was just a random Twitch streamer. Those people should just fucking kill themselves, choke yourselves in that pile of toilet paper you got yourself and then called yourself financially challenged. You braindead fucking retards!

Another dev-related thing is the normalization of SJW terminology. Now even "blind playthrough" gets your ass banned on Twitch. I saw a tweet about a Twitch employee (I think) proudly saying that they implemented it. Most upvoted comment on it was from a blind person, asking why they did this and not made the Twitch app more friendly to use for blind users. They too thought this was bullshit. Yet it still got added in, and more and more people are starting to think that "this is fine". Hell even that "this is necessary".

What annoys me the most is that this mostly comes from the US, where around that time they laid their knee on George Floyd, and didn't fix their legal system at all. As a European it baffles me since we have many immigrants here (the Drumpf even called Belgium a hellhole over it) and we just don't give a shit about whether or not they are "truly Belgian". We just let them live their daily lives like everyone else. Imagine just not giving a shit. Imagine not bothering them, not with racism, not with reverse racism, not with anything. Just let them do their thing and that's it. Yet despite Belgium being one of the most inclusive countries in the fucking world, I still got called a racist many times for asking.. why did you implement this? Why this, and not tackling the problem at its actual and pretty fucking obvious core?

So all in all I can only hope that 2021 will get a little bit better. But that's the same thing I said in 2019, and it didn't quite come true.

Please take sleep deprivation seriously!
Take care of it and don't allow stress to take you over.

Here's a little story of what happened to me:

I've had sleep problems for all of my life, but the beginning of last summer 2018 it went too far. I turned 18 and somehow all the school, dev and personal work started to pile up, I stressed about them and started to have no sleep every other day and little sleep another. Immediately I took time off from everything for trying get better sleep.

Having no sleep means that your brain starts to run in really low gear but you might not even notice it. So I started stressing about every little detail, making ridiculous decisions and doing stuff that didn't really make any sense.

I went to a doctor and was ordered to take time off for a month or so and start medication with bunch of different pills. At the time I thought the medication could wait for a day and went to an old work friend's place for night stay to discuss about everything. That wasn't obviously the thing I should've done. I was up all of that night, he slept, and in the morning he noticed something was really a bit off about me.

We went to the hospital and I agreed for a treatment in there. They got me to sleep normally again and I rested there for a while. I went back home or actually my parents' place and the problems continued, and back to the hospital I go. This time there was no choice. After a really long while, my mind started to stabilize enough that I was allowed to return to my everyday life: enjoying my summer break. It was an awful summer. I often felt lonely and bored. But at least I slept normally.

In the fall I returned to my usual busy schedule. And life's good again. This time I will manage my stress and sleep better and take them to account when planning schedule.

I recently accepted my first "real" Dev position. This has been a huge hurdle for me.

So my degree is in graphic design and it's pretty much what I spent the first 2-3 years after university doing. In fact, when I started at the place I am now (I am still working my notice) I was hired as a creative artworker.

I had always had a website I put together with some basic frontend skills, but always assumed the backend stuff was "beyond me". But, given the option here, I asked to be sent on a PHP course. Holy shit I took to it like a duck to water. Over the next few months I got my feet wet building a new website for the company, building out a little intranet, all that good stuff. I went from procedural spaghetti monstrosities to nice, OOP, documented code. It was beautiful. And no one here really have a fuck.

About 6 months ago, I started trying to leave. This was hard. I actually had several interviews for design positions, but always got turned down for some variation of "you're very technical and we think you'd get bored here" and thank god really, because they're right. I could never get a look in for Dev jobs though, because on paper I had no experience, hell my job title was still "Digital Designer" despite over a year of developing here.

But it finally happened. Through someone I used to know I got my foot in the door for a developer position. In the interview they even told me if it was a junior position they'd hire me on the spot - but sadly it wasn't. I had a good time though, a good laugh, and had a lot of fun finally, for the first time in my life, "working" and talking with other developers.

Over the next couple of weeks the agent kept telling me I had done really well and they were just dragging their feet getting things sorted, but I gave up hope a little. So imagine my surprise when I found out they turned the role into a junior one for me!

And so now, I get to go to a job where my job title includes the word "Developer". To some of you that might not mean much, but to me it's a fucking medal I wish I could mount on a plaque on my wall.

Stupid ass nimble fucker of an old friend talks to me for a whole week after a reunion saying stuff like "I'm glad we got to spent time together bro and stuff", the soul eater of poop being sets up a conversation over a week talking like he was a true friend. He only had to manage it for a week more, hell he had to resist his urge for a puny ass week and I would've considered that maybe good people existed. Well the universe along with this Pseudo-panty fuck decided it was time, they pitch me an "idea". Well after demonstrating kindly that I could technically pull (n) such ideas from my virtual butthole. The guy finally believes his idea was stupid and moves away. A minute later. SURPRISE MOTHER FUCKER! he says, telling me that he got an amazing idea along and if I could help him with some stuff. Well.. What? I jumped at this amazing opportunity. Not because of the dangling-dickina of an idea, because this was my way out of this misery fucks life. Alright should buy me some time right? He would go watch some tutorials, make a logo and call me when there's a problem. We'll in the milli fucking time that even a big bang couldn't have recurred, the bitch calls and says.. Bro, sorry for disturbing you, I need some help... [What did your mother from another son tell you she only gave birth to half of you?]
APPARENTLY, THE GUY JOINED FORCES WITH SOME INTELLIGENT MINDS AND SETUP A LEAGUE OF LIKE MINDED NECROPHILES AND I COULD HELP THIS DREAM TEAM with a name and a logo.
It started, I could sense it. I wasn't THE CHOSEN ONE. Tired, I said I'll see what I can do while attempting to block his number. A few hours later, he calls from another number with no shame and asks BRO? DID YOU. Did me what you bloody dick lubricator. Yeah I watched your mom a couple times, then I got bored when I found out it was an ad.

Unfortunately no I did not tell that, instead I used the kindest words I could pull out of my frustrated ass to tell him I won't do it cause I have better things to do.

The guy comes back a few hours later with an emotional back-story of how this is his way out of his sad ass life and saying stuff like sorry to disturb you bro, I never meant to.

Oh my gawd! Give this douche manufacturer an Oscar. Actually give him two!!

————

After this traumatic experience I often feel for such people. They have around 90 years to live. They have a free fucking brain. They have money. They have less problems.

Why can't they come up with a worthy idea with all these factors to compound the ideation process.

And why on the earth can't they make the Idea on their own. I'm completely self taught so I don't see it being a problem. I could well say that I'm more knowledgeable than a few grads out of my stupid college but I don't wanna compare myself to those stupid beings.

If you have an idea? Make it. Die for it. But never approach another being, either he eats you or you eat him.

! rant

Sorry but I'm really, really angry about this.

I'm an undergrad student in the United States at a small state college. My CS department is kinda small but most of the professors are very passionate about not only CS but education and being caring mentors. All except for one.

Dr. John (fake name, of course) did not study in the US. Most professors in my department didn't. But this man is a complete and utter a****le. His first semester teaching was my first semester at the school. I knew more about basic programming than he did. There were more than one occasion where I went "prof, I was taught that x was actually x because x. Is that wrong?" knowing that what I was posing was actually the right answer. Googled to verify first. He said that my old teachings were all wrong and that everything he said was the correct information. I called BS on that, waited until after class to be polite, and showed him that I was actually correct. Denied it.

His accent was also really problematic. I'm not one of those people who feel that a good teacher needs a native accent by any standard (literally only 1 prof in the whole department doesn't), but his English was *awful*. He couldn't lecture for his life and me, a straight A student in high school, was almost bored to sleep on more than one occasion. Several others actually did fall asleep. This... wasn't a good first impression.

It got worse. Much, much worse.

I got away with not having John for another semester before the bees were buzzing again. Operating systems was the second most poorly taught class I've ever been in. Dr John hadn't gotten any better. He'd gotten worse. In my first semester he was still receptive when you asked for help, was polite about explaining things, and was generally a decent guy. This didn't last. In operating systems, his replies to people asking for help became slightly more hostile. He wouldn't answer questions with much useful information and started saying "it's in chapter x of the textbook, go take a look". I mean, sure, I can read the textbook again and many of us did, but the textbook became a default answer to everything. Sometimes it wasn't worth asking. His homework assignments because more and more confusing, irrelavent to the course material, or just downright strange. We weren't allowed to use muxes. Only semaphores? It just didn't make much sense since we didn't need multiple threads in a critical zone at any time. Lastly for that class, the lectures were absolutely useless. I understood the material more if I didn't pay attention at all and taught myself what I needed to know. Usually the class was nothing more than doing other coursework, and I wasn't alone on this. It was the general consensus. I was so happy to be done with prof John.

