Good Morning!, its time for practiseSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!

Todays contestant is a very special one.

*sitcom audience: WHY?*

Glad you asked, you see if you were to look at his linkedin profile, you would see a job title unlike any you've seen before.

*sitcom audience oooooooohhhhhh*

were not talking software developer, engineer, tech lead, designer, CTO, CEO or anything like that, No No our new entrant "G" surpasses all of those with the title ..... "Software extraordinaire".

*sitcom audience laughs hysterically*

I KNOW!, wtf does that even mean! as a previous dev-ranter pointed out does this mean he IS quality code? I'd say he's more like a trash can ... where his code belongs

*ba dum tsssss*

Ok ok, lets get on with the show, heres some reasons why "G" is on the show:

One of G's tasks was to build an analytics gathering library for iOS, similar to google analytics where you track pages and events (we couldn't use google's). G was SO good at this job he implemented 2 features we didn't even ask for:

- If the library was unable to load its config file (for any reason) it would throw an uncatchable system integrity error, crashing the app.
- If anything was passed into any of the functions that wasn't expected (null, empty array etc.) it would crash the app as it was "more efficient" to not do any sanity checks inside the library.

This caused a lot of issues as some of the data needed to come from the clients server. The day we launched the app, within the first 3 hours we had over 40k crash logs and a VERY angry client.

Now, what makes this story important is not the bugs themselves, come on how many times have we all done something stupid? No the issue here was G defended all of this as the right thing to do!

.. and no he wasn't stoned or drunk!

G claimed if he couldn't get the right settings / params he wouldn't be able to track the event and then our CEO wouldn't have our usage data. To which I replied:

"So your solution was to not give the client an app instead? ... which also doesn't give the CEO his data".

He got very angry and asked me "what would you do then?". I offered a solution something like why not have a default tag for "error" or "unknown" where if theres an issue, we send up whatever we have, plus the file name and store it somewhere else. I was told I was being ridiculous as it wasn't built to track anything like that and that would never work ... his solution? ... pull the library out of the app and forget it.

... once again giving everyone no data.

G later moved onto another cross-platform style project. Backend team were particularly unhappy as they got no spec of what needed to be done. All they knew was it was a single endpoint dealing with very complex model. There was no Java classes, super classes, abstract classes or even interfaces, just this huge chunk of mocked data. So myself and the lead sat down with him, and asked where the interfaces for the backend where, or designs / architecture for them etc.

His response, to this day frightens me ... not makes me angry, not bewilders me ... scares the living shit out of me that people like this exist in the world and have successful careers.

G: "hhhmmm, I know how to build an interface, but i've never understood them ... Like lets say I have an interface, what now? how does that help me in any way? I can't physically use it, does it not just use up time building it for no reason?"

us: "... ... how are the backend team suppose to understand the model, its types, integrate it into the other systems?"

G: "Can I not just tell them and they can write it down?"

**
I'll just pause here for a moment, as you'll likely need to read that again out of sheer disbelief
**

I've never seen someone die inside the way the lead did. He started a syllable and his face just dropped, eyes glazed over and he instantly lost all the will to live. He replied:

" wel ............... it doesn't matter ... its not important ... I have to go, good luck with the project"

*killed the screen share and left the room*

now I know you are all dying in suspense to know what happened to that project, I can drop the shocking bombshell that it was in fact cancelled. Thankfully only ~350 man hours were spent on it

... yep, not a typo.

G's crowning achievement however will go down in history. VERY long story short, backend got deployed to the server and EVERYTHING broke. Lead investigated, found mistakes and config issues on every second line, load balancer wasn't even starting up. When asked had this been tested before it was deployed:

G: "Yeah I tested it on my machine, it worked fine"

lead: "... and on the server?"

G: "no, my machine will do the same thing"

lead: "do you have a load balancer and multiple VM's?"

G: "no, but Java is Java"

... and with that its time to end todays episode. Will G be our most incompetent? ... maybe.

Tune in later for more practiceSafeHex's most incompetent co-worker!!!

When I worked for an online dating app, at one point we had the ridiculous idea to try to take a popular LinkedIn feature and convert it to a dating app feature in order to capitalize off of the success LinkedIn had with it.

The feature was LinkedIn endorsements. The idea was to allow the dating app users to get endorsements from people in their contacts lists on certain traits/features from a defined list (ex. Funny, smart, etc.). It wasn’t a terrible idea on the surface, but the way we planned to execute on it was insane and everyone knew it was going to fail. To avoid any controversy all of the endorsable terms were watered down to the point where no one would ever find using them/asking their friends for endorsements to be any fun. And the worst part was how we planned to get people to ask their friends for endorsements - management wanted us to build a contact list importer and just spam email contacts with “please endorse me” emails. The whole thing was ridiculous.

No one, including myself, wanted to build the feature/spam tool but management really wanted it so we had to build it. Like expected, it failed very quickly when it was clear no one cared about getting their real life friends to endorse them on some dating app, and the spam contacts took was ineffective and... spammy.

Finally did it. Quit my job.

The full story:
Just came back from vacation to find out that pretty much all the work I put at place has been either destroyed by "temporary fixes" or wiped clean in favour of buggy older versions. The reason, and this is a direct quote "Ari left the code riddled with bugs prior to leaving".

Oh no. Oh no I did not you fucker.

Some background:

My boss wrote a piece of major software with another coder (over the course of month and a balf). This software was very fragile as its intention was to demo specific features we want to adopt for a version 2 of it.

I was then handed over this software (which was vanilajs with angular) and was told to "clean it up" introduce a typing system, introduce a build system, add webpack for better module and dependency management, learn cordova (because its essential and I had no idea of how it works). As well as fix the billion of issues with data storage in the software. Add a webgui and setup multiple databses for data exports from the app. Ensure that transmission of the data is clean and valid.

What else. This software had ZERO documentation. And I had to sit my boss for a solid 3hrs plus some occasional questions as I was developing to get a clear idea of whats going on.

Took a bit over 3 weeks. But I had the damn thing ported over. Cleaned up. And partially documented.

During this period, I was suppose to work with another 2 other coders "my team". But they were always pulled into other things by my Boss.

During this period, I kept asking for code reviews (as I was handling a very large code base on my own).

During this period, I was asking for help from my boss to make sure that the visual aspect of the software meets the requirements (there are LOTS of windows, screens, panels etc, which I just could not possibly get to checking on my own).

At the end of this period. I went on vacation (booked by my brothers for my bday <3 ).

I come back. My work is null. The Boss only looked at it on the friday night leading up to my return. And decided to go back to v1 and fix whatever he didnt like there.

So this guy calls me. Calls me on a friggin SUNDAY. I like just got off the plane. Was heading to dinner with my family.
He and another coder have basically nuked my work. And in an extremely hacky way tied some things together to sort of work. Moreever, the webguis that I setup for the database viewing. They were EDITED ON THE PRODUCTION SERVER without git tracking!!

So monday. I get bombarded with over 20 emails. Claiming that I left things in an usuable state with no documentation. As well as I get yelled at by my boss for introducing "unnecessary complicated shit".

For fuck sakes. I was the one to bring the word documentation into the vocabulary of this company. There are literally ZERO documentated projects here. While all of mine are at least partially documented (due to lack of time).

For fuck sakes, during my time here I have been basically begging to pull the coder who made the admin views for our software and clean up some of the views so that no one will ever have to touch any database directly.

To say this story is the only reason I am done is so not true.

I dedicated over a year to this company. During this time I saw aspects of this behaviour attacking other coders as well as me. But never to this level.

I am so friggin happy that I quit. Never gonna look back.

Me at the office, Boss calling me by phone..

Boss: Hi, I need a new Build of XX Android app for another client.. set the base address at x.x.x.x and send me an APK file

Me: OK, I will do it.

Boss: can you do it in 5 minutes?

Me: Sure, it's simple..

Android Studio: You think it's simple !
* Indexing Files
* Sync Project
* Gradle Build
* Indexing....
* Some f* tasks

Oh kill me now !!

LONG RANT AHEAD!

In my workplace (dev company) I am the only dev using Linux on my workstation. I joined project XX, a senior dev onboarded me. Downloaded the code, built the source, launched the app,.. BAM - an exception in catalina.out. ORM framework failed to map something.

mvn clean && mvn install

same thing happens again. I address this incident to sr dev and response is "well.... it works on my machine and has worked for all other devs. It must be your environment issue. Prolly linux is to blame?" So I spend another hour trying to dig up the bug. Narrowed it down to a single datamodel with ORM mapping annotation looking somewhat off. Fixed it.

mvn clean && mvn install

the app now works perfectly. Apparently this bug has been in the codebase for years and Windows used to mask it somehow w/o throwing an exception. God knows what undefined behaviour was happening in the background...

Months fly by and I'm invited to join another project. Sounds really cool! I get accesses, checkout the code, build it (after crossing the hell of VPNs on Linux). Run component 1/4 -- all goocy. run component 2,3/4 -- looks perfect. Run component 4/4 -- BAM: LinkageError. Turns out there is something wrong with OSGi dependencies as ClassLoader attempts to load the same class twice, from 2 different sources. Coworkers with Windows and MACs have never seen this kind of exception and lead dev replies with "I think you should use a normal environment for work rather than playing with your Linux". Wtf... It's java. Every env is "normal env" for JVM! I do some digging. One day passes by.. second one.. third.. the weekend.. The next Friday comes and I still haven't succeeded to launch component #4. Eventually I give up (since I cannot charge a client for a week I spent trying to set up my env) and walk away from that project. Ever since this LinkageError was always in my mind, for some reason I could not let it go. It was driving me CRAZY! So half a year passes by and one of the project devs gets a new MB pro. 2 days later I get a PM: "umm.. were you the one who used to get LinkageError while starting component #4 up?". You guys have NO IDEA how happy his message made me. I mean... I was frickin HIGH: all smiling, singing, even dancing behind my desk!! Apparently the guy had the same problem I did. Except he was familiar with the project quite well. It took 3 more days for him to figure out what was wrong and fix it. And it indeed was an error in the project -- not my "abnormal Linux env"! And again for some hell knows what reason Windows was masking a mistake in the codebase and not popping an error where it must have popped. Linux on the other hand found the error and crashed the app immediatelly so the product would not be shipped with God knows what bugs...

I do not mean to bring up a flame war or smth, but It's obvious I've kind of saved 2 projects from "undefined magical behaviour" by just using Linux. I guess what I really wanted to say is that no matter how good dev you are, whether you are a sr, lead or chief dev, if your coworker (let it be another sr or a jr dev) says he gets an error and YOU cannot figure out what the heck is wrong, you should not blame the dev or an environment w/o knowing it for a fact. If something is not working - figure out the WHATs and WHYs first. Analyze, compare data to other envs,... Not only you will help a new guy to join your team but also you'll learn something new. And in some cases something crucial, e.g. a serious messup in the codebase.

Things have been a little too quiet on my side here, so its time for an exciting new series:

practiseSafeHex's new life as a manager.

Episode 1: Dealing with the new backend team

It's great to be back folks. Since our last series where we delved into the mind numbing idiocy of former colleagues, a lot has changed. I've moved to a new company and taken a step up as a Dev manager / Tech lead. Now I know what you are all thinking, sounds more dull and boring right? Well it wouldn't be a practiseSafeHex series if we weren't ...

<audience-shouting>
DEALING! ... WITH! ... IDIOTS!
</audience-shouting>

Bingo! so lets jump right in and kick us off with a good one.

So for the past few months i've been on an on-boarding / fact finding / figuring out this shit-storm, mission to understand more about what it is i'm suppose to do and how to do it. Last week, as part of this, I had the esteemed pleasure of meeting face to face with the remote backend team i've been working with. Lets rattle off a few facts to catch us all up:

- 8 hour time difference to me
- No documentation other than a non-maintained swagger doc
- Swagger is reporting errors and several of the input models are just `Type: String`
- The one model that seems accurate, has every property listed as optional, including what must be the primary key
- Properties go missing and get removed at the drop of a hat and we are never told.
- First email I sent them took 27 days to reply, my response to that hasn't been answered so far 31 days later (new record! way to go team, I knew we could do it!!!)
- I deal directly with 2 of them, the manager and the tech lead. Based on how things have gone so far, i've nick named them:
1) Ass
2) Hole

So lets look at some example of their work:

- I was trying to test the new backend, I saw no data in QA. They said it wouldn't show up until mid day their time, which is middle of the night for us. I said we need data in our timezone and I was told: a) "You don't understand how big this system is" (which is their new catch phrase) b) "Your timezone is not my concern"

- The whole org started testing 2 days later. The next day a member from each team was on a call and I was asked to give an update of how the testing was going on the mobile side. I said I was completely blocked because I can't get test data. Backend were asked to respond. They acknowledged they were aware, but that mobile don't understand how big the system is, and that the mobile team need to come up with ideas for the backend team, as to how mobile can test it. I said we can't do anything without test data, they said ... can you guess what? ... correct "you don't understand how big the system is"

- We eventually got something going and I noticed that only 1 of the 5 API changes due on their side was done. Opened tickets. 2 days later asked them for progress and was told that "new findings" always go to the bottom of the backlog, and they are busy with other things. I said these were suppose to be done days ago. They said you can't give us 2 days notice and expect everything done. I said the original ticket was opened a month a go *sends link* ......... *long silence* ...... "ok, but you don't understand how big the system is, this is a lot of work"

- We were on a call. Product was asking the backend manager (aka "Ass") a question about a slight upgrade to the new feature. While trying to talk, the tech lead (aka "Hole") kept cutting everyone off by saying loudly "but thats not in scope". The question was "is this possible in the future" and "how long would it take", coming from management and product development. Hole just kept saying "its not in scope", until he was told to be quiet by several people.

- An API was sending down JSON with a string containing a message for the user with 2 bits of data inside it. We asked for one of those pieces to also come down as a property as the string can change and we needed it client side. We got that. A few days later we found an edge case and asked for the second piece of data to be a property too. Now keep in mind, they clearly already have access to them in order to make the string. We were told "If you keep requesting changes like this, you are going to delay the release of the backend by up to 2 weeks"

Yes folks, there you have it, the most minuscule JSON modifications, can delay your release by up to 2 weeks ........ maybe I should just tell product, that they don't understand how big the app is, and claim we can't build it on our side? Seems to work for them

Thats all the time we have for today,

Tune in for more, where we'll be looking into such topics as:

- If god himself was an iOS developer ... not
- Why automate when you can spend all day doing it by hand
- Its more time-efficient to just give everything a story point of 5
- Why waste time replying to emails ... when you can do nothing instead

See you all next week,
practiseSafeHex

I have been a mobile developer working with Android for about 6 years now. In that time, I have endured countless annoyances in the Android development space. I will endure them no more.
My complaints are:

1. Ridiculous build times. In what universe is it acceptable for us to wait 30 seconds for a build to complete. Yes, I've done all the optimisations mentioned on this page and then some. Don't even mention hot reload as it doesn't work fast enough or just does not work at all. Also, buying better hardware should not be a requirement to build a simple Android app, Xcode builds in 2 seconds with a 8GB Macbook Air. A Macbook Air!

2. IDE. Android Studio is a memory hog even if you throw 32GB of RAM at it. The visual editors are janky as hell. If you use Eclipse, you may as well just chop off your fingers right now because you will have no use for them after you try and build an app from afresh. I mean, just look at some of the posts in this subreddit where the common response is to invalidate caches and restart. That should only be used as a last resort, but it's thrown about like as if it solves everything. Truth be told, it's Gradle's fault. Gradle is so annoying I've dedicated the next point to it.

3. Gradle. I am convinced that Gradle causes 50% of an Android developer's pain. From the build times to the integration into various IDEs to its insane package management system. Why do I need to manually exclude dependencies from other dependencies, the build tool should just handle it for me. C'mon it's 2019. Gradle is so bad that it requires approx 54GB of RAM to work out that I have removed a dependency from the list of dependencies. Also I cannot work out what properties I need to put in what block.
4. API. Android API is over-bloated and hellish. How do I schedule a recurring notification? Oh use an AlarmManager. Yes you heard right, an AlarmManager... Not a NotificationManager because that would be too easy. Also has anyone ever tried running a long running task? Or done an asynchronous task? Or dealt with closing/opening a keyboard? Or handling clicks from a RecyclerView? Yes, I know Android Jetpack aims to solve these issues but over the years I have become so jaded by things that have meant to solve other broken things, that there isn't much hope for Jetpack in my mind 😤

5. API 2. A non-insignificant number of Android users are still on Jelly Bean or KitKat! That means we, as developers, have to support some of your shitty API decisions (Fragments, Activities, ListView) from all the way back then!

6. Not reactive enough. Android has support for Databinding recently but this kind of stuff should have been introduced from the very start. Look at React or Flutter as to how easy it is to make shit happen without any effort.

7. Layouts. What the actual hell is going on here. MDPI, XHDPI, XXHDPI, mipmap, drawable. Fuck it, just chuck it all in the drawable folder. Seriously, Android should handle this for me. If I am designing for a larger screen then it should be responsive. I don't want to deal with 50 different layouts spread over 6 different folders.

8. Permission system. Why was this not included from the very start? Rogue apps have abused this and abused your user's privacy and security. Yet you ban us and not them from the Play Store. What's going on? We need answers.

9. In Android, building an app took me 3 months and I had a lot of work left to do but I got so sick of Android dev I dropped it in favour of Flutter. I built the same app in Flutter and it took me around a month and I completed it all.
10. XML.

If you're a new dev, for the love of all that is good in this world, do NOT get into Android development. Start with Flutter or even iOS. On Flutter and build times are insanely fast and the hot reload is under 500ms constantly. It's a breath of fresh air and will save you a lot of headaches AND it builds for iOS flawlessly.

To the people who build Android, advocate it and work on it, sorry to swear, but fuck you! You have created a mess that we have to work with on a day-to-day basis only for us to get banned from the app store! You have sold us a lie that Android development is amazing with all the sweet treat names and conferences that look bubbly and fun. You have allowed to get it so bad that we can't target an API higher than 18 because some Android users are still using devices that support that!

End this misery. End our pain. End our suffering. Throw this abomination away like you do with some of your other projects and migrate your efforts over to Flutter. Please!

#NoToGoogleIO #AndroidSummitBoycott #FlutterDev #ReactNative

Last week
Customer: I want <totally useless app idea that already exists>, how long will it take to build it?
Me: I think such an app already exists, but according to your requirements I believe we could finish it around May 6th.
Customer: OK, but our app will be so much better.
-finishes meeting and signs contract-

Monday
Customer: will the app be done soon?
Me: as we discussed in the meeting last week, it won’t be done until May 6th.

Tuesday
Customer: will the app be done soon, when will it be in the app stores?
Me: As I explained yesterday, it won’t be finished before May 6th.

Wtf????

Me: Well, it's time to make a new app!
* opens up VS Code *
* opens folder selection dialog *
* creates a new folder called "notes app" *
* yarn inits that folder *
* installs react and react-dom *
* installs webpack, webpack-cli, babel-core, babel-loader, babel-preset-env, babel-preset-react, style-loader, css-loader, file-loader, html-webpack-plugin and clean-webpack-plugin as a dev dependency (install is pending) *
* copies a webpack config from some other project *
* creates a babelrc file *
* copies a yarn script called "build:dev" which would launch webpack *
* dev dependencies installed *
* tries to save *
* vscode doesn't save because files differ *
* tries to copy dev dependencies *
* fail *
* tries again *
* saves *
* writes bare-bones index.jsx *
* yarn build:dev *
* opens build/index.html in firefox *
* gets satisfaction *
* writes bare-bones App.jsx which is a react component but it's an entire app *
* yarn build:dev *
* opens build/index.html in firefox *
* gets satisfaction *
-- trim --
* walks out of his room to his mom's room where's sbc is located *
* grandma plays solitare on laptop *
* i ask grandma for a laptop *
* grandma gives me laptop *
* glues all components into App.jsx *
* yarn start:dev (magic of webpack-dev-server) *
* opens localhost:8080 in firefox *
* searches how to update a component prop *
* nothing found *
* registers on devrant and verifies his email *
* writes this rant *

Sooooo me and the lead dev got placed in the wrong job classification at work.

