Biggest challenge I overcame as dev? One of many.

Avoiding a life sentence when the 'powers that be' targeted one of my libraries for the root cause of system performance issues and I didn't correct that accusation with a flame thrower.

What the accusation? What I named the library. Yep. The *name* was causing every single problem in the system.

Panorama (very, very expensive APM system at the time) identified my library in it's analysis, the calls to/from SQLServer was the bottleneck

We had one of Panorama's engineers on-site and he asked what (not the actual name) MyLibrary was and (I'll preface I did not know or involved in any of the so-called 'research') a crack team of developers+managers researched the system thoroughly and found MyLibrary was used in just about every project. I wrote the .Net 1.1 MyLibrary as a mini-ORM to simplify the execution of database code (stored procs, etc) and gracefully handle+log database exceptions (auto-logged details such as the target db, stored procedure name, parameter values, etc, everything you'd need to troubleshoot database errors). This was before Dapper and the other fancy tools used by kids these days.

By the time the news got to me, there was a team cobbled together who's only focus was to remove any/every trace of MyLibrary from the code base. Using Waterfall, they calculated it would take at least a year to remove+replace MyLibrary with the equivalent ADO.Net plumbing.

In a department wide meeting:

DeptMgr: "This day forward, no one is to use MyLibrary to access the database! It's slow, unprofessionally named, and the root cause of all the database issues."
Me: "What about MyLibrary is slow? It's excecuting standard the ADO.Net code. Only extra bit of code is the exception handling to capture the details when the exception is logged."
DeptMgr: "We've spent the last 6 weeks with the Panorama engineer and he's identified MyLibrary as the cause. Company has spent over $100,000 on this software and we have to make fact based decisions. Look at this slide ... "
<DeptMgr shows a histogram of the stacktrace, showing MyLibrary as the slowest>
Me: "You do realize that the execution time is the database call itself, not the code. In that example, the invoice call, it's the stored procedure that taking 5 seconds, not MyLibrary."
<at this point, DeptMgr is getting red-face mad>
AreaMgr: "Yes...yes...but if we stopped using MyLibrary, removing the unnecessary layers, will make the code run faster."
<typical headknodd-ers knod their heads in agreement>
Dev01: "The loading of MyLibrary takes CPU cycles away from code that supports our customers. Every CPU cycle counts."
<headknod-ding continues>
Me: "I'm really confused. Maybe I'm looking at the data wrong. On the slide where you highlighted all the bottlenecks, the histogram shows the latency is the database, I mean...it's right there, in red. Am I looking at it wrong?"
<this was meeting with 20+ other devs, mgrs, a VP, the Panorama engineer>
DeptMgr: "Yes you are! I know MyLibrary is your baby. You need to check your ego at the door and face the facts. Your MyLibrary is a failed experiment and needs to be exterminated from this system!"

Fast forward 9 months, maybe 50% of the projects updated, come across the documentation left from the Panorama. Even after the removal of MyLibrary, there was zero increases in performance. The engineer recommended DBAs start optimizing their indexes and other N+1 problems discovered. I decide to ask the developer who lead the re-write.

Me: "I see that removing MyLibrary did nothing to improve performance."
Dev: "Yes, DeptMgr was pissed. He was ready to throw the Panorama engineer out a window when he said the problems were in the database all along. Didn't you say that?"
Me: "Um, so is this re-write project dead?"
Dev: "No. Removing MyLibrary introduced all kinds of bugs. All the boilerplate ADO.Net code caused a lot of unhandled exceptions, then we had to go back and write exception handling code."
Me: "What a failure. What dipshit would think writing more code leads to less bugs?"
Dev: "I know, I know. We're so far behind schedule. We had to come up with something. I ended up writing a library to make replacing MyLibrary easier. I called it KnightRider. Like the TV show. Everyone is excited to speed up their code with KnightRider. Same method names, same exception handling. All we have to do is replace MyLibrary with KnightRider and we're done."
Me: "Won't the bottlenecks then point to KnightRider?"
Dev: "Meh, not my problem. Panorama meets primarily with the DBAs and the networking team now. I doubt we ever use Panorama to look at our C# code."

