Manager: How come I go on vacation for 2 weeks and you are able to start, complete, and ship an entire sprint in that time where as when I'm around, the same amount of work takes months? I even got COMPLIMENTS from *the client* about how smoothly things went while I was gone...THIS IS COMPLETELY EMBARRASSING AND UNACCEPTABLE!

Dev: Well. I cancelled all of the status meetings, created tickets with clear expectations, didn't change those expectations, didn't add every idea that popped into the client's head during those two weeks to the current sprint, didn't pull anyone off their tickets to teach me to code, cut the budget for making degrading comments to zero, and incentivised everyone to work by allowing a half days on fridays to work on personal projects if we stayed on schedule.

Manager: THAT'S NOT YOUR JOB! I'M THE MANAGER AND ALL. OF. THOSE. THINGS. ARE. MY JOB! NOT YOURS!

Dev: ...I know.

The Absolutely True Story of a Real Programmer Who Never Learned C.

I have a young friend named Sam who is quite a programming prodigy. Sam does know C! I need to make this clear: he’s not the titular programmer.
But a couple years ago Sam told me a story about a different programmer who never learned C, and I liked it so much that right on the spot I asked his permission to repeat it. (I could never just steal such a tale.)
Sam wasn’t always a programmer—actually he started in his later teens, in part because he was more of a jock, and in part because he was related to programmers and wanted to do his own thing. But, like all great programmers, once he was bitten by the bug he immersed himself completely in it.
One day Sam happened to be talking programming with his uncle, who was also a programmer but from way, way back.
“Hey,” said Sam, “I’m learning this language called C. You must know a lot of languages, did you ever study C?”
“No,” said the uncle, to Sam’s surprise. “I am one of the very few programmers who never had to learn C.”
“Because I wrote it.”
Oh, Sam’s last name is Ritchie.
What I love about this story is the idea of Dennis waiting Sam’s entire life to deliver this zinger. Just imagine sitting on a line that good, watching your nephew grow up and waiting, waiting until the one day he finally starts learning to code. Did he work on the line in his head at night? Like, “Hmm, how should I word it so I can deliver the punch line perfectly? Should I say ‘I never took a class on C?’ Nah, too awkward…”
The great thing about geniuses is how much effort they put into everything.

Courtesy : Wil Shiply.

Taking a dump and showering are my number one non dev activities. They help to clear your head and when your head is empty you will get the best ideas and solutions.

31st December 2016, I had signed up for devRant.

It's my cake day today. Feels so good to be part of this community, have learned so much, made some of the greatest friends here.

2021 was a mind fuck. Taxing and draining. Very little growth and even less learnings.

I realised that I am in a toxic environment.

Lately, no philosophy, therapy, supplements, activity, work, etc. has been helping me to get back to my original self.

I used to spiral down with a lot of negative self talk and playing the victim card.

Just day before yesterday, I decided to listen to some affirmations on the Tube and that actually helped me bounce back.

I started socialising and stepping out to attend gigs and just be outdoors as much as I could.

My surroundings changed and so did my thought process.

Hence, I made a decision to continue affirmations and slowly change my surroundings, even if that demand domestic relocation.

Things are starting to look positive after a long, loooooong, time.

I also need more sun exposure for my vitamin D3 deficiency and steady dose of serotonin.

I feel lot clear in head and heart. My goals are clearer and I am ready to start working hard and be my original past self again.

I love you all and I really wish you all achive all your wishes and dreams, be happier and healthier in 2022 with ton of success and money.

Sometimes taking a break can really clear your head. Yesterday evening, I was programming with my mate and couldn't find a very persistent bug. Didn't want to get a break because I just wanted to solve it. He convinced me to go downstairs and get a drink. Reached the bottom of the stairs aaaaand poof, figured out the bug!

I can’t even say what’s wrong with PHP, because— okay. Imagine you have uh, a toolbox. A set of tools. Looks okay, standard stuff in there.

You pull out a screwdriver, and you see it’s one of those weird tri-headed things. Okay, well, that’s not very useful to you, but you guess it comes in handy sometimes.

You pull out the hammer, but to your dismay, it has the claw part on both sides. Still serviceable though, I mean, you can hit nails with the middle of the head holding it sideways.

You pull out the pliers, but they don’t have those serrated surfaces; it’s flat and smooth. That’s less useful, but it still turns bolts well enough, so whatever.

And on you go. Everything in the box is kind of weird and quirky, but maybe not enough to make it completely worthless. And there’s no clear problem with the set as a whole; it still has all the tools.