Until AI was listed as taught by "staff", I rolled the dice, and it came up snake eyes.

AI was the worst course I've ever been in. Our first project was converting old python 2 code to 3 and replicating the solution the professor wanted. I, no matter how much debugging I did, could never get his answer. Thankfully, he had been lazy and just grabbed some code off stack overflow from an old commit, the output and test data from the repo, and said it was an assignment. Me, being the sneaky piece of garbage I am, knew that py2to3 was a thing, and used that for most of the conversion. Then the edits we needed to make came into play for the assignment, but it wasn't all that bad. Just some CSP and backtracking. Until I couldn't replicate the answer at all. I tried over and over and *over*, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and could find Nothing. Eventually I smartened up, found the source on github, and copy pasted the solution. And... it matched mine? Now I was seriously confused, so I ran the test data on the official solution code from github. Well what do you know? My solution is right.

So now what? Well I went on a scavenger hunt to determine why. Turns out it was a shift in the way streaming happens for some data structures in py2 vs py3, and he never tested the code. He refused to accept my answer, so I made a lovely document proving I was right using the repo. Got a 100. lol.

Lectures were just plain useless. He asked us to solve multivar calculus problems that no one had seen and of course no one did it. He wasted 2 months on MDP. I'd continue but I'm running out of characters.

And now for the kicker. He becomes an a**hole, telling my friends doing research that they are terrible programmers, will never get anywhere doing this, etc. People were *crying* and the guy kept hammering the nail deeper for code that was honestly very good because "his was better". He treats women like delicate objects and its disgusting. YOU MADE MY FRIEND CRY, GAVE HER A BOX OF TISSUES, AND THEN JUST CONTINUED.

Want to know why we have issues with women in CS? People like this a****le. Don't be prof John. Encourage, inspire, and don't suck. I hope he's fired for discrimination.

I'm a student at a cyber education program. They taught us Python sockets two weeks ago. The next day, I went home and learned multithreading.
Then, I realized the potential.
I know a guy1 who knows a guy2 who runs a business and could really use an app I could totally make. And it's a great idea and it's gonna be awesome and I'm finally gonna do something useful with my life.
All I gotta do is learn UI. Easy peasy.
I spent the next week or so experimenting with my code, coming up with ideas for the app in my head and of course, telling all my friends about it. Bad habit, I know.

Guy1 was about to meet Guy2, so I asked Guy1 to tell Guy2 about my idea. He agreed. I reminded him again later that day, and then again in a text message.
The next day, I asked him if he remembered.
Guess what.
I asked him to text Guy2 instead. He came back to me with Guy2's reply: "Why won't he send me a message himself?".
So I contacted Guy2. After a while, he replied. We had a short, awkward conversation. Then he asked why he should prefer a new app over the existing replacement.
He activated my trap card. With a long chqin of messages, I unloaded everything I was gathering in my mind for the last week. I explained how he could use the app, what features it could have and how it would solve his problem and improve his product. I finished it off with the good old "Yeah, I was bored😅" to make the whole thing look a bit more casual.
Now, all that's left to do is wait.
...
Out of all the possible outcomes to this situation, this was both the worst the least expected one.
I'm not familliar with the English word for "Two blue checkmarks, no reply". But I'm certain there is no word in any language to describe what I'm feeling about this right now.
By that point, Guy1 has already made it clear that he's not interested in being my messanger anymore. He also told me to let the thing die, just in case I didn't get the hint. I don't blame him though.

It's been almost a week since then. Still no reply from Guy2. I haven't quite been able to get over it. Telling all my friends about it didn't really help.
Looking back, I think Guy2 has never realised he has that problem with his product.
But still, the least he could do is tell me why he dosen't like it...
"Why won't he send me a message himself?" Yeah, why really? HMMM :thinking:

You know what? If I ever somehow get the guts to leave my home country, I'm sending a big "fuck you" to this guy.

I remember the first time I downloaded smth from the internet and was extremely nervous not to fuck anything up. I was young and had just started using a computer. It was a desktop computer with windows xp in our basement, inside kind of its own wardrobe, standalone.
I remember my dad (not very tech-savvy) who told me not to download anything from the internet, as it would surely be a virus, but I was bored of the built-in programs and wanted to try it out. I downloaded a program and was extremely nervous and hoped for no virus. I don't remember what I installed back then (no virus/trojan/etc.😅) but it was this moment I realised I could download anything and wasn't tied to what the OS provided, which led me to be interested in computers in general.
I believe that if I hadn't attempted that download, I wouldn't have become the tech-savvy person that I am today, studying CS...

This isn't a funny rant or story. It's one of becoming increasingly unsure of the career choices I've made the path they've led me down. And it's written with terrible punctuation and grammar, because it's a cathartic post. I swear I'm a better writer than this.

The highlights:
- I left a low-paying incredibly stable job with room to grow (think specialized office worker at a uni) to become a QA tester at a AAA game studio, after growing bored with the job and letting my productivity and sometimes even attendance slip
- I left AAA studio after having been promoted through the ranks to leading an embedded test tools development team where we automated testing the game (we got to create bots, basically!) and the database, and building some of the most requested tools internally to the company; but we were paid as if we were QA testers, not engineers, and were told that wouldn't change; rather than move over or up, I moved out to a better paying, less fabulous web and tools development job for a no-name company
- No-name company offered one or two days remote, was salaried, and close to home. CTO was a fan of long lunches and Quake 3 Arena 1-2 hours at the end of every day. CTO position was removed, I got a lot of his responsibilities, none of his pay, and started freelancing to learn new skills rather than deal with the CFO being my boss.
- Went to work as a freelancer for an email marketing SaaS provider my previous job had used. Made loads of money, dealt with an old, crappy code base, an old, cranky senior dev, and an owner who ran around like the world was on fire 24/7; but I worked without pants, bought a car, a house, had a kid, etc;

Now during ALL of this, I was teaching game dev as an adjunct at my former uni. This past fall, I went full time as a professor in game dev. I took a huge pay cut, but got a steady schedule (semester to semester anyway) and great benefits. I for once chose what I thought was the job I wanted over more money and something that was just "different". And honestly, I've regretted it so much. My peer / diagonally above me coworker feels untrustworthy half the time and teaches the majority of the programming courses when he's a designer and I've been the game programming professor for 8 years (I also teach non-game programming courses, but those just got folded into the games program...); I hate full-time uni politics; I'm struggling with money for my family; and I am in the car all the time it feels like. I could probably go back to my last job, which had some benefits, but nowhere near as good; my wife doesn't want me back to working in the house all the time because that was a struggle unto itself once we had a kid (for all of us, in different ways); and I have now less than 24 hours to tell my university I want to not pursue longer term contracts for full-time and go back to adjunct next Fall (or walk away entirely), or risk burning a bridge (we are reviewing applicants for next year tomorrow, including my own) by bailing out mid-application process.

I'm not sure I'm asking for advice. I'm really just ranting, I guess. Some people I know would kill to have the opportunities I have. I just feel like each job choice led me further away from a job I liked, towards more money, which was a tradeoff that worked out mostly, but now I feel like I don't have either, and I'm trapped due to healthcare and 401k and such. Sure, I like working more with my students and have been able to really support them in their endeavors this semester, but... that's their lives. Not mine. The wife thinks I should stay at the university and we'll figure out money eventually (we are literally sinking into debt, it's not going well at all), while most people think I should leave, make money, and figure out the happiness factor once my finances are back on track and the kid is old enough to be in school.

And I have less than 24 hours it feels like to make a momentous decision.

Yay. Thanks for reading :)

I really need to vent. Devrant to the rescue! This is about being undervalued and mind-numbingly stupid tasks.