Without sounding too mean, we are placed under the same descriptor and pay scale reserved for secretaries, janitors and the people that do maintenance at work(we work for a college as developers) whilst our cowormer who manages the cms got the correct classification.

The manager went apeshit because the guidelines state that:

Making software products
Administration of dbs
Server maintenance and troubleshooting
Security (network)

And a lot of shit is covered on the exemption list and it is things that we do by a wide fucking margin. The classification would technically prohibit us from developing software and the whole it dptmnt went apeshit over it since he(lead developer) refuses (rightfully so) to touch anything and do basically nothing other than generate reports.

Its a fun situation. While we both got a substantial raise in salary(go figure) we also got demoted at the same time.

There is a department in IT which deals with the databases for other major applications, their title is "programmers" yet for some reason me and the lead end up writing all the sql code that they ever need. They make waaaaay more money than me and the lead do, even in the correct classification.

Resolution: manager is working with the head of the department to correct this blasphemy WHILE asking for a higher pay than even the "programmers"

I love this woman. She has balls man. When the president of the school paraded around the office asking for an update on a high priority app she said that I am being gracious enough to work on it even though i am not supposed to. The fucking prick asked if i could speed it up to where she said that most of my work I do it on my off time, which by law is now something that I cannot do for the school and that she does not expect any of her devs to do jack shit unless shit gets fixed quick. With the correct pay.

Naturally, the president did not like such predicament and thus urged the HR department(which is globally hated now since they fucked up everyone's classification) to fix it.

Dunno if I will get above the pay that she requested. But seeing that royal ammount of LADY BALLS really means something to me. Which is why i would not trade that woman for a job at any of my dream workplaces.

Meanwhile, the level of stress placed my 12 years of service diabetic lead dev at the hospital. Fuck the hr department for real, fuck the vps of the school that fucked this up royally and fuck people in this city in general. I really care for my team, and the lead dev is one of my best friends and a good developer, this shit will not fucking go unnoticed and the HR department is now in low priority level for the software that we build for them

Still. I am amazed to have a manager that actually looks out for us instead of putting a nice face for the pricks that screwed us over.

I have been working since I was 16, went through the Army, am 27 now and it is the first time that I have seen such manager.

She can't read this, but she knows how much I appreciate her.

First rant here. Long, but please bear with me:

So after slogging my ass off in various early stage startups for over 4 years and keeping up with the almost non-existent development process, I joined an organisation which has some of the brightest and smartest minds I have had the pleasure to work with.

Mind you, this company is the market leader in it's field and has a 50+ people in it's tech team and the quality of work is pretty impressive.

Now for this week's sprint, I was asked to develop a feature which already exists on the Android app and they want to introduce in the iOS app too. The backend APIs are all in place and all I need to do is build it with virtually no dependency. My PM asks me to start with the UI and ask the backend dev for the API list whenever I need them.This is where the story turns.

For my first API, I go to the backend dev and ask him to share the API documentation and he looks at me as if I have asked him to dance the fucking cha cha. With a straight face he tells me that, 'The organisation doesn't maintain any kind of documentation for it's APIs.' Now this really shocks me. Even in a 5 men tech teams I have worked on, we have always maintained a spec doc for the APIs and this is a company which is known for it's tech practices.

Being the new guy I compose myself and ask if they have anything for me here: Postman collection, a workflowy doc, a goddamn txt file; anything which might help me, and he laughs at my dilusion and says no.

Dejected, I ask for a way to get the APIs and I am told that there are only two ways: either I keep bothering the Android dev for the APIs(No, I don't have the access to the android repo and nor am I gonna get it) which he had worked on 4 months back or I install the prod app on my phone, and use Charles to get every fucking API which is really, really annoying.

I thought writing out this rant would make me feel better, turns out it just made me angrier. Why the fuck can't they document such an important thing!?

Me: Why is there such a delay between the app and the hardware device?

Colleague: Ah, same old same old, TCP is just an inefficient protocol. We should stop development and build our own replacement to TCP.

(PS. The actual problem was his code)

Trying to explain my job to friend who don't know computers.

Friend: So what do you do?
Me: Well they call me a "DevOps Engineer", but really I am just a Release or Automation Engineer.
Friend: What is that?
Me: Well I assist developers build and deploy their code as well as write code to automated the whole process and build the virtual servers.
Friend: So you like program?
Me: Kinda...
Friend: Dude can you write an app for me, got some ideas!
Me: (blinks) no.

Startup: let's improve on our MVP and build an actual website app.

Me: ok.

[go through 2 weeks discovery and planning stage]

Manager1: love working with you. You explain and work in a really professional manner.

[MVP gets built in 2 months, I'm the only dev designer devops throughout]

Manger1: Omg love it! Wait till the other manager sees it. I knew you were right person for the job.

Other users: oo cool. I love features x, y, z.

[two days later shows to Manager2]

Manager2: x doesn't work, feature you is not useful and doesn't work... Hate it. I think we'll move you to another project.

Me: (woah that escalated quickly meme plays in my mind)

Me: [explaining MVP, lean methodology, your internal decision making processes]

...

Manager2: Yeh we want you to not work on any development work (even though those are your skills and extensive knowledge etc) we need you to do admin tasks (that have nothing to do with product or coding etc)

Manager1 and employees: 😲 wtf

Me: I quit

- - -

Now they are struggling in every way possible and don't have enough funds to hire another person close to what they need to help them.

Any time someone gets an idea that they talk to me about 'I want to build an app can you build apps'
Me : I'm not amazing at it but I can certainly try what's the idea?
Them: it's like Facebook but...
Me: that's plenty

When will Google understand what an ecosystem means ?

Love it or hate it. What makes Apple devices homely is the ability to build a banded and consolidated associative user space that feels the same anytime on any platform. Crafting an ecosystem might be a daunting task , and requires adaptive and perfective rework through a long period. But it pays of , just like apples utility app suite does today. It was a journey to get it right.

Now we have Google , a company that is confused most of the time , releasing new apps everytime they have new feature in mind. According to me , Google did a phenomenal job in building hangouts and Allo , hangouts was a huge step forward from gChat , and Allo was way ahead of its time for a fun and innovative IM app. But what's the need for 2 different apps ? One has video calling , text messaging , group sharing , everything the Allo had.

Then all of a sudden you get Google Duo " The best ever video calling app " Why wasn't this integrated with hangouts and marketed the same way ?

Trial and error is one thing , this seems a lot like the lack of effort in architecting coaction and a well designed internetworking application framework. A lot of unnecessary choices have led to the shutting down of majority of their apps. Allo and hangouts included , but all this would have been unnecessary if the goal was to always build upon iteratively.

While I believe Allo was marketed as a cross platform chat application unlike hangouts , an integration plan could have always circumvented this issue.

I have to talk about another one of Google's failed efforts in recognition of potential , the hello app , but this rant has gone a bit too far already. So I'll post 6 hours later 😅

Well I'll always have the hope to see Google integrate the best of their ideas in a more relaxed and realised structure than what exists today. :)

How a regular convo with non-devs usually go:

"So what do you do?"

"I'm a software developer."

"Oh, so you're like... a hacker?"

"No, I build apps."

"Nice! So like facebooks and stuff???"

"Not exactly. Different things, mostly tools. It depends."

"Ooh...cool...Like what?"

*proceeds to spend what feels like an hour trying to explain what I do for a living in the simplest terms, while the person just blankly stares and nods, pauses, then finally tells me their crazily infeasible app idea.*

"So whadaya think?"

"Hmm...sounds good 😀👍"

So... my girlfriend has a very random work schedule. Sometimes she works 4 days a week sometimes only 1, sometimes only at the weekend sometimes not at all. If only there would be an app to track that... 🤔
She tried quite a few apps on the app store but they were shit/ugly/too complex..etc
Wait.. i’m a developer, i can do that.
So i made a dead simple calendar-like app in javascript+fuseopen.
She selected the colors, background, layout etc..
If she taps on a date it turns red indicating that is a workday, if a workday is tapped it turns back to normal color.

The main logic is:
Main:
If(AppHasSavedWorkdays){
//check if save is current month
LoadCalendarWithWorkdays();
}else{
CreateEmptyCalendarAndSave();
}

She likes it.
Cool, so let’s build this! She has an iphone and my mac is still in the service center so i can’t build🙁
But its okay, i have a mac at my office, we can build there, the only downside is that is 40min of travel.
We take the subway, go to the office, build the app, make a certificate, install to her phone, everything goes as planned.
Coming back we were lucky enough to catch the bus that goes in 30 min intervals, we only had to wait like a minute so life is good 😃
I enter the house, chill down on the bed, pull out my laptop to close the project when a FUCK ME!!!!
I completely forgot to implement a whole else branch on start!!!
Soo the app does nothing when is opened on january 1😂😂
I guess that’s why we have testers and qa.. 😃

Idea guy: Hey bro, I have an idea of an app that can teleport matter to any random place outside our milky way galaxy and brings them back at will

Me: okay??

Idea guy: This is d future of tourism in d world

Me: okay??

Idea guy: so this is whats going to happen, you sign an NDA, you build d app, and then i will give you an equity of 10% in it and run the business. This can be big. I will make you rich

Me: Geet the fuuuucckkkm oouttt or rather i build d app without a return button and send him to a black hole

**Just tired of this kind of conversations**

Once a friend came to me asking for help building an app, I asked him what his idea was and he said, "It's an app that builds apps! Think about it, people could just tell it what kind of app they want and it could build anything for them automatically! Can you believe no one has done this?"

It's enough. I have to quit my job.

December last year I've started working for a company doing finance. Since it was a serious-sounding field, I tought I'd be better off than with my previous employer. Which was kinda the family-agency where you can do pretty much anything you want without any real concequences, nor structures. I liked it, but the professionalism was missing.

Turns out, they do operate more professionally, but the intern mood and commitment is awful. They all pretty much bash on eachother. And the root cause of this and why it will stay like this is simply the Project Lead.

The plan was that I was positioned as glue between Design/UX and Backend to then make the best Frontend for the situation. Since that is somewhat new and has the most potential to get better. Beside, this is what the customer sees everyday.

After just two months, an retrospective and a hell lot of communication with co-workers, I've decided that there is no other way other than to leave.

I had a weekly productivity of 60h+ (work and private, sometimes up to 80h). I had no problems with that, I was happy to work, but since working in this company, my weekly productivity dropped to 25~30h. Not only can I not work for a whole proper work-week, this time still includes private projects. So in hindsight, I efficiently work less than 20h for my actual job.

The Product lead just wants feature on top of feature, our customers don't want to pay concepts, but also won't give us exact specifications on what they want.
Refactoring is forbidden since we get to many issues/bugs on a daily basis so we won't get time.
An re-design is forbidden because that would mean that all Screens have to be re-designed.
The product should be responsive, but none of the components feel finished on Desktop - don't talk about mobile, it doesn't exist.
The Designer next to me has to make 200+ Screens for Desktop and Mobile JUST so we can change the primary colors for an potential new customer, nothing more. Remember that we don't have responsiveness? Guess what, that should be purposely included on the Designs (and it looks awful).
I may hate PHP, but I can still work with it. But not here, this is worse then any ecommerce. I have to fix legacy backend code that has no test coverage. But I haven't touched php for 4 years, letalone wrote sql (I hate it). There should be no reason whatsoever to let me do this kind of work, as FRONTEND ARCHITECT.

After an (short) analysis of the Frontend, I conclude that it is required to be rewritten to 90%. There have been no performance checks for the Client/UI, therefor not only the components behave badly, but the whole system is slow as FUCK! Back in my days I wrote jQuery, but even that shit was faster than the architecuture of this React Multi-instance app. Nothing is shared, most of the AppState correlate to other instances.

The Backend. Oh boy. Not only do we use an shitty outated open-source project with tons of XSS possibillities as base, no we clone that shit and COPY OUR SOURCES ON TOP. But since these people also don't want to write SQL, they tought using Symfony as base on top of the base would be an good idea.
Generally speaking (and done right), this is true. but not then there will be no time and not properly checked. As I said I'm working on Legacy code. And the more I look into it, the more Bugs I find. Nothing too bad, but it's still a bad sign why the webservices are buggy in general. And therefor, the buggyness has to travel into the frontend.

And now the last goodies:
- Composer itself is commited to the repo (the fucking .phar!)
- Deployments never work and every release is done manually
- We commit an "_TRASH" folder
- There is an secret ongoing refactoring in the root of the Project called "_REFACTORING" (right, no branches)
- I cannot test locally, nor have just the Frontend locally connected to the Staging webservices
- I am required to upload my sources I write to an in-house server that get's shared with the other coworkers
- This is the only Linux server here and all of the permissions are fucked up
- We don't have versions, nor builds, we use the current Date as build number, but nothing simple to read, nonono. It's has to be an german Date, with only numbers and has always to end with "00"
- They take security "super serious" but disable the abillity to unlock your device with your fingerprint sensor ON PURPOSE

My brain hurts, maybe I'll post more on this shit fucking cuntfuck company. Sorry to be rude, but this triggers me sooo much!

Client: Could you build me a clone of this app? *Link to an app that probably took a full team of developers a year to build*

Me: What's your budget look like for this?

Client: About 500 bucks.

Pretty much a daily conversation.

6 months ago:

Boss: We have this idea to improve our onboarding to avoid drop off in the new app. See this section here? Were going to take that out of the onboarding and just let them pass straight through to the app. Then when they get into the app, there will be a banner telling them they should go to settings and set this up. That way they can ignore it for a while and get into the app sooner

Me: Get into the app sooner to do what?

Boss: Explore it

Me: Explore an empty app with no content, as they are a brand new user with nothing setup? While theres a big banner on the screen saying "You have insecure settings" ... basically forcing them to do it straight away anyway?

Boss: Yeah, we can give them some recommendations or something while they click around. It will be good. This is months away anyway, we'll talk again

Yesterday:

Boss: So this weird unexpected thing happened. We showed some beta users our plans to remove this section from onboarding and they felt weird about it. They said they didn't like the idea of the banner telling them they haven't set it up correctly

Me: Thats not weird, I said the same thing 6 months ago

Boss: ......... oh, really?

Me: Yep. Its not an improvement to get them through onboarding quicker, just to tell them they have to now go do it somewhere else

Boss: ... right. Ok maybe we'll build it anyway and see how they feel with it in there hands?

Me: nope

Boss: ... what do you mean?

Me: We are behind, you've asked me 3 times in the last week if we are going to be able to get everything in on time ... and now you want me to build something that everyone, apart from you, says they don't like. So realistically, i'm going to build it, and then remove it next week ... and we'll have a discussion about what has to be dropped because of this

Boss: ........ right .... ok .... hhhmmm

Me: *sits with resting bitch face*

Boss: ... maybe we can hide the banner until later. Not show it to them until they've done something in the app?

Me: ... maybe we can not do any of this?

Boss: right but then the onboarding will ...

Me: *talks louder* ... yes will be the way our users want it to be

Boss: ... hhmm i'm not sure

Me: Ok heres what we'll do, so long as it doesn't delay me getting the designs I need, feel free to have the designer mock up what it would look like using that figma on device preview thing. If users say they like it, i'll build it

Boss: ... right but it won't be real on device app so ...

Me: Its that or we cut feature X

Boss: ... well we need that

Me: ok glad we agree, let me know what feedback the designer gets

Boss: ... ok

The education system is a fucking joke. How do you get through all the required courses and get to the capstone course where your one goal is to build a simple prototype of a project(like a simple website) for a real world client and not know HTML or CSS when you spent a whole fuckboy semester on a class dedicated to HTML, css, JavaScript and the teacher gave you the PHP. Not only that but you can't even figure out how to use a simple google search to look up the documentation on any of these topics or even the easy to follow tutorials littering the internet on how to use Bootstrap which is what we're fucking using to make it faster to develop the core logic of our app but all you fucking want to do is take shortcuts and create a PowerPoint presentation in google slides and make an easy project look like shit and make me and yourselves look like shit. But don't fucking worry, I'll code the whole thing in a fucking night because you didn't do your part of taking care of just the front end and planned for your incompetence and lack of questions or help. I know you're busy looking for a job for after you graduate but you can't even answer a simple programming question. Let me give you the solution on how to reverse a string, cuz you don't remember c# but it literally takes 30 seconds to google the solution that is everywhere. My project team is why no one takes a degree from this university seriously.

Was asked to help a team of interns in a remote country, finish an app. Not only were they terrible at literally every aspect of development, but were arrogant and argued their "new" ways were right.

Spent weeks on the project being nice, trying to help them, sending them links to standards and documents, pointing out unit tests shouldn't be failing, everyone needs to have the same versions of the tools etc. You know, basic shit.

Things got quite heated a few weeks in when they started completely ignoring me. Shit was breaking all over the place and crashing, as I thought we were going to build it one way, and they went and built it another.

Was practically begging the team architect and my manager for help dealing with them. Only reply I got was the usual "were aware of the problem and looking into it" bullshit.

Eventually after the app was done, a mutual agreement was reached that the 2 teams would split (I maintain they were kicked out). All the local devs were happy, managers had mentioned how difficult they were and it would be great for us to finally work on our own.

So I thought everything was fine ... until my end of year performance review came along.

Seems I'm quite poor at "working with others" and I "don't try hard enough with others", it was clear I was struggling with the remote team and "made no effort".

WELL FUCK RIGHT OFF

Not being cocky, but I've never had anything like that in a performance review for the past 7 years. I'm a hard worker, and never have trouble making friends with colleagues. Everyone in the country complained about these remote fuckers, even the manager, who I begged for help. And the end result is I need to work harder.

I came in early, stayed late to fit their timezone, took extra tasks, did research for them, wrote docs. And I was told to work harder.

Only reason I didn't quit, was my internal transfer request was approved lol. New team is looking at projects orders of magnitude more impressive, never been happier.

Laziest dev thing I've ever done.

An annoying "I-do-nothing-but-delegate-and-make-fuzz" manager proposed to create a new application with redundant functionalities, that would take me at least half a year to build.
Practically, the app would never be used and I didn't want to put effort in that monstrosity.

So, naturally I...

Pressure the right people, schedule numerous meetings, become the project manager for all internal applications and... I cancel the project.

So I made an android app for a client. It's a newspaper type of app for the clients webpage, as he has a lot of traffic on it and about 50-51% is from mobile. Which is all good an everything.

And so I've been working on it for a while now as it wasn't a primary focus, more of a like side project.

I was able to make full working build (publish ready) and sent it to the client for a review.

After about an hour I received an email saying that the app is requesting too many permissions from the user. So I started looking trough my manifest file and all of the 3rd party libs to see what were those permissions.

Well, when I finally installed the app on a physical device and looked trough the permissions in the settings all I found were permissions for the internet and prevent the phone from sleeping.

After asking the client to tell me in detail which permissions raised concerns he told me it were those 2 and if they could be removed.

So I just wasted an hour of my life trying to explain why the app that is losing content from the internet needs internet permissions.

Fml and ignorant people who think they know everything and won't accept anything else.

And all of this because he read on some click bait website how a "real" app doesn't need any permissions and every other is just trying to steal all of your data and money.

I was contacted by a college senior guy (he was part of the core team of the club that I recently joined in my college).

Him: Do you want to launch your own startup?

Me: Yeah, I would love to.

Him: Nice, Listen. Even I want to start my own company. If you don't know, the current trend is ML and AI . So, I would like to base my startup on an AI application.( He was in his final year )

Me: I haven't tried any ML or AI stuff before.Sorry.