Now imagine you meet millions of carpenters using this toolbox who tell you “well hey what’s the problem with these tools? They’re all I’ve ever used and they work fine!” And the carpenters show you the houses they’ve built, where every room is a pentagon and the roof is upside-down. And you knock on the front door and it just collapses inwards and they all yell at you for breaking their door.

That’s what’s wrong with PHP.

I can’t even say what’s wrong with PHP, because— okay. Imagine you have uh, a toolbox. A set of tools. Looks okay, standard stuff in there.

You pull out a screwdriver, and you see it’s one of those weird tri-headed things. Okay, well, that’s not very useful to you, but you guess it comes in handy sometimes.

You pull out the hammer, but to your dismay, it has the claw part on both sides. Still serviceable though, I mean, you can hit nails with the middle of the head holding it sideways.

You pull out the pliers, but they don’t have those serrated surfaces; it’s flat and smooth. That’s less useful, but it still turns bolts well enough, so whatever.

And on you go. Everything in the box is kind of weird and quirky, but maybe not enough to make it completely worthless. And there’s no clear problem with the set as a whole; it still has all the tools.

Now imagine you meet millions of carpenters using this toolbox who tell you “well hey what’s the problem with these tools? They’re all I’ve ever used and they work fine!” And the carpenters show you the houses they’ve built, where every room is a pentagon and the roof is upside-down. And you knock on the front door and it just collapses inwards and they all yell at you for breaking their door.

That’s what’s wrong with PHP.

I work for a web agency.
Over the last 18 months a company asked us about 5 different quotes for rather minimal changes to their website.
While being minimal changes, estimating costs for them still requires several hours of work for research, meetings, correspondance and writing the damn things. They never even gave us a response (neither positive nor negative), except once where they told us that they wouldn't pay for project management because their instructions are so clear that PM isn't necessary.

As a response to the last one, after several months, they send us a 10 pages long pdf with requirements for a new website (or a "restyle" like they call it, even if it has absolutely nothing in common with the current one).
We inform them that we can't permit ourselves to continue studying new solutions for free and therefore tell them that a detailed offer would cost them something like 300$, and that amount would then be discounted from the eventually accepted job. We also roughly estimate a price range of about 15k - 20k for the new website.

We get an email back, from the CEO (until now it was a secretary), with essentially 3 arguments written in condescending form:
1. he brags about his revenue being over 9 billion $$$ a year, and that being a part of a global holding for which "communication is essential" (sic.) means that they need to coordinate and "can't simply accept an offer" [even if it's 400$, for specific change exactly requested by them, I guess...]

2. 15k is too much [... for the website representing this 9 billion dollar holding on the internet, for which the requirements are written in the 10 pages long pdf]

3. He asks for a meeting

We accept the meeting, we go to their office.

When we arrive there, the secretary informs us that the CEO will not participate. So we talk the her and the head of the "Communication Dept" in videoconference.
I explain them that if the sum, which we thought would be appropriate (~15 - 20k), is too high, the Pareto principle would allow us to, theoretically, achieve about 80% of the features and quality for about 20% of the cost. Their genuine response is:
"So your estimate was wrong! You can do it for much less!".
I try to explain them that the most money in a project goes into "attention to detail".
The "Communication Dept." person, who is "doing this job since too much time" (sic.), refuses to believe and insists that "details" don't exist on the web.
I tell her: "In any kind of work, the more effort you put into something, the better it tends to get, with diminishing returns".
She insists: "I don't understand this".

So now I'm here, doing the 6th offer, free of charge, for a 5k website, for a company that generates 9kkk revenue each year, trying to define a "Definition of Done" that works out.

FML I guess.

Sorry for the long post.

"Impossible deadline experience?"

When product owners promise delivery dates.

One day, I came back from a two weeks holiday, relaxed. I noticed a teammate missing. "Yes, he took the week off". Sure, why not.

We were working under a bastardized enterprisey version of Scrum (didn't we all at some point?). So we didn't just have a product owner, we had three and an additional "Head of PO". Because enterprises can't live without hierarchies or something. Barely an hour after I came into office, she entered the room and came straight to me. "Your coworker was almost done implementing feature X. You need to finish it immediately. No worries, though, coworker said the rest is a piece of cake".

It wasn't. There was *a lot* left to do, the JIRA task wasn't entirely clear, and the existing code for the feature was so-so (obviously WIP code). I estimated two weeks for the implementation, plus some time to clarify the requirements. When telling "Head of PO" she lost her shit. Screaming things like "this feature is due the end of this week" and "I signed this with my blood!". Well, I didn't, and I made it clear that I hadn't been consulted on this, thus I would not accept any blame in case we missed the deadline.

