The coolest project I've worked on was for a certain country's Navy. The project itself was cool and I'll talk about it below but first, even cooler than the project was the place were I worked on it.

I would go to this island off the coast where the navy had its armoury. Then to get into the armoury I'd go through this huge tunnel excavated in solid rock.

Finally, once inside I would have to go thru the thickest metal doors you've ever seen to get to crypto room, which was a tiny room with a bunch of really old men - cryptographers - scribbling math formulae all day long.

I can't give a lot of technical details on the project for security reasons but basically it was a bootable CD with a custom Linux distro on it. Upon booting up the system would connect to the Internet looking for other nodes (other systems booted with that CD). The systems would find each other and essentially create an ad-hoc "dark net".

The scenario was that some foreign force would have occupied the country and either destroyed or taken control of the Navy systems. In this case, some key people would boot these CDs in some PC somewhere not under foreign control (and off the navy grounds.) This would supposedly allow them to establish secure communications between surviving officers. There is a lot more to it but that's a good harmless outline.

As a bonus, I got to tour an active aircraft carrier :)

Shit. It's the weekend and my plan is to... code more.

Years ago, I was part of a project that went completely off the rails. A little context: we were a services company and we had local offices in cities all over the country. My team provided 2nd-level support which means we often had the PMs call us from those via an annoying Nextel radio.

I won’t go through the details but suffice it to say this project envolved one such branch going rogue and committing actual fraud, with criminal proceedings and all. People were on the edge, and the relationship with that branch was increasingly hostile. There was also an internal power struggle in the company between some directors at that point. In other words, a clusterfuck I’ll always cherish, if by cherish you mean hate hate hate. Anywho…

One time, there was a national holiday on a Thursday and we were going to make it a long weekend. As customary, I communicated with all the PMs about contigency plans. This PM then told us that we could not take Friday off because the customer wanted us to fly over there. We were supposed to be at the customer’s site early Friday morning. That meant we would have to fly Thrusday afternoon. I wasn’t happy.

It immediatly felt arbitrary too. As I said, the relationship was not good and we suspected he was just trying to cost us our days off. I knew enough of the customer to be fairly sure they would not have requested us that Friday. Why did the customer want us then? There was nothing yet on production and if it was just to show progress, surely we could move it to Monday. At worst, can’t we make it over the phone? No, no, no, he said. The customer was adamant that we be there on Friday. Sucked to be us.

So we flew over Thursday afternoon and on Friday morning we headed to the customer’s offices only to find it closed. They too had made it a long weekend and wouldn’t be back until Monday.

Normally I would be furious over the waste of time but to be honest, both I and my colleague smiled at that. It confirmed that the PM just tried to screw us and the customer have never asked for us. We headed back to the local office.

Before coming in, we both bought ourselves some icecream. My friend stayed in the little garden in front and I went in. The PM immediatly saw me and demanded to know why I wasn’t at the customer yet. I didn’t answer. Instead I grabbed the Nextel radio and headed back out with the PM following. I then sat down on the grass and called my director. Smiling and staring at the PM, I told him about the office being closed. The PM’s face froze when my director asked to talk to him.

We sat outside under the sun, enjoying our icecreams while the PM got shouted at. It was the best icecream I’ve ever had.

I'm the only developer in my company. I am a "junior dev" who started working like 6 months ago. Safe to say I am not well experienced and have a lot to learn in this journey. Due to this pandemic, my bosses who have been flaunting their wealth have started making losses and now needs to find another way to get money. Mind you, the company I work with is a marketing firm.
So what the bosses thought of doing was creating a delivery service due to the current situation. It is not their field but since they still need to show people they are the rich people, they need money either way. Since I'm the only developer in the company I've to make this application. I've to make an Android and iOS app with a back-end and an admin portal all in 1 month. My pay is shit and by shit I mean less than even 700 USD. I've not done a project like this before so there would be a learning curve as well. And there is no one to guide me either.
They think just because they have hired one developer anything development related is settled and I will do everything no matter how big or complicated or how shitty my salary is.
The feature list is a whole system, like it is so complicated that someone could really make their own company just to work on that application. It's HUGE.

I'm thinking of saying no I can't do this shit. But just wanted to see what some more experienced devs say about this. I've attached the features list in the rant.

Yup, that's about right.

My current workspace. Nothing fancy but it does the job. Tools: Windows 10, Emacs, Visual Studio 2015, git, bash.

Our technical debt has technical debt. There's no way we're fixing this tire fire 😔

Hi, I am an artificial intelligence created to simulate a developer.