The story starts about a year ago. We inherited a project from another company. For some months it was "my" project. As our company was small, most projects had a "team" of one person. And while I missed having teammates - I love bouncing ideas around and doing and receiving code reviews! - all was good. Good project, good work, good customer. I'm not a junior anymore, I was managing just fine.
After those months the company hired a new senior software engineer, I guess in his forties. Nice and knowledgeable guy. Boss put him on "my" project and declared him the lead dev. Because seniority and because I was moved to a different project soon afterwards. Stupid office politics, I was actually a bad fit there, but details don't matter. What matters is I finally returned after about 3/4 of a year.

Only to find senior guy calling all the shots. Sure, I was gone, but still... Call with the customer? He does it. Discussion with our boss? Only him. Architecture, design, requirements engineering, any sort of intellectually challenging tasks? He doesn't even ask if we might share the work. We discuss *nothing* and while he agreed to code reviews, we're doing zero. I'm completely out of the loop and he doesn't even seem to consider getting me in.

But what really upsets me are the tasks he prepared for me. As he first described them they sounded somewhat interesting from a technical perspective. However, I found he had described them in such detail that a beginner student would be bored.
A description of the desired behaviour, so far so good. But also how to implement it, down to which classes to create. He even added a list of existing classes to get inspiration or copy code from. Basically no thinking required, only typing.

Well not quite, I did find something I needed to ask. Predictably he was busy. I was able to answer my question myself. He was, as it turns out, designing and implementing something actually interesting. Which he never had talked about with me. Out of the loop. Fuck.

Man, I'm fuming. I realize he's probably just ignorant. But I feel treated like his typing slave. Like he's not interested in my brain, only in my hands. I am *so* fucking close to assigning him the tasks back, and telling him since I wasn't involved in the thinking part, he can have his shitty typing part for himself, too. Fuck, what am I gonna do? I'd prefer some "malicious compliance" move but not coming up with ideas right now.

I don't know how many of you here will understand/feel what I feel but here goes nothing

I'm the kind of person who's very calm and like sitting and talking to a friend over using a mobile phone or something. I mean, it's not like I don't use mobile phones at all but yeah.
At this point, I think my smartphone is just a waste of time. Whenever I'm bored or feel lazy, the first thing I do is unlock my phone and randomly see something online. Even though I have nothing important. I feel like it's almost cutting me off from the real world. Maybe in that time, instead of using the mobile for nothing, I could go talk to someone, go for a walk, exercise, think, etc. I even see group of friends sitting in a circle, but no one's talking. Only using their phones.
And let alone socializing, I think you miss a lot of "me" time as well (oh I like meditation and shit haha).

I'm thinking of switching to a non-smartphone. But still we are developers/engineers/designers, and for us to stay away from technology is not easy when we're the ones making it. I love what I do but at the same time I also want feel life.

Entering Week4 post-layoff. Week2 of pretty much nothing but playing with my kids, doing house chores, exercising and job searching.

I spent like 3 hours in the gym last Friday. Instructor there turned to me and said "tough divorce?". To what I answered "very happily married, got laid off from work". He said that it would be his second guess.

Even before this whole crap I had enough cash flow-yielding investments to just about make rent. My wife makes enough to make sure we will want for nothing, our old folks have our kids' tuition fees covered, and we have some savings anyway.
But the anxiety-laden period between "send a dozen messages and resumė's" and having the same "greetings, fellow millenial!" meetings with different sets of tech-illiterate boomers and toddlers is becoming a boring nuisance, one that "having a side project to keep my mind warm" could solve.

Maybe I will fix the Stardew Valley Mods API for Android. I haven't done the C#/.NET thing since uni, and my frontend Java game is weak (at best) but how much could have it changed this last decade or so? /s

Maybe I will write a MongoDB Runner for Apache Beam. But I'm afraid that won't yeld enough street cred to be worth it Does anyone knows what it means?

Maybe I will finally be done consolidating a lifetime of cloud storage into a big-kid glacier-level LTS solution.

Dunno, bored here. Need some 20h/week project I can quit as soon as some job appears to be lining up. Ideas?

I turned down another women who was absolutely, 100% flirting with me, because, from what I can gather, she was trying to get out of a relationship with her current boyfriend, a military veteran.

I outright ignored her and then when that failed, I made our work relationship 100% about that, work.
Even though I'm friendly with everyone else.

I'm an absolute shit, aren't I? I feel genuinely bad.
I'm not sure if I did it out of a misplaced sense of honor for a dude who obviously has some ptsd, or because I don't feel like I'm able to connect with anyone anymore.

I feel like I'm alone in this world. Not, like, sexually or anything, but more like I don't want to burden anyone with the shit I'm going through. Like a man on a mission on a sinking ship, and it would be wrong to let anyone else on board.
Like a one-man shit-show, all singing, all dancing, driven to one end, with one purpose. And it'd be wrong to let anyone get attached, or invite anyone else in.

Fuck I got so many irons in the fire. I have an ARG in the works, a full game, a social platform that the code and marketing plan is laid out and I'm saving money for, two more games already planned, plus spending an in-ordinate amount of time with my father and sister and mother as they deal with the loss of my sister, plus volunteering to help the homeless, plus working, plus studying.

I barely sleep.

It's just me. I'm like a cruise missile heading to one destination, to some final destination, I just don't know what. And I don't let anyone in, because then they might see how fucking crazy I am, and how crazy my life is, and how crazy my goals are. Thats not a humblebrag. Thats more of a "wholly shit, I'm so in over my head, I'm fucking drowning" type thing. But I'm not giving up, I'm just going deeper.

And it feels like drowning but somehow I'm okay with it. Like I've passed the crux of loneliness, and settled for going for it all, alone, shooting out of orbit, and saying "fuck it all' to everything and everyone. They say "if you got everything you wanted, everything you wished for, you'd wish you hadn't, which is why god isn't a genie". And lately I've been thinking god doesn't exist, or doesn't care, because he's left it all up to me, and I've fucked it up good and proper, and am on my way to either nothing, or everything I've ever wanted.

Is this what happiness feels like? Or suicide?

I don't know. I mean I really don't. I don't want to die. I think I could stop existing and be okay with it. Having achieved at least a modicum of understanding the universe, at least accomplished something small but meaningful.
Or maybe I'm delusional, driven mad with the full comprehension of human floundering against a meandering existence.

I don't fucking know.

I feel like I'm spinning my wheels, so much, that even two weeks feels like a fucking eternity. I don't sleep anymore. When I do, I escape into my dreams, where I can fly, or float, and the people in my dreams tell me I'm living in the matrix and I believe them..in my dreams. Feel it even.

And when I wake up, the feeling persists. Leaves me in wonderland, for hours after waking.

And I have visions, of going homeless, like some buddha, all the time, and then I say "wake up J, you're fucking crazy! You want to go be some couch surfing homeless bum living off other's good graces? get the fuck outa here! While others suffer, schlep it at whatever job they work, day in day out, toil. In this economy? In this inflation? What a dishonest way of thinking. What a dishonest way of dreaming."

And yet I daydream. Because its the only escape there is from all the world has become.

And I bring joy to others, earnestly, vicariously, because its the closest joy I can feel, when I've become numb.

It is this quasi-permanent sense of alienation that permeates my whole world, a sort of invisible force field that separates me from others, even as I reach out to understand them, to comfort them, to smooth the corners off their world, so that they don't become like I have, something not entirely human, but...other.

Often when we meditate, long and hard enough,
at the center that emerges, at the center of ourselves, we find an abyss, a whole universe, devoid of anything, a perfect silence, mirroring back the cosmos, and other people. Observing, silent, irreducible, implacable.

Sometimes I feel like I don't exist. Sometimes I think others don't exist.

Very often I feel like nothing is real. And that I am playing some sort of game. Not like a video game per se, but that there is a bigger pattern, a hidden pattern to it all, just out of reach, and I'm reaching for it but understanding eludes me.

Not that the universe has made me for some special purpose, but merely that the universe observes me specifically, for no special purpose, other than that it can, whatever trivialities may impede or push forward my life.

As if the universe were bored.