So I gave my best that week, getting pestered by "Head of PO" all the time. "Is it done yet?", "why does it take so long?" and "your coworker would've been done by now!". Yeah fuck you, too. Not only was I not relaxed any more, I was even more stressed than before my holiday! Thanks, you stupid bitch.

Well, her arbitrary deadline came and the feature wasn't ready. And what happened was... exactly nothing. The following week my coworker returned, who gave me an apologetic smile. "I told her the feature was nowhere finished. And even me, being familiar with the task, couldn't make it in time". We finished the feature together that week, and that was the end of it. So... "Head of PO" either didn't listen or lied to me. She then stressed me to the max right from the day I came back from my holiday. And in the end it didn't even matter.

Again, thanks you stupid bitch, for creating a toxic work environment. Should you ever read this, I'm happy I quit and I hope you miss every single deadline for the rest of your life. Screw you.

Have an 'anger' project open to the side, so when you get annoyed or tired of the paid work, take a quick break and jump into that project to clear your head, even if it is just a simple command line tool, done it before and it's quite a good thing from experience

The Setting:

Ola Cabs (One of the biggest competitors of Uber, for those who don’t know) comes to college to recruit software devs:

✅ Pre-placement talk

Now time for the aptitude/code round. Hackerearth used as the solution to run the test and compile code, as well as check the result immediately. Or so I thought.

3 programming questions, 2 hours.

The problem:
Me: *Write the code for the first question* (and I know it’s correct)

Me: Clicks “Compile and run”

Compiler: *Compiling*

*LITERALLY ONE FUCKING HOUR LATER*

Compiler: *Still compiling*

Hackerearth. What a fucking joke. Though the course of the HOUR I waited, I kept questioning the recruiter head from Ola and his response was:

Recruiter: “Try the other program, it’s possibly a problem with your code. I’ll check at my backend also, hold on.”

YOU FUCKING DIMWIT. MY CODE IS PERFECT AND EVEN IF IT WASN’T IT WOULDN’T TAKE MORE THAN A MINUTE (If you’re factoring in absolutely worst cases) TO COMPILE THIS SMALL ASS FUCKING PROBLEM’S CODE.

In the meanwhile I even coded one of the other remaining questions’ solution and the shit still didn’t work.

At the end of the 2 hour time limit, I’d finished code for all 3, the recruiter stops us all from coding and says:

Recruiter: “Just submit your code, we will evaluate it and get back to you.”

Like fucking hell, asshole.

*One hour post interview*

EVERYONE who attempted the aptitude code round (At least 30 of us) receive messages on our phones:

“Unfortunately you did not clear the aptitude round and we will not be able to take your application forward.”

FUCK YOU OLA. IN ONE FUCKING HOUR YOU “EVALUATED” ALL OF OUR CODE? FUCK YOU HACKEREARTH FOR YOUR SHIT FUCKING EXECUTION OF A “SOLUTION”. Maybe test your own fucking product before offering a solution to companies.

Fucking lost opportunity.

Do something completely different. Stressing about it won't help. Then when your head is clear and fresh again give it another go.

That's how I deal with being stuck.

One thing that @scout taught me is to wear the oxygen mask myself before helping others. Oh she is a sweetheart.

This advice has stuck with me since and slowly & steadily, I am regaining my lost confidence and self love.

Remember, how I was struggling for clarity a couple of months ago? But now, I feel more clear in head.

During the start of the pandemic, I joined a community of corporate normies. I used to live happier until that decision.

That place made me ultra competitive and I subconsciously became a rat trying to win the race. I damaged myself more than I benefited.

I joined at the time of inception. Every core member is a good friend.

Now the fun thing is, they moved to Slack. Many of the core members run the community as admins.

While I don't engage much, but talk to some of them occasionally.

One key area is, running a job board to help people get jobs. And another is mentorship to help the members overcome challenges and grow in their career.

In DMs, literally every core member who is doing this for others is struggling themselves for the same. How fucking ironic!

They seek help and advice from me and vent out their failure frustrations.

Imagine, someone who isn't able to solve their problem, let alone solving it first before helping others, is guiding the community of few thousands to excel in their careers.

Fucking brilliant.

One of the biggest life lessons @scout taught me, wear your oxygen mask first before helping others.

Overengineering. Finding the right point between overdesign and no design at all. That's where fancy languages and unusual patterns being hit by real world problems, and you need to deal with all that utter mess you created being architecture astronaut. Isn't that funny how you realize that another fancy tool is fundamentally incompatible with the task you need to solve, and you realize it after a month of writing workarounds and hacks.

