One day I developed a simple website for a goldsmith who I already new for a year or so.

We discussed everything and agreed on a feature set, price and a deadline when it should be ready. Based on this we signed a contract and I started my work.

Unfortunately at the same time I lost most of my childhood friends. I moved to a new city and started to study computer science, which was awesome on the contrary.

This is where the horror began.

I was totally occupied by the studying, my partner, myself and by the shit of life.

It knocked on my door. The horror decided to pay me a visit.

"Had a look at your calendar recently? Just saying..."

Shit! The deadline came closer and closer everyday and the pile of work undone grew with it. At that point I had to do something. I don't know what it was or how I did it, but somehow I managed to finish the project just in time. I was totally not proud of it, but it featured what was required.

The day before I contacted my client, the horror knocked on my door again. He said:

"You really should have a look at your hard drive."
"Why? everything seems allright."
"Well, then look closer."
"Fuck."
"Right."

Well, there are backups at least, I thought to myself. I'll just recover the last state. That was an annoying thought, but nothing serious. That's just one or two days of w... - Wait, what? Where are my backups? What the actual fuck? Why is the zip file broken? Why doesn't the flash drive work anymore? FUUUCK!!

I was lost. It was a complete nightmare.

Each time my telephone rang the following days, my heart skipped a beat. Finally my client's name appeared on the display. I answered the call, my hands shaking.

"Hey there! I'm calling to discuss the website project with you."
"Well, about that..."
"Yeah, I know you put a huge amount of efford in it so I'm really sorry to say that I on the other hand can't effort the money. Actually I'd like to simply forget about this whole idea."

Seriously? What the fuck just happend? I suddenly noticed a sticky note infront of me reading:
"It was really fun to see you suffer, but I have to go! See ya
- The Horror"

"Hello, are you still there? Do you hear me?", yelled a voice through my phone.
"Uh, yeah. You know, that project was a lot of work and... but you know what? It was actually a pretty fun exercise and I'm doing well over here, so because it's you I'd agree."
I heared a reliefed sigh from the other end of the line.
"Really good! I owe you something! Bye!"

What. The. Fuck.

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

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

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

Don’t worry about AI, Siri can’t even handle a simple calendar...

I used to be a sysadmin and to some extent I still am. But I absolutely fucking hated the software I had to work with, despite server software having a focus on stability and rigid testing instead of new features *cough* bugs.

After ranting about the "do I really have to do everything myself?!" for long enough, I went ahead and did it. Problem is, the list of stuff to do is years upon years long. Off the top of my head, there's this Android application called DAVx5. It's a CalDAV / CardDAV client. Both of those are extensions to WebDAV which in turn is an extension of HTTP. Should be simple enough. Should be! I paid for that godforsaken piece of software, but don't you dare to delete a calendar entry. Don't you dare to update it in one place and expect it to push that change to another device. And despite "server errors" (the client is fucked, face it you piece of trash app!), just keep on trying, trying and trying some more. Error handling be damned! Notifications be damned! One week that piece of shit lasted for, on 2 Android phones. The Radicale server, that's still running. Both phones however are now out of sync and both of them are complaining about "400 I fucked up my request".

Now that is just a simple example. CalDAV and CardDAV are not complicated protocols. In fact you'd be surprised how easy most protocols are. SMTP email? That's 4 commands and spammers still fuck it up. HTTP GET? That's just 1 command. You may have to do it a few times over to request all the JavaScript shit, but still. None of this is hard. Why do people still keep fucking it up? Is reading a fucking RFC when you're implementing a goddamn protocol so damn hard? Correctness be damned, just like the memory? If you're one of those people, kill yourself.

So yeah. I started writing my own implementations out of pure spite. Because I hated the industry so fucking much. And surprisingly, my software does tend to be lightweight and usually reasonably stable. I wonder why! Maybe it's because I care. Maybe people should care more often about their trade, rather than those filthy 6 figures. There's a reason why you're being paid that much. Writing a steaming pile of dogshit shouldn't be one of them.

The first dev project, like real dev project, I participated in was a school one and it was double.
The class was meant to make us learn about the software's life cycle, so the teacher wanted us to develop a simple, yet complicated, thing: a Web platform to help tutors send/refer students to the university services (psychologist, nutriologist, etc) and to keep track of them visits.
We all agreed on it being easy.
Boy were we so wrong.
I was appointed as dev leader as well as some others (I was the programming leader, the other ones were the DB guy and the security guy) and as such I was in charge of the technology used (well, now we all know that the client is the one in charge of that as well as the designer) and I chose Django because we had some experience with it. We used it for the two projects the teacher asked us to do (the second one was to find a little shop and develop something for it, obviously with the permission and all that), but in the second one I decided to use React on top of Djangl, which ended being a really good combination tho.
So, in the first project, the other ones (all the classroom) started to discuss and decided to use some other stuff like unnecessary carousel for images, unnecessary functions, they created mock ups for stuff that was never there to begin with, etc. It was really awful, we had meetings with the client (the teacher) with updates on the project, and in not a single one he was satisfied with the results. But still, we continued with the path the majority chose and it was the worst: deadlines were not met, team members just vanished until the end of the semester, one guy broke his leg (and was a dev leader) and never said a word not did anything about the project. At the end, we presented literal garbage, the UI was awful, its colors were so ugly because we had to use the university official colors, the functionality was not there, there literally was a calendar to make appointments for the services (when did the client ask for that? No one knows), but hey, you could add services and their data to it, was it what the client wanted? Of course not! What do you think we are? Devs?
Suffice to say that, although we passed with good grades, the project and the team was shit (and I'm counting me in)
The good part is that the second project was finished by me and it looked really good, yet it didn't matter, the first project was supposed to be used by the university, but that thing was unusable.
Then, in the subsequent vacations I tried to make pretty and functional/usable, yet I failed because I had a deadline for another thing I had to do, but hey, the login screen looked amazing!

The most stressful day of month.
I need to put hours into hour counting programs so computer can analyze those hours using deep learning algorithms and pay me a wage I don't deserve.

Each program work differently.
One of it works inside the local company network.
Other one I need to connect outside from company network.
In all of them I can't make mistake or I need to write to someone to fix my mistakes.
One of this programs use java applet, other is simple php website.
One of them blocks row in calendar when I click so when I login again and click I can't edit this row because it's locked by me who is editing this row.
One of them is requesting me to provide my work in minutes.
I need to follow strict procedures to report any holidays or national holidays that I need first figure out when they happen.
Wish me luck.

Last week I spent a couple of days researching how to sync a CalDAV server with any Android calendar.
I downloaded several apps, and tried to connect in many ways (without HTTPS, calendar link, user link, any combination of them, with and without www, etc.)
Today I chose an option I had been trying to avoid: downloading an app that was recommended in some places but that's no longer on Google Play Store.
Got the APK from some website that didn't look too suspicious...
website.com, username, password; and it WORKED. (This also confirmed my server was well configured)
IN A MATTER OF SECONDS. Within the next minutes I could test sending events to and fro.
WHY?
WHAT- WHY IS THERE NO ALTERNATIVE FOR SOMETHING SO TRIVIAL. This future is so dumb.
One would have thought that there was something better than a dead-simple app made for Android 4.4
I really can't believe it.