Are you listening to music?
What are you listening to?

i was bored so i made a meme based off of what i have learned from a week on this site

Tomorrow i have school starting.
Which inspires me to rant about how school fails. Ill omit the "arguments" - feel free to append arguments for my words in the comments. Lol

Dont get be wrong. I LOVE acquiring knowledge. And this is where my first point starts : PACE. My class is basically an assortiment of dumbfucks who dont understand anything without "learning by heart over the course of several weeks"

Ill give you a concrete example.
Our maths teacher wanted to make us think scientifically. So he invented a new type of numbers "root 6 numbers" that are formed like so:
a + b * sqrt(6)
Now he wants us to find out wether the sum of two root 6 numbers is also a root six number. this is all dandy, BUT CLASSMATES STILL DIDNT GET WHAT ROOT 6 NUMBERS ARE, EVEN AFTER SEVERAL EXPRANATIONS. Worse: they went to the main teacher to blacken the math teacher.
Another example would be the time our class needed to understand functions(x) : 4 weeks. Ik, as a programmer i have some ease, but four weeks is a bit too much.

Because of this slow pace, i am irreversibly bored of and in school.
And this leads to another problem: homework. Since i know most of the stuff (the few things i dont get at school, i research at home) the homework are useless to me and since the others dont get much, the homeworks are often more than abundant {in a negative way}.
So i dont do them - but that makes teachers disregard me. Which im sickened of.
Worse: often i dont get overly good grades (i honestly have no clue why. I know everything and go over most of the stuff with my menthor),which empowers teacher of the argument of "you are not good enuff, so you cant read in class".

It would be JUST FINE if the only problem were teachers - but my peers are horrible too.

I know our brains are growing, but thats no reason for being stupid.

I literally get told that i need to stop wearing shorts because they look horrible.

Yep. Also, most people think they are empowered of teaching me and talking about my defaillance - because they do their homework. Even though they know i know stuff better than them.

Now to one of the worst issues: a group work where we had to de a Radio report. The guy (the one who thinks he is intelligent BECAUSE he has good grades) invited himself and his gf to me, he wanted me to translate 22 pages from german to english (because he was too lazy to write in german), wanted me to do audiorecording, audioediting and writing of a report. When i left the group because i was called "weakest link" he spread the word that i he had done everythinh and that because i left his group had failed (noticed the flow in logic?)

NOW everybody thinks of me as stupid weirdo. And honestly - i think i will stop listening to them. Ive always hated people, i dont need a significant other.

Even though this will come with the secondary effect of me being gossiped at.

But honestly its fine.

You might have noticed my elojquent way of expressing myseld. I did that in order to show that i am, despite my grades, overly proficient in english

Ok. So now comes the conclusion. What should i do? Do you Think that i am like that because im pubescent myself? How can i stop having nightmares of every possible social situotion that could occur?
Does this have to do with me being a dev?

Well. ありがとう for reading.

When the monthly scrum retrospective reaches the 90 minute mark...

You know when people are being stress tested and they break by getting up, run around screaming and ultimately knock themselves unconscious by running into a wall?

That. I felt like doing that.

I swear someone activates some sort of gravity well when these meetings begin because time beings to stretch on and o........n....... while they meetings happen.

I began to list things I think I'd rather be doing than be in that meeting.

1) Tax returns.
2) Prostate exam (not old enough to need one yet but at least I'd be out the meeting).
3) Visiting the dentist.
4) Assembling IKEA furniture.
5) Watching soccer at least they have the decency to give you a break in the middle and I find sports as engaging as a dog turd on the sidewalk.

So bored was I that I began to notice notches and holes in the ceiling tiles and when I remarked upon them others became engrossed in them and began to speculate upon their origins.

I don't know who a speaker is, what department they are from, what product they're working on or what's so important about the algorithm they're working on. There is no context, no explanation and half way through a show and tell I had to check we were still in a show and tell.

I was bored shitless. I actually felt physical pain from boredom, I've not felt that way since I was a child.

I really, really hate that scrum is implemented in this way.

It left me with only half an hour of coding time left and really it sapped my energy and motivation to the point where I just went home early.

Excuse my language, but:

Fucking bloody cunting waste of time, I've had more productive moments in the restroom. They need to piss off or committed seppuku, ideally both. Dante got it wrong the seventh level of hell is this. I'm usually a very calm and balanced individual but yesterday, yesterday I just... Fuck! Argh! Fuck you meeting, fuck you.

If you are the type that schedules meetings like this:

May a thousand Jabberwockies plague your nightmares and be it that the next seventy seven times you lay with a human shall ye experience bitter failure! I hope Cthulhu himself visits his "enlightenment" upon you and you fear sleep henceforth.

I'm bringing a rubix cube or juggling balls into the next meeting so that I can say at least I learned something and it wasn't time wasted.

Hi there, I don't know what to do...
I got interviewed, and offered by two companies.
One startup, being around for 5 years, they loved me and they offered me a whole project to lead in a team of three, starting from scratch, in something that I am really interested in, plus the location is central and amazing.

The other one is a bigger company, located a bit far away from the city centre, the position is senior but not lead, is not an agency but they work on a huge range of products, so I will never get bored working on the same thing all the time.
Pay is the same, the first one I possibly could negotiate a bit more, the second one I can't for sure.
I am a hit scared of getting bored in the first one, even though I have been working on single products company all my life, now I wanted to change.
What do you guys suggest? Any other parameters I would need to consider?

This shit is long story of my computer experience over my lifetime.

When I was young I got my first PC with windows it was not so bad. It required safe shut down of it’s fat32 partition. From time to time I needed to reinstall it cause of slow down but I got used to it I was only a gamer.

Time passes and I got more curious about computers and about this linux. Everything worked there but installation of anything was complete madness and none of windows programs worked well, and I wanted to play games and be productive so I sticked with windows.

I bought hp laptop once with nvidia card, it was overheating and got broken. So I bought toshiba and all I told to the seller was I want ATI card. Took me 5 minutes to do it and I was faster then my friend buying pack of cigarettes because I was earning money using computer.

Then I grown up running my small one person programming businesses and I wanted to run and compile every fucking program on this world. I wanted linux shell commands. I wanted package manager, and I wanted my os to be simple because I wasn’t earning money by using my os but by programming. So after getting my paycheck I bought mac. I can run windows and linux on vm if I need it. I try not to steal someones work so I didn’t want to run hackintosh. I am using this mac for some time.

Also I use playstation for gaming. Because I only want to run and play game I am not excited about graphics but gameplay. I think I am pragmatic person.

I can tell you something about my mac.
When I close lid it go sleep when I open it wakes up instantly. I never need to wonder if I want to hibernate or shut down or sleep and drain battery. It is fucking simple.
When I want to run or open something it doesn’t want me to wait but it gives me my intellij or terminal or another browser or whatever I search for. Yeah search is something that works.
Despite it got 8 gigs of ram I can run whatever number of programs I want at the same speed. The speed is not very fast sometimes but it’s constant fast.
I have a keychain so my passwords are in one place I can slow down shared internet speed, I can put my wifi in monitor mode and I don’t need to install some 3rd party software.
And now I updated my mac to high sierra, cause it’s free and I want to play with ios compilation. Before I did it I didn’t even backup whole work. I just used time machine and regular backups. And guess what, it still works at the same speed and all I did was click to run update and cook something to eat.
When I got bored I close the lid, when got idea open lid and code shit, not waiting for fucking wakeup or fucking updates.

I wanted to rant apple products I use but they work, they got fucking updates all along at the same time. And all of updates are optional.

I cannot tell that about all apple products but about products I use.

I think I just got old and started to praise my limited time on this world. Not being excited about new crap. When I buy something I choose wisely. I bought iPhone. I can buy latest iPhone x but I bought iPhone 7 cause it’s from fucking metal. And I know that metal is harder then glass, why the fucking apple forgot about it? I don’t know.
I know that I am clumsy and drop stuff. Dropped my phone at least 100 times and nothing.

I am not a apple fan boy I won’t buy mac with this glowing shit above keyboard that would got me blind at night.
I buy something when I know that it can save my time on this world. I try to buy things that make me productive and don’t break after a year.

So now piece of advise, stop wasting your time, buy and update wisely, wait a week or a month or a year when more people buy shit and buy what’s not broken. And if something’s broken rant this shit so next customer can be smarter.
Cheers

!rant

So, when I was young, I wanted to be a freelancing nomad. You know, live the live, work remote and travel.

But I didn't have the bones to pursue that. After 10 years of struggling as a normal "programmer", I did a little of everything. I did normal boring "erp maintenance" in C#, Oracle and some legacy stuff called Visual WEB GUI , which was fun, but required a full 9,5 hours work day, 8:00 am to 6:30pm, and the bosses where squares, and I was young and wanted to try something out of the corporate world.