But on the other hand, duct tape slacking becomes a mess even quicker.

Not being able to promote projects. You may code the shit out of side project and still get zero response, absolutely no impact. That's why your side projects often becomes abandoned.

Oversleeping. You thought tomorrow was productive day, but you wake up oversleeped, your head aches, your mind is not clear and you be like "fuck that, I'm staying in bed watching memes all day". But there's job that has to be done, and that bothers you.

Writing tests. Oh, words can't describe how much I hate writing tests, any kind of. I tried testing so many times in high school, at university, even at production, but it seems like my mind is just doesn't accept it. I know that testing is fundamentally important, but my mind collapses every time I try to write a single fucking test, resulting in terrible headache. I don't know why it's like that, but it is, and I better repl the shit out of pure function than write fucking tests.

I have been trying to wrap my head around authentication in hapi for the last 6 hours...
Fuck this shit... when did simple,
I HAS A USERNAME
I HAS A PASSWORD
CAN HAS SESSION?
become:
- you magically get a token from somewhere
- you magically verify that token
- you respond with { credentials } //magic
- by some fucking black magic the server probably creates a session without you knowing about it...
- you freak out and write your own authentication scheme only to find out that you cannot read payload of POST requests in the authenticate method
- you get angrier and depressed and write a rant

(to be clear: there is @hapi/basic but I don't think sending a GET request with the URL looking like username:password@domain.tld is very safe...)

I think I may be someone's wk101soon given how things are going for me.

So I get shipped over to the new offices to do some work. Initially, I was supposed to be updating SQL stored procedures.

That I can handle, well my task is now to build the skeleton project for a web API in core 2.0 using domain driven design and onion architecture which the rest of the team will use.

Okay, I don't have any experience in any of that at all. And god bless the team lead explaining some stuff to me. But it's going to take more than a 20-minute chat here and there for this stuff to sink in.

And being told just to build it how you think it should be isn't great advice when I'm trying to figure out how the systems work.

Every other API project I look at is structured completely different from one another so looking for patterns has failed.

I'm fucking stressed out every bit of information I'm getting on whats potentially happening with my job im getting second hand from people. Because I can't access my emails while off-site something I'm repeatedly flagging.

Every job advert is painstakingly making it clear how out of date my skill set is (or lack of). Evidently, I've been way too lax, and this has been a kick in the bollocks I'm not likely to forget.

If we're being evaluated on performance to see who they'll keep, then I've failed at the first hurdle.

Life lesson for those in education, don't be this knob head here and get comfortable when you land a job. Just knowing about the tech that's commonly used in your field does jack all study it.

Not a structured/meaningful rant and shits probably not as bad as I see it. I've only chewed through one fingernail after all.

I'm at my Community College as a member of the engineering club requesting funds for a software and hardware-related physical project.

The code was mostly pre-written in Python from a university already, but we needed to build essentially a gaming-level PC to run it, do some welding and metalwork for the hardware, cables, et citera. I don't want to get too detailed in case anyone involved is reading this story.

To get funding, we needed to go before the student senate. I didn't go the first time, but later when we needed more funding for the project to do expansions, we attended.

I came in with a few pages of documentation explaining how the project operated, it's scope, and why we needed the additional $500 on top of the previous $1000 or so spent. I went in woefully behind the times on what a student senate meeting was like.

For starters, I thought this would be somewhat formal, being "Student Senate" in Week 8, and prepared to defend my project fully. Instead, we spent the first 15 minutes going around the table explaining what animal we would be and why, if we had to turn into an animal. It just kept going hilariously, painfully downhill from there.

They did ask some questions about what my project was and how it operated (as not many had seen it), and they wanted explanations even though it was clear absolutely nobody else in the room understood anything. My partner virtually shut down and let me do all the talking for my project and his because he couldn't take the ignorance of some of the questions and the assorted nonsense spread throughout the meeting.

Amazingly, we got funding. We had to sit for the rest of the meeting though, which (among other things) included a segment about whether we should create a new committee called the "Fundamental Insecurities committee" to help out with, well, "Fundamental Insecurities." There was only one member on this proposed committee.

When I brought up the question on why we were making a one-person committee alongside the, like, three one-person committees already in existence, they congratulated me for asking good questions and said I should come more often. They then said the exact same thing again when I pointed out there were better names than "Fundamental Insecurities." It's such a reality check that you are trying to impress people to get funding, when you can't help but feel that everyone is an utter idiot in the back of your head.

