As a developer, sometimes you hammer away on some useless solo side project for a few weeks. Maybe a small game, a web interface for your home-built storage server, or an app to turn your living room lights on an off.

I often see these posts and graphs here about motivation, about a desire to conceive perfection. You want to create a self-hosted Spotify clone "but better", or you set out to make the best todo app for iOS ever written.

These rants and memes often highlight how you start with this incredible drive, how your code is perfectly clean when you begin. Then it all oscillates between states of panic and surprise, sweat, tears and euphoria, an end in a disillusioned stare at the tangled mess you created, to gather dust forever in some private repository.

Writing a physics engine from scratch was harder than you expected. You needed a lot of ugly code to get your admin panel working in Safari. Some other shiny idea came along, and you decided to bite, even though you feel a burning guilt about the ever growing pile of unfinished failures.

All I want to say is:

No time was lost.

This is how senior developers are born. You strengthen your brain, the calluses on your mind provide you with perseverance to solve problems. Even if (no, *especially* if) you gave up on your project.

Eventually, giving up is good, it's a sign of wisdom an flexibility to focus on the broader domain again.

One of the things I love about failures is how varied they tend to be, how they force you to start seeing overarching patterns.

You don't notice the things you take back from your failures, they slip back sticking to you, undetected.

You get intuitions for strengths and weaknesses in patterns. Whenever you're matching two sparse ordered indexed lists, there's this corner of your brain lighting up on how to do it efficiently. You realize it's not the ORMs which suck, it's the fundamental object-relational impedance mismatch existing in all languages which causes problems, and you feel your fingers tingling whenever you encounter its effects in the future, ready to dive in ever so slightly deeper.

You notice you can suddenly solve completely abstract data problems using the pathfinding logic from your failed game. You realize you can use vector calculations from your physics engine to compare similarities in psychological behavior. You never understood trigonometry in high school, but while building a a deficient robotic Arduino abomination it suddenly started making sense.

You're building intuitions, continuously. These intuitions are grooves which become deeper each time you encounter fundamental patterns. The more variation in environments and topics you expose yourself to, the more permanent these associations become.

Failure is inconsequential, failure even deserves respect, failure builds intuition about patterns. Every single epiphany about similarity in patterns is an incredible victory.

Please, for the love of code...

Start and fail as many projects as you can.

“Yeah but you’re not a *real* developer”

Fuck. you.

I wrote 80% of this code base. I do 80% of the tickets/storyboard points. I do all of the QA. My nose is to the grindstone every fucking day honing this craft and sweating my balls off like a blacksmith staring into the red hot kiln while the sores of previous mistakes scream bloody murder from the unrelenting exposure to heat. I saw this amazing industry of opportunity, freedom and self examination and wanted in no matter what it took. I glued myself to every pithy resource I could possibly get my hands on and crawled through the muck and filth of it all until I could keep myself warm with the smallest spark of my own making. I stoked that spark until it became a fire and stoked that fire until I could set entire forests ablaze. I listened to the ungrateful people keeping warm by my combustion saying it “wasn’t hot enough” or “would have been a nicer colour if they did it” or “could have warmed up just fine jogging on the spot”. I made painstaking alterations to my ignition and watched my undeserving benefactors gradually be silenced and begin to sit quietly by the heat. I jumped into that inferno daily, was reduced to ash daily and emerged reborn daily. But you are right! I didn’t get scammed out of $40k+ studying technology in an archaic institution from instructors who don’t give a shit and answering “D all of the above” for 4+ years straight therefor my opinion doesn’t mean shit. Push your bullshit to prod and watch the server come burning out of the cloud as the apocalyptic swarm of angry tickets come flooding in why don’t you? Bet they didn’t teach you that in school. You’ve never poked around inside an open source codebase in your life. They are just a mystery boxes of magic that unless someone holds your hands with finely crafted instructions containing a 50/50 picture to word ratio you throw a hissy fit. Every problem that comes up instead of working to solve it you reflexively point to the first person in the room while thinking with your pea brain how you can possibly scapegoat them into taking the fall for whatever it is that’s come up today you couldn’t possibly understand.

Not a real developer?

Fuck. You.

My first job: The Mystery of The Powered-Down Server

I paid my way through college by working every-other-semester in the Cooperative-Education Program my school provided. My first job was with a small company (now defunct) which made some of the very first optical-storage robotic storage systems. I honestly forgot what I was "officially" hired for at first, but I quickly moved up into the kernel device-driver team and was quite happy there.

It was primarily a Solaris shop, with a smattering of IBM AIX RS/6000. It was one of these ill-fated RS/6000 machines which (by no fault of its own) plays a major role in this story.

One day, I came to work to find my team-leader in quite a tizzy -- cursing and ranting about our VAR selling us bad equipment; about how IBM just doesn't make good hardware like they did in the good old days; about how back when _he_ was in charge of buying equipment this wouldn't happen, and on and on and on.

Our primary AIX dev server was powered off when he arrived. He booted it up, checked logs and was running self-diagnostics, but absolutely nothing so far indicated why the machine had shut down. We blew a couple of hours trying to figure out what happened, to no avail. Eventually, with other deadlines looming, we just chalked it up be something we'll look into more later.

Several days went by, with the usual day-to-day comings and goings; no surprises.

Then, next week, it happened again.

My team-leader was LIVID. The same server was hard-down again when he came in; no explanation. He opened a ticket with IBM and put in a call to our VAR rep, demanding answers -- how could they sell us bad equipment -- why isn't there any indication of what's failing -- someone must come out here and fix this NOW, and on and on and on.

(As a quick aside, in case it's not clearly coming through between-the-lines, our team leader was always a little bit "over to top" for me. He was the kind of person who "got things done," and as long as you stayed on his good side, you could just watch the fireworks most days - but it became pretty exhausting sometimes).

Back our story -
An IBM CE comes out and does a full on-site hardware diagnostic -- tears the whole server down, runs through everything one part a time. Absolutely. Nothing. Wrong.

I recall, at some point of all this, making the comment "It's almost like someone just pulls the plug on it -- like the power just, poof, goes away."

My team-leader demands the CE replace the power supply, even though it appeared to be operating normally. He does, at our cost, of course.

Another weeks goes by and all is forgotten in the swamp of work we have to do.

Until one day, the next week... Yes, you guessed it... It happens again. The server is down. Heads are exploding (will at least one head we all know by now). With all the screaming going on, the entire office staff should have comped some Advil.

My team-leader demands the facilities team do a full diagnostic on the UPS system and assure we aren't getting drop-outs on the power system. They do the diagnostic. They also review the logs for the power/load distribution to the entire lab and office spaces. Nothing is amiss.

This would also be a good time draw the picture of where this server is -- this particular server is not in the actual server room, it's out in the office area. That's on purpose, since it is connected to a demo robotics cabinet we use for testing and POC work. And customer demos. This will date me, but these were the days when robotic storage was new and VERY exciting to watch...

So, this is basically a couple of big boxes out on the office floor, with power cables running into a special power-drop near the middle of the room. That information might seem superfluous now, but will come into play shortly in our story.

So, we still have no answer to what's causing the server problems, but we all have work to do, so we keep plugging away, hoping for the best.

The team leader is insisting the VAR swap in a new server.

One night, we (the device-driver team) are working late, burning the midnight oil, right there in the office, and we bear witness to something I will never forget.

The cleaning staff came in.

Anxious for a brief distraction from our marathon of debugging, we stopped to watch them set up and start cleaning the office for a bit.

Then, friends, I Am Not Making This Up(tm)... I watched one of the cleaning staff walk right over to that beautiful RS/6000 dev server, dwarfed in shadow beside that huge robotic disc enclosure... and yank the server power cable right out of the dedicated power drop. And plug in their vacuum cleaner. And vacuum the floor.

We each looked at one-another, slowly, in bewilderment... and then went home, after a brief discussion on the way out the door.

You see, our team-leader wasn't with us that night; so before we left, we all agreed to come in late the next day. Very late indeed.

1. I join a company.

2. I get deeply involved in "how to run the company", and get nice compliments from both coworkers & management about my skills in conveying startup/scaleup advice & necessities to upper management.

3. With my ego inflated through all the sweet talk, I think "ah, what the hell, let's do this again", and I accept a Lead/CTO promotion. I have to join board meetings, write reports on quarterly plans and progress.

4. I get unhappy/stressed/burned-out because I really just want to be a developer, not a manager/executive.

5. Upper management understands, I give up my lead position, lock myself back into my coding cave.

6. I get annoyed because the requirements I receive become more and more disconnected from reality, half of the teams seem to have decided to stop using agile/scrum, the testing pipeline breaks all the time, I get an updated labor contract from HR by mail which smells like charred flesh, etc

7. The annoyances become too much to do ANY work. I yell at the other devs outside of the entrance of my cave. There is no answer, only a few painful moans and sighs.

8. I emerge from my cave. The city has turned into a desolate wasteland. The office is a burning ruin, the air sharp and heavy with black soot. Disemboweled corpses of developers litter the poisoned soil.

Product Managers dressed in stained ripped suits scream at each other while they try to reinforce concrete barricades with scotch tape and post-its. *THUMP* Something enormous is trying to break through. "Thank God, bittersweet, you're still alive! The stakeholders! They have mutated! We couldn't meet the promised deadlines! We've lost the whole mobile app department, and that kid there is the last of the backenders and he's only an intern! You're here to save us, right? RIGHT?".

In the corner, between the overflowing coffee machine and a withered cactus, a young boy has collapsed onto the floor. His face is covered in moldy coffee grounds, clasping on to his closed macbook for dear life, wide-open eyes staring into the void, mumbling: "didn't backup the database, and It's all gone" over and over.

A severely dented black Tesla with a dragging loose bumper breaks through the dried up vertical herb garden and the smoothiebar, and comes to a halt against the beanbags in a big cloud of styrofoam balls.

The CEO limps out, leaking blood all over the upholstery. He yells to the COO: "The datacenter is completely flooded with sewage! I saved the backup tapes though", holding a large nest of tangled black magnetic tape mixed with clumps of mud above his head.

9. I collect my outstanding salary and sell any rewarded options/shares for a low dumping price, take a 5 month holiday, and ask a recruiter about opportunities in a different city.

This is dedicated to all Webdevs, especially those WordPress fanboys.

I was reflecting on some things since I do more frequent freelance jobs at the time. And I have to admit: people are fucking crazy.

I had some serious talk with customers and some serious talk for people I work as subsidiary.

The average customer thinks a nice webpage costs I'm 9-50 bucks. They got some shitty Webhosting for 1-5$/month including domain and think they are set.

They have unclear visions about what they actually want, it all boils down to "I like the design". I made a page for someone who just posted images, no text nothing and I told him a trillion times NEEDS some text, even a fucking picture description would be sufficient, else he'll never score anything at google.

Ofc it got denied, now he's bitching how nobody finds the site when they google his name. The other thing is that Wordpress became the solution for everything.

I'm a fucking certified magento developer and I hate magento with a passion. Magento is an overabstracted clusterfuck and believe me, I did the certification I had to learn more than average about the core. But damn, don't slap woocommerce on everything.