Then I did some work for a newly funded consulting company that used python, Django, and postgresql, but the bosses promised a lot and delivered none, (I was supposed to work backend and have frontend support, which I did not have, and that hurt my productivity and bosses instead of looking at what they promised but did not deliver, they just discounted my salary 3 months in a row, so Bye bye MFs!!

Then I did some remote work for some guys, that, I managed to sustain for a whole year, the pay was good, the stack was simple, just node.js and pug templates, that gig was good, but communication with the bosses was hard, and eventually things started to get hard for them and me, and we had to say farewell to each other, I miss those guys. This is the only time I remember having fun working, I could work whenever I wanted, I only had to reach the weekly goals, and then my time was mine, I could work from home in the odd hours, or rent a chair in a co working space if I wanted to socialize.

Then fate got me one big gig with a multinational company, and I could hire some people, but I delegated too much and was asking too little of myself, and that project eventually died because I did not know how to negotiate.

So, I quit the whole entrepreneur idea, and got a public job at my University, I was a public employee with all the perks, but none of the fun, I just had to clock-in, work, and clock-out. That experience led me to discover a lot of myself, I worked as a public employee for a year and a half, and in that time, I discovered more about myself than what I learnt in 27 years of previous life experience.

Then, I grew bored of that life, and wanted some action, and I found more than enough fun in a VC funded startup ran by young narcissists that did not have a clue of what they were doing, I helped them organize themselves into "closing stuff", you know, finish the things you say you have finished. Just to give you an idea of what it was like before I got there, the were working for 3 months already on this project, they had on paper 50% of the system done and working, when I tried to use the app, I couldn't even sign-up without hacking some database commands, (this was supposedly done). So I spent a month there teaching these guys how to finish stuff, they got, Sign Up, (their sign up was a mess, it is one of those KYC rich things, that financial apps have), Login, and some core functionality working in a month, while in the previous 4 months they only did parallel work, writing endpoints that were not tried, and an app that did not communicate with the backend. But the bosses weren't happy with me, because I told them time and time again that we were not going to reach the goal they needed to reach to keep receiving funds from the investors, and I had to quit before it became a mayhem of toxic employer/employee relationship.

So now I decided to re-engage with life, I have funds to survive about a month and half, I have a good line of credit in case I need some more funds, and the time of the world.

So wish me luck!!! And I'll be posting often, because I would like opinions, hear from people with similar life experiences and share anecdotes.

Next post, it's going to be about how I discovered taskwarrior, and how implemented my first weekend following some of the aspects of GTD to do all my housekeeping chores, because, I think that organizing myself will be key to survive as a freelancer nomad.

I’m from the UK, should I go freelance?

Last few weeks I’ve been feeling really bored with my job. Like mega fucking bored. It’s basically just meetings 7 hours a day, 4 hours planning and then 3 hours of talking about how everything didn’t get finish (I know. I keep saying it’s the fucking 7 hour fucking meetings).

Pay is pretty decent, we have a few juniors, not exactly great code base, kinda cool idea, pretty unique, business will defo work or be sold by corporate owners. (Start up owned by corporate)

I just feel really flat and bored. Mega bored. Keep wondering about going solo and being more of a consultancy or my own little agency? I’ve tried before but I suck at marketing and freelancer and similar sites never provided enough income.

I guess my questions are (if anyone wants to answer):
- What’s this new IR35 or whatever? Is it now pointless to be self employed?
- how would I boost my leads?
- should I do a bit of contracting to get used to it maybe?
- should I just stay where I am and deal with the feeling of not really feeling like I was hired to do anything?

I do also have a little side business I started that I could also work on whenever I have free time, it’s not taking any money at the moment though, early years I suppose?

I’m really sorry if anyone feels offended to read that I’m fucking bored and don’t have a clue what to do with myself. Please don’t reply with some sarccy comment. I really cba to have an internet keyboard troll fight about some stupid opinion we’ll all forget about in a few days. This now counts as a rant. So fuck you. It’s a rant. And I’m rant about the possibility you might comment on my post not bring a rant coz I can’t tell what category I’m posting on. I live in the 5th dimension. Deal. With. It. Or just ignore and scroll on 👍🏼

Ok... so I have a unique question/opportunity. I can't give all the details but here's the jist:

3yrs ago I was hired to consult a now prominent(still decently well known then) web-based company with many thousands of users, dealing with a lot of money and leveraging a social environment. They had several issues but initially they really needed me to find/train chat mods.

I did not take the offer for monetary reasons, like all consulting I've done, I had additional reason and/or fondness to fix the issues. In this case it was an interesting challenge and I knew several customers and some support staff so it'd be worthwhile.

They (without request) reduced their typical 2mo probationary period to 2wk for me. With less than a day left of that period, I was 'hacked' via a pushed telegram update, on the account they made me create for work purposes (they had control of the phone number not me).

During this 'hack' one of the 2, currently active, culprits sent a message to his tg account from the 'hacked' one and quickly deleted the entire convo. The other pretended (poorly) to be me in the chat with the mods in training (at least a few directly witnessed this and provided commentary).

Suddenly, I was fired without any rationale or even a direct, non-culprit, saying anything to me.

The 'hack' also included some very legit, and very ignorantly used, Ukrainian malware.

This 'hack' was only to a 2nd gen lenovo yoga I got due to being a certified refurbisher... just used for small bs like this chat mod/etc job. I even opened up my network, made honey pots, etc., waiting for something more interesting... nope not even an attempt at the static ip.

I started a screen recording program shortly after this crap started (unfortunately after the message sent be 'me' to the dude who actually sent it happened... so i still dont know the contents).

I figured I'd wait it out until i was bored enough or the lead culprit was at a pinnacle to fall from...

The evidence is overwhelming. This moron had no clue what he was doing (rich af by birth type)... as this malware literally created an unhidden log file, including his info down to the MAC id of his MacBook... on my desktop in real time (no, not joking... that stupid)

Here's my quandary... Due to the somewhat adjacent nature of part of our soon to be public start-up... as i dont want it to turn into some coat tail for our tech to ride on for popularity... it's now or never.

Currently im thinking, aside from any revenge-esq scheme, it'd be somewhat socially irresponsible to not out him to his fellow investors and/or the organisation that is growing with him as one of few at the forefront... ironically all about trust/safety/verification of admins in the industry.

I tried to reach out to him and request a call... he's still just as immature. Spent hours essentially spamming me while claiming it wasnt him but hed help me find whoever it was... and several other failed attempts to know what i had. When i confirmed he wasnt going to attempt a call, i informed him id likey mute him because i don't have time for back and forth bs. True to form he deleted the chat (i recorded it but its of no value).

So... any thoughts?

Here’s Today’s book, a little late in the day but we had a storm here and lost power. Powers back

Anyway Programming Pearls, this books isn’t so much a tutorial book, or like “how to program book” it’s more an influential book and thought book. Similar to the mythical man month book.

It’s short book little over 200 pages, of short essays on problems that have irritated programmers over the years. Hence the amage to pearls as a pearl is developed from grains of sand that irritate oysters. This book is a collection of irritants of programmers. (No not the social or business side of things) but technical problems we all face.
These articles are compiled from the original postings that occurred in the Communications of ACM journal, back in the late 90s.

This books offers workable solutions to these “pearls”.

Think of this like one of the precursors to what we have now as stack overflow .. information was shared via journals since the internet wasn’t available but not so much question then respond like we do more of hey I had this problem here’s the solution sort of system.

It’s the type of book, when your bored and you don’t want to read some “how to book” you read this, just like mythical man month and others.

This book references items from knuths books. As well as references to others.

So here’s to the pearls the plague us all.

So i wasted last 24 hours trying to satisfy my ego over a shitty interview and revisiting my old job's codebase and realising that i still don't like that shit. just i am 25 and have no clue where am i heading at. i am just restless, my most of the decisions in 2023 have given very bad outcomes and i am just trying doing things to feel hopeful.

context for the interview story-----
my previous job was at a b2b marketing company whose sdk was used by various startups to send notifications to their users, track analytics etc. i understood most of it and don't find it to be any major engineering marvel, but that interviewer was very interested in asking me to design a system around it.

in my 1.2 years of job there, i found the codebase to be extremely and unnecessarily verbose ( java 7) with questionable fallbacks and resistance towards change from the managers. they were always like "we can't change it otherwise a lot of our client won't use our sdk". i still wrote a lot of testcases and tried to understand the working of major features.