Almost a year later, I had to go back with a list of parts we needed. I wrote a whole complex list of things we needed for the project. Even though they tried to ask questions about what certain parts were (to appear like they weren't totally incompetent), and despite asking questions about a bunch of the items, nobody cared about what the $10 for "C418" was (google it if you don't get this joke). I spent about 30 minutes talking with them and succeeded in getting $600 more in funding. We then, to my surprise, spent less than 5 minutes debating whether to send 2 students on a field trip for $700. 30 minutes for $600, for a permanently installed project. <5 minutes for a $700 one-time thing.

And, because this is already a long rant, here's one more thing: The Student Senate's voting rules initially gave everyone who showed up 1 vote. We're all students, we all get a say, right?

Well, I soon put together that Student Senate had fairly low attendance. Engineering Club had high attendance. Student Senate and Engineering Club took place at the same date and time. I then, of course, asked why we couldn't bring the whole Engineering Club into Senate one day, and then proceed to pass an order by simple majority saying that all Student Life funding goes to us.

They then said that the administrators (the heads of Student Senate) could override that, but I pointed out that kind of defeats the purpose of voting in the first place. They then switched script and said they wouldn't do that and would honor such a vote. Shortly after, they changed the rules saying that you only get a vote on your 2nd consecutive visit; and again said I should visit more often because I was brilliant.

You can't make this stuff up.

So I have a friend. One of few who I can freely speak with using my natural language (so that means, narrow down topics to IT, mix some of my native language, mix in lot of english and mixture of our favourite languages terms (don't ask me how it works, but it works brilantly and its actually easier to communicate)). And its true friend, seriously.

But when we meet, 80% of time we spent together, every, single, fucking time we argue (in cultural maner, its more of discussion) about what enviroment and what languages have advantages against others. And it pisses the fucking hell out of me, when he takes his enviroment, takes his problems with exac his enviroment, and applies his favourite solutions to it, and goes on how they are fucking awesome and brilliant, and than I reply, sure in my enviroment if I ever had XYZ problem, I wouldn't say use mongo DB becouse I can do it my way, and it would work well too, but it's not really the way I really should solve XYZ problem, becouse in my enviroment you dont have it in the first place. And he will fucking go on, but at least he understands my solutions and finds various details where HIS solution works better. His solution to his problem vs my solution to non-existant problem.

But that's actually an example of much grander thing that I want to rant about. You see, that's not all that bad, we keep it civil and we somewhat enjoy these discussions even if often times, they are pointless. It's like playing games and shit like that, so it's not the point, I just used the example to make it clear what I mean later down the line.

So, to the actual point. What the living fucking fuck is wrong with people, for living fucks sake they cannot physically, mentaly, virtually or otherwise change mindset and point of view if they are telling YOU what to fucking do, what's better to do, etc.
What the fuck! You have around 0.1% of context that is in my head, and my solution works with most of it and your bearly manages to deal with your given 0.1%, so kindly please for living hell, fuck off telling me what to do, what is better in my fucking situation etc. You don't know most of shit I know about my own situation (dosent apply to people with coma and heavy mental issues, sorry its not 100% universal) that I know, yet you have something in your brain that fucking allows you (dosent tell you "its no-go lol") to try push thru your shit to me like it was your fucking life. It's not.

And to be clear, before someone gets sad becouse I was to broad and generic. If you giving advice you can do it properly. And there are people who legit have mindset "well, if I was you and known what you told me, I would do XYZ", but for what the living fuck reason most of people I know have more mindset of "Do XYZ coz fuck you if you dont, coz dat is my opinion and shit and I dont give a living fuck if it does what you want"

Talk to someone about your problem. If no one is there, talk to a rubber duckie. Know that it's fine to be stuck and sometimes the best thing to do is go for a walk to clear your head!

Start the day feeling blessed and grateful about what you've got around you,

Planning a little the next step that you have to do

Focus on yourself and your attitudes, looking to all the possibilitys with rationality, and try to make a footstep in that direction everyday

Thinking and be positive must to stay on the first position of a good mindset,
Be productive in a constantly way and trust the progress, this is an action than create an algorithm totally in sync with a new good habit for a stabilization of your transition

Start to visualize a clear picture of yourself happy and in peace and print that picture in your head as a personal goal

Write and read as a personal research method
It's a process that we can call art of the water's cup
Consisting in a continuing movement of pouring and filling the glass until the water is totally clear and drinkable

after that you may drink that water a bit every day for knowing exactly the taste of it,

write = pour
read = fill
drink = fix

becomoming like water