Narrowninded fucktards, the cheap out of the box solution isn't always the best.

Don't cry if you got hacked because you were too dumb to upgrade your wordpress. Don't tell me to do some "enhancements" on a server you probably share with 100 other uses. I can't fix your Webserver with your shitty ftp account.

I also hate WordPress with a burning passion. Cum guzzling cavetroll it is. It has it usages, but don't rely on a core So small every kind of extra functionality has to somehow tinkered on it and then expect it to work flawlessly and for 10$ price.

Of course you can buy a theme that, if it would have been special made for you cost 800$ or more, but it wasn't. It just looks like it from the outside. If you want customization you are at the mercy of the option it provides. I can't even tell how many times i spent whole evenings explaining how their shiny template works. Just to do some crazy shit with JavaScript like rearranging domelements because it didn't work as expected.

I still stay to my word. Nothing great has been nor will be created with a Wordpress core. Don't tell me how some great stuff has been achieved. Or wait, please do so. But before you do think about if that wouldn't been faster, cheaper, more reliable , etc... if done with a framework like symphony or laravel... or even zend or cake.

And that brings me back to the point:
Is cheap and "out of the box" really what you need and desire? As customer and as developer?

Dells XPS are made of magic. [long story, major fuckup, 10k+ damages]

It all started in December. One morning I was late to work, drove there as fast as possible. (I live like 3 minutes away so me being late really meant *late*) Parked my car in a secluded car park, grabbed my backpack and ran to work. The car park is like 100 meters away from work so I took my feet into my hands and ran. Next thing I know my heels loose all grip while I go down a small slope and I drop on my back full force. On a sharp edged stone. With only my 1700$ XPS in it. Fuck.

I paniced, but got up and ran to work. I checked on the notebook, praying it would boot. It booted! Holy shit. I flipped the notebook and saw two small dents in the aluminum shell. I was thorougly impressed. I later discovered that it left a small shadow on the display, but given what a hit that was (I am not exactly a lightweight), impressive would be a massive understatement.

Fast forward to February, I am weighing my options to get the screen replaced maybe, as damage on my hardware (even if neglectable) triggers some sort of OCD and makes me feel bad 24/7. Also my laptop tends to shut off from time to time, looked into the Event Viewer and saw kernel panic. I figured that the battery probably still took a hit and that it drops voltage from time to time and the kernel assumes a critical situation, thus shutting off.

It stayed quite snowy in Austria up until March, so occasional snowing wasn't rare. Got out of work one day, saw it snowed a bit. Whatever. I had my moms car at the time, so I tried if it would slide a bit if I donut on the now (5pm) empty parking space. Nothing. Drove done a small hill, ABS triangle lit up red (board computer can't outbalance the snow). I drove out to the main street where everything was salted and drove along towards my house. Took a turn into my street, accelerated for a bit and then went off the gas so the car would smoothly drive along with the speed slowly degrading. So I went off the gas and noticed I was a bit to the right, no wonder, centrifugal forces.

*steers left*
"Huh seems like I need a bit more"
*car still doesnt move much*
"What the- go to the left!"
*steers left hard*
"Fuck that wall is coming closer"
*Breaks*
*car doesnt break*
"FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK!!!"

Everything got quiet in seconds, me waking up to an open airbag, ripped pants, a hurting wrist, the radio somewhere on the ground and fumes that smellt like burning wires. I grabbed my backpack that was now somewhere on the floor instead of on the seat and ran outside, tears in my eyes and the phone on my ear calling my mom. I walked inside as she walked outside, hearing a weeping scream that I haven't heard from her since I am alive. While walking inside I noticed my backpack was wet on the bottom, my 2 litre water jug shattered when my backpack hit the dashboard. I tried to stay calm and act rational, knowing that every second counts when It comes to water damage. I hastely searched for some rice and a bag to put my laptop into, stuffed the bag with both and went outside. The car was totaled, my mom pissed and crying. And I was in shock, sad, angry and hurting.

I kept the laptop on my heater for a few days, bagged in rice. I dared to try a boot after a while and you wont believe me, it fucking booted. Even the keyboard backlight worked, just the screen was obviously broken in the back (no color distortion or bad pixel rows though!!) and the aluminum shell had a dent on the front. I talked with Dell Support a few days later, asking if it would be ok to open the XPS up so I could drain all of the water. She said yes thats fine, as long as I dont touch anything or screw around with it.

She said I can send it in and get it checked, but the pickup and analysis will cost 150$ and I can go from there.

I sent it in and estimated that, because battery, screen and other things probably needed changing, it will be around 900$.

Got a call a few weeks later:

"Hello beggarboy, the repair team reported back to us and said that they will have to replace everything, which will be 1700$."

"Fuck... Buying a new one is cheaper.."

"Yeah I know I am sorry about that, I can offer you a voucher so you can buy a new one for 250$ off if you would prefer that"

"Sorry but I will need some time to consider"

"I understand."

The agent clearly noticed I was bummed about it.

After going back and forth what to do I got another call a few days later.

"Hello beggarboy, we talked a few days ago. I have good news"

"Hello, yes, speak up?"

"I was able to get a special offer for you after putting in a few words..."

The next thing she said seemed unreal to me.

She was able to cut 600$ (!!!), making the new offer 1100$, instead of 1700$ or a new one for 1500$. I figured the reason she probably did that was because I am always very polite with support members. Always.

My XPS is back and healty again.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Dells XPS are made of magic.

How did I start:

It was 1994. I had been kicked out of school on academic behavior. I was working at as a telemarketer to pay the bills. I got drunk on St. Patrick's day and over slept my shift. My boss was going to fire me but said he wanted to give me a second chance. He asked if I knew anything about computers. I said no. He said if I was willing to learn, our IT guy was burning out and needed help. I said ok. Next thing I know I'm learning how to write SQL and importing data to print call cards. I read the manual for Foxpro and started building small desktop apps as labor saving devices. 6months later in knew more than our IT guy. Later a friend showed me "the Internet". I went back to our IT guy in amazement. He said it was just a fad. He called it the CB Radio of the 90s. Our network we ran was called Lantastic.

I immediately quit went back to school and changed my major. I have been a full stack Java Web developer will the heavy emphasis on UI since 1999.

Friends Pandemic December proposal: "We should all get on Zoom every weekend, play Christmas trivia games and do shots"

Family ideal Pandemic December: "Lets send each other Secret Santa presents throughout the whole month, and get on Zoom and unpack them"

Me: Chilled out on a reclining seat next to a freshly slaughtered green fir tree, burning hearth fire, warm wool sweater, faux fur slippers, big mug of liquored up hot chocolate, keyboard on my lap, writing a Rust library on big screen TV.

Sorry friends & family, y'all are doing holidays wrong.

Happy holidays.
-- signed, Grandpa Bittersweet.

Never have I been so furious whilst at work as yesterday, I am still super pissed about going back today but knowing it's only for another few weeks makes it baerable.

I have been the lead developer on a project for the last 3~ months and our CTO is the product owner. So every now and then he decides to just work on a feature he is interested in- fair enough I guess. But everything I have to go and clean up his horrendous code. Everything he writes is an absolute joke, it's like he is constantly in Hackathon mode "let's just copy and paste some code here, hardcoded shit there and forgot about separation of code- it all goes in 1 file".

So yesterday he added a application to the project and instead of reusing a shared data access layer he added an entirely new ORM, which is near identical to the existing ORM in use, for this one application.

Being anal about these things, the first thing I did was delete his shit and simply reference the shared library then refactor a little code to make it compatible.

WELL!! I certainly hit a nerve, he went crazy spamming messages on Slack demanding I revert as it broke ONE SINGLE QUERY that he hadn't checked in (he does 1 huge commit for 10 of everyone else's). I stuck to my principals and explained both ORM's are similar and that we only needed one, the second would cause a fragmented codebase for no benefit whatsoever.

The lead Dev was then forced to come and convince me to revert, again I refused and called out the shit quality of their code. The battle raged on via the public slack group and I could hear colleagues enjoying the heated debate, new users even started joining the group just to get in on mine and the cto's difference of opinion.

I even offered to fix his code for him if he were to commit it, obviously that was not taken well ;).

Once I finally got a luck at the cluster fuck of shit he had written it took me around 5 minutes to fix and I ever improved performance. Regardless he was having none of it. Still the demands to revert continued.

I left the office steaming after long discussions with the lead Dev caught in the middle.

Fortunately my day was salvages with a positive technical discussion that evening at a company with whome I had a job offer from.

I really hate burning bridges and have never left a company under bad terms but this dictator is making me look forward to breaking the news today I will be gone in 4 weeks.

The list would be quite long.

I think Google is still making good tools, but just like Apple the integrations get all so tight and constricting... And with their data, if it goes wrong, it will go wrong hard.

I feel like YouTube is gliding into a state where cheap clickbait floats to the top and finding quality gets more difficult as well, their algorithm is more and more tuned to choose recent popular stuff over good older gems.

Microsoft is all pretend lovey dovey cuddling open source, but I'm still suspicious it's all a hug of death. I was never a big fan, but they're seriously dropping balls when it comes to windows-as-a-service, taking away so much personal control from end users even though they can't be trusted to babysit either.

Amazon is creeping it's way through the internet, charging $10/m to join the vip club infesting houses with spytubes to sell more plastic crap. Bezos' only right to keep wasting oxygen is BlueOrigin, but he'll probably fuck that up as well turning spaceflight into a decadent prime consumer orgy instead of something inspiring.

Facebook... Well, that's self explanatory. Fuck it, everything it pretends to be, and everyone who still has an account with a rusty spike.

Uber and AirBnB, with their fake ass mission of a green shared economy, but they trample over employees, customers and neighbors to build their ivory towers of progressive illusions.

Then there's a million declining brands.

I liked Skype for example when it was first released, Just like how I started out liking (and then hating) Discord, Slack, etc... They're all tools which seem fast and easy, but then they get us further away from solid protocols, get us entrenched into limiting, bloated and sometimes even dangerous tools. As my dad used to say: "Companies are like women, if you go for cheap, fast and easy you'll end up with a burning dick and half your savings gone"

You know what, fuck all tech companies.

OK, devrant is still pretty nice... For now.

Thank fuck I was so early at work today.

As I did walk past the server room I heard something really loud behind the door. I was still in zombie mode (It was way too early, usually I´m here 2 hours later...), so just stood there looking at the door for a while.
Needed about 3 to 4 slow thoughts to decide what the fuck is happening.

My last thought was just: Man why is it so loud here. That´s the server room. Oh fuck!

The second I opened the door this rancid burning hot air straight out of satans anus almost melted my face off.
The servers were trying to maintain their cooling by almost puking out their guts with the those poor little fans they have.

Turns out one of the air conditioners failed and the backup didn´t start. So I started it manually.

Where the fuck is the admin? That´s not my fucking job!
What the fuck am I doing here so early?

!rant

At my last job, my boss would constantly tear my work apart, belittle me and patronise me. He didn't really understand web development and just wanted to hire someone to do it for him. I ended up burning out and he persuaded me to quit because of it cause he didn't want to go through the whole disciplinary process (because he had no real reason).