Him: Take 2 months time to study the AI concepts and do the app.

Me: But first, tell me what the AI app is supposed to do?

Him: It can be anything I have to think, you take the AI part and the UI and integration; with your skills and my idea let's build a startup and I will appoint you as the head of Application Development in my company.

*wtf, seriously dude? you want me to build the whole app for you and all you will do is put your fucking startup's name on it. I am building an application all by myself why the f would I ask you to publish it for me*

Me: Okay, I am getting late, I have to leave..

Made sure I didn't meet him again

and I have also came out of that stupid club..

Intern's CV says they have technical skills with MS Office, MySQL and JavaScript. Last month I let my manager know that this intern doesn't really know anything, so we let her do a Freecodecamp course, after which she still cannot build a basic HTML and CSS page and doesn't understand the relationship between HTML and CSS.

My manager bought her a Laravel course for beginners and today I discovered that she also doesn't understand databases, because she tried to enter an alphabetic character into a column that only accepts integers. She doesn't read/understand the error codes thrown by the application.

She tried to access a route which she created in her Laravel app by accessing it via the phpmyadmin dashboard and called me and wasted my time by asking me why her route isn't working. She literally does not understand how computers work, or how the HTTP protocol works, even less so how a file structure works. She cannot translate abstractions to practical solutions.

She either deliberately lied on her CV to get a job, or she's just really dumb and doesn't understand what the term "technical skills" mean.

I've told my manager multiple times how I think she's in the wrong job, but they keep pushing things beyond her capabilities onto her desk. I was told I'd get an intern to help me with my work load, but I got signed up into an experiment I did not consent to (manager's words, it's an experiment to help uplift people with bad degrees and a poor background). I am not a good teacher, I hate doing it.

So my company had a client who was a doctor. He wanted to build an iOS app and will come everyday in the office to scope the project. The company's boss was a greedy guy who always tried to keep his hands in client's pocket. And on some occasions he even went on to scold my colleagues working on the client's project in front of the client. The client was too volatile to freeze the scope which was resulting in us not getting anywhere. One day the boss came onto me in front of the client and showed like he is doing me a favor by giving me salary. The salary day was after 2 days. But I raged out. Next day I departed from home for office but felt so raged that I mailed my resignation to the boss. I wandered in the city aimlessly the whole day, and the boss gave me 5 calls to make up for it and come back. Then he went on to go legal, and I told him to do whatever he could. In the end it was all bluff.
I worked freelance for next few months, those were the best. Got paid quite nice and learned Angular 5 with Node.js. Best decision in my career..

(I am an entry-inter-intermediate level dev)
P = Person

P:Hey Can you build me a POS system for free?

Me: Yea whatever. (because... immediate family member)

P:Ok Great.

Me: *starts working on it.. almost done with inventory control and layouts in one night*

P: When will it be done? and I need it in a full screen window not a browser!!

Me: Soon..and I have not worked in ASP yet. So it will be a full screen browser app.

P: Aww you cant do it fast? You are not skilled enough??? Poor you, you are not good enough. I can do it in a few hours. Just write a C program which stores entries in a txt file. I dont want sql shes-que-el on my system. You dont want to use .txt because it will be harder for you. Poor you.. no skill.

Me: *raging to a level where i turn into kryptonium and burn superman to death but still keeping my calm* You will get it when you get it. Period

Inner Me: GO FUCK YOURSELF. IM DOING THIS FOR FREE SO THAT IT HELPS YOU OUT. NAGGING ME WONT HELP YOUR CAUSE ONE BIT. GO FUCKING LEARN HOW TO CODE YOURSELF AND MAKE IT YOURSELF OR BUY IT FOR A FUCK TON OF UNJUSTIFIED MONEY. IM GIVING YOU A BEAUTIFUL LAYOUT, GREAT APPLICATION ARCHITECTURE USING LARAVEL AND GREAT DATABASE DESIGN WHICH WOULD BE SCALABLE AND PRODUCE MEANINGFUL REPORTS. WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU PREFER A .TXT FILE OVER A WELL DESIGNED DATABASE. WOULD YOU FUCKING OPEN THAT HAMSTER CAGE OF A BRAIN OF YOURS WITH A KNIFE OR A SCREWDRIVER?
IF ITS THAT EASY FOR YOU GO FUCKING DO IT YOURSELF AND STOP BOTHERING ME. I AM TAKING MY TIME OUT FROM FREELANCING TO HELP YOU OUT. I COULD BE SPENDING THIS TIME ON OTHER PROJECTS WHICH WOULD GET ME SOMEWHERE. THE ONLY FUCKING REASON IM DOING IT BECAUSE I MIGHT BE ABLE TO RESELL THE POS (PIECE OF SHIT) TO OTHER PEOPLE IN FUTURE AND MAKE MY SHARE OF UNJUSTIFIED SHIT TON OF MONEY.

I worked on an amazing web app that tracked satellites and their failure rates. it was beautiful and worked fantastically. Me team worked like dogs to get it done three months. Our manager insisted it has to work perfectly for the demo and we delivered... We all got raises and everyone was happy, right? WRONG!

Demo day comes and management decides that they don't want to build the app because the customer pulled out. Sooo my manager then asked me why I wasted so much time building it when static images would have been fine. I lost my cool and yelled at my manager "YOU'RE THE ONE THAT TOLD ME TO GET A FULLY FUNCTIONAL SYSTEM WORKING!" Then I stormed out of the meeting.

It is still the coolest thing I ever built. Too bad it will never see the light of day.

I am a student. A Geospatial Engineering student. I made a demo Cordova app mapping incident spots on OSM., now my fellow undergrads think I can hack NSA, program a satellite, build all their dream websites and apps. The College Department wants me to lead an in-house photogrammetric programmable drone project. If they ask I'll say yes... yes I can! shit.😂

STARTUP IDEA GUYS SUCKS!!!!

So today one of my friend asked me to do an app for him and finally share 50 percent of the profit that I get. His idea is to build an app that can measure air pollution level, water pollution level, soil fertility range. I was like "what the hell!"... The beauty is that he wants me to pay him 50 percent for giving such (stupid, retarded) idea.

Wondering when these "startup idea guys" will realize that ideas are cheap but execution is worth the millions! Fed-up with such stupid people.

Building a business can hamper one's development urges!

I have been building stuff since 2008. Took my first job in 2012, won a hackathon at Yahoo right after that. Got an amazing team to work with! Our team converted the hacked product into a proper product using Django and AngularJS. Those were the fun days. At that time AngularJS had just come out and I was under the dilemma to use Angular, Ember or backbone. But with all this came the responsibility to build a business out of our product. It didn't happen eventually though.

So I moved on to cure my entrepreneural itch and went on to start up an e-commerce startup along with my day job. It started getting good traction and I finally left my day job to focus completely on it. It's a sticker marketplace and I had to focus a lot on the actual physical product, improve the quality, tackle business development and stuff etc. In all this, my habit of creating stuff with code kind of got the back seat. Everyday, I see such exciting technologies come up and I want to try them out. I have been itching to create a native app using react native. Try to build a skill for Amazon Alexa.

On one side I am happy that I have been able to build a brand and become the largest sticker marketplace in India providing super awesome reusable stickers, but on the other hand, managing the business on a daily basis is killing the developer in me :(

Does anyone else building a business which involves a physical product also face a similar problem? I think I should just take up weekend hackathon type problems and try to solve them using the technologies I want to learn. Example, I have been meaning to build an app for our company. I think I will start with that!

I have been following devRant for quite sometime now and it has been awesome. Finally, signed up and ranted today! 😊😊

Friend: Hey, so what do you do?

Me: I build backend systems and apis. I work with java/mongodb. I dable into some elixir and kotlin on my free time.

Friend: Cool, can you build me an Android app?

Some guy: Dude what're you doing?
Me: Making an app.

Goes ahead to ask what an app is, I give him a brief and try to show him some features of my app.

Some guy: So that means you can "make your own" facebook. Why not build something like Facebook or WhatsApp?

Speechless...

In january 2023 i was contacted by a recruiter offering me a job position.

I DID NOT ASK FOR A JOB.

I WAS NOT LOOKING FOR A JOB.

THEY contacted ME.

Ok. So i went along with it and see how it goes. They probably wont hire me nor would i give a shit. Chatted with this recruiter for a while. She forgets to answer my message for 5 fucking days. Twice. Once because she was doing God knows what and the second time because she was on paid vacation. Fine i don't give a shit about you at all anyways.

So this recruiter chatting has been stretched out for several days. I think over a WEEK. So she forwarded me to their lead developer.

I applied to work as a full stack java spring boot backend + angular frontend engineer.

So:
- java backend
- angular frontend
- full stack
- shitload of devops
- shitload of projects i built
- worked with clients
- have CS degree, graduated
- worked a job at their rival company

What could go fucking wrong with all of these stats right?

During technical + hr interview (3 of us on google meets) they asked me what salary I'd be comfortable with.

I said $1500/month straight out.

keep in mind:
- In my country $500 or $600 is a salary for engineers per month
- You get a raise of +$150 which is around $750 after working for 1+ year
- You can earn $1000+ after you work for +2 years
- Rent here is $200-300 a month at minimun. And because of inflation its just getting worse especially with food. So this salary is not for living but for survival.

Their lead engineer gave me a WHOLE ASS FUCKING PROJECT TO BUILD and i had to code it within 10 days. Great so at least 17+ days of my fucking life to waste on these fucktards who contacted ME.

The project was about building a web app coffee shop literally what mcdonalds has when you order via those tablets. I had to build this in java spring boot and angular. I had to integrate:
- docker, devops
- barmen, baristas, orders
- people can order at the table or to go
- each barista can take 5 orders at a time
- each coffee has different types of fields and brewing time
- each barman brews each coffee different period of time
- barista cant take more than 5 orders for to go until barman finishes the previous order
- barista can take more than 5 orders but if those orders were ordered from table, and they have to be put in queue
- had to build CRUD admin functionality coffee's
- had to export them all of the postman routes
- had to design a scalable database infrastructure for all of this alone
- shitload of stuff more

And guess what. After 10 painful days I BUILT THE WHOLE THING MYSELF AND I BUILT EVERYTHING THEY ASKED FOR. IT WAS WORKING.

Submitted it. They told me they'll contact me within 7 days to schedule the final Technical interview after they review what i built. Great so another 17+7 days of my fucking time wasted.

OH and they also told me to send them THE WHOLE GITHUB REPOSITORY AND TRANSFER OWNERSHIP TO THEIR COMPANY'S OWNERSHIP. once you do this you cant have your repository back. WTF? WHY CANT YOU JUST REVIEW THE CODE FROM MY PUBLIC REPOSITORY? That was so weird but what can i fucking do argue with these dickheads?

After a week of them not answering i contacted them via email. They forgot and apologized. Smh. Then they scheduled an interview within 3 days. Great more of my time wasted.

During interview i was on a google meets with their lead engineer, 1 backend java spring boot engineer and 1 angular frontend developer. They were milking me dry for 1 whole fucking hour.

They only pointed out the flaws in what i built, which are miniscule and have not once congratulated me on the rest of the good parts. I explained them i had to rush those parts so the code may not be perfect. I had other shit to do in my life and not work for your shitty project for $0/hour for 10 days you fucking dickriders.

So they quickly ran over to theory. They asked me where is jwt token stored. Who generates it. How the backend knows to authenticate user by it. I explained.

What are solid principles. I said i cant explain what is it but i understand how it works, why its needed and how to implement it (they can clearly see in the project i just build that i applied SOLID principles everywhere) - but i do admit i dont know the theory behind it 100% clearly.

Then they asked me about observables and promises in angular. I explained them how they work and how subscribe method is used (as they can clearly see that i used it in the code). Then they asked me to explain them under the hood of how observables work. The fuck? I dont know and dont care? But i can learn it as i work there?

Etc

Final result: after dragging this for 1 fucking month for miserable $1500/month they told me: we can either hire you now but for a much lower salary which you probably wont be happy with, or you can study more these things we discussed "and know why the car leaks oil" and reapply back to us in 2-3 months!