BTW, before you guys go on a declare me an embarrassment of an engineer who doesn't know the product's code base, let me tell you that we are talking SDKs (plural) and a service based company here. their was just one SDK with interesting, heavy lifting stuff and 9 more SDKs which were mostly wrappers and less advanced libraries. i got tasks in all of them, and 70% of my time went into maintaining those and debugging client side bugs instead of exploring the "already-stable-dont-change" code base.

so based on my vague understanding and my even more vague memory from 1 year ago, i tried to explain an overall architecture to that interviewer guy. His face was screaming the word "pathetic" from his expressions, so i thought that today i will try to decode the codebase in 12-15 hours, publish a cool article and be proud of how much i know a so called martech system design. their codebase is open sourced, so it wasn't difficult to check it out once more.
but boy oh boy i got so bored. unnecessary clases , unnecessary callbacks static calls , oof. i tried to refactor a few classes, but even after removing 70% of codebase, i was still left with 100+ classes , most of them being 3000-4000 files long. and this is your plain old java library adding just 800kb to your project.

boring , boring stuff. i would probably need 2-3 more days to get an understanding of complete project, although by then i would be again questioning my life choices , that was this a good use of my 36 hours?

what IS a correct usage of my time? i am currently super dissatisfied with my job, so want to switch. i have been here for 6 months, so probably i wouldn't be going unless i get insane money or an irresistible company offer. For this i had devised a 2 part plan to either become good at modern hot buzz stuff in my domain( the one being currently popularized by dev influenzas) or become good at dsa/leetcode/cp. i suck bad at ds/algo stuff, nor am i much motivated. so went with that hot buzz stuff.

but then this interview expected me to be a mature dev with system design knowledge... agh fuck. its festive season going on and am unable to buy any cool shirts since i am so much limited with my money from my mediocre salary and loans. and mom wants to buy a home too... yeah kill me

you know what annoys me about this situation the most ?

noone is living an ideal life
in any sense
except a few

but that being said, living less than ideal life if people had not wasted so much time, would have led to certain things becoming better.

example.

if i was out of development work, and had to take a crap job.

and lets say that ended up putting me in a financially unstable situation.

if i had rotten teeth, i could work part time, go to a sliding scale place and fix them one by one
while either educating myself further or looking for a better job because in truth, if i'm accepting a part time job, i must be fucked.

i don't see any longevity in an intensely physical job, I see an early death.

there are not enough paying people to ensure everyone has a skilled job, and truthfully not everyone can, but we have more people than we need to do the unskilled and skilled jobs both so why are we not running with that ?

the best time to do unskilled labor or just labor jobs period is when a person is young and there body is new.

and then not for long or with accommodation considering throwing your back out or fucking up your knees stays with you for life.

everything is so backwards in this country.

people think in terms so frequently these days in 'how can i make someone else suffer for my amusement and see their potential diminished so i feel better about my fucked up pathetic life ?'

or

'how can i get revenge against a person that doesn't deserve it'

or

'how can i ensure other people are totally boned so my charmed life i don't deserve seems satisfying'

its pretty gross as are these people

well fast forward years later and life appears fairly repetitive for alot of people

took a very large of detours here, had some fun, experienced some fucked up horros, saw a few wonders which were mostly based off my ideas, and some that were not.

still i return to what is to be done about our unfair, wasteful system ?

I've always been a fan of removing people's 'excuses' to neglect their children for example.
and definitely blocking all avenues of abuse.
even unintended, or pretended to be unintended.
i also hate people who smell because they don't clean themselves, and use excuses for that
I also hate people who make other people live in a situation where they can't take care of themselves and then try to dominate places they seek refuge because our fucking system sucks.

I also hate that there is more food than people can eat and restaurants closing when there are hungry people.

i also despise that we have more vacant houses in this country than we have family units.
some are just rotting away from neglect.

and i most especially hate people who get off on watching whole landscapes decay.

there is tons of work for the proper people
some of it is hard
some of it is tedious
its these kind of tasks that are necessary
the right spirit and the RIGHT COMPENSATION and the work gets done.. hopefully.

starting out with placing everyone in means to eat and sleep and clean themselves seems the most important.

everything else is icing on the cake, because by and large many people get sick of doing the same exact things, and people hate staring at the wall.

the problem is, there are alot of people who are, due to extreme damages from our modified culture, extremely abnormal, sadistic and untrustworthy around... anyone.

so with more time on their hands, they get bored and turn destructive and antisocial and breed people to be worse.

years I've been preaching this.
same people fly past in man places.
here and there some new fool marches in, eyes sparkling with malevolence, only to get caught in the same eternal loop and be absorbed into it.
i haven't seen one such as myself that I know of, that showed up with every intention of changing their life, becoming friendly with people, finding the things they enjoyed, and improving themselves intellectually, emotionally and socially; searching for an environment filled with more people who would be helpful to this extent, getting a rude awakening and realizing how horrible their country was becoming.

don't know if I should be happy being alone as the only sane person. heh.

I really don't want to be. I just want us to be happy. this is deserved after so much hardship. after seeing how people in general have become.

oh we all have lusts and vices and shortcomings, but the gulf that had grown between ordinary folk and the general population is astoundingly wide.

i don't understand what would be termed as "relaxing" for me.
when i was in college , i watched a lot of movies on romance, bromance and friendship. being from a very angry , isolated family with bitter relationships from relatives, we had almost 0 people to interact with.
i personnally was also very different from society and struggled making friends.

as of now i did have somewhat come over this problem and have a good number of "known people" (atleast 500+) that i can categorise into'
- A just people with whom i shared a situation( college, office, tutions)
-B people with whom i have spent my free times in those situations (aka friends, and free time = lunch breaks, seat sharing, projects with them, etc)
-C people with whom i spent some time willingly( aka close friends from college, tutions and home, with whom i played cricket, went on partying/touring places , etc)

-D people whom i liked but never got a love back( aka girls to whom i told i like them. they mostly belonged to category C but eventually went to category A)

previously the category C people were special for me and i would weave my life around them. like all those bromance and friendship movies? these are the guys with whom i would do that. world tours and awesome weird shit? these people will be their in the pic... i would wish them on birthdays, i will call them every few days, go meet with them , have a bite, plan trips, movies , etc...

but today i feel am so done with everyone. i feel like everyone is so fake and forgetful, no one is worth my attention. i can easily forget wishing them birthdays or calling/meeting them every few weeks, because i don't want to or care about it.

friendship , from what i have realised, is just a means of dealing with a task in a group. it just provides a herd immunity and herd advantage . and once you learn how to survive alone, you don't really see a point in it. after coming out of college i was alone in the world, as my friends were from different fields. before college, i thought these were the guys with whom we will be living as F.R.I.E.N.D.S, not just in terms of relation, but rather in a symbiotic way: each one helping each other.
today, i feel criingy just thinking about it.

no friend will remember you for more than a year if you die now. everyone will move on. and in the struggling phase that me and my friends are right now (20-30s), we don't even need to die to forget our friendships.
my so called friends have wished me less on my birthdays than the lifeless apps i have on my phone.

so neither i am expecting someone to do something for me, nor do i think i want to do anything with anyone

------
so back to the problem, i don't know how will i find some relax or meaningful time anymore.
i am always up for trips and one of the first person to say yes to plans.

once upon a time i had this realisation that in a trip, we can enjoy 3 things:
1. the people with whom we are
2. the place we are visiting : the locals, the foods, the nature
3. the mode of travel : car on highways, bikes or flights above the clouds , or some memorable train journeys, etc.

but lately so even that seems to be not working out.
- the people are shit
- places feel like somewhat same everywhere . it's either : rocks/mountains or snow or water or buildings and population. it's just a temporary change of scenary and doesn't really gives a feeling of peace. same for mode of transport.

if i rule the going out part, the things that remains is to enjoying your job, home family and daily life. that i do , but that's the thing that creates an environment of "bored-out"-ism in my mind.

i don't know what i am looking for. the only thing i have not experienced is that class D of people. to have a token of faith/respect/appreciation/love from a non blood related person. to have someone with home i will not feel "bored out" when am planning a journey with them.

mathematically , it seems so far fetched and crazily impossible. like if get bored out and loose trust on people whom i shared most of my life after 50-60 meets, how can i be not bored, and be unhappy with a person to whom i have to see each day?

but since this happens for most of the couples, i will say the mind is the biggest and the most fantasizing mystery of human body ❤️ 💔

ok this may look like a lazy ass beginner crying out for spoon feeding( which it kinda is), but i want some real industrial training in non documented Android coding.