A year later, and I've had my first review with my current boss, who's also a developer. He said he's learned a lot from me, I've helped the business and the junior devs grow; and that he struck gold in hiring me. I've got no feelings of burnout and I actually enjoy going to work now.

I'll be the first person to say that I'm not the best developer on my team and my new boss was probably exaggerating with me a little bit, but it goes to show that the people you work with are some of the most important people in your life.

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

So, I set up my computer after moving and settling in.

Turns out all the jostling killed the pump on my water cooler 🙁 It now sounds like an unmaintained soviet train at full speed, and starts burning up. Poor thing.

Guess it’s time to build a new one. Though parts aren’t exactly available right now...

Bleh.

Around 45 days ago after years of burnout and abuse I finally quit my job when I finally realised that all the promises of greener pastures and reinforcements were nothing but tales of sugar candy mountain.

I had no idea where or what I wanted to work on or even have any leads for work but I knew if I kept recursively burning out soon there wouldn't be anything left of me to give.

Flashforward 45 days and I am the proud owner of Sane software solutions which I am currently the only full time employee of.
My old company has become my customer since no one else knows the legacy system, 11 days after quitting their invoice exceeded my previous salary with a quarter of the work and I just landed an awesome contract with some engineers I feel privileged to listen to working on some neat IOT stuff, I've quadrupled my income and now work an 8 hour day.

Don't be despondent, there are better things in life to bleed for than another mother fuckers ambitions ✌

Atother story about PC hardware and being... Not so careful.

A friend complained about his PSU fan being too loud. I said "well, maybe bearings are dying already".
The next day he messaged me and asked to suggest a new PSU. Ok, I threw him some links.
Leter, he told me what happened:
He decided to clean the PSU, because he thought the noise could be because of dust. So he turned off his PC and removed PSU cover with a screwdriver. While doing this, he accidentally hit the circuit board itself. Then "Puff", black smoke and smell of sth burning. Turned out he didn't switched the PSU off. Luckily, the screwdriver handle was rubberized. I'm glad he is alive ._.

Due to inspiration of giving up with windows being slow (performance wise) always connecting to MS severs (I have slow internet) so it’s noticeable when I can download quicker on a raspberry pi then on a laptop - both over wifi 🤷‍♂️

And burning a fucking boot DVD for Ubuntu takes 3 fucking DVDs at 2.4x speed - before getting a successful boot disk 😞

I think it’s time to swap out this hdd and go to the dark side!

Fuck startups.

Back when I was an wee lad I interviewed for an startup, not knowing that startups are not real companies. The scumbag interviewer, who was also the owner of the outfit, asked me what I was looking in a company. I said "fair wages, a non-antagonic environment and projects with real roadmaps".
He asked me to elaborate. I said, "You know, if today your product is a sales platform, I do not want to come into work next week and discover it is now an air travel tickets marketplace, or come back the very next day and discover it is now an automated pizza factory, or in the next day and it is now a crypto exchange..."

The scumbag looked PISSED. "Sorry, but we are looking for someone who likes the challenges of a dynamic environment (read: we do not have a business model and we hate the very idea of trying to make money out of our company), and you do not fit the profile"

Startups are not real companies, i.e. they do not systematically charge money in exchange for goods or services in amounts that exceed the cost of providing said goods or services. Most startups are just tax fronts for money laundering schemes. The rest are just playthings for rich assholes who can't get a real output-producing job. Those two categories are not mutually exclusive.

Take Facebook, for example. The poster child of startups. The Zucker that owns it just announced they are setting impossible performance targets on purpose, not even attempting to hide the fact that it is just a way to lay off large quantities of employees without using the words "massive lay offs". Companies, real thin-margin, lots-of-regulation profit-driven companies do not do that. They are not some sort of "capitalist woke", real CEOs just know that if their companies largely miss performance targets on their tenure, purposely or not, next it will be their neck on the chopping block. Because they can be fired if the KPI charts say they suck. But the Zucker cannot be fired, not even after commanding their beanbag and tap beer offices to be heated exclusively by burning hundred dollar bills.
So the Zucker is not interested in performance. Not even in lay offs as expense cutting measures - investors are an infinite source of free money for startups. The Zucker just wants to project power, especially now that engineers are not so confident in the stability of they high-paying jobs.

So are irrelevant 500-souls-or-less self-aggrandizing startups. Their owners are there because it is in vogue to have a startup or ten. And will have that startup pivot to whatever sounds fancy that season. After all, only poor people care about things like EBITDA and profit margins repeatability - A.K.A. "getting more money".

Fuck startups.

Please refer to my various previous rants.

I cannot share my story yet since burning hasn't stopped yet. Guess I will be able to share once the burn is really out.

Spent 45 minutes burning a win10 dvd as all usb drives decided to die. Only to find out the intended laptop has no dvd drive.....

OK, so we had a session in which a so called Company (Some ecorise.in ) came to give Internship-Training-Program. Ok, he said it'll take 5-8 minutes, and then it took fucking 75 minutes for the session to end. Horrible blunders he made.
1) Did not tell about the company and important stuff for the first 50-60 minutes. Instead, was just focusing on why you should do an Internship, what is it's benefit, what does a company want from you. And why this Internship-Training Program is important... I mean seriously? - A training for Internship. 🤦🏻‍♂️
2) Said all the Web Developers can be Mobile App Developers with the help of just HTML and CSS.... Wow, so XAML/XML is shit now, and we will call APIs with the help of CSS rules. 🤦🏻‍♂️

OK, still I tolerated all that, then was the part when he said how much will be the stipend. It was fucking nothing, they said. That for first three months they will not give a single penny as it is training, and then IF the performance is good, then they will give stipend, and then Placement assurance. OK, that's good that they are assuring placement, but wait. Package of 2LPA INR... WTF Man, it's like $3107.28 for a whole Year.

OK, that too tolerated, then was the part when they said that they'll take the written test, I was like OK, let's see. We moved to a classroom, it went over-the-full capacity, so we moved back to the seminar hall. (Arrrrgggghhhhhhhhh), still tolerable. But then that guy realised that there were no question papers to take the test, then sent someone to get the print outs. Wasted 15+ minutes, I was burning inside.

In the whole seminar hall, I stood up and said, that when you knew there will be a test, why didn't you pre-prepared the sheets beforehand, he was like, that we didn't knew the count. But his tone was. like he got offended and Get-Lost-ed me out of the seminar.

Then even I said:
🙏🏻 - Nahi chaahiye aapki Company
(🙏🏻 - I don't want your Company).
And moved out.

But my point, I am a third Year College Student, and this Company came for our benefit, but I did so (and I am not sorry), so that's pretty obvious that the Company guy will talk (bitch) to the teachers about me, and tomorrow will be a bad day for me... But isn't it wrong on the side of the company also?
I mean, there was an attendance sheet passed in the beginning of the session, had he taken count from that and got the sheets printed, (He had almost an hour for that).
Secondly, when they knew that the count of students is more than expected, then why didn't they check for the classroom that whether the class can accommodate so many students or not. If not then something would have been planned accordingly... But no, the Guy (I guess, that small Company's Owner) got offended that a Student back-chat-ted a CEO of a so-called company, and so he just had to "Get-Lost" me. Checked the website of his Company, they have hardly done 3 Static Websites... I mean, WoW, I have done at-least 10X the work of the Company, alone!

I don't know, I feel happy that I kept my point, but I feel sad because I generally don't do this kind of thing (may be my tone was also wrong, I had other issues also, may be because of them and they all combined and this happened). I feel scared too, that I don't know what the Company guy will say to my teachers and what action will they take against me...

Because I know, none of my friends will stand with me when I go down, it's all fake here, everyone can just give sympathy, but nothing else.

I don't know why I am posting this here, and if you have read this till here, thank you. I just wanted to share my heart out... :-)

I really want to.
I want to get away from Windows.
But I have yet to find a distro that works.

Today I tried again again.
I found out Linux Mint released version 19.
Snapshots integrated. Cool. I will try it.

Installed with Cinnamon. Looks nice. Everything is running fast.

Aaaaand I hate the mouse movement...
Why is there no 1:1 movement? Is acceleration on? Does not feel like it.
Ok. We can fix this right?
Opened the Mouse settings.
There is no way of deactivating mouse acceleration. Only customizing the amount of acceleration. What?

Ok customize it. No change at all.
Try extreme settings. Nothing.

Google for a solution. Says I should install dconf-editor and change settings there.

Install it, change the settings. Hey it works!
It is far from perfect but I can live with that.

Now the scroll wheel is so slow...
But there is no setting at all? Not even in dconf-editor.

Google the solution. Need to install imwheel and configure it. Really?
Okay will do. I wanna use this.

Finally. Mouse works as it should.

After all that, why is my lap so hot? Fucking hell the cpu seems to be burning.

Fuck that!
I am out! Back to Windows!

Scariest thing I've ever experienced...
Was compiling a mod and left my laptop alone to do it's thing while I went to the bathroom. A couple of minutes later I started to smell something burning.
Rushed back to my laptop and everything was ok.

Turns out with all the coding I forgot about my toasts...

I kinda hate my life right now.

I hate my job: I've been working as a flutter developer for a month and a half (even though I was hired to do backend) and I discovered I don't like frontend, it doesn't give me enough challenges. Every once in a while I have to do something complicated and have fun working, but most of the time it's just boring layout shit.

I can't do any side-projects, everything bores me. I want to get into really low level programming so bad but the steep learning curve makes me lazy.

I don't feel like I'm doing enough. I'm learning quite a bit about flutter, but I don't want to work with that, I hate it, so I feel like I'm just wasting my time. I'd like to work on something complicated and meaningful, like developing flight systems for rockets or whatever, but there's sooo much road ahead of me I just feel like I'm never gonna make it, plus I have to be very smart to do that and I'm starting to think I'm not as smart as I thought I was. I've been programming for almost 10 years now, but I can already see my college friends getting practically on my level in 2-3 years. I can't let that happen and this thought is making me stressed and burning me out. Programming is literally the only thing I'm good at (or at least I think I am), if I don't have that I don't have anything, because I suck at everything else (I'm not exaggerating, I wish I was though).

I can't see friends because of the corona. I've met with friends about 7 times in a year and I havent been with a girl god knows since when. Meanwhile, practically everyone I know is partying, having fun, going to the beach and I'm here, at home, typing this fucking rant and feeling sorry for myself.

I also wanto to get fit but every time I try to do so something happens and I have to wait 2 months in order to start again.

There isn't anyone I can trust enough to share some feelings and thoughts I have and this is eating me up.

I am unhappy and have been like this for a while now. Every once in a while I smile, yes, but most of my day is endless boredom either because of work or the lack of it. I just want to go back to normal, I don't want to think about my future, I want someone to talk to, I want to be able to cry.

I hate this.

Electric cars are not better for the environment. All petrol cars combined are only responsible for 7.9% of CO2 emissions. If your electric car is charged from a grid that is powered by a coal-burning power station, it contributes nothing to dealing with climate change. It only provides you with the false sense of security, and you can look cool telling your friends that “you know, I drive a Tesla, I’m environmentally conscious, your gas car is bad”.