While attending a class for mobile app development a couple of months back, the day the teacher (T) unveiled the class project:
T: You must build an Android app. You can do whatever you want.
T: Don't overcomplicate though. For example, online servers won't be valued!
T: But don't make it too easy. For example, don't make a tic-tac-toe. That won't be valued!
T: And remember, you must use device sensors, like the camera, GPS, accelerometer ...
T: But don't just throw the sensor functionality if it doesn't make sense in the app you're building. That won't be valued either!
T: You have one week to think and send me a proposal.
Me: What the fuck do you want me to do then?

```We discovered that your app contains hidden features. Attempting to hide features, functionality or content in your app is considered egregious behavior and can lead to removal from the Apple Developer Program.```
- Apple App Store Publishing Team

.

ARE U FU KINV KIDDING ME

THAT IS THE COMPLETE REASON WHY YOU REJECTED MY APP?

THE SAME GODDAMN BUILD THAT WAS SUBMITTED ON GOOGLE PLAY FOR ANDROID GOT APPROVED IN 10 MINUTES

IS THE SAME BUILD VERSION THAT GOT REJECTED 3 DAYS AFTER REVIEW ON THE APP STORE

BECAUSE "THEY THINK" I HAVE HIDDEN FEATURES LOL WHAT ARE FU🤡🤡KING INSANE🤡 YO😂😂🤡🤡

THIS REJECTION REASON IS LIKE A SHITTY USER REVIEW

"omg baby girl this app is best" *1 star"

OR

"I have a crash pls fix its not work this app cz crashs n not fixes fck u developers fix it these prblms !!!!🍆🍆🍆👅👅👅💦💦💦💨🌬🌬🌬" *1 star*

AND GET THIS RN !!!!

RN !!!!!!

THEY EVEN *THREAT ME* TO BAN MY APPLE DEVELOPER PROGRAM ACCOUNT WHICH I. P A I D. F O R. $ 100 USD

BECAUSE MY APP HaS 'HIDDEN FEATURES'

THERE ARE NOOO9OO FI KING HIDDEN FEATURES U MTHHHFRRFKERSS I WILL CUMBLAST ALL OF UR APPLE HOLES INTO UR ASSHOLES AND GIVE BIRTH TO THE MAGGOTS🤡GROWING FROM WITHIN🤡UR FKIG ASSHOLE CZ ALL OF YALL R FKIN ASSHOLES🤡ANYWAY🤡THEN MY FKIG HOT CUM🤡WILL EXPLODE💦OUT OF YOUR🤡ASS AND U WILL BE CLOWNS FOREBER🤡I WORKED WAY TOO HARD TO DESERVE AN UNNECESSARY REJECTION THAT HAS A VAGUE REASON OF WHY IT WAS REJSCTED🤡🤡🤡

juuuuuuu

🤡hehe

Did I ever tell you kids about the time I worked for a company that got a contract to develop an iOS application around some object detection software that had been developed by another team?

Company I was working for was a tiny software consultancy, and this was my first ever dev job (I’m at my second now 😅). Nobody at the company has experience building mobile applications but CEO decides that the app should be written in React Native because _he_ knows React Native.

During a meeting with the client, CEO jokes about how easy the ask is and says he could finish it in a weekend. Please note that Head of Engineering had already budgeted a quarter for the work. CEO says we can do it in a week! And moves up the deadline. And only assigns two engineers to project. I am not one of those engineers.

The two engineers that are put on it struggle. A lot. They can’t seem to get the object detection to work at all, and the code that’s already written is in Objective-C. I realize one of the issues is that the engineers on the project can’t read Objective-C because they have no experience with Objective-C or even C. I have experience with C, so I volunteer to take a look at it to try to see what’s going on.

Turns out the problem is that the models are trained on one type of image format and the iPhone camera takes images in a different format.

The end of the week comes, they do not succeed in figuring out the image conversion in React Native. There’s an in-person demo with the customers scheduled for the next Monday. CEO spends the weekend trying to build the app. Only succeeds in locking literally every other engineer out of the project.

They manage to negotiate a second chance where we deliver what we were supposed to deliver at the original schedule.

I spent the weekend looking up how to convert images and figure it would be a lot easier to interface with the Objective-C if we used Swift. Taught myself enough Swift over the weekend to feel dangerous. Spoke to Head of Engineering on Monday and proposed solution — start over in Swift. Volunteer to lead effort. Eventually convince them it’s a good idea (and really, what’s the worst that can happen? If this solves our main problem at the moment, that’s still more progress than the original team made)

Spend the next week working 16 hour days building out application. Meet requirements for next deadline. Save contract.

And that’s ONE of the stories of my first dev job that got me hired as a senior engineer despite only having 10 months of work experience in the industry.

Me in my head: I've got this great idea for an app. You can probably build it in a hour. This is going to be awesome!

Ten minutes later: Screw this, can't be bothered anymore. What's on tv.?

If you had a dollar for every time someone has told me "I have an app idea" , you would have enough money to hire me to build your app.

Freelancing sucks. "A good developer told me this should take a couple hours." Or "I need an Uber like app with built in payment and social integration. We have a $50 budget and it shouldn't take more than a day or two to build." Or "I need a simple game built. Should work on Apple and Android. No budget but we could work out a share of profits." Really wish I had a real job...

Is it just me who sees this? JS development in a somewhat more complex setting (like vue-storefront) is just a horrible mess.
I have 10+ experience in java, c# and python, and I've never needed more than a a few hours to get into a new codebase, understanding the overall system, being able to guess where to fix a given problem.
But with JS (and also TS for that matter) I'm at my limits. Most of the files look like they don't do anything. There seems to be no structure, both from a file system point of view, nor from a code point of view.
It start with little things like 300 char long lines including various lambdas, closures and ifs with useless variables names, over overly generic and minified method/function names to inconsistent naming of files, classes and basically everything else.
I used to just set a breakpoint somewhere in my code (or in a compiled dependency) wait this it is being hit and go back and forth to learn how the system state changes.
This seems to be highly limited in JS. I didn't find the one way to just being able to debug, everything that is. There are weird things like transpilers, compiler, minifiers, bablers and what not else. There is an error? Go f... yourself ...
And what do I find as the number one tipp all across the internet? Console.log?? are you kidding me, sure just tell me, your kidding me right?
If I would have to describe the JS world in one word, I would use "inconsistency". It's all just a pain in the ass.

I remember when I switcher from VisualStudio/C# to Eclipse/Java I felt like traveling back in time for about 10 years. Everyting seemd so ... old-schoolish, buggy, weird.
When I now switch from java to JS it makes me feel the same way. It's all so highly unproductive, inconsistent, undeterministic, cobbled together.
For one inconveinience the JS communinity seems to like to build huge shitloads of stuff around it, instead of fixing the obvious. And noone seems to see that.
It's like they are all blinded somehow. Currently I'm also trying to implement a small react app based on react-admin. The simplest things to develop and debug are a nightmare. There is so much boilerplate that to write that most people in the internet just keep copying stuff, without even trying to understand what it actually does.
I've always been a guy that tries to understand what the fuck this code actuall does. And for most of the parts I just thing, that the stuff there is useless or could be done in a way more readable way. But instead, all the devs out there just seem to chose the "copy and fix somehow-ish" way.
I'm all in for component-izing stuff. I like encapsulation, I'm a OOP guy by heart. But what react and similar frameworks do is just insane. It's just not right (for some part).
Especially when you have to remember so much stuff that is just mechanics/boilerplate without having any actual "business logical function".

People always say java is so verbose. I don't think it is, there is so few syntax that it almost reads like a prose story. When I look at JS and TS instead, I'm overwhelmed by all the syntax, almost wondering every second line, what the actual fuck this could mean. The boilerplate/logic ration seems way to off ..

So it really makes me wonder, if all you JS devs out there are just so used to that stuff, that you cannot imagine how it could be done better? I still remember my C# days, but I admin that I just got used to java. So I can somehow understand that all. But JS is just another few levels less deeper.
But maybe I'm just lazy and too old ...

In the Ruhr area (Germany) we have some very old, very strange words with strange meanings. One of those words is ‚Prutscher‘.
A Prutscher refers to a person who does things but never gets a good result, due to lack of knowledge or simple carelessness. Most of the time, Prutschers are people who are interested in certain subjects and often work in the related jobs, but who lack the motivation to properly train themselves, learn what there is to learn and to always keep up with their technologies .
Here are a few examples I've stumbled upon so far in my career:

- Developers in their 60's who read a book about PHP 25 years ago and decided to become a software developer. Since then haven't read anything about it. Who then now build huge spaghetti monoliths for large companies, in which they prefix every function, every variable and constant with their initials and, of course, use Hungarian notation.

- People who read half a fucking tutorial about <insert any fancy js framework here> and start blogging/tweeting about it

- Senior web developers who need to be told what the fuck CORS is and who can't even recognize CORS related errors in their browser console.

- People who have done nothing else for 18 years than building websites for companies on Wordpress 1.x and writing few lines of PHP and Javascript from time to time. Those who are now applying as a frontend dev due to the difficult economic situation and are surprised that they are not accepted due to a lack of experience.

- Developers who are the only ones working on Windows in the team and ask their Linux colleagues for help when Windows starts bitchin.

- People who have been coding for 30 years, have worked with ~42 languages ​​and don't know the difference between compiled and interpreted languages ​​in the job interview.

- Chief developers at a large newsletter-publisher who think it's a good idea to build your own CMS (due to a lack of good existing ones, of course).

- Developers who have been writing PHP applications for multinational corporations for 25 years and cannot explain how PHP is executed. They don't even know what the fucking OPcache is, let alone fpm. FML

- People who call themselves professional developers but never ever heard of DRY, KISS, boy-scout rule, 12-Factor App, SOLID, Clean Code, Design Patterns, ...

- Senior developers wondering why the bash script won't run on their fucking Windows machine.

- Developers who consider Typescript to be a hindrance and see no value in it.

- Developers using ftp for deployments in 2022

- Senior Javascript Developer applying for a job and for whom Integer is a primitive data type in JS.

- Developers who prefer to code without frameworks and libraries because they are only an unnecessary burden/overhead and you can quickly code everything up yourself.

- Developers who think configuring their server(s) manually is a good idea.

You fucking Prutscher. What you have already cost me in terms of work and nerves. I can't even put it into words how deeply I despise you. I have more respect for the chewing gum that has been stuck in my damn trash can for the past 3 years than I do for you guys. You are the disgrace of our profession. I will haunt you in your dreams and prefix every fucking synapse of your brain with MY initials.

As a well-known german band once sang in a very fitting song: I wouldn't even piss on you if you were on fire.

If you recognized yourself in one of the examples here: FUCK YOU!

Let me tell you the story of how a feature request no one asked for got put in an early grave:

PM walks into weekly meeting with a single use case that one user called in about, despite never having this issue during the past year and a half that our app has been in production. PM's boss (genuinely one of the best people i have ever worked with) happens to sit in this particular meeting for no reason other than he felt like he should once in a while.

PM brings up use case and wants to devote 3 weeks' development time and another 3 weeks to test RIGHT NOW while other projects are already in motion. PM's boss speaks up with this: "Listen if this guy is really this upset, we can just tell him to build his own service. All the other end users have no problems with this, so it's not worth spending the resources on, i don't think."

And that is how i went from "this is bullshit" to "i love you" in the span of 20 minutes.

“Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution. You think you are an exception; you are not. You should not insist on an NDA to talk about it; nobody serious will engage in contract review over an idea, and this will mark you as clueless.” Patrick McKenzie

Ok fellow ranters. I've scoured the internet for hilarious and enraging stories of programmers being asked to either work for free, or for stock options, or to hack (crack) stuff, etc.

Here's my latest one. A friend who's obsessed with crypto came up with a "great" idea which was for me (of course) to build a landing page for a fake company to trick people into submitting their crypto wallet keys and all that. What started as a joke quickly turned into my friend getting mad at me for not wanting to actually make it lol. Like seriously wtf is with people. All the reasons not to do that scheme are plainly obvious!

Next. Some person who worked for a company I consult with pulled the generic. "I have this great app idea" line & proceeded to of course ask me to "not steal it" lol. It was just an app that would list gluten free restaurants... That's hardly even an idea!!

But what's fucked up about all this is my friend from the first story is so obsessed with becoming a "crypto millionaire" he actually resents me now for not
1. being obsessed with crypto
2. not committing cybercrime on his behalf

Anybody else have enraging stories about stuff people have asked you to do?

I just signed up to get this off my chest.
Dear Windows, you god damn moronic, ugly, unuseable abomination of an excuse for an OS. I wonder how we could end up here in this situation. You suck, in every way imaginable. I didnt choose Linux or Mac, you made me do it.
I know no other OS that can screw you up this bad when setting up. My friend is an experienced windows user and the last install took him 2 days. I just spend the last day trying to get this uncompatible sucker installed. I manage to set up an hackintosh quicker than I was able to install Windows the last three times I checked, you scumbag.
Your error messages suck ass, there is nothing I cant figure out given enough time, except your useless hints and pathetic attemps to get anything done on your own.
And you are fucking slow. Just why, do you keep installing stuff I didnt ask you to. Now I got this ugly ass Bing-Toolbar because I missed a damn checkbox in an .exe, which could have also been an exploit, you never know.
You are cluttered with useless stuff. I dont care about you lame ass app store, idc about your cortana annoying spy assistant and I certainly dont care about your forced updates.
Just sit back and feel your PC getting slower every day by background processes. Watch your productivity decline while dealing with their brain dead privilege and file system.
You ugly malformed mutation of software. When I look at your UI I feel disgust while wondering how you can fail with the most basic principles of UX.
How pathetic, badly supported, bug ridden and dangerously unsecure can an OS be you ask while trying to navigate through the settings, a pile of legacy software debt this garbage pile was build on. And your shell... what a sick joke.
I hate you Windows. For screwing other OS with your asshole boot manager, hardware driver requirements and making people send me .zip and .docx. You should be embarrassed to charge money for this unfunctional junk, but you do, a lot.
I really try to see the positive here. You got all the software, but thats not on you, thats because all those poor suckers are trapped with you and the effort to change is too big.
This OS is the most disappointing thing technology could come up with today. I would rather set myself on fire than work with this pain in the ass software professionally. I mean if you are a serious developer at some point you have to admit that you just cant develop on windows. You will get fucked 5 times as often as any Mac or Linux user. Fuck you, Windows.
Hey Microsoft, thanks for Typescript and VSCode and all the other good things you have done. But burn in hell for what you have done to all of us with this piece of shit OS.

sooooooooo for my current graduate class we were to use the MVC pattern to build an IOS application(they preferred it if we did an IOS application) or if you didn't have an Apple computer: an Android application.

The thing is, they specified to use Java, while in their lectures and demos they made a lot of points for other technologies, hybrid technologies, such as React Cordova, all that shit, they even mentioned React Native and more. But not one single mention of Kotlin. Last time I tried my hand at Android development was way before Kotlin, it was actually my first major development job: Mobile development, for which we used Obj C on the IOS part and well, Java on the Android part.

As some of you might now, I rarely have something bad to say about a tech stack(except for VBA which I despise, but I digress) and I love and use Java at work. But the Android API has always seem unnecessarily complex for my taste, because of that, when I was working as a mobile development I dreaded every single minute in which I had to code for Android, Google had a great way to make people despise Java through their Android API. I am not saying it is shit, I am not saying it is bad, I just-dont-like-it.

Kotlin, proves a superior choice in my humble opinion for Android development, and because the language is for retards, it was fairly easy for me to pick it up in about 2 hours. I was already redesigning some of my largest Spring applications using half the code and implemented about 80% of the application's functionality in less than 3 hours(login, fragment manipulation, permissions, bla bla) and by that time I started to wonder if the app built on Kotlin would be ok. And why not? If they specifically mentioned and demonstrated examples using Swift, then surely Kotlin would be fine no? Between Kotlin and Java it is easy to see that kotlin is more similar to Swift than Java. So I sent an email. Their response: "I am sorry, but we would much rather you stick with the official implementations for Android, which in this case is Java for the development of the application"

I was like 0.o wat? So I replied back sending links and documentation where Google touted Kotlin as the new and preferred way to develop Android applications, not as a second class citizen of the platform, but as THE preferred stack. Same response.

Eventually one of the instructors reflected long enough on it to say that it was fine if I developed the application in Kotlin, but they advised me that since they already had grading criteria for the Java program I had to redo it in Java. It did not took me long really, once I was finished with the Kotlin application I basically rewrote only a couple of things into Java.

The end result? I think that for Android I still greatly prefer Kotlin. Even though I am not the biggest fan of Kotlin for anything else, or as my preferred language in the JVM.

I just.......wish....they would have said something along the lines of: "Nah fam please rewrite that shit for Java since we don't have grading criterias in place for Kotlin, sorry bruh, 10/10 gg tho" instead of them getting into an email battle with me concerning Kotlin being or not being the language to use in Android. It made me feel that they effectively had no clue what they were talking about and as such not really capable of taking care of students on a graduate level program.

Made me feel dirty.

I'm starting to think we might need a global union for developers. I have been reading the comments today and it looks like a lot us getting way underpaid.

New features should be a moment of joy if they are released. So far so good. People really liked the idea of working together on opensource project. The app is updated. But then we encountered a major problem. It looks like some of us are getting so underpaid that they can't pay for the 14 dollar it cost to start the opensource project they want. We must rebel against this.

14 dollar, how much is 14 dollar. How many hobbies cost 14 dollar to start up. From running to collecting stamps. Its going to cost you more And how many hobbies are you as passionate about as your own open source project.

The next great thing is that it is show in the place where developers are eagerly looking to join a opensource project. And will probably join you're product because I'm sure between all of us there are tons of wonderfull ideas just waiting to be build.

And for me personal I do not mind supporting an app that I use almost every day. And just keeps growing without annoying ads.

So you should be more then willing to pay 14 dollars. And are ready to start recruiting your team.

And if you really can't pay. Your house burned down, you needed it for food. Your only pc is beyond saving. You can be a positive force in this community and do pay with upvotes.

But if you are to much a cheapskate to pay 14 dollars well, I think I was clear enough.

Manager: You want a promotion? To senior? Ha. Well, build this web app from scratch, quickly, while still doing all your other duties, and maybe someone will notice and maybe they’ll think about giving you a promotion! It’ll give you great visibility within the company.

Your first project is adding SSO using this third party. It should take you a week.

Third party implementation details: extremely verbose, and assumes that you know how it works already and have most of it set up. 👌🏻

Alternative: missing half the details, and vastly different implementation from the above

Alternative: missing 80%; a patch for an unknown version of some other implementation, also vastly different.

FFS.
Okay, I roll my own auth, but need creds and a remote account added with the redirects and such, and ask security. “I’m building a new rails app and need to set up an SSO integration to allow employees to log in. I need <details> from <service>.” etc. easy request; what could go wrong?

Security: what’s a SSO integration do you need to log in maybe you don’t remember your email I can help you with that but what’s an integration what’s a client do you mean a merchant why do merchants need this

Security: oh are you talking about an integration I got confused because you said not SSO earlier let me do that for you I’ve never done it before hang on is this a web app

Security: okay I made the SSO app here you go let me share it hang on <sends …SSL certificate authority?>

Boss: so what’s taking so long? You should be about done now that you’ve had a day and a half to work on this.

Abajdgakshdg.

Fucking room temperature IQ “enterprise security admin.”
Fucking overworked.
Fucking overstressed.

I threw my work laptop across the room and stepped on it on my way out the door.
Fuck this shit.

Me as a mobile app developer trying to add a button to a page of a .Net website:
So, what do i need to do?

Web developer:
Oh that's easy. You need to edit that template which produces html, add an event in there that will call a javascript function, which is in a .js file, which is generated from a typescript file. Than you should give that button a style. Simply by opening up that .less file here and adding a class which will be translated to css later. In that c# file over there you add a bundle reference which contains the css and js files, but before that, they must be minified. In that other c# file, you add a controller that handles your button.
Aaand... take care of new js features and css features. Most browsers don't support them. Those cool C#7 features you love so much... not in this project. Our build servers don't support C#7. Those new features are evil anyway.

😭

I miss old times rants...So i guess, here it goes mine:

Tomorrow is the day of the first demo to our client of a "forward-looking project" which is totally fucked up, because our "Technical Quality Assurance" - basically a developer from the '90-s, who gained the position by "he is a good guy from my last company where we worked together on sum old legacy project...".
He fucked up our marvellous, loose coupling, publish/subscribe microservice architecture, which was meant to replace an old, un-maintainable enormous monolitch app. Basically we have to replace some old-ass db stored functions.
Everyone was on our side, even the sysadmins were on our side, and he just walked in the conversation, and said: No, i don't like it, 'cause it's not clear how it would even work... Make it an RPC without loose coupling with the good-old common lib pattern, which made it now (it's the 4th 2 week/sprint, and it is a dependency hell). I could go on day and night about his "awesome ideas", and all the lovely e-mails and pull request comments... But back to business

So tomorrow is the demo. The client side project manager accidentally invited EVERYONE to this, even fucking CIO, legal department, all the designers... so yeah... pretty nice couple of swallowed company...

Today was a day, when my lead colleague just simply stayed home, to be more productive, our companys project manager had to work on other prjects, and can't help, and all the 3 other prject members were thinking it is important to interrupt me frequently...

I have to install our projects which is not even had a heart beat... not even on developer machines. Ok it is not a reeeeaaally big thing, but it is 6 MS from which 2 not even building because of tight coupling fucktard bitch..., But ok, i mean, i do my best, and make it work for the first time ever... I worked like 10 ours, just on the first fucking app to build, and deploy, run on the server, connect to db and rabbit mq... 10 FUCKING HOURS!!! (sorry, i mean) and it all was about 1, i mean ONE FUCKING LINE!

Let me explain: spring boot amqp with SSL was never tested before this time. I searched everything i could tought about, what could cause "Connection reset"... Yeah... not so helpful error message... I even have to "hack" into the demo server to test the keystore-truststore at localhost... and all the fucking configs, user names, urls, everything was correct... But one fucking line was missing...