I am in development hell right now so my responses may be late or may never come, I'm not always online you know.

Talk to me, help me grow, but I do filter your input so if you're not normal, odds are I won't respond.

So, I'm the only developer in a marketing firm. I was asked to develop the company website. The deadline was within a month. A full on CMS. When I was interviewed I told them that I'm more fluent in back-end development rather than UI design etc. So the company's designer started designing the website. Incomplete designs were given to me one week before the due date. I'm a fresh grad so I'm relatively new. So I used a website builder knowing that I can't code the whole CMS within a week. I asked them which they gave approval to knowing it was $16 a month.
I started making it using webflow. 2 pages in, I asked them to pay for the subscription because webflow allows 2-3 pages for the free version. When the time to pay came, they were like, "wow, $16? That's a lot every month for just a website". Keep in mind, it's not that they don't have the money. Just cheap. This was like 5 days before the deadline and they said it's too expensive and asked me to code everything by myself. And gave an extension for a few months.
I said okay and started development. I said we would still need to spend on a cloud instance for deployment which would be like $6 monthly. My manager asked me is there a way to not pay monthly and pay like $100 and get one for lifetime. I facepalmed so hard. I tried explaining to him cloud-server costs are either monthly/yearly or pay-per-use basis. He told me maybe because I'm new I don't know and go to do some research on it. I researched and the only solution was to buy a server which costs $100++ monthly. I sent him the costs in a document which he did not even bother to read.

That was back in November last year. Fast forward to February. I've coded the website thrice. The design keeps changing every week. The design is still not complete. And they are saying I'm not eligible for a promotion because the website is still not done. It pisses me the fuck off. It's not my fault it's not done. The designers haven't done the design, the manager can't decide on shit. I'm just here because it's my first job out of uni and I thought it might be a good experience, but honestly right now the way they are treating me it pisses me off.

My workplace has been forcing me to work everyday for almost a month now. I've been working at least 8-10 hours from Saturday to Thursday, and 2-3 hours on Friday as well. I'm so exhausted. I can't sleep properly. All I do is work. I have no time left to do things that I want to enjoy. I tried coding today but I'm too exhausted to do it. I was literally at 0 productivity today. I hate seeing my computer now. I don't know how to overcome this especially during the current lockdown situation. The work I do is not valued or appreciated and it's mentally breaking me honestly. I don't know what I want anymore. For sure another job but I need at least a temporary fix till the lockdown is over.

For those who know me or read through my profile, yup it's the same company. The reason I haven't left them even after all this is because this is a really tough time for me financially and I have no other sources of income and right now at my place there are no job opportunities. So the only option is to continue with the existing work place.

99 bugs in the code
99 bugs in the code
Fix one bug and patch it around
127 bugs in the code

Showing off this PC cluster rendering these gigantic 3D frames, a customer shakes his head: "Why is this so slow?" I asked why he thought it was slow and he said, "I have an old Windows laptop but if I double click on an image on the desktop, it opens immediately!"

After a horrible 11 months in probation I quit from my shitty job and got a new job with better benefits, better pay, better working hours and better co-workers (we'll see if that lasts).

However this new job turns out, I'm glad I got out of the toxicity of my old job and finally have some hope that things might work out after all.

print(walrus := boto3.client('iam'))

Imagine supporting blackbox software that still uses practices from the 1980s - unreadable 5 string DB2 column names, a custom piece of shit language you have to edit in what is essentially an Excel editor live on the server, etc.

Even better, the company that supports it has 6 month fix/release turnarounds. Six months in 2017!

I'm writing a minor productivity app which consumes and modifies a vbscript file on a network drive which apparently gets included in other productivity tools to drive the business, as well as updates the relevant DNS entry the field is associated with, and because I care about making the world a better place now writes the data out to what I hope becomes the authoritative source for said data which eventually replaces these who-the-knows-why-they-are-there network drive files and snippets.

The tool removes the need for an ISP tech in the field to make TWO phone calls when they update network equipment. One for the vbscript tweak, one for the DNS update.

Oh, did I mention that some PHP app under a L1 helpdesk guy's desk that the company has made absolutely necessary for their business (and I subsequently moved to a god damn server) consumes the vbscript file and parses it into something PHP can understand?

You can't make this shit up.

The only saving grace is that I have my team rewriting all of this ridiculous shit in Haskell. Type safety and long term refatorability will keep us sane.

Do I really need boto3 to upload my django media files to aws s3 bucket?

Your language has nulls. Would rather smash my own skull in with a mechanical keyboard with blue cherry switches so everyone can hear because omg how do you even get by.