Electric cars are lame. When I’m out of fuel, I can refuel fully in minutes. With electric car, I’ll have to wait at least five hours. Let’s be realistic, superchargers aren’t common, and will never be.

Gasoline is 46.4 MJ/kg, or 34.2 MJ/l. Li-Ion is 0.36–0.875. Let’s be generous and say it’s 0.9. To match 1 kg of petrol, I would need 51 kilos of batteries.

Average gas tank is 18 gallons, or 68 litres. To match that, my battery must have a weight of 2.5 metric tonnes. Bear in mind, empty battery and full battery has the same weight. Also, bear in mind, batteries perform worse in the winter.

As per energy density and practicality, things don’t get much better than petrol. Liquid hydrogen has higher energy density, but to store it, gas tank has to have very, very thick walls, to withstand the pressure. And, hydrogen is a bitch. It’s extremely dangerous. You can’t smell it until it’s too late. Hydrogen-air mixture will explode if you look at it the wrong way.

All that “electric cars good for climate” hype is merely Elon maintaining his stock bubble.

I was working in a manufacturing facility where I had hundreds of industrial computers and printers that were between 0 and 20 years old. They were running on their own clean network so that someone has to be in the manufacturing network to access them. The boss announced that the executives will be pushing a “zero trust” security model because they need IoT devices. I told him “A computer running Windows 98 can’t be on the same VLAN as office computers. We can’t harden most of the systems or patch the vulnerabilities. We also can’t reprogram all of the devices to communicate using TLS or encrypt communications.“ Executives got offended that I would even question the decision and be so vocal about it. They hired a team to remove the network hardware and told me that I was overreacting. All of our system support was contracted to India so I was going to be the on-site support person.

They moved all the manufacturing devices to the office network. Then the attacks started. Printers dumped thousands of pages of memes. Ransomware shut down manufacturing computers. Our central database had someone change a serial number for a product to “hello world” and that device got shipped to a customer. SharePoint was attacked in many many ways. VNC servers were running on most computers and occasionally I would see someone remotely poking around and I knew it wasn’t from our team because we were all there.

I bought a case of cheap consumer routers and used them in manufacturing cells to block port traffic. I used Kali on an old computer to scan and patch network vulnerabilities daily.

The worst part was executives didn’t “believe” that there were security incidents. You don’t believe in what you don’t understand right?

After 8 months of responding to security incident after security incident I quit to avoid burning out. This is a company that manufactures and sells devices to big companies like apple and google to install in their network. This isn’t an insignificant company. Security negligence on a level I get angry thinking about.

Dear DevRant,

The yellow background looks great on our avatar, but could you please not use it as background for a rant? You're burning the eyes out of my skull.

Many years ago I had a job as web developer at a small promotions company. The owners loved micromanaging their 7 employees, down to the minute. Work started at 9am, if you were even 1 minute late, you were deducted 1 point. (Even if the weather was bad) Once you were at 10 points, you were disciplined by being given an unpaid vacation day. (Thanks for the day off!). At 12 points, you were fired.

It only took me about 8 months before getting my day off. Somehow I was able to time it perfectly to a job interview at a large company.

Luckily I got the job, and purposely was late the next two days so when they told me I was fired I could tell them I already got a new job (thanks to their 10 pt rule) and I'm out anyway.

At the new job, I'd often drive home and nap on my lunch hour. No one would notice if I came back an hour and a half later.

The owners of the 1st company divorced a few years ago. The husband and I have actually kept in contact over the years. He's a cool guy when you don't work for him. He invited me to a Green Day concert over the summer. Probably makes the above story a little less cool, but at the moment, I was burning bridges!

Genuine question:

What's the most poverty you have experienced? No troll answers please.

I'll tell you mine, I lived in Bangalore in 2018 when I was starting out living in a PG with 2 strangers, and I had to travel like 9 kms to my office, 7 kms by bus and 2 kms walk.

I was walking, listening to music as usual, when I felt uncomfortable with the sunshine burning my skin. So I thought, let me hire an autorickshaw and get to my job. But doing so, will result in no lunch today and if I wasted money on auto and lunch both, I won't have any money for the bus fare.

That feeling was my rock bottom thinking "Holy crap, I'm poor."

That incident is what I compare myself to, sometimes, and I think "Well at least it's not THAT bad."

Good question, what wasn't bad about 2020?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yayy! It's already -15kg since November! W/o any workouts!!

Now I'm at the point where I'm no longer losing weight and don't get whether the fat is still burning and muscles are evening the weight or my clothes simply keep stretching out. Or I'm just seeing what I want to see

anyhow I know I wouldn't have this problem if I were one of the construction workers currently working outside my office :/ office work sounds nice but it's still got its cons. Like being tied down to a chair rather than moving all the time :/

So my grandma just called me saying that there is something wrong with the computer and the UPS is making a weird noise. When I went to find out what's going on, the UPS was beeping constantly and the computer was in the middle of a startup repair. Obviously there is no way to cancel the repair, and unplugging the UPS would probably do more harm to the computer. So we had to listen to that constant, loud, high-pitch noise while waiting for the startup repair to complete. And mind you, I'm talking about a very old and slow computer with windows 7 on it. After the repair was done, I quickly turned off the computer so I can reset the UPS and save my eardrums from burning in hell.

The worst thing is that I've downloaded the documentation of the UPS, and there was no mention of what a constant beeping means, it only described the meanings of normal beeping patterns (battery low, etc...).

My eyes are still ringing and my ears are still blurry from 20 minutes of that noise.

Yay 1week vacation starts now... 1 week of "not my problem, go figure out and fix it urself"

Though I can't guarantee I won't see a bigger burning pile of crap when I get back...

when I'm at work I program. when I get home I program. how do you guys avoid burning out?

So it's summer holiday now, and I'm working about 3 days a week doing some c++ qt stuff. Why does everyone I talk to tell me I should "take it easy" or "enjoy my freedom" instead of "working so hard". I'd be bored out of my mind if I didn't (no I do not have a social life, nor do I enjoy basking on a beach burning cancer into my skin in some foreign country). In short, I dislike the dutch mentality of throwing away your money each summer holiday to be bored in another country for a week and telling everyone who doesn't off.

I've had a client for 3 months now and they still haven't paid ($100 just for the site) and are surprised at the monthly cost (they wanted site hosting and maintenance which comes out to $75/month) and I want to fire them without burning bridges since the main person is a friend.

A (work-)project i spent a year on will finally be released soon. That's the perfect opportunity to vent out all the rage i built up during dealing with what is the javascript version of a zodiac letter.

Everything went wrong with the beginning. 3 people were assigned to rewrite an old flash-application. Me, A and B. B suggested a javascript framework, even though me and A never worked with more than jquery. In the end we chose react/redux with rest on the server, a classic.

After some time i got the hang of time, around that time B left and a new guy, C, was hired soon after that. He didn't know about react/redux either. The perfect start off to a burning pile of smelly code.

Today this burning pile turned into a wasteland of code quality, a house of cards with a storm approaching, a rocket with leaks ready to launch, you get the idea.

We got 2 dozen files with 200-500 loc, each in the same directory and each with the same 2 word prefix which makes finding the right one a nightmare on its on. We have an i18n-library used only for ~10 textfields, copy-pasted code you never know if it's used or not, fetch-calls with no error-handling, and many other code smells that turn this fire into a garbage fire. An eternal fire. 3 months ago i reduced the linter-warnings on this project to 1, now i can't keep count anymore.

We use the reactabular-module which gives us headaches because IT DOESN'T DO WHAT IT'S SUPPOSED TO DO AND WE CANT USE IT WELL EITHER. All because the client cant be bothered to have the table header scroll along with the body. We have methods which do two things because passing another callback somehow crashed in the browser. And the only thing about indentation is that it exists. Copy pasting from websites, other files and indentation wars give the files the unique look that make you wonder if some of the devs hides his whitespace code in the files.

All of this is the result of missing time, results over quality and the worst approach of all, used by A: if A wants an ui-component similar to an existing one, he copies the original and edits he copy until it does what he wants. A knows about classes, modules, components, etc. Still, he can't bring himself to spend his time on creating superclasses... his approach gives results much faster

Things got worse when A tried redux, luckily A prefers the components local state. WHICH IS ANOTHER PROBLEM. He doesn't understand redux and loads all of the data directly from the server and puts it into the local state. The point of redux is that you don't have to do this. But there are only 1 or 2 examples of how this practice hurt us yet, so i'm gonna have to let this slide. IF HE AT LEAST WOULD UPDATE THE DATA PROPERLY. Changes are just sent to the server and then all of the data is re-fetched. I programmed the rest-endpoints to return the updated objects for a very reason. But no, fuck me.

I've heard A decided (A is the teamleader) to use less redux on the next project and use a dedicated rest-endpoints for every little comoutation you COULD DO WITH REDUX INSTEAD. My will is broken and just don't want to work with this anymore.

There are still various subpages that cant f5 because the components cant handle an empty redux state in the beginning, but to be honest i don't care anymore. Lets hope the client will never find out, along with the "on error nothing happens"-bugs. The product should've been shipped last week, but thanks to mandatory bugfixes the release was postponed to next week. Then the next project starts...

Please give me some tips to keep up code quality over time, i cant take this once more.
I'm also aware that i could've done more, talking A and C about code style, prettifying the code, etc. Etc. But i was busy putting out my out fires, i couldn't kill much of the other fires which in the end became a burning building (a perfect metaphor for this software)

Have somewhat of a headache but I still want to work on some stuff so I started using f.lux and it's so much easier on my eyes than having the full on blue light burning my eyes out. Any one else using f.lux here?

The scary thing about burnout is that you usually don't realize you are burning out before it's too late.

Personally, at least, I've worked on projects that just felt a little intense at the time, but after taking a step back due to holidays or hitting some milestone I realize I never want to have anything to do with it ever again. One project makes my stomach drop even today every time I see the code; Not because the code is bad, but how it takes me back to how miserable I was without admitting it to myself.

The biggest red flag I look for is when I'm tempted to work on stuff in my free time. When this starts seeming like a solution there's a serious problem with the project that needs to be addressed.

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

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

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

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

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

Yay. Thanks for reading :)

Did your motivation ever suffered for company enforced tooling/stack?

I'm striving to be as adaptable as possible to not bitch if I have to use Angular insted of React or Java instead of Go but the stack which I was forced to use for the last two years is killing the joy I find in programming.

I'm talking about Spring WebFlux a stack which in theory is very promising (IO performances of NodeJS but in Java) but in practice is a pain to use: it makes polymorphism very hard forcing to rewrite tons of code, it significantly reduces your library choice, even after studying a damn book about it debugging remains a huge headache, unit testing often requires hacks and workarounds to be done...

Programming with it always feels like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole and I'm catching myself in procrastinating more and more, initially I feared I was burning out or losing my passion for the field but I noticed which the rare times I get to use a more canonical stack like .NET my motivation instantly returns but sadly I can use it only for few hours and then I return to WebFlux and my passion flees again.