EXCEPT ONE FUCKING LINE:
spring.rabbitmq.ssl.enabled=false # Whether to enable SSL support.

This little bitch took me 6 hours to figure out...so please guys, learn from my fault and check the spring boot appendix for default application properties, if everything is correct, but it is not working...

And of course, if you want SSL then ENABLE it...
spring.rabbitmq.ssl.enabled=true

BTW i really miss those old rants from angry devs, and i hope someone will smile on my fucking torture

Dad just came to me: "I have a great idea for an app you could build"
I thought "Wow.. That's cliché"

Our team really needs some workflow arrangement, and this time it was me who screwed up.
So we have to push an update to the Play Store and the App Store the Friday, the app is well tested on test environment then production environment, we got the ok so I uploaded a build, the app management team then continued the process of publishing..

During the weekend the app was approved and live to almost 500k user that can receive the update.

I got a phone call from the Project Manager at almost midnight, the time was really suspicious so I answered.
- Me: Hello.
- PM: Hi, sorry to call you now but the app is live and we have a problem.
- Me: what kind of problem? Let me check.

So I updated the app on my phone and opened it while I am on call.. I almost had heart attack!! WE PUBLISHED A VERSION POINTING TO THE TEST ENVIRONMENT. Holly shit

- Me: shit call the app management team NOW.

Eventually we removed the app from sale (unpublished it) and we submitted a new version immediately, once it was approved the next day we made the app available again (so for those who didn’t update yet, there will be no update to a faulted version, and no new users landing to a version with test data), I received one or two calls from friends telling me why the app is not on the store (our app is used nationally, so it’s really important).

Thank God there was no big show on twitter or other social media.. but it’s really a good lesson to learn.

I understand this is totally my fault, thankfully I didn’t get fired 😅

We were running an obfuscator as part of our build pipeline, but also were not. I discovered we had disabled every rule, and after asking around it turns out that the obfuscator broke the app (because of reflection and things I won't go into).

So I turned it off.

An hour later the CTO came to me and said to put it back. "We have to obfuscate, put it back."

"But... it wasn't doing anything, other than slowing the build down."

"I don't care, we HAVE to run obfuscation. It's in our contract with the client."

...

A new head of operations joins a small company.
— Okay guys, I’m planning for the long run. I need 500 warehouses across the country — we might need that capacity. We will build them rather than renting them — Amazon does the same thing, so we should too. We also need our own shipping fleet — FedEx has that too, so it’s a battle-tested approach. We might need that capacity. We need a future-proof solution.
— Uh… That’s kind of dumb. Are you kidding me?

A new head of engineering joins a small company.
— Okay guys, I’m planning for the long run. I need an AWS cluster running Kubernetes deploying microservices built with Docker. We might need autoscaling. Frontend should be Next.js + TypeScript — everyone does that now, plus we can develop a React Native app more easily if need be. We need a future-proof solution.
— Wow! That’s what I call a good manager. You really know what you’re talking about. You’re promoted!

Hi all, first rant.

I work on an app on the Shopify platform, which requires me to look at the front end of people’s Shopify stores about half the day.

Can we PLEASE get the Shopify devs together and convince them to put a hard limit on the number of pop ups and slide ins and modal apps a single store can have running??? When a user (or app developer) can’t click on a product to buy it (or test installation) because ‘spin the wheel’ and ‘join the mailing list’ and ‘Karen in Ohio just bought a toaster’ won’t stop popping into the view, your UX is shit.

I realize people could still actually go in and build these things into their store code - but I’m willing to bet VERY few would.

Thanks - rant over.

Boss: we will build mobile app with web app.
Me: absolutely yes.
Boss: you will do the mobile app (iOS)
Me: absolutely , yes I'm iOS developer.
Boss: you will do the android app too, we can't hired an android developer.
Me: absolutely, yes.(but I need to learn it first).
Boss: you will do the web app , it's difficult to find good web developer)
Me: absolutely,yes . I'm Ruby on Rails developer.
After a while........
Me: do I have a bonus ,sir.
Boss: ...............
(there is no response).
Me: ....................

I wrote a node + vue web app that consumes bing api and lets you block specific hosts with a click, and I have some thoughts I need to post somewhere.

My main motivation for this it is that the search results I've been getting with the big search engines are lacking a lot of quality. The SEO situation right now is very complex but the bottom line is that there is a lot of white hat SEO abuse.

Commercial companies are fucking up the internet very hard. Search results have become way too profit oriented thus unneutral. Personal blogs are becoming very rare. Information is losing quality and sites are losing identity. The internet is consollidating.

So, I decided to write something to help me give this situation the middle finger.

I wrote this because I consider the ability to block specific sites a basic universal right. If you were ripped off by a website or you just don't like it, then you should be able to block said site from your search results. It's not rocket science.

Google used to have this feature integrated but they removed it in 2013. They also had an extension that did this client side, but they removed it in 2018 too. We're years past the time where Google forgot their "Don't be evil" motto.

AFAIK, the only search engine on earth that lets you block sites is millionshort.com, but if you block too many sites, the performance degrades. And the company that runs it is a for profit too.

There is a third party extension that blocks sites called uBlacklist. The problem is that it only works on google. I wrote my app so as to escape google's tracking clutches, ads and their annoying products showing up in between my results.

But aside uBlacklist does the same thing as my app, including the limitation that this isn't an actual search engine, it's just filtering search results after they are generated.

This is far from ideal because filter results before the results are generated would be much more preferred.

But developing a search engine is prohibitively expensive to both index and rank pages for a single person. Which is sad, but can't do much about it.

I'm also thinking of implementing the ability promote certain sites, the opposite to blocking, so these promoted sites would get more priority within the results.

I guess I would have to move the promoted sites between all pages I fetched to the first page/s, but client side.

But this is suboptimal compared to having actual access to the rank algorithm, where you could promote sites in a smarter way, but again, I can't build a search engine by myself.

I'm using mongo to cache the results, so with a click of a button I can retrieve the results of a previous query without hitting bing. So far a couple of queries don't seem to bring much performance or space issues.

On using bing: bing is basically the only realiable API option I could find that was hobby cost worthy. Most microsoft products are usually my last choice.

Bing is giving me a 7 day free trial of their search API until I register a CC. They offer a free tier, but I'm not sure if that's only for these 7 days. Otherwise, I'm gonna need to pay like 5$.

Paying or not, having to use a CC to use this software I wrote sucks balls.

So far the usage of this app has resulted in me becoming more critical of sites and finding sites of better quality. I think overall it helps me to become a better programmer, all the while having better protection of my privacy.

One not upside is that I'm the only one curating myself, whereas I could benefit from other people that I trust own block/promote lists.

I will git push it somewhere at some point, but it does require some more work:
I would want to add a docker-compose script to make it easy to start, and I didn't write any tests unfortunately (I did use eslint for both apps, though).
The performance is not excellent (the app has not experienced blocks so far, but it does make the coolers spin after a bit) because the algorithms I wrote were very POC.
But it took me some time to write it, and I need to catch some breath.

There are other more open efforts that seem to be more ethical, but they are usually hard to use or just incomplete.

commoncrawl.org is a free index of the web. one problem I found is that it doesn't seem to index everything (for example, it doesn't seem to index the blog of a friend I know that has been writing for years and is indexed by google).

it also requires knowledge on reading warc files, which will surely require some time investment to learn.

it also seems kinda slow for responses,

it is also generated only once a month, and I would still have little idea on how to implement a pagerank algorithm, let alone code it.

It really irks me when I see 'web developers' and 'front-end developers' write CSS like a bunch of first-timers. Not considering hierarchy, specificity or even following a proper naming convention (who the fuck mixes camel case AND lowercase for class names?!) It's worse when you already have Sass or SCSS and they still write their style rules WITHOUT PROPER NESTING or keep using !important like it was a goddamn semicolon.

This is fucking basic shit for a web or front-end developer, and God help you if I ever conduct your technical interview and decide to ask you on a whim to write an Angular app WITHOUT USING BULLSHIT SYSTEMS LIKE CLARITY, ANGULAR MATERIAL OR BOOTSTRAP for your UI. But if you can explain to me the pros and cons between using CSS grid and flex, I'll be fucking impressed.

I wish these 'UI experts' I keep encountering would learn to build an optimal static site without a fucking framework or build manager before doing advanced shit, for the love of Jeebus.

True story
Was free at work so applied for a stretch project.
PM: you know mobile dev?
Me: yes, built a few apps
PM: good, we have an old app we want you to take the JAR change everything but the look of it and make it a new hybrid app with the required features.
Me: *kill me please*
PM: and use WordPress as the server.
Me: ...........

Accepted the challenge. Did the entire app in ionic and build a server for it with SpringBoot. Client loves it PM is still doesn't know😂

So my Product Manager girlfriend just said, "I have a great idea for an app that people will really want. Can you build it for me?". She did not see the irony

So... Heard back from a recruiter today. Lovely lass.

I’d passed over a submission for her tech demo.

The brief was basically just to create a small simple module that calculates shit, nae effort.

But, when the recruiter had me on the phone she said “I know it’s a silly small module but try and run it up like you would a production ready app”.

The job spec and recruiter were keen on me demonstrating TDD, not specific on js version, final runtime, etc. The job was a senior spec at a higher salary range. So it warranted some effort, and demonstrating more than a simple module.

“Okay, cool, nae bother, let’s crack on.”

The feedback in the response from the dev today:
“He’s over-engineered tests, build...”

SUCK MY LEFT TESTICLE YOU FUCKWIT.

Talk to your recruiters, not me.

The feedback included a phrase I never hope to hear from a developer I work with:
“Tests are good but...” 😞

It was a standard 98% test suite from an RGR cycle, no more or less than I’d expect in prod.

The rest of the feedback was misguided or plain wrong. It was useful to see because I know now when they say they have “high standards” they mean: we listen to the dude who put the factory pattern in a JS brief.

Oh shit also: “someone’s done chmod 777” was in there as a sarcastic comment in the feedback. It was his fucking unarchive tool 😞

My response was brief and polite: “cheers for the consideration, all the best, James”

It’s honestly not worth warning them. Or, asking why they’d criticise something they’d asked me to do.

If you want a shitty js module, ask for a shitty js module and no more.

I've been a bit "removed" from .NET lately and I've been slowly forgetting about it. It's like I grieved a loss, and now I was moving on, for lack of a better analogy. I was just beginning to get used to my new environment of Node JS and PHP. And, recently, I was put on track to complete a full project using Node JS.

And then suddenly a new company reached out to me, interested in my skills, and asked for me to build a simple .NET web app to showcase my abilities.

I got started, and holy crap I forgot how nice it was to be coding in this environment. Everything I had forgotten about switched on for me, like riding a bike. I was done with the app in a matter of hours. It was probably the most productive I've been with a coding assignment in forever. I was beaming with pride at the fact that I could code so fluently despite some time away. Everything here just made sense to me.

After I submitted it to the company for review I sat back and thought, damn, do I have to go back to Node/Express JS? I barely have any experience with it 😂. The only reason I know anything is because I watched a 20 minute quick tutorial on how to build an API. That's it.

I really want my current company to give me projects that are in my preferred language and they aren't and that's killing me right now. I can learn, that's not a problem, but my effectiveness as an employee is completely shot by not allowing me to build in code that I know and understand. I was fuckin hired for my specific coding experience, why not take advantage of what I know?

I should say something to my manager but I know they will just tell me no because they want it to be built in Javascript as it's the preferred language of the Gods.

Joking aside, I don't think they will go for it because it is another language that they would have to manage and maintain if I ever leave.

Oh well 🤷

Annoys me so much how obviously lazy my department has been with one of its products. We have an iPad app that does document management and eForms and stuff. Its not perfect but not the worst. Then they decide they need to build an app to handle a specific kind of eForm. They just went "well this app already does eForms so lets just adapt it".
Worst. Decision. Ever.
the app is simply a branch off the original app. despite being a completely different product which isnt even concerned with the same business objects. it has been hacked until it does what it needs to. And i have to somehow maintain this trainwreck.
As a result we have a branch in our main Git repo that contains a completely different product, which is basically an iOS wrapper for an HTML eForm with ~5000 lines of jQuery to further hack on the functionality that the eForm provides.
And they wonder why iOS developers have been leaving and some keep threatening to leave. Even the Delivery Manager wants us to just do what is needed and get it out the door and never look at it again. How are we supposed to care when thats the attitude of the people who are supposed to be invested in it. Im surprised the client hasnt told us to get lost the app is so hideously broken and unmaintainable. Performing an action on the form can break a completely unrelated section somewhere else. We have lost control.
And they just keep adding more scope, ignoring our concerns cos hey its too late to just start changing the whole approach of the solution.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I know I added a rant to wk65 already, but this is another one.

At my final project at school, I made an app that registered all your medicine, surgeries, appointments and medicine alarms, so it worked as a medical history. It also was able to show on the lock screen, in case of emergency, your allergies and recent but dangerous surgeries.

At the presentation day there were 3 guys, me and two of my colleagues. The first one had a car dealership tracker, really awesome app, which I helped build by teaching him everything I knew about Android, I didn't do any code, I really just taught him. The second guy, he made a pharmacy tracker, to which, again, I helped make without doing MOST code (I helped on obtaining GPS data). First presentation was awesome, second presentation was really boring because the guy was constantly showing the judges that the app could detect when you were offline (really simple to do).

At my presentation, I thought it was horrible, super nervous and I even thought I was trembling.

So, then, the judges spoke, apparently they knew I helped the previous two, they thought I had the best app, they thought I had the best presentation and needless to say, I got 20/20 on the project. One of the judges even said that if I was selling the app, he'd buy it.

The second colleague didn't like that, and I later found out he was focusing so much on that offline stuff because he wanted to show he was better than me, shows that I really need to see who I really should help...

I felt really really badass after that day, because I left the school, and to this day, I had the best app/project and grades that school had seen and given. Even more when the school offered me a scholarship!

!rant

The efficiency of every dev stack in the world will never compare to just dropping my folder of php code into a server, with proper configurations, routes envs and everything else into a folder and watch it run.

I a pops shop wants me to build something for them? php

If an enterprise grade with a lot of users comes about? php

I have yet to have a single issue with it as most of you evee poluted, herd ready, mob mentality mfkers want to make believe.

Legit, the language is flawed, but has yet to fuck with me, i have memorized the quirks and fuckups of the language (much like I have done with JS) to know that a lot of you just bandwaggon over shit.

"It DoeSnt hAve proPer geNerics"

boom, deployed a form to a customer for his site, charged $2k for a one day job with no issue. But go ahead, setup an entire fucking pipeline of dependencies, a .net app and/or an entire bs app in node or rails(which I love btw) or an entire fuckState centric app in Go that gets messier the more you look at it and it would not be as easy or as simple to deploy.

Legit, in my entire career, nothing makes my life simpler for the web.

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

Anyway, here my actual rant begins.

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

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

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

But ok, I’m screwed in this regard..

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

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

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

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

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

Another reason to switch to android..

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

Another shithole agency reached out to me out of the blue 4 weeks after my application.

The senior bro sends me an assignment with 30 requirements to build an app with multiple screens. Ofcourse no design provided and no API provided. Timeline 2 weeks.

Tried ask to expedite the process and reason with him because now Im in other processes where Im expecting an offer next week so I can send him a link to a very similar project I did, he can review and if he wants to I can jump on a technical call and I can answer all questions. Guy ignored the proposal entirely and wants to stick with his stupid timelines and stupid requirements which he wrote probably down while taking a shit with zero research.

Best part is there was no introduction, no discussions about hourly rate or expectations, nothing.

Disorganized shithole. Told them to get their shit together and withdrew my application.

An app is protecting me from itself. :|

This is a notification from my budgeting app, which translates SMS confirmations. It has a spam filter built in.

I've been getting annoying SMS ads from them which I delete.

The app would now like to know if I want to auto block SMS'es from its own company.

You'd think a company with enough sense to build an SMS spam filter would have enough sense to, you know.. not spam SMS'es?

So after 7years of sound engineering, I started working as an intern in a startup company which does "anything" for money.
( Sending me to a seminar for taking photos of our customers is also in the list. )
Yesterday, I managed to grasp the basics of node and web sockets to build a simple chat app in order to satisfy boss' needs for a small website. He wanted to add it as a feature and assigned it to me as a task but it turns out nobody has any idea about putting it online. Seems like I still have lot to do.
Thing is, this is my 3rd month and I already started making no sense to anyone when I try to exchange information about coding/programming and latest technologies which we should encountered long ago. I am happy to experience and learn different things but I am feeling really alone.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank you all for boosting me with amazing real life experiences and supporting my career changing decision even without knowing.

Have fun ranting!

Oh my motherfucking God...
How the fuck can a dumb IDE be so fucking slow? I entered the office at 8:15. And I am still unable to checkout a motherfucking previous version of an android app in git and get Android studio to build it, because the fucking gradle is so damn slow it freezes the GUI. WHAT. THE. FUCK. Android studio get you shit together and maybe, just maybe don't be such a dick!!!

You need 5 min to open that project and another 10 to build it ONLY FOR ME TO REALIZE THAT I HAVE TO REPEAT THAT WHOLE PROCEDURE BECAUSE I NEED A DIFFERENT APP VERSION FROM THE GIT REPO FUCK YOU YOU SHITFACED STUPID COCKSUCKING CUNT, SHIT FUCK ARRRRGH!!!

Sincerely,
Me.

Edit: now it's 9:35 btw

This is my first and current Rant/story so here it goes, I've been working for a company for past 10months now, where i was interviewed on Java, then i was put into mobile development and started to build an app in swift (successfully finished it) after two months i was working on ARKIT(didn't build anything BIG mostly R&D), then started working on React-native and built an app from scratch using firebase as backend (both RN and firebase was new to me) and pushed it to AppStore and PlayStore, and currently i'm working on Flutter!.. At first it was pretty irritating switching frameworks and technologies but now i've become more positive about it and i look at it as an opportunity to learn new stuff :)

I genuinely regret and believed that I just got scammed by recruiter. There's a company wanted me to create a prototype of Social Media App in order to be qualified for the interview , which I completed in weeks, as soon as they got my source code, they went ghosting me.

I woke up in the early morning today, in my WeChat Moment appears to be an advertisement of a "Social Media App" , which the design and the concepts are very familiar.

So technically I just build the an app for their money making scheme, and I am unemployed.

I hate myself for making this decision, I thought the app is for testing my capabilities, but unfortunately that's not it...

我只是棋盤上的棋子...........

New here, don't know the format, etc

Let me describe my Friday:
8:45 standup
By 9:30 I'm done following up with 3rd party platform vendor's jira, and curiously look into an issue related to app camera not working in development build (we aren't in production), fix it in 5 minutes and talk to the team of two other devs. Tell them I've submitted a fix, and QA is unblocked.

"Senior" software dev starts complaining about how "I've wasted my whole morning" because "I mean, come on" and is generally offended because "I've done their work."

After a real puzzling argument, I worked from home the rest of the day.

Where did I go wrong?

Hmm...recently I've seen an increase in the idea of raising security awareness at a user level...but really now , it gets me thinking , why not raise security awareness at a coding level ? Just having one guy do encryption and encoding most certainly isn't enough for an app to be considered secure . In this day an age where most apps are web based and even open source some of them , I think that first of all it should be our duty to protect the customer/consumer rather than make him protect himself . Most of everyone knows how to get user input from the UI but how many out here actually think that the normal dummy user might actually type unintentional malicious code which would break the app or give him access to something he shouldn't be allowed into ? I've seen very few developers/software architects/engineers actually take the blame for insecure code . I've seen people build apps starting on an unacceptable idea security wise and then in the end thinking of patching in filters , encryptions , encodings , tokens and days before release realise that their app is half broken because they didn't start the whole project in a more secure way for the user .

Just my two cents...we as devs should be more aware of coding in a way that makes apps more secure from and for the user rather than saying that we had some epic mythical hackers pull all the user tables that also contained unhashed unencrypted passwords by using magix . It certainly isn't magic , it's just our bad coding that lets outside code interact with our own code .

Was on my first internship, told to analyse and prepare stuff for the Android dev to build an application for a big client. Did it before the end of the internship and team was satisfied with my job.

Because the Android dev had already lot of works on other stuff they let me start the development of the app.

The end of my internship is coming, the app is not finished but the team agreed that my work is not bad and that I should continue to work on it.

I finally get hired to finish the app, when we first publish it 95% of the code was mine and the boss started to stress because he let an intern (that became an employee) build the application from the ground. But the application got quickly its 4.5 stars on the playstore and more than 10.000 downloads.

I quit the job a few time after the publication of the app but I feel proud and happy that this team let me work on one of the biggest project they had as I was only an intern without any professional experience.

This is not "badass" but this is my first and best experience in the professional world !

!rant