Needless to say, I was (still) pissed that they had used MyLibrary as dirty word and a scapegoat for months when they *knew* where the problems were. Pissed enough for a flamethrower? Maybe.

Web3 truly is a fucked up space. All of the fuckertry happening over here is out of control. Literally a dystopian shithole of scams frauds crimes theft and ponzi schemes.... As much as i try to defend web3 since im a web3 dev it's getting real fuckin hard. The more i work in this space the more i understand economics and how all of this shitshow flows.

Without diving into details, I'll tell you right now from a very deep economic perspective: i realized that all of these cryptos are just.. shams, quasi buzz words to keep the "investors" giving them money. Essentially like wolf of wallstreet scams mixed with bernard madoff multi billion dollar ponzi schemes. The "investors" earn a lot of money.... But on paper! As unrealized gains. And by the time they are able to withdraw their money, that money becomes worthless because of insufficient liquidity in the pool that has been drained from top to bottom of the pyramid. So the only person truly getting filty rich is the one on top of this pyramid - the founders!

After the FTX disaster that happened 2 days ago the prices of ALL coins dropped drastically and it isnt stopping. So much for your glorified "decentralization" 😹😹😹😹😹

How can something be decentralized if its enough for 1 influential man to tweet some shit and the company/token price value drops or increases within minutes? In this case the whole of crypto got sliced by 1 influential man... Again. It's only a matter of time until someone else goes bankrupt and cycle repeats... Again.

New developers. Tip: There is no silver bullet.

If you like Python, please understand GIL's behavior before making a system that handles thousands of requests.

If you like Java, know that "Write once, run anywhere" is a fallacy. Even application servers don't like the same WAR.

If you like PHP, understand the life cycle of a request before connecting to the database from all corners.

If you like C#, don't make it a small command-line application that will be used on FreeBSD.

If you like C, meet valgrind.

If you like C++, templates are cool, but don't overdo it. And take the opportunity to meet valgrind.

Never use the same tool to do everything. Elect the language and framework for the given need with rationality.

Every time I see a "Java Man", a "C++ Chad" or anything like that, it comes to mind that if he were a carpenter, he would be tightening screws with hammers.

Every lock-in is bad.

- be any programmer hired to a job
- do some cool thing that helps the business
- gets labeled as a smart programmer and a helpful team member
- get questions and cries of help from everyone at the office
- get burnt out and refuse to help some people
- get labeled as lazy, bad at my job, and having a bad attitude
- gets shadow fired
- cycle repeats

It’s time to burn down the houses of every rich person - and I hope we actually fully commit this time :)

I tried LSD yesterday!

Backstory: I have a weird combo of bipolar type 1 and autism. During the day, my brain works inconsistently. Here how my day usually goes:
09:00. I wake up. Uninterested, cold, masculine. No thoughts in the background. No OCD.
12:00. Brain warms up. Thought process begins. Thoughts are short in their length
14:00. Thoughts start to get longer. Stress starts to accumulate. Background thoughts start, now typically 2–3 at a time.
16:00. Twitching begins. Thought chains are now 5–6 concepts long, one following the other. Perception level rises quickly. I start to feel more feminine. It is in this state that I start to spot imperfections and mistakes looking at code or text without reading it. I see it like a painting, and mistakes appear as “visually wrong” parts. This does not depend on formatting.
17:00. OCD becomes more severe. I HAVE to touch all the surfaces around me, evenly, as if my hands were text highlighters, and I had to paint everything evenly, without overlaps or spots that are brighter or darker than the others. Some surface textures become irritating, and feel quite unpleasant to the touch. If I go for a run now, like 3 km or so, I feel somewhat relieved.
18:00. Things are getting serious. Creativity levels through the roof. I speak in long, never-ending, profound sentences. Background and foreground thoughts almost become one. I appear visually drunk and happy, despite never drinking alcohol. Femininity rises even further. Sometimes, when I speak to a small group of people, especially if I go with friends to meet new people, and we go to some bar, new people ask to record my voice or to write down whatever I’m saying. To be honest, this reason alone is a huge boost to how I see yourself.
19:00. OCD is crazy now. Surfaces have soul.
21:00 <— Gotta take my meds and go to sleep here to prevent what comes at 22:00
22:00. All thoughts, both foreground and background, fully became one. Now my brain officially disobeys me and thinks on its own, and I can ride it like a surfer at best. Twitching becomes concerning. I develop a 1000-yard stare. I am officially a female. Physical strength is somewhat enhanced. Pain tolerance lowered significantly.
23:00. Derealization begins. The world around me appears two-dimensional and flat, like a picture. It is hard to get home on foot, even in close (less than one km) proximity. Brain is fully numb. All that thought monstrosity that was building up is just noise now. Zero “flops” available to think about something I want to think about, like how much money I have on me or what time it is.