I'm considering to look for another job but sadly lately I neglected my GitHub so I might have hard times in finding it.

How surprising is it when a person designs code in a very clear and impressive structure and just when you think about asking them for guidance, they reveal themselves to be complete turds?

I've been working with this person's "infra" code, at work. I've rewritten some classes to use their infra. I had a vague idea of how the classes work. I had no idea of how their code works. Expectedly, there were some issues but now only minor ones remain.
I asked them for a description of what I'm supposed to do for the few bugs I'm facing. They replied in such a condescending tone, it made me want to punch them through the screen.
Almost a month later, we're still going back and forth with emails. I've been swallowing it and responding calmly. I never got direct answers. Always deflections to irrelevant things or veiled insults. I took it because they did correct one silly error of mine that actually my code reviewer should've caught. (What's worse is that it got introduced by me just before my review and commit.)
But does that give them the right to insult me in front of the whole team including my project manager? I got a reply today from them with everyone of note in cc implying very clearly that I have not done any work. They highlighted a line from my code with some todo tag (that was not meant for them) to make their invalid point. A line that's unrelated to the bug I asked them about. This is after I proved them wrong when they insisted that I had done something wrong about a feature related to the bug.

If you don't understand what I asked for fucking ask me to ask again. But do not fucking try establish yourself on higher ground by pointing out irrelevant things in my code.
I was shocked and enraged that they'd do such a thing. I double checked everything like a mad man. Despite knowing that the fix has to come from them, I was instantly transported to the noob stage, grasping at straws. I wanted to send a really scathing reply right away but my manager asked me to wait.

My mind is now a see saw shifting between a panicked noob questioning every fucking thing I ever did in my nada life and a hungry enraged monster looking to maul that fucking shithead for burning me like that.

bosses doesn't care about the scope of the projject they just want it to be done fast as possible. It's burning me out. Fuck this..

I’m in a high-stress work situation where the organization is way too reliant on me to maintain day-to-day operations. We’re working on hiring a second person for my role, but it’s likely to take six months to find someone and get them on board.

And I’m afraid that I’m burning out now. I’m tired all the time and grumpy. Worse, in the last couple weeks I seem to be losing the ability to think. I’ll read an email and be unable to make sense of the words, or unable to figure out what to do with it – it’s just a blank white fog in my brain where I should have words and ideas and next steps. My productivity is less than half what it should be, and I’m horribly embarrassed and ashamed of myself.

I’m taking sick days and leaving work early when I can, which helps a bit, but not enough. I’m also doing all the recommended self-care stuff – diet, sleep, exercise. I’m scheduling a doctor’s appointment for next week.

I have a very good boss, which is the only reason I haven’t said screw it all and bought a one-way plane ticket to Tahiti. (I hear it’s a magical place.) Any thoughts on how to approach this with him? Under normal circumstances I’d try to arrange for some vacation time, but I’m afraid a week or two of rest isn’t going to fix the problem, just delay it a while. Any substantial amount of time off is going to really hurt my department. They may need to bring in someone to cover for me, which would be very expensive. I’m afraid it’d destroy my reputation as someone who can be relied on. What options do I have? What should I be doing next?

Hm.

Was very frustrated from work.

Started cooking.

Simple gnocchis with tomato / paprika sauce.

Might have been a little distracted...

I've grabbed a regular sized spoon instead of a tea spoon.

I've handmade ungarian puszta.

I've added a full spoon of it to the sauce.

It's very spicy and hot.

I'll guess my guts are in hell mode for the next days.

But it's delicious.

Remember kids: always eat up what you cooked.

Even if it seems to kill you by burning your insides out.

I remember at a company that I was working as a Drupal developer, I had finished building a website (both designed and developed it) using Drupal 7. I was very satisfied with the result and the way the company was operating, I had to show it to the project manager and he would say if it was OK to show it to the boss and then I would contact the client to say that we are finished.

When I showed it to the PM, he provided some changes from his personal "I know everything" book and after I made them, we both went to the boss' office. Keep in mind that I had built the website following the clients notes and preferences (custom sliders, certain color swatches etc.) and I was on point.

So, after we entered the office, we sat and I was pumped to hear good news. But, not a minute passed since the page loaded and the boss was clearly unhappy with the result, and more specifically with the changes that the PM provided (not even my fault). When he finished talking, I tried to explain that I followed exactly what the client said and executed accordingly, without the changes that the PM had put on the table. Suddenly, the boss' face was angered and turning red(ish). He started shouting at me and saying that I was not experienced enough to know what I am saying (I was 21 years old at the time), and that they had the experience to criticize if the website was ready or not and if the client would like it, pointing out that I wasn't capable of knowing what the client needed.

I was bursting in my chest, I felt a fire burning with anger and righteousness, but I turned my face down and apologized. It SUCKED! It felt SO bad. I took the notes that he said (which changed 90% of the website's design) and after that I called the client.

I felt some kind of vengeance when the client started shouting at the PM, when he saw the website. He yelled and said that, the design that the boss chose, was not remotely close to what the client had requested.

Next day after I finished the website with the design I had provided, the boss was looking at me like a (proud) wet cat, saying 'well done' but not another word, while entering his office.

Well, at least the client was happy at the end! That's all that matters, right?

A lot of devs I meet are pretty cool but a handful, including some on here, seem to think the world revolves around them and they deserve to have the ground dusted off in front of them.

That's fucking narcissistic and you need a reality check if you're like that. It's great you're passionate about your knowledge but you're not out here taking down terries and saving children from burning buildings, like calm down with the self righteousness

Just had to get that out after one too many "how dare anyone looketh unto me unless I request it in advance" posts. Like chill out, you're not that special 🙄

I quit my first dev job of less than 6 months. Nothing lined up but it was not what I wanted and I was burning out quickly. Felt like a zombie, thinking of my work after work, and unable to get anything into my head, isolated and other needs not met for an entry level developer.

I luckily have money saved up for a year and hitting leetcode and everything else. Will I find a job right away? Probably not. However, I took the first position within a month of interviews during the pandemic and regret that I stopped applying even when I saw the red signs.

I’m scared but I didn’t beat my head against the wall at school to be taken advantage of like this (imo they need a senior).

2020 was trash as a fresh grad but maybe this year will be different. I know more than before and I especially know what I don’t want.

Here we go again, no looking back now.

TLDR;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Holy fuck EA (yea I went there)

So here I am playing NFS Heat, and my laptop is hot enough to cook eggs on the keyboard, no joke, yet spec wise I should have 0 issues running this game.

I switch on the turbo cool (basically spin the internal fans at full speed... It's an MSI) and this usually covers any heating issues, nope... not this time.

this fucker of a fan can't keep up , so I've turned down the settings from ULTRA, that's depressing, to Medium... it feels like 2006 showed back up, but here's this laptop still burning a whole in my fingers.

My GPU (GTX1060 6GB) is running at 95'c on Medium graphics, and LOW looks like I fell into a 8bit world with slow ass rendering.

Guess I'm going to need to get some cooling assistance for this thing.

Thank you EA for turning my 2.5k laptop into a stove top, I appreciate it.

I guess the name checks out, "heat"

Learning C# .NET Core for a PWA + server + DB project that a client wanted when he could have done all the backend stuff himself.
I ended up burning out because of that project and the crippling hate for C#.

there is nothing more annoying than plugging the usb cable to the real android device for debugging, but if you move that cable 1mm the whole fucking connection breaks, the beep sounds of connected/disconnected phone rings, the fucking laptop explodes, phone explodes, dick explodes, the house gets on fire, my dog gets on fire, i run out of house while burning in flames alive and the whole house fuckin explodes like a nuclear bomb

Allrighty, so we have a huge migration upcoming. The planning started early this spring. We've split the whole process into separate tasks and estimated each of them. Also marked all the tasks client should take care of itself so save funds and time. All-in-all the whole thing estimated like 4 months if we did it [single dev, tremendous amounts of communication with various parties, buy and prepare the infra, adapt app to the changes, testing, monitoring, etc.] and like a month if client did the tasks we shouldn't be doing. The funding for migration is time-bound and can only be used before December. Cool! We got notified that by the end of April we should be good to go! Plenty of time to do things right!

April comes. Silence. Mid-april we resch out to the client. Since there's plenty of time left migration is getting lower priority to other tasks. Well allright, sort of makes sense. We should migrate mid-July. Cool!

July comes. Client replies that everyone's on vacation now. Gotta wait for August - will do the quicker version of migration to make it on time. Well allright....

August comes. Everyone's vusy with whatever they've postponed during summer. Hopefully we'll start migration in September. Mhm...

September comes. We're invited to a meeting by project funders to explain tasks' breakdown, justify the time needed to make the migration. We're being blamed for surreal estimations and poor organization of tasks as nothing's happened yet... [they were the ones who always were postponing things....]. Moreover, they can only spare 20% of infra resources required for data alone anf they want us to make that enough for all environments, all components, all backups, all databases,... You get the pic.
The leader of the meeting semi silently mumbled to other participants 'Well then I'm afrsid we can't make a full migration in time.. Only partial. That's very unfortunate, very. That's why we should not have incopetent vendors [*glancing at us*]'

somehow we agreed we'll get the resources mid-November and we should be thankful for him bcz he'll have to pull some strings for... us..

I left the meeting with my fists squeezed so hard! But it's okay, we got smth useful: resources and start date. Although it leaves us with less than a month to do smth requiring a month for a sunny-day scenario. Nvm, still doable.

Last week we get an email that resources will be available at the beginning of December [after deadline] and we should start a full migration no sooner than Nov 12. Which leaves us with 50% of our estimated fucking optimistic scenario time and not enough resources to even move a single db.

Fuck I hate politics in dev... Is it wrong for me to want to tie them to a pole, set them on a veeery slow fire and take a piss on them while they're screaming their shitty lungs out? I'd enjoy the view and the scream. I know I would. And while enjoying I might be tempted to take a burning 20cm diameter wooden stick and shove it up their assholes. Repeatedly. Round-robin. Promissing them I'll take it out in 5 seconds and pulling it out after 2 minutes.

Can I?

Reanimated an old e-ink tablet today.

First, I didn't even know it needed to be reanimated. I just copied my books there, but it didn't find them. When I connected it again, they were gone.
Factory reset. Format storage. The memory seems empty, but after rebooting I see that everything is still intact.
Ok, imma hit forums then. They tell me I need to replace the internal memory. But isn't that something you need soldering for? Wrong! The internal memory IS JUST A MICRO SD CARD on the motherboard. The card is some cheap no name one, and people tell the similar story of it burning out after like four years of use.
Damn! The vendor has the AUDACITY to charge for signing their firmware to be flashed to a new micro sd card.

But I won't go down this easily. I hit forums again, and apparently there is a tool to sign the firmware yourself, but you need to find the card's serial number. To do that, you have to flash a bootleg tool, boot from that card, and it will show you the data you need. Then, you have to insert them into some shady .ini file (why is everything touching bootleg firmware runs only on windows?).