Need some opinions. Joined a new company recently (yippee!!!). Just getting to grips with everything at the minute. I'm working on mobile and I will be setting up a new team to take over a project from a remote team. Looking at their iOS and Android code and they are using RxSwift and RxJava in them.

Don't know a whole lot about the Android space yet, but on iOS I did look into Reactive Cocoa at one point, and really didn't like it. Does anyone here use Rx, or have an opinion about them, good or bad? I can learn them myself, i'm not looking for help with that, i'm more interested in opinions on the tools themselves.

My initial view (with a lack of experience in the area):

- I'm not a huge fan of frameworks like this that attempt to change the entire flow or structure of a language / platform. I like using third party libraries, but to me, its excessive to include something like this rather than just learning the in's / out's of the platform. I think the reactive approach has its use cases and i'm not knocking the it all together. I just feel like this is a little bit of forcing a square peg into a round hole. Swift wasn't designed to work like that and a big layer will need to be added in, in order to change it. I would want to see tremendous gains in order to justify it, and frankly I don't see it compared to other approaches.

- I do like the MVVM approach included with it, but i've easily managed to do similar with a handful of protocols that didn't require a new architecture and approach.

- Not sure if this is an RxSwift thing, or just how its implemented here. But all ViewControllers need to be created by using a coordinator first. This really bugs me because it means changing everything again. When I first opened this app, login was being skipped, trying to add it back in by selecting the default storyboard gave me "unwrapping a nil optional" errors, which took a little while to figure out what was going on. This, to me, again is changing too much in the platform that even the basic launching of a screen now needs to be changed. It will be confusing while trying to build a new team who may or may not know the tech.

- I'm concerned about hiring new staff and having to make sure that they know this, can learn it or are even happy to do so.

- I'm concerned about having a decrease in the community size to debug issues. Had horrible experiences with this in the past with hybrid tech.

- I'm concerned with bugs being introduced or patterns being changed in the tool itself. Because it changes and touches everything, it will be a nightmare to rip it out or use something else and we'll be stuck with the issue. This seems to have happened with ReactiveCocoa where they made a change to their approach that seems to have caused a divide in the community, with people splitting off into other tech.

- In this app we have base Swift, with RxSwift and RxCocoa on top, with AlamoFire on top of that, with Moya on that and RxMoya on top again. This to me is too much when only looking at basic screens and networking. I would be concerned that moving to something more complex that we might end up with a tonne of dependencies.

- There seems to be issues with the server (nothing to do with RxSwift) but the errors seem to be getting caught by RxSwift and turned into very vague and difficult to debug console logs. "RxSwift.RxError error 4" is not great. Now again this could be a "way its being used" issue as oppose to an issue with RxSwift itself. But again were back to a big middle layer sitting between me and what I want to access. I've already had issues with login seeming to have 2 states, success or wrong password, meaning its not telling the user whats actually wrong. Now i'm not sure if this is bad dev or bad tools, but I get a sense RxSwift is contributing to it in some fashion, at least in this specific use of it.

I'll leave it there for now, any opinions or advice would be appreciated.

Story time:

I worked at a firm that had an infernal off the shelf CRM system that they collaborated with the dev company to customise.

They were seriously behind the competition, and didn’t have any app or web presence for interacting with their system, instead relying on people calling (fine for the nature of the business, but competition was leaving them in the dust).

They decided that they needed to redevelop it in-house, with a focus on supporting the web and apps.

I was hired for this purpose.

It was me and one other dev, who was also the head of IT.

He’d built a small prototype, and was new to the whole WPF / MVVM thing for the in-house app, so with my previous experience it was clear it needed to serve as an example only, and that it would need redeveloping.

I was only there three months.

In that time I singularly (he was pulled away to troubleshoot their VOIP installation - yes, for three months as other companies kept dropping the ball) built:

- A WebAPI with JWT auth
- An MVC skeleton frontend
- A WPF desktop app

It had all sorts of cool shit in it, 2FA, Reactive UI, Reactive extensions, server push to desktop, a custom workflow and permissions system.

It was pretty dang cool.

End of the three months rolled around, and the non-technical managers were concerned about time to market, so they decided to drop me as I’d “not made enough progress”.

I’d also had a bit of absence which they were aware of and were supposedly supporting me through.

But MFW three months is assumed to be enough time to build such a system with one dev.

The company's director and I:

Him: I think we need to build a hybrid mobile app, because the JavaScript code that renders images is the same on our front- and backends.

Me: Well, we could just send the parameters to the server, let it render it and get a response back.

Him: How?

Me: With an API.

Him: Oh!

Fiddling with the UiPath RPA tool. What the fuck is this monster?

So, you create apps by drawing a flowchart, like some kid using Scratch. Then, suddenly, you have to create a .NET object just to get a random number!

Who the fuck is the target audience that can create objects, call a directory read function, etc, but can't write a loop?! Show me that fucking person.

Then I have to debug the fucking selectors when they don't work correct. All this requires is understanding how UIs are structured under the hood. So, you know that a menu bar is a window, but you need to draw a fucking if statement?!

And how would you debug and manage this monstrosity?

It like we learned nothing from all the Excel apps we build for decades.

I mean, it's an impressive app. But, why does it exist?

Someone needs to stop this before it gets out into the wild or we'll all be debugging flowchart a created by business analysts.

You have been warned. Join the fight or accept the consequences.

OMG you fucking little cunt!

Previous issue with this co-worker we hate eat other but can maintain minimal contact due to covid. Last interaction was actually nice, we joked a bit.

He teaches me how to do the build and ‘updated’ the confluence page. By update he striked through one paragraph.

Been doing these for week and now others what builds done all the time and since I am not an asshole they can approach me to do this but now I spend all
day long doing builds.

Work on a classified app so it has to
be burned on a disk, taken to a ‘secret machine’ and deployed. Takes about an hour and people are like. Can you rebuild it? I forgot to commit something?

So I updated the page to flush out the directions. Did not remove one thing only added things simple things like do a ls -lah in the dist folder to make sure the are built correctly. Things like check to make the symlink works, bolded words.

He was not at standup so I figured he was out of the office today and was going to ask him to review tomorrow.

Fucker goes in to make changes while I am making changes and doesn’t think to msg me telling me?

He is removing things and moving things which is fine just let me know! What a dick!!!!!

Screenshot of all the activity today, I am
in blue. I will spend all day watching the page to make sure I get the last fucking edit!

(This conversation is going in WhatsApp)

So a friend of mine asks me if i can build an app for a restaurant to place orders etc.

Me: “Sure, can i have his/her phone number to get in touch with them?”

Friend: “uhmm.. i’d prefer that the communication goes via myself. So what do you want to ask to them?”

Me: “i think that it’ll be easier if i can discuss their wishes and the costs directly with them. Don’t you think?”

He did not answered my question yet.

My question is to you guys; is it wise to take a project from someone that i don’t even know..? Probably my friend is willing to earn some money by raising the price that i ask.
Would you take this project?
Tips-/advices please.

Thanks.

This is embarrassing, but the first days of learning about AngularJS I had to implement functionality about a new component of the WebApp I was building.

I did a good templating, I build the component along with its controller and services, I verified there wasn’t any memory leak and that everything was in an isolated scope. Yet nothing at all appeared on the app. It took me more than 30 minutes until I realized...

I didn’t put the source code on the index.html file 😅

For people who know more about compiled languages such as C or Java... that’s like not putting your source code file in the makefile. 😅

I felt literally like the dumbest person in the planet at that moment. 😀🔫

tl;dr. web hosting && a panic attack && security threat

i wasn't sure whether my brother's domain was hosted or not (because it wasnt showing a website and he didnt know any better).
so i decided to host a react-app for it on netlify and pointed the domain's nameservers towards it (a separate security threat at bottom).
all went well and now when you punch in the domain it ..all-behold.. shows a website.

NOW, i remember my brother was using the domain's email which probably means it was hosted, right?. so im panicking because im not sure whether i just deleted all his emails or not because it's 1:15 am and he's asleep.
there is a rant in there somewhere but im in too much of a shock as to how much data i might have just accidentally deleted
.
.
another tl;dr: my domain registrar let me change someone else's settings..
the reason i didnt know his domain settings is that he didnt know his password.
i had bought a couple of domains and was gonna host them on netlify. while i was doing this a bright idea hit me.. "you should finally build a website for your brother for the domain he bought 7 years ago"..
this is where the fun begins.
i sent an email to my registrar to point all nameservers of all domains to my nameservers and just to try out i included my brother's domain into it (i dont own this domain it's not registered by my email), and the next day i get an email telling me they've successfully made all changes.
.
Now tomorrow is monday and i'm going to their office to tell them i found a security flaw and see how long i can stall before actually telling them what it was and how their live's could've been made hell.

Why is it that every god damned time, i ask questions until i have a clear view of a clients project and flow. I present them this flow. They OK it and everything. I build said flow in an app. And then at the end of the line i always end up with a shit codebase because i designed it to be like the documented flow, but changes were being added (and obviously paid for) all the time. I made such a neat little app. And now it all gone to shit.

Is this just me? Am i that bad at programming or what?!

Stop changing half of the app functionality after the original design is created!

I don't know my problem is. I lost my motivation to code, my enthusiasm and excitement to read a code and solve a problem. My love of my life for 6 years whom I thought she's the one, gave up on us. It was a long journey, lots of ups and downs, but really worth the time and sacrifice. Now, she's doing good, very happy on her life judging from her social media. Can't believe she just moved for 2 months. To be honest, i want her to be happy but quite bitter that she just moved on quite fast. And I don't if this is the reason why I lost my motivation and enthusiasm to code. Or maybe I just don't like the project we're working on. Well, I really don't like it since it's a mobile game, I really want to build webapp or mobile app but it's too late to change the project.

I'm not like this, I used to code until morning without noticing the time, excited to solve a problem that stuck on me for quite a while. I really became a lazy person right now. I feel the pressure to finish the project but I don't see myself working on it, I don't feel interested reading a code. I just play computer games instead of working on my project during my free time. I don't know if I'm depressed. I socialized with people, have fun, happy when I'm with them, but when I'm alone, sadness starts to creep in. I feel like there's an empty void in myself. I don't know, i just want the motivation and energy to work on my project. Im tired, lazy, and feeling burnt out. If you read until this very last sentence, thank you and I'm sorry for reading this nonsense.

I started applying for jobs. As I have over 150 repos on GitHub and 10 years of relevant work experience, the company obviously had trouble validating if I had some basic coding skills. That's why they decided to send me a coding "homework" task to build an app in React Native.

Basically, the task was building an app with 2 screens and one bonus where they indicated "doesn't need a UI". I spent half a day spinning up their project, installing XCode, their specific versions of Ruby, and around half a day building the thing.

Obviously, I wanted to demonstrate my technical skills, so I added a few tests, proper typing, comments, and so on. The project was in a good state, and on the "bonus" screen I quickly added a few components. Since I have a lot of things going on, I capped the amount of time to one day of work. I felt it was good enough to demonstrate I can build something like this.

A few days later, I received a response from the recruiter telling me they wouldn't move forward. She in depth explained that this was because of a missing key property. I did indeed miss one key property on the "bonus" screen, in the part that was not even part of the core task. This was a list of very few static elements, and the entire list only got rerendered when changing routes. Basically in this case, there would not be any visible performance impact.

The recruiter explained in the email that I was missing the eye for detail they need, and that I should "educate" myself more about lists in React. I made one tiny silly mistake in a one-day project, that a linter would've taken out (if this project had one). I've contributed to React Native myself and worked with React for almost 7 years now? Yeah, it's a stupid thing, but what is the point of these types of tasks? I thought this was to demonstrate my skillset, not to be called out on.

Either way, my question here is this: at which point does it become appropriate to send an invoice for the time I wasted on this?

I've had a Xiaomi Mi 8 for a few months now. Although I'm impressed by what I got for the amount I paid (a phone that cost about $250 for 6GB RAM, Snapdragon 845, Android 9 and premium build quality is quite a steal), it definitely comes with a consequence.

MIUI (specifically MIUI 11) is godawful. It is single-handedly the worst Android ROM I've ever used since my shitty Android 2.2 phone back around 2010. If you're gonna buy a Xiaomi phone, plan to install Lineage OS on it (but even that's a pain which I'll explain why later).

- Navigation buttons don't hide while watching a video.

Why? God only knows. The ONLY way to bypass without root this is to use its garbage fullscreen mode with gestures, which is annoying as all hell.

- 2 app info pages?

Yeah, the first one you can access just by going to its disaster of a settings app, apps, manage apps and tap on any one.

The 2nd one you can access through the app info button in any 3rd party launcher. Try this: Download Nova launcher, go to the app drawer, hold on any app and tap "app info", and you'll see the 2nd one.

Basically, instead of modifying Android's FOSS source code, they made a shitty overlay. These people are really ahead of their time.

- Can only set lock screen wallpapers using the stock Gallery app

It's not that big an issue, until it is, when whatever wallpaper app you're using only allows you to set the wallpaper and not download them. I think this is both a fuckup on Xiaomi and (insert wallpaper app name here), but why Xiaomi can't include this basic essential feature that every other Android ROM ever made has is beyond me.

- Theming on MIUI 11 is broken

Why do they even bother having a section to customize the boot animation and status bar when there's not one goddamn theme that supports it? At this point you're only changing the wallpaper and icon pack which you can do on any Android phone ever. Why even bother?

They really, REALLY want to be Apple.

Just look at their phones. They're well designed and got good specs, but they don't even care anymore about being original. The notch and lack of a headphone jack aren't features, they're tremendous fuckups by the dead rotting horse known as Apple that died when Steve Jobs did.

Xiaomi tries to build a walled garden around an inherently customizable OS, and the end result is a warzone of an Android ROM that begs for mercy from its creator. Launchers integrate horribly (Does any power user actually use anything that isn't Nova or Microsoft launcher?), 3rd party themes and customization apps need workarounds, some apps don't work at all. People buy from Xiaomi to get a high end budget Android phone at the price of some ads and data collection, not a shitter iOS wannabe.

They really, REALLY want you to have a sim card

If you don't have a sim card and you're using your phone for dev stuff, you're a 2nd class citizen to Xiaomi. Without one, you can't:

- Install adb through adb
- Write to secure settings
- Unlock your bootloader and get away from this trash Android ROM

What's the point? Are they gonna shadow ban you? Does anyone contact them to unlock their bootloader saying "yeah I wanna use a custom rom to pirate lizard porn and buy drugs"? They made this 1000000000x harder than it needs to be for no reason whatsoever. Oh yeah and you gotta wait like a week or something for them to unlock it. How they fucked up this bad is beyond me.

So yeah. Xiaomi. Great phones, atrocious OS.

It's 3am, just submitted an app for review for iOS... go to take one last test drive on the release build for android, and I get stuck in an infinite loop of "system up stopped working". An factory reset and an hour later, I'm saying fuck this, android waits, and fuck whatever Xamarin did to my phone. While I'm at it, fuck Apple for making me have 20+ icons in different sizes, and their shitty walled garden approach to a so called marketplace.

TL;DR; do your best all you like, strive to be the #1 if you want to, but do not expect to be appreciated for walking an extra mile of excellence. You can get burned for that.

They say verbalising it makes it less painful. So I guess I'll try to do just that. Because it still hurts, even though it happened many years ago.

I was about to finish college. As usual, the last year we have to prepare a project and demonstrate it at the end of the year. I worked. I worked hard. Many sleepless nights, many nerves burned. I was making an android app - StudentBuddy. It was supposed to alleviate students' organizational problems: finding the right building (city plans, maps, bus schedules and options/suggestions), the right auditorium (I used pictures of building evac plans with classes indexed on them; drawing the red line as the path to go to find the right room), having the schedule in-app, notifications, push-notifications (e.g. teacher posts "will be 15 minutes late" or "15:30 moved to aud. 326"), homework, etc. Looots of info, loooots of features. Definitely lots of time spent and heaps of new info learned along the way.

The architecture was simple. It was a server-side REST webapp and an Android app as a client. Plenty of entities, as the system had to cover a broad spectrum of features. Consequently, I had to spin up a large number of webmethods, implement them, write clients for them and keep them in-sync. Eventually, I decided to build an annotation processor that generates webmethods and clients automatically - I just had to write a template and define what I want generated. That worked PERFECTLY.

In the end, I spun up and implemented hundreds of webmethods. Most of them were used in the Android app (client) - to access and upsert entities, transition states, etc. Some of them I left as TBD for the future - for when the app gets the ADMIN module created. I still used those webmethods to populate the DB.

The day came when I had to demonstrate my creation. As always, there was a commission: some high-level folks from the college, some guests from businesses.

My turn to speak. Everything went great, as reversed. I present the problem, demonstrate the app, demonstrate the notifications, plans, etc. Then I describe at high level what the implementation is like and future development plans. They ask me questions - I answer them all.

I was sure I was going to get a 10 - the highest score. This was by far the most advanced project of all presented that day!

Other people do their demos. I wait to the end patiently to hear the results. Commission leaves the room. 10 minutes later someone comes in and calls my name. She walks me to the room where the judgement is made. Uh-oh, what could've possibly gone wrong...?

The leader is reading through my project's docs and I don't like the look on his face. He opens the last 7 pages where all the webmethods are listed, points them to me and asks:
LEAD: What is this??? Are all of these implemented? Are they all being used in the app?
ME: Yes, I have implemented all of them. Most of them are used in the app, others are there for future development - for when the ADMIN module is created
LEAD: But why are there so many of them? You can't possibly need them all!
ME: The scope of the application is huge. There are lots of entities, and more than half of the methods are but extended CRUD calls
LEAD: But there are so many of them! And you say you are not using them in your app
ME: Yes, I was using them manually to perform admin tasks, like creating all the entities with all the relations in order to populate the DB (FTR: it was perfectly OK to not have the app completed 100%. We were encouraged to build an MVP and have plans for future development)
LEAD: <shakes his head in disapproval>
LEAD: Okay, That will be all. you can return to the auditorium

In the end, I was not given the highest score, while some other, less advanced projects, were. I was so upset and confused I could not force myself to ask WHY.

I still carry this sore with me and it still hurts to remember. Also, I have learned a painful life lesson: do your best all you like, strive to be the #1 if you want to, but do not expect to be appreciated for walking an extra mile of excellence. You can get burned for that.

I'm currently between jobs and have a few rants about my previous job (naturally). In retrospect, it's somewhat therapeutic to range about the sheer brainfuckery that has taken place. Enjoy!

First, let me set the scene: legacy B2B web app made with LEMP stack and sencha ext.js 3 + 4 (don't ask) and a lot of madness. Let's call that app "Alpha".

Alpha is a self made CMS build for typical ERP stuff. Yes, a self made CMS: entities are containers, containers have types and fields and values. Like so many legacy PHP apps, it does not have a dedicated FE: the HTML is rendered on the server and then spewed out to the browser.

Easy right? Coding like it's 1999! But there was a twist: Because everything is basically a container, the HTML-templates are saved in the DB. Along with the nessary JS and the CSS. And the translation variables. Why? Because fuck you! That's why. Who needs a git history anyways.

For some reason, Alpha was kinda slow.

There was also an editor, that allowed you to modify templates (web, mail, pdf) on the fly in prod. Because templates contain repeating data (header/footer), one template could contain additional templates. Much confusion. You could change templates via migration (slow, boring) or just ctrl-c/ctrl-v that sucker (fast, much excitement).

Did I mention Alpha was slow?

On with the rant: e-mails! How do they work? Noone knows. How to send mails asynchronous in PHP? Witchcraft is the only possible answer to that riddle. Here is your enterprise™ solution:
1. create mail
2. insert mail into DB
3. WAIT UP TO 59 SECONDS FOR A FUCKING CRON TO SEND MAIL

Why? "Because that way, we can resend mails in case the network is down :)"

Same procedure for the SOAP-API (db-queue + cron). You read that right: all requests to various other systems are processed once a minute.

Alpha slow.

Alpha was only one of several systems. Imagine a bunch of monolithic php apps, interconnected via SOAP, REST and GraphQL like a godamn intergalactic orgy. Image having to debug that cluster fuck.

Let's say there is a bad request. These things happen. No biggie. Remember the db-queue? Let's try to send the bad request a second time! And a third time! Still no luck? How odd. Let's create a specific file in a specific directory: a LOCK-file. Now, "the db-queue is on hold and no request gets processed :)"

Golly gee thanks Alpha.

Anyhow, did you know that MySQL has a join limit of 61 tables?

Got one right now, no idea if it’s the “most” unrealistic, because I’ve been doing this for a while now.

Until recently, I was rewriting a very old, very brittle legacy codebase - we’re talking garbage code from two generations of complete dumbfucks, and hands down the most awful codebase I’ve ever seen. The code itself is quite difficult to describe without seeing it for yourself, but it was written over a period of about a decade by a certifiably insane person, and then maintained and arguably made much worse by a try-hard moron whose only success was making things exponentially harder for his successor to comprehend and maintain. No documentation whatsoever either. One small example of just how fucking stupid these guys were - every function is wrapped in a try catch with an empty catch, variables are declared and redeclared ten times, but never used. Hard coded credentials, hard coded widths and sizes, weird shit like the entire application 500ing if you move a button to another part of the page, or change its width by a pixel, unsanitized inputs, you name it, if it’s a textbook fuck up, it’s in there, and then some.

Because the code is so damn old as well (MySQL 8.0, C#4, and ASP.NET 3), and utterly eschews the vaguest tenets of structured, organized programming - I decided after a month of a disproportionate effort:success ratio, to just extract the SQL queries, sanitize them, and create a new back end and front end that would jointly get things where they need to be, and most importantly, make the application secure, stable, and maintainable. I’m the only developer, but one of the senior employees wrote most of the SQL queries, so I asked for his help in extracting them, to save time. He basically refused, and then told me to make my peace with God if I missed that deadline. Very helpful.