I go to sleep. I see nightmares. I wake up, and the cycle repeats.

Contrary to a popular opinion, I never take any “brain-boosting” meds like antidepressants, and I think now you can see why. I consume neither alcohol nor caffeine. Neither me, nor my doctors want my brain to explode. I only take lamotrigine that helps to “lower down” mania, and quetiapine, a neuroleptic, that slows down my brain, like a neuroleptic. Both are there to slow down my brain, to kinda “throttle” my brain like a CPU to cool it down.

That said, 100ug of LSD just… brought me my usual 18:00 state, but in the morning?

All that small-dose recreational ordeal? The thing that helps people feel more energetic and creative?

People pay money… for that? To feel the way I feel every evening?

I am back after 5 years

It's been a long time

After working for a shitty company, I ended up working for a startup for an interesting big project as a software architect

It was a good experience just for some stuff, but I hated every moment we needed to build some demo or prototype for potential customers or allies

I was tired... 2 years of demoing is too much. And finally I got a Senior Devops in this company working in Kubernetes

I finally discovered my role and my position, I want to solve problems for other devs and myself. I help anyway in the final product, because fast and reliable build and release cycle need to be a must

I wish everybody could find their main role. I took 12 years to find mine lol

So I met this person via a social platform.

They were absolutely silly and weren't able to hold a conversation. So I, like a normal person, just stopped trying to keep things alive.

Over the years, I have realised and learnt that if a person is interested in being friends, they'd put in efforts and I alone will not have to drag things on my shoulder.

I started cutting out people right, left, and center who I felt were taking advantage of me or using me in some way or another.

I ended up saving a lot of time and energy. I no longer feel drained or anxious about something not working out. Not dragging saved me from draining.

Anyway, they reach out to me again after few weeks and I was like let's give it a try to establish a friendship, because befriending people is my weak point.

The cycle repeats. At first I thought it must be because of the asynchronous nature of the platform so I drop my Telegram Id in case they preferred an IM approach.

I swear in the name of sweet lord, the retard does the same behaviour. So, I stopped communication.

And one fine day, the person tells me that they lack social skills and want to learn how to make friends and stuff.

Very fair point. So, me being me, gave them a few tips and critically pointed out their behaviour on how they reply with a one liner after every 2 or 3 business days.

Absolutely no change in their behaviour. They kept texting me the same.

At this point, I was like why am I doing it? I could find better people easily. Because for me, communication is everything. I cannot function without a good communication between two living beings.

So, I asked them why are they even trying to learn social skills when they barely implement it and don't want to change to which they reply saying that so they can use it to befriend people and network to getter better job opportunities.

I fuck them off.

And fuck such people who have intentions, are not clear enough about it, and play people for their own selfish gains.

And this where another learning I got from @scout is have boundaries.

Why do all good people in my life leave? Damn it! I need those good people back and be friends with them and not retards who cannot even communicate beyond one liner.

Continuing on the PR ranting.. That's six PR's in the queue now. The most important one took over a week to sort through because someone had a grand idea to generalize the work and that required a ton of changes. Great to receive that kind of feedback AFTER I've already done the work.. Then we waited on translations because can't miss those! Now the tests are failing. Not caused by me! Someone messed up the E2E tests. That's two weeks in the queue now.