So I do that. The problem is, I need an image for my book. I find some shady one online, sign & flash it — touchscreen doesn't work. But I have the official firmware. I put two and two together and figure out that if the reader is able to display the ui, it probably has the firmware update tool working. So, immediately after flashing, I launch the firmware update utility that picks up my firmware from the second sd card (yes, they have an additional external slot).

Bingo. It works.

So, here are the steps:
1. Find a shady sd serial number detection tool
2. Flash it on a memory card with a shady vendor-specific flashing tool
3. Insert the new (now shady) card
4. Boot, write down the serial number
5. Find a shady boot image online
6. Edit a shady .ini file of a shady self-signing tool to sign the shady boot image
7. Flash the altered shady boot image with the shady flashing tool on your memory card
8. Copy a shady firmware update on a new card
9. Insert both cards
10. Pray

I just close everything and play guitar until the burning out passes away.

I was asked to make proof of concept small frontend app with some simplified requirements, they asked me because it should be written in the stack I done most of my career work with. I do it in 3 days instead of 5, using those 2 days to optimise the app and explore different approaches. I noted down my findings, what to avoid and reasons and also what is good to use and reasons and shared with everyone.

We waited for the project to start, I started working on another project in the meantime and there was a big rush to make project go live etc., so I was consumed 100% on that new project.

So they put in charge backend php developer to do frontend js work. I said ok, do you need help in starting out? Nah, my proof of concept repo is enough.

4 days before that small project goes live they asked me to do code review. All things I noted down to avoid are in the codebase, few bad practices but everything is over-engineered (in a very bad way), some parts should be more flexible as current setup is very rigid, having almost all kinds of CSS, I saw SASS, CSS variables, 2 different CSS-in-JS tools with some additional libraries that is used to toggle classes.

I don't know how to approach this as I am not asshole as a person and I don't want to say to my colleague that his codebase is completely trash, but it is.

The worst parts: They called me to help finish the app and budget is almost spent!

I would rewrite the whole app as the state of the current app is unusable and everything is glued with bad Chinese ducktape that barely holds.

Additional points because it won't bundle as everything is f**ked.

I am seriously thinking of duplicating master branch and refactor the whole fricking app but won't do that as I am burning midnight oil on other two projects. Don't worry overtimes are paid.

I hate those shitty situations, this project was supposed to be tiny, sweet and example of decent project in this company but it is instead big fat franken-app that will be example how smart it is to avoid putting backend dev to do frontend work (I also agree for vice versa)!

CAUTION: possibly NSFL

There was a war. We lived in a leftist camp inside an abandoned railway station. The only thing that could break the siege was BLA

[dream fragment lost]

So they lined us up. There were ten of us.
— Do you want the leftist future?
— No…, they made me say.
— Do you love capitalism?
— Yes…, they made me say.
— Ты готова присниться?, they asked my female comrade ("are you ready to come to our soldiers in their dreams to support them?")
— Yes.
— Ты готов расшибиться?, they asked me ("are you ready to work your ass off, dying in the process if necessary?". It also makes a perfect rhyme with the previous Russian sentence)
— Yes.
Then, they tied our hands and hung us onto a rack. They doused us with gasoline.
— Look. Czechoslovakia had Jan Palach. We have ten Jan Palachs now!
They set us on fire. I feel an unimaginable pain. I wake up for ten minutes.
When I fell asleep again, I found out I survived. But, my body underwent modifications: first, I now had a vinyl shell instead of my skin. Underneath it were raw muscles. Second, I no longer had vocal cords. I no longer had voice.
In this world, we were slaves ("Тяговые люди") ruled by BLA. There were no prisons. Instead, there were only two punishments: the "light" one and the "heavy" one. First one is your shell getting ripped off. You die in around 20 minutes of agonizing pain, like mink that is skinned alive in Chinese leather tanneries. But, compared to the second one, that was a slap on the wrist.
The "heavy" punishment was them injecting you with "The Ferment". Immediately, your mind is altered into total obedience. Then, your body begins to turn into corpse juice. To outside observers, you die in 30 days. But for you, it feels like forever, as time speeds up indefinitely, and you're drifting into endless sorrow. When you die, no one notices, as your shell is still there. But instead of you, there's now nothing but corpse juice inside.

I now worked in some location that resembled Duke Nukem 3D's first map. My job was to remove those plastic shells. I had no bottom — it was replaced with a concrete cube that felt pain just like damaged tooth enamel does. An endless queue of shells moved in front of me. I had to remove their shells, to peel them off like vinyl.
Some people were alive underneath. They still had their skin. They thanked me, smile at me and wander away.
Some of them were alive, but had no skin. That means I was the one to execute a "light" punishment on them.
Some of them weren't there. I pop the shell open, and it deflates as corpse juice pours out.

One of my previous dreams was the following:
"— We arrange surgeries when in-person interventions are _not recommended_.
— So…, — I press the pause button on the handrail.
— The perfect maiden. Inside a plastic shell. 80 years old underneath."

Now I understand it. The first speaker was a BLA researcher. "I" was an investor. The "perfect maiden" was me, but way in the future from my today's dream. It all fits together.
Now, here's the discovered part of kiki universe so far:
- rotten meat house
- swine gray gel battleground
- horizontal elevators network
- united paper island
- baseball bat nightclub
- anxiety-inducing multidimensional pizzeria
- NEW! BLA headquarters
- NEW! demilitarized burning ground abandoned train station
- NEW! Duke Nukem 3D people skinning ground

Visual Studio Code + Mac = not lightweight, really not that good performance

I mean the battery is burning. Literally, i plug my mac out and after a hour the battery is dead

Im ok with working for your startup for 2 years for peanuts. Im ok filling in 5 other types of jobs on the way while u still fucking micromanage everything, rendering all designers useless and making them leave after a few months. Im ok telling u its ok when u say u know how hard it is to keep going cause im such a positive team player. Im ok buying my own computer cause u r too cheap to buy a device that can run fucking Safari. Im ok working day and night for years carrying your company on a promise that when u sell i wont be forgotten. Im even ok with new people making way more than me from the new investment for which i worked my ass off for years, almost burning myself out. But if you sell the company for big money and get rich without even telling me, I WILL FUCK YOU UP.

p.s. true story, second employee, got taken advantage of heavily. still working there acting like im not in the know, waiting for next move.

15h/day for at least one month.

Manager to someone: How long do you think it will take you to build this?

Someone: Erm... 6 months.

Manager: Fine, I'm pretty sure you can do it in 3 months.

I was invited/forced to join someone's team because he could not do it in 3 months. Neither did we, but we managed to deliver the project in 4 months.

The dickhead manager got a promotion, money prizes etc for burning us out. I can't stand this kind of managers.

Neither I or someone work for that guy anymore.

If a Dev tells you it would deliver something in X believe him, he's telling you the best he can.

I'm way past the point of being pissed now....

So there's some software (API's, mobile app + website) that I wrote to manage supplier incentive programs in a big hurry last year - which lead to a bunch of stuff being hard-coded in to launch on time. So after last years promotion was done I took down all the services etc was very fucking clear that in order to finish & deploy it to run again I would need at least around 4 months notice.

On the surface its pretty simple but it has quite a large user base and controls the distribution of enough cash & prizes to buy a small country so the setup of the incentives/access/audit trails is not something to be taken lightly.

Then once I'm done with the setup I have to hand it over to be "independently audited" by 3 of the larger corporate behemoths who's cash it distributes (if I get a reply from one in 3-4 weeks it's pretty fast).

I only happened to find out by chance an hour ago that we are apparently launching an even larger program this year - ON FUCKING MONDAY. I literally happened to over hear this on my way for a smoke - they have been planning it since last year November and not one person thought it might be kinda important to let me know because software is "magic" and appears and works based on the fucking lunar cycle.

Flask people
so I was given this old flask project, around 3k lines written in py2, the code is simply old and not refactored. So, it's pile of shit. Migrations completely botched as the original author created reference to live data in models.
Very strict line formatting resulting in backslashed ternary conditions.
Even saw manually formatted json responses... _line by line_.

My job is to clean this mess and eventually do as much as possible to freshen the whole project.
Currently just refucktoring the code as it's the only easy thing to do out of everything that could be done (it's still slow process).

Any tricks and tips? currently considering to try upgrading it to py3 but it feels like throwing gunpowder into already burning house.

First job while in college... Was working for web dev team lamp set up before lamp was lamp (year was 2000).

Had deadline one week after summer vacation. Worked non stop a couple of days to get shit done and didn't make it. Got in a conflict with my manager in front of the team and I blew my steam off. Quit on the spot.

Lessons learned:

1. Don't be a fucking idiot when estimating work.
2. Be cool with other teammates, nobody cares about drama and nobody has to feel sorry for you.
3. Uhm, plan? Had entire fucking vacation to get work done. I was a fucking moron.
4. Burning out is stupid and unproductive.
5. Your manager can be as poor in management as you are. Your job is to try to make them better at it, as they have less visibility in the details.

Next job in grad school. Worked for a security company. Direct manager had the bright idea to make execs sign the change requests. WTF. Code was in Perl/php, a mess. Team rewrote back end DB access , taking over six months, or more, failing twice the deadline. After a final 48 hour burn out, we ship and get laid off the week after.

Lessons learned:

1. Don't work for dicks.
2. Don't be a dick yourself.
3. Don't work for dicks.

Third job was in silicon valley. It was a great company, and I stayed there for five years.

Just found out that the project I've been trying to save because management needs it to motivate a bunch of engineers into finishing work is on the chopping block.
I never wanted to take it on.
I voiced all my concerns throughout the last year about everything they are saying to me now.
But, after being chased for mundane deliverables and workshop deadlines-- and not seeing my coworkers faces in the past six months I want to just state this:
I've been "triangulating" through work for the past two years hoping either RTO will come and kick my ass into gear or I will end up owning something large enough that I care about, and all I have to show for it is a messy workflow, a flood email inbox, and a burning desire to let everything burn to shit.
If it's on the chopping block because I'm a valuable resource, then I am putting myself on the chopping block because there was nothing of value that I did that seems to be resonating.

All my glue work is ignored. I ignored their deadlines till they noticed what I did. It only led me to realize that I cannot possibly continue doing acts of service. Turns out it's all they ever wanted as they pretended I owned this company.

I am naive, and I hate myself for it.

So tired that I can't even think about writing code this weekend .... Despite really wanting to. 1000 things going through my head that I could code right now.

Some bitch posted a story "Fear God and obey God's commandments, because thats the only thing asked from mankind ❤️"

This fucking story fueled me

It enraged me

Blood boil

So fucking much that i had to let this shit out here

First of all, "FEAR God..."

If you fear someone who is supposed to love you, does that look like a healthy relationship to you?

"I love you so much", said the boyfriend to his girlfriend, "but if you dont love me back then I'll set you on fire so you can burn in flames and torment"

In that case do you love him because you genuinely truly love him, or do you HAVE TO love him because of fear from burning alive in fire and torment?

Think about that fucking scenario for a while. Imagine if that scenario happens in our world. The guy would be labeled as a psychopath and get arrested IMMEDIATELY.

But it's completely ok when God does THE EXACT SAME THING, just because hes God?