For last 2 years i have been reading tons of Android articles and documentation on "how to use this library", "how to add this feature", "what this function of this class does", but not much about how to use it efficiently, like the way its used in industry.

When I interned with a startup, all they wanted from me was to push new design changes, fix layout bugs and work as fastly as i could. I had no time to understand their core code, which had so many things that i could have learned : those mvp/mvvm design/architecture patterns, dependency injections, kotlin , coroutines, state management designs, data bindings, eventbuses and handling, and VIPER,RIBS (I mean, not everything was particularly in their code, i picked up a few keywords from here n there)... a lot of stuff that is used by many apps for their codebase.
I can read up these stuff by myself, but i always end up feeling bored coz frankly, i got no big/valuable project to implement it upon and feel excited about it. I feel that open source projects from OSS companies could be my window, but their chat spaces are also mostly empty to discuss/get some guidance.

I want some specific training about these. Can you guys provide any online/offline course/company training/books in this subject, the best practices?

So I get this email from google for my development account about these new general data protection regulations and what they're doing with admob and all that good stuff.

I didn't dive too deep and there's nothing crazy in it but it definitely feels like it's spawned on by this "selling you data to advertisers thing."

We live in such a weird society where it's like outrage after outrage. I've never known anybody who has NOT known that their statistics and data was sold to third party for marketing for EVERYTHING they do on the computer or phone. For a DECADE or longer. It always seemed to be such a second hand thought but now out of nowhere everyone has their panties in a wad for something they ALREADY knew.

Are we like that miserable/bored/no hobbies/unsatisfied with our first world life that we have to just flip out about dumb crap all the time?

I am going to start a random stuff from dev life diary just for your annoyance… cause I’m bored (and kind of want to see how long I can be bothered to keep shit like this going)

So, work day 1 for 2022. Wrote TS and YAML. Yay, IaC is fun. Also, no one has bothered me with dms or calls or any such shite today, which is the way I like it. Leave me be, mofos!

Should still bother to prepare all the shit for tomorrow’s PoC spec planning workshop… what a chore. Couldn’t be bothered, I’d much rather someone else did the specs and I could skip to design and implementation. But I guess this is yet another context where I have to do it all myself. Woo hoo…

Mid - senior dev (L from now on) comes in on a project to help out. Starts working on creating a dashboard for the application. Work is progressing, new ideas come in, team lead (TL) is ok with everything, business analyst (BA) is also ok. The dashboard even gets thru testing (T), everything is great. In comes (A), a (probably bored) junior backend dev.

A little backstory about (A):
- seated right next to (TL)
- most discussion about every developed feature take place at (TL)-s desk, right next to (A)
- (A) was also present when discussions took place between (TL) and (BA) about dashboard
- (A) could have easily heard any number of the other team members (over 15) talk about the dashboard

Well, (A) comes into the picture ... and the dashboard (first page after login, big shiny new thing, working just fine ...) breaks. Well, breaks is a little understated. Disappears would be more exact. Cause (A) commented it out. NOT deleted from code. JUST commented out the code.

But why you ask? Because he didn't know what it did and why it was there.
No asking around, no looking up history in repository, no looking up tasks that might be related to that ... no nothing.
He's a backend dev, there's something new and unknown in the backend, the new thing has to go.

(L) didn't scream, (TL) didn't scream, (BA) didn't scream, (T) didn't scream ...
I almost screamed. This didn't happen to me, or (A) would have screamed!

"Dear TitanLannister : You are in the final year. A lot of shit is happening around u. its now time to make a career and take tough decisions. What would you do?"

CHOICE 1: COMPETITIVE
>>>>background : "a lot of super companies like wallmart, fb, amazon, ms, google,.. etc simply takes a straight coding test for fresher placement. They ask tough bad ass level questions, but with right guidance, a hell ton of dedicated hours of coding, and making it to the top of various coding tests could make you a potential candidate"
>>>>+ve points :
- "You got the teachers and professionals with great experience to guide you"
- "a dream job come true.you can go there and join teams that interests you"
- "it was your first exposure to computer world. maybe you would like doing it again, after 4 years"
>>>> -ve points:
- "You have always been an average 70 percentile guy. The task requires 2000-3000 hours of coding an year. it will be hard and you always grow bored out of this pretty quickly"
- "Even If you did that , you stand a lesser chance because your maths is shitty.There are millions running in this race with brains faster than your IDE"
- "your college will riot with you because they expect 75% attendance"
- "You are virtually out of college placements, in which , even though shitty companies come and offer even shittier 4LPA packages($6000 per annum), would take a tough logical/aptitude based test for which you won't be able to prepare"

CHOICE 2: PROFESSIONAL WORK
>>>>background: "you always wanted to create something , and therefore you started taking android based courses. you have been doing android for over 2 years and today you know a lot of things in android. you might be good in other professional lines like web dev, data analytics, ml,ai, etc too if you give time to that"
>>>>+ve points :
- "you will love doing this, you always did"
- "With the support of a good team, you will always be able to complete tasks and build new things quickly"
- "Start ups might offer you the placement, they always need students with some good exposure"
>>>>-ve points :
- "Every established company which provides interesting dev work takes their first round as coding, and do not considers your extra curricular dev work. So you are placing your all hopes in 1 good start up with super offerings that would somehow be amazed by your average profile and offer you a position"
- "start ups are well, startups and may not offer a job security as strong as est. companies"
- "You are probably not as awesome dev as you think you are. for 2 years, you have only learned the concepts , and not launched more than 1 shitty app and a few open source work"

CHOICE 3: NON CODING
>>>>background: "companies coming in college placements have 1-2 rounds of aptitude,logical reasoning , analysis based questions and other non tech tests. There are also online tests available like elitmus,AMCAT, etc which, when cleared with good marks help receive placements from decent established companies like TCS, infosys, accenture,etc"
>>>>+ve points :
- "you will eventually get placed from college, or online tests"
- "there will be a job security, as most of these companies bonds the person for 2-3 years"
>>>> -ve points:
- "You really don't like this. These companies are low profile consultant/services based companies which would put you in any area: from testing to sales, and job offers are again $5000-6000 per annum at max"
- "Since it includes college, the other factors like your average cgpa and 1 backlog will play an opposing role"
- "Again, you are a 70 percentile avg guy. who knows you might not able to crack even these simple tests"

Ugh... I am fucking confused. Please be me, and help.The things that i wrote about myself are true, but the things that i assumed about super companies, start ups or low profile companies might not be correct, these points comes from my limited knowledge ,terrified and confused brain, after all.
:(

I don't know if I'm terrible, or if this will sound familiar to anyone. I rushed so much of this project. That's not a good excuse for what's happening, but, speaking about it with a newly converted coder who is a good friend of mine, let him be called F:"
F: I'm so bored I'm going through my script and making a few subs for some repetitive code. I saved 90 lines today.