Because one test is failing, that's a block across all the PR's. All of them have now been waiting multiple days in the queue. After someone manages to fix the broken test, all PR's go one by one into the QA testing queue and that takes 1-2 hours per branch to test and deploy to production.

Really love having a cycle time of four days for coloring a button differently! And the constant context switching.

[Rust]
I have a bunch of computational steps in a Rust program, all very expensive. They all depend on each other, forming a cycle-free and rather small graph of dependencies which is not a tree. The results of each of them for a given input are likely used tens of times by the others, so I would like to cache the subresults dynamically.

How would I go about doing this, considering that caching (rightfully) requires mutable access to the cache and multiple operations often refer to the same subresult?

I can't ask SO because they'd just tell me to use another language or recalculate everything every time, fully convinced that difficult questions can only emerge from design mistakes.

So I started working at a large, multi billion dollar healthcare company here in the US, time for round 2,(previously I wasn't a dev or in IT at all). We have the shittiest codebase I have ever laid eyes on, and its all recent! It's like all these contractors only know the basics of programming(i'm talking intro to programming college level). You would think that they would start using test driven development by now, since every deployment they fix 1 thing and break 30 more. Then we have to wait 3 months for a new fix, and repeat the cycle, when the code is being used to process and pay healthcare claims.

Then some of my coworkers seem to have decided to treat me like I'm stupid, just because I can't understand a single fucking word what they're saying. I have hearing loss, and your mumbling and quiet tone on top of your think accent while you stop annunciated your words is quite fucking hard to understand. Now I know english isn't your first language and its difficult, I know, mine is Spanish. But for the love of god learn to speak the fuck up, and also learn to write actual SQL scripts and not be a fucking script kiddie you fucking amateur. The business is telling you your data is wrong because you're trying to find data that exists is complex and your simple select * from table where you='amateur with "10years" experience in SQL' ain't going to fucking cut it. Learn to solve problems and think analytically instead of copy fucking pasta.

Finally have some side project in mind but now I don't have the time. When I had time I was not well mentally to do anything. When is the cycle going to break? Work - burnout - recover - repeat 😣

Was working on a high priority security feature. We had an unreasonable timeline to get all of the work done. If we didn’t get the changes onto production before our deadline we faced the possibility of our entire suit being taken offline. Other parts of the company had already been shut down until the remediations could be made -so we knew the company execs weren’t bluffing.

I was the sole developer on the project. I designed it, implemented it, and organized the efforts to get it through the rest of the dev cycle. After about 3 month of work it was all up and bug free (after a few bugs had been found and squashed). I was exhausted, and ended up taking about a week and a half off to recharge.

The project consisted of restructuring our customized frontend control binding (asp.net -custom content controls), integrations with several services to replace portions of our data consumption and storage logic, and an enormous lift and shift that touched over 6k files.

When you touch this much code in such a short period of time it’s difficult to code review, to not introduce bugs, and _to not stop thinking about what potential problems your changes may be causing in the background_.

Who claims code reviews actually work? It has always been a bottleneck in every single organization I've ever worked at. You work on a story for 1 day because you want to apply continuous integration as a practice, but the branch always gets stuck in the code review phase when no one reviews it even though you ask them to, someone finds something small that needs to be changed with it and that adds more delays, or it ends up being halted because another team member who works on another layer of the cake is making changes to their layer and those changes need to be synced. So instead of having a cycle time of 1-2 days, it always ends up being 1-2 weeks. Simply because of the review process. Why can't I fucking pair program with someone?! This is so stupid. I want to have feedback immediately as I work if you don't trust people with real trunk base development!

What is the more common word?

abs
Ava
ABC
ABC's
and's <- this one is real
and

iOS seems to think the word "and" ranks last in priority when compared to the other words in the list.

I have had this hyperexpensive irritant for almost a year now, and I still cycle through this list in 90% of anything I type. I love posting to forums and this brick-in-three-years has tainted that. I even bought a mini bluetooth keyboard but it's awkward to use while relaxing.

Don't even get me started on how autocomplete deletes existing parts of the sentence if I don't choose whatever nonsense iOS has decided upon this time.