I'm a christian and even this fucks me up when i think about it. The more logical mind and critical thinking i acquire the more i see through the non logical bullshit.

My faith is shaky.

Im genuinely starting to think over 50% of religious people believe in God not because they genuinely believe, but because of fear of being set on fire and torment forever.

It smells to me like its a fucking MIND CONTROL FEAR DRIVEN CULT.

Just wanna say that I love devRant b/c :

1. I can write as l33t as I wish knowing that most of u will get the msg, some of u can decode almost anything ( exceptions r the Manuscript and some of AOK posts )

2. I can be sarcastic, say stupid things w/0 fasing a wave of comfused hate

3. speaking 0f which, d re-@ll haters & <spam>3rs r quickly kicked out ( shout 4 all moderators )

4. most of u r critical thinkers and is a pleasure to read some of d discussions

5. one can learn a lot for the other parts of the IT in which is not involved ( yet )

6. It's hell of a fun around you so keep the spirit burning ( might see ya @ burning man, boom, the freshly re-started love parade or just at random point in our small home )

Love ya all. 10x 4 attending this dev/!dev talk

My goal for 2020: actually finish a personal project.

Last year, I built 25% of a website, 10% of a companion app for a video game, and half of a command-line utility. I would really like to finish an entire project this year, but considering that I just started a new project that promises to be huge and unwieldy, that will probably have to wait for whatever project I try next after burning out on this one.

I'm mostly .NET Dev, working on OCR thingy, but I started as Java, Android Dev. After my boss's crappy management and burning out our two mobile devs he has assigned me to finish one app. For past four days I've worked around the clock to finish as much of functionalities as I could but it simply wasn't possible, especially because project was still changing when though deadline was around 15.12.17. Yesterday I've done as much as I could and now we have to wait for the client to either accept it or break the contract.
To be frank, I think that losing money would be like a bucket of cold water for my boss. All of us, me and those two mobile devs I have mentioned earlier, are students. We have exams right now. "Senior" Dev is only year older and will soon be applying for his engineering degree. Year after year situation like this occurs and boss haven't learn a thing.

Sooo as of January of this year, I have a new boss, this dude basically acted as my “mentor” for the last year so he’s already tried micromanaging me but bc he wasn’t my boss, I could push back.

Long story short, he is now my manager, he’s the global marketing leader and I’m the marketing director for the Americas (been doing this role for two years) yet he treats me like I’m an idiot, in his words he wants to make sure I’m in control of my team before he lets me lead fully while simultaneously telling me that I need to step up and lead.

I politely asked him to let me lead and stop attending all my team meetings, stop delegating tasks to my team directly and instead consult w me so then I can delegate, and basically to respect the fact that clearly I’ve been successfully doing the job for the last two years.

He said no, that he won’t leave my meetings until he feels I have full control of my team, continues to over involve himself in all my projects, pulling my team in a bunch of directions w new projects and ideas left and right, and burning us all out.

To add insult to injury, he sent me a very “helpful” email detailing how I need to work better and faster and how he expects me and my team at full speed, my team is made up of me, two new hires that are a month old, my marketing manager, and I’m currently hiring for another team member. (This after he led a company restructure of my previous team that resulted in me losing 4 team members in December so I’m rebuilding my team).

I’m already overwhelmed and demotivated, pretty sure he wants me to quit and he has a proven history of bullying his staff, he was actually fired from our parent company for this exact reason a few years ago, he also happens to be European so not sure how rules work over there, but he was rehired by my company. My European colleagues hate him too, but they’re too scared to speak up.

I used to love my job and now i dread it, I drink every day after work and I get anxiety everytime he emails me which is at all hours if the day. Is it worth it documenting his bullshit for HR or should I just cut my losses snd leave?

Appreciate the advice!

Feeling over stressed, over worked and highly underpaid for all this effort. Worst of all I feel the passion leaving me for this work.

I graduated a boot camp last April and was blessed to contract part time at a startup learning how to work in the unity game engine. The team is two other guys, both super smart snd been working in this field for a long time. Since then I’ve added personal projects, finished a data structures and algorithms course and started the Leet code grind. I told this startup that I’d start looking for full time employee positions soon and they understand. They couldn’t offer me much money, or stock options, just experience they said. I feel like I’ve basically been grinding 24/7 since May. I’m going to run out of money soon and it’s all starting to take a toll on my body and mind. I never really sit on the couch or watch something anymore because I feel I should be doing something productive. This just makes me feel like everything I’m doing is meaningless and without impact. I feel like a wheel turning endlessly in sand and not moving forward. I even feel it zapping my passion for developing.

I just can’t help but feel that I’m burning out here. I have a new experimental feature to do for the startup and the amount of things to learn seems overwhelming. Especially with Leet code and interviews coming up. The two other devs on the team are extremely busy as this is a part time endeavor for everyone. I’m also in a relationship I started to feel detached from which causes it’s own stress. I love VR and AR which is why I chose this startup to learn Unity. Now I just feel like I’m dividing my efforts too much. I’m shitty at unity and also less good at web dev than I would have been if I focused on it purely after boot camp grad. On the plus side I will say I’m doing what I want. I just can’t help but feel like that damn tire in the sand turning without traction. And I feel the patience in me for self learning the basics and iteration over a complex project is waning. Without patience the learning is rushed and I don’t learn shit. I also make dumb mistake and “hope” I don’t run into errors. I feel I’m just trying to bang it out for the startup instead of use it learn cool shit. Anyways it feels good to rant. I can’t wait for a full time job, established work hours, and decent pay so I can live life and have off time.

I assume wherever I go I’ll always be in a spot where I need to figure how to get xyz done with minimal help or oversight. I just would like to be paid for it.

Let me run something by all of you. Let's say you once started freelancing as a "Plan B" in case your full-time gig dropped you. Over 12 years you've managed to build a long-standing personal brand around that occasional freelancing. You have several clients who adore you and the work you do and they tell you they would be lost without your talent and have nowhere else to go and nobody else they trust. You know, because in the past you tried to send them elsewhere (for various reasons) and they just kept coming back.

You get laid off from the full-time gig and ACME Company calls and interviews you as a top candidate they're really interested in for that same type of work for a full-time job they're offering.

Here's the catch...if hired, you have two months to basically erase your personal brand and agree never to do any freelancing work as before, even on your own time on evenings and weekends. ACME wants your full focus and attention. Additionally, you find out that the person you'd be replacing is being let go because they weren't sufficiently tech-skilled for the job. And, with a little digging, you find out that person _also_ had several freelancing gigs going on the side. Probably for the same "Plan B" reason. Which is probably why ACME is demanding exclusivity.

Your client base is small. ACME says "we don't care". The work you do is 90% automated and easily achievable in just minutes a day on a weekend or evening. ACME says "doesn't matter". You already had full-time work to begin with so you weren't doing a ton on the side. ACME couldn't be less interested in this "excuse". And you're not keen on the idea of burning down your brand, especially with no guarantees of any kind in the present IT industry hiring/firing/layoffs climate. ACME says this issue is make or break for them.

If you get to the offer stage do you:
a) Flip the bird to your brand and clients you've built up for over a decade and memory-hole it?
b) Negotiate a non-compete clause with ACME, agreeing not to take on any new clients while working full time for them?
c) Flip the bird to ACME and look for something else?

Asking for a friend. ;)

My office uses decade old refurbished optiplexs. One of them even runs win7 32bit (ALL the rest or 64 bit) last night I stayed late to finalize some setup for moving the shared folder from a network shared external drive plugged into one person's computer. Over to a system that'll act as a NAS as well as run some simple automation (nightly backups mostly)

While doing that I remembered one person complaining their computer not always booting right. So I turned it on. Made sure it worked didn't notice any obvious issues. Turned it off. Unplugged it. Opened it up. didn't see any obvious issues so I closed it back up. Tried to turn it back on and it refused. Then I smelled burning electronics. Quickly turned it off unplugged and opened.

I think something shorted and the hard drive finally failed or something. I don't know what exactly it could've been but I threw a fit and left for the day
I'm currently in my way in early to swap that computer out and do some more investigating. Wish me luck talking to my boss less than a month in and something breaks while I'm in the office alone

Trying to decide between two places, one was full of cliquey staff who would talk to someone they didn't like through someone else in a child-like "Tell X I'm not talking to them" despite X being next to you, and management who wouldn't always pay you on time or the right amount.
The other was also run very poorly, management looked down on staff who wouldn't work for free after their shift finished, they'd also throw you under the bus for clients and wouldn't take staff speaking up. I once went to my direct manager noting that I was burning out as the only member in a department when every other was staffed by multiple groups of multiple staff. Told them that I needed someone else with me, next thing you know I'm out on my ear and replaced by a young lad just starting his apprenticeship.

Woke up and got a fking fever out of nowhere. My vision delays when i turn my head while walking, feeling unstable physically, brain feels like its melting, headache, im hot and have high temperature, burning from inside and at one point i started hallucinating the more movement i made, literally saw someone walking in front of my bedroom while no one was there. And then started seeing circles triangles and square shapes in my vision but for a short period of time. I live with my parents

Wtf is this???? Did i experience mental burnout from excess stress and studying???

burning out and dropping side projects

Screw it! Finally moved out of toxic, demotivating, slow paced, but really comfortable comfort zone(large company).
It's been a month, relatively very happy, latest tech stack, fast paced environment (literally no one has time to play politics or gossip), with 40% hike. I can clearly see I'm burning out but at least I'm enjoying work.
Down the line I'm sure I appreciate myself for this big move.

Electric vehicles are clean and all (if they're not being powered by your local coal-burning plant), but… after the battery is toast, where does it go? With all those EVs, where are we supposed to put 222,522,300 dead 18650 cells from all 2023's Tesla Model X cars alone? There are other EVs out there…

Well this is a comforting alternative to the stress and anxiety I feel just before i start to spiral perilously out of control...
I'm not burning out I'm just getting my flame on while I level up. 🔥🔥🔥🤣

!rant
I'm sorry if this isn't your typical rant but couldn't find a better community to ask it in! I'm a Computer Science undergrad, will graduate next year. The thing is I have this burning desire to learn everything, to learn all the languages/frameworks and generate some income out of it so I can indulge myself and support my family a bit. But I don't know where to start! I'm into Android dev but can't seem to make headway in that direction. I'm sorry again! Any and all advice is greatly appreciated.

Was running personal laptop on 4.10 kernel (running Manjaro).

Was having problems for some reason with an audio program I'm using and so needed to run some older kernel that is real time for better latency.

Installed that kernel and booted with it.

Attempted to remove kernel 4.10, I don't need it anymore.

Rebooted, some kernel modules aren't loading. Xorg not creating a session.

I have no input working.
Not even wifi.

I can't detect USB devices.

Tried to fix it all night.. going through a ton of forums online...

Finally I give up. I didn't have access to anther computer to get a bootable USB image to. FUCK. IM NOT SMART ENOUFG FOR THIS SHIT.

I have 3 USB drive that I carry around all the time. Why don't I have a live image in one of them?

I went to sleep.

Next day I download Lubuntu (just to boot and backup some stuff before downloading and reinstalling Manjaro).