Me: Bored you say... debating what sort of code of mine to send you for you to ... review.
Because, the reality is, if I dont finish certain features by May, shit will hit the fan lol So I am considering asking for a boilerplate NDA and a few extra bucks from client.nickname, to bring on testers and/or UI guys and/or database guys.
But you seemed to be doing alot lately, so I was thinking, I would deal with fiverr and freelancer.com first
F: I dunno what use id be by May but I'll always look at stuff
Me: A ton. You could literally review any code in any language youre learning. Your review code be: address/models.py class Address 1. TODO for validating formatted address 2. Why is formatted address declared twice?
To which my response would be Fuck thats right and Zomg really
And if I knew about this... last week.. I'd be hours ahead of schedule and not have just forgotten why I needed to fix address
F: Lol"

ugh, company discussion on WhatsApp sucks. i want to take a leave from this new company i joinedbas i am bored the hell out

the company policy is that we got 16 pl 7 mandatory leaves and 8 emergency leaves. pretty good deal i guess. but as a new joiner, i am on probabtion for 6 months and I can't take either of those mandatory/paid leaves.

i was neck deep in work so could not get time to call my manager. plus had a 1 hour incredibly boring and frustrating call with another 50 yo tech lead from another team who was goin on an on like a 90 yo uncle with his wartime stories so could not think straight.

i sent my manager a "hey a***" at 7.08 pm on WhatsApp.

that's a great shoot oneself in the foot situation. i could not call because it's 7.08 pm, and don't wanna give an impression of a corporate non living dev who makes or supports making calls at odd hours. i also can't dele6 the message coz that would be more awkward

but i had went with the creepy hey text , and didn't wanna keep him waiting, so quickly add anothe message with the context : "i wanted to discuss a small leave related query, will call tomorrow"

another classic shoot oneself in the foot.

the probation guy wants to take leaves? he doesn't have any, what could he talk about it? oh right, i was gonna cheese him to give me an informal permission. but now i made it all formal.

noice :/

I got bored / fed up with my previous line of work after just ending up on that path a good decade earlier, and started thinking what could be the thing I either could potentially be any good at or would possibly enjoy - and also make a steady income from as well, which was a luxury my previous career could never have offered me... for the longest time I couldn't think of anything. I just started browsing for some edu to apply, and saw an ICT BSc. And off I went... I guess the final realization I wanted to be a programmer, not a data analyst or ICT salesperson or something such was sometime during the series of Programming 101 courses that I found thoroughly enjoyable.

Not a rant, but seeking advice...

Should I abandon 2 years' worth of work on migrating a personal project from SQL (M$) to a Graph database, and just stick to SQL? And only consider migrating when/if I need graph capabilities?

The project is a small social media platform. Has around ~50 monthly active users.

Why I started the migration in the first place:
• When researching databases, I read that for social media, graph is more suitable. It was, at least in terms of query structure. It was more natural, there were no "joins", and queries were much simpler than their SQL counterparts.

• In case the project got big, I didn't want to have to panic-deal with database issues that come with growth. I had some indexing issues with MSSQL, and it got me worried that at 50MAU I'm having these issues, what would happen if I get more?

• It's a personal project, and the Gremlin language and graph databases looked cool and I was motivated to learn something new.

----

Why I'm considering aborting the migration:
• It's taking too damn long. I'm unable to work on other features because this migration is taking up all my free time. Sunk cost fallacy is hitting me hard with this one.

• In local testing within docker, it's extremely slow. I tried various graph engines (janusgraph, official tinkerpop, orientdb), and the fastest one takes 4-6minutes to complete my server tests. SQL finishes the same tests in under 2 minutes, same docker environment. I also tried running my tests on a remote server (AWS neptune) and it was just as slow. Maybe my queries are bad, but can I afford to spend even more time fine tuning all queries?

• I now realise that "graph = no scalability issues" was naïve of me, and 100% wishful thinking. Scalability issues don't care what database I use, but about how well tuned and configured the whole system is.

• I really want to move on. My tech stack is falling behind and becoming outdated. I'm unable to maintain dependencies.

• I'm worried about losing those 50 MAU because they're essential to gaining traction once I release the platform. I keep telling them about the migration but at some point (2 years later) they're going to get bored I feel.

I guess partially it's a rant because I feel like I shouldn't stop now having spent 2 years on this, but at the same time I feel like I'm heading towards a dead end.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading:)

OpenSource is fun they said. I being a bored teen thought, ah, another chance to experiment. Discover something new. Now I am into piracy, movies, music, software. If I can get it for free I ain't paying for it. So I went on to GitHub to see what exciting new Repos I could contribute to. I hate already implemented plenty of algorithms in GO for GitHub.com/TheAlgorithms so I was looking something more practical, more beneficial to society. Then I saw it, the perfect repo, not too complex and not amateur. SpotDL/spotify-downloader for downloading songs from Spotify, a grey area coz it's technically piracy. Well not from Spotify, we fetch the info from the Spotify API and search for the songs on YouTubeMusic. They were just about to release v3, a complete rewrite of the codebase stressing code readability and stuff. I spend about a day studying the codebase, trying to findout just where I could make my contribution. I can see outright that there's a huge problem with implementation.

First of all the script spawns 4 processes for downloading songs though you might be downloading only one song. Which means for everytime you run the script you have to wait for 4 other processes to be spawned before any downloading can happen. Sure this is faster when you are downloading more than like 4 songs, but it's actually slower when downloading a single song. But I ignored that coz I assumed that most users download playlists and albums. Anyway we talked with the like lead developer and he was all like, make those PRs anytime you feel like. So I made a really minor first contribution.

I introduced download from Spotify URI functionality, modified like 10 lines of code. I was half expecting that the PR would be merged within hours at most 24 hours coz of how minor of a contribution it was, 5 days in it was pending. So I tagged the lead Dev and he was all appreciative of the PR, calling it real 'clean code' and stuff. 3 more days, the PR is still not merged. I have now stacked 4 more commits to the same PR, I tag the dev and he's like he's waiting to see if my 'feature' will get atleast 10 upvotes so that it can be merged, he links an issue. I go to the issue and my feature is not there, So 11 days after I made my PR I have to write a comment explaining the 'feature' introduced in my PR and then wait for 10 upvotes.

I was like f**k this, I'll just develop on my fork if you want the features on my fork, you will make your own PR! I am so done with OpenSource, development is slow. I have no idea how you guys do it. I can't handle development where I don't have write access.

Need some advise from all you clever devs out there.

When I finished uni I worked for a year at a good company but ultimately I was bored by the topic.

I got a new job at a place that was run by a Hitler wannabee that didn't want to do anything properly including writing tests and any time I improved an area or wrote a test would take me aside to have a go so I quit after 3 months.

Getti g a new job was not that hard but being at companies for short stints was a big issue.

My new job I've been here 3 months again but the code base is a shit hole, no standardisation, no one knows anything about industry standards, no tests again, pull requests that are in name only as clearly broken areas that you comment on get ignored so you might as well not bother, fake agile where all user stories are not user stories and we just lie every sprint about what we finished, no estimates and so forth, and a code base that is such a piece of shit that to add a new feature you have to hack every time. The project only started a few months back.

For instance we were implementing permissions and roles. My team lead does the table design. I spent 4 hours trying to convince him it was not fit for purpose and now we have spent a month on this area and we can't even enforce the permissions on the backend so basically they don't exist. This is the tip of the iceberg as this shit happens constantly and the worst thing is even though I say there is a problem we just ignore it so the app will always be insecure.

None of the team knows angular or wants to learn but all our apps use angular..

These are just examples, there is a lot more problems right from agile being run by people that don't understand agile to sending database entities instead of view models to client apps, but not all as some use view models so we just duplicate all the api controllers.

Our angular apps are a huge mess now because I have to keep hacking them since the backend is wrong.

We have a huge architectural problem that will set us back 1 month as we won't be able to actually access functionality and we need to release in 3 months, their solution even understanding my point fully is to ignore it. Legit.

The worst thing is that although my team is not dumb, if you try to explain this stuff to them they either just don't understand what you are saying or don't care.

With all that said I don't think they are even aware of these issues somehow so I dont think it's on purpose, and I do like the people and company, but I have reached the point that I don't give a shit anymore if something is wrong as its just so much easier to stay silent and makes no difference anyway.

I get paid very well, it's close to home and I actually learn a lot since their skill level is so low I have to pick up the slack and do all kinds of things I've never done much of like release management or database optimisation and I like that.

Would you leave and get a new job?

So I have this new role at work, still app development with some added responsibilities. Nothing major. But already I'm noticing what could be a pattern.

Zoom meetings that could have been phone calls or emails. Meeting was setup a week and a half or so in advance. Had real a meaning last week where a team member mentioned it and reminded the other team members of the upcoming meeting. We all confirmed that we'd be there.

I get a notification that the meeting is in 15 minutes. Meeting time!!! So I log on, only to see one person from the other company, two more people from said company log on then my team member. But to my surprise him and I are the only people from my team on zoom.

My team member then goes on to waste this poor man's time asking him questions that he doesn't really have the answers to and I'm here just wondering why.

Why isn't this meeting a 2 minute phone call?
Why am I in this meet?
Is my team member bored?
How does this make my company look in the eyes of these people?

Now I know why my other team member didn't log on. They smelled the rat and knew this would be a wast of time. And me being new to the team walked right into it 😐