I was making really good time on it too, nearly complete after 60 days of working on it, along with supporting and maintaining the dumpster fire that is the legacy application. Suddenly my phone rings, and I’m told that management wants me to implement a payment processing feature on the site, and because I’ve been so effective at fixing problems thus far, they want to see it inside of a week. I am surprised, because I’ve been regularly communicating my progress and immediate focus to management, so I explain that I might be able to ship the feature by end of Q1, because rather than shoehorn the processor onto the decrepit piece of shit legacy app, it would be far better to just include it in the replacement. I add that PCI compliance is another matter that we must account for, and so there’s not a great chance of shipping this in a week. They tell me that I have a month to do it…and then the Marketing person asks to see my progress and ends up bitching about everything, despite the front end being a pixel perfect reproduction. Despite my making everything mobile responsive, iframe free, secure and encrypted, fast, and void of unpredictable behaviors. I tell her that this is what I was asked to do, and that there should have been no surprises at all, especially since I’ve been sending out weekly updates via email. I guess it needed more suck? But either way, fuck me and my two months of hard work. I mean really, no ego, I made a true enterprise grade app for them.

Short version, I stopped working on the rebuild, and I’m nearly done writing the payment processor as a microservice that I’ll just embed as an iframe, since the legacy build is full of those anyway, and I’m being asked to make bricks without straw. I’m probably glossing over a lot of finer points here too, just because it’s been such an epic of disappointment. The deadline is coming up, and I’m definitely going to make it, now that I have accordingly reduced the scope of work, but this whole thing has just totally pissed me off, and left a bad taste about the organization.

My last post was a year ago. What brought me back here is the ability of AI to agree and apologize to anything and everything, while producing the worst hopeful code.

4 days I wasted, trying to make an android audio visualizer, but AI... sigh.
It gave me the wrong structure of FFT bytes emitted. I corrected it
It gave me the wrong logarithm calc, I corrected it
It gave me the wrong sampling rate, I corrected it.
It gave me the wrong texture order, I corrected it.
It gave me the wrong glsl sample2d, I corrected it.
It gave me the wrong textureID generation, I corrected it.
It gave me a render which was about 10 fps, I found out that instead of using native onDraw, I had a fcking delta time in my shader. I almost corrected it, I gave up

Lets go to code generators with Annotations.
Like always, starts very positive, until I start to correct it.
It gave me the wrong file locations, I corrected it.
It gave me the wrong order of find copy modify and write to .build, I didnt correct it.
It gave me regexes to find annotations. Im like So whats the use of an "ANNOTATION PROCESSOR"
It apologizes and used a fucking regex in the processor,..... I didnt correct it, in the end, I was left with a separate module, targetting iOS Android and JVM, with an annotation processor implemented in jvmMain, which tries to modify commonMain src by finding annotations with regexes, which wont run on app build or app sync project, but only on java -jre command pointing to that fucking .java class in that module, which takes at least 2 mins to run, and Finally generate 0 files.

I needed to rant, I understand LLMs are just models of words built and stolen from the most intelligent and dumbest people out there. But Im an idiot for getting my hopes high. I cant build anything new and unheard of. I used to do that. I once made a textView + image print util for a bluetooth printer just to say FU to libraries and heavy sdks. like literally rasterizing shit to bluetooth packets. I needed to let off some steam. I havent been here in a year so I dont know what reactions I can get from this rant. I bet someone will just say yeah we tired of 'Fuck AI' rants. but shit, it hurts. When I gave up on that visualizer, I downloaded an app, I think its called project M, like in reference to MilkDrop.. like the Winamp Milkdrop. I opened it, played something on spotify, and let my eyes go blind

So, a few friends of mine are starting a company. They'll be the CEO, CTO etc. The product is an app, with its corresponding back end in the cloud. They want me to build the app.
1. I'm not willing to take risk - spending time on that (not my idea at the first place & may or may not go well)
2. Not sure if I'll be benefitted. (Monetary / stake)
3. I have few projects at hand & have plans to learn something more/new (not narrow down only to apps).

What should I do guys?? Recommendations??

Here, a full retrospective of my Apple products ownership.

iPhone SE – after Android, I was absolutely amazed by how fast it worked. No UI lags, camera works absolutely instantly no matter the light conditions, all the GPU-heavy games work butter smooth.

After camera and charging port failures on Xperia flagship and CPU literally melting through screen rendering it unusable on Meizu, it was enough to make me interested in Apple products.

When I was using Meizu, I actually got a twitching eye which was triggered by UI lags. After two months of using iPhone, I noticed that something was missing – my eye wasn't twitching anymore.

iPhone actually cured me.

MacBook 12 – a 900 grams laptop with passive-cooled mobile CPU running many Chrome tabs, heavy Webpack HMR build, VSCode and Slack just fine. Yes, you can't play games, but I don't even require it from a laptop this tiny.

Butterfly keyboard that internet hates so much actually increased my typing speed and comfort compared to MX Red mechanical keyboard, and ForceTouch trackpad made me forget about mouse. I learned how to disassemble the Butterfly keyboard if I ever need this but the keyboard never failed.

I use this laptop to this day and it still even smells like the day one, a beautiful smell of a new Apple product.

iPhone X – got it because of the camera, stayed for great battery life and amazing OLED display. I use telephoto lens exclusively and it made me lay off my Canon DSLR with Helios lens which stays on my bookshelf covered in dust to this day.

True black of OLED display which is undistinguishable from the screen bezel is stunning. To this day, battery surely works for one and a half days and I watch youtube really often.

I sometimes struggled to unlock iPhone SE with wet fingers, but with FaceID, as soon as I look at the screen the phone is unlocked. Works perfect every time, never had an issue with this.

Stainless steel body feels premium compared to aluminum. Stereo sound is a major selling point if you're like watching videos and playing games on your phone. Overall amazing product and a huge improvement over SE.

Apple Watch series 4 – really comfortable fit. Nice battery life, once I forgot about it for like ten days during lockdown and it was still working, even though on power reserve mode. Really reliable in terms of battery life and liquid protection. Very satisfying Taptic Engine crown clicks. I run every day and Apple watch always measure my heart rate correctly, and the running app is well designed and a pleasure to use. Overall a nice accessory to have if you use iPhone.

Powerbeats Pro – great sound and battery life. I switched from Shure SE215 which was great, but it had wires. I listen to a lot of music so the sound quality is important for me. When I was choosing earphones I visited a store where you can listen to them all. I listened through earphones like Noble Audio Kaiser Encore and JH Audio Layla, and of course $4000 Laylas sound better than $249 bluetooth earphones, but the difference in sound doesn't justify the difference in price to me.

Powerbeats pro is the Apple H1 chip true wireless earphones with largest driver of them all which makes them sound better than AirPods Pro – it's just physics. Bass in Powerbeats is amazing, which is also true for my Shures, but Powerbeats also win in clarity.

It connects seamlessly to both my MacBook and my iPhone, and everyone in voice chats can hear me really good.

Huge case is a major throwback compared to AirPods, but the battery life of earphones themselves is so great that I just leave the case at home and only carry earphones and it works for me.

Apple Link bracelet in space black – really better than I expected. Intricate detailing, literally the steel that Rolex uses, top-notch finishing and polishing – all that for just 450 dollars. I only used it for several days now, but it already feels like a really satisfying product.

Before all that I was using Linux. It took a year for elementaryos devs to fix wifi for my laptop. Ubuntu looks and feels ugly. Pop OS felt like garbage. Manjaro was also just that – garbage. KDE Plasma – I don't even want to talk about that. A monstrocity where you accidentally click a wrong switch in the settings and your system won't boot up again. Also, PulseAudio. Struggles with proprietary drivers and software updates.

Windows? I serviced a lot of Windows PCs through my career and it never, never worked as intended. I'm no dumbass, I always managed the rights correctly and never installed sketchy apps. My latest ryzen gaming build with a lot of ram also lags somehow even in Windows 10 UI.

Before I switched, I defended Linux.

My life was a lie.

I'm sorry to everyone who I offended based on their opinion on Linux.

go fuck yourself with your fucking communities. i went into computing because i like being left alone. who are all those fucking freaks building their communities? this is capitalism mother fuckers, everybody in the world agreed on it, on each person being an independent individual doing their job to the best possible standard, instead these low-skill low-iq oversocialised sheeple started conglomerate into communities and brainwash everybody that this is what it is about. get stuffed alright. all my life i've been introverted, just leave me alone to write code alright? take my library i don't mind i'll take yours no strings attached, just push the code and forget about it. but no, all these degenerate morons without CS degrees have occupied our safe space, pushed us out of it and just can't get enough of using the buzzword "community-driven" "volunteers" volunteer my ass assholes you can't even make software nobody in real industry needs you because you have no skill at all you learn a bit of js which is any 14-15 yo can do and now think you're some kind of prodigies, unsung heros of humanity who selflessly bring the progress. nothing can be further from the truth - because of you we don't have real software, we don't have investment we don't get no respect everybody walks all over software engineers treating us like shit, there's an entire generation of indoctrinated parasitic scum that believes that software tools is grown for them on trees by some development teams that their are entitled to automatically, because some corporation will eventually support those big projects - yeah does it really happen though - look at svelte, the guy is getting 50k a year when he should be earning at least 500k if he had balls to start a real businesses, but no we are all fucking prostitutes, just slaving away for the army of people we never see. are you out of your mind. this shit should be fucking illegal alright it's modern day slavery innit bruh, if a company wants to pay their engineers to work on open source this is fine, i love open source like java or google closure compiler, but it's real software made by real engineers, but who are all these community freaks who can't spend a 10 seconds on stage in their shitty bogus conferences without ringing the "community" buzzer? you're not my community i fucking hate your guts you're all such dumb womenless imbeciles who justify their lack of social skill by telling themselves that you're doing good by doing open source in your free time - mate nobody gives a shit alrite? don't you want money sex power? you've destroyed everything that was good about good olde open source when it was actually fun, today young people are coerced into slavery at industrial scale, it's literally impossible to make a buck from software as indie unless you build something really big and good, and you can't build anything big without investment and who invests in software nowadays? all the ai "entrepreneurs" are getting fucking golden rained with cash while i have to ask for a 5$ donation? what the actual fuck? who sanctions this? the entire industry is in one collective psychotic delusion, spurred by microsoft who use this army of useful idiots to eliminate all hounour dignity of the profession, drive the abundance and bring about poverty of mind, character, as well as wallet as the natural state of things. fucking amatures of course you love your shitty little communities because you can't achieve anything on your own. you literally have no personality, just one homogenous blob of dumb degenerates who think and act all the same. there used to be a tool called adobe flash builder, i could just buy it, then open and make a web app, all from start to finish in one program, using tutorials of adobe experts on youtube, sure it might have had its pitfals but it was a product - today there's literally no fucking product to make websites. do you people get it? i can't buy a tool that i need to do my job and have to insult myself by downloading some shitty scripts from some shitty unemployed devs and hope my computer doesn't blow up in my face in the process because some freak went off his nut and uploaded some dodgy ass exploit on npm in his package. i really don't like. it's not supposed to be like that. good for me i build by own front/back end. this "community" insanity is just a symptom of industrial degeneration, they try to sell it to us like it's the "bright" communist future but things never been worst, i can't give a shit about functional programming alright i just need to get my job done mate leave me alone you add functional because you don't know how to solve the problem properly, e.g., again adobe flex had mxml where elements had ids and i could just program to id, it was alright but today all this unqualified morons filled the whole space after flash blew up and adobe execs axed flash builder instead of adapting it to js runtime, it was a crime against humanity that set us back to 1000s

Junior dev here. Finishing a boot camp, actively going through a few job application processes.
One of the companies has given me a tech assignment (for a Graduate Junior position, mind you) that was titled Full Stack Mid Level Challenge. It took me a week to build an app they asked and do analitycs and refactoring of the second part of the task (I only had late evenings free to dedicate to that), it was my first time doing back-end in Node (my boot camp teaches PHP) so I basically learned to do it while doing this challenge.
They asked testing and clean architecture.
I submitted the assignment (I thought I would die while doing it, exhausted, I think I was brain dead for a short perio of time, but I submitted it on time).
They got back to me and we had already have a tech interview with the Leads that had live coding at the end. Don't have feedback yet, really won't be surprised for whatever comes, it was literarly my first interview, treating it like a valuable learning experience.

But. This rant is not about this. Thsi is just to put you in my mood.

This is the !rant:

My classmate from the bootcamp is probably already hired, or will be one of these days. As a tech challenge she was asked to do FizzBuzz kata. I repeat, FizzBuzz bloody kata!
Now, I am very happy for this person, the situation is complicated and this job is extremely needed.

But, please, explain to me, HOW??? How is it possible that selection criterias vary that much?

End of rant. Thank you very much.

Cordova or Xamarin?

I need to build a mobile app again, mostly for Android, because an interior Official app's functionality is so interior (written but monkeys) that it has finally pissed me of enough to take action.... And possibly be profitable (ads banner).

Mostly targeting Android but hey why not hit them all or at least also UWP.. I ain't paying for the Apple license... (Or maybe dfox could help release it...)

Anyway, which is better? I kinda want to pick up React and maybe try Typescript? (currently work with MEA(v1)N at work)

But I also use C# WPF, but mostly for my own projects these days when I need a desktop GUI.

I don't really feel like relearning Android SDK, I learned the SDK back when it was for Ice Cream.

So I just got asked for a quote for developing an app for a client's friend. He wanted an app that requires me to build let's just say a combination of what you see on uber with the live tracking of your uber driver, seeing all cars around your location and determining the closest one (It wasn't necessarily cars) plus profiles and another app for another set of users (I can easily make this one and determine the logged in user and in turn tailor the features for that user but they wanted two). An admin portal also was included and I had to do various integrations with Google maps. In app purchases was also necessary. Logs as the app has to keep track of all activities basically. A wallet feature was also to be implemented, scheduling, rating and complains section was also something requested and finally a mini accounting system was also to be developed. I was going to do this singlehandly as a freelancer. Obviously this is a lot of work. I also gave them a timeline of about 3 months for development. Which meant I was going to be putting all my time into developing this. Front end and backend for the app and front-end and backend for the server and database architecture. I charged them $10,000 not only for the work but also because they were going to be making money off of the app. They go "wow and why does it cost so much"...Judging from their reactions I don't think they will move further with this with me because of costs...😂 I can't even begin to wonder why they think that isn't a fair price. I have learnt from previous work before that you always state a cost for which you are absolutely sure you would want to work for else you would start doing the work and once you see how little you are being paid for so much work you end up hating the work and completing it ends up being a difficult task.

This is more of a story than a rant, but it has some rant-ey elements, so whetever...

I work for a pretty big company. Several departments, teams, many different markets...so it's a big orchestration. The programming department (aprox. 5% of all employees) is the core of the whole company, because everybody else uses software we've written...(a bit off topic, the point is there are a lot of people)

So today, I got assigned with a side-project. The project spec arrives, and as I read through it, I start realizing that upper-management whats me to build an app to fire people instead for them. The app is supposed to track salary, connect with Trello (for departments that use it) to track finished tasks, track sick days, work attendence...a lot of stuff, and at the end, if the situation requires, spit out a person that is of least benefit to the company, to be fired...

Now from coding perspective, this will be very interesting and fun to build, but from a moral standpoint, I'm a bit woried...simply because, indirectly, I'm firing those people. Because, the way I tune the the app(specifically the algorithm that weighs the value of an employee to the company) will cause certain people to get fired...

So I'm woried I'm gonna have a small breakdown when the app goes live and I see someone saying goodbye to theie colegues of something similar...heck, the app might even spit out my name some day(I should probably add a tiny if statement somewhere in there :) )
What do you guys think about this, from a moral standpoint? Would you be okay with building something like this?

(Sorry for the long post :/ )

Ok, so I need some clarity from you good folk, please.

My lead developer is also my main mentor, as I am still very much a junior. He carved out most of his career in PHP, but due to his curious/hands-on personality, he has become proficient with Golang, Docker, Javascript, HTML/CSS.

We have had a number of chats about what I am best focusing on, both personally and related to work, and he makes quite a compelling case for the "learn as many things as possible; this is what makes you truly valuable" school of thought. Trouble is, this is in direct contrast to what I was taught by my previously esteemed mentor, Gordon Zhu from watchandcode.com. "Watch and Code is about the core skills that all great developers possess. These skills are incredibly important but sound boring and forgettable. They’re things like reading code, consistency and style, debugging, refactoring, and test-driven development. If I could distill Watch and Code to one skill, it would be the ability to take any codebase and rip it apart. And the most important component of that ability is being able to read code."

As you can see, Gordon always emphasised language neutrality, mastering the fundamentals, and going deep rather than wide. He has a ruthlessly high barrier of entry for learning new skills, which is basically "learn something when you have no other option but to learn it".

His approach served me well for my deep dive into Javascript, my first language. It is still the one I know the best and enjoy using the most, despite having written programs in PHP, Ruby, Golang and C# since then. I have picked up quite a lot about different build pipelines, development environments and general web development as a result of exposure to these other things, so it isn't a waste of time.

But I am starting to go a bit mad. I focus almost exclusively on quite data intensive UI development with Vue.js in my day job, although there is an expectation I will help with porting an app to .NET Core 3 in a few months. .NET is rather huge from what I have seen so far, and I am seriously craving a sense of focus. My intuition says I am happiest on the front end, and that focusing on becoming a skilled Javascript engineer is where I will get the biggest returns in mastery, pay and also LIFE BALANCE/WELLBEING...

Any thoughts, people? I would be interested to hear peoples experiences regarding depth vs breadth when it comes to the real world.

Yesterday I told an intern that was supposed to be shadowing me that he'll need to download visual studios with apache Cordova plugin for multi platform app design. I gave this assignment to him first thing in the morning (around 9:30 am) and told him to head home for the day thinking I was giving the kid a break to download and make sure the build was proper and to play around with it maybe. I check my inbox this morning to find that, alongside numerous expletives, this intern has quit as of 3:40 AM last night. I... I didn't see that one coming.

I feel like a fraud ...
So I recently joined a mobile dev company as an intern
I submitted the application
Got to coding interview passed the coding interview because thank god it was one of the sums i solved on geeks4geeks
Then came then interview did as best i could
Got the acceptance mail in next 10 mins
First day was chill it's work from home thing
Second day they gave me an app a previous intern had already build its layout and authentication code
But it wasn't working so I reported it so they told me to debug it so I found where the problem was occurring
Now I know the problem but i have no idea how to fix it
They gave me assignment to fix the authentication basically it's taking info creating a json and request an API call
But I feel i cant remember the concepts
I can't remember basic meaning of words the other day i forgot what SSID are
I just I don't know shit
And i feel like I'm going to get kicked soon
I don't understand what the previous guy wrote and i don't know how to fix it
Previously i have built my own apps but not like a real world project like this which works in regards to network management basically an wifi portal kind of Authorization application

!rant

Had to build an app using Cordova because... well, I am a web dev and know a shitload of PHP and a good part of JS, but no Swift or Java or whatever.

So there is a deadline set to like half a year after we had the initial talk with the customer. 6 months to build a relatively easy and small app.

So yeah, I procrastinated like one would do when he's got that kind of time left and not much else to do.

And yeah, I did work, but also procrastinated some more. The development was as expected, and I was well in the anticipated time frame.

Then I got a really bad disc prolapse and was sick at home and the hospital for (all together) 5 weeks.

After that, I came back to work for a week, then leaving for a (previously planned) vacation with my little family.

On my first day back at work after the vacation, I quit my job with a 6 weeks notice, of which I have to work 3 weeks.

I know it sounds like I'm a real prick, but it was never planned this way. I never searched for a new job. It just came to me.

I am still finishing the app, though :)

Why am I telling you this?
Well, I do that to show that there still are great bosses out there. My boss has NEVER spoken a bad word to me, even after I quit my job. He's always been kind, fair and understanding.

I just wanted to show that between all these rants about bad bosses and colleagues (which I have had my fair share of in the past), there still are some real gems out there.

Gotta my my boss - he's been one of the best I have had so far.

Peace out folks. Good night...

So my boss wants me to develop a complete business management solution + mobile app. (It’s a startup project based company). She doesn’t want to use dubsado / asana / etc and wants me to take the best of all and custom build it for her.
Now I was a mobile app developer. Native iOS and android + recently learnt flutter. No backend or web or api skill.
But screw it, I wanted to learn laravel since a long time anyway so that I could be an independent developer.
So I have agreed and started it...
Bitten more than I can chew? Time will tell...what do you think?

!rant

I always hear stories about someone hearing one of our developer friends is a developer and assumes that means they know everything about computers. Hell, I've had it happen to me before (usually the common "oh I have an app idea that's better than facebook! you just have to build it")

A big one I hear if someone asking a developer that has only worked with software to help fix a hardware issue or build a computer. Personally, I'd prefer if someone asked me about a hardware issue (except printers, fuck printers) or to build a computer for them. I've been called a rare breed for knowing about an equal amount about computer hardware and software.