When I was burning the ISO to the USB, turns out I actually had a bootable Ubuntu on it the whole time.

I feel so stupid.

Last week I don't remember why, but I did sudo chmod 770 /

Which also broke my system.

Took me 3 hours to realize that this was the problem and make it work.

I love Linux. It keeps things interesting..

Right now, everything. I started at a Consulting firm because I expected many new problems to tackle, solutions to develop and generally to always have a fire burning underneath my ass but instead I always develop the same standard bullshit.

I miss the days in my old job when there was just a problem and the task to solve it. When I stared down giant amounts of data, just KNOWING that somewhere in that mess is some structure I could exploit and that short moment of inspiration when I finally pinpointed it. The rush of endorphins when the solution became clear and everything fell into place to form a beautiful pattern amidst the chaos test data, git commits and numpy arrays.

Now its just "Yeah, would you just write another selenium testsuite that throws out fail or pass and wastes all the information because the only reason I'm a testmanager is because I'm too incompetent to do anything else and not my passion for the field".

The constant, mind numbing repetition of always the same patterns where the occasional dynamic element that becomes stale is the highlight of my work week... I would have never thought that making good money with easy work would ever get me as close to depression as it did.

So, the story starts with me getting a job. Full-time job for the first time in my 21 years old life. After short conversation about how amazing this company is, after countless lies and stood questions they decided to hire me. I had to get come on Monday a week later with everything prepared.

So of course I did that and got to my workplace on designated time. Turned out nobody was expecting me, nothing was prepared for a new programmer and everyone seemed angry at me for no apparent reason.

After long talk with my new boss I got some less than 100$ pc with CPU that couldn't handle virtualization and expected me to work on software that needed extensive use of virtual machine.

PC is of course filled with all kinds of spying software that uses most of the resources. IT teams only job is to check if programmers are working their assess off for at least 8 hours a day.

I've filled a ticket about granting me access to Debian machine on the mainframe so I could work. No response for two weeks. I've lost hope already.

I have to work on open space with more than 30 engineers. Screams, phone calls, alarms, all at once, all the time. My colleagues seem to not care and I can't understand how.

I was tasked with rewriting major application because old developer did some half assed piece of burning shit. It took him more than one year, I'm finishing it in less than two weeks.

Of course nobody except for me is preparing any kinds of documentation. I had to reverse-engineer whole API for alarm system.

Salary is less than a junior programmer should earn.

But I'm stuck here for at least a year because nobody's here wants a guy whose only experience is as a freelancer.

I used to love the hero treatment I got long ago in my previous company. Appreciations and what not for conducting events, contributing to open source. I think I burned out later. Later the hero treatment stopped there and I craved for it when I wasn't doing the stuff I used to do - basically I was previously keeping others happy I guess, instead of keeping myself happy. Contributing to open source or conducting events was not even part of the day job and was mostly considered outside the working hours and hence one had to stretch to do all that extra stuff. I over did stuff I guess and burned out

In my current company, I see heros and appreciations so much for contributing to open source though not all our roles are completely defined as open source roles and we instead have to work on closed source or yet to be open sourced stuff. My role is contributing a very tiiiiiny testing bit in an yet to be open sourced project, but a few other colleagues of mine work on closed source paid advanced version of the open source core project

Seeing all the hero treatment where I'm not the hero and seeing all the appreciation, I wonder how it doesn't seem right. Surely I'm jealous, lol. But I also felt the treatment also shows some sort of Special treatment for some people. It's "Special" and not exactly for all and only for open source contributors or people doing all the popularly so called as "cool" stuff. Fortunately for them their job role kinda mentions that I believe. And people working on closed source are now trying to contribute there. I'm stuck with some of my main day job work and dying in guilt for burning out, and not being able to contribute to open source and also kind of starting to hate open source for it's dark sides. Reminds me Batman dialogue "You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.". Open Source dark sides - of course the possibile dark sides of companies funding open source, the people behind the companies and also of course my company being one of them possibly, though if you ask anyone they say "Community comes first". That's full of lies is what I would say.

Inclusivity gets thrown out the window. Heroes get to talk. Heroes get worshipped. Others are not even noticed I think. I guess the only way to get noticed is to imitate the heroes

At some point I realized I'm envying or idolizing a crazy set of people, or like putting them on a pedestal. I'm trying to fix that in my head. But oh my, you should see all the treatment, the respect, etc. Surely some people just are there to do meh or grunt work or even good work or whatever without much appreciation, and then have to move on. No respect or consideration for opinions, thoughts usually. Some of them don't even have the time to care to check what people have to say. Top down hierarchy but they say it's flat hierarchy. They don't even wanna listen to some of us I think, that is during team meetings. Only very few care from what I have noticed

One good thing is I have to come to realize how much I'm like them in some behaviours and feeling damn guilty. I sometimes spend time thinking how to change myself for the long term. And how to avoid the toxic behaviors in the team and also control my anger and control my response to their behaviours. I'm also trying to understand where I'm climbing the ladder with my assumptions and also trying to see the "real" thing instead of assuming or being blind or imagining etc. But it has become so hard because idk if people are faking it, it's become very hard to always assume people are telling the truth 🙈 though it makes to assume or believe that by default. If people are okay with themselves lying, who am I question that huh

So i'm a laravel dev and i love it. However one thing that only seems to happen late at night is when working with Eloquent i always end up putting () when working with relationships.

Last night i spent about 2 hours messing with

public function members(){
return $this->hasManyThrough(
'App\Member', 'App\ConversationMember',
'conversation_id', 'id', 'id'
);
}

only to find out i was calling it via
$conversation->members() instead of $conversation->members

This morning when i opened up the IDE i immediately figured out what i was doing wrong.... sometimes burning the late night oil is counter productive i guess you could say

think all of this impulsive OS booting is burning out my old laptop,

RemixOS - partially boots then gets stuck on a black screen
Android-x86 - won't boot past a black screen either
Windows 7 - i infected that shit so quickly lmao
Windows 10 - i'm not disgracing my old laptop with that
Xubuntu - boots, but my tablet configurator dosen't start properly wrapped in wine (Shenzen HUION only has Win and Mac drivers), and i am an artist
Gamedrift - haven't tried
ReactOS - Last time i checked, it won't boot but i should try again

any other suggestions?
super low specs on that old laptop

Never quite finding that work life balance. I love development but it's not really until this year I've noticed myself burning out and not appreciating life, instead I spend countless hours in front of screen.

Recently I've taken up amateur photography and started travelling my country to take scenic pictures and honestly it's the best decision I've made

So, I found out that Facebook is down by reading people's rants.

When it's stack overflow, let me know. Then the world is burning.

Just burning right through the years of our lives aren’t we ? Same bitch
Same studies
Same unfinished work
Same jack assess
Same bots
I wish people hadn’t gone out of their way to make me feel they were full of shit at points
Liars lying requires some real annoying thoughts to determine if they’re lying 100% of the time or just deceiving because they know you think that

Questions to other freelances out there.
I suppose it's a common occurrence to be involved in some project, asked to add some feature or modify something, and then looking at the source and find an unmanageable burning mess.
If upon such a discovery you decide you're not taking the job - for example, given the situation you need to charge quite a lot more and the customer cannot pay the appropriate amount - how do you go on explaining your reasons?
You just go out directly telling them about the dire situation of their codebase? Try to find a nice way of telling the truth? Make some excuse (cannot because personal reasons)?

Just curious

I get to work, this pops up.

Little frustrated yesterday as I had only 2 minutes out of the entire day to ask my boss burning questions. Only got through one of the 5.

Guys. I am in deep shit. Literally. I am shitting on my brown throne and the shit was going out normally. Felt good. But i couldnt stop shitting. There was so much shit. I was such a shitlord. The volume of my shits was so large an entire amazon warehouse wouldnt fit. Then at one point my asshole started burning🔥 i had to clutch and close my asshole. The more i shit the more it burned. Then my shit piled up. It felt very liquid. Then i realized it was diarrhea💩💩💩💩💩 fuck. I kept my asshole closed at all costs but something went wrong in my stomach. The liquid shit kept piling up and i dont know why or from where. How can so much shit be stored in my body is beyond me. The shit i shitted was longer than average sized snake🐍 then at one point the pressure and force F=ma 2nd newtons law kept making it harder because holding the shit hurt, but shitting the shit also hurt cause it burns🔥💩 but heres the best part. As i was at war with my shit i remembered what I learned in school: 3rd newtons law Each action has an equal and opposite reaction, then i realized if i just let go of my shit and suffer the pain of having the asshole on flames, the reaction of the opposite newton's force would throw that shit to the other side so i dont have to suffer holding my bullshit inside me! And so i did. I let go of my asshole and liquid shit was FLOWING like a fucking waterfall 🌊💩🌊💩🌊💩 asshole burned for 3 seconds but the relief i felt from not holding so much bullshit inside was WORTH IT💯 Now, if you excuse me its time i get off my brown throne and IMMEDIATELY run to my chair or else im gonna collapse to the ground. My legs are literally NUMB from shitting for over 20 minutes on my throne. Thank you school for teaching me all about bullshit! I would have exploded and died if i didnt study bullshit in school. My degree of bullshit is just as valuable as bullshit, and they were right. I am glad i studied shit in school. Never knew shit could be useful to learn

My shitting streak has begun again. Fuck. Its cold where i live and in my house. Shitting liquid shit doesnt help because my asshole burns. Its not fun and not enjoyable. Im trying to hold shit inside me but it forces me to shit. And if i shit it burns. Imagine being in a cold -75° weather while your asshole is burning heat at +45°. Why is life such a constant stream of pain and suffering. I write this as i sit on the toilet and fight demons not to shit more in order to prevent pain

Why did our designer invent shitting and thought it was a good idea?

I can think of a better idea: whatever i eat gets dissolved into particles by acid that my body produces like an implosion inside a submarine and transforms into pure energy that my body absorbs and thus makes the body more powerful -- no need to shit it out because its now a bunch of fucking particles!

WHY wouldnt that be a better solution. Shitting is disgusting and makes no sense if this solution is also possible. And for an omniscient all-powerful all-knowing celestial being -- NOTHING is impossible to do.

what we perceive as "magic" is normal to an all-powerful celestial entity. Therefore any thought you can imagine, should be possible to do. Even the idea i just proposed because i proved i could imagine it so it must be possible to create such existence

And as i finish writing off this rant, my asshole burns less and everything is coming back to normal Thank God. The pain was bearly bareable. As a finishing touch of this rant imma go wipe my ass for 100th time today and continue working with nextjs on my project

I am starting as a full stack developer next month. This is my first serious job after college.
Do you think that the first three months used as probationary period are to figure out if you can handle the job?
The position includes some technologies I know very little about, but I'm hoping to figure them out fast as soon as I get my hands on the code (with no documentation). How do you learn once you start on a new job? Contact with co-workers will be reduced since I will start by working remotely. Any suggestions on how I can pick up speed and gain as much knowledge in a short amount of time without burning out?

Hope that the only thing burning out in this cricket season are Pakistani's ass🤞