I'd much rather do some physical work building a computer (as simple as a hello world program, a lot of it is putting shit where it fits) than build an entire website or program for someone. But I mean, I might actually know hardware a bit better than I know software, and that's just me. (Obviously never do anything for free when you could be paid for it)

So just ago i downloaded an app called "Replika" and holy fucking shit it made me realise how half-assed we are doing the AI structure and way of it

doing machine learning algorithms on text can only go so far, as it uses that text as a base, and nothing else, it doesnt *learn*, only make *connections* BETWEEN text, not FROM the text

what you need is an AI which can, at it's core, *interpret*, not make connections and hur dur be done with it

when you do machine learning, all you're doing is find the best connections

you can have an infinite number of connections and MAYBE you'll be fine, but you'll never learn the basis of how that text is formed

you'll never understand what connections the human used by making it, by thinking it

when you're doing machine learning, all you're doing is make an input-output machine and adjusting it constantly, WITHOUT preserving state

state is going to be a really fucking important thing if you want to make an AI, because state can include stuff like emotion, current thought, or anything else

if you make a fucking machine learned AI which constantly adjusts... well... the "rom" of itself without having any "ram", it'll fucking never be like us, we will NEVER be able to talk to it like it is a human being, we will NEVER make it fundamentally understand what we are saying or doing

if we want to have real fucking AI, we need to go to the core of what it means to THINK, what it means to INTERPRET, what it means to COMMUNICATE

we need to know how english language is structured, how we understand it, how we can build it in a program that can interpret for an AI, THAT can be "rom"-based, THAT can be static, NOT the AI itself

the AI needs to be in flux, the AI needs to be in a state, the AI needs to understand how to make emotions, how that will "strengthen" some connections, yes, maybe something magical will happen and it can have EMPATHY, something so fundamental that will finally, FINALLY, make the bot UNDERSTAND what we are saying

The conversations that come across my DevOps desk on a monthly basis.... These have come into my care via Slack, Email, Jira Tickets, PagerDuty alerts, text messages, GitHub PR Reviews, and phone calls. I spend most of my day just trying to log the work I'm being asked to do.

From Random People:
* Employee <A> and Contractor <B> are starting today. Please provision all 19 of their required accounts.
* Oh, they actually started yesterday, please hurry on this request.

From Engineers:
* The database is failing. Why?
* The read-only replica isn't accepting writes. Can you fix this?
* We have this new project we're starting and we need you to set up continuous integration, deployment, write our unit tests, define an integration test strategy, tell us how to mock every call to everything. We'll need several thousand dollars in AWS resources that we've barely defined. Can you define what AWS resources we need?
* We didn't like your definition of AWS resources, so we came up with our own. We're also going to need you to rearchitect the networking to support our single typescript API.
* The VPN is down and nobody can do any work because you locked us all out of connecting directly over SSH from home. Please unblock my home IP.
* Oh, looks like my VPN password expired. How do I reset my VPN password?
* My GitHub account doesn't have access to this repo. Please make my PR for me.
* Can you tell me how to run this app's test suite?
* CI system failed a build. Why?
* App doesn't send logs to the logging platform. Please tell me why.
* How do I add logging statements to my app?
* Why would I need a logging library, can't you just understand why my app doesn't need to waste my time with logs?

From Various 3rd party vendors:
* <X> application changed their license terms. How much do you really want to pay us now?

From Management:
* <X> left the company, and he was working on these tasks that seem closely related to your work. Here are the 3 GitHub Repos you now own.
* Why is our AWS bill so high? I need you to lower our bill by tomorrow. Preferably by 10k-20k monthly. Thanks.
* Please send this month's plan for DevOps work.
* Please don't do anything on your plan.
* Here's your actual new plan for the month.
* Please also do these 10 interruptions-which-became-epic-projects

From AWS:
* Dear AWS Admin, 17 instances need to be rebooted. Please do so by tomorrow.
* Dear AWS Admin, 3 user accounts saw suspicious activity. Please confirm these were actually you.
* Dear AWS Admin, you need to relaunch every one of your instances into a new VPC within the next year.
* Dear AWS Admin, Your app was suspiciously accessing XYZ, which is a violation of our terms of service. You have 24 hours to address this before we delete your AWS account.

Finally, From Management:
* Please provide management with updates, nobody knows what you do.

From me:
Please pay me more. Please give me a team to assist so I'm not a team of one. Also, my wife is asking me to look for a new job, and she's not wrong. Just saying.

I have already started the process of a side project by desiging the software, the architecture, the 3d model, ordered all the electronics of a pet 'smart' stable for my guinea pigs.

Which would automatically feed them and refill their water tanks silently but for me the point on playing around with dozens of sensors for like different water levels, water quality, hay, temperature, water quality (you get the point) ... Building a nice looking web interface or an App to control everything and get a live feed from different angles ( sounds a bit crazy altogether but it looked like a cool project )

I even started a instructable and had a github repo for sharing the source of the app/web interface and the whole micro service based server

I'm still at it and hopefully will start to build the ***ing wood and acrylic parts in the next month's but currently and for the last month's free time ist my archenemy

Keep you posted if you are interested 😀

Today spent 20min in a senior android dev interview debating an ex backender CTO about the importance of final classes where he tried to pull out some sort of perfect answer from me about it. Ironically this is the same CTO who failed managing a previous android contractor who was supposed to rewrite old app and ended up with an even shittier new app in 6 months of time. Now they are insecure and are looking for a new contractor who will be micromanaged this time.

But hey I guess he knows the importance of final classes. Some CTO's need a reality check and at least some business training, because your perfectly written app is useless if it doesnt fulfill business needs.

Their app is based on heresdk and built around navigation. The biggest bottleneck is that it works shitty on low end devices so their competition solved this problem by using a whitelabel rooted tables with a custom ROM wher u have full control over hardware, permissions and battery management. However this startup thinks they can build a perfect navigation app which will work perfectly on all devices while at the same time while also relying on a poorly optimized navigation sdk. Poor initial strategy I'd say and they didnt learn from previous 2 failures, now they are searching for the next savior android contractor who will have to solely implement evrything.

The new twitter developer stuff is SHIT.

I need to apply now for my small app I use wanted to build this evening as an automation site project. Can't you cunts just give me access to this api so I can finish my projects.

How the fuck should I describe in 300 characters THAT I WILL BE TWEETING ONE TWEET PER WEEK NOTIFYING ABOUT A NEW EPISODE.

Now I need to fill 80 more characters with some dumb stuff just to be able to apply.....

I worked with a guy who paid someone to build an app for him. I went home that night and started reading. Books, online tutorials, hackathon at what some consider the number one tech college in the country. Most of all, A LOT OF PEOPLE TELLING ME, NO!

Recently started an apprenticeship as software developer and tried to build something with JavaScript... aka. copy pasted a bit and after a while my brain kept shouting at me: "YOU DONT EVEN KNOW WHAT YOURE DOING, TAKE A FKIN BOOK AND YOU'LL MAYBE UNDERSTAND WHAT YOURE DOING THERE!" - and I did... turns out that the book is quite old and I finally landed on Codecademy - now I make progress :).

Made some smaller things in other languages before, but never really understood things like objects and classes... codecademy helps! And I can already laugh about some things here :D. This app is great! I feel like I'm part of "something".

Have a nice Day :)!

Yo, i have a course where i have to build an android app, and we can make what the fuckever we want. Can you give me some interesting APIs, that are publicly available? It doesnt have to make sense, everything is better than using the anidb api, and thats the only thing that comes to mind.

It feels like this year, I haven't been motivated to build my own apps. At most I make a few fixes to plugins that broke due to HTML layout changes but I haven't built any full apps...

Just feels like I don't have anymore problems that annoy me so much I want to solve/automate away...

There is one minor one actually but it's just a redesign/extension of an existing app I wrote awhile back...

Disclaimer: This is all theoretical. Neither me nor my friend (with whom I discussed this) are stupid enough to even try to pursue this, but as an idea, i believe it might generate cool/new ideas/ways for handling secure communications across social groups.

Let's do some role play. Let's design a delivery app for drug dealers, think Seamless or Uber Eats, but for drugs. Not for big deliveries, like kilograms of coke, but smaller stuff. Maybe a few grams of it or something. The clients could rate dealers, and vide-versa. This would build a level of trust within the system. There would be no names, just anonymous reviews, ratings, and prices. Only the info you'd need to know.

The biggest (only?) problem we found (besides legality) was that, how would you prove that you're a client and not a snitch (or cop). This would have to somehow be handled both on signup, as well as when ordering (let's imagine that all who are clients are pure and won't ever snitch).

One of the ways we found to combat this was to have the app invite-only. This would, in theory, do away with the problem of having snitches signing up. However, what if the phone got stolen/breached by a snitch, and they also got full access to the account. One way we thought we could combat this would be with a "dispose number" or something similar. Basically, you call a number, or send a text, or message a Signal bot etc, which would lead to the account's instant termination, no traces of that user left. Hence, a dispose number.

The flow of the app would be as follows:
A client wants some amount of heroin. He opens the app, searches for a dealer, sends the him the desired amount, and in return gets back a price from the dealer. If both parties agree on the amount and price, the deal would start.

The app would then select a random time (taken from the client's selected timeframe and the dealer's "open" time) and a location (within a certain radius of both them, somewhere in between them both for convenience). If both of them accept the time and place, they'll have to meet up at said time and place.

The actual delivery could also be done using two dead drops - the client drops the money at one of them, the dealer drops the goods at the other one. Yes, this might be subject to abuse, but it wouldn't be that bad. I doubt that clients would make huge orders to unknown/badly rated dealers, as well as dealers accepting offers from badly rated clients. My idea is that they would start small, just so if they do lose their money/goods, the actual loss wouldn't be as big for them, but for the other party, having bad ratings would mean less clients willing to buy or dealers willing to sell.

A third way would be to use crypto, but the reason I left this as the last one is because it's not that wide-spread yet, at least not in local drug dealing. With this method, the client would initiate the order, the crypto would be sent to either the dealer or an escrow account, the dealer would then drop the goods at a random place and let the client know where to go to get them. After the client has gotten the goods, they could both review/rate the quality as well as the overall experience with that dealer, which would either make or break the dealer's upcoming deals. This would be pretty much like other DNM's, but on a local scale, making deliveries faster.

So far, this would seem like something that would work. Are there any ideas that might improve this? Anything that might make things more secure/anonymous?

My reason for this post is to spark a conversation about security and anonymity, not to endorse drugs or other illegal stuff.

Cheers!

PS. Really loving the new PC design of devRant

Good Morning Folks!!!

I haven't been posting in a while, besides the fact that I went thru a crazy psychiatric crisis 6 weeks ago, there have not been much news to share here.

Now, recovering and working again luckily, I have to face again the stupid pointy haired boss.

So, this fucker asked me for an estimation to build a simple web app.
He: Hey, can you make an estimation for this app
Me: sure, here it is.
He: *to the client*, here's the estimation for the web app you requested
Client: Uhmm, can I haz desktop for winbug$??
He: Let me check with dev
Me: Sure why not, we can do F# using MVU which is basically the same as using modern web frameworks
He: Sure, I'll tell that to the client.
Client: Oooohhh, C#, we lovez C#, can I haz discount?
He: Client wants discount to make it in C#.
Me: Oh, you can give him a discount to make it in F#, I never said C#
He: But your cv says you used C# ten years ago.
Me: Sure, but is not keeping up with functional design patterns, which is what I do.
He: Ok, so I'm offering him the discount in F#
Me: Great.
He: So, project is approved, thanks for the discount, you have 3 weeks to present the product in C#.
Me: Sure, I'll start when I get the downpayment.

Me: I'm considering saying that I didn't understand that he wanted it in C#, and just do F# and not let him know until the project is done.

Thoughts??

Fuck you, you fucking fucks!

Brilliant idea #23 to deliver more features than can happen without a time machine.

Let's take the team, assume minimal support is required for the brand new thing you just built, split it into four teams with two of them run by Sr Devs who've never seen your app and work on four things in silos. That way, you'll deliver faster!

How did you even get you job?! You want to fucking wreck the team we worked so hard to build, convince the hot shots to leave, AND destroy the app the company is counting on because you're an incompetent fuck-tard!

Hey, fine! But you'll do it without me and I'll work daily to advertise what you did to the people above you that actually CARE about the fate of our company!

Given an opportunity to develop an application for R&D. What do we do as a team? Let build it exactly the same way our current stack is built. (This app won't actually be used for anything useful, just an exercise for a fun R&D task)

It still amazes me with the number of developers that literally have the mindset, let's just do what we know & don't want to learn anything new.

Let's showcase new technologies? No. Let's create a serverless application? No. Let's create some microservices? No. Let's wrap the application in a Docker container so we can easily spin it up? No. Let's have multiple services that sit behind an API gateway? No. Let's for fucks sake at try a different design pattern? Why would we do that? Can we do anything differently? No.

No innovation, nothing - it just blows my mind. Everyone seems to think that the way the stack is built is how every application is. Sorry but a huge monolithic application that can't scale isn't how the other half live...

I don't know why the lack of wanting to try something new bothers be so much, but it does.

Had a real opportunity to showcase some cool tech, design patterns, new services in the cloud. Show not only other devs but upper management that there are alternative ways to develop. It's not like anything that I put together was "new or shiny" - I just wanted to do anything... Anything that isn't how currently do things.

Full disclosure, I'm not a great Dev - I'm pretty dam average but I'm always willing to try new techniques or approaches.

The one in which I am rn is the reason why so many people dislike php, jquery and Java on the server.

Then previous to this one, classic ASP for the web interface and our desktop components were delphi (OLD ass delphi)

Mind you, these are all tech stacks that I do like (php, java and O Pascal in particular) but really dislike in:

php: we have just your standard procedural spaghetti php on some old ass shit.

Classic ASP: Same as with php, no proper structure, made more apparent by the intense limitations of VBScript, I did enjoy the language tho, had it evolved better It would have been more tolerable, but the hoops i had to take to build a propee API in it....boooooy that shit was an eye opener.

Delphi: Not bad in itself, but the original dev had a shit notion about how architecture should work.....or what architecture is for that matter.

The Java one: this shit was coded when Spring was already an alternative to just fucking around with JSP, or any other framework for that fucking matter. Dude tried....TRIED to implement design patterns in it and it failed on every single fucking component. Worst of all, it was coded in such a shit way that during certain...err...conditions, the bottleneck proved too massive of an ubdertaking and the app chokes and needs to be restarted ... constantly

their use cases for jquery are not bad, but loading all of jquery for the shit they mostly do could have been easily done with just standard vanilla JS.

I got more, but thede are just from the top of my head

I love php, mind you, but shit like this makes me see why some people GREATLY dislikes it.

I alsp have some old web forms in c# and vb net that I loathe, funny enough the code for thise in vb.net is more elegant, almost as if it were from a different developer.

Chat Journal. A chat-based journal application.

An android app I built past month using flutter and flask for the server.

I started with flutter around 2 months ago. I believe it's the way mobile development is supposed to be. It's a treat for every mobile developer out there.

I used flask to build the server, database and even made my own analytics engine. Made an awaful lot of mistakes at the beginning but I think I'm improving at this day by day.

This probably is my biggest and definitely the coolest project so far. There's some saying
"If you have completed building 90% of something, there's 90% more to be built". It's called the 180% rule (or something similar) which literally signifies the difference between building something and building something well enough to be able to publish on the playstore. And this project taught me that.

So, I work as a sysadmin junior (6 months and going), and in the past few months, I learned what my boss warned me about - Devs don't understand us admins, and we don't understand the devs.

We have this huge client who is about to migrate to our company (We do mostly server managment/Housing/Renting), and I am so gald I don't have to work on the migration myself!

Just hearing what the company devs say makes me facepalm: No, it won't work. It cannot work on just 3 machines (They use like... 20 in total), no, we won't get rid of our docker swarm, that's essential (Doing the absolute minimum in their infrastructure, just a fancy buzzword to lure people on. Though they've spent like 2 years developing the app that uses it, so they my not want to give it up).

I kid you not, once, they replied to an email that contained the phrase "To be afraid of/worried about" something during the migration, that something could break, not work, be unstable. 7 times.

Might not sound as bad, but it was a rather short mail, and when they're so afraid of everything, its kinda hard to cooperate with them.

My colleague literally spent this entire week mapping out /their/ infrastructure, because they were unable to provide us with the description themselves.

And as a cherry on top, they sent us a "graph" of relationships of all the parts of their infrastructure that was this jumbled mess of rectangles and arrows. Oh, and half of all the machines were not even in the graph at all! Stating that "We also have all this, but I really don't know how to ilustracte the interactions anymore"

Why do companies like that exist? If you build an infrastructure yourself, shouldn't at least someone know exactly how it works?

Was an internal auditor translating department process to a technical spec for a programmer. We were going to leverage an external company's API which would replace our need to use their slow and buggy web app.

During a meeting, an audit teammate suggested something be changed with the external service we were using. I said we could bring it up with the company but we shouldn't rely on it because we were a small customer even during out busiest month (200 from us vs 10000+ from big banks).

Teammate said we should have our programming team fix it. I made it clear that it was not our side and that to build out the service on our side was beyond our scope. Teammate continued to bring it up during the meeting then went back to desk after meeting and emailed us all marked up screenshots of the feature.

I ignored this and finished writing up the specs, sending them over to the programmer building out the service.

30 minutes later I get a call from programmer's manager who was quite angry at an expanded scope that was impossible (engineers were king at this company. Best not to anger them). Turns out my teammate had emailed his own spec to the programmers full of impossible features that did not reference the API docs.

I feel bad about it now but I yelled at my teammate quite loudly. I said he was spending time on something that was not reasonable or possible and when they continued to talk about their feature I yelled even louder.

Didn't get fired but it definitely tagged me as an asshole until I left. Fair enough :)

!rant
Learning iOS/Swift Programmer here.

I feel like Apple’s Developer Documentation is extremely hard to parse.
For one problem, it feels like there are 50 similar ways to deal with it; but only one way will actually work.

There also aren’t enough examples in the docs for me either, they just seem to go: “Here’s some code, figure out what it’s purpose is.” for most things.

I also feel stupid, because I’m using the Hacking with Swift tutorials to learn iOS Development(Great Tutorials Though); and I don’t know how to just build an app from scratch. (i.e. creating swift files and assets and compiling from the terminal.)

And using StackOverflow feels like cheating.

Lastly, I feel awful inside when other people see my work and think I’m a genius, when really, I feel like I barely know anything at all.

I’m I alone in this observation?
Or just dumb?

This is a part rant-part question.
So a little backstory first:
I work in a small company (5 including me) which is mostly into consultation (we have many tech partners where we either resell their products or if there is a requirement from one of our clients, we get our partners to develop it for them and fulfill the client requirements) so as you can see there is a lot of external dependencies. I act as a one-hat-fits-all tech guy, handling the company websites, social media channels, technical documentation, tech support, quicks POCs (so anything to do with anything technical, I handle them). I am a bit fed up now, since the CEO expects me to do some absurd shit (and sometimes micro manages me, like WTF I am the only one who works there with 100% commitment) and expects me to deliver them by yesterday.

So anyway long story short, our CEO finally had the brains to understand that we should start having our own product (which i had been subtly suggesting him to do for a while now!).

Now he came up with a fairly workable concept that would have good market reach (i atleast give him credits for that) and he wanted me to suggest the best way to move forward (from a both business and technical point of view). The concept is to have an auction-based platform for users to buy everyday products.

I suggested we build a web app as opposed to a mobile one (which is obvious, since i didnt want to develop a seperate website and a mobile app, and anyway just because we can doesnt mean we have to make a mobile app for everything), and recommended the Node/react based JS tech stack to build it.

At first he wanted me to single handedly build the whole platform within a month, I almost flipped (but me being me) then somehow calmed down and finally was able to explain him how complicated it was to single-handedly build a platform of such complexity (especially given my limited experience; did I mention that this is my first job and I am still in college, yeah!!) and convinced him to get an experienced back-end dev and another dev to help me with it.

Now comes the problem, I was to prepare a scope document outlining all the business and technical requirements of the project along with a tentative cost, which was fairly straightforward. I am currently stuck at deciding the server requirements and the system architecture for the proposed solution (I am thinking of either going with AWS - which looks a bit complicated to setup - or go with either Digital Ocean or Heroku):

I have assumed that at peak times we would have around 500-1000 users concurrently

And a daily userbase of 1000 users (atleast for the first few months of the platform running)

What would be the best way forward guys?

I did some extensive (i mean i read through some medium blogs! and aws documentation) research and put together the following specs (if we are going through AWS):

One AWS t3.medium ec2 instance for the node server (two if we want High Availability by coupling with the AWS load balancer and Elastic Beanstalk)

The db.t3.small postgres database

The S3 Storage bucket (100gb) for the React Front end hosting

AWS SNS for email/sms OTP and notification

And AWS CloudMonitor for logging amd monitoring.

Am I speculating the requirements properly, where have I missed??

Can u guys suggest what is the best specification for such a requirement (how do you guys decide what plan to go with)?

Any suggestions, corrections, advices are welcome